Pakistan looks like a perfect example for the relationship between extractive political institutions and extractive economical institutions as described in "Why Nations Fail".
Elites often sacrifice the long term development of the country for their short term gain and to maintain their elite status.
Well it depends on the psychological orientation of the elites. A self made Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Jack Ma - or even an Adani or Nandan Nilekani is a lot more confident about free market competition than a Pakistani feudal family that has retained their wealth through generations of consistently throwing their country under the bus.
They sabotaged Indian nationalism and sided with the British and then the Muslim league to create Pakistan to keep their properties intact rather than participating in an inclusive nation building project under the socialist Indian National Congress.
They just as easily dumped Pakistani democracy to side with the military dictatorship of Ayub Khan. They supported Bhutto and the army against the socialist Mujib-ur-Rehman who favored land reforms. After Bhutto learned a lesson or two in populism from Mujib they joined the newly "socialist" Bhutto and neutered his land reforms from within, then they immediately embraced the Islamist dictator who executed him - and started promoting Islamic extremism to drown out any discussion of class struggle and paid off islamic scholars to declare land reforms unislamic.
The Pakistani feudal elite are sort of like multi-generational cockroaches, who have always rejected high ideals in favour of jumping on the bandwagon of whoever happens to take on power next. They are also heavily intermarried into military, bureaucratic, political and industrial families so there are no distinct elite subgroups as such.
Pakistan's 75 year long history has been a selection process that ensures that only the worst and most unscrupulous have survived.
Any "elite" families which did not internalize a consistent habit of jettisoning their principles for petty personal gains, or showed a backbone and real moral courage throughout this timeframe - would have been weeded out and purged by the Pakistani system long ago.
The only mechanism of creating new elites during time period was officers rising up via the military - and they basically entered into matrimonial relationships with the feudal elite and thus inherited their incentives. The army also gives out large tracts of land to senior officers - further driving convergence between the army and the feudals.
This leftover elite is not confident to take on the world or compete with the elites of other societies - they would rather preserve whatever wealth they have - millions of dollars and many many acres of land - rather than open themselves up to external competition for the chance to make billions or lose it all.
Akuma has written an excellent explanation already.
Economic development always comes with risks for the established order and power structures. Economic development requires some sort of creative destruction and social mobility, which often prove disadvantageous to the old elites' relative social status.
Take the UK. 1750 the higher nobility firmly held the power. Nowadays the house of lords has more ceremonial value and those annoying commoners even dared to dominate the list of richest Britons.
The problem with Pakistani society is that as the original thought behind the birth of Pakistan namely that Muslims cannot prosper under a secular Hindu majority nation, was essentially a negation of the idea of India, they view any success of India through the prism that India's success is a failure of the idea of Pakistan. However their formula for dealing with this problem has been to undermine India's success by encouraging ethnic conflict in India, rather than investing in their own economic capabilities.
The author seems to have fallen into the same trap, by talking up persecution of India's minorities. Fact remains that Muslims in India are doing much better than Muslims in Pakistan, the population of Muslims since independence has actually grown by over 4% (from 10% to 14%) while Muslims are poorer than Hindus on average, many of them are part of India's cultural and business elite. If one wanted to write of persecution the decline of Hindus in Pakistan's population from 15% at independence to about 1% might be more fertile ground.
Also not noted in this article is that when there have been multiple attempts, largely from the Indian side, to talk peace (Lahore summit by AB Vajpayee, Agra summit, Manmohan Singh's talks in 2008-09, Modi's visit to Pakistan in 2015) each time it has been undermined by hardliners in Pakistan. India today IMO views relations with Pakistan as a problem that cannot be solved and something where you just need to take care the nuisance value does not go beyond a point. If Pakistan needs to come out of the hole it is in, it needs to cut defence spending, initiate real land reforms (not the kind where the Bhutto family owns a quarter million acres of land post said reform), invest in non-religions education (as far as I can tell the reverse is happening), and build infrastructure and factories rather than nuclear bombs. However fear mongering of India has been tremendously profitable to the Pakistan elite and I don't see why they would step back from that. Any respite due to their economic slowdown may be temporary and if things improve they are likely to move back to the status quo.
I think this is reflected in all that I wrote with the caveat that this is a blog post and not a comprehensive history of Pakistan and its relationship with India since independence. I don't think I even mentioned persecution of Indian minorities at all anywhere here.
Kashmiri's are Indian Muslim minorities!! I was referring to the draconian policies on Kashmir being made a symbol of it's own rule comment, which is quite unfair.
Oh I see what you mean. I think that Kashmir situation is slightly different because their condition took place in a liminal space of citizenship characterized by separatism, counterinsurgency, and conditions of armed conflict. So while they are Indian citizens it is not straightforward to say that their experience was typical of minority life in India.
I would broadly agree that it is not typical. However maybe it is not easy for a non Indian to appreciate but multiple Indian states in the past 70 years, from Punjab to Assam to Chattisgarh to most of the North Eastern states have had some form of insurgency movement. Maybe it is not well known, as the issue has not been globalized as Kashmir has been, but at their peak Punjab and Assam were as bad in terms of death count as Kashmir has ever been.
India has had a successful template/ record whatever you call it of integrating these back into the political mainstream and even many insurgents have joined the political mainstream. E.g. Himanta Biswa Sharma current CM of Assam and Sarbananda Sonowal current Union minister in BJP central government were both part of the Assam separatist movement. There are many such cases in the North East also. So from an Indian perspective Kashmir is not a unique case but one of many insurgencies that have happened over the years. Obviously there are some distinctive elements but it is not like the only such problem. I understand you may have a different perspective on it.
Pakistanis think that Kashmir is India's first and only rodeo, meanwhile India was fighting Tamil separatists, Punjab separatists, Half a dozen northeast separatists (including some christian), domestic Islamists and a full fledged Communist revolution at the same time as Kashmir.
I don't think they realize the scale of problems India has had to overcome to reach where it is now - most of these insurgencies are now dead or dying and their leaderships have been integrated into the mainstream with a combination of carrot and stick - and now the next phase of the game looks easy in comparison.
Exactly, if one reads any history on post Independence India, Western observers were largely unified in the opinion that India would not survive as a nation given the differences in religion, caste, language and God knows what else. Where India has got today is commendable, though I wouldn't declare victory of any kind as yet. We have a of long history of doing victory dances while the battle is still being fought!
That said I am not surprised the RoW is unaware of contemporary Indian problems as we do a horrible job communicating them, I think it was Jaishankar or maybe Sanjeev Sanyal who said in a recent interview (in the context of India buying Russian oil) that the world always viewed India as somebody who was always complaining about something or the other but they could never understand what we wanted because we never articulated it. Now and I quote the interview we are giving our point of view and people are seeing that. I cannot think of a better encapsulation of Indian foreign policy over the years.
I'm sure you'll find enough who will tell you that they feel persecuted and will point at some news stories about bad things happening to muslims, but won't be able to give any concrete example of negative consequences they have faced in their own lives that started happening after 2014. Housing discrimination is the main issue most would face in practice and it is not new.
If you really want representative sample sizes, though Pew has done a best of breed survey where they asked around 30,000 Indians chosen scientifically to reflect national demographics, out of whom around 4000 were muslim.
i'll let my family protesting CAA and hijab law and moving into more and more crowded neighborhoods that you calculated their HDI for them, they will be very pleased
You're right, I've never cared about Muslim identity issues and have always been skeptical of their constant hypocritical whining about religious freedoms whenever they are granted anything short of Sharia law, their complete and utter lack of regard for any pain or inconvenience that they inflict on other communities and their absolute silence on the complete absence of equal rights for religious and other minorities in any society where Islam has any kind of power.
If anything I care only about ensuring the Indian constitution doesn't start looking like that of an Islamic state - true equal citizenship will require ending housing discrimination and social discrimination against muslims, as well as the closing of madrasas and the imposition of a uniform civil code - the Singapore model might be one to follow.
I think you’re stuck on something. I did NOT read any of this into the article which, as a person who has limited knowledge of the current picture of the entire region, I found fascinating..
I agree with the article in that it defines the problems Pakistan faces, and identifies elite capture of Pakistan's institutions as the major problem inhibiting the country. My issue is with the Kashmir hangover. Pakistan's obsession with India, which I spoke about in my comment has many aspects but Kashmir is the biggest one. If they need to get their own act together, they need to look beyond getting the better of India using terror as state policy and that necessarily means getting over Kashmir.
That is not happening in spite of the current crisis, as recently as last year the previous Army chief of Pakistan Qamar Bajwa batted for improving economic ties with India. He was shouted down saying it could not happen till Article 370 was restored etc etc.
> If one wanted to write of persecution the decline of Hindus in Pakistan's population from 15% at independence to about 1% might be more fertile ground.
It's honestly amazing how people want to give an opinion on an argument yet are downright clueless about the basic facts. It just shows where their biases lie.
The least you can do is look up figures from West Pakistan post-partition instead of combining Pakistan with Bangladesh and ignoring the effects of partition. The Hindu % in Pakistan from the 1951 survey was 1.58% and it has grown by 36% to a population share of 2.14% in the 2017 survey. Are basic statistical numbers inconvenient?
> fear mongering of India has been tremendously profitable to the Pakistan elite
While not wrong, the gall to say this when you're peddling fake propaganda to fear monger about persecution in Pakistan lmao.
Err East Pakistan was part of the political entity that was Pakistan in 1947 so the population of that period would include both the parts. And when you bring in the erstwhile East Pakistan in the context of an argument on treatment of minorities in the respective nations, one would need to also remember that in 1969 the army of West Pakistan carried out a genocide in East Pakistan in which as per independent accounts, some 400000 people were killed, some 200000 women were raped and some 2 million people were forced to migrate to India (all numbers mostly Hindus). These numbers are from Wikipedia but one may note that the Government of Bangladesh claims 3 million people were killed so the numbers i give above are much more muted...
So that is a story of persecution of Hindus of Pakistan (since what is today Bangladesh was then part of Pakistan and these were voters in the elections of Pakistan at the time)by Pakistan, if I am not mistaken. The logic of your argument of using Bangladesh to suggest Pakistan actually treats its minorities well is quite staggering. I congratulate you.
