PAKISTAN.

It is an irony of history that Pakistan was a state demanded neither by its founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), nor by the peoples of the territories that came to comprise the new country in 1947. The creation of Pakistan came at the cost of the partition of British India, approximately a million deaths, and the uprooting of some seventeen million people. Its two most populous provinces of Punjab and Bengal—both divided—sustained the largest share of these losses. Not only were regional solidarities violently rent, but Punjab was divested of its rich eastern districts and eastern Bengal of its industrial heart of Calcutta. For the remaining provinces of Pakistan—Baluchistan, the North Western Frontier Province, and Sind—the new territorial dispensation meant the corset-strings of a Punjabi-dominated center constraining their provincial autonomy. The Muslims from provinces in undivided India where they formed minorities might be supposed to have been its greatest beneficiaries. However, of the ninety-five million Muslims of pre-1947 India, almost a third remained in the Hindu-majority state either by choice or force of circumstance. Of those who moved to Pakistan, many have remained unassimilated, dubbed Muhajirs (migrants), within the homeland ostensibly created for them.

FOUNDING THE STATE

The founding of Pakistan is often traced to the reformer Syed Ahmed Khan's (1817–1898) articulation of the "two nation" theory in the 1880s. However, situating Syed Ahmed Khan in his times reveals that his concerns were more with securing the flagging fortunes of elite Muslims in north India than with advancing any separatist ideas. This required reconciling Muslims with British rule, Islamic ideas with Western modernity, and eschewing the Indian National Congress's anticolonial politics. Describing Muslims as a discrete community that Congress could not represent, Syed Ahmed Khan presumed greater unity among his co-religionists than empirical reality justified. But this was a perception reinforced by colonial censuses that had counted Indians into a Hindu "majority" and a Muslim "minority" community. In projecting Muslims and Hindus as two nations, Khan did not oppose the idea of an Indian nation as much as he sought to trump the majoritarianism he saw embedded in the Hindu-dominated Congress's nationalism that threatened to treat Muslims as a perpetual "minority."

Imperial systems of control through a balance between communities also lent support to the idea that Muslim interests needed separate representation. In October 1906, some Muslim leaders, with colonial encouragement, demanded separate electorates (granted by the 1909 Indian Councils Act) and in December 1906 established the All India Muslim League as a party that purportedly spoke for all Indian Muslims. While regional, linguistic, class, and sectarian divergences militated against a unitary conception of the Muslim community, this construction of the political category of "Indian Muslim" encouraged emphasis on religious identity to make demands from the colonial state.

This was the backdrop to Jinnah's revival of the two-nation theory in the late 1930s. In elections held in 1937 to create fully Indian ministries in the eleven provinces of British India, the Congress had won majorities in eight and the League in none. Beginning his political career in the Congress, Jinnah had little personal interest in the politics of religion. But the League's electoral debacle sent him in search of some way to unite the interests of Muslims in Hindu-majority provinces, where separate electorates had ensured the League's only victories, with those in provinces where they formed majorities but where cross-communal regional parties held sway. Religion provided a common thread, and claiming that Muslim India constituted a "nation" offered a viable strategy to argue for equal representation with "Hindu India" in any central government institutions. At no point did Jinnah view "Pakistan" so defined as incompatible with a federal or confederal state structure encompassing a united India. It was only by raising the specter of a future Congress-dominated postcolonial state that Jinnah persuaded Muslim-majority provinces wedded to their autonomy to accept the League as their "sole spokesman" in all-India negotiations. In the end, the Congress's rejection of the British Cabinet Mission's proposals of 1946, which protected Muslim interests through powerful provinces that could discipline the center, extinguished the last hopes for an undivided independent India. The British transferred power to Pakistan on 14 August 1947 and to India a day later.

