Pakistan: From the Rhetoric of Democracy to the Rise of Militancy

Jinnah’s Pakistan

Pakistan: From the Rhetoric of Democracy to the Rise of Militancy

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Pakistan: From the Rhetoric of Democracy to the Rise of Militancy

Jinnah’s Pakistan

Pakistan: From the Rhetoric of Democracy to the Rise of Militancy

Editor

Ravi Kalia

LONDON NEW YORK NEW DELHI

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First published 2011 in India by Routledge 912 Tolstoy House, 15–17 Tolstoy Marg, Connaught Place New Delhi 110 001 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2011 Ravi Kalia Typeset by Star Compugraphics Private Limited D–156, Second Floor Sector 7, Noida 201 301 Printed and bound in India by Avantika Printers Private Limited 194/2, Ramesh Market, Garhi, East of Kailash New Delhi 110 065 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-415-67040-1

Jinnah’s Pakistan

To all victims of violence in South Asia

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Pakistan: From the Rhetoric of Democracy to the Rise of Militancy

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Contents Acknowledgements

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Introduction

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1. Jinnah’s Pakistan Ravi Kalia

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2. Muhajir Politics: Ethnicity, Islam and the Muhajir Qaumi Movement Oskar Verkaaik 3. Islamabad and the Promise of Pakistan Annie Harper 4. Empowerment and Subordination of Pakistani Women through Patriarchy, Elitism, Class and Gender Discourses Tahmina Rashid 5. Pakistan and the Dilemma of Democracy T. C. A. Rangachari 6. Elitist Political Culture and the Perils of Democracy in Pakistan Zafar Iqbal

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7. Pakistan’s Pursuit of Democracy Frederic Grare

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8. Enlightened Moderation: Anatomy of a Failed Strategy Gilles Boquérat and Nazir Hussain

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9. U.S. and Pakistan: Relations during the Bush–Musharraf Years J. Andrew Greig

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10. Pakistan: The Burden of Islam Ainslie T. Embree

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About the Editor Notes on Contributors Index

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Acknowledgements It was the fall of 2005 and I was teaching a course on “Pakistan,

Military, and Religion” at the City College of New York. I had elected to offer this course for a number of reasons: Once again, military rule had been imposed in Pakistan by General Parvez Musharraf in 1999, and after the dreadful events of September 11, 2001 in New York, Pakistan had emerged as a strategic ally of the United States against the “War on Terror.” Musharraf himself had formed a close bond with President George Bush, which virtually assured that the United States would support the general rather than a weakling civilian leader leading a wobbly democratic government. Once again any prospect for democracy emerging had been undermined by geopolitical considerations, the story of Pakistan ever since its creation. Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan and mortally sick in the final year of his life, had made every effort to invite American engagement in the new Muslim nation. And so it had transpired, raising the stature of the American ambassador to Pakistan in the national matters of Pakistan. Against his better instincts, Jinnah had also fused religion with politics, and he was never able to retreat from that position. How the interplay of military and religion had shaped Pakistan’s history was the focus of the course that attracted students from many different ethnic backgrounds, including students of South Asian origin, attesting to the college’s reputation as the microcosm of New York — indeed the nation. A young Pakistani woman whose family had migrated recently to the New York area was visibly upset by Stephen Cohen’s newly minted The Idea of Pakistan (2004), one of the readings for the course; and she loudly decried it as Jewish propaganda, claiming that everything she had studied in Pakistan before arriving in the United States was different from what Cohen had written. It did not help that I was an apostate, by virtue of my Indian origin and Hindu faith. (It is a different matter that I grew up in a household that celebrated Nehruvian secularism and took pride in ecumenical practices.) Husain Haqqani, then affiliated with Boston University and Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States since 2008, quite unexpectedly came to my rescue. He had just published his Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (2005), and agreed to visit the class as a

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guest speaker. Needless to say, his visit produced animated discussion that set the tone for the rest of the term. But it became clear to me that for a complex course like the one I taught in 2005, there had to be multiple voices in the discourse. Thus the idea materialized for an anthology that incorporated different voices relating to Pakistan and its history. So I acknowledge my debt to the class of 2005, particularly the young lady who challenged the class readings. I am, of course, greatly indebted to the contributors to this volume. They cheerfully accepted criticisms of their essays, and expeditiously responded to the queries from the copy editor. Many thanks to Ambassador Husain Haqqani for several discussions; after accepting the ambassadorship it was understandably not possible for him to contribute to this volume. My thanks are also due to Routledge India for encouraging, nurturing, and bringing to fruition this project. Erwin Lici, my student at City College, was most helpful with research and other tasks. As always, I am thankful to Shantha and, more recently, to Georgie, for distractions.

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Introduction From

its inception, Pakistan has striven, at least in the political rhetoric provided by both civilian and military leaders, for democracy, liberalism, freedom of expression, inclusiveness of minorities, even secularism; but in practice, Pakistan has continued to drift toward increasingly brittle authoritarianism, religious extremism, and intolerance of minorities — both Muslim and non-Muslim. This chasm between animated political rhetoric and grim political reality has baffled the world as much as the Pakistanis themselves. In this volume, scholars and practitioners of statecraft from around the world have sought to explain the dichotomy that exists between the rhetoric and the reality. Founded on the fear of “Islam in danger” and on the promise of providing a territorial safe haven to Indian Muslims in postcolonial India, the Muslim League, the architect of Pakistan, found it difficult to politically employ Islam as a unifying force that it had been in pre-partition India. In Pakistan, Islam was no longer in danger (it never had been) and Indian Muslims were no longer in fear of Hindu dominance, which made citizens of the new nation ask: What does it mean to be Pakistani? A simple enough question, and one that has exercised many minds in the short history of the nation, but to ask it these days in Pakistan seems akin to drawing swords. Answers to this question are as diverse and different as the Pakistani polyglot population, which while attempting to rid itself of its syncretistic Indian inheritance attempted to identify itself with the Muslim Middle East. The dilemma of conflicted identity is best captured by the Pakistani Urdu poet Intizar Hussain when one of his characters notes, “[Y]ou Muslims . . . [are] always looking towards the deserts of Arabia, but for your graves you prefer the shade of India.” Pakistan is perilously close to sealing a reputation as a bastion of Islamic militancy, and risks becoming a failed state if it is unable to return to more moderate politics. Right from the start, there was something odd about the Pakistan demand and its zealous advocate Muhammad Ali Jinnah. By all accounts and personal practices Jinnah was a secular man, and his transformation from the ambassador of communal accord to the implacable spokesman of Muslim identity

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was far more chosen than ascriptive. What happened in the intervening years is that Jinnah came to understand that he could fashion his somewhat unusual and disordered position into something coherent and a unified Pakistan — a safe home for Indian Muslims. In the end Jinnah was unable to stamp down the religious rhetoric he had unleashed, and religion instead of becoming the glue that unifies ethnically diverse population proved to be the source of dividing them. The military and religion have fed on each other throughout Pakistan’s brief history — and although the military in the early days was more secular and modernistic, it sought legitimization from clerics to control the country, even during periods of civilian government. Other problems plagued Pakistan in the early years: the failure to construct a constitution; the army, the bureaucracy, and the feudal landlords — none had any faith in democracy. Muhajirs who migrated to Pakistan might have harbored rudimentary democratic notions, but understood what democracy would mean for them in the new country where they were in a minority. The efforts by muhajirs to impose Urdu as the national language created further divisions among the Pakistanis. Since the center of political gravity was in the west wing of Pakistan, and since the West Pakistanis, especially the Punjabis, viewed the numerous Bengalis in East Pakistan as inferior, democracy was viewed politically inconvenient. Democracy was also undermined as a consequence of Pakistan’s ties, first, with the United States, who feared an anti-American regime coming into power, and later, by Saudi Arabian monarchy and communist China. But most of all, Pakistan’s obsession with India and Kashmir consumed precious resources in military build-up rather than investment in infrastructure and the people. Pakistan also became, in General Ayub Khan’s words, “America’s most allied ally in Asia,” and has remained so in the post-9/11 world. Such conflicting efforts only deepened the quest for identity that could not be easily absorbed in a religiously colored national narrative, and found their resolution in multiple ethno-religious identities and provincial pride, making the national government fearful of centrifugal forces that could unravel the state. What the nationalist narrative could not readily absorb was coerced into it, and legitimized by religious endorsement. Consequently, the state, whether administered by a civilian or military administration, gravitated to un-bending authoritarianism and faithful compliance with religious conformity,

Introduction

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undermining the brilliant individualistic spirit of the Pakistanis that had flourished under mystic Sufism in the subcontinent and had created a tolerant socio-political space for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. To reflect on these issues, international and intergenerational scholars have contributed to this volume from their vantage point, and include Gilles Boquerat (France) and Nazir Hussain (Pakistan), A. T. Embree (U.S.A.), Frederick Grare (France), Zafar Iqbal (Kuwait), Tahmina Rashid (Australia), J. Andew Greig (U.S.A.), Annie Harper (U.S.A.), T. C. A. Rangachari (India), Oskar Verkaaik (The Netherlands), and Ravi Kalia (editor) (U.S.A.). Today Pakistan is viewed by the world, despite (or because of) its intimate but toxic relationship with America, as a client state of the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and China, an international school for training jihadi terrorists, a proliferator of nuclear technology, a theocratic state on the brink of bankruptcy, a government that is principally controlled by the military, and a nation in an unending conflict with its neighbors. To be sure, there is more to Pakistan than this: but is this Jinnah’s Pakistan? This volume provides a forum to explore this question — a question that is urgent and has global implications.

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1 Jinnah’s Pakistan Ravi Kalia

The obituaries got most of the facts right: that Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s death at the age of 71 (September 11, 1948) marked the passing of one of the most important public figures of the subcontinent in the first half of the twentieth century; that he began his political life as a moderate Congressman, with a commitment to finding a Hindu–Muslim accord; that his partisan journey over the decades from that starting point on the side of moderation to the intransigent separatism of which he became known as the Quaid-i-Azam (Great Leader) blazed a trail a large number of other Muslims would subsequently follow; that his influence was exerted not only through his stirring speeches but also through Dawn, the newspaper he founded in 1941 in Delhi, which helped him propagate the Muslim League’s point of views; that the ideas he shaped and disseminated through these channels contributed mightily to a change in the colonial political climate of the Raj; that this in turn helped bring about a great change in the subcontinent paving the way for the creation of Pakistan.1 All true. And yet The New York Times with sound judgment noted: “It is not clear who will replace [Jinnah], or, indeed, if he can be replaced.” Liaqat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s premier, “does not presume to the mantle of leadership long worn by his chief.” Of course, “There is a group of ‘Young Muslims’ in Pakistan, aspiring to political advancement.” But none “stands out yet as a potential Jinnah. It seems inevitable that there will be a struggle for leadership and control and the form that struggle takes may well determine the course of events in that part of the world for the next decade” (The New York Times, September 13, 1947).

As those close to him pointed out (they were very few), Jinnah in the flesh was relentlessly reserved, although unfailingly gallant, generous, and kind. He was uncompromisingly honest, as well as elegant in dress, urbane in style, and acerbic in wit. Which is to say

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he was a polemicist, one of the best in a heavily competitive field. As such he was always on the attack, and the attack was almost always directed against the Hindu-dominated Congress and its leaders, who insisted, with some merit, that the party represented all India. To the extent that any notice was taken of how embattled Jinnah was, it surfaced soon after his death, ironically, over the faith that had been his political instrument but now became a source of controversy for his funeral, as well as over his last will. He was given two separate funerals: one following Shia rituals that was held privately at Mohatta Palace (built by a wealthy Sikh businessman in the hybrid Indo-Saracenic vocabulary in the late 1920s who migrated to India after the partition), in Karachi; and the other according to Sunni rituals that was publically conducted, also in Karachi, by Allamah Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, a prominent (Deobandi) Sunni Muslim scholar, and attended by swarming Pakistanis — in clear view of media photographers. The two funerals symbolized not an expression of religious toleration but a political choice to appropriate the Quaid-iAzam to the dominant Sunni strain of Islam — repudiating not only Jinnah’s personal Shia faith but also his secular political beliefs. Fatima Jinnah, the Quaid’s sister who would live in Mohatta Palace in the mid-1960s (after her death in 1967, her sister Shireenbai occupied it until she died in 1980), had asked the Pakistan high court to execute Jinnah’s will under Shia law, since the Jinnahs belonged to the Ismali Khoja branch of Shia Islam (though it has been suggested by some scholars that Jinnah had become a Twelver Shia by confession in 1901 — but still secured in the Shia faith); in a 1970 legal challenge, however, a certain Hussain Ali Ganji Walji claimed Jinnah had converted to Sunni Islam, but the high court rejected this claim in 1976, effectively accepting the Jinnahs to be Shias. In a subsequent decision in 1984, when Sunni faith had gained ascendency under General Zia ul-Haq’s regime, the court maintained, “the Quaid was definitely not a Shia” — although without stating that he was a Sunni. The master of probate cases was unable to secure his own estate, or as a merchant of communal politics, defend his faith. Controversy over Jinnah’s faith was only a prelude to religious zealotry that unfolded after his death.2

Jinnah, Islam, and Democracy Even the stoic and sartorial Quaid-i-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah would surely be troubled by the nation he created, which has

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witnessed the rise of religious militancy, sectarian violence, appalling illiteracy, incomprehensible power of the mosque and military, and surging popularity of jihadi culture. Adnan K. Khan, a PakistaniCanadian journalist, is troubled by the present state of Pakistan: “Pakistanis are becoming the world’s pariahs. Since being implicated in a steady stream of violent attacks — from the London Tube bombings in 2005 to [the] failed attempt to bomb Times Square — it seems almost inevitable now that when the next act of terrorism happens, a Pakistani will be involved,” adding indignantly that “As a Canadian of Pakistani descent, I’ve watched this pattern emerge with a rising sense of trepidation. Thirty-five years ago, when my parents decided to move to Canada, things were much different. Pakistanis were different. They were much in demand — an intelligent, hardworking people who integrated and contributed positively to society, wherever they went.” “What a terrible journey we’ve made since then,” he lamented.3 Clearly, this is not the idea of Pakistan the constitutionalist Jinnah had in mind. But that is precisely the point: Did he actually have a clear idea of Pakistan, one that went beyond the political rhetoric of the “two-nations theory” and “Islam in danger” and “parity for Muslims?” Jinnah was not a prolific writer and, therefore, it is difficult for historians to find clarification of his ideas in his own writings. Members of his small and scattered family have been diffident about discussing him. Still, much has been written about Jinnah and undoubtedly more is yet to come. Much of it has official Pakistani sponsorship and approaches hagiography. Hector Bolitho, a journalist from New Zealand who had relocated to England, wrote a notable biography of Jinnah, entitled Jinnah: Creator of Pakistan, which was commissioned by the Pakistan government and first published in 1954.4 By the time Bolitho embarked on his assignment Jinnah had died; and Liaquat Ali Khan, who had actually recruited Bolitho, proved unenthusiastic to share information. However, Liaquat’s wife, Begum Rana Liaquat Ali Khan, provided information and anecdotes and emotional support. Fatima Jinnah, the devoted sister of the Quaid and the Madar-i-Millat (“Mother of the Nation”), was openly opposed to Bolitho completing the biography. Perhaps to protect the Quaid’s place in history, his dwindling family has been reluctant to discuss him. When the book was completed the Pakistan government carefully edited it. For these reasons Bolitho, as much a writer as an entrepreneur, sold his notes and diaries and the original

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manuscript to the American businessman Charles Lesley Ames, who in turn gifted the collection to the Ames Library, named after him, at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. The salience of the Bolitho collection is that it contains what oral history exists from Jinnah’s contemporaries, as well as insight into the political climate of the new nation soon after its creation. Available to historians today, but not then, are the newly published twelve volumes of British documents dealing with the transfer of power (TOPP), the Jinnah papers at the National Archives of Pakistan, and the documents of the Muslim League. The first to examine these documents were the American Stanley Wolpert, who completed a biography entitled Jinnah of Pakistan (1984), and the Cambridge-trained Ayesha Jalal, who published her dissertation The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan in 1985.5 The two books differ in style and purpose. Whereas Wolpert takes a long view of Jinnah’s life employing psycho-history methodology, Jalal’s work is only incidentally a biography as it focuses on the last ten years of the Pakistan movement leading up to the formation of Pakistan in 1947 and Jinnah’s shifting strategies to deal with the political constraints imposed on him by the British government, the Indian National Congress, and Muslim politics in the provinces. (A good comparison, with a clear Cambridge tilt, of the two volumes is provided by Francis Robinson, himself a product of the Cambridge School, although Asim Roy has written a much more balanced and substantive account.6) Introducing a carefully clothed and polished polemicist Jinnah who is in command of the Pakistan narrative, Wolpert views him as an adversary of Gandhi and the Congress, and the Pakistan demand as the outgrowth of that rivalry. “Few individuals significantly alter the course of history,” Wolpert generously concludes, adding, “Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nationstate. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.”7 But at what cost to the subcontinent? Remarkably, Jinnah created a Muslim nation without ever marching in a political rally (although he gave speeches at rallies), spending any time in the prison, taking a blow of a police lathi (stick), having been tried for sedition by the Raj, commiserating with the Muslim masses — and in personal life, observing the Five Pillars of Islam, visiting a mosque, reciting the Kalma (the Islamic credo), making a pilgrimage to Mecca, ever fasting during the Ramadan. In fact, what distinguished

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Jinnah are the intensely anti-religious terms in which he came to understand his personal salvation and professional ambitions. Jinnah emerges from the pages of Jalal’s tome as the Sisyphus of the Pakistan Movement led by the Muslim League. The Pakistan demand seemed very much like the Greek myth. Every time Jinnah found himself on the verge of rolling the Pakistan demand up the hills of Simla (Shimla), the summer capital of the Raj, some event would force him to start over. The Pakistani scholar S. Akbar Zaidi best captures the enduring consequence of the historiography of the partition of the subcontinent and the substance of Jalal’s argument: The . . . major thesis in her book, one which is indeed a major revelation to most readers in Pakistan who have been fed lies by official spokesmen over the last decades, is that, Pakistan for Jinnah did not mean the partition of India. In fact, what is most revealing is that the term and concept “Pakistan” was never defined by any of the Muslim League leaders, least of all Jinnah. “Pakistan” throughout the 1930s and 1940s (even up to 1947…) remains an abstract “homeland for [Indian] Muslims” with often vague and conflicting boundaries and with a clearly undefined constitutional status.8

Jalal’s heterodox argument is that “The object of the Lahore resolution [1940] was not to create ‘Ulsters,’ but to achieve ‘two nations … welded into united India on the basis of equality,’” and views the resolution as an innovative alternative to majority rule, not seeking to destroy the unity of India.9 “What the League wanted was a confederation of India for common purposes like defence, provided the Muslim and Hindu elements therein stood on equal terms.” But Jinnah’s strategy rested on unrealistic assumptions: the British would stay in power in India for at least another decade; the Congress Party, and especially the Hindu right, would not push for the partition; and there would be no mass migration of populations.10 H. V. Hodson, the English Reform Commissioner, perhaps understood Jinnah’s strategy better than anyone, concluding in his report (1941) that most Muslims wanted the British to stay on, and interpreted the Pakistan demand to mean confederation with India. But the British government and the Cripps Mission visiting India in 1942 to solve the communal problem ignored his report, determined as they were to transfer power to the sort of unitary authority that the Congress was demanding and that the British government was hoping would secure its geopolitical interests in South Asia after the Raj. Even after

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Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced as late as February 20, 1947 that the British government intended to transfer authority to India no later than June 1948, Jinnah hoped that the British “would transfer power to India gradually” so as to avoid any scramble for political control in the Muslim majority provinces, over which Jinnah had only tenuous control.11 Such constraints on Jinnah’s strategy hardly show him in control of the events in the last decade of the Raj. In the end when the new nation is born, Jinnah is rueful about inheriting a “moth-eaten Pakistan.” Biographers of Jinnah have dutifully mentioned his secular inclinations and his pull to British liberalism, but none has examined the specifics of his ideas or wondered how they would have worked in a confederation with India, or in the multi-ethnic, polychrome, polyglot Pakistan. But it is worth noting that Jinnah arrived in England when John Morley’s liberalism was in full swing. Jinnah acknowledged it became part of his life and “thrilled me very much.”12 According to a romantic view, especially popular in the liberal pseudoWesternized circles, the nation could have secured a secular, democratic, and pluralistic polity if only Jinnah’s ideas had been embraced and implemented by the misguided and selfish leaders of the young nation.13 This is simply speculation, especially so in the absence of any well thought-out plan by Jinnah, who admitted that he had not expected to see an independent nation emerge during his lifetime. His collapsing lungs in the last years of his life could not have allowed him to focus on such details. He never set out a clear exposition of his views. Typical of the barrister that he was, he would let his juniors prepare briefs that he would deliver in the Gothic Bombay High Court with rhetorical flourish and the force of his personality, according to the recollections of his contemporary jurist friend, M. C. Chagla. His treatment of crucial issues surrounding the foundation of the new nation of Pakistan was similarly detached. In a notable exception to the romanticized view of Jinnah, Farzana Shaikh has argued that Jinnah repudiated his earlier secular position in his “speech to the Sind Bar Association in Karachi on 25 January 1948,” by denouncing those who challenged “‘Shari’at Law’ as the basis of Pakistan’s constitution,” adding that succeeding leaders were to use “the ambiguity cultivated by Jinnah to negotiate their own positions and, in doing so, have continued the legacy of a movement that under Jinnah himself came to represent all things to all men.” Having used Islam to fire-up the flagging Pakistan movement, Jinnah was unable to contain the religious flames that would consume the

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new nation. That Jinnah “did not, significantly, go as far as to use the word secular” in any of his speeches left his rhetoric open to religious interpretations.14 Wolpert, more than any other historian, has stressed the Jinnah– Gandhi rivalry, with considerable merit. More than anything else, Jinnah wanted a seat at the national political table and was prepared to make “a pact with the Devil” if necessary to achieve his ends. Mohandas K. Gandhi’s return to India in January 1915 changed not just the rules, but by 1920 had also transformed the entire national, moderate, consultative political game. The non-confrontational Jinnah, who had earned much prestige and the sobriquet of ambassador of Hindu–Muslim unity for brokering a Hindu–Muslim accord in the famous Lucknow Pact (1916), found himself becoming superfluous in Indian politics with the emergence of Gandhi. Gandhi’s embracing of swaraj (self-rule) and, in 1920, his launching of the satyagraha revolution based on ahimsa (non-violence) to oppose the dreadful Rowlatt Acts (1919), and linking his satyagraha to the Khilafat movement that protested the termination of the Ottoman title of Khalif of all Islam and the move to dismember the Ottoman Empire by the Allied powers, not only brought Muslims under the Congress umbrella but also marked a beginning of mass movement politics, which was a sharp break with the past. The changes Gandhi wrought perhaps deserve to be ranked alongside the French and Russian revolutions as a hinge moment in history. Gandhi wanted to secure full swaraj for India, whereas Jinnah felt the best course for India was attainment of self-government within the British Commonwealth by constitutional methods. Becoming much less sanguine about satyagraha’s likely consequences, he blamed Gandhi’s methods for splitting India, and causing a rift not only “among Hindus and Muslims” but also “between Hindus and Hindus and Muslims and Muslims and even between fathers and sons.” He blamed Gandhi for promoting an “extreme” program that “has for the moment struck the imagination mostly of the inexperienced youth and ignorant and the illiterate.”15 Clearly, this was hyperbole on Jinnah’s part — but it also revealed his distaste for popular politics and his dependence on the British to secure his own political position and that of the League. Groomed by India’s Grand Old Man Dadabhai Naoroji and nurtured by Congress’s moderate Gokhale, he now felt disinherited. Jinnah’s main criticism of Gandhi was that mixing religion with politics to galvanize the masses was a dangerous

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practice, but one that he himself would exploit in the last years of his life, albeit without the ability to control impassioned masses.16 In any event, and not to put too fine a point on it, Jinnah was only too aware through his own minority Shi’ite Khoja identity within the larger Muslim community of the many fissures that divided Muslim India, and that those divisions could become exacerbated by popular politics. Low literacy rate, and caste and class and ethnic differences among the Muslims only aggravated the situation. Not surprisingly, Jinnah’s political successors, including the grandee Liaquat Ali Khan and the populist Zulfikar Bhutto, frequently conflated secular democracy with religious populism in an effort to plug sectarian cracks and unify the ethnic divides of Pakistan. General Zia ul-Haq made religion the centerpiece of his long administration in an effort to unify the nation under the monotheistic faith — while consolidating his power and that of the army. In short, Jinnah believed that Gandhi’s revolution would prevent the establishment of the self-rule in India that he, like Gandhi, wanted, and that it marked a dramatically negative shift in Indian politics. Jinnah had a powerful case to make for safeguarding the interests of the Muslim minority after the British left. The problem is that he made it relentlessly with disregard to the arithmetic of the demographics. He repeated his larger claim for Hindu–Muslim parity with such forcefulness and frequency that one is left wondering whether the brilliant barrister doth not protest too much. And in the end, he does not succeed in proving that what happened in and after 1947 was, in the full sense of the word, a partition. What did happen in 1947 might be characterized as an inheritance dispute between two rival South Asian siblings, the sort of quintessentially South Asian dispute, with which Jinnah was only too familiar after arguing countless probate cases in the Bombay High Court. With the demise of British rule imminent, the question of inheritance became urgent, with rival claims for power sharing by the Congress and the League. Based on the Hodson report, Jalal has argued that “Pakistan . . . was in essence a ‘revolt’ against the notion of minority status with safeguards. . . . The ‘two-nation’ theory was a better way of describing Muslim aims than ‘Pakistan,’ since it turned from safeguards and minority rights to the solid gains of national status. . . . [A] ‘new terminology’ [was needed that] ‘recognises that the problem is one of sharing power rather [than of] qualifying the terms on which power is exercised by a majority.’”17

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Ostensibly, Jalal’s Jinnah resolved this issue by, first, creating two (or more) nations on equal footing, and, second, reuniting them into a new confederation, each with equal standing. The problem is that the real Jinnah never expressly stated in his own words the details of such a confederation, nor explained how a sovereign Pakistan would fit into the “united” but “confederated” India. When the Cabinet Mission (1945) asked Jinnah for the specifics of his plan — and how assets and the armed forces were to be divided and shared — Jinnah scornfully snapped that “specificity was very well for those with huge secretariats, like the British and the Congress; the League had a hard enough job running its one office in Delhi, let alone producing a detailed scheme.”18 This is hardly the response the Mission was expecting from a man claiming to be the sole spokesman of a Muslim nation. Now that Jinnah can never be deposed, we will never know his true intentions or the architectural framework for any confederation he might have sketched in his mind. Meanwhile, Jinnah, the poker player, deliberately left “Pakistan” undefined and unexplained to his co-religionists. By allowing each Muslim to make whatever he wanted to make of Pakistan, one unintended (or maybe intended) consequence of this undefined Pakistan was that it fueled communal insecurities of both the Muslims and Hindus. Of course Muslims were easily won over to the idea of Pakistan because Jinnah had failed to explain to them what the costs of such a Pakistan were going to be. Jinnah, suffice it to say, offers us no shortage of contradictions. After breaking with Gandhi for mixing politics and religion, he tacitly supported Muslim clergy when they issued fatwas (Islamic legal opinion) in the Muslim League’s favor, such as those threatening Muslims with excommunication, declaring their marriages invalid, or denying them burial rights in Muslim cemeteries if they didn’t support the demand for Pakistan.19 These fatwas certainly benefited the League in the 1946 elections. Jinnah’s secularist credentials were further marred after he disowned his only daughter Dina for eloping with Neville Wadia, a Parsi-turned-Christian, even though Jinnah himself had married Dina’s mother Ruttie, a Parsi woman less than half his age; he hoped to remake India after calling for its partition as if people were made of clay; he drew his inspiration from the English John Morley’s liberalism and his anti-imperialist stance, yet he rejected Morley’s respect for the majority, even when the majority usually opposed his political positions.20

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In Jalal’s nuanced telling, The Sole Spokesman “delineated the uneasy fit between the claim of ‘Muslim’ nationhood and the uncertainties and indeterminacies of politics in the late colonial era that led to the attainment of sovereign ‘statehood.’” Clarifying that the demand for Pakistan was not a mere “bargaining” chip, Jalal argues: In staking a claim for share of power for Muslims on grounds of cultural difference, these schemes in their different ways challenged Congress’s right to indivisible sovereignty without rejecting any sort of identification with India. . . .

Adding: [O]utright] secession was simply not an option for Muslims hailing from provinces where they were in a minority. Virtually all the schemes put forward by Muslims living in minority provinces considered themselves as “a nation in minority” that was part of “a larger nation inhabiting Pakistan and Bengal.” If Muslims in Hindustan [where Hindus dominated] were seen as belonging to a larger nation in northwestern India, religious minorities, in Pakistan and Bengal [where Muslims dominated] were expected to derive security from sharing a common nationality with coreligionists dominating the non-Muslim state.

Then concluding: For the notion of reciprocal safeguards to work, Muslims and nonMuslims had to remain part of a larger Indian whole, albeit one that was to be dramatically reconceptualized in form and substance by practically independent self-governing parts. . . . What all these schemes led to was the claim that Muslims constituted a nation which could not be subjugated to a Hindu majority represented by the Congress. Taking this a[s] its point of departure and avoiding mention of “Partition” or “Pakistan,” the League’s draft resolution [1940] called for grouping of the Muslim majority provinces in northwestern and northeastern India into “Independent States” in which the constituent units would be “autonomous” and “sovereign.”21

Jalal sees Jinnah differently vis-à-vis partition. She seems to be the historian who not only understands Jinnah as he understood himself but who also understands Jinnah better than he wished to be understood. If indeed Jinnah envisioned such a postcolonial India, he certainly provided no details on how it would be structured and

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operated. To the extent the Leaguers claimed cultural differences with the Hindus, these differences were derived from separate religions. But in South Asian history, as Asghar Ali Engineer and others have shown, Hindu and Muslim narratives are intertwined, and most converts to Islam retained their cultural practices from the preconversion days — which is not to argue that there were no differences between the Hindus and Muslim or that these differences were not bitterly defended. Moreover, given these differences, what were the possibilities of success for “shared sovereignty?” What measures would be needed to resolve conflict between the two nations when one encroached upon the other? The deliberate failure to define “Pakistan” clearly in the Lahore resolution (1940) and mixing of “autonomy” and “sovereignty” made even Jinnah’s contemporaries question the thinking behind it. Columbia University law graduate B. R. Ambedkar, who served as a member of the Indian Constituent Assembly and who was responsible for writing a robust affirmativeaction program (that has safeguarded the interests of minorities, including Muslims) into the Indian constitution, pointedly noted that the resolution was “rather ambiguous, if not self-contradictory,” adding: It speaks of grouping the zones into “independent States in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.” The use of the terms “constituent units” indicates that what is contemplated is a Federation. If that is so, then, the use of the word “Sovereign” as an attribute of the units is out of place. Federation of units and sovereignty of units are contradictions. It may be that what is contemplated is a confederation.22

Is it not clear why an otherwise politically shrewd and legally sagacious Jinnah opted to keep his purpose under the veil rather than openly challenging the Congress Party’s hegemony? If, in fact, it was his goal to safeguard the interests of Muslims in postcolonial India, could they not have been better secured in a democratic and pluralistic framework in which a minority negotiated for its advancement and protection of interests more fully through political channels? Did not the words “autonomous,” “independent,” and “sovereign,” lead Muslims to conclude that Pakistan was to be a separate state? And did Jinnah not realize that the cry of “Islam in danger” would whip raw communal passions? Did he not bequeath to Pakistan a legacy that has created a crisis of identity and political instability, undermining his professed principles of liberalism and democracy?

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By claiming that Muslim India could never agree to Indian independence before settling the Pakistan question, Jinnah played the League’s equivalent of the British Conservative Party’s Orange Card in the Irish Question that stated Home Rule in Ireland would mean Catholic dominance over the Protestant north. Jinnah demanded from Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, a settlement of the Pakistan question; and in doing so Jinnah seems to be asking Britain to do in India what she had done a generation and a half ago in Ireland when the British parliament passed the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, dividing the island into north and south under British guarantees. On some level Jinnah must have understood his own weakness as well as that of what would constitute Pakistan, and he sought (what can only be described as) symbiotic relationships, first, with Britain for the creation of Pakistan, and later, with the United States for the survival of the new nation. In the hubris of leading his followers to the Promised Land, Jinnah came dangerously close to the primordial power of religion and its modern communalist variant, reminding us of the Greek mythical character Icarus. In the ecstasy of soaring too close to the sun, his wings melted and he fell to his death. By encouraging, however obliquely, Islamic millennialism in the movement for Pakistan, Jinnah had soared dangerously close to a sun that would raise communal temperatures. Unlike Gandhi, however, he had no experience in mass politics, seemed unable to imagine the horror of communal riots, and he did not demand or declare any commitment to non-violence. After Pakistan was created he did return to his old secular rhetoric, emphatically declaring that Pakistan will not be a “theocracy,” and that it will adhere to “popular, representative and democratic form of government.” He reassured non-Muslim minorities that they would be “citizens of Pakistan . . . without any distinction of caste, creed or sect,” and believed that the “collective conscience of Parliament itself will be a guarantee that the minorities need not have any apprehension of any injustice being done to them.”23 Tragically, it escaped Jinnah that his earlier “hostage theory” of safeguards for the Hindu and Muslim minorities — especially the Hindus — had created the impression that Pakistan was being founded on the basis of religion by the self-confessed communalist Muslim League, quite apart from the politics of the late colonial era. The recent works by Ritu Menon, Urvashi Butalia, Yasahmin Khan, Vazra Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, and others attest to the fear and uncertainty of partition and territories that would constitute Pakistan that contributed to the

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communal carnage and mass migrations of populations that preceded, accompanied, and followed independence. The Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, too, made similar reassurances to the Muslims in India: “As long as I am at the helm of affairs India will not become a Hindu State.”24 Nehru frequently threw himself between the opposing crowds to end a fight. Gandhi, already in his late 70s, fasted for peace and reconciliation whenever a communal riot broke out. There were no similar reciprocal gestures by Jinnah or any other Leaguer. Jinnah’s lack of experience and aptitude to comprehend and lead mass movements, consequently, left a vacuum in leadership with horrible consequences at the time of partition. It also created a bad example for the future leaders of Pakistan, who never embraced the idea of leading the nation by personal example. As Zamindar in her seminal work on partition has demonstrated, the framing of the demand for Pakistan before 1947 in terms of a “two-nation theory” based on religion later created complications between citizenship based on territory and citizenship based on religion.25 The nature of a religious movement is such that it tends to confirm its own message. It is not any different with the Pakistan movement. The clerics (who live off the charity of believers in the mosque) started to whip up a mass hysteria of fear, pointing to the need for the flagging Pakistan movement to attract the credulous to their creed. Jinnah had picked August 16, 1946, the 18th day of Ramadan, for “Direct Action Day” against Britain’s plan for Indian independence (which does not satisfy the Muslims’ old demand for a separate Pakistan). Though direct, the action was supposed to be peaceful — a day of reflection and atonement. But instead, before the disastrous day was over, more than 4,000 men, women, and children were dead and thousands more were wounded seriously or maimed. The violence was repeated in the rural Noakhali and Tippera districts of east Bengal. Soon, the Hindu right’s propaganda, a curious mix of the protest against the abolition of the zamindari rights and the anger against the Congress’s failure to protect Hindus in Calcutta, produced violence in neighboring Bihar, and shortly thereafter violence in the Punjab. As India became engulfed in communal fire (a sort of preview for the communal riots that would accompany the partition in 1947), and as the British started to pull troops from India, the League and Congress leaders appealed for peace. Jinnah fell helplessly silent and became withdrawn. Only aging Gandhi went to

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Bengal to console the victims. The revisionist narrative is correct in suggesting that these violent events were not all religiously inspired, and that Jinnah was steadfastly opposed to violence. But the larger point is that religion was now a legitimate, effective weapon of political struggle. Arguing that the Calcutta killings await their “historian,” Jalal has reasoned, “Jinnah had no idea of what was coming.”26 That may well be true — but that simply underscores Jinnah’s failure to understand the mutually reinforcing connection between religion and political violence, and his inability to control a mass political movement. Whichever way you look at it, the Calcutta killings were produced by his position and the demand for Pakistan. While we wait for a historian to deliver a verdict on the Calcutta killings, this much is certain: To the Muslims, Jinnah was upholding claims of Muslim sovereignty and the promise of a Muslim homeland. Equally significant is that Jinnah set a precedent that would be repeated after Pakistan was formulated. Religion became fused with national politics, as well as becoming an instrument of foreign relations vis-à-vis asymmetrical warfare that the military would pursue in the subcontinent by appealing to jihadis. Religion also became a convenient way of forming identities — often through violence. For the muhajirs Islam was the only passport to migrate to the new nation where local ethnic people were different from themselves. Jinnah had set out to frame the Muslim minority question through a constitutional lens but ended up framing the question through a cultural-religious lens; this was a terrible legacy from which Pakistan has not been able to rescue itself. The muhajir (emigrant) community, which included aspirants for government jobs (or the salariat, meaning “salaried,” class, as the late Pakistani Marxist scholar Hamza Alavi dubbed them), viewed Pakistan as a bridge back to political power, economic prosperity, and to the return of Urdu as the official language in the new nation.27 Using the Urdu newspaper Jang to express their views, they called for Pakistan’s embracing migrants as a key to the state’s religious/ ideological identity, and making Urdu the national language — a language that is not indigenous in what is now called Pakistan. Not surprisingly, the provincial government of Sind was far less welcoming of migrants, whereas the national government remained ambivalent about absorbing wholesale migration of Muslims from India. Zamindar further demonstrates how the Muslim migrants remained enmeshed with India even as Indian nationhood and

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identity solidified in the wake of partition.28 In time the muhajir culture and the Urdu language were to disturb the political and emotional and cultural balance in Pakistan’s provinces, creating political backlash against them in the 1970s and 1980s rooted in language rivalries. Despite the shattering events of the partition, the new nation of Pakistan kept the same ranks, the orders, the privileges, the franchises, the rules for property, the subordinations, the order (or lack of it) in the law, in the revenue, and in the magistracy, the feudal landlords, the commons, the corporations, and the same electors, as before independence and partition. The mullah was not impaired. His prestige, his fatwas and gradations, continued as before. In his speech to the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, Jinnah, perhaps inspired by the Act of Toleration passed by the British Parliament in 1689, but more likely out of sensitivity to his own minority religion in what was to be a Sunni-dominated country, promised the citizens of Pakistan: “You are free, you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. . . . [R]eligion or caste or creed . . . has nothing to do with the business of the state. . . . We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one state.”29 This promise of toleration, which permitted non-Muslims as well as Muslim minority sects to worship as they chose, was really a promise of indulgence rather than a confirmation of right. It offered non-Muslims and minority Muslims absolutely no relief from penal laws. And the failure to separate Islam from Pakistan meant that those who failed to recite the Islamic Kalma in Arabic or affirm the finality of the Prophet were barred from public office. Non-Muslims were reduced to second-class status, unable to participate in the ruling order of what remained in large measure an authoritarian, Islamic, and feudal regime. It did not help the new nation that after his death, Jinnah’s soaring secular speech to the Constituent Assembly, as well as his personal habits in his private life, were carefully omitted by the government from all official writings about him; history textbooks in schools, moreover, were revised to give them an Islamic flavor.30 Tellingly, this freedom of religion that Jinnah declared for non-Muslims was conditional on their loyalty to the state, as he clarified a week later in an interview to Dawn, the newspaper he founded.31 In time, as Farzana Shaikh has argued, discrimination against non-Muslims became institutionalized, reinforced by the religiously

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oriented military dictator Zia ul-Haq’s blasphemy laws, which neither the brief and wobbly “democratic interregnum” of the 1990s nor General Musharraf ’s platitudinal “enlightened moderation” succeeded in reversing.32 In sum, Pakistan could not be “national,” as Jalal has noted, and “Islamic” — because of the irreconcilable differences between two conflicting concepts of the state: one resting on the modern idea of statehood grounded in territorial limitation, promising citizenship to all the inhabitants; the other resting on the Islamic notion of statehood grounded in a putative supra-territorial community (umma), denying equal status to non-Muslims.33 A movement is simply a blueprint, the potential of which to be mediocre or brilliant lies outside the leadership’s purview. You cannot tell exactly what kind of oak tree will grow from the seed that you plant: too much depends on just about everything else — direction, perception, membership, sponsorship, beliefs, commitment, leadership, purpose, education, vision, participation, and so on. The unfinished nature of the form is, ultimately, what Jinnah could not abide. You can feel it in the prolixity of his speeches and in the dark smudges of his penciled notes: he wanted every speech to impart a moral lesson to his audiences, while instructing them about his great purpose. Jinnah’s speeches were hobbled by the same quality that lifted his imagination above the superficial: the complicated nature of his mind. He had started out thinking he had genius and a special destiny, and it was this belief in an ideal image of himself that, when transmuted into political form, won him both a wide audience and critical esteem. But that idealized self in all other respects eluded him — not because of his idiosyncratic habits, not because of his bad behavior with adversaries, but because he was a person at war with his own inclinations. A selfprofessed constitutionalist at heart, he also wanted to be a hero and an entertainer — having once had thespian aspirations as a youth in Britain. Although he came to believe that life is essentially a cheat and that redemption comes not from happiness and pleasure but from a deeper satisfaction that rises out of struggle, he always remained dependent to an unhealthy extent on the good opinion of others. And it was this dichotomy — his receptiveness to life’s most profound lessons coupled with his need to win over the world by the force of his personality — that made him capable of being, in equal measure, politically rigid and blatantly manipulative. If some scholars have exaggerated Jinnah’s accomplishments in mid-century Indian politics, and others have overstated his nationalist credentials, Jinnah remains difficult to evaluate because of the

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problematic nature of the Pakistan movement itself. In many ways it was a movement in which, to use the words of William Butler Yeats from his poem “The Second Coming,” “The best lacked all conviction, while the worst are full of intensity.” A much more transparent picture of Jinnah emerges in a neglected book by the American journalist and photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who, as a correspondent and photographer for Life magazine interviewed Jinnah and his sister, Fatima, in September 1947, barely a month after the founding of Pakistan. It should be noted, even though some observers of Pakistan have called her observations “sensationalist,” that nevertheless she remains one of the last Westerners to interview Jinnah when, in his final year, he could take stock of his achievements, making her therefore an indispensable source in understanding the mind of the Quaid, or at the very least his Pakistan program. The gritty Bronx-born Bourke-White gained notoriety as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet Industry, the first female war correspondent to work in combat zones, and the first female photographer for Henry Luce’s Life magazine, covering major events of the mid-twentieth century around the world. After spending more than two years in the subcontinent, stretching from the early spring of 1946 to the end of 1948, she provided a revealing picture of the Quaid-i-Azam, Pakistan, and India in her book Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India, published in 1949: Pakistan was one month old. Karachi was its mushrooming capital. On the sandy fringes of the city an enormous tent colony had grown up to house the influx of minor government officials. There was only one major government official, Mahomed Ali Jinnah, and there was no need for Jinnah to take to a tent. The huge marble and sandstone Government House, vacated by British officialdom, was waiting. The Quaid-i-Azam moved in, with his sister, Fatima, as hostess. Mr. Jinnah had put on what his critics called his “triple crown”: he had made himself GovernorGeneral; he was retaining the presidency of the Muslim League — now Pakistan’s only political party; and he was president of the country’s lawmaking body, the Constituent Assembly. “We never expected to get it so soon,” Miss Fatima said when I called. “We never expected to get it in our lifetimes.”

Furthermore: If Fatima’s reaction was a glow of family pride, her brother’s was a fever of ecstasy. Jinnah’s deep-sunk eyes were pinpoints of excitement. His

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whole manner indicated that an almost overwhelming exaltation was racing through his veins. I had murmured some words of congratulation on his achievement in creating the world’s largest Islamic nation. “Oh, it’s not just the largest Islamic nation. Pakistan is the fifth-largest nation in the world!”

Within a month Pakistan had gone through a revisionist history, transformed from a “mutilated, moth-eaten” Pakistan that Jinnah had complained about to “the largest Islamic nation” and “the fifth-largest nation in the world!” Several more revisionist versions of Pakistan history would follow. More importantly, the Jinnah of Pakistan is difficult to square with the nationalist Jinnah. The note of personal triumph was so unmistakable that I wondered how much thought he gave to the human cost: more Muslim lives had been sacrificed to create the new Muslim homeland than America, for example, had lost during the entire second World War. I hoped he had a constructive plan for the seventy million citizens of Pakistan. What kind of constitution did he intend to draw up?

Characteristically, Jinnah responded: “Of course it will be a democratic constitution; Islam is a democratic religion.” I ventured to suggest that the term “democracy” was often loosely used these days. Could he define what he had in mind? “Democracy is not just a new thing we are learning,” said Jinnah. “It is in our blood. We have always had our system of zakat — our obligation to the poor.” This confusion of democracy with charity troubled me. I begged him to be more specific. “Our Islamic ideas have been based on democracy and social justice since the thirteenth century.”

The constitutionalist Jinnah who had been “thrilled” by John Morley’s liberalism had morphed into the Muslim faithful Jinnah. This mention of the thirteenth century troubled me still more. Pakistan has other relics of the Middle Ages besides “social justice” — the remnants of a feudal land system, for one. What would the new constitution do about that? The Koran, by which the transactions of Muslims have been

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Jinnah explained: “The land belongs to the God,” says the Koran. This would need clarification in the constitution. Presumably Jinnah, the lawyer, would be just the person to correlate the “true Islamic principles” one heard so much about in Pakistan with the new nation’s laws. But all he would tell me was that the constitution would be democratic because “the soil is perfectly fertile for democracy.”35

Bourke-White wondered what transformed Jinnah from the ambassador of Hindu–Muslim accord into the deliberate apostle of discord? It was not religion. Jinnah was not a bigot. Not for personal gain. He was incorruptible. Not even to save the poor. He was far more comfortable in well-heeled groups of people. She concluded, “No one knows exactly.” . . .“It was a drive for power.”36 Or was Jinnah simply the chameleon of the Indian nationalist movement? In any case, Jinnah revived the moribund Muslim League in 1936 after it had dragged through an anemic thirty years’ existence, and took to the religious soapbox. He began dinning into the ears of millions of Muslims the claim that they were downtrodden solely because of Hindu domination. During the years directly preceding this move on his part, an unprecedented degree of unity had developed between Muslims and Hindus in their struggle for independence from the British Raj. The British feared this unity, and used their divide-and-rule tactics to disrupt it. Certain highly placed Indians also feared unity, dreading a popular movement, which would threaten their special position. Then another decisive factor arose. Although Hindus had always been ahead of Muslims in the industrial sphere, the great Muslim feudal landlords now had aspirations toward industry. From these wealthy Muslims, who resented the well-established Hindu competition, Jinnah drew his powerful supporters. One wonders whether Jinnah was fighting to free downtrodden Muslims from domination or merely to gain an earmarked area, free from competition, for this small and wealthy clan.37

After interviewing Jinnah, Fatima, Liaquat, and several other leaders of the new nation, White concluded that Jinnah represented the interests of the landed gentry rather than the Muslim masses, as was his claim to represent. Although the thrust of the Pakistan movement

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had been political rather than economic, and the Muslim League had not put much importance on matters relating to economic development, in the circle close to Jinnah “several big businessmen and industrialists played important roles, not only in helping to finance the Pakistan movement, but also in helping to organize businessmen, and in more specific political roles.”38 Jinnah himself played a prominent role “in the mobilization of Muslim businessmen through the organization of Muslim chambers of commerce and through the establishment of ‘nation-building’ companies which were to function in the new state.” Among others, this group included Sir Adamjee Haji Dawood, the two Ispahani brothers, Mahomedali Habib, Habib Ibrahim Rahimtoola, and others, as well as G. Alla, who was active in the provincial League in Karachi.39 The concentration of wealth and economic control in the hands of a few families was to have serious implications for the economic and political health of Pakistan, resulting in oligarchy rather than democracy. The brilliant barrister who meticulously kept account of domestic expenses to the last penny could have not known the economic price of partition: Pakistan raised 75 per cent of the world’s jute supply; the processing mills were all in India. Pakistan raised one third of the cotton of India, but it had only one thirtieth of the cotton mills. Although it produced the bulk of Indian skins and hides, all the leather tanneries were in South India. The new state had no paper mills, few iron foundries. Rail and road facilities, insufficient at best, were still choked with refugees. Pakistan has a superbly fertile soil, and its outstanding advantage is self-sufficiency in food, but this was threatened by the never-ending flood of refugees who continued pouring in long after the peak of the religious wars had passed. [Sic]40

In his singular pursuit for a separate Pakistan, Jinnah took all these losses “in his stride.” Later, reflecting on what I had seen, I decided that this desperation was due to causes far deeper than anxiety over Pakistan’s territorial and economic difficulties. I think that the tortured appearance of Mr. Jinnah was an indication that, in these final months of his life, he was adding up his own balance sheet. Analytical, brilliant, and no bigot, he knew what he had done. Like Doctor Faustus, he had made a bargain from which he could never be free. During the heat of the struggle he had been willing to call on all the devilish forces of superstition, and now that his new nation had been achieved the bigots were in the position of authority. The

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Revisionism, the itch of historians to say something new about something already known, has given Jinnah a political makeover to make him into a respectable spokesman of modern secular democracy. This has led to suggestions that Jinnah had Jacksonian democracy in mind when promising “a new land of opportunity where the bureaucrats would be men of the people,” or despite the obvious differences separating Thomas Jefferson and Jinnah, that “the founding fathers of two [different] nations born from revolution” had things more in common than what divided them — that are not only pretentious claims but also demonstrate a failure to understand American slave society in the eighteenth century and the evolutionary nature of the American presidency to which Pakistani leaders have periodically aspired.42 Jinnah’s constitutionalism is often mistaken for a commitment to modern democracy, but his faith in government as the essential custodian of power and his heavy reliance on economic elites in nation building were radically different from Jeffersonian benevolent elitism or Jacksonian populism or American Progressivism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that, as a reaction to the rising power of robber barons and growing corporations, called for greater control by average Americans over government, prompting progressives to make education a top priority in their reformist program. There are no comparable ideas to be found in Jinnah’s thinking. Jinnah made his way forward in Indian colonial politics by means of his skills as a debater and a phrasemaker. But in culture, in ideas, in purpose, in conduct and character, in interests, and in political goals he was dissimilar to Jefferson or Jackson. Born in mideighteenth-century colonial America, both Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were children of the Enlightenment that had its roots in Europe, and came of age in post-revolutionary America. The patrician Jefferson belonged to Virginia’s landed gentry and, although trained as a lawyer, had a broad range of interests — music, architecture, science, mathematics, farming, and so on — and was an avid reader and a prolific writer. Jefferson is best known as a political theorist who helped shape American republicanism that supported democracy, equal rights, albeit not for African slaves (not

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even for non-propertied whites), opposed aristocracy, and rejected “national” religion. Credited for crafting the American Declaration of Independence that claimed equality of all men (the document owed much intellectual debt to George Mason’s Virginia “Declaration of Rights”), he also authored “The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom” (1779) that was adopted by Confederation Congress in 1786. Its goal was complete separation of church and state — although throughout his administration Jefferson permitted church services in executive branch buildings, and the Gospel was also preached in the Supreme Court chambers. Reflecting the thinking of his time, he was agreeable to freeing slaves, but believed that the differences between whites and blacks were “fixed in nature” precluding cohabitation between them. The evolution of American democracy that reflected equality of all men and separation of religion and government was still a work in progress. Andrew Jackson had his roots as a yeoman farmer and a frontiersman. In 1779, during the revolutionary war, at the age of 13, while serving as a courier for a local regiment he was captured by the British. Asked to clean the boots of a British officer, Jackson refused to follow orders and the enraged redcoat slashed at him with a sword, giving him scars on his left hand and head, as well as a permanent dislike for the British. He lost much of his family in his youth and blamed it on the British, but still proceeded to educate himself, fought in the War of 1812, and based his career in developing Tennessee, becoming the first president primarily associated with the American Frontier. Jackson’s legacy is mixed: he was a promoter of popular democracy and individual liberty for American citizens, and broadened the franchise to include non-propertied adult whites; but he also supported slavery and Indian removal from federal lands. In contrast to the Jeffersonian era, Jacksonian democracy promoted the strength of the presidency and executive branch at the expense of Congress and states. The most unique, if controversial, part of the Jackson administration was the spoil system, or political patronage: Many of his supporters believed that rotating political appointees in and out of office was not only the right but also the duty of winners in political contests. Patronage was interpreted to be beneficial because it would encourage political participation by the common man, and also because it would make a politician more accountable for poor government service by his appointees. Jacksonians also believed that long tenure in the civil service was corrupting, so civil servants should

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be rotated out of office at regular intervals. However, such policies resulted in recruiting incompetent and corrupt officials from the Democratic Party rather than competent ones from the other party. American democracy remained a work in progress at the end of the Jacksonian era. But based on Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America (1835), the broader implication of American democracy in the first half of the nineteenth century suggests a flowering culture of the democratic spirit in American life around the time of Jackson’s presidency. Touring America at the beginning of the 1830s, Tocqueville, a French political thinker and historian, found there “the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions.” To Tocqueville and other commentators, both favorable and critical, America promised the democratic, egalitarian future; Europe remained locked in the old order. More than a century later, traveling to Pakistan, the American Margaret Bourke-White came to a very different conclusion about the brave new nation, and Jinnah, its undisputed leader. She found Jinnah talking about democracy based not on social contract and popular representation but on Islam and its ideals of zakat, piety, and Sharia. Pakistan democracy was also a work in progress — but on a very different trajectory from the Lockean dictates of rationality and social contract and religious toleration that had informed the American experience. Jinnah’s interpretation of Pakistan democracy differed markedly from Jefferson and Jackson’s interpretation of American democracy. In the end, Jinnah’s attitude towards Pakistan democracy was as inconsistent as his own political career. The warring impulse in him never really abated. He was alternatively sensible and reckless; worldly and adolescent; down to earth and somewhere above Alpha Centauri. He was not so much a walking contradiction as a quivering mass of dreams and ambitions that, depending on how he was feeling and whom he was talking to, created a dizzying array of impressions. Reading the White-Jinnah interview today, one can see the power of the elevated, “artificial” rhetoric that undermines the urgency of nation building. (Pakistan’s “soil is perfectly fertile for democracy”; a fine slogan, but no more than a slogan in the end.) Jinnah could sometimes achieve a monosyllabic simplicity that grates the ear of mid-twentieth-century political sensibilities because of its force and defiance. (“Our Islamic ideas have been based on democracy

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and social justice since the thirteenth century” — another fine slogan.) Very much like the movement that had left the demand for Pakistan undefined, the project left the purpose of nation building undetermined. Jinnah’s language is strikingly wooly, with more loft than lucidity. (“Of course [Pakistani constitution] will be a democratic constitution; Islam is a democratic religion”; but how, exactly?) Even after independence, Jinnah was still fighting in the demand movement rather than engaging in the task of nation building: consequently, his language never changed its tenor, and remained an exercise in elemental morale building rather than in explanatory eloquence. In a rare expression of intimacy born out of fatherly affection in the autumn of 1932 when he was in self-exile in London, Jinnah handed his doting daughter Dina a copy of H. C. Armstrong’s biography of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Grey Wolf, An Intimate Study of a Dictator, intoning: “Read this, my dear, it is good.” According to Bolitho, Jinnah had purchased the book from a bookshop in his Hampstead neighborhood after reading a review in the “Literary Supplement” of The Times. Grey Wolf was a symbol the Turks had taken for themselves in their early nomadic days, and it was the name some gave to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk for reviving Turkish nationalism. Ostensibly because of Jinnah’s obsession with the Turkish leader, the irrepressible Dina named her lawyerly father “Grey Wolf.” Bolitho has tried to imagine the influence of Kemal Atatürk on Jinnah’s psyche: “Like ‘Grey Wolf,’ Jinnah was to create a nation out of a perplexed multitude of Muslim people; but, in character — one a libertine [Atatürk], and the other a puritan [Jinnah] — they were as different as any two could be.”43 It is possible, as Bolitho notes, that Jinnah might have seen some parallels between himself and Atatürk: As boys, both were opinionated, self-willed, self-sufficient, sensitive to real or imagined slight, and, above all, loners, incapable of intimacy; Jinnah might have even compared Atatürk’s victories on the battlefield to his own victories in the courtroom. The two men were roughly the same age, Atatürk being a few years younger. Both viewed themselves as reformers of their respective societies. But Atatürk’s upbringing and thinking was decidedly grounded in the European Enlightenment — in his readings of Voltaire, Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke — with which Jinnah had a shaky familiarity at best. Whatever it was about Grey Wolf that made Jinnah buy the book and pass it to Dina, he seemed to have missed the overarching

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message of Atatürk’s political program that stands in stark contrast to the nebulous notion of Pakistan. As Armstrong has noted: “In [Atatuurk’s] clearness of vision lay his success. In the limitation of his aim was founded his greatness.” Just when the Turkish leader in his clear Western tilt was outlawing the traditional fez and instructing his countrymen to wear European hats and clothing, Jinnah was getting ready to identify himself with Islam by discarding Mayfair’s Savile Row suits for the more traditional karakul hat (popular in Central and South Asia) and courtly sherwani, now the national dress of Pakistan. Beyond their more superficial differences on matters of dress and carnal pleasure, the more defining difference between the two was that Atatürk’s break with religion was absolute and irrevocable, whereas Jinnah’s rejection of religion was a matter of political expediency. Although Arabs and other ethnic Muslims under the Ottoman Empire had come to resent Turkish hegemony, Atatürk’s decision to dissolve the Caliphate (Khilafat) in 1924 threw the Muslim world in turmoil because it had been the only unifying religious constant for the Muslims since the advent of Islam. The shifting of the national capital from Istanbul to Ankara affirmed the break with the old regime. In his magisterial biography of Atatürk Armstrong recorded the Turkish leader’s clear vision for his new nation: “At all costs, the Republic must be maintained. It is threatened. The Ottoman Empire was a crazy structure based upon broken religious foundations.”44 Atatürk emphatically added, “The new Republic must have good foundations and a well-made, scientific structure.” Instructing that the “Caliph and the remains of the House of Osman must go,” he demanded that the “antiquated religious courts and codes must be replaced by modern scientific civil codes. The schools of the priests must give way to secular Government schools. State and religion must be separated. The Republic [of Turkey] must finally become a secular state.”45 What followed were a series of liberal measures transforming Turkey from a medieval state into a modern nation: secularization of education, separation of religion and state, gender integration in public spaces, unveiling of women, promotion of women’s education and granting of equal rights, enforcement of monogamy, adoption of the Latin alphabet, adoption of the Gregorian Calendar, Europeanization of the law, promotion of Western culture (including ballroom dancing), and so on. For all of these measures Atatürk

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came to be viewed in the West as an emancipator of his people and in the Muslim world as the enemy of Islam. In foreign affairs he followed the dictum, “Peace at home and peace in the world,” and he pursued state control of economic policies and elimination of foreign ownership of capital. Although his was an autocratic rule based on a one-party system (Republican People’s Party), the basis of Atatürk’s policies depended on the power of the parliamentary sovereignty (justice, moral superiority, and social structure of the nation) established by the Republic. Jinnah and succeeding Pakistani leaders were to remain fascinated by Atatürk’s Turkey, but drew all the wrong lessons. Atatürk’s secular democracy was guaranteed by the military, and remains guaranteed by the military, but he lived long enough for his ideas to take root in the Turkish soil. The Pakistan military establishment clearly saw Turkey as an example of how to operate at home. A glimpse of raptures the Pakistani military felt about Turkey can be gleaned from General Pervez Musharraf ’s polemical autobiography In the Line of Fire.46 (He spent seven years in his youth in Ankara.) Governor general of Pakistan Jinnah acknowledged to the Turkish ambassador that the life and career of the great Atatürk were widely known in Pakistan. General Ayub Khan’s admiration for the Kemalist program was well known. And Zulfikar Bhutto was so smitten by Turkey that he copied the changing of the guard ceremony at Atatürk’s mausoleum and introduced it at the Quaid’s mazar (tomb) in Karachi, which remains in place today. He also built the Kamal Atatürk Memorial in his hometown of Larkana on the fiftieth anniversary of the Turkish Republic. Many of Ayub’s and later Bhutto’s early secular reforms and nationalization of the economy were inspired by Turkey.47 In the modernist capital city of Islamabad, a major traffic artery is named Atatürk Avenue. Vedat Dalokay, a Turkish architect and former mayor of Ankara, designed the famous Saudi-funded Faisal Mosque in Islamabad. Pakistani polls repeatedly rank Atatürk high in popularity. And not surprisingly every Pakistani leader has viewed himself as the Atatürk of Pakistan, but without the commitment to restrain religion or impair the ulama. The issue of social and political reform was handled differently in Turkey and Pakistan: in Turkey Kemal Atatürk completely eliminated the ulama (the college of Islamic scholars) from the religious life of the nation; in Pakistan, after attempts to reform the ulama failed, it was enlisted as a political instrument in nation building. The

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European-educated Mohammad Iqbal, the moral force behind the Pakistan movement and Jinnah’s spiritual mentor, viewed social and cultural reform of Muslims as a religious issue because “there is no aspect of our cultural life which can be separated from religion.” And that to an extent explains Jinnah’s adumbration of the new nation in his interview with the American Margaret Bourke-White in the autumn of 1947.

