Genesis

Pakistan came into being in August 1947 on the back of what its founders called the ‘Two Nation Theory.’

The Theory was culled from the 19th Century writings of modernist Muslim reformers in India who, after the collapse of the Muslim Empire in South Asia, began to explain the region’s Muslims as a separate political and cultural entity (especially compared to the Hindu majority of India).

This scholarly nuance, inspired by the idea of the nation-state first introduced in the region by British Colonialists, gradually evolved into becoming a pursuit to prepare a well-educated and resourceful Muslim middle-class in the region.

Eventually, with the help from sections of the Muslim landed elite in India, the emerging Muslim middle-classes turned the idea into a movement for a separate Muslim homeland in South Asia comprised of those areas where the Muslims were in a majority.

This is what we today understand to be the ‘Pakistan Movement.’

However, when the country’s founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah - a western-educated lawyer and head of the All India Muslim League (AIML) - navigated the Movement towards finally reaching its goal of carving out a separate Muslim homeland in South Asia, he was soon faced with an awkward fact: There were almost as many Muslims (if not more) in India than there were in the newly created Muslim-majority country of Pakistan.

Jinnah was conscious of this fact when he delivered his first major address at the new country’s Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947.

Though during the Movement some factions of his party (especially in the Punjab and the former NWFP) had tweaked the Two Nation Theory to also mean that the Muslims of India desired an ‘Islamic State’, Jinnah was quick to see the contradiction in this claim simply because millions of Muslims had either been left behind in India or had refused to migrate to Pakistan.

Islam during the Movement was largely used as a cultural and quasi-ethnic proposition to furnish and flex the Muslims’ separate nationhood claims. It was never used as a doctrinal roadmap to construct a theocratic State in South Asia.

In his August 11 speech Jinnah clearly declared that in Pakistan the state will have nothing to do with the matters of the faith and Pakistan was supposed to become a democratic Muslim-majority nation state.

Within the Muslim community in Pakistan were various Muslim sects and sub-sects with their own understanding and interpretations of the faith. Then the country also had multiple ethnicities, cultures and languages.

Keeping all this in mind, Jinnah’s speech made good sense and exhibited a remarkable understanding of the complexities that his new country had inherited.

But many of his close colleagues were still in the Movement mode. Not only because the Pakistan Movement was a fresh memory but also because when the Muslim League became the first ruling party of the country, it had to constantly evoke faith in places like the Khyber Pukhtunkhwa (former NWFP) where the Pukhtun nationalists had refused to join Pakistan.

Also, another region, Kashmir, having a Muslim majority but an aristocratic Hindu regime, had controversially opted to stay out of the Pakistan federation.

So a number of League members thought that with his August 11 speech, Jinnah was a bit too hasty in discarding the relegious factor and opting to explain the new country as a multicultural Muslim-majority state – even though these leaders too had had very little idea exactly what would be the ideological make-up of the country.

Jinnah died in 1948 leaving behind a huge leadership vacuum in a country that had apparently appeared on the map a lot sooner than it was anticipated to by even those who had been striving hard for its creation.

The leadership of the founding party, the Muslim League, was mostly made up of Punjab’s landed gentry and Mohajir (Urdu-speaking) bourgeoisie elite. The bureaucracy was also dominated by these two communities, whereas the army had an overwhelming Punjabi majority.

Either the multi-cultural connotations of Jinnah’s speech were not entirely understood by his immediate colleagues or were simply sidelined by them.

These connotations somewhat threatened the League’s leadership because the Bengalis of East Pakistan were the majority ethnic group in the new country and the democratic recognition of multiculturalism and ethnic diversity of Pakistan would have automatically translated into Bengalis becoming the main ruling group.

After Jinnah had promptly watered down the religious aspects of the Pakistan Movement, the League’s leadership that followed his unfortunate death in 1948, decided to reintroduce these aspects to negate the multicultural tenor of Jinnah’s speech.

 

Jinnah addressing the Constituent Assembly (August 11, 1947).

 

But things in this respect get even more complicated when one is reminded of how it was actually Jinnah who triggered the first serious expression of ethnic turmoil in Pakistan.

In March 1948 Jinnah delivered two speeches in Dhaka (the largest city of the Bengali-dominated East Pakistan). The speeches were delivered in English and were made at the height of a raging debate within the ruling Muslim League on the question of the country’s national language.

