Foreshadowing a decisive shift in the balance of power from elected to nonelected institutions, a mentally and physically unfit Ghulam Mohammed mocked parliamentary practice by appointing a “cabinet of talents” that included General Ayub Khan as defense minister and Iskander Mirza as interior minister with the doyen of the civil bureaucracy, Chaudhri Mohammad Ali, retaining the all- important finance portfolio

Contemptuous of all politicians, they were especially wary of a Bengali majority in any future federal constitution. If permitted to secure their rightful place in the governance of the country, Bengali politicians could join their disaffected counterparts in the non- Punjabi provinces to force a change in Pakistan’s Kashmir focused and pro- American foreign policy.

In the absence of democratic politics, the dominance of a predominantly Punjabi civil bureaucracy and army heightened the grievances of non-Punjabi provinces and the linguistic groups within them. Te entrenched institutional supremacy of a Punjabi army and federal bureaucracy, not Punjab’s dominance over other provinces per se, had emerged as the principal impediment to restoring democratic processes in Pakistan.

Except in Punjab and the NWFP, the central government’s Kashmir policy had little support in Sindh or Balochistan and even less in East Bengal. Instead of serving the people, civil servants and their allies in the army hoisted the political leaders with their Kashmir petard to become the veritable masters of the manor through autocratic and unconstitutional means.

Donning the populist garb, Bhutto swore to bring about the biggest turnaround the ill- fated country had ever seen. He would restore democracy, frame a constitution, and establish the rule of law so that the people would never again be “under the capricious will of any individual.

Pakistan is a visibly perturbed and divided nation. Its people are struggling to find an answer to the mother of all questions: what sort of a Pakistan do they want along a spectrum of choices, ranging from an orthodox, religious state to a modern, enlightened one?

In Iqbal’s view, the only purpose of the state in Islam was to establish a “spiritual democracy” by implementing the principles of equality, solidarity, and freedom that constituted the essence of the Quranic message. It was in “this sense alone that the State in Islam is a theocracy, not in the sense that it was headed by a representative of God on earth who can always screen his despotic will behind his supposed infallibility.

With doubts about its ability to survive being expressed both within and outside its freshly drawn boundaries, Pakistan’s insecurities were given full play in fashioning the nation’s history. Using the “two- nation” theory as their crutch, state- sponsored historians wrote histories for schools and colleges as well as for more general consumption that highlighted the tyranny of the Hindu community in order to justify the creation of Pakistan.

The failure of the Cripps Mission spared the Muslim League from the embarrassment of seeing its main constituents abandon all- India purposes for their own regionally construed concerns.

The Unionist construct of “Muslim interest” that was eventually incorporated in the Government of India Act of 1935 was a rude shock for minority- province Muslims, accustomed as they were to riding on the coattails of their coreligionists in the majority provinces. The revival of the AIML in 1934 with Jinnah at the helm was a direct result of minority- province Muslim dissatisfaction with the new constitutional arrangements.