Jinnah and America Arguably, the Pakistan-American relationship has been another toxic force in the history of the nation. It too was defined by Jinnah and assiduously pursued by succeeding generations of leaders. Pakistan’s interest in America was, and remains, pecuniary; America’s interest in Pakistan was, and remains, geo-political. This divergence of interest in each other has proved expensive for both nations, but they remain locked in a symbiotic relationship unable to cut the troubled ties. Unwittingly (or otherwise), America was to smooth the progress of the new nation from a “moth-eaten Pakistan” to a curious blend of theocratic and praetorian state.48 Nehru’s Fabian socialist fantasies and non-alignment posturing, and Gandhi’s doctrine of self-reliance (swadeshi) had made India a doubtful American ally against the Soviet Union in the Cold War, although both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations had hoped for a unified India emerging after independence. Pakistan emerged as a more suitable candidate in the fight against the “Godless” Soviets. When Margaret BourkeWhite inquired from Jinnah whether he expected to enlist technical or financial backing from America, he responded thus: “America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America. Pakistan is the pivot of the world, as we are placed” — he revolved his long forefinger in bony circles — “the frontier on which the future position of the world revolves.” He leaned forward toward me, dropping his voice to a confidential note. “Russia,” confided Mr. Jinnah, “is not so very far away.”

Even in his failing health the thespian in him was very much alive. His obsession with newspapers, which constituted his almost exclusive readings, had kept the Quaid informed of the Cold War — and here he was projecting Pakistan and the British-invented martial mystique of Muslim fighters as a bulwark against the ruthless Russians

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with their ethnic ties to pagan Slavs — all this to defend the twin American virtues of democracy and capitalism and to prevent Pakistan from turning into a Finland of Asia and its resulting Russification. The Russo-Afghan conflict of the late 1970s and 1980s was still thirty years away, and America in those years was far more Eurocentric, although not completely disinterested in South and Central Asia. This was a different Jinnah, one capable of stoking others’ fears to achieve his own ends. The skeptical American journalist noted in her book that Jinnah’s only basis for claim on “American friendship” boiled down to this: “that across a wild tumble of road-less mountain ranges lay the land of the Bolsheviks. I wondered whether the Quaid-i-Azam considered his new state only as an armored buffer between opposing major powers.” Pointing to far-flung American military interests around the world, Jinnah clarified his thinking: “America is now awakened,” he said with a satisfied smile. Since the United States was now bolstering up Greece and Turkey, she should be much more interested in pouring money and arms into Pakistan. “If Russia walks in here,” [Jinnah] concluded, “the whole world is menaced.”49

Throughout Bourke-White’s stay in Pakistan, Jinnah’s geopolitical thesis was repeated to her everywhere she went. But Pakistani officials also informed her, almost sadly, “Russia has shown no sign of being interested in Pakistan.” As she put it: “The hope of tapping the U.S. Treasury was voiced so persistently that one wondered whether the purpose was to bolster the world against Bolshevism or to bolster Pakistan’s own uncertain position as a new political entity.” She further added: “Actually, I think, it was more nearly related to the even more significant bankruptcy of ideas in the new Muslim state — a nation drawing its spurious warmth from the embers of an antique religious fanaticism, fanned into a new blaze.” What struck Bourke-White as still more odd was that even when Pakistan was overwhelmed with conflicts of state building a few weeks after coming into existence, the leadership was talking about sending Pakistani troops to help their Arab brothers in Palestine, and freeing the Holy land from an Israel that was not to be formally founded until May 14, 1948. “Dawn, the official Pakistani newspaper, condemned the ‘Jewish State’ and urged a united front of Muslims countries in the military as well as the spiritual sense. ‘That way lies the salvation of Islam,’ said one editorial.” Recognizing that Jinnah’s

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“most frequently used technique in the struggle for his new nation had been the playing of opponent against opponent,” she argued that, “this technique was now to be extended into foreign policy.”50 Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States since 2008, wrote in his influential book Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, that Bourke-White’s analysis “reveals the underlying assumptions of Pakistan’s relations with the United States for the next five decades.”51 The events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent “War on Terror” have helped revive and reinforce those assumptions once more. In 1950, Liaquat Ali Khan, a close ally of the Quaid and the first prime minister of Pakistan, declined an invitation to visit Russia in favor of visiting the United States to prop up relations between the two countries. Once there, he explained three elements of Pakistan’s foreign policy: maintaining the territorial integrity of Pakistan, commitment to Islamic culture, and promoting economic development. “Maintaining Pakistan’s integrity,” Haqqani has argued, “was a euphemism for ensuring adequate defense and military preparedness; it implied Pakistan’s need [for] a great-power patron to help pay for its defense.” Further, “When Liaquat Ali Khan addressed a Western audience, as when he stated the three fundamental interests, his Islamic rhetoric was diluted by couching it in cultural terms. In the domestic arena, however, he continued to use the term, ‘Islamic ideology,’ making it possible for Islamist ideologues to assert their role as interpreters of that ideology.”52 To win American favors, as declassified British and American documents from the period show, Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment “fabricated evidence of a communist threat to Pakistan to get U.S. attention.”53 Haqqani puts Pakistan’s new thinking succinctly soon after its creation: The United States was Pakistan’s great-power patron of choice, crucial as a source of weapons and economic aid. Alliance with the United States became as important a part of the plans for consolidating the Pakistani nation and state as Islam and opposition to Hindu India. At one stage, Liaquat Ali Khan even suggested that Pakistan would have “no further need to maintain an army,” let alone a large one, if the United States was ready to “guarantee Pakistan’s frontiers.”54

Of course, implicit in Pakistan’s rhetoric of friendship was that its loyalty to the United States depended on Washington guaranteeing Pakistan’s security against India. In 1951, two important events occurred: the Sandurst-trained Pushtun Ayub Khan became the first

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Pakistani army commander-in-chief, replacing the interim British general Douglas Gracey on January 17; and on October 16, Liaquat Ali was assassinated by a disgruntled Afghan nationalist. Rumors of a “foreign hand” in the assassination abounded. Between those dates, the two men, along with the Jinnah-appointed foreign minister Sir Zafarulla Khan (of the Ahmadi sect) initiated discussions with the Americans regarding military cooperation between the two countries, which ultimately led to Pakistan signing the Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement with the United States in May 1954 vis-à-vis SEATO (Southeast Asian Treaty Organization) later in the year; the following year, Pakistan signed the Baghdad Pact, thereby becoming a member of CENTO (Central Treaty Organization) — as it came to be named in 1958. The Americans were slow in warming up to Pakistan, preferring to deal with the subcontinent through the British Commonwealth. During World War II the Roosevelt administration’s sympathy for the Indian nationalist movement and independence was well known, but Roosevelt remained quiet because of Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s admonishments to the Americans not to interfere with the Raj. Consequently, the Truman administration’s declared position was that the term of the transfer of power was a matter for the British and concerned Indian parties to resolve among them. Congress leaders Gandhi and Nehru were well-known in America, much more so than the Muslim League and Jinnah. This may have been because Jinnah continued with partisan politics, directing his energy to Indian Muslims alone, while the League was largely moribund until the 1930s. And when the Hindu–Muslim politics of British India filtered into the American press, they created more confusion than clarity. For instance, the December 28, 1930 edition of The New York Times carried a story under the headline “Hindu or Moslem? The Undying Problem,” by Beatrice Barnby.55 After 1930, Jinnah gained some recognition in America when Time magazine featured him twice on its cover. Nonetheless, it was Gandhi, not Jinnah, who resonated with the American people because his simple message of non-violence carried a profound meaning for a racially divided and war-weary America. Not surprisingly, in 1959 Martin Luther King, Jr. spent a month in India studying Gandhi. In Jalal’s telling, by 1950 Pakistan and its military had been harnessed to the Cold War as a consequence of Anglo-American efforts.56 Haqqani, on the contrary, has argued that Jinnah himself offered Pakistan as a bulwark against Russia in return for economic

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development and military assistance, and that Liaquat, Ayub, and Zafarulla Khan had traveled to Washington to win American assistance by offering Pakistan as a base to the Americans in 1951. In fact, the Truman administration was not of one mind about entering into a military pact with Pakistan; in addition, differences existed between Washington and London because their interests were not identical in South Asia. Truman was concerned about the larger impact of military assistance to Pakistan on the region vis-à-vis India, and was still sensitive to British perceptions of things Indian and Pakistani. Jinnah fully understood America’s geopolitical concerns and its fear of communism when he was making his case to Bourke-White for American assistance; and General Ayub Khan and other Pakistani leaders played to American fears with over-embellished rhetoric. American fears were accentuated after Assistant Secretary of State George McGhee had unsuccessfully tried to persuade Prime Minister Nehru to join the American defense system, who, as it turned out wrongly, did not view communist China’s close geographic proximity to India as an existential threat. American thinking on Pakistan remained opaque, however. More broadly, American objectives in South Asia during the Truman administration were limited to maintaining regional stability and promoting goodwill for America. The emergence of communism in China in 1949, the reverses in Korea, and the mounting threat to the French in Indo-China made America re-evaluate its position in Asia early in 1951. Potential loss of India to communism came to be equated with the loss of all Asia. It was in this climate that McGhee flew to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in late February 1951 for a meeting of some fifty American officials, and a decision was taken to stop deferring to the British Commonwealth in South Asian matters in favor of direct American engagement. Since the Pakistanis appeared “much more realistic . . . [about] the communist threat than the Indians,” the Truman administration decided to enter into a military alliance with Pakistan and committed itself to “building up Pakistan’s military forces.”57 This decision was consistent with the Truman Doctrine that promised aid to any country that was threatened by communism and within the framework of the Point Four Program designed to offer economic assistance to poor countries that President Truman enunciated in his second inaugural address on January 20, 1949. With the advent of the Eisenhower administration in 1953, the U.S.-Pakistan relation got on a firmer footing. The Eisenhower

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Doctrine promised aid to Middle Eastern countries fighting communism, which did not go unnoticed in Pakistan. As Robert J. McMahon has shown, “Pakistan’s alignment with the West can best be understood as part of an evolving global strategy devised by the United States for containment of the Soviet Union,” but in this effort the suitor was Pakistan, not the United States.58 McMahon explains: A growing number of top American planners came to believe that the participation of Pakistani troops in an area defense plan could help resolve the West’s strategic dilemma in the Middle East. Acting on that assumption, early in 1954 the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed to provide Pakistan with military assistance in return for Pakistan’s promise to partake in a regional defense pact that was to be centered on the northern tier states of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan.

As a five star general and veteran of World War II, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was more responsive to General Ayub Khan and impressed by his credentials than President Truman. Eisenhower and Ayub had something else in common: both men had leapfrogged from a junior rank to generalship in short order. And both men stressed religious devotion. All these factors must have influenced Eisenhower’s decision to assist Pakistan’s entry into SEATO and CENTO, facilitating military assistance to Pakistan. So the Cold War arrived in the subcontinent in the mid-1950s over protests from both India and Afghanistan who feared, as it turned out correctly, destabilization of the region. Noting the reality of this, McMahon further argued that because scholars have sought to examine the consequences of military alliances, they have given less attention to the causes of American military assistance to Pakistan. While there is agreement among scholars about the expanding character of the Cold War and the consequent “burgeoning of American security commitments throughout the world,” they disagree in their explanations of the processes by which this expansion occurred. As McMahon notes: An earlier generation of historians viewed American expansion as a purely defensive response to Soviet aggression, triggered especially by Russia’s naked grab for power in Eastern Europe and the fear that American security would be gravely jeopardized by further Soviet expansion. During the 1960s, influenced in large part by popular disillusionment with the war in Vietnam, a revisionist school emerged that saw American leaders aggressively and self-consciously forging a modern-day empire to

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This new thinking in Washington made it opportune for General Ayub Khan and other Pakistani leaders to pitch their case to Washington in the 1960s. Meanwhile, American scholars of foreign policy continued to search for causes of American postwar expansion. Other historians, unconvinced by Gaddis’s neo-orthodox approach, have sought to reinvigorate a revisionist critique with the argument that strategic, rather than economic considerations lay at the heart of American postwar expansion. The conception of national security developed by American leaders between 1945 and 1948 was so sweeping, writes Melvyn P. Leffler, that it included “a strategic sphere of influence within the Western Hemisphere, domination of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, an extensive system of outlying bases to enlarge the strategic frontier and project American power, an even more extensive system of transit rights to facilitate the conversion of commercial air bases to military use, access to the resources and markets of most of Eurasia, denial of those resources to a prospective enemy, and the maintenance of nuclear superiority.” Given such an expansive definition of postwar security needs, Leffler submits, a globalized and militarized foreign policy was virtually inevitable.59

In McMahon’s telling, however, “American policy toward Pakistan was driven by a remarkably imprecise and inchoate formulation of the nation’s strategic needs. American planners came to view Pakistan as a key to the defense of the Middle East, but they were never sure exactly how it would contribute to that larger objective, nor were they certain about the exact nature of the threat Moscow posed to that troubled region.” As a consequence, “a peripheral state like Pakistan could often exert substantial influence on the United States, pressing for military aid for its own purposes and virtually forcing an American response,” although “[c]ountervailing pressures from an ally like Great Britain and a regional power like India . . . could often delay American military commitments indefinitely.”60 In other words, the United States did not always have a free hand in South

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Asia, which explains the limitations and inconsistencies of American strategic designs and policies there, as well as the enduring Pakistani complaint, at least since the 1971 Bangladesh crisis and the war with India, that the United States has not been a “reliable” friend. Even America’s closest ally General Pervez Musharraf, in his memoir In the Line of Fire and the late Benazir Bhutto in her posthumously published Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West feel compelled to note how America has worked against Pakistani interests and impaired democracy in that country.61 True, some of this rhetoric is for domestic consumption, and is part of the Pakistani leadership’s routine blaming of outside forces for its own manifold failures. But the evidence suggests that once Jinnah had promoted the idea of renting the new nation to America (succeeding leaders were to enter into similar arrangements with Saudi Arabia and China) in return for economic and military benefits to his American interlocutor Margaret Bourke-White, both civilian and military Pakistani elite tirelessly pursued an American connection, pitching their case not only in the official meetings of the State Department and the Pentagon, but also in influential American journals and newspapers in an effort to sway public opinion. Calling Pakistan “America’s most allied ally in Asia,” Ayub Khan remonstrated in Foreign Affairs in 1964 that America was “increasingly” taking Pakistan “for granted.”62 He was reacting to the Kennedy administration’s warming to India, an American move that also made him woo China as a counterbalance to India — but never at the cost of sacrificing American ties. In the American Academy of Political and Social Science Ayub Khan argued that democracy in Pakistan rested upon indirect suffrage, drawing from the “System of Basic Democracies, a comprehensive structure of local councils composed largely of elected members.”63 In 1961, he reassured the U.S. Congress that “our aim always was and always has been and always shall be to have representative institutions.”64 Ayub’s speech to Congress was actually the formulation of a new policy towards the United States in which, as Haqqani has candidly noted, “Pakistan [will be] saying one thing and doing another.”65 And the title of Ayub’s autobiography, Friends Not Masters (1968), defines the footing on which Pakistan sought American alliance.66 Until Jinnah died, his two military secretaries had been British officers. Most British officers who had been retained in Pakistan for the transitional period on Jinnah’s request spoke favorably about

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him. But they also noted that he never gave much thought to the role of the military in the formulation of the new nation. General Sir Frank Messervy, the first commander-in-chief of the Pakistan army, noted: “Jinnah was not really interested in the army: he had no idea on the subject, and said to me, ‘I have no military experience: I leave that entirely to you and Liaquat.’”67 In doing so Jinnah set a dangerous precedent, which the military would later make the most of in usurping civil authority. In another instance, when the English Rear Admiral J. W. Jafford, who had been charged with building the Pakistan navy, worried about funds for the two destroyers he considered essential, Jinnah had no hesitation in endorsing the purchase,68 even though the influx of refugees, myriad social and economic problems, and an impasse on the constitution dictated different priorities. As a consequence, military priorities would become inviolable in Pakistan. It was during these years, while Jinnah was still alive, that the supremacy of the military, both as a sentinel of territorial sovereignty against perceived threat from Hindu India and as a protector of Pakistan’s political unity against internal centrifugal forces, was established. As the respected Pakistani historian Pervez Hoodbhoy mordantly recounts, “a popular but rather humorless Pakistani joke, [has it that] ‘all countries have armies, but here, an army has a country,’” adding, “Indeed, even when civilian governments have nominally been in charge in Pakistan, there has never been much doubt about who actually makes decisions there.” The military in Pakistan exists as a parallel state: “In addition to holding political power, the Pakistani army controls vast commercial and industrial interests and owns massive rural and urban properties.”69 Several Western scholars of Pakistan share this view, most notably the American Stephen Philip Cohen, who has argued that Pakistan’s failure to develop a national economy and the practice of financial support from external sources has turned Pakistan into a rented state, much like oil-rich emirates but without the oil, renting itself out to powerful nations: first, the United States, and later, China and Saudi Arabia.70 But external funding is always transactional, and ceases after the crisis passes. This is what happened with the Afghanistan war in the 1980s, and will most likely happen after the present war. This might explain Pakistan’s interest in perpetuating the Afghan war by playing both sides of the street as disclosed by Wikileaks in July 2010. (Although whatever was leaked was widely known among Pakistan

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observers: what Wikileaks did, however, was to put the information in the public domain.) Another unfortunate consequence of easy American economic aid has been that the Pakistani leadership — civilian or military — has had little incentive for economic or political modernization, or for accountability and transparency in the government. Successive regimes in Pakistan have been exposed as fatigued kleptocracies, in the long run all proving themselves to be disliked and illicit. Because Pakistan has depended largely on external sources for revenue rather than on taxes from its population, the Pakistanis have not demanded much from their government, allowing elites to stay in power. And elites, torn between the pull of religion and the attraction of the modern world, schooled in Western ideas but conscious that those ideas to some extent obliged them to commit cultural and spiritual matricide, already felt they were one step removed from their countrymen, accentuating the gap between rulers and ruled. Jinnah had tried to temper the strident religious rhetoric of the Pakistan movement in his August 11 speech by sounding a secular note and promising inclusiveness to all citizens. Politically, that was untenable, and he could not totally step back from his earlier position. The prolific Islamist Maulana Sayyid Abdul Ala Maududi, Jinnah’s nemesis and the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami (Islamic Society or Party) in 1941, had withheld his endorsement of Pakistan during the movement on the grounds that his support depended on Pakistan becoming an Islamic religious state. Maududi represented the more puritanical version of Islam (anti-Western but nationalistic, corresponding to the Deobandi school of thought) as opposed to Muhammad Iqbal, Liaquat Ali, and other Leaguers who came from the progressive Aligarh School.71 Maududi’s call for Islamic revival was targeted at the middle classes and government employees. Still, in a symbiotic relationship, the Jamaat and the League had reinforced each other’s program: by legitimizing communalism in Islamic terms, the Jamaat helped the League build a support base by appealing to religious symbols; and by embracing politicized Islamic discourse, the League provided a bona fide claim to the Jamaat to insert itself into the Pakistan politics.72 In the spring of 1949, Maududi had his first political victory when, under pressure from the Islamists, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan relented and recognized the importance of Islam in the Objective Resolution that was to serve as Pakistan’s grundnorm for the constitution: “It provided for democracy, freedom,

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equality, and social justice ‘as enunciated by Islam,’ opening the door for future controversies about what Islam required of a state.”73 And also how Islam defined Pakistani citizenship. Declaring Islam to be as much an ideology as a religion and taking guidance from Communist Party organizational strategies in other countries, Maududi built a cadre-based structure in the Jamaat and forged alliances with other Islamist organizations in the Muslim world in the hope of bringing about an Islamic revolution, foreshadowing the rise of a global radicalization of Islam. His first targets were the Ahmadis in 1953. The Ahmadis are a minority Muslim sect that follows the teachings of their nineteenth-century leader Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who is considered their prophet, in direct contradiction of the central tenet of Islam that acknowledges Muhammad as the final prophet. For that reason orthodox Muslims reject the Ahmadis’ claim to be Muslims. But Maududi’s crusade against the Ahmadis had a political agenda as well. He hoped to bring down the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Bogra by calling for the resignation of foreign minister Zafarulla Khan, an Ahmadi and Jinnah appointee. The Ahmadi crisis brought about martial law to Pakistan, thereby demonstrating the power of religion, the impotence of a civilian authority to maintain law and order, and the pre-eminence of the military in keeping the country together. Equally important, the Ahmadi crisis raised the question of who is a true Muslim? On this question there was no satisfactory answer, since there were, and remain, contested definitions.74 The report of the Munir Commission that investigated the causes of the Ahmadi crisis concluded that, “Keeping in view the several definitions given by the ulema,” the report could only conclude “that no two learned divines are agreed on this fundamental.” As such, “If we attempt our own definition as each learned divine has done, that definition differs from that given by all others, we unanimously go out of the fold of Islam. And if we adopt the definition given by any one of the ulema, we remain Muslims according to the view of that alim but kafirs according to the definition of everyone else.”75 Jinnah never addressed this fundamental dilemma of the new Muslim nation. The Pakistan Jinnah founded must have given him some angst. In Jinnah there seems to be a misalignment of national and personal ambitions. He had never considered Pakistan as anything but a place midway between history and dream. Even while promoting

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millennial celebrations on Direct Action Day (1946) — when he defiantly declared, “I also am going to make trouble” — Jinnah was happy to hint at the supernatural: but he also must have been filled with the horrors of working out the future of Pakistan. Jinnah must have been troubled by his admitted inability to understand the army or tame religion. On June 14, 1948, Jinnah spoke to the officers of the Staff College, Quetta: “I want you to remember and if you have time enough you should study . . . our present Constitution, that the executive authority flows from the Head of the Government of Pakistan, who is the Governor-General and, therefore, any command or orders that may come to you cannot come without the sanction of the Executive Head. This is the legal position.”76 Mercifully, Jinnah did not live to see “the legal position” dishonored. He died on September 11, 1948, a mere shadow of himself in his last days. Neither did he see the progression of the U.S.–Pakistan relationship he had so ardently promoted, Nor did he see the climb of archrival Maududi in politics. Maududi had opposed Pakistan’s alliance with America, but dropped his opposition once the Americans thought it prudent to prop up Maududi as a counterweight to the communists. The Americans supported his religious activities indirectly by buying his inflammatory literature only to dump it in the Arabian Sea. (At the time, good-humored Pakistanis joked, “there was more Islam in the sea than on land.”) The Jamaat-eIslami proved a useful source during the Afghan war in the 1980s. The United States stoked the fervor of Islamic feelings by enlisting Pakistani aid against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. For example, in 1980 the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) commissioned the Center for Afghanistan Studies (CAS), University of Nebraska, Omaha, to revise the curriculum of Afghani schools in line with the anti-Soviet policy objectives of the U.S.supported jihad. Under a $43 million USAID-financed project, some fifty university faculty and staff members worked overtime to produce more than 15 million textbooks in Pashto and Dari, the two primary languages in Afghanistan, for distribution to children, largely living in refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran. Along with a chain of Wahhabi madrasas in the Pak-Afghan border regions, the CIA contrived — with active support from the Inter-Service Intelligence (Pakistani military intelligence agency) — to sow the seeds of a militarized civil society that would furnish physical sustenance in addition to providing ideological support to the anti-Soviet jihad.77

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Jinnah would have been happy he did not live to see the extremist religious rhetoric of the Pakistan movement mutate into the business of jihad. As Jessica Stern has noted: “the ‘jihad’ movement is also developing a spiritual momentum linked to its financial one.” Rich Pakistanis donate money to jihad; the poor donate their sons believing it to be a spiritual duty. “One mother whose son . . . died fighting in Kashmir told me she would be happy if her six remaining sons were martyred. ‘They will help me in the next life, which is the real life,’ she said.”78 Jinnah would have recognized none of this. In his deliberations and resolutions, the astute barrister was as careful as possible to observe, or at least mimic, the procedures and forms of legality, and he did everything within his power to foster and preserve an illusion of constitutionality. Even so Jinnah, a romantic visionary wearing constitutional monocles, lacked peripheral vision. His adherence to rules and traditions notwithstanding, he could not alter the fact that the movement he led had worked profound and, as it turned out, permanent transformation in the direction taken by the new nation. The long period of hegemonic alliance between religious and military authorities enabled a new order to gradually emerge within a framework comfortably preserving much of the old.

Notes 1. To David Gilmartin and Robert Twombly, thanks for their comments. 2. Interestingly, none of the biographers of Jinnah have mentioned the controversy over Jinnah’s funeral and his last will. Official records and Pakistan government–supported websites confirm that Jinnah was given a Sunni funeral led by Allamah Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, as does Akbar Ahmed in his Jinnah, Pakistan, and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin (London: Routledge, 1997). 3. Adnan R. Khan, “On Being Pakistani,” AOL News, May 16, 2010, available at http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/opinion-on-beingpakistani/19478357. Accessed on August 1, 2010. 4. Hector Bolitho, Jinnah: Creator of Pakistan (London: John Murray, 1964, reprint). 5. Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

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1985). For the record, the author completed his doctoral degree under Stanley Wolpert at the University of California, Los Angeles. Francis Robinson, “Review (Untitled),” Modern Asian Studies, 20(3) (1986): pp. 611–18; Asim Roy, “The High Politics of India’s Partition: The Revisionist Perspective,” Modern Asian Studies, 24(2) (May 1990): pp. 385–408. Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan, p. vii. S. Akbar Zaidi, “Review: A Compassionate Portrayal,” Economic and Political Weekly, 24(30) (July 29, 1989): pp. 1705–706. Jalal, The Sole Spokesman, pp. 70–71. Ibid. See also Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Jalal, The Sole Spokesman, p. 237. Cited in A. G. Noorani’s “Jinnah’s Commitment to Liberalism,” Economic and Political Weekly, 25(2) (January 13, 1990): pp. 71–73. Also see Bolitho, Jinnah, p. 9. Several Pakistani scholars have made this point, including, most recently, Ayesha Jalal in her book, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). Referring to the Zia regime, she notes that General Zia ul-Haq, in a decisive way broke with the past, changing “the motto of the army to ‘Islam, Piety, and Jihad’” from Jinnah’s “secular theme of ‘unity, faith, and discipline.’” The tendency to take Jinnah at his word persists, as does the penchant to blame external forces, especially America, for radicalization of religion in Pakistan. See Jalal, Partisans of Allah, pp. 274–75. See Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 82–83. Quoted in Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan, p. 70. Jinnah objected to Gandhi linking his non-cooperation movement that he had launched in response to the British brutalities of 1919 with the Jamiyat-al-Ulama-i-Hind (The Indian Association of Muslim Theologians) sponsored Khilafat Movement that protested the dissolution of the Caliphate by the Allied powers. In the late 1930s, Jinnah and the League criticized Gandhi’s Wardha educational scheme (named after his headquarters) that aimed at promoting vernacular education in rural India by teaching students how to use their minds by learning how to use their hands. These schools were named Vidya Mandirs (“Temples of Learning”), which ostensibly prompted objection by the Leaguers. Gandhi frequently used vernacular and Sanskritized terms and images that had significance with the Indian masses. For example, Gandhi’s use of the religiously neutral spinning wheel was one of the most significant unifying elements of the nationalist movement in India. See Rebecca Brown, Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India (London: Routledge, 2010).

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17. Jalal, The Sole Spokesman, p. 70. 18. Cited in ibid., p. 179. 19. See ibid., p. 147; also see, Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005). 20. In a letter from Switzerland, Neville Wadia confirmed to Stanley Wolpert that Jinnah disapproved of his marriage to Dina on “religous grounds.” See Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan, p. ix. 21. Ayesha Jalal, “Between Myth and History,” in M. R. Kazimi, ed., M. A. Jinnah: Views and Reviews (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 120–21. 22. B. R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or Partition (Bombay: Thacker, 1946, 3rd edn), p. 4–5. See also Roy, “The High Politics of India’s Partition.” 23. Jinnah’s remarks on Pakistan, May 21, 1947, cited in Jalal, The Sole Spokesman, p. 277. 24. Nehru declined to inaugurate the restored historic Somnath Temple in Gujarat on the grounds that that would violate India’s commitment to secularism, and Nehru also (albeit unsuccessfully) encouraged Rajendra Prasad to follow his example. See Ravi Kalia, Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), p. 12. Nehru, cited in Khan, The Great Partition, p. 178. 25. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 26. Jalal, The Sole Spokesman, p. 216. 27. Hamza Alavi, “Class and State,” in Hassan Gardezi and Jamil Rashid (eds), Pakistan — The Roots of Dictatorship: The Political Economy of a Praetorian State (London: Zed Press, 1983), pp. 40–93. In his other writings as well, Alavi has argued that the Pakistan movement was driven not by religious fears but by economic considerations of the Muslim bureaucratic class, which resented the displacement of Persian and Urdu by English under British rule. 28. Zamindar, The Long Partition. 29. Cited in Hassan Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror (Armonk, New York: M. E. Shape, 2005), p. 18. 30. Haqqani, Pakistan, p. 13. 31. Dawn, August 17, 1947, cited in Tahir Hasnain Naqvi, “The Politics of Commensuration,” in Naveeda Khan, ed., Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), p. 75. 32. According to Farzana Shaikh, “The success of Zia’s endeavours owed much to a cultural discourse that had been closely, if unevenly, associated with the foundations of the state, which held that being a Muslim was a condition of being Pakistani,” Making Sense of Pakistan, p. 78.

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33. Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 234. 34. The issue of compatibility of Islam with democracy is a much-debated issue. A democratic state that recognizes Islam as the state religion incorporates religious values into public life, but Islam is not the only source of law. On the other hand, what is called Islamist democracy represents a more comprehensive inclusion of Islam into the affairs of the state. Islam specifically states that only God reserves the right to make laws, while in democracy (as understood in the West) people make laws. Many verses from Quran prohibit law-making by people. Only Turkey has had a measure of success in experimenting with Westernstyle constitutional and representative democracy. As the controversial Bernard Lewis has observed, “[It] is exceedingly difficult to grasp the meaning of limited government, of civic and human rights, and of participation, other than by direct personal experience over a long period of time — and few outside the existing democracies have had the opportunity to acquire such experience” (Bernard Lewis, “Why Turkey is the only Muslim Democracy?” The Middle East Quarterly, 1[1], (March 1994): pp. 41–49). Admittedly, Lewis’s argument has a Weberian cultural echo, which viewed Catholicism and especially Islam, as not so responsive to modernization and democracy. Samuel Huntington provides an even more culture-determining argument in his polemical work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, Simon and Schuster, 2003, reprint). The culturalist view is challenged by the economic view that links modernization and democracy to economic development. According to Freedom House, a non-profit organization that tracks democracy worldwide, “the last 30 years have seen a trend diametrically opposite to the global trend toward political liberalization” in Muslim nations. Fareed Zakaria also weighs in on the side of culture by suggesting the “illiberal” character of Muslim societies, particularly in the Middle East. See Fareed Zakaria, “Islam, Democracy, and Constitutional Liberalism,” The Political Science Quarterly, 119(1) (Spring 2004): pp. 1–20. 35. Margaret Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1949), pp. 91–92. See also Bolitho’s Jinnah for Jinnah extolling Islam over the Western civilization, pp. 215–16. For labeling of Bourke-White’s writing as “sensational and exaggerated,” see Roger Long, Dear Mr. Jinnah: Selected Correspondence and Speeches of Liaquat Ali Khan, 1937–1947 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 278, footnote 10. 36. Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom, p. 94. 37. Ibid., pp. 94–95. 38. Hanna Papanek, “Pakistan’s Big Businessmen: Muslim Separatism, Entrepreneurship, and Partial Modernization,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, 21(1) (October 1972): pp. 1–32.

46 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

Ravi Kalia Ibid. Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom, p. 99. Ibid., p. 101. Jalal, The Sole Spokesman, p. 149. Also see, Akbar Ahmed, “Thomas Jefferson and Mohammad Ali Jinnah: dreams from two Founding Fathers,” The Washington Post, opinions, July 4, 2010. Bolitho, Jinnah, p. 102. The reference to H. C. Armstrong’s Grey Wolf is deliberate — and exclusion of more recent biographies of Atatürk intentional — because Jinnah had read Armstrong only. H. C. Armstrong, Grey Wolf, An Intimate Study of a Dictator (New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1933), pp. 207–8. Citations in the preceding paragraph are also attributed to Armstrong’s Grey Wolf. Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), Chapter 3. Although Ayub, to a limited extent, was more successful in opposing the Islamists, he nonetheless used the ulama to endorse his position that a woman was unfit to govern Pakistan: he was brazenly discrediting Fatima Jinnah, his challenger in the 1965 elections. On the other hand, Zulfikar Bhutto has the dubious distinction of making Islam as the “state religion” of Pakistan in the 1973 constitution he authored. Reflecting on America’s involvement in global wars, Andrew J. Bacevich in his Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010) has noted that long wars are “antithetical” to democracy and lead to praetorianism. In one of the ironies of history, American military involvements overseas have nurtured the Pakistani army. Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom, pp. 92–93. Also see, Haqqani, Pakistan, pp. 30–32. For a good and comprehensive account of U.S.–Pakistan relations, see Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947–2000: Disenchanted Allies (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2001). Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom, pp. 93–94. Citations in the preceding paragraph also attributed to Bourke-White. Haqqani, Pakistan, p. 30. Ibid., pp. 31–32. Ibid., p. 32. Ayesha Jalal in her, The State of Martial Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 112–13, has cited these declassified documents; Haqqani cites Jalal in his Pakistan. Haqqani, Pakistan, p. 32. Betty Miller Unterberger, “American Views of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Pakistan Liberation Movement,” Diplomatic History, 5(4) (1981): pp. 313–36. Jalal, State of Martial Rule.

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57. W. H. Brands has provided a detailed account of American discussions relating to South Asian security in “India and Pakistan in American Strategic Planning, 1947–54: The Commonwealth as Collaborator,” in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 15(1) (1986): pp. 41–54. 58. Robert J. McMahon, “United States Cold War Strategy in South Asia: Making a Military Commitment to Pakistan, 1947–1954,” The Journal of American History, 75(3), (December 1988), pp. 812–40. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Musharraf, In the Line of Fire; Benazir Bhutto, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). 62. Ayub Khan, “The Pakistan–American Alliance: Stresses and Strains,” Foreign Affairs, 42(2), (January 1964), pp. 195–209. 63. Ayub Khan, “A New Experiment in Democracy in Pakistan,” American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 358 (New Nations: The Problem of Political Development), (March 1965), pp. 109–13. 64. Cited in Ravi Kalia, Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India (Columbia: South Carolina University Press, 2004), p. 83. 65. Haqqani, Pakistan, p. 197. 66. Ayub Khan, Friends not Masters: A Political Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). 67. Cited in Bolitho, Jinnah, p. 200. 68. Ibid., p. 202. 69. Pervez Hoodbhoy, “Can Pakistan Work? A Country in Search of Itself,” Foreign Affairs, 83(6), (November–December, 2004), pp. 122–29. Also see, Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy (London: Pluto Publishing, 2007). 70. Stephen Philip Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2004). 71. Among Indian Muslims two schools of thought exercised influence during the Pakistan movement. The more conservative and purist school by the Dar-ul Uloom Deoband (a madrassa school) in the north Indian town of Deoband was founded in the mid-1860s to flush Muslims of colonial and Western influences in British India. Their basic argument was that Muslim India had lost its splendor because the Muslims had abandoned the core values of Islam. In the view of the Deobandis, the Muslim League didn’t represent the pristine values of Islam and, of course, Jinnah was a Shi’ite. However, some dissident Deobandis did cross over to the Muslim League. Today the Deobandi influence extends to several countries, including the United Kingdom. In Pakistan, the Deobandis established themselves in Ashrafabad, Sind. The Aligarh school grew out of the Mohammedan Anglo Oriental College founded by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan at Aligarh, and it was upgraded to Aligarh

48

72.

73. 74.

75.

76. 77.

78.

Ravi Kalia University in 1920. Sir Syed had concluded that Muslim backwardness was due to their poor education, and that they could regain their old status through English education and the sciences, which, in his view, were not incompatible with Islamic law. However, in rejecting the program of the Indian National Congress, he was instrumental in stirring separatist Muslim nationalism. Maududi and Jamaat’s role in Pakistan is more fully explored by Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr in his two studies: The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama’at-i-Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) and Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Haqqani, Pakistan, p. 16. The relationship between Islam and nationalism, argues Farzana Shaikh, is the “single greatest source of ideological uncertainty in Pakistan,” and Jinnah’s own prevarication over the decisive relationship between religion and politics during the Pakistan movement that under him represented “all things to all men” allowed multiple voices and differing perspectives to claim legitimacy from religion after the creation of Pakistan. See Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan, chapters 1 and 2. For the complete report, see, The Report of the Court of Inquiry Constituted under Punjab Act II of 1954 to Enquire into the Punjab Disturbances of 1953 (Lahore: Government of Pakistan Printing Press, 1954). There has been no lasting lesson learned from the Munir report. Jinnah’s speech, June 14, 1948, available at http://www.humsafar.info/ int_sp.php. Accessed on August 28, 2010. Ishtiaq Ahmed has estimated the aid to be $51 million. See his article “The Madrassa Industry,” in Daily Times, Lahore, July 26, 2005. Also see his essay “Spectre of Islamic fundamentalism (1947–2007),” in Rajshree Jetly, ed., Pakistan in Regional and Global Politics (New Delhi: Routledge, 2009), pp. 150–80. Jessica Stern, “Pakistan’s Jihad Culture,” Foreign Affairs, 79(9) (November/ December 2000): pp. 115–26.

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2 Muhajir Politics: Ethnicity, Islam and the Muhajir Qaumi Movement Oskar Verkaaik

The Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) is perhaps the most interesting political phenomenon produced by the unique political culture that has come about in Pakistan’s relatively short history. Established in 1984 by second-generation migrants from India who had settled in Pakistan’s largest and most populous city of Karachi, the party embodies the complexities that characterize the polity of the new nation state. Many Western commentators as well as Pakistanis themselves have struggled to understand as to how precisely Islam and ethnicity relate to each other, how democracy and violence do or do not contradict each other, and how modernity and tradition often overlap and engage each other in unpredictable ways. All these unresolved issues have shaped the spectacular rise of the MQM in Pakistan’s political landscape in the 1980s, just as they have contributed to its equally stunning decline from the mid-1990s onwards. If anything, the party has added its own often-paradoxical logic to questions of national identity, religious solidarity, and social justice. Although by now a mainstream political party like many others, its early history still provides a unique insight to the main tensions and conflicts within Pakistani politics. In discussing the political context that gave rise to the MQM, three crucial issues deserve attention: the routinization of political violence during the military regime of General Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s; the impact of the war in the Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, in particular on the changing position of the religiously based Jamiat-i-Islami (founded by Maulana Maudoodi in August 1941); and the unresolved issues of Islam and ethnicity as the main identity markers around which identity politics in Pakistan revolves. Post-independence Migration To some extent, the MQM is a direct result of the mass-migration that followed the independence of both India and Pakistan in 1947.

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On August 14, 1947, the new state of Pakistan came into being as the result of a long political campaign of the Muslim League led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Right from the start, the paradox of Pakistan was that it received its greatest support from those parts of undivided India where Muslims were a minority, in particular the cities of northern India (specifically Lucknow), whereas the popular support for Pakistan came relatively late in provinces like Sind, Balochistan, the Punjab, or the North-West Frontier — even Bengal. Whereas partition almost immediately led to large-scale violence in the Punjab and to a lesser extent Bengal, which forced Hindus and Sikhs to flee to India and Muslims to seek refuge in Pakistan, Urdu-speaking Muslims from the United Provinces (now called Uttar Pradesh), Bihar, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Bombay, and the Deccan migrated to Pakistan from 1948 to the early 1950s.1 They were driven less by religious violence than by the wish to live in a Muslim-majority state and by the expectations of social and economic betterment. As Muslims, they identified themselves with the new Pakistani nation, as well as with the population of the provinces that made up Pakistan. Soon they were to discover to their disappointment that they were resented in the provinces, especially in Sind, where they formed one of the largest diasporas. Most of these migrants settled in Karachi — the newly designated capital city of Pakistan as well as the old capital of Sind. Many migrants felt attracted to Karachi not only because it was the political center of the new nation and the place of birth of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, but also because it was a port city and a commercial center. Many of them also dispersed to smaller towns and cities in the southern province of Sind like Hyderabad, Mirpurkhas, Nawabshah, and Sukkur. They by and large replaced the Sindi Hindus, who — although a minority — were primarily an urban bourgeoisie, dominating Sindi urban centers. Most of them traveled to India or migrated to other parts of the world. Mostly urban Muslim migrants from India took their place. Rather than addressing themselves as migrants or refugees (panahgir), the newcomers called themselves muhajirs, thus identifying themselves with the hijra (exodus) of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 C.E., which signals the beginning of the Islamic calendar and symbolizes the beginning of the new times. The term also was intended to articulate the national and religious solidarity between migrants and locals, who came to be called ansar, just like the local population of Medina in prophetic times, who had hospitably

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welcomed the muhajireen from Mecca. Although in the 1950s there was some pressure upon the migrants to start calling themselves the New Sindis to express a stronger identification with the province of Sind, the term muhajir stuck to the migrant population, who came to dominate Karachi and also made up a significant segment of the population in other Sindi towns. For muhajirs, Karachi became a quintessentially muhajir city. Its neighborhoods (mohallah) and slums (basti) mirrored the northIndian way of life and the Urdu language, which was appropriated as the national language of Pakistan — the lingua franca for the new nation — thereby relegating provincial languages to an inferior position. Initially, the muhajir elite dominated the Muslim League and the bureaucracy and therefore had a considerable weight in the process of state-building, even though the military was primarily dominated by the Punjabis and Pakhtuns (Pathans). The muhajir position, however, began to diminish with the advent of the first military government of Ayub Khan (1958–68), which curbed the muhajir-dominated politics of the state in favor of the military visá-vis the Punjabis. Symbolic of their decreasing powers was the relocation of the capital city from the muhajir-dominated Karachi to the new modernist city of Islamabad that Ayub Khan built in the early 1960s. Muhajirs suffered further set-backs in the 1970s, when the first democratically elected government (albeit, with a socialist tilt) led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) introduced reservation quotas for civil service jobs and educational institutions based on ethnicity. In 1971, East Pakistan had become independent Bangladesh formed on the basis of a separate ethnic Bengali identity. Islam as the supra-unifying ideology of Pakistani nationalism had failed to successfully suppress ethnic identifications. Rather than repressing ethnic identity, as Ayub Khan had done in his efforts to modernize Pakistan, Bhutto accommodated — even encouraged — ethnic loyalty, particularly in his native province of Sind, where Sindi nationalists challenged the Pakistani state. As part of his policies, Bhutto made Sindi the official provincial language, forcing all Sindi students — including those of migrant background — to learn the local language. Muhajir students protested against this, arguing that they were citizens of Pakistan rather than inhabitants of the province of Sind. For them, ethnic affiliation and linguistic chauvinism of the new policy superseded religious solidarity on which Pakistan was

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formed. Although some muhajir pressure groups and student organizations were formed in opposition to Bhutto’s ethnic/linguistic policies, muhajir remonstrations and demonstrations did not as yet lead to the establishment of a muhajir political party. Muhajir dissent was rather voiced by Islamic parties like the Jamiat-i-Ulama-iPakistan (JUP), which was a largely muhajir-dominated political party. However, the JUP and other religious parties did not manage to win the votes of the vast majority of muhajirs, as the MQM would do a decade later, because the lower-class muhajir population had been coopted by Pakistan Peoples Party’s populist economic programs that were endorsed by various labor unions. For many poor muhajirs, the PPP’s promise of ‘Roti, Kapra aur Makaan’ (Bread, Clothing and Shelter) resonated much better than the allegation of PPP’s antimuhajir stance. Still, many Muhajirs saw the Muhajir Qaumi Movement as the party that managed to unite muhajirs politically. The party’s success was possible by appropriating the logic of ethnic politics and reformulating muhajirs as an ethnic group (qaum), at par with other officially recognized ethnic groups, like the Sindis, Punjabis, Pakhtuns, and Baluchis. Foreshadowed by the founding of the All Pakistan Muhajir Student Organisation (APMSO) in 1978, the MQM was officially formed in 1984 at the height of the military dictatorship of Zia ulHaq. By turning to ethnic identity politics the MQM was not only breaking with the earlier muhajir ideology of religious solidarity, rendering it superfluous, it also was confronting the Islamization policy of Zia ul-Haq head on. In return for the state support the first generation of muhajirs had largely identified themselves with the Pakistani state, but the younger generation presented the MQM as an anti-establishment movement. At the same time, the MQM portrayed itself as the party of the true Pakistanis who had made the supreme sacrifice of migration to live in Pakistan. In order to understand this paradox of ethnic identity and religious nationalism, it is necessary to take a closer look at how ethnicity and Islam are intertwined in the Pakistani national discourse.

The Ethnicization of Islam Many studies on Pakistani nation-building argue that Pakistani religious nationalism has failed because the various ethnic groups which form the Pakistani nation have not been able to put aside the primordial ethnic loyalty in favor of an overarching national identity

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as fellow Muslims. Whereas Islam was supposed to bring all South Asian Muslims together, the nation has in fact been fragmented along ethnic and linguistic lines. The loss of former East Pakistan in 1971 is often mentioned as the “deathblow” to the so-called Two Nation Theory that had served as the basis for the creation of Pakistan. Especially in the 1970s and 1980s, many other ethnically organized political organizations arose, particularly in student politics, at Pakistan’s main universities. Leaders of ethnic organizations have likewise argued that Pakistan is an artificial construct. I do not agree with this argument that Islam and ethnicity are opposite forms of political identification. Of course, Pakistani nationalism is an incomplete, never-ending project, as there will always be groups who challenge the unity of the nation, but that is true for virtually all nations with a heterogeneous population. It is also true that within Pakistan there are many different opinions on what exactly constitutes a proper Islamic lifestyle: from orthodox to heterodox, liberal to Marxist, secular to Islamist, patriarchal to feminist. But to argue that Islam has therefore failed to bring all Pakistanis together is to deny the extent to which Islam informs the public discourse within Pakistan. Even separatist rebellions, such as those of Bengali and Sindi nationalists, have legitimized themselves by arguing that Bengal and Sind have historically shaped their own particular brand of Islam that differs from the Islam of other ethnic groups. Sindi nationalists like G. M. Syed, for instance, have gone to great lengths to argue that the Sindi Islam is rooted in long Sufi traditions of mysticism, quite distinct from the “bookish” Islam of the philosopher-poet Muhammad Iqbal, whose reformism has been importantly informed by the elitist Islamic modernism in Pakistan.2 Such alternative interpretations of Islam are at the core of ethnic political identity, as central as language, and far more important than custom, folklore, or history. Ethnicity in Pakistan, therefore, is not opposed to Islam, as is often argued by Pakistani and foreign scholars alike.3 Rather, various Islamic traditions have been used to construct a distinct ethnic identity to counter the hegemonic Islamic modernism of the state. I have called this process the ethnicization of Islam.4 It also shows that religious nationalism in Pakistan has been relatively successful as even dissent is expressed in Islamic terms. In Sind and elsewhere, the ethnicization of Islam was initially directed against the authoritarian Islamic modernism of the 1950s and 1960s. In the heydays of Islamic modernism, it was quite common

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to argue that so-called “folk” Islamic practices, such as visiting the shrines of holy men (pir), were remains of Hinduism that had survived among the “uneducated” common people.5 As a reaction against this, Sufism emerged as a source of ethnic pride. Paradoxically, the 1960s and 1970s were both the high tide of reformist modernism as promoted by the Ayub Khan administration and the boom of shrine pilgrimage by young, urban students and intellectuals in search of their ethnic roots. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the first elected prime minister of Pakistan, made use of this ethnicized mysticism during his political campaigns. His visits to the famous shrines of Sehwan Sharif and Bhitshah in the Sindi countryside added significantly to his charisma. Bhutto in particular identified with Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, the saint buried in Sehwan Sharif. The song associated with the saint, with the recurring, rhythmic line “dam-a-dam mast qalandar,” became the party song of the Pakistan Peoples Party. It spoke of the spirit of self-sacrifice, hot passion, and unconditional commitment, as well as demonstrated their importance in terms of political mobilization as they gave political activities an adventurous and, at times, even an existential dimension. In its early years, the MQM did not only turn to ethnicity by proclaiming that muhajirs constituted a qaum or ethnic group, it also adopted various practices associated with ethnicized Islamic rebellion. It did so even more skillfully, spectacularly, and successfully than other ethnic organizations had done before. During the early years between 1984 and 1988, but also later on, the MQM was considered a major tamasha (spectacle) by its followers. Public appearances were colorful diversions from daily routine; speeches and songs depicted their migration to Pakistan as a heroic act of sacrifice and will power; the young charismatic leader Altaf Hussain proved to be an entertaining orator, funny and uncompromising at the same time. The image of the urban muhajir as a modernist Muslim was shed by the party. Rather, MQM leaders also evoked Sufi traditions, like Sindi parties had done before, for instance, in the practice of nicknaming Altaf Hussain Pir Sahib — a reverential title usually reserved for Sufi leaders. In speeches, the MQM also referred to Shia religious practices, such as the commemoration of martyrdom during the month of Muharram — a somewhat provocative practice in predominantly Sunni Pakistan. But this element of provocation was precisely what made the MQM so attractive to young muhajirs in Karachi and Hyderabad.

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These displays of provocation, spectacle, and “fun” were remarkable in the early years of the MQM, but these were also violent times when a repressive dictatorship came to an end and various political parties competed with each other, often violently. In these times firearms also became easily available as a result of the war in Afghanistan, supplies for which arrived at the port of Karachi. Criminal and political violence often merged with each other in the second half of the 1980s, resulting in large-scale ethnic violence throughout the country. It is against this background of rapidly increasing violence that the tremendous success of the MQM also needs to be explained.

Ethnic Violence The MQM leadership had also established the All Pakistan Muhajir Student Organization (APMSO) in June 1978. Most of them were students in the pharmacy department of Karachi University. Student politics had rapidly increased in the 1970s and student organizations emerged as important instruments of power in student life. At Karachi University, the student organization Islami Jamiat-i-Tulabah (IJT), affiliated to the religious Jamiat-i-Islami, was the most powerful of student organizations, but it faced strong opposition from the student wing of the PPP, the Pakistan Student Federation (PSF), as well as from various ethnically organized organizations, such as the Jeay Sind Students Federation, the Pakhtun Student Federation, and the Punjabi Students Association.6 Most muhajir students joined either the IJT or the PSF, but by forming the APMSO their leaders sought to bring all muhajir students together in one student organization. Conflicts between various student organizations were often fought out violently in the 1970s, and the way the new APMSO was treated by the powerful IJT was no different.7 APMSO members were ridiculed, harassed, and molested, until they finally decided to leave the campus altogether. That proved to be a deciding move for the APMSO members who now began to mobilize the muhajir youth outside the educational institutions, gradually turning the initiative into a popular movement with a strong base in muhajir neighborhoods. When the MQM was founded in March 1984, its support already exceeded the student population of Karachi. The MQM began to make its name, however, with the largescale ethnic violence that broke out in the mid-1980s. The first in a series of ethnic riots occurred in 1985 when a Pakhtun bus driver

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killed a muhajir student named Bushra Zaidi in a traffic accident. Members of the Islami Jamiat-i-Tulabah (IJT) protested against this by destroying the property of recent Pakhtun settlers. The Pakhtuns retaliated swiftly by killing Bihari muhajirs in the Orangi Township slum the next day. The violence escalated when competing Pakhtun and muhajir criminal gangs, both involved in drug trafficking, also got involved. The mayhem lasted for several days, but ethnic violence repeated itself in the fall of 1986, in September 1988, and — most brutally — in May 1990. In all cases, the muhajir youth was involved, fighting recent Pakhtun settlers in 1985 and 1986, and confronting Sindis in 1988 and 1990. The MQM youth skillfully made use of the violence by presenting itself as the only party that was capable of offering muhajir victims protection, rehabilitation, and revenge. The military government did very little in terms of protection or aid, leaving it to non-governmental organizations to run refugee camps and provide shelter and medical care. More importantly, the Jamiat-i-Islami and its student organization (IJT) faced a dilemma when muhajirs and Pakhtun were fighting each other in the streets. Although traditionally a muhajirdominated party, the Jamiat-i-Islami had played a crucial role in mobilizing support for the Afghan mujahideen since 1978. It had an increasing number of supporters in the North-West Frontier as well as among Pakhtun migrants in Karachi. At the same time, the party did not want to lose its muhajir voters. Reluctant to take sides, the Jamiat-i-Islami was ferociously attacked by the MQM for betraying its muhajir supporters. The MQM leader Altaf Hussain accused “the bearded fundamentalists” of the Jamiat-i-Islami of being “traders in Quranic verses” accusing them of leaving its erstwhile supporters in the cold.8 At the same time, the MQM drew a direct line between the partition of 1947 and the present-day violence. Azim Ahmad Tariq, the MQM chairman, for instance, declared, “Two million Muhajirs have given their lives for the sake of Pakistan. . . . We left our homes and hearths for Pakistan, our entire cities were destroyed, but we are being killed for it.”9 Muhajir Qaumi Movement’s message to the beleaguered muhajir population was to no longer rely on the Jamiat-i-Islami for support, and skeptically view its message of Islamic solidarity and revolution, but instead to support the MQM and its reformulation of the muhajir people as a separate cultural group of people, rooted in the diaspora’s experience of migration and persecution.

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The campaign proved extremely powerful. The MQM defeated the established parties during the municipal elections of 1987. In the campaign leading up to the national elections in 1988, the MQM continued to attack the alliance of parties that had supported the Zia ul-Haq government, including the Jamiat-i-Islami, arguing instead for an agreement with the Sindi parties, including the Pakistan Peoples Party. The MQM decisively won the elections in muhajirdominated districts of Karachi and Hyderabad, which made it possible to form a PPP–MQM coalition, led by the new PPP leader, Benazir Bhutto. This coalition, however, did not last long. The old muhajir–Sindi animosity was soon revived, not so much in Karachi itself (where Sindis form a tiny minority) as in other cities in Sind, notably Hyderabad, the center of Sindi nationalism.

Martyrdom and Terrorism The distrust between muhajirs and Sindis dates back to the language crisis of the early 1970s when it was made compulsory for all students in Sind, including muhajirs, to learn the Sindi language. Muhajirs and Sindi students of Sind University in Hyderabad clashed violently over the issue. In the interior of Sind, muhajirs distrusted the PPP as an essentially Sindi party and supported General Zia ul-Haq when he dismissed and later executed PPP-leader Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a Sindi landlord himself. Muhajir parties were formed in Hyderabad prior to the founding of MQM, and took a more radically anti-Sindi stance than the MQM. The Muhajir Ittehad Tehreek (MIT), for instance, argued for the partition of Sind, dividing the province into Sindi and muhajir parts, the latter consisting of both Karachi and Hyderabad, an urban muhajir enclave for which the name Jinnahpur was invented. For Sindi nationalists, this was of course an outrageous affront. Hyderabad was also the base of some militant Sindi nationalist organizations, including the Sindi Taraqqi Pasand Party (Sindi Progressive Party), which was willing to fight the threat of a divided Sind with all means. In a show of strength, Sindi militants attacked muhajir neighborhoods in September 1988, killing dozens of muhajir inhabitants of Hyderabad. Incidents like this made it difficult for the MQM leadership to work together with the PPP of Benazir Bhutto and to continue flirting with Sindi traditions of ethnicized Sufism. Once in power on both municipal and national levels, the MQM’s own reputation as a party prone to violence and intimidation also

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increased. The party was accused of significantly contributing to the so-called “kalashnikov culture,” including political assassination, blackmail, and robbery. It became involved in widespread nepotism to reward its activists, and was accused of the extensive practice of bhatta, or “tax collection” by MQM supporters. In MQM-dominated neighborhoods, the MQM local leadership attempted to win support by charity, such as free education or medical care for the poor or employment projects for the jobless youth, simultaneously exercising tight social control by armed bands of young party members, trained in martial arts and weapons in many new gyms. When the party broke with the PPP, its activists were soon persecuted and put on trial for various criminal and political offenses. In response, the party took to various traditional practices of Islamic martyrdom and appeals to ethical politics to protest state persecution. The most dramatic moment came when the supreme leader Altaf Hussain went on a hunger strike, a well-known method of protest in South Asia ever since Gandhi’s campaigns of non-violent satyagrah. The six-day hunger strike (during which only women were allowed to meet him) signified the special bond between the innocent, suffering muhajir population and their leader’s agony. Whereas women read the Quran in front of his house, others beat their chest as a sign of penance and protest, like it is done during the Ashura festival commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussain near Karbala. Altaf Hussain himself explicitly referred to the story of Karbala in his speeches, saying, “if what I say is beginning to sound like the story of Karbala, it is because our story is like the story of Karbala.”10 He also compared the Bhutto government to the tyrannical rule of Yazid, the killer of Imam Hussain. Evoking a language of oppression (zulm) and Islamic righteousness, he asked his followers to be ready to sacrifice their personal interest for the cause of the muhajirs. The spirit of sacrificial militancy could not prevent the military from launching a massive campaign against the MQM after June 1992 under the code name of “Operation Clean-up.” Hundreds of MQM workers were arrested or killed in police ambushes, whereas thousands of others went into exile. To justify the often extra-judicial methods of persecution, the government accused the MQM of “terrorism.” The army claimed to have discovered various MQM-run “torture cells,” MQM leaders were accused of sexually abusing young muhajir girls, and rumors were spread of the MQM’s connections with the intelligence services of India and Israel. In her infamous speech,

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Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto called MQM supporters “rats.” Prior to the military operation, the MQM leader Altaf Hussain had fled to the UK, where he has lived ever since. Meanwhile, the party split into two fractions: one that remained loyal to Altaf Hussain, and the breakaway MQM-Haqiqi — haqiqi meaning “true’” or “righteous.” For many supporters of Altaf Hussain, the MQM-Haqiqi was formed and trained by the military intelligence agency, the ISI, in order to destroy the MQM. As a result of this split and the continuing presence of the military in Karachi, violence and intimidation became a daily routine in muhajirdominated neighborhoods. Between 1992 and 1995, hundreds of MQM members were killed annually in armed conflicts by both the military forces and the MQM-Haqiqi fraction. These years of violence and persecution seriously weakened the MQM. Many of its leaders, including Altaf Hussain himself, lived in exile, and some of them were killed, including the party’s number two, Azim Ahmad Tariq, in 1993, whereas the local rank and file, known as the sector-in-charge, were killed or arrested by the military. The MQM has nevertheless managed to continue winning elections in muhajir-dominated districts in various elections. The party, however, has lost its revolutionary appeal and is no longer capable of bringing large crowds out into the streets, as it had done in the 1980s and early 1990s. By renaming itself from Muhajir Qaumi Movement into Muttehida Qaumi Movement (United Qaumi Movement), it has tried to transform itself from a muhajir organization to a party representing the urban lower-middle class. Although this ambition has not been fulfilled, the class dimension behind the MQM’s success has often been overlooked. There is no doubt that other aspects of the MQM career — the turn to ethnic politics, its evocations of Islamic martyrdom and sacrifice, its contributions to ever-increasing political violence in Pakistani politics — have been most remarkable. At the same time, however, the MQM has also been an early expression of a changing political culture that is less elitist and increasingly populist. For it may easily be forgotten that the MQM was the first major political party in Pakistan with a non-elitist leadership and a nonelitist following.

