In recent months, my articles have tended to try to apply political theory and intellectual history to political events and behaviour in Pakistan and Bangladesh. The insight that comes from working at the interstices of intellectual history and political theory is somewhat akin to that described in the The Financial Times’ recent excerpt from Stephen Johnson’s new book How We Got to Now, a book about scientific innovation.
In it, as I understand from the excerpt, innovation is described as primarily arrived at through technological discoveries of different people coming together to make an idea only imagined before it becomes feasible. The light bulb is an example.
Different people worked more or less simultaneously on a generally recognised problem, turning electricity into light, and a solution appeared. One person got the credit, but drew on the work of many others.
But innovation may start with a visionary thinker imagining potential uses for technology that is yet to be imagined, say electricity, long before it was harnessed for power. The heroine of this particular piece is Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who, because she lived at the interstices of advanced mathematics and poetry, saw the possibilities of how mechanical numerical calculating machines could be directed by internal instructions to go beyond numerical calculations to algebraic and analytical systems that encompass prose, poetry, and music.
Sophisticated calculating machines which could be programmed to go well beyond numerical calculation, such as she had envisioned, had to wait for electricity and a number of other inventions, and came along to change our lives over 100 years later.
Now, I do not consider myself or the many others who labour to bring together political theory and intellectual history to be innovators. Visionaries in such fields are rare indeed, and even breakthroughs in thinking are very uncommon. But I do believe that working at the crunch point of two or more such disciplines allows one to often see beyond the superficial surface appearance of events and actions to their historical and conceptual roots and to their intended, and especially their unintended, consequences.
For example, I wrote of state and nation-building recently, and noted the difference between the two. States can be weak or strong, but neither a strong or a weak state necessarily makes a nation. Nations, no matter how they came to be, are inhabited by citizens whose greatest loyalty is to the nation/state, not to family, ethnic groups, or the region. Nations have usually been able to establish a coherent national identity, or ideology, which is the foundation for an organic national narrative.
Pakistan is a weak state with an invented nationalist ideology, and a national identity that is still up for grabs. Its national narrative has been, to a large extent, hijacked, first by both the military which constructed a self-serving defensive national narrative, and later by fundamentalists who have morphed it into a defensive and exclusionist one.
The unintended consequences of this incoherence are fairly clear: A myopic and defensive obsession with India; the buildup over decades of proxy armies based on this defensive narrative which now have turned against the state because, though the times and the civilian government’s agenda have changed, that of the proxies (and perhaps the army) has not; an erratic and often disjointed foreign policy which at the very least confuses its friends; and a national narrative that leads to incongruent public reactions to national and international events, eg the long-standing duality about Afghanistan and the recent ambiguous public response to Malala’s Nobel Peace Prize.
The mixed reaction to Malala’s Nobel Prize is especially illustrative when I compare it to the Bangladesh reaction to Muhammad Yunus’ Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Yunus was universally acclaimed in Bangladesh when he won. The message from Bangladeshis then was that Yunus had brought great honour to their country. His troubles in Bangladesh came much later and were political in nature. The attacks on him began in 2010, four years after he had won the prize.
They were the result of a particular policy of Sheikh Hasina, who, as one rumour has it, may have felt the prize should have been hers – though for what is very hard to say – or according to another rumour, she feared him as a possible political opponent, something he may have exacerbated by appearing to be interested in a political role after the Bangladesh army intervened in early 2007.
In any case, since Sheikh Hasina took power in 2009, she has made it a point to go after Yunus and Grameen Bank. Some of her party men jumped on that bandwagon smelling blood and loot, but many did not and do not agree. And four years after the attacks began, the government has succeeded in removing Yunus from Grameen Bank, but has not yet accomplished its ultimate objective: Taking over the bank. Except for a vindictive prime minister and her acolytes, however, Yunus remains very popular in Bangladesh and his worldwide reputation is, perhaps, even stronger than it was.
Malala’s case is more depressing. Although the latest Pew Poll shows that an overwhelming majority of Pakistanis favour schooling for girls, and there was a great outpouring of pride and joy about her award in most of the Pakistani press that I could read, much more attention than it deserved was given in the Western press to the small but noisy minority that panned the award, seeing it as a Western conspiracy of some sort, and/or Malala as a tool of anti-Pakistan elements.
An undercurrent of misogyny here could not be missed. There are some, I suppose, who see a great threat to their ways of life or to their culture in her assertion that schooling for girls is an innate, universal human right. In any case, the reaction from Pakistan was, in many Western eyes, ambiguous.
And again this raised questions about whether Pakistan will ever come to terms with modernity, whether it remains a country whose elite (I heard this expressed publicly recently by an American educator who has worked in Pakistan) have no interests in education for the underclasses, be they girls or boys, and whether its contorted, out-of-date national identity and distorted national narrative are both cause and effect of its weakness as a state, and the seeds of possible failure.
This article was previously published in The Friday Times.
