a brief account on pakistan (from my LJ)

Professor Gandhi's currently attending some kind of conference in Rome, so he had a guy from some other department stand in for him in today's class. The topic of his presentation was Pakistan. I appreciated getting to know more about Pakistan, since people don't usually have anything nice to say about it, and it's not fair to judge a people by its government. In the absence of any knowledge about the common Pakistani, I think it's safe to assume that he or she is as good or bad as the common person from any country.

But I do hold that the idea of Pakistan itself was the result of the megalomania and irrationality of its founding fathers. It's true that Muslims in India were sometimes treated badly by Hindus. But it's also true that those Hindus treated other Hindus badly, as well, and that rational Hindus were nice to Muslims. The claims the All-India Muslim League made were almost as ridiculous as the ones that radical feminists make today. In claiming that Muslims needed to be united as a community because their rights were being impinged upon, the AIML provoked more antipathy toward Muslims than had existed previously. The country these leaders envisioned was a theocratic autocracy in principle. Jinnah, the Father of Pakistan, went through with the idea of Pakistan for no other reason than that Nehru had been selected to be independent India's first Prime Minister.

But the partition has happened, and there is no way in which it can be revoked now. The present generation of Pakistanis was born Pakistani - not Indian. To them, Pakistan is probably more than an outrageous idea thought up over drinks. But they can't expect to gain much from the history of their country: the founding fathers were capricious and irrational, and don't deserve the glory accorded them. The common Pakistani should by no means emulate them, for to do so would mean subordinating oneself and one's values to the mindless monstrosity that is the Pakistani government. The title of Christopher Hitchens' book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is as true in this context as it is in any other. The sooner the Pakistanis manage to cure themselves of their religion, the better. But I don't expect that to happen anytime in the foreseeable future.

The idea of Pakistan can at best be described as a political practical joke, and should be treated as such. And I don't imply that the Indian government is the epitome of benignity.