What Being a “Centre-Left” Pakistani Means to Me

This post was initially published on “Brown Pundits” (BP) and reflects some of the debates on that blog.

In front of the Taj (c. 2000)

I have been repeatedly accused on BP of not actually being “Centre-Left”. A commenter has said “Pakistani liberal is an oxymoron”. I have been called an “Islamist” and “Islamofascist”. While it doesn’t particularly make a difference to my life what some random people (whom I am unlikely to ever meet in reality) think of me, I would like to take this opportunity to define what precisely being centre-left means to me. I do not attempt to speak for other Pakistanis–though I believe there is a significant proportion of the population who share some of my beliefs– but only to describe my own personal background and ideology. This exercise will also hopefully help me to examine some of my own assumptions.

As I have previously mentioned in some comments, I come from a family that believes in Nehruvian Secularism and in the “idea of India”. This ideological influence comes primarily through my father. My paternal grandmother was from Agra and came to Pakistan only after her marriage to my grandfather (who was from Peshawar). My grandfather was an official in the Pakistan Railways and prior to the 1965 war, my father and his siblings used to travel by train to Agra every year to see their maternal grandparents and relatives. The war unfortunately put an end to that. While I never had an in-depth discussion with my grandmother about what exactly Pakistan meant to her, my father has told me that she was deeply saddened by the fact that she was separated from her parents and one of her brothers. Such tragedies were common in many Pakistani and Indian Muslim families. I was lucky enough to be able to visit India as a child and spend time in my dadi’s ancestral home. There are pictures of me in front of the Taj.

On my mother’s side, my maternal grandfather was born in Amritsar (though he was ethnically Kashmiri). In 1947, he was living in Sialkot and married to my nani (who was from West Punjab). However, his relatives came to Sialkot as refugees from Amritsar. For decades, they continued to carry the keys to their houses in Amritsar. In fact, when my mother spent time in Indian Punjab in the 1990s (while doing some international development work) people there were surprised to learn that she could describe Amritsar neighborhoods in great detail without ever having been there before.

It is also important to note that though I was born in Pakistan, I spent most of my formative years growing up in the United States. My parents had many Indian friends. Also, my entire family was deeply involved with Hindustani classical music and this naturally tends to be an Indian diaspora activity. My ustad was Bangladeshi-American but very few of his students were Muslim. While I was learning to sing khayal, I also learned bhajans and shabads in various ragas.

I am not going to get much more in-depth about my background, but I would like to quote briefly from an essay written by my younger brother entitled “Brown as the mouths of rivers” and published in Seminar magazine in 2012. The essay begins with a description of a visit to an exhibition of South Asian Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. He writes:

Even more than other similar exhibitions (a selection at the Met itself of depictions of the goddess in South Asian art; Gandharan sculpture, recently on display at the Asia Society; a show of photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, stretching from before any of those countries existed to the present day, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London), Wonder of the Age left me with a strange feeling. The history of ‘South Asia’ is so rich, in fact because of our differences, in fact because so many people came from so many places – and now that richness is precisely what we are told to deny, the very aspect of our heritage we wish to ignore. In Pakistan, at least, we have chosen to turn our backs on the vast majority of our history, acting as if things began with Muhammad bin Qasim and then sped forward to 1947. Severed from our roots, it should be no surprise that we grow deformed.

Later on, he describes how we grew up:

Walking home across Manhattan and thinking about those ragamala paintings, I remembered all those years I spent, growing up in the DC suburbs, studying Indian music. Several times a year, my teacher (since we are talking about South Asia: he was for the record a Bengali, born in Calcutta, his ‘homes’ now Baltimore and Dhaka) would gather his students from up and down the East Coast at someone’s house, for performances, or, in November, at the UMBC campus for a competition. At the time, the experience of learning music was painful, unenjoyable (forcing a pathologically shy child into the performing arts still seems to me both cruel and essentially unhelpful), but the paintings set those years into a different context.

