ArabNews
This is with reference to the letter, “Partisan facts” by Islam Habib Khan (March 23).
Nobody could not have put the facts about the partition of India any better. Indeed, in the original plan, the whole of the Punjab and Bengal (Bangladesh and India’s West Bengal) would have gone to Pakistan. As it is, the country was left with a strip of land, no industries to talk of and even today, is bound by an agreement with India over its use of water from the Indus River.
It is small wonder then that in the initial days and for decades afterward, it was thought that the little country would fall apart and India would be “whole” again. But the little country survived. It not only survived but prospered and there was a time when a visit to Pakistan was actually a status symbol.
And Pakistanis, being only human, beamed with pride and boasted of their success. In fact, at one point they were contemptuous of all things Indian. The PIA was the airline of choice; the airhostesses had their uniforms cut and fashioned in Paris; Lahore was the heart of the country and Karachi was the city where the world came to shop.
Islamabad, the capital, was acclaimed for its ethereal beauty which even Rajiv Gandhi (who visited at the invitation of Benazir Bhutto, then prime minister of Pakistan) could not resist saying if there was a heaven on earth, then this was it. India just could not compete with this rising Muslim power whose jawans held their flag proudly, proclaiming boldly that Pakistan was the land of the “pure.”
At the height of their glory (in the late 1970s) the Pakistani government offered refuge to the Afghanis and harbored thousands of them in camps along their borders.
It is a very different story today. Pakistan’s leaders have cheated their people. The morale of the Pakistanis is at its lowest ever in its 63 years of existence. Sadly now, there are an increasing number of people who say that they should never have migrated to the new country. They think they could have had a better future in India. Over the past decades, there has been a silent migration to other parts of the world because Pakistan had long been recognized to be a fool’s paradise.
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