MULLAH-MILITARY ALLIANCE: ‘The mullah–military alliance’ is a cliché of Pakistani politics. For many liberals this cliché forms the bedrock of their analysis of the many problems that Pakistan faces today. A key problem with this line of analysis is that it assumes both the military and the mullahs to be coherent, monolithic groups without internal contradictions and differences. Let us start with the mullahs. The loosely defined category of mullahs, or religious groups, includes a wide range of organisations, many with competing aims. The Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), a quintessential Islamist party – and immensely influential in terms of acting as an inspiration for other groups and as a training ground for their leaders – is seen as one of the groups most closely aligned with the military. This view stems from its close collaboration with the Ziaul Haq regime during the 1980s. If we take a longer historical view, however, we can see that the JI’s alliance with the Pakistani military was neither inevitable nor entirely comfortable. The JI, founded in 1941, essentially aimed at bringing about a social and intellectual transformation among the Muslims of South Asia by provoking a deeper political engagement among them. Elevating political participation to a level of importance equal to rituals of worship, such as prayers and fasting, JI founder Syed Abul Ala Maududi drew the ire of the traditionalist ulema, who saw his ideas as a dangerous innovation, one that carried the threat of tainting religion with the opportunism associated with politics. His attempt at devising a way for middle class Muslims to retain their ‘Muslimness’, while also being modern, was not widely appreciated by the traditionalists. Despite the debate generated by Maududi’s views, the JI remained a small, and relatively marginal, group throughout the 1940s with South Asian Muslim political participation spread over a range of political parties — from the Communist Party of India to Congress to the Indian National Army to regional parties and the All-India Muslim League. Quite apart from the lack of interest that the majority of South Asian Muslims exhibited toward the JI, the party was also structured along the lines of a Leninist cadre-based organisation and was not seeking to engage directly in electoral politics at that time. Having opposed the creation of Pakistan because, according to him, it would have divided the Muslims of South Asia, Maududi chose to move to Pakistan once the country was formed, calculating that the chances of exerting influence in a Muslim majority country were greater. A look at the JI’s relationship with the three military dictatorships will help us see the changes within the organisation and also the limited value of assuming an inevitable relationship between the military and the JI. Under the first military dictatorship of General Ayub Khan, the JI positioned itself in opposition to the regime. Indeed, the JI imagined itself an opposition party right from the time of independence. In 1948, the JI and the Communist Party of Pakistan held a joint rally in Lahore to protest the dominance that the Muslim League was attempting to exert on Pakistani politics. During Khan’s military regime, the JI formed part of a larger alliance of progressive and opposition parties to support the candidacy of Fatima Jinnah as the president of the country. This led to a split within the party when Maulana Amin Ahsan Islahi, arguably the most prominent scholar within the JI, broke away, denouncing Maududi’s political decision to support a woman’s candidacy to lead a country of Muslims. So, how did a party that was not averse to forming alliances with left-wing, secular groups come to be viewed as their key opponent? It is, of course, during the late 1960s that the JI took up a concentrated campaign against socialism in Pakistan. Without a madrassa base to recruit from, and dependent upon its ideological vision of a vanguard party, the JI recruited from professional colleges and universities. It was precisely in these venues that the strength of Pakistan’s emerging Maoist groups also lay during the 1960s. Intense competition between the JI and the left-wing groups had not yet led to persistent violence. In a decade of America’s support for Khan, the JI completely overestimated its strength in electoral politics. The elections of 1971 were a severe jolt to the party, which had fielded the highest number of candidates in the country. The resounding rejection by the Pakistani electorate led to much soul-searching and internal questioning of Maududi’s leadership, as is evident from letters and articles in JI’s magazine, Zindagi. Most analysis of the JI remains stuck in the 1970s and 1980s, when the party worked closely with the military — first in East Pakistan and then with General Ziaul Haq. We are all too familiar with the history of collaboration between the JI and Haq’s regime. It is unclear how this collaboration would have worked out if Maududi had stayed alive. His death in 1979 and the long-term impact of his dominating personality left the JI with a relatively weak leadership. It is also clear that soon after the initial euphoria of Haq’s appropriation of the JI ideology wore off, the party was an internally divided organisation trying to resolve the contradictions of this relationship. The Haq regime’s support for the rise of the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) in Karachi hit the JI quite directly, as both parties were competing to recruit from the same constituency. At the same time, the war in Afghanistan had allowed many JI leaders access to influence and political capital. The increasing use of violence by the Islami Jamiat Talaba (IJT) – JI’s student wing in university campuses in urban Pakistan – and its support for the Al-Badr and Al-Shams militia groups that operated in East Pakistan during its war of independence with West Pakistan, solidified the party’s categorisation by the left as a fascist group. The American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) supported both this militarisation and the coffers of the JI, indirectly, by buying and distributing literature produced by the organisation against socialism. