Pakistan: A Hard Country (11 page)
The decisive moment for the demand for Pakistan as a slogan came with the Government of India Act of 1935 and the elections of 1937 which fol owed. Prior to the elections, Congress had made informal promises to the League that the two parties would form coalition governments in provinces with substantial Muslim minorities.
As it turned out, however, Congress’s victories were so overwhelming that – most unwisely – the Congress leadership decided that it did not need to share government with the League, and reneged on its promise.
This Congress ‘treachery’ convinced Jinnah and the other leaders of the League that Muslim parties would be excluded from power in a Congress-ruled independent India, and Muslims reduced to a whol y subordinated community. In the background to al these moves and counter-moves were recurrent ‘communal riots’, in which local issues and religious prejudice led Hindus and Muslims to attack each other, often resulting in heavy casualties.
The eventual result was the Lahore Resolution of 1940, in which, at Jinnah’s cal , the Muslim League set out the demand for an independent Muslim state. However, Jinah stil spoke not of ful separation but rather of ‘dividing India into autonomous national states’ (my italics); and as the distinguished South Asian historian Ayesha Jalal has convincingly demonstrated, this demand was not quite what it seemed.8 As late as 1939, Jinnah was stating that although Hindus and Muslims were separate nations, ‘they both must share the governance of their common homeland’.
Jinnah in the end was bitterly disappointed with the ‘moth-eaten’
Pakistan that he eventual y received. Not merely did this exclude almost al the great historic Muslim centres of India, but it left out those areas of north India where support for the Muslim League and the demand for Pakistan had been strongest; and yet for demographic and geographical reasons, there was no way that an independent Pakistan could ever have included these areas. Furthermore, al the evidence suggests that Jinnah and the League leadership were completely unprepared for the realities of complete separation from India. This was to have tragic consequences when Pakistan was created.
Rather, it seems, Jinnah was using the slogan of Pakistan for two purposes: to consolidate his own control over the League, and as a threat to force Congress to concede what he – and most Muslims – real y wanted. This was a united India in which Muslims would be guaranteed a share of power, which in turn would guarantee their rights. On the one hand, this would be a highly decentralized India in which the provinces (including the Muslim-majority provinces) would hold most of the power – a goal shared by the Muslim and indeed Hindu elites of Punjab and Sindh. On the other hand, Muslims would be constitutional y guaranteed a 50 per cent share of positions in the central government, and a large enough share of the central legislature to block any attempts to change the constitution or introduce policies hostile to Muslim interests.
In 2010, such goals may not seem particularly outrageous. In the cases of Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Lebanon and parts of Africa we have become accustomed in recent decades to constitutional arrangements guaranteeing ‘power-sharing’ between different ethno-religious groups, and heavily qualifying strict majoritarian democracy.
However, these demands proved unacceptable to the Congress. They threatened Congress’s power, Hindu jobs and the plans of Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru for state-led economic development, something which depended on a strong centralized state. There was also a wel -based fear that a loose Indian confederation would soon col apse into appal ing civil war. In the end, therefore, Congress preferred – however unwil ingly – a smal er but strong and united Congress-dominated India to a larger but weak, decentralized and endangered Indian confederation.
In 1947, with British rule disintegrating and Hindu – Muslim violence increasing, the British agreed with Congress and the League on independence and partition. Pakistan was to consist of two halves separated by almost 1,000 miles of Indian territory: in the east, the Muslim-majority areas of the province of Bengal; in the west, the Muslim-majority areas of the province of Punjab, together with Sindh, the North West Frontier Province and adjoining tribal and princely territories.
To some extent, the movement for Pakistan may have escaped from Jinnah’s hands. As his famous speech to the Pakistani constituent assembly had it, in Pakistan,
Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of every individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.
This passage makes clear that Jinnah expected Pakistan to be a Muslim-majority but essential y secular country in which Muslims would be the ‘people of state’, but large Hindu and Sikh minorities would exist and would have a share of power. Pakistan would also therefore stil be part of a wider South Asian unity, in cultural, social and economic terms, with the possibility of some form of confederation between equal partners emerging later.9
However, since Muslim numerical weakness meant that Jinnah and the League could not block Congress’s plans by democratic and constitutional means, they were critical y dependent on Muslim street power; and this street power was largely mobilized using the rhetoric of Islam (with strong jihadi overtones harking back to the Khilafat movement) and of communal fear. This then col ided head-on with Hindu and especial y Sikh street power mobilized in the name of their respective fears and visions.
Jinnah spoke of a secular Pakistan, but on the streets the cry was the Muslim profession of faith:
Pakistan ka naaraah kya?
La illaha illallah
(What is the slogan of Pakistan?
There is no God but God)
This is stil the slogan of the Islamist parties in Pakistan concerning the country’s identity. The wave of mass religious enthusiasm that powered the Muslim League in the last years before partition led Peter Hardy to describe it as ‘a chiliastic movement rather than a pragmatic political party’.10 The Pakistan movement therefore was one in which a secularminded leadership in the tradition of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan coexisted uneasily with mass support motivated above al by the cry of ‘Islam in danger’, and by vague dreams of creating a model Islamic society.
A combination of this religious fervour with Jinnah’s original plan to balance against the Hindus in an Indian confederation was responsible for the most disastrous aspect of the new Pakistan, namely the uniting of West Pakistan (the present Pakistan) with Muslim East Bengal. This union made absolutely no geographical, historical, economic or strategic sense, and was bound to col apse sooner or later. Apart from anything else, East Pakistan was indefensible in the face of serious Indian attack, as the war of 1971 proved.
