THE closer I get to becoming a senior citizen - or an "uncle" as one is increasingly called in this country - the more I realize that Pakistan, far from being an historical aberration or a product of any divide-and-run strategy by the British, was an historic inevitability. It had to come into being because of the irreconcilable differences between the Hindu and Muslim races. I find it utterly amazing that there are people both here and in India who should think otherwise.

A book I have just been reading is Nirad Chaudhuri's stunning "Autobiography of an Unknown Indian." After having read it I am ashamed of the fact that it had to take me half a century to reach it. Anyone interested in the recent history of the sub-continent, especially the revival of Hindu nationalism in the 19th century, should take this revelatory book to heart and chew its contents slowly. A more insightful look at the psychology of the Hindu mind over the ages would be hard to come across.

One of the things coming out strongly in Chauduri's account is that Hindu nationalism was not born as a consequence of British rule. It was there when the Muslims first arrived on this land and, feeding on rancour and hatred, it festered within for all the long centuries that the Muslims ruled India. Undergoing a revival in the 19th century at the hands of such enlightened teachers as Rammohum Roy and Swami Vivekenanda, it became corrupted when it came under the influence of Gandhism which returned Hindu nationalism back to the crude, atavistic forms it had acquired in response to the Muslim invasions.

Since the Muslims of the subcontinent also had a consciousness of separate identity, Hinduism and Islam in India were fated to follow divergent paths. Partition, therefore, far from being a tragedy, was driven by the forces of historic necessity. To historians my submissions would sound banal and over-simplistic, as perhaps they are. All I want to say is that the precise idea of Pakistan may have been articulated in the 1930s or '40s, but its seeds were sown when the first Muslim conquerors came to India a long time ago.

In setting down these facts (for so I take them to be) my intention is not to do my bit to stoke the fires of India-Pakistan animosity which already are blazing away merrily without needing any help from anyone. I am just trying to make a point, that too for domestic consumption.

And the point is that if the idea of Pakistan (while considering this, please keep the demons of literalism at bay) lay embedded in the alluvial soil of the Indo-Gangetic plain for so long, then it is likely that the realization of this idea will survive the ravages of history.

In other words, Pakistan is not an artificial construct like Yugoslavia or indeed the Soviet Empire whose break-up we have witnessed. It would therefore be quite wrong to label it a 'failed state' because this tag implies that such a state, collapsing under the weight of its failures, is about to have its name erased from the calendar of nations. Unless the entire sub-continent reverts to the chaos and disorder which existed in India between the twilight of the Mughals and the advent of the British, this is unlikely to happen.

Now if it is accepted that Pakistan will be around till the final trumpets sound, it follows that when with every change of government Pakistanis mount the house-tops and shout that this is their last chance, they stand guilty of collective stupidity. If Pakistan is going to be around till global warming gets the better of all of us, how can Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif or General Pervez Musharraf be our last chance?

Rulers will come and go, as will finance ministers with their promises to take us to the moon, but even if each one of them is worse than the other, Pakistan with all its debts and mishaps will remain - not because it has received a special dispensation from the gods but simply because its scaffolding rests on a thousand years of history. This does not mean that we have open licence to commit what folly we please. But it does mean that we should learn to temper some of the morbidity which strikes us whenever one government falls and another takes its place.

The question of the idea addressed, what then is Pakistan's abiding tragedy? It is simply this that the guardians of its flame, whether chosen by accident or design, have been unequal to the task entrusted to them. The idea of Pakistan has been betrayed by the country's successive rulers and this fact, more than anything else, accounts for the mordant and unrelieved quality of Pakistani cynicism.

What is important to bear in mind, however, is that the motivating force of this cynicism is neither nihilism nor a sense of despair. Far from being so effete or defeatist as to question the very purpose of the country's existence, it rather asks, often with anguish in its voice, why the country's circumstances are not better than they are, why inadequacy is the defining characteristic of Pakistani leadership, why Pakistan and Pakistanis should be the butt of international criticism. Behind such expressions of concern lurks the hope that Pakistan too can be a proud nation liberated from the never-ending cycle of reliving its past.

But this cynicism also recognizes that while certain things measure up to the idea of Pakistan, others do not. Bumbling political leadership is a bad thing but it is a fact of political life. Countries, even the most advanced and developed, get good rulers and bad. Life goes on. But political power in the hands of the military is a distorting influence, an aberration, because in no respect is it consistent with the spirit which underlies the creation of Pakistan.

True, Pakistan's democrats have been their own worst enemies. But that should mean the replacement of one legitimate sovereign by another till the golden mean is struck and not the replacement of democracy by a different animal altogether.

Although the wisdom of the masses is a meaningless cliche, nothing is more misleading than the assertion that illiteracy and poverty make the people of this country unfit for democracy. If being illiterate they could vote for Pakistan, and being poor keep faith with the country (which is more than can be said of the educated and the rich), they are fit enough for democracy. But only if their betters will let them be and not thrust fresh political experiments upon them after every few years.

These may sound like metaphysical calculations but going beyond them, how can we close our eyes to our own history wherein military rule is remembered more for the enduring damage inflicted than any good achieved? We must suffer from a strange death-wish to want to go down the same paths again.

Those who, struck by a loss of memory, say that this government will be different should look closely at its performance over the last 90 days. No one is saying it should have wrought miracles in this period. But at least it should have been able to get its direction straight and, if asked, been able to point out the difference its coming has made.

For most people the initial burst of euphoria with which the advent of the military was greeted is over because the realization, although slow in coming, has finally dawned, that replacing mufti with khaki in the seat of power has made no difference to their lives.

True, under the aegis of the army's monitoring teams, encroachments have been removed and some roads cleaned up. An accountability drive of sorts is also sputtering along. For the rest, all the glowing characteristics of subcontinental administration - bribery, work-shirking, inefficiency - remain in place. What justification then for rolling up the baggage of democracy?

Nor must eyes be closed to another danger. The army is getting more embroiled in civilian affairs: WAPDA, railways, district monitoring, canal desilting, in addition to the other jobs it is doing. What if it becomes an expert in everything else and starts getting rusty about its primary function for which the nation feeds and clothes it? That would be a bit like the crow in the old fable who wanted to walk like a peacock and could not but in the process forgot how it was to walk like a crow.

This is no reflection on the fighting qualities of our officers and jawans (who will always do their duty) but just a reminder of what happens to army commands when they pile up too many extraneous things on their plate.