INTERPLAY OF RELIGION AND POLITICS IN SOUTH ASIA PAKISTAN UNDER ZULFIQAR ALI BHUTTO, A SHIFT TOWARD RELIGIOUS STATE

Abstract

Religio-politics brought irreversible impacts on the dynamics of politics worldwide, since Athens and the emerging Europe human history has suffered a lot in employing religion as a tool of politics, empowering the authority of church over the state, narrating clergy as divine leadership and sacred institution over the general consents of masses and the well of an ordinary man made the state and politics dependent on religion and church. It is not only about Europe and the church, in fact, across the globe religion and politics are intermarried, and particularly the orthodox societies firmly believe that religion is a mainstream essence of politics. South Asia is one of the hot and triggering areas for researchers interested in investigating the interplay of religion and politics.  Particularly, India and Pakistan are relatively more enriched to produce new aspects of the interplay of religion and politics and the outcomes. Pakistan, believed to be an ideological state, has employed religion to meet its different causes, at first to form a single uniform national identity, Islam is considered a tool to unite culturally heterogeneous societies. The state itself used a religious-oriented mechanism to address societal and constitutional issues. Later, the Bhutto regime made Pakistan a constitutionally religious state where the religion Islam was adopted as the state religion. The Bhutto regime is a key era toward making Pakistan a religious state, and politics of the state under the shadow of religion. The research aims to investigate and analyze the factors that led Bhutto to shift his socialist and secular lining politics to purely religious polity.