Musharraf hated because he is a mohajir: US academic
Friday, June 15, 2007
WASHINGTON: An American academic has claimed here that “the current hatred of Gen Musharraf has little to do with the nature of his government. His real ‘crime’ is that he is a mohajir”.
This astounding claim comes from Arthur Herman, a conservative historian, who is currently working on a study of Gandhi and Churchill.
In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, meant to be a rejoinder to a June 8 article by Benazir Bhutto, Herman writes, the “current hatred” of Gen Musharraf flows from his “crime” of being a mohajhir, “the son of one of millions of Indian Muslims who fled to Pakistan during partition in 1947. Although it was mohajirs who agitated for the creation of Pakistan in the first place, many native Pakistanis view them with contempt and treat them as third-class citizens.”
Benazir Bhutto herself, as prime minister in the summer of 1995, referred to Pakistan’s mohajirs as “rats” and said they had “bad blood”. In an interview with India Today, a mohajir spokesman responded that “we have bad blood; it was this blood that built this country,” he recalls.
According to Herman, “Even for Western-educated Pakistanis like Ms Bhutto (the scion of an elite Sindhi family), the sight of a common mohajir like Gen Musharraf as Pakistan’s supreme power holder is intolerable. Pushing for his fall has little to do with ‘a return to democracy.’ It is far more a matter of restoring Pakistan’s equivalent of Jim Crow.”
He calls Bhutto “one of the most incompetent leaders in the history of South Asia” who was dismissed in November 1996 for her regime’s “nepotism, corruption” and “mismanagement”. During her “chaotic” administration in the mid-1990s, he alleges, scores of people were being murdered in the streets of Karachi every day. Her return to power, or that of her Pakistani People’s Party, would almost certainly trigger a return to anarchy and open the door to a Taliban-style fundamentalist coup, he believes. He does note that Bhutto dismisses this possibility as “nonsense,” asserting that “more than two-thirds of Pakistanis are distinctly moderate” in their religious views. …
True or false? Could the Punjabis and Sindhis (especially the racist Bhutto dynasty) be dumb enough to shoot themselves in the foot for the second time like they did in 1971?