Crypto-imperialism of the Pakistan Elite

It is not easy to make sense of Pakistan's persistent acrimony with India, Afghanistan and the USA, its intractable international disputes, its versions of history, its attitudes towards terrorists operating at home and abroad, and more recently its reactions to Bangladesh's trials for atrocities in the 1971 civil war. Some Pakistani discourse on these subjects is very reasonable, liberal and enlightened. But for most part, Pakistani opinions appear to be angry, demagogic and tending to promote historical grievances.

A plausible explanation for this apparent appetite for discord lies in the mental hang-ups of the Pakistani elite. By 'elite' is meant the influential class of decision- and opinion-makers at the higher levels of Pakistani society, which include leading lights of political parties, big landowners, hereditary Pirs, and people who have risen to success in business, bureaucracy, military and media. For various reasons, they cultivate a self-image of being direct descendants and ideological heirs of medieval empire-builders and torchbearers of religion; in short, modern-day remnants of grand empires and religious conquests.

Thus, Pakistan's elite, are at best aspiring feudalists and at worst, frustrated imperialists. They rule over what they see as nameless faceless multitudes in Pakistan and have, on multiple occasions, declared it moral necessity to rule without a constitution, or to suspend the public’s right to vote or to suppress regional autonomy, economies and even languages.   

The aforesaid hang-ups of Pakistan elite have ensured that whenever a question of democratic or political rights of any group has been raised, it only deepened feelings of injustice and betrayal in these frustrated imperialists. Any calls for mutually respectful co-existence by others have been seen as conspiracies to sap the will of the Pakistani elite, who already suffer because the unjust modern world order does not offer them due deference.

For example, one hears repeated statements to the effect 'we ruled over the Hindus for a 1000 years and India was a just society then.' Pakistani elite feel they were tricked by Indian National Congress (INC) out of their patrimony of ruling over the multitudes of India. In particular, the absence of elite Muslim rule over the lower caste Hindu multitudes is an ongoing human rights violation epitomized by the Indian state, fraudulently established in 1947 by an illegitimate elected majority of the Congress. Poseurs such as Gandhi tricked the Indian population by staging a faked mass independence movement in sinister defiance of Mohammed Ali Jinnah's strong disapproval. The misled Indians were then incited by INC to illicitly break their legally mandated feudatory relationship with the British and the Pakistani elite whose forefathers had won their right to rule India in the battlefield.

Take the Ayesha Jalal school of Partition history. Even ostensibly liberal Pakistanis feel that INC betrayed Muslim League (ML) in 1947 by conceding ML's own longstanding demand of Pakistan and depriving ML of its right to veto the Indian Constitution indefinitely as it had done since 1939. Instead, INC should have suppressed its own elected majority, sunk the hopes, wishes and rights of its millions of constituents and refrained from declaring a sovereign India in 1947. INC should have allowed ML to veto the Indian Constitution and State until ML chose to secede as Pakistan at a time of its choice. When INC chose to settle for full sovereignty and partition in 1947 by asserting its elected mandate, its undeserving leaders essentially usurped the dispossessed Muslim elites’ rights over India. The INC’s electoral mandate, whether as majority or minority, was unauthorized and illiberal.

Consider recent outrage over Bangladesh's execution of Abdul Quader Molla, convicted for the killings of hundreds in 1971. The Pakistani parliament passed a resolution condemning the hanging and Imran Khan asserted that Molla was innocent. Many Pakistanis think that in cahoots with the malign Indian state, East Bengalis betrayed the right of 'racially and spiritually superior' West Pakistan elite to rule them, with or without a constitution. They deprived West Pakistanis of power to deny East Bengalis a just share of the revenues that East Bengalis contributed. On being massacred, East Bengalis unjustly fought back, and cravenly chose to exercise their elected mandate, snatching West Pakistan’s power to deprive them of it.

Pakistan's frustrated imperialists thus feel unjustly deprived by their neighbors of extraterritorial populations to rule over, and extraterritorial resources to harvest. More recently, outrage is expressed about USA, Afghanistan and India raising the issue of jihadi militias attacking soldiers and civilians. In demanding that Pakistan rein in jihadi fighters without offering any quid pro quo, these countries are denying Pakistan its legitimate power to coerce and kill citizens in neighboring countries. The US has also been threatening to deprive Pakistanis of billions of US taxpayers' dollars. This is seen as extremely unfair, because Pakistanis feel they are on the side of justice in all three cases: Afghans do not deserve to choose their own government, Indians do not deserve to live free of attacks, and Americans do not deserve to spend their wealth elsewhere.

Lately, the Pakistani elite feel that fellow Pakistanis, namely Baluchis, Sindhis and Pashtuns are also betraying them by raising questions about Pakistani Punjab's right to deprive them of their fair shares of river waters and revenues from natural gas. The elite are also in conflict with jihadi militias, who were previously obedient, over who should exercise absolute power over the other.

In summary, the Pakistani elite being hidebound by their lineages and religious adherence, feel they are owed limitless feudal and imperial over lordship over others. But others, being small-minded and self-serving, have denied it to them; hence force must be used to achieve it.

If no way can be found to get through this mammoth sense of entitlement and betrayal of the Pakistani elite, any individual or group or nation, small or large, can forget about achieving co-existence with them on mutually respectful, equitable, and peaceful terms.