THE STRUGGLE FOR PAKISTAN: A MUSLIM HOMELAND AND GLOBAL POLITICS
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2014;
435 pages; Rs 995
To defend Pakistan in the court of public opinion is a task so difficult that only the most skilful of defence counsels would attempt it. In The Struggle for Pakistan, a major new work from Harvard University Press, the historian Ayesha Jalal takes on the task. She valiantly defends not only Jinnah and the idea of Pakistan, but “actually existing Pakistan” –- to steal and modify a term beloved of the old pro-Soviet left. Professor Jalal fails to mount a satisfactory defence, but then that is not entirely her fault; finding endless external scapegoats for Pakistan’s problems is not as easy when writing a rigorous history as most Pakistanis think. What is her fault, I suppose, is the belief that a history of Pakistan must necessarily also be a defence.
Instead of this contest over Jinnah’s legacy, it might be more useful to look at today’s Pakistan – little more than a heavily armed, increasingly hyper-religious Punjab – as being descended more from Sikandar Hayat Khan of the Unionist Party via Abul Maududi of the Jamaat. Such inquiry, however, is beyond a Pakistani establishment, political and academic, that is still defending – in this book, for example – the shaky myths of nationhood called into being 70 years ago.
As with all of Professor Jalal’s books, The Struggle for Pakistan is pleasingly written and flows smoothly. Indeed as a guide to the events that shaped modern Pakistan, it is more than adequate: it provides to the history of the past century a sense of immediacy. Few histories of India have done the same; Ramachandra Guha’s, for example, was far more idiosyncratic in its choice of incidents than this one is.
It is not, therefore, as a guide to events, or even as a restatement of Pakistan’s nationalist narrative, that I take issue with Professor Jalal’s book. As both, it is exemplary –- in particular, in its discussion of the complexities of governance that 1950s Pakistan presented, with its patterns of dysfunction not yet set. My questions lie elsewhere.
First, there is a certain tone-deafness about economics and about class politics that is endemic, in my opinion, to historical writing about Pakistan. Its obsession with Jinnah – in the establishment’s telling, an elitist who made “concessions” to popular Islamists and regionalists, fought the duplicitous Westerners and Hindus, and “won” Pakistan for himself – has caused the entire Pakistani establishment to see the country’s history through a similar prism. Pakistan’s story is, thus, a story of its leaders, never its people: of Bhutto and Zia and Sharif and Yahya and Musharraf, of the “cynical use” of Islamism by a secular elite – and never of, say, the radicalisation of its people in response to the imperatives of a national ideology, or the aspirations of an urban proletariat or rural underclass.
This absence of basic economic content in the narrative leads Professor Jalal to, for example, express puzzlement at why anti-capitalist ideologues would attach themselves to a feudal magnate like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto –- although, as endless examples across history attest, a rising industrial class is the common enemy of the landlord and the socialist. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that the feudal Bhutto declared himself a socialist and expropriated the industrial class through nationalisation. To my startlement, “feudal” itself – a word with a rich cultural history in modern Pakistan – is defined as a “term loosely used in Pakistan to refer to personalised rule”. Not even a footnote gesturing to the landscape of meaning that “feudal” encompasses in Pakistan, a landscape of bonded labour and vast landholdings, of Sufi pirs and SUVs, of lavish houses in South Kensington.
The second problem is discomfort with, and, therefore, a defensive mockery of, the very idea of secularism. Even when saying that Imran Khan’s anti-Ahmadi positioning was evidence that his ideology was far from secular, Professor Jalal puts the word in scare quotes. There is no escaping, it appears, the contradiction at the heart of Pakistani nationalism, one that has entrapped even the most non-religious of that country’s establishment: the desire to demonstrate that India’s founding ideology simply could not be secular, for that would show up the principles underlying Pakistan as illiberal by contrast. Here is Professor Jalal, decrying “a misconception of the precise role of religion in the two countries”: “If Islamic Pakistan made too much of religion in its nationalist narratives, secular India underplayed religion’s salience in the official annals of its nationalism.” Professor Jalal has often tried to make a distinction, essentially spurious in practice, between religion-as-personal-faith and religion-as-identity –- a questioning that she shares with several people on this side of the border hoping to similarly demean Indian secularism. Sadly, attacking Indian secularism necessarily seems to imply an overall de-emphasis of secularism as an aspiration for states like India and Pakistan. In this, the most liberal of Pakistani establishmentarians are forced to sound like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Elsewhere, Professor Jalal has written, in words that clarify her agenda in this book: “The binary opposition between secular nationalism and religious communalism is singularly inadequate for [understanding South Asia] … . Turning heterogeneities into homogeneities and conflicts into unities, both terms have done more to perpetuate stereotypes than shed light on political dynamics in South Asia. It is time to go beyond the morass of the communitarian mode of analysis which has locked interpretations of the subcontinent’s history and politics into a simplistic distinction between ‘secular’ and ‘communal’.” Narendra Modi could not have crushed the pseudo-seculars with more vigour.
