This book provides a useful background for those who wish to understand better the India-Pakistan relationship. For all right thinking people living in India, and it must be the same for those in Pakistan too, the question top most in mind is why and how these two Siamese twins,conjoined at birth, born of the same mother, with the same cultural and racial genes, have turned out to be as different as chalk is from cheese. Though the book deals with the events in Pakistan leading to the creation of Bangladesh, one of the explanations that it offers is that the latter event is based on similar factors and on the analogy of the former. The author explains how 'Region' ,'Religion' and culture including language were leveraged to justify the formation of Pakistan, with the British only too happy to divide and oblige. The concentration of large Muslim populaces in the Punjab and in Bengal, met the criteria laid down for partition. Jinnah also argued that the Muslims are a different nation because their religion has nothing in common with the majority Hindu population, they occupied distinct and separate geographical areas, and their culture and traditions had nothing in common with the Hindus. While this worked with the British in the 1940s, little did the Pakistanis of the 1960s realise that these same arguments would be successfully used by East Pakistan to break away too. After all, as the author explains, the Eastern part of Pakistan was geographical distant as well as distinct from the West, with a culture that harmonised more with the Hindus of West Bengal than with their co-religionists of West Pakistan. Unfortunately the rulers in West Pakistan, who were mainly from Punjab, did not understand or appreciate this. They were politically,economically as well as culturally insensitive to the Bengalis, looking down upon them.
Immediately after Independence it became clear to all Pakistanis that the Western part had donned the mantle of the natural leader of the country. Bengalis were relegated to second place in the politica, bureaucratic and military heirarchy, and this brought matters to a head because the Bengalis were more in number, and in the general election of 1971, one of their candidates, Mujib-ur-Rehman, won the Presidential election. Econmically too, most of the plan funds were directed towards the Western part, with the East being neglected so that the gap in the GDP widened in the years after Independence. The Pakistani oligarchy also blundered when it made Urdu the national language, and removed Bengali as the language of instruction in the educational institutions of the East. This was the last straw for the Bengalis, the attempt to cleanse the Eastern half of its culture. Of course the Pakistani military adventure in invading East Pakistan and indulging in rape and genocide didn't help their cause of a united Pakistan in any way.
All this is written in this book. Unfortunately, present day Pakistan has not learnt from its mistakes. Instead of encouraging its diverse populations to live in harmony, it has indulged in similar efforts to wipe out the culture of its five distinct states, and super-impose an alien culture imported from Saudi Arabia. The Pakistanis are South Asians and not Arabs. They cannot wish away their roots, their gentle Sufi traditions, the tolerance fostered by South Asian ethos. By denying this heritage and aspiring to be Middle Eastern and Arabic, the oligarchy has wiped out their countrymens self identity, and left a vacuum. This is where terrorism has found such fertile soil in this country. ( )