The crowd is seemingly an inescapable part of our daily life in urban centres. A city or a metropolis itself appears as a huge crowd, though in reality it is a phenomenon of population density and an aggregate of people living and moving in a designated habitable space. So people, sizable in number, in an urban setting, prima facie may look like a crowd, which they are not in the proper sense of the word. People living or interacting in a close proximity does not necessarily constitute a crowd. The crowd by its very definition is a group of people, sufficiently large in number, that is formed by specific unity of purpose or shared objective that may be clear or vague. Unity of purpose in its nature may be affirmative or negative, straightforwardly open or meanly insidious. But there are innumerable types of crowd which we encounter in human history ranging from the hunting crowd of primitive era to the political crowd of contemporary times as has been shown and brilliantly analyzed by Elias Canetti in his profound but highly readable book ‘Crowds and power’. In our history two types seem to have longer life than others; the religious and political. Such crowds have played a powerful historical role in shaping human life and they still do. They are especially significant in the context of our society which is kept in perpetual motion or commotion by religion and politics or by an odd admixture of the both.

Here we can discern that religious crowds are driven by political dreams and political crowds are moved by seductive force of religious utopia. A religious crowd may end up as a political crowd and a political crowd may morph into a religious one. Both irrespective of their apparent differences share a common goal: quest for power as has amply been demonstrated by the evolution of Pakistani society in the last seven decades of its collective life. Before we touch on the history of crowd starting from the Pakistan Movement to present times it is worthwhile to keep in mind that in order to unearth the dynamics of a crowd it is essential to discover the nature of the crowd. Crowd can be organic or inorganic/artificial in the sense of its being engineered by the powers that dominate the societal structure at a particular point of time.

In the run-up to the partition of India and emergence of new Muslim majority state of Pakistan, the All India Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who, in the words of historian Ayesha Jalal, asserted to be the sole spokesman for Indian Muslims, mobilised large segments of diverse Muslim population. These segments out on the street formed a distinct crowd. It was a political crowd but the uniting link that brought them together was faith or to be more precise, a perceived threat to their faith in the soon to be independent Hindu majority India. That economic aspirations veiled in religious slogans should never be ignored in any meaningful analysis we leave out for the moment. So the crowd formed in support of the Muslim League in the pre-Partition days can be termed as a politico-religious crowd that was organic in the sense that its shared faith and common economic interests which provided the motivation that moved it in a particular direction. It was not something unusual if we remember that in the Subcontinent faith and politics have been intertwined since the arrival of Aryans in the Punjab and Sindh [Indus Valley]. In our long history we have just two honourable exceptions. Buddhist Emperor Ashoka [268-232 BC] and Muslim Emperor Akbar [1542-1605] were the rulers sagacious enough to separate religion from the state in a bewilderingly diverse India. But sadly their legacies proved short-lived for the complex reasons, historians and scholars tell us, that turned religion(s) into culture(s)It’s the objective as pointed out in the beginning that holds the crowd together and makes it act in unison. When the objective is achieved or absolutely frustrated, the crowd disperses. Dispersal of a crowd signals either its success or failure. And this is what happened with the League’s crowd. When Pakistan came into being, it lost its raison d’être and dispersed never to gather again.

We witness the phenomenon of purely political crowd which was organic in the late 1960s in both East [now Bangladesh] and West Pakistan when political agitation against the military dictatorship of General Ayub Khan snowballed into an unstoppable avalanche that changed our national landscape forever. The crowds in the eastern wing, deprived but aspiring for politico-economic rights, had their inspiring leadership in Awami League led by Shaikh Mujibur Rehman. Pakistan People’s Party, led by ZA Bhutto, mobilised and galvanized crowds in the Punjab and Sindh in the western wing. When the crowd in the East Pakistan was denied its legitimate democratic right to power, it gained power through other means; civil war with a huge cost for all. The crowd in West Pakistan petered out and faced an inevitable dispersal after ZA Bhutto was installed in the echelons of power in the aftermath of dismemberment of the country.

Article continues after ad

In the recent years, political/semi political and religious/semi religious crowds have mushroomed. Such crowds can be categorised as organic, semi organic and inorganic. The difference between an organic and inorganic crowd does not lie in the different behavour patterns of the two but rather in the relationship the crowd has with itself and outside social forces. Link with the objective [raison d’être of the crowd] or its absence is of crucial importance. The organic crowd with clear rational objectives is the blood that helps the social organism to keep well. An inorganic crowd with irrational objectives can be a source of deep social worry. But the situation may cause greater alarm when forces ensconced in the power structure engineer crowds which are inorganic and use them as strategic policy tools in a bid to fulfill undeclared objectives that are different from and contrary to the declared ones. — soofi01@hotmail.com