The Past As Present

A top columnist in a leading American newspaper recently described Pakistan as ‘Paranoidistan’—‘a state that suspects every U.S. move as weakening Pakistan for the benefit of a secret U.S. alliance with India.

Are Pakistanis paranoid and is Pakistan ‘Paranoidistan’?

There is a perception of Pakistan as the world’s largest assembly line of terrorists, using Islam as an instrument of domestic and foreign policy.

The international opinion is that Pakistanis are not terrorists. But most acts of terrorism inexorably carry the Pakistani paw print. This was seen in the botched-up bombing attempt of New York’s Times Square by a Pakistani-born American.

Perceptions matter but devoid of historical grounding can fall short of providing a balanced perspective. Grasping the reasons for the Pakistani tendency for paranoia and violence requires assessing its troubling present in the light of a troubled past. Only then is it plausible to ask how, if at all, Pakistanis can be persuaded to change course, not only in a strategic sense but also in terms of recasting the rational and emotional framework through which they perceive the world and in turn are perceived by it.

Pakistan ins called the epicentre of global terror

Over the past six years or so an estimated 22,110 people have died, including at least 2,637 security personnel, 7,004 civilians and 5,960 terrorists or insurgents. While Pakistan has become a veritable killing field, its commitment to the American-led war against al Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan is under acute suspicion. Why does Pakistan elicit such scepticism and distrust?

With the spectre of Talibanization radiating out of the northwestern Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Pakistanis are split on the merits of their strategic alliance with the United States of America. A heated debate on how best to tackle the insurgency in FATA at the University of Peshawar ended in pandemonium when the former chief of Pakistan’s Inter- Services Intelligence (ISI), Chief General (retd) Asad Durrani, blurted out, ‘Leave all this discussion, let me ask the audience whether they want the Taliban to win or the US? Just raise your hand.’ The question underlines the deep ideological fissures inside Pakistan that has made it such a difficult ally for Washington.

Whether in private discussions, public fora, newspapers or back-to-back talk shows hosted on private television channels, a cross-section of Pakistanis are displaying a penchant for conspiracy theories over reasoned arguments supported by hard evidence. Instead of reporting bare facts and letting people draw their own conclusions, the media’s opinion managers, assisted by a string of ’experts’, are burnishing the old narrative of national insecurity with apocalyptic fear.

Lending credence to the media’s conspiratorial puffery are recurrent intelligence failures to prevent suicide bombings in urban centres in retaliation against military operations in Swat and South Waziristan and a spate of American drone attacks on militant hideouts in the northwestern tribal belt neighbouring Afghanistan. Terrorist attacks in key cities, even when claimed by the Pakistani Taliban, are ritually blamed on American private security agencies such as Blackwater and DynCorp as strategic revenge for Pakistan’s refusal to break off ties with the Afghan Taliban and deliver the ever-elusive Osama bin Laden.

Besieged by enemies within and without, television’s spin-doctors, impelled by the state’s intelligence agencies, attribute Pakistan’s multi- faceted problems to the machinations of invisible external hands, as opposed to historically verifiable causes of internal decline and decay. If India’s hegemonic designs are not hindering Pakistan at every step, America and Israel are believed to be hatching plots to break up the world’s only Muslim nuclear state. Call it paranoia, denial or intellectual paralysis, but Pakistan’s deeply divided and traumatised people are groping for a magical formula to evade collective responsibility for their failure to gel as a nation. Individual voices of reason calling for sober analyses and pragmatic 17responses to an admittedly difficult situation are drowning in an upsurge of anti-American vitriolic. Seeing Pakistan’s ills as gifts from abroad is not the bane of Islamic extremists alone. Liberal-minded Pakistanis are, for patriotic reasons, joining the national chorus condemning American-led conspiracies to destabilise Pakistan.

A psychologically introverted national mind-set resistant to critical self-reflection tends to be suspicious and paranoid. This is not to say that there are no grounds for harbouring suspicions of friends and allies, not to mention enemies, but Pakistanis need to ponder why they have ended up as the world’s favourite whipping boy. An informed, open-ended and sustained internal debate that can shed light on the root causes of their present predicament is impossible without some semblance of a shared historical consciousness. Yet the idea of history as a study of the past through rigorous investigative methods of critical enquiry has suffered from willful neglect in the interest of promoting new-fangled ideologies defined by regimes pursuing the politics of self perpetuation. Instead of history, Pakistanis are given emotive lessons in ideology, along with a compendium of selective facts, which instead of opening up minds parrot the ’truths’ of hastily constructed national myths. While myths are an important dimension of the historical imagination of a people, they are meaningful only when they bear a broad resemblance to actual history. Shorn of a history, people living in myths are just that—a mythical people whose thoughts and actions lack credibility and substance, a frustrated and depressed people.

