The Old Pakistan is Dead, Long Live New Pakistan

Preface: This is an opinionated piece written in an aggressive and confrontational style for the purpose of provoking a passionate response from the reader. A historical summary of relevent highlights is presented to argue a theory that we are beating a dead horse and that the future needs an entirely fresh approach: a paradigm shift, if you will. This is one of two articles on the same theme.


Once upon a time there was a country called Pakistan. On August 14th, 1947, Pakistan, along with its "sister", Hindustan, became the successor states of the British Indian Empire. Pakistan had two wings: East Pakistan and West Pakistan. On December 16, 1971 Pakistan ceased to exist during a well-celebrated ceremony when Lieutenant General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi and Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Arora signed an armistice document. Niazi was the commander in charge of all Pakistani Armed forces in East Pakistan and Aurora was Hindustan's commander in charge of the Eastern theater of war. Pakistan and Hindustan had been at war over the political fate of East Pakistan. The East Pakistani separatists wanted to form a new political entity called Bangladesh. They were successful with Hindustan's military support.
The armistice which the two generals signed, confirmed the surrender of "All Pakistan Forces in Bangladesh". By virtue of that document the legal existence of the state of Bangladesh became a reality and Pakistan was mortally mutilated and disappeared into the mist of history.
This tragedy was the culmination of a drama that began many years earlier.
In April 1933, a barrister from Bombay, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, attended a formal banquet hosted by Chaudhry Rahmet Ali at the Waldorf Hotel in London. Earlier that year Rahmet Ali and his expatriate friends had coined the name Pakistan and given form to the idea (attributed to the poet-philosopher Iqbal) of a separate Muslim homeland in post-British India. Rahmet Ali wanted to convince Mr. Jinnah to take on and pursue this cause. Upon hearing about Pakistan Jinnah called the idea "...an impossible dream..." and refused to have any involvement with what he felt was an impractical notion.
However, the course of events took unpredictable turns and Mr. Jinnah ended up earning the title of Quaid-i-Azam (Supreme Leader) and led the creation of the muslim state of Pakistan. In 1937, the English speaking Quaid of the Indian Muslims changed his mind about the idea Rehmat Ali had tried to sell him four years earlier at their dinner meeting in London.
What had happen to change Jinnah's mind? The British government of India had held general elections in 1937. The majority of seats in the Parliament went to the Congress Party which was dominated by a hindu majority. The hawkish demagogue Vallabhai Patel of Congress, and his powerful faction refused to share power with the Muslim League despite laments to the contrary of their elderly leader, Gandhi. This convinced Mr. Jinnah that he must exert himself for a separate state where the ethnic muslims would be a voting majority.
The irony is that Mr. Jinnah's first instinct about Pakistan was to prove the right one in the end. Time eventually demonstrated that the ideological basis upon which the concept of Pakistan was packaged and marketed to the muslim masses of the British Indian Subcontinent was unfeasible. Mr. Jinnah's Pakistan does not exist any more than does the Empire of Napoleon's France. They were both short lived political experiments.
The death certificate of Pakistan was formally endorsed when Bangladesh was recognized by Pakistan's heir state which adopted the long winded name of "Islamic Republic of Pakistan". This new entity, which I shall call the Islamabad Republic, replaced the former West Pakistan.
After Pakistan's demise the Islamabad Republic needed a new reason for existence because history had shown that the basis of the original Pakistan was not reliable.
Under this strain a charismatic politician, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was a member of the aristocratic elite and had played a role in the crisis that led to the original country's demise, was chosen by the powerful junta to jump-start the new republic and give it a new face. Mr. Bhutto had the political skills analogous to those of a great magician. He was the perfect man for pulling off this illusion. He was declared Quaid-i-Awam (Peoples' Leader).
