Photo credit

Its that time of (many in) the year we blow the lid on India and Pakistan, again. Mohammed Hanif in a New York Times Op-Ed gets it right, and with a comically satiric streak. If only it weren't so brutally direct and fitting.

"India accuses Pakistan of sponsoring terrorism in India. Pakistan accuses India of sponsoring terrorism in Pakistan, and of having bad manners. To India, it seems obvious that Pakistani militants were behind the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, and it is exasperated that the world won’t punish Pakistan for that.
In its own defense Pakistan points to all the hundreds of suspected terrorists it has killed in the last year and a half. It reminds India that some 60,000 Pakistanis have been killed by terrorists. India responds by saying: You are only killing the terrorists who kill Pakistanis while protecting the terrorists who kill Indians.
India would like the world to make Pakistan stand in a corner of the classroom and again and again write on the blackboard, “I have been a bad boy.” Pakistan claims the dog ate its homework, and that it is busy hunting the dog down."
Read the full excerpt here
As a reminder of this legacy that spans three generations ,  the New Yorker ran a riveting article  by William Dalrymple on the primer to all of this - the violence of the India-Pakistan partition. The piece covers the history of Hindu-Muslim relations in the sub-continent before the partition, theories of the buildup to the partition including various viewpoints on the role of the British, the personality of Jinnah and a section on Saadat Hassan Manto's writing , most notably the tragic Toba Tek Singh.
"Across the Indian subcontinent, communities that had coexisted for almost a millennium attacked each other in a terrifying outbreak of sectarian violence, with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other—a mutual genocide as unexpected as it was unprecedented. In Punjab and Bengal—provinces abutting India’s borders with West and East Pakistan, respectively—the carnage was especially intense, with massacres, arson, forced conversions, mass abductions, and savage sexual violence...Some British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse...."
More here