Independent Indian: Work & Life of Professor Subroto Roy
Life of MK Roy 1915:2012, Indian Aristocrat & Diplomat, Birth Centenary Concludes 7 Nov 2016
Thoughts, words, deeds: My work 1973-2014
Bibliography, Books, Public Lectures, Memoranda, Memoirs
Buju's Life & Paintings 14 Feb 1943:10 Jan 1998 (Draft 14.2.2018)
India-Pakistan Diplomacy During the 1965 War: the MK Roy Files
Solving a Problem of State Tyranny: Director General Siddhanta Das: Have Forest Service Officers been threatening ordinary citizens, seizing their property, then threatening them with arrest if they complain? If so, how many cases of wrongful seizure and wrongful imprisonment have WCCB caused among India's villagers and forest dwellers since 1994? There is immediate need for an Ombudsman to independently review all cases in each of your Five Zones!
My American years: Part One 1980-90: battles for academic integrity & freedom
Become a US Supreme Court Justice! (Explorations in the Rule of Law in America)
Fixing Washington: On Improving Institutional Design in the United States
Philosophy of Economics: On the Scope of Reason in Economic Inquiry (1989)
Apropos *Philosophy of Economics*
Science, Religion, Art & the Necessity of Freedom (2004)
A General Theory of Globalization & Modern Terrorism (2001)
Physics & Reasoning (An Ongoing Tract) by Subroto Roy DRAFT 01.12.2017
Is "Cambridge Philosophy" dead, in Cambridge? Can it be resurrected, there? Case Study: Renford Bambrough (& Subroto Roy) preceded by decades Cheryl Misak's thesis on Wittgenstein being linked with Peirce via Ramsey…
Economics as a Beautiful Subject: Its Concepts & Principles Explained for Everyone (DRAFT)…. by Subroto Roy
Rajiv Gandhi and the Origins of India's 1991 Economic Reform
Three Memoranda to Rajiv Gandhi 1990-91
Did Jagdish Bhagwati "originate", "pioneer", "intellectually father" India's 1991 economic reform? Did Manmohan Singh? Or did I, through my encounter with Rajiv Gandhi, just as Siddhartha Shankar Ray told Manmohan & his aides in Sep 1993 in Washington? Judge the evidence for yourself. And why has Amartya Sen misdescribed his work? India's right path forward today remains what I said in my 3 Dec 2012 Delhi lecture!
Sonia's Lying Courtier with Postscript 25 Nov 2007, & Addendum 30 June 2014
Much as I might love Russia, England, France, America, I despise their spies & local agents affecting poor India's policies: Memo to PM Modi, Mr Jaitley, Mr Doval & the new Govt. of India: Beware of Delhi's sleeper agents, lobbyists & other dalals
"Haksar, Manmohan and Sonia"
Modi & Monetary Theory: Economic Consequences of the Prime Minister of India
Introduction and Some Biography
Pricing, Planning & Politics: A Study of Economic Distortions in India (1984)
Silver Jubilee of "Pricing, Planning & Politics: A Study of Economic Distortions in India"
My (armchair) experience of the 1999 Kargil war (Or, "Actionable Intelligence" in the Internet age: How the Kargil effort got a little help from a desktop)
Critique of Monetary Ideas of Manmohan & Modi: the Roy Model explaining to Bimal Jalan, Nirmala Sitharaman, RBI etc what it is they are doing (Drafts 4 August, 7 August 2019; 27 August, 28 August, 30 August, 31 August, 1 September 2019)
S N Roy hears from Lytton: A 1922 case of British imperial racism in Indian governance (with lessons for today) [Draft text 12 August 2018]
On being reunited with Arrow Hahn after a dozen years
How the India-Bangladesh Enclaves Problem Was Jump-Started in 2007 Towards its 2015 Solution: A Case Study of Academic Impact on Policy
Pakistan's & India's Illusions of Power (Psychosis vs Vanity)
Delhi can never be improved — until the rest of India improves!
On India's Education Policy
(1) My 13 Sep 2019 Advice to PM Modi's Adviser: Let PM address each State Legislature, get all India Govt Accounting & Public Decision Making to have integrity (2) 16 May 2014 Advice from Rajiv Gandhi's Adviser to Narendra Modi: Do not populate the "Planning Commission" with worthies, scrap it, integrate its assets with the Treasury. And get the nationalised banks & RBI out of the Treasury. Tell them to read my 3 Dec 2012 Delhi lecture with care. Clean Government Accounting & Audit is the Key to Clean Public Finances & a Proper Indian Currency for the First Time Ever
My Recent Works, Interviews etc on India's Money, Public Finance, Banking, Trade, BoP, Land, etc (an incomplete list)
drsubrotoroy
Index of Names and Subjects
15th Lok Sabha
1918 Influenza epidemic
Abdul Ghaffar Khan
Academic economics
Academic fraud
AD Shroff
African ivory
Ahmadis
Air warfare
Aksai Chin
Alec Douglas Home
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Alexander Dubček
Alfred Lyall
America's Civil Rights Movement
America's housing market
America's impatience
America's military-industrial complex
America's mortgage crisis
America's torture debate
American academia
American elections 2016
American financial crises
anarchy and governance
Andhra Pradesh Government
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov
Anglo-American relations
Anglo-Russian Treaty 1907
Ann Dunham
Anna Schwartz
April Glaspie
Archer Blood
Arvind Panagariya
Asia and Latin America
Asia and the West
Athenian democracy
Attlee
Attorney fraud
Bal Gangadhar Tilak
Bangladesh currency history
Bangladesh India land Boundary Agreement 2015
Bangladesh's economy
Barack Hussein Obama Senior
Battle of Borodino
Bengal Constitutional Politics
Bengal Legislative Council
Bengal Primary Education Bill 1919
Bengal's Public Finances
Bengali Adda
Bengali modern literature
Bengali poetry
Benjamin Strong
Bhagwati-Sen spat
Big Business and Big Labour
Bolsheviks
BR Ambedkar
BR Shenoy
Brendan Whyte
Bretton Woods institutions
Britain in India
Britain's Chilcot Inquiry
Britain's Parliament
Britain's immigrant communities
Britain's monarchy
British military doctrine and traditions
British philosophy
British Universities
Bulls and bears
C Rajagopalachari
C Rangarajan
Cambridge Univ Economics
Cambridge University Philosophy
Canadian Senate
Capital and labour
Cardiff Business School
Case by Case Philosophical Technique
Chandrayan
Charles Eliot
Cheryl Misak
Chiang Kaishek
Chief Red Cloud of the Sioux
China's exports
China's macroeconomics
China's savings rate
China's Commonwealth
China's dissidents
China's expansionism
China's History
China's internal passports
China's military
China's nationalism
China's religions
China's wars
China-India Relations
China-Pakistan relations
China-Taiwan problem
China-Tibet problem
Chinese pilgrims to India
Christian forgiveness
Chumbi Valley
Clausewitz
Common markets
Commonsense
Comparative Government
Congress of Vienna
Congress Party
Congress Party History
Conservative Party Britain
Constitutional Politics
Corpus Christi College Cambridge
CPI-M
CR Das
Crash of 1929
Credit markets
Dabhol/Enron fiasco
Demand theory
Deposit multiplication
DH Lawrence's novels
DH Lawrence's travels
Dharma Kumar
DHN Johnson
Diplomatic protocols
Diplomatic recognition
Dogras
Don Patinkin
Donald J Trump
Dorjiev
Double bind
Dr Zakir Hussain
Durand Line
Dynamic competition
East Turkestan
Economic quackery
Economic Theory of Growth
Economic Theory of Interest
Economic Theory of Value
Economics and Energy
Economics of energy
Economics of exchange controls
Economics of Exchange Rates
Economics of housing markets
Economics of information technology
Economics of international trade
Economics of migration
Economics of Public Finance
Economics of real estate valuation
Economics of sports
Economics of Unemployment
EM Forster
Enclaves
Enclaves in International Law
Enterprise and entrepeneurship
Epistemology (Theory of Knowledge)
Epistemology of Economics
Etruscans
European Community
Expertise and democracy
FA Hayek
FCR Robinson
Federal Reserve Banks
Federal Rule 60(b)
Feroze Gandhi
Fiat justitia pereat mundus
Film and cinema
Financial Repression
Foreign exchange controls
FR Leavis
Frank Hahn
Friedman Foundation
Fuzlul Huq
GDI Impuls Zurich
General equilbrium theory
George P Shultz
Gilgit and Baltistan
Girja Shankar Bajpai
GK Gokhale
Gobi Desert
Godhra and aftermath
Gold market
Gold stocks
Gopi Arora
Government accounting
Government Budget Constraint
Government of Afghanistan
Government of Pakistan
Graham Staines
Grandfathers and grandsons
Grandmothers and grandchildren
Great Tremor of 2008
Gregori Perelman
Growth rates (economic)
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
Gulab Singh
Habeas Corpus for terrorist suspects
Haileybury College
Harry Johnson
Hasidic Jews
Hazel Atlas 322 US 238
Hindu political traditions
Hindus and Muslims
History of Indian National Congress
Holocaust and its denial
Incentive compatibility
India Bangladesh Land Boundary Agreement 2015
India in international law
India's Big Business
India's Cabinet Government
India's credit markets
India's demographics
India's Government economists
India's interest rates
India's military doctrine
India's NCAER
India's nuclear tests
India's protocols
India's public health
India's religions
India's savings rate
India's scientists
India's stock and debt markets
India's 1991 Economic Reform
India's 2009 General Election
India's agriculture
India's Agriculture & Food
India's airforce
India's archives
India's Army
India's aviation
India's balance of payments
India's Bangladesh liberation war
India's Banking
India's Budget
India's bureaucracy
India's Capital Markets
India's Caste/Ethnic Problems
India's cinema
India's civil unrest
India's communists
India's Constitution
India's constitutional politics
India's corporate finance
India's corporate governance
India's corruption
India's cricket
India's crimes
India's culture
India's currency history
India's Democracy
India's Diplomacy
India's Economic History
India's Economy
India's education
India's Election Commission
India's Electorate
India's emigrants to the West
India's Energy
India's Exports
India's Families
India's farmers
India's Finance Commission
India's Foreign Exchange Reserves
India's Foreign Policy
India's Foreign Service
India's Foreign Trade
India's Forest officials
India's Government Budget Constraint
India's Government Expenditure
India's grassroots activists
India's Health/Medicine
India's higher education
India's History
India's independence
India's Industry
India's inflation
India's Judiciary
India's Jurisprudence
India's Labour Markets
India's Land
India's Lok Sabha
India's Macroeconomics
India's migrant workers
India's Military Defence
India's mob violence
India's Monetary & Fiscal Policy
India's Money
India's Moon mission
India's Muslims
India's Nationalism
India's Naxal guerrilla rebels
India's nomenclatura
India's Panchayat local democracy
India's Parliament
India's Partition
India's peasants
India's Personality Cults
India's Philosophy
India's political lobbyists
India's political parties
India's Politics
India's Polity
India's pork-barrel politics
India's poverty
India's Presidency
India's private TV channels
India's Public Finance
India's Rajya Sabha
India's Reserve Bank
India's Revolution
India's Rule of Law
India's secularism
India's Space Programme
India's sports
India's State Assembly Constituencies
India's State Finances
India's Supreme Court
India's tyrannies
India's Union-State relations
India's urbanisation
India's zombie companies
India-Bangladesh Enclaves
India-China relations
India-Pakistan cooperation against terrorism
India-Pakistan Enclaves
India-Pakistan naval cooperation
India-Pakistan peace process
India-Pakistan wars
India-Tibet Border
India-United States business
India-US Nuclear Deal
India-USA interests
India-USA Merchandise Trade
Indian mathematics
Indian National Congress Origins
Indian Revolution
Indira Gandhi's assassination
Inflation targeting
Interest group politics
International immigration
International monetary economics
International Monetary Fund IMF
Introduction and Contents
Iran's cinema
Iran's disputed 2009 elections
Iran's politics
Iran's modern history
Irrationality
Israel's nuclear weapons and policy
Israel's security policy
Israel-Iran conflict-resolution
Israeli attack on Gaza
Jagadish Chandra Bose
Jagdish Bhagwati
Jahangir
James M Buchanan
Jammu & Kashmir in international law
Jean Drèze
Jews for and against Zionism
Jews in India
JK Galbraith
John Hicks
John Neville Keynes
John Wisdom
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
Kanchenjunga
Karakorum Pass
Kargil war 1999
Karl Georg Zinn
Kenneth Arrow
Kesavananda Bharati
Keynesian economics
Knowledge and Scepticism
Knut Wicksell
KPS Menon
Kutusov
Labour Managed Firms
Laddakh
Lahore Resolution
Lal Bahadur Shastri
Land and political economy
Law of the Sea applied to international terrorists
Laws and customs of parliaments
Laws of war
Laws of war applied to international terrorists
Leaf World
Lehman Brothers crisis
Letters of DH Lawrence
Liberalism/Libertarianism
Lok Sabha TV
MA Jinnah
Manchu and Mongol Tartars
Manchuria
Manindranath Roy
Margaret Thatcher's Revolution
Martin Ricketts
Marx and Engels
Master and Servant Law
Medha Patkar
Median Voter
Mendacity
Mendacity in politics
Metaphysics (Ontology)
Michio Morishima
Microeconomic foundations of macroeconomics
Mihir Kumar Roy (MKRoy)
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev
Military doctrine
Minoo Masani
MK Gandhi
MK Roy
Mob violence and behaviour
Mohammad Reza Shah Pehlavi
Monarchy vs Republicanism
Moral reasoning
Mountains and trekking
Mujibur Rahman
Mumbai financial world
Mumbai massacres
Mumbai terrorist Kasab
Mumbai's Police
Mumbai/Bombay
Munir Report
Muslim and Hindu communalism
Nani Palkhivala
Narendra Modi Government
Nariman House massacre
Natural Justice
Natwar Singh
NEFA Arunachal
Nicholas Kaldor
Nikita Kruschev
Nominalism and Realism
Nuclear conflict
Nuksaan Faida Analysis
Obama Doctrine
Occidentalists
October 1929 New York Stock Market Crash
OECD savings rates
Open and Closed Societies
Ottawa 1958
Padma Desai
Pakistan in international law
Pakistan's civil war
Pakistan's origins
Pakistan's psychology
Pakistan's 2005 earthquake
Pakistan's constitutional politics
Pakistan's currency history
Pakistan's diplomacy
Pakistan's economy
Pakistan's emigrants to the West
Pakistan's exports
Pakistan's history
Pakistan's judiciary
Pakistan's military
Pakistan's murder of Indian POWs
Pakistan's nuclear weapons
Pakistan's politics
Pakistan's Rule of Law
Pakistan's terrorist masterminds
Pakistan's terrorist training institutes
Pakistan, Balochistan, Afghanistan, Iran
Pakistani expansionism
Paper money and deposits
Parliamentary Backbenchers
Parliamentary Backbenches
Parliamentary Constituencies
Parliamentary Government
Parliamentary law
Pashtuns
Patrick Minford
PC Mahalanobis
Perjury & Bribery in US Federal Court
Personality Cults
Pervez Hoodbhoy
Philip Cagan
Philosophy of Economics
Phoenix by DH Lawrence
PN Haksar
Political assassinations
Political cynicism
Political legitimacy
Political mendacity
Political oligopoly
Poppy and morphine
Pork-barrel politics
Positive-Normative Distinction
Power-elites and nomenclatura
Prague Spring of 1968
Princeton University Economics Department
Principal-agent problem
Public Choice/Public Finance
Public property waste fraud
Qadian
QD Leavis
Raghuram Govind Rajan
Rai Bahadur Umbik Churn Rai
Rajiv Gandhi's assassination
Ram Janambhoomi
RAND study of Mumbai attacks
Ranjit Singh
Rational decisions
Redeposits
Renford Bambrough
Reverse-Euro Model for India
RF Harrod
Robert Zoellick
Roy vs University of Hawaii
Roys of Behala
Russian spies in India
Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyaya
Satyam corporate fraud
Satyendranath Bose
Scepticism and Dogmatism
Schizophrenia in economic policy-making