Populism and Democratization Apart from the language of ethnicity and religious sacrifice, the MQM has consistently portrayed itself as a revolutionary party

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fighting for the underprivileged segments of the urban population. Whereas in the 1970s the Pakistan Peoples Party also presented itself as a popular and anti-elitist party, promising the Pakistani poor to provide them with food, clothing, and shelter (roti, kapra aur makan), and condemning “feudalism” as the primary hindrance to Pakistan’s economic development, the MQM addressed similar issues primarily for the urban poor. It claimed to speak for and represent the “poor people” (gharib log), the “common people” (aam log), or, simply, “the people” (awam), and to strive for social justice and equality (musawat). Moreover, the party portrayed itself as a party of the humble lower-middle class. Like the PPP had done earlier, the MQM condemned “feudalism” and the vested interests of a small number of rich clans — “the 22 families who rule Pakistan as if it were their own landed property (jagir)”11 — and rallied against the ruling elite of landlords, bureaucrats, and the military. Ironically, this rhetoric was primarily meant to discredit the Pakistan Peoples Party, which, despite its once revolutionary language, was seen by muhajirs as primarily a party dominated by Sindi rural landlords. As an urban-based party, the MQM saw itself as an essentially modern party, representing the educated strata of the Pakistani society that would be essential for the nation’s modernization. Party leaders encouraged their young muhajir followers to create their own employment instead of trying to get a job in the civil service. Such jobs are in high demand, but because of nepotism and bribe, difficult to access. For instance, when ruling the Karachi administration, the MQM initiated the so-called “yellow taxi scheme,” which gave young Karachiites the possibility to obtain a taxi under favorable loans and start their own enterprise. Party leaders, including Altaf Hussain himself, also regularly criticized the old muhajir elite, living in well-appointed homes in upscale areas of Clifton and Defense Colony, for their lack of solidarity with the poorer muhajirs living elsewhere in the city. In return, the muhajir elite generally was suspicious of the MQM, and remains suspicious today. Very few of them joined the MQM, including Nasreen Jalil, who would become a senator for the MQM. She complained, however, that her neighbors and the elite muhajir friends who no longer accepted her as one of them did not appreciate her political career at all. Because of its broad popular support as well as the populist language of its leadership, the MQM significantly transformed the

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reputation of muhajirs within the larger context of the Pakistani ethnoscape. Lacking a popular movement of its own, the underprivileged muhajir population had supported various parties, including the Jamiat-i-Islami, the Jamiat-i-Ulama-i-Pakistan, and the Pakistan Peoples Party. The muhajir elite tended to identify strongly with a state-supported discourse of the nation, Islamic reform, and modernization. Although the MQM never distanced itself from the muhajir elite values, the party significantly modified and popularized the notion of an urban muhajir culture. Whereas the muhajir elite had always stressed the importance of education, the eloquence of speech — in particular the Urdu language — and the Iqbalian notion of ijtehad (the rational interpretation of the Islamic texts), the lowermiddle-class culture fostered by the MQM became associated with key values like masculinity, physicality, and religious passion. Part of the attraction of the MQM lay precisely in its irreverence for the ashraf (noble) lifestyle held in such high esteem by the old muhajir elite. There is, therefore, some truth in the MQM claim that the party stood for a political transformation that went beyond the interests of the urban muhajir population alone. The MQM also represented an effort to more fundamentally transform and, indeed, democratize Pakistani politics. Given the party’s reputation of violence, intimidation, and ethnic exclusiveness, it seems odd to associate the MQM with the larger project of democratization. However, when democratization is defined as a transformation of politics in which political elite is gradually losing its paramount position in favor of a more popular discourse to which larger segments of the underprivileged population can relate, then the MQM can indeed be seen as an expression of this trend. In that respect, the early — forced — break with student politics and subsequent move to street-based neighborhood mobilization was a crucial moment in the party’s career. Defined as such, democratization is not opposed to political violence. It is rather a heightened state of conflict between old postcolonial elites organized in established political parties on the one hand, and an increasingly impoverished urban population rallying around charismatic leaders of new parties promising to put an end to the corruption and insincerity of the old political elite on the other. A brief comparison with neighboring India would be in place here. At the same time that the MQM swept the elections in muhajirdominated Karachi and Hyderabad, the Hindu nationalism of the BJP

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(Bharatiya Janta Party) successfully challenged established political parties like the Congress Party in India. Both trends went hand in hand with large-scale violence — “ethnic” in the case of Pakistan; anti-Muslim in the case of India. But whereas the rise of the BJP and other Hindu nationalist parties has significantly altered the political spectrum in India, such major transformation has not occurred in Pakistan. With the help of the military, established political parties in Pakistan have managed to prevent the MQM from becoming even more powerful. This has not, however, put an end to the widespread social dissatisfaction and disillusion with the main political parties. On the contrary, the faith in politics as such has seriously eroded because of continuing accusations of corruption, inefficiency, and popular betrayal by established political parties. It led to yet another period of military rule under General Parvez Musharraf, lasting almost ten years, disrupting the conflictual process of democratization once again. Fundamental critique of the Pakistani political culture now no longer comes from ethnic parties like the Muhajir Qaumi Movement, but from so-called Islamist parties and their militant organizations. Like ethnically organized parties, these Islamist parties are partly the products of Pakistani political discourse, which has always revolved around the dynamics of ethnicity, Islam, and nationalism. They also, however, claim to be popular movements, channeling popular complaints and displaying basic lack of trust in Pakistani politics. The root of the conflict continues to be the staggering inequality in political representation and power between political elites and the larger population, both urban and rural. As the gap between the political elite and the common people becomes wider, the call for social justice will assume a more radical, violent, and intolerant character. In that sense, the violence with which the MQM has been associated since its earliest days reflects the political inequality of its times.

Notes 1. By the 1950s Indo-Pak border crossing had hardened as both countries introduced passports. See Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: University of Columbia Press, 2007).

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2. G. M. Syed, Religion and Reality (Karachi: Saeen Publishers, 1986). 3. See, for instance, Christophe Jaffrelot, Pakistan: Nationalism without a Nation? (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002). 4. See Oskar Verkaaik, Migrants and Militants: “Fun” and Urban Violence in Pakistan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Oskar Verkaaik, “Ethnicizing Islam: Sindhi Sufis, Muhajir Modernists and Tribal Islamists in Pakistan,” in Saeed Shafqat, ed., New Perspectives on Pakistan: Visions for the Future (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2007). 5. Katherine Pratt Ewing, “The Politics of Sufism: Redefining the Saints of Pakistan,” Journal of Asian Studies, 42(2) (1983): pp. 251–68. 6. Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, “Students, Islam, and Politics: Islami Jamiat-I Tulaba in Pakistan,” Middle East Journal, 46(1) (1992): pp. 59–76. 7. Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jamiat-i Islami of Pakistan (London: Taurus, 1994). 8. Dawn, Karachi, June 11, 1978. 9. Ibid., September 30, 1989. 10. Frontier Post, Peshawar, April 27, 1990. 11. This is a widespread trope in Pakistani political discourse, the origin of which is not known to me.

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3 Islamabad and the Promise of Pakistan Annie Harper

Islamabad

is not a typical Pakistani city. Its gridiron layout, its smooth, wide streets and their green, well tended verges, and its ordered traffic and tidy markets all set the city apart from the rest of the nation. The city is indeed often described as being “twelve miles from Pakistan,” the distance between it and the much older city of Rawalpindi. At the same time, however, Islamabad has also been described to me as “the only truly Pakistani city,” built as it was after independence; the only city built by Pakistanis, for Pakistanis. I argue in this essay that a double narrative runs through the conception, design, and materialization of Islamabad over time. The first narrative is of an authoritarian, exclusive city, conceived, designed, and built as a space separate from and above the rest of the nation, a space for the privileged and the powerful. The second narrative is of an ideal Pakistani city, a city representing all Pakistanis, a space both to lead and unite the nation. This tension that Islamabad embodies, between being, on the one hand, the “only truly Pakistani city,” and on the other hand, a city separate from the rest of the nation, reflects a wider national tension between the powerful draw of the idea of Pakistan, and the continued struggles to realize the idea in practice. Most Pakistanis deeply desire a strong, unified nation of which they can be proud, and indeed public discourse often presents the nation as such. At the same time, they are keenly aware, and anxious about the fact, that theirs is a fragmented nation lacking an effective or coherent national identity. The tension between a powerful idea that fails to materialize is also reflected in the nation’s political situation, with the persistent and repeated emergence of undemocratic, authoritarian, and unrepresentative governments, despite the deep desire of the majority of Pakistanis for representative democracy.

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Conception and Location The decision to build Islamabad was made early in 1959 by the military ruler, Field Marshall Ayub Khan, who had taken over the government in a coup the previous year. Ayub Khan was keen to legitimate his rule to both a national and a global audience, and building an entirely new, modern city seemed like just the sort of grandiose stroke that would prove his capabilities, particularly in a context where “dealing with” the refugee problem through building new settlements was a key priority, even though Islamabad was not in fact imagined as a refugee settlement. He was also keen to emulate the building of Chandigarh, the capital of Indian Punjab over the border, to prove that Pakistanis too were capable of such a feat.1 There had been discussions through the 1950s about building a new capital complex, but the assumption had been that the new complex should be located either within the port city of Karachi, the existing capital, or in a separate satellite city just outside Karachi. Ayub Khan had other ideas. His taking over the government marked a shift in power from politicians and business people, mainly muhajirs (refugees from India) who considered Karachi their base, to the Punjabi-dominated army and bureaucracy. Ayub Khan himself was a Hindko speaker, a dialect of Punjabi, from the town of Haripur, close to the city of Rawalpindi, headquarters of the military. He set up a commission in February 1959 to select the location for the new capital, which brought together nine subcommittees comprising various experts to consider and report on various issues, with the aim of ensuring a strictly “scientific” and rational process of site selection. The committees produced detailed reports comparing two possibilities, the first just outside Karachi, as had been discussed before, and the second on the Potohar plateau, more than 1,000 km north of Karachi, close to Rawalpindi. Despite the fact that East Pakistan had a slightly larger population than West Pakistan, the committee members had no hesitation in concluding that the capital could not possibly be in the former, citing a range of reasons from its “unhealthy” climate to its orientation eastwards rather than westwards, the latter necessary for a properly Islamic nation.2 Eventually Dhaka was made a “second capital” of sorts, with the building of a capitol complex designed by Louis Kahn where periodic meetings of the National Assembly and the Supreme Court were supposed to take place, but the marginalization of East Pakistan was very clear.3 As it happened

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the capital complex was not even completed before East Pakistan seceded in 1971 to become independent Bangladesh. Generally the idea that the capital should “look West,” towards the Muslim world and away from India runs through the committee reports. The final report, published in May 1959, did not come to a final conclusion on which of the two West Pakistanis sites would be the best, but Ayub Khan’s mind was made up. In June he publicly announced that the new city would be built at the second location, likely making the public announcement in order to preempt any discussion on the matter.4 In locating the new city close to Rawalpindi, and indeed close to his home town, Ayub Khan was seeking to consolidate his power. He wanted to run his government as far as possible from the influence of the politically powerful muhajirs, many of whom were also powerful businessmen, who considered Karachi their base, and a location close to the existing military headquarters was an obvious choice for a military leader. He was also concerned to limit the influence of the East Pakistanis. From the East Pakistani perspective, if Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan, was not to be made the federal capital, then Karachi was the only acceptable alternative, dominated as it was by migrants, geographically peripheral to West Pakistan, and easily accessible by sea.5 Ayub Khan, however, had little respect for East Pakistanis, describing them as “under considerable Hindu cultural and linguistic influence” and as such having “all the inhibitions of down-trodden races . . .”6 The thinking behind the location of Islamabad preempted in many ways the eventual secession of East Pakistan in 1971 to become independent Bangladesh. Ayub Khan chose a Greek architect-urban planner, Constantine Doxiadis, to prepare the masterplan for Islamabad. Doxiadis had in fact been involved in the emerging capital city project for some time, pushing both the Pakistani government and possible donors to go ahead with the plan. He had first come to the country in 1954 as part of the Ford Foundation–funded Harvard University Development Advisory Service to advise on Pakistan’s first five-year plan, and had, since then, been lobbying to prepare a nationwide urban settlement plan. Over time Doxiadis had realized that such a project was unlikely to materialize, given the resistance of his Harvard colleagues, the Pakistani government, and potential donors to such an ambitious and expensive endeavor, in addition to the lack of coordination between various government departments that would have to cooperate on

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such a plan.7 He had therefore come to focus more and more on the capital city project. Up until Ayub Khan took over the government, Doxiadis had had little more success with his efforts to make this project happen, but things changed after the military coup.8 One of Ayub Khan’s major concerns, after taking over the government, was to legitimate his rule to a global audience, particularly those who could provide funds for development, notably the United States. Although Eisenhower’s Republican government supported the coup, Democrats in Congress were not convinced.9 Doxiadis’s keenness to stay involved in Pakistan, and his links with the Ford Foundation made him an attractive hire for Ayub Khan, and he was asked to undertake a major refugee resettlement project just outside Karachi. The project was completed by August 1959, in record time, a success that Ayub made much of (even though the settlement was, within only a few years, seen as a failure), and Doxiadis was then offered the new capital city project. Just as Ayub Khan was motivated by the building of Chandigarh, Doxiadis too wanted a project that would put him in the same “global architect” league as Le Corbusier, the French architect-planner of Chandigarh. Building a capital city was modest by the standards of his larger vision, which entailed working at a national (even a global) scale, but it was a start. As things turned out, within just a couple of years, the Americans had embraced Ayub Khan as a key ally, despite his lack of democratic credentials, given their need for a solid ally in the region against the communist Soviet Union and China, and increasingly socialist India. Also, money had started to flow from the “Aid to Pakistan” consortium organized by the World Bank. Although the new capital project continued after this time, Doxiadis himself became less relevant to Ayub Khan, and his hopes to build on his success with Islamabad in the form of a national-level plan were not supported by the leadership, and never came to fruition.10 The idea of Islamabad, and the decision to build it in an entirely new location, far from the existing capital, reflected the political reality of the nation. On the one hand, it emerged from Ayub Khan’s authoritarianism and exclusivism, even racism. At the same time, it reflected the chaotic political situation of the new nation during the 1950s; the frequent changes of government, the failure of different political factions to cooperate on national strategy, the dependence on foreign aid, the strategic interests of those foreign donors, and the resulting ability of an individual like Doxiadis to play the situation as

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part of his effort to achieve his personal professional dreams. More generally, the idea of Islamabad reflected the insecurity of both the leadership and the wider nation; their anxiety that the new nation should be legitimated both in the view of global powers to the West and vis-à-vis India to the East. There is today, and has always been, an alternative narrative about Islamabad’s provenance that interweaves with the narrative of an exclusive, undemocratic decision made by an authoritarian leader. This alternative narrative marks Islamabad as an ideal Pakistani space, one that can overcome the inherent contradictions of the new nation, and that can be a space of national unity. Pakistan has, since its inception, struggled to define an effective national identity. The idea of Pakistan as a proud, unified, Muslim nation, distinct from India, has been unable to contain the reality of the enormously diverse nation, still entangled in so many ways with the India left behind. While the vast majority of Pakistanis are indeed Muslim, their regional, ethnic, and linguistic differences, and indeed the variations in religious belief as it is practiced, make it a rather unwieldy national whole. This is complicated by the fact that Islam as it is practiced in Pakistan, the general cultural practices of its people, and their historical connections and memories are difficult to distinguish from the same in India. The existence of the large and politically and culturally significant population of muhajirs who came from India adds to those complex and continued interconnections. While Ayub Khan was certainly concerned about legitimizing and consolidating his own power, he was also an idealist, and a nationalist, deeply concerned to unite Pakistan, and to shape the nation, and its people, according to his ideal vision of the future (one in which East Pakistan clearly did not play a central role). Building a new capital city fit with this wider professed aim of building a stronger and more unified nation.11 As, through the 1950s, Karachi disintegrated into a chaotic patchwork of competing groups, it hardly represented the ideal, unified nation of Pakistan that many had dreamed of. Later Ayub Khan wrote about this time, “I would come back from my occasional visits to Karachi depressed and distressed, wondering what was happening to the country. Why were people not attending to their work with some honesty of purpose and why could they not evolve some team spirit? Why all these factions, dissensions and disputes? And why all this malice and distrust? They were all busy destroying each other. It used to take me three or four days to recover from a Karachi visit.”12

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By moving the capital to a new location, Ayub Khan hoped to “start afresh,” to build a city in which the residents would all simply be Pakistanis, which would “become a symbol for the whole nation,” and which could prove Pakistan’s potential to become a strong, modern nation.13 Religious ideals clearly ran through the idea for the new city, reflected in both its location and its name, meaning “the abode of Islam,” but Ayub Khan’s vision for the new city emphasized unity, strength, and modernity above all else.14 Ironically, in imagining an ideal Pakistani space, Ayub Khan imagined a space distinctly separate from the wider nation. He could not in practice look beyond bureaucrats and the military as the personification of that ideal, and his imagined ideal city paralleled in numerous ways the colonial cantonments of the British Raj. Nonetheless, while Ayub Khan’s own motives for building Islamabad can certainly be debated, the alternative narrative of a new city that could define an ideal Pakistani space has taken hold over time. Although it took many years for Islamabad to establish itself in the national imagination, today many Pakistanis, and certainly most residents of Islamabad, imagine their city as an ideal Pakistani space, not simply as a product of political machinations and struggles for power.

Design and Planning In many ways Doxiadis’s ideas about urban planning, as laid out in his own self-described “science of human settlements” which he called “Ekistics,” suited Ayub Khan’s authoritarian style. Doxiadis was clearly personally impressed by Ayub Khan’s ability to make things happen and, like other modernist architects of the time, he believed that urban space could be designed in a totalizing plan, from scratch, such that populations could be controlled without the threat of violence.15 Although the ideal planned, modernist city was one in which its residents acted appropriately of their own accord (though structured to do so by their surroundings), a key feature of such cities of the period is their amenability to the very kind of control they were supposed to obviate. The low buildings, open spaces, broad streets, and segregation of different aspects of everyday life, both limit the potential for organization at the level of ordinary people, and enable rapid and effective clamp-downs on any rebellious activity should it take place.16 Islamabad’s gridiron pattern, low buildings, and wide open streets fit this description perfectly.

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Figure 1: Map of Islamabad reproduced in the city park showing the gridiron layout of the city Source: Photograph by author.

Doxiadis’s design also fit with Ayub Khan’s idea of Islamabad as a space representing a new Pakistan, set apart from the disorder and disunity of the wider nation. The style and layout of the new design represented a new vision, distinct from “typical” Pakistani space and the continued cultural and historical entanglements with India embedded in those spaces. This was nowhere clearer than in the contrast and separation between Islamabad and the existing city of Rawalpindi, a separation echoing that in colonial urban settlements. Islamabad’s gridiron layout contrasted starkly with the narrow, winding streets of Rawalpindi’s old city.17 Although Islamabad was only a few miles from Rawalpindi, and relied on the latter for labor, goods, and services, the two cities were clearly separated in the design not only by a line on the map, but actual physical barriers, in the form of a green belt, a “light industrial zone” along the southern edge of the city, and a major highway. Their symbolic roles remained distinct, with Islamabad maintaining exclusive status as the capital of the nation.18 Islamabad would serve administrative

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and cultural functions and Rawalpindi would serve industrial and commercial functions, as well as continuing to act as “the regional center” and a garrison town. Just as ambiguity can be found in Ayub Khan’s ideas about Islamabad, however, Doxiadis’s vision and plan for the city was full of ambiguities, and indeed downright inconsistencies, often revealing a much less authoritarian, more flexible approach. Doxiadis had been obliged over the years, while struggling to find himself the type of large-scale project in Pakistan that would establish his career, to compromise with the various other players involved. These included not only Ayub Khan and the Pakistani governing body more generally, but also the Ford Foundation, with their particular agenda of promoting a Western industrialized paradigm of development set squarely against a communist alternative.19 To appeal to the Ford Foundation, for example, Doxiadis had been obliged to couch any proposed housing interventions in terms that emphasized self-help and educational benefit, avoiding anything that might suggest socialist ideology.20 Doxiadis had already bowed to the demands of Ayub Khan in accepting the new location for Islamabad — he himself had originally favored the option of building close to Karachi — and his design of the new city was similarly constrained.21 From Doxiadis’s perspective, for example, Ayub Khan’s vision of an essentially administrative center, with only very limited space for business or industrial interests, was unrealistic. Central to Doxiadis’s ideas about urban space was the concept of dynapolis, the idea that all cities should plan for unlimited growth. He imagined a future in which cities would grow until they eventually fused together in a sort of global, never ending city, an ecumenopolis. Given the inevitability of such growth, he argued that architects and urban planners should not try to resist the process, but should rather put frameworks in place that would shape future growth, providing space for community and nature alongside the inevitable high speed transport networks that would be required. As a framework for future growth, rather than a complete and pre-limited design, Doxiadis’s city plans explicitly provided a degree of space for innovation and change over time, in contrast to other similar planned cities of the time, notably Brasilia and Chandigarh.22 On the face of it, Doxiadis conceded to Ayub Khan’s demands for a single-function, limited growth capital city in the case of Islamabad, with many sections of the masterplan

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describing such a city, but at the same time the plan was clearly based on an imagined future ecumenopolis, hinting at a future large, multifunctional city.23 While Doxiadis did clearly separate Rawalpindi from the new capital, for example, he also envisioned the older city expanding along the same gridiron pattern as Islamabad, and in his long-term vision the two cities would, eventually, grow according to his concept of dynapolis to become part of a single metropolis (finally becoming part of the universal ecumenopolis).24 While the gridiron layout of Islamabad has been seen as a topdown, imposing urban form, reflecting the Pakistani government’s military nature, and rendering the city amenable to strict control by the state, Doxiadis himself saw the 2 km by 2 km sector squares as a key element of the dynapolis approach, countering the potential alienating sprawl of an ever-growing city.25 As the city grew, each new square, or sector, would comprise a relatively self-contained neighborhood with its own administration, civic buildings, mosques, and other amenities, so fostering community at a local level. On the one hand, Doxiadis clearly imagined that Islamabad would impress the authority of the state on residents and visitors. He deliberately located the capitol complex in “the most imposing area in order to be seen from all over town,” for example, and the placing of the presidential house directly in the center of that complex, and slightly higher than the adjacent parliament building, would seem to symbolize the authority of the former over the latter.26 On the other hand, Doxiadis’s leanings towards some sort of democratic ideal are apparent in his original design for the main avenue running in front of the capitol, for example, which was to be constructed on two levels, the lower one for traffic and the upper one for pedestrians, such that the area in front of parliament house should be an area for visitors and public gatherings.27 This idea was abandoned later on, likely because of the democratic and thus threatening nature of such a space to the military government.28 Doxiadis also imagined Islamabad as a city with a relatively wide range of socio-economic groups. He was less politically radical than many other modernist architects — for example, Oscar Niemeyer, the architect of Brasilia, Brazil’s new capital, who intended that all social classes live together in single apartment buildings of similar appearance, “dwelling units of uniform height and appearance grouped into residential superblocks with gardens and collective

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facilities” — but Doxiadis was committed to some degree of social mixing.29 He conceded to the demands of his employers in the case of Islamabad, however, organizing space within the residential areas such that different income groups should not be too close together. He wrote that “complete intermixing would cause difficulties in physical planning and could also create social problems. After a sociological study, the principle adopted was that gradual integration should be sought, both to help the lower income people to mature, and to assure the comfort of the higher income classes.”30 Two strips of sectors were set aside for mainly higher-income residents, “to let them enjoy a better view and a quieter environment,” with the sectors closer to Rawalpindi reserved mainly for lower-income people.31 Size of plots, rents, and house costs were set depending on income level though more important than actual income, for government servants, was position in the government bureaucracy.32 Hull points out that in the first built areas of the city, mostly reserved for bureaucrats, “the future inhabitants of residential sectors were conceptualized as a population organized by the national bureaucratic hierarchy, rather than as groups formed around family, religion, tribe or ethnicity, regional affiliation or wealth, significant bases of social order in Pakistani society,” the latter being the forms of sociality that shaped the mohallas of Rawalpindi and other Pakistani cities.33 For Doxiadis and indeed many Pakistani bureaucrats involved in the design and building of the city, the vision for Islamabad was intended to be exactly a departure from those traditional forms of sociality. They imagined a socially just space free of traditional hierarchies and injustices, which the Pakistanis associated disparagingly with the Hindu caste system. While the original plan for allocating house plot sizes had been based in part on bureaucratic salary scales, Doxiadis had intended that the difference between plot sizes should not be too extreme, with the largest plot approximately thirteen times the size of the smallest one.34 The Pakistani government insisted, however, that as they went up the scale bureaucrats’ status was not adequately reflected by their salaries, and that plot sizes should be much larger. Ultimately the new city administration, the Capital Development Authority (CDA), decided that the largest plot should be approximately twenty-two times that of the smallest.35 The bureaucratic organization that emerged was perhaps as hierarchical as the traditional social structures the early planners imagined leaving behind.

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Islamabad Today As Islamabad has grown, it has in many ways grown further away from the ideals that Doxiadis intended it embody, in part because of the relative flexibility of his plan, and also because of his limited involvement in the project. He and his team did not have a smooth relationship with their Pakistani patrons. They complained of “excessive interference” by Pakistani officials in their work with the relationship steadily worsening over time, particularly after December 1961 when General Yahya Khan was replaced as CDA chairman by Wazir Ali Shaikh, and the increasing involvement of other foreign architects and donors, including a British group funded by the Colombo plan. Ultimately Doxiadis’s contract was terminated two years earlier than expected, in October 1963.36 Islamabad is perhaps, as a result, more of a Pakistani city than it might have been, drawing in the concerns and dreams of Pakistanis, not simply those of its architect. By this I do not mean that Islamabad has become more like the rest of the nation. To the contrary, it has become increasingly separated from the rest of the nation, that separation reflecting the elusiveness of an effective Pakistani national identity, the persistent gap between the idea of Pakistan as a proud, unified nation, and the reality of its diversity and its history. While the capital city is imagined as an ideal national space, in practice it persistently excludes most things associated with the wider nation. I do not mean that in so doing it is has become an enclave emulating the West. There are elements of Western, Middle Eastern and Mughal influences in its architecture, but the overall impression is not even of bricolage, but rather of an emptied out space. For the first two decades after building started, Islamabad grew more slowly than planned, with many Pakistanis unconvinced of its necessity. In 1970 the population was only 75,000, compared to the 150,000 that had been estimated for that date.37 It was only in 1971, after the brutal civil war and the resulting secession of East Pakistan to become independent Bangladesh, that Islamabad’s position was finally secured. During the 1970s, there was increasing private sector investment in the city, but it was only in the 1980s that it finally began to grow more quickly, largely in response to external forces. Many moved to Islamabad from the increasing violence in Karachi and there was also a surge of wealth from the oil boom in the Arabian Gulf, the burgeoning arms and drugs trade fuelled by the war in

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Afghanistan, and in the related, and also increasingly lucrative aid business, dominated by USAID but also including a range of other donors.38 Much of this new found wealth was invested in housing in Islamabad, and property prices skyrocketed correspondingly. The influence from the Gulf was compounded by the increasing involvement of the Saudi government in the region, which, along with the U.S. government, provided funding to groups fighting the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, often using Pakistan’s government and armed forces as a conduit. The increasing Saudi influence on Pakistani affairs, which reached its height during the 1980s under the military ruler Zia ul-Haq, and has continued in less formal but no less significant permutations since then, was symbolized in the form of Islamabad’s enormous national mosque, the largest in the world at the time, which was built during the 1980s with funding from the Saudi King, Shah Faisal, after whom the mosque is named.39 No state mosque of this kind had been included in Doxiadis’s original masterplan.40 The parallel development that Doxiadis intended for Rawalpindi in the original masterplan never materialized. Poor coordination between the authorities in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, and a lack of resources allocated to the latter reflecting a deeper refusal to “see” Rawalpindi as part of the same urban space, meant that within just a few years the idea of the two cities growing in tandem orderliness had been abandoned.41 While Doxiadis himself had couched the separation of the two cities in largely practical terms, later documentation on the subject reveals a more colonial mentality. As it is written in one document produced by the city administration, “the idea is that Islamabad should be served by Rawalpindi and yet not face the danger of being intermingled with it.”42 In the first official revision of the masterplan, in 1978, the first of many departures from Doxiadis’s plan, Rawalpindi was entirely excluded from the revised image of Islamabad. All subsequent revisions of Islamabad’s masterplan have continued to leave Rawalpindi out of the picture, and the city has grown outwards in an unplanned sprawl, its administration unable to cope with its fast growing population.43 Rawalpindi’s rapid growth has resulted in part from the fact that the vast numbers of low-income service providers upon whom Islamabad depends are not able to live in the capital itself, and are obliged to live in Rawalpindi, commuting hours each day, given the non-existence of an efficient or affordable public transport system.

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Low-income housing was built in the first sectors that were developed, but sectors built more recently have less or no low-income housing, and that which exists does not cater to the poorest groups, who provide some of the most essential services. Some people are accommodated in servants’ quarters, and there are also a number of katchiabadis, or slum settlements, weaving through the city, following the lines of the natural ravines, or nullahs, in which they huddle. Doxiadis had intended that these nullahs should be left as spaces of nature, a natural grid softening the formal grid of 2 km by 2 km sectors.44 In practice typical urban Pakistan in its rudest form has managed to insert itself into these spaces. Although the existence of the katchiabadis offends the sensibilities of many wealthier residents of Islamabad, the services their inhabitants provide mean that they are tolerated, as long as they remain contained and relatively invisible, hidden in the nullah areas or behind high walls built for the purpose. The dominance of the military and the bureaucracy in the wider political set-up has also further manifested itself in the city over time, beginning with the 1978 revision which allocated four key sectors to the military as a restricted area cantonment. Residents of Islamabad have no local political representation: a mayor appointed by the federal government administers the city. The most powerful institution other than the army, the bureaucracy, is enormously corrupt, and the original design for the city has been undermined, as different groups have exercised their political power to their own ends. The starkest evidence of this is the fact that Doxiadis’s original dynapolistic vision for the city has been abruptly halted at sector 11, as the political wrangling within the bureaucracy has prevented further development.45 Sporadic development is taking place in further sectors (the original masterplan included sixteen sectors, but clearly envisioned the city stretching way further than that in the future) but the regular gridiron pattern of the city has been entirely disrupted. An additional sector was taken entirely out of the masterplan, as an “exempt” area, in response to pressure from the strong political clout of the local pir, or religious figure, whose shrine and land were in that sector.46 As the planned growth to the south-west has been stymied by these problems, so growth has gone elsewhere to compensate, spreading out to the east and south. Much of a “National Park” area, designed by Doxiadis to remain mainly green space, has been taken over by “farmhouses,” large houses built by the wealthy,

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the land supposedly utilized for agricultural purposes but in fact mostly used as extensive luxury gardens. Islamabad today is in many ways similar to gated communities that have proliferated worldwide, and is also strongly reminiscent of colonial urban spaces from days past.47 Like such urban spaces, it is a city of the privileged, keeping the poor upon who it depends close by, but largely invisible. There is, however, an important difference between Islamabad and these other two forms of exclusive urban space. While the privileged residents of Islamabad enjoy the orderliness and exclusivity of their city, they imagine it, ideally, as an inclusive city, one for all Pakistanis. They thank God that they live in Islamabad, far from the chaos of the wider nation, but at the same time they want their city to represent that wider nation, to be a truly Pakistani city. They want to be proud to be Pakistani. Residents of Islamabad often told me that theirs is the only city in Pakistan where ethnicity does not matter. While this is not entirely true, ethnicity is certainly less relevant than in other cities. The second generation of Islamabad see themselves as simply “Pakistani” in a sense rarely found elsewhere in the nation. The ethnic diversity of the city, however, does not detract from its lack of economic diversity, from its lack indeed of much that looks like Pakistan at all. And this lack of Pakistani-ness, while it is welcomed at one level, is at another level a source of profound anxiety for the city’s relatively wealthy residents. The separation from the nation, the reality of the exclusive urban space belies their desired narrative of Islamabad as an ideal, unifying Pakistani space. The exclusivity and elitism of the city, the deep social hierarchies upon which the lives of the privileged depend, contradict the democratic ideals that many of them hold dear, in theory at least. The continued fragility of the nation, and the persistent threats from many sides to national unity mean that Islamabad’s residents are extremely anxious that the city represent Pakistan, that it be a space that can prove Pakistan’s unity. At the same time, when the poor of the city, be they the residents of the katchiabadis, or indeed the occupants of some of the city’s madrassas, become too visible, those same privileged residents tend to reassert the exclusiveness of the city’s spaces. While the narrative of the city as a unifying Pakistani space did not, under Ayub Khan, contradict his authoritarian style — in fact he believed that such unity could only come about through authoritarian rule — many residents of the city today are, by and large, firmly

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on the side of democracy, even in many cases those who hold fairly senior positions in the bureaucracy and the military. For some of the relatively wealthy residents of the city, that commitment to democracy takes the form of joining citizens’ groups to fight against efforts by commercial developers and private corporations, in collaboration with the city administration, to take over various public spaces in the city. These residents see the encroachment of these commercial or private developments as symbolic of the nation’s problems, including corruption, undemocratic processes, and unbridled consumerist capitalism.48 Included in the gamut of actors seen to be working against democracy are extremist religious groups, building mosques and madrassas in public spaces, representing the rising religious radicalism and intolerance in the wider nation.49 The residents who protest these developments present a counter-discourse of democracy, environmental justice, authentic culture, and tolerance. They argue that in taking over public spaces, particularly with the compliance of the state, commercial developers are not only trampling the ideals of democracy, but also rejecting authentic Pakistani-ness. In one case, in an attempt by an entertainment mogul to set up a mini golf course in a public park, the public space being taken over was a playground for the residents of a nearby katchiabadi, people who, for some wealthy residents of Islamabad, represent an authenticity and connection with the wider nation that the city otherwise lacks. In another case, the building of a seven-star hotel, restaurant, shopping mall, and residential complex; the commercial development is criticized not only for being blatantly out of reach of the vast majority of Pakistanis, but also for emulating a global style rather than anything identifiably Pakistani. As such it is seen as abandoning authentic Pakistaniness for crass and tasteless imitations of the West and of the Arabian Gulf. The protestors’ idealized image of Islamabad is as an inclusive city, one in which all Pakistanis, regardless of wealth and power, are welcome, and also as a city that represents the wider nation, that proudly embraces Pakistani-ness. The failure of Pakistan to achieve a lasting democracy, as well as the continued fragility of its unity as a nation, makes the desire for inclusivity and unity particularly intense. While the protestors that I write of are playing an important role in moving not only the city of Islamabad, but also the discourse of the nation, towards a more democratic norm, their idealized vision of democracy tends to be based on a particular romanticized view of

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authenticity. While they welcome poor people who behave in particular ways and also, crucially, whose presence is limited to particular spaces, they do not want Islamabad to become like other Pakistani cities. As much as these middle and upper middle class residents of Islamabad desire democracy as an ideal, they fear its actual materialization. As an expression of the will of the masses, real democracy would threaten the orderly spaces of Islamabad that the residents appreciate so much.50 While the residents of the city desire some degree of unity and shared identity with the excluded, more “authentic” bodies and spaces of the wider nation, and while their desire for democracy is genuine and deeply felt, the actual materialization of that democracy is a threat to them and their way of life.

Conclusion I have argued that while on the one hand Islamabad was brought into being through the whims of a military dictator, in collaboration with an authoritarian urban planner, on the other hand it can be understood as an effort to renew the promise of Pakistan. It was an effort to carve out a “pure and empty” space, untroubled by the chaos and poverty reigning in much of the country, the political infighting and corruption of Karachi, the ethnic divisions throughout the country, and the persistent entanglement with Indian land, history, and culture. It was to be a space that was truly Pakistani, that could embrace and represent all Pakistanis. This vision of Islamabad became particularly dominant after the “problem” of East Pakistan was no longer there. In practice, the urban space that has emerged sits uncomfortably in Pakistan, its orderly framework contrasting sharply with the more chaotic Pakistani spaces around it, or, in the case of the katchiabadis, inside it. Doxiadis’s plan for even a relative degree of inclusion and integration of lower-income groups in the city was undermined by the desires and power politics of the Pakistani elite and the bureaucracy, but at the same time his design, perhaps unwittingly, accommodated and enabled the realization of those desires and the continuation of traditional politics through extra-legal urban growth. Ultimately Islamabad does reflect and represent the Pakistani nation, but just as the nation still struggles with disunity, enormous wealth inequalities, an over-powerful military, a corrupt and ineffective administrative system, and persistent anxieties about national identity, so too

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does Islamabad. Its residents’ commitment to democratic ideals is a positive note for the future, but, as can be seen from the increasing separation of rich and poor in global urban spaces, the promise of democracy for equality and social justice is not guaranteed.

Notes 1. The building of Chandigarh in India was part of a larger strategy by the Indian government to “transform India from a rural to an urban society” (Ravi Kalia, “Modernism, Modernization and Post-colonial India: A Reflective Essay,” Planning Perspectives, 21 (2006): pp. 133–56, here p. 134). No equivalent strategy existed in Pakistan. See Markus Daechsel, “Misplaced Ekistics: Constantinos A. Doxiadis and Urban Planning in Pakistan,” presented at Athens Conference on Doxiadis and the Post World War II Planning Context, December 2006, unpublished. 2. See C. Doxiadis, Dox-PA-8: The Federal Capital of Pakistan, A Preliminary Report (Islamabad, Pakistan: CDA library, 1959), p. 28. 3. G. V. Stephenson, “Two Newly Created Capitals: Islamabad and Brasilia,” Town Planning Review 41(4): pp. 317–32, here p. 314. 4. Frank Spaulding, “Ayub Khan, Constantinos Doxiadis, and Islamabad: Biography as Modernity in a Planned Urban Space,” in C. H. Kennedy, K. McNeil and C. G. D. Ernst, eds, Pakistan at the Millennium (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2003). 5. Mathew Hull, “Paper Travails: Bureaucracy, Graphic Artifacts, and the Built Environment in the Islamabad Metropolitan Area 1959–1998,” PhD, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, Chicago, pp. 62–63. 6. Ayub Khan, Friends Not Masters: A Political Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 187. 7. Daechsel, “Misplaced Ekistics.” 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. (Ibid. Ultimately Doxiadis left the Islamabad project, and Pakistan, in 1963, two years earlier than planned. Till today, Doxiadis’s role in designing the capital city has not been publicized by the Pakistani government in any significant way, in sharp contrast to the way Corbusier’s involvement in the design of Chandigarh has been central to the Indian government’s publicity about the city (ibid.). 11. Building Islamabad was only one of a wide range of ambitious interventions designed to “clean things up” and to “put Pakistan back on track,” with thirty commissions set up to deal with everything from refugees and

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15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

Annie Harper land reform, to education, family law, the constitution, and corruption (Khan, Friends Not Masters, Appendix V). Ibid., p. 39. C. Doxiadis, Dox-PA-127: The Spirit of Islamabad (Islamabad, Pakistan: CDA Library, 1961, p. 6. Like many of his contemporaries in the Pakistani army and political establishment of the time, Ayub Khan was not an overtly religious man, but his modernist ideals encompassed a rational and scientific interpretation of Islam. It is also true, however, that as Islam remained one of the only unifying categories in the new nation, its use as such can be seen as political strategy rather than religious commitment. Orestes Yakas, Islamabad, the Birth of a Capital (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 10; Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press). Abraham Akkerman, “Harmonies of Urban Design and Discords of City-Form: Urban Aesthetics in the Rise of Western Civilisation,” Journal of Urban Design, 5(3) (2000): pp. 263–86. Rawalpindi, as a British military town, had a cantonment area that was originally laid out in a gridiron pattern, similar to that of Islamabad. Over the years, however, the cantonment had taken on more and more characteristics of a more typically Pakistani urban space, such that it had merged in many ways with the older, more organic part of the city. Rabia A. Specht, “Islamabad, Rawalpindi: Regional and Urban Planning,” Ph.D., School of Architecture, Copenhagen, 1983, p. 42. Daechsel, “Misplaced Ekistics”; Panayiota Pyla, “Back to the Future: Doxiadis’s Plans for Baghdad,” Journal of Planning History, 7(1) (2008): pp. 3–19. Daechsel, “Misplaced Ekistics.” Ibid. Yakas, Islamabad, p. 68. Stephenson, “Two Newly Created Capitals,” p. 324. C. A. Doxiadis, “Islamabad,” Town Planning Review 36 (1965): p. 20. M. Hull, “The File: Agency, Authority and Autography in an Islamabad Bureaucracy,” Language and Communication, 23 (2003): pp. 287–314; Spaulding, “Ayub Khan.” Yakas, Islamabad, p. 69; Imran Ahmed, “The Journey from New Delhi to Islamabad: Dependence and Subversion in the Ambivalent Expression of Nationhood,” M.S. Thesis, Department of Architecture, MIT, 1992, p. 103; see also Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 130. Yakas, Islamabad, p. 82. Z. K. Ahmed, “Nature-City and State-Citizen Relationships: The Making of Islamabad as a ‘City of the Future’ 1959–63,” lecture delivered at the Department of Architecture, Brown University, March 2009.

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29. James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 32; see Yakas, Islamabad, p. 71. 30. Doxiadis, “Islamabad,” p. 9. 31. Yakas, Islamabad, p. 71. 32. Specht, “Islamabad, Rawalpindi,” p. 50; Hull, “Paper Travails,” p. 92. 33. Hull, “Paper Travails,” p. 91. 34. Yakas, Islamabad, p. 97. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., p. 144. 37. CDA, Islamabad Concept and Planning (Islamabad: Planning Directorate Capital Development Authority, 1973), p. 17. 38. Oskar Verkaaik, Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); L. A. Gayer, “Divided City: Ethnic and Religious Conflicts in Karachi,” Pakistan, 2003. Available at http://www.ceri-sciencespo.com/archive/mai03/artlg.pdf. 39. In particular the Saudi influence is often blamed for the rise in the number of radical madrassas (religious schools) in the nation generally, and in Islamabad specifically. In July 2007 violence erupted in the city after months of tension and growing violence centered around a madrassa associated with what was seen as a particularly radical mosque, known as the Lal Masjid (red mosque). The Pakistani army stormed the madrassa and mosque with the loss of at least 100 lives, including women and children. This event was, for many of Islamabad’s residents, a conflation of what they saw as a misguided, violent rendering of Islam, and the blundering, violent response of a broken, undemocratic government. Since then, the city has seen numerous bomb blasts in public places, mostly targeting the elite; for residents of a city used to security and calm in its public spaces, regardless of the state of the rest of the nation, the last few years have been shocking. After 1993, Faisal Mosque ceased to be the largest mosque, that distinction first went to the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca, Morocco, and then to the Masjid al_Haram (Grand Mosque) of Mecca and the Al-Masjid alNabawi (Prophet’s Mosque), both in Saudi Arabia. 40. Richard L. Meier, “Islamabad is Already Twenty Five,” Ekistics, 52(311): pp. 213–14; Ahmed, The Journey from New Delhi, pp. 141–42. 41. Dusan Botka, “Islamabad After 33 Years,” Ekistics, 373–75 (1995): pp. 209–35, here p. 216. 42. CDA, Islamabad Concept and Planning, p. 13, italics added, see also Specht, “Islamabad, Rawalpindi.” 43. A separate plan was prepared for Rawalpindi, in which the rigid gridiron pattern was replaced by a vaguer, curved grid, and considerably more space given over to the army, but the new plan was never put into practice.

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44. Doxiadis, “Islamabad,” p. 9; Derek Lovejoy, “Islamabad, Dodoma and Brasilia: A Tale of Three Cities,” in A. Evin, ed., The Expanding Metropolis: Coping with the Urban Growth of Cairo (Singapore: Concept Media/The Aga Khan Award for Architecture, 1985), p.. 224; Yakas, Islamabad, p. 77. 45. Hull, “Paper Travails”; M. Hull, “Uncivil Politics and the Appropriation of Planning in Islamabad,” in Naveeda Khan, ed., Beyond Crisis: Reevaluating Pakistan (New Delhi: Routledge). 46. Hull, “Paper Travails,” p. 259 . 47. See, for example, Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in Sao Paolo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Setha Low, “The Edge and the Center: Gated Communities and the Discourse of Urban Fear,” in Setha Low and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga, eds, The Anthropology of Space and Place; Locating Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001); Petra Kuppinger, “Exclusive Greenery: New Gated Communities in Cairo,” City and Society, 16(2) (2004): pp. 35–61; Anne Waldrop, “Gating and Class Relations: The Case of a New Delhi Colony,” City and Society 16(2) (2000): pp. 93–116; ChoonPiew Pow, “Securing the ‘Civilised’ Enclaves: Gated Communities and the Moral Geographies of Exclusion in (Post-)socialist Shanghai,” Urban Studies 44(8) (2007): pp. 1539–558; Anthony King, Colonial Urban Development (London Henley and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976); Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press [paperback], 1991); William J. Glover, Making Lahore Modern, Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 48. See Amita Baviskar, “Cows, Cars and Cycle-rickshaws: Bourgeois Environmentalism and the Battle for Delhi’s Streets,” talk given at Yale University, January 22, 2008 and Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, “Guardians of the Bourgeois City: Citizenship, Public Space, and Middle-Class Activism in Mumbai,” City and Community, 8(4) (2009): pp. 391–406 for middle-class movements in Delhi and Mumbai respectively that have some parallels with these groups in Islamabad. A key difference between the Indian movements and those in Islamabad are that those in India explicitly and unashamedly seek to exclude the unsightly poor from their neighborhoods. The relationship between Islamabad’s middle and upper-middle classes and the poor of the city is much more complex, with the former holding an idealized sympathy for the latter. 49. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post-colonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 50. See Hull, “Uncivil Politics” for a discussion of such mosque building, and the ways in which those who build them circumvent official channels for approval of the new constructions.

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4 Empowerment and Subordination of Pakistani Women through Patriarchy, Elitism, Class and Gender Discourses Tahmina Rashid April 13, 2009 will remain a black spot in the history of women’s rights in Pakistan, as the National Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution calling upon the president to accord approval to the Nizam-e-Adl Regulation 2009 (peace agreement) in Swat. Women parliamentarians remained silent: the only opposition came from three male members belonging to MQM, JUI, and PMLN.

Women’s role in their own subordination is not unique to Pakistan;

women across the globe have connived with the state and disempowered their own “sisters” legitimizing discriminatory practices. Muslim women of India inadvertently collaborated with their subjugators during the anti-colonial struggle and afterwards, due to unequal gender relations and their class and status in the private/ public spheres of the society. Muslim women’s relationship with the state is complex; they are citizens yet deprived of many rights on account of customary practices and religious decrees. Before independence they were asked to join hands with men, glorifying their historical role as mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives; after independence they contributed in nation-building through social welfare projects and rehabilitation work for refugees. Later, Islam was used to curtail their rights further and segregate them from mainstream society — all in the name of their protection. Now they have to make sacrifices again, as these are difficult times, and the threat of terrorism and religious militancy needs women to stay in line with Pakistani politics that marginalizes women. Pakistani women politicians, while criticizing the public flogging of young girls, approve Pakistani puritans who sanction these punishments.

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I should note the lack of scholarly work on the role of Muslim women in the nationalist movement. Two factors played a major role in documenting the contributions of Muslim women: first, the absence of archives, personal papers, dairies, correspondence, and detailed biographies of elites and upper-middle-class Muslim women who were at center stage in the nationalist struggle; second, there being a total neglect of the role played by the subaltern.1 Scholars of the history of Pakistan have failed to incorporate the changes that took place in the lives of women and men in rural communities and those belonging to lower/working classes after the transfer of power to the Pakistani elite made up of predominantly men.2 The history of Pakistan continues to ignore the role of the people of Pakistan; there are no parallel histories of the struggle of men and women belonging to different classes and they have been denied agency by the upperand middle-class women who speak of/for women.3 The present position of women in Pakistan has linkages to the colonial and nationalist periods during which women remained politically invisible. The failure to empower women in the last six decades has resulted in undermining democracy in Pakistan.

Colonial Encounters and Contestations for Rights Women have been central to imperialist projects in colonies since they provided crucial justification for the continuation of imperial rule that could claim itself to be the reforming agency for the betterment of women. Similarly, Western women of the empire, while empathizing with Indian women, enjoyed a hegemonic position; they denied agency to colonized women; spoke on their behalf; presented distorted versions of colonized women’s lives and aspirations; and imposed their own versions of emancipation.4 During the colonial period, Indian women’s education through public and Christian missionary schools began, although the impact of this education remained restricted largely to the upper classes in India and the effect of these reformist efforts was not always constructive, for example, property rights of Muslim women were curtailed in line with British family laws.5 Such mandatory reforms continued in Pakistan, benefiting women of privileged classes (both political and religious), providing them with new career opportunities, financial and political support, while the majority of Pakistani women remained (and

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remain) disenfranchised from the formal economic and political process. There were apolitical efforts to improve women’s lives, yet the state conveniently deferred the question of constitutional reform for women, class, gender, and identity politics.6 Improvement in the position of women in the public sphere was aligned with reconstructing the position of the women in the private, making women the center of the reformist agendas.7 McClintock’s arguments can be employed here, as she suggests that women are “excluded from direct action as national citizens,” and “subsumed symbolically into the national body politic as its boundary and metaphoric limit,” and denied any direct relation to national agency. She refers to major ways in which women across the globe have been implicated in the national narratives: as biological reproducers of the members of the national collective; as reproducers of the boundaries of national groups (through restrictions on sexual or marital relations); as active transmitters and producers of the national culture; as symbolic signifiers of national difference; and as active participants in nationalist struggles.8 In late nineteenth-century Europe, the relationship between state and family was changing with a new emphasis on child rearing and home making as a national duty. Thus a new curriculum was introduced to increase the size of the elite as “imperial assets,” which led to allocation of resources to upper classes at the expense of lower classes in Europe.9 English women took responsibility upon themselves to civilize Indian women and improve their lives. Thus, educating Indian women and uplifting their domestic lives became colonial projects, regenerating class inequalities that “depoliticised the domestic realm and furthered the formation of gendered separate spheres.” By invoking the theme of home as a national symbol and home life as an indicator of the progress of a nation, home became “an object of government intervention and cultural debate.”10 Because of their contributions, English women have been labelled as “Imperial feminists,” accused of “mothering India and Indians,” of “maternalistic imperialism,” of “cultural colonialism,” and of “white feminism.”11 Irrespective of such criticism, the impact of “Imperial Projects” was twofold on the women; one, they assisted in raising awareness of rights among Indian women; and two, these projects because of their reformist nature characterized indigenous cultures inferior to the West.

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English women were hardly employed in colonial India; their role was limited to supporting their spouses and engaging in social welfare programs. On the other hand, Indian women from lower classes toiled in the rural/agrarian economy — not even worthy of attention as the main game of politics centered in urban centers. Later, the local middle-class and elite Indian women gained respectable entry into the public sphere, either through their charitable work for the needy or through the spousal support of their politically active husbands. Indian women’s public role was an extension of their private/domestic role of nurturer and service provider. [Indian] Women had endeavoured to influence legislative action for the benefit of their own sex, since they can only sue, and have no power to demand. . . . Women play the traditionally male suitor role as they approach the all-male parliamentary body, thus demonstrating both the validity of their claims and their essential femaleness: they must become men — the supreme sacrifice — in order to secure the attention and hence the equality they seek as women.12

European colonists of the nineteenth century and the nationalist activism in colonial India not only shaped new nations of India and Pakistan but left their marks on gender relations as well. The British tightened control on the colonized societies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, consequently the rights denied to men were denied to women. Colonialism only served to increase women’s oppression along national, class, and gender lines; however, for the Indian Muslim women, first, the fear of British rule, and later, the fear of dominance by the Hindu majority, formed the basis for participation in public life. After the partition, Pakistani women were largely excluded from new state structures and remained confined to the domestic arena.

Identity Politics and Anti-colonial Movement The colonial period had a critical impact on Islamic law in the Indian subcontinent. In Pakistan, the new legal system strengthened the authority of certain community groups, especially the landed elite. The focus remained on accuracy of Islamic laws rather than capturing the indigenous spirit in the implementation of the legal process, thus freezing these laws in a particular historical time. The British had failed to comprehend the diversity in Islamic jurisprudence and made

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decisions that had a long-lasting impact on women and minority sects in Pakistan. The British recognized the differences between Sunni and Shiite Islam; however, they ignored local customs as an independent source of law, despite pleadings from religious scholars, effectively denying rights to Khoja, Memon, and Mappilla groups (adherents of Islam customarily governed by the Hindu personal law). Classical texts were treated as binding legal codes, not cognizant of the socio-legal milieu necessary to interpret and implement laws, applying a text based-approach, emphasizing rule-based legality.13 This led to the legitimization of the orthodox rules of the Hanafi School, uniformly applied in India at the cost of other schools of Islamic jurisprudence. The Anglicization of Muslim laws contributed profoundly in the formation of a Muslim identity with uniform implementation of these laws, hastening reassessment of Muslim self-consciousness by Islamic scholars in various parts of India and making adherence to Sharia “central to the maintenance of Muslim identity.”14 Successful attempts at passing the “Wakf Validating Act of 1913” and “Muslim Personal Law Application Act, 1937” not only “affirmed a scriptural version of Islam” but also “protected the economic interests of certain propertied classes,” thus making Islam the center of Indian Muslim identity.15 The British created and maintained landed aristocracy and tribalism in various parts of India that played a significant role in determining the rights and role of women during the anti-colonial movement. This was apparent in the urban demand for implementation of Sharia law (Mohammadan Law) while the rural elite demanded the continuation of customary law. Although their respective reasons ranged from the desire to exclude women from inheriting landed property to demanding more rights for Muslim women than the colonists were willing to accord. Irrespective of the reasons behind such demands, religion became the vehicle in determining the rights and role of women as well as a symbol of modernity and national identity for Muslims in British India. Invoking religion created another struggle between the puritans and the modernist Muslim political elite, one trying to keep religion outside the purview of the state while the other demanded rights from the state as a separate religious entity, highlighting the beginning of a tension between puritans and modernists, bringing religion into the domain of the state, as puritans feared disempowerment from their power bases.16

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Muslim leadership in the late nineteenth century was advocating the need of education among Muslim men; such suggestions clearly reflected prioritizing the needs of men while at the same time blaming Muslim women for the plight of men who “have to spend their lives with savages.”17 The irony is that Muslims recommended traditional education for their women, and modern/British education for men (who have ignored religious rights of their women “due to ignorance”), hoping to get these Islamic rights for women through Western education.18 The opening of Muslim girls’ schools was intended to contain the influence of Christian missionary schools in urban areas. Female education remained largely confined to the domestic arena and girls were only allowed to be educated through the available religious literature produced by the puritans, though a small minority of girls (lower middle class) were allowed to enrol in public schools. Such literature reinforced female seclusion and domestication by providing detailed instructions on daily chores, advocating women to become good wives, mothers, and daughtersin-law, ignoring other aspirations and the right of education.19 Not all modernist Muslims were vouching for women’s rights; some disdained the idea of women’s liberation, labelling European suffragettes as superfluous women compelled to “conceive ideas instead of children,” and insisting that the “demand for the vote was in fact a plea for a husband,” suggesting polygamy as the solution to “this riot of unemployed.”20 Women remained mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of the nation; thus the nation was symbolically figured as a domestic genealogy, where women become the authentic body of national tradition, representing continuity while men by contrast symbolized change, and become active agents of modernity, representing discontinuity.21 As Chakarbarti has suggested, “the concern with domesticity and distinction between private and public was linked with nationalist struggle aiming at the citizenship in the nation-state.”22 Purdah of Muslim women became the central theme of nationalist discourse among the puritans and the modernist Muslims alike, yet such discussions were more relevant to the urban elite than to rural women (except women of the landed class) where adherence to purdah was not possible due to their role in agrarian communities.23 The history of women in Pakistan has remained stereotyped, glorifying their role as mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters; while their public role as producers, peasants, workers, artisans, domestic servants (in paid

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and unpaid labour force) has never been recognized. It has rightly been stated that in the colonial period, Muslim women’s education was “an integral part of the process of Muslim identity formation,” not envisaged for “women’s liberation” but “reform of a patriarchal sort.”24 Pakistan’s history remains a history of great men and continues to ignore the role played by women, whose support made these people great. Indian (Hindu/Muslim middle-class) women’s role in modernity efforts initiated by the British was an indication of the fact that women have invented themselves as participants in these projects, ready to perform vital ideological service as citizens, not merely as subjects. The nationalist/anti-colonial struggle became a necessary precondition for securing women’s rights, giving impetus to the nationalist-feminist struggle.25 However, these feminist agendas subsequently marginalized the radical subaltern critique of gender and class hierarchies that were obscured by the abstract construction of the normative citizen-subject. The founder of Pakistan, Jinnah, was a modern Muslim who did not visualize a Muslim theocracy, differentiating between Islam and Muslims as two distinct constructs: the former more particularistic and the latter denoting a more general ethno-cultural identity. His attitude towards the public role and status of Muslim women was considered progressive even at that time, he encouraged women to acquire an active public role and was mostly accompanied by his younger sister, Fatima Jinnah, as his confidant. He supported the cause of women by encouraging them to participate on an equal basis with men in all spheres of life, stating that: No nation can rise to the heights of glory unless your women are side by side with you; we are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable conditions in which our women have to live. You should take your women as comrades in every sphere of life.26

He vouched for women’s equality; yet his efforts were limited by two factors: the pressure from the landed elite and Muslim identity politics — the framework similar to demanding rights from the British.27 Even before the creation of Pakistan, Jinnah materialized his vision to improve the status of women by introducing the “Muslim Shariat Application Act” through the Central Assembly in 1937, which gave women some inheritance rights, yet under the

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tremendous opposition of landed class he had to amend the proposed bill and omit agricultural land from the category of property that families could pass on to their daughters. Though Muslim women played a role in the debates on the Child Marriage Restraining Act (Sarda Act, 1929) under the British, it was more of an attempt by these women to gain a rightful share and control of the modernity project and a legitimate entry into public discourse.28 In Jinnah’s vision, the idea of a separate homeland (Pakistan) became a site in which Muslim women’s active public role and empowerment could be imagined and realized. It also gave women the opportunity to speak of and for Muslim women to make collective demands. During the national liberation struggle for the creation of Pakistan, women involved themselves in the more or less conscious hope of obtaining some recognition of their identity and rights; however, once the nationalist struggle was over, these hopes turned into disappointments.29 There remains an asymmetrical relationship in women’s role during the colonial period and their participation in nation-building afterwards as women continued to formulate their rights on account of their role in the domestic arena, within the parameters of religion, thus defining the limits and boundaries of rights themselves.30

Harnessing Hope with Independence The nationalist struggle had brought respite for Muslim women from their relationship of subservience to the colonial state, which ended as soon as the elitist state sought legitimacy in Islam by forging alliances with the bureaucracy, military, and the landed aristocracy. The feudalization of politics, aversion to land reforms, and a static clergy added to the oppression of women in various forms. Although the new state of Pakistan gained independence from foreign domination, the new regime continued to be controlled by the old traditional patriarchal structures. The newly empowered national elite began to build a nation stratified by class, gender, and the rural/urban dichotomy. The politics of that era restricted full citizenship to men and women of elite classes and land owners/feudals, and the state remained the arbiter of women’s fate (e.g., refugee women in the early years, and for instance, deciding the fate of women abducted during partition and later repatriated to Pakistan — assigning men the status of a wali/legal guardian in marriage/diyat (blood money)

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cases. The patriarchal state relegating women’s citizenship status to that of a “protectee.”31 Although women remained potent symbols of national identity in an effort for nation building, their status and socio-political and economic rights gradually eroded to an extent that they were denied the rights given by religion or customary practice. Women issues could not become a priority as resources were strained due to the assets dispute with India which were primarily released after efforts made by Gandhi and there were other compulsions, such as traditional customary practices and patriarchal mores, forcing women to perform a secondary role in the established state hierarchy. The meager concessions given to women in the polity of the new nation were confined to the elite while the underprivileged were denied rights on the basis of class and gender. Pakistan inherited Anglicized family laws that had been unified by the British, which remain the basis of Muslim family/personal laws today.32 In the spheres where Islam gave women more rights than did the existing social system or customs, the state avoided intervention on their behalf with a degree of impunity.33 After the initial mayhem of the partition, nation-building began with women sidelined for social welfare work. The parliamentarians clearly demonstrated their unwillingness to grant economic rights to women; the hesitation in passing the Muslim Personal Law of Shari’ah 1948 is a case in point that recognized women’s rights to inherit property, including agricultural property.34 Upper-class urban women continued to push for rights, taking advantage of their class position — obvious from the dynamics leading to the formation and membership of the All Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA).35 The APWA could not become a platform for demanding the socioeconomic and political rights for Pakistani women as its base was too narrow to influence the legislative bodies or be a lobbying group, and the scope of its demands remained confined to political representation and legal rights. Women’s political participation remained confined to supporting roles for their political families, while the discourse for women rights continued to be shaped by invoking religion and as an extension of their domestic role.36 The political bickering shelved women’s rights recommended by the Family Law Commission, which were ultimately implemented as the “Family Law Ordinance 1961,” demonstrating that neither the political nor the religious elite was willing to let women challenge the customary practices or orthodox versions of Islam.37 Though the 1961 laws did not bring radical

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change in women’s lives, yet puritans (such as Maududi/Thanavi) were profoundly upset, declaring it against the spirit of Islam since these challenged the prerogative of Muslim men in family affairs.38 The civil strife in 1971, leading to the establishment of Bangladesh, was a serious blow to the religious/national identity of Pakistan; therefore, Zulfiqar A. Bhutto felt compelled to restore the selfconfidence of the nation and establish his credentials as leader of a Muslim state by stalling progress on women rights.39 His regime (Pakistan Peoples Party, PPP) remains full of contradictions, though he promised rights for the masses and guaranteed women’s rights in the 1973 constitution that stipulated: All citizens are equal before law and are entitled to equal protection of law. There shall be no discrimination on the basis of sex alone. Nothing in this article shall prevent the state from making any special provision for the protection of women and children.40

By invoking the religious argument, his regime succeeded in restoring the self-confidence of a Muslim nation and established economic and political links with Muslim countries but failed in guaranteeing rights for lower classes and women as promised in the constitution.41 His regime, however, created more public space for women by overhauling the public service sector by providing increased parliamentary representation and job opportunities to women, although women’s public role was largely determined by their class situation and the particular ideological orientation of their families.42 Bhutto’s power politics led to the imposition of another military regime that thrived on the politics of religion initiated during the 1977 election campaign.

