FAITH CANNOT CHANGE DNA: PARTITION AND THE BITTER FRUIT OF A POLITICAL IDEA

                                                 

( The Dharmarajika Stupa  a Mauryan era Buddhist  Stupa near the city of Taxila , Pakistan)

FAITH CANNOT CHANGE DNA: PARTITION AND THE BITTER FRUIT OF A POLITICAL IDEA

 

"Yeh tank taup ye bombaar aag bandookein,

 Kahaan se laaye ho kis ki taraf hai rookh in-kaa

Dayaar e waaris o iqbal ka yeh taufa hai ?

Jaga ke jung ke tufaan zameen e nanak se

Uthay ho barq giraane kabir ke ghar par ?

Ghulam tum bhi thay kal tak ghulam hum bhi thay ,

 Naha ke khoon mein aayee thi fasl e aazadi

Abhi tau subah ki pehli hawaaein sanki hain

Abhi shagoofon ne kholi nahin hai aankh apni

Abhi bahaar ke lub par hansi nahin aayee

Na jaane kitnay sitaare bhuji si aankhon ke

Na jaane kitnay fasurda hathhelion ke gulab

Taras rahein hain abhi rang o roshini ke liye

Hamaare pass hai kya dard e mushtareq ke siva

Mazaa tau jab thaa ki mil kar ilaaj e jaan kartay

Khud apnay haathhon se taamir e gulistaan kartay”......( Ali Sardar Jafri )

 

(These tanks, these cannons, these bombers, these fires, these guns,

Where have you brought them from, and towards whom are they turned?

Is this the gift you bring to the land of Waris and Iqbal?

Having stirred the storms of war from the soil of Nanak,

Have you risen to hurl lightning upon the house of Kabir?

You were slaves only yesterday, and so were we.

The harvest of freedom came drenched in blood.

The first winds of dawn have only just begun to stir.

The buds have not yet opened their eyes.

Spring has not yet brought a smile to its lips.

Who knows how many stars, their eyes dimmed, still await the light,

Who knows how many roses of hope lie withered in waiting,

Still yearning for colour and radiance.

What do we possess, except this shared sorrow?

How much better it would have been had we joined together to heal our wounds,

And with our own hands built a garden of flowers.)

 

The lines convey a significant and deeply human message to the rulers of Pakistan. They ask a fundamental question: why should the lands of Waris Shah and Iqbal, Nanak and Kabir, be turned into theatres of war when their peoples share a history of suffering, servitude and sacrifice? The poem reminds those in power that independence was purchased with blood, and that the promise of freedom was meant to open a new dawn, not perpetuate hatred and conflict. Its imagery of unopened buds, fading stars and withered roses represents generations whose hopes remain unfulfilled. Above all, it is a plea to replace militarism and confrontation with healing, cooperation and reconstruction. The final image of joining hands to build a garden of flowers offers the rulers of Pakistan a powerful alternative: nations are not strengthened merely by tanks, guns and bombers, but by giving their people peace, dignity, opportunity and hope.

Pakistan has suffered the consequences of Partition itself. The political legacy of the Two Nation Theory has also contributed to making the subcontinent a region marked by division, suspicion, religious polarisation and ideological distance. The men who planted this seed could not have foreseen the kind of tree that would eventually grow from it. They imagined that they were planting a tree of political security and power. What grew instead was a tree of continuing conflict, competing identities and historical separation.

The Partition of 1947 was one of the greatest demographic upheavals of the twentieth century. Millions crossed the newly created borders, families were separated, homes and property were lost, and enormous numbers of people were uprooted from places where their families had lived for generations. Scholarly estimates of the numbers displaced vary, but the scale was unprecedented in South Asian history.

The deepest irony is that the Muslims of the subcontinent had evolved within the same civilisational landscape as their Hindu, Sikh and other neighbours. Their religious faith was different, but their languages, food, music, customs, dress, folklore, social institutions and historical experiences had developed within the same geographical and cultural environment.