My teacher’s students included the children of Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (and also what our parents insisted on referring to as ‘Americans’). On stage, though, singing those songs (for most of those six years I studied singing, so that is what I remember best), we were all the same. We were Muslims singing bhajans and Hindus singing shabds, all of us mangling equally badly the Urdu of ghazals and the Bengali of Rabindra sangeet.

I’ve lost touch with all those other kids, and I have no idea if any of them look back on the experience the same way, but in retrospect what we were learning was not just music (music that to me was arcane, foreign, a Jainesque Shahnama) but culture; what we were learning was in the end ‘South Asia’. In suburban houses in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Virginia, in that auditorium outside Baltimore, we created something like a microcosm, a simulacrum, an accessible version of South Asia. More than Indian or Pakistani or Bangladeshi (or Punjabi or Bengali, Marathi- or Gujarati-speaking), we were South Asian.

I would like to end this essay with a brief explanation of my political beliefs.

Partition: I tend towards the view that Partition was not inevitable. It was the result of the lack of compromise between the Indian National Congress (which though it claimed to be a party of all Indians primarily represented Hindu interests) and the Muslim League (which was a party that represented primarily the interests of North Indian Muslims and arguably only the elite among them) as well as the desperation of the colonial power to leave India. Ultimately, Lord Mountbatten sped up the British departure from India, leading to a botched Partition and needless ethnic cleansing. However, I do believe that the creation of Pakistan was in the end a net positive since it allowed a substantial segment of the Muslims of British India to exercise their own destiny in a sovereign state. I believe most Indians (certainly those on the Hindu Right) are happy to have less Muslims within their national boundaries. I would also speculate that most Bangladeshis are happy to live in a Bengali Muslim state.

Secularism: As I mentioned, I come from a Nehruvian secularist family. Also, my upbringing in the US (a constitutionally secular state) has led me to prefer secularism to religious majoritarianism. I would hope India does not go the way of Pakistan and declare itself a state that belongs solely to its religious majority. That said, I am of course not an Indian citizen and India has the right to amend its constitution the way it wishes. However, the rest of us are free to judge that amendment as a retrogressive step.

Kashmir: Very briefly, I believe that Kashmir is disputed territory and that this dispute will ultimately have to be settled in a way that is acceptable to India, Pakistan and to the Kashmiri people. I disagree with the Indian argument of Kashmir being an “integral part” of India. Yes, the Maharaja acceded but that was only under the conditions of Article 370, which no longer exists. Pandit Nehru’s promise in front of the UN that a plebiscite would be conducted in Kashmir also happened after the Maharaja’s accession. Thus, accession is not the final argument.

However, I also disagree with those Pakistanis who say “Kashmir banega Pakistan” (Kashmir will be Pakistan). The ultimate fate of the Kashmiri people is up to them and not to mainland Pakistanis. The Kashmiri people may well choose azaadi from Pakistan as well as from India.

I would be remiss if I didn’t clearly state here that I am against the use of terrorism as Pakistani state policy. Pahalgam is indefensible. Where I differ from others on BP is that I do not uncritically believe that Pakistan was behind this incident. Before conducting “Operation Sindoor”, the Indian government should have conducted a neutral investigation before the International Community. Obviously, I also disagree with the official Pakistani line that Pahalgam was a “false flag”.

Finally, I’d like to say a word about civilian supremacy. I believe that the Pakistani Army should restrict itself to its constitutional role (of protecting the borders) and not get involved in politics. There is no reason for the military to have a veto on foreign policy. However, the reality is that Pakistan is a national security state and aggressive rhetoric from India (and actions such as “Operation Sindoor”) will only serve to strengthen the hold of the Pakistan Army on Pakistan.

In conclusion, I do not hate “the idea or existence of India” as I have been accused of on BP. There are Pakistanis much further to my right who dream of “Ghazwa-e-Hind” just as there are Indians who dream of “Akhand Bharat”. I do not share either of these beliefs. However, I do not believe Pakistan must accept Indian hegemony in South Asia.