4. The word Pakistan is a somewhat contrived acronym coined by Chaudhury Rahmat Ali, founder of the Pakistan National Movement, while he was a student at Cambridge. As he explained in his pamphlet “Now or Never,” by “PAKISTAN” its proponents “mean the five Northern units of India viz: Punjab, North-West Frontier Province (Afghan Province), Kashmir, Sind, and Baluchistan” (Ali 1933, n.p.). Thus, P is for Punjab; A is for Afghan Province, K is for Kashmir, S is for Sindh, and “Tan” is for Balochistan.
5. The United Provinces of Agra and Oudh was formed in 1877 when the presidency of Agra and the kingdom of Oudh were merged. The former United Provinces was largely coterminous with the modern Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.
6. As Indians became increasingly insistent on self-rule, the British looked for ways of diffusing the demands of the Congress and retaining its colony. In 1935, in one such effort to undermine the political power of the Congress at the all-India level, the British Parliament enacted the Government of India Act, which authorized the establishment of provincial legislative assemblies and created a central government incorporating the provinces and many of the princely states under continued British rule. The act also sought to provide for the protection of religious minorities by creating separate electorates for 19 religious and social categories (e.g., Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Anglo-Indian, Other Backward Classes). Voters could cast a vote for candidates only in their own category. The Government of India Act of 1935 expanded the franchise by lowering land-holding requirements and substituting literacy for higher educational standards. Depending on the status of their husbands, some women were also granted the right to vote. The act also imposed a number of region-specific voting rules (Government of India Act of 1935). The 1935 law gave the provinces much more autonomy, in hopes that doing so would undercut the increasing demand for self-rule. Not only did British officials in India and in London think that such limited concessions could sufficiently appease Indian sentiment to maintain the integrity of the Raj, but they also believed that “even the prospect of provincial autonomy alone in India would be enough to pull many away from the national congress movement through the prospects of offices, jobs, and patronage” (Muldoon 2009, 177). While the motive for the act was undermining Congress’ cohesion, it was nevertheless the first initiative to transfer substantial power to Indians on the basis of electoral successes. The act and ensuing elections provided the Indian National Congress, under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, with an opportunity to demonstrate the legitimacy of its claim to speak on the behalf of Indians as a genuinely representative political body. To prepare for the 1937 elections, the first to be held under the new law, the Congress focused on building up its membership by establishing an all-India grass-roots presence. Its efforts paid off: in 1935 it had 473,000 members; by 1939, its rolls had expanded to 4.5 million (Brendon 2008, 394). Raj officials who had dismissed the Congress as a party of the elites were surprised by its ability to broaden its base (Muldoon 2009).
7. The Congress’ victory in the 1937 elections raised numerous questions about the fate of Muslims after the transfer of power from the British to an Indian central government. Jinnah struggled to secure the Muslim League’s standing as the party that spoke for Muslims as a rebuke to the Congress’ claim to speak on behalf of all of India. Lord Louis Mountbatten (the last viceroy of the British Raj who oversaw the partition of the Raj and from 1947 to 1948 served as the first governor general of independent India) tried to persuade Jinnah to present a more specific vision of Pakistan, but Jinnah refused to propose exact geographical boundaries. Seeking to reinforce its claim that it spoke for all of South Asia’s Muslims, the Muslim League continued to insist that South Asia’s Muslims, regardless of their many differences, composed a single nation (Jalal 1990).
8. Actually, the term prince was imported by the British as an umbrella term for a variety of greater and lesser Indian rajas, nawabs, who were dependent on larger states, and even large landowners known as zamindars.
9. British paramountcy was represented by the viceroy or crown representative, the political department, and Britain’s various local agents. Until the twentieth century, the foreign department was responsible both for foreign affairs and relations with the princely states. However, by 1914 a dedicated political department had been formed within the foreign and political department to manage relations with the states (Kooiman 1995).
10. The British established the Chamber of Princes in 1921. It included 108 high-ranking princes and 12 members who represented 127 other princely states. The viceroy presided over the council and set the agenda (Ramusack 2003, 127).
