19
Ethnic and Islamic militancy in Pakistan

Mohammad Waseem

Introduction

In 2007, Pakistan entered into an era of suicide bombing, attacks on public rallies, government property, military personnel, police stations, and girls’ schools, killing of alleged ‘spies,’ and abduction of government officials and foreign diplomats. Proto-Taliban elements were able to torch a large number of containers carrying supplies for NATO forces across the border with Afghanistan. They practically took over Swat valley in late 2008 and early 2009, abolished the writ of the state and forced a quarter of a million people to migrate. The army started operations against the Taliban but failed to make any headway. The government in Peshawar felt obliged to negotiate with the Taliban after the breakdown of social order in the valley. There were also incidents of sectarian violence in Quetta in Balochistan and Dera Ghazi Khan in Punjab which cost dozens of lives and created tension between the followers of Shi’a and Sunni sects.

Politics in Pakistan took a major turn towards violence under Musharraf (1999– 2008) and later under Asif Zardari (2008– ).The expanding profile of the building blocs of militant action in pursuit of political objectives presented a grim picture of public life in the country in 2008. This involved incidents of suicide bombing, capture of government buildings, and abduction and beheading of security officers in Swat valley in pursuit of a homegrown project of implementation of Sharia.In January 2009, the Swat valley was overrun by Tehrik Taliban Pakistan who issued their edicts relating to public morality and religious injunctions. A widely circulated video released by the Taliban in the tribal areas of Pakistan showed bodies of declared criminals dangling from electricity poles.¹ Other incidents included burning of video shops, closing down educational institutions for girls and stopping administration of polio drops to children, suicide bomb attacks in the garrison city of Rawalpindi near President Musharraf ’s office, in Sargodha on a bus carrying air force cadets, and in Karachi on a million-strong rally for Benazir Bhutto when she arrived in Pakistan after an eight-year long exile. Curiously, while there were demands to unmask the faces behind the suicide bombing on Benazir’s rally, she pointed her finger at Zia’s remnants within the political establishment. Others pointed to the complete failure of intelligence agencies to uncover terrorists, thus allowing them to spread from tribal to settled areas, and indirectly hinting at their possible connivance in incidents of violence.The political community and civil society generally held the Musharraf govern ment responsible for Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in a public meeting in Rawalpindi on 27 December, 2007. For its part, the government held the Taliban leader in Pakistan, Baitullah Mahsud, responsible for killing Benazir, which the latter denied.

At the other end, Balochistan continued to be in the throes of a mini-insurgency in the wake of an undeclared military operation, involving attacks on gas pipelines, railway tracks, and government buildings.The banned Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) spearheaded the militant activities. Its followers among youth also opposed the nationalist parties for participating in the February 2008 elections. They disrupted a public meeting of the nationalist leader, a former chief minister of Balochistan, Akhtar Mengal for not declaring war against the state.² In Balochistan, as elsewhere in Pakistan, militancy was an indirect outcome of the nation-building project, which generally dwelled on coercive strategies for unification across ethnic divisions. It was a structural requirement of the state to disallow subnational communities from claiming a share in the political and economic resources beyond the script. The inherently liberal constitutional legacy of British India, which considered mass mandate as the source of legitimacy and federalism as the principle of unity in diversity, operated against the perceived interest of the postcolonial state. Dismissal of elected governments in provinces and successive unification models of the federal government led to various ethnonationalist movements.

In contemporary Pakistan, the quantum of violence in an urban milieu is higher than in the countryside, especially if the movement is supported by a strong party organization, a well-established cult of leadership, and an electoral mandate. In consequence, politics of the bullet and politics of the ballot may not necessarily be contradictory. At the other end, religious militancy is an indirect and long-term consequence of the expanding power of the ulema, as they flourished due to the state’s quest for, and commitment to, divine sources of legitimacy beyond the constitutional framework. At the heart of the emergence of the Islamic establishment was the so-called Khaki-mullah alliance, which has operated for decades from the late 1970s to the late 2000s. The crucial input of the world of Islam perspective in bringing forth a dichotomous worldview based on Islam versus the West cannot be overstated.³ In this context, empathy with Muslim suffering in regional conflicts ranging from Palestine to Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq has effectively externalized political identity in Pakistan.

Ethnic revival and Islamic ascendancy draw on different sources of inspiration. However, it is possible to point to the shared political context experienced by them, which is shaped by a state system struggling to operate in an unstable regional setting characterized by wars and revolutions involving India, Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq. The two movements have sometimes operated in succession. Thus, the Pakhtun nationalist movement, which dominated the politics of the NWFP for decades before and after Partition, gave way to a strident Islamic movement from the 1980s onwards. The latter culminated in the victory of the alliance of Islamic parties, Muttahida Majlis Amal (MMA) in NWFP in the 2002 elections. However, in the 2008 elections, MMA lost to the resurgent Pakhtun nationalist Awami National Party (ANP). Similarly, mohajirs (Urdu-speaking migrants) who generally supported Islamic parties, the Jamat-i-Islami (JI) and Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUP) in elections in the 1970s, overwhelmingly shifted their allegiance to a new ethnic party the Mohajir (later Muttahida) Qaumi Movement (MQM) in the 1980s. At the same time, the Islamic movement typically operated at the behest of the state authorities to contain the ethno-nationalist movements in various provinces.To that extent, we need to look at Islamism as a force antithetical to ethnicity, as part of the nation-building project of the state of Pakistan. The legitimizing potential of Islam for the ruling dispensation provided a filip to the operational dynamics of ulema parties and groups, whereas the perceived villainy of ethnic parties, leaders and ideologies often invited the wrath of the state.

In this chapter, we plan to look into ethnic and Islamic militancy as an outcome of the project of state building. Paul Brass located state policies and elite competition at the heart of ethnonationalist movements.⁴ It makes perfect sense that state policies can and do lead to consequences which can be positive or negative for the cause of national harmony. In this context, two broad policy orientations have been outlined:

1 ethno-pluralism, especially its British variety of multiculturalism, whereby the political system provides a space for multiple identities and communities, and

2 institutional pluralism whereby a variety of federal formulas emerge to provide regional autonomy to the core communities living in the federating units.⁵

This approach tends to focus on government policies.⁶ It is argued here, however, that reliance on policy as an independent variable is problematic.Apart from the fact that policies do not operate effectively in the political context of a postcolonial society in which the state-building project is underway, we need to look at the context and the source of these policies.

