Anomaly at Midnight

LIFE IS A CATALOGUE OF UNCERTAINTY BUT there is one thing you can be sure of: much of it will be consumed by a tense debate between freedom and inde­pendence. Check with any teenager for clarification; ask any octogenarian for confirmation.

The origin story in the Abrahamic tradition turns this conflict into an admonition and then a metaphor of faith. Eve and Adam had the best address in the universal town, but were tempted by the fruit of independence. Life on earth, a turbulent byproduct, was born from this Original Sin. God kept control through a simple mechanism: death is arbitrary, whimsical and certain.

Almost every religion is structured around the return to eternal dependence on God with Paradise or Nirvana, the land without suffering, as quid pro quo. Life, chosen by the free will of the created, is sufferance. Beware, as the sages say, of what you want; you might get it. Is death the ultimate liberation from independence?

Julius Caesar was a workaholic, like all ambitious warriors. The Roman historian Plutarch reports that he was signing papers during dinner with friends on March 13, 44 BCE when the conver­sation turned to a practical question, inevitable in the company of those who live by the sword: Which was the best way to die? Caesar looked up and said: “Unexpectedly.” He understood the horrors of the cusp before the inevitable. The next morning some 40 senators sent him into oblivion in his preferred way. Death cuts the chains that anchor life. A fortunate few have golden chains but that does not stop them from being chains.

From the beginning of recorded social organisation human be­ings have created political space around the cherished ambition of collective independence. Geography encouraged fragmenta­tion and identity evolved through kinship and language; war was an enthusiastic consequence. Power was soon measured by the success of aggression up to the age of empires, colonies and neo-colonies. History became a glorified record of those who destroyed a neighbour’s independence, or went further, dress­ing expansion as some form of benevolence. The ultimate con was sanctioned by priests, who crowned the wretched victims of despotism with the halo of martyrdom. Just a hundred years ago, the term ‘totalitarian state’ was first used to describe Mussolini’s Fascist state in Italy, and he was benign compared to Germany’s Hitler. The dictator, always preening in ideological feathers, exer­cised complete control over everything from national law to indi­vidual morality. The dependence of the people upon this demigod was extolled as the highest expression of public morality.

Liberty as an individual right is a recent virtue, which found its feet in Asia and Europe only after the defeat of the colonial and totalitarian state. The consequences were transformative: adult franchise democracy in a republic, gender emancipation, poverty elimination, a more equitable world order. Individual freedom is not an absolute right, but that does not make it less potent or infruc­tuous. By the measurement of history, the concept is still a toddler, so a large section of the contemporary world has still not been able to get the balance right. A doctrine of benevolent dictatorship has been used to deny citizens freedom in many nations on the pretext that stability, survival and economic benefits are more important. Democracy is a convenient scapegoat. It is another matter that empirical evidence confirms that dictators do not deliver but the idea of an absolute monarch, which has been at the heart of gov­erning ethos through the story of mankind, became the familiar answer to any crisis. It is never easy to be persuasive about as radical a concept as individual freedom. The French Revolution of 1789 did not make the French free. They scuttled back to monarchy, giving their military hero Napoleon a brief glimpse of feudal glory, before settling for a resurrection of the dynasty they had beheaded. France went on to create a colonial empire which ended only after two vi­cious wars, in Algeria and Vietnam. But the French still do a pretty good annual parade in Paris around liberty, equality and fraternity, in which there is no mention of the fact that French women did not get the franchise till 1944. The security blankets of monarchy or religious identity have their market.

India, which ended the era of European colonialism by de­molishing British rule in 1947, could have become the role mod­el for modernity as a united, multicultural, multi-religious de­mocracy. But this revolutionary manifesto managed to achieve only a partial victory.

THE INDIAN FREEDOM movement got renewed momen­tum in 1919 after a characteristic display of brutal British despotism, as manifest in the Jallianwala Bagh mas­sacre, and the broken promises of World War I. Within the next seven decades, the world map changed beyond recognition. There were about 50 recognisable states in 1920; 80 after the realignments follow­ing World War II; and around 190 by the 1990s after the collapse of the communist Soviet Union. Communism, after prom­ising liberation to the oppressed classes, became as multinational a concept as any empire hiding behind an ideology.

The anomaly of 1947 was Pakistan, created through a tortured argument which diminished a universal faith, Islam, into a parochial nationalism. Within a decade, Pakistan had degener­ated into a “jelly state”.

