Sixty years ago, British India was granted Independence and partitioned into Hindu-majority India and my native nation, Muslim-majority Pakistan. It was a birth of exceptional pain.
Handed down to me through the generations is the story of my namesake, my Kashmir-born great-grandfather.
He was stabbed by a Muslim as he went for his daily stroll in Lahore’s Lawrence Gardens. Independence was only a few months away, and the communal violence that would accompany the partition was beginning to simmer.
My great-grandfather was attacked because he was mistaken for a Hindu. This was not surprising; as a lawyer, most of his colleagues were Hindus.
Yet 1947 is also remembered in my family as a time of enormous hope. My great-grandfather survived. And the birth that year of his grandson, my father, marked the arrival of a first generation of something new: Pakistanis.
My mother recalls a childhood of sugar and flour rations. The 1950s, she says, were a decade of a young country finding its feet. She grew up in a small town and she describes a fierce love for Pakistan felt by her and her schoolmates.
In the 1960s, my mother’s family moved to Lahore, which had been the cultural and governmental centre of Punjab Province before the region was ripped apart at Independence. By then, Pakistan’s economy had begun to boom. My parents speak of cinemas showing the latest films, colleges producing idealistic graduates, and young couples walking along the banks of the River Ravi.
Still, these rosy family recollections paint an incomplete picture. For the civilian government of Pakistan had been deposed by a military coup in 1958. Gen Mohammad Ayub Khan was a steadfast American ally against the Soviet Union and the recipient of large amounts of American weaponry and aid.
But deprived of democracy for much of my parents’ youth, Pakistanis were unable to articulate an inclusive vision of what their country stood for. Making things worse, the country was divided in two, separated geographically by India. West Pakistan, the army’s heartland, received far more than its fair share of resources.
After years of mistreatment and rigged elections, East Pakistanis fought a war of independence, India took up arms on their side, and East Pakistan became the nation of Bangladesh.
After the bloodshed, what was left of Pakistan was forced to ask what it stood for. Democracy was restored, and Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto became wildly popular with a simple slogan: “Bread, clothing and a home”. In other words, Pakistan existed to lessen the poverty of its citizens. Bhutto was deposed in 1977 and hanged.
Although we disliked our president, Gen Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, my friends and I remained fiercely patriotic. We idolised Pakistani sporting heroes in cricket, field hockey and squash. We felt a thrill of achievement when we listened to bootleg cassettes of the first Pakistani rock bands. For us, the success of anything Pakistani was a source of personal pride.
In 1988, shortly before I left for college in America, Zia died in a suspicious airplane crash and civilian rule was again restored. But the democracy of the ‘90s was a disappointment, with power alternated between ineffective, feuding governments, eventually replaced by yet another military dictator.
And now Pakistan is once again turning its knife on itself. Insurgencies simmer in the regions bordering Afghanistan, and suicide bombers have begun to kill fellow Pakistanis with increasing frequency.
For me personally, the 60th anniversary of independence, while worthy of note, is not of the utmost importance. My hopes are already dashing ahead and attaching themselves to the elections that are scheduled for later this year.
A 60th birthday brings with it the obligation to shed some illusions. Pakistanis must realise that we have been our own worst enemies. My wish for our national anniversary is this: that we finally take the knife we have turned too often upon ourselves and place it firmly in its sheath.
NYT