> Err East Pakistan was part of the political entity that was Pakistan in 1947 so the population of that period would include both the parts.
You can't actually be this stupid, right? Apart from misleading people, why would you use joint figures when minority numbers were available for West Pakistan? News flash, East Pakistan separated so, how are those 1947 numbers representative of Pakistan? I mean, this is basic statistics, yet you don't even know what constitutes a simple comparison.
This is the equivalent of using pre-partition numbers to insinuate that there has been a Muslim genocide in India. In the 1941 census, Muslims were 24% of the population. After the persecution, it has fallen to 14% in 2011. Do you realize how downright moronic your argument is? Who knew that a partition can change the demographic composition? It's weird how you want to have an opinion yet are clueless about how to do a basic analysis.
> one would need to also remember that in 1969 the army of West Pakistan carried out a genocide in East Pakistan in which as per independent accounts, some 400000 people were killed, some 200000 women were raped.
This is largely irrelevant to the treatment of minorities/Hindus in West Pakistan. What number of the 400K were Hindus? How many out of the 200K women were Hindus? Imagine actually being this slow. Rambling won't help you buddy.
> So that is a story of persecution of Hindus of Pakistan
What persecution? The one where they grew by 36% between 1951 and 2017? Weird how that works.
Perhaps Murtaza is under the illusion that India (sans the BJP) is clamouring for a rekindling of ties with Pakistan. In fact, not too long ago, Rahul Gandhi (scion of the Gandhi family and largely seen as the de-facto leader of the Indian National Congress) said in a talk held in Cambridge that normalisation of ties with Pakistan wasn’t possible until the cross- border terrorism stops.
After 3 direct wars (all begun by Pakistan) and a number of terrorist attacks inside India which have been traced back to terrorist cells in Pakistan which the Pakistan government/establishment refuses to extradite or effectively prosecute - and after various forays for peace by the Indian government - *even* the BJP: Vajpayee in Lahore in 1999 leads to the Kargil war & Modi at a Sharif wedding (also) in Lahore 2015, answered by terrorist attacks in Pathankot in 2016 & then Pulwama in 2019 - you could perhaps say that the appetite for most Indians to even talk with Pakistan is at an all time low.
As for the perpetual & grave identity crisis of Pakistan, there are various well documented instances & events which reveal the sole idea that the state of Pakistan was based on - the 2 nation theory.
Jinnah’s speech of 11th August 1947 has long been held up by the progressives and non-residents of Pakistan as something which meant that the state was *supposed to be* secular - which has been laughed off by serious researchers. Jinnah went around giving incendiary speeches throughout the 2nd World War in Muslim circles & meetings (while the leaders of the Congress were in jail for protesting against Indian involvement in the War) which subsequently culminated in wide spread communal riots & the final massacre of the partition in 1946-47.
Saving face in a speech in the face of increasing scrutiny by the Allied powers (especially the US) is not enough for dear Murtaza to say that Pakistan is a secular state. The very few minorities that remain in Pakistan cannot become Presidents or Prime Ministers - declared so by the constitution.
Hans J Morgenthau, in his book ‘The New Republic’, observed: “Pakistan is not a nation and hardly a state. It has no justification, ethnic origin, language, civilisation or the consciousness of those who make up its population. They have no interests in common, save one: fear of Hindu domination. It is to that fear and nothing else that Pakistan possess its existence and thus for survival as an independent state.”
During the same period, another American scholar Keith Callard in his book ‘Pakistan, a Political Study’ commented: “... the force behind the establishment of Pakistan was largely the feeling of insecurity”.
The Cabinet Secretary of Pakistan, Mohd Ali, when asked by a top Indian bureaucrat, B.K. Nehru, regarding the persistent use of abusive language against India and Hindus by the Pakistani Newspaper ‘Dawn’ (Muslim League’s mouthpiece), replied that, though he knew that it was wrong, but such fabrications about an enemy was necessary for building Pakistan.
Military and civilian rulers in Pakistan have used the anti-Hindu rhetoric for mobilising the people against India both during war and peace. On 29 August, just before the 1965 War, President Ayub Khan in a directive to the Commander in Chief, (General Mohammad Musa), wrote: “…… as a general rule, Hindu morale would not stand more than a couple of hard blows delivered at the right time and place. Such opportunities should therefore be sought and exploited.”
Therefore, the general consensus throughout India is that the onus remains on Pakistan to convince India to come take a seat at the table, not the other way around. Let’s see how long that takes to get through the collective heads of the Pakistani government & the military and also their people.
Fantastic read! Thanks for bringing him as a guest Noah!
What I find interesting is that Pakistan and Nigeria are have a lot of similarities. Huge 200M population that's underutilized, massive inequality, religious extremism causing backwardness, massive issues post independence, and they even have similar per capita income levels & UN development levels by HDI.
But they got there in different ways. Pakistan needs land reform while Nigeria depends on oil booms to grow and stalls during commodity busts. It will be interesting to see which nation will fair better by 2030.
While you say that Pakistan should defer the conflict for the future , the question remains that why should India do the same instead of capitalising of Pakistan's weakness right now ? As a nation India has little to no incentive to let Pakistan grow. As can be observed from data whenever Pakistan is in an economically stable position the number of terrorist attacks in India increase.
Indian leaders tend to be very risk-averse when it comes to foreign policy. Theoretically pushing Pakistan to the brink of explosion would be emotionally satisfying on some level but I think they also fear the consequences of having hundreds of millions of people living in a failed state with nuclear weapons right on their border. It's not conducive to India's own plans for the region and itself and Indian diplomats periodically make statements to the effect (including of late) that geography is unchangeable so there needs to be some modus vivendi ultimately.
The risk averse generation is quickly dying off with each passing year. Did anyone imagine in 2010 that India will drop bombs in Pakistan's territory as a way to vent off anger due to terrorist attacks ? You may or may not have noticed that even among the Indian right wing circles Modi is increasingly being seen as an impotent old man. Just look at the recent incident where the Defence ministry of Ukraine posted a meme with a distorted image of the Hindu Goddess Kali, a lot in Hindu right wanted Modi to respond in same way that Islamists respond to any perceived transgressions against Prophet Mohammad. The Overton window is shifting in India.
As for Pakistan imploding that is a little too far fetched conclusion to make. The Indian government can try to pressurise Pakistan just enough to impede its growth. And I believe Pakistani army can maintain strong enough grip on Pakistan to not let it implode as they would not want to lose cash cow that gives them their tremendous wealth.
To be honest Pakistan's army is the institution that has hampered its growth. Recently Indian government dissolved all military cantonment because they had a lot of land in the areas like Tech hubs Bangalore and Pune. Can you imagine Pakistani army letting something similar happen ?
You're right about the rightward drift of Indian public sentiments but I find this is a common phenomenon in that people feel more constrained by circumstances once they are actually in power. For instance I am sure that Modi would take far more hawkish actions in a perfect universe but he must balance multiple responsibilities, while his right-wing critics are free to criticize without consequence.
Could never imagine Pakistani military liquidating its economic interests in the manner you describe unless they felt highly pressured by internal or external forces. One thing I did not mention is the possibility of Western sanctions on Pakistani military and intelligence officials which could actually be an appropriate step.
I think if threatened with sanctions by the west Pakistani military and intelligence officials will start playing the game of "think about our nukes, they might fall in the hands of Islamist nutjobs". There is a reason that obama said that Pakistan's nukes keep him awake at night and Pakistani army knows that . They will try to use that leverage as a bargaining chip to protect their financial interests.
When I say sanctions, I don’t mean broad sectoral sanctions that could theoretically destabilize the country. I am thinking of targeted sanctions on individuals and companies tied to certain bad practices. No one can claim with a straight face that if their New York bank account is frozen that will mean the Taliban may get Pakistan’s nuclear weapons!
I don't think Pakistani elites are that stupid they have kept their ill gotten gains in countries like Switzerland and other tax haven countries which don't impose sanctions easily.
Not to mention west doesn't want to further push Pakistan into China's arms , let's say that the US sanctions some ISI executives or some military generals what is stopping those people from sabotaging US interests in Pakistan and go charging ahead into China's lap ?
India will be already doing Pakistan a huge favour if they do not try to crush Pakistani economy right now. As the saying goes "Kindness to enemies is cruelty to yourself".
India doesn't need to destabilize it as in funding insurgencies but by putting economic pressure to further slow down Pakistan's economic growth. For example by targeting Pakistan's exports to other countries, make those goods available to buyers at a cheaper price even if they have to subsidize those industries. Lobbying organisations like FATF hard to put pakistan back on grey list.
I think the current round of devaluation along with the reduction in oil prices has balanced Pakistan's trade deficit in recent months - so no fear of an immediate crash since Iron Brother China will give funds to take care of the upcoming debt repayments.
Time to start the next round of pushing in terms of Lawfare and trade policy. A military mobilization would hurt Indian growth momentum and could either cause a 'hard crash' like you alluded or cause the country to rally around the army against an external aggressor.
But there are many options on the table to keep the pressure on the elite while containing the fallout to non-military means.
Apart from FATF grey/blacklisting that Pakistan entirely deserves (for e.g. UN designated terrorists Hafiz Saeed and Syed Salahuddin were recorded in public rallies by Pakistani youtubers in the last couple of months threatening India)
I think recognition for the 1971 genocide by western Europe in return for FTAs should be next on the Indian agenda along with advocating for the repeal of GSP+ status for Pakistan or making it conditional on verified implementation - which is a no-brainer policy that India and Bangladesh should push for concertedly and wholeheartedly.
Pakistan still teaches in its mainstream education system that it was Hindu teachers in east Pakistan brainwashed the locals against Pakistan. Its political class is still unable to pass an anti-forced-conversion law even though it is an established fact that up-to 1000 minority girls (mostly Hindu) are kidnapped, raped, converted to islam and married off to their captors in rural Sindh every year. Atheists are hunted down and killed if they critique islam openly and the state sides with the killers.
