March 20 , 2009

Reflections on the Idea of Pakistan
By Syed Arif Hussaini

 

Within days of the publication of this column, Pakistanis at home and abroad will be celebrating their national day. Sixty-one years after the inception of their state, any question as to the validity or advisability of the idea of a homeland of their own would be offensive to a vast majority of them. No such question is raised as to the independent existence of even the tiny Maldives Islands, they would ask, why then in the case of Pakistan?

But the fact of the matter is that a section of foreign media has already started saying that Pakistan is ‘unraveling’, it is close to being declared a ‘failed

state’, and the process of its ‘disintegration’ has already commenced with the acceptance of the exit of a substantial area of its northwestern province from the pale of its judicial writ.

Dr. Stephen Cohen, an eminent college professor and a scholar at Brookings Institute, has pointed out in his book on “The Idea of Pakistan” that the state has emerged as a largely military-dominated entity that has nuclear weapons and is characterized by weak and uneven economic growth, political chaos, and sectarian violence. He queries: “Whether failure is a strong possibility. If so, would Pakistan dissolve slowly or collapse suddenly. Would it become an outlaw and a threat to the entire world? Or, would Pakistan become a normal state at peace with its neighbors and itself?”

While the people at large would like Pakistan to become a normal state, the puny politicians at the helm of affairs now are, in pursuit of their selfish aims, have led the country to the brink of a crisis, conflict and disaster. Yet, the country’s base stands on solid foundation stones that will enable it to come out of the crisis by sorting out the internecine strife. The geo-strategic location of Pakistan, its well-disciplined army, its well-educated and enterprising middleclass, and its hard-working masses, and above all the abiding logic of its basic concept, will enable it to overcome the temporary setbacks.

In this brief column, I can barely point out the salient feature of Pakistan’s raison d’etre.

Pakistan came into being because the Muslims considered themselves as a separate entity from the majority Hindu community – the well-known two-nation theory. Several movements were launched to promote a rapprochement between the two communities. Most forceful of these was the one started by Bhagat Kabir of the fifteenth century that posited that spiritual attainment was more important than the rituals of Islam or Hinduism. While it enraged the Hindu priests, the Muslims viewed it as subversive. So, it did not make much of a dent.

The Brahmanic caste system did not admit of the acceptance of Muslims in a class other than the lowest, the menial, and the untouchable - the ‘maleech’. Naturally this status was not acceptable to the Muslims who had ruled over India for centuries. Not surprisingly enough, when a Hindu converted to Islam, it meant his complete break from the past. He acquired a new name, a new personality, radiating confidence, grit and courage, and membership into a community adhering to the concept of brotherhood and equality of man.

This concept of the equality of man was the chief attraction in a society given to discrimination by birth - the stratification of society into four castes.

Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism were all for the concept of equality and therefore opposed to the Brahmanic domination. But the shrewd Brahmanic elite

maneuvered to absorb all of them into the Hindu fold. They failed to do that with the Muslims.

Let us now look at the problem from Hindu viewpoint.

Waves after waves of Muslim armies invaded India and invariably defeated and subjugated the opposing Hindu forces. Mahmood Ghaznavi invaded the country seventeen times. Qutbuddin Aibak established the first proper empire, the Slave Dynasty, towards the end of the twelfth century. This was perhaps the most outstanding incident in the annals of world history where meritocracy was taken to the highest extreme - one slave king handing over power to another slave, no relation at all. The Khiljis and the Lodhis followed the Slaves for two centuries and were replaced in 1526 by Babur, a Mogul chieftain of central Asia, who founded the Mogul empire which lasted 331 years till the British took over in 1857.

Throughout these seven centuries of continuous Muslim rule over India, they comprised between 15 to 20 per cent of the total population. Although the Moguls adopted many Hindu customs, married into Hindu families and accommodated them in senior echelons of administration, there never was a true assimilation of the two communities and the development of a composite culture. The Muslims continued to be the ruling, warrior class with a compatible, congruent status in Indian society.

The Hindus, smarting under the dominant position of the Muslims, always looked for a leveler, an equalizer. They saw the opportunity approaching them as the combined struggle of both communities for independence from British rule gathered momentum. Muslim intellectuals had started suspecting the designs of the Hindu (Brahman) leaders as far back as the eighteenth century, particularly after the Battle of Plassey in 1757 marking the first defeat of the Muslim army.

