What to read about Pakistan

AS PAKISTAN HEADS for a parliamentary election on February 8th the country has rarely been in such a mess. It is on its 23rd bail-out from the IMF, which demands in return painful fiscal measures, including cuts in subsidies for electricity and fuel. The Pakistani Taliban are resurgent. In January Pakistan exchanged missile fire with Iran; both sides say they were aiming at militants based in the other’s territory. Hopes that the toppling of Pakistan’s last military dictator—Pervez Musharraf—in 2008 would lead to a steady strengthening of democracy have been dashed. The generals are ensuring their role as the most important political players through a continuing “soft coup”. The army is doing all it can to prevent the return to power of Imran Khan, the former prime minister who was once a military favourite and has been recently sentenced to multiple jail terms. Pakistan has 230m people, nuclear arms and borders with Asia’s two biggest powers, China and India. Here are six books on a large and strategically important country.

Seventy-five years after his death Muhammad Ali Jinnah still casts a shadow over the country he created in 1947 to be the homeland of South Asia’s Muslims. The frustrated actor turned Lincoln’s Inn barrister is at the centre of the endless arguments about what Pakistan is for. Fundamentalists say that Pakistan should be ruled by sharia law. Liberals endorse Jinnah’s exhortation that it should be a secular state in which Hindus “are free to go to your temples”. Ayesha Jalal, a historian at Tufts University near Boston, Massachusetts, contends that Jinnah did not really want a separate Muslim homeland at all. He spent most of his political career campaigning for India’s independence from Britain. But he began to worry that the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress, the main pro-independence party, would sweep away privileges enjoyed by elite Muslims like him. When he latched onto the idea of Pakistan, he saw it as a “bargaining chip” to strengthen the position of the Muslim minority within an independent India. But Congress did not yield, and so Pakistan was born. When Ms Jalal made this argument in 1985 Pakistani scholars and patriots condemned it as heresy. The thesis is no longer taboo in Pakistan.