Britain, before vacating its colony in India, partitioned the country into India and Pakistan in 1947, leaving the young political entities to their fate. While India adopted a secular constitution under the influence and guidance of Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, and other secular-minded leaders, Pakistan, as fate would have it, lost its founding father Jinnah, who was secular in his outlook, the very next year. Pakistan, perhaps, would not have become a rabid state that it is today, if a largely secular-minded Jinnah had lived for another 10-15 years molding its political process. But Jinnah’s untimely and unfortunate death left Pakistan rudderless and inevitably Pakistan became a full-fledged Islamic state in 1956. 

In the 60 years since their independence, while India has all along drawn its strength from its secular constitution, Pakistan’s identity crisis has pushed it into prolonged periods of political instability and military rule. One of the Pakistani military dictators, Zia-ul-Haq, sowed the seeds of religious extremism, and since then it has been downhill all the way for Pakistan as a society and as a nation. 

When Pakistan came to know this, it sent its rangers to forcibly take over Kashmir. Hari Singh immediately signed the treaty of accession with India to join the Indian Union. The Indian army entered Kashmir and stopped Pakistan’s march. The part of Kashmir that Pakistani forces occupied then is still under the control of Pakistan, while India administers the rest. Both the nations since then have been wasting huge sums of money in arming themselves for a possible armed conflict to decide the ownership. 

In hindsight, Kashmir perhaps would not have become a flashpoint, if India had not helped East Pakistan become Bangladesh. During the civil war between West and East Pakistan, West Pakistan used its armed might against the hapless East Pakistanis, resulting in a huge exodus of refugees from East Pakistan into India. This forced India to get involved in the war, and Bangladesh was created after the Indo-Pakistan war in 1971. Pakistani army is still smarting under the defeat in the war and has been trying, in its own words, to “bleed India through a thousand cuts,” through cross-border terrorism in India and engineering communal troubles in Kashmir. 

Unfortunately for Pakistan, the presence of foreign players with their hidden agendas in its political space has only added more problems. The Unite States’ blinkered foreign policy of getting rid of socialist regimes at any cost saw Pakistan getting pulled into the US-Soviet proxy war in Afghanistan, with the US arming religious extremists, including one Osama bin Laden, to get rid of USSR-supported Najibullah, the then ruler of Afghanistan—a reason why US’s current attempt to hunt down terrorists in Pakistan is uncannily similar to Dr. Frankenstein chasing the monster he had created. 

China has it own agenda in Pakistan. There is no love lost between India and China, especially after the 1962 Indo-China border war. And more importantly, China is antagonistic to India, because India gave Dalai Lama refuge after he escaped from China following the 1959 Tibetan uprising. Also, China sees India as an economic rival in the region, whose progress it would be only too happy to stall. Pakistan needs weapons which China supplies to keep India in check. 

And there is another discreet player in Pakistan’s political scene: Saudi Arabia (plus other Sunni-Islamic gulf countries). Saudi Arabia, besides exporting its own brand of Islam, funds Pakistan’s religious scene which includes a lot of madrasas, with many of them having become recruiting grounds for extremist/terrorist organizations.

Pakistan’s proximity to US or US’s need for Pakistan in a geostrategic sense makes Saudi Arabia want to have Pakistan under its influence. Also, Pakistan is a nuclear state, and in a possible Shia (Iran) vs. Sunni (Saudi Arabia and the rest) war, Pakistan, a Sunni state, will provide the fire power (nuclear, no less). 

Given these ground realities, it is going to take a Herculean effort from Pakistan to free itself from foreign influence and become a responsible nation. An opportunity offered itself to set the record straight when the world’s most wanted terrorist Osama bin Laden was taken out by the US forces on the Pakistani soil. Osama could not certainly have taken refuge in the cantonment area near Pakistan’s capital without the knowledge of Pakistani army and ISI, indicating their complicity. But Pakistani government and civil society wasted this opportunity to rein in the army and ISI by belligerently glossing over their omissions and commissions. 

However, Pakistan’s hopes as a nation lie in initiating drastic structural changes in the way things are run. Now, Pakistan is a sham democracy with its army and intelligence wing calling the shots and the common people having no say in governance. Only when Pakistan gets a truly representative democratic government, it can rein in its army and intelligence wing. Also, Pakistan should consider switching over to a secular constitution. Tall order, but failing which, Pakistan can never hope to shed the tag of rogue nation.