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| Secular Jinnah and Pakistan, What the Nation Doesn’t Know |
Interview by Talha Mujaddidi (Bridgehead Institute)
TM: What inspired you to write a book setting the record straight with respect to Justice Munir?
SK: My original research began with an accidental discovery that a certain speech of Jinnah (the Munir quote – http://www.secularjinnah.co.uk ) could not be traced to any of Mr. Jinnah’s speeches but could only be found in Munir’s From Jinnah to Zia (1979) – or so I thought at the time. I had simply intended to write an article explaining the issue with the quote. In fact I almost didn’t even write the article as I had not grasped the significance of what I had found. My research took me in unexpected directions and I began to see there was much more to the story of the quote than I had first realised, but I kept the book relatively short. Sometime after SJ1’s (Secular Jinnah, 2005) release I discovered that the Munir quote actually had its origins in the ‘Munir Report’ of 1954 – i.e. same author, but different publication. Interestingly, the Munir quote was first used to deadly effect in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly debates of 1954, shortly before Ghulam Muhammad dissolved the Assembly. I have reviewed this in detail in SJ2, but otherwise my book is not centred on Justice Munir’s quote.
TM: What are the differences between the two editions – the original SJ1 and the new SJ2?
SK: SJ1 was a shorter book and it emphasised the Munir quote. SJ2 has a similar title, but as such it is completely different in terms of both style and content, even though it contains everything from SJ1 with updates. In addition, SJ2 covers pre-partition history in detail, including the Round Table Conferences of the 1930s, Mr. Jinnah’s differences with Mr. Gandhi, the provincial elections of 1936-7, and the Pakistan movement. I have also looked in detail at the constitutional background to the Lahore Resolution; I have reviewed the Cabinet Mission Plan in more depth than in SJ1; I have reviewed the debate over the Objectives Resolution; and I have looked at Jinnah’s attempts to retain national unity in Pakistan in the eighteen months before his death.
