Reading Pervez Musharraf’s famous speech well after it was delivered, I was impressed by how craven it was. Not in the sense of being a command performance ordered by the Americans; no, it was craven because it was so cringingly deferential to the idea of Pakistan as a Muslim country. The general urged his compatriots to help him purge Pakistan of fundamentalism because fundamentalism mis-represented Islam, not because religion had no place in politics. You could argue that in the Pakistan that General Zia made (and therefore the Pakistan that General Musharraf inhabits), any process of moderation or reform must take the Muslimness of Pakistan as a given if it is to remain politically credible. If this is so, there is no prospect of real political change in that peculiar country.
It is hard to believe that everyone from the American establishment to Lal Krishna Advani saw in the general’s speech an agenda for the transformation of Pakistan into a civilized state. For the most part Musharraf’s speech (especially the half that dealt with the domestic situation in Pakistan) urged Pakistanis to respect the state’s monopoly of violence. He wanted Pakistani Muslims to stop killing each other in the name of religion and he half-promised that the Pakistani army would stop training and exporting fanatics to other countries.
This was enough for the listening world — including, in India, the Lahore Nostalgists, a loose group of grizzled liberal columnists who had gone to college in Lahore or wished they had — to declare that Musharraf was either Ataturk, or at the very least, a moderate Muslim leader with whom the world, including India, could and should do business. Liberal Pakistani columnists dusted off their memories of Jinnah’s constituent assembly speech and wondered (for the nth time) if the general was the political instrument chosen by history to create the religion-blind state allegedly envisioned by Jinnah. On the strength of one speech we are asked to believe that Jinnah went to the trouble of carving out Pakistan because he actually wanted to set up a secular democratic state that just happened to have a Muslim majority.
Even if this were true, a secular democratic state is no part of Musharraf’s agenda. From his speech and other interviews it is clear that he wants to roll back theocracy (that is, a government mentored by mullahs) by disciplining madrasahs and violent sectarian outfits, but he has no intention of meddling with the essential characteristic of the Pakistani state, that is, its Muslimness.
Much has been made of the general’s admiration for Ataturk but Musharraf himself has been careful to distance himself from the Turkish modernizer. Pakistan, said Musharraf in an interview, was more “Muslim-minded” than Turkey. The two things that Ataturk and Musharraf have in common is that, like the Turkish modernizer, Musharraf is a soldier and is suspicious of democracy.
Musharraf wants to set up a moderate Muslim state of the kind that Americans like doing business with. Since this category (Moderate Muslim State) has in the past included both the Wahabi monarchy of Saudi Arabia and the taliban, it is hard to know what features American policymakers attribute to such a state, but what Musharraf understands by it is a little clearer. He wants a Muslim-minded state, managed by the military, minus the mad mullahs. Amongst his many military predecessors, he favours Ayub’s guided democracy, not Zia’s flirtation with theocracy.
But even if he were to abolish the Hudood ordinances and put an end to prosecutions under the dreadful blasphemy laws, Musharraf will remain wholly committed to the “essentially” Muslim nature of the Pakistani state. It is this that makes Pakistan such a strange, sick state. Ninety eight per cent of its population is Muslim and yet its entire political class is reflexively committed to affirming that the state is owned by the majority community. This pathological anxiety to reassure Muslims that they are first class citizens means that non-Muslims have to be something less than that.
When Musharraf in his speech reminds his subjects that ninety eight per cent of Pakistan’s population is Muslim, he does it not to reassure them that such numerical dominance secures their identity as Muslims; he cites the figure to reproach Muslims in Pakistan for fighting each other on sectarian grounds. The scary thing about Musharraf’s speech in particular and Pakistani politics in general is that ideologically and rhetorically, non-Muslims count for nothing in Pakistan.
Pakistan’s barbaric example should make us ever more grateful that India’s constituent assembly created a secular state within an overwhelmingly Hindu India. The sangh parivar, the Shiv Sena, the search for a “Hindu-minded” India represented by Hindutva, the rath yatra, the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the rewriting of history textbooks by Hindu zealots, show us that the Indian republic could have looked very different, that secular democracy in India wasn’t inevitable, that it wasn’t an emanation of the “essentially tolerant nature of Hinduism” — it was brought into being by political will. A politics defined by the beliefs of any faith is inevitably and essentially intolerant.
Liberals in India are incorrigibly optimistic about Pakistan. This is a mistake. Pakistan isn’t an errant younger brother who needs our indulgence; Pakistan is a cautionary tale and the moral of its wretched history is this: a majoritarian politics devours its people. Musharraf can casually tell the world that Pakistan is a Muslim country. He takes it for granted that Pakistan’s polity must accommodate this Muslimness. In Pakistan there is a monstrous matter-of-factness about the bizarre idea that a country can be owned by a religious community. An increasing number of Indians, particularly middle-class Indians, have begun to buy into this majoritarian “common sense”. Should this feeling become general in India, the sub-continent will become home to two “Pakistans”. We’ll be the bigger one.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
