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Pakistan
PROSPECTS FOR SOCIAL COHESION
Pakistan has been struggling to develop an all-encompassing identity
since the founding of the state in 1947. The nation was created
by Western-oriented professionals and bureaucrats as a homeland
for Muslims, a place where they would no longer be a minority
community in the Hindu-majority state of India. Enthusiasm and
a sense of profound moral renaissance for Muslims in South Asia
accompanied independence. Expectations were high that Pakistan
would flourish and that its citizens would be unified by their
sense of social contract. It was hoped that Pakistanis would freely
and vigorously engage in parliamentary debate, while creating
new industries, all under the umbrella of Islam.
This vision of promise and unity soon encountered the realities
of state building. Islamists and secularists disputed the centrality
of Islam in the government. Pakhtun and Baloch tribes resisted
relinquishing their autonomy to the new centralized state, which
they regarded as an outside power. Partition also created new
ethnic communities. The Urdu-speaking entrepreneurs and industrialists
who migrated to Karachi created a new self-identifying group,
the muhajirs. Unlike the majority of Pakistanis, who
are tied emotionally and politically to a specific locality in
the country, muhajirs did not have these ties. When the
new state granted housing and land to the muhajirs to
compensate them for what they had left behind in India, indigenous
Punjabis and Sindhis clashed with the newcomers. Also during the
1950s, language riots in East Pakistan and anti-Ahmadiyya protests
in Punjab cast doubt on the unity of Pakistanis under the rubric
of Muslim brotherhood.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Pakistan emphasized building its industrial
base to ensure both economic and political survival. Western-educated
professionals and industrialists, as well as forward-looking feudal
landlords who valued education, were increasingly influential;
more traditional leaders saw their power deteriorate. A fairly
liberal interpretation of Islam was supported by the state, resulting
in the passage of the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance in 1961.
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto promoted "Islamic Socialism" in his 1971
electoral campaign, raising the material expectations of the masses
to an unprecedented level. Many people believed that life would
improve significantly under Bhutto and the Pakistan People's Party,
but from 1971 to 1977 there was little change in the standard
of living.
Intergroup tensions grew as members of the lower and middle classes
became disillusioned, as upper-class industrialists were alienated
by the government's nationalization policies, and as wealthy landlords
were threatened by Bhutto's land reform program, which weakened
only his adversaries.
Ethnic groups in Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province
pressed for increased autonomy, while muhajirs, not yet
organized as a political group, ran the city of Karachi and non-Muslim
minorities worried about the state's increasingly formal identification
with Islam.
Bhutto restructured the civil bureaucracy while increasing his
personal authority, alienating many people at the highest echelons
of power while creating opportunities for others. Under the first
democratically elected government in twenty years, Bhutto made
full use of his power by giving jobs and privileges to supporters
of the PPP.
Under Zia-ul-Haq, who governed from 1977 to 1988, nepotism continued:
who one knew was much more important than what one knew. The leadership
gave jobs, contracts, and privileges to its allies as it sought
to undermine the PPP. Traditional markers of ascribed identity,
such as mother tongue, area of family origin, and kinship ties,
increasingly dictated individuals' opportunities as competition
continued to block the development of citizenship based on shared,
nationwide concerns. The common expression in Urdu and Punjabi,
"the whole world knows (or believes) that . . .," reflects the
small (usually family or neighborhood) social reference group
of many Pakistanis.
In February 1979, Zia decreed that Islam--or, rather, a certain
interpretation of Islam--was to be the basis of Pakistan's legal
system. Fearing discrimination, some non-Muslim minorities, especially
Zoroastrians, began to emigrate from Karachi in unprecedented
numbers. Shia Muslims marched on Islamabad in 1982 to protect
their right to maintain their own system of social welfare.
