Quotes from Ayesha Jalal

What came in the wake of 1971 promised to be an endless trial by fire for the constituent units of a Pakistani federation that the military in league with the central bureaucracy insisted on governing as a quasi- unitary state.

Jinnah's "Pakistan" did not entail the partition of India; rather it meant its regeneration into an union where Pakistan and Hindustan would join to stand together proudly against the hostile world without. This was no clarion call for pan-Islam; this was not pitting Muslim India against Hindustan; rather it was a secular vision of a polity where there was real political choice & safeguards, the India of Jinnah's dreams, a vision unfulfilled but noble nonetheless.

The murder of Pakistan's first prime minister heralded the imminent derailment of the political process and the onset of a brutal political culture of assassinations, sustained by the state's direct or indirect complicity.

In the absence of democratic politics, the dominance of a predominantly Punjabi civil bureaucracy and army heightened the grievances of non-Punjabi provinces and the linguistic groups within them. Te entrenched institutional supremacy of a Punjabi army and federal bureaucracy, not Punjab's dominance over other provinces per se, had emerged as the principal impediment to restoring democratic processes in Pakistan.

In Iqbal's view, the only purpose of the state in Islam was to establish a "spiritual democracy" by implementing the principles of equality, solidarity, and freedom that constituted the essence of the Quranic message. It was in "this sense alone that the State in Islam is a theocracy, not in the sense that it was headed by a representative of God on earth who can always screen his despotic will behind his supposed infallibility.

The veil of secrecy shrouding high-profile political assassinations in postindependence Pakistan has extended to information on the inner dynamics of its frenzied history.

Pakistan is a visibly perturbed and divided nation. Its people are struggling to find an answer to the mother of all questions: what sort of a Pakistan do they want along a spectrum of choices, ranging from an orthodox, religious state to a modern, enlightened one?

Except in Punjab and the NWFP, the central government's Kashmir policy had little support in Sindh or Balochistan and even less in East Bengal. Instead of serving the people, civil servants and their allies in the army hoisted the political leaders with their Kashmir petard to become the veritable masters of the manor through autocratic and unconstitutional means.

The uneasy symbiosis between a military authoritarian state and democratic political processes is often attributed to the artificial nature of the country and the lack of a neat fit between social identities at the base and the arbitrary frontiers drawn by the departing colonial masters.

Contemptuous of all politicians, they were especially wary of a Bengali majority in any future federal constitution. If permitted to secure their rightful place in the governance of the country, Bengali politicians could join their disaffected counterparts in the non- Punjabi provinces to force a change in Pakistan's Kashmir focused and pro- American foreign policy.

With doubts about its ability to survive being expressed both within and outside its freshly drawn boundaries, Pakistan's insecurities were given full play in fashioning the nation's history. Using the "two- nation" theory as their crutch, state- sponsored historians wrote histories for schools and colleges as well as for more general consumption that highlighted the tyranny of the Hindu community in order to justify the creation of Pakistan.

Tarring regional demands with the Indian brush became such an entrenched part of the official discourse of nationalism in Pakistan that the managers of the centralized state regarded legitimate demands for provincial autonomy with deep suspicion.

Sudden and unexplained deaths of key politicians have been a recurring feature of Pakistani history since 1951. Often the reasons have been patently evident.

Pakistan's first crop of leaders at the center consisted mainly of migrants from India with limited or no real bases of support in the provinces. Suspicious of their provincial counterparts, émigré politicians at the center focused on consolidating state authority rather than building the Muslim League into a popularly based national party.

Pakistanis have internalized the threats, imagined and real, to the political stability and security of their country. An overwhelming fear of continued chaos and violence, if not outright disintegration, has made it difficult to arrive at balanced assessments of a disturbing present in order to plan for the future as a unified and coherent nation.

Donning the populist garb, Bhutto swore to bring about the biggest turnaround the ill- fated country had ever seen. He would restore democracy, frame a constitution, and establish the rule of law so that the people would never again be "under the capricious will of any individual.

As the commission tartly noted, no two religious divines could agree on the definition of a Muslim. If the members of the commission tried imposing a definition of their own, the ulema would unanimously declare them to have gone outside the pale of Islam. Adopting the definition of any one religious scholar entailed becoming an infidel in the eyes of all the others.

The failure of the Cripps Mission spared the Muslim League from the embarrassment of seeing its main constituents abandon all- India purposes for their own regionally construed concerns.

Foreshadowing a decisive shift in the balance of power from elected to nonelected institutions, a mentally and physically unfit Ghulam Mohammed mocked parliamentary practice by appointing a "cabinet of talents" that included General Ayub Khan as defense minister and Iskander Mirza as interior minister with the doyen of the civil bureaucracy, Chaudhri Mohammad Ali, retaining the all- important finance portfolio

With the potentially disruptive issue of the role of Islam in the state temporarily out of the way, the praetorian guard and its mandarin friends sanguinely accepted the constituent assembly's stance on fundamental rights. As they knew only too well, the proof of the pudding lay in the eating.

At the root of Pakistan's national identity crisis has been the unresolved debate on how to square the state's self- proclaimed Islamic identity with the obligations of a modern nation- state. This has been confounded by an official history that cannot explain the gaping inconsistencies between the claims of Muslim nationalism and the actual achievement of statehood at the moment of the British withdrawal.

The Unionist construct of "Muslim interest" that was eventually incorporated in the Government of India Act of 1935 was a rude shock for minority- province Muslims, accustomed as they were to riding on the coattails of their coreligionists in the majority provinces. The revival of the AIML in 1934 with Jinnah at the helm was a direct result of minority- province Muslim dissatisfaction with the new constitutional arrangements.