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January 2003 Edition
Book Review: A History of Pakistan and its Origins (Ed: Christophe Jaffrelot, Anthem Press) Although this newly released volume is likely to disappoint many readers in the Indian subcontinent for its many important omissions (particularly regarding the role of colonial Britain in fomenting Islamic separatism and communal violence) and generally shallow analysis, it is not entirely without merit. Marred by a tendency to present some of the facts in a partisan manner, it may nevertheless provide a useful measure of scholarly information for academicians and lay-readers alike. The section on Economy and Social Structures is likely to be of most value to those unfamiliar with the subject. In other sections, readers may have to tread with some caution. In the chapter on Islamic Identity and Ethnic Tensions, it is acknowledged that the demand for Pakistan was put forth not by the Muslims of the Muslim-majority areas of pre-partition India but by the Muslims of the Muslim-minority areas of India (such as from the Gangetic Plain), who feared that democratization would weaken their disproportionate hold on power. For instance, it is cited that in 1886, in the United Provices (now Uttar Pradesh), Muslims who constituted 13.4% of the population occupied 45 per cent of the administrative positions. It is also mentioned that this Urdu-speaking elite resented how in 1899, Hindi (the language of the masses) was also accorded official language status. The author of this chapter also notes the reticence of Muslims in the 'majority' areas towards the 'theory of two nations', noting how the Pashtun leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan (also known as 'Frontier Gandhi' for his affinity with Gandhian methods of struggle) never came to accept the program of the Muslim League, and even in Punjab and Sindh, the demand for a separate state initially received a cool reception. In 1937, the author acknowledges that the Congress swept the polls, and the Muslim League won a mere 5% of the Muslim vote. However, when the author traces the subsequent electoral successes of the Muslim League in the provinces of East Bengal, Punjab and Sindh, several key points are omitted. For one thing, there was no universal suffrage in British India. Voting for the provincial assemblies was first restricted to land-owners and later expanded to the literate sections of the population. The author fails to clarify that the Muslim League had never demonstrated its strength in a truly popular election, and frequently tends to misreport its popularity. It should also be noted that after the Congress issued its Quit India call in 1942, all its top leaders were incarcerated, and were unable to counter the Muslim League's incendiary communal-baiting. Whereas the Muslim League was free to demonize Hindus and the Congress, secular forces in the Congress were unable to present an alternative point of view. (See The 2-Nation Theory and Partition) Although the author acknowledges that the Congress handily won the 1946 assembly elections in the North West Frontier Province, the author fails to point out how this was also true of Baluchistan. But an even more surprising omission is how the author makes no mention of the views Maulana Azad (and other Maulanas and Maulvis) who were quite vehement in their rejection of the two-nation theory. Maulana Azad - as President of the Indian National Congress represented not only an important current amongst the Indian Muslim intelligentsia, but also symbolized the extent to which the Congress was willing to go in accommodating Muslims in positions of national leadership. In his "India Wins Freedom", Maulana Azad had written very critically of the Muslim League, observing: "It was said that one of the objects of the League would be to strengthen and develop a feeling of loyalty to the British Govt. amongst the Muslims of India. The second object was to advance the claims of the Muslims against Hindus and other communities in respect of service under the crown and thus safeguard Muslim interests and rights. The leaders of the League were therefore naturally opposed to the demand for political independence raised by the Congress." He had also noted that: "During this phase the British Govt. always used the Muslim League as a counter to the demands of the Congress." The author's failure in recording how it wasn't just the Hindu leaders of the Congress who saw the Muslim League as being inimical to Indian national interests (and an agent of British colonial strategy) is a rather worrisome one - for it suggests that the author has been unable to transcend the colonial tendency of presenting the Indian historical record in a communally-charged or sectarian manner. Not only does the author downplay divisions amongst Indian Muslims regarding their attitude towards the League (and the demand for partition), by and large there are too few (if at all) references to the views of pro-unity Muslims, or non-communal democratic Muslims. And there is simply no attempt to examine what the views of the Muslim masses might have been vis-à-vis the two-nation theory and partition. (For instance, Asghar Ali Engineer has noted how in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, there was a vertical division among the Muslims and the low-caste Muslims were not at all enthusiastic about Pakistan, and the Ansari Muslims (of the weaving caste) who were politically organized and more conscious were opposed to the very idea of Pakistan, and publicly demonstrated against the idea.) Another serious lapse is the failure to incorporate any