Pakistan in 1947 comprised two wings separated by 900 miles of Indian territory—an ethnically and linguistically homogeneous East Pakistan made up of Bengalis, and West Pakistan, dominated by the Punjab. Despite East Pakistan representing more than half of the population, it was subservient to the political and economic domination of West Pakistan, which derived much of its income and funds for industrial development from the exploitation of Bengali (East Pakistani) jute. Constitutional manipulation by both military and military-guided civilian governments sought to institutionalise the West’s dominance. The underlying motivation for General Ayub Khan’s 1958 military coup was to prevent the prospect of a Bengali majority in the National Assembly. With the introduction of democratic elections and the abolition of the One Unit system in 1970, the Bengali Awami League gained a healthy majority of seats in the central government to govern both West and East Pakistan. The victory of a Bengali political party in a system of government whose military, bureaucratic and economic power was predicated on the dominance of the Punjab meant that the military postponed the transfer of power. The resulting civil unrest in Bengal and the attempt to suppress opposition with the use of force led to a declaration of Bengali independence which was achieved following the India–Pakistan War in 1971. In the division of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh, attempts to centralise power, the neglect of both ethnic and provincial demands, and the attempt to maintain the position of the military at the expense of democratic and civilian decision-making exacerbated ethnic divisions and led to a further state partition along ethnic lines.
The scars of Partition remain. At the Wagah border between Lahore and the Sikh holy city of Amritsar separating India and Pakistan, the sixty-year confrontation is re-enacted daily. The pride of each country’s armed forces—its tallest men with the shiniest boots and the loudest marching stomp face off in a carefully choreographed ceremony, parading the chest-thumping assertion of each nation’s claim to superiority. As the soldiers march at pace in a swirling mass of flying arms, legs and virulent military prowess, only the coloured turbans, which add an extra foot to the soldiers’ already puffed-up pride, remain still and recognisable—the post-imperial heraldry of military menace. Trumpets sound and sergeant majors with bristling moustaches bellow commands at their strutting men, to the delight of massed crowds on either side shouting their national slogans: ‘
Pakistan zindabad
’, ‘
Jai hind
’—‘freedom to Pakistan’, ‘victory to India’. The Indian tricolour with its Ghandian spinning wheel of self-sufficiency and the green standard of Pakistan with its crescent moon are saluted and lowered in stages at exactly the same moment so that one never flies higher than the other. Bizarrely, in this orchestrated theatre of national assertion, a kind of subcontinental haka, as the flags are folded and the final commanding bellows are uttered, the two commanding officers from each side look each other in the eye and, with brisk military formality, shake hands before the vast iron gates across the continent are slammed shut. The crowds of men, women and children on either side then walk slowly towards each other—silent and calm after all the noise and display of the soldiers—and look with curiosity at the exotic species on the other side, separated by a few metres and a wire fence. No one talks, no one waves—it is as if they have woken up for the first time in years, blinked and encountered themselves in the mirror, slightly older, utterly recognisable, and not quite the xenophobes, fundamentalists and vengeful ideologues that either side has been led to expect.
Even in the curiously antiquated language of radio call signs—whose tangos, romeos and foxtrots echo the jaunty language of World War II Spitfire pilots—the Indo-Pakistan rivalry made itself felt. In the Islamic Republic,
I for India
was unacceptable (replaced with the more neutral
Italy
) while
W for Whisky
remained in place, much joked about by the country’s Johnny Walker–quaffing officer class.
At Partition, Pakistan was left with the rump of the country: half of Punjab, half of Kashmir and the depopulated and troubled frontier provinces of Balochistan and the North West Frontier. Aside from the city of Lahore, and perhaps Peshawar, this new state created for the subcontinent’s Muslim population was cut off from the great centres of South Asian Islam: Delhi and Agra with their Red Forts and the Taj Mahal; Aligarh, whose university was modelled on the Oxford colleges where many of Pakistan’s leaders were educated, and was where the idea of ‘the land of the pure’ was born; Lucknow, the courtly cultural capital of the Urdu-speaking world. These places were now in India—a new and different country.
