Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
to view these places as such, is, from the vantage point of New Delhi, to ignore the lessons
of history and geography.
As this record of imperial to-ing and fro-ing over the course of millennia shows, Afgh-
anistan and the war there is not just another security issue for India to deal with. Only in
the Western view is Afghanistan part of Central Asia; to Indians it is part of their subcon-
into India, for terrorists in our day as for armies in days past, but as a strategically vital rear
base for Pakistan, India's primary enemy.
While India's geographic logic is not perfect, Pakistan, right-angled to the course of in-
vasions past, has, in the opinion of many, no geographic logic at all, and Afghanistan far too
little. Pakistan can be viewed as an artificial puzzle piece of a territory, straddling the fronti-
er between the Iranian-Afghan plateau and the lowlands of the subcontinent, encompassing
the western half of the Punjab, but not the eastern half, crazily uniting the Karakoram in
the north (some of the highest mountains in the world) with the Makran Desert almost a
border of sorts, the Pakistani state sits on both of its banks. Pakistan is the home of four
major ethnic groups, each harboring hostility to the others and each anchored to a specif-
ic region: Punjab to the northeast, Sindh to the southeast, Baluchistan to the southwest,
and the Pushtun-dominated North-West Frontier. Islam was supposed to have provided the
unifying glue for the state but it has signally failed in this regard: even as Islamic groups
in Pakistan have become more radical, Baluch and Sindhis continue to see Pakistan as a
foreign entity overlorded by the Punjabis, with the Pushtuns in the northwest drawn more
into the Taliban-infected politics of the Afghan-Pakistani border area. Without the Punjabi-
dominated army, Pakistan might cease to exist—reduced to a rump of an Islamic Greater
Punjab, with semi-anarchic Baluchistan and Sindh drawn closer into the orbit of India.
Founded in 1947 by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a London-Bombay intellectual, the son of
a merchant from Gujarat, Pakistan was built on an ideological premise: that of a homeland
for the Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent. And it was true, the majority of the subcon-
tinent's Muslims lived in West and East Pakistan (which became Bangladesh in 1971), yet
many tens of millions of Muslims remained in India proper, so that Pakistan's geographic-
al contradictions rendered its ideology supremely imperfect. Indeed, millions of Muslims
and Hindus became refugees upon Pakistan's creation. The fact is that the subcontinent's
history of invasions and migrations makes for a plenteous ethnic, religious, and sectarian
mix. For example, India is the birthplace of several religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jain-
ism, and Sikhism. Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians have lived in India for hundreds and
thousands of years. The philosophy of the Indian state accepts this reality and celebrates it;
the philosophy of the Pakistani state is far less inclusive. That is partly why India is stable
and Pakistan is not.
