Authors: Patrick French
“We miss her so much,” said Rajesh, “that we just don’t know what to do.”
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A
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NDIAN WOMAN
walks into a London fishmonger, which is owned by a Pakistani man. She has a look at the fresh fish laid out on inclined slabs amid pellets of ice, asks him about the red snapper, examines the salmon steaks and glances at the dark smoked fish he sells mainly to his African customers. It is a mixed-up part of south London, with no ethnic community predominating, but the buyer and the seller both know straight away, by instinct, that they come from a connecting culture. Although they start out speaking in English, their conversation soon becomes subcontinental, switching between languages. While the dialogue is mutually comprehensible, since the languages are nearly the same, she is using Hindi and he is using Urdu—which means he knows she is from India, and she knows he is probably from Pakistan. What about the shrimp, she says, is it fresh? It is, he answers, I’ll get you some that came in this morning. “Hum apne logon ko ghatiya cheezein nahin detey”—“We don’t sell bad stuff to our own people.”
This is part of the relationship between the two countries, the most ideologically charged and unstable element of modern India’s politics. It has all the hatred and love of a feud between siblings, but when plucked out of context and transplanted to a foreign city, it is the unity that matters. For
they are the same people, and he would not sell bad stuff to his own people, only to the foreigners he lives among in London.
Immediately after partition it was apparent that Indians and Pakistanis were the same people, since they came from the same original country, but as the decades passed, the expression of such a feeling became fraught with complications. No political leader in either country would dare to say what the fishmonger said. India’s policymakers feel particularly aggrieved when third parties hyphenate their country to Pakistan, believing it is unjust to link a large and vibrant democracy to an imploding state. They are happier with a more recent American dispensation, by which their neighbour is linked to Afghanistan, thereby creating a new, abbreviated problem couple: “Af-Pak.”
The fatal break between India and Pakistan came not in 1947, but in the 1970s. Even after the violence and dispossession of partition, there was a strong enough social overlap between the political and military leadership of the two countries for their connection to be self-evident. When East Pakistan broke away from the remote dominance of West Pakistan in 1971 and became Bangladesh, it was a death blow to Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan and a mortifying defeat for a nation that prided itself on its martial aptitude: India, the land of Gandhi and vegetarians, had helped rebellious Bengalis to victory on the battlefield. The relationship between India and Pakistan became increasingly fraught and difficult. As the leader of a truncated Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto introduced socialism and a new constitution, but in 1977 he found himself in prison following a coup by the chief of the army staff, General Zia-ul-Haq.
General Zia had owed his initial rise to his unctuous devotion to Bhutto. Even after being incarcerated, the compelling Bhutto believed this once loyal and seemingly dim soldier would release him—as had been promised—and allow him to contest fresh elections. He turned down an opportunity to go into exile. On 3 April 1979, when a jail superintendent read out a court order saying he was to be hanged, Bhutto assumed it was another ploy. “I should have been informed by the competent authority 24 hours prior to the execution, but it has not been done,” responded the deposed prime minister, and ordered his lawyers to be sent to him. His wife and his daughter Benazir had seen him that morning, and they had not known he was to be executed. It was only when Bhutto asked his security officer, Colonel Rafi-ud-Din, what drama was being staged that the truth dawned. The colonel later described what happened:
I answered, “Sir, have I ever tried to joke with you? … You will be executed today.”
For the first time I saw a bewildered look on Mr. Bhutto’s face … It seemed like Bhutto Sahib’s eyes had exploded because of fear. His face turned yellow and dry … Then he said, “At what time? Today?”
I showed him seven fingers of my hand just like a [parachute] jump master tells the time before the jump.
He said, “After seven days?”
I went near him and told him, “Sir, hours.”