In no way does Pakistan deserve the EU's GSP+ status for conforming to any charter of human rights - this is just an artefact of the west's long history of mollycoddling Pakistan and protecting it from consequences.
Revoking the GSP+ or suspending it until Pakistan cleans up its act on paper and improves the situation on the ground- this should drop Pakistan's goods exports by another 10-20% - most of these orders would be directly replaced by Bangladesh and to a lesser degree India - which would make for an interesting kind of poetic justice.
This should be coupled with mercantile policies and a special government fund to tactically degrade any markets for Pakistani goods and services.
India spent 80 billion dollars on its military this year and will probably end will probably spend 100 billion next year. This is highly inefficient given that a targeting subsidies of a few billion in a few commodity sectors might end up crowding out Pakistani exports. Just as we seem to have an 'outcompete China' plan for our high end sectors we should have a 'outcompete Pakistan' plan for our low end sectors - the latter can be outsourced to Bangladesh based on their competitiveness in the sector.
A lot of these don't even require complex workarounds around the WTO - can't India set up a dedicated sporting goods mission, a surgical instruments mission on the same lines as the national toy mission?
Pakistan's founder did not want a "secular homeland". Jinnah has never EVER used the word "secular" in any of his speeches.
On the other hand, he has said, "I could not understand a section of people who deliberately wanted to create mischief and made a propaganda that the constitution of Pakistan would not be made on the basis of Shariat.”
Having Islamic Law/Sharia as the basis of one's constitution is not exactly anywhere close to Secularism.
On another rant against Western countries Jinnah went back to the tried and test method of Islamism. “Take inspiration and guidance from the Holy Quran, the final victory will be ours [….] You have to develop the spirit of mujahids. All I require of you is that everyone … be prepared to sacrifice all, if necessary, in building Pakistan as a bulwark of Islam.”
Pakistan is exactly what Jinnah created - an Islamic republic which wants to be the bulwark of Islam, whose constitution and laws are derived from Islamic Law.
Also, Jinnah allied with Feudals when he allied with Unionist Party(A party of Feudal Landlords). Land Reforms is again, never mentioned by Jinnah. While his counterpart in India, was on record that Land Reforms is India's future as far back as in 1929(India got independence in 1947).
Lots of blame mongering on India and other countries. It is a typical Pakistani mindset, not to expose the evils and hypocrisy of their own being, no investment in their own progress. I wonder how it feels to be this insecure? No facts given about the ostensible “outrageous” behaviour of the Indian govt or the “Draconian” Kashmir Law which is for the benefit and protection of persecuted Sikh, Christian, Hindu, Parsi & tribal minorities from Pakistan primarily that any honourable country unlike Pakistan would consider itself liable for. When the hunter can’t hunt the hunted, I guess in a morphed corner of their mega maniac universe protection laws will seem “draconian” - furthermore a Sharia peddling country, plastering that label on one other than itself is comical. There was no mention of the persecution of its minorities from Hindus to Sikhs to Kalash communities other than Ahmediya Muslims (this is where the buck stops for Pakistanis - even to name other minorities seems blasphemous to their cause) and how temples have been turned into toilets and how Hindu, Sikh & Christian women are kidnapped on a daily basis, gang raped, killed if they are lucky enough and if not then forcibly converted to Islam to endure an entirely fallible life. Kashmir is and will always be a part of India. A beautiful land such as and also the birthplace of Shaivism should never fall prey to the same destiny as Pakistan - it should pray that at the rate which it is going, Balochistan does not become a part of India by its own will (but of course a negative state will always assert that it is India’s “draconian” will at play) In actuality there is no revenge to be had on the part of Pakistan for what happened in East Pakistan (which was a part of India to begin with) - it was entirely Pakistan’s doing and the genocide that was being committed by the Pakistani army on Bangladeshi nationals forced India to step in and help Bangladesh. Pakistan should be thanking India for averting and buffering it’s disasters. Pakistan and it’s Murtazas’ can harp all they want, it is the homogenous Islamist attitude of blaming all shortcomings of one’s own on others and lagging behind on the homework needed to build a strong, robust nation and conscientious analysis of what it means to be human. This articles states no real statistics and derivations and lessons learnt on behalf of a pernicious state that Pakistan is. Making excuses and running on the same mindset (of course some superfluous self effacing statements pooh & paah-ing that barely scratch the surface of reality have been made given how bad the situation for the country is despite of the billions of dollars spent on it over the years by extraneous sources from America to Saudi and now China - that in itself is laughable and proves the true nature of Pakistan) No mention of how it has sold itself to China in present times and it’s atrocities in Balochistan and Pakistan occupied Kashmir. Overall, if this article is a testament to the revamp of Pakistan at all, I can say not even an iota of the kind of mind bogglingly deep reconnaissance into the country’s problems and its Islamist stance has been done and at this rate it’s going to remain as non-salubrious, pathetic and laughable as it always was.
I think you have to be a little deranged to read this article which is entirely a criticism of Pakistan and conclude that it's blaming India. Presumably you want it to include some worshipful appraisals of Indian conduct as perfect and the absence of that alone is offensive. Suffice to say its a very emotionally immature attitude and is sadly not uncommon to partisans of its presently ascendant political movement.
I think you have to be very deranged to have written it in the first place. I certainly didn’t expect you to be applauding India (you made your biases and tubular vision plentifully clear) but I didn’t expect you to misstep and wrongfully present facts when it came to India and laws that it corroborates for protection of subjects that it deems right and worthy of protecting. Nobody has the right to object to it, let alone call it “draconian” and “outrageous”. This is why the stereotype that India produces neurosurgeons and Pakistan produces bombers (hilarious and politically incorrect as it may be) is so tempestuous to be ascertained as right! The tag of emotionally immature from someone who is on a grander scale safe guarding a terrorist state and identity of an Islamist state and putting most of the blame on the elite circles of the country ( where do they get that kind of dishonesty and cognitive dissonance from? Ever thought of doing a deep dive there? Ever thought of what maybe so ideologically wrong with Pakistan that the most powerful of the country would bring their own people to this state and that too with all the aid provided by the first world ) talking about other ascendant political movements is rich and sad that a hypocrite like yourself even got the platform to write about an intricate issue such as this that you’re clearly mentally (intellectually and emotionally) in-equipped to handle. It’s very common for Pakistanis to combobulate with an Indian subcontinent identity when it suits their purpose and then blame the nefarious bits of their history and trajectory onto India and of course you’re going to have to accept the pathetic state that Pakistan is at some point because hey it’s the reality! The world knows it at this point. Nothing new about that.
Dude you need to relax lmao. I'm not sure if English isn't your first language or your reading comprehension is subpar, but you're screaming into the void here.
Let's start with the claim that the Indian army is using rape as state policy in Kashmir.
We have quotes by Pakistani army general in charge in 1971 threatening to "change the race of the Bengalis" (i.e. have all the Punjabi/Pashtun soldiers rape the local women) - leading to one Bengali officer killing himself right after hearing that speech, and at another time flippantly saying "So should I send my men to Jhelum (i.e. to a brothel in west Pakistan) instead?" when asked about the claims of sexual assault by his troops during the Bengal violence. We have reports of the Australian abortion camps that had to run for 6 months after the end of the conflict.
Do you have any similar statements by Indian generals, or policy documents by the Indian army, or accounts written by former officers who have acknowledged a deliberate policy of sexual assault as was documented in the case of Pakistan - or are you intentionally extrapolating from individual incidents in order to claim a false equivalence?
Much as I dislike Modi and his worldview even as an Indian, I have to admit his approach in Kashmir is logical. It is literally IMPOSSIBLE for any political party to allow self-determination in Kashmir. You could scream special circumstances as much as you like but it would be the beginning of the end of India as a country with numerous other States and regions demanding their own version of it. Must as we like to speak idealistically, I can't think of one country that has been created through the ballot box.
Given those circumstances, it is perfectly logical to stop the region from bleeding itself to death and forcibly integrating it with the rest of the country. I wouldn't want India to go to the extremes that China has done in Xinjiang but a softly softly approach has the potential to hurt more in the long run.
Exactly. The first step begins with admitting that the ideology itself is wrong, but that won’t happen. It’s best to just cut Pakistan off from any aid and let them wither on the vine - if they are so devout, their god should help them, right?
I am quite surprised at this introspection of Pakistan by Murtaza Hussain. I think he has captured the ills and the shortcomings of Pakistan rather candidly; some clearly visible to even a casual onlooker of affairs of the region and others with some insights. As I read this long essay though, I felt that some of the things he has stated incorrectly, or incompletely, should be set straight.
But before I do that, I must admit that I hadn't known of Murtaza or his work before this. So, I checked out both his own substack and The Intercept. Predictably, his anti-India stance and Hindu-phobia shows up regularly; both in the topics he chooses to write on the Intercept (mainly), and in his treatment in detail of such topics. I can write pages worth of details but that will be tangential to commenting on the article here. The only reason I am mentioning this is to establish his clear bias against India and it helped me understand why he had to keep dragging India in this article when the sole focus on Pakistan would have been most appropriate. I should also mention that I did not readily see any other work on either his substack or on the Intercept by him that was critical of Pakistan. Perhaps Noah’s invitation was specific?
That said, I am surprised at his sharp critique of Pakistan and equally surprised that he tipped his hat to BJP government for the progress they have delivered in India. Coming back to where I find his article is either inaccurate or incomplete. First, his claim that Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah was agnostic about religion and was secular. It is like saying that Trump believes in welcoming illegal immigrants wholeheartedly! This is either charitable reimagining of Jinnah or willful ignorance. Nothing could be further from the truth! It was Jinnah who demanded the split from India because he wanted an Islamic nation for Muslims. A split that was so bloody that over 12 million people lost their lives, so it would be quite appropriate to say that their blood was on Jinnah’s hands.
