Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: February 20 , 2009
URL: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090220/jsp/opinion/story_10563494.jsp
- Pakistan's latest danger comes from encroaching
holy warriors
How long does it take for a nation-state to
either collapse into utter chaos and anarchy or fragment into pieces? The
question has repeatedly been raised in the context of Pakistan, a country
living on death row since its violent birth in 1947. This week's imposition
of sharia law in the Malakand division of the North West Frontier Province
after an Islamist insurgency has again revived these concerns.
Prior to 1971, the absurdity of two non-contiguous
wings co-existing under the banner of a unitary State was understood. To that
extent, the separation of East Pakistan was not unforeseen. Yet, the suggestions
of Pakistan's imminent demise didn't cease even after it became a more compact
nation-state bound by contiguity, State institutions and common faith.
In 1983, around the time Zia-ul-Haq, was making
the most of the Soviet invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan, the expatriate
radical, Tariq Ali, created a minor flutter in his home country by asking:
Can Pakistan Survive? He didn't foresee a united Pakistan persisting: "Those
who have made religion into the organizing cement of the state are no longer
capable of holding it together; those who, by changing its very character,
could maintain it are weak, dispirited and demoralised."
The imminent collapse which radical Pakistanis
detected in the high noon of the Zia era has still not materialized. In recent
times, the civil society-led movement for democracy, which resulted in the
removal of Pervez Musharraf and the installation of a civilian government,
produced an outpouring of hope.
Yet, many Pakistan-watchers greeted this appearance
of change with a measure of scepticism. In a much-discussed article, "Drawn
and Quartered" (The New York Times, February 1, 2008), Selig Harrison
resurrected the fear of vivisection: "Whatever the outcome of the Pakistani
elections… the existing multiethnic Pakistani state is not likely to
survive for long unless it is radically restructured… (The) Punjabi-dominated
regime of Pervez Musharraf is headed for a bloody confrontation with the country's
Pashtun, Baluch and Sindhi minorities that could well lead to the breakup
of Pakistan into three sovereign entities." In a similar vein, the physicist
and peace activist, Pervez Hoodbhoy, raised the alarm of Talibanization. In
an article in the monthly, Newsline (January 2009), he wrote: "The common
belief in Pakistan is that Islamic radicalism is a problem only in FATA, and
that madrassas are the only institutions serving as jihad factories. This
is a serious misconception." The problem, he felt, lay in a generation
"incapable of co-existing with anyone except strictly their own kind.
The mindset…may eventually lead to Pakistan's demise as a nation state."
Hoodbhoy's challenged the well-meaning belief
that Pakistan is a variant of India. He argued that the past 30 years has
seen Pakistan turn its gaze westwards: "For three decades, deep tectonic
forces have been silently tearing Pakistan away from the Indian subcontinent
and driving it towards the Arabian Peninsula. This continental drift is not
physical but cultural… (The) desert sands of Saudi Arabia are replacing
the rich soil that had nurtured a magnificent Muslim culture in India for
a thousand years." To trace Pakistan's Saudi-ization to Zia may not be
strictly accurate. In her study of India's Muslim communities in Self and
Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850, Ayesha
Jalal located Pakistan's Islamic impulses to the sense of "lost sovereignty"
after the formal collapse of Mughal rule in 1857. Coupled with an unending
tussle between Indian Muslim exceptionalism and Islam's universalism, it generated
political movements that both narrowed the concept of the nation and increasingly
identified it with the larger ummah.
Contrary to a self-serving mythology, Jalal
documented that viciously sectarian mobilization wasn't a creation of the
Muslim League after the Pakistan resolution of 1940; it had a longer pedigree
and had developed deep roots by the time the new Muslim State came into existence
in 1947. Whereas institutional politics was in the hands of the modernist
Muslims, the disenfranchised masses had already been swayed by ideological
currents that favoured a more doctrinaire and, occasionally, austere view
of Islam.
Ayub Khan tried to circumvent the problem
with limited participatory government. His "basic democracy" did
exactly what the colonial regime had done: empower the middle classes and
the propertied, and disenfranchise the masses. Pakistan under Ayub was only
nominally confessional. After 1970, participatory democracy based on universal
adult franchise released pent-up frustrations of a society that veered between
regional separatism and the Islamic project. Zia's ideological engineering
sharpened a pre-existing divide between two wildly contradictory impulses
and made democratic governance episodic. Pakistan's inability to secure any
worthwhile consensus over its democracy added to this emotional schism.
Aware of the fissiparous tendencies that could
debilitate the country, Zia initiated a unique measure. Based on his understanding
that the military was the only vibrant institution left in Pakistan and convinced
that the country's destiny lay in forging an Islamic State that would be the
envy of the Muslim world, he undertook the project to Islamize the military
and infuse Pakistani identity with an even greater dose of faith. The jihad
in Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion gave him the necessary cushioning
to undertake his revolution. The extension of the holy war to India - "the
war of a thousand cuts" - linked the visceral anti-India impulses of
the bazaar with the military's own desire to avenge the humiliation of 1971.
From a Pakistani perspective, the decision
to proactively exploit the contradictions within India has served a domestic
agenda. The dream of liberating oppressed fellow-Muslims in India became a
bridge between elite aspirations and mass impulses. Anti-Indianism became
the Pakistan Creed because it conferred additional weight on the sense of
national purpose.
Nearly all those who forecast Pakistan's fragmentation
and possible drift to anarchy were convinced that neither the military nor
Islam could be a cementing force. But it is the blend of these two so-called
divisive forces that has kept Pakistan united and still going.
The argument that a meaningful peace between
India and Pakistan is linked to democracy in both countries is questionable.
The absence of democratic depth in Pakistan - a function of the country's
inability to generate sufficient surplus for State-sponsored social activism
- has meant that politics has to either fall back on emotionalism or be held
hostage by it. Benazir thought she could upstage the military's claim to be
the ultimate custodian of Pakistan's national interests by getting shrill
over azadi in Kashmir; Nawaz couldn't but be bamboozled into joining the jingoism
over Kashmir during the Kargil conflict; and Asif Ali Zardari fast realized
that the imperatives of survival meant he had to espouse bellicosity against
India after the 26/11 Mumbai attack.
Amity between a democratic India and a democratic
Pakistan has proved an elusive ideal. Democratic Pakistan has lacked the necessary
resilience to take on an over-ambitious military and counter the attractions
of a global jihad which has devastated the Islamic world. The present danger
is that Pakistan may well be overwhelmed by the creeping encroachments of
the holy warriors within its own borders.
The perception that Afghanistan is ready for
re-conquest and that the liberation of Kashmir is next in line is calculated
to cause convulsions within Pakistan. Rather than await Pakistan's re-discovery
of modernity and the charms of the Indo- Islamic civilizational encounter,
India has no choice but to prepare for the worst, while hoping for the best.
New Delhi can't prevent the fallout of this impending Pakistani triumphalism;
it can only resist it and try to contain any internal fallout.
