The Daily Clarity

The enigma of Pakistani nationalism

There is a certain naivety in the discussion of Pakistan political  transparency as undertaken by Western analysts. When an impatient diplomat asks why can’t the Pakistan government do this or that, they are using the performance driven language of Western culture where results can be measured in milliseconds. However, Pakistan is still forming its nationalism in the fiery crucible of  this region. This over simplification of intent and motivation is an intellectual indulgence and laziness. The Western approach to understanding  a country’s  behavioral norms as shaped by historical influence is a a type of non-critical whimsical curiosity. For the Asian mind, it is a matter of life and death, and age old rivalries still shape modern consciousness.

Pakistan was created under suffrage  by a Britain racked by the throes of a colonial unravelling.  A quick summary of Pakistan’s creation belittles the massive social unrest it signified. Pakistan as a state began with independence from British India on 14 August 1947. This short history is misleading as the region has been inhabited continuously historians estimate for at least two million years, with lines and affiliations drawn and redrawn over this time . The political emergence of Pakistan began after 90 years of direct and harsh rule by the British Crown in response to the Indian Rebellion.  In the 1930’s   the poet Muhammad Iqbal called for an autonomous “state in northwestern India for Indian Muslims“.  Muhammad Ali Jinnah, commonly referred to as Pakistan’s founder,  espoused the ‘Two Nation Theory’ and led the Muslim League to adopt the Lahore Resolution , demanding the formation of an independent Pakistan. The British had neither the heart or capacity to resist any longer, and the fragmentation of British India was complete.

Pakistan became independent as a Muslim-majority state – its religious character crucial to its national identity. This was not a bloodless creation however.  The dividing of British India resulted in widespread riots across the new India and Pakistan — as millions of Muslims moved to Pakistan and millions of Hindus and Sikhs moved to India. Hundreds of thousands died in conflicts and many communities fractured in a religious redistribution. Disputes of ownership arose, which are still issues of contention today, including Kashmir and Jammu. This led to the First Kashmir War in 1948 which ended with India administrating roughly two-thirds of Kashmir  and Pakistan occupying the remainder. A Kashmiri republic was declared in 1956  but was stalled by a internal coup and a second later war  between Pakistan and India. The UN promised to support claims of Kashmiri independence as a settlement of the counter claims , but to this day despite multiple requests have failed to action their promise, leaving Kashmir still divided and ruled by foreign administrations. Pakistan’s formation was hard fought in other parts of the country too.  Political dissent in East Pakistan led to violence and army repression, escalating into civil war in 71 and ultimately the secession of East Pakistan as the independent state of Bangladesh.  So from the remnants of the British India  emerges the modern day states of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir – all nations at the forefront of Western attention, if not their understanding.

The British did not ceded influence easily and  were careful to try and focus Pakistan more closely on its borders with India, rather than those of its neighboring ethnic and religious brethren in Afghanistan and Iran. The British achieved this by forcing  the newly formed Pakistan to adopt  a national language , Urdu (also known by the British at the time as Oordoo and Urdoo)  that had no real validity to this new country, and tied it back to British India roots. The following passage from an Yahoo discussion group by regional language scholars elucidates the wiliness of the  British strategy: 

Persian was the official language of Pakistan region for many centuries… during both pre-British Muslim and non-Muslim periods.  Urdu/Hindi language belonging to only Gangetic valley was first promoted and developed by the British.  What made the British choose Urdu rather than Persian is revealed by the available documents of that period. For instance, the Commissioner and Superintendent of the cis-Sutlej states wrote to the Secretary, Punjab Government, on 17 June 1862:

“In 1853 when I first took charge of the Commissionership the language of the Courts was Persian; and I altered it to Oordoo for two reasons. Firstly the extreme slipperiness of Persian, and extreme Provision of Oordoo as a Judicial language. 2ndly the Political advantage of hastening the amalgamation of our provinces.”

The idea that the peoples of Pakistan region should look towards India, where Urdu was predominant, and not towards Afghanistan/Iran/Central Asia, certainly influenced the choice of the vernacular in this region.  This is further supported by the following letter of 22 July 1862 from the Director of Public Instruction to the Secretary of the Punjab Government:

“Persian may be considered the vernacular of the educated classes rather than Urdoo, …. I would recommend that Urdoo be continued as the Court Vernacular. On the annexation of the Punjab political motives, I dare say, had a great share in giving the superiority to Urdoo over Persian, which was commonly used in the Courts, and the desirability of making the union of the wild tribes with the adjoining population in our territories more complete, and their intercourse more convenient, by the use of a common tongue, is obviously very desirable. All our Education efforts tend to this object among others and they will be greatly aided by the currency of Urdoo, in all our Courts, as the standard language.”

It is a fact that the British replaced Persian with Urdu in order to destroy Pakistan’s close cultural/political links with its Persian-speaking Muslim neighbors on its west/north, and to engineer/promote their newly invented “Indian” colonial identity with Urdu/Hindi-speaking Gangetic (eastern/Hindu) region as its base.”

This is a fascinating act of linguistic and tribal manipulation by the British that has long lasting effect. But the manipulation and confusion over what warrants a Pakistani nationalistic psyche is made even more complex by religious nuance. There is the impact of Shia-Sunni divide, and the resultant linkages of common religious roots and ethnicity that stretches down through Iran, Iraq and on to Hezbollah in Lebanon.  The following extract forms the introduction to a spirited debate between Pakistanis on the existential question of their national identity predicated as Pakistan was as a Muslim state. In this historic discussion , it positions Pakistan as a Shia-minority political dominated  state (hence with a connection to Iran) that has only of late been dominated by a Sunni agenda. This is somewhat different to the normally accepted Western understanding of the Pakistan national dynamic.

“Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was an Ismaili by birth and a Twelver Shia by confession, though not a religiously observant man. He had studied at the Inns of Court in London and was better versed in English law than in Shia jurisprudence, was never seen at an Ashoura procession, and favored a wardrobe that often smacked as much of Savile Row as of South Asia. Yet insofar as he was Muslim and a spokesman for Muslim nationalism, it was as a Shia. His coreligionists played an important role in his movement, and over the years many of Pakistan’s leaders were Shias, including one the country’s first governor-generals, three of its first prime ministers, two of its military leaders (Generals Iskandar Mirza and Yahya Khan), and many other of its leading public officials, landowners, industrialists, artists, and intellectuals. Two later prime ministers, the ill-fated Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his Radcliffe-educated, currently exiled daughter, Benazir Bhutto, were also Shia. Feeling the wind shift in the 1990s, Benazir styled herself a Sunni, but her Iranian mother, her husband from a big Shia landowning family, and her father’s name, the name of Ali’s twin-bladed sword, make her Shia roots quite visible. In a way, Benazir’s self-reinvention as a Sunni tells the tale of how secular nationalism’s once solid-seeming promise has given way like a rotten plank beneath the feet of contemporary Pakistan’s beleaguered Shia minority.

Benazir’s father came from a family of large Shia landowners who could afford to send him for schooling to the University of California at Berkeley and to Oxford. He cut a dashing figure. Ambitious, intelligent, and secular, he was a brilliant speaker, with the ability, it is said, to make a crowd of a million people dance and then cry. His oratory manipulated public emotion as the best of Shia preachers could, and his call for social justice resonated with Shia values. His party’s flag conveniently displayed the colors of Shiism: black, red, and green. Although he never openly flaunted his Shia background, he commanded the loyalty of Pakistan’s Shia multitudes, around a fifth of the population. What he lacked in the area of regular religious observance he made up for with his zeal for Sufi saints and shrines, especially that of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, the widely popular Sufi saint of Shia extraction whose tomb is a major shrine in southern Pakistan.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s years in power (1971–77) marked the pinnacle of Shia power in Pakistan and the high point of the promise of an inclusive Muslim nationalism. But the country that Jinnah built and Bhutto ruled had over time become increasingly Sunni in its self-perception. The Sunni identity that was sweeping Pakistan was not of the irenic Sufi kind, moreover, but of a strident and intolerant brand. Bhutto’s Shia-supported mix of secularism and populism—sullied by corruption and his ruthless authoritarianism—fell to a military coup led by pious Sunni generals under the influence of hard-eyed Sunni fundamentalists. In April 1979, the state hanged Bhutto on questionable murder charges. A Sunni general, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, strongly backed by Sunni fundamentalist parties, personally ordered that the death sentence be carried out, even after Pakistan’s highest court recommended commutation to life imprisonment.

The coup of 1977 ended the Pakistani experiment with inclusive Muslim nationalism. Shia politicians, generals, and business leaders remained on the scene, but a steadily “Islamizing” (read “Sunnifying”) Pakistan came to look more and more like the Arab world, with Sunnis on top and Shias gradually pushed out. Pakistan in many regards captures the essence of the political challenge that the Shia have faced. The promise of the modern state has eluded them as secular nationalism has been colonized from within by Sunni hegemony.”

              SOURCE: The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future,by Vali Nasr (W. W. Norton, 2006)

The issue of Sunni-Shia agenda in the history and the underpinnings of Pakistani consciousness is critical in understanding the regional dynamic. The Sunni-Shia divide is a political chasm that divides and aligns groups through the Middle East and up into Asia. The Western friendlyArab  states, including Saudi Arabia and Jordan, are of nervous of Iran’s growing hegemony in the region given its Shia majority. The fact that the US disturbed the regional balance in Iraq and Afghanistan further complicates the issue. Iraq under Hussein was a Sunni dominated neighbor to Iran . The Afghanistan Taliban were also vehemently anti-Shia and again this group was deposed by the US freeing Iran from any circumspection in  its regional ambitions. The West can long to its own actions as enablers of this new geopolitical landscape.

Iran’s regional  reach is long. It spans from Iraq, through Hezbollah in Lebanon, on to the Shia minority and Taliban opposition groups in Afghanistan . Oddly the common language and ethnic roots of Iran’s Farsi and Dari spreads even through some Afghanistan Sunni groups, and some ethnic grops in the Frontier Provinces and back into Pakistan through yet another more circuitous route. Iran’s increasing regional influence is a factor that the West doesn’t yet seem to fully understand, and if an active Pakistan cultural and scholarly populace can argue the Shia roots of Pakistan’s independence movement, the impact of closer ties with Iran must be factored as a regional possibility. From the above, it is clear why Pakistani national identity is a challenge. It is apparent why there is an innate distrust of India as a neighbor, and a growing reliance on the links with Afghanistan and subsequently Iran for support of the national identity. If the West fails to understand these nuances, as they have with other similar regional influences such as the  Pashtun ethnic groupings, the West will continue to trip over its best efforts in the Middle East and Cenreal Asia and doom itself to the repeated frustration of the last 8 years. The struggle for Pakistan national identity is still ongoing, and they will be more likely to respond to support than censure at this troubling time.  That is  a history lesson the West should take seriously.