Solidarity against violence —Rasul Bakhsh Rais
28/04/2009.
Pakistan has, like many other societies, faced violence of many types — sectarian, ethnic, and now religious. But there is a difference. Most societies in Asia, Africa and Latin America that went through agonising cycles of violence, revolutionary or motivated by criminal and other considerations, have largely stabilised or are in the process of defeating them. Some have been more successful than others.
What is our story; what forces and elements fuel violence and what we can do about it? We need to debate these questions very candidly. In our view, violence is not a cultural trait of any society as is generally assumed. Therefore, it cannot be ascribed to or associated with any particular regional group.
National, regional and international circumstances produce various groups and shape their choice of violence as a weapon of political and social coercion. In making this terrible choice, two sets of belief guide the perpetrators of violence.
The first is about the self; that these individuals and groups are pursuing the right cause, have justified grievances and can convince their followers about the moral basis of violence against the state or other communities and groups that may be competing for the same space, political power or resources.
The second belief is that they can get away with violence, and that the state is too socially and politically weak to sustain a confrontation with them. There are also external interests that have destabilised Pakistan and many other states facing challenges of nation and state building. Local groups organised around ethnicity, religion or sect associated with regional states is more of a norm than an exception in South Asia, because states in this part of the world have yet to embrace the fundamental value of the Westphalian system: inviolability of borders and sovereign jurisdiction within national boundaries.
Foreign support for local militants, whether in Pakistan or other South Asian countries, is not a primary factor, however. It is the outcome of adversarial relations in the past and a covert form of coercion parallel to normal diplomacy. Foreign elements become active only when local groups create a critical mass to disrupt activities of the state or start posing a challenge to national security.
While debating what role our neighbours play in fomenting trouble inside our territories by aligning with anti-state groups, we cannot shift our analytical or policy focus away from what propels some of these groups to take up arms. Not all violent groups have similar motivations; in our history, we have confronted ethnic, sectarian and religious groups.
Ethnic and sectarian groups are pretty old and have confronted us in many forms, but their power and ability to harm the nation has depended on the political and security climate of the region and the country. For example, the absence of democracy and true federalism has alienated some sections of the Baloch people.
This created bad conditions for national integration because autocracy and centralisation worked against the spirit of ethnic and regional pluralism. The Baloch more than others rightly felt robbed of their resources, powerless to influence the policies of the centre and humiliated by the personal style of governance of Pakistan’s last strongman, General Pervez Musharraf.
And the history of internationalising domestic conflicts, particularly in relation to Afghanistan and India, has created the right atmosphere for local groups in Pakistan and these countries to work together against Pakistan’s national interests. Much of the trouble we face today in Balochistan and the Pashtun borderlands have both domestic and regional roots.
We are facing multiple security challenges today, not just the one from the Taliban. Too many groups confronting us may stretch our security resources and also divide our political attention.
As we think about our collective response to security challenges, it is also important to shape them appropriately. Parliament and political consensus among the major parties can be the starting point. Fortunately, it is already happening both on Balochistan and the Taliban threat. Provincial autonomy for Balochistan and other provinces under the 1973 Constitution should have been granted long time ago. Denial of autonomy and provincial rights is a clear violation of the social contract by the federation. This naturally feeds into the grievances of disillusioned nationalist leaders.
There appears to be an emerging sense among the major political parties that the issue of provincial autonomy is serious and needs to be settled quickly and made part of the new package of constitutional amendments. But while we wait for that to happen, the transfer of the concurrent list to the provinces shouldn’t await new amendments. That will be simply implementing the national consensus and honouring the federation’s compact with the units. Things will then hopefully start calming down in Balochistan.
Talibanisation is a complex issue because it is not confined to a particular ethnic group or region of the country. Also, it mixes politics, power and religion; and that combination makes such movements difficult and costly to defeat.
Unlike the ethnic demands of devolution of power, assertion of provincial rights on resources and autonomy that are negotiable, the Taliban’s demands about changing the very identity and writ of the Pakistani state are beyond the framework of the Constitution.
While we may employ power when there is no other choice left against a group that takes up arms and is unrelenting, something that every state does no matter how weak or small or how big the challenges, we need to mobilise society. Local communities quite often become hostage to the power and cruelty of armed groups. Also, outside the affected areas, other parts of society blame the state and security forces more than the militants. Nor are the militants always engaged in reactive violence, as people outside the conflict zones tend to believe.
It is equally necessary, if not more, to mobilise society against the violent groups, as is it is to use to force, if and when inevitable.
The cultural, historical and civilisational foundations of solidarity among the people of Pakistan are strong and have manifested themselves even without the agency of the state on occasions of national distress and emergency. Religious extremism and the violence associated with it cannot be left out of the social sphere as the exclusive responsibility of the state.
It is our country, our society, our identity and our political order under our Constitution that are threatened. Our resolve to stand up against violence and show greater solidarity would morally and socially weaken violent groups and give us the collective strength to face our challenges. We cannot afford to pass on our responsibility to others.
Dr Rasul Bakhsh Rais is author of Recovering the Frontier State: War, Ethnicity and State in Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2008) and a professor of Political Science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He can be reached at
rasul@lums.edu.pk