LUBP looks at liberal blogs too!

With unhappy results.

Selective secularism

This is the second recent article from Pakistan, as shiv notes, that calls for tolerance towards Ahmedis and Christians, but not Hindus or Sikhs.  Is it a new trend?

A clear statement, but is it true?

At PTH, we have argued for the partition as a nuanced set of events that were characterized by extreme mistrust between the two major political forces of that time. These major parties harboured deep distrust against each other. The Muslim League politics increasingly focused on the idea of Pakistan as a bargaining chip to win the rights for the sizeable Muslim majority within the United India. The British hurry to leave the United India, emergence of Muslim League as the sole spokesman for the Muslims, and Congress unwillingness to recognize the Muslim nation demands within the United India resulted in a bloody and messy partition. We still live with the scars of the partition that resulted in one of the largest uprooting and human migration of modern times.... (AZW)

Here.

This is a highly disputable version of history.  If you have the patience, absorb the material on The Cabinet Mission Plan website.

If not, just remember that:

B R Ambedkar on Communal Representation 1909-1947

I recommend reading this as a mild corrective to chaighar stuff.  It is lengthy, but worth the effort.

The culture of denial

I.A Rehman writes in the Dawn:

It should not have been difficult to see that the honourable parliamentarian was only elaborating one of the Pakistani elite’s main cultural traits — the culture of denial. This norm was adopted first by the elite in nearly all fields of life — politics, warfare, economy, academics and even theology — and has been turned, through centuries of practice, into an essential pillar of belief by the commoners too.

Thus, we the Pakistanis have never done anything wrong. If we ever lost a war the reason lay in the enemy’s perfidy or the duplicity of a traitor in our ranks. All our miseries in pre-partition India were the result of a malevolent alliance against us by the British and the Hindu and at the global scale we are innocent victims of the conspiracies continually hatched by ahle-Hunud-o-Yahood. We had no part in pushing East Bengal out of Pakistan; this was achieved by a ruler who drank and womanised and who was helped by the Soviets and India. Those who are killing people in mosques and shrines are not from us, they are aliens unleashed by hostile external forces.

Pakistanis do not even hesitate to deny their part in their biggest accomplishment, the creation of Pakistan, and blame Congress for this, and this theory gathers more and more supporters as the people see their condition becoming increasingly unbearable. No, we are not responsible for people’s poverty and for making a mess of almost everything. And apart from a distorted interpretation of the belief in a pre-ordained world, there is great material advantage in blaming Providence for all our follies, excesses and misadventures.

Digression - the Christians and the Romans

The issue of the relations between the first Muslims and the pagans of Mecca quickly morphed into a discussion of the Romans and the Christians.

Below is an excerpt from Prof. Balagangadhara's book - The Heathen in His Blindness.  A very rough summary is that the Romans saw religion as tradition, practices handed down by the forefathers; and in that framework they honored all traditions.   The Jews and Christians posed a challenge to the Roman conception.  The Jews however claimed a long history, and so the Romans could "understand" them.  The Roman pagans, however, never really understood the Christians (part of the reason Balu invokes the blindness of the Heathen).

Re: Afghanistan - a welcome admission

The Leader of the Opposition in Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, has called his own policies towards Afghanistan, which were in force when he was Prime Minister, a mistake.

Dawn

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan should stop trying to influence affairs in Afghanistan, the opposition leader said Tuesday, while admitting that the pro-Afghan Taliban policy he pursued when he was prime minister in the 1990s was a failure.