11. Indian nationalists formed the INA in 1942 in Southeast Asia. It drew initially from Indian prisoners of war who had been captured by the Japanese in the Malayan Campaign and in Singapore. Later, Indian expatriates in Malaya and Burma also joined. The first INA was short-lived, but it was revived under Subhas Chandra Bose (a Bengali), and its men fought alongside the Japanese against British and Commonwealth forces in South and Southeast Asia. Some INA members faced treason charges when they returned to India after the war, and this became a further rallying cry for independence. After independence, Nehru would not let the former INA soldiers rejoin the army. While he respected their heroism, he feared their capacity for insubordination and their political activism. The legacy of the INA is complex. While its men are heroes, they were also traitors who made enemies out of their own countrymen who were fighting with the British. They were also complicit in the war crimes of the Imperial Japanese Army. For more details, see Cohen (1963–1964).
12. According to Birdwood (1952, 305), “… The effect of the awarding of the other three tehsils to India was to offer India a railway and railhead without which she would have found it almost impossible to conduct operations in Kashmir.” Birdwood’s argument is simply wrong: India would have received Pathankot, the tehsil it required for these operations, even had the principle of religious affinity been applied. Such an oversight is surprising for a former chief of the Indian Army, who should have had a greater grasp of the region and of the Army’s logistical requirements. Alastair Lamb, a British historian, has also consistently championed this view in his various writings. He maintains that the British, motivated by their strategic assessment of India’s vulnerable northern frontier during the colonial period, envisioned Kashmir as joining India. According to Lamb, Mountbatten would have been loath to sacrifice the considerable security architecture that the British had built to fend off Russian imperial encroachment and believed that the inclusion of Kashmir within India was a necessary safeguard against Russian–Soviet penetration. Lamb also contends that Mountbatten certainly would have known that an eventual inclusion of Kashmir within the dominion of India would be contingent on the inclusion of the disputed tehsils in India’s Gurdaspur award. He speculates further that British strategists advising Mountbatten would have seen India as a better guardian of the northern frontier than Pakistan (Lamb 1991, as discussed in Wirsing 1998, 25–26).
13. For concise discussion of this concept, see Peers (2008). The term race was used inappropriately under contemporary understandings of the word. The imperial ethnographers tended to use caste, class, and race interchangeably, although race tended to be used to denote a group of people who shared some kind of common heritage (linguistic, cultural, or religious) rather than common genetics. Related to this was another race-based belief that descendents of Aryans were better soldiers—a belief that disadvantaged those ethnic groups of South Asia that are not Aryan (e.g., those in South India). Other justifications for the Indian Army’s focus on specific groups included arguments about unfamiliarity with combat due to prolonged periods of peace in parts of South Asia, ecological and climactic reasons for the martial prowess of some races, and strategic proximity to Britain’s foes, such as Russia (Rizvi 2000a). As a result of these demand-side considerations, the British Indian Army predominantly drew personnel from the nor
thern part of the empire and Nepal (Rizvi 2000b).
14. Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism has undergone considerable criticism since he introduced it in 1978. The term generally refers to the way Westerners defined, represented, and depicted the East and themselves in relation to it. I use the term in Porter’s (2009) sense, in which “Orientalism” is not monolithic but rather “a plural and shifting set of epistemological ideas, attitudes and practices” (14).
15. There was no coherent colonial army in this period. Instead, each of the three presidencies of the company (in Bengal, Bombay, and Madras) had its own army. Since the Bengal presidency stretched from Burma to the Khyber Pass, the Bengal Army was the most heavily involved in the rebellion of 1857 (for South Asians, the First War of Independence), which was centered in modern-day Uttar Pradesh.
16. The area covered by modern-day Uttar Pradesh and its environs.
17. Understandings of the rebellion of 1857 (also known as the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857) and of the First War of Indian Independence continue to evolve and be contested. See Brodkin (1972), Habib (1998), David (2002), and Callahan (2008).
