WHY WE CREATED PAKISTAN?

The Indus Valley Civilization now known as Paksitan

Pakistan existed 5000 years ago as the IVC

The Pakistan Ideology

by
Moin-Ansari
Original March 16th, 1996 and Updated February 7th, 2009

| NEW YORK | RUPEE NEWS | March 16th, 1996 | Moin Ansari |

Lest we forget the ideology of the Hinduvata Mahasab, let us quote it right here. Lest some dismiss it as a relic of the past, let us remind them that the BJP was in power in in Delhi and holds a major vote in the Lok and Rajha Saba. For those who may say that this quote is a historical anomoly belonging to the hsitory books, let us remind them that Mr. Narendar Modi, Mr. Adhvani and Mr. Bal Thackery have cloned themselves by the millions and this very same thinking was used to burn, rape and massacre more than 2000 Muslims in Gujarat just a few months ago.

“I declare that the future of the Hindu race, of Hindustan and of the Punjab, rests on these four pillars: (1) Hindu Sangathan, (2) Hindu Raj, (3) Shuddhi of Moslems, and (4) Conquest and Shuddhi of Afghanistan and the Frontiers. So long as the Hindu nation does not accomplish these four things, the safely of our children and great-grandchildren will be ever in danger, and the safety of the Hindu race will be impossible. The Hindu race has but one history, and its institutions are homogeneous. But the Musalmans and Christians are far removed from the confines of Hindustan, for their religions are alien and they love Persian, Arab and European institutions. Thus, just as one removes foreign matter from the eye, Shuddhi must be made of these two religions. Afghanistan and the hilly regions of the frontier were formerly part of India, but are at present under the domination of Islam. . . .Just as there is Hindu religion in Nepal, so there must be Hindu institutions in Afghanistan and the frontier territory; otherwise it is useless to win Swaraj. For mountain tribes are always warlike and hungry. If they become our enemies, the age of Nadirshah and Zamanshah will begin anew. At present English officers are protecting the frontiers; but it cannot always be. . . .If Hindus want to protect themselves, they must conquer Afghanistan and the frontiers and convert all the mountain tribes.” Pratap of Lahore, Lala Hardayal in 1925. Quoted by Dr. Ambedkar in his book “Pakistan”

When there are problems in Pakistan many look at the government and think of the present administration in power as the state. While the head of every government boldly declares “Le etat c’est moi” (I am the state), all of us who are disenfranchised, suppressed, and repressed need to take a cold hard look at the government. We should understand the difference between he government and the state. The government could be evil but the state of Pakistan does not belong to the government, the state of Pakistan belongs to the people of Pakistan, it belongs to us. 5561st re-birthday! Congratualations to Indus Pakistanis

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Neither the strife in FATA, nor the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, nor the  externally sponsored hooliganism and  killings in Swat that have become the hallmark of today’s news, nor the band of marauders and mercenaries that infiltrate our borders to create malaise and mayhem in our land, can detract us from remembering the anniversary of the day that we decided to create a land for the Muslims of the subcontinent—a land we later named Pakistan. Pakistan: Another Indian prophecy of doom. Here we go again. The first one came in 1947.

THE PAKISTANI RESILIENCE IN THE FACE OF THREATS: Mountbatten, Nehru, Indira, Kruschev, Johnson, Carter, Kissinger (Nixon), Gobachov, Clinton, Armitage (Bush), Karzia (Bush and Vajpayee/Sing) have all threatened Pakistan: The Pakistanis are used to it…so what else is new?!! Pakistan’s Nuclear Program should be seen in the backdrop of these threats.The capacity of Pakistan to sustain some fifteen major disarticulations in polity, power, and structure and still preserve a national identity is a phenomenon one is tempted to explain by recourse to the supernatural.

Pakistan which has been pummelled by external events (three wars with India, secession of Bangladesh, 3.5 million Afghan refugees) and disrupted by internal fissures (4 periods of martial law totalling 27 years and ethnic violence in Sindh) to a degree which no other state established since 1945 has suffered. In this respect it stands as an exemplar of a nation whose adversities “common sense” might suggest make its viability impossible.

Yet its continued existence defies the reality induced by such speculation. The enormity and persistence of these difficulties and the resilience of the nation in absorbing and somehow surviving them must be regarded with awe if not admiration.” RALPH BRAIBANTI

This salute is dedicated to the 1200 men and women who died defending our borders as well as the thousands who were innocent victims of aggression on our shores. In-spite of the murders, and in-spite of the bombs, life in Pakistan goes on, and the Crescent and the Star flutters  high on our sky scrapers and pulsates proud in our hearts. Let this  anniversary of our Lahore resolution be a lesson to our enemies, that we remember our dedication to our cause, and promise to keep the dream of our fathers of our nation, Jinnah, Liaqat-Ali Khan and Iqbal alive.

Trail of freedom from the bowels of hell in Bharat to freedom in Pakistan

We remember the 1 million lives lost in creating a country, and also rededicate ourselves to the fact that “Pakistan manzil nahin, Nishan e Manzil hai”. Thatmanzil was defined by Iqbal, Liaqat, Jinnah and many others who carry the banner in the land of the Crescent and Star. Despite some impediments we have not lost track of the “manzil“. Pakistan as it existed 5000 years ago

‘India is no more a country than the Equator’.Winston Churchill

The British Indian Empire included Iraq, Aden, Somalia, Burma, and more than 500 states of the Subcontinent

The British Empire spanning continents

The Muslim majority areas of the Subcontinent should have been part of Pakistan. Many Muslims wanted to stay and fight in the “Darul Harb” ’till it was changed to “Darul islam“. (notice islam with lower case “i” which depicts islam=peace). The Quaid’s vision was to separate based on demographics. 

Patel and others cheated us out of a real separation.

The more then 500 independent princely states of the Subcontinent

The State of Hyderabad wanted to stay independent after 1948 but was run over by Patel

The Princely state of Bombay Presidency

The Princely state of Baroda

Before separation

After separation

After the Muslims won the right for separate electorates, Jinnah supported the Dalits to get the same right. This was wholeheartedly opposed by Mr. Mohandas Gandhi. In the Round Table Conferences in 1930-32, the concept of separate electorates for the Untouchables  and Dalits was raised by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, as a way to ensure sufficient representation for the minority Dalits, in government.

… Gandhi was a so-called “high caste”. High castes represent at small minority in India, some 10-15 percent of the population, yet dominate Indian society in much the same way whites ruled South Africa during the official period of Apartheid. Dalits often use the phrase Apartheid in India when speaking about their problems.

.. Gandhi’s main critic and political opponent, Dr. Ambedkar, for whom our journal is named and the first Dalit in history to receive an education ..

The All India Muslim League session of 1936

1938 RESOLUTION ASKED FOR SEPARATION:Even earlier in 1938 Sir Abdullah Haroon moved a resolution for establishing independent Muslim states in the north-west and eastern zones. The word states continued to be used in subsequent sessions of the All India Muslim League till about 1943. Originally the two zones were meant to be autonomous and sovereign and it was only when the British and the Hindus insisted that Punjab and Bengal were to be partitioned that Pakistan began to be talked about as one state.

THE PAKISTAN RESOLUTION OF 1940: The Lahore Resolution (later known as the Pakistan Resolution) The Lahore resolution moved by Fazlul Haq at the 27th Session of the All India Muslim League, at Lahore on March 23, 1940 stated:

“that geographically contagious units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial adjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which the Muslims are in a majority, as in the north-west and eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.”

What is the Two Nation Theory exactly? The moniker “‘two’ ‘nation’ ‘theory’” is a misnomer. The theory of nationalities states that “India does not have a homogeneous population”.  There are many racial, ethnic and linguistic groups in India. India is not a national state, India is not a country, but a  sub-continent composed of “nationalities”. The two nation theory clearly states that that there are several nationalities in the subcontinent, and the Hindus and the Muslims are the largest of the two nations.  Hindus and Muslims are different therefore Muslim majority areas must exist separately. Chaudry Rehmat Ali’s “Pakistan proposal asked for SEVERAL MUSLIM STATES  in the subcontinent.”

In this document a map of India has also been published showing India split into different states, named as Pakistan, Guruistan, Usmanistan, Bangsamispan, Hindoostan comprising Rajistan, Kathiwar, Maharashtra, Rajistan and Dravidia. This pamphlet was reproduced in 1934  (Ref: The Great Divide by H. V. Hodson page 81). Karakal Pakistan’ existed as autonomous region of USSR.

He claimed that the destiny of whole Millat in the continent of “Dinia” (changed name of India) and its dependencies lies in the integration of Muslims into 10 countries: Pakistan, Bangistan, Usmanistan, Siddiqistan, Faruqistan, Haideristan, Muistan, Maplistan, Saristan, Nasarastan and than to be coordinated into Pak. Common Wealth of Nations.

• Hanoodia:243 principalities or Rajwaras
• Hindoostan: Rajistan, Kathiwar, Mahrashtra, Rajistan and Dravidia
• Saristan
• Nasarastan
• Haideristan
• Siddiqistan
• “Pakistan” (P=Punjab, A=Afghania, K=Kashmir, I=Islam, TAN=Baluchistan) in the Northwest including Kashmir, Delhi and Agra: “
• Bangistan” in Bengal:
• “Osmanistan” in Hyderabad; “Siddiquistan” in Bundelhand and Malwa; “
• Faruqistan” in Bihar and Orissa: “
• Haideristan” in UP: “
• Muinistan” in Rajasthan: “
• Maplistan” in Kerala:
• “Safiistan” in “Western Ceylon” and “Nasaristan” in “Eastern Ceylon”, etc.

The map was published by Rahmat Ali in 1934 and came to be widely circulated in his pamphlet called “Now or Never” among the Muslims of the Subcontinent.

Rahmat Ali was disgusted at the bias of the British and referred the “British-Banya alliance” presumably in  He even declined to refer to an “India” as having ever existed at all and instead called the subcontinent  “Dinia”, and the oceans and the seas around India as the “Pakian Sea”, the “Osmanian Sea” etc. He urged the Dalits, Sikhs, Buddhists to rise up against the Hindus. In in  “Sikhistan” he asked them to be independent. He urged all of the supressed peoples  to rise up against supression.

This is what we asked for.

We were cheated out of this.

ANALYSIS OF THE TWO NATION THEORY:
The two nation theory enunciates that the subcontinent is made of several nationalities, the Hindus and the Muslims being the largest of the two. India is as big as Western Europe and contains many many racial, religious, linguistic, and ethnic groups. The Hindus and the Muslims are two separate nations, in terms of diet, attitude, social behavior, economic tendencies, social interaction, behaviors, and attitude.

According to many Pakistanis “The two nation theory did not solve all the problems of the subcontinent. However it did save 200 million Muslims (those emancipated in Pakistan and Bangladesh) from social economic and political servitude. The servitude is proven by the decadent condition of Indian Muslims in a “secular” Indian state. Perhaps it sacrifices 150 million Indian Muslims. But the alternative was 450 million Muslims in servitude.” “Secularism” in “India” means “Hinduism Light.“

Nationhood is defined as the tendency of a nation to exist. No two nations have the same reason to exist. USA and Canada exist separately, though you may think that both nations have English speaking population, with similar accents, similar religions, similar culture, similar economic structures, and similar racial and ethnic backgrounds. Do you hear America question the validity of Canada to exist. I believe that the USA has the power to take over Canada, if it really wanted to. BUT the USA recognizes the right of the Canadians to exist separately.

THE TWO NATION THEORY & THREE STATES: The Two Nation theory cannot be debunked because there are more then one Muslim country in the subcontinent. The Hindu nation lives in more than one country (India, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Burma, Sri Lanka, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Bangladesh). The Chinese nation lives in several states (Taiwan, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia). Similarly the Muslim nation (transcending all racial, ethnic, caste and linguistic boundaries) can live in several states. There are several Arab Muslim countries too. The country of Pakistan as a unified Muslim country in the subcontinent was actually asked for the Bengali nationalists. Jinnah acquiesced.

The “Nationalistic” Indian attitude towards the TNT: Many modern Indians have a what Pakistanis consider a “strange” attitude. Pakistan should not exist, because it would be better for Indian Muslims, better for Indian Hindus, better for Pakistanis. Pakistanis ask “How do they know it would be better for us?” And who are they to judge our feelings, and tell us what is better for our nation?” If a nation is defined “as a tendency of a people to seek a country”then the Muslims of the Subcontinent are a nation. They point out to one insignificant point or the other in Pakistan to devalue the “raisan d’etre” of Pakistani nationhood. This attitude spell perpetual warfare.

PAKISTANI NATIONHOOD: Pakistanis justify the existence of the country by explaining that “India was never ONE NATION. India is as big as Western Europe and has more nationalities than Europe. The subcontinent has always been a conglomeration of states and nationalities. If one looks at the “Indian” map during the Mughal era, or during Vikramadatya’s era, one will see dozens, sometimes hundreds of STATES. Pakistanis believe that “Akhand Bharat” was a figment of the imagination of Gandhi and the Jan Sangh. Just because the British called it India, does not mean that it was one nation ever or will be one nation ever.”

Plutarch expressed this sentiment well some centuries ago: “A conqueror is always a lover of peace. He would like to make his entry into your cities unopposed.” Does India talk peace in the Plutarchian sense?

SUMMARY AND ABSTRACT ON SOUTH ASIAN SCHISMS
This article presents the arguments of political stratification and nation forming that were in the air in the Forties. The arguments against the Subcontinental nationhood are discussed at length. The arguments for a Pakistani nation are analyzed in depth. Arguments from both sides are presented and refuted.

The history of the creation of India and Pakistan is not always in teleological progression. We have lost a lot of history by tracing our history by traveling through chronological diaries and self aggrandizing biographies. Neither Pakistani  nor Indian history books have done an adequate job of tracing our roots. Neither explain “partition” properly.

The Pakistani text books ignore Hindu contributions to our common struggle against colonialism, and seem ashamed of the common lineage with Hindus—(Indus Valley, Buddhism), Pakistani historical narratives underplay the role of the nationalist Indian Muslim leadership, Jauhar, Azad and Suhrawardi, and over emphasize the importance of the RSS and Jan Sangh. Pakistani textbooks ignore the Sufi contributions to our struggle of independence and restrict discussion of Sufiism to Shah Waliullah and a few others.

The Indian textbooks fail to see the Pakistan movement as a provincial and minority rebellion against the Nehruite Marxist-Leninist Federalism that was the hall mark of the INC. The Indian textbooks fail to mention the three wings of Congress, the Nehruite secular wing led by Nehru, the fundamentalist and communal wing led by Rai, the religious wing led by Gandhi, and the extreme nationalist wing led by Patel. The Bharat text books fail to recognize that fact that Gandhi was and was seen as a religious leader by  the minorities and by a large section of the Hindu populace. The Indian text books over glorify many Hindu periods, fail to mention the Hindu Buddhist wars, diminish Brahamanism and Brahamanic cruelties towards non-Brahmans, relegate the Mughal era to the greatness of Akbar, ignore the Hindu communal organizations, demonize Muslim leaders who differed with Gandhi, brand secular and moderate Muslim leadership of the Muslim League as communal leaders, overlook the frailties of the INC leadership that led to the Hindu-Muslim schism, and fail to recognize the radical non-secular part of the Congress that scared the minorities.

The Indian textbooks neglect to mention the accomplishments of the Muslim League Muslim leadership that tried to safeguard the interests of the Indian Muslim minorities by fighting for separate electorates for the Muslims, and tried to guarantee the rights of the minorities through the Cabinet Mission Plan and by demanding one third of the representation in parliament. This ingenious plan would have guaranteed a fair and equitable settlement. However vested interests in the INC would not allow this.

The article has some in-bred biases towards the Pakistani point of view. No apologies are given for this slant. The purpose of the article is not convince people, simply to present facts and analysis.

THE FORTIES: THE THEORIES IN AIR
Freedom is in the air. The Union Jack is to come down. How do wedeal with independence? Are we mature enough to behave as civilized nations? The years preceding our independence was an intense time. The Freedom Movement created many leaders and many movements. Neither the Muslims nor the Hindus nor the Sikhs were monolithic groups. Each political group had many leaders. Many times the leadership seemed to head in different directions. The Harrow-Eaton Oxbridge led INC under the leadership of Motilal Nehru was a very different Congress. The INC led by his son Jawaharlal Nehru was a very different INC.

The INC had several factions that split and made up. Similarly the Muslim Movement had factions and grouping in it. Disgruntled elements in each of  the major parties went and formed their own political parties and contested the elections. Each group had sub-groupings and subdivisions. There were more than 550 states in the Subcontinent. The Forties gave us the opportunity to forge a country in the Subcontinent or create many nations. As a people we failed to remain at peace. As countries we failed to keep the peace. As nations we failed to usher in an era of prosperity into the Subcontinent. Today let history teach us some lessons.

Most readers are familiar withGandhi’s great hunger strike against the so called Poona Pact in 1933. The matter which Gandhi was protesting, nearly unto death at that, was the inclusion in the draft Indian Constitution, proposed by the British, that reserved the right of Dalits to elect their own leaders. Dr. Ambedkar, with his degree in law from Cambridge, had been chosen by the British to write the new constitution for India. Having spent his life overcoming caste-based discrimination, Dr. Ambedkar had come to the conclusion that the only way Dalits could improve their lives is if they had the exclusive right to vote for their leaders, that a portion or reserved section of all elected positions were only for Dalits and only Dalitscould vote for these reserved positions.

Separate electorate was vehemently opposed by Mahatma Gandhi on the grounds that the move would disintegrate Hindu society. If the Dalits had gotten a separate electorate, this would have ensured certain constituencies which would have been reserved for them. Only the Dalits would have been able to vote for the candidates contesting those seats. This would have given them real leaders and real participation in the elections.

Gandhi was determined to prevent this and went on hunger strike to change this article in the draft constitution. After many communal riots, where tens of thousands of Dalitswere slaughtered, and with a leap in such violence predicted if Gandhi died, Dr. Ambedkaragreed, withGandhi on his death bed, to give up the Dalits right to exclusively elect their own leaders and Gandhi ended his hunger strike.

Later, on his own death bed, Dr. Ambedkar would say this was the biggest mistake in his life, that if he had to do it all over again, he would refuse to give up Dalitonly representation, even if it meant Gandhi’s death.

What is strange about this entire discussion is the way it has shaken the Indian psyche. Challenging the historiography of the events of 1947 is a difficult task. Many have tried it.

Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, in his insightful book Guilty Men of India's Partition recounts those painful days when the decision to divide India and the two communities-Hindus and Muslims- was taken. He identifies the leaders and circumstances responsible for the Partition in a candid conversation with his readers. He shares his experiences of being sidelined, his efforts being thwarted and his prophetic foresight being ignored in the midst of influential leaders with political power.

Rammanohar Lohia wrote a book titled “Guilty men of India’s partition” (Published by Kitabistan, 1960). However that earlier work was largely ignored by those who find it easier to be in the age old comfort zone–demonizing Jinnah, by corollary all Muslims and by extension Islam for all the problems that face Bharat today.Jaswan’t Singh has stirred literally typed up a storm (pun intended). The book, like all books will bring out the best and the worst. Some will use it to confirm their pre-existing bigoted notions. Others will let it be water off a ducks back. A few will change their mind. Based on the comments on our site, the Bharati psyche has been shaken but not stirred. Many of our Bharati readers still see Jinnah as a antagonists, and the Pakistani readers see him as an protagonist of 1947.

We of course do not agree with Singh’s lament about what he calls “partition”. We don’t think of 1947 a cataclysmic event. We think of it as a natural extension of the wranglings of the 570 states that were in existence in South Asia before the British arrived in South Asia in 1757. Many states of the Indus banded together to renew their pledge to continue to live together. The states on the Ganges were coerced or decided to live on the banks of the Ganges. The states on the Brahmaputra later decided to live independently on the banks of the Bay of Bengal.

Map of the 570 states of the Subcontinent in pre-indpendence British Empire "india"

Mohmmad Ali Jinnah did not create facts on the ground. The Muslim population rejected various other messages thrown at them, and conscripted Mohammad Ali Jinnah (After he resigned from the Indian National Congress and left for England) and brought him back. This was not mere accident of history. It was a complex mixture of divine providence, manifest destiny and the wishes of the Mussalmans of South Asia.

If Jinnah did not exist, the Muslims of South Asia would have created him. He was not imposed on the people. His plans were not artificts from his library. As a good attorney he represented the Muslims to the best of his ability–taking into consideration the wishes of the people of South Asia. After he was repeatedly elected by the Muslim League to represent the Muslims.

The Indian National Congress (INC) with all its machinery could not eliminate the Muslim League. The INC could manufacture consent by marketing a relatively unknown failed attorney from South Africa. The INC could bring in religious symbols to encourage the RSS into proposing the Ram Raj. But the INC could not eliminate Mohammad Ali Jinnah by drumming out the Muslims from the INC.

A decade ago a book by Delhi historian Ajit Javed celebrated Jinnah as a pragmatic man who wanted foremost to achieve security for Muslims in a new Indian federation. In 1989 a senior barrister from Mumbai, H.M. Seervai, authored a book, Partition of India: Legend and Reality, in which he portrayed Jinnah as a staunch secular leader, who really wanted to reach a credible accord with Congress for the equal status of Muslims in an independent India. A good 50 years ago another barrister, S.K. Mazumdar, published Gandhi and Jinnah, in which he argued that Jinnah was badly let down by the clueless Congress.

Even Gandhi’s grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, portrayed Jinnah in a very favourable light in his famous book Eight Lives: a Study of the Hindu-Muslim Encounter.

One of us was involved in the British television series End of Empire in the early 1980s, and interviewed political figures and key civil servants around Mountbatten, who stated that there was a realistic solution other than partition. It would not have been easy; high-level civil servants too were split along which way to go. But few, if any, believed partition was inevitable.

Winford Thomas, a BBC correspondent posted in Delhi at the time, said the fault lay principally with Nehru and Patel. Labour politician Woodrow Whyte spoke highly of Jinnah and said that the Congress made the gravest mistake when it failed to accommodate him. It is on record that Jinnah accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan in 1946 — which ultimately may have undermined his bargaining position with the Congress.

Just before independence Maulana Abul Kalam Azad wrote to Gandhi, pleading that Congress give maximum autonomy to the provinces. The subjects (such as finance, foreign affairs, defence) dealt with by the central government should be divided equally to create a reassuring sense of parity between Muslims and Hindus.

Azad argued that an increasingly insensitive Congress by then had lost Muslim sympathy and that it consequently needed to resort to strong and self-sacrificing measures to regain it. Gandhi, unfortunately, responded to Azad’s plea in a way that amounted to a snub.

Gandhi instructed Azad not to issue public statements on this delicate issue because at that moment, according to Gandhi, Azad’s radical proposals could not be entertained. Dawn. The partition game By Sayeed Hasan Khan & Kurt Jacobsen, Thursday, 03 Sep, 2009 | 09:03 AM PST |

In an interesting back and forth between Kapil Komireddi and Samar Abbas Kazmi we can see microcosm of the age old discussion that has been going on among the people of South Asia.

Jaswanth Singh eulogized Mohammad Ali Jinnah in his current book. The Bharati media weaned on the milk of "Jinnnah hatred" don't have a clue about one of the greatest political leaders of South Asia

In his analysis of a new book about Jinnah, Kapil Komireddi accuses the author, Jaswant Singh, of “bowdlerising zealously” to rid Pakistan’s founder of the “blame of partition”. Yet Kapil’s account omits certain important facts relevant to any discussion of how the “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity” came to found one of the modern world’s only two states carved in the name of a religion (the other being Israel).

To suggest that the story of a man as complex as Jinnah can be told without omissions in the confines of an opinion piece would be unfair to the man and to the storyteller. Kapil errs not in that he makes omissions in the story but that he attempts to tell the story at all in such a confined space. As Kapil rightly points out, Jinnah was, by all accounts, a secular constitutionalist and staunch Indian nationalist for most of his career. The story of how he became the voice of the movement that sought British India’s division across religious lines is a complex early 20th century drama involving conflicting personalities and fractured identities set against the backdrop of a dying empire.

The leading characters in this drama – Nehru, Gandhi, Jinnah, Patel, Iqbal – are variously worshipped and demonised in modern India and Pakistan. Yet, they are all merely human, children of India’s first tryst with modernity, individuals trying to make sense of their own very different histories to conjure visions of their future, who, in doing so, happen to alter the history of the subcontinent forever.

• RSS bigotry, INC arrogance, Gandhi’s racism made Pakistan inevitable
• Pakistan was inevitable– its seeds had been sown many centuries earlier
• Muslim rule in “India”: Myth and reality

Their stories are rich and worthy of being told and retold, and for anyone interested in how modern India and Pakistan came to be, their relationships withone another are worth examining in detail. These are stories of evolving identities in which we find the Harrow and Cambridge educated Mr Nehru becoming Pandit Nehru; barrister Gandhi becoming Mahatma Gandhi; Sir Iqbal becoming Allama Iqbal; and, the most fascinating of them all, the provincial Mahomedali Jinnahbhai transforming into the Savile Row-fitted Mr MA Jinnah, before finally settling on the Persianic Quaid-e-Azam. These are splendid, complex, brilliant men, each guided by his own sense of self and nationhood, who come together to dismantle the British Raj, yet part ways when the end is in sight.

It is thus unfortunate that these fascinating individuals must always be seen through the prism of their greatest collective failure: the sequence of wholly avoidable events leading to the bloodbath of partition. And as events of great human tragedy often do, the story of partition has become a deeply divisive and political issue in modern India and Pakistan.

South Asia in 5000 years has not been a monolith "country". Map of the 570 states of the Subcontinent in pre-indpendence British Empire "india"

The two countries have evolved competing histories of the event and the persons responsible for it: India sees the creation of Pakistan as a result of machinations by Jinnah, his band of Muslim League cronies and the conniving, departing British; Pakistan imagines its birth as a result of a hard-fought historic struggle against the twin evils of British imperialism and Hindu majoritarianism.

It is in this wide chasm between two competing falsehoods that Singh finds his space. In Singh’s book a new Jinnah is born, a much more human Jinnah, neither the demon hated in India nor the hero worshipped in Pakistan: a self-made man in an era of princes and privilege, driven by ambition to the pinnacle of success, yet held back by circumstance; a person whose intransigence was fed by that of those he was up against; and one whose resolve eventually broke him and the India he had set out to free.

His argument, drawn from primary sources of the time, centres on the sense of insecurity bred in the psyche of Muslim leadership as a result of what they perceived to be gains of Hindus, as represented by the Congress, at their expense. The level to which these fears were real is, of course, open to debate among historians, but as Singh explains, this “minority syndrome” amongst Muslim leadership caused religion to become the field where battles over federalism, socialism, modernism, and Indian identity are fought between these highly complex personalities.

He is, of course, not the first to challenge the historiography of partition. As early as 1960, Ram Manohar Lohia, an active member of the nationalist movement, had published a book called Guilty Men of India’s Partition, which criticized Nehru and Patel’s acquiescence to partition. In her 1985 book The Sole Spokesman, Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal examined the last decade of British power in India and reached similar conclusions as Singh as to the causes of India’s partition.

Kapil is wrong to dismiss Singh’swork – he does an important job in straddling the important boundary between academic, polemical and popular histories and reaching a conclusion that challenges both prevailing national narratives. Needless to say, it helps that Singhis one of modern India’s most prominent individuals, and has the ability to generate a greater popular effect than the most erudite of academics: the fact that his book has been banned in Gujarat, while sad and reprehensible, speaks volume for the level of discomfort his narrative is causing to that of the Indian establishment’s. He may ultimately be wrong – the strengthof his evidence leads me to suspect he is more right than most existing accounts – but the very existence of his work should serve to kindle a long overdue soul-searching in both countries as to how we see ourselves, our leaders and each other. When it comes to the question of Jinnah, independence, India and partition, zealotry must give way to intelligent discourse if we are to ever exorcise the ghosts of partition. Jinnah: neither angel nor demonPakistan’s founder was a complex figure. A controversial new book rightly challenges zealous fictions about him.Samar Abbas Kazmi guardian.co.uk, Monday 31 August 2009 16.00 BST Article history

This is the map of the Indus Valley Civilization which existed 5000 years ago on the banks of the Indus. This represent the Indus Pakistanis (see Indus Saga by Ahtizaz Ahsan). The IVC was not Hindu. They buried their dead, wrote a non-Sanskirt pictographic language, ate beef, did not know the horse, wre not vegetarian, wrote right to left, did not know the horse (No Arjun), and did not worship any of the Hindu pantheon (Arjun, Agni, Mithra, Nag). This map shows the Indus Valley Civilization which traded with the Muslim Moses in Mesopotamia. Pakistan is the latst Muslim incarnation of the IVC. The Indus people banded together to live togther as they had lived together for thousands of years. This was the contract once the Britain left. Bharat never existed as a united country--WHAT PARTITION?. This map shows the later stages of the IVC in Lothala and part sof Gujerat. The original IVC thrived only on the banks of the Indus (http://moinansari.wordpress.com/files/2008/01/pakistan-existed-5000-years-ago-as-ivc.gif)

Almost every discussion of the events of 1947 quickly degenerates into brickbats being thrown on the personalities of the leaders of the INC and the Muslim League. The Bharati temple educated point of view does not accept Pakistan. Bangladesh is brought up as a point to denigrate the Pakistani ideology. The Bharati point of view goes as follows. Since there are problems in Pakistan, therefore there should be no Pakistan and it should be absorbed back into Bharat which should extend from Kabul to Raj Kalhani (mythical land east of Hindu Bali in Indonesia). The bankruptcy of this mystical behemoth state is based on the some weird interpretation of Hindu scripture which concocts up the hallucinating notion that Qandhar somehow was mentioned in the scripture. It is historical fact, testified by meticulous Greek and Afghan records that Qandhar/Kandhar is a corruption of the Sikandar/Alexander and representsone of the hundreds of the cities named after the Macedonian. The temple educated logic doesn’t end with the fabrication about Qandhar, it continues to try to represent Buddhist and Jainism as part f Hinduism. Of course the Jains and Buddhist around the world (Korea, China, Lanka, Tibet, Vietnam) do not consider themselves as Hindus–but Hinduism tries to assimilate them within its own fold. This is the reason that Buddhism was exterminated from the place of its brith. Hinduism first eliminated Buddhism in Kashmir and other places and then tried to absorb it into the Hindu dharma. All this is rejected by the Buddhists.

