Pakistan circa 2020

The great four-way split happened five years ago, in 2015, but the impact is still being felt, what with the latest Pashtoonistan crisis.

Five years into its formation, the Islamic Commonwealth has called an emergency meeting of the state formerly known as Pakistan. This, loosely described, is a loose federal set-up of Baluchistan, Sind, Punjab and Pashtoonistan. The last of these entities includes a large chunk of what was once Afghanistan. The remaining territories include the US held enclaves of Islamabad, Sargodha, Kabul and Murree, where the US Eighth army is in permanent possession of a nuclear arsenal.

The agenda of the meeting, to be held in a triple-reinforced cabin of a high-security submarine at an undisclosed sea location off the coast of Karachi, is to craft a joint response to the threat posed by the erection of the Peshawar Wall by the president for life of the Pashtoon republic, General Mohammad Alseidndone.

The mood is grim. The Pashtoon regime’s spokesperson has made it abundantly clear to anyone who would listen that as far as their republic is concerned, everyone but them is a “kafir”, and no dialogue is possible with any non-Pashtoon state or representative. The wall, the spokesperson asserts, has become an inevitability in order to maintain Pashtoon purity, as promised in the nascent nation’s new and recently adopted constitution.

The rest of the world, however, is reminded of the wall in Berlin that lasted 50 years, and is not in favour of another one in this volatile region in the northwest corner of the otherwise prosperous Subcontinent. The Islamic Commonwealth has assured the world community that it is addressing the Pashtoon crisis without ado.

The Islamic Commonwealth has already caused a series of changes in the world order, some subtle and others stark. For India, Kashmir has been witness to dramatic changes ever since the country formerly known as Pakistan underwent its 2015 transformation into what is now loosely described as a loose federation. According to reliable intelligence sources, there are now four ISIs and the CIA working in the valley, working at what can be identified as cross purposes. More often than not, armed intruders into the Valley end up shooting each other. Indian officials have expressed satisfaction that Jihadist coordinated attacks are a thing of the past, with many more deaths now taking place through ‘friendly fire’. This has not disturbed the agenda of the Hurriyat Conference, which has again issued its customary call in Srinagar for aazadi at Friday prayers. However, when quizzed by reporters from New Delhi on what this means, the Hurriyat spokesperson demanded a few days of Wikipedia reference work to come up with an answer.

Saudi Arabia is also under strain, now having to give five times the dole it once did to the state formerly known as Pakistan. For Reuters, a news agency now owned by China’s Xinhua, a new rule has been formed that bars the reporting of suicide bombings in the entire Commonwealth. The explanation is that the endeavour was taking up almost 60 per cent of staff time. On the same topic, the Singapore government is providing the Commonwealth consultancy on banning the use of belts. This is based on their own experience with the ban on chewing gum three decades or more ago.

Meanwhile, the United States’ Af-Pak ambassador is sick of taking off and landing at five airports while on official fire-fighting tours, and has requested submarine meetings as a relief measure. The CIA has also had to expand its bandwidth by doubling its language laboratory in Langley to include training in the fluency of tongues such as Pashto and Sindhi, apart from Urdu and Arabic.

Astute observers note that it is not as if the states of the Islamic Commonwealth disagree on everything. There is complete agreement on some major issues across the region. Foremost among them is an agreement on how women should dress in public. Across all republics, the veil has been made compulsory, rainy day or not, and adultery means the adulteress must get stoned. Presidential pardon has been abolished. The status of women under the Islamic Commonwealth, thus, is in the spotlight at this year’s Woman, Gender and Conflict Conference in Geneva.

Another point of agreement has been on minorities.

According to the Norway-based human rights group, Minority World, there is not a single non-Muslim citizen left in Pashtoonistan, and about six families are holding out in Punjab. The report says that the Commonwealth may soon become the first place in the world to have no minorities at all.

The state with the closest relations with the rest of the Subcontinent—namely, India—is not Sind, as was expected by New Delhi’s grand strategists before Pakistan’s break up. It is Baluchistan. The Indian business conglomerate Reliance Industries has taken over the gas reserves there and assured 3 per cent royalty to Baluch locals. As for the rest of the 97 per cent, the Supreme Court of Baluchistan is to decide at what cost the gas is to be split between the two Ambani brothers.

On the economic front, the World Bank has reported that the Commonwealth’s main exports are cotton, poppy seeds and sundry nuclear components. Everything else is imported. The World Bank has warned that the economic zone formerly known as Pakistan, at this rate, may run out of money in three weeks. An emergency session is to be called at Riyadh. At a previous such session, economists had agreed that since the Commonwealth runs largely on fake currency, running out of genuine money should not affect the local economy.

In the entertainment sector, Reliance Adag has opened a joint venture with Mahesh Bhatt for a multiplex chain to show Bollywood movies across the Commonwealth, except in Pashtoonistan, which was briefly thought to be warming up to song-and-danceless Hollywood, until it was found there had been a miscommunication and their actual demand was for Oliver and Sharon ‘stoned’.

In a spot of good news, three Cern physicists have teamed up with political scientists at Harvard and won a joint Nobel Prize in physics and literature for a new book of fiction, Pakistan: Order Out of Chaos.

About The Author

Ninad D. Sheth