Varun Vuppala Responds

I just got a thoughtful response from a student at Amherst.

Mr. Ostrowski,

I’ve read Lew Rockwell Blog since I began following Ron Paul’s campaign. Being from India, I’ve been interested in your posts on Pakistan.

You talk about McCain’s plan to hold Pakistan together as a single country as a bad thing. India, sir, is proof that a multi-ethnic state is indeed possible. You’ve listed a section of the CIA factbook to suggest that force is the only thing that could bind people together.
This overlooks the 5000 year history of India, throughout which, thousands of ethnic groups have lived together in relative peace.
Other than the bloody 600 year Muslim occupation of India, India has been the peaceful home to Christians and Buddhists and Hindus, of different castes, skin colors, and languages, and it has stayed united. Even today, there are ancient communities of Jews and Zoroastrians in India. This is proof that multicultural societies are not doomed to fail.

What then of Pakistan? Why has it had a tougher time than India in the modern era? It is a result of imperialist national building on part of the British. The British envisioned a state per identity, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/92/India_Pakistan1947a.jpg
not one single viable nation in the bunch, but a board set for internal conflict unseen since the medieval Holy Roman Empire. As with Rwanda and Israel, the British set people against one another before they left, and profited from it- one of the first things India did was buy armaments and ships from Britain’s Military-Industrial complex.

Pakistan has failed where India has succeeded not because of the differences of its people but because of Government intervention. The government has not defended liberty or life or property. Thousands of Hindu and Buddhist temples have been destroyed. Thousands of Christian churches as well. Government collusion with one special interest over another is what sparks civil conflict, not the differences ethnic or religious.

What I believe you’re subtly suggesting is that Pakistan be split up, the way India was, into states for each identity group. The 5000-year history of India is important because it is a 5000-year history of property ownership. If you are a minority identity in a city, and that city becomes part of a majority identity-based state, your life and your property are no longer safe, as we have seen in the 1947 Partition of India.

I know the Lew Rockwell Blog often talks about the importance of life and property as the fundamental building blocks of society. In the interest of these fundamentals, Partition is not a good idea.

Sorry about the length, I do get excited talking about the sub- continent.

Varun Vuppala
UMass Amherst 2008

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8:16 am on December 28, 2007