Explaining Pakistan's Foreign Policy

Escaping India

Aparna Pande

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136818936
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Thema: Internationale Beziehungen

Pakistan has over the decades become a hotbed for the terrorist ideology often referred to as Jihadism. This book investigates the underlying principles of Pakistan's foreign policy from 1947 until the present day, and explains the rise of Jihadism as an offshoot of Pakistan's security concerns.

The book goes on to discuss that from its inception as a separate state, Pakistan's foreign policy focused on 'seeking parity' with India and 'escaping' from an Indian South Asian identity. The desire to achieve parity with its much larger neighbour led Pakistan to seek the assistance and support of allies. The author analyses the relationship Pakistan has with Afghanistan, United States, China and the Muslim world, and looks at how these relationships are based on the desire that military, economic and diplomatic aid from these countries would bolster Pakistan's meagre resources in countering Indian economic and military strength. The book presents an interesting contribution to South Asian Studies, as well as studies on International Relations and Foreign Policy.

1 Constructing political identity

Since 2001, Pakistan has been the center of a global war on terrorism. In an interview in April 2008, former US President Bush said that Pakistan, and not Afghanistan or Iraq, had now become the most likely place where “Al Qaeda had established safe havens and was plotting attacks against the United States.”¹ Soon after taking office in January 2009, President Obama reiterated that Afghanistan and Pakistan were the “central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism.”²

Pakistan has over the decades become a hotbed for the terrorist ideology often referred to as Jihadism.³ To a large extent, this is the outgrowth of Pakistan's attempts to define foreign policy in the context of a state ideology and the aim of this book is to trace the origins of Pakistan's foreign policy and analyze its key ideological drivers.

The Indian Muslim elite that helped create Pakistan, and led it in its formative years, consciously oriented Pakistan's foreign policy towards a paradigm designed to create a unique Pakistani identity. Islam and Islamic unity were the principal drivers of this ideological foreign policy, which fit in with the leaders' conviction that Islam could be a substitute for nationalism as the basis of Pakistani identity.

The core of this ideological foreign policy rests on a particular perception of Pakistan's security environment. Pakistan's relations with its neighbors (India, Afghanistan) and its allies (the United States, China, the Muslim world) reflect both an Islam-centered worldview and the security dilemma resulting from the perceived Indian threat. In some ways Pakistan has been trying to escape its Indian legacy—historic, geographic and civilizational—and attempting to find security in a virtual relocation through ideology.

Constructing an identity

According to Benedict Anderson,⁴ nations are “imagined communities,” and how they define themselves and perceive others helps determine both their domestic and foreign policies. Pakistan's founding fathers constructed a religion-based identity for Pakistan and a national narrative about Pakistan's origins and creation. They also developed a view of the “other” that is “Hindu” India. Identity here refers to an individual's comprehension of the “other” as a discrete or separate entity.⁵ The feeling of mistrust towards India, which is seen by Pakistanis as Hindu in identity, and the insecurity about India's larger size and perceived desire to reabsorb Pakistan, led Pakistanis to believe that India posed an existential threat to Pakistan. The fervent desire to check this existential threat from “Hindu” India led Pakistan's leaders to construct an ideology-driven⁶ national identity and a corresponding foreign policy.

Crafting a Pakistani identity was considered a matter of national survival.⁷ India could not be allowed to eliminate Pakistan's distinctiveness as that was as important as securing the new country's borders and building its economy. This constructed ideology-driven identity had both an internal and an external dimension. The identity within emphasized religious nationalism as the ideology to bind the country together. Pakistan was the first country to call itself an Islamic Republic and the 1949 Objectives Resolution of Pakistan's First Constituent Assembly emphasized the need for “ordering lives in accordance with the teachings and requirements of Islam.”⁸

Externally, Pakistan's policy-makers saw their regional environment through a realist lens albeit with an ideological tint. It was an anarchical Hobbesian⁹ world wherein Pakistan envisioned a mortal threat from its larger neighbor, India, which at the time of partition was not reconciled to Pakistan's creation as an Islamic state. Over time, the existential threat to Pakistan has been expanded to include all global powers engaged in conflict with Muslims. This has included, at different times, the Soviet Union, Israel and the United States.

