And how it has played out
While the general elections were just a few weeks away, some people thought that these would either be postponed or not held at all. They cited rising terrorism, religious militancy and weakening law and order situation, particularly in Karachi, Khyber Pakhtunkhaw (KP) and Balochistan as the reason. This shows that there is a mindset in Pakistan for which security concerns are more important than the continuity of the political process. They may not be adherents of Allama Tahir-ul-Qadri’s creed; nonetheless, his slogan of ‘siyasat nahi, riyasat bachao’ explains somewhat their predicament.
This mindset has not grown out of the ‘wave of terrorism’ afflicting the country for the last two decades rather it has roots deep in the colonial past. Ian Talbot in his latest book on Pakistan explains this phenomenon by arguing that the areas that constitute this country today were actually a part of the British ‘security state’ in pre-partition era, meaning thereby that institutions of representative democracy were sacrificed at the altar of national security. With volatile Afghanistan next door and the hovering Russian giant beyond, the British imperialists could not afford to nurture democracy as these areas had to be used as what the scholar Tan Tai Yong call a ‘garrisoned state’ for military expeditions. It was because of these strategic considerations that while the representative institutions were grafted in today’s India at the end of the nineteenth century, the Simon Constitutional Commission Report as late as 1930 outrightly rejected the political participation of the masses in the provinces of Balochistan and NWFP (today’s KP). The slow pace of electoral politics in this region can be further understood from the fact that till 1947, only the Quetta Municipality was allowed to elect its members out of the whole of Balochistan. And don’t be surprised by the fact that the regions of Gilgit and Baltistan got a representative assembly only in the 21stcentury.
To some extent, all this also explains why democratic institutions evolved at a different pace in India and Pakistan. Historically, it was impressed in the minds of the people living here that security concerns were more important than political issues. After partition of the subcontinent in 1947, the Pakistani state inherited the mantle of the British ‘security state’. With India refusing to accept its creation and Afghanistan staking claims on its Pakhtun areas in NWFP by observing 31 August as the ‘Greater Pakhtunistan Day’, security issues took precedence over the growth of political institutions. On top of it, the All India Muslim League which was just a political party but by claiming to be the creator of Pakistan identified itself as the entity that represented the will of the state as well. This metamorphosis of a party into the state had far reaching implications on the political evolution in the country.
Now, any threat to the Muslim League could be termed as a threat to national security. The state that felt threatened from its neighbours was equally afraid of the actors within, who dared to challenge its worldview. Several examples can be quoted in support of this premise. In 1948, the Kalat National Party was banned in Balochistan. The same year the Azad Peoples Party was formed with Abdul Ghaffar Khan as President, Abdus Samad Achakzai as Vice President and G M Syed as General Secretary. The party was killed in its infancy when its leaders were imprisoned for long time just because it envisioned a non-communal and secular Pakistan on socialist ideals which clashed with the religion based communal nationalism touted by League, the party in power.
Such an attitude by the ruling party bred a culture of political intolerance towards the opposition from the very beginning. Although every democratic society accepts the existence of political pluralism and conflicting viewpoints, exactly the opposite happened in Pakistan. The provincial elections of 1951 testify this trend. It was none other than Quaid-i-Millat Liaquat Ali Khan, under whom the ruling party, the Muslim League used the state’s power not only to rig the elections and violate the sanctity of the ballot box but also witch-hunt the opposition. The rigging was so pervasive that a new term ‘jhurlo’ was coined for the first time in popular jargon. Rigging is one thing but Premier Liaquat went to the extent of branding all the politicians opposed to his party as ‘traitors’ and ‘dogs’. He stated that all those political parties that did not subscribe to the ideology of the League were unpatriotic and declared that “the formation of new political parties in opposition to the Muslim League is against the interest of Pakistan”. Fast forward to the ‘90s and we heard the same harangue from a new generation of League leaders against another party. This time the PPP’s leader Benazir Bhutto was denounced as a national security threat.
The approach of dubbing the entire opposition as ‘unpatriotic’ or ‘wrong’ was not limited to Liaquat Ali. The example set by him was emulated by League’s central and provincial leaders as well. Khan Abdul Qayyum, the strongman of the League in the NWFP squeezed the ‘Red Shirts’ of Abdul Ghaffar Khan after the ‘Hazara Plot’. He was equally vindictive towards those ‘friends’, who had left the League and started a new party to challenge his power. One such figure was Pir of Manki Sharif, who was kicked out of the province just because he had founded the Awami Muslim League.
At the federal level, the Communications Minister Sardar Abdur Rab Nishter tried to stifle the voices of regional protest by branding them as fifth columnists. He went on to declare, “Regional patriotism is simply repugnant to Islam”. In this way the political repression of the League was submerged with the religious sanction. This strategy was effectively used by the Leaguers in the 1946 general elections as Talbot succinctly notes that “its campaigners had declared that anyone who voted against the League was a ‘kafir’ and would not be buried in a Muslim graveyard”.
Such rhetoric engendered intolerance towards any political opposition. This totalitarian attitude was all the more dangerous because the League was the oldest and the biggest Muslim party in the subcontinent and ruled unchallenged for several years after the creation of Pakistan. The political model that it set was replicated by other parties as well. In the ultimate analysis, it was not a democratic model based on the principle of “live and let live”. That is why instead of providing good governance the politicians settled scores against one another. A new tendency of dragging in the army was introduced when one group of squabbling politicians found it too difficult to overthrow the ruling group. General K M Arif, who served as General Zia’s Chief of Staff justified the military intervention in his book, ‘Working with Zia’ by stating that it was due to absence of “reconciliation, accommodation and tolerance among the quarrelling politicians”. However, the last five years have shown that the politicians have at least matured in this regard. Not only did they refrain from calling in the army but quite successfully neutralised those few voices which still clamoured for the martial law in some areas of the country. The PPP government that just completed its term was probably the first government that broke the old mould of political intolerance by promoting the culture of live and let live.
The writer is an academic and journalist who can be reached at [email protected]
