Division and misrule

‘The 20th century was not kind to Pakistan’, Tariq Ali says in the first sentence of his latest book on his native land.

‘The 20th century was not kind to Pakistan’, Tariq Ali says in the first sentence of his latest book on his native land. The glib opener is a taste of what’s to come. It is both annoying and accurate. The 20th century created Pakistan, after all, and — apart from eight most difficult years since the turn of the millennium — the country has known no other. But Pakistan’s first 50 years certainly were troubled and the knowledge that the emergent nation was badly treated (over the division of assets with its neighbour in 1947 and India’s grabbing of Kashmir) and has been unlucky (with the death of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the country’s founder in September 1948 and the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan in 1951) is deep in the nation’s psyche.