Schizophrenia in international relations
Science, Religion, Literature
Sea voyages
Secular governance
Secularism in practice
Sen-Bhagwati spat
Senlis Council
September 11 attacks
Serendipity and international relations
Shyama Prosad Mukherjee
Siddhartha Shankar Ray
Sidney Hook
Sidney Stuart Alexander
Sindhis
Singur and Nandigram
Sinification
Sinkiang
Sino-Indian Border
Sir Barnes Peacock
Sir Henry Cotton 1845-1915
Sonia-Manmohan regime
Soraiya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary
Soviet spies
Space explorations
Sri Lanka's civil war
Sri Lanka's currency history
Sri Lanka's economy
St Paul's Darjeeling
Statesmanship
Stonewalling in politics
Submarine warfare
Subroto Roy
Sudeten Germans
Sukhamoy Chakravarty
Sun Yatsen
Sunnis and Shias
Surendranath Roy
Swaraj Party
Swine flu supposed pandemic
Tara Chand
Technological progress
Telangana flare-up
Terence Hutchison
Terrorist techniques
Terrorist-hostage situations
Theodore W Schultz
Tiananmen Square protests
Tolerance and Intolerance
Totalitarianism
Trade-liberalization
Trade-protection
Uighurs
UN/League of Nations
United States as an economic union
United States Civil War
United States Library of Congress
University of Buckingham
Unorganised capital markets
Urho Kekkonen
US AfPak policy
US Agriculture
US China policy
US Constitution 22nd Amendment
US Court of Appeals for Ninth Circuit
US District Court District of Hawaii
US Federal Law & Jurisprudence
US Federal Reserve System
US Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Espionage
US in World Trade
US Justice Department
US Military Doctrine
US Monetary and Fiscal Policy
US Pakistan policy
US protectionism
US Republicans and Democrats
USA Rule of Law
USA, United States
USA, United States polity
Vallabhbhai Patel
Virgnia Tech
Wall Street financial crises
Walter Bagehot
Wei Jingsheng
Westminster model
William E (Ted) James (1951-2010)
World Trade and Payments
Zafrullah Khan
Zainulabidin
Zhou Enlai
Zombie companies
Zubin Mehta
On Pakistan and the Theory & Practice of the Islamic State: An Excerpt from the Munir Report of 1954
January 15, 2011 — drsubrotoroy
From REPORT of THE COURT OF INQUIRY constituted under PUNJAB ACT II OF 1954 to enquire into the PUNJAB DISTURBANCES OF 1953 "Munir Report"
It has been repeatedly said before us that implicit in the demand for Pakistan was the demand for an Islamic State. Some speeches of important leaders who were striving for Pakistan undoubtedly lend themselves to this construction. These leaders while referring to an Islamic State or to a State governed by Islamic laws perhaps had in their minds the pattern of a legal structure based on or mixed up with Islamic dogma, personal law, ethics and institutions. No one who has given serious thought to the introduction of a religious State in Pakistan has failed to notice the tremendous difficulties with which any such scheme must be confronted. Even Dr. Muhammad Iqbal, who must be considered to be the first thinker who conceived of the possibility of a consolidated North Western Indian Muslim State, in the course of his presidential address to the Muslim League in 1930 said:
"Nor should the Hindus fear that the creation of autonomous Muslim States will mean the introduction of a kind of religious rule in such States. The principle that each group is entitled to free development on its own lines is not inspired by any feeling of narrow communalism".
When we come to deal with the question of responsibility we shall have the occasion to point out that the most important of the parties who are now clamouring for the enforcement of the three demands on religious grounds were all against the idea of an Islamic State. Even Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi of Jama'at-i-Islami was of the view that the form of Government in the new Muslim State, if it ever came into existence, could only be secular.
Before the Partition, the first public picture of Pakistan that the Quaid-i-Azam gave to the world was in the course of an interview in New Delhi with Mr. Doon Campbell, Reuter's Correspondent. The Quaid-i-Azam said that the new State would be a modern democratic State, with sovereignty resting in the people and the members of the new nation having equal rights of citizenship regardless of their religion, caste or creed. When Pakistan formally appeared on the map, the Quaid-i-Azam in his memorable speech of 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, while stating the principle on which the new State was to be founded, said:—
"All the same, in this division it was impossible to avoid the question of minorities being in one Dominion or the other. Now that was unavoidable. There is no other solution. Now what shall we do? Now, if we want to make this great State of Pakistan happy and prosperous we should wholly and solely concentrate on the well-being of the people, and specially of the masses and the poor. If you will work in co-operation, forgetting the past, burying the hatchet, you are bound to succeed. If you change your past and work together in a spirit that every one of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what is his colour, caste or creed, is first, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges and obligations., there will be no end to the progress you will make. "I cannot emphasise it too much. We should begin to work in that spirit and in course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities—the Hindu community and the Muslim community— because even as regards Muslims you have Pathana, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on and among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalis, Madrasis and so on—will vanish. Indeed if you ask me this has been the biggest hindrance in the way of India to attain its freedom and independence and but for this we would have been free peoples long long ago. No power can hold another nation, and specially a nation of 400 million souls in subjection; nobody could have conquered you, and even if it had happened, nobody could have continued its hold on you for any length of time but for this (Applause). Therefore, we must learn a lesson from this. You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed— that has nothing to do with the business of the State (Hear, hear). As you know, history shows that in England conditions sometime ago were much worse than those prevailing in India today. The Roman Catholics and the Protestants persecuted each other. Even now there are some States in existence where there are discriminations made and bars imposed against a particular class. Thank God we are not starting in those days. We are starting in the days when there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State (Loud applause). The people of England in course of time had to face the realities of the situation and had to discharge the responsibilities and burdens placed upon them by the Government of their country and they went through that fire step by step. Today you might say with justice that Roman Catholics and Protestants do not exist: what exists now is that every man is a citizen, an equal citizen, of Great Britain and they are all members of the nation. "Now, I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State".
The Quaid-i-Azam was the founder of Pakistan and the occasion on which he thus spoke was the first landmark in the history of Pakistan. The speech was intended both for his own people including non-Muslims and the world, and its object was to define as clearly as possible the ideal to the attainment of which the new State was to devote all its energies. There are repeated references in this speech to the bitterness of the past and an appeal to forget and change the past and to bury the hatchet. The future subject of the State is to be a citizen with equal rights, privileges and obligations, irrespective of colour, caste, creed or community. The word 'nation' is used more than once and religion is stated to have nothing to do with the business of the State and to be merely a matter of personal faith for the individual.
We asked the ulama whether this conception of a State was acceptable to them and everyone of them replied in an unhesitating negative, including the Ahrar and erstwhile Congressites with whom before the Partition this conception was almost a part of their faith.
If Maulana Amin Ahsan Islahi's evidence correctly represents the view of Jama'at-i-Islami, a State based on this idea is the creature of the devil, and he is confirmed in this by several writings of his chief, Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, the founder of the jama'at. None of the ulama can tolerate a State which is based on nationalism and all that it implies; with them millat and all that it connotes can alone be the determining factor in State activity.
The Quaid-i-Azam's conception of a modern national State, it is alleged, became obsolete with the passing of the Objectives Resolution on 12th March 1949; but it has been freely admitted that this Resolution, though grandiloquent in words, phrases and clauses, is nothing but a hoax and that not only does it not contain even a semblance of the embryo of an Islamic State but its provisions, particularly those relating to fundamental rights, are directly opposed to the principles of an Islamic State.
FOUNDATIONS OF ISLAMIC STATE
What is then the Islamic State of which everybody talks but nobody thinks? Before we seek to discover an answer to this question, we must have a clear conception of the scope and function of the State.
The ulama were divided in their opinions when they were asked to cite some precedent of an Islamic State in Muslim history. Thus, though Hafiz Kifayat Husain, the Shia divine, held out as his ideal the form of Government during the Holy Prophet's time, Maulana Daud Ghaznavi also included in his precedent the days of the Islamic Republic, of Umar bin Abdul Aziz, Salah-ud-Din Ayyubi of Damascus, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Tughlaq and Aurangzeb and the present regime in Saudi Arabia. Most of them, however, relied on the form of Government during the Islamic Republic from 632 to 661 A. D., a period of less than thirty years, though some of them also added the very short period of Umar bin Abdul Aziz.
Maulana Abdul Haamid Badayuni stated that the details of the ideal State would be worked out by the ulama while Master Taj-ud-Din Ansari's confused notion of an Islamic State may be gathered from the following portion of his interrogation :—
"Q.—Were you also in the Khilafat movement ?
A.—Yes.
Q.—When did the Khilafat movement stop in India ?
A.—In 1923. This was after the Turks had declared their country to be a secular State.
Q.—If you are told that the Khilafat movement continued long after the Turks had abolished Khilafat, will that be correct?
A.—As far as I remember, the Khilafat movement finished with the abolition of the Khilafat by the Turks.
Q.—You are reported to have been a member of the Khilafat movement and having made speeches. Is it correct ?
A.—It could not be correct.
Q.—Was the Congress interested in Khilafat ?
Q.—Was Khilafat with you a matter of religious conviction or just a political movement ?
A.— It was purely a religious movement.
Q.— Did the Khilafat movement have the support of Mr Gandhi ?
Q.— What was the object of the Khilafat movement ?
A.— The Britisher was injuring the Khilafat institution in Turkey and the Musalman was aggrieved by this attitude of the Britisher.
Q.— Was not the object of the movement to resuscitate the Khilafat among the Musalmans ?
A.—No.
Q.— Is Khilafat with you a necessary part of Muslim form of Government ?
Q.— Are you, therefore, in favour of having a Khilafat in Pakistan ?
Q.— Can there be more than one Khalifa of the Muslims ?
Q.— Will the Khalifa of Pakistan be the Khalifa of all the Muslims of the world ?
A.— He should be but cannot be."
Throughout the three thousand years over which political thought extends, and such thought in its early stages cannot be separated from religion, two questions have invariably presented themselves for consideration : —
(1) what are the precise functions of the State ? and
(2) who shall control the State ?
If the true scope of the activities of the State is the welfare, temporal or spiritual or both of the individual, then the first question directly gives rise to the bigger question:
What is the object of human life and the ultimate destiny of man? On this, widely divergent views have prevailed, not at different times but at one and the same time. The pygmies of equatorial West Africa still believe that their God Komba has sent them into the forest to hunt and dance and sing. The Epicureans meant very much the same when they said that the object of human life is to drink and eat and be merry, for death denies such pleasures. The utilitarians base their institutions on the assumption that the object of human life is to experience pleasant sensations of mind and body, irrespective of what is to come hereafter. The Stoics believed in curbing and reducing all physical desires, and Diogenes found a tub good enough to live in. German philosophers think that the individual lives for the State and that therefore the object of life is service of the State in all that it might decide to undertake and achieve. Ancient Hindu philosophers believed in the logic of the fist with its natural consequence, the law of natural selection and the struggle for survival. The Semitic theory of State, whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic, has always held that the object of human life is to prepare ourselves for the next life and that, therefore, prayer and good works are the only object of life. Greek philosophers beginning with Socrates thought that the object of human life was to engage in philosophical meditation with a view to discovering the great truths that lie in nature and that the business of the others is to feed the philosophers engaged in that undertaking.
Islam emphasises the doctrine that life in this world is not the only life given to man but that eternal life begins after the present existence comes to an end, and that the status of a human being in the next world will depend upon his beliefs and actions in this world. As the present life is not an end in itself but merely a means to an end, not only the individual but also the State, as opposed to the secular theory which bases all political and economic institutions on a disregard of their consequences on the next life, should strive for human conduct which ensures for a person better status in the next world.
According to this theory Islam is the religion which seeks to attain that object. Therefore the question immediately arises : What is Islam and who is a momin or a Muslim ? We put this question to the ulama and we shall presently refer to their answers to this question. But we cannot refrain from saying here that it was a matter of infinite regret to us that the ulama whose first duty should be to have settled views on this subject, were hopelessly disagreed among themselves.
Apart from how these learned divines have expressed themselves, we conceive of Islam as a system that covers, as every systematic religion must, the following five topics :—
(1) the dogma, namely, the essentials of belief ;
(2) the cult, namely, religious rites and observances which a person must
perform ;
(3) ethics, i. e. rules of moral conduct ;
(4) institutions, social, economic and political ; and
(5) law proper.
