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| 26/03/2004 |
| TWO HALVES DID NOT MAKE A WHOLE: Pakistan before and after Bangladesh |
Paper for the CULTURE RESEARCH MATERIALS PROJECT, FLETCHER SCHOOL OF LAW AND DIPLOMACY, TUFTS UNIVERSITY, USA, 26-28 MARCH 2004
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| The creation of Pakistan as a nation-state on 14 August 1947 was in retrospect a bizarre political aberration, for it brought into being one country with two disparate wings, located a thousand miles apart with a hostile country, India, in between. Never in the course of recent history had there been such a decision to co-join two unlikely parts into one compatible, national corpus. Nor had there been such a conscious act of foolhardiness by a departing colonial power in a desperate bid to shed itself of the burden of empire. It took twenty-four years of prickly co-existence between the two wings of Pakistan and a bloody war of liberation in December 1971 to rectify that costly error. |
| To refer to Pakistan during the period from 1947 until 1971, therefore, as if it was one nation is to perpetuate an assertion that its two wings enjoyed something natural beyond a common name and a common religion. No two geographical areas on the subcontinent could have been more different. West Pakistan ran from the northern Himalayas to the Arabian Sea, and East Pakistan served as the sodden outfall of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers debouching into the Bay of Bengal. No two communities could have been more dissimilar - ethnically, linguistically, and culturally. They were in fact two different races, the western and the eastern extremities of the former Mughal empire, forced to coexist centuries later under the roof of the same nationality. |
| Seen together as they were for those twenty-seven years of shared nationhood, their differences appeared stark and irreconcilable. Viewed apart, as they have been since December 1971, when East Pakistan became the new and state of Bangladesh, their similarities have become more pronounced. Both of them remain underdeveloped. Each has too large a population for comfort. Both are predominantly Muslim - Pakistan being 98% so, and Bangladesh 88%. Both struggle to come to terms with a dominant neighbour. Each though, since 1971, has learned to function as one self-contained contiguous mass, a self-sufficient whole, a sovereign independent country, independent of each other, and in the case of Bangladesh independent of its midwife, India. |
| The two wings of Pakistan came into existence in 1947 as one nation-state less by design than by default. The demand for a separate homeland for the Muslims of India had not been a seminal force in the independence movement when agitation against the ruling British first began. |
| The initial objective had been simply to expel the British. Gradually, as fissures began to appear as a result of the policies of the Indian Congress party that marginalized the Muslim community, Mohammed Ali Jinnah shrewdly enlarged these cracks to his own political advantage: ‘During the election campaign of 1937, he realised the hidden potential of the Muslim League. He then exploited to the maximum the nascent Muslim fear of Hindu Raj during the Congress rule. He felt that in utilising the Hindutisation campaign of Congress as a recurrent theme in his speeches, the Muslim League could only gain an identity and obtain status among the Muslim population of India. Therefore the Muslim League, in order to succeed, had to emphasise the Hindu element in Congress.’.....[EXTRACT] |
| Published in DEVELOPING CULTURES:CASE STUDIES, edited by Lawrence E. Harrison and Peter L. Berger (2006) |
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| 26 March 2004 |
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