"The State of Pakistan," a new genre of journalism

I don't know what it is about the piece I am about to comment on that made me finally write this post; it could have been one of hundreds of others that have appeared in print and online, from both Western and South Asian sources, over the past few years. Perhaps it is because I am so used to dismissing them as temporary effluvia from the security politics crowd lacking the requisite sense of history, but this time something in me responded to the message. This is Aaatish Taseer's recent article in Mint, entitled "Losing faith in Pakistan."
http://www.livemint.com/2010/08/06210142/Losing-faith-in-Pakistan.html

The interesting thing about this article is that it manages to be half remarkably insightful and half pernicious nonsense. Let's start with the good: Taseer's basic claim is that contemporary religious extremism in Pakistan aims to "cleanse the Islam of that country of its cultural contact with the Indian subcontinent." In practical terms, this refers to the imposition of Saudi-derived ideological puritanism and the political programme of Maududi's Jamaat-e-Islami set up against "the full world, the world of culture, of stories, of songs, of dress, of ornate ritual" epitomised by the "syncretic" Sufis. Taseer is undoubtedly right in saying that the societal conflict tearing Pakistan apart has far, far less to do with clashes of civilisations between West and East than with the largely internal political struggle over the forms public religion should take in Pakistan. Such a position compels us to understand the different fractions and cleavages within the various Muslim movements within Pakistan, as Manan Ahmed pointed out during the height of the "failed state" hysteria in the Western media, aka that "the Taliban are 20 miles outside of Islamabad" time:
http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/just_a_thought_v.html

The recent attacks, first on the Ahmadi mosque, then on the Data Darbar Sufi shrine in Lahore, seem to have awakened even the most hopeful and progressive commentators to the existence of a very real threat. If the country as a whole is in no immediate danger of being "Talibanised," still the audacity and increasing frequency with which the attacks are coming raises the question: who is not a kafir now? Alarmism may not be such a bad word anymore. See Raza Rumi's impassioned appeal:
http://lahorenama.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/stop-lahores-talibanisation/

Taseer also very justly points out that far more of an outcry followed the Sufi attack, even among the lamenters. In the official media, of course, passing off the Ahmadi attack as a Zionist conspiracy was not only easier but also de rigueur. On the other side, with the exception of Manan Ahmed's excellent series on the history of anti-Ahmadi legislation (archived here: http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/category/homistan), the debate is dangerously close to reproducing a "good Sufi"/"bad Wahhabi" dichotomy that has plagued the literature on Pakistan for quite some time.

One take-away point from Taseer's piece is that historians need to pay more attention to the "Islamisation" of Pakistan under General Zia and to the connections, especially via labour migration to the Middle East, between Islam in Pakistan and outside. But we should avoid imposing a dualistic frame over all past events, as William Dalrymple does when he recasts even the history of the 1857 Indian Mutiny as a struggle between the tolerant Sufis of Bahadur Shah's court and the North Indian rebel forerunners of Osama bin Laden. Such wishful thinking avoids the uncomfortable questions about Sufis' role in upholding the feudal order in Pakistan, somewhat forcefully asked in the following article with the provocative title, "The Bad Sufi":
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/03-the-bad-sufi-ss-02

To better grasp what made me uncomfortable with Taseer's presentation of the story, I re-read the introduction to his otherwise excellent translations of Manto, where he claims that he is rescuing Manto for India out of the ghetto of being considered a "Pakistani writer." By implication he is doing the same thing for Urdu. Similar to his suggestion that Pakistan's problems could be resolved by a rapprochement with some forgotten essence of "Indianness," or as he puts it, the "Indian pink" underneath the "black Arab abaya," this claim has the air of denying the validity or legitimacy of the Pakistani nation itself. Towards the end of the article, the argument gets more and more intense, and in one sentence the problem of Kashmiri azadi is thrown away as a mere fixation of insecure Pakistanis in search of an identity -- which is remarkable, even offensive, considering the massive violence and curtailment of freedoms unleashed by the Indian Army in Kashmir even as we speak. The flavour of the month:
http://kafila.org/2010/07/10/curbs-continue-on-kashmir-media-is-it-martial-law-in-srinagar/

