Perspective: How Zia defined Pakistan | I.A. Rehman

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The Pakistan supporters were divided into two camps; one may be loosely defined as the group that swore by democracy while the other was vaguely attached to the concept of a religious state. The roots of Zia’s Pakistan lay in this division.

Times of Ahmad | News Watch | US desk
Source/Credit: Daily Dawn / TKM
By I.A. Rehman | July 4, 2017

"The Ayub regime [had] tried to crush both the ‘democratic ideals’ and ‘religious slogan’ groups."

Forty years ago General Ziaul Haq seized power and put the country under its third and longest martial law. Over the next decade, he decisively transformed what was left of Jinnah’s dream of a secular democratic Pakistan into an almost completely theocratic polity. His handiwork has survived more than three decades and appears unlikely to be replaced with another political structure in the foreseeable future.

In order to understand Ziaul Haq’s success in redefining Pakistan and the survival of his scheme we have to examine the genesis of ‘the Pakistan idea’ because he drew upon the tussle between two groups of people over what Pakistan was meant to be.

The Lahore Resolution of 1940 offered a constitutional scheme as an alternative to the one embodied in the Government of India Act of 1935. In his address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947, the Quaid-i-Azam also described the creation of Pakistan and Partition as the only solution of India’s constitutional problem. This would imply that the movement for Pakistan was a purely political struggle unrelated to any religious objective.

July 5 marks the 40th anniversary of the 1977 military coup which brought General Ziaul Haq into power. Eos looks back at the coup that fundamentally altered Pakistan’s trajectory, whose repercussions are being felt to this day.
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Complements: The Times of Ahmad

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