Zia employed his rhetoric of Islamic state building to disguise
his political opportunism. He also exploited the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan to build his arsenal of weapons by diverting some
that were shipped through Pakistan for the Afghans. Some experts
have even argued that the massive explosion at the Ojhri munitions
camp on the outskirts of Rawalpindi in April 1988 was deliberately
planned to justify "replacement" purchases in excess of the quantity
actually lost.
In the 1980s, Pakistan continued to place little emphasis on
social programming despite growing problems, including a rapid
rise in heroin addiction. The country has been criticized by international
development organizations for ignoring social and human development.
In the 1980s, the government's priorities were instead political,
and it strengthened those regional political leaders who could
contain the PPP in their localities. In addition, the central
government declared that democratic principles would have to remain
in abeyance while the state searched for the right Islamic guidelines.
The government's decision allowed local officials to continue
corrupt practices, such as hiring and firing people within the
bureaucracy at will and making significant commissions from contracts
on projects they approved.
To many Pakistanis already disillusioned with the economic and
political functioning of the state, the fundamental social weaknesses
of the nation came to the fore in the early 1990s. The most obvious
of these--uneven distribution of wealth; the selfcenterness ,
nepotism, and greed of the privileged; and rapid population growth
among the nation's poorest people--made the institutionalization
of a nationwide concept of citizenship problematic. The failure
to forge a widely understood social contract is reflected in increased
tensions among ethnic groups, social classes, extended families,
and religious factions.
The way people interrelate with one another, the way they perceive
national issues and their role in affecting them, and the priority
they assign to personal ties and group identification are all
parts of the matrix of a society and indicators of its social
cohesion. Until Pakistanis can come up with an inner commitment
to a cause--which in Pakistan's history has been fairly rare outside
of kinship circles--little can be done or will be done to serve
the wider society impartially, be it a national conservation strategy,
education reform, opium poppy substitution programs, or the promotion
of industrial growth.
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General works pertaining to social change in Pakistan include
Sabeeha Hafeez's The Changing Pakistan Society, Akbar
S. Ahmed's Discovering Islam, Anita M. Weiss's Culture,
Class, and Development in Pakistan, Hastings Donnan and Pnina
Werbner's Economy and Culture in Pakistan, and Myron
Weiner and Ali Banuazizi's The State and the Restructuring
of Society in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. Shahid Javed
Burki examines Pakistan's social development in Pakistan:
A Nation in the Making, and Naseem Jaffer Quddus addresses
education issues in Problems of Education in Pakistan.
Khawar Mumtaz and Farida Shaheed's Women of Pakistan
gives an overview of the Pakistan women's movement. The controversial
report by the Pakistan Commission on the Status of Women became
available in 1991, five years after it was published. For a composite
of statistical information on women based on all four of Pakistan's
official censuses, the Pakistan government's Federal Bureau of
Statistics' Women's Division's Women in Pakistan: A Statistical
Profile and Ann Duncan's Women in Pakistan: An Economic
and Social Strategy are helpful. A recent study of women's
lives, drawing on women's own words and views in the context of
wider social changes, is Anita M. Weiss's Walls Within Walls.
Islamic issues in Pakistan are analyzed in Anita M. Weiss's Islamic
Reassertion in Pakistan and John L. Esposito's Islam
and Politics.
Environmental issues are addressed in the Pakistan government's
National Conservation Strategy Report. Geographic information
can be found in Ashok K. Dutt and M.M. Geib's Atlas of South
Asia and in K.U. Kureshy's A Geography of Pakistan.
The works of Frederick Barth and Akbar S. Ahmed analyze Pakhtun
society, and an in-depth look at the Baloch is provided in A.H.
Siddiqi's Baluchistan.
The most important English-language magazines providing useful
accounts of current social issues are Herald and Newsline,
both based in Karachi. Travel narratives that capture cultural
features of Pakistani life include Geoffrey Moorhouse's To
the Frontier, Richard Reeves's Passage to Peshawar,
and Christina Lamb's controversial Waiting for Allah.
(For further information and complete citations, see Bibliography.)
Data as of April 1994
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