Relations between India and Pakistan remain at an impasse, largely because of the different trajectories taken by the two nations since independence. India chose an inclusive democracy and secularism as its central plank. It had tall leaders who nurtured the concept in the formative years of the young nation, but more importantly, the idea of democracy and secularism jelled well with the majority Hindu population, as Hinduism (Sanātan Dharma), in essence was inclusive and non-sectarian. Paradoxically, in Pakistan, a state which came into being based on a separate religious ideology, there was lack of ideological lucidity.
The word ‘PAKSTAN’ was coined by Rahmat Ali in a pamphlet he published on 28 January 1933, titled "Now or Never: Are We to Live or Perish Forever?” As originally conceived, Pakistan was to consist of the five northern units of British India—Punjab, North West Frontier Province (Afghania), Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan. East Bengal was not a part of this calculus. By the end of 1933, the word ‘Pakistan’ had become common vocabulary where an ‘I’ was added to ease pronunciation. In the pamphlet, Ali spoke of the Muslim and Hindu being separate nations and expressed the need for the creation of Pakistan, lest “our Islamic heritage perish throughout the Sub-continent of India”. The underlying principle for the creation of Pakistan was thus based on exclusivity, and having a separate state based on religious affinity.
This was the political theme which Jinnah too propounded. “It is a dream,” he said, “that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality…The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and literature[s]. They neither intermarry nor inter-dine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions…To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent, and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a state”. While Jinnah was not the first to propound the two nation theory, he gave the concept political legitimacy, which led to the creation of Pakistan as a separate homeland for the Muslims.
Was Jinnah conflicted on what Pakistan should be? In his address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 11 August 1947, as the Governor General designate of Pakistan, he spoke of a secular Pakistan. “You may belong to any religion,” he said, “that has nothing to do with the business of the state… We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of the state… I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal…”
This was in direct contradiction to his earlier rhetoric seeking a different identity based on being Muslim. In any case, four decades of laying emphasis on the differences between Hindus and Muslims and the threat to the latter from the former could obviously not be erased by a single speech. An “Islamic Pakistan” may have been a slogan for the Muslim League to mobilise followers rather than as a goal of the League’s leadership. However, the slogan took on a life of its own committing Pakistan to incorporate Islam into the fabric of the state. While Jinnah may have been a secularist in his personal life, his politics was not based on secular principles.
The issue of what Pakistan should be still resonates in the country, without any satisfactory outcome and raises the question whether the idea of Pakistan was sufficiently imagined at its inception. In her book, historian Ayesha Jalal asks, ‘how did a Pakistan come about which fitted the interests of most Muslims so poorly’? This perhaps is an acknowledgement that the imagined Pakistan has not only not come about, but has taken on a form, which ill serves the people for whom it was supposed to be a new Medina, harking back to the imagined glory at the time of Muhammad.
Hans J. Morgenthau’s comments on Pakistan also make the same point. In an article published in 1956, critiquing the Asian policy of the US, he stated that the US military policy with respect to Pakistan was ‘fraught with illusion and danger’. The latter, he said was… ‘not a nation and hardly a state. It has no justification in history, ethnic origin, language, civilisation, or the consciousness of those who make up its population. They have no interest in common save one: fear of Hindu domination. It is to that fear and to nothing else that Pakistan owes its existence, and thus far its survival as an independent state’. He further observed that it was hard to see ‘how anything but a miracle or else a revival of religious fanaticism, will assure Pakistan’s future’. That miracle is yet to happen, but religious fanaticism continues to gain ground at a rapid rate.
What has made successive Pakistani leaderships use Islam as a tool for nation building? In the early years after independence, it was done to glue the nation together as there was an absence of nationalism in the various constituents that made the two wings of Pakistan. Each constituent had its own distinct social fabric, language and ethnicity, so the belief was that Islam could be used as the binding glue. The formation of Pakistan was attributed to a presumed unified Islamic ethos, and in the process, all kinds of tools were applied to de-emphasise local and regional agendas and any discussion of regional dynamics or prerogatives was considered subversive. The Urdu speaking elite which had migrated to Pakistan from the minority provinces of India abrogated to themselves a major say in the shaping of the narrative at the expense of the regions indigenous intellectuals and activists, as a consequence of which the latter had lesser influence in helping to shape the destiny of the new nation.
In the event, when Pakistan adopted its Constitution on 23 September 1956, Pakistan was declared an Islamic Republic. Earlier, the Constituent Assembly had adopted the ‘Objectives Resolution’ on 12 March 1949, as a set of guiding principles for the future constitution. Combining features from both Western democracy and Islamic principles, it stated that sovereignty belonged to Allah alone but He has delegated it to the state of Pakistan through its people for being exercised as a sacred trust. The principles of democracy, freedom, tolerance and social justice as enunciated by Islam were to be fully observed, fundamental rights were to be guaranteed, Pakistan was to be a federation and the judiciary was to be independent. However, incorporating into law the concept that sovereignty belonged to Allah alone was dangerous as it had the potential to override any law to appease Muslim sentiment and potentially delivered power to the clergy.
While Jinnah’s vision of a liberal Pakistan lacked roots, it was but one of the competing ideas in a series of narratives, the others being those put forward by the Islamists and the various ethno-linguistic groups in the Provinces. An astonishing aspect of Pakistan’s creation was the fact that it chose Urdu as its national language. Urdu was the language of the Mughal court and army, and of the Muslim elites and population of North India. It was not the mother tongue of the people living in either of the Wings of Pakistan and was spoken by less than 3 per cent of the population at that time. The strategy of forcing these populations to go to school in Urdu spurred local nationalist resentment in East Pakistan, Sindh and the North West Frontier Province (NWFP, now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), especially as Urdu was not the language of the top elites. Under British rule, English had remained the language of senior ranks of government, of high society and of higher education. The imposition of Urdu as the national language thus remained unpopular at the lower level of society and was treated with snobbish contempt by the English speaking elite. It thus got squeezed from both ends of society. In the case of East Wing, it eventually led to the breakup of the state in just over two decades with the erstwhile East Pakistan becoming sovereign and naming itself Bangladesh in 1971.
The first decade of Pakistan’s independence were witness to political instability, civil disturbances and a weakening economy, which prompted a military takeover by General Ayub Khan on 7 October 1958. Ayub’s coup was given legal sanction by Pakistan’s Supreme Court, citing the Doctrine of Necessity. Thus began Pakistan’s long experiments with military rule, broken by short periods of civilian rule which too were for the most part autocratic in functioning. Under Ayub, the military justified its rule in moral and strategic terms and took on itself the onus of addressing grave matters of state security from the hands of the political class. The security of Pakistan in turn came to be identified with the Punjab and NWFP as nearly all its manpower was drawn from these two provinces. This still remains the dominant theme within Pakistan. While remaining aloof from Islamic doctrine, the military focused on geo-strategic concerns while formulating a security policy for Pakistan. Security concerns voiced by the military were perceived in terms of a threat from India. This was centred on three prongs. The first was the need for a strong standing army ready to take to field at short notice against any threat from India. The second was to exploit Pakistan’s geo-strategic position to receive aid from the West and the third was to move towards better relations with both the (then) USSR and China. A curious aspect of Pakistan’s security policy was that it was entirely centred on the security of the West Wing. Ayub believed East Pakistan was indefensible, being surrounded on three sides by India. The defence of the East Wing hence lay in the strength of West Pakistan. This reasoning did not go down too well with the Bengalis and was one of the factors which led to the creation of Bangladesh.
It was under Ayub Khan’s presidency (October 1958-March 1969) that the study of Islam or ‘Islamiyat’ was made compulsory in Pakistan’s education system. As taught in schools, the history of Pakistan was no longer a product of a post-colonial constitutional power-sharing struggle or the subcontinent's syncretic and shared Hindu-Muslim heritage, but an almost inexorable culmination of the arrival of Islam on the subcontinent. Notions of implacable Hindu and Indian hostility were reinforced. While Ayub Khan was not imbued with radical ideology, he was neither a secularist nor was he averse to Pakistan having a state ideology. General Zia ul Haq went further down the road in Islamising Pakistan’s legal and educational system, but his policy was an extension of a consistent state ideology and not an aberration.
