After the Clash

'Clash of civilizations' renewing lives, communities

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Author: Mustafa Malik

Can Biden get a Muslim lad mad?

Mustafa Malik September 26, 2020

SEVERAL AMERICAN MUSLIM friends, spooked by President Trump’s “Muslim ban,” shift of America’s Israeli embassy to Jerusalem and other anti-Muslim acts, are getting excited about Joe Biden’s steady lead over him in the polls. I am trying to douse their enthusiasm for the Democratic presidential nominee for several reasons, especially because Islam and liberalism, the creed of the West, are evolving fast.

Electoral polls can be notoriously misleading.  About this time four years ago Hillary Clinton was way ahead of Trump in the polls. Yet on the early evening of Election Day, Trump’s winning numbers on delegate count boards got Clinton’s victory parties to disperse quietly and had her slump into bed, crying. But as Trump now begins to lose white voters without a college education, his core support groups, I am inclined to think that he is facing a bigger hurdle against Biden than he did against Clinton.

The second reason I am advising Muslims to be cautious about Biden is the mixed signals he is sending on Muslim issues. In July he delighted American Muslims by becoming the first presidential nominee from either political party to address a large Muslim gathering directly, and moreover, express his desire to see Islam taught in American schools. In that online engagement he also told 3,000 or so members of Emgage Action, a Muslim advocacy organization, that he would abolish Trump’s Muslim ban “on Day One” of his presidency.

But a month later the Biden campaign publicly and loudly castigated Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian Muslim activist, as an “anti-Semite.” Sarsour has been an effective advocate of the global campaign to boycott Israel, citing its colonialist and apartheid policy toward the Palestinians. By denouncing Sarsour, the Biden campaign obviously was trying to appease American Jews, a key voting bloc and source of campaign donations.

Biden is, in fact, following the parameters of relations with Muslims created by his former boss, President Barack Obama. Obama fired up Muslims everywhere by going to Cairo and giving a soaring speech, calling for “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” That relationship, he said, would be based on America’s appreciation of the Islamic civilization and Islamic values. Obama also boldly criticized linking Islam to terrorism, as had been done by Republicans and a host of American media outlets.

And yet Obama escalated America’s thoughtless and pointless drone strikes on targets in Pakistan and other sovereign Muslim countries, blowing up countless innocent women, children and men; and maintained a “kill list” of mostly innocent Muslim “terrorists.” The Obama White House persistently turned down Muslim job applications. Obama’s election campaigns made sure Muslim activists didn’t show up on platforms with him. In Chicago, two of Obama campaign’s Muslim activists in hijab had managed to step on to a platform with Obama, only to be pushed out. President Obama, too, brushed aside Muslim invitations to visit a mosque until the last year of his presidency.

Moral desert

Biden and Obama remind me of the late Republican Senator Charles McC. Mathias Jr. of Maryland, a moral tower and one of two American politicians I admired most those days. The other was Democratic Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. During a November 1985 interview with Mathias in his Senate office in Washington I reminded him of his description of U.S. senators’ slavishness toward Israel in an article he had written in Foreign Affairs magazine (Summer 1981).  He had narrated how the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) had got President Gerald Ford to scrub his decision to “reassess” U.S. aid to Israel after Israel had backed out of its Sinai disengagement talks with Egypt. When AIPAC representatives hit the Senate with a letter to the president opposing his decision, 76 senators signed in on it “promptly,” Mathias had written, “although no hearings had been held, no debate conducted, nor had the Administration been invited to present its views.”

“Why?” I asked.

“We need the backbone to stand up for what is right, to do what is in America’s best interest,” he said. “We need moral courage.”

During the 35 years since that interview (my last with Mathias) Congress and the White House have become more of a moral desert. American politicians have become more dependent than ever on campaign contributions from big corporations and special interest groups. Moral stands often rub up some of these entities and groups the wrong way. Biden is spineless and wishy washy on many issues. How then would Islam and Muslims fare under a Biden presidency, if there is one?

To begin with, Biden would generally, but not always, follow the wind, and the anti-Muslim wind that roiled America in the wake of 9/11 has abated greatly. His comments to Emgage apparently reflects that. He will also be dealing with a more hospitable Islam. Muslim societies have all but moved past “Islamism,” the movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East, Jamaat-i-Islami in South Asia, and other organizations, which sought to pit Muslims and Islam directly against the West. Muslim societies are modernizing fast and becoming “secular,” in the sense in which “post-Islamist” Islamic activists use the word.

In August 1998 when Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now president of Turkey, told me in an interview that he was a “secular Muslim,” I thought he was lying. I was conducting fieldwork in Turkey and several European countries to explore the prospects for Turkey’s accession to the European Union, and Erdogan, just sacked as mayor of Istanbul, was getting ready to serve a prison term for reading out an Islamic poem at a public meeting in what used to be ultra-secular Turkey. I thought that he was pretending to be secular because, having been stung by his recitation of an incendiary Islamic poem,  he did not now want me to describe him as an “Islamic extremist” in American publications.

But from his subsequent words and deeds and those of his colleagues in the Justice and Development Party (AKP) I realized that he genuinely believes that Islam does not require a modern state to be “Islamic,” or curb the freedom of non-Muslims or discriminate against them.

The same policy is followed by the Ennahda party in Tunisia, Justice and Development Party (PJD) in Morocco and the Center Party in Egypt. These groups don’t associate Islam with the state of state policies, or favor Muslims over other faith groups in access to public institutions, as Islamist groups would. Secular Islamic activists do not disown Islamic traditions or ban Islamic values and symbols from the public sphere, which Western secularists do.

In the Muslim world “secular Islam” marks the faith’s evolution under the impact of the spread of education and modernization. On the eve of his December 10, 2002, meeting with then President George W. Bush at the White House, Erdogan explained his and the AKP’s secularity in a wide-ranging speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. “We are learning from experience,” said the soon-to-be prime minister of Turkey, and becoming “secular.”

What “experience” had been secularizing the AKP? I asked the visiting AKP leader during an interview following his CSIS talk.

“Experience of living in the world, modern world,” Erdogan replied.

Mass education

Islamists are also modernizing, but they view the West, the source of modernity, with hostility. Secular Islamic activists, in addition to being avid modernizers, have no qualms about engaging the West and doing business with it. This was a basic difference between Erdogan and his Islamist mentor Necmettin Erbakan, the founder of the Islamist movement in Turkey. Erbakan missed no opportunity to rail against the West, proposed to create an “Islamic NATO” and scorned the European Union as a “Christian club,” which he did not want Muslim Turkey to join. Erdogan tried hard to join the EU (He initially dismissed my suggestion that that was a futile exercise) and courted the United States at every opportunity.

Islamists view Islam as a faith and Muslim societies as its own home in which non-Muslims should be welcomed and tolerated, but not treated as equal citizens. Secular Islamic activists view Islam as a civilization and set of cultures in which all faiths and their adherents should have equal rights, but in countries where Muslims are the majority community, Islamic values would form the moral and cultural bedrock.

Muslim exposure to modernity, which has accelerated at a breathtaking pace, has been speeded by mass education. In the mid-1950s I was one of only four boys attending high school from Balaut “pargona,” or county, in what is now Bangladesh. Three years ago, I was taking a morning walk from my farmhouse in Mujahid Khani village in that county.  My eyes were gripped by a fascinating scene of droves of pupils, male and female, scampering along a dirt road through rice fields to a high school that my brother, Abdul Mukit Tafader, helped to build. And there are other high schools in that county. Some of these students were also going to the nearby Harikandi Madrasa, which I had attended for two years, when its curriculum was confined to subjects relating to Islamic scripture and faith, excluding any secular subjects. Today math, social studies and other secular are taught in Harikandi Madrasa, along with, of course, Islamic subjects.

Lumbering back to my centuries-old ancestral home, surrounded by mango, jackfruit and betelnut trees that were buzzing with a bazaar of chirping birds, I remembered an essay written by Dale Eickelman of Dartmouth College in which the anthropologist depicted how mass education has catalyzed the rapid transformation of Muslim societies.

“Like the printing press in sixteenth-century Europe,” the article began, “the combination of mass education and mass communication is transforming the Muslim-majority world, a broad geographical crescent stretching from North Africa through Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Indonesian archipelago.” Modernization, he adds, is “dissolving prior barriers of space and distance and opening new grounds for interaction and mutual recognition” of Muslim and non-Muslim societies and cultures. “Quite simply, in country after country, government officials, traditional religious scholars, and officially sanctioned preachers are finding it very hard to monopolize the tools of literate culture. The days have gone when governments and religious authorities [in Muslim countries] can control what their people know and what they think.”

Historically, a main source of liberal Westerners’ antipathy for things Islamic has been their hostility to religion per se and the religiosity of Muslims in general. Since the last decades of the last century that antipathy has been diminishing in the West, especially among intellectuals. Most of the West’s major philosophers, sociologists and social anthropologists (Jurgen Habermas, Martha Nusbaum, Peter Berger, Grace Davie, Daniele Harvieu-Leger, Richard Martin, to name just a few) now appreciate the role of religions and religious values in lending people meaning and priorities of their lives, which liberals of earlier times refused to acknowledge. Liberals as they remain, these philosophers and sociologists are prone to harnessing the nourishing and humanizing values of religious traditions. This valuation of religions, and hence religious communities, has been seeping through to Western social mainstreams. America is fast shedding Islamophobia, spawned after 9/11 by neoconservatives, nativists and out-of-work Cold War jingoists.

The next U.S. administration faces a confident Muslim world, better informed than ever before, which is eager to engage, rather than fight, America and the West. A Muslim lad in my Mujahid Khani village in Bangladesh, or in the Turkish megacity of Istanbul, laughs, rather than gets mad, at Trump’s hysterical scream: “Islam hates us!” A President Biden, if there is one, would have to be a reckless rascal to incur his hostility.

India’s lesson for Lebanon

Mustafa Malik September 7, 2020

India and Pakistan could have been spared catastrophes by power-sharing systems they rejected. The Lebanese should hold on to the one they have.

