MJ Akbar
Pakistan is not a state. It is a state of mind, conceived in a strange supremacism, bred in distance from other faiths, and sustained by a self-corroding hatred of Hindus that demanded the separation of some Muslims from the motherland in the absurd cause of purity.
It was born from a theory of distance from Hindus, first articulated on the Indian subcontinent by Shah Waliullah, and revived after a long convalescence of two centuries by the politics of Partition in the 1940s, championed by a leader who had little understanding of Islam, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, but took advantage of a slogan that was tantamount to apostasy, ‘Islam in Danger!’, to destroy the unity of India. Jinnah’s spur was more personal than collective for he wanted to be ruler of a country, which was impossible for him in united India.
His legacy was hatred, and its prime derivative, violence; first in the form of war, and now in the manifestation of terrorism. He ordered the first war against free India, in October 1947; his successors, despite repeated defeat in conventional war, have made the evil of terrorism, the massacre of innocents, a crime in any religion or civilisation, into their creed for survival. Barbarism is the daily diet of a country that never had moorings in rational doctrine, and continues to be an exemplar of continuing collapse.
Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, which till a decade ago was inflicting savage havoc across many parts of India, has now honed in on Kashmir as its prime battlefield.
Jinnah’s incarnation
Jinnah’s latest reincarnation, Pakistan’s General Asim Munir, who has never been famous for intellect or indeed military genius, made a bold incursion into public life last week with a justification for terrorism, in yet another loud and incoherent advocacy for the war of a thousand cuts, which is Pakistan’s phrase for terrorism. Munir justified the existence of Pakistan, and his ambitions for Kashmir’s separation from India, by reiterating the tired cliché that Muslims are “different from Hindus in every possible aspect of life”: “Our religions are different, our thoughts are different, our ambitions are different. That was the foundation of the two-nation theory that was laid there. We are two nations, we are not one nation.”
Someone should give General Munir some lessons in elementary mathematics. He must learn how to count. Perhaps the General has pronounced amnesia. He quite forgot that the two-nation theory became three nations in 1971, not because Bengali Muslims were less Muslim but because they were less Pakistani. They liberated their country and renamed it Bangladesh. Despite the onerous and often hypocritical efforts of the latest unelected Government in Dhaka, led by Muhammad Yunus, to justify a sudden friendship with Islamabad, his Government was forced to demand billions of dollars in reparation for the massacres committed by the Pakistan Army in Bengal between March and December 1971.
It is possible that Pakistan’s mosques and cantonments are under strict orders to erase this genocide from personal and public memory, and that an estimated 10 million Bengali Muslims and Hindus fled to India for safety, returning to their land only after the murderous Pakistan Army had been driven out of its dictatorial control of both wings of the country after a full-scale war.
Asim Munir was three years old when the two-nation theory exploded, but perhaps his father, an Imam, forgot to tell him about the birth of Bangladesh. It is likely that the schools he went to pretended that Pakistan was born in 1947 and reborn in 1971 with the expulsion of ‘Hinduised Bengali Muslims’.
On April 16, General Munir set out the agenda for a renewed war of terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir. We do not know whether he had the authority from the professed Government in Islamabad, led by the Sharif brothers, to do so. But that may be irrelevant. The Pakistan Army has not taken orders from Pakistan’s politicians since 1957. Munir set off the alarums of war with a declaration that Kashmir “was our jugular vein, it is our jugular vein, we will not forget it… We will not leave our Kashmiri brothers in their historical struggle”.
Is there a credible reason, or two, for this sudden intervention? Munir has been famous for his silence since he was appointed Army Chief but perhaps he was biding his time, building his strength within the command structures of his force. He could have been impelled by a factor outside his control: the growing prosperity within Jammu & Kashmir as the peace dividend has brought its rewards in the last five years. It could be an anxious effort to obfuscate a changing reality.