Murtaza also mentions that Pakistan outperformed India in the beginning. This is mostly true, but it requires some color. A newly created Pakistan should have carried proportionate amount of debt that pre-partition India was saddled with. It never paid that amount to India. This amount is said to be in the range of Rs 55 crore to Rs 95 crore, or in 1947-48 value of US$ between $160 million to $295 million. It may seem small by today’s inflated standards, but it was an immense sum back then and both West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) were beneficiaries. What is also noteworthy is that the independent India still gave Pakistan over Rs 300 crores (US$870 million) as their share of the split, without adjusting for the debt that Pakistan reneged on. This is over and above the army, military equipment etc. that was divided between India and Pakistan. My point is, that Pakistan had a clean slate and a flush bank balance to start with, where as India carried all the debt. Pakistan also started receiving aid almost from the start from US, UK and others.
Murtaza also dilutes Pakistan’s bailouts by just casually mentioning of negotiations of a new IMF bailout. What he left unsaid is that Pakistan already has had 23 IMF bailouts in 75 years! Even the poster child of failed economy, Argentina, has had “only 21” bailouts! WSJ reported recently that as of end of 2022, Pakistan had a staggering $130 billion debt, and $73 billion of this amount is due by 2025! It is unclear if this is their total debt, i.e., whether it includes loans by China, various European countries, Gulf countries, Türkiye, and even smaller nations like Malaysia!
Bottom line, Pakistan’s fiscal mismanagement has always been criminal and West, and particularly US and IMF, have kept the drug coming to an addict.
I want to end with one final point, and that is Murtaza’s desperate attempt to drag India in this discussion somehow. He chooses the Kashmir issue and tries to compare Pakistani army’s atrocities in Bangladesh with Indian army’s handling of Pakistan fomented terror campaigns in Kashmir. This is like comparing Germany’s cruel treatment of Jews in WWII to my local county mishandling of an arrest warrant. If Pakistan stops their cross-border terrorism and the proxy war, then they may gain some help from India. India has overlooked Pakistan’s export of terrorism and offered a hand in the past but repeated betrayal has shut that door until Pakistan completely disavows terrorism and dismantles the terrorist factories that it has created.
All in all, no amount of our analysis will be of any help to Pakistan. As Murtuza correctly portrays, it has far too many vested interests that are feeding on the easy money. More importantly, it needs to really take a hard look at the religious fanatism, not just in their intolerance to others and hate for India and esp. Hindus but also, as Murtaza points out, to minorities in Pakistan, mainly other Muslim sects as Hindus, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians are mostly chased out, killed, or forcefully converted already. Until then Pakistan is walking around like a suicide bomber, always in a death embrace of a bomb vest that is held close to their body and so carries real risk of being torn to pieces.
I don't claim to be an expert (at all) on Pakistan--for me the post was a nice introduction and I thought it presented a comprehensive overview, hence my comment. If there were some facts or interpretations of events and the overall situation in Pakistan that you thought the author got wrong, then please share your perspectives with the rest of us so that we can have an interchange and all come away from this better informed.
He has not really spoken about the degree to which Pakistan's current position is a direct consequence of its founding ideology, it's pathological hatred of India, and the extent to which it brainwashes its children - he has tried to couch it as much as possible as a regular case of an incompetent elite in a developing country - but Pakistan is unique in the way it teaches its people a distorted history of its past which then leads to them making delusional decisions down the line.
The consistency of these delusional choices is quite striking - it is almost impossible to rationally explain many of the actions Pakistan has taken throughout history - the army starting wars without informing the air force etc.
At one point they literally taught their soldiers that one muslim soldier would be able to kill 10 hindu soldiers and studied battle plans from the quran. This has led to excessive risk taking w.r.t. India over the decades and turned it into an enemy when it could have been a friend and partner. Even now Pakistanis live in utter delusion about India.
Ultimately the author's goal is to project Pakistan as just another regular country - but it's not really the case. It has all the features of a regular basketcase country but also an overlay of grandiose narcissism and inability to self reflect as a result of the one-sided, largely fake narrative that is fed to its citizens since childhood. It is because of this that it is unable to make commonsense strategic adjustments that any other country in the same position would make. (See Bangladesh/Sri Lanka etc).
To sum up how twisted it is - Pakistan celebrates the 1965 war as 'defense day' - a war that it started by attacking India in Kashmir and lost - in the sense of that it failed to achieve all objectives, just barely ended up defending Lahore, and even lost a bit of land to India in Kashmir.
He refers to the Kashmir in a very separatist, Ghazwa-e-Hind kind of way which is the mentality of most Pakistan sponsored terrorists. He says “…..Pakistanis, Kashmiris and Indians” to further corroborate that Kashmir is not a part of India which is not how it officially is. This gives away a huge part of his internal biases. So although the article is about Pakistan and its shortcomings, he also drags India into the picture and maligns it which is of course not appreciated by those updated on the realities of the discourse and have a pro-India view.
For a tour of Pakistan's challenges, my favorite book remains Anatol Lieven's "Pakistan: A Hard Country." If you want to know more about some of the issues mentioned in this post, I recommend it.
In a larger sense, of course, Pakistan's tragedy is not that different from many other developing countries. Maybe someday we'll get a better recipe than the old Washington Consensus for getting countries out of the elite capture trap.
We have some hints, now, for better policy; Noah's covered a lot in his development articles. But those better policies have to be enacted by politicians -- and we still know so little about how to get better politics.
“We still know so little about how to get better politics.” Ain’t that the truth. We keep having to confront our primitive natures based on fear of the non-us and survival that it’s hard to be creative in a country/world way.
Author gives Jinnah far too much credit - Jinnah didn't have a plan - he told different things to different people and tailored his message to the audience. At the end of the day everyone got a different message about what Pakistan was supposed to be - and that confusion persists till date.
Jinnah never wanted a secular state, he simply didn't care about the details beyond getting his own country.
Over time the strongest groups - the mullahs, the military and the mill owners (Feudals) have all taken their share of the pie and ended up defining the state in ways that are beneficial to their interests.
Ishtiaq Ahmed has written extensively about Jinnah and particularly about his complete lack of a coherent agenda for Pakistan.
Secondly the topic of the essay is 'How can Pakistan join the South Asian boom' - basically 2 economies in South Asia are booming - India and Bangladesh. Pakistan still can not bring itself to change it's strategic orientation with respect to these countries - (beyond having some long term fantasy to turn Bangladesh against India militarily and convert it to the 'Pakistan ideology').
The blocker on normalization is not coming from the Indian side 'Hindu fascist BJP' or whatever - Modi invited the PM of Pakistan to his swearing in ceremony and visited Pakistan to normalize relations early in his tenure, only to get backstabbed with back-to-back terror attacks.
It is the Pakistani establishment and the Pakistani intellectual class which is unable to digest normal relations with India, and even now is dreaming of a strategic pause in their eternal war against India rather than a genuine change of direction and the assessment of the potential of India as a friend rather than an enemy.
If there is no strategic realignment to reverse relations with India and Bangladesh- there is no way for Pakistan to practically benefit from the broader South Asian boom in terms of trade, investment and technology, except for the soft power and psychological effects of seeing their neighbours making tangible progress for the first time. (Before the pandemic - Pakistani media had studiously avoided showing any pictures of skyscrapers, metro trains or new airports coming up in India.)
Only if Pakistan is able to calm down its politics and society and reform internally into a more moderate country, will it start benefiting from the global value chains moving there eventually as Indian labor costs become prohibitively high - but that requires for most of India to first become significantly richer than Pakistan and such an expectation can backfire badly India still has poorer states like UP, Bihar and Jharkhand which still have cheaper labor than Pakistan and can fuel Indian manufacturing for at least another decade after the southern states become prohibitively expensive.
A rational elite would have figured out a pivot to India/"grand bargain on Kashmir" a long time ago - specially in the 2008-2012 era when India overtook Pakistan in developmental indicators comprehensively, India's long term economic trajectory was firmly established. Instead, the elite decided to stick its head in the sand and pretend that India was not rapidly expanding, and instead decided to act as a conduit for Chinese investment in Pakistan.
You can see the difference in how India is leveraging the quad vs how Pakistan used CPEC by acting as a strategic bulwark against India.
India is leveraging its security relationship with the US to pull in high-tech export oriented manufacturing into the country using India labor and to increase FDI into defense, electronics, IT, r&D- in the meanwhile it is maintaining a stable trade relationship with China (with increasing scrutiny in a few sensitive strategic sectors) and only promising the US economic and technological competition with China - not all out war - this gives it space to change to a more neutral position if needed in the future if it gets the appropriate deal from China.
Pakistan on the other hand has left no scope for compromise with India - halted trade which ended up harming itself more than India. It offered itself to China for cheap let the chinese build infrastructure using dollar denominated debt which ultimately had no direct impact on its exports.
I'm also going to ignore classical Pakistani mistakes that comes from reading newspaper headlines instead of looking at the primary source for data - e.g. India's GDP per capita is now higher than Bangladesh's because BDesh also had a devaluation in the past year - etc.
"By midcentury, Pakistan could have a population greater than 330 million, making it an outsize part of a global population that is generally growing older and more scarce."
Pakistan doesn't seem like a good candidate to sustainably reach that population level.
"An average Pakistani household spends 50.8 percent of monthly income on food. This makes them particularly vulnerable to shocks, including high food prices. The impact of climate change and population displacements exacerbate the situation."
Pakistan looks like a perfect example for the relationship between extractive political institutions and extractive economical institutions as described in "Why Nations Fail".
Elites often sacrifice the long term development of the country for their short term gain and to maintain their elite status.
@Akuma has written good comments on declining foreign support for Pakistan and Arabia's pivot to India under another blog post: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/herecomesindia/comment/15494424
Well it depends on the psychological orientation of the elites. A self made Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Jack Ma - or even an Adani or Nandan Nilekani is a lot more confident about free market competition than a Pakistani feudal family that has retained their wealth through generations of consistently throwing their country under the bus.
They sabotaged Indian nationalism and sided with the British and then the Muslim league to create Pakistan to keep their properties intact rather than participating in an inclusive nation building project under the socialist Indian National Congress.
