The Politics of Exclusion Haunts Pakistan

The current dismal situation in Pakistan has roots in an ideology, which was premised on the assumption that Muslims were a nation apart from all other religious communities of India. Such confessional ideology dichotomised Hindus (about 70 per cent) and Muslims (25 per cent) as two antagonistic and hostile nations whose worldview and social practices clashed at all levels of life.

The Two-Nation Theory advanced on 22 March 1940 by Mohammad Ali Jinnah on behalf of the All-India Muslim League demanded that India be partitioned to create separate states for Indian Muslims in areas in which they constituted majorities. Such a radical demand for the partitioning of India was directed against the Indian National Congress’ One-Nation Theory which at least from the late 1920s onwards had been spearheading territorial nationalism which argued that all Indians belonged to one, indivisible nation with equal rights of men and women and preferential rights for historically disadvantaged groups in society. On such a basis they demanded freedom in a united India from British rule.

During World War II, while the Congress Party refused to help the war effort and demanded the end of colonial rule through the transfer of power to elected representatives of the Indian people, the Muslim League offered to help the British and demanded that at the end of the war the Muslim nation should be granted the right of self-determination. Under the circumstances, the British started patronising the Muslim League and especially promoted Jinnah as a great leader.

In such favourable circumstances, Jinnah and his supporters could launch a concerted campaign othering and demonising Hindus and warning Muslims that in a united India Islam will be annihilated and Muslims obliterated. Therefore, the creation of Pakistan was an existential question for both Islam and Muslims. Such a campaign resulted in a polarised election result in 1946: Hindus voted for the Congress Party (wanting to keep India united), Muslims for the Muslim League (demanding partition to create Pakistan) and Sikhs for the Panthic parties (determined not to let Pakistan get the whole of Punjab and to have the Hindu-Sikh areas of Punjab kept out of Pakistan). It can be noted that only 11 per cent of the Indian population had the right to vote at that time.

Although the British were on the victorious side of the war, their capacity to hold on to India was greatly weakened by Nazi onslaught which left the British economy in shambles. Moreover, the United States pressured Britain to grant freedom to India. The cumulative pressure of the 1942 Quit India movement, the establishment of the INA by the Japanese, the uprising of the naval ratings in early 1946 and the outbreak of communal violence in Calcutta during 16-20 August 1946 on a large scale after Jinnah’s call to direct action, which became endemic to Indian politics and spread to other parts of India hastened the end of British rule. However, before exiting, they decided to create Pakistan as Jinnah had demanded. Such a decision was arrived at after the British military signalled its acceptance of Pakistan as a frontline state to contain Soviet Communism.

The transfer of power in mid-August 1947 proved to be an unprecedented human calamity as communal riots claimed the lives of at least 1 million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs and caused the 12-15 million to cross the border drawn between India and Pakistan. It bequeathed a legacy of territorial disputes and over sharing of the assets of colonial India. India–Pakistan relations have since then been marred by such a legacy and have resulted in several wars.

Notwithstanding a relentlessly rabid communal campaign, which had won him Pakistan, Jinnah on 11 August made an apparent about-turn on the two-nation theory by declaring that in Pakistan, Hindus, Muslims, and other non-Muslims will enjoy equal rights. However, on 14 August when the Pakistan Constituent Assembly was formally inaugurated, he returned to the organic connection between Islam and Pakistan by telling Mountbatten that Prophet Muhammad was the role model for Pakistan. Thereafter followed several other moves underlining the Islamic identity of Pakistan and Islamic law, the Sharia, as the source of constitution and law in Pakistan.

Irrespective of what Jinnah wanted the ideology on which Pakistan was based severely circumscribed his ability to delink himself and Pakistan from the Islamic antecedents of that ideology or the implications and ramifications of such ideology within Pakistan. While Hinduism was proverbially afflicted by the ubiquity of the fissiparous nature of the caste system the myth of Muslim homogeneity exploded soon after Pakistan came into being because sectarian and sub-sectarian divisions were as deeply rooted among Muslims.

