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From the Newspaper |  Cyril Almeida  | 26th August, 2012 IT began with the flag. A strip of white slapped on, but separate and away from the sea of green — the problem was there from the very outset: one group cast aside from the rest. A more prescient mind would have thought to put the white in the middle, enscon-ced in a sea of green, a symbolic embrace of the other. But why blame the flag? It began with the founding theory. A country created for Muslims but not in the name of Islam. Try selling that distinction to your average Pakistani in 2012. 1947 was another country and it still found few takers. Pakistan’s dirty little secret isn’t its treatment of non-Muslims or Shias or the sundry other groups who find themselves in the cross-hairs of the rabid and the religious. Pakistan’s dirty little secret is that everyone is a minority. It begins with Muslim and non-Muslim: 97 per cent and the hapless and helpless three. But soon enough, the sectarian ...

From the Newspaper |  Cyril Almeida  | 26th August, 2012 IT began with the flag. A strip of white slapped on, but separate and away from the sea of green — the problem was there from the very outset: one group cast aside from the rest. A more prescient mind would have thought to put the white in the middle, enscon-ced in a sea of green, a symbolic embrace of the other. But why blame the flag? It began with the founding theory. A country created for Muslims but not in the name of Islam. Try selling that distinction to your average Pakistani in 2012. 1947 was another country and it still found few takers. Pakistan’s dirty little secret isn’t its treatment of non-Muslims or Shias or the sundry other groups who find themselves in the cross-hairs of the rabid and the religious. Pakistan’s dirty little secret is that everyone is a minority. It begins with Muslim and non-Muslim: 97 per cent and the hapless and helpless three. But soon enough, the sectarian ...