One more time, a favourite quote: “The struggle of man against power is memory’s struggle against forgetting”. And this time, I would try to delve a little deeper into the message that Milan Kundera had intended in his novel, ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’.
My reason for invoking this quote is that on July 5 this year, on Tuesday, it was the forty-fifth anniversary of Gen Ziaul Haq’s coup against the first elected prime minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Though surely there were some voices in the media that recalled a seminal moment in Pakistan’s history, it was hard to dispel the impression that we are continuing to lose our struggle against forgetting.
We may want to suppress unpleasant memories in our personal lives but when this exertion is wilful and compulsive, the results are detrimental to our mental health and our capacity for rational thinking. It would be the same for nations – and Pakistan is a prime example of what becomes of a nation that deliberately closes its eyes to its own past and does not pay heed to its own history.
Besides, our rulers have constantly made an effort to rewrite, even reinvent, the history of the making of Pakistan and its evolution across the past decades. One obvious example is our collective loss of memory of the events of 1971. It was in the same continuity that the long, dark night of Zia’s martial law descended on this land and changed it to an extent that it is now not easy to decide whether it is Jinnah’s Pakistan or Zia’s.
Look around carefully at what is happening to us at this time, with all its urgency and unease, and you will find deep shadows of Zia’s ideological legacy. His Islamization project remains undaunted – and undented. And yet, at the same time, Pakistani politics’ almost immortal yearning for a populist leader like Bhutto has not diminished.
Incidentally, Imran Khan recalled the July 5, 1977 coup in his speech on Tuesday through a video link. He compared himself with Bhutto and said that both their governments were ousted at the behest of the United States. But the irony here is that Imran Khan is more a disciple of Zia than a student of Bhutto’s politics. He holds Zia’s ideological torch and repeatedly summons the “Pakistan ka matlab kya” slogan that was never raised by Jinnah’s Muslim League. Then, there is this promise of following in the traditions of the state of Madina.
But neither Imran Khan nor other leading politicians betray any insight into the history of Pakistan and what we can learn from this journey of a nation that has now fallen behind Bangladesh in nearly all areas of social and economic development.
Unlike July 5 and December 16, we do observe certain anniversaries with so much fanfare, such as August 14 and March 23. Next month’s Independence Day is so very special because it will be the landmark 75th anniversary of the creation of Pakistan. And yes, there is also the Defence of Pakistan Day on September 6.
Still, there are no serious and honest investigations into the historical facts of our existence. What we have are official narratives that leave out many essential elements of how historical realities are assessed and interpreted. It is in this perspective that I have to return to Milan Kundera and refer to some ideas that are part of a novel that considers the nature of forgetting as it occurs in history, politics and life in general.
One very perceptive comment is that the rulers, mainly autocratic rulers, want to be the masters of the future only for the power to change the past. In other words, owning the past is power for the future. Kundera, a Czech writer who went into exile in France in 1975, spends a lot of time talking about how the destruction of a culture or people happens when its past – history, language, rituals – is somehow erased. By the way, the novel tells a story of how this happens at a personal level.
Kundera said that if you take a look at any political campaign, you will notice that there is a whole lot of modification of the past to assume the power to dictate how we move forward and how we create ourselves as people or as a nation.
Consider how a military dictator of Pakistan sought to erase so many pronouncements of the Founder of the Nation – and succeeded in his designs to a considerable extent. It is now possible for a leader like Imran Khan to take a certain ‘matlab’ of Pakistan for granted. Meanwhile, the small liberal faction of our society continues its struggle to remember a speech made on August 11, 1947.
One tragedy is that the time when Ziaul Haq was presiding over the destiny of this country is fast receding from living memory. We are such a young country, though immensely populous, that not more than five per cent of those alive now would be adults during Zia’s rule and, hopefully, able to bear witness to that time of infamy.
But living memory can only go that far. History lives in other forms and primarily it is taught in educational institutions and preserved in museums and archives. It informs and sustains the national conscience and guides the nation’s way forward.
However, the situation in Pakistan seems exceptional. History, as a discipline, is by and large the missing link in the academic structure of our universities. First, the history departments were bifurcated into Islamic Studies and General History and then the General History departments started to expire.
To conclude, one fact. In a conversation on this subject, Dr Syed Jaffar Ahmed, our authority on Pakistan studies, told me that in a survey of 250 colleges, he found that only three – only three – had general history departments with just four lecturers between them. The silver lining: one of the four lecturers was said to be excellent.
The writer is a senior journalist. He can be reached at: ghazi_salahuddinhotmail.com