Kapil Komireddi’s series on Pakistan

[vinod2070]

Guys, I am currently reading a series of articles on Pakistan by Mr. Kapil Komireddi. I think they provide good food for thought and discussions.

It is a series of 10 articles at present. I will be posting them not all at a time but one by one, so that we can discuss them.

The articles start from the origin of the idea of Pakistan and come up to the present day Pakistan. They are not pro-Pakistanis but include a lot of facts and interesting insights.

Looking forward to some interesting discussions!

[vinod2070]

Pakistan in Crisis

This is the first installment in Kapil Komireddi’s series on Pakistan. Click here to read the rest of the series.

With a stockpile of over 80 nuclear warheads, a rapidly collapsing state, and an army and intelligence service severely contaminated with Islamists, Pakistan represents perhaps the single biggest security challenge of the 21st Century. Yet, as Stephen Cohen has written, the U.S. seems to know very little about this country. Washington’s policy toward Pakistan has been, at best, an enduring contradiction: it was a friend in the fight against Soviet communism, a conduit during the effort to befriend Chinese communists, a hub in the war against Soviet expansionism in Afghanistan, and is now an ally in the war against the formerly “good guys” of the Afghan war. Mistrust of America in Pakistan is fueled in part by Washington’s willingness to tolerate deeply destructive dictators – so long as they cooperate with the U.S. It is not by accident that the ruler most intensely detested by Pakistanis, the austere bigot Zia ul Haq, was also Pakistan’s most pro-American leader.

But the notion that American intervention somehow retarded Pakistan’s organic evolution does not stand up to scrutiny. Pakistan was rarely a passive player in its relationship with America, and where it stands today is in large measure a consequence of the active choices made by its leaders – choices in which a majority of the vocal urban Pakistanis always seemed to acquiesce. For instance, the blame for the crisis that is currently consuming Pakistan is often directed at America, precisely to the Reagan White House’s support for the anti-Soviet jihad, which turned Pakistan into a guesthouse for the globe’s mujahideen. Yet it was during a rare period of democratic rule in Pakistan that the Taliban – actively backed by Benazir Bhutto – flourished and seized control of Afghanistan. Bhutto had sought to build Pakistan’s defenses from the detritus of the anti-Soviet war; her assassination a decade and a half later revealed the depth to which the Islamism she encouraged abroad had penetrated her own country.

Today’s Pakistan is at war with itself, torn between competing ideas of what it means to be Pakistani. Created almost accidentally as a homeland for India’s Muslims on the premise that, in Pakistan, no Muslim would be killed for being Muslim, it has become a country in which Muslims are today being killed for not being “good Muslims.” The ongoing battle there is unlikely to deliver the Pakistani state to the Taliban. But that is hardly a consolation in view of the fact that the Taliban’s objectives are shared by many in the army that is fighting them. By some estimates, up to 30 percent of the Pakistani army are Islamists. To them, this is a logical culmination of the journey that began in 1947. And it is difficult to fault them – because for all the talk of malign external intervention, Pakistan’s capacity to produce, autonomously, a nationalism that can even remotely be described as humane or liberal has been checked by the foundational myth of the “Muslim nation”: it is impossible to arrive at equality in Pakistan without negating the struggle that created it. Pakistan has remained trapped in that struggle, keenly aware of what it is not, but failing to define cohesively, in over six decades of its existence, what it actually is.

Understanding Pakistan has never seemed more important than now. But to do so, we must look beyond the 1980s. In a series of essays here at FrumForum, I will begin at the beginning, looking at the origins of the idea of the Pakistan, its abrupt and implausible creation, the subsequent events that led to its disintegration and the enmity with India that has sustained Pakistan’s sense of itself since its birth. Along the way, I will dissect the key figures that have shaped Pakistan: M.A. Jinnah, Zulfi Bhutto, Shiekh Mujib, Zia ul Haq, AQ Khan, Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and, finally, Pervez Musharraf. Four major issues – the birth of Bangladesh, the Kashmir conflict, A.Q. Khan’s global nuclear network, and the role of the Pakistani Army in the country’s history – will be analyzed in separate essays, and the final essay will carefully evaluate the state of contemporary Pakistan.

[vinod2070]

Pakistan: Origins of a Failed State

November 18th, 2009 at 2:14 pm by Kapil Komireddi | 11 Comments |
Share

This is the second installment in Kapil Komireddi’s series on Pakistan. Click here to read the rest of the series.


On a momentous March afternoon in 1940, Muhammad Ali Jinnah irrevocably ended the idea of a united India: he proclaimed the idea of Pakistan. In a rousing speech to a gathering of over 100,000 Muslims in central Lahore, Jinnah raised the spectre of Hindu domination that a united India was bound to yield. This, he claimed, would result in nothing less than the “complete destruction of what is most precious in Islam.” Muslim emancipation was possible only though the division of India along communal lines, and he – the scotch-swigging, pork-scoffing Jinnah, who had barely read the Koran – was going to lead them to their destined land. At about this point, something happened then that should have alarmed Jinnah. A young woman who had been listening intently from a curtained-off enclosure for female attendees felt so thoroughly infected by the message of liberation all around her that she decided to announce her participation in the struggle for Pakistan. She tore off her veil, ran out of the enclosure, and climbed on to the speakers’ platform. The pandal fell silent. Guards plunged on to her. She was escorted back to her place.

