Pakistan : some interesting facts

* Pakistan politics has been traditionally dominated by a feudal-military-bureaucratic oligarchy, which has suppressed civilian democratic tendencies to protect its own narrow class interests. As of 1998, 76.8% of all the manufacturing assets of the country were owned by 43 families in a nation of 150 million.

*Although religion was the ostensible reason for the Partition, Pakistan formally became an Islamic Republic in 1956. The Sharia legal code was introduced by General Zia in 1979. He made performing the Namaz compulsory in offices. It seems that although religious strife was the reason for establishment of the state, the state has progressively turned to religion more and more as a political strategy to maintain its authority and credibility.

*The same General Zia was military adviser to the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan when the infamous Black September incident (King Hussein of Jordan used military force against Palestinian refugee and militant organizations to preserve his authority) took place in 1970. Zia also hanged the democratically elected President Zulfiqar Bhutto . Ironically Bhutto had appointed Zia as his military adviser to protect him from a possible military coup. Brutus anyone? People say this happened with tacit Western consent.

*Pakistan is to my knowledge the only example of a nation-state where the state-espoused national language is not spoken as a native language by a majority of the population and is also not the single largest language in the country. The regional heartland of Urdu is in fact in Northern India whereas Punjabi is the language mostly widely spoken in Pakistan now. In undivided Pakistan, most of the population spoke Bengali. 48 % of Pakistan's present population speak Punjabi as their first language, 13% Pushto, 12% Sindhi and only 10% Urdu. (Tareq Ali is Pakistan's best-known liberal intellectual...obviously his urdu is rather anglo-accented ;)...I usually listen seriously to his analyses of Pakistani politics)

* In the 1965 Indo-Pak war, the ethnically Bengali East Pakistan regiment played a key role in the defence of Lahore (the most important city in Punjab, West Pakistan). It is argued that Lahore might have fallen to Indian forces without the dogged resistance of Battalion 1E of the Bengali regiment. Ironically however Bengalis in undivided Pakistan were denied political rights by dint of superior West Pakistani representation in the army and bureaucracy. One of the cited reasons for Pakistan's power elite being traditionally wary of democratic culture is in fact the fear of numbers. Bengalis were the most populous ethnicity in undivided Pakistan, and would surely have been in a greater position to influence politics and statecraft had democracy been given a chance. This was not a pleasant proposition for the West Pakistani religious-political elite who considered Bengalis as "inferior", "not true believers" etc because most Bengali Muslims were converts from lower caste Hindus who still retained elements of "Hindu culture". Such systematic suppression coupled with geographical discontinuity made the co-existence of the two wings of Pakistan impossible. Things came to a head when the Bengali leader MujiburRehman won an all out majority in a Parliamentary election, but was denied the right to form the government. The rest is bloody history. An interesting experiment in statehood came to a violent end as it was proved yet again that ideology was not enough glue to hold people together against very real practical constraints. Here's a horrible rock version of Nazrul's famous Bangla marching song which I now dedicate to the East Pakistani martyrs.

* There is a great deal of interesting speculation about what might have happened, had Pakistan's architect, the charismatic Mohammed Ali Jinnah (who is the "Qaid-e-Azam" or "The monster who caused Partition" depending on who you ask) lived longer or lesser. He died of a rare form of blood cancer shortly after the creation of Pakistan. Some believe Nehru could just have bided time till Jinnah died and it'd have been all Congress hegemony over the subcontinent. Others argue that had Jinnah lived longer he might have taken Pakistan on a different path of modernity and progress. Wasn't he the secular, sausage-devouring, whiskey-drinking, "pucca" anglicized, brilliant lawyer in his heyday after all? It is an open problem in historical speculation.

Enough of politics for the time being. I might be an Indian national but contrary to popular stereotype, my favorite pastime isn't exactly "Paki-bashing". So here's some fun and queer facts about Pakistan to balance it all up. :)

* Pakistanis like Indians make great "entrepreneurs". This activity chiefly consists in selling odd knickknacks to the West ( the actually useful stuff is made by the Chinese) and making obscene profits from it ( labor in South Asia is surplus and can be easily exploited at dirt cheap prices with some feudal finger-swaggering ). The list includes leather goods to be used by the bondage-fetish sex industry. The poor, modestly attired, conservative Muslim women who make the stuff probably think they're making dog leashes.

* Begum Nawazish Ali has to be the most famous cross-dressing celebrity in South Asia. "His"
wildly popular tv show was banned by the wretched authorities, but we all love the kitschy way in which "she" flirts with "her" celebrity guests and wears them down.

* India and Pakistan have a pretty much shared heritage of Hindustani classical music. Yeah that highbrow stuff that alternates intractably between paying obesiance to the elephant-headed god and persian couplets and upsets our inherited sense of hindu-muslim dichotomy like nothing else. But wait...Pakistan has a bharat natyam dancer too! Yes it's that complicated eye-rolling, head-bobbling, face-twitching, krishna-worshipping dance form, the kind of thing we associate with the deeply spiritual, nerdy, Hindu folk down south.


* Pakistanis have always been more aggressive than Indians no doubt because of the identity crisis of a smaller new-born state. What they have lost on the field of battle (obviously...India is big.... and a bully!) they have more than made up in the field of sport. They have repeatedly beaten us in hockey and cricket (yes, yes of course they were helped by the Sharjah umpires), consistently produced great fast bowlers, our women have swooned more over their cricketers : but more importantly they have stood up no-holds-barred to the colonial apologists and oppressors. Of course I am referring to the Gatting-Shakoor Rana incident. Two stubborn men and the ugly sides of two cultures clashed then. Funny stories and urban legends got woven around that too. An English county cricketer decided to appeal with "where is Allah?" in stead of the traditional "howzzat" with the hope that the finger would be raised upwards. Rana wasn't amused. Oh, and Pakistanis invented the great arts of reverse swing and ball tampering too.


* Lollywood can make for a lot of lulz (here's how to make a scantily clad passably good looking woman look ridiculously funny ), but three of Bollywood's greatest figures have ancestral roots in the shadows of the Khyber pass. Prithviraj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar/Yusuf Khan actually lived in Peshawar. Shahrukh Khan has family roots there (the Americans might have wanted some classified info on South Waziristan when they detained him at O'Hare aiport recently).


* The thing I love most about Pakistan with the possible exception of kebabs and biryanis, is Saadat Hassan Manto, arguably the best exponent of dark humor in South Asian literature.
"He was tried for obscenity half-a-dozen times, thrice before and thrice after independence in Pakistan" : South Asian hypocrisy takes more than half an odd century to go away. Despite all the glitzy malls, India is almost as bad as Pakistan when it comes to banning books and reining in artistic freedom.


Note : I can't provide links for all the facts and figures quoted here as some of them are garnered from various books I have read over the years. There is only one I am in a position to refer right now. The statistics about the industrial assets ownership and languages in Pakistan is from : Development, ethnicity and human rights in South Asia by Ross Mallick