The Duel (9 page)

Mainstream Islam responded to this with a shower of fatwas, but the Ahmediyya sect continued to win adherents over the years and was in 1901 registered as a separate Muslim sect. The founder died in 1908 and was succeeded by another scholar as the caliph. On the latter’s death Mirza G.’s son, Mirza Bashir-ud-din, became the head of the organization. This, as is so often the case with sects, led to a split. A
group that accepted the teaching but rejected the claims of prophethood seceded and set up their own group in Lahore.

In 1947, according to their own estimates, there were over two hundred thousand Ahmediyyas in both factions. They became known for their missionary zeal abroad, and Ahmediyya missions were active in East and South Africa, where they achieved some success. Like the Baha’is in neighboring Iran, they looked after their own, had a much higher level of education than the rest of the country, and made sure that none of their number was ever in serious need of food or shelter. They were represented in virtually every sphere of public life. Their philanthropy was appreciated by many people who were far removed from their interpretation of Islam. The poet Iqbal, who understood Islamic philosophy and history better than most, was certainly impressed by Ahmediyya scholarship and worked with them in some areas.

The Islamist groups began a violent campaign against them, attacking their meetings, killing an Ahmediyya army major, demanding the sacking of the foreign minister, and insisting that the sect be declared non-Muslim. This could easily have been stopped, but sections of the Muslim League leadership in the Punjab, reeking of opportunism, jumped on the bandwagon, including the oily-tongued, Oxford-educated Mian Mumtaz Daultana, who had flirted mildly with Communism during his youth. Daultana effectively prevented the police from providing protection to the besieged Ahmediyya community. In 1953, serious riots broke out, Ahmediyya shops were looted and mosques attacked, and some members of the community lost their lives. As a nine-year-old it was my first encounter with irrationality. Just below our apartment in Lahore was a Bata shoe store, owned by an Ahmediyya, whose son was at school with me. Returning from school one day, I saw it being attacked by armed hoodlums. Nobody was hurt, but it was a frightening experience.

An angry provincial governor called on the army to intervene. Martial law was declared in Lahore. General Azam gave orders to shoot rioters on sight. Within twenty-four hours the crisis was over. Maulana Maududi and others were tried for treason, and Maududi was sentenced to death, which was later commuted.

A court of inquiry was established to inquire into the cause of the
disturbances. It was presided over by Justice Munir and Justice Kayani. The published report, I have often argued, is a classic of its type, a modern masterpiece of political literature. It should become part of the national curriculum if a serious state education system is ever established. The two judges began to question Muslim clerics from rival schools, and different factions testified as to what they thought constituted a Muslim state and their definition of a Muslim. With each new reply the judges found it difficult to conceal their incredulity, some of which was reflected in their report. All the groups concurred in the view that a secular state was impermissible and that non-Muslims could not be treated as equal citizens. This raised a new problem:

The question, therefore, whether a person is or is not a Muslim will be of fundamental importance, and it was for this reason that we asked most of the leading ulama [religious scholars] to give their definition of a Muslim, the point being that if the ulama of the various sects believed the Ahmadis to be
kafirs
[unbelievers], they must have been quite clear in their minds not only about the grounds of such belief but also about the definition of a Muslim because the claim that a certain person or community is not within the pale of Islam implies an exact conception of what a Muslim is. The result of this part of the inquiry, however, has been anything but satisfactory, and if considerable confusion exists in the mind of our ulama on such a simple matter, one can easily imagine what the differences on more complicated matters will be....

