Date: 21/03/2019
A nation that is not proud of its heritage is an orphan who does not know who gave birth to him.
The name Pakistan has got associated with bombs, Taliban, extremism, a country where Malala is shot and Osama is a state guest for a decade, where Hafiz Saeed roams freely and Prof Junaid rot in jail, where its only Nobel Laureate is a heretic and Masood Azhar remain in protective custody!
The misfortune of Pakistan is that it is commonly perceived to be more similar with its Westen neighbour (Afghanistan) than with the one in the East, the land and the people it shares thousands of years of history.
This is a direct result of how Pakistan’s Military establishment & its chosen political elite decided to define its identity from the day one. That definition pitched Pakistan on divergent footings from India.
Pakistan state since 1947 has been in search of an identity & purpose. The first and foremost was a religious identity. So, it was decided by the state to desecrate the thousands of years old pluralistic religious and cultural history. So, it was foremost to destroy the centuries old Hindu history which was etched at every inch of the land.
Pakistani textbooks portray Hindus and Muslims living on the Indian sub-continent as two distinct and separate nations. There is no mention of that they coexisted and intermingled and mostly in peace. It was the British who first conducted a census in 1881. before them nobody knew the religious demography of the sub-continent. In the Pakistani history, there is room for Muslim heroes only; no Sikhs, no Hindus and only orthodox Muslims. The reign of Akbar, the great is not mentioned but the brother butcher Aurangzeb is eulogised for being a Islamist.
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