Showing posts with label Imran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Imran. Show all posts
Monday 12 June 2023
Sunday 14 May 2023
Are smart people deliberately acting stupid? The Rise of the Anti-Intellectual
Nadeem Paracha in The Dawn
Across the 20th century, intellectuals played an important role in political parties and governments, both democratic and authoritarian. According to Richmond University’s Professor of Politics Eunice Goes, intellectuals perform several roles in the policy-making process.
They help politicians make sense of the world. They offer cause-effect explanations of political and economic phenomena, and diagnoses and prescriptions to policy puzzles. They also help political actors develop ideas and narratives that are consistent with their ideological traditions and political goals.
But in this century, politics has often witnessed a backlash against the presence of intellectuals in political parties and in governments. This is likely due to the strengthening of the parallel tradition of anti-intellectualism, which was always (and still is) active in various polities.
This tradition has been more active in right-wing groups. It was especially strengthened by the rise of populist politics in many countries in the 2010s. But mainstream political outfits in Europe and the US still induct the services of intellectuals, even though this ploy has greatly been eroded in the Republican Party in the US after it wholeheartedly embraced populism in 2016, and still seems to be engulfed by it.
Since the 1930s, the Democratic Party in the US has always had the largest presence of intellectuals in it. This policy was initiated during the four presidential terms of the Democratic Party’s Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932-45), during which time a large number of intellectuals were inducted. Their role was to aid the government in bailing the US out of a tumultuous economic crisis, and to develop a narrative to neutralise the increasing appeal of organisations on the far right and the far left. This tradition of inducting intellectuals continued to be employed by the Democrats for decades.
Interestingly, even though the Republican Party has had an anti-intellectual dimension ever since the early 20th century, it carried with it intellectuals to counter intellectuals active in the Democratic Party. This was specifically true during the presidencies of the Republican Ronald Reagan (1981-88) who was, in fact, propelled to power by an intellectual movement led by conservatives and some former liberals. This movement evolved into becoming ‘neo-conservatism’ during the Reagan presidencies. Britain’s Labour Party and Conservative Party have carried with them intellectuals as well, especially the Labour Party.
Some totalitarian regimes too employed the services of intellectuals in the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy. The Soviet dictator Stalin was not very kind to intellectuals, though. But intellectuals played a major role in shaping Soviet communism. Hitler’s Nazi regime had the services of some of the period’s finest minds in Germany, such as the philosophers Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, the logician Rudolf Carnap, and a host of others.
They helped Hitler mould Nazism into an all-encompassing ideology. Just how could some extremely intelligent men start to both romance as well as rationalise a brutal ideology is a topic that has often been investigated, but it is beyond the scope of this column.
In Pakistan, three governments banked heavily on intellectuals to formulate their respective ideologies, narratives and economics. The Ayub Khan dictatorship (1958-69) carried scholars who specialised in providing ‘modernist’ interpretations to various traditional aspects of Islam. This they did to aid Ayub’s modernisation project. The intellectuals included the rationalist Islamic scholars Fazalur Rahman Malik and Ghulam Ahmad Parwez, and, to a certain extent, the progressive novelist Mumtaz Mufti and Justice Javed Iqbal, the son of the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal. The writer Qudrat Ullah Shahab was Ayub’s Principal Secretary.
Z.A. Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) was studded with intellectuals who remained active in the party during at least the first few years of Bhutto’s regime (1971-77). These included the Marxist theorist JA Rahim who (with Bhutto) wrote the party’s ‘Foundation Papers’ and then its first manifesto. He also served as a minister in the Bhutto regime till his acrimonious ouster in 1975.
Then there was Dr Mubashir Hassan, who was the main theorist behind PPP’s concept of a ‘planned economy’. He served as the Bhutto regime’s finance minister. The intellectuals Hanif Ramay and Safdar Mir wrote treatises to counter the ideologies of the Islamists. Ramay also formulated the party’s core ideology of ‘Islamic socialism’. The lawyer and constitutional expert Hafeez Pirzada too was a founding member of the party. He was one of the main authors of the 1973 Constitution.
The Ziaul Haq dictatorship adopted the Islamist theorist Abul Ala Maududi as the regime’s main ideologue. Maududi was also the chief of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI). Zia, when he was a lieutenant general in the early 1970s, used to distribute books written by Maududi to his officers and soldiers. Maududi passed away in 1979, just two years after Zia overthrew the Bhutto regime. But Zia continued to apply Maududi’s ideas to his dictatorship’s ‘Islamisation’ project.
Zia also had the services of the prominent lawyers AK Brohi and Sharifuddin Pirzada. Brohi and Pirzada were instrumental in formulating the murder charges against Bhutto. In his book, Betrayals of Another Kind, Gen Faiz Ali Chisti wrote that Brohi and Pirzada encouraged Zia to hang Bhutto, which he did. Pirzada also wrote oaths for judges sworn in by Zia that omitted the commitment to protect the Constitution. He would go on to do the same for the Musharraf dictatorship (1999-2008). In fact, Sharifuddin Pirzada had also served the Ayub regime.
The rise of populist politics in the second decade of the 21st century has greatly diminished the role of intellectuals in political parties and governments. This is because populism is inherently anti-intellectual. It perceives intellectuals as being part of a detested elite. Therefore, for example, one never expected intellectuals of any kind in Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI). This is why the nature of this party’s narrative is ridiculously contradictory and even chaotic.
However, in a January 2022 essay for The Atlantic, David A. Graham wrote that it’s not that intellectuals have vanished from political parties. Rather, due to populism’s anti-intellectual disposition, they have purposely dumbed down their ideas.
According to Graham, “This is the age of smart politicians pretending to be stupid.” If stupidity can now attract votes and save the jobs of intellectuals in parties and governments, then smart folks can act stupid in the most convincing manner. Even more than those who are actually stupid.
Across the 20th century, intellectuals played an important role in political parties and governments, both democratic and authoritarian. According to Richmond University’s Professor of Politics Eunice Goes, intellectuals perform several roles in the policy-making process.
They help politicians make sense of the world. They offer cause-effect explanations of political and economic phenomena, and diagnoses and prescriptions to policy puzzles. They also help political actors develop ideas and narratives that are consistent with their ideological traditions and political goals.
But in this century, politics has often witnessed a backlash against the presence of intellectuals in political parties and in governments. This is likely due to the strengthening of the parallel tradition of anti-intellectualism, which was always (and still is) active in various polities.
This tradition has been more active in right-wing groups. It was especially strengthened by the rise of populist politics in many countries in the 2010s. But mainstream political outfits in Europe and the US still induct the services of intellectuals, even though this ploy has greatly been eroded in the Republican Party in the US after it wholeheartedly embraced populism in 2016, and still seems to be engulfed by it.
Since the 1930s, the Democratic Party in the US has always had the largest presence of intellectuals in it. This policy was initiated during the four presidential terms of the Democratic Party’s Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932-45), during which time a large number of intellectuals were inducted. Their role was to aid the government in bailing the US out of a tumultuous economic crisis, and to develop a narrative to neutralise the increasing appeal of organisations on the far right and the far left. This tradition of inducting intellectuals continued to be employed by the Democrats for decades.
Interestingly, even though the Republican Party has had an anti-intellectual dimension ever since the early 20th century, it carried with it intellectuals to counter intellectuals active in the Democratic Party. This was specifically true during the presidencies of the Republican Ronald Reagan (1981-88) who was, in fact, propelled to power by an intellectual movement led by conservatives and some former liberals. This movement evolved into becoming ‘neo-conservatism’ during the Reagan presidencies. Britain’s Labour Party and Conservative Party have carried with them intellectuals as well, especially the Labour Party.
Some totalitarian regimes too employed the services of intellectuals in the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy. The Soviet dictator Stalin was not very kind to intellectuals, though. But intellectuals played a major role in shaping Soviet communism. Hitler’s Nazi regime had the services of some of the period’s finest minds in Germany, such as the philosophers Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, the logician Rudolf Carnap, and a host of others.
They helped Hitler mould Nazism into an all-encompassing ideology. Just how could some extremely intelligent men start to both romance as well as rationalise a brutal ideology is a topic that has often been investigated, but it is beyond the scope of this column.
In Pakistan, three governments banked heavily on intellectuals to formulate their respective ideologies, narratives and economics. The Ayub Khan dictatorship (1958-69) carried scholars who specialised in providing ‘modernist’ interpretations to various traditional aspects of Islam. This they did to aid Ayub’s modernisation project. The intellectuals included the rationalist Islamic scholars Fazalur Rahman Malik and Ghulam Ahmad Parwez, and, to a certain extent, the progressive novelist Mumtaz Mufti and Justice Javed Iqbal, the son of the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal. The writer Qudrat Ullah Shahab was Ayub’s Principal Secretary.
Z.A. Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) was studded with intellectuals who remained active in the party during at least the first few years of Bhutto’s regime (1971-77). These included the Marxist theorist JA Rahim who (with Bhutto) wrote the party’s ‘Foundation Papers’ and then its first manifesto. He also served as a minister in the Bhutto regime till his acrimonious ouster in 1975.
Then there was Dr Mubashir Hassan, who was the main theorist behind PPP’s concept of a ‘planned economy’. He served as the Bhutto regime’s finance minister. The intellectuals Hanif Ramay and Safdar Mir wrote treatises to counter the ideologies of the Islamists. Ramay also formulated the party’s core ideology of ‘Islamic socialism’. The lawyer and constitutional expert Hafeez Pirzada too was a founding member of the party. He was one of the main authors of the 1973 Constitution.
The Ziaul Haq dictatorship adopted the Islamist theorist Abul Ala Maududi as the regime’s main ideologue. Maududi was also the chief of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI). Zia, when he was a lieutenant general in the early 1970s, used to distribute books written by Maududi to his officers and soldiers. Maududi passed away in 1979, just two years after Zia overthrew the Bhutto regime. But Zia continued to apply Maududi’s ideas to his dictatorship’s ‘Islamisation’ project.
Zia also had the services of the prominent lawyers AK Brohi and Sharifuddin Pirzada. Brohi and Pirzada were instrumental in formulating the murder charges against Bhutto. In his book, Betrayals of Another Kind, Gen Faiz Ali Chisti wrote that Brohi and Pirzada encouraged Zia to hang Bhutto, which he did. Pirzada also wrote oaths for judges sworn in by Zia that omitted the commitment to protect the Constitution. He would go on to do the same for the Musharraf dictatorship (1999-2008). In fact, Sharifuddin Pirzada had also served the Ayub regime.
The rise of populist politics in the second decade of the 21st century has greatly diminished the role of intellectuals in political parties and governments. This is because populism is inherently anti-intellectual. It perceives intellectuals as being part of a detested elite. Therefore, for example, one never expected intellectuals of any kind in Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI). This is why the nature of this party’s narrative is ridiculously contradictory and even chaotic.
However, in a January 2022 essay for The Atlantic, David A. Graham wrote that it’s not that intellectuals have vanished from political parties. Rather, due to populism’s anti-intellectual disposition, they have purposely dumbed down their ideas.
According to Graham, “This is the age of smart politicians pretending to be stupid.” If stupidity can now attract votes and save the jobs of intellectuals in parties and governments, then smart folks can act stupid in the most convincing manner. Even more than those who are actually stupid.
Thursday 27 April 2023
Wednesday 15 March 2023
Friday 13 January 2023
Friday 4 November 2022
Monday 31 October 2022
Pakistan: Ironies of Liberation
by Najam Sethi in The Friday Times
Will November prove to be the cruelest month of all? It all depends on the answers to some burning questions. Will the COAS, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, go home on 29th November, 2022, as he has pledged several times, or will some extraordinary development “compel” him to stay on? Will Imran Khan’s long march of thousands end with a whimper or a bang (literally)? Will Imran Khan and Shehbaz Sharif enter into negotiations to end civil strife by setting a mutually acceptable date for the next general elections? What role will the Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP), Umar Bandial, play in mediating or exacerbating political conflict?
With less than one month to go, General Bajwa’s departure is clouded by the reluctance of the PDM government to announce his successor. Just as rumours abounded earlier about Imran Khan’s offer of an extension to the COAS in exchange for help in defeating the vote of no-confidence against him launched by the opposition in March – now proven true – it is no secret that the PDM leadership would like to scratch his back in exchange for help in warding off the looming threat from the PTI. Even Imran Khan has suggested that if the PDM government can be packed off this month and caretakers installed, General Bajwa may stay on as COAS until after the elections have returned a new government to office. Thus, despite his avowed “apolitical” stance, if push comes to shove during the PTI’s long march, it is not inconceivable that General Bajwa may be “compelled” to step in, pry apart the two warring sides, knock some sense into them and gain an extension in tenure by virtue of his “good deed”. That would open the door to an early election rather than a late one. Under the circumstances, CJP Bandial might see the wisdom of approving another extension for General Bajwa until a new government is installed after the elections.
Much will therefore depend on how Imran Khan’s long march pans out in the next week or two. It has begun on a soft note, partly because Imran knows that, after the DGISI’s unprecedented public intervention, the Miltablishment could take off its gloves if he crosses their red lines again, and partly because he is still hoping that the PDM government will succumb to the threat of violence and open the door to negotiations that fulfil his objectives. Both sides are propagating their intent to fight despite admitting pressure to talk.
Significantly, too, both parties are begging CJP Bandial to take their side. Imran Khan wants to march and the PDM government wants to stop him in his tracks. Khan insists his marchers will remain peaceful but Rana Sanaullah, the interior minister, has offered evidence of the PTI’s intentions to incite violence. The CJP says that the PTI has a right to march but notes his power to stop it at any time. Meanwhile, the good judge is exploiting this opportunity to browbeat the government and pack the court with handpicked junior judges. The threat of blocking the acquittal of Maryam Nawaz and outlawing the amended NAB law that has reprieved the top leaders of the PDM has sent the government scurrying for compromise, even to the extent of sacrificing its law minister, Azam Tarar, who was compelled to vote in favour of CJP Bandial’s nominees in the Judicial Commission against the interests of the bar which he has long represented.
Another struggle is manifestly unfolding in the background. At least five top generals are vying for the top slot in the army on November 29th when General Bajwa is scheduled to doff his uniform. If he doesn’t do so because of some extraordinary development, they will all go home before he does. So they have a vested interest in forestalling violent conflict, keeping Imran Khan at bay and showing their chief to the door.
It is a perverse comment on the state of Pakistan that the two institutions that are supposed to be “politically neutral” – the army and the judiciary – have become the most intrusive and controversial. Worse, their heads are flaunting their unaccountable powers and prejudices without restraint.
The double irony built into the situation should not be lost on us, too.
Even as the army high command is insisting that it has become apolitical and neutral and intends to stay that way in the future, both the PTI and PDM are knocking on its door for salvation. The former is threatening them and the latter is cajoling them. Under the circumstances, the probability is that the generals will not shy away from upholding the “national interest” when the state is threatened by instability and destabilization in the face of financial bankruptcy, as always.
The other irony lies in the nature of the unprecedented popular attack on the army’s political interventionism launched by Imran Khan. In normal circumstances, this would be viewed as a belated but welcome development to strengthen constitutional democracy. Indeed, this is the common thread running through the long struggles of liberals, leftists, democrats, human and women’s rights groups and ethnic/sub-nationalist, religious minorities on the periphery. The problem has arisen because the current struggle for “real liberation” led by the PTI is not aimed at defanging the army to strengthen multi-party constitutional democracy but at sharpening its claws to clamp down on the PTI’s political opponents to entrench populist one party fascism.
