Constitutional Debate in Pakistan: Competing Nationalisms

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan was established as a separate state from India through partition after the end of the British Raj. This was due largely to the efforts of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League, who established themselves as a viable alternative to the Indian National Congress. Supporters of the Muslim League were united by a desire of a separate homeland for Muslims of British India, after Jinnah’s calls for certain rights and autonomy Muslims in independent India were met with resistance from Congress leaders. In his vision for Pakistan, secular modernist Jinnah favored a state for Muslims, rather than a Muslim State. However, the Muslim League as a whole lacked a cohesive ideology for what kind of state Pakistan would be. Nevertheless, on 14 August 1947, Pakistan came into being. From the moment it was created, Pakistan struggled to to create a stable, democratic national culture due to differing views on the nature of Islam in the republic, compounded by the competing nationalisms of Islamic Nationalism and Bengali Language Nationalism, which resulted in political violence, growing military clout, and civil war. 

The founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, proclaimed, “We are starting in the days when there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another.”¹ His version of Pakistan was modern and democratic with freedom of religion. The role of Islam, according to Jinnah, would be no different from any other religion.

“Hindus would cease to Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense…but in the political sense as citizens of the state.”

Here, he argues that it is in the interests of South Asia for political expressions of religion to be eliminated to establish a secular state. Jinnah seems to have believed in Pakistan as a state for Muslims, rather than a Muslim State. Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, similarly believed in democracy, tolerance, and social justice, but based those ideals on Islam rather than secular ideology. He emphasized Islam as a guiding force in Pakistan’s nation-state project. He had a strong belief in Islam as a healing force for the world’s problems, and saw Pakistan as a contributor to this vision. Still other activists favored an Islamic state. Abul Ala Maududi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami movement, argued that Pakistan should be established in an Islamic tradition, since its independence “was achieved exclusively with the object of becoming the homeland of Islam.” Islamic Law, in his view, was part of a total way of life.

The division in the outlooks of Pakistan’s founders influenced constitutional debate in the Dominion of Pakistan. “The nine years required to agree upon and ratify it reflected implacable differences among the politicians of the Muslim League and other parties, on the one hand, and between religious and political leaders, on the other.”² The nine years it took Pakistan to frame its constitution should be compared with with India, whose framers took only three years to do the same. These differences primarily the level which Islam should permeate political and personal life in Pakistan. The absence of a charismatic, unifying leader such as Jinnah to bring disparate groups together was “sorely felt”. Both sides discredited the other in an effort to get their way, which “prepared the way for bureaucrats and soldiers to advance other interests.”² The high clout of the military and intelligence agencies in Pakistan traces its origins to the constitutional debates of the late 1940s and 1950s.

The other major hurdle to political stability in Pakistan was nationalism in Bengal. While regionalism was present in many Indian provinces, it was most prevalent in Bengal. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the last Prime Minister of Bengal before independence, made an impassioned plea for an undivided Bengal, independent from India and Pakistan.³ This was rejected by both Congress and the Muslim League, and Bengal was partitioned in 1947. The United Bengal proposal showed that Bengali Nationalism was a legitimate concept. Suhrawardy's successor, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, brought Bengali Nationalism back into the mainstream and created a mass movement that saw East Bengal's separation from Pakistan. Why was Bengali Language Nationalism so strong? The other ethnic groups of Pakistan did not share Bengal's level of resistance to Urdu as a unifying language. East Bengal contained more than half of the population of Pakistan, so Dhirendra Nath Datta, among others, suggested that Bengali be added to the official languages of government, but was denied. This angered Jinnah, who said that “without one state language, no nation can be tied up solidly together”.⁴ While Jinnah’s point about a unifying language is a strong one, the anger felt by Bengalis is similarly justified since a majority of Pakistan’s population spoke Bengali, whereas Urdu did not have even close to as many speakers. Therefore, Jinnah’s speech comes off as arrogant, since he refused to consider compromising with the largest bloc of citizens in the country. It is not surprising that this caused severe problems down the line.  

While Suhrawardy did briefly become Prime Minister in 1956, he was dismissed in 1958 and all power was put in the hands of the West-dominated military under the leadership of Ayub Khan, who “further impaired the balance between east and west.” In response, new Bengali leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman created the “six-point plan” which called for a federalized Pakistan with provincial autonomy in all areas sic military, foreign affairs, and currency.⁵ This plan shows that nationalistic fervor rose in Bengal rose during authoritarian rule. This can be inferred from the boldness of Rahman’s plan, which would have needed strong support in East Pakistan to propose. Thus, the competing nationalisms caused a deterioration of democracy and rule of law, and these problems inflamed nationalistic tensions, creating a vicious cycle.