The essential basis of the rules on all these subjects is revelation and not reason, though both may coincide. This coincidence, however, is accidental because human reasoning may be faulty and ultimate reason is known only to God, Who sends His message to humanity through His chosen messengers for the direction and guidance of the people. One must, therefore, accept the dogma, observe the cult, follow the ethics, obey the law and establish institutions which God has revealed, though their reason may not be apparent—nay even if they be opposed to human reason. Since an error by God is an impossibility, anything that God has revealed, whether its subject be something occult or preternatural, history, finance, law, worship or something which according to human thought admits of scientific treatment as for instance, birth of man, evolution, cosmology, or astronomy, has got to be accepted as absolute truth. The test of reason is not the acid test and a denial of this amounts to a denial of the supreme wisdom and designs of Allah—it is kufr. Now God has revealed Himself from time to time to His favoured people of whom our Holy Prophet was the last. That revelation is contained in the Qur'an and covers the five topics mentioned above. The true business of a person who believes in Islam is therefore to understand, believe in and act upon that revelation. The people whom God chooses as medium for the transmission of His messages are rasuls (messengers) or nabis (prophets). Since every action or saying of a prophet is, in the case of our own Holy Prophet it certainly was, prompted by Allah, it has the same degree of inerrancy as the formal revelation itself, because prophets are ma'sum, incapable of doing or saying something which is opposed to Divine wishes. These sayings and actions are sunna having the same infallibility as the Qur'an. The record of this sunna is hadith which is to be found in several books which were compiled by Muslim scholars after long, laborious and careful research extending over several generations.
The word hadith means a record of actions or sayings of the Prophet and his companions. At first the sahaba. i. e. people who had lived in the society of the Prophet, were the best authority for a knowledge of the sunna. Later people had to be content with the communications of the tabi'un, i. e. successors, people of the first generation after the Holy Prophet who had received their information from the sahaba, and then in the following generations with the accounts of the so-called successors of the successors (tabi'ul-tabi'un), i.e. people of the second generation after the Holy Prophet, who had concerted with the successors. Marfu' is a tradition which contains a statement about the Prophet ; mawquf, a tradition that refers only to the sayings or doings of the sahaba ; and maqtu' a tradition which does not at most go further back than the first generation after the Holy Prophet and deals only with sayings or doings of tabi'un. In some of the ahadith the actual word of God is to be found. Any such tradition is designated Hadith-i-Qudsi or Ilahi as distinguished from an ordinary Hadith-i-Nabvi.
A very large portion of sayings ascribed to the Prophet deals with the ahkam (legal professions), religious obligations, halal and haram (what is allowed and forbidden), with ritual purity, laws regarding food and criminal and civil law. Further they deal with dogma, retribution at the Last Judgment, hell and paradise, angels, creation, revelations, the earlier prophets. Many traditions also contain edifying sayings and moral teachings by the Holy Prophet. The importance of ahadith was realised from the very beginning and they were not only committed to memory but in some cases were reduced to writing. The work of compilation of hadith began in the third century after the Hijra and the Sihah Sitta were all compiled in that century. These are the musannifs of —
(1) Al-Bukhari, died 256/870,
(2) Muslim, died 261/875,
(3) Abu Dawud, died 275/888,
(4) Al-Tirmizi, died 279/892,
(5) All Nasa'i, died 303/915, and
(6) Ibn-i-Maja, died 273/886.
According to modern laws of evidence, including our own, the ahadith are inadmissible evidence of sunna because each of them contains several links of hearsay, but as authority on law they are admissible pro prio vigore. The merit of these collections lies not so much in the fact that (as is often wrongly stated) their authors decided for the first time which of the numerous traditions in circulation were genuine and which false but rather in the fact that they brought together everything that was recognised as genuine in orthodox circles in those days.
The Shias judge hadith from their own stand-point and only consider such traditions reliable as are based on the authority of Ali and his adherents. They have, therefore, their own works on the subject and hold the following five works in particularly high esteem—
(1) Al-Kafi of Muhammad b. Yaqub Al-Kulini, died 328/939,
(2) Man La Yastahdiruhu'ul-Fakih of Muhammad b. Ali b. Babuya Al-Kummi,
died 381/991,
(3) Tahdib Al-Ahkam,
(4) Al-Istibsar Fi-Ma'khtalafa Fihi'l-Akhbar (extract from the preceding) of
Muhammad Altusi, died 459/1067, and
(5) Nahj Al-Balagha (alleged sayings of Ali) of Ali b. Tahir Al-Sharif Al-Murtaza, died 436/1044 (or of his brother Radi Al-Din Al-Baghdadi.)
After the ritual, the dogma and the most important political and social institutions had taken definite shape in the second and third centuries, there arose a certain communis opinio regarding the reliability of most transmitters of tradition and the value of their statement. The main principles of doctrine had already been established in the writings of Malik b. Anas, Al-Shafi'i and other scholars regarded as authoritative in different circles and mainly on the authority of traditional sayings of the Holy Prophet. In the long run no one dared to doubt the truth of these traditions and this almost conclusive presumption of truth has since continued to be attached to the ahadith compiled in the Sihah Sitta.
We have so far arrived at this result that any rule on any subject that may be derived from the Qur'an or the sunna of the Holy Prophet is binding on every Musalman. But since the only evidence of sunna is the hadith, the words sunna and hadith have become mixed up with, and indistinguishable from, each other with the result that the expression Qur'an and hadith is not infrequently employed where the intention is to refer to Qur'an and sunna.
At this stage another principle, equally basic, comes into operation, and that is that Islam is the final religion revealed by God, complete and exhaustive in all respects, and that God will not abrogate, detract from or add to this religion (din) any more than He will send a fresh messenger. The din having been perfected (Akmalto lakum dinokum, Sura V, verse 3), there remains no need for any new code repealing, modifying or amplifying the original code; nor for any fresh messenger or message. In this sense, therefore, prophethood ceased with the Holy Prophet and revelation stopped for ever. This is the doctrine of the cessation of wahi-i-nubuwwat.
If the proposition that Muslim dogma, ethics and institutions, etc., are all based on the doctrine of inerrancy, whether such inerrancy lies in the Qur'an, the sunna, ijma' or ijtihad-i-mutlaq, is fully comprehended, the various deductions that follow from it will be easily understandable. As the ultimate test of truth, whether the matter be one of a ritual or political or social or economic nature, is revelation and revelation has to be gathered from the Qur'an, and the sunna carries almost the same degree of inerrancy as revelation and the only evidence of sunna is hadith, the first duty of those who desire to establish an Islamic State will be to discover the precise rule applicable to the existing circumstances whether that rule is to be found in the Qur'an or hadith. Obviously the persons most suited for the purpose would be those who have made the Qur'an and hadith their lifelong study, namely, among the Sunnies, the ulama, and among the Shias, the mujtahids who are the spokesmen of the hidden Imam, the ruler de jure divino. The function of these divines would be to engage themselves in discovering rules applicable to particular situations and they will be engaged in a task similar to that in which Greek philosophers were engaged, with only this difference that whereas the latter thought that all truth lay in nature which had merely to be discovered by individual effort, the ulama and the mujtahids will have to get at the truth that lies in the holy Book and the books of hadith.
The ulama Board which was recommended by the Basic Principles Committee was a logical recognition of this principle, and the true objection against that Board should indeed have been that the Board was too inadequate a mechanism to implement the principle which had brought that body into existence.
Ijma' means concurrence of the mujtahids of the people, i.e., of those who have a right, in virtue of knowledge, to form a judgment of their own, after the death of the Holy Prophet. The authority of ijma' rests on the principle of a divine protection against error and is founded on a basal tradition of the Holy Prophet, "My people will never agree in error", reported in Ibn Maja, By this procedure points which had been in dispute were fixed, and when fixed, they became an essential part of the faith and disbelief in them an act of unbelief (kufr). The essential point to remember about ijma' is that it represents the agreement of the mujtahids and that the agreement of the masses is especially excluded.
Thus ijma' has not only fixed unsettled points but has changed settled doctrines of the greatest importance.
The distinction between ijma' and ijtihad is that whereas the former is collective, the latter is individual. Ijtihad means the exerting of one's self to the utmost degree to form an opinion in a case or as to a rule of law. This is done by applying analogy to the Qur'an and the sunna. Ijtihad did not originally involve inerrancy, its result being always zann or fallible opinion. Only combined ijtihad led to ijma, and was inerrant. But this broad ijtihad soon passed into special ijtihad of those who had a peculiar right to form judgments. When later doctors looked back to the founding of the four legal schools, they assigned to their founders an ijtihad of the first rank (ijtihad-i-mutlaq). But from time to time individuals appeared who returned to the earliest meaning of ijtihad and claimed for themselves the right to form their own opinion from first principles. One of these was the Hanbalite Ibn Taimiya (died 728). Another was Suyuti (died 911) in whom the claim to ijtihad unites with one to be the mujaddid or renewer of religion in his century. At every time there must exist at least one mujtahid, was his contention, just as in every century there must come a mujaddid.
In Shia Islam there are still absolute mujtahids because they are regarded as the spokesmen of the hidden Imam. Thus collective ijtihad leads to ijma', and the basis of ijma' is divine protection against error—inerrancy.
ESSENTIALS OF ISLAMIC STATE
Since the basis of Islamic law is the principle of inerrancy of revelation and of the Holy Prophet, the law to be found in the Qur'an and the sunna is above all man-made laws, and in case of conflict between the two, the latter, irrespective of its nature, must yield to the former. Thus, provided there be a rule in the Qur'an or the sunna on a matter which according to our conceptions falls within the region of Constitutional Law or International Law, the rule must be given effect to unless that rule itself permits a departure from it. Thus no distinction exists in Islamic law between Constitutional Law and other law, the whole law to be found in the Qur'an and the sunna being a part of the law of the land for Muslim subjects of the State. Similarly if there be a rule in the Qur'an or the sunna relating to the State's relations with other States or to the relations of Muslim subjects of the State with other States or the subjects of those States, the rule will have the same superiority of sanction as any other law to be found in the Qur'an or the sunna.
Therefore if Pakistan is or is intended to be converted into an Islamic State in the true sense of the word, its Constitution must contain the following five provisions:—
(1) that all laws to be found in the Qur'an or the sunna shall be deemed to be a part of the law of the land for Muslims and shall be enforced accordingly;
(2) that unless the Constitution itself is framed by ijma'-i-ummat, namely, by the agreement of the ulama and mujtahids of acknowledged status, any provision in the Constitution which is repugnant to the Qur'an or sunna shall to the extent of the repugnancy be void;
(3) that unless the existing laws of Pakistan are adapted by ijma'-i-ummat of the kind mentioned above, any provision in the existing law which is contrary to the Qur'an or sunna shall to the extent of the repugnancy be void;
(4) that any provision in any future law which is repugnant to Qur'an or sunna shall be void;
(5) that no rule of International Law and no provision in any convention or treaty to which Pakistan is a party, which is contrary to the Qur'an or the sunna shall be binding on any Muslim in Pakistan.
SOVEREIGNTY AND DEMOCRACY IN ISLAMIC STATE
That the form of Government in Pakistan, if that form is to comply with the principles of Islam, will not be democratic is conceded by the ulama. We have already explained the doctrine of sovereignty of the Qur'an and the sunna. The Objectives Resolution rightly recognised this position when it recited that all sovereignty rests with God Almighty alone. But the authors of that Resolution misused the words 'sovereign' and 'democracy' when they recited that the Constitution to be framed was for a sovereign State in which principles of democracy as enunciated by Islam shall be fully observed.
It may be that in the context in which they were used, these words could not be misunderstood by those who are well versed in Islamic principles, but both these words were borrowed from western political philosophy and in that sense they were both wrongly used in the Resolution. When it is said that a country is sovereign, the implication is that its people or any other group of persons in it are entitled to conduct the affairs of that country in any way they like and untrammelled by any considerations except those of expediency and policy. An Islamic State, however, cannot in this sense be sovereign, because it will not be competent to abrogate, repeal or do away with any law in the Qur'an or the sunna. Absolute restriction on the legislative power of a State is a restriction on the sovereignty of the people of that State and if the origin of this restriction lies elsewhere than in the will of the people, then to the extent of that restriction the sovereignty of the State and its people is necessarily taken away. In an Islamic State, sovereignty, in its essentially juristic sense, can only rest with Allah. In the same way, democracy means the rule of the demos, namely, the people, directly by them as in ancient Greece and Rome, or indirectly through chosen representatives as in modern democracies. If the power of the people in the framing of the Constitution or in the framing of the laws or in the sphere of executive action is subject to certain immutable rules, it cannot be said that they can pass any law that they like, or, in the exercise of executive functions, do whatever they like. Indeed if the legislature in an Islamic State is a sort of ijma', the masses are expressly disqualified from taking part in it because ijma'-i-ummat in Islamic jurisprudence is restricted to ulama and mujtahids of acknowledged status and does not at all extend, as in democracy, to the populace.
OTHER INCIDENTS OF ISLAMIC STATE ACCORDING TO ULAMA
In the preceding pages we have attempted to state as clearly as we could the principles on which a religious State must be built if it is to be called an Islamic State. We now proceed to state some incidents of such State, with particular reference to the ulamas' conception of it.
LEGISLATURE AND LEGISLATION
Legislature in its present sense is unknown to the Islamic system. The religiopolitical system which is called din-i-Islam is a complete system which contains in itself the mechanism for discovering and applying law to any situation that may arise. During the Islamic Republic there was no legislature in its modern sense and for every situation or emergency that arose law could be discovered and applied by the ulama. The law had been made and was not to be made, the only function of those entrusted with the administration of law being to discover the law for the purposes of the particular case, though when enunciated and applied it formed a precedent for others to follow. It is wholly incorrect, as has been suggested from certain quarters, that in a country like Pakistan, which consists of different communities, Muslim and non-Muslim, and where representation is allowed to non-Muslims with a right to vote on every subject that comes up, the legislature is a form of ijma' or ijtihad, the reason being that ijtihad is not collective but only individual, and though ijma' is collective, there is no place in it for those who are not experts in the knowledge of the law. This principle at once rules out the infidels (kuffar) whether they be people of Scriptures (ahl-i-kitab) or idolators (mushrikeen).
