On Aug. 11, 1947, Jinnah had left no room for confusion about his idea of Pakistan in his address to the constituent assembly of Pakistan. “You are free, free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this state of Pakistan,” he said. “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the state.” Jinnah continually emphasized equal citizenship for all Pakistanis irrespective of their religion or ethnicity.

The wavering of his doctors and the failure to have a backup ambulance on his last journey home is a good metaphor for how his successors treated Jinnah’s vision for Pakistan. They abandoned it, added immense confusion and ambiguity to what he stood for, and rewrote history so many times, in so many different ways, that its real history became unrecognizable.

A mere six months after Jinnah’s death, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, who had been Jinnah’s deputy, presented a set of principles, known as the Objectives Resolution, that established a framework for drafting the Constitution of Pakistan, which was adopted in 1956.

All non-Muslim members of the constituent assembly opposed the resolution, which they saw as flying in the face of Jinnah’s stated views and laying the foundations of a theocracy. Mian Iftikharuddin, the founder of Progressive Papers Limited, a publishing group, which produced several progressive newspapers, was the solitary Muslim member of the assembly who opposed Khan’s resolution. On March 12, 1949, after a mere five days of debate, Jinnah’s liberal vision for Pakistan had been scrapped.

Prime Minister Khan’s resolution led to changing the name of the country from the Republic of Pakistan to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and Islam became the religion of the state. Khan had faced some pressure from the religious right but also naïvely thought that invoking Islam would work as a glue to hold the young country together and provide its leaders room to create a Western-style democracy.