While Mr Jinnah certainly created Pakistan
single-handedly, it was Mr Jawaharlal Nehru and Mr Vallabhbhai Patel
who jointly presided over the division of India by compromising with
the Hindu communalists within the Congress party and pushing Mr
Jinnah out of their fold. The sad irony was that it was Mr Gandhi who
had to pay the price of their folly with his own life by insisting on
a secular ideal for India. That lesson remains lost on many Indians
even today.

Since 1969, over 10,000 people have died in communal clashes in
Ahmadabad, which fact bemoans the passing of Mr Gandhi's dream into a
sectarian nightmare. Last week, over 600 innocent Muslims died in
Gujarat and at least 30,000 were rendered homeless. Nearly 30 mosques
in Ahmadabad were razed to the ground. Ten years ago, Hindu militants
ran amuck in Ayodhya and sparked communal riots which left over 2000
people dead.

Well meaning secular Indians rightly berate Pakistan for being an
"ideological and authoritarian state", proudly pointing to their own
country's "secular and democratic" moorings. Yet they overlook the
frightening similarities between the fundamentalists of the two
countries, those in Pakistan who have declared war on Hindu India and
the infidel West and those in India who talk of protecting or
strengthening the "Hindu nation", those who wield the trident, stick
and firetorch in India and those who carry automatic rifles and
advocate an Islamic state for the "Muslim nation" in Pakistan. Both
may be minorities within their faiths but both have powerful
political supporters in the civil and military hierarchies of their
own countries.

The impulse of Hindu-Muslim communalism is rooted in the politics of
medieval Indian history. Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism emanated from
within the soul of ancient India and therefore didn't lead to violent
conflagration. But Islam arrived from outside India as a "conquering"
force through the sword of the "temple breaking" Muslim hordes or on
the back of "liberating" Muslim saints and mystics. Later the British
imperialists aggravated religious tensions by politicizing the
divide. The birth of Pakistan followed because Indian secularists
couldn't comprehend the nature of the communal challenge posed by the
Hindus communalists within their fold rather than as a result of
Muslim League belligerence in quest of a Muslim "nation". But just as
Pakistani Muslims should have stopped their search for a "Muslim
nation" after the formation of their state in Pakistan in 1947 (as Mr
Jinnah had advocated) but didn't do so to their everlasting disarray,
so too the Hindus should have stopped clamouring for a Hindu "nation"
in India (as Mr Gandhi had pleaded) but didn't do so to their
recurrent dismay. Indeed, if many of Pakistan's post-independence
woes can be laid at the door of its "Muslim ideologues", some of
India's problems have been accentuated by its Hindu revivalists who
seek to define and enlarge Hinduism in the same erroneous manner of
Islamism in Pakistan.

Of course, the rise of Islam as a "civilisational" force following
the eruption of oil politics in the 1970s has hurt both countries. In
Pakistan it fertilized the ground for the emergence of Ziaism and
provided the impetus for the Saudi-American sponsorship of jihad in
Afghanistan. In India, it laid the seeds of a counter-civilisational
response in the form of Hindutva. The articulation of this
"civilisational" behaviour was manifest in India by the advent of the
"smiling Buddha" in 1974, a reference to India's "peaceful nuclear
explosions", and in Pakistan by the launching of plans to build the
"Islamic bomb" subsequently. Pakistan now came to be cast in the
mould of an Islamic state while India began to shed its secular
leanings in favour of a Hindu Rashtra. In Pakistan the process of
Islamising the state was fed by the ambitions of the military while
in India the BJP could not have scaled the heights of the state
without the democratic votes and financial power of civil society.
Over time, the failed authoritarianism of Pakistan and the successful
democratization of India have led them to the same ideological
cul-de-sac. In trying to disprove the political legitimacy of each
other, both countries have mirrored the compulsions and concerns of
the religious impulse in the other.

The most indelible memory of Partition is of railway carriages filled
with mutilated corpses of Hindus and Muslims. Five decades later, the
blood lust of both communities in India was fanned by exactly the
kind of circumstances that fueled the slaughters in 1947, making
India's orgy of secular self-immolation look like some hoary fantasy.
The irony is that it is General Pervez Musharraf who wants to
liquidate fundamentalism and separate religion from politics in
Pakistan today while India's prime minister in waiting, Mr L K
Advani, remains a staunch supporter of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
which seeks a "Hindu Rashtra". The truth is that if India and
Pakistan want to be stable and prosper together, they must be more
like each other in secular outlook and less like each other in
religious terms.