Pakistan

263 Pages·2017·1.82 MB·English

by  Tilak Devasher

PAKISTAN
Courting the Abyss
TILAK DEVASHER
To the memory of
my mother
Late Smt Kantaa Devasher,
my father
Late Air Vice Marshal C.G. Devasher PVSM, AVSM,
and my brother
Late Shri Vijay (‘Duke’) Devasher, IAS
‘Press on… Regardless’
Contents
Preface
Introduction
I The Foundations
1 The Pakistan Movement
2 The Legacy
II The Building Blocks
3 A Question of Identity and Ideology
4 The Provincial Dilemma
III The Framework
5 The Army Has a Nation
6 Civil–Military Relations
IV The Superstructure
7 Islamization and Growth of Sectarianism
8 Madrasas
9 Terrorism
V The WEEP Analysis
10 Water: Running Dry
11 Education: An Emergency
12 Economy: Structural Weaknesses
13 Population: Reaping the Dividend
VI Windows to the World
14 India: The Quest for Parity
15 Afghanistan: The Quest for Domination
16 China: The Quest for Succour
17 The United States: The Quest for Dependence
VII Looking Inwards
18 Looking Inwards
Conclusion
Notes
Index
About the Book
About the Author
Copyright
Preface
MY fascination with Pakistan is not because I belong to a Partition family (though my wife’s family
does); it is not even because of being a Punjabi. My interest in Pakistan was first aroused when, as
a child, I used to hear stories from my late father, an air force officer, about two Pakistan air force
officers. In undivided India they had been his flight commanders in the Royal Indian Air Force. They and
my father had fought in World War II together, flying Hurricanes and Spitfires over Burma and also after
the war. Both these officers later went on to head the Pakistan Air Force. Though still in my teens, the
Indo-Pak wars of 1965 and 1971 further heightened my interest in Pakistan. In college and university I
studied the history of the freedom movement and the Partition of India. And I was hooked.
My curiosity grew at every twist and turn in Pakistan. The sophistication of Pakistani plays like Dhoop
Kinare and Tanhaiyaan that two generations of Indians still rave about, the excellence of the Pakistani
cricket teams and the brilliance of its squash players contrasted harshly with the trajectory of its political,
economic and religious development. The difference between the democratic journey of India and the
military dictatorships in Pakistan provoked questions as to why the two countries have developed so
differently. The growth of intolerance and radicalization on the one hand and terrorism directed against
India resulting in the deaths of hundreds of innocent Indian civilians on the other lent an ominous
dimension to my questions. I was determined to understand what made Pakistan such a violent and
inhospitable place, on the verge of being declared a terrorist state and the worst nuclear proliferator in
the world. In short, why was Pakistan courting the abyss?
Two couplets by Pakistan’s greatest poets, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Habib Jalib, helped me narrow my
quest. While the couplet from Faiz expressed anguish at the circumstances of the birth of Pakistan, Jalib’s
articulated what the rulers of Pakistan had done to the country. Combined, the two couplets expressed the
ongoing tragedy of Pakistan.
Faiz: ‘Subh-e-Azadi’/‘Dawn of Freedom’:
Ye daagh daagh ujala, ye shab-guzida sehr
Woh intezar tha jiska, ye woh sehr to nahin
This tainted light, this night-bitten dawn
This is not the dawn we waited for
Jalib on the army crackdown in East Pakistan:
Mohabbat goliyon se bo rahe ho, Watan ka chehra khoon se dho rahe ho
Gumaan tumko ke raasta kat raha hei, Yaqeen mujhko ke manzil kho rahe ho.
You are sowing love through violence, smearing the face of the nation in blood;
You think your journey is being completed, I am certain you are losing your destiny.
Being a student of history, I was not satisfied with just skimming the surface, trying to understand Pakistan
through current events and reporting. I wanted to dig deeper to know more about how Pakistan was
created and the impact of those developments on the trajectory that Pakistan had adopted. I also wanted to
understand what was behind the façade of a hostile neighbour, what were the real issues that plagued the
country and its people. So much was being written on ‘exciting’ issues like the Pakistan Army, the nuclear
programme, terrorism, and, of course, Indo-Pak relations, that scant attention seems to have been paid to
what was happening inside the country. Seemingly ‘boring’ issues like identity, the situation in the
provinces, water, education, economy, population, etc., seem to have been largely ignored, though they are
critical to the survival and understanding of any country. I, therefore, decided to write a holistic book on
Pakistan that would encompass the ‘exciting’ issues and the ‘boring’ ones, to analyse why Pakistan was
hurtling towards the abyss.
This is a book about Pakistan. It is not about a comparison between India and Pakistan. In fact, I have
tried to minimize comparisons with India as much as possible. It is equally not about Indo–Pak relations.
There is already vast literature on the subject. Of course, no book on Pakistan is complete without India
because Pakistan’s perception of India is central to its identity, its ethos, its world view and policies.
