Understanding Pakistan’s response to Mumbai
by Praveen Swami

In 1951, the Majlis-e-Ahrar, a group of clerics who had ceded from the Indian National Congress two decades earlier, initiated an agitation calling for members of the heterodox Ahmadiyya sect to be declared non-Muslims. It also demanded the removal of Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Chaudhuri Zafarullah Khan, an Ahmadiyya. In the view of its mullahs, Pakistan was an Islamic state — and in an Islamic state, the minorities could not enjoy equal rights.

Factional politics helped the anti-Ahmadiyya movement gather momentum. Punjab Chief Minister Mumtaz Muhammad Khan Daulatana had for long used the services of the mullahs, as well as Maulana Abul Ala Maududi’s Jamaat-e-Islami, to keep public attention focussed on religious issues. Daulatana thus covered up his inability to address the province’s economic problems. For their part, the clerics regained ground lost through their opposition to the creation of Pakistan, and pushed for its new constitution to decree into existence an Islamic state.

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“…provided you can persuade the masses to believe that something they are asked to do is religiously right or enjoined by religion, you can set them to any course of action, regardless of all considerations of discipline, loyalty, decency, morality or civic sense.”

It was a lesson that key leaders of the movement to transform Pakistan into an Islamic state — like the Jamaat-e-Islami’s Maududi — learned well. The failure of the Pakistani state to act against the rising tide of religious neo-conservatism aided their cause.

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Maududi greeted Pakistan’s next military ruler General Yahya Khan — an officer whose hard-drinking, womanising ways were even then public knowledge — as “a champion of Islam.” Yahya Khan did little for the Jamaat’s project in Pakistan but did use its Razakar irregulars to unleash a campaign of terror in what is now Bangladesh. Yahya Khan’s use of Jamaat-e-Islami irregulars in Bangladesh built on similar experiments in Jammu and Kashmir — and prepared the ground for Pakistan’s use of jihadists as an instrument of state policy a decade later.

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By 1974, Bhutto —who had alienated his peasant and working class constituency by this time — was facing a new anti-Ahmadiyya movement led by the Jamaat-e-Islami’s student wing, the Islamic Jamaat-e-Tulba. Bhutto at first sought to contain the agitation by arresting some 834 of the protesters and their leaders. Later, though, he caved in and declared the Ahmadiyya sect outside the pale of Islam. It did nothing, though, to prevent the near-inevitable outcome: the army leveraged the chaos to assert itself, and Zia-ul-Haq was installed as Pakistan’s third military ruler.

http://www.thehindu.com/2009/01/26/stories/2009012650570800.htm