Pakistan was meant to be a model, an example for other nations to emulate. It was founded after World War II, as the sun was setting on the British Empire and India was preparing for independence. India’s Muslims, though glad to see the end of the Raj, were apprehensive about becoming a minority in a Hindu-majority land.
They envisioned instead what might be called a “two-state solution”: the establishment of a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims in areas where Muslims were in the majority. Their new nation was to be free, pluralist and tolerant. “We are starting with this fundamental principle,” Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader) declared in 1947, “that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State.”Jinnah died one year later.
The very creation of Pakistan was a mistake for two big reasons.
1. Pakistan is the original Islamic State. This leaves no room for infidels. 23% of the population of Pakistan was non-Muslim in 1947. Today, it's 3%. The country is a case study in how a society tortures and mutilates itself when it enforces sharia with more vigour with each passing year. We see more honor killings, acid attacks, wretched blasphemy laws, explicit legal discrimination against a minority, etc.
2. Pakistan is not a nation-state. There are four provinces in the country. Each of them has an officially unique provincial language, slightly different food, a dissimilar culture and diverse clothing styles. The relatively cosmopolitan, Urdu-speaking, Bollywood-obsessed, bhangra-crazy peoples of Punjab have barely anything in common with the Pashto-speaking, AK-47-wielding, week-smoking, bacha-baazi-enthusiasts of the North West Frontier Province.
Because of this corrosive reality, Pakistan has already cracked once in 1971 -- East Pakistan became Bangladesh.
The only thing that can be used to barely hold it together is the strict, ruthless enforcement of an old evil: Islam.
(Originally posted at Isaac Schrödinger.)
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