[Assam] One Myth, Many Pakistans, from NYTimes

[Chan Mahanta]

One Myth, Many Pakistans
By ALI SETHI
Published: June 11, 2010
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Lahore, Pakistan
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André da Loba
FOR many Pakistanis, the deaths of more than 80 members of the Ahmadi  
religious sect in mosque attacks two weeks ago raised questions of the  
nation’s future. For me, it recalled a command from my schoolboy past:  
“Write a Note on the Two-Nation Theory.”

It was a way of scoring easy points on the history exam, and of using  
new emotions and impressive-sounding words. I began my answer like this:

The Two-Nation Theory is the Theory that holds that the Hindus and  
Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent are Two Distinct and Separate  
Nations. It is a Theory that is supported by Numerous Facts and  
Figures. During the War of Independence of 1857 the Muslim rulers of  
India were defeated by the British. Suddenly the Hindus, who had  
always held a grudge against the Muslims for conquering them, began to  
collaborate with the new British rulers. They joined British schools,  
worked in British offices and began to make large amounts of money,  
while the Muslims, who were Discriminated Against, became poorer and  
poorer. It was now Undisputable that the Hindus and the Muslims were  
Two Distinct and Separate Nations, and it was becoming necessary for  
the Muslims to demand a Distinct and Separate Homeland for themselves  
in the Indian Subcontinent.

To that point, my “note” had only built up the atmosphere of mistrust  
and hostility between Hindus and Muslims. It had yet to give examples  
of the Distinctness and Separateness of the two communities (such as  
that Hindus worshipped the cow but Muslims ate it), of Hindu betrayals  
and conspiracies (they wanted Hindi, not Urdu, to be the national  
language). And it had still to name and praise the saddened Muslim  
clerics, reformers and poets who had first noted these “undisputable”  
differences.

I got points for every mini-note that I stretched into a full page,  
which was valid if it gave one important date and one important name,  
each highlighted for the benefit of the teacher. This was because the  
teacher couldn’t really read English, and could award points only to  
answers that carefully showcased their Facts and Figures.

After the exam I would go home. Here the Two-Nation Theory fell apart.  
I was part-Shiite (my mother’s family), part-Sunni (my father’s  
family) and part-nothing (neither of my parents was sectarian). There  
were other things: the dark-skinned man who swabbed the floors of the  
house was a Christian; the jovial, foul-mouthed, red-haired old woman  
who visited my grandmother every few months was rumored to be an  
Ahmadi. (It was a small group, I had been told, that considered itself  
Muslim but had been outlawed by the government.)

But even more than these visible religious variations, I was more  
aware of things like caste and money: my mother’s family was upper  
caste, claiming a magical blood bond with the Prophet Muhammad, and  
owned large tracts of land in the countryside. My father’s relatives,  
however, were undisguised converts from Hinduism who had fled their  
villages long ago and now lived in the city, where they were always  
running out of money, working in government offices and selling  
homemade furniture and gambling (and losing) on the stock market.

The Two-Nation Theory allowed only for the simple categories of Hindu  
and Muslim, one for India and the other for Pakistan; it had no room  
for inner complications like Shiite and Sunni and Christian and  
Ahmadi. (I had yet to learn that more than a million Hindus still  
lived in Pakistan.) It also required the abolition of magical blood  
claims and landholdings and stock markets, so that our personalities  
and situations could be determined purely by our religious beliefs.

But I knew that things weren’t really like that. And this was  
something I knew from the beginning, and lived with quite comfortably:  
the history in my textbook was Distinct and Separate from the  
histories of real people.

Some years later, in a secluded college library in Massachusetts, I  
read a very different account of the Two-Nation Theory. Here I learned  
that it was devised in the 1930s by a group of desperate Muslim  
politicians who wanted to extract some constitutional concessions from  
the British before they left India.

The Muslims of India, these politicians were saying in their political  
way, were a “distinct group” with their own “history and culture.” But  
really, the book told me, all they wanted was special protection for  
the poor Muslim minorities in soon-to-be-independent, mostly Hindu  
India.

But the politicians’ gamble failed; they were taken up on their bluff  
and were given a separate country, abruptly and violently cut-up, two  
far-apart chunks of Muslim-majority areas (but what about the poor  
Muslim minorities that were still stuck in Hindu-majority areas!) that  
its founders (but it was a mistake!) now had to justify with the  
subtleties of their theory.

It was like a punishment.

One by one, the founders died — the most important, Muhammad Ali  
Jinnah, just a year after Pakistan’s birth. Their theory could have  
died with them. What was the use now of the idea of Muslim specialness  
— the distinctiveness and separateness of Indian Muslims — in an  
independent, Muslim-majority country?