of the information that has now become available with the release of several top-secret (and formerly classified) documents pertaining to the role of the colonial administration in the years leading up to partition. For example, the Transfer of Power Documents' 1942-1947, describe in quite shocking detail how the British authorities engineered riots between Hindus and Muslims, bribed armed terrorists associated with the Muslim League, deliberately broke up meetings held by pro-unity Muslim leaders of the Congress, and ordered their police forces not to intervene in the wave of terror that led to the expulsion of Hindus and Muslims from what is now Pakistan. But even as the author of the Introduction speaks of the flow of Muslim migrants and refugees from India to Pakistan on page 2, the forced depopulation of non-Muslims from Pakistan is not mentioned till page 236. And when it is mentioned, there is an attempt to obscure the role of the party most criminally culpable - namely the Muslim League (who with British complicity) launched a wave of terror that engulfed Pakistan's unarmed Hindu and Sikh communities, and forced them to abandon a land that had been their ancestral home for hundreds of generations - (a land that had been theirs long before the advent of Islam). Throughout this extensive volume, there are repeated attempts to whitewash the pernicious communal terrorism of the League, and all too frequently, the authors strain to side-step or finesse its slavishly pro-British and anti-democratic character. Recently unsealed British top secret documents however point to how Mohammed Ali Jinnah (leader of the Muslim League) articulated his demand for partition in 1940 only after getting the approval of Lord Zetland, then secretary of state for India. In his commentary: Creation of Pakistan - Safeguarding British Strategic Interests, Narendra Singh Sarela (former Indian Ambassador to France) wrote how earlier in 1939, Jinnah had pledged the loyalty of Indian Muslim troops (who comprised over 40% of the British Army in India) and the British expected that this loyal fighting force would come in handy in controlling the oil-wealth of the Middle East, and provide the Western powers with a "reliable ally" that could serve as a foil to the former Soviet Union. But this volume is largely silent on how India's colonial rulers sought to manipulate the situation to precipitate partition. Although the authors fail to subject the two-nation theory to any measure of critical examination, they acknowledge the lack of federalism in Pakistan, and note how "Pakistan has been dominated on the one hand by Punjabis - dominant in the military and administration - and on the other by Muhajirs, occupying all the higher positions in the administration and executive power". The authors go on to clarify how Muhajir farmers benefited little, and the administrative plums went to the Muhajir elites - the former aristocrats and intelligentsia. They also record how prior to the war of liberation, the East Bengalis were victim of genuine economic exploitation - with much of the export surplus of the East Bengal province being spent in the Western half of Pakistan. In the section on East Bengal, the author provides some revealing information about who embraced the Muslim League - citing the example of Khwaja Nazimuddin whose forbears had arrived in Bengal from Kashmir, and had acquired widespread landed properties as a result of their support for the British at the time of the Mutiny. The authors note how the luxurious residence of the Urdu-speaking Khwaja family in Dhaka became the centre for Muslim League activities from the time of its foundation, and remained so throughout the Pakistani period. There is also reference to country folk - the huge majority of the Muslim peasantry who were illiterate, poor and spoke only Bengali, and how during the 19th century, Quranic purists (oddly referred to as "reformers") sought to wean them away from their worship of saints and veneration of Sufi teachers, and dissuaded them from maintaining close ties with their Hindu neighbors. Such poor peasants had little to do with the politics of the League, although when independence was on the horizon, the League tried repeatedly to poison their minds against unity with India. Unsurprisingly, there is nothing on how members of the Muslim League. (with police protection) beat up Swadeshi activists, and tried to disrupt the National movement in Bengal. Even though Congress moderates (such as Surendranath Bannerjee), had commented on the role of the East Bengal colonial administration in instigating fratricidal strife amongst Hindus and Muslims, this aspect is not explored by the authors. However, there is a reasonably good description of how the province of East Bengal was politically, socially and economically discriminated against by the Pakistani authorities, and how the intransigence of the military and political elite in West Pakistan led to the eventual collapse of Pakistan's unity. Although the narrative describing the birth of Bangladesh appears to cover all the main points and it is acknowledged that both the US and China wished to prevent the breakup of Pakistan, US attempts to intervene on behalf of the Generals in Pakistan, to threaten and intimidate India by sending the US Seventh Fleet (led by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Enterprise) to the Bay of Bengal is not mentioned. Neither do the authors care to examine US attempts to destabilize the relatively India-friendly regime of Mujibur Rehman whose assassination led to a military coup by General Ziaur Rehman in 1975, and a rapprochement with