Tampering with history
Some of the past rulers deliberately distorted history to suit their own purposes. General Zia did the most damage in this respect by ordering the rewriting of textbooks.
By Shahid Javed Burki
Tuesday, 18 January, 2011
ECONOMISTS have a term for what I will discuss today. They call it ‘path dependence’; how what has happened in the past can influence the present and define the future. The influence of the past can be benign, positive or negative depending on what happened in the past.
In Pakistan’s case the impact is mostly negative. The country has had a troubled history and this has had an influence on the way it has developed over the past six decades. These are difficult times and it is appropriate to weigh some of the burdens history has placed on the Pakistani people and the Pakistani state.
What we need to explore with reference to history are the several aspects of the development of Pakistan. In order to break this dependence on the past we must first do two things: list the main problems the country faces at this time and then see how they have been impacted and infected by the past.
There are half a dozen issues on which we need to reflect in a historical context in order to shape the future.
One of the more important subjects is the role of religion in politics and how its various interpretations have influenced society. We need also to examine why there is an absence of civility in public discourse and in that context why we are so unwilling to treat with compassion and understanding the minorities in our midst.
We have become progressively less tolerant towards the people we consider different from us in some respect. The shabby treatment of minorities is an amazing development in a country that was founded on the basis of protecting the rights and privileges of a community — the Muslims of British India — which was afraid it would be poorly treated at the hands of the Hindu majority. But by minorities I mean more than those that follow a different religion from the majority. I also mean those groups that speak a language or follow practices or have different ethnicity from the majority.
We should also debate the role of politics in building a durable structure of the Pakistani state. In that context what is very important is to devise ways for ensuring the accountability of elected officials who occupy positions of power. We should analyse the impact on politics, economics and society of increasing income and wealth inequalities.
As I will suggest in a later article the chain of causality that led towards the cold-blooded murder of Governor Salman Taseer includes not only a clash of two points of view concerning the role of religion. It was also abetted by a clash between two classes — the very rich and the not-so-poor.
Let me turn to the way history has been perverted to advance a certain point of view regarding the first of these many issues: the role of religion. In an earlier article titled ‘History must not lie’ published in this space on Nov 9, 2010 I suggested that Pakistan was not created to advance Islam in South Asia; it was founded to protect the economic and social rights of a distinct communi ty that felt threatened by the transfer of political power to the majority.
But that is not what we teach our children in public schools. Some of the country’s rulers have deliberately distorted history to suit their own purposes. General Ziaul Haq did the most damage in this respect by ordering the retelling of history in the textbooks taught in public schools. The government has a monopoly over the writing and production of textbooks. There is no outside peer review of what gets written. Whatever the government of the day believes in — and whatever the establishment of the day wants the people to believe — gets written.
Zia ordered the rewriting of history to assign a greater role to religion than was justified by facts. But as is vividly portrayed in Mohammad Hanif’s The Case of Exploding Mangoes — a fascinating fictional account of the Zia years — the military leader did not confine his attention to the writing of textbooks that told a historical lie. He used the unconstrained power he wielded to affect many other changes, including replacing the wording in the insignia worn on the uniforms of army personnel. The words ‘unity, faith and discipline’ were dropped in favour of a commitment to the waging of jihad.
It was President Zia’s assumption that by adopting these measures he would be able to change the mindset of the people who served in the armed forces. Did he succeed? How much have religious beliefs permeated the military? To what extent are the personnel in uniform likely to follow their religious views in carrying out their duties? These are important questions that can only be answered by carefully surveying the opinions of those who serve in the military and associated services. But that some parts of the security establishment have been penetrated was in chilling display in the assassination of Gov Taseer.
There are many reasons why the Pakistani people were prepared to accept this retelling of history. The most obvious one is the quality of education in the public school system, in which rote learning is the basis of imparting what can only be loosely described as knowledge. This unquestioning approach to life is also the reason for the lack of tolerance in public discourse.
It is extraordinary that the assassination of a liberal politician for expressing views that caused discomfort in some quarters was applauded not only by some religious scholars. It drew support from a section of the legal community. It was the same community that had bravely fought the establishment on the question of the independence of the judiciary. It is the same community that is agitating in the courts to hold the government and its agencies accountable for the plight of ‘missing persons’.
Now some of its members have no trouble in countenancing murder to silence an influential political voice. The legal community is expected to protect citizens against the use of arbitrary means to suppress dissent. Nothing can be more arbitrary than murder. By distorting our history we have distorted our worldview. ¦ The writer is chairman of the Lahore-based Institute of Public Policy, a former finance minister of Pakistan and former vice president of the World Bank.