The birth of a nation, the death of nationality

kaho dairo haram waalon, ye tumney kya fusoon foonka
khuda key har pey kya guzri, sanamkhaney pey kya guzri

In 1928, a young law student at Cambridge named Rahmat Ali, sat down to write a paper, full of vision and imagination. In the course of writing this paper, he coined the name Pakistan, and started a process that damned the fate of several millions, devastated thousands of villages and tore apart a socio-cultural fabric several thousand years old. Never again in human history would so few words achieve so much damage.

But Rahmat Ali's paper would remain a piece of fiction, a much criticized string of neo-fascist ideas, until the Muslim League under Jinnah, suffering defeat and feeling cheated at the provincial elections of 1938, began to feel threatened and marginalized in a Hindu dominated Congress (India).

It was then, history tells us, that Jinnah and the top leaders of the league, began to take the idea of a separate Muslim nation with seriousness.

The Pakistan story after that is much written and talked about. Jinnah's adamancy, Mountbatten's increasing frustration at brokering a negotiation, Nehru and Patel's eagerness to be done with the whole thing, Gandhi's struggles till the end, all this historians tell us. We find records in history about how the struggle for Pakistan spread from the corridors of Aligarh Muslim University into the fields of hundreds of North India's villages.

What emerges from all of this writing in history is a picture of strong Muslim insistence on partition and the need for Pakistan.Historians, as much as I have read them, have tried to blame leaders like Jinnah and Iqbal for dividing up a great nation and causing one of the world's largest human massacres.

What I do not see anywhere though, is the records of efforts by secular forces to counter the separatist propaganda. I do not see a paper on united India, a speech by Nehru against partition, a movement in other colleges unifying and rallying the masses. We need history to answer these questions. We need history to explain, why no one was trying to stop our nation to be split in the middle by the axe of fanaticism.

If Jinnah was to blame for it, isn’t Nehru equally guilty? While the AIML asked for Pakistan, couldn't the Congress have stopped or thwarted it? Those of us, who chose to be passive bystanders of the partition, are perhaps equally, if not more guilty, than those who lobbied and fought for Pakistan. Because if we really had made an effort, our love would have won over the 30 million who felt insecure and threatened in the very land of their fathers, from the very people who till 1947, had been living as brothers.

And had we done that, what a great nation we might have been.