The final problem is that The Struggle for Pakistan – fittingly for a book that apparently intends to be the new Establishment history of that country – is riddled with apologia and defensiveness about Pakistani agency and choices.
And, as the subtitle of the book – “A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics” – telegraphs, this defensiveness translates, essentially, into anti-Americanism. This is in spite of the fact that the country’s rulers decided at its very birth to go out and see what it could get from the West; like other attitudes of the Pakistani elite, this, too, can be traced back to the noble Quaid, who made it so explicit in an interview to Life in 1947 that Margaret Bourke-White suggested Jinnah “considered his new state only as an armoured buffer between opposing major powers”. (This quote comes from Hussain Haqqani’s 2013 history, Magnificent Delusions, which contains considerably more truth-telling than does this one.)
The various “betrayals” of Pakistan by America are duly listed –- two of the biggest being the 1965 and the 1971 wars, which apparently America should have won for Pakistan. This is a familiar litany. But the laziness of analysis and the flatness of morality, naturally following a habitual assignation of malign influence to the West, crop up everywhere in the narrative. For example, it seems as if Professor Jalal, somewhat incredibly, blames Nawaz Sharif for Pervez Musharraf’s coup removing Mr Sharif from power. One wonders what underlies this blame, until the answer is made obvious a few pages later: she patiently repeats a “liberal” commentator’s claim that the Sharifs had become the “greatest lackeys the Americans ever had”. Why? Because they had called for an end to support of the Taliban, beloved to the army, thereby provoking the confrontation and coup.
As in this case, Professor Jalal always selects her damning quotes with care, and deploys them effectively –- most notably, perhaps, when relying on Robert Fisk of The Independent to describe Bill Clinton’s whistle-stop lecture-visit to Islamabad in 2000. The security turned Islamabad into “a city without people in a country without a voice”, said Mr Fisk; “there was something almost sinister about President Clinton’s cortege, his long sleek limousine swishing at 60 mph down the empty autobahn". Professor Jalal leaves us with little doubt that she shares Mr Fisk’s opinions.
This sympathy is even clearer later. When describing Mr Clinton’s address to the people of Pakistan on that visit, where he memorably warned – with Kargil fresh in his listeners’ minds – against “redrawing borders with blood”, she cannot describe or contextualise this simply as a historian; the narrative steps out of that role and responds sharply and jarringly to the president with the nationalistic pablum that is the official position on Kashmir. (Unsurprisingly, the scholarly footnotes for this section are two angry op-eds, published at that time in Dawn – by a certain Ayesha Jalal.)
Here Professor Jalal tells us, in her capacity as the 21st century’s Sole Spokesman, what Pakistanis wanted from Mr Clinton in 2000: “Some reassurance from the leader of the most powerful nation on earth that redirecting energies to ‘regional peace’ would bring Pakistan solid post-Cold War dividends.” This is, in its own way, a reasonable representation of what Pakistan still wants from America and the world. It is almost tragic that even the apologetic history that Professor Jalal has offered up to that point does nothing to disguise the sheer shared lunacy of this expectation.
Peace, it is clear to the Pakistani establishment, whether “liberal” (like Professor Jalal) or Islamist or military-backed, is only worth it if America bribes you into it. It has no intrinsic value; nor do tangible benefits flow from it. That the Establishment can find justice in this view of peace even when a hundred children die is beyond tragic. And it is also too fundamentally pessimistic and illiberal a principle to underlie a national history. For any country, that is, other than Ayesha Jalal’s Pakistan.
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2014;
435 pages; Rs 995
To defend Pakistan in the court of public opinion is a task so difficult that only the most skilful of defence counsels would attempt it. In The Struggle for Pakistan, a major new work from Harvard University Press, the historian Ayesha Jalal takes on the task. She valiantly defends not only Jinnah and the idea of Pakistan, but “actually existing Pakistan” –- to steal and modify a term beloved of the old pro-Soviet left. Professor Jalal fails to mount a satisfactory defence, but then that is not entirely her fault; finding endless external scapegoats for Pakistan’s problems is not as easy when writing a rigorous history as most Pakistanis think. What is her fault, I suppose, is the belief that a history of Pakistan must necessarily also be a defence.
