'Deconstructing' Pakistan: A Framework of People's History

By Bilal Hamid

What happens when a nationalist discourse falls apart? When major events after the creation of a country are explained only in terms of conspiracy because the nationalist discourse would be challenged? Does it mean the entire narrative of creating a country is flawed? In the last decade of his life, the official historian of Pakistan turned against all his writings he had earlier authored as the official view, and began to write people’s history of Pakistan. The official view regards the ‘two-nation theory’ as reason for the creation of Pakistan. It implies that as a narrative center Hindus and Muslims were always two nations, hence, Pakistan’s creation was natural, predestined. From French philosophical standpoint, deconstruction, the historian’s turnaround can be viewed as a rupture in the history writing project of Pakistan’s nationalist discourse, creating a new narrative at a different center of people’s experiences. The reason for the historian’s turnaround is the reality of downward spiral in Pakistan, and personally the neglect he suffered in Pakistan as a government employee. After this rupture, a displacement of central idea of history written around the two-nation theory has occurred, placing people’s experience at the center. The two-nation theory, which explains the constitutional history of India leading to partition, becomes a subplot in this new center. The historian’s effort is significant but the new center created does not address many contours of Pakistan’s political landscape, including the recent rise in militancy. A new eccentric center must be sought.
The war of 1857 caused a reorder of Muslim society, with traditional and modern elements emerging. This division is manifest today in two distinct educational streams in Pakistan. Always at the margins of society, eventually, the traditional consciousness emerged to assert itself on all others. This was due to the state incorporating traditional structures, and they becoming linked with the war economy of the Afghan Soviet conflict. Rather than traditional elements integrating into modern consciousness, in Pakistan these two consciousnesses are developing a parallel trajectory, interacting with each other often violently. By tracing a trajectory of modern and traditional consciousness in Pakistan, this work explains many current events in Pakistan, and gives an understanding of structures which are shaping events in Pakistan.
Both Indian and Pakistani governments have failed their own people, becoming states in which elites extract resources. Words like ‘progress’, ‘development’, ‘jihad’ mean opposite of what they were supposed to mean. In India, this has caused violence to emerge in its central regions. In Pakistan the state itself has given rise to militant organizations that started ‘jihad’ in Afghanistan, extended it in Kashmir against India and now target minorities, or those who differ from their ideology, within Pakistan. At a deeper level, the issue is imagination of a new nation-state, since both Pakistan and India are products of a devolving empire with a gaping wound of Kashmir which inflected their imagination. Successive years of military rule have changed the imagination of Pakistan. In its initial imagination, Pakistan was thought as an inheritor of the great Gandhara civilization, which had social welfare as its guiding principle. With the definition of Islam in the hands of the army, it is now viewed more from a religious sense, history before the arrival of first Muslims is not even taught in schools. In 2008, Pakistan’s silent majority rose and defeated a dictator who was manipulating the judiciary to bend to his will and prolong his rule. People’s power representing modern consciousness is gradually rising in Pakistan. Elections in 2013 marked another milestone in the rise of modern consciousness when two urban based parties eclipsed political domination by feudals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bilal Hamid
• Release date: May 15, 2013

Bilal Hamid

The author is a graduate from the University of Texas. He has been a student of Professor Gail Minault, Professor William Roger Louis, Professor Khaled Abu el Fadl, and attended a seminar with Professor Jamal Malik. He currently lives and works in Lahore as a dot com executive.

Book preview

‘Deconstructing’ Pakistan

A Framework of People’s History

BF Hamid

© Copyright, 2013. All Rights Reserved by Bilal F. Hamid

Preface

One: Beginning

Two: KK Aziz and the Eccentric Center

Portrait of a Punjabi Family, 1800-1970: A Journey into the Past

Religion, Land and Politics in Pakistan: a Study of Piri-Muridi

World Powers and the 1971 Breakup of Pakistan

The Pakistani Historian, The Murder of History in Pakistan

Three: Sir Syed and the Birth of Modern Indian Muslim Consciousness

Sir Syed on the Bijnor Rebellion in 1857

Sir Syed in England

Onwards to Aligarh

Muslim Educational Conference

Four: Muslim Political Consciousness towards Separatism

Separatism, Post-Khilafat

Five: Post Pakistan, Ayub and Bhutto

Bhutto in Power

Six: War Economy and the Rise of Religio-Political Structure

1953 Riots: Towards Martial Law

Zia and the Rise of Religio-Political Structure

Council for Islamic Ideology

Zakat System

Seven: the House of Saud

Eight: The Rise of Militancy in Pakistan

The Red Mosque Incident

Swat

Drone Attacks in Pakistan

Nine: the Lawyer’s Movement and the Long March

Ten: Imagining ‘India’, Imagining ‘Pakistan’

