August 10, 2003

‘Our roots have been bludgeoned out of existence by the self-proclaimed ideologues. Having done that, they had to fill this void with a fiction, so they invented an identity by reassimilating the nation into another assumedidentity that was extra-territorial and disconnected,’ argues Aitzaz Ahsan

BARRISTER Aitzaz Ahsan believes the establishment has played a dirty trick with the nation, leaving it a confused mass rather than a nation proud of itself. Discrediting our roots is no service to the nation, says Aitzaz, who held key portfolios during the two terms Benazir Bhutto had in power.

Apart from being a lawyer and a politician, Aitzaz is the author of The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan, a political history of the land. In a recent interview with Dawn Magazine, Aitzaz Ahsan spoke in detail about the confusion that surrounds the issue of Pakistani nationality. The following are excerpts:

Q. Many people believe Pakistan is not a nation even after 56 years of independence. What, in your view, are the possible reasons for such a state of affairs?

A. The first important reason is the identity crisis that we have brought upon our own selves. We have been schizophrenically torn between the South Asian and Arab identifications. We deny the one and assume the other. We have thus assumed a split personality. Both the complete denial and the eager assumption are unrealistic. But reason has no basis in our attitudes. If you deny your own identity, you will end up effectively denying your nationhood.

For 56 years we have been made to believe that the only justification for the partition of the subcontinent was that we were two entirely different and mutually exclusive peoples in every detail and particular. The Indians were Indians in every sense of the word, and we were distinct from them in every aspect. And we convinced ourselves that this was the sole justification for the creation of Pakistan even when there were other reasons as well.

Q. What were the effects of this concept of exclusivity on our nationhood?

A. This concept of mutual exclusivity had three direct results. First, it compelled us to deny all the common factors of language, poetry, literature, art forms, culture, dress, rituals and the entire complex of lifestyles and emotions that were common between what are now the Indians and the Pakistanis, including origins, birthplaces and institutions of learning.

From school, we were taught to hate India and the Indians. The ruling industrial elite and the defence establishment could not, of course, justify appropriation of enormous resources to its own needs and requirements, which, as we all know, stretch far beyond just weapons, and include residential plots and pensions, without creating a hysteria based on hatred for India.

To justify this hatred, every means had to be found to differentiate the Pakistani from the Indian. This included the denial of common attributes and factors. The communal riots at the time of Partition were constantly cited to build an anti-India fervour. To be good Pakistanis, we had to be ‘un-Indian’ and anti-Indian: to shun their produce, their films, their friendships. But in this process, we denied a part of our own selves which was indeed in part ‘Indian’ or which shared several attributes with the Indians. In cultural terms, this rupture and denial were against facts, and unnatural.

In its endeavour to establish such exclusivity the fundamentalists became the allies of the establishment. The security establishment fanned fear and the religious parties, which had opposed Pakistan, found in this debate a chance to re-establish their credentials. The clergy provided that new philosophical justification for the foundations of the very country they had opposed. This mindset created an illiberal and intolerant state apparatus. Thus, the Jamaat, for instance, partnered the army action in East Pakistan and the so-called Islamization during the Zia era.

To reject the real and to adopt the extra-territorial fiction we rewrote school syllabi, distorted our history books, prescribed hate programmes on state-controlled media, labelled all pacifists as traitors, created a tense militarist mindset and thus destroyed the foundations of our nationhood.

The truth is that the Pakistani shares a great deal of his identity with the Indian. But that does not mean that the Pakistani does not have his own distinct national identity. Having lived for tens of thousands of years along the banks of the Indus and its tributaries, the Pakistani has a primordial and ancient culture that is distinct from the Indian, the Persian, and the Central Asian. Yet he shares some attributes of his identity with all of them. In this nationhood, the Pakistani peoples are distinct.

Together they form one over-arching identity which spans the entire reach of the Indus basin embracing the Kashmiri, Pathan, Punjabi, Sindhi and the Baloch. This is an identity that pre-existed the advent of Islam in the Indus region. The Mohajirs, who, during the earlier centuries, had crossed over to the Gangetic region from the Indus Valley were only the sons and daughters of Indus who now returned to the motherland in 1947.

All these together were, indeed, one Indus nation rooted in its territory and its own distinct culture. We should all take pride in this identity, but it has itself been bludgeoned out of existence by the self-proclaimed ‘ideologues’ of Pakistan; and exclusive and utterly intolerant elitist club of mumbo-jumbo born-again Islamists.

Q. You said there were three consequences of the exclusivity concept. What are the other two?

A. The second consequence of this denial was that the Pakistani elite having rejected the actual ground reality (our South Asian nationhood) had to fill this void with a fiction. It had to invent an identity. It had broken away from a physical, territorial, cultural, racial and historical foundations and now tried to re-assimilate the nation into another assumed identity that was extra-territorial and disconnected. This demanded a ‘personality switch’ of the Pakistani citizen from a South Asian to an Arab identity. Doctrinaire and obscurantist versions of Islam, that had not been able to bond the Turk, or the Indonesian with the Arab, became the great vehicle of this personality switch. The fundamentalists facilitated Zia’s attempts to introduce Arab interpretations of Islam.

