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Pakistan: An Introduction [It would be worthwhile to bear in mind my family background before reading the installments on Pakistan.] The most salient reality of Pakistan is that it was cobbled together from bits and pieces of the British Indian Empire as a homeland for Indian Muslims. It is in essence a region of India in a state of secession. For there was no such thing as Pakistan or Pakistani identity before independence from Britain. Nor was there any Bangladesh, which first began its life as the eastern wing of Pakistan, separated from the western wing by the very breadth of India. Before 1947, it was all British India. In 1940, after a complicated history of rivalry and coexistence with Nehru's Hindu-majority Indian National Congress (which we need not go into), the All-India Muslim League of Muhammed Ali Jinnah decisively broke with the idea of a unified Indian state in the famous Lahore Resolution: The problem in India is not of an intercommunal character but manifestly of an international one, and it must be treated as such... If the British Government are really in earnest and sincere to secure peace and happiness of the people of the subcontinent, the only course open to us all is to allow the major nations separate homelands by dividing India into autonomous national states. (An inauspiciously ineloquent beginning for Pakistan....) The plan that was eventually drawn up stipulated that those states of British India where the Muslims were the majority would break away from India to form Pakistan. Unfortunately, in every state lived large numbers of both Muslims and Hindus. The Partition of India, when it finally came in 1947, was accompanied by a paroxysm of violence as Hindus and Muslims all over the subcontinent rioted looted & raped, slaughtering each other, burning people alive in houses, bashing children's heads against the wall, and driving whole communities out of neighbourhoods where they had lived for centuries, even a millennium. My grandfather, at the time an officer in the British Indian Army serving in the Muslim-majority Punjab and fanatically opposed to Partition and Pakistan, saw a group of Muslims blow up a bridge as hundreds of Sikhs were crossing it. His brother and my late great-uncle, a fanatical proponent of Pakistan serving in Hyderabad, often spoke tearfully of seeing Muslims being hung from trees and gutted. That year, in the largest exchange of population the world has ever seen, millions packed up all they could carry and literally moved -- Hindus, Sikhs and other non-Muslims toward the mainly Hindu region in the centre of the subcontinent retaining the name India; and Muslims toward the two wings of Pakistan on opposite sides of the subcontinent. In the end, what Gandhi called the "vivisection of India" was achieved at the cost of more than 2 million lives and 15 million refugees. For all the butchery & dislocation of a Yugoslavia or an East Timor, the post-war world hasn't seen anything as epic as the Partition. Contrary to popular legend, Pakistan was not founded as an Islamic republic. Not until 1956 was it proclaimed as one, and this relabelling was not accompanied by any substantive changes before the late 1970s, when Zia-ul-Haq took Pakistan down the path of Islamicisation. The Pakistan that was founded in 1947 was a secular state, but a secular state created on behalf of Muslims. Muhammad Ali Jinnah made this clear in his inaugural address as Governor-General: "You will find that in the course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State". But given the preconceptions Islam suffers from in the West, some may find all this incongruous. What is a Muslim state which is not an Islamic republic? Well, look no further than Israel -- a state which is Jewish but decidedly secular. And if you read the writings of Muslim intellectuals such as Muhammed Iqbal, the first to propose a separate Muslim state, the analogy with secular Judaism is quite apt. According to his "Two Nation Theory" of India, Indian Muslims were a distinct nation unto themselves, with a distinct history and culture which went beyond the common religion. In essence, he propounded a cultural Islam which even secular Muslims could abide. But I would go further: Iqbal envisioned, and Jinnah founded, Pakistan in much the same sprit as did Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann the State of Israel. (Of course, Pakistanis would blanch at the analogy with Zionism.) These men not only demanded recognition for the Muslims of India as a distinct culture and community, but also craved a homeland for them. Although Jinnah realised that Hindu-majority India would continue to be home to millions of Muslims, Pakistan would at least be there to look after their interests and provide a haven if need be. [My grandfather, a Pathan officer in the British army at the time of Partition, once supplied a more waggish interpretation of the founding of Pakistan: "Pakistan was founded to protect the sacred right to eat beef".] Of course, the reality of Pakistan today has fallen far short of this ideal, especially since Muslim immigrants from India are pretty badly treated in the country. But there is no denying that Jinnah's vision remains the implicit ideology of the Pakistani state, the very raison d'tre that Pakistanis take seriously. Pakistan's interminable dispute with India over Kashmir (a Muslim-majority state within the Indian union), and the popular enthusiasm for continuing involvement in that region, cannot be understood without this context. The ideal of the Muslim haven is also what Pakistani intellectuals mean when they say they believe in the "idea of Pakistan". I personally think that India