Bengali leadership in the League had purposed the Bengali language on the basis that Bengalis were the largest ethnic group in Pakistan.

However, the party’s Mohajir members led by one of Jinnah’s closest colleagues, Liaquat Ali Khan (who was also Pakistan’s first Prime Minister), disagreed by claiming that Pakistan was made on the demands of a hundred million Muslims (of India) and that the language of these Muslims was Urdu.

Of course, it was conveniently forgotten that quite a large section of these millions of Urdu-speaking Muslims had been left behind in India and that at the time of Pakistan’s inception, Urdu was spoken by less than 10 percent Pakistanis.

Faced with this dilemma and aggressively pushed by the arguments of Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan to declare Urdu as the national language, Jinnah arrived in Dhaka and in his two speeches there insisted that indeed Urdu was to become the country’s national lingua franca.

Bengalis went on strike and held widespread demonstrations, but Urdu did become the national language.

Dhaka, East Pakistan: A large number of people gather (to protest) at the site of a road sign that was changed from Bengali to Urdu.

The Bengalis’ resentment found immediate sympathisers within other non-Punjabi and non-Mohajir ethnic communities.

Sindhi, Pukhtun (and eventually, Baloch) intelligentsia were alarmed by the way the state and government had treated the Bengalis’ demands, and foresaw the same happening to their own languages and cultures.

The government, instead of anticipating future fissures in the country on ethnic lines, became even more myopic and wallowed in its self-serving naivety about using faith as a slogan that was supposed to dissolve ethnic nationalism among the Muslim majority of the country.

Slogans underlined by faith might have worked to haphazardly pull together the Muslim minority of various ethnicities of India during the Pakistan Movement; there was no guarantee that it would be able to do the same in a country where the same Muslims had become an overwhelming majority.

Ideally a system and constitution advocating democracy should have been worked out to facilitate and streamline the political and cultural participation of all ethnicities in the nation-building process.

But this wasn’t done. After Jinnah’s demise, political and cultural expressions of ethnicity were immediately treated as being threats to the unity of the nation.

Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, though steeped in the modernist Muslim tradition of Sir Syed’s ‘Aligarh School of Thought,’ was, however, willing to continue to use religion selectively to maintain the cherished unity of the Muslim majority of Pakistan.

He wasn’t the ‘son of the soil.’ Meaning, unlike most Sindhis, Pukhtuns, Punjabis, Baloch and Bengalis, Liaquat was born outside of what eventually became Pakistan and didn’t have a large constituency based on language and ethnicity in the new country.

So it is understandable why the notion of Islam being a unifying factor was important to him, as well as to most other Mohajirs of the country.

 

Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister.

 

But the question was what kind of Islam?

This question hadn’t really mattered during the Pakistan Movement in which the Muslims of South Asia were agitating as a minority. But then, when a large part of this minority became a majority in Pakistan, the historical, political and theological divisions and crevices between this majority’s many sects and sub-sects began to seem starker than before.

The Muslim League, bred on the theories of Muslim nationalism that evolved from the scholarly works of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, and philosopher and poet, Muhammad Iqbal, had understood all the Muslim sects and sub-sects of South Asia to be a community united by various doctrinal and political commonalities and a rich history of conquest, and scientific and cultural achievements.

After lamenting the decadent state the Muslim community had slipped into after the fall of the Muslim Empire in India, these men pointed towards a renewed and updated look at Islam. Such an exercise to them would help revive the political, social and economic vitality of the community.

To men like Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan was to be explained as the organic culmination and natural result of what Sir Syed and (especially) Iqbal had been contemplating and advocating.

It was to make all ethnicities and sectarian differences secondary compared to the precepts of Pakistani nationhood.

But what exactly was this nationhood about?

A good part of the answer first came from a man, who during the Pakistan Movement had actually denounced Jinnah.

Islamic scholar and founder of the Jamat-e-Islami (JI), Abul Ala Maududi, was not an Islamic cleric.

He was a well-read and prolific journalist and author. Though his commentaries in this respect were highly conservative, his was a radical conservatism because not only did he challenge the Muslim nationalism of the likes of Jinnah (claiming nationalism had no place in Islam); he even managed to offend many scholars belonging to Sunni sub-sects by accusing them of being wedged in ancient clerical traditions, and distorting the true message of Islam through unsavoury innovations.