I NORMALLY CAN’T stand Boris Johnson because of his demagoguery and conservative political creed. But last week Emmanuel Macron made me appreciate the British prime minister, for the first time.

The French president was in Beirut, on his second trip since last month’s massive explosion in the Lebanese capital. He warned politicians there that they had “the last chance for [their] political system,” which is based on sharing political power and interests among the country’s half a dozen religious-political factions.

The system had been introduced in Lebanon by imperial France after World War I when it created and colonized that Arab country. Macron, like many other critics of Lebanon’s consensus democracy, now says the power-sharing model has bred corruption and inertia among Lebanese officials, which somehow caused the devastating blast of a stockpile of ammonium nitrate at Beirut port.

On his first visit to the city soon after the August 4 explosion, the French president had given the Lebanese a tongue-lashing for their corruption and called for “a new political pact,” which would, he explained later, transform that country’s consensus democracy into some kind of a majoritarian one.

A democracy can be based on a consensus among groups or communities, or on the strength of a legislative majority. Under the consensus model, executive powers and legislative seats are shared by a country’s ethnic, religious or other communities, and government decisions are arrived at through dialogue among representatives of those communities. A majoritarian democracy, on the other hand, is a winner-take-all game in which a political party (or a coalition of parties), which wins a majority of seats in a parliamentary election, forms the government and enacts laws without input from minority parties of communities. 

On his second trip Macron warned his Lebanese hosts that if they failed to reform their political system, he would push the international community to stop aiding Lebanon financially and sanction those among them who had amassed wealth through corruption. 

I was born in India and spent part of my childhood there and then lived for years in Pakistan’s eastern province before migrating to the United States. I have been dismayed lately to see that tensions between India and Pakistan have spiked to new heights since the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi wiped out the autonomy of the Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir state. The British had colonized the Indian subcontinent for nearly two centuries. After reading Macron’s comments on the Internet, I wondered how Indians and Pakistanis would feel if Boris Johnson were to descend on Islamabad and New Delhi and tell Modi and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan how to settle the Kashmir issue and warn of dire consequences if they failed to follow his diktat.

I am grateful that Johnson apparently has better sense than today’s occupant of the Elysée Palace in Paris, whose forebear Henri Gouard carved out and ruled Lebanon.  General Gouard had suffered two humiliating defeats at the hands of the Turks in World War I. Never mind, the French general tucked his tail between his legs and marched on Damascus, where he kicked the tomb of Salahuddin Ayyubi, the Kurdish victor over French and other European Crusaders, and thundered: “Wake up, Saladin! We are back. My presence here marks the final victory of the Cross over the Crescent!”  I am afraid Macron’s current posture in Lebanon and vision about its future will prove as delusional.

The Beirut blast – which killed 181 people, wounded 6,000 others and made 300,000 homeless – pained me much as I once fell in love with that city and cherish fond memories of my three visits there. But I am nettled, really, by the attacks, mostly by Westerners, on Lebanon’s consensus system, as I believe in my bones that such a power-sharing arrangement could have spared my native Indian subcontinent two horrifying tragedies. One was the 1947 partition of British India into the modern Indian and Pakistani states, during which Hindu, Muslim and Sikh rioters massacred 800,000 souls and uprooted 14 million others from their homes and lands. The other was the dismemberment of old Pakistan in 1971 during which hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis perished in a savage Pakistani military crackdown in what was then East Pakistan.

Lebanon’s French colonial rulers who succeeded Gouard had the insights to realize that any European political model would not work in the chimera of a “nation” they had jumbled together out of Muslim and Christian sects who had never lived together in a nation-state. In cooperation with native elites, they developed a structure to provide autonomy for the country’s different sectarian communities and allow them to share executive and legislative powers. Lebanon’s political and social leaders saw the wisdom of the arrangement had it incorporated in the 1943 charter of their country’s independence from French colonial rule. Lebanon has since customized the system in response to the exigencies of the times.

Under the system, as it operates today, the president of Lebanon is to be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, the speaker of the parliament a Shiite Muslim, and the deputy prime mister and deputy speaker Eastern Orthodox Christians. The sects are also allotted parliamentary seats roughly in proportion to their population ratios.

Indian confederation

Three years after the Lebanese independence, the British colonial power in the Indian subcontinent realized that the time had come for them to pull up their stakes in that country. And like the French in Lebanon, they realized that the two major religious communities there needed a power-sharing political structure to live relatively peaceably in an independent country.

Accordingly, in the summer of 1946 a British Cabinet delegation, led by then British Secretary of State for India, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, worked out a confederal arrangement for an independent successor state to British India. Under it the country’s provinces would be grouped into Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority ones, and those provincial groups would enjoy wide autonomy in managing their administrative, economic and social affairs. That would leave the government in New Delhi with only four subjects: foreign affairs, defense, currency and communications. The plan was initially accepted by the Indian National Congress, led by Mohandas K. Gandhi, known as the Mahatma, the great soul; and the Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Both were Oxford-educated barristers.

Gandhi’s Congress was mostly a Hindu organization whose top leaders wanted the country to run as a secular majoritarian democracy like Britain in which people would be expected to vote without regard to their religious and ethnic affiliations, and a parliamentary majority would legislate for the country and govern it through a Cabinet at its will. Jinnah, a Shiite Muslim, was actually more secular than the Hindu Gandhi. But he believed, unlike the Mahatma, that religious consciousness would dominate the minds of everyday Indian voters.

And he feared that because Hindus made up three-quarters of the British Indian population, the overwhelmingly Hindu parliament of a united democratic India would suppress Muslim interests and discriminate against Muslims unless the Muslim minority’s basic political and religious interests were safeguarded by a constitution. He proposed a list of 14 Muslim demands to be incorporated in the future constitution of India. In American parlance those demands outlined an affirmative action plan for the Muslim minority.

The Congress turned down Jinnah’s 14-point Muslim safeguards. The Muslim leader then pushed for an alternative project to preserve Muslim rights: the creation of an independent Pakistan, consisting of British India’s Muslim-majority provinces. But after the British delegation proposed a plan offering wide autonomy for the provinces, including Muslim-majority ones, Jinnah embraced the new plan for a united, confederal India.

Despite the Congress’s initial acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s chief lieutenant, had reservations about it.  Anointed president of the Congress in the final year of British rule, Nehru knew, as did everyone else, that he was going to be prime minister of independent India. The last thing he wanted to do as prime minister was dabbling only with four subjects, leaving all the rest of governmental powers with groups of provinces.

On July 10, 1946, the new Congress president called a world press conference in New Delhi and went on a tangent tearing the British plan apart. An independent India would not “be bound” by any provisions of the Cabinet Mission Plan, Nehru declared, and its “sovereign parliament” would legislate and govern the country as it saw fit. Nehru found himself in alliance with his rival for the leadership of the Congress, Vallabhbhai Patel, a rabidly anti-Muslim Hindu politician.

Jinnah’s foresight

Jinnah was horrified. India was still under British rule. If the Congress president was now renouncing the plan that offered, among other things, autonomy to Muslim-majority provinces and thus the preservation of Muslim rights and interests, what would Muslims do if and when a “brute majority” of Hindus in the sovereign parliament of a united India actually enact laws and take action trampling Muslim rights? The Muslim leader withdrew his earlier acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan. He brushed aside clarifications by other Congress leaders that Nehru’s comments had been out of line with the policy of the movement because, again, who would keep a future Congress leadership or sovereign Hindu-majority parliament from scrapping the British plan? Jinnah reverted to his earlier demand for a partition of the subcontinent to create an independent Pakistan, which eventually became a reality.

I was raised by an anti-Pakistan Muslim father in northeastern India, and in my boyhood I loathed Jinnah. I came to appreciate the founder of Pakistan and his wisdom in pulling out of the Cabinet Mission Plan more than half a century later when India’s anti-Muslim Hindu nationalist groups began to rise and ultimately win successive elections through their political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). BJP leader Modi was elected prime minister in 2014 and reelected to the post with an overwhelming parliamentary majority in 2019. His government has been adopting policies and getting laws passed curbing Muslim rights, allowing the lynching and widespread persecution of Muslims and stamping out the autonomy of the Muslim-majority Kashmiri state.

The Pakistan that Jinnah and the Muslim League created would fall apart 24 years later, this time because of a Pakistani ethnic community’s refusal to share powers with another. The Muslims of Bengal (along with those of the United Provinces) were in the vanguard of the Pakistan movement and in 1946 elected the only Muslim League provincial government in all of British India. But once Pakistan was created, its bureaucracy and military came under the domination of elites of Punjab province in West Pakistan. Those bureaucrats and military officers relentlessly refused to share political power with the Bengalee Muslim ethnic community, who made up more than 90 percent of the population of East Pakistan province and a majority of the entire Pakistani population.  To hold on to power, the Punjabis – Punjabi elites, that is – repeatedly disrupted Pakistan’s democratic process and staged one military and military-backed coup after another. They spurned Bengalee demands for “provincial autonomy,” which, ironically, was the salient feature of the British Cabinet Mission Plan, rejected by Nehru and Patel, paving the way for the partition of old India.

By 1970, when Pakistan had its first parliamentary elections, most Bengalees in East Pakistan had been fed up with Punjabi domination, especially the dictatorship of a West Pakistan-based Punjabi military junta, led by General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan. East Pakistan voted near-unanimously for the Awami League party, which had called for a confederation between East and West Pakistan under a 6-point plan, similar to the one proposed for a united India by the British Cabinet mission and a bit looser than the Lebanese accord of 1943.

Pakistani’s military dictatorship spurned the Awami League’s power-sharing formula, triggering a full-blown Bengalee independence movement in East Pakistan. India, Pakistan’s archenemy, seized the golden opportunity to wreck Pakistan, invaded East Pakistan and midwifed the creation of independent Bangladesh on December 16, 1971.