A SHARED CIVILISATIONAL GROUND

For thousands of years, the land between the Indus and the Brahmaputra constituted a vast and internally diverse civilisational space. Its peoples fought wars, established kingdoms and experienced religious conflicts, but they also lived together, borrowed from one another and participated in shared cultural worlds. A Muslim from Lucknow could have far more in common culturally with a Hindu from Lucknow than with a Muslim from Arabia. They could speak the same language, eat the same food, listen to the same music, share similar manners and participate in the same regional culture. The Two Nation Theory reduced this extraordinary complexity to a political proposition that Hindus and Muslims constituted separate nations and could not securely share a political future. Whatever its political rationale in the circumstances of the late colonial period, its subsequent history demonstrated that religious identity alone could not contain the enormous linguistic, regional, ethnic and cultural diversity of the Muslims of the subcontinent.

THE FIRST BITTER FRUIT

Muslims who migrated during Partition experienced the first bitter fruit. Millions left ancestral homes, villages, towns, and cities, expecting a separate Muslim homeland to provide greater security and political fulfilment. Pakistan's first census in 1951 recorded approximately seven million refugees, amounting to about one fifth of the country's population and almost half of its urban population. The new state consequently began its existence under enormous demographic, administrative and economic pressure. Yet within twenty-four years the new state itself was divided.

In 1971, East Pakistan became Bangladesh. Bengali Muslims and Punjabi Muslims shared the same religion, but religion alone could not overcome differences of language, regional interests, political representation and economic power. Contemporary historical studies describe the marginalisation of Bengali language and culture and economic discrimination in East Pakistan as important elements in the growth of demands for autonomy. The creation of Bangladesh therefore demonstrated a fundamental historical truth. A common faith does not automatically create a single nation.

THE SECOND BITTER FRUIT

The second bitter consequence was experienced by Muslims who remained in India. Partition did not remove the Muslim population from India. Millions remained in the country, particularly in regions such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal, Kerala, Kashmir and elsewhere. These Muslims became citizens of a country from which a large part of the Muslim League leadership had sought separation, even though the individuals who remained had not collectively chosen Partition. Partition consequently left a difficult psychological and political legacy. Indian Muslims could sometimes find themselves questioned about an event that had displaced millions but for which they could not individually be held responsible. The historical literature also shows that Partition created new minorities on both sides of the border. Joya Chatterji has pointed out that the division of Bengal inevitably left millions of Muslims within India, just as millions of Hindus remained within Pakistan. Thus, a political division intended to solve the question of communal political security did not eliminate minority questions. It reproduced them in altered forms.

THE THIRD BITTER FRUIT

The third consequence concerns Pakistan itself. A nation needs a positive conception of its own identity. If national identity is defined predominantly through negation, through the assertion that ‘we are not India’ or ‘we are not Hindus’, the question of what constitutes the country's own historical identity becomes increasingly difficult. Pakistan is not historically empty territory that suddenly acquired a civilisation in 1947. It contains Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, Taxila and numerous other archaeological and historical sites representing civilisations and cultures that existed long before the arrival of Islam. The history of a territory does not begin when the dominant religion of its present population arrives. Egypt did not begin with Islam. Iran did not begin with Islam. The history of the Indus region did not begin with Islam. Islam became an important and eventually dominant religious force in large parts of the region, but the civilisation into which Islam entered was already ancient. Muslims of the subcontinent inherited that civilisation as well as the Islamic tradition.