The union of West and East Pakistan was dictated in the first instance by the need to keep al Muslims together so as to form the largest possible block against the Hindus within an Indian confederation. Thereafter, the quite different idea of independent Pakistan as the homeland of al the Muslims of South Asia, and the source of their safety and progress, meant that enormous political and emotional capital was invested in trying to maintain Pakistan as one state – when two friendly al ied states would have made so much more sense.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the need to balance, conciliate or suppress the Bengalis of East Pakistan exerted a malign influence on Pakistan’s development. The first protests in the East were in defence of the Bengali language, and in opposition to the extension of Urdu as the state language. From there, opposition turned into demands for greater autonomy, and final y into a programme of de facto separation.
The fact that East Pakistan, though much smal er geographical y and economical y, held a smal majority of Pakistan’s population helped make democracy impossible, as it would have implied a Bengali domination which most of the West Pakistanis simply would not accept. This contributed to the breakdown of Pakistani democracy in the 1950s, and the military coup by General Ayub Khan in 1958. Ayub then tried to prevent Bengali domination by abolishing the provinces of West Pakistan and lumping them together in ‘one unit’, alongside the other ‘unit’ of East Pakistan. This in turn greatly increased local discontent in West Pakistan.
Ayub’s successor, General Yahya Khan (who took power in 1969), reduced tension in West Pakistan by abolishing ‘one unit’ and restoring the provinces, but failed altogether to conciliate East Pakistan. The West Pakistani establishment – including Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistani People’s Party (PPP) – were prepared to accept neither a loose confederation with East Pakistan, nor the democratic domination of the Bengali majority in a united Pakistan.
During the years of protest against Ayub’s rule, Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rehman had emerged as leader of the Awami League, representing Muslim Bengali nationalism. Mujib’s ‘Six Point’ programme was a return to the original platform of the Muslim League in British India, demanding maximum autonomy for East Pakistan and reducing Pakistan to a loose confederation. Bengali radicalism had been increased by repeated clashes in East Pakistan between demonstrators and troops, and a catastrophic cyclone in November 1970 in which up to 1 mil ion people died and the government was accused of negligence.
In the December 1970 national elections, the Awami League won 160 out of 162 seats in East Pakistan, and an absolute majority in the national parliament. The PPP won 81 seats out of 138 in West Pakistan. Mujib therefore demanded the right to form the national government, with confederation the inevitable result. This was acceptable neither to Yahya Khan and the army, nor to the Punjabi elites, nor to Bhutto, who demanded an equal share in government on the basis of his party’s majority in West Pakistan, and who forged an al iance with hardline military elements in Yahya’s administration to resist Bengali demands.
A series of moves and counter-moves took place in the fol owing months, accompanied by increasingly violent mass protests and clashes with the military in East Pakistan. Then at midnight at the end of 25 March 1971, the military launched a savage campaign of repression in East Pakistan (Operation Searchlight). Thousands of students, professionals, Awami League leaders and activists and East Pakistani police were kil ed, amid dreadful scenes of carnage and rape.
This revolting campaign was the most terrible blot on the entire record of the Pakistani army, and was made possible by old and deepseated racial contempt by the Punjabi and Pathan soldiery for the Bengalis, whom they also regarded as not true Muslims but crypto-Hindus. It is worth noting that, despite recurrent episodes of military repression, nothing remotely as bad as this has ever happened in West Pakistan, where this racial and racist tension between army and people does not exist to anything like the same degree. Indeed, unwil ingness to fire on their own people has been one factor in undermining the wil of the soldiers to confront the Taleban.
Memory of the March 1971 massacres in East Pakistan has been largely suppressed in the Pakistan of today, since for obvious reasons neither the military nor the political parties (including the PPP, which after the death of Bhutto was headed for a while by General Tikka Khan, who as commander in East Pakistan launched the campaign of kil ing there) nor the newspapers, which justified or ignored the kil ings, have any desire to recal them.
The campaign led to the mutiny of East Pakistani troops (the Bengal Regiment) and a mass uprising in the countryside. Mil ions of refugees fled from East Pakistan to India with dreadful tales of the Pakistani army’s behaviour. Eight months later, with international opinion now ranged against Pakistan, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India ordered the Indian army to invade East Pakistan, and in two weeks 96,000 hopelessly outnumbered Pakistani troops there were forced to surrender. An attempt to save the situation by invading India from West Pakistan was beaten off with ease. East Pakistan became the independent state of Bangladesh, and was recognized by the international community.
Because of the vision of Pakistan as both a united Muslim homeland and an ideal Muslim state, the loss of Bangladesh has been seen by most West Pakistanis as a catastrophe which cal ed into question the ‘two nation theory’ of Muslims as a South Asian nation equal to ‘Hindu’
India, and therefore the very meaning of their country.
In actual fact, it was only the terrible circumstances of the end of united Pakistan that were a catastrophe. Separation itself was inevitable sooner or later, and left West Pakistan a geographical y coherent state whose peoples were also much more closely linked by ethnicity and culture. Pakistan has indeed demonstrated this by surviving, despite so many predictions to the contrary, and by the fact that despite a variety of local uprisings, until the rise of the Taleban it has never faced a chal enge remotely on the scale of East Bengali nationalism.
THE NEW PAKISTANI STATE
In West Pakistan, however, despite the cynicism instil ed by the later decades of Pakistani history, the initial idealism of the Pakistan movement, and its real achievements, should not be underestimated.