Historical Background

Since the dawn of civilization modern day Pakistan has been an integral part of India. The Indus River valley, now in Pakistan, was the center where ancient Indian civilization was founded, spreading through the plain of the Ganges, and into southern India. Pakistan has also been the principal corridor into India from the Mediterranean and Central Asian worlds. Islam entered India though Pakistan in the century after Islam's founding and soon converted the Sindh area on the lower Indus. Centuries later Central Asian Islamic empires invaded, sacked, proselytized, and ruled northwestern India through the Pakistani corridor. This entry point, closely connected to the Islamic world of the Middle East, became heavily Muslim in time but remained an integral part of Indian society. Islam was hardly confined to this region, converts were found throughout India but were also concentrated particularly in the impoverished floodplain of the Brahmaputra River in eastern India.

India was always divided into a number of separate states throughout its history, becoming unified for the first and only time under the British Raj in the 18th Century. The origin of Pakistan's identity distinct and separate from the rest of India is quite recent. It arose after the beginning of the Twentieth Century, indeed well after World War I. In hindsight it hardly seems to have been predestined. The modern state of Pakistan is the construct largely of one man - Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

During three decades of growing Indian agitation for independence a rift developed and steadily grew between the predominantly Hindu Brahmin leaders of the movement and Ali Jinnah, the leading Muslim nationalist. In 1917 Hindu and Muslim (as well as Parsi and Sikh) nationalists were united behind the program expressed in the Lucknow Pact which demanded national self-determination and also specified proportional legislative representation for the various religious communities. This principle - that Muslims would be guaranteed representation proportionate to their numbers in government - set a standard that Jinnah would judge all future proposals. The Hindu-dominated All Indian Congress dropped this principle in favor of at-large voting with no set-asides for minority communities in the 1920s, a policy seemingly neutral and "ethnically blind" on its face, but one that naturally favored the Hindu majority. This issue crops in multi-ethnic societies the world over, such as in recent debates about affirmative action in the US. Jinnah and the Muslim League split with the Congress over this issue at the December 1928 All-Parties Conference.

From then on the inevitable differences and tensions that arise between social groups differentiated by religion and economics pulled the two sides apart without any tendency for rapprochement. Partly it was due to the tendency of Hindu leaders to favor the members of their own religion, castes and families to the detriment of the minority Muslims, a tendency that had led to the 1928 fracture. Partly it was due to a deliberate strategy of the Raj to divide the nationalist movement so as to weaken it and perhaps keep India British. Partly it was the rise of Islamic consciousness that forms a major theme in 20th Century history. But mostly it was the growing convictions of Jinnah, fed by all these influences. It did not help that the leading figure of the Hindu-based independence movement (the satyagraha), Mohandas K. Gandhi, chose to adopt the trappings and pose of a sadhu, a Hindu holy man, a posture that did not appeal at all to Muslim Indians.

In 1930 the concept of a separate Muslim state was proposed for this first time, instead of merely a guaranteed political base within a unified Indian state. This hypothetical state was given a hypothetical name "Pakistan" meaning "land of the pure".

The last chance for avoiding partition was a proposal developed by a three-man commission sent by the British cabinet in 1946. The proposal was for a three-tier federal structure with a large degree of self-rule for regions devised along communal lines. Jinnah and the League accepted the proposal, even though it was less than the independent Muslim state they now preferred. But true to form, the Congress leaders - particularly Jawaharlal Nehru - found nothing but difficulty with it, leaving partition as the only option.

So it was that less than 19 years after that fateful Conference, the history of India was irrecovably altered when at midnight on 14-15 August 1947 the calamitous partition of British India into the modern states of India and Pakistan took place.

It is clear to everyone that the legacy of partition is a key driving force behind the nuclear standoff that now exists between India and Pakistan. Partition split apart a region that had been united for millennia amid communal massacres on a scale never before seen, leaving in its wake the unresolved issue of contested Kashmir - a Muslim-maj