COMMENTARY / World

Pakistan's creation — a mistake?

It's still worth asking if the subcontinent's Hindus and Muslims would have been better off had India never been partitioned

A visitor looks at photographs and newspaper clippings at the Partition Museum in Amritsar, India. On both sides of the border that divided the subcontinent 70 years ago during the partition that took place in August 1947, historians are racing to record the accounts of the last living witnesses to one of the largest and deadliest human migrations of all time. | AFP-JIJI

By Gwynne Dyer

Aug 2, 2017

LONDON –

It was never my plan to tell Pakistanis their country had been a mistake. I was 19 years old at the time, in Pakistan for the summer with 40 other young Canadian university students on a trip to foster international understanding. I had already realized that this was a completely pointless exercise, but it was a free trip and I had never been out of North America before.

I also already knew that sticking up handbills in Lahore announcing a public debate in which the visitors would argue that the creation of Pakistan had been a bad idea would be a very bad idea, but nobody asked my opinion.

So there were rent-a-crowd riots in Lahore, and the military dictator of the time had us all arrested and shipped up to a boys' school in Abbotabad, empty for the summer, until they could find enough seats on Pakistan International Airlines to expel us all. (The same town was also, much later, the last refuge of Osama bin Laden, but I digress.)