The irredentist fabrication of history in Bharat does not end with the effort to incorporate Buddhism. It tries then to reach back into the Indus Valley Civilization which was certainly not Hindu in any sense of the word. The Indus valley people did not worship any of the Hindu pantheon of Gods (Agni, Mithra, Arjun, Ganesh, Shiva Lingam, Hanuman, Ram, Sita etc.), they buried their dead, did not use the Hindu Sanskrit language in any of its forms, were voracious beef eaters, did not know the horse (so no Arjun, Sita, Ram, Hanuman), were an Urban society (unlike the Hindu scriptures Kauras, Pandas, Mahabharta etc which are based on a rural society), used a pictographic language (not known to the Hindus of the Ganges Valley), did not cremate their dead, and read right to left (rather than left to right). The incapacity of the temple educated Bharatis cannot comprehend the Indus man as the modern Pakistan.

Just because John Principas concocted Ashoka as a composite figure, it doesn’t mean that he really existed. There are no records of “Ashoka” in any other text before 1837. Did Ashoka exist? Did Pandit Radhakantta create him for James Princep in 1837

In short, if Jinnah did not exist, the Muslims would have drafted another Muslim to represent them to create Pakistan.

Pakistan Historian.

Was Pakistan inevitable?

1920s: Pandit Malaviya shuddi (reconversion) movement

The term ‘shuddhi’ literally means ‘purification’. It refers to the re-conversion into the Hindu fold of non-Hindus, especially of those Hindus who have been converted to other religions by hook or crook. The word ‘shuddhi’ has been retained throughout in this section. Savarkar

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya was the president of the Indian National Congress during 1909 and in 1918. Pandit Malaviya led the Congress to oppose the just claims of the Muslim community. He founded the Hindu Mahasabha in 1906. Malaviya was a rabid racist and communalist conservative who believed in the ‘Varnashrama Dharma’ (caste system).

Before Gandhis arrival from Africa the Indian National Congress (INC)was led by people like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Jinnah had excellent relations with Dadabhai Naoroji, the president of the sister Indian National Association and later Member of Parliament in the British House of Commons, the first Indian to win a seat there. Jinnah was called the Muslim Gokhle. Instead of creating consensus politics, the Congress moved to the religious fanatics of the time like Malaviya.

There were other such “Hitlers” who wanted Mahabharta cleansed of all Muslims, Jians, Sikhs and Chiristians. Here is Savarkar.

…Most of the nations that could not root out the political and religious power of the Muslims were destroyed and became Muslim themselves. But even those non-Muslim nations who succeeded in toppling Muslim political power but kept Muslim religious power intact could not escape from the persistent and terrible Muslim menace. Only three to five nations did not rest after toppling the political power of Muslims but immediately launched a bitter war against their religious power and made their nation free of Muslims. These nations alone not only managed to survive but actually smashed the Muslim menace. (1963, Sahaa soneri pane or Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, Samagra Savarkar vangmaya, Vol.4, p. 787). Savarkar

I do not despise, let alone hate Muslim or Christian brethren, indeed even the most primitive tribes in the human race. I oppose the wickedness of individuals and groups belonging to them when I see it. It is my hope and conviction that Hindu-Muslim unity can be based on a permanent and beneficial footing only through the practice of shuddhi. (1927, Majhi janmathep or The Story of My Transportation for Life, Samagra Savarkar vangmaya, Vol.1, p. 511). Savarkar

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya a former president of the Indian National Congress led the "Shuddi" (reconversion) movement directed as Muslims. Pandit Malaviya wanted to follow Hitler's plans

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya and Lal Lajpat Rai, both ex-Congress Presidents, founded their own Nationalist Party that year, a Hindu first communal party, which won many seats in the United Provinces…..

Malaviya was president of the Hindu Mahasaba, a conserative communal society that focused on saving cows and slaughter Muslims while trying to force the conversions of Muslims to Hinduism, arguing that most of India’s Muslim population had originally been Hindus but had forcibly been converted to Islam during some five hundred years of Muslim rule.

One of the most militant popular Hindu communal leaders of that “reconversion” (shudhi) movement, Swami Shraddhanand, was assassinated in Delhi that December by a Muslim extremist. The swami, like Lala Lajpat Rai, belonged to another fundamentalist Hindu society, the Arya Samaj, which advocated turning back India’s history more than three thousand years to an ancient Aryan tribal polity, reflected in Vedic scripture, when Brahmans and cows were treated as gods on earth.Rajib Dogars

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya led the “Shuddi” (reconversion) movement. One of the most salient developments in the 1920s was the launching of the shuddhi movement by the Arya Samaj to bring into the Hindu fold various groups considered outside the pale of what had now come to be defined as ‘Hinduism’, including untouchables and, later, Muslim, Christian and even Sikh communities. The Arya shuddhi campaign provoked Muslim leaders and groups to respond, and this took the form of various tablighi or Islamic missionary initiatives intended to counter the Arya Samaj’s conversion drive and, going further, to attempt to spread Islam among non-Muslims as well.

The first recorded shuddhi of a born Muslim was reported in 1877, when Dayanand Saraswati performed the shuddhi of a Muslim man from Dehra Dun, giving him the name of Alakhdhari. Individual conversions of this sort were few and far between, for such converts not only severed all social ties with their relatives but were also not fully accepted as equals not just by the Sanatani Hindus, who vociferously opposed the shuddhi project, but even by members of the Arya Samaj, who Ghai says, ‘behaved like most of the traditionalists and conservatives, fearing the wrath of their caste biraderi’. Clearly then, the Aryas realized, shuddhi among the Muslims would have to take the form of conversion of entire Muslim social groups if it was to really succeed. As a prelude to the actual launching of this ambitious missionary drive, towards the end of the nineteenth century Maharaja Ranbir Singh, the Hindu ruler of the largely Muslim state of Kashmir, is said to have commissioned the preparation of a 21-volume encyclopaedia by the name of Ranbir Karit Prayaschit Mahanibandh ['Ranbir's Great Essay on Repentance'], which argued the case and suggested strategies for the mass conversion of all the ‘neo-Muslim communities’ [nau Muslim aqwam] of India to ‘Hinduism’. This book, Muslim leaders were to later allege, had been secretly circulated among leading Hindus so that the Muslims remained unaware of the plot.

The first attempts by the Aryas at mass conversions of Muslim groups date to 1908, when Arya missionaries began touring the area around Deeg in the Bharatpur State in eastern Rajputana, calling upon Muslims there to renounce Islam, which, they alleged, had been forcibly imposed on their ancestors.

Some years later, Arya missionaries found active among the neo-Muslim Malkanas, a Rajput group who claimed to be Muslim but followed several Hindu customs and beliefs, in Etawah, Kanpur, Shahajahnpur, Hardoi, Meerut and Mainpuri in the western United Provinces, exhorting them to return to what they called their ‘ancestral religion’. In 1910, shuddhi sabhas were set up in several places in these districts, and although it was claimed that they had converted some 1000 Malkana Muslims to the Hindu fold, they were wound up the following year. As in the case of Deeg, the Aryas are said to have met with little success, being successfully countered by the intervention of local Muslim bodies working in association with the Anjuman Hidayat-ul Islam, a Delhi-based Muslim missionary organization.

A decade later, however, the Aryas were to launch the shuddhi campaign in the Malkana belt on a war-footing. In August 1922, in the wake of grossly exaggerated reports of forced conversions of Hindus in Malabar in the course of the Mappilla rebellion, the Kshatriya Upakarini Sabha ['Kshatriya Upliftment Society'], an organization of Hindu Rajputs patronized by Rajput princes and landlords, passed a resolution at a meeting in Allahabad calling for the conversion of the Muslim Rajputs to the Hindu fold. In December that year, the Sabha met once again, and decided to launch a campaign to convert the Malkanas to ‘Hinduism’. This provided the stimulus to the Aryas to start shuddhi work among the Malkanas. In August 1923, Shraddhanand, the leading Arya shuddhi advocate, presided over a meeting to discuss strategies for the shuddhi of the Malkanas. The fact that the meeting was attended by leading Sanatani, Jain and Sikh spokesmen, all of whom vociferously supported the shuddhi campaign, clearly suggests, as Muslim leaders were to allege, that the race for numbers and political interests, rather than the propagation of the Arya brand of ‘Hinduism’, were the motivating factors behind the planned missionary drive. The meeting approved the setting up of the Bharatiya Hindu Shuddhi Sabha, an all-India shuddhi council, whose objective was said to be the conversion of all non-Hindu groups all over India to the Hindu fold.

The shuddhi campaign among the Malkanas, which was launched in early 1923, reached its peak by the end of 1927, by which time some 1,63,000 Malkana Muslims are said to have been brought into the Hindu fold. Significantly, although the Aryas played the leading role in the drive, the shuddhi-ed Malkanas, by and large, did not convert to the Arya faith as such. Other than renouncing some of their Islamic practices, such as burial of the dead or male circumcision, there seems to have been little change in their own beliefs and practices. If they chose not to accept the Arya brand of Vedic ‘Hinduism’, orthodox Hindus seemed reluctant to accept them, considering them as ritually impure and inferior. Having ‘rescued’ them from their Islamic past, the Aryas and the Sanatanis were quite content to leave the Malkanas to their own devices. De-Islamization, and not an impelling urge to spread Arya beliefs, seems to have been the fundamental impulse behind the Arya shuddhi drive among the Malkanas.

Shuddhi emerged as a powerful mobilizational symbol and tool to consolidate Hindu ranks, helping galvanize the process of the construction of a pan-Indian Hindu community rigidly set apart from the rest. It is hardly surprising that Shradhhanand, the leading force behind the Malkana shuddhi, was also the most ardent advocate of sanghathan, the consolidation and militarization of all Hindudom. As testimony to the success of the shuddhi campaign in mobilizing and consolidating the Hindus, both Aryas as well as the Sanatanis who had initially been vehemently opposed to shuddhi, as one, transcending deep-seated caste, sectarian, racial, linguistic and regional divisions, the Tribune of Lahore, in its editorial of 2 May, 1927, remarked: ‘The shuddhi… propaganda is no longer the exclusive concern of the Arya Samaj; an overwhelming majority of the Hindus are identified [with it]‘.

Muslim reactions to the shuddhi campaign – ii. The success of the Aryas in their campaign among the Malkanas led them on to attempt to spread their work among several other neo-Muslim groups in northern India, including Muslim Jat, Gujjar and Rajput communities in the Punjab and the United Provinces. Soon, appeals began being issued calling for the shuddhi of virtually all the Muslims of India. At a public rally in Lahore, Shraddhanand delivered a fiery speech, appealing to the Hindus to convert to the Hindu fold 65 million Indian Muslims. Bhaskarteertha, the Sanatani Shankaracharya of the Sharada Peetha, went even further and declared that barring ‘a few hundred thousand’ Indian Muslims whose forefathers had come from ‘Afghanistan and Baluchistan’, the rest of the Muslims of the country were descendants of Hindu converts and that they should, therefore, be all made Hindu once again.

The Muslim reaction to the prospect of mass desertions of large numbers of only partially-Islamised Muslims, perhaps the majority of the Indian Muslim population, to the Hindu fold, was, naturally, one of shock and panic. Leading Muslims now appealed for frantic efforts to be made to rescue the Malkanas, to prevent further conversions to ‘Hinduism’, and even to begin counter-missionary drives among the Hindus themselves. They were unanimous in asserting that the need of the hour was to launch an India-wide missionary drive, to purge Muslim groups of what were seen as their Hinduistic customs, to spread awareness about the teachings of Islam among them and to bring their practices and life-styles in conformity with the Islamic law [shar'iat] and thereby create clear boundaries between Muslims and others, to prevent Muslims from easily being absorbed into the Hindu fold. As a leading Deobandi ‘alim of the Jami’at-ul Ulama-i-Hind asserted, the need of the hour was to ‘dye the Hinduistic society [hinduana mu'ashrat] deep with the colour of the culture of the Hijaz’.

Mendicants and blind beggars should sing Islamic songs while asking for alms. This strategy promises to be particularly effective, because, Nizami says, ‘In India song and music have a far more powerful effect than lectures and sermons’. Muslim writers should write tracts on methods of tabligh as well as stories about the brave feats of the Muslims. The latter, Nizami says, will have a special appeal for ‘martial groups’ such as the Rajputs.Nizami set up the Nizamia Sufi Mission to carry out his tablighi project. He does not, however, seem to have met with much success. More fruitful, however, were the efforts of Islamic groups opposed to the popular Sufism that Nizami represented. Such, for instance, was the Tablighi Jama’at, launched by a Deobandi ‘alim, Maulana Muhammad Ilyas in 1925, and which today has emerged as the single largest Islamic movement in the world, active in almost every country. The launching of the Tablighi Jama’at was a direct fall-out of the Arya shuddhi campaign. Apprehensive that the Meos of Mewat, a nominally Islamised group living in the vicinity of the Malkana belt, would also fall prey to the Aryas, Ilyas began a campaign aiming at what he saw as their fuller ‘Islamisation’. He instructed the Meos to give up their Hindu practices and beliefs and to strictly abide by the shari’at in their daily lives. Meo villagers, who hardly had any knowledge of Islam and whose practices were scarcely different from those of their non-Muslim neighbours, were formed into groups [jama'ats] and despatched to Deobandi madrasas in the western United Provinces and Delhi, there to learn the basics of Islam, such as the creed of confession and the five ritual prayers, from leading ‘ulama. On their return to Mewat, they transmitted this knowledge to their kinsmen, and exhorted them to join the jama’ats as well. Great rewards in heaven [sawab] were promised in return for this. According to Tablighi Jama’at sources, in a few years after the launching of Ilyas’ campaign, most Meos had given up worshipping at Hindu shrines, wearing Hindu-style clothes and sporting Hindu names.Like Nizami and Ilyas, other Muslim ideologues argued for the ‘ulama and Sufi divines to play a leading role in spearheading the tabligh counter-offensive. The Jamiat-ul Ulama-i-Hind, an organisation of leading, largely Deobandi ‘ulama, called for the setting up of a chain of madrasas all over the country to impart Islamic education to ordinary Muslims to prevent them from falling into the clutches of the Aryas. ‘No number of madrasas is too much, and nor is any amount of money to be spent on them’, declared Maulana Muhammad ‘Abdul Halim Siddiqui, the treasurer of the Department for the Propagation and Protection of Islam, set up by the Jami’at in 1923 in the wake of the shuddhi campaign among the Malkanas. A similar demand was voiced by the leading ‘alim of the Firangi Mahal madrasa of Lucknow, Maulana ‘Abdul Bari, who called for Sufi preceptors to instruct their disciples to form teams and tour the countryside preaching Islam to neo-Muslim groups. These teams would include, besides Muslim scholars, individuals with a good knowledge of medicine who would administer to the sick and thus play an important role in spreading Islam among non-Muslims.

This focus on spreading Islamic knowledge among the Muslims to combat the threat of the Aryas emerges as particularly salient in the writings of the period of one of the leading Islamic ideologues in recent South Asian history, Maulana Sayyed Abul A’la Maududi, who was later to go on to found the Jama’at-i-Islami. In a series of articles in 1925 of Al-Jami’at, the official organ of the Jami’at-ul Ulama-i-Hind, of which he was then the editor, Maududi argued the case for a more activist and broad-based tabligh campaign that fitted in with his own understanding of Islam as an all-embracing ideology that covered every aspect of life. Maududi stressed that the success of the Arya campaign was but a reflection and a consequence of Muslims having forgotten what he calls ‘the fundamental aim’ of a Muslim’s life and existence–the establishment of Islam in its entirety in accordance with the Will of God, through constant engagement in its tabligh, inviting others to the Truth. ‘The entire life of the Prophet Muhammad’, he wrote, ‘was a manifestation of this da’awat-i-haq [Invitation to the Truth']‘, and Muslims must follow in his footsteps. A Muslim’s entire life, he stressed, is a form of tabligh. For a Muslim to fulfil this divine mission, he or she must have at least a modicum of knowledge of Islam. Further, he or she must be a self-conscious believer. It is not enough, Maududi says, for someone to claim to be a Muslim simply because of birth in a Muslim family. The tablighi project of spreading knowledge of Islam among Muslims, Maududi suggests, must also be accompanied by efforts at social

reform on the lines of the shari’at. In particular, social inequalities and caste-like features within the Muslim community, taking advantage of which the Aryas had managed to make considerable headway in their shuddhi campaign, must be combatted. In this way, what Maududi calls for is a consolidated, homogenous, well-defined and closely-knit Muslim community, defined and set apart from the others by strict observance to the shar’iat.

Conclusion

The Arya shuddhi offensive was thus seen as a grave challenge by Muslim leaders, who responded to it by advocating a grand community-wide effort of Islamic reform, reaching out to hitherto neglected neo-Muslim groups, seeking to draw them into the fold of the emerging pan-Indian Muslim community, united on the basis of allegiance to common beliefs and ritual practices. In the changed socio-political context, ordinary people thus assumed far greater importance in elite-led mobilisational projects than they had hitherto been. In the process, individual Muslims, no matter how humble their station in life, were now seen as crucial symbols and representatives of Islam, assuming the place that the Muslim ruler had traditionally enjoyed. Tabligh and the defence of Islam as a duty of all Muslims, men and women, whatever their social position. Yogi Sikand

Mohammad Ali Jinnah after winning the elections, and as “the sole spokesman” of all the Muslims of the South Asian Subcontinent fought for and got the British to agree to Separate Electorate for the Muslims. This gave the Muslims tremendous clout in the political spectrum of South Asian Asia politics. Mohammad Ali Jinnah and nurtured and brought in Dr. Ambedakar into the parliament and convinced him to demand separate electorate for the Dalits and Untouchables. Dr. Ambedkar compared the hatred against the Scheduled Castes with apartheid and antisemitism.

Dr. Ambedkar was a protege of Jinnah and Jinnah nurtured him. In the case of Ambedkar, there has been marked response in his life after meeting the different leaders. After meeting Jinnah in January 1940 along with Periyar, Ambedkar became more confident and reassured. Ambedkar, Periyar and Jinnah on Januay 9, 1940: Mohammad Ali Jinnah courted, mentored and helped Dr. Ambedkar get elected. He strived for a Muslim-Dalit coaltion that would have given them the majoirty. The Muslims of Bharat must reach out to the Dalits, form alliances with them, and liberate them from Untouchability through Islam

The Hindu Civilisation…. is a diabolical contrivance to suppress and enslave humanity. Its proper name would be infamy. What else can be said of a civilisation which has produced a mass of people… who are treated as an entity beyond human intercourse and whose mere touch is enough to cause pollution?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Igk1oTrpQg

Dr. Ambedakar got the concession for separate electorate from the British. When Mohandas Gandhi– a very strong supporter of the caste system and Untenability– heard about the British acceptance o f separate electorate, he went into a tizzy fit. The Hindu mahasabah threatened mass massacres of the Dalits. The enslaved Untouchables were harassed to no end all across the land. Mr. Gandhi went into a fast unto death to blackmail Dr. Ambedkar. Finally Dr. Ambedkar gave in to the pressure, and surrendered the rights of the Dalites. He said that this was the biggest blunder of his life. The Dalits still remain oppressed because of the lack of separate electorate for them. Ambedkar was a fierce critic of Mohandas Gandhi and the Indian National Congress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiT1pm7ZDv4

Ambedkar had become one of the most prominent untouchable political figures of the time. He had grown increasingly critical of mainstream Indian political parties for their perceived lack of emphasis for the elimination of the caste system. Ambedkar criticized the Indian National Congress and its leader Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, whom he accused of reducing the untouchable community to a figure of pathos. Ambedkar was also dissatisfied with the failures of British rule, and advocated a political identity for untouchables separate from both the Congress and the British. At a Depressed Classes Conference on August 8, 1930 Ambedkar outlined his political vision, insisting that the safety of the Depressed Classes hinged on their being independent of the Government and the Congress both:

We must shape our course ourselves and by ourselves… Political power cannot be a panacea for the ills of the Depressed Classes. Their salvation lies in their social elevation. They must cleanse their evil habits. They must improve their bad ways of living…. They must be educated…. There is a great necessity to disturb their pathetic contentment and to instill into them that divine discontent which is the spring of all elevation.[2]

In this speech, Ambedkar criticized the Salt Satyagraha launched by Gandhi and the Congress. Ambedkar’s criticisms and political work had made him very unpopular with orthodox Hindus, as well as with many Congress politicians who had earlier condemned untouchability and worked against discrimination across India. This was largely because these “liberal” politicians usually stopped short of advocating full equality for untouchables.

In 1932, M. C. Rajah concluded a pact with two right-wingers in the Indian National Congress, Dr. B. S. Moonje [4][5] and Jadhav. According to this pact, Moonje offered reserved seats to scheduled castes in return for Rajah’s support. This demand prompted Ambedkar to make an official demand for Separate Electorate System on an all-India basis. Ambedkar’s prominence and popular support amongst the untouchable community had increased, and he was invited to attend the Second Round Table Conference in London in 1931. Here he sparred verbally with Gandhi on the question of awarding separate electorates to untouchables.[2] A fierce opponent of separate electorates on religious and sectarian lines, Gandhi feared that separate electorates for untouchables would divide Hindu society for future generations.

When the British agreed with Ambedkar and announced the awarding of separate electorates, Gandhi began a fast-unto-death while imprisoned in the Yeravada Central Jail of Pune in 1932. Exhorting orthodox Hindu society to eliminate discrimination and untouchability, Gandhi asked for the political and social unity of Hindus. Gandhi’s fast provoked great public support across India, and orthodox Hindu leaders, Congress politicians and activists such as Madan Mohan Malaviya and Palwankar Baloo organized joint meetings with Ambedkar and his supporters at Yeravada. Fearing a communal reprisal and killings of untouchables in the event of Gandhi’s death, Ambedkar agreed under massive coercion from the supporters of Gandhi to drop the demand for separate electorates, and settled for a reservation of seats. This agreement, which saw Gandhi end his fast, in the end achieved more representation for the untouchables, while dropping the demand for separate electorates that was promised through the British Communal Award prior to Ambedkar’s meeting with Gandhi. Ambedkar was to later criticise this fast of Gandhi as a gimmick to deny political rights to the untouchables and increase the coercion he had faced to give up the demand for separate electorates.

This is the main reason 450 million Dalits and Untouchables hate Mohandas Gandhi

Ambedkar died in his sleep on December 6, 1956at his home in Delhi. Since the Caste Hindus denied the cremation at Dadar crematorium, A Buddhist-style cremation was organised for him at Chowpatty beach on December 7, attended by hundreds of thousands of supporters, activists and admirers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAki71LuxKs

The pre-independence map of 570 states of the Subcontinent. Why would the separation of Pakistan be considered "Partition"? What gave Nehru the right to forcibly absorb Hyberabad, Junagarh, Manvadar and Goa into the Indian Union? Can Bharat also claim Nepal as part of the union? Can Bharat also claim Lanka as part of Bharat, or Burma?

Jaswant Singh is going from pillar to post in an endeavor to sell his books, but also to propagate his vision of “Akhand Bharat” (Greater India). By personifying the glorious struggle of for independence into the body of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, he is trying to convert the ideology of Pakistan into a Greek tragedy–complete with heroes and villains. Mr. Janawant Singh self aggrandisingtours are profitable to his personal ambitions and political career, but the creation of Pakistan (re-birth of the Indus Valley as a Muslim state) is not a page out of Shakuntala. The blunders of Nehru and Gandhi precipitated the constitutional crisis and made the proposals of the Indian National Congress untenable. However reducing the self of loss of the Muslims in a post 1857 world to a personality is the height of arrogance. While Jaswant Singh scores points against the Indian National Congress, he defends the original proponents of the Two Nation theory, Lala Rai, Sarvarkar, Haldiram and Gowalkar.

Mr. Singh asks a lot of questions about the ideology of Pakistan. His sole purpose is to denigrate the entire leadership of the Muslims of South Asia. He eulogizes Jinnah, but he also defends the racism of Rai and the bigotry of Haldiram. This dichotomy in Mr. Singh’sthinking makes one wonder about his true motives about writing the book with a focus on what he calls “partition”.

South Asia was a conglomeration of 570 states. Why isn’t the independence of Burma from the British considered “partition”? Why isn’t the liberation of Lanka also considered “partition”? What about Nepal? At one time the British empire included Nepal. Why isn’t the separation of Hindu Nepal from Bharat considered “partition”? At one point Aden and Iraq were part of the same British “Indian Empire”. Was the independence of Iraq also a cataclysmic “partition” event? What about the French “Indian Empire”? For the French “India” included parts of present day “India”, but it also included Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Why isn’t the independence of Vietnam considered “partition” of India. The Dutch “India” included parts of present day “India” and the country of Indonesia. If we are to go by the logic of Jaswant Singh, the independence of Indonesia would also be considered “partition”.

This map shows the vision for Pakistan and Bangistan. Quaid e Azam struggled and the Muslims struggles for this solution. Chaudhry Rehmat Ali described the Continent of "Dinia" and dependencies. Ch. Rehmat Ali's map depicted Muslim rule in South Asia after the British left. The Muslim homelands would be carved out of "Dinia". This was the struggle for independence. Rehmat Ali and the Muslims wanted the region returned to Muslim rule as it was before the British arrived

NEW DELHI: One has to understand MohammedAli Jinnah – bothas a man and as a statesman – to understand India’s relationship with Pakistan and Bangladesh, veteran politician and author Jaswant Singh said here Saturday.

“Unless we understand MohammedAli Jinnah as a man and as a statesman, we cannot understand Bangladesh, Pakistan and our relations with the two countries. Nobody has written about Jinnah – whom Mahatma Gandhi described as a great man – the way I have,” Singh told a packed audience comprising writers, journalists, publishers and bureaucrats at the Pragati Maidan here on the inaugural day of the 15th Delhi Book Fair.

Singh, a former defence and finance minister, was expelled from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) earlier this month over his appraisal of the Pakistan founder in his controversial book “Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence”.

The book, which defends Jinnah’s role in the partition of the subcontinent and says he had been “unnecessarily demonised”, has been banned by the BJP government in Gujarat.

At the book fair, Singh was addressing a panel discussion, “Ban on Jaswant Singh’s Book – Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence”.

The panelists included Tushar A Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and head of the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation, Minister of State for Minority Affairs Salman Khursheed, former Karnataka governor TN Chaturvedi and retired Delhi High Court judge CM Nayar. The discussion was moderated by academic and writer Yogesh Atal.

“I have no intention of speaking at a discussion promoting my book at a book fair. It could be construed as self-promotion. Instead, I will speak on the fallout of partition, which prompted me to research the book.Times of India. One has to understand Jinnah to know Pakistan: Jaswant 29 Aug 2009, 2102 hrs IST, IANS

Pre Independence map of British "India". This is the political map of South Asia. The Muslims always saw South Asia as a conglomeration of 570 states--they never saw it as one country. "Akhand Bharat" never existed except in the minds of the Hindu mhasabah bigots. There was no partition. The states on the banks of the Indus decided to continue to live together.

By reducing Jawaharlal Nehru, Jaswant Singh increases the value of the RSS type of thinking. He uses Jinnah as a leverage to downgrade Nehru, however he does not accept any of the things that Mohammad Ali Jinnah stood for. Mr. Jaswant Singh talks about understanding Pakistan, but his book is but a polemic on the Pakistan ideology. Jaswant Singh constantly talks about “partition” as a cataclysmic event, as if “Mother India” ever existed a nation state. South Asia never exsited as a nation state. When the British came to Kokota, there were 570 states in South Asia. When the British left South Asia, there were 570 states plus the dominions of Bharat and Paksitan. In 1947 the states on the Indus decided to continue to live together, just like they had lived together for 5000 years. There was no bond between Mehergarh and Goa. Moenjadarohad no links with Benearas. Harappa was intricatelyliked to Kashmir, but has no connection with Ayudiya. South Asia is as big as Western Europe. Why would Luxembourghook up with Italy, or Liechtenstein be part of Spain. Why would Switzerland be part of Greece?

The journey of Mohammad Ali Jinnah from “the Ambassador of Hindu Muslim Unity to the Quaid e Azam of Pakistan” is a journey of the Muslims of South Asia. Alama Iqbal also went through the same journey. Alama Iqbal typified the Muslim experience–from a “Indian patriot” to a “Pan Islamic thinker” to a “Pakistani”. Today’s Muslims in South Asia have all gone through the same transition.

The British Empire does not even show half of Pakistan. In 1850 this was the British map of South Asia. Only the purple areas belgonged to the East India Company. This map reflects back to the Indus policy of Lord Curzon A previous map would show Afghanistan as part of the empire. This map shows Nepal and parts of Burma as part of "India". Another map also shows Aden and Iraq as part of "India". Why is the independence of Pakistan called "partition" and the independence of Neap, Burma, Lanka, Afghanistan, Iraq from the British Empire not called "partition"

“The original title of my book was very long, ‘Mohammed Ali Jinnah: Journey from an Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity in India to Quaid-e-Azamin Pakistan’. My American publishers did not like it. They are ignorant about Jinnah or India’s partition. They don’t understand Indian history unless you compare it with the American civil war,” Singh maintained.

“Partition has been the most damaging event in modern India. Though I was born in a village far away from Lahore and Sindh, I always wondered how could they ever become foreign lands… and (how) the man (Jinnah) who had so assiduously worked for the 1916 Lucknow Pact could divide the country,” he said.

The 1916 Lucknow Pact between the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress had pressured the British government to give Indians more authority to run the country.

“The takeoff point for my research was 1857 – the mutiny which brought the Hindus and Muslims in the subcontinent together and finally uprooted the British after 90 years, in 1947. The 1857 revolt continued to haunt the British,” Singh said.

“Jinnah set another milestone in communal amity in 1916 with the Lucknow Pact. A man who had lived all his life in India barring the last 13 months and who had been insulted by the British did not have to be demonised by us,” he said.

“India cannot be shackled by its neighbours and unless we become one country, it will be difficult to realise our dreams. We have to cultivate a mindset that allows us to think freely.

