Daily Times

It was August 14 when at the stroke of midnight hour a twin was born. But born out of what? Carved out might be a more befitting title for this bicephalous twin, later cleaved into two acutely uneven halves. The formidable one was named after India while the frail and tenuous became Pakistan.

The Second World War brought the nemesis of the European powers. The era of their domination was over. The question was how to maintain their hegemony. The sagging British Empire, finding herself incapable of retaining her colonial power, quickly realised her impotence. To avoid further embarrassment, a ‘prophylactic-decolonisation’ was deemed necessary.

The partition was not a crafty effort based on surgical precision — since fixing the ailment was unintended — but a crude leash of a butcher’s axe and the reason was as spurious as the fragmentation itself. The two ill-fated parts were left lurching in the mire of permanent animosity and religious fascism of the most obnoxious hue. The idea of hegemony was delectably fulfilled.

For the colonisers, the Indian partition was unambiguously intended to turn the convulsive tides of class struggle into a vague battle of metaphysical ideas. Freedom from want, from the daily struggle of existence, the real objective of struggle was replaced with a myth advertised as ‘independence’. A state of wallowing in-dependence upon those who held the means of production.

“To redeem the pledge of a tryst made with destiny” or to avoid “the chaos of living together,” millions were forced to migrate, hundreds lost their lives, and women in battalions were gang raped. Could religion be that cruel? It might be a dish for the gods, but was it worth the salt of humanity? The answer may be in yes or no, depending on which side of the divide one is standing on, and whose interests one is looking after.

Every year the celebrated idea of independence is sold to the people with pomp and show. Independence maybe, but from whom? From the Brits, but to them it was a mere transfer of power. They left behind two Governor Generals as semi-viceroys. A viable army, a fully functioning bureaucracy, and a system based on inequality rife with prejudices of class, caste and creed. For people, the sphinx of independence had already committed the hara-kiri.

Later, a “moth-eaten state,” as described by the father of the nation himself, left no stone unturned to trim entire relations to suit the necessities of a ruling feudal class. The language riots left an agonising memory, and a martyr-square in East Bengal brought a yawning breach in the relations of the two wings. On the foreign front, Liaq Ahmed and Feroz Khan Noon peddled their way to Washington holding Pakistan in a platter to present it as a bulwark against communism. Despite receiving less than a tepid response, the direction of state’s foreign policy was settled once and for all.

“The foreign policy is the continuation of the internal policy,” writes Karl Marx). And Horkheimer states: “[It] distracts from the exploitation inland.” Pakistan was no exception to this rule of thumb. Internally, the establishment — the leftover of the Brits — kept playing havoc with a weak apolitical ruling class before the real hegemon overtly took over the reins of power. “Political power grew” straight “from the barrel of the gun.” Bengal was already colonised; it was time for the boots to trample the remaining part of the ‘God-gifted state’.

A legacy of Bonapartism, couple of armed conflicts, another dismal adventure in Kargil, and in its interregnum a gory intervention and a meek surrender in Bengal were the only highs or lows of the hazy history of this land where atavism of religious purity and cultural decadence has rocked the boat ever since. In a succession of failures, why forget a delectable victory that proved more pyrrhic than all the defeats it had to face. The fruitful Afghan jihad, which brought more seeds than fruits, the seeds that germinated into several Frankensteins, was the worst of all.

The children of these ‘midnight’ states are reduced to theoretical concepts or mere abstractions, which are required by the ruling classes only when the hour of elections strikes its jangle. According to the UNDP, some 58.7 million people in Pakistan are living below the poverty line. Raise the poverty line to two dollars per day, and up goes the poverty graph to 60.2 percent of total population. Those who are living slightly above this sham line would have their number hovering somewhere near the same figure.

Health and education have never been the state’s priorities, yet the ever-rising defence budget is reaching a feverish pitch, despite the many lethal weapons or nuke toys that the Pakistan army already has in its arsenal. What utility do these means of destruction serve for such states with a large number of starved populace living in inhuman conditions — a real nuke ticking to explode?

The Kleptocracy imposed upon the people in the name of democracy is equally anathematic, in fact, an Orwellian plague. The Panama-fame prime minister, savouring the third term of power-feast, has marshalled his way through cardiac surgery in the UK consuming many a million, while the life-span of an ordinary citizen is getting curtailed with the not-so-in-fashion diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, gastroenteritis, to name a few. This certainly wasn’t the idea of independence once sold to the people as freedom from want and misery inflicted by the British-Hindu nexus.

In this ‘kingdom of heaven’, pelf in one’s pocket guarantees not only access to the highest pedestal, but to a Helen with her Troy as a trophy — a tribute to one’s wealth. Else, madrassas are an alternative. Loss of few other lives besides one’s own opens the gateway to a metaphysical world of end-less Helens and cities superior to Troy with all Eros and no Ananke. But to attain this ‘blessing’, one may have to cross another bridge that leads to the domain of Haqqanis and their mentors.

Apart from poverty, illiteracy, backwardness and indifference, there is another broken bridge that our ruling elite finds no will to build or repair. This is the most crucial one since it leads the state to its ‘soft belly’, the largest yet the most neglected province of Pakistan. The killing spree, the discovery of mutilated cadavers, and the sudden disappearance of youngsters from their homes are no more mysteries. The ‘accursed’ documentary of BBC, which was subsequently banned, alludes to the fact that the power brokers are refusing to learn from the history of Bengal. “Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” Burke wrote.

If all these afflictions were not enough, the advent of religious terrorism — homegrown, state-backed or otherwise — has revealed the ruse of this Pandora’s box familiar as independence, and which could never translate itself into freedom. In the wake of grisly happenings within, how can one condemn the gory crimes committed by the Indian state in the occupied Kashmir? After watching the bullet-riddled body of Salmaan Taseer and Rashid Rehman, no one can think about freedom of speech. The law against blasphemy and the sanctity of holy institutions and the cyber-crime bill are all enacted to influence the critical thought. Under these stifling conditions, one needs either a lot of stupidity or strength to refer to this hostage-like situation as independence.

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com