Its sole architect Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who used hyperbole with the pa­nache of a lawyer uncertain of his brief, fought for freedom from Hindus rather than the British. In 1946, speaking in Cairo, which was a stopover on the air route to London, he said that “Hindu India” would become an “imperialistic power” and a greater “menace for the future” than the British Empire had ever been. Paradoxi­cally, Jinnah accepted that Pakistan would not be able to preserve its independence without a powerful ally, and selected America as its shield through reductive reasoning. Britain and France had become crippled; the Soviet Union was communist, atheist and hence anti-Islam. America was a natural benefactor given the geography of West Pakistan. In November 1946, Jinnah sent his friend, the industrialist MAH Ispahani, on an exploratory tour to America. Ispahani reported that Americans were amenable to “sweet words” and first impressions mattered.

Jinnah turned on some sweet geopolitical music. Wearing what was described as a satisfied smile, he told the American jour­nalist Margaret Bourke-White in September 1947 that Russia was not far away from Pakistan. “America,” he volunteered, “needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America. Pakistan is the pivot of the world, as we are placed—the frontier on which the future of the world revolves.” That was the geography of the Cold War, but the Jinnah doctrine prevails: Pakistan would become a Western base for “Middle Eastern defence”, a fortress against the south­ward pressure of the Soviet Union.

On September 11, 1947 Jinnah set the context for his America tilt by telling his cabinet that Russia alone had not sent a congratu­latory message on Pakistan’s birth. He then sent a formal request to Charles Lewis, the American chargé d’affaires in Karachi, for $2 billion in aid over the following five years. Pakistan has never underestimated the price of the sale of Pakistan.

America was listening with interest. In 1950 President Harry Truman sent an aircraft to London to pick up Pakistan Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan on his way for his first visit to the States, and was at the airport on May 3 to receive Khan. It was a deliberate snub to India, whose Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had gone to the White House armed with lectures and advice on world peace. Khan pledged full support to the US against communism, and voted with America in the United Nations on North Korea.

Jinnah did not live to see his dreams come true, but they did. On January 5, 1954 President Eisenhower agreed in principle to send military aid to Pakistan, and on May 19, 1954 America and Paki­stan signed the Mutual Defence Agree­ment in Karachi.

What Jinnah did not realise, or re­fused to admit, was that Pakistan would become a base against American foes among Muslim countries to Pakistan’s west. Pakistan supported the Anglo- French-Israeli invasion of the Suez Canal in 1956, which India opposed. By 1958 Washington had decided that it had had enough of fractious civilian politicians in Karachi and backed the military coup by General [later Field Marshal] Ayub Khan. Generals spoke straight, and shot straight, in the decisive view of the Pentagon. America was also being governed by a general, albeit democratically elected. In December 1959 Eisenhower vis­ited Pakistan in a public endorsement of the military takeover of Pakistan, which has not ended. Pakistan has what can only be described as bicameral authority: instead of two chambers of the legislature, it has two sources of power. The army controls its levers on a permanent basis; the civilians come and go, and go more often than they come.

Washington has never permitted any fog over the relationship. Pervez Musharraf was brought to heel when America moved against Afghani­stan, and then Iraq, after 9/11. In both instances Musharraf had to silence his own country’s public opinion to obey Washington. Bringing knowledge up to date, America bombed Iran from bases in Pakistan when it joined Israel in the recent war against Iran. Israel is not a popular country in Pakistan but no generalissimo in Islamabad can do anything but obey and collect reward points from the Pentagon.

The powerful American lobby in Delhi refuses to understand a basic truth, with India paying a price for its misapprehensions. For America, India will be a friend but Pakistan will be an ally. There is nothing sentimental in the American position. India will not permit American generals to order bombers to lift off from its territory to bomb any other nation. Pakistan does. Its presi­dent also decorates the American general who ran the operation with its highest military award. Pakistan was born in the name of Islam. This does not prevent Pakistan from cooperating with America or the West against Muslim countries: Egypt in 1956, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Iran in 2025.

Pakistan’s birth mistake was to confuse Islam with nationalism, and so it keeps silent about con­tradictions. It surrendered, in the Jinnah doctrine, its independence to preserve its freedom. Paki­stan was shocked when America could not do enough in the 1971 war with India which led to the emergence of Bangladesh, another reminder that Islam had nothing to do with nationalism.

Perhaps our only recourse in such a discourse is to return to divinity. Thank you, Lord Buddha, for such good advice: “What is the use of discussing doctrines about the soul? Do good and be good and this will take you to freedom and whatever truth there is.”

'jelly state'freedom issue 2025freedom struggleIndia’s partitionIslamJawaharlal NehruMuhammad Ali Jinnahparochial nationalism