Author: Khaled Ahmed
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: July 15, 2000
My favourite Sunday reading
is Dr Farrukh Saleem's column in The News. He writes with great terseness
and referential authority. His latest essay was titled, `What kind
of Pakistan do we want?', in which he wrote: We cannot fight holy wars
around the world and expect peace within our boundaries. We cannot
think of nuclear mobile launchers and social development both at the same
time. We have got to pick one or the other. We could either
have a chaotic, Talibanised Pakistan or an orderly, integrated, progressive
nation-state. It all boils down to what kind of Pakistan we really
want.
These observations are
directed at the Musharraf Government because no one else in Pakistan, given
the circumstances, can even openly analyse what Dr Saleem is driving at.
The generals who deposed Mr Nawaz Sharif have to decide where Pakistan
has to go after ten years of warrior-state misdirection. They were
responsible for creating the national consensus on jihad.
How many economists in
the country are writing like Dr Saleem? Most of the economists writing
in newspapers in Pakistan can be called jihadi economists because they
refuse to factor the phenomenon of Talibanisation and jihad into their
critique of the economy. They have stood aside from the debate on
the CTBT and allowed jihad to defeat reason.
Ghazi Salahuddin (The
News) has repeated his appeal for the revival of the intellectual tradition
in Pakistan. The intellectual in Pakistan has simply wilted in the
face of aggressive ideology and the violent society it has spawned.
History tells us that ideology replaces the intellectual with the ideologue
because of its intolerance of the variant point of view. Pakistan
s prominent lawyer Abid Hassan Minto, speaking of the Lahore Press Club,
accused the progressive community of being passive in the face of the creeping
medievalism of Pakistan s ideology.
Mr Minto would perhaps
have understood the reason for this passivity had he examined the nature
of coercive change the state has brought about in the last decade.
In these years, ideology has been enforced through violence, not directly
by the state, but by the weaponised elements the state chose to adopt as
its agents instead of civil society. Civil society needs conditions
of minimal democracy and freedom of expression to function. No one
who is not organised as an armed militia can take on an aggressive state
and its violent proteges.
Pakistan s nuclear physicist
and educationist Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy has pointed to the mainspring of Pakistan
s conversion into a violent society in his article, What are they teaching
in Pakistan s schools today? As a government-appointed member of the Education
Advisory Board, Dr Hoodbhoy brought to the notice of the head of the curriculum
wing of the Education Ministry a document that goes to the root of the
matter we are discussing.
It was a 1995 directive
of the Federal Ministry of Education asking primary schools in Pakistan
to produce certain kind of pupils. Mr Abid Hassan Minto should have
a look at the directive. Its heading is: At the completion of Class
Five the child should be able to :
One, Acknowledge and
identify forces that may be working against Pakistan. Two, Demonstrate
by actions a belief in the fear of Allah. Three, Make speeches on
jihad and shahaadat. Four, Understand Hindu-Muslim differences and
the resultant need for Pakistan. Five, India s evil designs against
Pakistan. Six, Be safe from rumour-mongers who spread false news.
Seven, Visit police stations. Eight, Collect pictures of policemen,
soldiers, and national guards. Nine, Demonstrate respect for the
leaders of Pakistan.
The ideology of Pakistan
was incrementally defined by General Zia and the right wing politicians,
to whom he bequeathed the state. With the help of the Council of
Islamic ideology, the federal shariat court and the lower and higher judiciary,
ideology graduated from being mainly Indophobic to generally xenophobic
as politicians spread the message that the economy had not collapsed because
of their own misconduct but because of the assault on Pakistan s sovereignty
by such West-dominated multilateral institutions as the IMF, the World
Bank and the WTO.
In 2000, everybody has
got the state they wanted but are scared of it. Interior Minister
General (Retd) Moinuddin Haider has had to issue a demeaning denial that
he told The New York Times that Pakistan should be a secular state.
General Musharraf s statement the same day in Teheran that Pakistan was
not a fundamentalist state has come under editorial attack in some newspapers,
and his approval to the Iranian-Indian pipeline has been criticised because
it demoralises the jihad.
The Musharraf Government
is under pressure from jihad and knows it. It could get civil society
behind it but civil society was put under challenge by the Army itself
during Mr Sharif s regime. In this environment of total internal
collapse of will, the only corrective pressure on the state is from the
outside. Not all of us like it and are forced to subliminally support
the chaos Pakistan has become by protesting sovereignty. When Finance
Minister Shaukat Aziz says that he will get Pakistan s sovereignty back,
he perhaps does not realise that a sovereign Pakistan at this stage will
go more swiftly to its doom than a Pakistan restrained by its external
obligations.
(The writer is an academic
and a journalist based in Lahore- ADNI)
