WHOSE PROGENY
MISUSE OF ISLAM BY MUSLIM ELITE AND
BY MIR M TALPUR
Chowk
http://www.chowk.com/interacts/17460
Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur has an association with the Baloch rights movement going back to the early 1970s. He can be contacted at mmatalpur@gmail.com
Everyone is trying to comprehend why
It is surprising that most intellectuals, writers and politicians, when rightly condemning fundamentalist terrorism and terrorists, hold only Ziaul Haq responsible for of all that is wrong here. Terming the scourge of fundamentalism and Taliban terrorists "Ziaul Haq's progeny", they erroneously overlook as to whose progeny Ziaul Haq was, for certainly he and his ideology did not suddenly appear from nowhere. DNA testing would certainly establish the parentage.
Fanatical ideologies and individuals are products of long social, political, economic and historical processes. Blaming Zia alone for all the ills here is erroneous and dangerous because it creates a false sense of complacency, leading to the belief that if what Zia did could be undone then there would be peace and tranquillity. We need to look at history before Zia to understand why it had to be Zia who was born with his particular mindset, promoting hatred and hypocrisy instead of a Sufi preaching of tolerance and forbearance.
If you build a unit to produce bullock-carts then, as pious, virtuous and well intentioned as you may be, you cannot expect a Porsche to roll out from that assembly line. It will produce just what it was programmed to. Nothing happens in a vacuum, nothing happens until conditions ideal for something to happen exist. Seeds grow and eggs hatch when certain conditions are met but, more importantly, because they have that inherent quality to grow and fertilise. Stones shaped like seeds or eggs will not respond however ideal the conditions might be. Zia became Zia because that inherent quality of hate and hypocrisy he represented was produced in him by a long history of vigorous and sustained promotion of a vicious kind of fundamentalism that could only produce pernicious mindsets.
Who would you hold responsible for the policies of genocide, human rights abuses and war crimes that
Zia is undeniably culpable but do look farther back to understand him and his policies, and unless that is done there simply cannot be any hope of change. Obsession with Zia will thwart any attempt to delve into the real reasons for the prevalence of this pernicious mindset in the 'fortress of Islam'.
Without the Objectives Resolution there could have been no Zia, but then that too had its precursor. Unfortunately, the subcontinent's Muslim landed gentry, having ruled for centuries, considered itself superior to the rest of humanity. They were sharp enough to understand that they would have to exploit the people's emotional attachment to religion to acquire power that otherwise would always remain in the realm of impossibility.
It is evident that the efforts of the Muslim League for the creation of a state were located in the use of religion to neutralise nationalism. Exploitation of religious sentiments became their weapon of choice in the battle for a new state. It appears that those interested in the creation of a Muslim homeland for the continuation of their power failed to understand, or maybe they did, that there would eventually be grave repercussions and consequences of their garnering support solely in the name of religion.
The Muslim League leadership's promotion of religiously-based politics was in keeping with their firmly held beliefs and the dawning of the realisation after election setbacks that they could not contend with nationalist sentiments without exploiting religion. This dangerous tendency was carried over into the governing of the new state: one unit was not accidental; it was part of that grand strategy.
The beliefs, actions, attitudes and pronouncements of the Muslim League's leaders determined what ideology the newly formed state would adopt. Sprinklings of secular sounding statements were never going to be enough for motivating deviation from the course decided by those bent upon achieving and continuing in power through religion.
The Nehru Report (1928) provided for a secular basis of governance and had this been accepted then with partition being agreed to after, it certainly would have been less traumatic and less divisive. Without doubt, the Hindutva champions and supporters equally share the blame for using communalism. Initially, there were many prominent secular minded leaders on both sides with enough influence to stop the two communities from splitting into eternally hostile camps but they lost out to the zealots.
B R Nanda in his book Road to Pakistan points out that at Muslim League's December 1927 Calcutta session, presided over by the Maharaja of Mahmudabad (Raja Sahib's father), the All-India Muslim League expressed the hope that League members would "ratify" the proposals of the Nehru Committee by the end of 1928. Among the 14 signatories to the manifesto were the Maharaja of Mahmudabad, as well as eminent figures such as Seth Yakub Hassan, Saifuddin Kitchlew, Maulana Zafar Ali Khan, Maulana Abdul Bari, Syed Mahmud and M C Chagla.
