STATE OF NOTHING

Tunku Varadarajan offers his personal,

and drastic, solution to Pakistan's problems: abolish it

PAKISTAN — Midnight's Child born on the wrong side of history's bed — has recently entered its 50th year. Typically, it marked the event with a political murder. Murtaza Bhutto was shot dead by the khaki brigade, which acted beyond the Prime Minister's (Murtaza's sister's) con- trol. But did they? We shall never know. `The land of the pure' has, for much of its existence, been a land of pure farce. I shall explain why.

Pakistan has never made sense; its exis- tence today is as pointless as Burkina Fasso's or Liberia's. This is not because it is a bankrupt place, sucking greedily on the drip of foreign aid; no, Pakistanis are a vig- orous people with proper traders' instincts. But it is totally bankrupt in a more impor- tant way.

It was the intention of Pakistan's founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, that the only country with a made-up name to be born outside Africa this century should start life with an utterly clean sheet. The problem with clean sheets, however, is that they have no history written on them. But All right, number two speak clearly into the mouthpiece and repeat, "Have I got a deal for you." ' great countries need a history, Jinnah and his acolytes had then to attempt to concoct one for Pakistan.

But what to do? Problem one: wasn't Pakistan's history really also that of India? Problem two: how was a 'state for Mus- lims' (Jinnah, with almost endearing naivety, did not envisage a 'Muslim state') to dispose of all its historical Hindu bag- gage? Problem three: how was the 'map' of Pakistan's history to be invented? Clearly, its modern era began with independence from 'the Hindus' in 1947 (or with the founding of the Muslim League some decades earlier), but wasn't the rest really a bit of an unwieldy jigsaw? Moghuls, yes. Gandharas, no. The Sepoy Mutiny, yes, but only the good bits. The Indus Valley civilisation, perhaps. (And that man Gand- hi, who did far more for Pakistani inde- pendence than Jinnah himself, how was Pakistan to deal with him?) Since the writing of the country's history proved to be impossible without too many people asking too many inconvenient ques- tions, Pakistan's rulers went for the easier option — mass lobotomy. Education, which had once thrived in West Punjab, (Lahore University was, with Delhi and Calcutta, the finest in British India), was fiercely throttled. Nothing is now studied in that country. A new beginning is best made with an empty head.

Pakistan has no poets born after 1947. `I love his use of space.'

Its greatest poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz Sic, who was a supreme lyricist in spite of his ludicrous infatuation with Stalin, could never come to terms with this new non- country. Pakistan has no novelists born after 1947 either. (It might have made a bid for Saimaa Rushdie but for that incon- venient book of his.) Pakistan has no important scientists born after 1947. Philosophers, linguists, philologists and historians? You must be joking. Its univer- sities are merely dens of violence, political intrigue and mass cheating by students.

Pakistan has no proper playwrights (although there are plenty of men and women who churn out television soap operas). It has wiped out its classical music and dance. Kathak, the northern Indian dance form which took shape in the Mus- lim courts of Oudh, is now stamped on and described by the state as lewd, `Hindu' and un-Islamic. The classical raga tradition, which once flourished in Punjab, has all but died, the mullahs having silenced vocalists for singing `Hindu' music.

The country's best-known musician, Nus- rat Fateh Ali Khan, sings QawwaliSic, a rapturous Sufi musical form. It has nothing to do with the joyless WahabiSic version of Islam, imported slavishly from the sheikhdoms, which is daily rammed down Pakistani throats. (Sufis are, to put it sim- ply, 'Hindu' Muslims.) The country has no cinema worth the name, no painting, no sculpture, no art. Even the 'Hindu' sari, widely favoured as a form of dress before 1947 by elegant Muslim ladies in Karachi and the Punjab, has disappeared. This is all proof of Pakistan's ideologues' desperate desire to invent a new identity and to per- form a cultural 'ethnic cleansing'.

Tariq All once wrote a book called Can Pakistan Survive?: it was banned in his home country and he was widely pilloried. (Of all the things to pillory him for this was not the best choice, as it was not a bad book at all.) Mr Ali ought really to have raised the following question: should Pak- istan survive? Since he did not, I will.

Should Pakistan survive? My answer is no, and its 50th birthday, on 14 August 1997, would be the perfect date for it. When Jinnah secured for 'his people' their promised land, he was not merely creating another nation-state. The amputation of Pakistan from India and from Hindustan was much more profound than that. Pak- istan was thereby — and I cannot empha- sise this too strongly — detaching itself from Indian civilisation — its civilisation. The road to spiritual ruin cannot have been more clearly signposted.

India, too, has suffered; its equilibrium was profoundly disturbed by the redrawing of its age-old map and the loss of its 'Cur- zonian direction'. (I owe the phrase to Swapan DasguptaSic, India's most original political commentator and the only one of my friends who can boast of having taken Benazir Bhutto to High Table at Oxford, which he did while he was a research fel- low at Nuffield and she a forlorn figure in exile. His thesis, which I commend to you, is that Lord Curzon was the first great Indian nationalist, with his political map of India stretching from Afghanistan to the Straits of Malacca.) Yet nowhere has the equilibrium been more disturbed than in the place that today calls itself Pakistan. Its people float in an ugly limbo, now neither Indian (in the proper, historical sense of the word), nor Middle-Eastern (although the dicta- tor Zia-ul-haq, paradoxically the one Pak- istani ruler with whom India could do business — possibly because of his educa- tion at St Stephen's College, Delhi always described his country as 'Middle- Eastern).

Pakistanis are accosted daily by an alien form of Islam, far removed from those important dilutions introduced by Indian civilisation which have, historically, made their religion so much less intolerant on the Indian subcontinent than it is when prac- tised by Arabs. And geopolitically Pakistan today is no more than the rump of the old Punjab, with various recalcitrant bits tacked on. What dignity is there in that?

Is it not time, at 50, for that country's younger generation to be placed in the sub- continent's pre-1947 mould, where they can start to imbibe the ways of a tolerant Indi- an civilisation? Is it not time for Pakistan to admit that its ambitious experiment has failed? Is it not time, frankly, for Pakistanis to be Indians again?

Tunku Varadarajan writes for the Times.

Owing to an editing error, the meaning of the last two sentences of David Pryce- Jones's article on the Jerusalem distur- bances was changed. They should have read:

For Palestinians, the image of a tunnel has the power to encapsulate a collective fear that they are holding on to what the Israelis are undermining. The further image of a sui- cide bomber encapsulates a collective hope never to compromise. Metaphor rules, and will continue to do so until prosaic facts break it down.