ANALYSIS: The Pakistani Purpose —Salman Tarik Kureshi

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ANALYSIS: The Pakistani Purpose —Salman Tarik Kureshi

However a state may have chanced to appear on a map or for whatever reason it may have been founded, once this has happened, its purpose thereafter is nothing more and nothing less than promoting the wellbeing of its citizens

Someone has sent me one of those maps again. You know the kind that purport to show the future borders of countries in Central and South Asia, but with the familiar outlines of our Pakistan entirely missing. I have been seeing such maps, or their equivalents, for at least the past half-century. Every now and then, someone jumps up with a ‘Eureka’ gleam in the eye and proof of yet another deadly conspiracy against us, ‘established’ by one or the other such cartographic exercise. Doom and national extinction are forecast.

Well, doom and political break-up are among the very real perils that the failing state of Pakistan is confronting. But, let us be clear, our membership in the excusive circle of failing states has everything to do with the inability of our military, political and economic elites to provide basic governance, some kind of economic vision, valid education or social services, justice, democracy, rule of law or simple basic law and order. It has nothing to do with the nefarious designs of external map-makers.

These latter come in two variants. On the one side are right-wing medievalists, who hold that Pakistan is a religiously unified entity (or, at least, will be once they eliminate all those untidy minorities, heterodox sects, points of view, and every kind of regional or national cultural expression) whose purpose is to embody and project a particular political ideology. This is seen as the core raison d’etre of the 170 million men, women and children who call this land their home. This ideological unity of purpose is inevitably perceived as a Big Threat by (get this!) every other nation in which the six billion members of the human race live. Therefore, the entire six billion are against us and all are conspiring to dismember and destroy Pakistan — led, of course, by our major ally and benefactor, the USA.

The psychiatric term for such ways of thinking is Paranoid Schizophrenia! But, before we become too harsh in our judgement, let us also look at the other side of this argument — the doctrinaire leftists. These Pink Warriors of yesteryear are deeply imbued with such intellectual constructs as Stalin’s Theory of Nationalities and will point to the ethnically confused borders of the Pakistan state.

Look at our western-most ethnic group, the Baloch. It is a minority of native speakers of Balochi and related languages that live in the Pakistani provinces of Baluchistan and Sindh. The Baloch ethnic territory stretches across the border into Iran, all the way to Bander Abbas, and even beyond, along the Gulf Coast, to Oman and Yemen. Pakhtuns are divided between Pakistan and that bizarre former Central Asian kingdom called Afghanistan, with a slight majority being in Pakistan.

Of the Sindhi-speaking people, the great majority lives in Pakistan. But those across the border in India include such prominent personages as the mega-billionaire Ambani brothers and Leader of the Opposition Lal Krishna Advani, who was moreover born in what is now Pakistan.

Urdu-speaking Pakistanis are a comparatively small fraction of their ethnic brethren who stayed behind in India. As for the largest ethnic identity in Pakistan, the Punjabi, this is the one said to be most identified with ideas of Pakistani nationhood. However, this was the most violently divided of all linguistic groups at the time of Independence. The overall population of Punjabi speakers in India is not much less than in Pakistan and includes their present and one of their previous prime ministers. More, the impact of Punjabis on popular Indian culture and sports is especially heavy.

Pakistan, then, is an ethnically multiple state entity. And this, according to many of our left-wing friends, is the source of Pakistan’s instability — an instability that is being exploited to sere the nefarious designs of (get this one!) the very same bete noir as the religious right, the USA.

The point is that India is even more of a multi-ethnic state, not to mention China, Indonesia, Nigeria, Canada, the Russian Federation and others. Are they also unstable members of the Failed States Club? And the fact that the ethnic groups within Pakistan are divided between different countries is also true of India, Iran (as we have shown earlier), Canada, Mexico and others.

So much for the left-wing assumption of Pakistan being an ‘artificial’ state and therefore inherently unstable! What is not being appreciated is that all states are, in one sense or the other, ‘artificial’ entities. Let’s face it, there are no borders marked on the ground. The earth on both sides is the same and usually the people as well. Some states have accidentally grown until someone determined to put a legal border around them and claim sovereignty within those bonds. Where, in ethnic or historic terms, does the USA end and Canada begin? Or France and Belgium? Or Germany, Switzerland and Austria? There are also states that have been consciously ‘founded’ at a moment in time. Such, for example, would include Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the USA, Lebanon, Israel, Kenya and some others.

The point is that however a state may have chanced to appear on a map or for whatever reason it may have been founded, once this has happened, its purpose thereafter is nothing more and nothing less than promoting the wellbeing of its citizens. It is meant to provide governance, promote economic activity, make available education and other social services to its citizens and ensure their freedom, their rights, justice and law and order. Once national independence was achieved, the ‘maqsad’ of Pakistan became the greater good of the greatest number of its citizens. It’s as simple as that.

This was directly articulated by Pakistan’s founder, addressing the first session of the new parliament. He spoke of policy issues regarding governance, law and order, black-marketing, corruption and nepotism. The ‘religious’ perspective was dismissed by the Quaid, stating that “all these angularities of the...Hindu community and the Muslim community...will vanish...In course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.”

Could any message have been clearer than this?

The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet