S.M. Zafar is one of the most outstanding lawyers in Pakistan. He served as federal minister for law at a young age in Gen Ayub Khan’s last cabinet. He has been general secretary of one or the other of the various versions of the imperishable Muslim League for many years. His counsel has often been sought by Pakistan’s successive rulers. He has been a senator for many years. He still retains the air of an activist of the Muslim Students Federation that formed the vanguard of the Muslim League’s struggle for Pakistan in Punjab. And he regularly writes about his experiences as a lawyer and as a politician on call. He is thus well qualified to reinterpret the history of Pakistan that has not, in his view, received a fair treatment from historians in general.

Zafar divides his History of Pakistan Reinterpreted into three parts: ‘Constitutional’ (the longest section), ‘Political’ and ‘Social’. He begins the first part by tracing the evolution of democracy before summarising the history of the All-India Muslim League, 1906-1940, and giving a gist of the resolutions adopted at its annual sessions. Then, he offers his first piece of interpretation, by describing the Lahore Resolution of 1940 as an equivocal draft for accommodating Indian Muslims’ political aspirations within a single Indian entity. A definite demand for Pakistan was only made vide the resolution adopted at the convention of Muslim League members of legislatures elected in 1945-46.

Next, the author reinterprets Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s speech of Aug 11, 1947, which is described as “a visionary, all-inclusive speech” in which the two-nation theory was abandoned as no divisive force could be allowed to undermine the ideal of the entire population of Pakistan constituting a single nation. The author takes a pause and tries to read Jinnah’s mind in the last moments of his life, including his satisfaction at having laid the foundation of national integration on the basis of one nation, one state and one language.

According to the author, Liaquat Ali Khan proved to be an adequate successor to Jinnah. He stabilised the economy “while aligning it with the capitalist trend of the West.” Like the Quaid, Liaquat, too, had to face provincial leaders’ desire for autonomy while Jinnah and Liaquat “had adopted a strategy of a centralist philosophy that was rooted in the federal concept of the new nation state.”

While dealing with the Liaquat period, the author defends the Objectives Resolution as a compromise with the ulema — who had demanded much more — that was in favour of a democratic polity and blames the weak post-Liaquat governments for allowing the religious lobby to popularise its version of the Resolution, just as they permitted the bureaucracy to capture the corridors of power.

S.M. Zafar’s look at Pakistan’s history, despite some biases and low production values, is a mine of information that readers will find extremely useful

As the Jinnah-Liaquat phase ends, Zafar’s narrative becomes more and more the familiar story of rulers’ attempts to address the problems of governance or the crises they created for themselves. In this scheme of things, there is little space for discussing the trials and tribulations of the people or how they responded to their circumstances, or for the struggles of women, academia, labour and the peasantry, or whether non-Muslims were accepted as members of the single Pakistan nation.

From the mid-50s to the break-up of Pakistan, the author takes a critical look at the 1956 constitution (an unjustified claim to create a republic), the Ayub martial law, the 1965 conflict with India, the 1969 Round Table Conference, the Yahya martial law, the military operation in East Pakistan and the surrender to Indian forces on Dec 16, 1971. The narrative is interspersed with the author’s advice to the government as a member of the Ayub cabinet and as one of the top leaders of the Muslim League.

Zafar criticises the decision to leave the Agartala conspiracy case undecided and uses the harshest language against anyone in the whole book when he says that “Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was made a hero out of his treacherous conduct.” Finally, he attributes the country’s break-up to “treachery and subversion from within and aggression and conspiracy from without, [and] lack of political understanding to handle the complexity by the Martial Law Administrator General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan.”

In the history of post-1971 Pakistan, all rulers fail to rise to the challenges of democratic governance, though all of them are not equally guilty of misrule. The author takes care to conclude the account of each of the three sets of rulers — Zulfikar Ali Bhutto/Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and Gen Ziaul Haq/GenPervez Musharraf — with a sort of balance sheet, in which entries in both credit and debit columns are made. But while dealing with the Bhuttos, his fidelity to objectivity as a historian suffers a marked erosion.

