The Break-up Of Pakistan Bodes Well For India

The break-up of Pakistan bodes well for India Rediff February 19, 2009 Tristan James Mabry, a professor in the government department at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, believes that Pakistan is a failed State. Although it has a per capita GDP similar to India, he points out that it scores low on political rights, ranks fifth in the world for group grievances, scores low on the State's legitimacy to represent the people, and has the army as a State within a State ("If the army is the State, the Inter Services Intelligence is its cabinet"), and is among the countries with the most factionalised elites at the highest levels of government. Speaking to Rediff India Abroad's P Rajendran, Mabry, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and a producer for CNN, argued that ethnic differences are more likely to result in conflict than economic divisions, and that India remains undivided because it gave some authority to ethnic and linguistic groups, among other things by drawing state boundaries around them. Given that Pakistan has not been able to address the needs of the various groups within it, he believes it would be better off as three of four stable countries than one unstable one.

How is it that you see Pakistan as a failed State? For a State to be successful, you would assume, as a necessary condition, that it is legitimate. And for a State to be legitimate, it has got to follow the principle of popular sovereignty. It is pretty hard to find a country that says it doesn't represent the will of the people. The central problem for Pakistan is that there's a great disagreement among the people about what Pakistan should look like. In the same way, there was a time. at least in the US when we looked at Iraq, where we would think, 'How do I make a better country for the Iraqis?' It took a few years but, eventually, people figured out that there wasn't anything called an Iraqi. There was a Sunni Arab, a Shia Arab, and a Kurd, and they all have very different ideas about what the country should look like.

In Pakistan, the complexities of the internal ethnic divisions are difficult for policy-makers to appreciate. My experience, certainly interviewing Sindhi separatists, was that the sentiment for their own country is very deep, very sincere, and not likely to disappear anytime soon.

Which country are you talking about? Pakistan? Oh, I'm talking about Sindh, not Pakistan. And then the Mohajirs, of course, who don't get along with the Sindhis, and both the Sindhis and the Mohajirs resent the dominance of the Punjabis. The Balochis resent the Punjabis because they see them as the Staatvolk (dominant people) of the State. Like in France, it's supposed to be a civic country, but there is a group who view the (citizen) Algerians as not really French. There's something called the Francais de souche (French stock) and they are kind of the Staatvolk -- the national culture has wine and cheese as opposed to couscous. In Pakistan, the Punjabis are so dominant because they are the largest ethnic group, but also because they control the military, and the military essentially is the State. So the Balochis resent the Punjabis because they take all the natural gas and they don't give anything back to the poorest part of the country. So there's the Balochistan Liberation Army which seeking independence from Pakistan. Then you have the North West Frontier Province which has been really divided for a long time but now there's even a movement to call it Pashtunistan, to give it a name like Balochistan, or Sindh: name the place after the people. So the fact that the NWFP is dominated by one ethnic group is certainly getting more and more resonance, and the fact that that ethnic group is the same as on the other side of the border in Afghanistan is politically problematic. There's no real agreement on participation in a Pakistan civil society. There's such a strong sense of separate identities among the different peoples. Most of the time it doesn't matter because there's control. So there's a kind of fiefdom in Karachi. Islamabad lets Karachi be run by the Mohajirs as long as they don't question the Punjabis.

Doesn't the bogey of India bring these peoples together? Oh, absolutely. In the post-colonialist or anti-imperialist period, it is very easy to unite a country. You can get people to come together in opposition to a common threat, but that only works as long as there's a threat. If you get rid of the threat, then you're confronted with the problem of how do we get along among ourselves. The logic there is that sometimes it is better to have an enemy than to not have one. You can make an argument that for Pakistan, it is in its interest to maintain hostile relations with