The final issue that led to the demise of Pakistan was trust. In the 1970 elections, West Pakistan was dominated by the social-democratic PPP, while all seats in East Pakistan except two went to the social-democratic Awami League led by Rahman, giving him a majority. However, dictator Yahya Khan, PPP leader Bhutto and west Pakistanis in general⁶ did not want to hand power to Rahman. This can only be explained in one way – West Pakistanis did not trust Bengalis. Democracy, tolerance, and freedom were the ideals espoused by Pakistan’s founders and confirmed by its constitution, yet the West Pakistanis were willing to go against democratic ideals in order to keep Rahman out of power. This mistrust flowed in the other direction. Bengalis mistrusted the military due to its dominance by Punjabis. Additionally, they felt capital was being funneled from East to West Pakistan⁵. Mutual mistrust was the culmination of the problems that plagued Pakistan from its inception, namely the lack of a unified outlook for the Islamic Republic and the rise of Bengali Nationalism.

Perhaps a unifying figure was necessary for a stable foundation for Pakistan, which Jinnah was not able to provide due to his death. However, even he showed resistance to acknowledging the legitimate concerns of the Bengali people, which made up half of the country’s population. This casts doubt on the assumption that anybody could have stopped the problems that arose in the first three decades of Pakistan’s existence. It also casts doubt on whether creating a Muslim homeland in India was the right decision to make. The “two-wing” experiment was a failure. Comparing Pakistan’s immediate post-partition history to India’s is particularly damning; Pakistan fell into civil war within 25 years, whereas India has not faced civil war to date. This is ironic, since Pakistan was created in large part due to fears of civil war. Rather than religion, division in Pakistan from 1947-1971 was based on ethnicity and language with ultimately prevailed. There is plenty of division in India in regards to language, and Muslims there make up a sizable minority. However, division in India cuts across so many layers that the status quo has remained. Pakistan was a new idea, on the other hand, and needed to prove its existence. It was undone by the strength of the Bengali identity and the central government’s unwillingness to accept that identity.

           

 

 

 

History of India #1: New Arrivals in the Indus Valley

History of India #1: New Arrivals in the Indus Valley

2000 BCE - 1100 BCE

------------------------------------------------------------

1300 BCE, and the Indus Valley Civilization...is gone. 

What happened to it? No one knows. 

Well, there are a variety of speculations, but what can generally be said is that it declined. Natural causes  such as floods and/or droughts are brought up as possibilities. conflict, whatever it was, caused the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) to decline. Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, Rakhigarhi, Dholavira, and other IVC cities were collapsing or abandoned by 1300 BCE, when one of the most important events in the history of South Asia began.

People from the Eurasian steppe, the Indo-Europeans (called so by historians because they were neither Indian nor European), had been migrating and expanding throughout Eurasia for for some time. Many tribes coalesced around the Central Asian steppes and Iranian Plateau. These are known as the "Indo-Iranians", or, more famously, the Aryans. Towards the end of the 3rd Millennium BCE, some tribes began migrating further south into the Indus River (and later the Ganges River). This process accelerated for the first half of the millennium, and by around 1500 BCE the Indo-Iranian speakers began to solidly diverge into two main groups. The southern migrants became Indo-Aryans, or Indic peoples, whereas the sister civilization that they diverged from became the Iranian peoples.

Because of this divergence, the Common Indo-Iranian or Aryan language also diverged, evolving into the oldest documented languages of each civilization. For Indo-Aryans, Vedic Sanskrit (संस्कृतम्) and for the Iranians, Old Iranian, also known as Avestan (𐬎𐬞𐬀𐬯𐬙𐬀𐬎𐬎𐬀𐬐𐬀𐬉𐬥𐬀). Both languages are the most important liturgical language to the respective Ancient Civilizations, as Avestan is the language of the Zoroastrian Avesta, while Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas of Hinduism. Both languages were also extremely similar, meaning that they were less than a thousand years removed from each other. For instance, the phrase "Sapta-Sindhava" or "Sapta-Sindhu" in Sanskrit became "Hapta-Hindu" in Avestan and Old Persian, which is where the term "Hinduism" originates from. 

Anyway, archaeology and the Vedas (primarily the Rigveda) are essentially the only two sources for early Indo-Aryan civilization. While this seems pretty bad (because it is), it's still much better than the Indus Valley Civilization, who, despite inventing writing a millennium before the Indo-Aryans, wrote in a script we still can't decipher. 

So, what can be said is that these peoples continued to spread across the northern part of the subcontinent. This is where they presumably encountered a rapidly declining Harappan civilization. You can see examples of the different tribes that made their way across the Hindu Kush into the plain in the map below. Eventually, through a combination of migration and conquest, the tribes fashioned themselves as the ruling classes of the Indo-Gangetic region, developing a series of distinct proto-states.

Next Episode in two weeks.