Keeping in view the several definitions given by the ulama, need we make any comment except that no two learned divines are agreed on this fundamental. If we attempt our own definition as each learned divine has done and that definition differs from that given by all others, we unanimously go out of the fold of Islam. And if we adopt the definition given by any one of the ulama, we remain Muslims according to the view of that alim, but kafirs according to the definition of everyone else.
*

The demand to declare the Ahmediyyas infidels faded from public view. No government took it seriously, and threats to the community receded. Ironically, it was Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, under political siege by a combined opposition in 1976, who thought he would outflank the Islamist parties by implementing three of their old demands: a ban on alcohol, Friday and not Sunday as the official holiday, and, more serious, declaring the Ahmediyyas a non-Muslim sect. This craven capitulation could only strengthen those who had first proposed these measures. Ahmediyyas remain Muslims in India, Britain, France, Germany, East Africa, but not in Pakistan. The late Pakistani physicist Dr. Abdus Salam was the only Muslim scientist to win the Nobel Prize. That he was an Ahmedi would make the preceding sentence inaccurate in Pakistan.

The Pakistan envisaged by Jinnah never took off. The geographical entity died on the killing fields of East Pakistan. Over 70 percent of Pakistanis were born after the debacle of 1971. Amnesia prevails. Few have any idea what took place or even that there was once another country. The country’s name was the brainchild of Chaudhry Rahmat Ali, an Indian Muslim studying in London during the thirties and evidently with time on his hands. He played around with the initials of Muslim majority areas in India:
P
represented the Punjab,
A
was for Afghanistan,
K
was Kashmir,
S
represented Sind. Unfortunately,
pak
also means “pure” but, more interesting, there was no
B
for Bengal or Baluchistan. Could a nuclear Pakistan dominated by the military fragment still further, and if so, what might be the consequences for the region as a whole? Whose interests would another division serve? Those without knowledge or understanding of their own history are fated to repeat it. What follows is an attempt to explain the past and the present in the hope of a better future.

I
N OCTOBER 1958, A DECADE AFTER THE
G
REAT
L
EADER’S DEATH
, the political system he had set in place received its first shock. The Pakistan Army, backed by Washington, decided on a preemptive strike against democracy and declared martial law. Some months later at a public poetry reading, most of the participants confined themselves to reciting love poems. When it was his turn, the Punjabi poet Ustad Daman began to recite a poem about birds twittering. Some of us shouted from the audience, “For Allah’s sake, say something!” This unseemly provocation elicited an extemporized couplet:

Now each day is sweet and balmy,
Wherever you look, the army.

Cheered by the large crowd, he was then picked up by the police a few hours later and held in custody for a week or so. Pakistan had changed.

How and why did this happen? Within a year of the country’s founding, the Great Leader was dead, leaving behind a set of notables— mainly landed gentry sometimes doubling as hereditary religious
leaders (Pirs, Makhdooms, etc.)—who sometimes wondered how they were going to muddle through. The new rulers were soon confronted with two contradictions, one of them serious.

The first of these concerned the political geography of the new country. It was divided in two parts, East and West, separated from each other by a thousand miles of India and having little in common except religion, and sometimes not even that. If Islam constituted a nationality (as the Muslim League insisted but as orthodox Islamists initially resisted), this was always going to be its big test. Sixty percent of the population was in East Pakistan, with their own language, tradition, culture, diet, and time zone. The overwhelming bulk of the bureaucracy and army was from or based in West Pakistan. The reason was simple. The Punjab had been the “sword arm” of the raj especially after the conclusion of the Sikh Wars of the nineteenth century. A large share of the native soldiery came from the most economically backward parts of the subcontinent; the army was considered a step up by poor peasant families groaning under the yoke of native landlords. The British virtually restricted recruitment to the countryside. They were suspicious of the urban petit bourgeois and saw the Bengalis as the epitome of this layer, loquacious and unreliable, who had to be kept out.

In 1933, General Sir George MacMunn (1869–1952), a doughty warrior from the Scottish lowlands, wrote a quaint tract entitled
The Martial Races of India,
replete with imperial justifications for the pattern of recruitment to the British Indian army:

The staunch old yeoman who came into the Indian commissioned ranks via the rank and file, or the young Indian landowner made the Indian officer as we know him. . . . The clever young men of the Universities were quite unfitted for military work... the army officers had long realised that the Indian intelligentsia would never make officers.

