Open War

Electoral communications in English and which appealed specifically to Christian solidarity ought to feature the bogeymen of Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi, but each of those is more ambivalent towards Muslims, and towards the most hardline Islamists at that, be that Netanyahu towards the Gulf despots, or Modi towards the Taliban.

Just as Modi will not extradite Sheikh Hasina, the convicted war criminal and aunt of the fugitive Tulip Siddiq MP, so he has used the Taliban to take colonial possession of Afghanistan, the better to squeeze Pakistan. The Durand Line is as meaningless as the Sykes-Picot Line. The P in Pakistan is Punjab, the a is Afghania, the k is Kashmir, the i was added "for ease of pronunciation" (in other words, to sound more Urdu and less Punjabi), the s is Sindh, and the tan is Balochistan. But of those, only Sindh has ever been wholly in Pakistan. Part of Bolchistan is in Afghanistan, while rather more of it is in Iran.

And Afghania is the Pashtun homeland. Most of its area is in Afghanistan, but there remain two and a half times as many Pashtuns in Pakistan, which does not see itself as meddling in Afghanistan. Rather, Pakistan sees its present territory as whatever could be won and held in 1947. Leaving enormous unfinished business in Kashmir, in Punjab, in Balochistan, and in Afghania. It is fundamental to Pakistan that Amritsar, Srinagar, Zahedan and Kandahar and are all naturally and rightfully Pakistani cities. To get the whole of Afghania, then Pakistan would take the whole of Afghanistan. And to get the whole of Afghania, then the Taliban would take the whole of the country where they were ṭālibān, Pakistan. But that would bring its own complications with India. "Keep a bit of India," said Winston Churchill. But it was the Attlee Government that did it. That Government's foreign policy record was rarely as admirable as its record in domestic policy.

The Muslim League initially opposed independence altogether, and it was duly cultivated by the same British authorities that had directly created the Muslim Brotherhood in order to oppose Egyptian independence. The Brotherhood has enjoyed good Foreign Office contacts ever since, and for most of the period since 1947 Britain has at least broadly sided with Pakistan. After all, the British military top brass had enthusiastically supported the creation of Pakistan as a seat for British military bases, and not least for new airbases, in strategically the most important part of the Subcontinent, right where the Great Game had been played out in the nineteenth century.

Pakistan was the first state ever to have been founded specifically for the sake of Islam, and it was hoped that it would become the focus of global Muslim allegiance and aspiration, all the while within the British Commonwealth and retaining the British monarch as Head of State. Pakistan retained the monarchy longer than India, so that, in her time, the late Queen was Queen of Pakistan, having sworn at her Coronation to govern its people (and, indeed, those of apartheid South Africa) "according to their respective laws and customs".

The scholars at Deoband had opposed Partition, arguing that the idea of a "Muslim nation" in India was contrary to the universal mission of Islam. But Partition severed the Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan from the influence of Deoband itself, making them prey to the Pakistani Army in its role of reinforcing the most hardline definition of the country's Islamic identity in order to keep the feud with India going, and thus consolidate the power of the Army. That suited the Americans in the Afghanistan of the 1980s and 1990s, just as it had suited the British in earlier times, and just as it had suited them both when the Thatcher Government and the Reagan Administration had enthusiastically supported the regime of General Zia-ul-Haq.

Darul Uloom Deoband, though, is still there, surrounded by Hindus. Nearly 80 years after Partition, the "Muslim nation" is divided almost equally among three countries. Bengal was not even mentioned in the acronym that gave rise to the name of Pakistan, but East Bengal had to be included initially on the balance of populations. No one ever expected all of India's Muslims to move to Pakistan. Indeed, that would have been impossible to manage. But neither of those things was at all germane to Britain's support for its creation.