Pakistan was hacked off the stooped shoulders of India by the departing British in 1947 as a homeland for India’s Muslims, but—at least until very recently, if one can extrapolate from the two countries’ population growth trends—more Muslims have remained in India than live in Pakistan. Pakistan’s relations with India have ever since been bedevilled by a festering dispute over the divided territory of Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state. Decades of open conflict and simmering hostility, punctuated by spasms of bonhomie that always seem to sputter out into recrimination, have characterised a relationship that has circumscribed India’s options and affected its strategic choices. The knowledge that our nearest neighbour, populated as it is by a people of a broadly similar ethnic mix and cultural heritage, defines itself in opposition to India and exercises its diplomatic and military energies principally to thwart and undermine us, has inevitably coloured India’s actions and calculations on the regional and global stage. The resort by Pakistan to the sponsorship of militancy and terrorism within India as an instrument of state policy since the 1980s has made relations nearly as bad as in the immediate aftermath of independence.
There is, in Indian eyes, a deep-seated pathology at work here. Former Pakistani Ambassador Husain Haqqani has written of ‘Pakistan’s near pathological obsession with India’ and the ‘paranoia’ of its elite, fuelled by the resentment of émigrés from India who developed ‘a national narrative of grievance’. These migrants, who did not hail from the territory of the country they were ruling, had to develop and sustain an ideological narrative about Pakistan, giving birth to a nationalism that was reductive: Pakistan’s principal raison d’être became that it was not India and that it defined its interests in opposition to India’s.
The ‘two-nation theory’ that Hindus and Muslims could not live together, and the notion of a thousand years of conflict between the two peoples, had to be created, justified and propagated, including through the ‘prescribed myths’ of tendentious history textbooks. As the Pakistani commentator Khaled Ahmed observed: ‘Pakistani nationalism comprises 95% India-hatred. They call it Islam because that is how we learn to differentiate between ourselves and India.’ Islam became central to Pakistan’s sense of itself: as the academic Waheed- uz-Zaman put it in 1973, ‘If the Arabs, the Turks, the Iranians, God forbid, give up Islam, the Arabs yet remain Arabs, the Turks remain Turks, the Iranians remain Iranians, but what do we remain if we give up Islam?’ One Pakistani official answered this question to the New York Times in 1980: ‘second-rate Indians’.
If this visceral hatred of India is, to Pakistanis, the main casus belli, embellished by the ‘just cause’ of Kashmir, the horrors that were inflicted on Mumbai by terrorists from Pakistan at the end of November 2008 remain the starting point for any Indian’s discussion of Pakistan. They have left an abiding impact on all Indians. India picked itself up after the assault, but it counted the cost in lives lost, property destroyed and, most of all, in the scarred psyche of a ravaged nation. Deep and sustained anger across the country—at its demonstrated vulnerability to terror and at the multiple institutional failures that allowed such loss of life— prompted the immediate resignations of the Home Minister in D
Source: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/essay/beyond-kashmir