They just as easily dumped Pakistani democracy to side with the military dictatorship of Ayub Khan. They supported Bhutto and the army against the socialist Mujib-ur-Rehman who favored land reforms. After Bhutto learned a lesson or two in populism from Mujib they joined the newly "socialist" Bhutto and neutered his land reforms from within, then they immediately embraced the Islamist dictator who executed him - and started promoting Islamic extremism to drown out any discussion of class struggle and paid off islamic scholars to declare land reforms unislamic.
The Pakistani feudal elite are sort of like multi-generational cockroaches, who have always rejected high ideals in favour of jumping on the bandwagon of whoever happens to take on power next. They are also heavily intermarried into military, bureaucratic, political and industrial families so there are no distinct elite subgroups as such.
Pakistan's 75 year long history has been a selection process that ensures that only the worst and most unscrupulous have survived.
Any "elite" families which did not internalize a consistent habit of jettisoning their principles for petty personal gains, or showed a backbone and real moral courage throughout this timeframe - would have been weeded out and purged by the Pakistani system long ago.
The only mechanism of creating new elites during time period was officers rising up via the military - and they basically entered into matrimonial relationships with the feudal elite and thus inherited their incentives. The army also gives out large tracts of land to senior officers - further driving convergence between the army and the feudals.
This leftover elite is not confident to take on the world or compete with the elites of other societies - they would rather preserve whatever wealth they have - millions of dollars and many many acres of land - rather than open themselves up to external competition for the chance to make billions or lose it all.
Akuma has written an excellent explanation already.
Economic development always comes with risks for the established order and power structures. Economic development requires some sort of creative destruction and social mobility, which often prove disadvantageous to the old elites' relative social status.
Take the UK. 1750 the higher nobility firmly held the power. Nowadays the house of lords has more ceremonial value and those annoying commoners even dared to dominate the list of richest Britons.
The problem with Pakistani society is that as the original thought behind the birth of Pakistan namely that Muslims cannot prosper under a secular Hindu majority nation, was essentially a negation of the idea of India, they view any success of India through the prism that India's success is a failure of the idea of Pakistan. However their formula for dealing with this problem has been to undermine India's success by encouraging ethnic conflict in India, rather than investing in their own economic capabilities.
The author seems to have fallen into the same trap, by talking up persecution of India's minorities. Fact remains that Muslims in India are doing much better than Muslims in Pakistan, the population of Muslims since independence has actually grown by over 4% (from 10% to 14%) while Muslims are poorer than Hindus on average, many of them are part of India's cultural and business elite. If one wanted to write of persecution the decline of Hindus in Pakistan's population from 15% at independence to about 1% might be more fertile ground.
Also not noted in this article is that when there have been multiple attempts, largely from the Indian side, to talk peace (Lahore summit by AB Vajpayee, Agra summit, Manmohan Singh's talks in 2008-09, Modi's visit to Pakistan in 2015) each time it has been undermined by hardliners in Pakistan. India today IMO views relations with Pakistan as a problem that cannot be solved and something where you just need to take care the nuisance value does not go beyond a point. If Pakistan needs to come out of the hole it is in, it needs to cut defence spending, initiate real land reforms (not the kind where the Bhutto family owns a quarter million acres of land post said reform), invest in non-religions education (as far as I can tell the reverse is happening), and build infrastructure and factories rather than nuclear bombs. However fear mongering of India has been tremendously profitable to the Pakistan elite and I don't see why they would step back from that. Any respite due to their economic slowdown may be temporary and if things improve they are likely to move back to the status quo.
I think this is reflected in all that I wrote with the caveat that this is a blog post and not a comprehensive history of Pakistan and its relationship with India since independence. I don't think I even mentioned persecution of Indian minorities at all anywhere here.
Kashmiri's are Indian Muslim minorities!! I was referring to the draconian policies on Kashmir being made a symbol of it's own rule comment, which is quite unfair.
Oh I see what you mean. I think that Kashmir situation is slightly different because their condition took place in a liminal space of citizenship characterized by separatism, counterinsurgency, and conditions of armed conflict. So while they are Indian citizens it is not straightforward to say that their experience was typical of minority life in India.
I would broadly agree that it is not typical. However maybe it is not easy for a non Indian to appreciate but multiple Indian states in the past 70 years, from Punjab to Assam to Chattisgarh to most of the North Eastern states have had some form of insurgency movement. Maybe it is not well known, as the issue has not been globalized as Kashmir has been, but at their peak Punjab and Assam were as bad in terms of death count as Kashmir has ever been.
India has had a successful template/ record whatever you call it of integrating these back into the political mainstream and even many insurgents have joined the political mainstream. E.g. Himanta Biswa Sharma current CM of Assam and Sarbananda Sonowal current Union minister in BJP central government were both part of the Assam separatist movement. There are many such cases in the North East also. So from an Indian perspective Kashmir is not a unique case but one of many insurgencies that have happened over the years. Obviously there are some distinctive elements but it is not like the only such problem. I understand you may have a different perspective on it.
Pakistanis think that Kashmir is India's first and only rodeo, meanwhile India was fighting Tamil separatists, Punjab separatists, Half a dozen northeast separatists (including some christian), domestic Islamists and a full fledged Communist revolution at the same time as Kashmir.
I don't think they realize the scale of problems India has had to overcome to reach where it is now - most of these insurgencies are now dead or dying and their leaderships have been integrated into the mainstream with a combination of carrot and stick - and now the next phase of the game looks easy in comparison.
Exactly, if one reads any history on post Independence India, Western observers were largely unified in the opinion that India would not survive as a nation given the differences in religion, caste, language and God knows what else. Where India has got today is commendable, though I wouldn't declare victory of any kind as yet. We have a of long history of doing victory dances while the battle is still being fought!
That said I am not surprised the RoW is unaware of contemporary Indian problems as we do a horrible job communicating them, I think it was Jaishankar or maybe Sanjeev Sanyal who said in a recent interview (in the context of India buying Russian oil) that the world always viewed India as somebody who was always complaining about something or the other but they could never understand what we wanted because we never articulated it. Now and I quote the interview we are giving our point of view and people are seeing that. I cannot think of a better encapsulation of Indian foreign policy over the years.
maybe you should ask a few Indian muslims how they feel about persecution today.
I'm sure you'll find enough who will tell you that they feel persecuted and will point at some news stories about bad things happening to muslims, but won't be able to give any concrete example of negative consequences they have faced in their own lives that started happening after 2014. Housing discrimination is the main issue most would face in practice and it is not new.
If you really want representative sample sizes, though Pew has done a best of breed survey where they asked around 30,000 Indians chosen scientifically to reflect national demographics, out of whom around 4000 were muslim.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religion-in-india-tolerance-and-segregation/
21% of muslims say they have faced discrimination in the past 12 months in India, compared to 17% of Hindus and 10% of Christians.
I did a computation a while back and Indian muslim HDI came out around 5% lower than the Indian average - overall still much higher than Pakistan's.
i'll let my family protesting CAA and hijab law and moving into more and more crowded neighborhoods that you calculated their HDI for them, they will be very pleased
Let them know they are hypocrites for supporting the hijab while protesting against CAA. Selective secularism.
there we go - showing your true colors! never cared for minorities - only that they stop complaining
You're right, I've never cared about Muslim identity issues and have always been skeptical of their constant hypocritical whining about religious freedoms whenever they are granted anything short of Sharia law, their complete and utter lack of regard for any pain or inconvenience that they inflict on other communities and their absolute silence on the complete absence of equal rights for religious and other minorities in any society where Islam has any kind of power.
If anything I care only about ensuring the Indian constitution doesn't start looking like that of an Islamic state - true equal citizenship will require ending housing discrimination and social discrimination against muslims, as well as the closing of madrasas and the imposition of a uniform civil code - the Singapore model might be one to follow.
I think you’re stuck on something. I did NOT read any of this into the article which, as a person who has limited knowledge of the current picture of the entire region, I found fascinating..
I agree with the article in that it defines the problems Pakistan faces, and identifies elite capture of Pakistan's institutions as the major problem inhibiting the country. My issue is with the Kashmir hangover. Pakistan's obsession with India, which I spoke about in my comment has many aspects but Kashmir is the biggest one. If they need to get their own act together, they need to look beyond getting the better of India using terror as state policy and that necessarily means getting over Kashmir.
That is not happening in spite of the current crisis, as recently as last year the previous Army chief of Pakistan Qamar Bajwa batted for improving economic ties with India. He was shouted down saying it could not happen till Article 370 was restored etc etc.
Hope that clarifies.
> If one wanted to write of persecution the decline of Hindus in Pakistan's population from 15% at independence to about 1% might be more fertile ground.
It's honestly amazing how people want to give an opinion on an argument yet are downright clueless about the basic facts. It just shows where their biases lie.
The least you can do is look up figures from West Pakistan post-partition instead of combining Pakistan with Bangladesh and ignoring the effects of partition. The Hindu % in Pakistan from the 1951 survey was 1.58% and it has grown by 36% to a population share of 2.14% in the 2017 survey. Are basic statistical numbers inconvenient?
> fear mongering of India has been tremendously profitable to the Pakistan elite
While not wrong, the gall to say this when you're peddling fake propaganda to fear monger about persecution in Pakistan lmao.
Err East Pakistan was part of the political entity that was Pakistan in 1947 so the population of that period would include both the parts. And when you bring in the erstwhile East Pakistan in the context of an argument on treatment of minorities in the respective nations, one would need to also remember that in 1969 the army of West Pakistan carried out a genocide in East Pakistan in which as per independent accounts, some 400000 people were killed, some 200000 women were raped and some 2 million people were forced to migrate to India (all numbers mostly Hindus). These numbers are from Wikipedia but one may note that the Government of Bangladesh claims 3 million people were killed so the numbers i give above are much more muted...
So that is a story of persecution of Hindus of Pakistan (since what is today Bangladesh was then part of Pakistan and these were voters in the elections of Pakistan at the time)by Pakistan, if I am not mistaken. The logic of your argument of using Bangladesh to suggest Pakistan actually treats its minorities well is quite staggering. I congratulate you.
> Err East Pakistan was part of the political entity that was Pakistan in 1947 so the population of that period would include both the parts.
