The Dialectical Conceptions of Statehood and the Identitarian Conundrum of Pakistan PDF

# Introduction ## The Dialectical Conceptions of Statehood and the Identitarian Conundrum of Pakistan The genealogy of the problématique of State security in South Asia can be traced to the history of British colonialism in the region. Such a phenomenon can be understood by examining the modes thr...

# Introduction ## The Dialectical Conceptions of Statehood and the Identitarian Conundrum of Pakistan The genealogy of the problématique of State security in South Asia can be traced to the history of British colonialism in the region. Such a phenomenon can be understood by examining the modes through which the structural-functional dynamics of colonialism tended to shape the processes involved in the making of the idea of modern State and the structuring of political community in South Asia. To do this, at the outset, the partition of the Indian subcontinent, which emerged as the product of the complex process of colonisation and decolonisation, ushered in a dialectical contest between two antithetical ideas of the State in South Asia. On the one side of this dialectical divide, there existed the idea of the State, which was accorded by the structure of the international system. In accordance, both India and Pakistan, which emerged out of the process of partition, gained the common identity of sovereign Statehood scripted in the Westphalian vocabulary. On its other side, there lay the phenomenon of the ideational constitution of the State, implying that the State was more of an ideological construct rather than a material embodiment of the Westphalian framework of sovereignty and political territoriality. This antithesis to the Westphalian idea of the State was predicated upon the contention that different primordial articulations of the nation required separate geographies to represent their respective political identities. It meant that contrary to the commonness of the identities of India and Pakistan derived out of the Westphalian idea of the State, the ideological State tended to accentuate the existence of dissimilarity of identities that was founded on the assertions of primordial lineages. The onset of such a situation has been explained here by considering the Indian subcontinent as a manifestation of such an intrusive process of the formation of an ideological State. The partition of the Indian subcontinent on the basis of the two-nation theory, and the subsequent creation of Pakistan as a sovereign territoriality for the Muslims of South Asia, manifests as the genealogical conditionality towards laying the foundations to this entire process in the region. Since the foundational narrative of Pakistan tends to be located in the ideology of the two-nation theory and subcontinental Muslim nationalism, the formation of the ideological State in South Asia may be understood by dwelling in the structures, processes, strategies and ideational contexts that the formation of such a territorial entity has executed. Pakistan has been selected for this study because the country, and the tumultuous history of its interractions with India, lies at the heart of the South Asian security predicament. What deeply underpins the security predicament of South Asia itself has been the colonially instigated processes of nation State formation and the instrumentalisation of the imported values of metropolitan governance. This will be done by exploring the ways in which the crisis that was generated by the processes of the structuring of political community, the postcolonial State making and the State construction that was carried out by a dilettantish application of the colonially imported values of metropolitan governance in Pakistan, which resulted in the emergence and endurance of its India-centred State security problématique. Such a scenario tended to emerge, as the condominium of the Islamists, the army, the political class and the bureaucracy considered the dissemination of Indophobia in the demotic consciousness, not only as a populist political instrument to perpetuate their own class interest, but also as a medium to project the political idiom that the very condominium of power elite is the sole deliverance to guard the country from such a menace. To do this, an attempt has been made here to decode the question as to how the problems confronted by the internal structure of the political system in Pakistan factored deeply in conditioning its national security agenda, which ultimately contributed towards the evolution of a tumoultuous subcontinental security environment. Hence, an attempt has been made here to analyse the inextricable linkages between the domestic subsystemic compulsions of a State and the trajectory of international relations in the context of South Asia by placing colonialism as the common element that connects both these distinct spheres of politics. This problematic has been decoded by mapping the ways in which the problems of postcolonial political development that are rooted in colonial history have transformed Pakistan into a weak State. In this regard, the work demonstrates how such a transformation contributes significantly in the identitarian crisis in the psyche of Pakistan. Such a predicament gets demonstrated in the form of a four-fold conundrum that signifies the identitarian predicament that postcolonial Pakistan has encountered, while engaging in the task of State-making and the structuring of political community. First was the problem of knitting a coherent idea of the nation-State by tailoring the perforated political geography that Pakistan had inherited as a legacy of partition. This was essential because the political geography of Pakistan was created in such a manner that the two wings of the country were separated from each other by a thousand miles of Indian territory. Hence, bringing in of cohesion between the Eastern and the Western wing of Pakistan became an imperative. Second was the crisis of reconciling the contested definitions of the idea of Pakistan that were plagued by internal contradictions. It manifested in the form of contradictions between a nation-State founded upon the norms of the Westphalian synthesis, and a religio-cultural territoriality predicated upon the primordialist civilisation value of being the exclusive homeland for South Asian Muslims. Third was the issue of identifying who possesses the credentials of being designated as the real Pakistani Muslim. Such a question cropped up because of the innate ethno-linguistic and sectarian divisions that pestered the polity of Pakistan right from its inception. Owing to this, identitarian issues