Two weeks earlier, on December 2, I had arrived in Beirut on a stint from the Pakistan government. Among the people I met there was Ihsan Rabah, a Ph.D. candidate from the American University of Beirut, who told me that he wanted to learn about “the civil war in your country.”

Before flying in to Beirut, I had spent a few days in Baghdad, where officials of the ruling Baath Party griped about the Kurds hatching an often-bloody independence movement in northern Iraq under their redoubtable leader Mulla Mustafa Barzani. Fayyad Alwan, a Farsi professor at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, blamed the Kurdish movement and Sunni-Shiite cleavage in Iraq on “Muslims [being] forced to live like the English and Russians” under the Baath Party’s secular socialist laws, which had uprooted them from “the brotherhood of Islam.

While India advanced its military juggernaut toward East Pakistan, I discussed with Rabah the bloody independence struggles in East Pakistan and the Kurdish provinces of northern Iraq. He told me that he gave the French “the credit for our consociational system,” which had allowed “our [sectarian] communities to share powers and responsibilities of government” and cultivate the values of their religious communities into which they had been “rooted for centuries.” The arrangement, he added, had “enabled us live more or less peaceably” and let Lebanon “flower as a democracy,” while the people of neighboring Arab states had to endure repressive measures of ruthless kings and dictators to keep their states from breaking up.

Did I think, my friend asked, that a “consociational system like ours” could have spared Iraq and Pakistan the ethnic bloodletting that I had talked about? I did not meet Rabah again, but after the breakup of Pakistan I would have answered his question affirmatively.

The “more or less peaceable” lives of the Lebanese were subsequently shattered by a brutal sectarian civil war. More than 150,000 of them perished and 1 million were displaced during the 1975-1990 conflicts. I spent much of my 1995 visit to Beirut bemoaning the demise of the prosperous, boisterous shining city on the Mediterranean shore. Aside from Cairo, Beirut is the Arab city I have been most excited to visit. My precious memories of the city include my leisurely strolls with friends from An Nahar newspaper, and others, along Hamra Street, the so-called Champs Elysees of the Arab world, which was a hangout of Arab intellectuals, artists, visitors like me, diplomats, millionaires and billionaires. Among my favorite spots on the street were The Strand and Movenpick restaurants, where I used to dine – alone, and with friends.

Enduring, too, is my memories of evening rendezvous with friends in my room in The Lord’s hotel on the Mediterranean. On one of those evenings, I opened the window. A silence descended in the room as a heavenly scene unfolded before our eyes: gently rolling sea waves sparkling gloriously in the crimson rays of the setting sun.

All that seemed to me now to have “gone with the wind.” The city once known as the “Paris of the Middle East” had become a ghost town. Dour-faced managers watched solitary customers at Hamra Street stores. Sparse passersby plodded unhurriedly on the streets once bustled with boisterous crowds. Nearly half of the 180,000 homes and flats destroyed during the civil war were still to be rebuilt. Beirut’s population of more than 1 million had dropped to 400,000.

But just as the Americans had done more than a century earlier, the Lebanese eventually pulled together after their disastrous civil war and moved on. The religious sects already had regrouped under their modestly reformed power-sharing accord, negotiated in Taef, Saudi Arabia, and approved by the Lebanese parliament on November 4, 1989.

Successful political systems often take centuries to evolve through vicious conflicts among their religious, ethnic and political communities. The British took seven turbulent and bloody centuries to do so.  In the meantime, the English and Scotts fought bloody wars; the military locked down Parliament and Parliament rose and sent the army back into the barracks; a prime minister committed regicide; and guided by bishops in the House of Lords, Parliament passed many laws denying basic rights to Catholics and nonconformists. 

Democracy in America allowed, and sometimes facilitated, slavery, segregation and the lynching of African Americans. Many people don’t know how vicious were American whites’ relations with blacks and other racial categories and how long American democracy turned a blind eye to it.

‘Conservative progressives’

In 1975 my would-be wife, a bleeding-heart progressive from New Hampshire, arrived in Frederick, Maryland, to enroll in a master’s degree program at the University of Maryland at Baltimore. Patricia Susan Gawdy, 22, was aghast at seeing the statue of former Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a native of Frederick, standing majestically in a small park in front of the city’s courthouse. In 1857 Taney had written and delivered the notorious Supreme Court decision denying American slaves’ right to flee to freedom.

Pat asked a white couple passing by why people of Frederick were “still putting up with the statue of this monster”?

“Who is a monster, young lady?” the man asked indignantly.

Pat pointed her finger at Taney’s statue.

“How dare you, girl? He is one of the heroes of our town, don’t you know?”

“Where are you from?” asked the woman.

Before she could reply, another white man, who had lumbered toward them, pointed his right index finger to Pat, and roared: “Are you a Communist?”

On March 17, 2017, a crew of three men pulled down the Taney statue with a crane at that park and loaded it onto an old Chevy pickup truck to be discarded at an undisclosed location. In the wake of nationwide protests against Confederate symbols that had been smoldering across America since 2015, the people of Frederick, where I had made my debut as an American journalist, finally decided that they had had enough of Chief Justice Taney.

My wife of 41 years was terminally ill with cancer. She read out to me a snippet from her laptop screen about the departure of the Taney statue from Frederick.

“How do you feel about it, dear?” I asked.

“These are among my better moments in life,” she said. “I think, though, that many people in Frederick still think of him as their hero.”

“What makes you think Justice Taney was a monster?”

“It’s the Roaring Sixties during which I grew up, I guess. And the progressive ghetto in which we have lived all these years.”

After a pause she added: “We remain unreconstructed progressives, don’t we? Very conservative progressives.”

My much-loving and beloved wife’s insights into life and society, and her inexhaustible generosity, sustained me during the very best years of my life.

America’s long-troubled democracy is a functioning enterprise now.  Workable democracies don’t come as prefabs. They grow through trials and errors.

There are working democracies, majoritarian and power-sharing, in the West and the East. The majoritarian ones that come to mind include Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Bangladesh and Nepal, although the last two have their limitations. Among the stable consensus democracies are Sweden and the four other Nordic democracies, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, and Malaysia.

Historical communities

Westerners steeped in their white-liberal political and cultural monochrome would accept any democracy as long as it has free elections and its people don’t discard it. The great German sociologist and philosopher Max Weber would find any democracy kosher as long as it is based on “popular belief in its legitimacy.” Ever since the French Revolution most Westerners, including Weber, have failed to realize the limits of such democracies in multi-religious, multi-ethnic societies outside the West.

Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and other non-Western faith groups cherish their traditional religious, ethnic, linguistic and territorial communities. Their lives and aspirations are, in many ways, fulfilled better by the heritage and cultures of those communities than their newer “imagined communities,” the term used by the Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson to describe modern nations. The moral values, lifestyles and we-they social boundaries of most peoples outside the West are shaped by their affinity with those historical communities.

Naturally, in the polling booths they usually vote for candidates who belong to and espouse communal causes and interests. Unfortunately, the values and cultures of those communities can become frigid, some quite malignant. The challenge of the coming era is going to be unfreezing those cultural rigidities and heal the malignancy of those values. Many among the non-Western elites who emerged during the late-colonial era shied away from healing the malignancy of some of those values, infecting the social and cultural norms and institutions of their societies. Instead, they got sucked up by the dominant institutions and outlook of colonizing European powers. They left the task of cultural and social reforms to religious fundamentalists, whose performance, often retrograde, is outside the scope of this article.

Beginning in the early decades of of the 20th century native leaders of European colonies plunged into struggles for their countries’ independence from European colonial rule. Many of them had a Western education. Most of these patriots fought valiantly and many suffered hardships during their struggles. They included Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk of Turkey, Riza Shah of Iran, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Mohammad Siad Barre of Somalia, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, and Gandhi and Jinnah of British India.

In India a British education and exposure to the Western civilization apparently clouded the political vision of Mahatma Gandhi, an otherwise searingly intelligent and insightful man. He – and Nehru – failed to realize that Hindus and Muslims of their native land could not be secularized the way Western Europeans had been to work out a civic majoritarian democracy of the Westminster variety. If they had, they would have anticipated Narendra Modi, who has been elected Indian prime minister twice under its majoritarian democracy by Hindu voters, in spite of – for many of them, because of – his anti-Muslin bigotry. The Modi government has faced no effective opposition from India’s overwhelmingly Hindu society as it has launched an anti-Muslim pogrom with alarming ferocity.

No form of government can function flawlessly in any society, but social science research has preponderantly established that in multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies the consensus model is much fairer and more successful over the long haul than the majoritarian model. Arend Lijphart, a renowned political scientist who has researched democratic categories extensively, calls consensus democracies “kinder and gentler” than majoritarian ones. He says the power-sharing system promotes dialogue between ethnic and religious groups and incentivizes mutually beneficial compromises.

Consensus democracies’ proportional voting systems lead to the formation of governing coalitions that take care of the interests of a cross-section of society. They also promote close relationships between the state and interest groups and bargaining between employers and employees. All these reduce the exploitation of workers by corporations, as it is occurring in America, where more than 90 percent of the national income is piling up in the coffers of the top 1 percent of the population.

Yes, negotiations and compromises, which sometimes encounter partners’ vetoes, slow the process of governing. And assured shares of power often make leaders of constituent groups corrupt and allow them to dish out largesse among their cronies. A lot of this is happening in Lebanon, as in other democracies.

But is a quick decision, without enough reflection on its consequences, always better than a slower one made with careful deliberation among the parties it would affect? Political scientists such as Aurel Croissant of Heidelberg University in Germany argue that “democracy must grant effectiveness over representativeness.”  They obviously have not carefully studied the case of  Muslims living under the effectively running Modi government in India, or that of Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka, a majoritarian democracy, where the Tamils have no agency through which to share with the Buddhist government in Colombo their torture, rape or extortion by members of the Buddhist majority.