Not so long ago, the people of Pakistan passionately backed the Lawyers Movement for Independence of the Judiciary as a veritable “revolution” in the offing. A decade later, we have been lumped with the most unaccountable and politically biased judiciary in history as exemplified by the likes of ex-CJPs Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, Saqib Nisar and Asif Khosa. Today, we are in the throes of another such populist upsurge against another repressive state institution that threatens to further enslave us instead of liberating us.
Will November prove to be the cruelest month of all? It all depends on the answers to some burning questions. Will the COAS, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, go home on 29th November, 2022, as he has pledged several times, or will some extraordinary development “compel” him to stay on? Will Imran Khan’s long march of thousands end with a whimper or a bang (literally)? Will Imran Khan and Shehbaz Sharif enter into negotiations to end civil strife by setting a mutually acceptable date for the next general elections? What role will the Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP), Umar Bandial, play in mediating or exacerbating political conflict?
With less than one month to go, General Bajwa’s departure is clouded by the reluctance of the PDM government to announce his successor. Just as rumours abounded earlier about Imran Khan’s offer of an extension to the COAS in exchange for help in defeating the vote of no-confidence against him launched by the opposition in March – now proven true – it is no secret that the PDM leadership would like to scratch his back in exchange for help in warding off the looming threat from the PTI. Even Imran Khan has suggested that if the PDM government can be packed off this month and caretakers installed, General Bajwa may stay on as COAS until after the elections have returned a new government to office. Thus, despite his avowed “apolitical” stance, if push comes to shove during the PTI’s long march, it is not inconceivable that General Bajwa may be “compelled” to step in, pry apart the two warring sides, knock some sense into them and gain an extension in tenure by virtue of his “good deed”. That would open the door to an early election rather than a late one. Under the circumstances, CJP Bandial might see the wisdom of approving another extension for General Bajwa until a new government is installed after the elections.
Much will therefore depend on how Imran Khan’s long march pans out in the next week or two. It has begun on a soft note, partly because Imran knows that, after the DGISI’s unprecedented public intervention, the Miltablishment could take off its gloves if he crosses their red lines again, and partly because he is still hoping that the PDM government will succumb to the threat of violence and open the door to negotiations that fulfil his objectives. Both sides are propagating their intent to fight despite admitting pressure to talk.
Significantly, too, both parties are begging CJP Bandial to take their side. Imran Khan wants to march and the PDM government wants to stop him in his tracks. Khan insists his marchers will remain peaceful but Rana Sanaullah, the interior minister, has offered evidence of the PTI’s intentions to incite violence. The CJP says that the PTI has a right to march but notes his power to stop it at any time. Meanwhile, the good judge is exploiting this opportunity to browbeat the government and pack the court with handpicked junior judges. The threat of blocking the acquittal of Maryam Nawaz and outlawing the amended NAB law that has reprieved the top leaders of the PDM has sent the government scurrying for compromise, even to the extent of sacrificing its law minister, Azam Tarar, who was compelled to vote in favour of CJP Bandial’s nominees in the Judicial Commission against the interests of the bar which he has long represented.
Another struggle is manifestly unfolding in the background. At least five top generals are vying for the top slot in the army on November 29th when General Bajwa is scheduled to doff his uniform. If he doesn’t do so because of some extraordinary development, they will all go home before he does. So they have a vested interest in forestalling violent conflict, keeping Imran Khan at bay and showing their chief to the door.
It is a perverse comment on the state of Pakistan that the two institutions that are supposed to be “politically neutral” – the army and the judiciary – have become the most intrusive and controversial. Worse, their heads are flaunting their unaccountable powers and prejudices without restraint.
The double irony built into the situation should not be lost on us, too.
Even as the army high command is insisting that it has become apolitical and neutral and intends to stay that way in the future, both the PTI and PDM are knocking on its door for salvation. The former is threatening them and the latter is cajoling them. Under the circumstances, the probability is that the generals will not shy away from upholding the “national interest” when the state is threatened by instability and destabilization in the face of financial bankruptcy, as always.
The other irony lies in the nature of the unprecedented popular attack on the army’s political interventionism launched by Imran Khan. In normal circumstances, this would be viewed as a belated but welcome development to strengthen constitutional democracy. Indeed, this is the common thread running through the long struggles of liberals, leftists, democrats, human and women’s rights groups and ethnic/sub-nationalist, religious minorities on the periphery. The problem has arisen because the current struggle for “real liberation” led by the PTI is not aimed at defanging the army to strengthen multi-party constitutional democracy but at sharpening its claws to clamp down on the PTI’s political opponents to entrench populist one party fascism.
Not so long ago, the people of Pakistan passionately backed the Lawyers Movement for Independence of the Judiciary as a veritable “revolution” in the offing. A decade later, we have been lumped with the most unaccountable and politically biased judiciary in history as exemplified by the likes of ex-CJPs Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, Saqib Nisar and Asif Khosa. Today, we are in the throes of another such populist upsurge against another repressive state institution that threatens to further enslave us instead of liberating us.
Saturday 29 October 2022
Imran Khan has Pakistani army ducking & defending. Why it’s a historic moment for the subcontinent
Shekhar Gupta in The Print
Since its founding, Pakistan’s army has built a consistent record of launching wars on India and losing. It is a record of unblemished consistency. There is, however, another battlefield where it has an equally consistent record of winning. Which is where it is staring at defeat. We will elaborate on this in just a bit.
On fighting and losing wars with India, there will obviously be some nitpicking. The tough fact is, after so many wars, this army has lost almost half of Pakistan (Bangladesh), destroyed its polity, institutions, economy and entrepreneurship, and driven out its talent. Finally, it has even less of Kashmir (think Siachen) than it started out with.
So where is it that its record of winning has been equally consistent and it is now on the retreat?
---
Check out this entire press conference by Lt Gen. Nadeem Ahmed Anjum, the serving chief of the almighty Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which vanquished the Soviet and American powers, the KGB and the CIA, in Afghanistan. Chaperoned by Lt Gen. Babar Iftikhar, the chief of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), he has spoken for nearly an hour and a half. All of this was invested in defending himself, the ISI, his chief and the army.
Now, never mind that Elon Musk has stolen that metaphor for posterity, please allow us also to use it: Let that sink in. This is the ISI that all of Pakistan both loved and feared, loved and loathed, that friend and foe held in awe. It only had to wink, nod and sometimes nudge, and most of the Pakistani media would fall in line. If you didn’t, you might end up in jail, exile, a corpse in a gutter or in a strange land. In some cases, all of these. Think Arshad Sharif, the former ARY anchor. He was fired and exiled, as was his boss. Sharif turned up dead in Kenya, apparently shot by the police in a matter of mistaken identity. If you believe that, you must be high on something totally illegal.
Now, we had the ISI chief, institutionally among the most powerful men in the world at any time, at a press conference with a hand-picked friendly audience (most of the respected publications were excluded). Usually, his word and his chief’s were an order for Pakistan’s media, politicians, and often also the judiciary. The chief of ISPR was his constant messenger.
Now, both of them, speaking on behalf of their institution, were claiming victimhood. When the Pakistani army goes to the media complaining about a political leader who they evidently fear, you know that its politics has taken a historic turn.
---
Pakistan’s army is brilliant at scrapping with its political class and winning. Now it fears defeat at the hands of its politicians too. To that extent, Imran Khan might be on the verge of a victory that would mean even more in political terms than his team’s cricket World Cup win in 1992. If the Pakistani army can finally be defeated by a popular, if populist, civilian force, it’s a history-defining moment for the subcontinent.
It’s history-defining because an institution that was never denied its supreme power except for a few years after the 1971 defeat is now seeking public sympathy with its back to the wall under a mere civilian’s onslaught. Its word used to be a command for any government of the day. It could hire, fire, jail, exile, or murder prime ministers serving, former and prospective. To understand that, you do not have to go far.
In 2007, it looked as if Benazir Bhutto was on the ascendant, after her return from her second long exile (the first return was in 1986, which I had covered in this India Today cover story from Pakistan). She was assassinated despite so many warnings that her life was in danger. Nobody has been punished yet. It’s buried in Pakistan’s history of conspiracies and eternal mysteries like so many others. Her party’s government was kneecapped and her husband subsequently reduced to an inconsequential, titular president.
Nawaz Sharif came back with a comfortable majority. He too grew “delusional”, from his army’s point of view, in beginning to believe that he was a real prime minister. By 2018, this army, under a chief he had appointed, had conspired and contrived to get rid of him, jail and exile him. It ensured that his party didn’t get a majority in the election that followed. In the process, they also built, strengthened and employed Pakistan’s most regressive Sunni Islamist group, Tehreek-e-Labbaik.
---
Imran Khan was then the army’s candidate, and does it matter if he fell short of a majority? The army and the ISI collected enough small parties and independents to give him a comfortable majority. Albeit at their sufferance. A majority was no issue for one seen as the boy of the boys.
Until, this ‘boy’ also began to believe that he was a real prime minister and was causing ‘discomfort’ at the army GHQ.
Worse, his delusions weren’t just domestic. He was now seeing himself as the new leader of the Islamic Ummah, a 21st-century Caliph of sorts in his own right. He was talking in shariat terms, bringing a Quranic curriculum, building a new agenda that was as Islamist as it was anti-West. Both of these alarmed the army.
In the same state of political ‘high’, Imran started to believe he now bossed the army. That’s how the first, and decisive, fights broke out over top-level appointments. The first was over the appointment of the new ISI chief. The army chief had his way with Nadeem Anjum and Imran lost out over his insistence on continuing with Lt Gen. Faiz Hameed. This fight was, however, like a crucial league match before the final — the appointment of the new chief in November.
Think about what is the one thread that’s common to this entire ugly story of intrigue, betrayal, and now it seems, assassination too? General Qamar Javed Bajwa has been the army chief through all of these years. Appointed by Nawaz Sharif who he later fired and exiled, given a three-year extension by Imran Khan who he first created and then got fired, and now challenged by him.
Over the past five decades, two great political families have fought for democracy in Pakistan in their own patchy ways, although mostly by keeping the army GHQ on their sides. Both, the Bhutto family’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Sharifs’ Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) are now tired and spent forces. One because of its shrinking footprint from Punjab, and the other because its only popular leader, Nawaz Sharif, is hesitant to leave the safety of exile in London and join the fight at home. Both are counting on the army to save their throne and skins.
This used to be business as usual. If the army was on your side, the world was yours in Pakistan. The reason these aren’t usual times is that today it is the army that’s staring at the greatest, scariest existential threat to its power and stature. This threat has come from a populist, riding democratic power. So what if it’s that often nutty and deeply flawed Imran Khan. Did we ever argue democracy is perfect?
Since its founding, Pakistan’s army has built a consistent record of launching wars on India and losing. It is a record of unblemished consistency. There is, however, another battlefield where it has an equally consistent record of winning. Which is where it is staring at defeat. We will elaborate on this in just a bit.
On fighting and losing wars with India, there will obviously be some nitpicking. The tough fact is, after so many wars, this army has lost almost half of Pakistan (Bangladesh), destroyed its polity, institutions, economy and entrepreneurship, and driven out its talent. Finally, it has even less of Kashmir (think Siachen) than it started out with.
So where is it that its record of winning has been equally consistent and it is now on the retreat?
---Also watch
---
Check out this entire press conference by Lt Gen. Nadeem Ahmed Anjum, the serving chief of the almighty Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which vanquished the Soviet and American powers, the KGB and the CIA, in Afghanistan. Chaperoned by Lt Gen. Babar Iftikhar, the chief of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), he has spoken for nearly an hour and a half. All of this was invested in defending himself, the ISI, his chief and the army.
Now, never mind that Elon Musk has stolen that metaphor for posterity, please allow us also to use it: Let that sink in. This is the ISI that all of Pakistan both loved and feared, loved and loathed, that friend and foe held in awe. It only had to wink, nod and sometimes nudge, and most of the Pakistani media would fall in line. If you didn’t, you might end up in jail, exile, a corpse in a gutter or in a strange land. In some cases, all of these. Think Arshad Sharif, the former ARY anchor. He was fired and exiled, as was his boss. Sharif turned up dead in Kenya, apparently shot by the police in a matter of mistaken identity. If you believe that, you must be high on something totally illegal.
Now, we had the ISI chief, institutionally among the most powerful men in the world at any time, at a press conference with a hand-picked friendly audience (most of the respected publications were excluded). Usually, his word and his chief’s were an order for Pakistan’s media, politicians, and often also the judiciary. The chief of ISPR was his constant messenger.
Now, both of them, speaking on behalf of their institution, were claiming victimhood. When the Pakistani army goes to the media complaining about a political leader who they evidently fear, you know that its politics has taken a historic turn.
---
Pakistan’s army is brilliant at scrapping with its political class and winning. Now it fears defeat at the hands of its politicians too. To that extent, Imran Khan might be on the verge of a victory that would mean even more in political terms than his team’s cricket World Cup win in 1992. If the Pakistani army can finally be defeated by a popular, if populist, civilian force, it’s a history-defining moment for the subcontinent.
It’s history-defining because an institution that was never denied its supreme power except for a few years after the 1971 defeat is now seeking public sympathy with its back to the wall under a mere civilian’s onslaught. Its word used to be a command for any government of the day. It could hire, fire, jail, exile, or murder prime ministers serving, former and prospective. To understand that, you do not have to go far.
In 2007, it looked as if Benazir Bhutto was on the ascendant, after her return from her second long exile (the first return was in 1986, which I had covered in this India Today cover story from Pakistan). She was assassinated despite so many warnings that her life was in danger. Nobody has been punished yet. It’s buried in Pakistan’s history of conspiracies and eternal mysteries like so many others. Her party’s government was kneecapped and her husband subsequently reduced to an inconsequential, titular president.
Nawaz Sharif came back with a comfortable majority. He too grew “delusional”, from his army’s point of view, in beginning to believe that he was a real prime minister. By 2018, this army, under a chief he had appointed, had conspired and contrived to get rid of him, jail and exile him. It ensured that his party didn’t get a majority in the election that followed. In the process, they also built, strengthened and employed Pakistan’s most regressive Sunni Islamist group, Tehreek-e-Labbaik.
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Imran Khan was then the army’s candidate, and does it matter if he fell short of a majority? The army and the ISI collected enough small parties and independents to give him a comfortable majority. Albeit at their sufferance. A majority was no issue for one seen as the boy of the boys.
Until, this ‘boy’ also began to believe that he was a real prime minister and was causing ‘discomfort’ at the army GHQ.
Worse, his delusions weren’t just domestic. He was now seeing himself as the new leader of the Islamic Ummah, a 21st-century Caliph of sorts in his own right. He was talking in shariat terms, bringing a Quranic curriculum, building a new agenda that was as Islamist as it was anti-West. Both of these alarmed the army.
In the same state of political ‘high’, Imran started to believe he now bossed the army. That’s how the first, and decisive, fights broke out over top-level appointments. The first was over the appointment of the new ISI chief. The army chief had his way with Nadeem Anjum and Imran lost out over his insistence on continuing with Lt Gen. Faiz Hameed. This fight was, however, like a crucial league match before the final — the appointment of the new chief in November.
