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The book advances a clearly enunciated premise. Although the founding leader of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was a secular man whose vision of an Independent Pakistan was that of a secular twin to India, this did not materialize. India was majority Hindu but espoused a secular ideal of minorities living amicably with the majority and participating actively in the body politic. Jinnah, too, viewed Pakistan as a majority Muslim country that would allow the Hindu minority and others to live amicably but this vision was not shared by many of his close advisors including the Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan. Jinnah's vision suffered its first severe setback with the brutal violence that marked the mass migration following the Partition. India appeared to weather the impact with greater equanimity and was able to sustain a secular outlook until recent years. Pakistan, on the other hand, lost Jinnah and, in the process, his vision of the new homeland within a short span of a couple of years.
Democracy sputtered until the mid-1950s when General Ayub Khan deposed President Iskandar Mirza and took over the reins of the government. Successive regimes of Generals, Yahya Khan, Zia ul Haq, and Pervez Musharraf, were only briefly punctuated by attempts at democratically elected governments of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, his daughter Benazir Bhutto, twice, and Nawaz Sharif, three times, who were all unceremoniously ejected from office before completion of their elected terms and, worse, by hanging, assassinations, or exile. Thus, Pakistan has been ruled by military leadership, either directly or by proxy, ever since its inception.
The authoritarian military regimes mobilized religious sentiment and furor to maintain their grip on the political and administrative structure of the country and, as a result, to wage persecution not only of minority Hindus and Christians but also of minority Muslim communities, such as the Ahmaddiyas. In recent years, the minority Shias, too, have been subject