The Hindu Business Line : Making sense of Pakistan

Pakistan appears to be a failing state, but faith is what Pakistanis have in plenty. India would do well not to underestimate the power and the determination that faith can give, says P. V. INDIRESAN.

A new book Making Sense of Pakistan by Farzana Shaikh, who was born in Karachi and is currently a Fellow in Chatham House, London, is evidently unsympathetic to the way Pakistan has been ruled. Hence, one needs to be guarded in accepting her views. Yet there are several issues that she raises about which we in India should be concerned.

The book has six chapters: Why Pakistan, Who is a Pakistani, the Burden of Islam, the Dilemma of Development, the Crescent and the Sword and Demons from Abroad. Each one of these issues should be raised with respect to India, too.

About Pakistan, she writes: It is well known that the term “Pakistan” is an acronym thought up in England by a group of Muslim intellectuals. P for the Panjabis, A for the Afghans, K for the Kashmiris, S for Sind and Tan for Balochistan. She adds ruefully, Bangladesh never got its name in the title, and so eventually it took the hint and seceded from the secessionists. We should appreciate the chagrin of the Pakistanis; they lost territory even as we added them — Goa, Sikkim and, more importantly, Kashmir.

The term India (and the expression Hindu) was given by the Greeks to the people living on the river Sindhu (or Indus). Hence, the only Indians (and Hindus, for that matter) are truly the Pakistanis and not any of us!

One wonders what would have happened if Jinnah had insisted on the name ‘India' for what is Pakistan and we had been called ‘Gangastan' or whatever!

The fact is Jinnah's Two-Nation theory collapsed at its very birth — many Muslims remained in India and would have been unwelcome had they tried to migrate to Pakistan. It collapsed entirely when its larger part, Bangladesh, seceded. The idea that Muslims were a people confined to Pakistan did not hold with orthodox Muslims, who felt that Islam was universal and, more important, that they were the only group fit to rule the world.

Ms Shaikh expands on the belief among Muslim clerics (and other Pakistanis too) that as they had ruled India for six hundred years, they had the right to do so in the future, too. That should be food for thought for us: We could become so rich as to once again become the envy of the people to our West.

At the same time, our wealth could make us so soft that we might succumb to much smaller forces the way we lost to Babur. That is a danger of the future which few Indians are willing to contemplate.

ISSUES IN PAKISTAN

Next, Ms Shaikh turns her attention to “Who is a Pakistani?” Apparently, that is a burning issue in Pakistan (in both the literal and figurative senses). Pakistan has been declared an Islamic Republic; no non-Muslim can be President or Prime Minister of the country. That leads to the question — who is a Muslim? Ahamediyas have already been declared non-Muslims. There are pressures to declare that the Shias too are unacceptable; there is also much pressure to make only Wahabi and Deobandi Sunnis as acceptable.

Such extremism may amuse us. We have similar (thank God, not so powerful) groups who want India to be declared the land of the Hindus only. In the week when the Babri Masjid report was made public and on the anniversary of 26/11, we would be unwise to sneer at our neighbouring country.

Ms Shaikh's chapter, “The Burden of Islam” is horrifying. In Pakistan, government after government, both military and democratic, has found it necessary to seek the support of extremist clerics and has yielded to their pressures to impose rule by shariya.

For instance, evidence not only by women, but by non-Muslim males too, has only half the weight of that given by Muslim males. Fortunately, forces of secularism are far stronger in India.

Many people in India would consider development a non-controversial issue, but we know it is not. Otherwise, we would not be suffering from Naxalism and other such parallel governments that afflict a third of our country.

In India, the complaint about development revolves around inequity and increasing disparity between the rich and the poor.

In Pakistan, it is said to be “a perennial struggle between those content to accept an ad hoc role for Islam in the sphere of policy, subject by definition to change, and those determined to elevate Islam to the state of immutable law.”

POWER OF THE MILITARY

As for corruption, it has been suggested that though the blame is usually placed on politicians, it is actually the civil-military alliance that is the real perpetrator which has clearly manoeuvred to shift the blame to scapegoats.

Pakistan is really corrupt but unfortunately we do not have anything much better to boast, except that we do not have a civil-military alliance.

The relatively meagre authority wielded by the Indian military (and the civil services) is in sharp contrast to life in Pakistan. All along, the Pakistan military harped on the antagonism of India and on the “liberation” of Kashmir. As that is no longer compatible with the new international order, it has tried to bolster its legitimacy on the basis of cultural unity based on the “value of Islam”. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on what Islam is.

On the other hand, many Pakistanis are convinced that India can be bled. At the same time, few Pakistanis realise that the forces the military has patronised are bleeding Pakistan more than India.

Ms Shaikh complains that Pakistan's foreign policy has been determined less by its national interest than by issues of national identity. As she says, Pakistan was born not in a struggle against British colonial rule, but in opposition to the Indian nationalist movement. It is this “negative identity” that has been the true burden on Pakistani culture.

LESSONS FOR INDIA

Understandably, Pakistanis are angry with us for dismembering their country. That, they feel, is reason enough for them to dismember India, too. At the highest levels, there is bitterness, anger and even hatred for India and particularly for its relatively greater success.

Indeed, a few years ago, there was a learned article in the Economic and Political Weekly advocating Mughalistan stretching from Pakistan, Kashmir and the entire sub-Himalayan territory, Bangladesh and Assam, to which all Muslims would be evacuated. For some reason or the other, nobody in India reacted. That kind of indifference to ideas hostile to the very existence of secular India is what we Indians should be afraid of.

We have had several Muslim presidents, chief ministers and governors; we have currently a Sikh as the Prime Minister. We have had Muslim and Parsee Chiefs of Staff in the Armed forces.

On the other hand, we have not looked after our poor, particularly the hill peoples. That is our Achilles Heel. Let us hope somebody will take note and rectify the error.

Pakistan appears to be a failing state, but faith is what Pakistanis have in plenty. India would do well not to underestimate the power and the determination that faith can give.

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