Think about what is the one thread that’s common to this entire ugly story of intrigue, betrayal, and now it seems, assassination too? General Qamar Javed Bajwa has been the army chief through all of these years. Appointed by Nawaz Sharif who he later fired and exiled, given a three-year extension by Imran Khan who he first created and then got fired, and now challenged by him.
Over the past five decades, two great political families have fought for democracy in Pakistan in their own patchy ways, although mostly by keeping the army GHQ on their sides. Both, the Bhutto family’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Sharifs’ Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) are now tired and spent forces. One because of its shrinking footprint from Punjab, and the other because its only popular leader, Nawaz Sharif, is hesitant to leave the safety of exile in London and join the fight at home. Both are counting on the army to save their throne and skins.
This used to be business as usual. If the army was on your side, the world was yours in Pakistan. The reason these aren’t usual times is that today it is the army that’s staring at the greatest, scariest existential threat to its power and stature. This threat has come from a populist, riding democratic power. So what if it’s that often nutty and deeply flawed Imran Khan. Did we ever argue democracy is perfect?
Sunday 5 June 2022
THE PERFORMATIVE POLITICIAN
Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn
Illustration by AbroPopulism is a way of framing political ideas that can be filled with a verity of ideologies (C. Mudde in Current History, 2014). These ideologies can come from the left or the right. Populism in itself is not a distinct ideology. It is a performative political style.
No matter where it’s coming from, it is manifested through a particular set of animated gestures, images, tones and symbols (B. Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism, 2016). At the core of it is a narrative containing two main ‘villains’: The ‘elites’ and ‘the other’. Elites are described as being corrupt. And ‘the other’ is demonised as being a threat to the beliefs and values of the ‘majority’.
Populists begin by glorifying the ‘besieged’ polity as noble. They then begin to frame the polity’s civilisation as ‘sacred’. Therefore, the mission to eradicate threats, in this context, becomes a sacred cause. The far-right parties in Europe want to protect Europe’s Christian identity from Muslim intruders. They see Muslim immigration to European countries as an invasion.
Yet, these far-right groups are largely secular. They do not propose the creation of a Christian theocracy. Instead, they understand modern European civilisation as the outcome of its illustrious Christian past. They frame the Muslim immigrant as ‘the other’ who has arrived from a lesser civilisation. So, according to far-right populists in Europe, the Muslim other — tolerated and facilitated by a political elite — starts to undermine the Christian values that aided European civilisations to become ‘great’.
Ironically, most far-right outfits in Europe that espouse such notions are largely critical of conventional Christian institutions. They see them as being too conservative towards modern European values. Far-right outfits are not overtly religious at all — even though their fiery populist rhetoric frames their cause as a sacred undertaking to protect the civilisational role of Christianity in shaping European societies.
Thus, European far-right populists adopt Christianity not as a theocratic-political doctrine, but as an identity marker to differentiate themselves from Muslims (Saving The People, ed. O. Roy, 2016). It is therefore naive to understand issues such as Islamophobia as a tussle between Christianity and Islam. Neither is it a clash between modernity and anti-modernity, as such.
The actions of some Islamist extremists, and the manner in which these were framed by popular media, made Muslim migrants in the West a community that could be easily moulded into a feared ‘other’ by populists. If one takes out the Muslim migrants from the equation, the core narrative of far-right populists will lose its sting.
Muslims in this regard have become ‘the other’ in India as well. Hindu nationalism is challenging the old, ‘secular’ political elite by claiming that this elite was serving Muslim interests to maintain its political hegemony, and that it was repressing values, beliefs and memories of a Hindu civilisation that was thriving before being invaded and dismantled by Muslim invaders.
Here too, the populist Hindu nationalists are not necessarily devout and pious. And when they are, then the actions in this respect are largely performative rather than doctrinal. That’s why, today, a harmless Hindu ritual and the act of emotionally or physically assaulting a Muslim, may carry similar performative connotations. For example, a militant Hindu nationalist mob attacking a Muslim can be conceived by the attackers as a sacred ritual.
Same is the case in Pakistan. The researcher Muhammad Amir Rana has conducted several interviews of young Islamist militants who were arrested and put in rehabilitation programmes. Almost all of them were told by their ‘handlers’ that self-sacrifice was a means to create an Islamic state/caliphate that would wipe out poverty, corruption and immorality, and provide justice. This idea was programmed into them to create a ‘self’ in relation to an opposite or ‘the other’. The other in this respect were heretics and infidels who were conspiring to destroy Islam.
When an Islamist suicide bomber explodes him/herself in public, or when extremists desecrate Ahmadiyya graves, or a mob attacks an alleged blasphemer, each one of these believe they are undertaking a sacred ritual that is not that different from the harmless ones. But Islamist militants are not populists. They have dogmatic doctrines or are deeply indoctrinated.
Not so, the populists. Populists are great hijackers of ideas. There’s nothing original or deep about them. Everything remains on the surface. Take, for instance, the recently ousted Pakistani PM Imran Khan. He unabashedly steals ideas from the left and the right. His core constituency, which is not so attuned to history, perceives these ideas as being entirely new. Everything he says or claims to have done, becomes ‘for the first time in the history of Pakistan.’
But being a populist, it wasn’t enough for Khan to frame his ‘struggle’ (against ‘corrupt elites’) as a noble cause. It needed to be manifested as a sacred conviction. So, from 2014 onwards, he increasingly began to lace his speeches with allusions of him fighting for justice and morality by treading a path laid out by Islam’s sacred texts and personalities. He then began to explain this undertaking as a ‘jihad’.
These were/are pure populist manoeuvres and entirely performative. Once the cause transformed into becoming a ‘jihad’, it not only required rhetoric culled from Islamist evangelists and then put in the context of a ‘political struggle’, but it also needed performed piety — carrying prayer beads, being constantly photographed while saying obligatory Muslim prayers, embracing famous preachers, etc.
And since ‘jihad’ in the popular imagination is often perceived to be something aggressive and manly, Khan poses as an outspoken and fearless saviour of not only the people of Pakistan, but also of the ‘ummah’.
Yet, by all accounts, he is not very religious. He’s not secular either. But this is how populists are. They are basically nothing. They are great performers who can draw devotion from a great many people — especially those who are struggling to formulate a political identity for themselves. There are no shortcuts to this. But populists provide them shortcuts.
Khan is a curious mixture of an Islamist and a brawler. But both of these attributes mainly reside on the surface and in his rhetoric. The only aim one can say that is lingering underneath the surface is an inexhaustible ambition to be constantly admired and, of course, rule as a North Korean premier does. Conjuring lots of adulation, but zero opposition.
Saturday 30 April 2022
Yearning for the Miracle Man
Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn
After rough weather and stormy seas battered the country for three quarters of a century, a nation adrift saw two miracle men arise. Separated by 50 years and endowed with magical personalities, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Imran Khan set the public imagination on fire by challenging the established order.
After Bhutto was sent to the gallows, many PPP jiyalas self-flagellated, with several immolating themselves in despair. Till their fiery end, they believed in a feudal lord’s promise of socialist utopia. Similar horrific scenes occurred after the assassination of his charismatic daughter. That the father was instrumental in the break-up of Pakistan, and that during the daughter’s years Pakistan fell yet deeper into a pit of corruption, left jiyalas unfazed. Today’s Sindh remains firmly in the grip of a quasi-feudal dynasty and the Bhutto cult.
But still worse might lie ahead as Imran Khan’s cult goes from strength to strength. Writing in Dawn, Adrian Husain worries that a matinee idol with a freshly acquired messianic status is skillfully exploiting widespread anger at corruption to sow hate and division among Pakistanis. Fahd Husain evinces alarm that PTI’s flag-waving ‘youthias’ can see no wrong in whatever Khan says or does. He wonders why even those with Ivy League degrees put their rational faculties into deep sleep. Conversing with PTI supporters, says Ayesha Khan, has become close to impossible.
What enabled these two men to command the senseless devotion of so many millions? Can science explain it? Forget political science. The dark secret is that this isn’t really a science. So, could neuroscience give the answer? Although this area has seen spectacular progress, it is nowhere close to cracking the brain’s inner code.
Instead one must turn to the animal kingdom. Gregariousness and suppression of individuality helps protect members of a species because leaders give direction in a difficult environment. But there is a downside. Herds of sheep are known to follow their leader over a cliff and self-destruct. Human groupies have done similarly.
Specific social attitudes — groupthink and its diametrical opposite, scepticism — explain why some societies crave messiahs while others don’t. At one level, everyone is a sceptic. When it comes to everyday life — where to invest one’s life’s savings, what food to eat, or which doctor to see for a serious health problem — we don’t simply believe all that’s told to us. Instead, we look around for evidence and are willing to let go of ideas when contrary evidence piles up. But in political and religious matters, open-mindedness often turns into absolutism.
Absolutism has made Pakistani politics less and less issue-oriented and more and more tribal. It is hard to tell apart PML-N or PPP from PTI on substantive matters such as the economy, foreign debt, or relations with neighbouring countries. The only certainty is that the government in power will blame the previous government for everything.
This absolutism makes most party supporters purely partisan — you are with us or against us. Zealots willingly believe accusations aimed at the other side but dismiss those aimed at their own. A rational PTI supporter, on the other hand, will entertain the Toshakhana as possible evidence of wrongdoing just as much as Surrey Palace or Avenfield Apartments. He is also willing to admit that all Pakistani political leaders — including Khan — have lifestyles at odds with their declared assets and income. Rational supporters who can say ‘yeh sub chor hain’ exist but are few.
Instead, a culture of intellectual laziness feeds upon wild conspiracy theories coupled with unshakeable belief that political destinies are controlled by some overarching, external power. The ancient Greeks believed that the world was run by the whims and desires of the great god Zeus. For the PTI zealot, the centre of the universe has shifted from Mount Olympus to Washington.
In the zealot’s imagination, an omnipotent American god sits in the White House. With just the flick of his wrist, he ordered Imran Khan’s (former) military sponsors to dump him and then stitched together his fractured political opposition into organising a no-confidence vote. Of course, everyone dutifully obeyed orders. And this supposedly happened inside one of the world’s most anti-American countries! But we know that pigs can fly, don’t we? (Incidentally, America’s severest critic for over 60 years, Noam Chomsky, has reportedly trashed Khan’s claim of a regime change conspiracy.)
Fortunately, not all who stand with a political party, PTI included, are zealots. They do recognise that the country’s entire political class is crass, corrupt, self-seeking, and puts personal interest above that of the electorate. Knowing this they choose a party that, in their estimation, is a lesser evil over a greater one. Democracy depends on this vital principle.
To see this, compare the mass hysteria generated by Khan after being voted out of office with the calmness that followed France’s recent elections. Though despised by the majority of those who voted for him, Macron won handsomely over Marie Le Pen, his far-right, Islamophobic opponent. To her credit, Le Pen did not attribute the defeat either to Washington or to a global Islamic conspiracy. That’s civilised politics.
Why democracy works for France but has had such a rough time in Pakistan is easy to see. It’s not just the military and its constant meddling in political affairs. More important is a culture where emotion and dogma shove truth into the margins. What else explains the enormous popularity of motivational speakers who lecture engineering students on methods to deal with jinns and other supernatural creatures?
Pakistan’s education system stresses faith-unity-discipline at the cost of reason-diversity-liberty. This has seriously impaired the ordinary Pakistani’s capacity to judge. Even in private English-medium schools for the elite, teachers and students remain shackled to a madressah mindset. Why be surprised that so many ‘youthias’ are burger bachas? Unless we allow children to think, the yearning for Miracle Man will continue. It will long outlast Imran Khan — whenever and however he finally exits the scene.
After rough weather and stormy seas battered the country for three quarters of a century, a nation adrift saw two miracle men arise. Separated by 50 years and endowed with magical personalities, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Imran Khan set the public imagination on fire by challenging the established order.
After Bhutto was sent to the gallows, many PPP jiyalas self-flagellated, with several immolating themselves in despair. Till their fiery end, they believed in a feudal lord’s promise of socialist utopia. Similar horrific scenes occurred after the assassination of his charismatic daughter. That the father was instrumental in the break-up of Pakistan, and that during the daughter’s years Pakistan fell yet deeper into a pit of corruption, left jiyalas unfazed. Today’s Sindh remains firmly in the grip of a quasi-feudal dynasty and the Bhutto cult.
But still worse might lie ahead as Imran Khan’s cult goes from strength to strength. Writing in Dawn, Adrian Husain worries that a matinee idol with a freshly acquired messianic status is skillfully exploiting widespread anger at corruption to sow hate and division among Pakistanis. Fahd Husain evinces alarm that PTI’s flag-waving ‘youthias’ can see no wrong in whatever Khan says or does. He wonders why even those with Ivy League degrees put their rational faculties into deep sleep. Conversing with PTI supporters, says Ayesha Khan, has become close to impossible.
What enabled these two men to command the senseless devotion of so many millions? Can science explain it? Forget political science. The dark secret is that this isn’t really a science. So, could neuroscience give the answer? Although this area has seen spectacular progress, it is nowhere close to cracking the brain’s inner code.
Instead one must turn to the animal kingdom. Gregariousness and suppression of individuality helps protect members of a species because leaders give direction in a difficult environment. But there is a downside. Herds of sheep are known to follow their leader over a cliff and self-destruct. Human groupies have done similarly.
Specific social attitudes — groupthink and its diametrical opposite, scepticism — explain why some societies crave messiahs while others don’t. At one level, everyone is a sceptic. When it comes to everyday life — where to invest one’s life’s savings, what food to eat, or which doctor to see for a serious health problem — we don’t simply believe all that’s told to us. Instead, we look around for evidence and are willing to let go of ideas when contrary evidence piles up. But in political and religious matters, open-mindedness often turns into absolutism.
Absolutism has made Pakistani politics less and less issue-oriented and more and more tribal. It is hard to tell apart PML-N or PPP from PTI on substantive matters such as the economy, foreign debt, or relations with neighbouring countries. The only certainty is that the government in power will blame the previous government for everything.
This absolutism makes most party supporters purely partisan — you are with us or against us. Zealots willingly believe accusations aimed at the other side but dismiss those aimed at their own. A rational PTI supporter, on the other hand, will entertain the Toshakhana as possible evidence of wrongdoing just as much as Surrey Palace or Avenfield Apartments. He is also willing to admit that all Pakistani political leaders — including Khan — have lifestyles at odds with their declared assets and income. Rational supporters who can say ‘yeh sub chor hain’ exist but are few.
Instead, a culture of intellectual laziness feeds upon wild conspiracy theories coupled with unshakeable belief that political destinies are controlled by some overarching, external power. The ancient Greeks believed that the world was run by the whims and desires of the great god Zeus. For the PTI zealot, the centre of the universe has shifted from Mount Olympus to Washington.
In the zealot’s imagination, an omnipotent American god sits in the White House. With just the flick of his wrist, he ordered Imran Khan’s (former) military sponsors to dump him and then stitched together his fractured political opposition into organising a no-confidence vote. Of course, everyone dutifully obeyed orders. And this supposedly happened inside one of the world’s most anti-American countries! But we know that pigs can fly, don’t we? (Incidentally, America’s severest critic for over 60 years, Noam Chomsky, has reportedly trashed Khan’s claim of a regime change conspiracy.)