Structural dynamics of the state

The ruling elite of post-independence Pakistan, which had pushed forward the agenda of a separate Muslim homeland in British India, embraced a set of policies that included: a foreign policy based on perceived insecurity vis-à-vis India, that sought security through Islamic unity; a constitutional policy that denied parliamentary sovereignty, and emphasized a quasi-unitarian federalism; and a policy concerning Islam as the ultimate source of legitimacy in a supralegal sense. Partition led to the emergence of a new ethnic hierarchy led by a salariat based on the mohajir and Punjabi middle classes.⁷ On the other hand, Pakhtuns, Bengalis, Sindhis, and the Baloch operated at the margins of the emergent multiethnic society. While the former group looked at Pakistan as a nation state, the latter perceived it as a “composite multination.”⁸ The perceived dichotomy between the mohajir–Punjabi salariat and all others created an ethnic bipolarity that was absent in India.⁹

The middle class shaped the authority structure of the new state through the civil bureaucracy that controlled public policy, even as the tribal and landed elite was formally represented in the national and provincial assemblies.The national project was essentially conceived and put in place by the middle class, which was ideologically Islamic modernist, ethnically mohajir and Punjabi, and sociologically urban-based and professionally oriented. It was socially progressive and politically conservative. Pakhtuns, Bengalis, Sindhis, and the Baloch had no sizeable middle class and thus had meager representation in the bureaucracy. Their political leadership constantly knocked at the doors of the state in a bid to open them through elections.The relatively less-developed ethnic communities, with their leadership still immersed in a cultural ethos rooted in pre-modern values and norms characterized by oppression against tribesmen, peasantry, and women, upheld the cause of electoral democracy. At the other end, the state apparatuses of army and bureaucracy, with their modern training, exposure to the West and high educational and professional standards, often sought to dispense with electoral democracy, parliamentarism, and political freedoms.This anomaly has operated throughout Pakistan’s history. General Musharraf ’s promulgation of emergency on 3 November, 2007 reflected the middle-class ethos of controlling what was considered unbridled political participation.

It can be argued that there is need to take one step back from policy proper to the policy-creating ethnic and class dynamics of the structure of power in Pakistan in order to look for an explanation of ethnic revival and Islamic ascendancy along with potential or actual violence.The operational context for exercise of state power can be defined in terms of the grand nation-building project. Structurally speaking, Pakistan passed through four major processes of political transformation in the postcolonial period: centralization, militarization, Punjabization, and Islamization.

Centralization

The project of centralization brought in political actors from outside the parliament, especially the civil bureaucracy and later the army. Various policy-related matters in provinces were handled by the bureaucracy, which was recruited, trained, posted, and promoted by the Center. Federalism in West Pakistan was abolished when its four provinces and princely states were merged into one unit (1955–70). Presidentialism reigned supreme as the principle of unity of the nation, enshrined in the 1962 Constitution. Later, the presidency was eastablished as the supraparliamentary office under the 1985 Eighth Amendment and 2003 Seventeenth Amendment. The upper house of parliament, the Senate, emerged as a territorial chamber as late as 1973, a quarter of a century after Partition. It was supposed to give strength to the provinces vis-à-vis the centre. However, the differential in the policy scope of the two houses continued to frustrate the federalist ambitions of the smaller provinces.The Senate continued to be weak into the late 2000s. Additionally, the Centre often dismissed provincial governments led by opposition parties by using relevant constitutional provisions. This “constitutional terrorism” continued to play havoc with principles of pluralism, often involving the judiciary on the side of the federal government. A blatant example of this was the 1976 verdict of the Hyderabad Tribunal which banned an opposition party, the NAP. In February 2009, the supreme court disqualified the chief minister of Punjab, Shehbaz Sharif of the PML-Nawaz Sharif, from holding office, allegedly at the behest of President Zardari.

Militarization

The military is to Pakistan what party is to India. In common parlance, the army is considered to be a party by default, which is permanently in power overtly or covertly without being obliged to seek a mass mandate. The militarization of politics in Pakistan has followed a clear path. During a century of military recruitment from Punjab after 1857, the province provided half of the British Indian army, and thus laid the basis of the new myth of martial races cultivated by the British.¹⁰ During the interwar years, the soldiery acquired proprietary rights through an ambitious scheme for allotment of canal-irrigated lands to men at arms. It also enjoyed preferential treatment in voting rights for the Punjab Legislative Assembly under the prevalent system of restricted franchise.¹¹ Thus, Pakistan inherited the most militarized province of India, which soon emerged as the power base of the new country. At the heart of the partition of India lay the partition of Punjab. The demobilized soldiery, belonging to the rival Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu communities, perpetrated violence on opponents in an organized and professional way.¹² This more than anything else brought about the exodus of Muslims from East Punjab and Hindus and Sikhs from West Punjab. The butchery during the partition riots and the bloody process of migration in 1947 left deep scars on the twin communities now living across the newly drawn international borders. However, unlike India where (East) Punjab was a mere peripheral state, in Pakistan Partition deeply securitized the national vision because Punjab played a central role in the country

While Punjabis on both sides of the new border committed acts of murder, arson, and rape on the rival communities fleeing their homes and hearths, the two governments of India and Pakistan put together military evacuation organizations to escort refugees safely across the border.¹³ In Pakistan, army units were exposed to the misery of Muslims fleeing from East Punjab and living in temporary refugee camps on their way to a life of extreme uncertainty in their new homeland. This further militarized politics and greatly weakened the principle of civilian supremacy over the armed forces even before the latter formally took power in 1958. The strategic vision of the army moved to the center stage of all policy-making activity in the civilian sector, thus drawing the contours of political imagination along the ends and means of national security. Not surprisingly, centralization of the command structure, a unitary state model, the presidential form of government and a non-sovereign parliament have represented the leading aspects of the state elite’s political thinking for six decades. At the other end, the idea of a diversity of authoritative institutions based upon principles of federalism, parliamentarism, provincial autonomy and a pluralist framework of politics in general continued to characterize the political vision of various ethnic communities not effectively represented in the state. In 2007–08, Musharaf, as both a serving and later a retired army general, on the one hand and a coterie of politicians including Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto—later Asif Zardari—on the other, characterized the divide in national thinking along civil–military lines.

Punjabization

The demographic makeup of Pakistan has been such that various policy measures relating to federalism have focused on a concern that one province may come to dominate all. For a quarter of a century after Partition, East Pakistan had a majority (around 55 percent) of the country’s population. However, its demographic strength could not be reflected politically because general elections were postponed repeatedly. The power elite typically comprising mohajirs and Punjabis, failed to reconcile to the idea of a Bengali-dominated parliament and government.This concern led to the idea of inter-wing parity and thus to constitutional engineering. Lahore, the capital of Punjab, became the capital of the “One Unit,” comprising the whole of West Pakistan. Other provincial capitals, namely, Peshawar, Quetta, and Hyderabad lost their pivotal positions in their respective areas. This policy of coercive de-ethnicization of politics led to the emergence of rampant anti-Punjab feelings. The erstwhile smaller provinces reacted sharply to the One Unit “steamroller,” which had disregarded popular ethnoregional aspirations and identities.¹⁴ After the 1958 military coup, the Punjab-based army put a lid on the federalist ambitions of the smaller provinces. Later, Ayub shifted the capital of Pakistan from Karachi to Islamabad. Thus, both the federal and provincial capitals were located in Punjab from 1960 to 1970, when finally Yahya restored the four provinces.The ill-conceived constitutional project to meet the challenge of demographic imbalance between the two wings ran adrift at a considerable cost to the cause of national harmony in the form of resurgent ethnic movements.