“I am grateful that the intellectuals and the publishing world are standing by me to support freedom of thought, that is, the freedom to write. Where the mind is without fear… will heads be held high and there will be freedom,” Singh said, taking a cue from Rabindranath Tagore’s famous lines.Times of India. One has to understand Jinnah to know Pakistan: Jaswant 29 Aug 2009, 2102 hrs IST, IANS

Constables 1893 British map showing Pakistan, Afghanistan, Burma, Ceylon, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim as part of "Indian Empire". Lord Curzon and Britain's On to the Oxus policy was short lived. Churchill said it best "India is as ephimeral as the equator"

If Mr. Jaswant Singh and Bharat want to understand “Paksitan”, the need to understand the writings of Rai, Haldiram, Sarvarkar, and Gowalkar. They need to comprehend the wrongs done to the Dalits and the mistreatment of the Indian Muslims in present day Bhrat. Eulogizing Jinnah won’t help them comprehend Pakistan–reading the Saachaar report and taking corrective action will help them understand Pakistan. Writing a book on Jinnah as a great man may be a first step in comprehending the Muslim psyche, but if Bharat wants to find solutions, it has to dump the farce of a fake article of accession in Kashmir. If Bharat wants peace, then it has to overcome the paranoia about Pakistan. The current government in Dehithinks that peace with Pakistan is a reard for good behaviour. It needs to comprehend the fact that peace is the interest of all parties, and Bhratcan never be a regional power ’till it makes peace with Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Lanka, Bangladesh, Mayanmar, Pakistan and China.

• http://rupeenews.com/most-popular-articles/pakistan-and-america-what-is-not-known-and-what-they-wont-tell-you/pakistan-the-new-pressler-amendment-should-be-countered-with-request-for-a-marshall-plan-for-pakistan/on-kashmir-matters/
• http://rupeenews.com/2008/09/12/expansion-of-early-islam-in-maps-6th-7th-century/
• http://rupeenews.com/2007/12/07/kashmir-does-the-article-of-accession-exist/
• http://rupeenews.com/most-popular-articles/pakistan-and-america-what-is-not-known-and-what-they-wont-tell-you/pakistan-the-new-pressler-amendment-should-be-countered-with-request-for-a-marshall-plan-for-pakistan/on-kashmir-matters/polls-on-kashmir-tehrik-e-ilhaq-e-pakistan/
• http://rupeenews.com/2007/12/10/nehurs-commitement-to-people-of-kashmir-and-various-un-implemented-resolutions-on-kashmir/
• http://rupeenews.com/2008/08/19/the-green-wildfire-of-freedom-in-indian-occupied-kashmir-fields-of-pakistani-flags-in-srinagar/

Kashmir and the subcontinent has a rich and tumultuous history. We can pick up the pieces in the nineteenth century, but the actual history of Kashmir begins much much much earlier, before Islam or Hinduism was present on the soil of our lands.

Slogans raised by Kashmiris all over Sirinagar & Indian Occupied Kashmir

Long before the Crescent and Star flew atop Islamabad, long before Mohammed Bin Qasim invaded Sind, long before the Mughals spread prosperity in all the nooks and corners of the subcontinent, long before the Sikh dynasty got Kashmir from the British, long before the Chundra Gupta Vikramadatya ruled India, the people of Kashmir were tied to the people of Pakistan.

• The Geographic Two Nation Theory. Pakistan existed 5000 years ago as the “Indus Valley Civilization”
• Gwadar to China:- Trade lessons from the 5000 yr old Pakistani Indus Valley Civilization: The Harrappan Trade Corridor within the IVC (Dilmin, Mekan) and beyond is now being resurrected again

Kashmir has been in existence since 5000 years. Its history can be traced to time immemorial. Kashmir has always been a magnet to immigrants.

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This is what Edward Desmond has to say about Kashmir in his book Himalyan Ulster:

On a map of the western Himalayas, the valley of Kashmir shows up as a smooth, oval-shaped patch amid a sea of surrounding peaks in what is today Indias Jammu and Kashmir state.

For thousands of years, travellers, freebooters, and empire builders have set down their breathless impressions of this valley the French writer Francois Bernier called it the paradise of the Indies with its towering pine forests, deep lakes, flower carpeted meadows, and fields of iridescent saffron. The seventeenth century Mughal emperor Jehangir sighed on his death-bed that his last wish was to visit Kashmir. Indians today revere the valley as the place they long to visit, and it serves as the setting for countless romantic Indian films.

• Nehru’s commitment to the people of Kashmir
• Kashmir and Junagarh is Pakistani territory
• Kashmir: Does the article of accession exist?
• UN resolutions, and Nehru speeches on disputed nature of Kashmir

Prior to Hinduism in the subcontinent, the Kashmir Valley (called Abhasrsa) traded with the Indus Valley Civilisation. In pre-Vedic times the people who lived in the Indus Valley lived in absolute harmony. There is some confusion as to who were the original inhabitants of the subcontinent. Many feel that there was a civilisation BEFORE the Dravidians landed in South Asia. Some have ventured to claim that based on the fact that all of Indias neighbours are Oriental, perhaps the original inhabitants of ancient India were Oriental in ethnic origin. The Dravidians either defeated the original peoples of India or totally assimilated with them. The Dravidians came to the subcontinent and made it their home. This is known: The Dravidians were not Hindu, the Dravidians preceded the Hindu era in the Subcontinent. The peaceful Dravidians were an enlightened and cultured peoples and they formed the Indus Valley Civilisation.

New Kashmiri slogans reported by Indian activist Arundhati Roy

The Aryans came to the subcontinent in many waves, and caused havoc with the local inhabitants. These barbaric hordes came to the subcontinent and totally destroyed the earlier civilisations and formed their own caste systems. After many waves of Aryans had invaded the subcontinent, Hinduism as a later wave to the land now called Pakistan. Hundreds of years were spent in wars between the Dravidians and the Aryans. These wars are noted in pre-vedic literature as Ramayana. After the Aryan Hindus had settled in the land, they started fighting amongst themselves. The Inter-Aryan wars were called the Mahabharta wars. Hindus claim that 650 million soldiers died in the Mahabaharta wars (I didn’t make up the numbers, I just reported them !).

The Arayans arrived in South Asia in waves. The Huns, the Rajputs and others were always in conflict. After the Hindu conflicts died down, around the 8th century B.C Buddhism took root in the subcontinent. Buddhist-Hindu wars claimed many lives.

The Kashmir valley was mostly inhabited by many people that included sun worshippers, Zorastarians, and Buddhists. Kashmir became an important centre of Brahman learning. Brahaman art, literature and philosophy flourished unhindered, on the backs of the untouchables, and the lower caste Hindus. After the 8th century the clear and loud message of Islam was heard in the Valley. It was the Sufis who carried the message of Mohamamd to Kashmir. The caste system of the Hindus, the Brahman cruelty, and the practices of Sati, and human sacrifices were fertile grounds for Islam in Kashmir. Slowly but surely, people converted to the message that accorded the Untouchables INSTANT equality among the Muslim brotherhood.

From 1326 to 1819, Muslims improved the lot of the Kashmiris and ruled the Kashmir valley with compassion and honour. The Mughals not only ruled Kashmir, they also brought it art, culture, music, paintings, and architecture that the people had never seen. Wherever the Moghuls lived they brought life with them. The Shalimar Gardens and the Mosques built in the Valley are a testament to the affluence of India in the 16th century. Jahangir was the wealthiest man on the planet and he spent his money to create luxury for his people. Kashmir benefited too. Hindu temples built in the sixteenth century were subsidised, and today they remain in the valley.

Hindus thrived in the Valley. The forefathers of the Nehrus lived and prospered in Kashmir during the Muslim rule. During the regimes of chaos during the Afghan rule (1752-1819) many Muslims lost their lives due to Patel persecution.

Kashmir was sold to the Sikhs following the defeat of Sikhs at the hands of the British in 1846, Gulab Singh, the cruel and dim-witted Dogra ruler of Jammu, acquired Kashmir from the British and ruthlessly tired to rule the state of Jammu & Kashmir.

The period of the Dogra rulers was the darkest in the history of the state. Gulab Singh was a ruthless ruler. He ruled by edict only, the edict of the Kirpan. Thus Jammu & Kashmir became a Princely State and remained so till 1947 until India occupied it.

ABHISARA

Contrary to popular belief, Kashmir is not a monolith. It has been called many names throughout history. The recorded history of Kashmir is more than five thousand years. On the eve of Alexander’s invasion, Kashmir was called Abhisara. The great Kashmiri historians, Kalhan and Ratnakar have written beautiful stories about the valley, but the story of Kashmir begins much before that and Rajatarangini of Kalhana records some of it. Ibn-e-Batuta, Al-Beruni and Fa-hien mention Kashmir in their travelogues. Many Mughals, including Akbar mentions Kashmir in their many diaries. Muslim Kashmiri poets have eulogised the beauty of the Valley of Kashmir for centuries. Lalitaditya Avantivarman, Sikander Butshikan, Shamas-u-din Iraqi, Mirza Hyder Dughlat, Faquirullah Kanta, Mir Hazar Khan Zainul-Abedin, Duralabhavardhana, Jiyapida are only a few of the famous kings of the Valley.

Some Indian revisionists have tried to portray the picture that Kashmiri history begins with Maharaja Ghulab Singh. Kashmiri history began a long time before partition, a very long time before Ghulab Singh. It surely began before the very brief Sikha-Shahi of Lahore. To start the history of Kashmir in the nineteenth century is like beginning the history of the subcontinent after the war of independence of 1857 (The Great Indian Mutiny).

Kashmir and the subcontinent has a rich and tumultuous history. We can pick up the pieces in the nineteenth century, but the actual history of Kashmir begins much much much earlier, before Islam or Hinduism was present on the soil of our lands.

Long before the Crescent and Star flew atop Islamabad, long before Mohammed Bin Qasim invaded Sind, long before the Mughals spread prosperity in all the nooks and corners of the subcontinent, long before the Sikh dynasty briefly controlled Kashmir, and long before the Chundra Gupta Vikramadatya ruled India, the people of Kashmir were tied to the people of Pakistan.

The history of the subcontinent pre-dates Hinduism. Some in secular India are pawning off religion as history. Vedic events are religion. Ramayana and Mahabharta are the holy scriptures of Hinduism. These scriptures need to be revered and respected. We learn a lot about our land from these scriptures.

The state of Kashmir was not created by the Sikhs. Various areas of Kashmir were re-incarnated by the Sikhs during the British rule. The British defeated the Sikh leader, and the rule reverted to Hindu (Dogra) maharaja.

• Nehru’s commitment to the people of Kashmir
• Kashmir and Junagarh is Pakistani territory
• Kashmir: Does the article of accession exist?
• UN resolutions, and Nehru speeches on disputed nature of Kashmir

Ancient Origins
Some recent historians have portrayed the history of the subcontinent as wars between two monoliths, the Hindus and the Muslims. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The history of the subcontinent is a history of wars between the various peoples who lived the subcontinent and the people who came to the subcontinent. The history of the subcontinent is replete with wars against the foreigners.

Some recent revisionists have portrayed the history of Hinduism as the history of India. The absolute fact is that The Indus Valley Civilisation preceded the Aryans, and preceded Hinduism. IF Islam is a foreign influence in the subcontinent so is Hinduism. The Aryan Swastika was imported from the caucus mountains, and has non-Indian origins. The only original people of the subcontinent were the people who were in the Indus Valley Civilisation.

Stone Age
Though man existed in Palaeolithic, and Stone ages, the first real civilisation in the subcontinent was the Indus Valley Civilisation. The Pakistanis of Sindh, Punjab, Kashmir the Baraouhis tribes of Balauchistan are the true descendants of the Indus Valley Civilisation . The Aryans were invaders who came and destroyed the Indus Valley Civilisation. The Aryans then began creating states in the rest of India. The story of Ramayana is basically a story of wars between the Aryans and the Dravidians. The story of Mahabharta is a story of inter-Aryan wars.

Around 468 B.C. Jainism and Buddhism appeared on the scene. Both competed with the tenants of Hindusim. Gautam Buddha was such a dynamic sage, that many Hindus have adopted him as a God. Even some Muslims consider him a prophet. However the fact remains that Buddhism is different from Hinduism.

Though many Hindus later regard Buddha as God, the Brahmans were always leery of Buddhists because this reduced their power. Buddhism is fundamentally different than Hinduism because it does not believe in the caste system. Because of the lack of the caste system, the Brahmans did not like Buddhists.

Alexander Invades
On the eve of Alexander’s invasion, Kashmir was called Abhisara. Abhisara consisted of the districts of Punch and Naushara. One of the few direct results of the Greek invasions of India was the establishment of Greek colonies in the area of Kashmir. One of Asokas edicts refers to the existence of Yavana (Greek) settlers on the fringes of his empire. We now know that he was referring to the area of Hunza. Actually after the fall of the Muyeria (Greek) kingdoms in India, the Bacterians formed a number of Greek kingdoms in the area in and around Kashmir. In fact Chandragupta actually faced Alexander for military help (324-300 BC) but did not secure it.

The foundation of the Maurya empire in the subcontinent saw Kashmir exist on the outer fringes of the empire. Chandragupta Muyara was a Jain. According to the records of Hieun Tsang and Kalhanas Rajaatarangini, Kashmir was included in the empire of Asoka the great (273-232 BC). One of the most brutal massacres of Hindus occurred at the hands of the Muyara kings. Some historians put the number at 300,000 (akin to 3 million in present day numbers).

Contrary to BJP belief, all massacres in India were not committed by Muslims, Persians and Arabs. Asoka renounced violence, and renounced his religion after the Kalinga war, and he became a Buddhist. The Brahmans did not like him, and many historians think the Brahaman opposition to Asoka led to the destruction of the Muyarian dynasty.

With political disunity in the subcontinent, many foreigners invaded India. Alexander’s kingdom was divided. The Bacterians invaded India (250 BC). From the ashes of the Muyara empire, Kanishka the conqueror rose to power (78 AD) and began a new era in India. He annexed the Indus Valley and conquered Kashmir. He set up his headquarters in Purushapura (Peshawar). Kanishka was a Zorastrian. His coins display the sun god. Later in life he supported Buddhism (to the ire of the Hindu Brahmans). Kanishka had convened the Buddhist Council of Kashmir to spread Buddhism instead of Hinduism in the subcontinent (much to the chagrin of the Brahmans ). During Asoka, Buddhism had become the state religion. Hinduism survived only due to Indian princes like Gautamiputra Satkarni.

With the fall of the Muyara dynasty, the Guptas came to power (beginning of the fourth century AD) with their independent kingdoms. Dr. R.C. Majumdar writes that The empire of Samudragupta included the whole of Northern India EXCEPT Kashmir. During this time Fa-hien visited India to study Buddhism (399 AD). The Gupta period saw the distinct revival of Hinduism in the subcontinent. Buddhism declined, and never did rise in India. Kashmir was either independent at the time or was an insignificant state.

When did Kashmiri History begin
Although some Indians would like it to make it so, the history of Kashmir does not begin with Maharaja Ghulab Singh. Kashmiri history began a long time before partition, a very long time before Ghulab Singh. It surely began before the very brief Sikha-Shahi of Lahore. To start the history of Kashmir in the nineteenth century is like beginning the history of the subcontinent after the war of independence of 1857 (The Great Indian Mutiny).

The recorded history of Kashmir is more than five thousand years. The Sikh Dogras have said wonderful things about the paradise called Kashmir, but the story of Kashmir pre-dates Sikhism. The great Kashmiri historians, Kalhan and Ratnakar have written beautiful stories about the valley, but the beautiful story of Kashmir pre-dates Hindusim. Muslim Kashmiri poets have eulogised the beauty of the Valley of Kashmir for centuries, but the story of the valley pre-dates Islam. Lalitaditya Avantivarman, Sikander Butshikan, Shamas-u-din Iraqi, Mirza Hyder Dughlat, Faquirullah Kanta, and Mir Hazar Khan are only few of the famous kings of the Valley.

The history of the subcontinent pre-dates Hinduism. Some in secular India are pawning off religion as history. Vedic events are religion. Ramayana and Mahabharta are the holy scriptures of Hinduism. These scriptures need to be revered and respected. If these holy scriptures are mistaken for history, than we are all in trouble.

The IVC

Five thousand years ago the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation lived in harmony on the banks of the Indus. Moenjadaro, Harappa and Taxila were all towns on the banks of the Indus. This was one of the original civilisation on the planet. This civilisation is marked as great a civilisation as the Chinese and the Egyptian civilisation. The Indus Valley Civilisation did not extend East of the Indus. Neither did it extend beyond the Western Mountain ranges of Bolan, and Khyber. The Indus Valley Civilisation existed on the banks of the Indus. The Indus valley Civilisation existed in what is today Pakistan. Pakistan is the natural inheritor of the Indus Valley Civilisation, just like modern day China is the natural inheritor of the Chinese civilisation, and modern day Egypt in the natural inheritor of the Egyptian civilisation. Pakistan existed 5000 years ago, even though it was not called Pakistan. This is the geographic two nation theory.

People up the river traded with people down the river. People up in the mountains traded with people down in the plains. For thousands of years, Kashmiris cut down trees and threw them into the river. This was trade at its best. The people of the Indus valley traded with Mesopotamia to the West, but there was no civilisation to the east of the Indus to trade with. There were only monkeys and apes. A human civilisation did exist in the Malaya straits but that was too far for the Indus Valley Pakistanis.

Recent archaeological finds in Kashmir have supported the theory that the Indus valley Civilisation indeed stretched right to the origins of the Indus beyond the Himalayas, into the Karakorums and into Kashmir.

All through the centuries Pakistan and Kashmir were trading partners to the WEST and NORTH-WEST of current Pakistan by land routes and traders with Oman and Gulf state through Arabian sea. In modern times Sindh was part of Bombay presidency and there was hardly any trade across Rajistan desert. Under Mughals, Mirs of Sindh maintained quite an independent administration on current day Sindh Province. The Middle East had always used these Baluchistan, Sarhad, and Kashmir and other areas in current Pakistan to access the main land in India. In fact Gwader is a Pakistani Island port that was owned by Kuwait till the sixties.

Sarhad historically was trading partners with Kashmir, Punjab, Afghanistan and central Asia (including Sinkiang province of present day china). Kashmir did not even have a road link to India except through Muslim dominated portion of Punjab —through a town called Gurdaspur. (The tragedy of Gurdaspuspur is the tragedy of Kashmir. Today The Muslim town of Gurdaspur is part of India, and so is Kashmir). All its trade of fruits, wood and handicrafts was to its south west and west (Punjab and Sarhad) the wood from its forests flowed down the INDUS to Pakistan and all the administrative services such as electricity/postal/communication etc. were linked from present Pakistan. Punjab was the only province which had major trade eastward. But the trade was also with countries to the west as well as rest of Pakistan. All of North west India east of the Khyber pass, is clearly a totally unique country, naturally allied to Kashmir.

THE ARYAN HUNS INVADE THE IVC
With the decline of the Guptas, the nomadic tribes of Central Asia called the Huns invaded India. Their leader Tormana invaded Kashmir (500 AD).

Jawaharlal Nehru in his book Glimpses of World History says Skandagupta, the fifth of the Gupta line had to face this Hun invasion…gradually they spread all over Gandhara and the greater part of Northern India. THEY TORTURED THE BUDDHISTS AND COMMITTED ALL MANNER OF FRIGHTFULNESS….There must have been continuous warfare against them, but the Guptas could not drive them away. Fresh waves of Huns came …

The valley roars with these slogans

HINDU SAVAGERY

Jawaharlal Nehru says the following about the Hindu Huns …Torman installed himself king . He was bad enough, but after him came his son Miharagula, who was an unmitigated savage and fiendishly cruel. Kalhana in his history of Kashmir–the Rajatrangini–tells us that one of his Miharagulas amusements was to have elephants thrown over the great precipices into the valley below.

The treatment of men was sometimes worse then that of animals (some of the animals like cows were actually revered because they were Gods). Lower caste Hindus had a miserable life. Other historians have commented that the treatment of women was even worse, specially women of lower castes, they were considered the property of the upper caste Hindus, to be molested and/or raped at will. In many cases the new bride had to stay a night with the village Brahman before she was married off. Kashmir converted to Islam during this time period. It was cruelty like this that led to the whole sale conversion to Islam. The new religion offered them equality and saved them from the Brahmans.

Nehru continues, Soon however the Hun power weakened in India… the Huns have been defeated and driven back, but many remain in odd corners. The Great Gupta dynasty fades away after Balditya.

The next great event for Kashmir was the birth of Harshavardhana (606-647 AD). There are references to Harshas expeditions to Kashmir. According to the Chinese traveller Hiuen Tsang Kashmir was an independent state at the time. Harshas ancestors were sun worshippers, however he himself was attracted towards the Mahayana form of Buddhism. The Brahmans were very displeased with him and even conspired to kill him. Harsha spent time and money on arts and literature, and drama, and was probably the last great Buddhist emperor of India.

THE RAJPUT HINDU ERA IN INDIA

The death of Harsha ushered in an era of anarchy again. The Rajputs were the invaders this time. This era is called the Rajput era. According to Tod The Rajputs were the descendants of Sakas,Huns, Ushans, Gujaaras etc.

According to Rajatarangini of Kalhana which forms the chief source of our history on Kashmir, Duralabhavardhana founded a new royal dynasty in Kashmir about the middle of the 7th century. Lalitaditya ascended the throne in 724 AD and he conquered large areas of India and brought it under Kashmiri rule. After him (750 AD) the power of Kashmir receded.

Jiyapida, the grandson of Lalitaditya tried to revive the reputation of the Karkota dynasty. The Karkota dynasty in Kashmir was replaced by the Utpala dynasty about the middle of the 9th century. The Rajputs were true Hindus and patronised Hindu religion and culture in all of India.

THE RAJPUT ERA ENDS
The end of the Rajput era created the beginning of the Muslim era in India. Dr. Smith says that this became so prominent that the centuries from the death of Harsha to the Mohammedan conquest of Hindustan, extending in round numbers from the middle of the seventh century to the close of the twelfth century, was the Rajput era . This is 500 years of Hindu rule. This is one of the few periods of history when Hindus ruled India.

On the eve of the Arab invasion of Sind (712 A.D: Quaid-e-Azam said that this is the day the Pakistan movement began in India), Chandrapida, the grandson of Durlabhavardhan was the ruler of the Korkot (Kashmir ) kingdom The most powerful king was Muktipida Lalitadya, brother and successor of Chandrapida. He was a great conqueror, and is said to have conquered Punjab, Dardistan and Kabul .

Mahmud of Gahazni made two attempts between 1015-1021 to conquer Kashmir, but was unsuccessful. Mahmud of Ghazni attacked temples in the subcontinent because the temples were the seats of political power. The Brahaman priests kept all knowledge to themselves. They kept all knowledge away from the population, locked up in temples (including the knowledge to build the temple). To destroy the political and military power of the city, the temple had to be destroyed. Since the high priest controlled the populations, they had to be defeated. The temples also contained all knowledge of the area. Mohammed Ghauri was the founder of the Muslim empire in India (1173 A.D). The slave dynasty lasted from 1206-1290. The Khilji dynasty lasted from 1290-1320. The Tughlaq dynasty lasted from (1320-1412). In 1304 Ibin-e-Batuta visited visited China through Kashmir. The Syed and Lodhi dynasty lasted from 1413-1526. During the reign of the sultans of Delhi the Khokars had established themselves between Lahore and Ghazni on the Southern border of Kashmir.

The caste system, the practice of Sati, human sacrifices, the ostracization of the lowest caste Hindus from society, and the treatment meeted out to them led to the infusion of Islam into the beautiful valley of the safron. Since Islam allowed instant equality to the down-trodden the religion made huge in-roads into the valley.

From the eighth century through Muslims permeated the state of Kashmir even though the rulers were Buddhist. Kashmiri rulers were Buddhist till it was conquered by the Muslims in 1339 AD. Even though Kashmir was inhabited by Muslims, it was still being ruled by Buddhist princes till 1349 when Shah Mirza, after the death of his royal patron, ascended the throne under the title of Samsuddin Shah. Thus began the Muslim era in Kashmir. K.Ali writes that of the rulers of Kashmir, Zainul-Abedin was the best and most liberal ruler under whom people enjoyed a peaceful and prosperous reign. After Abedin, anarchy reigned in Kashmir. At the end of 1540, Haider Mirza a relative of the Mughal emperor Humanyun occupied the state. But the Mirza dynasty was overthrown by the Chakk dynasty in 1561.

From the eighth century till the fifteenth century the population of Kashmir changed. However it was not Arab invasions, or Persian conquest that transformed Kashmir, it was the power of the new religion. For seven hundred years Kashmir was under Buddhist rule. However the rule was autocratic, and people were treated like animals. The general populace was disenchanted with the state machinery, and the state religion. IN droves they converted to Islam. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the accession of a Muslim to the throne was a forgone conclusion.

At the time of Baburs invasion 1526 Kashmir and Sind were independent but they did not play any major role. Around the 3rd part of the sixteenth century Kashmir was passing through disorder. The chaotic condition of the state induced Akbar to interfere in its internal affairs. Moreover the excellent climate of the valley and its natural scenery might have attracted Akbar. Akbar conquered and annexed Kashmir in 1586-1587. Henceforth Kashmir became the summer seat of the Mughal government. During Jahangir, and Shahjahan’s reign the Mughals built the magnificent Shalimar Garden in Kashmir. This is long before Ghulab Singh was in Kashmir.

For the next 100 years peace remained in Kashmir. Saddozais (Sikander Butshikan, Shamas-u-din Iraqi, Mirza Hyder Dughlat, Faquirullah Kanta, Mir Hazar Khan ) ruled Kashmir for almost a century before the Sikhs. Peace was broken by the rise of Sikh power. The Sikhs rose to power in 1675 under Guru Gobind Singh. After the death of Gobinda Singh in 1708 the Sikhs established several states in the Punjab. Rajat Singh establish the Sikh empire in the Punjab. The Sikh rule in the history of the subcontinent is a footnote in history. It was extremely brief and was known for its stupidities (hence the word Sikha-shahi, and the jokes about Sikhs). Gulab Singh tried to rule Kashmir by putting together diverse and far-flung areas like Jammu bordering on the Punjab, Ladakh bordering on Tibet and Gilgit bordering on Sinkiang, Afghanistan and Central Asia across the Pamirs. There are many diverse groups in Kashmir. Gulab Sings was a ruthless ruler.

MAHRAJAH HARI SINGH: SEX and FOLLIES OF THE NINCOMPOOP RAJA OF Kashmir

This is what Larry Collins and Dominique Lapiere write about the Sikhs in the Punjab in their book (Freedom at Midnight… the source book for the screen-play Gandhi).The collapse of the Mogul empire gave the Sikhs the chance to carve out a kingdom of their own in their beloved Punjab. The tragedy of the Punjab was that while Moslems, and Sikhs could live under the British, neither could live under each other. The Moslems memory of Sikh rule in the Punjab was one of mosques defiled, women outraged, tombs razed, Moslems without regard to age or sex butchered, bayoneted, strangled, shot down, hacked to pieces, burnt alive. This was the legacy of Gulab Singh and his successors.

This following is what Larry Collins and Dominique Lapiere write about last maharaja of Kashmir Hari Singh in their account of the partition of India (Freedom at Midnight… the source book for the screen-play Gandhi).

Hari Singh was a weak vacillating indecisive man who divided his time between opulent feasts in his winter capital in Jammu and the beautiful flower-choked lagoons of his summer capital, Sirinagar, the Venice of the Orient. He had begun his reign with a few timid aims for reform which were quickly abandoned for an authoritarian system that kept his jails filled with his political foes. Their most recent occupant had been none other than Jawarlal Nehru. The prince had ordered Nehru arrested when he tried to visit the state in which he was born. Hari Singh too had an army to defend the frontiers of his state and give his claims to independence a menacing emphasis.

Kashmir kee Mandi Rawalpindi

The bonfire (of the accounts of sexual eccentricities of some of India princes were in themselves lengthy enough to stoke a good fire for hours …. were being burnt at the behest of the British government ) consuming the archives dealing with the maharaja of Kashmir destroyed the traces of one of the more unsavoury scandals of the world between wars. The impetuous prince was trapped in fragrant delicto in Londons Savoy hotel by a man he assumed to be the husband of his ravishing bed companion. In fact, the prince had fallen into a gang of blackmailers who proceeded to drain the state of Kashmir, via the princes personal bank account, OF A VERY CONSIDERABLE PART OF ITS REVENUES. The case finally broke when the young lady’s real husband persuaded that he had not been properly remunerated for the loan of his wife, went to the police. In the court case that followed, the unfortunate Maharajas infidelity was concealed under the pseudonym of Mr. A. Disillusioned for good with women as a result of his tribulations, Hari Singh returned to Kashmir, where he discovered new sexual horizons in the company of young men of his state. The accounts of his activities had been faithfully reported to the representatives of the Crown, Now whipped by the fresh mountain breeze of Srinagar, they disappeared into the Himalayan sky.

He ( Hari Singh) was a weak vacillating man whose perversions and orgies had given him the reputation of the Himalayan Brogia. Unfortunately, Hari Singh, the man who was Mr. A had titillated the readers of the British penny press before the war, was something else. He was the hereditary Hindu maharaja of the most strategically situated princely state in India.

Logic seemed to dictate that Kashmir join with Pakistan. Its people were Moslem. It had been one of the areas originally selected for an Islamic state by Rehmat Ali when he formulated his impossible dream. The k in Pakistan was for Kashmir.

Hari Singh the last playboy Raja of Kashmir was an abdominal character-less hedonist bi-sexual. His only redeeming quality was that he held out against Patels bullying. Hari Singh was escorted out of the state under the curfew of the Indian army. India claims that next day he signed the so called article of accession to India. According to Alistair Lamb a noted historian of Kashmir, has cast several doubts on the article of accession. India’s claim to accession is in dispute. The U.N. recognised the dispute, and treats Kashmir as disputed territory between India and Pakistan.

• Nehru’s commitment to the people of Kashmir
• Kashmir and Junagarh is Pakistani territory
• Kashmir: Does the article of accession exist?
• UN resolutions, and Nehru speeches on disputed nature of Kashmir

UNDERSTANDING KASHMIR: A geographic region or an idea?

What is the background of Kashmir ? Pakistan is a country based on the banks on the Indus and its tributaries. All its major cities owe their existence to the rivers originating in the Himalayan mountains. Kashmir lies north of Pakistan, a natural extension to the mouth of the Indus river. It is in the ancient Silk Rout thorough which noted travellers like Ibn-Batuta, and Fa-hein travelled. Pakistan is the size of Texas and Minnesota put together. Kashmir is another Minnesota added to it.

Kashmir means many things to many peoples. The total area of J&K state is 2.22 lakh (222,000) sq. kms. Of this, the Pakistani area accounts for 78,114 sq. kms. Chinese area is 37,555 sq. kms plus another 3,180 sq. kms. ( that was an area adjusted during the boundary agreement with Pakistan ). At present, 35% of the state is Azad Kashmir and 17% is Chinese Kashmir. In a landmark boundary adjustment between Pakistan and China, China received 2.3% from Pakistan (There is no boundary dispute between China and Pakistan. China is today Pakistan’s largest arms supplier. India occupies less than half of the original state which belonged to Hari Singh in 1947). The Indian area is 1.01 lakh (101,000)sq. kms. The Indian area is divided into the following divisions: Ladakh, Jammu and the Kashmir Valley. The Ladakh division is 49,146 sq. kms. The Jammu division is 26,293 sq. kms. and the Muslim Kashmir Valley is 15,948 sq. kms.