Reflecting this view of Pakistan's leaders, even in the midst of the crises attending partition in 1947, Pakistani officials advocated sending trained exsoldiers to Palestine to prevent the creation of Israel.¹⁰ Decades later, Pakistan's military ruler General Zia ul Haq, in an interview in 1980, said that Pakistan believed Israel's close ties with India reflected an “organized conspiracy against Pakistan.”¹¹ These fears of “unbelievers” ganging up against Pakistan surfaced long before India had close relations with the US or Israel. Good relations between India and these other perceived enemies of Islam have reinforced the ideological rationale for Pakistan's security concerns. In August 2009, during a press conference, the Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman stated that the “India-Israel nexus” posed a “serious threat to regional security” and stressed the need for countries in the region to “demonstrate utmost circumspection” on this count, especially in the wake of the prevailing nuclear environment of the region.¹²

The need to shape a separate identity meant that Pakistan wove a very intricate pattern of ideological differentiation with India. The crafting of a historical narrative in Pakistan's textbooks, the creation of a “Pakistan Studies” curriculum at all levels of schooling and the depiction of any gesture from the Indian side as an offer from the Hindu bania¹³—by inference, untrustworthy—were elements of a contrived state ideology. The elite narrated Pakistan's history in such a manner that, in the words of a Pakistani journalist,

[I]t appears natural to people that to be Pakistani you have to be anti-Hindu: it is part of the definition, like the core of the being. You have to define yourself in opposition to the other. India has become the definite other for the Pakistanis.¹⁴

Governments fashion nationalism through appeals to language, civilizational heritage, cultural ties, history and links to territory. Pakistan, however, was different. It was an ethnically diverse country comprising initially two separate territories divided by a stronger neighbor that was not reconciled to its creation. Pakistan's leaders were consistently worried about ethnic and linguistic nationalism trumping Pakistani nationalism. They found the way out in an “ideology” that would create “a sound, solid and cohesive nation” and thus help Pakistan play “its destined role in history.”¹⁵ Pakistan's Islamic identity would thus be an “ideological safeguard” protecting its territorial integrity and preventing any disputes and disruptions from within,¹⁶ in addition to uniting the diverse ethnicities against external threats.

According to Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan's first Prime Minister, the ideology of Pakistan was the Islamic way of life which meant “a body of faith, tradition and belief which has been a part of man's heritage for over thirteen hundred years.” When this ideology was “applied to statecraft and the conduct of human affairs,” it would be bound to promote human welfare.¹⁷ Geography and history are key factors in shaping the foreign policies of most nations but Pakistan's policy-makers emphasized ideology as a third dimension. As former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, Tanvir Ahmed Khan stated in an interview with this author:

A whole mythology was created to justify the two nation theory and ideology came to occupy a disproportionate place in the Pakistani thinking by and large mostly for instrumental reasons. For the elite it was to help differentiate the created identity. No army can do without the need to postulate a possible enemy and the enemy had to be defined in ideological terms. So in a way ideology has always hung like a cloud on Pakistan's foreign policy.¹⁸

There are certain unique circumstances surrounding the creation of Pakistan, arising from the impact of partition from India in 1947, and the experience of the second partition in 1971, when Bangladesh was hived off. No other post-colonial country could be said to have come into being on the basis of religious nationalism, with the possible exception of Israel. Alongside these circumstances, Pakistan's foreign policy was also influenced by all those issues which matter to any nation, such as the need to safeguard national security and the demands of diplomacy, including the desire to increase its power with other countries.

The origins and idea of Pakistan

Till the advent of Pakistan none of us was in fact a Pakistani … prior to 1947 our nationalism was based more on an idea than on any territorial definition … ideologically we were Muslims, territorially we happened to be Indians, and parochially we were a conglomeration of at least eleven smaller, provincial loyalties.

(Ayub Khan¹⁹)

The history of a nation and the circumstances leading to its birth play an important role in defining the foreign policy of any country. Pakistan is the only state created by what, to many, appeared to be an unnatural partition—which did not represent the reality on the ground. The subcontinent was partitioned purely on religious lines even though the people of the two religions were ethnically the same and historically had largely common linguistic, cultural and regional identities. The two communities in undivided India, Hindus and Muslims, had lived together under various regimes for over a thousand years and neither community significantly interfered with the religious and social practices of the other. In order to understand the creation of Pakistan it is, therefore, important to look at the pre-partition history of the Indian subcontinent.