Fortunately, not all who stand with a political party, PTI included, are zealots. They do recognise that the country’s entire political class is crass, corrupt, self-seeking, and puts personal interest above that of the electorate. Knowing this they choose a party that, in their estimation, is a lesser evil over a greater one. Democracy depends on this vital principle.
To see this, compare the mass hysteria generated by Khan after being voted out of office with the calmness that followed France’s recent elections. Though despised by the majority of those who voted for him, Macron won handsomely over Marie Le Pen, his far-right, Islamophobic opponent. To her credit, Le Pen did not attribute the defeat either to Washington or to a global Islamic conspiracy. That’s civilised politics.
Why democracy works for France but has had such a rough time in Pakistan is easy to see. It’s not just the military and its constant meddling in political affairs. More important is a culture where emotion and dogma shove truth into the margins. What else explains the enormous popularity of motivational speakers who lecture engineering students on methods to deal with jinns and other supernatural creatures?
Pakistan’s education system stresses faith-unity-discipline at the cost of reason-diversity-liberty. This has seriously impaired the ordinary Pakistani’s capacity to judge. Even in private English-medium schools for the elite, teachers and students remain shackled to a madressah mindset. Why be surprised that so many ‘youthias’ are burger bachas? Unless we allow children to think, the yearning for Miracle Man will continue. It will long outlast Imran Khan — whenever and however he finally exits the scene.
Sunday 24 April 2022
Saturday 23 April 2022
The state of Pakistan: Isn't the support for BJP similar?
Fahd Hussain in The Dawn
Imran Khan’s supporters can see no wrong in what he says or does. We have witnessed this phenomenon unfurl itself like a lazy python these last few years, but more so with greater intensity during Khan’s pre- and post-ouster days. On display is a textbook case of blind devotion. Such devotion entails a deliberate — or perhaps subconscious — suspension of critical thinking. Only mass hysteria can explain absolute rejection of facts and a willing embrace of free-flying rhetoric untethered by verifiable information.
And yet, does this really make sense?
Bounce this explanation off actual people around you — friends, families, acquaintances — and you start to feel uncomfortable with the laziness of the explanation.
On your left, for instance, is the professor with a doctorate in natural sciences from one of the top universities in the world, someone whose entire educational foundation and career is based on the power of empirical evidence and scientific rationalism — and here he is hysterically arguing why the PTI deputy speaker’s violation of the constitution is no big deal. On your right is the top executive of a multinational company with an MBA from an Ivy League school, someone whose training and practice of craft is based on hard data crunched with power of sharp logic — and here he is frothing at the mouth in delirium while yelling that the Joe Biden administration actually conspired with the entire top leadership of the PDM to topple Imran Khan.
These are rational people, you remind yourself. You have known them for years, and admired them for their academic and professional achievements — perhaps even been motivated by their pursuit of success — and yet you see them experiencing a strange quasi-psychedelic meltdown in full public glare. It just does not add up.
It is not just these metaphorical persons — resembling many real ones in all our lives, as it so happens — but hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis from all walks of life locked inside a massive groupthink spurred by sweeping generalisations dressed up as political narrative. No argument, no logic and no rationale — no, nothing makes sense, and nothing is acceptable or even worth considering if it does not gel perfectly with their preconceived notions.
What we are witnessing is a seminal moment in our political evolution — progressive or regressive is a matter of personal perspective — and this moment is situated bang in the centre of a social and political transformation so impactful that it could define the shape of our society for the years ahead.
In an acutely polarised environment, it is easy to pass judgement on those sitting across the fence. Most of us yield to this temptation. When we do, we help reinforce caricatures that have little resemblance to people around us, and these fail to explain why people believe what they believe.
So why do such a large number of people believe what they believe even when overwhelming evidence points towards the opposite conclusion? In our context, this may be due in part to the visceral politicisation of the national discourse and the deep personal loathing of rivals that the PTI has injected into what should otherwise be a contest of ideas and ideologies. At the heart of this is the revulsion against the system because it has not really delivered what it exists to deliver: improving the lives of citizens through protection of rights and provision of services. It is therefore easy and convenient to blame the system, and in turn all those institutions that constitute the system as a whole.
Imran Khan has modelled himself well as the anti-system crusader. He insists very persuasively that he has neither been co-opted nor corrupted by the system; that when he says he wants to change this system, it implies that there is nothing sacrosanct about the system, or for that matter, about the exalted institutions that make up the system. He has been able to establish this narrative successfully because the central theme of his narrative is, in fact, true: the system has not delivered.
But the argument is only half done here. The other half is perhaps even more crucial — diagnosing why it has not delivered. It is here that Imran Khan goes off tangent. And he does so not just in terms of his solutions, but his own shockingly weak performance as the prime minister who had it all but could not do much with it. In fact, after nearly four years in power, and having precious little to show for them, Imran has for all practical purposes joined the long line of those who are, in fact, responsible for the sad reality that the system has not delivered.
But someone forgot to break this news to the PTI supporters.
In essence then, if Pakistani society wants to row itself back from this stage where the electorate is at war with itself on a battlefield littered with semi-truths, partial facts and outright lies, it will need to face up to a bitter fact: what we see unfolding in front of us is the contamination of decades of social and educational decay injected with deadly and potent steroids of propaganda, brainwashing and ‘otherisation’ of anyone who looks, speaks, acts or believes differently.
Those social studies books you read in school and thought you would outgrow — well, now you know how wrong you were?
In this cesspool, everyone points fingers at everyone else when no one really has the right to do so. Seven decades of wrong governance laced with wrong priorities and fuelled by wrong policies have led us to a stage today where traditional parties cannot stomach the aspirations of a new generation, and new parties cannot digest the requirements of what constitutes governance, statecraft and institutional equilibrium within a democratic society.
And you thought holding elections was our biggest problem today. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Friday 22 April 2022
The Perils Of Conceptual Reality
Nadeem F Paracha in The Friday Times
I’m sure by now you must have come across people (mostly on social media) who let loose a barrage of words as a reaction to what they believe is an anti-Imran-Khan tweet or post. The words are almost always,”looters,” “corrupt,” “chor,” and “traitors.” These words are dedicated to parties and leaders who till recently were in the opposition and are now in government (after ousting Khan).
Very rarely can one find a pro-Khan or pro-PTI person actually listing the successes of the ousted PM’s economic or social policies. But the fact is: as much as such folk are rare, so are the previous government’s successes. If one still believes that this is not the case, he or she needs to provide some intelligent, informed arguments so that an exchange can turn into a debate — instead of a hyper-monologue in which a single person is frantically crackling like a broken record: “looters, corrupt, chor, traitors!”
Is this person stupid? Not quite. Because one even saw some apparently intelligent men and women crackling in the same manner when Khan fell. To most critics of populism, people who voted for men such as India’s Narendra Modi, America’s Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Poland’s Andrzej Duda and Pakistan’s Imran Khan, were all largely ‘stupid.’
But what is stupidity? Ever since the mid-20th century, the idea of stupidity, especially in the context of politics, has been studied by various sociologists. One of the pioneers in this regard was the German scholar and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. During the rise of Nazi rule in Germany, Bonhoeffer was baffled by the silence of millions of Germans when the Nazis began to publicly humiliate and brutalise Jewish people. Bonhoeffer condemned this. He asked: how could a nation that had produced so many philosophers, scientists and artists suddenly become so apathetic and even sympathetic towards state violence and oppression?
Unsurprisingly, in 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested. Two years later, he was executed. While awaiting execution, Bonhoeffer began to put his thoughts on paper. These were posthumously published in the shape of a book, Letters and Papers from Prison. One of the chapters in the book is called, “On Stupidity.” Bonhoeffer wrote: “Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it political or religious, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”
According to Bonhoeffer, because of the overwhelming impact of a rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and they give up establishing an autonomous position towards the emerging circumstances. It is a condition in which people become mere tools in the hands of those in power, and begin to willingly surrender their capacity for independent thinking. Bonhoeffer wrote that holding a rational debate with such a person is futile, because it feels that one is not dealing with a person, but with slogans and catchwords. “Looters, corrupt, chor, traitors!” ‘Looters, corrupt, chor, traitors!’ Repeat.
But Khan did not rise. He fell. Truth is: this condition in which a person becomes a walking-talking instrument of repetitive slogans and catchwords, first appeared during Khan’s rise to power. During that period “looters, corrupt, chor, traitors” were active words, deployed to justify Khan’s rise, and the demise of his opponents. After his fall, the same words have become reactive. Either way, neither then nor now is this condition suitable for a more informed debate between two (or more) opposing ideas or narratives.
Does this mean that most Khan fans are incapable of having such a debate? Many may not be very well-informed about the ins and outs of politics or history, but does that make them stupid — even though sometimes they certainly sound it?
To Bonhoeffer, stupidity was not about lack of intelligence, but about a mind that had voluntarily closed itself to reason, especially after being impacted and/or swayed by an assertive external power. In a 2020 essay for The New Statesman, the British philosopher Sacha Golob wrote that being stupid and dumb were not the same thing. Intelligence (or lack thereof) can somewhat be measured through IQ tests. But even those who score high in these tests can do ‘stupid’ things or carry certain ‘stupid ideas.’
I’m sure by now you must have come across people (mostly on social media) who let loose a barrage of words as a reaction to what they believe is an anti-Imran-Khan tweet or post. The words are almost always,”looters,” “corrupt,” “chor,” and “traitors.” These words are dedicated to parties and leaders who till recently were in the opposition and are now in government (after ousting Khan).
Very rarely can one find a pro-Khan or pro-PTI person actually listing the successes of the ousted PM’s economic or social policies. But the fact is: as much as such folk are rare, so are the previous government’s successes. If one still believes that this is not the case, he or she needs to provide some intelligent, informed arguments so that an exchange can turn into a debate — instead of a hyper-monologue in which a single person is frantically crackling like a broken record: “looters, corrupt, chor, traitors!”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Is this person stupid? Not quite. Because one even saw some apparently intelligent men and women crackling in the same manner when Khan fell. To most critics of populism, people who voted for men such as India’s Narendra Modi, America’s Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Poland’s Andrzej Duda and Pakistan’s Imran Khan, were all largely ‘stupid.’
But what is stupidity? Ever since the mid-20th century, the idea of stupidity, especially in the context of politics, has been studied by various sociologists. One of the pioneers in this regard was the German scholar and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. During the rise of Nazi rule in Germany, Bonhoeffer was baffled by the silence of millions of Germans when the Nazis began to publicly humiliate and brutalise Jewish people. Bonhoeffer condemned this. He asked: how could a nation that had produced so many philosophers, scientists and artists suddenly become so apathetic and even sympathetic towards state violence and oppression?
Unsurprisingly, in 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested. Two years later, he was executed. While awaiting execution, Bonhoeffer began to put his thoughts on paper. These were posthumously published in the shape of a book, Letters and Papers from Prison. One of the chapters in the book is called, “On Stupidity.” Bonhoeffer wrote: “Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it political or religious, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”
According to Bonhoeffer, because of the overwhelming impact of a rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and they give up establishing an autonomous position towards the emerging circumstances. It is a condition in which people become mere tools in the hands of those in power, and begin to willingly surrender their capacity for independent thinking. Bonhoeffer wrote that holding a rational debate with such a person is futile, because it feels that one is not dealing with a person, but with slogans and catchwords. “Looters, corrupt, chor, traitors!” ‘Looters, corrupt, chor, traitors!’ Repeat.
But Khan did not rise. He fell. Truth is: this condition in which a person becomes a walking-talking instrument of repetitive slogans and catchwords, first appeared during Khan’s rise to power. During that period “looters, corrupt, chor, traitors” were active words, deployed to justify Khan’s rise, and the demise of his opponents. After his fall, the same words have become reactive. Either way, neither then nor now is this condition suitable for a more informed debate between two (or more) opposing ideas or narratives.
Does this mean that most Khan fans are incapable of having such a debate? Many may not be very well-informed about the ins and outs of politics or history, but does that make them stupid — even though sometimes they certainly sound it?
To Bonhoeffer, stupidity was not about lack of intelligence, but about a mind that had voluntarily closed itself to reason, especially after being impacted and/or swayed by an assertive external power. In a 2020 essay for The New Statesman, the British philosopher Sacha Golob wrote that being stupid and dumb were not the same thing. Intelligence (or lack thereof) can somewhat be measured through IQ tests. But even those who score high in these tests can do ‘stupid’ things or carry certain ‘stupid ideas.’
Golob gave the example of the novelist Arthur Conan Doyle, who created the famous fictional character Sherlock Holmes. Holmes, a private detective, was an ideal product of the ‘Age of Reason,’ imagined by Doyle as a man who shunned emotions and dealt only in reason, empiricism and the scientific method. Yet, later on in life, Doyle became the antithesis of his character, Holmes. He got into a silly argument with the celebrated illusionist Harry Houdini when the latter rubbished Doyle’s belief that one could communicate with spirits (in a seance).
How could a man who had created a rather convincing empiricist and rationalist character such as Sherlock Holmes begin to believe in seances? In fact, Doyle also began to believe in the existence of fairies. Every time someone would successfully debunk Doyle’s beliefs, he would go to great lengths to provide a counter-argument, but one which was even more absurd.
Golob wrote that stupidity can thus be found in supposedly very intelligent people as well. According to the American psychologist Ray Hyman, “Conan Doyle used his smartness to outsmart himself.” This can also answer why one sometimes comes across highly educated and informed men and women unabashedly spouting conspiracy theories that have either been convincingly debunked, or cannot be proven outside the domain of wishful thinking. But why would one do that?
There can be various reasons for this. According to Golob, Doyle, who had already developed some interest in ‘spirituality,’ began dabbling in the supernatural after the death of his son. According to Golob, “Doyle used his intellect to weave a path through grief that, although obviously irrational, was personally restorative.” So, it can be a way to live through grief or a personal tragedy which things like reason, rationality or logic cannot address. But this does not mean that the thousands of intelligent people who begin to mouth irrational populist hogwash all suffer personal tragedies. Yet, in the context of politics, resentfulness and grief can be triggered in a class or tribe if it is convinced that it has been neglected, mocked or sidelined by a ‘political elite.’
How could a man who had created a rather convincing empiricist and rationalist character such as Sherlock Holmes begin to believe in seances? In fact, Doyle also began to believe in the existence of fairies. Every time someone would successfully debunk Doyle’s beliefs, he would go to great lengths to provide a counter-argument, but one which was even more absurd.
Golob wrote that stupidity can thus be found in supposedly very intelligent people as well. According to the American psychologist Ray Hyman, “Conan Doyle used his smartness to outsmart himself.” This can also answer why one sometimes comes across highly educated and informed men and women unabashedly spouting conspiracy theories that have either been convincingly debunked, or cannot be proven outside the domain of wishful thinking. But why would one do that?
There can be various reasons for this. According to Golob, Doyle, who had already developed some interest in ‘spirituality,’ began dabbling in the supernatural after the death of his son. According to Golob, “Doyle used his intellect to weave a path through grief that, although obviously irrational, was personally restorative.” So, it can be a way to live through grief or a personal tragedy which things like reason, rationality or logic cannot address. But this does not mean that the thousands of intelligent people who begin to mouth irrational populist hogwash all suffer personal tragedies. Yet, in the context of politics, resentfulness and grief can be triggered in a class or tribe if it is convinced that it has been neglected, mocked or sidelined by a ‘political elite.’
