Notwithstanding political statements, nationalist rhetoric, media frenzy and the colourful celebrations, national integration remains an objective yet to be attained. For all practical purposes, we remain a nation more in hope than in being
FOLLOWING the Second World War when Great Britain and other colonial powers were forced under great economic pressures and growing mood of defiance to relinquish control of their colonies, there emerged a number of new states on the globe. In the new countries, the absence of independent and autonomous economic and administrative structures and viable political institutions brought about an uncertain situation, raising question about their future development. The biggest challenge for them was to create new nations in societies which by and large were traditional in nature with archaic social systems and norms.
Rupert Emerson in his From Empire to Nation aptly characterized them as nations not in being, but in hope. Pakistan itself was one such country where people had yet to transform themselves into a nation. No one at independence would have thought that the Pakistanis would remain a ‘nation in hope’ even after over half-a-century.
Looking at the state of affairs after 56 years of independence, one does not find it difficult to realize that despite expansion in a number of areas, national integration remains an objective to be attained by the Pakistanis. Notwithstanding the statements of political leaders, the nationalist rhetoric and the enthusiasm generated through the media, and the colourful celebrations around national days, the spirit of nationhood is absent from our midst.
Our collective life is devoid of an inner unity. Different segments of society are attuned to their respective interests, objectives and goals, seeking them in isolation. An analysis of Pakistani socio-political realities reveals the existence of multifarious contradictions which have grown with the passage of time. People at distance with each other, polarization of interests, indifference, intolerance, growing tendency of violence, absence of a culture of dialogue, extermination of one religious group from Islam by the other, lack of consensus on fundamental political principles of statecraft and recurrent military rules ... all these facts speak volumes about a people who have not coalesced into a nation, and are a disjointed lot.
At no point in the last 56 years have Pakistanis presented a picture of a nation, with a noticeable level of mental and practical harmony, which would have built bridges of compromise and would have resolved its contradictions through mutual compromise and coexistence.
The question arises as to why after having traversed a long distance and having undergone crisis after crisis, Pakistanis could not transform themselves into a nation. At the outset, it must be accepted that nations are not formed through propaganda, slogans and rhetoric. Nor do appeals and sermons, or even ideological indoctrination transform a mass of heterogeneous people into a nation.
Stern rules and regulations and coercive means, too, do not mould a nation. National integration realizes through vision, long-term planning, reasoning, and removing of the ethnic, regional, social and gender contractions through concrete measures. It is only after doing this that the real national ethos emerges in a society and the people begin to relate to each other and accept the existence of the others as a useful condition for attaining collective good.
A number of social scientists define nationalism as a state of mind, a collective consciousness that enables a people to believe that their membership of a collectivity would enhance their well-being. Such consciousness is not produced by ideological inducements, rather it results from producing material conditions conducive to its creation. Looking back at Pakistan’s political journey, one finds these material and pragmatic conditions lacking. One could identify at least four major irritants that caused our failure in realizing a true spirit of nationhood.
Pakistan’s first unresolved problem has been the ideological confusion that has marred our political development. What relationship should there be between the state and religion? How should the state respond to the divergent religious sections of society? Should the religious class control political power for bringing society in conformity with the high ideals of Islam? These questions have remained at the centre of political debate since independence.
Had we benefited from the ideas of pre-independence enlightened intellectuals and leaders like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Allama Iqbal and the Quaid-i-Azam, the issues could have been resolved relatively easily as these leaders believed in a creative, dynamic and democratic concept of Islam. They saw Islam as a source of higher human values that ensured the development of society as an enlightened whole.
At the time of Partition, we had at least one leader who had no confusion in his mind about the manner in which a Pakistani nationhood could be developed. Jinnah was not only a witness to the political development of united India in the first half of the twentieth century, but had also played a decisive role in it. Who else could know better why India, instead of getting independence as a united country, split into two states at independence.