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The Struggle for Pakistan is cleverly named. The title links the Muslim League’s agitation under Jinnah to the struggles for the country’s “soul” after Partition and independence. The not-so-subtle link is one beloved of a certain sort of Pakistani nationalist: that Jinnah’s struggle for a secular Muslim state is still for some (and to them, incomprehensible) reason incomplete. Both India and Pakistan increasingly make the mistake of seeking justification for national ideologies in the personalities and ephemeral political positions of their leaders before Independence. This side of the border, this means that Nehru is played off against Patel or Bose. Sadly for Pakistan, Jinnah’s self-appointed position as South Asian Muslims’ “sole spokesman” means that this ideological struggle for Pakistan becomes a struggle merely for Jinnah. This is in spite of the fact that Professor Jalal’s own expert telling of Jinnah’s political manoeuvring demonstrates how the popular basis for his power over South Asian Muslims was mythical: he was their sole national spokesman only because electable regional power-brokers permitted him to be so.
Instead of this contest over Jinnah’s legacy, it might be more useful to look at today’s Pakistan – little more than a heavily armed, increasingly hyper-religious Punjab – as being descended more from Sikandar Hayat Khan of the Unionist Party via Abul Maududi of the Jamaat. Such inquiry, however, is beyond a Pakistani establishment, political and academic, that is still defending – in this book, for example – the shaky myths of nationhood called into being 70 years ago.
As with all of Professor Jalal’s books, The Struggle for Pakistan is pleasingly written and flows smoothly. Indeed as a guide to the events that shaped modern Pakistan, it is more than adequate: it provides to the history of the past century a sense of immediacy. Few histories of India have done the same; Ramachandra Guha’s, for example, was far more idiosyncratic in its choice of incidents than this one is.
It is not, therefore, as a guide to events, or even as a restatement of Pakistan’s nationalist narrative, that I take issue with Professor Jalal’s book. As both, it is exemplary –- in particular, in its discussion of the complexities of governance that 1950s Pakistan presented, with its patterns of dysfunction not yet set. My questions lie elsewhere.
First, there is a certain tone-deafness about economics and about class politics that is endemic, in my opinion, to historical writing about Pakistan. Its obsession with Jinnah – in the establishment’s telling, an elitist who made “concessions” to popular Islamists and regionalists, fought the duplicitous Westerners and Hindus, and “won” Pakistan for himself – has caused the entire Pakistani establishment to see the country’s history through a similar prism. Pakistan’s story is, thus, a story of its leaders, never its people: of Bhutto and Zia and Sharif and Yahya and Musharraf, of the “cynical use” of Islamism by a secular elite – and never of, say, the radicalisation of its people in response to the imperatives of a national ideology, or the aspirations of an urban proletariat or rural underclass.
This absence of basic economic content in the narrative leads Professor Jalal to, for example, express puzzlement at why anti-capitalist ideologues would attach themselves to a feudal magnate like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto –- although, as endless examples across history attest, a rising industrial class is the common enemy of the landlord and the socialist. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that the feudal Bhutto declared himself a socialist and expropriated the industrial class through nationalisation. To my startlement, “feudal” itself – a word with a rich cultural history in modern Pakistan – is defined as a “term loosely used in Pakistan to refer to personalised rule”. Not even a footnote gesturing to the landscape of meaning that “feudal” encompasses in Pakistan, a landscape of bonded labour and vast landholdings, of Sufi pirs and SUVs, of lavish houses in South Kensington.
