When The Enemy Lies Within

It took a ham-eating, whiskey-drinking, non-adherent, and rather dandily dressed (also barrister at Lincoln’s Inn), Muhammad Ali Jinnah, to deliver the ‘land of the pure’ or Pakistan, the only country in the world to be created in the name of a religion.

He was confused and contradictory in attempting to weave ‘secularism’ in such a narrative and consequently got relegated to fading photos in a Karakul cap in government offices and currency notes. Jinnah’s wishful Pakistan, isn’t. Jinnah must bear blame for scripting an ‘Idea of Pakistan’ that was doomed to implode.

It then took two-three more leaders to add to Jinnah’s inherently flawed script to regress it irrecoverably towards religious extremism – the first, ironically a Berkeley-Oxford educated Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto and then counterintuitively a Stephanian, General Zia-ul-Haq.

If the former misused religious rhetoric, symbolism, and passed bigoted ordinances (making Ahmediyas non-Muslim) for political/electoral purposes, the latter institutionalised it in the national bloodstream to such an extent that it is inextricable, now.

So, it is ironic that those who were supposedly modernized, acquainted with progressive thoughts, and studied in institutions like Cathedral and John Connon School, Lincoln’s Inn, Oxford, Cambridge, Berkely and St Stephen were primarily responsible for driving Pakistan towards the religious extremism, and it wasn’t by some madrassah educated maulvi.

Perhaps each thought that they could hunt with the hound and run with the hare, thereby ‘controlling’ the forces that they were deliberately unleashing, even if they may or may not be subscribing to the tenets of the same, genuinely. But each got consumed by their own misdoings, particularly overplaying the religion card.

Jinnah got effectively forgotten, Bhutto got hanged by an even more bigoted Zia-ul-Haq, who then died in a mysterious plane crash leaving behind a religious tinderbox that is now exploding.

Along with the bogey of religion, all three i.e., Jinnah, Bhutto and Zia, knew that they needed one more conflation to religion to create a powerful ‘enemy’, and so a secular India emerged as a perfect ‘enemy’ that justified their respective thoughts and actions.

Even a supposedly pious Zia was a supremacist and exclusionist who ensured the virtual second-class citizenship for Shias, Ahmediyas and other minority sects within Islam, let alone Hindus, Christians and Parsis.

Then came an Aitchison College, Cathedral School, and Oxford type playboy who married a British-Jewish millionaire heiress i.e., the suave Imran Khan. Initially a welcome portent of modernity and progressive possibilities, the politician Imran soon spoke the language of Riyasat-i-Medina and then hardened his stance to get the infamous moniker, Taliban Khan.

He too was hardly a paragon of an ideal Muslim, but Imran morphed into a religious evangelist (later married a peerni) and kept sliding the nation into the dark and angry abyss of religious extremism that it is today.

Insincere (or simply regressive in interpretation) in their personal piety these four leaders kept nurturing the bogey of India as the ‘enemy number one’ with statements like “bleed India with a thousand cuts…” and invested in nuclear profligacy with, “we will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will have our own” – a fixation that successfully distracted the Pakistani masses from far more meaningful pursuits. It

created a toxic environment of hate that had to birth terrorism, which too, they thought they could control ‘directionally’. They clearly couldn’t.

But as the former Secretary of State for the USA, Hillary Clinton had presciently warned earlier, “You can't keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors. You know, eventually those snakes are going to turn on whoever has them in the backyard”.

As with all cautionary suggestions of moderation that go unheeded in the Pakistani narrative, they kept dialing up the threats from India (even provoking with a ‘Kargil’ misadventure) and somehow contextualising the same to some sort of religious duties, causes, and imperatives.

But if the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 was to deligitimise the flawed and religious ‘two-nation theory’, the ultimate shift in real security threat from India to one emanating from its co-religious and its self-created terror nursery in Afghanistan, is the second tight slap on Pakistan’s wishful thinking of controlling the ‘direction’ of terror industry, using religion as a sub-text.

Religion and false narratives could not save Bangladesh for Pakistan, and now seemingly so, even Afghanistan, which is incidentally ruled by Pakistan-created, Taliban.

The age-old wisdom of restraining the genie of religion to the bottle were tellingly forgotten by the Pakistanis as once unleashed, it brutally turned on its progenitor. As Hillary had noted prophetically that the proverbial snakes would turn “on whoever has them in the backyard”.

Today, terror in Pakistan is flooding in from across the invisible Durand Line on the Af-Pak border. If 2024 was the deadliest year of violence and terror related fatalities, then 2025 looks far graver.

No condescending and mealy-mouthed platitudes of ‘Brother Muslim Country’ are cutting ice with Kabul as the Afghan Taliban are seemingly doing to the Pakistanis, what the Bengalis did in the late 60’s and early 70’s i.e., seeking their ouster.

Suddenly the reality to blame co-religious Afghanistan as opposed to the traditional enemy i.e., India, no longer sounds as ‘just’, legitimizing, and rationalising, for the genealogical ‘Idea of Pakistan’ or for its current ‘establishment’.

So, Pakistan continues with its rote and ostrich-like stance of blaming the enemy to the east (read, India), and meekly so, to the enemy on the north i.e., Afghanistan. But never itself.

Incredulously, following the recent ‘trainjacking’ in Balochistan, the Director General of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Lt Gen AS Chaudhry claimed, “We must understand that in this terrorist incident in Balochistan, and others before, the main sponsor is your eastern neighbour (India)”! And to keep up the age-old conflations with religion, the DG ostensibly assured the populace, “these terrorists have nothing to do with being Baloch, being Pakistani or being a Muslim”.

But obviously the Afghan hand had to be sheepishly slipped in along with the India card, “We’re in an intelligence-driven war waged against the state of Pakistan by RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) and other hostile agencies through Afghanistan, especially because Afghan soil is being used against us”. The mealy-mouthed admission of the Afghan reality now runs along with the tired and worn-out script of the ‘India hand’.

That both Balochistan (with BLA and other Baloch insurgent groups) or Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (with TPP and other terror groups) are thousands of miles away from Indian border, or that no weapons bearing Indian markings have been found with either BLA or TPP groups, is ever mentioned.

As is the denialism afforded to the continued diminishment of the Baloch, sudden disappearances, or having created the poison of religious extremism in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region, ever adequately discussed or admitted.

The usual pointing of the blaming finger to the East (India), North (Afghanistan) and sometimes even to the West (Iran) continues unabated with recalibration of the order, but seldom is the finger of blame pointed within.

Lt General Bhopinder Singh (Retd) is former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.

Cover Photograph: Late Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto with his then Army Chief Zia who later seized power and executed his former boss.