With the sun sinking into the haze over this old Mongol city last week, hatred between rival Muslim sects brought three masked men bursting into the 400-year-old Shahi mosque. Shouting “Infidels!” at rows of men and boys prostrated at evening prayer, the intruders leveled Kalashnikov rifles. In the fusillade, 10 worshipers died.
The attack and a dozen others like it that killed at least 70 people in the Lahore area in the first 10 days of August has riveted Pakistanis and dominated front pages and conversations here just as the nation marks the 50th anniversary of its birth on Aug. 14, 1947. To many people, the bombings, shootings and grenade attacks by religious extremists seemed like a devil’s parody of the violence that has blighted the country through much of its life.
Taking stock of their country after its first half-century, Pakistanis have found much to regret but also much that makes them proud. Starting from little in 1947, when the country was carved out of British India as a homeland for Indian Muslims, Pakistan has been burdened by poverty but also has scored impressive successes.
It has a large industrial base, with steel mills and chemical plants and truck factories. Its scientists, with help from China and materials smuggled from Western countries, have developed a stockpile of nuclear weapons.
Pakistan’s armed forces, while weighing down a national treasury that is $60 billion in debt, are among the most modern and efficient in Asia.
Best of all, from the viewpoint of many Pakistanis, the country is in some respects more up-to-date than India, having never closed its economy to foreign trade and technology to the extent that India did. Indians visiting Pakistan often are envious of the country’s airlines, hotels, and telephones, which rarely show the fustiness and inefficiency that define life in India.
For all these gains, Pakistan also is a country with serious problems, as the sectarian killings showed. While the killings were concentrated in only one province, Punjab, they seemed to encapsulate for many Pakistanis their worst nightmares about the country. In 50 years, Pakistan has endured military coups, assassinations, the loss in 1971 of half the country in the civil war that created the nation of Bangladesh, and repeated disappointments from its civilian politicians, who often have turned out to be incompetent and corrupt.
The recent mosque killings struck an especially deep chord in the nation’s psyche because Pakistan from its inception was a country established as a refuge for Muslims who would have been outnumbered by Hindus in a single Indian state.
“It’s tragic, really tragic, that in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which we insisted on establishing because we were scared of the Hindus, the Muslims of Lahore are today afraid to go and pray in the mosques because they are afraid of being killed by other Muslims,” said Arif Nizami, 47, editor of The Nation, an influential Lahore-based newspaper.
But Pakistanis on Thursday put aside their anxieties long enough to gather spontaneously all over the country and shout “Pakistan Zindebad!”–“Long Live Pakistan!”
Pakistan sprang from a vision laid down by Mohammed Ali Jinnah. In the late 1930s, Jinnah, a London-educated barrister, broke with the Hindu leaders of the Indian independence movement and demanded that Muslim-majority areas of British India be carved out to create Pakistan.
Once Britain agreed to the partition, only weeks before the August independence date, at least 10 million Hindus and Muslims left their homes for new lives across the frontiers British mapmakers had hurriedly drawn.
At least 500,000 of the migrants, perhaps more, were killed by frenzied mobs, sowing seeds of bitterness that later led to three wars between India and Pakistan.
Decades later, it is common to encounter Pakistanis and Indians who weep when they recall the gruesome scenes of bodies piled high in trains that had halted long enough for mobs to massacre their occupants, then rolled on. Others remember relatives, often the very young or the very old, who disappeared during the chaos of the migration, never to be heard from again.
For Pakistan, the violence of the partition was a prelude to repeated shocks later on. One early blow was the death of Jinnah, who had become the country’s first governor-general, 13 months after Pakistan came into being. The assassination in 1951 of Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, Jinnah’s closest associate, was a further shock.
The two men had made few concrete plans for the new nation. Left with few leaders with experience, Pakistan headed into decades of turbulence.
By 1958 the army had taken control. Under different generals, the country has spent 24 of its 50 years under military rule, and another four with civilian governments directly controlled by generals.
One civilian prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was overthrown by the army in 1977 and hanged for an alleged political murder two years later. The general who seized power from Bhutto, Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, was killed in a mysterious plane crash in 1988.
In 1971, heavy-handed rule from Islamabad set off civil war in what was then the eastern wing of Pakistan, now Bangladesh. But before Indian troops moved in and forced the surrender of Pakistani troops, a slaughter had ensued, officially estimated in Bangladesh to have cost a million lives. What was left of Pakistan after the conflict, the western wing that had been carved out of British India along with the eastern half in 1947, was left to engage in exhausting recriminations over who had “lost” the country’s other half.
For the last nine years, power has rotated among elected governments, but the three that preceded Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s current government were dismissed by the country’s president before completing their terms.
Perhaps the greatest disappointment for many Pakistanis has been their politicians. As portraits were draped with bunting for the anniversary, two leaders’ faces were glaringly absent: Benazir Bhutto and her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. From the 1970s to the 1990s, father and daughter had a magnetic appeal to Pakistan’s poor, drawing enough support to head three governments.
Once in office, the Bhuttos were a crushing disappointment, engaging in political maneuvering and, critics say, sleazy politics that enriched themselves and their friends.
By the time that Benazir Bhutto was defeated last February, the gap between reality and her promises to the poor was glaring. According to figures from the World Bank and other international agencies, the rate of Pakistanis living in poverty, 30 percent, is one of the highest in Asia.
