The Struggle for Pakistan

Title: The Struggle for Pakistan – A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics

Author: Ayesha Jalal

Publisher: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2014 (First)

ISBN: 9780674052895

Pages: 435

With the partition of India along religious lines in 1947, there arose in South Asia the bitter enmity of two brothers who shared much of the culture and destiny of the subcontinent. However, the substance behind Jinnah’s claim that Muslims constituted a distinct nation cannot be wished away. After a long series of protests and manipulations, he achieved his dream of aiding the birth of the nation of Pakistan for the Muslims of India. The newborn country always held India under its suspicious gaze as if it tried to subvert the young nation taking its first strides. Fears of a forceful re-annexation of Pakistan back into India were a potent concern for its people in the first decades of its existence. With India’s open support to secessionists in East Pakistan, relations between the two countries reached its lowest ebb, coupled with Pakistan’s crushing military defeat in 1971 and the separation of Bangladesh. This book’s title may confuse casual readers into thinking that the subject matter is related to the pre-independence machinations of Jinnah’s Muslim League. However, it is a history of the birth and growth of the idea of Pakistan (italics added) from League’s Lahore Resolution of 1940 till present. In that sense, the title should be understood as the struggle for the idea of Pakistan. This is relevant since even after seven decades, the country pitifully falls short of the aspirations of its founding father. Ayesha Jalal is a Pakistani-American historian who serves as the Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University. She has authored many books on social, cultural and political aspects of South Asia, especially Pakistan.

Jalal’s incisive analysis identifies the rise of the military to a position of enduring dominance within the Pakistani state structure as the most salient development in the country’s history. Hatred against India is deep-rooted in Pakistan, which makes its soil fertile for the military’s tentacles to take hold effortlessly. The author narrates the arduous road to Pakistan traversed by its pioneering ideologists. In the Lahore session of the Muslim League, Jinnah asserted that India’s 90 million Muslims were not a minority but a nation in itself. The partition of the provinces of Bengal and Punjab defeated his plans for a negotiated settlement of Muslims in those provinces where they were in a minority. Here, Jalal pauses to romp home the point that religion was not the main impetus behind the creation of Pakistan. The demand for Pakistan was intended to get an equitable, if not equal, share of power for Indian Muslims in an independent India.

The first decade of Pakistan’s life was momentous. With Jinnah’s early demise, constitutional propriety and strict adherence to rule of law were the early casualties. Its efforts at constitution-making was a step in the right direction as Jinnah promised to base the state on the teachings of Islam but promised equal rights to religious minorities as seen in the Objectives Resolution of 1949. However, the Ahmadis were the first community to bear the brunt of religious intolerance when the state began its bigoted attempts to throw the Ahmadis out of the Islamic fold right in 1953 itself.

Pakistan is always in the grip of an insecurity complex. The cold war and the rise of US as a global power, the Indian threat and irritations with Afghan claims on its territory combined with the great challenges flowing from partition laid the basis of this insecurity complex. That may be the reason why the military ruled it for more than half of its existence. The military was relatively unscathed from the horrors of division because even though Pakistan received only 17.5 per cent of the financial assets of undivided India, it obtained 30 per cent of the defence forces. Kashmir becomes ever more significant if we take note of the water situation. All the western rivers of Indus flowed into Pakistan from Kashmir and as long as India controls the territory, Pakistan will always be on the edge. It entered into a military partnership with the US, but the bigger brother took the little one seriously only when it suited them. There were many instances in which Pakistan couldn’t enforce its will against the Americans on Pakistani territory. When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the foreign minister under Ayub Khan, wanted to visit the Badaber base of American forces in Pakistan where many covert operations were taking place, the US snubbed the Pakistani leader by confining him to the cafeteria of the base.

Pakistan’s polity and administration is largely oligarchic and mostly theocratic. Political and economic power is concentrated in the hands of 80 or so large landlord families. The urge to Islamize is a constant refrain. Ayub Khan’s constitution removed the word ‘Islamic’ to rename the country as the Republic of Pakistan. All references to the Koran and Sunna in the 1956 constitution were deleted. However, Khan was forced to recant on this issue and the terms were re-inserted as the very first amendment to the constitution.

Jalal gives a detailed narrative of the secession of Bangladesh. Not only were all military and political powers concentrated in West Pakistan, it was also economically far better placed. The per capita income in the West was 10 per cent higher than the East at partition, but boomed to 35 per cent higher by 1970. The Bengalis were treated as inferior from the beginning itself, with snide comments even on their skin colour appearing in polite circles too. The Urdu-only policy added fuel to the fire. Police firing on students protesting the language policy at Dhaka resulted in many deaths, and Bangladesh still mourns it as Martyrs’ Day. Bengali cultural assertions were frowned upon. Tagore and his works were purged from state media. Economic exploitation was rampant as the surplus from jute exports were pilfered to the West. At last, Bengalis found a voice in Mujib-ur-Rehman. His six-point formula as a precondition for a compromise plainly smacked of secessionist tendency. That it was a manifesto for independence is evidenced by the demands for separate Reserve Banks, foreign currency accounts and a paramilitary force for East Pakistan. With the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 with active Indian help, Pakistan fell into a deep gloom. 93,000 Pakistani soldiers had meekly surrendered to Indian forces at the end of the war.

Post-1971 era saw the rise of a military dictator Zia ul-Haq and judicial assassination of the elected Prime Minister Bhutto who was ousted by the military. Zia was a pious but unscrupulous man. He brought in the Hudood and Zina laws that respectively put blasphemy and adultery as the most heinous crimes punishable by death. At the same time, the military under Zia encouraged the trade and export of narcotics. Heroin was Pakistan’s largest export during the Zia era, earning it billions of dollars in illicit money. The army’s National Logistics Cell was known to be involved in the safe transport of narcotics from the northwest to the port city of Karachi (p.241). Not only Zia, but all military and bureaucratic bigwigs treated elected leaders with derision and contempt. As prime minister, Benazir Bhutto was asked to listen to the President’s address to the nation on television to learn of her dismissal from office. Corruption was rampant in all administrations and even Benazir, often affectionately termed the ‘Princess of Larkana’, was not immune from its clutches. Jalal hints that a dozen Pakistanis are known to have made enough illicit money since the start of the Afghan war to repay half the nation’s foreign debt.

The book gives a comprehensive picture of the post-1971 Pakistan when its course was closely tied to the developments in Afghanistan – the first in the form of Soviet occupation of the country in 1979 and then again in 2001 following its American occupation in a bid to flush out terrorists from its mountain fastness in the aftermath of 9/11. The book is nicely written in an impeccable language full of savoury idioms and phrases. It also focusses on the resistance among cultural and literary figures against authoritarian regimes. Sadat Hassan Manto’s writings are given pride of place. However, Jalal doesn’t mention about the sad plight of minorities as a result of Talibanization taking place since the 1980s. Cursory references are there, but readers expect more from the author. It is curious to note that in the list of acronyms given in the beginning of the book, only three Indian organizations are mentioned – the BJP, RSS and RAW! She makes a stunning claim that the RSS assisted the Indian army in quashing the rebellion against Kashmir’s accession to India.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star