Since Islam is a perfect religion containing laws, express or derivable by ijma' or ijtihad, governing the whole field of human activity, there is in it no sanction for what may, in the modern sense, be called legislation.
Questioned on this point Maulana Abul Hasanat, President, Jami'at-ul-Ulama-i-Pakistan says :—
"Q.—Is the institution of legislature as distinguished from the institution of a person or body of persons entrusted with the interpretation of law, an integral part of an Islamic State?
A.—No. Our law is complete and merely requires interpretation by those who are experts in it. According to my belief no question can arise the law relating to which cannot be discovered from the Qur'an or the hadith.
Q.—Who were Sahib-ul-hall-i-wal-aqd
A.—They were the distinguished ulama of the time. These persons attained their status by reason of the knowledge of the law. They were not in any way analogous or similar to the legislature in modern democracy."
The same view was expressed by Amir-i-Shari'at Sayyad Ata Ullah Shah Bukhari in one of his speeches reported in the 'Azad' of 22nd April, 1947, in the course of which he said that our din is complete and perfect and that it amounts to kufr to make more laws.
Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, however, is of the opinion that legislation in the true sense is possible in an Islamic State on matters which are not covered by the Qur'an, the sunna, or previous ijma' and he has attempted to explain his point by reference to the institution of a body of persons whom the Holy Prophet, and after him the khulafa consulted on all matters relating to affairs of State. The question is one of some difficulty and great importance because any institution of legislature will have to be reconciled with the claim put forward by Maulana Abul Hasanat and some other religious divines that Islam is a perfect and exhaustive code wide enough to furnish an answer to any question that may arise relating to any human activity, and that it does not know of any "unoccupied field" to be filled by fresh legislation. There is no doubt that Islam enjoins consultation and that not only the Holy Prophet but also the first four caliphs and even their successors resorted to consultation with the leading men of the time, who for their knowledge of the law and piety could well be relied upon.
In the inquiry not much has been disclosed about the Majlis-i-Shura except what is contained in Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi's written statement which he supplied to the Court at its request. That there was a body of men who were consulted is true, but whether this was a standing body and whether its advice had any legal or binding force, seems somewhat doubtful. These men were certainly not elected in the modern way, though their representative character cannot be disputed. Their advice was certainly asked ad hoc, but that they were competent to make law as the modern legislatures make laws is certainly not correct. The decisions taken by them undoubtedly served as precedents and were in the nature of ijma', which is not legislation but the application of an existing law to a particular case. When consulted in affairs of State, their functions were truly in the nature of an advice given by a modern cabinet but such advice is not law but only a decision.
Nor can the legislature in a modern State correspond to ijma' because as we have already pointed out, the legislature legislates while the ulama of Majlis-i-Shura who were called upon to determine what should be the decision on a particular point which was not covered by the Qur'an and the sunna, merely sought to discover and apply the law and not to promulgate the law, though the decision when taken had to be taken not only for the purposes of the particular case but for subsequent occasions as a binding precedent.
An intriguing situation might arise if the Constitution Act provided that any provision of it, if it was inconsistent with the Qur'an or the sunna, would be void, and the intra vires of a law made by the legislature were questioned before the Supreme Court on the ground that the institution of legislature itself was contrary to the Qur'an and the sunna.
POSITION OF NON-MUSLIMS
The ground on which the removal of Chaudhri Zafrullah Khan and other Ahmadis occupying key positions in the State is demanded is that the Ahmadis are non-Muslims and that therefore like zimmies in an Islamic State they are not eligible for appointment to higher offices in the State. This aspect of the demands has directly raised a question about the position of non-Muslims in Pakistan if we are to have an Islamic Constitution.
According to the leading ulama the position of non-Muslims in the Islamic State of Pakistan will be that of zimmies and they will not be full citizens of Pakistan because they will not have the same rights as Muslims They will have no voice in the making of the law, no right to administer the law and no right to hold public offices.
A full statement of this position will be found in the evidence of Maulana Abul Hasanat Sayyad Muhammad Ahmad Qadri, Maulana Ahmad Ali, Mian Tufail Muhammad and Maulana Abdul Haamid Badayuni. Maulana Abul Hasanat on being questioned on the subject stated as follows :—
"Q.—If we were to have an Islamic State in Pakistan, what will be the position of the kuffar (non-Muslims)? Will they have a voice in the making of laws, the right of administering the law and the right to hold public offices?
A.—Their position will be that of zimmies. They will have no voice in the making of laws, no right to administer the law and no right to hold public offices.
Q.—In an Islamic State can the head of the State delegate any part of his powers to kuffar?
Maulana Ahmad Ali, when questioned, said:—
"Q.—if we were to have an Islamic State in Pakistan, what will be the position of the kuffar? Will they have a hand in the making of the law, the right to administer the law and the right to hold public offices ?
A.—Their position will be that of zimmies. They will have no say in the making of law and no right to administer the law. Government may, however, permit them to hold any public office".
Mian Tufail Muhammad stated as follows :—
"Q.—Read the article on minorities' rights in the 'Civil and Military Gazette' of 13th October, 1953, and say whether it correctly represents your view of an Islamic State? (It was stated in the articles that minorities would have the same rights as Muslims).
A.—I have read this article and do not acknowledge these rights for the Christians or other non-Muslims in Pakistan if the State is founded on the ideology of the Jama'at".
The confusion on this point in the mind of Maulana Abdul Haamid Badayuni, President, Jami'at-ul-Ulama-i-Pakistan, is apparent from the following: —
"Q.—Have you ever read the aforesaid speech (the speech of the Quaid-i-Azam to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 11th August, 1947)?
A.—Yes, I have read that speech.
Q.—Do you still agree with the conception of Pakistan that the Quaid-i-Azam presented to the Constituent Assembly in this speech in which he said that thereafter there would be only one Pakistan nation, consisting of Muslims and non-Muslims, having equal civic rights, without any distinction of race, religion or creed and that religion would be merely a private affair of the individual ?
A.—I accept the principle that all communities, whether Muslims or non-Muslims, should have, according to their population, proper representation in the administration of the State and legislation, except that non-Muslims cannot be taken in the army or the judiciary or be appointed as Ministers or to other posts involving the reposing of confidence.
Q.—Are you suggesting that the position of non-Muslims would be that of zimmies or any better ?
A.—No. By zimmies are meant non-Muslim people of lands which have been conquered by an Islamic State, and the word is not applicable to non-Muslim minorities already living in an Islamic State. Such minorities are called mu'ahids, i.e. those people with whom some agreement has been made.
Q.—What will be their status if there is no agreement with them ?
A.—In that case such communities cannot have any rights of citizenship.
Q.—Will the non-Muslim communities inhabiting Pakistan be called by you as mu'ahids?
A.—No, not in the absence of an agreement with them. To my knowledge there is no such agreement with such communities in Pakistan."
So, according to the evidence of this learned divine, the non-Muslims of Pakistan will neither be citizens nor will they have the status of zimmies or of mu'ahids. During the Islamic Republic, the head of the State, the khalifa, was chosen by a system of election, which was wholly different from the present system of election based on adult or any other form of popular suffrage. The oath of allegiance (ba'it) rendered to him possessed a sacramental virtue, and on his being chosen by the consensus of the people (ijma'-ul-ummat) he became the source of all channels of legitimate Government. He and he alone then was competent to rule, though he could delegate his powers to deputies and collect around him a body of men of outstanding piety and learning, called Majlis-i-Shura or Ahl-ul-Hall-i-wal-Aqd. The principal feature of this system was that the kuffar, for reasons which are too obvious and need not be stated, could not be admitted to this majlis and the power which had vested in the khalifa could not be delegated to the kuffar. The khalifa was the real head of the State, all power vesting in him and not a powerless individual like the President of a modern democratic State who is merely to sign the record of decisions taken by the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. He could not appoint non-Muslims to important posts, and could give them no place either in the interpretation or the administration of the law, the making of the law by them, as already pointed out, being a legal impossibility.
This being the position, the State will have to devise some machinery by which the distinction between a Muslim and a non-Muslim may be determined and its consequences enforced. The question, therefore, whether a person is or is not a Muslim will be of fundamental importance, and it was for this reason that we asked most of the leading ulama, to give their definition of a Muslim, the point being that if the ulama of the various sects believed the Ahmadis to be kafirs, they must have been quite clear in their minds not only about the grounds of such belief but also about the definition of a Muslim because the claim that a certain person or community is not within the pale of Islam implies on the part of the claimant an exact conception of what a Muslim is. The result of this part of the inquiry, however, has been anything but satisfactory, and if considerable confusion exists in the minds of our ulama on such a simple matter, one can easily imagine what the differences on more complicated matters will be. Below we reproduce the definition of a Muslim given by each alim in his own words. This definition was asked after it had been clearly explained to each witness that he was required to give the irreducible minimum conditions which, a person must satisfy to be entitled to be called a Muslim and that the definition was to be on the principle on which a term in grammar is defined.
Here is the result : —
Maulana Abul Hasanat Muhammad Ahmad Qadri, President, Jami'at-ul-Ulamai-
Pakistan —
"Q.— What is the definition of a Muslim ?
A — (1) He must believe in the Unity of God.
(2) He must believe in the prophet of Islam to be a true prophet as well as in all other prophets who have preceded him,
(3) He must believe in the Holy Prophet of Islam as the last of the prophets (khatam-un-nabiyin).
(4) He must believe in the Qur'an as it was revealed by God to the Holy
Prophet of Islam.
(5) He must believe as binding on him the injunctions of the Prophet of
(6) He must believe in the qiyamat.
Q.—Is a tarik-us-salat a Muslim ?
A.—Yes, but not a munkir-us-salat"
Maulana Ahmad Ali, President, Jami'at-ul-Ulama-i-Islam, Maghribi Pakistan —
"Q.— Please define a Muslim ?
A.—A person is a Muslim if he believes (1) in the Qur'an and (2) what has been said by the prophet. Any person who possesses these two qualifications is entitled to be called a Muslim without his being required to believe in anything more or to do anything more."
Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, Amir Jama'at-i-Islami —
"Q.—Please define a Muslim ?
A.—A person is a Muslim if he believes (1) in tauheed, (2) in all the prophets (ambiya), (3) all the books revealed by God, (4) in mala'ika (angels), and (5) yaum-ul-akhira (the Day of Judgment).
Q.—Is a mere profession of belief in these articles sufficient to entitle a man
to call himself a Musalman and to be treated as a Musalman in an Islamic State ?
Q.—If a person says that he believes in all these things, does any one have a right to question the existence of his belief ?
A.—The five requisites that I have mentioned above are fundamental and any alteration in anyone of these articles will take him out of the pale of Islam."
Ghazi Siraj-ud-Din Munir—
A.—I consider a man to be a Muslim if he professes his belief in the kalima, namely, La Ilaha Illalah-o-Muhammad-ur-Rasulullah, and leads a life in the footsteps of the Holy Prophet."
Mufti Muhammad Idris, Jamia Ashrafia, Nila Gumbad, Lahore—
"Q.—Please give the definition of a Musalman ?
A.—The word 'Musalman' is a Persian one. There is a distinction between the word 'Musalman' which is a Persian word for Muslim and the word 'momin'. It is impossible for me to give a complete definition of the word 'momin'. I would require pages and pages to describe what a momin is. A person is a Muslim who professes to be obedient to Allah. He should believe in the Unity of God, prophethood of the ambiya and in the Day of Judgment. A person who does not believe in the azan or in the qurbani goes outside the pale of Islam. Similarly, there are a large number of other things which have been received by tavatir from our prophet. In order to be a Muslim, he must believe in all these things. It is almost impossible for me to give a complete list of such things."
Hafiz Kifayat Hussain, Idara-i-Haquq-i-Tahaffuz-i-Shia—
"Q.—Who is a Musalman?
A.—A person is entitled to be called a Musalman if he believes in (1) tauheed, (2) nubuwwat and (3) qiyamat. These are the three fundamental beliefs which a person must profess to be called a Musalman. In regard to these three basic doctrines there is no difference between the Shias and the Sunnies. Besides the belief in these three doctrines, there are other things called 'zarooriyat-i-din' which a person must comply with in order to be entitled to be called a Musalman. These will take me two days to define and enumerate. But as an illustration I might state that the respect for the Holy Book, wajoob-i-nimaz, wajoob-i-roza, wajoob-i-hajj-ma'a-sharait, and other things too numerous to mention, are among the 'zarooriyat-i-din' "
Maulana Abdul Hamid Badayuni, President, Jami'at-ul-Ulama-i-Pakistan :
"Q.—Who is a Musalman according to you ?
A.—A person who believes in the zarooriyat-i-din is called a momin and every momin is entitled to be called a Musalman.
Q.—What are these zarooriyat-i-din ?
A.—A person who believes in the five pillars of Islam and who believes in the rasalat of our Holy Prophet fulfils the zarooriyat-i-din.
Q.—Have other actions, apart from the five arakan, anything to do with a man being a Muslim or being outside the pale of Islam?
(Note—Witness has been explained that by actions are meant those rules of moral conduct which in modern society are accepted as correct.)
A.—Certainly.
Q.—Then you will not call a person a Muslim who believes in arakan-ikhamsa and the rasalat of the prophet but who steals other peoples' things, embezzles property entrusted to him, has an evil eye on his neighbour's wife and is guilty of the grossest ingratitude to his benefector?
A.—Such a person, if he has the belief already indicated, will be a Muslim despite all this".
Maulana Muhammad Ali Kandhalvi, Darush-Shahabia, Sialkot —
"Q.—Please define a Musalman?
A.—A person who in obedience to the commands of the prophet performs all the zarooriyat-i-din is a Musalman.
Q.—Can you define zarooriyat-i-din ?
A.—Zarooriyat-i-din are those requirements which are known to every Muslim irrespective of his religious knowledge.
Q.—Can you enumerate zarooriyat-i-din ?
A.—These are too numerous to be mentioned. I myself cannot enumerate these zarooriyat. Some of the zarooriyat-i-din may be mentioned as salat, saum, etc."
