The furore in Pakistan about Salman Rushdie's
knighthood tells us a great deal about that
peculiar country and something about ours.
Of the many protests that the knighthood seems to
have provoked in Pakistan (among them effigy
burnings, street protests, political resolutions
and outraged diplomatic memorandums) there were
two that were of particular interest: one, the
announcement by Zia-ul-Haq's son, now a federal
minister, that the British government's decision
to confer the knighthood was a provocation grave
enough to justify any suicide bombings that might
follow and two, the decision of a shopkeepers'
association to offer lakhs of rupees to any
Muslim who decapitated Rushdie.
The minister back-pedalled when the British
government let the Pakistani state, its ally in
the war against terror, know that it wasn't
amused, but that he made the statement in the
first place is significant. It would be a mistake
to see this only as a son's attempt to claim his
father's Islamist mantle, though that might be
part of the explanation. The statement's
significance lies in the insight it offers into
the political compulsions of a majoritarian state.
The Pakistani state explicitly derives its
legitimacy from its Muslim people. Created in the
name of Muslim self-determination, its
nationalist self-image is a collage of two
political styles: Pan-Islamist rhetoric and
Kashmir-centred revanchism. This myth of origin,
combined with the chronic failure of
representative politics in that country, made it
hard for Pakistan's political culture to develop
the secular populism that legitimizes electoral
politics in third-world countries, which helped
democracy strike roots in republican India.
The temptation to play the defender of the faith
trumps the more targeted politics of affirmative
action, subsidy, tariff barriers, linguistic
mobilization, nationalization. In short, the
political short-cuts, the halfway houses, the
tokenism and the coalition-building that makes a
pluralist democracy work.
Consider, by way of illustration, the case of
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. An urbane populist, he tried
his own version of Indira Gandhi's "roti, kapda
aur makaan" in Pakistan. He was successful for a
while but eventually made his peace with Islamist
parties because in the auction house of populist
politics in an 'Islamic Republic' like Pakistan,
the game is fixed: only religious rhetoricians
can make the highest bids. The good minister
overplayed his hand by crudely licensing future
suicide bombers at a time when Pakistan depends
on Western subsidies, but in his own dim way, he
was playing by the rules of the house: You can't
champion the cause of the faithful temperately:
yours has to be a pre-emptive, shut-out bid.
If you consider Indian populism and its
practitioners - Indira Gandhi, Lalu Prasad, M.G.
Ramachandran - the thing they have in common is
that they promise to alleviate social and
economic deprivation and suffering. Bank
nationalization, the Twenty Point Programme,
Mandal, reservation, the mid-day meal scheme may
or may not have achieved their object, but their
object was the material well-being of particular
political constituencies. Indian populism (with
an important exception that I'll come to in a
minute) consists of Indians arguing and
quarrelling amongst themselves about justice,
inequality, entitlement and the right routes to
prosperity.
Pakistani populism, in contrast, is increasingly
extra-territorial, outwardly directed. Pakistan's
authoritarian, militarized political culture
sponsors a populism that seeks to mobilize
Pakistanis not as citizens but as a community of
believers, as Muslim tuning forks resonating to
the injustices done to the millat by its enemies.
This is a populism where the heroism of the
Hizbollah, the sufferings of Palestinians, the
violent daring of the mujahedin in Afghanistan
and Iraq, the malicious, pre-meditated
provocation of Danish cartoonists, the struggle
of Kashmiri Muslims against the Indian State and
the perfidy of Rushdie and his British 'sponsors'
are more urgent, and rhetorically more important
than poverty, internecine violence, education,
the dislocations of modernity and the challenges
of building a democracy in a poor country.
Internationalism is a good thing, but when it
drowns out arguments about the state of the
citizens of that country and its institutions, it
becomes pathological.
This is not to suggest that Pakistanis are any
less concerned than Indians are about
bread-and-butter issues or democracy; it is to
point out that a majoritarian state
constitutionally defined by faith fights a losing
battle against ideologues who can wheel out the
howitzers of revelation against the pragmatic,
necessarily compromising nature of democratic
politics.
There is one important populist tendency in India
that bases its rhetoric on the politics of faith.
The sangh parivar and the Shiv Sena have for
years used a Hindu chauvinism dressed up as
'Hindutva' to mobilize a majoritarian
constituency with considerable success. Hindutva
is a close cousin of Islamist politics based as
it is on the idea of enemies without and
fifth-columnists within. But an important reason
why India's pluralist polity has (despite
Gujarat) survived Hindutva's challenge while
Pakistani politics is increasingly mortgaged to
an Islamist style and idiom is that the
foundations of the Indian State are built on an
uncompromisingly pluralist and democratic
constitution. Unlike Pakistan, in India it is the
liberal democrats who have the best lines in a
political argument because a resoundingly liberal
constitution supplies the script within which
politicians and parties must improvise. With the
result that even the champions of a Hindu
majoritarian politics have to disguise their
prejudices in the vocabulary of pluralism: thus,
'positive secularism'.
We are perversely fortunate to have Pakistan as a
neighbour because its politics forewarn us of the
consequences of majoritarianism, of how it can
debauch not just the State but also civil
society. That's where the shopkeepers who put a
price on Rushdie's head (literally) come in. M.F.
Husain lives in coerced exile in England and a
young art student in Baroda was recently
arrested. Both artists, one hugely famous, the
other wholly unknown, suffered for having
allegedly offended religious sensibilities of
Hindus.
There's an important distance between a
shopkeeper's association paying for a writer to
be scalped and Hindu chauvinists misusing the law
to intimidate artists. It is important for
liberal critics to acknowledge the distinction,
but we would be complacent if we thought that it
couldn't happen here. Because there, but for the
hard-won but always precarious health of our
pluralist democracy, go we.
Udhampur : A top most Army commander of the strategically important Northern Command Lt-Gen HS Panag on Sunday said that troop pull out from world's highest glacial battlefield in Siachen cannot happen unless the present positions are well demarcated and further authenticated by both the sides before signing an agreement which will be binding on India and Pakistan. "There is no compulsion on us to pull out troops from Siachen though at diplomatic level efforts are on to reduce the tension in the region. We are capable of holding our positions there and we are dominating in the region," GoC-in-C Northern Command Lt-Gen Panag told a Press conference on the occasion of the 36th Raising Day of the command. He also ruled out the presence of international terrorist group Al-Qaeda in Jammu and Kashmir. The global terror group is only maintaining strong relations with Pak terror groups like Lashkar-e-Tayyeba(LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in Pakistan and is providing them training. "There is no presence of Al Qaeda in Jammu and Kashmir at this point of time and before arriving at a conclusion we should wait till our security agencies investigating the authenticity of Al-Qaeda CD recently surfaced in Kashmir Valley come out with their report. Further clarifying he said, "Several years ago, after the arrest of an Afghani terrorist, his presence was linked with the group but on detailed investigations it wks found out to be untrue." Commenting on the present level of infiltration and terrorist training camps operating across LoC, Lt Gen Panag said there had been a marginal increase in the level of infiltration in the region in recent months. "Compared to 118 incidents of infiltration bids reported last year during the first six moths this year we had a marginal increase as 137 infiltration bids have been reported so far," he said.Referring to the much publicised demand of demilitarisation, Lt-Gen Panag said militant organisations at the behest of intelligence agencies in Pakistan were calibrating graph of militancy in the State and there was no change in the agenda of the United Jehad council as was evident from the recent Press statements. "So I do not think we can think of pulling out troops or cutting their numbers already deployed in counter terrorists and counter infiltration operations as they are needed to restore normalcy in the region."
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