Political Conflict in Pakistan

Mohammad Waseem

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781787384002
• eBook ISBN: 9781787387683
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is a major reinterpretation of politics in Pakistan. Its focus is conflict among groups, communities, classes, ideologies and institutions, which has shaped the country’s political dynamics. Mohammad Waseem critically examines the theory surrounding the millennium-long conflict between Hindus and Muslims as separate nations who practiced mingled faiths, and the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh renaissances that created a twentieth-century clash of communities and led to partition.

Political Conflict in Pakistan addresses multiple clashes: between the high culture as a mission to transform society, and the low culture of the land and the people; between those committed to the establishment’s institutional constitutional framework and those seeking to dismantle the ‘colonial’ state; between the corrupt and those seeking to hold them to account; between the political class and the middle class; and between civil and military power. The author exposes how the ruling elite centralised power through the militarisation and judicialisation of politics, rendering the federalist arrangement an empty shell and thus grossly alienating the provinces. He sets all this within the contexts of education and media as breeders of conflict, the difficulties of establishing an anti-terrorist regime, and the state’s pragmatic attempts at conflict resolution by seeking to keep the outsiders inside. This is a wide-ranging account of a country of contestations.

1

SEVENTY YEARS OF PARTITION

Introduction

This chapter deals with a subject that has been covered copiously by scholars: partition. Mainstream South Asian historiography imagined partition as a relatively smooth affair, given its heavy reliance on the transfer of power documents relating to constitutional debates, official correspondence and the statements of political leaders and parties.¹ However, research in recent decades has highlighted the mobilizational aspect of the process of conversion of Muslims to the cause of partition and of their faith-based identity that distinguished them from the Hindu majority.² My argument is that this composite heritage of partition, based on ideology as a mission-mantled agenda and identity as an exclusionary commitment to faith, carved out a huge public space that emerged as a battleground for rival contenders for power in Pakistan. In this book, partition is discussed essentially as a blueprint for the political conflict in Pakistan.

Partition made religion a defining variable for evaluating the role of the elite and the masses, past and present, culture and politics. It produced a robust sense of predestination whereby people felt they had arrived in the promised land. Partition made India a lasting grief for Pakistan, just as it had made Pakistan a lasting grief for India.³ Apart from the archival history of the constitutional negotiations that led to partition, one finds emotionally charged and highly subjective accounts of partition that can be grouped together as partition exotica. In India, this approximates the ‘vivisection syndrome’, while in Pakistan this has been elevated to a war between Islam and Hinduism. On both sides, ‘sacrifice syndrome’ became a source of sanctifying violence, especially in Punjab where demobilized soldiers had recently returned from the war.⁴

Communal violence raises some interesting questions about the nature of the political leadership of Gandhi, Jinnah and Nehru, among others. These Anglicized, modern and charismatic leaders mobilized the traditional public and delivered it from colonial rule by the strength of their command over the public will. However, the fact that these leaders were totally helpless in the face of violence, which assumed colossal proportions during partition, rendered them mere spokesmen of their respective communities in British India rather than their ‘representatives’. While deeply immersed in the high politics of constitutional wrangling, they did not share, much less participate in, the religious hatreds at the bottom of the society that had percolated down from the cultivation of religiously coded propaganda. Once belligerent identities moved from high politics to low politics, the political initiative shifted away from the hands of the leadership and created mayhem in the locality.

The basic argument of this chapter is that nationalism arrived late in India, sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, whereby the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh elites heralded the process of an exclusive faith-based nationalist upsurge in their respective communities. India’s nameless and faceless humanity developed religious boundaries that eventually provided the basis for a separate nationhood for Muslims. This chapter also locates the pattern of an exclusive reliance on religion for building a Muslim nation across the future borders of Pakistan that has great potential for explaining the country’s divergent path vis-à-vis India in the context of parliamentary democracy. There is a need to look at the specific nature of the two migratory movements across the emergent borders in terms of the number and share of refugees in the host countries. In Pakistan, this gave rise to a new ethnic hierarchy by turning it into a ‘migrant state’, while India had its political imagination firmly rooted in the soil. Most scholarship focuses on the politics of partition in the context of the emergence of two states and the concomitant processes of migration, communal violence, refugee resettlement and nation-building projects. There is a significant gap in the sociology of partition by way of the ruralization of communities after the loss of their urban sectors – such as in the case of Sindh and East Bengal – the loss of the multicultural syncretic society that was built over a millennium in these provinces as well as Punjab, the brutalization of social and cultural attitudes towards the new ‘other’ in the partitioned provinces, and the rise of religion as a maker and shaper of the national destiny first in Pakistan and a generation or two later in India.

