PAKISTAN finds itself embroiled in a fresh turmoil as Islamist politics has taken a violent turn in the past few days. Thousands of people are pouring out into major cities to lodge protest against the Imran Khan Government whose Police opened fire on angry mobs killing several people. The Police also have arrested reportedly countless hundreds of people for rioting and attacking Government servants. The events suggest that all the mishandling of the situation by Prime Minister Mr. Imran Khan is now surfacing in the violent resistance being witnessed in the streets. Factually, such situations are not new to Pakistan.

 

Throughout its existence of seventy-plus years, Pakistan has suffered at the hands of religious extremists who tend to go berserk time and again, in an effort to dominate the internal discourse. The Government also resorts to banning a few outfits every now and then, only to revoke the decision sometime later. But when a ban is slapped on the religious extremist groups, they enter the arena under a different banner and continue creating trouble. This is what is happening in Pakistan currently as well, leaving Prime Minister Mr. Imran Khan clueless about the ways to handle the ever-worsening situation. This kind of official hobnobbing with religious extremists has been the method and manner of the Government in Pakistan under different political dispensations. Whatever it does, the Pakistani Government has always found itself at the losing end of the battle. That is the reason why Pakistan has suffered worst troubles at the hands of religious extremists even though it is officially and constitutionally an Islamic State.

 

The Government there has often found itself riding the proverbial tiger from whose back it cannot afford to dismount. For, if it does that, it has to end up in the tiger’s stomach. It is actually a no-win situation in Pakistan -- not for today but for all the seventy-plus years since its formation. Because of a terribly confused ideological construct, Pakistan has often followed a twisted narrative that invited religious extremism to be an official part of the State policy. On one hand, the Pakistan rulers consider religious extremists as their partners in power, and on the other they wish to chuck the Islamists as an anathema to their political interests.

 

They do not realise that both these things cannot be operated simultaneously. Yet, they keep making futile attempts to achieve an impossible balance between religious extremism and administrative secularism that is so essential to governance, no matter what the State’s official religion is. History offers a good evidence of a paradoxical situation when Pakistan founder Barrister Mohammad Ali Jinnah tried to pursue a secular path. The political community and people of Pakistan could not bear the contrast between Mr. Jinnah’s secular tilt and his earlier stance of forcing Partition on India on religious ground. It was because of this reason that Mr. Jinnah suffered a terrible political and social isolation in the country which he sculpted into existence. The man who carved out a new nation, therefore, suffered towards the end of his life terrible consequences of his unstable approach to ideology. There is little doubt that Pakistan can never erase this part of its fate, no matter what its rulers do or do not do. For, when a nation is founded on principle of hate and separatism, its confused fate is only a matter of fact, well beyond the fiction its founders might have woven around the idea. The current inner turmoil in Pakistan, thus, represents all that confusion and contortion from whose grip it can never escape. Obviously, Pakistan is destined to fail under the weight of its own reason of existence.