After the loss of East Pakistan, an outcome in which India had a decisive role,. Pakistan began to assert its Islamic character by strengthening its ties with the .... covers the whole period from independence until 31 December 1985, when. General ...... the Turkish conquest of the area, the rule of the Delhi Sultanate and the.
(ii)
DECLARATION
I declare that the work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original, except as acknowledged in the text, and that the material has not been submitted previously, either in whole or in part, for a degree at this or any
other institution. -"
M~~')'~ C. G. P. Rakisits/
(iii)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract Acknowledgements Preface List of Tables and Charts
PART I:
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. Theoretical, Analytical and Conceptual approaches Chapter 3. The "Two-Nation Theory" PART II: PART III:
EVOLUTION OF THE POLITICAL SYSTEM
106 129 183
215 249 301
THE EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT
Chapter 10. The Search for Friends (1947-1971) Chapter 11. The Middle East Attraction (1971-1985) PART VI:
53
ETHNICITY
Chapter 7. The Ethnic Composition of Pakistan Chapter 8. The East Wing - West Wing Polarization (1947-1971) Chapter 9. New Pakistan's Ethnic Problems (1971-1985) PART V:
1 9 35
RELIGION
Chapter 4. The Religious Dimension to the Creation of Pakistan Chapter 5. The Modernist Period (1947-1977) Chapter 6. The Islamization Period (1977-1985) PART IV:
iv vi vii xii
CONCLUSIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
352 401 443 460
ABSTRACT
The process of national integration in Pakistan has been hampered by the interaction of two opposing forces: religion and ethnicity.
While the
Indian Muslims succeeded in establishing a state on the basis of the "Two Nation Theory" which argued that Muslims and Hindus were two separate and distinct 'nations', Islam soon proved not to be the unifying force the national leaders had expected it to be.
This was mainly due to the
presence of three irreconciliable schools of thought, that is, the Modernists, the Traditionalists and the Fundamentalists, regarding the role Islam should have in the social and political order of the country. The persistent disagreement between the adherents of these threee approaches has diminished the power of Islam as the most important locus for affective identity and, accordingly, strengthened the affective loyalty for ethnic groups.
Although Pakistan is certainly not unique in having a multi-ethnic character, it has been the consistent policy of the successive national governments to implement highly centralized systems of government which has coapounded the centrifugal pull of ethnicity.
The dissatisfaction
with this policy has been reinforced by two elements: first, the centre's domination of the political system at the expense of the provinces is in direct contradiction with the 1940 Lahore Resolution which had guaranteed full provincial autonomy in the future state of Pakistan; and, second, the Punjabis' control of all major national institutions, including the armed forces and the civilian bureaucracy, has resulted in the 'peripheral' ethnic groups viewing centralization as being tantamount to the 'Punjabization' of Pakistani society.
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Not only has the clash of religion and ethnicity created political instability and adversely affected the process of national integration, but the presence of a hostile environment has further compounded the country's political developments.
Surrounded by bellicose neighbours, and
faced with the unenviable task of defending a territory which, until 1971, consisted of two wings separated from one another by over 1000 kilometres of Indian territory, the national leaders decided that the dual objectives of promoting a feeling of nationhood amongst the ethnic groups of the two wings and defending the country's national integrity would best be met by pursuing a strategy of centralization.
It is this decision which led to
increased Bengali demands for provincial autonomy, ultimately leading to the seccession of East Pakistan.
And, although post-l97l Pakistan is
certainly more easily defendable, this has not resulted in the central governments changing their approach.
In sum, it is the convergence of the three forces of religion, ethnicity and the external environment which has impeded the process of national integration in Pakistan.
Until the national leaders are able to
resolve the religious debate, reduce the centrifugal pull of ethnicity by granting provincial autonomy, the Pakistan polity will remain vulnerable to the influence of the external environment, and the process of national integration will continue to stagnate.