The population of the state governed by India is 6 million; of this, 64% are Muslims, 32% are Hindus, 2.2% are Sikhs and 1.2% are Buddhists. Another 2 million Muslims live in Azad Kashmir; taken together, Muslims would constitute 75% of the population of the entire state of Jammu & Kashmir, which is roughly 5% of the total Muslim population of India (the number of Muslims in India is more than 100 million). The Indians claim that in 1947 half a million Hindus and Sikhs also lived in Azad Kashmir. When 5 million Muslims were transferred from East Punjab to Pakistan, half a million Muslims fled Kashmir.

The Indian part of the state of Kashmir is divided into 3 main regions: Jammu, Kashmir Valley and Ladakh. In terms of area, Ladakh forms 58%, Jammu 26% and Kashmir valley 16%. Buddhists used to constitute a majority in Ladakh but a few years ago (according to the last Indian census reports) Muslims are in a majority in Ladakh now. Hindus form a majority in Jammu and Muslims form a majority in Kashmir valley. In British India Kashmir was about 95% Muslim. Before 1947, nearly a million non-Muslims — mainly Kashmiri Hindus called Pundits ruled the Kashmiris with the Dogra ruler Hari Singh. After the Dogra raja left the state in Indian custody, the Pandits also began leaving Kashmir. Today they live in Jammu and are asking for a separate union territory called Panditdesh.

• The Green Wildfire of freedom in Indian Occupied Kashmir: Fields of Pakistani flags in Srinagar. Indian Occupied Kashmiris have made it very clear to the world that they not only want freedom from Indian occupation, they have made it clear to the world that they want to join Pakistan. Indian Occupied Kashmir:-Children of the stones yearn for freedom and Pakistan.
• “We are Pakistanis and Pakistan is us because we are tied with the country through Islam,” he roared, as the crowd cheered him and chanted: “Hum Pakistani hain, Pakistan hamara hai” (We are Pakistanis, Pakistan is ours). Syed Gilani
• “Kashmiris chant azadi & Jeevay Jeevay Pakistan in equal numbers and with equal intensity” “There was a green flag on every lamp post, every roof, every bus stop and on the top of chinar trees. A big one fluttered outside the All India Radio building. Road signs were painted over. Rawalpindi they said. Or simply Pakistan” Arundhati Roy on Kashmir
• Fed on a steady diet of triumphalist media reports it is very hard for the Hinduvata India to comprehend. Very recently parts of the Indian press has begun to recognize the real problems. Indian Occupied Kashmirs throngs UN offices asking for freedom and end to occupation

• Freedom: Arundhati Roy on “Brave New India”
• Indian Occupied Kashmiris: “no solution to the Kashmir issue other than merger with Pakistan,” Gilani “Hum Pakistani hain, Pakistan hamara hai” (We are Pakistanis, Pakistan is ours).
• Is Delhi preventing the 4th Battle of Panipat or instigating it?

Peace is a two way street
Nehru’s commitment to the people of Kashmir
Kashmir & Junagarh are Pakistani territory
Kashmir: Does the article of accession exist?

Huge backlash against Zardari’s Kashmir statement. Pakistanis repudiate this treason and treasury ‘batt keh raheh gaa hindustaan—kashmir banaiga Pakistan

KASHMIR Junagarh & Manvadar Kashmir and Junagarh is Pakistani territory
Kashmir: Does the article of accession exist?
Northern Areas are part of Pakistan and were never part of Kashmir

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WHY WE CREATED PAKISTAN?

The Indus Valley Civilization now known as Paksitan

Pakistan existed 5000 years ago as the IVC

The Pakistan Ideology

by
Moin-Ansari
Original March 16th, 1996 and Updated February 7th, 2009

| NEW YORK | RUPEE NEWS | March 16th, 1996 | Moin Ansari |

Lest we forget the ideology of the Hinduvata Mahasab, let us quote it right here. Lest some dismiss it as a relic of the past, let us remind them that the BJP was in power in in Delhi and holds a major vote in the Lok and Rajha Saba. For those who may say that this quote is a historical anomoly belonging to the hsitory books, let us remind them that Mr. Narendar Modi, Mr. Adhvani and Mr. Bal Thackery have cloned themselves by the millions and this very same thinking was used to burn, rape and massacre more than 2000 Muslims in Gujarat just a few months ago.

“I declare that the future of the Hindu race, of Hindustan and of the Punjab, rests on these four pillars: (1) Hindu Sangathan, (2) Hindu Raj, (3) Shuddhi of Moslems, and (4) Conquest and Shuddhi of Afghanistan and the Frontiers. So long as the Hindu nation does not accomplish these four things, the safely of our children and great-grandchildren will be ever in danger, and the safety of the Hindu race will be impossible. The Hindu race has but one history, and its institutions are homogeneous. But the Musalmans and Christians are far removed from the confines of Hindustan, for their religions are alien and they love Persian, Arab and European institutions. Thus, just as one removes foreign matter from the eye, Shuddhi must be made of these two religions. Afghanistan and the hilly regions of the frontier were formerly part of India, but are at present under the domination of Islam. . . .Just as there is Hindu religion in Nepal, so there must be Hindu institutions in Afghanistan and the frontier territory; otherwise it is useless to win Swaraj. For mountain tribes are always warlike and hungry. If they become our enemies, the age of Nadirshah and Zamanshah will begin anew. At present English officers are protecting the frontiers; but it cannot always be. . . .If Hindus want to protect themselves, they must conquer Afghanistan and the frontiers and convert all the mountain tribes.” Pratap of Lahore, Lala Hardayal in 1925. Quoted by Dr. Ambedkar in his book “Pakistan”

When there are problems in Pakistan many look at the government and think of the present administration in power as the state. While the head of every government boldly declares “Le etat c’est moi” (I am the state), all of us who are disenfranchised, suppressed, and repressed need to take a cold hard look at the government. We should understand the difference between he government and the state. The government could be evil but the state of Pakistan does not belong to the government, the state of Pakistan belongs to the people of Pakistan, it belongs to us. 5561st re-birthday! Congratualations to Indus Pakistanis

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Neither the strife in FATA, nor the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, nor the  externally sponsored hooliganism and  killings in Swat that have become the hallmark of today’s news, nor the band of marauders and mercenaries that infiltrate our borders to create malaise and mayhem in our land, can detract us from remembering the anniversary of the day that we decided to create a land for the Muslims of the subcontinent—a land we later named Pakistan. Pakistan: Another Indian prophecy of doom. Here we go again. The first one came in 1947.

THE PAKISTANI RESILIENCE IN THE FACE OF THREATS: Mountbatten, Nehru, Indira, Kruschev, Johnson, Carter, Kissinger (Nixon), Gobachov, Clinton, Armitage (Bush), Karzia (Bush and Vajpayee/Sing) have all threatened Pakistan: The Pakistanis are used to it…so what else is new?!! Pakistan’s Nuclear Program should be seen in the backdrop of these threats.The capacity of Pakistan to sustain some fifteen major disarticulations in polity, power, and structure and still preserve a national identity is a phenomenon one is tempted to explain by recourse to the supernatural.

Pakistan which has been pummelled by external events (three wars with India, secession of Bangladesh, 3.5 million Afghan refugees) and disrupted by internal fissures (4 periods of martial law totalling 27 years and ethnic violence in Sindh) to a degree which no other state established since 1945 has suffered. In this respect it stands as an exemplar of a nation whose adversities “common sense” might suggest make its viability impossible.

Yet its continued existence defies the reality induced by such speculation. The enormity and persistence of these difficulties and the resilience of the nation in absorbing and somehow surviving them must be regarded with awe if not admiration.” RALPH BRAIBANTI

This salute is dedicated to the 1200 men and women who died defending our borders as well as the thousands who were innocent victims of aggression on our shores. In-spite of the murders, and in-spite of the bombs, life in Pakistan goes on, and the Crescent and the Star flutters  high on our sky scrapers and pulsates proud in our hearts. Let this  anniversary of our Lahore resolution be a lesson to our enemies, that we remember our dedication to our cause, and promise to keep the dream of our fathers of our nation, Jinnah, Liaqat-Ali Khan and Iqbal alive.

Trail of freedom from the bowels of hell in Bharat to freedom in Pakistan

We remember the 1 million lives lost in creating a country, and also rededicate ourselves to the fact that “Pakistan manzil nahin, Nishan e Manzil hai”. Thatmanzil was defined by Iqbal, Liaqat, Jinnah and many others who carry the banner in the land of the Crescent and Star. Despite some impediments we have not lost track of the “manzil“. Pakistan as it existed 5000 years ago

‘India is no more a country than the Equator’.Winston Churchill

The British Indian Empire included Iraq, Aden, Somalia, Burma, and more than 500 states of the Subcontinent

The British Empire spanning continents

The Muslim majority areas of the Subcontinent should have been part of Pakistan. Many Muslims wanted to stay and fight in the “Darul Harb” ’till it was changed to “Darul islam“. (notice islam with lower case “i” which depicts islam=peace). The Quaid’s vision was to separate based on demographics. 

Patel and others cheated us out of a real separation.

The more then 500 independent princely states of the Subcontinent

The State of Hyderabad wanted to stay independent after 1948 but was run over by Patel

The Princely state of Bombay Presidency

The Princely state of Baroda

Before separation

After separation

After the Muslims won the right for separate electorates, Jinnah supported the Dalits to get the same right. This was wholeheartedly opposed by Mr. Mohandas Gandhi. In the Round Table Conferences in 1930-32, the concept of separate electorates for the Untouchables  and Dalits was raised by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, as a way to ensure sufficient representation for the minority Dalits, in government.

… Gandhi was a so-called “high caste”. High castes represent at small minority in India, some 10-15 percent of the population, yet dominate Indian society in much the same way whites ruled South Africa during the official period of Apartheid. Dalits often use the phrase Apartheid in India when speaking about their problems.

.. Gandhi’s main critic and political opponent, Dr. Ambedkar, for whom our journal is named and the first Dalit in history to receive an education ..

The All India Muslim League session of 1936

1938 RESOLUTION ASKED FOR SEPARATION:Even earlier in 1938 Sir Abdullah Haroon moved a resolution for establishing independent Muslim states in the north-west and eastern zones. The word states continued to be used in subsequent sessions of the All India Muslim League till about 1943. Originally the two zones were meant to be autonomous and sovereign and it was only when the British and the Hindus insisted that Punjab and Bengal were to be partitioned that Pakistan began to be talked about as one state.

THE PAKISTAN RESOLUTION OF 1940: The Lahore Resolution (later known as the Pakistan Resolution) The Lahore resolution moved by Fazlul Haq at the 27th Session of the All India Muslim League, at Lahore on March 23, 1940 stated:

“that geographically contagious units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial adjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which the Muslims are in a majority, as in the north-west and eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.”

What is the Two Nation Theory exactly? The moniker “‘two’ ‘nation’ ‘theory’” is a misnomer. The theory of nationalities states that “India does not have a homogeneous population”.  There are many racial, ethnic and linguistic groups in India. India is not a national state, India is not a country, but a  sub-continent composed of “nationalities”. The two nation theory clearly states that that there are several nationalities in the subcontinent, and the Hindus and the Muslims are the largest of the two nations.  Hindus and Muslims are different therefore Muslim majority areas must exist separately. Chaudry Rehmat Ali’s “Pakistan proposal asked for SEVERAL MUSLIM STATES  in the subcontinent.”

In this document a map of India has also been published showing India split into different states, named as Pakistan, Guruistan, Usmanistan, Bangsamispan, Hindoostan comprising Rajistan, Kathiwar, Maharashtra, Rajistan and Dravidia. This pamphlet was reproduced in 1934  (Ref: The Great Divide by H. V. Hodson page 81). Karakal Pakistan’ existed as autonomous region of USSR.

He claimed that the destiny of whole Millat in the continent of “Dinia” (changed name of India) and its dependencies lies in the integration of Muslims into 10 countries: Pakistan, Bangistan, Usmanistan, Siddiqistan, Faruqistan, Haideristan, Muistan, Maplistan, Saristan, Nasarastan and than to be coordinated into Pak. Common Wealth of Nations.

• Hanoodia:243 principalities or Rajwaras
• Hindoostan: Rajistan, Kathiwar, Mahrashtra, Rajistan and Dravidia
• Saristan
• Nasarastan
• Haideristan
• Siddiqistan
• “Pakistan” (P=Punjab, A=Afghania, K=Kashmir, I=Islam, TAN=Baluchistan) in the Northwest including Kashmir, Delhi and Agra: “
• Bangistan” in Bengal:
• “Osmanistan” in Hyderabad; “Siddiquistan” in Bundelhand and Malwa; “
• Faruqistan” in Bihar and Orissa: “
• Haideristan” in UP: “
• Muinistan” in Rajasthan: “
• Maplistan” in Kerala:
• “Safiistan” in “Western Ceylon” and “Nasaristan” in “Eastern Ceylon”, etc.

The map was published by Rahmat Ali in 1934 and came to be widely circulated in his pamphlet called “Now or Never” among the Muslims of the Subcontinent.

Rahmat Ali was disgusted at the bias of the British and referred the “British-Banya alliance” presumably in  He even declined to refer to an “India” as having ever existed at all and instead called the subcontinent  “Dinia”, and the oceans and the seas around India as the “Pakian Sea”, the “Osmanian Sea” etc. He urged the Dalits, Sikhs, Buddhists to rise up against the Hindus. In in  “Sikhistan” he asked them to be independent. He urged all of the supressed peoples  to rise up against supression.

This is what we asked for.

We were cheated out of this.

ANALYSIS OF THE TWO NATION THEORY:
The two nation theory enunciates that the subcontinent is made of several nationalities, the Hindus and the Muslims being the largest of the two. India is as big as Western Europe and contains many many racial, religious, linguistic, and ethnic groups. The Hindus and the Muslims are two separate nations, in terms of diet, attitude, social behavior, economic tendencies, social interaction, behaviors, and attitude.

According to many Pakistanis “The two nation theory did not solve all the problems of the subcontinent. However it did save 200 million Muslims (those emancipated in Pakistan and Bangladesh) from social economic and political servitude. The servitude is proven by the decadent condition of Indian Muslims in a “secular” Indian state. Perhaps it sacrifices 150 million Indian Muslims. But the alternative was 450 million Muslims in servitude.” “Secularism” in “India” means “Hinduism Light.“

Nationhood is defined as the tendency of a nation to exist. No two nations have the same reason to exist. USA and Canada exist separately, though you may think that both nations have English speaking population, with similar accents, similar religions, similar culture, similar economic structures, and similar racial and ethnic backgrounds. Do you hear America question the validity of Canada to exist. I believe that the USA has the power to take over Canada, if it really wanted to. BUT the USA recognizes the right of the Canadians to exist separately.

THE TWO NATION THEORY & THREE STATES: The Two Nation theory cannot be debunked because there are more then one Muslim country in the subcontinent. The Hindu nation lives in more than one country (India, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Burma, Sri Lanka, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Bangladesh). The Chinese nation lives in several states (Taiwan, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia). Similarly the Muslim nation (transcending all racial, ethnic, caste and linguistic boundaries) can live in several states. There are several Arab Muslim countries too. The country of Pakistan as a unified Muslim country in the subcontinent was actually asked for the Bengali nationalists. Jinnah acquiesced.

The “Nationalistic” Indian attitude towards the TNT: Many modern Indians have a what Pakistanis consider a “strange” attitude. Pakistan should not exist, because it would be better for Indian Muslims, better for Indian Hindus, better for Pakistanis. Pakistanis ask “How do they know it would be better for us?” And who are they to judge our feelings, and tell us what is better for our nation?” If a nation is defined “as a tendency of a people to seek a country”then the Muslims of the Subcontinent are a nation. They point out to one insignificant point or the other in Pakistan to devalue the “raisan d’etre” of Pakistani nationhood. This attitude spell perpetual warfare.

PAKISTANI NATIONHOOD: Pakistanis justify the existence of the country by explaining that “India was never ONE NATION. India is as big as Western Europe and has more nationalities than Europe. The subcontinent has always been a conglomeration of states and nationalities. If one looks at the “Indian” map during the Mughal era, or during Vikramadatya’s era, one will see dozens, sometimes hundreds of STATES. Pakistanis believe that “Akhand Bharat” was a figment of the imagination of Gandhi and the Jan Sangh. Just because the British called it India, does not mean that it was one nation ever or will be one nation ever.”

Plutarch expressed this sentiment well some centuries ago: “A conqueror is always a lover of peace. He would like to make his entry into your cities unopposed.” Does India talk peace in the Plutarchian sense?

SUMMARY AND ABSTRACT ON SOUTH ASIAN SCHISMS
This article presents the arguments of political stratification and nation forming that were in the air in the Forties. The arguments against the Subcontinental nationhood are discussed at length. The arguments for a Pakistani nation are analyzed in depth. Arguments from both sides are presented and refuted.

The history of the creation of India and Pakistan is not always in teleological progression. We have lost a lot of history by tracing our history by traveling through chronological diaries and self aggrandizing biographies. Neither Pakistani  nor Indian history books have done an adequate job of tracing our roots. Neither explain “partition” properly.

The Pakistani text books ignore Hindu contributions to our common struggle against colonialism, and seem ashamed of the common lineage with Hindus—(Indus Valley, Buddhism), Pakistani historical narratives underplay the role of the nationalist Indian Muslim leadership, Jauhar, Azad and Suhrawardi, and over emphasize the importance of the RSS and Jan Sangh. Pakistani textbooks ignore the Sufi contributions to our struggle of independence and restrict discussion of Sufiism to Shah Waliullah and a few others.

The Indian textbooks fail to see the Pakistan movement as a provincial and minority rebellion against the Nehruite Marxist-Leninist Federalism that was the hall mark of the INC. The Indian textbooks fail to mention the three wings of Congress, the Nehruite secular wing led by Nehru, the fundamentalist and communal wing led by Rai, the religious wing led by Gandhi, and the extreme nationalist wing led by Patel. The Bharat text books fail to recognize that fact that Gandhi was and was seen as a religious leader by  the minorities and by a large section of the Hindu populace. The Indian text books over glorify many Hindu periods, fail to mention the Hindu Buddhist wars, diminish Brahamanism and Brahamanic cruelties towards non-Brahmans, relegate the Mughal era to the greatness of Akbar, ignore the Hindu communal organizations, demonize Muslim leaders who differed with Gandhi, brand secular and moderate Muslim leadership of the Muslim League as communal leaders, overlook the frailties of the INC leadership that led to the Hindu-Muslim schism, and fail to recognize the radical non-secular part of the Congress that scared the minorities.

The Indian textbooks neglect to mention the accomplishments of the Muslim League Muslim leadership that tried to safeguard the interests of the Indian Muslim minorities by fighting for separate electorates for the Muslims, and tried to guarantee the rights of the minorities through the Cabinet Mission Plan and by demanding one third of the representation in parliament. This ingenious plan would have guaranteed a fair and equitable settlement. However vested interests in the INC would not allow this.

The article has some in-bred biases towards the Pakistani point of view. No apologies are given for this slant. The purpose of the article is not convince people, simply to present facts and analysis.

THE FORTIES: THE THEORIES IN AIR
Freedom is in the air. The Union Jack is to come down. How do wedeal with independence? Are we mature enough to behave as civilized nations? The years preceding our independence was an intense time. The Freedom Movement created many leaders and many movements. Neither the Muslims nor the Hindus nor the Sikhs were monolithic groups. Each political group had many leaders. Many times the leadership seemed to head in different directions. The Harrow-Eaton Oxbridge led INC under the leadership of Motilal Nehru was a very different Congress. The INC led by his son Jawaharlal Nehru was a very different INC.

The INC had several factions that split and made up. Similarly the Muslim Movement had factions and grouping in it. Disgruntled elements in each of  the major parties went and formed their own political parties and contested the elections. Each group had sub-groupings and subdivisions. There were more than 550 states in the Subcontinent. The Forties gave us the opportunity to forge a country in the Subcontinent or create many nations. As a people we failed to remain at peace. As countries we failed to keep the peace. As nations we failed to usher in an era of prosperity into the Subcontinent. Today let history teach us some lessons.

Most readers are familiar withGandhi’s great hunger strike against the so called Poona Pact in 1933. The matter which Gandhi was protesting, nearly unto death at that, was the inclusion in the draft Indian Constitution, proposed by the British, that reserved the right of Dalits to elect their own leaders. Dr. Ambedkar, with his degree in law from Cambridge, had been chosen by the British to write the new constitution for India. Having spent his life overcoming caste-based discrimination, Dr. Ambedkar had come to the conclusion that the only way Dalits could improve their lives is if they had the exclusive right to vote for their leaders, that a portion or reserved section of all elected positions were only for Dalits and only Dalitscould vote for these reserved positions.

Separate electorate was vehemently opposed by Mahatma Gandhi on the grounds that the move would disintegrate Hindu society. If the Dalits had gotten a separate electorate, this would have ensured certain constituencies which would have been reserved for them. Only the Dalits would have been able to vote for the candidates contesting those seats. This would have given them real leaders and real participation in the elections.

Gandhi was determined to prevent this and went on hunger strike to change this article in the draft constitution. After many communal riots, where tens of thousands of Dalitswere slaughtered, and with a leap in such violence predicted if Gandhi died, Dr. Ambedkaragreed, withGandhi on his death bed, to give up the Dalits right to exclusively elect their own leaders and Gandhi ended his hunger strike.

Later, on his own death bed, Dr. Ambedkar would say this was the biggest mistake in his life, that if he had to do it all over again, he would refuse to give up Dalitonly representation, even if it meant Gandhi’s death.

Speech on the occasion of the opening ceremony of the State Bank of Pakistan, Karachi, 1st July 1948

Mr Governor, Directors of the State Bank, Ladies and Gentlemen,

The opening of the State Bank of Pakistan symbolises the sovereignty of our State in the financial sphere and I am very glad to be here today to perform the opening ceremony. It was not considered feasible to start a bank of our own simultaneously with the coming into being of Pakistan in August last year. A good deal of preparatory work must precede the inauguration of an institution responsible for such technical and delicate work as note issue and banking. To allow for this preparation, it was provided, under the Pakistan Monetary System and Reserve Bank Order, 1947, that the Reserve Bank of India should continue to be the currency and banking authority in Pakistan till the 30th September, 1948. Later on it was felt that it would be in the best interest of our State if the Reserve Bank of India were relieved of its functions in Pakistan as early as possible. The date of transfer of these functions to a Pakistan agency was consequently advanced by three months in agreement with the Government of India and the Reserve Bank. It was at the same time decided to establish a Central Bank of Pakistan in preference to any other agency for managing our currency and banking. This decision left very little time for the small band of trained personnel in this field in Pakistan to complete the preliminaries, and they have by their untiring effort and hard work completed their task by the due date which is very creditable to them, and I wish to record a note of our appreciation of their labours.

As you have observed, Mr Governor, in undivided India banking was kept a close preserve of non-Muslims, and their migration from Western Pakistan has caused a good deal of dislocation in the economic life of our young State. In order that the wheels of commerce and industry should run smoothly, it is imperative that the vacuum caused by the exodus of non-Muslims should be filled without delay. I am glad to note that schemes for training Pakistan nationals in banking are in hand. I will watch their progress with interest and I am confident that the State Bank will receive the cooperation of all concerned including the banks and universities in pushing them forward. Banking will provide a new and wide field in which the genius of our young men can find full play. I am sure that they will come forward in large numbers to take advantage of the training facilities which are proposed to be provided. While doing so, they will not only be benefiting themselves but also contributing to the wellbeing of our State.

I need hardly dilate on the important role that the State Bank will have to play in regulating the economic life of our country. The monetary policy of the bank will have a direct bearing on our trade and commerce, both inside Pakistan as well as with the outside world and it is only to be desired that your policy should encourage maximum production and a free flow of trade. The monetary policy pursued during the war years contributed, in no small measure, to our present day economic problems. The abnormal rise in the cost of living has hit the poorer sections of society including those with fixed incomes very hard indeed and is responsible to a great extent for the prevailing unrest in the country. The policy of the Pakistan Government is to stabilise prices at a level that would be fair to the producer, as well as to the consumer. I hope your efforts will be directed in the same direction in order to tackle this crucial problem with success.

I shall watch with keenness the work of your Research Organisation in evolving banking practices compatible with Islamic ideals of social and economic life. The economic system of the West has created almost insoluble problems for humanity and to many of us it appears that only a miracle can save it from the disaster that is now facing the world. It has failed to do justice between man and man and to eradicate friction from the international field. On the contrary it was largely responsible for the two world wars in the last half century. The Western world, in spite of its advantages of mechanization and industrial efficiency is today in a worse mess than ever before in history. The adoption of Western economic theory and practice will not help us in achieving our goal of creating a happy and contented people. We must work our destiny in our own way and present to the world an economic system based on the true Islamic concept of equality of manhood and social justice. We will thereby be fulfilling our mission as Muslims and giving to humanity the message of peace which alone can save it and secure the welfare, happiness and prosperity of mankind.

May the State Bank of Pakistan prosper and fulfil the high ideals which have been set as its goal!

In the end I thank you, Mr Governor, for the warm welcome given to me by you and your colleagues and the distinguished guests who have graced this occasion as a mark of their good wishes and the honour you have done me in inviting me to perform this historic opening ceremony of the State Bank which I feel will develop into one of our greatest national institutions and play its part fully throughout the world.

Source: Jamil-ud-Din Ahmad 1960, Vol. II p.565-568 (original source to be confirmed)

WHY WE CREATED PAKISTAN?

The Indus Valley Civilization now known as Paksitan

Pakistan existed 5000 years ago as the IVC

The Pakistan Ideology

by
Moin-Ansari
Original March 16th, 1996 and Updated February 7th, 2009

| NEW YORK | RUPEE NEWS | March 16th, 1996 | Moin Ansari |

Lest we forget the ideology of the Hinduvata Mahasab, let us quote it right here. Lest some dismiss it as a relic of the past, let us remind them that the BJP was in power in in Delhi and holds a major vote in the Lok and Rajha Saba. For those who may say that this quote is a historical anomoly belonging to the hsitory books, let us remind them that Mr. Narendar Modi, Mr. Adhvani and Mr. Bal Thackery have cloned themselves by the millions and this very same thinking was used to burn, rape and massacre more than 2000 Muslims in Gujarat just a few months ago.

“I declare that the future of the Hindu race, of Hindustan and of the Punjab, rests on these four pillars: (1) Hindu Sangathan, (2) Hindu Raj, (3) Shuddhi of Moslems, and (4) Conquest and Shuddhi of Afghanistan and the Frontiers. So long as the Hindu nation does not accomplish these four things, the safely of our children and great-grandchildren will be ever in danger, and the safety of the Hindu race will be impossible. The Hindu race has but one history, and its institutions are homogeneous. But the Musalmans and Christians are far removed from the confines of Hindustan, for their religions are alien and they love Persian, Arab and European institutions. Thus, just as one removes foreign matter from the eye, Shuddhi must be made of these two religions. Afghanistan and the hilly regions of the frontier were formerly part of India, but are at present under the domination of Islam. . . .Just as there is Hindu religion in Nepal, so there must be Hindu institutions in Afghanistan and the frontier territory; otherwise it is useless to win Swaraj. For mountain tribes are always warlike and hungry. If they become our enemies, the age of Nadirshah and Zamanshah will begin anew. At present English officers are protecting the frontiers; but it cannot always be. . . .If Hindus want to protect themselves, they must conquer Afghanistan and the frontiers and convert all the mountain tribes.” Pratap of Lahore, Lala Hardayal in 1925. Quoted by Dr. Ambedkar in his book “Pakistan”

When there are problems in Pakistan many look at the government and think of the present administration in power as the state. While the head of every government boldly declares “Le etat c’est moi” (I am the state), all of us who are disenfranchised, suppressed, and repressed need to take a cold hard look at the government. We should understand the difference between he government and the state. The government could be evil but the state of Pakistan does not belong to the government, the state of Pakistan belongs to the people of Pakistan, it belongs to us. 5561st re-birthday! Congratualations to Indus Pakistanis

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Neither the strife in FATA, nor the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, nor the  externally sponsored hooliganism and  killings in Swat that have become the hallmark of today’s news, nor the band of marauders and mercenaries that infiltrate our borders to create malaise and mayhem in our land, can detract us from remembering the anniversary of the day that we decided to create a land for the Muslims of the subcontinent—a land we later named Pakistan. Pakistan: Another Indian prophecy of doom. Here we go again. The first one came in 1947.

THE PAKISTANI RESILIENCE IN THE FACE OF THREATS: Mountbatten, Nehru, Indira, Kruschev, Johnson, Carter, Kissinger (Nixon), Gobachov, Clinton, Armitage (Bush), Karzia (Bush and Vajpayee/Sing) have all threatened Pakistan: The Pakistanis are used to it…so what else is new?!! Pakistan’s Nuclear Program should be seen in the backdrop of these threats.The capacity of Pakistan to sustain some fifteen major disarticulations in polity, power, and structure and still preserve a national identity is a phenomenon one is tempted to explain by recourse to the supernatural.

Pakistan which has been pummelled by external events (three wars with India, secession of Bangladesh, 3.5 million Afghan refugees) and disrupted by internal fissures (4 periods of martial law totalling 27 years and ethnic violence in Sindh) to a degree which no other state established since 1945 has suffered. In this respect it stands as an exemplar of a nation whose adversities “common sense” might suggest make its viability impossible.

Yet its continued existence defies the reality induced by such speculation. The enormity and persistence of these difficulties and the resilience of the nation in absorbing and somehow surviving them must be regarded with awe if not admiration.” RALPH BRAIBANTI

This salute is dedicated to the 1200 men and women who died defending our borders as well as the thousands who were innocent victims of aggression on our shores. In-spite of the murders, and in-spite of the bombs, life in Pakistan goes on, and the Crescent and the Star flutters  high on our sky scrapers and pulsates proud in our hearts. Let this  anniversary of our Lahore resolution be a lesson to our enemies, that we remember our dedication to our cause, and promise to keep the dream of our fathers of our nation, Jinnah, Liaqat-Ali Khan and Iqbal alive.

