Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century (11 page)

The principal consequence of Benazir Bhutto’s death was the setback it has dealt to the US-inspired plan to anoint her as the acceptable civilian face of continuing Musharraf rule. The calculations were clear: Musharraf was a valuable ally of the West against the Islamist threat in the region, but his continuing indefinitely to rule Pakistan as a military dictator was becoming an embarrassment. The former Chief Martial Law Administrator had to doff his uniform—long overdue, since he was three years past the retirement age for any general—and find a credible civilian partner to help make a plausible case for democratization. Benazir—well
spoken, well networked in Washington and London, and passionate in her avowals of secular moderation, however self-serving—was the chosen one.

The other exiled civilian ex-prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, was none of these things and, having been the victim of General Musharraf’s coup, was considerably less inclined to cooperate with his defenestrator. So Nawaz was returned to exile in Saudi Arabia when he attempted to come home and, when that ploy did not work (the Saudis having no particular desire to take Benazir’s side over his), was disqualified from running for office on the risible grounds that his attempts as an elected prime minister to prevent a coup against himself amounted to hijacking and terrorism. This left the field free for Benazir to do sufficiently well in the elections to become prime minister of Pakistan for a third time.

Her first two stints had, however, been inglorious. From 1988 to 1990 she had been overawed by the military, whose appointed president duly dismissed her from office on plausible charges of corruption, mainly involving her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who had acquired the nickname ‘Mr Ten Percent’. Her second innings (1993–96) was, if anything, worse: charges of rampant peculation (and administrative adhockery) mounted, even as her avowedly moderate government orchestrated the creation of the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan. This time it was a president of Pakistan from her own party who felt obliged to dismiss her. To assume that a third stint would have been any different requires a leap of faith explicable only by the mounting international anxiety over Musharraf’s fraying rule.

But Benazir’s true merit lay in the absence of plausible alternatives. She was no great democrat—as her will, appointing her husband and nineteen-year-old son to inherit her party, confirms. The Bhuttoist ethos is a uniquely Pakistani combination of aristocratic feudalism and secular populism. To her, democracy was a means to power, not a philosophy of politics. But the same was true of the other contenders in Pakistan’s political space—the conservative Punjabi bourgeoisie represented by Nawaz Sharif, the moderate pro-militarists grouped around Musharraf, the deeply intolerant Islamists and the assorted regionalist and sectarian parties whose appeal is limited to specific provinces. Musharraf knew that all that elections would ensure was a temporary rearrangement
of the balance of forces among these diverse elements. But it would enable him to remain in charge as a ‘civilian’ president while portraying his Pakistan—more credibly than heretofore—as the last bastion of democratic moderation in the face of the Islamist menace. When this hope collapsed and Musharraf went into exile, the ascent of Benazir’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, to the presidency meant that a civilian of dubious repute—and one with very little ability to resist the entrenched power of the military behind the scenes—had now to assume this mantle.

Democrats in India may well believe that the Pakistani people deserve better, but it is difficult to imagine a viable alternative to military rule, cloaked to a greater or lesser degree in civilian raiment. As explained earlier, the central fact of Pakistani politics has always been the power of the military, which has ruled the country directly for thirty-two of its sixty-four years of existence and indirectly the other half of the time. The military can be found not only in all the key offices of government, but running real-estate and import–export ventures, petrol pumps and factories; retired generals head most of the country’s universities and think tanks. The proportion of national resources devoted to the military is by far the highest in the world. Every once in a while a great surge of disillusionment with the generals pours out into the streets and a ‘democratic’ leader is voted into office, but the civilian experiment always ends badly, and the military returns to power, to general relief. The British political scientist W.H. Morris-Jones once famously observed that the only political institutions in Pakistan are the coup and the mob. Neither offers propitious grounds for believing that an enduring democracy is around the corner.

The elections that created Pakistan’s current civilian government saw Benazir’s party benefiting from a sympathy vote after her killing, but in the absence of a charismatic leader, it was inevitably obliged to come to an accommodation with the generals. Despite widespread anger at Musharraf’s failure to protect Benazir, his successor, General Kayani, determines how far the civilian government can go on all the issues that matter to the country, and his personal authority has been confirmed by a three-year extension of his tenure beyond the scheduled retirement age. Kayani, a former head of the ISI, knows how useful the Islamist militants are to his military goals, but he is also conscious that his men have lost
control of many of the more wild-eyed elements they had previously encouraged and funded. The result is a particularly delicate version of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. The Islamists, who have never won more than 10 per cent of the popular vote nationally, fared even worse electorally in the aftermath of Benazir’s killing; most people assume her killers were religious fundamentalists. The Islamist sympathizers in the Pakistani military, of whom there are many in key positions (notably in the ISI), are also on the defensive in the face of popular fury at Benazir’s murder and the assaults on Pakistani military installations (IGHQ Rawalpindi and the naval base in Mehran, near Karachi) by Islamist fundamentalists. The great danger in Pakistan has always lain in the risk of a mullah–military coalition. The death of Benazir and the events in its aftermath have made that less likely for now, and that may remain her most significant legacy.

International affairs all too often seems a weighty subject, full of complexity and nuance, laden with portents of tension and conflict. No wonder it lends itself to overly solemn treatment, full of abstract analyses and obscure allusions: the relations between countries, it is usually assumed, cannot be understood through the recitation of trivial anecdotes.