To him the Muslims’ renewal as a political and cultural force depended not on Muslim nationalism but on an evolutionary process across all Muslim societies in which the people were to be ‘Islamised’ from below so that they could be prepared for Islamic laws (Shariah) imposed from above (the state).

So it was ironic when Liaquat and his aides, after being confronted by the grumblings of ethnic nationalists, agreed to adopt a portion of Maududi’s thesis on Political Islam while passing the 1949 Objectives Resolution in the Constituent Assembly.

The Resolution was supposed to be an outline of what the final constitution of the country should look and sound like and also what Pakistani nationhood should be about.

Just a year and a half after Jinnah had described Pakistan to be a pluralistic Muslim-majority state, the Resolution declared Pakistan to be ‘an Islamic entity’.

Maududi’s JI decided to end its boycott of conducting politics in Pakistan after the Resolution, despite the fact that the Resolution did not translate into meaning that the government would begin to legislate Shariah laws immediately (or was even willing to).

The government might have thought that it had successfully defined the finer points of Pakistani nationhood through the Resolution, but things in this context got even more complex.

In 1951, Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated and in 1954 vicious riots erupted in Punjab against the Ahmadiyya community when JI and another party, the Majlis-e-Ahrar, demanded that the community be declared non-Muslim (for holding ‘heretical’ views).

The military had to be called in and it crushed the riots with an iron hand. It arrested a number of JI and Ahrar leaders and Maududi was sentenced to hang for inciting the riots. The judgement was later reversed.

 

General Azam Khan in Lahore: He planned and oversaw the crushing of the 1953 anti-Ahmadiyya riots in the Punjab.

 

In 1956, the Constituent Assembly (made up of indirectly elected members of the Muslim League and the Republican Party), got down to finally author the country’s first constitution.

In the constitution, the non-Punjabi and non-Mohajir ethnic nationalists were appeased with the promise of direct elections based on adult franchise, while the religious parties were given the space to define Pakistan as an ‘Islamic Republic’.

Whereas most activists and politicians on the left and ethnic nationalists weren’t entirely happy with the contents of the Constitution, Maududi readily exhibited his satisfaction by declaring it to be ‘sufficiently Islamic’.

 

Members of the Constituent Assembly debating the 1956 Constitution.

 

In 1957 most of the detractors came together in the left-wing National Awami Party (NAP) and were confident that the party was in a good position to win the most seats in the promised direct elections (that were to be held in 1958).

But in late 1958, President Iskandar Mirza, who wasn’t happy with the Constitution nor with the potential of parties like NAP to win the election, colluded with the military chief, Ayub Khan, and dismissed the assembly and imposed the country’s first Martial Law.

Mirza had described the 1956 Constitution as the ‘selling of Islam for political ends.’

But soon after the imposition of Martial Law, Mirza was dismissed by Ayub and forced to leave the country. Ayub, as Chief Martial Law Administrator, became the sole centre of power in the country.

 

The chiefs of the armed forces with President Iskandar Mirza after the 1958 Martial Law. Mirza was soon removed by Ayub Khan (right) and sent into exile.

 

Ayub wasted no time in exhibiting his disgust at what had transpired in the county’s politics after Jinnah’s death, and got down to completely scrapping whatever that had emerged as Pakistani nationhood in the preceding decade and took it upon himself to once and for all give a definitive shape to Pakistani nationalism.

Society 1947-1950

A group of people raising the Pakistani flag one day after Pakistan came into being on August 14, 1947.

Eid prayers in Karachi, 1948.

 

Boy Scouts in ‘Jinnah Caps’ in Karachi, 1949.

 

 

Men and women labourers working on the construction of a building in Karachi, 1951.

 

 

A British tourist trying out traditional shoes at a shop in Swat (NWFP) in 1952.

 

 

Students relax at a medical college in Lahore (1953).

 

A wedding ceremony in Lahore (1954).

A locust attack in Karachi (1956).

 

Famous Pakistan cricketer, Fazal Mahmood, signing autographs for fans in Lahore (1954.

 

Pakistani film actresses, Sabiha Khanam and Zeenat, doing a photo shoot in 1954.

Controversial Urdu short-story writer, Sadat Hassanh Manto in Lahore.