The manifestation of conceptual reality
In the US, folk in the ‘rural’ South felt exactly that. They felt their ideas and lifestyles were mocked by the ‘liberal elite’ for being backward, anti-modern and superstitious. Their resentment in this regard was brilliantly tapped by Donald Trump. And even though the Southern states in the US have the largest number of Christian fundamentalists and regular Church-goers in that country, they continued to support Trump despite his involvement in scandals both of the flesh and finances.
This brings us back to Nazi Germany and Bonhoeffer. A nation was left grief-stricken by a humiliating defeat (during the First World War). It was thus willing to suspend all critical thinking after the grief was first treated with a barrage of conspiracy theories (blaming the Jews), and then by a man who became a powerful conduit of these theories. His rise was the sum of collective resentment and grief. It was a negation of empirical reality where a society was trapped in a serious existential crisis.
Theoretically, the crisis could have been addressed in a rational manner as well (such as through the continuation of the democratic process). But such processes evolve slowly and come to be seen as part of a reality that is pregnant with crisis. The answers to such a malaise often come in the shape of ‘conceptual reality.’ Empirical realty is the reality which one interacts with on a daily basis through the senses. Conceptual realty, on the other hand, is created and fuelled by certain ideological drivers or by what one thinks empirical reality should actually be. Conceptual reality is an imagined world but is stuffed with claims and physical paraphernalia to make it seem like empirical reality.
The promise of a ‘thousand-year-Reich’ by the Nazis was a fantasy that used physical symbols (such as a messiah-like leader, large rallies and public marches, uniforms, imposing architecture, etc.) to replace an empirical reality with a conceptual one. And when a person escapes into a conceptual reality, communicating with him or her on an empirical and rational level becomes next to impossible.
1983 copy of US government instructions to its embassies in Muslim countries on how to ‘politely’ deny that astronaut Neil Armstrong had converted to Islam
Conceptual reality is a product of – and mostly appeals to – people who have developed a persecution complex because they failed to find an identity or purpose in the empirical reality. So, they dismiss it and look to replace the ‘what is’ with the ‘what (they believe) should be’. This is fine if they can do so while remaining within the empirical reality. But the results can be disastrous when they reject empirical reality by losing themselves in building a conceptual reality. This reality is utopian. But when manifested physically, it quickly becomes dystopian, myopic and even delusional.
German historian Markus Daechsel has brilliantly demonstrated this in his book The Politics of Self Expression. Conceptual reality includes the projection of one’s religious and ideological beliefs on people that have little or nothing to do with them. Conceptual reality also entails projections that are often proliferated through populist media as a way to concretise conceptual reality.
Daechsel gave the example of certain pre-Partition Muslim and Hindu outfits who insisted that their members wear a uniform and hold parades. Daechsel writes that in the empirical reality, there was no war or revolution taking place there. But in the minds of the members of the outfits, there was such a situation (or there should have been). So, they created a conceptual reality in which there was revolutionary turmoil and these outfits were an integral part of it.
Daechsel also gave the example in which Hindus and Muslims, after feeling unable to challenge Western inventions and economics in the empirical reality, created a conceptual reality by claiming that whatever the West had achieved in the fields of science had already been achieved by ancient Hindus and/or is already present in Islamic texts.
In the late 1970s, tabloids in Indonesia, Malaysia and Egypt carried a front-page news about Neil Armstrong — the famous American astronaut who, in 1969, became the first man to walk on the moon. The news claimed that Armstrong had converted to Islam. Supposedly he had done so after confessing that when he was on the moon, he had heard the sound of the azaan, the Muslim call to prayer.
Conceptual reality can be a very emotional place
J.R. Hensen, in his 2006 biography of Armstrong, First Man, writes that by 1980 the news had been repeatedly carried and reproduced by tabloids in a number of Muslim-majority countries. So much so, that Armstrong began receiving invitations from Islamic organisations. The news continued to gather momentum in Muslim countries. Hensen writes that in 1983, on Armstrong’s request, the US State Department issued instructions to US embassies in Muslim countries asking them to “politely but firmly” communicate that Armstrong had not converted to Islam and that “he had no current plans or desire to travel overseas to participate in Islamic activities.”
Despite this, the belief that he had converted to Islam after hearing the azaan on the moon continued to do the rounds. In fact, this impression still pops up on YouTube channels and websites funded and run by various Islamic evangelical organisations. This is a case of how a conceptual reality (in this case, the power of ‘Eastern spirituality’) compelled a member of empirical reality (Western science and technology) to leave the latter and embrace the former.
In December 2018, former PM Imran Khan gleefully shared a 1988 video recording on Twitter of conservative Islamic scholar Dr Israr Ahmad. In it, Ahmad is seen claiming that according to one of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s doctors, the founder of Pakistan, during his last moments, spoke about the importance of imposing Shariah laws and the caliphate system in Pakistan.
This was conceptual reality coming into play to counter the reality in which Jinnah had done no such thing and was, in fact, a Westernised and pluralistic politician. This nature of projection of a conceptual reality actually goes further back.
The day after the founder of the modern Turkish republic Kemal Ataturk passed away in November 1939, one of the leading Urdu dailies in pre-Partition India, the Inqilab, reported that Ataturk, who had slipped into a coma before his death, “briefly woke up to convey a message to a servant of his.” Apparently, the staunch, life-long secularist who went the whole nine yards during his long rule to erase all cultural and political expressions associated with Turkey’s caliphate past, had briefly woken up from a coma to instruct his servant to tell the “millat-i-Islamiyya” to follow on the footsteps of the Khulafa-i-Rashideen.
Inqilab was a well-respected Urdu daily catering to the urban Muslim middle classes in pre-Partition India. In its 11 November 1939 issue, the paper went on to ‘report’ that Ataturk, after communicating his message to the servant, shouted “Allah is great!” and passed away – this time, forever. Quite clearly, unable to come to terms with the dispositions of Ataturk and Jinnah in the empirical reality, some created a conceptual reality where, in death, both dramatically became caliphate enthusiasts.
Let us now take a more contemporary example: the so-called ‘US conspiracy’ that ousted Imran Khan as PM. This is being repeated over and over again by Khan, his supporters and some half-a-dozen TV anchors. In empirical reality, the performance of Khan’s regime compelled its erstwhile pillar of support, the powerful military establishment, to begin distancing itself from a malfunctioning government. This created space for opposition parties to conjure enough strength in the Parliament to remove him through a no-confidence vote.
However, in the conceptual reality — that began being constructed by Khan when his ouster became a stark possibility — US and European powers conspired with opposition parties and pressurised the military to oust Khan because he wanted a sovereign foreign policy and was planning to construct an anti-West bloc in the region. There is no empirical evidence that substantiates the existence of a foreign conspiracy. But then, there is no place for anything empirical in a realm that is entirely conceptual.
In the US, folk in the ‘rural’ South felt exactly that. They felt their ideas and lifestyles were mocked by the ‘liberal elite’ for being backward, anti-modern and superstitious. Their resentment in this regard was brilliantly tapped by Donald Trump. And even though the Southern states in the US have the largest number of Christian fundamentalists and regular Church-goers in that country, they continued to support Trump despite his involvement in scandals both of the flesh and finances.
This brings us back to Nazi Germany and Bonhoeffer. A nation was left grief-stricken by a humiliating defeat (during the First World War). It was thus willing to suspend all critical thinking after the grief was first treated with a barrage of conspiracy theories (blaming the Jews), and then by a man who became a powerful conduit of these theories. His rise was the sum of collective resentment and grief. It was a negation of empirical reality where a society was trapped in a serious existential crisis.
Theoretically, the crisis could have been addressed in a rational manner as well (such as through the continuation of the democratic process). But such processes evolve slowly and come to be seen as part of a reality that is pregnant with crisis. The answers to such a malaise often come in the shape of ‘conceptual reality.’ Empirical realty is the reality which one interacts with on a daily basis through the senses. Conceptual realty, on the other hand, is created and fuelled by certain ideological drivers or by what one thinks empirical reality should actually be. Conceptual reality is an imagined world but is stuffed with claims and physical paraphernalia to make it seem like empirical reality.
The promise of a ‘thousand-year-Reich’ by the Nazis was a fantasy that used physical symbols (such as a messiah-like leader, large rallies and public marches, uniforms, imposing architecture, etc.) to replace an empirical reality with a conceptual one. And when a person escapes into a conceptual reality, communicating with him or her on an empirical and rational level becomes next to impossible.
1983 copy of US government instructions to its embassies in Muslim countries on how to ‘politely’ deny that astronaut Neil Armstrong had converted to IslamConceptual reality is a product of – and mostly appeals to – people who have developed a persecution complex because they failed to find an identity or purpose in the empirical reality. So, they dismiss it and look to replace the ‘what is’ with the ‘what (they believe) should be’. This is fine if they can do so while remaining within the empirical reality. But the results can be disastrous when they reject empirical reality by losing themselves in building a conceptual reality. This reality is utopian. But when manifested physically, it quickly becomes dystopian, myopic and even delusional.
German historian Markus Daechsel has brilliantly demonstrated this in his book The Politics of Self Expression. Conceptual reality includes the projection of one’s religious and ideological beliefs on people that have little or nothing to do with them. Conceptual reality also entails projections that are often proliferated through populist media as a way to concretise conceptual reality.
Daechsel gave the example of certain pre-Partition Muslim and Hindu outfits who insisted that their members wear a uniform and hold parades. Daechsel writes that in the empirical reality, there was no war or revolution taking place there. But in the minds of the members of the outfits, there was such a situation (or there should have been). So, they created a conceptual reality in which there was revolutionary turmoil and these outfits were an integral part of it.
Daechsel also gave the example in which Hindus and Muslims, after feeling unable to challenge Western inventions and economics in the empirical reality, created a conceptual reality by claiming that whatever the West had achieved in the fields of science had already been achieved by ancient Hindus and/or is already present in Islamic texts.
In the late 1970s, tabloids in Indonesia, Malaysia and Egypt carried a front-page news about Neil Armstrong — the famous American astronaut who, in 1969, became the first man to walk on the moon. The news claimed that Armstrong had converted to Islam. Supposedly he had done so after confessing that when he was on the moon, he had heard the sound of the azaan, the Muslim call to prayer.
Conceptual reality can be a very emotional placeJ.R. Hensen, in his 2006 biography of Armstrong, First Man, writes that by 1980 the news had been repeatedly carried and reproduced by tabloids in a number of Muslim-majority countries. So much so, that Armstrong began receiving invitations from Islamic organisations. The news continued to gather momentum in Muslim countries. Hensen writes that in 1983, on Armstrong’s request, the US State Department issued instructions to US embassies in Muslim countries asking them to “politely but firmly” communicate that Armstrong had not converted to Islam and that “he had no current plans or desire to travel overseas to participate in Islamic activities.”
Despite this, the belief that he had converted to Islam after hearing the azaan on the moon continued to do the rounds. In fact, this impression still pops up on YouTube channels and websites funded and run by various Islamic evangelical organisations. This is a case of how a conceptual reality (in this case, the power of ‘Eastern spirituality’) compelled a member of empirical reality (Western science and technology) to leave the latter and embrace the former.
In December 2018, former PM Imran Khan gleefully shared a 1988 video recording on Twitter of conservative Islamic scholar Dr Israr Ahmad. In it, Ahmad is seen claiming that according to one of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s doctors, the founder of Pakistan, during his last moments, spoke about the importance of imposing Shariah laws and the caliphate system in Pakistan.
This was conceptual reality coming into play to counter the reality in which Jinnah had done no such thing and was, in fact, a Westernised and pluralistic politician. This nature of projection of a conceptual reality actually goes further back.
The day after the founder of the modern Turkish republic Kemal Ataturk passed away in November 1939, one of the leading Urdu dailies in pre-Partition India, the Inqilab, reported that Ataturk, who had slipped into a coma before his death, “briefly woke up to convey a message to a servant of his.” Apparently, the staunch, life-long secularist who went the whole nine yards during his long rule to erase all cultural and political expressions associated with Turkey’s caliphate past, had briefly woken up from a coma to instruct his servant to tell the “millat-i-Islamiyya” to follow on the footsteps of the Khulafa-i-Rashideen.
Inqilab was a well-respected Urdu daily catering to the urban Muslim middle classes in pre-Partition India. In its 11 November 1939 issue, the paper went on to ‘report’ that Ataturk, after communicating his message to the servant, shouted “Allah is great!” and passed away – this time, forever. Quite clearly, unable to come to terms with the dispositions of Ataturk and Jinnah in the empirical reality, some created a conceptual reality where, in death, both dramatically became caliphate enthusiasts.
Let us now take a more contemporary example: the so-called ‘US conspiracy’ that ousted Imran Khan as PM. This is being repeated over and over again by Khan, his supporters and some half-a-dozen TV anchors. In empirical reality, the performance of Khan’s regime compelled its erstwhile pillar of support, the powerful military establishment, to begin distancing itself from a malfunctioning government. This created space for opposition parties to conjure enough strength in the Parliament to remove him through a no-confidence vote.
However, in the conceptual reality — that began being constructed by Khan when his ouster became a stark possibility — US and European powers conspired with opposition parties and pressurised the military to oust Khan because he wanted a sovereign foreign policy and was planning to construct an anti-West bloc in the region. There is no empirical evidence that substantiates the existence of a foreign conspiracy. But then, there is no place for anything empirical in a realm that is entirely conceptual.
Tuesday 12 April 2022
Friday 11 March 2022
Friday 21 January 2022
Pakistan: Towards a modern Riyasat-e-Madina
Nadeem F Paracha in The Friday Times
On January 17, an article written by PM Imran Khan appeared in some English and Urdu dailies. In it, the Pakistani prime minister shared his thoughts on ‘Riyasat-e-Madinah,’ or the first ‘Islamic state’ that came into being in early 7th-century Arabia. PM Khan wrote that Pakistan will need to adopt the moral and spiritual tenor of that state if the country was to thrive.
Even before he came to power in 2018, Khan had been promising to turn Pakistan into a modern-day Riyasat-e-Madinah. He first began to formulate this as a political message in 2011. However, this idea is not a new one. It has been posited previously as well by some politicians, and especially, by certain Islamist ideologues. Neither is there any newness in the process used by Khan to arrive at this idea. Khan took the same route as ZA Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) took decades ago. In 1967, when the PPP was formed, its ‘foundation documents’ — authored by Bhutto and the Marxist intellectual J.A. Rahim — described the party as a socialist entity. To neutralise the expected criticism from Islamist groups, the documents declared that democracy was the party’s policy, socialism was its economy, and Islam was its faith.
The documents then added that by “socialism” the party meant the kind of democratic-socialism practiced in Scandinavian countries such as Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland; and through which these countries had constructed robust welfare states. But this did not impress Islamist outfits, especially the Jamat-i-Islami (JI). It declared the PPP as a party of ‘atheists.’ In 1969, JI’s chief Abul Ala Maududi, authored a fatwa declaring socialism as an atheistic idea. The next year, when the PPP drafted its first ever manifesto, the party explained that its aim to strive for democracy, a “classless society,” economic equality and social justice “flows from the the political and economic ethics of Islam.”