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s aggressive attacks on the very groups that had helped him to power – student organisations and trade unions – left a political vacuum by the late 1970s, in which the JI was able to step in. The end of the Afghan war, Haq’s sudden removal from the Pakistani political scene and a dramatic decline in American support for the very mujahideen that form a part of today’s Taliban, left the JI without a clear ally. This truth has taken some time to sink in within the party. During the reign of Pakistan’s third military dictator General (retd) Pervez Musharraf – supported by the liberal intelligentsia in Pakistan for his secular credentials – the JI remained mired in confusion about its role, eager to respond to overtures by the military regime but finding itself constrained by its constituency that remained solidly against the US war in Afghanistan and Pakistan — one that can justifiably be called a war ‘of’ terror. Qazi Hussain Ahmed’s attempts – in the 1990s and 2000s – to transform JI into a mass party, his interest in forming wide political alliances and his support for expanding the party’s social work have all meant that JI today is a much more diverse party than it was during the 1960s and 1970s. To not recognise this is to remain stuck in an ossified, ahistorical perspective. This does not mean, of course, that JI has a clear political programme that is beneficial for the masses or that some of its leaders are not still close to the military high command. Nevertheless, all of this renders JI to be very similar to other ‘secular’ political parties in Pakistan. The assertion by the current JI Amir, Munawar Hasan, a one-time leftist student activist, that Pakistani soldiers killed while fighting America’s war in Pakistan are not martyrs, does not represent a sudden rupture between the army and the JI. It is merely another episode in a process in which the JI, over the last decade and a half, has tried to carve out a space for itself in Pakistani politics beyond the patronage of the military high command. Some have speculated that the JI chief has his eyes set on the upcoming local government elections and has picked an issue that has some resonance for electoral politics. If so, nothing stops our more secular parties from picking up the issue of the army’s support for America’s war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and stealing the JI’s thunder. More critically, to extrapolate the conclusions drawn from JI’s history to all other religious groups in Pakistan – from the Tehrik-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) to the Tableeghi Jamaat to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan to the Afghan Taliban – is to confuse those groups that may still be close to the Pakistani intelligence agencies and those who are antagonistic towards the Pakistani security forces or just indifferent to them. There are immense differences among these religious groups and to assume that they are all working in cohesion with each other raises two grave dangers. Firstly, such an assumption gives mullahs an importance and ability which they clearly do not possess. This often leads to exaggerated and hysterical responses that are completely inappropriate. Does anyone still seriously believe that the TNSM from Swat had the capacity to take over Islamabad in 2009? Secondly, it distorts the axis on which we evaluate Pakistani politics. Ultimately, the struggle in Pakistan is not between the religious and the secular but between the haves and the have-nots. For more than a decade, the so-called secular parties have evaded any real questioning of their political platforms, economic policies and social agendas by blaming the religious lobby for thwarting social and economic development. Female education, income inequality, unemployment, provincial imbalances — none of this has been created by the religious parties because nowhere in the country have they been in power long enough to have a deciding influence. If we turn now to the Pakistani armed forces – a consistent presence in Pakistan’s political scene – we find an organisation that is riven with internal divisions. The army high command has traditionally been the most consistent conduit of US influence in the country. From Khan to Haq to Musharraf, the army has provided suitable generals to support US wars in the wider region. As writer and journalist Tariq Ali so rightly pointed out, the Pakistani army has produced Islamist or secular generals as and when the US has needed them. Unlike during the Haq regime, there is no overtly or clearly religious presence within the current high command of the Pakistani army. What, then, forms the basis of persistent allegations of the mullah–military alliance even today? The vague and often expressed assumption is that the military continues to patronise many of the religious groups it has supported in the past to further its own interests. Based on historical experience, where groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LT) acted as extensions of the Pakistani army (much like Blackwater does for the US army now), as well as the coming together of Haq’s military dictatorship with Islamists such as the JI, this assumption seems entirely plausible — particularly, in the case of some groups like the LT. However, rendering the military as one efficient machine, where the commands of generals face no resistance from soldiers, ignores the reality on the ground and buys the narrative that the Pakistani army would like to sell. The reality on the ground is that the layers of senior officers who benefit directly from fighting America’s war are finding it increasingly hard to convince lower and middle level officers to go ahead with attacks on their fellow citizens. Within such a context, the military’s ability to control and manage all of the different religious groups in Pakistan, with their vastly different political interests, is severely limited. Rather than staying with the comfort of blaming known truisms, such as the mullah–military alliance, we need to think critically about the precise alignments today. Some in Pakistan have supported the Pakistani military’s operations in the tribal areas as well as the drone attacks, in contradiction with their continued invocation that the mullah–military alliance is behind the rise of militancy in Pakistan. Why provide the military with moral and political support to undertake these operations if it is, indeed, behind the rise of militancy in Pakistan?
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:07:48 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015