Operation Greenhunt

Kashmir

Imagining Nation-States

The Theft of Language in Pakistan

Finding Solutions

Voices of Rationality, Voices of Modernism

Asoka the Great, Emperor of the Mauryan Dynasty

Asoka’s Rock Edicts

On Kalinga

Theory of Tolerance, Welfare as Principle of Governance

Dhamma Officers

Karl Marx

Economic History of East India Company: On Corruption & Money Driven Policies

Disraeli on the Causes of the Indian Revolt

On Torture for Revenue Purposes

Iqbal

Bibliography

End Notes

Preface

What happens when a nationalist discourse falls apart? When major events after the creation of a country are explained only in terms of conspiracy because the nationalist discourse would be challenged? Does it mean the entire narrative of creating a country is flawed? In the last decade of his life, the official historian of Pakistan turned against all his writings he had earlier authored as the official view, and began to write people’s history of Pakistan. The official view regards the ‘two-nation theory’ as reason for the creation of Pakistan. It implies that as a narrative center Hindus and Muslims were always two nations, hence, Pakistan’s creation was natural, predestined. From French philosophical standpoint, deconstruction, the historian’s turnaround can be viewed as a rupture in the history writing project of Pakistan’s nationalist discourse, creating a new narrative at a different center of people’s experiences. Two-nation theory becomes a subplot in this new narrative. It only explains the constitutional history of creation of Pakistan. The reason for the historian’s turnaround is the reality of downward spiral in Pakistan, and personally the neglect he suffered in Pakistan as a government employee. After this rupture, a displacement of central idea of history written around the two-nation theory has occurred, placing people’s experience at the center. The historian’s effort is significant but the new center created does not address many contours of Pakistan’s political landscape, including the recent rise in militancy. A new attempt must be made to rewrite people’s history.

The war of 1857 caused a reorder of Muslim society, with traditional and modern elements emerging. This division is manifest today in two distinct educational streams in Pakistan. Always at the margins of society, eventually, the traditional consciousness emerged to assert itself on all others. This was due to the state incorporating traditional structures, and they becoming linked with the war economy of the Afghan conflicts. Rather than traditional elements integrating into modern consciousness, in Pakistan these two consciousnesses are developing a parallel trajectory, interacting with each other often violently. By tracing a trajectory of modern and traditional consciousness in Pakistan, this work explains many current events in Pakistan, and gives an understanding of structures which are shaping events.

Both Indian and Pakistani governments have failed their own people, becoming states in which elites extract resources. Words like ‘progress’, ‘development’, ‘jihad’ mean opposite of what they were supposed to mean. In India, this has caused violence to emerge in its central regions. In Pakistan the state itself has given rise to militant organizations that started ‘jihad’ in Afghanistan, extended it in Kashmir against India and now target minorities, or those who differ from their ideology, within Pakistan. At a deeper level, the issue is imagination of a new nation-state, since both Pakistan and India are products of a devolving empire with a gaping wound of Kashmir which inflected their imagination. Successive years of military rule have changed the imagination of Pakistan. In its initial imagination, Pakistan was thought as an inheritor of the great Gandhara civilization, which had social welfare as its guiding principle. It is now viewed more from a religious sense, history before the arrival of first Muslims is not even taught in schools. In 2008, Pakistan’s silent majority rose and defeated a dictator who was manipulating the judiciary to bend to his will and prolong his rule. People’s power representing modern consciousness is gradually rising in Pakistan. Elections in 2013 mark another shift towards ascendancy of modern consciousness as feudal hold on Pakistan’s politics is eclipsed with the emergence of two urban based all-Pakistan parties.

"In general, i try to distinguish between what one calls the future and l'avenir (to come). The future is that which - tomorrow, later, next century - will be. There's a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l'avenir which refers to someone who comes whose arrival cannot be anticipated. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable."