Bhutto shaved, brushed his teeth, combed his hair and ordered a cup of coffee. Then he rearranged his mirror, comb, hair brush and prayer mat. Next he wrote his will for several hours, only to burn it. The ashes floated around his cell, and he called a servant to clean them. He lay down on his bed. One minute after midnight, prison officials entered the cell. He opened one eye, looked at them, and closed it again. The prison doctor tried to rouse him, but he did not respond. By now the cell was filling with prison officials. More minutes passed. A magistrate asked Bhutto if he would like to dictate a will, and just as he started four warders entered his cell and lifted him by his hands and feet. “Leave me,” he said, but they did not leave him, and while he was being carried outside his shirt became entangled in one of the warder’s boots and was ripped from his back. Petromax lanterns had been lit along the route to the gallows. His hands were cuffed roughly behind his back, and after he had dropped through the floor his body was washed. A photographer from Pakistan’s intelligence agencies photographed his genitals to confirm he had been circumcised; there had been rumours that Mr. Bhutto was not a true Muslim.
1
Such a scene would have been hard to imagine in India at this time. Mrs. Gandhi might declare an Emergency and imprison political leaders, but it would be difficult to picture her having her opponents executed, and it is even harder to imagine an Indian military dictator. Had events gone a little differently, General Zia might have been an aberration in Pakistani history. Instead, a rare sequence of decisions made him a deeply significant figure; during his eleven years in power he sought to alter the national character by putting a puritanical interpretation of Islam at its centre.
Educated in Simla and at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, Zia might have been like any other whisky-sipping Pakistani general of his era, Anglophile but patriotic, convinced he could make a better fist of running the country
than the politicos—but he was something else. His father had a low-level clerical job in the Indian government before the family was left homeless at partition, and both his parents were deeply religious. In his first address to the nation, Zia praised Islamist agitators who had opposed Bhutto, saying, “It proves that Pakistan, which was created in the name of Islam, will continue to survive only if it sticks to Islam. That is why I consider the introduction of Islamic system [sic] as an essential prerequisite for the country.” He also said in private that Muslims believe in “one God, one Prophet and one Book, and their mentality is that they should be ruled by one man.”
2
Islam as practised by Indians over centuries had rarely been a rigid system, but in a restructured Pakistan it began to change, fitting with Zia’s own wish to exert military discipline over its people, and his need to gain domestic legitimacy and support from the more reactionary religious leaders. The older, more inclusive and evolved forms of local Islam, with their singing and dancing, were replaced.
During the 1970s Pakistan’s gaze turned away from the east, away from India and the humiliation of an independent Bangladesh, and towards the west—not the West, but the Arabian peninsula, newly rich and influential from the fruits of oil, and an important source of employment for close to a million Pakistanis. Heads were turning to Iran too, which was in the throes of an unprecedented theocratic revolution after the return of Ayatollah Khomeini months before Bhutto’s execution. They turned as well to Afghanistan, which had been invaded by the Soviets in the same year. For Sunnis and Shias, in their distinct ways, Islam became a rallying point, especially since the state’s only substantial minority—the Hindus of East Pakistan—had gone. Jinnah’s version of secularism disappeared. It was understandable that a truncated Pakistan should look towards its non-Indian neighbours in its search for a fresh identity. Neither capitalism nor socialism appeared to have provided the answers since 1947. Many of Pakistan’s old feudal structures remained in place, and a handful of industrialists retained disproportionate economic influence. As global political power adjusted, the country developed a critical strategic importance because of its geographical position. Now a revived Muslim certitude, battened down by military rule, was on offer.
3
Jinnah and the other founders of Pakistan had taken it for granted that faith was to be kept distinct from government. This did not mean it was irrelevant. In 1949, a set of resolutions was passed by Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly which proposed a form of democracy that was influenced by Islam. The early leaders used Islamic or Mughal heritage as a means to bind
Pakistanis together, and made Urdu the compulsory national language, to be taught in public schools. (For the East Pakistanis, nearly all of whom spoke Bengali as their first language, this would create a fatal rupture.) Jinnah, who was born in 1876, saw no inconsistency in being an inspirational leader to Muslims while admiring constitutional democracy, speaking English, being a skilful lawyer, drinking alcohol occasionally, wearing slick European clothes from Hanover Square in London and having a Parsi wife who liked to wear low-cut dresses to Bombay dinner parties. As he told one of his associates: “Gandhi may wish to be clad like a peasant, but I wish to be dressed like a gentleman.”
