The Bhutto assassination and the widespread suspicion in Pakistan that it was perhaps manipulated by the military dictatorship, underline the truth that exists in many Islamic regimes, that unlike in other countries that own the Army, it is the Army that owns the country. Pakistan and Bangladesh, both Muslim majority countries, are today ruled by Army-backed regimes. It is no great secret that the move in Pakistan to hold elections was the result of American pressure to give a democratic veneer to the Army's iron grip on the country.

No doubt, the Army-led regime allowed Benazir Bhutto, president of the Pakistan People's Party, to return from self-exile. But that too was done under US pressure. The same pressure applied through the Saudi King, a US ally, forced President Musharraf to let PML(N) chief and exiled former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to return, even though only a month before that he was forced out of Pakistan by the same regime.

In the background are two recent reports. The New York Times revealed that the Army diverted for its own purposes billions of dollars given to the military regime by the Bush administration to fight terror groups on the Pak-Afghan border. It is important to recognise that in Pakistan the largest enterprise is the Army itself. The other report is a revelation by US journalists, that when Benazir Bhutto first came to power, the ISI planned her assassination with the help of Al Qaeda boss Osama bin Laden, but gave up at the last moment because the terror merchant's terms were too risky.

The military in Pakistan has hand-fed the Al Qaeda, but has baulked at the idea of a Taliban type regime in Pakistan itself. The reason is that, such a regime has the potential to eclipse the Army's own dominance in politics and tilt the power balance in favour of religious extremist leaders. You keep a dog to bark at others, not to bite you. That, in short, defines the relationship between the extremists and the Army in Pakistan.

So, the ISI might have cooperated with the terrorists to get rid of Benazir Bhutto, though it is yet to be established that it initiated the move. As several analysts point out, Islamic extremists are no supporters of democracy. In their perspective, law is what their religion has written down in its scriptures. No other law is needed. One of the most quoted experts on Islam, Bernard Lewis, emeritus professor at Princeton University on near eastern affairs, reveals in his bestselling book, The Crisis of Islam, for the Muslim community it is the law as laid down by their Prophet, collectively known as Shariat, that is everything: "The Ayatollah Khomeini once remarked that 'Islam is politics or it is nothing.' Not all Muslims would go that far but most would agree that God is concerned with politics, and this belief is confirmed and sustained by the Shari'a, the Holy Law, which deals extensively with the acquisition and exercise of power, the nature of legitimacy and authority, the duties of ruler and the subject, in a word, with what we in the West would call constitutional law and political philosophy."

The state, in the Islamic fundamentalist view, therefore, has only one function: to implement the law as written down in the Shariat. The instruments of Constitutional law, as the rest of the world understands them, are legitimate only to the extent they enforce this holy law. That is why, says Lewis, Islamic fundamentalists target their own rulers alleging that they deviate from what is laid down in the Holy Book. It should be noted that while some Muslim leaders condemn the use of terror, and claim that Islam is a religion of peace, they do not ever denounce the basic claim that the Shariat constitutes what ought to be the law.

What happens in Pakistan is a matter of intimate concern for India, both for historic and geo-political reasons. Therefore, the noises we are hearing from our secular lobby, praising Benazir Bhutto - the UPA even thought of sending an all party delegation to her funeral - should be checked against the reality of the Islamic state and the tensions within it. Benazir, no doubt, said much against terrorism while she was in exile. But while in power, it was the same Benazir who hailed the Kashmiri extremists as freedom fighters. As Prime Minister, the demonstration she organised with she herself shouting "azadi, azadi" cannot be forgotten.

The Bhuttos have never been friends of India, though Benazir used to attend seminars in our country while in exile from her own, mouthing high sounding words. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto as Prime Minister had wanted the Islamic bomb, saying that Pakistan would, if necessary, starve, but it would find the resources to make nuclear weapons. He made Indira Gandhi return the 90,000 Pakistani soldiers captured during the Bangladesh War by promising that Pakistan would consider Kashmir to be a bilateral dispute. He broke his promise once his soldiers went back to Pakistan.

Even though elected rulers of Pakistan like Nawaz Sharif responded to Indian initiatives for peace, such responses did not have any depth. After General Musharraf removed him from power and sent him to exile, Sharif started disowning the Kargil adventure and blaming the Army for hiding it from him. But the history of the Kargil conflict shows that as Prime Minister, Sharif did not stop it when it burst into the open and agreed to a withdrawal only when he found that the Indian Army had broken the Pakistan Army's back and that international allies like the United States and China were not willing to back Pakistan. The NDA government's firm handling of Kargil trapped the Pakistani establishment in its own misadventure.

For us, therefore, to expect much from whatever form of democracy Pakistan gets would be like throwing caution to the wind. The testing stone should be how far any regime in Islamabad can rein in the dogs of extremism, and our response should be calibrated on that test. On this point, the jury is still out.

The UPA government, however, cannot fight terrorism within the country so long as its constituents and outside supporters are in a race to placate competitive extremism among Muslim communal forces. For the simple reason, that such extremism originates from the unquestioned faith in one religion as the final and sole arbiter of human destiny. You cannot fight extremism abroad when you encourage it within your own country. You cannot fight this extremism if you ignore its link with the faith as seen by its common followers.

As Lewis points out, the entire Arab crescent translated only 330 books annually into Arabic, which is less than the number of translations by one country, Greece. The totality of translations over the last six centuries does not exceed one lakh titles. So long as Islamic followers are not open to critical review of their faith and open to public denouncement of religious extremism, serious governments outside Islam cannot sleep with confidence that terror can be contained.

Balbir K. Punj can be contacted at bkpunj@gmail.com

Courtesy: www.asianage.com, January 05, 2008