Daily Times

The current tense situation between Pakistan and India due to Indian originated aggression compelled me to conduct some academic research onthe historic animosity between the two states. While reading a piece by Andreas Wimmer titledWhy Nationalism Works, I was constrained to think, is Pakistan a nation state or a state nation? And does Pakistan need more nationalism or more patriotism? According to Wikipedia, a nation state is defined as a sovereign state of which most of the citizens or subjects are united by linguistic or ethnic characteristics. A nation state is a state in which the great majority shares the same culture and is conscious of it. The nation state is an ideal in which cultural boundaries match up with political ones. The term “nation-state” is a relatively clear term-of-art used in political science discussions. It refers to a country which is created based on a doctrine of ethno-nationalism. This means that it is a country created to serve the national and cultural interest of a specific ethnic group. Greece, Turkey, Armenia, Italy, Israel, Pakistan, Thailand, and a number of other countries can be said to be nation-states since they were created for one ethnicity to self-govern. Of course, these countries also have ethnic minorities, but the prevailing culture, values, and orientation of the society comes from the predominant ethnic group, even if equal rights are granted to minorities. The term “state-nation” is not a clear term-of-art in political science and only occurs in a few research papers. In all of these papers, the term is explicitly defined by the authors. For example in the article Nation-States and State-Nations by Mostafa Rejai and Cynthia H. Enloe, a “state nation” is defined as when: “authority and sovereignty have run ahead of the self-conscious national identity and cultural integration.” This refers to countries that functionally exist because they have borders and a government, but not because there is a national cultural identity that derives from a particular ethnic group. These countries exist because of incidental borders, not because of a coherent sense of identity. Many of the post-colonial countries in Africa and Asia could be considered state-nations under this rubric, especially those in Sub-Saharan Africa; and even the US and India faced this dilemma at the time of their births, which they continue to confront.

According to Andreas Wimmer, nationalism has a bad reputation today. It is, in the minds of many educated Westerners, a dangerous ideology. Some acknowledge the virtues of patriotism, understood as the benign affection for one’s homeland; at the same time, they see nationalism as narrow-minded and immoral, promoting blind loyalty to a country over deeper commitments to justice and humanity. In a January 2019 speech to his country’s diplomatic corps, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier put this view in stark terms: “Nationalism is an ideological poison.” In recent years, populists across the West have sought to invert this moral hierarchy. They have proudly claimed the mantle of nationalism, promising to defend the interests of the majority against immigrant minorities and out-of-touch elites. Their critics, meanwhile, cling to the established distinction between malign nationalism and worthy patriotism. In a thinly veiled shot at US President Donald Trump, a self-described nationalist, French President Emmanuel Macron declared last November that “nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism.”

Indian PM Narendra Modi’s promotion of aggressive Hindu nationalism has resulted in the brutalization of minorities; including Muslims, Sikhs and Christians

The American Civil War was a struggle over two competing ideas of the nation-state. This struggle has never ended; it has just moved around. In the antebellum US. Northerners, and especially northern abolitionists, drew a contrast between (northern) nationalism and (southern) sectionalism. “We must cultivate a national, instead of a sectional patriotism” urged one Michigan congressman in 1850. But Southerners were nationalists, too. It’s just that their nationalism was what would now be termed “illiberal” or “ethnic,” as opposed to the Northerners’ liberal or civic nationalism. This distinction has been subjected to much criticism, on the grounds that it’s nothing more than a way of calling one kind of nationalism good and another bad. But the nationalism of the North and that of the South were in fact different, and much of US history has been a battle between them. If love of the nation is what drove American historians to the study of the past in the nineteenth century, hatred for nationalism drove American historians away from it in the second half of the twentieth century. By the 1960s, nationalism looked rather worse than an anachronism. Meanwhile, with the coming of the Vietnam War, American historians stopped studying the nation-state in part out of a fear of complicity with atrocities of US foreign policy and regimes of political oppression at home.

In India, incumbent Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi, heading the far right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has tried to ride the tide of centrifugal and fissiparous tendencies marked by hundreds of languages and thousands of casts and subcasts in India by promoting aggressive Hindu Nationalism.This has resulted in the brutal treatment of minorities; predominantly Muslims, Christians and Sikhs. This is shaking the very foundations of the so-called world’s largest democracy and secular India as a State Nation. Modi, despite only being a semi-literate person, has proven to be a shrewd politician whose “made in India” slogan resonated well among the Indian masses — especially the cosmopolitan or urban people. It also resembled Trump’s “America First” slogan. However,defeat in three major states in the 2018 state election gave a big jolt to the BJP, that had thus far gained majority in 21 states out of 29; resulting in the sudden resurgence of the Indian National Congress under younger leadership by Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi. In addition to that, Modi’s failure to provide jobs to millions of followers and the suffering of farmers in the rural majority areas urged him to up the ante against Pakistan, especially across the Line of Control (LOC) by failed air raids in the backdrop of a suicide attack on a paramilitary convoy at Pulwama in Indian occupied Kashmir (IOK). Pakistan’s befitting and prudent response in the next 24 hours by shooting down two Indian intruding military aircrafts in Pakistani territory and arrest of Indian pilots thoroughly embarrassed Modi and his hawks, who were foolishly treating the situation as a political gimmick aimed at gaining 22 more seats in the upcoming general elections.This tactic has backfired; but has nevertheless raised the specter of greater escalation between two nuclear rivals and has underscored the inherent danger of flawed Indian belligerent nationalism. The other purposes Modi might have aimed at achieving were covered in my earlier article “Pulwama Black Swan” published in Daily Times and Daily Business News.

Just as nothing unites India like war-hysteria against Pakistan, nothing unites Pakistani people more thanthreats from India. And that is where the advantage of Pakistan being a nation state comes into play versus an aggressive state nation like India, threatened by her own internal dissensions. And that is how Pakistanis affection, love, loyalty and patriotism successfully confronts and punches back in the face of Indian nationalist rulers’ narrow minded, immoral and unjust quest to suppress minorities within India especially Kashmiri Muslims and subdue smaller neighbouring countries in the whole region that are incidentally members of SAARC, where India strives to act as a shark. Needless to say, Pakistani patriotism is based on the slogan given by the father of the nation Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, “Unity, Faith and Discipline”.

The writer is SI (M) is a retired senior Army officer with rich experience in Military & Intelligence Diplomacy

Published in Daily Times, March 3^rd 2019.