Moment of Partition

In 1947, Pakistan got out of India. But India did not get out of Pakistan. That has made all the difference. India continued to be part of Pakistan in various ways. Apart from Pashtu and the languages of the northern areas, the languages of Pakistan are essentially Indian languages, including the national language, Urdu, along with Punjabi, Sindhi and some minor linguistic varieties.⁵ The Indian calendar, Indian dress, Indian cuisine, Indian medicine, Indian wedding rituals and Indian customary laws have continued to operate in large parts of what became Pakistan. The name for Sunday (Itwar) is derived from the Hindu sun god, Aditya; similarly, the names for Monday (Somwar) and Tuesday (Mangalwar) belong to the Sanskrit, while the name for Wednesday comes from Buddha.⁶ Several superstitious practices, including the witchcraft among Muslims of Pakistan, are essentially Hindu practices. While the Muslim Ashraf was largely influenced by the British rulers, organized according to a pattern of one man/one wife, monogamy was typically carried into life after conversion to Islam, even though polygamy was not unknown among Hindus. Not surprisingly, the Pakistan project aimed at creating a divide between the two communities, by giving an identity to Muslims that was explicitly separate from their non-Muslim street neighbours, friends, colleagues, employees, and employers. This exercise followed both a vertical approach from the elite downwards and a horizontal approach across regions throughout India. The genesis of the first major conflict in Pakistan can be traced to the mandatory requirement for Pakistan to de-Indianize itself, a constant pursuit ever since partition. This is a conflict between the cognitive ‘self’– the deep-rooted social attitudes, cultural mores and linguistic and behavioural patterns at one end – and the new national identity that subsumed the post-partition ideological context at the other.⁷ General Zia expressed it succinctly: if Turkey or Egypt did not project Islam, they would remain Turkey and Egypt.⁸ But if Pakistan did not pursue Islam aggressively, it would become part of India again. This fear became part of the national psyche.

The Partition of Indian Society

Pakistan has always felt obliged to take the agenda of partition forward in order to inject meaning into the existence of a country separate from India. The Hindu–Muslim conflict has been at the heart of the meta-narrative in Pakistan. According to this, Indian history was beset with conflict between the two faith-based communities, called ‘nations’ according to the two-nation theory.⁹ My argument seeks to question the periodicity of conflict between the two nations of Hindus and Muslims spread over the centuries. India before and under the Mughal Empire was, of course, a scene of internecine warfare. But Hindu and Muslim generals and soldiers jointly fought for Akbar against Chand Bibi, for Aurangzeb against the descendants of the Bahmani Sultanate in the Deccan, for the Sikh Maharaja Ranjit Singh against the Durranis in what later became North West Frontier Province (NWFP), and against Nawab Muzaffar Ali Khan of Multan, and for Tipu, Sirajuddaula, Wajid Ali Shah and Bahadur Shah Zafar against the British. Most typically, people fought for region, not religion, for the ruling dynasty, not an ideological agenda, and for territory, revenue and prestige rather than for a transcendental goal or racial superiority. Conflict defined the breaking point of relations among the stakeholders from different faiths as well as among co-religionists playing on the chessboard of the Indian subcontinent. Those around the Muslim courts of various kingdoms conspired, planned and strategized warfare around conflict between the followers of Tariqa and Sharia, between Shias and Sunnis, between liberals who allowed music and dance and conservatives who did not, and between loyalists of the kingdom and dissidents, including potential or actual rebels be they Hindu, Muslim or Sikh.

I. H. Qureshi and a whole generation of scholars before and after partition argued that Hindus and Muslims had existed as separate entities for a millennium.¹⁰ They took religious boundaries for granted as these existed in the twentieth century. But conversion to Islam was a prolonged process, spread over six hundred years in what can be called a pre-identity construction phase. The idea of conflict between the two ‘nations’ in a context where boundaries between religions were hardly demarcated was superimposed on the emergent pattern of conflict between the Hindu and Muslim elites struggling for space in British India. In a peasant society such as India, as the British administrators of the population census discovered, faiths were deeply intermingled. As Harjot Oberoi has discussed, many among the Meherat Rajputs from Ajmer and its vicinity who considered themselves descendants of Prithvi Raj Chauhan identified themselves with Islam, practised nikkah and buried their dead. More than a million Sikhs in Punjab declared themselves Hindus in the 1891 census, while 200,000 people in Gujarat registered themselves as Mohammadan Hindus. Bengali Muslims used the name Iswar for the Creator. A seventeenth-century Muslim scholar, Umaru Pulavar, wrote about the early Islamic history based on local Tamil tradition.¹¹

