shiv wrote:Is there a possibility that the 190 million illiterate "masses" of Pakistan will lynch these people if they start telling the truth about Pakistan? Is this simply a way of postponing the revelation of facts? Or are they simply trying to make themselves feel better by lying to themselves? One possibility is that the TV stations are fully under army control - i.e they will not chirp one word that says Pakistan is weak in any sense compared with India - because the army will be the first entity that will have to answer questions if the beepuls of Bakistan start hearing that they are not as powerful as they claim. What gives?
Making sense of Pakistan is not difficult. IMHO, it is all of the above plus the following. BTW, I am not stating anything that you or other forummers do not know. I am simply re-stating facts.
It all boils down to the decision to secede from India on the basis of religion. Their notions of nationhood, sovereignty, identity (at least at one level though there is great confusion at another level), ideology, geography et al come from 'Islam' without which Pakistan, as a piece of real-estate, would not exist today. That was the raison d'etre for the British to carve out this piece of real-estate and call it a nation, that was what sustained the US interests etc. Jinnah & Co invested a great deal in Islamic symbolism. The Muslim League even demanded that the whole of India be handed over to them when the Crown ceased its presence in British India because they were the legal successors to the Mughals from whom the British acquired India. ZA Bhutto claimed the Kohinoor on this basis. Such fake intellectual and political arguments have been invented to sustain the myth of Islamic claims on India. Politicians like Jinnah, Liaquat Ali, Suhrawardy, ZA Bhutto et al as well as Islamists like Mohammed Iqbal, Madani and above all Mawdudi participated in this spurious dissembling.
Of course, there were other interests too such as land-holders, those motivated by a quick rise in their stature in a small Muslim country rather than a large secular India etc which too played its part but they invariably played the Islam card nevertheless. Clumping all Muslims under one group for 'communal purposes to achieve a separate nationhood' hid within itself the unbridgeable faultlines and fissures but for the time being they were given a short shrift. This facade collapsed soon after Independence, which is a different story. Soon fighting erupted between emigrees from India and the local, native population, followed by demands to declare Ahmedis as non-Muslims, then Shi'a as non-Muslims and now anyone other than a Sunni Deobandi/Wahhabi as a non-Muslim.
So, the staple diet was Islam and naturally India became the 'other', and to strengthen and perpetuate this religious basis for its own existence among its own masses, the 'other' was conveniently characterized as 'Hindu' by the Pakistani leaders. If the first part of the project was to extoll the non-existent hold of Islam over Hindu India, the second part was to disseminate the 'evils' of Hindu India to its own masses. Thus, 'tall, fair, martial-race' Pakistanis were juxtaposed to 'short, dark, rice and wheat eating' Hindu Indians, the 1:10 ration between a Pakistani Muslim soldier and his Indian Hindu counterpart (a ratio that Ms. Benazir Bhutto even raised to 1:100), derogatory references to Hindu practices and places of worship, how Pakistanis speak better English or how they have better infrastructure, how the SUPARCO engineers relocated the orbit of a satellite in GSO which India would have struggled with, how Pakistani musicians are far better than their Hindu Indian counterparts, how Pakistan was ahead of India in economy or aerospace engineering etc.
Until the 90s, the interaction among the peoples of India & Pakistan was low. With explosive inter-communication these days, Pakistan is struck with a cognitive dissonance that only top leaders of Pakistan were privy to in earlier times. The human tendency is always to eliminate the dissonance. Now, Pakistan cannot resort to drum-beating its own achievements to counter India because there is nothing in their kitty. Of course, they fire a borrowed Hatf or Ra'ad every time the dissonance reaches an unbearable level. Or, they decide to resume their Pakistan Day parade and invite Xi Jinping etc. The other way to reduce dissonance is to be contemptuous of and to diss Indian achievements. Thus, the internal harmonious balance is re-established and everything is blissful all over again until another event rocks this feigned state of Nirvana.
The gap between the normal and dissonant cognitive state is also called by Pakistanis as 'Honour & Dignity'.
The 21 other newly promoted major generals are: Nadeem Zaki Manj, Shaheen Mazher Mehmood, Kamran Ali, Muhammad Aamer, Shahid Pervaiz, Hafeez ur Rahman, Amjad Ahmad 
