Inspired (more or less ;)) by theserecent threads by Abisafyan. What was the point, really, of creating a separate state out of territories mostly Indian in culture and language and predominantly Muslim in religion? And what material benefit have Pakistanis got out of it? India has become a thriving continent-size democracy. Pakistan has been riven since independence by coups, civil war, and the secession of East Pakistan/Bangladesh.
Wouldn’t it be better for Pakistan to reunite with India?
Or, better still, see this map. For decades there has been intermittent agitation for a new state of “Pashtunistan” uniting the Pashto people, currently divided between southern Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Northwestern Provinces. There is also agitation, in both Pakistan and Iran, for an independent Balochistan. Both of these peoples are more Persian than Indian in culture – unlike the Pakistanis of Sind and Punjab. Since the U.S. controls Afghanistan now, presumably we could carve it up if we forced the issue. Let Pashtunistan be created. Let Pakistani Balochistan become independent (which will infuriate the Iranian government to no end :D). Let Sind and Punjab become states of India.
a) if we’re going to redraw boundaries, surely the conflict in Kashmir is relevant;
b) India has indeed been a wonderful democracy, but their first 35 years or so suffered from a “Hindu rate of growth”. Of course it turned out to have nothing to do with the religion and everything to do with over-regulation and under-education. Poor industrial policy may have also played a role: contrast India with South Korea’s and Taiwan’s successful industrial policy (i.e. “Export oriented growth”).
c) Personally, I’m pretty skeptical of independence movements, because they invariably change the subject from important but technical methods of promoting economic growth to emotive but largely pointless tribal concerns. The one possible exception to this is that some recarves can successfully shunt the hotheads off to the side: that’s what the Czechs did with the Slovaks, when the latter complained about their oh-so-terrible repression. Just hand them the keys, shut the door, and let them work things out among themselves.
Currying favour with possible Indian nationalists on this boards, eh? (heheh, I slay myself)
Pakistan does have active separatist movements, but then againso doesIndia. However IMHO the most pressing issue facing India is the growinglymassive, bloody/powerfulNaxalites. If ‘the world’s largest democracy’ falls it would probably be due to them.
That said, if Pakistan/India is too fragmented/weak they will fail it will be due to the political reality of the locals who are living there. The days of foreigners carving up the sub-continental map are long gone.
Yeah, the last time we partitioned a state along ethnic/religious grounds it worked out splendidly for everyone. Why has no one thought of doing the same all over the world? Brilliant!
And let India have about 200 years worth of an insurgency in a contiguous and difficult area where the people hate it no end.
Re Pashtunistan, that is a dead issue, even the Nationalists acknowledge it. You have a large Pashtun Diaspora in other cities of Pakistan, Karachi and Islamabad, espcially have larger Pashtun populations than any city in the Frontier and secondly upto a third of that areas population is not Pashtun. While in Balochistan, about 50% of the population is ethnic Baloch, and indeed while there are large baloch areas outside Balochistan for example DG Khan and Rajanpur and Punjab and Jacobabad in Sindh, the province itself has large Pashtun, Brahui, Hazara and Makrani populations who would hate such an idea.
To the OP ,do the research my friend, and I do not mean a bit of light reading on wikipedia.
Here’s a good NYtimes article on the Naxalites from last year.
slight correction
That said, if Pakistan/India is too fragmented/weak,* they will fail due to the political reality* of the locals who are living there. The days of foreigners carving up the sub-continental map are long gone.
It does seem to me, that the two states conceved by M.A. Jinnah, were set up to fail.
First: Pakistan is pretty arid, and needs extensive irrigation.
Second: Madrasas are no substitute for modern education.
Third: Pakistan has been unstable for a long time…not good for the economy.
Enter the USA-we allied ourselves with pakistan, because pakistan allowed us to use peshawar as an espionage base.
now the Cold war is history…and Pakistan is not reforming itself.
bad all around.