Zia’s Islamist Agenda The 1980s would remain a critical link to the current socio-political scenario in Pakistan; Zia ul-Haq’s military regime colluded with puritans and Bhutto’s political opponents, promising to restore an Islamic political system by steering the society back to the moral purity of early Islam.43 Zia — a self-proclaimed “divinely ordained” devout Muslim — appealed to the conservative elements of society by employing the popular idiom of “Chadar and Char Dewari,” referring to the protection of women and upholding Islamic values.44 Religious groups like Jamaat-i-Islami took this opportunity to join

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power politics since they never made it to the Parliament though electoral politics.45 When Zia introduced his Islamic laws (Hudood Ordinances 1979; and Law of Qisas and Diyat 1984), he enjoyed the full support of puritans who not only legitimized his dictatorship but also eroded the few gains of Pakistani women.46 This led to a strong resistance from urban upper/middle-class educated women who formed the Women Action Forum (WAF) and demanded these laws be rescinded. This movement remained confined to major urban centers and the educated class, but kept an apolitical stance as many women of the group belonged to the elite, their men serving in the bureaucracy or military. Political parties remained aloof as women’s rights have always remained peripheral in their agendas. The WAF had serious disagreements regarding the use of Islam and broadening its membership base fearing that Islamist women would join their ranks and overtake the movement.47 It has also been criticized by feminists such as Kishwar Naheed, who recognize the complexity in cutting across the boundaries of class, but assert that by restricting its membership, the WAF has institutionalized the differences among women in diverse class locations.48 Despite the claims made by women organizations that women issues and concerns in both rural and urban communities are the same and anticipate unity between various groups, this has not been envisaged yet, nor are there indications for a future of shared womanhood. Women’s rights groups have ignored the fact that womanhood is only one part of female identity and agency, other factors like religion, class, socioeconomic status, and urban/rural location would continue to define the multifaceted concerns of women. The WAF disagreed with the religious groups on a number of issues and refused to accept the monopoly of religious groups in defining the status and role of women, as the Islamists glorified the domestication and nurturing role of women and sought a segregated public role and space for women in the name of Islam. The WAF’s inability to take a clear position on religion as part of their agenda in defining the status of women and seeking their rights was maneuvered by women belonging to religious groups, who filled this gap and exploited women’s religious identity and debates of women’s rights. In reaction to WAFs’ ambiguous stance on employing religious discourse, women from orthodox religious groups initiated the demand for the rights given by Islam. In a society structured on class, gender, ethnic, and urban/rural divide, Islam had a larger appeal to

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lower and middle classes by stressing equality irrespective of their class situation.

Post-Zia Politics It has to be recognized that during the eleven years of Zia’s dictatorship, a generation grew up in a politicized Islamic environment; joined the ranks of jihadi outfits fighting in neighbouring Afghanistan; and is now serving in the public/private sectors. For this generation the break-up of the Soviet Union was a victory of Islam and Muslims that glorified the role of Islam as “the” solution to complex socioeconomic and political concerns. One could witness the increased use of religious idiom, a sign of piety ostentatiously displayed through religious ritualism. After Zia’s sudden death in 1988, two main political parties, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Muslim League (MLN-Nawaz Sharif), were able to form governments, but despite their electoral mandate they were unwilling to change these discriminatory laws. During Nawaz Sharif ’s regime, there was a push to conform to prevailing customs and inculcation of religious values in the system, introducing enforcement of the Shari’ah Act, 1991.49 The failure of successive civil regimes to abolish discriminatory laws is also a reminder that changing these laws also requires transforming the Islamic mindset. Benazir Bhutto neither had the numbers nor political will to challenge the discriminatory laws, and members of her party endorsed honor killings of women on the parliamentary floor as traditional practice.50 Benazir rather adopted a conformist attitude by marrying by her family’s choice, adopting a traditional dress code, even holding prayer beads during public appearances (which may have been a ploy for political survival, yet a combination of such ploys and the failure to even attempt introducing a bill to amend the Islamized laws speaks volumes of the priority to stick to power rather than challenge the existing discriminatory practices). The failure of PPP and MLN to unite the ragged polity and restore public confidence in state institutions led to further political apathy among masses. When Musharraf imposed military rule and overthrew an elected government in 1999, there was hardly any public protest. To appease moderate elements in the society, he assured political and economic rights for women, stating that his administration will make “conscious efforts to ensure equality for women and empower them because empowerment is the only way to enable the vast majority of women” to improve their position.51 In contradiction to his liberal

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posture, he joined hands with religious groups, exiled main political leadership, and limited public choice to religious groups in electoral politics. Despite his intentions for female empowerment, his public remarks on the plight of rape victims illustrate the nature of sociocultural attitudes towards women and the inability of the state in formulating a clear agenda for women’s rights: You must understand the environment in Pakistan. This has become a money-making concern. A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped.52

In 2006, the regime approved the women’s protection bill, a critical step towards women’s rights through institutional and judicial support. These laws deal with some aspects of Zia’s laws making a distinction between adultery and rape; evidence requirements in courts; outlawing sexual relations with underage girls; disallowing forced marriages, marriage with Quran (a practice in interior Sindh and some parts of South Punjab where such marriages take place, these women cannot marry a man once they are forcefully married to the Quran, the reason is to keep the landed property within the family and stop its distribution through inheritance, exchange marriage, where girls are exchanged as a part of dispute settlements, given in marriage to any male member of the other family irrespective of age differences); allowing divorce in abusive marriages; and in some cases recognizing women’s inheritance rights.53 This bill provided a symbolic public space to women, although asymmetrical power relations between the religious elite and the military regime have been discursively articulated, secured, and contested. Puritans attempted to use it as a “text” on culture, a symbolic form upon which the norms and practices of society are inscribed and social categories maintained. Religious groups vehemently criticized these amendments fearing that it would lead to “a sex-free society,” “an immoral society,” therefore destructive for the moral fabric of society. Ironically, none of the women in these religious groups have condemned maltreatment or honor killing of women and, unfortunately, see segregation of sexes as the solution to social problems. We also have to keep in mind that these landmark steps are to be enforced through the same law enforcement structures that have societal biases towards women. Interestingly, legal rights of women have been granted and denied by successive military regimes, which

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highlights the fact that political parties and civil regimes neither have the will to unite on women issues nor consider it to be a prerequisite for creating a civil society. Benazir Bhutto’s assassination was a blow to the civil society, not particularly the women’s rights movement, yet her persona had a symbolic meaning for Pakistani women. The current regime led by her husband is also a reminder of the limitation of upper-class women in furthering a feminist agenda and how they remain hostage to the class-based political structure and power politics.

Conclusion A review of the history of Pakistan highlights a few overlapping factors that continue to contribute to women’s subordination: the cultural legacy; the-class based socio-economic and political structure; the urban/rural divide; the patriarchal practices; and the role of religion in the polity. Pakistan’s freedom movement created the myth of Muslim identity distinct from indigenous communities, effectively uprooting the masses from their socio-cultural heritage. Pakistan’s history remains confined to the main political players, focusing on the legislative aspects of the anti-colonial struggle. Muslim people in Pakistan therefore lack a clear understanding of their sociological and cultural history because classroom curriculum and textbooks conform to the official Islamic teachings that demand allegiance to Arab culture. Discriminatory practices based on class and gender are generally attributed to the influence of indigenous cultural and religious practices. For the majority of literate people, Muslim history in India begins with the arrival of Muslim “conquerors” such as Muhammad bin Qasim. For the last six decades, Pakistani feminists and women’s rights activists (primarily based in major urban centers) have explicitly stated their mission as working for their powerless sisters. These urban-based feminists treat rural women as passive subjects in need of protection along patriarchal lines assuming the role of a protector in an oppressive state and society — in which they seek greater rights for themselves.54 Feminists ignore the fact that mere “shared womanhood” has failed to constitute a common ground for agency and factors like religion, class, caste, and ethnicity would continue to play a significant role in negotiating rights for men and women. Since rural women have not spoken from any organized platform, urban

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feminists have robbed them of an opportunity to articulate their concerns and be part of the agenda setting processes. Like colonial feminists, upper-class Pakistani women have tried to cut across class and urban/rural boundaries, yet this unequal partnership has formed a relationship of power between upper-middle-class urban feminists and lower and lower-middle-class urban and rural women. Ironically, if equal rights are guaranteed, upper-class urban women would have to renounce many privileges enjoyed by their class, which may result in depriving them of their existing status in the socio-economic and political sphere, limiting their ability to challenge the system beyond a certain point. Women activism remained, and remains, confined to legal rights, demanding rights based on religion, and their domestic role and not as citizens of Pakistan; the issues revolve around representation in the parliament or various bodies formed by the state. These statesponsored efforts (official commissions on women in 1955, 1976, 1985, 2001) were confined to urban women, effectively restricting participation to urban activists with a moderate agenda along with representatives of conservative and modernist Islamists. The demand for fair allocation of resources in the urban/rural or class context or a challenge to the existing structural hierarchies can potentially rupture their superior status and deny class-based advantages. Any possible unity based on class is disrupted by gender differences, while shared womanhood is fractured by differences in the socio-economic location of women. This had a damaging effect on expanding the role and representation of lower and lower-middle-class working women from rural and urban areas. This urban focus of the policy makers, in socio-economic and political arenas, not only ignores and excludes the living realities of rural lower- and middle-class women but also fails to acknowledge alternative ways of examining the women question and female subjectivity. The failure of WAF to formulate a clear and cohesive agenda and deal with the issues of religion and broadening its membership base (fearing that Islamists may join their ranks) led to its split. Their problem stemmed from a complex situation that employs religious idiom that puts them in the trap of puritans, who argue for restricting women’s public role and disapprove of women’s interpretation of the text. Over the years, women belonging to older professional classes of the dominant elite have expanded public space for themselves, yet Islamization and the subsequent women’s activism have resulted in a

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strange and indirect dialogue between women of lower/lower-middleand upper-middle-class professionals. Women following the puritans’ version of Islam, glorify past contributions of Muslim women and have a clear position to restrict the demand of rights within the parameters of Islam and the Sharia, rejecting the secularist view based on the charter of universal human rights adopted by the United Nations.55 They appeal to the disenfranchised segments of the society, though they insist on their version of Islam which the majority of the population has never practiced. Islamists declare local customs and festivals as un-Islamic, while feminists belonging to liberal women organizations consider customary practices responsible for the plight of women, both denying agency to gender, class, and sociological roots failing to capitalize on traditional structures to improve the human rights situation and broaden their base of appeal. Human rights activists criticize military regimes for the increased role of religion, ignoring the fact that the failure of civil regimes to initiate policies that can deliver basic goods and services or provide justice has sharpened the puritans’ appeal. Constant failure of parliament to introduce laws to end structural injustices and a dismal role played by the law enforcing agencies and judiciary has disappointed the masses to an extent that seeking refuge in religion is gaining currency. In the absence of a public network of basic services like health and education, the Islamists have made inroads in remote communities by opening religious schools instilling their ideology. On the other hand, a close connection between feminists, NGOs, INGOs, donor agencies, and the bureaucracy has raised doubts on the sincerity of the cause, even risking compromising agendas in line with the state and donors’ demands. The puritans, pronouncing feminists as Western agents promoting an anti-Islam agenda, have wickedly exploited these links. Such developments have given rise to parallel religious activism through organizations such as Al-Huda in urban and rural areas furthering the puritans’ agenda, conducive to intolerance and unsympathetic to diversity in religious beliefs and practices. The recent silence of women parliamentarians in approving the Nizam-e-Adl Regulation, 2009 is reminiscent of the fact that upperclass women will continue to collaborate with the state in their own subordination in exchange for an acceptable public role for a minority. They have become a party in sanctioning their own inferior status through legitimizing a particular version of religion in violation of

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the spirit of the constitution and are willing actors in the project for their own subjectivity. It has to be highlighted that by legitimizing the use of Islam, women are defining boundaries for negotiation of their rights limiting their ability to bargain within a puritanical religious framework. In the absence of the full integration of women in economic, social, and political arenas, democracy will have a limited appeal in Pakistan.

Notes 1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Difference–Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal,” in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 381. 2. Dolores E. Janiewski, “Gendered Colonialism: The ‘Women Question’ in Settler Society,” in Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri, eds, Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 59. See also, Chakrabarty, “The Difference–Deferral of a Colonial Modernity,” p. 375. See also, Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 233. 3. Gyanendra Pandey, “The Prose of Otherness,” in David Arnold and David Hardiman, eds, Subaltern Studies VIII: Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). 4. Clare Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865 (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 148. 5. Fletcher quoted in Janiewski, “Gendered Colonialism,” p. 67. 6. Mary Hancock, “Gendering the Modern: Women and Home Science in British India,” in Antoinette Burton, ed., Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 149. 7. Chakrabarty, “The Difference–Deferral of a Colonial Modernity,” pp. 378, 383. 8. Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias quoted in McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 355. 9. Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” in Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire, pp. 91, 101, 105. 10. Hancock, “Gendering the Modern,” p. 157. 11. Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Colonial Rule (New York: Routledge, 1995). Detailed discussion in Introduction. See also, Barbara N. Ramusack, in Nupur Chaudhuri, and Margaret Strobel, eds, Western Women and

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12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Tahmina Rashid Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 133. Antoinette Burton, “Fearful Bodies into Disciplined Subjects’ Pleasure, Romance, and the Family Drama of Colonial Reform in Mary Carpenter’s Six Months in India,” in Barbara Laslett, ed., History and Theory: Feminist Research, Debates, Contestations (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 226–27. Michael R. Anderson, “Islamic Law and the Colonial Encounter in British India,” in David Arnold and Peter Robb, eds, Institutions and Ideologies: A SOAS South Asia Reader (London: Curzon Press, 1993), pp. 166–77. Ibid., pp. 180–81. Ibid., pp. 183–84. Dushka Saiyid, Muslim Women of the British Punjab: From Seclusion to Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). Chapter 3 details the ongoing struggle at that time in Punjab. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan quoted in ibid., p. 67. Ayesha Jalal, “The Convenience of Subservience,” in Daniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 81. Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanavi and Behishti Zewar, http://www.urducl. com/Urdu-Books/969-416-212-016/ (accessed December 21, 2008). Ibid., p. 83. This refers to the European suffragette’s efforts at the time and their potential impact on women’s rights debates in British India. McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 359. Chakrabarty, “The Difference–Deferral of a Colonial Modernity,” p. 377. Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1986), pp. 92–94. Aparna Basu, “Women’s Histroy in India: A Historiographical Survey,” in Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson, and Jane Rendall, eds, Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives (Hampshire: Macmillan, 1992), p. 188. Mrinalini Sinha, “The Lineage of the ‘Indian’ Modern: Rhetoric, Agency and the Sarda Act in Late Colonial India,” in Burton, Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, p. 215. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Speeches and Statements (Karachi: Government of Pakistan, 1956), p. 194. Ibid., p. 194. Burton, Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, p. 12. Cecile Dauphine, “Women’s Culture and Women’s Power: Issues in French Women’s History,” in Pierson and Chaudhuri, eds, Nation, Empire, Colony, p. 124. Ibid., p. 190. Aparna Basu, “Uprooted Women: Partition of Punjab 1947,” in Chaudhuri and Strobel, eds, Western Women and Imperialism.

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32. David Pearl, A Text Book on Muslim Law (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 98. 33. Jalal, “The Convenience of Subservience,” p. 86. This is in reference to inheritance rights which are guaranteed by Islam but traditionally denied especially in the landed class. There are two dimensions here, one the rights given by Islam but denied customarily, the other being women given an inheritance share less than men. 34. Khawar Mumtaz and Fareeda Shaheed, Women of Pakistan — Two Steps Forward One Step Back? (Lahore: Vanguard, 1987), p. 53. 35. APWA (1950), Working Paper No. 1. 2. 36. Mumtaz and Shaheed, Women of Pakistan, p. 53. See also, Gail Minault, The Extended Family (Delhi: Chanakya Publishers, 1981), pp. 265–67. 37. Minault, The Extended Family, p. 268. See also, Fareeda Shaheed, Pakistan’s Women: An Analytical Description (Lahore: Shirkat Gah, 1990), p. 22. For details of the Family Law ordinance, see Tahmina Rashid, Contested Representation: Punjabi Women in Feminist Debates in Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2006), Appendix-1. 38. Anjuman Jamhooriat Passand Khawateen, Samaj, Qanoon Aur Pakistani Aurat (Lahore: DSW, 1987), p. 13. See also, Minault, The Extended Family, pp. 265–67 and Shaheed, Pakistan’s Women, p. 22. 39. Stanley Walpert, Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan (Lahore: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 230–45. 40. Article 25, The Constitution of Pakistan 1973 (Islamabad: Government of Pakistan, 1973). 41. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Bryan Haines, and Ellison Findly, The Islamic Impact (New York: Syrcause University Press, 1984), p. 85. See also, Rashid Ahmad, “Islamic Legacy of Bhutto,” The Daily Masawat, August 26, 1973. 42. Administrative Reforms 1972 (Islamabad: Government of Pakistan, 1972). See also in Jalal, “The Convenience of Subservience,” p. 99. See also Mumtaz and Shaheed, Women of Pakistan, p. 63. See also, Rashida Patel, “Women and Constitution of Pakistan,” Working Paper No. 460 (Lahore: PASC, 1975), p. 6. 43. Jalal, “The Convenience of Subservience,” p. 100. 44. Fareeda Shaheed, “The Cultural Articulation of Patriarchy; Legal System, Islam and Women in Pakistan,” South Asia Bulletin, Spring 43 (1986): pp. 38–44. See also Hamza Alvi, “Pakistan: Women in a Changing Society,” The Economic and Political Weekly 23(26) June 25, 1988): pp. 1328–330. 45. Iftikhar Malik, “The State and Civil Society in Pakistan: From Crisis to Crisis,” Asian Survey, 36(7) (July 1996): pp. 673–90. See also Shahnaz J. Rouse, “Women’s Activism in Pakistan: State, Class, Gender,” South Asia Bulletin, 6(1) (Spring 1986): pp. 30–37.

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46. For the text of these laws, Rashid, Contested Representation, Appendix II & III, pp. 311–39. See also, M. H. Askari, “Martial Law and the Civil Society in Pakistan,” The Dawn. September 17, 1980. See also, “Pakistan’s other Women,” The Economist, January 13, 1990, 314(7637), p. 38. See also Fareeda Shaheed, “Women in Pakistan — 50 Years Later,” WIN News, 24(1) (Winter 1998): p. 63. 47. Night Said Khan and Rubina Saigol are the known socialist feminists while lawyers Asma Jehangir and Hina Jillani, Neelam Hussain have a secular approach towards women rights in Pakistan. Kishwar Naheed in her interview (February 2002) with the researcher was critical of the fact that the women’s movement closed its memberships as they were afraid that Islamists will join and dominate their general bodies and will jeopardize the objectives of the movement. She also elaborated the fact that she suggested that a minimum amount should join the ranks of the movement which will increase the membership as well as the influence among all strata of the society and will also help to meet the financial cost of the work but was rejected on the grounds mentioned. 48. Kishwar Naheed, Interview, February 2002. 49. Khawar Mumtaz, “Identity Politics and Women: ‘Fundamentalism’ and Women in Pakistan,” in Valentine M. Moghadam, ed., Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Assertions and Feminism in International Perspective (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), p. 233. For the complete text of the bill, see Rashid, Contested Representation, Appendix-IV, pp. 393–98. 50. Ardeshir Cowasjee, “A Matter of Honour?” available at www. dailystarnews.com/199908/10/n9081002.html (written 1999, accessed December 21, 2008). See also “Crime or Custom: Violence Against Women in Pakistan,” Available at www.hrw.org/hrw/reports/1999/ pakistan/index.html (accessed December 21, 2008). 51. The Dawn, February 10, 2004. 52. See http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/opinion/31kristof.html (accessed December 21, 2008). The Washington Post released the full audio of his press conference, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con tent/article/2005/09/30/AR2005093001536.html (accessed December 21,. 2008). 53. See http://www.pakistani.org/pakistan/legislation/2006/wpb.html (accessed December 21, 2008). 54. Burton, Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, pp. 148, 151. 55. Nira Yuval-Davis and Pnina Werbner, Women, Citizenship and Difference (London: Zed Books, 1992), pp. 5, 18–19.

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5 Pakistan and the Dilemma of Democracy T. C. A. Rangachari

Recent developments have rekindled hopes, yet again, of the revival

of democracy in Pakistan. The formation of the civilian government following the elections of February 2008 brought to an end the nine-year military rule initiated by the October 1999 bloodless coup against the elected, civilian government of Nawaz Sharif. That democracy is going to require sustained nurturing should be evident from President Asif Ali Zardari’s observation that “Our transitional Pakistani democracy is still restructuring after decades of episodic dictatorship.”1 Assessments regarding Pakistan’s future remain dire. The cover of the first issue of The Economist in 2008 described Pakistan as “the most dangerous place” in the world. The Atlantic Council Report released by chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, in February 2009, regards Pakistan now as a country under siege with the possible short- and long-term consequences of a breakup of the country or civil war that could be catastrophic for the country and for the region. The report says time is running out in the battle to keep Pakistan stable, at peace, and prosperous, and, to help Pakistan change its present course toward increasing economic and political instability, and even ultimate failure. This is the cumulative impact of the policies adopted over the six decades following the creation of Pakistan, in 1947, through the vivisection of a united India that Britain ruled for nearly two centuries. During this period, many of the rationalizations used to carve out of India a homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent have been dented, if not disproved, including the two-nation theory, the ideological basis for the creation of Pakistan. The average Muslim in Pakistan is not necessarily better off than his Indian counterpart; his life and liberty, even his freedom to pursue his religious faith, is not much better secured. Pakistan has, indeed, come a long way in

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the sixty years since it was created though not quite the way in which its founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, would have wanted it to. Since the end of World War II, there has been a global effort to ensure that governments are based on the consent of the governed. As Eric Hobsbawm has observed, “One thing is undeniable: ‘the people’ (whatever group of humans is defined as such) is today the foundation and common point of reference of all state governments except the theocratic. This is not only unavoidable but right, for if the government has any purpose, it must be to speak in the name of, and care for, the well being of all citizens.”2 It is expected that the state would strive to provide to all citizens the freedoms, rights, and benefits of belonging to a state. The international community, through the universal forum of the United Nations has, in large measure, codified these in international covenants, which have attracted large, though not universal, adherence. There is, thus, a large measure of understanding of, if not agreement on, the desirable components of a state model, and democracy has come to symbolize it. To quote Hobsbawm again, “The word ‘democracy’ means this standard state model, i.e., a constitutional state offering to guarantee the rule of law and various civil and political rights and freedoms, and governed by authorities which must include representative assemblies elected by universal suffrage and numerical majorities of all citizens in elections held at regular intervals between competing candidates and/or political organizations.”3 Even if not the original, or the only, meaning of democracy, it is the one generally practiced as acceptable. The failure of democracy to take roots in Pakistan can be traced back to its very origin, in particular the flawed premise guiding its creation. The fear of an unassailable Hindu majority riding roughshod over Muslim interests haunted the Muslim leadership from the time efforts for greater Indian representation in decision making began in the late nineteenth century. It led to the formation of the Muslim League in 1906 and, eventually, to the demand for Pakistan. The concept of parity between the majority (the Hindu community) and the minority (the Muslim community) put forth by the Muslim League, under Jinnah’s leadership, became, eventually, the basis for the formation of the state of Pakistan. But this quest for parity irrespective of numerical strength negated the majoritarian principle that is fundamental in a democracy, that is, the will of the majority would prevail.

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Pakistan was not created as a result of a mass movement. The rank and file of the Muslim League neither anticipated nor was ever made aware of the consequences of the establishment of Pakistan nor of the impact it might have on their lives. The mass transfer of population and the enormous loss of life in consequence might well have been avoided had there been clarity in this regard. India’s Muslims demanded Pakistan without really knowing the results of that demand.4 Ideas about Pakistan remained vague and once achieved, it lacked clear defining parameters.5 In subsequent decades, in the absence of a popular will, it was not surprising that the will of a small coterie of decision-makers became dominant and concepts and structures based on democratic principles could not emerge. Determination of public interest from above substituted for empowerment of the people to determine their own destiny. The country came to be basically controlled by a small but “culturally and socially intertwined elite,” known for their loyalty to the “core principles” of a central state.6 The executive branch gained ascendancy as the legislature and the judiciary, often willingly, submitted to the will of the ruler of the day, allowing them to be disregarded or remolded as desired. The British colonial regime was responsible for, and frequently fuelled, the division between the communities in India. Even as the British encouraged formation of representative organizations with a view to creating support for British rule, blunting opposition and making possible, over a period of time, the ‘Indianization’ of British rule, they stoked mutual suspicions and fears among the communities to prolong and perpetuate their rule. The policy of Divide and Rule demanded accentuating the rift between the two communities. The realization of the un-sustainability of imperial rule that began to worry the British after the War triggered the search for a policy that would allow for imperial interests and Western strategic ambitions in this region to be continued to be served even after the end of the Raj. This led to the policy of Divide and Quit. Inclusion of Indians in the political and administrative process through representative bodies should, in the ordinary course, have brought about a greater unity of purpose amongst the colonized peoples. All communities in India, irrespective of their numbers, had a common interest in liberation from colonial rule and attainment of political independence. In the case of the Hindus and Muslims, the religious, social, personal, and even culinary preferences and

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predilections often made for mutual avoidance, even repulsion. A joint effort at securing this objective required overcoming, or at least setting aside, differences arising from the distinctive characteristics of the different communities. Indeed, despite the rigidity and insularity of the two communities towards each other, bred by their exclusive social customs and habits, they had displayed, as recently as in 1857 — barely three decades before the formation of the Indian National Congress — unity of political purpose in opposing foreign rule and restoration of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. As the Muslim educator, jurist and author, founder of the AngloMohammedan Oriental College at Aligarh, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (1817–98) noted in a speech at Patna on January 27, 1883, “Hindus and Muslims are religious terms. In fact, all the residents of India whether Hindus, Muslims or Christians, by virtue of the fact of their residence, constitute one nation. The time is past when merely on the grounds of religion, the inhabitants of one country could be regarded as members of two nations.”7 The Indian National Congress, that had been the brain-child of the British civil servant A. O. Hume, and that had been approved by the Marquis of Dufferin in 1885, the governor-general of India (1884– 88), sought to make itself representative of all communities. The Congress professed loyalty to the Crown and goodwill towards the British Empire. Its objective was good government rather than selfgovernment. As W. C. Bonnerjee, who presided over the first session of the Congress in Bombay on December 28, 1885 observed, the desire was that the “basis of the government should be widened and that the people should have their proper and legitimate share in it.” He saw no contradiction between this desire “to be governed by the ideas of government prevalent in Europe” and “loyalty to the British government.”8 Dufferin noted that “Putting aside the demands of the extremists. . . . The objectives even of the more advanced party are neither dangerous nor very extravagant” and that he had met a considerable number of able and sensible Indians on whose loyal cooperation he could undoubtedly rely.9 Official indulgence became evident in the gestures made by Lord Dufferin and the governor of Madras, Lord Connemara, in hosting garden parties for the delegates of the Second and Third Congress Sessions. The Muslim community was at the very least suspicious of, if not opposed to, the Congress movement. The numbers of Muslims who joined it remained relatively small; few attended its annual sessions.

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Badruddin Tyabji, the president of the Third Session of the Congress wrote to Hume, on October 27, 1888, that: “We are all of [the] opinion that having regard to the distinctly hostile attitude of the Mohammedans, which is becoming daily more pronounced and more apparent, it is time for friends, promoters and supporters of the Congress to reconsider their positions.” He proposed that following the next session at Allahabad, the Congress should be “prorogued, say at least for five years,” to allow for reflection all around and to persuade the Muslim opinion in support of the Congress without which, “the movement ipso-facto ceases to be a general or National Congress.”10 This proposal was opposed by other Congress leaders, including stalwarts like Dadabhai Naoroji, and was not acceptable to the majority of the delegates. Attempts to persuade the Congress to accept the principle of parity continued. In pursuit of that objective, in 1896, Haji Muhammad Ismail Khan, a friend of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, suggested to the Congress president Rahimtullah M. Muhammad Sayani, that the Congress should pass a resolution to the effect that the Hindus and Muslims should have an equal number of seats in the Legislative Council, district boards, and municipalities. Sir Syed endorsed the proposal arguing that the Muslims could join the Congress only if the Congress agreed to this proposal. The power of an articulate minority claiming to represent an entire community to force an organization that sought to be representative and counted among its members even representatives from that very community, to pause and rethink, even reconsider its very existence, laid the foundation for the continuing divide and was to reassert itself, time and again, throughout the freedom struggle. It served also to bend the majority to the will of the minority — a precedent that ill-served the state of Pakistan when it was formed. From its inception, the Congress had advocated election by the people and adequate representation of the minorities. The Congress never pressed for any rights that would have benefited the Hindus at the expense of the Muslims. At its Fifth Session in 1889, the Congress resolved that the total number of minority community representatives — Muslims, Christians, Parsees, or even Hindus where they were in a minority — elected to the legislature should not be less than the proportion of that community in the population of that electoral jurisdiction (Section 5 of Resolution II adopted at that Congress).11

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A combination of factors kept the Muslim community, as a whole, from being actively involved in the national life. Among the wellto-do, there was the sense of despair arising out of the sense of loss of glory and their privileged position as rulers of India for over seven centuries till the advent of the British. The loss of political power brought about the decline of the landed aristocracy and a virtual whole-scale eviction of Muslim landlords. At the level of the general masses, poverty and illiteracy generated alienation and social discontent. Rahimtullah M. Muhammad Sayani, president of the Twelfth Session in Calcutta (1896) attributed the failure of the Congress to enlist the support and the goodwill of the Muslim community to the lack of education among the Muslim community and consequent ignorance about the Congress ideals.12 With neither political nor economic power to underpin its identity, the community sought to define itself in terms of religion. The induction of religion into politics did provide a basis for mobilization. But, inevitably, it led to defining of goals and objectives of the community in a communal idiom which, over time, grew into separatism. The search for a separate and distinct communal identity coincided with the colonial establishment’s need to win over the dispossessed community. The stance of the pan-Islamic sections, alarmed at the predatory activities of imperialists in other parts of the Muslim world, fed into fears of anti-British sentiment being fanned up into a resurgence of Muslim fanaticism. Another stream — the Deoband movement, named after the seminary founded in 1867 by Maulana Muhammad Qasim Nanotawi (1832–80) and Maulana Rashid Ahmed Gangoni (1829–1905), both of whom had been actively involved in the mutiny of 1857 — totally rejected collaboration with the colonial power. Against this backdrop, it suited colonial interests to encourage the Muslim community to target the bogey of the majority community’s hegemonic dominance and designs for ventilating its grievances thereby diverting attention from the culpability of the existing colonial system for the state the community found itself in. The next logical step was to form a separate organization dedicated solely and exclusively to the cause of promoting the interests of a single community. The Muslim League was founded in 1906, with the blessings of another governor general, Lord Minto (1905–10). The memorandum submitted to the governor general by a delegation of Muslim leaders led by the Aga Khan, in Simla in 1906, stated,

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inter alia, that the position accorded to the Mohammedan community in any kind of representation, direct or indirect, and in all other ways affecting their status and influence, should be commensurate not merely with their numerical strength, but also with their political importance and the value of the contribution which they make to the defense of the Empire and with due regard to the position they occupied in India a little more than a hundred years ago. The memorandum suggested that to reach this goal, Muslims should be given the right to select representatives through separate communal electorates. Lord Minto concurred, declaring his conviction that any electoral representation in India would be doomed to “mischievous failure” which aimed at granting a personal enfranchisement, regardless of the beliefs and traditions of the communities composing the population of the subcontinent. In effect, representation would not be determined on the basis of the democratic principle of oneman, one-vote but on extraneous criteria and considerations, determined without a reference to the populace and undermining, thereby, that principle. The colonial government in India could now argue that India was not one nation but consisted of multiple communities with varying and conflicting interests and, thus, not suited for democratic institutions. The communal electorates were designed to lead the Muslims to vote and think communally, to look for constitutional and other reforms only in terms of more relative communal power and express their grievances communally. The Aga Khan noted in his “Memoirs” that Lord Minto’s acceptance was the foundation of all future constitutional proposals made for India by successive British governments. Its final, inevitable consequence was the partition of India and the emergence of Pakistan. The League, the vanguard of the Pakistan movement, played on Muslim fears of the Hindu majority; of how a majority could jeopardize the interests of a minority, even lead to its political extinction and absolute effacement. It had distinguished antecedents for this reasoning. The Central Mohammedan Association (CMA) had argued in the late 1880s that the introduction of representative institutions in their entirety would not be to the advantage of the Mohammedans. In 1890, the influential Mahomedan Literary Society, founded in 1863, submitted a memorandum to the government in which they “prayed” for the withdrawal of political practices such as elections.13 In the nineteenth century, during the colonial phase,

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Western-educated Muslims led by Sir Syed Ahmed, though small in number, argued that Western-style democracy or political representation was unsuitable in India because it ignored the hostility between India’s “races, castes and classes.” They feared the consequences of Muslims being in a permanent minority. On December 28, 1887, in a speech at the Lucknow Session of the Mohammedan Educational Conference, Sir Syed said: “Suppose that all the Mohammedan electors vote for a Mohammedan member and all the Hindu voters vote for a Hindu member, and now count how many votes the Mohammedan members will have, and how many Hindu. It is certain that the Hindu members will have four times as many because their population is four times as numerous. Therefore we can prove by mathematics that there will be four votes for the Hindu to every one vote for the Mohammedan.”14 Years later, Jinnah was to say much the same thing when Gandhi sought to identify himself as a brother — “the difference is that brother Gandhi has three votes and I have one.”15 Pakistan, it is argued by Pakistani scholars, was conceived, justified, fought for, and spelt out in democratic terms. For one thing, these scholars argue, it was demanded on the basis of the universally accepted democratic principle — the right of self-determination — which any sizable and influential minority or sub-national group within a larger geographic context, but demographically dominant in some specified areas, could invoke to rid itself of the domination of a permanent, hostile majority. Jinnah had successfully argued the case of separate Muslim nationhood in terms of the distinguishing traits, both at the macro and micro levels that transform an aggregate of population into a nation. For over three decades he had fought for India’s liberation from the parliamentary platform, rather than on the streets. Pakistan was to be established through the democratic process of ascertaining the wishes of the Muslims. During the critical 1945–46 elections which were to decide the fate of the demand for Pakistan, Jinnah wanted the verdict of the Muslims whether they wanted Pakistan or not. The beginning made through the demand for separate electorates led, imperceptibly but inevitably, towards separate statehood till it was too late to retract. The catch was that the voters were never given a chance to consider the full implications of the formation of Pakistan over their own situations even as the communal and religious elements were fanning the flames of separation.16 As an ultimate insider, Lt Gen Gul Hasan Khan, Pakistan army chief, was

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constrained to note, “Our people are simple folks who, taking the cue from the leaders, cannot comprehend what the whole of Pakistan is about.”17 The fear of the majority, however, did not disappear with the creation of Pakistan even though it had become a Muslim majority state. It gave way to a West Pakistani fear of the East Pakistani Bengali majority which contributed, in no small measure, a quarter of century after the formation of Pakistan, to the birth of Bangladesh. Threequarters of a century earlier, at a time when even the idea of Pakistan had not been conceived, Sir Syed had argued that the first prerequisite of a representative government was that the voters should possess the highest degree of homogeneity. In a form of government which depended for its functioning upon majorities, it was necessary that the people should have no differences in the matter of nationality, religion, ways of living, customs, morals, culture, and historical traditions; these things should be common among a people to enable them to run a representative government properly. Only when such homogeneity is present can representative government work or prove beneficial; it should not even be thought of, he believed, when these conditions do not exist. The birth of Bangladesh proved him right, though perhaps not in the way he would have wanted. Sir Syed could never have envisaged that what he perceived as the infirmities of a composite polity wherein the Muslim community was in a minority, would become the basis for separatism even in a Muslim majority country. East Pakistan did not conform to the prescribed criterion of commonality except in regard to religion. A common nationality was imposed by the terms of the partition, though pre-partition debates had included the question of whether one or more states were to be created as homelands for the Muslims of India. Religion apart, the East Bengali Muslim shared more in terms of history, economy, culture, and way of life with his West Bengali Hindu counterpart than with a Muslim Punjabi or Pathan. The Awami League in East Pakistan demanded the scrapping of the artificial parity of the Western wing with the more populous Eastern wing imposed by the federal government, and holding direct elections to the Federal Parliament based on adult franchise on the principle of one man, one vote. The Six-Point formula of the Awami League, of which this constituted a part, was considered unacceptable by the rulers in West Pakistan who saw it as “provinces minding their own business with the Centre being reduced to the status of a referee without a whistle.”18 The majority

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insisted on asserting its rights and unwillingness to accept being ruled by a minority. The fundamental principle of democracy asserted itself, refusing to be constrained by shared bonds of religion. Even Benazir Bhutto, for all her commitment to, and advocacy of, democracy, missed this central argument. Instead of focusing on the denial of the right of the Parliamentary majority to from the government, she blamed Mujib, the leader of the Awami League, the party with the majority of seats in the National Assembly, for not working with her father, as a political necessity, in writing a constitution that would be “acceptable to both wings of Pakistan” and, instead “instigating” an independence movement. She could not — or chose not to — see the contradiction in this position and her observation that, in 1973, “as the leader of the majority in the National Assembly,” her father became the prime minister of Pakistan.19 Benazir was to face the same problem in 1988 when, despite becoming the leader of the party with the largest number of seats in the National Assembly, every effort was made to thwart her attempts to form the government. British imperialism was torn between two mutually conflicting ideals — the ideals of good governance connoting continuance of its supremacy and of self-government connoting the whole or the partial abdication of that supreme position. The military in Pakistan had no such dilemma. Pakistani politics was set in the context of paternalism and a culture of the ruled having expectations that the rulers would provide for them (the mai-baap culture). Political parties were organizationally weak with a personalized style of functioning. The military had a formidable organization, a functioning structure and hierarchy; setting goals and implementation of those goals were central to its existence. It was not difficult for the military to persuade itself that it could provide superior governance. Its selfesteem in this regard was vindicated by the assessment that each time it intervened in the politics of the country it had earned approbation for “saving” the country. Indeed, the welcome accorded to successive military takeovers was taken as buttressing the essential soundness of this reasoning. Little thought was given to institution building that would enable the nascent nation to evolve systems of governance. On the contrary, there was active effort to undermine, even subvert, institutions. In 1958, Major General Sayyid Iskander Ali Mirza, who presided over Pakistan, first, as governor general, and later, as president under the first constitution that he called a “trashy book,” persuaded the chief

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justice to acquiesce in the imposition of martial law on the doctrine of necessity. The army chief would administer it. This opened the way, in subsequent years, to the suspension of the constitution and imposition of martial law as a matter of course. On each occasion, the judiciary was forthcoming in its endorsement. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto even earned the dubious distinction of becoming the first civilian chief martial law administrator. Politicians were clearly in cahoots with the military, more than willing to play a supporting role in the subversion of democracy. Following the elections of 1970, for example, Bhutto had advocated a “short, sharp” clamp-down in East Pakistan.20 It is a somewhat recent phenomenon that the down side of this dalliance with military rule and periodic subversion of democracy is coming to be recognized as harmful to the country, leading to the failure to evolve and nurture sustainable institutions and systems of participatory governance that are necessary for political stability. Each of the three military interludes outlived their initial welcome; it was not long before public disenchantment and disapproval surfaced. Worse, with the choking off of public discourse on issues of national importance and lacking openness and transparency in decision making, each of them brought disaster upon the nation: the Ayub-Yahya regime led to the break-up of Pakistan; the Zia regime brought the gun-anddrug culture; the Musharraf regime has left Pakistan with a legacy of terrorism that has led its foremost ally, the U.S., to describe the situation in Pakistan (and Afghanistan) as the “international security challenge of the highest order.”21 The first free and fair elections in post-independence Pakistan held, ironically, under the military rule of General Yahya Khan had two consequences: the break-up of Pakistan; and, the emergence, in West Pakistan, of a genuinely popular political formation, the PPP (Pakistan Peoples Party). Its founder, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, for all his personality flaws that ultimately led to his downfall and tragic execution, was the first mass leader that post-Jinnah Pakistan produced. His populism, advocacy of a brand of Islamic socialism, promise of fulfillment of minimum needs encapsulated in the slogan roti, kapda aur makaan (bread, clothing, housing) resonated with the people. Bhutto could be charismatic. He could move the multitudes with his oratory. Fed up of years of military rule and seeking popular participation in governance, the people were willing to repose faith in Bhutto and saw in him a leader who could give shape to their aspirations. Politicization of the people was a singular contribution made

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by Bhutto that survived his departure from the scene. The formation of successive alliances of political parties to seek restoration of democracy in the Zia and Musharraf years is testimony to Bhutto’s legacy. Mobilization of the people, in particular, the rural populace, as happened in interior Sindh in the 1980s in direct confrontation with law enforcement authorities with the backing of the Wadheras — the landed gentry that traditionally supported the establishment and depended upon it — was a revelation to the establishment.22 The party that Bhutto built and bequeathed to Benazir had committed loyalists who, willingly and courageously, suffered years of repression by the military regime of Zia ul-Haq, the Bhutto-appointed chief of army staff, who made the coup against Bhutto. He was the leader, Bhutto’s daughter Benazir was to write later, who installed a constitution guaranteeing civil rights and legal protection to a people who had till then been ruled by tribal chiefs and landlords; he had guaranteed a Parliamentary system and periodic elections where violence and bloodshed were the norm for a regime change.23 Zia led the country through eleven tumultuous years, the consequences of which Pakistan is still assimilating. Zia’s regime replicated the paternalistic model of governance inherited from the inception of Pakistan that became, not surprisingly, a one-man administration.24 He reneged on his promise to hold elections within ninety days of his takeover. The PPP had swept the local-level elections held a few weeks after the coup and there was every reason to believe that the national-level elections would produce a similar result. That would have not only de-legitimized the coup but also would place Zia personally in an impossible situation. Bhutto was not wrong in his assessment that generals do not commit high treason by staging a coup in order to hold elections and restore constitutional democracy. If that were the objective, the coup would have been unnecessary in the first place. Zia’s solution was to carry on without elections as long as possible and govern under martial law. Strict censorship was imposed. Publication of any material considered dangerous to national security, public morality, or maintenance of order was punishable by ten lashes and five years of rigorous imprisonment. (The Musharraf regime that overthrew the Nawaz Sharif government in 1999 departed from this script and won accolades for allowing for the freedom of the press and media. It is a different matter that it did not foresee that this freedom would, in due course, become one of the factors in its downfall. By the time that realization dawned and

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Musharraf sought to clamp down, it was too late.) When a return to civilian rule became inevitable by the mid-1980s, Zia innovated with a controlled, party-less, electoral process designed to produce a predetermined result. The two major trends that characterized Zia’s eleven-year rule were Islamization and the undermining of political institutions and leadership. Partly out of the need to seek legitimacy for his rule, and partly out of personal conviction, Zia actively sought the support of Islamic parties. These parties commanded little political support among the people. The army had, hitherto, refrained from bringing religion into a professional organization. Zia imparted a new momentum to Islamization within the armed forces and within the society at large. Zia justified his Islamization drive in the belief that Islam was the raison d’etre of Pakistan. “For the first time, a maulvi, a deeply religious person was the Head of State, Head of government and army chief — a frightening combination — and he seemed determined to recreate the Islamic legal and social order which had originated in tribal Arabia more than a thousand years earlier.”25 Three decades down the line, the character of Islam in Pakistan has changed. “A stern, unyielding version of Islam is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis in Pakistan.”26 Islamic rituals and teachings became part of the army’s day-to-day activities. Soon after taking over as chief of army staff (COAS) in 1976, Zia had changed the motto of the army from Jinnah’s Faith, Unity and Discipline to Iman, Taqwa, Jihad fi sabeelillah (Faith, Obedience to God, Struggle in the path of Allah).27 The subsequent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought about an unfortunate coincidence of interests between Pakistan and America in supporting the proliferation of madrassas imparting Islamic education which would turn out cadres imbued with values that could transform them into committed warriors in the name of religion against “infidels” — the godless communists, Afghans and Russians alike. Pakistan’s status as a “front-line” state in the battle against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, which presaged the collapse of global communism and even of the Soviet Union itself, was too central to permit too close a scrutiny of the corrosive longer-term implications of this process of Islamization for Pakistan. As the war wound down and the interest of America waned following the retreat of the Soviets from Afghanistan, Pakistan was left with jihadism and jihadis threatening to rent asunder the society and politics of

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Pakistan. The madrassa system of education has taken its toll with an estimated 1.5 million students acquiring religious education in over 13,000 madrassas. “Pakistan’s self-inflicted suffering comes from an education system that, like Saudi Arabia’s system, provides an ideological foundation for violence and future jihadists.”28 The beginnings of Pakistan as a “failed state” are being traced by a younger generation to 1988, “the year when Zia died, the Soviets and Americans withdrew from Afghanistan, and it was time for Pakistan to decide what was strategically in its long term interests regarding Afghanistan, jihadis, democracy, the military . . .”29 “Twenty-five years ago, the Pakistani state used Islam as an instrument of state policy. Today, government intervention is no longer needed because of a spontaneous groundswell of Islamic zeal.”30 Since a challenge to the organized power of the military could only be mounted through a political process involving the mobilization of people with political parties in the vanguard, the polity had to be de-politicized. Accordingly, restrictions were placed on political activity from the time martial law was imposed. To cow people into acceptance, participation in such activities attracted imprisonment and even whipping. In later years, Pakistani newspapers, freed from censorship, carried vivid accounts of the whipping of political detainees with members of high society being invited to watch the “ceremony” — tea and cakes laid out to fill the intervening pauses. The condemned, reports said, continued, even in their agony, to shout pro-Bhutto slogans till they could retain their senses. It was this unflinching loyalty that the military rulers came to fear — and which, regrettably, Benazir failed to live up to during her two tenures in the government. The next step was the banning altogether of political parties and organizations, at all levels. Violation was punishable with fourteen years’ imprisonment, confiscation of property, and twentyfive lashes. In public discourse, political parties could be described only as “defunct.” As Benazir noted, with one stroke, she and her mother had been “reduced to a ‘defunct’ leaders of a ‘defunct’ party in a defunct democracy.”31 The repression might have continued for much longer but for the fact of the internal situation coming under increasing scrutiny by the mid-1980s as a result of the heightened global engagement with Pakistan as a “front-line” state in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. With the war in full flow, and the consequent flood of indispensable international assistance of one kind or another, it

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became incumbent upon the military regime to be responsive to calls for a restoration of democracy. The structure that Zia then created sought to give a civilian facade to army rule. Zia secured continuance in office for himself through a devious referendum and stage-managed a party-less election for a Majlis-e-shoora or National Assembly. Given the party-less character of the elections, there were no public meetings or campaigns built around national issues and political platforms. The Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) — a conglomeration of parties opposed to military rule and seeking a return to civilian set-up — had decided to boycott the elections precisely for this reason though it did field candidates affiliated to constituent parties in their individual capacities as was required. Calls for boycott of the elections were prohibited at the pain of imprisonment. In the event, the PPP-affiliated candidates won in good numbers indicating that the party still remained the strongest in the country. It had clearly retained its character as appealing to multiple constituencies in Pakistan consisting of different socioeconomic groups. This substantive victory was, however, without much political consequence at the moment. Zia zeroed in on a Sindhi, Mohammed Khan Junejo, as prime minister. The choice was intended to signal accommodation of the smaller provinces. Zia calculated, no doubt, that a relative political non-entity, lacking experience and hailing from a smaller province would be pliable, easier to handle and more amenable to ceding executive power to the presidency. To the credit of the political forces, while Junejo remained deferential and, for the most part, unable to exercise real power of decision making that should normally go with the office of the prime minister, he persisted with efforts for the lifting of the martial law and return of politics through the revival of political parties and organizations. It speaks volumes for the military’s tenacious refusal to relinquish power to normal civilian processes that it took virtually a whole year for the “elected” government to get rid of the martial law and the emergency (declared sixteen years earlier by General Yahya Khan) and that, too, only after conceding substantive powers of executive decision making to the president, including the power to dismiss, at will, the Assembly and the government supposedly answerable to it. Codified in the Eighth Amendment to the constitution, this provision has haunted successive democratic governments. The lifting of the martial law suggested a return to civilian rule but this was more a public relations

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exercise to appease the West than a real return to democratic governance. The military regime remained unwilling to concede, or even share, power. Not surprisingly, the unceasing efforts of the civilian government to exercise power created the condition for a lingering civil-military conflict. It was to this sullen, silenced polity to which Benazir returned in April 1986 from a self-imposed exile into which she had slipped following years of incarceration in Pakistan. For Benazir, return to Pakistan was an intensely emotional event. She received a tumultuous welcome from an estimated million supporters, far exceeding the expectations of political pundits or even herself. It took an incredible ten hours for her to travel from the Lahore airport to the Minar-ePakistan (a commemorative monument to Pakistan), a distance of a mere dozen kilometers. This was not just the demonstration of affection for a leader. It represented, at one level, the outpouring of national guilt and shame people felt at their own impotence that not a leaf had stirred when Bhutto was hanged and, at another level, the hope that her return symbolized that Pakistan would, before long, make the journey back to real civilian rule. Civil-military relations, at the best of times, have remained tense. Zia’s experiment with civilian rule was not turning out to be successful. The civil government was coming to develop a sense of security about its continuance in office with the passage of time. It had persuaded itself that it had become increasingly acceptable and, hence, more difficult to dislodge except through the process of another election which was not due till 1990. This emboldened the government to question policies being pursued by the military ruler and to seek participation in decision-making. Confrontation was inevitable; result predictable. Junejo’s government, not surprisingly, fell victim to the arbitrariness of the hijack of the constitution that the Eighth Amendment represented. The threat of dismissal of the civilian government by the military had remained real for the Junejo government throughout its three-year tenure. The dismissal of the Junejo government came on May 29, 1988. (This undemocratic method was resorted to again in 1990 and 1994 to evict the duly elected governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, respectively.) As had become the norm on each such occasion of a military takeover, the promise of an election was held out for November 1988 though it was, by no means, clear that elections would be held on schedule or, indeed, even held at all. Three months later, on August

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18, the dice rolled again. The death of Zia ul-Haq in a plane crash opened up real possibilities of a return to democracy. Most Pakistanis would have agreed with Benazir Bhutto, the most potent symbol of democracy at that point, that she would have “preferred to have defeated General Zia at the polls but life and death are in God’s hands.”32 Army chief Aslam Beg, partly in deference to domestic opposition to continuance of military rule and partly under pressure from the international community, notably the U.S., wanted a civilian face to the government. The army was willing to step aside and allow return to a civilian rule, permitting a symbolic hold over the levers of power. It was clear that the Benazir-led PPP would emerge as the largest single party. The PPP had been the premier political party since the 1970s and had won, by far, the largest number of seats in West Pakistan in the last free and fair elections held in 1970. Its loyalists had suffered the most for their opposition to military rule and for leading the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy — deprived of their rights, jailed, tortured, and in some cases, even killed. There was also a latent sense of guilt that they had failed to save their leader from the gallows; they had not even succeeded in rousing strong enough street protests after his execution. The people owed the PPP and Benazir Bhutto a debt — they had to bring her back to power in order to prove their fealty to her and do right by her and, thereby, reaffirm their faith in her, and through her, in democracy. The military disliked — and feared — Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s legacies: the PPP and Benazir, his daughter. If Benazir saw herself as the “Daughter of the East,” the army’s perception of her was as the “Daughter of the Beast.” Benazir as a populist leader in her father’s image could not be trusted with the nation’s interests, especially the nuclear program. Her attitude to the advocacy of a “liberated” Afghanistan as a reliable strategic rear was suspect. The fact that she was strongly backed by the U.S. did not also help since, despite the enormous investment made in the Pakistani military and the economy, there was widespread suspicion regarding U.S. intentions towards Pakistan. Clearly, the army did not wish to see the PPP and Benazir in power. Certainly it had no intention of facilitating Benazir’s return to office. Accordingly, administrative measures were devised that had the effect of disenfranchising large sections of the voters, particularly the rural poor, who might be expected to vote overwhelmingly for the PPP.

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The army needed to ensure also that the political forces did not unite and remained divided so that the military could play the arbiter. This was not difficult to achieve given the divisive and fractious nature of Pakistani politics. The military’s covert intelligence wing, the ISI, cobbled together an alliance of “like-minded” parties with the objective of blocking the Benazir-led PPP. This alliance was built around the Pakistan Muslim League led by Nawaz Sharif who had been promoted by General Zia, and endorsed by the Islamic parties. Nawaz Sharif had the advantage of being from the Punjab, the largest province, commanding considerable support there. He was ambitious and keen to take over the reigns of power at the national level. The Islamic parties had a coincidence of interest in preventing a woman from becoming the leader of a Muslim nation. They could use the emotional power of religion to oppose her candidacy by declaring a woman’s leadership of an Islamic nation to be undesirable, impermissible. The U.S. backing, indeed preference, for her candidacy was an additional objectionable feature that the Islamic parties shared with the military. The military encouraged the Islamic parties to use the argument that her loyalties would be with the U.S., making her a security risk and that she could not be trusted with Pakistan’s nuclear secrets; nor could she be trusted to stand up to India on issues like Jammu and Kashmir, which Pakistan had claimed since independence on grounds of religion.33 The election in November 1988 produced a split verdict. While Benazir’s PPP emerged as the single largest party in the National Assembly with 92 seats out of 215, she did not have numbers on her own to form a government. She was dependent on the goodwill of President Ghulam Ishaq Khan to invite her to form the government. Khan, a former bureaucrat, had been elevated to that office — he had been, as chairman of the Senate, next in line for the presidency — on Zia’s death by the army precisely because, having been Zia’s trusted associate with shared suspicions regarding, and dislike of, the Bhuttos and the PPP, he could be expected to support attempts to scuttle her bid for office. It was only as a result of the failure of weeks of maneuvering by the ISI in patching together an alternative coalition and the increasing desperation to get the much-needed U.S. aid approved, that Benazir finally got the nod. But that too came at a price. She had to accept the continuance of the president — whom she knew to be hostile — in office; the foreign minister would be his (and the army’s) nominee; she would have no say in nuclear policy;

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her role in the Afghan and India policy would be limited; and the army would be left pretty much alone. Elections had been held. A civilian government had been installed. But it was not a return to democracy or constitutionalism. There was a change in form; not change in substance. The office would be hers; power rested elsewhere. The relationship with the president was going to be difficult and this was compounded by Benazir’s inexperience. There were structural impediments to democratic functioning. Nawaz Sharif found himself equally helpless when he became prime minister after the election following Benazir’s dismissal in August 1990. But if he was the victim of a strangled democracy in his first tenure, he himself became the strangler of democracy when he returned to power in 1997 for a second term. His Bonapartist attempt to seize control of all instruments of power had the same hallmarks of authoritarianism as that of military rulers. Perhaps, the prolonged exile in Saudi Arabia and the U.K. during the nine-year rule of Musharraf (1999–2008) and the assassination of Benazir (December 2007) have brought home to him the realization that political forces, however antagonistic to each other, have to stand together if they are to succeed in nurturing and sustaining democracy against anti-democratic forces. It was strikingly ironic that Bhutto’s daughter should have been suspect in the eyes of the military in regard to the nuclear program. Bhutto had never made secret of his ambition to acquire the Bomb. Iqbal Akhund, a career foreign service officer who served as under secretary general at the United Nations and was Benazir Bhutto’s adviser on foreign affairs, has recorded that as far back as in 1965, when Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was the foreign minister in the military regime of Field Marshal Ayub Khan, he had gathered together a team to work on this project. He did not get very far at that time partly because Pakistan then lacked the human and material wherewithal and Ayub was unable and unwilling to make the investment for it, and partly because Bhutto’s own tenure in government was shortlived. He revived that project in 1972 when he took control of the government — the first civilian chief martial law administrator — following the humiliation of the Pakistan army and the country’s break up. In 1974, he had handed over the responsibility of developing a bomb to A. Q. Khan, as the “only man” who could fulfill his dream of making Pakistan the possessor of the first “Islamic Bomb.” Khan, then at URENCO in Holland, returned to Pakistan in 1975 and built

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the Engineering Research Laboratories in Kahuta that later came to be named after him. The chosen route was uranium enrichment; the time frame seven years. Bhutto had already obtained a commitment from China to assist the project. Agha Shahi, a member of the colonial Indian Civil Service who served as foreign minister in the early 1980s, noted that 1965 was a critical year. “We made a pact with China that ushered in decades of assistance that we could not have got elsewhere.”34 Whatever the military’s differences with Bhutto, this was one issue on which there was total agreement. The military rulers pursued the nuclear program. They made their intentions clear to the Reagan administration at the very outset of the Afghanistan crisis. Agha Shahi, Zia’s foreign minister and General K. M. Arif, vice chief of the army and Zia’s trusted deputy, who led the negotiations with the Reagan administration for the billions of dollars in assistance that the U.S. would provide for the campaign to roll back the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, were pleasantly surprised to discover that the U.S. was willing not to make demands relating to Pakistan’s internal affairs and even to treat its nuclear program as a private matter.35 Pakistan decided to make public its possession of nuclear weapons in 1987 at the height of the Indian military’s Brass Tacks exercise close to the Indo-Pak border. The intention of the military rulers who then ruled Pakistan was to put India on notice that Pakistan had acquired a nuclear deterrent that rendered India’s conventional superiority impotent. Pakistan’s survival could no longer be threatened by India — a belief that had come to have the power of an “institutional truth.” Indeed, Pakistan now had the power to place India’s survival under threat, should it so choose. But neither then nor later, did the military share control over the nukes with the civilians. The prime minister was kept out of the decision-making process which had, for years, been in the hands of the military. Those involved were not answerable or accountable to the civilian government. To soften critics of the system and to bring a sense of calm to those alarmed at the fuzzy accountability, a Nuclear Command Authority headed by a troika of the president, the prime minister, and the army chief was created in 1989, soon after the formation of the new government. But the key player in this structure, the army chief, candidly admitted that this arrangement was a sham and only for public consumption.36 Successive civilian prime ministers remained, for the most part, unaware of the extent of the program and its components.