Jinnah’s experience of Indian politics gave him a sense of the factors that make or break the nations. This sense found its best expression in his famous speech of August 11, 1947, in which he clearly identified the course through which a strong Pakistani nation could be evolved. The essence of Jinnah’s speech is this that if a part of a nation becomes a permanent majority while the other is relegated to the position of a permanent minority, this serves as a source of national disintegration.
Adding emphasis to his point, he referred to the example of Britain where after years of conflict between the Roman Catholics and the Protestants, the British people finally succeeded in evolving a united nation. Concluding his point, he suggested: “Now, I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of the individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.”
Perhaps no better exposition of Jinnah’s vision of a Pakistani nationhood could be possible. His vision underlined neutrality of state viz-a-viz religious beliefs and sectarian affiliations. Unfortunately, following his death, successive governments invoked religion to foster their interests. The policy to use Islam as a tool to legitimize their authoritarian rule might have brought these governments their desired ends, but it divided the Pakistani people in combative factions.
For decades, separate electorates were continued in contravention of Jinnah’s vision. Discrimination was practised against religious communities and extremist outfits were patronized with the result that today society has become hostage to them.
The second contradiction of Pakistani society which has prevented the people from becoming a nation has been the social cleavage in society. There has been a vast disparity between the privileged and the underprivileged. To be fair, it would be wrong to assume that such differences do not exist in countries that have succeeded in attaining a noticeable degree of unity. But in those countries the underprivileged sections are not totally neglected by the state. The result is that the self-respect of the vast majority remains intact, and it does not develop into a sense of deprivation and alienation.
Pakistan, whose demand was made with the claim of establishing a just society, has not moved towards that end even by a small measure. Today, the small minority of the most privileged few is economically more powerful than it had been ever before, while around 40 per cent of the population languishes below the poverty line.
After independence, our economy has certainly expanded, and in certain sectors the growth rate has been exemplary. Thus, according to estimates, since 1947, our economy has expanded ten times, with an average annual growth of five per cent. But one must also be mindful of the fact that the indicators of a country’s economic growth do not necessarily represent the actual human conditions in that country. It is important to see how and to what extent the economic expansion has benefited the society and resulted in the human development which may be measured along factors such as the purchasing power of an individual, access to education, and availability of health facilities.
The state of human development in Pakistan can be gauged by the fact that in 2001, the per capita income was Rs5,128 per annum. The SPDC’s 2001 Annual Report warns that this figure is an overall average, and the distribution of national income remains an area of concern.
In the last fifty years, the country’s literacy rate has increased, but its pace has been miserably slow. According to official sources, the literacy rate is around 49 per cent; the unofficial sources suggest a much smaller figure. The state of the health sector is no less disappointing. According to estimates, 86 per cent of the rural population is deprived of clean drinking water. To what extent health facilities have been made available to the people can be ascertained by the fact that around 50 per cent of all deaths in the country result from contagious diseases which result due to unclean water and unhygienic environment.
The gap between the rich and the poor can also be ascertained by the trends in income inequalities. According to the SPDC’s said report, the impact of gross inequality on the incomes of the highest and the lowest twenty per cent of the population is quite disturbing.
Accordingly, the real per capita income of the highest quintile households has risen from Rs9,471 in 1988 to Rs11,607 in 1999. On the other hand, the real per capita income of the lowest quintile households increased marginally from Rs1,905 in 1988 to Rs1,947 in 1999. These figures suggest that the purchasing power of households in the highest quintile increased by over 33 per cent in eleven years, whereas that of households in the lowest quintile rose by only two per cent in the same period.
One can imagine the material and the mental gap between the privileged few and the vast majority of the deprived and dispossessed in the country. In the presence of such inequilibrium, the dream of Pakistani nationhood is difficult to materialize.
The third contradiction which has thwarted national integration has been the Centre-province conflicts and the regional disparities that have existed in the country and our failure in evolving a system that could ensure fair and just representation to all provinces and equal opportunity of development to all regions.
Pakistani society has been, in its nature, a federal society with different cultures, languages and ethnic identities — apart from quite a few common factors. In a society with divergent and common elements operating simultaneously, it is necessary to recognize and accommodate all of them. In such a society, political institutions need to be built in a creative manner so that they may represent a balance between both sets of values and aspirations. A true federal constitutional system, for instance, can ensure unity in diversity.