Interestingly enough the three richest men in India are MUSLIMS. A list of the top 10 richest Muslims in India reveals all have made their fortunes from technology or businesses.
A list of the 10 richest men in Pakistan revelas all are either land or hereditary wealth. (BusinessWeek Magazine)
Of course weath is just one measure but it says something interesting, in terms of economics Muslims were able to function better under India. Of course some will argue no amount of economic success will offset giving up their Muslim traditions
Muslims have done better as a whole, in India than Pakistan and soon the number of Muslims in India will be greater than the populatin of Pakistan as a whole.
Muslims of course, can’t admit this because the whole idea behind Pakistan was that Muslims could never get a fair shake in a primarily Hindu state.
Now has this been the case? Have they? I don’t know, as I said economics is just one measure
it was an excellent idea - India had enough problems of its own to also have to deal with a big restive minority. In more recent news they have also built the Bangladesh–India border - Wikipedia to keep out influx of people from one of these overpopulated and growing areas.
The basic principle is, first you have to get your own house in order and then and only then can you start even thinking of some sort of “expansion”. Throwing together totally unrelated and hostile peoples that each have their own unresolved problems only spreads misery around and empowers tyrannical and evil governments that arise to hold them together by brute force.
I feel the creation of a seperate state of Pakistan was a good idea. There were a lot of Muslims who did not want to live in a Hindu-majority state. Forcing them to do so would have been a problem.
Unfortunately the idea was executed about as poorly as possible. Because a lot of people refused to accept partition was going to happen, planning on how to make partition work was delayed until the last moment. And the resistance to the idea of partition often turned into animosity towards the other religion. And finally, the Muslims ignored the fact that while the two halves of Pakistan shared a religon they had substantially different cultures otherwise and they didn’t fit together well into one nation.
Muslims remained a large restive minority, so hard to say this was solved.
Totally unrelated hostile people? Most of the Muhajirs were Hindi speakers and converts from the local populations in eastern portions of India. They were, to use the American vernacular, “totally related, dude.”
Yeah but Muhajirs are about 3 percent of the population. And yiu make my point, these are people who moved because they did not want ti live in a Hindu dominated India. Why would they of all people wish to live in India?
I agree that the way partition was carried out was flawed, but it should be remembered that it was expected that the border would remain open and there would remain a common travel areas, as indeed was the case for many years after August 1947.
Please don’t make stuff up. The richest man in Pakistan is Mian Muhammad Mansha, who is an Industrialist, followed by Anwar pervez, another industrialist and banking group head and then by Mr Hashwani who runs a chain of hotels, and then you have the heads of ARY Group and the Schon Group of industries.
your logic seems to boil down to “what’s best for Muslims?” Well, if these Muslims were to be incorporated into Japan courtesy of Alien Space Bats, maybe that would have been even better for them than that. But it takes two to tango - plenty of Hindus did not want extra Muslims back then and even fewer want or like them now.
The remaining Muslim minority in India are not very popular there either, but they are probably a lot less restive than they could have been if their intellectual elite had not moved to Pakistan as the “muhajirs”.
Another key point to note here is that Pakistan consists of entire ethnic groups that converted to Islam long time ago (it was the first area conquered by Muslims, after all) and subsequently played a major role in military rule over India first by the Mughals and then by the British. Meanwhile many of the Indian Muslims are descendants of relatively recent conversions from amongst the local lower classes. So they are not exactly the Punjabi or Pathan type “martial race” of a kind you see in Pakistan. The same applies to Bangladesh, where the ethnically distinct Pakistanis have shown so much contempt and brutality for the unwarlike locals during the war of 1971.
I’m not sure I’d call the Bengalis “unwarlike.” It’s been a separate power-base for assorted dynasties since the mid 8th century, starting with the imperial-minded Palas. That “martial class” bullshit was pretty much that and one piece of evidence is that Bengalis were considered to number among them before the Great Mutiny, but not after :).