Trail of freedom from the bowels of hell in Bharat to freedom in Pakistan

We remember the 1 million lives lost in creating a country, and also rededicate ourselves to the fact that “Pakistan manzil nahin, Nishan e Manzil hai”. Thatmanzil was defined by Iqbal, Liaqat, Jinnah and many others who carry the banner in the land of the Crescent and Star. Despite some impediments we have not lost track of the “manzil“. Pakistan as it existed 5000 years ago

‘India is no more a country than the Equator’.Winston Churchill

The British Indian Empire included Iraq, Aden, Somalia, Burma, and more than 500 states of the Subcontinent

The British Empire spanning continents

The Muslim majority areas of the Subcontinent should have been part of Pakistan. Many Muslims wanted to stay and fight in the “Darul Harb” ’till it was changed to “Darul islam“. (notice islam with lower case “i” which depicts islam=peace). The Quaid’s vision was to separate based on demographics. 

Patel and others cheated us out of a real separation.

The more then 500 independent princely states of the Subcontinent

The State of Hyderabad wanted to stay independent after 1948 but was run over by Patel

The Princely state of Bombay Presidency

The Princely state of Baroda

Before separation

After separation

After the Muslims won the right for separate electorates, Jinnah supported the Dalits to get the same right. This was wholeheartedly opposed by Mr. Mohandas Gandhi. In the Round Table Conferences in 1930-32, the concept of separate electorates for the Untouchables  and Dalits was raised by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, as a way to ensure sufficient representation for the minority Dalits, in government.

… Gandhi was a so-called “high caste”. High castes represent at small minority in India, some 10-15 percent of the population, yet dominate Indian society in much the same way whites ruled South Africa during the official period of Apartheid. Dalits often use the phrase Apartheid in India when speaking about their problems.

.. Gandhi’s main critic and political opponent, Dr. Ambedkar, for whom our journal is named and the first Dalit in history to receive an education ..

The All India Muslim League session of 1936

1938 RESOLUTION ASKED FOR SEPARATION:Even earlier in 1938 Sir Abdullah Haroon moved a resolution for establishing independent Muslim states in the north-west and eastern zones. The word states continued to be used in subsequent sessions of the All India Muslim League till about 1943. Originally the two zones were meant to be autonomous and sovereign and it was only when the British and the Hindus insisted that Punjab and Bengal were to be partitioned that Pakistan began to be talked about as one state.

THE PAKISTAN RESOLUTION OF 1940: The Lahore Resolution (later known as the Pakistan Resolution) The Lahore resolution moved by Fazlul Haq at the 27th Session of the All India Muslim League, at Lahore on March 23, 1940 stated:

“that geographically contagious units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial adjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which the Muslims are in a majority, as in the north-west and eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.”

What is the Two Nation Theory exactly? The moniker “‘two’ ‘nation’ ‘theory’” is a misnomer. The theory of nationalities states that “India does not have a homogeneous population”.  There are many racial, ethnic and linguistic groups in India. India is not a national state, India is not a country, but a  sub-continent composed of “nationalities”. The two nation theory clearly states that that there are several nationalities in the subcontinent, and the Hindus and the Muslims are the largest of the two nations.  Hindus and Muslims are different therefore Muslim majority areas must exist separately. Chaudry Rehmat Ali’s “Pakistan proposal asked for SEVERAL MUSLIM STATES  in the subcontinent.”

In this document a map of India has also been published showing India split into different states, named as Pakistan, Guruistan, Usmanistan, Bangsamispan, Hindoostan comprising Rajistan, Kathiwar, Maharashtra, Rajistan and Dravidia. This pamphlet was reproduced in 1934  (Ref: The Great Divide by H. V. Hodson page 81). Karakal Pakistan’ existed as autonomous region of USSR.

He claimed that the destiny of whole Millat in the continent of “Dinia” (changed name of India) and its dependencies lies in the integration of Muslims into 10 countries: Pakistan, Bangistan, Usmanistan, Siddiqistan, Faruqistan, Haideristan, Muistan, Maplistan, Saristan, Nasarastan and than to be coordinated into Pak. Common Wealth of Nations.

• Hanoodia:243 principalities or Rajwaras
• Hindoostan: Rajistan, Kathiwar, Mahrashtra, Rajistan and Dravidia
• Saristan
• Nasarastan
• Haideristan
• Siddiqistan
• “Pakistan” (P=Punjab, A=Afghania, K=Kashmir, I=Islam, TAN=Baluchistan) in the Northwest including Kashmir, Delhi and Agra: “
• Bangistan” in Bengal:
• “Osmanistan” in Hyderabad; “Siddiquistan” in Bundelhand and Malwa; “
• Faruqistan” in Bihar and Orissa: “
• Haideristan” in UP: “
• Muinistan” in Rajasthan: “
• Maplistan” in Kerala:
• “Safiistan” in “Western Ceylon” and “Nasaristan” in “Eastern Ceylon”, etc.

The map was published by Rahmat Ali in 1934 and came to be widely circulated in his pamphlet called “Now or Never” among the Muslims of the Subcontinent.

Rahmat Ali was disgusted at the bias of the British and referred the “British-Banya alliance” presumably in  He even declined to refer to an “India” as having ever existed at all and instead called the subcontinent  “Dinia”, and the oceans and the seas around India as the “Pakian Sea”, the “Osmanian Sea” etc. He urged the Dalits, Sikhs, Buddhists to rise up against the Hindus. In in  “Sikhistan” he asked them to be independent. He urged all of the supressed peoples  to rise up against supression.

This is what we asked for.

We were cheated out of this.

ANALYSIS OF THE TWO NATION THEORY:
The two nation theory enunciates that the subcontinent is made of several nationalities, the Hindus and the Muslims being the largest of the two. India is as big as Western Europe and contains many many racial, religious, linguistic, and ethnic groups. The Hindus and the Muslims are two separate nations, in terms of diet, attitude, social behavior, economic tendencies, social interaction, behaviors, and attitude.

According to many Pakistanis “The two nation theory did not solve all the problems of the subcontinent. However it did save 200 million Muslims (those emancipated in Pakistan and Bangladesh) from social economic and political servitude. The servitude is proven by the decadent condition of Indian Muslims in a “secular” Indian state. Perhaps it sacrifices 150 million Indian Muslims. But the alternative was 450 million Muslims in servitude.” “Secularism” in “India” means “Hinduism Light.“

Nationhood is defined as the tendency of a nation to exist. No two nations have the same reason to exist. USA and Canada exist separately, though you may think that both nations have English speaking population, with similar accents, similar religions, similar culture, similar economic structures, and similar racial and ethnic backgrounds. Do you hear America question the validity of Canada to exist. I believe that the USA has the power to take over Canada, if it really wanted to. BUT the USA recognizes the right of the Canadians to exist separately.

THE TWO NATION THEORY & THREE STATES: The Two Nation theory cannot be debunked because there are more then one Muslim country in the subcontinent. The Hindu nation lives in more than one country (India, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Burma, Sri Lanka, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Bangladesh). The Chinese nation lives in several states (Taiwan, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia). Similarly the Muslim nation (transcending all racial, ethnic, caste and linguistic boundaries) can live in several states. There are several Arab Muslim countries too. The country of Pakistan as a unified Muslim country in the subcontinent was actually asked for the Bengali nationalists. Jinnah acquiesced.

The “Nationalistic” Indian attitude towards the TNT: Many modern Indians have a what Pakistanis consider a “strange” attitude. Pakistan should not exist, because it would be better for Indian Muslims, better for Indian Hindus, better for Pakistanis. Pakistanis ask “How do they know it would be better for us?” And who are they to judge our feelings, and tell us what is better for our nation?” If a nation is defined “as a tendency of a people to seek a country”then the Muslims of the Subcontinent are a nation. They point out to one insignificant point or the other in Pakistan to devalue the “raisan d’etre” of Pakistani nationhood. This attitude spell perpetual warfare.

PAKISTANI NATIONHOOD: Pakistanis justify the existence of the country by explaining that “India was never ONE NATION. India is as big as Western Europe and has more nationalities than Europe. The subcontinent has always been a conglomeration of states and nationalities. If one looks at the “Indian” map during the Mughal era, or during Vikramadatya’s era, one will see dozens, sometimes hundreds of STATES. Pakistanis believe that “Akhand Bharat” was a figment of the imagination of Gandhi and the Jan Sangh. Just because the British called it India, does not mean that it was one nation ever or will be one nation ever.”

Plutarch expressed this sentiment well some centuries ago: “A conqueror is always a lover of peace. He would like to make his entry into your cities unopposed.” Does India talk peace in the Plutarchian sense?

SUMMARY AND ABSTRACT ON SOUTH ASIAN SCHISMS
This article presents the arguments of political stratification and nation forming that were in the air in the Forties. The arguments against the Subcontinental nationhood are discussed at length. The arguments for a Pakistani nation are analyzed in depth. Arguments from both sides are presented and refuted.

The history of the creation of India and Pakistan is not always in teleological progression. We have lost a lot of history by tracing our history by traveling through chronological diaries and self aggrandizing biographies. Neither Pakistani  nor Indian history books have done an adequate job of tracing our roots. Neither explain “partition” properly.

The Pakistani text books ignore Hindu contributions to our common struggle against colonialism, and seem ashamed of the common lineage with Hindus—(Indus Valley, Buddhism), Pakistani historical narratives underplay the role of the nationalist Indian Muslim leadership, Jauhar, Azad and Suhrawardi, and over emphasize the importance of the RSS and Jan Sangh. Pakistani textbooks ignore the Sufi contributions to our struggle of independence and restrict discussion of Sufiism to Shah Waliullah and a few others.

The Indian textbooks fail to see the Pakistan movement as a provincial and minority rebellion against the Nehruite Marxist-Leninist Federalism that was the hall mark of the INC. The Indian textbooks fail to mention the three wings of Congress, the Nehruite secular wing led by Nehru, the fundamentalist and communal wing led by Rai, the religious wing led by Gandhi, and the extreme nationalist wing led by Patel. The Bharat text books fail to recognize that fact that Gandhi was and was seen as a religious leader by  the minorities and by a large section of the Hindu populace. The Indian text books over glorify many Hindu periods, fail to mention the Hindu Buddhist wars, diminish Brahamanism and Brahamanic cruelties towards non-Brahmans, relegate the Mughal era to the greatness of Akbar, ignore the Hindu communal organizations, demonize Muslim leaders who differed with Gandhi, brand secular and moderate Muslim leadership of the Muslim League as communal leaders, overlook the frailties of the INC leadership that led to the Hindu-Muslim schism, and fail to recognize the radical non-secular part of the Congress that scared the minorities.

The Indian textbooks neglect to mention the accomplishments of the Muslim League Muslim leadership that tried to safeguard the interests of the Indian Muslim minorities by fighting for separate electorates for the Muslims, and tried to guarantee the rights of the minorities through the Cabinet Mission Plan and by demanding one third of the representation in parliament. This ingenious plan would have guaranteed a fair and equitable settlement. However vested interests in the INC would not allow this.

The article has some in-bred biases towards the Pakistani point of view. No apologies are given for this slant. The purpose of the article is not convince people, simply to present facts and analysis.

THE FORTIES: THE THEORIES IN AIR
Freedom is in the air. The Union Jack is to come down. How do wedeal with independence? Are we mature enough to behave as civilized nations? The years preceding our independence was an intense time. The Freedom Movement created many leaders and many movements. Neither the Muslims nor the Hindus nor the Sikhs were monolithic groups. Each political group had many leaders. Many times the leadership seemed to head in different directions. The Harrow-Eaton Oxbridge led INC under the leadership of Motilal Nehru was a very different Congress. The INC led by his son Jawaharlal Nehru was a very different INC.

The INC had several factions that split and made up. Similarly the Muslim Movement had factions and grouping in it. Disgruntled elements in each of  the major parties went and formed their own political parties and contested the elections. Each group had sub-groupings and subdivisions. There were more than 550 states in the Subcontinent. The Forties gave us the opportunity to forge a country in the Subcontinent or create many nations. As a people we failed to remain at peace. As countries we failed to keep the peace. As nations we failed to usher in an era of prosperity into the Subcontinent. Today let history teach us some lessons.

Most readers are familiar withGandhi’s great hunger strike against the so called Poona Pact in 1933. The matter which Gandhi was protesting, nearly unto death at that, was the inclusion in the draft Indian Constitution, proposed by the British, that reserved the right of Dalits to elect their own leaders. Dr. Ambedkar, with his degree in law from Cambridge, had been chosen by the British to write the new constitution for India. Having spent his life overcoming caste-based discrimination, Dr. Ambedkar had come to the conclusion that the only way Dalits could improve their lives is if they had the exclusive right to vote for their leaders, that a portion or reserved section of all elected positions were only for Dalits and only Dalitscould vote for these reserved positions.

Separate electorate was vehemently opposed by Mahatma Gandhi on the grounds that the move would disintegrate Hindu society. If the Dalits had gotten a separate electorate, this would have ensured certain constituencies which would have been reserved for them. Only the Dalits would have been able to vote for the candidates contesting those seats. This would have given them real leaders and real participation in the elections.

Gandhi was determined to prevent this and went on hunger strike to change this article in the draft constitution. After many communal riots, where tens of thousands of Dalitswere slaughtered, and with a leap in such violence predicted if Gandhi died, Dr. Ambedkaragreed, withGandhi on his death bed, to give up the Dalits right to exclusively elect their own leaders and Gandhi ended his hunger strike.

Later, on his own death bed, Dr. Ambedkar would say this was the biggest mistake in his life, that if he had to do it all over again, he would refuse to give up Dalitonly representation, even if it meant Gandhi’s death.

Jaswant Singh recently had an epiphany. His “eureka moment” and four year research is useless. His version of events is taught in the 8th grade in Pakistan. The world already knew all this. Here is a different perspective on Pakistan.

THE THESIS:  There was no “partition”

THERE WAS NO “PARTITION”: For Britain ” ‘Indian’ Empire” included Somalia, Iraq, Burma, Singapore etc. For the French “India” included Vietnam (Indo-China). For the Dutch “India” included “Indo-n-asia”.

Historians in general and many Pakistanis in particular take deep umbrage and dislike the usage of the term “partition” because “partition” implies the division of a whole. Pakistanis prefer Independence. Pakistanis will accept “Separation” but not “partition.” As the maps show, the term “India” was very ephemeral and put in vogue by the British. Before British times, there was no such word. Because there never was a country called “India” there was no partition. 

“India is no more a country than the Equator“  Winston Churchill 

Initially when Lord Clive of the East India company defeated Shirijud Daulah, he called it British Bengal.  When the British formally came to the Subcontinent in 1857, they encountered more than 570 states. When they left the Subcontinent they left more than 570 independent states and two dominions, India and Pakistan. The states on the banks of the Indus decided to live together as Pakistan, as they had lived together for thousands of years. The states on the Gangetic plain banded together to form “Bharat”. The state on the Brahamaputra became its own state.

Maps showing various sovereign, independent states in the Subcontinent during the British Raj

Each state had its own currency, laws, jails, flag, crest, passport, military, treasury, and British forces were not allowed to enter the state. Many were ruled by Muslims rulers like Hydrabad, Bhopal, Junagarh etc. Maps showing various sovereign, independent states in the Subcontinent during the British Raj.

.

The separation of Burma is not called “partition”. The independence of Sri Lanka is not called “partition”. The removal of Iraq from the British Indian Empire is not called “partition”. The independence of Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan is not called “partition”. Aden and Somalia became independent in the British Indian Empire and are not lamented as being “partitioned” off. For the French, separating Vietnam from their Indian Empire is not called “partition”. For the Dutch, removing Indonesia from Dutch “India” is not called separation.

The Western states had lived together in the Valley of the Indus for more than 5000 years together so it was natural for them to live together

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THE BASIS FOR THE THESIS

“Pakistan” existed 5000 years ago.  

5000 years ago Pakistan was probably not called “Pakistan”. China 5000 years ago was also called something else. Egypt 5000 years ago was called something else.

Kushan Parthian maps show different parts of the world

The British Indian Empire included Somalia, Iraq, Aden, Burma and other states. Then there was the French “Indian” Empire, Dutch “Indian” Empire, “Portuguese” Indian Empire and even a Dansih “Indian” Empire. Each one had a different meaning of “India”.The French “Indian” Empire included Vietnam etc. The Dutch Indian Empire included parts of the Subcontinent and Indonesia. Columbus called America “India” and the local inhabitants Indian. Other islands in the new world were called East Indies. South East Asia was called Indo-China.

The French “Indian” Empire included parts of the Subcontinent and (Indo-China) Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos in it

The Dutch “Indian” Empire included Indonesia in it

Map showing Burma, Aden, Iraq as part of the “Indian” Empire

Constables maps of 1893 not shwoing many part of Paksitan in the “Indian” Empire

Map of Asia showing “India” without Pakistan

Map of the Middle East does not show Pakistan as part of the Subcontinent

Timur’s Empire show Pakistan not part of the Subcontinent

THERE WAS NO PARTITION

The Pakistan proposal “Now or Never” was not based on any partition. It was based on the Muslim majority areas coming together.

“Notwithstanding [a] thousand years of close contact, nationalities which are as divergent today as ever, cannot at any time be expected to transform themselves into one nation merely by means of subjecting them to a democratic constitution and holding them forcibly together by unnatural and artificial methods of British Parliamentary statutes. What the unitary government of India for one hundred fifty years had failed to achieve cannot be realised by the imposition of a central federal government. It is inconceivable that the fiat or the writ of a government so constituted can ever command a willing and loyal obedience throughout the sub-continent by various nationalities, except by means of armed force behind it. Quaid E Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah: Founder of Pakistan and the Father of the Nation

These maps show the distribution of Muslim majority areas and other areas. The proposal called for Pakistan to be created in the Muslim majority areas

THE PROOF OF THE THESIS

How could a country be partitioned when it has existed for 5000 years as a separate entity. One hundred and Fifty years as part of the British empire does not make “India” a country

Pakistanis and historians detest the word that incorrectly describes the genesis of the country that has existed since time immemorial

 Sindhu (Indus) river. From Sindh to Hindh. In time all residents beyond the Indus were also called Hindus. 

The term “india” stems from the Arab usage of the word Hind from for the inhabitants who lived on the

The Western states, Kalat, Bhawalpur, and provinces Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan, and NWFP banded together to form “Pakistan” and decided to live together as one country just like they had lived together for thousands of years before the British arrived in the Indus Valley Civilization that existed almost entirely on the banks of the Indus. The states of the Gangetic Civilization that existed on the banks of the Ganges banded together to live form Bharat(constitutional name of “India”). Pakistan had objected to the name “India” being used by Bharat.

These maps show the British Indian Empire which included many states. The other maps detail the condition of the Subcontinent on the eve of the British departure.There never was a country called “India.” The Arabs never ventured past Sindh. The nomenclature was for those on the river Indus as Sindhu or Hindu. ”India” is a colonial derivative of the word. During British Times vast areas of Asia came under the jurisdiction of Britain. Iraq, Somalia, Burma and 526 states in the Subcontinent were all part of the British Empire. When the British were leaving all the parts were made independent.Of these, Somalia, Iraq, Burma, and Pakistan are some of the countries that got liberated. There never was any partition because there never was a “whole” to divide.

At one point Afghanistan was also part of the British Indian Empire. Curzon’s retreat from Afghanistan, and its separation from the “Indian” Empire was not called “partition”. The separation of Iraq from the Indian empire was not called partition. The separation of Aden from British India was not called partition. the separation of the gulf states from “India” was not called partition. The independence of Burma from the British raj in 1933 was not called “partition”. Why is the Pakistani separation called “partition”, as if it was part and parcel of a “whole”.

British Raj (rāj, lit. “rule” in Hindi) or British India, officially the British Indian Empire, and internationally and contemporaneously, India, was the term used synonymously for the region, the rule, and the period, from 1858 to 1947, of the British Empire on the Indian subcontinent. The region included areas directly administered by the United Kingdom (contemporaneously, “British India”) as well as the princely states ruled by individual rulers under the paramountcy of the British Crown. The princely states, which had all entered into treaty arrangements with the British Crown, were allowed a degree of local autonomy in exchange for accepting protection and complete representation in international affairs by Great Britain. The British Indian Empire included the regions of present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and, in addition, at various times, Aden (from 1858 to 1937), Lower Burma (from 1858 to 1937), Upper Burma (from 1886 to 1937), British Somaliland (briefly from 1884 to 1898), and Singapore (briefly from 1858 to 1867). British India had some ties with British possessions in the Middle East;the Indian rupee served as the currency in many parts of that region. What is now Iraq was, immediately after World War I, administered by the India Office of the British government.Source: Wikipedia

THE FOUR SUPERPOWERS OF PROTO-HISTORY: China, Egypt, Iraq and Pakistan. The Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates delta, the Yangtze Delta, and the Indus, are the wombs of all civilizations on our earth. These river valley spawned and nurtured humanity. Imagine a world with four superpowers at peace with each other. Imagine a planet where each civilization was immersed in humongous construction projects, urban edification and trade. . How did these proto-world powers interact with each other? Imagine a civilization without any implements of war. Let us look into pre-history and peek into the “seeds” of time. Let us look at the valleys of the world that engendered the Superpowers of the ancient world..

PAKISTAN 5000 YEARS AGO:-The Indus Valley Civilization of South Asia was one of the inceptive civilizations on the planet. It was contemporaneous with the Chinese, Egyptian, and Sumerian civilizations. These were the times when the Egyptians were building huge monuments to their God-kings,the pyramids and the Sphinx. These were the centuries when the Chinese were building palaces for the Shun dynasty. These were exciting eons in the Holy lands too.

These were the centuries when Moses was battling the pharaohs, Abraham was building the Kaaba, David was ruling the kingdom, and Solomon was building the Temple of Yahweh. It was during these centuries that the Indus Valley Civilization flourished and reached its zenith in South Asia.

The IVC built well planned municipalities for its citizens. While the Egyptians spent three generations of their labor force (estimated between 20,000-10000) building useless mausoleum-pyramids to bury the God-kings, the Harappans were successful in eradicating, disease, hunger, and malnutrition.

The Harappans of the IVC did not build huge commemorative, deifying, dedicatory, cenotaphs. The Harappans of Meluhha-IVC built the finest cities of the third millennium.

THE CENTRIFUGAL FORCES IN CURRENT DAY BHARAT

Because the Subcontinent was never “one” country, there are deep fissures in “Bharat.” The Kashmiris, the Naxalites, the Northeastern states, as well as East Punjab, and Tamil Nadu on the South all want to revert to the pre-1947 era.

There are several other articles on the History of India and Pakistan, and Geographic Two Nation Theory on this site:

http://moinansari.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/the-geographic-two-nation-theory-pakistan-existed-5000-years-ago/

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Speech at a public reception at Chittagong, 26th March 1948

I am grateful to you all for the warm welcome which you have accorded me on this my first visit to a city destined to be one of the biggest in Pakistan as a whole. On my part I am glad to be in your midst and I need hardly assure you that not only are your problems being dealt with steadily and progressively but that unhindered by difficulties and obstacles we are determined to make good the neglect of centuries in the course of the next few years when Chittagong will rank as one of the finest ports in the world.

You are only voicing my sentiments and the sentiments of millions of Musalmans when you say that Pakistan should be based on sure foundations of social justice and Islamic socialism which emphasise equality and brotherhood of man. Similarly you are voicing my thoughts in asking and in aspiring for equal opportunities for all. These targets of progress are not controversial in Pakistan, for we demanded Pakistan, we struggled for it, and we achieved it so that physically as well as spiritually we are free to conduct our affairs according to our traditions and genius. Brotherhood, equality and fraternity of man – these are all the basic points of our religion, culture and civilisation. And we fought for Pakistan because there was a danger of denial of these human rights in this subcontinent. We aspired for these great ideals because of centuries of dual domination by the foreign rulers and by a caste-ridden social system. This domination continued for over two hundred years until we realised that it would ultimately mean complete extinction of Musalmans individually as human beings and collectively as a nation. After all, the story of Pakistan, its struggle and its achievement is the story of great human ideals struggling to survive in the face of odds and difficulties. This biggest Muslim State came into being on 15th August 1947. It was a great day in our history. But on this great day, it was not merely a Government which came into existence; it meant the birth of a great State and a great nation – one supplementing the other and both existing for each other. I can understand and appreciate the limitations of those amongst us whose minds have not moved fast enough to realise that 15th of August ushered in such a State and such a nation. It is natural for some to think only in terms of Government, but the sooner we adjust ourselves to new forces, the sooner our mind’s eye is capable of piercing through the horizons to see the limitless possibilities of our State and of our nation, the better for Pakistan. Then and then alone it would be possible for each one of us to realise the great ideals of human progress, of social justice, of equality and of fraternity which, on the one hand, constitute the basic causes of the birth of Pakistan and also the limitless possibilities of evolving an ideal social structure in our State. It reiterates most emphatically that Pakistan was made possible because of the danger of complete annihilation of the human soul in a society based on caste. Now the soul is free to exist and to aspire it must assert itself, galvanising not only the State but also the Nation.

Such mental and spiritual changes cannot be brought about overnight. Nor can these be inflicted by anybody without dislocating the structure of human relationships.

Today your State is hardly eight months old, but if we look back and review this short span of our national life, we can clearly see the steady evolution of great ideologies and balanced relations between man and man. Any impartial observer will admit that in fact it has already been admitted that the minorities in Pakistan have had a better deal than elsewhere. Here in our midst they have lived not only peacefully but have enjoyed complete liberty of asserting themselves. Some have even given a lead in controversies which, but for the realisation on the part of our people, might have struck at the very root of Pakistan in an hour of grave emergency.

This – our single biggest achievement – alone reflects the direction in which we are moving. There cannot be any better evidence to show that we are determined to evolve a State based on principles of equality and social justice. If we can be fair and just to others there can be no doubt about being fair and just among ourselves.

The address of welcome which you have just presented refreshingly embodies your urge for progress and development. It is indeed a pleasure to see that the people of Pakistan are conscious of the great possibilities of their State – though I must warn you that impatience will be as dangerous as lack of enthusiasm. Chittagong is destined to be great and you, as her citizens, are destined to share her greatness and prosperity. I can assure you that the Central and Provincial Governments are endeavouring hard to catch up on years of indifference and neglect. Notwithstanding the inevitable preoccupation of your Central Government with grave and emergent problems which confronted them in Western Pakistan which was called upon to shelter, house and rehabilitate millions of your brethren uprooted from the Indian Union, blueprints for developing Chittagong have been got ready. This potentially great port has been neglected for centuries along with other similar areas in Pakistan regions and you know that such neglect and indifference has constituted the biggest single justification for our demand for Pakistan. Accordingly, now that we are free to shape our future, we are not going to be indifferent to it. We need not look back to the past of neglect with pessimism. All that is required is courage and faith in our future, and I am glad to say that such faith has not been found lacking during the last eight months.

I need hardly remind you that due to the determination of the people of Pakistan and the efforts made by your Government, Chittagong as a port is already coming into its own. During the last few months, ships of various nationalities, whose ensigns fly colourfully along your roads today, have harboured in your port, some for the first time in history to take your raw products to their countries for manufacture into finished products. Chittagong is already handling a fair portion of your export and import trade. This has been possible mainly due to the efforts of us all to decrease our dependence on others.

This achievement in such a short time shows what human will can do. Funds are no doubt necessary for development but at the same time national growth and regeneration do not depend on funds alone. It is human toil that makes for the prosperity of a people and I have no doubt that we have in Pakistan a nation of industrious and determined people whose past traditions have already distinguished them in the field of human achievement.

I have frankly and clearly associated myself with your aspirations for developing your city of which you are justly proud. Your urge for progress and your Government’s efforts to reach the goal will soon get translated in the shape of large-scale projects, which I am satisfied are being actively pursued. The most important scheme which concerns you vitally, and which is at present under active examination, is the harnessing of Karnaphuly River to control floods and silt, to irrigate fields and to develop cheap hydroelectric power. The necessary preliminary work is being expedited and the project is on our top priority list. I might tell you that one of the reasons, which prompted me to visit East Pakistan at this juncture, when Western Pakistan particularly is passing through a period of grave emergency, was to see for myself the progress made in respect of developing your city which can now look forward to a future of great maritime importance.

While at Chittagong, I have spent the major portion of my time in studying the possibilities of port development and I am confident that the course of the next years, Chittagong will not only be a port of embarkation for Hajis from East Pakistan but also an export and import center for which we can spare for the world and for what we need from other countries. Chittagong is destined to be the Eastern mighty queen and gateway to Pakistan, your will to progress, labour and work and your Government’s efforts to hit targets of progress aimed at, will, I am sure, do it.

Nature has endowed you bountifully. Yours is a beautiful garden land with sea, rivers and hills and magnificent scenery all-round. It remains now for man in Chittagong to play his part fully and raise Chittagong to the zenith for which it is destined.

So I wish you God speed.

Pakistan Zindabad!

Source: Jamil-ud-Din Ahmad 1960, Vol. II p.555-510(original source to be confirmed)

What is strange about this entire discussion is the way it has shaken the Indian psyche. Challenging the historiography of the events of 1947 is a difficult task. Many have tried it.

Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, in his insightful book Guilty Men of India's Partition recounts those painful days when the decision to divide India and the two communities-Hindus and Muslims- was taken. He identifies the leaders and circumstances responsible for the Partition in a candid conversation with his readers. He shares his experiences of being sidelined, his efforts being thwarted and his prophetic foresight being ignored in the midst of influential leaders with political power.

Rammanohar Lohia wrote a book titled “Guilty men of India’s partition” (Published by Kitabistan, 1960). However that earlier work was largely ignored by those who find it easier to be in the age old comfort zone–demonizing Jinnah, by corollary all Muslims and by extension Islam for all the problems that face Bharat today.Jaswan’t Singh has stirred literally typed up a storm (pun intended). The book, like all books will bring out the best and the worst. Some will use it to confirm their pre-existing bigoted notions. Others will let it be water off a ducks back. A few will change their mind. Based on the comments on our site, the Bharati psyche has been shaken but not stirred. Many of our Bharati readers still see Jinnah as a antagonists, and the Pakistani readers see him as an protagonist of 1947.

We of course do not agree with Singh’s lament about what he calls “partition”. We don’t think of 1947 a cataclysmic event. We think of it as a natural extension of the wranglings of the 570 states that were in existence in South Asia before the British arrived in South Asia in 1757. Many states of the Indus banded together to renew their pledge to continue to live together. The states on the Ganges were coerced or decided to live on the banks of the Ganges. The states on the Brahmaputra later decided to live independently on the banks of the Bay of Bengal.