The idea of the two-nation theory had thus been germinating for a century or more before it was articulated by Sir Syed and his team and formally presented by Iqbal at the Allahabad session of the Muslim League in 1930.

The seeds of Hindu-Muslim discord were sown much earlier during the partition of Bengal in 1909 that effectively divided that area into two parts - one dominated by Muslims and the other by the Hindus. Hindu community’s opposition to the grant of separate representation to the Muslims strengthened their apprehensions towards the hidden Hindu agenda.

The grant of provincial autonomy and the induction of elected Congress ministries in 1937 and their clear communal bias alerted further the Muslim community. The Hindu leaders kept denying that there was any Muslim problem as they steadfastly maintained that India had but one community. The disillusionment among even the nationalist Muslims over the arrogance of the Congress leadership and the unsympathetic treatment meted out to the Muslims by Congress-led provincial governments solidified the idea of a separate homeland in the minds of the Muslims of the subcontinent.

As Victor Hugo says, there are no armies as powerful as an idea whose time has come. The Pakistan Resolution of March 23, 1940 was the formal manifestation of that idea. It received an impetus from Hindu opposition to it. Nationalism thrives on opposition. The stronger the opposition to it, the more coherent it grew.

Theoretically though the idea had a serious flaw. It did not cover the entire Muslim community of India. It was understood that the presence of a large Hindu minority in Pakistan would assure the protection of the Muslim minority in Hindu India. Subsequent developments have proved this wrong.

The idea had, anyway, taken firm roots. Quaid-i-Azam led eminently the nation in pursuit of that idea. As Stanley Wolpert, professor of history at UCLA describes it succinctly in his biography of the Quaid: “Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly any one can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.”

Even his opponents acknowledge his prominent role in the realization of the idea. But, this does not mean that Pakistan would not have come into existence had the Quaid not been there. Someone else would have emerged to lead the people in the pursuit of that idea whose time had come.

When Mahatama Gandhi, representing the Hindu community, agreed to the division of India and the creation of Pakistan, he called his acceptance “a Himalayan blunder”. A fanatic Hindu, Godse, shot him dead for that “blunder”.

It was no blunder; it was an acceptance of an unavoidable reality. Mr. Gandhi’s statement was merely to assuage the feelings of nationalist Hindus.

Let me add here that Mr. Gandhi was a great thinker, a far-sighted intellectual, with the uncanny quality of practicing what he preached for the uplift of the menial class – the Harijans (children of God). He had no compunction in doing the work of Harijans - the cleaning of lavatories. He was by any standard a great benefactor of the downtrodden. He turned the Hindu trait of non-violence into a point of strength that played a significant role in the struggle for independence.

From the perspective of a student of history of the subcontinent, Pakistan was inevitable, so was the split and creation of an independent Bangladesh. In the hysterical euphoria on the surrender of Pak army, Mrs. Gandhi proclaimed, “Today we have thrown the two-nation theory into the Bay of Bengal”. Fact of the matter is that with the separation of Pakistan’s eastern wing, the two nations became three and the new nation, Bangladesh, could not be amalgamated into the Indian Bengal.

Within four years of the liberation of Bangladesh, the architect of that state, Mujibur Rehman, was killed and the Indo-Bangladesh Alliance of 1972 went into animated suspension till it lapsed in 1992.

Many of Pakistan’s self-serving and greedy leaders, both civilian and military, have badly let down the people. Their follies do not negate the conceptual moorings of the state. Right now, Nawaz Sharif and Zardari are at loggerheads for the fruits of office. A third party, waiting in the wings, might brush them both aside and take the reins of powers, though protesting vehemently (hypocritically?) against having to resume that role.

The real challenge to the idea of Pakistan is germinating in the tribal belt. The founding fathers had strongly negated Mullacracy in any form in the country.

Gen. Zia’s Islamisation project fared a stillbirth, for the people at large were averse to fanaticism. The basic idea remains valid; it is waiting for a strong leader to articulate the feelings of the masses and uproot the subversion germinating in the tribal region. Long live Pakistan.

Arifhussain@hotmail.com