Thus, there is a separate chapter on India and India does figure in various other chapters too. But, the
book is essentially about Pakistan.
I would like to express my gratitude to a few people who in their own ways have helped me in the writing
of this book.
To my wife Anjali for her patience in allowing me to spend hours, days and months in my ‘bat-cave’
(my study) reading, researching and writing this book instead of doing what normal civil servants do –
take up a post-retirement job.
To my son for his wit and amazing sense of humour and my daughter-in-law for her courage and quiet
strength in the face of life-changing adversity, both of whom helped me retain a sense of proportion.
To my daughter, for suggesting and digging up material that I was unable to locate, for being my
staunchest critic as also a pillar of strength and with whom I had engaging discussions on several chapters
of the book.
To Dr Ajai Sahni for encouraging me to write a book in the first place and for accessing some of the
comparative indices.
To my editors Karthika V.K. and Antony Thomas at HarperCollins for all their effort in bringing out
this book.
Despite the help, all the shortcoming and errors in this book are mine.
Introduction
THE contrast between the two flights could not have been sharper.
When Mohammad Ali Jinnah (henceforth Jinnah) boarded the viceroy’s shining silver Dakota from
Delhi to Karachi on 7 August 1947, he looked back towards the city and said: ‘I suppose this is the last
time I’ll be looking at Delhi’.1 As the plane was taxiing, Jinnah said enigmatically, ‘that’s the end of that’.
He spoke only once on the four-hour flight to Karachi when he leaned over to his ADC, Flight Lieutenant
Ata Rabbani, and offered him some newspapers and said, ‘Would you like to read these?’2 Jinnah
received a tumultuous welcome in Karachi. In the words of the British high commissioner, ‘Mr Jinnah
found in the city of his birth an enthusiastic welcome. Tens of thousands of people thronged the airport,
breaking through the police cordons; and hundreds of cars followed him to Government House…’3
A little over a year later, on 11 September 1948, Jinnah, weighing barely 70 pounds and suffering from
consumption, compounded by cancer of the lungs, was carried on a stretcher aboard the governor
general’s Viking for the flight from Quetta to Karachi.4 He was in no position to read newspapers or talk.
Despite his condition, however, he found the energy to return, from his stretcher, the salute given by the
flight crew.5 There was no one to receive him at Mauripur airport (Karachi’s military airport) barring his
military secretary Colonel Geoffrey Knowles and an army ambulance, sans any nurse. The diplomatic
corps had not been informed about his arrival, which was the norm whenever Jinnah landed in Karachi so
that he was received in the approved official way.6 The ambulance would break down halfway to his
residence and it took Col. Knowles two hours to fetch another, from the local Red Cross.7 Meanwhile,
Jinnah was stranded on the road for two hours in an ‘oppressive’ ambulance that completely exhausted
him. No one knew that that Jinnah was in the stranded ambulance. His pulse was weak and irregular.8
Jinnah was to die later that night. The tragic manner of his death was compounded by his last rites. A
Twelver Shia, following his conversion from the Ismaili sect, Jinnah had to have two separate funerals –
one according to the Sunni rituals in the open and the other before that according to Shia norms in his
home.9
The poignancy and the depressing contrast between the two journeys symbolically captures the tragedy
of Pakistan – from the blood-soaked yet enthusiastic creation in 1947 to the present-day exhaustion and
gloom-and-doom scenarios. It is this journey from Faiz’s tainted dawn to Jalib’s tragic destiny that is the
subject matter of this book.
The book aims to explain how this has happened and how Pakistan is courting the abyss. It traces
Pakistan’s development not only from 1947, when the country came into being, but also looks at the
foundations – the Pakistan movement; the impact that the British replacing the Mughals had on the Muslim
psyche; and the role the colonial power played in crystallizing a separate Muslim identity. It looks at the
internal and external dynamics of Pakistan to understand why it is careering towards the abyss. In that
sense it is not a conventional book on Pakistan. It does not trace the history of Pakistan; neither does it
detail developments chronologically. It is more in the nature of an interpretative study, looking at various
elements of Pakistan’s history and development to explain why Pakistan is such a persistently troubled
state and why, without serious corrective actions, a tragic destiny looms.
On 7 August 1947, as Jinnah took off from Delhi could he have visualized that the country that he
created would within twenty-four years be broken into two? Could he have visualized that the rump
would come to be variously described as ‘deeply troubled’, ‘in terminal decline’, ‘in crisis’, ‘failing’,
‘on the edge’, ‘on the brink’, a state unable to provide minimum safety and law and order to its citizens, a
state unable to survive without repeated external financial support, an insecure state looking for security
primarily in narrow military terms, a hotbed of terrorism, both internal and external, a country rent
asunder by sectarian killings, a nuclear proliferator?
