Most of Pakistan’s political life was replete with civil disobedience movements, processions, strike calls, accusations of rigged elections, bans on political activity, “taming of parties”, dismissals of cabinets, reinforcements of martial law censorship, detentions, house arrests, murder of opponents, executions, farcical referendums, electoral frauds, boycott of elections, and the pursuit of bringing the country into conformity with the shari’a law.

While General Muhammad Zia-ul Haq’s administration publicized the belief that his Nizam-e Mustafa plan of action was different from the Islamization programmes of the previous governments,[14] some commentators seemed convinced that his Islamic legal reforms have had only a minor impact on the corpus of Pakistan’s legal system.[15] The thin veneer of westernization, characteristic of the Pakistani elite, wore out, and with the new generations dominating political discourse, the ‘nativization’ of the country’s politics necessarily involved more Islamization.[16] Ayub was a ‘brown Englishman’, and Zia appeared to be more rooted in his native culture. [17] Perhaps the first measure underZiz toward Islamization was the introduction of separate electorates as the basis of the future elections, expecting voters belonging to different religious persuasions to exercise their franchise only for their own candidates. Soon, Khatt-e Imam (Khomeini line of thinking) got the upper hand.

Eventually, directives were issued to government departments for namaz, (prayers) during office hours, to be led by departmental heads. All business centers were obliged to close for Friday prayers. A committee was set to revive the Islamic institutions of Zakat (poor tax) and ushr (agricultural tax).[18] In addition to present coursts, shar’a benches were created, whose decisions could not be challenged in any other court.[19] Hudud punishments were introduced for drinking, theft, dacoity, and adultery. [20] Zia discouraged co-education but encouraged chadar (closed garments) for women. A Shari’a Faculty was established at the Quaid-e Azam University in Islamabad, the Council of Islamic Ideology was empowered to make recommendations as to the measures for bringing existing laws into conformity with the Qur’an and the Sunnah (the sacred tradition in rule or custom), and the Islamic Research Institute was entrusted with the task of conducting research in Islam.[21] Steps were taken to revise textbooks and curricula. The poor flocked to the madrasas (religious schools) which gave them food and shelter. The television and radio were ordered to redesign their programmes according to the Islamic teachings. With the echo of the Iranian outcry of Musalman-e Pakbaz the unwanted Muslims were eliminated, and persons known for their strong commitment to an Islamic order were appointed to key government positions. Zia promulgated (15 June 1988) an Ordinance, which made the Shari’a the supreme law of the land.[22] He exhausted all of his political cards, including Islam, to legitimize his rule. Had he lived, an “extremely hostile opposition” would have confronted him.[23] While some criticized him severely for being antidemocratic, reactionary and discriminatory to women, some Islamapasands found what he did as too little. The mysterious crash that killed him (17 August 1988) perhaps gave hime an “honourable” exit.[24]

Genral Zia-ul Haq’s regime had lasted very long (1977-88) without much challenge to its authority, except the launching (1981) of the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD). Perhaps more time must elapse before his place in the country’s history can be more objectively assessed. He might have moved Pakistan to a prominence desired by some of the earlier leaders, but he is now remembered as the man who illegally seized power, and after more than a decade of repressive rule, left behind unemployment, hunger, discrimination, corruption, drugs, debt and empty Islamic rhetoric.[25] Although the transfer of power to elected  representatives put Islamization on a low key, no political party could ignore that concept during the 1988 election. Every leading party had its own “pocket Maulvi” as an ally. Everyone carrying with it an Islamic label, Benazir Bhutto’s PPP had jamiat-ul Ulama-e Islam, and the Muslim League had jamaat-e Islami.[26] One of the first things that Benazir, the long-time exiled leader of the PPP and who wanted to keep her father’s legacy alive, did was to perform umrah (the lesser pilgrimage to Mecca). She naturally upheld (January 1989) the governmental ban an Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Her administration did neither dismantle the shari’a courts, nor rescind the hudud ordinances, nor curb the authority of the Council of Islamic Ideology.

