Why My Father Hated India

[Abu Zolfiqar]

Wait are you serious. Aatish Taseer is an illegitimate child?

based on the facts, it seems that he was...............

"an accident"

 

[jetti]

not to mention the fact that your border forces kill their people and you have land disputes with them; it's only natural reaction I guess....

Bangladesh and Pakistan were always seperate "nations" in my humble view. Geography plays a big role here. Though I think relations improved considerably post 71 than at any time prior to that.

i think if you want to talk about religion and all that -- it should be noted that anti-Islam sentiment in hindustan is even more widespread simply because

a.) what indians perceive as "india" was divided in 1947 and Muslims were victorious

b.) Muslims ruled what indians perceive as "india" for over 1,000 years and did a good job at it


as for Taseer's tweet -- well I think it is touching to say the least how offended some indians may feel about it.....I guess it was just a funny joke that some people are taking too personally.

depends on whose perspective you are saying that muslims did a good job. they took over enormous wealth of the centuries generated by native hindus and frittered it away on luxuries. with all the wealth there was no concept of modernization. this is because the goal was to rule over and enjoy wealth generated by others.the hindu population which would have been 90% had a miserable life. so i think you are wrong .. they did a bad job when they finally handed over everything to the British and their last heirs were brutaly shot dead.

 

[jetti]

Wait are you serious. Aatish Taseer is an illegitimate child?

yess he was born out of wedlock. is that illegitimate. i thought illegit was one who did not know of father. but in this case the father and mothe are known.

 

[Water Car Engineer]

that seems fair....and at the same rate, if Pakistanis didnt like minorities (such as Hindus or other groups) there would constantly be widespread protests against cricket players like Mr. Kaneria or top SC justices like Mr. Baghwandas (many more examples come to mind)

so it works both ways really...

and indians should be assured that vitriol by fundamentalist groups in Pakistan don't represent the views necessarily of all Pakistanis.

You can speak about this more then I can, I don't know your country other then media. And Indians like Pakistanis will talk with out really knowing.

 

[Abu Zolfiqar]

What gives Attish Tasseer the right to pontificate on this page? his unique birth?
he talks of his fathers hatered of India .. what about his mother's ? does she count?

Attish writes trash and skirts the story of his father and his fathers father.
A a tale of murder and mayhem and misdeeds that his 3 generations have carried on.

His father, Salman Taseer was assassinated by his own guard, religious zealot no doubt who thought Salmand Taseer had insulted Islam.

What Attish (which means fire) doesn't tell is that his that grandfather had funded the defense of another religious murderer during British Raj who had stabbed and killed a hindu publisher in Lahore that "religious minded" people thought was insulting Islam too.

Mr. Taseer .. what goes around, comes around,

Murder, Mayhem is your past, your present and your future is all about- don't drag rest of the world into your nonsense.

from the comments section

 

[acetophenol]

Why My Father Hated India

Aatish Taseer, the son of an assassinated Pakistani leader, explains the history and hysteria behind a deadly relationship

Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."

My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.


Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.

Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.

This shared experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between the two countries. In human terms, it meant that each of my parents, my father in Pakistan and my mother in India, grew up around symmetrically violent stories of uprooting and homelessness.


But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.

In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination.

Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.

But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase.

Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.

Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani businesses were thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency abroad. Compared with starving, socialist India, they were on much surer ground. So what if India had democracy? It had brought nothing but drought and famine.

But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after independence evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam.

As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization, Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's utopia was reduced to ruin and insolvency.

The primary agent of this decline has been the Pakistani army. The beneficiary of vast amounts of American assistance and money—$11 billion since 9/11—the military has diverted a significant amount of these resources to arming itself against India. In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability but rather a backyard, which—once the Americans leave—might provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" against India.

In order to realize these objectives, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some—such as Laskhar-e-Tayyba's 2008 attack on Mumbai—actively supported.

The army's duplicity was exposed decisively this May, with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets.

This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country's wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge property holdings.

The reversal in the fortunes of the two countries—India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized utopia—is what explains the bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part—a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.

This rage is what makes it impossible to reduce Pakistan's obsession with India to matters of security or a land dispute in Kashmir. It can heal only when the wounds of 1947 are healed. And it should provoke no triumphalism in India, for behind the bluster and the bravado, there is arid pain and sadness.

—Mr. Taseer is the author of "Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands." His second novel, "Noon," will be published in the U.S. in September.

Why My Father Hated India - WSJ.com

well,
different people think in different ways.thats all.

 

[rai_kamal]

India-"It doesn't matter what your father think..."

 

[Patriot]

Salman Taseer was a great guy - If Pakistanis forget their religious difference and respect each other view then i think we can show a collective middile finger to India but who cares about opinion of some random bastard child.

 

[gulte]

I don't know why, but i don't like this guy Aatish Taseer.

 

[JonAsad]

A bastard would be an appropriate term for this Aatish Taseer.