After the emergence of Bangladesh, Pakistan again faced the one-province-dominates-all situation. Now it was Punjab that enjoyed a numerical preponderance at around 58 percent of the total population. During the following decades, Punjab emerged at the heart of the new ethnic discourse.¹⁵ In the 1960s Punjab had emerged as the hub of the Green Revolution.With 66 percent of tubewells and 62 percent of tractors operating in Punjab, the province progressed rapidly. It enjoyed huge government subsidies for fertilizer, pesticides, seeds, and agricultural machinery.¹⁶ By the late 1960s Punjab had overtaken Sindh in its manufacturing potential as well, especially in the textile industry. Apart from the lion’s share going to Punjab in both agricultural and industrial development, that province increasingly dominated the bureaucracy. By the 1980s it occupied nearly 55 percent of the jobs in the public sector as opposed to its nearest rival, the mohajir community, whose share declined from a whopping 30 percent to less than 18 percent, with Sindhis at 5.4 percent, NWFP at 13.4 percent, and Balochistan at 3.4 percent.¹⁷ The army has been both numerically and symbolically Punjabi, initially with 79 percent of the men in uniform coming from that province. The military operations against Bengalis (1971), the Baloch (1973–77), Sindhis (1983) and mohajirs (1992–94 and 1995) spread anti-Punjab sentiment all around. The fact that Pakhtuns and mohajirs also have a disproportionately high share of the army’s officer cadre is generally not part of the public imagination of non-Punjabis. Neither are they conscious of the underprivileged groups, communities and regions within Punjab. The story of ethnic militancy in Pakistan is one of reaction to the perceived Punjabization of the state in economic, political, cultural, administrative, and military terms.

Islamization

Islam in Pakistan has played a role in mobilizing the public as a means towards acquiring or retaining power. The selection and use of Islamic symbols and provisions changed according to the prevailing situation in relation to the objectives of political actors. Over decades, the state establishment followed a strategy of depoliticizing the public by appropriating Islamic sources of legitimacy in addition to, or in lieu of, a mass mandate as a source of constitutional legitimacy. Reetz has outlined four major constituents of the legacy of Islam inherited by Pakistan:¹⁸ street agitation in pursuit of Islamic causes from the khilafat and hijrat movements (1920s) onwards; institutions of Islamic learning, especially in UP, which recreated the glory and the pristine message of Islam and led to a century of anti-Western intellectual discourse; Wahhabist and Deobandist orientations rooted in a purifying mission at one end and reaction to heretical interpretations of religious classics by Ahmadis at the other; and mulla activism in the Pakhtun belt along the border of Afghanistan in the form of a tribal rebellion against the modern state, which was perceived to be ungodly and immoral. Examples of this near-xenophobic tribal movement are the Wana rebellion in the 1970s, the Tehrik Nifaz Shariat Mohammadi movement in Swat in the early 1990s and again in 2007–09, and the Taliban and proto-Taliban movements in the middle and late 2000s.

The Islamic legacy skirted around mainstream politics led by the Muslim League, first in pursuit of a Muslim homeland and later as part of its nation-building project. Ishtiaq Ahmad has suggested a fourfold typology to define the relationship between Islam and the state in Pakistan:¹⁹

the sacred state excluding human will

the sacred state admitting human will

the secular state admitting divine will

the secular state excluding divine will.

The independence generation of the political and intellectual elite implicitly, and Justice Munir professedly, believed in the fourth model which envisaged disengagement between church and state.²⁰ Jinnah declared: “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed, that has nothing to do with the business of the state … Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense because that is personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.”²¹

The 1956 Constitution represented a compromise between the ulema and the ruling elite whereby the non-Islamic provisions would be taken off the statute book and the sovereignty of Allah would be exercised in Pakistan through public representatives.²² In other words, the elite settled for the model of a secular state while admitting the divine will into the scheme. At the other end, the two variations of the sacred state model continued to knock at the doors of the state even as, curiously, support from the public for this model has been scant. The JI and the conservative intelligentsia in general deliberated on the need for establishing an Islamic state, acknowledging the agency of human will in keeping with the requirements of the modern age. However, the two decades of the Afghan war in the 1980s and 1990s greatly strengthened the Islamic establishment in Pakistan, which recruited, trained and armed mujahideen for Afghanistan, as well as for Kashmir from 1989 onwards. Pakistan’s involvement in Kashmir came to an end in 2003–04 as the composite dialogue with India moved ahead under Washington’s auspices. But, the spillover of Taliban from Afghanistan into the tribal areas and beyond brought the fourth model of the sacred state without human will into full action. This has become socially embedded through the Islamization of the Pakhtuns and their rigid adherence to rituals on the two sides of the Pak-Afghan border during the last quarter of the twentieth century. This was part of an emergent Islamic vigilante culture formalized through the 2006 Hasba Bill passed by the NWFP Assembly under the MMA government (2002–07).

During the six decades since Independence, Pakistan moved from a position in which the state defined religion to one in which religion defined the state.As the 1970 election campaign brought forth the leftist and Bengali nationalist movements in West and East Pakistan respectively, Yahya’s military government aligned itself with Islamic parties, especially the JI.This alliance was further cemented during the civil war in East Pakistan in 1971. A mulla–garrison alliance came into being, which operated both covertly, for example in opposition to the three PPP governments (1971–77, 1988–90, 1993– 96) and overtly as under Zia (1977–88) and selectively under Musharraf (1999–2008). Islamic parties and groups gained tremendous patronage from the army.They were catapulted into prominence as contenders of power in their own right.They shared the military establishment’s political vision based on anti-Indianism, anti-secularism, relative intolerance for subnational identities rooted in ethnic sentiments and, until recently, the presidential form of government as a mechanism of unity by command. Not that everything fit well.The centrality of Islam as part of the state system demanded by Islamists was never on the agenda of the state. Conversely, despite the post-9/11 anti-US sentiment of Islamic parties belonging to MMA, the pro-US Musharraf government formed a coalition government with them in Balochistan (2003–07). It also appointed the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F) chief, Fazlur Rehman, as leader of the opposition in the National Assembly even though he enjoyed the support of only a minority from the opposition. Moreover, the army displayed a bias in favor of Sunni sectarian groups. This bias was operationalized in the backdrop of the largely Sunni-based Islamization program of the Zia government; support for the largely Sunni– Deobandi Afghan mujahideen; and the need to stem the tide of the much-feared revolutionary fervor of Shi’as in Pakistan after the Iranian revolution.²³

As a typically weak postcolonial state, characterized by a quasi-unitary form of authority system within a federalist framework, Pakistan faced ethnonationalist movements in four out of five provinces. While the establishment sought to pursue its agenda for nation building, it co-opted Islamic forces in order to activate the divine sources of legitimacy.These initiatives ended up strengthening Islamic movements directly by way of patronage and ethnic movements indirectly by alienating their leaders still further. In 2009, the government was criticized both at home and abroad for appeasement of Islamic militants by entering into negotiations and signing ceasefire agreements with the Taliban leadership of Islamic insurgency in FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) and Swat valley.