18. Many of the bases Pakistan inherited were “oriented towards the frontier to the West. … [For example, the General Headquarters] was the former Northern Command of the old Indian Army, the Staff College was in Quetta, looking out upon Central Asia” (Stephen P. Cohen, personal communication, August 2009).
19. The territories that became India had largely benefited from the British policy of gradually devolving power. This began with the 1882 Self-Government Act, which fostered the development of empowered—if limited—local governance. The provinces were the next to experience democratization, beginning in 1909 and culminating in 1935 with the Government of India Act, which allowed a degree of parliamentary democracy at the provincial level. This act was a basis for the constitution of independent India. India also inherited much of the bureaucratic and governance structure of the Raj which had its capital in New Delhi (Jaffrelot 2002b). The areas that became Pakistan did not benefit from the geography of colonial parliamentarianism. Notably, those provinces that would become the core of Pakistan had the least experience with parliamentary rule. While Bengal (which in 1971 became Bangladesh) and Sindh were conquered by the British fairly early and by 1947 had significant experience with parliamentary governance, Punjab was formally conquered only in 1849. Even after it joined the Raj, the Punjab was governed by district magistrates who were responsible for everything from tax collection to the administration of justice. Balochistan, which occupies about 40 percent of Pakistan’s landmass, became a British province only during the Second Afghan War (1878–1880). Whereas by 1947 much of the Raj had experienced provincial parliamentarism, electoral activity in Balochistan was confined to Quetta (Jaffrelot 2002b). The NWFP was an administrative entity created by the British in 1901 to organize the defense of the empire against a Russian advance. The British viewed both the NWFP and the Punjab through the prism of multiple layers of security interests. First, the two provinces, especially the Punjab, were the most important recruitment ground for the army. Second, they formed the primary corridor for the traditional invasion route from Central to South Asia. For these reasons—among others explained in Chapter 4—the British kept the Punjab and NWFP in relatively militarized states.
Chapter 4
1. This chapter builds upon the work in Fair (2012). Without evidence, Paris (2010, 7) writes, “The danger for the army, and for Pakistan generally, is not Talibanisation but Islamisation from Punjab-based militants and their allies.” Needless to say, not only is the claim lacking in evidence, but also Paris fails to describe what he means by Islamization and why this is necessarily dangerous. His analysis suggests Islamists are more prone to hand the country to terrorists than are others.
2. I adopt the definition of Islamization offered by Nasr (2001), who describes the process of Islamization as ensconcing “Islamic norms, symbols and rhetoric in the public sphere, and in the process, it has had a notable impact on politics, policy making, law and social relations” (3).
3. These militant groups have included including the Afghan Taliban, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Jaish-e-Mohammad, among dozens of other groups terrorizing the region. For an example of such fears, see Paris (2010). For a countervailing view, see Schofield and Zekulin (2007).
4. Militants could obtain such materials without the assistance of the armed forces, which speaks to a greater disquiet about the spread of terrorism and radicalization in Pakistan, and state ability to counter it (Leigh 2010). These concerns about terrorist acquisition of nuclear technology or materials have intensified since late May 2011, when terrorists associated with the Pakistani Taliban launched a complex attack on a major naval base in Karachi. Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad (2011) reported that the operation was facilitated by an al-Qaeda cell within the Pakistan Navy. (Shortly after publishing this article in the Asia Times, Shahzad was slain, allegedly by Pakistani intelligence agencies; Filkins 2011.) This was only one of several recent assaults on military, intelligence, police, and other federal and provincial facilities involving militant sympathizers and operatives from the ranks of the armed forces. Others include attempts to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf in 2003 and 2004 (Voice of America 2011), the 2007 suicide raid on army commandos at a high-security facility in Tarbela (Khan and Syed 2007), and the 2009 attack on Army General Headquarters by militants in military uniforms (Perlez 2009b). Many of these attacks involved civilian personnel, junior officers, or enlisted men from the army, navy, air force, police, or paramilitary organizations (Rumi 2011). Given the frequency of such attacks, Pakistanis themselves are increasingly concerned about the integrity of their national security institutions and the degree to which they have been compromised by the enemy within (Brulliard 2011). Materials pilfered from US officials and published by WikiLeaks have brought even classified discussions of these fears into the public domain (Leigh 2010; see also Amin 2009).
