JALEES HAZIR It was a satisfying experience to get together with six bright students and talk about Jinnah and the relevance of his legacy 61 years after his death. The discussion had been organised by a TV channel for the forthcoming Quaid-i-Azam Day, and it was heartening to hear the young generation rescue the founding father from fossilized images on currency notes and official portraits. Their unconventional views generated a lively debate and breathed new life into his ideas. The next day, the programme's producer called to inform me that the discussion was too frank to be televised and requested that we record it again with some other participants expected to say the kind of things we are more used to hearing. That would be useless, I told him. After all, what is the point in repeating half-true clichs crammed out of text books that do not do full justice to the man and the legacy he left behind for our nation. In fact, it is very important to challenge the historically inaccurate official image crafted by the state after his death which has made him more and more irrelevant to today's Pakistan. By trapping the great leader's vision in officially sanctified quotable quotes, the state has actually harmed the ideals he'd lived and died for. That is being disrespectful to his memory. The best way to pay respect to him is what the censored students were attempting to do: courageously revisiting his political legacy with their feet on the ground and their curious minds looking for answers for today. Deifying officially-sanctified caricatures of the great men whom we acknowledge as our founding fathers is a bad idea. These great men and visionaries are rigidly and narrowly defined in order to give them the contours of sculpted idols. They are placed beyond critical analysis and this is supposed to be a sign of respect. In actual terms, this disabling reverence is used to fossilise their legacies and turn them into harmless gods to be worshipped in exploitative temples of status quo. The essence of their struggle is buried in mazars where dubious gaddi nasheens carefully guard half-baked myths about them. It is important to break these false idols built around our founding fathers and reclaim them by bringing their ideas to life. The discussion with the students did exactly that. They were not afraid to raise questions and challenge text-book versions, and though their ideas might come across as revolutionary to the traditionalists guarding the well-defined ideals of Quaid-i-Azam, they refused to be intimidated. Responding to a quotation from the Quaid's presidential address to the Constituent Assembly, a student felt that this seemed contradictory perhaps to his later views. In that speech, he had said: "If you change your past and work together in a spirit that everyone 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." This encouraged the participants to think and revisit his political evolution from being an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity to the founder of a separate homeland for the Muslims of the sub-continent. One of them felt that in creating a separate country, Quaid-i-Azam was actually carving out a space where universal human ideals could be achieved, something he found unachievable in the framework of the Indian union that carried the baggage of centuries of communal identities. By articulating the aspirations of the marginalised Muslim minority and eventually seeking the creation of a separate country for it, he was actually working towards the creation of a political entity where the communal question could be put to rest by following progressive ideals, unifying all citizens as one nation. And all that is more than obvious in his presidential address that, more than any of his other speeches, defines the direction in which he wanted the new state of Pakistan to move: "...Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense because that is the personal faith of every individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state." The students asked and answered other probing questions, but this issue was perhaps the most pertinent. Over the years, references to Muslims and Islam made by our founding fathers have been twisted and transformed to mean something very different from what they had originally meant. More and more, the state and its official ideology have come to identify Islam with ignorance preached by clerics and politicians posing as religious scholars. It does not seem to matter that the founding fathers, whether Iqbal or Jinnah, had very different views on what it meant to be a Muslim. As opposed to the observance of rituals and superstition that Islam has been reduced to, they were talking about Islamic values that were universal and could actually make a positive difference in the lives of Muslims and in the state that they envisioned. Any genuine tribute to the founding fathers should address these crucial questions rather than brushing them under the carpet in the name of respect. The ability to critically analyse the founding fathers, talk about them as exceptional humans rather than worshipping them as idols and to reinterpret their political ideals is actually the measure of the strength of a nation. This strength is reflected in the honest questioning of Pakistan's young men and women. Too smart to take the unconvincing official caricatures as the whole truth, their exploring minds are uncovering the real greatness of the founding fathers and resurrecting their ideals that had been buried under heaps of lies. Hopefully, the timid bosses of my producer friend would catch up with them in time. The writer is a freelance columnist.