History of Pakistan since 3000 BC

lahori_bhai · March 8, 2008, 1:49am

Re: History of Pakistan since 3000 BC

That does not prove anything. The muslim population happens to be the most persecuted and despised minority in india.

India’s Muslims deemed to be in dire straits

Haroon Siddiqui sums up a federal report that has global implications

Feb 11, 2007 04:30 AM
Haroon Siddiqui

NEW DELHI–The president of India is a Muslim. The leading tennis star, Sania Mirza, is a Muslim woman. Three members of the national cricket XI are Muslim. So are the biggest stars of the ubiquitous Bollywood movies, as also India’s two leading and world-renowned painters, M. F. Husain and Tyeb Mehta.
Yet, in the many paradoxes that characterize India, the 150-million Muslim minority in this nation of 1.3 billion is in crisis, due to entrenched official and social discrimination, according to a federal commission.
The Prime Minister’s High-Level Committee, as it was called, was headed by Rajindar Sachar, retired chief justice of the Delhi High Court.
His unflinching report, released two months ago, is under intense national debate. It has international relevance as well:

Many of the prejudices it cites have an eerie echo of the West’s post-9/11 Islamophobia.

The fate of the world’s second-largest group of Muslims, after Indonesia’s 180 million, does matter. For example, Indian Muslim moderation has been held up by both India and the U.S. as proof that a secular democracy is a good antidote to terrorism. That argument gets eroded if such a polity fails the community, as Sachar declares.
Historically Muslims have been a minority in the subcontinent, albeit a ruling one for several centuries. But when British India was divided in 1947, Muslims formed a majority in Pakistan. When Pakistan itself got carved up in 1971, Muslims formed a majority in Bangladesh as well. But they are a minority in India where, at times, they have been accused of dual loyalty to Pakistan and targeted in periodic pogroms.
Sachar says Muslims “carry a double burden of being ‘anti-national’ and being ‘appeased’ at the same time. They must prove on a daily basis that they’re not ‘anti-nation’ and `terrorists.’ It is not recognized that the alleged ‘appeasement’ has not resulted in the desired level of socio-economic development” for them.
During sectarian violence, his seven-member commission says, Muslims are victimized many times over:

By the Hindu communalists who attack them.

By police who side with the criminals and are “heavy-handed” with Muslims, raiding their homes “at the slightest pretext.”

By media, which “overplay the involvement of Muslims in violent activities and underplay the involvement of others.”

By governments that fail to “bring to book the perpetrators of communal violence” and fail to compensate Muslim victims.
Muslims – “fearing for their safety and security” and fleeing “social boycott in certain parts of the country,” where they cannot buy or rent property – are abandoning areas “they have lived in for centuries,” and moving to Muslim areas.
“Distress sales” of properties in the areas they are fleeing from fetch them a low price, while they pay inflated prices in the “secure” areas they move to.
Worse, Muslim neighbourhoods have become “easy targets for neglect by municipal and government authorities. Water, sanitation, electricity, schools, public health facilities, banking, ration shops, roads and transportation facilities are all in short supply in these areas.”
Muslims, clustered in urban areas, are poorer than others.
“Their conditions on the whole are only slightly better than those of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes” – those on the lowest rungs of the Hindu caste system and traditionally the most discriminated against.
Only 27 per cent of urban Muslims are engaged in regular work vs. 49 per cent for upper caste Hindus and 40 per cent for the scheduled castes, Sachar says.
In the coveted public sector, Muslims have the lowest share, 24 per cent vs. 39 per cent for the lower castes. In federal police, the share of Muslims is just 6 per cent vs. 42 per cent for upper caste Hindus and 23 per cent for the lower castes. In defence-related jobs, Muslims have only 4 per cent of the jobs.
Muslims are, of necessity, disproportionately self-employed, as casual labour or street vendors – that, too, without fixed locations. Yet they do not have proportionate access to credit, in part because their areas are ill-served by banks.
As disheartening as all this is, it is worth noting in the context of Indian democracy that Sachar is a Hindu, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who is promising a series of remedial measures, is a Sikh.

That is why i say that the muslim-hindu divide is big and the partition was necessary. The differences between hindus and muslims can never be reconciled and the two cannot live as equals in the same country