(vi) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My sincere gratitude is due to many individuals who have, in some way,
contributed to the completion of this dissertation. First and foremost, I wish to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Dr U. Sundhaussen, for his unfailing support and his valuable comments without which the completion of this study would not have been possible. Financially, I would not have been able to undertake this study if it had not been for the University of Queensland Postgraduate Research Scholarship and the University of Queensland travel grant which enabled me to conduct my field trip to Pakistan. In this regard I wish to thank Professor R. Scott and Dr B. Stinebrickner for supporting the extension of my scholarship. I wish to acknowledge the assistance I received from the many Pakistanis who gave me valuable insight into their.society. Certainly the ones to whom I owe a special debt are: Col. Qayum of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Muzzaffar Abbas, Director of the Information Service Academy, Brig. (ret.) Noor Husain and Ali Sheikh of the Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad and the members of Department of International Relations at the Quaid-i-Azam University and the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs in Karachi. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to Baron R. Capelle-Burny of the Belgian Embassy in Islamabad for his personal support while in Pakistan. For assisting me with the word processor, the printing out of the dissertation and indulging me with their patience, I am indebted to Linda Buckham, Sue Harris, Gail McGill and Carol Parker. Also, I wish to record my appreciation to my family and friends for their continued interest in the progress of the dissertation. Finally, but certainly not least, I owe a special feeling of gratitude to Rhondda Nicholas for her patience and support during this whole period.
PREFACE
For the last twenty-five years Pakistan has been the focus of many scholars interested in the study of political development, and specifically the process of national integration, in Third World countries.
However, while many of the resultant studies have helped in
having a better understanding of Pakistani politics and society, none have systematically examined the combined effect of the interaction of three factors which I suggest are vital for the process of national integration in Pakistan; these factors are ethnicity, religion and the external enviroDlllent.
I have chosen to attempt to fill this lacuna because, although each of these three factors are by themselves important elements in the process of national integration, and they have been sufficiently examined on an individual basis in the many publications on Pakistan, it is the convergence and connectedness of ethnicity, religion and the external enviroDlllent which has compounded Pakistan's political developments.
While
Islam, the basis for the creation of Pakistan, should have been a uniting factor and facilitated 'nation-building', it has proven unable to counter the centrifugal forces of ethnicity.
This persistent struggle between, on
the one hand, the successive military and civilian governments' drive to establish a highly centralized polity using Islam as a legitimizing device and, on the other hand, the provinces' demand for greater political autonomy as promised to them prior to independence, has been compounded by the presence of a hostile environment.
It is these three forces pulling
in different directions which will be the focus of this dissertation; for, I suggest, it is only by analysing the three together that one may gain a clearer understanding of the process of national integration in Pakistan.
(\liii)
Right from the start I wish to acknowledge some inevitable shortcomings in my research.
First, I conducted my field research from
September 1983 until February 1984.
This was certainly the most turbulent
period of President Zia's tenure in office, since it covered the period during which the Pakistani government had to contain the violent rural uprising in Sind.
This resulted in a stiffening of Martial Law Orders
regulating the activities of opposition politicians.
Consequently,
because all politicians of any standing had either been gaoled, placed under house arrest or sent into tvoluntary' exile abroad, I was unable to interview the top leaders of the opposition alliance, the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, and thus was limited to interviewing the less prominent opposition politicians.
Second, I was categorically refused by
the Army Chief of General Staff the authorization to interview active high-ranking military officers.
Moreover, I was also denied access to the
library of the National Defence College, a sure source of valuable information.
Nothwithstanding these limitations, I managed to gather
valuable primary information for this study.
These fall into three
categories: interviews, official documents, and newspapers and weeklies.
My first category of primary sources consisted of approximately 75 interviews conducted in all four provinces of Pakistan and, to a more limited
~xtent,
in India and Bangladesh.
categories of interviewees.
There were essentially seven
These were: retired high-ranking military
officers, some of whom had been cabinet ministers of Ayub's, Yahya's and Zia's governments, former federal ministers in Bhutto's cabinet, federal ministers in Zia' s government, including active military officers, high and middle ranking civil servants, journalists, academics, lawyers and religious leaders.
(ix)
However, although the overwhelming majority of interviewees discussed candidly the highly sensitive subject of national integration in Pakistan, I was often asked not to reveal their names.
Accordingly, except for
statements which are generally accepted opinion, or which are attributed to government officials, I have deliberately omitted the name of the interviewees.
Similarly, wishing to avoid possible government censure
against the interviewees, I have decided, in consultation with my supervisor, not to follow the general practice of including an appendix listing the individuals interviewed during the field trip.
The acquisition of official documents, the second category of primary sources, met with mixed results.
While the Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting generally had a wide selection of material publicly available on the early years of Pakistan, notably regarding Mohammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the All-India Muslim League and the first Governor-General of Pakistan, and Liaquat Ali Khan, Prime Minister of Pakistan from 1951-1953, sources on President Ayub Khan (1958-1969) were definitively scarcer, and material on President Yahya Khan (1969-1971) and Prime Minister Bhutto (1971-1977) were virtually non-existant.
I was told this was because
every new leader either had all published material from the previous administration destroyed or refused public access.
In this regard even
speeches of Jinnah which cast doubts on President Zia's Islamization programme have been taken off the shelves and deleted from official documents dealing with the Jinnah period.
Needless to say that speeches,
statements and other official material relating to President Zia-ul-Haq and his government's programme were abundant.
(x)
Finally, also included in this category of primary sources have been the various books and articles written by former Pakistani leaders, for example, Ayub Khan, Liaquat Ali Khan, Chaudhri Mohammad Ali and Bhutto. Some of the most important sppeches and discourses made by prominent members of the Muslim League and government officials in the first ten years of Pakistan's existence have been compiled by private publishers with the 'blessing' of the government.
As with offical publications,
these works clearly deleted any statements which, for example, made any allusions to ethnic dissension, Bengali demands for provincial autonomy, and opposition to the establishment of an Islamic system of government.
The third category of primary sources widely used in this study involved newspapers and weeklies.
The two newspapers upon which I relied
most heavily for my research were the relatively independent Muslim published in Islamabad, and the government-supported Karachi-based Dawn. While both had their drawbacks, The Muslim having a Shi'a orientation and Dawn supporting muha,iir interests, they were certainly more objective in their reporting than The Pakistan Times, the de facto official mouthpiece of the government.
Two weeklies of diametrically different political
orientation were also used: the Dawn (Overseas Weekly), published abroad for the purpose of promoting a positive image of the government's policies, and the blatantly pro-Moscow-oriented Viewpoint which surprisingly has been allowed to continue although it is highly critical of Zia and his government.
As a result of the relatively limited amount of primary sources available in Pakistan and in Australian university libraries on the first 30 years of Pakistan's political history, I have had to rely substantially
(xi)
on the re-interpretation of secondary sources.
These can be categorized
into two classes, depending as to where there are published.
First,
because of the tough censorship laws presently existing in Pakistan, all books published in Pakistan are, except for a few, apologetic of the Zia government and critical of past governments.
Works on Jinnah, especially
the ones which promote his Islamic credentials, are abundant and widely circulated.
Similarly, books on Islam, Pakistan's position in the Muslim
World and the Muslim unity of the Pakistan tnation' are plentiful.
The
second category of books on Pakistan are the ones published abroad. works can be classified into essentially three types.
These
All works published
in India, whether by Indians or Pakistanis, are overwhelmingly subjective and highly critical of all matters relating to the domestic politics, the military, and the foreign policy of successive Pakistani governments.
The
second category of books published abroad are the ones written either by Western scholars, essentially American and British, and Pakistani expatriates residing in the West.
These works, while generally critical
as well of the various governments' policies, are nevertheless intellectually sounder and their approach certainly more rational. Finally, the third type of books published abroad, mainly in Britain, are the ones written by Pakistanis scholars and journalists who tend to be as subjective as their counterpart in Pakistan; except that in this case they dogmatically follow a Marxist approach in their analysis of Pakistani politics.
(xii )
TABLES AND CHARTS
Theoretical model with variables affecting national integration process
5
Ethnic Stratification in Pakistan
14
Model with sequential stages of national integration
30
Graphic Representation of the or~glns of the three major Islamic schools of thought
126
Political position of the different categories of Muslim belief systems
127
Grid categorizing participants in Partition debate according to the Islamic schools of thought and political orientation
128
Proportion of refugees in the population of the major cities of Pakistan, 1951
245
Composition of the armed forces
252
Literacy ratio
328
Ranking of districts of provinces according to rural development criteria
332
Distribution of seats in the Majlis-i-Shoora
344
PART I
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1.
INTRODUCTION
Since achieving independence in 1947, Pakistan has been plagued with a high level of political instability.
This situation is the consequence of
the interaction of three forces, ethnicity, religion, and the external envir~t.
On
the one hand, the various ethnic groups that constitute
Pakistan have been acting as a powerful centrifugal force, hampering the process of national integration.
On the other hand, the successive
central governments have, in various degrees, attempted to use Islam, the basis for the creation of the country, as a centripetal force to promote national unity.
Furthermore, the resulting clash of these two powerful
affective values has been compounded by the presence of a hostile envirou.ent which has had adverse domestic effects on the political develo~nts
of the country.
Nevertheless, even with these deeply
divisive forces present in Pakistan since independence, the country has .anaged to survive, albeit since 1971 only in a truncated form.
The study of national integration in Pakistan is probably the most interesting aspect of the polical development process of the country, aainly because of the basic premise on which Pakistan was founded: it was assu.ed that with the Muslim League's "Two-Nation Theory" Muslim loyalty would supersede all the various ethnic identities that affected the indigeneous population of the future state of Pakistan.
