Re: The Balkanization of Pakistan
there is no real hatred of Urdu speaking and Pashtuns in Karachi too - there has been clashes but surprisingly it is not ad bad as most people make out. I think if anyone willl resent the urdu spaking community the most it will be Sindhis and udging by their reaction to benazir's murder, - they are not as sleepy as one would think.
most of the people from urdu speaking backgrounds and pashtuns get on - everyhuman s slightly racist deep inside but im pretty much sure its just a portion of the MQM supporters who create this trouble not every on eof them.
But if the country was split then dividing it along ethnic lines is not as easy as people think it would be as some areas are mixed and funnily enough each ethniciity claim these areas. Dividing it provincially would make minorities of othese areas protest and surely truly nationalist people would allow the freedom of choice to these people (unless recent immigrants)
Excellent post and its good to see there are some people on this board who still think. Where are Zakk, Rajput Fury and Ehsan these days? I always enjoyed reading their posts.
The breakup of Pakistan would see horrific violence somewhat along the lines of what we've seen in Iraq in the last few years. Unfortunately Pakistan has a much larger population and thus the violence would be at least 5 times larger in magnitude.
The area likely to be worst hit is Karachi with the city roughly 40% urdu speaking and a very even split among other ethnicities. I shudder to think of the scale of violence we might see. In other areas you would see similar things, perhaps not the same degree since the hatred you see in Karachi between ethnicities is not present between Punjabis and Pashtuns in Pindi or Lahore, nor is it present between the Hindko speaking and Pashtuns in the Hazara belt. Even in the Seraiki belt things are relatively tame.
Lets all hope and pray things contain themself and calm down.
Unfortunately at this time there is reaosn to fear the worst.