THE HUMAN COST OF THE TWO NATION THEORY

The implementation of the Muslim League’s Two Nation Theory culminated in the Partition of British India in August 1947, unleashing one of the largest and most violent forced migrations in modern history. The Indian Independence Act received Royal Assent on 18 July 1947, and the two independent dominions of India and Pakistan came into existence on 15 August and 14 August, respectively. The boundaries dividing Punjab and Bengal were announced on 17 August 1947, two days after India’s Independence, leaving millions uncertain about which country they would belong to. In the ensuing violence, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were killed, assaulted and driven from their ancestral homes. Approximately 14 to 18 million people were displaced, while estimates of the death toll vary widely, from several hundred thousand to around one million or more. Trains carrying refugees arrived at stations filled with corpses; villages were set ablaze, women endured abduction and sexual violence, and families were torn apart in the chaos. Millions abandoned their homes, lands, businesses, places of worship and the graves of their ancestors, often never to return. The Radcliffe boundary transformed familiar regions into hostile frontiers and fractured communities whose histories had been intertwined for centuries. The Partition of 1947 was not merely a territorial division; it was a profound human catastrophe in which a political theory based on religious nationhood was translated into mass displacement, communal bloodshed and enduring collective trauma. Its consequences continue to shape relations between India and Pakistan and the memories of families on both sides of the border.

THE PROBLEM OF MANUFACTURED DISTANCE

This creates a profound problem when national identity is constructed by creating cultural distance from neighbouring India. If the culture of the region is substantially shared, the temptation arises to manufacture difference through history, language, dress, manners and ancestry. History may then be rearranged so that the narrative begins principally with foreign Muslim rulers rather than with the ancient civilisations of the territory itself. Yet Mohenjo Daro, Harappa and Taxila are not foreign histories. They belong to the soil of present-day Pakistan. A child growing up in Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar or Multan should know that his history is much older than the creation of Pakistan. His history includes the ancient peoples of the Indus region and the many civilisations that subsequently inhabited and influenced the land. There is no contradiction in being Muslim and acknowledging this inheritance.

LANGUAGE IS NOT ANCESTRY

Language provides another illustration. Urdu is profoundly a language of the subcontinent. Persian and Arabic contributed enormously to its vocabulary and literary development, but its grammatical and structural foundations belong to the linguistic environment of South Asia. Punjabi, Sindhi, Bengali, Kashmiri, Pashto and other languages spoken by Muslim populations are similarly rooted in the linguistic history of the region. The presence of Arabic or Persian vocabulary does not make a South Asian language Arab or Persian. Nor does speaking Arabic make a South Asian Muslim an Arab. The same principle applies to food, music, dress and social customs. South Asian Muslims possess an enormous indigenous cultural inheritance. Islam is a universal religion. Arab culture is one particular historical culture in which Islam emerged. The two should not be confused.

FAITH CANNOT CHANGE ANCESTRY

The Two Nation Theory reduced the 5,000-year-old civilisational complexity of the Indian subcontinent to the political assertion that Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations who could not live together. Its bitter fruits have been profound. Muslims who migrated were promised that religion alone could sustain a nation, yet within 24 years East Pakistan separated to become Bangladesh, demonstrating that religious identity could not by itself overcome linguistic, cultural and regional differences. Muslims who remained in India were made to bear suspicion for a Partition they had not sought, while Pakistan has struggled with an identity increasingly defined in opposition to India and Hindu civilisation. This separation encouraged the reframing of history, language, dress and lineage. Ancient centres such as Mohenjo Daro, Harappa and Taxila, all within present-day Pakistan, can be overshadowed by narratives beginning with foreign invaders. Indigenous linguistic forms have sometimes been displaced by Arabic and Persian influences, traditional South Asian dress disparaged in favour of imported forms, and communities such as Jats, Rajputs and Gujjars encouraged in some narratives to imagine Arab or Turkic ancestry. Yet religious faith does not mutate ancestry. Most Muslims of the subcontinent remain historically connected to populations that inhabited these regions before conversion, notwithstanding considerable genetic diversity and varying external gene flow. Conversion changed belief and religious identity; it did not transform Punjabis, Sindhis, Bengalis, Kashmiris or people of the Gangetic plains into Arabs, Turks or Persians. Arab, Persian and Central Asian ancestry certainly exists in some families, but it cannot reasonably be presented as the origin of the majority. Faith belongs to belief; DNA belongs to biological inheritance. A people cannot become historically rootless by changing its religion.

