Pakistan: In search of identity

Making Sense of Pakistan' is a timely analysis of the ideological conflicts that lie at the heart of pakistan's conception as a nation-State

Zorawar Daulet Singh Delhi

If Pakistan's history is repeating itself as a farce, we must make that tumultuous journey into her bloody inception to discern the present impasse. Much of Pakistan's internal and external behaviour cannot be understood without deconstructing its genetic makeup.

In pursuant of this question, Farzana Shaikh's Making Sense of Pakistan has accomplished a formidable task - to offer an engaging and objective narrative that not only explores the trials and tribulations of Pakistani elites but exposes the inherent ideological conflicts that lie at the very root of Pakistan's existence.

Shaikh's principal argument is that the role of Islam in Pakistani political life has never been adequately squared by its leadership, which has struggled to construct a nation based solely on religion. The contest and interplay between two rival discourses of Islam - the "communal" espoused by the ruling feudal-military elite sufficient to sustain the two nation-theory and the "Islamist" favoured by the religious establishment seeking to impose a doctrinaire version of Islam - according to Shaikh, account for the ideological incoherence in Pakistan. The irony of Pakistan is that despite being conceived "as a Muslim homeland built in the name of Islam", it remains "a state still trapped in myths of its own making" six decades later.

If Pakistani elites' choices and policies defy normal State behaviour, it is because Pakistan is an anomaly in the proliferation of nation states in the past century. Neither a nation with conventional attributes such as a "core" ethnic nationality, a composite culture or a common linguistic tradition nor a geographical entity with historical boundaries, Pakistan's raison d'être has been contested from the very outset.

The creative challenge before Pakistan's leaders was "to provide a constitutional niche for Islam that recognised its importance in the creation of the State while containing its influence in dictating policy" and to eventually, perhaps, create a State "capable of standing without the aid of Islamic crutches". And yet, "mobilising Islam in order to substitute for the absence of political legitimacy was a legacy of Pakistan's nationalist movement" itself.

Jinnah's Freudian slip, (the declaration of August 11, 1947) of appealing to a principle of "equal citizens of one State", was short-lived. But, it is the one that has subsequently sustained the secular pretensions of Pakistani elites, was retracted by Jinnah himself on January 25, 1948 when he called "to make Pakistan a truly great Islamic state".

The author suggests that the lack of local roots among the first generation of Pakistani leaders including Jinnah, who had arrived from urban north-central India, contributed to their invoking of Islamic symbols to attain legitimacy and suppress regional cleavages. Shaikh also draws attention to Jinnah's ambivalence and suspicion toward participatory democratic politics preferring instead a version of "constitutionalism". Indeed, Jinnah and subsequent generations of Pakistani leaders were "unable to resist the temptation of mobilising the language of Islam to generate power".