I am, first of all, no nationalist, and least of all a Pakistani nationalist. I have repeatedly said in various conversations on the topic that Pakistan, "moth-eaten" as it was at birth and caught in the paradox between being a "state for Muslims" that was not meant to be a "Muslim state" (Jinnah's utopian dream), divided between Punjabi elites and waves of regional separatism from Bengalis to Balochis, crushed by the army and the centre, has had a sorry run of historical luck. But all that has been over the past 60 years, sab ho gaya and we cannot un-wish Pakistan out of existence. Every single time a Western or Indian commentator suggests that Pakistan is facing an "existential" crisis and goads this enormously diverse and stratified population to breezily "re-think" the basis of their country and to learn "new narratives," the implication remains that the people of Pakistan are somehow a "problem people," engaged for over half a century in the illicit enterprise of having a country. History can't be re-written overnight; as Marx once wrote, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please." In Pakistan's case, the fight for social justice, democracy, and pluralism can only start from the rubble around us, brick by brick. It might also have to happen under the same green-and-white flag at the end of the day.

Ayesha Jalal began her Manzur Qadir Memorial Lecture of 1989 in Lahore, by saying that she loved Pakistan "with the same complicated and consuming passion" with which Braudel loved France. The problem with most of the purveyors of the "State of Pakistan" brand of journalism in India and the West is that they wish to save Pakistan without ever having loved it, at least a little bit.

The Trouble with Jinnah

On this topic, I will live up to the blog's title (which, by the way, is only 10% a pun based on the assumption that what I have to say is "just," and 90% straightforward, as in an honest admission that what I am offering is merely speculative). I don't know much about Pakistan, even less about Jinnah, and nothing at all about senior now-ex-BJP politician Jaswant Singh's new book on Jinnah that has caused so much controversy, because I haven't read it. From what I've heard, he has proposed that Jinnah was a sincere nationalist with a liberal, secular vision for Muslims whose best efforts at maintaining a united India were stymied by the intransigence of Congress leaders Nehru and Patel. Much has been made of the fact that such an argument at once united Congress and the BJP in outrage, and Narendra Modi banned his book in Gujarat not because he praised the creator of Pakistan but because he insulted the Gujarati hero Patel!

Why would a senior BJP leader praise Jinnah? For that matter, why did L.K. Advani, cheerleader of the Babri Masjid demolition and current head of the party who expelled Jaswant Singh, get into similar trouble four years ago for travelling to Karachi and saying nice things about the Quaid-e-Azam of Pakistan? The easy answer is that Jaswant is a "moderate liberal" member of the BJP who has always been interested in better relations with Pakistan, also the momentary goal of Advani on that particular trip. We can note that Singh is a scholar with a genuine interest in history who simply couldn't deny a valid explanation of Partition based on evidence (his points are not new in the literature, having been first articulated with great force and originality by Ayesha Jalal in her 1985 book The Sole Spokesman). But is there a Hindu nationalist case for Jinnah? What rhetorical moves can be made to arrive at such a position?

