Proud to be a Pakistani?

It has been almost 56 years but India and Pakistan have not yet overcome their hatred against each other which has been fuelled by two things, mainly the Kashmir issue & secondly by the stories of butchery and loss of Muslim lives at the time of the partition which our parents and grandparents have been telling us.

Being a Pakistani, hating India and wanting to destroy India and all Hindus come natural to us. It is a national pastime to sit in the living room with some friends and criticise the riots in India where lots of Muslims are butchered. In our conflict with India over Kashmir, Pakistan’s side of the story is that we want justice for the people of Kashmir, and we want the people of Kashmir to decide their future for themselves, our point being that the Muslims in Kashmir are living in unsafe and unjust conditions. India’s claim is that Pakistan supports terrorist groups in their deadly incursions across the border in the “occupied” Kashmir. I do not know how much truth there is in this claim but that is a fact that all the radical Islamic groups known to us as ‘Mujahideen’, who find pride in taking the blame for countless massacres of Hindu civilians in Kashmir, are trained and based in Pakistan where they have originated.

Pakistani ministers and generals, who are the men of utmost power in Pakistan, claim that Pakistan wants peace in the region, but they do not let an opportunity get away to also boast that if India shows aggression, Pakistan will answer it with even more aggression, and ‘Pakistan knows how to defend its borders’, and ‘Pakistan is not Iraq, and we know how to fight the invaders’ and stuff like that. Someone should ask them that regardless of Pakistan’s ability to fight off India and our so called great achievement of being a nuclear power; does Pakistan match India in other, a bit positive aspects? Does Pakistan have educational institutes like IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) and IIM (Indian Institute of Management) where the quality of education matches the best universities of the western world and where it is said that getting admission in IIT Madras or Kanpur is harder than getting admission in Stanford, Harvard or MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)? Does Pakistan match the software exports of India? Does our state bank hold more than $75 billion as foreign exchange reserves? Does Pakistan enjoy as much foreign investment and confidence as India? Do the most successful businesses in the world invest in Pakistan as they invest in India? Will Bill Gates ever pay a visit to our Haiderabad as he did in the Indian state of Hyderabad and met with its chief minister and invested huge sums of money in their Software industry?

Our leaders do not even seem to be interested in educating the people of Pakistan. In our government schools, teaching English alphabets ABC starts from the 6th grade, what can we expect from such a system? Where there is a subject called Pakistan studies, the most of which revolves around what atrocities Hindus and Sikhs committed to Muslims at the time of the partition and how unfairly Lord Mount Batten divided the subcontinent. Our leaders sitting in their big houses, driving their big cars, surrounded by body guards, partying at their farm houses do not seem to bother as to what the future holds for overly ambitious students like myself who are made to stand at the end of the line at every job opportunity around the world because of the known educational standards in Pakistan and the green colour of our passports.

It has been a long time since I stopped caring about what happens in Kashmir and paying any attention to all those mass emails which are sent to me with grizzly pictures of corpses in Kashmir and Palestine and which say in the end that if I am a true Muslim I will forward this email to at least 10 other people. I simply delete all those emails. I did not take sides in the war on Iraq. I feel sorry for a dead Iraqi soldier as much as I feel sorry for a dead American or British soldier. Because firstly, I am not Iraqi and secondly, I am too concerned about me and my future and the future of millions of other Pakistani students who can only dream of a career as promising as that of an American or a British student or even an Indian student, to be paying attention to whoever wins the war in Iraq. We should try to follow India, not regarding the missiles and weapons but regarding economic growth, health and education. If enemies like Britain and France who fought for centuries can become friends and trade partners, so can we.


I want to see my fellow Pakistanis getting jobs, supporting their families better, educating their children and ensuring a bright future for them. I want to see a branch of HSBC, a McDonald’s, a school, a university, a Gucci outlet, and a Ferrari showroom in my village and I want the sons of our “Mazaras”, whose fathers and forefather had served my father and forefather, to drive a Mercedes or to win the Wimbledon or the PGA tour, or to get a Nobel prize.

I think the day that we stop using Islamic fanaticism to hinder our country’s progress and development, the day that we forget that we have a right on the Indian part of the Kashmir as well and the day a student like me, a teacher, a scientist, an economist, an educationalist, a banker or a scholar can have a chance of getting elected by the same people who only elect candidates from their “Biradari”, and ruling Pakistan, that is the day when I will be literally “Proud to be a Pakistani”.