-- Derrida

On Deconstruction

Discussing deconstruction in an interview, Professor Jacques Derrida stated:

"One of the gestures of deconstruction is to not naturalize what isn’t natural. To not assume what is conditioned by history, institution, or society is natural. The very condition of a deconstruction, maybe at work in the work, within the system to be deconstructed. It may already be located there, already at work not at the center, but in an eccentric center, in a corner, whose eccentricity assumes a solid concentration of the system, participating in the construction of what it at the same time it threatens to deconstruct. One may then be inclined to reach this conclusion: deconstruction is not an operation which supervenes afterwards from the outside, one fine day. It is always already at work in the work. Since the disruptive force of deconstruction is always already contained within the very architecture of the work, all one would finally have to do to be able to deconstruct, given this always already, is to do ‘memory work’." Professor Derrida, however, being a deconstructionist does not believe in taking definite positions. He then adds, Since, I want to neither accept nor reject the conclusion formulated in precisely these terms, let us leave this question suspended for the moment.

One: Beginning

Something has happened in the history of concept of a nation-state structure, which can be called an event. An event, which emerges, something which is there now and wasn’t there before. A nation-state structure is organized by nationalism around a concept, its transcendental idea; its creation is an outcome of the idea’s victory. Magic of nationalism is to turn the narrative of idea’s victory into destiny. In the process of writing the history of its own concept – its historiography – a nation-state structure then necessarily deploys determinism as a narrative style, organized around its transcendental idea, the center. The center limits free play within boundaries. Determinism describes eternality of the narrative. For deterministic thought, an event in its own history is problematic. Yesterday there was a certain cross section of organized data, and today there is a slightly different cross section of organized data. Determinism because of its inherent eternality is unable, and unwilling, to say anything about how this change of data came about. In its inability to discuss change, it sees conspiracy. Determinism sees successive cross sections of data and calls it history. It does not say how one thing lead to another; rather it says one thing came after another; a play on the eternality of the transcendental idea as it unfolds in time. ¹

The event in the historiography of nation-state of Pakistan is the emergence of a new center away from the deterministic center, the two-nation theory. This is an eccentric center, at a corner, within the system from which the previous center is generated. The deterministic center and the eccentric center have both been produced by the same author at different stages of his career. This is an example of what Derrida calls ‘memory work,’ using the same data a different organized history has been presented to create an eccentric center. This does not invalidate the authenticity of the original deterministic narrative, which is the creation of Pakistan nor of the two-nation theory, something which is now being frequently done by many scholars. Rather, the new eccentric center created is a narrative of people’s history. The two-nation theory, a narrative of constitutional history leading to partition of India, becomes a subplot within a larger narrative of people’s history. This is a rupture from the previous history of the idea of the two-nation theory, which became the central narrative around which all data was organized, as it culminated in the creation of a new nation-state. It works only to understand the constitutional history of India leading to partition. In this narrative only elite political history remains, people’s history became irrelevant; lesser known political movements, feminism, and social movements are left out of this narrative. After this event in historiography, a rupture has occurred. The historiography of Pakistan is no longer deterministic with an idea at the center, but anthropocentric with man at the center. The center is no longer the center.

The previous center’s deterministic view, the two-nation theory, produces authentic results in the pre-partition period, but falls apart in the post-independence years. Determinism, since it is unwilling to accept change, then gives space to conspiracy theories, since there is no other basis to explain, first the breakup of the country, and then the manifest decline in the conditions of the country with each passing year, when it is surrounded by such high ideals at the time of its creation. This is the point of rupture, where the intellect of KK Aziz, as the official historian of Pakistan, simply failed to square the dark reality around him in his later years after leaving government service, while he had previously been writing of the glory of the idea of Pakistan. The limitation on free play imposed by the center simply ruptured when presented with evidence otherwise. A new eccentric center, hence, emerged for Aziz. Yet despite his pioneering effort, there is a lack of causality in Aziz’s new eccentric center at certain points, a personal bias has crept in. Aziz’s eccentric center must be remade. This work, then, is an attempt at finding another eccentric center. It traces the path of modern Muslim consciousness from its first articulation to later manifestations as it traverses through time. It also traces the path of the traditional or religio-political consciousness as it emerged from margins of society to become a noticeable force in contemporary times.

