How Did Pakistan Come To Accept For Eleven Years The Draconian Laws And Ordinances That Gen Zia Promulgated During His Rule?
By Nadeem F. Paracha
20 Sep 2020
Recently,
when social media in Pakistan exploded, condemning the brutal rape of a woman
on the Lahore motorway and the insensitive words used by Lahore’s Capital City
Police Officer (CCPO) for the victim, there were also folk who suggested that
the punishments for zina (rape and premarital sex) introduced in 1979 by the
reactionary Zia-ul-Haq dictatorship, were successful in curbing incidents of
rape in Pakistan. It wasn’t hard for those who disagreed with this perception
to produce facts and figures to completely negate, in fact, rubbish this claim.
Illustration
by Abro
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But this
piece is not about that. Instead, it is a response to those who were left
baffled after learning the dynamics and technicalities of Zia’s laws in this
context, and inquired how society had accepted such laws for eleven years — the
number of years Zia was in power as dictator (1977-88).
First of
all, since women were most affected by these laws, which actually saw scores of
them ending up in jail while their tormentors were set free, there was constant
resistance from various women’s organisations against Zia. In fact,
organisations such as the Women’s Action Forum (WAF) found themselves pushed on
to the frontlines of the resistance, after a majority of mainstream political
outfits opposed to Zia were neutralised through arrests, long jail sentences,
disappearances, torture and exile.
Mohammad
Zia-ul-Haq | Twitter
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Zia
extracted power from above by being part of the military-establishment and
through the support that he received from the US and Saudi Arabia. To draw
political support from below, he nourished those segments and constituencies
that had been developed and activated by the religious parties during the 1977
movement against the Z.A. Bhutto government (1972-77).
One can
assume that, had he failed to cultivate support from these segments, he would
have struggled to so unabashedly introduce the series of controversial laws
that his regime eventually imposed in the name of faith.
Nevertheless,
in 1988 when he passed away, he left behind a country wracked by escalating Sunni-Shia
strife, the growth of militant sectarian and ‘Islamist’ outfits whose leaders
were brought into the mainstream to preach and practise armed jihad, a rise in
hate crimes against minority sects and other religions, an onslaught on women’s
rights, and a generation of young Pakistanis ravaged by drug addiction, gun
violence and embroiled in deadly ethnic and sectarian conflicts.
Corruption
in state and government institutions too increased when the regime repealed
anti-corruption laws enacted in 1973. Zia introduced ‘development funds’ for
members of his handpicked national and provincial assemblies and wrote off bank
loans taken by his supporters. Many senior officers of the armed forces and
members of Zia’s cabinet were reported to have been involved in the narcotics
trade and money laundering scams.
So why did
so many Pakistanis go along with the charade of a regime which promised them a
‘new Pakistan’ by claiming that it was going to finally create an ‘Islamic
State’ that it insisted was what Pakistan’s founders had been committed to
deliver?
An increase
in the rate of literacy from 1972 onwards meant that more and more urban
Pakistanis were exposed to the writings and theories of scholars operating
outside the intellectual and political realm of the ‘Muslim Modernism’ of the
country’s founders.
By the late
1970s, they had begun to question the sincerity and feasibility of the
modernist project. Because of the impact of the loss of East Pakistan in 1971,
many tended to agree with the anti-modernists that the project had been
engineered to keep an economic and political elite in power.
An increase
in the literacy rate saw young men (and some women) from the country’s small
towns and villages furthering their studies in the colleges and universities of
the main urban areas. When they arrived to take their place in educational
institutions in cities such as Karachi and Lahore, the ethos of their
traditional upbringing felt alienated and even threatened by the vocal left and
liberal groups on campuses. Consequently, they were embraced by right-wing
religious outfits. Many of these students would go on to graduate and settle in
the cities and become part of urban Pakistan’s emerging new petty bourgeoisie
and trader classes.
What’s
more, when these classes came out on the streets during the 1977 anti-Bhutto
movement, they were backed by the industrialist and business classes, who were
repulsed by the ‘left-leaning’ Bhutto regime. The movement’s slogan was
‘Nizam-i-Mustafa’ (Shariah law). So in Zia’s promise of an ‘Islami Nezam’ (Islamic system) they
could identify what they believed was their ‘true heritage’ and calling,
whereas the industrialists and the businessmen yearned for a strong ruler who
would reset the country’s economic direction back to what it had been before
Bhutto’s chaotic ‘socialism.’
According
to Riaz Hassan in the anthology, Pakistan at Seventy, an increase in the urban
population also had important social and political consequences. A large
segment of the increasing population led a precarious existence, subjected to
all kinds of hardships. This frustration generated a considerable amount of
disillusionment with the modernist governments and their policies of economic
and social development.
The
persistent insecurity of urban existence over the years resulted in the
emergence of various religious movements. The number of mosques in the cities
multiplied and, through them, religious influences further permeated social
life. This was shaped into a powerful segment and constituency by the religious
parties and then nourished and expanded by the Zia dictatorship.
These
segments provided considerable support for Zia’s so-called ‘Islamisation’
process. Even though those protesting against Zia’s programmes and laws,
especially organisations such as WAF, often managed to embarrass the regime by
getting their point of view published in some western newspapers, most human
and civil rights activists and political workers went unheard even in the most
liberal and democratic European countries.
This was
because of the fact that much of the efforts of the media in these countries
and of their governments were focused on the civil war in Afghanistan. The US
and its allies in NATO largely looked the other way when the Zia regime was
using religion to commit open human rights violations and intense political
repression.
The most
the West was willing to offer at the time was political asylum to those thrown
out or volunteering to move out of Pakistan because of the oppressive
atmosphere here. For the US and its European allies, Zia was too important an
asset to upset in their Cold War against ‘Soviet expansionism.’
These are
some of the prominent factors behind the dictatorship’s success in unleashing
laws and ordinances which, today, would be almost impossible to enact without
being vehemently challenged within and outside the country, even though
attempts to retain and re-ignite them are still very much part of Pakistan’s political playbook.
Original Headline: WHEN THE PAST COMES KNOCKING
Source: The Dawn, Pakistan
URL: https://newageislam.com/the-war-within-islam/how-pakistan-come-accept-eleven/d/122969
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