Around 2002, when I was in Dubai, my neighbour was a young, recently married, well-to-do, and MBAed Pakistani who worked in a multinational and whose father was a former PAF pilot. We hit it off, even with the obvious differences.
It was one of those incongruent friendships we struck that lasted me through my stay. But this post isn’t about that. This is about what he not just fervently believed, but was also apparently taught formally in school. And it was that West Pakistan did not decisively and humiliatingly lose the 1971 war for the liberation of Bangladesh.
What he believed in lieu of this is immaterial. It is important to note that he was unaware of a seminal event, that happened in the lifetime of his parents, in the history of his country, of which he was quite proud and openly patriotic.
This is apart from the claptrap of believing that there always was Pakistan since 711CE and that the primary identity of the Mughals was Islam and that everything they did was rooted in (and rose from) their religion and solely their religion. And there was some more gobbledygook about other subjects as well. I won’t discuss all of that here for sake of brevity.
But, regarding his factually and historically wrong beliefs about the 1971 war, without going into further details, I’d like to recount that any source (from basic Wikipedia to books from the Cambridge University Press) offered by me was denounced to be tainted (by my then religion, my nationality, or that of the author, or some sort of bias and partisanship which he would have a pat explanation for) and/or incomplete (he claimed they did not cover all aspects or missed some nuance either by design or accident) for him. Nothing was ever enough to change his mind. I gave up after a while since I valued our friendship, and once I figured that there was no way to convince him of the truth. Indeed, as I realised later, it wasn’t as if there weren’t enough methods and resources to reach the truth or that he lacked access to them. It was as if truth simply did not matter.
I will only state here, for that is the purpose of this post, that for all his education, manners, travel, warmth, hospitality, and sincerity, he looked like an absolute idiot to the outside world.
Beware. Our children and grandchildren will be laughed at for parroting history, and even science, this regime is intent on teaching them.
