Pakistanis usually laugh it away embarrassingly and admit that India has indeed made great strides in building an international image. The Pakistani diaspora is reputed to be hard working; of course nowhere near the brand of Indians, but their ability to integrate well within other societies is always suspect because of the image that goes along with them.

I remember the time when the role and image were the opposite. Pakistanis visiting India in the Sixties brought along various foreign goods and a unique water pumper called Rahber. They were immensely proud of their quality of life and looked down upon us Indians in socialist India.



Today, one can see Pakistani artistes wishing to settle here. If anything, they are fully aware that despite all its limitations, India aspires and works towards the betterment of its common citizens. There may be corruption, poverty, overruns of projects and too much bureaucracy, but at the end of the day the Indian citizen can legitimately aspire for a better life and that cuts across strata of society, farmer suicides notwithstanding. An Indian enjoys high international reputation. Worldwide, people speak of India’s century along with that of China. The old world hyphenation of India with Pakistan is now transformed to hyphenation with China and other emerging nations.

A Pakistani citizen may have to wait nine months or more for a visa to visit Hong Kong because being Pakistani is synonymous with being reasonably undesirable and alien to civilized society. How did this come to pass and why does that image persist? Is Pakistan doing anything as a nation to dilute that image? That would be worth examining because Pakistanis themselves would be interested to find out.

At the outset we need to go back to 1977 and the Zia mission. It was all about the planned retribution by the Pakistan Army against India, for the loss of its eastern segment (now Bangladesh). General Zia knew that to take on India he needed to do two things; one, go nuclear and two, exploit India’s ethnic, religious, caste and regional fault lines through a low cost, long term proxy war.

Pakistan went covertly nuclear in early 80s. On the second front, it started with Punjab and moved on to J&K before targeting other parts of India. Pakistan’s military establishment, not the Government, thinks it is still winning the low intensity proxy war that it commenced in the 80s and continues to support it. Zia had no qualms in radicalizing the Army because Radicalism in his vocabulary meant total support from the moneyed elements of the Middle East.



The Pakistani citizens need to know and so does the rest of the less-informed world that the tenuous hold that Islamic radicalism has over the world today can be squarely placed at the altar of Zia and his advisers of the ISI and the Army. It also attracted the much needed funding for Pakistan on the pretext of the Afghan refugees and the trans-national Islamic mercenaries. The Zia Plan continues to the day, followed by his successors. What it has succeeded in doing is to keep the ‘terror sponsor’ label closely affixed to Pakistan’s national persona.

A civil society instrumental in removing Ayub Khan from the presidency in 1968-69 through street power, today is virtually cowering and held to ransom by a brute military; one of the major achievements of the Pakistan Army. The common citizen is under fire from different directions; the radicals and the clergy along with the Army all combine to make life hellish. There is a vibrant media which feels intimidated; remember the Hamid Mir case. The ubiquitous face of the Pakistan Army is everywhere. It seems it never lost power ever.