Muslim modern consciousness is a product of the shock received by the defeat of 1857. It articulates rationality as the center of society, as it was defeated by it. All Muslim institutions had been destroyed, a product of six hundred years of Muslim ruler over India decimated. This new consciousness was articulated by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, who first served as an employee of the East India Company and later visited England. He cast a new vision of existence for the Muslims of India, the vision of Muslims as conquerors was buried in complete defeat of an entire civilization and all its modes. Jihad was now in the mind, not with the sword. This vision, also the prefix of colleges he established M.A.O., had three constituents: Muhammadan, as an aspect of religion; Anglo, as an aspect of rationality; and Oriental, to reaffirm the Indian character and culture. It traversed through many paths ultimately surfacing in the movement against a military dictator, to restore the sacked chief justice of Pakistan in 2008. For modern consciousness, the fight for to make society rational is existential, for that alone ensures trust without which there can be no progress, justice or equality. The history of modern Muslim consciousness can now be placed at the center of this new narrative.

With the history of Muslim modern consciousness as the center, the authenticity of the idea of Pakistan is revalidated as its manifest outcome, and layers of inadequate historiography can be stripped bare. The history of the Muslim modern consciousness is its fight against imminent dominance from upper caste Hindus, represented by All India National Congress. It is a fight which was fought not just by Muslims but by other minorities. It is a struggle which continues to date between India and Pakistan, and within India. Emperor of the Mauryan dynasty, Asoka the Great, converted to Buddhism two and half thousand years ago, in order to leave the violent Hindu consciousness. The lower caste leader Ambedkar would similarly convert to Buddhism six months before his death, a few years after partition, heartbroken with upper caste Hindu treachery after repeated failed promises to reform Hindu laws. Lower caste political parties, Sikh problem, Kashmir insurgency, Hindu revivalist movements targeting minorities, Muslim pogroms in Gujarat, Naxalite movement, and many other examples are all fights against upper caste Hindus today. Nehru’s failure to uphold his promise of plebiscite in Kashmir in 1948, made to the UN, is what caused Kashmir to be an unresolved issue. Today, the Indian government has seven hundred thousand troops deployed to crush an entire province.

The fight for modern Muslim consciousness began as an effort to guarantee constitutional safeguards in the devolving rule of the raj,² fearful of the coming Hindu raj. It ultimately led to the creation of Pakistan. The territories that comprised Pakistan were not fully liked or thought complete by its founder, the great Muhammad Ali Jinnah. He called it ‘truncated and moth eaten.’ Beset and challenged by entrenched forces, modern consciousness received a number of setbacks, yet at the people’s level the root of Sir Syed’s idea keeps regenerating itself in different forms through successive years. This continuity is not present in the deterministic narrative of the two-nation theory. The transcendental idea of the two-nation theory falls apart in the post-independence period. The deterministic march towards a new country ruled by ideals of the supreme religion produced totally opposite results. It led to the breakup of the country. It became a place of parasitic rulers, and elite interest, and religious intolerance. A place where tyrannical anti-democratic forces gained ascendancy over the forces of modern consciousness which had created the new country. What started as fight against Hindu raj, converted into a fight against military and civilian authoritarianism. The history of modern Muslim consciousness is a fight for justice. The first fight against Congress is what can be called the two-nation theory, the second fight is for Jinnah’s Pakistan. Two-nation theory then is not falsified, it is authenticated through this new perspective.

This work first discusses the career path of KK Aziz’s work as a Pakistani historian and his attempt at people’s history. It then unfolds in two dialectic narratives. In the first narrative, an attempt is made to seek the history of the birth of modern consciousness among Muslims in India through the career of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. Sir Syed gave birth to a syncretic vision of modernism which derived its foundation from rationalism, itself an Islamic tradition and parent of western rationalism, fused it with Islamic ideals but kept it away from politics. Years after his death, this aloofness was not possible with events in India proceeding at a different pace. Muslim modern consciousness when it intersected the Indian political scene, developed into a consciousness of separateness from upper caste Hindus, who they feared because of their numerical strength running an overt Hindu agenda. At the same time a parallel narrative of traditional consciousness plays out when politics as a profession, enabled by mass print media, made its entry in India after the First World War. The Turkish Caliphate crisis pioneered a new career for a Muslim journalist. He found that by articulating Muslim demands he could put himself at the front of defending his community. In spreading this message from town to town, contributions were collected. Defending the community became a business. The career path of a religio-political leader was born. For such a professional politician, there was and always is a cause for defense,