Tampering with History

Some of the past rulers deliberately distorted history to suit their own purposes. General Zia did the most damage in this respect by ordering the rewriting of textbooks.Economists have a term for what 1 will discuss today. They call it 'path dependence'; how what has happened in the past can influence the present and define the future. The influence of the past can be benign, positive or negative depending on what happened in the past.In Pakistan's case the impact is mostly negative. The country has had a troubled history and this has had an influence on the way it has developed over the past six decades. These are difficult times and it is appropriate to weigh some of the burdens history has placed on the Pakistani people and the Pakistani state.What we need to explore with reference to history are the several aspects of the development of Pakistan. In order to break this dependence on the past we must first do two things: list the main problems the country faces at this time and then see how they have been impacted and infected by the past.There are half a dozen issues on which we need to reflect in a historical context in order to shape the future.One of the more important subjects is the role of religion in politics and how its various interpretations have influenced society. We need also to examine why there is an absence of civility in public discourse and in that context why we are so unwilling to treat with compassion and understanding the minorities in our midst.We have become progressively less tolerant towards the people we consider different from us in some respect. The shabby treatment of minorities is an amazing development in a country that was founded on the basis of protecting the rights and privileges of a community - the Muslims of British India - which was afraid it would be poorly treated at the hands of the Hindu majority. But by minorities I mean more than those that follow a different religion from the majority. I also mean those groups that speak a language or follow practices or have different ethnicity from the majority.We should also debate the role of politics in building a durable structure of the Pakistani state. In that context what is very important is to devise ways for ensuring the accountability of elected officials who occupy positions of power. We should analyse the impact on politics, economics and society of increasing income and wealth inequalities.As I will suggest in a later article the chain of causality that led towards the cold-blooded murder of Governor Salman Taseer includes not only a clash of two points of view concerning the role of religion. It was also abetted by a clash between two classes - the very rich and the not-so-poor.Let me turn to the way history has been perverted to advance a certain point of view regarding the first of these many issues: the role of religion. In an earlier article titled 'History must not lie' published in this space on Nov 9, 2010 I suggested that Pakistan was not created to advance Islam in South Asia; it was founded to protect the economic and social rights of a distinct community that felt threatened by the transfer of political power to the majority. …