And how valid is the argument, now being made by critics Lebanon’s consensus system, that doing away with that system would reduce political and financial corruption in government? It’s actually baseless propaganda made mostly by Europeans and Americans who think, apparently without a basis, that a majoritarian-type system would checkmate certain Lebanese factions they don’t like, especially Hezbollah, a nemesis of Israel and ally of Iran.

Studies have found that both majoritarian and consensus systems can be equally prone to corruption. Transparency International’s 2019 corruption index ranks Lebanon 137th among the 180 countries it surveyed. (The greater a country’s number on the corruption scale, the more corrupt it is assumed to be.) Here are the corruption levels in the public sectors of six of Lebanon’s neighboring majoritarian democracies, determined by Transparency. Three are more corrupt, and three less so. The three more corrupt are Bangladesh (146), Iraq (162) and Afghanistan (173). The three less corrupt are India (80), Sri Lanka (93) and Pakistan (120). So the notion that community-based power-sharing has necessarily made Lebanon more corrupt than majoritarian democracies does not hold water.

As we discussed, democratic journeys are long and arduous. But societies have to go through them to mature and stabilize. Britain and the United States endured long and scary roller coaster rides to do so. In what would have been a democratic Indian subcontinent the trip was botched up before it began. In old Pakistan it was interrupted after it had.

If and when Macron calls Michel Aoun to talk again about turning Lebanon into a majoritarian democracy, the Lebanese president should answer him with two words: Get lost.

  • Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington.

China plots to encircle India

Mustafa Malik July 31, 2020

“Yay!”

I exclaimed within myself. China was going to upgrade the Sylhet airport, said a blurb on the Internet. Sylhet is my hometown in northeastern Bangladesh.

Sylhet’s Osmani airport is rather small and every time I fly in to the city, I have to hustle through a crowded arrival lounge into the hurly-burly of a packed parking area. Sylhet, too, is close to the Indian state of Assam, where I was born. I felt good about the prospect of traveling more comfortably from Sylhet to see my friends and relatives in India.

I was browsing through news sites on my laptop in my living room in the Washington suburbs. I now wanted to know more about the airport project and gradually found out, through Google search, that it was a much bigger story than I had thought. The modest $248 million project was just the tip of an iceberg of growing bitterness between Bangladesh and India, and more startlingly, part of a grand Chinese strategy to contain India.

The Chinese venture in Sylhet was big news in the Indian media. Some Indian bureaucrats and pundits were fuming at the Bangladesh government for cozying up to China and giving the airport contract to a Chinese company when India was reeling from its border clash with the Chinese in the Himalayas that killed 20 Indian troops. One commentator pointed to Sylhet being next door to Assam, a caldron of unrest against India. Was the Bangladeshi airport going to be a nest for Chinese spies, fomenting trouble for India in Assam? The Bangladeshi government was ignoring these Indian criticisms and not making secret of serious strains in its relations with India.

A report attributed to the Bhorer Kagoj (Morning paper), a Bengali-language Bangladeshi daily, revealed that for four months the Bangladeshi prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, had been turning down requests for a meeting with the Indian high commissioner (ambassador) to Dhaka, Riva Ganguly Das. Some in the media speculated that Hasina did not want to hear any Indian carping about the growing Bangladeshi-Chinese ties. In mid-July India finally decided to remove its envoy from her Dhaka post.

The relationship between Dhaka and New Delhi had been flustered, as never before, by two apparently anti-Muslim measures adopted by the Hindu nationalist government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A new Indian law provides Indian citizenship to immigrants of all faiths from neighboring countries – with the exception of Muslims. And nine out of 10 Bangladeshis are Muslim. Then a new survey of citizenship status of people in Assam, widely criticized as a Muslim witchhunt, has stripped 2 million Assamese, mostly Muslims of Bangladeshi origins, of their Indian citizenship. As a result, anti-Indian outrage was sweeping Bangladesh, and the Hasina government, which had been chummy with New Delhi, had to downgrade its ties to India to an all-time low.

China obviously lost no time in exploiting the animus between Dhaka and New Delhi and reached out to Bangladesh with largesse. Besides taking up the Sylhet airport project, Beijing is working on other trade and investment ventures in Bangladesh. On June 19 Bangladesh and China signed a trade agreement under which China provides duty-free access to 97 percent of 8,200 Bangladeshi products, an undreamed of bonanza for Bangladesh. Then Beijing signed an agreement with the Hasina government to build a submarine base at the Cox’s Bazar harbor of Bangladesh.

While this was going on, the Pakistani prime minister, Imran Khan, surprised the region by making a widely publicized phone call to his long-estranged Bangladeshi counterpart, Hasina. Khan complained to her about India’s annexation of the Muslim-majority Kashmir state. The call had considerable optical implications. In 1971 India went to war with Pakistan to let Bangladesh (then Pakistan’s eastern province) secede from Pakistan and become an independent state. Ever since, relations between Bangladesh and Pakistan had been on the rocks. It appeared that China’s long arm of diplomacy had got Khan to call up Hasina as part of Beijing’s broader anti-Indian strategy.

Besides Pakistan and Bangladesh, Nepal has also been at loggerheads with India. For years the Nepalese have been accusing India of having illegally annexed three of their territories.  The festering feud led Kathmandu to try to wiggle out of India’s economic orbit by courting China. Beijing grabbed the overture enthusiastically, dishing out loans, aid and investments to Nepal. Last year, during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Kathmandu, the two countries upgraded their relationship to a “strategic partnership.”

The Nepali-Indian tensions heated up in May when India opened a new road through the territories claimed by Nepal, which reached the Chinese border. China was not amused. New Delhi also put out a map showing the territories claimed by Nepal are part of India. Nepal responded by publishing its own map showing the disputed territories to belong to Nepal. Indian politicians and news media are accusing China of orchestrating Nepal’s anti-Indian moves. They are branding Kathmandu a Chinese “proxy,” trying to create troubles for India at Beijing’s behest.

China isn’t bothering to deny these Indian accusations. On the contrary, it apparently has decided to put its potentially anti-Indian ducks in a row. On July 27 Beijing held a virtual conference with Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan, ostensibly to adopt a four-point plan to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic. But significantly, the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, also discussed plans to boost economic recovery in the region and prodded Afghanistan to get on with Beijing’s global infrastructure project, known as the Belt and Road Initiative. Largest of its kind in history, the BRI is focused on making huge investments in transportation, communication, education, power grid, iron and steel manufacture, and so on. China expects the initiative, involving more than 68 nations, to accelerate economic growth across the Asia Pacific region, Africa and Central and Eastern Europe.

Pakistan was among the first countries to jump into the BRI. Bangladesh and Nepal then joined in. And impoverished Afghanistan is unlikely to pass up the opportunity to embrace the mammoth project that would accelerate its economic growth.

The United States, India, Japan, Australia and some other pro-Western countries have stayed away from the BRI. Some have denounced the project as China’s mega strategy for world domination, a mechanism to financially trap countries into the Chinese orbit. Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros warned governments against joining the venture, calling China a “mortal threat to open societies.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government had joined the BRI, has dissociated his country from it, citing Chinese persecution of Uighur Muslims.

All the same, China has invested billions of dollars in India’s neighborhood – in Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. It obviously is now using those investments and the lure of the BRI to stitch these countries together into a pro-Chinese albatross around India’s neck.

  • Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington.

John Lewis: Icon of a bygone era

Mustafa Malik July 21, 2020

John Lewis, who died last week, will shine in American history as a great hero who fought valiantly for the rights of African-Americans in the 1960s with a vision of the 1960s.

When he was 16, Lewis went to a library to get a membership card. He was denied the card because the library was only for white people. When he was outside home and would become thirsty, the boy from Troy, Ala., had to scamper up and down looking for a water fountain marked for the “negroes.”  And we know what happened to him on that “Bloody Sunday” in March 1965. When Lewis and his fellow civil rights marchers reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., a white police force swooped down on them with brutal force and cracked open Lewis’s skull with their billy clubs.  It took him six days in a hospital to get his fractured skull repaired and somewhat healed.

In the mid-20th century America no struggle was more urgent than fighting against the grave justices suffered by African-Americans: lynching; segregation in housing, schooling and social life; job discrimination; and smoldering white hatred. Led by the legendary civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., Lewis and hundreds of thousands of other black and white Americans kept marching and agitating for racial justice until they shook American conscience, changing America forever. The historic movement got the blacks their civil rights and voting rights, most kinds of jobs, desegregated schools and housing, and established, legally, social equality across America.

The success of the struggle overall was breathtaking and far-reaching, as Congressman Lewis described it few years ago.

 “Now we have black and white elected officials working together,” he said. “Today, we have gone beyond just passing laws. Now we have to create a sense that we are one community, one family. Really, we are the American family.”

I have a problem, though, with his last two sentences. I think the acclaimed civil rights leader got a little carried away there.

Is America, really, “one community”? Are we all one “American family”?

Lewis’s mentor, Dr. King, had the “dream” that “one day … in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

Nearly six decades after the historic speech that Dr. King delivered in Washington on August 28, 1963, how many “little black boys and black girls [are] able to join hands with little white boys” in Alabama or anywhere else in America?

America has not become, and I doubt it ever will be or need to be, a single community, let alone a single family. The last census showed that 97.7 percent of American white wives have white husbands. A 2013 American Values Survey found that the social networks of white Americans are nearly 91 percent white. Blacks and Latinos have more diverse social networks, but they too are socializing mostly with people of the same races.

Most people are marrying and socializing, happily and voluntarily, within their racial and ethnic communities because they value their particular communal identities. Those communal ties bring them happiness and a sense of security. They lend meaning to their lives.

For all its breathtaking accomplishments in social, political and fields, the Civil Rights Movement picked one apparently unattainable goal: eliminating racial and ethnic markers and values. The black communal subculture pulsates with life and vigor as it ever did. So do Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Hispanic and other cultural communities. Today not many African-Americans would want to sacrifice their racial or cultural identity and cultural pattern for a college admission, a business contract or job (unless maybe he is a Clarence Thomas!) 

