Commentary / Mani Shankar Aiyar

Whenever Pakistan is divided in soul, it is the army that keeps its body politic united

The separation of Bengali-speaking Pakistan from west Pakistan was seen by the Islam-pasand parties as the opportunity to get on with building their nationhood on religion without the tiresome distraction of ethnicity; and by others, specifically those banded together in the PPP under the slogan of roti, kapda aur makaan as the opportunity of getting on with nation-building without being distracted by distant refractory Bengalis, strange of tongue and dark of complexion.

While despair at the humiliation of losing their east wing was writ large into the national mood, the Pakistanis were astonishingly resilient in reconciling themselves to the loss of Bangladesh and after Mujib stated quarrelling with India within months of liberation,and especially after he fetched up in Lahore in 1974 to embrace Bhutto at the Lahore Summit of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, Pakistanis in general began believing that the travails of their long gestation were at long last over and they could now get on with modern nation-building.

There was no problem over Islam. Both sets of contenders accepted that Pakistan was an Islamic republic. Almost all Pakistanis were Islamic. And there was no iridescent desire to make room for even more Muslims from elsewhere in the sub-continent. It was hoped that the partition of Pakistan would consolidate the Partition of India and that a united, democratic and prosperous Pakistan might still arise, Phoenix-like from the ashes of military defeat.

That, alas, was not to be. For one thing, Bhutto's definition of democracy might have delighted Mussolini; it would hardly have been recognised at Westminster. For another, the flurry of Bhutto's nationalisations had failed to set Pakistan on the path to prosperity. But, much more fundamentally, Islam had failed to unite.

There was no question but that Pakistan was an Islamic republic. Of that there was no dispute between whisky-swilling Bhutto and Rooh Afza- partial Zia. It was just that the PPP thought that having become an Islamic republic, Pakistan could put religion behind it and get on with the other demands of nation building. The Islam-pasand, on the other hand, thought the whole purpose of becoming an Islamic republic was to get on with building an Islamic nationhood.

In other words, the PPP thought Islam was the assumption of Pakistan's nationhood while the Islam-pasand said no, Islam is the goal of our nationhood. And it is this dispute -- over whether Islam is the starting-point or the endgame, the bismillah or the manzi -- added to the other argument over whether it is Sunni Figah Hanafi or the Shia Figah Jafferiya which is the true Islam -- that has resulted in all nation-building floundering over religion instead of religion being the bonding adhesive that the conception of Pakistan alleged it to be.

Compounding religious strife is the persistence of ethnic grafting. It is our very diversity that saves our unity; neither sectarian nor linguistic diversity in Pakistan is sufficient to impose the idea of unity in diversity on the Pakistani mind-set. On the other hand, Punjabi dominance is not sufficient either to pretend to ethnic homogeneity nor sufficient to inure Pakistan from the imperatives of Pushto, Baloch and Sindhi identities.

Luckily, we have no ethnic majorities; we are a congeries of ethnic minorities. Even the Hindi-speaking Indian is in a minority of well below half the population and, happily, there are vast tracts of India where Hindi completely disappears. We, therefore, accept diversity as the basis of our nationhood and, over millennia, have evolved a matchless capacity to live with diversity, indeed to celebrate diversity.

In Pakistan, the raw newness of their being a nation at all and the unanticipated divisiveness of religion and sectarianism, combined with their turning their backs on the composite culture that has been the sub-continent's proudest contribution to world civilisation, has lost them, as a nation, the Indian genius to celebrate diversity without substituting unity through uniformity as the alternative to unity in diversity.

The consequence has been that the army in Pakistan has emerged as the only truly national force. The Pakistan armed forces have never quarrelled among themselves on the basis of sectarianism, language or region. The basis of Pakstan's unity has, therefore, subtly changed from Islam to the armed forces. Whenever Pakistan is divided in soul, it is the army that keeps its body politic united.