Nevertheless, as long as Jinnah lived, the divisions among Muslims over belief and doctrines remained dormant. His early death on 11 September 1948 opened the Pandora box of sectarian, sub-sectarian and linguistic differences and disputes which existed among Muslims. It started with the 7 March 1949 Objectives Resolution which called for Pakistan to be an ideal Muslim democracy upholding the sovereignty of God. How that would translate into a coherent, tangible constitutional formula and define the laws of Pakistan remained unclear. Already in 1953, the fissures within the presumed homogeneous Muslim nation took a violent form when Punjab was rocked by anti-Ahmadiyya riots. The constitutions of 1956, 1962 and 1973 not only retained the Islamic character of Pakistan but the 1973 constitution added more Islamic features. In 1974 the Pakistan Parliament unanimously declared the Ahmadis as non-Muslims.

Under General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, Deobandi ideas received state patronage, and many controversial outdated laws were imposed on Pakistan. Moreover, the Hudood and blasphemy laws and several misogynist measures rendered Pakistan intolerant and encouraged a mob mentality preying on those suspected of deviating from pure and true Islam. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan publishes reports on violent mob attacks on religious minorities and free-thinking Muslims.

The introduction of zakat (tax) by Zia was rejected by the Shia minority which agitated for exemption from it. In the 1990s a proxy war was fought on Pakistani soil between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia through their sectarian affiliates in the form of armed militias. The terrorism which followed claimed hundreds of lives, but the upper hand belonged to the Sunni extremists who not only formed a majority of 85 per cent but were supported by state agencies. Such a tendency even resulted in angry polemics and terrorism between different sub-sects of Sunnis.
Also, because of Pakistan’s involved in the so-called Afghan Jihad sponsored by the United States and Saudi Arabia and assisted by many other states extremism, militancy and violence had become endemic to Pakistani state and society. After the Afghan Jihad so-called non-state actors carried out terrorist attacks in the Indian Kashmir as well as in several Indian cities.

Communalism which before 1947 had been directed against Hindus had also concealed another deep division among Muslims: that deriving from linguistic and centre-periphery tensions and disputes. Rather soon after Pakistan came into being, the West Pakistani rulers began to treat the Bengalis as lesser citizens even when they formed a 55 per cent majority of the Pakistan population. Ultimately the former East Pakistan broke away after a civil war which claimed thousands of lives and became Bangladesh in December 1971.

In Sindh, the native population too developed many grievances against the Urdu-speaking migrants from mainly North India. The latter settled in large numbers in Karachi as well as in major Sindhi cities and towns and in the early years dominated the federal government. In the 1980s and 1990s ethnic conflict between the Urdu-speakers resulted in shocking cases of terrorism. Currently, separatist tendencies in Balochistan and in the tribal areas of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa against the Punjabi-dominated Pakistan state have caused violence and terrorism on a large scale.

Considered in the light of the historical record, one can conclude that the logic of exclusion based on religion which underpinned the Two-Nation Theory and became the ideology upon which the partition of India took place turned inside and assumed a virulent form. If Pakistan was created for the Muslim nation of India, then inevitably the question, intellectual, theological and ideological, which followed from some reasoning was: who a Muslim is. Given the deep-rooted sectarian and sub-sectarian divisions as well as the existence of linguistic nationalities within Pakistani Muslims, the quest to find a pure Muslim identity has for all practical purposes resulted in the exclusion and alienation of non-dominant sects and linguistic nationalities from what in 1947 was projected as a homogenous Muslim nation. One can add that non-Muslim Pakistanis have always been marginalised and over the years their position has become increasingly vulnerable to majoritarian tyranny.

In theoretical terms one can argue that once the politics of othering, demonising and dehumanising gets entrenched in politics its divisive nature comes to haunt society in a profound manner and therefore communalism transforming into sectarianism and sub-sectarianism is built into the logic of such politics. 77 years of Pakistan experience is ample corroboration of the egregious nature of such politics.