The period of Ayub Khan saw the transformation of Pakistan from an ideologically defined but ethnically circumscribed state to one whose orientation was perceived in terms of security against India. By the time Ayub was deposed by his Army Chief, General Yahya Khan, the Pakistan Army too had changed, from being an apolitical force to one that was deeply involved in the running of the country. The process had begun in 1947 itself, with the military invoking jihad and religious scholars issuing supportive fatwas or religious decrees to mobilise tribesman from the frontier for raiding and seizing Kashmir. Pakistan failed in this attempt, but it still took recourse to tapping jihadi sentiments as part of its war fighting strategy to asymmetrically secure political and territorial gains vis-à-vis India. Pakistan attempted this again in the 1965 war with India when it sent armed infiltrators into Kashmir, in the hope of igniting a wider uprising. It failed yet again, but in the aftermath of the conflict, the Pakistani military moved closer to an Islamist ideology with religious symbolisms being used to raise the morale of troops. Pakistan’s state controlled media generated a frenzy of jihad, extolling the virtues of Pakistan’s ‘soldiers of Islam’. Many young officers who fought in that conflict described it as a struggle between Islam and un-Islam, a terminology used previously only by religious ideologues such as Jamaat-e-Islami’s Maulana Maududi.
When Bhutto came to power post the disastrous 1971 war with India, which saw the breakup of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh, his slogan was “Islam our Faith, Democracy our Polity, Socialism our economy”. This period saw reference in Pakistani history text books to Mohammad bin Qasim, an Arab commander of the Umayyad dynasty who invaded Sindh in 711 CE, as the first Pakistani. This notion was first propagated in 1953 and soon after found its way into the narrative of religious parties such as the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), before becoming part of the school curriculum under Bhutto’s watch. Zia ul Haq later aggressively promoted this idea in a bid to trace Pakistan’s roots to the Arab world in a bid to abandon Pakistan’s Asian roots. In 1998, Qasim was officially adopted as the ‘first citizen of Pakistan’ in ‘Fifty Years of Pakistan’ published by the Federal Bureau of Pakistan. This question of identity underlines an inherent fault line in Pakistan which continues to shape the Pakistani narrative.
Bhutto sought to curtail the powers of the Army and initiated Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme, both as a strategic wedge against India as also to undercut the Army’s claim to being the ultimate defender of Pakistan. But he remained in agreement with the Army that the primary threat to Pakistan came from India. The issue of Muslim identity continued to be asserted, with Pakistan’s parliament adopting a law that declared the Ahmadiyya community non-Muslims. The country's constitution was amended to define a Muslim "...as a person who believes in the finality of the Prophet Muhammad”. Zia ul Haq went further down that road, when he promulgated Ordinance XX on 26 April 1984, which prohibited the practice of Islam and the usage of Islamic terms and titles for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.
Bhutto was replaced in a coup by General Zia ul Haq, the fourth in Pakistan’s brief history. His vision of a modern Pakistan had Islam at its core; he accordingly attempted to foster an Islamic ideology on the state declaring that the “preservation of that ideology and the Islamic character of Pakistan were…as important as the security of the country’s geographical boundaries”. While restoring the Army’s role in Pakistan, he also gave it the mantle of guarding the nation’s ideological frontiers over and above its mandated role of guarding Pakistan’s geographical boundaries.
Zia championed a role for Islam that was more state directed and less a matter of personal choice. The Islamic Ideology Council that he formed soon after coming to power was tasked to prepare an outline of an Islamic theocratic state. He announced the basing of all laws on the Sharia and on Islamic tenets. He established the Federal Shariat Court to examine laws in the light of Islamic injunctions and to review all military and civil verdicts for compliance with Islamic law. The strategies that Zia appropriated and propagated were based on narrow, medieval interpretations of Islam, which resulted in gender biased attitudes and policies and militarised exhortations to take up arms for the sake of jihad. The stratification of Pakistan's educational infrastructure also created significant divergences of world views with madrassa students tending to gravitate more toward jihad. Public school or Urdu-medium students too imbibed radical ideas but to a lesser extent.
