Tinderbox mj akbar11/21/2023 ![]() Fundamentalists continue to stall any effort to make it a modern state. Akbar does not think that Pakistan will eventually break up despite the pressure by the strikingly independent Balochis and Pashtuns. ![]() His thesis was that while Pakistan could not afford a conventional war, India would never negotiate without the pain of unconventional war.Įfforts to convert the nation into a Taliban-style Islamic emirate “will continue in one form or the other”. Besides shifting focus to non state actors, he also ensured that the struggle was no longer limited to liberation of Kashmir, but included the conversion of Kashmir into ‘Islamic space’. Zia changed the dynamics of the Kashmir confrontation when he outsourced the jihad to Jamaat-e-Islami and ideologically motivated groups. Thereafter, Akbar ascribes the impact on Maududi’s disciple, General Zia ul Haq, who worked to turn governance into ‘Nizam-e-Mustafa’ through a rigorous application of the Sharia law. Maududi’s influence is described eloquently in a separate chapter. If Pakistan has to survive as a rational nation, then it must really become Jinnah’s Pakistan rather than Maududi’s Pakistan. But he didn’t realise what he had created. Jinnah himself could have been a very proud member of Indian Parliament by temperament. In an interview to Rahul Pandita, Akbar qualifies that there was nothing that Jinnah said in his speech on 11-12 August 1947 at the Karachi constituent assembly which he could not have said in India’s Parliament. He reinforces it with Nirad Chaudhuri’s observation in “Continent of Circe”, that Jinnah was a man who made a political impossibility a fact, a man who had no deep faith in Islam as a religion, but treated it as a form of nationalism. Akbar supports this with references from Wolpert’s biography. Jinnah, a man who had little religion divided India in the name of religion. Jinnah, the father of Pakistan was challenged by the Godfather of Pakistan, Maulana Maududi, who was the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami. Akbar reckons that the “mistrust of the Hindus, fundamental to the theory of distance, became the catechism of Muslim politics when it sought to find its place in the emerging polity of British rule in the early 20th century”.Īkbar believes that the “DNA of the idea of Pakistan”, is influenced by a strong sense of theocracy. Islam could survive in India, he argued, only if Muslims maintained “physical, ideological and emotional distance” from Hindus. He feared that Indian Muslims would lapse into Hindu practices. The protection of Islamic purity was his prescription for a community that was threatened by the cultural power and military might of the infidel. The book reveals the “theory of distance” as proposed by the well known Sunni theologian Shah Waliullah. Akbar, “Within six decades, Pakistan had become one of the most violent nations on earth, not because Hindus were killing Muslims but because Muslims were killing Muslims”. ![]() Was the formation of Pakistan conceptually wrong? Has there been a radical shift in the thinking since its emergence? Why has it become synonymous with violence and sponsorship of terrorism? The author attempts to provide us many cogent explanations, backed by comprehensive logic. ![]() Whatever be the outcome, there are some questions that crop up time and again. We hear of Pakistan being a failed State or going to become one in the not too distant future. In “Tinderbox” Akbar argues that the formation of Pakistan was the “culmination of a search for what might be called ‘Muslim space’ that began during the decline of the Mughal Empire, by a north Indian elite “driven by fear of the future and pride in the past”. Akbar’s writing echo his sentiments as he talks of Muslims living in India for five centuries with a “superiority complex suddenly lurched into the consuming doubt of an inferiority complex which became self-perpetuating with every challenge that came during different phases of turbulent colonial rule”. In his view, Pakistan is actually a “successor state to the Mughal Empire”. Published by HarperCollins India, Akbar explores historical events, circumstances and the mindset of people that divided India and created Pakistan. Akbar’s compelling book, “Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan”, has quickly climbed the bestseller charts country wide.
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