State Security of Pakistan (PDF)

## Introduction This book is an attempt at understanding the problem of State security of Pakistan. The study looks at how the intersectionality among the internal weaknesses emanating from the legacy of colonial history of Pakistan, the problems of the country’s postcolonial political development,...

## Introduction This book is an attempt at understanding the problem of State security of Pakistan. The study looks at how the intersectionality among the internal weaknesses emanating from the legacy of colonial history of Pakistan, the problems of the country’s postcolonial political development, and its anguished geo-strategic, politico-economic and psycho-cultural contestations with India, largely tends to play a significant role in determining the problem of State security in South Asia. In pursuit of exploring answers to this question, the book endeavors to present a historical sociological account of the modes by which the condominium consisting of the religio-military and politico-bureaucratic classes that constitute the power elite in Pakistan have moulded an India-centered State security problem. For this book, such a task has been undertaken by the condominium, by declaring India as an existential menace to the very idea of Pakistan. The idea of Pakistan is presented as pun, which in turn, tends to get subjected to a kind of triple entente wherein the phenomenon of Pakistan simultaneously gets framed as a cartographic, communal as well as a transcendental idea. If, on the one hand, the cartographic idea of Pakistan, manifests in the form of a modern sovereign territorial State of the Westphalian prototype, on the other hand, the communal idea emerges to be the romanticized homeland for the subcontinental Muslims that is modeled in terms of the medanite prototype. For its part in the military/bureaucratic condominium, the transcendental idea of Pakistan is imagined as the borderless transnational entity that has been weaved with the help of faith. In other words, Pakistan as a transcendental entity has been projected as the guardian of the Islamic ummah. India itself, in tems of such a multilayered and multifaceted idea, manifests as an ontological nemesis to the very triadic conception of Pakistan that has been contemplated by the condominium of power elite of the country. In accordance with such an imaginary of the condominium of power elite, India owing to its geographic magnitude, poses a threat to the cartographic idea of Pakistan. Similarly, India as a Hindu majority country, tended to prognosticate perilous ramifications for the communal idea of Pakistan. Finally, in the same way, a Hindu-dominated India also presented grave threats to the ontological security of the transcendental idea of Pakistan as the protector of the Islamic ummah. On the basis of such a conception of India as a triadic ontological exigency, the condominium of power elite in Pakistan managed to shape an India-centred State's security problem. Pakistan's policy response in this regard has been, on the one hand, the product of its constant endeavor to deal with the internal weakness that was engendered by the predicament of colonially constructed cartography and the idea of the modern State. On the other hand, it was the result of the dilemmas of the processes of structuring of political community and the resultant predicament of post-colonial political development. The policy response that emerged out of this multi-layered domestic compulsion itself was underpinned by Pakistan's irredentist claims over the Indian territory of Jammu & Kashmir. This has been done by the condominium of power elite in Pakistan, with the help of the ontological element of the reinvention of the religio-cultural tradition. Subsequently, Pakistan's foreign policy towards India is such a reinvention of the religio-cultural tradition that largely underscored the evolution of Pakistan’s foreign policy towards India has been packaged as a national ideology that is supposed to be globally disseminated. After this, it had to be effectively instrumentalised and popularised into the demotic consciousness as an icon of national consciousness. In this way, the very narrative on the India-centred State's security problématique of Pakistan, tended to get substantiated through the public discourse on national security that got mediated through the speech acts of this condominium of power elite. Underpinning the process of the construction of such a public discourse has been the constant retelling by Pakistan's condominium of power elite, of the narrative of injustice and suffering that was engendered at the very inaugural moment of the State's inception. What lies beneath such a narration is the ways in which negotiations leading to the State formation of Pakistan that was instrumentalised by way of the partition of the Indian subcontinent, emerged as a kind of transaction that merely earned deprivation for Pakistan in terms of geographic, economic as well as military resource gains. In accordance with such a constant reenactment of the narrative of deprivation that was derived in 1947, the partition of the subcontinent was an unequal politico-strategic bargain owing to which Pakistan had to suffer injustice. By virtue of such a grounding of its irredentist claims in the narrative of the history of its creation, the state behaviour of Pakistan has tended to get conditioned into performing the role of a revisionist State. The Indian intervention immediately after decolonisation in Hyderabad and Junagarh for the purpose of gaining the accession of those princely States, strengthened Pakistan's convictions pertaining to its policy of irredentism and revisionism. Further, the Indian engagement in the liberation of Goa from the imperial rule of Portugal, tended to have a catalytic impact in this regard. However, all this came to a full circle with the Indian support of the war of liberation of Bangladesh of 1971. Subsequently, Pakistan's admonitions regarding India's supposed role in fomenting the Baloch secessionist movement strengthened the narrative of injustice and suffering that was engendered in 1947. However, it also intensified the penchant of the Pakistani power elite towards magnifying the scope of its irredentist assertions and revisionist intentions. Hence, to assert the role of being an irredentist and a revisionist State, Pakistan has consistently challenged the political arrangement of sub-continental geography that was instituted in 1947. It has done this through an endeavor towards maintaining preponderance over India, by a constant engagement in acts of offensive military strategy. Such nature of Pakistan’s perception of its equations with India tends to be determined by the contested notions pertaining to the idea of nation, sovereignty, and political geographies. In order to deconstruct such a constitutive phenomenon of the State's security problématique in South Asia, this book argues that Pakistan’s animosity with India is largely determined by a psychology of injured national pride. Such a psychology has been the product of a sense of victimhood that was vehemently nurtured and articulated since the day of its genesis. Underpinning the foundations of such a sense of victimhood was the trust deficit and animosity between India and Pakistan that marked the inaugural moment of the inception of the two subcontinental neighbours as sovereign States. It was engendered by geo-political disputes and the conflict over resource sharing that they tended to experience at the time of decolonisation. Such disputes and conflict were a product of an unequal bargain that Pakistan managed to gain, out of the complexly negotiated deal of the partition of 1947. On the one hand, India, which was designated as the successor State to the British empire in the Indian subcontinent, achieved this status by virtue of inheriting a major portion of the established administrative, legal and defence structures instituted by the erstwhile colonial authority. In addition to this, India also inherited a territory that was nearly four times larger than that of its nascent subcontinental neighbour, Pakistan, on the other hand, had to confront the agony of State formation and State construction right from the beginning, with access to limited resources. The problem was compounded by the mass pogroms that accompanied the tempest of the partition and the subsequent outbreak of the first Kashmir war. Hence, such an intricate conundrum of State formation and State construction that was carried out under the shadow of an environment of conflict led to the birth of self-generated fears of extermination and lack of self-esteem within the Pakistani establishment. This happened largely in the context of its larger and more powerful subcontinental neighbour, India, which was separated from Pakistan by a wide gulf, in so far as the availability of resources, the size of territory, and the strength of the defence establishment was concerned. The dilemmas pertaining to identity and the threat of ontological security that Pakistan tended to experience, owing to the compounding effect of partition and decolonisation, accentuated such a syndrome.