Maulana Amin Ahsan Islahi —
A.—There are two kinds of Musalmans, a political (siyasi) Musalman and a real (haqiqi) Musalman. In order to be called a political Musalman, a person must:
(1) believe in the Unity of God,
(2) believe in our Holy Prophet being khatam-un-nabiyin, i.e., 'final
authority' in all matters relating to the life of that person,
(3) believe that all good and evil comes from Allah,
(4) believe in the Day of Judgment,
(5) believe in the Qur'an to be the last book revealed by Allah,
(6) perform the annual pilgrimage to Mecca,
(7) pay the zaka'at,
(8) say his prayers like the Musalmans,
(9) observe all apparent rules of Islami mu'ashira, and
(10) observe the fast (saum).
If a person satisfies all these conditions he is entitled to the rights of a full citizen of an Islamic State. If any one of these conditions is not satisfied, the person concerned will not be a political Musalman. (Again said) It would be enough for a person to be a Musalman if he merely professes his belief in these ten matters irrespective of whether he puts them into practice or not. In order to be a real Musalman, a person must believe in and act on all the injunctions by Allah and his prophet in the manner in which they have been enjoined upon him.
Q.—Will you say that only the real Musalman is 'mard-i-saleh' ?
Q.—do we understand you aright that in the case of what you have called a political (siyasi) Musalman, belief alone is necessary, while in the case of a haqiqi Musalman there must not only be belief but also action?
A.—No, you have not understood me aright. Even in the case of a political (siyasi) Musalman action is necessary but what I mean to say is that if a person does not act upon the belief that is necessary in the case of such a Musalman, he will not be outside the pale of a political (siyasi) Musalman.
Q.—If a political (siyasi) Musalman does not believe in things which you
have stated to be necessary, will you call such a person be-din ?
A.—No, I will call him merely be-amal".
The definition by the Sadr Anjuman Ahmadiya, Rabwah, in its written statement
is that a Muslim is a person who belongs to the ummat of the Holy Prophet and professes belief in kalima-i-tayyaba.
Keeping in view the several definitions given by the ulama, need we make any comment except that no two learned divines are agreed on this fundamental. If we attempt our own definition as each learned divine has done and that definition differs from that given by all others, we unanimously go out of the fold of Islam. And if we adopt the definition given by any one of the ulama, we remain Muslims according to the view of that alim but kafirs according to the definition of every one else.
Apostasy in an Islamic State is punishable with death. On this the ulama are practically unanimous (vide the evidence of Maulana Abul Hasanat Sayyad Muhammad Ahmad Qadri, President, Jami'at-ul-Ulama-i-Pakistan, Punjab; Maulana Ahmad Ali, Sadr Jami'at-ul-Ulama-i-Islam, West Pakistan; Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, founder and ex-Amir-i-Jama'at-i-Islami, Pakistan; Mufti Muhammad Idris, Jami'Ashrafia, Lahore, and Member, Jami'at-ul-Ulama-i-Pakistan; Maulana Daud Ghaznavi, President, Jami'at-i-Ahl-i-Hadith, Maghribi Pakistan; Maulana Abdul Haleem Qasimi, Jami'at-ul-Ulama-i-Islam, Punjab; and Mr. Ibrahim Ali Chishti). According to this doctrine, Chaudhri Zafrullah Khan, if he has not inherited his present religious beliefs but has voluntarily elected to be an Ahmadi, must be put to death. And the same fate should befall Deobandis and Wahabis, including Maulana Muhammad Shafi Deobandi, Member, Board of Talimat-i-Islami attached to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, and Maulana Daud Ghaznavi, if Maulana Abul Hasanat Sayyad Muhammad Ahmad Qadri or Mirza Raza Ahmad Khan Barelvi, or any one of the numerous ulama who are shown perched on every leaf of a beautiful tree in the fatwa, Ex. D. E. 14, were the head of such Islamic State. And if Maulana Muhammad Shafi Deobandi were the head of the State, he would exclude those who have pronounced Deobandis as kafirs from the pale of Islam and inflict on them the death penalty if they come within the definition of murtadd, namely, if they have changed and not inherited their religious views.
The genuineness of the fatwa, Ex. D. E. 13, by the Deobandis which says that Asna Ashari Shias are kafirs and murtadds, was questioned in the course of enquiry, but Maulana Muhammad Shafi made an inquiry on the subject from Deoband, and received from the records of that institution the copy of a fatwa signed by all the teachers of the Darul Uloom including Maulana Muhammad Shafi himself which is to the effect that those who do not believe in the sahabiyyat of Hazrat Siddiq Akbar and who are qazif of Hazrat Aisha Siddiqa and have been guilty of tehrif of Qur'an are kafirs. This opinion is also supported by Mr. Ibrahim Ali Chishti who has studied and knows his subject. He thinks the Shias are kafirs because they believe that Hazrat Ali shared the prophethood with our Holy Prophet. He refused to answer the question whether a person who being a Sunni changes his view and agrees with the Shia view would be guilty of irtidad so as to deserve the death penalty. According to the Shias all Sunnis are kafirs, and Ahl-i-Qur'an; namely, persons who consider hadith to be unreliable and therefore not binding, are unanimously kafirs and so are all independent thinkers. The net result of all this is that neither Shias nor Sunnis nor Deobandis nor Ahl-i-Hadith nor Barelvis are Muslims and any change from one view to the other must be accompanied in an Islamic State with the penalty of death if the Government of the State is in the hands of the party which considers the other party to be kafirs. And it does not require much imagination to judge of the consequences of this doctrine when it is remembered that no two ulama have agreed before us as to the definition of a Muslim. If the constituents of each of the definitions given by the ulama are given effect to, and subjected to the rule of 'combination and permutation' and the form of charge in the Inquisition's sentence on Galileo is adopted mutatis mutandis as a model, the grounds on which a person may be indicted for apostasy will be too numerous to count.
In an earlier part of the report we have referred to the proscription of the 'Ashshahab', a pamphlet written by Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani who later became Sheikh-ul-Islam-i-Pakistan. In that pamphlet the Maulana had attempted to show from the Qur'an, the sunna, the ijma' and qayas that in Islam the punishment for apostasy (irtidad) simpliciter is death. After propounding the theological doctrine the Maulana had made in that document a statement of fact that in the time of the Caliph Siddiq-i-Akbar and the subsequent Caliphs vast areas of Arabia became repeatedly red with the blood of apostates. We are not called upon to express any opinion as to the correctness or otherwise of this doctrine but knowing that the suggestion to the Punjab Government to proscribe this pamphlet had come from the Minister for the Interior we have attempted to inquire of ourselves the reasons for Government's taking a step which ex hypothesi amounted to condemning a doctrine which the Maulana had professed to derive from the Qur'an and the sunna. The death penalty for irtidad has implications of a far-reaching character and stamps Islam as a religion of fanatics, which punishes all independent thinking. The Qur'an again and again lays emphasis on reason and thought, advises toleration and preaches against compulsion in religious matters but the doctrine of irtidad as enunciated in this pamphlet strikes at the very root of independent thinking when it propounds the view that anyone who, being born a Muslim or having embraced Islam, attempts to think on the subject of religion with a view, if he comes to that conclusion, to choose for himself any religion he likes, has the capital penalty in store for him. With this implication Islam becomes an embodiment of complete intellectual paralysis. And the statement in the pamphlet that vast areas of Arabia were repeatedly bespattered with human blood, if true, could only lend itself to this inference that even when Islam was at the height of its splendour and held absolute sway in Arabia there were in that country a large number of people who turned away from that religion and preferred to die than to remain in that system. It must have been some such reaction of this pamphlet on the mind of the Minister for the Interior which prompted him to advise the Punjab Government to proscribe the pamphlet. Further the Minister who was himself well-versed in religious matters must have thought that the conclusion drawn by the author of the pamphlet which was principally based on the precedent mentioned in paras. 26, 27 and 28 of the Old Testament and which is only partially referred to in the Qur'an in the 54th verse of the Second Sura, could not be applicable to apostasy from Islam and that therefore the author's opinion was in fact incorrect, there being no express text in the Qur'an for the death penalty for apostasy. On the contrary each of the two ideas, one underlying the six brief verses of Surat-ul-Kafiroon and the other the La Ikrah verse of the second Sura, has merely to be understood to reject as erroneous the view propounded in the 'Ash-Shahab'. Each of the verses in Surat-ul-Kafiroon which contains thirty words and no verse of which exceeds six words, brings out a fundamental trait in man engrained in him since his creation while the La Ikrah verse, the relevant portion of which contains only nine words, states the rule of responsibility of the mind with a precision that cannot be surpassed. Both of these texts which are an early part of the Revelation are, individually and collectively, the foundation of that principle which human society, after centuries of conflict, hatred and bloodshed, has adopted in defining one of the most important fundamental rights of man. But our doctors would never dissociate chauvinism from Islam.
PROPAGATION OF OTHER RELIGIONS
Closely allied to the punishment for apostasy is the right of non-Muslims publicly to preach their religion. The principle which punishes an apostate with death must be applicable to public preaching of kufr and it is admitted by Maulana Abul Hasanat, Ghazi Siraj-ud-Din Munir and Master Taj-ud-Din Ansari, though the last subordinates his opinion to the opinion of the ulama, that any faith other than Islam will not be permitted publicly to be preached in the State. And Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, as will appear from his pamphlet 'Punishment in Islam for an apostate', has the same views on the subject.
Ghazi Siraj-ud-Din Munir, when questioned on this point, replied :—
"Q.—What will you do with them (Ahmadis) if you were the head of the
Pakistan State ?
A.—I would tolerate them as human beings but will not allow them the right
to preach their religion".
The prohibition against public preaching of any non-Muslim religion must logically follow from the proposition that apostasy will be punished with death and that any attack on, or danger to Islam will be treated as treason and punished in the same way as apostasy.
Earlier we have pointed out that one of the doctrines on which the Musalmans and Ahmadis are at variance is that of jihad. This doctrine at once raises a host of other allied matters such as the meanings of ghazi, shahid, jihad-bis-saif, jihad fi sabili'llah, dar-ul-Islam, dar-ul-harb, hijrat, ghanima, khums and slavery, and the conflict or reconciliation of these conceptions with modern international problems such as aggression, genocide, international criminal jurisdiction, international conventions and rules of public international law.
An Islamic State is dar-ul-Islam, namely, a country where ordinances of Islam are established and which is under the rule of a Muslim sovereign. Its inhabitants are Muslims and also non-Muslims who have submitted to Muslim control and who under certain restrictions and without the possibility of full citizenship are guaranteed their lives and property by the Muslim State. They must, however, be people of Scriptures and may not be idolaters. An Islamic State is in theory perpetually at war with the neighbouring non-Muslim country, which at any time may become dar-ul-harb, in which case it is the duty of the Muslims of that country to leave it and to come over to the country of their brethren in faith. We put this aspect to Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi and reproduce his views :—
"Q.—is a country on the border of dar-ul-Islam always qua an Islamic State in the position of dar-ul-harb ?
A.—No. In the absence of an agreement to the contrary, the Islamic State will be potentially at war with the non-Muslim neighbouring country. The non-Muslim country acquires the status of dar-ul-harb only after the Islamic State declares a formal war against it".
According to Ghias-ul-Lughat, dar-ul-harb is a country belonging to infidels which has not been subdued by Islam, and the consequences of a country becoming darul-harb are thus stated in the Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam :—
"When a country does become a dar-ul-harb, it is the duty of all Muslims to withdraw from it, and a wife who refuses to accompany her husband in this, is ipso facto divorced".
Thus in case of a war between India and Pakistan, if the latter is an Islamic State, we must be prepared to receive forty million Muslims from across the border into Pakistan.
In fact, Maulana Abdul Haamid Badayuni, President, Jami'at-ul-Ulama-i- Pakistan, thinks that a case for hijrat already exists for the Musalmans of India. The following is his view on this subject :—
"Q.—Do yon call your migration to Pakistan as hijrat in the religious sense ?
We shall presently point out why Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's version of the doctrine of jihad is relied on as a ground for his and his community's kufr, but before we do that it is necessary first to state how jihad has been or is understood by the Musalmans. There are various theories about jihad which vary from the crude notion of a megalomaniac moved by religious frenzy going out armed with sword and indiscriminately slaughtering non-Muslims in the belief that if he dies in the combat he becomes a shahid and if he succeeds in killing attains the status of a ghazi, to the conception that a Musalman throughout his life is pitted against kufr, kufr here being used in the sense of evil and wrong, and that his principal activity in life is to strive by argument a where necessary by force to spread Islam until it becomes a world religion. In the latter case he fights not for any personal end but because he considers such strife as a duty and an obligation which he owes to Allah and the only recompense for which is the pleasure of Allah. The Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam contains the following brief article on djihad :—
"DJIHAD (A), holy war. The spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general. It narrowly escaped being a sixth rukn, or fundamental duty, and is indeed still so regarded by the descendants of the Kharidjis. This position was reached gradually but quickly. In the Meccan Suras of the Qur'an patience under attack is taught ; no other attitude was possible. But at Medina the right to repel attack appears, and gradually it became a prescribed duty to fight against and subdue the hostile Meccans.
Whether Muhammad himself recognised that his position implied steady and unprovoked war against the unbelieving world until it was subdued to Islam may be in doubt. Traditions are explicit on the point ; but the Qur'anic passages speak always of the unbelievers who are to be subdued as dangerous or faithless. Still, the story of his writing to the powers around him shows that such a universal position was implicit in his mind, and it certainly developed immediately after his death, when the Muslim armies advanced out of Arabia. It is now a fard ala'l-kifaya, a duty in general on all male, free, adult Muslims, sane in mind and body and having means enough to reach the Muslim army, yet not a duty necessarily incumbent on every individual but sufficiently performed when done by a certain number. So it must continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam. It must be controlled or headed by a Muslim sovereign or imam. As the imam of the Shias is now invisible, they cannot have a djihad until he reappears. Further, the requirement will be met if such a sovereign makes an expedition once a year, or, even, in the later view, if he makes annual preparation for one. The people against whom the djihad is directed must first be invited to embrace Islam. On refusal they have another choice. They may submit to Muslim rule, become dhimmis (q. v.) and pay djizya and kharadj (q. v.) or fight. In the first case, their lives, families and property are assured to them, but they have a definitely inferior status, with no technical citizenship, and a standing only as protected wards. If they fight, they and their families may be enslaved and all their property seized as booty, four-fifths of which goes to the conquering army. If they embrace Islam, and it is open to them to do so even when the armies are face to face, they become part of the Muslim community with all its rights and duties. Apostates must be put to death. But if a Muslim country is invaded by unbelievers, the imam may issue a general summons calling all Muslims there to arms, and as the danger grows so may be the width of the summons until the whole Muslim world is involved. A Muslim who dies fighting in the path of Allah (fi sabil Allah) is martyr (shahid) and is assured of Paradise and of peculiar privileges there. Such a death was, in the early generations, regarded as the peculiar crown of a pious life. It is still, on occasions, a strong incitement, but when Islam ceased to conquer it lost its supreme value. Even yet, however, any war between Muslims and non-Muslims must be a djihad with its incitements and rewards. Of course, such modern movements as the so-called Mu'tazili in India and the Young Turk in Turkey reject this and endeavour to explain away its basis; but the Muslim masses still follow the unanimous voice of the canon lawyers. Islam must be completely made over before the doctrine of djihad can be eliminated".
