The attack on Jinnah residency

http://www.afghanistantimes.af/

The attack on Jinnah residency in Ziarat—Quetta reveals much more than what we saw on television screens or in print news. For many it was a symbolic act of terrorism and vandalism. For many it was an act of registering their anger with Pakistan and an act of voicing their freedom or separation. It was also an act of showing the world that Balochis don't want Jinnah’s Pakistan anymore. It validates the concept that the two-nation theory was flawed. It also falsified the so-called ideology of Pakistan. It also has laid it bare that Pakistan faces existential threats from within. Pakistan, the progeny of the two-nation theory, has been struggling to survive as a nation but the attack on the residency of Jinnah—the founder of Pakistan, has proved that despite living together for more or less 65 years after its conception, Sindhis, Balochis, Punjabis and Pashtuns have failed to live together as a nation. Jinnah received what he had sown during his lifetime. He divided the Hindus and Muslims of the subcontinent on the basis of the two-nation theory. Then he took a sharp U-turn and announced before the members of the Constituent Assembly that Hindus and Muslims are not two nations but two communities, and in the state polity and policies there shouldn't be any discrimination between them. This is where Pakistan’s problems started off. If a common man makes some mistakes, tells a lie and proved to be a turncoat, it is just he himself that reaps its outgrowth, however, when a leader commits some mistakes it is his nation that bears the downsides of his works. Pakistanis are now reaping what their leader has sown for them. The so-called ideology of Pakistan was very clumsy from the very beginning and it couldn’t last long but just fell apart in 1971 when eastern Pakistan became Bangladesh. This ideology has been responsible for desperation, religious bigotry, and political disharmony in the leftover-Pakistan. Religious intolerance and political discord have permeated in the lives of Pakistanis. Had Pakistan been a natural state, it wouldn’t have witnessed its breakage in form of Bangladesh—being a separate state now. And it wouldn’t have seen separatist movement in Balochistan. It is Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) that has claimed the attack on Jinnah Residency in Zairat—Quetta but the jingoistic Pakistani media and its military establishment will call it an act of foreign hands. The problem is they don’t see at their own faults as what made Bangladeshis alienated from western Pakistan and what distanced Balochis from Islamabad. They blame India for separating Bangladesh from Pakistan while concealing the fact that the very idea of Pakistan was clumsy having no capacity to remain intact for long. This is why its breakage for natural. A nation is a historically evolved stable community of language, territory, economic life, shared goals, and psychological make-up, and all of them should be manifested in a community of culture. Ideology is the very raison de’tre of Pakistan. It is the foundation, and it is the basis on which Pakistan stands and on which India was divided. It is such an idea that Afghanistan never subscribed to it. It was for two major reasons that Afghanistan opposed the idea of Pakistan. First, if a new state comes into existence in the subcontinent, majority of Afghan-Pashtuns will come under its subjugation. And indeed it happened when Pakistan came into existence. Second, Kabul believed that it would be a great injustice with those Muslims who will remain back in India. But the obdurate political genius Jinnah clung to his idea of ‘two-nation theory’ and eventually made Pakistan. His ideology is responsible for the bloodshed in the region. Had there been no two nation theory, no Pakistan, there wouldn’t have been any bloodshed in the name of religion particularly in this region.