Why My Father Hated India?, the son of assassinated Pakistani leader.

[JAYRAM]

By AATISH TASEER

Aatish Taseer, the son of an assassinated Pakistani leader, explains the history and hysteria behind a deadly relationship

Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."

My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

Mohandas Gandhi visits Muslim refugees in New Delhi as they prepare to depart to Pakistan on Sept. 22, 1947.

Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.

Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.

This shared experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between the two countries. In human terms, it meant that each of my parents, my father in Pakistan and my mother in India, grew up around symmetrically violent stories of uprooting and homelessness.

Rex USA.

Salman Taseer, governor of Pakistan's Punjab province, in May 2009. He was assassinated in January 2011.

But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.

In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination.

Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.

But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase.

Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.

Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani businesses were thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency abroad. Compared with starving, socialist India, they were on much surer ground. So what if India had democracy? It had brought nothing but drought and famine.

But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after independence evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam.

As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization, Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's utopia was reduced to ruin and insolvency.

The primary agent of this decline has been the Pakistani army. The beneficiary of vast amounts of American assistance and money—$11 billion since 9/11—the military has diverted a significant amount of these resources to arming itself against India. In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability but rather a backyard, which—once the Americans leave—might provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" against India.

In order to realize these objectives, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some—such as Laskhar-e-Tayyba's 2008 attack on Mumbai—actively supported.

The army's duplicity was exposed decisively this May, with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets.

This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country's wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge property holdings.

The reversal in the fortunes of the two countries—India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized utopia—is what explains the bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part—a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.

This rage is what makes it impossible to reduce Pakistan's obsession with India to matters of security or a land dispute in Kashmir. It can heal only when the wounds of 1947 are healed. And it should provoke no triumphalism in India, for behind the bluster and the bravado, there is arid pain and sadness.


—Mr. Taseer is the author of "Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands." His second novel, "Noon," will be published in the U.S. in September.



Why My Father Hated India - WSJ.com

 

[ashdoc]

A son in search of his father--

Aatish Taseer, son of assassinated Punjab Pakistan Governor Salman Taseer and Indian mother Tavleen Singh always had an uneasy relationship with his estranged father. His debut book, stranger to history was a journey that meshed the political with the personal

Salman Taseer, assassinated governor of Punjab province in Pakistan killed because of his liberal views on the blasphemy laws in that country had a connection with India.


Aatish Taseer, author and son of Indian journalist Tavleen Singh and Pakistani politician Salman Taseer

Salman Taseer's son Aatish Taseer, based in London and Delhi surfaced some years ago, with a book in search of his father. Aatish was born after his journalist mother Tavleen Singh had an affair with Salman Taseer though the relationship eventually ended.

Aatish's debut book, Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands holds several threads together, his relationship with his father and the complications of Indian-Pakistan parentage, the weight of history bearing down on those ties and the reaffirmation of the oft touted phrase: the personal is the political.

Affair

Aatish writes in a chapter called, 'Bhutto's Footprint.' "My parents met in March 1980, in Delhi. My father was in India promoting a biography he had written of his political mentor, the Pakistani leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. My mother, a young journalist with a Delhi newspaper, was sent to interview him.

'Which one of you is Salman Taseer?' she said, as she entered the room my father and his publisher were staying in at the Oberoi Hotel in Delhi.

Their affair began that evening. My father took my mother's number, they had dinner at a Chinese restaurant called the House of Ming, and for a little over a week, my father disappeared with my mother.

My parents met at a point in their lives when they became politically involved in countries that were experiencing political cataclysm...

My parents' affair lasted little more than a week, when my father left Delhi for Lahore, where he already had a wife and three small children. A month later, my mother discovered she was pregnant. The scandal of it was too great to assess.

My mother was from an old Sikh family, still carrying the pain of Partition. For her then, to become pregnant out of marriage by a visiting Pakistani was at the time, and still today, incalculable scandal. In a week when she was considering an abortion, my father called unexpectedly from the Club Marbella in Dubai. She told him what had happened...

My father asked what could be done to change her mind. She replied that they would have to at least pretend to be married, and over the course of their conversation, they came to a tenuous agreement to continue their relationship for as long as they could.

The months that followed were defined by secrecy. My parents met again in April, in Pakistan; they went to Dubai; they spent a summer in London, full of bright evenings and the bustle of people in pubs and open-air restaurants; and all the time, their relationship and my mother's pregnancy were kept from her parents and from my father's family in Pakistan.