The generally accepted view is that the fifth verse to Sura-i-Tauba (Sura IX) abrogated the earlier verses revealed in Mecca which permitted the killing of kuffar only in self-defence. As against this the Ahmadis believe that no verso in the Qur'an was abrogated by another verse and that both sets of verses, namely, the Meccan verses and the relative verses in Sura-i-Tauba have different scopes and can stand together. This introduces the difficult controversy of nasikh and mansukh, with all its implications. It is argued on behalf of the Ahmadis that the doctrine of nasikh and mansukh is opposed to the belief in the existence of an original Scripture in Heaven, and that implicit in this doctrine is the admission that unless the verse alleged to be repealed was meant for a specific occasion and by the coming of that occasion fulfilled its purpose and thus spent itself, God did not know of the subsequent circumstances which would make the earlier verse inapplicable or lead to an undesired result.
The third result of this doctrine, it is pointed out, cuts at the very root of the claim that laws of Islam are immutable and inflexible because if changed circumstances made a new revelation necessary, any change in the circumstances subsequent to the completion of the revelation would make most of the revelation otiose or obsolete.
We are wholly incompetent to pronounce on the merits of this controversy but what has to be pointed out is the result to which the doctrine of jihad will lead if, as appears from the article in the Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam and other writings produced before us including one by Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi and another by Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, it involves the spread of Islam by arms and conquest. 'Aggression' and 'genocide' are now offences against humanity for which under sentences pronounced by different International tribunals at Nuremburg and Tokio the war lords of Germany and Japan had to forfeit their lives, and there is hardly any difference between the offences of aggression and genocide on the one hand and the doctrine of spread of Islam by arms and conquest on the other. An International Convention on genocide is about to be concluded but if the view of jihad presented to us is correct, Pakistan cannot be a party to it. And while the following verses in the Mecca Suras :—
Sura II, verses 190 and 193 :190. "Fight in the Cause of God Those who fight you,
But do not transgress limits ;
For God loveth not transgressors".
193. "And fight them on
Until there is no more
Tumult or oppression,
And there prevail
Justice and faith in God ;
But if they cease,
Let there be no hostility
Except to those
Who practise oppression".
Sura XXII, verses 39 and 40:
39. "To those against whom
War is made, permission
Is given (to fight) because
They are wronged;— and verily,
God is most Powerful
For their aid;—"
40. "(They are) those who have
Been expelled from their homes
In defiance of right,—
(For no cause) except
That they say, 'Our Lord
Is God.' Did not God
Check one set of people
By means of another,
There would surely have been
Pulled down monasteries, churches,
Synagogues, and mosques, in which
The name of God is commemorated
In abundant measure. God will
Certainly aid those who
Aid His (cause);—for verily
God is Full of Strength,
Exalted in Might,
(Able to enforce His Will),"
contain in them the sublime principle which international jurists have only faintly begun to discover, we must go on preaching that aggression is the chief characteristic of Islam. The law relating to prisoners of war is another branch of Islamic law which is bound to come in conflict with International Law.
As for instance, in matters relating to the treatment of prisoners of war, we shall have to be governed by Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi's view, assuming that view is based on the Qur'an and the sunna, which is as follows :—
"Q.—Is there a law of war in Islam?
Q.—Does it differ fundamentally from the modern International Law of war?
A.—These two systems are based on a fundamental difference.
Q.—What rights have non-Muslims who are taken prisoners of war in a jihad?
A.—The Islamic law on the point is that if the country of which these prisoners are nationals pays ransom, they will be released. An exchange of prisoners is also permitted. If neither of these alternatives is possible, the prisoners will be converted into slaves for ever. If any such person makes an offer to pay his ransom out of his own earnings, he will be permitted to collect the money necessary for the fidya (ransom).
Q.—Are you of the view that unless a Government assumes the form of an Islamic Government, any war declared by it is not a jihad?
A.—No. A war may be declared to be a jihad if it is declared by a national Government of Muslims in the legitimate interests of the State. I never expressed the opinion attributed to me in Ex. D. E. 12:—
"Raha yeh masala keh agar hukumat-i-Pakisten apni maujuda shukl-o-surat ke sath Indian Union ke sath apne mu'ahadat khatm kar-ke i'lan-i-jang bar bhi de to kya us-ki yeh jang jihad ke hukam men a-ja'egi ? Ap ne is bare men jo rae zahir ki hai woh bilkul darust hai – Jab-tak hukumat Islami nizam ko ikhtiyar kar-ke Islami nah ho jae us waqt tak us-ki kisi jang ko jihad kehna aisa hi hai jaisa kisi ghair Muslim ke Azad Kashmir ki fauj men bharti ho-kar larne ko jihad aur us-ki maut ko shahadat ka nam dediya jae – Maulana ka jo mudd'a hai woh yeh hai keh mu'ahadat ki maujudgi men to hukumat ya us-ke shehriyon ka is jang men sharik hona shar'-an ja'iz hi nahin – Agar hukumat mu'ahadat khatm kar-ke jang ka
i'lan kar-de to hukumat ki jang to jihad phir bhi nahin hogi ta-an keh hukumat Islami nah ho jae.'
(translation)
'The question remains whether, even if the Government of Pakistan, in its present form and structure, terminates her treaties with the Indian Union and declares war against her, this war would fall under the definition of jihad? The opinion expressed by him in this behalf is quite correct. Until such time as the Government becomes Islamic by adopting the Islamic form of Government, to call any of its wars a jihad would be tantamount to describing the enlistment and fighting of a non-Muslim on the side of the Azad Kashmir forces jihad and his death martyrdom. What the Maulana means is that, in the presence of treaties, it is against Shari'at, if the Government or its people participate in such a war. If the Government terminates the treaties and declares war, even then the war started by Government would not be termed jihad unless the Government becomes Islamic'.
About the view expressed in this letter being that of Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, there is the evidence of Mian Tufail Muhammad, the writer of the letter, who states: "Ex. D. E. 12 is a photostat copy of a letter which I wrote to someone whose name I do not now remember."
Maulana Abul Hasanat Muhammad Ahmad Qadri's view on this point is as
Q.—Does it differ in fundamentals from the present International Law?
Q.—What are the rights of a person taken prisoner in war?
A.—He can embrace Islam or ask for aman, in which case he will be treated as a musta'min. If he does not ask for aman, he would be made a slave".
Similar is the opinion expressed by Mian Tufail Muhammad of Jam'at-i-Islami who says:—
"Q.—Is there any law of war in Islamic laws?
Q.—If that comes into conflict with International Law, which will you follow?
A.—Islamic law.
Q.—Then please state what will be the status of prisoners of war captured by your
forces?
A.—I cannot reply to this off hand. I will have to study the point."
Of course ghanima (plunder) and khums (one-fifth) if treated as a necessary incident of
jihad will be treated by international society as a mere act of brigandage.
REACTION ON MUSLIMS OF NON-MUSLIM STATES
The ideology on which an Islamic State is desired to be founded in Pakistan must have certain consequences for the Musalmans who are living in countries under non-Muslim sovereigns.
We asked Amir-i-Shari'at Sayyad Ataullah Shah Bukhari whether a Muslim could be a faithful subject of a non-Muslim State and reproduce his answer:—
"Q.—In your opinion is a Musalman bound to obey orders of a kafir Government?
A.—It is not possible that a Musalman should be faithful citizen of a non-Muslim Government.
Q.—Will it be possible for the four crore of Indian Muslims to be faithful citizens of their State?
The answer is quite consistent with the ideology which has been pressed before us, but then if Pakistan is entitled to base its Constitution on religion, the same right must be conceded to other countries where Musalmans are in substantial minorities or if they constitute a preponderating majority in a country where sovereignty rests with a non-Muslim community. We, therefore, asked the various ulama whether, if non-Muslims in Pakistan were to be subjected to this discrimination in matters of citizenship, the ulama would have any objection to Muslims in other countries being subjected to a similar discrimination. Their reactions to this suggestion are reproduced below:—
Maulana Abul Hasanat Sayyed Muhammad Ahmad Qadri, President, Jami'at-ul-Ulama-i-Pakistan:—
"Q.—You will admit for the Hindus, who are in a majority in India, the right to have a Hindu religious State?
Q.—Will you have any objection if the Muslims are treated under that form of Government as malishes or shudras under the law of Manu?
Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi :—
"Q.—If we have this form of Islamic Government in Pakistan, will you permit Hindus to base their Constitution on the basis of their own religion?
A—Certainly. I should have no objection even if the Muslims of India are treated in that form of Government as shudras and malishes and Manu's laws are applied to them, depriving them of all share in the Government and the rights of a citizen. In fact such a state of affairs already exists in India."
Amir-i-Shari'at Sayyad Ata Ullah Skak Bukhari :—
"Q.—How many crores of Muslims are there in India?
A.—Four crores.
Q.—Have you any objection to the law of Manu being applied to them according to which they will have no civil right and will be treated as malishes and shudras?
A.—I am in Pakistan and I cannot advise them."
Mian Tufail Muhammad of Jama'at-i-Islami :—
"Q.—What is the population of Muslims in the world?
A.—Fifty crores.
Q.—If the total population of Muslims of the world is 50 crores, as you say, and the number of Muslims living in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Indonesia, Egypt, Persia, Syria, Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, Turkey and Iraq does not exceed 20 crores, will not the result of your ideology beto convert 30 crores of Muslims in the world into hewers of wood anddrawers of water?
A.—My ideology should not affect their position.
Q.—Even if they are subjected to discrimination on religious grounds and denied ordinary rights of citizenship ?
This witness goes to the extent of asserting that even if a non-Muslim Government were to offer posts to Muslims in the public services of the country, it will be their duty to refuse such posts.
Ghazi Siraj-ud-Din Munir :—
"Q.—Do you want an Islamic State in Pakistan?
A.—Surely.
Q.—What will be your reaction if the neighbouring country was to found
their political system on their own religion?
A.—They can do it if they like.
Q.—Do you admit for them the right to declare that all Muslims in India, are shudras and malishes with no civil rights whatsoever?
A.—We will do our best to see that before they do it their political
sovereignty is gone. We are too strong for India. We will be strong enough to prevent India from doing this.
Q.—Is it a part of the religious obligations of Muslims to preach their religion?
A—Yes.
Q.—Is it a part of the duty of Muslims in India publicly to preach their religion?
A.—They should have that right.
Q.—What if the Indian State is founded on a religious basis and the right to preach religion is disallowed to its Muslim nationals?
A —If India makes any such law, believer in the Expansionist movement as I am, I will march on India and conquer her."
So this is the reply to the reciprocity of discrimination on religious grounds.
Master Taj-ud-Din Ansari :—
"Q.—Would you like to have the same ideology for the four crores of Muslims in India as you are impressing upon the Muslims of
Pakistan?
A.—That ideology will not let them remain in India for one minute.
Q.—Does the ideology of a Muslim change from place to place and from time to time?
Q.—Then why should not the Muslims of India have the same ideology as you have?
A.—They should answer that question."
The ideology advocated before us, if adopted by Indian Muslims, will completely
disqualify them for public offices in the State, not only in India but in other countries also which are under a non-Muslim Government. Muslims will become perpetual suspects everywhere and will not be enrolled in the army because according to this ideology, in case of war between a Muslim country and a non-Muslim country, Muslim soldiers of the non-Muslim country must either side with the Muslim country or surrender their posts.
The following is the view expressed by two divines whom we questioned on this point:—
Maulana Abul Hasanat Sayyed Muhammad Ahmad Qadri, President, Jami'at-ul-
Ulama-i-Pakistan :—
"Q.—What will be the duty of Muslims in India in case of war between India
and Pakistan?
A.—Their duty is obvious, namely, to side with us and not to fight against us
on behalf of India."
Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi : —
"Q.—What will be the duty of the Muslims in India in case of war between
India and Pakistan?
A.—Their duty is obvious, and that is not to fight against Pakistan or to do
anything injurious to the safety of Pakistan."
OTHER INCIDENTS
Other incidents of an Islamic State are that all sculpture, playing of cards, portrait
painting, photographing human beings, music, dancing, mixed acting, cinemas and
theatres will have to be closed.
Thus says Maulana Abdul Haleem Qasimi, representative of Jami'at-ul-Ulama-i-Pakistan: —
"Q.—What are your views on tashbih and tamseel ?
A.—You should ask me a concrete question.
Q.—What are your views on lahw-o-la'b?
A.—The same is my reply to this question.
Q.—What are your views about portrait painting?
A.—There is nothing against it if any such painting becomes necessary.
Q.—What about photography?
A.—My reply to it is the same as the reply regarding portrait painting.
Q.—What about sculpture as an art?
A.—It is prohibited by our religion.
Q.—Will you bring playing of cards in lohw-o-la'b?
A.—Yes, it will amount to lahw-o-la'b.
Q.—What about music and dancing?
A.—It is all forbidden by our religion.
Q.—What about drama and acting?
A —It all depends on what kind of acting you mean. If it involves immodesty
and intermixture of sexes, the Islamic law is against it.
Q.—If the State is founded on your ideals, will you make a law stopping
portrait painting, photographing of human beings, sculpture, playing
of cards, music, dancing, acting and all cinemas and theatres?
A.—Keeping in view the present form of these activities, my answer is in the affirmative."
Maulana Abdul Haamid Badayuni considers it to be a sin (ma'siyat) on the part of
professors of anatomy to dissect dead bodies of Muslims to explain points of anatomy to the students.
