Parvez Hasan, ‘asabiya’ and Pakistan

The book I have read with great interest this week is Parvez Hasan’s My Life my Country: Memoirs of a Pakistani Economist (Ferozsons Ltd Lahore, 2011). It takes you on an easy journey through the economic history of Pakistan, with the side-spectacle of a wonderful gallery of great men who presided over it.

While working under Ghulam Ishaq Khan in the ministry of finance, Hasan came to grips with the economic disparity between East and West Pakistan and had to face up to his alienated Bengali colleagues. The man who made the case for East Pakistan was Dr Akhlaqur Rahman, a very well-trained economist, with a PhD from MIT, but “with a strong Bengali nationalist viewpoint”. Dr Rahman’s brief against West Pakistan — his PhD dissertation — “was incendiary, which infuriated General Ayub”.

Hasan worked with a panel of economists representing both wings and came up with an agreed final set of recommendations on how to balance the uneven economic growth in East and West Pakistan. The report was sabotaged by East Pakistan economists. He writes: “The Chief Economist of the East Pakistan government arrived and informed the committee that the instructions of his government were to totally disassociate it from the entire report. After saying this he folded his papers and left the meeting. This was a huge rebuke to the Committee, the National Assembly [which had set up the committee] and the Federal Government” (p.259).

What was happening was not economics but what Ibn Khaldun calls ‘asabiya’ and what Hasan recognised as ‘Bengali nationalism’. Shall the economist always ‘stand by the nation’ or be loyal to his discipline? On past evidence, the economist succumbs to the ‘tribal feeling’ when something big is about to happen. This is what happened in 1998 when Pakistan’s nuclear tests defied all economic wisdom, but no economist in government resigned saying Pakistan was inviting hardship by testing at the bottom of the economic curve while the Indian testing had been done at the top of the curve.

The asabiya, or the tribal feeling that binds, has a teleology in history, maturing into its peak manifestation in the shape of the nation-state in Europe. Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) knew that asabiya was barbaric, promising war while it kept kingdoms together. After the two world wars, Europe realised that the asabiya of nationalism was actually a disease embedded in the nation-state and should be got rid of. Out of this realisation was born the Common Market which later became the European Union (EU).

In Pakistan, asabiya is raising its ugly head once again. The economist in Sindh stands behind Sindhi nationalism when it comes to discussing dams with upper riparian Punjab. The Baloch economist stands behind the Baloch ‘nationalist’, while the economist in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa gets status from the ‘tribal feeling’ over Kalabagh Dam. All asabiya is essentially separatist and promises the setting up of a new state every now and then. Pakistan had its asabiya moment in 1971 and may get its second one at the hands of al Qaeda in the coming years.

Today, the economist in Pakistan appears to have joined the consensus that kills asabiya the way the EU did, by allowing the nation-state to fade away through a ‘common market’. In 1963, ASEAN decided to steer its dangerously conflicted group of island states out of war through an integrated regional bloc. It aims to declare it a ‘union’ in 2015. Less clearly, Saarc in 1985 thought of the same solution to asabiya but the paradigm of war still dominates its nation-states. Nothing kills internal asabiya like codependency through external open trade and investment.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 8^th, 2011.