has done a pretty good job of protecting the rights of its minorities, including the Muslims (despite such incidents as Ayodha, where a Hindu mob burnt down the Babri mosque, or the 1984 mass slaughter of Sikhs in Delhi after a Sikh bodyguard blew up Mrs Gandhi). But I can sympathise with this "idea of Pakistan". For all minority peoples want a place where they can control their destiny, a place free from even the slightest possibility of a threat from the majority. It is the history, it is the political culture, it is the passion of the Muslim to live in Dar-al-Islaam, or the Abode of Islam. Muslims everywhere have always striven to live within it. Islam even makes it the onerous duty of every Muslim, should he be unfortunate enough to find himself therein, to quit Daar-al-Harb (the House of War, or Non-Islam) and to seek refuge in a land ruled by a Muslim state. And I believe the Muslims of South Asia, most of whom had always lived under Muslim rulers, yearned for Daar-al-Islaam. Morever, in the eyes of many Muslims in 1947 only a Muslim state could be considered the legitimate successor to the Mughal Empire, the last great dynasty in a long line of Muslim dynasties which had ruled northern India for almost a millenium before the British showed up. Many Indians today, craving what was before, denounce the founding of Pakistan and claim that it was undertaken by the Muslim elites without consulting the masses. But I note for the record that in the national legislative elections held in 1945 across British India, the Muslim League captured all 30 seats reserved for Muslims in the Central Assembly; and in the elections for state legislatures in 1946, the ML won 439 of the 494 seats allotted for Muslims in all British Indian states. These elections were held more than five years after the Muslim League issued the Lahore Resolution and the question of partition had been debated endlessly. Perhaps there were three or four Muslims in the land who didn't know about the intentions of the Muslim League. I would call these victories nothing less than an unequivocal popular mandate for the establishment of Pakistan. Here is a pretty good map of Pakistan for general reference:
And one of the better provincial maps of Pakistan that I've seen: Pakistan's provinces are Punjab, home to the Punjabis who comprise Pakistan's ethnic & linguistic majority (about 60%); the legendary Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), a piece of Afghanistan inside Pakistan, inhabited by the lowland Pathans; Azad Kashmir, that slice of the disputed territory of Kashmir which is occupied by Pakistan (though not marked on this legalistic map); Baluchistan, where, despite the name, the native Baluchis of Iranian stock are outnumbered by non-Baluchis; and Sindh, whose population is divided between the native Sindhis and the Muhajirs, Muslim immigrants from India. Thus, you have got the constituents of the acronym devised by a bunch of Cambridge subcon nitwits in the 1930s: Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Iran, Sindh. (Conveniently, Pakistan also means the "Land of the Pure".) The are also two non-provincial units: the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), a string of self-governing mountainous territories, where the highland Pathans still live in traditional tribal structures, complete with blood feuds and defiance of civil authority; and the Northern Areas, Pakistan's answer to Nepal, with three of the ten tallest mountains in the world -- K2, Rakaposhi and Nanga Parbat. Also, take a look at this very revealing ethnolinguistic map of Pakistan:
First, the only territory of Pakistan's which is not shared with another country, is Sindh. All the others are shards of a larger culture: the NWFP is merely that small piece of Afghanistan which the British managed to snatch away; next door to Baluchistan is another Baluchistan in Iran; and Punjab should really be called West Punjab in recognition of the "East Punjab" that is home to the Sikhs of India. (India's Haryana state also used to be part of once-united Punjab.) Second, the map goes a long way toward explaining why, despite the common legacy of British institutions, Pakistan has failed miserably at democracy while India managed to erect the "world's largest democracy". Most of Pakistan is frontier territory, far from the political heartland of British India. Really the only significant cities in Pakistan are Karachi and Lahore. Yet the former was a provincial capital under the British and a minor port, a distant second to Bombay's commercial preeminence; the latter, an architectural gem but without the institutions of power that were erected in Delhi and even Simla. Pakistan's territories were also the last acquisitions of the British in India: the NWFP was acquired in 1893-1901, the wastes of Baluchistan in 1877; Punjab in 1849; and Sindh in 1843. By contrast, Calcutta in Bengal was made the capital of British India in 1772. The imprint of the British in Pakistan is necessarily shallower. A quick digression: Pakistan also inherited fewer civil servants from British times than India did. Thus, the "division of the all-India services of the Indian Civil Service and the Indian Police Service was also difficult. Only 101 out of a total of 1,157 Indian officers were Muslim. Among these Muslim officers, ninety-five officers opted for Pakistan; they were joined by one Christian, eleven Muslim military officers transferring to civilian service, and fifty Britons, for a total of 157. But only twenty of them had had more than fifteen years of service, and more than half had had fewer than ten years." Enough intro nonsense. Now, here is my route through Pakistan:
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