IMO, Pakistan means nothing to ppl living down south or towards the eastern parts of India. The dehyphenation has to come at the policy makers level.
By dehyphenation I do not mean hostility for hostility is a mood and not a policy.
India has often reacted to Pakistan's provocations, which should be avoided in the future.
I don't know about the East part so much levina. I grew up there. We have pretty strong views about Pakistan. Both as a nation and a people.
I think it is a fallacy, generated more by the Pakistanis (West Pakistanis to be precise in terms of the original terminology) than anybody else, that they are somehow different to the rest of the Indian nation and have only real ties to the Punjabi populace.
If you see India today, and hypothetically presume a partition at the level of the Vindhyas, then too you would hear the same 70 years hence.
If the NE states never joined the Indian state, and were separated from us for 70 years, you would hear the same. You do hear the same even today, with them as part of the country, do you not?
Fact is, a cleavage happened. On ideological grounds. Now 70 years hence you will hear all sorts of revisionist theories of different civilizations, and races, and languages, and continuous separate existence, untouched by the larger mainland, etc etc etc till the cows come home.
Fact of the matter is that for me, my people are from Iran originally. But my people have been Indian for over a thousand years.
When we came to India, we were given shelter by the Indian people. And we lived for over a thousand years amongst Indian people, as Indians.
For me personally, all Indians are originally Hindus, where over the past thousand odd years some of them (all of whom I consider "my" people) have become Muslim.
They were not the ones who drove us from our ancestral land. Though to be equally brutally fair, many of them did continue to fight alongside foreigners to persecute us EVEN on this land which gave us refuge. Driving us into the hills and forests to save our holy fire, once again, where we lived for near 2-300 years before moving to Mumbai.
Atash parast where we came from.
Atash parast where we came to!
The irony of the existential deja vu largely lost on my people, we broke our oath to lay down our arms (given to Hindu king Jadi Rana) and actually formed a militia of Parsi garrisons to fight with and alongside Shivaji's forces. In and through most of the 1600s during his campaigns in the Gujarat.
One of my ancestors actually raised a sum of 20 lakh rupees in those days and led one of the campaigns in the Kutch. Cavalry, and French artillery.
We have currently a family tree recreation thing going on in India for the past 3+ years, and this factoid came to light when I bumped into another namesake of mine on a ride to Mahabaleshwar one Sunday.
So in summary, I do not believe we are ever going to be de-hyphenated at a people level.
But as nation states, its happened some decade and a half ago. Maybe two.