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The U.S. was aware, at the very least, of Pakistan’s bomb-making activities or complicit in it, at the very worst. After 9/11, during the Musharraf years, when the reality of A. Q. Khan’s role in supplying the bomb-making technology to the very countries that the U.S. considered as the “axis of evil” — Iran, Libya, and North Korea — could no longer be hidden from public scrutiny, Khan was made the fall guy. The public confession of a hitherto strictly clandestine operation by A. Q. Khan, who had earned himself the sobriquet of “Father of the Islamic Bomb,” to having been solely responsible for unauthorized proliferation activities was, in reality, a ruse to cover up the fact that the covert trade in the nuclear bazaar resulted from the foreign policy of a nation, plotted and supervised by Pakistan’s military rulers. Pakistan had become the number one threat to the world in terms of danger to the West from nuclear weapons.37 Benazir’s hopes for peace with India did not fit in with the army’s agenda. She belonged to the post-partition generation that had no direct memories of partition. Rajiv Gandhi who, similarly, though born a couple of years before partition, had no direct baggage of partition, then led India. Her father and his mother had negotiated the Simla agreement of 1972 that had ensured peace between the two countries for a decade-and-a-half. There was hope that the two youthful leaders would establish a new relationship of friendship and co-operation. This optimism was exaggerated, however, even misplaced. This became evident soon enough. A reshaping of the relationship required more than goodwill, good intentions, and youthful absence of historical memories. Benazir did not have the political capital to deliver on an agenda of partnership. (This has remained true for other civilian political leaders since. Nawaz Sharif ’s effort to extricate Pakistan from the Kargil war in 1999 resulted in yet another military coup.) She did not have any authority to deviate from the institutional orthodoxy honed over the years and based on the presumption of implacable and immutable hostility between Pakistan and India. Her father, ironically, had contributed, in no small measure, to perpetuating these perceptions. Indeed, even the Simla agreement that had made possible the longest no-war period was the remnant of a scar on Pakistan’s psyche that would never heal. She was, thus, in no position to make concessions on issues like Jammu and Kashmir or even accepting the status quo as envisaged in the Simla agreement as a lasting solution. Pending resolution of that issue which Ghulam

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Ishaq Khan termed as a part of the “unfinished agenda of Partition,” she could not take other aspects of a cooperative agenda forward even if they served Pakistan’s interests, for example, trade, cultural, and people-to-people contacts. It did not help that by the time she came to office, Rajiv Gandhi was also caught up in domestic troubles that eroded not just his political, but also personal standing. The troubled Indo-Pak relations predated her assumption of office. The declaration of the Pakistan military attache at the Embassy in New Delhi as persona non-grata and ordering of his return home, having been caught red-handed at a seedy hotel receiving purloined documents from the Defence Ministry, was seen in Pakistan as a provocation at a sensitive juncture of transition to civilian rule to test Pakistani resolve even though the Indian action was totally unrelated to the dynamics of internal developments in Pakistan. (A few years later, the same officer, by then promoted to the rank of major general, was court-martialled by the Pakistani military for his links with extremist organizations and alleged role in a plot to overthrow the government.) Mercifully, the adverse impact of this incident proved to be short lived. But it did presage the minefield Benazir had to tread in demonstrating to her people — and, more importantly, to the military — her ability to protect national interest and yet chart a new course in the relationship with India. Given the zero-sum-game that the relationship with India had been reduced to, this would have been a tall order for the strongest of leaders. For Benazir it was impossible. Her room to maneuver shrank further with reports that she had sent her interior minister Aitzaz Hasan to India with confidential documents relating to Pakistan’s support for the Sikh terrorist campaign in the Indian Punjab. The Indian prime minister did undertake two visits to Pakistan in a short span of six months (December 1988 and July 1989) — no Indian prime minister had visited Pakistan in over three decades; it took another decade before the next one took place — but these, if anything, hardened positions on both sides. The disappointment resulting from the failure to benefit from the perceived goodwill generated by Benazir’s assumption of office and the return of democracy in wresting concessions from India on a range of issues, including territorial and security issues, led to a backlash from the military leadership. It strengthened the impression, assiduously cultivated by the army among other domestic opponents, that Benazir’s over-hyped abilities to bring about a resolution of Pakistan’s security problems with India had been, in fact,

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non-existent. It was convenient for these elements to gloss over the fact of the absence of any progress on these very issues during the decade-long military rule. Benazir did not help herself either in Indian perceptions with her hysterical cries of “azadi, azadi, azadi” (freedom, freedom, freedom) in February 1990 at a rally in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) — Azad Kashmir in Pakistani parlance — soon after an insurrectionlike situation developed in the Kashmir valley. Twenty-five years earlier, her father had sold Operations Grand Slam and Gibralter to a reluctant Ayub Khan, envisaging precisely the sort of uprising that the world was now witnessing as a basis for a successful military campaign to wrest Jammu and Kashmir from Indian control. It remains unclear whether the Pakistan army had planned the 1990 uprising or simply took advantage of it subsequently. But there is little dispute about its continued funneling of arms, money, and trained cadres to keep the issue alive over the decades. At that juncture, in the heady backdrop of the symbolism of the collapse of the Berlin Wall signifying the end of an era where established boundary lines could be redrawn, it might well have seemed to Pakistan that it was on the verge of securing — finally — satisfaction on the “unfinished agenda of partition.” The integration of Jammu and Kashmir with Pakistan would undo the damage done by the secession of East Pakistan and revalidate the two-nation theory. The military had a plan in readiness involving the use of the battle-hardened mujahideen from the Afghan war and the “freedom fighters” from Pakistanoccupied Kashmir to cross the peaks and fight their way to taking over Jammu and Kashmir. The victory would be credited to the civilian government. Benazir Bhutto, according to her own telling, demurred, not wanting to trigger what might end up becoming an all-out war with India whose final outcome was less than certain, just on the self-belief of the military. Instead, support for lower-level insurgency was a more acceptable option. Ten years later, another army chief — Pervez Musharraf — was to inveigle another civilian leader, Nawaz Sharif, on a similar plan on similar assumptions, though with the somewhat more modest aim of forcing India to make real concessions on Jammu and Kashmir rather than winning outright victory. The resultant conflict in Kargil in the summer of 1999 vindicated the earlier political judgment with the civilians being left to pull the military’s chestnuts out of the fire. The desperation that led the Pakistani leadership to rouse the U.S. leadership from the

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July 4 holiday to use their good offices to help restore the “sanctity of the LoC” — a euphemism for securing Pakistani military withdrawal — did not smack of a victory. The military’s continuing ambitions vis-à-vis Jammu and Kashmir and grievances against India have now become an obstacle in combating terrorism and jihadism that is challenging the state of Pakistan itself and threatening a Talibanized make-over. It is torn between its desire to be seen as a cooperating partner of the West, notably the U.S., in fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and, to retain terrorist outfits sponsored for more than two decades as strategic assets in its conflict with India. It is loath to surrender terrorism as an instrument of state policy at least insofar as it targets India. Pakistan will continue to remain a haven for jihadism unless this essential perception of the military changes. The civilians seem to have made that transition — in the last two free elections that have been held, in 1997 and 2008, India policy and Jammu and Kashmir were not campaign issues. This is not to say that anti-India emotions cannot be whipped up fairly easily — as the events after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks demonstrated — but the civil society seems willing to prioritize its threats differently. The tragedy of Pakistan is that those who assess the threats correctly do not have the power to fight them; those who have the power are convinced that they are on the right side of history by declaring India to be the main threat. In Pakistan, relations between the center and the provinces have also been problematic from the very beginning. The conduct of center–state relations had been problematic even going back to the days of the Pakistan movement. The central leadership of the Muslim League did not always see eye to eye with the provincial leadership nor did they always have the same perspectives or interests. The interests of the Muslim majority and Muslim minority provinces did not always coincide. The provincial leadership was often with the land owning and the more prosperous classes. Their politics revolved around regional sentiments and their vision did not extend beyond provincial boundaries. The demographic distribution suggested that they did not need to. There were 95 million Muslims in pre-partition India, including Bengal and the Punjab — the two provinces whose division the partition entailed. In Muslim-majority united Bengal, out of a total population of 33 million, about 55 per cent were Muslims; out of a total population of 16 million in the united Punjab, about 57 per cent were Muslims. Given this demographic profile, the provincial leadership of neither province felt that a partition would

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enhance their position, particularly since the Muslim League could form governments in association with other regional parties. With prospects of gaining power and office in these provinces the provincial units had little reason to be interested in the central set-up. Among the various concepts that had been debated in the run-up to the Lahore resolution of 1940 was an idea for “autonomous and sovereign” wings in the East and the West with each having independent relations with Britain; constitutional safeguards for Muslims in provinces where they were in a minority would be provided. This would have meant a weak center which would exercise powers ceded by the provincial units. Jinnah envisaged a strong role for the center. But, having provided broadly an agenda for separatism, Jinnah did not spell out his thinking about the future shape of Pakistan nor his strategy in the ongoing negotiations. This left the provincial leaders to interpret the agenda from their own vantage point. Jinnah, in turn, did not have control over the provincial units and was uncertain of the support that the provincial leadership of the Muslim League would extend to him as he pursued his evolving agenda. In this atmosphere of uncertainty; it was necessary for him to ensure the acceptance of his own agenda as the “Sole Spokesman” for Pakistan with complete power over negotiations for the future. But his continuing prevarication over the offer regarding the creation of Pakistan even in June 1947 — which went on to become the final award — led Mountbatten to force his hand by appropriating to himself the role of speaking for the League, resulting in choreographing the nod of acquiescence that sealed the Partition Plan on June 3, 1947. When the partition did take place, Bengal and the Punjab were the worst affected. Bengal, as East Pakistan, and the Punjab as a part of West Pakistan, became part of a separate country — separated from each other by over 1,500 kilometers. The ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and economic divide between the two wings was even wider, giving rise to tensions from the very inception and the disastrous consequences that were to soon become evident. Bengal was the largest population-wise and, therefore, should have had the largest say in the running of the country. But given the evolution of thinking in Pakistan, as noted earlier, the majority, far from being decisive, was marginalized to a point where it led to its own separatist movement. Fuelled by ethnic, cultural, and linguistic homogeneity, it resulted in the breakup of Pakistan less than twenty-five years after its formation. In the West, the Punjab became the largest of the four provinces,

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creating resentment amongst the other three — Sindh, Baluchistan, and the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) — with their own preexisting separate and independent identities. Over the last sixty years, they have each nursed grievances of neglect and discrimination and fears that they would be swallowed by the Punjab. Not surprisingly, there have been continuing efforts to neutralize the dominance of Punjab. Pakistan has been unfortunate that the leadership paid little attention to developing a democratic style of functioning. The example may have been set by Jinnah himself who made it clear to his ministers that they served at his pleasure. An early example of this attitude was his reprimand of Finance Minister Ghulam Mohammed: “It is not for you to decide to be in the Cabinet; that prerogative is mine.”38 He was right about his constitutional authority. But he was also making clear that he wished to have complete and unfettered freedom to do as he wished. A ministerial office would be derived not from political standing and support that one could command within the party but would depend on the whim of the president. Holding office at the “pleasure of the president” became a literal rather than a constitutional formulation that most democracies adopt. This was not the only precedent Jinnah set that created an enduring problem to the democratic process. Jinnah was not only governor general but also president of the Pakistan Muslim League and the president of the Constituent Assembly. While he kept the executive and the legislative offices, he soon gave up the party office. Jinnah was held in high esteem and the adulation for him transformed his actions into precedents to be followed axiomatically. The conclusion that succeeding leaders drew was that real power and status lay in the office of the head of state. They followed the tradition of complete authority over the government and concentrated power in their hands. Governments were formed or fell depending on their will. This had consequences for the office of the head of the government as also for the party. Political parties having consistently suffered from organizational weakness, the party apparatus got marginalized. Within the government, power gravitated to the president at the cost of the prime minister. The tension between the two offices created serious political and constitutional problems in later years. Some politicians like Z. A. Bhutto tried both offices to see which they preferred. But, even today, the relationship remains, at best, uneasy and till such time as the powers that have been arrogated to the

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president, that is, the Eighth Amendment to the 1973 constitution and its subsequent incarnations, remain on the statute books, the office of the president will retain executive power of last resort. (The constitution framed under Bhutto’s guidance is not without its critics. Kasuri, the law minister in Z. A. Bhutto’s cabinet, termed it as prime minister’s dictatorship.) Zia and Musharraf reduced their “elected” prime ministers and ministers to non-entities. Imposition of martial law and assumption of supreme authority became easier to justify for the generals. There were other aberrations which detracted from democratic traditions. Ayub Khan, giving a pass to the principles of separation of powers, occupied the positions of the army chief and defence minister; Bhutto became the first civilian chief martial law administrator; Zia and Musharraf retained their positions as army chief even as they elevated themselves to the position of president. Worse, political parties were created for the precise purpose of being handmaidens of military regimes. Generals, having seized power, saw advantage in conjuring up their own support base by creating the so-called king’s parties and taking party offices and assuming party leadership. Ayub Khan, as president, took on the title of the president of the Muslim League; Zia and Musharraf conjured up new political formations through defections and splits. Their real purpose, however, was not to give impetus to democratic functioning but to impede it and to use the political process to obtain a fig-leaf of legitimacy. The military rulers, at different points, sought to delegitimize not just the political process but even the political parties. The prime example was Zia’s attempt to take on the mantle of Amirul-momineen who drew his legitimacy not from the people but from Allah. It is a tribute to the political leaders and the people of Pakistan that the attempts of successive military governments to organize the polity in a party-less structure were not allowed to succeed. In the aftermath of the 1988 election, given the divisive role devised for the IJI (Islamic Jamhooriyat Ittehad or an Islamic Democratic Alliance) — a political formation instigated by the ISI — it was not surprising that the Punjab, under its leader Nawaz Sharif, took on the role of opposition. He was the leader of choice for the military; he headed the government of the largest and most prosperous province; he led the Pakistan Muslim League that had its power base in the province. He was well-placed to become the acclaimed focal point for voicing of all grievances and discontent against the federal government. For the first time, the Punjab

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portrayed itself as a victim, blaming the federal government for neglecting the interests of the province and favoring the other three smaller provinces. Punjabis would take pride in Punjabiyat and the Punjabi language, disregarding Urdu that had been imposed as the national language. This tended to turn things on their head since hitherto the smaller provinces had nursed grievances of neglect and discrimination, accusing the Punjabis of dominance. The central government, under Benazir and the PPP, was faced with the task of combating the political opposition that the PML and Nawaz Sharif represented — with active encouragement from the military — without hurting the Punjabi sentiment to be able to sustain its own considerable support base in the Punjab. That the PPP was portrayed as a usurper and its leader, Benazir, as ineffectual, even suspect, made countering the challenge posed by Nawaz Sharif in the name of the Punjab near impossible; giving in would be seen as capitulation by the central government, standing firm would adversely impact on the PPP’s fortunes in the province. Whatever may have been the flaws of the Benazir government, her dismissal in August 1990 after just twenty months in office, under the undemocratic provisions of the Eighth Amendment to the constitution retained from the Zia regime as insurance against political liberalization, did not resolve problems. Fresh elections were, indeed, held and brought Nawaz Sharif and the PML to office but within a matter of months, he, too, fell victim to the same constitutional coup. If anything, the decline in economic performance compounded discontent. The democratic interlude of 1988–96 did not strengthen liberal politics in Pakistan also because it coincided with declining GDP growth rates, development expenditure, reduction in social sector spending, and a rise in inflation, unemployment, and poverty. It was unfair of the military to blame the civilian governments for the consequences of the economic decisions taken during the military regimes. But it was also the failure of the civilian governments to overcome the imperatives laid down by the military and their inability to develop alternative priorities and sustainable policies for the revival of the economy. If there were few tears shed at the demise of democracy, yet again in 1999, the political parties were as much to blame for not having learnt their lesson. The constitution of Pakistan assigned sovereignty over the entire universe to Almighty Allah. But here on earth, it has been exercised in His name, more often than not, by the military. There have

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traditionally been three centers of power in Pakistan: the president, the prime minister, the COAS (chief of army staff). The PM is elected by the people and heads the government; the president is elected indirectly and heads the state; the COAS is an appointee of the two. But the creature has come to be more powerful than the creators on the basis of the coercive power that the military has acquired. The army has come to be the most powerful, the one institution that determines events in Pakistan. The constitution is what the military allows it to be. Thus, when Zia died, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, as chairman of the Senate was next in line of succession, and designated by the constitution to take over the office of the president. But it was not to be until the army had decided that he could do so. Indeed, the exercise of that power was so blatant that he was summoned to the GHQ, as former vice chief of army staff, General K. M. Arif has noted, to be informed of that decision.39 The courts have upheld the legitimacy of successive military coups. The only adverse judgments have come when the military rule had either ended or the military ruler was dead — Yahya Khan was declared a usurper after he was no longer in power; Zia’s dissolution of the National Assembly in 1988 was held to be invalid in law after his death. That the court took the cue from the military became further evident in the reversal of President Ghulam Ishaq Khan’s decision in dismissing Nawaz Sharif ’s government in 1993: the COAS, having given the nod to the dismissal, subsequently distanced himself from the decision. The military has always had a presence in Pakistan. Whenever issues of national importance were discussed between the president and the prime minister, the COAS was not only present but his voice was decisive. On occasions when there was a difference in view between the two, the COAS played the arbiter. Indeed, the military cast its shadow even when it was not present at meetings between the president and the prime minister as, for instance, during the discussions between Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Benazir Bhutto about the presidential elections of 1993.40 The civilians have not served Pakistan’s democracy any better. The blame for allowing the military to assume trappings of sovereignty and become the arbiter of Pakistan’s politics must, in the first instance, be laid at the doors of the political parties. Their governments were civilian but hardly civil; rule of law was subverted rather than being sustained; institutions were emasculated rather than being evolved. They have shown willingness to seek the military’s support for their

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political ambitions and for their singular inability to function in cohesion in promoting the evolution of democratic norms and institutions of governance. It was this division among the political parties that prevented the abrogation of the despised Eighth Amendment to the constitution devised by Zia to arrogate to himself the power to dismiss elected governments. Instead of constitutional processes being relied on to make and unmake governments, political parties chose to conspire with the presidency to undo governments under this amendment, which incentivized competitive supplication. There were, indeed, some attempts to come together and jointly undo the Eighth Amendment in the early 1990s. The ruling PML made their intentions in this regard clear and the PPP showed willingness to support. Unfortunately, the lure of office was stronger than the pursuit of principle. The PPP, despite being a victim of the same amendment, showed preference for supporting the president’s exercise of power under this law, yet again, as it would facilitate its return to office and actively worked towards that end. Like military rulers, democratic leaders — Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto, and Nawaz Sharif — all turned out to be as authoritarian and unwilling to share power. Authoritarian practices have alienated provinces. In the 1970 elections, for example, while the PPP had won overwhelming majorities in the Punjab and Sindh, it had won no seats in Balochistan and just one in the NWFP. Bhutto found this situation unpalatable enough to dismiss the government in Balochistan in 1973, causing the NWFP government to resign in protest whereafter the ANP leadership was jailed and tried for conspiracy and high treason. Bhutto never succeeded in pacifying Balochistan — nor did his successors, civil and military. Ironically, it was the military regime under Zia that reversed the decision to launch army operations in Balochistan. The operations rationalized under Bhutto as aimed at combating insurgency were halted; general amnesty announced; sentences already handed down, remitted; properties confiscated returned to owners. The ANP leaders were released and cases against them dropped.41 Some of the actions taken by succeeding civilian governments have similarly left an adverse imprint. Efforts to subvert the independence of the judiciary during civilian rule match those under military rule. General Musharraf ’s decision, as president, to get rid of the chief justice of the Supreme Court in 2007 was a replay of a similar effort by Nawaz Sharif ten years earlier when he was the prime minister.

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Successive presidents, too, played the game of divide and rule among the parties and leaders. They used persuasion as well as coercive tactics like threats, intimidation, and blackmail, as Nawaz Sharif put it in his radio address on April 17, 1993. They created cabals within parties; even created a king’s party. Such cabals would voice the president’s views within the parties, revolt against the party leadership when called upon to do so and split the party to form or join up with the king’s party. Two successive presidents dismissed three successive elected, civilian governments in a span of less than ten years before the Parliament, under Nawaz Sharif, struck back and abrogated the Eighth Amendment that made such dismissals possible. Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed the governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif in 1990 and 1993, respectively; Farooq Leghari dismissed Benazir’s government in 1997. Strangely, Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed Nawaz Sharif whom he preferred over Benazir; Leghari dismissed Benazir even though he was her nominee for president. To be able to achieve this objective, the president had to work in tandem with the military. Thus, the military was the one to whom the parties and the president looked to for success of their chosen path to undo democratic functioning. These provisions of the constitution continue to remain in force — the elections of 2008 and the subsequent deposing of Musharraf, notwithstanding. The tragedy of Pakistan has been that military men in power kept promising the nation that they would transfer power to the civilians while the civilians, when in power, did everything possible to facilitate the return of the military to power. Democracy, not surprisingly, has been the casualty.

Notes 1. Asif Zardari, Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2009. 2. Eric Hobsbawm, Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism (London: Little Brown, 2007), p. 100. 3. Ibid., p. 96. 4. Husain Haqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), p. 6. One result of Jinnah’s elaborate strategy was that India’s Muslims demanded Pakistan without really knowing the results of that demand. Once Jinnah’s demand for recognition of Muslim nationhood had been characterized

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5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

T. C. A. Rangachari as a demand for India’s division, Jinnah’s critics pointed out that any division of India along communal lines would inevitably have to include a division of the two major provinces, Punjab and Bengal, along similar lines. A few months before independence, Khwaja Nazimuddin, who later became Pakistan’s second governor general as well as its second prime minister, candidly told a British governor that he did not know ‘what Pakistan means and that nobody in the Muslim League knew.’ Ahmed Akbar, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity (London: Routledge 1997), p. 177, “Jinnah’s ideas about Paksitan remained vague. Vagueness was both the strength and weakness of the Pakistan movement. It became all things to all men drawing in a variety of people for different reasons but it also meant that once Pakistan was achieved there would be no clear defining parameters.” Stephen P. Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press, 2004), p. 69. B. N. Pande, General Editor, A Centenary History of the Indian National Congress Volume One (1885–1919) (New Delhi: Jointly published by All India Congress Committee (I)/Vikas Publishing House Private Limited, 1985), p. 282. Ibid., p. 16. Sir Alfred Lyall, Life of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava (London 1905), vol. 2, pp. 151–52, cited in Pande, A Centenary History, p. 107. Cited in Establishment of All India Muslim League, 1906. Part 2, A Publication of Nazaria-e-Pakistan Foundation from Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada, ed., Foundations of Pakistan: All-India Muslim League Dociments, vol. 1 (1906–24) and vol. 2 (1924–27) (Karachi: National Publishing House Ltd., 1969). Pande, A Centenary History, p. 40. Ibid., p. 40. Akbar, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity, p. 56. Jamiluddin Ahmad, Early Phase of Muslim Political Movement (Lahore, 1967), p. 56 cited in Establishment of All India Muslim League, 1906. Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan, p. 36. For a detailed exposition of this theme see Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Gul Hasan Khan, Memoirs (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 249. Ibid., p. 242. Benazir Bhutto, Daughter of the East: An Autobiography (London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1988), pp. 46, 59. Khan, Memoirs, p. 272. Barack Obama, President of the United States Remarks by the President on a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, March 27, 2009. The White

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House, Office of the Press Secretary, The Briefing Room. Speeches and Remarks.www.whitehouse.gov. Accessed April 15, 2009. 22. Roedad Khan, Pakistan — A Dream Gone Sour (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 89. 23. Bhutto, Daughter of the East, p. 4. 24. Nawaz Shuja, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 384. 25. Khan, A Dream Gone Sour, p. 94. 26. “The Saudi-isation of Pakistan” by Pervez Hoodbhoy, Newsline, Karachi, Pakistan, January 2009, http://www.newsline.com.pk/NewsJan2009/. Accessed April 15, 2009. 27. Shuja, Crossed Swords, p. 384. 28. “The Saudi-isation of Pakistan” by Pervez Hoodbhoy. 29. Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows (London: Picador, 2009). Interview published in The Hindustan Times, New Delhi, April 18, 2009. 30. “The Saudi-isation of Pakistan” by Pervez Hoodbhoy. 31. Bhutto, Daughter of the East, p. 25. 32. Ibid., Editor’s note, p. xi. 33. Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott Clark, Deception, The US and the Global Nuclear Conspiracy (India: Penguin Books, 2007), p. 186. 34. Ibid., p. 61. 35. Ibid., p. 82. 36. Ibid., p. 191. 37. Ibid., p. 449. 38. Ghulam Khan, Memoirs, p. 74. 39. K. M. Arif, Working with Zia (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 401 cited in Khan, A Dream Gone Sour, p. 178. 40. For a detailed account of the interaction between the president, PM and the COAS during the 1990s, see Khan, A Dream Gone Sour. 41. Ibid., p. 86.

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6 Elitist Political Culture and the Perils of Democracy in Pakistan Zafar Iqbal

Arguably, democracy has become a universally desired value because it gives voice to the people in the government, while promoting equality, justice, peace, and human rights. But the pathway to democracy has often been long, difficult, and frustrating; this is the lesson we have learned from the history of democracy in the West.1 In the past sixty-some years of its history, democracy has eluded Pakistan, although it is not clear whether the ruling elite — civilian or military — ever considered it seriously. Several reasons for this failure have been put forth, including military takeovers, a prevailing feudal culture (particularly in political parties), incompetent and corrupt leadership, an outdated institutional infrastructure, a low literacy rate, poverty and a weak middle class, a disoriented civil society, and, finally, foreign interventions due to Pakistan’s geo-strategic location in South Asia.2 In this essay, I have discussed the undemocratic practices of the dominant political players in Pakistan and attempted to answer the question of how a weak political culture has been an obstacle to a democratic Pakistan. It is argued that democratically elected Pakistani governments did not adhere to the required democratic principles in their conduct of affairs. And similarly, the opposition also played an important role in destabilizing the elected governments, ultimately eroding the democratic process. Unfortunately, leaders from all sides have been deeply involved in corruption and self-aggrandizement. Lack of democratic discourse has provided ripe opportunities to belligerent generals for prolonging military regimes. To support these arguments I examine evidence from various elected governments since 1971, when the eastern part of the country became the independent state of Bangladesh, and only the western part remained as Pakistan.

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Many scholars of democracy consider the civic or political culture of a society as an important ingredient for a sustainable democracy.3 Havel argues that a strong political culture leads to a vigilant civil society that in turn acts as a watchdog for democracy.4 The political culture of a community reflects its beliefs, perceptions, and values, such as, tolerance, acceptance of opposition, accountability, transparency, compromise, and commitment to democratic ideals. Political culture also ensures how democracy is practiced, and how a group of people will govern itself.

Civilian Governments and their Political Culture A democratic society can be realized only when its individual members behave according to democratic norms and values. The elected governments in Pakistan have failed because the political actors did not adhere to the democratic spirit. Briefly, the political culture of Pakistan can be characterized as complex, traditional, and feudal. A range of factors, such as enduring traditional beliefs, feudal values, distorted perceptions, and weak political institutions, have shaped Pakistan’s polity. Some of the traditional institutions that contribute to the complexity of the value system are the religion of Islam, semifeudal relations, unrelenting tribalism and provincialism, culture of patriarchy, strong colonial heritage, and dual educational system, among others.5 Expectations of authority and elitism are important components of the political culture in Pakistan inherited from the colonial system of rule through intermediaries.6 Thus, feudal, tribal, religious, familial, and military elites have dominated the political scene generation after generation.7 It is important to note that weak democratic institutions allowed these elites to maintain their supremacy and control. The rule of law, a free judiciary, and accountability does not suit the workings of elites. How else do we explain the fact that every ruler since Ayub Khan in 1958 to Asif Zardari in 2009, who assumed power in the name of democracy and public service, has ended up as a billionaire, while the country became improvised and half of the population still lives below the poverty line?8 On several counts the nation ranks at the bottom of the UN Human Development Index but ranks high on the Transparency International list of corrupt nations. In the following narrative I provide examples of the undemocratic conduct of Pakistan’s political elites.

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Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto: December 20, 1971–July 5, 1977 In 1970, for the first time, free and fair elections were held in Pakistan. The Awami League of Mujib-ur-Rehman emerged as a majority party in the eastern wing, whereas Z. A. Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) won a majority in the two provinces of Punjab and Sindh. Other smaller parties won in the smaller provinces of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Baluchistan. Top generals from West Pakistan were not willing to transfer power to a Bengali politician and Bhutto was not ready to sit in the opposition, either.9 Yahya and Bhutto created a rift with Mujib and instead of inviting him to form his government, the military was sent to East Pakistan. Major General Rao Farman Ali, advisor to the martial law administrator in Dhaka, wrote in his diary, “Green Land of East Pakistan will be painted red.”10 Soon violence broke out; the tragic events of the Bengalis’ genocide by the Pakistan army, its defeat by the Indian military, and ultimately, the disintegration of Pakistan occurred. Pakistan was dismembered simply because of the anti-democratic and criminal behavior of its military and a political leadership that could not accept the results of a fair election.11 For Pakistan, the decade of the 1970s was supposed to be a period of national reflection and assessment so that the nation could heal and embark on a path of democracy and progress but, sadly, it failed to learn from its own tragedy and continued, as usual, to witness more of the same in the coming decades. On December 20, 1971, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto replaced General Yahya Khan as the president and chief martial law administrator (CMLA) of the new Pakistan. Bhutto’s charismatic personality attracted many to write on his life, from the scholarly works of Stanley Wolpert to the memories of his childhood friend Pillo Mody. Born into an elite feudal family of Sindh, Bhutto started his political career in 1958 as a minister in the martial law cabinet of General Ayub Khan, who took power forcibly from President Major General Iskandar Mirza, Bhutto’s early benefactor and mentor. No doubt, Bhutto was charismatic, highly articulate, extremely sharp, and welleducated. He projected himself as a leader of the poor masses but, in fact, he was thoroughly an aristocrat deep in his bones. Most of his close associates described him as a highly ambitious, arrogant, and self-absorbed leader wrapped in vanity.12 He was considered one of

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the ten best-dressed people of the world.13 He successfully used the media to portray himself as a great leader, like Mao or Nehru. As head of state he gave the country a new constitution in 1973, successfully negotiated with India on several vital issues, put the country on the path to becoming a nuclear power, encouraged sciences in academia, promoted a populist culture among the masses, and made Pakistan an important country in the region and the Islamic world. However, here, I focus on his lack of commitment to democratic values that resulted in the failure to establish the democratic process in the country. Bhutto’s attitudes towards legitimate opposition, democraticdecision making, the rule of law, due democratic process, accountability, and corruption were rooted in his feudal background and his self-perception of unmatched genius destined for greatness.14 He was above all constraints and never subjected himself to the rules. Soon after assuming power he turned into an autocrat. He insisted that his party must dominate in all four provinces; he dismissed the coalition government in NWFP and imposed governor’s rule. In protest, the coalition government resigned in the province of Baluchistan. He later banned opposition parties, arrested their leadership, and kept them imprisoned for years. He never showed tolerance to any opposition and would use any tactic to silence it, including physical elimination.15 Eventually, in 1979, he received a death sentence in the murder case of the father of a close friend-turned-foe. Bhutto created his own paramilitary force, the “Federal Security Force” (FSF), in September 1972, to crush any opposition. Because of his deep distrust of the military, he would not rely on the military for his wishes, thus the need for FSF. Bhutto was so obsessed with power that he retained the position of civilian martial law administrator for almost two years. According to Talbot “the exercise of power not only fascinated [Bhutto], but fed his ego.”16 He filled the important slots of FSF with people having questionable reputation. Bhutto’s close associate and federal minister Dr Mubashir Hassan, writing about the head of the FSF, said, “an unprincipled, pompous, arrogant and unpopular officer who was known for his sadistic inclinations” was chosen to lead the organization.17 In appointments to vital positions, Bhutto would not follow institutional procedures or requirements. He alone made decisions, and he needed compliant people who would follow his orders faithfully, without questioning his authority.18 He used FSF to crush the democratic voices of friends

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and foes alike. All of his ideological partners who helped him create the socialist leaning party were tortured, imprisoned, disgraced, and even exiled. In fact, Bhutto seriously damaged the progressive and democratic movement by bringing a young liberal and progressive cadre into his party and then destroying them. His mentor J. A. Rahim was beaten up and he saved his life only by fleeing the country.19 As well, Bhutto betrayed his other benefactors like General Iskandar Mirza, General Ayub Khan and General Yahya Khan. Even the army and air chief, General Gul Hassan and Rahim Khan, who brought him to power in 1971, were removed in a dramatic and unceremonious way. Was Bhutto an opportunist who had no respect for people and complete disregard for the rule of law? Bhutto showed no regard for the democratic ideals of freedom, human rights, peace, and negotiation. This claim can be easily verified through his personal behavior highlighted in the news media and other pertinent literature. First of all, he tolerated a free media as long as it was not critical of his own actions or policies. In his own controlling ways, he allowed only positive and favorable coverage of himself.20 He resorted to Ayub Khan’s infamous Press and Publication Ordinance (PPO) to strictly curtail freedom of the press. He often used FSF to threaten and beat up non-cooperative media members. A free press is vital for democratic development; its mistreatment reveals the lack of democratic values of the Bhutto government. Another example demonstrating his attitude towards human rights was his appointment of a new army chief. After removing General Gul Hassan, Bhutto appointed General Tikka Khan, who had earned himself the title of the “Butcher of Bengal” for his horrendous slaughter of unarmed Bengali women, children, and elderly people. Through such an appointment Bhutto probably wanted to send a message to Bangladesh and India of his approval of this massacre.21 Certainly the appointment of a criminal with a racist temperament reflected Bhutto’s attitude towards human rights and genocide. Instead of trying Tikka Khan for war crimes and human rights violations, Bhutto rewarded him with highest military position. Sadly, Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, retained Tikka Khan in political positions for many years. Bhutto also exhibited no respect for the right of minorities in a democracy. In order to establish his supremacy in Baluchistan, he blamed Baluch national leaders for their restlessness and conspiracy to liberate Baluchistan.22 He sent in the military, and in the process,

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many Baluch people were killed including women and children. Baluch leadership was displaced and in December 1974 Bhutto declared victory but kept forces there until the end of his rule. The Baluch conflict was an issue of provincial rights that could have been solved through negotiations, but instead Bhutto used force to resolve this political conflict. Such military actions compounded the grievances of the smaller provinces and strengthened separatist sentiments. Another example reflecting Bhutto’s lack of concern for democratic ethics is the issue of provincial autonomy. To retain power at the center, the federal government denied smaller provinces their due share and rights, creating an environment of mutual distrust and insecurity. In 1973 smaller provinces demanded their rights to be addressed in the new constitution. Although coming from a smaller province himself Bhutto resisted their demands. He kept the power in the center by providing at least one hundred instances in the constitution where federal law could supersede provincial laws.23 Instead of democratizing the federation, he provided for the creation of an Islamic state within the constitution allowing an opportunity for the future Islamization of the country. Instead of building and strengthening the democratic institutions of the country, Bhutto weakened them. He dismissed provincial assemblies, appointed governors and ministers as he wished and replaced real politicians and intellectuals with feudal leaders and opportunists. He did not allow anyone in the party to succeed him except his daughter Benazir, thereby laying the foundations for a family-controlled party rather than a democratic institution necessary for a democracy. Benazir remained the chairperson of the party until her death in December 2007; and in her will, she appointed her son, Bilawal, as her heir apparent, and her husband as the regent until the son came of age; Bhutto achieved this by ignoring the senior party members. Her husband Zardari has maintained the same pattern of feudal ownership within the party. He brought his own people to core positions in both the party and the government. He brought two of his sisters to the parliament and appointed one to head the party’s women’s wing despite few qualifications. Those who disagree with his approach are marginalized or expelled from the party. For example, Barrister Aitzaz Ehsan, one of the most senior members who had held several high positions in the government and was a close confidant of Benazir Bhutto, was removed from the party’s

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central executive committee as he supported and led the movement for the restoration of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry. Several other senior party leaders have been sidelined for their dissent while information minister Sherry Rehman was let go as she disagreed with Zardari’s policy to use force against the lawyers’ movement. Thus, the feudal tradition still prevails in the party organization laid down by Z. A. Bhutto. The collapse of the socialist ideal has significantly weakened the progressive political forces in Pakistan, depriving them of an alternative vision. Since the 1990s, there has been no real ideological opposition in Pakistan. Mainly, the opposition is made up of the same elites, who are temporarily out of power; therefore, there is no genuine opposition that could nurture democratic tradition and culture. Opposition made up of the same feudal and business families cares less about accountability or the rule of law; instead it is focused on conspiracies and scandals to bring down the party in power. The opposition parties that suffered most during Z. A. Bhutto’s regime came together to form an alliance known as the “Pakistan National Alliance” (PNA) to face him in the elections of 1977. Most of the PNA leaders had lost faith in Bhutto’s words or his purported commitment to democratic ideals; therefore they also resorted to undemocratic ways to see him out of power. The opposition leader Asghar Khan sent a letter to the military generals asking them not to obey the illegal orders of Bhutto.24 There were allegations that some PNA leaders deliberately delayed negotiations to provide an opportunity for military takeover. According to Professor Ghafoor, a member of the PNA negotiation team, an agreement had been reached between the two groups on the night of July 4.25 General Zia used this delay as an excuse for assuming power. It was further confirmed when some of the PNA leaders became ministers in the martial law cabinet. Some PNA leaders also demanded that Zia postpone national elections until the accountability of the Bhutto government was complete. Due to PNA’s poor commitment to democratic ethics, General Zia successfully used the opposition parties to assume power and then got rid of them. In this regard Benazir Bhutto writes, “When six months after my father’s death, Zia had dispensed with the ministries and banned all political parties, the PNA found themselves in the political wilderness.”26 With Z. A. Bhutto gone and political parties banned, Zia had made it possible to rule the country for eleven years. This is an example of how politicians’ lack

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of commitment to the democratic values put the country in the hands of a repressive dictatorship. General Zia ul-Haq assumed power in 1977 and immediately imposed martial law. He concentrated the powers of the president, as well as the prime minister and the army chief, into his own hands. He ruled the country with an iron fist, seriously undermining the constitution, the judicial system, and other institutions. He exploited religious ideology in its crude form to gain legitimacy and the rationale for his rule from the clerics. He promoted Islamization in the society at large, and worse, in the military. On his watch the culture of drugs and weapons proliferated as he totally engaged Pakistan in the Afghan war, fighting America’s proxy war against the USSR. Today, three decades later, Pakistan is fighting for its own survival against the Taliban, who control western parts of the country and have spread into most of urban Pakistan. Zia’s rule is considered the darkest period for democracy in Pakistan. He died in a plane crash in mysterious circumstances in 1987. Recently, his son Ejaz ulHaq, publically blamed CIA and some of the top Pakistani generals for his father’s assassination. During the decade of 1988–98, political discourse of the nation reflected the struggle between the ghosts of Z. A. Bhutto and Zia ulHaq, represented by Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, respectively. Both twice formed governments taking turns. Instead of strengthening democratic institutions and promoting a democratic environment, they engaged in bickering, nepotism, and corruption.

Benazir Bhutto: December 2, 1988–August 6, 1990 With General Zia gone, the possibility of democratic process returned to Pakistan. Zia’s supporters in the political and military leadership tried to manipulate the elections in 1988 — but, still, Benazir was able to win a simple majority in the parliament. From the outset, she had to work with powerful opponents: the president, the military chief, and the chief minister of Punjab, the most powerful province of Pakistan. Her twenty-one month stint was mired by money scandals, inefficiency, and mismanagement. Benazir’s first political blunder was to enter into an agreement with the army chief, Mirza Aslam Beg. By accepting the following five conditions she seriously undermined her position. Those conditions

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were: (a) no change in the Afghan policy; (b) no change in nuclear policy; (c) no change in defense policy; (d) no meddling in the administrative set-up of the civil service, and (e) General Zia’s family was not be harassed.27 Conceding to these conditions hamstrung the elected government from addressing the serious domestic and foreign policy matters and rendered it meaningless. First, the Afghan policy of opposing the USSR in Afghanistan and supporting Afghan warlords and criminals did not have popular support in Pakistan. Pro-democracy forces considered the Afghan war an American war waged by the Pakistani military to make money; it was an adventurist war that had serious social, political, and economic consequences that over time destabilized Pakistan. Unfortunately, General Zia was more interested in the war vis-à-vis the American largess than in the stability of Pakistan. By agreeing not to change the Afghan policy, Benazir Bhutto ignored popular sentiment and the impact of that war on Pakistan and the region. Next, the defense policy of training and supporting Kashmiri mujahideen forfeited any prospect of normalizing relations with India, destabilizing the region. This defense policy had also been a drain on the national resources, badly needed for public welfare, social development, and education. Third, civil services had become indolent and corrupt; therefore, reforms were badly needed in the administration to improve performance. In a democratic society, efficient and honest administration is vital for the delivery of public services like education, health, and law and order. Finally, there were stories in the national and international press about the Zia family’s involvement in the drug trade.28 The public also wanted to know about the billions of U.S. dollars Zia and his close military associates had accumulated. The nation had been hurt by Zia’s eleven years of dictatorship; people wanted accountability, peace, democracy, and progress, thus, they had voted for Benazir’s party. By entering this agreement with the military she dashed the democratic aspirations of the people and undermined the legitimacy of her government. This reflected on her political immaturity but also on her lack of commitment to democratic ideals. Still, Benazir Bhutto continued entering into deals with military generals despite her substantive experience in politics, perhaps because of her sense of insecurity; because she understood, as other politicians understand, that the final arbiter in national matters in Pakistan remains the military.

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Although Benazir attended the elite schools of Harvard and Oxford, like her father she could not overcome the feudal mindset she inherited. She felt great pride in her family’s feudal background. In her autobiography, Daughter of the East, she notes with some pride her family’s feudal power: “Our ancestors, who had owned much of the land in the [Sindh] province and dominated its politics for hundreds of years.” On the same page she further writes, “[The] Bhuttos were among the largest employers of agricultural workers in the province. Our lands like those of other landowners in Sindh were measured in square miles, not acres.”29 Many of her decisions adhered to her feudal perceptions and values. In South Asia, selecting a spouse is a critical decision for a family, even more so for a politically prominent family. Being an educated woman she married Asif Zardari, a man who had little education or any intellectual depth. Rather, he had a flawed reputation as a playboy.30 In her autobiography she admired her husband’s feudal background as a qualification for marriage. Benazir’s personal sense of ownership did not permit her to allow her brother Mir Murtaza Bhutto to hold office in the party, as he could become a potential challenger. She even removed her mother from the position of party chairperson because of her suggestion to nominate Murtaza as the chief minister of Sindh.31 Later, during Benazir’s second government, Murtaza was killed. Murtaza’s daughter Fatima Bhutto has publicly accused Asif Zardari for her father’s murder.32 According to Pakistani-born British historian and social activist, Tariq Ali, “the Peoples Party had now formally become a family heirloom, a property to be disposed of at the will of its proprietor.”33 Sadly, Tariq Ali’s assessment of Bhutto’s party is applicable to all the major political parties of Pakistan. With these political parties there is little hope for a democratic culture to take root in the country. According to Ian Talbot, Pakistan has entered a new political era that is characterized by the politics of patronage and confrontation rather than of principle and consensus.34 In Pakistan, the political parties failed to become institutions to train and educate their cadre in democratic traditions, which has undermined the growth of democracy at the grass-roots. At this point in its history, Pakistan needs a genuine democratic political party that adheres to the ideals of justice, equality, progress, human rights, and peace in the region. Political rivalry between Benazir and Nawaz Sharif as the chief minister of Punjab disappointed the public, destabilized the political

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system, and strengthened anti-democratic forces in the establishment. Duels to put each other down revealed their selfish and amateurish mindsets, while publicly claiming to bring democracy to Pakistan. Benazir appointed the infamous General Tikka Khan as governor of Punjab, over popular Punjabi opposition. Tikka Khan (“the butcher of Bengal”) was considered a man without principles, who could commit crimes to prove his party loyalty. When the Nawaz Muslim League presented its supplementary budget, Benazir’s Peoples Party staged a walkout in the Punjab assembly with the intention of causing financial problems for the provincial government. Benazir Bhutto also rejected the Punjab government’s call for a meeting of the Council of Common Interests (CCI) to resolve financial issues between the provinces and the federal government. Bhutto’s government became very personal when it chose not to provide railway wagons to transport iron scrap for Ittefaq Foundries owned by the Sharifs. But Nawaz Sharif responded in kind by launching personal attacks against Benazir Bhutto and her party immediately after the elections. He, too, rejected all federal government initiatives, right or wrong; he created a parallel government of his own, often hostile to the center. Exploiting provincial feelings, he presented himself as the savior of the Punjab, which, in fact, has been the province dominating the smaller provinces since independence. He created his own Bank of Punjab and a provincial television channel to portray Punjabis as a deprived nationality. He vehemently opposed developmental projects pursued under Benazir’s “People’s Work Program.” Both leaders were so blinded by personal squabbles that they ended up supporting their common enemy, President Ishaq Khan, who dismissed both governments, one after the other. First, Nawaz asked the president to sack Benazir’s government, and when Nawaz assumed premiership, Benazir contacted the president to remove Nawaz’s government in return for her support for the president’s bid for a second term. Once again, personal ambitions of politicians triumphed over national democratic objectives. In the end, Benazir Bhutto’s government was dismissed on August 6, 1990. No one could defend her performance as she failed democracy by failing to perform democratically.

Nawaz Sharif: November 6, 1990–April 18, 1993 One reason that political leaders have lacked commitment to democratic tradition is because of their association with the military. It is common knowledge in Pakistan that rarely can a politician climb

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to power without the support of the Pakistan military and endorsement from the United States.35 General Ayub Khan groomed Z. A. Bhutto, while General Zia patronized Nawaz Sharif. The Sharif family’s personal contacts with generals elevated Nawaz to the position of chief minister in 1985. Nawaz remained loyal to Zia until his death. An example of undemocratic ethics is observed in the conduct of elections held in 1990 after Benazir’s dismissal. President Ishaq, representing the establishment, colluded with politicians to influence the outcome of the elections. He appointed caretaker governments in the center and in the provinces that were deeply antagonistic to Benazir’s party. Benazir and her husband were kept from campaigning because of the pending corruption cases against them. Asif Zardari was arrested while Nawaz Sharif was provided government resources to run his campaign. The caretaker chief minister of Punjab aided him. According to Hamid Khan, “The caretakers under the guidance and support of the president were to ensure that the PPP [Benazir’s party] would not return to power.”36 The president even went a step further and on a radio broadcast appealed to the nation to reject the Pakistan Peoples Party. “He used the expression that he had already put them [PPP] in the coffin and it was for the nation to bury them.”37 Elections were held and the desired results were achieved, as rigging the campaign has become an established practice of political campaigning in Pakistan.38 Another blow to democracy was dealt with no remorse. The public treasury of an economically ailing nation funded this drama. Neither the president nor the election commission was held accountable for the sham elections. Like Benazir, Nawaz Sharif ’s rule entailed stories of corruption. Corruption in Pakistan is still rampant, engulfing all aspects of life. It is so wide-spread that not one single government could claim to be free from it since Ayub Khan’s government in 1958. Probably, corruption is the most compelling reason to pursue a career in politics or military or civil administration in Pakistan. In Tariq Ali’s view Benazir deprived the country of approximately U.S. $1.5 billion while Sharif stashed away U.S. $3 billion during his stint.39 According to the investigative writer Mujahid Hussain, in the past thirty years corrupt politicians, generals, and others have stolen about U.S. $150 billion from the country.40 Nawaz Sharif built his family fortune in steel, sugar, cotton, textile, and real estate projects. He brought his business skills into the domain of politics and used them to destabilize rival governments

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and strengthen his own position by buying parliamentarians through money, urban plots of land, lucrative jobs, and other material gains. Many of his policies, like privatization, the yellow cab scheme, cooperative societies, and the motorway scheme, became breeding grounds for corruption.41 Similarly, Bhutto’s spouse, Asif Zardari, was allegedly involved in corruption, blackmail, bribery, graft, and kidnapping and even murder; because of his influence peddling, he acquired the nickname “Mr Ten Percent.” Although President Ishaq Khan dismissed Benazir’s government for corruption, three years later, in 1993, he swore in Asif Zardari as a federal minister in the caretaker government. What kind of example is this to be set by the president of a country? Corruption, lavish life-styles and political power are interconnected phenomena. The few prominent political families of the country are billionaires. They retain homes and businesses in the Middle East and the West. Their children attend Western private schools, meet domestic and foreign dignitaries, and prepare to buy their way into the high public offices. Their families live in sprawling homes, drive luxury vehicles, consume exclusive brand-name products, and retain an army of servants and maids to provide for every comfort. These elites dominate electoral politics, making it impossible for the ordinary citizens to run for a public office, blocking honest, principled leaders ever from rising. Sadly, accountability for embezzlement in Pakistan is very difficult or almost impossible to establish for several reasons. First, embezzlement is widespread in all institutions, including the judiciary, the executive, and legislative branches, the armed forces, the private sector, and even the media. Second, powerful people at the top are complicit in corruption: for example, the former prime minister Shaukat Aziz wanted to sell the famous Pakistan Steel Mills and other profit-making public sector enterprises to parties of his interests for pennies, which was only prevented at the last minute by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. In retaliation, President Musharraf removed and arrested the chief justice of Pakistan. Thanks to the lawyers’ movement he was restored to his position of chief justice. Third, no government has ever made any serious effort at the national level to root out corruption. Fourth, although the public is fed up of corruption, there has been no public demand or struggle for its eradication.42 Rather, people keep electing the same corrupt politicians and their parties.

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Overall, a weak democratic culture has allowed corruption to weaken the country and its institutions. Rampant corruption is reflected in the quality of leadership to which the nation has been subjected. The prevailing environment of mal-administration, the law and order disturbances, and corruption scandals made it easier for the president to send the Sharif government home on April 18, 1993.

Benazir Bhutto (Second Term): October 19, 1993–November 5, 1996 Another powerful reason to suggest that Benazir Bhutto was not committed to democratic norms is that she took no lessons from her previous mistakes and wasted another opportunity to lead the country to democracy. Her second government was dismissed by her own appointed president, once again on the grounds of mismanagement, the law and order situation, an assault on the judiciary, corruption, and nepotism. During her re-election campaign, Benazir promised to restore the constitution and the judiciary, two vital components of a democracy. Was Benazir Bhutto really serious about bringing democracy to the poor people of Pakistan or was she merely using democracy to attain personal power? Certainly her supporters who benefited under her will consider such questions outrageous. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that she lacked commitment to democratic ethics and ideals, her claims to the contrary notwithstanding. The constitution of Pakistan had been badly distorted by General Zia to appropriate all the state powers into his hands for blunt authoritarianism. According to Hamid Khan, the power Zia had assumed, “he exercised recklessly, maliciously, and capriciously, at all times to the detriment of the PPP.”43 Thus, it was necessary for Benazir’s government to correct the constitution so that democracy could follow its due course. Instead, she rushed to remove the government in the province of NWFP through constitutional subterfuge.44 She had no tolerance for the democratically chosen government of other parties. She wanted to install the government of her party in the province despite being in the minority. She asked the president to issue a proclamation under Article 234 of the constitution to remove the current government and impose governor’s rule in the province.45 The president complied, and on February 25, 1994, the provincial government of NWFP was removed. This undemocratic action

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from the outset opened another round of confrontational politics, damaging democratic discourse. Later, Benazir’s party acquired a majority in the provincial parliament, thanks to huge sums of money paid in bribes.46 This example reflects on Benazir’s disregard for legitimate opposition and on how she failed to promote the muchneeded culture of tolerance and transparency. Under a powerful military, Pakistan became a “praetorian state,” or a state whose political economy is determined and shaped by defense.47 In such a state, its other institutions such as the legislature and judiciary are weak and serve the dominant interest of the military. Former army chief General Aslam Beg viewed the role of the “judiciary as the facilitator [of military rule] under the cover of the Law of Necessity.”48 Since 1958, the Superior Court of Pakistan has legitimized the illegal regimes of generals, stunting the development of democratic institutions. In order to bring democracy to Pakistan, the judiciary must be made an independent institution to control the excesses of executive power and to dispense justice. Benazir promised to reform the judiciary but unfortunately, she further weakened it by removing the chief justices in the provinces of Sindh, Punjab, and the NWFP. Then, she tried to pack the judiciary with many unqualified judges. Ironically, she got in trouble with her own appointed chief justice of Pakistan. Further, she filled the Supreme Court with ad hoc judges. Through several such moves she damaged the institution of the judiciary. During Nawaz Sharif ’s second government, in 1997, the Supreme Court of Pakistan faced another crisis that badly tarnished the image of the judiciary. In an effort to constitute a favorable judiciary, Sharif got into a personal conflict with the chief justice of Pakistan and the president. Ten of the Supreme Court judges, discontented with the chief justice’s attitude, formed an opposing group that favored Nawaz Sharif, thus, dividing the judiciary. The divided judiciary engaged in bickering and in order to put each other down, both groups took decisions against each other, reducing the judicial decisions to mockery. Nawaz’s followers, including ministers and parliamentarians, stormed the chief justice’s Court, setting an unprecedented example of contempt of the Court. Finally, this episode ended when the chief justice was removed and the president of Pakistan resigned. It also struck a heavy blow to the government of Nawaz Sharif. In sum, the judiciary in Pakistan has been obsequious to the military, loath to discipline lawless politicians, and protective of unethical judges.

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Benazir’s second term also ended under a cloud of corruption and incompetence. The nation had realized that she had no vision for the future of the country.49 Common perception prevailed that she was more interested in looting the wealth of the nation than in bringing prosperity and betterment to the poor people of Pakistan. Hamid Khan has very appropriately summed up her rule in the following words, “The legacy of her government has been corruption, high inflation, political and economic uncertainty, disillusionment, and widespread apathy amongst the common citizens.”50

Nawaz Sharif (Second Term): February 17, 1997–October 12, 1999 After Benazir’s dismissal, the president of her party, Mr Farooq Leghari, needed protection from Benazir, so he entered into an agreement with the opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif. This provided support for Nawaz in the elections of 1997. The president made several concessions, including an amendment in the election law to enable the Sharif brothers to contest the elections. The Sharif brothers were defaulters on huge loans they had taken from the banks. As a result they could not participate in the elections. With the support of the president, Nawaz Sharif returned to power with a more than two-third majority while Benazir was badly defeated. Nawaz had an unexpected mandate and he used it to strengthen his position. The president embodies all the powers under article 58(2)(b) of the constitution, and that allows him to dismiss the government at will. The first thing Nawaz did was to quietly, and without due process, push an amendment through the parliament to cancel the discretionary powers of the president to dissolve the assembly. All political parties were against this article so it passed without any delay. This reduced President Leghari to merely a symbolic head of state. Leghari tried to fight back but eventually resigned from office unceremoniously. With no real opposition, Nawaz Sharif now had all the power to hire and fire anyone, including the army chief and the chief justice of Pakistan. Soon the nation saw a civilian dictator rather than a democrat running the country. He personalized power and ruled the country like a private fiefdom.51 He pursued undemocratic policies and routinely engaged in unethical practices. He sacked several generals and appointed Pervez Musharraf as the army chief. After a squabble, the general assumed

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power, arrested Nawaz Sharif and charged him with treason and kidnapping. To save his skin, Sharif entered into an agreement with Musharraf by promising to quit politics and leave the country for ten years, thanks to the Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz and the U.S. president William Clinton’s efforts. These examples clearly reflect on the undemocratic behavior of Pakistani rulers — but also suggest the influence of Saudi Arabia and the United States in Pakistan politics. Musharraf recklessly ruled the country for almost nine years further weakening the institutions. Consumption-based, supply-side economic policies created a sense of economic growth in the shortterm that Musharraf claimed to be his greatest achievement. To justify his rule, he devised his own strategy to bring democracy to Pakistan in three different phases that he articulated in his every speech, projecting himself as an intellectual. To build his own purported democratic team of politicians, he gathered the worst of the political elements, the most blatant opportunists from all parties, who in an ordinary situation could not have ever imagined being in powerful positions for so long. Not a single minister from his team could win the election in 2008. His imported prime minister, the U.S.-based Shoukat Aziz, refused to come back to Pakistan and did not show the courage to face the courts for his wrong doings, embarrassing Musharraf. In the aftermath of 9/11, under blunt threats from the Bush administration, Musharraf made Pakistan a frontline state on the war on terror by accepting all the demands of Washington. During his nine years in power, Musharraf failed to devise an effective, holistic policy to deal with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, allowing the two organizations to grow exponentially, now posing a serious threat to the stability of Pakistan. Many people in Pakistan believed, and continue to believe, that neither America nor Musharraf were serious about ending the Taliban game for their own reasons. The rise of Taliban in Pakistan is partly an outcome of successively failed governments and inequitable distribution of wealth and policies that reward the rich in the cities and marginalize the powerless, rural people. Similarly, the private educational system serves the elite segments, whereas the poorly funded public school system is illequipped to deliver quality education. Under the influence of the neo-conservative policies, the public educational system has about collapsed, thereby providing space for religious schools to fill, and recruit students from the impoverished rural areas. Inequity in education contributes to social inequality, creating a ripe environment

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for the Taliban and other militant groups to recruit disillusioned Pakistani youth. Amazingly, the same people who are responsible for the creation of the Taliban are now in the forefront of the war on terror, making money at the both ends. Soon after becoming the chief of army staff in October 1998, Musharraf had embarked on an adventurist operation in Kargil, Kashmir (1999), which pushed Pakistan and India close to another war. The war was averted when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif rushed to Washington to seek President Clinton’s intervention, claiming that he had no knowledge of the Operation Badr, which Musharraf later denied. It is questionable that as a military ruler Musharraf will have any serious commitment to democracy. But after proclaiming himself as the president, he routinely professed his commitment to democracy in Pakistan that he used as a ploy to stay in power. In the end, fearing an unfavorable judgment against his tenure as the president of Pakistan, he arrested sixty judges along with their families. His unwise actions gave rise to a powerful lawyers’ movement supported by a powerful media and people grown tired of empty promises and autocratic rule. He was forced to quit office and for now lives in the West.

Asif Ali Zardari: February 18, 2008–Present The constrained and weak political system of Pakistan has failed to produce visionary, principled leaders. What it has produced are narcissistic, inept, and narrow-minded rulers. We have seen how these rulers — civilian and military — have behaved to run the affairs of the nation. They have damaged the country to its core. Sadly, they have served the interests of a garrison state (of armed forces) and America well. The U.S. has supported tyrants and dictators in Pakistan since 1958.52 According to Tariq Ali, it is well-known in the Pakistani media that after the army chief, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan is the most important individual in the country.53 For Pakistan to cultivate true democracy, the anti-democratic role of the U.S., Pakistani military, and feudalism has to be eliminated. Unfortunately, there is no dearth of unscrupulous leaders in Pakistan but Zardari tops the list. His entire career testifies to unprincipled practices. President Zardari was imprisoned for corruption. Zardari’s arrival to the presidency was facilitated by the U.S. and

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the U.K. through negotiations with President Musharraf. Musharraf promulgated an ordinance in July 2007 known as the “National Reconciliation Ordinance” (NRO) under which corruption cases against Benazir, Zardari, and others were to be dropped and Musharraf was to continue as a president. It is widely known that the U.S. and the Pakistan military were party to this arrangement where an unpopular president was retained and an embezzler of national wealth let off the hook. Pakistani media considered NRO damaging, while the Western, pro-democracy media presented Benazir as the champion of democracy.54 Through such shady deals, the people of Pakistan have come to understand that the U.S. and the U.K. are not the friends of democracy in Pakistan. Zardari’s first year was anything but democratic. He broke his promises to restore the judiciary several times, intemperately claiming that, “his words and promises were not the holy words of Quran.” Restoration of the judiciary was a national demand so people were deeply disappointed in Zardari’s irresponsible utterances. People were further shocked when no one in Zardari’s party publicly criticized him for such an attitude. Rather, his main party figures went on to defend this unethical position. Also, it was appalling to see how Zardari’s coalition partners joined his course, saying farewell to democratic norms. In March 2009, Zardari was forced to yield to the lawyers’ movement, restoring the judiciary to its position. Because of their role, Zardari and his allies were seen as the foes of justice and democracy. Zardari does not meet the criteria required for holding public office, which requires a college degree. The chief justice Hameed Doggar lowered the qualification standards to allow Zardari to become the president of Pakistan. Zardari is the most powerful civilian president as he holds all the powers under article 58 (2)(b) of the constitution till 2010. As president he has to be neutral but he retains his party’s chairpersonship, which creates a conflict of interest with the office of the president. The concentration of power in one individual has reduced the parliament to a rubber stamp. He dismissed the Punjab government and imposed governor’s rule. Despite attempts to buy off the loyalties of Punjabi parliamentarians, he failed and had to backtrack on his undemocratic decision. To appease opportunists, his weak government has formed the largest cabinet in the country’s history with around 100 ministers and advisors. He has surrounded himself with unelected officials sidelining the prime minister and

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the cabinet. Decisions are made by him and not by institutions. The Zardari government has no vision for the country. According to the Pakistani press, the country is facing the worst crisis ever, while the leadership is totally incompetent. After three years into power, an elected government has totally failed to improve the situation in the country. Every aspect of life has further deteriorated due to mismanagement, corruption, and absence of coherent policy-making. The rulers are detached from the public and their miseries, eroding faith in the democratic process. Meanwhile, the establishment has recovered fully from its low-point reached during Musharraf ’s time and seems to be ready for another take-over, thanks to incompetent and corrupt politicians. Sadly, Zardari and his allies have not learned any lesson from the past and neither have the people who keep voting them into power.

