Let’s take a look at them and see what conclusion we draw. Your first choice is Khalid bin Sayeed’s Pakistan: The Formative Phase, which looks at the strengths and weaknesses of the Muslim separatist movement, which eventually led to the creation of Pakistan.

Yes, this book is extremely well documented and it has the advantage that besides taking the story up to the partition of India and Pakistan, it also takes the story forward to approximately the first decade of Pakistan as a separate national identity. And it is clear that even in 1940, when the Pakistan resolution was passed, it was not without significance that the word Pakistan did not exist in the resolution. So, in a sense, Pakistan was born before it was conceived. It was not clear what it was that Pakistan would be, apart from not being India.

And yet Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who was the first Governor General of Pakistan, from what he said in his inaugural address to the Pakistan Constituent assembly on 11 August 1947, seemed to have wanted a Pakistan that would be a virtual mirror image of India. He was a secularist who found himself caught up in the sectarian cause. But putting forward Pakistan as a nation of Muslims had several problems. What about the Muslims not moving to Pakistan? Were you going to leave them behind in what Jinnah regarded as hostile territory? And, secondly, if Islam constitutes the nation’s nationality then why is there a border between Pakistan and an even more Islamic Afghanistan. Surely, as two Islamic nations, they should be together? The third question was: when you talk about Islam, which school of Islam do you mean?

Secularism, as conceived in our subcontinent, is a matter of having different religious communities living together in tranquillity and harmony, whereas in Pakistan, especially west Pakistan, from where many minorities choose to move out to India, secularism takes on a different role of being a matter of tranquillity and harmony between different sects of Islam. And yet getting to that point is very hard when the sects are defined in different theological terms and each theology feels that its word is the true interpretation of the word of God.

But religion was one of the driving forces behind India and Pakistan’s split, so it is hard to take it out of the equation.

Yes, but when you look at the history of the partition, it was not until the 1930s, when it was clear that India was going to achieve self-government, that the idea of Pakistan started emerging. And it first arose in the head of a few students in Cambridge who invented the word Pakistan. Then in 1937 there was the election where the advocates of a separate Muslim identity, that is the Muslim League, suffered the tremendous setback of getting less than 5% of the votes in separate electorates for the Muslims and the Hindus.

The idea of Pakistan starts crystallising only in 1940 through the Lahore Resolution, and it is only after the Congress Party is put behind bars in 1942 that there is a certain momentum given to the Pakistan idea. All the Congress leaders were languishing in jail thinking the world hadn’t changed after 1937, so that the election results of 1945 came as a huge shock to them. But even in 1946, with less than a year to go before the separation, Jinnah was still toying with the idea of a united India.

Then he resorted, on 16 August 1946, to “direct action” ­– violence in the street directed against the other community. And that “direct action” was the progenitor of the unbelievable violence that accompanied the partition. And it would appear that Jinnah, more than anyone else, was shocked at this Frankenstein monster that he had unleashed. And yet, because of the manner that Pakistan was obtained – through direct violence – it inevitably led to a complete exodus of the minorities to India, making it impossible to make Pakistan a mirror image of India.

It would be very hard to make it cohesive with all those different groups living there.

Yes, the West Asian Muslim countries are largely countries which are unitary in nature, there is not much plurality there. Whereas the South Asian countries are all pluralistic countries and have to learn to forge their unity in diversity. But Pakistan has been unable to do this.

Let’s fast forward from the partition of India and Pakistan to A Journey to Disillusionment by Sherbaz Khan Mazari, which looks at the Bhutto and Zia eras.

Sherbaz Khan Mazari was about 17 or 18 years old when Pakistan was created, and he says in the book that he was very enthused by the idea of Pakistan. He is a very deeply committed democrat and I think he is probably the most honest politician in the whole of the subcontinent. He thought that Pakistan would have its best opportunity when, after years of military rule, in 1971 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto became effectively the democratic civilian leader of Pakistan.

Most of this book looks at how democracy was subverted by those who had captured the state in the name of democracy. There is this disillusionment with the attempt to bring real democracy to Pakistan. Mazari thinks the only solution possible to the problem of Pakistan is democracy, but despairs of securing it when democracy is subverted by democratic politicians themselves.

Unfortunately, many of Pakistan’s leaders have given democracy a bad name.

Yes. In South Asia, you cannot have democracy without pluralism. Because Pakistan is a South Asia nation, it has a plurality of languages, of political opinions and a plurality of religious sects. And it is only if you have a celebration of this kind of plurality that you will be able to create a nation out of diversity.