Despite a well-orchestrated official nationalism, Pakistan ever since its creation has been searching for moorings somewhere in the twilight zone between myth and history. Not a novel occurrence in a newly independent state, it has—due to a dysfunctional educational system and a closed media (its recent commercialisation notwithstanding)— led to the dissemination of some remarkable distortions and mistruths. Curbs on freedom of speech during extended periods of military authoritarianism, declining educational standards, and an obsessive fear of Indian hegemonic designs, has stunted the development of a critical intellectual tradition. Intellectuals have been hounded and muzzled or bribed into subservience. History has been reduced to a jumble of cliches by official hacks expounding improbable versions of Pakistan’s much-touted Islamic ideology.

The achievements of essentially secular Muslim rule in Hindu India for millennia have been tweaked to assert Islamic superiority. Forced to imbibe official truths, the vast majority of literate Pakistanis take comfort in ignorance, scepticism and, most disconcertingly, in a contagion of belief in conspiracy theories. The self-glorification of an imagined past matched by habits of national denial have assumed crisis proportions today when Pakistan’s existence is under far more serious threat from fellow Muslims than it was in 1947 from rival non-Muslim communities.

Importance of History

Established as a homeland for Indian Muslims, Pakistan has fewer Muslims than in India and Bangladesh. Official Pakistani nationalism ascribes the country’s creation to the ’two-nation’ theory, according to which Indian Muslims were always a distinct community that had resisted assimilation into the subcontinent’s predominantly Hindu culture. The claim is not corroborated by historical facts. Indian Muslims shared a common religious identity but were hardly united in their politics, which were more often defined by class, regional and ideological affiliations. An absence of unanimity in Muslim politics, not the commonalities of religion, allowed the Indian National Congress to cut the All-India Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan down to size.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah had twice rejected the territorial contours of Pakistan as it emerged, describing them as ‘mutilated, truncated and moth- eaten’. He had wanted a constitutional arrangement that gave Muslims something close to parity at a centre re-established on the basis of a partnership between two essentially sovereign states—Pakistan (representing Muslim-majority provinces) and Hindustan (representing Hindu-majority provinces). Jinnah’s hopes of a renegotiated Indian union based on confederal or treaty arrangements between Pakistan and Hindustan were dashed by Congress’s refusal to share power and the British haste to draw the shutters on their Indian empire. If their claim to nationhood was conceded, Muslims as a ’nation’ were divided into two hostile states. The contradiction between the claims of Muslim nationalism and the achievement of a territorial state was never resolved, confounding Pakistan’s struggle to define an identity that is both Islamic and national.

The importance of history in building a cohesive nation was recognised, but the methods adopted proved inimical for national unity. 19Celebrating the rich diversity of Pakistan’s regional cultures might have made for more judicious narrations of the nation. Portraying Pakistan as an Islamic entity distinct from Hindu India, the official scribes of nationalism saw regional identities as threats to the state. Using the Islamic bond to justify suppressing the distinctive linguistic and cultural mores of Pakistan’s regional peoples, especially during prolonged bouts of military dictatorship, had politically divisive effects. Before and after Bangladesh’s formation in 1971, official versions of Pakistani history elicited derision and resentment in some regions.

Without a credible history, a people cannot develop a historical consciousness, much less a national one. By devaluing history for political and ideological reasons, Pakistan has found it difficult to project a national identity that can strike a sympathetic chord with its heterogeneous people. Sixty-three years after independence, Pakistan is trying to define the inner and outer contours of its national identity. The dilemma flows from a stubborn refusal to accept the more awkward truths about the historical circumstances surrounding its birth. Pakistanis are conditioned to think that their country emerged from a religiously inspired separatist movement against Hindu domination in an independent India. This overlooks Congress’s solution of India’s Muslim problem.

Not only were the two main Muslim majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal partitioned, but the Muslim League was also denied a share of power at the all-India level, an arrangement Jinnah had expected to negotiate in order to safeguard the interests of all Indian Muslims. Glossing over the historically weightier matter of the exclusion of Muslim-majority areas from India, the managers of Pakistan harped on fears of reabsorption into Hindu India. While relations between the two neighbours have been strained ever since 194 7, particularly over Kashmir it is arguable whether India wishes to reincorporate the Muslim majority areas and endanger its existing political balance between communities and regions. The desire to encircle and weaken Pakistan cannot be confused with the objective of undoing partition.

