Essentialising Pakistan

ZNet, January 13, 2008

By Badri Raina

There was that time when Hegel pronounced that India had “no history”; it “is a repeat of the same old majestic ruin,” he wrote.

Instructively, not until his full-blooded engagement with India towards 1857 was Marx to demur with the Hegelian hypothesis. That he was to work his way towards enunciating what he called “the Asiatic mode of production” as an explanation for the seemingly eternal stasis of India remains evidence of his historical anxiety always to make sense of the seemingly incomprehensible.

Since the emergence of India and Pakistan as sovereign nation-states, most “indigenous” historians have strenuously questioned both the Hegelian stipulation and the full validity of the “Asiatic mode of production” thesis.

Especially those who subscribe to a dialectical materialist perspective of time, space, and human agency, it must seem an absurdity, ab initio, to suggest that any human subject, concept, group/community, or nation is ever in a state of coma.

It is of course the case that the pace of historical transformation observes differing momentums from agent to agent, community to community, nation to nation; so that in some instances the “sameness” seems to make invisible the dynamic, and in others the dynamic overwhelmes the “givens” frenetically.

II

I have taken the liberty to thus preface my point about Pakistan in order to underscore an irony that informs much lazy comment post the Benazir martyrdom.

Many among those who have over the years hotly, and justly, contested the western metropolitan project of “essentialising” India (Edward Said called the politics of that project “Orientalism”) think nothing of proferring the complacent view that nothing ever changes in/about Pakistan. “Repeat of the same majestic ruin,” as it were!

Such Indian comment from “experts” and upwardly-mobile beneficiaries of India’s “development” alike barely conceals a smirk.

There is indeed truth to the overview that since the murder of the first Pakistani Prime Minister in 1953, interested forces have sought in every conceivable way to keep in place a stranglehold that has been hard to breach. This ideological and material conglomerate has comprised the AMA—America/Mullah/Army—in a peculiar marriage between the feudal, the theological, and infusions of the technologically comprador.

Yet, it would be a serious misreading of the dynamics of Pakistani history to think that the Benazir murder is a mere repeat of that first murder of Liaqat Ali Khan. Or that the Benazir persona in 2007 embodied merely an unvaryingly familiar personal mind-set and collective history.

Continued . . .