You can't actually be this stupid, right? Apart from misleading people, why would you use joint figures when minority numbers were available for West Pakistan? News flash, East Pakistan separated so, how are those 1947 numbers representative of Pakistan? I mean, this is basic statistics, yet you don't even know what constitutes a simple comparison.
This is the equivalent of using pre-partition numbers to insinuate that there has been a Muslim genocide in India. In the 1941 census, Muslims were 24% of the population. After the persecution, it has fallen to 14% in 2011. Do you realize how downright moronic your argument is? Who knew that a partition can change the demographic composition? It's weird how you want to have an opinion yet are clueless about how to do a basic analysis.
> one would need to also remember that in 1969 the army of West Pakistan carried out a genocide in East Pakistan in which as per independent accounts, some 400000 people were killed, some 200000 women were raped.
This is largely irrelevant to the treatment of minorities/Hindus in West Pakistan. What number of the 400K were Hindus? How many out of the 200K women were Hindus? Imagine actually being this slow. Rambling won't help you buddy.
> So that is a story of persecution of Hindus of Pakistan
What persecution? The one where they grew by 36% between 1951 and 2017? Weird how that works.
Perhaps Murtaza is under the illusion that India (sans the BJP) is clamouring for a rekindling of ties with Pakistan. In fact, not too long ago, Rahul Gandhi (scion of the Gandhi family and largely seen as the de-facto leader of the Indian National Congress) said in a talk held in Cambridge that normalisation of ties with Pakistan wasn’t possible until the cross- border terrorism stops.
After 3 direct wars (all begun by Pakistan) and a number of terrorist attacks inside India which have been traced back to terrorist cells in Pakistan which the Pakistan government/establishment refuses to extradite or effectively prosecute - and after various forays for peace by the Indian government - *even* the BJP: Vajpayee in Lahore in 1999 leads to the Kargil war & Modi at a Sharif wedding (also) in Lahore 2015, answered by terrorist attacks in Pathankot in 2016 & then Pulwama in 2019 - you could perhaps say that the appetite for most Indians to even talk with Pakistan is at an all time low.
As for the perpetual & grave identity crisis of Pakistan, there are various well documented instances & events which reveal the sole idea that the state of Pakistan was based on - the 2 nation theory.
Jinnah’s speech of 11th August 1947 has long been held up by the progressives and non-residents of Pakistan as something which meant that the state was *supposed to be* secular - which has been laughed off by serious researchers. Jinnah went around giving incendiary speeches throughout the 2nd World War in Muslim circles & meetings (while the leaders of the Congress were in jail for protesting against Indian involvement in the War) which subsequently culminated in wide spread communal riots & the final massacre of the partition in 1946-47.
Saving face in a speech in the face of increasing scrutiny by the Allied powers (especially the US) is not enough for dear Murtaza to say that Pakistan is a secular state. The very few minorities that remain in Pakistan cannot become Presidents or Prime Ministers - declared so by the constitution.
Hans J Morgenthau, in his book ‘The New Republic’, observed: “Pakistan is not a nation and hardly a state. It has no justification, ethnic origin, language, civilisation or the consciousness of those who make up its population. They have no interests in common, save one: fear of Hindu domination. It is to that fear and nothing else that Pakistan possess its existence and thus for survival as an independent state.”
During the same period, another American scholar Keith Callard in his book ‘Pakistan, a Political Study’ commented: “... the force behind the establishment of Pakistan was largely the feeling of insecurity”.
The Cabinet Secretary of Pakistan, Mohd Ali, when asked by a top Indian bureaucrat, B.K. Nehru, regarding the persistent use of abusive language against India and Hindus by the Pakistani Newspaper ‘Dawn’ (Muslim League’s mouthpiece), replied that, though he knew that it was wrong, but such fabrications about an enemy was necessary for building Pakistan.
Military and civilian rulers in Pakistan have used the anti-Hindu rhetoric for mobilising the people against India both during war and peace. On 29 August, just before the 1965 War, President Ayub Khan in a directive to the Commander in Chief, (General Mohammad Musa), wrote: “…… as a general rule, Hindu morale would not stand more than a couple of hard blows delivered at the right time and place. Such opportunities should therefore be sought and exploited.”
Therefore, the general consensus throughout India is that the onus remains on Pakistan to convince India to come take a seat at the table, not the other way around. Let’s see how long that takes to get through the collective heads of the Pakistani government & the military and also their people.
Now this is a real article! Very well stated and systematically derived. Kudos!
Fantastic read! Thanks for bringing him as a guest Noah!
What I find interesting is that Pakistan and Nigeria are have a lot of similarities. Huge 200M population that's underutilized, massive inequality, religious extremism causing backwardness, massive issues post independence, and they even have similar per capita income levels & UN development levels by HDI.
But they got there in different ways. Pakistan needs land reform while Nigeria depends on oil booms to grow and stalls during commodity busts. It will be interesting to see which nation will fair better by 2030.
Some info on Nigeria:
https://open.substack.com/pub/yawboadu/p/inequality-within-west-africa-and?utm_source=direct&r=garki&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://open.substack.com/pub/yawboadu/p/nigerias-economy-part-three-1960?utm_source=direct&r=garki&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
While you say that Pakistan should defer the conflict for the future , the question remains that why should India do the same instead of capitalising of Pakistan's weakness right now ? As a nation India has little to no incentive to let Pakistan grow. As can be observed from data whenever Pakistan is in an economically stable position the number of terrorist attacks in India increase.
Indian leaders tend to be very risk-averse when it comes to foreign policy. Theoretically pushing Pakistan to the brink of explosion would be emotionally satisfying on some level but I think they also fear the consequences of having hundreds of millions of people living in a failed state with nuclear weapons right on their border. It's not conducive to India's own plans for the region and itself and Indian diplomats periodically make statements to the effect (including of late) that geography is unchangeable so there needs to be some modus vivendi ultimately.
The risk averse generation is quickly dying off with each passing year. Did anyone imagine in 2010 that India will drop bombs in Pakistan's territory as a way to vent off anger due to terrorist attacks ? You may or may not have noticed that even among the Indian right wing circles Modi is increasingly being seen as an impotent old man. Just look at the recent incident where the Defence ministry of Ukraine posted a meme with a distorted image of the Hindu Goddess Kali, a lot in Hindu right wanted Modi to respond in same way that Islamists respond to any perceived transgressions against Prophet Mohammad. The Overton window is shifting in India.
As for Pakistan imploding that is a little too far fetched conclusion to make. The Indian government can try to pressurise Pakistan just enough to impede its growth. And I believe Pakistani army can maintain strong enough grip on Pakistan to not let it implode as they would not want to lose cash cow that gives them their tremendous wealth.
To be honest Pakistan's army is the institution that has hampered its growth. Recently Indian government dissolved all military cantonment because they had a lot of land in the areas like Tech hubs Bangalore and Pune. Can you imagine Pakistani army letting something similar happen ?
You're right about the rightward drift of Indian public sentiments but I find this is a common phenomenon in that people feel more constrained by circumstances once they are actually in power. For instance I am sure that Modi would take far more hawkish actions in a perfect universe but he must balance multiple responsibilities, while his right-wing critics are free to criticize without consequence.
Could never imagine Pakistani military liquidating its economic interests in the manner you describe unless they felt highly pressured by internal or external forces. One thing I did not mention is the possibility of Western sanctions on Pakistani military and intelligence officials which could actually be an appropriate step.
I think if threatened with sanctions by the west Pakistani military and intelligence officials will start playing the game of "think about our nukes, they might fall in the hands of Islamist nutjobs". There is a reason that obama said that Pakistan's nukes keep him awake at night and Pakistani army knows that . They will try to use that leverage as a bargaining chip to protect their financial interests.
When I say sanctions, I don’t mean broad sectoral sanctions that could theoretically destabilize the country. I am thinking of targeted sanctions on individuals and companies tied to certain bad practices. No one can claim with a straight face that if their New York bank account is frozen that will mean the Taliban may get Pakistan’s nuclear weapons!
I don't think Pakistani elites are that stupid they have kept their ill gotten gains in countries like Switzerland and other tax haven countries which don't impose sanctions easily.
Not to mention west doesn't want to further push Pakistan into China's arms , let's say that the US sanctions some ISI executives or some military generals what is stopping those people from sabotaging US interests in Pakistan and go charging ahead into China's lap ?
Yes, no real roadmap given other than the entitled expectation that India should be on a suicidal path by helping Pakistan at this stage.
India will be already doing Pakistan a huge favour if they do not try to crush Pakistani economy right now. As the saying goes "Kindness to enemies is cruelty to yourself".
Yes, well stated! Kindness should be reserved for those who are capable of integrating with it.
What could India gain from a conflict? It has no interest in additional terrain and destabilizing Pakistan is only risks with no possible gains.
India doesn't need to destabilize it as in funding insurgencies but by putting economic pressure to further slow down Pakistan's economic growth. For example by targeting Pakistan's exports to other countries, make those goods available to buyers at a cheaper price even if they have to subsidize those industries. Lobbying organisations like FATF hard to put pakistan back on grey list.
For now, India may be more concerned that Pakistan does not crash too hard.
I think the current round of devaluation along with the reduction in oil prices has balanced Pakistan's trade deficit in recent months - so no fear of an immediate crash since Iron Brother China will give funds to take care of the upcoming debt repayments.
Time to start the next round of pushing in terms of Lawfare and trade policy. A military mobilization would hurt Indian growth momentum and could either cause a 'hard crash' like you alluded or cause the country to rally around the army against an external aggressor.
But there are many options on the table to keep the pressure on the elite while containing the fallout to non-military means.
Apart from FATF grey/blacklisting that Pakistan entirely deserves (for e.g. UN designated terrorists Hafiz Saeed and Syed Salahuddin were recorded in public rallies by Pakistani youtubers in the last couple of months threatening India)
I think recognition for the 1971 genocide by western Europe in return for FTAs should be next on the Indian agenda along with advocating for the repeal of GSP+ status for Pakistan or making it conditional on verified implementation - which is a no-brainer policy that India and Bangladesh should push for concertedly and wholeheartedly.
