ASIAN affairs

VOLUME 3
NUMBER 30
EDITORIAL

Repression of a select number of communities by the police and the armed forces is a common happening in the Sindh Province.

Pakistan is a country suffering from an identity crisis. That is one of the reasons for its continued hostility towards India whose part it was more than fifty years ago. The problem arises because the country is founded on the assumption that people professing one faith are one nationality. But this is not true. Even Pakistan's short history has proved that religion cannot be the basis for nationality. It could be one factor, but language, cultural, geography and history were the much more powerful components of nationalism as we see it today.

Bangladesh, the erstwhile East Pakistan, separated from Pakistan because of this clash of nationalities. The West Pakistanis, now Pakistan, wanted to dominate the Bengalis of East Pakistan. The military rules of Pakistan further aggravated this problem. Hence, the Bengalis of East Pakistan rose in revolt and separated from Pakistan to from Bangladesh. Clearly, Bangladesh does not suffer from any crisis of national identity. A predominant majority of the people is Muslim; but they are Bengalis first. They speak Bengali. The Bengali culture is ingrained in them, whether its is art, music, dance or literature. Ravindra Nath Tagore, a Hindu, is still their most popular poet. The country's national anthem is a song written by Tagore! Doesn't this prove the mullahs and other religious bigots wrong?

Not that after the formation of Bangladesh things settled down in Pakistan. The problem of a national identity crisis continued to bedevil the country. The Pathans and Punjabis don't see eye to eye with the Sindhis and Mohajirs. The various ethnic groups of the country are perennially at war. The fortifications that surrounded the Karachi's localities, where different ethnic groups and communities live separate from one another, are a proof of this. Inter-community warfare is the order of the day. Repression of a select number of communities by the police and the armed forces is a common happening in the Sindh Province.

One of the communities which is fast becoming an outcaste in Pakistan is that of the Mohajirs or refugees, who left India after the partition in 1947 for Pakistan because they thought this was their Islamic homeland. These people, mostly from North India, speak Urdu, the national language of Pakistan. It is their mother tongue. As they were better educated and forward looking, they initially managed to gain considerable influence in all walks of life in Pakistan. But as other communities rose, the Mohajirs begun to be frowned upon as an affluent Urdu-speaking elite, who gobbled jobs and captured businesses. The contradictions are so severe today that the police and army have literally been unleashed on them. Their leader Altaf Hussain, founder of the MQM, lives in a self-imposed exile in London.

Pakistan's desperation to find a common national identity in religion has created many distortions in its political system. The mullahs run a parallel administration in some parts of the country. The Taliban movement is gaining strength with every passing day. Militarised fanatics as the Taliban are pose a direct threat to the country's democratic setup. Unscrupulous politicians are using the armed fanatics for short-term gains. But in the long run, the armed bigots in cohort with the Pakistani military can reduced the country to another Afghanistan. The danger is too obvious to be overlooked.