It was this pact of secrecy that made their relationship possible, and it was from this period that one of the two objects I linked with my father as I grew up came into my mother's possession: a copy of his biography of Bhutto.

The inscription dated '17/5/80', read: 'With love and love, Salman Taseer.' The other was a browning silver frame with two pictures of him. In one he's holding me as a baby and in the other he's at a Mughal monument, dressed in white, wearing large seventies sunglasses."

Secrecy

Aatish even writes in a chapter called, 'Rupture' that, "A pact of secrecy had made my parents' relationship possible, but soon after they went to Dubai, leaving me with my grandparents in Delhi, this pact began to unravel. News of my birth was travelling. In Dubai, there was a false alarm.

My father was cooking dinner when his sister's husband walked up to him and said, 'How's Aatish?' My father dropped the pan he was holding and recovered himself only when he realised that his brother-in-law didn't in fact know of my existence, but was using my name not normally used to mean 'fire' in a banal sense to check the stove's fire.

Our past sometimes comes back to haunt us and so do the words we write. Aatish was with his father when Benazir Bhutto was killed in Pakistan. It is now eerie to read what he writes in the book about that murder. Aatish writes, "It's too awful,' my mother wept. I first saw her when I was with your father.

We were in Islamabad and he said, That's Benazir Butto. She was so young, so pretty. She had no business dying. Whatever her faults she didn't deserve to die like this. My mother had witnessed the death of the great Indian demagogues, Indira Gandhi and her son, Rajiv.

She understood demagoguery. She knew that in countries like ours, more so in Pakistan, where institutions are weak, where the state is threatened, these seemingly indestructible icons thrown up by the people bring a kind of solidity to the political landscape: they make it impossible to imagine the world without them..."

Aatish is Indian, his father Pakistani it is a cleave that only children from these relationships understand is so deep that to fill that chasm, even given all those clich ©s like love conquers all may be impossible.

In the book Aatish writes, "I didn't need to be Pakistani to understand what my father meant, only perhaps the degree to which he meant it. The death of the demagogue would demoralise the population. But in a country with few national leaders, removing Benazir made the very idea of the federation less viable..."

Aatish says in the book as he watched his father post Benazir's murder. "I felt a great sympathy as I watched the man I had judged so harshly, for not facing his past when it came to me, muse in the pain of history in this country. And maybe this was all that the gods had wished me to see, the grimace on my father's face, and for us, both in our own ways strangers to history, to be together on the night that Benazir Bhutto was killed."

Aatish's royal girlfriend

Aatish Taseer, 30-year-old son of the slain Pakistani politician Salman Taseer, went out for three years with a member of the British royal family but hopes they would marry were dashed four years ago.

Aatish, Salman's son from a brief relationship with the Indian journalist Tavleen Singh, upset his father by writing an autobiographical novel, Stranger to History: A Son's Journey through Islamic Lands. Reviewers said the book reflected the anguish of a son who felt betrayed by his father for abandoning his pregnant mother.

In 2006, Hello! magazine reported that the romance between Lady Gabriella Windsor, the daughter of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, and Aatish Taseer, which many had expected to culminate in wedding bells, had ended after the royal beauty reluctantly decided not to follow her boyfriend back to his home in India.

Somewhat unusually a spokesman for Princess Michael went on the record to state, "I can confirm that Gabriella and Aatish are no longer together, but the love and respect they share for each other has not diminished."

He emphasised, "They are not getting married. That's official. They are very young, they are just enjoying each other's company."

Some sources suggested that Princess Michael, by birth a German, did not want her daughter to marry an Indian but there was no evidence to back up this claim.

The couple, who are both writers, first met when Gabriella (known as "Ella" in short) was on a magazine internship in the US while completing her final year at the prestigious Brown University, Rhode Island. When she returned to London, Aatish followed and the couple became a regular sight on the British social scene.

"Aatish very much wanted her to go back with him to India," a close friend told the Daily Mail, "but she wants to stay in Britain and pursue her writing career here. So they have very sadly decided to go their separate ways."

Rumours that the couple were about to get engaged were given currency in 2005 by a report in the "Mandrake" gossip column of the Sunday Telegraph, which stated, "Prince and Princess Michael of Kent will announce that their elegant 23-year-old daughter is to marry Aatish early this year."

The paper quoted Aatish, a trainee reporter then with Time magazine, as saying, "I will be heading back to India to pursue my career.

