Daily Times

Pakistan’s current ‘democratic’ government has brought only dismay to the people. While all the important state policies are being designed and implemented by the military establishment (or the Americans), prolonging the hurtful stay of the present political regime is making less sense with every passing day. This scenario gives rise to many difficult questions: who should be running the Pakistani state? What should be the system of governance? If neither dictatorships nor democracies work in Pakistan, then what does? After having tried and tested military regimes and so-called democracies for over 63 years, Pakistan today seems like an unsolvable riddle. But to answer questions about the future of Pakistan, we first need to single out the root causes of Pakistan’s misfortunes. And to do that, we need to look around for parallels.

In modern political history, the cases of Pakistan and Israel are particularly atypical. Pakistan is a country that has failed under all kinds of regimes despite many constitutional therapies. Today, many in the west think of Pakistan as a grave threat to world peace. Israel, on the other hand, is a problem child in its own right. Despite its inauspicious attitude towards the jugular vein of world peace — Palestine — it continues to be pampered by the US.

Both Pakistan and Israel are somehow an outcome of the illicit affairs of the British Empire. It may not be very odd to say that Israel and Pakistan are, in ways, the illegitimate offspring of the British crown. In the haste of retreating, the British left us with two of the world’s most contentious conflicts — Palestine and Kashmir. While the legacy of these nations does have an important bearing on their present, many factors that followed led them on very different paths.

On observing closely, we find some very interesting ‘peculiarities’ in both Israel and Pakistan, helping us put Pakistan’s political reality in perspective. If we try to grasp these subtle points that make Pakistan and Israel unique, we will take a huge step in understanding the internal politics of Pakistan and in comprehending the pro-status quo forces that prevent all kinds of progress in this country.

When studying Pakistan, drawing the Israel analogy helps one understand the security mindset very well, delineating for us the reason why Pakistan’s threat perception has led it to being overly defence oriented. Besides, by considering the parallels between Pakistan and Israel, we are also able to see how this mutual congruence determines the internal politics of the two nations in question.

To start with, both Pakistan and Israel declared their creation within a year of each other — 1947 and 1948 respectively. Both states were founded in the name of religious ideologies, thus making them the only two ideological states in the world, i.e. created in the name of religion. Ever since their formation, both have fought numerous wars and have persistently put serious efforts toward defending themselves from actual or perceived security threats that emanate from their ‘surroundings’. Israel and Pakistan are both nuclear-armed states and their threat perception has forced them to invest heavily in arms build-up. These factors have determined the political systems that govern each of the two states, i.e. heavily influenced by their respective security establishments and centred on the few individuals who are in charge.

Civilians in Israel and Pakistan also share some interesting commonalities. Upon the creation of Pakistan and Israel, huge migrations occurred in both the newborn states. Between 1948 and 1951, over 600,000 Jews arrived in Israel, significantly altering the demographics of the region. In the case of Pakistan, 7.2 million Muslims immigrated, creating a huge Mohajir population in the country. In both cases, the migrations occurred on a religious basis, i.e. in the name of Judaism and Islam. Both these mass population movements created demographic complexities that continue to wreak havoc in Pakistan and Israel to date. Israel and Pakistan contain two of the world’s most armed civilian populations. This fact might not be very surprising considering the history of violence in both countries. While Israelis like to practice their shooting at stone pelting kids, Pakistanis have some eccentric vocations of their own.

The most interesting point that came about concerns their respective national languages. In both countries, languages that were, for all practical purposes, alien to the local people were proclaimed as the vernacular. Israelis practically revived a dead language — Hebrew — which is an incredible feat on its own. Pakistanis, in a very similar fashion, made Urdu their national language — a language that is the mother tongue of less than eight percent of Pakistan’s population. New identities were therefore stamped upon a diverse mix of people, creating discomfort in some sections of society and, in others, a sense of belonging.

The ethnic conflicts, the rift between provinces, the migrant ruling families that continue to wield power, the ever powerful generals, the India-centric defence policies and the feudal culture in the robe of democracy, all have a well defined context in Pakistan — and our Israel analogy explains this very well.

All these points give background to the ethnic fault lines in our society. They explain why we have Punjabi, Baloch, Pashtun and Sindhi political parties rather than national political parties. They explain to us the reasons behind the insecurities that Punjabis have with other ethnic groups in the country. These points explicate why certain cultural realities have been suppressed and others have been imposed, forcibly. These points also give a background to the economic disparities in our country — they explain to us why the interests of a few families have always been protected against those of the masses. They also explain how the insecurities of Pakistan’s establishment have held hostage the whole nation for so many years. The parallels that we share with Israel delineate for us the reasons why certain sections of our society take an uncompromising stand on their religious beliefs and identity.

Once we start looking we will find many clues to the sources of our problems and perhaps also some solutions, if only we have the will to solve our problems. We will also have a lot to learn from our own history and the history of other nations that had a similar legacy as ours. But alas, we pay no heed to the lessons that history has for us. Our failure as a nation stems from our inability to comprehend the historical context in which our problems are grounded. True, we cannot change our legacy but we can change our future.

Our broth always gets spoilt because we have too many ‘fake-degree’ cooks. Or perhaps our recipe is all wrong. We have been eating spoiled broth for over 63 years and we keep blaming all the wrong things for our stomach ache. While Pakistan has afforded unsuccessful military dictatorships and individual-centred democracies for over six decades, it will not harm us much if we try something out of the box — just for a change of taste.

The writer is a research assistant at the Development Policy Research Centre, Pakistan and is also associated with the Centre for International Media Ethics. He can be reached at talhajalal@hotmail.com