Pakistan: A Hard Country (12 page)

Without them, Pakistan might not have survived at al . In Pakistan’s first years, despite political turmoil, many Pakistanis displayed a level of energy and public service that they have never since recovered. These qualities were largely responsible for their country’s success in overcoming the quite appal ing problems generated by partition, the disruption of trade and the transport network, mil ions of refugees and growing tension with India. As Ian Talbot writes: [M]any of the refugees regarded their journey to Pakistan as a true hijrat, an opportunity for a renewal of their faith ... Those who have grown cynical over the passage of time in Pakistan wil be surprised by the widespread manifestations of social solidarity and improvisation, reminiscent of Britain during the Blitz in the Second World War, which marked the early days of the state’s existence.11

The late Akhtar Hamid Khan (a former British Indian civil servant and founder of the famous Orangi urban regeneration project, who moved to Pakistan after partition), told me in 1989 that ‘ridiculous though that may sound now’, he and many younger educated Muslims had genuinely believed that Pakistan could be turned into a sort of ideal Muslim socialist state, drawing on Islamic traditions of justice and egalitarianism as wel as on Western socialist thought. In the lines of the Punjabi poet and Muslim Leaguer Chiragh Din Joneka: The Quaid-e-Azam wil get Pakistan soon, Everyone wil have freedom and peace.

No one wil suffer injustice.

Al wil enjoy their rights.12

In fact, however, as with later attempts at radical reform, the first years of West Pakistan also turned into the story of the digestion of the Pakistan movement by local political society and culture, based on ‘feudalism’, kinship and conservative religion – an experience that was to be repeated under the administrations of Ayub Khan, Zia-ul-Haq and Musharraf. Al , in their different ways, tried to bring about radical changes in Pakistan. Al were defeated by the weakness of the Pakistani state and the tremendous undertow of local kinship networks, power structures and religious traditions.

Any hope in the immediate aftermath of independence that reformist elements in the Muslim League might prevail against these traditions was destroyed by the premature deaths of Jinnah (barely a year after independence) and his prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan. 13 Without them, the Muslim League quickly disintegrated. This marks a critical y important difference with India, which helps explain why these two offspring of the British Indian empire have had such different political histories.

In India, the charismatic leader of the independence movement, Jawaharlal Nehru, survived in power until 1964, and founded a dynasty which dominates Indian politics to this day. Thanks largely to Nehru, the Congress Party also survived as a powerful force. Indeed, although a ‘democracy’, until the 1960s India was in some respects (like Japan for more than five decades after the Second World War) a de facto one-party state. In Pakistan, no such party existed.

Even had Jinnah lived, however, it is questionable whether the Muslim League could have continued to succeed political y as the Congress did. The League had its origins, its heart, and by far the greatest part of its support in the north of what was now India. Until shortly before independence, Punjab and Sindh were ruled by local parties dominated by great landowners, in al iance with their Hindu and Sikh equivalents (in Punjab) and with Hindu businessmen (in Sindh).

The North West Frontier Province was ruled by a local Pathan nationalist party in al iance with Congress, and Balochistan by its own local chieftains, several of whom opposed joining Pakistan.

The leaders of the new Pakistani state and army were acutely aware of the thinness of loyalty to the new state across most of its territory; and this too helped create the mentality of a national security state, distrustful of its own people, heavily reliant on its intel igence services, and dependent ultimately on the army to hold the country together.

The Muslim League was only able to supplant the local Sindhi, Punjabi and Pathan parties towards the very end of British rule, when the imminent prospect of an independent Hindu-dominated India stirred up profound fears in the Muslim masses of the region. And even then, the League was only able to prevail because it was joined by large sections of the local landowning elites – the first of the compromises between reformist parties and traditional local elites which has been one of the dominant themes of Pakistani history. In consequence, the hopes of more radical elements of the League for land reform were soon buried.

Al the same, at the start the top ranks both of the Muslim League and of the bureaucracy were dominated by men from what was now India. This included Jinnah and Liaquat, and a large proportion of the senior ranks of the civil service. This added an additional degree of distance from local society to what were in any case not an indigenous state structure and legal system, but ones bequeathed by the British empire.

One might almost say that the composition and the achievements of the Pakistani state in its first twenty years were mostly non-Pakistani: a state structure created by the British and largely staffed by officials who had moved from the old Muslim territories in India, outside the new Pakistan; a British-created and British-trained army; and an industrial class mainly made up of Gujaratis, also from India. In the decades since, this state has been brought into conformity with the societies over which it rules.

In language too, the new state created a double distance between itself and the population. The new national language, inevitably, was supposed to be Urdu, the language of the Mughal court and army, and of the Muslim elites and population in north India. It was not, however, the language of any of the indigenous peoples of West Pakistan, let alone the Bengalis of East Pakistan.

The strategy of forcing these populations to go to school in Urdu spurred local nationalist resentments in Sindh and the NWFP; al the more so as Urdu was not in fact the language of the top elites. These had come, under British rule, to speak English, and in Pakistan English – of a kind – has remained the language of the senior ranks of government, of high society and of higher education. The baleful effects of this on the legal system wil be examined in the next chapter; while the idea that an Urdu education confers social prestige does not long survive any conversation with young upper-class Pakistanis, whose snobbish contempt for Urdu-medium pupils is sometimes quite sickening. So Urdu found itself squeezed from both above and below.

ATTEMPTS AT CHANGE FROM ABOVE

Since the disintegration of the Muslim League in the early 1950s, Pakistan has seen four attempts at radical transformation, three of them in the secular tradition of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, and one in the Islamist tradition stretching back to Shah Waliul ah. Three of these attempts have been by military administrations, and one by a civilian administration.

