Pakistan has no natural tendency to be democratic. Rule of Islam is the priority

The Print

02-06-2025

So let us see whether these beliefs about Pakistan are true, or merely our own confirmation biases in action, where we evaluate others by our own standards and historical experience. It is my belief that you cannot judge an Islamic state by any standard except the one set by Islam's history.
Three other statements made about Pakistan are equally worth questioning. One, Pakistan is a failed state. No state is a failed state unless it is totally incapable of using power to achieve its basic aims. This is far from being the case in Pakistan. Another half-truth is that the country has no self-definition beyond hatred for 'Hindu India'. And yet another assumption, which we have now begun to question, is that religion cannot be a basis for statehood. We started saying this after we helped create Bangladesh, but now we are back to square one, for the post-Hasina Bangladesh government is Islamist and effectively anti-India. We now have two Pakistans to confront, not just one.
One of the enduring myths Indians are told about Pakistan is that the real hurdle to peace is its army, which is a state above the state. It is the Pakistani Army that needs to use terror as state policy against a stronger India, and this, in turn, enables the army to retain extraordinary power. That the Pakistani Army chief was recently elevated to the rank of Field Marshal after an indifferent performance in the short, near-war with India seems to reinforce this statement. Victory or defeat, the army will rule.
Let's start with the frequently made statement—partially in jest—that other countries have an army, but in Pakistan, the army has a country. There is surely some truth to this, but we must consider other explanations too. Ask yourself, was the Pakistani state any different at the time of Partition, when its army, then run by British Generals, decided to use tribal forces to overrun and take over Jammu & Kashmir? Did a democratically elected Zulfikar Ali Bhutto have any different notions about India than its rapidly Islamising army under Zia ul-Haq?
An alternate hypothesis would be that Muslim majority states have no natural tendency to remain democratic or secular, because Islam puts religion above the state, umma (a global community of Muslims) above the nation-state. In the imagined existence of an umma, the existence or non-existence of a state like Pakistan is immaterial. What matters is whether the state, or states, are under the rule of Islam. So, when secular historians point out that Islam does not provide a template for national unity, they are partly wrong. In Islam, a legitimate state must merely follow the sharia; so whether we have one Islamic state or 100, the umma remains one in theory.
And this situation does not change whether it is an army that rules or a theocracy (with some notable exceptions). Neither of them is willing to accept the normal checks and balances that apply to any functioning democracy.
This is why, despite having lost almost all wars with India and behaving brutally with its own insurgencies in Balochistan, the army is still the most popular institution in Pakistan, with 74 per cent approval ratings. The most important aspect of Islam (as with the Communists) is the acquisition of power, and hence it does not matter whether the person wielding the power is a mullah or a soldier, or someone who combines both functions. So when Field Marshal Asim Munir declares himself to be a believer in the two-nation theory, he is only validating his right to rule over all Muslims in Pakistan.
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Who rules an Islamic country?
The ideological underpinnings of Islam start with the Prophet, who combined the roles of political, religious and military head of the community in Medina. His successor Caliphs followed the same policy. Unlike Christianity, which, after repeated clashes between church and state, accepted a bifurcation of sovereignty based on whether something belonged to the temporal sphere or the religious, in Islam, there is no such separation.
In both Pakistan and Bangladesh, the military has often dumped the elected government, and the military uses religious authority to remain in power. Among Muslim-majority countries that have had short or long spells of military rule—Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Yemen and Turkey (before Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist party came to power). Even the most benign of Muslim states, Indonesia, had a general, Suharto, as its president for nearly three decades. The rest are either theocratic (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan) or ruled by Muslim monarchs. And Nigeria, which is evenly divided between Muslims and Christians, has seen military dictatorships. Boko Haram, one of the most brutal terrorist organisations in the world, wants to turn it into a full-blown Islamic state.
Some rulers may be liberal and some conservative, but the idea that the head of the state must represent religious authority is key in Muslim majority states (no doubt, with some honourable exceptions). Malaysia is somewhere in between. Islam is the official religion, but it gives guaranteed political spaces to its minorities as long as they don't threaten Islamic supremacy. The second part of the statement is vital, for it does not imply equal treatment for all religions.
A Pew Research survey on Muslim attitudes to Sharia law in 39 countries (India was not surveyed, for some strange reason) found an overwhelming majority of Muslims favouring Sharia. By implication, one can conclude that—since Sharia needs to be imposed from above, by a ruler who has to be Muslim and proclaims Islam as the state religion and sets up laws to align with Sharia—the people who want Islamic law may not object to any ruler who promises them the same. Whether they wear the robes of clerics or military uniforms does not matter. In India's neighbourhood, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan have 82-99 per cent of the population supporting Sharia.
