The fifth of July brings to our mind the reactionary military coup General Ziaul Haq engineered, which reshaped Pakistan’s ideological, social, cultural and strategic landscape. No any other regime influenced so much the course of a nation in search of a destiny as did Gen Zia’s campaign of the brutalisation of society in the name of so-called Islamisation. How far has Zia’s legacy survived and how is it hindering national efforts to eliminate the scourge of religious extremism and terrorism?
Pretending to be the saviour of his benefactor, Gen Zia turned out to be the hangman of Pakistan’s first directly elected and most popular prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was misguided by the sycophancy of the general and promoted the general out of turn. Zia perpetuated his rule from 90 days to over a decade by co-opting the religious right and the ethnic nationalists who had joined hands against Bhutto in the Nizam-e-Mustafa movement under the aegis of the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA).
The overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the Saur (April) revolution in Afghanistan triggered such an immense reaction in the free world that an isolated military regime suddenly became the darling of the West. Thanks to its historical military ties with the US, Pakistan became the frontline state in the capitalist world’s fight against communism and Soviet intrusion in Afghanistan.
The PNA movement laid the social and ideological basis for the mullah-military-bazaar alliance against the centre-left populist forces. For long the Himalayas didn’t cry over the tragic death of Bhutto who was no less instrumental in bringing the army back into action in the internal civil strife and appeasing the religious right to mitigate the social reaction against his populist and liberal policies.
It is quite problematic to understand that it was Bhutto who defined Pakistan’s aggressive nationalist security paradigm, yet he was ostracised by the same establishment that still continues to follow almost the same beaten track. It was, however, Gen Zia who metamorphosed Bhutto’s populist nationalism into Islamic nationalism – combining internal religious reaction with the jihad in Afghanistan.
Thanks to their political enmity with Bhutto and electoral unacceptability, the parties of the PNA extended all-out support to Gen Zia and joined his cabinet. Later, some of them participated in his nominated bodies and in the non-party elections. Consolidating his social base in the name of Islamisation, he perpetuated his rule by extensively pushing Pakistan into the dirty business of an undeclared war that not only attracted Wahabi-Salafi Islamist warriors from all over the Muslim world but also radicalised Deobandi and Ahle-Hadith clerics and Sunni sectarian forces in Pakistan.
With absolute power in his hands, Zia refashioned Pakistan along retrogressive and orthodox lines while promoting orthodoxy, sectarian hatred and terrorism. Religious seminaries were expanded and rejuvenated with arms and money, and a Kalashnikov and heroine culture was promoted. While outlawing the performing arts and perverting the humanities, Zia changed the whole curriculum and ran a witch hunt on the lines of McCarthyism against the enlightened intelligentsia. Thousands of political activists fighting for democracy under the banner of the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) were tortured and jailed, while all avenues of due process were closed as a lame-duck judiciary haplessly watched the violation of all norms for a due judicious process.
Within a decade of his most repressive regime, Gen Zia had changed the character and direction of Pakistan. The constitution was ruthlessly subverted and institutions of the state were transformed to suit his orthodox and authoritarian designs. Promoting militancy and sectarianism across the country, Gen Zia changed the social landscape of Pakistan and even remoulded the pivotal institutions of the state to promote reactionary elements both within and outside the state structures.
As Gen Zia’s legacy prevailed, the liberal, enlightened and egalitarian part of Bhutto’s legacy was marginalised. Neo-conservative forces were planted and patronised to continue with Zia’s legacy. There may not be anyone to mourn or pray for him at his grave, as compared to Bhutto who has become a martyred legend in the memory of the poor people, but the legacy of Gen Zia has established its ideological hegemony.
The two half-regimes of Benazir Bhutto tried to promote liberal-democratic values but could not unravel the hold of Zia’s ideological spectre as Ziaists continued to hold sway over the real power structures of Pakistan. The two half-regimes of Nawaz Sharif kept and strengthened the constituencies the PNA and Gen Zia had created. Although a liberal Gen Pervez Musharraf tried to distance from Gen Zia’s ideological behest, he avoided trying to reverse the Ziaist state and its ideological moorings. He, rather, kept the jihadi proxies to pursue his strategic objectives, despite appreciably pursuing conflict resolution with India and making a historic breakthrough on Kashmir.
Although both the PPP and PML-N governments brought democratic changes in the constitution, their bi-partisan efforts were handicapped by the religious parties who vetoed all the efforts to remove most of Gen Zia’s arbitrary amendments that stuffed the 1973 constitution with theocratic burden.
Despite post-9/11 dramatic shift against religious extremists and terrorists, a powerful establishment and spineless political elite were reluctant to take a course of ideological and strategic transformation. Until the terrorists dared to pose a serious threat to the writ of the state, the military establishment did not respond as vehemently as it did after the attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar. With Operation Zarb-e-Azb the armed forces showed their real teeth and wiped out a big chunk of terrorists from the tribal regions.
And yet Advisor on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz admits that the government cannot fight against all terrorists at the same time, even though there seems to be no sequencing or calibration in sight as banned outfits are freely operating across the country – and not without some kind of state patronage. The half-hearted manner in which the executive and its arms are implementing or avoiding full implementation of the National Action Plan (NAP) shows how deeply entrenched Zia’s legacy is.
The task of the de-Ziaisation of the state, its pivotal institutions, constitution, laws, strategic paradigms, culture and curriculum is much more rigorous and all-sided. It is the task of the de-jihadisation of the state that it distances itself from the predominant sectarian and extremist religious ideology and undertakes a comprehensive transformation into a forward looking, democratic, federalist and pluralist state that forbids hate and subversion both within and in the neighbourhood.
Gen Zia’s arbitrary amendments have to be removed from the constitution, the state ideology promoting religious extremism has to be changed, the curriculum needs to be cleaned up, and national security paradigms based on eternal enmity with India and extension of the Monroe Doctrine to Afghanistan have to be re-visited. Most importantly, the predominant narrative of religious extremism and aggressive nationalism has to be challenged.
Pakistan needs an across-the-board transformation of state and society to become economically sustainable, culturally emancipated and people-friendly, if we are to ever bury Gen Zia’s legacy.
The writer is a senior journalist.
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