How can Jinnah be eulogized in independent Bangladesh against its founding ideals?

The controversy that emerged on September 14, following the reopening of the renovated museum of the Dhaka University Central Students’ Union (DUCSU), is not merely about the addition or removal of a few photographs. It concerns the interpretation of Bangladesh’s history, 1952 Language Movement, the spirit of the 1971 Liberation War and the political significance of national memory.

After the museum reopened, it was found that there was no prominent standalone portrait of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founder of Independent Bangladesh. In contrast, three photographs of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, had been displayed. One showed the moment on March 21, 1948, when he declared Urdu the sole state language of Pakistan at the Racecourse Maidan. Another depicted the 1940 Lahore session, while the third was taken from a 1970 election report published in Pakistan’s ‘Dawn’ newspaper.

Within hours of the incident, a student tore down Jinnah’s photographs. Protesters later put up a photograph showing Jamaat-e-Islami supreme  Ghulam Azam being beaten with shoes in their place. DUCSU authorities said the photographs had been displayed to document historical events, not to glorify Jinnah. Complex historical figures and events may certainly be represented in a museum. But in such cases, it is essential to clearly explain the historical context, power relations and the role of the individuals concerned. This is particularly important in a museum belonging to Dhaka University whose history is inseparably linked to the 1952 Language Movement, democratic struggles, 1969 Mass Upsurge and the Liberation War in 1971.

The question, therefore, is: What should Jinnah’s place be in the national memory of independent Bangladesh? To answer it, we need to look back at history.

What were Jinnah’s Ideas About Pakistan and His Political Strategy?Historian Ayesha Jalal, in her widely discussed research work ‘The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan’, has shown that Jinnah’s political strategy behind the demand for Pakistan was multifaceted. According to her analysis, Jinnah initially used the demand for Pakistan, among other things, as a bargaining tool to secure greater autonomy for Muslim-majority provinces within an undivided India. In other words, viewing the demand for Pakistan from the outset as a straightforward and irreversible plan to establish a separate state obscures the complexity of the issue.

There was also a significant contradiction between Jinnah’s personal life and his political identity. Stanley Wolpert’s ‘Jinnah of Pakistan’ portrays him as a Barrister accustomed to Western dress and a Western lifestyle. Questions have also been raised about his ease with the Urdu language. For political purposes, he made the religious identity and security of the Muslim population one of the principal foundations of the Pakistan movement.

This contradiction was not unknown to his contemporaries. Maulana Abul A’la Maududi, who founded Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941, criticised Jinnah and the Muslim League in his journal ‘Tarjuman-ul-Quran’. His argument was that the political thinking of the Muslim League leadership was inconsistent with Islamic ideals and that it was presenting political interests in the name of Islam. Maududi mockingly referred to the Muslim League as ‘Jamaat-e-Jahiliyat’, or ‘the party of ignorance’. He also questioned Jinnah’s understanding of Islam.

Therefore, questions about the legitimacy of Jinnah’s religious politics did not come only from secular critics in later years. There were sharp disagreements on the issue among Islamist thinkers of his own time. Ignoring this historical debate while attempting to turn Jinnah into a religious-national symbol in Bangladesh would obscure an important aspect of history.

We must not forget Jinnah’s stand on Bangla language. Jinnah’s visit to Dhaka in March 1948 revealed an important aspect of the language policy and centralised political structure of the Pakistani state. In speeches delivered at the Racecourse Maidan (now Suhrawardy Udyan where the Pakistan occupation army surrendered being defeated in 1971) on March 21 and at Curzon Hall of Dhaka University on March 24, he declared Urdu as the sole state language of Pakistan. A section of the students present protested against his position.

Bangla was the mother tongue of the majority of the population of Pakistan at the time. Consequently, the language question was not merely about cultural identity. It was also connected to state power, administrative opportunities and civic equality.