No government could take backward steps from the Islamization drive. The end result was the birth of various umbrella organizations for the major sects and groups, namely, the Sipahi-e Sahaba for the Sunnis and the Tahrik-e Jaffria for the Shi’a. When a group of ulama had approached Quaid-e Azam asking him to enforce the shari’a, he reportedly replied: “Whose shari’a? Hanafi’s? Hanabali’s? Shafaie’s? Maliki’s?’[27] Pakistan, thus, became a safe haven for many radical Islamic groups in the world, and turned into a violent society. The premises of the madrasas are now centers of jehad to where arms and ammunition flow freely, and private armies settle scores in the name of Islam.

Ther were times when armed clashes occurred between supporters of competing political forces, and the country seemed to be on the verge of civil war. Following in the footsteps sof the Taliban, students from the religious schools in the tribal areas of the frontier go around raiding houses and burning television sets “to purge the society” of what they brand as un-Islamic practices.[28] The Government of Pakistan succumbed to the demands of the Tahrik-e Nifaz-e Shari’a-e Muhammadi (TNSM) with the enactment of the Shari’a Nizam-e Adl Regulation (1999) in Malakand. The Chief Minister (Sardar Mehtab Ahmad Khan) reportedly said: “This is a historic step with far-reaching significance. The day is not far when inshallah the people of the ares will achieve the distinction of guiding Pakistan and the whole Islamic world in the enforcement of the shari’a.”[29]

Benazir Bhutto,[30] the daughter of the executed prime minister, twice (1988-90, 1993-96) served as the chief executive and dismissed on both occasions, was frequently accused of corruption and finally found guilty of embezzlement of funds. While Nawaz Sharif was holding supreme executive authority after the mid-term general election in 1997, which some authors defined as a “smooth transfer of power” the country had never witnessed before,[31] and while Pakistan was looking forward to the next National Assembly and presidential elections in 2002, Genral Parwaz (Pervez) Musharraf, Chief of Staff, usurped power (1999) but promised a return to civilian rule-without a fixed date, however.[32] Sharif had returned to power with a mandate big enough to strike down the controversial Article 58/2/b and to refuse to revive the Council for Defence and National Security, thereby depriving the armed forces of direct leverage they had thus far enjoyed, the absence of such mechanisms to change corrupt governments increased the danger of extra-constitutional intervention.

Since independence, Pakistan meant Punjab, first and foremost. The Punjabis were in all the key positions, and politicians from that province dominated the country’s polity. Benefiting from the line or reasoning that India never reconciled itself to the idea of partition, the leaders of the armed forces, who are also mostly Punjabis or in accord with them, possess the state. They have accumulated more authority in the absenece of charismatic civilian leaders, whose public images are often blended with corruption as well as failure. They hanged Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had given Pakistan a sort of legitimate government. Many of them argued that democracy did not suit Pakistan, and engineered one coup d’etat after another. Calling the shots under civilian or military governments, the armed forces formulated the policy towards the neighbours and the great powers. They endorsed the repetition of the Afghan experience in Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan’s social fabric is giving way because of the country’s present connection with the Afghan Mujahideen, whose camps are training grounds for Islamic zealots. In response to the excessive “Punjabization” of Pakistani politics, and also attracted by the Pathan Taliban, the Pushtu people of Pakistan may encourage the formation of “great Afghanistan”. If their interest is channeled towards an independent state for the Pathans, the issue of “great Baluchistan” may also come up, as the Mohajir demand a separate province.

The Pushtunistan (Pakhtunistan) movement (NWFP) was dormant[33] while the Sindh and the Baluch movements rose over time. Their rise or fall are related to the domestic and international factors. Even when the  new Islamic state was to be formed domestic and international factors. Even when the new Islamic state was to be formed in 1947, the Pushtun, Sindhi and the Baluchi elites pursued the goal of establishing their own autonomous states. Realizing a successful boycott campaign against the special referendum held by the British, the Pathans in the north-west evidently favoured the formation of their own state. The hope of a synthesis between liberal nationalism and the Islamic umma, which had characterized the state ideology of Pakistan at the beginning of partition, broke down, to be restructured under AyubKhan is the form of new one-unit and one-official language entity called West Pakistan, now to adhere to a “Basic Democracy” system[34] and a pro-Western foreign policy. The elite of the non-Punjabi peoples, who could not find their due share even in this new system, interpreted the nation-building efforts of the military-bureaucratic leadership as domestic colonialism. The traditional landed elite in the north-west was left outside political power, the rich agricultural land of Sindh was partially distributed among the Punjab senior officials, and Baluchistan’s natural gas went to the other provinces as well. Not only the Pushtun, Sindhi and the Baluchi elites, but also Ayub Khan himself eventually based his own political autobiography on the trial-and-error belief that the developing countries needed Western friends, not masters.[35]

