by B.Raman
Since the 1950s, the fate of Pakistan has been determined largely by an undeclared
alliance between two coercive forces--the religious Ulema and the military.
The provision in the Objectives Resolution adopted by its
founding fathers that the State would be governed in accordance with the precepts of Islam
gave the Ulema, despite their lacking popular support, the right to determine whether laws
and governmental decisions/actions were in accordance with these precepts and to apply the
coercive power of religious medievalism against those who had, in the eyes of the Ulema,
deviated from these precepts.
The Pakistani Constitution, inter alia, defines high treason as
the subversion or abrogation of the Constitution through the use of force. A compliant
judiciary has repeatedly exempted the military from this definition, by upholding its
seizure of power and suspension or abrogation of the Constitution under the doctrines of
"civil necessity" and "unavoidable act of military revolution" to save
the State from collapse.
This judicially-sanctioned extra-constitutional coercive power
has been repeatedly used by the military against duly-elected political leaderships in
violation of another Constitutional provision, which subordinates the military to the
elected political leadership.
The Pakistani society, its political leadership and large
sections of its elite cannot escape their share of the blame for the steady growth of this
coercive axis. While ready to express themselves against the coercive power of the Ulema
whenever they had an opportunity of doing so anonymously as during the elections, they
refrained from doing so publicly lest they be dubbed anti-Islam.
While criticising the repeated military intervention in politics,
they did not hesitate to seek its complicity in their campaigns against their political
opponents as sections of the political leadership did in seeking the intervention of the
military against the late Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto in 1977, against Ms.Benazir Bhutto in 1990
and against Mr.Nawaz Sharif in 1993 and 1999.
For Mrs.Benazir Bhutto, the army was a saviour when it arrested
and prosecuted Mr.Sharif in October 1999, but became a curse and anti-democratic only when
it refused to drop the corruption proceedings against her.
Till 1970, these two coercive powers acted in parallel and not in
concert. The first signs of a concert became evident in the then East Pakistan in 1971
when the military and the Jamaat-e-Islami acted in tandem in suppressing the Bengalis,
despite their being as pious Muslims as the people of the then West Pakistan.
Zia-ul-Haq institutionalised this coercive axis. He used the
Ulema and the religious parties, in support of the US objectives, in Afghanistan and
prepared the ground for using them later against India in Kashmir and elsewhere. He
promoted a new brand of Ulema, the jehadi kind. Till his advent to power in 1977, the
Ulema still had a large number of genuinely pious, well-read and highly respected
religious scholars.
It was Zia who had them marginalised and replaced by the Jehadi
variety consisting of people like Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the present Amir of the
Jamaat-e-Islami, and Maulana Fazlur Rahman, of the Jamaat-ul-Ulema Pakistan. The Ulema
promoted by Zia were known more for their knowledge of the Kalasnikov and the RDX
explosives than for their religious piety and Islamic scholarship.
Zia did more damage to the Pakistani society and economy than any
other Pakistani ruler. Weaponisation, heroinisation, sectarian brutalisation and
medievalisation were his legacy to the people of Pakistan.
The Pakistani people are haunted today and will continue to be
haunted for years to come by the devastating impact of his action in practically handing
over the country's education system to this jehadi brand of Ulema. He inducted them in
large numbers into the Education Department, let them exercise their coercive power in
deciding the syllabus and abdicated the responsibility of the State to provide modern
education to the children, particularly in the rural areas, who cannot afford to go to
private schools.
Pakistan is one of the very few countries in the world where
Government expenditure on education has been steadily declining. If this has not resulted
in a deepening unalphabetisation of the society, it is largely due to the network of
madrasas set up by the Ulema, with Saudi and heroin money, in the rural areas.
The rural youth of Pakistan, who have grown up during the last 20
years, do not know the world outside the world of the Ulema and are strangers to the new
frontiers of knowledge. Their knowledge is confined to the Holy Koran as interpreted by
these bigoted Ulema and to the glories of so-called martyrdom in the cause of Islam.
The Ulema painstakingly excluded from the curriculum humanities,
Western history and thought, logic, science or any other subject which might have made the
youth develop the capability for independent thinking and start questioning their medieval
mindset and teachings.
In no other Islamic country of the world---not even in Iran-- has
the Ulema acquired such a stranglehold over the education system as in Pakistan. It
produced willing cannon fodder for the "jehad" in Afghanistan, Jammu &
Kashmir in India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, southern Philippines, the Xinjiang province of
China, the Central Asian Republics, and the Chechnya and Dagestan areas of Russia and
little else.
