Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publication: Free Press Journal
Date: February 24, 2009
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. India has no choice but
to prepare for the worst.
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 coexisting 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
nationstate bound by contiguity, state institutions and common faith.
In 1983, around the time General Zia-ul Haq
was making the most of the Soviet invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan, 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 materialised. 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" (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) Punjabidominated
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, physicist and peace activist
Pervez Hoodbhoy raised the alarm of Talibanisation. 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." Hoddbhoy challenged the wellmeaning
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-isation to Zia may
not be strictly accurate. In her study of India's Muslim communities (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.
Field Marshal 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 Islamise 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 pro-actively 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 to 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 socalled 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 bamboozle d into joining
the jingoism over Kashmir during the Kargil conflict; and Asif Ali Zardari
fast realised 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 overambitious 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 civilisational 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.