Conclusion The political system in Pakistan is in tatters and its culture is wholly undemocratic. Those who have ruled and continue to rule the country never truly believed in democracy. Those who championed democracy turned out to be authoritarians. They merely used democracy as a slogan to attain power. A question may be asked, is democracy possible in Pakistan? Although democracy seems distant, very distant, a tiny ray of hope has emerged with the lawyers’ movement supported by a robust media and an emerging popular movement, albeit a nascent one. That one individual, the chief justice of Pakistan, can stand up to promote and protect justice is an encouraging sign. This has given birth to a new hope for democracy, supported by the confidence that the peoples’ power can prevail over tyrants and dictators.

Notes 1. Shery Burman, “How Democracies Emerge: Lessons From Europe,” Journal of Democracy 18(1) (January 2007): pp. 28–41. 2. For a detailed discussion of the causes of failure of democracy in Pakistan see Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Irshad Ahmad Haqqani, “Failure of Democracy in Pakistan?” The Muslim World 96(2) (April 2006): pp. 219–32.

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3. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1963), p. 8. 4. Vaclav Havel, “How Europe Could Fail,” The New York Review of Books, 40(19) (November 18, 1993), p. 3. Address to the General Assembly of the Council on Europe, Vienna, October 9, 1993. 5. For more discussion, see Marvin G. Weinbaum, “Civic Culture and Democracy in Pakistan,” Asian Survey, 36(7) (July 1996): pp. 639–54. Poorly funded public education system versus private system for the rich. 6. Talbot, Pakistan, p. 13. 7. Ibid., pp. 2–3. 8. Hamid Khan, Constitutional and Political History of Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2009, 2nd. edn): pp. 596–600; and Mujahid Hussain, Badunwani Ki Hukamrani: Ayub Khan se Pervez Musharraf tak (Rule of Corruption: From Ayub Khan to Musharraf) (Lahore: Nigarishat Publishers, 2009). 9. Lt. General Gul Hassan Khan, Memories of Lt.-General Gul Hassan Khan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1993). Also see Nawaz Shuja, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars within (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 263. 10. Shuja, Crossed Swords, p. 280. 11. A. Mascarenhas, The Rape of Bangladesh (Delhi, Vanguard Publishers, 1971), p. 70–81 quoted in Talbot, Pakistan, p. 195. 12. Khan, Memories. 13. Hussain, Badunwani, p. 75. 14. Talbot, Pakistan, p. 217. 15. Shuja, Crossed Swords, p. 332. 16. Talbot, Pakistan, p. 216. 17. Mubashir Hassan, The Mirage of Power: An Inquiry into Bhutto Years, 1971–1977 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 268. 18. Oriana Fallaci, Interview with History (Hardcover) (New York: Liveright, 1st edition, 1976), p. 190. 19. See Lawrence Ziring, “Pakistan: A Political Perspective,” Asian Survey 15(7) (July, 1975): pp. 630–33. 20. For a discussion, see Shuja, Crossed Swords, pp. 344–45. 21. Ibid., p. 325. 22. Rafi Raza, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and Pakistan 1967–1977 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 269. 23. Anwar H. Syed, The Discourse and Politics of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (London: MacMillan, 2000), p. 175. 24. M. Asghar Khan, My Political Struggle (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 501. 25. Murtaza Anjum, Kon Keese Gia? (Who Left How?) (Lahore: Dar-UlShaor, 2007), p. 217. 26. Benazir Bhutto, Daughter of the East (London: Mandarin, 1988), p. 164.

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27. Admiral Iftikhar A. Sirohey, Truth Never Retires (Lahore: Jang Publishers, 2000), p. 367. 28. Ahmed Saleem, Siassatdano ki Jabri Naehallian (Forced Disqualifications of Politicians) (Lahore: Jang Publishers, 1991), p. 137. 29. Benazir, Daughter, p. 29. 30. Tariq Ali, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (Lahore: Good Books, 2008, Urdu edn), p. 224. 31. Ibid., p. 223. 32. Ibid., p. 226. 33. Ibid., p. 239. 34. Talbot, Pakistan, p. 310. 35. General (retd.) Mirza Aslam Beg, “The Powerbrokers of Democracy,” The Nation, Lahore, April 6, 2007. 36. Khan, Constitutional, p. 404. 37. Ibid., p. 411. 38. M. Waseem, The 1993 Elections in Pakistan (Lahore, Vikas Publications, 1994), p. 39 quoted in Talbot, Pakistan, p. 331. 39. Ali, The Duel, p. 17. 40. Hussain, Badunwani, p. 10. 41. For detailed discussions, see Khan, Constitutional, pp. 412–26. 42. For a detailed discussion on the issue of corruption, see Khan, Constitutional, p. 596, and Ahmed, Siassatdano Ki Jabri. 43. Khan, Constitutional, p. 434. 44. Ibid., p. 428. 45. Ibid., p. 429. 46. Ziring. Pakistan in the Twentieth Century, pp. 556–57. 47. Talbot, Pakistan, p. 3. 48. Shuja, Crossed Swords, p. 33. 49. Weekly Time of April 17, 1995, p. 16. 50. Khan, Constitutional, p. 441. 51. Ibid., p. 473. 52. Hillary Clinton, the U.S. secretary of state, admitted to the Appropriations Sub-committee on State and Foreign Operations, Washington, DC, on May 19, 2009 that some of the problems faced by Pakistan today are a direct result of American policies and funding in the 1980s. Islamabad, The News International, May 21, 2009. 53. Ali, The Duel, p. 242. 54. Ibid., p. 206.

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7 Pakistan’s Pursuit of Democracy Frederic Grare

Following

a year of political crisis which culminated with the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s election of 2008 had generated a lot of expectations in Pakistan. The opposition had won by a landslide. More than eight years after Pervez Musharraf ’s coup, government was finally returning to civilian hands. Anxious to restore the morale, prestige, and professionalism of the army the chief of army staff, Pervez Kayani, had promised a relatively smooth electoral process. The hope was that civil/military relations would be redefined and democracy consolidated. However, Pakistan soon went back to its old habits. Civilian political mistakes and a firm determination of the military to prevent effective decision-making power in security and foreign affairs matters to slip out of their control quickly limited the elected government’s freedom of action to manage current affairs. Pakistan’s armed forces only granted sufficient space for democratic forces to pacify the opposition to authoritarianism. This was by no means a novelty in Pakistan’s troubled political life. The crisis of political leadership started only two years after independence. Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan died before they could consolidate the political institutions of the new state. Their immediate successors had neither the stature to run a state nor the motivation to mobilize and inspire the people and were unable to evolve a national consensus. By the time the first constitution was framed, in 1956, the political institutions were already in decline while the military maintained a disciplined and very cohesive profile. Their image as the bulwark of the new state, their ethnic and regional cohesion as well as their de facto alliance with the bureaucracy prepared the way for their dominance. From 1954 onwards the bureaucratic-military elite changed federal and provincial governments at will.1 The political leaders had lost the battle. In October 1958, the Ayub Khan coup did formalize military dominance but did not initiate it.

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Ayub Khan was forced out of power in 1969 but was immediately followed by another general, Yayha Khan, who stepped down in 1971 after the East Pakistan secession and defeat against India. In 1977 Zia ul-Haq seized power and hanged the democratically elected prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. He disappeared in 1988 in the crash of his helicopter that also killed the American ambassador to Pakistan who was on board. The last episode to date of direct military rule was initiated by a coup staged by Pervez Musharraf in October 1999. It ended in 2008 when the dictator was forced to step down. In between eras of military dictatorship, the rare periods of civilian government that Pakistan has experienced since 1958 were often no more than pseudo-democratic intervals during which the military kept pulling the strings, allowing the civilians only a narrow political space to manage current affairs, but making sure that nothing considered essential for the military institutions remained outside its control. The reasons for Pakistan’s inability to move out of military domination are a recurrent theme of the literature on Pakistan. It is almost a cliché today to say that the army owes its role to the extremely difficult conditions in which the country emerged as an independent entity. The constraints of external security, the scope of the domestic problems, especially ethnic and communal feuds with the central government, immediately made the security and integrity of the young state the primary concern of the Pakistani decision makers. As a matter of fact, Pakistan did present at the time of its creation all the characteristics of a developing state likely to favor the expansion of an army role: a weak social cohesion, an extremely fragmented class structure, a weak middle class, an absence of symbols likely to favor social and political mobilization, weak political institutions, a weakness in and inefficiency and corruption of political parties, a mediocrity of the political personnel, a lingering conflict between the center and the provinces. Yet, civilian elites were not innocent in the process either. Even when democratically elected, they were never truly interested in consolidating democratic institutions. Neither were the political elite willing or able to enforce good government, economic progress, or simply accept the orderly succession of elected governments. The 1989–99 period was particularly interesting in this regard. The army was the referee of the power struggle dominated by the rivalry between Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who succeeded each other as prime minister. But none of them ever opposed the sacking of his/her rival by the military.

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The search for explanations for the weakness of the democratic institutions in Pakistan, however, goes beyond the power struggle. Decline of political institutions in Pakistan takes place in the larger debate about the conditions of emergence and survival of democracy. Reasons for Pakistan’s democratic failure also have to be looked at in the light of the traditional set of arguments usually examined when dealing with the vectors for democracy or its impediments. The failure to provide socio-economic development to Pakistan, and rise of cultural chauvinism and religious militancy have also contributed to the inherent instability of the country. However, this essay argues that these traditional explanations, including their modernized versions, fail to capture the entirety of the problem. As democracy is a political process, it cannot be fully explained by non-political arguments. Even a superficial comparison with India demonstrates that religious and cultural diversity, or underdevelopment constitutes as many constraints for, but not an impediment to democracy. History, culture, religion, social characteristics, and economics do play an important role and do influence political decisions. Yet they are not static realities. They also evolve as a result of policies. It does therefore make sense to consider that if Pakistan’s democratic failure is better understood through the dialectic between political and non-political factors, politics remains the most decisive one.

Development and Democracy: Is Underdevelopment a Cause or the Consequence of Pakistan Authoritarianism? In a recent Foreign Affairs article, Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel argued that “it is unrealistic to assume that democratic institutions can be set up easily, almost anywhere at any time . . . democracy is most likely to emerge when certain social and cultural conditions are in place.”2 According to the authors, modernization brings democracy because “once set in motion it tends to penetrate all aspects of life, bringing occupational specialization, urbanization, rising educational levels, rising life expectancy and rapid economic growth. These create a self-reinforcing process that transform social life and political institutions, bringing rising mass participation in politics and — in the long run — making the establishment of political institutions increasingly likely.”3 The authors do admit

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though that modernization does not automatically lead to democracy but brings, in the long run, “social and cultural changes that make democratization increasingly probable.”4 Pakistan can be seen as an illustration of the argument, albeit a failed democracy. Because the country’s economic development remained limited, its political system never went beyond an electoral democracy at best. In macro-economic terms, Pakistan has not done badly over the past decades. Its per capita income tripled between 1950 and 1999 and, in purchasing power parity terms, was higher than a third of the world’s countries by 1999. Until 2004, the economy grew at an average of 6 per cent per year despite a slowdown in the 1990s. However, the country lacks manufacturing capacities, and with the exception of its textile industry, is unable to add significant value added to goods. As noted by Stephen Cohen, even in agriculture, its most important sector, Pakistan is lagging far behind India in exactly comparable regions.5 More fundamental, however, is the fact that whatever economic development existed was never accompanied by similar social progress. Pakistan possesses a well-educated and entrepreneurial diaspora outside the country as well as a professional elite within the country, and yet systematically underperforms in most social and political indicators. Moreover, the Inglehart and Welzel argument should not be used in a mechanistic way. Economic and social development is always the result of policies. Policies (or their deliberate absence), too, prevented Pakistan’s economic and social development from taking off. It is ultimately the consequence of the interests of three distinct social groups: the army, the clergy, and the landed aristocracy. All avoided land reform and failed to encourage investment in new advanced technology sectors. Consequently, they were comfortable also with a poorly educated population whose skills were considered sufficient for a mostly agricultural model of development. Education is the most striking example of this situation. According to several Pakistani sources such as Mundi Index and the Pakistan Times, as well as the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States, Pakistan’s literacy rate hovers around 49.9 per cent (male 63 per cent; female 36 per cent), ranking the country 195 in the world. Decades of wrong policies, starting with Zulfi Bhutto’s nationalization of the private sector, followed by Zia ul-Haq’s Islamization policies,

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and too little attention paid to social and economic development by suceeding civilian governments, have resulted in a constant underinvestment in the education sector. A third category benefited from this situation: the clergy. Although each of these groups has a specific agenda, all concur in limiting the education offering to the minimum, because as more people are educated they would demand not only a more equitable redistribution of national income but also more political power. This, more than any other consideration explains, for example, the constant underinvestment in education. As a result the educational and technical infrastructure has remained stagnant in Pakistan. Overall the socio-economic structures likely to lead to the emergence of a democratic culture have been rendered weak. In that sense, underdevelopment is the consequence, not the cause of authoritarianism. The experiment conducted in the economic field under Nawaz Sharif ’s first government is particularly instructive of the way the Pakistani establishment has successfully managed to prevent the economic development of the country. His privatization and liberalization program was opposed by the traditional landed interests, including Benazir Bhutto, because his policies adversely affected Pakistan’s political and economic power structure. When Nawaz was dismissed on April 18, 1993, the Dissolution Order listed “the lack of transparency in the process of privatization and in the disposal of public/govt. properties” as one of the grounds for dismissal. On the other hand, the army was particularly upset with Nawaz’s privatization because its several private foundations (operating as commercial entities) were required to face private sector competition on a more level playing field.6 This situation de facto limited all further development of the Pakistani economy. But it also impacted Pakistan’s social and political evolution. Pakistan appears stuck at an early stage of development where land is abundant relative to capital and ownership is highly concentrated in a few hands. It can be argued that neither authoritarianism nor underdevelopment have been able to discourage the aspirations of Pakistanis to democracy, as demonstrated by the 2007 political crisis which precipitated the downfall of Pervez Musharraf. The crisis surrounding Musharraf was primarily one of legitimacy; that it escalated to such a scale was due to the lawyers’ demands for the restoration of the chief justice who had been sacked by Musharraf. The widespread economic resentment of the larger population dovetailed into opposition to Musharraf.

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However, the Inglehart and Welzel argument should be used with caution. It states implicitly that the emergence of a strong middle class is a prerequisite for the development of democracy. Although there is little doubt that the empowerment of the middle class is likely to generate pressures on the political establishment to reshape the political system so as to be more responsive to the middle class, but that, per se, may not act as the vector of democratic values. The two political parties that can be characterized as specifically representing the middle class in Pakistan are the Jamaat-i-Islami and the Muttahida Qwami Movement (MQM). The former is an Islamist totalitarian movement, the latter a mafia type organization. Finally, the aspiration to democracy cannot, however, be confused with democratic culture as demonstrated by the 2007 political crisis. The juxtaposition of democratic claims — the restoration of the chief justice and the independence of the judiciary — and economic demands was partly coincidental. The former helped crystallize the latter but they were not identical. Nor did they mobilize the same categories of population. As a result, it can be argued that the movement produced only cosmetic changes, where civilians officially hold government position, but in reality the authoritarian nature of the political system remained unchanged — with the military as the final arbiter.

Are the Religious Political Parties an Obstacle to Democracy in Pakistan? Since the end of the Cold War, many commentators have questioned the compatibility of the Islamic doctrine with more liberal conceptions of Western-style democracy. For many supposedly inherent extremist tendencies of Muslim societies, more specifically as they have materialized in Pakistan, due to the dominance of its religiouspolitical parties, have made military dictatorship a regrettable yet necessary option to contain growing “Islamic militancy.” The recent statement by one of Pakistan’s Taliban leaders, Sufi Mohammad, according to whom “democracy is anti-Islamic” is misleading. Moreover, the recent military intervention in the Swat valley would lead too easily to the dual conclusion that Islamism and democracy are antithetical and that military dictatorship, even in disguise, is a necessary evil to maintain order.

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To clarify the debate, a distinction should be made between radical organizations opposing not only the government but the existing constitutional system, and the institutional Islamist organizations that operate within the system. Although they were always part of the political landscape, the former became significant only recently and have had historically no influence in shaping the system.

Islamic Ideology and Political Expediency An examination of Pakistan’s institutional Islamic political parties, however, shows a more complex reality. They have never been in a position to seize power in the country, but, in relation with the military, they have been at times able to exert some influence on Pakistan’s political system. Moreover, the relationship that religious political parties entertain with democracy is one of deep ambivalence. The reasons for this ambivalence are to be looked for in the permanent tension between a religious ideology that considers that sovereignty belongs only to God and the condition of emergence and existence of almost all religious political parties for which democracy is the very condition of their survival. For Maulana Mawdudi, founder of the Jamaat-i-Islami, one of the leading organizations of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), the coalition of Islamist parties that ran Balochistan and the NWFP between 2002 and 2008, the concept of divine sovereignty is central and constitutes the main difference between the Islamic political system and Western democracy in which sovereignty belongs to the people. For him “every notion of our independence is nothing but sheer deception and misjudgment. God controls every fiber of our being and none can escape his grip.”7 Not only are our free will and independence delegated by God but the “territory” in which these are exercised is also determined by God and belongs to him. In this conception, to acknowledge any other entity as being sovereign or to accept any principle of authority is equivalent to idolatry.8 Not all Islamist thinkers or political activists in Pakistan go as far as Mawdudi and the Jamaat-i-Islami in the enunciation of the concept of “Theo democracy.” All concur, however, in the idea that the sovereignty of the people is necessarily subordinate to the sovereignty of God. However, the political history of the country shows a different reality. The Ayub Khan years were the turning point for most of the Islamist parties who took on socio-religious persona in order to

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survive politically. Like all political institutions, they were banned during the martial law period. But they continued to function under the cover of their social, educational, and religious activities. As the dictator’s economic policies proved successful, the only way the religious parties could attack the government was to demand the restoration of civil rights, in other words, democracy. As sovereignty belongs to God only, democracy remained hateful from a theoretical point of view but constituted the primary condition for their political survival. Defending it was the only strategy they could reasonably adopt. Despite the religious sympathies of Zia ul-Haq, the Islamist parties had no other option but to adopt a similar strategy during the new martial period. This period was particularly difficult for the Jamaat-i-Islami due to the Islamization campaign launched by the military dictator. Having fought Bhutto with the slogan “Islam and democracy,” the Jamaat had also disapproved of the coup, but suddenly had to choose between the two. It was on the promise of a restoration of democracy that never materialized that it accepted to participate in the government, only to leave it eight months later when it became obvious that the dictator had no intention of holding the promised elections. Relations only grew worse when the military ruler, although having created a “Sharia Federal Court” in charge of ensuring that existing laws were in conformity with Islam, exempted the decrees of martial law, the tax system, and the overall banking system from conformity with the Sharia. After the death of Zia ul-Haq, all religious political parties lived in a state of permanent contradiction. On the one hand, they vitally needed democracy to survive politically but were unable to accommodate it during the rare periods of relative political freedom that the country has experienced in its history. Islamist parties, therefore, historically continuously oscillated between a potentially totalitarian ideology and a strategy that, in the end, made democracy, theoretically at least, the condition of their success. Until 9/11, their entire political history was an attempt to overcome this contradiction.

Islamist Groups as Instruments of Military Power Another factor should, however, be taken into consideration when one tries to understand the relation of the Islamic political parties with democracy: their convergence of interest and the patron/client

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relationship that the religious parties entertain with the military. This relationship has expanded to different fields over the years, from domestic to foreign affairs and has led ultimately to the partial contradiction that characterizes the Islamists–military relations today. Both institutions have formally accepted democracy but remain fundamentally opposed to it. Both, however, accept the prevailing political system only as long as it serves their special interests. However, the military and religious parties do share a common set of interests. As asserted by Husain Haqqani, “Pakistan’s state institutions, especially its national security institutions such as the military and the intelligence services, have played a leading role in building Pakistani national identity on the basis of religion since Pakistan emerged as an independent country in August 1947”.9 Islamic political parties have been instrumental in trying to break up ethnic identities in Pakistan. During the East Pakistan war of secession in 1971, the military used Islamist groups to keep secular leaders elected by the Bengali population out of power. Islamic groups also participated in the brutal repression of the Bengali rebellion. After the 1971 war, and even more so after the civil war in Balochistan, between 1973 and 1977, Islamist groups, both armed and unarmed, were systematically rewarded in order to create national cohesion through religion. On the Islamist side, the Islamization agenda could be created only with the support of the military, which also provided them with an outlet by using their parties’ military wings in the hotspots of the subcontinent: Afghanistan and Kashmir. After 9/11, however, the international context in which this relationship had flourished changed dramatically. The military, which had again seized power through a coup two years earlier, suddenly felt trapped between, on the one hand, the need to preserve its traditional alliance with the U.S., which meant cooperating with the U.S. and allied forces in the fight against Al Qaeda and its Taliban protectors; and on the other, preserving its strategic interest in Afghanistan by controlling the events in the region. In this context, the institutional Islamist opposition helped confuse the U.S. and its Western allies. The rigged 2002 national and provincial elections brought the MMA (a coalition of six Islamist parties) to power in Balochistan and the NWFP, giving credence to the idea that there was indeed an Islamist threat in Pakistan, relieving

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part of the pressure on the Musharraf government, allowing him to pursue his Afghan policy unabated. This partially contradictory Musharraf ’s agenda led to a policy of selectively targeting Islamist groups, depending on complex set of criteria, including their value for the Americans, their capacity to deliver whatever the military asked them to do, as well as their compliance with military instructions. Al Qaeda members were the typical U.S. high value targets with limited usefulness for Pakistan’s security establishment. They could therefore be traded for U.S. goodwill, while the Afghan Taliban remained untouched. As Al Qaeda was joined by more traditional clients of the Pakistani intelligence agencies such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba or the Jaish-e-Mohammed, the selection became more complicated. This led to a partly cooperative, partly confrontational relationship between the Pakistani military and the Islamist parties in which the most radical groups could suddenly claim their hatred for democracy. The February 2008 elections reinforced the military’s image as the defender of democracy, whereas the military was actually trying to sabotage democracy. Nothing changed, however, in the attitude of the institutional Islamist parties, who kept playing by democratic rules — and found themselves at odds with some of the new radical groups who were capturing parts of their electorate. The Islamist parties too called upon the military to intervene against radical groups. Although autonomous, institutional as well as radical Islamist forces have always been politically dependent on the military for their survival. Irrespective of their ideology they are an impediment to democracy, if only because of their relationship with the military. They are the consequence, not the cause for the lack of democracy in Pakistan.

Military Governance, Stability, and the Future of Democracy in Pakistan The existence of a patron/client relationship between the religious political parties and the military is only one aspect of the manipulation of Pakistan’s political system by the military. Decades of subversion of the political system also accounts for Pakistan’s democratic failure. Political engineering through the selective funding of the political parties, setting up of political alliances, rigging elections, and

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pressures on the media are only some of the most traditional means employed by the military to distort the system in its favor and ensure that the military remained in control. But to ensure its unchallenged hold on power, the military also systematically manipulated political violence. During the Zia ulHaq era, for example, the Jamaat-i-Islami received support from the military in order to contain the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in the Punjab province. When the Jamaat-i-Islami distanced itself from the dictator, the Muttahida Qawmi Movement, an organization recruiting essentially amongst the muhajir population with the help of the Inter Service Intelligence (ISI), became almost overnight a major political movement in Sindh — but ISI later had to discipline the organization to make it more compliant. In the 1980s, Zia ul-Haq, with the financial help of the Saudis, promoted sectarianism among Pakistanis in order to counter the growing assertiveness of the Pakistani Shias who felt politically galvanized by the Islamic revolution in Iran. Throughout the latter part of the 1990s, sectarian groups claimed responsibility for the assassinations of religious leaders, diplomats, priests, and worshipers of all hues. In 1999, they also carried out an assassination attempt on then Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who was trying actively to combat them. Over the years, sectarian organizations have been used for various tasks domestically and abroad, particularly in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Divide and rule tactics are not unfamiliar to Pakistan. Nor is the adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Over the years, however, the Pakistani security establishment has developed the peculiar habit of creating enemies for its enemies and then dividing them in order to better rule them. Through its intelligence agencies, it has generated a series of Frankensteins whose powers it has had to limit at times by pitting them against one another in order to maintain control. Karachi is a good example of such policies. In the 1980s, the Jamaat-i-Islami was initially supported by Zia ul-Haq to counter the influence of the PPP. However, as soon as the Jamaat-i-Islami left the government, the security establishment started to promote the MQM, which was transformed from a student group with limited audience into a powerful political organization in order to counter both the PPP and the Jamaat-i-Islami. When the MQM became too powerful, the security establishment reversed its policy and turned against the MQM, which was slowly but surely declining until Pevez Musharraf decided to help it become a national organization.

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The long-term impact of these operations has been devastating for the national cohesion of the country, the legitimacy of the state as the nation with democratic values. In most totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, the confrontation between the state and the opposition is direct, not mediated through proxies. It is often the brutal reaffirmation by the state of its monopoly over legitimate violence. The political struggle then is a clash of values as much as a conflict of interests. In Pakistan, the security establishment itself has engaged in a proxy war against its own citizens, pitting one community against the other and turning violence into an acceptable means of managing social and political relations. This sort of behavior is, paradoxically, compatible with the existence of a formally democratic system — it was particularly effective during the rare democratic intervals of Pakistan’s political history — but democracy is unlikely to survive in a society torn by distrust and intolerance. Instability has been the consequence, not the cause of authoritarianism. The result is not only a weakened state but the de-legitimization of democratic values that could ultimately prove dangerous for Pakistan.

Is there a case for “Developmental Realism” in Pakistan? Surprisingly, however, the role and responsibility of the army in Pakistan’s democratic failure remains controversial. In a 2006 article in the The National Interest, for example, Pakistan observer Anatol Lieven argued that the lack of democracy in Pakistan could not be attributed only to the repeated military seizure of power because “democracy usually reflects not so much ‘the people’ or ‘the electorate’ as the distribution of social, cultural and economic power within a given society.”10 According to him, the nature of the Pakistani society is such that “the resulting democracy is not going to be a force for good governance, economic progress, respect for human rights, fair elections or even orderly transitions of elected governments.”11 The lack of democratic culture is demonstrated, according to him, by the lack of modern, mass political parties in a country where traditions, loyalty to the family, clan or religion are the prevailing values. Anatol Lieven does not deny the role of the army, which sees itself as a referee, “but a referee, it must be said, with a strong personal interest in the outcome of many of the fights and a strong tendency to

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make up the rules as he [the referee] goes along.”12 But because the civilians often prove no better when in power and show no better performance in the field of human rights, Pakistan exemplifies the “frequent irrelevance of democracy.”13 As a consequence, Lieven argues in favor of what he calls “developmental realism” in Pakistan. “Developmental realism” is best defined as a policy which draws upon U.S. strategies in East and Southeast Asia from 1950 to the 1970s, where very large sums of money directed to Southeast Asian states not only promoted economic development and strengthened their resistance against communist subversion, but also laid the basis for democracy in the region despite significant corruption.14 Although it is never mentioned as such in the essay, the Islamic threat has replaced the communist one in the mind of the author. The idea is that helping promoting development in Pakistan would help secure democracy by preventing the masses from joining Islamist movements. This analysis contains, of course, some truth. However, it is debatable on at least three counts: 1) It supposes a power of attraction to democracy of Islamist forces that has never been proven; 2) It ignores the fundamental perversion of the political system by the Pakistani military, which Lieven essentially sees as an imperfect yet acceptable necessity; 3) The comparison with Southeast Asia underplays the radical difference between Pakistan’s military and Islamist groups when set against the case of Southeast Asian governments and communist insurgencies of the 1950s and 1960s. 1) There is simply no evidence of the attraction of Islamist values to the Pakistani population at large. Wherever Islamists have been able to develop some influence, they have done so based on patronage politics in no way different from the practice of mainstream political organizations. In places their power is based on sheer terror, which can hardly be confused with popular adhesion to the Islamist message. 2) The subversion of the political system by the Pakistani military is not a simple case of corruption in which members of the institution try to maximize their individual benefits, although this element is also present. It does reflect primarily the belief that the army is the only institution capable of running the country. On that basis it also feels entitled to economic privileges that it considers a just and honest reward

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for preserving the integrity and stability of the country. The military has therefore no incentive to help develop and preserve a democratic system, including one in which it would play an insignificant role, but has, on the contrary, developed the firm conviction that the status quo should not be disturbed. This does not mean that the military is opposed to economic progress or, more generally, the modernization of society; but that any such evolution has to take place in a political framework whose shape is defined by the military’s own institutional interests. 3) Unlike the Southeast Asian countries of the 1950s and 1960s which saw the communist insurgencies as an existential threat, the Pakistani military de facto considers Islamist radical groups as part of the security establishment and uses them accordingly as indicated earlier. This does not mean that radical Islamist groups and military do share a similar worldview, nor that the relationship may not occasionally be confrontational as is currently the case in the Swat valley or south Waziristan. It does not mean either that a convergence of interests may not prove erroneous in the future. It does demonstrate, however, that stability cannot be a prerequisite for the establishment of democracy since the main political actor (the military) has a vested interest in preventing it. Lieven’s argument is, however, interesting if one does not take for granted that the model of economic development chosen will necessarily result in social development and create the conditions for political evolution or simply lead to consolidation of democracy. Decades of economic policies in Pakistan have demonstrated just the opposite. A certain level of economic development has so far been necessary for all military dictators to stay in power but has never resulted in any loosening of the military grip on power. On the contrary, Musharraf ’s downfall was also precipitated by the deterioration of the economic situation in the country. In this regard, the recent Kerry-Lugar bill in the U.S. senate for an enhanced partnership with Pakistan constitutes an interesting attempt to reconcile all the inherent contradictions of any assistance program to that country. On the one hand, it is an interesting attempt to reconcile the need for economic development as a way of creating the conditions for the consolidation of democracy while

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trying to prevent the military from taking control of all remaining democratic institutions. On the other hand, it is likely to contribute to maintaining the fiction of a democratic process without altering the nature of Pakistan’s political system. Overall democracy is not the result of a logical evolutionary process at the end of which democracy would emerge “naturally.” It is both a process in which every step counts and the outcome of that process. It is not the political result of a non-political process and cannot be left only to chance, especially when some of the actors have every interest to prevent the evolution of democracy in Pakistan, and every incentive to distort it at every stage.

Conclusion The Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has noted that “a country does not have to be fit for democracy; rather it has to become fit through democracy.”15 In Pakistan the absence of democracy has made it increasingly unfit for democracy. Decades of military manipulations of the political system have placed Pakistan in a downward spiral that has not only weakened democratic institutions but also made the very possibility of an alternative to the existing political system increasingly more difficult. Since the 2008 elections, Pakistan is no longer formally a military dictatorship. But it is still a praetorian state with only a democratic façade. Although no military regime in Pakistan has been able to create the necessary framework to ensure political participation as well as developing infrastructure for ensuring socio-economic justice, the old arguments are still being used to explain and somehow justify the sustained presence of the military in power to protect the state. Surprisingly, despite numerous writings by Pakistani scholars and journalists, the extent and nature of the military role in politics as well as its impact on the democratic future of the country is still controversial and remains largely misunderstood. The question of whether democracy can ever be consolidated in Pakistan is still being asked reflects a sort of collective myopia. A simple comparison with India should be sufficient to demonstrate that the traditional classical explanations for the absence of democracy in Pakistan are only partially valid. Although differences existed between the two countries at the time of independence, they were comparable in economic and social development. Literacy was no more developed in India than in

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Pakistan but this was never truly an obstacle to the development of democracy in India. There is no reason either to believe that the elites of the two countries had fundamentally different mindsets. Independent India and Pakistan inherited the same political traditions. The political spectrum was also comparable in the two countries. Finally, the religious political parties played no significant role in the initial years of Pakistan, although in the end religion did play a crucial role in the political future of the country. The main difference was from the very beginning the role of the army. Over the years it established itself as the ultimate referee of the power struggle by manipulating the social and political forces to suit itself. As it realized the benefits it could draw from its dominant position it manipulated the game more and more systematically, progressively destroying all social movements without being ever able or willing to replace them by alternative structures that could gradually unify the country in a common political will. By discrediting traditional political forces and making sure that initially marginal radical forces were heard in the political space, the military was soon left face to face with the radicals. Reversing the process and establishing a true democracy in Pakistan is not yet impossible. It is, however, increasingly difficult. The cause, however, should not be searched for in the social and economic situation of the country — but in the political will of the military elite.

Notes 1. Hasan-Askari Rizvi, Military, State and Society in Pakistan (New York/ London: St Martin’s Press/McMillan Press, 2000), p. 7. 2. Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, “How Development Leads to Democracy,” Foreign Affairs, 88(2) (March/April 2009): pp. 33–48. 3. Ibid., p. 34. 4. Ibid., p. 38. 5. Stephen Philip Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan (Washington, D.C., The Brooking Institutions, 2004), p. 248. 6. Ibid., p. 251. 7. S. Ala Mawdudi, Islamic Law and Constitution (Lahore: Islamic Publications, 9th edn, June 1986), p. 47. 8. Ibid.

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9. Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), p. 3. 10. Anatol Lieven, “A Difficult Country: Pakistan and the Case for Developmental Realism,” The National Interest, April 2006. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Amartya Sen, “Democracy as Universal Value,” Journal of Democracy, 10(3) (1999): pp. 3–17.

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8 Enlightened Moderation: Anatomy of a Failed Strategy Gilles Boquérat and Nazir Hussain

Reading about the Pakistan army struggling to drive back Taliban

militants from territories the latter have come to control or about the Parliament approving without much ado the “Nizam-e-Adl Regulation 2009” mediated by Maulana Sufi Muhammed, the chief of the proscribed Tanzim Nifaz Shariat-i-Muhammadi, one would inevitably conclude that Musharraf ’s concept of “enlightened moderation” (hereafter referred to as EM) has not struck a chord with the country at large and could be dismissed as just another political gimmick put forward by a military ruler anxious to impress influential quarters abroad by echoing their concerns over the rise of radical Islam. Enlightened moderation was indeed a questionable device made to project Pakistan abroad as a modern and tolerant Muslim country distinct from the overwhelming images of gun-toting jihadis. Also, EM deserves closer examination as it addressed the emotional issue of the Islamic credentials of the state that imbues the nationalist discourse and reopened the conflict between the conservatives and the modernists that is as old as Pakistan. Musharraf, in an attempt to push for a reading of Islam as a religion of mutual accommodation and benevolence, took on the extreme religious right holding a quasi-monopoly over the public discourse on Islam and for whom EM was nothing more than a Western import unworthy of an Islamic state. The Pakistani population has shown a propensity to conceive its attachment to Islam more as a matter of cultural identity than as a political manifesto — and hence the relatively poor electoral performances of the religious parties: yet Pakistan did not respond to Musharraf ’s appeal to take on the obscurant and extremist elements as the country could not allow radicalization of the society. It is this apparent contradiction that this essay wants to explore.

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The Rationale for Enlightened Moderation As chief of army staff, Musharraf was well placed to understand the extremist danger as jihadi groups had been instrumentalized by the establishment to carry out some of its strategic objectives. Contrary to the piety displayed by Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, Musharraf followed the first military ruler, Ayub Khan, for his progressive outlook. To substantiate this view, there was the oft-mentioned reference to his admiration for Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, partly derived from his early upbringing in that country. Yet there is a fundamental difference between Atatürk and Musharraf since the former was looking at the West as a model for modernization. Turkey’s secular credentials remain largely an anathema for the Islamic republic of Pakistan. In fact, Musharraf has been at pains to explain that EM is neither Westernization nor secularism. There had been signs that Pervez Musharraf would try to give a progressive twist to his government, even if pragmatism deterred him from colliding head-on with the Islamic conservatives whose support was needed to consolidate his power. In April 2000, he announced a proposal to make an administrative change in the procedure for registration of cases under the blasphemy law. It aimed at reducing the misuse of this law to settle personal scores. He nevertheless retreated in the face of opposition from some religious groups, as he did in March 2005 after Islamist groups had raised their voice against the deletion of the column on religion in new Pakistani passports. Considering the opposition from the religious lobby engendered by those piecemeal measures, a broader framework for action and coherence was needed to carry conviction and this is where the concept of enlightened moderation came into the picture. An opportunity was provided by 9/11 for bringing forward a new paradigm of a tolerant and progressive Islam in opposition to a Muslim world seen as a fertile ground for the propagation of religious extremism. Musharraf won some kudos from the international community for announcing, in January 2002, a ban on the Lashkar-eToiba, the Jaish-e-Mohammed, the Sipah-i-Sahaba and some other Islamic militant organizations in the midst of a military build-up with India, following the attack on the Indian parliament by Kashmiri militants. As a concept supposedly valid for the entire Muslim world, EM was aired at the tenth Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC)

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summit held in Putrajaya (Malaysia) in October 2003. The then Pakistani president recalled that today “neither Islam nor the Muslim world is known with reference to true Islamic teachings, our glorious past, or our core humanistic values” because the extremists have cynically manipulated the anger in Muslim societies against Western policies to sell sectarianism and anti-modernism.1 This was for the enemy within. On the external front, Musharraf indicated that most of the people under foreign occupation were Muslims. In response to these predicaments, Musharraf suggested the two-pronged strategy of EM. The first prong was to attend to the internal weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the Islamic world to tackle militancy and extremism. Poverty, lack of education, unemployment, shortage of academic and scientific skills were the curse of the Muslim world, and the responsibility for this predicament was within. The second pincer of the strategy was the responsibility of the West to redress injustice done to Muslims by looking for just solutions to the political disputes where they are unfairly oppressed and to assist in the socio-economic development of the Muslim world to stave off desperation. The idea of EM to rectify the “downward slide of Muslims” resurfaced forcefully on June 1, 2004 in an opinion column by Musharraf published in The Washington Post, and relayed by other international and national dailies. In the meantime, Musharraf survived two assassination attempts linked to Al Qaeda; Pakistan faced an international outcry for the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology by the A. Q. Khan network; and its army was involved in heavy fighting in South Waziristan against Taliban elements. A trail of suicide bombings has made it all the more urgent to convince the world that Islam was not a “religion of intolerance, militancy, and terrorism.” So as not to appear submissive to the West, Musharraf put much of the responsibility for the spreading of pan-Islamic extremism on the resentment born out of Western policies that started with the Palestinian and Kashmir disputes, got invigorated with the Afghan war of the 1980s and the victimization of Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya. Current American military operations in the Muslim world added to the Muslim world’s resentment. It was therefore for the West to resolve those political disputes with justice “as their part of the commitment to the strategy of Enlightened Moderation.” He then called on the Muslims “to wash off the common belief that Islam is in conflict with modernization, democracy and secularism” and came into being as the flag bearer of a just, lawful, tolerant,

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and value-oriented society, recalling that “the armies of Islam did not march forward to convert people to Islam through the sword, despite what the perceptions may be, but to deliver them from the darkness they were under, through the visible example of their virtues.”2 Moderation was supposed to take the sting out of extremism while enlightenment would stifle it. Interestingly, Musharraf ’s opinion column got released at the time when Washington’s Greater Middle East reform initiative, which had been in the making for quite sometime, was to be officially endorsed at the G-8 summit held at Sea Island (USA) a few days later. The proposal for enlightened moderation appeared to be prompted primarily by the growing clout of militant groups in those OIC countries that are of vital strategic interest to Washington and have close military ties with the West. Later, during an international seminar on global terrorism, Musharraf explained his strategy to curb extremist tendencies: (a) ensure that banned organizations do not re-emerge under new names, and must not be allowed to collect money; (b) no publications promoting hate and militancy to be allowed; (c) no misuse of mosques by clerics or obscurantists to spew out hatred and militancy against everyone at large; (d) redo the syllabus and curriculum in the educational institutions so as to remove divisive content; (e) reform the madrassas which are indoctrinating the minds on the side of militancy and, in some tribal areas, harboring terrorists, then ensure that they are not only teaching religion (but other subjects also) because there is the need for mainstreaming the students into life; (f) recognize the need to carry out a Muslim renaissance with Pakistan in the lead.3 With the advantage of hindsight, Musharraf ’s words do not carry much conviction, if only one considers the delay in responding to the challenge put out by the clerics at the Lal Masjid in the heart of Islamabad leading ultimately to the violent confrontation in July 2007. If the Pakistani polity in the matter of religion is to be divided between the secularists, the modernists, and the Islamist forces, Musharraf belongs to the modernist school of thought, which (whether liberal or/and authoritarian) has in fact ruled Pakistan since its creation, with the sole exception of Zia ul-Haq.4 The modernists think that Islam is a significant part of the identity of Pakistan but it should be a forward-looking interpretation of the religious precepts and not an ossified and rigid Islam where every aspect of life should be ruled by the Sharia. Musharraf ’s EM was on paper a welcome development in reversing a policy of appeasement vis-à-vis the

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religious right on social issues. But to oppose those who consider themselves to be the custodians of Islam, Musharraf knew he needed to justify EM’s course of action in Islamic terms. Can EM be interpreted in Islamic terms? Yes, if one had to believe Pervez Musharraf when he said that EM contributes to propagate “the true picture of Islam to the world at large by adopting the message of peace and brotherhood for the mankind.” No, when the same Musharraf said, “EM has nothing to do with Islam and its teachings. It has more to do with Muslims and their emancipation.”5 This apparent contradiction could be interpreted as a reflection of EM having nothing to do with Islam, per se, since Islam is said to be enlightened and moderate as it enjoins to follow the middle course. But it has also to do with “true Islam” since the latter has been distorted by extremists. Musharraf could not have left unchallenged the assertion that EM had been inspired, if not forced upon, by the West, and aimed at the emasculation of Islamic values and infirmity of faith. A damaging accusation when Muslims feel victimized by the West and at a time when religious convictions become ostentatious, even among those who are better off. Analyst Khaled Ahmed observed, “If a coercive order aimed at the transformation of society is allowed to reign for some years its effects become embedded in society, and a ‘public demand’ for Islamization becomes unavoidable. Pakistan’s discourse at least remained as intensely Islamic as it was under General Zia because the public mind had become unfamiliar with secular-pluralist discourse during a decade of [the Zia] dictatorship,” which also saw the clergy forming its own centers of power parallel to the state. Once religion occupies center stage, it is indeed difficult to sideline those who profess to be the guardians of the faith. The multiplication of private TV channels offered another window of opportunity for propagating an Islamic point of view.6 Yet, at the same time, the orthodox clergy is facing new attacks from “alien values” on the TV front with programs touching issues more commonly discussed in the Western media. The promoters of EM had to come forward with an Islamic rationale. Musharraf proclaimed that “we all are moderate and religious and no government has really tried to sideline religion as it is a vital part of our country so I believe we have the right environment if we take the public towards enlightened religion, towards Haqooqul Ibad (human rights) and not just leave them on Haqooqul

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Allah (religious rights).” Apologists have made much of the contrast between the puritanical Zia ul-Haq and his allegiance to dogmatic thoughts standing opposed to any change in the creed to suit modern times, and the moderate-modernist Musharraf seeking to suit Islam to modernity by using the concept of ijtihad (exercise of independent judgment for innovative thinking): “which in essence means that we should remain current with time and environment, [that we should] adopt postures according to time and environment.” Disregarding the moderate-modernist approach has allowed Islam to be hijacked by obscurantists, who are only talking about rituals.7 It brings to mind the report submitted by Punjab’s chief justice Muhammad Munir and Justice M. R. Kayani, in the wake of the anti-Ahmadiyya disturbances of 1953. Regarding the tendency of many Muslim sects to view one another as infidels, it observed that such intolerance would project Islam “as a religion of fanatics, which punishes all independent thinking.” Such rigidity was precisely the problem, noted the 1954 report, stressing, “. . .nothing but a bold reorientation of Islam to separate the vital from the lifeless can preserve it as a World Idea and convert the Musalman into a citizen of the present and future world from the archaic incongruity that he is today.”8 Enlightened moderation also impelled the need for an Islamic renaissance that, according to its main proponent, had bypassed the Muslim world after the Mongols destroyed Baghdad in 1258, dealing a fatal blow to ijtihad. According to Muhammad Iqbal, Islam has been immobile for 500 years, during which most Muslim countries have been mechanically repeating old values: “Eternal principles when they are understood to exclude all possibilities of change tend to immobilize what is essentially mobile in nature.”9 Iqbal had astutely underlined that ijtihad is the key to renaissance and the Renaissance in Europe represented a positive departure from a religion steeped in bigotry, fanaticism, obscurantism, superstition, and meant the rejection of every dogma and every theory that could not be objectively tested. The European Renaissance also preceded the Age of Enlightenment that called for a reinterpretation of reality through reason. But Iqbal himself rejected aql (reason/ intelligence) in favor of a supra-aql (a supra-rational level resulting from spiritual experience). If EM smelled of secularization and apostasy for the religious lobby, for some its Islamic exegesis sounds rather hollow.

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Tanvir Ahmed Khan, a former foreign secretary, for instance, regrets that “the fruit of a lifelong intellectual quest for a true interface between faith and modernity has largely been supplanted by products of the communication industry and fashion houses. They [the lifestyle liberals] flash the so-called ‘soft image’ but lack meaning and substance [in their lives].”10 Musharraf had time and again lashed out at the educated class who too easily abdicate their responsibility of teaching true Islam to the uneducated masses, leaving the field wide open to chauvinistic theologians. Yet it appeared that for the proponents of EM, the search for an Islamic rationale remained largely elusive.

Enlightened Moderation Under Scrutiny Beyond the wisecrack that EM is a tautology for moderation, and that by definition an enlightened mind is per se moderate, the most unrelenting criticism of EM inevitably came from commentators close to or part of the religious lobby. For the detractors, EM’s purpose is only to pander to the West, in political and religious terms, and an act of contrition for the perceived Islamic militancy. In fact, for the Islamists, the West and its biased media has deliberately maligned Islam and the Muslims, turning the Muslim leadership defensive in their approach. Instead of colluding with Washington’s game plan to count Pakistan among pro-U.S. moderate Sunni states, defiance and opposition should be the path to follow to address the problems imposed upon the Muslim world by Western aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, and not subservience as expounded by the upholders of “moderate Islam.” The Islamists regret that Musharraf, while comforting those equating terrorism with Islam, did not have a word for state terrorism as practiced by countries like India and Israel. The onus is unfairly placed upon the Muslims, which smacks of an inferiority complex and a defeatist mindset. Enlightened moderation was also a reflection of an unwanted Western approach to religion and consequently adverse to Islam. It was an attempt to introduce the imported concept of secularism into the Islamic discourse even though it had no place in it since there is no church in Islam, hence no division between the spiritual and the temporal and so between religion and politics. The “new religious order” sought to promote a view of Islam that restricts religion to homes and mosques, while the entire affairs of state should be run

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according to precepts and ideologies suited to the West. It was an order that aimed at holding the Sharia in abeyance. Khurshid Ahmad of the Jamaat-e-Islami drew a parallel between Emperor Akbar’s venture to devise a new religion, “Deen-e-Ilahi,” to win the favors of those opposed to his rule, with EM’s version of Islam elaborated at the behest of America and the West with the sole aim of marginalizing the Muslim ummah and making it answerable to their narrow local interests.11 There is no doubt that the masses would not accept easily the idea of separation of Islam from the state since there cannot be a reduction of the faith to the sphere of the personal. The secular and liberal leaderships had betrayed the Muslim world, acting hand-in-glove with the imperialist powers and against the interests of their own countrymen in the postcolonial era. Intentionally or not, Musharraf ’s EM was suspected of pushing for a secularist agenda, negating the raison d’être of Pakistan, warning the president that whosoever amongst his predecessors, from Iskandar Mirza to Ayub Khan, has ventured to toe this line had eventually to lick his own wounds.12 The fear of a Zionist conspiracy is never too far in the Muslim world. Thus the attempted de-Islamization of the Pakistani school curriculum is to submit to an American agenda, behind which stands the Jewish lobby. They both want to exclude the topics/ideologies of jihad and shahadat (martyrdom) from the curriculum to suit their own purpose.13 If hardly anyone would disagree with the idea that Islam basically promotes the middle path that enjoins moderation, the modernists on the other hand drew the conclusion that it could not sustain the confrontationist and rigid approach of the conservatives. Also, EM was the order of the day and fitted into Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambition to join the European Union and former Malaysian prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s concept of “Islam Hadhari” (civilizational Islam), focusing on good governance, knowledge, religious tolerance, and moral integrity. Enlightened moderation’s supporters have argued that enlightenment is central to Islam and that the Quran’s first injunction is iqra (read). Consequently, EM was not against Islam, but the state should not unnecessarily interfere with the religious beliefs of the citizens and certainly not permit the cynical and divisive exploitation of religion that had wreaked havoc on the society. It is only in being inclusive and tolerant that Islam can stand a chance of becoming again the beacon of modernity it once was.14 For Senator Mushahid Hussain

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Sayed, secretary general of the Pakistan Muslim League, Sufism is the embodiment of enlightenment and moderation as it focuses on substance, linking the practice of rituals with the realities of everyday life and rejects munafaqat (religiosity for show) that had spread in Muslim societies with official patronage. Besides, it was through Sufi saints and scholars that the message of Islam circulated throughout South Asia for many centuries.15 Then there are the skeptics, those who see nothing wrong in EM but doubted the capacity of the president, General Musharraf, to deliver. There were many reasons for this perception. First, the tendency of the military establishment to strike deals with the religious right to hold on to power (the military–mullah Alliance). Second, the curtailment of political space for the secular forces, notably because the army does not want to undermine its many interests requiring the status quo. Third, the manipulative tactics by the ruling elite have created a trust deficit between the rulers and the ruled. The “America’s war” fought by Pakistan’s army in the tribal areas played in favor of the extremists who enjoyed a wide range of silent support for their anti-U.S. line.16 It was stated that the Malaysian reformer-politician Mahathir bin Mohamad did not face the same kind of constraints since he left no stone unturned to blast the American and Israeli policies, something Musharraf was unable to do in spite of his avowed concern for the Muslim causes.17 In trying to assess the impact of EM, the opinion of the student community in Pakistan was evaluated in 2006–7 through a series of round-table meetings held on different campuses (Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, Multan, Peshawar), during which a questionnaire was distributed. Seeking the remarks and comments of the highly educated youth was felt necessary since most of them were born during Zia’s times and grew up in an Islamized environment, reinforced by religiously-colored textbooks and the family’s TV screen. The respondents ranged from 18 to 25 in age, with females numbering slightly more than males. A large majority of those students were at B.A. level, and most students defined themselves as belonging to the middle class. Half the students did not indicate any preferences for the main political parties (Pakistan Muslim League, Pakistan Peoples Party, Pakistan Muslim League [PML]–Nawaz, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal [MMA]), showing a significant degree of de-politicization of the student community that has generally little regard for the political class. Among those who expressed political

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preferences, the Pakistan Peoples Party came a bit ahead of the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid-e-Azam, followed by the PMLNawaz, the MMA, and then the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf of former cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan. The first set of questions went to assess the knowledge, the usefulness and the credibility of EM. Over 90 per cent of the students had heard about EM (yet 30 per cent were not really sure about its meaning), and 70 per cent considered that the promotion of a moderate and progressive Islam was indeed needed. But Musharraf did not pass the credibility test as close to three-quarters of the respondents interpreted EM as an act of political expediency rather than a serious attempt to tackle extremism. A bit less discouraging could be the fact that a bit more than half the students considered that his policies have indeed favored enlightenment and moderation. A second set of questions put EM in relation to Pakistan’s polity and the role of religion. More than 60 per cent of the respondents did not consider that this concept was conflicting with the ideology of Pakistan. Among the former Pakistani rulers, the towering figure of Jinnah was clearly seen as the one who had made a notable service to the cause of Islam, except in Peshawar where Zia ul-Haq was the favorite choice. Zia ul-Haq came second and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto third. Ayub Khan, Nawaz Sharif, and Benazir Bhutto do not seem to have left a mark in this regard. Some 60 per cent of the respondents considered that madrassa education was not compatible with EM. More problematic for the proponents of a secular mindset was the fact only 13 per cent of the respondents considered that the influence of religious considerations should not be very significant in the determination of state policies. On the more conservative campuses of the University of the Punjab in Lahore and at the University of Peshawar, almost 40 per cent favored a very significant influence of religion; the rest would do with only a significant influence. Coming to the measures that could be taken to substantiate EM, the emphasis was put on providing better educational facilities. The media were also seen as a powerful tool in spreading it. There were also those who think that a proper understanding of Islam is by itself sufficient. When asked about the reasons explaining the attraction of some Muslims for extremism, unsurprisingly it was first of all seen as a reaction against Western policies in the Muslim world. Both educational inadequacy and economic deprivation came next. Other explanations for extremism were the lack of democracy, ahead of the

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possibility of identity assertion and the contention that Islam itself is radical. Turkey was seen by a large margin as the most moderate and enlightened country in the Muslim world, reflecting the traditional closeness between the two countries. Iran was ranked second, with high marks in Peshawar. The third place was shared by a disillusioned “none” and Malaysia which has demonstrated that Islamic values and globalized economic development can co-exist. Then only came Pakistan, and in decreasing order, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Indonesia, Lebanon, the Central Asian Republics, and Bangladesh were also mentioned. Regarding the relation with the West, almost three-quarters of the respondents believed in the clash of civilizations, a thesis first put forth by Harvard scholar Samuel P. Huntington. An even larger number believed that there was a direct link between EM and the “war on terror,” implying that President Musharraf acted in response to pressure from America. For a significant majority, EM would give a boost to their country’s image in the West, but yet twothirds considered that EM was Westernization in disguise. Some other points emerged from the students’ responses to the questionnaire. One was the manipulative character of the relation that the West has with Pakistan in which Musharraf appeared a willful tool for the sake of his political survival. The responses also presented a mirror image of the contradiction that plagues the Pakistani society at large in relation to religion and politics. Restricting religion to a personal affair seemed desirable but it clashed with an all-embracing Islamic nationalism and a fine balance remains as elusive as ever. So is the dilemma of being modern without appearing to be Westernized. One is also at a loss to explain some apparent contradictions, for instance, admiring Turkey but otherwise displaying non-secular attitudes. Somewhat along the same lines were the responses during the roundtable discussions. There was a near consensus that EM was nothing new in the Islamic teachings and practices. In fact the Quran, while explaining the characteristics of true Muslims, called them ume-wasta, meaning thereby, those who follow the “middle” path or the moderate path. There was a broad consensus about the Pakistani perspective on religion and its practices. People generally adhere to religious teachings as a way of life but not through a version imposed by the state. Also, despite believing in the modernist approach of Islam, the students were generally skeptical about EM and not just because of any contextual or conceptual weaknesses. This observation

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must be confronted with the fact that generally people have got used to the state providing the direction, whether it is Zia’s Islamization or Musharraf ’s EM. There was an interesting observation that in Pakistan ideas are imposed and not imparted. And in a vacuum where conceptual limitations and scholarly-influenced discourse hampered the flourishing of ideas, the state takes upon itself to fill in this vacuum. There was a consensus that Pakistan is afflicted with three fundamental problems: social inequity, political illegitimacy, and economic inequality created by the unjust environment and perpetuated by the state. In this situation one of the alternatives were the religious madrassas that have flourished over the years and embarked on a political course during Zia’s rule. Now in this unjust socio-economic and politically manipulative order, the religious alternative to the Western-oriented Pakistani leadership was open to the masses, yet it could not provide the solution to their political and economic problems. Leaders, political and religious, have the tendency to exploit religion for their personal power interests. The MMA especially has struck a balance between religion and politics, religion being the code of life and politics the code of the relation between state and society, and so they used religion to get votes. There was another interesting but contestable view: that the religious forces in Pakistan provided a safety valve between extremism and modernity and the deprived and disgruntled sections of the society feel comfort in the policies and practices of the religious parties. It was assumed that in the absence of the religious elements the whole Pakistani society could become extreme and violent. This may sound correct in the circumstance when Pakistan is having an intolerant society, having social and economic injustices, exploitation of religion for political purposes and existence of nexuses between clergy, military, feudal, and the bureaucracy with no real interest in reforming the society. These nexuses think that they represent Pakistan.

The Twists and Turns of Military Rule Notwithstanding the precedent of accommodative tactics, it looked like Musharraf had of late opted for a collision course with the politico-religious groups. The Women Protection Bill was passed by the National Assembly in November 2006 reviewing the infamous Hudood Ordinances imposed by Zia ul-Haq twenty-seven years before. The politico-religious groups responded in kind when the

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NWFP Provincial Assembly, where they had a majority, voted in favor of the controversial Hasba bill that was designed to implement Sharia in line with the moral code that the Taliban were forcefully implementing in areas of NWFP under their control. (The Supreme Court blocked the bill, declaring it unconstitutional.) Musharraf promised to tackle the obscurantist views that had penetrated into the entire educational system. It was announced that the new English syllabus would emphasize liberal values and Pakistani textbooks would be revised to give a more moderate and less-biased interpretation of the two-nation theory; the new textbooks would exclude material that promoted prejudices against non-Muslims; and the new books would stress that Pakistan was not founded to be a religious state, but rather a homeland for the Muslims of India in order to protect their economic and political interests against the Congress Party that had come to be increasingly dominated by Hindus. The issue was never “Islam in danger” but “Muslims in danger.” Islamic teaching would be limited to Islamiyat classes.18 Independent scholars had observed that textbooks “contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan.” In particular, it was noticed that incitement to militancy and violence, including encouragement of jihad and shahadat (martyrdom), distorted history, and led to a glorification of war, and prejudice, bigotry, and discrimination.19 The provincial education minister in MMAruled NWFP inevitably expressed his strong reservations about any dilution of the centrality of Islamic inculcation in the new scheme of studies.20 Yet a number of people were questioning the credibility of the military establishment really distancing itself from the mullahs. It is worth recalling that in its efforts to sideline the parties of former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, so as to allow a political space for its own creation, the PML (Q), the ruling establishment has increased the overall power of the religious parties and helped the electoral prospects of a coalition of Islamist parties under the banner of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal. The latter managed to secure 25 per cent of seats in the federal parliament in the 2002 elections as well as the control of the provincial governments in NWFP and partly in Balochistan. They allowed Musharraf to amend the constitution in 2003 to remain army chief and president. Furthermore, there was the suspected attitude of the state vis-à-vis Islamic militant groups orchestrated by some intelligence agencies.

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The capacity of banned Wahhabi outfits to resurface under different names and to quietly operate and propagate ideas was not really doing justice to either enlightenment or moderation. So obvious were the activities of these militant organizations that in September 2006, the government directed provinces to strictly curb publication and sale of hate material issued by banned organizations.21 These observations did not square with the advocacy by the government that Sufism has an enlightened approach within an Islamic paradigm, representing a benign image of Islam “sellable” to the West and rooted in the subcontinent’s popular culture; that humanistic Sufism stands in opposition to the more belligerent and extremist orthodox Arab-originated discourse that alleges Sufism with nonIslamic practices. The government, in fact, set up a National Council for Promotion of Sufism with the president of Pakistan as its patronin-chief with the objective to “foster positive linkages between Islam and the West in the field of philosophy, religion and mysticism.”22 Enlightened moderation was also meant to ensure a congenial environment for all communities to live according to their faith. But minorities continued to complain that the blasphemy law was being indiscriminately used to commit atrocities against all religious minorities, unhindered by the local authorities. The sidelining of the mainstream political parties and restraining their leadership was also creating political strangulation and a sense of psychological deprivation. Pervez Hoodbhoy believes that deprived of the right to collectively organize or to petition, thinking people had stopped taking interest in political matters that vitally affect society. Those who offer rewards in heaven and encourage ill-formed minds towards violence had filled the vacuum. Pakistan’s most urgent need was to get its people politically involved again. For this, the ban on trade unions, student unions, and political activities was to end.23 These actions would release political forces that are liberal, enlightened, and moderate and which can contribute to the change in the political culture to make it more open, transparent, and participatory.