The political and cultural development of the Language Movement following Jinnah’s declaration reached a bloody culmination on February 21, 1952. The sacrifice of the language martyrs became one of the foundations of Bengali national consciousness leading to the emergence of Bengali nationalism that finally culminated with the liberation of sovereign Bangladesh on December 16, 1971. In the year that followed this consciousness became connected with the demand for autonomy, the Six-Point Movement, the Mass Uprising of 1969 and the Liberation War of 1971.

There is no denying the role the Language Movement played in shaping Bangladesh’s national identity. At the same time, Jinnah’s position on language must be evaluated within this historical context.

Jinnah died in 1948. Yet the centralised structure of the Pakistani state established under his leadership deepened political and economic disparities between East and West Pakistan over the following two decades. The subsequent ruling groups, the military-civilian bureaucracy and state policies of Pakistan played important roles in creating and perpetuating these disparities.

According to published information based on the Pakistan government’s Planning Commission data, the transfer of resources from East Pakistan to West Pakistan between 1948�"49 and 1968�"69 amounted to approximately $2.6 billion in contemporary terms. During the same period, East Pakistan generated around 70 per cent of Pakistan’s total export earnings but received only 25 per cent of import allocations. The imbalance between East Pakistan’s economic contribution and state allocations further intensified the sense of deprivation among Bengalis.

Disparities were also evident in the education sector. Research by Oxford scholar Mohammad Niaz Asadullah examines inequalities between the education systems of East and West Pakistan. The study shows a declining trend in the number of primary schools in East Pakistan. Meanwhile, despite having a smaller population, West Pakistan surpassed East Pakistan in both the number of schools and the teacher-student ratio.

These disparities were not the result of any single decision. They were rooted in the combined effects of centralised state power, unequal distribution of economic resources and the dominance of the military-civilian bureaucracy.

In the 1954 provincial elections in East Pakistan, the United Front won 223 of the 237 seats, while the Muslim League secured only 10. The result was an important expression of the political mood of the people of East Bengal. It can be regarded as a clear electoral verdict by East Bengali voters against Pakistan’s centralised system of governance and the politics of the Muslim League.

In 1971, the Pakistani military carried out widespread killings in East Pakistan. The military operations and genocide conducted to suppress the Bengali demand for independence brought the state’s deep political crisis to its ultimate stage. The Hamoodur Rahman Commission, formed by the Pakistani government, investigated the role of the state’s military and political leadership and the events that took place in East Pakistan that led to the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971.

Various studies, including Anthony Mascarenhas’s ‘The Rape of Bangladesh’, have documented the violence, state repression and humanitarian catastrophe of 1971. The birth of Bangladesh historically exposed the fallacies and limitations of the Two-Nation Theory of Jinnah and Muslim League. Religious identity cannot erase a people’s language, culture, political rights or aspiration for self-determination. The Bengali nationalist movement and the Liberation War were historical expressions of that truth.

Jinnah is undoubtedly an important historical figure. His role in the partition of the Indian subcontinent, the Pakistan movement and the establishment of Pakistan cannot be denied. But placing a historical figure in a museum and establishing that person as a symbol of national ideals are two different matters. His leadership and his political stand are not in conformity with the history of independent Bangladesh and the spirit of the Liberation War. Not only DUCSU, but DU authorities including Vice-Chancellor, Academic Council, Syndicate and Senate can't shirk the responsibilities of distorting the national history and acting against the founding ideals of the country.

The centre of independent Bangladesh’s national memory should be occupied by the 1952 language martyrs, 1971 freedom fighters, Sector Commanders, Bir Shreshto, Bir Bikrams, Bir Uttams and those who sacrificed their lives for the language, rights and freedom of the Bengali people. No symbolic rearrangement that obscures their history and strikes at the foundations of the independence struggle can be acceptable.

It can therefore be said without ambiguity that the language martyrs and freedom fighters alone deserve a place in independent Bangladesh's collective memory. Jinnah, not those who opposed the 1971 Liberation War, by no means, do.