Thats explains his hate for his fathers country- and thus the article-
Bollywood should make Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Ghum type movie on him-

 

[EjazR]

There is one mistake that has to be pointed out by Aatish Taseer where he mentions the idea of Pakistan as sourced from Allama Iqbal. This is incorrect, but the Pakistani propaganda has worked so much in overdrive that most people don't even investigate this and accept this as fact

Keeping in mind that Iqbal died in 1937 before even the Pakistan declaration and at the time when Jinnah's muslim league and Indian National Congress were both negotiating on sharing power without any sepratists agendas at all.

In his 1930 speech, Iqbal clearly states a case of a muslim majority state WITHIN the Indian union. Keep in mind that Balochistan and NWFP was not a seperate province. Sindh was part of Bombay. So the only muslim majority provinces were Bengal and Punjab which had a razor thin majority of 52 to 53%. What he mentioned in his 1930 speech was a redistribution of provinces WITHIN the Indian union so that there are atleast some wholly muslim majority provinces just like there are wholly Hindu majority provinces in UP, CP or Madras e.t.c.

The Pakistan scheme was actually the idea of a student in UK- and this is important because he actually gave the name Pakistan and also clearly mentioned the creation of seperate states - Chaudry Rahmat Ali. He along with Muhamed Ali Jinnah are the fundamental founders of Pakistan.

When Iqbal's 1930 speech was portrayed in some papers including in the UK as being an advocation of the Pakistan scheme, Iqbal promptly replied that Pakistan is not being advocated by him and his scheme is to have redistribution of provinces WITHIN the Indian union.

The letter is

Dr. Sir Mohd Iqbal, M.A., Ph.D. Barrister-at-Law

Lahore 4 March 1934

My Dear Mr. Thompson,

I have just received your review of my book. It is excellent and I am grateful to you for the very kind things you have said of me. But you have made one mistake which I hasten to point as I consider it rather serious. You call me a protagonist of the scheme called “Pakistan”. Now Pakistan is not my scheme. The one that I suggested in my address is the creation of a Muslim Province – i.e; a province having an overwhelming population of Muslims in the North-West of India. This new province will be, according to my scheme, a part of the proposed Indian Federation. Pakistan scheme proposes a separate federation of Muslim Provinces directly related to England as a separate dominion. This scheme originated in Cambridge. The authors of this scheme believe that we Muslim Round Tablers have sacrificed the Muslim nation on the altar of Hindu or the so called Indian Nationalism.

Yours Sincerely,

Mohammed Iqbal

The Cambridge scheme was basically initiated by Chaudry Rahmat Ali.

For those interested they can read the 1930 speech in full here Presidential Address, annual session of the All-India Muslim League, Allahabad, December 1930, by Sir Muhammad Iqbal

In fact, there is ample evidence that creation of Pakistan and what the rulers did vis a vis Indo-Pakistani relations later was mostly against what he advocated. An excerpt from his speech is enough to show how Jinnah leading the separate entity of Pakistan and then using troops to invade India soon after was anti-thetical to what Iqbal had mentioned in 1930 and envisioned the future of North West INDIAN Muslims

[[7e]] I have no doubt that if a Federal Government is established, Muslim federal States will willingly agree, for purposes of India's defence, to the creation of neutral Indian military and naval forces. Such a neutral military force for the defence of India was a reality in the days of Mughal rule. Indeed in the time of Akbar the Indian frontier was, on the whole, defended by armies officered by Hindu generals. I am perfectly sure that the scheme for a neutral Indian army, based on a federated India, will intensify Muslim patriotic feeling, and finally set at rest the suspicion, if any, of Indian Muslims joining Muslims from beyond the frontier in the event of an invasion.

 

[forcetrip]

if i had the power, i would have dug a deep hole and massacred all ghaddars like taseeris and dumped them

in pakistan we need to get all ghaddars out, pakistan must immediately implemet shariah with islamic socialism, and there should be limit to one's opinions

salman the has gone, but he has left a verman out there, his children that are a vermens and germs to the society

and thats why i support hitler action on jews, because jews were the same to germans what these vermons are to pakistani society, these taseeris and mirzais bhuttos and zerdaris corrupt feudal vermons

pakistan tere baap ki jayedad nahi, pehle khud dekh, hazaar aikar ke zaminon peh pakistanion ko ghulam banata hai, apne auqat kio bhulta hai jahil pakistani!!

taseer died a fraud corrupt guy but is made shaheed WTFing joke

yeah taseer ka sala wahi illegetimate bharati aulaad hai

Acha .. but who will fight your ignorance and stupidity once you destroy the "veermen"? Some other Jahil like you will end up killing you like the animals you both will become because of constant anger issues with other people. I would not like that to happen to you and the other people that are mentally not fit to be human beings.

 

[T-Faz]

Acha .. but who will fight your ignorance and stupidity once you destroy the "veermen"? Some other Jahil like you will end up killing you like the animals you both will become because of constant anger issues with other people. I would not like that to happen to you and the other people that are mentally not fit to be human beings.

Don't pay any attention to him, he is the lowest of the low.

As for the article, its odd that Taseer's "hate" for India is encapsulated and represented by a single tweet.

Odd article by an emotional wreck.

 

[VelocuR]

As soon I read exciting, and then stop reading after first or second sentence. (come to ear and then come out from other ear)

Pretty boring Article.

 

[muse]

An excellent read - much appreciated -