“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned” — Antonio Gramsci.
An aunt of mine (now long departed) often sought closure of political discussions with the accusation, “You young people know nothing about the sacrifices made for this country, nor the ideology behind its creation.” One could point out to the lady that we “young people” (among whom I then numbered) were in fact aware of the massive Molochian sacrifice of well over a million men, women and children slaughtered in the bloody drawing of our borders, as well as of the millions killed since then in the ethnic clashes in East Pakistan, Balochistan, and Sindh, not to mention the continual, unending blood-letting in Kashmir, Karachi, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, FATA and elsewhere.
Coming down to the present, Zeeshan Salahuddin, in his article in last week’s Friday Times (“Caught NAPping”), writes: “As a nation, we have no central narrative, nothing that makes us inherently ‘Pakistani’”.
But wait a minute. Of course there is a “central narrative” in which Pakistan is seen as a Muslim state, a fortress of Islam that stands firm against the enemies of the faith, and where an Islamic way of life is (or is meant to be) practiced. And that is precisely where the problem lies.
I trust my readers will permit me a moment’s digression to introduce the term Hegemony, as used by the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci. Commonly, we use the term with reference to international affairs. We speak of India’s ‘hegemonic designs’ in South Asia. Or we refer to the US as the ‘international hegemon’ who wishes to control all energy resources, or is waging a war against Muslims, or is conspiring to break up Pakistan, or whatever.
But the sense in which Gramsci used the term was sociological and referred to the hegemony of a group or class within a society exercising domination over other groups or classes. The victims of this hegemony are the oppressed or exploited members of that society, who may be more numerous than their oppressors but are, by definition, weaker.
The key insight proposed by Gramsci was that oppressed or exploited groups remain quietly under domination because they are in fact brain-washed into accepting, and even applauding, the injustices of the social order in which they live. Control over them is exercised in two ways: first, through the coercive power of the state – the midnight knock, the police knout – to suppress any tendencies that threaten dominance; secondly, through being subjected to propaganda which propagates an idea, a narrative, that conceals the societal hegemony under a claimed unifying identity. It is this exploitative intellectual construct which we refer to as a “national narrative”.
Gramsci, who witnessed the rise of Mussolini in Italy and was imprisoned and tortured by the fascists, describes the all-encompassing national narrative as a tool for establishing and maintaining political dominance within a society. The dominant classes, Gramsci suggests, maintain control, not only through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the rulers become the common-sense values of the ruled as well.
For Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on a consented coercion. Inequity and injustice within a society is concealed and submerged within an all-encompassing narrative – usually evoking race, religion, nation or ethnicity. This is what we mean when we speak of obscurantism.
Now, nation states, whether or not they possess a national narrative that proposes some kind of distinguishing identity or raison d’être, have diverse histories and life spans, but have one thing in common. All nation-states comprise a geographically identifiable stretch of territory within which the inhabitants – whether or not they share ethnic, linguistic or cultural characteristics – feel that their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are better served by belonging to the state than in not doing so.
While nation-states may have a wide range of perceptual origins, each is in fact a historical accident in search of a destiny. Once a nation state has appeared on the map, its purpose is nothing more than to provide governance, promote economic activity, make available education and other social services to its citizens, and ensure their freedom, their rights, justice, and law and order.
In Pakistan’s case, right from the 1950s, there was a piecemeal articulation of a hegemonic narrative for the new state. The non-elected military-bureaucratic combine, which has in fact usually held the levers of power, based this narrative on a pseudo-Islamic set of premises. With this narrative, conformity was imposed on pluralism and a unitary state was sought to be created. In place of the diverse colours of our native heritage, cultural uniformity was imposed. Ideological formulations were trumpeted, dissent discouraged. To oppose the state or its functionaries was to oppose Islam itself!
This pseudo-Islamic narrative proved insufficient to satisfy the inchoate yearnings of minority ethnicities like the Baloch, Pakhtuns, Sindhis or Mohajirs. Worse, it failed to unite the geographically divided country. Amid massive upheavals, disorder and bloodshed, the state of Pakistan fell apart in 1971. Following the populist-socialist Bhutto hiatus, the usurper Zia regime restored a version of the pseudo-Islamic ideological narrative, intensified and distorted to malignant proportions. The institutions he promoted and the retrograde educational systems he erected, polluted the intellectual atmosphere of the land and gave birth to today’s bigoted, obscurantist political culture and its poisonous fallouts of violent insurgency, terrorism and cold-blooded mass murder. This most retrograde of dictators ruled virtually unshaken for over eleven years, challenged only by the repeatedly martyred Bhutto family and by the women of this country.
In hindsight, with all the massive damage that has been done and that continues unabated, we need to understand that the complex sets of intentions of the nation’s founders became less-than-relevant after the achievement of independence. Once national independence was achieved, the Maqsad of Pakistan became the greater good of the greatest number of its citizens. It’s as simple as that. And that is how it was articulated by the nation’s founder.
With every respect to my late aunt (may the Almighty bless her soul), there is no point in harping on about issues like “Pakistan ka matlab kiya?”. Today, the spurious ‘national ideology’ promoted by the establishment to maintain an unconstitutional dominance, has spiralled completely out of control and both the citizens and the state are in mortal peril. But no ideologically meaningful counter-narrative is being proposed, either by the political heirs to the Bhuttos, or by the culturally isolated remnants of the liberal-left.
We must cast away the cowl of illusion from our heads. How long can we effectively fight this existential war on the very ideological ground that itself spawned this most cruel and barbaric of enemies?
