Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani
Pakistan’s short history as a country has been very turbulent. Fighting among the provinces–as well as a deep-rooted conflict that led to a nuclear stand-off with India–prevented Pakistan from gaining real stability in the last five decades. It oscillates between military rule and democratically elected governments, between secular policies and financial backing as a “frontline” state during the Cold War and the war against terrorism. Recent declared states of emergency and the political assasination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto indicate a continuing trend of economic and political instability.
Overview
When Pakistan became a country on August 14th, 1947, to form the largest Muslim state in the world at that time. The creation of Pakistan was catalyst to the largest demographic movement in recorded history. Nearly seventeen million people-Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs-are reported to have moved in both directions between India and the two wings of Pakistan (the eastern wing is now Bangladesh). Sixty million of the ninety-five million Muslims on the Indian subcontinent became citizens of Pakistan at the time of its creation. Subsequently, thirty-five million Muslims remained inside India making it the largest Muslim minority in a non-Muslim state.
Scarred from birth, Pakistan’s quest for survival has been as compelling as it has been uncertain. Despite the shared religion of its overwhelmingly Muslim population, Pakistan has been engaged in a precarious struggle to define a national identity and evolve a political system for its linguistically diverse population. Pakistan is known to have over twenty languages and over 300 distinct dialects, Urdu and English are the official languages but Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashtu, Baluchi and Seraiki are considered main languages. This diversity has caused chronic regional tensions and successive failures in forming a constitution. Pakistan has also been burdened by full-scale wars with India, a strategically exposed northwestern frontier, and series of economic crises. It has difficulty allocating its scarce economic and natural resources in an equitable manner.
All of Pakistan’s struggles underpin the dilemma they face in reconciling the goal of national integration with the imperatives of national security.
Following a military defeat at the hands of India the breakaway of its eastern territory, which India divides it from, caused the establishment of Bangladesh in 1971. This situation epitomizes the most dramatic manifestation of Pakistan’s dilemma as a decentralized nation. Political developments in Pakistan continue to be marred by provincial jealousies and, in particular, by the deep resentments in the smaller provinces of Sind, Baluchistan, and the North-West Frontier Province against what is seen to be a monopoly by the Punjabi majority of the benefits of power, profit, and patronage. Pakistan’s political instability over time has been matched by a fierce ideological debate about the form of government it should adopt, Islamic or secular. In the absence of any nationally based political party, Pakistan has long had to rely on the civil service and the army to maintain the continuities of government.
The Emergence of Pakistan
The roots of Pakistan’s multifaceted problems can be traced to March 1940 when the All-India Muslim League formally orchestrated the demand for a Pakistan consisting of Muslim-majority provinces in the northwest and northeast of India. By asserting that the Indian Muslims were a nation, not a minority, the Muslim League and its leader, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had hoped to negotiate a constitutional arrangement that provided an equitable share of power between Hindus and Muslims once the British relinquished control of India. The demand for a “Pakistan” was Jinnah’s and the League’s bid to register their claim to be the spokesmen of all Indian Muslims, both in provinces were they were in a majority as well as in provinces where they were a minority. Jinnah and the League’s main bases of support, however, were in the Muslim-minority provinces. In the 1937 general elections, the league had met a serious rejection from the Muslim voters in the majority provinces.
There was an obvious contradiction in a demand for a separate Muslim state and the claim to be speaking for all Indian Muslims. During the remaining years of the British Raj in India neither Jinnah nor the Muslim League explained how Muslims in the minority provinces could benefit from a Pakistan based on an undivided Punjab, Sind, North-West Frontier Province, and Baluchistan in the northwest, and an undivided Bengal and Assam in the northeast. Jinnah did at least had tried to get around the inconsistencies by arguing that since there were two nations in India-Hindu and Muslim-any transfer of power from British to Indian hands would necessarily entail disbanding of the unitary center created by the imperial rulers. Reconstitution of the Indian union would have to be based on either confederal or treaty arrangements between Pakistan (representing the Muslim-majority provinces) and Hindustan (representing the Hindu-majority provinces). Jinnah also maintained that Pakistan would have to include an undivided Punjab and Bengal. The substantial non-Muslim minorities in both these provinces were the best guarantee that the Indian National Congress would see sense in negotiating reciprocal arrangements with the Muslim League to safeguard the interests of Muslim minorities in Hindustan.
Despite Jinnah’s large claims, the Muslim League failed to build up effective party machinery in the Muslim-majority provinces. Consequently the league had no real control over either the politicians or the populace at the base that was mobilized in the name of Islam. During the final negotiations, Jinnah’s options were limited by uncertain commitment of the Muslim-majority province politicians to the league’s goals in the demand for Pakistan. The outbreak of communal troubles constrained Jinnah further still. In the end he had little choice but to settle for a Pakistan stripped of the non-Muslim majority districts of the Punjab and Bengal and to abandon his hopes of a settlement that might have secured the interests of all Muslims. But the worst cut of all was Congress’s refusal to interpret partition as a division of India between Pakistan and Hindustan. According to the Congress, partition simply meant that certain areas with Muslim majorities were ‘splitting off’ from the “Indian union.” The implication was that if Pakistan failed to survive, the Muslim areas would have to return to the Indian union; there would be no assistance to recreate it on the basis of two sovereign states.
With this agreement nothing stood in the way of the reincorporation of the Muslim areas into the Indian union except the notion of a central authority, which had yet to be firmly established. To establish a central authority proved to be difficult, especially since the provinces had been governed from New Delhi for so long and the separation of Pakistan’s eastern and western wings by one thousand miles of Indian territory. Even if Islamic sentiments were the best hope of keeping the Pakistani provinces unified, their pluralistic traditions and linguistic affiliations were formidable stumbling blocks. Islam had certainly been a useful rallying cry, but it had not been effectively translated into the solid support that Jinnah and the League needed from the Muslim provinces in order to negotiate an arrangement on behalf of all Indian Muslims.
The diversity of Pakistan’s provinces, therefore, was a potential threat to central authority. While the provincial arenas continued to be the main centers of political activity, those who set about creating the centralized government in Karachi were either politicians with no real support or civil servants trained in the old traditions of British Indian administration. The inherent weaknesses of the Muslim League’s structure, together with the absence of a central administrative apparatus that could coordinate the affairs of the state, proved to be a crippling disadvantage for Pakistan overall. The presence of millions of refugees called for urgent remedial action by a central government that, beyond not being established, had neither adequate resources nor capacities. The commercial groups had yet to invest in some desperately needed industrial units. And the need to extract revenues from the agrarian sector called for state interventions, which caused a schism between the administrative apparatus of the Muslim League and the landed elite who dominated the Muslim League.
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