50 Years Of Unlearning

The birth of Bangladesh on a Thursday—December 16, 1971—is a rem­inder to Pakistan of what it has lost, and a looming threat of a rep­eat for the beleaguered nation. When Pakistan came into being, Bengali Muslims were at the forefront of the movement. It was the only province where the Muslim League of Jinnah had an absolute majority. My home province of Sindh was the second. The rest of Pakistan, including Punjab (Punjab under Unionist Party and Balochistan of the Qalat Jirga) and the then North West Frontier Province (NWFP, now renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) had voted against Pakistan.

For the first few years, politicians of then East Bengal did hold some influence over the newly-emerged state but could not hold it against the growing power of the western wing’s civil and military bureaucracy, in cahoots with the feudal elite of Pakistani Punjab. That’s the reason why, soon after the death of Jinnah and ass­assination of Liaquat Ali Khan, Hussein Shaheed Suharwardy and Khwaja Nazimuddin of East Bengal were humiliated and thrown out. Sheikh Mujib too, who was a staunch supporter of the Pakistan movement and a close lieutenant of Suharwardy, met the same fate and faced imp­risonment many times.

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In a strange stroke of luck, the same classes of Pakistani Punjab who opp­osed the creation of Pakistan, all of a sudden bec­ame the custodian of the new state and created a system of discrimination and exploitation of the very people who created the All India Muslim League in Dhaka in 1906. The downgrading of Bengali language, imposition of Urdu on East Bengal and later discriminatory policies, including the unjust ‘One Unit’ system created to oppose the majority of the people of East Bengal, finally led to an eruption that culminated in the landslide victory of the Awami League led by Sheikh Mujib in the elections held on December 7, 1970. The denial of transfer of power by the military reg­ime of General Yahya Khan and the bloody suppression of the people of former East Pakistan, that provided the bulwark of the progressive democratic movements in united Pakistan, ended on December 16, 1971, when the military of the eastern wing surrendered before the Indian troops.

That is how the most democratic part of the united Pakistan was chopped away by the Pakistani ruling est­ablishment. The dismemberment of Pakistan half-a-century ago changed the very DNA of the remaining country and created unp­recedented challenges. All of a sudden, Pakistan, which used to export jute and tea and was part of the ASEAN, was detached from East Asia, and its South Asian character started fading. The country that used to have strong links with the subcontinent shifted more towards West Asia and the MiddleEast.

After the creation of Bangladesh, the new Pakistan developed a fear of losing more territory against its big neighbour, India. Three years after the creation of Bangladesh, India detonated its first nuc­lear device in Pokhran in 1974. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the leader of the new Pakistan, treated it as an exi­stential threat and started the nuclear programme of Pakistan, fearing more shock from the east, like Bangladesh.

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It is the same period that Pakistan’s Arabisation and Islamisation spree started. In February 1974, the Islamic Summit of Lahore took place and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto gravitated the country towards the MiddleEast. On September 7, 1974, the Ahmadiyya community was declared non-Muslim after the second amendment in the constitution that was passed only a year ago. Four years later, when Gen. Zia-ul-Haq overthrew the Bhutto government in a coup d’etat, he transformed the country into a theocratic state and laid the foundations of the complete negation of Pakistan’s South Asian identity. Gen. Zia-ul-Haq went further and changed the very ethos of a moderate Muslim nation into a Wahabi, Salafi nation. Instead of jute and tea, Pakistan became the exp­orter of jihad and extremism, thanks to the US’s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s democratic ethos couldn’t develop as fast as India led by Nehru. After the death of Jinnah, Pakistan could not draft its constitution as the constituent assembly was dissolved by machinations of the civil and the military bureaucracy supported by the feudal aristocracy of the Pakistani Punjab. Since the civil and the military bur­eaucracy was the most org­anised part of the state apparatus after independence and the political class was not organised due to the dominant feudal and tribal set up, the bureau-cratic hold by the civil and military became more pronounced. The martial law of Gen. Ayub and Gen. Yahya that lasted 13 years accentuated the process.

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Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the most powerful civ­ilian leader ever, too was fearful of the power of the military-bureaucracy. Although he was able to shuffle the decks soon after the fateful dismemberment of the country, there was a failed attempt by junior military officers against him, even before the successful coup of July 5, 1977.

In the book he wrote in his death cell, Bhutto likened Pakistani military to the Prussian army of the 19th century. To Bhutto, the Pakistani military too faced a similar problem faced by the Prussian military fighting the Napoleonic wars. Like the big Prussian military, he felt Pakistan too faced three choices: expand its territory, reduce its size or collapse under its own weight. And Bhutto knew that Pakistan was condemned to the last option.

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However, under the Zia era the first option of exp­anding territory through the strategic depth of using Afghanistan as its backyard too gained currency, which still resonates to some in the country. The perennial crisis of identity, transformation into a national security state after the creation of Bangladesh, the unending conflict with its eastern neighbour and the constant weakening of its democratic order has impacted the state of Pakistan all through its existence.

Since 2018, it has tried a new hybrid order under Imran Khan, but the experiment has failed to deliver. On the contrary, it has created an economic meltdown, total failure of governance and complete diplomatic isolation. Regardless of the success or failure of the movement launched by opp­osition parties under the banner of the newly-formed alliance, the Pakistan Democratic Movement, the country will not be able to find stability till it discovers its democra­tic ethos, rooted in its South Asian identity, gets rid of the Middle­Eastern baptism and finds a peaceful solution with its eastern neighbour against which it has fought four wars, including the one in 1971, half-a-century ago.

(Views expressed are personal)

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Murtaza Solangi is a senior Pakistani journalist and former head of Radio Pakistan