Speaking of Pakistan

This Tuesday, at 11:00 AM, I am lecturing on Jinnah and the Muslim League as a part of a South Asia course. 2nd floor, Mathematics Building, Columbia University, if you want to make it.

I am a tad nervous. Not so much because of stage fright, but more so because it's always hard to talk about Jinnah and the idea of Pakistan. Too many people seem to have axes to grind when it comes to this topic. I have none. I care about being sensitive to all sides.

The idea of Pakistan is intrinsically tied to both Pakistani and Indian nationalisms. For the Indian state, the fact of Pakistan's creation was anathema because it gave the lie to its claims to represent both Hindus and Muslims of Hindustan.

Of course to Pakistani nationalists, the idea of Pakistan is deeply meaningful. Pakistan meant to be the homeland for all of South Asia's Muslims. Critics of Pakistan point out that Jinnah's two-nation theory - that Muslims and Hindus were two separate nations - was an outcome of colonial rule and thinking. They criticize Jinnah for adopting it. Other critics have alleged that Pakistan was merely a bargaining table for Jinnah.

They point to facts of post-47 history to validate these claims. Urdu was popular largely among the Mohajirs from India and Punjabis. The Punjabi-Mohajir nexus was set in place as long as Punjabis dominated the army, the most powerful institution in Pakistan by far.

Meanwhile, Balochis, Sindhis, Bengalis and Pathans all demonstrated autonomous tendencies in varying degrees - the most outspoken of them being perhaps the Bengalis and Balochis. Many of these autonomous movements were borne of an expression of cultural distinctiveness.

I heard recently that in the Balochi uprising (that Mr. Bhutto suppressed with an iron hand) many of Sheikh Mujib's writings and formulations for East Pakistani autonomy were widely read in Balochistan.

Was Jinnah's Pakistan then a mistake?

There are defenses possible of course to Jinnah's designs.

Jinnah wasn't necessarily the Miltonic self-absorbed nation-maker that many of his critics like to see him as. It was important from him to have a flexible idea of Pakistan because its spatial boundaries were far harder to define, as Indian Muslims were diffused all over. It was important for the idea of Pakistan to develop gradually.

And Jinnah wanted a far more complex Pakistan. First up, he wanted the whole of the Punjab and the whole of Bengal. This would have made a substantial difference.

Think about this. Sikhs and Hindu Punjabis continued to dominate the Indian Army at least for a while, the way Punjabi Muslims dominated the Pak Army. If Pakistan included the whole of Punjab, the Pakistan Army would have been mighty. And religiously diverse.

Religious diversity in the most important state institution of Pakistan would have gone a long way in defining its nationalism.

Secondly, if Pakistan had the whole of Bengal (Jinnah wanted Calcutta), the civil-bureaucratic administration of new Pakistan would have been far more colorful and complex. Bengali Hindu Bhadraloks, were prominent in the early years of the Congress in the early days of India.

If Pakistan had absorbed these Calcutta-based civil servants, bureaucrats and intellectuals, their presence would have greatly changed the character of Pakistan. We would have had on our hands, a far more composite, pluralistic and diverse Pakistan in the upper echelons of civil-bureaucratic-military administrations.

However, the realities of 1950s and 60s Pakistan were starkly different. The state failed to incorporate the Bengalis of East Pakistan into its fold, neither economically nor politically or culturally, and events of '71, perhaps not in their gruesome form, now appear inevitable to those that look back and reflect.

To my Bangladeshi and Pakistani readers:
The post is not an exercise is pro-Pakistani nostalgia or anti-Pakistani rhetoric, but in reminding ourselves of the complex trajectories of history that are too often levelled into simple narratives.

Armies and Indoctrination

Armies have always fascinated me. The fascination began with G. I. Joe action figures and might culminate by figuring centrally in a doctoral dissertation. I remember a conversation in college pre-Abu Ghraib with a politically conservative friend who insisted that the US Army pumped out jawans who were critical and ethical and unlikely to abuse their power in post-conflict situations. Abu Ghraib surprised him greatly. But having been around military families in South Asia and interacted with various personnel, egregious conduct from soldiers, even in peacekeeping situations never surprise me. Afterall, isn't the whole idea of an army is to train obsequious combatants, who will suspend all ethic and critical judgment to obey orders? How can such a rigorous process of indoctrination in one nationalism or the other, or some other form of -ism, not produce many strangeos? They would be more than "exceptional" I would think. How can such an intense process of bodily and emotional disciplining not change one chemically, and often unpredictably?

1860s onwards, the British in India stopped recruiting from the South and the East (Madras and Bengal Presidencies) after a Mutiny and opted instead for jawans from the North-West. Their raison d'etre was two-fold: firstly, the jawans from the North-West (modern-day Punjab, Kashmir, NWFP, Rajasthan, etc) were more "martial" and secondly, more obedient. The ideological indoctrination in armies was so powerful that a wonderfully symbiotic alliance formed between Punjab and the colonial state. Consequently, the Independence movement against the British took a while to get off the ground in the Punjab (See Rajit Mazumdar on this). Another historian has also attempted to explain the war machine that was the Germany Army in the 20th century by drawing on colonial wars that the German Army fought in Africa in the 19th Century. She has argued that motivated by racism against Africans, the German Army adopted a tendency of "absolute destruction" which became internalized, the worst excesses of which came to pass in the World Wars.

What we see today seems no different. I was reading somewhere that over 200 UN “peacekeepers” have been sent back to their home countries or otherwise disciplined for sexual and other misbehavior. One wonders how a group of (usually) under-privileged teenagers conditioned and disciplined through one ideology or the other, dangerously real-politik, and in line with one nation’s and imagined community's exclusive gain over others’ – can ever be counted upon to act as a moral or social police.

UN peacekeeping missions in Haiti, Liberia, Congo, Sudan, and Somalia have been notorious. The Bangladeshi state, as much as it trumpets it prolific record in peacekeeping missions, have a lot to be mortified about. Bangladeshi peacekeepers have been notorious in southern Sudan. About 15 Bangladeshi peacekeepers have been disciplined for sexual offenses against Sudanese girls, many of them minors.

Last year, I ran into to a Indian Uncle who happened to be a retired Army officer, during a layover at the Kuwait Airport. He said he was trying his hand in journalism and wanted to write a piece he wanted to call "Ethics of Bombing." It appeared as if he had thought much about the needfulness of bombing enemy states into oblivion. Slightly intimidated by his hawkishness, I resisted the temptation to suggest how the said piece might be better entitled "Bombing of Ethics."