It was never used as a theological roadmap to construct an Islamic State in South Asia. In his August 1. 1 speech, Jinnah clearly declared that in Pakistan the state will have nothing to do with matters of the faith and Pakistan was supposed to become a democratic Muslim majority nation state. He went on to add you will find that in course of time in Pakistan 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. Video Rare footage of a snippet from Jinnahs August 1. Some extraordinary circumstances World War II, the receding of British Colonialism and rising tensions between the Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities in India had combined to hand Jinnah a Muslim majority country that had fewer Muslims compared to those who stayed behind in India. Within this Muslim community were various sects and sub sects with their own understanding and interpretations of the faith. Then, the country also had multiple ethnicities, cultures and languages some of them being more ancient than Islam itself Keeping all this in mind, Jinnahs speech made good sense and exhibited a remarkable understanding of the complexities that his new country had inherited. But it seems many of his close colleagues were still in the Movement mode. A number of League members thought that with his August 1. Jinnah was being a bit too hasty in discarding the Islamic factor from the new equation and opting to explain the new country as a multi ethnic and multi cultural Muslim majority state. So soon after Jinnahs speech, an attempt was made by these leaders to censor the draft of the speech that was to be published in the newspapers. It was only when the then editor of Dawn newspaper, Altaf Hussain, threatened to take the issue directly to Jinnah that the League leaders relented and the full text of the speech was published. Jinnah died in 1. The leadership of the founding party, the Muslim League, was mostly made up of Punjabs landed gentry and Mohajir Urdu speaking bourgeoisie elite. The bureaucracy was also dominated by these two communities, whereas the army had an overwhelming Punjabi majority. Either the multi cultural connotations of Jinnahs speech were not entirely understood by his immediate colleagues or simply side lined by them. There is very good reason to believe that these connotations somewhat threatened the Leagues leadership because the Bengalis of East Pakistan were the majority ethnic group in the new country and the democratic recognition of multi culturalism and ethnic diversity of Pakistan would automatically have translated into the Bengalis becoming the main ruling group. After Jinnah had promptly watered down the Islamic aspects of the Pakistan Movement, the Leagues leadership that followed his unfortunate death in 1. Jinnahs speech. But things, in this respect, get even more complicated when one is reminded of how it was actually Jinnah who triggered the first serious expression of ethnic turmoil in Pakistan. In March 1. 94. 8, Jinnah delivered two speeches in Dhaka the largest city of the Bengali dominated East Pakistan. The speeches were delivered in English and were made at the height of a raging debate within the ruling Muslim League on the question of the countrys national language. Bengali leadership in the League had purposed the Bengali language on the basis that Bengalis were the largest ethnic group in Pakistan. However, the partys Mohajir members led by one of Jinnahs closest colleagues, Liaquat Ali Khan who was also Pakistans first Prime Minister, disagreed by claiming that Pakistan was made on the demands of a hundred million Muslims of the sub continent and that the language of these Muslims was Urdu. Of course, it was conveniently forgotten that the majority of these millions of Urdu speaking Muslims had been left behind in India and that at the time of Pakistans inception, Urdu was spoken by less than 1. Faced with this dilemma and aggressively pushed by the arguments of Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan to declare Urdu as the national language, Jinnah arrived in Dhaka and in his two speeches there insisted that, indeed, Urdu was to become the countrys national lingua franca. Jinnah left and Liaquat Ali Khan right share some matters during a smoke break in Karachi 1. As the Bengalis went on strike and held widespread demonstrations protesting the contradiction in the governments decision, Jinnah ordered that the Bengali writing system close to Vedic and classic Sanskrit be replaced with Arabic script and even with the Roman script. It was as if the government was suggesting that Bengali could not be adopted as the national language because its writing system looked too much like that of Hindi. Jinnahs desperate attempt to replace the Bengali writing system was vehemently challenged by Bengali intellectuals and politicians and he had to beat a hasty retreat on the issue. But Urdu did become the national language.