The second problem is discomfort with, and, therefore, a defensive mockery of, the very idea of secularism. Even when saying that Imran Khan’s anti-Ahmadi positioning was evidence that his ideology was far from secular, Professor Jalal puts the word in scare quotes. There is no escaping, it appears, the contradiction at the heart of Pakistani nationalism, one that has entrapped even the most non-religious of that country’s establishment: the desire to demonstrate that India’s founding ideology simply could not be secular, for that would show up the principles underlying Pakistan as illiberal by contrast. Here is Professor Jalal, decrying “a misconception of the precise role of religion in the two countries”: “If Islamic Pakistan made too much of religion in its nationalist narratives, secular India underplayed religion’s salience in the official annals of its nationalism.” Professor Jalal has often tried to make a distinction, essentially spurious in practice, between religion-as-personal-faith and religion-as-identity –- a questioning that she shares with several people on this side of the border hoping to similarly demean Indian secularism. Sadly, attacking Indian secularism necessarily seems to imply an overall de-emphasis of secularism as an aspiration for states like India and Pakistan. In this, the most liberal of Pakistani establishmentarians are forced to sound like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Elsewhere, Professor Jalal has written, in words that clarify her agenda in this book: “The binary opposition between secular nationalism and religious communalism is singularly inadequate for [understanding South Asia] … . Turning heterogeneities into homogeneities and conflicts into unities, both terms have done more to perpetuate stereotypes than shed light on political dynamics in South Asia. It is time to go beyond the morass of the communitarian mode of analysis which has locked interpretations of the subcontinent’s history and politics into a simplistic distinction between ‘secular’ and ‘communal’.” Narendra Modi could not have crushed the pseudo-seculars with more vigour.
The final problem is that The Struggle for Pakistan – fittingly for a book that apparently intends to be the new Establishment history of that country – is riddled with apologia and defensiveness about Pakistani agency and choices.
And, as the subtitle of the book – “A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics” – telegraphs, this defensiveness translates, essentially, into anti-Americanism. This is in spite of the fact that the country’s rulers decided at its very birth to go out and see what it could get from the West; like other attitudes of the Pakistani elite, this, too, can be traced back to the noble Quaid, who made it so explicit in an interview to Life in 1947 that Margaret Bourke-White suggested Jinnah “considered his new state only as an armoured buffer between opposing major powers”. (This quote comes from Hussain Haqqani’s 2013 history, Magnificent Delusions, which contains considerably more truth-telling than does this one.)
The various “betrayals” of Pakistan by America are duly listed –- two of the biggest being the 1965 and the 1971 wars, which apparently America should have won for Pakistan. This is a familiar litany. But the laziness of analysis and the flatness of morality, naturally following a habitual assignation of malign influence to the West, crop up everywhere in the narrative. For example, it seems as if Professor Jalal, somewhat incredibly, blames Nawaz Sharif for Pervez Musharraf’s coup removing Mr Sharif from power. One wonders what underlies this blame, until the answer is made obvious a few pages later: she patiently repeats a “liberal” commentator’s claim that the Sharifs had become the “greatest lackeys the Americans ever had”. Why? Because they had called for an end to support of the Taliban, beloved to the army, thereby provoking the confrontation and coup.
As in this case, Professor Jalal always selects her damning quotes with care, and deploys them effectively –- most notably, perhaps, when relying on Robert Fisk of The Independent to describe Bill Clinton’s whistle-stop lecture-visit to Islamabad in 2000. The security turned Islamabad into “a city without people in a country without a voice”, said Mr Fisk; “there was something almost sinister about President Clinton’s cortege, his long sleek limousine swishing at 60 mph down the empty autobahn". Professor Jalal leaves us with little doubt that she shares Mr Fisk’s opinions.
This sympathy is even clearer later. When describing Mr Clinton’s address to the people of Pakistan on that visit, where he memorably warned – with Kargil fresh in his listeners’ minds – against “redrawing borders with blood”, she cannot describe or contextualise this simply as a historian; the narrative steps out of that role and responds sharply and jarringly to the president with the nationalistic pablum that is the official position on Kashmir. (Unsurprisingly, the scholarly footnotes for this section are two angry op-eds, published at that time in Dawn – by a certain Ayesha Jalal.)
Here Professor Jalal tells us, in her capacity as the 21st century’s Sole Spokesman, what Pakistanis wanted from Mr Clinton in 2000: “Some reassurance from the leader of the most powerful nation on earth that redirecting energies to ‘regional peace’ would bring Pakistan solid post-Cold War dividends.” This is, in its own way, a reasonable representation of what Pakistan still wants from America and the world. It is almost tragic that even the apologetic history that Professor Jalal has offered up to that point does nothing to disguise the sheer shared lunacy of this expectation.
Peace, it is clear to the Pakistani establishment, whether “liberal” (like Professor Jalal) or Islamist or military-backed, is only worth it if America bribes you into it. It has no intrinsic value; nor do tangible benefits flow from it. That the Establishment can find justice in this view of peace even when a hundred children die is beyond tragic. And it is also too fundamentally pessimistic and illiberal a principle to underlie a national history. For any country, that is, other than Ayesha Jalal’s Pakistan.