"IF Pakistan is to move forward as a democratic
and progressive state it is necessary to firmly
check sectarian activities, otherwise Pakistan
will be reduced to a retrogressive medieval
state."-Punjab CID chief, 1952

ONE of the most
relevant ways of looking at the Lal Masjid affair
is to treat it as another wake-up call -
hopefully the last one. On the one hand, this
case has introduced us to a new, and perhaps the
deadliest, form of religious militancy, and on
the other hand, it has revealed the upgraded
standing of the theocratic camp. A combination
of these two will be disastrous for the polity
Pakistan has no far experimented with, unless
those in command have wisdom and guts to redefine
the foundational assumptions of the state, and do
not ignore the present warning in the manner they
have done so far.

The polity adopted by Pakistan
at independence was an admixture of the Viceregal
system and rudimentary democracy. The founding
elite saw little wrong in this model and this was
one of the major reasons for its failure to frame
a new constitution for the state. The
contradiction between this system and the
religions basis of the demand for partition was
ignored by the Muslim League leadership but those
attracted by theocratic ideals had reason not to
follow suit. Soon after independence they served
their first warning of their political ambition
when a memorandum calling for Islamisation of the
state was submitted on behalf of the country’s
ulema.

The government did not accept the ulema’s
demands and yet it produced the Objectives
Resolution. Despite government spokesmen’s
rhetoric in the Constituent Assembly (statements
such as ’Pakistan was not supposed to be a
laboratory for Islam’), the religious lobby
viewed the resolution as the foundation-stone of
a religious state (for instance, Jamat-i-Islami
leader Mian Tufail Mohammad’s claim that after
the adoption of the Objectives Resolution, the
reservation on accepting Pakistan as an Islamic
State had become redundant) The religio-political
lobby began challenging its rivals in power
through the anti-Ahmadia agitation in Punjab. The
government followed the way shown by its colonial
predecessor. Two Ahrar leaders were sent to
prison for making objectionable speeches in
mosques. Their sentence was however remitted and
the idea of prosecuting anyone for speeches in
the house of God was almost totally given up.
During the 1953 riots that followed, Maulana
Abdul Sattar Niazi, who had been an important
leader of the Punjab Muslim League, offered the
first face of religious militancy and Lahore’s
Wazir Khan Mosque became the pole of power to
challenge the state.

What happened after this government-mosque clash?
The military had a dress rehearsal for martial
law. Prime Minister Nazimuddin ordered Mumtaz
Daultana to vacate the Punjab Chief Minister’s
couch and propose Firoz Khan Noon’s name as his
successor. Many political parties that had jumped
at the opportunity for populist politics learnt
the lesson they are relying upon to this day -
that it is possible to distance oneself from the
methods of a protest and yet benefit from its
fallont. Finally, Justices Munir and Kayani wrote
a report on the anti-Ahmadi riots, which bears
the former’s name only and which became a sort of
Bible for middle class secularists, who deluded
themselves with the thought that the challenge in
the name of belief had been beaten off for good.

The post-1953 reality was otherwise. The 1956
constitution revealed the extent of the religious
lobby’s nibbling at the polity. The republic
became Islamic Republic; under the directive
principles of policy, the state undertook to
enable the Pakistani Muslims to order their lives
in accordance with the Holy Quran and Sunnah, to
make the teaching of the Quran compulsory, and to
secure the proper organisation of Zakat, Waqfs
and mosques; an Islamic research institution was
set up; a bar was created against any legislation
that was repugnant to Islamic injunctions and the
existing law was to be brought into conformity
with such injunctions (the latter task was to be
done in the light of a commission’s report).
These were quite significant gains for the
religio-political lobby.

The imposition of the
military regime in 1958 froze the tussle between
the theocrats and the liberals - both so
described for want of better definitions. The
struggle for democratic rights dominated the
national scene. The religio-political factions
joined this struggle as it offered them a means
to widen their base, but since the central issues
were revival of parliamentary democracy and
demands for provincial rights, they could not
push their call for theocracy to the top of the
national agenda. In 1970, as the possibility of
an end to military autocracy emerged, the
liberals received another wake-up call. All
religio-political groups joined the race for
power. Much was made of an alleged burning of the
Holy Quran and socialists were told they were
going to lose their tongues. The theocrats failed
because they were divided, the majority wing
population did not brook any deviation from their
struggle for autonomy and leadership of the
state, and a majority of the West Wing people
were swinging to the tune of the most effective
slogan in Pakistan’s democratic politics - roti,
kapra aur makan. But they had reason to be
optimistic.

The new branch of the political elite, that had
begun by proclaiming Islam as one of the three
pillars of its ideology, increased the role of
belief in constitutional life. Along with
reiteration of democratic and socialist ideals,
Islam was made the religion of the state.

So far the state’s pro-religion inclinations
were not wholly became of pressure from
religio-political factions. A stronger impetus
was the argument developed by liberal Islamic
scholars that Islam was in total accord with not
only democratic governance but also with
egalitarian economics. Some went on to argue that
Islam envisaged a socialist order. Thus, Bhutto
and Nasser (vide the constitution of the United
Arab Republic) could swear by socialism while
declaring Islam to be the religion of the state.

The most essential premise of this approach was
the theory that determination of the political
requisites of belief and their enforcement was
not the monopoly of the theocratic camp - this
authority lay with the country’s population and
was to be exercised through its elected
representatives.

The Zia years marked four substantial changes in
the situation. First, the state accepted the
goal of a theocracy and began working towards it.
Secondly, traditionalists were enabled to
consolidate their monopoly over religious
discourse with the help of constitutional
instruments. Thirdly, the authority to interpret
Islamic injunctions and to enforce them was in
effect taken away from parliament and handed over
to officially recognised scholars. And, fourthly,
the use of the gun to capture state power was
added to the curriculum of a vastly expanded
network of religions seminaries. All this led to
the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the
inevitable diversion of their attention to
Pakistan.

Lal Masjid constitutes a relatively
small item on the agenda of the new breed of
religious militants; some of their bigger
enterprises are in Fata and the adjoining areas
(hitherto described as settled districts). The
situation now is that the contenders for state
power fall into three categories. The first
category comprises political elements that swear
by democracy and constitution, they may be
called, for the sake of convenience, democrats,
who can gain their goal only through political /
electoral means. The second group comprises
advocates of theocracy who accept elections as
one of the legitimate means of securing power but
are also open to other means. And the third is
the army of militants who have acquired the skill
to get their way by holding the state to ransom.

The present representative of militants is more
dangerous than his precursors because he does not
demand personal or group favours, he only demands
enforcement of an Islamic order, a demand nobody
can oppose. His strength also lies in the fact
that his attempt to seek political ends through
force cannot be seriously questioned in a country
where seizure of state apparatus by force has
been held legitimate more than once.

The appearance of the new militant has changed
the political equation in favour of the
theocratic lobby. While the so-called democratic
camp remains divided (the latest proof is the
London APC), and their division will not end so
long as the military has its finger in the
political pie, the religio-political parties have
managed to forge functional unity. They stand to
benefit from the militant elements’ adventures
without commending their tactics, secure in the
belief that public (and even government)
endorsement of the militants’ demand advances
their own agenda.

Pakistan’s real crisis is that so long as the
military retains power it cannot but contribute
to the growth of militancy, and even if these
militants do not succeed in toppling the regime,
they will have paved the way to the success of
religio-political parties - the final result of
the military establishment’s forays into politics.