The Zia decade of power (July 1977-August 1988) coincided largely with the decade of Soviet occupation in Afghanistan (December 1979–May 1988), which allowed him to salvage his reputation at the international level. The anti-Soviet jihad which Pakistan supported and propped with US assistance served the purpose of defeating the Soviets but led to Pakistan becoming a major global centre of radical Islamists ideas and groups. During the war against the Soviet Union, a large number of Afghans took refuge in Pakistan and were housed in camps which later became the base for the recruitment of mujahidin. Financial and material support to the mujahidin came from the United States and Saudi Arabia using the ISI as the conduit. Over time, religious schools (madaris) became the breeding ground for these warriors and religious leaders assumed dominance in a society where traditionally they had a subservient role to play and were excluded from participating in tribal councils (called jirgas). By the time the Soviets were defeated and the U.S. had left the region, religion had become a major force in the frontier.
A consequence of the Soviet defeat was that the large numbers of jihadis trained in Pakistan were now free for employment elsewhere. These now became the strategic assets of Pakistan, to retain influence over Afghanistan and for employment against India. Zia’s death in a plane crash on 17 August 1988 brought back a semblance of civilian rule, though the political parties were mindful of the interests of the Army. But Zia’s eleven years at the helm of affairs had radically altered the social and religious landscape of the country. The children of those years are now radicalised young men and women. The assassination of Salman Taseer, Governor of Punjab Province by his security guard in 2011, reflects the mindset of those young men and women impacted by Zia’s thrust on Islamic ideology. Husain Qadri, the killer was unrepentant. ‘I am a slave of the Prophet and the punishment for one who commits blasphemy is death,’ he told a television crew from Dunya TV that arrived at the scene shortly after the killing, reflecting the level to which radicalisation had crept into society.
The period of civilian rule coincided with the end of the Cold War, which diminished Pakistan’s geo-strategic importance to the US and the West and led to reduced inflows of economic and military assistance. But despite civilian rule, there was no push back against the Islamisation process. On the contrary, in 1998, Pakistan moved further down the Islamic road, with the Nawaz Sharif government declaring the Quran and the Sunnah to be the law of the land. The Bill provides for a federal Shariat court to determine whether any existing law is repugnant to Islam and empowers the federal government to issue directives and make laws for the implementation of the Islamisation process. It also bestowed sweeping powers on the government to take necessary action against any state functionary for non-compliance with its directives. Paradoxically, the bill was opposed by the secular polity as also by the religious right. The formers opposition was the fear that such a measure signalled a theocracy being established while the religious right felt that the Bill did not go far enough. In the event, neither group was pleased.
Deteriorating civil military relations prompted Sharif in October 1999 to sack the Army Chief, General Pervez Musharraf, and announce his replacement on national television. The Army however stood beside their Chief and in a bloodless coup, Nawaz Sharif was deposed and Musharraf seized power. The coup was not only bloodless but also popular. For Pakistanis across the sociological spectrum, the Army was not responsible for ruining their country’s desire for democracy. That dishonour went to Bhutto and Sharif.
Musharraf’s decade long stint at the helm coincided with the US War on terror. He adroitly capitalised on the situation and aligned Pakistan to US interests in its war in Afghanistan. But it also led to resentment within the country as what many perceived to be buckling under US Pressure. This, along with the attack on the Lal Masjid by military commandoes to evict the Mosques of terrorists, led to tribal leaders coalescing and declaring a jihad against the government and the military and spurring the loosely connected militant groups to come together. Thus was formed a united front under the banner of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The birth of the TTP, incorporating representatives from all the seven tribal regions of Pakistan as well as parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, including Swat, Malakand, Buner, and Dera Ismail Khan, where the Taliban movement was already active, led to a massive upsurge of insurgency in the region which has shown no signs of abating. It has led to sectarian conflict and continues to fuel radical ideology in the country.