Why did the civil rights leaders, then, want to renounce the native cultural space of “little black boys and black girls” and blend them into the mostly white American social mainstream? They did so because their worldviews were shaped by the classical concept of nationalism, which privileged national communities and national cultures over religious, ethnic and racial ones. This is where Dr. King and Malcolm X differed. Malcolm X wanted to sustain and nurture the blacks’ cultural niche, while eliminating all kinds of inequities and discrimination against African-Americans.

It is apparent by now that nationalism, as it was viewed through the 1950s and 1960s, sought to replace people’s religious and ethnic values and cultures with national “high cultures,” based on humanism. That notion of nationhood has since faced challenges everywhere. Religious and ethnic values and agendas are shaping politics and government policies all over the world outside the West – in Malaysia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and so on.  Nations in Europe, the birthplace of modern nationalism, have all but jettisoned national sovereignty and boundaries and blended into the European Union, held up by their more natural root: race. The refreshing and ennobling thing about the revival of Europeans as racial category (The Turks call the EU a “white-Christian club”) is that their white, Germanic tribal roots no longer breed hostile vibes they used to only eight decades ago. The Holocaust, realization of the futility of the colonization of brown and black peoples’ lands, etc., have mollified Europeans’ racial affiliation.

In the early 1970s, when I lived in London, mocking the lifestyles of Bangladeshi immigrants in Tower Hamlet was a pastime among many white Londoners. In 2016 when I bumped into a news blurb on the Internet announcing the election of a Bangladeshi native, Sadiq Khan, as mayor of the capital of what used to be the British Empire (of which Bangladesh was a colony), I was mesmerized. Bangladeshi natives made up 0.7 percent of London’s population, and the news bulletin told me how deeply has race consciousness eroded among white Britons.

On visits to the Parliament Square, I used to see clusters of mostly white tourists gazing admiringly at the statue of Winston Churchill (whose political eloquence and literary genius I extolled in my college years).  I could not have dreamed ever of seeing white Londoners attacking Churchill’s stature there, as they did xxx. Put in a box to protect it from anti-racist demonstrators, some of them daubed the box with the graffiti: “Racist inside.” Then in Prague, white participants in another anti-racist rally sprayed Churchill’s stature in red graffiti with the words “Byl rasista,” meaning, “He was racist.” In 1999 then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had unveiled Churchill’s statue in the Czech capital.

There are pockets of racism and Islamophobia in Europe, but the white mainstream across Britain and the Continent has mostly rubbed off the malignancy that once oozed from its racial and communal affinity.

That should be a lesson for the rest of us. We should proudly nurture our affiliation with our naturally evolved cultural communities: national, religious, ethnic, tribal, and yes, racial. Our sense of belonging to these communities give us our lives their meaning and fulfillment. The challenge today is to develop social and political models that erode malignancy from our communal belongings, as Europe apparently has.

If I were John Lewis’s speechwriter, I would have replaced “one community, one family” with “a nation of mutually supportive communities.”

  • Mustafa Malik is a Washington-based analyst of international affairs.

Can Israel digest 30% of West Bank?

Mustafa Malik July 12, 2020

WASN’T BENJAMIN NETANYAHU going to extend “Israeli sovereignty” to 30 percent of the West Bank, beginning July 1? Well, July 1 came and slipped quietly away, but the Israeli prime minister didn’t annex an inch of the Palestinian territory.

What has happened to his plan?

Rabbi Sharon Brous tells us what has. An influential leader of American Jews, she indicated that wiser Jewish views drove home to Netanyahu that annexing a large chunk of Palestinian land would be “catastrophic” to Israel. Writing in the online newspaper The Forward, the Los Angeles rabbi said that these Jews are worried that taking in 30% or even less of the West Bank with its large Palestinian population would whittle away Israel’s Jewish culture and democratic institutions.

Her argument touched a chord in me as I have been exploring in my political memoir if or how a liberal democratic state can handle cultural pluralism. Western democracies don’t face the problem because they are mostly white-Christian cultural monochromes. The democratic process in these countries turns up governments that represent the bulk of the populations and their values and cultures, and government policies don’t alienate or estrange significant segments those societies.

In Pakistan, where I lived many years, the first nationwide democratic elections in 1970 triggered a secessionist movement that led to the breakup of that country and the rebirth of its Bengalee-inhabited eastern province as independent Bangladesh. In
neighboring India, where I was born, the last two elections have produced a
virulently anti-Muslim government, whose policies and actions have endangered the rights and cultures of 200 million Indian Muslims. Mind you, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government was elected in 2014 and reelected in 2019 by large majorities of
Indian Hindus, who make up 83 percent of the Indian population.

Liberalism has given us freedom and democracy. The two concepts can, and often do, clash in multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies, as they have in Lebanon, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Thailand, India, Pakistan and elsewhere. Democratic elections in those countries have often threatened the freedoms of their minorities. The agony of liberal democracy has been aggravated by the rise of people’s consciousness about their faiths and cultures. More and more people are voting for their ethnic and religious interests, leading to violence between rival ethnic and cultural groups.

In Israel, gone are the days when secular socialists ruled the country. The last several elections produced right-wing Jewish governments that are gobbling up the lands of Palestinian Muslims, threatening their lives and culture. Rabbi Brous and other cool-headed Jews are worried that Israel’s further expansion would dangerously enlarge and stimulate Israel’s Palestinian Muslim subculture that could destabilize the Israeli state and society. This ties into a theme I am trying to tackle in my memoir: Does majoritarian democracy fit societies with robust, incongruent cultures?

Brous reminded me of an encounter between a Pakistani diplomat and a Pakistani politician I witnessed in New York decades ago. I was covering a U.N. General Assembly session in New York for the Pakistan Observer newspaper, published from Dhaka, now the Bangladeshi capital. On the evening of Oct. 9, 1971, I got a bombshell of a scoop. Over dinner in his kitchen in Washington, the departing Pakistani ambassador to the United States, Agha Hilaly, told me on condition of anonymity of a visit from Henry Kissinger, then U.S. national security adviser.

“The CIA has learned,” the Pakistani envoy quoted Kissinger to me, “that India will overrun East Pakistan in mid-November.” Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her security Cabinet had made the decision the previous week.

“How reliable is the CIA’s source?” I asked.

Reminding me of the not-for-attribution basis of the interview, the ambassador speculated that Morarji Desai, then deputy prime minister of India and Indira Gandhi’s nemesis, might have leaked the information to the CIA. I suspected that Yahya’s unceremonious recall of Hilaly had prompted the ambassador to spill the beans to me.

A secessionist movement among ethnic Bengalees had been raging in Pakistan’s eastern province. A Pakistan-wide election the previous year had got a Bengalee political party, the Awami League, a parliamentary majority. That party had been agitating against repression by Pakistan’s military dictatorship and exploitation by economic interests supported by it. The Awami League wanted to tear East Pakistan away from West Pakistan, the bastion of Pakistan’s military and economic power. Democracy had given the party the opportunity to gain the independence of the province it already had been calling Bangladesh. In a desperate attempt to forestall its secession, Yahya brushed aside the electoral verdict and launched a brutal military crackdown in East Pakistan. And the dictator had got two Bengalee politicians from East Pakistan to lead Pakistan’s U.N. delegation to try to show the world that some East Pakistani leaders loved Pakistan and opposed the secession of East Pakistan, which they indeed did.

Back from the Hilaly interview, I called up Mahmud Ali, the Bengalee leader of the Pakistani delegation, from my room in Hotel Carlton in Washington. Ali was staying at Plaza Hotel in New York.

I asked Ali if he was with any visitors.

“No, go ahead,” he said.

“Do you know about the CIA tip that Nixon has sent to Yahya Khan?”

“What was that?”

“That India is going to invade East Pakistan in mid-November.”

“Who told you this cock-and-bull story?” he said.

I realized that Yahya was continuing to use the Bengalee leader without telling him about the impending Indian invasion of his native East Pakistan.Then I rang up the Bengalee deputy leader of the delegation, Shah Azizur Rahman, at Tudor Hotel in New York. (Eight years later he would become prime minister of Bangladesh.)

“Shah Bhai,” I said. “I’m returning tomorrow morning. I want to see you. It’s very important.”

Shah Aziz’s eyeballs were popping out when I narrated my conversation with Hilaly. He then drooped forward, holding his head with both his palms. A minute later he slowly leaned back against the back of his chair, staring blank at the ceiling.

Having regained his composure, the East Pakistani leader got up. “Let us catch Alvi,” he said, picking up his jacket. “Let’s see what the bastard has to say.”

M.A. Alvi (I forget what “M.A.” stood for) was Pakistan’s assistant foreign secretary, accompanying the delegation. In his Plaza Hotel suite, Alvi looked intently and incredulously into my eyes as I rehashed my conversation with Hilaly. He asked me if the ambassador had given Nixon’s message “directly to the president,” Yahya Khan. It was obvious to me and Shah Aziz that Alvi, too, had not heard about the CIA alert.

But the Pakistani diplomat decided, anyway, to embark on an anti-India tirade. If Indira Gandhi were to “make the stupid mistake” of sending Indian troops into East Pakistan, he roared, Pakistan would “bomb every major Indian city” and march on to “Delhi and Lucknow before the bitch can tell what is happening” to her country.

Shah Aziz was in no mood to listen to the bullshit from the megalomaniac diplomat.

“Mr. Alvi,” he said, “for Allah’s sake, please don’t conquer India.” (Pakistan had lost its two previous wars with India.) He laughed loudly to vent his sarcasm. Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, he continued, “struggled very hard and made enormous sacrifices” to slice out “a piece of land” from old India to create “a Muslim homeland,” Pakistan.

Getting up to leave, Shah Aziz asked Alvi, again sarcastically, if he “want us to rejoin India” through an invasion. Did Alvi want to let Indian Hindus “demolish our mosques and ban the Qurbani?”