To be fair to the author, one must give him credit for not deciding whether the military regimes pushed the country forward or backward. He leaves the readers free to decide for themselves the price paid by the country for the rulers’ obsession with saving the state from becoming representative of, and responsible to, the people.

In the second part, ‘Political’, the author discusses the history of five institutions — the judiciary, the political parties, the armed forces, the bureaucracy and local government — and the Kashmir issue.

Then we have, in part three, six essays on ‘The Ideology’ (the concept not in accord with the idea of a nation state); ‘The Terrorism’ (we alone can deal with the monster we have created); ‘Culture, Religion, Civilisation and Nation’ (an introduction); ‘Nuclear Pakistan’ (incredible treatment of a national hero); ‘Balochistan’ (different case than East Pakistan); and ‘Miscellaneous’ (water dispute, climate change, galloping population).

Finally, in the Epilogue, the author is full of optimism about Pakistan’s future: victory against terrorism is helping Pakistan become “a religiously more tolerant, peaceful and harmonious society”; it will be impossible to ignore Pakistan’s role as a regional player; the existing political leaderships will be replaced by a “new generation with entrepreneurial zeal”; and there will be no military rule in future. “Taken altogether,” says Zafar, “there is a definite visible light at the end of the tunnel. Pakistan may, in a couple of decades, be a large, vibrant and stable economy and a confident nation and the civil government which is no more to look across its shoulder to see if the army is not [sic] going to intervene.” One surely feels like saying ‘Amen’.

At the end of the story, the followers of Bhuttos and Sharifs will not be happy, but unhappier will be the standard bearers of the two-nation theoryand the ideology of a religious state.

The highly experienced lawyer that the author is, he embellishes his arguments with countless quotations from writers on Pakistan’s journey over seven decades — foreign scholars more than Pakistanis — as if he wishes to win his case by throwing at the court as many references, rulings and precedents as possible. It is a boon for students of Pakistan’s history, as they will find here almost everything that anybody has ever said about the turns and twists in Pakistan’s history. The references relied upon by the author include — besides books — numerous articles, reports and comments published in leading English language newspapers. However, some of the books used as reference works hardly deserve the distinction.

The author has, unfortunately, been let down by the publisher, whose experience seems to be limited to publishing what most judges and lawyers say in courts or write in their judgements and petitions. He apparently needs the services of neither a copyeditor nor a proofreader. The author’s tribute to the publisher for “maintaining the quality of international acceptability” is only proof of his own magnanimity.

The book also suffers from the stenographer’s inability to deal with text that is different from legal petitions and rejoinders. While transcribing what Zafar seems to have dictated, he often betrays his love of hilarity. His decision to write “Wyne” as “wine” and “corps” as “core” has been noted in the corrigendum, but the book has many more of his beautiful renderings: “Radcliff” becomes “Red Cliff” and “global” becomes “globle”. When Zafar says “Nehru Report”, the stenographer, in his discretion, attributes the report to Jawaharlal Nehru instead of his father, Motilal, who is not known to him. But his masterpiece is that, when the author says “Yahya Bakhtiar, the counsel of Nusrat Bhutto”, the stenographer plenipotentiary gives the lawyer’s full name as “General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan Bakhtiar.”

Despite these irrelevant deviations from the author’s narrative, the book is a mine of information that students of Pakistan’s history, its political journey and the functioning of its institutions will find extremely useful. If, for the second edition, a competent editor is asked to drastically reduce the volume of the book, remove unnecessary references and purge the text of the stenographer’s discretionary interventions, the value of the book and readers’ pleasure in going through it will both be greatly enhanced.

The reviewer is a veteran journalist, rights activist and has written extensively on Quaid-i-Azam’s political ideals

History of Pakistan Reinterpreted: Constitutional, Political, Social
By S.M. Zafar
Manzoor Law Book House,
Lahore-Islamabad
ISBN: 9781-234567897
796pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 26th, 2020