The opportunities in media out there are excellent and I'm determined to give it a go. I've lived here in London and in New York, but Delhi is where I am from and where I want to be."

However, in an interview to a reputable German Sunday newspaper, Welt am Sonntag, Princess Michael categorically denied her daughter was about to get married.

"It is not true," she said. "Gabriella is so young and is not thinking about getting married. She is going first to Africa to write an article about guenons (monkeys) in the Kalahari. Why should she be sitting around in India with babies? I am very fond of her boyfriend. I would not be against a marriage even though I receive letters from many people who do not appreciate multicultural marriages."


People pay homage to Pakistan's former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto who was assassinated in 2007

It would have been hard for Aatish to have adjusted to his wife's royal background. But the reality is that she is royal only in a technical sense, being 31st in line to the throne. Her elder brother, Lord Frederick Windsor, 31, who was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took a 2:1 in classics, is 30th in line.

Meanwhile, Salman Taseer's brutal death may free his author son, Aatish, from writing about the father with whom he had, by his own admission, a difficult relationship.

While in the West it is all too common for children to write about celebrity parents in an excessively critical way, Pakistani and Indian society appears not to be ready for such public scrutiny. When Aatish wrote about the father-son encounter in the form of a thinly disguised novel, his father was not pleased.

Salman Taseer, who was on his third marriage and had other children, had ambitions and reacted badly, it seems, to his son's novel.

Some open-minded fathers might have congratulated their sons on the literary merit and honesty of such books. From all account and particularly that of Aatish, Salman Taseer was apparently furious. The son felt rebuffed.

Aatish wrote in the London Evening Standard about his father's opposition to his novel. "My first intimation of trouble was when my father, in part the subject of my memoir Stranger to History, re-entered Pakistani politics after a 15-year hiatus.

As the book was being typeset, he was sworn in as a caretaker minister in General Musharraf's Cabinet and then, with an ideological flexibility particular to Pakistan, he was Asif Ali Zardari's governor in Punjab."

Aatish continued, "As the book was going to print, he threatened to sue my Canadian publisher for referring to his union with my mother as 'a marriage'.

They were never married. They had a liaison soon after my mother, a journalist at the time, interviewed my father about his book on his political mentor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto; I was the result. 'How funny, darling,' a friend said. 'Your father considers it libellous to have been married to your mother!' "

Several women journalists become involved with men they interview. Some in London dine out for years afterwards on the strength of the men who loved them and left them. But perhaps Aatish was being na ve if he thought his father's political opponents would not throw the book at him.

"I must sadly confess, after my father's political opponents in Pakistan used the book to rubbish his Islamic credentials, to being an accidental accessory to attempted political parricide," Aatish recounted. "My father's reaction was silence, far more menacing than his threats to the Canadians for their delayed attempt at making an honest woman out of my mother."

Fatima Bhutto has written a gripping book about her father's assassination. Painful though it will be, Aatish will now in theory also be able to write a moving book, both as an observer and a participant, about the latest shocking drama in Pakistan.

http://www.mid-day.com/news/2011/ja...-Salman-Taseer-Tavleen-Singh-relationship.htm

 

[bose]

It baffles me how that women could sleep with an enemy and come out with THIS....

 

[Ray]

A balanced article.

One of the reason why the Pakistanis dislike India, inter alia many others, is because of the Mohajirs.

The Mohajirs, the refugees from India, were the rootless group, who went to the Muslim homeland, carved out of India.

Yet, the intellectuals, the educated, the bureaucrats, the judicial officers, the commercial brains, were all Mohajirs. The actual 'sons of the soil', the Punjabis, Baloch, Frontier men were either feudal lords or were the bonded labour and the vast majority were uneducated or tin jamat pass.

Therefore, the governance of Pakistan was in the hands of the Mohajirs.

To ensure their (Mohajir) identity became relevant, they ensured Urdu (their language) became the national language (since it was the language of the educated Muslim and because it got the label that it was a 'Muslim' language). Other languages were common for both the Muslims and Hindus of that community.

Then, to ensure that sub nationalism i.e. community identity is relegated in prominence (so that the Mohajirs are not identified in the small motley groups that they were, being from different parts of India, the held Islam as the national totem. That obviously, dissolved the sub national fervour and all were on the same footing.

Islam, as a totem, worked. None could object to the importance given to the religion or it would be blasphemous, as also given that religion was the raison d'etre for Pakistan, it worked well. And since the Partition was on religion, it encourage the anti Hindu (read anti India) sentiment that continues till today.

