The anthology volume, Rethinking Pakistan: a 21st Century Perspective (Folio Books 2019), features a plethora of essays offering prescriptions for the problems facing the country today. Among these is an analysis by Nadeem Farooq Paracha, ‘The Conflicted Self: The Existentialist Battle between Being Muslim and Islamic in Pakistan.’
According to a 2011 Gallup-Pakistan poll, 59 percent of Pakistanis identify as Muslim first, compared to just 22 percent who described themselves as Pakistani first. A majority of the latter percentage belonged to the country’s minority communities, mainly Christians and Hindus. According to Pakistan’s internal data, over 95 percent of citizens identify as Muslim, an overwhelming majority that has persisted since the country’s inception on Aug. 14, 1947. This is thanks to the circumstances that led to Partition, when the British accorded regions with a Muslim majority—but noteworthy Hindu minorities—to Pakistan while leaving Hindu-majority areas—with significant Muslim minorities—with India.
Ideology takes over
As Paracha notes, many aspects of Pakistan’s modernist Muslim project did not make it to the 1956 and 1962 constitutions, as most of the policies shaped by the modernist tendency of Muslim/Pakistani nationalism were carried forward by non-parliamentary means; through special judicial rulings or special ordinances authored by military regimes. This modernist tendency declined because it was not part of laws authored by a properly elected National Assembly, leading to the rise of a populist socialist government that, in the 1973 Constitution, tried to find balance between an ascending theocratic tendency and the government’s own take on Muslim modernism. Initially, the 1973 Constitution appeared to be balanced, looking to draw out civic-nationalism through a new modernist-theocratic-fusion. But within a year, regressive amendments began to be introduced as the polity and the government shifted more to the right due to various internal and external reasons.
The reason for the theocratic tendency of Muslim nationalism persisting over modernist views is because many aspects of the former were added to Constitution; so much so that by the late 1980s, the 1973 Constitution had almost entirely lost its civic-nationalist dimension. The state, as a consequence, became a vague theocracy pretending to be a democracy. This meant that suggested, or even legislated, reforms are easily challenged in courts in light of the present-day Constitution even when physical barriers (such as armed extremist groups) as stallers of reform are neutralized (as they were between 2014 and 2017).
China, the unlikely partner
Pakistan is now at the epicenter of China’s economic influence and growth in the region, as Beijing recognizes and responds to the many financial benefits of a growing economy such as Pakistan, despite the fact that these opportunities are often overshadowed in local and international media by Pakistan’s political instability. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is a direct manifestation of China’s aim to utilize untapped investment opportunities in Pakistan. This investment, China believes, not only have a positive impact on Pakistan’s economy, but also lead to political stability.
Theoretically, this makes sense. And if one is to further stretch this theory, economic progress and its resultant political stability would attract investors from other countries as well. They are then sure to be followed by non-business visitors, the tourists. However, a question rarely asked is whether Pakistan’s prevalent social milieu is conducive to addressing the needs of such visitors? Bluntly, it isn’t. Both the government and the state of Pakistan would have to initiate some drastic shifts and changes in the prevailing cultural milieu and ethos. Ideally, economic progress also boosts tourism, which, though influenced by business tourism, eventually becomes the benchmark that foreign investors use to gauge a country’s economic feasibility.
Ideology, the dominant narrative
So, what will a tourist do here? Not all of them are likely to be mountain-climbers in awe of the country’s magnificent peaks. Unfortunately, the country’s cultural ambiance has become stifling over the past 30 years or so. When a country with a stifling ethos becomes a tourist attraction, this can create problems. Or to put it more bluntly, it can then never become one. So these problems need to be resolved, especially for a state like Pakistan that is neither a conservative society, nor a bastion of liberalism. Its strength lies in a historically inherent moderate disposition, which, whenever it was given the space to assert itself, exhibited a remarkable aptitude to tolerate a co-existence between conservatism and a woman prime minister.
Before the 1980s, Pakistan was an entirely moderate society where mosques and Sufi shrines thrived and so did cinemas, clubs and other vibrant recreational vistas. On most occasions they were at peace with each other, just as they still are in Muslim-majority countries such as Turkey and Tunisia, and, to a certain extent, Egypt. For over 30 years, from the day Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah announced the creation of a Muslim-majority state, till the 1970s, Pakistanis were largely a nation of robust and enterprising moderates, the historical and contemporary extensions of the aforementioned Mughal Muslim ethos.
But almost 40 years after the state began churning out a rather reactionary ideological narrative to explain economic and political issues, there is trouble; what was once a project of the state has become a project of society. This is why now, even when the state wants to alter its course in this context, it finds it difficult to proceed. Indeed, it has realized that CPEC promises positive change. But it is also realizing that, to fully benefit from it, Pakistan’s polity needs to change as well. Thus the new developing narrative: outmaneuver arch-rival India through the economic benefits being promised by CPEC.
This, however, would require changes that would undo the laws that many believe are actually providing legal cover to elements who have become impediments for a nation that needs to move forward as a democratic, modern Muslim-majority country, one driven by the kind of reinvigorated civic-nationalism that was inherent in the ideas of the country’s founding father.