This suppression of free female expression in a gathering deliberating the liberation of an allegedly oppressed people exposed Pakistan’s fatal flaw: it was, to use Salman Rushdie’s words, an “insufficiently imagined” idea. Was the land of the pure going to offer its women the kind of liberties its proponents claimed Muslims would be denied in India? Would the source of its constitution be religion? If yes, then who was going to prevail, the moderates or the bigots? In any event, hadn’t Jinnah identified the preservation of “what is most precious in Islam” as one of the principal reasons for Pakistan’s foundation? And how do you determine what is most precious in Islam? For sixty years, Pakistan has been at war with itself to answer that question; none is forthcoming.

What is often ignored in analyses of Jinnah’s motivations is the cancer that was eating away his lungs. Jinnah was a man aware of his imminent mortality. He was so blindingly thrilled by his ability to exercise power in the present that his actions’ implications for the future never really mattered – or even occurred – to him.

Jinnah’s willingness in these circumstances to uncork the genie of hatred which he knew he would not be around to force back into the bottle rather takes the blush off what his defenders posthumously claim was the purpose of his agitation: to secure a better future for India’s Muslims. Hate and mistrust had penetrated the bones of his cadres. The senior Muslim League leader Abdul Khaliq had bellowed at a meeting that “The real Jews of the West were the British, and those of the East were the Hindus, and both were sons of Shylock.” Even Muslim kids who had been brought up in cosmopolitan Bombay were infected. A young Zulfi Bhutto, who was later to play a major role in sovereign Pakistan’s politics, sent an enthusiastic note to Jinnah from the Himalayan town of Mussoorie. “Hindus,” it read, “are the deadliest enemies of our Koran and our Prophet.”

By 1946, Jinnah himself was issuing calls of “India divided, or India destroyed.” Dr. Rafiq Zakaria, who was active in the freedom movement, went along to one of Jinnah’s meetings in Bombay. He was shocked by the “venom” in the speeches, which “aggravated the hostilities between the two communities as never before.”

In the months leading up to the partition of India, Jinnah was so erratic and vague that no one quite knew what he wanted, or indeed how to respond to him. Lord Mountbatten, Britain’s last viceroy to India, considered Jinnah a “psychopathic case,” finding him impossible to deal with. Charged with dissolving the Empire, Mountbatten was keen to keep India united. He tried to explain the impossibility of Pakistan to Jinnah. Muslim majorities in India lay in the west and east of the country, in Punjab and Bengal, respectively. How could a state divided by over a thousand miles of hostile territory be practicable? Besides, if majorities were the guiding factor, the Bengalis outnumbered the Punjabis. But was it not obvious that, in Jinnah’s Pakistan, Punjabi chauvinists of the west were going to lord over the Bengalis of the east? Now Mountbatten played his trump card: What about the sizeable non-Muslim populations in both states? Didn’t the very logic of Pakistan – bluntly put, majorities cannot be trusted – dictate that these minorities could not be left to Pakistan’s mercy? Jinnah froze: he knew Pakistan would be worthless if Punjab and Bengal were partitioned. He immediately offered safeguards to minorities in both states; Mountbatten offered safeguards to Muslims within a united India. Where was the need for Pakistan? Jinnah had no card up his sleeve. He had been hoisted with his own petard. His Pakistan was going to be “moth-eaten,” with Calcutta prised out of Bengal and vast tracts of fertile farmland in Punjab transferred to India. If he really sought the welfare of the people he claimed to represent, this was the point at which he should have dropped, or significantly modified, the claim for Pakistan. Instead, Jinnah called for partition. “Until I had met [Jinnah],” Mountbatten later wrote, “I would not have thought it possible that a man with such a complete lack of… sense of responsibility could… hold down so powerful a position.”

Jinnah’s conduct certainly bore out this observation. To the very eve of Partition, he was busy acquiring prime property in Bombay and Karachi. And as blood-smeared refugees arrived in the Promised Land, their Qaid, ever the hater of mass contact with the unwashed, did not even pay them an open visit, preferring instead to tour the areas in the dead of night, ‘in purdah.’ This was in cutting contrast to Nehru, who, as India’s first prime minister, raced to the scene of communal clashes on his own, often chasing Hindu thugs without regard for his personal safety, and at least once threatening to blow up with bombs anyone who so much as touched India’s Muslims.

[vinod2070]

Now Mountbatten played his trump card: What about the sizeable non-Muslim populations in both states? Didn’t the very logic of Pakistan – bluntly put, majorities cannot be trusted – dictate that these minorities could not be left to Pakistan’s mercy? Jinnah froze: he knew Pakistan would be worthless if Punjab and Bengal were partitioned. He immediately offered safeguards to minorities in both states; Mountbatten offered safeguards to Muslims within a united India. Where was the need for Pakistan? Jinnah had no card up his sleeve. He had been hoisted with his own petard. His Pakistan was going to be “moth-eaten,” with Calcutta prised out of Bengal and vast tracts of fertile farmland in Punjab transferred to India.

I find it really strange that Mr. Jinnah could (and with a straight face) ask for the division of India on the basis of communalism and then say that Punjab and Bengal with almost 40% non-Muslims should not be divided because they were Punjabis and Bengalis first before they were Hindus and Muslims!

Does boggle the mind now and I am sure it did then.