On practical grounds too, we should feel a sense of relief that India is not one gigantic, unwieldy country spreading across the entire peninsula. The soft Indian state has not been able to deal successfully either with the Naga insurrection in sixty years or with the Naxalite movement in forty years. And one is not even talking about Kashmir. Can you imagine dealing with Baluchi, Waziri and Pashtun revolts and mini-wars? It is best that Islamabad deals with these headaches. Delhi has enough on its plate!

Recent scholarship (eg, Sarila and Dasgupta) leads us to believe that Pakistan was consciously created by our erstwhile Anglo-Saxon rulers in the pursuit of their strategic self-interest in a calm, unemotional manner. Churchill and Wavell, Attlee and Mountbatten need to be congratulated on their far-sighted strategic achievement. The partition of India and the creation of Pakistan have served the Anglo-American alliance very well. In the fifties and sixties Pakistan was a member of SEATO and CENTO and provided bases for U2 planes. In the seventies, Pakistan helped Nixon and Kissinger reach out to China. In September 1970, a brigade of the Pakistani army (led by a young general named Zia ul Huq) helped Jordan (an Anglo-American client state) suppress and expel the PLO. Many may not know that the expression ‘Black September’ refers to this event. In the eighties, Pakistan supported the US in its proxy war with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. And post-9/11 Musharaf has tried to be as faithful an ally of the US as he possibly can. It is inconceivable that an undivided India would have been so useful to London and Washington, and for that matter neither is the present Republic of India ever likely to be. Ironically, today we are the beneficiaries of the British decision to partition India and we are in a position to leverage this to our advantage.

... contd.