On their Eid al-Adha festival Muslims kill cows and goats to commemorate Abraham’s preparation to kill his son at the behest of God. The ritual is called Qurbani. In many places in old India Hindus used to attack Muslims for killing cows, which are sacred to them. 

Ironically, India’s Hindu nationalist government today appears to be vindicating the Muslim argument that had led to the creation of Pakistan, namely that India’s huge Hindu majority would subvert Islamic culture and the interests of its Muslim minority. Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has abolished the autonomy of the Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir state and restricted the domicile and citizenship rights of Muslims in Assam state. It has renamed a host of towns and cities that bore Muslim names and
looked the other way as its supporters abused and lynched Muslims.  And cow slaughter and serving meat in restaurants are banned in several Indian states.

Democracy in India has clearly undermined the freedom of its Muslim minority, as it has the freedom of minorities in many other non-Western societies. Enlightenment thinkers, living in white-Christian societies, could not obviously anticipate the plight of these minorities in democratic non-Western societies. It’s time for more inclusive, communitarian political models for freedom-loving, identity-conscious minorities in societies outside the West. 

  • Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington.

Are they killing Gandhi’s soul now?

Mustafa Malik December 29, 2019

SYLHET, Bangladesh: India is in turmoil from an historic clash between two “nations.” Most Indians and most of the rest of the world are waiting to see which of the two triumphs in the “world’s largest democracy.”

The latest clash between the two types of nations has centered on a couple of pieces of legislation, passed by the Hindu nationalist Indian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. These laws would relegate the country’s 200 million Muslims into second-class citizens. If implemented, they would also drastically erode India’s foundational ideology of secularism. Widespread public protests against these a ti-Muslim laws have led to violent police action and the death of a score of protesters and bystanders. So far the Modi government has shown no sign of quashing or amending those parliamentary acts. The question is whether India will endure as a secular, pluralist nation, or relapse into a religious one.

India’s Hindu nationalists are represented by Modi’s ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). These zealots consider Hinduism, or rather a manufactured version of it, as the only legitimate source of Indian nationhood. Adherents to Islam, Christianity, and other faiths that did not originate in India do not, according to them, belong to the Indian nation.  A Hindu nationalist state can be compared with the early Islamic caliphate, Byzantium under its early Christian rulers and the present-day “Jewish nation” of Israel, propagated by its ruling Likud and Haredi parties.

Challenging this credal concept of nationhood in India are a cluster of secular political parties – the Indian National Congress, Trinamool Congress, Communist Party of India- Marxist (CPI-M), and so on  – which view India as a “civic nation” in which all citizens – irrespective of their faith, ethnicity and membership of other groups – are equal members of that territorial nation. The United States of American, the United Kingdom, Japan, Malaysia and Bangladesh are among secular, civic nations, some with obvious shortcomings.

I have long been wondering whether India would endure as a Western-style secular, pluralist nation. India’s secular democratic model was chosen by its Oxford-educated founders – Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru – who knew of the deep religious affinity of the everyday Indian and the bigotry of Hindu nationalists. But they and some other Westernized leaders of the Indian independence movement believed that in course of time Indians’ religious passion and sentiments would, to use Nehru’s words, “dissipate” and “recede into the background.” The Hindu nationalists believed, on the other hand, that it was the secular, pluralist system, which they said was alien to Indians’ religious and cultural tradition that would eventually wither away.

On the sunny afternoon of Jan. 30, 1948, Hindu nationalist firebrand Nathuram Vinayak Godse, outraged by Gandhi’s stubborn opposition to anti-Muslim riots in India, pumped three bullets into the heart of the father of the nation, eliminating Gandhi physically. The BJP’s rise to power and many Indians’ unswerving support for it make me wonder if the Hindu nationalists finally would snuff out his soul? Could they replace his creed of a secular democracy with a Hindu theocracy of sorts?

~Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator, hosts this blog.

Mahmud Ali: Generals wrecked Pakistan

Mustafa Malik September 3, 2019

MAHMUD ALI’S BIRTH centenary on September 1 reminded me of a comment Jawaharlal Nehru made during his meeting with George Bernard Shaw in London.

Independent India’s first prime minister, a driven Fabian socialist, had been invited to attend the June 2, 1953, coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey. That was “a formal occasion,” he told Shaw when the celebrated Irish playwright arrived to see Nehru at the Indian prime minister’s personal invitation, sent from Delhi nearly a month before.

‘Mahmud Ali (right), then minister of social work in Pakistan, is greeted by then Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in Beijing in 1972.’

The more important event for him, Nehru added, was “meeting you,” the best-known ideologue of Fabian socialism. Shaw said he had been “deeply gratified” by his host’s compliment.  But he asked why Nehru had said that.

“Because what I am is because of what you have written,” replied Nehru.

I’m no Jawaharlal Nehru. But I am what I am largely because of what I learned from Mahmud Ali – and Nurul Amin – during my years as a student, journalist and political activist in what used to be East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh.

I was 17 and about to graduate from high school when I first met Ali, then revenue minister of East Pakistan, at an election rally in his native Sunamganj subdivision, which is now a district (administrative regions). He was one of four visiting government ministers, and the shortest and youngest of them. They spoke at a public meeting in a rice paddy field, blanketed with crumbling stalks of harvested crops.  Ali’s speech drew the most enthusiastic and sustained applause from the crowd. Their acclaim for the other speakers was lukewarm.

During his speech the revenue minister denounced the “exploitation” of peasants and workers by land owners and industrialists. And he told the audience, twice, that if he should fail to push through certain legislative initiatives to mitigate their plight, “I will leave the government and come back and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you” to continue his struggle for their “lentil and rice,” staple food for poor Bengalees.

I was impressed by Ali’s expressions of empathy for the poor, and the passion with which he made them. Faking as a restaurant worker carrying food to the ministers, I slid through a police cordon around a government bungalow in Guwainghat town in which the dignitarieswere resting after the meeting. I asked Ali a couple of questions about the anti-poverty initiatives he had talked about. He flattered me as “an intelligent young man” and asked about my family and plans for further education.

My admiration for Ali soared a few months later when I, now a college freshman, heard over the radio that he had resigned from the East Pakistan government. Mahmud Ali was the only government minister ever to resign voluntarily in the 24-year history of East Pakistan. (In 1971 that Pakistani province would emerge as independent Bangladesh.) A couple of days after Ali’s resignation I buttonholed one of his close associates in Sylhet town, from where I was attending Murarichand College.

“Do you know why Mr. Mahmud Ali has resigned,” I asked Motassir Ali.

“He was not getting anything done” that he wanted done, replied kala (black) Motassir, as he was popularly known.

I realized that Mahmud Ali was delivering on his pledge to the people of Sunamganj.

His unswerving struggle for the rights of peasants and industrial workers earned him the label of “Communist” from his right-wing political adversaries. In the 1960s, as a student of Dhaka University, I became close to him, while also moonlighting as the press aide to Amin, the leader of the opposition in the Pakistan National Assembly and a former chief minister of East Pakistan. The political circle in Sylhet came to know about my being a close associate of Ali’s. To that circle belonged my former host at a lodge from where I had attended college.

Abdullah Chowdhury asked me one day why I had become a “henchman of that Sunamganji politician.”

What was wrong with that? I inquired.

“You are the son of an alem, you should stay away from him,” replied the social conservative belonging to Sylhet’s landed aristocracy. “Mahmud Ali is always fighting rich people, people richer than his family. Do you hear him talk about Islam?”

I replied that Ali was “fighting for economic and social justice,” which was a core Islamic value but was being opposed by Muslim aristocracy.

Ali is better known, however, as a trailblazer in the struggle to restore democracy in Pakistan, abolished by the military dictatorship of Gen. Mohammad Ayub Khan. He founded and led the Ganatantri Dal (Democratic Party) and was a top leader of the National Awami Party, National Democratic Front, Pakistan Democratic Movement and Pakistan Democratic Party all of which he helped organize to achieve his seminal goal of wresting democracy back from the clutches of Pakistani generals.

He faced the most crucial decision of his turbulent political career in the wake of the movement for East Pakistan’s secession from Pakistan and reincarnation as independent Bangladesh.He just couldn’t reconcile with the idea of dismembering the country he had struggled long and onerously to help create and build.

Ali knew too well about West Pakistani political and bureaucratic elites’ neglect of economic development in East Pakistan and abolishment of democracy by the West Pakistan-based military brass – the two issues that fueled the Bangladesh movement. But he believed,and argued over and over, that the answer to those abuses of power lay in the democratization of Pakistan. East Pakistanis, 98 percent of whom are Bengalees, made up the majority of the Pakistani population, and he believed that full-fledged democracy would empower East Pakistanis and get them to end the injustices done to them. Ali, Amin, and a host of other Bengalee leaders who were in the vanguard of the Pakistan movement also feared that Bangladesh would become a satellite of India, which would border three sides of the impoverished and defenseless country.

I shared Ali’s and Amin’s political prognoses and defended and promoted them through my column in the Pakistan Observer newspaper, published in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan. In the late 1960s Bangladeshi activists harassed and denounced Ali, kidnapped and persecuted him and bombed his house in Dhaka. (I, too, faced harassment and death threats for my writings against the breakup of old Pakistan.)

But despite those adversities and dangers, Ali never budged from his staunch support for the “unity of democratization” of Pakistan. On the eve of the birth of Bangladesh he and Amin, facing security threats in East Pakistan, moved to West Pakistan with their families. Nurul Amin served as Pakistan’s last Bangalee Prime Minister and Vice President, and Mahmud Ali as a federal minister .

Toward the end of his life Ali anguished over the “continued suppression” of Pakistani masses by the political-military-feudal elites. During my continual telephone conversations with him from the United States, he would lament the “economic plight” of everyday Pakistanis and maintain that “freedom and justice for which we have Pakistan” remained to be realized.

“Why?” I inquired of my mentor.

“Because of the power structure,” he replied.

Was it not “the same power structure,” I asked, that had disrupted democracy and sustained economic disparity between East and West Pakistan, driving that province into breaking away from Pakistan?

