Recently, Orya Maqbool Jan, the retired bureaucrat who now fancies himself as an ideologue and political commentator, warned that if the ‘establishment’ continues to support the current government, Pakistan will be rocked by a revolutionary uprising like the one that erupted in Iran in 1979. 

Then there is the former prime minister Imran Khan who was ousted in April 2022 and is now claiming that, if he is arrested, people would pour out on the roads like thousands of Turks did during a failed coup attempt against Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016. 

Pakistani politicians and ideologues often refer to contemporary dramatic events elsewhere to conjure alarmist possibilities in their own country. Only rarely do they refer to past events that took place in Pakistan. At least not in this context.

For example, no one speaks of the violent 1983 movement against the dictator Ziaul Haq, which almost yanked Sindh away from the rest of the country. Or very few now speak of the mass uprising against the Ayub Khan dictatorship in 1968.

Pakistan’s 75 years are full of events that our alarmists can invoke to offer warnings of social upheavals. Yet, why do Pakistani politicians and self-styled analysts continue to look elsewhere?

Surely, our latest batch of sudden revolutionaries such as Jan and Khan could have given examples closer to home to forewarn the coming of an apocalypse in case things didn’t go the way they want them to. 

Maybe they believe that examples like the 1968 and the 1983 movements, or even the 1977 uprising against the ZA Bhutto regime, or for that matter, the 2007 Lawyers’ Movement against the Pervez Musharraf dictatorship, were not dramatic enough? Perhaps. Indeed, images of public executions and firing squads and burning buildings from the Iranian Revolution, and visuals of people lying in front of tanks in Turkey, are certainly more exciting. 

In 1969, when protests, mainly by leftist youth, had managed to force Ayub Khan to resign, the Islamist ideologue Abul Ala Maududi warned that the youth may face brutal retaliations from those who did not agree with their ideology. Maududi referenced the violence that Indonesian communists encountered in 1965-66. 

In 1965, 500,000 to 1,000,000 communists and alleged communist sympathisers were massacred by the Indonesian armed forces and by right-wing Islamist groups when the military accused the largest communist party in Indonesia of murdering six military officers and attempting a coup. 

But whereas Maududi, perturbed by the increasing leftist sentiments among Pakistan’s youth, warned about a retaliation against them in the mould of the 1965 Indonesian massacres, the retaliation did take place two years later — but 2,000 km away in the erstwhile East Pakistan.

What’s more, Maududi’s political party sent volunteers to facilitate Pakistan’s armed forces to eliminate Bengali nationalists.

This begs the question whether the alarmism that references dramatic upheavals elsewhere is actually wishful thinking on the part of those who use it to conjure what might happen in Pakistan? Their ‘warnings’ might actually be desires or even fantasies. After all, wouldn’t men such as Khan love seeing his supporters lying in front of tanks, or Jan relish the idea of an Iran-type revolution in Pakistan? 

The reason that these remain alarmist fantasies inspired by events outside Pakistan is because Pakistan’s diverse ethnic and sectarian demography and the strongly unified nature of its armed forces are not compatible with the aforementioned events in Iran and Turkey — two countries that enjoy more sectarian/religious and ethnic homogeneity.

Yet, the reference of the 1979 Iranian uprising was all the rage in Pakistan across the 1980s. Ironically, it was mostly referred to by those in power. For example, in 1980, a sitting minister in the Zia dictatorship explained Zia’s Hudood Ordinances as deterrents formulated “to avoid an Iran-like revolution in Pakistan.” The stringent ordinances were described as ‘Islamic’ by the dictatorship, but were largely seen as being draconian and even “barbaric” by Zia’s opponents.

The minister was thus warning that, without such ordinances, the “Islam-loving people of Pakistan” would rise up and demand Shariah rule and that Zia was fulfilling this demand in a more measured manner and therefore mitigating the kind of commotion seen in Iran in 1979.

Even till the first Nawaz Sharif government (1990-93), Sharif was warning that if he did not continue “Zia’s mission”, the country would face an Iran-like uprising. In this case, however, it wasn’t wishful thinking, really. It was a warning to those who were his opponents.

In a way, Nawaz was telling them (as had Zia) to better tolerate his strand of Islamism than the strands being demanded by militant clerics. But why refer to the 1979 Iranian revolution in this respect, when one could refer to the vicious 1953 and 1974 anti-Ahmadiyya movements? Of course, after 1974, these movements became constitutionally justified and couldn’t be used as warnings of any kind. 

The devastating Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) was once another favourite alarmist example. In the late 1980s, when ethnic violence erupted in Karachi, the then chief of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM), Altaf Hussain, often warned that Karachi would become like Beirut, the Lebanese city that was ravaged by the civil war. Images of that civil war were still fresh in people’s minds. So, instead of, say, referring to war-torn Dhaka of 1971 in former East Pakistan, Hussain chose to speak of Beirut. 

The interesting bit is that, whether it was 1965’s Indonesia, 1980’s Beirut, 1979’s Iran or 2016’s Turkey, none of these references are very convincing in Pakistan’s context because the dynamics of Pakistan’s political and economic cleavages are nothing like those of Indonesia, Iran, Lebanon or Turkey.

And certainly not like those of 18th century France. Yes, Pakistani politicians are also very fond of warning about an uprising like the 18th century French Revolution. Why not refer to the 1857 uprising against the British in India instead, one wonders? 

Most of these referential warnings look and sound like alarmist fantasies more than an outcome of any informed analysis. Pakistan’s 75 years are full of events that our alarmists can conjure. Yet, they continue to look elsewhere, blissfully ignorant of the fact that conditions elsewhere are quite different than what they are in Pakistan.

The reading of history by our alarmists is alarmingly sensationalist.

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 12th, 2023