I find that "I told you so" deeply problematic. The Muslims in India today had no say on where they were born. They had no say in the creation of Pakistan.
xeuss,
Will mildly disagree with you on your statement that Indian Muslims had no say in the creation of Pakistan.
Remember that in the 1940s there was a religiously separate electoral system. The British had set that up to ensure proportional representation in the Constituent Assembly.
Indian Muslims could vote for either the "secular" Congress Muslim candidate or a Muslim League candidate. The proportion of Muslim candidates in the Parliament would be the same.
When the Muslim League proposed Partition the vast majority of Indian Muslims where they were in a minority voted for Partition while the population where Muslims were in majority the Congress ( or other parties such as Union Party) candidates did well.
Liaquat Ali Khan, Chaudhuri Khaleequzama , Shaheed Suharwardy, Hussain Imam, Qasam Razvi. were Muslim League stalwarts from UP, Bengal, Bihar and Hyderabad and they knew that Partition would mean they would be refugees in Pakistan and in poverty as they would be leaving all their property and assets behind. Qaid e Azam Jinnah was himself of Gujarati Maharashtra ( Bombay) origin and lost all his substantial assets in India while fighting for Pakistan.
So why did Indian Muslims support Pakistan in the 1940s.
There are several precedents in the history of Muslims globally. The Oghuz Turks chose to migrate out of Central Asia knowing that they were depleting the strength of the urban Muslim centers like Samarkand and Bukhara and consigning the population there to a living hell under the Mongols. Likewise the Andalusian Spaniards left for Morocco hoping to secure Morocco as a haven.
Some must be sacrificed for a long term perspective. The Hindu juggernaut would have dealt with Islam in the entire subcontinent just as it dealt with Buddhism years earlier displacing it as a state religion under Ashoka reducing it into a minority sect. A nuclear armed Pakistan offers Hindutva a choice:
Allow Islam to remain in the sub continent or the only significant Hindu majority country vanishes along with Islam. There are 51 other Muslim majority countries.
Let us also understand that Jinnah's concept of Pakistan was a safe space for South Asian Muslims to live, free from the ills of Hindu majoritarianism. It was never intended to be limited by the boundaries that we see today.
Agree, ...it was also intended to be the homeland of those Hindus and other minorities already living here with full citizens rights.
Population displacement had never been on the Muslim League agenda
It was the rogue runaway East Bengali unit of the Muslim League that kicked off the cycle of holocausts with the Noakhali massacres in 1946. This was deliberate communal cleansing for which the Indian Muslims paid a fearsome price. The East Bengali Muslim sub-nationalism would result in the secession and Civil War that led to Bangladesh today. Ironically even the most pro-Indian politicians in Bangladesh have never apologized for the wholesale slaughter of Noakhali and many other pogroms. They pin the blame on Pakistan (with the famous Bengali saying "
Jeto Dosh Nandu Ghosh").
Therefore, it would be unfair to criticize those who just happened to end up on the wrong side of Radcliffe's line.
Agree...but Indian Muslims shouldn't just shut up..They should present the current Pakistani What's App generation with the facts and know who their real sympathizers are. A large number of Indian Muslim refugees were massacred by their "Islamic brethren " in Bangladesh just because they spoke a different language.
In a similar vein, today many Pakistanis live a comfortable and financially better life in the US/UK than their brethren in Pakistan. Wouldn't it be considered poor manners to criticize and put down those who did not or could not migrate to greener pastures in the west? So why does such behavior elicit glee when it comes to Indian Muslims?
Do Pakistanis need Indian Muslims to suffer to validate the thesis of Jinnah? By that same extension, do we need others to suffer to justify the choices we made?
No. Pakistanis do not need the sufferings of Indian Muslims trapped in vicious historical process to be a cause for satisfaction. Pakistanis should leave Indian Muslims to their fate with no comments on their plight. The historical links are gone. Pakistan is not the Pakistan of 1947 and it is the Pakistan that has emerged after 1971. We were reminded that linguistic and cultural identities matter. Our civil war with the eastern wing demonstrated that. Pakistan today is firmly on the path to its own identity.
We don't know what the future holds for Indian Muslims, but we Pakistanis will preserve for you remnants of your once glorious culture in your language, poetry, music and cuisine long after you gone into the history books forever.
Your obituary has already been written in the famous poem by Devi Prasad Mishra " Woh Musalman the ..."