Opinion A lament for Pakistan

This is why we need to understand why Pakistan is in the state of flux it is today. As always,the roots of the tragedy go far back into history. Ignore the Congress’s version of the Partition story. Pakistan was not proposed as a religious state. Jinnah did not trust the Congress to be able to resist the pressures of the Hindu majority against the rights of the Muslim minority. He asked for a sub-federation within post-British India. What he ended up with was a ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan.

He did not envisage an Islamist Republic. He wanted a modern Muslim majority democratic nation which would accommodate other minority religions. Yet,what he did not have was a mass-based political party rooted in the region over which he came to rule. The Muslim League was a UP-Bihar party,not a Sind-Punjab one. Democracy could not take roots in such a context. Pakistan lost Jinnah and Liaquat Ali soon after Independence. So,they had a succession of military bureaucratic regimes interrupted by fragile democratic episodes. The problem with Pakistan has been that it has never been secure about its identity as a nation. It is one thing to have a sub-federation to guarantee minority rights in a large federation,but what is then the basis of the nation where the erstwhile minority is now the majority? What was it which united the two halves of Pakistan across two thousand miles of Indian territory? Urdu was imposed as a national language which led eventually to the secession of East Pakistan. Left with the single territory,the idea of Pakistan was still ill-defined. The very word ‘mohajir’ shows that locals don’t consider Muslim refugees from India as Pakistanis. How then could Pakistan be defined?

Perhaps Pakistan got a brief chance to become a modern democratic nation while Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was its prime minister. But his execution closed that door. Zia-ul-Haq chose Islamisation to be the cementing idea for Pakistan. The Americans were ready to bankroll him since they needed him to fight their proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Their reward was Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban. By the time the US woke up after 9/11,the genie had escaped the bottle.

General Pervez Musharraf tried to,but could not contain the Islamist wave. He also sabotaged Benazir Bhutto’s return and hence we have yet another fragile democratic episode with Asif Ali Zardari at the helm. We know that Zardari is unable to,and perhaps even unwilling to,stop the Islamisation of Pakistan. Salman Taseer’s death and the reluctance of the PPP to come out in his support at his funeral are proof of this.

Even so,Pakistan has some forces which are willing to fight for a liberal modern democracy. The agitation against Musharraf and in favour of the Supreme Court Chief Justice just two years ago was a sure sign of this. India has never been positively supportive of Pakistan’s democratic aspiration. It is a pity. We shall miss Pakistan as a moderate democratic aspirant when it is gone and replaced by an Islamist monster.