Mohammad Waseem’s new book, Political Conflict in Pakistan, is a veteran social scientist’s witness statement about the country’s national project, as carried out by the state of Pakistan.

Writings on the politics of Pakistan are either composed in drab prose or outright polemics, but Waseem’s book, in contrast, is lucidly written, using a wide range of sources ranging from French social thinkers to Urdu evangelical writings. The variegated literature in Waseem’s deft hands results in a hefty, but eminently readable and valuable, account that enhances our understanding of the dynamics of political conflict in Pakistan.

Waseem argues that “conflict should be conceived as a product of the state-building project itself, spearheaded by the ruling elite.” And the ultimate bastion of the ruling elite is not the much maligned feudal, but a middle class that has become “the custodian of the state ideology, the policy structure and the master narrative.”

Ethnically it is dominated by Punjabis and the Urdu-speaking migrants from India (Mohajirs). Waseem’s claim will jolt middle-class readers who have been lulled into complacency by the dominant political discourse in Pakistan.

To drive home this daring claim, Waseem turns to history: “In 1947, Pakistan got out of India. But India did not get out of Pakistan.” For the last seven decades, Pakistan has tried to “de-Indianise” itself through nationalism which is “the codified version of anti-Indianism.”

A veteran social scientist’s new book, a culmination of decades of research and teaching, connects the dots of conflict from the corridors of power to the streets and is essential reading

This strand of nationalism, and the conflict it has bred, is traced to Partition that was accompanied by fratricide in Punjab and massive migration, leading to a peculiar coalition of forces creating the ‘migrant state’.

The new state’s main leaders, including Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan, belonged to non-Pakistan areas, as did the two-thirds of the Muslim Indian Civil Service (ICS) officers who opted for Pakistan. It created a new ethnic hierarchy, where “the Mohajir-dominated bureaucracy and bourgeoisie made common cause with the Punjabi-dominated army in bringing about a ‘bureaucratic polity’ during the first quarter of a century after independence.”

The middle class was the very creation of colonialism and, since independence, has had a firm grip over power levers and ideological leanings of the ‘migrant state’. Lacking social reformist vision, this class created a system defined by “centralisation of power, militarisation of authority and Islamisation of the narrative.”

Its dominance was challenged from within the system by what Waseem terms a “political class” which evolved from “collaborators” of the British with roots in the local population, and it operates through a party system. The former identified with the ‘establishment’ led by the army, and the latter was represented by “political parties and parliament.”

Pakistan’s constitutional woes and the crisis of federalism are partly a result of an unresolved conflict between the middle class and the political class, where the latter uses mass mandate as a source of legitimacy, with parliament as the centre of power. The odds weighed heavily against parliament throughout the post-independence period. The colonial legacy of governing through bureaucracy emboldened the establishment to undermine parliamentary sovereignty using bureaucratic-politicians, then Bonapartist generals and, of late, a strident judiciary.

Waseem states that a “major problem for constitution-making in Pakistan has been the issue of devising a mechanism for power distribution between the centre and the federating units.” Pakistan is a “holding-together federalism, which can be heavily coercive through the centralising power of the state”, as compared to “coming-together federalism in which various entities give up part of their sovereignty to achieve shared economic and political goals.”

The author’s model helps us contextualise the conflict between the unelected and the elected segments of the ruling classes. His brilliant portrayal of a complacent Pakistani middle class should disabuse attentive readers of the mistaken belief of considering the middle class as the solution to Pakistan’s problems.

Social classes as an analytical category can be very useful, but creating binaries such as ‘middle class’ and ‘political class’ has its limitations, and hopefully Waseem’s thesis will generate critical theoretical conversation among theoretically inclined observers of Pakistan’s politics. Space constraints do not allow starting that debate in this review.

The ruling elite of the country are a product of an education system that has nurtured a typical Pakistani mind-set. Waseem does a fine job of drawing upon French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of education as “the process of the transmission of the cultural capital of the dominant classes”, to conclude that “education in Pakistan has become both a cause and effect of the state’s ideological agenda since Partition.”

Young minds are shaped “in an atmosphere of acute insecurity and developmentalism”, creating “gross inwardness among students, who operate in a binary of loving the best (Pakistan) and hating the rest (outside Pakistan).”

The institutional design of the state and its ideological underpinnings as codified in school curricula created categories of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider.’ The ‘outsider’ is not defined by lacking resources, income or influence, but it is “defined with reference to the insider.”

Waseem focuses on ethnic and religio-sectarian minorities as arch outsiders. Being a migrant state, as discussed earlier, “the Mohajir-Punjabi combine has dominated the state’s agenda” and plays a pivotal role as gatekeeper. The insider/outsider dichotomy “left the project of nation-building in tatters”, as the ‘insiders’ took pride in creating Pakistan, while others identified it with Mohajir and Punjabi imperialism.

Religious minorities are the other outsider. The Objectives Resolution of 1949 played a main role in the minoritisation of communities by dividing citizens on religious lines. These are the most depressed sections of the society, at the lowest rung of the social ladder.

From Christians living in the slums of Islamabad, to Hindus residing in Islamkot, Sindh, their loyalty to Pakistan is always suspect and, in times of national anger against the infidel West or Hindu India, vulnerable Christians and Hindus come handy as the proverbial sacrificial goat. “Islamisation under Zia effectively steered the nation towards piety as policy, and morality as law.” When conflict, fuelled by the religious zeal of brutal majoritarianism spills out on the street, it leads to spectacles of vigilante mobs lynching hapless Christians or individuals suspected of blasphemy.

Political Conflict in Pakistan connects the dots of conflict from the corridors of power in Islamabad to the streets of Pakistan. The author shows us how the partitioning of hearts and minds between the two successor states of British India became the national agenda in Pakistan.

Attempts at “re-sizing” and “re-peopling” the state created new sources of conflict in the form of ethnic and linguistic tensions, which refuse to die down even 75 years after formal independence.

Waseem’s book is not cynical or clichéd. It contains a healthy dose of scepticism, which is the culmination of decades of research and teaching about Pakistan, in Pakistan. The book deserves wide readership — which is probably wishful thinking in our current intellectual milieu.

The reviewer teaches at IBA, Karachi. He can be reached at hnizamani@hotmail.com

Political Conflict in Pakistan
By Mohammad Waseem
C. Hurst, UK
ISBN: 978-1787384002
304pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 27th, 2022