From:
http://www.livemint.com/2011/07/21012219/Why-my-father-hated-India.html
** Why my father hated India **
Pakistan's anger at India is not merely about Kashmir. It goes to the
heart of an artificial identity it acquired after 1947
Aatish Taseer / WSJ
Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."
My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India.
Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.
To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge-its hysteria-it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan.
The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician, but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim League, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence". Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.
Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.
This experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between the two countries. But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.
In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before the partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. It set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination.
Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favour of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.
But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase. Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after the partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.
But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after 1947 evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam. As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization, Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's Utopia was reduced to ruin and insolvency.
The primary agent of this decline has been the army. The beneficiary of vast amounts of US assistance and money, the military has diverted a significant amount of these resources to arming itself against India. In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability, but rather a backyard, which might provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" against India.
In order to realize these objectives, the army has led the US in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of US money. All this time it kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some-such as Lashkar-e-Taiba's 2008 attack on Mumbai-actively supported.
The army's duplicity was exposed decisively this May, with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of trade in nuclear secrets.
This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country's wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests.
The reversal in the fortunes-India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized Utopia-is what explains the bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part-a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.
This rage is what makes it impossible to reduce Pakistan's obsession with India to matters of security or a land dispute in Kashmir. It can heal only when the wounds of 1947 are healed. And it should provoke no triumphalism in India, for behind the bluster and the bravado, there is arid pain and sadness.
-The Wall Street Journal
Edited excerpts. Comment at theirview@livemint.com
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