THE ORDINARY HUMAN BEING

This is why the question should ultimately be brought down from political rhetoric to ordinary human life. Does a farmer in  Sialkot want fundamentally different things from a farmer in Ludhiana? Does a mother in Lahore want fundamentally different things from a mother in Lucknow? Their religious beliefs may differ. Their political circumstances may differ. Their national identities may differ. But their fundamental human aspirations are remarkably similar: food, shelter, health, education, dignity, security and a better future for their children. There is no uniquely Hindu aspiration for a mother to see her child educated, nor a uniquely Muslim aspiration for a farmer to earn a decent livelihood. These are human aspirations. This does not mean that religious or national differences are unreal. They are real and historically important. But they should not be allowed to obscure the much older layers of shared civilisation.

THE POLITICS OF PERMANENT HOSTILITY

It is also necessary to examine the institutional consequences of permanent hostility. A state facing a permanent external threat naturally gives considerable importance to security institutions and defence expenditure. Pakistan and India have experienced genuine wars, territorial disputes and security dilemmas, particularly over Kashmir. It would therefore be simplistic to suggest that every security concern has been manufactured. But prolonged hostility can become institutionally entrenched. When an external enemy becomes central to national identity, reconciliation becomes politically more difficult. A permanent threat can also provide continuing justification for extraordinary emphasis on defence and security. This is where the legacy of Partition remains particularly consequential. For sections of the establishment, peace with India can appear to diminish the political importance of the very conflict around which national security narratives have been constructed. The result can be a self-reinforcing cycle in which hostility sustains institutions and institutions sustain hostility.

THE LESSON OF EUROPE

Europe offers an instructive historical contrast. France and Germany fought devastating wars against one another. Yet after the Second World War, European states deliberately began constructing institutions of cooperation. The Schuman Declaration of 1950 proposed pooling French and German coal and steel production precisely because these resources were central to industrial power and warfare. The European Coal and Steel Community followed in 1952 and became one of the foundations of European integration. Europe did not erase its history. It changed the political meaning of that history. Former enemies chose institutional cooperation over permanent confrontation. South Asia has largely failed to make a comparable transition.

We share rivers, monsoons, cuisines, musical traditions, languages and countless cultural practices that cross the political boundaries established in 1947. Yet the psychological boundary between the countries can remain deeper than the geographical boundary itself.

HISTORY IS BEING RECLAIMED IN THE ARAB WORLD

There is another significant development that deserves attention. Across parts of the Arab world, history is increasingly being treated as an essential component of national education and cultural self-understanding. Saudi Arabia has undertaken sustained curriculum reform, including systematic revision of textbooks and greater emphasis on history, national identity and the development of analytical understanding rather than rote learning.  The UAE has similarly incorporated the historical foundations of the federation into school social studies and national education, explicitly seeking to acquaint students with the history of their forefathers and the circumstances that produced the Union. Ministry of Education UAE. Egypt, too, continues to place its exceptionally long historical inheritance within its educational narrative, while scholarship on Egyptian textbooks demonstrates how historical interpretation has remained an important part of debates about national identity. This is an important lesson for Pakistan. A nation cannot build historical maturity by teaching its children only a selective memory of the past. Pakistani children deserve to know, without euphemism or ideological filtering, the successive peoples, kingdoms, invaders, conquerors and defenders who shaped the land on which Pakistan stands today. They should know where invasions came from, who resisted them, who ruled before them, how political power changed hands and how indigenous civilisations responded to successive conquerors. History should neither manufacture hatred nor erase uncomfortable truths. It should give children the intellectual courage to distinguish between the land, its indigenous peoples, the invader and the defender. Only such historical honesty can produce a society confident enough to examine its past without fear.

