n December 18, 1947, the Pakistan Provincial Legislatures Order, 1947, was promulgated by Governor-General MA Jinnah. This law stipulated that any legislator who was a member of the central or provincial legislature or local body in the Dominion of India would no longer be allowed to be a member or contest elections in any provincial legislature in the Dominion of Pakistan unless they resigned their seat in the Indian Union legislatures or local bodies.

In West Pakistan, this law affected only one legislator: RK Sidhwa. Sidhwa was a member of both the Sindh Legislative Assembly and the Central Constituent Assembly. He was a Parsi from Karachi, an active worker of the Indian National Congress, and a clerk in the Postal Services. He had served as secretary general of the 45th Indian National Congress in 1931 in Karachi.

In the days leading up to the enactment of the new law, Sidhwa had informally resigned, although he waited to receive formal permission from the Sindh Provincial Congress Committee before migrating to India. The law was drafted to benefit Indian Muslims who had moved to Pakistan and were seeking to participate in provincial legislature elections.

Beyond the political opposition between Indian nationalism and the idea of Pakistan, which has been extensively discussed academically, Sidhwa’s case is a crucial event for understanding the future trajectory of Pakistan’s political life, its citizenship and its national belonging. It highlights how religious identity was prioritised over legal identities, the definition of a citizen and participation in electoral politics.

On July 24, 2004, Jagan Nath Azad, a poet, writer and academic, passed away at the age of 85. A prolific writer who had worked to promote Urdu in India, Azad was among the Indian Urdu writers and intellectuals who shaped the Urdu literary scene of post-independence India.

Usually, the deaths of such writers are followed by hagiographic obituaries that focus on their literary works and achievements. Azad’s death sparked a significant controversy that initiated a heated debate in the scholarly and literary circles of India and Pakistan, which continued for several years.

After Azad’s death, Balraj Puri wrote an obituary in the fortnightly The Milli Gazette (August 16 - August 31 2004) issue, mentioning that Azad was asked to pen the first national anthem of Pakistan. The matter also featured an interview with Azad by Luv Puri. It was Azad’s last interview, taken just a few days before his death.

In the interview, titled My last wish is to write a song of peace for both India and Pakistan: Azad, Azad claimed that in early August 1947, Jinnah had approached him and requested that he write an anthem for Pakistan. This was the first detailed interview where Azad talked at length about his anthem.

Although Azad had reminisced about his proposed anthem for Pakistan on many occasions in the past, especially at literary gatherings and in his biography and memoir, this claim had never been brought to light so overwhelmingly.

Since Azad was not around to address the points raised in response to his statement, historians and researchers faced a significant challenge. Pakistani liberal intelligentsia, jubilant at the idea of Azad’s anthem as a token to prove liberal nationalism and Jinnah’s secular vision for Pakistan, celebrated Azad as the creator of Pakistan’s first national anthem despite the lack of credible and accessible official archives.

Many articles appeared in the Pakistani press, praising Azad’s stance on India-Pakistan friendship and peace activism, drawing a false parallel between Jinnah’s censored August 11 speech to the first constituent assembly and Azad’s ‘lost anthem’ and ‘a Hindu’s anthem.’ There is no mention of this anthem in Hector Bolitho’s biography of Jinnah, although the book was often cited as a reference.

This was perhaps the first time the state contemplated how restrictive measures to the public’s access to official archival sources contributed to such contested histories. In 2009, the National Documentation Wing under the Cabinet Division of the Government of Pakistan published a booklet where declassified documents on the national anthem were publicised for the first time.

This work explores the intellectual pathways to the legal entailments of the state and the politics of national belonging in the post-1947 period.

The following year, in 2010, writer and researcher Aqeel Abbas Jafferi produced a researched book that can be considered the first attempt to sketch the history of the national anthem in Urdu.

Beyond how these histories shaped public perception, Azad’s portrait became so popular that today, even in Pakistan, it has sometimes been placed alongside that of Hafeez Jallandhari in public displays.

