Commentary / Mani Shankar Aiyar

What ails Pakistan?

We came together to freedom 50 years ago. We've neither of us made a particular success of freedom. But India has sustained its democracy for half a century and given itself a Constitution which, notwithstanding some 80 amendments, has endured through five decades of trial and error.

Pakistan, on the other hand, never seems to have built that national consensus which is the foundation of all Constitution-making and has, therefore, lurched from republic to republic, Constitution to Constitution, dictatorship to democracy to dictatorship. It lost half its territory in the Silver Jubilee year of its founding and looks set to surrender its democracy once more to either tyranny or chaos in its Golden Jubilee.

I, for one, can find no satisfaction in this. A stable Pakistan would be in our interest, their interest, the region's interest. Can there be a stable Pakistan?

In principle, yes. Indeed, Pakistan's prospects of stability were much brighter than ours at Independence. They had found in Islam a bonding adhesive. We were still groping with an untried secularism and an untested 'unity in diversity.' They were fired with the zeal of victory. Our Independence was cast over with the pall of vivisection that the Father of Freedom refused to join the celebrations and Nehru was forced to confess that we were redeeming our pledge of a tryst with destiny 'not wholly, nor in full measure.'

Our first political assassination took place within six months of freedom. Their's did not happen till Premier Liaquat Ali Khan was shot down at a public meeting in Rawalpindi in 1951. Their initial economic performance was so impressive that 1965 annual report of the UN Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East noted that the second most industrialised country in the region in per-capita terms was Pakistan, second only to Japan.

We were in that year plateauing it on the Hindu rate of growth. And at the stage, it was we who had lost border areas to China; the Pakistani heel was firmly grinding the Bengali Pakistans to fine dust.

In the Silver Jubilee of Pakistan's Independence, one Bhutto set Pakistan on the slide to disaster. In the Golden Jubilee, another Bhutto has pushed Pakistan to the edge of an economic precipice. Unless Pakistan finds in Shahid Javed Burki, their Manmohan Singh, the Golden Jubilee of Pakistan's freedom is going to witness an economic calamity quite in proportion to the political calamity which overtook them in their Silver Jubilee.

Why has that country come to such a sorry pass? The short Churchillian answer is that never before have so few -- Bhutto, father and daughter -- contributed so much to the ruin of so many. The longer answer lies deeper in the very conception of Pakistan. It is an answer pregnant with lessons for India. I hope the Sangh Parivar, in particular, and all Indians, in general, will heed those lessons instead of celebrating the misery and discomfiture of Pakistan in 1996.

The idea of Pakistan was flawed in conception -- because religion in the 20th century cannot be a basis for nationhood. If it were, the Muslims of the sub-continent should have opted to become part of existing Iran (if they were Shias) or extant Afghanistan (if they were Sunnis) and then agitated for the merger of Afghanistan into Iran as the prelude to the final establishment of one worldwide Islamic nation.

Instead, the Muslim League not only chose to run a border that demarcated pious Pakistan from infidel India, they also chose to keep the border that demarcated their Dar-ul-Aman from the Dar-ul-Aman of the faithful on the other side of their borders. And the first ethnic riots which showed that religion does not constitute nationality even in a nation based on religion took not much more than a few months into Independence (April 1948) to sweep over East (that is, Bangladeshi) Pakistan.