 

[Ray]

It baffles me how that women could sleep with an enemy and come out with THIS....

Love is blind and lovers cannot see!

 

[Blackwater]

It baffles me how that women could sleep with an enemy and come out with THIS....

Tharki women.................tharak has no boundries

 

[Ray]

OK, chaps, these threads are becoming threads that are veering off from the main issues.

Can we return to the actuals and have some very well thought out posts?

Thank you.

 

[Rahul Singh]

"Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."

I always wondered if elite pakistanis believe they are infinite times more intelligent than regular pakistanis or they simply know that Regular pakistanis are bigger idiots than they are.

 

[hit&run]

A must watch video.
Pakistanis themselves have defeated Jinnah and his ideology.

 

[tarunraju]

You'll never see our politicians, not even right-wingers like Balasaheb, use such a tone on Pakistan. I think it's not because it's not politically-feasible for them to spit venom on Pakistan, but because we are way out of Pakistan's league.

 

[Daredevil]

Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani businesses were thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency abroad. Compared with starving, socialist India, they were on much surer ground. So what if India had democracy? It had brought nothing but drought and famine.

Overall, a very balanced article. Though, I don't agree with above statement that Pakistan had better roads, better cars etc as they were few in number and enjoyed by a miniscule number of Pakistanis - Pakistani elite. Pakistan took care of the media by projecting this as the whole truth about Pakistan and people have lapped it up naively. They have done a good job of covering up the not so developed vast majority of Pakistan.

The fundamentals of the Pakistan were always weak from the beginning and that is the reason why it is floundering and unraveling itself on all fronts - religious intolerance, education, economy, feudalism etc. And the fundamental pillars of formation of Pakistan - a place for sub-continent muslims against Hindu oppression and anti-India hate are also failing or have already failed. Right from the beginning something was wrong with this place including the founder of the country - Jinnah.

 

[sob]

hit&run,
Thanks for sharing this video with us. Very informative. If there were more thinkers like the gentleman than I am sure Pakistan would have turned out a much better nation state.

The faul lines in a country run very deep be it India or Pakistan but the difference between the two countries is that one tried to cover the fault lines while the other is still harping on it. 63 years later Mohajirs are still a issue while in India this has ceased to be am issue a long time back.

 

[ejazr]

There is one mistake that has to be pointed out by Aatish Taseer where he mentions the idea of Pakistan as sourced from Allama Iqbal. This is incorrect, but the Pakistani propaganda has worked so much in overdrive that most people don't even investigate this and accept this as fact

"Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947."
Again incorrect.

Keeping in mind that Iqbal died in 1937 before even the Pakistan declaration and at the time when Jinnah's muslim league and Indian National Congress were both negotiating on sharing power without any sepratists agendas at all.

In his 1930 speech, Iqbal clearly states a case of a muslim majority state WITHIN the Indian union. Keep in mind that Balochistan and NWFP was not a seperate province. Sindh was part of Bombay. So the only muslim majority provinces were Bengal and Punjab which had a razor thin majority of 52 to 53%. What he mentioned in his 1930 speech was a redistribution of provinces WITHIN the Indian union so that there are atleast some wholly muslim majority provinces just like there are wholly Hindu majority provinces in UP, CP or Madras e.t.c.

The Pakistan scheme was actually the idea of a student in UK- and this is important because he actually gave the name Pakistan and also clearly mentioned the creation of seperate states - Chaudry Rahmat Ali. He along with Muhamed Ali Jinnah are the fundamental founders of Pakistan.

When Iqbal's 1930 speech was portrayed in some papers including in the UK as being an advocation of the Pakistan scheme, Iqbal promptly replied that Pakistan is not being advocated by him and his scheme is to have redistribution of provinces WITHIN the Indian union.

The letter is

Dr. Sir Mohd Iqbal, M.A., Ph.D. Barrister-at-Law

Lahore 4 March 1934

My Dear Mr. Thompson,

I have just received your review of my book. It is excellent and I am grateful to you for the very kind things you have said of me. But you have made one mistake which I hasten to point as I consider it rather serious. You call me a protagonist of the scheme called "Pakistan". Now Pakistan is not my scheme. The one that I suggested in my address is the creation of a Muslim Province – i.e; a province having an overwhelming population of Muslims in the North-West of India. This new province will be, according to my scheme, a part of the proposed Indian Federation. Pakistan scheme proposes a separate federation of Muslim Provinces directly related to England as a separate dominion. This scheme originated in Cambridge. The authors of this scheme believe that we Muslim Round Tablers have sacrificed the Muslim nation on the altar of Hindu or the so called Indian Nationalism.