“You have a point,” he said, “but some politicians on both sides [East and West Pakistan] were busy exploiting the problems [instead of finding] their solutions.”

He believed to his dying day that unfettered democracy, restored in time, “would have saved [old] Pakistan.” He explained that the Ayub Khan regime should have re-established democracy in the early 1960s when the people of the two parts of Pakistan had “deep brotherly relations.”  The military dictatorship of Gen. Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan held Pakistan’s first national elections in 1970, when many East Pakistanis had been “fed up with economic disparity and military rule.” That led to the “victory of the secessionists” in East Pakistan and its “rupture” with the western wing.   “Military dictatorships killed Pakistan,” he added.

Ali, Amin and most other leaders of the democratic struggle in Pakistan blamed the United States for “abetting the killing of our democracy.” American administrations, Republican and Democratic, coddled each of Pakistan’s military dictators, who overthrew democratically elected governments and abrogated democratic constitutions. From the Cold War to the “war on terror, the United States has always used Pakistan to fight its strategic enemies. Never did an America administration put pressure on a Pakistani dictatorship to restore democracy.

I returned to the truncated Pakistan after the independence of Bangladesh and came away with a different take, however. I interviewed dozens of Pakistani politicians, military officers, journalists and civic society leaders about their thoughts on economic disparity between East and West Pakistan, dismissal of Bengalee-led central governments (of Prime Ministers Khwaja Nazimuddin and Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy), the Bengalee demand for East Pakistan’s autonomy, and West Pakistani elites’ support for military dictatorships, all of which had poisoned relations between the two wings of old Pakistan. The mentality and priorities betrayed by those leading lights of Pakistani society showed that very few of them had the kind of commitment to Pakistan that Amin and Ali did. I figured that the Pakistani military and civilian leadership, centered in Punjab, wouldn’t have conceded real power to the Bengalees or allowed the establishment of real democracy, which would have done so.

As I was flying back to London from Islamabad, my mind was flashing with memories of my political activities and thinking during the pre-Bangladesh years, including what appeared now to be mymisinterpretation of events and mistaken judgments. In came rolling the last episode of Victor Hugo’s breathtaking novel Les Misérables.

Monsieur Gillenormand, the aristocratic grandfather of Marius, had bitterly opposed for years Marius’ marriage to Cosette, Jean Valjean’s adopted daughter. Valjean was a lower-class man who had served a prison term for stealing pieces of bread to feed his starving family. When Gillenormand finally realized that his aristocratic pride was destroying what would be his grandson’s lifelong pleasure and happiness, he consented to the marriage. As he was taking leave of Valjean after a glamorous wedding ceremony, Gillenormand apologized for his mistake of not approving the marriage earlier.

“Don’t most of us make mistakes most of our lives?” responded Valjean. It was better to learn of a mistake, he added, than never realize and come to grips with it.

  • Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

India’s empty threat to Pakistan

Mustafa Malik August 21, 2019

Pakistan was protesting, vociferously, India’s decision to wipe out the “special status” of the part of the Jammu and Kashmir state under its occupation. Rajnath Singh, the Indian defense minister, told Islamabad to hush up. He said New Delhi may be changing its “no-first-use” policy on firing nukes.

India adopted the policy of not using its nuclear weapons against an adversary unless that adversary had attacked it with nukes first.

Singh warned Pakistan, in effect, that the Indians were now prepared to rain their nuclear bombs on Pakistan without waiting to be targeted by a Pakistani nuke.

The Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir principality was never part of the Indian mainland, even though Indian emperors occasionally had invaded and occupied it. In 1948, after “British India” had been split into independent India and Pakistan, Pakistani tribes overran a third of the Muslim-majority kingdom, while India grabbed the other two-thirds. The dispute went to the United Nations, where then Indian prime minister, Kashmiri pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, promised to hold a plebiscite to let the Kashmiri people decide whether to join India or Pakistan or to remain independent. India eventually reneged on its plebiscite commitment and, instead, allowed Kashmir a “special status” with wide autonomy. Two weeks ago India’s Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked Kashmir’s special status, triggering a new round of row between India and Pakistan, which had fought two wars over the fate of Kashmir.

As I read Singh’s comment online, my mind raced to the dreary, darkish afternoon of Jan. 21, 1972. My friend Asrar Ahmed had dropped in to see me in the Pakistani vice presidential compound on Peshawar Road in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. I worked as press secretary to Vice President Nurul Amin. My boss was in the living quarters and I was drafting a speech he would be delivering he next day at a student gathering in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

“Bhutto stirred up the Qiyamah in me,” said Ahmed, seating himself on a coach next to my desk. Ahmed and I had become friends a couple of years before when he was elected president of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists of which I was an active member.

“Qiyamah in you?” I said, staring into my friend’s eyes.

In Islamic scripture Qiyamah means the Day of Judgment when terrified throngs of resurrected humans would be streaming to the field of Arafat in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, (by some accounts, somewhere in greater Syria) to be dispatched to hell or heaven, depending on their sins or virtuous deeds in their lives.

Ahmed asked for tea, which I ordered.

He said the day before he had “sneaked into” a meeting of leading Pakistani physicists, nuclear scientists and engineers in the city of Multan. He had got a tip, saying the new Pakistani president, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had called the meeting to talk about a “new security strategy” for the country, which had lost its eastern half to an invading Indian army just six weeks earlier.

India had invaded East Pakistan, facilitating its secession from West Pakistan and emergence as independent Bangladesh. The Pakistani army’s Dec. 16, 1971, surrender to Indian forces in Dhaka, the East Pakistani capital, had led the Indians to drag 93,000 Pakistani troops and civilians into Indian detention centers as prisoners of war. Some Pakistanis I had talked to asked whether India would now be using its overwhelming military might to pulverize the rest of Pakistan.

Ahmed said that on his way to the Multan meeting he had wondered if Bhutto, a widely known boozer, had been “drinking too much” as he was trying to get “people who only know to peep into microscopes and telescopes” to help him hash out a national security strategy

Bhutto warned the gathering that what had been left of their country after the secession of Bangladesh existed “on borrowed time.” India could chop up the rump of Pakistan, too, but was giving the world the time to “digest its tearing up a sovereign country.” A time could come, the president warned, when New Delhi could decide to turn Pakistan into another “Muslim Spain.” In the fifteenth century Catholic armies and militias had reconquered all Muslim domains in Spain and Portugal, obliterating the flourishing Islamic civilization there.

The president told the scientists that Pakistan’s only defense against India lay in acquiring the nuclear bomb. He kept asking them: “Are you going to give me the bomb”? Pakistan’s Nobel laureate physicist Abdus Salam was among the first to assure him that he would get his wish. Bhutto then wanted a time frame. One scientist said it would take five years to build a nuke from a scratch. “Five years!” the president howled. “Can’t you do it in three? Come on, three years!” Siddique Butt, a younger physicist, jumped to his feet and punched the air with his fist. “Yes sir,” he declared. “three years. You will get it in three years, Mr. President.”

Ahmed told me that he didn’t “really know how long it will take” Pakistan to get the bomb, but that he, too, believed now that “Pakistan can’t survive without the bomb.”

Forty-seven years later Rajnath Singh’s threat to nuke Pakistan vindicated to me the panic that had driven Bhutto into his no-holds-barred, whirlwind drive to get Pakistan its own nukes.

Getting Pakistan the bomb became Bhutto’s all-consuming mission in life. He probably gave his life for it. On a visit to Pakistan in August 1976 Henry Kissinger, then U.S. secretary of state, twisted Bhutto’s arms brutally to get him to abandon his nuclear program. When Bhutto refused, Kissinger warned the Pakistani statesman – in presence of Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir; and then deputy chief of the US mission in Islamabad, Gerald Feuerstein – that in that case “we will make a horrible example of you” of resistance to U.S. will. Zulfikar and Benazir Bhutto believed through their dying days that Kissinger and the CIA had got Gen. Ziaul Haq to overthrow the father of the Pakistani bomb in a military coup and then hang him on trumped-up murder charges.

Singh’s bluster reminded me that the populist Pakistani leader’s mission had been crowned with success. New Delhi’s threat to launch a nuclear strike on Pakistan was actually empty. Hindu nationalist Indians are of course going bonkers with their animosity toward Pakistan. But I doubt that they’re total loonies. They know that Pakistan, with its stockpile of more than 150 nuclear warheads, can turn such an act into a suicide mission for India. That makes such a misadventure highly unlikely.

To get Pakistan to this point, Bhutto had once declared, “We will eat grass, even go hungry. But we will have our own [nuclear bomb]. We have no choice.” With their near-melting economy, Pakistanis are eating grass, so to speak; but thanks to their hard-drinking, “Islamic socialist” leader, they’re unlikely to be herded into Indian detention camps again.

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He hosts this blog. 

Bangladesh, Pakistan trade luck

Mustafa Malik July 10, 2019
Bhutto

I FEEL GOOD about living to see this day.  Bangladesh, whose creation I once opposed, is belying my forebodings about its future. It has surpassed Pakistan and, in some cases, the economic behemoth of India in economic development and well-being. Bangladeshi economic performance glows brighter when you compare that with the near-meltdown of the Pakistani economy.

Here’s how Bangladesh compares with Pakistan and India economically and socially, as shown by four key indicators. The first three are from the World Bank database, and the fourth from that of UNICEF.

Economic growth rates: Bangladesh – 7.9%; Pakistan – 5.4%; India – 7%.

Per capita income: Bangladesh – $1,700; Pakistan – $1,400; India – $2,000.

Life expectancy: Bangladesh – 73 years; Pakistan – 67 years; India – 69 years.

Literacy rate (15-24 years): Bangladesh – 73%; Pakistan – 56%; India – 69%.