The inevitable,
but logical, consequence of this belief was that since Pakistan was now a 'nation' based on Islam it became necessary for the government authorities to suppress all ethnic-based affective loyalties, and ignore the legitt.ate aspirations for provincial autonomy by the various ethnic groups.
Had the successive governments not followed this policy, and had
decided instead to acknowledge the importance of these ethnic identifications, it would not only have threatened the supremacy of Islam as a focus of affective loyalty, but it could have and, indeed did, put into doubt the validity of the quasi-sacred "Two-Nation Theory".
Simply
put, any "counter-theory" that suggests that ethnic loyalty is more
2
powerful than Muslim identification is considered by the regt.e in power as being anti-national; because an acceptance of any dissension would be tanta.ount to admitting that Pakistan has no raison d'@tre, and that MUsl~
of British India never had any legitiaate basis for demanding a
state of their own.
This state approach was aade abundantly clear in the
way the central government reacted to the East Pakistan-based Awami League's re-interpretation of the Lahore Resolution, Pakistan's founding document.
Moreover, this state-directed policy of suppresing ethnic-based sentt.ents has been compounded by the Punjabis' and .uhajirs' (Indian Muslim migrants) domination of all major state institutions, especially the ar.ed forces and the civil service, at the expense of all other ethnic groups, that is, the Baluch, the Pukhtuns, the Sindhis and (until 1971) the Bengalis.
Thus, the successive governments' use of Islam as a
legitimizing ideology to implement a centralized system of government has been perceived by the 'peripheral' ethnic groups as amounting to the 'Punjabization' of Pakistani society.
It is the de facto establishment of
a unitary sytem of government dominated by two ethnic groups which has embittered the other component ethnic groups, for it contradicts the spirit and the letter of the 1940 Lahore Resolution which had guaranteed the provinces complete autonomy vis-a-vis the centre.
Alongside the divisive forces of ethnicity, Pakistan's process of national integration has been compounded by the inability of the religious and lay leaders to agree as to what role Isla. should have in the social and political order of the country.
The adherents of one school of
thought, the Modernists, believe that Islam should be limited to the private sphere, free from government interference.
On the other hand, the
3
Traditionalists and Fundamentalists, who are themselves deeply divided according to the religious interpretation of the Islamic scriptures, advocate the implementation of an Islamic system of government which would regulate the public and private lives of all Pakistanis.
While there have
been periods of compromise, it is nevertheless the failure to reach a lasting consensus on this highly emotional issue which has been a .ajor obstacle in the country's process of national integration.
Moreover, because of the particular territorial composition of the country - until 1971 its two wings being separated by over 1000 kilometres of Indian territory -
the impact of a hostile external environment
definitively has had a negative influence on the country's quest for national integration.
This has been exacerbated by the fact that Done of
Pakistan's component ethnic groups wholly inhabit the country, all of them have kin in the neighbouring countries; a reality that has often been exploited by India and Afghanistan.
Faced with such real or perceived
threats to its precarious territorial integrity, the Pakistan leaders, soon after independence, began to search for allies outside the region, notably the United States.
Following the United States' lack of support for Pakistan during the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War, the second conflict between these two countries, the leaders began to look toward China for external support.
After the
loss of East Pakistan, an outcome in which India had a decisive role, Pakistan began to assert its Islamic character by strengthening its ties with the Muslim world.
Finally, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
Pakistan has been propelled into the role of a 'frontline' state, leading to a rejuvenated alliance with the United States.
As will be exaained in
this study, the continuous imPact of a hostile environment upon the
4
.ulti-ethnic and fractured nature of the Pakistani polity has had a direct bearing on the country's political developaents, and specifically on its process of national integration.
Too often academic research in the field of national integration, both at the empirical and theoretical levels, fails to include or recognize the important and often decisive role the external environment performs in the political development of a country.
Accordingly, the analysis of the
inter-action of these three factors - ethnicity, religion and the external environ.ent - in the process of national integration will be the focus of this study.
Although the selection of these three variables does not mean
that that there are no other elements involved in tnation-building', in the case of Pakistan, however, the satisfactory reconciliation of these three variables is a minimum requirement if the country is to proceed successfully with national integration.
Even though the theoretical model that will be applied to the case of Pakistan is certainly applicable to the study of national integration in other Third World countries, the aim of this dissertation is not to fill a major lacuna in the theoretical research of national integration, however; rather, its objective is to contribute to the study of political developaent in Pakistan, and, specifically, the role of the three forementioned variables in the process of national integration.
5
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