CONFUSION REGARDING THE JUSTIFICATION FOR PAKISTAN AS IT SPIRALS INTO CHAOS
These days an old Punjabi professor from Pakistan resident in Sweden — Ishtiaq Ahmad — has released a book and videos in which he claims to dispel the “myth” among certain Pakistani bourgeois “secular” quarters regarding Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan….and what his actual intentions were regarding the action for which history knows him. Some people are trying to give the impression that Jinnah later regretted his deeds, but Ishtiaq asserts that there were no such regrets on Jinnah’s part and he was fully intent on what he was doing. This statement rings true, but I still am not clear regarding the intentions with which Ishtiaq is now making these arguments and what he hopes to derive from them. His discourse seems garbled and self-contradictory and is characterised by rambling and getting tripped up by his own statements. Perhaps he is aiming clumsily to apologise for Jinnah, while simultaneously advocating a “united India” viewpoint, like most ethnic Indics who have been disappointed by the Pakistan “idea”. At any rate, he is exposing a flawed idea while trying to support it at the same time. This is a comical situation in which most Pakistani discussants find themselves.
In my own opinion, Jinnah had clearly intended to make Pakistan, and about this there is no doubt. A lesser known fact however is that he decided on Pakistan rather late in the day (from 1940 onwards) — on the promptings of his British masters, when it was clear that Britain’s continued ascendancy in India had become untenable because of WW2, and they needed another vehicle via which to sustain their geopolitical ambitions in this part of the world. It is also clear that these ambitions no longer concerned the protection of the British Indian Empire per se but were now related to the protection of the West’s primacy over Middle East’s petroleum resources from the Soviet Union, in which strategy Pakistan would play a pivotal role as an aid-sustained garrison state governed by a toady elite nexus of military and civil bureaucrats and politicians. Later on this instrument was passed by the declining British to their up and coming US protégés. The Anglo-Americans were also afraid of an independent United Indian political entity under a Congress regime, what with its independent capabilities, populism and pro-Soviet inclinations— which they needed to counterbalance. Since the end of WW2, Islam had been seen as a useful counterweight to communism by Western planners, and the concept of Pakistan presented them with an opportunity for its use. During the Afghan Jihad from 1980 onwards, the Pakistani state acquired a gangster-style character.
In 2021 the strategy of global geopolitics changed with the start of the Ukraine war for the first time since 1945, and resultantly the utility of the Pakistani scheme became redundant and it began to be distanced by its former Western patrons. No Pakistani or Punjabi analyst including Ishtiaq seems to mention this crucial factor.
Lastly, whatever the viewpoints of Ishtiaq Ahmad are — for me as an ethnic Iranic individual who owns his roots and is faithful to his heritage, the idea of returning to a United India is not at all acceptable….at least as regards the lands to the left of the Indus River. Those regions that are ethnic Indian are entitled to pursue any view they may have regarding such a reunion, but people such as Ishtiaq have no right to portray me and my type as being Indic and sharing the same objectives. The Pakistani government used our lands as buffer zones for the interests of its Anglo-American masters, which is unforgiveable. The framework of Pakistan has never meant anything to my true personal historical identity and that of my forebears who have inhabited our regions for thousands of years — and now that concept is finally redundant without any further doubt, and we must go our separate ways. People like Ishtiaq Ahmed are trying to present a hopeless one-sided and inaccurate picture which is a falsification of historical facts and existing realities.