manifested as a major determinant of the crisis-prone society of the country. Finally, Pakistan's postcolonial conundrum was compounded due to its ambiguous relationship with Islam. This manifested into two distinct facets. First was the conflation of the functionalist definition of Islam as a source of macrosocial identity, with its metaphysical interpretation as an individual's inner sense of belief. Second was the dispute between the pure/authentic Islam of the cosmopolitan version and its popular, syncretistic manifestations. At the bottom of such a four-fold identitarian conundrum of Pakistan lies the socialisation of Pakistan towards representing its own identity in terms of everything that is unIndian (Ahsan, 2005: XII). This kind of a multifaceted and multi-layered conundrum of Pakistan has played out in the country as a fierce dialectical contest between the Westphalian and primordialist ideas of the State. Such a dialectical contest generated an intense friction between the processes of State-making and the structuring of the political community. Hence, unlike in the case of the post-Westphalian European experience, in Pakistan, the processes of State-making and the structuring of political community tended to compete with each other in a manner to place the modern notion of the State and the primordialist conception of the political community in a framework of an intractable relationship of antinomies. In order to deal with such a multilayered and multifaceted postcolonial predicament, Pakistan attempted to instrumentalise the very ideas of nation and nationalism into an ideological structure. The functional utility of this ideology was that it helped its State machinery construct the image of the national self and portray its "enemy other" as an impending existential threat. Pakistan's ruling elite helped construct this divide among the self, the victim, and the victimising other. This then manifested as an existential menace fuelled by defining the notions of the nation and nationalism within the vocabulary of religion, which became an instrument to deal with the acute postcolonial dilemmas of the country. Considering this, its political class began to frame the divide between the self and other in terms of the ideology of "two-nation theory" and subcontinental Muslim nationalism on the basis of which Pakistan was created. Such a task of engendering the divide between the self and the other was done by advocating a strategy of nation-building that was based on a policy tripod. This implied that a three-fold institutional strategy was devised to delineate the ontological demarcation between the self and the other that was supposed to be mediated with the help of the ideological instrument of the two-nation theory and subcontinental Muslim nationalism (Haqqani, 2005: 15). Such a tripod consisted first of the fostering of a national Islamic identity that was supposed to hold together the diverse ethnic, linguistic and politico-economic interest of the pluriversal population of Pakistan. Second was the portrayal of India as the ultimate nemesis, which situated it at the pivot that determined the nature and direction of the problématique of State security. Such an imagery of India as a foundational threat to the ontological security of Pakistan, as projected by the State propaganda, tended to be rooted in the pathological hatred of the Hindus towards the Muslims. This imagery, according to such a propaganda, also was supposed to be grounded in India's implacable urge to weaken or entirely dismember Pakistan (Ibid: 42) Third in order to deal with the threat of India, the policy option that was resorted to by the leadership of Pakistan was the gaining of strategic and economic aid from outside powers like the United States through military alliances such as the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation and the Central Treaty Organisation (Ibid). The mechanism to accomplish such a policy tripod has been what is designated by Haqqani as the "mosque/military alliance" (Ibid). Such an alliance referred to a long-standing partnership, wherein the military rulers used religious parties and groups as instruments to achieve their goals in both domestic and international spheres. In exchange for such a utility, they allowed the deeper Islamisation of the Pakistani polity, which not only benefited the programmatic agenda of the Islamists, but it also facilitated the power elite to project the idea of a Hindu India as the ultimate nemesis of an Islamic Pakistan (Barracca, 2016: 132). In this sense, the imagery of India as an ontological threat factored deeply in shaping the problématique of State security of Pakistan. This construction was manufactured with the help of the ontological elements of the religio-civilisational reinvention of tradition. It was subsequently packaged as a national ideology that was supposed to be globally disseminated and distributed for the consumption of the demotic consciousness as an iconic signifier of national consciousness. The process of manufacturing, packaging and distribution was mediated by the power elite of Pakistan, which has tended to deeply penetrate into the civic and political life of the country's entire postcolonial history. In accordance with this manufactured narrative, the idea of Pakistan as an Islamic State in the making emerged to be the antinomy to a Hindu-dominated India, which was home to a large Muslim minority population. In this sense, India emerged to be the natural enemy of Pakistan, which posed an ontological threat to it. The Pakistani ruling elite fomented this imagined fear and began to raise an Indo-centric existential threat that was meant for both domestic and international consumption. It is on this very premise of the divide between the self and other that the Pakistani ruling elite, heavily driven by its own class interest, attempted to vindicate the clarion calls for representing India as the primordial existential threat and mould an India-centred State security problématique. A manifestation of this has been the constant policy of irredentism that Pakistan has followed to justify the conflict with India and provide credence to its postulate of the colonial foundations of the country's security predicament. On its part, owing to the overdeterministic accentuation upon irredentism while moulding its security and foreign policy, Pakistan evolved into a revisionist State that constantly endeavours at gaining escalation dominance over India through overt or covert military means. In such a scenario, the military has assumed a pivotal position in the politics of Pakistan. The military has catapulted