Why My Father Hated India

[Tiki Tam Tam]

are all Indians Dumb?? it was a reply to this comment of Tiki uncle "There are many good reasons why people hate India, but it is wiser to let such things be left unsaid."

@Ajay

I don't think Indians are dumb.

They just don't have a command of thoroughly useless information.

 

[Tomato boy]

^^^^ we all know how dumb Indians are.. I can prove it but ensure me that i won't get banned

 

[aakash_2410]

^^^^ we all know how dumb Indians are.. I can prove it but ensure me that i won't get banned

I agree. And that's why we are stereo typed as computer nerds, doctors and engineers whereas people of some countries are stereo typed to be terrorists.

 

[Tomato boy]

deleted

reason: Why to be as dumb as aakash_2410..!!

 

[aakash_2410]

deleted

reason: Why to be as dumb as aakash_2410..!!

That's true we're so weak and defensive. 1 Pakistani = 10 Indian theory has been proven in 4 wars. We all know how Pakistan won all the wars.

Girls from all over the world are attracted to you including Indians? Alright then good for you...... Well my ex-girlfriend was Pakistani. [I know it's irrelevant but I just thought you should know. ]

How Indians get treated in Australia? Haha look at how you people get treated IN WHOLE WORLD. lool

And I like how you deleted your original message.

 

[Ajaxpaul]

are all Indians Dumb?? it was a reply to this comment of Tiki uncle "There are many good reasons why people hate India, but it is wiser to let such things be left unsaid."

@Ajaxpaul

ohhh personal attacks eh...but not in a mood for play..well sh!t happens all the time..too bad it was you tonight..LOL

 

[somebozo]

Aatish Taseer wouldn't even know who is his actual daddy until salman assassination news became rampant in the media.

 

[Mani2020]

Why My Father Hated India

Aatish Taseer, the son of an assassinated Pakistani leader, explains the history and hysteria behind a deadly relationship

Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."

My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.


Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.

Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.

This shared experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between the two countries. In human terms, it meant that each of my parents, my father in Pakistan and my mother in India, grew up around symmetrically violent stories of uprooting and homelessness.


But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.

In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination.

Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.

But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase.

Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.

Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani businesses were thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency abroad. Compared with starving, socialist India, they were on much surer ground. So what if India had democracy? It had brought nothing but drought and famine.

But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after independence evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam.

As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization, Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's utopia was reduced to ruin and insolvency.

The primary agent of this decline has been the Pakistani army. The beneficiary of vast amounts of American assistance and money—$11 billion since 9/11—the military has diverted a significant amount of these resources to arming itself against India. In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability but rather a backyard, which—once the Americans leave—might provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" against India.

In order to realize these objectives, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some—such as Laskhar-e-Tayyba's 2008 attack on Mumbai—actively supported.

The army's duplicity was exposed decisively this May, with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets.

This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country's wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge property holdings.

The reversal in the fortunes of the two countries—India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized utopia—is what explains the bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part—a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.

This rage is what makes it impossible to reduce Pakistan's obsession with India to matters of security or a land dispute in Kashmir. It can heal only when the wounds of 1947 are healed. And it should provoke no triumphalism in India, for behind the bluster and the bravado, there is arid pain and sadness.

—Mr. Taseer is the author of "Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands." His second novel, "Noon," will be published in the U.S. in September.

Why My Father Hated India - WSJ.com

Is this man gone nuts? or has lost his senses?

Whoever the hell you are Mr Atish taseer don't impose anything on us neither pretend to be so kind to us, we know the reality .if you consider yourself an indian , Take ur @$$ away from Pakistan and don't poke your nose in our matters .

Bullshit article.

 

[Abu Zolfiqar]

poor, disenchanted, emotional fatherless bastard

sucks to be him!

 

[Areesh]

After reading this article I don't know why but I just remember my school days when one of my friend used to say to everyone who acts stupid or dumb "Is main tera nahi terai baap ka qusoor hai".

 

[VelocuR]

Think differently in this- Why My Father Hated Pakistan, I wonder what everyone reaction. I bet somewhere!

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Wow - 100+ posts about an uninformed, speculative rant by a Pakistan hater.

And the thread starter actually created the thread in the 'Strategic Affairs' section, somehow inexplicably imagining an uninformed Pakistan bashing rant/opinion piece to be of 'Strategic and geo-political importance and relevance.' A good insight into the mindset of some Indians ...

