Have we turned the corner?
By Shahid Javed Burki
Tuesday, 26 May, 2009
THERE are two — perhaps three — nation-building ideas that have been in conflict in South Asia since the British left the subcontinent in the late 1940s.
One was espoused by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India who governed the country for the first 17 years after independence in 1947.
This was that even in a country with such diversity as India it was possible to construct economic, political and social systems that would protect all citizens, not only those who constituted the majority. Sunil Khilnani, the Indian historian has called this the “idea of India”.
This idea, however, was rejected with some vehemence by Mohammad Ali Jinnah. He maintained that the land over which the British ruled was not inhabited by one Indian nation but by two — one Hindu and the other Muslim. Jinnah believed that each nation deserved its own political space within which it could order the lives of its citizens according to their religious beliefs and social norms. This came to be called the two-nation theory which became the basis for the creation of Pakistan as a homeland for the Muslims of British India. The American political scientist, Stephen Cohen has called this “the idea of Pakistan”.
However, some revisionist historians, in particular Ayesha Jalal, have suggested that Jinnah was not serious about the idea of Pakistan. His demand for the creation of a separate homeland for the Muslim community of British India was meant to obtain protection from the Hindu majority once India became independent. But the leaders of the Congress party granted him his wish and, in Jinnah’s own words, a “moth-eaten” Pakistan was born on August 14, 1947 a day before Indian gained independence.
But religion as a glue for nation-building turned out to be a weak device. The leaders of West Pakistan were reluctant to fully accommodate the wishes and aspirations of the citizens of East Pakistan. The result was considerable acrimony between the two leadership groups which eventually resulted in civil war. This led to the emergence of East Pakistan as an independent Bangladesh led by Sheikh Mujibur Rehman whose “six-point” formula for the grant of considerable autonomy to the eastern wing had not been not acceptable to the West Pakistani leaders. The six points were in fact the third nation-building idea to take hold in the South Asian mainland. According to this ethnicity and culture are powerful attributes of nationhood, even stronger than religion.These three ideas have contributed to the persistence of tensions in South Asia. These have been very strong in the case of Pakistan’s relations with India. It is not clear from Jinnah’s speeches and the few writings he left behind as to what were his precise intentions with respect to the role of religion in the state of Pakistan. He often spoke about the need to be guided by the teachings of Islam.
This was inevitable since he had used the idiom of religion to make his case for a separate homeland for the Muslims of South Asia. But it appears that he was inclined to lead the country towards a secular democracy, not too different from the one Nehru and his colleagues were able to enshrine in their country’s constitution. Adopted in 1951, the Indian constitution has proved to be a flexible instrument of governance. It has been amended scores of times to keep it current with the demands of a society that has seen rapid economic and social change.
For Pakistan, the case for keeping religion out of politics was weakened by the unanticipated transfer of population that occurred around the time India and Pakistan obtained independence. I have estimated in an earlier work using the censuses conducted by the two countries in 1951 that some 14 million people moved across the border in a few months in the summer and autumn of 1947. Eight million Muslims migrated from India to Pakistan while six million Hindus and Sikhs moved in the opposite direction.
By 1951, Pakistan had been ‘ethnically cleansed’ — a term that was not used then but gained currency when Yugoslavia fell apart in the early 1990s. For Pakistan the event was traumatic; when the country took its first census in 1951, 25 per cent of its population of 32 million was made up of refugees. What was not realised then but proved to be a political trauma in the long run was the ‘Muslimisation’ of Pakistan.
In the late 1940s non-Muslims in the areas that are today’s Pakistan constituted about a third of the population. Today the religious minorities account for less than five per cent. It was inevitable that with Muslims constituting such an overwhelming share of the population religion would become a greater force. However, it needn’t have bred religious extremism as it did starting in the late 1970s.
While the idea of India worked in India, it did not keep religion entirely out of politics. The BJP, one of the two national political parties in the country, traces its origin to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925 to protect what were perceived to be the rights of the Hindu population in British India. The party gained ground in the 1990s by drawing upon the grievances of those who believed that the Indian state had given too much ground to the lower castes in the population and to the Muslim minority.
The party drew support in particular from the Hindus who had migrated from what was now Pakistan. L.K. Advani, the party’s leader in the elections of 2009, was born in Karachi and left for India at the age of 20. The party’s overt pursuit of Hindu interests led to the demolition of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The mosque was supposed to have been built on the ground where Ram, one of the most venerated figures in Hindu mythology, was said to have been born. The assault on the mosque led to riots, in particular in the always restive city of Bombay. Thousands of people were killed, many of them Muslims.
The 2009 elections in India have confirmed the longevity of the “idea of India”. The Congress won handily against the BJP-led alliance as well as the alliance of regional parties that would have liked to see the further weakening of central authority. The decision by the elected government in Pakistan to send the military to chase out Islamic militants from Malakand in the north-eastern part of the country may have ushered in a process that could bring the country back towards religious moderation and political modernisation.
It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that the Indian elections in April-May 2009 and the action against Islamic extremists in Pakistan could cleanse the political systems in the two countries of religious influences. It will require leaders from both sides of the South Asian divide to take advantage of these events.