On March 27, 2017, chairman of the Senate Mian Raza Rabbani was quoted by the media as saying that the recent attempts being made by the Pakistani state and government to construct a counter-narrative cannot be achieved without the direct participation of intellectuals and scholars.

Ever since December 2014, when the country’s military establishment and the PML-N government green-lighted in earnest a comprehensive armed operation against religious militancy, there has also been a lot of talk about initiating a National Action Plan (NAP) through which the more social aspects of extremism in Pakistan can be addressed.

The idea is to evolve a counter-narrative to neutralise the one which has influenced the proliferation of religious militancy and an intemperate mindset. This mindset is believed to have facilitated the violent belligerency and growth of armed groups who claim to be the only true Muslims in the country.

In a way, the ‘establishment’ of Pakistan has already owned up to the fact that it was the state itself which, decades ago, began to weave together a rather myopic nationalist narrative, especially in the 1980s. This narrative flaunted a highly political strand of the faith and encouraged religious radicalisation in society as long as it was aimed against (the largely imagined) internal and external ‘enemies’ of Pakistan.

Reconstruction of national narratives should be a joint venture between politicians and intellectuals but also the military

This was achieved with the moral and financial assistance of not only staunchly conservative donor countries such as Saudi Arabia but, ironically, also at the behest of strategic allies such as the United States who wanted to use Pakistan as a launching pad for a radical Islamist insurgency against the Soviet forces which had occupied Afghanistan (1979-88).

From a pluralistic and modernist Muslim-majority state, which the chief founder of the country Muhammad Ali Jinnah had envisaged, by the 1980s, Pakistan had become a myopic ‘ideological state.’ It had willingly walled itself inside its increasingly paranoid worldview and a peculiar existentialist narrative in which delusions of grandeur and a persecution complex overlapped to produce a destructive ideological concoction.

This concoction generated a volatile milieu in which any act of violence and bigotry perpetrated in the name of faith was expected to be taken as a justified undertaking. Until one day the state itself began to be seen as an enemy.

The post-2014 military operation has been largely successful. In fact, it has been one of the world’s largest armed maneouvers against faith-based militancy in a Muslim country. But the operation’s other leg, NAP, is yet to be fully flexed. One can already witness a push-back against the whole idea of NAP. The resistance against NAP is emerging from those sections of the polity which have benefitted the most from the old narrative and milieu, and this includes elements from within the ruling party as well as some state institutions.

"The post-2014 military operation has been largely successful. In fact, it has been one of the world’s largest armed maneouvers against faith-based militancy in a Muslim country. But the operation’s other leg, NAP, is yet to be fully flexed. Yet, one can already witness a push-back against the whole idea of NAP. The resistance against NAP is emerging from those sections of the polity which have benefitted the most from the old narrative and milieu, and this includes elements from within the ruling party as well as some state institutions.

Another problem which NAP is facing is the fact that some aspects of it are being challenged by those who can now use the constitution against it. Ever since the 1980s, the constitution incorporates many features of the narrative which the state is now trying to actually reverse.

That is why it is now convenient for resisters to anticipate actions initiated by NAP and use the judiciary against these actions. Using the cynical, populist electronic media is yet another way to keep NAP napping.

Though the military has been the most vocal in its desire to fully implement NAP, it has understandably assumed it to be the civilian arm of the operation against extremism. This has clearly created frustration within the ranks of those who have been militarily fighting extremism. Till now certain political and judicial restraints have left the civilian leadership almost entirely unsure of how to go about implementing NAP in its true form and spirit.

Truth is, NAP should be as much of a military pursuit as it is a civilian quest. Military ruler Ayub Khan, in the 1960s, was largely successful in working with two progressive Islamic scholars, Ahmad Parvez and Dr Fazalur Rahman Malik, to effectively weave a modernist Muslim narrative which facilitated him in creating a contemporary and moderate milieu conducive for rapid economic growth.

And when this narrative failed to placate certain ethnic groups who felt ignored by Ayub’s economics, his regime did not hesitate to invite a communist opponent, famous Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, to help the regime further fatten the narrative to include dimensions which were more cultural in nature.

Sadia Toor in her essay “At Home with the World” (edited by Mridula Nath Chakraborty) writes that, in 1967, the Ayub regime invited Faiz to chair a major meeting of the Commission of Culture & Arts. A report based on Faiz’s lectures generated a lengthy document dubbed ‘the Faiz Report.’ It explained Pakistan as a multicultural and multi-ethnic entity and a modern Muslim-majority state, of which religion was just one aspect and not its entire body.

Toor writes that though the report was well-received by the military-establishment, Ayub fell in March 1969. The report remained buried till Z.A. Bhutto took over a battered post-1971 Pakistan.

In a paper on Pakistan’s folk culture for the University of Alberta, Shumaila Hemani writes that in 1972 the former chief ideologue of Bhutto’s PPP, J.A. Rahim, invited a host of intellectuals to a conference to help shape Pakistani nationalism, especially in the light of the 1971 East Pakistan debacle and the arrival of parliamentary democracy in the country.

Ironically, the central theme of the conference was the Faiz Report which was commissioned by a regime that the PPP had opposed. Hemani quotes one of the intellectuals, Khalid Saeed Butt, who was at the conference as saying that two views emerged at the event. One was that, indeed, Pakistan’s nationalism should promote multiculturalism. But the other view insisted that (in the event of East Pakistan’s separation) a more rigorous nationalism should be constructed and the country’s culture be defined as a single entity.

The latter became the nationalist mantra. In the 1980s, during the Zia regime, it began to mutate and became a myopic and, eventually, a destructive line of thinking. But the point is not what it became. The point is that an intellectual endeavour initiated by the military and then furthered by civilian leadership and the intelligentsia became well-engrained in the country’s political ethos. The point is, this now troublesome ethos can only be undone in the same manner.

So Mr Rabbani is correct that politicians will have to sit with intellectuals to devise the much required counter-narrative. But I’m afraid it is a folly to assume that the military has nothing to do with this. Because the counter-narrative is first to be instilled in those on the frontlines, fighting an enemy which is the renegade product of the old, mangled narrative. The military’s participation in the formation of the counter-narrative is thus vital.

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 2nd, 2017