This revolt within the ranks of the Muslim League in support of the Nehru Report was most shocking for Jinnah because such a step would have precluded any hope of his assuming overall leadership of the Muslims in
The Muslim and the Hindu leaderships vied in obduracy and inflexibility. This obduracy destroyed any hope for a cordial relationship then and for the future. The obduracy and intolerance, as exhibited by the leaders on both sides, became a major reason for the senseless violence that struck the subcontinent preceding partition and in its aftermath.
In the new state of
The Objectives Resolution, passed on
The Objectives Resolution permanently distorted this country's constitutional history and, more importantly, its elite's psyche; it definitely was not an afterthought. Mr Izzud-Din Pal in Objectives Resolution: The Root of Religious Orthodoxy says it was authored by Dr Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi and adds: "As Dr Qureshi himself observed, there was no pressure for this action; the Resolution was quickly prepared and passed 'in a snap' at a meeting of the Muslim League Party." Mark, "there was no pressure for this action" and "passed 'in a snap'", establishes that it was a premeditated stratagem to permanently infuse religion into the state and citizens' lives; to make informal orthodoxy the officially sanctioned orthodoxy — the cornerstone of all policies and actions.
The Objectives Resolution was aimed at creating a new ethos for the newly acquired citizens, an ethos or flavour, which would supersede the centuries-old ethos that permeated their lives and psyches. It was an attempt to superimpose religion over nationalism to create loyalty for the new state. It was a device for 'ethos cleansing', which is but a slightly milder form of 'ethnic cleansing'. It was a coercive instrument with the benign face of Islam crafted for compelling opposition to change its ethos. 'Ethos cleansing' too employs force to modify the old ethos.
The Objectives Resolution and the state's affinity for fanaticism has a historical background. Professor Ishtiaq Ahmed, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Stockholm University, in a piece titled 'The demand for Pakistan and Islam' (Daily Times, June 8, 2010) says that the opportunity for Jinnah to make a breakthrough in the Muslim-majority provinces of northwestern India — Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, and Sindh — arrived in July 1945 when the British government announced provincial elections for February 1946. He says, "... the tactics that the Muslim League adopted during the long election campaign... (included) efforts to appeal to the bigotry of the electors. Pirs and maulvis have been enlisted in large numbers to tour the province and denounce all who oppose the League as infidels. Copies of the Holy Quran are carried around as an emblem peculiar to the Muslim League. Feroz [Khan Noon] and others openly preach that every vote given to the League is a vote cast in favour of the Holy Prophet (PBUH)."
"... The ML [Muslim League] orators are becoming increasingly fanatical in their speeches. Maulvis and pirs and students travel all round the province and preach that those who fail to vote for the League candidates will cease to be Muslims; their marriages will no longer be valid and they will be entirely excommunicated..."
It beggars belief that Jinnah was in the dark about the "appeal to the bigotry of the electors". Apologists for Jinnah have projected his secularism but have tactfully glossed over other aspects; many spontaneous remarks contradict his secularism. He once stated: "I want the Muslims of the Frontier province clearly to understand that they are Muslims first and Pathans afterwards..." This has nothing to do with secularism.
The readers would wonder what necessitated these tactics. For one it was a part of Muslim Leaguers' belief and ethos and, secondly, the 1937 elections demonstrated that without resorting to appeals to religion, they could not survive. Agha H Amin in his piece 'Idea of Pakistan: Myth and Reality' details the Muslim League's rout in the 1937 elections: "All India Muslim League was literally routed in Muslim majority provinces of India, the League just getting only 321,772 Muslim votes out of a total Muslim vote of 7,319,445, a mere 4.4 percent. In
When a party and state connote and equate their institutions and actions as of Islam and Islamic, then inevitably society becomes hostage to those who loudly profess Islam. The state attempted to cleanse the Baloch, Bengali, Sindhi and Pashtun ethos with a heavy dose of fundamentalist Islam and invoked Islam for all unjust actions, but bit off more than they could chew and ended up giving license to the clergy and those who thrive on fanaticism to impose their very own brands of religion on society. This, in turn, has resulted in the Talibanisation of society, vicious sectarianism, inhuman and indiscriminate terrorism and persecution of minorities, not to mention human rights abuses, denial of rights to the Baloch, Sindhis and Pashtuns, and an ever-floundering economy.
Postscript: Chief Minister Raisani has recently issued a notification to make Arabic compulsory from class I to X for students in Balochistan. Another blatant attempt at 'ethos cleansing'.
The Pakistani state and elite have not only always turned a blind eye to the venomous hate and intolerance preached by millions of pulpits that adorn this 'land of the pure', but have also actively promoted it. They patronised preachers of murder and mayhem, thereby creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation in which no one can object to their sinister and pernicious dogmas. Extremists have been allowed to hijack culture, morality, history, attitudes, and even the minds of people.