Ethnic violence

Pakistan emerged as a migrant state. The migration of more than seven million Muslims from India to Pakistan provided a source for the nationalist movements of both Sindhis and mohajirs. Jinnah and Liaqat were both migrants from India, along with the majority of the members of the Muslim League Council and Central Working Committee.The civil bureaucracy was dominated by migrants from UP and East Punjab, while the business community drew overwhelmingly from Bombay. Refugees from India accounted for 20 percent of the population in West Pakistan in 1951. The migratory elite had a profound impact on the literary, artistic, cultural, administrative, and political aspects of public life in Pakistan. Urdu became the national language even though only three percent of the population had it as its mother tongue. Islamic literature was written predominantly in Urdu. The leaders of Islamic parties were typically Urdu-speaking migrants, including Shabbir Ahmad Usmani (JUI), Maududi (JI) and later Noorani Mian (JUP). In the new ethnic hierarchy, the Urdu-speaking migrants were on top. As early converts to the cause of Pakistan and voters for the Muslim League in the 1937 elections, mohajirs mistrusted the popular leadership of the Pakistan areas proper who voted for Jinnah’s Pakistan only in 1946 as late converts. The former cultivated a higher legitimacy for themselves than for their lesser compatriots.²⁴

It is true that migrants suffered through the tragedy of leaving their homes and hearths behind, along with the breakdown of family and clan ties in many cases. However, it was a migrant-dominated administration at the other end of their journey that welcomed refugees, arranged for their safe passage from India, provided them shelter on arrival, allotted them urban property and agricultural land evacuated by the outgoing Hindus and Sikhs, and extended loans to them for starting their businesses. Migrants, especially those from minority provinces, who generally cultivated a self-image as makers of Pakistan, were territorially agnostic in their political vision. For them, Pakistan was a Muslim homeland, the end product of a struggle for political survival in India that was rapidly moving towards a majoritarian democracy. The actual territory and peoples of their land of migration were never part of their imagination. In the post-Partition years, deification of the state emerged as the leading political attitude of migrants, as they started their new life in an “alien” society. They shunned ethnic and linguistic identities and embraced an ideology of “all-Pakistanism.”²⁵ Islam now served to unite the disparate provinces and states of Pakistan that had never before formed a territorial state. The new Muslim homeland was conceived and projected as the “historical spatial container” of somewhat unproblematized ethnic groups, and “a sacred place set aside for God.”²⁶

An acute sense of national insecurity vis-à-vis India, mistrust of “local” politicians in and out of parliament, and commitment to firm leadership on top turned migrants into supporters of military governments.The larger section of migrants, almost two-thirds, who had come from East Punjab and adjoining states of India, got assimilated in West Punjab within a generation, and lost its identity. A shared legacy of language, literature, culture, administration, politics, geography, and history welded migrants and locals together. However, the one-third of migrants who had come from other parts of India outside Punjab and settled mainly in Sindh remained unassimilated in the host community. Being non-Sindhi speaking in Sindh, they soon gravitated towards the identity of an Urdu-speaking mohajir community that needed to carve out a niche under adverse circumstances. As they descended on Karachi from the north, south, east, and west of India in their hundreds of thousands, the Sindh government became concerned over the grim prospect that Sindhis might become a minority in their own homeland.

The Sindhi grievances against migrants continued to accumulate on several counts.²⁷ The central government moved to separate Karachi from Sindh to become the federal capital and, in 1948, pushed the Sindh government to Hyderabad instead.The Sindhi language was banned or discouraged at various levels as a medium of instruction. The Sindh University at Karachi was relocated at Jamshoro near Hyderabad. The assets of the provincial government in Karachi were arbitrarily transferred to the central government.The province of Sindh was merged with One Unit. Mohajirs were accused of assuming an attitude of cultural arrogance towards Sindhis, almost bordering on racism. Karachi overnight became a mohajir city where Sindhis were reduced to 3.5 percent of the population. Mohajirs occupied government jobs in numbers grossly disproportionate to their population while representation of Sindhis in jobs in both public and private sectors was negligible. A large tract of land brought under irrigation through Guddu and Ghulam Mohammad barrages in Sindh was allotted to civil and military officers, both Punjabis and mohajirs. Refugees from India allegedly sponsored Hindu–Muslim riots in Karachi in 1948 with a view to pushing Hindus out of Sindh. This was resented by Sindhi Muslims who swore by tolerance between followers of the two faiths and accused mohajirs of bigotry. Under Yahya (1969–71) finally One Unit was disbanded, which led to restoration of the four provinces, including Sindh. Karachi once more became the capital of Sindh, and a new quota system was introduced with separate provisions for rural and urban Sindh to take care of Sindhis and mohajirs respectively.

The PPP government in Karachi and Islamabad (1971–77) was able to consolidate the gains of the quota system by incorporating it into the 1973 Constitution and implementing it at various levels. In a quarter century, it produced a tiny middle class among Sindhis and led to the emergence of a rudimentary Sindhi civil bureaucracy. The execution of Z. A. Bhutto by Zia in 1979 eventually led to insurgency in Sindh in 1983 as part of the agitation of the Movement for Restoration of Democracy (MRD). Zia’s martial law government brutally suppressed the Sindhi agitation. An indirect consequence of the Sindhi nationalist upsurge was the emergence of a mohajir nationalist party (MQM) in 1984, which many among its opponents believed was the creation of Zia. At the other end, PPP operated as an ethnonationalist party in Sindh even as it had the profile of a federal party elsewhere in the country.

In this way, the province of Sindh produced two rival ethnic movements of Sindhis and mohajirs, based in rural and urban sectors, and led by the PPP and the MQM respectively. Sindhi nationalists have been struggling with the perceived enemies within: mohajirs in urban areas, Punjabis in both urban and rural milieus, and Pakhtuns in Karachi.The Sindhi nationalist leadership remained firmly in the hands of the landed elite, Sindhi intelligentsia, bureaucracy, and students. Banditry, the main form of traditional violence in Sindh, was occasionally mixed up with ethnic militancy. Being non-urban in its support base, the Sindhi ethno-national movement remained somewhat contained despite violent outbursts such as in 1983 and, to a lesser extent, in 1992.

