Pakistan will be celebrating its fifty-second Independence Day in another week or so. The government of Nawaz Sharif has promised elaborate arrangements for marking this particular national holiday. Perhaps the decision emanates from a desire to divert public attention from the Kargil fiasco.

Government’s failure to come clean with the people and the street agitation, against the decision to climb down from Kargil, mainly by the radical right-wing Jamaat-i-Islami, which incidentally had not even participated in the struggle for Pakistan, have created an aura of confusion if not gloom among the people.

Jamat-I-Islami’s charge that Nawaz Sharif chickened out is evidently rooted in emotions and disregards the fact that discretion is better part of valor. The worldwide disapproval of the Kargil operation indicates that it was not a well-conceived project. It fell to the lot of Nawaz Sharif to pull the planners’ chestnuts out of the fire.

The BJP government in India had, on the other hand, gone all out to stir up jingoistic hysteria in the country with an eye perhaps on the forthcoming general elections. The diplomatic back up of its military moves left little to be desired.

The Washington accord is now being presented as a great military victory, whereas the number of body bags reaching from Kargil to various parts of that country tell a different story. That a few hundred valorous guerrillas could hold at bay several battalions is swept under the rug.

The euphoria has led many quarters in India, particularly a section of the media, to question the very raison d’être of Pakistan. It is being called a “failed state”, a “dying economy on artificial respiration provided by IMF”. Some Muslim pseudo-intellectuals argue that the Muslims of the sub-continent would have been better off had the country not been partitioned. For, in that case the Muslims would have had a much better clout in the affairs of the sub-continent by being almost 30 % of the total population.

I had the advantage of visiting India last year after a gap of almost half a century. I traveled extensively in Andhra, Karnataka and Maharashtra. Some inescapable impressions gained are jotted down below.

• Indian economy is doing much better than that of Pakistan mainly because it is not anchored by feudalism and an avaricious ruling elite. Its defense expenditure too is much less on a per capita basis -$10 per person per year as against almost $30 in Pakistan. It is a savings, rather than consumption, oriented economy.
• It is providing vast educational facilities to its youth, both boys and girls.
• It is sinking under the weight of its population. Man to man a Pakistani looks physically a taller, healthier person, better fed and clothed. Indian cities are choking with pollution. In some areas I was gasping for breath. The government may be having laudable foreign exchange reserves, but the people are reeling under intense poverty. Many live, marry, breed and bring up children on sidewalks. Bullock carts, a rare sight in Pakistan, carry farm produce to the markets. But, India is also producing at the same time large numbers of soft and hard ware engineers and other highly qualified professionals with outstanding attainments by any standard. Women are, by and large, emancipated and work shoulder to shoulder with men.
• Most important finding was that even after fifty-two years of independence, Indian social development has failed to produce a Hindu-Muslim composite culture. The two communities continued to live in two different compartments and interact mainly in the market place only.
• The caste system, the bane of Hindu society and the chief obstacle in the way of a composite culture and perhaps one of the main instigators of the two nation theory, continues to wield almost the same influence as it did fifty years back.

It is trite to mention, though absolutely true, that Pakistan came into existence because the Muslims were for centuries made to feel that they constituted a foreign graft on the Indian body which had rejected it. Post-independence Indian Muslims have generally reconciled to their status as second class citizens.

The Brahmanic caste system did not admit of the acceptance of Muslims in a class other than the lowest, the menial, the untouchable, the ‘maleech’. Naturally this status was not acceptable to the Muslims who had ruled over India for centuries. Not surprisingly enough, when a Hindu converted to Islam, it meant his complete break from the past. He acquired a new name, a new personality, radiating confidence, grit and courage, and membership in a community adhering to the concept of brotherhood and equality of man. This set free the convert’s spirit from the bondage of the caste system to labor and live well as an equal. This concept of the equality of man was the chief attraction in a society given to discrimination by birth.

Budhism, Jainism and Sikhism were all for the concept of equality and therefore opposed to the Brahmanic domination. But the shrewd Brahmanic elite maneuvered to absorb all of them into the Hindu fold. They failed to do that with the Muslims. And, they succeeded in remaining at the helm of affairs even after independence and despite the spread of secular Western education. That gives an idea of how deep-seated the caste system is in the Hindu society.

Let us now look at the problem from Hindu (Brahman) viewpoint. Waves after waves of Muslim armies invaded India and invariably defeated and subjugated the opposing Hindu forces. Ghaznavi invaded India seventeen times. Qutbuddin Aibak established the first proper Muslim empire, the Slave Dynasty, towards the end of the twelfth century. This was followed by another hundred year rule of the Khilji dynasty. Then came the Lodhis who were replaced in 1526 by Babur, a Moghul from Farghana in central Asia, who founded the Moghul empire which lasted 331 years till the British took over the state in 1857.

Throughout these seven centuries of Muslim rule over India, the Muslims comprised between 15-20 per cent of the total population. Although the Moghuls adopted many Hindu customs, married into Hindu families and accommodated them in senior echelons of administration, there was never a true assimilation of the two communities and development of a composite culture. The Muslims continued to be the ruling, warrior class with a compatible, congruent status in Indian society.

The Hindus, smarting under the dominant position of the Muslims, always looked for a leveler, an equalizer. They saw the opportunity approaching them as the combined struggle of both communities for independence gathered momentum. Muslim intellectuals and leaders had started suspecting the designs of the Hindu Brahman leaders as far back as the eighteenth century.

The idea of the two-nation theory had thus been germinating for a century or more before it was articulated by Sir Syed and his team and formally presented by Iqbal at Allahabad session of the Muslim League in 1930.

As Victor Hugo says, there are no armies as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Pakistan resolution of March 23, 1940 was the formal manifestation of that idea. Quaid-i-Azam led eminently the nation in pursuit of that idea. Had he not been there, some one else would have done the same job. The idea had taken roots.

When Gandhi, representing the Hindu community, agreed to the division of India and the creation of Pakistan, he called his acceptance “a Himalayan blunder”. A fanatic Hindu, Godse, shot him dead for that “blunder”.

The demolition of the Babri mosque has symbolized to the Hindu community a reversal of the process of Muslim conquests. The TV coverage of the episode, showed the excitement and passion with which the fanatics attacked the mosque and demolished it in no time. The same psyche was in operation when the Pakistani prisoners of 1971 war were taken by train to various parts of India to flaunt the victory over a Muslim army. And, the same instinct is behind the recent announcement that Kargil will be turned soon into a tourist attraction.

From the perspective of a student of the history of the subcontinent, Pakistan was inevitable, so was the split and creation of an independent Bangladesh which could not be swallowed up by India.

Pakistan is certainly not a failed state. What has indeed failed is the government over the past decade led by the corrupt regimes of Benazir and Nawaz Sharif. They have destroyed the inherent resilience and strength of the economy bringing it to the brink of bankruptcy by their self-serving policies. The people and the state have not failed; it is the myopic leadership that has failed them.

The people of Pakistan are made of excellent material. The system that is keeping them under the heel need must change. Give them freedom and education and see how they shine. May the Independence Day mark the beginning of the process of their independence from the oppressive heel!

Nahein mayoos Iqbal apni kisht-i-veran say

Zara num ho toe yeh matti bari zarkhez hai saqi.