Pakistan still teaches in its mainstream education system that it was Hindu teachers in east Pakistan brainwashed the locals against Pakistan. Its political class is still unable to pass an anti-forced-conversion law even though it is an established fact that up-to 1000 minority girls (mostly Hindu) are kidnapped, raped, converted to islam and married off to their captors in rural Sindh every year. Atheists are hunted down and killed if they critique islam openly and the state sides with the killers.
In no way does Pakistan deserve the EU's GSP+ status for conforming to any charter of human rights - this is just an artefact of the west's long history of mollycoddling Pakistan and protecting it from consequences.
Revoking the GSP+ or suspending it until Pakistan cleans up its act on paper and improves the situation on the ground- this should drop Pakistan's goods exports by another 10-20% - most of these orders would be directly replaced by Bangladesh and to a lesser degree India - which would make for an interesting kind of poetic justice.
This should be coupled with mercantile policies and a special government fund to tactically degrade any markets for Pakistani goods and services.
India spent 80 billion dollars on its military this year and will probably end will probably spend 100 billion next year. This is highly inefficient given that a targeting subsidies of a few billion in a few commodity sectors might end up crowding out Pakistani exports. Just as we seem to have an 'outcompete China' plan for our high end sectors we should have a 'outcompete Pakistan' plan for our low end sectors - the latter can be outsourced to Bangladesh based on their competitiveness in the sector.
A lot of these don't even require complex workarounds around the WTO - can't India set up a dedicated sporting goods mission, a surgical instruments mission on the same lines as the national toy mission?
Your guest writer has his head up his arse, if that is at all possible.
Haha absolutely!
Excellent overview--very well written.
Excellent? I guess facts must not matter to you much.
There are a few inaccuracies in the article.
Pakistan's founder did not want a "secular homeland". Jinnah has never EVER used the word "secular" in any of his speeches.
On the other hand, he has said, "I could not understand a section of people who deliberately wanted to create mischief and made a propaganda that the constitution of Pakistan would not be made on the basis of Shariat.”
Having Islamic Law/Sharia as the basis of one's constitution is not exactly anywhere close to Secularism.
On another rant against Western countries Jinnah went back to the tried and test method of Islamism. “Take inspiration and guidance from the Holy Quran, the final victory will be ours [….] You have to develop the spirit of mujahids. All I require of you is that everyone … be prepared to sacrifice all, if necessary, in building Pakistan as a bulwark of Islam.”
Pakistan is exactly what Jinnah created - an Islamic republic which wants to be the bulwark of Islam, whose constitution and laws are derived from Islamic Law.
Also, Jinnah allied with Feudals when he allied with Unionist Party(A party of Feudal Landlords). Land Reforms is again, never mentioned by Jinnah. While his counterpart in India, was on record that Land Reforms is India's future as far back as in 1929(India got independence in 1947).
Lots of blame mongering on India and other countries. It is a typical Pakistani mindset, not to expose the evils and hypocrisy of their own being, no investment in their own progress. I wonder how it feels to be this insecure? No facts given about the ostensible “outrageous” behaviour of the Indian govt or the “Draconian” Kashmir Law which is for the benefit and protection of persecuted Sikh, Christian, Hindu, Parsi & tribal minorities from Pakistan primarily that any honourable country unlike Pakistan would consider itself liable for. When the hunter can’t hunt the hunted, I guess in a morphed corner of their mega maniac universe protection laws will seem “draconian” - furthermore a Sharia peddling country, plastering that label on one other than itself is comical. There was no mention of the persecution of its minorities from Hindus to Sikhs to Kalash communities other than Ahmediya Muslims (this is where the buck stops for Pakistanis - even to name other minorities seems blasphemous to their cause) and how temples have been turned into toilets and how Hindu, Sikh & Christian women are kidnapped on a daily basis, gang raped, killed if they are lucky enough and if not then forcibly converted to Islam to endure an entirely fallible life. Kashmir is and will always be a part of India. A beautiful land such as and also the birthplace of Shaivism should never fall prey to the same destiny as Pakistan - it should pray that at the rate which it is going, Balochistan does not become a part of India by its own will (but of course a negative state will always assert that it is India’s “draconian” will at play) In actuality there is no revenge to be had on the part of Pakistan for what happened in East Pakistan (which was a part of India to begin with) - it was entirely Pakistan’s doing and the genocide that was being committed by the Pakistani army on Bangladeshi nationals forced India to step in and help Bangladesh. Pakistan should be thanking India for averting and buffering it’s disasters. Pakistan and it’s Murtazas’ can harp all they want, it is the homogenous Islamist attitude of blaming all shortcomings of one’s own on others and lagging behind on the homework needed to build a strong, robust nation and conscientious analysis of what it means to be human. This articles states no real statistics and derivations and lessons learnt on behalf of a pernicious state that Pakistan is. Making excuses and running on the same mindset (of course some superfluous self effacing statements pooh & paah-ing that barely scratch the surface of reality have been made given how bad the situation for the country is despite of the billions of dollars spent on it over the years by extraneous sources from America to Saudi and now China - that in itself is laughable and proves the true nature of Pakistan) No mention of how it has sold itself to China in present times and it’s atrocities in Balochistan and Pakistan occupied Kashmir. Overall, if this article is a testament to the revamp of Pakistan at all, I can say not even an iota of the kind of mind bogglingly deep reconnaissance into the country’s problems and its Islamist stance has been done and at this rate it’s going to remain as non-salubrious, pathetic and laughable as it always was.
I think you have to be a little deranged to read this article which is entirely a criticism of Pakistan and conclude that it's blaming India. Presumably you want it to include some worshipful appraisals of Indian conduct as perfect and the absence of that alone is offensive. Suffice to say its a very emotionally immature attitude and is sadly not uncommon to partisans of its presently ascendant political movement.
Love this reply. !
I think you have to be very deranged to have written it in the first place. I certainly didn’t expect you to be applauding India (you made your biases and tubular vision plentifully clear) but I didn’t expect you to misstep and wrongfully present facts when it came to India and laws that it corroborates for protection of subjects that it deems right and worthy of protecting. Nobody has the right to object to it, let alone call it “draconian” and “outrageous”. This is why the stereotype that India produces neurosurgeons and Pakistan produces bombers (hilarious and politically incorrect as it may be) is so tempestuous to be ascertained as right! The tag of emotionally immature from someone who is on a grander scale safe guarding a terrorist state and identity of an Islamist state and putting most of the blame on the elite circles of the country ( where do they get that kind of dishonesty and cognitive dissonance from? Ever thought of doing a deep dive there? Ever thought of what maybe so ideologically wrong with Pakistan that the most powerful of the country would bring their own people to this state and that too with all the aid provided by the first world ) talking about other ascendant political movements is rich and sad that a hypocrite like yourself even got the platform to write about an intricate issue such as this that you’re clearly mentally (intellectually and emotionally) in-equipped to handle. It’s very common for Pakistanis to combobulate with an Indian subcontinent identity when it suits their purpose and then blame the nefarious bits of their history and trajectory onto India and of course you’re going to have to accept the pathetic state that Pakistan is at some point because hey it’s the reality! The world knows it at this point. Nothing new about that.
Dude you need to relax lmao. I'm not sure if English isn't your first language or your reading comprehension is subpar, but you're screaming into the void here.
Okay bro, I will all because you’re so cool bro. Thanks come again.
On a lighter note this comment brought to mind what Shakespeare said about sound and fury...
Let's start with the claim that the Indian army is using rape as state policy in Kashmir.
We have quotes by Pakistani army general in charge in 1971 threatening to "change the race of the Bengalis" (i.e. have all the Punjabi/Pashtun soldiers rape the local women) - leading to one Bengali officer killing himself right after hearing that speech, and at another time flippantly saying "So should I send my men to Jhelum (i.e. to a brothel in west Pakistan) instead?" when asked about the claims of sexual assault by his troops during the Bengal violence. We have reports of the Australian abortion camps that had to run for 6 months after the end of the conflict.
Do you have any similar statements by Indian generals, or policy documents by the Indian army, or accounts written by former officers who have acknowledged a deliberate policy of sexual assault as was documented in the case of Pakistan - or are you intentionally extrapolating from individual incidents in order to claim a false equivalence?
Much as I dislike Modi and his worldview even as an Indian, I have to admit his approach in Kashmir is logical. It is literally IMPOSSIBLE for any political party to allow self-determination in Kashmir. You could scream special circumstances as much as you like but it would be the beginning of the end of India as a country with numerous other States and regions demanding their own version of it. Must as we like to speak idealistically, I can't think of one country that has been created through the ballot box.
Given those circumstances, it is perfectly logical to stop the region from bleeding itself to death and forcibly integrating it with the rest of the country. I wouldn't want India to go to the extremes that China has done in Xinjiang but a softly softly approach has the potential to hurt more in the long run.
Exactly. The first step begins with admitting that the ideology itself is wrong, but that won’t happen. It’s best to just cut Pakistan off from any aid and let them wither on the vine - if they are so devout, their god should help them, right?
I am quite surprised at this introspection of Pakistan by Murtaza Hussain. I think he has captured the ills and the shortcomings of Pakistan rather candidly; some clearly visible to even a casual onlooker of affairs of the region and others with some insights. As I read this long essay though, I felt that some of the things he has stated incorrectly, or incompletely, should be set straight.
But before I do that, I must admit that I hadn't known of Murtaza or his work before this. So, I checked out both his own substack and The Intercept. Predictably, his anti-India stance and Hindu-phobia shows up regularly; both in the topics he chooses to write on the Intercept (mainly), and in his treatment in detail of such topics. I can write pages worth of details but that will be tangential to commenting on the article here. The only reason I am mentioning this is to establish his clear bias against India and it helped me understand why he had to keep dragging India in this article when the sole focus on Pakistan would have been most appropriate. I should also mention that I did not readily see any other work on either his substack or on the Intercept by him that was critical of Pakistan. Perhaps Noah’s invitation was specific?
