By Vivek Katuj

Tilak Devasher’s Pakistan: Courting the Abyss is a comprehensive and clinical survey of a deeply troubled country which has become a centre of extremist ideologies and terrorist violence; consequently, a threat to many of its own nationals as also to countries in its neighbourhood and beyond. Devasher competently examines the causes for Pakistan’s evolution along this trajectory as well as the failure of its political process to develop firm democratic roots and its economy remaining stunted.

The foundations of Pakistan are embedded in the Muslim elite’s despondency at the loss of political power to the British and its failure to accept democracy as the future system for a united and Independent India. That led to separatist tendencies which, after the establishment of the Muslim League in 1906, took concrete shape in the demand for separate electorates. Muslim separatism was encouraged by the British as part of their policy of “divide and rule”. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, once an ambassador of Hindu Muslim unity and later the Muslim Quaid-e-Azam took this separatism to its culmination in the Partition of India. Devasher navigates events and processes of the creation of Pakistan and shows how they continue to cast a shadow on the country. Read more

Source: Asian Age