This personality switch ran contrary to historical facts. It undermined our own nationhood. We were neither Arabs nor were Arabs prepared to accept us as such. In the 5,000 years since the advent of the Aryans, the Indus region, or Pakistan, had only had a brief encounter with the Arabs. That, too, was confined to its southern reaches alone and between the years 711AD, when Muhammad Bin Qasim entered Sindh, up to 854AD only. Even the Islam that was introduced and that spread all over the Indus region was not a gift of the Arabs. The Indus was introduced to Islamic teachings by Sufi saints with their origin in Central Asia, Persia and Iraq.

The third consequence of this personality switch was that we lost our own moorings and confidence. We had no identity of our own. We became apish and copy-cats by nature. Once we had denied ourselves, we naturally began to assume that everything foreign was good. Nothing that was of Pakistani manufacture had quality. It has taken Pakistani manufacturers enormous advertisement expenditures to convince people that they have quality. Even they keep advertising that the key components are imported. This is because the dogmatic interpretations of ideology are themselves imported. No nation can thrive in borrowed clothes. Its nationhood is, and must always remain, its own.

Q. Do you think that the political parties have failed to play their role in this regard? How do you see the role of the regional parties?

A. The political leadership that was in place after the death of the Quaid had no popular constituency. To remain in office they had to obtain the support of the civil and military establishment. The C-in-C, Gen Ayub, was inducted as the defence minister. Civil bureaucrats like Ghulam Mohammad and Chaudhry Mohammad Ali were inducted as governor-general and prime minister. A game of musical chairs was played to avoid going to the polls. The superior judiciary supported the establishment in the Tamizuddin Case (1954) and the famous Reference of 1955 which provided a sham electoral college as a fig-leaf for democracy. Finally, when general elections became unavoidable, the military stepped in and imposed martial law in October, 1958.

To avoid the democratic aspirations of East Pakistan, the right-wingers were inducted to support Ayub. In trying to force down an amorphous, extra-territorial concept of the so-called ‘ideology of Pakistan’, the clergy and the military together tested the very fabric of nationhood. The result was Bangladesh.

When major political parties become adjuncts of the security apparatus, conjuring up imaginary issues such as self-crafted ‘ideologies’, and neglect the real issues of the people, then naturally regional parties will come forth and fill up the vacuum. But before this could entirely happen in Pakistan, the Pakistan Peoples’ Party had been formed on a platform that was dedicated to the real issues of the people: roti, kapra aur makaan. It was a blessing, but the establishment has tried to fracture the PPP’s liberal appeal by funding and encouraging ethnic, religious, sectarian and regional parties. Zia funded the APMSO, MQM, Jiey Sindh, and all the religious outfits. But the PPP has survived.

Now another national party is emerging on an anti-establishment platform: the PML-N. As long as it retains a posture independent of the security establishment it will maintain a nationwide constituency. How long it will continue to do so is difficult to predict. But if these two parties remain committed to their programmes and ideals, a new era of democracy and political harmony will emerge cutting out fissiparous elements.

Q. But what message is conveyed to the people when Nawaz Sharif says, ‘jag Punjabi jag’, and Benazir says that Punjabi leaders get a better treatment even at the hands of the judiciary? Does it not mean that even top leaders fan prejudices and weaken national unity?

A. Nawaz Sharif raised the slogan of ‘jag Punjabi jag’ with the support of the defence establishment. It was raised to oppose the then prime minister Benazir and to highlight that she was a Sindhi. The president who dismissed the Benazir government and the COAS, and the Chief Justice who endorsed the dismissal then facilitated the elevation of her opponent, Nawaz, to the office of prime minister in 1990. I am sure Nawaz has now learnt his lessons.

Benazir had more cogent reasons to complain about judicial verdicts. After she was dismissed in 1990, the dismissal was upheld by the Supreme Court. Then Nawaz was dismissed in April 1993. Within five weeks of urgent hearing, the Supreme Court reinstated him. The grounds were not much different, but the verdicts were. Even more stark was the difference that was yet to be manifested. When Benazir was dismissed by Farooq Leghari in 1996, she naturally expected her reinstatement on the same principles propounded in the Nawaz Sharif case. But the goal post was shifted for her.

Even the Judges Case seems to have been meant exclusively for the Benazir administration. What else should she then say? Yet she has never employed the so-called Sindh card or abandoned her vast constituency in Punjab and other provinces. This is her strength and this provides her with the credentials of a national leader.

Q. What are the possible consequences if the present state of affairs is allowed to continue?

A. Disaster. Paranoia. Chaos. Anarchy. A nation pitted against itself. At a time when the pressure of population is upon us, when scarce resources like water and jobs have to be shared, we need harmony and tolerance. The engines of intolerance must be denied fuel and sustenance. They must be marginalized.

Q. What remedial steps would you propose?

A. Recognition of the fact that we are a plural society and that each person has his individual right to his beliefs and rituals so that our energies are no longer spent out upon being vigilantes or minders of others, and each one of us begins to attend to his own honest business and advancement; peace with India so that we can reduce our defence outlays; disarming fundamentalist, sectarian and ethnic outfits so that we can attract more foreign investment and generate more jobs and prosperity; and, to do all this, a revision of the academic syllabi and a tolerance of what is presented on the means of entertainment. Let the people relax and be themselves. Let us enjoy in the joy of others.

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