While this article inspires itself from Pakistan’s new maps, the fact that Islamabad still finds incidences in India as a reason to find relevance describes the mental bankruptcy of the 73 year young state.
It must be hard to be social science student in Pakistan, with distorted history and now political geography all around. For one Pakistan’s history books begin with Islamic raiders being described as Nobel liberators. It imagines armies of a bygone era – whose only motive was loot and pillage as those fighting for ideas of freedom that didn’t exist for at least five centuries after that.
It even imagines Indian Freedom struggle as one divided into two parts, an Islamic struggle and another one which was Indian.
At every state of its nation building effort rulers have tried to find inspiration in Arabian Peninsula thereby denying their own legacy.
The present effort of redrawing internal maps to claim AJK/PoK as part of Pakistan has undertaken a self-defeating chore. The abrogation of article 370 in India was never an effort by Indian state to formally integrate J&K into India, that was done long back with retiring Kashmiri flag and Rajpramukh titles. It was an effort to outclass the politics of state which had long dealt with militancy as a political tool.
The Pakistani decision, on the contrary, goes back on its promise of Kashmiri self-determination. With the façade name – Free Jammu and Kashmir and ceremonial position of its political chief being called Prime Minister; Islamabad was able to put Kashmir as a disputed territory that needed to follow a UN resolution.
The present map destroys that seven decades of efforts by declaring that Pakistan is interested in a territorial grab and it’s a Indo-Pak dispute wherein Kashmiri populace have no say.
In effect it can even be argued that this completely destroys its support for militancy in Pakistan making it a completely bilateral affair.
What is surprising is the fact that Pakis have were little to gain from it. They cant enter Junagarh or take away Srinagar. In fact we are at complete loss for what Imran Khan gained by doing this. May be it was the pressure from the boys, but then the ’boys’ understand this game better and this stupidity will have no place in their strategic war games.
The only other explanation can be that Imran was expected to deliver something within a year of J&K removal from special status in India. Under pressure to avoid becoming another Zulfikar Ali Bhutto – Imran tried to buy some time.