Pakistan - even though just four years earlier, the Pakistani military had been responsible for the massacre of between one and three million Bangladeshi independence-fighters. The brief section on Independent Bangladesh and Pakistan brings out how like in Pakistan, Islam proved to be an important (even fundamental) aspect of the Bangladeshi identity. Bangladesh attended the Islamic Conference in Lahore in 1974 and participated in the creation of the Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah. In 1975, General Ziaur Rehman saw to it that the mention of "secularism" was deleted from the Constitution, to be replaced by the phrase: 'absolute trust and faith in Allah, the All-Powerful'. In 1998, General Ershad declared Islam to be the state religion. (Thus even as Bangladesh broke off from Pakistan, it began to resemble it more and more). The substantial section on Pakistan's Foreign Policy is mostly an unremarkable rehash of familiar themes and serious analysts in the subcontinent are unlikely to be convinced by some of the attempts to present the US as a relatively neutral party in the region. Even the extensive cooperation and intimate coordination between the CIA/Pentagon and Pakistan's military leaders and intelligence officials is mentioned rather briefly and casually in the section titled Pakistan in the Game of the Great Powers. Indian readers may nevertheless find it interesting to read how Pakistan, even as it entered into a close military alliance with the US in organizations such as the SEATO and CENTO, managed to maintain reasonably cordial relations with both China and the Soviet Union between 1956 and 1961. Although India signed a treaty recognizing China's sovereignty over Tibet in 1954, China did not reciprocate by recognizing Indian sovereignty over Kashmir - and hedged its bets by calling for bilateral negotiations between India and Pakistan. Chinese and Pakistani ties further improved prior to the Indo-Chinese war of 1962, and once Pakistan and China had signed a deal on Kashmir at India's expense, the Chinese position on Kashmir moved still closer to Pakistan's. Soviet leaders, even as they condemned Pakistan while visiting India in 1955, nevertheless sought to improve relations a year later, and signed a major oil exploration deal with Pakistan in 1961. (By 1971, a Washington-Beijing-Islamabad axis had developed in the region, and it was mainly the combined hostility of Washington and Beijing towards the former USSR that eventually pushed it towards a far-reaching friendship treaty with India). The chapter on Living with India mildly questions some of the most preposterous and outlandish charges routinely leveled against India in Pakistan and gently nudges Pakistan to re-evaluate its hostile stand towards India. But Indian readers are likely to chafe at the subtle but disingenuous attempts to equate the belligerent tactics of the Pakistan military with India's legitimate right to defend against them. Similarly, the author fails to adequately distinguish between the Pakistani rulers' congenital hatred of India with India's growing frustration with a never-ending border war on its North-Western front. References to Kashmir exhibit little in-depth understanding of the ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity of the region, and the authors are conspicuously silent on the subject of how Pakistan has repressed the Ladhakhi-speaking Shia majority populations of Gilgit and Baltistan. Not only does the chapter occasionally fudge facts, it fails to highlight the growing divergence between India and Pakistan in terms of social indicators and quality of life achievements. There is also no mention of how Nawaz Sharif (in spite of his many shortcomings) was attempting to normalize relations with India, and his attempt to displace Musharraf from military leadership was a brave (albeit unsuccessful) attempt at invoking civilian authority over the military. One of the more interesting sections of this compendium is the one titled: A Fruitless Search for Democracy. Citing some of the grave economic inequities that plagued the nation after independence (such as how in 1962, four big merchant families controlled two-thirds of the national industrial heritage although they comprised only 0.5% of the population) it goes on to describe some of the populist measures enacted periodically to mitigate such disparities. It then goes on to summarize Pakistan's mostly still-born attempts to build a democratic polity and paraphrases the situation with a flash of rare and refreshing frankness: "The political trajectory of Pakistan gives the impression of an eternal return in a rhythmic succession of cycles of about ten years. in the course of which democratic phases and military governments alternate. This is for the most part mere optical illusion, since Pakistan has never really tasted democracy. These episodes have systematically degenerated into a drift towards authoritarianism on the part of the person in power and/or turned out to be mere illusion like the democracy of the 1990s, when elected governments found that they could do nothing against the strength of the army. Under such circumstances, how can we talk about a 'transition to democracy'." It is in the analysis of Pakistan's internal political trajectory that this volume has most to recommend it, although the description of Pakistan's invasion of Kargil leaves much to be desired - as it fails to mention that Clinton called for a Pakistani retreat only after it had become abundantly clear that India had finally seized the advantage, and Pakistani forces were about to be routed. The section on Pakistan's attempts