5. Haqqani (2005) notes the redaction in official published versions of this speech. For details about the lost recording of this speech, see Siddiqui (2012).
6. Minority legislators were very disturbed by this. They argued for a secular constitution, fearing, perspicaciously, that they would become the objects of persecution and discrimination. They argued for an amendment that would replace the statement “Muslims shall be enabled to order their lives … in accordance with the teachings and requirements of Islam” with “Muslims and non-Muslims shall be equally enabled to order their lives in accordance with their respective religions” (Shaikh 2009, 72, emphasis original).
7. The Ahmediyas view themselves as Muslims. The Ahmediya movement began at the end of the nineteenth century in British India with charismatic reformer Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908), who claimed to be the messiah. Because this claim contradicts the essential Islamic tenet of the finality of Prophet Muhammad, other Muslims denounce Ahmediyas as apostates in Pakistan and beyond.
8. The title of this volume is significant. Ayub sought to explain that what Pakistan sought in its foreign relations were friends who would work with Pakistan rather than masters who would work through Pakistan to secure their own national goals.
9. There is considerable ambiguity implied by this phrase “Jihad-fi-sibilillah.” It need not simply mean militarized struggle, as is often presumed. According to Maududi, who was an important influence for Zia, the phrase has a fairly capacious meaning and includes “any act or deed which is done for the collective well-being of mankind, by a person who has no vested interest in this world (Duniya), but seeks only to earn the pleasure and favour of Allah” (Khattab 1995, 9).
10. The Pakistan Army, like other armies, has chaplains (imams/maulvis), but the army does not make information about them public. Thus, little is known about their numbers, their credentials, or how they are recruited, among other important information.
11. According to Stephen Cohen, Zia personally explained to him that he admired
the US military’s chaplin corps and that this is what motivated him to upgrade the status of the unit maulvis (Stephen Cohen comments on earlier drafts, January 2013). It is instructive to compare the various roles of Islam in the Pakistan military to that of Judaism in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Pakistan and Israel share many similarities, one of which is that they are both states founded on religion and where full citizenship is contingent on religious identity. For an analysis of how the IDF mobilizes religion, see Cohen (2013).
12. The exact dates of the brigade’s deployment are not publicly available, but it was withdrawn in 1988 when its last commander, Gen. Jehangir Karamat, departed. See Atlantic Council, “Pakistan Army Challenges: General Jehangir Karamat,” July 1, 2009, http://www.acus.org/event/challenges-facing-pakistan-army.
13. Rashid (1996) cites a report prepared by the staff of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, which “has a different estimate of Pakistani troops in Saudi Arabia” (34).
14. The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) also participated in various Arab–Israeli wars. During the Yom Kippur War (also known as the Ramadan War) in 1973, PAF planes left Pakistan to support Egypt and Syria but arrived after the ceasefire. Because Syria remained in a state of war against Israel, PAF pilots become instructors there and formed the A-flight of 67 Squadron at Dumayr Air Base (Scramble Magazine n.d.)
15. The value of Cohen’s work is that it is derived from extensive access to the Pakistan Army, including numerous interviews with officers. The limitation of his work, as he readily concedes, is that his research took place before the anti-Soviet jihad and subsequent regional and domestic developments brought about important changes in the army.
16. Pakistaniat is somewhat difficult to translate. Roughly it suggests that Pakistan itself is an ideology.
17. As I detail in Chapter 6, the 1971 war is considerably more complicated. West Pakistan’s abusive policies toward the Bengali citizens in East Pakistan devolved into a civil war. As refugees began streaming into India, India had numerous concerns to evaluate. India began providing extensive political and military support to the insurgents, including training the Mukti Bahini, who were fighting to liberate East Pakistan. By summer 1971, India saw the insurrection as an opportunity to intervene and break up Pakistan. While India was preparing its war plans, Pakistan started the war in December when it began air strikes on Indian positions.
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