Monday, February 5, 2018

Business Recorder Column Feb 5, 2018

The National Question in Pakistan

Rashed Rahman

February 5 for many years now is commemorated in Pakistan as Kashmir Solidarity Day. Rallies, marches, protests and discussions ensue on the right of self-determination for the long suffering people of Kashmir, as (partially) enshrined in the UN resolutions on the issue. However, when it comes to the internal problems in Pakistan on this right, or even the grievances and political, economic, social and other rights for nationalities alienated from the state on this basis, blinkers tend to descend over our collective eyes and rational discussion becomes virtually impossible, if not dangerous.
There is a need to understand the National Question in its historical context generally, and in relation to Pakistan’s experience in particular. Modern nationalism is a byproduct of the emergence of capitalism, initially in Europe, later globally. The identification of discrete ethnic groups having common origins, territory, history and culture as nations in their own right owed much to the desire of the capitalist class (bourgeoisie) of such groups to have control of the market on territory identified as the location of the particular ethnic group. In some instances, this nation-state formation proceeded peacefully, in many others through wars and conflicts with adjoining states or even internal conflicts before nation-states were consolidated in Europe. To prevent further conflict and wars, the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 set the seal on the boundaries of the emergent nation-states in Europe.
The new system of capitalism proved the most dynamic in history till then and capital accumulation soon reached a point of where capital burst the relatively recently established national boundaries and spread to the rest of the world through colonial conquest and occupation in the rest of the world. In the Americas, southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand it took the form of settler colonialism. The successor European populations of these areas are the heirs of that initial settlers’ series of waves. In the rest of the world, colonialism remained an occupying power, extracting raw materials and supplanting local manufactures and products with the output of its own factories, thereby ruining the economies and lives of millions of ‘natives’.
When the wave of independence movements in the colonies after World War II eventually ended in the dismantling of the colonial system, the newly emerged independent states in these erstwhile colonies saw the light of freedom in states amongst whom many were not ethnically homogeneous. More often than not, a particular ethnic group dominated the power structures in the newly freed states, with considerable minority ethnic groups or nationalities contained within their borders. That multi-ethnic, multi-national construct fed into many internal conflicts and wars as these new states struggled to define and consolidate their national political structures.
In Pakistan too the postcolonial state inherited from British colonialism betrayed certain peculiarities that became the basis of conflict and civil wars in our 70-year-old history. The legacy of the British consisted in the over-determination and excessive power of state institutions the colonialists created and nurtured for the purpose of keeping the ‘restive natives’ quiescent. Two state institutions stood out in this regard: the military and the bureaucracy. In Pakistan’s case, because of historical peculiarities rooted in the colonialists’ concerns to keep control of the conquered peoples through loyalists, these two state institutions were largely, in fact overwhelmingly drawn from one province, Punjab. They were also inheritors and carriers forward of the mindset in which they had been nurtured of treating the citizenry as people to be kept under their control. After the first military coup by General Ayub, the bureaucracy steadily and incrementally lost ground to the military. This trend has reached its apogee by now.
Pakistan emerged on the map as a state made up of a mosaic of disparate and discrete ethnic groups and nationalities with aspirations to have their identities and rights duly recognized and respected in the new independent state dispensation. However, this became the source of much conflict inn our history, conflicts not reconciled even today. The basic reason for these conflicts was the clash between the aspirations of the constituent units of the new state (barring Punjab, ‘privileged’ by the composition of the military and ruling elite) and the overarching ideological straitjacket of one nation based on a common religion into which the ruling elite has tried to force the Pakistani polity.
Balochistan’s accession to Pakistan against its desire for independence or at the very least maximum autonomy became the first such conflict at the very birth of the new state. East Pakistan followed soon after in 1948 over the national language issue, which fed into and fuelled other political, economic and social grievances. The first has spawned repeated nationalist insurgencies in the face of the state’s failure to accommodate, to the extent possible, these grievances and aspirations. The current nationalist insurgency is the fifth in the last 70 years. The second ended in the breakaway of half the country, a majority of the population of undivided Pakistan, and the embitterment of relations with Bangladesh after a brutal military crackdown, civil war and finally Indian military intervention in 1971.
The loss of half the country should have been a moment for retrospection and the learning of lessons. Instead, the ‘episode’ of East Pakistan/Bangladesh was brushed under the carpet, ensuring no lessons were drawn or learnt. This inevitably resulted in a repetition of the same strong arm policy of quelling sub-nationalist aspirations by liberal use of the knout and bayonet. The 2010 18th Amendment was a major step towards the constitutional devolution of powers to the provinces. Unfortunately, many of its provisions have still to be implemented in practice by the provinces.
The autonomy accorded to the provinces by the 18th Amendment does not, even conceptually, mean that all the conflicts amongst the provinces and the Centre have been resolved. The simmering nationalist insurgency in Balochistan, the aspirations for just treatment of the Sindhi nationalists, and the continuing, albeit admittedly much weakened, ambitions of Pashtun nationalists point to this truth.
Pakistan’s minority nationalities’ struggles for autonomy and rights have remained part of the general struggle for a democratic order. The present faux democracy we have has served to muffle, if not silence, these voices. However, states that ignore such simmering discontents run grave risks, as 1971 proved. It is still not too late to revisit the national project by embracing the discontented nationalities, deal with their historically received and current grievances and consolidate Pakistan as a genuinely equal and just federal state in a democratic framework that not only helps resolve old conflicts but ensures these become a thing of the past. Complacency and indifference to these issues could one day come back to haunt the state and create an even bigger cataclysm than 1971.




rashed-rahman.blogspot.com

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