Daily Times

As discussed last week, Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s twin attack on the free press and the politicians was part of the well-conceived strategy that was replicated by the army usurpers who followed. According to the late Mazhar Ali Khan, the Ayub Khan regime felt an urgent need for a totally subservient press and had initially planned “starting one or two newspapers under the government’s direct control.” But the junta and its client intellectuals, like Qudratullah Shahab and Altaf Gauhar, determined that such venture might not fly. They subsequently thought of nationalising the whole press but decided against it, fearing “adverse publicity” internationally. The clique ultimately settled on targeting, on April 18, 1959, the Progressive Papers Limited, because it included the country’s largest English daily, The Pakistan Times, as well as the Urdu daily Imroze. The highly pro-US generalissimo had done a total number on the press and now had his own versions of subservient newspapers.

Pakistan’s first military regime did not stop at muzzling of the press and crushing democratic political forces. Pakistan was a multi-ethnic state and the junta was in search of the cement that not just held the various nationalities together but also legitimised and consolidated the military’s controlling position over them. The Pakistani brass needed to invent a working ideology to become the supra-ethnic gel. It chose the ideological state model with heavy emphasis on Islamic — or even pan-Islamic — identity, anti-India jingoism entrenched in the ‘martial race’ delusion, and the market economy (read western and US aid). The supra-ethnic Islamic ‘national identity’ imposed at gunpoint thus became the grundnorm, from which Pakistan never could extricate itself.

Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy and other leading politicians of the era had seen this coming. Writing in the April 1957 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Suhrawardy had prophetically noted, “No royal or aristocratic pattern of duty and authority based on long and universal acceptance is at hand to serve our needs (to build an effective basis of the state). The goal can be achieved only through elections. Warning voices sometimes tell me that Pakistan is not ready for the democratic process. I can only reply that then Pakistan is not ready at all; for there is no alternative way of bringing about rapport between authority and people, no other avenue to national fulfillment…On the one side are ranged the advocates of segregation of our voters into religious communities. Proponents of this plan argue that Pakistan’s destiny is to be an ideological state. They would keep alive within Pakistan the divisive communal emotions by which the subcontinent was riven before the achievement of independence. On the other side are those who see Pakistan in terms of a nation state. I am unequivocally committed to this side. I see a Pakistan great enough and strong enough to encompass all its citizens, whatever their faith, on a basis of true civic equality and by that fact made greater and stronger.”

After the 1959 coup, Ayub Khan too laid out his ‘vision’ in Foreign Affairs magazine. In the July 1960 issue of the journal, a lengthy piece titled “Pakistan’s Perspective” appeared under the dictator’s byline, which gives a glimpse of the junta’s mindset and Qudratullah Shahab-types who provided the theoretical basis for its experiment. The article is replete with references to religion and relies heavily on Allama Iqbal’s role as ‘creator of our ideology’. Ayub Khan quotes Iqbal to postulate that in Islam the “spiritual and the temporal are not two distinct domains” and how Pakistan had been “involved in the paradox of almost losing its ideology in the very act of trying to fulfill it.” He then shamelessly trashed the politicians and democracy as a “system of government totally unsuited to the temper and climate of the country” before giving the outlines of his basic democracy that “should be able to produce reasonably strong and stable governments.” Ayesha Jalal and Husain Haqqani (the latter in particular) in their books have provided great analyses of this tug of war between the political forces and the junta. Like Mazhar Ali Khan’s Pakistan Forum article, the above quoted Foreign Affairs articles remain necessary reading even today.

Ayub Khan’s vision obviously prevailed over Suhrawardy’s and the military became the custodian of the ‘ideological frontiers’, in addition to defending the physical frontiers. Each successive military regime took up from where the previous one had left and kept pouring more political Islam and jingoism into the Ayub formula. The ideology deck was stacked against the democratic forces, which were now bound in the straightjacket of the supra-ethnic Pakistani-Islamic identity. The politicians and whatever was left of the alternative media voices found themselves under assault both from the guardians of the ideological frontiers directly, as well as from the street — teeming with military-allied mullahs and their subsequent reincarnations — and the junta-co-opted media. Whether it was the 1988 Geneva Accords with Afghanistan/USSR or more recently the Kerry-Lugar-Berman law issue, the national interest nutcracker of the junta and its media-mullah stooges had the politicians trapped. From the mysterious death of Suhrawardy to the assassination of leaders like Benazir Bhutto and bomb attacks on Asfandyar Wali and Afrasiab Khattak, politicians have risked physical elimination whenever they tried to break this chokehold.

It is most unfortunate that even the relatively liberal analysts would unquestioningly grant the army the status of the sole arbiter of defining Pakistan’s national interest. Any discussion of Salala and General Kayani’s recent speech is incomplete without dissecting his and his predecessors’ overt and covert political interventions, each one of which ended in a national disaster.

As the respected intellectual Dr Manzur Ejaz puts it, the post-Salala shenanigans were the Kargil of Pakistan’s military-run foreign policy. Like the Operations Search Light, Gibraltar, Jalalabad, Kargil and so on, the self-appointed custodians of the national interest — and those singing their unqualified praises — have egg on their face again. The brass bit off more than it could chew and risking exclusion from the Chicago moot on Afghanistan ended up vacating, quite humiliatingly, the Tiger Hill of diplomacy that it thought it had captured.

About time that those analysts who, in the words of the late Zamir Niazi, are in an incestuous relationship with the power players, realised that one cannot run with the hare and hunt with the hounds — they will be called out on it.

(Concluded)

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/mazdaki