Pakistan : early years
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Pakistan : early years
1947 partition: its objectives and the outcome (misleading title)
By S. Khalid Husain
HAS the partition of India been good for the Muslims or would they have been better off in an undivided India? This is a question agitating many Muslim minds sixty years after a separate state was carved out of the subcontinent for them.
Before proceeding further, it is better to have a look at the way Pakistan and India started off as independent states.
The All India Muslim League leadership was made of professionals like Ismail Ibrahim Chundrigar, businessmen like Abdullah Haroon, M.A.H Ispahani, populists like A. K Fazlul Haq, H.S Suharwardy, Syed Husain Bilgrami, but it was dominated by leaders from the landed or tribal class, men and women such as Liaquat Ali Khan, Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar, Raja Sahib of Mahmoodabad, Nawab Ismail Khan, Qazi Isa, Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman, Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan, G. M. Syed, Ayub Khuhro, Begum Jahanara Shahnawaz, Raja Ghazanfar Ali Khan, Zafar Ali Khan and
others.
The commitment of these leaders for Pakistan was borne out of conviction and they were sincere. All of them contributed to the cause at considerable personal cost in time, money and conveniences they had to forgo with no personal benefit or reward in sight. There appeared no element of self-interest in their rallying under Jinnah’s leadership.
However, as Prof Tan Tai Yong at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, writes his 2005 book The Garrison State: The Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1857-1947, “The political linchpin of British rule in Punjab was the Unionist Party (of Muslim landlords) founded by Sir Fazl-e–Husain and later led by Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan and supported by Sir Chottu Ram, by leaders of Hindu Jats and by the Sikh Khalsa Nationalist Party of loyalist Sikh landlords”.
The Punjab Unionist party was the king’s party in Punjab. It was created to serve British interests in colonial India. It was made of influential Muslim, Sikh, Hindu landlords of Punjab. Through their official patronage and their throttlehold on the tenant farmers who made up bulk of the rural population, they were successful in preventing both the Muslim League and the Congres from making much headway in Punjab.
After the 1946 elections, however, when Pakistan was no longer a dream but a sure possibility the Muslim landlords abandoned the Unionist party, then led by Sir Sikander Khizr Tiwana, to join the Muslim League. After the influx of Unionists in it, as Prof Yong writes: “the Muslim League was no longer the party of erstwhile Muslim intelligentsia or progressive reformers who wanted to create an egalitarian Islamic utopia; it had become a party of conservative landlords. Moreover, the Pakistani Punjab emerged as the sword arm of the new state. The Pakistani army was essentially a Punjabi army. Both such factors combined to pass on the legacy of the garrison state to Pakistan.”
Thus merely a year before the transfer of power the All India Muslim League leadership became diluted with Unionists who had strictly personal agendas to protect their privileged positions by maintaining socio-economic status quo in the new country. Any change that sought the slightest weakening of their hold on land and people was to be resisted at all costs.
The assassination of the country’s first prime minister in four years of the country’s birth was a telling blow. Despite a sustained campaign, led by Dawn, to call in the Scotland Yard or the French Surete Generale to probe the murder, no meaningful action resulted.
So, had the transfer of power in 1947 been inherited by the original leadership of the Muslim League the story of Pakistan may have been different. However, the power was transferred to the new-look Muslim League. For the people, this meant a shift from British rule to the rule of the nawabs, jagirdars, zamindars, waderas, makhdooms, sardars and the like.
The bureaucracy became a partner with these vestiges of the Raj and the army joined the ranks of the new rulers soon enough. The mullahs, who had virulently opposed Pakistan, have been straining to gatecrash the ruling combine with a mixed success. The people, as they did during the Raj, still mattered little.
India acted soon after independence to decide on a constitution for the country, re-align provinces with creation of new ones to eliminate conflict aspects, hold the first election, and rid the country of rajas, maharajas and carry out effective land reforms to end the exploitation of peasants by the land barons. It won over the bureaucracy to work under the new political dispensation, not subvert it. It managed to keep the army where it belongs, in the barracks.
India got off to a flying start while Pakistan got enmeshed in issues of religion and parity between the two wings of the country.
It had become abundantly clear in early years that religion alone will not work for moulding a disparate people into a nation. It had also become clear that insistence on parity by the minority in West Pakistan with the majority in East Pakistan would, in a federal structure, be in denial of the basic principle of democracy of ‘one man one vote’ and such ‘democracy’ will not take roots.
However, despite all this, Pakistan’s first constituent assembly pressed on with passing the ‘Objectives Resolution’, and haranguing on parity. It goes to the credit of representatives from East Pakistan that they acquiesced to the ‘parity formula’ in the interest of an agreement on the constitution. When, despite giving up their rights as a majority, East Pakistanis’ discrimination continued, they came up with what became known as Mujibur Rahman’s Six Points.
If the Six Points had not been rejected outrightl as ‘traitorous’ but debated, and with appropriate modifications adopted not only for East Pakistan but also for the provinces in West Pakistan, the country would have been spared a lot of grief. No lessons seem to have been learnt, the inequitable treatment of provinces continues.
The ‘Objectives Resolution’ opened the doors for induction of theology in governance and produced the mantra of ‘Islamic Ideology’ which continues to resist becoming clearly defined. The ‘parity formula’ sowed the seeds of discord and unending political and social unrest in the country and its eventual breakup twenty five years later.
The first constituent assembly of Pakistan entrusted with framing the country’s constitution under which the first elections were to be held failed to deliver for nine years. Instead it brought religion into the affairs of the state, created alienation between the two wings and divisiveness between provinces. By its narrow vision and lackadaisical functioning it precluded the holding of the country’s first elections.
If there is any group of men who are responsible for the country making a false start, it is the men who made up the first constituent assembly of Pakistan. It is they who committed Pakistan’s two original sins — no constitution, no election — when the both were critically needed to give the country a right start.
It is not that all the waters of the river Indus could not wipe the original sins. It is that the original sins instead of being washed clean became rooted in the country’s political culture. Amongst the reasons for this is undoubtedly the fact that bulk of the political leadership of the country has always been made up of the forebears of the members of the first constituent assembly, and who have lived up to the ‘do nothing to change the status quo’ credo of their forefathers.
The constitution, such as the country has been ‘blessed’ with from time to time, has remained a plaything in the hands of the rulers of all shades and hues, and elections a mere sport, with the rules of the game made and the game refereed by the incumbents.
There is a lot that is wrong with Pakistan, also a little that is right. If what is wrong with the country is viewed in the context of the country’s leadership and governance, past and present, Partition would hardly be found to be the cause of the Muslims’ woes in the subcontinent.
Pakistan has recently marked its sixtieth independence day. The scenario as above has prevailed and continues to prevail since the first day of the country’s existence as a sovereign state. Nothing had happened so far that could show that things would change until, that is, Gen. Musharraf obliged the nation with his March 9 faux pas.
Gen. Musharraf’s wrong step has been a ‘giant leap’ for the country. The legal fraternity and civil society took over from where the politicians and political parties had not been able to move ahead. For first time in its history the country is showing signs of ‘rising from the dust’. n
The writer is a retired corporate executive.
husainsk@cyber.net.pk