Pakistani sprinter, Abdul Khalique (left), on his way to winning Pakistan’s first international gold medal in athletics. He won this honour in the 1959 Commonwealth Games in the 100 meters dash.

 

An early fleet of planes of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) lined up at the Karachi Airport.

 

 

A participant films a festival in Karachi (1958).

 

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The great debate

Ayub Khan was a practicing Muslim but almost entirely secular in his political and social outlook. He claimed that he wanted to ‘liberate the spirit of religion from superstition and move forward under the forces of modern sciences and knowledge.’

Understanding that a nation-state requires powerful myths to base its justification on, Ayub became the first Pakistani head of state to overtly use the state to devise a more holistic national ideology.

He formed the Advisory Council on Islamic Ideology (ACII) and the Islamic Research Institute and populated both with liberal Islamic scholars.

Imagining himself to be a Pakistani Kamal Ataturk and a Muslim de Gaulle, Ayub posed to express Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan. To him, this vision was about a modern Muslim-majority state with a strong economy (based on heavy industry) and a sturdy military that would not only protect the country’s borders but its ideology as well.

 

Ayub relaxing at an arts exhibition in Karachi a month after he took power through a military coup in 1958.

 

Incensed by his policies and the fact that he was getting most of these sectioned by the ACII, the religious parties finally moved in to directly challenge him.

Political parties had been banned by Ayub but he lifted the ban in 1962. The parties on the left such as the National Awami Party (NAP) opposed him for his overt capitalist manoeuvres, his regime’s more-than-close relationship with the United States, and his insistence on refusing to entertain the demands of the Sindhi, Baloch, Bengali and Pusktun nationalists for decentralisation, democracy and provincial autonomy.

The religious parties, especially the Jamat-i-Islami (JI), largely focused their opposition on Ayub’s ‘modernisation’ policies.

 

Ayub offering a toast to Pak-Indonesia friendship with famous Indonesian leader, Sukarno.

 

Rather uncannily, by attempting to mould a national ideology, Ayub gave JI the idea to take the concept and turn it on its head.

The term Pakistan Ideology was nowhere in the founders’ speeches during the creation of Pakistan in 1947. And nor was the Urdu expression, Nazriya-e-Pakistan (Pakistan Ideology).

When Ayub’s 1962 Constitution highlighted his regime’s understanding of Pakistani nationhood to mean being a Muslim-majority state where a modern and reformist spirit of Islam would guide the country’s politics and society, the JI opposed it.

It was at this point that the term Nazriah-e-Pakistan emerged. It is largely believed that it was first used by the JI that suggested that the Pakistan Ideology should be squarely based on policies constructed through the dictates of Muslim holy scriptures and should strive to turn Pakistan into becoming an Islamic State because it was on the basis of religion that the country had separated from the rest of India.

Of course, very little was mentioned in this context by the JI about the fact that the party had opposed the creation of Pakistan, and had described the Muslim League as a westernised and pseudo-Muslim party.

 

A newspaper report (from DAWN) on the banning of the Jamat-e-Islami by the Ayub regime. The ban was, however, overturned by the Supreme Court.

 

The debate as to exactly what kind of a vision drove Jinnah to demand a separate Muslim country in South Asia and what should constitute Pakistani culture and nationhood hit a peak in the late 1960s.

In 1967, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto formed the socialist Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), and the Sindhi, Baloch, Pusktun and Bengali nationalists accelerated their agitation for provincial autonomy.

To the JI the story of Pakistan began not during the Pakistan Movement, but with the invasion of Sindh by Arab commander, Muhammad bin Qasim, in the 8th Century CE who defeated the region’s Hindu ruler, Raja Dahir.

On the other hand, incensed by Ayub’s version of Pakistani nationhood and as well as by JI’s Nazriah-e-Pakistan, Sindhi scholar and nationalist leader, GM Syed, went to the extent of declaring Sindhi culture squarely at odds with the Pakistani state’s understanding of Islam and nationhood. He also insisted that to the Sindhis, Muhammad bin Qasim was the usurper and Raja Dahir the hero.

GM Syed

The PPP saw itself being pulled into the debate when, after witnessing the ascendency of leftist parties in Pakistan in the late 1960s, the JI declared that socialism was an anti-Islam ideology akin to atheism.

