A Tale of Two Countries. The Genesis. Part 1

In this series of posts, which should drag on for a long time, we will be exploring the genesis of India and Pakistan. We shall treat this process as a social experiment conducted on a scale never seen before by a once mighty empire on a bunch of haggled and hapless people. We shall be deliberate and slow and we shall leave nothing unexplored, as nothign is sacred in the pursuit of truth. As is the motto of the great Nation of India: "सत्यमेव जयते" or Satyameva jayate! which means The truth alone triumphs, so shall it be ours.

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The "What"

Pakistan as a nation came into being on the 14th of August 1947, carved out of erstwhile British India, this event was followed by India's own independence a day later on the 15th of August.. It is interesting to note the dates chosen by both Pakistan and India, the significance of which we will come back to, later. Much later.

Pakistan was created as a new homeland for the Muslims that lived in India prior to partition, a "safeplace" where they would be safe from the supposed discrimination by the Hindu majority, a fact that they could accurately predict would occur, once the westerners, in the form of the colonial British, would leave. With a prediction algorithm that accurate, we'd be able to make the Gaussian Copula seem as sophisticated as a third graders mnemonic aid but that is a discussion for another day.

That this was one of the best real world examples of comparing two religions side-by-side seems to have been lost to the world. But this is expected in our post-Nazi world. The world is wary of the task of assigning worth to any sort of "social group" be it on religious terms or racial terms like the Nazis did in Europe, but at what cost? Have they[the good guys...the allies] forgotten that they implicitly had to apply a sense of worth[lessness] to the Nazis as well? Did they not deem German National Socialism to be a grave danger to the world?

Did the Nazis not have a right to believe in whatever they believed in? Yes, but when they started murdering jews, they caused their downfall. The world, rightfully so, in that situation set about the task of destroying them as they no longer had the right to anything. Not even that of "life" But the crucial thing is that we said no to Nazism. We had no problems in labeling them evil, now why is it that people will shudder to call a religion; evil, in the same vein?

It is pertinent to remember that in order to stop injustice, very often violent means are required. Which is why Cops carry guns. Which is why the government has the judicial and correction system... you get the general idea. Non-violence will work if the enemy has a moral compass that needs to be reset. If this compass is absent, non-violence may as well be termed foolish-suicide. Remember the story of the frog and the scorpion?

Anyway, both these new countries had a host of conditions in common during the time period of their genesis. They both had similar Geography, Climate, Coastline, fertility, water supply, language, Genotypes, and the list goes on and on... The one delineating characteristic however was that Pakistan as a reaction to its overt separatism, chose to follow the Islamic path, India chose to follow the "Dharmic" path.

So there we have it, two countries carved out of the same stock of people and piece of land, beset with the same problems, (in fact if you conducted a SWOT analysis for the two in 1947 they'd end up being about even) with one discerning difference. Religion. The history of these two countries is nothing but the clash of two religions, Hinduism vs Islam. We shall slowly and in painstaking detail dissect; how? as this series of posts progresses.

To be continued...