When General Zia-ul Haq was asked about the reason behind Pakistan cultivating hostility towards India as its premier state policy, he said that Egypt and Turkey would remain Egypt and Turkey even without being aggressively Islamic, but Pakistan, without being aggressively Muslim, will be swamped by the all-enveloping embrace of India. What he implied was that partition could hardly erase the essence of India from the newly founded Pakistan, rubbish the preposterous ‘two nation’ theory of Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Since then, Pakistan has been groping for an identity independent of India for almost eight decades, but only in vain. Instead, Pakistan’s identity has increasingly been hyphenated with India, with its state machinery’s tomfoolery formulating an India-centric foreign policy fixated on warmongering and terror sponsoring. Wasting its energy and resources on ‘bleeding the neighbour by a thousand cuts’ daydreaming, Pakistan, after eighty years of its creation, has ended up being a fiefdom of the men in uniform groveling to the big powers for generosity as well as protection from India.
As Pakistani state machinery was seized by the military in 1958 following political turbulence of the initial years, it attempted to feed on ‘Indophobia’ which would integrate the military with the state identity as its savior and would legitimize its dominance on state machinery. Eminent scholar of South Asian security Stephen Cohen articulates in his book Idea of Pakistan that when Pakistan’s founders expected the idea of Pakistan to shape the state of Pakistan, a military bureaucracy imposed its own vision of a Pakistani nation and indulged in axiomatic distrust of India. Pakistani state machinery always attempted to hit India at the, to its consideration, most opportune moment, only to come a cropper, be it in October 1947, the Kashmir invasion, when the newly installed government in Delhi was coping with the partition debris, or in 1965 when General Ayub Khan ventured to wrest Kashmir from exhausted India post 1962 defeat. The 1971 war jolted Pakistan to its core, mortifying its foundational claim of ‘state for South Asian Muslims’, while the 1999 Kargil misadventure exposed the helpless surrender of an elected government to its military bosses over deals with India, but also underlined India’s preparedness for both peace and war to General Musharraf and his team. However, these cringe-worthy experiences only turned the military administrators more obstinate, indulging in vacuous determination not to give up their anti-India mission. Such an unconscionable attitude not only pushed bilateral relations to implacability but also triggered diabolical schemes sponsoring both terrorism inside India and founding anti-India power centers in India’s neighborhood. Such an inane mission only created an opportunity for big powers like China to use Pakistan as a proxy against India, turning it into its weapon market and a client state.
However, had Pakistan not opted for an anti-India policy since the dawn of its creation, the post-colonial history of South Asia would have been different. Instead of attempting to disown its ‘Indianness’, Pakistan could have reaped the benefits of nurturing it, creating a positive ambiance that would promote bilateral relations with India. Treating partition as a somber episode in history, if the Pakistani state had harped on cross-border cultural and literary affinities at the outset (Bollywood movies remain popular in Pakistan), the future Pakistani state would not have been so myopic about the positive outcomes of stable, friendly relations with a neighbor.
The most important missing aspect of the whole affair is the unawareness of the immense loss of economic opportunity, and here the bilateral relations between China and its East Asian neighbors deserve special mention. China did not allow territorial disputes with its East Asian neighbors to get in the way of maximizing bilateral economic opportunities. Even the historical animosity with Japan did not hinder the promotion of prosperous economic relations with China. Unfortunately, the rulers of Pakistan have prioritized the reverse vis-à-vis India. Had they understood the benefit of doing business with the largest economy in their neighbourhood it might have saved Pakistan from begging at the IMF doorstep. In fact, India granted most favoured nation status to Pakistan in 1996, a World Trade Organization rule that ensures a country treats all its trading partners equally with respect to tariffs and trade concessions. However, trade never took off fully amid frosty bilateral relations, and India revoked the status in 2019 following a suicide bombing in Pulwama in Kashmir. Lately, there has been a growing realization in Pakistan about the benefits of doing business with India, as evidenced by the country’s Finance Minister Ishaq Dar acknowledging in 2024 that his government was mulling it over. This realization emanated from the fact that the business class Dar’s party Muslim League (Nawaz) represented has always favoured normalizing trade ties with a large and growing India. However, the anti-India factions within and outside the Pak state machinery have understandably been against any such closeness with India. The occasional terror attacks, with support from the state apparatus, on India are conducted to nip such initiatives in the bud. This facile refusal by the state machinery to harness economic relations with India not only ruins Pakistan’s economy but shatters any hope for the construction of a robust South Asian regional economic network. When China-ASEAN trade crossed the $1 trillion milestone in 2025, India’s trade with South Asian neighbors under the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) framework recorded a mere $29.9 billion during FY 2025–26.
Pakistan is considered the main impediment to the revival of SAARC, and quite correctly so, because of its myopic vision towards India, creating an implacable situation. The only way to come out of this stalemate is an emphasis on the positive aspects of bilateral relations and a genuine initiative in this regard from Pakistan. From the Simla Accord to the Lahore Declaration, India has exhibited its seriousness about improving relations, only to be disappointed. Pakistan seriously needs to take training not in weapons technology but in policy formulation from China on when and how to prioritize what is best suited for the nation’s prosperity, not vested interests.
