Pakistan needs to shed its anti-India obsession to avoid a final fall

So, Imran Khan is terribly miffed that when he was prime minister the then Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa put pressure on him to cultivate friendly ties with India. “Gen. Bajwa wanted me to develop friendly ties with India. He put pressure on me for this and it was one of the reasons our relationship deteriorated,” he claimed during an interaction with social media journalists last week.  Bajwa’s advocacy of improved India-Pakistan relations, he suggested, was a betrayal of Pakistan’s national interests in the light of India’s decision to change the special status of Jammu and Kashmir. Asserting his own nationalist credentials, he claimed he heroically stuck to his stance that Pakistan should only hold peace talks with India provided New Delhi restored the special status of Jammu and Kashmir.  The playboy cricketer-turned-fiery politician  alleged that what Bajwa did to Pakistan even an enemy couldn’t do.  “Bajwa should be held accountable by the army,” Khan said.  Earlier, Imran Khan had owed his prime ministership  to Bajwa before falling out with them and accusing them of plotting with America to topple him. Now, we  are told that the fallout was in fact prompted by Bajwa’s desire to repair relations with India.  Even by the standards of Pakistan’s Kafkaesque politics, this must be a first: A civilian Pakistani PM protesting because the army favours good relations with New Delhi. Historically, Pakistani PMs have protested because the army has opposed normalisation of India-Pakistan relations to justify expanding its empire by presenting India as a threat to Pakistan’s security. For much of Pakistan’s existence its army has cynically played the “Kashmir card” to sabotage attempts by civilian governments to lower tensions with India. For the first time, here was a Pakistani army chief who - wonder of wonders - was keen on stabilising relations with India, but was opposed by a prime minister  using the discredited Kashmir card to suit his domestic agenda.  However, the piece is not about the Khan-Bajwa spat. At a time when the country is facing an existential economic crisis, Pakistani politicians are engaged in petty politicking over an issue that is the last thing on an ordinary Pakistani’s mind when they are facing an uncertain future.  A crisis caused by decades of power abuse and mismanagement by successive regimes.   But over decades, Pakistanis  have got so used to their  leaders’ genius for cynical behaviour that barely an eyebrow has been raised over what is going on.  So, where does Pakistan go from here?  Most  likely it will scrape through the economic crisis. There is simply too much at stake in terms of political and security implications  for the international community to let it collapse.  However, what is less certain is its future trajectory in an increasingly challenging global environment when it is facing international isolation, with even its traditional Muslim allies avoiding its company.  A bigger question is: How the founding idea of Pakistan as a plucky outpost of Muslim pride and ingenuity will emerge from the crisis.  Pakistan has been plagued by questions about its identity and its damaging impact on societal cohesion ever since its inception. The question, “What Pakistan stands for?” has acquired an increasingly sharper edge over the years  amid an aggressive assertion of multiplying sectarian and regional identities–overshadowing its founders’ vision of a country bound by a shared Muslim identity. Let us remember Pakistan was founded on the basis of religion as a separate homeland for Indian Muslims, and its very raison d’etre rested  on its “Muslimness”.     Yet,  despite Islam’s central role in the founding of Pakistan, it was never able to develop  a consensus  over the place of Islam in Pakistan. The  result has been a profound crisis of identity which continues to haunt it even today. More than 70 years after its creation, the idea of Pakistan remains deeply contested with Pakistanis lacking  even a commonly-shared sense of what it means to be a Pakistani. Whether a person is a Pakistani first, or a Muslim or a Punjabi?   This is compounded by continuing tensions between Muslim migrants from India (the so-called “mohajirs”) and indigenous groups — all flaunting  rival versions of “the Pakistani”.   Myriad interpretations produce a fractured Pakistani identity.   In his address  to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 11 August 1947, Jinnah promised  a secular state where every citizen would be free to follow their own religion. The State, he assured, would make no distinction between the citizens on the grounds of faith. What happened later, of course, was  exactly the opposite. There has been endless contrafactual speculations on how Pakistan might have evolved had Jinnah lived longer to steer his vision of a modern Muslim state. His death,  barely a year after his famous speech, may have plunged the country’s future  trajectory into uncertainty–ultimately opening doors for the mullahs to take over.   But did Jinnah really mean what he said?  Some Pakistani historians have accused him of playing to the gallery, and trying to please whoever he was addressing at a given point of time. Well-known UK-based Pakistani  historian, Farzana Shaikh, has argued  that the country’s acute identity crisis is  a legacy of Jinnah’s own “ambivalent” approach. After whipping up emotional religious rhetoric to make the case for a Muslim Pakistan, he behaved like a “reluctant convert to his own idea”.    “It’s no wonder then that, after Jinnah’s death…within months of Pakistan’s independence, many of its political elites were uncertain about, or hostile to, his understanding of the role of Islam in defining the nation’s constitutional foundations,” she wrote in her book, Making Sense of Pakistan.   The reality is that Pakistan is a theocratic state characterised by majoritarianism. And, there is no indication that a change is imminent. Imran Khan’s remarks after becoming prime minister in 2018  illustrated the depth of the crisis and confusion as he struggled  to explain his vision for Pakistan: An odd concoction of “the kind of country that our leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah wanted” and “the type of state established by Prophet Muhammad in the city of Medina”.  Here, we have a classic fudge pretending to reconcile two irreconcilable ideas of Pakistan. But by invoking the Prophet he left no one in doubt where his own instincts lay. He was rooting for an Islamised Pakistan–perhaps a softer version of  Gen Zia-ul-Haq’s  “Islamisation” programme in the 1970s and 1980s. Memories of  political and cultural havoc it caused are still fresh. Yet, Khan’s remarks barely caused a stir.  The truth is that popular Pakistani imagination continues to be in thrall to the idea of an Islamic Pakistan. Islamabad’s paranoia about India is driven by its own religious obsession.  It has led the country into many blind alleyways of dumb priorities, foolish misadventures, and shortsighted fixes –all of which have contributed to the current crisis. And, if it does not resolve its identity conundrum, rid itself  of its India obsession, and starts to behave like a normal state, the last of the slippery slopes is not far. The writer is an independent columnist and the author of Unmasking Indian Secularism: Why We Need A New Hindu-Muslim Deal_. Views are personal._  Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.