Yours Sincerely,

Mohammed Iqbal

The Cambridge scheme was basically initiated by Chaudry Rahmat Ali.

For those interested they can read the 1930 speech in full here Presidential Address, annual session of the All-India Muslim League, Allahabad, December 1930, by Sir Muhammad Iqbal

In fact, there is ample evidence that creation of Pakistan was mostly against what he advocated. An excerpt from his speech is enough to show how Jinnah leading the separate entity of Pakistan and then using troops to invade India soon after was anti-thetical to what Iqbal had mentioned in 1930 and envisioned the future of North West INDIAN Muslims

[[7e]] I have no doubt that if a Federal Government is established, Muslim federal States will willingly agree, for purposes of India's defence, to the creation of neutral Indian military and naval forces. Such a neutral military force for the defence of India was a reality in the days of Mughal rule. Indeed in the time of Akbar the Indian frontier was, on the whole, defended by armies officered by Hindu generals. I am perfectly sure that the scheme for a neutral Indian army, based on a federated India, will intensify Muslim patriotic feeling, and finally set at rest the suspicion, if any, of Indian Muslims joining Muslims from beyond the frontier in the event of an invasion.

 

[Iamanidiot]

no one thought Pakistan as an independent state would materialize even until 1945.The muslim Feudals used it only as a bargaining tool

 

[Yusuf]

Thanks for that Ejaz. Amazing how history is doctored by Pakistanis and facts twisted.

 

[thakur_ritesh]

It baffles me how that women could sleep with an enemy and come out with THIS....

give it to the woman.

enemy yeah, but only politically, between the countries, what harm would have salman taseer caused tavleen singh personally for her to brand him her enemy or vice versa? ever attended some pakistani delegation coming over, and the parties that follow, you would end up being confused who is an indian and who is not? you wont be able to make it from the spoken english until urdu is spoken or from the dress code, take another example, women from there are bigger guzzlers than most you would find in the party circle here, imagine that from a conservative country they come from where alcohol is considered haram, and i am not even talking about what follows and there are quite a few aatish on this side and the other if i were to use aatish as a metaphor. enemy, you would wonder but only on papers, and in the media.

anyways, why i say give it to the woman, is because a lot of people have flings which last for weeks, months, at times just one night stands and the woman ends up getting pregnant but the moment the couple or the woman gets to know she is pregnant, the very first reaction is to abort the foetus.

at least she was not like those, its very easy to take high moral grounds and make talk claims that most of us as humans tend to do but most fall weak on knees when confronted with reality as it strikes on your face, and this hard, imagine an unmarried lady giving birth to a child and in a society like india, and here we are not even talking about 2000s but 1980s!

 

[Archer]

give it to the woman.

give it to the sikh woman. if you read aatish taseers articles, its quite clear salman taseer, despite his accidental deification & so called martyrdom, was a bigot through and through. he had an extremely bigoted view of hindus and sikhs ("kaffirs" in one article probably no longer available on the net, but which was available through google cache). he came to india, had his fun with a woman of an enemy country and an "inferior culture" and tried to play the gentleman as long as it was not too inconvenient for him. tavleen singh showed remarkable spine and guts not to mention character, while this salman taseer did what most elite pakistanis do when faced with their personal foibles - run. whether it be benazir talking high and mighty and then supporting the kashmir jihad and being more rabid than the most obscurantist mullah, or salman taseer mocking india and the hated hindus at every turn, its amazing how these rich elite pakistanis think they can play both sides of the hunt and not face any trouble. at the end of the day, benazir was killed by the very scum she once supported in one form or the other, and salman taseer, self appointed defender of pakistani islam, was killed by those who thought they were better defenders of islam than he was. i for one, have no tears shed, at the stuff that is happening in pakistan today. these elite bigots like taseer were ok with terrorism as long as it killed non muslims across the border, and even sneered at indian muslims as being weak, and effiminate for daring to live peacefully with their non muslim brethren. they lived lives of avarice, total hypocrisy, were thoroughly corrupt to the core and plundered wealth wherever they could (not too dissimilar to some elite indians as well in that aspect), and today, they are running scared from the very bearded fanatics whom they supported. because these latter guys have figured out that, with the gun, comes power and they might as well do what they want. best of luck to you aatish, you'll be a far better human being than the man who was too much of a coward to even accept the responsibility of being the father.

