Ayushman Singh Jamwal
ayushmanjamwal@gmail.com
For years Pakistan has posed itself as a responsible international player that has adhered to the rule of law and global conventions. From Pakistani civil society to the political discourse, its socio-economic challenges, tumultuous history and struggles with reputation have often been ignored to paint a golden picture of progress and prosperity, or chalked up to foreign conspiracies by long-time adversaries and ‘back-stabbing allies’.
Despite Pakistan’s looming legacy of military incursions and the shadow of terror as a state policy, India has always experimented with peace with its neighbour, dealing with an ecosystem that poses Pakistan has a mirror image of India in terms of language, culture and heritage. The calls for dialogue often look to the social and cultural convergences, to create a dual world narrative in Pakistan, hoping that nurturing the educated, peace loving side will overpower the war mongering, radical and propaganda-driven one. The optics look great in songs, films and conferences, but the tangible core of Pakistan, that manages the reality around that ecosystem, is what India has to really contend with. The core pillars of our two nations are fundamentally different – and moral sermons or viral campaigns do little to change that reality. It is the only reason why an iron fist approach to Pakistan is the only tangible foreign policy.
For nearly eight decades, Pakistan has struggled to live up to its democratic promise. Periodic elections may give the impression of representative rule, but behind the ballot boxes lies a system distorted by military dominance, feudal strangleholds, minority exclusion, foreign dependency, and the dark shadow of terror.
Roughly 33 years out of 78 since Pakistan’s independence can be classified as sustained democratic periods where civilian governments were elected and survived without being overthrown by a coup. Yet even those years were marred by presidential dismissals, weak civilian control and strong military influence. The single greatest impediment to democratic consolidation in Pakistan has been the military’s outsized role in governance. From coups to engineered elections, the generals have long treated Pakistan as their preserve. This imbalance has hollowed out civilian institutions, leaving parliament weak and political parties pliant. Look no further than Field Marshal Asim Munir, the head of the Pakistani military, who strides ahead of the elected prime minister of Pakistan to lead the nation’s foreign policy and trade negotiations.
The next core pillar that shows Pakistan as divergently different from India is the grip of the landlord class, another poison in Pakistan’s political bloodstream. For millions in rural Pakistan, voting is not a matter of free choice, but of loyalty to the local feudal lord who controls land, credit, and livelihoods. These dynasties dominate parliaments but rarely legislate for reform. Comprehensive land reform, rural education, and empowered local governments are something India achieved fairly immediately after independence. In Pakistan, the zamindari system is still alive and kicking, delivering 50% of the nation’s prime ministers since independence. Pakistan’s ballot box mirage ignores this oligarchical DNA, which will not allow the son of a tea-seller to achieve the highest political office of the land.
Nations with diversity often see friction between different communities, and India is no exception. However, what sets Pakistan different from India is the legal codification of discrimination. Pakistan’s legal system has long been weaponized to persecute minorities, embedding structural discrimination into both law and practice. The most glaring example is the blasphemy laws, introduced under General Zia-ul-Haq and retained in the Pakistan Penal Code, which prescribes harsh punishments including death for alleged insults to Islam or the Prophet. These laws are routinely misused against Christians, Hindus, Ahmadis, and even dissenting Muslims. The Ahmadi community is legally barred from calling themselves Muslim or practicing the core tenets of their faith, with constitutional amendments and penal provisions criminalising their religious expression. In addition, discriminatory personal laws restrict the rights of Hindu and Christian women in marriage and inheritance, while forced conversions of minority girls remain a pervasive problem with little recourse in courts.
Terror as a state policy has merged itself into Pakistani society, another core pillar that sets the nation apart from India. Top leaders from Bilawal Bhutto to Khawaja Asif have called it the ‘Dirty work of the West’, but among the top 5 nations with globally designated terrorists and terror groups on their soil – Pakistan is second to Afghanistan where the Taliban is in power. Even as Pakistan projects itself as a beacon of Islamic modernity, no democracy can survive when terror groups operate with impunity. Pakistan’s decades-long policy of nurturing jihadist proxies for foreign policy goals has come at a devastating domestic cost – thousands of lives lost, civic space eroded, and politics held hostage by extremists.
Finally, the distortion of military history, and the pattern of denial, silence and admission is another thing that sets Pakistan apart from India. Every nation’s government is accused of propaganda and misinformation, but Pakistan has a record of simultaneously bungling and doubling down on its own misinformation to an embarrassing degree. In the first India-Pakistan war over Jammu & Kashmir, Pakistan long framed the campaign as an indigenous revolt by ‘tribal irregulars’, downplaying state direction, planning, provisioning and the movement of Pashtun tribes in the weeks leading to the 1947 invasion. Pakistan commemorates September 6 as ‘Defence Day’, celebrating the ‘repulse’ of Indian offensives near Lahore and Sialkot in 1965, and often presenting the war as a win, even when it failed in its objective to take control of Jammu and Kashmir.
On the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, U.S. diplomatic cables described the Pakistani army’s crackdown as ‘genocide’. Pakistan’s own ‘Hamoodur Rahman Commission’ – suppressed for decades and later leaked – recorded evidence of widespread atrocities by Pakistani troops. During the 1999 Kargil War, India recovered the bodies of several Pakistani soldiers. When offered to Pakistan through the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Pakistani Army refused to accept them, in order to maintain the fiction that only ‘irregulars’ were involved. The Indian Army conducted the last rites with full military honours and as per Islamic traditions. Despite its initial denials, Pakistan subsequently acknowledged the dead as its own soldiers and conferred gallantry awards posthumously.
For the Pakistani state, these are non-negotiable attributes, written in stone, with no signs of active civil movements for deep, meaningful institutional change. Its core realities necessitate a hardline foreign policy stance. Unfortunately, the Pakistani citizenry exists in a fragile ‘theatre’ of democracy, ignorant or blissfully unaware that sustained democracy cannot be delivered by generals, oligarchs, extremists or foreign patrons. Peace at least requires some level of convergence of national characters. The drastic divergence of national DNAs is a reality we must accept.
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