Crises Of A New State

The arrest last week of Najam Sethi, editor of well-known weekly The Friday Times, by Pakistan’s armed forces, wasn’t a lone attack on the press in Pakistan. Prior to that Imtiaz Alam of The News had his car burnt and another correspondent of The News, M.A.K. Lodhi, was harassed for participating in a yet-to-be-released bbc documentary that supposedly deals extensively with corruption in Pakistan. But Sethi’s arrest is a far more serious affair, for not only his freedom, but even his life might be in danger.

For one thing, he has not been arrested by the police but by the army under the Armed Forces Act, and is now in the custody of Pakistan’s dreaded Inter Services Intelligence directorate. For another, he’s been accused not only (to quote the Associated Press of Pakistan) of launching an ‘irrelevant, disgraceful and disgusting diatribe against his own country, Pakistan, in India’, but of having links with raw, the Indian intelligence agency. What’s more, not only has the Pakistani government closed down The Friday Times; it has also erased every single word of all issues of the paper—past and present—from the Internet. The intention to gag its editor and courageous writers could not be plainer.

Both charges are absurd. As Sethi himself pointed out before he began to speak, his speech virtually reproduced an editorial he’d written in The Friday Times some months ago. What’s more, there was absolutely nothing he said that wasn’t already in the public domain.

Sethi said that in the next millennium, Pakistan had to deal with six crises—those of identity and ideology; of law, constitution and political system; of economy; of foreign policy; of civil society; and of national security. Not only are these ‘crises’ well known, and extensively discussed by a host of writers and academics in Pakistan and in universities across the world; not only are they well understood in India by those who deal with Pakistan, but to a considerable extent they’re the very crises India also faces as it peers ahead at the next millennium.

India too doesn’t yet know what kind of a country it is—Hindu or secular, monolithic or pluralistic. It doesn’t know whether to be proud of its past, or to be ashamed of it; whether the cross-fertilisation of Hindu culture with Islam and Christianity enriched or impoverished it. While one segment of Indians define ‘Hindu’ as indistinguishable from ‘secular’, another segment divorces secularism from both religion and culture and inadvertently robs all Indians of the larger part of their identity.

Our educational system reflects this confusion. Is it any wonder that so many of the educated, urban, English-speaking middle class is secretly ashamed of its own country? Pakistan’s judicial system may be under attack, but ours has broken down under the weight of its own dilatory procedures. Their democracy may be an empty ritual, but ours is riddled with corruption and crime. Corruption was institutionalised, and by degrees legitimised by the point-blank refusal of all political parties, from the Communists to the bjp, to create a state funding system for financing elections after Indira Gandhi’s government banned company donations in 1970. Crime has followed close on its heels: One man facing 37 indictments for murder is a minister in the UP government. As for the economy, the Indian State is only a little further from bankruptcy than Pakistan. And India’s foreign policy crisis is largely the mirror image of Pakistan’s.

There are, of course, important differences too. The reason why I’m stressing similarities is not to run down India but to highlight the fact that most of these problems are problems of nation-building. In one way or another, every nation has faced them in the past and most young nations are facing them today. India may have done a fair bit better than Pakistan. But given the magnitude of the task, and the very adverse international circumstances in which both countries are having to tackle it, Pakistan hasn’t done too badly either. One has only to look at the experience of Central and South America, of Africa and of Indo-China to appreciate how much Pakistan has achieved. It has fared less well than India because unlike India it’s a new state. Hence the imperative of first consolidating and then maintaining its territorial unity has prevailed over that of promoting democracy. To put it in a nutshell India as a very old, successor state, was able to use democracy as a tool for national consolidation. Pakistan, by virtue of being a new state, wasn’t able to do so. Most of its problems—the crises Sethi referred to—spring from this.

The mere fact that Pakistan’s problems are those of nation-building in a young country means they aren’t insurmountable. There are, after all, very few failed states in the world today. That was the true message Sethi sent out in his speech in Delhi. Not only was he not cowed by his environment, and the presence of the entire top brass of the Pakistan High Commission, but he knew that one way to make sure Pakistani policymakers would sit up and listen to what he had to say, was to say it in Delhi. It required not only a lot of courage, but also a deep loyalty to and love for his country. As Sethi said in his speech: "I’m deeply and passionately concerned about what is going on in my country, and I’m not afraid of speaking the truth at any forum in my quest for posing the problem."

Problems don’t disappear if you ignore them. Only when you’ve faced them squarely can you start looking for solutions. If Pakistan’s future looks dark it’s not because Sethi and other Pakistani intellectuals of his ilk are calling their leaders’ attention repeatedly to their problems, but because the leaders don’t have the courage to face them. Sethi’s arrest, and the absurd charge that he has connections with raw, make Pakistan’s future look a lot more bleak than any of the problems he actually outlined in his speech.