But the idea was kept alive and made useful: first by a set of  
unelected bureaucrats, then by generals, then by landowners, and then  
by generals again. And, always, to blackmail the people (still  
indistinct and unspecial). An Islamic dance was danced: sovereignty  
rested with “Allah alone”; the country would be called an Islamic  
republic; alcohol and gambling were banned; the Ahmadi sect was  
outlawed (to please the fringe mullahs) for violating, with their  
beliefs and practices, Muhammad’s position in “the principle of the  
finality of [Muhammad’s] prophethood.”

It peaked with the government takeover in 1977 by Gen. Muhammad Zia ul- 
Haq, who announced that his great wish in life was to “Islamize” the  
people of Pakistan. The Two-Nation Theory, confined so far to  
political slogans and clauses in the Constitution, now went  
everywhere: it was injected into textbook passages (the ones I would  
reproduce, with new words and emotions, in my exam) and radio shows  
and programs on the one state-run TV channel. And it branched out,  
becoming anti-Communist (to attract American money), anti-Shiite (to  
attract Arab money, given for cutting Iran’s influence in the  
continent), anti-woman (to please the mullahs) and still more anti- 
Ahmadi (to enhance the pleasure and power of the mullahs).

The Two-Nation Theory was dynamic, useful, lucrative.

And it still is lucrative. Its best rewards are nowadays found in the  
high ratings (and correspondingly high advertising revenue) of  
Pakistan’s newly independent TV channels. Dozens of them are competing  
to sell the fastest-burning conspiracy theories (India and Israel and  
America are behind the latest suicide bombings) and the most punishing  
religious advice (don’t wear nail polish, don’t celebrate birthdays,  
kill blasphemers wherever you find them), that a semi-urban, semi- 
Islamized population, raised on years of government textbooks and  
radio shows and TV sermons (themselves confirmed and elucidated by the  
sermons of mullahs in neighborhood mosques) finds hard to shut out.

So the coordinated gun and bomb attacks during services at two Ahmadi  
mosques here on May 28 surprised no one. Some were saddened. But most  
took it as a matter of course. On the TV channels news of the assaults  
was reported and displayed (all those eyeballs, all those ads) but not  
explained. And in Lahore’s Main Market, near rickshaw stands and fruit  
stalls — the rickshaw drivers and fruit sellers standing in the heat  
outside the window display of an electronics shop, watching the muted  
carnage on an imported flat-screen TV — the incident was mulled over  
and attributed in the end to the larger madness that was overtaking  
the country.

IT was, they agreed, in some ways like the burning last year of a  
Christian village outside Lahore, and in other ways like the sporadic  
killings of Shiites in the years before that. But they also likened it  
to the televised killings of armed clerics in Islamabad’s Red Mosque —  
carried out three years ago by the military itself — and the  
unadmitted, unexplained attacks by American drones still falling on  
the people in the western mountains.

In the drawing rooms of Lahore, among the children of bureaucrats,  
landlords and military men (amazingly practical and un-Islamic in  
their drawing rooms), it was said that the Ahmadi attacks, though  
tragic, were not a sign of doom. After all, the Punjabi Taliban, who  
had claimed responsibility, were just another network — easily  
disrupted (when the time came) by a combination of on-the-ground raids  
and abductions, long and unexplained detentions, and perhaps strikes  
on mountainside training centers by the Predator drones that we don’t  
admit to knowing anything about.

That was their idea of the war on terrorism: the physical removal of a  
nuisance, something rare and extreme and isolatable.

A few days later, I read in the newspaper that the police had made an  
arrest in the Ahmadi attacks. The suspect’s name was Abdullah and he  
was 17 years old. When asked for his motives, he said that he had  
learned that Ahmadis were drawing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad,  
“so their bloodshed was a great service to Islam.”

It was a simple enough statement. But I wondered about his ideas. Had  
he taken them from the Constitution? Or was he inspired by the court  
order days earlier banningFacebook for holding a contest of cartoons  
of the Prophet Muhammad?

Did he hear it in a mosque, or see it on a TV screen in the window  
display of an electronics shop? Did he read about blasphemy and its  
punishments in a textbook? Or was he one of those boys (Twenty  
million? Thirty million?) who don’t go to school and can’t read  
textbooks?

Was he taught about the Ahmadis in the mountains of Waziristan, where  
the police say he trained for his mission? Did he witness an American  
drone attack there? Did he think it was carried out by Ahmadis? Was it  
confirmed for him by a popular talk show host that the Ahmadis were  
America’s agents in Pakistan? And, in Waziristan, was he trained by  
the good Taliban, the ones the Pakistani military is trying to  
protect, or the bad Taliban, the ones it is trying to kill?

Or was he told about the Ahmadis after he had come all the way to the  
vast, grassy compound on the outskirts of Lahore where doctors and  
professors and businessmen — and even, it is said, some bureaucrats  
and landowners and military men — converge now and then to hang out  
with the masses and talk about the ways and woes of Islam?

Several theories now, with several competing culprits. It’s hard to  
pick just one.



Ali Sethi is the author of “The Wish Maker,” a novel.