India, because it distracts people in Pakistan from the much harder questions about fairness and social justice within Pakistan. They can say, well, yes, that's a nice question but we really have to worry about India. So it is in Pakistan's interests to have problems with India? It's definitely in the Punjabis' interest. You have said there was hardly any state presence in parts of the country. In rural Sindh, you don't see much of the State. You don't see the flag of Pakistan anywhere. You don't even see the police -- well, they're really dangerous, no one likes to see them around. It's a kind of malign neglect. Which is not to say the Inter-Services Intelligence isn't there. Because among the different parties -- the Jeeay Sindh Quomi Mahaz, the Sindh Taraqqi Pasand Party, Sindh National Front, and so on, one of the problems among the Sindh separatists is that every person I met pointed to some other group and said they are on the payroll of the ISI. They don't trust each other. To some extent, the ISI has been successful in breeding an environment that keeps everyone separated. Certainly, I am sure, some of them are on the ISI payroll but which ones who knows!

But even India is made up of so many sub-nations, so many groups all with different ideas about what India ought to be. In India, in the early days there was the same idea about uniting against an imperialist, to get the British to quit India. And that was great. But India did something that at least political scientists look back and think was a terrific idea, which was writing the Constitution, to draw state boundaries around ethnic and linguistic groups. So you took something like Marathis and you gave it official status within its own state, and the same with Tamil, and the same with Kannada. If you had not done that you could have had serious internal problems between groups. One of the great mysteries of India is how it managed to stay together, given that it's so diverse. But I think the principal reason for that was that India gave some authority, some pride of place, to the largest groups within India in the federal system. That was a really good idea. When those territories are threatened, where their stability is at risk, because of migration especially, that's when you have problems -- like in Assam and Nagaland. If there's some challenge to the legitimacy of the State within India you'll get issues. But what's getting people's attention now is the relative strength of India's civic national identity: The idea that it doesn't matter whether you're from Mumbai or Hyderabad, you are Indian first, and then you are (Maharashtrian) second.

You can make an argument that for many years, especially during the height of the Congress party years, that was a successful project, that there was unity as an Indian first. But the thing that seems most troublesome about that strength is the Hindutva movement. There you have a group that is making the argument that India is not a civic nation, that it should be a Hindu nation. That means, of course, that if you're not Hindu, you've got an issue. So the Sikhs or the Christians, especially in Orissa, are not Indian. I met the archbishop of Orissa.

Mar Cheenath? Yes. I did some research before I went to talk to him and realised that the struggle between the Kandas and the Panas is very old. And you have an element of the difference between a Scheduled Caste and a Scheduled Tribe, but you also have the difference between ethno-linguistic groups. So the Kandas and the Panas have been in ethnic conflict since before the foundation of India. You had a subordinate group, the Panas, who benefited from British rule -- and that's the same that happened with the Muslims in north India. They got a leg-up that they would not have without the British. But they (the British) always do that. Well, I'm a dual citizen with Ireland and see, they took a minority of the Protestants and they gave them power. But a minority that has power is yours. You own them. If you ever take away their power they are in deep trouble because they are a minority. So they gave the Panas authority, which really troubled the Kandas because they were of upper status. But the Panas got that power possibly because they converted to Christianity. Here we are 60 years later, and it is suddenly been redefined not as an ethnic conflict, but as a religious conflict between the Hindus and the Christians. I actually asked the archbishop, 'Look, this looks to me like a classic ethnic conflict, and it's been taken over by the Hindutva group to call it a religious conflict because it helps stir up passions and makes them the Hindutva group more prominent'. But the archbishop also has an interest, because of his position in the church, to call it a religious conflict. That way he can depend on support from Rome. So he's kind of playing into the Hindutva group's game a bit. Anyway, it's that kind of conflict which is the biggest threat to Indian civic national identity. But it is nowhere near as problematic as the same kind of issues in Pakistan.

Could it be just an issue of resources? That people with less tend to have more conflict?