POSTCOLONIAL CONTINUITY

That, despite the upheavals of partition, the state did not collapse in either Pakistan or India is a testimony to the robustness of the colonial structures that survived in both countries after independence. Unlike India, however, which had inherited the mantle of the British Raj, Pakistan was defined as a seceding state and had to fashion its international identity anew, asking cap in hand for admission into the comity of nations. More importantly, it had to carve out a new political center and have its authority acknowledged by provincial politicians fiercely protective of their regional power. This task was rendered both more urgent by the outbreak of hostilities with India over Kashmir and harder by the fact that the only national party, the Muslim League, had little or no organizational structure in the areas that came to form Pakistan. Its main constituency had always been drawn from among Muslims in Hindu majority provinces now in India. The result was the early reliance by weak central politicians on the two main non-elected institutions, the civil bureaucracy and the army, put in place by the colonial state. This explains in large measure why, beginning with the same colonial legacy in 1947, whereas India was able to sustain more or less stable traditions of formal democracy, Pakistan's fifty-seven-year-old history has been dominated by military rule in collusion with the mighty civil service. Although federal in form, the Pakistani state emerged, like its colonial predecessor, as highly centralized in practice and reliant on the administrative fiat of the bureaucracy and a disciplined army.

THE CREATION OF BANGLADESH

The difficulties of national integration and the inadequacy of Islam as a force capable of overriding regional particularisms were forcefully illustrated by the secession in 1971 of East Pakistan. Separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory from the western wing, East Bengal comprised over half Pakistan's population. Yet, despite this demographic edge, Bengalis were denied their due share in governance. Indeed, the fear of Bengali dominance led Punjabi politicians to collude with bureaucrats and the army to postpone democratic elections. Politically marginalized, the Bengalis were also severely underrepresented in the powerful bureaucracy and military. And economically, Bengali revenues from the export of primary goods such as jute were used to finance the development of the western wing, producing accusations of an "inner colonialism." Moreover, the center's imposition of Urdu and repression of the Bengali language and literature lent a cultural dimension to political and economic discontent. These various resentments fueled a campaign for provincial autonomy led by Mujibur Rahman (1920–1975) and his Awami League; in 1970, in the first national elections held in Pakistan, the party swept the polls in East Bengal. The Pakistani center ordered a military crackdown in March 1971, precipitating the dismemberment of the country as a Bengali Liberation Army, assisted by the Indian military, fought a war of independence that ended with the creation of Bangladesh.

ISLAM AND ISLAMIZATION

In the 1970 elections, the Pakistan People's Party of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928–1979) won most seats in West Pakistan. Bhutto had campaigned on a platform of land reforms and state control of financial and economic institutions. His populism failed because of his inability to keep together the broad coalition of his supporters—economic and social groups with divergent interests linked only by a common opposition to twelve years of martial rule. Charges of corruption, nepotism, and authoritarianism against the Bhutto regime were used by the army to reassert control in 1977 against a backdrop of widespread social unrest. General Mohammad Ziaul-Haq (1924–1988), who dismissed this first ever democratically elected government and hanged Bhutto in 1979, had to seek political legitimacy from Islamic groups and other similar constituencies that were in the forefront of opposition to Bhutto.

In Jinnah's vision of a democratic Pakistan, as enunciated in his speech to the Constituent Assembly on 11 August 1947, religion was to be a personal matter that had "nothing to do with the business of the state." Yet this perspective sat uneasily with the founding rationale of the state as a homeland for Indian Muslims. Islam as state ideology has played an ambivalent role in Pakistan. Religious groups such as the Jamat-i-Islami, founded by Syed Abul Ala Maududi (1903–1979), while opposing the demand for Pakistan as an expression of a godless nationalism, became among the most vocal advocates of an "Islamic state" after partition. However, while religious leaders have been kept on the periphery of state power, it was the periodic resort to Islam by temporal authorities to fortify weak secular legitimacies that opened the door to fundamentalist forces. This trend was accelerated under Zia-ul-Haq, whose regime (1977–1988) rested on the two supports of militarism and Islam. Yet even his Islamization program was selectively targeted at politically safe constituencies. Leaving the economy out of the purview of reform, his Islamic commitment was expressed through a series of purportedly religious ordinances in 1979 discriminating against women—effacing the distinction between rape and adultery and reducing the evidence of a woman to half that of a man. The genie of religious conservatism once out was difficult to re-bottle, as was demonstrated by the inability of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (b. 1953, prime minister 1988–1990 and 1993–1996), the first woman leader of an Islamic state, to repeal these laws. Political expediency assumed priority given her tenuous majority in parliament and the vociferous opposition to her assuming office from the orthodox Islamic lobby.

