Pakistan is in the centre of negative world attraction for some time. Apart from the ambitious politicians and military men, the nation has been torn apart by different categories of people. Its identity crisis has been one of its worst enemies.
Hasan Suroor writes in The Hindu (12 June 2009)
Arguably 60 years are not a long time in the history of a nation but by 60, even a country with a troubled past such as Pakistan, is expected to at least start making sense of what it stands for and where it is heading, however fuzzy the direction. And when it continues to flounder — like Pakistan — lurching from one crisis to another, it becomes a liability not only to its own people but also has implications for the wider international community, especially its neighbours — in this case India.
Pakistanis are a proud people. They feel humiliated when their country is mocked at as a “failed state” and routinely mentioned in the same breath as the pirate-infested Somalia which does not even have a properly functioning capital. For all its afflictions, Pakistan (a functioning democracy, however flawed, with a free press, an independent judiciary and a vibrant civil society) is by no means a failed state.
Not yet. But signs of a meltdown are all too evident and there are genuine fears about its future. One view, of course, is that the West will not allow it to fail for its own strategic reasons. But that is hardly very reassuring.
So what went wrong? How did a country which has no dearth of talent and whose founders had such high hopes for it that they named it “Pakistan” (a pure country) go so horribly wrong? Was there something rotten at the very core of the idea of Pakistan that has been its undoing? Is Pakistan’s failure to make sense of itself the result of a deep confusion over its Islamic/Muslim identity? If yes, what is the way forward, if any?
A new book, Making Sense of Pakistan (Hurst & Company, London) by Farzana Shaikh — a highly regarded U.K.-based Pakistani scholar and Fellow of Chatham House — argues that there is no hope for Pakistan unless it sorts out its identity crisis which, it says, is the root cause of the country being such a disaster. Indeed, in order to make sense of Pakistan, it is important to make sense of its identity crisis first.
Everything that is wrong with Pakistan today — its “distorted economic and social development,” its “obsession” with India, the sectarian divisions that have blighted relations among its various communities, its proneness to military dictatorships and the rise of extremism first directed at its “enemies” and now devouring its own creators — is a direct or indirect result of its confused sense of itself, Dr. Shaikh says.
So deep is this confusion that more than six decades after its creation, even the definition of who is a “Pakistani” is not clear with the Indian Muslim migrants still being regarded as outsiders by ethnic communities which claim that they are the “real” Pakistanis by virtue of their historical roots in the region. Over the years, this conflict between indigenous Muslim groups and migrants has been a source of deep (and frequently violent) divisions in Pakistani society. And it is still festering.
But nowhere is Pakistan’s self-inflicted identity crisis more evident than in relation to India, according to Dr. Shaikh. Because of the nature of its creation — a secessionist state born in opposition to the Indian nationalist movement — Pakistan was lumped with an identity, defined in terms of what it was “not” (it was “not India”) rather than what it was.
“Indeed, much of the uncertainty over Pakistan’s identity stems from the nagging question of whether its identity is fundamentally dependent on India and what its construction might entail outside of opposition to the latter. This has prompted the suggestion that Pakistan is a state burdened with a negative identity shaped by the circumstances of Partition,” Dr. Shaikh says.
Ever since its formation, Pakistan has struggled to overcome this negative identity. Its search for what it regards as legitimacy has, in fact, been the “defining feature” of its policy towards India, especially the Kashmir issue, and is at the heart of its quest for military parity with a neighbour “almost seven times its size in population and more than four times its land mass.”
The dispute with India over Kashmir has come to symbolise Pakistan’s obsessive bid to delink its identity from its historical antecedents. To quote the author: “It is here [over Kashmir], amid the rhetoric of rival claims over territory and state sovereignty, that Pakistan has fought to assert itself and to liberate its identity from the uncertainties that have attached to its status as merely ‘not India’.” She argues that Pakistan’s efforts to achieve this identity underline its historical claim to parity with India: a claim “grounded” in Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s insistence that “equality of the nations of Hindus and Muslims” be the basis for any territorial division of British India.
As much as the national interest, it is Pakistan’s compulsive desire for parity with India (an extension of its efforts to assert its “independent” identity) that has shaped much of its foreign policy leading it to seek help from foreign powers. Take its alliance with America which, the author points out, has been motivated as much by security considerations — a protection against an attack from India — as by its “need for validation and its desire to win recognition of its special status.” Being a “strategic partner” of the world’s only superpower is seen in Pakistan as a boost to its “global image” to match India’s global status.
Again, it is Pakistan’s “self-perception” of national identity that, according to Dr. Shaikh, has led it to compete with India in the race for regional domination — by, for example, flexing its muscles in Afghanistan. “Although the consequences of these foreign policy ambitions have often been devastating to Pakistan and the strategic costs immense, no price is yet seen to be too high to validate Pakistan’s claim to nationhood ... Thus Pakistan’s struggle against India is deeply embedded in a painful awareness of its own lack of a national history,” she observes.
Ultimately, though, India is only part of a bigger story of Pakistan’s struggle with its identity which, Dr. Shaikh contends, has had a profound effect on every aspect of the country’s life and, indeed, its world view. The uncertainty resulting from a lack of consensus on what constitutes Pakistan’s national identity has “deepened the country’s divisions ... discouraged plural definitions of the Pakistani ... blighted good governance and tempted political elites to use the language of Islam as a substitute for democratic legitimacy.”
Today, Pakistan remains an enigma with no clear understanding of the nature of the Pakistani state. Analysing the causes of this debilitating confusion, she traces it back to the origins of Pakistan, the politics of its creation and the flawed assumption of its founders that religion could be the basis of a modern, forward-looking state.
A project forged around the idea that a Muslim religious identity, overriding cultural and social factors, was enough to unify a nation was doomed from the start. And, sure enough, the project started to unravel within years of its inauguration with Bengali-speaking Muslims breaking away from Pakistan to form their own Muslim state of Bangladesh. It is Pakistan’s “artificiality” as a nation-state — its eastern and western wings separated by more than a thousand miles of Indian territory and its citizens divided by a variety of linguistic and cultural traditions despite a common religion — that has prevented the evolution of a coherent national identity. This, in brief, is the thrust of Dr. Shaikh’s argument.
So what’s new, one might ask. Doesn’t it sound all too familiar? Dr. Shaikh may not be breaking new ground here but it is refreshing to come across a Pakistani viewpoint that doesn’t regard the discussion of Pakistan’s legitimacy as a no-go zone. It is a sensitive issue with Pakistanis who, as Dr. Shaikh points out, believe that India still “rejects the rationale of Pakistan’s statehood even if it has been forced to accept its reality.”
At the outset, Dr. Shaikh makes clear that her book is a “work of interpretation rather than of historical research.” Even so, one is often struck by what seems like an over-interpretation of Pakistan’s identity problem. There is a tendency to conflate issues which are not directly related to identity in order to fit an argument. For example, to see Pakistan’s arms race with India purely in terms of its attempt to overcome an identity crisis is to ignore the fact that any small country can have genuine security fears vis-À-vis a big and powerful neighbour, especially if there is a history of conflict between them.
That does not, however, take away from the importance of this book. It is a work of serious scholarship dealing with some of the most important issues that have shaped Pakistan and which, if not resolved, can have consequences for its future.
It is do or die situation for Pakistan. All those Pakistanis who are keen to save their soil should unite to deal with this peculiar crisis. Otherwise their nation will vanish sooner or later.
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