Thursday, August 25, 2016

Three Interlinked Problematics

by Tarek Heggy
1] Identity : On August 13, 19 47 , the Muslim Indian who went to bed resolved to remain in India woke up on August 14, 19 47 still an Indian. But Muslim Indians who chose to leave India and join the new entity, Pakistan , slept as Indians and woke up the next morning having dropped the word Indian from their name and replaced it with a new appellation derived from the word ‘ Pakistan '.
However, given that a new identity cannot be acquired overnight, the truth is that Muslim Indians who decided not to remain Indian chose to discard the Indian component of their identity and retain only the Muslim – thereby falling victim to an acute identity crisis. For they had decided to define their identity in terms of only one of its constituent elements: the religious.