by John Keay
There remained, too, the perhaps greater danger of nuclear arsenals falling into hostile hands, domestic or foreign, or detonating accidentally. This gave each government an interest in the internal stability of its neighbour and argued for some normalisation of relations as conducive to it. But it also prompted mutual scrutiny, most notably in the 1990s when the Indian electorate seemed willing to entrust the levers of power to bellicose nationalists and when in Pakistan uncertainty prevailed over whose finger (the military’s, the intelligence services’ or the government’s) was actually on the button. Meanwhile in both countries radical militias with terrorist agendas appeared increasingly able to strike at the most sensitive of installations; and as for accidental detonation, there remained of course the terrible legacy of Ojhri and Bhopal.
Assuming the figures are approximately correct, the total of Indian lives lost and blighted by the Bhopal disaster would scarcely be exceeded by either the ongoing Panjab crisis, the imminent intifada in Kashmir or the intermittent Hindu – Muslim massacres of 1992–2002. Likewise, Ojhri set a bloodstained benchmark for the countless individual bombings and shootings to which both Pakistan and India were about to be subjected. In effect, both ‘accidents’ lent a grim perspective to that catalogue of conflicts that characterised turn-of-the-century South Asia.
The population of India was now nearing the 1 billion mark, with those of Pakistan and Bangladesh each soaring towards 150 million. More people meant more potential victims. As the Kalashnikov replaced the tribal jezail, as the rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) gave every sniper a tank-busting potential and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) could seemingly be assembled at will, the scale of outrage could only escalate. Yet the headline-grabbing body-counts were, if possible, less shocking than the extreme brutality that accompanied all these conflicts. Mutilation, rape, human incineration and the butchery of infants were widely logged and again stoked memories of Partition. An avowedly benign Islam, no less than a supposedly inclusive secularism, seemed incapable of restraining the violence or resolving the conflicts. The police were neither impartial nor effective, the military were among the worst offenders, the administrative services were hopelessly politicised and the governments, when not actually complicit, were often ambivalent. The state itself was compromised. Any national consensus, whether that projected by Jinnah or forged by Nehru, seemed to have atrophied.
Violence as between different sects, castes, linguistic communities, ethnic groups and ideological persuasions had been endemic long before Partition and had, if anything, escalated. In India orthodox Sikhs (with Bhindranwale to the fore) had hounded Nirankari Sikhs much as, in Pakistan and Bangladesh, orthodox Muslims had hounded Ahmedi (Ahmaddiya) Muslims. Condemned as heretics by their own government, most Pakistani Ahmedis had by the late 1980s been driven to emigrate to the West. Among Muslims in general the Sunni habitually antagonised the Shi’i, and among non-Muslims in general – Christians and Sikhs as well as Hindus – the caste-conscious habitually oppressed the casteless. In Karachi, Urdu-speaking mohajirs fought with both Sindhi-speaking natives and Pushtu-speaking incomers. In Bombay, Marathi-speaking Hindus of the Shiv Sena (‘Shivaji’s Army’ as well as ‘Shiva’s Army’) managed to provoke just about everyone. For each well-publicised celebration of communal harmony there were hushed whispers of another eruption of particularist sentiment, often in the back of beyond. Caste warfare ran riot in Bihar; Maoist revolutionaries (Naxalites) terrorised other parts of eastern India; and just as refugees from Afghanistan swamped the borderlands of Pakistan, economic migrants from Nepal and Bangladesh destabilised the Indian borderlands. Pakistan’s ‘tribals’ – they being the mostly Pathan clans of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of the north-west frontier – were a law, or lack of it, unto themselves. India’s ‘tribals’ – they being the adivasi (‘aboriginal’) peoples of the forests and hills – were being harried into an equally truculent resistance by speculators and proselytisers. The ‘Million Mutinies Now’ of V. S. Naipaul’s book were certainly no novelty; but neither were they a preposterous exaggeration.
