Musharraf proposes to name NWFP as ‘Khyber’

[Faruk_Khan]

Re: Musharraf proposes to name NWFP as ‘Khyber’

@Kooks

as for the hindko speakers. the vast majority of todays non-pashtun population of sarhad are descendants of immigrants. a lot of the hindko speakers in hazara are basically pashtuns. so they would not object to afghania. their culture and way of life is still based on pashtunwali. chitralies also have more in coomon with afghans that border their province than with hindko,punjabi or urdu speakers. if you ask hindko speakers what their orgins were you would find out that many of them were of indian extraction be that rajput, urdu or whatever. so they are not really native to the area. a very high number of them are kashmiri's too - butts, some raja's, etc... then you have qazalbash's and syeds who also have more in common with afghan/pashtuns than others and nowadays many of these speak pashtu too.

as for d i khan a significant amount of the seraiki speakers there are of pashtun extraction so why they would object to afghania or even pashtunistan i do not know.

afghania is a better name over all and if you include quetta then the changazis there will feel no objection to it too.

Wrong, some Hindko speakers might be recent Punjabi immigrants who adopted Hindko over Pashto because of linguistic similarities but way back in time the Hindko were the original inhabitants, even before Pashtuns arrived.

Indic languages moved south-eastwards into South Asia from the northwest not vice versa, Hindko and Potohari languages were spoken in eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan by imperial/warrior caste Hindus way before the ancestors of Pashtuns arrived in these regions, there was a country called Gandhara here which was originally Hindu and then converted to Buddhism and as manuscripts from that era testify the language spoken in that region then was pretty much the same as what we nowadays call Hindko, they say the oldest universities in the world were in Taxila and the dialects used in them were presentday Hindko and Potohari.