After coming to power in December 1971, the PPP began using the term “Musawat-e-Muhammadi” (social and economic equality preached and practiced by Islam’s holy Prophet [PBUH]). In 1973, a prominent member of the PPP, Sheikh Ahmed Rashid, declared that the economic system that Islam advocated and the one that was implemented in the earliest state of Islam was socialist. When a parliament member belonging to an Islamist party demanded that Islamic rituals be made compulsory by law “because Pakistan was made in the name of Islam,” Rashid responded by saying that the country was not made to implement rituals, but to adopt an “Islamic economy” which was “inherently socialist.”
Now let us see just how close all this is to the route that PM Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) took in formulating their concept of Riyasat-i-Madinah. In 2011, PTI and Khan suddenly rose to prominence as a party of urban middle-classes and the youth. In his speeches between 2011 and 2015, Khan was quite vocal in his appreciation of the Scandinavian welfare states. But, often, this appreciation was immediately followed by Khan declaring that the non-Muslim Scandinavians had uncannily followed Islamic ideals of social justice and economic equality better than the Muslims had (or do). Of course, he did not mention that Scandinavian countries are some of the most secular nation-states in the world, and that a strong secular-humanist disposition of their polities and politics played a major role in the construction of the welfare states that Khan was in such awe of.
As the 2018 elections drew near, Khan began to explain the concept of the European welfare state as a modern-day reflection of the 7th-century state that was formed in the city of Madinah. This notion was close to Bhutto’s Musawat-e-Muhamadi. But Bhutto and his PPP had claimed that the Islamic state in Madinah had a socialist economy, and that this alone should be adopted by Pakistan, because it was still relevant in the 20th century. This position had given the PPP enough space to remain secular in most other areas. But to Khan, if the Scandinavian model of the welfare state is adopted, and then supplemented by Islam’s moral, spiritual and political ethos in all fields and areas, this would result in the modern-day re-enactment of a 7th-century ‘Islamic state.’ Khan’s idea in this this context is thus more theocratic in nature.
Khan’s concept seemed to be emerging from how Pakistan was imagined by some pro-Jinnah ulema during the 1946 elections in British India. To Mr. Jinnah’s party, the All India Muslim League (AIML), the culture of Indian Muslims largely mirrored the culture of Muslims outside South Asia, particularly in Arabia and even Persia. But the politics and economics of India’s Muslim were grounded in India and/or in the territory that they had settled in 500 years ago. Therefore, the Muslim-majority state that the League was looking to create was to be established in this territory. The League’s Muslim nationalism was thus territorial. It was not to be a universal caliphate or a theocracy with imperial and expansionist aims. It was to be a sovereign political enclave in South Asia where the Muslim minority of India would become a majority, thus benefiting from the economic advantages of majoritarianism.
However, whereas this narrative – more or less – worked in attracting the votes of the Muslims of Bengal and Sindh during the 1946 polls, the League found itself struggling in Punjab, which was a bastion of the multicultural Union Party. The Congress, too, was strong here. Various radical Islamist groups were also headquartered in Punjab. They had rejected the League’s call for a separate country. They believed that it would turn the remaining Muslims in India into an even more vulnerable minority. The Islamists viewed the League as a secular outfit with westernised notions of nationalism and an impious leadership.
This is when some ulema switched sides and decided to support the League in Punjab. This is also when overt Islamist rhetoric was, for the first time, used by the League through these ulema, mainly in Punjab’s rural areas. The ulema began to portray Jinnah as a ‘holy figure,’ even though very few rural Punjabis had actually seen him. The well-known Islamic scholar Shabbir Ahmed Usmani, who left the anti-Jinnah Jamiat Ulema Islam Hind (JUIH) to support the League, began to explain the yet-to-be-born Pakistan as a “naya Madinah,” or new Madinah.
By this, Usmani meant the creation of a state that would be based on the model of the 7th century state in Madina. But, much to the disappointed of the pro-League ulema, the model adopted by Pakistan was largely secular and the Islam that the state espoused was carved from the ideas of ‘Muslim modernists’ such as the reformer Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (d.1898) and the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (d.1938), who urged Muslims to look forward with the aid of an evolved and rational understanding of Islam, instead of looking backwards to a romanticised past.
***
Khan often spoke about Riyasat-i-Madinah before he became PM. But the frequency of him doing so has increased in the last year and a half – or when his government began to truly unravel. Today, it is in deep crises and expected to either be eased out by the Parliament, or knocked out in a ruder manner before it completes its term in 2023. The economy is in shambles, inflation and unemployment rates are climbing, and so are tensions between the government and its erstwhile patrons, the military establishment.
Amidst the growing crises, Khan has spoken more about morality, ‘westernisation,’ and Islamophobia than on how his government is planning to address the mounting economic problems that the country is facing, and the consequential political quagmire that his government has plunged into. Yet, he still somehow found a reason – or for that matter, the audacity – to lecture the polity on the moral and spiritual principles of Riyasat-i-Madinah, or the kind of morally upright and pious state and society that he is dreaming of constructing. One wonders if he is planning to do this with the large IMF loans that his government has had to acquire to keep the country from going bankrupt?
Khan’s article on Riyasat-i-Madinah was censured by the opposition parties. They saw it as a political ploy by him to distract the people from the failures of his government. There is evidence that a PR company hired by Khan has been advising him to raise the frequency of his Islamic rhetoric. The purpose behind this could be what the opposition is claiming. It might also be about something personal. But for men such as Khan, the personal often becomes the political.
According to political scientist David O’Connell, it is crisis, not political convenience, that more often brings out religion in politicians. In his book God Wills It, O’Connell argues that when public opinion of political leaders begins to dwindle, or when a head of state or government is threatened, that is when one sees religious rhetoric appear.
In 1976, when the Bhutto regime was struggling to address economic problems caused by an international oil crisis that had pushed up inflation, and due to the regime’s own mismanagement of important economic sectors that it had nationalised, Bhutto decided to organise a grand ‘Seerat Conference’ in Karachi. The conference was organised to discuss and highlight the life and deeds of Islam’s Prophet (PBUH) and how these could be adopted to regenerate the lost glory of the Islamic civilisation. Khan did exactly the same, late last year.
Bhutto’s intended audience in this respect was the Islamists who he had uncannily emboldened by agreeing to their demand of constitutionally ousting the Ahmadiyya community from the fold of Islam. He believed that this would neutralise the threat that the Islamists were posing to his ‘socialist’ government. The demand had risen when the Islamist groups in the Parliament had asked the government to provide the constitution with the provision to define what or who was a Muslim. In 1973, the government had refused to add any such provision in the constitution. But the very next year in 1974, when a clash between a group of Ahmadiyya youth and cadres of the student-wing of JI caused outrage amongst Islamist parties, they tabled a bill in the National Assembly which sought to constitutionally declare the Ahmadiyya as a non-Muslim community.
Bhutto threatened to unleash the military against anti-Ahmadiyya agitators who had besieged various cities of Punjab. According to Rafi Raza, who, at the time, was a special assistant to the prime minister, Bhutto insisted that the Parliament was no place to discuss theological matters. In his book ZA Bhutto and Pakistan, Raza wrote that the Islamist parties retorted by reminding the PM that in 1973 the constitution had declared Pakistan an ‘Islamic republic’ – and therefore, parliamentarians in an Islamic republic had every right to discuss religious matters.
After much violence in Punjab and commotion in the National Assembly, Bhutto capitulated and allowed the bill to be passed. This also meant that parliamentarians now had the constitutional prerogative to define who was or wasn’t a Muslim. This would eventually lead to the 1985 amendments in Articles 62 and 63 of the constitution, proclaiming that only ‘pious’ Muslims can be members of the Parliament and heads of state and government. The man who had initiated this, the dictator Zia-ul-Haq, had already declared himself ‘Sadiq and Amin’ (honest and faithful).
In 1976, Bhutto’s Islamist opponents were deriding him as a ‘bad Muslim,’ because he had ‘loose morals,’ was an ‘alcoholic,’ and that his government was as bad at fixing the economy as it was in curbing the “rising trend of obscenity and immorality in the society.” So, with the Seerat Conference, Bhutto set out to exhibit his Islamic credentials and, perhaps, to also demonstrate that his regime may be struggling to fix the economy, but, at least, it was being headed by a ‘true believer.’ But this didn’t save him from being toppled in a military coup that was triggered by his opponents who, in 1977, had poured out to agitate and demand a government based on Shariah laws.
Khan is on a similar path. He had been ‘reforming’ himself ever since he retired in 1992 as a cricketing star, a darling of tabloid press, and a ‘playboy.’ From a lifestyle liberal who had spent much of his time stationed in the UK, playing cricket and hobnobbing with European and American socialites, he gradually began to refigure his image. After retirement from cricket at age 40, he was mostly seen with prominent military men such as General Hamid Gul, who had once been extremely close to the dictator Zia-ul-Haq.
Khan also began to have one-on-one meetings with certain ulema and Islamic evangelical groups. Khan’s aim was to bury his colourful past and re-emerge as an incorruptible born-again Muslim. But his past was not that easy to get rid of. It kept being brought up by the tabloids and also by Nawaz Sharif’s centre-right PML-N, which began to see him as a threat because Khan was trying to appeal to Sharif’s constituency. Sharif was a conservative and a protégé of Zia. In 1998, his second regime was struggling to fix an economy that had begun to spiral down after Pakistan conducted its first nuclear tests. This triggered economic sanctions against Pakistan, imposed by its major donors and trading partners, the US and European countries.
The crisis saw Nawaz formulate his own ‘Islamic’ shenanigans. His crusades against obscenity were coupled by his desire to be declared ‘the commander of the faithful’ (amir-ul-mominin). Instead, he was brought down by a coup in 1999. Unlike the coup against the Bhutto regime which was planed by a reactionary general, the one against Nawaz (by General Musharraf) was apparently staged to fix the economy and roll back the influence that the Islamists had enjoyed, especially during the Zia and Nawaz regimes.
Khan’s party initially supported the coup against Nawaz. But it pulled back its support when the PTI was routed in the 2002 elections. Khan began criticising Musharraf as an “American stooge” and “fake liberal.” Musharraf responded by claiming that Khan had asked him that he be made the prime minister. Musharraf then added that Khan’s ideas were “like those of a mullah.” One wonders whether this statement had annoyed Khan or delighted him. Because remember, he was trying his best to bury his glitzy past and convince everyone that he was now a pious gentleman who wanted to employ ‘true Islamic principles’ in the country’s politics and polity.
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But weren’t many of these ‘principles’ already made part of the country’s constitution and penal code by the likes of ZA Bhutto, Zia and Nawaz?
From 1974 onwards, Pakistan started to become what the Canadian political scientist Ran Hirschl described as a “constitutional theocracy.” The phrase was initially coined by the French political scientist Oliver Roy for Iran’s post-revolution constitution. Hirschl expanded it in a 2010 book in which he studied the increasing Islamisation of constitutions in certain Muslim countries, and the problems these constitutions were facing in coming to terms with various contemporary political, legislative and social challenges.
Constitutional theocracies empower the Islamists even if they are a minority in the Parliament. This is quite apparent in Pakistan. According to Syed Adnan Hussain, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Saint Mary’s University, even though most Islamists scoff at democracy, there were also some prominent Islamist ideologues who posited that constitutions, judicial review, legal codes and a form of democratic election could be integrated into an Islamic state. Abul Ala Maududi and Maulana Taqi Usmani were two such ideologues. They agreed to use whatever means were available to turn Pakistan into an Islamic state. And these included democratic institutions, processes and the constitution.
Involvement of the ulema in drafting the 1956 constitution was nominal, even though the constitution did declare the country an Islamic republic. Their contribution in drafting the 1962 constitution was extremely minimal. And even though, there were just 18 members of various Islamist parties in the National Assembly which came into being after 1971, their input increased during the drafting of the 1973 constitution. Their influence continued to grow. By 1991, the constitution had been greatly Islamised.
Therefore, even the more electorally strong non-Islamist parties have had to add various Islamist ideas in their armoury because as the American author Shadi Hamid wrote: “Private religious devotion (to Islamists) is inseparable from political action. Islam is to be applied in daily life, including in the public realm. And to fail to do so is to shirk one’s obligations towards God. Faith, or at least their faith, gives (the Islamists) a built-in political advantage.” It is this advantage that the non-Islamist politicians want to usurp. They frequently find themselves pressed to continue positioning themselves as equally pious champions of Islam. Khan is doing exactly that. Bhutto did so in the second half of his rule, and Nawaz during his second stint as PM. But, of course, this does not come naturally to non-Islamists. And the Islamists are never convinced. In fact, they see it as a way by non-Islamists to neutralise the political influence of the Islamists. Yet, in times of crisis, many non-Islamist heads of government in the country have curiously leaned towards religion, believing that by adopting an ‘Islamic’ demeanour, they would be able to pacify public anger towards their failing regimes.
This can be a desperate and last-ditch ploy to survive a fall. But on occasion, it can also be about a personal existentialist crisis – which makes it even worse. I believe Khan is a case in point. Indeed, there is an element of political amorality in his increasingly fervent moral rhetoric and religious exhibitionism. According to the British journalist and documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, as the world continues to become more complicated than ever, political leaders are increasingly struggling to comprehend today’s complexities and, thus, failing to formulate and provide a coherent vision of the future. They are attempting to define the complexity of today’s realities in an overtly simple manner.
Driven by a demand to simplify modern-day complexities, the leaderships, instead of trying to figure out new ways forward, have begun to look backwards, promising to bring forth a past that was apparently better and less complicated. But the recollection of such pasts is often not very accurate, because it involves a nostalgia which is referred to as ‘Anemoia’, or a nostalgia for a time one has never known. A past that is not a lived experience. A past that is largely imagined.
Khan likes to talk about the 7th-century state in Madinah. But as the anthropologist Irfan Ahmad and the historian Patricia Crone have demonstrated, there was no clear concept of a state anywhere in pre-modern times, east or west. The idea of the state as we know it today, began to emerge after the 17th century and matured from the 19th century onwards. It is a European concept. What is more, according to Ahmad, the idea of an Islamic state is a 20th century construct. It is derived from an imagined memory. Pre-modern states were vastly different than what they became from the 19th century onwards. States in pre-modern times had extremely limited capacity or resources to regulate every aspect of life.
They were impersonal and mostly erected to collect taxes from the subjects so that landed elites and monarchs could sustain standing armies, mount their wars, and retain power. A majority of the subjects were left to their own devices, as long as they did not rebel. Conquered areas were mostly put in the hands of local leaders on the condition that they would remain loyal to the conquers. Ancient states in Muslim regions and in the regions that the Muslims conquered were no different. But 20th-century Islamic ideologues began to speak of creating Islamic states. According to Ahmad, the idea of an Islamic state was the result of how the concept of the modern state had begun to fascinate ideologues and politicians in India.
The Congress began to talk about an Indian state, the League began to work towards a Muslim-majority state, the socialists towards a socialist state, and Islamists like Maududi began musing about an Islamic state. Shabir Usmani and Maududi projected the idea and reality of an all-encompassing modern state as a way to explain the functions of the 7th-century Madinah state, as if it had functioned like a modern state, regulating the lives of its subjects with coded laws, interventions, constitutions and through other established state institutions. This was not the case. What is more, there was little or no scholarship in the premodern Muslim world on political ideas or philosophy. These would only begin to appear in the 14th century in the works of Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun.
