70, and counting...

Watching the usual proliferation of flags, buntings and young people out in cars and on motorbikes to celebrate Pakistan's Independence Day, with special importance this year because the country has completed 70 years in its journey, one hesitates to dampen the mood of celebration. However, as a thinking citizen, it is impossible to contemplate this journey without being reminded of the precarious state of affairs facing Pakistan. The question that stubbornly refuses to let one alone is: what exactly are we celebrating, independence from colonial rule or partition leading to a separate state of Pakistan? Or both? Has the Pakistani identity, if we can presume such a creature exists despite our diversity and complexity as a society, evolved as non-India or anti-India? Or can it claim a hue that is all its own, positive, not a negation of the other? The negative identity ignores the critical reality of our diversity that survived partition and its accompanying mass migration and communal massacres in favour of an imagined community that is Muslim alone and exclusively.
It goes without saying that the scars of the wounds of partition have only partly healed. The older generation that lived through those seminal times has suffered by now considerable natural attrition. The in-between generation received the story of partition from the lived experience of their elders and was therefore comparatively less bitter against the 'other'. The present generation is further removed from those tragic events and in many cases, no longer carries the baggage of their elders.
So what is the legacy of partition? It is the eventual inevitability of the separation of a state overwhelmingly Muslim (partly because of the exodus of religious minorities to India during partition and to a lesser extent, ever since) when the last hope of a united India with provincial autonomy and 10-year constitutional guarantees for the large Muslim minority faded with the sabotage of the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 by Congress Party leaders. But the inevitable was rendered horribly tragic by the British colonial authorities' rushed, botched partition and handover of power to the two new states. Lack of preparation and the failure to protect religiously diverse communities living peacefully together for hundreds of years (some critics argue this was a British neo-colonial ploy to keep Pakistan and India permanently at loggerheads and therefore dependent on the world powers), resulted in communal riots breaking out and the mass migration of some 10 million people from their homes to the other side, the largest mass migration in history. The immigration routes of hapless people going both ways became virtual slaughterhouses, with rape and egregious butchery thrown in for good measure. The die was then cast for Pakistan-India hostility and the evolving view of each being the 'permanent' enemy of the other. Kashmir, the long lingering agenda of partition, became the core issue of conflict, added to in later years by wars and jockeying for advantage over the other side. By now, both states are nuclear-armed but the hostile rhetoric emanating from both sides, far from abating in the light of the threatening nuclear shadow, has grown shriller.
The India factor explains a great deal in the country's trajectory away from Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah's vision of a secular, democratic, modern state towards one in which national security seemed to trump all other considerations. Adventures with religious extremism to fight proxy wars in the neighbourhood have rebounded with a vengeance to consume our own society in the cauldron of religious fanaticism and terrorism. The national security state arguably lost us more than half (in population) of the country in 1971. The remaining Pakistan is beset with serious problems.
The challenges facing the country include international, regional, internal and systemic. Amongst the first named, the drift away from an angry US because of our role in Afghanistan in backing the Taliban against the foreign and indigenous government forces, which some optimists dismiss with the notion that China will replace our former patron, could end up posing incremental serious consequences in the years to come. If Washington has so far acted with restraint despite calls in the US Congress for cut off of aid and sanctions against Pakistan, it is not only because the logistics of their presence in Afghanistan demand keeping the transit route through Pakistan open, it is also because the superpower has its eye on the region and the Pakistani military's potentially critical role in the playbook unfolding there. Similarly, notwithstanding Washington's irritation with Pakistan's partial actions against terrorists while continuing covert support to the Afghan Taliban, Islamabad cannot ignore the benefits of staying on the right side of the US, nor the latter's clout to harm Pakistan and its interests.
Regionally, Pakistan has so far maintained a wise distance and neutrality in the sectarian wars raging and threatened in the Middle East, with their potential for spillover into Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. The current trend of exacerbated tensions with India because of the uprising in Kashmir and India's attempts to suppress it by extreme force while blaming Pakistan for the troubles has led to the breakdown of the 2003 cease-fire on the Line of Control (LoC). This has also led to the reversal of intra-Kashmiri interaction across the LoC. Internal security, whether because of terrorism or the Baloch nationalist insurgency (with the latter's implications for the China Pakistan Economic Corridor project), will remain on top of the country's agenda for the foreseeable future.
But the most crucial issue for Pakistan's future is the inability to date to provide a consistent system to run the country. Despite all the military coups and authoritarian interventions to remove elected governments in our history, the consensus on the democratic project as the only feasible and viable system to keep the country on track and on the path to a better future remains intact, albeit battered by its critics. Essentially, the project asks how governments are to be chosen, how they are to govern, with what separation of powers and checks and balances, and how they are to be removed. The answers lie in the concept of the sovereign as supreme, ie the people. Governance must look to parliament as the supreme authority. Other state institutions must function within their constitutional ambit. No government should be removed except by an appeal to the electorate. Simple? Yes, but what a thorn-strewn path it is in our history.
If such a democratic system that allows room for dissidence and delivers to the people their deepest aspirations for a better life can be forged in the still hot cauldron of our political life, Pakistan can look forward to the next 70 years with confidence and hope. If not, the outlook appears dire to some, sappingly stagnant to others. All other options having been tried and found wanting, there appears no escape from the necessity to soldier on in assuring the democratic project continues to march forward and overcomes with good, intelligent political strategy, all the considerable obstacles in its path.
[email protected]
rashed-rahman.blogspot.com