Social and Political Concerns in Pakistan and India: Critical Conversations for College Students
By Anjum Altaf
Lightstone Publishers
ISBN: 978-969-716-206-2
350pp.

A selection of 25 essays written for a blog (thesouthasianidea), Anjum Altaf’s book, Social and Political Concerns in Pakistan and India: Critical Conversations for College Students, adopts an unusual format. While each chapter (originally an essay) is a critique of a text by notable South Asians, from Amartya Sen to Pervez Hoodbhoy, each chapter is followed by a conversation with the blog’s readers.

The core audience, as the subtitle suggests, is the college-level student community. However, given the range of topics explored, the book has an appeal beyond students. Readership interested in Pakistan-India history and politics will find the tome provocatively interesting.

Since this anthology touches upon a myriad of topics, too numerous to cover in a single review, I will largely focus on two specific chapters, owing to the light and heat the topics of these chapters might generate. One on Partition; the other on Imran Khan.

Titled, ‘The Road to Partition’, Chapter Three is motivated by Jaswant Singh’s book. Altaf in this chapter, skilfully unpacks British colonial strategies to impose confessional identities on the Indians. The identity formation, in turn, laid the basis for the divide-and-rule strategy.

A selection of essays on diverse topics written for a blog incorporates engagements with the blog readers in an attempt to question the dictatorship of mainstream discourses

According to Altaf, the “introduction of the census (conducted in 1871) in which the determination of religion was of primary importance”, and the separate electorates introduced in 1909, were the two mechanisms to hammer out religionised identities, on the one hand, and institute the minority-majority divide, on the other.

While the census in Britain was a secular exercise, it was given a........

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