Enlightened Moderation or Moderate Enlightenment? This essay has striven to examine the idea of EM in its domestic, international, and religious context. Whatever the sincerity one could

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attach to President Musharraf ’s determination to make Pakistan a progressive country, there was a credibility gap. True to his selfcongratulatory form, Pervez Musharraf writes on his website that the strategy of enlightened moderation “captured the imagination of the West in particular and was adopted by the Islamic World.”24 The reality is, of course, different, especially so in Pakistan. For many persons the idea was first emanating from a general who assumed power through a coup d’état and showed every intention to unscrupulously retain his position; and second, EM was introduced by a country that has been commonly seen for more than fifty years as the place where military power behind the scenes makes and unmakes the rulers. Enlightened moderation got bogged down by the impression that it was created to cope with the debilitating image problem of Pakistan and to satisfy foreign actors impatient to see the containment of violent political Islam. Consequently, it had little domestic outreach. Then there was the difficulty resulting from the fact that the basis of nationhood in Pakistan is Islam, and when the state proclaims not only a religious identity (a cultural construct) but also assumes a religious vocation (a political factor), it is bound to clash with those who traditionally organize religious life and eventually carry more legitimacy for the common man when it comes to religious understanding. If Musharraf had shown sincere intention to carry forward an enlightened agenda through EM, he should have shown the determination to resist the demands of the clergy on policy making. It would be indeed reassuring to the Pakistanis and the West alike that despite the multiple internal problems of Pakistan, the consensus view is that the future of Pakistan lies in moderation; however, moderation and reshaping of the popular Pakistani mindset would come through an evolutionary process, and not by any state-sponsored doctrine. The outlook of the young generation is predominantly Islamic because the state has either supported or not confronted with determination religious zealotry over the last thirty years. It makes it all the more difficult to give currency to a liberal and pluralist outlook in Pakistan. The Pakistani state needs to reinvent itself as a moderate and tolerant state, responsive to the needs of its citizens, supportive of pluralistic ideas, interested in progressive education, and globally engaged if it has to prosper in a globalized, multicultural, and competitive world.

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Notes 1. President Musharraf ’s address at the 10th OIC summit, October 16, 2003. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Special Report on Enlightened Moderation: The Post 9/11 Scenario, October 2004, pp. 17–21. 2. The News, June 2, 2004. 3. Dawn, August 30, 2005. 4. See Denis Matringe, Un islam non arabe — horizons indiens et pakistanais (Paris: Téraèdre, 2005), pp. 34–35. 5. Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 297. 6. Khaled Ahmed, “Dishing Out Religion on TV Channels”, The Friday Times, July 28–August 3, 2006, p. 8. 7. Quotes in this paragraph cited from President Musharraf ’s remarks to the media on February 3, 2006. Previously on http://www.presidentof pakistan.gov.pk. Accessed in early 2007. 8. Government of the Punjab, Report of the Court of Inquiry Constituted under Punjab Act II of 1954 to Enquire into the Punjab Disturbances of 1953 (Lahore: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1954). As quoted by Anwar Syed, Pakistan: Islam, Politics and National Solidarity (Lahore: Vanguard, 1984), pp. 91–92. 9. Khwaja Masud, “Leadership in the Global Village,” The News, March 20, 2006. 10. Tanvir Ahmed Khan, “Pakistan and Rise of Democrats,” Dawn, November 27, 2006. 11. Khurshid Ahmad, “Islam and the Battle of Ideas,” July 2004. Originally published in Jamaat-e-Islami’s monthly organ Tarjumanul Quran. Quoted in Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Special Report on Enlightened Moderation, p. 36. 12. For a reflection of these viewpoints, see, for instance, Muzzafar Iqbal, “Enlightened and Moderate Islam,” The News, June 4, 2004; Khurshid Ahmed, “Enlightened Moderation Serves West’s Interests,” Dawn, July 24, 2004; Muhammad Asim, “Enlightened Moderation,” The Nation, August 12, 2004; Israr Ahmed, “Difference between Moderation and Extremism,” N-Waqt, March 18, 2005. 13. Flt. Lt. (R) Muhammad Ayub Abbasi, “Propagation of Enlightened Society,” N-Waqt, March 11, 2005. 14. See, for instance, Mir Jamilur Rahman, “Moderation versus Extremism,” The News, June 5, 2004; Mumtaz Alam, “Enlightened Moderation is the True Sense of Islam,” Ausaf, August 13, 2004. 15. Interview conducted by Amir Mateen, “Politics of Piety,” Dawn, September 5, 2004. 16. Pervez Hoodbhoy, Friday Times, July 21–27, 2006.

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17. Amanat Ali Chaudhury, The Nation, June 11, 2004. 18. Islamic studies started right from independence but it was during Ayub Khan’s martial law that religious education became compulsory at elementary school level as part of the uniform school curriculum designed to develop national unity. 19. A. H. Nayyar and M. Salim, The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan (Islamabad: SDPI, 2004), pp. v–vi. 20. Dawn, January 25, 2007. 21. Dawn, September 22, 2006. 22. Daily Times, September 22, 2006. 23. Interview with Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islamabad, November 15, 2006. 24. http://www.generalpervaizmusharraf.com. Accessed in early 2007.

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9 U.S. and Pakistan: Relations during the Bush–Musharraf Years J. Andrew Greig

This essay is an account of the bilateral relationship between the United States and Pakistan during the Bush administration written by a mid-level foreign service officer who spent part of those years working on issues pertaining to Pakistan both as the senior country desk officer in the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs and as an analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the State Department’s small in-house component of the intelligence community.1 Although I had access to highly classified materials, this account makes its case by relying on publicly available sources, informed by my experience. A great deal of information is still classified and so a full history of these years is decades away. Nevertheless, the centrality of Pakistan to the national interests of the U.S. demands more urgency than can wait for the declassification of those materials. I was not in a policymaking position and am not tied to the policies of the period. In fact, I was often very uneasy with them. Our near-total reliance on Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, was the best, and perhaps the only, viable option in 2004. By then, the U.S. administration had already let the leadership of Al Qa’ida and the Taliban escape into Pakistan from whence they could attack Afghan government and Western forces with impunity, and the Bush administration had already diverted major attention and resources to the folly of invading Iraq. Two years later, the intellectual and strategic poverty of the AfghanPakistan policies of the Bush administration is clearly being felt. At the end of the Bush administration, the U.S. national interests in forestalling the threat of Al Qa’ida and in creating stability in South Asia remained unfulfilled. Even more alarming, the ability of the U.S. to influence publics in the Islamic world has been seriously weakened by the invasion of Iraq, the U.S.-Iranian relations, and the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo. Added to these missteps in U.S. policy are rapidly changing global issues such

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as growing social inequality, climate change, globalization of trade, diversion of vital resources, and the neglect of long-standing issues such as unfettered population growth, lagging economic development, moribund political institutions, and a generalized breakdown of trust between Islam and the West. In that complicated context, the continuance of what I perceived as flawed U.S. policies continued even though Pakistan was showing signs of becoming increasingly unstable. Political and economic abuses by the military-led government further weakened already weak democratic institutions. The rise of militancy continued unabated and unchallenged. Pakistan’s nuclear program and illegal proliferation activities have not been addressed for nearly a decade, thus allowing Pakistan to help North Korea and Iran to take major strides in their own nuclear and missile programs. In addition, Pakistan and India developed new delivery systems for their already existing nuclear arsenals. A nuclear South Asia is just over a decade old. When, on Monday, May 11, 1998, India detonated three nuclear devices in the desert of Rajasthan not far from the border with Pakistan, the U.S. government and the Clinton administration were caught by surprise. The CIA’s leadership apparently heard the news from deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott, who had learned it from CNN.2 Two days later India followed up with more explosions and Pakistan responded with six nuclear explosions in another two weeks. India and Pakistan’s adamant refusals to sign the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) were now moot; there was now no point in even trying to put that genie back in the bottle. Instead, attention in the Clinton administration turned to the also unsigned Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif made it clear he would not sign any treaty unless India did so first. The obvious key to the puzzle was India, and so Talbott and Jaswant Singh, India’s minister of external affairs in the BJP-led government, met repeatedly to discuss the CTBT. The U.S. clamped sanctions on both countries, but sanctions hit India harder. The new sanctions forestalling any military cooperation affected only India because the U.S. Pressler Amendment, which barred arms sales and military cooperation with Pakistan because of its nuclear program, had been in force in 1990.3 The new sanctions also withdrew economic aid and development programs from both countries and placed at risk a presidential visit from Bill Clinton to India. While India could live without the aid programs, they wanted the presidential visit because it would highlight India’s dramatic

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economic emergence since President Jimmy Carter’s visit twenty years earlier. In the end, the nuclear blasts delayed the visit for over two years: time filled with intense bilateral negotiations. Still the issue of the CTBT was not resolved when President Clinton finally visited India. Clinton pressed the U.S. case on the CTBT and nonproliferation.4 In meetings and televised remarks, Clinton made the same points during his brief stopover in Pakistan, and also expressed concern over the recent military coup d’etat which had brought General Pervez Musharraf to power and Pakistan’s support for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.5 Indian and Pakistani resistance to the CTBT was unyielding, but once the U.S. presidential campaign of 2000 began in earnest, U.S. diplomatic leverage was undermined by domestic politics. Republican Party candidate and former Texas governor George W. Bush, in his first major foreign policy speech, called for a robust missile defense system instead of pursuit of non-proliferation treaties such as the CTBT.6 It was no surprise that both India and Pakistan decided to await the outcome of the U.S. elections. After the inauguration of the Bush administration on January 20, 2001, U.S. pressure on India and Pakistan to sign the CTBT went on the back burner. The focus of the new administration was on building a missile defense system.7 No one in the Bush administration could have known then about the illegal proliferation activities of Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan.8 If they had known, however, it probably would not have made a difference to what followed. Even as the dust cloud was settling over lower Manhattan and the Pentagon was still smoldering on September 11, 2001, CIA director George Tenet and the National Security Council’s (NSC) point man on counterterrorism, Richard A. Clarke, both claim to have recognized the hand of Al Qa’ida and Osama Bin Laden.9 Both men were holdovers from the Clinton administration which had deep concerns about terrorism in general and about Al Qa’ida in particular.10 A Presidential Decision Directive (PDD-62), dated May 1998, had identified terrorism as a top national security priority and created an interagency Counterterrorism Strategy Group (CSG) headed by the National Security Council.11 The existing bureaucratic structure, however, had been largely ignored before 9/11, according to NSC coordinator Clarke. But when President George W. Bush and his war cabinet met on September 15, they resolved to use all the levers

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of power available to the U.S.: intelligence, finance, diplomacy, as well as military force, in what was soon dubbed a “Global War on Terror” (GWOT).12 The new approach rejected any method that smacked of law enforcement, i.e., punishing the perpetrators of 9/11 by building up legal cases. Instead, counterterrorism efforts were led by the CIA and, later, by the Department of Defense. Bush trumpeted the change on television the next day, saying “This crusade, this war on terrorism is gonna take a while.”13 This comment, unremarkable in the eyes of Americans, reportedly set off alarm bells in Europe.14 And so the day after that, Bush, perhaps hoping to calm the inquietude of old allies, seemed to channel a Texas lawman: “. . . there’s an old poster out West . . ., ‘Wanted, Dead or Alive’.”15 Although Bush’s new words appeared to return U.S. goals to a law enforcement model, combined with the dismantling of Al Qa’ida and those who support them, that is, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the U.S. was already on a war footing. Planning for placing troops in Afghanistan was well underway, and the best access to Afghanistan was clearly through Pakistan, an old regional client.16 Since Pakistan’s cooperation would obviously be essential to the new policy, Secretary of State Colin Powell, ignoring the ebb in bilateral relations, had immediately telephoned Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on September 12, allegedly spelling out that Pakistan “was either with us or against us.”17 This blunt message was underscored by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage by summoning the director-general of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), General Mehmood Ahmad, who happened to be in Washington, and Pakistan’s ambassador, Maleeha Lodhi. It was clearly an uncomfortable meeting; Musharraf claims in his memoirs that Armitage threatened that Pakistan would be “bombed back to the Stone Age.”18 The next day, September 13, seven specific demands were delivered to the government of Pakistan through diplomatic channels in both Washington and Islamabad, the double tracking obviously meant to underline their importance.19 Among other things, Musharraf agreed to isolate Al Qa’ida and the Taliban regime and to provide logistical support for the U.S. war effort.20 Musharraf later wrote that he acceded to U.S. pressure only because he felt he did not have a choice, the Pakistani army could not withstand the force of U.S. arms.21 A second account, relying on the memory of Pakistan’s foreign minister, Abdul Sattar, says that while Musharraf had accepted unequivocally all U.S. demands, he intended to back-track when the opportunity arose.22

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Thus Pakistan’s cooperation was obtained within days and the U.S. overall counter-terrorism strategy was set within the first week. It was only after a crucial supply corridor for U.S. ground operations in Afghanistan was established through the port of Karachi and the Khyber Pass that air strikes began on October 7, nearly a month after 9/11, and ground operations after that.23 The Taliban regime collapsed before the U.S. onslaught, the attacks of the Northern Alliance, and a general disquiet with the Taliban within Afghanistan. Meanwhile, back in Washington, instead of focusing on the capture of bin Laden and other Al Qa’ida leaders, the White House seemed immediately to focus on Iraq. Interest in regime change in Iraq seems to have begun even sooner. Richard Clarke recounts being ordered to scour the intelligence for evidence of Iraqi involvement in the days following 9/11, despite the consensus in the intelligence community — the 16 branches spread out over several departments that deal in collecting intelligence and its analysis — that Iraq had nothing to do with it.24 Pakistan’s interests were not truly aligned with those of the U.S. Although the Taliban’s fall rendered the ISI’s investment in and contacts with them less tenable, Pakistan’s military, backed by strong public opinion, saw the threat to the nation as coming from India. Civilian politicians also refused to recognize the risks of rising militancy. In repeated meetings with U.S. officials, representatives of Pakistan’s political parties saw the military government, that is, Musharraf, as the major danger to Pakistan’s democracy. To them, the threat to Pakistan was the military, not the militants. Islamist political leaders, re-organized into the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), sought to use the militants to strengthen their own hands, and were able to do so with some success. The unpopularity in Pakistan’s provinces adjoining Afghanistan of the overthrow of the Taliban led to MMA victories in the NWFP and Balochistan in the general elections in October of 2002. They took control of the Provincial Assemblies in the NWFP and Balochistan and became the largest opposition bloc in the National Assembly: a historic breakthrough in the level of electoral support for political Islam in Pakistan. Nonetheless, Pakistan’s popular opinion was perceived as less important to the U.S. than the support of the military, personified in Musharraf. The White House, the State Department and the Defense Department set out to woo President Musharraf.25 Powell and his

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deputy, Armitage, as well as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz all visited Pakistan and India in October and November, 2001. The U.S. offered substantial financial aid, mostly in the form of debt restructuring, to Pakistan.26 On November 11, 2001, Musharraf met with Bush at the U.N. in New York and pleaded with the U.S. not to back the Northern Alliance, which had taken Mazar-i Sharif the day before from the Taliban, Pakistan’s old allies. Bush offered $1 billion dollars in aid, and Musharraf asked for F-16s. No F-16’s, but Bush reportedly reassured Musharraf with a personal guarantee: “You tell your people that the president looked you in the eye and told you that he would stick with you.”27 Bush’s words were soon put to the test. Western journalists in Kunduz, in northeast Afghanistan, reported that over several nights toward the end of November of 2001, Pakistani aircraft evacuated an indeterminate number of people to safety before the fall of the city to the Northern Alliance.28 Seymour Hersch reported that the evacuees included not only Pakistani army officers, intelligence advisers, and volunteers but also Taliban and Al Qa’ida fighters, the precise targets of the U.S. military.29 These flights could not have happened without U.S. knowledge and at least tacit cooperation, but both Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, denied that any flights occurred. Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United Nations confirmed them, as did several high-ranking U.S. officials to Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist.30 If these reports are true, Bush’s promise to Musharraf may have had the effect of undermining the capture of Al Qa’ida and Taliban fighters and operatives. It may also have contributed mightily to the massacre of as many as 2,000 Taliban prisoners believed to have been killed in container trucks by U.S.-allied Afghan troops under the control of Northern Alliance General Abdul Rashid Dostum, and buried in a mass grave in Dasht-e-Leili, Afghanistan, a war crime that has yet to be investigated.31 A second chance to put a quick end to the depredations of Al Qa’ida came in mid-December. Numerous reports placed bin Laden in his fortified cave hideout in Tora Bora, a remote mountain near the Pakistani border. In the face of intense bombing and an assault by CIA-hired mercenaries, an Afghan tribal leader, bin Laden and his praetorian guard escaped across the border into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where they were said to remain safe from American forces years later.32 Despite a reward by

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the U.S. government that eventually reached $25 million, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have eluded detection, most likely protected by a fierce praetorian guard of foreigners ringed by Pakistani supporters, even perhaps with the knowledge of elements in the government of Pakistan. A debate raged between elements of the U.S. government over whether the government of Pakistan was, indeed, protecting the leadership of Al Qa’ida. If it were so, had a policy decision been made or were elements or individuals sympathetic to Osama bin Laden? If the former, then the question arises who in the government of Pakistan made it? Bush’s trust in his personal relationship with Musharraf propelled, but also limited the bi-lateral relationship and ultimately undercut the strategic goal of neutralizing the threat posed by Al Qa’ida. Musharraf had risen through the ranks of the army to assume the presidency in a coup d’etat by seizing opportunities as they arose. Bush was the scion of a political family, and had held only one elective office before winning the presidency. Their many meetings and telephone calls almost always resulted in some benefit for Pakistan. In late June 2003, they met at Camp David, and Bush committed to a five-year aid package of $3 billion, or $600 million a year, half in arms sales (Foreign Military Financing, or FMF) and half in economic and development aid. Most of the development aid, $1 billion of it, was given directly to Pakistan as budgetary support, that is, with no stronger strings attached than a set of mutually-agreed upon “strategic objectives.” There was no mechanism to ensure that the U.S. money was increasing Pakistan’s investments in infrastructure and education instead of merely replacing funds that had been diverted to other purposes. In order to legalize this aid, waivers of the Pressler Amendment had to be sent to Congress annually. In the years ahead, the Congressionally-mandated annual reports on human rights and trafficking in persons were either toned down or the statutory sanctions waived so Pakistan’s poor performance would not interfere with the inflow of aid. A year later, after the removal of Saddam Hussain from power in Iraq, the destruction of Iraq’s social order and the looting of Iraq’s treasure, and the abuses of Abu Ghraib had unleashed a torrent of anti-U.S. feeling among millions of Muslims, Bush named Pakistan a “major non-NATO ally,” rhetorically upgrading the military relationship, because of Musharraf ’s promised cooperation.33 This was a far cry from the early 1990s, when Pakistan was briefly labeled as a state

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sponsor of terrorism by the Department of State. But the U.S. sorely needed the support of strong leaders in Muslim-majority countries, and Musharraf ’s was on the front lines with Afghanistan’s reemergent insurgency. Even though the focus for both the U.S. and the anti-U.S. forces had significantly switched to Iraq, the Taliban were regrouping and planning to counter-attack in Afghanistan from their safe havens in Pakistan. Meanwhile, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri continued a sophisticated and effective propaganda war against the U.S., issuing a steady stream of statements for media broadcast. The U.S. was unable to respond nearly as effectively. Much of the apparatus for telling America’s story had been dismantled in 2001, with the incorporation of the erstwhile United States Information Agency into the Department of State for, while the personnel remained in place, the leadership, creative energy, and vision had been dissipated. The propaganda war almost always went in the favor of Al Qa’ida. AntiU.S. sentiment took another ominous turn that included the rise in importance of self-radicalized, largely de-centralized cells widely spread and operating autonomously, as in the Bali bombing of 2002, the Madrid bombing of 2005, and the London bombings of 2006.34 Even as the insurgencies grew in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. officials insisted on calling them “terrorists,” a misnomer perhaps intended to conflate them with the 9/11 hijackers, but which did little to dissuade thousands of Muslims from joining the “jihad” against an invasion by foreign, non-Muslim, forces. In fact, the conflating of terrorist with insurgent may have had the opposite effect of legitimizing terrorism. Most of the extremists seeking to participate in jihad who flocked to Iraq and Afghanistan were trained in classic insurgency techniques, intended to disrupt and disable armies, not to terrorize and sway the thinking of populations. When they engaged in terrorism, such as suicide or car bombings against Iraqi and Afghan citizens, it often worked against them by alienating Muslim populations. In 2005 al-Zawahiri felt the need to write a warning to the leader of Al Qa’ida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: “[W]e must not throw the masses — scant in knowledge — into the sea before we teach them to swim.”35 Bush’s response to the deteriorating situation in both Iraq and Afghanistan, for which he needed support from the few Muslim leaders who would meet with him, was to meet with Musharraf annually on the fringes of the opening of the United Nations General

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Assembly every September. The president rarely spent much time in New York for these events, and so bilateral meetings by other heads of state were highly sought after. In a further accommodation to Pakistan, Bush visited Pakistan and stayed overnight in Islamabad in March, 2006. The decision to do so was made to honor a special request from Musharraf who, like many Pakistanis, had felt slighted when Clinton had spent only five hours in Pakistan six years earlier. Bush’s visit was more ceremonial and intended to prop up Musharraf. He made no public appearances but showed an interest in cricket, Pakistan’s national sports craze. In contrast, the India leg was short but focused on strengthening economic ties and, most importantly, advancing a deal to provide India with civilian nuclear material and technology that would not violate the non-proliferation treaty, of which the U.S. was a founder.36 Such a deal had been agreed to in July of 2005, but all necessary steps were not completed until the end of September 2008. It was made clear to Pakistan that no such deal was in the future of U.S.Pakistan relations, due to the, by then, widely known proliferation activities of the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb: Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan. When the U.S. presented the evidence to Musharraf in 2004, he claimed to be shocked that there was gambling going on in this casino. Dr Khan reportedly confessed to being solely responsible for supplying technology to North Korea, was pardoned by Musharraf, and placed under house arrest in his comfortable bungalow in the suburbs outside Islamabad. No foreigners were allowed to question him about the extent and nature of his dealing. In addition to North Korea, there is evidence that he supplied technology to Iran. In 2008, Dr Khan recanted his confession, saying that his activities had been approved and were official policy of the government of Pakistan. In 2009, he was freed from house arrest by Pakistan’s Supreme Court. The slight on nuclear technology and material was easily overlooked by Pakistan. Most importantly, arms sales and training of Pakistan’s security forces by the U.S. were flowing at record paces. They had quickly accelerated faster than they could be properly audited for effectiveness. The U.S. underwrote expenses incurred by the Pakistani army in pursuing militants in the FATA, called Coalition Support Funds (CSF). The costs of that program, little noticed or monitored at the time, eventually rose to almost $6 billion dollars between 2002 and 2008.37 Monitoring of the program has

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been criticized by the General Accounting Office, the non-partisan watchdog reporting to Congress, saying the Defense Department, “did not obtain detailed documentation to verify that claimed costs were valid, actually incurred, or correctly calculated.”38 The bills for the CSF transmitted through the Defense Department offices in Islamabad were vetted through the Department of Defense before being sent to the Department of State for final approval. They soon reached approximately $80 million dollars a month, or nearly a billion dollars a year, with no paper trail or accounting record of what the money was spent on or where it went when it was transferred, when they were approved by a mid-level foreign service officer on the Pakistan desk who had no way of confirming the correctness of the expenses and no power to reject them. On March 25, 2005, Bush had at last agreed to sell Pakistan F-16s as a reward for Musharraf ’s support for the Global War on Terror, which at that time was largely the invasion of Iraq.39 Pakistan eventually bought 36 new F-16C/D block 50/52s with an option for additional planes. In addition, Pakistan contracted for some of its older F-16s to receive “mid-life updates,” that is, renovation of their airframes and avionics. As an additional gesture of good-will, the U.S. gave Pakistan several older decommissioned F-16s from its own stocks.40 In order to assuage U.S.-Indian relations the administration encouraged U.S. defense manufacturers to bid on requests for proposals for aircraft for the Indian air force. The Bush administration assessed that these arms sales were unlikely to significantly tilt the balance of power between Pakistan and its much stronger adversary India. An examination of this sale by the Congressional Research Service concluded that while F-16s could be used in counterterrorist operations, they are over-designed for this use; attack helicopters and slower combat aircraft would have greater utility. It further noted that Pakistan had already outfitted its existing F-16s to carry nuclear weapons. It should have been presumed that the new aircraft would be similarly modified.41 The sale of the F-16s equipped with “over the horizon” AMRAAM air-to-air missiles was further proof that Pakistan’s military goals were aimed to counter India’s air force which has the ability to lock onto air targets before they can be seen. F-16s are not designed to stamp out insurgencies, such as those that would soon break out in the NWFP, FATA, Punjab, and Kashmir.

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Since limiting Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions had clearly taken a back seat to charming Musharraf into turning over Al Qa’ida members, it is fair to look at what was delivered. Under pressure from their chain of command, Pakistan’s security went after Al Qa’ida operatives, but after the F-16 deal, their capture noticeably slowed. The list of those captured or killed before early 2005 included Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hasayn Abu Zubaydah (captured March 2002), Ramzi Binalshibh (captured September 2002), Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (captured March 2003), Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (captured July 2004), Mustafa Mohamed Fadhil (August 2004, capture unconfirmed), Amjad Farooqi (killed September 2004). Abu Farraj Al-Libbi was captured in May 2005, after the F-16 deal was announced, but before negotiations were completed. While the location of some of these terrorists had been known for a long time, they had been allowed to operate until Pakistani authorities traded them for U.S. support. Abu Zubaydah for example, had been living openly in Pakistan, which had refused to turn him over to then assistant secretary of state Karl Inderfurth in January 2000.42 Several of those operatives turned over by Pakistan were subsequently subjected to what the International Committee of the Red Cross has termed torture in contravention of international law.43 From the F-16 deal until the end of the Bush administration, no major Al Qa’ida or Taliban operatives were captured by Pakistani security forces. No successful operations directed against either bin Laden or al-Zawahiri were conducted, or apparently ever mounted. Some in the U.S. government suspected that ISI agents maintained residual contacts with their former clients because in several instances, operations against militants failed because the targets seemed to have been tipped off in advance. Whatever the reason there was little real progress in dismantling Al Qa’ida, as measured by the fact that bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have now attained international fame for evading for eight years the largest manhunt in history. Furthermore, resistance to the U.S. and Western interests through terrorism has spread most notably to Bali, Madrid, London, Istanbul, and India. Most ominously, militant ideology has affected the political stability of many Muslim-majority states, most of which have seen their security decline. At the same time, the U.S. did not pressure Pakistan to crack down on other Islamic extremists. The leadership of the Taliban had found safe havens in the ethnic Pashtun community in Pakistan, many

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were believed to be in Quetta, where they were able to reestablish their organization and fundraising links, actively reaching out to donors in the Gulf states and especially in Saudi Arabia. They began recruiting supporters among the half of the Pashtun population that has always been Pakistani and in the many refugee camps, many of whose residents had never known life in Afghanistan, that is, populations who had no recollection of the Taliban’s cruelties when they were in power. For five years, the Taliban’s leadership evaded capture and engagement with hostile troops while raising sufficient money from donors in Pakistan and the Gulf, and made deals with opium traffickers. They also joined with other Pashtun leaders to recruit a steady supply of suicide bombers in order to attack Western troops in Afghanistan, and threaten the stability of Afghanistan and, increasingly, Pakistan. From 2006 on, militant violence increased in Pakistan, much of it under the leadership of newly-founded Tariq-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP). In what was then a new development, these attacks were directed increasingly against Pakistani targets such as politicians, officials, military installations and bases, hotels catering to foreigners, as well as against Shi’as. The politics of Pakistan’s response were complicated and confused. At first, Musharraf tried persuasion. In mid-2004, Musharraf had called for “enlightened moderation” in the practice of Islam, and a rejection of extremist ideologies. Even though such a message might well have had some resonance among the majority of Pakistan’s citizens who profess a moderate Islamic doctrine called Barelvi Hanafi, Musharraf made his initial appeal in an Op-ed piece in the Washington Post to an audience of American policy makers, and addressed the Organization of Islamic Conference, but not in Pakistan.44 Clearly, Musharraf ’s appeal was more for his foreign audiences than for his countrymen. At the same time, the militants’ message of opposition to American interference in Pashtun affairs found considerable sympathy among many Pakistani politicians, especially those in the MMA, but also among the Punjabi merchant class supporters of Nawaz Sharif and most probably among mid-ranked officers in the military. Actual measures taken against extremists were either few or ineffectual. For instance, the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), often believed to have been created by the ISI as a proxy in Pakistan’s anti-India campaign in Kashmir, and LeT’s “charitable wing,” the Jamaat ud-Dawa (JuD), were designated as terrorist organizations under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1267, which required

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all member states to freeze their financial assets. Nonetheless, LeT’s leadership remained at large and JuD offices throughout Pakistan continued to raise funds for years afterward. The Pakistanis showed no real interest in going after the Taliban, the LeT, or other militant organizations, which were, in any case, largely creations of the ISI. Possibly Pakistan’s people, leadership, and media feared that the U.S. would cut off aid once Al Qa’ida’s leadership was captured, a not wholly unrealistic concern. That sums up what happened to Afghanistan after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead, Pakistan served the U.S. a steady diet of the foreigners — Arabs, Uzbeks and Chechens — who were operating out of North and South Waziristan, while simultaneously harboring training camps and offering safe haven to terrorists from around the world. For instance, several of those implicated in the 2006 transatlantic airline plot in London were trained in Pakistan, to where they later fled. Years later, in November 2008, terrorists attacked Mumbai after being trained and outfitted in Pakistan. Elements of the Pakistani military leadership were clearly ambivalent toward militants other than Al Qa’ida. Perhaps the ISI was loyal to its former clients, perhaps Pakistan wished to preserve viable leverage in Afghanistan, and perhaps Pakistan’s security apparatus was simply not up to the operational challenges posed by its home-grown militant groups. At any rate, U.S. policy was unable to address effectively this basic schism with the Pakistanis because it was based on the personal relationship of Bush and Musharraf. Although Bush apparently pressed Musharraf to crack down on infiltration by Kashmiri militants into India, the results were sporadic. For a while in 2006, after Bush’s visit to Pakistan, infiltration did seem to slow down, indicating that Pakistan had leverage with the militants when they wanted to use it. But this forced inaction in Kashmir was mirrored by an increase in activity in Afghanistan. Sadly, Bush’s unwavering support for Musharraf had the perverse effect of undermining the legitimacy of the government of Pakistan and support for the GWOT in the eyes of Pakistan’s people. Bush used his second inaugural speech in 2005 to proclaim a new “democracy agenda” as central to U.S. policy. The U.S. Embassy even began to press for electoral reforms in Pakistan, but seemed overall unconcerned with public opinion. U.S. public diplomacy in Pakistan was conducted by only five officers: three in Islamabad, one in Peshawar and one in Lahore, who also served Karachi, Pakistan’s

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largest metropolis. Tight security constraints limited all of their activities. Typically, tours of duty were one uncomfortable year, barely enough time to get one’s bearings before moving on. With so little U.S. skin in the game, Pakistani officials could be excused for believing that the U.S. was unconcerned about the political price of using their security forces against their own people. Instead, Bush’s democracy agenda in Pakistan seemed to focus solely on elections, which the administration had conflated with democracy. The Bush administration also seemed to have confused democracy with good governance. Therefore, good elections were an adequate replacement for the growth of strong civil society institutions and a vigorous mechanism to petition the government.45 In fact, elections provide for an orderly change of power. Accountability in government, essential to good governance, requires strong institutions and the protection of civil rights. Very little of the money given to Pakistan was ever spent on the people of Pakistan. No major infrastructure projects were undertaken. Pakistan’s abysmal public education system remained dysfunctional. The energy sector remained underdeveloped and unable to accommodate the needs of Pakistan’s increasing population and growing economy. Social programs remained starved for funding. As a result Pakistan remained desperately poor, much of its population illiterate and living on subsistence wages, despite the large infusion of U.S. money. The result, according to at least one observer, has been “immense hatred of the U.S. Army and America, hatred that penetrates all classes of society.”46 It did not have to be this way. U.S. largesse can have measurable effects on Pakistani public opinion. For instance, the U.S. people and government responded immediately and with open hands after the October 8, 2005 earthquake, rated as 7.6 on the Richter scale, devastated large tracts of Kashmir and killed approximately 80,000 people. Instantly, the U.S. government and numerous non-governmental organizations began collecting money and relief supplies. U.S. military air support immediately rushed supplies, medical personnel, and earth moving equipment. The U.S. effort also reached out to other countries to locate helicopters that could operate in the rarified atmosphere of the Himalayan regions. The U.S. humanitarian response to the large earthquake represented a high water mark in public appreciation for the U.S., demonstrating clearly that U.S. approaches directly to the people, over the heads of the military government worked to improve the U.S. image and

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public support for U.S. goals in Pakistan. Charity, which is one of the five pillars of Islam, was reported positively in the local media and deeply appreciated. In a poll taken a month after the quake by the Pakistani pollster, ACNielson Pakistan, positive views of the U.S. doubled from 23 per cent to 46 per cent and support for Al Qa’ida and suicide bombings plummeted. Counter-intuitively, this did not translate into increased public support for the U.S. anti-terrorism efforts, indicating deep underlying concerns about the U.S. War on Terror.47 At the same time, Kashmiri militants were the first on the disaster scene in many instances because their training camps and bivouacs were already located near the epicenter. Groups such as the JUD also saw their public esteem rise as their remaining field hospitals were made into trauma centers and their surviving fighters delivered help, food, shelter, and medical supplies to the farthest reaches of the mountainous region. For a time, the U.S. tacitly stopped insisting that UNSCR 1267 sanctions be enforced on the enormous sums of money JUD raised for relief activities. Much of that money may have remained in their war chest and bankrolled the increase in political violence in the years that followed. Unfortunately, although the U.S. had opened a window of opportunity, it never took the initiative to solidify popular support for America in Pakistan. One path never taken would have been to reach out to Islamic leaders, obvious potential contacts in any ideological debate against Muslim extremists. This lacuna was a purposeful decision by the Embassy, USAID, and the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, ostensibly because of legal confusion over whether the establishment clause of the constitution of the U.S. disallowed governmental support for religious institutions and leaders. No inroads were made to help with the reform of Pakistan’s religious schools, some of which fostered intolerance and recruited youths to engage in jihad, and others that simply left millions of Pakistan’s youths undereducated.48 Nor was any serious attempt apparently made to countermand the caricature that the U.S. was a nation without faith. The International Visitor Program, which typically invited influential individuals to visit the U.S. for several weeks of meetings and observation on topics of interest to them, brought fewer than a dozen Pakistani Muslim clerics to see for themselves the richness of religion in America. Even when Muslim clerics reached out to the U.S. — one traveled to the U.S. on his own money to beg for U.S. help — policy makers in the Department of

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State ignored them. As of this writing, there has been no attempt made to reach out to those millions of moderate and reasonable Pakistanis who are horrified by what is happening to their country. U.S. reluctance to engage directly with the people of Pakistan coupled with Bush’s embrace of a military leader exposed serious flaws in the Bush administration’s vision of democracy. Bush’s much touted “democracy agenda” appears to have been an obsession with elections. Throughout 2006, efforts were made to ensure the reform of election rolls and the integrity of Pakistan’s Election Commission. Only when it began to look as if the 2007 elections would not be credible unless there was some political opposition also, did the U.S. re-open contacts with Benazir Bhutto. For years prior to that, requests by Bhutto to meet with the secretary of state, or the deputy secretary of state, or any undersecretary of state or assistant secretary of state were refused. Instead, she was routinely offered a meeting with the director of the Office of Pakistan and Bangladesh, an official far below her rank and dignity as a former prime minister and leaderfor-life of Pakistan’s most popular political party. When it became clear to Washington that Bhutto had to be part of the solution to Musharraf ’s political problems, Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, an experienced foreign service officer, formerly U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, ambassador to Iraq and director of National Intelligence, was set the task of go-between in the “arranged marriage” between Bhutto and Musharraf. Initial meetings discussed a modus vivendi between them, so that Musharraf could remain president. In the end, Bhutto and her old rival, Nawaz Sharif, were allowed to return to Pakistan by the Supreme Court that Musharraf had installed. The U.S. wished to have the impending elections seen as legitimate, and so the participation of opposition parties was essential. Bhutto’s election campaign ended in her assassination in December 2007. The election, perhaps Pakistan’s second truly “free and fair” election, resulted in a political condominium between Musharraf ’s rivals — Nawaz Sharif and Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari — and the subsequent resignation of Musharraf from, first, his role as chief of army staff, and then as president.49 It was not until late 2008, a year after Musharraf had unseated a Supreme Court judge that seemed intent on disqualifying his re-election, banned opposition political parties, and arrested thousands of protesters, and months after Pakistani-trained terrorists had attacked

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the Indian embassy in Kabul and Western tourists in luxury hotels in Mumbai, and it was undeniable the Pakistani army’s counterterrorism efforts had slowed to a crawl, that Bush seemed to accept that his unquestioning support for Musharraf had not produced results. Al Qa’ida was still at large in the FATA and posed a continuing threat to the U.S., according to a July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate.50 In 2007, a new group, the Tariq-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP), apparently formed as an alliance between Pakistani militant groups in the FATA, began active and violent opposition to the government of Pakistan. Largely unsuccessful military operations in North and South Waziristan, the siege of the Lal Masjid in Islamabad in July 2007, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto six months later, and deteriorating security situations in Bajaur, North and South Waziristan, and the unrest in the Swat Valley demonstrated that the writ of the government of Pakistan was ebbing. It was only in the summer of 2008 that the Bush administration began a new strategy of going around the ISI and Pakistani army by deploying unmanned predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles to attack suspected Al Qa’ida targets inside Pakistan. This is a policy that the incoming Obama administration has continued, despite repeated public protests from the Pakistani government and politicians. Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, seemed to signal in October, 2008, that there is an understanding that the missile attacks will be tolerated even though, “. . . there are politicians in Pakistan who think that there is value in making statements on the conduct of the war, and in trying to arouse a nationalist sentiment.”51

Conclusion After many years and billions of dollars, U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan are in danger of failing entirely, dealing a major setback to U.S. strategic interests in the region. Pakistan resides at the crossroads of virtually all major terrorist movements in the world today. One analyst, who served in the secretary of state’s Policy Office before joining the Council on Foreign Relations, calls parts of Pakistan a hot bed of terror.52 Groups in Pakistan provide safe havens, recruitment, indoctrination, training facilities, financing, and protection to terrorists and terrorist organizations such as the Al Qa’ida leadership, the Taliban and its leadership, the Tariq-i Taliban Pakistan, Lashkar-iToiba, and many related groups and individuals, including some members of the Pakistani diaspora holding Western passports.

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These groups collectively and individually pose threats to Afghanistan, India, the U.K, and the U.S., as well as Russia, China, several Central Asian nations, and Southeast Asian nations which face the threat of terrorist violence from extremists who have passed through Pakistan. The role of Pakistan in combating militants is oftentimes ambivalent, if not reluctant, because of the weakness of its political, social, and economic institutions and Pakistan’s lagging control over increasingly large areas of its territory. Sometimes, however, large amounts of evidence point to the fact that Pakistan’s ISI has supported terrorist organizations in the past in order to further what were perceived as national goals of undermining India’s position in Kashmir. Those groups, the Lashkar-i-Toiba foremost among them, have turned into Frankenstein’s monsters. They are now either beyond the control of the ISI and the government of Pakistan and have gone rogue, or they are still under the protection of the government of Pakistan, which has shown a reluctant willingness to crack down on the perpetrators of the LeT’s brazen attack on Mumbai in November 2008. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s large and politically powerful army remains fortified with unrestricted nuclear weapons, largely because of a position Bush took even before he took office. Although Pakistan appears to be veering toward increasing anarchy, we are given unsubstantiated assurances by the governments of both Pakistan and the U.S. that the nuclear weapons are safely protected by loyalist elements of Pakistan’s military. Such assurances without verification would not be accepted from any other nation. One is reminded of President Ronald Reagan’s mantra, ‘“Trust, but verify.” If extremists manage to crack the loyalty of some of those given over to protecting those weapons, either through appeals to religious beliefs and duty, or to anti-American or anti-Israeli feelings, or through simple corruption, one of those nuclear weapons, even without the sophisticated delivery devices Pakistan has developed, would pose a real danger to U.S. interests, no matter where it was used. As a consequence of a vast misapprehension of the motives and methods of Pakistan’s military-led government, and an unbridled trust in Musharraf, the Bush administration has left behind a time bomb that grows increasingly dangerous the longer it ticks. The danger posed by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri will outlive Al Qa’ida’s leadership. Al Qa’ida has won the battle against the U.S. simply by standing up to, and surviving, the strongest power on the earth.

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Notes 1. The opinions and characterizations in this chapter are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the United States Government or the Department of State. 2. Strobe Talbott, Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), p. 2. 3. The Pressler Amendment was enacted in 1985 because of worries about its nuclear ambitions. It enjoined all military to military contacts unless the president issued an annual waiver. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush refused to issue a waiver, thus freezing military contacts with a nation that was then considered a “strategic ally.” All arms sales, including a shipment of F-16 fighter planes for which Pakistan had already paid, had been frozen ever since. 4. Joint U.S.-India statement. Released by the Office of the Press Secretary of the White House in Agra, India, March 21, 2000. Available at http:// www.state.gov/www/global/human_rights/democracy/fs_000321_us_ india.html. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 5. Thomas Pickering (U/S for Political Affairs), Remarks at SAIS. Johns Hopkins University, April 27, 2000. Available at http://www.fas.org/news/ pakistan/2000/000427_pickering_sa.htm. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 6. George W. Bush. “A Distinctly American Internationalism.” Foreign policy speech given at the Ronald Reagan Library, Simi Valley, California, November 19, 1999. Available online at www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/ bush/wspeech.htm. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 7. Bush’s policymakers at the Department of State — Secretary Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage, Under Secretary for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation John Bolton, and Assistant Secretary for South Asian Affairs Christina Rocca — quietly adopted the Clinton administration’s long established four non-proliferation benchmarks, that is, no more testing, a halt in the production of fissile material, strategic restraint, and stricter export controls, but did not take any significant action in the months before 9/11. 8. Esther Pan, “Nonproliferation: The Pakistan Network,” Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder, February 12, 2004. Available at http:// www.cfr.org/publication/7751#12. Accessed on November 4, 2010. Also see Seymour Hersch, “The Deal,” The New Yorker, March 8, 2004. Available online at http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/03/08/040 308 fa_fact. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 9. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002). p. 4. Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 2.

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10. Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), pp. 788–90. U.S. concerns about Al Qa’ida were ratcheted up a notch after the bombings of two U.S. embassies in east Africa and the U.S. naval vessel The Cole. 11. An unclassified version of PDD-62 can be found at http://www.fas.org/ irp/offdocs/pdd-62.htm. Accessed on November 4, 2010. PDD-62 also established within the National Security Council a national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection and counter-terrorism. The first incumbent was Richard A. Clarke, a senior non-political civil servant. Extraordinarily, he was given a seat at meetings of the cabinet-level Principals Committee. He still headed the CSG on September 11, 2001, but reported through Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley to the Deputies Committee. 12. Woodward, Bush at War, p. 73. 13. http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/gen.bush.terrorism/. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 14. http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0919/p12s2-woeu.html. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 15. http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/17/bush.powell.terrorism/. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 16. Woodward, Bush at War, p. 48ff. 17. Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (New York: Free Press, 2006), p. 201. 18. Musharraf, In the Line of Fire, p. 201. Armitage and DG-ISI General Mahmud Ahmad deny it. Tariq Ali, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (Lahore: Good Books, 2008. Urdu Ed.), p. 145. 19. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. Also known as the Kean-Hamilton Report. Authorized Edition (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 2004), p. 331. 20. Musharraf, In the Line of Fire, pp. 204–6. 21. Ibid., pp. 201–2. 22. Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Viking Press, 2008), p. 28. 23. Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), p. 302. Citing Tommy Franks, American Soldier (New York: Harper and Collins, 2004), pp. 256, 273. From available accounts, it appears that there was no discussion of deploying either of the army’s elite airborne divisions: the 82nd Airborne and the 101st Airborne. They presumably were capable of starting ground operations sooner. 24. Clarke, Against All Enemies, p. 32.

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25. Musharraf had declared himself president on June 20, 2001. 26. “U.S. is Planning an Aid Package for Pakistan Worth Billions,” The New York Times, October 27, 2001. Also see Rashid, Descent into Chaos, p. 89 for a summary. 27. Rashid, Descent into Chaos, p. 86, citing interviews with senior Pakistani aides and diplomats present. Woodward, Bush at War, p. 303. These two reporters differ only slightly on Bush’s exact words. 28. Dexter Filkins and Carlotta Gall, “Pakistanis Again Said to Evacuate Allies of Taliban,” The New York Times, November 24, 2001. The reportage is examined by Michael Moran. The “airlift of evil,” MSNBC, November 29, 2001. Available at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3340165. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 29. Seymour Hersch, “The Getaway: Questions Surround a Secret Pakistani Airlift,” The New Yorker. January 28, 2002. Available at http:// www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/01/28/020128fa_FACT. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 30. Rashid, Descent into Chaos, p. 91ff. 31. The charges of a massacre have been around for years, and are repeated in Tariq Ali’s The Duel, p. 91ff, as well as other news sources. Physicians for Human Rights has posted online heavily redacted U.S. government documents obtained through a FOIA request, that show concerns among many parties about the mounting evidence that a massacre did occur. See http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/documents-2008-12-11. html, accessed on November 4, 2010. Recently, The New York Times (July 13, 2009) published an editorial calling for an investigation of the Dasht-e Leili massacre, after its reporter had claimed that the Bush administration had discouraged any investigation (James Risen, “U.S. Inaction Seen After Taliban P.O.W.’s Died,” The New York Times, July 10, 2009). 32. National Intelligence Estimate, The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland, (Washington, D.C.: National Intelligence Council), July 2007, p. 6. Available online at http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20070717_release. pdf. Accessed on November 3, 2010. 33. “Bush Names Pakistan ‘Major Ally,’” BBC News, June 17, 2004. See http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3814013.stm. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 34. National Intelligence Estimate, Declassified Key Judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate. Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States, April 2006. Available online at http://www.dni.gov/press_ releases/Declassified_NIE_Key_Judgments.pdf. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 35. Letter from al-Zawahiri to al-Zarqawi, ODNI News Release No. 2-05, October 11, 2005, p. 5. Available online at http://www.fas.org/irp/ news/2005/10/dni101105.html. Accessed on November 4, 2010.

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36. “Bush Visit to India Centers on Nuclear Pact.” http://www.cnn.com/2006/ WORLD/asiapcf/03/01/bush.india/. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 37. Caroline Wadhams, Brian Katulis, Lawrence Korb, and Colin Cookman, Partnership for Progress: Advancing a New Strategy for Prosperity and Stability in Pakistan and the Region (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress), November 2008, p. 63. Available at http://www. americanprogress.org/issues/2008/11/pakistan_report.html. Accessed on November 3, 2010. 38. GAO Report. Combating Terrorism: Increased Oversight and Accountability Needed Over Pakistan Reimbursement Claims for Coalition Support Funds,” GAO-08-806. Available at http://nationalsecurity.oversight.house.gov/ documents/20080624134619.pdf. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 39. “U.S. Agrees to Sell New F-16s to Pakistan,” http://www.f-16.net/news_ article1335.html. Accessed on November 4, 2010. The Pakistani order had the salutary effect of preserving the Lockheed Martin F-16 assembly line in Fort Worth, Texas, which was otherwise slated to close. 40. These aircraft may well have been built originally for the 1986 Pakistan order. In other words, they were airplanes Pakistan had already bought but which had never been delivered due to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. 41. Christopher Bolkcom, Richard F. Grimmett, and K. Alan Kronstadt, Combat Aircraft Sales to South Asia: Potential Implications, Congressional Research Service publication RS22148, May 19, 2005. Available online at http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RS22148.pdf. Accessed on November 4, 2010. There is no discussion in this report, nor was there elsewhere in the U.S. government to my knowledge, and I inquired at the time, whether F-16s on a one-way mission could potentially reach as far as the eastern Mediterranean if fitted with extra fuel tanks. 42. Rashid, Descent into Chaos, p. 48. 43. “ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen ‘High Value Detainees’ in CIA Custody,” Confidential Report, February, 2007. Available online at http://www.nybooks.com/icrc-report.pdf. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 44. Pervez Musharraf, “A Plea for Enlightened Moderation,” Washington Post, June 1, 2004. The author once asked a Pakistani cleric for the Urdu for “enlightened moderation,” only to be surprised that there was no clear translation. The absence of one is further indication that the message was not truly intended for the Pakistani audience. 45. This confusion of elections with democracy was also exemplified with the administration’s push for elections in Palestine, which resulted in the victory of Hamas. Once the Palestinian people’s will was known, the Bush administration attempted to nullify the results by refusing to recognize their victory and talk to what was then the elected government of the Palestinians.

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46. Rashid, Descent into Chaos, p. xl. 47. “Dramatic Change of Public Opinion in the Muslim World,” Terror Free Tomorrow, 2005. Available online at http://www.terrorfreetomorrow. org/articlenav.php?id=71. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 48. The best, and most recently published, work on madrassas in Pakistan is Christine Fair, Madrassah Challenge: Militancy and Religious Education in Pakistan (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 2008). An earlier and more comprehensive study was edited by Robert Hathaway, Education Reform in Pakistan: Building for the Future (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2005). 49. The first “free and fair” election was the election of 1970 that led to the victory of the Bengali party, the Awami League and Sheik Mujibur Rahman. The upshot was that the leader of the PPP, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, rejected the results and the Pakistani army moved to suppress the Bengalis in March 1971. The resultant conflict, which dragged in India on the side of the Bengalis, led to the succession of East Pakistan and the declaration of an independent Bangladesh. It is interesting to note that both “free and fair” elections were conducted by military dictators, and both brought the PPP to power. 50. “The Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland,” National Intelligence Estimate, July, 2007. Available at http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/ 20070717_release.pdf. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 51. Interview with Ambassador Husain Haqqani. “Fighting Terrorism is Pakistan’s Own War.” Council on Foreign Relations, October 21, 2008. Available at http://www.cfr.org/publication/17567/capital_interview.html. Accessed on November 4, 2010. 52. Dan Markey. “Hotbed of Terror,” Council on Foreign Relations OpEd. August 11, 2008. Available at http://www.cfr.org/publication/16929/ hotbed_of_terror.html Accessed on November 4, 2010.

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10 Pakistan: The Burden of Islam Ainslie T. Embree

In July 1947, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, as undisputed leader of the

Muslim League, was invited by the members of its branch in London to address them in celebrating his victory and theirs in making Pakistan a reality. He had to decline, but reminded them that the far greater task remained “of constructing and building up of Pakistan, which will require every ounce of our energy but by the grace of God we shall build up this new greatest Muslim sovereign state in the world with complete unity, discipline and faith.”1 Behind these proud words was historical memory, which, as the French essayist Paul Valéry put it, is the most dangerous product of the human intellect, for it causes dreams; it intoxicates whole people; gives them false memories; keeps their old wounds open; and makes nations bitter. The brief history of Pakistan calls upon a large store of dreams having to do with the idea of Pakistan as a Muslim — or Islamic — state. In older national states, language, history, religion, geography, and culture are basic to national identity, but in Pakistan they all worked to divide the nation. This was most obvious in East Pakistan when Jinnah declared Urdu the national language although it was the mother tongue of only 1 per cent of the population of East Pakistan. Urdu was identified with Islam in North India, but Bengali had long been the language of Islam and culture in East Pakistan. It is noteworthy that Jinnah said “Muslim state,” not “Islamic state.” A Muslim state was a demographic fact, where the majority of the population would be Muslims but an Islamic state was something quite different. As stated in the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan in 1949, and in subsequent constitutions, the people of Pakistan would live “in accord with the teachings and requirements of Islam as set out in the Holy Qur’an and the Sunna.”2 Debates and quarrels, often violent, followed as scholars, politicians, and military leaders claimed the right to define Pakistan: as either a Muslim or an Islamic state.

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Did the state have to enforce laws that claimed their legitimacy, not in reason or democratic decisions, but in the immutable will of God?

Islam as Community Throughout his long career Jinnah’s concern had been the protection of the civil rights of the large Muslim population of India in the midst of the much larger Hindu majority, and he rarely if ever spoke of his aim as the creation of an Islamic state. Inherent in the title of this essay, however, is the argument that the deliberate commitment by the Constituent Assembly, the legal entity to which the British transferred power over the territory that became Pakistan in August 1947, to make Pakistan an Islamic state, with all its complex ramifications, was a transformative action in the development of Pakistan as a nation. It is this commitment, coupled with the historic legacy of a thousand years of Muslim rule in the region, that locates Pakistan in the world community as well as determines its internal civil society. This claim is not to deny the great importance of other factors, such as the economy and relations with other states, particularly India and the United States, but only to insist that in nation building in Pakistan Islam as a religion and an ideology constitute what I have called in the title of the essay “the burden of Islam.” Burden is being used here as it often is in religious discourse, especially in the foundation texts and doctrines of the Abrahamic traditions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — to convey a willing acceptance of a duty or responsibility in submission to ultimate divine power. Most of those texts have some version of the familiar promise in the New Testament that the individual or group that submits to divine authority will find the yoke is easy and the burden is light, and reward is great.3 For Muslims, the core concept of their faith is exactly such submission to God, that is, Allah. The root of the Arabic word for submission, is s-l-m, from which the terms Islam, the totality of God’s revelation, and Muslim, one who submits to God’s will, are derived, but it also means peace, and those who surrender to the ultimate, transcendent truth and are at peace with God, with themselves, and with the world-wide community of faith, the umma, that is, believers who have accepted the divine plan of salvation as revealed to Muhammad.4 A second sense of “burden of Islam” is more metaphorical, suggesting that Islam is a burden that has been unwillingly placed

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on Pakistan. Farzana Shaikh in her Making Sense of Pakistan, says that the founders of Pakistan, principally Jinnah, wanted a modern constitutional state but were committed to finding a special role for Islam in nation building. This commitment to Islam was an “embarrassment,” Shaikh says, that the new rulers sought to modify by interpreting Islam freed from the pre-modern associations attached to religion.5 The primary sense remains, however, in that there has been what appears to be an unchallenged acceptance in Pakistan of the idea of the centrality of the umma, the community of believers that links the modern state of Pakistan with the history of Islam in the Indian subcontinent. When Jinnah insisted in 1940 that Islam and Hinduism are not religions in the strict sense of the word, he was undoubtedly identifying religion as he had observed Christianity in England and in the small, and notably secular, British community in India, a kind of voluntary organization with club houses which some used and some did not. In contrast, Hinduism and Islam were distinct social orders deriving their existence from different sources of history. While he was refusing to fit Islam into the cubby-hole of what he considered the Western meaning of religion, he was linking it with more generic definitions that recognize community in the universality of religious phenomena. One such attempt, accepted in this essay, defines religion as a fusing of memories and experiences around symbols that are regarded as possessing powers that transcend ordinary life, and these experiences unite people into a community. Religion is, therefore, not a self-sufficient entity but it is embedded in the historical processes that shape and respond to all aspects of human creativity.6 In this definition, there is no religion without community, an understanding which is fundamental to the social role of religion in Pakistan. At the same time, the attempt to create a homogenous community out of large and disparate groups carries with it the seeds of dissension, a process that is observant in the historical legacy of Muslim societies in the Indian subcontinent from their beginning up to the present time. The Qur’an sums up this emphasis in this fashion: “This day I have perfected for you your religion and completed My favour towards you, and approved al-Islam for you as a religion.”7 Religion seems to mean here obedience to the beliefs and practices of the true believer in relation to God; there is no question of Islam being one religion among many. It is religion, of which Christianity and Judaism are

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corruptions, but since they preserve some features of the truth their adherents historically were permitted a large measure of freedom in practicing their faiths, but not to proselytize. The corollary of this ironic world view, however, is that the establishment of the just Islamic order will arouse enemies seeking to destroy it. Believers must be prepared to fight these enemies: “To those who believe not in the signs of God, and unjustly slay the prophets, and slay those men who enjoin righteousness, announce an afflictive chastisement. . . . Let not believers take them for their friends. . . . Who does this has nothing to hope from God.”8 This is as contemporary as the statement of a young member of a radical Muslim group justifying the killing of CIA officials in Afghanistan in 2010, in almost a paraphrase of this verse, because they were enemies of Islam who had killed Muslims.9

Faith and History in Islam in the Indian Subcontinent It may sound remote from the reality of present-day Pakistan to move back to the eighth century to what is now the state of Sind, but it is of importance for the intellectual and political history of Pakistan that from the establishment of an initial foothold by invaders from Iraq from 694 to 714 CE. there were recurring social and political issues for the Islamic rulers. The limits of conquest fall roughly within the boundaries of present-day Pakistan and the issue that confronted the rulers was that they and their soldiers were a very small minority Muslim community that had to maintain control over the conquered people. Complicating this was the demand from religious leaders who accompanied the invaders that the victors should convert the non-Muslim population that God had given them to rule. The conquest of al-Hind, as the Arabs called the territories they had conquered, was not, however, the result of an Islamic crusade to convert non-Muslims but was due to the extraordinary military and political dynamism of the Arab leaders. Conversions did take place but those who converted to Islam were a small minority and the rulers treated the rest of the population — Hindus and Buddhists — in much the same way that Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians had been treated earlier in Iraq and Syria, despite the demand of the religious leaders that the Muslim rulers should use force to propagate the faith.10 The tension between the ruling institution and the

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religious institution was already becoming a characteristic of political and social life of Muslim rule in India. The rulers saw the value of the Indian conquests in the taxes paid, however grudgingly, by the Hindus that comprised the vast majority of the population and who continued to follow old customs as they accepted the new rulers. Even as Muslim rulers conquered much of North and Central India in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Islam remained a minority religion, and Hindus made up most of the peasantry who cultivated the land, paid taxes, and served in the armies. They also continued to be dominant as traders and merchants and were also officials at all levels of the bureaucracy. The Muslim rulers were concerned, in the judgment of careful scholars of the period, less with converting the non-Muslims than in preserving “the cultural and religious identity of the ruling group so that it would instinctively cohere to defend its privileged political position against the non-Muslims.” This led the rulers to be very active in suppressing unorthodox Muslim sects who threatened the cultural unity of the Muslim minority, thus ensuring the support of the ulama, the scholars recognized as authorities in Islamic law. Early in the thirteenth century one well-known scholar could declare that “the world is maintained through legal opinions of the learned and by their piety.”11 Another scholar stressed that the primary duty of the ruler, in conjunction with learned scholars, was to protect the faithful, so that Muslims could give “themselves to obedience to God and the performance of their religious duties in peace of mind.”12 Zia ud-din Barani (1285–1357), one of the most important of Indian Muslim scholars, was enunciating the relation between ruler and religious leaders in terms of what he called the functions of kingship and prophethood: “The world will not come right or stay right through kingship alone,” he insisted, “there must be both prophets and kings in the world so that mankind’s business may be carried through in accordance with God’s wishes.”13 Barani, like General Zia later in Pakistan, insisted that the duty of a Muslim ruler was to enforce public morals by appointing “harsh-tempered censors of morals” who would “check wine-sellers, flute-players, and dice-players. . . . All male prostitutes should be prevented with severe blows from adorning themselves like women. . . . Anything prohibited by the Shari’a . . . should be totally suppressed.”14 In the relatively brief record of Pakistan as a modern nation the implications of confessional politics was to remain an enduring issue.