After Musharraf’s ouster on 18 August 2008, there has been an outward semblance of democracy in Pakistan, but the levers of power have remained firmly in the hands of the military. Whenever the ruling political establishment has tried to clip the wings of the Army, it has found itself beset with problems, and then forced to seek the Army’s assistance. Zardari found that to his cost when Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the US was falsely implicated by the Army in 2011, of masterminding a memo to US officials to help Pakistani civilians overcome the military’s hegemony in domestic politics. Thereafter, Zardari’s tenure was effectively that of a lame duck President. Nawaz Sharif was to receive the same fate when protests led by a cleric, Tahirul Qadri, and supported by Imran Khan, on the specious grounds that the elections were rigged, virtually paralysed the government, forcing Sharif to seek the Army’s assistance. Later, Nawaz was eased out of office on corruption charges in the infamous Panama Papers scandal, which linked his children to offshore companies which were used to buy expensive properties in London. This was widely construed to be a judicial coup, with the unseen hand of the Pakistan Army in the background.
That neither the military nor the Mosque will let go of the power it enjoys has become the default condition of Pakistan as a state and this is what drives its foreign policy against India. The military has, over the years entrenched itself into a privileged position in the nations polity, and has also built up a sizeable commercial empire. Given the scale of its commercial interests and the need to safeguard them, the Army controls policy to prevent interference by civilian governments. Moreover, it is today not just defending its professional turf and institutional interests from civilian encroachment, but actively expanding them. Improving relations with India is thus antithetical to the interests of the Pakistan military, as to do so would negate the need for a strong and over arching military. The bogey of the Indian threat thus has to be kept alive, to ensure that the army maintains its disproportionate resources and influence in Pakistan. Consequently, the army will not allow any civilian government to mend relations with India, making a state of no war no peace an inevitable default condition. It will continue to fuel destabilising policies in terms of both overt and covert support to anti India terrorist organisations such as the LeT and the Hizbul Mujahideen, which has the potential to escalate into conflict as happened in the Kargil war of 1999.
As a society, the Pakistani state remains overly radicalised. Two recent instances highlight the malady, both under the new government led by Imran Khan, which reaffirm the extent to which Islamist groups have penetrated civil society. When the new government was formed, Dr Atif Rehman Mian, a renowned Pakistani-American economist, was selected as one of the members of the newly constituted Economic Advisory Council (EAC). His appointment was however opposed by Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal and the Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Parties, who objected to his Ahmadi faith. The government was forced to bow down under pressure from these groups and Dr Mian was dropped from the EAC.
The second case, following closely on the heels of the first, pertained to a decision by Pakistan’s apex court, which on 31 October 2018, struck down the death sentence for blasphemy, awarded by a lower court to a Christian woman, Asia Bibi. This led to countrywide protests by Islamist groups, with the TLP announcing its intent to paralyse the country if the decision was not reversed. Calls were given for the death sentence to be given to the three judges of the Supreme Court who had passed this judgement, and an appeal was made to soldiers to mutiny against their officers, if the Army supported the decision. Prime Minister Imran Khan warned the protestors, but was forced to retract and sign an understanding with them, a decision he rationalised in the name of avoiding bloodshed. The News in its editorial remarked: “The PTI government has negotiated as complete a surrender as possible. For three days, the TLP’s violent members shut down the nation’s cities, threatened law and order and routinely called for mass assassinations of the country’s leaders…The only reaction to this document of surrender should be shame.”
The two issues highlighted above increasingly point to the government succumbing to the dictates of radical religious groups. As Pakistan continues in its path of Islamisation, where acceptance of a faith other than Islam is anathema, the political establishment will have little room if any to manoeuvre, should they attempt to normalise relations with India. The interest of the Mosque and the military coalesce in maintaining an anti India stance, which would ensure that the two nations exist in a state of perpetual hostility. In a statement given to the Jinnah Institute in 2017, Riaz Khokhar, Pakistan’s former foreign secretary pithily remarked in 2017, “There is no such thing as a normal relationship between India and Pakistan: relations are always either abnormal, or ultra-abnormal, or war-like”. Khokhar advocated talks as the way out, but that would depend on the Military-Mulla nexus foregoing the use of terrorism to destabilise India, something which these two groups cannot and will not do.
