For Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founding father, it was clear that the country he was founding would not be an Islamic state. He said so in a speech given on August 11, 1947, three days before being sworn in as the country's first governor general. He had campaigned to create a country in which British India's Muslim population, then numbering about 100 million, could live comfortably and follow their distinct culture. That would not have been possible in an independent India in which those of Hindu religion will be in a large majority.

He seemed not to have given much attention to ethnicity which would – and in Pakistan's case did – stand in the way of nation building. He himself belonged to a small ethnic group called the Khojas which was largely based in Karachi. Small commercial activities were their main occupation.

Once Pakistan came into being, he thought that its creation would bring together and become a nation using the same language. That would be Urdu spoken by a minority of British India's Muslim population. About 3 to 4 million of this group, left their homes in what was now independent India and went to Karachi, chosen by Jinnah to be the new country's capital. Another 4 million went to the province of Punjab, occupying the land tilled by Sikh farmers who had migrated to India.

On his first and only visit to Dhaka, the capital of what was then called Pakistan's eastern wing, he suggested that Urdu would be Pakistan's national language. That was not acceptable to the Bengalis who lived in that part of Pakistan. They believed that Bengali, their language, was richer........

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