DAWN Magazine (Aug 10, 2003) carried an interview of lawyer, politician and author, Aitzaz Ahsan, in which he discussed the issue of the making of the ‘Pakistan nation’, and the role played in it by the establishment and various political parties.
The need for me to comment on it arose because Mr Ahsan, in his endeavour to prove his earlier views expressed in The Indus Saga, has tried to reinterpret, ending in confusing the questions that are so important to the existence and identity of the peoples inhabiting the Indus Valley, including Sindhis who, of course, concern me the most. He has tried to distort historical facts and disfigure the historical process to conform to his specific thinking, and justify his current political standing. It is saddening as it is done in the name of ‘correcting the misdeeds of others’.
The centrepoint of Mr Ahsan’s idea is that the establishment is ‘torn (the people) between South Asia and Arab identifications’ while his own emphasis is that the identity of the ‘Pakistan nation’ lies with South Asia. Ironically, he himself is torn between a host of identifications; sometime he calls it ‘South Asian’, at other times giving it the name of ‘Indian’, while his effort is aimed at portraying present Pakistan as a nature a single identity. But the interview in itself carries such flagrant, stark and instant contradictions that show the hollowness of the cause Mr Ahsan is pleading, and a cursory look will suffice to prove it.
First of all, there does not exist, and never has, any single identity such as South Asian. What is common between Bhutanese and Sindhis, or Pukhtuns and Sinhalese, or Punjabis and Bengalis? Mr Ahsan’s emphasis is to disown the identity based on religion. Then comes ‘common Indian identity’ for which Aitzaz Ahsan cites “common factors of language, poetry, literature, art forms, culture, dress, rituals and the entire complex of lifestyles and emotions....” One cannot imagine reading an artifact sentence more than this one, as even a schoolboy knows that these factors are not found common in any two peoples of the subcontinent, let alone the whole of India.
If Mr Ahsan has in mind the proximity of Urdu and Hindi languages, it was confined to a very few areas of northern India which do not form any part of today’s Pakistan. In pre-partition Sindh, Balochistan, Punjab and Pakhtun areas, very few had the privilege of knowing Urdu, while for the masses it was just another language. Same was the case with people of southern and eastern parts of India vis-a-vis Hindi, who even today adore their national (regional) languages and prefer even English over Hindi. These very areas of northern India were the most vociferous for Partition of India on religious basis, and eager to garb Arab identity. No one can minimize, let alone forget, the Bengali-Urdu tussle during the earlier part of Pakistan’s life and its consequences. In case of other ‘common factors’ cited such as literature, poetry, art forms, culture, dress, etc, the situation is not much different from that of language.
Coming to the idea of (present day) Pakistan being a ‘national entity’, before 14th August 1947, there never existed such a unit even geographically, what to talk of other factors such as language and culture, etc, which were, and are, very much different for each constituting unit. And the basis of making present day Pakistan a single entity was the religion (or Arab identity) which Mr Ahsan tends to discard in the changed circumstances. His effort to portray “5,000 years since the advent of the Aryans, the Indus region (as) Pakistan” is intellectual hypocrisy and the worst kind of fraud with history one can possibly imagine. In fact Mr Ahsan has himself fallen prey to the same heresy which the establishment has been victim of — to invent an identity.
There is complete agreement to and appreciation of Mr Ahsan’s views about the clergy’s connivance and collusion with ruling elite in creating an exclusive mindset and an unliberal and intolerant state when, he says, “thus the Jamaat, for instance, partnered the army action in East Pakistan and the so called Islamization during the Zia era.” But here one feels compelled to ask what has been the role of the PPP in these very fields? And it is regretful to say that Mr Aitzaz’s party has played the same role and, in some cases, even overshadowed the religious parties. When tanks rolled in the streets of Dhaka city and the corridors of Dhaka University, his leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, said: “Thank God Pakistan has been saved.”
Jamaat-i-Islami provided Alshams and Albadar volunteers to fight alongside the army to kill the aspirations of Bengalis, while Bhutto, with all his abilities, defended this ‘joint operation’ and pleaded the case of military government at the UN with the famous act of tearing apart the resolution for ceasefire. As far as the ‘so called Islamization’ is concerned, it is an undeniable fact that this process started during the first tenure of the PPP government led by Z.A. Bhutto. Up to 1970, under civilian or military governments, with all their defects and deficiencies, corruption and coercion, the Pakistani polity and Pakistani state were secular in character. Mr Bhutto, out of sheer political hypocrisy, laid the foundations of this ‘so called Islamization’ by declaring Qadianis non-Muslims and Friday as holiday, closing wine shops, creating council of Islamic ideology and enforcing other religions rituals over which, General Zia, giving unprecedented heights to hypocrisy, built a big multistory building.
Now what happened to the much-trumpeted slogan of “Roti, Kapra aur Makan during the PPP’s three stints to power is a worldwide known fact and hardly needs any comment. However, in order to put the record right, the need is felt to divulge on the role of the establishment vis-a-vis the PPP and other parties, specially Jeay Sindh. The following chairman of PPP started his political career under the umbrella of first martial law under Ayub Khan, and reached the zenith of power through second martial law, when he created an unprecedented and unrivalled record of becoming the civilian Chief Martial Law Administrator. On taking the hot seat, in collaboration with the much-maligned establishment, Mr Bhutto dismissed the democratically elected government of Balochistan and thus deprived the country of the only real chance of democracy and strengthening civilian institutions. It should not be surprising for anyone to know that the founding chairman of ‘the liberal PPP’ has been the most vociferous proponent, in the history of Pakistan, of the hate-India campaign that Mr Ahsan today hates so much.
As far as the allegation of funding of Jeay Sindh and other parties is concerned, I, as a responsible person of the party of the founder of Jeay Sindh, Saeen G.M. Sayed, the Jeay Sindh Mahaz, say with all authority and confidence that the establishment, including Ziaul Haq and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto could not even dare to offer anything to Sayed or any member of Jeay Sindh Mahaz. However, it could be possible that state institutions, including the period under the PPP, may have bribed an individual or any splinter group to weaken and disgrace the Jeay Sindh Movement. Mr Aitzaz Ahsan has remained incharge of the interior ministry and he must be aware of any such transactions, so he should make them public.
Present-day Pakistan is not a single entity with a common identity, but a country comprising different nations with different identities and having separate and distinguished languages and cultures occupying their specific soils since the last 5,000 years. The establishment’s theory of one common identification based on religion (Arab identification) is not a new one. People like Choudhry Aitzaz Ahsan remained happy and content with this identification until it worked in denying different constituent units, or nations, their separate identity and keeping them subservient to Pakistan’s power; Punjab.
Now, after the separation of Bengal on the basis of nationalism and in the wake of the changed international scenario, when they find this theory of common (religious) identity wanting, they have started this campaign to invent and, in fact, enforce this new theory of nationhood based on land, language history and culture. Their effort is new but the purpose is old, i.e. to keep the state structure intact, which gives Punjab the exclusive right to rule and its people dominance over others.
