(Part 6)
Zia: The Perfect Antagonist of Pakistan
Pakistan was born with a built-in contradiction. Its founding idea was not nation-building but nation-separation. Its identity defined in opposition to India, not in affirmation of its own civilisational depth. This means that the intellectual source code had one line written in stone:
“We exist because we are not India.”
When a country defines itself negatively, the project of positive progress becomes difficult. Progress requires inspiration, not resentment.
Pakistan is the textbook case of a country that is open in geography and economics, yet closed in thought. And thought-closure can be far more damaging than border-closure, because it blocks not goods but ideas, and ideas are what modern nations run on.
Pakistan’s drift towards Islamic radicalism is now a certainty, with the Pakistani Army and Islamic radicals using the same curriculum and slogans in their training academies and battalions. The decline of Pakistan did not happen in 1947. It needed an antagonist to plan it. Zia-ul-Haq was the man who poured the metaphorical bhang into Pakistan’s cognitive well.
General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq had a dream. He wanted to head a Muslim confederation stretching from Turkmenistan to Kashmir, a powerful Pan-Islamic league under the dominance of Pakistan. William Casey and the US administration encouraged him in pursuing such a fantasy. To legitimise Pakistan as a US ally and as the frontline against Iran, Washington declared that Pakistan was a secular state, though Sharia law in fact superseded the written constitution. Thanks in part to Pakistan’s support of US policies, Soviet power disintegrated in Central Asia. In exchange for the favour, America turned a blind eye when Pakistan began funding Islamist fundamentalist groups in the aftermath of the Afghan war, and stood aside when Pakistan acquired nuclear power.
Zia wrote a foreword to the book titled The Quranic Concept of War. It was written by Brigadier S. K. Malik, which tells his method to achieve his dreams:
This book brings out with simplicity, clarity and precision the Quranic philosophy on the application of military force, within the context of the totality that is JEHAD. The professional soldier in a Muslim army, pursuing the goals of a Muslim state, CANNOT become ‘professional’ if in all his activities he does not take on ‘the colour of Allah.’ The non-military citizen of a Muslim state must, likewise, be aware of the kind of soldier that his country must produce and the ONLY pattern of war that his country’s armed forces may wage.
Thus, he expressed his vision in which every civilian was soldier for the cause of the country. But as a dictator he was the only competent authority to tell what country wants. Most countries has heroes and villains, but rarely does a country produce a figure who becomes the antagonist of the country itself. Zia-ul-Haq was neither the opponent of a party, nor the enemy of a leader, nor the rival of a faction. His policies did target individuals but they also targeted the cognitive and cultural foundations of the society. He not only silenced a generation with a gun, he rewired all future generations.
He replaced ambiguity with absolutism.
He substituted conversation with conviction.
He traded humanity for doctrine.
Before him, Pakistan had authoritarianism but it also had theatre, poetry, ambiguity, dissent, and cultural permeability.
After him, Pakistan has ideology without identity. It has doctrine but no discourse.
Society is certain without scope of conversation.
He replaced the old groundwater of culture with a new groundwater of paranoia. That’s the “bhang in the well”, the phrase I used in Part 4 of this series. This poison did not fade with time, it deepened, calcified, and seeped through every institution until the state itself became addicted to its own delusions. Now Pakistan’s problem is not isolation from its culture but also from its own potential.
Zia died in a way that perfectly mirrored what he had created. His C-130 exploded mid-air, scattering bodies so violently that they could not be separated. His limbs, uniforms, and medals, all merged into one grotesque heap of metal and flesh. He could be identified only by his teeth, as if even death itself refused to give him a separate identity.
The man who dissolved the boundaries between truth and falsehood died dissolved among the wreckage. The architect of confusion left the world as an unrecognisable fragment inside the confusion he engineered.
Zia is the antagonist because his legacy continues to attack Pakistan long after his death. His ideology outlived him. His curriculum outlived him. His weaponised religion outlived him. His paranoia outlived him. His politics outlived him. Even the Taliban and the deep-state tendencies are his aftershocks, still shaking the ground.
Zia not only ruthlessly ruled Pakistan as a dictator, he rewrote its script as a tragedy.
He remains the perfect antagonist of Pakistan’s fate today.
Zia met his fate, which every Pakistani leader has suffered. It is a Pakistani jinx. That will be discussed in next part 7.
References:
- The Quranic Concept of War by Brigadier S. K. MALIK Foreword by General M. ZIA-UL-HAQ published and reprinted in 1992 by ADAM PUBLISHERS & DISTRIBUTORS SHANDAR MARKET, CHITLI QABAR, Delhi India.
- THE UNENDING GAME: A Former R&AW Chief’s Insights into Espionage by Vikram Sood published by Penguin Random House India (2018).
- Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars behind the Terror Networks by Loretta Napoleoni (2003).