I REMEMBER coming across a Pakistani textbook that asserted that Pakistan was created the day Mohammad Bin Qasim landed in Sindh. And during General Zia ul Haq’s reign in Pakistan I remember coming across an editorial in Urdu Digest by Altaf Hussain Qureshi that argued that we should have made Arabic the national language of this country.

Most Pakistanis have ridiculed or laughed with contempt at such assertions. I do not know if Mr. Qureshi knows Arabic or not but less than 1% of Pakistanis - including the now famous madrassa students - can understand Arabic and they remember that Muslims ruled, influenced and enriched life, art and cultures in different corners of the Indian peninsula for almost 1200 years after the arrival of the Arab General.

And most of them do remember that even 1234 years after Mr. Qasim’s fateful arrival Pakistan’s would-be founder, Jinnah, that astute Bombay lawyer, was still prevaricating with his cards on the table. Yes, I am referring to Dec 1946 when he accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan in its entirety- a plan to develop a loosely federated but ‘United India’ which Congress rejected. Ironically this is also something which Indian text books do not teach and normal ‘para likha’ or educated Indian does not remember.

Yet it would only be fair to accept that confusions have always persisted in Pakistani minds regarding their history - especially their relationship to the ancient history of India. Dr. Satyabrata Rai Chowdhuri, is correct that Pakistani text books have not discussed Ashoka, Mauryas and Guptas with the attention they deserve or that they are ambivalent how and where to place Ashoka in their history but then, in his scholarly innocence, and perhaps unintentionally, Dr. Chowdhuri has raised wider and deeper questions; Whose identity are we talking of? Is this confusion only restricted to Pakistan? Could it be that this identity crisis be common to both India and Pakistan?; a product of the division of their common heritage?

How, after all, would we explain the adoption of ‘Sanskrit’-laden Hindi by the Indian Union when only a small fraction of its populace read or used the language that was more a symbol of ancient history than to represent any practicality? What is more interesting is that the common man’s ‘bazaar language’ that grew under the experiences of multi-cultural Mughal ‘Lashkhar’ and which British developed at Fort William College, for the ease of its use, was ‘Urdu’ not ‘Hindi’.

However it reminded the new rulers, in Delhi, of the undue influence of Muslim invaders, cultures and rule and in any case was adopted by Pakistan as the national language so, it will only be fair to say that, a point of distinction was needed. But then is not this the whole controversy? Need to grow a new identity divorced from the realities of India that had grown in the last four hundred years if not more?

It will be interesting to have a look at the confusions in national anthems. Poet, Hafiz Jullundari, selected Persian words and traditions for Pakistani inspirations at a time when Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Miraji had already transformed the Urdu expression by developing the explicitly local and indigenous imaginary. Even more ironically Pakistani imagination is continuously harking back to the supposed Muslim Sultanates and Empires – that have long gone.

What about India? Whereas Pakistani anthem used words at least understood by the common Pakistani student - if not the populace - India selected ‘Jana Gana Mana’ whose highly Sanskiritised upper class Bengali remains largely incomprehensible to majority of north Indians and wholly inaccessible to the south Indians. And more interestingly makes references to Punjab and Bengal the great parts of whom now exist in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

What about the political ideals? Fortunately for us we are conducting this analysis at a time when we are armed with the hindsight of the cataclysmic events that have gripped, and shaped both India and Pakistan in the last 20 years or so. This helps us to see the common patterns that have emerged irrespective of the often cited and journalistic differences across the two major progenies of what Bankam Chandra Chatterjee, in 19th century, referred to as “mother India”

It is therefore possible to point out with credible evidence at our disposal that it would be naïve to down play the intellectual roots of the controversy regarding Ram Janam bhooni and Babri Masjid or to treat the whole episode as a mere event- a creation of few political interests or groups. Irrespective of the historic facts whether Masjid was created on top of the temple-which perhaps it was not- the furor generated, the role it played in the consciousness of Hindu masses, and its political dividends to Hindutva forces clearly spell out the deep confusion in the Indian mind on the evolution of its own history.

Who are Indians? And what is India? Is India a product merely of Hindus and Hinduism? Or else is it a joint evolution of the cultures of Hindus, Muslims Christians and others? How can you go in time to correct something that if happened - at al l- happened 500 years ago? How can you own Chicken Massala, Seekh Kebab, Ghazal and Taj Mahal that help in your ‘ego massage’ and then turn around and disown Babar, Babri Masjid, Muslims their culture and religion as things alien?

If India was a indeed a syncretic fusion of Islam and Hinduism and other religions and cultures as Nehru had claimed, and many Indians still believe, then we do not need to go any further to diagnose current malaise as a serious identity crisis; if India is for Hindus as we are increasingly learning, and which Muslim leadership had always suspected, then of course Muslims, whether in India or without, have to look and reflect what identity they have or could have.

The events and developments of the last few decades - that saw division of India, wars between India and Pakistan, creation of Bangladesh, and rise of religious polities in both India and Pakistan - have unfolded so quickly, and when measured against the time scale of history, in such a short period that it looks as if in our genes we contained seeds for all this; and everything was programmed to be played once the trigger was available.

