'Why My Father Hated India': Aatish Taseer's Essay on a Deadly Obsession

What did Aatish Taseer argue about Pakistan's obsession with India?

In July 2011, the Wall Street Journal published an essay by writer Aatish Taseer that began with a tweet. Ten days before his assassination that January, Taseer's father — Salman Taseer, governor of Pakistan's Punjab province — had mocked an Indian rocket failure online: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."

The younger Taseer, half-Indian and raised in Delhi by his Indian mother, had been estranged from his father for three years when Salman Taseer was murdered by his own bodyguard for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy. From that personal rupture, the essay built a larger argument.

What is at the heart of Pakistan's animus toward India?

Taseer's thesis was historical. The idea of Pakistan, he wrote, was first seriously formulated not by a cleric or a politician but by the poet Muhammad Iqbal, who in 1930 made the case for a state where India's Muslims could realize their "political and ethical essence." What defined the new state, from its conception, was what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.

To understand Pakistan's obsession with India — "its special edge, its hysteria" — you had to understand that founding rejection: of India, its culture, and its past. The animus was not a policy failure, Taseer argued; it was the country's organizing principle. And it explained, in his view, both Pakistan's unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active undermining of its ostensible ally, the United States.

Why does the essay still matter?

Fifteen years on, the essay reads as a warning that went unheeded. Pakistan's establishment never broke with the founding animus Taseer described, and the region has paid for it repeatedly. The personal cost is in the essay's opening image: a son who lost his father twice — first to an ideology, then to a bullet.

Taseer wrote from the hardest possible position: a man who loved both countries and was claimed fully by neither. That is precisely why his diagnosis deserves to be read in full — and why no excerpt, however faithful, can substitute for it.