The Duel (8 page)

Monarchy, you know, is coercion
Trade, is coercion too
The shopkeepers stall integral to throne and crown;
Profit from trade, tribute from occupation,
The world-conqueror is also a merchant
Killing without war a strategy;
In the rotation of his machines lurks death.

Alongside the hidden or explicit critiques of the poets, the new country faced serious problems. How would it function in the absence of the imperial parent? What were its global priorities, and, most important, where was the cash coming from? Unsurprisingly, India had claimed the giant’s share of the combined state’s assets. There was also the question of personnel. Who would run the army and the civil service, two crucial bequests of the British Empire? Some of Jinnah’s colleagues were fond of recounting a popular anecdote from the Mogul period, considered the high point of Muslim rule despite the fact that virtually all the Mogul rulers, much addicted to the pleasures of wine, women, and hashish, could hardly be described as model Muslims. A Mogul emperor is said to have summoned a highly respected scholar to the audience chamber in the palace and informed him, “I wish to make you the
qadi
[a chief justice with wide-ranging administrative powers] of this city.” The learned man responded, “Your majesty, I am not fit for this post.” A surprised ruler asked why this should be the case. The scholar replied, “Consider whether what I have just said is true or false. If it is true, then accept it. If it is a lie, then reflect whether it is permissible to make a liar the chief justice of this fair city.”

But few people in the new state confessed to not being fit for the positions on offer. This state had been created, after all, to make it easier for them to get all the jobs without competition from Hindus and
Sikhs. It now became their unflinching duty to keep permanent vigil and ensure that the lower classes of the Muslim population never received an education that might lead them to challenge their monopoly of power. This continuity has been carefully maintained.

Even in those trying times, during the first months after independence, most of the people at the top were mainly thinking about themselves. Young Pakistanis should have no illusions. The situation has worsened considerably, but there never was a golden age.

Take the Great Leader, Jinnah. A revealing portrait of his priorities emerges from a confidential report by Paul H. Alling, the Connecticut Yankee sent as the first U.S. ambassador to the new country. While presenting his credentials, Alling informed his hosts that the United States was “appreciative of the difficulties which beset a new nation” and was “deeply sympathetic with the many problems which face Pakistan.” Clearly this sympathy had its limits: the Joint Chiefs of Staff had contemptuously rejected an earlier request from the Pakistan government asking Washington for $2 billion to modernize the army.

Nonetheless the ambassador was invited to a picnic with Jinnah and his sister, Fatima. Assuming that important matters of state might be discussed, Alling prepared himself as best he could and joined the siblings on the governor-general’s launch close to their beach cottage on Sandspit. The discussion centered on nation building of a special variety. Jinnah was widely regarded as a fop, a somewhat prim and very proper Edwardian gentleman, far removed from the world of vulgar commerce and the mass struggles for independence. Decorum mattered a great deal to him. This was less true of Fatima, a thin woman with a drawn, careworn face who knew that her brother did not have long to live and the future needed to be secured. Given the refusal of his estranged daughter to leave Bombay, Fatima ran the household. As turbaned waiters were serving tea and cucumber sandwiches, Jinnah wanted to know how the ambassador was getting on with the acquisition of property for the new embassy and staff. Alling explained that they had a tentative program and everything was under control:

Both he and his sister then inquired whether we were interested in their house “Flagstaff” which he had told me a few days previously
was available for purchase. I explained that our negotiations for the purchase of an Ambassador’s residence at No 1 Bonus Road had progressed so far—before we had knowledge that “Flagstaff” was available—that it had proved impossible to withdraw.

