The fear factor

Will we ever be rid of our demons?

I never remember a time in our 64 years of independence when we have had complete faith in our future. We have always lived in the shadow of fear. First, we were afraid that India was bent on destroying us. With regards to East Pakistan, there was a constant fear gnawing at our insides that India was scheming in our eastern wing. That it was spreading its dharm and entrenching its culture over there. What a majority of Hindus couldn’t do in thousand years in a united India (as Muslim culture and religion remained intact), we now lived in fear in our own country that the Hindu minority could do in the newly-created Pakistan.

As long as East Pakistan remained with us, we lived in a state of fear. And the sum of our fears came true one day. But the reason wasn’t India. It was our own cravenness. First, we lived in apprehension of the Hindu. Then in apprehension of the majority of East Pakistan (which was also a fear of the Hindu minority in East Pakistan as we had the deep-seated worry that they were misguiding the Muslims there and that a rule by the majority in East Pakistan would de facto be a rule of the Hindu minority there).

To allay these trepidations, first we didn’t give the East Pakistanis their deserved right to forming a government in the centre. Whenever there was a PM from East Pakistan, we got rid of him by hook or crook. Then we used the One Unit Scheme to neutralise their majority. We convinced them that 52 percent and 48 percent were in fact equal and that the constituent assembly should have equal seats for both wings due to this parity. Despite doing this, we were still fearful that East Pakistan might gain a majority by taking some members from the erstwhile smaller provinces into its fold.

To deal with this dread, we formed a military government. East Pakistanis waged a constant struggle against military dictatorship and were finally able to get their right as a majority accepted. When elections took place in 1970, Mujeeb-ur-Rehman’s Awami League got a decisive majority in the national assembly. We were then afraid that this would mean the end of military interference in politics. Thus, power was not transferred to him. We thought that we could establish control over the unarmed Bengalis through military might. But it was not so. We cleared the road for the Indian army due to our cowardliness and our fears eventually culminated in us losing East Pakistan to the Indian army.

We still lived in perpetual panic in what was left of Pakistan after that. Because slogans for dealing with the remnant Pakistan had begun to be chanted in India. But Bhutto picked up the pieces and worked to stabilise Pakistan. When he got our annexed territory and POWs back from India, he became the embodiment of our fears. We made a united oppositional front against him. Some quarters called on the army to get rid of him. General Zia-ul-Haq came forward to do the job. But even though he had put the man in jail, the dictator still lived in apprehension of the man. The ruling elites decided that the best way to deal with this was to hang him. But Zia-ul-Haq’s fears didn’t die with Bhutto even though his vice-like grip on power tightened. He was now afraid that the PPP would win elections so they were held under the condition that elections would not be party based. In this non-party assembly, the dictator formed a government under his own supervision. He gave the prime ministerial slot to a man he thought was harmless. But as soon as Muhammad Khan Junejo started to get his powers, the generals also began to be fearful of him and that led them to dissolving the assemblies.

Internally, we had been afraid of Bhutto and then his ghost for the longest time. But our external fears too never went away. India was the ever-present bogeyman. But now there was the additional terror of the Soviet armies in Afghanistan. So terrorised were we that we willingly became America’s proxy and asked for all kinds of help. They gave us arms, money and ‘Islam’. We used these three key ingredients to train warriors and send them to Afghanistan. After a long drawn out war, the Soviet armies left Afghanistan but America also deserted the region. We were now afraid about what would happen to us without their patronage. In throes of this fear, we made the nuclear bomb.

We thought that the bomb would be the end of our fears but it wasn’t. To deal with these, we started the Kargil mission. The mujahideen we sent to Kargil were encircled by the Indian army. There were airstrikes against our armed forces. This Indian aggression put the fear back in our then COAS. He went to the prime minister to get the US to intervene and get us our men back. India made that promise and we thought we could finally have some peace and be rid of our demons. But, no. The generals who were the architects of the Kargil misadventure and hence our defeat at the hands of India were now afraid that they would be dismissed. On the other hand, the civilian prime minister was afraid that the army might oust him. The PM’s fears turned out to be true and the scared generals did indeed conduct a coup.

Thus began General Musharraf’s reign. During his tenure, terrorist attacks on America took place. Then the American statement ‘with us, or against us’ scared us and we became their allies. For ten years as an American ally, we have been against the very mujahideen we ourselves trained. The beginning of our alliance was the beginning of a new fear: that of the backlash that would emanate from the militants. It came indeed and it came with an untold fury. The TTP was conducting (and continues to conduct) attacks on our army and people. The Taliban were unhappy that we were helping the US and the US furious that we were aiding the Taliban. Between a rock and a hard place, we were frightened of both. We were now also fearful about the very bomb that we made to deal with our deepest darkest fears. Fearful that the US would take it away.

The situation is that now we are afraid of the Taliban. And the US. And the conditions in the tribal regions. We are also afraid of trade with India. At the time of independence, the source of our fear was just India. Now, it is virtually everyone, everything and everywhere. We have been independent for 64 years but never independent from our fears. I wonder how many generations will continue to live like this…

The writer is one of Pakistan’s most widely read columnists.