Prominent intellectuals in the PPP and those sympathetic to its cause, specially Hanif Ramay, Safdar Mir and poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, retaliated (though pro-PPP magazines) by first emphasising the JI’s pre-1947 anti-Jinnah rhetoric, and then suggesting that Pakistani nationhood and culture were multi-ethnic and multicultural and best served by democracy and socialism.

The JI’s founder and Islamic scholar, Abul Ala Maududi, saw the leftist and liberal Pakistani political organisations and cultural outfits as Trojan Horses through which they had infiltrated the Pakistani society, government and polity to erode Pakistan’s ‘Islamic character.’

Abul Ala Maududi

Interestingly, as the movement by leftist political parties, trade unions and student groups against the Ayub regime gained momentum in the late 1960s, Ayub’s Information Ministry had already begun to mend fences with the JI.

By the time Ayub resigned in 1969 and handed over power to General Yahya Khan, the JI rebounded to become an ally of the regime.

 

A pro-Bhutto leftist student rally in Karachi in 1968. Such rallies demanded the ouster of the ‘pro-US Ayub regime’ and the imposition of Socialism.

 

General Yaya’s Information Ministry tried to use the JI to blunt the leftists’ unprecedented push against the military regime.

As Ayub’s idea of Pakistani nationhood dwindled, the JI made its concept of Nazriah-e-Pakistan one of the main planks of its election manifesto for the 1970 General Election (the first in Pakistan based on adult franchise).

During the 1970 election campaign the JI appealed to the voters to defeat the left and ethnic-nationalist parties because they were a threat to the ideology of Pakistan.

But in the election, the JI and most other conservative parties were routed by the PPP and NAP (in West Pakistan) and by the Bengali nationalist party, the Awami League (in East Pakistan).

Yet again the project of moulding an ideology of Pakistan acceptable to all Pakistanis had hit a dead-end. However, after the 1970 election, it seemed that the idea of Pakistani nationhood being advocated by left parties was to prevail.

It may as well have had Pakistan not gone to war with India in 1971 and then lose its Eastern Wing.

Shiekh Mujeebur Rheman’s Awami League had won the highest number of seats in the 1970 election (albeit all in East Pakistan).

 

Bengali nationalist leader, Shiekh Mujeeb, adressing an election rally in Dhaka (1970).

 

In theory his party should have been invited by Yahya to form Pakistan’s first popularly elected government.

But the military regime and Bhutto’s PPP pointed at Mujeeb’s ‘anti-Pakistan rhetoric’ and suggested that he would use the Parliament to separate East Pakistan from the rest of the country on the basis of Bengali nationalism.

A delay in the handing over of power to Awami League saw the eruption of a full-scale civil war in East Pakistan.

Thousands of Bengalis lost their lives in the conflict as the Yahya regime employed brutal tactics to stem the Bengalis’ march towards independence.

Acts of brutality were also committed by the militant wings of the Bengali nationalists, as well as against military personnel, non-Bengali residents of East Pakistan and those Bengalis who were accused of collaborating with the Pakistan Army.

Thousands of Bengalis crossed over into Indian Bengal as refugees. Though India was by now backing the militant Bengali nationalists, it was in December 1971 that it fully entered the battlefield.

East Pakistan became the independent republic of Bangladesh. In late December 1971 a group of military officers forced Yahya Khan to resign and hand over power to Z A. Bhutto.

Society 1960-70

 

A ‘scooter-rickshaw’ riding across a road in Karachi in 1960.

 

 

Pakistan hockey team is greeted on the runway of the Karachi Airport after winning the 1960 Olympic Hockey title in Rome.

 

 

Eid prayers at Lahore’s Badshahi Mosque (1959).

 

 

A man in Lahore prepares to leave for his office on his bike (1961).

 

 

Stewardesses of the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) in 1961.

 

 

Children line up to receive food and medicines donated by the US in Chittagong (East Pakistan) in 1961.

 

 

A sprawling slum in Karachi (1960).

 

 

People buying snacks for Iftaar in Karachi during the 1961 Ramazan.

 

 

Tourists sunbathe at a Karachi beach in 1962.

 

 

The inside of Lahore’s famous ‘Pak Tea House’ (1963). During the 1950s and 1960s this café was regularly frequented by famous Urdu poets, writers, journalists, political activists and intellectuals.

 

 

A Pakistani man about to board a flight to London in 1964. At the time Pakistanis got their visas on arrival in most European countries.