In contrast, mohajir nationalism had a militant character from the start.²⁸ The movement was born out of the “indigenous revival” in and around 1970, expressed through Bengali and Sindhi nationalisms and the anti-establishment revolt in Punjab identified with PPP. The “migrant” state finally took roots in the territory where it was based. In post-Bangladesh Pakistan, Indus civilization became the new source of identity.The federating units were severally defined as four brothers, four cultures, and four nationalities. Mohajirs in Sindh lost in many ways during the 1970s. A quarter of a million of their counterparts in Bangladesh, called Biharis, had fled to Pakistan through Nepal and India as well as by sea. They were brutalized by years of insecurity, ethnic hatred, and separation from their families and friends back in Bangladesh.They eventually provided the core of the militant wing of the incipient mohajir movement in Sindh. The Sindhi nationalists reacted sharply to the prospects of another spate of migration destined to further upset the worsening demographic balance against them.At the other end, mohajirs had suffered under a series of reversals of fortune during the first quarter of a century after Partition, including: appropriation of jobs by Punjabis after the 1958 and 1969 military coups; shift of capital from Karachi to Islamabad in 1960; merger of Karachi back in Sindh in 1970; regionalization of the political idiom along ethnic lines; and the affirmative action policies which directly hit their potential for recruitment into government services on the basis of merit. Mohajirs further lost their political, bureaucratic, commercial, and cultural ascendancy under Z. A. Bhutto in the 1970s.

Mohajirs reacted to the widely cultivated idea of Karachi as a mini-Pakistan where all ethnic communities could settle and as a safe haven for foreign refugees. Mohajir nationalism represents a new sons-of-the-soil movement.²⁹ The mohajir community sought to shed its alien identity and develop nativist nationalism in the process of transforming itself into a distinct ethnic community. In this movement, we see ethnicity-in-making, drawing on multiple linguistic, cultural, historical, and geographical identities. Mohajirs shared the minimal experience of having been non-Punjabi refugees from India, dominated by the Urdu-speaking community. The peculiar resettlement process of migrants coming in successive waves resulted in nearly half of the population in Karachi living in squatter settlements by the end of the twentieth century. It is here that ethnic violence took birth in the midst of rude competition for social space, amenities, security, and habitat, largely outside the purview of law. These groups at the bottom of the social ladder hobnobbed with the criminal underworld to obtain supplies of water, electricity, and other amenities, and to fight rival groups making similar demands.This type of endemic violence spilled into the streets in a situation in which Pakhtuns controlled public transport in a mohajir-dominated metropolis. The famous Bushra Zaidi incident in which a young girl was killed in a road accident in 1985 brought to surface the simmering mohajir anger. It was followed by MQM’s victory in the local bodies’ elections in 1987 and successive general elections thereafter.

The MQM soon emerged as a militant party. It targeted the press for covering its militant activity by burning and looting property. It also attacked the perceived renegades from its own cause and non-conforming mohajirs in general, thereby seeking to impose unity by command. This “in-group policing” was carried out by application of informal sanctions characterized by social pressure or even violence.³⁰ MQM’s militant operational network approximated what Paul Brass calls an institutionalized riot system (IRS) in his explanation of Hindu–Muslim riots in Meerut.³¹ Brass claims that this system leaves doors open for more riots and for their eventual acceptance by the society.³² The military operation against MQM in 1992–94 and the so-called Rangers Operation in 1995 sought to control the party’s militant politics. The government resorted to extra-judicial murder of MQM workers, ruthless searches and intensive intelligence work. Under Nawaz Sharif (1997–99), the party again joined the coalition government, but later parted ways with it on the issue of the murder of ex-governor Hakim Saeed, alleged to be the work of MQM. After an uneasy period under Musharraf ’s military rule (1999–2001), the MQM joined coalition governments in Karachi and Islamabad with the “king’s party,” Pakistan Muslim League Quaid-i-Azam (PML-Q), from 2002 to 2007 and again with the PPP in Sindh after the February 2008 elections. The party was accused of carrying out bloody attacks on the occasion of the defunct Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary’s arrival in Karachi on 12 May, 2007, on Benazir Bhutto’s rally on 18 October, 2007, and on the lawyers’ offices on 9 April, 2008.

Lack of understanding between major ethnic communities in Karachi turned the city into a powder keg. The character of violence was different in the two cases of mohajirs and Sindhis.The mohajir violence has been planned and organized, rooted in a social matrix of sustained tension between communities in the backdrop of an urban situation of extreme congestion.As opposed to this, the rural-based Sindhi violence operated from outside the mainstream social fabric, generally identified with the dacoit phenomenon. The Sindhi militancy was characterized by a lesser quantum of planning and organization, and was not based on geographical proximity between hostile communities in densely populated areas.A major reason for this difference also lay in the phenomenon of party. The MQM had well-trained and ideologically indoctrinated party cadres, who had internalized the cult of Altaf Hussain’s leadership. The production of violence under these circumstances was far more efficient than in the case of Sindhis.The father of Sindhi nationalism, G. M. Syed, was unable to win popular votes or establish a cult of his leadership. He consistently lost to rival leaders, from Ayub Khuhro in the 1950s to Z. A. Bhutto in the 1970s.There was no all-Sindhi party per se, except that the PPP operated in that province along ethnolinguistic lines. At the heart of MQM’s politics was “ethnic outbidding,” which led to its monopoly over representation of the perceived mohajir interests and identity. At the heart of the PPP’s politics was “ethnic underbidding” for fear of losing support in other provinces.³³

Unlike the Sindhi, mohajir and Bengali movements, the Baloch and Pakhtun movements started from separatist agendas in the late 1940s. The congress government in NWFP was removed within days after Partition. But the province gradually moved towards integration with the rest of West Pakistan, both politically and economically. The Pakhtun leadership by Ghaffar Khan and his family of the Khudai Khidmatgars, later transformed succesively into the National Awami Party (NAP) and the Awami National Party (ANP), lost ground in a span of two generations. In contrast, Balochistan remained without a pristine Baloch Party and an all-Baloch leader.The merger of Balochistan with Pakistan took place through annexation under alleged coercion and co-option.Tribal lashkars (armed units) put up resistance, leading to counterinsurgency measures by successive governments. The dismissal of the NAP’s popular government of Balochistan by the Bhutto government in Islamabad in 1973 led to a guerrilla war that lasted four years. It involved a major military operation, a complex judicial process known as the Hyderabad Tribunal, lengthy jail terms for the Baloch leadership, and militarization of the Baloch ethnic movement in general.

During the Afghan jihad against the Red Army, Baloch nationalists saw hundreds of thousands of refugees from across the border settling in their province, which turned the delicate demographic balance against the Baloch in favour of Pakhtuns. After Musharraf ’s coup of 1999, the old wounds were reopened. The government’s accountability drive led to incarceration of several Baloch leaders.That left the field open for party cadres, student activists, and intelligentsia to take the initiative in their own hands. The rape of a female Baloch doctor, allegedly by an army officer, in 2005 finally ignited a fresh wave of violence from the Bugti tribe that spread to other areas and groups.

The most obvious targets of Baloch militant actions are: the gas pipeline, which is the symbol of nationalist resistance against the state inasmuch as a local facility serves other parts of the country, providing four-fifths of the total supply of gas; railway lines, which link Balochistan with other provinces; and military cantonments, which carry a profile of an occupying force belonging to the dominant ethnic community of Punjab. Baloch militants fired 30,000 mortars in three years from 2005 onwards, with 1,570 attacks in that year alone, backed by an armory that included Kalashnikovs, machine guns, and grenades, along with walky-talkies and satellite phones.³⁴ Among the militants, the BLA, mainly comprising Bugti and Marri tribesmen, consistently made news headlines. It was banned as a terrorist organization.