In Bangladesh, support was 82 per cent, which explains why even with a friendly Sheikh Hasina in place (before last August's student-led coup), the de-Hinduisation of Bangladesh continued. It is the nature of society that determines democracy and inclusion, not whether it is an army running the show or clerics or some more secular dictator. Nothing else can explain the steady decline of Hindus in Bangladesh from 22 per cent after Partition to under eight per cent now. Even when the ruler may be mildly secular, its polity is definitely not on the same page.
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Pakistan will always be a problem
The second point, that Pakistan is a country without a positive self-definition, is equally unimportant. Reason: Hatred is a strong binding force for nationhood. It gives the rulers and the population enormous ability to withstand economic deprivation. This is the main reason why Bhutto said that he would eat grass in order to fund the country's efforts to build a nuclear bomb. Hatred for the 'other' is one of the most powerful motivators. In our own Mahabharata, we can note how Ashwatthama's hatred for the Pandavas—for using subterfuge to kill his father Dronacharya in the Kurukshetra war—motivated him to kill almost the entire Pandava clan in the stealth of night. This happened even after the war had formally ended with the killing of Duryodhana. This is why Aman ki Aasha can never trump Pakistani hatred of India.
The third point relates to Pakistan's status as an Islamic state, created as a redoubt to strengthen Islam against 'Hindu India'. This idea, too, has its roots in Islamic history, where the Prophet, when he was weak, chose to establish a regime in Medina, where he fused religion with military and political power. Once he gained in strength, he could take over Mecca without a fight, after abrogating the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, a 10-year peace treaty he had signed with the Meccans. Peace is useful only when you are weak. Pakistan, to note a scholarly work by Venkat Dhulipala, was about 'Creating a New Medina' for undivided India's minority Muslims. A Medina is always temporary, and meant to provide a sanctuary to build your strength till you are ready to take on your enemy. Two Medinas or three do not make this template irrelevant to understand what Pakistan is all about.
The mere creation of Bangladesh did not enable the country to embrace secularism or pluralism, as it is now becoming apparent. For the future, it also implies that Balochistan may also become another Islamist country once it achieves freedom from Punjabi-ruled Pakistan. We must, of course, support the freedom movement to weaken Pakistan, but we should not be naive enough to believe that it implies a win for secularism in the end.
As far as Pakistan is concerned, India has to reckon with the possibility that even if, at some point, its army were to be cut down to size, that country's enmity to 'Hindu India' will not cease. Terrorism could remain a way of life in Pakistan, either as one country or in truncated form, especially since terrorists are integrated into the army and civil society. A smaller Pakistan will become even more prone to foisting terror, since its army can no longer defeat India. What a truncated Pakistan will give us is a brief reprieve.
Pakistan, as one unit or many mini-Pakistans, will continue to remain a problem for India, and possibly the world, under army rule or civilian rule.
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Open up for reinterpretation
So, what hope is there for peace in the future? The answer lies with thinking and questioning Muslims, who have been intimidated into silence by jihadi elements. It is only when ordinary Muslims start openly questioning the basic tenets of Islam and modifying or reinterpreting them for the modern era that jihadism will start shrinking.
It is worth noting that global Islam closed the doors to ijtihad—the use of reason to interpret sacred texts—nearly 10 centuries ago, after briefly trying to begin the process during the 10th and 11th centuries CE. The age of Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd (Avicenna and Averroes to western writers), which dawned when Islamic armies ruled parts of Europe and came in touch with Greek philosophy, died by the end of the 11th century, when Al-Ghazali and the Asherite movement closed the gates to ijtihad and declared the Quran as not subject to revisionist and reason-based interpretations. These trends and the victory of non-reason are brilliantly captured in Robert R Reilly's book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis. The revival of reason and tolerance needs the wider Muslim polity to end this continuing intellectual suicide.
Things will change when Muslims reopen ijtihad. The starting point will be reached when they openly disown the idea of the umma as a brotherhood only of Muslims, or that the kafir is undeserving of equal rights. In India, Muslims must see other Indians, especially non-Muslims, as part of their core umma. The word kafir must be outlawed, for it is does not just mean non-believer, but someone worth dehumanising, and made actionable under the law as a put-down.
Till then, we must judge Pakistan or any Islamist nation only in the context of Islamic history and experience. And be ready to defend ourselves.
R Jagannathan is former Editorial Director, Swarajya. He tweets at @TheJaggi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)