The experience of Partition was one of both logic and lunacy combined—the logic of the ethno-nationalist nation-state chaotically superimposed over the entire Indian subcontinent. The creation of Pakistan embodied this strange contradiction: it was an ancient neologism; a country for the Muslim minority that contained only a minority of the subcontinent’s Muslims; and its source of life—the river Indus—gave name to the state from which the creators of Pakistan sought to escape.
Even Pakistan’s national language was not widely spoken in the truncated lands that would become Pakistan. Urdu (related to the word ‘horde’) was a language of Northern India, a military lingua franca that arose out of the army camps of the former Mughal Empire. It is largely the same as Hindi but written in the Arabic script and more heavily influenced by an Arabic and Persian vocabulary. The Urdu-speaking Northern Indians who migrated to Pakistan after 1947, who became the country’s military and administrative elite, were known within Pakistan as
mohajir
, a term derived from the Arabic word meaning ‘immigrant’.
When I had arrived in Islamabad, the capital created by such
mohajirs
, I did not realise the power this association held and did not become aware of it until I started organising a trip into the rural Punjab to observe local elections. The Punjabis—the most populous group in Pakistan—had seen their written language banned at Partition and the compulsory expansion of Urdu as the language of state, as artificial and remote from the earthy ribaldry of Punjabi as the capital itself. Calling random government offices, electoral departments and district commissioners, I was told of a slightly longer than usual crackle over the ancient phone lines as it dawned on the local administrators in their dusty, paper-strewn offices, that they were being summoned from the capital. Any and every request was agreed to instantly with an unhesitating ‘yes, Sir’ as representatives from the capital expressed their seigneurial rights: cars, accommodation, food, guides, information were all supplied without question. Getting off the phone after another of these calls to an unsuspecting minor official, a colleague of mine once remarked that he ‘could hear his spine stiffen.’ Just receiving a call out of the blue from a member of the Urdu-speaking elite in the capital had terrified him.
The brilliant Urdu short-story writer Saadat Hasan Manto wrote heart-rendingly about the moment of Partition, expressing much of the bewilderment and absurdity of the moment—a sensation that can still accompany new arrivals in Islamabad. His bleakly comic story ‘Toba Tek Singh’ is set in a lunatic asylum during the creation of the two new states and the administrative difficulties in working out which countries each of the inmates should belong to. One Sikh lunatic asks, ‘Why are we being sent to India? We don’t even know what language they speak there,’ while a Muslim inmate shouts ‘
Pakistan zindabad
’ with such vigour that he loses his balance, falls over and is knocked out. The new boundaries cause endless confusion. ‘If they were in India, where on earth was Pakistan? And if they were in Pakistan, then how come that until only the other day it was India?’ Another inmate escapes and seeks sanctuary from the lunacy of Partition itself by climbing a tree, declaring: ‘I wish to live neither in India nor in Pakistan. I wish to live in this tree.’ Two Anglo-Indian lunatics are concerned that the European ward in the asylum will be abolished, that breakfast will never be served again and they will be forced to eat chapattis. There is general concern that, in the confusion of Partition, both India and Pakistan would simply slide off the map altogether.
Despite its relative newness as a country, Pakistan is a land with a long, troubled and somewhat truncated history—and is influenced by the great civilisations with which it borders: Afghanistan, Iran, China and India. So much of what is now written about Pakistan ignores this—it is seen as a piece on the geopolitical chessboard, a difficult ally, a hard place, the most dangerous place on earth, prone to extremism and facing sectarian meltdown. The idea of Pakistan has become synonymous with threats posed by supposed ‘Talibanisation’ and ‘atomic mullahs’.
One day, while walking through the narrow, windy streets of Peshawar’s old city, I was stopped by a man in long white robes, with dark glasses and a long black beard. Having been taught to be suspicious of precisely this stereotype, I started our conversation guardedly. We discussed the weather (hot), the cricket (dull), tourist sites in and around Peshawar. Just as I was beginning to wonder what the catch was, the man gripped me by the hand and shook it vigorously. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘we are not all terrorists.’ And we went our separate ways. Now that Pakistan is increasingly seen as Afpak—part of the front line in the war in Afghanistan—it is almost radical to suggest that its overwhelming social, cultural, political and economic ties lie with an Indic, rather than Talibanic, civilisation.