Much has been written about the causes of the conversion to Islam in India: the spread of Islam through the sword; liberation from caste-based inequality; intermarriages between Muslims and non-Muslims; acculturation through service in the Moghul administration, such as among Kayasthas; upward social mobility; and the teachings of Sufi saints, among others. What concerns us here is the life and times of the converted Muslims who were not part of the power play at the top. Their identity was indistinct, muddled and blurred for generations, even centuries. In Peter Hardy’s view, even the Europeans took time to acknowledge their existence as an entity separate from the Muslims of non-Indian origin who ruled India.¹² While the latter were remembered as Tartars, the former were termed ‘Moors’.¹³ Indeed, the educated and sophisticated Muslim professionals and landlords discovered the large mass of converted Muslims through the colonial censuses and gazetteers. The masses now acquired a new relevance for them as an electorate after the constitutional reforms of 1919.¹⁴ The elite was now attracted essentially to the number of Muslims that would become handy with the expansion of franchise.

British administrators such as Ibbetson found slow change in Muslims after conversion, because they considered religion a matter of social belonging rather than a creed or a code of life.¹⁵ One finds a deliberate effort at using faith-based icons for proselytization purposes. In East Bengal in the mid-nineteenth century, the low-caste Bediyas were converted to Islam but they did not join the mainstream for a considerable time. Indeed, Ibbetson found a Muslim in East Punjab carrying a baggage from before conversion, whereas a Hindu across the Indus was considered ‘almost as the Musulman’.¹⁶ Richard Eaton identifies conversion to Islam in India with accretion, i.e. ‘adding new deities or superhuman agencies to their existing cosmological stock’,¹⁷ without involving exclusion or distinction from the village community’s practices of propitiating a local goddess or performing devotion to Krishna’s avatar.¹⁸ A Bengali poet, Syed Sultan, used the word Isvara in the late sixteenth century; one Shaykh Mansur similarly used pre-conversion names for divinity.¹⁹

As per the 1901 census, some Bengali Muslims indulged in religious activities, which were alien to Islam.²⁰ An interesting example of inter-mingling of faith-based groups is the Meo community which lives in the vicinity of Delhi. Shail Mayaram refers to several narratives of Muslim bards, poets and storytellers. For example, Shamsuddin Pathan started his story with a tribute to a local divine figure. Mufti Jamaluddin of Alwar claimed Surajwansi descent – lineage from the sun – while seeing no contradiction in it with his own faith. Qadiri Sufi Shah Abdurrazak enjoyed the theatrical rendering of the story of Narsimha Avatar and Krishna. Syed Rasul Shah became a Peshwa of a gypsy tribe. Abdul, an old Mirasi, praised God for showing the right path, but also attributed his inspiration to a local celestial figure.²¹

The overlapping nature of religious identities often drew on a shared worship of saints and of pilgrimages to their shrines. For example, the Muslim saint, Sakhi Sarwar, was one of the most popular saints among Sikhs in the nineteenth century, with a following registered at around 80,000 at the turn of the twentieth century. Sakhi Sarwar’s shrine in Dera Ghazi Khan and the sub-shrines devoted to him in Gujranwala, Lahore and elsewhere attracted Hindu, Sikh and Muslim devotees. Oberoi has argued that the unlettered masses from all communities faced physical as well as mental ailments and took recourse to ‘spiritual’ healing that crossed religious boundaries.²² Shrines – far more than Sufis, who have been accredited with the task of conversion in the literature for generations – were the real agents of conversion.²³ In death, Sufis became larger than life as their miracles became popular myths. The blending of Hindu–Muslim faiths comes out clearly in Mohammad Mujeeb’s monumental work, The Indian Muslims: for example, the Hindu cult of the river Indus among Sindhi Lohanas; Darya Panth becoming the worship of Khawaja Khizr; and the cult of the crocodile, which was still visible in Mangopir in Sindh. He also mentions Hussaini Brahmins, devotees of Khawaja Ajmer, who were Hindus but wore Muslim dress, performed fasting and gave burial to the dead.²⁴ These local and disparate communities were travelling along different routes of a long-range conversion process when British India presided over the new moral universe of the subcontinent after 1857. In other words, conflict alone did not define the vast humanity living across India. Far more pervasive were the patterns of cooperation, co-optation, compromise, collaboration, partnership, co-existence, concurrence, fusion, reciprocity,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Seventy Years of Partition
• 2. Master Narrative
• 3. Two Power Centres
• 4. An Establishmentarian Democracy
• 5. Constitutional Dynamics
• 6. Mass Public
• 7. The Outsider
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Glossary
• Index
• Back Cover