He then asked if “Flagstaff” would not be suitable for the use of other personnel of the Embassy. In reply I said that we had, of course, explored that possibility but that our building expert felt he could not justify the purchase of such an extensive property for any of the subordinate personnel. I added that actually we were interested only in purchasing a few small houses or flats whereupon he said he would send us details of one or two such properties. I could sense, however, that Mr Jinnah and his sister were disappointed that we had been unable to purchase “Flagstaff.”
*

The Father of the Nation died soon after in September 1948. Alling had left for another posting a few months earlier. Several weeks before his departure, a thoughtful State Department sent Jinnah a small gift as a token of their esteem. Four ceiling fans, twelve inches in diameter, arrived at Flagstaff and were accepted. The embassy surveyors’ work had not been entirely in vain.

It was not an auspicious beginning either for the country or its relations with Washington. In the years that followed, “Flagstaffing” would reach epidemic proportions, with politicians and senior armed services personnel competing with each other for unearned income. Meanwhile the ruling elite would sigh with relief and happiness at being accepted as servitors in a Washington heaven, their country now a U.S. satrapy in a continent racked, for most of the twentieth century, by colonial wars and revolutions. Milton’s Satan was convinced that it was “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” Pakistan’s rulers proved it was possible to do both.

Jinnah had become the governor-general of Pakistan without having ever created a substantial party organization, let alone one of a mass
character. The United Provinces in India, one of the main regions of the Muslim middle classes for whom he spoke, was not included in the new state. Largely a stranger to the present provinces of West Pakistan, he simply confirmed the provincial landlords and feudalists in power as the representatives of his party there. The result was that the ruling elite in Pakistan never possessed a reliable political party capable of controlling the masses. The Muslim League soon became a clutch of corrupt and quarrelsome caciques who discredited it permanently. Pakistan was thus, from the outset, firmly dominated by its civilian bureaucracy and the army, both of which had faithfully served the British. The top echelons of each were composed of an exclusive English-educated elite, handpicked and trained for their tasks by the British Empire. In the first decade after partition, the civilian bureaucracy exercised political paramountcy in Pakistan. The CSP—Civil Service of Pakistan—comprised a closed oligarchy of five hundred functionaries commanding the state. Indeed, the two masterful heads of state of this period, Ghulam Mohammad (1951–55) and Iskander Mirza (1955–58), were co-opted directly from its ranks. They manipulated the token parliamentarism of the time, until it became so discredited that in 1958 a military coup was engineered, which brought General Ayub Khan to the presidency.

Given that Pakistan had been created in the name of religion, new questions arose. What would be the nature of the new state? Could a state created for one religious community be nonreligious? Jinnah was staunchly secular. In a memorable address to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, he left no room whatsoever for any doubt:

. . . every one of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what his colour, caste or creed, is first, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges and obligations. . . . I cannot emphasise it too much. We should begin to work in that spirit and in course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities—the Hindu community and the Muslim community—because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on—will vanish . . . you are free; you are free
to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan . . . you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.

This attempt to institutionalize a Muslim nationalism dissociated from religion was analogous to Zionism. Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and all the other implacable and ironhearted creators of a Jewish state were not religious. The same was, more or less, true of a number of Muslim League leaders. This was one reason why the more serious Islamist organizations in India, the Jamaat-e-Islami, led by Maulana Maududi, and the Majlis-i-Ahrar, had both opposed the demand for Pakistan to be “un-Islamic.” The Majlis had been set up in 1929 and was linked to the Congress Party. Its key founder, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, refused to accept Pakistan and became a leader of the Indian Congress Party and a close friend of Nehru’s. The Ahraris believed in a composite nationalism and had been long aligned with the Congress Party, but key figures split with Azad and decided to shift to Pakistan. Like Maududi, they loathed Jinnah. He was trying to steal their flock. For them the idea of a secular nationalist Muslim state was “a creature of the devil.” They migrated to Pakistan and gave battle.

