ABSTRACT
In retrospect, the creation of Pakistan as a nation-state on August 14, 1947 was a bizarre political aberration. It brought into being one country with two disparate wings, located a thousand miles apart with a hostile country, India, in between. Never in recent history had there been a decision to conjoin two such unlikely parts into one national corpus. Nor had there been so conscious an act of foolhardiness by a departing colonial power in a desperate bid to shed itself of the burden of empire. It took twenty-four years of prickly coexistence between the two wings of Pakistan and a bloody war of liberation in December 1971 to rectify that costly error.