This rule was relaxed during the Second World War when expediency dictated the entry of educated officers, and a number of undesirables (including even Communists after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union) were hastily recruited to assist the war effort in India and Britain.
Postwar pruning got rid of most of this layer. Others left voluntarily. Staunch yeomen and younger sons of the landed gentry remained.

The British Indian army was shaken during the war. The fall of Singapore to the Japanese had pierced the myth of British invulnerability. There was no fail-safe inoculation against the nationalist disease, and a number of officers and soldiers (some of them from the “martial races”) captured by the Japanese defected and set up the Indian National Army, which fought alongside their captors against the British on the basis of wrongheaded nationalist logic according to which “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” something that is almost always never the case. Empires old and new have no friends. They only have interests. The civil conflicts during partition also colored the thinking of Indian officers in the north. They had witnessed appalling massacres that they were helpless to prevent, largely because the imperial power feared that divided loyalties would lead to chaos if there was a breakup of the army along communal lines. For that reason the military was not encouraged to intervene in order to stop the massacres. At best, the army offered some limited protection to refugees on both sides.

This army itself was partitioned along communal lines, creating two different command structures, each temporarily under the control of a British general. Consequently, the new Pakistan army maintained most of the old colonial traditions with continuity preserved in the first instance by the appointment of General Sir Frank Messervy and subsequently Sir Douglas Gracey, a colonial veteran, as its first two commanders in chief. In addition, over five hundred other British officers stayed behind to give the new fighting force a much-needed boost. This created some resentment. In 1950, a small group of more nationalist-minded officers (including a general, Akbar Khan), together with an even tinier collection of Communist intellectuals, discussed a possible coup d’état to topple the pro-West government. The half-baked plot was uncovered, and the participants (including the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the literary critics Sibte Hassan and Sajjad Zaheer) were sent to prison, and the infinitesimal Pakistan Communist Party was banned.

In contrast to Hindu and Sikh detachments, no all-Muslim units had been allowed in the colonial army, a decision dating back to the 1857 anti-British uprising for which the imperial power wrongly held
the old Muslim aristocracy exclusively responsible. In fact, it was a proto-nationalist rebellion by Indians of every stripe against the new conquerors. The old recruitment policy persisted till well after partition. Few Bengalis were recruited to the Pakistan army. The policy was changed much later with the partially successful, if politically disastrous, Islamization during the late seventies and eighties that is discussed in a subsequent chapter and whose effects are still present.

The first Pakistani military chief met all MacMunn’s criteria. General Ayub Khan was tall, mustachioed, and well built. He was from tried and tested stock, the son of a risaldar major (a noncommissioned officer), and regarded by his superiors as an obedient and trustworthy soldier. He was to fully justify that trust, remaining loyal first to the British and later to the United States throughout his years in military politics. He reached the top effortlessly, helped by fate: General Iftikhar, due to succeed Gracey and generally regarded as a sharper and more independent-minded officer, perished in an air crash in 1949. It would be unfair to single out Ayub Khan as the only native conservative-minded and submissive, pro-British senior officer in the new Pakistan army. Few of his well-trained contemporaries were any different. The same could be said about their Indian counterparts. Reading through the prolix and self-serving memoirs of postindependence generals on both sides of the Indo-Pak divide is tedious and unrewarding. The books are revealing, however, in that they provide an insight to the psychology of the generals. The golden age, for most of them, lies firmly in the past, with gimlets (gin cocktails) at lunchtime or a post-sunset whiskey with their pink-skinned superiors. That they had not been allowed membership in exclusive whites-only clubs till after independence did not bother them unduly. They had got used to the social apartheid. At their happiest fighting alongside and working under British officers, they would treasure those times for the rest of their lives. Ayub Khan, for instance, had been among an early batch of young native cadets sent to Sandhurst when the “Indianization” of the army had become necessary. He would later proudly recall that he was “the first foreign cadet to be promoted Corporal and given two stripes.”