Map of the 570 states of the Subcontinent in pre-indpendence British Empire "india"

Mohmmad Ali Jinnah did not create facts on the ground. The Muslim population rejected various other messages thrown at them, and conscripted Mohammad Ali Jinnah (After he resigned from the Indian National Congress and left for England) and brought him back. This was not mere accident of history. It was a complex mixture of divine providence, manifest destiny and the wishes of the Mussalmans of South Asia.

If Jinnah did not exist, the Muslims of South Asia would have created him. He was not imposed on the people. His plans were not artificts from his library. As a good attorney he represented the Muslims to the best of his ability–taking into consideration the wishes of the people of South Asia. After he was repeatedly elected by the Muslim League to represent the Muslims.

The Indian National Congress (INC) with all its machinery could not eliminate the Muslim League. The INC could manufacture consent by marketing a relatively unknown failed attorney from South Africa. The INC could bring in religious symbols to encourage the RSS into proposing the Ram Raj. But the INC could not eliminate Mohammad Ali Jinnah by drumming out the Muslims from the INC.

A decade ago a book by Delhi historian Ajit Javed celebrated Jinnah as a pragmatic man who wanted foremost to achieve security for Muslims in a new Indian federation. In 1989 a senior barrister from Mumbai, H.M. Seervai, authored a book, Partition of India: Legend and Reality, in which he portrayed Jinnah as a staunch secular leader, who really wanted to reach a credible accord with Congress for the equal status of Muslims in an independent India. A good 50 years ago another barrister, S.K. Mazumdar, published Gandhi and Jinnah, in which he argued that Jinnah was badly let down by the clueless Congress.

Even Gandhi’s grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, portrayed Jinnah in a very favourable light in his famous book Eight Lives: a Study of the Hindu-Muslim Encounter.

One of us was involved in the British television series End of Empire in the early 1980s, and interviewed political figures and key civil servants around Mountbatten, who stated that there was a realistic solution other than partition. It would not have been easy; high-level civil servants too were split along which way to go. But few, if any, believed partition was inevitable.

Winford Thomas, a BBC correspondent posted in Delhi at the time, said the fault lay principally with Nehru and Patel. Labour politician Woodrow Whyte spoke highly of Jinnah and said that the Congress made the gravest mistake when it failed to accommodate him. It is on record that Jinnah accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan in 1946 — which ultimately may have undermined his bargaining position with the Congress.

Just before independence Maulana Abul Kalam Azad wrote to Gandhi, pleading that Congress give maximum autonomy to the provinces. The subjects (such as finance, foreign affairs, defence) dealt with by the central government should be divided equally to create a reassuring sense of parity between Muslims and Hindus.

Azad argued that an increasingly insensitive Congress by then had lost Muslim sympathy and that it consequently needed to resort to strong and self-sacrificing measures to regain it. Gandhi, unfortunately, responded to Azad’s plea in a way that amounted to a snub.

Gandhi instructed Azad not to issue public statements on this delicate issue because at that moment, according to Gandhi, Azad’s radical proposals could not be entertained. Dawn. The partition game By Sayeed Hasan Khan & Kurt Jacobsen, Thursday, 03 Sep, 2009 | 09:03 AM PST |

In an interesting back and forth between Kapil Komireddi and Samar Abbas Kazmi we can see microcosm of the age old discussion that has been going on among the people of South Asia.

Jaswanth Singh eulogized Mohammad Ali Jinnah in his current book. The Bharati media weaned on the milk of "Jinnnah hatred" don't have a clue about one of the greatest political leaders of South Asia

In his analysis of a new book about Jinnah, Kapil Komireddi accuses the author, Jaswant Singh, of “bowdlerising zealously” to rid Pakistan’s founder of the “blame of partition”. Yet Kapil’s account omits certain important facts relevant to any discussion of how the “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity” came to found one of the modern world’s only two states carved in the name of a religion (the other being Israel).

To suggest that the story of a man as complex as Jinnah can be told without omissions in the confines of an opinion piece would be unfair to the man and to the storyteller. Kapil errs not in that he makes omissions in the story but that he attempts to tell the story at all in such a confined space. As Kapil rightly points out, Jinnah was, by all accounts, a secular constitutionalist and staunch Indian nationalist for most of his career. The story of how he became the voice of the movement that sought British India’s division across religious lines is a complex early 20th century drama involving conflicting personalities and fractured identities set against the backdrop of a dying empire.

The leading characters in this drama – Nehru, Gandhi, Jinnah, Patel, Iqbal – are variously worshipped and demonised in modern India and Pakistan. Yet, they are all merely human, children of India’s first tryst with modernity, individuals trying to make sense of their own very different histories to conjure visions of their future, who, in doing so, happen to alter the history of the subcontinent forever.

• RSS bigotry, INC arrogance, Gandhi’s racism made Pakistan inevitable
• Pakistan was inevitable– its seeds had been sown many centuries earlier
• Muslim rule in “India”: Myth and reality

Their stories are rich and worthy of being told and retold, and for anyone interested in how modern India and Pakistan came to be, their relationships withone another are worth examining in detail. These are stories of evolving identities in which we find the Harrow and Cambridge educated Mr Nehru becoming Pandit Nehru; barrister Gandhi becoming Mahatma Gandhi; Sir Iqbal becoming Allama Iqbal; and, the most fascinating of them all, the provincial Mahomedali Jinnahbhai transforming into the Savile Row-fitted Mr MA Jinnah, before finally settling on the Persianic Quaid-e-Azam. These are splendid, complex, brilliant men, each guided by his own sense of self and nationhood, who come together to dismantle the British Raj, yet part ways when the end is in sight.

It is thus unfortunate that these fascinating individuals must always be seen through the prism of their greatest collective failure: the sequence of wholly avoidable events leading to the bloodbath of partition. And as events of great human tragedy often do, the story of partition has become a deeply divisive and political issue in modern India and Pakistan.

South Asia in 5000 years has not been a monolith "country". Map of the 570 states of the Subcontinent in pre-indpendence British Empire "india"

The two countries have evolved competing histories of the event and the persons responsible for it: India sees the creation of Pakistan as a result of machinations by Jinnah, his band of Muslim League cronies and the conniving, departing British; Pakistan imagines its birth as a result of a hard-fought historic struggle against the twin evils of British imperialism and Hindu majoritarianism.

It is in this wide chasm between two competing falsehoods that Singh finds his space. In Singh’s book a new Jinnah is born, a much more human Jinnah, neither the demon hated in India nor the hero worshipped in Pakistan: a self-made man in an era of princes and privilege, driven by ambition to the pinnacle of success, yet held back by circumstance; a person whose intransigence was fed by that of those he was up against; and one whose resolve eventually broke him and the India he had set out to free.

His argument, drawn from primary sources of the time, centres on the sense of insecurity bred in the psyche of Muslim leadership as a result of what they perceived to be gains of Hindus, as represented by the Congress, at their expense. The level to which these fears were real is, of course, open to debate among historians, but as Singh explains, this “minority syndrome” amongst Muslim leadership caused religion to become the field where battles over federalism, socialism, modernism, and Indian identity are fought between these highly complex personalities.

He is, of course, not the first to challenge the historiography of partition. As early as 1960, Ram Manohar Lohia, an active member of the nationalist movement, had published a book called Guilty Men of India’s Partition, which criticized Nehru and Patel’s acquiescence to partition. In her 1985 book The Sole Spokesman, Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal examined the last decade of British power in India and reached similar conclusions as Singh as to the causes of India’s partition.

Kapil is wrong to dismiss Singh’swork – he does an important job in straddling the important boundary between academic, polemical and popular histories and reaching a conclusion that challenges both prevailing national narratives. Needless to say, it helps that Singhis one of modern India’s most prominent individuals, and has the ability to generate a greater popular effect than the most erudite of academics: the fact that his book has been banned in Gujarat, while sad and reprehensible, speaks volume for the level of discomfort his narrative is causing to that of the Indian establishment’s. He may ultimately be wrong – the strengthof his evidence leads me to suspect he is more right than most existing accounts – but the very existence of his work should serve to kindle a long overdue soul-searching in both countries as to how we see ourselves, our leaders and each other. When it comes to the question of Jinnah, independence, India and partition, zealotry must give way to intelligent discourse if we are to ever exorcise the ghosts of partition. Jinnah: neither angel nor demonPakistan’s founder was a complex figure. A controversial new book rightly challenges zealous fictions about him.Samar Abbas Kazmi guardian.co.uk, Monday 31 August 2009 16.00 BST Article history

This is the map of the Indus Valley Civilization which existed 5000 years ago on the banks of the Indus. This represent the Indus Pakistanis (see Indus Saga by Ahtizaz Ahsan). The IVC was not Hindu. They buried their dead, wrote a non-Sanskirt pictographic language, ate beef, did not know the horse, wre not vegetarian, wrote right to left, did not know the horse (No Arjun), and did not worship any of the Hindu pantheon (Arjun, Agni, Mithra, Nag). This map shows the Indus Valley Civilization which traded with the Muslim Moses in Mesopotamia. Pakistan is the latst Muslim incarnation of the IVC. The Indus people banded together to live togther as they had lived together for thousands of years. This was the contract once the Britain left. Bharat never existed as a united country--WHAT PARTITION?. This map shows the later stages of the IVC in Lothala and part sof Gujerat. The original IVC thrived only on the banks of the Indus (http://moinansari.wordpress.com/files/2008/01/pakistan-existed-5000-years-ago-as-ivc.gif)

Almost every discussion of the events of 1947 quickly degenerates into brickbats being thrown on the personalities of the leaders of the INC and the Muslim League. The Bharati temple educated point of view does not accept Pakistan. Bangladesh is brought up as a point to denigrate the Pakistani ideology. The Bharati point of view goes as follows. Since there are problems in Pakistan, therefore there should be no Pakistan and it should be absorbed back into Bharat which should extend from Kabul to Raj Kalhani (mythical land east of Hindu Bali in Indonesia). The bankruptcy of this mystical behemoth state is based on the some weird interpretation of Hindu scripture which concocts up the hallucinating notion that Qandhar somehow was mentioned in the scripture. It is historical fact, testified by meticulous Greek and Afghan records that Qandhar/Kandhar is a corruption of the Sikandar/Alexander and representsone of the hundreds of the cities named after the Macedonian. The temple educated logic doesn’t end with the fabrication about Qandhar, it continues to try to represent Buddhist and Jainism as part f Hinduism. Of course the Jains and Buddhist around the world (Korea, China, Lanka, Tibet, Vietnam) do not consider themselves as Hindus–but Hinduism tries to assimilate them within its own fold. This is the reason that Buddhism was exterminated from the place of its brith. Hinduism first eliminated Buddhism in Kashmir and other places and then tried to absorb it into the Hindu dharma. All this is rejected by the Buddhists.

The irredentist fabrication of history in Bharat does not end with the effort to incorporate Buddhism. It tries then to reach back into the Indus Valley Civilization which was certainly not Hindu in any sense of the word. The Indus valley people did not worship any of the Hindu pantheon of Gods (Agni, Mithra, Arjun, Ganesh, Shiva Lingam, Hanuman, Ram, Sita etc.), they buried their dead, did not use the Hindu Sanskrit language in any of its forms, were voracious beef eaters, did not know the horse (so no Arjun, Sita, Ram, Hanuman), were an Urban society (unlike the Hindu scriptures Kauras, Pandas, Mahabharta etc which are based on a rural society), used a pictographic language (not known to the Hindus of the Ganges Valley), did not cremate their dead, and read right to left (rather than left to right). The incapacity of the temple educated Bharatis cannot comprehend the Indus man as the modern Pakistan.

Just because John Principas concocted Ashoka as a composite figure, it doesn’t mean that he really existed. There are no records of “Ashoka” in any other text before 1837. Did Ashoka exist? Did Pandit Radhakantta create him for James Princep in 1837

In short, if Jinnah did not exist, the Muslims would have drafted another Muslim to represent them to create Pakistan.

Pakistan Historian.

Was Pakistan inevitable?

Speech on the Inauguration of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, Karachi, 14th August 1947 (01)

Your Excellency, (02) I thank His Majesty the King on behalf of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly and myself for his gracious message. (03) I know great responsibilities lie ahead, and I naturally reciprocate his sentiments and we are grateful for his assurance of sympathy and support, and I hope that you will communicate to His Majesty our assurance of goodwill and friendship for the British nation and himself as the Crown Head of the British.

I thank you for your expressions of goodwill and good wishes for the future of Pakistan. It will be our constant endeavour to work for the welfare and wellbeing of all the communities in Pakistan, and I hope that everyone would be inspired by the idea of public service, and they will be imbued with the spirit of cooperation and will excel in their political and civic virtues which go to make a great nation and help to advance its greatness.

I once more thank you and Lady Mountbatten for your kindness and good wishes. Yes, we are parting as friends and sincerely hope that we shall remain friends.

I wish to emphasise that we appreciate the spirit in which those in the Government service at present and in the Armed Forces and others have so willingly and ungrudgingly volunteered themselves provisionally to serve Pakistan. As servants of Pakistan we shall make them happy and they will be treated equally with our nationals. The tolerance and goodwill that great Emperor Akbar showed to all the non-Muslims is not of recent origin. (04) It dates back thirteen centuries ago when our Prophet not only by words but by deeds treated the Jews and Christians, after he had conquered them, with the utmost tolerance and regard and respect for their faith and beliefs. The whole history of Muslims, wherever they ruled, is replete with those humane and great principles which should be followed and practised.

Finally, I thank you for your good wishes for Pakistan, and I assure you that we shall not be wanting in friendly spirit with our neighbours and with all nations of the world.

Source: K.A.K. Yusufi 1996, p.2609-10
Originally appeared: Star of India, 15 August 1947

1920s: Pandit Malaviya shuddi (reconversion) movement

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya was the president of the Indian National Congress during 1909 and in 1918. Pandit Malaviya led the Congress to oppose the just claims of the Muslim community. He founded the Hindu Mahasabha in 1906. Malaviya was a rabid racist and communalist conservative who believed in the ‘Varnashrama Dharma’ (caste system).

Before Gandhis arrival from Africa the Indian National Congress (INC)was led by people like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Jinnah had excellent relations with Dadabhai Naoroji, the president of the sister Indian National Association and later Member of Parliament in the British House of Commons, the first Indian to win a seat there. Jinnah was called the Muslim Gokhle. Instead of creating consensus politics, the Congress moved to the religious fanatics of the time like Malaviya.

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya a former president of the Indian National Congress led the "Shuddi" (reconversion) movement directed as Muslims. Pandit Malaviya wanted to follow Hitler's plans

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya and Lal Lajpat Rai, both ex-Congress Presidents, founded their own Nationalist Party that year, a Hindu first communal party, which won many seats in the United Provinces…..

Malaviya was president of the Hindu Mahasaba, a conserative communal society that focused on saving cows and slaughter Muslims while trying to force the conversions of Muslims to Hinduism, arguing that most of India’s Muslim population had originally been Hindus but had forcibly been converted to Islam during some five hundred years of Muslim rule.

One of the most militant popular Hindu communal leaders of that “reconversion” (shudhi) movement, Swami Shraddhanand, was assassinated in Delhi that December by a Muslim extremist. The swami, like Lala Lajpat Rai, belonged to another fundamentalist Hindu society, the Arya Samaj, which advocated turning back India’s history more than three thousand years to an ancient Aryan tribal polity, reflected in Vedic scripture, when Brahmans and cows were treated as gods on earth.Rajib Dogars

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya led the “Shuddi” (reconversion) movement. One of the most salient developments in the 1920s was the launching of the shuddhi movement by the Arya Samaj to bring into the Hindu fold various groups considered outside the pale of what had now come to be defined as ‘Hinduism’, including untouchables and, later, Muslim, Christian and even Sikh communities. The Arya shuddhi campaign provoked Muslim leaders and groups to respond, and this took the form of various tablighi or Islamic missionary initiatives intended to counter the Arya Samaj’s conversion drive and, going further, to attempt to spread Islam among non-Muslims as well.

The first recorded shuddhi of a born Muslim was reported in 1877, when Dayanand Saraswati performed the shuddhi of a Muslim man from Dehra Dun, giving him the name of Alakhdhari. Individual conversions of this sort were few and far between, for such converts not only severed all social ties with their relatives but were also not fully accepted as equals not just by the Sanatani Hindus, who vociferously opposed the shuddhi project, but even by members of the Arya Samaj, who Ghai says, ‘behaved like most of the traditionalists and conservatives, fearing the wrath of their caste biraderi’. Clearly then, the Aryas realized, shuddhi among the Muslims would have to take the form of conversion of entire Muslim social groups if it was to really succeed. As a prelude to the actual launching of this ambitious missionary drive, towards the end of the nineteenth century Maharaja Ranbir Singh, the Hindu ruler of the largely Muslim state of Kashmir, is said to have commissioned the preparation of a 21-volume encyclopaedia by the name of Ranbir Karit Prayaschit Mahanibandh ['Ranbir's Great Essay on Repentance'], which argued the case and suggested strategies for the mass conversion of all the ‘neo-Muslim communities’ [nau Muslim aqwam] of India to ‘Hinduism’. This book, Muslim leaders were to later allege, had been secretly circulated among leading Hindus so that the Muslims remained unaware of the plot.

The first attempts by the Aryas at mass conversions of Muslim groups date to 1908, when Arya missionaries began touring the area around Deeg in the Bharatpur State in eastern Rajputana, calling upon Muslims there to renounce Islam, which, they alleged, had been forcibly imposed on their ancestors.

Some years later, Arya missionaries found active among the neo-Muslim Malkanas, a Rajput group who claimed to be Muslim but followed several Hindu customs and beliefs, in Etawah, Kanpur, Shahajahnpur, Hardoi, Meerut and Mainpuri in the western United Provinces, exhorting them to return to what they called their ‘ancestral religion’. In 1910, shuddhi sabhas were set up in several places in these districts, and although it was claimed that they had converted some 1000 Malkana Muslims to the Hindu fold, they were wound up the following year. As in the case of Deeg, the Aryas are said to have met with little success, being successfully countered by the intervention of local Muslim bodies working in association with the Anjuman Hidayat-ul Islam, a Delhi-based Muslim missionary organization.

A decade later, however, the Aryas were to launch the shuddhi campaign in the Malkana belt on a war-footing. In August 1922, in the wake of grossly exaggerated reports of forced conversions of Hindus in Malabar in the course of the Mappilla rebellion, the Kshatriya Upakarini Sabha ['Kshatriya Upliftment Society'], an organization of Hindu Rajputs patronized by Rajput princes and landlords, passed a resolution at a meeting in Allahabad calling for the conversion of the Muslim Rajputs to the Hindu fold. In December that year, the Sabha met once again, and decided to launch a campaign to convert the Malkanas to ‘Hinduism’. This provided the stimulus to the Aryas to start shuddhi work among the Malkanas. In August 1923, Shraddhanand, the leading Arya shuddhi advocate, presided over a meeting to discuss strategies for the shuddhi of the Malkanas. The fact that the meeting was attended by leading Sanatani, Jain and Sikh spokesmen, all of whom vociferously supported the shuddhi campaign, clearly suggests, as Muslim leaders were to allege, that the race for numbers and political interests, rather than the propagation of the Arya brand of ‘Hinduism’, were the motivating factors behind the planned missionary drive. The meeting approved the setting up of the Bharatiya Hindu Shuddhi Sabha, an all-India shuddhi council, whose objective was said to be the conversion of all non-Hindu groups all over India to the Hindu fold.

The shuddhi campaign among the Malkanas, which was launched in early 1923, reached its peak by the end of 1927, by which time some 1,63,000 Malkana Muslims are said to have been brought into the Hindu fold. Significantly, although the Aryas played the leading role in the drive, the shuddhi-ed Malkanas, by and large, did not convert to the Arya faith as such. Other than renouncing some of their Islamic practices, such as burial of the dead or male circumcision, there seems to have been little change in their own beliefs and practices. If they chose not to accept the Arya brand of Vedic ‘Hinduism’, orthodox Hindus seemed reluctant to accept them, considering them as ritually impure and inferior. Having ‘rescued’ them from their Islamic past, the Aryas and the Sanatanis were quite content to leave the Malkanas to their own devices. De-Islamization, and not an impelling urge to spread Arya beliefs, seems to have been the fundamental impulse behind the Arya shuddhi drive among the Malkanas.

Shuddhi emerged as a powerful mobilizational symbol and tool to consolidate Hindu ranks, helping galvanize the process of the construction of a pan-Indian Hindu community rigidly set apart from the rest. It is hardly surprising that Shradhhanand, the leading force behind the Malkana shuddhi, was also the most ardent advocate of sanghathan, the consolidation and militarization of all Hindudom. As testimony to the success of the shuddhi campaign in mobilizing and consolidating the Hindus, both Aryas as well as the Sanatanis who had initially been vehemently opposed to shuddhi, as one, transcending deep-seated caste, sectarian, racial, linguistic and regional divisions, the Tribune of Lahore, in its editorial of 2 May, 1927, remarked: ‘The shuddhi… propaganda is no longer the exclusive concern of the Arya Samaj; an overwhelming majority of the Hindus are identified [with it]‘.

Muslim reactions to the shuddhi campaign – ii. The success of the Aryas in their campaign among the Malkanas led them on to attempt to spread their work among several other neo-Muslim groups in northern India, including Muslim Jat, Gujjar and Rajput communities in the Punjab and the United Provinces. Soon, appeals began being issued calling for the shuddhi of virtually all the Muslims of India. At a public rally in Lahore, Shraddhanand delivered a fiery speech, appealing to the Hindus to convert to the Hindu fold 65 million Indian Muslims. Bhaskarteertha, the Sanatani Shankaracharya of the Sharada Peetha, went even further and declared that barring ‘a few hundred thousand’ Indian Muslims whose forefathers had come from ‘Afghanistan and Baluchistan’, the rest of the Muslims of the country were descendants of Hindu converts and that they should, therefore, be all made Hindu once again.

The Muslim reaction to the prospect of mass desertions of large numbers of only partially-Islamised Muslims, perhaps the majority of the Indian Muslim population, to the Hindu fold, was, naturally, one of shock and panic. Leading Muslims now appealed for frantic efforts to be made to rescue the Malkanas, to prevent further conversions to ‘Hinduism’, and even to begin counter-missionary drives among the Hindus themselves. They were unanimous in asserting that the need of the hour was to launch an India-wide missionary drive, to purge Muslim groups of what were seen as their Hinduistic customs, to spread awareness about the teachings of Islam among them and to bring their practices and life-styles in conformity with the Islamic law [shar'iat] and thereby create clear boundaries between Muslims and others, to prevent Muslims from easily being absorbed into the Hindu fold. As a leading Deobandi ‘alim of the Jami’at-ul Ulama-i-Hind asserted, the need of the hour was to ‘dye the Hinduistic society [hinduana mu'ashrat] deep with the colour of the culture of the Hijaz’.

Mendicants and blind beggars should sing Islamic songs while asking for alms. This strategy promises to be particularly effective, because, Nizami says, ‘In India song and music have a far more powerful effect than lectures and sermons’. Muslim writers should write tracts on methods of tabligh as well as stories about the brave feats of the Muslims. The latter, Nizami says, will have a special appeal for ‘martial groups’ such as the Rajputs.Nizami set up the Nizamia Sufi Mission to carry out his tablighi project. He does not, however, seem to have met with much success. More fruitful, however, were the efforts of Islamic groups opposed to the popular Sufism that Nizami represented. Such, for instance, was the Tablighi Jama’at, launched by a Deobandi ‘alim, Maulana Muhammad Ilyas in 1925, and which today has emerged as the single largest Islamic movement in the world, active in almost every country. The launching of the Tablighi Jama’at was a direct fall-out of the Arya shuddhi campaign. Apprehensive that the Meos of Mewat, a nominally Islamised group living in the vicinity of the Malkana belt, would also fall prey to the Aryas, Ilyas began a campaign aiming at what he saw as their fuller ‘Islamisation’. He instructed the Meos to give up their Hindu practices and beliefs and to strictly abide by the shari’at in their daily lives. Meo villagers, who hardly had any knowledge of Islam and whose practices were scarcely different from those of their non-Muslim neighbours, were formed into groups [jama'ats] and despatched to Deobandi madrasas in the western United Provinces and Delhi, there to learn the basics of Islam, such as the creed of confession and the five ritual prayers, from leading ‘ulama. On their return to Mewat, they transmitted this knowledge to their kinsmen, and exhorted them to join the jama’ats as well. Great rewards in heaven [sawab] were promised in return for this. According to Tablighi Jama’at sources, in a few years after the launching of Ilyas’ campaign, most Meos had given up worshipping at Hindu shrines, wearing Hindu-style clothes and sporting Hindu names.Like Nizami and Ilyas, other Muslim ideologues argued for the ‘ulama and Sufi divines to play a leading role in spearheading the tabligh counter-offensive. The Jamiat-ul Ulama-i-Hind, an organisation of leading, largely Deobandi ‘ulama, called for the setting up of a chain of madrasas all over the country to impart Islamic education to ordinary Muslims to prevent them from falling into the clutches of the Aryas. ‘No number of madrasas is too much, and nor is any amount of money to be spent on them’, declared Maulana Muhammad ‘Abdul Halim Siddiqui, the treasurer of the Department for the Propagation and Protection of Islam, set up by the Jami’at in 1923 in the wake of the shuddhi campaign among the Malkanas. A similar demand was voiced by the leading ‘alim of the Firangi Mahal madrasa of Lucknow, Maulana ‘Abdul Bari, who called for Sufi preceptors to instruct their disciples to form teams and tour the countryside preaching Islam to neo-Muslim groups. These teams would include, besides Muslim scholars, individuals with a good knowledge of medicine who would administer to the sick and thus play an important role in spreading Islam among non-Muslims.

This focus on spreading Islamic knowledge among the Muslims to combat the threat of the Aryas emerges as particularly salient in the writings of the period of one of the leading Islamic ideologues in recent South Asian history, Maulana Sayyed Abul A’la Maududi, who was later to go on to found the Jama’at-i-Islami. In a series of articles in 1925 of Al-Jami’at, the official organ of the Jami’at-ul Ulama-i-Hind, of which he was then the editor, Maududi argued the case for a more activist and broad-based tabligh campaign that fitted in with his own understanding of Islam as an all-embracing ideology that covered every aspect of life. Maududi stressed that the success of the Arya campaign was but a reflection and a consequence of Muslims having forgotten what he calls ‘the fundamental aim’ of a Muslim’s life and existence–the establishment of Islam in its entirety in accordance with the Will of God, through constant engagement in its tabligh, inviting others to the Truth. ‘The entire life of the Prophet Muhammad’, he wrote, ‘was a manifestation of this da’awat-i-haq [Invitation to the Truth']‘, and Muslims must follow in his footsteps. A Muslim’s entire life, he stressed, is a form of tabligh. For a Muslim to fulfil this divine mission, he or she must have at least a modicum of knowledge of Islam. Further, he or she must be a self-conscious believer. It is not enough, Maududi says, for someone to claim to be a Muslim simply because of birth in a Muslim family. The tablighi project of spreading knowledge of Islam among Muslims, Maududi suggests, must also be accompanied by efforts at social

reform on the lines of the shari’at. In particular, social inequalities and caste-like features within the Muslim community, taking advantage of which the Aryas had managed to make considerable headway in their shuddhi campaign, must be combatted. In this way, what Maududi calls for is a consolidated, homogenous, well-defined and closely-knit Muslim community, defined and set apart from the others by strict observance to the shar’iat.

Conclusion

The Arya shuddhi offensive was thus seen as a grave challenge by Muslim leaders, who responded to it by advocating a grand community-wide effort of Islamic reform, reaching out to hitherto neglected neo-Muslim groups, seeking to draw them into the fold of the emerging pan-Indian Muslim community, united on the basis of allegiance to common beliefs and ritual practices. In the changed socio-political context, ordinary people thus assumed far greater importance in elite-led mobilisational projects than they had hitherto been. In the process, individual Muslims, no matter how humble their station in life, were now seen as crucial symbols and representatives of Islam, assuming the place that the Muslim ruler had traditionally enjoyed. Tabligh and the defence of Islam as a duty of all Muslims, men and women, whatever their social position. Yogi Sikand

One hundred and fifty years have passed since Lord Dalhousie annexed Oudh (Awadh) in 1856. It aroused mass resentment against the British. Muslim elite realised that Delhi would be the next target as the Mughal empire was already in the throes of death. With its easy annexation by the East India Company, India would be lost as Darul-Islam. (For details see the Fatwa by Molvi Karamat Ali Jaunpuri, published by the Mohammedan Literary Society, Calcutta).

For Muslims, 1857 uprising was but a continuation of the campaign by Syed Ahmad (d.1831) that started at the turn of the 19th century to save the Muslims from subjugation.

The British called it the Sepoy Mutiny (Ghadar) – a seditious rebellion by a few discontented sepoys against the use of tallow-greased cartridges. They deliberately minimised the popular resentment that the general population in India felt against their repressive policies, and after India’s Independence in 1947, persistent attempts are underway to rewrite the history of India’s first war of independence also. The intended goal appears to remove the traces of mass struggle by the Muslims to save India from the clutches of the ever-greedy British plunderers.

Christopher Hibbert’s The Great Mutiny; India 1857 provides valuable insights into the genesis and causes of Ghadar – the massive uprising.

On page 60 (1978) Hibbert mentions how the “fakirs and maulvis” moving about the countryside, were warning the attentive crowds of the designs of the ‘Fringhis.’ They also exhorted to prepare for the looming fight for their faith. The mutineer’s slogan was: “Help, O King! We pray for assistance in our fight for the faith” (p.93). Jivanlal’s diary recorded a proclamation issued by the beat of drums that his Majesty (Bahadur Shah Zafar) would himself lead an attack on the English. “In consequence of this proclamation upwards of 10,000 Mohammedans converged near the Kashmir gate and waited till midnight for the arrival of the King.”

Neo-nationalist historians rarely mention Muslim heroes of this first war of India’s Independence except Bahadur Shah Zafar. However, they portray several insignificant players as the real heroes.

Who knows about Nawab Mahmud Khan, Ahmadullah Khan, Made Khan, Enayat Rasul, Khan Bahadur Khan, Bahadur Khan (of Rampur), Molvi Wahajuddin (of Mau), etc? Where do we get the mention of massive killing of Muslim noblemen? The detention and deportations of the Muslim activists to Kala Pani continued for decades after Ambala (1864) and Patna (1871) plots.

Bakht Khan Rohila’s contribution is largely maligned and ignored. He was the one who organised the rebellious sepoys into a fighting force that kept the freshly recruited reinforcements from the Punjab and the Gurkha Battalion from retaking Delhi for more than four months from June-September 1857.