The India Factor

The Indian bugbear helped turn Pakistan into a security state, but threats to its survival as a sovereign independent state invariably emanated from within. The Army and senior civil bureaucracy registered their 20dominance over parliament and elected bodies at the provincial and local levels within years of independence. The supremacy of the non­ elected institutions survived the tentative experiment in parliamentary democracy during the first decade, controlled politics under military dispensation after 1958, and persisted after Pakistan’s dismemberment in 1971. Against the backdrop of centre-province tensions, a gagged media, weak political parties and the organisational limitations of civil society, the emerging structural imbalance within the state was given constitutional legitimacy by a judiciary forced into submission by a presumptuous executive. The result was a centralised state structure, federal in form and unitary in substance, whose military authoritarian character was at odds with the tenor of politics in the regions. These structural asymmetries contributed to a lack of democratic institutions, inadequate mechanisms for public accountability, inequitable distribution of resources and chronic tensions between the centre and the provinces.

The uneasy symbiosis between a military authoritarian state and democratic political processes is often traced to the artificial nature of Pakistan and the lack of a neat fit between social identities at the base and the arbitrary frontiers drawn by the departing colonial masters. Yet India, with greater social diversities, laid the foundations of a constitutional democracy. This crucial difference between the two states that replaced the British Raj cannot be put down to a democracy deficit in the Muslim psyche. Nor can the complex and shifting political dynamics that thwarted Muslim dreams for peace and prosperity be blamed wholly on America’s cynical exploitation of Pakistan’s geostrategic location.

A choice was made by the rulers of Pakistan in the face of Washington’s efforts to charm New Delhi with generous amounts of economic assistance. The country’s first finance minister, Ghulam Mohammad, summed up the feeling well when he told the Americans that Pakistanis felt like ‘a prospective bride who observes her suitor spending very large sums on a mistress, i.e. India, while she herself can only look forward to not more than a token maintenance in the event of marriage’.

Faced with the unenviable choice of accepting Indian hegemony or joining American-backed security alliances aimed at the containment of communism, the Pakistani leadership opted for the latter. By the mid 1950s, Pakistan had entered the South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) covering West Asia in return for 21American military and economic assistance. Hitching its wagons to the Anglo-American bloc dented Pakistan’s efforts to project itself as a leader of the Muslim world. During the 1950s an Arab world rife with anti-imperialist and nationalist trends felt little affinity for a country flaunting its Islamic identity. Pakistan’s alliance with the West bolstered Jawaharlal Nehru’s bid to register India as a leader of the non-aligned movement. This served to heighten the Pakistani sense of inferiority vis-a-vis India, forcing an abject reliance on America whose capitalist-driven consumerism and military prowess was as much an object of resentment as of awe in the country.

Manto’s Letters

The Urdu short story writer Saadat Hasan Manto conveyed the mood of ordinary Pakistanis reduced to silently watching the world’s richest and most powerful country arming one of the poorest and weakest to counter the local bully on the block. ‘My country is poor, but why is it ignorant?’ Manto asked in the first of nine satirical letters to Uncle Sam. The percipient Uncle had to know the answer in his heart unless it had been removed by one of America’s brilliant surgeons. Manto wondered where America got all its money from to be such a ‘show off’.

He loved his country, however poor and ignorant. Tired of wasting his considerable talents living a life of penury, Manto feared he might soon kill himself or die a natural death, ‘because where flour sells at the price at which it sells here only a shame-faced person can complete his ordained time on earth.’ The stark truth was that ‘we neither know how to live nor how to die.’ What Pakistanis needed most from the US were constitutional experts to help draft a constitution. A nation can do without a national anthem, but ‘cannot do without a constitution.’ This was why, unlike the United States, interesting things happened in Pakistan. Ministers changed every other day, would-be prophets made outlandish claims, countrywide disturbances brought no change and inquiry commissions worked under the direction of unnamed higher authorities. Manto liked the idea of an American military pact with Pakistan so long as he got a personal atom bomb to lob at mullahs whose habits of personal hygiene offended him. He was certain that American military aid was to arm the mullahs. Once the ‘gang of mullahs is armed’ and ’their pajamas stitched by American machines in strict conformity with the Sharia’, the Soviets would have to shut down shop in Pakistan.

As Manto anticipated, American influence marginalised the left and weakened an incipient democracy without substantially improving the lot of the toiling masses.

Islam was regularly invoked but religion’s role in state affairs was kept in check. Retrospectively constructed arguments about Islam being deployed as an instrument of foreign policy by successive governments ever since the emergence of Pakistan are in need of modification.

There was a vast difference between utilising religion for the state’s internal homogenising logic or upstaging India at international fora and an ideologically driven policy of making Pakistan an ultra conservative Islamic state committed to waging ‘jihad’ against all and sundry.

Campaigns by self- styled religious parties, looking to carve out a political niche in a state whose creation they had opposed, were fiercely contested and the ’tyranny of the mullah’ resolutely condemned for the sake of more realistic foreign policy goals.