Feelings About the Father of the Nation

By G.C. Contreras

At the beginning of this Congress I would like to greet its authorities and all the delegates gathered here. As with colleagues who come from every corner of Pakistan, the delegates who have come from all corners of the world are here to pay homage to the Quaid-i-Azam, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Father of the Nation, on the first hundredth anniversary of his birth. I want to make this homage extensive, as undoubtedly he would have deserved it, to the people of Pakistan, who endowed with an unbreakable will have achieved the greatness of their nation, thirty years after her beginning.

We know by experience that young nations like my own, Mexico, or like Pakistan, when they relinquish a colonial past, go through difficult and hazarduous moments for the first years of their independent life, moments full of weaknesses and dangers which test the reserves and potential energy of their human material.

Not only the culminating moment when the new nation, product of a long ideological and political struggle, has begun her life is decisive, but the daily process of maintaining her alive ensuring that she prevails against all contingencies. Notwithstanding, when a community has the will for becoming a nation, armed with its high ideals and the wish of an independent life, her place among the free peoples is assured. Of you, I can say, in the very words of Jinnah, “Pakistan has come to stay and no power on earth can destroy it.”

Muhammad Ali Jinnah was a man of great wisdom, strong ideals, an enemy of injustice who fought so that his community could exercise its due rights. His strong determination through a long and difficult struggle for the Independence of the Indian Subcontinent led him inevitably, within the historical circumstances, to the ideal of the creation of Pakistan as a free and sovereign nation.