Also are seldom mentioned thousands of prominent local Muslim chiefs and landlords around Delhi, Rohilkhand, Bundelkhand, and Oudh who lost their estates and lives on the slightest pretext of disloyalty or on suspicion of providing material support to the so-called mutineers.

The dairies, journals and personal notes written during the stormy days of 1857 and immediately after the British Raj was restored have preserved somewhat a blurred picture of the bravery, sacrifice and suffering of those who bore the brunt of British vengeance.

Sir Sayed (1817-1898) witnessed the events first hand. His writings, especially Asbaab-e Sarkashi-e Hindostan, Tarikh-e Sarkashi-e Bijnore, and Loyal Mohammedans of India have invaluable information though as a loyal servant of the British Raj, his portrayal of the freedom fighters was that of unruly bandits revolting against magnanimous rulers.

The British had their spies and henchmen implanted in every Darbar. For example, they assigned the job of keeping Bahadur Shah Zafar – the Last Mughal emperor – from Bakht Khan Rohila to Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, his private doctor and for his ‘valuable’ services paid him a pension of two hundred rupees a month till his death. His journal, written in Persian is lost but its English translation is partially preserved. Chunni Lal was a grocer for the Red Fort. His record of the events is very interesting, and so is the journal of the Delhi Kotwal, Mubarak Shah. The dairy of Munshi Jivanlal who administered the pensions paid by the British to the Mughal kings contains passages showing how widespread unrest in Delhi was. Khwaja Moinuddin Hasan’s journal that appeared in Ahsanul Akhbar was later collected in Hadang-e Ghadar by Khwaja Ahmad Faruqi.

Charles Ball’s History of the Indian Mutiny and Christopher Hibbert’s The Great Mutiny; India 1857, though highly partisan, attest to fact that the British inflicted maximum punishment to the Muslims and ruthlessly plundered them.

Muslims Led the Independence War of 1857

The Muslims in India rebelled against the repressive colonial power of the East India Company because it had been usurping their lands under the slightest pretext and looting the poor masses through heavy taxes. The Muslims were in the forefront of the 1857 war of independence and often had to face in combat fellow Indians in the British army ranks.

The Mutiny, as the British labelled the 1857 War of Independence, started from Meerut on May 10, 1857 where 85 sepoys were court-marshalled for refusing to obey the orders. Low ranking Muslim soldiers rebelled against the insulting behaviour of their superiors, killed British officers, freed their comrades, and destroyed the Company offices. With their slogan of “March to Delhi”, they arrived at the outskirts of the Red Fort. They entered the city through the Kashmiri Gate and affirmed their allegiance to Bahadur Shah Zafar, the nominal Mughal emperor.

Bakht Khan Rohila took the command of the rebel army and kept the British garrison under siege for four months. Daily battles raged and the British had almost lost hope when Nicholson came to their rescue. What followed was the worst plunder and massive massacres in the thousand-year history of Delhi. British historians attest to the thorough destruction of Delhi in three days following its capture on September 20, 1857. One of them described Delhi as “a deserted charnel house.”

The brutal suppression of the Muslims in India continued for another decade.

Revolt Spread

The Delhi Revolt against the British rapidly spread through northern and central India.

Col. Greathed was dispatched from Delhi to rescue the British under siege in Agra fort for months. He pursued the mutineers across Doab into Oudh. By the end of November, the countryside around Delhi was cleared.

When restive elements in Lucknow got the wind of the revolt in Meerut and Delhi, they also revolted against the British Resident. Wajid Ali Shah’s son under the guardianship of Hazrat Mahal was pronounced the legitimate authority. General Outram and General Havelock were sent to rescue the besieged Lucknow garrison. However, both came under intense attack and surrounded by the insurgents led by the “Maulvi of Faizabad.” He had under his command a formidable force. However, Gen. Collin Campbell’s large army supported by fresh Gurkha reinforcement sent by Jang Bahadur, the de facto ruler of Nepal, was able to defeat the ill-equipped throng at Lucknow on March 21, 1858 though the fighting was quite savage. Alam Bagh, Dilkusha Bagh and Sikandar Bagh became red with the blood of innocent Muslim inhabitants. As in Delhi so in Lucknow victory followed the looting and indiscriminate killing: “Sepoy or Oudh villager, it mattered not – no question asked. His skin was black, and did not that suffice?”

Many British officers feared that their share of prize-money would not amount to nearly as much they had hoped for. Even so the plunder accumulated by the prize-agent in Lucknow was estimated by The Times at over six hundred thousand pounds. The amount did not include the amount of what the British soldiers took with them.

Kanpur rebelled on May 15. By June 7 the British residents decided to vacate the city. Nana Sahib had allowed the British to leave safely. Gen Havelock moved on Kanpur but Tatya Tope pushed him out on November 23 and Havelock died there. Finally, in the third battle, Campbell defeated Tope on December 6, 1857. Fatehgarh, another stronghold of the rebels, fell to Campbell on January 5, 1858.

After the fall of Lucknow, Taluqadars in Oudh continued their resistance. Walpole’s campaign in Rohilkhand ended in his defeat at Ruiya on April 15, 1858. However, Campbell was able to defeat Khan Bahadur Khan outside Bareilly on May 5, 1858. Maulvi Ahmadullah retreated from Lucknow into Rohilkhand, seized Shahjahanpur and shelled the British cantonment. Under pressure, he retreated to Oudh again but was killed in a fight. The Rajah of Pawayan cut off his head and took it to the British magistrate of Shahjahanpur to claim fifty thousand rupees reward announced over his head.

With the death of the Maulvi of Faizabad the fire of rebellion almost died down in Rohilkhand and Oudh. Still there were many who refused to surrender. They took refuge in Nepal and Jang Bahdur asked Lord Canning to send troops to root them out. When Hazrat Mahal crossed Nepalese border with her son at the end of 1858 and appealed to Jang Bahadur for help, he told her: “I inform you that if you should remain within my territory the Gurkha troops will most certainly … attack…you. Be it also known that the Nepalese State will neither assist, show mercy to, nor permit to remain in its territories….”

The sepoys of Jhansi mutinied and surrounded the fort on June 8, 1857. However, Laxmi Bai, the widow of Raja of Jhansi, did not join their war of independence. She stayed away from the revolt though Lord Dalhousie had rejected her request to declare her adopted son as the Raja, after Gangadhar Rao’s death and had annexed Jhansi three years ago. The Company had also been pressing her hard to pay back all her husband’s debts out of her own pension of Rs. 60,000.

The mutineers took the British officers prisoners. They murdered them and left Jhansi next day with the treasure and magazine. The Rani reported to Major WC Erskine, Commissioner of Sagar Division: “The troops stationed at Jhansi through their faithlessness, cruelty and violence killed all the European civil and military officers and the Rani… could render them no aid, which she very much regrets.”

Jhansi was invaded by two neighbouring states. Her appeal to the British to protect Jhansi from the neighbouring Rajas was turned down. In desperation, she turned to her rebel army for help. They drove the invaders out but also pressed her to declare independence from the British. She still seemed to have been unwilling to commit herself. However, she was forced to give in to the rebels’ demand when a formidable British army appeared at the walls of Jhansi intent upon revenge for the massacre.

Tatya Tope brought over his twenty thousand men to help the Rani, but was beaten back by the British. One night the Rani escaped with a few of her loyal cavalry to join Tatya Tope at Kalpi. The British army caught up with her near Gwalior and mowed her down in the battlefield. Tatya Tope fled across the Chambal river, was captured later and executed on April 1859. Rao Sahib was not captured until 1862.

Other notables of the Ghadar, Firuz Shah died in Makkah in 1877. Hazrat Mahal was allowed to remain in Nepal with her son. Nana Sahib entered Nepal and was said to have died there in September 1859. The King of Delhi, Bahadur Shah Zafar was put to trial before a military court at the end of January 1859 and banished to Rangoon, Burma where he died on November 7, 1862. In July 1859, Lord Canning called for a day of thanksgiving and announced: “War is at an end. Rebellion has been put down.”

A book of essays by Marx and Engels (Moscow: 1960) called it the “First Indian War of Independence”. Savarkar (1909) insisted that the Mutiny was indeed a national revolt, and B.S. Chaudhury supported this designation. But R.C. Majumdar declared that it was neither first, nor national, nor a war of independence. Hibbert’s quoted first-hand description of the events leaves no doubt that it was a Muslim War of independence and they lost it because the revolting masses could not compel the ruling elite to grab the momentum and unite for the cause of independence.¨War of Independence. ABUL KALAM analyses the various factors that led to 1857 war of independence, and concedes that for Muslims, it was but a continuation of the campaign by Syed Ahmad that started at the turn of the 19th century to save the Muslims from subjugation.

Presidential Address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, Karachi, 11th August 1947

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I cordially thank you with the utmost sincerity for the honour you have conferred upon me – the greatest honour that is possible for this Sovereign Assembly to confer – by electing me as your first President. I also thank those leaders who have spoken in appreciation of my services and their personal references to me. I sincerely hope that with your support and your cooperation we shall make this Constituent Assembly an example to the world. The Constituent Assembly has got two main functions to perform. The first is the very onerous and responsible task of framing our future Constitution of Pakistan and the second of functioning as a full and complete Sovereign body as the Federal Legislature of Pakistan. We have to do the best we can in adopting a provincial constitution for the Federal Legislature of Pakistan. You know really that not only we ourselves are wondering but, I think, the whole world is wondering at this unprecedented cyclonic revolution which has brought about the plan of creating and establishing two independent Sovereign Dominions in this subcontinent. As it is, it has been unprecedented; there is no parallel in the history of the world. This mighty subcontinent with all kinds of inhabitants has been brought under a plan which is titanic, unknown, unparalleled. And what is very important with regard to it is that we have achieved it peacefully and by means of an evolution of the greatest possible character.

Dealing with our first function in this Assembly, I cannot make any well-considered pronouncement at this moment, but I shall say a few things as they occur to me. The first and the foremost thing that I would like to emphasise is this – remember that you are now a Sovereign Legislative body and you have got all the powers. It, therefore, places on you the gravest responsibility as to how you should take your decisions. The first observation that I would like to make is this: You will no doubt agree with me that the first duty of a government is to maintain law and order, so that the life, property and religious beliefs of its subjects are fully protected by the state.

The second thing that occurs to me is this: One of the biggest curses from which India is suffering – I do not say that other countries are free from it, but, I think, our condition is much worse – is bribery and corruption. (Hear, hear.) That really is a poison. We must put that down with an iron hand and I hope that you will take adequate measures as soon as it is possible for this Assembly to do so.

Black marketing is another curse. Well, I know that black marketeers are frequently caught and punished. According to our judicial notions sentences are passed or sometimes fines only are imposed. Now you have to tackle this monster which today is a colossal crime against society, in our distressed conditions, when we constantly face shortage of food and other essential commodities of life. A citizen who does black marketing commits, I think, a greater crime than the biggest and most grievous of crimes. These black marketers are really knowing, intelligent and ordinarily responsible people, and when they indulge in black marketing, I think they ought to be very severely punished, because they undermine the entire system of control and regulation of foodstuffs and essential commodities, and cause wholesale starvation and want and even death.

The next thing that strikes me is this: Here again it is a legacy which has been passed on to us. Along with many other things, good and bad, has arrived this great evil – the evil of nepotism and jobbery. This evil must be crushed relentlessly. I want to make it quite clear that I shall never tolerate any kind of jobbery, nepotism or any influence directly or indirectly brought to bear upon me. Wherever I will find that such a practice is in vogue, or is continuing anywhere, low or high, I shall certainly not countenance it.

I know there are people who do not quite agree with the division of India and the Partition of the Punjab and Bengal. Much has been said against it, but now that it has been accepted, it is the duty of every one of us to loyally abide by it and honourably act according to the agreement which is now final and binding on all. But you must remember, as I have said, that this mighty revolution that has taken place is unprecedented. One can quite understand the feeling that exists between the two communities wherever one community is in majority and the other is in minority. But the question is whether it was possible or practicable to act otherwise than what has been done. A division had to take place. On both sides, in Hindustan and Pakistan, there are sections of people who may not agree with it, who may not like it, but in my judgment there was no other solution and I am sure future history will record its verdict in favour of it. And what is more it will be proved by actual experience as we go on that that was the only solution of India’s constitutional problem. Any idea of a United India could never have worked and in my judgment it would have led us to terrific disaster. Maybe that view is correct; maybe it is not; that remains to be seen. All the same, in this division it was impossible to avoid the question of minorities being in one Dominion or the other. Now that was unavoidable. There is no other solution. Now what shall we do?

Now, if we want to make this great State of Pakistan happy and prosperous we should wholly and solely concentrate on the wellbeing of the people, and especially of the masses and the poor. If you will work in cooperation, forgetting the past, burying the hatchet you are bound to succeed. If you change your past and work together in a spirit that every one of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what is his colour, caste or creed, is first, second and last a citizen of this state with equal rights, privileges and obligations, there will be no end to the progress you will make.

I cannot emphasise it too much. We should begin to work in that spirit and in the course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community – because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on and among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalis, Madrasis, and so on – will vanish. Indeed, if you ask me this has been the biggest hindrance in the way of India to attain freedom and independence and but for this we would have been free peoples long long ago. No power can hold another nation, and specially a nation of 400 million souls in subjection; nobody could have conquered you, and even if it had happened, nobody could have continued its hold on you for any length of time but for this. (Applause.)

Therefore, we must learn a lesson from this. You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State. (Hear, hear.) As you know, history shows that in England conditions, some time ago, were much worse than those prevailing in India today. The Roman Catholics and the Protestants persecuted each other. Even now there are some States in existence where there are discriminations made and bars imposed against a particular class. Thank God, we are not starting in those days. We are starting in the days when there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one state. (Loud applause.)

The people of England in the course of time had to face the realities of the situation and had to discharge the responsibilities and burdens placed upon them by the government of their country and they went through that fire step by step. Today, you might say with justice that Roman Catholics and Protestants do not exist; what exists now is that every man is a citizen, an equal citizen of Great Britain and they are all members of the nation.

Now, I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in the course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.

Well, gentlemen, I do not wish to take up any more of your time and thank you again for the honour you have done to me. I shall always be guided by the principles of justice and fairplay without any, as is put in the political language, prejudice or ill will, in other words, partiality or favouritism. My guiding principle will be justice and complete impartiality, and I am sure that with your support and cooperation, I can look forward to Pakistan becoming one of the greatest Nations of the world. (Loud applause.)

I have received a message from the United States of America addressed to me. lt reads:

‘I have the honour to communicate to you, in Your Excellency’s capacity as President of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, the following message which I have just received from the Secretary of State of the United States:

‘On the occasion of the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly for Pakistan, I extend to you and to members of the Assembly, the best wishes of the Government and the people of the United States for the successful conclusion of the great work you are about to undertake.’

Source: G.W. Choudhury 1967, p.19-22 and R. Ahmad 2002 (Vol VI) p.355-366 (Original appears in Dawn, Hindustan Times, Morning News and Leader, 12th August 1947; and in Star of India, Pakistan Times and Civil & Military Gazette, 13th August 1947)

Message on the attainment of Dominion Status by Ceylon, Karachi, 4th February, 1948

The attainment of dominion status by Ceylon in the wake of India and Pakistan is a matter of great satisfaction and rejoicing to us, and on behalf of the people of Pakistan and myself I extend to you our sincerest congratulations on this happy and historical occasion. We in Pakistan will watch your progress with the most friendly and sympathetic interest as some of the problems confronting your Island are similar to ours. We have both suffered from exploitation at the hands of a foreign power and now that a new era has been ushered we shall have to strive every nerve to improve the lot of the common man, so sadly neglected heretofore. The problem confronting us is by no means small or easy but we must tackle it boldly if we are to prove ourselves worthy of our newly won freedom and sovereign government of the people.

Ceylon is rich in material resources and talent and I have no doubt that under the guidance of her great leaders she will make rapid strides on the road to good government and prosperity and will play her rightful part in promoting goodwill and friendship throughout the world. Pakistan has the warmest goodwill towards Ceylon, and I am sanguine that the good feelings which exist between our two peoples will be further strengthened as the years roll by and our common interests, and mutual and reciprocal handling of them, will bring us into still closer friendship. Once again, I wish all prosperity and a glorious future of Ceylon.

Pakistan Zindabad

Source: Waheed Ahmad 2003, Vol. VII p.164-5; K.A.K Yusufi 1996, Vol. IV p.2674-5
Originally appeared: Pakistan Times, 5 February 1948; Dawn, 12 February 1948

Eid-ul-Azha Message to the Nation, Karachi, 24th October 1947

God often tests and tries those whom He loves. He called upon Prophet Ibrahim to sacrifice the object he loved most. Prophet Ibrahim answered the call and offered to sacrifice his son. Today too, God is testing and trying the Muslims of Pakistan and India. He has demanded great sacrifices from us. Our new-born State is bleeding from wounds inflicted by our enemies. Our Muslim brethren in India are being victimised and oppressed as Muslims for their help and sympathy for the establishment of Pakistan. Dark clouds surround us on all sides for the moment but we are not daunted, for I am sure, if we show the same spirit of sacrifice as was shown by Ibrahim, God would rend the clouds and shower on us His blessing as He did on Ibrahim. Let us, therefore, on the day of Eid-ul-Azha which symbolizes the spirit of sacrifice enjoined by Islam, resolve that we shall not be deterred from our objective of creating a State of our own concept by any amount of sacrifice, trials or tribulations which may lie ahead of us and that we shall bend all our energies and resources to achieve our goal. I am confident that in spite of its magnitude, we shall overcome this grave crisis as we have in our long history surmounted many others and notwithstanding the efforts of our enemies, we shall emerge triumphant and strong from the dark night of suffering and show the world that the State exists not for life but for good life.

On this sacred day, I send greetings to our Muslim brethren all over the world both on behalf of myself and the people of Pakistan. For us in Pakistan, this day of thanksgiving and rejoicing has been overshadowed by the suffering and sorrow of 5 million Muslims in East Punjab and its neighbourhood. I hope that, wherever Muslim men and women foregather on this solemn day, they will remember in their prayers these unfortunate men, women and children who have lost their dear ones, hearths and homes and are undergoing an agony and suffering as great and cruel as any yet inflicted on humanity. In the name of this mass of suffering humanity I renew my appeal to Muslims wherever they may be, to extend to us in this hour of our danger and need, their hand of brotherly sympathy, support and cooperation. Nothing on earth now can undo Pakistan.

The greater the sacrifices we are made to undergo the purer and more chastened shall we emerge like gold from fire.

So my message to you all is of hope, courage and confidence. Let us mobilise all our resources in a systematic and organised way and tackle the grave issues that confront us with grim determination and discipline worthy of a great nation.

Pakistan Zindabad (API)

Interview with Mr. Doon Campbell, Reuters’ Correspondent, New Delhi, 21st May 1947

Q. What sort of relationship do you envisage between Pakistan and Hindustan?

Ans. Friendly and reciprocal in the mutual interest of both. That is why I have been urging: let us separate in a friendly way and remain friends thereafter.

Q. How would you divide the armed forces? Do you envisage a defence pact or any other kind of military alliance between Pakistan and Hindustan?

Ans. All the armed forces must be divided completely, but I do envisage an alliance, pact or treaty between Pakistan and Hindustan again in the mutual interest of both and against any aggressive outsider.

Q. Do you favour a federation of Pakistan states even if there is to be partition of Punjab and Bengal?

Ans. The new clamour for partition that is stated is by the vocal section of the caste Hindus in Bengal and the Sikhs in particular in the Punjab will have disastrous results if those two provinces are partitioned and the Sikhs in the Punjab will be the greatest sufferers; and Muslims under contemplated Western Punjab will no doubt be hit, but it certainly will deal the greatest blow to those, particularly the Sikhs, for whose benefit the new stunt has been started. Similarly in Western Bengal, caste Hindus will suffer the most and so will the caste Hindus in Eastern Punjab.

This idea of partition is not only thoughtless and reckless, but if unfortunately His Majesty’s Government favour it, in my opinion it will be a grave error and will prove dangerous immediately and far more so in the future. Immediately it will lead to bitterness and unfriendly attitude between Eastern Bengal and Western Bengal and same will the case with torn Punjab, between Western Punjab and Eastern Punjab.

Partition of Punjab and Bengal, if effected, will no doubt weaken Pakistan to a certain extent. Weak Pakistan and a strong Hindustan will be a temptation the strong Hindustan to try to dictate. I have always said that Pakistan must be sufficiently strong as a balance vis-à-vis Hindustan. I am therefore, deadly against the partition of Bengal and the Punjab and we shall fight every inch against it.

Q. Will you demand a corridor through Hindustan connecting the Eastern and Western Pakistan States?

Ans. Yes.

Q. Do you envisage the formation of a Pan-Islamic state stretching from the Far and Middle East to the Far East after the establishment of Pakistan?

Ans. The theory of Pan-Islamism has long ago exploded, but we shall certainly establish friendly relations and cooperate for mutual good and world peace and we shall always stretch our hand of friendship to the near and Middle East and Far East after the establishment of Pakistan.

Q. On what basis will the central administration of Pakistan be set up? What will be the attitude of this Government to the Indian States?

Ans. The basis of the central administration of Pakistan and that of the units to be set up will be decided no doubt, by the Pakistan Constituent Assembly. But the Government of Pakistan can only be a popular representative and democratic form of Government. Its Parliament and Cabinet responsible to the Parliament will both be finally responsible to the electorate and the people in general without any distinction of caste, creed or sect, which will the final deciding factor with regard to the policy and programme of the Government that may be adopted from time to time.

As regards our attitude towards Indian States I may make it clear once more that the policy of the Muslim League has been and is not to interfere with the Indian States with regard to their internal affairs. But while we expect as rapid a progress as possible in the various states towards the establishment of full responsible government, it is primarily the concern of the ruler and his people.

As regards the position of the states in the light of the announcement made by His Majesty’s Government embodied in the White Paper of the 20th of February, I wish to make it clear that the states are at liberty to form a confederation as one solid group or confederate into more than one groups, or stand as individual states. It is a matter entirely for them to decide. And it is clear, as I can understand, that paramountcy is going to terminate and, therefore, they are completely independent and free. It is for them to adjust such a matter as there may be by virtue of their treaties and agreements with the paramount power. They must consider as completely independent and free states, free from any paramountcy, as to what is best in their interest and it will be open to them to decide whether they should join the Pakistan Constituent Assembly or the Hindustan Constituent Assembly – Constituent Assemblies must be and will be two sovereign Constituent Assemblies of Pakistan and Hindustan.

Q. In general terms what will be the foreign policy of Pakistan? Will it apply for membership of the United Nations?

Ans. The foreign policy of Pakistan can only be for peace and friendly relations with all other nations and we shall certainly play our part in the membership of the United Nations.

Q. On which major power is Pakistan most likely to lean?

Ans. The one that will be in our best interests. It will not be a case of leaning to any power, but we shall certainly establish friendship and alliances which will be for the benefit of all those who may enter into such an alliance.

Q. What sort of relationship do you envisage between Pakistan and Britain?

Ans. The question can only be decided by the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan and as I understand the situation, a relationship between Pakistan and British can be established which will be really beneficial for both. Pakistan cannot live in isolation, nor can any other nation do so today. We shall have choose our friends and I trust, wisely.

Q. What are your views in regard to the protection of minorities in Pakistan territories?

Ans. There is only one answer: The minorities must be protected and safeguarded. The minorities in Pakistan will be the citizens of Pakistan and enjoy all the rights, privileges and obligations of citizenship without any distinction of caste creed or sect.

They will be treated justly and fairly. The Government will run the administration and control the legislative measures by its Parliament, and the collective conscience of the Parliament itself will be a guarantee that the minorities need not have any apprehension of any injustice being done to them. Over and above that there will be provisions for the protection and safeguard of the minorities which in my opinion must be embodied in the constitution itself. And this will leave no doubt as to the fundamental rights of the citizens, protection of religion and faith of every section, freedom of thought and protection of their cultural and social life. – API

Q & A text sourced from photocopy of original: Dawn, 22nd May 1947 (with thanks to Mr. Inamullah Khawaja). See also copy in Zaidi, Z.H. (ed) (1993) Jinnah Papers: Prelude to Pakistan, Vol. I Part I. Lahore: Quaid-i-Azam Papers Project, p.845, which was obtained from an original typewritten document containing corrections in Jinnah’s own handwriting as well as his signature.

Related Documents: Appendix 1

Interview to the Associated Press regarding his impression of the meeting of the Muslim League Council, New Delhi, 3rd April 1934

After two days’ (01) deliberations of the Council meeting, which was the most representative that I have seen during my connection with the League, extending now to over 20 years, I must say I was immensely impressed with most of the speeches that were made there by various leaders, who came from different provinces in India. The League is perfectly sound and healthy, and the conclusion I have come to is that Musalmans will not lag behind any other community in serving the very best interests of India. To condemn the White Paper, one does not require special arguments, one has only got to read the White Paper (02) proposals and understand them, and that is enough. But while many of us feel that this treacherous scheme is almost at our door – and I for one have hesitated to declare my views with regard to the scheme – the problem of all problems which still confronts us is how to avert the scheme being foisted upon India. That cannot be achieved, and will not be achieved, until there is unity between Hindus and Muslims.

India looks forward to a real, solid, united front. Can we even at this eleventh hour bury the hatchet, and forget the past in the presence of imminent danger, and close our ranks to get sufficient strength to resist what is being hatched both at Downing Street and in Delhi? It is up to the leaders to put their heads together, and nothing will give me greater happiness than to bring about complete cooperation and friendship between Hindus and Muslims; and in this desire, my impression is that I have the solid support of Musalmans. The Council has passed a resolution (03) which is before the public. It clearly indicates how that unity can be achieved immediately. On my return to India, I have seen abundant evidence that public opinion, both Hindu and Muslim, thinks alike in terms of the political evolution of the country.

The emphasis which Muslims place on the Communal Award (04) is only an indication of their desire to make sure that any national demand which they join to put forward on behalf of the country will incorporate the safeguards which Muslims consider to be a minimum. Muslims are in no way behind any other community in their demand for national self-government. The crux of the whole issue, therefore, is: can we completely assure Muslims that the safeguards to which they attach vital importance will be embodied in the future Constitution of India?

Letter to the Editor: (01) Appeal to Muslim leaders to assemble largely at the Bombay Session of the All-India Muslim League, 11th November, 1915

Sir,

Now that the Council of the All-India Muslim (02) League has decided to hold the Session of the League in Bombay, (03) may I appeal to the Mohammedan (04) leaders of the community in general to close our ranks? We are bound by our constitution. Reverence for and obedience to the constitution and discipline are absolutely necessary qualities to enable us to say that we are for for real political franchise, freedom and self-government.

At this juncture we are watched not only by India but by the whole of the British Empire of which we aspire to be an independent, free and equal member along with the dominions who already enjoy freedom and self-government. No consideration of any kind or nature whatsoever should weigh with us or influence us except the best interest of the country and the community. The Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League both have for their goal the attainment of self-government for India. The recognition of this claim will have to be judged by, and depend greatly upon, how the Congress and the League organise control and conduct themselves this year and in the near future.

I wish to state with the greatest emphasis that there is no truth in the baseless statements made in some quarters that any responsible Mohammedan leader thinks that the League should be merged into the Indian National Congress. But conference in collaboration, if possible, is the object, and what objection is there to this course?

Now that the majority of the leading representatives of the Council have decided on holding the Session in Bombay, can we not bury our differences, show a united front and acquit ourselves with credit and honour?

What will the success of the Sessions of the League this year mean?

1. It will show the power of organisation, the clarity of Musalman opinions and their true worth. This will entitle them to claim the rights and privileges of a free people.
2. It will make our Hindu friends value us all the more and will make them feel more than ever that we are worthy of standing shoulder to shoulder with them for the cause of the Motherland.
3. It will prove to British politicians and statesmen, to Parliament and the British nation generally, that we are not crying for the moon when we ask for self-government but that we are determined and are in earnest about it and that we shall pursue our course steadfastly and unitedly [sic] till the goal is realised.
4. It will convince the Government here and in England and the British Empire at large that Mohammedans of India, notwithstanding their religious sentiments and feelings at this juncture of the greatest crisis that the Empire has to face, can show due control, restraint and moderation in their deliberations and can exercise judgment and pursue a course which is worthy of the highest statesmanship.

In conclusion, I urge all the Mohammedans to rally round the flag of the All-India Muslim League and, as true patriots, stand by its constitution and thus make the community feel proud of the only political organisation it possesses at present.

Bombay, Nov. 11.

Yours etc.,
Sd. M.A. Jinnah

Source: R. Ahmad 1997 (Vol II) p.419-421 (Original: Bombay Chronicle, 11th November 1915)

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Kashmir and the subcontinent has a rich and tumultuous history. We can pick up the pieces in the nineteenth century, but the actual history of Kashmir begins much much much earlier, before Islam or Hinduism was present on the soil of our lands.

Slogans raised by Kashmiris all over Sirinagar & Indian Occupied Kashmir

Long before the Crescent and Star flew atop Islamabad, long before Mohammed Bin Qasim invaded Sind, long before the Mughals spread prosperity in all the nooks and corners of the subcontinent, long before the Sikh dynasty got Kashmir from the British, long before the Chundra Gupta Vikramadatya ruled India, the people of Kashmir were tied to the people of Pakistan.

• The Geographic Two Nation Theory. Pakistan existed 5000 years ago as the “Indus Valley Civilization”
• Gwadar to China:- Trade lessons from the 5000 yr old Pakistani Indus Valley Civilization: The Harrappan Trade Corridor within the IVC (Dilmin, Mekan) and beyond is now being resurrected again

Kashmir has been in existence since 5000 years. Its history can be traced to time immemorial. Kashmir has always been a magnet to immigrants.

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This is what Edward Desmond has to say about Kashmir in his book Himalyan Ulster:

On a map of the western Himalayas, the valley of Kashmir shows up as a smooth, oval-shaped patch amid a sea of surrounding peaks in what is today Indias Jammu and Kashmir state.

For thousands of years, travellers, freebooters, and empire builders have set down their breathless impressions of this valley the French writer Francois Bernier called it the paradise of the Indies with its towering pine forests, deep lakes, flower carpeted meadows, and fields of iridescent saffron. The seventeenth century Mughal emperor Jehangir sighed on his death-bed that his last wish was to visit Kashmir. Indians today revere the valley as the place they long to visit, and it serves as the setting for countless romantic Indian films.

