|
India is perversely fortunate to have Pakistan as a neighbour
By MUKUL KESAVAN The furore in Pakistan about Salman Rushdies knighthood tells us a great deal about that peculiar country and something about ours. Of the many protests that the knighthood seems to have provoked in Pakistan (among them effigy burnings, street protests, political resolutions and outraged diplomatic memorandums) there were two that were of particular interest: one, the announcement by Zia-ul-Haqs son, now a federal minister, that the British governments decision to confer the knighthood was a provocation grave enough to justify any suicide bombings that might follow and two, the decision of a shopkeepers association to offer lakhs of rupees to any Muslim who decapitated Rushdie. The minister back-pedalled when the British government let the Pakistani state, its ally in the war against terror, know that it wasnt amused, but that he made the statement in the first place is significant. It would be a mistake to see this only as a sons attempt to claim his fathers Islamist mantle, though that might be part of the explanation. The statements significance lies in the insight it offers into the political compulsions of a majoritarian state. The Pakistani state explicitly derives its legitimacy from its Muslim people. Created in the name of Muslim self-determination, its nationalist self-image is a collage of two political styles: Pan-Islamist rhetoric and Kashmir-centred revanchism. This myth of origin, combined with the chronic failure of representative politics in that country, made it hard for Pakistans political culture to develop the secular populism that legitimizes electoral politics in third-world countries, which helped democracy strike roots in republican India. Posted by: John Frum 2007-06-29 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=192014 |