This Quaid, through his blunderous arrogance, unwittingly united the members of his own class against himself. He succeeded (though he never intended to) in becoming the symbol of their troubles. All their attention got focused on his personal follies (of which they were many) and the larger issues were swept under the rug. Mr. Bhutto was eventually removed by the junta. He was not a team player and became too dangerous for his own class so he could not be allowed a second chance. He was eliminated.
Mr. Bhutto's misfortune was that he was too egotistical to realize the limits of his power. Like King Charles the First, of England, he disregarded the interests of the aristocracy which formed the basis of his power and made a bid for popular appeal directly to the masses. When King Charles tried this he imposed what historians call his "Personal Rule". This led to great dissatisfaction among the mercantile and aristocratic classes. Eventually general Oliver Cromwell with his Ironsides overthrew (in 1647) and, after a court trial, executed (in 1649) the king. The autocratic Mr. Bhutto met a similar fate at the hands of his own creation: a general named Zia ul Haq who ruled until he died, as did Cromwell (from 1647-58), for over eleven years between 1977 and 1988.
Zia ul Haq was hand picked for successive promotions by Prime Minister Bhutto who eventually made him chief of army staff. "The greatest mistake of my life..." Mr. Bhutto was later to tell his heir princess, Benazir, in his prison cell.
Mr. Bhutto was out of the picture but his mission had been accomplished. He was able to perpetuate the hoax of the failed national ideology by hiding it under a new garb. He proceeded to pretend as if the erstwhile Pakistan continued to exist. National amnesia was actively encouraged under his rule. New ideological lies were invented to reinforce and add to the old lies, and soon everyone felt sure that nothing had really happened in 1971 and that Pakistan was in fact alive and well.
Although Pakistan no longer existed, what remained alive and well, as they had done after 1947, were the three pillars of the British Raj, the real Lords of the Land, namely, the imperial military, the colonial bureaucracy and the feudal aristocracy.
Now fifty years after the British left the situation in Islamabad Republic, seems to be heading the way of Yugoslavia with Punjab as its Serbia. Since 1971 the imperial military has engaged in covert and overt warfare with the native populations on one contrived ideological pretext or another. There have been repeated assaults in Baluchistan during the 1970s and in Sindh and Frontier in the 1980s. Few years ago the imperial military began fresh internal operations in Sindh. They called it "operation clean-up". That began a new era of internal military operations by the same armed forces that did not succeed in Bengal more than a quarter century earlier.
Many people in The Punjab hail such strong arm tactics. In 1971, when the same imperial army used brute force in East Pakistan many in West Pakistan applauded. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
Intolerance, ignorance, prejudice and chauvinism are actively encouraged. The officially condoned pantheon of heroes contains psychopathic murderers like the obscure fanatic who is proudly referred to as Ghazi Illam din Shaheed. This character is admired because he stabbed a man to death for publishing a controversial book which the Ghazi would probably not have bothered to read even if he were literate.
The number of unregistered automatic firearms which have entered the political equation since the Afghan war years is staggering. Some other places that have similar combinations of elements are the former Yugoslavian states, the Trans-Dinester region of Moldova, Georgia, Nogorno Karabach, Somalia, Algeria, Congo and Tajikistan. The big difference, however, is that in the Subcontinent the population density is much greater and therefore any explosive situation would naturally prove much more disastrous in human terms.
The closing decade of this millennium is unrelenting in its ferocity for change. Artificially propped up multiethnic federal states cannot withstand the gales of time. Especially imperial style federal bureaucracies based on one ideological fiction or another have out lived their epoch as the fates of Moscow and Belgrade will starkly testify. The so-called Pakistan and Hindustan, AS THEY EXIST TODAY, are anachronisms. It is merely a matter of time before they vanish like whiffs of smoke in the winds of history.
We have to go back to the drawing boards and re-think our whole concept of national and ethnic identity. A New Pakistan can be made a viable entity if properly redefined in the light of the realities of the 21st Century. Let us begin today, we are on borrowed time.