The soldier or the policeman will have the right, on grounds of religion, to disobey a command by a superior authority. Maulana Abul Hasanat's view on this is as follows :—
"I believe that if a policeman is required to do something which we consider to be contrary to our religion, it should be the duty of the policeman to disobey the authority. The same would be my answer if 'army' were substituted for 'police'.
Q.—You stated yesterday that if a policeman or a soldier was required by a
superior authority to do what you considered to be contrary to religion, it would be the duty of that policeman or the soldier to disobey such authority. Will you give the policeman or the soldier the right of himself determining whether the command he is given by his superior authority is contrary to religion ?
A.—Most certainly.
Q.—Suppose there is war between Pakistan and another Muslim country and the soldier feels that Pakistan is in the wrong; and that to shoot a soldier of other country is contrary to religion. Do you think he would be justified in disobeying his commanding officer ?
A.—In such a contingency the soldier should take a fatwa of the 'ulama'."
We have dwelt at some length on the subject of Islamic State not because we intended to write a thesis against or in favour of such State but merely with a view to presenting a clear picture of the numerous possibilities that may in future arise if true causes of the ideological confusion which contributed to the spread and intensity of the disturbances are not precisely located. That such confusion did exist is obvious because otherwise Muslim Leaguers, whose own Government was in office, would not have risen against it; sense of loyalty and public duty would not have departed from public officials who went about like maniacs howling against their own Government and officers; respect for property and human life would not have disappeared in the common man who with no scruple or compunction began freely to indulge in loot, arson and murder; politicians would not have shirked facing the men who had installed them in their offices; and administrators would not have felt hesitant or diffident in performing what was their obvious duty. If there is one thing which has been conclusively demonstrated in this inquiry, it is that provided you can persuade the masses to believe that something they are asked to do is religiously right or enjoined by religion, you can set them to any course of action, regardless of all considerations of discipline, loyalty, decency, morality or civic sense.
Pakistan is being taken by the common man, though it is not, as an Islamic State. This belief has been encouraged by the ceaseless clamour for Islam and Islamic State that is being heard from all quarters since the establishment of Pakistan. The phantom of an Islamic State has haunted the Musalman throughout the ages and is a result of the memory of the glorious past when Islam rising like a storm from the least expected quarter of the world—wilds of Arabia—instantly enveloped the world, pulling down from their high pedestal gods who had ruled over man since the creation, uprooting centuries old institutions and superstitions and supplanting all civilisations that had been built on an enslaved humanity. What is 125 years in human history, nay in the history of a people, and yet during this brief period Islam spread from the Indus to the Atlantic and Spain, and from the borders of China to Egypt, and the sons of the desert installed themselves in all old centres of civilisation—in Ctesiphon, Damascus, Alexandria, India and all places associated with the names of the Sumerian and the Assyrian civilisations. Historians have often posed the question : what would have been the state of the world today if Muawiya's siege of Constantinople had succeeded or if the proverbial Arab instinct for plunder had not suddenly seized the mujahids of Abdur Rahman in their fight against Charles Martel on the plains of Tours in Southern France. May be Muslims would have discovered America long before Columbus did and the entire world would have been Moslemised; may be Islam itself would have been Europeanised. It is this brilliant achievement of the Arabian nomads, the like of which the world had never seen before, that makes the Musalman of today live in the past and yearn for the return of the glory that was Islam. He finds himself standing on the crossroads, wrapped in the mantle of the past and with the dead weight of centuries on his back, frustrated and bewildered and hesitant to turn one corner or the other. The freshness and the simplicity of the faith, which gave determination to his mind and spring to his muscle, is now denied to him. He has neither the means nor the ability to conquer and there are no countries to conquer. Little does he understand that the forces, which are pitted against him, are entirely different from those against which early Islam, had to fight, and that on the clues given by his own ancestors human mind has achieved results which he cannot understand. He therefore finds himself in a state of helplessness, waiting for some one to come and help him out of this morass of uncertainty and confusion. And he will go on waiting like this without anything happening. Nothing but a bold re-orientation of Islam to separate the vital from the lifeless can preserve it as a World Idea and convert the Musalman into a citizen of the present and the future world from the archaic in congruity that he is today. It is this lack of bold and clear thinking, the inability to understand and take decisions which has brought about in Pakistan a confusion which will persist and repeatedly create situations of the kind we have been inquiring into until our leaders have a clear conception of the goal and of the means to reach it. It requires no imagination to realise that irreconcilables remain irreconcilable even if you believe or wish to the contrary. Opposing principles, if left to themselves, can only produce confusion and disorder, and the application of a neutralising agency to them can only produce a dead result. Unless, in case of conflict between two ideologies, our leaders have the desire and the ability to elect, uncertainty must continue. And as long as we rely on the hammer when a file is needed and press Islam into service to solve situations it was never intended to solve, frustration and disappointment must dog our steps. The sublime faith called Islam will live even if our leaders are not there to enforce it. It lives in the individual, in his soul and outlook, in all his relations with God and men, from the cradle to the grave, and our politicians should understand that if Divine commands cannot make or keep a man a Musalman, their statutes will not….
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Parliament is supposed to control the Government, not be bullied or intimidated by it: Will Rahul Gandhi be able to lead the Backbenches in the 15th Lok Sabha?
June 1, 2009 — drsubrotoroy
Any Lok Sabha MP who neither sits with the Opposition nor is a sworn-in member of the Government is a Backbench MP of the Government party or its coalition.
Shrimati Sonia Gandhi is the most prominent of such Backbench MPs in the 15th Lok Sabha, just as she was of the 14th Lok Sabha, and has chosen to be in a most peculiar position from the point of view of parliamentary law. As the leader of the largest parliamentary party, she could have been not merely a member of the Government but its Prime Minister. She has in fact had a decisive role in determining the composition of the Manmohan Government as well as its policies. She in fact sits on the Frontbenches in the Lok Sabha along with the Manmohan Government. But she is not a member of the Government and is, formally speaking, a Backbench MP who is choosing to sit in the Frontbenches.
(Dr Manmohan Singh himself, not being a member of the Lok Sabha, may, formally speaking, sit or speak from among the Frontbenches of his own Government only by invitation of the Lok Sabha Speaker as a courtesy – such would have been the cardinal reason why Alec Douglas-Home resigned from being Lord Home and instead stood for a House of Commons seat when he was appointed British Prime Minister.)
Sonia Gandhi's son, Mr Rahul Gandhi, is also a Backbench MP. From all accounts, including that of Dr Singh himself, he could have been a member of Dr Singh's Government but has specifically chosen not to be. He has appeared to have had some much lesser role than Sonia Gandhi in determining the composition of the Government and its policies but he is not a member of it. He is, formally speaking, a Backbench MP, indeed the most prominent to actually sit in the Backbenches, as he had done in the 14th Lok Sabha, which, it is to be hoped, he does in the 15th Lok Sabha too.
Now Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and their 541 other fellow 15th Lok Sabha MPs were declared winners by May 16 2009 having won the Indian people's vote.
(Incidentally, I predicted the outcome here two hours before polls closed on May 13 – how I did so is simply by having done the necessary work of determining that some 103 million people had voted for Congress in 2004 against some 86 million for the BJP; in my assessment Congress had done more than enough by way of political rhetoric and political reality to maintain if not extend that difference in 2009, i.e., the BJP had not done nearly enough to even begin to get enough of a net drift in its favour. I expect when the data are out it shall be seen that the margin of the raw vote between them has been much enlarged from 2004.)
As I have pointed out here over the last fortnight, there was no legal or logical reason why the whole 15th Lok Sabha could not have been sworn in latest by May 18 2009.
Instead, Dr Manmohan Singh on May 18 held a purported "Cabinet" meeting of the defunct 14th Lok Sabha – an institution that had been automatically dissolved when Elections had been first announced! The Government then went about forming itself over two weeks despite the 15th Lok Sabha, on whose confidence it depended for its political legitimacy, not having been allowed to meet. Everyone – the Congress Party's Supreme Court advocates, the Lok Sabha Secretariat, the Election Commission, Rashtrapati Bhavan too – seems to have gotten it awfully wrong by placing the cart before the horse.
In our system it is Parliament that is sovereign, not the Executive Government. In fact the Executive is accountable to Parliament, specifically the Lok Sabha, and is supposed to be guided by it as well as hold its confidence at all times.
What has happened instead this time is that Government ministers have been busy taking oaths and entering their offices and making policy-decisons days before they have taken their oaths and their seats as Lok Sabha MPs! The Government has thus started off by diminishing Parliament's sovereignty and this should not be allowed to happen again.
(Of course why it took place is because of the peculiarity of the victory relative to our experience in recent decades – nobody could remember parliamentary traditions from Nehru's time in the 1950s. Even so, someone, e.g. the former Speaker, should have known and insisted upon explaining the relevant aspect of parliamentary law and hence avoided this breach.)
A central question now is whether a Government which has such a large majority, and which is led by someone in and has numerous ministers from the Rajya Sabha, is going to be adequately controlled and feel itself accountable to the Lok Sabha.
Neither of the Lok Sabha's most prominent Backbenchers, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, have thus far distinguished themselves as Parliamentarians on the floor of the Lok Sabha. In the 14th Lok Sabha, Sonia Gandhi, sitting in the Frontbenches, exercised the enormous control that she did over the Government not on the floor of the House itself but from outside it.
It would be best of all if she chose in the 15th Lok Sabha to actually physically sit in the Congress's Backbenches because that would ensure best that the Government Party's ministers in the Frontbenches will keep having to seek to be accountable to the Backbenches!
But this seems unlikely to happen in view of the fact she herself seems to have personally influenced the choice of a Speaker for the 15th Lok Sabha and it may be instead expected that she continues to sit on the Frontbenches with the Government without being a member of it.
That leaves Rahul Gandhi. If he too comes to be persuaded by the sycophants to sit on the Frontbenches with the Government, that will not be a healthy sign.
On the other hand, if he continues to sit on the Backbenches, he may be able to have a salubrious influence on the 15th Lok Sabha fulfilling its responsibility of seeking to seriously control and hold accountable the Executive Government, and not be bullied or intimidated by it. His paternal grandfather, Feroze Gandhi, after all, may have been India's most eminent and effective Backbench MP yet.
Subroto Roy, Kolkata
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Separation of Powers: India, the USA, Pakistan
February 13, 2006 — drsubrotoroy
Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws outlined a doctrine that applies to India, the USA and all constitutional democracies: there is no monopoly of political wisdom.
By SUBROTO ROY
First published in The Sunday Statesman, The Statesman Editorial Page, Special Article Feb 12-13 2006
The Speaker's noble office is that of the single member of the House, traditionally chosen by unanimity, whose task it is to self-effacingly maintain order in Parliamentary debate and proceedings, so that the House's work gets done. C'est tout. Once chosen Speaker, he ipso facto retires from partisan politics for life. The Speaker neither contributes to the substance of Parliamentary debate (except in the rare case of a tie) nor has to feel personally responsible for Parliament's conduct.
Our Parliament has tended to become so dysfunctional since Indira Gandhi and her sycophants destroyed its traditions 30 years ago, that supervising its normal work is an onerous enough task for even the finest of Speakers to handle.
The Lok Sabha's incumbent Speaker has tended to see himself as the champion of Parliament. He need not. He does not command a majority in the Lok Sabha; the Government Party does. We have had the oddest peculiarity unfolding in India at present where the person who does command the Lok Sabha's majority, and therefore who would be normally defined as Prime Minister of India, has chosen to nominate someone who is not a member of the Lok Sabha to act as Prime Minister, i.e. to command the Lok Sabha's majority. (The Rajya Sabha was and remains irrelevant to most things important to Indian democracy, regardless of its narcissism and vanity). Someone with access to 10 Janpath should have told Sonia Gandhi in May 2004 that if she did not wish to be PM and wanted to gift the job to someone else, she should do so to someone who, like herself, had been elected to the Lok Sabha, like Pranab Mukherjee (elected for the first time) or Kamal Nath or Priya Ranjan (both veterans).
Manmohan Singh, a former Lok Sabha candidate, may as Finance Minister have been able to progress much further with economic reforms. But sycophancy has ruled the roost in the Congress's higher echelons, and nobody had the guts to tell her that. Indeed as early as December 2001, Congress leaders knew that in the unlikely event they won the polls, Manmohan Singh would likely be PM by Sonia Gandhi's choice (though he was not expected to last long at the top), and yet he did not contest the Lok Sabha polls in 2004.
The Government of the day, not the Speaker, is Parliament's champion in any discussion with the Supreme Court over constitutional rights and Separation of Powers. And the Government has in fact quietly and sensibly requested the Supreme Court to set up a Constitutional Bench for this purpose. Such a Constitutional Bench shall have cause to ask itself how far Kesavananda Bharati needs to be tweaked if at all to accommodate the contention that Parliament has a right to judge its own members. The Court may well likely say that of course Parliament has a right to judge its own members but even that right is not an absolute right, (nothing is). Even Parliament's right to judge its own members must be in accordance with natural law, with principles of justice, with due and clearly defined processes. E.g. the established Privileges Committee and not the ad hoc Bansal Committee had to do the needful.
Imagine a hypothetical case of fantastic fiction where half a dozen independent MPs are elected to a future Lok Sabha, and then take it upon themselves to expose corruption and shenanigans of all major political parties. Our fantastic super-heroes become whistleblowers within Parliament itself while remaining totally incorruptible as individuals — like Eliot Ness's team who jailed Al Capone and other gangsters, and came to be depicted in Hollywood's The Untouchables. These Untouchables would come to be feared and despised by everyone from Communists on one side of the political spectrum to Fascists on the other. They would upset everybody precisely because they were so clean and were not purchasable. The Government and Opposition of the day might wellgang up to expel such troublemakers and even fabricate charges to do so. (Now there's a script for a Bollywood movie!)
What our Supreme Court's Constitutional Bench decides now in the matter at hand will determine the fate of our super-heroes in such a future fantasia. The present case is a polar opposite — where MPs have been caught on camera with their sordid fingers in the cookie-jar, and then made to walk the plank immediately by their peers. Yet natural law applies here as it will to our fantastic future fighters, and this is what the Bench would have to speak on.
