In a recent piece in these pages, columnist Farman Nawaz averred: “Pakistan is fighting a war against terrorism without an ideology and that is the reason behind why Pakistan has still not been able to define its goals and those of its fight.” He suggested that we, the people of Pakistan, do not have an “ideology” that can permit us to combat the forces of extremist terror that our own earlier follies have unleashed upon us and, indeed, upon the world.
I do agree that we are confused about our goals in this war. But I have problems with the overused word ideology in the context of the state. The term ideological state is synonymous with rigid, single-thought dictatorships, i.e. with totalitarianism. We have numerous, frightful examples – Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Communist China, North Korea and Saudi Arabia are some – of states in which all liberties were/are denied to the citizens, particularly freedom of thought and association, and scores, even millions, of people were/are imprisoned, tortured or murdered in the name of the purported ideology of the state. Thus, to take a proximate example, the Islamic state being set up by the entity known as Daesh (Islamic State) is indeed an ideological state. On the other hand, our Pakistan, where we pay at least lip service to democratic values and constitutional principles, is – thank the Almighty – not an ideological state.
But the real quandary that Farman Nawaz implies is this:“If the official state-promoted narrative (to abjure the term ideology) lies along the same locus as that of the enemies of that state, then how is the state to be defended against that particular enemy?The question is pointed. And it cuts deeper.
Ernest Gellner, the great British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist who has been described as one of the world’s most vigorous modern intellectuals, wrote, among other issues, on nationalism. In his 1983 treatise, Nations and Nationalism, Gellner held that “Nationalism is primarily a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.”
Okay, fine. But how do we define a “national unit”? What creates in people’s minds that broad sense of identity and affinity, which is the “imagined community” of a nation? Is it common language? Racial uniformity? Cultural (including religious) similarities? Economic linkages? Common social values? Common geographic territory?As will be clear in a moment’s reflection, all these attributes, other than the last mentioned, are totally malleable, provisional factors that blend, change and evolve all the time. There is nothing fixed about them. Only geography does not change, or changes very slowly.
A nation-state is therefore a geographic entity upon which people live and may or may not develop common languages, religions, cultures, etc. Of necessity, it is also a military entity and must have defensible borders. The inhabitants of a nation-state feel their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are better served by belonging to that particular state than not so belonging. Primeval identities may assist these processes of integration but are not essential. Consider such notably patriotic citizens as those of, say, Belgium, Vietnam, Canada, Brazil, Switzerland, the US, or even India – all either multi-lingual, multi-religious and even multi-racial states.
A nation-state is then not eternal; it is a contingency at a particular point in the story of a geographic space. It is frequently a historical accident, whose longevity or otherwise depends, internally, on the relative satisfaction of its citizens and, externally, on its military defensibility and diplomatic expertise. In fact, according to Gellner, “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist.” Thus, states develop national narratives and national myths as a kind of raison d’être for their existence and these are commonly developed after the establishment of the state, as a kind of retrospective justification, not before.
There are disparate elements involved in the formation of a state. Consider some of the varying motives and movements that led to the genesis of Pakistan. To begin with, there were the predominantly Muslim Ashrafelite of northern India: Mughal legatees, who had evolved into what Hamza Alvi has characterised as a ‘salariat’ that now sought a space for career growth and effective power. In Gujarat and Maharashtra, there was an incipient Muslim trading bourgeoisie, which struggled to emerge from beneath the smothering weight of the Baniya merchant castes’ traditional advantages. In East Bengal, the oppressed peasantry of the delta craved deliverance from the largely Hindu Bhadra Lok. The Makhdooms, squires and other members of the landed gentry of Punjab and Sindh rushed to protect their ancestral holdings from the Nehru-ite socialist radicalism of the Congress Party. And so on. These varying tendencies and interests all came together under the leadership of the Quaid in establishing the new state of Pakistan.
But the narrow bureaucratic-military leadership that actually assumed control after the Quaid’s death was sceptical of the very clear outlines, which that great liberal democrat had outlined for the national narrative of the new state. Pakistan, having already been achieved, the Quaid proclaimed, “You are free, you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed, that has nothing to do with the business of the state.”
But the post facto national narrative actually contrived ignored the founder’s explicit desires. Cynical use was made of a pseudo-Islamic cement to bind together the different ethnicities, classesand interests. Had there been an iota of historical understanding or political wisdom within the ruling cliques, they might have understood the improbability of using the inherently non-national concept of the Muslim millat to strengthen a national consciousness among the diverse groups within this country. Maulana Maudoodi had long before grasped this contradiction when he had rejected the idea of a Pakistani nation as being an un-Islamic construction, disharmonious with the multi-state Muslim millat. In Gellner’s terminology, the borders of the millat, an enormous national unit, could never be congruent with the fractional Pakistani political unit.
But, of course, our bureaucratic-military masters were never too conceptually literate anyhow. Not only did their weak pseudo-Islamic narrative fail to hold the country together, it actually proved to be divisive, breeding the kind of violent divisiveness that a reactionary dictator like Ziaul Haq could exploit. It was also the rationale for creating the squads of armed goons who directly attacked the sovereignty of this already weakened state that had now also thrown away its monopoly over armed force. And it has raised precisely the questions that Farman Nawaz and many others are asking.
The way forward will begin to emerge only when we finally realise that, however a state may have chanced to appear on a map, once it has done so, its purpose is nothing more and nothing less than promoting the wellbeing of its citizens. It is meant to provide governance, promote economic activity, make available education and other social services to its citizens, and ensure their freedom, their rights, justice, and law and order. Nothing else matters.
The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet