Zafar Hijazi

Choices we make matter Akbar’s clerks measured the fields of most of northern India, bigha by bigha, and wrote down what each owed. In 1600, Lahore Subah was assessed almost as high as Delhi. The lands that are now Pakistan held 8 percent of the empire’s people and paid more than 10 percent of its revenue. Under the Raj the pattern held: in 1941 these lands held under 10 percent of the people and paid 11 percent. For three and a half centuries this land raised more per head than the rest of the empire: $39 under Akbar, $53 in 1900 and $126 in 1941, in today’s dollars. Then we made our choices. Since 1941 our population has grown more than ninefold, against less than fivefold in India’s Mughal lands and about fourfold in Bangladesh’s. Today we hold 18 percent of the old empire’s people and raise less than 12 percent of its revenue. Pakistan now raises $211 a head, while the same Mughal soil across the border raises $390. Bangladesh made different choices. In 1941 its lands held 12 million more people than ours; today we hold 92 million more. It taxes even less per head than we do, yet one in four of its children is stunted against four in ten of ours, and nearly eight in ten Bangladeshis can read against six in ten Pakistanis. It did not find a bigger purse. It chose fewer children per family, and it sent its daughters to school. When children multiply faster than the means to raise them, nothing breaks at once. Everything thins: a smaller share of the river, a more crowded classroom, a body that never reaches its full height. Same rivers, same soil, same inheritance. Geography did not decide our fate, and neither did history. Choices did, and choices can still be made.