Book: The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience

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Author: Christophe Jaffrelot

Publisher: Random House India

Pages: 688

Rs: 799A number of writers have attempted to understand Pakistan. The Pakistan Paradox by Christophe Jaffrelot, a redoubtable scholar on South Asia, reveals a country grappling with multiple dichotomies, most of which can be traced to separatist ideals espoused by the country's early leaders. The manner in which their successors opened one raw nerve after another in their obsession with creating a centralised unitary nation state ironically only aggravated the fissiparous tendencies.

Jaffrelot delves into great detail on three sources of tensions that roiled Pakistan: ethnic schisms, be it Bengali, Baloch, or Pashtun, and their federal aspirations that came into conflict with the unitary definition of the Pakistan nation; the army's tendency to interrupt the democratic process; and differences between Islamists and those who view Islam as a common cultural identity marker that distinguishes Pakistan from, say, India.

Jaffrelot concludes that Pakistan appears less vulnerable to the centrifugal forces of ethno-nationalism in the 2000s compared to the 1970s, when these movements first assumed militant stances. A notable feature of the chronic instability and alternating periods of democratisation and martial law is that the country never slipped out of the clutches of the ruling elites. As a result, land and fiscal reforms were non-starters and benefits of secular education never really reached the grassroots.

This directly fed into Zia-ul-Haq's Islamisation policy – a period of unprecedented state support for madrasas coupled with liberal funding from Saudi Arabia. However, Jaffrelot is clear that Zia was driven by the idea of state control over Islamic religion and would never have brooked Islamic leaders calling the shots in Pakistan. Nevertheless, Pakistan paid a heavy price for his Islamisation policy. It sprung two offshoots, jihadism and sectarianism, that pose a greater threat to Pakistani society than the possibility of ethnic strife or another army coup.

Jaffrelot is unsparing in blaming Pakistan for promoting jihadism, expecting this to provide a strategic counterweight against India, and extend Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan. In this context, Pakistan could have made a clean break with Islamists post-9/11. Here, Jaffrelot notes that the Pakistan army's perception of the Afghan Taliban, Haqqani network, and Lashkar-e-Taiba as assets and the refusal to tackle these groups head-on enabled them "to acquire such power that today they can defy the state and create the conditions of a low-intensity civil war". In discussing the possibility of civil war, Jaffrelot proceeds to discuss the army's actions in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

In the end, Pakistan's (and India's) best bet for long-term survival is economic upliftment of the masses. The world over, there is growing discourse around economic inequality, but South Asian nations continue to be enmeshed in the polarising rhetoric of cultural-religious nationalists.

Jaffrelot has given us a comprehensive tome, that combines a sociological perspective of Pakistan's history and a deep – occasionally sympathetic – understanding of positions staked out by the politicians and army generals in steering the country through choppy waters.