The All India Muslim League’s (AIM) demand for the division of British India and creation of a separate state based on religion was the antithesis to the Indian National Congress’s (INC) demand for an undivided, sovereign India. After the partition of the Indian subcontinent, the INC, under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, made efforts to establish a secular and pluralistic Indian polity.
Contrary to that, after the death of Mr Jinnah, Liaqat Ali Khan, the first Prime Minister of Pakistan, doctored his efforts to create a monolithic religious state, oblivious of the ethnolinguistic and religious diversity of the Pakistani polity. Consequently, instead of making Pakistan a “melting pot” of varied ethnic, religious and linguistic identities, the post-Jinnah leadership created a singular Muslim identity and declared it an Islamic state.
They imposed Urdu as the only national language because they considered it to be a language closer to “Islamic culture and Muslim traditions” – as compared to the provincial vernaculars of Pakistan. They developed textbooks, following the two-nation theory or Islamic ideology, ignoring and defacing the thousands of years of the rich cultural, ethnic and linguistic history of people already living in their respective regions.
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