Brookings Institution and Stephen Philip Cohen have made a career out of deliberating about Pakistan. Many a known journalists and political scientists from that country also have latched on to the Institute for their intellectual nurture and professional survival. 

What is even more interesting is that Mr Cohen and his students at the Institute have, more often than not, been critical of the state of Pakistan on account of the failure of statecraft of that country. We in India, for the sake of keeping our neutrality and our pledge of ‘non-interference in the internal affairs of our neighbouring states’, have often been non-committal about the desperate state of socio-economic conditions prevailing there and about the abolition of all democratic political hopes of her people. It is not considered PC (‘politically correct’) on the part of the ‘Hindu’-majority state of India to criticise our small Muslim neighbour, even though that neighbour has been nothing but a pain in the butt and every other place to us over the past 57 years.  

But putting those platitudes aside, I would like to focus on the booking hand. This is the latest piece of political analysis offered by this author of high repute and one who commands respect on both sides of the divide. 

It is a well-known, and frequently recognised, fact that Pakistan is a country in a perpetual state of turmoil — She is forever obsessed about the hegemony of India next door; she is desperate to establish her Islamic credentials in the Arab World (with an eye on purses heavy with petro-dollars which flow freely in the direction of ‘Islamic loyalty’); and her citizenry is heaving with energy for modernization –the urge to become a western style democracy which was left behind by the Raj and which her founder, Qa’id-I-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah wanted Pakistan to be. 

Tragedy is that heirs to Jinnah’s dream of a secular, Muslim majority state called Pakistan, have laid that vision to waste. People of Pakistan have been badly let down by her ‘patriotic military dictators as much as corrupt democrats’.  

Just like India, Pakistan also came into being out of ‘perforated freedom’ and has ever since lived with paranoia, dressed up by Islam in a military uniform. Pakistan is even today fighting with herself in search of her identity in the modern world, the ‘proverbial global village’ and debris of her inner struggle spills over the frontiers, with every spasm. And every single such spasm grips the ‘civilized West’ with the fear of a possible nuclear war between the two nuclear-armed neighbours. 

And this fear has a potential of spilling over any state boundaries: It has destroyed Afghanistan; it has brought ruination to Iraq; it is already gnashing its teeth at Iran. So who is next in the sights of US War-machine?  Saddam Hussain might have lost his Baathist perch; but Osama-bin-Laden still has his caves; and though Parvez Musharraf has turned the West’s ‘war on terror’ into his own ‘existential necessity’. But looking back at the history, every ruler’s ‘success is written in the failure’ of  Pakistan as a state. 

Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan was a cultural home for the Muslims of the subcontinent, and not a pawn in the hands of ‘a set of punitive, regulative, and extractive codes’ labelled as Islam. Pakistan to day is “one of Asia’s most un-evolved civil societies” wherein every act of salvation launched by her leadership has ended in betrayal. 

True, the founder of this state did not live long enough to supervise the process of ‘Nation-building’; but those who followed him did Pakistan no favour by launching their own versions of Qa’id-i-Azam’s dream. The corrupt democrats as well as the patriotic dictators joined forces in carving the image of a common enemy, a nationally unifying and emotionally mobilising bogeyman— and that became India. Two full-scale wars and a Kargil venture later, the present chief is still looking for a Kashmir to rescue the nation’s honour. And the freelancing fees he earns from Washington, he is still no wiser. Bernard-Henry Levy still makes a chilling judgement on her: Pakistan is the biggest rogue of all the rogue states today.  

Fact is Pakistan’s obsession with security, in the face of India’s hegemony in the region places a disproportionate burden on the life of the country, socially as well as economically. More recently the leadership has even conjured up a “grand alliance of ‘Hindu’ India and the Western civilization bent upon destroying the Muslim power. This apocalyptic vision of the world is destroying all vestiges of hope in constructive Nation building and is driving the community towards revenge and martyrdom—a martyrdom for no cause, but destruction of the enemy, however real or perceived he may be.

―Shreeram Vidyarthi