Why the present situation continues to be disconcerting is because the whole country heard all the holier-than-thou protestations, yet everyone continues to take a very dim view of what they see of politicians' behaviour. There remain strong suspicions that only a few very tiny tips of very large icebergs were or can be caught on camera. Large-scale deals and contracts involve payments into invisible bank accounts, not petty cash into pockets or even suitcases filled with cash sloshing around Delhi.
What we have desperately needed in the situation is modern prime ministerial leadership which could intelligently and boldly guide national debate in the right direction on the whole matter of probity in public life. Why a distinguished parliamentarian like the Speaker has found himself in the limelight is because neither the de jure nor de facto Prime Ministers of India are anywhere to be seen thinking on their feet on these central issues of constitutional procedure and practice. They tend to use prepared scripts and may be temperamentally disinclined to do what has been called for by these unscripted circumstances. (Indeed the much-maligned H. D. Deve Gowda could be alone among the bevy of recent PMs who has been able to think on his feet at all.)
Collapse Before Executive Power
In the meantime, the United States is going through its own Separation of Powers' crisis. As explained in these columns previously, the American system is distinctly different from the British, and our own system is midway between them. Yet similar principles may be discerned to apply or fail to be applied in all.
Winston Churchill once perspicaciously observed:
"The rigid Constitution of the United States, the gigantic scale and strength of its party machinery, the fixed terms for which public officers and representatives are chosen, invest the President with a greater measure of autocratic power than was possessed before (the First World War) by the Head of any great State. The vast size of the country, the diverse types, interests and environments of its enormous population, the safety-valve function of the legislatures of fifty Sovereign States, make the focussing of national public opinion difficult, and confer upon the Federal Government exceptional independence of it except at fixed election times. Few modern Governments need to concern themselves so little with the opinion of the party they have beaten at the polls; none secures to its supreme executive officer, at once the Sovereign and the Party Leader, such direct personal authority."
America's Legislative Branch has, on paper, strong powers of advice and consent to control errors, excesses or abuse of power by the Executive President. But (with rare and courageous exceptions like Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia) the Legislature cravenly collapsed before the father-son Bush presidencies in regard to the Middle East wars of recent years. America's once-revered federal judiciary has also tended to lose its independence of mind with overt politicisation of judicial appointments in recent decades.
Bush the First went to war against Saddam Hussein (a former American ally against Islamic Iran) at least partly with an eye to winning re-election in 1992 (which he would have done as a result but for a random shock known as Ross Perot; Bill Clinton became the beneficiary). Bush the Second obsessively wished to follow up on the same, to the point of misjudging the real threat to America from Bin Laden and fabricating a false threat from an emasculated Saddam.
America's Legislature palpably failed to control her Presidents. Now, late in the day, after all the horses have bolted, the Senate Judiciary Committee began tepid hearings on February 5 2006 into whether the President authorized laws to be broken with impunity in regard to wire-tapping some 5,000 citizens (doubtless mostly non-white and Muslim) without judicial warrants. Republican Senator Arlen Specter, the Committee's Chairman, has said he believes the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has been "flatly" violated, and "strained and unrealistic" justifications are now being offered. Bush's men, from his Vice President and Attorney General to political intelligence operatives, have brazenly placed in the dustbin the traditional principle fiat justitia pereat mundus — let justice be done even if the world perishes — saying that the Sovereign can do just as he pleases to save the realm from external enemies as he might perceive and define them to be.
What this kind of collapse in current American practice reveals is a new aspect unknown at the time of Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. In the modern world, Separation of Powers involves not merely constitutional institutions like Executive, Legislature and Judiciary but also the normal civil institutions of a free and open society, especially academic institutions and the press. In America, it has been not merely the Legislature and Judiciary which have tended to collapse before Executive Power in regard to the recent Middle East wars, but the media and academia as well.
"Embedded reporters" and Fox TV set the tone for America's official thought processes about Iraq and the Muslim world — until it has become too late for America's mainstream media or academics to recover their own credibility on the subject. On the other hand, unofficial public opinion has, in America's best traditions, demonstrated using vast numbers of Internet websites and weblogs, a spirited Yankee Doodle individuality against the jingoism and war-mongering of the official polity.
Neither the press nor academia had collapsed the same way during America's last major foreign wars in Vietnam and Cambodia forty years ago, and it may be fairly said that America's self-knowledge was rather better then than it is now, except of course there were no Internet websites and weblogs.
Our Pakistani Cousins
Across the border from us, our Pakistani cousins are, from a political and constitutional point of view, cut from the same cloth as ourselves, namely the 1935 Government of India Act, and the Montague-Chelmsford and Morley-Minto reforms earlier. However, ever since Jinnah's death, they have refused to admit this and instead embarked haplessly on what can only be called an injudicious path of trying to write a Constitution for a new Caliphate. The primary demand of the main scholars influencing this process was "That the sovereignty in Pakistan belongs to God Almighty alone and that the Government of Pakistan shall administer the country as His agent". By such a view, in the words of Rashid Rida and Maulana Maududi, Islam becomes "the very antithesis of secular Western democracy. The philosophical foundation of Western democracy is the sovereignty of the people. Lawmaking is their prerogative and legislation must correspond to the mood and temper of their opinion… Islam… altogether repudiates the philosophy of popular sovereignty and rears its polity on the foundations of the sovereignty of God and the viceregency (Khilafat) of man." (Rosenthal, Islam & the Modern National State, Cambridge 1965.) Pakistan's few modern constitutionalists have been ever since battling impossibly to overcome the ontological error made here of assuming that any mundane government can be in communication with God Almighty. In the meantime, all normal branches of Pakistan's polity, like the electorate, press, political parties, Legislature and Judiciary, have remained at best in ill-formed inchoate states of being — while the Pakistan Armed Forces stepped in with their own large economic and political interests and agendas to effectively take over the country and the society as a whole, on pretext of protecting Pakistan from India or of gaining J&K for it. Pakistan's political problems have the ontological error at their root. Pakistan's political parties, academics and press, have with rare exceptions remained timid in face of the militaristic State — directing their anger and frustration at an easier target instead, namely ourselves in India. The Pakistan Government's way of silencing its few political, academic or press dissidents has been to send them into comfortable exile abroad.
Sheikh Abdullah Contrasted
Pakistan's perpetual constitutional confusion deserves to be contrasted with the clarity of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah's thinking, e.g. his 5 November 1951 speech to the Constituent Assembly of J&K: "You are the sovereign authority in this State of Jammu & Kashmir; what you decide has the irrevocable force of law. The basic democratic principle of sovereignty of the nation, embodied ably in the American and French Constitutions, is once again given shape in our midst. I shall quote the famous words of Article 3 of the French Constitution of 1791:- 'The source of all sovereignty resides fundamentally in the nation. Sovereignty is one and indivisible, inalienable and imprescriptable. It belongs to the nation.' We should be clear about the responsibilities that this power invests us with. In front of us lie decisions of the highest national importance which we shall be called upon to take. Upon the correctness of our decisions depends not only the happiness of our land and people now, but the fate as well of generations to come."
Contrasting the Pakistani views of constitution-making with those of Sheikh Abdullah may help to explain a great deal about where we are today on the delicate and profound subject of J&K. (See "Solving Kashmir", The Statesman, December 1—3, 2005)
India's current debate about Separation of Powers needs to keep at a distance the clear negative examples of our American friends, who have brought upon themselves in recent times a craven collapse of Legislature, Judiciary, press and academia to the Executive President (as Churchill had seemed to predict), as well as of our Pakistani cousins who have continued with general political and civil collapse for half a century. Because our universities are all owned by the State, India's academics, from Communist to Fascist, have tended to be servile towards it. In respect of the press, the power of independent newspapers has been dwindling, while the new TV anchors have created their own models of obsequiousness and chummery towards New Delhi's ruling cliques of the day. It thus becomes India's Supreme Court which remains the ultimate guardian of our Constitution and the safest haven of our very fragile freedoms — besides of course our own minds and hearts.
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Unaccountable Delhi: India's Separation of Powers' Doctrine
UNACCOUNTABLE DELHI
India's Separation Of Powers' Doctrine
First published in The Statesman Jan 13 2006 Editorial Page Special Article,
The Speaker does not like the fact the High Court has issued notices questioning the procedure he followed in expelling MPs from Parliament. Sonia Gandhi's self-styled "National Advisory Council" has demanded control over disbursement of 100,000,000,000 rupees of public money. The Manmohan Singh Government plans to quietly ignore the Supreme Court's finding that it had breached India's Constitution in imposing President's Rule in Bihar. All three issues have to do with application of India's Separation of Powers Doctrine, i.e. the appropriate delimitation of Constitutional powers between our Legislature, Executive and Judiciary.
A constitutional crime was attempted in India during the Indira-Sanjay Gandhi political "Emergency" declared on 26 June 1975. On 10 November 1975 (a time of press censorship) a 13-judge Bench of the Supreme Court met to hear the Government plead for overrule of Kesavananda Bharati (A.I.R. 1973 S.C. 1461), a landmark Nani Palkhivala once called "the greatest contribution of the Republic of India to constitutional jurisprudence". Within two days, the Government had failed in the Court, and Kesavananda held. What was upheld? That while India's Parliament was sovereign and could amend the Constitution, the amending power may not be used to alter or destroy "the basic structure or framework of the Constitution". And the Supreme Court decides for itself whether Parliament has exceeded its legitimate power to amend.
Basic structure
Palkhivala's description of what constitutes the "basic structure or framework" of India's Constitution is excellent enough: "the rule of law, the right to personal liberty and freedom from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, the right to dissent which implies the freedom of speech and expression and a free press are… a part of the basic structure of a free democracy, and it is these priceless human freedoms which cannot be destroyed by Parliament in exercise of its amending power. Thus Kesavananda's case ensures that tyranny and despotism shall not masquerade as constitutionalism."
Palkhivala argued that, if anything, the aspects of Kesavananda that needed to be set aside were those that had over-ruled Golaknath (A.I.R. 1967 S.C. 1643) which said Parliament should not be held to have the power to abridge any fundamental right, indeed any amended article which abrogates any fundamental right is invalid.
Dicey said "In the principle of the distribution of powers which determines its form, the constitution of the United States is the exact opposite of the English constitution." Kesavananda Bharati showed the midway point between the two in constitutional jurisprudence anywhere in the world. We are like the Americans and unlike the British first in being a Republic, and secondly in having an explicit written Constitution. We are like the British and unlike the Americans in being a parliamentary democracy where the Executive Branch of Government, namely the Prime Minister and his/her Cabinet is elected from within the Legislative Branch of Government, namely, Parliament, and must at all times retain the confidence of the latter, specifically the Lok Sabha, the House of the People.
The American Executive Branch has a directly-elected President who chooses his administration, and it is commonplace for him to not have the confidence of the Upper or Lower House of the Legislature, to the point that one recent president had to undergo impeachment proceedings and barely survived. There is no constitutional crisis in America if the Legislature loathes the President and wishes him out. The American President and his Executive Branch stay in office until the last minute of his fixed term.
PM answers to Parliament
In our system, the Prime Minister answers at all times to Parliament. Parliament in India's democracy has normally meant the House of the People — where every member has contested and won a direct vote in his/her constituency. India's current Lok Sabha has set a constitutional precedent not seen in more than a hundred years anywhere in electing an Executive led by someone not a member. The British Upper House used to have an aristocratic hereditary component which Mr Blair's New Labour Government has removed, making it more like what the Rajya Sabha was supposed to be — except that by now our Rajya Sabha has tended to become a place for party worthies who have lost normal elections, superannuated cinematic personalities, perpetual bureaucrats still seeking office, and others who really should be at home helping to raise the grandchildren. Parliament may not have fully recovered its health ever since that constitutional crime committed against the Republic known as the Indira-Sanjay "Emergency" (and at least one member of Sanjay's coterie wields much power today).
Crimes and misdemeanours
The Supreme Court's finding that the Government breached the Constitution by imposing President's Rule in Bihar is a finding not of a constitutional crime but of a constitutional misdemeanour. (For reasons given already in these columns on 20 October 2005, it has nothing to do with the President, who merely embodies the sovereignty of our Republic.) For an Executive Order or Legislative Act to be found by a competent Court as being unconstitutional means merely that it does not have to be obeyed by citizens. In the Bihar case, the Supreme Court found this consequence irrelevant because new elections were already in process, the result of which would come from the most authentic democratic voice possible, namely, the same people who elect the House of the People in the first place. India's Executive has been found to have committed a constitutional misdemeanour, for which it needed to apologise to the Court and Parliament (who are its constitutional co-equals) and then ask the latter to renew its confidence — in which event, life goes on. If confidence was not renewed, the Government would fall and a new Government would have to be formed. But we do not have yet the idea of a backbench revolt —mainly because all the front benches themselves have tended to be in such confusion and disarray with regard to parliamentary traditions, processes and functions.
The Supreme Court as the ultimate protector of the Constitution would be well within its prerogative to oversee whether a Parliamentary Speaker has acted appropriately. Consider a hypothetical case. Once elected, a Speaker is supposed to have no party-affiliation ever more for the rest of his/her life. Suppose, hypothetically, a controlled experiment found a Speaker systematically biased in favour of his/her own former party-members and against their opponents. Where but the Courts could such arbitrariness be effectively remonstrated against? Even if the incumbent Speaker impossibly imagines himself the personal embodiment of the Legislative Branch, he is not beyond the Constitution and therefore not beyond India's Separation of Powers' Doctrine.
The Opposition had alleged that the Speaker failed to follow procedure which required the culprits in the expulsion case be referred to the Privileges Committee. But beyond that the Opposition was too confused and guilt-ridden to pursue the matter during the dying moments of Parliament's Winter Session. In the clear light of day, the issue has now ended up in the Courts. If the Supreme Court eventually rules the Speaker had in fact failed to follow Parliament's own procedures (and hence breached Constitutional practices), the Speaker would need to apologise to the Courts and the House that elected him, and perhaps offer to fall on his sword.
Finally, for the "National Advisory Council", a wholly unelected body, to demand a say for itself over spending Rs. 100 billion in State and Union Government budget-making, would be another constitutional misdemeanour — unless its members are merely on the personal staff of the Hon'ble Member representing Rae Bareili, who may of course introduce whatever legislation on money-bills that any other Lok Sabha Member may do.
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