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s policy of “Islamic socialist community”[36] and sharing of power with other ethnic elites, designed to meet the challenge of continuing local grievances, came to an abrubt end. Divergence towards a new non-aligned path in foreign affairs did not help, and the non-Punjabis emphasized their regional nationalism. Sindhi and Baluchi guerilla organizations had already emerged when Bhutto was overthrown by the military. Ethnic alienation persisted while the new administration to the one-unit and one-language and closer relations with the Muslim world. Afraid of Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, the masses once more clustered around the Islamic axis, further bolstered by the Iranian Revolution. Is spite of such ‘blending’ factors, the non-Punjabi nationalities continued off-and-on to resist the melting pot of the Pakistani state? The North-West Frontier Province may be renamed as “Pakhtunkhwa”. If the Mujahideen ignite a civil war on Pakistan’s soil, the long-standing demand for an independent Pathan state may reopen.

The feelings of alienation and separate identity among Mohajirs, those Muslim refugees who fled India at the time of partition and came over to Pakistan to settle in Karachi, Hyderabad and Sukkur, occurred as a result of a number of recent events and led to their mobilization under the banner of the MQM. The original idea of Pakistan did not envisage en masse transfer of population, but as Muslims from minority provinces came “by train loads, on trucks, lorries, bullock-carts and on foot”[37] to become legitimate citizens of the new state, they were given an initial identity of “Panahgeerss”, also meaning refugees as the first symptom of their denial of guaranteed status. These refugees, who had come mostly from the urban areas of India, had already broken from rural way of life and also from the feudal mentality, and were therefore closer to the Sindhi hari or Punjabi mazera (peasant), and not the Baluchi sirdar or the Pathan Khan (landlord). In addition to being more devoted to the Pakistan ideology, the Mojajirs were, at least initially, more advanced educationally compared to the other four ethnic groups in West Pakistan. One of the outstanding refugees of the country was the first Prime Minsiter Liaquat Ali Khan, assassinated in 1951. This dramatic event led many among the refugee community to think that those who came from outside were not accepted as the “real sons and daughters of the soil” even though their children might later be born on that land.[38]

The Mohajir-Pathan clashes were the first ethnic riots in Karachi. Gohar Ayub Khan, the son of President Ayub Khan, is believed to have engineered the attacks on the Mohajir community when the latter supported Fatima Jinnah, the sister of the Quaid-e Azam, against the President during the late-1964 elections. The Mohajirs, not only doubted the credibility of the election, but also feared the further erosion of their influence on account of the shift of the federal capital from Karachi to Rawalpindi, Ayub Khan’s birth place. The Mohajirs felt alienated again when the Sindh Assembly, dominated by the sindhi-speaking members of Bhutto’s PPP, passed (1972) a bill accepting Sindhi, along with Urdu, as the provincial language,[39] and also when the regime, which nationalized big business, introduced an urban-rural quota in Sindh arousing Mohairs, always supportive of “Pakistani” nationalism, were forced to seek and define their own identity. The MQM was formed (1984), on the basis of the All-Pakistan Mohajir Student Organization, a few days after General Ziaul Haq extended the rural-urban quota system for another ten years. After Altaf Hussein, the MQM leader, announced that he would unite the Mohajirs under the banner of their own party, gunmen and the police opened fire on several occasions killing members of the MQM or its sympathizers.[40] Some Mohajirs now demand a separate province to be called Jinnahabad or Jinnahpur.

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