• Nehru’s commitment to the people of Kashmir
• Kashmir and Junagarh is Pakistani territory
• Kashmir: Does the article of accession exist?
• UN resolutions, and Nehru speeches on disputed nature of Kashmir

Prior to Hinduism in the subcontinent, the Kashmir Valley (called Abhasrsa) traded with the Indus Valley Civilisation. In pre-Vedic times the people who lived in the Indus Valley lived in absolute harmony. There is some confusion as to who were the original inhabitants of the subcontinent. Many feel that there was a civilisation BEFORE the Dravidians landed in South Asia. Some have ventured to claim that based on the fact that all of Indias neighbours are Oriental, perhaps the original inhabitants of ancient India were Oriental in ethnic origin. The Dravidians either defeated the original peoples of India or totally assimilated with them. The Dravidians came to the subcontinent and made it their home. This is known: The Dravidians were not Hindu, the Dravidians preceded the Hindu era in the Subcontinent. The peaceful Dravidians were an enlightened and cultured peoples and they formed the Indus Valley Civilisation.

New Kashmiri slogans reported by Indian activist Arundhati Roy

The Aryans came to the subcontinent in many waves, and caused havoc with the local inhabitants. These barbaric hordes came to the subcontinent and totally destroyed the earlier civilisations and formed their own caste systems. After many waves of Aryans had invaded the subcontinent, Hinduism as a later wave to the land now called Pakistan. Hundreds of years were spent in wars between the Dravidians and the Aryans. These wars are noted in pre-vedic literature as Ramayana. After the Aryan Hindus had settled in the land, they started fighting amongst themselves. The Inter-Aryan wars were called the Mahabharta wars. Hindus claim that 650 million soldiers died in the Mahabaharta wars (I didn’t make up the numbers, I just reported them !).

The Arayans arrived in South Asia in waves. The Huns, the Rajputs and others were always in conflict. After the Hindu conflicts died down, around the 8th century B.C Buddhism took root in the subcontinent. Buddhist-Hindu wars claimed many lives.

The Kashmir valley was mostly inhabited by many people that included sun worshippers, Zorastarians, and Buddhists. Kashmir became an important centre of Brahman learning. Brahaman art, literature and philosophy flourished unhindered, on the backs of the untouchables, and the lower caste Hindus. After the 8th century the clear and loud message of Islam was heard in the Valley. It was the Sufis who carried the message of Mohamamd to Kashmir. The caste system of the Hindus, the Brahman cruelty, and the practices of Sati, and human sacrifices were fertile grounds for Islam in Kashmir. Slowly but surely, people converted to the message that accorded the Untouchables INSTANT equality among the Muslim brotherhood.

From 1326 to 1819, Muslims improved the lot of the Kashmiris and ruled the Kashmir valley with compassion and honour. The Mughals not only ruled Kashmir, they also brought it art, culture, music, paintings, and architecture that the people had never seen. Wherever the Moghuls lived they brought life with them. The Shalimar Gardens and the Mosques built in the Valley are a testament to the affluence of India in the 16th century. Jahangir was the wealthiest man on the planet and he spent his money to create luxury for his people. Kashmir benefited too. Hindu temples built in the sixteenth century were subsidised, and today they remain in the valley.

Hindus thrived in the Valley. The forefathers of the Nehrus lived and prospered in Kashmir during the Muslim rule. During the regimes of chaos during the Afghan rule (1752-1819) many Muslims lost their lives due to Patel persecution.

Kashmir was sold to the Sikhs following the defeat of Sikhs at the hands of the British in 1846, Gulab Singh, the cruel and dim-witted Dogra ruler of Jammu, acquired Kashmir from the British and ruthlessly tired to rule the state of Jammu & Kashmir.

The period of the Dogra rulers was the darkest in the history of the state. Gulab Singh was a ruthless ruler. He ruled by edict only, the edict of the Kirpan. Thus Jammu & Kashmir became a Princely State and remained so till 1947 until India occupied it.

ABHISARA

Contrary to popular belief, Kashmir is not a monolith. It has been called many names throughout history. The recorded history of Kashmir is more than five thousand years. On the eve of Alexander’s invasion, Kashmir was called Abhisara. The great Kashmiri historians, Kalhan and Ratnakar have written beautiful stories about the valley, but the story of Kashmir begins much before that and Rajatarangini of Kalhana records some of it. Ibn-e-Batuta, Al-Beruni and Fa-hien mention Kashmir in their travelogues. Many Mughals, including Akbar mentions Kashmir in their many diaries. Muslim Kashmiri poets have eulogised the beauty of the Valley of Kashmir for centuries. Lalitaditya Avantivarman, Sikander Butshikan, Shamas-u-din Iraqi, Mirza Hyder Dughlat, Faquirullah Kanta, Mir Hazar Khan Zainul-Abedin, Duralabhavardhana, Jiyapida are only a few of the famous kings of the Valley.

Some Indian revisionists have tried to portray the picture that Kashmiri history begins with Maharaja Ghulab Singh. Kashmiri history began a long time before partition, a very long time before Ghulab Singh. It surely began before the very brief Sikha-Shahi of Lahore. To start the history of Kashmir in the nineteenth century is like beginning the history of the subcontinent after the war of independence of 1857 (The Great Indian Mutiny).

Kashmir and the subcontinent has a rich and tumultuous history. We can pick up the pieces in the nineteenth century, but the actual history of Kashmir begins much much much earlier, before Islam or Hinduism was present on the soil of our lands.

Long before the Crescent and Star flew atop Islamabad, long before Mohammed Bin Qasim invaded Sind, long before the Mughals spread prosperity in all the nooks and corners of the subcontinent, long before the Sikh dynasty briefly controlled Kashmir, and long before the Chundra Gupta Vikramadatya ruled India, the people of Kashmir were tied to the people of Pakistan.

The history of the subcontinent pre-dates Hinduism. Some in secular India are pawning off religion as history. Vedic events are religion. Ramayana and Mahabharta are the holy scriptures of Hinduism. These scriptures need to be revered and respected. We learn a lot about our land from these scriptures.

The state of Kashmir was not created by the Sikhs. Various areas of Kashmir were re-incarnated by the Sikhs during the British rule. The British defeated the Sikh leader, and the rule reverted to Hindu (Dogra) maharaja.

• Nehru’s commitment to the people of Kashmir
• Kashmir and Junagarh is Pakistani territory
• Kashmir: Does the article of accession exist?
• UN resolutions, and Nehru speeches on disputed nature of Kashmir

Ancient Origins
Some recent historians have portrayed the history of the subcontinent as wars between two monoliths, the Hindus and the Muslims. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The history of the subcontinent is a history of wars between the various peoples who lived the subcontinent and the people who came to the subcontinent. The history of the subcontinent is replete with wars against the foreigners.

Some recent revisionists have portrayed the history of Hinduism as the history of India. The absolute fact is that The Indus Valley Civilisation preceded the Aryans, and preceded Hinduism. IF Islam is a foreign influence in the subcontinent so is Hinduism. The Aryan Swastika was imported from the caucus mountains, and has non-Indian origins. The only original people of the subcontinent were the people who were in the Indus Valley Civilisation.

Stone Age
Though man existed in Palaeolithic, and Stone ages, the first real civilisation in the subcontinent was the Indus Valley Civilisation. The Pakistanis of Sindh, Punjab, Kashmir the Baraouhis tribes of Balauchistan are the true descendants of the Indus Valley Civilisation . The Aryans were invaders who came and destroyed the Indus Valley Civilisation. The Aryans then began creating states in the rest of India. The story of Ramayana is basically a story of wars between the Aryans and the Dravidians. The story of Mahabharta is a story of inter-Aryan wars.

Around 468 B.C. Jainism and Buddhism appeared on the scene. Both competed with the tenants of Hindusim. Gautam Buddha was such a dynamic sage, that many Hindus have adopted him as a God. Even some Muslims consider him a prophet. However the fact remains that Buddhism is different from Hinduism.

Though many Hindus later regard Buddha as God, the Brahmans were always leery of Buddhists because this reduced their power. Buddhism is fundamentally different than Hinduism because it does not believe in the caste system. Because of the lack of the caste system, the Brahmans did not like Buddhists.

Alexander Invades
On the eve of Alexander’s invasion, Kashmir was called Abhisara. Abhisara consisted of the districts of Punch and Naushara. One of the few direct results of the Greek invasions of India was the establishment of Greek colonies in the area of Kashmir. One of Asokas edicts refers to the existence of Yavana (Greek) settlers on the fringes of his empire. We now know that he was referring to the area of Hunza. Actually after the fall of the Muyeria (Greek) kingdoms in India, the Bacterians formed a number of Greek kingdoms in the area in and around Kashmir. In fact Chandragupta actually faced Alexander for military help (324-300 BC) but did not secure it.

The foundation of the Maurya empire in the subcontinent saw Kashmir exist on the outer fringes of the empire. Chandragupta Muyara was a Jain. According to the records of Hieun Tsang and Kalhanas Rajaatarangini, Kashmir was included in the empire of Asoka the great (273-232 BC). One of the most brutal massacres of Hindus occurred at the hands of the Muyara kings. Some historians put the number at 300,000 (akin to 3 million in present day numbers).

Contrary to BJP belief, all massacres in India were not committed by Muslims, Persians and Arabs. Asoka renounced violence, and renounced his religion after the Kalinga war, and he became a Buddhist. The Brahmans did not like him, and many historians think the Brahaman opposition to Asoka led to the destruction of the Muyarian dynasty.

With political disunity in the subcontinent, many foreigners invaded India. Alexander’s kingdom was divided. The Bacterians invaded India (250 BC). From the ashes of the Muyara empire, Kanishka the conqueror rose to power (78 AD) and began a new era in India. He annexed the Indus Valley and conquered Kashmir. He set up his headquarters in Purushapura (Peshawar). Kanishka was a Zorastrian. His coins display the sun god. Later in life he supported Buddhism (to the ire of the Hindu Brahmans). Kanishka had convened the Buddhist Council of Kashmir to spread Buddhism instead of Hinduism in the subcontinent (much to the chagrin of the Brahmans ). During Asoka, Buddhism had become the state religion. Hinduism survived only due to Indian princes like Gautamiputra Satkarni.

With the fall of the Muyara dynasty, the Guptas came to power (beginning of the fourth century AD) with their independent kingdoms. Dr. R.C. Majumdar writes that The empire of Samudragupta included the whole of Northern India EXCEPT Kashmir. During this time Fa-hien visited India to study Buddhism (399 AD). The Gupta period saw the distinct revival of Hinduism in the subcontinent. Buddhism declined, and never did rise in India. Kashmir was either independent at the time or was an insignificant state.

When did Kashmiri History begin
Although some Indians would like it to make it so, the history of Kashmir does not begin with Maharaja Ghulab Singh. Kashmiri history began a long time before partition, a very long time before Ghulab Singh. It surely began before the very brief Sikha-Shahi of Lahore. To start the history of Kashmir in the nineteenth century is like beginning the history of the subcontinent after the war of independence of 1857 (The Great Indian Mutiny).

The recorded history of Kashmir is more than five thousand years. The Sikh Dogras have said wonderful things about the paradise called Kashmir, but the story of Kashmir pre-dates Sikhism. The great Kashmiri historians, Kalhan and Ratnakar have written beautiful stories about the valley, but the beautiful story of Kashmir pre-dates Hindusim. Muslim Kashmiri poets have eulogised the beauty of the Valley of Kashmir for centuries, but the story of the valley pre-dates Islam. Lalitaditya Avantivarman, Sikander Butshikan, Shamas-u-din Iraqi, Mirza Hyder Dughlat, Faquirullah Kanta, and Mir Hazar Khan are only few of the famous kings of the Valley.

The history of the subcontinent pre-dates Hinduism. Some in secular India are pawning off religion as history. Vedic events are religion. Ramayana and Mahabharta are the holy scriptures of Hinduism. These scriptures need to be revered and respected. If these holy scriptures are mistaken for history, than we are all in trouble.

The IVC

Five thousand years ago the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation lived in harmony on the banks of the Indus. Moenjadaro, Harappa and Taxila were all towns on the banks of the Indus. This was one of the original civilisation on the planet. This civilisation is marked as great a civilisation as the Chinese and the Egyptian civilisation. The Indus Valley Civilisation did not extend East of the Indus. Neither did it extend beyond the Western Mountain ranges of Bolan, and Khyber. The Indus Valley Civilisation existed on the banks of the Indus. The Indus valley Civilisation existed in what is today Pakistan. Pakistan is the natural inheritor of the Indus Valley Civilisation, just like modern day China is the natural inheritor of the Chinese civilisation, and modern day Egypt in the natural inheritor of the Egyptian civilisation. Pakistan existed 5000 years ago, even though it was not called Pakistan. This is the geographic two nation theory.

People up the river traded with people down the river. People up in the mountains traded with people down in the plains. For thousands of years, Kashmiris cut down trees and threw them into the river. This was trade at its best. The people of the Indus valley traded with Mesopotamia to the West, but there was no civilisation to the east of the Indus to trade with. There were only monkeys and apes. A human civilisation did exist in the Malaya straits but that was too far for the Indus Valley Pakistanis.

Recent archaeological finds in Kashmir have supported the theory that the Indus valley Civilisation indeed stretched right to the origins of the Indus beyond the Himalayas, into the Karakorums and into Kashmir.

All through the centuries Pakistan and Kashmir were trading partners to the WEST and NORTH-WEST of current Pakistan by land routes and traders with Oman and Gulf state through Arabian sea. In modern times Sindh was part of Bombay presidency and there was hardly any trade across Rajistan desert. Under Mughals, Mirs of Sindh maintained quite an independent administration on current day Sindh Province. The Middle East had always used these Baluchistan, Sarhad, and Kashmir and other areas in current Pakistan to access the main land in India. In fact Gwader is a Pakistani Island port that was owned by Kuwait till the sixties.

Sarhad historically was trading partners with Kashmir, Punjab, Afghanistan and central Asia (including Sinkiang province of present day china). Kashmir did not even have a road link to India except through Muslim dominated portion of Punjab —through a town called Gurdaspur. (The tragedy of Gurdaspuspur is the tragedy of Kashmir. Today The Muslim town of Gurdaspur is part of India, and so is Kashmir). All its trade of fruits, wood and handicrafts was to its south west and west (Punjab and Sarhad) the wood from its forests flowed down the INDUS to Pakistan and all the administrative services such as electricity/postal/communication etc. were linked from present Pakistan. Punjab was the only province which had major trade eastward. But the trade was also with countries to the west as well as rest of Pakistan. All of North west India east of the Khyber pass, is clearly a totally unique country, naturally allied to Kashmir.

THE ARYAN HUNS INVADE THE IVC
With the decline of the Guptas, the nomadic tribes of Central Asia called the Huns invaded India. Their leader Tormana invaded Kashmir (500 AD).

Jawaharlal Nehru in his book Glimpses of World History says Skandagupta, the fifth of the Gupta line had to face this Hun invasion…gradually they spread all over Gandhara and the greater part of Northern India. THEY TORTURED THE BUDDHISTS AND COMMITTED ALL MANNER OF FRIGHTFULNESS….There must have been continuous warfare against them, but the Guptas could not drive them away. Fresh waves of Huns came …

The valley roars with these slogans

HINDU SAVAGERY

Jawaharlal Nehru says the following about the Hindu Huns …Torman installed himself king . He was bad enough, but after him came his son Miharagula, who was an unmitigated savage and fiendishly cruel. Kalhana in his history of Kashmir–the Rajatrangini–tells us that one of his Miharagulas amusements was to have elephants thrown over the great precipices into the valley below.

The treatment of men was sometimes worse then that of animals (some of the animals like cows were actually revered because they were Gods). Lower caste Hindus had a miserable life. Other historians have commented that the treatment of women was even worse, specially women of lower castes, they were considered the property of the upper caste Hindus, to be molested and/or raped at will. In many cases the new bride had to stay a night with the village Brahman before she was married off. Kashmir converted to Islam during this time period. It was cruelty like this that led to the whole sale conversion to Islam. The new religion offered them equality and saved them from the Brahmans.

Nehru continues, Soon however the Hun power weakened in India… the Huns have been defeated and driven back, but many remain in odd corners. The Great Gupta dynasty fades away after Balditya.

The next great event for Kashmir was the birth of Harshavardhana (606-647 AD). There are references to Harshas expeditions to Kashmir. According to the Chinese traveller Hiuen Tsang Kashmir was an independent state at the time. Harshas ancestors were sun worshippers, however he himself was attracted towards the Mahayana form of Buddhism. The Brahmans were very displeased with him and even conspired to kill him. Harsha spent time and money on arts and literature, and drama, and was probably the last great Buddhist emperor of India.

THE RAJPUT HINDU ERA IN INDIA

The death of Harsha ushered in an era of anarchy again. The Rajputs were the invaders this time. This era is called the Rajput era. According to Tod The Rajputs were the descendants of Sakas,Huns, Ushans, Gujaaras etc.

According to Rajatarangini of Kalhana which forms the chief source of our history on Kashmir, Duralabhavardhana founded a new royal dynasty in Kashmir about the middle of the 7th century. Lalitaditya ascended the throne in 724 AD and he conquered large areas of India and brought it under Kashmiri rule. After him (750 AD) the power of Kashmir receded.

Jiyapida, the grandson of Lalitaditya tried to revive the reputation of the Karkota dynasty. The Karkota dynasty in Kashmir was replaced by the Utpala dynasty about the middle of the 9th century. The Rajputs were true Hindus and patronised Hindu religion and culture in all of India.

THE RAJPUT ERA ENDS
The end of the Rajput era created the beginning of the Muslim era in India. Dr. Smith says that this became so prominent that the centuries from the death of Harsha to the Mohammedan conquest of Hindustan, extending in round numbers from the middle of the seventh century to the close of the twelfth century, was the Rajput era . This is 500 years of Hindu rule. This is one of the few periods of history when Hindus ruled India.

On the eve of the Arab invasion of Sind (712 A.D: Quaid-e-Azam said that this is the day the Pakistan movement began in India), Chandrapida, the grandson of Durlabhavardhan was the ruler of the Korkot (Kashmir ) kingdom The most powerful king was Muktipida Lalitadya, brother and successor of Chandrapida. He was a great conqueror, and is said to have conquered Punjab, Dardistan and Kabul .

Mahmud of Gahazni made two attempts between 1015-1021 to conquer Kashmir, but was unsuccessful. Mahmud of Ghazni attacked temples in the subcontinent because the temples were the seats of political power. The Brahaman priests kept all knowledge to themselves. They kept all knowledge away from the population, locked up in temples (including the knowledge to build the temple). To destroy the political and military power of the city, the temple had to be destroyed. Since the high priest controlled the populations, they had to be defeated. The temples also contained all knowledge of the area. Mohammed Ghauri was the founder of the Muslim empire in India (1173 A.D). The slave dynasty lasted from 1206-1290. The Khilji dynasty lasted from 1290-1320. The Tughlaq dynasty lasted from (1320-1412). In 1304 Ibin-e-Batuta visited visited China through Kashmir. The Syed and Lodhi dynasty lasted from 1413-1526. During the reign of the sultans of Delhi the Khokars had established themselves between Lahore and Ghazni on the Southern border of Kashmir.

The caste system, the practice of Sati, human sacrifices, the ostracization of the lowest caste Hindus from society, and the treatment meeted out to them led to the infusion of Islam into the beautiful valley of the safron. Since Islam allowed instant equality to the down-trodden the religion made huge in-roads into the valley.

From the eighth century through Muslims permeated the state of Kashmir even though the rulers were Buddhist. Kashmiri rulers were Buddhist till it was conquered by the Muslims in 1339 AD. Even though Kashmir was inhabited by Muslims, it was still being ruled by Buddhist princes till 1349 when Shah Mirza, after the death of his royal patron, ascended the throne under the title of Samsuddin Shah. Thus began the Muslim era in Kashmir. K.Ali writes that of the rulers of Kashmir, Zainul-Abedin was the best and most liberal ruler under whom people enjoyed a peaceful and prosperous reign. After Abedin, anarchy reigned in Kashmir. At the end of 1540, Haider Mirza a relative of the Mughal emperor Humanyun occupied the state. But the Mirza dynasty was overthrown by the Chakk dynasty in 1561.

From the eighth century till the fifteenth century the population of Kashmir changed. However it was not Arab invasions, or Persian conquest that transformed Kashmir, it was the power of the new religion. For seven hundred years Kashmir was under Buddhist rule. However the rule was autocratic, and people were treated like animals. The general populace was disenchanted with the state machinery, and the state religion. IN droves they converted to Islam. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the accession of a Muslim to the throne was a forgone conclusion.

At the time of Baburs invasion 1526 Kashmir and Sind were independent but they did not play any major role. Around the 3rd part of the sixteenth century Kashmir was passing through disorder. The chaotic condition of the state induced Akbar to interfere in its internal affairs. Moreover the excellent climate of the valley and its natural scenery might have attracted Akbar. Akbar conquered and annexed Kashmir in 1586-1587. Henceforth Kashmir became the summer seat of the Mughal government. During Jahangir, and Shahjahan’s reign the Mughals built the magnificent Shalimar Garden in Kashmir. This is long before Ghulab Singh was in Kashmir.

For the next 100 years peace remained in Kashmir. Saddozais (Sikander Butshikan, Shamas-u-din Iraqi, Mirza Hyder Dughlat, Faquirullah Kanta, Mir Hazar Khan ) ruled Kashmir for almost a century before the Sikhs. Peace was broken by the rise of Sikh power. The Sikhs rose to power in 1675 under Guru Gobind Singh. After the death of Gobinda Singh in 1708 the Sikhs established several states in the Punjab. Rajat Singh establish the Sikh empire in the Punjab. The Sikh rule in the history of the subcontinent is a footnote in history. It was extremely brief and was known for its stupidities (hence the word Sikha-shahi, and the jokes about Sikhs). Gulab Singh tried to rule Kashmir by putting together diverse and far-flung areas like Jammu bordering on the Punjab, Ladakh bordering on Tibet and Gilgit bordering on Sinkiang, Afghanistan and Central Asia across the Pamirs. There are many diverse groups in Kashmir. Gulab Sings was a ruthless ruler.

MAHRAJAH HARI SINGH: SEX and FOLLIES OF THE NINCOMPOOP RAJA OF Kashmir

This is what Larry Collins and Dominique Lapiere write about the Sikhs in the Punjab in their book (Freedom at Midnight… the source book for the screen-play Gandhi).The collapse of the Mogul empire gave the Sikhs the chance to carve out a kingdom of their own in their beloved Punjab. The tragedy of the Punjab was that while Moslems, and Sikhs could live under the British, neither could live under each other. The Moslems memory of Sikh rule in the Punjab was one of mosques defiled, women outraged, tombs razed, Moslems without regard to age or sex butchered, bayoneted, strangled, shot down, hacked to pieces, burnt alive. This was the legacy of Gulab Singh and his successors.

This following is what Larry Collins and Dominique Lapiere write about last maharaja of Kashmir Hari Singh in their account of the partition of India (Freedom at Midnight… the source book for the screen-play Gandhi).

Hari Singh was a weak vacillating indecisive man who divided his time between opulent feasts in his winter capital in Jammu and the beautiful flower-choked lagoons of his summer capital, Sirinagar, the Venice of the Orient. He had begun his reign with a few timid aims for reform which were quickly abandoned for an authoritarian system that kept his jails filled with his political foes. Their most recent occupant had been none other than Jawarlal Nehru. The prince had ordered Nehru arrested when he tried to visit the state in which he was born. Hari Singh too had an army to defend the frontiers of his state and give his claims to independence a menacing emphasis.

Kashmir kee Mandi Rawalpindi

The bonfire (of the accounts of sexual eccentricities of some of India princes were in themselves lengthy enough to stoke a good fire for hours …. were being burnt at the behest of the British government ) consuming the archives dealing with the maharaja of Kashmir destroyed the traces of one of the more unsavoury scandals of the world between wars. The impetuous prince was trapped in fragrant delicto in Londons Savoy hotel by a man he assumed to be the husband of his ravishing bed companion. In fact, the prince had fallen into a gang of blackmailers who proceeded to drain the state of Kashmir, via the princes personal bank account, OF A VERY CONSIDERABLE PART OF ITS REVENUES. The case finally broke when the young lady’s real husband persuaded that he had not been properly remunerated for the loan of his wife, went to the police. In the court case that followed, the unfortunate Maharajas infidelity was concealed under the pseudonym of Mr. A. Disillusioned for good with women as a result of his tribulations, Hari Singh returned to Kashmir, where he discovered new sexual horizons in the company of young men of his state. The accounts of his activities had been faithfully reported to the representatives of the Crown, Now whipped by the fresh mountain breeze of Srinagar, they disappeared into the Himalayan sky.

He ( Hari Singh) was a weak vacillating man whose perversions and orgies had given him the reputation of the Himalayan Brogia. Unfortunately, Hari Singh, the man who was Mr. A had titillated the readers of the British penny press before the war, was something else. He was the hereditary Hindu maharaja of the most strategically situated princely state in India.

Logic seemed to dictate that Kashmir join with Pakistan. Its people were Moslem. It had been one of the areas originally selected for an Islamic state by Rehmat Ali when he formulated his impossible dream. The k in Pakistan was for Kashmir.

Hari Singh the last playboy Raja of Kashmir was an abdominal character-less hedonist bi-sexual. His only redeeming quality was that he held out against Patels bullying. Hari Singh was escorted out of the state under the curfew of the Indian army. India claims that next day he signed the so called article of accession to India. According to Alistair Lamb a noted historian of Kashmir, has cast several doubts on the article of accession. India’s claim to accession is in dispute. The U.N. recognised the dispute, and treats Kashmir as disputed territory between India and Pakistan.

• Nehru’s commitment to the people of Kashmir
• Kashmir and Junagarh is Pakistani territory
• Kashmir: Does the article of accession exist?
• UN resolutions, and Nehru speeches on disputed nature of Kashmir

UNDERSTANDING KASHMIR: A geographic region or an idea?

What is the background of Kashmir ? Pakistan is a country based on the banks on the Indus and its tributaries. All its major cities owe their existence to the rivers originating in the Himalayan mountains. Kashmir lies north of Pakistan, a natural extension to the mouth of the Indus river. It is in the ancient Silk Rout thorough which noted travellers like Ibn-Batuta, and Fa-hein travelled. Pakistan is the size of Texas and Minnesota put together. Kashmir is another Minnesota added to it.

Kashmir means many things to many peoples. The total area of J&K state is 2.22 lakh (222,000) sq. kms. Of this, the Pakistani area accounts for 78,114 sq. kms. Chinese area is 37,555 sq. kms plus another 3,180 sq. kms. ( that was an area adjusted during the boundary agreement with Pakistan ). At present, 35% of the state is Azad Kashmir and 17% is Chinese Kashmir. In a landmark boundary adjustment between Pakistan and China, China received 2.3% from Pakistan (There is no boundary dispute between China and Pakistan. China is today Pakistan’s largest arms supplier. India occupies less than half of the original state which belonged to Hari Singh in 1947). The Indian area is 1.01 lakh (101,000)sq. kms. The Indian area is divided into the following divisions: Ladakh, Jammu and the Kashmir Valley. The Ladakh division is 49,146 sq. kms. The Jammu division is 26,293 sq. kms. and the Muslim Kashmir Valley is 15,948 sq. kms.

The population of the state governed by India is 6 million; of this, 64% are Muslims, 32% are Hindus, 2.2% are Sikhs and 1.2% are Buddhists. Another 2 million Muslims live in Azad Kashmir; taken together, Muslims would constitute 75% of the population of the entire state of Jammu & Kashmir, which is roughly 5% of the total Muslim population of India (the number of Muslims in India is more than 100 million). The Indians claim that in 1947 half a million Hindus and Sikhs also lived in Azad Kashmir. When 5 million Muslims were transferred from East Punjab to Pakistan, half a million Muslims fled Kashmir.

The Indian part of the state of Kashmir is divided into 3 main regions: Jammu, Kashmir Valley and Ladakh. In terms of area, Ladakh forms 58%, Jammu 26% and Kashmir valley 16%. Buddhists used to constitute a majority in Ladakh but a few years ago (according to the last Indian census reports) Muslims are in a majority in Ladakh now. Hindus form a majority in Jammu and Muslims form a majority in Kashmir valley. In British India Kashmir was about 95% Muslim. Before 1947, nearly a million non-Muslims — mainly Kashmiri Hindus called Pundits ruled the Kashmiris with the Dogra ruler Hari Singh. After the Dogra raja left the state in Indian custody, the Pandits also began leaving Kashmir. Today they live in Jammu and are asking for a separate union territory called Panditdesh.

• The Green Wildfire of freedom in Indian Occupied Kashmir: Fields of Pakistani flags in Srinagar. Indian Occupied Kashmiris have made it very clear to the world that they not only want freedom from Indian occupation, they have made it clear to the world that they want to join Pakistan. Indian Occupied Kashmir:-Children of the stones yearn for freedom and Pakistan.
• “We are Pakistanis and Pakistan is us because we are tied with the country through Islam,” he roared, as the crowd cheered him and chanted: “Hum Pakistani hain, Pakistan hamara hai” (We are Pakistanis, Pakistan is ours). Syed Gilani
• “Kashmiris chant azadi & Jeevay Jeevay Pakistan in equal numbers and with equal intensity” “There was a green flag on every lamp post, every roof, every bus stop and on the top of chinar trees. A big one fluttered outside the All India Radio building. Road signs were painted over. Rawalpindi they said. Or simply Pakistan” Arundhati Roy on Kashmir
• Fed on a steady diet of triumphalist media reports it is very hard for the Hinduvata India to comprehend. Very recently parts of the Indian press has begun to recognize the real problems. Indian Occupied Kashmirs throngs UN offices asking for freedom and end to occupation

• Freedom: Arundhati Roy on “Brave New India”
• Indian Occupied Kashmiris: “no solution to the Kashmir issue other than merger with Pakistan,” Gilani “Hum Pakistani hain, Pakistan hamara hai” (We are Pakistanis, Pakistan is ours).
• Is Delhi preventing the 4th Battle of Panipat or instigating it?

Peace is a two way street
Nehru’s commitment to the people of Kashmir
Kashmir & Junagarh are Pakistani territory
Kashmir: Does the article of accession exist?

Huge backlash against Zardari’s Kashmir statement. Pakistanis repudiate this treason and treasury ‘batt keh raheh gaa hindustaan—kashmir banaiga Pakistan

KASHMIR Junagarh & Manvadar Kashmir and Junagarh is Pakistani territory
Kashmir: Does the article of accession exist?
Northern Areas are part of Pakistan and were never part of Kashmir

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