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Illustration by Abro
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Since ages, certain sections of the Pakistani intelligentsia have been insisting on the importance of changing the country’s national narrative (to better fight the social aspects of Pakistan’s war against religious extremism).
They are correct in suggesting that the more militant ogres now at war with the state of Pakistan in the mountains, hills and even in some congested areas of urban Pakistan, are (in a way) armed expressions and projections of a rather myopic and suspicious national narrative.
This narrative, to them, is the result of whatever that was concocted in the name of a national ideology many years ago and then proliferated through school text books and the state-owned media until it began to inform the political and social mindset of the Pakistani polity as a whole.
So what was this narrative? And why even today the military and political establishments of the country are finally looking to tweak it, if not replace it outright?
The narrative is largely blamed for popularising a peculiar idea of nationhood that sees Pakistan as a unique state based on a rather ill-defined version of the Muslim faith — a state at odds with enemies who are constantly conspiring to undo it.
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born” — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci
Many now believe that once this idea leapt out from school text books and began to influence the constitution and state policies, it started to encourage both vigilante as well as state-backed maneuvers that were violent and at times outright bigoted but explained away as actions undertaken to defend the country’s rather abstract religious rims and ideological whims.
Furthermore, all this infused a dangerous strain of confusion among large sections of the Pakistani polity. And consequently, the polity did not know exactly how to respond to (or sometimes even condemn) actions undertaken in the name of religion.
Alas the death of over 50,000 thousand civilians, soldiers, policemen and politicians at the hands of extremists and mainly due to last month’s horrendous terrorist attack on a school in Peshawar has finally managed to shake large sections of the Pakistani public and the military and political establishment to at least begin to question ideas that so openly encourage such carnages in the country.
When the narrative — that today is increasingly being seen as a beast of sorts — was first constructed, it did not foresee the fact that one day it will radically transfigure and begin to actually retard the country’s political and social evolution.
The first major move to construct this narrative was made in the early 1970s by the populist and left-leaning government of Z.A. Bhutto (PPP).
A subject called Pakistan Studies was introduced in the national curriculum in 1972 by the Bhutto regime.
Over the decades, Pakistan Studies books have gradually evolved into becoming one-dimensional manuals of how to become and behave like a ‘true Pakistani’.
Though the content in these books pretends to be of a historical nature, it is anything but. It is a monologue broken into various chapters about how the state of Pakistan sees, understands and explains the country’s history, society and culture, and the students are expected to believe it.
It’s an instruction manual that was introduced as a compulsory subject (almost in a panic) by the Bhutto regime soon after the country lost its eastern wing (East Pakistan) after a brutal civil war.
In 1973 the government organised a large conference in which some of the country’s leading intellectuals, historians and scholars were invited. They were encouraged to debate and thrash out a nationalist narrative that could then be turned into a state ideology and imposed through legislative means and school text books.
In a nutshell the emerging narrative that came out from this exercise went something like this: West Pakistan was always the real Pakistan because it’s a cohesive and seamless region that runs from north to south along the mighty Indus River. This region’s population had predominately been Muslim (ever since the 12th Century), and though it may have a number of ethnicities, its population has similar views on Islam and had largely remained aloof from the happenings in India’s ancient seat of power in Delhi.
This meant that the Bengali East Pakistan that lay thousands of miles away from West Pakistan was an unnatural part of what had appeared on the map as Pakistan in 1947.
The narrative was created to soften the blow of East Pakistan’s separation and the Bhutto government sanctioned the project to construct an ideological narrative that would help the state redeem the floundering belief in a united Pakistan.
This was the immediate aim. But as the Bhutto government came under increasing criticism from the religious parties, it began to move rightwards and tried to occupy the space that it believed was being created by a so-called religious revivalism taking place at the time in the Muslim world.
Consequently the narrative began to be increasingly expressed through populist religious symbolism and finally became consolidated as a staunchly reactionary entity once the Ziaul Haq dictatorship took over (July 1977) and further honed the narrative to justify the regime’s draconian laws (enacted in the name of faith) and to also whip up support for the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan.
What we have been witnessing in the last 20 years or so are the effects of the failure of this narrative. It became a convenient ideological, legislative and rhetorical tool for military dictators and politicians alike to influence and subdue a growingly muddled and conservative populace.
Eventually such a narrative also became a weapon in the hands of influential clerics and radical outfits that believed that they alone were worthy and willing to turn Pakistan into what the narrative had described the country to be: ‘A bastion of faith’.
Our collective failure lies in us not fully understanding how the state’s experiments in the context of seeding a non-organic ideology has contributed the most in whatever that has gone down in this country in terms of faith-based violence and the ever increasing episodes of bigotry.
It has thrown Pakistan further towards the wrong side of history. This must stop. We are in a dire need of a new narrative.
The present government must make use of the growing consensus against extremism and replicate what the government did in 1973. It should organise an expansive conference and invite the country’s leading intellectuals, media personnel, historians, artistes, and religious and secular scholars, and encourage them to generate a brand new existential narrative of Pakistani nationhood that can replace the one that has destructively failed.
This conference of resourceful and well-informed minds should then come up with a new narrative that would once and for all help Pakistan survive and grow into a multicultural, progressive and modern Muslim nationalist state and society.
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, January 25th, 2015
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