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Sectarians who challenged received opinions throughout Islamic history in India were regarded as dangerous by the rulers because they threatened the good order of society while their heretical doctrines were seen by religious leaders as a threat to the salvation of the faithful. The importance of the treatment of one such heretical sect in Pakistan, the Ahmadiyyas, is noted later. During the Mughal Empire, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the power and authority of the rulers were most clearly articulated in both practice and theory, the tension between the imperial institution and the religious institutions of Islam was evidenced by the reaction to the religious policies of the emperor Akbar by his supporters and his opponents. In 1579, ulama at Akbar’s court issued a declaration that as “learned scholars and men accomplished in minute study” who had “migrated to Hindustan and have chosen this country for their home” had now concluded that Akbar, “the Shadow of God over Mankind,” was “a most wise king and one most informed of God.” Therefore, when Akbar gave a decision for “the good orders of the world’s affairs, it was obligatory for everyone, including the ulama, to follow it.”15 The challenge to this high vision of the imperial institution came, not surprisingly, from scholars who were not attendant on the court, notably Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624), an opponent of the Shias, Persian immigrants, and the Sufi mystical orders who had been favored by Akbar. He wrote how he rejoiced at the news of the death of Akbar, making it possible to get rid of the Akbar’s wicked ulama who spread the fatal poison of false teaching. Now wise ulama would be able to be helpers and assistants of rulers, guiding the spread of the Shari’a and “the strengthening of the community.”16 The eighteenth century witnessed the drastic weakening of the Mughal Empire, which had reached its greatest territorial extent under Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707), but just before his death, he wrote to his sons, that “guardianship of the people” is the trust the ruler commits to his sons, but he knew his own sons to be incompetent, and he himself “had not been the guardian and protector of the empire.”17 The dangers threatening the empire and the Muslim community in India after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 is one of the themes of the writing of a remarkable thinker of the period, Shah Wali Ullah, (1703–1762). He saw the decline of the Mughal Empire and the weakness of Islam in India as closely related, especially when Delhi, the capital, was threatened by rebellious Hindus, principally

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the Marathas. Aside from this actual danger of a conquest of the capital of the empire, he saw the culmination of the weakening of the Muslim community in the insidious increase of the influence of the Hindu community, or sect, as they are called in the translation used here. “Every tax and levy that is current in the imperial administration is in the hands of Hindus. There are no accountants and managers not of that sect. . . . Whatever bankruptcy and wretchedness there is has fallen upon the Muslims.”18 The only hope for Islam in India and for the empire was unity of the Muslim community in support of a ruler who enforced the Shari’a and Sunna. Shah Wali Ullah had no immediate effect in his life time in his plea for the unity of Indian Islam but his followers, under Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi (1786–1831) in the nineteenth century moved to the idea of a state in the Indian subcontinent, free from both British and Hindu domination, where the bulk of the population would be Muslim and where individual and social life could follow without hindrance to the tenets of Islam.19 This led to the call for fighters, mujahideen, in a jihad, holy war, to establish such a state in western Punjab. At first their enemy was the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh, but after the British conquest of the Panjab, they fought the British without much success because the British were attacking Muslim Afghanistan. This inevitably brings to mind the Taliban in the twenty-first century. Similar, but not directly related, movements of Muslim peasants in Bengal, enraged by the oppression of their Hindu landlord, for a short time set up a Muslim state until they were defeated by the British in 1786–1831. However inchoate and unsuccessful, these movements in the Muslim majority areas that now constitute the two great Muslim states of Pakistan and Bangladesh, are surely links in the long chain of the “idea of Pakistan” reaching from the Arab conquests in the early eighth century to Jinnah’s “greatest Muslim sovereign state” in 1947. The founding of the Muslim League in 1906 should be a great landmark in the codification of the idea of Pakistan but its aims as stated in its initial resolutions make no hint of a desire for independence from Britain or open hostility towards the Hindu majority. Its central aim, however, was one that had frequently been stressed in the past: “To protect and advance the political rights and interests of Mussalmans of India and respectfully to represent their needs and aspirations to government.”20 This is in line with the writings of the great political philosophers of Indian Islam where the welfare and unity of the community is the defining concern.

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There is, however, one notable exception where concern for the Muslim community was broadened to include all Indians. This was in the early speeches and writings of Muhammad Ali Jinnah as a young man when he had been the secretary to Dadabhai Naoroji, one of the great architects of the Indian National Congress. When Naoroji was the Congress’s president in 1906, and sick and feeble, Jinnah had helped in the writing of the speeches that included such phrases as all Indians, Hindus, and Muslims, “must sink or swim together. Without this union, all effort will be in vain.”21 Jinnah returned to the twin themes of the welfare of the Muslim community and the good relations with the Hindus as a community in his Lucknow speech in 1916, and reading it in the light of the partition, one can see the seeds of what later came to be called communalism, the dark side of relations between Hindus and Muslims: The Mussalmans must learn to have self-respect, and what we want is a healthy fair impetus to be given to our aspirations and ideals as a community and it is the most sacred duty of Government to respond to that claim. Towards the Hindus our attitude should be of good will and brotherly feelings. Cooperation in the cause of our Motherland should be our guiding principle. India’s real progress can only be achieved by a true understanding and harmonious relations between the great communities.22

It was this sense of India’s destiny as dependent upon good relations between the two communities that led the India National Congress and the Muslim League to agreement upon separate Hindu–Muslim electorates in what became known as “the Lucknow Pact” to ensure a democratic, united India. In urging the acceptance of the agreement in his Presidential Address to the League in 1916 he urged its members to accept the agreement: The Musalmans of India would be false to themselves and the traditions of their past, had they not shared to the full the new hope that is moving India’s patriotic sons to-day, or had they failed to respond to the call of their country. Their gaze, like that of their Hindu fellow country-men, is fixed on the future. . . . [On our decisions will depend] . . . the fate of India’s future, of India’s unity, and of our common ideals.23

This was the Jinnah of whom Edwin Montagu, the secretary of state for India in the British Cabinet, said when he met him in India at this time:

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Young, perfectly mannered, impressive looking, armed to the teeth with dialectics . . . Jinnah is a very clever man and it is, of course, an outrage that such a man should have no chance of running the affairs of his own country.24

Montagu had guessed that “running his own country” was what the young man wanted to achieve. Reading these words, however, in the light of partition and the development of Pakistan’s relations with India, one has to ask, what happened then, not so much to Jinnah as to India and the world, that from 1916 to 1947 he ceased to be what leaders of the Indian National Congress called him in 1916, “The Ambassador of HinduMuslim Unity,” and what they call him now, the Muslim destroyer of Indian unity? The explanation is not, I am convinced, in any dramatic change in Jinnah’s thinking, but is to be found in the phrase “Muslim community.” Community has the same roots as “communal,” which had come to have a very pejorative usage by the 1930s. Communal has been defined, in the context of North India, in a social science formulation as “a consciously shared religious heritage which becomes the dominant form of identity for a given segment of society.”25 A leading historian of modern South Asia has suggested that it would be well to discard “the conventional but misleading framework of reference to united homogenous communities,” Muslim or Hindu, because such groups do not exist.26 This is probably true for careful modern social scientists, but references to the two communities as Muslim or Hindu has long been common, and “the injection of religion, albeit as a symbol of the cultural self-defence of communities, did much to polarize social relations.”27 Not all, but many of the events in the formative years after 1917 had religious overtones, enough to exacerbate Hindu–Muslim tensions and contribute to the burden of Islam for the new state. Those events are as well-known as they are controversial. The Balfour Declaration, with its promise of a Jewish state in Palestine, at the expense of the majority Muslim population in Palestine, was seen in India, not surprisingly, as anti-Muslim. So was the Treaty of Sèvres that dismantled the Ottoman Empire and led to the deposing of the Caliph. Montagu and Lord Reading, the governor-general, saw both of these events as indications to Indian Muslims that Great Britain was willing to appease groups outside India at the expense of India’s Muslims. The fact that Montagu and Reading were both Jewish, as

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was frequently noted in the British and Indian press at the time, was of peculiar importance: for Montagu was strongly opposed to the Balfour Declaration as inevitably leading to trouble in the Middle East and India, with Lord Reading dubious about it; both were openly critical of the of Treaty of Sèvres.28 Another factor in Hindu–Muslim relations was that Muslims resented Gandhi’s rise to power as the leading voice of the Indian National Congress, with its strong overtones of Hindu piety, as excluding them from Indian nationalism. Coupled with the strident Hindu nationalism, often virulently anti-Muslim, of movements like the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, this made many Muslims fearful of their future. So did the alleged unfair treatment of Muslims in provinces that after 1937 were led by the Indian National Congress, which Muslim leaders, including Jinnah, characterized as a Hindu organization. The democracy the Government of India Act of 1935 espoused meant, they insisted, perpetual domination of the Muslim minority by the Hindu majority. Congress leaders like Nehru insisted that such fears were groundless — all citizens would be Indian, that their religious identification was personal, and would have no influence in deciding policy. Powerful and influential Muslim voices, however, questioned this reading of the role of religion. Gandhi’s grandson writes that Gandhi knew that the Indian masses, Hindu or Muslim, could be stirred, for good or ill, only “by movements that connected to their faiths and loyal to their cultural and religious inheritance.”29 Muhammad Iqbal, the most famous of Indian Muslim writers of the time, enforced Gandhi’s understanding of Indian history and society from a Muslim point of view when he declared in his presidential address to the Muslim League in 1930 that the position of the Indian National Congress that religion was not a decisive component to nationality was unacceptable to Muslims. For Muslims, he argued, religion and society were organically related, the one nourishing the other. “The construction of a polity on national lines, if it means displacement of Islamic principles, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.”30 Iqbal was emphasizing the fundamental importance of the umma, the community, to Islam, not the state, which was, as noted at the beginning of this essay, the position of Islamic political philosophers in India. While there was a world-wide umma to which all believers belonged with the Ka’ba as a recognizable center for all Muslims everywhere, Iqbal was stressing something different,

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“a regional centre as a politically defined centre was necessary for the Muslims of the sub-continent.”31 For Iqbal this had an existing territorial base with a Muslim majority population: Panjab, North West Frontier Province, Sind, and Baluchistan. This is essentially the Pakistan that emerged after the secession of Bangladesh in 1971. The session of the Muslim League in 1940 where Jinnah made his famous speech declaring that India was made up of two nations, one Hindu and one Muslim, was held in Lahore, which had been a political and cultural center of Muslim power in India since the twelfth century. It is extremely difficult to appreciate, he said, why Hindus fail to understand that Islam and Hinduism are not religions in the strict sense, but “different and distinct social orders,” and “it is a dream that Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality.” Muslim India, he emphasized, cannot accept any constitution which must necessarily result in a Hindu majority government. Democracy of the kind of which “the Congress High Command is enamored [with] would mean the complete destruction of what is most precious in Islam.”32 The unspoken assumption was that the British would shortly be transferring their Indian empire to Indian hands. With this in mind, following Jinnah’s powerful speech, the League members passed what has become known as the “Lahore Resolution” that stated in lawyerly, but ambiguous language that no British constitutional plan would be acceptable to Muslims, unless areas in which the Muslims were numerically in a majority, “as in the north-western and eastern zones of India,” were grouped to constitute “independent states” in which the constituent units would be autonomous and sovereign.33 Just exactly what those phrases meant — a single state or a group of states — does not seem to have attracted much attention of the Muslim League at the time, although it has been much debated since; but for Jinnah there seems to have been no ambiguity. In 1945, already ill, he told a crowd “that Pakistan is the question of life and death for us. . . . All Muslims believed in one God and were one nation. . . . The moon of Pakistan is shining, and we shall reach it.”34 Jinnah’s conviction that all Muslims believed in one God was probably as correct as any such religious generalization can be, but so also is Ayesha Jalal’s summary of the political realities as the new state came into existence on July 14, 1947: “If Islamic sentiments were the best hope of keeping the Pakistani provinces pulling in the same

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direction, their particularistic traditions and linguistic affiliations were formidable stumbling blocks.”35 Not the least of these stumbling blocks had to do with the implementation of what I have called the burden of Islam while engaged in building a modern state. A number of these issues can be listed rather schematically: (1) The commitment in “The Objectives Resolution,” adopted by the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan in 1949, to recognize that Islam was to be the guiding force of Pakistan; (2) The treatment of religious minorities; (3) The authoritarian military and the role of Islam; (4) Islam and civil society, particularly in relation to cultural expressions, education, and the status of women; (5) The interplay of Islam and foreign policy, in relation to India and the United States. Most of these issues have been affected by the rise of expressions of Islam of different groups known variously and not very precisely as fundamentalists, jihadists, Taliban, and Islamists. In July 1947, after negotiations between the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League, and the British had broken down and the partition of British India had been agreed to by the three parties, however unwillingly; elections for a Constituent Assembly were held in the provinces that were to make up Pakistan. It was to this body that Great Britain formally turned over sovereignty on August 14, 1947. Jinnah gave a remarkable address to the new Constituent Assembly on August 11 in which he noted that it was unavoidable that there would be religious minorities in both countries, India and Pakistan, and in the past there had been enmities between the two, but the time had come to forget that and to realize that all were equal citizens of Pakistan. Then followed a declaration of religious liberty: “You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the State.”36 Jinnah never explained what he meant by saying that religion has nothing to do with the business of the state since it seems to stand in obvious contradiction to what Pakistan stood for, but there are possible explanations. One is that he was saying that while Pakistan was a home for Muslims, this need not infringe in any way the religious liberties of the religious minorities. Another is that he was envisaging areas in civil society which would be free from direct

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government control. All this is suppositious, however, as Jinnah died on September 11, 1948. Liaquat Ali Khan, as prime minister, became the driving force in the government, although the president was Khwaja Nizamuddin of East Pakistan. On March 7, Liaquat Ali Khan moved the resolution on which the constitution was to be based: In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful; Whereas sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to God Almighty alone and the authority which He has delegated to the State of Pakistan through its for being exercised within the limits prescribed by Him as a sacred trust, Wherein the principles of democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance, and social justice, as enunciated by Islam, shall be fully observed; Wherein the Muslims shall be enabled to order their lives in the individual and collective spheres in accord with the teachings and requirements of Islam as set out in the Holy Qur’an and the Sunna.37

The operative words in all this are, of course, “as enunciated by Islam,” and groups, ranging from social democrats to those we call “The Taliban,” can find learned scholars of Islam to validate that their positions are in accord with it. The Objectives Resolution finds a place in all the subsequent constitutions of Pakistan, available to all as bedrock for their social and political positions. Liaquat elaborated on their meaning after moving their adoption, declaring, that as Pakistanis, We are not ashamed of the fact that we are overwhelmingly Muslims and we believe that it is by adhering to our faith and ideals that we can make a genuine contribution to the welfare of the world. Therefore, you would notice that the Preamble of the Resolution deals with a frank and unequivocal recognition of the fact that all authority must be subservient to God.

He must have recognized that he was playing into the hands of many of the ulama, who believed that they should be recognized as having a place in legal and judicial decisions, for he reminded his audience that “Islam does not recognize either priesthood or any sacerdotal authority,” and therefore there was no question of Pakistan becoming a theocracy. “If there are any who still use the word theocracy in the same breath as the polity of Pakistan, they are either laboring under a grave misapprehension, or indulging in mischievous propaganda.”

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Although states with Muslim rulers and with considerable Muslim communities in them had existed in the region that is now Pakistan for over a thousand years, this was the first state in South Asia with Muslim rulers and with a large majority Muslim population. The Resolution was a political proclamation, in a Western-style ruling body, intended to assert that in Islam the demands of the divine and the secular are not demarcated, since the fundamental precept of Islam is the doctrine of the unity of God with his rule overall aspects of his creation. The person whom God appoints as ruler over a population, made up of Muslims or non-Muslims, is under obligation to rule all people in accordance with God’s will. While these assertions are often ignored or dismissed as pious ejaculations by Western politicians and scholars, to do so is to misread the signals being broadcast by Pakistan’s civil and military society. A test of the place of minorities came early, not over the abstractions of tolerance and democracy, but over the status of the Ahmadiyya, a prominent group whose members regarded themselves as pious Muslims but whose opponents asserted that their claim to be Muslims was based on a scandalous falsehood. The founder of the Ahmadiyya was Ghulam Ahmad (1835– 1908), who, according to his successor as head of the movement, taught that in times of great spiritual need, God sends prophets of whom Jesus was one and Muhammad another, “to gather together men of all faiths, and guide the nations of the world along the right path.” Ghulam Ahmad was the Promised One for the reformation of the present age. In the eyes of the Muslim spiritual leaders of the time, however, he had committed the gravest of sins by saying Muhammad was not the last of the prophets and denying the finality of his revelations. The Ahmadiyyas might have been dismissed as a minor group except that in the troubled years immediately after the establishment of Pakistan powerful voices began to demand that the spirit of the Objectives Resolution should be fulfilled and steps taken to move towards making Pakistan a truly Islamic state. Maulana Maududi (1903–79) was the best-known spokesman for this position through his organization, Jamal-i-Islami, which gained wide support among college students and government workers. While it did not achieve much electoral success, the logic of his ideas permeated the Muslim League and other political parties: “We have succeeded in attaining our cherished goal — this country of Pakistan. If now . . . we fail to

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achieve the real and ultimate objective of making Islam a practical, constitutional reality . . . our entire struggle becomes futile and all our sacrifices meaningless.” We had committed ourselves “before God and at the altar of History [to] the promulgation of an Islamic constitution,” not “a secular and godless one.”38 These stirring words found a militant response from an organization, the Majlis-i-Ahrar, which had been founded in India after the uprisings of 1857 to oppose both the British and the Hindus who seemed to be profiting at the expense of the Muslims. For Muslims, it was a time of “the lowest depth of broken pride,” and the Ahrar was dedicated to restoring Islam as a cultural and political force.39 In the 1930s it began a campaign against the Ahmadiyyas as perverters of Islam, and in Pakistan they attacked the government for tolerating them as enemies of Islam, demanding that the Ahmadiyya should be banned from calling themselves Muslims. Prominent ulama strengthened this by demanding that the most famous of the Ahmadiyya, Sir Zafrulla Khan, the foreign minister, who had brilliantly defended Pakistan against India over Kashmir, should be dismissed. The Ahrars also attacked members of the Shia minority in Pakistan for a false interpretation of the truth of Islam. Communists were also attacked as enemies of Islam. Liaquat Ali Khan’s assassination in 1951 added to the sense of unease and lack of direction, as it was not known who was responsible for the riots or Liaquat’s murder. Early in 1953 there was a virtual insurrection against the government as rioting spread in Panjab and arson and murder became common, and in an attempt to restore order the government declared martial law. The government set up a commission under Justice Munir of the Panjab Supreme Court to inquire into the causes of the riots, and its findings, known as the Munir Report, criticized the authorities for their failures in maintaining law and order.40 It was especially critical, however, of the violence associated with the increasing demand for establishing an Islamic state to replace the framework of the colonial state Pakistan had inherited from the British. This led Munir and his commission to challenge the ulama and other advocates of an Islamic state to define what they meant. The Report essentially represented the liberal, or “modernist” understanding of the relation of Islam to the state, and quoted liberally from Jinnah’s speech in which he had insisted that Pakistan would be a modern democratic state and religion would not be a controlling factor. The traditional or orthodox

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groups insisted that the Objectives Resolution declared precisely that all laws and social behavior must be in conformity with the teaching of the Qur’an and the Sunna. Munir argued that this was a denial that Pakistan was a sovereign state, capable of making laws suitable for a modern democratic state. “The phantom of an Islamic state,” the Report concluded, “has haunted the Musulman throughout the ages. . . . He therefore finds himself in a state of helplessness, waiting for someone to come and help him out of this morass of uncertainty and confusion.”41 With this kind of language, the Report often reads like a robust manifesto for the creation of a democracy. The Report insists that the idea of an Islamic state as expounded by Maududi and others does not represent the true spirit of Islam, but the interests of corrupt politicians and of “those ulama who aspire after their own power and dominance.” True Islam, on the other hand, encourages equality, reflection, free inquiry, and tolerance, which can only be realized in a democratic state. This kind of thinking has not been uncommon in Pakistan, but always has remained under the shadow of Pakistan’s necessary commitment to the primacy of what Munir’s Report calls “the sublime faith called Islam.” It is a part of the contradictory story of the relationship of democracy, the military, and Islam that it was Munir, as chief justice, who, along with the majority of his colleagues on the Federal Court, legitimized the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in 1954 by the president, leaving a weakened form of parliamentary government that was overthrown by General Ayub Khan in 1958. Many scholars have concluded that democracy failed because of incompatibility with Islam and the enmity of the ulama, but Allen McGrath, in a careful study of the legal proceedings comes to a quite different conclusion. Munir claimed that the president had the right to dissolve the Constituent Assembly when it was not in session by what he called the Law of Civil Necessity, but McGrath argues that Munir had created a legal doctrine not recognized in the Anglo-American jurisdictions to which he appealed, but which was to be used by successive Pakistani rulers. In his report, Munir had blamed the ulama for stirring up religious passions against the constitution proposed by the Assembly. But McGrath argues that the ulama were not religious fanatics; rather, they were scholars who were capable of a compromise on the application in mundane situations to “the sovereignty of God” and the idea of an “Islamic

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state,” but that Justice Munir was intent, however, on weakening the power of the Assembly; he was complicit in bringing about the death of democracy in Pakistan.42 The leaders who sought power or seized it with the promise to save Pakistan from what Munir considered “uncertainty and confusion” all became involved in issues relating to its commitment to Islam. These issues included foreign policy, treatment of minorities, the status of women, social morality, the economy, and education. Every martial law administrator, president, or prime minister was forced by political necessity or personal religious adherence to indicate concurrence in some fashion to achieving a version of an Islamic state, including General Ayub Khan, Zulfikar Bhutto, General Zia, and General Musharraf. Outside the official offices, were a number of loosely defined and disparate groups usually referred to as “The Taliban,” which conferred a unity of purpose and organization they in fact do not possess while underestimating their ability to threaten the stability of the state and their appeal to a wide segment of the population. General Ayub Khan took over power from the civilian government in 1958, insisting that it had become ineffective and corrupt and needed the discipline of martial law to remove “the confusion and imbalance of social and economic life of the country.” When he promulgated laws, however, to give women greater protection in divorce and inheritance proceedings he was attacked by members of the ulama for his support of Western manners and morals, as weakening the fabric of Islamic social and religious life. Ayub’s defence in his memoir of his social and religious policies, provides an insight into the difficulties the commitment to Islam was causing in Pakistan.43 The most eloquent and effective opponent of Ayub’s modernist interpretation of Islam was Syed Abu’l-ala-Maududi (1903–79) (also spelled Maudoodi), founder in India of the influential organization Jama’at-i-Islami (Islamic Association). He had opposed the preindependence separatist movement for Pakistan on the grounds that its nationalism was based on Western, not Islamic values; after partition, however, he went to Pakistan where his organization, the Jama’at-i-Islami, campaigned for a true Islamic constitution. We have achieved our cherished goal, this country of Pakistan, he said, and if “we fail to achieve the real and ultimate objective of making Islam a practical constitutional reality, our entire struggle becomes fruitless.

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. . . We are already committed before God and man and at the altar of History . . . and no going back on our words is possible.”44 This message gained wide support among college students, government workers, and factory workers and his ideas permeate later attempts, including those by General Zia, to make Pakistan a genuine Islamic state. Ayub denounced Maududi and his followers for promulgating a view of Islam that led to superstition and fatalism; instead, he saw Islam as a vehicle of progress against dogmatism and revivalism. The true purpose of Maududi and the ulama was to reassert their authority and the right to lead the Muslim community, as they saw leadership passing to the educated, modern Muslims of Pakistan. It was for this reason that they were carrying on their campaign to “the God-fearing but uneducated masses,” and they had succeeded so far in Pakistan in converting the “optimistic and enthusiastic people” into a “cynical and frustrated community” because of the failure of the so-called democratic politicians. Although probably many members of the educated elite were sympathetic to Ayub’s modernist interpretation of Islam, support drained away while the Islamic leaders he called “revivalists” denounced him as a traitor to Islam, politicians and the press demanded elections, and East Pakistan leaders became increasingly hostile to the federal government. The commander-in-chief of the army, Yahya Khan, replaced Ayub in 1969; but his brutal attempt to crush the uprising in East Pakistan failed when the Indian government in 1971 supported the secessionists. The secession of East Pakistan to form the new state of Bangladesh was hailed by Indian leaders as proof of the failure of Jinnah’s “two-nation theory” that Muslims constituted a nation separate from Hindu India; but that South Asia now has two large Muslim nations can be just as easily read as the proof that Islam was proving an essential to nationhood. K. K. Aziz, a historian of the idea of Pakistan, suggests that the secession of Bangladesh indicates that its people were not interested in continuing to be part of the Indian Muslim community.45 They saw themselves as constituting a nation with the familiar marks of nationhood that justified secession from Pakistan: a distinct territory, a common language, an economy very different from that of West Pakistan, and a version of Islam that differed from that practiced in West Pakistan. The best denial of the validity of the two-nation theory would have been if in 1947 Nehru and the Congress had accepted what Jinnah apparently would have,

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an undivided India, with undivided Punjab and Bengal recognized as Muslim majority states within a federal India. After the defeat of the Pakistan army and the secession of Bangladesh, a civilian government under Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a graduate of Berkeley and Oxford, who was not noted for his piety, replaced the military regime. It seemed that the promotion of an Islamic polity would not be high on his agenda, but, like Ayub and other politicians, Bhutto wanted to declare his allegiance to Islam while making Pakistan acceptable as a modern nation. There is no reason for doubting his sincerity when he declared “Islam is our religion . . . it is the basis of Pakistan. There is no controversy on that and if any party were not to make Islam the main pillar of its ideology, then that party would not be a Pakistani party.”46 The burden of submission to Islam for Pakistan had never been more strikingly stated and Bhutto went on to spell out its political and economic implications. Anwar Hussain Syed, a sympathetic critic, summarizes what Bhutto called Islamic Socialism in this fashion: He contended that one could not be a good Muslim without being a socialist, that socialism was a part of Islam. . . . He maintained that his goal of establishing classless society — where equality, fraternity, democracy, and social justice would reign — emanated from the political and social ethic of Islam.47

Bhutto brought in a new constitution in 1973 that, while preserving the references to Islam in the Objectives Resolution and the constitutions of 1956 and 1962, in a few instances strengthened Islam’s position. Islam was unambiguously declared the religion of Pakistan, and the legislature was obligated to bring all laws into conformity with the Qur’an and the Sunnah.48 Bhutto, like rulers since the early periods of Islam in India, if not expecting the support of the ulama, at least hoped that such declarations would prevent their opposition. What he did not get was support from the army, which under General Zia-ul-Haq, took control of the government in 1977. Probably no other ruler of Pakistan so deeply influenced Pakistan as General Zia did through his complementary commitments to authoritarian military rule and to the creation of a truly Islamic society. His compulsion to Islamize Pakistan can be understood in terms of personal religious zeal for Islam as well as a military man’s belief that an orderly society demands obedience by everyone to a

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common code of behavior. He was convinced that while the majority of people believed that Pakistan was by its origin and constitutional statements an Islamic state, previous governments had lacked zeal in fulfilling their duty to the people. His commitment was also a search for political legitimacy for his regime. For Zia, Pakistan was the “Citadel of Islam,” and therefore, he said, he had embarked upon a process of Islamization. We have unitedly tried to establish Islam as a way of life. . . . We, in our country, should be united like a phalanx, more so in the matter of religion so that outsiders should know that this country is so galvanised and united that no wedge can be driven and no cracks and fissures can be created.49

A number of measures were taken to ensure that Islamization went forward, with the first step being setting up courts with ulama as judges to prevent laws taking effect that were repugnant to the Qur’an and Sunnah. The Hudood Ordinances of 1979 were a collection of criminal laws intended to bring Pakistan’s criminal legal system, inherited from the British, in conformity with Islamic law, including such punishments as amputation for theft. Punishments for sexual offences such as rape, fornication, and adultery were applied to women in ways that women’s organizations denounced as brutal and degrading. The laws also, it was alleged, left children without protection.50 Other laws forbade drinking alcohol and censored cinema and television. In 1988 a sweeping ordinance was passed to enforce Shari’ah covering many forms of social behavior, and making provision for monitoring to ensure compliance. One provision that especially alarmed many people concerned with education at all levels was the article concerning the Islamization of education. Unanimity has not been a characteristic of the identification of problems and their solution in Pakistan’s civil society except in one area, and that is, the serious weaknesses of the educational system at all levels that are related to every aspect of the nation’s economic, social, and political problems. “The State shall,” it decreed, “for a comprehensive and harmonious development as an Islamic society, take steps to ensure that the educational system of Pakistan is based on Islamic values of learning and teaching.” The mass media was also to promote Islamic values. The Islamization of the economy was also to take place as the state took steps “to ensure that the economic system of Pakistan is

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constructed on the basis of economic principles, values and priorities [consistent with Islam].”51 Details for fulfilling these high aims are not specified, beyond the monitoring of the systems to check compliance with Islam. General Zia did not live to oversee the working out of the Ordinance of 1988 for creating an Islamic state, for he was killed that year in an airplane accident. In 1997, Mahbub ul-Haq (1934–98), one of Pakistan’s best-known economists and a former finance minister, however, gave a grim reading of the human condition in Pakistan that suggests Islamization had not brought better life for its people, although he does not make that argument. Surveying the connection between poverty, ill-health, education, and human development he wrote: Pakistan’s social and human indicators make dismal reading. Two thirds of the total adult population and 77 per cent of its adult women are illiterate. . . . Basic health facilities are available only to half the population. . . . Basic social services are coming under increasing strain every year because of high population growth of three percent a year. Thus, a low human development and a high population growth are locked together in a fatal unending embrace.52

The struggle to make Pakistan an Islamic nation has called upon the people to bear a heavy burden without the promised reward of inner peace and harmony in the Muslim community. This is not a judgment on the truth or falsity of the message of Islam but only to recognize that an important segment of the population of Pakistan, the groups that are called “The Taliban,” have felt impelled to move to violence, partly against the “godless” state of Pakistan, but even more against the declared external enemies of Islam, personified by the United States of America and India. It is impossible to generalize much about so complex a phenomenon as the violence associated with the Taliban except to stress that the common thread though all the activities associated with them is the insistence that the struggle is to preserve Islam from its enemies. Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban forces in Afghanistan, gave a reasonable statement of their own self-image: A simple band of dedicated youths determined to establish the laws of God on earth and prepared to sacrifice everything in pursuit of their goal. . . . The Taliban will fight until there is no blood left in Afghanistan to be shed and Islam becomes a way of life for our people.53

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Inherent in Taliban activities is the position, held by many traditional scholars, that an Islamic state is not compatible with the modern state system and the international order. That order is based on the acceptance, at least theoretically, of such principles as the equal sovereignty of all states, the recognition of borders between states, and the inviolability of treaties, and relations within societies based on reason and human necessity. This is not the case with the Taliban with their idea of a social order prescribed by God, not by legislative assemblies composed of fallible human beings. The members of the Taliban are very often graduates of Islamic schools, and will know from the Qur’an how to deal with the Americans: How can there be a treaty between idolaters and God? . . . How can they be trusted? If they prevail against you, they will neither observe pacts nor good faith with you. They flatter you with their tongues, but their hearts are averse to you, for most of them are iniquitous. . . . The infidels should not think that they can bypass the law of God. . . . Prepare against them whatever arms and cavalry you can muster that you may strike terror in the hearts of the enemies of God and your own. Whatever you spend in the way of God will be paid back to you in full.54

When Christian clergymen in the United States referred to Islam as “a very evil religion” or when an American president spoke of waging war against Islamic terrorists, the Taliban fighters knew their struggle was justified against the enemies of truth. When Hilary Clinton, the secretary of state of the United States and Richard Holbrooke, its special plenipotentiary to South Asia, continued to use the expression “war on terror” as a synonym for American action against any Islamic groups that used violence as a tactic in their struggles against what they regarded as oppression of Muslims, Reza Aslan, an American of Iranian origin, suggested that this pleased the militant groups. It confirmed for them that “the West has declared war on the Islamic world” and they are going to win “because God is on their side.”55 “What makes religious violence particularly savage and relentless,” writes Mark Juergensmeyer, one of the most perceptive students of the relationship of religion and violence, “is that its perpetrators have placed religious images of divine struggle — cosmic war — in the service of worldly political battles.”56 The burden of Islam for Pakistan is not just that some of its citizens, such as the Taliban, yearn to fight in the cosmic war, but that the nation is committed by its existence to seek to realize God’s plan for human salvation in an

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Islamic state. That commitment has led it to make war with two far more powerful nations, India and the United States, but as warriors who have submitted to bear the burden of Islam they have a surety of success: The infidels will remain in doubt about it till the Hour overtakes them unaware. The order will be God’s on that Day. He will judge between them. Then those who had come to believe and done the right will be in gardens of delight. But those who did not believe and called our revelations lies, will be given disgraceful punishment.57

This kind of textual religious expression is not itself the motivation of so much that seems irrational in religious violence, whether in check points in Islamabad, Sufi shrines in Karbala, or abortion clinics in the United States but it justifies an expression of both an emotional and intellectual response to a perceived threat to group and personal identity. To ignore it is to plunge deeper into the dangerous and uncharted territory of historical memory, which as Valéry claims in the quotation at the beginning of this essay, is the “most dangerous product of the human intellect, intoxicating whole people.” This is true whether the people are “a simple band of dedicated youths determined to establish the laws of God” in Pakistan or very sophisticated, very powerful hegemons in Washington dedicated to victory over them.

Notes 1. Quoted in Sharif al Mujahid, Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah: Studies in Interpretation (Karachi: Quaid-i-Azam Academy, 1981), p. 640. 2. Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, Debates, 1947– (Karachi: Manager of Publication) vol. 1, pp. 1–7. Sunna are the customs and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. 3. Matthew 11: 28. 4. Following the usage of many modern scholars, “God” and “Allah” are used here more or less interchangeably; see Allah, Islam, and Umma in Ainslee T. Embree, ed., Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961). 5. Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 81.

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6. Ainslie T. Embree, “Religion,” in Sumit Ganguly and Neil de Votta, eds, Religion in Contemporary India (Boulder: Lynne Reiner, 2003), pp. 192–93. 7. Qur’an 5:3. “Religion” is used in the well-known older translation by the English convert to Islam, M. M. Pickthall, but a recent translation by the Pakistani author, Ahmed Ali in Al-Qur’an (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) translated it as “system of belief ” or “creed” to avoid giving the impression that Islam is one of many religions. 8. Qu’ran Surah 60. 9. Stephan Farrell, The New York Times, A1, January 9, 2010. 10. Andre Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Islamic World (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 192–96. 11. “The Coming of Islam to India,” in Ainslie T. Embree, ed., Sources of Indian Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 388–89. 12. “Duties and responsibilities of a Muslim ruler,” in ibid., pp. 417–18. 13. “The Muslim Ruler in India,” in ibid., pp. 410–11. 14. Ibid., pp. 418–19. 15. “The Declaration of Akbar’s Status as a Mujthaid,” in ibid., pp. 427–28. 16. “Against Rulers Misled by Wicked Ulama,” in ibid., pp. 429–30. 17. Tarikh-i-Iradat Khan, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, edited by H. M. Elliot and John Dowson (Allahabad: Kitab Mahal, 1964), vol. 7, pp. 562–64. 18. “The Islamic Community in India,” in Embree, Sources of Indian Tradition, pp. 481–82. 19. Aziz Ahmad, Studies of Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 213. 20. “Muslim Resolutions at Dacca, 30 December 1906,” in C. H. Phillips, ed., The Evolution of India and Pakistan, 1858 to 1947 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 194. 21. Quoted in Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 27. 22. M. Rafique Afzal, ed., Selected Speeches and Statements of the Quaid-iAzam (Lahore: Research Society of Pakistan, 1960), p. 62. 23. Quoted in Wolpert, Jinnah, p. 47. 24. Edwin S. Montagu, An Indian Diary, edited by Venetia Stanley (London: Heinemann, 1930), pp. 56–58. 25. Kenneth W. Jones, in “Communalism in the Punjab,” Journal of Asian Studies, 28 (1968): pp. 39–54, here p. 49. 26. Mushirul Hasan, Nationalism and Communal Politics in India, 1916–1928 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1979), p. 3. 27. Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 81.

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28. Ainslie T. Embree, essay on Reading and Montagu in unpublished essays on Jews in India, edited by Kenneth Robbins. To be published in Ahmedabad by Mapin in 2012. 29. Rajmohan Gandhi, Revenge and Reconciliation: Understanding South Asian History (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 266. 30. Speeches and Statements of Iqbal, compiled by “Shamloo” (Latif Ahmed Sherwani) Lahore: Al-Manar Academy, 1948), p. 9. 31. Ahmad, Studies of Islamic Culture, p. 272. 32. Jamil-ud-din Ahmad, ed., Some Recent Speeches and Writings of Mr. Jinnah (Lahore: M. Ashraf, 1946), vol. 1. pp. 174–80. 33. Parliamentary Papers, X, India and the War; 1939–1940 (London: HMSO, 1941). 34. Quoted in Wolpert, Jinnah, p. 251. 35. Ayesha Jalal, “Pakistan,” in Ainslee T. Embree, ed., Encyclopedia of Asian History (New York: Scribners, 1988), p. 197. 36. Ahmad, Some Recent Speeches and Writings of Mr. Jinnah, vol. 2, pp. 399–404. 37. Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, Debates, pp. 1–7. As mentioned earlier, Sunna are the customs and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. The following citations are also from this source. 38. Syed Abu’l ala Maudoodi, Islamic Law and the Constitution (Lahore: Herald Press, 1954), pp. 14 ff. 39. Ishtihaq Qureshi, The Muslim Community of the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent (610–1940) (Gravenhage: Mouton, 1962), p. 265. 40. Report of the Committee of Inquiry Constituted to Inquire into the Punjab Disturbances of 1953 (Lahore: Government Printing Press, 1954), pp. 201–32. 41. Ibid. 42. Allen McGrath, The Destruction of Pakistan’s Democracy (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 225–27. 43. Mohammad Ayub Khan, Friends, not Masters: A Political Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 68, 70–72, 77. 44. Maudoodi, Islamic Law and Constitution, pp. 14ff. 45. K. K. Aziz, A History of the Idea of Pakistan (Lahore: Vanguard Press, 1987), vol. 3, p. 740. 46. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Awakening the People: Statements, Articles, Speeches, 1966–1969 (Rawalpindi: Pakistani Publications, n.d.), p. 205. 47. Anwar Hussain Syed, Pakistan: Islam, Politics, and National Solidarity (New York: Pager, 1982), p. 116. 48. Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, articles 2 and 230. 49. General Zia, Islam Stands for Unity and Brotherhood (Islamabad: Government of Pakistan, 1983), pp. 5–6. 50. Asma Jahangir and Henna Jillian, The Hudood Ordinances: A Divine Sanction? (Lahore: Rotas, 1990), pp. 23–24.

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51. An Ordinance for the Enforcing of Shari’ah (Islamabad: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1988), pp. 245–49. 52. Mahbub ul Haq, The Strategy of Economic Planning: A Case Study of Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 38. 53. Quoted in Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 289. 54. Qur’an, Surah 9 and Surah 8. 55. Interview of Reza Aslan with A. J. Pais, in India Abroad, August 29, 2009, p. A 18. 56. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 146. 57. Qur’an, Surah 22.

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About the Editor Ravi Kalia is a professor of history at the City College of the City University of New York (CUNY). He holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Delhi University, and Ph.D. and M.B.A. degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He has taught in California, Oregon, and North Carolina, and is the author of Chandigarh: The Making of an Indian City (1999, revised), Bhubaneswar: From a Temple Town to a Capital City (1994), and Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India (2005). His extensive publication career includes articles in Technology and Culture; Journal of Urban History; Habitat International, Planning Perspectives, among others. Kalia lives in the Bronx.

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Notes on Contributors Dr Gilles Boquérat is currently head of the South Asia program at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI) in Paris. He was recently resident scholar at the Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad and previously had been head of the Department of International Relations at the French Centre for Social Sciences in New Delhi. He has authored a number of articles and books on South Asian domestic and international policies. Ainslie T. Embree is professor emeritus of History, Columbia University, where he was chairman of the Department of the Middle East Languages and Culture, chairman of the History Department and associate dean of the School of International and Public Affairs. He served the American Embassy in New Delhi at various times. He is a member of the Kashmir Study Group, a non-governmental body. Among his books is Utopias in Conflict: Religion and Nationalism in India (1990). He was editor of the Encyclopedia of Asian History (1988) and he edited Pakistan’s Western Borderlands (1977). He has contributed essays to many publications including one on Kashmir in Faith Based Diplomacy (2003), edited by Donald Johnston, and one in Prospects for Peace in South Asia (2005) edited by Rafiq Dossani. Frederic Grare is the charge de mission for Asian Perspectives at the Department of Strategic Affairs for the Ministry of Defense, France. He served as a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington from 2005 to 2008. He also served as political and cultural advisor at the French Embassy in Pakistan, and as director of the Centre for Human Sciences in New Delhi. He is the author of several books, including Reforming the Intelligence Agencies in Pakistan’s Transitional Democracy (2009), Rethinking Western Strategies Toward Pakistan: An Action Agenda for the United States and Europe (2007), and Pakistan: In the Face of the Afghan Conflict 1979–1985, At the Turn of the Cold War (2003). He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from Geneva’s Institut de Hautes Etudes Internationales and an advanced degree from the Institut d’Etudes Politique de Paris.

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J. Andrew Greig has recently retired as a foreign service officer with the Department of State and the United States Information Agency. He served as the senior country desk officer for Pakistan from 2004 to 2006, when many of the events discussed in his essay in this volume took place, and then worked as an analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department, covering issues on terrorism in Pakistan and elsewhere. He has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in South Asian history. Annie Harper recently completed a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Yale University. Her dissertation, entitled “The Idea of Islamabad: Unity, Purity and Civility in Pakistan’s Capital City,” explores Pakistani national identity through the lens of Islamabad. Her work examines the design, history, and contemporary everyday life of the city, showing that the modernist, planned capital, in its very difference and separation from the wider nation, in fact reflects Pakistan’s struggle to define a satisfying national identity that embraces the diversity of its population. Prior to her doctoral studies, Harper worked for many years in international development in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Zimbabwe. She has taught at Yale University, and is currently teaching at Trinity College in Connecticut. Harper lives with her husband and three children in New Haven, Connecticut. Dr Nazir Hussain is associate professor at the Department of International Relations, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. In 1985, he was associated with the Department of Defence and Strategic Studies, Islamabad. He has also served as a senior research fellow on the Middle East at the Institute of Strategic Studies in 2001– 2002. He has been a visiting fellow at the Henry L. Stimson Center, Washington, D.C., working on nuclear risk reduction measures in South Asia. Zafar Iqbal has been involved in the democratic movement in Pakistan. He has taught sociology courses at Purdue University, USA, and at Brock University, Canada. Currently he is working on a research project at the Communications Department, Kuwait University. His areas of interest include political values and consumer culture, work in global economy, and equity in education.

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T. C. A. Rangachari had a distinguished thirty-six-year career with the Indian Foreign Service, serving in various positions in many countries, including in Pakistan, where he served as deputy high commissioner for India. His recent assignments were as Indian ambassador to Algeria, France, and Germany. He completed his masters’ in History from Hindu College, Delhi University, and is presently a visiting professor at the Academy of Third-World Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi. Tahmina Rashid is an associate professor in International Studies, Faculty of Arts & Design at the University of Canberra, Australia. After completing her Ph.D. in Gender and Politics from the University of Melbourne, she worked as Program Director International Development, RMIT, and assistant professor in Pakistan. She was a Fulbright scholar in 1996 and was also awarded the Asia Fellow Award, Ford Foundation in 2004–5 to work in urban slums in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is a development consultant and field researcher with a keen interest in the South Asian region. Her academic interests include feminist movements in South Asia; urban/rural poverty; migration and identity; development and human rights; community sustainability and empowerment and microcredit. She is the author of Contested Representations: Punjabi Women in Feminist Debates in Pakistan (2006). Oskar Verkaaik is associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam. He has worked extensively on religious and ethnic cultural politics in the South of Pakistan, in particular the cities of Karachi and Hyderabad. He is the author of Migrants and Militants: “Fun” and Urban Violence in Pakistan (2004), and has contributed articles to several journals and anthologies, including his co-edited volume (with Thomas Blom Hansen) Urban Charisma: Everyday Mythologies in the City (2010). He has taught at the University of Chicago and the Free University, Amsterdam, and has served as the director of the Amsterdam Branch Office of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS). He currently works on Islam and secular nationalism in Europe as well as modern mosque design in Europe and North America.

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Index Abu Ghraib 194, 200 Abu’l-ala-Maududi, Syed 233 Afghanistan 121; jihadi outfits fighting in 96; Pakistani aid against Soviet invasion 41, 118; retreat of Soviets from 117; Soviet aggression 117, 124 Afghan war (1980) 41, 145, 146, 179 ahimsa (non-violence) 10 Ahmad, Ghulam 230 Ahmadi crisis 40 Ahmadiyyas 222, 230, 231 “Aid to Pakistan” 67 Akbar, Emperor 184; religious policies 222 All Pakistan Muhajir Student Organisation (APMSO) 52, 55 All Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA) 93 Al Qaeda 128, 154, 168, 169, 179, 194 Ambedkar, B. R. 14 American Academy of Political and Social Science 37 American Declaration of Independence 25 American Progressivism 24 American slave society 24 Anglicization of Muslim laws 89 Anglo-Mohammedan Oriental College 108 ansar 50 anti-Ahmadiyya disturbances 182 anti-India campaign in Kashmir 205 anti-Soviet jihad 41 Armstrong, H. C. 27 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 27–29, 178 Atlantic Council Report 105 Attlee, Clement 9

Aurangzeb, Emperor 222 Awami League 113, 114, 140, 216 Azad Kashmir 127 Badawi, Abdullah Ahmad 184 Badr, Operation 155 Baghdad Pact 33 Balfour Declaration 225, 226 Bangladesh crisis (1971) 37 Barelvi Hanafi doctrine 205 Barelvi, Sayyid Ahmad 223 Barni, Zia ud-din 221 Beg, Mirza Aslam 121, 145 Bengali rebellion 168 Bhutto, Benazir 37, 96, 114; Afghan policy 146; assassination of 98, 160; December 2, 1988–August 6, 1990 (first term) 145–48; October 19, 1993–November 5, 1996 (second term) 151–53; People’s Work Program 148; political blunder 145; political rivalry with Nawaz Sharif 147– 48; re-election campaign 151 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali 11, 29, 51, 54, 94; attitude towards human rights and genocide 142; creation of Federal Security Force (FSF) 141; December 20, 1971–July 5, 1977 140–45; nationalization of private schools 163; relation with Baluch national leaders 142 blasphemy law 19, 178, 190 Bolitho, Hector 6, 7, 27 Bonnerjee, W. C. 108 Bourke-White, Margaret 20, 22, 26, 30–32, 34, 37 British Commonwealth 10, 33, 34 British Raj 4, 8, 22, 33, 69 “Butcher of Bengal” 142, 148

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Cabinet Mission (1945) 12 Calcutta killings 16–17 Capital Development Authority (CDA) 74 Central Mohammedan Association (CMA) 111 Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) 33, 35 Chaudhry, Iftikhar Mohammad 144 chief martial law administrator (CMLA) 140 chief of army staff (COAS) 116, 117, 133, 155, 160, 178, 209 Child Marriage Restraining Act 92 Christian missionary schools 90 Churchill, Winston 33 civilian governments in Pakistan, political culture of 139 civil–military relations, in Pakistan 120 civil service jobs, reservation quotas for 51 civil war, in Balochistan 168 Clarke, Richard 198 Clean-up, Operation 58 Clinton, President Bill 195, 196 Coalition Support Funds (CSF) 202, 203 Cohen, Stephen Philip 38, 163 Cold War 30, 33, 35, 165 Colombo plan 75 communal: carnage 16; electorates 111 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) 195, 196 conflicted identity, dilemma of 1 Connemara, Lord 108 Constitution of Pakistan 132; distortion by General Zia-ul-Haq 151; Eighth Amendment 119, 120, 131, 132, 134, 135 Council of Common Interests (CCI) 148

Counterterrorism Strategy Group (CSG) 196 Cripps Mission 8 cultural colonialism 87 Dar-ul Uloom Deoband 47 Daughter of the East (Benazir Bhutto) 147 Dawn 4 Deen-e-Ilahi 184 Democracy in America (Alexis de Tocqueville) 26 democracy in Pakistan: and consequence of authoritarianism regime 162–65; Islamic ideology and political expediency, impact of 166–67; military governance, stability, and future of 169–71; religious political parties as obstacle to 165–66; revival of 105; role and responsibility of army in 171–74 Deoband movement 110 Direct Action Day (1946) 16, 41 Divide and Rule, policy of 107 Doggar, Hameed 156 Doxiadis, Constantine 66, 67, 69, 70, 72–84 Dufferin, Lord 108 dynapolis, concept of 72, 73 East Pakistan: loss of 53; war of secession 168 economic growth, in Pakistan 163, 172 ecumenopolis, concept of 72, 73 educational institutions, reservation quotas for 51 education, scope and development in Pakistan 163 Eighth Amendment (1973) 119, 120, 131, 132, 134, 135 Eisenhower Doctrine 34–35 Eisenhower, President Dwight D. 34

Index Engineer, Asghar Ali 14 Engineering Research Laboratories, Kahuta 124 enlightened moderation (EM): vs. moderate enlightenment 190– 91; Musharraf ’s concept of 177; and Organization of Islamic Conference 178; rationale for 178–83; scrutiny of 183–88 ethnic violence 55–57 European Enlightenment 27 Family Law Commission 93 Family Law Ordinance (1961) 93 fatwas 12 Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) 199, 202, 203, 210 Federal Security Force (FSF) 141 female education 90 Ford Foundation 66, 67, 71, 72 Foreign Military Financing (FMF) 200 Friends Not Masters (Ayub Khan) 37 Gandhi, Mohandas K. 10, 15; doctrine of self-reliance 30 Gandhi, Rajiv 125, 126 Gangoni, Maulana Rashid Ahmed 110 General Accounting Office 203 Gibralter, Operation 127 Global War on Terror (GWOT) 197, 206 Government of India Act (1935) 226 Government of Ireland Act (1920) 15 Grand Slam, Operation 127 Grey Wolf, An Intimate Study of a Dictator (H. C. Armstrong) 27 G-8 summit 180 Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India (Margaret BourkeWhite) 20

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Hanafi School 89 Haqooqul Allah (religious rights) 181–82 Haqooqul Ibad (human rights) 181 Haqqani, Husain 32, 168 Harvard University Development Advisory Service 66 Hasba bill 189 Hassan, Mubashir 141 Hindu Mahasabha 226 Hindu–Muslim relations 226 Hindu nationalism 226 Hobsbawm, Eric 106 Hodson, H. V. 8 Hodson report 11 Home Rule in Ireland 15 Hoodbhoy, Pervez 190 Hudood Ordinances (1979) 95, 188, 236 Hume, A. O. 108 Huntington, Samuel P. 187 Hussain, Altaf 58, 60 Hussain, Intizar 1 Hussain, Saddam 200 ijtihad, concept of 182 Imperial feminists 87 Imperial Projects 87 Indian National Congress 7, 16, 48, 108, 224, 225, 226 Indian nationalist movement 22, 33 Inglehart, Ronald 162, 165 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) 199 International Visitor Program 208 Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) 41, 59, 122, 131, 170, 197, 204–6, 210, 211 In the Line of Fire (Pervez Musharraf) 29, 37 Iqbal, Muhammad 30, 226 Islam: as community 218–20; ethnicization of 52–55; faith and history in the Indian subcontinent 220–39

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Islamabad: conception and location of 65–69; design and planning of 69–74; map of 70; original masterplan 71; present scenerio 75–80 “Islam Hadhari”, concept of 184 Islamic Bomb 123 Islamic Democratic Alliance 131 Islamic Jamhooriyat Ittehad (IJI) 131 Islamic militancy 1, 165, 183, 189 Islamic militant organizations 178 Islamic revolution 40; in Iran 170 Islamic Socialism 115, 235 Islami Jamiat-i-Tulabah (IJT) 55, 56 Islamist democracy 45 Islamist groups, role in military power 167–69 Islamization for Pakistan 117 Jackson, Andrew 25 Jafford, J. W. 38 Jaish-e-Mohammed 169, 178 Jalal, Ayesha 7, 13, 227 Jamaat-e-Islami 39, 41, 49, 61, 94, 165 Jamiat-i-Ulama-i-Pakistan (JUP) 52 Jammu and Kashmir, military campaign for capture of 127 Jang 17 Jeay Sind Students Federation 55 Jefferson, Thomas 24 jihad: anti-Soviet 41; ideologies of 184; against invasion by foreign, non-Muslim, forces 201; Pakistan movement 42; U.S. support against Soviets 41 jihadi terrorists 3, 17 Jinnah: Creator of Pakistan (Hector Bolitho) 6 Jinnah, Fatima 5, 6, 20 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali 1, 106; America, relation with 30–42;

death of 4, 41; “Direct Action Day” 16; inability to control communal riots 16–17; interpretation of Pakistan democracy 26; Islam and democracy 5–30; lack of experience in leading mass movements 16; Lucknow Pact (1916) 10; Pakistan movement 7, 20, 39; political life 4; Quaid-i-Azam 4; rivalry with Gandhi 10; Shia faith 5; twonation theory, concept of 16, 53, 105, 127, 227, 234 Jinnah of Pakistan (Stanley Wolpert) 7 Junejo, Mohammed Khan 119 “kalashnikov culture” 58 Kargil war (1999) 125, 127, 155 Kayani, Pervez 160 Kerry, John 105 Kerry-Lugar bill 173 Khan, Aga 111 Khan, A. Q.: contribution in development of 123; as “Father of the Islamic Bomb” 125; proliferation of bomb-making technology 125, 179, 202 Khan, General Ayub 2, 29, 34–37, 51, 54, 65–72, 78, 82, 123, 127, 131, 139, 142, 161, 166, 178, 233 Khan, General Tikka 142, 148 Khan, General Yahya 75, 115, 119, 140, 234 Khan, Ghulam Ishaq 122, 126, 133, 135, 148–50 Khan, Liaquat Ali 6, 11, 32, 160, 229, 231 Khan, Sir Syed Ahmed 47, 48, 102, 108, 109, 112, 113 Khilafat movement 10, 43 Lahore Resolution (1940) 8, 14, 129, 227

Index Lal Masjid, siege of 83, 180, 210 language crisis 57 Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) 169, 178, 205, 206, 2011 Law of Civil Necessity 232 Law of Qisas and Diyat (1984) 95 lawyers’ movement 155 Lewis, Bernard 45 Lieven, Anatol 171 literacy rate, in Pakistan 163 Lucknow Pact (1916) 10 madrassas 47, 78, 79, 83, 117, 118, 180, 186, 188, 216 Mahomedan Literary Society 111 Majlis-e-shoora (National Assembly) 119 Majlis-i-Ahrar 231 mass migrations of populations 16, 49 maternalistic imperialism 87 Maududi, Maulana Sayyid Abdul Ala 39, 166 McGrath, Allen 232 McMahon, Robert J. 35, 36 Messervy, Sir Frank 38 metropolis 73 Middle East Defense Organization (MEDO) 33 migration, post-independence 49–52 military aid, to Pakistan 199, 203 military dictatorship 52, 161, 165, 174 military–mullah Alliance 185 military power, role of Islamist groups 167–69 military rule in Pakistan 105, 119, 188–90 Minar-e-Pakistan 120 Minto, Lord 111 Mirza, Sayyid Iskander Ali 114 missile defense system 196 Mohammedan Educational Conference 112

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Mohammed, Ghulam 130 Montagu, Edwin 224–26 Morley, John 9, 12, 21 Mountbatten, Lord 15 Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) 119, 121 Mughal Empire 222 Muhajir Ittehad Tehreek (MIT) 57 Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM): anti-Sindi stance 57; ethnic violence 55–57; martyrdom 57–59; populism and democratization 59–62; post-independence migration 49–52; terrorism 57–59; yellow taxi scheme 60 muhajirs 2, 17, 50–51, 60, 65, 66, 68 Muhammed, Maulana Sufi 177 mujahideen 156, 127, 146, 223 Mujib-ur-Rehman 140 Mundi Index 163 Munir Report 231 Musharraf, General Pervez 29, 37, 127, 191; concept of “enlightened moderation” 177; military coup to seize power 161; National Reconciliation Ordinance 156; operation in Kargil 155; political crisis and downfall of 164, 173; strategy to curb extremist tendencies 180 Muslim fanaticism, resurgence of 110 Muslim League 1, 4, 7, 15, 16, 23; formation of 106; Pakistan Movement 8 Muslim League (MLN-Nawaz Sharif) 96 Muslim Middle East 1 Muslim Personal Law Application Act (1937) 89 Muslim Shariat Application Act 91 Muslim women: Christian missionary schools, influence of 90;

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colonial encounters and contestations for rights 86–88; identity politics and anti-colonial movement 88–92; and postZia politics 96–98; role in nationalist movement 86; and Zia’s Islamist agenda 94–96 Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) 166, 185, 189, 198 Muttehida Qaumi Movement (MQM) 59, 165 Naheed, Kishwar 95 Nanotawi, Maulana Muhammad Qasim 110 Naoroji, Dadabhai 10, 109, 224 National Council for Promotion of Sufism 190 National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) 156 Nehru, Jawaharlal 16 Niemeyer, Oscar 73 Nizam-e-Adl Regulation (2009) 100, 177 Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) 195 Northern Alliance 198, 199 North West Frontier Province (NWFP) 130, 140, 151 nuclear bomb: development of 123; nuclear deterrent and possession of 124 Nuclear Command Authority 124 nuclear program 123; Chinese involvement in 124 The Objectives Resolution 228, 229, 232, 235 Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) 178, 205 Ottoman Empire 10, 28, 225 Pakhtun Student Federation 55 Pakistan–American relationship 30– 42; anti-Muslim propaganda

war 201; cooperation on counter-terrorism 198; governmental support for religious institutions and leaders 208; military aid 199, 203; on nuclear program and illegal proliferation activities 195, 202; Pressler Amendment 195 Pakistan authoritarianism, consequences of 162–65 Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Husain Haqqani) 32 Pakistan Movement 7, 8, 16, 20, 22, 39, 47, 111 Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) 144 Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) 127 Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) 51, 54, 55, 96 Pakistan Student Federation (PSF) 55 Pakistan Times 163 panahgir 50 People’s Work Program 148 Point Four Program 34 Presidential Decision Directive (PDD-62) 196 Press and Publication Ordinance (PPO) 142 Pressler Amendment 195, 200, 212 private schools, nationalization of 163 public educational system 154 Punjabi Students Association 55 purchasing power parity, of Pakistan 163 Quaid-i-Azam 4, 5, 20, 31 Rahim, J. A. 142 Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh 226 Rawalpindi 64, 65, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 82, 83 Reading, Lord 226

Index Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West (Benazir Bhutto) 37 Rehman, Sherry 144 religious movement 16 religious nationalism, in Pakistan 53 Renaissance in Europe 182 reservation quotas, for civil service jobs and educational institutions 51 Robinson, Francis 7 Roosevelt, President 33 Rowlatt Acts (1919) 10 Roy, Asim 7 Russo–Afghan conflict 31 Sarda Act (1929) 92 satyagrah 10, 58 Sayani, Rahimtullah M. Muhammad 109, 110 Sen, Amartya 174 Sèvres, Treaty of 226 shahadat (martyrdom) 184 Shahi, Agha 124 Shaikh, Farzana 18–19 Sharia 100 Sharia Federal Court 167 Shari’ah 93 Shari’ah Act (1991) 96 Sharia law (Mohammadan Law) 89 Shariati-Muhammadi, Tanzim Nifaz 177 Sharif, Nawaz 105, 116, 125; assassination attempt on 170; February 17, 1997–October 12, 1999 (second term) 153–55; November 6, 1990–April 18, 1993 (first term) 148–51; political rivalry with Benazir Bhutto 147–48 Sikh terrorist campaign, Pakistan’s support for 126 Simla agreement (1972) 125 Sindi Taraqqi Pasand Party 57 Sipah-i-Sahaba 178

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Sirhindi, Shaikh Ahmad 222 social inequality 154 social welfare programs 88 The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan (Ayesha Jalal) 7, 13 Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) 33, 35 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan 117, 118 suicide bombings 179, 205, 208 swaraj 10 Swat valley 173 Syed, Anwar Hussain 235 Syed, G. M. 53 Talbot, Ian 147 Taliban 128, 145, 154, 165, 168, 169, 179, 189, 194, 196–99, 206, 237, 238 Tariq-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP) 205, 210 transfer of power (TOPP) 7 Transparency International list of corrupt nations 139 Truman Doctrine 34 Truman, President 34 “two-nation theory” 16, 53, 105, 127, 234 Tyabji, Badruddin 109 Ullah, Shah Wali 223 um-e-wasta 187 UN Human Development Index 139 United Nations Security Council Resolution 1267 205 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 41, 76 uranium enrichment program 124 Urdu, as national language of Pakistan 17

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U S–Pakistan relationship see Pakistan–American relationship The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom (1779) 25 Wahhabi madrasas 41, 190 Wakf Validating Act (1913) 89 Walji, Hussain Ali Ganji 5 Welzel, Christian 162, 165 white feminism 87 Wolpert, Stanley 7, 10 Women Action Forum (WAF) 95, 99 Women Protection Bill 188

Zaidi, S. Akbar 8 zamindari rights, protest against abolition of 16 Zardari, Asif Ali 105, 139, 143, 144, 147, 150, 209; February 18, 2008–Present 155–57 Zia-ul-Haq, General 11; blasphemy laws 19; death in plane crash 121, 145; dissolution of National Assembly 133; imposition of martial law 145; Islamic laws, introduction of 95; Islamization policy 52, 94–96, 117, 145, 163, 236; military dictatorship 52; paternalistic model of governance 116; political violence 49