As ever, underlying all these conflicts was competition for scarce resources, especially land and water, for jobs and for educational places, along with expectations of an end to various forms of discrimination. From the late 1970s another way of escaping penury and prejudice offered itself in the form of overseas employment. This was nothing new either. Bonded migrant labourers had been leaving South Asia ever since the mid-nineteenth century. Many had never returned, their descendants forming the nuclei of the substantial ‘Indian’ communities of East and South Africa, the Caribbean, Fiji and South-East Asia. In the aftermath of Partition another exodus, principally to the UK and North America, had lasted well into the 1960s, and again, though some had returned, many had not. All, however, had invariably remitted home any savings they could spare, so galvanising otherwise neglected local economies and providing an unexpected facelift in districts like Mirpur (in Azad Kashmir) and Sylhet (in north-east Bangladesh) from which mid-century migration had been substantial.
The latest exodus was an unforeseen bonus of the 1970s hike in oil prices. It was on a much bigger scale, was directed almost exclusively towards the now cash-rich Gulf states (including Saudi Arabia) and was governed by fixed-term contracts, so precluding permanent settlement. Families did not follow their migrant menfolk, and remittances did not tail off as tended to happen with second-generation settlers. On the contrary, the constant turnover of labour meant that the pool of recruits spread ever wider and the flow of remittances ever further. Given the religious complexion of the Gulf, the takeup was greater among Muslims than non-Muslims. Pakistan and Bangladesh were thus prime beneficiaries, but with Kerala, Gujarat and other parts of India participating on a scale to justify regular direct flights between, for example, Trivandrum and Dubai.
What all this was worth in economic terms remained largely a mystery until early in the twenty-first century American and international agencies began to monitor the flow of remittances as part of ‘the war on terror’. According to the World Bank, the transfer of funds to South Asia from migrant workers worldwide was running at $20 billion per annum in 2000 and had by 2008 risen to a colossal $75 billion per annum. In 2009 ‘India alone got $52 billion from its diaspora, more than it took in foreign direct investment’ – and this at a time when its economy was out-perfoming (and out-attracting) most others.1 Unlike international aid, the migrants’ money orders bypassed governmental and non-governmental agencies, so reaching their intended recipients more or less intact. If the cash was then mostly blown on consumer durables, nuptial extravaganzas and land purchases, it at least served to boost domestic demand, alleviate national shortages of hard currency and relieve the indebtedness and hardship of innumerable unsung lives.
The new migration experience, like the traditonal haj, also tended to excite expectations of change and spiritual renewal, in this case among a menial and marginalised class of labourers with no previous exposure to international Islam. In a globalised world ideas, like cash, transferred easily but were hard to quantify. It was assumed that the inflow of so-called ‘knowledge transfers and social and political remittances’ was on a comparable scale to that in money orders. The migrant phenomenon was therefore seen as a contributory factor in the contemporary assertion throughout South Asia of the more legalistic and politically intrusive traditions of Sunni Arab Islam. The growing prominence of indigenous reformist and ‘fundamentalist’ movements, the proliferation and popularity of Quranic madrassahs, the construction of gleaming new mosques and the multiplicity of Islamic political parties were accounted a by-product of the new diaspora. So was the considerable foreign, often Saudi, investment required for all these enterprises.
The implications were not lost on politicians. In India vigilant Hindu activists detected an Islamic conspiracy. The conspiracy, which was supposedly aimed at politicising Indian Muslims, attracting converts and promoting foreign – that is, Pakistani – desi
gns on the integrity of the nation, seemed to have seduced even Rajiv Gandhi when in 1985 his Congress government intervened in an excruciatingly convoluted affair known as the Shah Bano case. Basically the Supreme Court had just rejected the plea of a male Muslim divorcee against a lesser court’s ruling that he must indefinitely support his seventy-five-year-old ex-wife, the eponymous Shah Bano. Muslim law required that he pay only three months’ maintenance but the Indian criminal code required that he pay up as long her circumstances required. In favouring the Indian code, the Supreme Court raised the thorny issue of whether constitutional safeguards in respect of Muslim personal law still applied, or whether, as the constitution intended, they might now be overridden by the uniform criminal code. Naturally most Muslims took the former view. They saw the Court’s judgment as an assault on Islamic jurisprudence and a gratuitous swipe at the submissive conduct expected of Muslim women. Shah Bano was duly vilified by her community and eventually driven to award her husband’s stipend of 180 rupees a month (about £4 or $6) to a charity.