 

 

Workers building the Mangla Dam near Jhelum River (1963). It is still one of the biggest dams in Pakistan.

 

 

A classical dancer performs her art during the first ever television transmission in Pakistan in November 1964.

 

 

A Pepsi factory on the outskirts of Karachi (1964).

 

Madam Noor Jehan recording her famous national song, ‘Ay Watan Kay Shajeelay Jwanaoun’ at EMI-Pakistan’s studios in Karachi during the 1965 Pak-India war.

 

Children at a fishing village near the Hawks’ Bay Beach in Karachi (1966).

 

 

Scenes from the famous Urdu film, Arman (1966).

 

Karachi’s busy financial district in 1967.

Pakistan’s newest city, Islamabad, under construction in 1966. It was made the country’s capital in 1967.

 

Two girls in a village in Punjab (1967).

 

An article in the National Geographic magazine about a traditional Pakistani wedding (1968).

 

A conductor of a bus that ran from Peshawar to Kabul (and back) waits for passengers in Peshawar (1967).

 

 

Tourists and locals enjoy dinner and drinks at Karachi’s Beach Luxury Hotel during the 1969 News Year’s eve.

 

Famous Pakistan TV actor, Shakeel, at a Karachi restaurant in 1970.

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An uneasy consensus

Bhutto’s party, the PPP, that had swept the 1970 election in former West Pakistan’s two largest provinces, Punjab and Sindh, on a socialist manifesto, and formed the government at the centre and in the mentioned provinces.

Another left-wing party, the National Awami Party (NAP) that had won a number of seats in the former NWFP and Balochistan was able to form coalition governments in these provinces.

The first phase of the Bhutto regime (1972-74) was dominated by the radical left-wing of the PPP. However, since Pakistan found itself reeling from an expensive war, a demoralised army, and fears that India may go on to fan separatist movements in the NWFP and Balochistan, his government sanctioned a project to mould an ideological narrative that would help the state redeem the floundering belief in a united Pakistan.

 

Bhutto speaking at a rally in Karachi’s Nishtar Park.

 

It is believed that the narrative was first and foremost devised to uplift the morale of the army. But by late 1972 it began to make its way into school text books as well.

In a nutshell, the narrative went something like this: West Pakistan was always the real Pakistan because it’s a cohesive and seamless region that runs from north to south along the mighty Indus River. This region’s population had predominately been Muslim (ever since the 12th Century), and though it may have a number of ethnicities, its population has largely remained aloof from the happenings in India’s ancient seat of power in Delhi, and had similar views on Islam.

This conveniently meant that the Bengali-majority East Pakistan that lay thousands of miles away from West Pakistan was an unnatural part of what had appeared on the map as Pakistan in 1947.

In 1972 the study of Pakistan Studies, a subject that exclusively dealt with the history and culture of the country, was introduced and then made compulsory for school and college students.

But in the early 1970s it was still very much a work-in-progress.

In 1973, the PPP government organised a large conference in which some of the country’s leading intellectuals, historians and scholars were invited. They were requested to debate and thrash out a nationalist narrative that could then be turned into a state ideology and imposed through legislative means and school text books.

Though the Bhutto regime was populist and posing to be socialist, in 1973 it managed to get a consensus from all the parties to unveil a new constitution that reintroduced Pakistan as an Islamic Republic.

Bhutto speaking to a guest at a state dinner after the National Assembly passed the 1973 Constitution.

The JI and other religious parties had explained the breakup of Pakistan in 1971 as a consequence of its rulers failing to turn the country into an Islamic state and thus giving leftists and ethnic nationalists enough reason and space to dictate terms and harm the unity of the country.

The second half of the Bhutto regime (1974-77) saw the slowing down of its socialist projects and the declining influence of PPP’s socialist and Marxist ideologues in the policy-making process.

The regime’s capitulation in the event of the agitation and the demands of the religious parties to declare the Ahamadiyya community as a non-Muslim minority was at least one symptom of Bhutto’s rightward shift.

By the 1977 election, the PPP had all but eliminated the word socialism from its manifesto. Its regime, elected on a relatively radical socialist program in 1970, had (within a matter of five years), become a somewhat odd mixture of nationalist populism and an equally populist expression of Political Islam.

