years. The Indian army has no tradition of
mounting coups against the civilian government.
Instead of authoritarian military rulers, the Nehru
family – down to and including Rajiv Gandhi –
acted for most of India’s history as a ‘dynasty’
able to win the necessary electoral support to
maintain itself in power except for short periods.
India’s leaders have made it a fundamental objec-
tive of nation-building that the republic is secular
and that the majority Hindu and minority Muslim
populations enjoy equal civil rights. No ‘nation-
alism’ based on religious foundations is tolerated.
Pakistan’s official title since the constitution of
1962 is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. But
appearances are misleading. Certain aspects of
Islam, for example the enforcing of the sharia law
with amputations and floggings, were introduced
by General Zia-ul-Haq, who seized power in
1977 and cloaked his military dictatorship with an
Islamic façade of respectability. His death in
August 1988 in a plane crash, probably the result
of sabotage, removed a tyrant who had ordered
more than 4,000 floggings of criminals and polit-
ical opponents during his decade in power. But
under Zia the religious leaders, the ulema, had no
controlling influence, unlike those in Khomeini’s
Islamic Iran. The exclusion of the ulemafrom the
management of the nation’s political affairs has
been determinedly maintained by all Pakistan’s
leaders since independence.
In 1947, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of
India’s Muslim League, was determined to estab-
lish an independent secular Muslim state if he
could not get a loosely structured, unified India
with circumscribed power at the centre – some-
thing Nehru and the Congress Party leaders
would not agree to. The independent alternative,
Pakistan, then became the only other means of
protecting Muslim lives and property in the
Indian subcontinent. But a separate Pakistan
could be justified only on ethnic and religious
grounds. The Muslim League thus had to empha-
sise religion as a ground for demanding inde-
pendence and as a basis for its appeal to the
Muslims spread throughout India. There was one
Muslim to every four non-Muslims (most of
whom were Hindus), and the appeal of the
Muslim League was particularly successful in
central India, where the Muslims faced the hos-
tility and discrimination of Hindu majorities. An
independent Muslim nation would not only free
Muslims within its confines from fear but also
promised economic and social improvement for
the repressed Muslim poor. The incitement of
religious feelings was, however, bound to be dan-
gerous; it led to the fanaticism and massacres that
followed partition – consequences which the
Muslim League had desperately wished to avoid
but which were beyond their control.
Thus, from the very beginning, Jinnah’s
secular Muslim state implied ambiguities. The
ulemawere nevertheless powerful in the inde-
pendent state and could stir up the masses against
the ruling elite, so constitution-making proved a
long-drawn-out affair. Jinnah, the father of the
nation, lived for only one year after independ-
ence, and during the decade from 1948 until
1958, when the military first seized power, polit-
ical development in Pakistan was stunted by the
failure of the Muslim League to develop as a mass
party – a decade characterised by the factionalism
and corruption of the politicians.
Nation-building was in any case going to be
difficult, and there was no one of Jinnah’s stature
to take his place. Pakistan was divided into two
parts, separated by a thousand miles of the Indian
land mass. In Eastern Pakistan, where the major-
ity (54 per cent) of Pakistanis lived, the Muslims
were ethnically homogeneous Bengalis. In
Western Pakistan, there was ethnic diversity
among Punjabis, Sindhis, Pathans and Baluchis.
The central Pakistan government, situated in the
western half, set itself the task of dominating the
divided West and sought also to dominate the
East. In the West, more than half the population
lives in the Punjab, the remainder in four
provinces and in the capital, Islamabad. The army
and the higher civil service were predominantly
Punjabi, and the political leadership of the Muslim
League had strong roots in the refugees who had
fled from India, where they had been in a minor-
ity. The building up of a mass democratic base
would have ousted the Punjabi–Muslim refugee
elite from power and handed it over to the far
more united Bengali East. But the desire to hold
on to power meant that the Punjabi–Muslim