Here I want to repeat that I am not speaking of Jaswant Singh's beliefs per se, since I haven't read his book and don't want to put words into his mouth. He may very well be a liberal man who simply wants to build bridges; I wish to perform an imaginative exercise that would explain how Jinnah fits into a certain kind of Partition narrative.
Let's start with the fact of the division itself. The RSS and BJP have forever been utterly opposed to the very idea of Pakistan's existence. Indeed, one of the things that got Advani into hot water after he came back from Karachi was his assertion that Partition was "irreversible" and should be accepted. I read this statement, together with his comments about Jinnah being secular, as deeply melancholic. The old RSS man Advani is saying, "I don't like the fact that this country exists, but we have to deal with it, and anyway if it should have existed in the first place it would have been better off under secular Jinnah than as it turned out."
What Hindu nationalists don't like about Pakistan as it exists today is 1) its perceived Islamic fundamentalism (they obviously oppose the very notion of an Islamic state, and the threat of terrorism hangs heavy on their minds) and 2) its militarism (they perceive Pakistan not as a neighbor but as a permanent adversary). The distinction of an Islamic state vs. a state for Muslims is a subtle one, and for the average Hindutvavadi there may be no difference. For a sophisticated thinker like Jaswant and even for Advani, the "secular" promise of Jinnah, which included protection of Hindu minorities in Pakistan (Advani is a Sindhi Hindu born in Karachi), is a counterpoint to what they see as today's dangerous Pakistani state. The trick is that Pakistan itself is a story of failure, a grievous error that has ended badly for everyone (but especially for Hindu India, which now has to deal both with a problematic Muslim minority and with a troublesome Muslim state, two if you count Bangladesh). Where this Hindu nationalist thought differs from a liberal Pakistani intellectual in lamenting the difference between Jinnah's vision and reality is that, while it prefers Jinnah's secular Pakistan to actual Pakistan, the best thing of all would have been no Pakistan.

Here the second interesting twist happens, involving the attack on Nehru and Patel. Jaswant Singh himself has asked, "What part of the ‘core belief’ has been demolished by my book? What is core about Patel? He was the first leader to ban the RSS and imprison its leaders...but he didn’t ban the Muslim League.” This is perhaps the most un-subtle yet overlooked aspect of the whole story. The BJP in all its incarnations over time, from the BJS to the Janata Party, has first and foremost been suspicious of Congress-walas. To rehabilitate Jinnah is to redistribute the blame for Partition unto Nehru and Patel's shoulders, men who were actively hostile to the "right" kind of Hindu nationalism. After all, they were the ones who "let" the country fall apart and didn't "deal" with Jinnah properly.

To sum up, the feeling one gets is that there is a strand of Hindu nationalist thought that wishes more was done to prevent the creation of Pakistan, though at the cost of keeping more Muslims within a united India. This seems paradoxical, since the Hindu right has been trying for years to intimidate, and sometimes violently suppress, Muslims in India. But deep in the psychological recesses of that hateful chant aimed at the Indian Muslim, "Go to Pakistan!" lies this very frustration with India's division. "You have your state," they are saying, "now go to it."
What would have been the fate of Muslims in a united India? Do Hindu nationalists who oppose Partition believe they would have been swamped by numbers or "kept down" in their appropriate place?

More importantly, from "our" perspective (as scholars concerned with minority interests), how should we interpret the creation of Pakistan from the standpoint of what should be, in my view, the all-important question: what was/is best for Muslims in the Indian subcontinent? On the one hand, we decry Partition and its loss of life, and may wish that Muslims could have found a place in a united, secular India. But then what of Pakistan's intended purpose, as a safe space for Muslims? In the 1973 film Garam Hawa, Balraj Sahni's character is an aging Muslim shoemaker living in Agra who sees his family gradually disintegrate and, shunned, disempowered, even physically attacked at home, decides to make the move. The director, M.S. Sathyu, ends the film with the character changing his mind and staying in Agra to participate in a protest march. The conclusion affirms the possibility of a secular, socialist future in India that includes Muslims, and Sathyu never shows what happens on the other side of the border. Here Pakistan can appear as an option, a refuge from worsening conditions for Muslims in India. But the plight of the muhajir in Pakistan, as well as that country's turbulent history more generally, question such an assessment.
Pakistan is therefore a difficult subject for the historian, and there is no final verdict that can be rendered on a country so large and complex. Does it even make sense any longer to view Pakistan through the lens of "Muslims as a whole in the Indian subcontinent?" Separated by years of violence and miles of barbed wire, are Pakistani Muslims and Indian Muslims now two separate entities, like two species of Darwin's finches evolving on adjoining islands?