Burying the Zia legacy

Instead of questioning Musharraf’s sincerity, it’s in everyone’s interest to help him along

BY delivering that speech last Saturday General Pervez Musharraf has embarked on a path which will conclusively end (if he succeeds, that is) the era inaugurated by General Zia-ul Haq. Both Zia and Musharraf responded to external factors and navigated their state accordingly.

One came to power at a period during the Cold War when the US was feeling particularly vulnerable. The joke in Washington in the ’70s was that detente was like going to a wife swapping party and returning home alone. Musharraf’s rise coincided with Pax Americana at its height.

All was fair in the war against the Soviet Union, including Islamic fundamentalism. Zia took advantage of this high tolerance level for religious extremism and sank his nation in an Islam that would be disengaged from the civilisational pull of Hindustan where, awkwardly for him, resided the world’s second largest Muslim population, greater than Pakistan’s.

It was America’s high tolerance of Islamic extremism in the ’70s which over time bred the Al-Qaeda cells, which struck New York and Washington on September 11. A shaken America, determined to exorcise ghosts from the past, found in Musharraf a willing, even enthusiastic, ally. As Henry Kissinger said the other day, it is pointless speculating about Musharraf’s sincerity: it is in everyone’s interest, including that of the Muslim world, India, China and the West, to help him along the difficult journey.

To simplify the narrative for the purposes of the Bollywood movie script, the scene must open at the OPEC headquarters after the quadrupling of oil prices by the Arabs following the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Western economies are rattled. The Sheikhs are everywhere — from hotels (and hospitals) in Bombay to the Savoy and Dorchester in London. Simpson’s roasts are now from halal meat. Saville Row sets up assembly lines to cater to the new clients from the Gulf. Even Marks and Spencers had to put up signs in Arabic. Anti Christ had entered the citadel.

Before the West can comprehend the phenomenon, the Iranian revolution brings into focus a cleric with a novel headgear and long, flowing gowns, avowedly Islamic and virulently opposed to the West. In fact, the graffiti on the walls paints the US ‘‘Shaitan-e-buzurg’’, or the senior Satan.

Once the Soviets occupy Afghanistan, Zia finds a role for himself, boosted by the West and Saudi Arabia but often for distinct reasons. The Iranian revolution is a direct challenge to the Saudi monarchy for leadership of the Muslim world. The Saudis re-adjust, tone down their kingly hues, call themselves the keepers of the holy places. They then mount a counter attack by funneling large sums via Pakistan into a project of Wahabiisation of Afghanistan which, in the long run, will work as a bulwark against Iran’s Shia Islam.

Zia has in the past served in Saudi Arabia, leading a Pakistani elite special force brigade to protect the Saudi royal family. So he knows the Saudis well. Americans, meanwhile, must defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. Zia, willingly, serves both these purposes — to set up an anti-Iran Islam in Afghanistan and to mobilise this force in the war against the Soviet Union.

A large Muslim country cannot set up an extreme variety of Islam in a neighbouring country without setting itself up as some sort of a model, becoming an embodiment of such beliefs. In this development lay Zia’s India policy: spread a hard shade of green across Pakistan which makes Pakistan more of a West Asian state, divorced from South Asian culture.

How Zia’s Islamisation project, Nizam-e-Mustafa or government according to Sharia, impacted on India has to be understood. Since Nizam-e-Mustafa coincides with unprecedented wealth in Arab hands, Indian labour with a heavy Muslim component turns up in the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Remittances which were to the tune of $8 billion begin to alter the sociology of Muslim enclaves like Calicut and Hyderabad. Flushed with cash, the Arabs begin to fund madrasas in the cause of Islam. The Sikh agitation in Punjab, Mrs Gandhi’s assassination, the widely published Meenakshipuram conversions — all combine to create a Hindu backlash.

Muslims are seen as the Congress votebank and therefore an obstacle in the way of the backlash manifesting itself. Begins a competition between the Sangh Parivar and Congress for the Hindu soul. Rajiv Gandhi opens the locks of the Ayodhya temple to please the Hindus; he reverses the Shah Bano judgement to attract the Muslims. Loses control of the game. The BJP, from two seats in Parliament in ’84, returns in ’98 as the largest single party.

In this phenomenal rise of the BJP, the role of external influences cannot be ignored — Nizam-e-Mustafa in Pakistan and a perception, sometimes far in excess of the fact, of huge Arab investments in ‘‘Arabisation’’ of Indian Muslims. It was like water being made ‘‘wetter’’.

Musharraf has clearly seized upon the moment as one who has been able to make a reappraisal of the Muslim predicament and its urgent need for reform to meet the challenges of the modern world. In this he deserves all our help not in any patronising sense but as partners.

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