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@RajivMessage has written some extraordinary long form articles a long time ago which hold true even today. Here's one of them revisited via a thread of extracts. The link is in the last tweet of the thread. #Article370 #KashmirHamaraHai
It is commonly accepted as an article of faith that Kashmir is the root cause of all problems between India and Pakistan. I disagree with this premise, and wish to demonstrate that the ‘Kashmir issue’ is the clash of two worldviews: pluralism vs exclusivisim.
Most people fail to recognize that this clash between pluralism and exclusivism does indeed exist. This exposes an intellectual failing and lack of preparation in getting to the root cause of the India-Pakistan conflict.
All religions have two dimensions: theological beliefs that pertain to one’s relationship with a Supreme Reality of whatever kind; and sociological beliefs that pertain to dealings with human society.
The three important social demands that dominate the Islamic orthodoxy as adopted by Pakistan’s government and many other Islamic States (as opposed to alternative liberal interpretations that are subverted) are:
(1) the 2-nation theory, (2) global loyalty to Islam superceding sovereignty of man-made countries, and (3) Islamic triumphalism. These are summarized below:
An intense identity is often programmed from childhood. For instance, history gets rewritten to fit the requirement that anything pre-Islamic is to be seen as inferior and false. In India, this legitimized the destruction of Hindu-Buddhist institutions.
When Islam is in a minority and brute force power is not advisable, the Al-taqiyah doctrine legitimizes deception, if done for the larger cause of dar-ul-islam. All this has built a neurosis and hatred for others. There is also hatred for modernity, seeing it as evil.
Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938), the leading Muslim philosopher of his time, was an Indian nationalist in his early writings. But by 1930, in his poem, The Millat, his thoughts had crystallized on Muslim separatism.
The name ‘Pakistan’ originated in 1933, when some Muslim students in Cambridge (UK) issued a pamphlet titled Now or Never. The pamphlet denied that India was a single country, and demanded partition. It explained the term ‘Pakistan’ as follows:
“Pakistan… is… composed of letters taken from the names of our homelands: that is, Punjab, Afghania [North-West Frontier Province], Kashmir, Iran, Sindh, Tukharistan, Afghanistan, and Balochistan. It means the land of the Paks, the spiritually pure and clean.”
After Jinnah, Pakistan became increasingly radicalized and Islamicized, in many ways more extreme than the founder’s vision. For instance, the Ninth Amendment in 1985 caused Article 227 to read:
“All existing laws shall be brought in conformity with the Injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Holy Quran and Sunnah, in this Part referred to as the Injunctions of Islam, …”
The problem for an educated Pakistani is to figure out when and where his history started. If it is to be 1947 in the geographical area that is now Pakistan, then there is very little past for him to build an identity.
If it is to be from the time of Mohammed, then his history is outside his land. If it is prior to that, then his history is largely a Hindu-Buddhist history, a past he wants to deny. rajivmalhotra.com/library/articl…
