Author: Balbir K. Punj
Publication: The Asian Age
Date: October 29, 2002
If the results of the recently held
elections in Pakistan, which General Musharraf conducted to give his
rule the veneer of a popular mandate,
have come as a surprise, it is mostly to the peaceniks of our country,
like Kuldip Nayar and his entourage.
Every year when on August 14 they
take candles to the Wagah border, it is under the assumption that Pakistanis
want peace with India but a few clerics and mullahs, abetted by the military
establishment, prevent them. They often cite the fact that extremist parties
had never secured even five per cent of the vote in any one of the free
elections in Pakistan.
But now, with 25 per cent of the
popular vote, these jihadi elements are openly espousing the cause of Osama
bin Laden and Talibanisation. This is not in accordance with what our secularists
and peaceniks had anticipated. In the two tribal provinces of Pakistan
bordering Afghanistan, the jihadi elements are in a majority and will form
the state governments. If nothing else, this will make the American operation
to capture the fugitive elements of the Taliban and the Al Qaeda, including
Osama himself, reported to be hiding in these tribal areas, even more difficult.
Our peaceniks are under the illusion
that the overwhelming majority of Pakistanis desire to live in fraternal
peace with India. The culture of Urdu shairi and some "Islamised commonality"
might have spanned a bridge between Lucknow and Lahore once. But nothing
prevented the occurrences of communal riots throughout British India almost
every year between 1893 and 1947. We must be realistic enough to note that
the nostalgia of this pre-Partition culture is shared only by a dwindling
minority of the older generation in both countries that were avulsed as
a result of the Two-Nation theory. In the fifty years and more since Partition,
a new generation has come up in both India and Pakistan. But while India's
new generation has been soaked in liberal education, open society, democracy
and pluralism, in Pakistan it has been the opposite.
According to Foreign Affairs (Nov.-Dec.
2000), the prestigious magazine of American policymakers, there are some
40,000 to 50,000 madrasas in Pakistan preaching the fundamentalist version
of Islam. These had received active patronage during Zia-ul-Haq's regime
towards the indoctrination of young minds with a Taliban like philosophy
and a return to Shariat law. Islam shall and must prevail everywhere in
the world is a divine obligation to them. Gen. Musharraf, when he came
to power, was reported to have made it clear that only registered madrasas
would operate in Pakistan and their curricula should be modernised. But
as the magazine reported, only about 4,350 of them cared to register. The
General could not enforce his law, even remotely, on the rest.
As a Harvard researcher Jessica
Sterms has reported in Foreign Affairs: "These schools encourage their
graduates, who often cannot find work because of their lack of practical
education, to fulfil their 'spiritual obligations' by fighting against
Hindus in Kashmir or against Muslims of other sects in Pakistan." The Harvard
researcher's study quotes Pakistan's interior minister Moinuddin Haider
as saying, "Some, in the grab of religious training, are busy fanning sectarian
violence and poisoning people's minds."
While dealing with Pakistan, we
must realise that generations who have passed through these schools of
hatred are now in their 20s and 30s and constitute a significant part of
the country's voters. When what is happening in Pakistan is seen in the
context of the Islamic revivalism and its built-in intolerance of all that
is un-Islamic (that includes America, India and Israel, in particular,
and Christian, industrial and western in general), it is naive to assume
that the people of Pakistan want peace but the mullahs and the generals
are misleading them. This should also be seen in the context of the fact
that the bulk of the Muslim population in our country prefers to attend
religious schools to regular ones (even though education up to the secondary
level is free in most states) and fosters a ghetto mentality. All they
need is a slight provocation to go on a rampage and kill their non-Muslim
neighbours just because some Christian pastor in far away America has made
some unacceptable remarks against the Prophet of Islam. The reference here
is to the recent Solapur riots which left a dozen dead and over a hundred
injured.
The other illusion our peaceniks
have is that at the core of their hearts the Pakistani people want to return
to democracy. They, therefore, think that it would be possible to push
Gen. Musharraf to loosen his hold, gradually, and hand over power to a
democratically elected government without fully dismantling his regime.
