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Pakistan
Index
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.
* * *
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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