However, in a sign that Pakistani history cannot be divided neatly into periods of ‘democracy’ and ‘dictatorship’, the civilian administration of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was in many ways more dictatorial than the military administrations of Generals Ayub Khan and Pervez Musharraf, just as for most of his time in power Musharraf’s rule was if anything milder than the ‘democratic’ government of Nawaz Sharif that he overthrew in 1999.

Both main ‘democratic’ parties when in power have used il egal and dictatorial methods against their opponents – sometimes in order to suppress ethnic and sectarian violence, and sometimes to try to maintain their own power in the face of multiple chal enges from political rivals, ethnic separatists and the military. In the gloomy words of a Pakistani businessman:

One of the main problems for Pakistan is that our democrats have tried to be dictators and our dictators have tried to be democrats. So the democratic governments have not developed democracy and the dictatorships have not developed the country. That would in fact have required them to be much more dictatorial.

But whether civilian or military, and more or less authoritarian, as pointed out in the introduction al Pakistani governments have failed radical y to reform Pakistan – in consequence of which, Pakistan, which was ahead of South Korea in development in the early 1960s, is dreadful y far behind it today. However, it is also worth pointing out that they did not fail completely: Generals Ayub Khan, Zia-ul-Haq and Musharraf presided over periods of fairly successful economic growth, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s rule, though economical y disastrous, freed many Pakistanis from their previous position of complete subservience to the rural elites, and gave them a degree of pride and independence which they have never since whol y lost. In consequence of these achievements, if Pakistan is not South Korea, it is also not the Congo – which is saying something, after al .

Two Pakistani military governments tried to change and develop Pakistan in the general spirit of the Westernizing traditions of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. I therefore have grouped the administrations of General Ayub Khan (1958 – 69) and General Pervez Musharraf (1999 – 2008) in one section. Ayub Khan came from a background that to some extent exemplifies the ethnic complexity of Pakistan: born in the NWFP, from a Pathan tribe but a Hindko-speaking Hazara family of smal landowners. In a way, however, this was irrelevant. Coming from a military family (his father had been a Rissaldar-Major in the British Indian army), and having spent almost his whole adult life in the British Indian and then the Pakistani military, like Musharraf and a great many Pakistani officers his personal identity was completely bound up with his professional one as a soldier.

While Ayub’s family had been in the British military service, Musharraf’s had served the British as administrators. Like Musharraf’s father, Ayub had studied briefly at Aligarh University, which Sir Syed founded. Both men derived from this tradition a strong dislike of Islamist politics, and from their military backgrounds a loathing of politicians in general; yet both found that, in order to maintain their power, they had to rely on parliamentary coalitions made up of some of the most opportunist politicians in the country. In contrast to other military and civilian rulers of Pakistan, both men were personal y kindly and tolerant, yet both headed increasingly repressive regimes.

In striking contrast to most successful civilian politicians in Pakistan and throughout South Asia, neither they nor Zia-ul-Haq founded political dynasties or tried to do so. This was in fact impossible, above al because, although they ran what were in certain respects personal dictatorships, they were none of them personal leaders of what has been cal ed the ‘sultanistic’ kind, and did not personal y control the institution that brought them to power.

Rather, they came to power as the CEOs of that great meritocratic corporation, the Pakistan army; and the board of directors of that corporation – in other words the senior generals – retained the ultimate say over their administration’s fate. This marks the degree of the army’s ‘modernity’ compared to the political parties. Both Ayub and Musharraf left office when the other generals decided it was time for them to go. As to Zia, no one knows who was responsible for his assassination.

Both Ayub and Musharraf were committed secular reformers. Ayub in particular was bitterly hostile to the Islamists, and removed the ‘Islamic’ label from the official name of the Republic of Pakistan. He promoted women’s education and rights, and was the only ruler in Pakistan’s history to have made a real y serious attempt to promote birth control, correctly identifying runaway population growth as one of the biggest threats to the country’s long-term progress. Like his reformist successors, however, Ayub was forced to retreat from much of his reformist programme in the face of the Islamists’ ability to mobilize much of the population in protest at interference with their values and traditions, and the traditional landed elite’s ability to block any moves that threatened their local dominance.

Like Musharraf and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Ayub Khan expressed great admiration for the reformist secular policies of Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish republic; but al three of them failed to implement anything like Atatürk’s programme, for al the reasons that have made Pakistan since independence so different from Turkey since the fal of the Ottoman empire.

Apart from anything else, Atatürk and his movement rode to power on the back of military victory against the Greek, Armenian and French troops which had invaded Asia Minor at the end of the First World War. Ayub’s attempt at military victory over India in 1965 ended in failure, and the wave of nationalist fervour that he had aroused then blamed him for the inevitable compromise peace, and contributed greatly to his downfal . In the process, Ayub discovered the severe limits to America’s al iance with Pakistan, to which he had committed his administration. Musharraf’s experience in this regard was even harsher.

Both Ayub and Musharraf fol owed strongly free-market economic policies, though, compared to Musharraf’s, Ayub’s administration did far more to build up the industry and infrastructure of the country. In one respect, Ayub went further than Musharraf, and further than any other government except that of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s. Ayub’s administration introduced a land reform in 1959 which, if it fel far short of India’s and was largely frustrated by the big landlords, nonetheless contributed to the break-up of the biggest ‘feudal’ estates, and their transformation in northern Punjab (though barely elsewhere) into smal erscale commercial holdings.