Far be it from me to take issue with a piece printed in an actual news source, let alone so august a publication as the Dawn, but if I may, for a second, pull on my sass pants, I take great exception to something Irfan Husain wrote.
Sure, good points. There are pluses and minuses to Partition having happened and I agree with him that Pakistan would probably be less developed if it were a mass with India and Bangladesh. For examples, see Bihar, Assam and other areas with high Muslim populations, especially far flung ones. He is exaggerating the potential savings of not being armed to fight one another. It seems very Pollyanna-ish to say the one South Asian mega-country would not have huge defense expenditures since they would be bordering the always-ready-to-expand China. Plus, a united Hindustan's position in the Cold War would be borderline impossible to guess, as India tended Soviet and Pakistan was solidly in the American camp. His treatment of religion is facile but not worth going into.
The article steadfastly ignores the giant elephant [racist] in the room even as it is using its prehensile trunk to sling its shit all over the walls while bellowing for attention. Obviously, the deaths related to migration during Partition were a net loss to the Subcontinent. The horrific manner and the sheer number of deaths should at least be mentioned in a fantasy piece about what might have happened if the creation of Pakistan and India as separate countries had never happened. It seems like a million dead and the shocking images of the trains of death would make a tremendous impression worldwide, but sadly, those horrors, more recent than the Holocaust, seem to have slipped from Mr. Husain's mind even as he writes from Pakistan.
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