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| V V: Making sense of Pakistan | |
| V V / New Delhi June 20, 2009, 0:29 IST | |
As Pakistan teeters on the brink, close to a permanent state of anarchy as Islamist revolutionaries led by the Taliban and their many allies take more territory and state power shrinks, the question is often asked, “Can Pakistan work?” or worse, “Can Pakistan survive?” Yet, the question is rarely answered as the state’s dysfunctionality is seen to stem from other causes. These range far and wide, many of which provide convincing answers to Pakistan’s key problems: its failure to ward off military dictatorships; its uneven social and economic development; its ethnic divisions; and even the pursuit of questionable foreign policies. The whole idea of Pakistan is brought into question. Yet, Dr Farzana Shaikh, fellow of international affairs at Chatham House, says in her book, Making Sense of Pakistan (Hurst, Foundation Books reprint, Cambridge University Press, Rs 695), “These explanations are treated…as causes of Pakistan’s fragility as a nation-state rather than as symptoms of the underlying uncertainty about its identity—an uncertainty that stems from the lack of consensus over Islam.”
Dr Shaikh says that Pakistan today is an enigma with no clear understanding of the nature of the Pakistani state. Analysing the causes of this confusion, she traces it back to the origins of Pakistan, the politics of its creation and the flawed assumption of its founders that religion alone could be the basis of a modern forward-looking state, ignoring cultural and social factors. When he founded Pakistan in 1947, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a thoroughly westernised Muslim with Victorian manners and a secular outlook, promised the subcontinent’s Muslims that they would finally fulfil their cultural and civilisational destiny: his fundamental premise was that Hindus and Muslims could never live together. But with time, Jinnah’s Pakistan has grown weaker, more authoritarian and increasingly theocratic.
Dr Shaikh argues that the root cause of Pakistan’s mess is the confusion about its identity. Because of the nature of its creation — a secessionist state born in opposition to the Indian national movement—Pakistan was identified in terms of what it was “not” (it was not India) rather than what it was.
“Indeed much of the uncertainty over Pakistan’s identity stems from the nagging question of whether its identity is fundamentally dependent on India and what its construction might entail outside of opposition to the latter. This has prompted the suggestion that Pakistan is a state burdened with a negative identity shaped by the circumstances of Partition.”
Ever since its formation, Pakistan has struggled to overcome this negative identity. Its search for what it regards as legitimacy has, in fact, been the “defining feature” of its policy towards India, especially the Kashmir issue, and is at the heart of its quest for military parity with a neighbour “almost seven times its size in population and more than four times its land mass.”
Uncertainty about its national identity and lack of consensus have affected Pakistan’s constitutional and political development; it has also impinged on the construction of a coherent economic and social vision.
“With no clear appreciation of the role of Islam in public life, policies were pursued and judged not in terms of their success or failure to deliver social and economic benefits, but in terms of whether they weakened or strengthened the putative Islamic purpose of the state…The influence of religious authorities was considerably enhanced by their growing links with Pakistan’s most powerful state institution—the military. Like political leadership, the armed forces were compelled to confront multiple meanings of Pakistan and the diverging interpretations of Islam that attached to the country’s identity.”
Dr Shaikh says in her introduction that her book is “a work of interpretation rather than of historical research.” This is only partly true because the thesis has been deeply researched though the conclusions, as they should be, are entirely her own. It is the big picture, not the nitty-gritty of detail, that will attract readers. And the reason is: for the first time a Pakistani scholar has picked on “the public role of religion (ie Islam)” for the chaos that the country finds itself. Religion in public life always divides the liberals and the purists, (as it does with Hindutva): the mullahs and hardliners brushed aside what little of Jinnah’s liberalism survived the pangs of Partition. No Pakistani scholar (and there have some excellent studies by Pakistanis in recent years) has said it in so many words with “simplicity, clarity and purity of line” as Shakespeare would have put it. A must read for anyone who wants to know what’s going on next door and why Pakistan will find it extremely difficult to stamp out terrorism. And why we will have to live with it.
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