Asian Window

What does Pakistan mean? What kind of Islamic state should it be? Manan Ahmed on the real threat facing Pakistan today. From the National:

Pakistan, as constituted by the retreating British, was hardly a cohesive state. The two biggest provinces were themselves partitioned (Punjab and Bengal) and the fate of three princely states was undetermined – Swat, Baluchistan and Kashmir. The country itself was divided into two unequal halves separated by India. The communal horror of Partition, which saw the displacement and killing of millions, soon gave way to the mobilisation of the Army of this nascent state to redraw its borders. In fact, the actions taken then in Baluchistan and Kashmir quickly shifted the balance of power in Pakistan from the civil and the political to the military.

Still, Jinnah’s hopes for a democratic state were briefly glimpsed in the first constitution, which was signed in 1956. The constitution declared Pakistan an Islamic republic but reserved minority rights and enshrined laws in the hands of a secular judiciary. But this was a short-lived achievement, and in the next several decades, dictatorial leaders would steadily erode the unity of the state through their often brutal attempts to consolidate power in Islamabad – first under the guise of modernisation, and then Islamicisation and, more recently, anti-terrorism.

The first of these, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, with the Cold War support of the United States, suspended the constitution and embarked on a decade-long military dictatorship during which he systematically broke down all progressive and democratic voices in the nation. In order to cement his military rule, Ayub Khan preyed on exactly those ethnic divisions which Jinnah had hoped to eliminate. His West Pakistani military regime deliberately marginalised the East Pakistani Bangla population. Though there were populist resisters to Ayub – most notably the political campaign of Fatima Ali Jinnah in 1965 – the military dictators brokered no relief. The creation of Bangladesh in 1971 – after the Pakistani military failed to recognise a legitimate national election and embarked on a systematic killing of Bengalis – spelt the end of Iqbal and Jinnah’s notion that Muslims in India could form a cohesive political union. The fate of Pakistan, the state, in turn, hung in the balance. More:

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