Author: Khaled Ahmed
Publication: The Friday Times
Date: February 1-7, 2002
General Pervez Musharraf has finally
reined in the jehadis. Immediately, the secret of the empowerment of the
clergy through them in Pakistan is no longer a concealed fact. Religious
extremism is engendered by jehad and is related to all religious parties
and state institutions promoting Islam. The state itself was extremist
in its views and was spurred on by the establishment, led by the ISI and
other intelligence agencies representing the paranoia of the state. In
other words, General Musharraf has embarked upon the task of 'cooling down'
the over-heated state of Pakistan and expelling from its body politic the
intemperate passions that render it dysfunctional. What he has to do next
is: complete the action he has started against the jehadi organisations,
and then gradually switch off the high-pressure radicalisation of the establishment.
For the first task he has the support of the world, including Pakistan's
Islamic allies in the Gulf region, and of the people of Pakistan. The second
task is complicated by the fact that he will be sharing power with the
elected politicians by the end of this year.
As the jehadi organisations close
down and their leaders lose the power they had over society, facts about
their place in society are coming to the surface. What is being revealed
is crime and coercion. More will come out as rebel members of these outfits
become articulate and fear no reprisals from the ISI. Sometimes directly
and sometimes indirectly, clerics have grown in power and deterrence because
of the exemptions allowed to the jehadis by the ISI. Their aggression was
at first restricted to the Deobandi clerics and such non-Deobandi clerics
as were fielding their militias in Kashmir. In reaction, certain Barelvi
clerics too tried to acquire power by developing their 'fire power' and
demanding a part in the jehad. Sunni Tehreek is one such organisation which
has empowered a number of clerics through its policy of violence, Maulana
Shah Ahmad Noorani of the heretofore pacific JUP being one of them. The
coming into the arena of extremist politics by Shah Ahmad Noorani, now
that the religious panjandrums he feared as professional rivals are in
confinement, is his second attempt to boost his languishing Barelvism in
Pakistan. His first attempt was in 1990 when he sided with Iraq's Saddam
Hussein and challenged the state in Pakistan.
Popular opinion favours anti-jehad
reform: Despite the fears felt in the intelligence agencies, which caused
General Musharraf to hesitate till the December 13 incident in New Delhi,
popular opinion in Pakistan has stood behind the president and his anti-jehad
policy. The Urdu press where the newsroom is influenced by the religious
parties and the columnists usually support the views of the powerful clerics,
a sea change has occurred after this show of popular support. The emasculation
of jehad has liberated Urdu opinion and demonstrated how difficult it is
to enjoy freedom of expression in a society driven by religious coercion.
The political parties, always under pressure from religious politics, have
welcomed Musharraf's decision to return the country to joint electorates.
The PML (N), through its mouth-piece Raja Zafarul Haq, may be siding with
the offended clergy on this issue, but the larger breakaway PML is inclined
to take the line earlier taken by the PPP. Imran Khan's Insaf Party (after
his failure as an Islamic warrior), Leghari's Millet Party, already favour
joint electorates. Those who protest that Musharraf has changed the Constitution
undemocratically are embarrassed by the fact that the 1985 elections were
held under separate electorates by a general who scrapped the consensual
joint electorates (agreed to by the clerics in 1973) without asking anyone.
The army taketh away and the army rendereth back.
To tame the powerful and rich clergy
is going to be difficult. The simplest rule that would curb the powerful
parties to some extent is removing the exemptions awarded to them and to
which General Musharraf referred when he told the nation in his TV address
about the diminishing of the writ of the government. These exemptions were
handled through the two ISI officers posted at the district level, a system
that lined the pockets of the client and the minder, but led to the empowerment
of the clergy over society in rivalry to the state. The laws promulgated
to ban fund-collection through coercion and under the pretext of fighting
this jehad or that, will give enough handle to the next government, if
it agrees with Musharraf's reforms, to curb Pakistan's internal extremism.
The president in his address to the ulema and mushaikh in January 2001
used a lot of what may be called Islamic ambiguity to influence the less
aggressive clergy. The palliative he offered will work to some extent,
but nothing will work better than the thoroughness and stringency of the
action he has set on foot against the more extremist clergy. It is important
that this action continues after 2002 when parliament will be functional
again.
