Samuel Baid:Pakistan's evergreen slogan: Crush India

Pakistan's evergreen slogan: Crush India




One sees no or very little evidence of conscious measures taken by successive Governments in Pakistan in the last 59 years to promote national integration.
Perhaps they had taken it for granted that all the conflicting regional interests would give in to the unifying force of Islam. But they closed their eyes to world history, which is filled with wars between Muslims and Muslims and between Christians and Christians for their national and economic interests.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who rode on the anti-Hindu wave to reach the goal of Pakistan, had apparently visioned the havoc the Islamic interpretations of his two-nation theory would cause if the new State did not opt for secular democracy. Mr.Jinnah's unexpected advocacy of secular democracy in the course of his address to Pakistan's Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, could be the result of this realisation. Had Pakistani leaders followed their Quaid-e-Azam's advice, Pakistan, with its talented men and women and bountiful national resources, would have become a great, prosperous democracy of the world. But his advice came too late when he was about a year away from his death. He was heard and obeyed when he ignited communal passion. But he was ignored as a spent force when he talked of unity of the Pakistani nation irrespective of caste and creed.

Anti-democracy forces had already chalked out their post-Jinnah agenda. Seven months after Mr Jinnah's death in September 1948, the very same Constituent Assembly whom he exhorted to follow secular democracy (where the State would have no religion of its own), passed the controversial Objectives Resolution, which made Islam the basis of the would-be Constitution.

Whatever Mr.Jinnah had to tell the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, the 1949 Resolution was a natural corollary of the expectations raised by the two-nation theory during the run-up to the establishment of Pakistan. The Islamist Sunnis, who had opposed the creation of Pakistan and the two-nation theory, now vowed to make this country an Islamic State. They first tested their strength by launching a campaign for the expulsion of the Ahmediyyas, a small but well-placed Muslim sect in Military and bureaucracy, from Islam. The campaign led to bloody anti-Ahmediyya riots in Lahore in 1953. An inquiry held into these riots by Mr.Justice Muhammad Munir clearly indicated that Islamic militancy and intolerance had already taken roots in the less than eight-year-old Pakistan.

The tragedy of Pakistan has been that the Muslim majority, which should have been the guarantor of the country's political stability and national unity, has become increasingly divided on sectarian lines. With the free availability of weapons and funds in the wake of the Afghan war during the 1980s different sects made it their holy mission to kill those who did not follow their interpretation of Islam. The anti-Hindu frenzy in pre-partitioned India had thus changed into sectarian and ethnic intolerance and unending bloodshed. Sunnis and Shias killed each other. Sunnis thought they served Islam by killing Shias. But Sunnis themselves were divided into warring groups. Deobandis against Brelvis and Zikris and Jamaat-e-Islami against the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM). The MQM is not a sectarian group but it opposes Islamic extremism.

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Islamists destroyed sectarian peace, but they showed great unity in forcing successive military and civilian Governments to pass Islamic laws like Blasphemy Laws and Hadood Ordinance and have made the lives of non-Muslims and women very insecure. Blasphemy laws are generally being made to settle personal scores but no Government amends them. There are cases where a person accused of blasphemy is killed by mobs without waiting for the court verdict. Under the Hadood Ordinance, a raped woman cannot get justice. She is instead accused of fornication. Islamists would not allow any change in their Ordinance either.

In the presence of such laws, the uncivilised practices of honour killing and Wani (where girls are forced to marry against their wishes as a settlement of murder cases) are carried on without any fear of courts and the Government. That Pakistani Taliban's control of parts of tribal areas should cause no surprise. No surprise also when the NWFP State Assembly condoles the death of Ayman Al Zawahiri though General Musharraf's Army is supposed to be fighting Al-Qaeda too. Like the Islamists, the Army also took advantage of the two-nation theory and attacked Kashmir to ultimately claim itself to be the defender of Pakistan's borders and more so of its ideology. That invested it with a jehadi status. The Army has made full use of this status to rule Pakistan directly or indirectly for the past 55 years.

Both the Islamists and the Army are allergic to democracy and that is the secret of their camaraderie. Both have been a great stumbling block in Pakistan's national unity. East Bengalis protested when the Constituent Assembly passed the 1949 Objective Resolution because that threatened to split Bengali Muslims and Bengali non-Muslims in the Eastern wing that broke away in 1971. The new Islamic wave did not go well with the Sindhi nationalism. Father of Sindhi nationalism G.M.Syed said Sindhi culture was 5000-year old i.e. much older than Islam. Although the Sindh Provincial Assembly was first to pass a resolution in favour of the creation of Pakistan, it was also the first to raise the banner of revolt against Pakistan when it came into existence. Balochistan was annexed by force. Pakistan's Islamic slogans have never allured the Baloch nationalists. They are always in a state of revolt. The Army dominance and the Islamists' influence have not been able to kill the people's democratic aspirations. But these three factors have produced a pattern of governance which is neither military, Islamic or democratic. In this confusion the question of national integration still remains unattended.

The Pakistan Establishment seem to believe that what it cannot do by ensuring democracy and economic and social justice it can do by raising an external bogey. In 1965 Ayub Khan forced a war on India and spent crores of rupees on popularising the Crush India slogan. This slogan generated such a strong anti-India frenzy that Pakistani papers later wrote that never before the people of Pakistan displayed such a "unity". The present Musharraf Government, too, subtly uses this slogan.


The views expressed in the article are the author's