National identity & the fate of nations

Aatish Taseer

Saturday's Wall Street Journal is often the best paper of the week.  This Saturday was no exception. Most notable was an impressive editorial titled, Why My Father Hated India Why My Father Hated India by Aatish Taseer.*  It was insightful.  

Taseer's father was Salman Taseer,  governor of Punjab Province.  He was assassinated in Islamabad Jan. 4, 2011, by his security guard, who objected to his defense of a Christian woman charged with blasphemy. Pakistani law prohibits blasphemy against all religions but is de facto applied only to impiety against Islam. 

Taseer presents a compelling account of Pakistan and India in 1947.  The idea for a separate country for India's  Muslims was birthed in 1930 by Muhammad Iqbal, an Indian Muslim poet.  

"Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947.  Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations.  But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for it's non-Muslim communities.  Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history."

 

As Taseer describes the history he teases out what makes up national identity.  In the case of Pakistan, it's hatred of India.  "The shared experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between two countries...But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning.  It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.

"In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by it opposition to India.  It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition...dress, customs multicultural festivals, marriage rituals and literature.  The new country set itself the task of erasing its associations with the subcontinent, an association many came to view as a contamination.  Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect.  What made this self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture." 

There were so many wrong turns made by Pakistan.  At the time of the partition it was structurally more successful, "better roads and cars, thriving businesses, compared to starving India." But something started to happen in the 1990s.  India began turning away from socialism just as Islamized Pakistan became more extreme, on the road to failed-state status.  

The Pakistan-India conflict brings to mind ancient Greece's Peloponnesian War, between Athens and Sparta.  Athens lost.  It was once the premier city state in Greece, reduced to a state of complete subjection.  

 I realized there's an odd familiarity to the story of Pakistan, bringing me to surprise number three:  Is the U.S., with it's political self-destructiveness, becoming like Pakistan, transforming itself into a self-wounding place?

Another editorial in Saturday's WSJ teases out this idea.  Peggy Noonan wrote about polls measuring the right track/wrong track numbers on Presidential economic policies.  "The wrong track numbers hit 63% this month...But there are other reasons for American unease, and in a way some are deeper and more pervasive.  Some are cultural...Pretty much everyone over 50 in America feels on some level like a refugee.  That's because they were born in one place--the old America--and live now in another.  We're like immigrants, whether we literally are or not.  

"But everyone over 50 in America feels a certain cultural longing now.  They hear the new culture out of the radio, the TV, the billboard, the movie, the talk show.  It is so violent, so sexual-ized, so politicized, so rough.  They miss the old America they were born into, 50 to 70 years ago.  And they fear, deep down, that this new culture, the one of their children, isn't going to make it.  Because it is, in essence, an assault-ive culture, from the pop music coming out of the rental car radio to the TSA agent with her hands on your kids' buttocks.  We are increasingly strangers here, and we fear for the future.  There are 100 million Americans over 50.  A third of a nation."

Two disparate writers from extremely different places have touched upon a nihilistic cultural trait that corrodes the soul of a society.  Quick!  What's the antidote? 

*Aatish Taseer has written several books and articles about the no-man's-land of trying to understand his father and his father's country.  He's the illegitimate son of Salman Taseer, a Pakistani politician, and his Indian journalist mother, Tavleen Singh.  His parents had a one-week affair in Delhi in 1980.  A month later, his mother discovered she was pregnant.   "For a young woman from an old Sikh family to become pregnant out of marriage by a visiting Pakistani was then (and now) an enormous scandal. During the week when she was considering an abortion, my father called unexpectedly from Dubai," Taseer recounts in a WSJ interview.  He talked her out of it.   Mother and son followed Salman's tumultuous political career, multiple imprisonments, democratic governments and failed ones.  At the age of 21 Aatish visited his father in Lahore and their relationship flourished, for a time.  Until the bombings in London.  Aatish wrote a an opinion piece for a British online journal Prospect, stating, "To be Indian is to come from a safe, ancient country and, more recently, from an emerging power. In contrast, to be Pakistani is to begin with a depleted idea of nationhood. In the 55 years that Pakistan has been a country, it has been a dangerous, violent place, defined by hatred of the other—India."  Father and son were still estranged at the time of the assassination.