Another irritant for Baloch nationalists was the government’s project for development of Gawadar as an international port on the Arabian coastline with the help of China.The Baloch resisted the project on various grounds: the fiercely ambitious land grab movement of military and non-military personnel from outside the province represented a colonial presence; the migration and settlement of people into the province from outside was expected to dwarf the Baloch population; the much-touted development work in Balochistan was perceived to be a conspiracy to increase the potential of the military and security agencies to control the province rather than improve the living conditions of people. The Musharraf government followed a policy of sorting out the recalcitrant tribal lords (sardars) led by Nawab Bugti, who was later killed in an ambush in 2006. A spate of arrests and extra-judicial killings followed, and several cases of “disappeared” persons came to the surface, allegedly involving intelligence agencies. Islamabad even sought to support the Pakhtun-based Islamic parties to counter the ethnic appeal of the Baloch nationalist parties.³⁵ After the February 2008 elections, the PPP Chief Minister Raisani released Akhtar Mengal and Nawab Bugti’s grandson Shazain Bugti, among others. Prime Minister Gilani stopped the military operation against Baloch activists and announced a policy of dialogue with them.

Militancy in Balochistan has been considered especially dangerous because of the fear of a state-sponsored counterinsurgency based on cultivation of Islam against Baloch ethnicity, or of al-Quaeda moving in to fill the vacuum.³⁶ However, there are reasons to believe otherwise. First, violence itself is relatively contained. The number of militant Baloch activists has been small, reflecting the demographic weakness of Balochistan at a mere 3.5 percent of the national population, with only half of it belonging to the Baloch proper. Second, with 42 percent of the land of Pakistan, the province is sparsely populated. This made guerrilla warfare extremely difficult across hundreds of kilometers of rugged territory. Third, tribal hierarchies led by sardars and nawabs represented rival power blocs, often organized as parallel political parties or party factions. Thus, the Baloch National Party (BNP) represented Mengals, Jamhoori Watan Party (JWP) Bugtis, and Baloch Haq Talwar (BHT) Marris. This pattern circumscribed their potential of producing an all-Baloch nationalist party along the lines of MQM, and thus kept their militant activities bound to certain localities and tribes. Fourth, for decades the Baloch have been engaged in a quiet war against Pakhtuns, the enemy within.The latter dominated the economic and cultural life of the capital city of Quetta and northern Balochistan in general. The arrival of Afghan refugees in the 1980s further changed the profile of the city and the province linguistically, culturally, demographically, and economically in favor of Pakhtuns.

Identity formation seems to be a major and continuing preoccupation of nationalists and ethnonationalists alike. In Amartya Sen’s words, “imposition of singular and belligerent identities” on people can only serve to sharpen divisions in society.³⁷ Identity underscores the cultural construction of the fear of the other.³⁸ It serves the purpose of laying out the turf for a pre-emptive attack out of fear for personal and collective security.³⁹ As such, identity-based violence rooted in the imperatives of security has prevailed in all the current ethnic movements of Pakistan, namely, mohajir, Sindhi, and Baloch.

Islamic militancy

While answering the question of whether Islam provides a theory of violence, the contributors to a recent book on Islamist violence define a fundamentalist as “a messianic, death-dealing hero who sacrifices his life on the altar of God spurred by the promise of eternal salvation of his soul in paradise.”⁴⁰ This may be the psychology of individual terrorists, but it hardly explains the larger phenomenon, namely, an extra-constitutional and aggressive mode of political participation through violence. Jessica Stern’s exposé of Pakistan’s jihad culture brings in the institutional background of potential terrorists emerging from madrasahs, the “schools of hate.”⁴¹ She sees it as a principal–agent problem whereby the agent (terrorist) has outgrown the principal (state).⁴² Islamism has been widely discussed with reference to modernity from opposite perspectives. It is defined as a reaction to modernity that brought down traditional mechanisms of solidarity in Muslim communities at the hands of the Westernized elite.⁴³ Alternatively, it is understood in terms of serving a modern agenda relating to statehood and interstate relations reflecting “sectarian utopian orientations.”⁴⁴

Western approaches to the phenomenon of Islamic militancy focus on a reified construct of that religion as an indomitable force pushing its adherents in a certain undesirable direction of action and behavior. The clash of civilizations thesis deals with this phenomenon at a macro level, as do various analyses dealing with the current wave of Islamic militancy flowing from central to southeast Asia. However, following the research based on the World Values Study 1995–2001, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart find that there is no fundamental difference of values between the Islamic world and the West, that the post-communist European societies show far less support for democracy than Islamic societies, and that certain sub-Saharan African countries and Catholic countries of Latin America provide an even stronger role for religious authorities than do Muslim countries. By the same token, they do find a real difference in the realm of gender equality and sexual liberalization.⁴⁵ The typical Western scholarly approach seeks to unravel the “mystery” of Islam. The conflation of religion and state in Islam has already become an academic orthodoxy, which belies the political scene on the ground for almost the whole of the last 1,500 years in almost all Muslim societies.⁴⁶

These views ignore the professed subjective, narrative and projective idiom of the practitioners of both politics and Islam in the Muslim world. One can argue that the world view of Muslims has been increasingly shaped by a dichotomy between the world at large dominated by the West and the mini-world of Islam conceived as two essentialisms. A pervasive world-of-Islam perspective operates through projects such as the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and support for the perceived Muslim suffering in regional conflicts ranging from Palestine to Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq. In other words, a dichotomous worldview provides the background against which we need to judge the understanding and action of Muslims in Pakistan. A persecution syndrome has been part of the Muslim self-image during the last half century in various geographical regions of the world.

After 9/11, Islamabad turned its back on its erstwhile allies, the Taliban in Kabul, in support of the US war effort. A large number of state functionaries, especially from intelligence agencies led by ISI, who were recruited, trained and socialized into militant action against Russian “infidels” in Afghanistan under Zia, were jolted into changing sides, although in some cases unsuccessfully. Combined with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the latent goodwill for the Taliban among the general public was increasingly couched in anti-American terms. The top brass of the army took the “pragmatic” decision of joining the US-led war against terrorism. But, various Afghanistan-savvy ex-generals, mid-career intelligence officers, Islamic parties, remnants of pro-mujahideen and pro-Taliban elements from the articulate sections including academia, media, and the professions in general continued to oppose the new deal with America. They believed that the war against terrorism was fought in the American interest and not in Pakistan’s interest. This led to ambiguity, confusion, and contradiction concerning religious violence among politically motivated sections of the public. Along with formal condemnation of terrorism, one finds opposition to anti-terrorist operations such as the one against the Red Mosque in Islamabad in August 2007, in Swat in October–November 2007 and January–February 2009, in South Waziristan in mid-2008 and Bajaur in February–March 2009. The legitimacy and high moral ground of the war against terrorism were lost on the way.

