Improved Defensive Capabilities, Management System Imperative to Counter Pakistan, Feel Experts

June 03, 2014

New Delhi: India needs to build its defensive capabilities, have better management systems and take other domestic measures to counter the backlash of Islamist Radicalism in Pakistan, insisted experts on Pakistan during a round table discussion on ‘The Sectarian Challenge to Pakistan: Options for India’. The discussion was organised by the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) on June 3, 2014.

Discussing Jihad, the experts felt that the there is a wide spread acceptance for radicalism in Pakistan. They observed that the Pakistan Army is infiltrated by the Radical Islamists.

The experts argued that the Radical Islamists generally dictate the political discourses in Pakistan and the Islamised education has created successive generations which reciprocate the idea of Jihad and rule by Shariah.

The institute organised the discussion taking the recently published Monograph ‘Religion as the Foundation of a Nation: The Making and Unmaking of Pakistan’ by Shri P K Upadhyay, Consultant to IDSA for Pakistan project, as the back drop.

The monograph is an effort to explore the genesis and accentuation of the sectarian divide in Pakistan, its present status, future prognosis and implications.

It highlights the sectarian fault-lines in Pakistan, a country that owes its origin to the ‘Two Nation Theory’ in the sub-continent’s polity. Leaders of the Pakistan Movement were convinced that Muslims were a separate nation from the Hindu nation and the two could not live together. In their zeal to create a modern progressive Muslim state in the sub-continent they chose to down-ply, or even ignore, the sectarian divide that had been manifesting in South Asian Islam even when the British were still at the helms. Came independence and these sectarian fault-lines began to manifest themselves in Pakistan’s polity.

It speaks about the Pakistan’s political leader’s efforts to politically manipulate the sectarian divide in Pakistan to suit their needs. The monograph insists that it would be erroneous to blame General Zia ul-Haq with triggering the big Islamic theological divides, they were already there. Even General Ayub Khan and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto tried to politically manipulate the sectarian divide in Pakistan to suit their needs. What Zia ul-Haq did was to build a common cause with Islamic zealots and provide them Army/ISI’s patronage and access within the structures of the government. Various national and regional events since then have allowed these Radical Islamists (RIs) become almost a state within the state with an ideological dream.