Despite having been under Muslim rule from the tenth century onwards, India had remained largely Hindu. Having been rulers for so many centuries, their numerical inferiority with respect to the Hindus had never really concerned Muslims. With the establishment of the British Indian Empire²⁰ in 1858,²¹ the Muslim elite did not just lose political and economic power but, more importantly, they developed a “feeling of powerlessness.” The Indian Muslim leaders had always known they were a numerical minority but they had never “felt like a minority.” The advent of British rule made them realize their minority status and that had a tremendous impact on them.²²

The reaction of the Indian Muslim elites to the establishment of British rule saw the development of two broad strands of nationalism. For some Muslim leaders, the answer was territorial nationalism: Indian Muslims were Muslim in religion and Indian in nationality. The Indian National Congress which was founded in 1885 was a secular nationalist party. Many Muslims joined the Congress but Muslim Congressmen only comprised 6.6 percent of the total delegates who took part in the annual meetings of the Congress between 1892 and 1909.²³ The Congress was, therefore, hard put to justify that it spoke for Muslims too.

Many other Muslim leaders, however, looked upon religious nationalism as the defining characteristic of Indian Muslim identity. To them, Muslims of India were unique in their historic experience and, therefore, a distinct community. They had known they were a numerical minority but it had not mattered earlier as they were the ruling elite. Now, not only did the census instituted by the British, starting from 1882 onwards reinforce their numerical minority status, but the British decision to introduce democratic institutions created new fears. In the age of parliamentary democracy, numbers mattered far more than they had in the era of Muslim monarchs. A firm belief that they needed to safeguard their interests (and those of their community) led the Muslims to set up organizations that would champion their interests as well as demand safeguards for British India's Muslims.

The decision by the British to change the official language to English from Persian, which had been the court language for the last eight hundred years, reinforced the Muslim leaders' sense of loss of political and cultural power. The establishment in 1870 of the All India Muslim Education Conference, the foundation of the Muslim-Anglo Oriental College at Aligarh in 1875 and other attempts to bring the Muslim community together reflected the desire of this Indian Muslim elite for increased Muslim awareness and unity, as well as for a share in the new alignment of political and economic influence.

The late nineteenth century also saw rising tensions between Hindus and Muslims with a growing sense of community-based identity. Urdu, or Hindustani, had been the spoken language of the Indian elite, both Hindu and Muslim, since the seventeenth century. Now there were demands by many members of the Hindu elite, partly under British influence, to separate their language (and script) from the Muslims. These Hindu leaders raised the demand for Hindi to be written in the Sanskrit-Devanagri script and not in the Arabic-Persian script. Correspondingly, Muslim spokesmen put forth a counter-demand—that their language, Urdu, should be written exclusively in the Arabic script.

Riots between Hindus and Muslims were rare in the earlier eras. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a rise in the incidence of riots between the two communities often over issues which earlier would have been resolved by community leaders but which were now allowed to inflame popular passions. Issues such as cow slaughter by Muslims or playing of music in front of mosques by Hindus now began to cause large-scale riots.

Most of the Muslim elite also mistrusted the Congress because they saw it as a largely “Hindu organization”²⁴ which would work for the benefit of Hindus and not for the Muslims. There was thus a lack of trust in the Hindus and a belief that Muslims needed allies, preferably ideologically similar allies in order to stand up to the numerically stronger Hindus. Even after partition, this legacy of mistrust can be seen in the foreign policy of Pakistan in relation to India and in Pakistan's search for allies in the West and the Muslim world to help it stand up to a much larger “Hindu” India.

Mistrust led to demands placed on the British Indian government for guarantees to protect Muslims against the “untrustworthy” Hindus. The Muslim demand for separate electorates needs to be seen in this context. Parliamentary democracy in India meant the creation of a number of territorial parliamentary constituencies in various parts of British India which would elect Indians to the legislative assemblies. In a democracy, constituencies comprise common electorates—called joint electorates in the Indian subcontinent—where the entire voting population of a country or region is part of a single electorate which votes for the candidates who contest elections. In the case of separate electorates, the voting population of a country or region would be divided into different segments, based on certain factors like religion or caste. Here, members of each segment voted only to elect representatives for their community, thereby reinforcing communal politics and the communal divide. In British India this meant division of the electorate on the basis of religion, i.e. Hindus electing Hindu candidates and Muslims voting only for Muslims.

In a Hindu-majority country like India, elections under a joint electorate syste...