Demise and national salvation

Islamabad diary

The republic founded by Jinnah and conceded in all good grace by the British is dead. Let’s not be coy about this fundamental circumstance. Without the British there would be no Pakistan. The Raj did not greatly trouble the Muslims of India. The prospect of living under a Hindu majority did.
Our forefathers fought not for liberation from foreign rule. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan at least was in no doubt about the benefits of British rule: “...for the peace of India and for the progress of everything in India the English Government should remain for many years – in fact for ever!” (This speech in Meerut, March 1988, makes for interesting if not extraordinary reading.) No, our forefathers struggled for safeguards to protect their separate status. And the British, not averse to playing the higher game of divide and rule, as any imperial conqueror would have done, gave them those safeguards.
Fear about the future, which for the leaders of the Muslim community became a consuming insecurity, led over time to the demand for a state on the grounds of separatism: that we were a separate nation distinct from the Hindu majority, with our own culture and way of life. This was the two-nation theory and, try as we may to give it a modern interpretation, its foundation was religion. Not theocracy, far from it, but on nationhood defined in religious terms. There is no getting away from this.
And since our foundational principles were cast in these terms is it any wonder that the divines and mullahs who had opposed Jinnah and the Muslim League abandoned their old positions once Pakistan was created and went about appropriating the ideology of the new state to use it for their own ends and impose their own brand of philosophy on it?
Yes, Jinnah outlined an altogether different vision in his address to the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947: you are free to go to your temples, free to go to your mosques, this has nothing to do with the business of the state. There could be no clearer exposition of a secular polity. How desperately some of us clutch at the straw provided by this speech?
But those words fell on disbelieving ears for they were at odds with the entire thrust of the Pakistan movement. In the 1946 elections which cemented the Muslim League’s position as the undisputed representative of the Muslim population, what was the battle-cry to which the party responded? “Muslim hai toh Muslim League mein aa” – if a Muslim then come to the Muslim League. Not much of a secular vision in this. And here Jinnah, a bit late in the day, was pulling in the opposite direction to this emotion, in so doing reverting all of a sudden, and without any advance preparation, to that distant past when he was hailed as an Indian nationalist and Sarojini Naidu, Nightingale of India, had sung his praises...the Jinnah before the sherwani and the cap which bears his name.
The two-nation theory was good enough, if not indispensable, for Partition and the creation of Pakistan. It was irrelevant to the needs of a modern state. So, not surprisingly, it had no answer to the grievances of the people of East Pakistan, just as it has no answer to the grievances of the Baloch people today, and resonates but little with the forces of religious extremism now increasingly on the march.
Led by men of vision and stature the idea of Pakistan could have been redefined to bring it in line with the demands of a modern state. But this is where leadership failed us. Compared to the leaders of today Jinnah’s successors were titans. Compared to the challenges they faced they were men of straw. Matters were allowed to drift, the innate conservatism of the Muslim League leadership coming to the fore. Where a constitution should have been framed they debated a piece of ideology called the Objectives Resolution and when it was passed, over the fervent objections of the Hindu members, the impression they exuded was of having gained the keys to the holy kingdom.
Jinnah’s Pakistan could still have been saved. But two things corrupted it: American military alliances – Cento, Seato and the rest of that devilish agenda – and the inexorable slide to military rule. Gen Ayub Khan was secular-minded but appealing to God knows what constituency he too was soon wearing the Jinnah cap. It was the Republic of Pakistan under him, to begin with. Then it became the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. More to the point, he started a war of whose objectives he had not the foggiest idea, his Svengali, the moving spirit pushing him to his doom, the clever Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Pakistan was doing fairly well until then. The 1965 war derailed it completely.
Then came Gen Yahya Khan and his merry court, Gen Rani, his favourite madam and a lady of infinite resource, the doorkeeper to his earthly heaven. Then after the Bhutto interlude, and Bhutto too on more than one occasion unnecessarily played the Islamic card, the Islamic revivalism of Gen Zia and our CIA-aided and Saudi-financed Afghan adventure which dismantled what was left of Jinnah’s Pakistan, pushing us into the Pakistani variant of the dark ages, where we happily remain. The Taliban and their presence in Pakistan are no accidents of history. They have arisen from the soil we prepared and the seeds we diligently sowed.
Would Jinnah recognise this Pakistan and Iqbal make sense of the prevailing winds? Would either of them understand the near-canonisation of someone like Mumtaz Qadri, ghazi to no small number of Pakistanis? What a strange milieu we have managed to create. And to remember the promise we once had, the kind of society we could have created...the stuff of sadness.
But enough of history and breast-beating. The future beckons and the choice is ours. Do we remain in the dark ages or do we retrieve, from the wreckage of our dreams, the precarious legacy left by our founding fathers? An uphill task, whichever way we look at it. As if mediocre leaders were not enough it is with the faint-hearted we must now contend, forever dithering, forever hair-splitting, and terrorised into a paralysis of action by their fears.
Crisis of leadership, no two ways about it. Every six months or so chiefs of our defence services can be seen in solemn assembly watching with stern eyes a missile being launched into the skies. Our missile capability is forever being perfected, surely a great thing but, pray, of what use against what threatens Pakistan the most, the threat from within?
Victory and defeat are first in the mind, no arsenal capable of making up for a lack of resolution. The least our bombs and missiles could have done was give us greater confidence against India. But our military leaders still pay homage at the altar of the old bogeys. A veritable nuclear arsenal and yet such monumental insecurity...even the great Hakim Luqman had no cure for paranoia. The last time we were dismembered (1971), and may it not happen again, India would have exploited nothing had we not been the agents of our own misfortune.
How do we enter the real world? What will it take to convince the General Staff that the threat we face is not from the east but the west? And we are having a hard time getting our map-reading right.
True, no stampeding into any kind of operation, certainly not under foreign diktat. That’s not the way to conduct wars. But at least some clarity of mind and a minimum of purpose, else the fight is as good as lost...and Jinnah’s Pakistan lowered that much deeper into the ground.
Tailpiece: By the way, a nation which must have five to six holidays every Eid is in no mental condition for any kind of struggle. So I agree with those who say no unnecessary risks and that discretion is the better part of valour.

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