itself to such a role because of the geostrategic asymmetry that separates Pakistan from its larger and more resourceful neighbour, India (Aziz, 2005). Such a context of status inconsistency induced various scholars to situate the India-Pakistan bilateral antagonism in the framework of the distinction between a strong and a week State. (Basrur, 2008: 50). It is this very asymmetry that has impelled Pakistan to balance India, both internally as well as externally (Sattar, 2010: 40). It has also factored deeply in determining Pakistan's enduring strategic tilt towards the US (Farooq, 2016). Pakistan has been coerced to take recourse to this path because it considers India as an existential menace, after the horrendous experience of the tormenting tempest of partition of 1947 and its subsequent recollection in 1971 (Haqqani, 2015). The army has been at the pivot of determining such a policy, as it has been the principal agent that has shaped both domestic and foreign policy of Pakistan (Fair, 2014: 4). Owing to this, the military has emerged as the most powerful institution in Pakistan (Aziz, 2008: 18). Overall, the end result has been that due to the policy of irredentism and the strategic urgency for competition with India, pursued unrelentingly by Pakistan, as well as the politico-military responses that India has advanced against Pakistan, which are embedded in the principle of strategic offensive, both States have ended up getting locked in a protracted trail of conflict since the day of their inception. Such a stalemate, does not seem to defuse, and the territory of Jammu & Kashmir has emerged as the key battle ground of high politics between the two countries. This kind of a situation continues, despite four wars and several attempts at peace building. To further complicate the quagmire, the two subcontinental adversaries have got themselves embroiled into an aggressive nuclear arms race. On its part, the nuclearisation of the Indo-Pakistan dyadic relations in 1998 has deepened South Asia's regional security dilemmas. This is because of Pakistani involvement in a low-intensity conflict with India, by way of using the instruments of supporting insurgency in Jammu & Kashmir as well as State-sponsored cross-border terrorism deep inside its territory. Such low-intensity warfare constantly haunts the region with the fear of both the States reaching the threshold of a nuclear war, which may have fatal effects upon human security and the ecology in the region. Besides, the probable threat of terrorists operating in the region gaining access to the nuclear arsenal has constantly bedevilled the security establishments across South Asia. Due to such a postcolonial nature of South Asia, the region has witnessed the preponderance of geopolitics as an idea and practise. This has impelled the region's polities to take the sovereign State as their key referent (Chatterjee, 2019: 84). By virtue of this, the South Asian States have not only endeavoured at strictly guarding their territorial integrity, but they have also tended to unrelentingly aspire to construct exclusive models of nationhood (Ibid: 144). To make sense of such a scenario, the aim of the book is to understand how the trajectory of the linked histories of South Asia is suspended between its colonial and postcolonial epochs, factors deeply in the moulding of the nature of conflict in the region. Such an endeavour has been undertaken here by mapping the ways in which postcolonial processes of democratisation in the region tend to mirror this linked history. At the bottom of this kind of a trajectory of democratisation lies the dilemmas of development that the postcolonial polities have confronted. Sankaran Krishna has designated such dilemmas as "the cartographic anxiety" (Krishna, 1994). Owing to this, the polities of South Asia largely tend to fail in reaching the stage of democratic consolidation. Due to such a lacuna, the countries transform into democracies, but they fall short of achieving the fullest realisation of the fundamental norms of democratic deepening. Pakistan seems to suffer from such a syndrome owing to its overdeterministic engagement with sovereignty that has been engendered by its inter-twined Statehood that is connected to India (Mishra, 2021). Since in democracies such as Pakistan, the civilian control over policy formulation is constantly contested by centralising autocratic force inbuilt in the architecture of their armies and bureaucracies, democratically elected governments seldom have a say in the process of decision making on sensitive issues pertaining to national security. This is exactly the case in the sphere of defence and foreign policy of Pakistan that is considerably shaped by the intrusive role of the army (Fair, 2018: 25). Such a phenomenon, apparently manifests in Pakistan's policy responses to the enduring rivalry that it has with India. Hence, the embededness of Pakistan in the quagmire of cartographic anxiety, largely determines the nature of its State's security problématique. Considering this, an attempt has been made in this book to interrogate the questions pertaining to the influence of the domestic factors, in the moulding of the Pakistani State's security problématique. This has been done here by examining the subcontinental security predicament involving the two nuclear-powered adversaries, India and Pakistan. ## The Genealogies of Distrust and Hostilities Between India and Pakistan As the cold war was defining an intense bipolar security structure at the global level, South Asia was structuring itself into a region that was characterised by conflicts that were founded upon mutual threat perceptions. This was apparent in the episodes of conflict between India and Pakistan. On its part, underlying the bilateral dynamics between India and Pakistan, seems to be their engagement with sovereignty in relation to each other which deeply underpins the nature of their Statehood. In turn, their inter-twined Statehood that emanated out of the partition of 1947, tends to determine their sovereign lives. It is this very intersectionality that exists between the inter-twined Statehood and, the sovereign lives of India and Pakistan that lie at the bottom of the conflictual character of their relationships (Mishra, 2021). Situating the understanding of such a conflict in South Asia within the subtext of the subcontinent's colonial genealogy and postcolonial ontology, what this book endeavours to present a historical sociological account of the checkered chronicle of Pakistan's geopolitical and strategic rivalry with India. In pursuit of this, the fundamental epistemic question to be interrogated in