Daylight, as always, cast its tepid light over the heady exultation of my night-time arrival in Islamabad. The city was very far from what I had imagined. It was not the thriving subcontinental metropolis of ‘life and liberty’ that I had imagined from the glorious words of Nehru’s speech. In his own address to the nation on 15 August 1947, Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in well-intentioned but less inspired rhetoric, said:
Our object should be peace within and peace without. We want to live peacefully and maintain cordial and friendly relations with our immediate neighbors and with the world at large. We have no aggressive designs against any one. We stand by the United Nations Charter and will gladly make our full contribution to the peace and prosperity of the world.
The city of Islamabad was the incarnation of Jinnah’s view—a lawyers’ creation given form by a military love of order and right angles, thus giving urban expression to two of the dominant forces of Pakistan’s post-independence history: the army and the judiciary. Its order and tranquillity did not breathe the excitement of the midnight hour but reflected ‘an opportunity to demonstrate to the world how can a nation, containing many elements, live in peace and amity and work for the betterment of all its citizens, irrespective of caste or creed’, as Jinnah described the mission of his new nation. Islamabad did just this.
I woke to wide empty boulevards and leafy suburbs. Vast houses lined the road next to the Margalla Hills, the foothills of the Himalayas, and a neatly trimmed cricket pitch with a gabled pavilion glinted in the early morning sun. The city, as I discovered, was one vast urban grid of order and logic, trees and gardens, and neat designated shopping zones whose air-conditioned shops sold rich fabrics, books, and knocked-off designer goods. Advertising hoardings promoted Coke and mobile phone companies offering to ‘connect the gentry’. I wandered round, slightly bewildered by this almost-empty Islamic Canberra, whose suburbs had been given alphanumeric sequences of sectors and subsectors instead of names. The main shopping centre was in F10, while my hotel languished in the obscurity of E7/2. The vast government boulevard named after the former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was a modern concrete rendition of Lutyens’s Delhi. Ever grander buildings culminated in what was known as Benazir’s house, or the Pink Palace—a colossal pseudo-Mughal building in soft pink marble and sandstone built to accommodate the political aspirations and realisations of the Bhutto family. Where in Britain and Australia the mark of the arriviste financier was mock-Tudor, in Pakistan it was mock-Mughal; not quaint homeliness but the mausolean splendour of the Taj Mahal.
After a morning walking around and talking to nobody, I returned to my hotel room, with its exceptionally loud and ineffective air conditioner, the soothingly bland predictability of BBC World and pictures of eighteenth-century English rural scenes—pheasants taking flight, a man (with top hat and tails) and a woman (in a lacy dress) admiring a swan. There I pondered my findings. Thinking I would use this momentary reprieve to try to learn some Urdu, I had a look at a teach-yourself language book but was slightly put off by such chapter headings as ‘I do not have a reservation’ and ‘Where’s my wife?’.
With all its separateness and control, Islamabad did not so much present an example of modernity and progress to the rest of the world as repeat the follies of the old. In all cities in the subcontinent there exists the ‘old city’, with its swirling streets and vibrant centres whose lanes are filled with lives and livelihoods exhibited to the world from small shopfronts and market stalls that—to the outsider—wind their way in a mesmerising knot of chaos and commerce. Beyond this, the colonial rulers established the cantonment or the civil lines catering to an altogether new imperial reality. Where the great Mughal mosques, palaces and centres of government were located at the heart of undivided India’s great cities, the British rule introduced a separation, especially after the mass uprising against British rule in 1857, variously known as the sepoy rebellion, the Indian Mutiny or the First War of Independence. Virtually all towns and cities in India and Pakistan thus have civil lines or a cantonment once reserved for the British army and bureaucracy but now occupied by the Pakistani middle class and retired military officers, whose rents were becoming increasingly exorbitant. During an early visit to find cheap accommodation in Islamabad, accompanied by a friend’s contact in the Islamabad real estate world, I even managed to pass out at precisely the moment when yet another venal landlord started his quotes—this time for a mini oven masquerading as a room.