India: A History. Revised and Updated (108 page)

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 ultra-conservative 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 predated 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.

Moreover, like New Delhi at the time of the birth of Bangladesh, Islamabad had reasons of its own for engaging in Afghanistan. The influx of refugees from the Afghan conflict, which by 1989 topped 3 million, placed an intolerable social burden on the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Baluchistan and, after some resettlement, Panjab. As well as the need for an internationally aided relief operation, the refugees brought to an already fiercely competitive labour market a contentious expertise in transport, opiates and firearms. A ‘Kalashnikov culture’ quickly overran cities like Peshawar and Karachi, further eroding the authority of the state. Clearly, enabling the refugees to return was in everyone’s best interests; and like Indira Gandhi in 1971, Zia was not above
stressing this humanitarian consideration as reason to back the
jihad
against the Soviets.

But nor were he and his military colleagues innocent of wider designs. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had proposed that the security of a Bengal-less Pakistan would best be served by a strategic realignment aimed at ‘defence in depth’. What Bhutto seems to have had in mind was a bulking up of Pakistan’s slender northern neck through alliances with central Asian neighbours and through the exercise of influence or authority in Afghanistan; that country could then serve as a possible redoubt in the event of an Indian invasion of Pakistan as well as affording some compensation for the loss of Bangladesh. The Soviet occupation elevated this exciting prospect into a veritable imperative. Reclaiming Afghan Islam from its new communist rulers qualified for the sanction of a
jihad,
and it also offered the satisfaction of a proxy war against India. Mrs Gandhi had conspicuously declined to condemn the Soviet occupation and had been rewarded with increased diplomatic, economic and intelligence access in Kabul; briefly Pakistan’s ‘defence in depth’ had looked to have invited encirclement. But the Afghan
jihad
held out the promise of reversing this situation and so confounding New Delhi as much as Moscow. It would also demonstrate how, in the new religious climate, Sunni Muslim identity transcended national sovereignties and territorial boundaries. India would in future be dealing not with a peripheral sliver of the erstwhile raj but with a key component of the Islamic world. In effect ‘defence in depth’ was to be realised as ‘defence in Islam’.

An additional consideration was that the long-standing demand by the NWFP’s Pushtu-speaking Pathans for an independent Pushtunistan might be blunted by the Afghan adventure and even turned to good account. Pathans straddled the long north-west frontier whose demarcation (as per the British-drawn ‘Durand Line’) Afghanistan had generally declined to recognise. But the prospect of Pushtu/Pathan reunification in the name of a universalist Islam could be expected to turn old foes on both sides of the frontier into eager activists. In short, the ‘a’ in the ‘Pakistan’ acronym that had been meant for a somewhat vague ‘Afghania’ might finally be realised.

According to the most perceptive account of modern Pakistan, the great achievement of Zia’s decade lay not in its patchy record of corporate privatisation but in its ‘privatising the concept of
jihad’.
⁵
The twin tasks of Islamising society and providing motivated manpower for the Afghan
jihad
were seen as complementary, yet also as probably beyond the capacity of the state and possibly injurious to the efficiency of the army. It was convenient, therefore, ‘to sub-contract them out’ to the numerous Muslim ideologues and institutions already empowered by Zia’s Islamising policies
and increasingly fronted by their own political parties and fielding their own privately trained militias. In cities like Karachi sectarian assaults by these vigilante enforcers, especially on the minority Shi’ah community, escalated in the late 1980s and added a further dimension to the mainly ethnic strife between Sindhis,
mohajirs,
Afghans and Pathans. The twice-elected but short-lived governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif in the 1990s, no less than Zia’s regime itself, ended amid widespread bloodshed and a near breakdown of law and order. Herein lay a pretext not only for the dismissal of incumbent governments but for the reimposition of military rule. In 1999 General Pervez Musharraf duly availed himself of it.

From the maelstrom of jihadist fervour released by the combination of Zia’s Islamisation and Washington’s indiscriminate support for the struggle in Afghanistan, there also emerged the bewildering array of jihadist
lashkar
(‘levies’) and
hisb
(‘parties’) that actually fought in Afghanistan and that then, after the Soviet retreat in 1989, continued to fight among themselves while more notoriously extending their activities to Kashmir, Pakistan itself, India and the wider world. Encouraged and initially directed by Pakistan’s pro-Islamist intelligence services, they included mainstream groupings like Hisb-ul-Mujahidin of the Jamaat-i-Islami; state-sponsored mavericks like the Lashkar-i-Taiba of a religious foundation based near Lahore; and assorted recruitment and training centres attached to radical foundations like the Red Mosque in Islamabad. By 2000 the Hisb-ul-Mujahidin would be the most active of the many terrorist groups operating in Kashmir. In 2007 the Red Mosque would be a scene of carnage when the Musharraf regime stormed the premises in a bid to contain its vigilante activities. And a year later it would be the Lashkar-i-Taiba who stood accused of the carnage in Bombay when
mujahidin
rampaged through that city targeting prestige venues like the Taj Hotel.

Most of these groups attracted funds and fighters from outside South Asia, especially after 1989 when the role of the US and the Western powers came to be perceived in a new light. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, quickly followed by the collapse of the communist bloc, had ended US interest in the Afghan conflict. Six years of civil war ensued in which the Afghan contenders were left to their own devices, plus such logistical support as Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) saw fit to render and such financial assistance as could be obtained from elsewhere in the Muslim world. Meanwhile the
mujahidin’s
former Western sponsors were exposed not as sympathetic onlookers but as rank traitors. The 1990-1 UN action over Kuwait and the ongoing sense of outrage over Israeli actions in Palestine and a US military presence in the Arabian peninsula brought to Muslim
minds all the horrors of the crusades and the perfidy of the post-First World War carve-up of the Middle East. The West, as politically treacherous as it was morally corrupt, was revealed in its true colours as the inveterate enemy of Islam.

In Pakistan, those Afghan Pathans who had been raised in the sprawling refugee camps of the NWFP and schooled in their rough-and-ready madrassahs were encouraged to blame their plight on the US betrayal and a new world order that was one-sidedly Western. Responding to this perception, they stressed the redemptive powers of a puritanical Islam when launching a movement known simply as the Taliban.
Taliban
being Muslim ‘students’ (as opposed to the
ulema
of ‘scholars’), the movement had little time for the niceties of Quranic exegesis or the bickering of Muslim divines. Untainted by involvement in Washington’s proxy Afghan war in the 1980s, and committed to restoring an Islamic peace in that country, albeit of the harshest hue, the Taliban entered the Afghan fray apparently with the support of Pakistan’s alternating prime ministers, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, and of the ISI.