The suicide bombing in Pulwama in Jammu and Kashmir is illustrative. On 14 February 2019, a local Kashmiri lad, rammed his explosive laden car against a bus carrying personnel of India’s Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), killing 44 personnel. Within an hour, a video of the bomber was released by Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), a Pakistan based Deobandi jihadist terrorist group, which claimed the attack, and shortly thereafter, India vowed retaliation to the perpetrators, wherever they might be. The raison d’être of the JeM is to separate Kashmir from India and merge it into Pakistan. It is but one of the terrorist groups operating in Pakistan against India and has, since its inception in 2000 CE, carried out several terrorist strikes against India including the infamous attack on India’s Parliament in 2001 and more recently, the attack on a military base in Uri in 2016 and the attack on an IAF base in Pathankot in the same year. Pakistan based terrorist groups have been waging what is termed as a proxy war against India, since 1990, with a focus on Kashmir, as a "gateway" to the entire India, whose Muslims are also deemed to be in need of liberation. After liberating Kashmir, it aims to carry its ‘jihad’ to other parts of India, with an intent to drive Hindus and other non-Muslims from the Indian subcontinent.
On 26 February, India retaliated with an air attack on the JeM base at Balakot, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan. The attack was a precision strike carried out by 12 Mirage 2000 fighter aircraft, and the stated target was destroyed. It is believed that 200-300 terrorists were in the buildings hit in the early morning strike and all of them were believed to have perished. Predictably, Pakistan claimed that the Indian missiles missed the targets and no damage was caused, though weeks after the event, Pakistan has not permitted either the foreign or their own media to visit the site. A day later, on 27 February, Pakistan retaliated with an air strike with its F 16 aircraft, the missiles fired by the Pakistani fighters missing an ammunition dump of a forward brigade position of the Indian Army. The Pakistan premier said that the miss was deliberate as he did not want the conflict to escalate. In the ensuing dogfight, an Indian MiG Bison fighter was shot down, with the pilot ejecting and landing in POJ&K and being apprehended by the Pakistan military. The Pakistan Air Force lost an F-16 in the dogfight, which Pakistan initially claimed as an India MiG, but later maintained a stoic silence over the same. The Indian pilot was returned within 72 hours, and the immediate crisis was over, but underlying tensions between the two countries remain, as the prime cause—the use of terrorists by Pakistan as its strategic assets—has not been addressed.
Regardless of the claims made by India or Pakistan with respect to the effectiveness of the air strikes, the very fact that India used its Air Force to strike at targets deep within Pakistan signals a shift in strategy and indicates that India will no longer be restrained in confining its operations to within its boundaries but will strike at the very heart of the terror organisations. Another paradigm shift in the Indian stance was in calling Pakistan’s nuclear bluff. Henceforth, the rules of engagement stand changed, with the world by and large accepting India’s right to strike at targets within Pakistan which are being used as bases by terrorist groups to target India.
What then of the future of India-Pakistan relations? Talks between the two countries are unlikely to yield any result. If such potential was there, it would have been realised by now. Pakistan either will not or perhaps cannot dismantle its terrorist infrastructure, created over decades, as the possible blowback to the state may prove to be prohibitive. Islamic radicalisation has seeped into every aspect of life in Pakistan, and effecting a change in mindsets will take at least one generation. This does not signify a failure of what the founding fathers of Pakistan had imagines the Islamic state to be. Rather, it signifies the success of such venture. To that extent, we would do well to consider that Ayesha Jalal was perhaps not correct when she stated that the idea of Pakistan was not well imagined. It was imagined on precisely these lines. What perhaps was not imagined was that it would succeed so well and the consequences would not be to Pakistan’s liking. Hence, India must give up the chimera of seeking peace with Pakistan and prepare to make Pakistan pay for its antagonism. While peace may not be the outcome, a firm deterrent posture will in all likelihood lead to the avoidance of war. That is the best that can be hoped for.(Published as a book chapter in the book: INDIA-THE FUTURE OF SOUTH ASIA by Turning point publishers) Editor: Karan Kharab, pp130-143.