PM Khan is thus dealing in anemoia. He, like 20th-century critics of modernity, is raging against its supposedly cold and mechanical disposition. But instead of offering something new, he is investing more effort in trying to revive romanticised pasts which did not exist in the shape that they are often remembered as. Khan’s failure and incompetence to address the mounting problems of the here and the now, and his insistence on creating a theocratic potpourri of schemes already exhausted by Islamist ideologues – and by heads of state and government such as Bhutto, Zia and Nawaz – may as well be the last nail in the coffin of a much-exploited idea that is almost entirely based on a politically motivated and largely imagined memory.
On January 17, an article written by PM Imran Khan appeared in some English and Urdu dailies. In it, the Pakistani prime minister shared his thoughts on ‘Riyasat-e-Madinah,’ or the first ‘Islamic state’ that came into being in early 7th-century Arabia. PM Khan wrote that Pakistan will need to adopt the moral and spiritual tenor of that state if the country was to thrive.
Even before he came to power in 2018, Khan had been promising to turn Pakistan into a modern-day Riyasat-e-Madinah. He first began to formulate this as a political message in 2011. However, this idea is not a new one. It has been posited previously as well by some politicians, and especially, by certain Islamist ideologues. Neither is there any newness in the process used by Khan to arrive at this idea. Khan took the same route as ZA Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) took decades ago. In 1967, when the PPP was formed, its ‘foundation documents’ — authored by Bhutto and the Marxist intellectual J.A. Rahim — described the party as a socialist entity. To neutralise the expected criticism from Islamist groups, the documents declared that democracy was the party’s policy, socialism was its economy, and Islam was its faith.
The documents then added that by “socialism” the party meant the kind of democratic-socialism practiced in Scandinavian countries such as Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland; and through which these countries had constructed robust welfare states. But this did not impress Islamist outfits, especially the Jamat-i-Islami (JI). It declared the PPP as a party of ‘atheists.’ In 1969, JI’s chief Abul Ala Maududi, authored a fatwa declaring socialism as an atheistic idea. The next year, when the PPP drafted its first ever manifesto, the party explained that its aim to strive for democracy, a “classless society,” economic equality and social justice “flows from the the political and economic ethics of Islam.”
After coming to power in December 1971, the PPP began using the term “Musawat-e-Muhammadi” (social and economic equality preached and practiced by Islam’s holy Prophet [PBUH]). In 1973, a prominent member of the PPP, Sheikh Ahmed Rashid, declared that the economic system that Islam advocated and the one that was implemented in the earliest state of Islam was socialist. When a parliament member belonging to an Islamist party demanded that Islamic rituals be made compulsory by law “because Pakistan was made in the name of Islam,” Rashid responded by saying that the country was not made to implement rituals, but to adopt an “Islamic economy” which was “inherently socialist.”
Now let us see just how close all this is to the route that PM Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) took in formulating their concept of Riyasat-i-Madinah. In 2011, PTI and Khan suddenly rose to prominence as a party of urban middle-classes and the youth. In his speeches between 2011 and 2015, Khan was quite vocal in his appreciation of the Scandinavian welfare states. But, often, this appreciation was immediately followed by Khan declaring that the non-Muslim Scandinavians had uncannily followed Islamic ideals of social justice and economic equality better than the Muslims had (or do). Of course, he did not mention that Scandinavian countries are some of the most secular nation-states in the world, and that a strong secular-humanist disposition of their polities and politics played a major role in the construction of the welfare states that Khan was in such awe of.
As the 2018 elections drew near, Khan began to explain the concept of the European welfare state as a modern-day reflection of the 7th-century state that was formed in the city of Madinah. This notion was close to Bhutto’s Musawat-e-Muhamadi. But Bhutto and his PPP had claimed that the Islamic state in Madinah had a socialist economy, and that this alone should be adopted by Pakistan, because it was still relevant in the 20th century. This position had given the PPP enough space to remain secular in most other areas. But to Khan, if the Scandinavian model of the welfare state is adopted, and then supplemented by Islam’s moral, spiritual and political ethos in all fields and areas, this would result in the modern-day re-enactment of a 7th-century ‘Islamic state.’ Khan’s idea in this this context is thus more theocratic in nature.
Khan’s concept seemed to be emerging from how Pakistan was imagined by some pro-Jinnah ulema during the 1946 elections in British India. To Mr. Jinnah’s party, the All India Muslim League (AIML), the culture of Indian Muslims largely mirrored the culture of Muslims outside South Asia, particularly in Arabia and even Persia. But the politics and economics of India’s Muslim were grounded in India and/or in the territory that they had settled in 500 years ago. Therefore, the Muslim-majority state that the League was looking to create was to be established in this territory. The League’s Muslim nationalism was thus territorial. It was not to be a universal caliphate or a theocracy with imperial and expansionist aims. It was to be a sovereign political enclave in South Asia where the Muslim minority of India would become a majority, thus benefiting from the economic advantages of majoritarianism.
However, whereas this narrative – more or less – worked in attracting the votes of the Muslims of Bengal and Sindh during the 1946 polls, the League found itself struggling in Punjab, which was a bastion of the multicultural Union Party. The Congress, too, was strong here. Various radical Islamist groups were also headquartered in Punjab. They had rejected the League’s call for a separate country. They believed that it would turn the remaining Muslims in India into an even more vulnerable minority. The Islamists viewed the League as a secular outfit with westernised notions of nationalism and an impious leadership.
This is when some ulema switched sides and decided to support the League in Punjab. This is also when overt Islamist rhetoric was, for the first time, used by the League through these ulema, mainly in Punjab’s rural areas. The ulema began to portray Jinnah as a ‘holy figure,’ even though very few rural Punjabis had actually seen him. The well-known Islamic scholar Shabbir Ahmed Usmani, who left the anti-Jinnah Jamiat Ulema Islam Hind (JUIH) to support the League, began to explain the yet-to-be-born Pakistan as a “naya Madinah,” or new Madinah.
By this, Usmani meant the creation of a state that would be based on the model of the 7th century state in Madina. But, much to the disappointed of the pro-League ulema, the model adopted by Pakistan was largely secular and the Islam that the state espoused was carved from the ideas of ‘Muslim modernists’ such as the reformer Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (d.1898) and the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (d.1938), who urged Muslims to look forward with the aid of an evolved and rational understanding of Islam, instead of looking backwards to a romanticised past.
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Khan often spoke about Riyasat-i-Madinah before he became PM. But the frequency of him doing so has increased in the last year and a half – or when his government began to truly unravel. Today, it is in deep crises and expected to either be eased out by the Parliament, or knocked out in a ruder manner before it completes its term in 2023. The economy is in shambles, inflation and unemployment rates are climbing, and so are tensions between the government and its erstwhile patrons, the military establishment.
Amidst the growing crises, Khan has spoken more about morality, ‘westernisation,’ and Islamophobia than on how his government is planning to address the mounting economic problems that the country is facing, and the consequential political quagmire that his government has plunged into. Yet, he still somehow found a reason – or for that matter, the audacity – to lecture the polity on the moral and spiritual principles of Riyasat-i-Madinah, or the kind of morally upright and pious state and society that he is dreaming of constructing. One wonders if he is planning to do this with the large IMF loans that his government has had to acquire to keep the country from going bankrupt?
Khan’s article on Riyasat-i-Madinah was censured by the opposition parties. They saw it as a political ploy by him to distract the people from the failures of his government. There is evidence that a PR company hired by Khan has been advising him to raise the frequency of his Islamic rhetoric. The purpose behind this could be what the opposition is claiming. It might also be about something personal. But for men such as Khan, the personal often becomes the political.
According to political scientist David O’Connell, it is crisis, not political convenience, that more often brings out religion in politicians. In his book God Wills It, O’Connell argues that when public opinion of political leaders begins to dwindle, or when a head of state or government is threatened, that is when one sees religious rhetoric appear.
In 1976, when the Bhutto regime was struggling to address economic problems caused by an international oil crisis that had pushed up inflation, and due to the regime’s own mismanagement of important economic sectors that it had nationalised, Bhutto decided to organise a grand ‘Seerat Conference’ in Karachi. The conference was organised to discuss and highlight the life and deeds of Islam’s Prophet (PBUH) and how these could be adopted to regenerate the lost glory of the Islamic civilisation. Khan did exactly the same, late last year.
Bhutto’s intended audience in this respect was the Islamists who he had uncannily emboldened by agreeing to their demand of constitutionally ousting the Ahmadiyya community from the fold of Islam. He believed that this would neutralise the threat that the Islamists were posing to his ‘socialist’ government. The demand had risen when the Islamist groups in the Parliament had asked the government to provide the constitution with the provision to define what or who was a Muslim. In 1973, the government had refused to add any such provision in the constitution. But the very next year in 1974, when a clash between a group of Ahmadiyya youth and cadres of the student-wing of JI caused outrage amongst Islamist parties, they tabled a bill in the National Assembly which sought to constitutionally declare the Ahmadiyya as a non-Muslim community.
Bhutto threatened to unleash the military against anti-Ahmadiyya agitators who had besieged various cities of Punjab. According to Rafi Raza, who, at the time, was a special assistant to the prime minister, Bhutto insisted that the Parliament was no place to discuss theological matters. In his book ZA Bhutto and Pakistan, Raza wrote that the Islamist parties retorted by reminding the PM that in 1973 the constitution had declared Pakistan an ‘Islamic republic’ – and therefore, parliamentarians in an Islamic republic had every right to discuss religious matters.
After much violence in Punjab and commotion in the National Assembly, Bhutto capitulated and allowed the bill to be passed. This also meant that parliamentarians now had the constitutional prerogative to define who was or wasn’t a Muslim. This would eventually lead to the 1985 amendments in Articles 62 and 63 of the constitution, proclaiming that only ‘pious’ Muslims can be members of the Parliament and heads of state and government. The man who had initiated this, the dictator Zia-ul-Haq, had already declared himself ‘Sadiq and Amin’ (honest and faithful).
In 1976, Bhutto’s Islamist opponents were deriding him as a ‘bad Muslim,’ because he had ‘loose morals,’ was an ‘alcoholic,’ and that his government was as bad at fixing the economy as it was in curbing the “rising trend of obscenity and immorality in the society.” So, with the Seerat Conference, Bhutto set out to exhibit his Islamic credentials and, perhaps, to also demonstrate that his regime may be struggling to fix the economy, but, at least, it was being headed by a ‘true believer.’ But this didn’t save him from being toppled in a military coup that was triggered by his opponents who, in 1977, had poured out to agitate and demand a government based on Shariah laws.
Khan is on a similar path. He had been ‘reforming’ himself ever since he retired in 1992 as a cricketing star, a darling of tabloid press, and a ‘playboy.’ From a lifestyle liberal who had spent much of his time stationed in the UK, playing cricket and hobnobbing with European and American socialites, he gradually began to refigure his image. After retirement from cricket at age 40, he was mostly seen with prominent military men such as General Hamid Gul, who had once been extremely close to the dictator Zia-ul-Haq.
Khan also began to have one-on-one meetings with certain ulema and Islamic evangelical groups. Khan’s aim was to bury his colourful past and re-emerge as an incorruptible born-again Muslim. But his past was not that easy to get rid of. It kept being brought up by the tabloids and also by Nawaz Sharif’s centre-right PML-N, which began to see him as a threat because Khan was trying to appeal to Sharif’s constituency. Sharif was a conservative and a protégé of Zia. In 1998, his second regime was struggling to fix an economy that had begun to spiral down after Pakistan conducted its first nuclear tests. This triggered economic sanctions against Pakistan, imposed by its major donors and trading partners, the US and European countries.
The crisis saw Nawaz formulate his own ‘Islamic’ shenanigans. His crusades against obscenity were coupled by his desire to be declared ‘the commander of the faithful’ (amir-ul-mominin). Instead, he was brought down by a coup in 1999. Unlike the coup against the Bhutto regime which was planed by a reactionary general, the one against Nawaz (by General Musharraf) was apparently staged to fix the economy and roll back the influence that the Islamists had enjoyed, especially during the Zia and Nawaz regimes.
Khan’s party initially supported the coup against Nawaz. But it pulled back its support when the PTI was routed in the 2002 elections. Khan began criticising Musharraf as an “American stooge” and “fake liberal.” Musharraf responded by claiming that Khan had asked him that he be made the prime minister. Musharraf then added that Khan’s ideas were “like those of a mullah.” One wonders whether this statement had annoyed Khan or delighted him. Because remember, he was trying his best to bury his glitzy past and convince everyone that he was now a pious gentleman who wanted to employ ‘true Islamic principles’ in the country’s politics and polity.
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But weren’t many of these ‘principles’ already made part of the country’s constitution and penal code by the likes of ZA Bhutto, Zia and Nawaz?
From 1974 onwards, Pakistan started to become what the Canadian political scientist Ran Hirschl described as a “constitutional theocracy.” The phrase was initially coined by the French political scientist Oliver Roy for Iran’s post-revolution constitution. Hirschl expanded it in a 2010 book in which he studied the increasing Islamisation of constitutions in certain Muslim countries, and the problems these constitutions were facing in coming to terms with various contemporary political, legislative and social challenges.
Constitutional theocracies empower the Islamists even if they are a minority in the Parliament. This is quite apparent in Pakistan. According to Syed Adnan Hussain, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Saint Mary’s University, even though most Islamists scoff at democracy, there were also some prominent Islamist ideologues who posited that constitutions, judicial review, legal codes and a form of democratic election could be integrated into an Islamic state. Abul Ala Maududi and Maulana Taqi Usmani were two such ideologues. They agreed to use whatever means were available to turn Pakistan into an Islamic state. And these included democratic institutions, processes and the constitution.
Involvement of the ulema in drafting the 1956 constitution was nominal, even though the constitution did declare the country an Islamic republic. Their contribution in drafting the 1962 constitution was extremely minimal. And even though, there were just 18 members of various Islamist parties in the National Assembly which came into being after 1971, their input increased during the drafting of the 1973 constitution. Their influence continued to grow. By 1991, the constitution had been greatly Islamised.
Therefore, even the more electorally strong non-Islamist parties have had to add various Islamist ideas in their armoury because as the American author Shadi Hamid wrote: “Private religious devotion (to Islamists) is inseparable from political action. Islam is to be applied in daily life, including in the public realm. And to fail to do so is to shirk one’s obligations towards God. Faith, or at least their faith, gives (the Islamists) a built-in political advantage.” It is this advantage that the non-Islamist politicians want to usurp. They frequently find themselves pressed to continue positioning themselves as equally pious champions of Islam. Khan is doing exactly that. Bhutto did so in the second half of his rule, and Nawaz during his second stint as PM. But, of course, this does not come naturally to non-Islamists. And the Islamists are never convinced. In fact, they see it as a way by non-Islamists to neutralise the political influence of the Islamists. Yet, in times of crisis, many non-Islamist heads of government in the country have curiously leaned towards religion, believing that by adopting an ‘Islamic’ demeanour, they would be able to pacify public anger towards their failing regimes.
This can be a desperate and last-ditch ploy to survive a fall. But on occasion, it can also be about a personal existentialist crisis – which makes it even worse. I believe Khan is a case in point. Indeed, there is an element of political amorality in his increasingly fervent moral rhetoric and religious exhibitionism. According to the British journalist and documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, as the world continues to become more complicated than ever, political leaders are increasingly struggling to comprehend today’s complexities and, thus, failing to formulate and provide a coherent vision of the future. They are attempting to define the complexity of today’s realities in an overtly simple manner.