 

[pankaj nema]

Salman Taseer's this Tweet about how India shud stick to Bollywood and NOT have a space program did not receive much attention in India His death , in fact HID this comment

His death was mourned by many stupid " AMAN KI asha type brigade" in India

Salman taseer was shot like a dog

He was TOO liberal for Pakistanis and his death was celebrated like a war victory

If such over liberals hate India so much then the hate of the bearded rabid fanatics who comprise 99 % of pakistani population ; towards India can well be imagined

 

[pankaj nema]

Why Pakistanis hate India need not be told here because there are so many reasons

1 Kashmir , 2 1965 and 1971 The Martial race theory was junked

3 Technological backwardness , they cant make anything MORE THAN Cotton textiles

4 Economic BEGGARY ;Pakistanis have made begging a FINE ART
Pakistanis BEG with a GUN pointed to their OWN heads

In fact in the enemy forum YOUNG Pakistanis OPENLY say that they HATE India . Maybe Man mohan SIngh and Barkha Dutt should read it

Pakistanis were infact dreaming that HINDU India cant fight and would fall in their lap

They were dreaming rather HALLUCINATING of
Putting the "Green Flag on Red fort "

 

[thakur_ritesh]

give it to the sikh woman. if you read aatish taseers articles, its quite clear salman taseer, despite his accidental deification & so called martyrdom, was a bigot through and through. he had an extremely bigoted view of hindus and sikhs ("kaffirs" in one article probably no longer available on the net, but which was available through google cache). he came to india, had his fun with a woman of an enemy country and an "inferior culture" and tried to play the gentleman as long as it was not too inconvenient for him. tavleen singh showed remarkable spine and guts not to mention character, while this salman taseer did what most elite pakistanis do when faced with their personal foibles - run. whether it be benazir talking high and mighty and then supporting the kashmir jihad and being more rabid than the most obscurantist mullah, or salman taseer mocking india and the hated hindus at every turn, its amazing how these rich elite pakistanis think they can play both sides of the hunt and not face any trouble. at the end of the day, benazir was killed by the very scum she once supported in one form or the other, and salman taseer, self appointed defender of pakistani islam, was killed by those who thought they were better defenders of islam than he was. i for one, have no tears shed, at the stuff that is happening in pakistan today. these elite bigots like taseer were ok with terrorism as long as it killed non muslims across the border, and even sneered at indian muslims as being weak, and effiminate for daring to live peacefully with their non muslim brethren. they lived lives of avarice, total hypocrisy, were thoroughly corrupt to the core and plundered wealth wherever they could (not too dissimilar to some elite indians as well in that aspect), and today, they are running scared from the very bearded fanatics whom they supported. because these latter guys have figured out that, with the gun, comes power and they might as well do what they want. best of luck to you aatish, you'll be a far better human being than the man who was too much of a coward to even accept the responsibility of being the father.

did i sound anywhere defending salman taseer? if at all it came like that, no such intention was there.

coming to the character that salman taseer was, he was well known for his tongue in cheek comments and no, that love lost was not just for us, the indians or india, but across the board, pakistanis included. most people have a habit of mocking others, some do it on the face, others on the back, so what if he was doing it on the face.

do i expect anything better from a pakistani? no, a definite no. from day one people who have been bred on hatred will do no better, lest i expect them to. i am very sure a lot of these who come across as very friendly to india on the face would be extremely hostile in the closed doors and conspiring at time, may be few of them pretty much work as agents to their agencies, who knows.

and no its not just a pakistani elite thing, you bet the indian elite are no better and why should i just make it a class thing, any class and any section where people have a more normal contact, the natural instincts of those people tend to take over and people get over with the regional disputes, arent there pakistanis and indians marrying each other overseas knowing fully well the hostilities that exist and still have babies and successful lasting marriages and we within our own society where no such concept of enemy exists are today faced with a situation where there are more divorce reported than ever before or with an ever increasing rapes.

and yes all the accolades to aatish, he has all the courage in the world to openly talk about his mother, the relationship his mother had with his father and how he was to make it into this world, there are fewer more brave men than him, and that too talk in a society where even today a female is supposed to be some sati savitri, where female foeticide and things like khap are as much a part of our tradition as ever and if you check the first few replies till the time ray sir corrected the trend, people where more interested in the character that tavleen singh is than the content which was written in the first post posted, and this coming from a well educated class, imagine the character assassination from not so well educated lots.