THE%20SINDH%20STORY

A legitimate question would be: If the Indian States can live together, why are
the Pakistan provinces not able to live together? After all, they are a pretty
homogeneous state, in the same river valley.
There are three good reasons why they cannot. India is a large country with
several States, none of which dominates the Union. Even Uttar Pradesh, the
biggest State, has less than one-sixth of the seats in the Lok Sabha. By contrast,
the Punjab in Pakistan is bigger than all the other provinces put together.
American backing for the Pakistani army, which is basically Punjabi, puts even
more premium on the Punjab. And that makes it even more unacceptable to
Sindh and other provinces. The third factor is psychological: the Hindus tend to
be tolerant even of the non-Hindus; the Muslims tend to be intolerant even of
each other.
Such are the wages of monotheistic Islam --- and such, the bonus of polytheistic
Hinduism. As Arnold Toynbee put it in his Dialogues with Daisaku Ikeda of
Soka Gakkai of Japan: “The Indian and East Asian attitude is pantheism. The
Judaic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) have concentrated the element of
divinity into a unique, omnipotent, creator god outside the universe, and this
restriction of divinity has deprived nature --- including human nature --- of its
divinity. By contrast, in India and Eastern Asia, before the impact of the modern
West, the whole universe and everything in it, including non-human nature and
man himself, was divine and, therefore, possessed, in human eyes, a sanctity and
a dignity that have restrained man’s impulse to indulge in greed by doing
violence to non-human nature...I believe that mankind needs to revert to
pantheism. The present adherents of the Judaic monotheistic religions are, all of
them, ex-pantheists. This historical fact suggests that there might be some hope
of their reverting to the pantheistic attitude, now that they have become aware of
the badness of the consequences of the monotheistic lack of respect for nature.”
Nor is that all. Pakistan was a very reluctant, a very much forced, state. Even in
the 1946 assembly elections, the majority of the Sindhis did not vote for the propartition
candidates, though the province had 70 per cent Muslim population.
Baluchistan’s top leader, Khan Samad Khan, was against partition. The Khan of
Kalat actually applied for accession to India. It was the British-controlled tribal
jirgas that opted for Pakistan. The NWFP had elected a Congress Government
even in 1946. It went to Pakistan only by default --- because West Punjab’s
plumping for partition had removed the NWFP’s land-link with the new India,
and the British would not give it the choice of Independence. In disgust, the
NWFP Congress boycotted the referendum. Good old Ghaffar Khan justly
complained that they had been “thrown to the wolves”.
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