Apparently, the Bush administration has bought this assessment, possibly
due to its compulsion to work with the General in getting to the heart
of Islamic terror.
The nuclear capability acquired
by Pakistan has added a new dimension of threat perception that favours
continued American support (or so they think in Washington) to the General.
American and Western establishments are convinced that without the General,
Pakistan will fall to pieces and in such a situation, the fissile material
could fall into the hands of the jihadi elements - something that the jihadis
deeply covet.
In his hard-hitting style, respected
American columnist and academic Selig Harrison has written in the International
Herald Tribune before the recent Pakistani elections, that there is increasing
evidence that "Pakistan is now the global hub of Qaeda operations" and
that "Musharraf is raising his price for cooperation with Washington, demanding
large-scale military aid including F-16 fighter jets, on top of the bonanza
of economic aid already showered on Islamabad since Sept. (2001)." He regrets
that the Bush administration has allowed the General to call the shots.
And he strongly advises the administration to shift to a more stringent
carrot and stick policy instead of supporting the General unconditionally.
American journalists and academicians
themselves have exposed the fragility of Pakistan and the corruption of
its ruling class that supports the growing jihadi mindset to divert people's
attention from its own wrongdoing. An early write-up in the prestigious
Fortune magazine had revealed how an annual five-billion-dollar loot is
being pocketed by a small class of army and corrupt business families.
It had warned that this group is funding the fundamentalists to queer the
pitch for any administration that seeks to crack down on this tightly knit
cabal of crime. Harrison says that 18,000 officers of the armed forces,
both serving and retired, control the several foundations that under the
garb of army welfare hold the key to Pakistan's economy. He says that the
General is especially vulnerable because his army officers have ousted
the civil service officers who were earlier controlling key posts in civil
and economic areas. Some 76 generals and 600 brigadiers and colonels have
been installed in a variety of key civil service posts. This makes Pakistan
even more unstable and prone to corruption.
The revelation made by these articles
that Pakistan is now the global hub of Islamic terrorism, makes for frightening
reading. This should be analysed in the context of the recent bombings
in Bali and Philippines and the attack in Yemen and elsewhere. With the
top leadership of the Al Qaeda more or less intact, and in Pakistan, and
with the growing emotional response to jihadi rhetoric, the threat to civil
society from such fundamentalism is greater today than ever before. There
is irrefutable evidence that this fundamentalist disease is getting a response
from among sections of Indians as well. This explains why ISI agents get
a safe sanctuary in many places and even remote towns like Solapur are
prone to riots. Here, the question for India is whether the self-styled
secularists and leaders of the Muslim community are doing enough to educate
the community about its perils.
A recent issue of the Time magazine
focuses on the disease spreading to Bangladesh and taking hold of the power
structure there. In a country that has dropped "secularism" (one of the
four pillars of its founder father Mujib-ur-Rehman's political doctrine)
from its Constitution, democracy itself appears under threat from conservative
Muslim clerics demanding the imposition of a strict Islamic code. We see
little of the countervailing force in action in these vulnerable spots.
On the other hand, as Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria pointed out, "throughout
the Muslim world, the growing anti- Americanism only makes it easier to
recruit young men for suicide missions." The trend is clearly not just
in Pakistan but beyond it in Malaysia, Indonesia and even Europe.
In any case, there is little to
feel cheerful about the "franchise exercise of democracy" in Pakistan.
These hardliners who have emerged triumphant have called for a ban on cable
television, the dislodging of American troops and a strict Islamisation
of the country. An ominous fear for the worst dogs the country's minuscule
minority population, which is under severe stress. The Indian government
cannot encourage a military de-escalation and still keep the infiltration
and proxy war at bay. A de-escalation in Indo-Pak relations is not easy
considering the stake Pakistan has in keeping one-fourth of the Indian
Army tied down to Kashmir though the General may modulate his support to
infiltration to gain concessions from the Americans. A lasting solution
to Indo-Pak problems rest, agree analysts from different countries, on
a simple proposition: the rise of a liberalising force within Islam. But
of that, there is very little evidence.
(Balbir K. Punj is a Rajya Sabha
MP and convenor of the BJP think tank and can be contacted at bpunj@email.com)