Driven by a demand to simplify modern-day complexities, the leaderships, instead of trying to figure out new ways forward, have begun to look backwards, promising to bring forth a past that was apparently better and less complicated. But the recollection of such pasts is often not very accurate, because it involves a nostalgia which is referred to as ‘Anemoia’, or a nostalgia for a time one has never known. A past that is not a lived experience. A past that is largely imagined.
Khan likes to talk about the 7th-century state in Madinah. But as the anthropologist Irfan Ahmad and the historian Patricia Crone have demonstrated, there was no clear concept of a state anywhere in pre-modern times, east or west. The idea of the state as we know it today, began to emerge after the 17th century and matured from the 19th century onwards. It is a European concept. What is more, according to Ahmad, the idea of an Islamic state is a 20th century construct. It is derived from an imagined memory. Pre-modern states were vastly different than what they became from the 19th century onwards. States in pre-modern times had extremely limited capacity or resources to regulate every aspect of life.
They were impersonal and mostly erected to collect taxes from the subjects so that landed elites and monarchs could sustain standing armies, mount their wars, and retain power. A majority of the subjects were left to their own devices, as long as they did not rebel. Conquered areas were mostly put in the hands of local leaders on the condition that they would remain loyal to the conquers. Ancient states in Muslim regions and in the regions that the Muslims conquered were no different. But 20th-century Islamic ideologues began to speak of creating Islamic states. According to Ahmad, the idea of an Islamic state was the result of how the concept of the modern state had begun to fascinate ideologues and politicians in India.
The Congress began to talk about an Indian state, the League began to work towards a Muslim-majority state, the socialists towards a socialist state, and Islamists like Maududi began musing about an Islamic state. Shabir Usmani and Maududi projected the idea and reality of an all-encompassing modern state as a way to explain the functions of the 7th-century Madinah state, as if it had functioned like a modern state, regulating the lives of its subjects with coded laws, interventions, constitutions and through other established state institutions. This was not the case. What is more, there was little or no scholarship in the premodern Muslim world on political ideas or philosophy. These would only begin to appear in the 14th century in the works of Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun.
PM Khan is thus dealing in anemoia. He, like 20th-century critics of modernity, is raging against its supposedly cold and mechanical disposition. But instead of offering something new, he is investing more effort in trying to revive romanticised pasts which did not exist in the shape that they are often remembered as. Khan’s failure and incompetence to address the mounting problems of the here and the now, and his insistence on creating a theocratic potpourri of schemes already exhausted by Islamist ideologues – and by heads of state and government such as Bhutto, Zia and Nawaz – may as well be the last nail in the coffin of a much-exploited idea that is almost entirely based on a politically motivated and largely imagined memory.
Friday 14 January 2022
Pakistan's Brave Judge
Najam Sethi in The Friday Times
Justice Athar Minallah, Chief Justice of the Islamabad High Court, has made history. He has ordered the Capital Development Authority (CDA) to knock down the Pakistan Navy’s Sailing Club House on the edge of the Rawal Dam in Rawalpindi as well as the Monal Restaurant in Islamabad and seize the Margalla Greens Golf Club in the Capital, because these have been built illegally on land belonging to the Margalla Hills National Park. He has thus outlawed the military’s claim to about 8000 acres of such land. Most significantly, the good judge has expressed the view that the Pakistan Navy does not have the authority to undertake a real estate development venture, nor the right to lend its name to any such enterprise.
Naturally, this judgment has warmed the cockles of millions of Pakistani hearts even as it has raised the hackles of powerful people lording it over unaccountable state institutions which have similar illegal stakes in real estate across the country. For starters, the Auditor General of Pakistan has revealed a list of 79 “encroachments” on the land of the Margalla Hills National Park, noting that several government bodies – CDA, Metropolitan Corporation Islamabad, Islamabad Wildlife Management Board, etc. – claim the right to control and manage the area, making the job of adjudication of rights and permissions difficult.
Justice Minallah’s judgment has also ignited questions of how courts have earlier dealt with such matters relating to the rich and powerful as opposed to the poor or feeble. In recent times, two cases have roused public indignation and in both the courts have been inclined to bend over backwards to appease powerful stakeholders. The first is that of Imran Khan’s sprawling multi-billion rupee estate in Bani Gala which was illegally constructed many years ago and brazenly “regularized” by the CDA on orders of Justice Saqib Nisar. In pursuit of this court order, the wretched chairman of the CDA who sent a questionnaire to Imran Khan regarding the property was swiftly dispatched to the nether lands and the journalist who quoted a news report exposing the PM’s shenanigans was served with a “show cause notice” by PEMRA. The second is a high rise luxury apartment construction at 1 Constitution Avenue Islamabad, a list of whose owners reads like a Who’s Who of the high and mighty (Imran Khan was one such). This building again, was “regularized” by the Saqib Nisar court, in sharp contrast to the demolition orders of lesser structures and lay encroachments in Karachi ordered recently by the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Gulzar Ahmed.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The highway robbery began at the time of partition in 1947 when tens of billions worth urban and rural evacuee property of Hindus and Sikhs was seized by the new lords of the state and distributed freely over the years to their favoured assets and allies regardless of merit or due process. In time, the parliaments of the state began to make laws for cheap acquisition of lands and properties belonging to Pakistanis for the avowed purpose of building public parks, educational institutions or military security and defense installations. These land were then leased out at throwaway rates to favoured institutions and individuals, only for the latter to quietly transform these into high value, exorbitantly profitable commercial ventures in the private sector (housing societies, clubs, marriage halls, golf courses, etc). And that is how “Military Inc.” irresistibly came to be the leading “businessman” in Pakistan, owning airlines, shipping, hotels, banks, insurance, food, fertiliser, cement, housing, you name it. This is why Justice Minallah’s recent judgment is something to write home about. Earlier, he had put a stop to the practice of the civil bureaucracy allotting valuable residential and commercial plots to themselves and judges at throwaway prices to ensure protection against land-grabbing claims and law-bending practices, thus casting the first few stones at the established disorder. Which other court or judge will follow his laudable example and make these singular milestones in Pakistani history?
The Supreme Court is now faced with another public interest challenge. The Supreme Court Bar Association led by lawyer Ahsan Bhoon has filed a petition challenging the lifetime disqualification of PMLN’s Nawaz Sharif and PTI’s Jehangir Tareen from holding public office for not being “sadiq and ameen”. This petition follows revelations of high level judicial impropriety, misconduct and political bias by ex-CJP Saqib Nisar (that name again!) made by ex-CJ Gilgit-Baltistan, Rana Shamim, aimed at knocking out Nawaz Sharif from politics. To prepare the ground further for appropriate judicial review, the ex-Secretary of the PTI, Ahmed Jawad, has now come out of the closet to level accusations of judicial and military manipulation to oust Nawaz Sharif from office and hoist Imran into it. His allegation that Supreme Court judges disqualified Jehangir Tareen in order to “balance” their unfair ouster of Nawaz Sharif is bound to impact the trial and appeals of Mr Sharif in multiple cases and help pave the way for the judiciary to reclaim its lost credibility. It is significant that Justice Athar Minallah is also seized of adjudicating the allegations of ex-CJ GB Rana Shamim, and he will now be hard pressed to include the testimony of Ahmed Jawad in his deliberations.
Is Justice Athar Minallah the man of the moment? The history man?
Justice Athar Minallah, Chief Justice of the Islamabad High Court, has made history. He has ordered the Capital Development Authority (CDA) to knock down the Pakistan Navy’s Sailing Club House on the edge of the Rawal Dam in Rawalpindi as well as the Monal Restaurant in Islamabad and seize the Margalla Greens Golf Club in the Capital, because these have been built illegally on land belonging to the Margalla Hills National Park. He has thus outlawed the military’s claim to about 8000 acres of such land. Most significantly, the good judge has expressed the view that the Pakistan Navy does not have the authority to undertake a real estate development venture, nor the right to lend its name to any such enterprise.
Naturally, this judgment has warmed the cockles of millions of Pakistani hearts even as it has raised the hackles of powerful people lording it over unaccountable state institutions which have similar illegal stakes in real estate across the country. For starters, the Auditor General of Pakistan has revealed a list of 79 “encroachments” on the land of the Margalla Hills National Park, noting that several government bodies – CDA, Metropolitan Corporation Islamabad, Islamabad Wildlife Management Board, etc. – claim the right to control and manage the area, making the job of adjudication of rights and permissions difficult.
Justice Minallah’s judgment has also ignited questions of how courts have earlier dealt with such matters relating to the rich and powerful as opposed to the poor or feeble. In recent times, two cases have roused public indignation and in both the courts have been inclined to bend over backwards to appease powerful stakeholders. The first is that of Imran Khan’s sprawling multi-billion rupee estate in Bani Gala which was illegally constructed many years ago and brazenly “regularized” by the CDA on orders of Justice Saqib Nisar. In pursuit of this court order, the wretched chairman of the CDA who sent a questionnaire to Imran Khan regarding the property was swiftly dispatched to the nether lands and the journalist who quoted a news report exposing the PM’s shenanigans was served with a “show cause notice” by PEMRA. The second is a high rise luxury apartment construction at 1 Constitution Avenue Islamabad, a list of whose owners reads like a Who’s Who of the high and mighty (Imran Khan was one such). This building again, was “regularized” by the Saqib Nisar court, in sharp contrast to the demolition orders of lesser structures and lay encroachments in Karachi ordered recently by the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Gulzar Ahmed.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The highway robbery began at the time of partition in 1947 when tens of billions worth urban and rural evacuee property of Hindus and Sikhs was seized by the new lords of the state and distributed freely over the years to their favoured assets and allies regardless of merit or due process. In time, the parliaments of the state began to make laws for cheap acquisition of lands and properties belonging to Pakistanis for the avowed purpose of building public parks, educational institutions or military security and defense installations. These land were then leased out at throwaway rates to favoured institutions and individuals, only for the latter to quietly transform these into high value, exorbitantly profitable commercial ventures in the private sector (housing societies, clubs, marriage halls, golf courses, etc). And that is how “Military Inc.” irresistibly came to be the leading “businessman” in Pakistan, owning airlines, shipping, hotels, banks, insurance, food, fertiliser, cement, housing, you name it. This is why Justice Minallah’s recent judgment is something to write home about. Earlier, he had put a stop to the practice of the civil bureaucracy allotting valuable residential and commercial plots to themselves and judges at throwaway prices to ensure protection against land-grabbing claims and law-bending practices, thus casting the first few stones at the established disorder. Which other court or judge will follow his laudable example and make these singular milestones in Pakistani history?
The Supreme Court is now faced with another public interest challenge. The Supreme Court Bar Association led by lawyer Ahsan Bhoon has filed a petition challenging the lifetime disqualification of PMLN’s Nawaz Sharif and PTI’s Jehangir Tareen from holding public office for not being “sadiq and ameen”. This petition follows revelations of high level judicial impropriety, misconduct and political bias by ex-CJP Saqib Nisar (that name again!) made by ex-CJ Gilgit-Baltistan, Rana Shamim, aimed at knocking out Nawaz Sharif from politics. To prepare the ground further for appropriate judicial review, the ex-Secretary of the PTI, Ahmed Jawad, has now come out of the closet to level accusations of judicial and military manipulation to oust Nawaz Sharif from office and hoist Imran into it. His allegation that Supreme Court judges disqualified Jehangir Tareen in order to “balance” their unfair ouster of Nawaz Sharif is bound to impact the trial and appeals of Mr Sharif in multiple cases and help pave the way for the judiciary to reclaim its lost credibility. It is significant that Justice Athar Minallah is also seized of adjudicating the allegations of ex-CJ GB Rana Shamim, and he will now be hard pressed to include the testimony of Ahmed Jawad in his deliberations.
Is Justice Athar Minallah the man of the moment? The history man?
Wednesday 5 January 2022
Saturday 13 January 2018
Imran Khan on Himself
From The Friday Times
Friends, fundos and youthias, I want you to know that I took the Hypocritic oath ages ago while schmoozing my way across London with one eye on my political career back home, and the other on the chicks of Chelsea. I knew that once I’d taken the Hypocritic oath, I’d be free to do Hypocritical things. Like pretending to be a democrat while trying to oust elected governments via conspiracies. Like pretending to be a principled leader while treating my party like a principality. Like defending the disadvantaged while taking advantage of defenseless women. Like funding madrassahs in Pakistan whilst sending my owns sons to England’s best madrassah, at £ 22,000 a year.
The problem is not with me but with this formerly glorious land that was once full of stupas, but is now full of stupids.
Why is my marriage to my spiritual advisor a scandal? Because it shows my utter lack of judgment? Or because it reveals my callousness? Or both?
Well, I don’t care and I’m going to carry on doing whatever or whoever I like. I really thought I had it all under wraps and was enjoying the winter sun with my spiritual advisor out on the lawns of my Bunny Gala estate. Then, suddenly a drone flew past with GEO NEWS written on it. I waved and waved but it didn’t stop for me. It was not until my spiritual advisor gave me a violent nudge in the ribs that I stopped waving. My spiritual advisor dived under the table to hide herself but by then the drone had let down a streamer which said, “touch luck, dumb f—-k”. I was spelling it out to my spiritual advisor when I came to the end and realized that the middle three letters of the last word were missing.
The fact that GEO NEWS’ drones can’t spell so alarmed me that whilst still writing this diary, I began suffering from writer’s block. I turned to my spiritual advisor and said, “please give me a profound thought on which to conclude my diary”. She said what about “the end”?
Friends, fundos and youthias, I want you to know that I took the Hypocritic oath ages ago while schmoozing my way across London with one eye on my political career back home, and the other on the chicks of Chelsea. I knew that once I’d taken the Hypocritic oath, I’d be free to do Hypocritical things. Like pretending to be a democrat while trying to oust elected governments via conspiracies. Like pretending to be a principled leader while treating my party like a principality. Like defending the disadvantaged while taking advantage of defenseless women. Like funding madrassahs in Pakistan whilst sending my owns sons to England’s best madrassah, at £ 22,000 a year.
The problem is not with me but with this formerly glorious land that was once full of stupas, but is now full of stupids.
Why is my marriage to my spiritual advisor a scandal? Because it shows my utter lack of judgment? Or because it reveals my callousness? Or both?
Well, I don’t care and I’m going to carry on doing whatever or whoever I like. I really thought I had it all under wraps and was enjoying the winter sun with my spiritual advisor out on the lawns of my Bunny Gala estate. Then, suddenly a drone flew past with GEO NEWS written on it. I waved and waved but it didn’t stop for me. It was not until my spiritual advisor gave me a violent nudge in the ribs that I stopped waving. My spiritual advisor dived under the table to hide herself but by then the drone had let down a streamer which said, “touch luck, dumb f—-k”. I was spelling it out to my spiritual advisor when I came to the end and realized that the middle three letters of the last word were missing.
The fact that GEO NEWS’ drones can’t spell so alarmed me that whilst still writing this diary, I began suffering from writer’s block. I turned to my spiritual advisor and said, “please give me a profound thought on which to conclude my diary”. She said what about “the end”?
Im the Dim
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