to develop democratic institutions could have further benefited from an inquiry into whether Pakistan's inability to construct a genuinely democratic framework did not emerge from the undemocratic nature of its founding and constitution. How the demand for its creation had never been approved in a popular referendum where all sides were free to advance their own vision of a de-colonized future for the subcontinent; how its constant India-baiting, and reliance on a medieval and sectarian ideological system for its essential identity might always impinge on any democratic impulses. Not only did Pakistan's constitution as an Islamic state reject the mediating and somewhat more tolerant strains of Sufic Islam that had in medieval times tried to build bridges between Muslims and Hindus, growing Saudi influences have led to a trend towards Quranic absolutism and a Jehadi mentality that is incompatible with the development of democracy. Throughout the world, democracy has been virtually impossible to achieve without a measure of pluralism, without secular tolerance of diversity - but this is something the founders of Pakistan rejected right from the start when they began to falsely demonize all Sikhs and Hindus. More ironically, even as they stressed that Muslims could not be safe in a Hindu 'dominated' India - they abandoned the Muslims who would have been most vulnerable (in India's Hindu-majority regions), and settled for an Islamic state in the Muslim majority areas where Muslims should have had little to fear from the non-Muslim minorities. The strident insistence on separation implied a deep fear and distrust of democratic processes and institutions since Indian leaders were more than willing to encode all manner of protections for Muslims in the new constitution. Pakistan had been created by those who were terrified of democracy in a United Federal India - it should therefore come as little surprise to anyone that those who so feared Indian democracy failed to launch a successful democracy in the nation they created in opposition to India. The authors of this volume very gently hint at these contradictions, but largely refrain from forcefully probing these very fundamental questions that are most germane to Pakistan's future. By and large, this compendium has been written to appeal to Western readers, the majority of whom have little interest or genuine sympathy for the masses of the Indian subcontinent. When they do read something about India or Pakistan, they prefer that the material be conveniently packaged, without much complexity, and without raising too many troubling questions. Because of the West's historically closer relationship with Pakistan, the book is especially wanting in providing a fair exposition of the Indian point of view concerning Pakistan. It also neglects to present the situation from the point of view of Pakistan's oppressed, landless and illiterate masses, whose poverty is acknowledged, but their inevitable manipulation by the frenzied rhetoric of a sectarian or Jehadi state is not. Notes: Concerning Pakistan's search for democracy, it might be helpful to compare Pakistan's attempts at democratic functioning with India's. Contrary to assertions by India's critics, and despite the odd hiccups, India's democratic institutions have shown themselves to be remarkably resilient. In recent years, India has seen the widening and deepening of its democracy that has not only opened doors for Dalit politicians such as Mayawati, but is now also creating the political space for Muslim women to run for seats in city councils and win mayoral posts in the towns of Western Uttar Pradesh. Most recently (Apr 2003), Congress's Aneesa Mirza was elected mayor of Ahmedabad. In addition, there has been rapid growth of grassroots volunteer organizations that have led a variety of popular struggles bypassing conservative party organizations and appealing directly to the judiciary for remedies and relief, and often securing victories on a range of issues - whether they be the right to information, protection of the environment, abolition of colonial era laws that discriminate against same-gender relationships, or proper implementation of anti-poverty programs. Without a doubt, India's highly varied democratic currents have played a vital role in helping India slowly recover from the depredations of colonial rule. In Pakistan, the logical imperative of the two-nation theory has confined it in a trap of its own making that even as it succeeds in constantly bleeding India, it deprives it of something even more important - the ability to construct a nation that is content and at peace with itself and its neighbors, whose people have equal opportunities towards just progress. Related Essays: Contemporary Pakistan: Elections in Pakistan: Real or Hoax? Blasphemy Laws and Intellectual Freedom in Pakistan Trade Union Rights in Pakistan The Struggle for Self-Determination and Democratic Rights in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) The Language and Culture of Baltistan Historical background: Loyalist Agents in the Indian Aristocracy and the Early Congress The 2-Nation Theory and Partition Other Related Essays: Jammu & Kashmir: Self-Determination and Secession Cheap Labor, Oil and War in the Middle East Back for other selections from South Asian Voice for other articles on issues confronting India and the region. Also see South Asian History or Topics in Indian History for relevant essays that shed some light on the history of the subcontinent. (If you liked our site, or would like to help with the South Asian Voice project and help us expand our reach, please click here) |