True enough. And yet sometimes a minor incident, a tempest in a teacup, can illuminate broader foreign policy challenges. Something of this nature happened in the hot summer of 2011, when Aatish Taseer, the estranged son (by an Indian mother) of the assassinated Governor of Pakistani Punjab Salman Taseer, wrote a searing column in the
Wall Street Journal
, with the provocative title ‘Why My Father Hated India’, on the pathologies of hatred that in his view animated Pakistan’s attitude to our country.

‘To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan,’ Aatish Taseer averred. ‘This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan’s animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness
to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.’

He went on to make his point in language that was sharp and, at least to this reader, heartfelt and accurate. I do not know Aatish Taseer, nor had I met his colourful father, but I have admired the young man’s writing, particularly his poignant ruminations on Salman Taseer’s murder by his Islamist bodyguard earlier this year. So I was surprised to see the outraged reactions his article provoked from Pakistani liberal journalists. A number of them whose ideas I have appreciated and whom I ‘follow’ on the social networking site Twitter—the likes of Marvi Sirmed and Mosharraf Zaidi, widely respected progressive thinkers both—reacted with rage and derision. One of them, the estimable Ejaz Haider, who has penned some courageous pieces in the Pakistani press criticizing his own country and some morally deplorable ones defending Hafiz Saeed, went so far as to author an entire column to disparage and deconstruct Aatish Taseer’s.

Young Taseer had, in his piece, put the onus on the Pakistani Army for that country’s problems, and particularly for diverting the vast amounts of American aid it has received (he underestimated it at ‘$11 billion since 9/11’) to arming itself against India. He added, powerfully, words I would have gladly put my own name to: ‘In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability but rather a backyard, which—once the Americans leave—might provide Pakistan with “strategic depth” against India. In order to realize these objectives, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some—such as Laskhar-e-Tayyba’s 2008 attack on Mumbai—actively supported.

‘The army’s duplicity was exposed decisively this May,’ he went on, ‘with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets. This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan
than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country’s wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge property holdings.’

It is hard to imagine anyone in India, however sympathetic they might be to Pakistan, dissenting from this view of the malign role of the Pakistani military. In our naivety, we also tend to assume that Pakistani liberals would agree with us, seeing the salvation of their land lying in greater democracy and development, free of the stranglehold of the world’s most lopsidedly funded military. Alas, judging by their reactions to Taseer’s article, this seemed not to be the case.

In his rebuttal, Ejaz Haider went into great detail about the strength and deployment patterns of the Indian Army, as if to justify the Pakistani military’s behaviour. But there was no recognition whatsoever that India’s defence preparedness is prompted entirely by the fact that Pakistan has launched four incursions into our territory, in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999; that India is a status quo power that manifestly seeks nothing more than to be allowed to grow and develop in peace, free from the attentions of the Pakistani military and the militants and terrorists its sponsors; and, bluntly, that there is not and cannot be an ‘Indian threat’ to Pakistan, simply because India wants nothing from Pakistan except peace.

No, as I have already argued, the ‘Indian threat’ is merely a useful device cynically exploited by the Pakistani military to justify their power and pelf. But Pakistani liberals are particularly prone to the desire to prove themselves true nationalists; it is the best way to ensure that their otherwise heretical opinions are not completely discredited by the men in uniform who hold the reins of power in the state.

In a newspaper column, therefore, I wrote that this otherwise minor editorial spat had demonstrated to me that Indians needed to put aside our illusions that there are many liberal partners for us on the other side of the border who echo our diagnosis of their plight and share our desire to defenestrate their military. Nor, I added, should we be surprised: a Pakistani liberal is, after all, a Pakistani before he is a liberal.

This column provoked howls of even greater outrage across the border than young Taseer’s original effort had. (It didn’t help that an Indian headline writer had chosen to title it ‘Delusional Liberals’, which
raised additional hackles among those in Pakistan who felt the noun, but not the adjective, applied to them.) The reactions, both in print and even more angrily in social media forums, were sharp. Inevitably, I was subjected to the usual bouts of invective and abuse that have so cheapened discourse in the age of the Internet, where the refuge provided by anonymity has encouraged a level of vileness that few would permit themselves to express face-to-face. But those need not detain us here. Far more interesting and worthy of attention were three columns in the mainstream Pakistani media responding to mine. By broadening and deepening the terms of the debate beyond the Taseer piece, they made my original column worth writing.

The tenor of the three articles (none of whose authors I had met by then or known personally) varied. The most liberal of the trio, Marvi Sirmed, in her column in the
Daily Times
, began by clarifying that she had actually no disagreement with the central thesis of Aatish Taseer’s article (on the various misdeeds of the Pakistani military establishment), but had rejected the author’s assertion that his father, Salman Taseer, the late Governor of Pakistani Punjab, ‘hated’ India. She also objected to Aatish’s claim that Pakistan was the ‘dream of a poet’ (Muhammad Iqbal, who first wrote of a Muslim homeland within India), though this was not an issue I had dwelt on in my own piece. And she ended with two impressive points I had no difficulty acknowledging: that I should be more conscious of the diversity of the Pakistani liberal community, and that Ms Sirmed saw herself as a proud Pakistani whose love of her country did not oblige her to hate India. Marvi Sirmed is the kind of intelligent, broad-minded Pakistani most Indians would have no difficulty engaging with, and I tipped my (metaphorical) Gandhi cap to her.