More progressive Muslims, however, welcomed the Supreme Court’s judgment as a chance to remove an embarrassing and Quranically suspect anomaly; and so too, of course, did most Hindus and all those concerned with women’s rights. Thus when the issue came before parliament, while a Muslim MP made the case in favour of Islamic practice, a Muslim minister made the case against it. The minister won, having the backing of Rajiv Gandhi and the massive majority he had secured in the post-Indira elections. But there then followed a string of poor by-election results that prompted Rajiv to think again. Under Nehru and Indira the Congress party’s electoral accounting had required the Muslim vote; evidently it still did. So a government that had just upheld the Supreme Court’s decision quickly introduced a bill that effectively reversed it. The bill was passed in 1986, leading to howls of protest from all quarters save those of conservative Muslims. Rajiv’s reputation as a peacemaker – won in brokering accords in Kashmir and Assam as well as Panjab – was shattered, his political honeymoon over. Meanwhile, buoyed by accusations of the government’s capitulation to a ‘Muslim fundamentalist’ conspiracy, the star of Hindu zealotry soared impressively under the direction of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
JIHAD, THE FRANCHISE
For evidence of a resurgent Islam, Indians were invited to look no further than Pakistan and Bangladesh. In both countries the military rulers who had ended the populist extravagances of Bhutto and Mujib had since shed any pretence of secularism to accord greater prominence to Islamic values and interests. After much Pakistani indecision on the matter, by 1987 both states called themselves Islamic Republics and spattered their official discourse with pious phrases for the edification of reformist clerics and orthodox ulema. To generals badly in need of legitimacy, the approval of Muslim ideologues was the next best thing to electoral endorsement. Zia-ur-Rahman in Bangladesh had even extended an amnesty to the leader of the Jamaat-i-Islami, an ultra-religious party compromised by its links to Pakistan, its opposition to Mujib’s breakaway and so its ambiguity over the very existence of Bangladesh. More fatefully Zia-ur-Rahman had also awarded pardons and political sinecures to his predecessor’s military killers, a move that launched his, and then his widow Khaleda’s, new Bangladesh National Party (BNP) on a permanent collision course with the Awami League of the murdered Mujib, and now of his daughter Hasina. Thus a clemency that Zia billed as in the interests of national unity proved exactly the opposite. Thirty years later Bangladeshi politics remained polarised as between the BNP and the Awami League with the main bone of contention still being whether or not to try Mujib’s killers. Moreover whatever Zia-ur-Rahman’s clemency had been meant to achieve, it had been ill requited in that he too was assassinated by military mutineers in 1981.
The succession-by-coup of General Husain Mohamed Ershad as Bangladesh’s new chief martial-law administrator (1982) and then president (1983) changed very little. Like Zia, Ershad veered away from the socialist policies and the pro-India stance of Mujib to cultivate better relations with the US, the Islamic world and potential foreign donors. With education a high priority, Muslim madrassahs continued to multiply, Islamic studies were incorporated into the state school curricula and in 1988 a constitutional amendment declared Islam the official state religion. Thanks to such initiatives, literacy in Bangladesh, among women as well as men, forged ahead of that in both India and Pakistan, while the birth-rate fell behind. Reduced fertility and wider literacy were revealed as by no means incompatible with Islamic orthodoxy.
The shift towards an Islamicised society and an Islamic definition of the state had been even more pronounced in Pakistan, though less obviously beneficial. There, according to one authority, Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime ‘wanted to set Pakistan “straight”, or as Zia used to say, correct the politicians’ qibla, or direction of prayer’.2 Following the loss of Bangladesh, Bhutto had reoriented the state towards the Islamic world; Zia-ul-Haq now finessed this position by narrowing its focus to Mecca. Besides encouraging religious schooling as in Bangladesh, he set out to reform society as a whole in accordance with what he took to be Islamic principle and law. Just as government was best served by the military, so the governed would be best served by Islam. The sale of alcohol was banned, public performances required a licence, donations to religious charities became obligatory, a Quranic financial system was announced and, most notoriously, sharia law was introduced, albeit on a limited basis. Provided the evidence conformed to the rather elevated standards of proof required by the sharia, religious courts were obliged to convict in accord with archaic notions of criminality, then mete out the draconian and gender-repugnant penalties – including floggings, stonings and amputations – appropriate to the Middle Ages.