We can point to regional instability as a potent factor in shaping the contours of contemporary Islamic militancy in Pakistan. The Afghan resistance heavily influenced Pakhtun politics in Pakistan by discrediting the relatively secular ANP leadership in the 2002 elections. Pakhtuns moved from the ethnic project to the Islamic project, in the process leaving behind Ghaffar Khan’s ideology of non-violence and embracing a militant strategy to defeat the West as well as “Westernism” at home. Like Afghanistan, the tribal areas had no colonial legacy of a constitutional state system, rule of law, rational–legal bureaucracy, political parties, elections, and independent judiciary. In the absence of an urban-based middle class committed to legal, educational, bureaucratic, and technocratic careers, tribal-based resistance in Afghanistan and in the tribal areas of Pakistan produced the Islamic project identified with the Taliban. No constraint in the way of implementation of Shari’a was to be tolerated by various proto-Taliban elements from north and south Waziristan and Wana. A similar pattern of Pakhtun Islamism emerged from the semi-settled areas from Swat and Dir states, which became part of the mainstream legal–administrative setup as late as 1970. The latter states targeted the central government’s implements of authority and sought to take over government at the district level. In October 2007, Sufi’s son-in-law, Fazlullah, launched the movement for implementation of Shari’a and took control of 59 villages in the valley.The Musharraf government launched a military operation in order to restore the government’s writ. The pattern was clear: the less constitutional the state, the more the political violence.

Pakistan’s military engagement with Afghanistan for two decades, first as a launching pad for guerrilla warfare and later as creator, supporter, and patron of the Taliban, produced an Islamic movement that was predominantly Sunni-based. Zia’s own Islamization program in Pakistan bore the same character, reflecting the mainstream sectarian commitment.The Iranian revolution introduced a new factor in the whole Islamic project in the form of reinvigorated Shi’a dynamism, which soon led to resistance against imposition of Sunni jurisprudence. From the mid-1980s onwards, a sectarian war began in various localities of Pakistan that involved targeted killing of Sunni and Shi’a leaders, throwing of hand grenades on mosques and imambargahs, and demonstrations and violent clashes between sectarian activists. The Zia government and the first Nawaz Sharif government (1990–93) were generally perceived to be supporters of the Sunni activists, who operated from the platform of Sipah Sahaba Pakistan (SSP).⁴⁷

Apart from Afghanistan and Iran, Saudi Arabia played a significant role in shaping Islamic attitudes in Pakistan along revivalist lines. The Saudi influence operated in three distinct ways: by financing the Afghan jihad and providing it diplomatic, ideological and moral legitimacy; by supporting anti-Shi’a activist organizations, thus indulging in a proxy war with Iran on the soil of Pakistan; and, most significantly, by shaping the religious beliefs and practices of millions of Pakistani expatriates in Saudi Arabia along Wahhabist/ Salafi lines, thus seeking to reproduce a pristine Islam.The returnees from Saudi Arabia brought back petrodollars and also a commitment to Islamic glory along with hatred for the perceived enemies of Islam led by America and Israel.

The tribal and semi-settled areas along the northern borders with Afghanistan represent a political culture that is not in consonance with the style of a typical ex-British colony such as India or Pakistan. This latter style is characterized by issue formation and policy orientation and even ideological expression typically through party activity in and outside the electoral framework. In this way, parliament performed the function of taking protagonists of various causes, Islamic or ethnic, off the streets. By the same token, the tribal areas and the recently annexed princely states such as Swat, Dir, and Chitral continued to operate according to the traditions of “indirect rule.” These areas have been characterized more by arbitrary rule than by adherence to the rule of codified law based on the British Common Law, a rational–legal bureaucracy, habeas corpus and other writs for protection of citizens from the state, and a general respect for the will of the majority and piecemeal accommodation of grievances. Instead, these areas exhibited an arbitrary expression of individual and group power, an unregulated public behavior, the will of a minority against that of the majority, and the power of the bullet prevailing over the power of the ballot. Democracy binds individuals to the state, prescribing duties for the former and responsibilities for the latter. It controls the flight of imagination, restricts agendas, focuses on resources, and allows only incremental change.⁴⁸ Democracies carry far more authority than authoritarian regimes, which depend on the rude exercise of naked power. Bringing the unsettled and semi-settled areas into mainstream politics requires careful planning for the transition from indirect to direct rule.⁴⁹

Conclusion

Our observations bring out various factors that led to Islamic and ethnic violence in Pakistan in recent years. First and foremost, the character of violence needs to be defined in relation to the level of destruction, for example, by distinguishing indiscriminate killing from precisely targeted attacks and individual acts of terrorism from group participation in violence. In Pakistan, violence itself remains limited. It does not approach the level of genocide such as in Rwanda and Burundi, massacres such as in Sabra and Shatilla or in Bosnia, protracted human suffering such as in Darfur, or a life of endemic insecurity involving recurrent loss of life and property as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gaza. In other words, the terrorist profile of Pakistan is far higher than the reality on the ground. The enigma lies in the way the transnational Islamic networks have operated in Pakistan. Incidents of violence in the country include attacks on a perceived enemy or its symbols such as government property, railway lines, gas pipelines, holy places of other religious sects, and, most recently, defense establishments and men in uniform especially at the hands of the Taliban. Pakistan entered the era of suicide bombing in 2007 after the army’s attack on the Red Mosque in Islamabad. However, Pakistan’s legal and institutional infrastructure is reasonably strong by the Third World standards, sufficiently at least to keep violence from becoming a way of life.

There is a measure of consensus in Pakistan on the normative ideal of democracy, at least in procedural terms. Ethnic conflicts often reflect a desire to safeguard the rule of public representatives against centralized rule, especially in provinces and communities other than Punjab. State elites celebrate the 1940 Lahore Resolution as a milestone on the way to establishment of a Muslim homeland. Ethnonationalist leaders seek a (con)federal arrangement on the basis of the same resolution whereby provinces would have maximum autonomy.⁵⁰ Ethnic movements drew heavily on grievances against the dismissal of the elected government in NWFP in 1947, successive elected governments in East Bengal and Sindh, and the elected government of Balochistan in 1973, obliging the NAP government in NWFP to resign in protest. In other words, violence emerged as a desperate mode of politics after exhausting all constitutional formulas and parliamentary initiatives. The failure of the Musharraf government to implement the recommendations of the two senate committees to deal with the Balochistan issue contributed to the commitment of Baloch nationalists to pursue their mission outside the constitutional framework.

At the same time, Islamists have been brought in by successive military governments to subvert the constitutional source of legitimacy derived from mass mandate. Islamist groups duly obliged the military governments and, in the process, professed and practiced an extra-constitutional agenda, while amassing small arms in pursuit of jihad in Afghanistan and Kashmir.The chickens came home to roost in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Public acceptance of violence outside the purview of law, even more than violence itself, is a persistant malaise of societies such as Pakistan.