That said, I am surprised at his sharp critique of Pakistan and equally surprised that he tipped his hat to BJP government for the progress they have delivered in India. Coming back to where I find his article is either inaccurate or incomplete. First, his claim that Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah was agnostic about religion and was secular. It is like saying that Trump believes in welcoming illegal immigrants wholeheartedly! This is either charitable reimagining of Jinnah or willful ignorance. Nothing could be further from the truth! It was Jinnah who demanded the split from India because he wanted an Islamic nation for Muslims. A split that was so bloody that over 12 million people lost their lives, so it would be quite appropriate to say that their blood was on Jinnah’s hands.
Murtaza also mentions that Pakistan outperformed India in the beginning. This is mostly true, but it requires some color. A newly created Pakistan should have carried proportionate amount of debt that pre-partition India was saddled with. It never paid that amount to India. This amount is said to be in the range of Rs 55 crore to Rs 95 crore, or in 1947-48 value of US$ between $160 million to $295 million. It may seem small by today’s inflated standards, but it was an immense sum back then and both West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) were beneficiaries. What is also noteworthy is that the independent India still gave Pakistan over Rs 300 crores (US$870 million) as their share of the split, without adjusting for the debt that Pakistan reneged on. This is over and above the army, military equipment etc. that was divided between India and Pakistan. My point is, that Pakistan had a clean slate and a flush bank balance to start with, where as India carried all the debt. Pakistan also started receiving aid almost from the start from US, UK and others.
Murtaza also dilutes Pakistan’s bailouts by just casually mentioning of negotiations of a new IMF bailout. What he left unsaid is that Pakistan already has had 23 IMF bailouts in 75 years! Even the poster child of failed economy, Argentina, has had “only 21” bailouts! WSJ reported recently that as of end of 2022, Pakistan had a staggering $130 billion debt, and $73 billion of this amount is due by 2025! It is unclear if this is their total debt, i.e., whether it includes loans by China, various European countries, Gulf countries, Türkiye, and even smaller nations like Malaysia!
Bottom line, Pakistan’s fiscal mismanagement has always been criminal and West, and particularly US and IMF, have kept the drug coming to an addict.
I want to end with one final point, and that is Murtaza’s desperate attempt to drag India in this discussion somehow. He chooses the Kashmir issue and tries to compare Pakistani army’s atrocities in Bangladesh with Indian army’s handling of Pakistan fomented terror campaigns in Kashmir. This is like comparing Germany’s cruel treatment of Jews in WWII to my local county mishandling of an arrest warrant. If Pakistan stops their cross-border terrorism and the proxy war, then they may gain some help from India. India has overlooked Pakistan’s export of terrorism and offered a hand in the past but repeated betrayal has shut that door until Pakistan completely disavows terrorism and dismantles the terrorist factories that it has created.
All in all, no amount of our analysis will be of any help to Pakistan. As Murtuza correctly portrays, it has far too many vested interests that are feeding on the easy money. More importantly, it needs to really take a hard look at the religious fanatism, not just in their intolerance to others and hate for India and esp. Hindus but also, as Murtaza points out, to minorities in Pakistan, mainly other Muslim sects as Hindus, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians are mostly chased out, killed, or forcefully converted already. Until then Pakistan is walking around like a suicide bomber, always in a death embrace of a bomb vest that is held close to their body and so carries real risk of being torn to pieces.
I don't claim to be an expert (at all) on Pakistan--for me the post was a nice introduction and I thought it presented a comprehensive overview, hence my comment. If there were some facts or interpretations of events and the overall situation in Pakistan that you thought the author got wrong, then please share your perspectives with the rest of us so that we can have an interchange and all come away from this better informed.
He has not really spoken about the degree to which Pakistan's current position is a direct consequence of its founding ideology, it's pathological hatred of India, and the extent to which it brainwashes its children - he has tried to couch it as much as possible as a regular case of an incompetent elite in a developing country - but Pakistan is unique in the way it teaches its people a distorted history of its past which then leads to them making delusional decisions down the line.
The consistency of these delusional choices is quite striking - it is almost impossible to rationally explain many of the actions Pakistan has taken throughout history - the army starting wars without informing the air force etc.
At one point they literally taught their soldiers that one muslim soldier would be able to kill 10 hindu soldiers and studied battle plans from the quran. This has led to excessive risk taking w.r.t. India over the decades and turned it into an enemy when it could have been a friend and partner. Even now Pakistanis live in utter delusion about India.
Ultimately the author's goal is to project Pakistan as just another regular country - but it's not really the case. It has all the features of a regular basketcase country but also an overlay of grandiose narcissism and inability to self reflect as a result of the one-sided, largely fake narrative that is fed to its citizens since childhood. It is because of this that it is unable to make commonsense strategic adjustments that any other country in the same position would make. (See Bangladesh/Sri Lanka etc).
To sum up how twisted it is - Pakistan celebrates the 1965 war as 'defense day' - a war that it started by attacking India in Kashmir and lost - in the sense of that it failed to achieve all objectives, just barely ended up defending Lahore, and even lost a bit of land to India in Kashmir.
India doesn't commemorate the '65 war.
He refers to the Kashmir in a very separatist, Ghazwa-e-Hind kind of way which is the mentality of most Pakistan sponsored terrorists. He says “…..Pakistanis, Kashmiris and Indians” to further corroborate that Kashmir is not a part of India which is not how it officially is. This gives away a huge part of his internal biases. So although the article is about Pakistan and its shortcomings, he also drags India into the picture and maligns it which is of course not appreciated by those updated on the realities of the discourse and have a pro-India view.
It would be great to have a contribution like this on Egypt.
For a tour of Pakistan's challenges, my favorite book remains Anatol Lieven's "Pakistan: A Hard Country." If you want to know more about some of the issues mentioned in this post, I recommend it.
In a larger sense, of course, Pakistan's tragedy is not that different from many other developing countries. Maybe someday we'll get a better recipe than the old Washington Consensus for getting countries out of the elite capture trap.
We have some hints, now, for better policy; Noah's covered a lot in his development articles. But those better policies have to be enacted by politicians -- and we still know so little about how to get better politics.
Great book!
“We still know so little about how to get better politics.” Ain’t that the truth. We keep having to confront our primitive natures based on fear of the non-us and survival that it’s hard to be creative in a country/world way.
Author gives Jinnah far too much credit - Jinnah didn't have a plan - he told different things to different people and tailored his message to the audience. At the end of the day everyone got a different message about what Pakistan was supposed to be - and that confusion persists till date.
Jinnah never wanted a secular state, he simply didn't care about the details beyond getting his own country.
Over time the strongest groups - the mullahs, the military and the mill owners (Feudals) have all taken their share of the pie and ended up defining the state in ways that are beneficial to their interests.
Ishtiaq Ahmed has written extensively about Jinnah and particularly about his complete lack of a coherent agenda for Pakistan.
Secondly the topic of the essay is 'How can Pakistan join the South Asian boom' - basically 2 economies in South Asia are booming - India and Bangladesh. Pakistan still can not bring itself to change it's strategic orientation with respect to these countries - (beyond having some long term fantasy to turn Bangladesh against India militarily and convert it to the 'Pakistan ideology').
The blocker on normalization is not coming from the Indian side 'Hindu fascist BJP' or whatever - Modi invited the PM of Pakistan to his swearing in ceremony and visited Pakistan to normalize relations early in his tenure, only to get backstabbed with back-to-back terror attacks.
It is the Pakistani establishment and the Pakistani intellectual class which is unable to digest normal relations with India, and even now is dreaming of a strategic pause in their eternal war against India rather than a genuine change of direction and the assessment of the potential of India as a friend rather than an enemy.
If there is no strategic realignment to reverse relations with India and Bangladesh- there is no way for Pakistan to practically benefit from the broader South Asian boom in terms of trade, investment and technology, except for the soft power and psychological effects of seeing their neighbours making tangible progress for the first time. (Before the pandemic - Pakistani media had studiously avoided showing any pictures of skyscrapers, metro trains or new airports coming up in India.)
Only if Pakistan is able to calm down its politics and society and reform internally into a more moderate country, will it start benefiting from the global value chains moving there eventually as Indian labor costs become prohibitively high - but that requires for most of India to first become significantly richer than Pakistan and such an expectation can backfire badly India still has poorer states like UP, Bihar and Jharkhand which still have cheaper labor than Pakistan and can fuel Indian manufacturing for at least another decade after the southern states become prohibitively expensive.
A rational elite would have figured out a pivot to India/"grand bargain on Kashmir" a long time ago - specially in the 2008-2012 era when India overtook Pakistan in developmental indicators comprehensively, India's long term economic trajectory was firmly established. Instead, the elite decided to stick its head in the sand and pretend that India was not rapidly expanding, and instead decided to act as a conduit for Chinese investment in Pakistan.
You can see the difference in how India is leveraging the quad vs how Pakistan used CPEC by acting as a strategic bulwark against India.
India is leveraging its security relationship with the US to pull in high-tech export oriented manufacturing into the country using India labor and to increase FDI into defense, electronics, IT, r&D- in the meanwhile it is maintaining a stable trade relationship with China (with increasing scrutiny in a few sensitive strategic sectors) and only promising the US economic and technological competition with China - not all out war - this gives it space to change to a more neutral position if needed in the future if it gets the appropriate deal from China.
Pakistan on the other hand has left no scope for compromise with India - halted trade which ended up harming itself more than India. It offered itself to China for cheap let the chinese build infrastructure using dollar denominated debt which ultimately had no direct impact on its exports.
I'm also going to ignore classical Pakistani mistakes that comes from reading newspaper headlines instead of looking at the primary source for data - e.g. India's GDP per capita is now higher than Bangladesh's because BDesh also had a devaluation in the past year - etc.
"between military and _civilization_ governments"
Freudian typo?
"By midcentury, Pakistan could have a population greater than 330 million, making it an outsize part of a global population that is generally growing older and more scarce."
Pakistan doesn't seem like a good candidate to sustainably reach that population level.
"An average Pakistani household spends 50.8 percent of monthly income on food. This makes them particularly vulnerable to shocks, including high food prices. The impact of climate change and population displacements exacerbate the situation."
See https://www.wfp.org/countries/pakistan