Bhutto it seems had sensed the Islamic revival taking place across the Muslim world after the 1973 Arab-Israel War. Though the war had ended in a stalemate, oil-rich Arab monarchies enjoyed a sudden rise in profits after they slowed down oil production and greatly jacked-up petroleum prices.

The profits gave the oil-producing Arab countries power to influence Muslim regimes that did not have the fortune of owning vast oil fields.

Saudi Arabia hardly played a role in the matters of Pakistan before 1973. But after 1973, Bhutto’s Pakistan began to court the oil-rich Saudi monarchy, hoping to fatten Pakistan’s struggling economy with hearty hand-outs from its wealthy Muslim brethren (‘Petro Dollars’).

But, the money came with a condition.

The Saudi monarchy was a passionate proponent of a rather puritanical strand of Islam. It had alarmingly seen the rise of socialist regimes in Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Algeria, Sudan, Somalia and Pakistan.

After 1973 when Saudi Arabia began to pump in huge amounts of money into Muslim countries, with the money also came allusions and nudges to undermine leftist ideologies and kick-start an intellectual and political exercise to ‘Islamise’ governments and societies according to the Saudis’ interpretation of the faith.

 

Fiery Marxist leader, Miraj Mohammad Khan, speaking at a PPP rally. He was ousted from the party in 1974.

 

Arab monarchies had struggled to stay afloat against the onslaught and rise of progressive Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s. And in spite of the fact that most of them were allies of Western powers, these monarchies were also conscious of Western political ideas trickling into the minds of their citizens, especially the younger lot.

From 1973 onwards a huge amount of Petro Dollars began to be disbursed and distributed among Muslim academics, intellectuals, governments and religious leaders.

What began to emerge from this exercise was a Political Islam that was anti-socialism/communism and anti-Zionism, but (curiously) pro-West, pro-monarchy and with a healthy bank balance!

Saudi monarch, King Faisal with ZA Bhutto at the Lahore Airport (1974).

Bhutto, apart from trying to appease the religionist lobby by reintroducing certain clauses in the 1973 Constitution, and then giving revisionist narratives a run across Pakistan Studies books, then moved in to appease his new-found Saudi friends and donors.

Since by now the Pakistan Ideology had begun to place Pakistan’s historical roots in lands from where Arab horsemen had invaded India in the 8th Century, it was decided that the Arabic language too, should be adopted and taught in schools.

Bhutto felt secure in the belief that he was successfully keeping his left and liberal constituencies satisfied along with the conservative religious sections of the society and also Pakistan’s new Arab donors.

So it must have come as a rude shock to him when in December 1976 a nine-party alliance of religious and other anti-Bhutto parties united under the umbrella of the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA).

The alliance geared up to face Bhutto’s PPP in the 1977 election. And it was only when the PNA used the words ‘Nizam-e-Mustafa’ (The Prophet’s System) as its main slogan, that it became apparent that the Bhutto regime’s experiments in the still elusive territory of the Pakistan Ideology had actually ended up providing his opponents the space and idea to use religion as an effective electoral tool.

Another factor that Bhutto might have undermined was that Saudi Arabia was not only cultivating relations with the Bhutto regime, it was also on very good terms with religious parties, such as the JI.

The PPP went on the defensive because according to Bhutto’s analysis it was the Islamic revival factor that now needed to be fought for and grabbed.

The word Islam outnumbered the word socialism in the party’s new manifesto and for the first time religion became the focal point of debate and discussion during an election in Pakistan.

 

Cover of a March 1977 Urdu magazine with pictures of PNA leaders and rally.

 

The PPP trounced the PNA in the National Assembly election. The PNA cried foul and accused the Bhutto regime of rigging the polls. The truth was that the regime had rigged only a handful of seats (in the Punjab) and would have won the election anyway.

But Bhutto wanted to change the country’s parliamentary system into a Presidential one and for that he desired a big majority in the National Assembly.

The PNA refused to contest the Provincial Assembly elections and instead began a protest movement that soon turned violent.

PNA supporters - mostly made up of urban middle-class youth and supported by the industrialist and trader classes that were greatly stung by the Bhutto regime’s wayward socialist manoeuvres - poured out onto the streets.

Surprised by the tenacity of the protesters, Bhutto began emergency talks with the PNA leadership.

The ironic aspect of the movement was that when the PNA and the protesters began to use religious symbolism and slogans, these were culled from what the Bhutto regim