I would not like to compare India and Pakistan on the same canvas but since one is on this subject, my two paisa views are being given.
The difference is as chalk to cheese.
India is a vast country, with many ethnicities, religions, languages, customs and culture. It is not so in Pakistan.
Pakistan, in comparison, is a small country and has manageable ethnicities, languages, customs and culture. Pakistan has the greatest boon – one religion, and that too, a religion that is clear in establishing that it is supreme. Its minorities are but a handful and their numbers do not count, while India has the second or third largest Muslim population in the world and some states have 30% of the population Muslim! Unlike India, where there are separate Personal Laws for the Muslims, which the Indian Muslims zealously guard, Pakistan has Islamic Sharia applicable to all, be they Muslim or Minorities and of course, Pakistan has the Blasphemy Law which licks into shape any deviant minority.
It is worth noting that the Constitution of India was amended to accommodate Muslim personal law which the Supreme Court had ruled was gender suppressive. Therefore, one can judge to the extent, secularism is protected. Is it perfect? Well, it is more perfect than many other countries with lesser contradictions in terms of religions, ethnicities, languages, customs and culture.
Of course, India’s governance is nothing to write home about. It is a Witches Brew. To imagine trying to chalk a straight path with so many contradictions as mentioned above and added to it is the huge divide between the rich and the poor, between the urban and the rural, between the educated and the illiterate and so on. And to top it all, corruption at high places that have gone unnoticed till recently because of subtle political control over what should have been autonomous institutions. The infamous Bofors case and Quattorochi comes to mind that remains a mystery because of politically nudged indifference to solving the same. The recent 2G spectrum scam incensed the nation so much that there was an All India agitation spearheaded by a non political social worker that brought the Govt nearly to its knees. A super law is in the making to ensure that all politicians and govt functionaries can be called to be accountable and all autonomous institutions including investigation agencies made real autonomous; and So, there is hope that there will be some improvement in governance….a hope!
Anatol Lieven does not compare India and Pakistan. He has merely commented that if Pakistan were a state of the Indian Union, it would be somewhere in the middle—far below such success stories as Karnataka, but well above such dreadful basket cases as Bihar.
On governance, he states India too suffers from domestic insurgency—the Naxalite Maoists control a much bigger proportion of the country than the Islamist militants do of Pakistan.
His comments on the Human Rights does not say much except ‘also goes for human rights in India, as Human Rights Watch reminded us in a recent report on the Indian police’.
Lieven’s comment in no way indicates that governance is more disconnected than Pakistan. Lieven forgets that Pakistan today is still afloat because of foreign money, be it American or Saudi and therefore, if Pakistan was to be less progressive than Karnataka and better than Bihar, then it indicates serious corruption coupled with misgovernance. I think he is not being charitable to Pakistan.
There is nothing wrong intrinsically with Pakistan. It is forgotten that under Ayub, Pakistan has a far better economy than India!
If Pakistan has spiralled downwards, it is because Zia overdid the religion card. So long as Pakistan was not in the grips of the born again Muslims and Mullahs, it was a vibrant nation. It was Zia who led Pakistan to the sorry state it is in.
A. H. Nayyar and Ahmad Salim, in a report for the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in Pakistan, have stated that the educational system in Pakistan was designed “from the very beginning” to reinforce “one particular view of Pakistani nationalism and identity, namely that Pakistan is an Islamic state rather than a country with a majority Muslim population.” Furthermore, the educational system needed to produce an image of a “singular homogeneous majoritarian Muslim identity that could be sharply differentiated from that of India, even though it meant suppressing the many different shades within Pakistan.”
This was done through myth-making and the embellishment of history. In a chapter on “Historical Falsehoods and Inaccuracies” in Pakistani education, Salim observes that many Pakistan Studies textbooks declare that Muhammad-bin-Qasim, an Arab general who led the Umayyad conquest of the Sindh and Punjab regions in the early eighth century, was Pakistan’s first citizen—a full twelve centuries before its independence in 1947. Indeed, one textbook simply declares that “although Pakistan was created in August 1947, . . . the present-day Pakistan has existed, as a more or less single entity, for centuries.”
In addition, the Pakistani public education system developed a , strongly anti-Indian and anti-Hindu bias in its curriculum as per Nayyar and Salim.
It is unfortunate that you all cannot understand Urdu but Najam Sethi, a journalist on Youtube subscribes to the same theory as Nayyar and Salim. Interestingly, it is in Pakistan history book that Pakistan was there right from the 8th Century and not a country born on 14 Aug 1947!
On Naxals and Maoists, in the next post.
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