Musharraf must defang the state's
own extremist institutions. These institutions include the intelligence
agencies and organisations created to promote Islam. It is mot necessary
to scrap the Council for Islamic Ideology (CII) and the Federal Shariat
Court that actually instill an extremist view of life culled out of old
taqleedi Islamic jurisprudence but to man them with individuals of moderate
opinion. For instance, the CII doesn't have to unearth the weirdest traditions
of medieval Islam and ask the people of Pakistan to pressure Islamabad
to implement them. The present head of the CII, Dr S.M. Zaman has been
telling Pakistanis that the their country will be at rest only if prisons
are abolished and paper currency is recalled because it carries human likeness
on it. This applies to postage stamps too. There have been cases where
a person summoned to a court of law has refused to enter the room because
the portrait of the Quaid hung on the wall behind the judge. Men with an
Islamic chip on their shoulders must be made to stay away from state institutions.
Here the caveat is that 'reputable' scholars whose 'reputation' is much
touted by the bureaucracy are usually those who wish to avenge themselves
on society with their purism and hate the external world with diseased
intensity. Dr S. M. Zaman's own lack of knowledge of the world in general
and the national economy in particular was revealed when he went out of
his way during the Ulema and Mushaikh conference to castigate Globalisation
as an enemy of the Muslims. He also hid predictably behind the easy screen
of anti-India rhetoric. There was a time when moderate individuals headed
the Islamic institutions. But after General Zia fired Justice Aftab Hussain
from the Federal Shariat Court, the governments have preferred intellectually
light weight but extremist individuals like Justice Tarar, by appointing
whom as president of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif had shocked everyone in his
own party.
Who should come to power, PPP or
PML? The most uncertain phase is going to begin after October 2002, and
the problems are going crop up not so much with the PPP as with the PML,
which stands to the right, close to the religious parties, and hates India
more than the PPP. If the PML comes to power it will exploit the ideological
ambivalence of Musharraf and his apparent 'compensatory' intensification
of focus on Kashmir to roll back his moderate agenda. If he PPP comes to
power, the PML is going to attack Musharraf''s policy with great vigour
to gain more popularity. This vulnerability has developed because of the
strategy of 'counterbalance' adopted by Musharraf after the September 11
watershed in world politics. Suddenly finding the Taliban policy to be
untenable in the face of world opposition, he decided to turn on a dime
and abandon it. He did this by subliminally assuring the people of Pakistan
that he was balancing the abandonment of the Taliban policy by intensifying
the focus on Kashmir. As he moved closer to the influential Western Alliance,
he hoped that his advocacy of the Kashmir cause would get a better hearing.
He has failed to find sponsoring states in the UN Security Council for
another resolution, but some acknowledgement of the fact that India had
unfinished business with Pakistan over Kashmir has been expressed by a
generally pro-India Western media. The biggest drawback of this 'compensatory'
emphasis on Kashmir will become apparent when the politicians start exploiting
it after October 2002.
So far the pattern has been that
when an economically hamstrung civilian government tries to normalise with
India, the army gets rid of it with the help of the civilian opposition.
The intelligence agencies controlled by the army aggressively hunt politicians
and parties inclined to arriving at some kind of understanding with India
to relieve the pressure on Pakistan's economy. This time around, however,
General Musharraf as president of Pakistan is expected to go along with
any government that chooses to give priority to the economy even over such
policies as Kashmir itself. His power over the political system will be
through a veto in the National Security Council and the revived Article
58(2)B of the Constitution, but it will still be indirect and severely
curtailed by his desire not to dismiss the government in power and revert
to military rule. On the other hand, in the coming days, Pakistan, although
much assisted by its Western friends from the outside, will be expected
to pay a price internally for the blunder of its Taliban policy and its
undeniable linkage with the Kashmir policy. (This reveals the weakness
of Musharraf's compensatory intensification on Kashmir). In this period
of emotional bruising, the politicians will be attracted to exploiting
the logical inconsistencies of Musharraf's actions. The heavily negative
and doctrinally inculcated jurisprudence of the Indo-Pak rivalry will help
the politician in this attempt at a roll-back.
In South Asia, Pakistan is the most
externally dependent state. It is logical therefore to assume that it has
survived despite its ideological leanings because it is not sovereign enough
to complete its suicidal agendas. A logical outsider can force Pakistan
to mend its ways more easily than he can India. The logic of change is
understood by the people of Pakistan too, and Musharraf has seen it proved
in front of his eyes. But the state is no longer willing to change its
stance on a number of issues that it has adopted as ideology. The outside
world therefore has a duty to the people of Pakistan who agree with a change
in the nature of the Pakistani state: a very considerable pressure must
be kept up also on the politicians when they come to power, as on Musharraf
now, to cleave to the course of moderation and develop flexibility of approach
on issues that the state emphasises at the cost of the economy. Pakistan's
nuclear capability can serve as a persuader to reluctant governments in
the West. Given Pakistan's incapacity for change, its bombs can become
a threat to the world if its extremists are not prevented from taking over.
