What country has the most unused potential?
What’s the worst thing you’ve seen a server do?
I know you already have an unparalleled knowledge of the gears of industry that keep the world chugging along and the ballots and votes that smooth those gears (see: Shaheer Hashmi’s answer to What do you think of Imran Khan’s speech? and Shaheer Hashmi’s answer to Do you think Socialism would be beneficial in Pakistan?), so you’re not looking for any easy answers.
So instead, I’ll talk about a country that could have been — and when we’re talking about anything that could’ve been, well, that’s where the most lost potential is.
So here’s the country I’m talking about:
Yes! I hope you’re as excited as I am when you imagine what this country could’ve been, had it emerged from the tentacles of British rule as a cohesive unit, instead of as two bawling, disectomized twins.
Pre-Partition India stretched from the monsoon-washed tea-hills of Assam in the east to the soaring, bone-dry mountains of Khyber Pakhtunwa in the west; it would’ve spanned ice-cold rivers cascading from their frost-jammed Himalayan roots in Gilgit Baltistan in the north to the tropical estuaries of Kerala in the coastal south. A country where both the Indus and the Ganges could serve as the lifeblood of agriculture, where the Taj Mahal, Sri Harmandir Sahib and the Badshahi Mosque would be shared. A cricket team with names like Sachin Tendulkar and Wasim Akram, Virat Kolhi and Shoaib Akhtar, restaurants that could’ve proudly served masala dosa and palak paneer side by side dotting the whole subcontinent, a nation responsible for both Malala Yousafzai and Rabindrath Tagore, and cities like Karachi, Mumbai, Dhaka and Bangalore shipping the fruits of this massive nation to the entire world, via the sea-lanes and the air-waves.
The sheer diversity of languages, religions and ethnicities of this nation would outrival anywhere else in the world: millions of Marathis, Parsis, Gujaratis, Uttar Pradeshis, Punjabis, Pashtuns, Bengalis, Keralans/Malayalis, Kashmiris and Tamils would break bread under the same proverbial roof; Hindi, Urdu, English, Kannada, Bengali, Sanskrit, Telugu, Farsi, Pashto, Baluchi and Malayalam would be written or spoken all at once in street signs, bazaars and parliament-houses — I could go on all day.
Kerala
Imagine the sister-cities of Lahore and Amritsar sitting at the heart of an unbroken Punjab, together pumping out fantastic cuisine, poetry, music, language, religious mysticism, cinema and athleticism that’s always characterized that region; imagine a rich and proud Bengal never broken by nationalist supremacy and genocide; imagine a reduction of the jingoistic identitarianism based on that ethnicity and caste or this religion that’s increasingly swallowing up the subcontinent’s political discourse. And what an imagination I have, because Partition was basically unavoidable with just a basic understanding of human psychology, and this country is by now a pipe dream.
The Israel-Palestine and South-North Korea split are terrible, but for me, this one’s the worst.
Many people, like me, wouldn’t have existed without Partition, and we’ll never truly know whether that action was for better or for worse in the long run — such are the massive implications of that event. And I’m not going to wade into the overtly political, because I don’t know or care anything about that. I’m just going to discuss the hard facts of what a united India would look like.
Here are some raw numbers that can give some spirit to this dead ideal:
I. Population:
A united, pre-Partition India had an estimated population of about 390 million people, accounting for nearly 306 million Hindus and 75 million Muslims (not including Kashmiris) — it would’ve simultaneously been the largest Hindu and largest Muslim country in the world, demographically. It would’ve had great clout in both Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian circles, and with the number of immigrants it could’ve pumped out, would be a fearsome “soft power” that would’ve been heard around the world.
These are just the numbers immediately after post-Partition (1951 Indian and Pakistani censuses) — after which nearly 14 million people were slaughtered — so give or take about a couple dozen million people to these figures. And of course, the population would keep on growing.
And as I said in an earlier answer, a youthful and virile population is the most valuable asset any country can have — muscle to churn up the fertile soil, cast seeds and drive forward the machine of industry and brainpower to study and advance law, medicine, technology and philosophy. Now, both India and Pakistan were not lacking in population at their outset, and neither were without severe economic deficiencies. But as we’ll see in the following answers, Partition only hurt these assets, and decidedly didn’t help them.
II. Agriculture and Industry:
Right now, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh each rank quite high in terms of agricultural output, literally leading the world in cotton, wheat, jute, milk, rice, chickpea, mango, orange, sugarcane, onion, pulse, oilseed and tea production — so basically almost everything that can grow on God’s green earth is harvested here in bushels upon bushels upon bushels.
The province of Punjab in northwestern India (the “breadbasket of India”) is alone responsible for about 2% of the entire world’s wheat and cotton production and 1% of its rice production (20% and 10% of India’s respectively), and it’s tiny compared to the Pakistani Punjab. A united Bengal would be a miracle of industry, more than Bangladesh already is: its textile manufacture and natural gas extraction would enrich all of India.
Now, on top of all that, imagine how much more productive these regions would be with the sponsorship and subsidization of a billion-person tax-base. Who wouldn’t want to invest their dollars, euros and yen into this country?
I’m not well-versed in the exact economic and political conditions that led to the tiger-nation boom of India and Bangladesh in the past decades, nor am I entirely sure that all of these industries could be properly managed in such a large bureaucracy, but one thing is for sure — the raw resources all fall into place to make this sleeping tiger into a could-have-been economic force to be feared, respected and invested in.
A poverty-stricken North-Western Frontier Province could’ve been developed with the taxes collected from a prosperous and fertile Punjab, for example, and allowed for direct oil and gas lines and trade-lanes snaking through the northwest into Iran, China and Afghanistan, while the same could be done with Myanmar in the east. And all this goes without mentioning the tourism in a subcontinent with clines comparable to both Switzerland and Mexico, and the spiritual centers of Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism all in the same nation.
