Will #pakistan put its national interest first?

If there is any country in the world that is a poster child for dictatorship, it is Pakistan. Over the last two and half decades at least, Pakistan seems to have been more stable and more prosperous under its military dictators than its “democratically” elected leaders.

Pakistan is the way it is because it doesn’t have enough merchant castes and has too much peasant castes. While it is hard to disagree with this too, the fact remains that large numbers of Baloch, Sindhis, Pashtuns and Punjabis were traders, merchants and money lenders. Religion was how they prayed to God; profit was the motive behind their business.

You cannot divorce Pakistan from the man who drove its creation. It seems unfathomable why Jinnah, a wine drinking, pork eating atheist and a man who believed in the European mode of secularism, would want a country based on religion. And when he got it, declared he wanted a secular state. It is also quite inexplicable that Jinnah, an urbane constitutionalist who otherwise believed in the rule of law—and found Gandhi’s mode of non co-operation contrary to this—would find it convenient to unleash hordes when he did not get his way on things.

One common reason given, rather uncharitably, was that he wanted to be head of state and would stop at nothing to get what he wanted. The reason was almost certainly far more complex: Jinnah wanted Pakistan out of ideology, but that ideology was not Islam.

Jinnah was a capitalist. He had a certain disdain for the masses, and found his calling as the candidate of the zamindars. The Muslim League was the party of the zamindars, the Talukdars and the Rais. Had Jinnah been honest about the fact that he wanted a non-socialist state, he would not have gotten popular support. Islam was a decoy for continuing with the land-owning status quo. And today, it is this status quo that has come back to bite the state. Any nation that is feudal will go through this churn: It will be replaced by either communism or religion—both promise equality and both follow similar methods of ‘converting’ the disenchanted with promises of a better tomorrow.

The fact remains that the part of Pakistan that India speaks to is the feudal part. These by no stretch of imagination, can be called liberals. They speak English, they appeal to our sense of nostalgia, but they are responsible for a lot of what is wrong with Pakistan. It is a patriarchal feudal state where a few families own the bulk of the land; the rest are dispossessed. Militant Islam is a reaction to this inequity in society.

So, is Pakistan as a nation doomed? It is still not too late, but for that its ruling elite will have to put national interest first. Land reforms will have to happen, education has to be imposed, women have to be given rights, and the rule of law has to be paramount. Too many splintered interests in Pakistan—the land owners, the Army, the secret service, the political class—are looking at their own narrow self interest. In all this, their nation is crumbling.