In stark contrast, if a Bizenjo, a G M Syed, a Badshah Khan or a Bhashani dared to demand rights for the oppressed, they were locked up and the keys thrown away. Many brave and dedicated people like Hameed Baloch, Nazeer Abbasi and Hassan Nasir perished in dungeons and on the gallows for the crime of struggling for the people's rights. Heroes like Nawab Nauroz Khan Zarakzai and companions, who dared to resist armed aggression against their people with arms were summarily sentenced and executed. Poets and intellectuals were ceaselessly hounded and all this gave the fundamentalists the opportunity to lay the foundations of theocracy.
The government to date remains very selective in its reaction to ideas and demands. It takes no action against cranks who instigate people to violence in the name of religion, but if someone were to ask for the independence of Balochistan, the entire state machinery would come down on him like a ton of bricks. Such bias has forced people to seek solutions through other means.
This state-initiated process of discrimination between the good Pakistani (the fundamentalist), the not-so-good Pakistani (the secularist) and the anti-Pakistani (Baloch/Bengali/Sindhi/Pashtun nationalists) has created and intensified alienation amongst the people of different nationalities from the state.
Unsurprisingly, the missing people's list, like always, is of an almost exclusively nationalist cadre. It was only after the state fell out with certain 'strategic assets' that some went missing. The state persists with repression because it considers the intrinsic democratic rights of citizens and the people in general as inimical to their aim of tyrannical rule.
The elite, having been donated a country by the British, did not let history take its course but set about engineering it as an exercise in historical eugenics. They feared that the old divisions of language, culture and histories would thwart their ambitions of establishing a semi-theocratic state; they promulgated the Objectives Resolution and launched a full-fledged brainwashing exercise. They hoped Islam's supposedly irresistibly cohesive force would somehow erase those histories and cultures. For them, apart from the Islamic period that began with Mohammad Bin Qasim, the marauders and looters of Mohammad Ghauri and Mahmood Ghaznavi's ilk, the rest of history was rubbish. History, understandably so, often portrays
Envisaging the emergence of a new Islamic identity from the ruins of old identities, they arrogantly rejected histories, customs and values that existed before and actively tried to obliterate them. This warped motive was and, as of now, remains the progenitor of the intolerant fundamentalism that is rife in this 'Fortress of Islam'. This led to the creation of not one, but thousands of Ziaul Haqs who now blight the country. The elite only succeeded in creating an intimidating atmosphere of fear and insecurity where no one dares to speak against the aggressive brands of religion and human rights violations for fear of being termed a blasphemer.
Allowing the different nations to develop independently would have meant that different national identities would have prevailed and, consequently, even the army would have remained '
The 1954 One Unit plan was a tactic to achieve the strategic goal of obliterating national identities under the misleading and maliciously unjust slogan of parity and Islamic unity; it was a political extension of the religion-oriented Objectives Resolution. Surprisingly, advocates of the One Unit plan have never demanded parity since
Whenever confronted with a crisis, the elite have exploited religion. The undertones of religion in the crisis of 1971 are brazenly obvious.
The media, too, has been complicit in the crime of promoting fundamentalism by glorifying the state's concept of Islam and Pakistani nationalism. The coverage given to conflicting views has usually been meagre because of government restrictions and the media barons' interests. Mediums of performing arts like films and television have actively abetted in promoting the state's policy. The only exception has been theatre, especially the Ajoka Theatre.
Ironically, the very ideology that they had hoped would provide unity and cohesion to the disparate people, cultures and histories has now proven to be the single most important factor that is unravelling their dream at breakneck speed. They had neither studied history nor even bothered to see how the Muslim world was arranged. Had Islam ever been a force strong enough to raze national identities, all Middle Eastern countries would have been a single entity because of their common language and the same ethnic denomination. They failed to understand that Islam has never succeeded in uniting disparate national sentiments. Their attempt at historical eugenics failed and created the present irresolvable problems.
Readers naturally expect enunciation of solutions; solutions are processes that take time to become effective and need careful nurturing. Had the state spent the money on education and health that it instead spent on the armed forces, had the Objectives Resolution not been passed, had the 'strategic assets' and 'strategic depth' policies not been adopted, had not merit been smothered in its infancy, and had different nationalities been allowed to flourish, this country would not have been in this situation. Readers will object to my presenting of solutions in the past tense. This I have done intentionally because I feel that these still are the solutions but no one had implemented them then and no one is going to do it now.
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