Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [37]
The late Akhtar Hamid Khan (a former British Indian civil servant and founder of the famous Orangi urban regeneration project, who moved to Pakistan after partition), told me in 1989 that ‘ridiculous though that may sound now’, he and many younger educated Muslims had genuinely believed that Pakistan could be turned into a sort of ideal Muslim socialist state, drawing on Islamic traditions of justice and egalitarianism as well as on Western socialist thought. In the lines of the Punjabi poet and Muslim Leaguer Chiragh Din Joneka:
The Quaid-e-Azam will get Pakistan soon,
Everyone will have freedom and peace.
No one will suffer injustice.
All will enjoy their rights.12
In fact, however, as with later attempts at radical reform, the first years of West Pakistan also turned into the story of the digestion of the Pakistan movement by local political society and culture, based on ‘feudalism’, kinship and conservative religion – an experience that was to be repeated under the administrations of Ayub Khan, Zia-ul-Haq and Musharraf. All, in their different ways, tried to bring about radical changes in Pakistan. All were defeated by the weakness of the Pakistani state and the tremendous undertow of local kinship networks, power structures and religious traditions.
Any hope in the immediate aftermath of independence that reformist elements in the Muslim League might prevail against these traditions was destroyed by the premature deaths of Jinnah (barely a year after independence) and his prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan.13 Without them, the Muslim League quickly disintegrated. This marks a critically important difference with India, which helps explain why these two offspring of the British Indian empire have had such different political histories.
In India, the charismatic leader of the independence movement, Jawaharlal Nehru, survived in power until 1964, and founded a dynasty which dominates Indian politics to this day. Thanks largely to Nehru, the Congress Party also survived as a powerful force. Indeed, although a ‘democracy’, until the 1960s India was in some respects (like Japan for more than five decades after the Second World War) a de facto one-party state. In Pakistan, no such party existed.
Even had Jinnah lived, however, it is questionable whether the Muslim League could have continued to succeed politically as the Congress did. The League had its origins, its heart, and by far the greatest part of its support in the north of what was now India. Until shortly before independence, Punjab and Sindh were ruled by local parties dominated by great landowners, in alliance with their Hindu and Sikh equivalents (in Punjab) and with Hindu businessmen (in Sindh). The North West Frontier Province was ruled by a local Pathan nationalist party in alliance with Congress, and Balochistan by its own local chieftains, several of whom opposed joining Pakistan.
The leaders of the new Pakistani state and army were acutely aware of the thinness of loyalty to the new state across most of its territory; and this too helped create the mentality of a national security state, distrustful of its own people, heavily reliant on its intelligence services, and dependent ultimately on the army to hold the country together.
The Muslim League was only able to supplant the local Sindhi, Punjabi and Pathan parties towards the very end of British rule, when the imminent prospect of an independent Hindu-dominated India stirred up profound fears in the Muslim masses of the region. And even then, the League was only able to prevail because it was joined by large sections of the local landowning elites – the first of the compromises between reformist parties and traditional local elites