Unfortunately, in Pakistan, true federal thinking has not been prevalent in governmental circles. Instead, a highly centralized system has remained intact in the country. This centralization has discouraged local initiatives, deprived provincial autonomy and tried to quell regional sentiments through force.
During the freedom movement, the Muslim League had assured the Muslim-majority provinces that they would get more autonomy in Pakistan than that they could expect in a united India. It is also a historical fact that right from the beginning the Congress party had been the advocate of a strong Centre, while the Muslim League and Jinnah stood for provincial autonomy. Had the League leadership not committed itself to provincial autonomy, it would not have been possible to bring the Muslim-majority provinces to rally around the demand of Pakistan.
However, after the creation of Pakistan, the concept of provincial autonomy was abandoned — a fact that paved the way for continued crises over the last 56 years. In 1971, we lost East Pakistan only because successive Pakistani regimes were not inclined to give to the Bengalis their due share and a satisfactory quantum of autonomy.
In the western part of the country, too, the Centre-province conflict became a permanent feature. In 1955, all the provinces and regions in the western wing were merged to create a single unit, a step that was resented by the smaller provinces which directed all their efforts to get the One Unit undone.
In 1973, the country finally succeeded in getting a unanimous constitution with all the provinces endorsing it. Though the constitution did not ideally embody the federal spirit, it could serve as a good starting point on a course leading to a genuine and viable federal system. But this could not happen, as soon after the promulgation of the constitution, Balochistan was subjected to military action.
Then in 1977, all prospects of constitutional progress were halted with the imposition of martial law. In the absence of constitution and democracy, provincial autonomy was unthinkable. After eleven long years of military rule, civilian rule was restored with severe limitations, with the result that in the next eleven years, four governments were installed — none of them being able to complete its tenure. It is interesting that on each occasion when the elected government at the Centre was removed by the presidents, or, as in the last case, by the Chief of the Army Staff, on pretexts of corruption, nepotism and mismanagement of economy, provincial assemblies were also dissolved without realizing that being in a federation they had a life of their own.
The fourth obstacle in our way of evolving a nationhood has been our state structure whose political and administrative institutions operate not in conjunction with the people, but above them. Pakistan acquired for itself a nomenclature of a ‘Republic’ way back in 1956, but its state continued to operate at a distance from the people.
The colonial legacy of controlling the people was imbibed by our state institutions. Thereby they take ‘control’ to be their objective, instead of devoting themselves to public service. The state-society contradiction has persisted ever since independence and it continues even today.
A nation cannot be built if its functions are divided into two distinct parts of governance and citizenship without linkages and without bearing of one on the other. In the absence of democratic channels between the state and society, the state institutions at best co-opt certain civilians for a particular span of time, and once they fulfil their purpose, they are removed. This is not what democracy stands for. Democracy integrates the people with the state in a most cohesive manner.
Having analysed the reasons why Pakistanis could not become a nation, one can move on to ask what can be done to foster nationhood in the country. National integration can be achieved only after we remove the irritants. It is important to indicate that of all the reasons cited above, none is a creation of the people. Though it can be said that the people cannot be absolved of the responsibility of enduring the wrong policies, they cannot be held responsible for creating them.
On the other hand, over the years, the people have waged a successful struggle for their survival. In fact, the one positive attribute of today’s Pakistani society is the undeniable truth that our people — most of them being extremely poor and dispossessed — have shown an exemplary instinct and talent for survival.
It is these people with whom the future of this country and its nationhood lies. A Pakistani nation will not, and cannot, be formed by those who have been ruling this country. If they could, they would have done it by now. This historical task can be fulfilled only by the people themselves. This they can do by taking the destiny in their own hands and begin a collective action towards realizing the material conditions on which they could build their nationhood.
Notwithstanding political statements, nationalist rhetoric, media frenzy and the colourful celebrations, national integration remains an objective yet to be attained. For all practical purposes, we remain a nation more in hope than in being 
