Religion in politics and economics

Pakistan – its people and the succession of leaders that have governed the country over the last almost eighty years — can take pride in the fact that the country is unique in one important aspect in its neighborhood. It is the only one in the geographic space in which it is located that has kept religion out of governance. That was not supposed to happen since it was religion that led to the founding of the state of Pakistan. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father, wanted to save the large Muslim population of British India from being overwhelmed by the much larger Hindu majority. Jinnah, however, never thought of creating an Islamic state. That was one reason why the Jamaat-e-Islami, then led by Maulana Maududi, opposed the idea of Pakistan. Jinnah wanted to establish a secular state to save the Muslim culture and society from being dominated by the more numerous Hindu population. To indicate that Muslims were very different from Hindus, he is reported to have said that “while Hindus worship the cow, I as a Muslim eat it.”

The attack on the secular Pakistani state came from two different directions. General Zia ul Haq, Pakistan’s second military leader after Filed Marshal Ayub Khan, launched a campaign to make Pakistan an Islamic state. The changes he introduced were confined to everyday speech rather than in the content of governance. One example was to change the name of the cost and benefit of money transactions from “interest” to “profit”. But the religious parties and groups wanted more significant changes, in particular by the way the country was being governed. General Zia refused to move in that direction. China was the only neighbour that did not adopt religion as the basis of governance. Afghanistan, Iran and increasingly India are now religious states.

Of the four countries with which Pakistan shares its borders, three are now religious states. China is the only exception unless we define the aggressively defined Communism the country now practices as a religion. Iran and Afghanistan now proclaim themselves as Islamic states although the versions of Islam they profess to follow are very different from one another. Iran is a Shite state while Afghanistan is a Sunni nation. The Sunni-Shia conflict in Islam goes back to the founding of the religion when the question of succession to Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) – the founder of the religion to whom the word of God was revealed in the form of the Quran – came to be debated at the time of his passing. Iran’s Shia clerics who deposed the Emperor Raza Shah Pahlavi and established a clerical state have followed what they believe to be the main features of the religion on the question of governance.

Taliban, who now rule Afghanistan from Kabul, have taken over the government when the twice democratically elected President Ashraf Ghani escaped from the country’s capital and finally landed in the UAE. That was on August 15, 2021. Ghani’s departure allowed the Taliban to enter the presidential palace and establish an Islamic state. Taliban’s interpretation of Islam follows the one practised in Saudi Arabia. The world “Taliban” in Arabic means “students”. It now refers to the young men who were educated in the madrassas set up by Pakistan with the help of the Saudis to educate hundreds of thousands of Afghans who escaped from their country and went to neighbouring Pakistan to escape the fighting between the Soviet troops and a group of Islamic fighters called the mujahidin. Moscow had sent in its troops in 1979 to keep the Communist regime they had established in Kabul from falling. They were forced out of the country ten years later by the mujahidin.

We are likely to see the Sunni-Shia conflict reemerge in Syria as that country attempts to define the mode of governance it would like to follow after the departure of King Bashar al-Assad who fled to Moscow on December 5, 2024. Assad escaped as the rebels representing different, mostly religious groups, advanced towards Damascus, the country’s capital.

Then there is India, Pakistan’s fourth neighbour, which is now under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He has governed his country for ten years and, by winning the election held in 2024, is to stay in power for five more years. He heads the Hindu-nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP, which has its roots in the Rashtriya Sevak Sangh, the RSS, which was founded in the 1930s and drew on Germany’s Nazi Party as a way to manage its affairs. Modi and his senior colleagues have opted to follow the governing philosophy that goes under the name of Hindutva which places the Hindu religion at the centre of governance in the country. Modi has indicated that he would like to change the name of the country from India to Bharat. The name India is drawn from the name of the Indus River that originates in Tibet and, after flowing through Pakistan for a thousand miles, enters the Indian Ocean. It does not touch India.

Modi’s Bharat assigns the secondary status to the non-Hindu religions in the country. This is a clear departure from the governing principles adopted by Jawaharlal Nehru who created an inclusive state that accommodated all castes, religious groups and tribes into the structure of the state. The Indian Constitution, written by a non-Hindu lawyer BR Ambedkar, had provisions to help the non-Hindu citizens to advance economically, politically and socially in the country. The most affected by this approach to governance by Modi and his party are the large Muslim minority numbering 200 million people.

Pakistan has managed for almost eight decades to ignore the religious pressures from the neighborhood for defining the nature of its state. The most serious impact is from the Sunni extremists who govern from Kabul in Afghanistan. The Sunni Taliban in Pakistan draw support for Afghanistan. The Pashtun population is divided between the two countries, with more living on the Pakistani side of the border. Iran’s Shia state has some impact on Pakistan especially when it takes the form of Sunni-Shia conflict in the areas that have large numbers of people belonging to the two sects.

It is not clear how Pakistan will deal with the growing resentment of the Indian Muslims at their treatment by the state and by the Hindu vigilantes. Could this lead to the large movement of people as happened in 1947. Some 8 million Muslims left their homes in what had become independent India and headed for Pakistan.