Ayesha Jalal Quotes

The murder of Pakistan's first prime minister heralded the imminent derailment of the political process and the onset of a brutal political culture of assassinations, sustained by the state's direct or indirect complicity.

Taking the logic of Jinnah's demand to its extreme, Congress now offered him a 'Pakistan' stripped of the Punjab's eastern divisions (Ambala and Jullundur), Assam (except Sylhet district) and western Bengal and Calcutta - the 'mutilated and moth-eaten' Pakistan which Jinnah had rejected out of hand in 1944 and again in May 1946. Such a permanent settlement would at a stroke eject Jinnah from the centre, clear the way for a strong unitary government wholly under Congress's sway, and give away only parts of provinces which past experience had shown lay outside the Congress's ken.

Recourse to thick narrative detail reveals that the principal hurdle in the way of a united Pakistan was not disagreement on constitutional matters but the transfer of power from military to civilian hands. More concerned with perpetuating himself in office, Yahya Khan was strikingly nonchalant about the six points. He left that to the West Pakistani politicians, in particular Bhutto, who, contrary to the impression in some quarters, was more of a fall guy for the military junta than a partner in crime.

Jinnah's "Pakistan" did not entail the partition of India; rather it meant its regeneration into an union where Pakistan and Hindustan would join to stand together proudly against the hostile world without. This was no clarion call for pan-Islam; this was not pitting Muslim India against Hindustan; rather it was a secular vision of a polity where there was real political choice & safeguards, the India of Jinnah's dreams, a vision unfulfilled but noble nonetheless.

In the absence of democratic politics, the dominance of a predominantly Punjabi civil bureaucracy and army heightened the grievances of non-Punjabi provinces and the linguistic groups within them. Te entrenched institutional supremacy of a Punjabi army and federal bureaucracy, not Punjab's dominance over other provinces per se, had emerged as the principal impediment to restoring democratic processes in Pakistan.

The uneasy symbiosis between a military authoritarian state and democratic political processes is often attributed to the artificial nature of the country and the lack of a neat fit between social identities at the base and the arbitrary frontiers drawn by the departing colonial masters.

Except in Punjab and the NWFP, the central government's Kashmir policy had little support in Sindh or Balochistan and even less in East Bengal. Instead of serving the people, civil servants and their allies in the army hoisted the political leaders with their Kashmir petard to become the veritable masters of the manor through autocratic and unconstitutional means.