The headquarters of the Islamist groups had been in what was now India. Had they been consistent in their beliefs, they would have stayed there propagating the idea of a world Islamic caliphate. It was not as if India were ever going to be denuded of Muslims, however hard the Hindu fundamentalists might try to bring this about. Some venerated Muslim leaders such as Maulana Abul Kalam Azad were members of the new Indian government. Azad had reduced the Muslims of Delhi to tears with his famous address pleading with them to stay on: “How can you bear to leave this our city, our Chandni Chowk, all that our forebears helped to build. . . .” But Maududi and the Ahraris chose Pakistan. Having done so, they were determined to purify it of all un-Islamic influences, and of these there were many, starting with the Great Leader himself. So began a long battle for the soul of the new
state. The terrain chosen by the Islamists was faith. They ignored non-Muslims since they were unbelievers and should be treated as such without any nonsense of equal citizenship. None of the Islamist groups, however, could agree on what constituted an Islamic state, though Saudi Arabia came close to being a model for many orthodox Sunni Muslims. Shia divines would hark back to the form of government during the Prophet’s lifetime, but there was never any agreement on the precise functions of the state or the composition of those who controlled it. What the followers of Maududi and the Ahrar leadership and smaller groups did agree on was that the Muslim League was led by a bunch of infidels, and that the country’s first foreign minister, Zafarullah Khan, was an apostate who deserved death. Why? Because, they argued, he belonged to the heretical Ahmediyya sect, which had no place in the Islamic community. Having opposed the creation of Pakistan, these worthies were now determined to prove their loyalty to the new state by sprinkling hydrochloric acid on the impure.

A campaign against the Ahmediyya community began with the birth of Pakistan and was the first episode in the long duel between Islamists and the state for control of the country. Islamic history is replete with “heretical sects” and reform movements from the earliest days after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. During the nineteenth century a self-proclaimed Mahdi (a controversial notion in Islam, a redeemer who will make himself known before the Day of Judgment) emerged in the Sudan at the head of a giant mass movement, created a guerrilla army, and defeated the British at Khartoum in 1885. Poor General Charles Gordon was martyred in the process.

Mirza Ghulam Ahmed (MGA), the founder of the Ahmediyya sect, was far removed from any notion of an armed struggle against British imperialism. He was born in Qadian in 1835, the grandson of a Muslim general who had fought under the legendary Sikh ruler Maharaja Ranjit Singh. In a subcontinent riven with religious controversy and Islam under attack by Christian missionaries as well as Arya Samajists (a Hindu reform movement), Mirza Ghulam Ahmed became a religious scholar, mired himself in Persian and Arabic manuscripts and books on early Islam, and developed an interesting synthesis in a lengthy four-volume defense of his faith and dozens of other works, including one
on Muslim philosophy that greatly impressed the Russian novelist Tolstoy. Unsurprisingly, the gifted scholar acquired a large following. No Elmer Gantry was he. His view that Islam in India had become obsessed with rituals and forgotten the content was close to the mark.

Had he confined himself to scholarship, Mirza G. undoubtably would have become a popular figure among Indian Muslims, but an overimmersion in any faith can sometimes have a hallucinatory impact, as Joan of Arc and Teresa of Ávila have demonstrated in the past. In 1882, MGA told his followers that he had received a divine revelation entrusting him with a special mission. This was dangerous territory and challenged Islamic tradition, according to which only the founder of the faith could be so blessed. MGA persisted, however, and as the recipient of divine messages he demanded recognition from his followers of this new status.

According to Ahmed, the revelation he’d received went like this: Jesus, son of Mary, had not died on the cross, had not ascended to heaven, but had rather been rescued off the cross by an intrepid band of disciples, cured of his wounds, and helped to escape from Palestine. He reached Kashmir, where he lived a long and happy life and died a natural death. This is strong stuff, but the revelation ended on a truly surreal note.

The rescue of Jesus and his asylum in Kashmir negated any idea of a literal Resurrection. What it meant was that someone else with all the attributes of Jesus would one day appear among the followers of the Prophet of Islam. This had now come to pass. Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, he announced, was none other than that person and should accordingly be greeted and treated as the Messiah, whose arrival had been foretold. He also declared himself a Mahdi. Ahmed declared he would wage the jihad of reason and defeat the opponents of Islam through argument and not violence.