Hasan Suroor

A new book argues that there is no hope for Pakistan unless it sorts out its
identity crisis which, it says, is the root cause of the country being such a
disaster.
Arguably 60 years are not a long time in the history of a nation but by 60,
even a country with a troubled past such as Pakistan, is expected to at least
start making sense of what it stands for and where it is heading, however
fuzzy the direction. And when it continues to flounder — like Pakistan —
lurching from one crisis to another, it becomes a liability not only to its own
people but also has implications for the wider international community,
especially its neighbours — in this case India.
Pakistanis are a proud people. They feel humiliated when their country is
mocked at as a “failed state” and routinely mentioned in the same breath as
the pirate-infested Somalia which does not even have a properly functioning
capital. For all its afflictions, Pakistan (a functioning democracy, however
flawed, with a free press, an independent judiciary and a vibrant civil society)
is by no means a failed state.
Not yet. But signs of a meltdown are all too evident and there are genuine
fears about its future. One view, of course, is that the West will not allow it to
fail for its own strategic reasons. But that is hardly very reassuring.
So what went wrong? How did a country which has no dearth of talent and
whose founders had such high hopes for it that they named it “Pakistan” (a
pure country) go so horribly wrong? Was there something rotten at the very
core of the idea of Pakistan that has been its undoing? Is Pakistan’s failure to
make sense of itself the result of a deep confusion over its Islamic/Muslim
identity? If yes, what is the way forward, if any?
A new book, Making Sense of Pakistan (Hurst & Company, London) by
Farzana Shaikh — a highly regarded U.K.-based Pakistani scholar and Fellow
of Chatham House — argues that there is no hope for Pakistan unless it sorts
out its identity crisis which, it says, is the root cause of the country being such
a disaster. Indeed, in order to make sense of Pakistan, it is important to make
sense of its identity crisis first.
Everything that is wrong with Pakistan today — its “distorted economic and
social development,” its “obsession” with India, the sectarian divisions that
have blighted relations among its various communities, its proneness to
military dictatorships and the rise of extremism first directed at its “enemies”
and now devouring its own creators — is a direct or indirect result of its
confused sense of itself, Dr. Shaikh says.
So deep is this confusion that more than six decades after its creation, even
the definition of who is a “Pakistani” is not clear with the Indian Muslim
migrants still being regarded as outsiders by ethnic communities which claim
that they are the “real” Pakistanis by virtue of their historical roots in the
region. Over the years, this conflict between indigenous Muslim groups and
migrants has been a source of deep (and frequently violent) divisions in
Pakistani society. And it is still festering.
But nowhere is Pakistan’s self-inflicted identity crisis more evident than in
relation to India, according to Dr. Shaikh. Because of the nature of its creation
— a secessionist state born in opposition to the Indian nationalist movement
— Pakistan was lumped with an identity, defined in terms of what it was
“not” (it was “not India”) rather than what it was.
“Indeed, much of the uncertainty over Pakistan’s identity stems from the
nagging question of whether its identity is fundamentally dependent on India
and what its construction might entail outside of opposition to the latter. This
has prompted the suggestion that Pakistan is a state burdened with a negative
identity shaped by the circumstances of Partition,” Dr. Shaikh says.
Ever since its formation, Pakistan has struggled to overcome this negative
identity. Its search for what it regards as legitimacy has, in fact, been the
“defining feature” of its policy towards India, especially the Kashmir issue,
and is at the heart of its quest for military parity with a neighbour “almost
seven times its size in population and more than four times its land mass.”
The dispute with India over Kashmir has come to symbolise Pakistan’s
obsessive bid to delink its identity from its historical antecedents. To quote
the author: “It is here [over Kashmir], amid the rhetoric of rival claims over
territory and state sovereignty, that Pakistan has fought to assert itself and to
liberate its identity from the uncertainties that have attached to its status as
merely ‘not India’.” She argues that Pakistan’s efforts to achieve this identity
underline its historical claim to parity with India: a claim “grounded” in
Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s insistence that “equality of the nations of Hindus
and Muslims” be the basis for any territorial division of British India.
As much as the national interest, it is Pakistan’s compulsive desire for parity
with India (an extension of its efforts to assert its “independent” identity) that
has shaped much of its foreign policy leading it to seek help from foreign
powers. Take its alliance with America which, the author points out, has been
motivated as much by security considerations — a protection against an
attack from India — as by its “need for validation and its desire to win
recognition of its special status.” Being a “strategic partner” of the world’s
only superpower is seen in Pakistan as a boost to its “global image” to match
India’s global status.
Again, it is Pakistan’s “self-perception” of national identity that, according to
Dr. Shaikh, has led it to compete with India in the race for regional
domination — by, for example, flexing its muscles in Afghanistan. “Although
the consequences of these foreign policy ambitions have often been
devastating to Pakistan and the strategic costs immense, no price is yet seen to
be too high to validate Pakistan’s claim to nationhood ... Thus Pakistan’s
struggle against India is deeply embedded in a painful awareness of its own
lack of a national history,” she observes.
Ultimately, though, India is only part of a bigger story of Pakistan’s struggle
with its identity which, Dr. Shaikh contends, has had a profound effect on
every aspect of the country’s life and, indeed, its world view. The uncertainty
resulting from a lack of consensus on what constitutes Pakistan’s national
identity has “deepened the country’s divisions ... discouraged plural
definitions of the Pakistani ... blighted good governance and tempted political
elites to use the language of Islam as a substitute for democratic legitimacy.”
Today, Pakistan remains an enigma with no clear understanding of the nature
of the Pakistani state. Analysing the causes of this debilitating confusion, she
traces it back to the origins of Pakistan, the politics of its creation and the
flawed assumption of its founders that religion could be the basis of a
modern, forward-looking state.
A project forged around the idea that a Muslim religious identity, overriding
cultural and social factors, was enough to unify a nation was doomed from the
start. And, sure enough, the project started to unravel within years of its
inauguration with Bengali-speaking Muslims breaking away from Pakistan to
form their own Muslim state of Bangladesh. It is Pakistan’s “artificiality” as a
nation-state — its eastern and western wings separated by more than a
thousand miles of Indian territory and its citizens divided by a variety of
linguistic and cultural traditions despite a common religion — that has
prevented the evolution of a coherent national identity. This, in brief, is the
thrust of Dr. Shaikh’s argument.
So what’s new, one might ask. Doesn’t it sound all too familiar? Dr. Shaikh
may not be breaking new ground here but it is refreshing to come across a
Pakistani viewpoint that doesn’t regard the discussion of Pakistan’s
legitimacy as a no-go zone. It is a sensitive issue with Pakistanis who, as Dr.
Shaikh points out, believe that India still “rejects the rationale of Pakistan’s
statehood even if it has been forced to accept its reality.”
At the outset, Dr. Shaikh makes clear that her book is a “work of
interpretation rather than of historical research.” Even so, one is often struck
by what seems like an over-interpretation of Pakistan’s identity problem.
There is a tendency to conflate issues which are not directly related to identity
in order to fit an argument. For example, to see Pakistan’s arms race with
India purely in terms of its attempt to overcome an identity crisis is to ignore
the fact that any small country can have genuine security fears vis-À-vis a big
and powerful neighbour, especially if there is a history of conflict between
them.
That does not, however, take away from the importance of this book. It is a
work of serious scholarship dealing with some of the most important issues
that have shaped Pakistan and which, if not resolved, can have consequences
for its future.