Notes

1 Pervez Hoodbhoy, “It is our War,” Dawn, 23 October, 2007.

2 Dawn, 11 June, 2008.

3 See Mohammad Waseem, “Islam and the West: A Perspective from Pakistan,” in James Peacock et al. (eds), Identity Matters: Ethnic and Sectarian Conflict (New York: Berghahan Books, 2007), pp. 191–92.

4 Paul R. Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism (New Delhi: Sage, 1991), p. 8.

5 William Safran, “Non-separatist Policies Regarding Ethnic Minorities: Positive Approaches and Ambiguous Consequences,” International Political Science Review, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1994), pp. 63–64.

6 Michael E. Brown and Sumit Ganguli (eds), “Introduction,” in Government Policies and Ethnic Relations in Asia and the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 11.

7 Hamza Alavi,“Authoritarianism and Legitimacy of State Power in Pakistan,” in Subrata Mitra (ed.), The Postcolonial State in South Asia (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), pp. 32–33.

8 See Alain-G. Gagnon and James Tully, Multinational Democracies (Cambridge: University Press, 2001), p. 2.

9 James Manor,“Ethnicity and Politics in India,” International Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 1 (1996), p. 463.

10 Tai Yong and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 206–10.

11 Yong and Kudaisya, pp. 211–12.

12 Swarna Iyer, “August Anarchy: The Partition Massacres in Punjab 1947,” South Asia, Special issue, 18 (1995), pp. 23–24.

13 Mohammad Waseem,“Muslim Migration from East Punjab: Patterns of Settlement and Assimmilation,” in Ian Talbot and Thinder Shandi (eds), People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial and Postcolonial Migration (Karachi: Oxford University Press), p. 69.

14 Rafiq Afzal, Political Parties in Pakistan: 1947–1958 (Islamabad: National Institute of Historical and Cultural Studies, 1998), pp. 255–58.

15 Stephen P. Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan (Lahore: Vanguard, 2005), pp. 207 and 223–24.

16 Mohammad Waseem, Politics and the State, pp. 213–16.

17 Charles Kennedy, “Pakistan: Ethnic Diversity and Colonial Legacy,” in John Coakley (ed.), The Territorial Management of Ethnic Conflict (London: Frank Cass, 2003),Table 7.2, p. 162.

18 Dietrich Reetz, God’s Kingdom on Earth: The Contestations of the Public Sphere by Islamic Groups in Colonial India (1900–1947), rehabilitation thesis, Berlin University, Berlin 2001, abstract.

19 Ishtiaq Ahmed, The Concept of an Islamic State, PhD thesis, University of Stockholm (published) (Edsbruk, 1985), pp. 34–43.

20 See Justice (Rtd) Munir Ahmed, From Jinnah to Zia (Lahore:Vanguard, 1980), pp. 32–36.

21 Mohammad Ali Jinah, Speeches as Governor General of Pakistan, 1947–48 (Karachi, n. d.), p. 9.

22 Article 198, Clause 1, Constitution of Pakistan (1956); see also Fazlur Rehman, “Islam in Pakistan,” Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1985), p. 35.

23 See Vali Nasr, “Islam, the State and the Rise of Sectarian Militancy in Pakistan,” in Christopher Jaffrelot (ed.), Pakistan: Nationalism without a Nation (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002), pp. 88–92.

24 See Mohammad Waseem, “Functioning of Democracy in Pakistan,” in Zoya Hasan (ed.), Democracy and Muslim Societies: The Asian Experience (New Delhi: Sage, 2007).

25 Feroz Ahmed, Ethnicity and Politics in Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 100–02.

26 Robert J. Kaiser, “Homeland Making and the Territorialization of National Identity,” in Daniel Conversi (ed.), Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 230.

27 Mohammad Waseem, “Political Ethnicity and the State in Pakistan,” in The Nation-State and Transnational Forces in South Asia (Tokyo, 2001), pp. 270–71.

28 Mohammad Waseem, “Mohajirs in Pakistan: A Case of Nativisation of Migrants,” in Crispin Bates (ed.), Community, Empire and Migration: South Asians in Diaspora (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 245.

29 See, for comparison, Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1978), pp. 6–7.

30 Brubaker and Laitin, p. 433.

31 Paul R. Brass,“Development of an Institutionalised Riot System in Meerut City, 1961 to 1982,” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 39, No. 44 (30 October–5 November, 2004), pp. 4,839–48.

32 Brass, “Development of an Institutionalised Riot System,” p. 4,845.

33 See Brubaker and Laitin, p. 434.

34 Massoud Ansari,“Between Tribe and Country,” Himal (Khatmandu), Vol. 20, No. 5 (May 2007), pp. 23, 27.

35 International Crisis Group (ICG), Pakistan: The Worsening Conflict in Baluchistan, Report No.119 (Islamabad, 2006), p. 21.

36 Fredrick Grare, Pakistan:The Resurgence of Baluch Nationalism, Carnegie Papers, No. 65, 6 January, 2006; and Rajshree Jetly, “Resurgence of the Baluch Movement in Pakistan: Emerging Perspectives and Challenges,” paper for International Symposium on Pakistan, Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) National University of Singapore, 24–25 May, 2007, p. 8.

37 Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence:The Illusion of Destiny (London: Allen Lane, 2006), p. 2.

38 Brubaker and Laitin, p. 442.

39 Stuart J. Kaufman, Modern Hatreds:The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 19.

40 Hamadi Redissi and Jan-Erik Lane,“Does Islam Provide a Theory of Violence?” in Amélie Blom et al. (eds), The Enigma of Islamist Violence (London: Hurst & Company, 2007), p. 45.

41 Jessica Stern,“Pakistan’s Jihad Culture,” Foreign Affairs (November/December 2000), p. 118.

42 Stern, p. 16.

43 Ira M. Lapidus,“Islamic Revival and Modernity: The Contemporary Movements and the Historical Paradigms,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 40, No. 4 (1997), p. 444.

44 S. N. Eisenstadt, Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution (Cambridge: University Press, 1999), pp. 2–3.

45 Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Islam and the West:Testing the Clash of Civilizations Thesis, KSG Working Paper (April 2002), No. RWP02, pp. 14–15.

46 Dale F. Eickleman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1996), pp. 47–48.

47 See Vali Nasr, “The Rise of Sunni Militancy in Pakistan: The Changing Role of Islamism and the Ulema in Society and Politics,” Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2000), pp. 145–54.

48 See Philippe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, “What Democracy is … and is Not,” Journal of Democracy (1991), pp. 50–54.

49 Brubaker and Laitin, p. 428.

50 See Mohammad Waseem,“Pakistan Resolution and the Ethnonationalist Movements,” in Kaniz F. Yusuf et al. (eds), Pakistan Resolution Revisited (Islamabad: National Institute of Historical and Cultural Studies, 1990), pp. 522–27.