Organizer: David Gilmartin, North Carolina State University
Chair: Lawrence Ziring, Western Michigan University
Discussants: Charles Kennedy, Wake Forest University; Barbara Metcalf, University of
California, Davis
With the partition of India in 1947, Pakistan emerged as both a new state and a new society. Historians have often looked to the role of Islam, which initially defined the new state, to explain the distinctive trajectory of Pakistan's politics after 1947. The Islamic redefinition of the state in fact marked, in critical respects, a decisive break with the colonial past. But at the same time, critical elements in the colonial relationship between state and society survived in Pakistan, even as they were transformed by the state's (and the society's) ideological re-definition. This panel will examine several of the critical legacies of the colonial regime in Pakistan, in both law and politics. It will attempt to analyze the ways that these legacies have shaped the structure and development of politics in Pakistan, even as the relationship between state and society was reconstructed in the post-colonial context.
The first paper, by Nasser Hussain, will examine the role of the law in defining the new state. He will discuss the manner in which the courts in Pakistan sought to legitimize the new state, attempting to draw on both colonial tradition, and new forms of legal doctrine. The second paper, by David Gilmartin, will examine the role of an ideology of development in shaping the history of the Pakistani state. It will examine the colonial roots of this notion and suggest how it interacted with Islamic ideology in defining the relationship of the state to Pakistani society. The third paper, by Steven Holtzman, will look at the functioning of the electoral system in Pakistan. He will examine in particular the role of biradari, localized kin-based loyalties, in shaping electoral politics. The role of biradari in Pakistani politics was profoundly shaped by the legacies of the colonial state and yet, at the same time, its role in shaping relations between state and society was transformed in the new Pakistani context.
Nasser Hussain, University of California, Berkeley
In 1971, in the matter of Asma Jilani v. Government of Punjab (P.L.D. 197 S.C. 139), the Supreme Court of Pakistan was once again asked to rule on the legitimacy of a military assumption of power and a suspension of the constitution. The court's own precedents pointed toward an affirmation of such actions: in the 1958 case of the State v. Dosso, the court had used the writings of the jurist, Hans Kelsen, particularly his understanding of changes in the grundnorm, to argue that a successful revolution or coup d'etat changed the first source of legitimate authority, the constitution as grundnorm, and thus the court was compelled to recognize the defacto validity of the new regime as dejure. But in the Asma Jilani case, the court was more skeptical of the earlier formulation. What after all were to be taken as the first legal principles of Pakistan? Could they be found in the colonial statutory instruments of the Government of India Act of 1935 and the Independence Act of 1947, by which the state came into being, and which provided the institutional framework for later developments? The Chief Justice in the Asma Jilani case, in overturning earlier precedents and denying the validity of the military takeover, offered an alternative rationale: "if a grundnorm is necessary, Pakistan need not have to look to the western legal theorists to discover it. Pakistan's own grundnorm is enshrined in its doctrine that the legal sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to Almighty Allah alone, and the authority exercisable by the people within the limits prescribed by Him is a sacred trust."
Interpretations of political and legal developments in Pakistan often focus on two aspects: the failure of political parties and the periodic collapse of institutions of a so-called civil society, and/or the salience of "Islamic Law," understood almost as an inexorable manifestation of a Muslim state and society. I offer the brief but suggestive snapshot above, not so much to dislodge these interpretations, but to supplement them. I propose to consider some of the patterns of state formation in Pakistan by focusing on judicial interpretations. By doing so, I hope to specify some of the continuities between the colonial and post-colonial, as well as the mode in which discontinuities are posited and understood. How far do British judicial structures and constitutional frameworks endure in Pakistan? How is a "Muslim" vision of legal sovereignty used by the Supreme Court to fill in crucial gaps in the elaboration of constitutional legitimacy? What are the more material consequences of such interpretations?
David Gilmartin, North Carolina State University
The historical creation of Pakistan has often been portrayed as a process peculiarly divorced from the history of the particular land that is today Pakistan. The pre-history of Pakistan has most frequently been seen as the broad history of Islam in South Asia. At the time of its creation, many viewed Pakistan as an "ideological state," a state rooted in the history of Indian Islam, and somehow only fortuitously connected to the particular piece of land on which the Pakistan idea was ultimately forced to establish itself. But the connection of the Pakistani state to the "development" of the Indus Basin region that it came to occupy has had a profound impact on the nature of the Pakistani state and its relation to Pakistani society. This was a relationship rooted not in the history of South Asian Islam, but in the physical transformations of the Indus Basin that occurred during the colonial period. This paper will examine the relations between state and society embedded in Indus Basin irrigation development, both before and after the creation of Pakistan, to suggest the colonial legacies that have shaped the Pakistani "development" state, and the role that Islam has played in defining it.
Steven Holtzman, Columbia University
The biradari, or extended kinship group, has historically played, and continues to play, a critical role in Punjabi electoral politics in Pakistan. In the years before 1947, the role of biradaris in politics grew out of the colonial politics of representation and rural political control more generally. In order to define a structure linking the colonial state to indigenous society, the British deliberately drew administrative and local constituency boundaries that encouraged representation based on indigenous kinship ties. Though such structures hardly determined entirely the form of electoral politics, they created a framework in which biradari loyalties came to play a significant role in channeling the ties of patronage and alliance on which electoral politics were built. Biradaris have continued to play important roles in electoral politics since 1947. This paper will examine the colonial roots of biradari politics and suggest the how the continuing importance of biradari in Punjabi politics has served to shape the relations between Punjabi society and the Pakistani state.
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