Another enduring legacy of the Zia-ul-Haq years was the rise in Shia-Sunni sectarian violence. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 had encouraged political activism among Pakistan's Shia minority (15 to 25 percent of the population), many of whom also opposed Zia-ul-Haq's Islamization as promoting a narrow Sunni vision incompatible with Shia interpretations. In response, the central government, with the help of the army and its intelligence wing and funding from Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Persian Gulf, bolstered a variety of Islamic institutions, especially madrasas (seminaries) propagating a particularly militant form of Sunni orthodoxy. Careering out of control in more recent times, sectarian violence claimed almost 1,300 lives in urban Pakistan alone between 1990 and 2002. And while, in the mid 1990s, the government made efforts to curb Sunni extremism at home, it was exported to Kashmir and Afghanistan.

ALLIANCE WITH THE UNITED STATES

Zia-ul-Haq's purely homegrown program of Islamization was queered by the American policy of organizing Muslim mujahidin (religious warriors) against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. As a result, generous funds and arms became available from the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to underpin Zia-ul-Haq's support for Islamic groups in Pakistan. This was not the first time that the Pakistani state, through the instrumentality of its army, became subsumed into U.S. strategic planning. As early as in the 1950s, Pakistan had been enlisted as a valuable ally in the Cold War. Toward this end, Washington buttressed the Pakistani bureaucracy and the army as more reliable safeguards against communism than the unpredictable world of democratic institutions. Indeed, many observers suggest that the first military coup of General Mohammad Ayub Khan (1907–1974) in 1958 had tacit American support. Whether or not they were themselves concerned with "rolling back communism," both Generals Ayub and Zia-ul-Haq were grateful beneficiaries of the financial and military aid this alignment brought.

While U.S.-Pakistani relations have seen periods of cooling off, such as happened after the latter's nuclear tests in 1998, military and security ties were never broken and were reinvigorated in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks. In fact, while the United States had joined other parts of the world in condemning the coup of General Pervez Musharraf (b. 1943) in October 1999, more recently such criticism has been muted. President Musharraf, in turn, has deftly made an about-face from full-fledged support of the Taliban in Afghanistan to cooperation with the United States in dealing with Islamist forces in the region. Notwithstanding occasional doubts expressed in Washington about the Musharraf regime's sincerity in weeding out Islamic fundamentalists, the administration of George W. Bush (b. 1946) has been unstinting in praising Pakistan as a frontline ally in the "war against terror."

See alsoAl Qaeda; British Empire; British Empire, End of; India; Islam; Islamic Terrorism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hardy, Peter. The Muslims of British India. Cambridge, U.K., 1972.

Jaffrelot, Christophe, ed. Pakistan: Nationalism Without a Nation? London, 2002.

Jahan, Rounaq. Pakistan: Failure in National Integration. New York, 1972.

Jalal, Ayesha. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge, U.K., 1985.

——. The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan's Political Economy of Defence. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.

Nasr, S. V. R. The Vanguard of Islamic Revolution: The Jama'at-i Islami of Pakistan. Berkeley, Calif., 1994.

Talbot, Ian. Pakistan: A Modern History. London, 1998.

Ziring, Lawrence. Pakistan in the Twentieth Century: A Political History. Karachi, 1997.

Mridu Rai