Pakistan, Islam and Economics: Burki to Bourke-White
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
Florida
A Pakistani-US economist who once served as Pakistan’s caretaker finance minister, Mr Shahid Javed Burki, has made an interesting observation in a recent column of his, ‘Economics was the basis of Pakistan’, for an English language daily.
He says: “Pakistan was created not because its founding fathers thought that ‘Islam was in danger’ but for entirely economic reasons. The present rise of extremism is also owing to economic and political reasons. Those who follow it are not fighting a war of faith with the Pakistani state or the West. These people resent their exclusion from political and economic systems — both dominated by narrow elites — and some of them have opted for extreme violence as the preferred form of expression.”
Mr Burki has not only repainted the history of the Pakistan movement in a shade he prefers but is also dead wrong about the causes and scope of jihadist terrorism that has ravaged Pakistan.
One finds it rather curious that otherwise incompatible people like the European leftist Mr Tariq Ali and former World Bank official Mr Burki still see the brutal takfiri (apostatizing) terrorists as a downtrodden lot ostensibly waging a class struggle against the elite. What class or nationalist struggle justifies killing innocent people en masse from Meena Bazar and Army Public School, Peshawar to Lahore’s Data Darbar and Karachi’s Abdullah Shah Ghazi shrine? How could the killings of Pashtun barbers in Swat, Shia Hazara street vendors in Quetta and Urdu-speaking lower middle class residents of Karachi even remotely be a struggle for economic and political rights?
Take the case of Dr Asim Hussain, killed brutally in his clinic in phase one, sector D-4 of the Peshawar suburb, Hayatabad, last week. Dr Asim Hussain was a general practitioner, who was extremely well liked by the lower middle class community he had served for decades. He was not exactly a rich man. His real crime, in the eyes of his killers, was his Shia faith, not his modest clinic. On the other hand, the defunct sectarian outfit Sipah-e-Sahaba, which in all probability carried out this gruesome murder, has had the patronage of several medium and large business owners, i.e. people of means, in Peshawar since at least 1992.
Mr Shahid Burki has quoted a private conversation he had with the former Pakistani ambassador Professor Husain Haqqani and alleges that the latter told him that in the sense that large numbers of Muslims were left behind in India post-partition, the creation of Pakistan was a mistake. It would be hard to determine the veracity of Mr Burki’s claim but quoting a private conversation over lunch, which is all he says it was, seems really an off-color and unethical peg for a column. Regardless, Mr Burki is on flimsy grounds with his rather rudimentary argument that “In order to understand the direction in which we should go, we must carefully understand why the country in which we live and of which we are citizens was created. The Pakistan Movement was largely the result of economic factors; religion intervened since the Muslims feared that they will be discriminated against on account of their faith.” While the early Muslim leaders like Sir Syed Khan, Nawab Viqar-ul-Mulk and Nawab Saleemullah Khan were concerned about the post-1857 downward socio-economic and educational spiral of the Indian Muslims, the All-India Muslim League (AIML) remained wedded to Muslim nationalism under Mr Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
One is hard pressed to find any economic slogans let alone a comprehensive economic plan put forward by the AIML. The honorable exceptions were the AIML Punjab wing’s 1944 manifesto produced by the leftist Danial Latifi and the Marxist Mian Iftikharuddin’s land reform recommendations after independence. On the other hand, Mr Jinnah himself had said precious little about what economic direction the country carved out of India would take. Mr Jinnah’s speeches and quotes pertaining to the economic plight of the Indian Muslims and economy in general, available in the Quaid-i-Azam Papers, do not qualify as an economic roadmap. On the critical economic front, Mr Jinnah offered little more than prodding a few Muslim business houses to start an airline, a shipping company and some banks in anticipation of the creation of a separate country that would need them. Mr Jinnah’s much-trumpeted speech at the State Bank of Pakistan’s inauguration was a castigation of the “Western economic system” for creating “almost insoluble problems for humanity” and pledging to “present to the world an economic system based on the true Islamic concept of equality of manhood and social justice”.
The inadequacy of such generalizations became evident within months after independence with stark economic realities setting in. When the journalist Margaret Bourke-White asked Mr Jinnah about industrial development and whether he hoped “to enlist technical or financial assistance from America”, he famously said: “America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America...Pakistan is the pivot of the world...since the United States was now bolstering up Greece and Turkey, she should be more interested in pouring money and arms into Pakistan.” Mr Jinnah was raising the specter of a Soviet invasion and setting the stage for a dependent state, not formulating a cogent plan for bilateral economic ties. It would be interesting to learn Mr Shahid Javed Burki’s views on why a movement that he claims had aimed for economic emancipation did not have an economic plan worth the name.
Regarding the overarching ideological character of the Pakistan movement one need not look farther than Mr Shahid Javed Burki’s own book, Pakistan: Fifty Years of Nationhood, in which he criticizes Mr Jinnah’s famous August 11, 1947 speech, through which the founding father had intended to heal the communal gash. Mr Burki writes: “How could Muslims cease to be Muslims and Hindus cease to be Hindus in the political sense when the religion to which they belonged...Was Jinnah giving up the two-nation theory, the ideological foundation of the state of Pakistan, once the new state had come into existence...The speech raised all these and many other questions, but Jinnah failed to explain his statement. The explanation for what was said on August 11 is perhaps a simple one. Jinnah probably did not know that even as he was speaking millions of people were leaving their homes and moving in two different directions: Hindus and Sikhs to India and Muslims to Pakistan.”
Ironically, Mr Burki is unwilling to allow anyone else the right to critique Mr Jinnah, which he affords himself and had exercised abundantly to denigrate the solitary speech where Pakistan’s founder outlined a non-communal vision for Pakistan.
(The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com and he tweets @mazdaki)
