The country’s ethnicities include the Punjabis and Sindhis who live in the agriculturally rich and feudally organized provinces of Punjab and Sindh along the Indus River in the east and south of the country. These two regions account for most of Pakistan’s population and are the chief centers of power. The sparsely populated and arid wastes of Baluchistan—a province rich in natural gas—lies to the west. Pakistan’s rugged North-West Frontier Province is the only one not named after its dominant ethnic group, the Pashtun, whose population spreads across the border into southeastern Afghanistan and whose grievances are at the heart of much of the violence plaguing both countries. Last are the Mohajirs, descended from Muslim refugees who fled India when Pakistan was created by being violently torn from British India in 1947. Although concentrated in the city of Karachi in Sindh, they live throughout Pakistan. President Musharraf is Mohajir, a fact that along with his being a military man, binds him to the “Pakistan Ideology.”
An old but not inaccurate cliché holds that Pakistan may be understood by examining the “Three ‘A’s” that have shaped its destiny: Allah, the Army, and America. Yet there is a fourth “A” that has arisen from the interaction of the others: Alienation, a psychological phenomenon with many dimensions that has placed Pakistanis violently at odds with the peoples of neighboring countries, the West, and with each other.
The modern state of Pakistan—which means “land of the pure” in Persian and Urdu—came into existence as a result of a split in the Indian independence movement during the final years of British rule. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of India’s Muslims, raised the specter of Hindu domination once the country gained its freedom, a prospect he claimed placed “Islam in danger.” Though Jinnah was himself a secularist, this cry has been raised by such diverse actors as Pakistan’s religious parties, mainstream military officers, and jihadi terrorists, resounding through the history of the South-Central Asian region with devastating effect. Only by establishing a separate homeland for Muslims in the areas where they were a majority, Jinnah and his party the Muslim League argued, could they be protected from discrimination and much worse.
There was, however, a socioeconomic subtext to this agitation, one that was to define Pakistan as an independent country and plays a substantial role in the current crisis. Jinnah represented affluent Muslim professionals and feudal landowners who felt that their interests and privileges—such as power over their serfs—were threatened by the democratic pluralism and economic populism espoused by India’s founders, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawharal Nehru. By appealing to Islamic identity and instigating fear that Islam was under attack, the Muslim League hoped to maintain an authoritarian exclusivity, and block social and economic reform. Emphasizing that this dynamic was carried over from the independence struggle into the politics of the new country, Pakistani writer Khurshid Hyder wrote, “Lacking economic and social programs, politicians adopted obscurantist tactics and religious sentiments for the furtherance of their respective political aims.” Whenever more secular-minded Pakistanis have raised issues such as democracy, the rule of law, regional autonomy, poverty, women’s rights, illiteracy, and the persistence of feudalism, the military has suppressed demands for change under the guise of defending an endangered Islam.
PROTECTOR OF ISLAM OR MILITARY INDUSTRIAL CORPORATION?
The “Pakistan Ideology” holds that the country is not an ordinary state with defined borders and the normal obligations to provide for security, rule of law, and development within that territory. Pakistan’s dictator of the early 1970s, General Yahya Khan, often spoke of “defending ideological frontiers.” Similar to Turkey’s post-Ottoman designation of its military as protector of “Secularism,” in Pakistan, the military is the designated protector of Islam, which in their view translates into military rule. “Pakistan” is as much an ideological concept as it is a place from which Islam is championed wherever it is challenged—a regional and even world mission. There have been four direct military coups in Pakistan’s history—1958, 1969, 1977, and Musharraf’s in 1999—and a military head of state has ruled during almost half Pakistan’s existence.