Few doubted Zia’s sincerity in all this. In realigning Pakistani society with that of its Muslim neighbours, and in re-envisaging the nation as an impregnable bastion of West Asian Islam rather than as a battered relic of Muslim rule in India, he drew on personal conviction, as well as on his experience of secondment to the staff of King Hussein of Jordan in the early 1970s. Hussein had successfully reconciled pro-Western policies with Islamic orthodoxy; so could Zia. Personally devout, if politically devious, ‘[Zia’s] working assumption was that an Islamic state had to be preceded by an “Islamised” citizenry’ – with Zia himself setting the example.3 Unlike Yahya and Bhutto, he never drank; unlike Ershad and Bhutto, he was no philanderer. Whereas Bhutto had turned to Islam and cosied up to the Jamaat-i-Islami only when his regime was under threat, Zia had done so from the start and only regretted it later. King Hussein himself had eventually turned on his Palestinian jihadist guests and driven them from Jordan in the ‘Black September’ of 1970. Just so, when the doctrinaire Jamaat-i-Islami baulked at Zia’s gradualism, the general had no compunction in performing an about-turn, rebuffing the Islamist intellectuals and turning to a rival Jamaat (‘Muslim party’) dominated by the more conservative ulema.
Oddly the country to which Pakistan was most commonly likened was not in fact Jordan but Israel. Pakistan and Israel were unique in being twentieth-century nation-states predicated solely on the basis of religion. Additionally both had been wrenched from British rule in 1947, had opted for a territorial sovereignty that entailed partition, had struggled to assimilate substantial numbers of immigrants and had had to contend with ultraconservative minorities. Both, too, had survived three major wars with powerful neighbours; both had seen fit to develop a nuclear capacity (though both had long denied it); and both had habitually aligned themselves with the US.
More controversially, Pakistan was still being credited with ‘the dynamism and insecurity of an Israel’ as late as 1987. According to a staff writer on The Economist, Pakistan’s evident vitality at the time contrasted favourably with India’s ‘hopeless poverty of lethargic, underfed people’. Pakistanis were mostly bigger and healthier; they had more colour TVs and cars per 1000 people; and in real terms the growth rate of their economy had for years
been double that of India. As a result, ‘prosperity is now visible in even the poorest areas’ – which weren’t slums, according to The Economist, just ‘areas called slums’.
Yet the political insecurity implied by years of authoritarian rule and all manner of social conflicts was as acute as ever. However ‘dynamic’, Pakistan seemed ‘stuck in a crisis-ridden adolescence’. Compared to the chaotic state takeovers of Bhutto’s ‘Islamic socialism’, the ‘Islamic capitalism’ preferred by Zia went down well enough with The Economist. As under Ayub, military rule did wonders for the balance of payments. But the results were a credit less to indigenous investment and enterprise than to extraneous windfalls. Migrant workers’ remittances, mostly from the Gulf, were already being put at $2.9 billion a year, with US aid at around $300 million a year and the profits from the illicit trade in heroin at ‘incalculable millions’.4
Both the migrant phenomenon and Zia’s Islamising policies pre-dated the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979. It was therefore somewhat fortuitous that the role suddenly assigned to Islamabad in the Afghan conflict chimed so well with the heavily amplified muezzins already coming from Pakistan’s mushrooming minarets. On the face of it, Zia’s willingness to resume the responsibilities of a front-line state in the US containment of communism was a reprise of Ayub’s role. As Washington saw it, Soviet access to the Indian Ocean had to be blocked and the Soviet presence in Afghanistan challenged. Only Pakistan could deliver on both counts. Its Baluchistan province barred the path to the Arabian Sea, its military were accustomed to American weaponry, its Islamic credentials would defuse international criticism and its madrassahs teemed with motivated Muslim youths keen to support the Afghan jihad against the godless invader. The Pakistani army would not itself be expected to take the field, merely to act as a conduit and facilitator; and in return for reviving the Great Game of stirring up trouble across the north-west frontier, it would receive massive US arms shipments, financial aid and logistical support, plus some latitude in respect of its nuclear programme. Even a civilian government would have found it hard to resist such terms. Neither M. K. Junejo (Zia’s prime minister) nor Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif (their own prime ministers to the extent that they were freely elected) would cancel the arrangement.