I think that has been enough fun.

Thread closed.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Aatish’s personal fire​

By Ejaz Haider
Published: July 18, 2011

Will Cuppy, American humorist and literary critic, was said to read some 25 volumes of history on average before penning his humorous sketches of historical figures contained in the delightful volume The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. That was then. Now we base our analysis of an entire country on a tweet. Welcome to Aatish Taseer’s Wall Street Journal article “Why My Father Hated India”!

There’s much thrown in here so let me try a flowchart of sorts.

Indian rocket test fails; father tweets to taunt at India’s misfortune; father’s attitude to India causes tension with Aatish (right!); Pakistan’s obsession with India; grounded in Partition; Pakistan’s search for identity; rejection of India’s culture; Islamisation; identity crisis; coups; Pakistani military is the villain; wants strategic depth in Afghanistan; plays a double game; imaginary threat from India; back to father’s tweet; veneer of bravado; arid pain and sadness; wounds of Partition to be healed.

How does one deal with a piece which throws in everything except the kitchen sink in order to construct a supposedly linear reality? The technique reminds me of the cross-examination of Stanley Weber by the two strange characters, Goldberg and McCann in Pinter’s The Birthday Party. From ‘why the chicken crossed the road’ and ‘you left the organisation’ to ‘why you defiled your mother’, the rhetoric becomes a nightmare for Stanley and leaves him catatonic. Taken separately, one can discuss issues and arrive at a balanced analysis. But that’s not the purpose of Aatish’s piece. Pakistan must be seen as a mistake, acting without stimuli. India is Professor Godbole sitting contentedly and doing nothing while Dr Aziz goes around raging and making a fool of himself. That is of course nonsense. But whoever controls the narrative wins.

Mercifully, contained within Aatish’s piece are pointers to greater complexity. The father was killed because he supported a Christian woman. How does that fit in with the article’s thesis that the father hated India (and Pakistan has to hate India and be Muslim) because that religious distinction lies at the core of its ‘other’-isation of India? Or is Pakistan more complex than is hinted in the article?

Aatish’s father did not ‘hate’ India. He was one of those who did much to open up Lahore — to Indians — by using the Basant festival. There is not a single viable political party in Pakistan that does not want to normalise with India. That is a matter of record. But Salmaan Taseer (Aatish’s eye for detail doesn’t inspire much confidence since he gets the spellings of his father’s name wrong), like others, was a proud Pakistani. We don’t need to ‘other’ India to be Pakistanis but neither can we ignore real problems that need to be addressed. Tackling those problems requires mature analysis, not reducing everything to Pakistan’s identity crisis vis-a-vis India.

But what of the Pakistani military, the villains in all this? Since Aatish began with India’s failed GSLV rocket test, let me put in some facts here for him.
The Indian Army, standing at over 1.1 million active-service personnel and 1.8 million reserves, is configured under six area commands (operational) and one army training command (ARTRAC). Three of these area commands — western, northern and southwestern — are totally Pakistan-specific. A fourth, central command, with one corps (1 Corps) is also primarily Pakistan-specific. The Indian Army has 13 corps, out of which eight, including one from the central command, are specific to Pakistan.

But more than the number of corps, it is the number of divisions — infantry, mountain, armoured — as well as independent armoured and artillery brigades that manifest the deployment pattern or order of battle (ORBAT) of the Indian Army. The Pakistan-specific area commands and corps have a much-higher number of lower formations, the actual fighting elements, than the eastern and southern Commands.

Aatish alleges that Pakistan army has diverted most of the $11 billion to arming itself against India. He has no details and is plainly wrong but let’s take what he says on face value. This money has come to Pakistan over 10 years, according to his own piece. Compare this with India’s defence expenditure especially in purchasing power parity terms and one would realise what Pakistan is up against. He can check the figures with SIPRI and IISS.

Finally, each of his points has inspired scholars to write books; he would do well to avoid reductionist analyses. Nor should he utilise his father’s clout to serve personal ends by making a sales pitch to audiences in both India and the US. On a personal note, his article would have extracted only a yawn from me but for a query from Shashi Tharoor who wanted to know why I had advised Aatish Taseer to stick to writing novels. Now, Mr Tharoor is serious business. And if he needs to be explained what was wrong with Aatish’s article, then we are in real trouble.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 19th, 2011.
Aatish