According to the online Oxford dictionary, a phantasmagoria is “A sequence of real or imaginary images like that seen in a dream.” The online Merriam-Webster dictionary proffers a range of meanings: an exhibition of optical effects and illusion, a constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined, a scene that constantly changes, a fantastic combination, collection, or assemblage. In my doctoral dissertation, The Concept of an Islamic State: The Ideological Controversy in Pakistan (London and New York 1987; Lahore 1991-1992), I have described the Pakistani phantasmagoria in the following words:

“Pakistan meant different things to different people. To the landlords it meant continued leadership, to the doctrinal-minded Muslims, a unique opportunity to create an Islamic state in the light of their ideas, to the Muslim intelligentsia and the poorer classes, a state where social and economic justice would prevail and their dignity established according to Iqbalite teachings, to the peasants, freedom from the yoke of the Hindu money-lender, to the regional leaders, greater autonomy than was expected in a united India dominated by the Congress, to the Muslim bourgeoisie, the necessary environment where they could develop their potential, which seemed choked in a united India due to the many times greater strength of Hindu and Parsee capital based in Bombay and Calcutta, to the bureaucrats and the military an excellent opportunity to secure quick promotions and to the military establishment it brought a central role in a country where the civilian political process was dependent from the beginning upon its support and active participation.”

Since then, more images have been added to the phantasmagoria. The US-Saudi sponsored Afghan jihad, in which China was the third external partner and Pakistan the main implementer, was fostered under the aegis of the garrison state ruled by General Ziaul Haq. That image has multiplied further, and it currently ranges on the extreme right with the Taliban utopia in full glory. In it women are confined within the four walls of the house, men grow beards of a particular length and shape, nobody laughs and everyone maintains a pious exterior.

Having said this, there is no denying that the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, in a very short period of time (March 1940 to August 1947), and under most challenging circumstances, cast a spell on Muslim voters who gave him a mandate to demand Pakistan as a separate, independent and sovereign Muslim state. Congress inflexibility and British promptings played their own role but Jinnah’s charisma no doubt played a pivotal role in rousing Muslim support and sympathy for a future Pakistan. However, mobilising people in record time is not the same thing as translating those different aspirations and images into an elegant nation-building project, which would supplant the phantasmagoria with a steady and stable vision of a Muslim state. On this point I need not elaborate — the facts are all there to see.

Thus, for example, the landlords turned the Muslim League into a citadel of conservative politics aiming to maintain the status quo. Call it the feudal system or a manifestation of Karl Marx’s Asiatic Mode of Production, the fact remains that the cultural hegemony of landlordism remains intact even when big landownership has shrunk. More importantly, the Iqbalite vision of the welfare state has been a direct casualty of the landlord’s vision of Pakistan.

No doubt the Muslim bourgeoisie, consisting mainly of ethno-sectarian minorities of Memons, Ismailis and Bohras and our very enterprising Chinioti Sheikhs, got the space needed to expand their businesses. However, their expansion was dependent on a strong state and a powerful Centre. The Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) famously first set up industries with the help of foreign aid. Once those industries, mainly based on an import substitution strategy, began to produce a profit, they were sold to private interests. As a result, the so-called historical role of the bourgeoisie as the harbinger of democracy and liberalism was not possible in the Pakistani context where the bourgeoisie was a creature of the all-powerful state, which Hamza Alavi described as the civil-military oligarchy.

More importantly, the free hand given to the ulema (clerics) and pirs (spiritual leaders) during the 1945-1946 election campaign to paint Pakistan as a future ideal Islamic state and society came into direct conflict with the vision of a Muslim modernistic welfare state. That the ulema won that ideological contest was by no means some quirk of history but neither was it a foregone conclusion. Had the modern, educated politicians been competent and responsible, things could have evolved differently. They were not.

I have talked to some leading economists who tell me that despite all the political, cultural and economic problems, there is more money in Pakistan today than ever before and that the middle class is steadily growing. This is good news but abject poverty still ravages the lives of millions and that cannot be acceptable to any fair-minded person. If Pakistan is ever to extricate itself from the mess in which it landed following the 1965 war, which I have argued in my book, Pakistan: The Garrison State (Oxford University Press, 2013), effectively scuttled Pakistan’s chances of emerging as a successful capitalist state in the 1960s, we will have to listen to those people who sincerely believe in the Iqbalite version of a welfare state to which Jinnah was also sympathetic. I shall be examining that vision over the next two weeks with the help of one of the most rare and most insightful interviews I have conducted in recent days.

The writer is a visiting professor, LUMS, Pakistan, professor emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University, and honorary senior fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Latest publications: Winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book award at the Karachi Literature Festival: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, Oxford, 2012; and Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011), Oxford, 2013. He can be reached at billumian@gmail.com