Yes. I will answer that by comparing Pakistan with Bangladesh. Both countries are really poor. Actually, Pakistan is much, much better off than Bangladesh (the per capita GDP of India and Pakistan is the same but for Bangladesh it's a fraction of that). Now both Pakistan and Bangladesh are poor, but you don't have internal conflicts within Bangladesh. You don't have separatist movements, you don't have terrorists either. Yes, there's a little bit of Muslim Islamist politics going on, but it's really minor. So the fight is within the legitimacy of democracy. It's very, very poor, but its biggest problem is literacy. In Pakistan, there are more resources, but it's the distribution and fairness of those resources that is the problem. That's not a problem in Bangladesh because everybody's poor. But everyone is also Bangla. The legitimacy of being in Bangladesh doesn't come up because that is why they seceded and stopped being East Pakistan. But the problem in Pakistan is that some people have much more power than other groups. So if you're going to choose a lottery before you're born, you either want to be a Punjabi or a Mohajir. You don't want to be a Sindhi, and you definitely don't want to be a Balochi. But the inequality between groups means you have a reason for collective grievance, and that is dangerous. The difference between the rich and the poor in the US is larger than some sub-Saharan country. That is perhaps why in some of those countries -- at least in those where resources aren't extremely low -- there's less social conflict than here.

Is it that the difference between the haves and the have-nots a bigger issue in Pakistan? Yeah, it is, but it's when the haves and the have-nots are separated by an ethnic line. Like, in the US there's an economic measure called the Gini co-efficient, which is about how even the distribution of income or wealth is across the country. And the US is actually terrible. It's on the same level as the Philippines -- which is even the income or wealth across the country. Part of that is because of the concentration at the top because the top one percent is so astonishingly wealthy. But in a place like the Philippines the problem is that the difference is much greater between groups. If you go to the Muslim south, it is the poorest part of the country and they are a different cultural group as Muslims. So they have a double reason to be upset. You don't have in the US, for example, a mobilisation among poor white people. They're just poor. But it's a bigger problem for African Americans because they're also an ethnic minority. So there's much more anger there than there is in Appalachia. So if it's a cross-cutting ethnic class distinction, if there are lot of ethnic groups who are rich and poor, that's okay, that's not socially dangerous. It is when you have a group that's also relatively deprived that it can be more explosive.

Many people in India, including those belonging to Hindutva groups, are happy at the thought of Pakistan breaking up. Is that a good idea? In the short-term, no, of course not. But in the long term if the same process that happened in Europe happens in South Asia, it's going to break up anyway. I mean, the fact that France is full of French people and Italy is full of Italian people, and Germany is full of Germans. That happened over a couple of centuries and there was a lot of ethnic cleansing going on. Ethnic cleansing is morally unconscionable, but the problem in history is that once it actually happens things tend to stabilise. Obviously, you can't use a policy prescription to permit ethnic cleansing. The Czech country doesn't have any Germans in it. After World War II, three million Germans had to move, which is remarkable.

You are saying that, given that it has failed, it better that Pakistan should break up, right? Imagine if Bangladesh was still East Pakistan. Would that be in India's interests? Probably not, because it would have been really unstable and it would have the (Pakistani) flying, or trying to fly over India, and you would have issues with Biharis still. So to that extent would it be better that Pakistan broke up? Well, if it meant that you have two or three stable democratic countries, that's probably a better set of neighbours to have. But that's talking long term. And it's easy to forget how much can change in a short amount of time. I mean, look how old India is. Or look how old Bangladesh is. But the problem is, people look at the world map and assume it has always been like that. So it is very hard to get people to think that borders will change, but they do. They keep changing. I mean, Kosovo didn't exist last year. The point you are making is that a little blood-letting in the short term, however unpleasant, in the long run it would be better for the region. It could over a long period, I mean, a lot of people died during the war of independence too, but they've become national martyrs; they died for a good reason. So who's not to say that if there's an independent Balochistan they would see less people die? But now we're 'free' because we have a nation State based on being Balochi as opposed to this strange idea of being Pakistani, which was really an idea that would try to resurrect the honour and prestige of the Mughal empire. But that was an idea only for the Mohajirs.