Founding a country is hard, historically rare, remarkable as an act of political engineering. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was a founder, fine! But so could have been Robert E Lee of the United States if the Confederacy had actually become an independent state. He was, by most accounts, a gifted general and a man capable of personal honour.
Americans still shouldn’t put his statue back up in the town square, because the statue was never about generalship. It was about what he represented, and what he represented was a political order built on someone else's subjugation. Jinnah is our Lee.
You can admire the engineering and still refuse the monument, because the monument was never about the engineering. Admiration for the craft and celebration of the craftsman are two different acts, and we keep letting people collapse them into one so they can avoid the harder conversation.
“He represented something bad" is too easy a sentence to assert and walk away from. I want to show you three things. First, that Jinnah personally overrode the version of Pakistan that might have given Bengal real autonomy, at the moment it was on the table, in 1940. Second, that the way he later imposed Urdu on Bengal follows the same pattern as Sheikh Hasina calling protesters Razakars in 2024, an act of contempt so total it doesn't register the danger it is creating, and that this pattern eventually killed both his project and hers.
Third, that even if you are a dyed-in-the-wool Pakistani nationalist who thinks the two-nation theory was correct and Partition was justified, Jinnah still isn't your hero, because he is the man who guaranteed that Pakistan would not survive.
The Lahore Resolution and Bengal
Go back to March 1940, Minto Park, Lahore. The Lahore Resolution, the document that would later get flattened into the phrase "the Pakistan Resolution," was moved by A K Fazlul Huq, the Chief Minister of Bengal, not by Jinnah. Huq's Bengal delegation had travelled from Dhaka to put their weight behind it. And the actual text, read carefully, doesn't say Pakistan anywhere. The word doesn't appear once.
It says the Muslim majority zones of the northwest and the east of India should be grouped into what the resolution literally calls "independent states," plural, with the constituent units autonomous and sovereign. Not one state stretching across two wings of a continent. Multiple states, each governing itself. There is a historical argument, and I'm not the first person to make it, that Fazlul Huq understood this as two separate Muslim homelands, a Bengal one and a Punjab-Sind-Frontier one, each running its own affairs, each answerable to its own people rather than to Bombay or Karachi or Lahore.
The plural vision that a Bengali Chief Minister had carried into that hall and put his name on collapsed into a single-state vision from a Bombay lawyer who understood, correctly as it turns out, that two separate Muslim states would be harder to sell to the British and to history than one unified one. He knew what he was doing, which was taking Bengal's proposal for its own sovereignty and quietly rewriting it into Bengal's subordination to a state that would be run from the other side of the subcontinent.
The name "Pakistan" itself wasn't even in the resolution. It came from Rahmat Ali, a student in Cambridge, and got glued onto Huq's language afterward, as if the branding could paper over the fact that what got built bore little resemblance to what Bengal had agreed to. That is not a footnote. That's the founding act. Before Pakistan existed as a country, it existed as a broken promise to the province that helped invent it.
Urdu and the politics of contempt
Skip ahead eight years. Jinnah is now Governor General, Pakistan is a real country, and he comes to Dhaka in March 1948 to tell students at a civic reception that Urdu, and only Urdu, will be the state language. His actual words, more or less, were that no nation can hold together without one state language, and that anyone telling them otherwise was an enemy of Pakistan.
A man addressing Bengali speakers, the numerical majority of the country he had just founded, tells them their own language cannot be a state language and that objecting to this makes them traitors. This wasn't a slip of the tongue at one event either. He repeated some version of the same line at Curzon Hall days later, to university students who would go on to form the backbone of the movement that eventually answered him.
I don't think Jinnah sat down and plotted the destruction of Pakistan. I think something worse happened, which is that he could not conceive of Bengalis as political equals worth consulting. That's a kind of structural blindness so total it functions like intention. And here's the part that should unsettle anyone reading this in Dhaka right now, because we watched the same script play out in real time.
In July 2024, Sheikh Hasina, facing a student movement she considered beneath serious engagement, called the protesters Razakars, collaborators, traitors to the nation. She meant it as contempt. What it did instead was hand an entire generation a label they turned around and wore as a badge, chanting it back at her until the chant became the movement that ended her rule. She lit the fuse that burned her own government down. She never planned that outcome. She was too arrogant to imagine the people she was insulting could organize against her.
Jinnah did the same thing in 1948. He meant "enemy of Pakistan" as an insult that would shut down dissent. Instead, it became the opening line of the Bhasha Andolon, the language movement that ran through 1952 and Ekushey February and never stopped running until it hardened into the ideological bedrock of 1971.
Two politicians, seventy-six years apart, both convinced their own contempt was a weapon, and both watching that same contempt get picked up by the people they aimed it at and turned into the thing that destroyed them. Jinnah isn't the hero of this story. He's the villain who writes his own downfall into the first act without noticing he's doing it, exactly like Hasina did.
The Pakistan Jinnah built
Now here's the argument I want DUCSU to sit with, because it doesn't require you to agree with a single word I've said about Bengali nationalism. Let's say you don't buy any of it. Let's say you think Partition was necessary, the two-nation theory was correct, and Pakistan as an idea deserves respect. Fine. Even on those terms, Jinnah is not your man.
A country built across a thousand miles of hostile Indian territory, with the numerically larger half treated as a resource base and an afterthought for the smaller, culturally dominant half, was never going to hold. That is basic political geography, and there were people saying it at the time, including some of the Bengali leaders whose plural vision got overwritten at Lahore. East Bengal grew the jute, West Pakistan spent the foreign exchange it earned.
East Bengal held the population majority, West Pakistan held the bureaucracy, the army, and eventually the language of government. Jinnah built a state on a geographic and demographic impossibility and then, instead of trying to bind the halves together with something like shared language rights or federal autonomy, he chose the one policy almost perfectly designed to guarantee resentment in the wing that had the population advantage.
He failed to prevent Pakistan's eventual rupture. Worse than that, he wrote the rupture into the founding documents and the founding speeches, in his first year in office, before the ink had dried. Twenty-four years is not a long life for a country, especially one that was supposed to be the great homecoming of a civilization. If you love Pakistan, you should be furious at the man who doomed it, not grateful to him.
So go back to that museum wall. It doesn't matter to me who hung those Jinnah photographs or what specific nostalgia they were indulging, whether it's some romantic idea about the "golden days" of a unified Muslim South Asia or a more calculated political statement about where certain student politics in Bangladesh are drifting right now.
What matters is the underlying assumption that Jinnah belongs in any position of honour at all. He doesn't. Not in Bangladesh, where he is the man who called our right to speak our own language a form of treason. And not even in Pakistan, technically, if Pakistan's own long-term survival was ever something worth valuing, because he is the one who set the tone that made sure it wouldn't survive.
We keep having this argument as though it's a dispute about historical memory, about which photographs get hung where. It isn't. It's a dispute about whether contempt for a majority, dressed up as national unity, gets remembered as founding wisdom or as the mistake it was. Sher-e-Bangla Fazlul Huq brought a vision of plural, autonomous Muslim states into that hall in Lahore. Jinnah answered with one word and erased it.
Bengalis spent the next three decades finding out what that one word cost them.
DUCSU can hang whatever photographs it wants. But if the university is going to call something a museum, it should have the honesty to explain what, precisely, it thinks it's preserving when it preserves Jinnah. Because it isn't history. It's a wound with a frame around it.
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Anupam Debashis Roy is the editor-in-chief of Muktipotro. He can be reached at writeranupam1101@gmail.com