Faced with today’s Pakistan, the obvious question Jinnah would have asked is what went wrong. What
happened to those hopes and aspirations, that ‘jazba’ and ‘josh’ of the people at the birth of a new
country? In short, how did Pakistan manage to arrive at its present precarious condition? If, indeed, he
could have anticipated the Pakistan that exists today, would he have striven so relentlessly to create it in
the first place?
Jinnah would not be the only one seeking answers to such questions. Most Pakistanis are, a lot of
Indians are, as are many concerned people across the world. The answers are necessary because Pakistan
is a very important country. Geographically, it spans South Asia and Central Asia, lies at the mouth of the
Persian Gulf, and provides land access to China. This has been a focal yet troublesome region that over
the centuries has attracted great powers. Bordering Afghanistan, this region was the pivot of the Great
Game between Britain and Russia. After its creation, Pakistan has been a front-line state in the Western
coalition against the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1980s and in the war on terror in the first decade of
the new century. Demographically, it is the sixth-largest country in the world. Militarily, it has the eighth-
largest standing army with reportedly the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal in the world. It is also the
epicentre of global terror, a part of which has turned against its own masters and it has the dubious
distinction of being the world’s worst nuclear proliferator with doubts continually being raised about the
safety of its nuclear arsenal.
Unfortunately, the news from and about Pakistan today is mostly disturbing. Attention naturally gets
focused on the latest maelstrom and its implications for Pakistan and the region. Many analysts have
identified the various maladies that afflict the Pakistani state and society. Some have provided
prescriptions and recommendations to the Pakistani leadership and others to the Western, especially, the
US leadership. Yet it is not just the current crisis but the cumulative multiplier effect of these crises and
the deeper malaise that afflicts Pakistan, which has put it on a tragic trajectory. While terrorism emanating
from Pakistan captures attention, other issues such as the state of education, the looming water crisis, the
precipice of an economic meltdown, the danger of an unrealized ‘demographic dividend’, to name but a
few, have the potential to threaten and destabilize Pakistan in the longer term.
While each individual malaise is bad enough, each malaise actually feeds off the other making the
situation cumulatively worse. Using religion to forge unity and national identity has led to growth of
radicalism and sectarianism which, in turn, has fed into terrorism and jihadi groups leading to an
increasingly violent society. These jihadi groups have got sustenance from a state that sees security
largely in military terms. Instead of coming to terms with its neighbours, especially India, policies
adopted by successive rulers, civilian and military, have reinforced the military mindset. The use of non-
state actors has backfired and the cancer of terrorism is destroying Pakistani society. Attention is focused
on military security and the resultant military mindset has diverted resources and attention from the real
sinews of society – economy, education, water and health.
Compounding matters is the deep polarization in the country. Where politicians continue to bicker over
the validity of elections, long after a government has been sworn in, where the debate about who is a true
‘Muslim’ ravages even Muslim minorities like the Shias centuries after Islam was born and in a nation
created in the name of Islam, where the meaning of Pakistan and a ‘Pakistani identity’ is contested, the
state and society have an extremely difficult task to tackle the monumental mess that successive leaders
have led to the nation into.
The totality of the malaise has put Pakistan today at the risk of multi-organ failure. The tragedy of
Pakistan is that the hydra-headed issues that confront the government are fast going beyond the capability
and reach of the state and society to resolve.
The increasing violence in society was perhaps best described by the Human Rights Commission of
Pakistan:
Attacks on religious minorities encroached into areas where they had been largely absent
hitherto, and the government failed to take measures to reassure the citizens that it had the
ability or the commitment to clamp down on faith-based violence. Extrajudicial killings,
unlawful and arbitrary detention, custodial torture and enforced disappearance continued. Well
over two million internally displaced persons, most of them women and children, had to leave
their homes in search of safety and joined multitudes of others who had been displaced in
earlier bouts of armed conflict between the security forces and militant extremists.10
However, such intolerance and violence is not a new phenomenon; it dates back to the origins of Pakistan
itself. The trend of silencing all debate and forcing a hegemonic view harks back to Jinnah and the
Muslim League. They had started the practice of denouncing anyone who opposed the League as a traitor
to Pakistan, at times even to Islam itself. This trend continued after Pakistan was created. Among those
dubbed as traitors in the early days were:
a. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, also known as Frontier Gandhi. His crime was that he was a Congressman
prior to the creation of Pakistan and even though he took an oath of loyalty to Pakistan and attended the
Constituent Assembly, his loyalty was always suspect. He was jailed for many years and died when
he was still deemed a traitor in 1988;
b. Ghulam Murtaza Shah Syed, popularly known as G.M. Syed, the president of Sindh Muslim League
and the person who moved the resolution to make the province a part of the proposed state of
Pakistan. His crime was to articulate the rights of the Sindhis. He spent close to thirty years in the
prisons of Pakistan and died in prison in 1995, deemed a traitor;