Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is neither Islamic nor a republic and post-1971, not quite Pakistan
After Sir Cyril Radcliffe was given the unenviable task of carving out India and Pakistan from the Indian subcontinent within six weeks in the summer of 1947, he haphazardly sliced out the 450,000 square kilometres of the land he knew very little about. To be fair to the man, a connoisseur wouldn’t have done a prodigiously better job considering how the geographically and ethnically contiguous units had been theological blends. Had the demarcation been done on an ethnical basis, the slicing act would’ve been a relative piece of cake, but wedging out a Muslim homeland and a Hindu-majority secular state from the Hindu-Muslim hotchpotch was a telling task. The Radcliffe Line was the proverbial shot in the dark.
66 years down the line the western wing of Radcliffe’s patchwork, also known as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, has witnessed its ideological glue intermittently come off from various segments. One fragment of the Muslim-majority hodgepodge retraced its own identity in 1971, while four other portions continue to have their differences of varying proportions as they vie to rubberstamp their ethnic superiority. With ethnic and provincial identities regularly being given preference over any national or ideological commonalities, further segments like ‘Saraikistan’ being put on the table and the centre’s inability to govern the frontiers resulting in national and regional instability, proper fragmentation of Pakistan has been proposed by many an academic, along the lines of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union as a solution to the seemingly perennial turmoil – a Balkanisation of Pakistan, if you will.
The army’s dominance in Pakistan and the ensuing Islamist militancy are normally touted as the destabilising factors in the country. And so to peddle the Pakistani Balkanisation at a time when a democratically elected government safely passed on the reins to another democratically elected government, for the first time in the history of the country, might seem a bit ill-timed. However, a look at the voting patterns in last month’s General Elections further adds impetus to the call of potential Balkanisation of Pakistan.
One province singlehandedly gave the current ruling party an overwhelming mandate in the national assembly, another stuck to its old guns, the third summoned the fifth party at the provincial helm in the past couple of decades, while the fourth didn’t really bother joining in on the voting party. The fact that Pakistan does not really have a national party says a lot about any concept of national unity that the patriots might want to peddle. In fact, if there’s any entity that is binding this country together, it is the military. When that’s the case, the realm under the militaristic control can be dubbed a quasi-empire, not a nation. And as Voltaire once said of the Holy Roman Empire, “it’s neither Holy, nor Roman nor an empire”, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is neither Islamic nor a republic and post-1971, not quite Pakistan.
The proposed Balkanisation would see the merger of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) and FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) with Afghanistan, officially making the Durand Line what it has been for ages: non-existent. Sindh and Balochistan would break free from the shackles of subjugation to become independent states, while Punjab would be the standalone remnant of Pakistan. Any calls for the independence of any of the provinces is obviously dubbed high-treason, but to believe that one could cogently fuse units, that don’t really want to exist in unison, for considerable length of time, is medieval thinking.
This week’s Ziarat attack was yet another reminder of the Balochistan question. A resource-rich region like Balochistan becoming a financial mess and in turn the hub of turbulence is a massive price to pay for delusions of national unity. 66 years worth of human rights abuse, ethnic cleansing, military operations and the myriad missing persons in the garb of patriotism, should suffice is throwing any inkling of Pakistani nationalism out of the Baloch windows. When one tries to comprehend the quintessence of “nationalism”, the irony that surfaces is that Balochistan’s call for independence is prodigiously stronger as compared to Pakistan’s call for independence from the Indian subcontinent. Balochistan is doing to Pakistan what Pakistan did to pre-1947 United India, albeit with more of a claim to being a nation.
Whether Pakistan’s raison d’etre was Islamic or secular consociationalism – a term that funnily enough didn’t exist at the time – its carving out was supposed to be done on a “Muslim majority” basis, which was the instruction given to Sir Cyril Radcliffe. By defining the new realm, and distinguishing a separate nation, on the basis of the religion of its inhabitants, the founders of Pakistan not only buried any modern-day claims of secularity, but also laid the foundation of similar separatist movements in Pakistan. Castigating the use of ethnicity and venerating using religious identity for a nationalist movement uses the same double-standard gauge that highlights freedom fighters of the Balochistan Liberation Army as terrorists.
With Pakistan’s own born and bred militant groups becoming more of a threat to the national security than any foreign state that you might want to point your finger at, Balkanisation is a solution to the turbulence in the country and a possible answer to regional stability. The breakup of Yugoslavia is a classic example of achieving relative stability in regions with ethnic turmoil, and South Asia is undoubtedly the Balkans of the 21st century. Even so, in addition to possible regional stability, separation of provinces and the dissolution of united Pakistan would mirror the country’s own birth and its preceding movement, and in turn provide the answers to many scathing questions that we have been dodging for the past 66 years. The concept of unity was lost on founders of Pakistan, and the irony that we expect the Baloch nationalists to adhere to that concept, seems to be lost on the modern-day Pakistanis.
Through the general elections, the masses might have inadvertently balloted for Balkanisation. Whether for regional security or to collectively drag itself out of an identity crisis, Pakistan might have to cease its existence as a security state where the constituent units have been woven together through theocratic and militaristic filaments. And just like the Austrian Empire of 1815, the Pakistan of 2013 is akin to a “worm-eaten house”, if one of its parts is removed, no one can tell how much of it will fall.
The writer is a financial journalist and a cultural critic. Email: khulduneshahid@gmail.com, Twitter: @khuldune