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Although some clerics had wanted Islam to have a central position in the new homeland, the thrust of Muslim intellectual life in India since the nineteenth century had been towards modernity (the Khilafat movement in the early 1920s was the exception). The stimulus came in part from Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, a Mughal nobleman of substantial influence, who in 1875 had founded a Muslim college in Aligarh, modelled on Cambridge University. He had encouraged a modern, scientific, rationalist approach towards religious customs, realizing that traditional modes of learning were not equipping India’s Muslims for a changing world. At around the time his college was founded, an official in Malabar had noted that many Muslim parents preferred their own schools to “the vernacular schools of the Hindus,” where their children might be diverted from their traditions. “The teachers, being as illiterate as their pupils, except in knowledge of Koran recitations, usually employ Hindu youths to teach the pupils.”
5
It was this disjuncture between the communities that Sir Syed, and those who followed him, were seeking to change.
General Zia-ul-Haq and his supporters thrust Jinnah’s approach aside. On the founder of the nation’s birth anniversary in 1981, newspaper articles were not even permitted to quote the optimistic words he had spoken about the creation of Pakistan—that it was his ideal that “Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.”
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Zia was not the first Pakistani leader to play politics with religion. Bhutto had himself courted popularity by introducing prohibition and declaring the Ahmadis, a reformist sect which followed a nineteenth-century Punjabi religious leader, to be non-Muslims. Using religious impulses as a vehicle for political ambitions had become a common tactical tendency in Pakistan, as it was among hardline Hindus in India. Under General Zia, the process
became much more serious, and the nature of Pakistan’s public debate increasingly arcane. Should women be permitted to play sports and, if so, should they wear trousers? Should soldiers be required to grow a beard? Religious knowledge became essential to an army officer’s promotion. Friday replaced Sunday as the weekly holiday. Members of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a movement which had long been unsuccessful at the ballot box, were given crucial positions in the judiciary and civil service. Textbooks were filleted of “un-Islamic” information, and India was portrayed in a more malign light. Zia made blasphemy a criminal offence, introduced an Islamic banking system, initiated prayer times in government offices and altered the law to allow punishments laid down in the Quran and other texts—including public flogging for moral misdemeanours and the charge of fornication against women who had been raped. Most of these rules were rarely enforced, but they became a prime source of corruption and persecution. If you had a property or business dispute with a Christian, an Ahmadi or a Shia, you could accuse them of blasphemy in the knowledge the case would remain tangled in the legal system for decades, before probably being thrown out by a higher court.
The invasion of Afghanistan at Christmas 1979, more than any other move during the later stages of the Cold War, seemed to provide unanswerable proof that the Soviet Union was intent on territorial expansion. What if the Russians were to move down towards the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean? Fighting the menace of Soviet communism became a central purpose for the United States and its allies—and its greatest ally was General Zia, now recast as a warrior for freedom. Just as the British in colonial India had often tilted towards monotheists, finding them easier to deal with than Hindus, so the Americans found that Pakistan’s bluff, pugilistic generals spoke their language. Zia handled his new ally with great cunning and skill, and the U.S. soon stopped mentioning Pakistan’s lack of democracy or its development of a nuclear arsenal.
America would help to fund, organize and arm the glamorous, cloaked, bearded and behatted “Mujahideen” resistance fighters. President Jimmy Carter offered Zia $150m; he stalled, and ended up with Ronald Reagan giving him a multi-billion-dollar aid package and assorted fighter aircraft. Zia considered Bill Casey, the director of the CIA, a “soul mate” and was delighted when the U.S. allowed Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, to control all operations and to train the guerrillas who were fighting against the Soviet army in Afghanistan.
7
From the American point of view, it seemed a reasonable trade; as Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski put
it: “militarist Pakistan” and “fundamentalist Saudi Arabia” had little in common, and besides, “What is more important in the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some hotheaded Islamists or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”
8
Brzezinski was speaking in 1998.