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April 27, 2003
REVIEWS: Dreams are not free
If the thirteen articles, carried by Mumbai’s Economic and Political Weekly in Nov 2002, and brought together in this book, were to be condensed in one question, a question never asked, it would be: “How did Pakistan, starting with formal independence, end up as a neo-colonial state?” The answer, in some ways, would be contained in the question itself.
The thirteen contributors included in the collection are from varied, but generally related, fields — social anthropologists, historians, experts on development, activist academics, political scientists, economists etc, all of them distinguished in their fields.
Hamza Alavi’s contribution on the social nature of the struggle for Pakistan and the developments in its early years defines the space in which the others’ works are placed. It conditions the theses which follow it.
He rejects the Congress propaganda that while, it was enlightened and secular, the Muslim League was obscurantist. Alavi says that the League’s politics was emphatically secular and remained so right until the fifties. It was Gandhi who brought religion and religious idiom into politics.
The Muslim League entered into the Lucknow Pact with Congress in 1916 in order to wage a combined struggle against the British. Their demands were similar and entirely secular. The divergence widened between them as the Congress revealed itself increasingly as a practically Hindu party. The break came in 1928 in Calculta when the Congress allowed the Mahasabha to reject the agreement the Congress and the Muslim League had already reached.
The situation changed radically in 1937 with the inception of the elected governments in the provinces. Now the centre of gravity of Muslim politics shifted from the minority to the Muslim majority provinces, mainly Punjab and Bengal. The Punjabi landed class, worried about its survival in the face of the Congress’ programme of land reforms, ultimately supported partition.
In Bengal, the League was radicalized as it took up the struggle of the Muslim peasants against Hindu land magnates. Gandhi’s mass basis was a myth, according to Alavi. He “sought no more than to make the peasant speak in the name of the Congress and did little to make the Congress speak in the name of the peasant”.
All this time, Muslim League itself stuck to its secular outlook leaving the Muslim religious parties to be nurtured by the Congress. It was only when, a few years after independence, regional movements, raised their heads in Pakistan that Liaquat Ali started using religion as a counter-foil. Of course, once bigotry was given an opening, it did not cease to grow.
Ayesha Jalal, a historian, has followed Manto in writing a letter in his name to Vajpayee, explaining that, as long as the Kashmir problem lasted, the army would ride high in Pakistan, that democracy in Pakistan hinged on democracy in Kashmir.
Our distinguished historian Dr Mubarak Ali says the so-called Pakistan ideology has the assignment of justifying the partition, adding “whenever history is written under the influence of an ideology, its objectivity is sacrificed. But mon cher docteur where does one find an objective history? Thucydides? Gibbon? Toynbee? All historical narrative is a statement. The only thing is on whose behalf it is made.
Stalinist history was crude. Braudel’s is sophisticated. But they both have class angles. Nationalism requires myths even more so, because, being based on class collaboration, it has to minimize the class conflicts. The Indus Saga or Feroze Ahmad’s writings are attractive because they, fleeing into primitive nationalism, do not have to paper anything over. But a nation without history, including the myths, loses its memory, since nations need illusions as much as does the individual.
Mohammad Waseem, searching for reasons for what he calls the “democratic downslide” in Pakistan attributes it to “structural discontinuity”, influx of refugees, relentless Indian menace, etc. He blames over centralization for the rise of centrifugal tendencies and for what he calls “permanent non-elected machinery of the government, which increasingly operates as a state into itself”. All that is true. But over-centralization was needed to overcome discontinuity. Anyway the role the ever-stronger feudal class has not been treated here adequately. In fact, it is so powerful that it broke the back of our nascent industrial bourgeoisie through massive nationalization in the seventies.
Shahrukh Rafi Khan’s piece on WB-IMF’s “aid” is solid. And his advice should be taken, that we should “concentrate on reviving domestic industry making it internally competitive”, instead of letting others de-industrialize us. But as long as we live beyond our means, we cannot overthrow the tutelage of WB-IMF.
This is the point stressed by Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha who says simply that we cannot match India and our economy cannot sustain the current rate of expenditure on the armed forces, which, moreover, goes mostly on personnel instead of modernization of weapons. It is not good for defence itself, because, as she puts it “sustaining defence spending at a comparatively high land erodes security”. She suggests a small army with conscript backup. However, there we may face the problem of movement in time of war. So all people must be trained and armed. But of course, the landed class would not want an armed peasantry.
Arif Hasan holds the “Islamization” Zia-style responsible for the alienation of the elite from the Pakistani culture. Reza Ali is right that urbanization is an integral part of modernization. Tariq Rahman feels that language movements are responses to the use of Urdu as symbol of Pakistani identity. He may be right, but if today every Pakistani can communicate with every other, it is because of the state policy of spreading Urdu. No other Pakistani language can take its place.
Ercelawn and Nauman are right that the economy cannot be left entirely to the search for profit. And, after all, the capital needs non-profit seeking agencies to keep the people alive and educate them for its use.
Shahid Kardar’s statement that even the middle class of Pakistan “was not a product of a dynamic process of growth” only means that he takes the bourgeois ideological history at its face value. The state’s role has everywhere been crucial in the creation of the capitalist class. And I would rather not comment on the concrete measures suggested by him for improving the civil service.
Zaidi concludes that the latest elections have not broken the pattern of Pakistani politics. Opportunism and praetorianism rule supreme. He should have added that this internal weakness reflects itself in foreign relations, in our further slide to neo-colonialism.
The fact is that, if one does not pay for liberty before independence, one has to do so afterwards. Independence is a certain arrangement, a certain relationship. But it is also a certain inner transformation. One starts becoming free when one launches upon the struggle and creates the brotherhood which makes the nation strong.
The problem with the Muslim League was that it represented a minority, a huge one but all the same, a minority. If a minority attempts mass agitation, it would arouse the majority against it. Therefore, it can only find a place for itself in a struggle of others.
As a result, the Muslim League, though it had mass support could not lead a mass movement and was not steeled in battle. So it had too many carpet-baggers and was brushed aside with ease by the bureaucracy, after independence.
Secondly, a solution to the problems of the Muslim minority provinces could not be sought elsewhere. Most of the pieces here are of a high quality, covering the process of our national development from different angles. They are a corrective to “approved” history.
Continuity and Change: Socio-Political and Institutional Dynamics in Pakistan
Edited by S. Akbar Zaidi
City Press, 316 Madina City Mall, Abdullah Haroon Road, Karachi-74400. Tel: 021-5650623, 5213916
Email: cp@citypress.cc
Website:
www.citypress.cc
ISBN 969-8380-64-7
185pp. Rs395
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