Free The Duel by Tariq Ali

Nation died soon after in September 1948. Alling had left for another posting a few months earlier. Several weeks before his departure, a thoughtful State Department sent Jinnah a small gift as a token of their esteem. Four ceiling fans, twelve inches in diameter, arrived at Flagstaff and were accepted. The embassy surveyors’ work had not been entirely in vain.
    It was not an auspicious beginning either for the country or its relations with Washington. In the years that followed, “Flagstaffing” would reach epidemic proportions, with politicians and senior armed services personnel competing with each other for unearned income. Meanwhile the ruling elite would sigh with relief and happiness at being accepted as servitors in a Washington heaven, their country now a U.S. satrapy in a continent racked, for most of the twentieth century, by colonial wars and revolutions. Milton’s Satan was convinced that it was “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” Pakistan’s rulers proved it was possible to do both.
    Jinnah had become the governor-general of Pakistan without having ever created a substantial party organization, let alone one of a masscharacter. The United Provinces in India, one of the main regions of the Muslim middle classes for whom he spoke, was not included in the new state. Largely a stranger to the present provinces of West Pakistan, he simply confirmed the provincial landlords and feudalists in power as the representatives of his party there. The result was that the ruling elite in Pakistan never possessed a reliable political party capable of controlling the masses. The Muslim League soon became a clutch of corrupt and quarrelsome caciques who discredited it permanently. Pakistan was thus, from the outset, firmly dominated by its civilian bureaucracy and the army, both of which had faithfully served the British. The top echelons of each were composed of an exclusive English-educated elite, handpicked and trained for their tasks by the British Empire. In the first decade after partition, the civilian bureaucracy exercised political paramountcy in Pakistan. The CSP—Civil Service of Pakistan—comprised a closed oligarchy of five hundred functionaries commanding the state. Indeed, the two masterful heads of state of this period, Ghulam Mohammad (1951–55) and Iskander Mirza (1955–58), were co-opted directly from its ranks. They manipulated the token parliamentarism of the time, until it became so discredited that in 1958 a military coup was engineered, which brought General Ayub Khan to the presidency.
    Given that Pakistan had been created in the name of religion, new questions arose. What would be the nature of the new state? Could a state created for one religious community be nonreligious? Jinnah was staunchly secular. In a memorable address to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, he left no room whatsoever for any doubt:

. . . every one of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what his colour, caste or creed, is first, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges and obligations. . . . I cannot emphasise it too much. We should begin to work in that spirit and in course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities—the Hindu community and the Muslim community—because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on—will vanish . . . you are free; you are freeto go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan . . . you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.

    This attempt to institutionalize a Muslim nationalism dissociated from religion was analogous to Zionism.