Both India and Pakistan inherited similar anglicized and secular administrative and judicial structures. Whereas, unlike India, Pakistan added the mumbo jumbo of religion in its first constitutions, in reality the administrative structures have remained fairly secular in their outlook, dispensation and policy profiles and showed similar constraints. It was only with the passage of time that the larger political context, in which they operated, overtook them and changed their outlook.

So when, in early 1950’s, Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan engineered riots against the Ahmadiya minority, Pakistan Army was trigger happy against the bearded zealots, tried Maulana Moudoodi and Kausar Niazi for inciting hatred and awarded them death penalties. Not only this; the Chief Minister of West Pakistan, Mumtaz Daultana was suspected of inciting the violence and was made to resign. And the judicial report by Justices Munir and Kayani openly ridiculed the intellectual assumptions of Islamists and warned of any attempts to create a religious state.

However in early 70’s things had regressed to a level where Pakistan’s popularly elected Parliament, under a fiercely secular Bhutto, declared the Ahmadiya community as “non-Muslim” thus effectively converting itself into an ecclesiastical court. In 80's it was the army that struck an alliance with the mullahs and brought legislative changes that significantly incorporated religion into national politics.

But has India done any better? Hindu nationalists had momentarily lost the political momentum after Gandhi’s murder by RSS. But they were still strong enough in 1949 to occupy the Babri Masjid and even an all powerful Nehru, despite dragging his feet in impotent rage, had limitations in dealing with the legal issues. But the real rot came in 1980’s - interestingly more or less parallel with the developments in Pakistan - when Indira Gandhi, perhaps correctly realizing the changing political signals, openly courted the Hindutva vote, and it can be argued that the tide has grown stronger since then.

Though Indian constitution had allowed conversions but when, in 1981, a thousand ‘Dalits’ (untouchables) converted to Islam in the South Indian village of Meenakshipuram there were impassioned appeals against the threat of Islam and petro-dollars. Hindu leaders jump started a national movement and sought Indira’s help to impose ban on conversion and Nehru’s daughter asked them to create the right political atmosphere. The then president of BJP, a poet, was so pleased that he likened her with the goddess ‘Chandi Devi’; his name was Atal Behari Vajpayee.

Few Indians would have heard, or remember the studies carried out by the Indian psychotherapist, Sudhir Kakar, on the phenomenon of spirit possession in rural North India. Kakar found out that Muslims seemed to symbolize the alien and demonic in the unconscious part of the Hindu mind. According to him the vilest, the strongest, the most evil spirits possessing an afflicted Hindu are associated with the Muslim community. Can one argue that from the cruder sentiments of Guruji Golwalker, and the likes in RSS, to the sophisticated expressions of Girilal Jain, Vinod Mehta and N.C Menon there runs the same uninterrupted theme? Fear of the foreigner? But who is a foreigner here?

Many Indians, even in the Discussion Forum of South Asia Tribune, have tried to belittle the importance of what happened in Gujarat as an unfortunate event; something that could have happened in such a pluralistic society. Yet it hides the real question: In the post-Godhra pogroms the only relationship the attackers of the train could have with the victims of Nirendra Modi’s fascist revenge troops was of ‘identity’ otherwise these unaware, hapless Muslims were if anything Indians in flesh, soul and spirit and subject to the same constitutional guarantees like Hindus. And yet we know, thanks to an Indian investigative journalist that the Police had no orders to save them.

This brings us to another important sub-distinction within the gene of religious or sectarian violence that distinguishes what happens within India and Pakistan. When in the last week or so a targeted attack took place against a Shiite mosque in Quetta the ineffective, weak or bruised Pakistani state had an immediate single point response: indiscriminate use of force to stop the violence - something in which the Indian state has failed, not only in Gujarat but in hundreds and thousands of such incidents since 1947; could there be a greater evidence - if one was needed - of the painful and difficult identity crisis the proclaimed secular India suffers from?

The regression of India’s political culture, its deviation from its professed secular values, and its inability to impose the constitutional writ of the state is reflected from whichever perspective you may approach it. When Hindu fundamentalists had demolished the Babri Mosque in December 1992, with the open connivance of the State government, the then Union Government responded by disbanding the BJP state set ups. However in 2002 when Nirendra Modi and his VHP fascists, in post-Godhra Gujarat were carrying out pogroms there was little political consensus as how to respond to this national calamity.

The usual ‘para likha’ (educated Indian) responds to every news of crisis or criticism either by insensitive disapproval, outright denial or classical ostrich attitude of referring to the Indian democracy. This innocent belief in the power of electoral system is certainly appreciable, however, we only wish if it was true. In Gujarat Indian electorate rewarded Nirendra Modi’s killing machines by a landslide; the pro-Modi wave was so strong that it overcame the usual anti-incumbency factor of the Indian politics.

George Orwell had once said that man’s life is a series of defeats. Nations, States and political structures are organic extensions of the same life and they, if anything, mirror the hopes, the aspirations, and failures of human spirit. Both India and Pakistan have achieved something and lost a lot since an unnatural partition and both suffer from identity crisis of varying degrees and, as we have seen, the Indian saga is no less traumatic, if not more. Perhaps, contrary to popular rhetoric, it may be India that needs to come to terms with its Islamic past and Muslim neighbors.