It is now established that Azad did not write any national anthem. Rather, he wrote an anthem, or more generally a national song, titled Ae Sar-zameen-i- Pak Zarray Teray Haen Aaj Sitaaron Say Taabnaak, which would air on Radio Pakistan before the adoption of the official anthem.

No doubt, Azad was never officially acknowledged by Pakistan for his contributions to the national language, Urdu, and his expertise on the national poet, Iqbal. His exclusion was shaped by his Hindu religious identity and Indian nationality. Nonetheless, acknowledging Azad for writing the national anthem was historically incorrect.

Contested histories are not limited to the national anthem. The contested histories of nationalisation projects – such as the exact date of Pakistan’s independence, remembrance of national days, constitutional histories, cartographic representations, national festivals, emblems and mottos – continue to challenge historians and affect the sense of belonging of individuals and communities.

Anthems, flags and emblems are seen as symbols of the state in modern political praxis, evolving beyond mere symbols to instruments for proving allegiance to the state and curbing dissent.

For example, in recent years, Pakistan’s state-owned television channel, PTV, introduced a practice of muting the Indian national anthem during live broadcasts of cricket matches as a gesture of patriotism and a reminder that the lyrics of the Indian anthem reference the geography of Pakistan.

There has been a trend of playing the national anthem more frequently and unnecessarily at various functions. In India, during the CAA protests, police forced marchers to sing the Indian anthem, further illustrating how these symbols are used to assert control and allegiance.

Borrowing the words from Pakistan’s national anthem, Qaum (nation), Mulk (country), Sultanat (state) is the title of a new book by Ali Usman Qasmi, an associate professor of history at LUMS. Qaum, Mulk, Sultanat: Citizenship and Belonging in Pakistan has been published by Stanford University Press and, more recently, by Ilqa Publishers in Lahore.

This work explores the intellectual pathways to the legal entailments of the state and the politics of national belonging in the post-1947 period. It discusses the establishment of the normative order of citizenship and nationhood as both legal membership and majoritarian ethos.

Prof Qasmi’s earlier works include notable contributions to the scholarship on the politics of Muslim nationalism in India, a relatively understudied area. He has co-edited a book titled Muslims Against The Muslim League: Critiques of the Idea of Pakistan. His other books include The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan and Questioning the Authority of the Past: The Ahl al-Quran Movement in the Punjab.

At the beginning of the book, Qasmi develops his case from the conversion of Jugal Kishor Mehra (Ahmad Selman) to Islam at the moment of Pakistan’s creation and later, in 2016, his granddaughter Salma Agha seeking Indian citizenship by recalling her Hindu ancestry.

Situating these religious identities highlights significant shifts in citizenship laws and privileges linked to specific religions. Through these empirical cases and theoretical underpinnings, the book not only examines citizenship from the perspective of colonial subjecthood but also addresses fundamental questions regarding the nationalisation project, which are often found in contested histories.

Qasmi lays out the broader meanings of Qaum, Mulk, Sultanat, beyond their verbatim meanings in the text of the national anthem. “I argued in a jointly written essay that an etymological survey of these terms reveals they have embodied various meanings and histories that do not necessarily align with those emphasised in the anthem,” he writes.

This is one of the major arguments in the book, explaining how reading texts that hymn the nation is important for understanding the underlying ideas and histories.

For historians in Pakistan, access to archives is often fraught with difficulty. This book, however, is rich in archival material and offers an intellectual history of Pakistan, focusing on the ideational basis of nationhood and citizenship based on Muslim qaumiyyat.

In the words of Prof Qasmi, “The idea of qaumiyyat and its attendant history and articulation in political thought were central to the project of carving the Pakistani nation-state.”

Qaum, Mulk, Sultanat:

Citizenship and National Belonging in Pakistan

Author: Ali Usman Qasmi

Publisher: Ilqa Publications Lahore, Pakistan, 2024

Price: Rs 1,799

The reviewer is a historian, travel writer and translator.