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Balochistan: the wider issues at stake

K. Shankar Bajpai

Patriotism, nationalism, devotion to country — it is all essentially a matter of feeling, of attachment.

BEYOND THE sympathy it evokes for a fine, long-harassed people, Balochistan's continuing torment underlines profoundly disturbing issues regarding both Pakistan's nationhood and our own — issues sharpened in our case by Malegaon.

In both countries, since birth, constituent parts have manifested varying dissatisfaction over being parts at all or over denial of some greater distinctiveness within the whole. Is this not because, certainly in Pakistan's case but, like it or not, increasingly dangerously in ours, the whole has not succeeded, as extensively as needs require, in being greater than the sum of its parts?

What exactly constitutes nationhood? Patriotism, nationalism, devotion to country — it is all essentially a matter of feeling, of attachment. Although nationality — like, mostly, religion — is simply an accident of birth, it can drive people to extraordinary deeds of heroism or cruelty. Emotion or sentiment engender loyalty to an entity with which they particularly identify. Before the nation-state, this could be a monarch, a tribe, a religion; the last two remain compelling even in the modern state, especially one which, by embodying a plural society, cannot fit the traditional nation-state concept and needs to devise a new basis for making all its people feel they belong to something greater than their particularisms. We in India were blessed with a concept comprehending our uniquely immense and varied diversities, and have — or had — gone far towards consolidating a very special nationhood. Pakistan, while seemingly more compact, has yet to do so.

We forget that Pakistan was conceived as a homeland for the Muslims of India. This is not to rake up the rights or wrongs of Partition but to bring out the fact that Partition did not provide such a homeland. It not only left the largest single segment of Muslims in India, it could not even hold together the Muslim majority areas that opted out. Granted geography and cultural differences other than religion made Bangladesh a special case, it showed that religion alone is not enough to inspire nationalism. What remained of Pakistan has not yet found an answer as to what constitutes its nationhood — except hostility to India. Absent a comprehensive basis for, or sense of, nationhood, and you revert to tribe, language, region or whatever seems the more important of your multiple identities. Which is precisely what is happening in Balochistan, and precisely why we need to revisit some of our own problems of group dissatisfaction.

Big handicap

One Pakistani handicap is that there is no historical antecedent to their state. The four provinces of British India, plus the unadministered frontier areas, which now make up Pakistan, never before constituted a state. More importantly, the peoples of those areas had no sense of common group identity until Pakistan was created except one: they were Muslims of India. They were not Arabs or Persians, and Pakistan's strenuous efforts to break away from the Indianness of their background — Arabicising their language, banning the saree, cutting off trade, discouraging people-to-people contact, not to mention making India their bogey — have not made them accepted as part of any other region. Howsoever strong their bonds with West Asia, the original problem remains: the sense of belonging to something greater than specific provincialisms was linked to their being Indian Muslims; once that was removed, tall claims of 5,000 years of Pakistan notwithstanding, the new nationalism — of being a Pakistani — needed to be nurtured with a skill and sensitivity totally lacking in the ham-handed Punjabi domination, or the mere building-up — with much help from us — of the threat from India. (Another complication: historical antecedents for some Pakistanis involves considering themselves the true heirs of the Mughals, further muddying thinking about India.)

Of course, states flourish without historical antecedents — many have been shaped simply by colonial gerrymandering. Pakistan has had many assets for consolidating its nationhood. What its leaders, especially today's, seem blind to is the increasing phenomenon, world wide, of groups feeling conscious of a distinctive cultural identity, be it based on religion, language, race, region — seeking a distinctive political identity, either with more ability to further their distinctive way of life within an existing state or by opting out. Without careful handling of such urges, many existing states will be hard put to maintain their unity — witness ourselves. To an outsider it would seem obvious that a truly federal solution would answer this aspect of Pakistan's problems. The Punjabi `Musselman' is a formidable creature, but if he persists in treating the rest of Pakistan as a colony of Punjab, challenges such as Balochistan can only grow.

As the tart Pakistani retort to our inept comment on Balochistan pointed out, we in India have more than our fair share of similar problems — and are in danger of being as thoughtless about them as Pakistan. We can preen over what we have achieved, but it is no longer enough to imagine smugly that we are a democracy and that our democracy will find the answer. Far too many groups in our country feel less and less confident that we can provide the framework within which they can look forward to their future with confidence. Whether in Kashmir, the Northeast or in many tribal areas, not least among our Muslim population all over, resentments keep simmering — and keep being ignored when they are not deliberately exacerbated, domestically or externally.

Of course, Pakistan will use, even create, resentment but that does not mean it is not genuinely there irrespective of Pakistan's hand. The concept of India that inspired our national movement seems to have lost both its shine and it driving force. It needs to be revivified so that all our discontented diversities can feel stronger attachment to a nation, if not as devotion to it then at least as confidence that it will give them an acceptable future. For this, our political forces must rise above their narrow parochialism, and what they see as an electoral advantage in furthering ever pettier, ever more fragmenting, group interests. Above all, we must address urgently, sanely and constructively, what is manifestly our biggest challenge of all but which is bafflingly turned away from — the situation of our Muslims. Before Partition, the great majority of Muslims accepted the vision of India as a plural haven in which they could pursue their way of life alongside the Hindus and other communities. As so often in history, a determined minority changed everything — but in this case not only solved nothing but created even more intractable problems. That even the truncated, moth-eaten Pakistan that they are left with is facing some of those problems may stimulate some schadenfreude at a deliberately hostile neighbour itself suffering what it foments among us, but we should rather see it as yet another awful warning that among the unforeseen legacies of Partition is the continuing difficulty of identity among all the Muslims of undivided India, perhaps excepting Bangladesh.

Our nationalist leaders, including a whole galaxy of Muslims, rejected the very idea that there was a Hindu-Muslim problem — other than what colonial divide and rule tactics engendered. We must accept that there not only was but still is such a problem. Partition not only did not solve it but changed it into more intractable forms. One consequence, of course, is the accentuation of Muslim distinctiveness; consider how most Muslim leaders now seek to emulate Jinnah, concentrating on their community's rights; successors to Maulana Azad, Asaf Ali, Humayun Kabir, etc., who concentrated on strengthening what then genuinely was, and surely no longer is, a thriving composite culture, are fewer and farther between.

With all other communities not only similarly concentrating on group rights but subdividing themselves in search of even more sub-group rights, our Muslims have little choice. Moreover, only those wilfully blind can ignore the damage done to any Muslim sense of belonging to an India that will look after their interests by the frightening banalities of Hindutva zealots, who are only playing Pakistan's game in raising communal tensions. (including now the alarming appearance of radicalisation among Muslim youth). Malegaon underlines our vulnerability to terrorism; that is something we can only live with, but only by containing, preferably preventing, communal fallout. Even balanced Hindus blame our Muslims for not doing more to be part of our so-called mainstream. Our Muslims do appear to need a more thoughtful and effective leadership, which will both serve the community (as distinct from a self-serving creamy layer) and strengthen its Indian-ness, as many individuals are trying to do at an intellectual rather than political level. But the supposedly majority community must realise its obligation both to help in the encouragement of such a Muslim leadership and in the re-strengthening of the only concept of India that can make us the great state and civilisation we dreamed of being, and which alone can keep us from disasters even greater than Balochistan - or Malegaon.

(The writer is a former Ambassador to Pakistan, China, and the United States, and Secretary, External Affairs Ministry.)

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