An aunt of mine (now long departed) often sought closure of political discussions with the accusation, “You young people know nothing about the sacrifices made for this country, nor the ideology behind its creation.” One could point out to the lady that we “young people” (among whom I then numbered) were in fact aware of the massive Molochian sacrifice of well over a million men, women and children slaughtered in the bloody drawing of our borders, as well as of the millions killed since then in the ethnic clashes in East Pakistan, Balochistan, and Sindh, not to mention the continual, unending blood-letting in Kashmir, Karachi, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, FATA and elsewhere.
Coming down to the present, Zeeshan Salahuddin, in his article in last week’s Friday Times (“Caught NAPping”), writes: “As a nation, we have no central narrative, nothing that makes us inherently ‘Pakistani’”.
But wait a minute. Of course there is a “central narrative” in which Pakistan is seen as a Muslim state, a fortress of Islam that stands firm against the enemies of the faith, and where an Islamic way of life is (or is meant to be) practiced. And that is precisely where the problem lies.
I trust my readers will permit me a moment’s digression to introduce the term Hegemony, as used by the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci. Commonly, we use the term with reference to international affairs. We speak of India’s ‘hegemonic designs’ in South Asia. Or we refer to the US as the ‘international hegemon’ who wishes to control all energy resources, or is waging a war against Muslims, or is conspiring to break up Pakistan, or whatever.
In a hegemonic culture, the values of the rulers become the common-sense values of the ruled
But the sense in which Gramsci used the term was sociological and referred to the hegemony of a group or class within a society exercising domination over other groups or classes. The victims of this hegemony are the oppressed or exploited members of that society, who may be more numerous than their oppressors but are, by definition, weaker.
The key insight proposed by Gramsci was that oppressed or exploited groups remain quietly under domination because they are in fact brain-washed into accepting, and even applauding, the injustices of the social order in which they live. Control over them is exercised in two ways: first, through the coercive power of the state – the midnight knock, the police knout – to suppress any tendencies that threaten dominance; secondly, through being subjected to propaganda which propagates an idea, a narrative, that conceals the societal hegemony under a claimed unifying identity. It is this exploitative intellectual construct which we refer to as a “national narrative”.
Gramsci, who witnessed the rise of Mussolini in Italy and was imprisoned and tortured by the fascists, describes the all-encompassing national narrative as a tool for establishing and maintaining political dominance within a society. The dominant classes, Gramsci suggests, maintain control, not only through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the rulers become the common-sense values of the ruled as well.
For Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on a consented coercion. Inequity and injustice within a society is concealed and submerged within an all-encompassing narrative – usually evoking race, religion, nation or ethnicity. This is what we mean when we speak of obscurantism.
Now, nation states, whether or not they possess a national narrative that proposes some kind of distinguishing identity or raison d’être, have diverse histories and life spans, but have one thing in common. All nation-states comprise a geographically identifiable stretch of territory within which the inhabitants – whether or not they share ethnic, linguistic or cultural characteristics – feel that their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are better served by belonging to the state than in not doing so.
While nation-states may have a wide range of perceptual origins, each is in fact a historical accident in search of a destiny. Once a nation state has appeared on the map, its purpose is nothing more than to provide governance, promote economic activity, make available education and other social services to its citizens, and ensure their freedom, their rights, justice, and law and order.
In Pakistan’s case, right from the 1950s, there was a piecemeal articulation of a hegemonic narrative for the new state. The non-elected military-bureaucratic combine, which has in fact usually held the levers of power, based this narrative on a pseudo-Islamic set of premises. With this narrative, conformity was imposed on pluralism and a unitary state was sought to be created. In place of the diverse colours of our native heritage, cultural uniformity was imposed. Ideological formulations were trumpeted, dissent discouraged. To oppose the state or its functionaries was to oppose Islam itself!
This pseudo-Islamic narrative proved insufficient to satisfy the inchoate yearnings of minority ethnicities like the Baloch, Pakhtuns, Sindhis or Mohajirs. Worse, it failed to unite the geographically divided country. Amid massive upheavals, disorder and bloodshed, the state of Pakistan fell apart in 1971. Following the populist-socialist Bhutto hiatus, the usurper Zia regime restored a version of the pseudo-Islamic ideological narrative, intensified and distorted to malignant proportions. The institutions he promoted and the retrograde educational systems he erected, polluted the intellectual atmosphere of the land and gave birth to today’s bigoted, obscurantist political culture and its poisonous fallouts of violent insurgency, terrorism and cold-blooded mass murder. This most retrograde of dictators ruled virtually unshaken for over eleven years, challenged only by the repeatedly martyred Bhutto family and by the women of this country.
In hindsight, with all the massive damage that has been done and that continues unabated, we need to understand that the complex sets of intentions of the nation’s founders became less-than-relevant after the achievement of independence. Once national independence was achieved, the Maqsad of Pakistan became the greater good of the greatest number of its citizens. It’s as simple as that. And that is how it was articulated by the nation’s founder.
With every respect to my late aunt (may the Almighty bless her soul), there is no point in harping on about issues like “Pakistan ka matlab kiya?”. Today, the spurious ‘national ideology’ promoted by the establishment to maintain an unconstitutional dominance, has spiralled completely out of control and both the citizens and the state are in mortal peril. But no ideologically meaningful counter-narrative is being proposed, either by the political heirs to the Bhuttos, or by the culturally isolated remnants of the liberal-left.
We must cast away the cowl of illusion from our heads. How long can we effectively fight this existential war on the very ideological ground that itself spawned this most cruel and barbaric of enemies?