First, a bit of the genesis of Bangladesh and Pakistan. In 1947 old Pakistan was carved out of two Muslim-majority slices of the Indian subcontinent, separated by 1600 miles of Hindu-majority India. East Pakistan, agrarian and flood-prone, was inhabited mostly by impoverished Bengalee Muslims. West Pakistan, especially its Punjab province, throbbed with industries and flourishing farms and was the locale of most of the country’s armed forces.

Bengalee Muslims had struggled onerously to create the “Muslim homeland” of Pakistan while the ethnically diverse Muslims of what became West Pakistan were opposed or indifferent to the Pakistan movement. The irony of ironies, 24 years after the creation of Pakistan, Bengalee Muslims in East Pakistan split Pakistan to make their eastern province independent Bangladesh. They had become fed up with army rule, economic exploitation and political suppression by West Pakistan’s mostly Punjabi military, feudal and political elites. Ever since Pakistan is what had been West Pakistan. 

Bangladesh’s quite rapid economic progress and strides toward modernization have been an agreeable surprise to me because I had underestimated the progressive and creative potential of my fellow East Pakistanis. I believed that the relatively backward East Pakistan, with its stagnant economy, couldn’t survive, or at any rate would suffer, without the support of Pakistan’s western wing. In my column in the Pakistan Observer newspaper, published from Dhaka, now the Bangladeshi capital, I argue repeatedly that the “real task before us,” East Pakistanis, was to restore democracy in Pakistan, not dismember the country, which we had fought hard to create. East Pakistanis accounted for 56 percent of the Pakistani population, and I maintained that under a democratic system that would ensure free and fair elections, “we will rule Pakistan,” ending military rule and economic exploitation of the Punjabi clique.

On the morning of March 22, 1969, I was abducted at dagger-point from Dhaka by a dozen or so rowdy activists of the Bangladesh independence movement. My kidnappers called me a “Punjabi agent” and tormented me for my “filthy writings” against the Bangladeshi “national liberation.”  They eventually let me go with the warning that if I dared to write “one more word” against their movement, my corpse would be “floating in the Burigunga,” the river snuggling Dhaka’s southern border.

I soon dropped my byline from my commentaries and the Observer’s publisher, Hamidul Huq Choudhury, arranged to send me out to work as the paper’s London bureau chief. I wasn’t surprised when I learned that I was among about 200 East Pakistanis who had become persona non grata in the newly independent Bangladesh. I immigrated to the United States as a political refugee.

From America I began to watch Bangladesh’s steady economic rise, after two decades of economic downturn, a famine and two military coups. It led first to my confusion and then soul searching and research. From my inquiries I realized that Bangladeshis’ innate spirit of enterprise and ingenuity, which I suspect party derives from their genetic inheritance, have been propelling their rapid rise. I was at once embarrassed and elated. Embarrassed because of my underrating Bangladeshis’ capabilities and opposing their independence struggle, and elated because of the accomplishments of my fellow natives of the new nation. 

Bangladeshis are a hybrid racial strain, belonging to Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Australoid other racial stocks. In 2014 I ran into two German researchers in Dhaka who were investigating the genetic components of Bengalee ethnicity in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, also inhabited by Bengalees. Ninety-eight percent of Bangladeshis are ethnic Bengalees. Fritz von Meyer, from Lower Saxony, told me that the “very rich racial mixture” in their genome had made Bengalees more inquisitive and innovative than people with less variegated racial and ethnic genealogies. I realized that prolonged military-political suppression by the Punjabi-led West Pakistani elites had, partly, kept that ingenuity and creativity from flowering among Bengalees in East Pakistan. 

Today I see the same deplorable drama playing out in what is left of Pakistan. I didn’t research the genetic or societal characteristics of Pakistan’s diverse ethnic communities, but Punjabis are known for their talent and enterprise, Pashtun for their indomitable courage and perseverance, Baloch for their vigorous spirit de corps and artistic aptitudes, and so on. If harnessed, these gifts of character and abilities could catapult Pakistan into high levels of progress and prosperity. 

Yet Pakistan is facing the deepest crisis in its history. In April a Pakistani economist warned that his country had “reached the point of collapse.” Kaiser Bengali said, “The alarm bells are ringing. We have no choice but to beg. I fear starvation, poverty and unemployment.”

Prime Minister Imran Khan, once an internationally famed cricket star, came to power promising to create 10 million new jobs and 5 million new houses and revitalize the economy. Little did he know that the burden of running an impoverished country with domineering army generals looking over his shoulders is quite a bit heavier than running through the cricket field with leg pads, thigh guard, helmet and gloves.

Pakistan’s growth rate has plummeted to a nine-year low, to 4 percent; 35 percent of its population languishes below the poverty line. Yet curbs imposed by the IMF bars the government from launching public sector programs that could have alleviated the hardships of the poor. The IMF has given Pakistan $6 billion in loans to help stabilize the economy, imposing constraints on the government’s economic and financial policies. Meanwhile, prices of sugar, flour, electricity and most other essential commodities and services are rising unremittingly. On top of it, the Pakistani government has had to announce a sharp tax hike, also under IMF pressure, which, when presented before the parliament, drew angry shouts and howls. The country’s productivity, reflected in its export earnings, has dropped significantly. It’s telling to recall that as late as in 1992 Pakistan’s per capita real GDP, adjusted for purchasing power of the currency, was 65 percent higher than India’s. Today it’s 28% lower than that of its larger neighbor.

The rise of productivity, a fast rise, would be the key to restoring Pakistan’s economic health, and with it political and social advancement. But raising productivity requires a motivated manpower with animated hopes and aspirations. The problem is you can’t truly motivate people into doing anything consequential if it doesn’t enkindle their creativity and energy and offer them a stake in the outcome of their drudgery. It all calls for social and political freedoms, which Pakistan’s power-drunk military brass, landed aristocracy and government bureaucracy have resisted tooth and nail so far.

The military, in collaboration with the aristocracy and bureaucracy, has continually interrupted in the democratic process throughout Pakistan’s history. Imran Khan is Pakistan’s 19th elected prime minister. Thanks to military-bureaucratic interventions none of the 18 before him completed his or her five-year term in office. Khan is trying to do so by accepting the military tutelage – practically ceding foreign relations to the generals and clearing his key domestic programs with them. That’s not a recipe for economic recovery or growth, let alone promoting freedom and democracy in Pakistan.

As I said on other occasions, I’m an optimist who is waiting for the day Pakistanis say enough is enough. That day they will rise to beat their swashbuckling generals and colonels back into the barracks – as the Turks did in the wake of the aborted Turkish military coup in 1916 – and win their freedoms and their and their children’s’ future.

  • Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He hosts this blog.

Is Democratic Party festering in a rut?

Mustafa Malik June 28, 2019

AS I WAITED yesterday for the second Democratic presidential debate, I tossed out a question to Facebook. Could Joe Biden “get up before the referee counts to 10”? Some friends liked it, but none offered a response.

I had thought that the former vice president, so far the clear front-runner in the polls, would get a knockout punch from Bernie Sanders. The “democratic socialist” from Vermont is running second to him in the polls. I thought – and hope – that the Democratic Party has started loosening its embrace of Wall Street and social conservatives, coddled by Bill and Hillary Clinton and the now dormant Democratic Leadership Council. The Barack Obama presidency, despite Obama’s progressive rhetoric, was basically and extension of that era.

Biden did get a crushing blow during the debate. He was pummeled over his professed pride in working with racist lawmakers, opposition to school busing, insensitivity to the plight of immigrants, dillydallying on the abortion issue, vote for the Iraq war, and other right-wing positions. And CNN declared him a “direct loser” of the contest.

But it was mostly the foxy Kamala Harris, not Sanders, who gave him most of the thrashing. And most of the post-debate analysts in the news media anointed Harris winner of the encounters.

Sanders’ main problem with many Democrats has been his no-holds-barred blitzkrieg against the established, if corrupt, political and economic order and his call for a revolution to trash it. Many centrist and right-of-center Democrats have been leery about it. His push for Medicare of all, a free college education and elimination of all student debts, ending all foreign wars, and so forth, also rattle many Democrats for whom the established order is akin to religion.

Mainstream media, most of them owned by mega corporations, have been rankled by Sanders’ anti-corporate, anti-capitalist programs and rhetoric. Salon dismissed his political surge as “more about anti-Clinton sentiment than actual Bernie fever.”

On foreign policy, the mainstream media have traditionally followed the American flag, largely because of their thin grasp of foreign affairs. The late Andy Kohut of the Pew Research Center told me in 2008 that “more than 60 percent of our [Middle East] correspondents have no grounding in the dynamics of societies across the Mediterranean.”

Much of the media and many Democrats appear to be leaning toward Harris and Elizabeth Warren, who appeared in last night’s debate. These two high-energy, combative senators are progressive enough to tear the last Democratic vice president into pieces and revile the exploitative neoliberal economic establishment, while not threatening to dismantle that establishment. Harris is also popular with pro-Israeli Democrats, a substantial chunk of the party, because of her Jewish husband and hobnobbing with Benjamin Netanyahu and other right-wing Israeli politicians.

The primaries are a barometer of the Democratic Party’s center of gravity. I will be watching them to see how much of the party has broken loose of its corporate, right-wing tether. Are enough of them ready to jump into Sanders’ revolutionary bandwagon? Would they settle, instead, for a more conventional but still progressive candidate like Harris or Warren? Or do too many of them remain too invested in the Clintons-Wall Street economic order to abandon Biden, who seems to be running for a third term for Obama?

Last night’s was just the first of six primary debates that the Democratic National Committee plans for the party’s presidential candidates, the sixth is scheduled for December. We probably won’t know until the new year whether the bulk of party has moved past the Clinton-Obama era or is still staggering in a rut.

-Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

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Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of the blog ‘After the Clash,’ worked for more than three decades as a reporter, editor and columnist for American, British and Pakistani newspapers and as a researcher for two American think tanks. He also conducted fieldwork in Western Europe, the Middle East and South Asia on U.S. foreign policy options, the “crisis of liberalism” and Islamic movements. He wrote continually for major U.S. and overseas newspapers and journals.
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