Pakistan inherited from the British a three-commodity (textiles,
sports and leather goods) and one-port (Karachi--excluding East Pakistan) economy. More
than 50 years after independence, it has become just a four-commodity economy, with heroin
being the only, but the most lucrative addition.
How can there be a diversification of the economy without skilled
manpower due to the shambles in the education system? Which foreign investor will be
interested in a country, which produces more Kalashnikov-wielding bigots than
computer-savvy professionals and more heroin power than brain power and in which one is
transported in the time machine from the modern to the medieval or even pre-medieval?
The greatest threat to Pakistan's future as an independent
nation-State is not from India as its people are repeatedly told by the Ulema and the
military, but from this coercive axis of the two. Its nuclear weapons may be a deterrent
against India as perceived by them, but it will not be a deterrent against this creeping
medievalisation of the society by the Ulema with the complicity of the military.
Zia made this coercive twosome into a triumvirate, with the
co-option of the narcotics barons. It is now the coercive power of the Ulema and the
military, supported by the money power of the narcotics barons, which stands in the way of
Pakistan taking its place in the comity of modern, democratic nations.
Even, in the pre-1977 period, when the Ulema's malign influence
was not as strong as it is today, the military did not produce many enlightened,
far-seeing officers. It is even less likely to do so today due to the creeping
mullaisation of not only the lower and middle, but also the senior ranks.
For the first time in its history, the Pakistani Army has three
veritable Mullahs in uniform as Lt.Generals-- Lt.Gen.Mohammad Yousaf Khan, the Chief of
the General Staff, Lt.Gen. Muzaffar Usmani, CO, 5 Corps, Karachi, and Lt.Gen. Mohammad
Aziz Khan, CO, 4 Corps, Lahore. All of them, along with Gen.Pervez Musharraf, the
self-styled Chief Executive, won their professional spurs under Zia.
They are the progenies and the beneficiaries of this coercive
triumvirate. Will it be reasonable to expect them to act against it?
The USA's Pakistan experts can be very simplistic in their
analyses and assessments. Many of them shared, with the thousands of Pakistanis who hailed
Gen. Musharraf as the saviour last year, fond hopes that this Scotch-gulping, dog-loving
and Bangkok-massage-parlour-frequenting blue-eyed boy of Gen.Anthony Zinni, former CO of
the US Central Command, might pull Pakistan out of the medieval vortex in which it has
been caught.
Instead of doing so, he has added to the coercive power of the
Ulema by conceding its demands one after the other and by proclaiming his public support
of their jehadi madness. Even Zia did not make so many concessions to the religious
extremist groups in his first year in office as Gen.Musharraf has done. The Ulema,
consequently, feel stronger today than ever in the past.
What is the state of Pakistan today, one year after this
self-proclaimed saviour assumed office on October 12,1999?
The highly-respected "Friday Times" of Pakistan wrote
as follows: "The Army is in power, full stop. The Ulema are also partly in power
because of their armed militias and their contribution to the Army's crucial agenda of
keeping the Kashmir issue alive. They exercise considerable coercive and ideological
control over civil society. Their leverage on the Government is far more palpable
than that of the politicians. It is no surprise, therefore, that they have asserted their
agenda very aggressively. They have an economic programme that scares even the Army with
its radicalism. They want a change in foreign policy that even the hawkish establishment
in Islamabad cannot implement. And all of them have announced their decision not to
contest elections, but to gain power on the basis of militant Islamic ideology. The
politicians, in the meanwhile, are nowhere on the scene…. While both are allies in
jehad, they differ in their approach to the political system. The Army wants to
re-establish guided electoral democracy in the country, while the Ulema want a more
utopian order in which a Western-type representative system is simply not permitted. Add
to this the confusion generated by Constitutional provisions that favour the Ulema, but
not the politicians, like the Council of Islamic Ideology and the Federal Shariat Court,
and you have a situation that is primed to tilt in favour of anarchy."
Who can save Pakistan from its 'saviours' and how? That is the
question every right-thinking and forward-looking Pakistani must be asking himself or
herself as they watch on their TV screen moving scenes of how the people of Yugoslavia
rose like one man against another self-proclaimed saviour---Slobodan Milosevic.
(8-10-00)
