CAN
INDIA AND PAKISTAN CO-EXIST?
LOGIC SAYS NO
{This
piece is written from a long durée perspective of history on the interrelations
between India and Pakistan}
Many
of those who are born after the partition of India into India and Islamic
republic of Pakistan, and almost all those who will be born in coming hundreds
of years, would find this division as nothing less than historical madness. A
state was carved out on the basis of religion (though its founder called and
wanted it to be a secular state), crazily in west and one of its part in the
eastern side, with hinterland states like Hyderabad intent on joining in. The
religion defeated geography. It divided humans on the basis of formal religion,
ignoring the shared past, food, dress, language, culture and spirituality. More than this, it sowed a seed of an inherent
contradiction that would always lie at the base of unstable India and Pakistan
(including Bangladesh). As more history
would flow, the coming generation would find this act as no less ridiculous and
stupid. It may perhaps be high in top of the chart of human blunders of last
three thousand years or so.
Peace shall not come to the sub-continent
unless this logical contradiction is resolved. Till then, relations between
India and Pakistan would only be that of crisis management and one ridden with
regular violence interspersed with war each twenty years. The inconsistency in
the dialectical moment of the partition is that a modern nation state was
created on the basis of religion out of a civilizational mass that was
inherently mixed and sustained life only on the strength of shared co-existence.
Logic would have required or by extension
would always require resolving this contradiction with following conditions:
1.
India should have been partitioned
as Islamic Pakistan and Hindu India. Or now, India should become a Hindu
nation, peace will come, by sheer removal of logical contradiction.
2.
Pakistan becomes a secular state
like India with no mention of Islamism in its existence, but then it is a
difficult position to achieve as it would mean denying the entire history of
the very creation of the Pakistan, the very basis of its birth. In fact, this
is the logical position Pakistan has been trying to achieve in its struggle
within the discourse of being Islamic, yet modern, yet secular, yet feudal, yet
ethnic. It is a protracted option, and portents are not encouraging as it is
fast slipping into an illogical chaos of secular state in religious society.
3.
Third option is non-existence of
Pakistan. This logic can be achieved by a decisive war on field between a religious
(contextually illogical state) and a logical secular* State (build up on the logic of co-existence of a people for thousands of
years), followed by the defeat of the “idea” of Pakistan and reconciliation of
the misdirected movement of history. In case the forces of ill logic win and the
idea of Pakistan reigns, the India would be forced to become a religious
state-Hindu/Islamic. In other words, it would mean non existence of India as a state
and idea of a secular India.
What
history has in its womb for the region is for history to show, but whatever it is;
it would be mostly a chronology of the choices among three logical options.
Lasting peace shall not come unless the logical choices under logical option
are not exercised or played out.
.............................................***...................................................
* Secular
state is conceived here neither in the manner a Westphalian state proposes it,
nor it has its moorings in the political secularism that is under debate in
India in terms of its domestic polity. Here, it is only used as a counter juxtaposition
to the religious idea of Pakistan and relies on the characterization of shared
past of people of Pakistan and India.
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