The rain on your parade

a time to remember August 14, 2009

Cover of TIME magazine dated April 22, 1946

as the years go by, more and more people seem to forget why the country exists as it is today. more and more people know that they are pakistani and will proudly say the same when the national cricket team takes on india or australia, or when they get confused for an indian while being an expat, but not many remember what all happened to make us where we are right now. this is august 14th. a time to remember. hopefully we can sort that out now.

let’s start at the beginning. 1947. jinnah has now fought long and hard and convinced  muslims, hindus, indians, parsi’s, christians and all the other indigenous peoples of the sub-continent that aside from the brits leaving india, the muslims of the region need to have a separate state of their own. whether he chose to convince people of this for reasons to better his career (he was a terrible lawyer apparently) is still debated today. why he chose to do this when indians (muslims, hindus and other peoples) had lived harmoniously in the region for centuries is not known either. so on aug 14th, 1947 he manages to succeed and a state for muslims is formed.

it’s called pakistan. for some idiotic reason nobody really notices it’s in two parts divided by another country the size of a mini-continent and nobody really cares (will play into importance in a couple of decades). the name apparently has a double meaning. 1) the land of the pure. 2) p is for punjabi’s, a for afghan’s, k for kashmiri’s, s for sindhi’s and tan for balochis(tan). the mohajir’s are evidently left out. [ed.note: about 14.5 million people crossed the borders between india and pakistan in one of the bloodiest immigrations of peoples ever]. karachi is made the capital of the country.  by the way, at this point it’s not an islamic republic yet. nor is it a republic at all. it’s only the ‘dominion of pakistan’ for muslims and anyone else who feels like living here.

the national anthem is now written by a guy called hafeez jalandhry. the reason most of you don’t understand it is because it’s written in farsi (persian). apparently, there was another one that was used when jinnah was alive until 1948, but not many people care about that either. the flag is cheesily designed with an islamic crescent and star and giving the easiest excuse of dimensions by saying the white is representative for minorities and green for muslim majorities. the flag does not at this point, nor has it ever had any state governed dimensions. anyway, now jinnah is the first governor-general of pakistan. [pakistan never had an elected prime minister until zulfikar ali bhutto]. india gave that honour to it’s last viceroy, lord louis mountbatten.

fast forward to 1956 and four prime ministers and governor-generals have gone by. the dominion is now dissolved on march 23rd (that’s why you celebrate pakistan day) and pakistan officially becomes an islamic republic and we now have a constitution. it didn’t last long and was dissolved in a military coup two years later by iskander mirza and ayub khan was made president. this began a long history of pakistan’s military coups and martial law’s.

after ayub came yahya, and yahya  (another fellow who had martial law going) was the fellow in charge in 1971. a blemish amongst the many in the country’s history, 1971 was the year bangladesh was formed and east pakistan finished. the bangladesh liberation war as it is officially termed occurred and resulted in the hundreds of thousands of deaths of bengali’s, east pakistani’s and indians (bengali authorities claim that upto 3 million people were killed, whereas the official word from pakistan is as low as 26,000). as per the guinness book of world records, the atrocities of the bangladesh liberation are amongst the top 5 genocides ever. hear that? we’re right up there with the nazi’s and rwanda and cambodia.

after the war, bhutto was handed over power. and thus began the wonderful bhutto legacy that is still the ruin of the country today. to his credit, zulfikar ali bhutto was a man who had the ability to move the masses and speak to them like no other (do watch the entire clip, the last 30 seconds are worth it). he was arrogant and well educated. within a month of moving into office, he began nationalizing pretty much every thing possible. his government promulgated the Nationalization and Economic Reforms Order nationalizing 31 key industrial units. he said “I had made a pledge to the people of Pakistan to implement industrial reforms. I am now beginning to redeem the pledge”. it was indeed only a beginning, and big business was to receive successive jolts during his six years rule and paving the future of rubbish beauracratic government offices. leading industrialists went bankrupt overnight and were either put under house arrest or imprisoned. you can read more on the impact of the nationalization on the pakistan economy here. rest assured, had it not been for nationalization, pakistan would have a very different economic landscape today. oh by the way, he was also the father of pakistan’s nuclear arms program, another terrific waste of resources. bhutto was also the loser behind the farcical amendment in the constitution under pressure from the psycho fundo’s of the time to falsely reflect that the ahmadiyya are non-muslims and anyone claiming to be such would be tried and imprisoned on blasphemy charges.

our next martial law dictator soon follows. zia-ul-haque took over from bhutto in another coup and then later killed the guy for pretty much no particularly reason other than the fact that they didn’t get along very much. this guy pretty much setup the roots of islamic fundo’s that run rampant today in the country. he helped the americans setup and coordinate with the taliban to get the commie’s out of afghanistan. he screwed with the ahmediyya even more than bhutto. he’d cut your arm for theft and other insane sharia laws (flogging or stoning to death for adultery etc). being a shia was almost a sin while this guy was around. he made a ton of money embezzling in the trade of heroin and weapons through the afghan war but not much was evidenced against the guy as he had the media on a gag order too and tv, radio and print was heavily censored due to the fact that zia might have anyone reporting against him killed. his islamization got so bad that women were not allowed out in the evenings after maghrib nor could they be with any males who were not mahram. anyway after a brutal martial law which seemed to last forever, he died in a plane crash in 1988. rumour is that the americans took care of him for us.

after this, between ’88 and ’99 civilian rule resumed exchanging hands between benazir and nawaz. neither did a very good job of it. not much changed and not much happened during these times. aside from karachi. karachi became a mess with the mqm using the city as it’s personal playground. between 1994 and 1995 karachi was a battleground in a civil war between the mqm (I would link to mqm.org but apparently google don’t think it’s a wise idea to head there) and everyone else. operation clean up by the military was initiated and over 2000 people were killed in the city in the months during this cleanup. after, random corruption charges exchanged hands between nawaz and benazir. by 1999 nawaz in an attempt to dismiss the then chief of army (for his escapades in kargil, siachin and other kashmiri areas) failed to do so and general pervez musharraf became the next military ruler of pakistan in another coup. he exiled nawaz sharif to saudi arabia.

during musharraf’s reign, the economy improved significantly.  he brought the people of the country out of the rut that they had been in since zia. for the most part the country and the people within were happy. they didn’t care too much who was in power as long as their lifestyles were improving. and they were. they weren’t supressed by his militancy. he opened up the media and improved the arts and culture and education sectors. he improved upon existing infrastructure. he did a lot. too bad he screwed up as well with the lawyers and the lal masjid scenario. his ratings plumetted and then things went downhill from there.

for some reason or the other the country figure they’d be better off having this guy around. what will happen tomorrow, we shall never know. there’s a good timeline here in case anyone is interested. happy 14th august everyone. wishing you a hearty independence from abbas and abbas.