THE DANGER OF CULTURAL ROOTLESSNESS

There is another danger in the progressive displacement of indigenous historical consciousness by an imagined foreign ancestry. The child in Lahore should know the Indus before he knows the history of Arab conquest. He should know Mohenjo Daro and Harappa. He should know Taxila. He should know the history of Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Kashmir. He should know the poets, philosophers, rulers, saints, artists and ordinary people who shaped these lands. He should know the Islamic history of the region as well. One history does not need to destroy another. A Muslim can be fully Muslim without ceasing to be a product of the civilisation of the subcontinent. Indeed, acknowledging indigenous civilisational inheritance does not weaken Islam. It explains how Islam became part of the extraordinary cultural history of South Asia.

PAKISTAN'S SUBCONTINENTAL IDENTITY VS ARAB IDENTITY 

The debate inside Pakistan between an Arabist identity and an Indus or subcontinental identity is old and Justice Dr Javed Iqbal son of Allama Iqbal was one of its most important voices. In his books 'Islam and Pakistan's Ideology' and 'Apna Gareban Chaak' he argued that Pakistan was established on a modern reconstructive interpretation of Islam which orthodox clerics had always opposed and that what Pakistan became after Jinnah was not what his father had envisioned because an Islamic state with equality of citizenship like Medina has never actually been formed and is not acceptable to orthodoxy today, and this view was shared by a large group of Pakistani thinkers including Faiz Ahmed Faiz who insisted Pakistan is heir to syncretic Punjabi and Hindustani culture, Eqbal Ahmad who openly criticised Arabisation under Zia ul Haq, historians Prof Mubarak Ali who said Pakistan's history must start from the Indus Valley not from Muhammad bin Qasim, Prof K K Aziz who exposed the Arab centric distortion in Pakistan Studies textbooks, scientist Pervez Hoodbhoy who criticised Arabisation of education, historian Ayesha Jalal who showed through Jinnah's 11 August 1947 speech that Jinnah treated the subcontinent as one nation of 400 million and identified Pakistan culturally with India, and writers like Tariq Ali and Nadeem F Paracha who describe Pakistan as South Asian not Middle Eastern, and their combined argument is that Pakistan is geographically and culturally a South Asian country whose people, languages, food, dress, music and social structure belong to the Indus Valley and not to Arabia and that in trying to be Arabesque or Persianate Pakistanis become imposters in Arab eyes and orphans in their own land because as a Pakistani writer himself noted 'we have employed religion to distance ourselves from our own land and heritage and in rejecting what we are we are lost, and a large section carries surnames like Syed, Bokhari or Shirazi claiming Arab or Turk origin but an Arab will only smirk at such claims since Arabs still call Pakistanis Hindi from beyond the Indus, therefore the school says Pakistan should own its pre Islamic Indus past and its Punjabi, Sindhi, Baloch and Pashtun roots rather than market itself as an Arab outpost' .

THE BITTER FRUIT AFTER EIGHTY YEARS

The men who planted the seed of the Two Nation Theory could not have known the full consequences of the tree that would grow from it. Their historical moment was shaped by colonial withdrawal, political competition, constitutional uncertainty, communal fears and the search for political security. Their decisions therefore have to be understood within their own historical circumstances. But their consequences can also be examined critically. Eighty years later, the subcontinent continues to consume some of the bitter fruit. Hindus and Muslims have both been harmed by the legacy of Partition. Indian Muslims have sometimes been asked to answer for a Partition they did not collectively choose. Pakistani Muslims inherited a national identity deeply influenced by an unresolved relationship with India. Bangladesh emerged because religious unity could not overcome linguistic, regional and political differences. And the subcontinent continues to pay a political and economic price for hostility.

The danger becomes greater when Pakistan seeks to construct historical continuity primarily outside its subcontinental roots. The wider the cultural distance from India is made to appear, the wider the political divide can become. The wider the political divide becomes, the easier it is for suspicion and hostility to reproduce themselves in succeeding generations.

WHEN STATE FANS COMMUNAL RHETORIC

 It is difficult to reconcile the requirements of modern statecraft, constitutional responsibility and regional peace with the communal rhetoric that has occasionally emanated from Pakistan’s highest military leadership. Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan’s Army Chief, while speaking at the Overseas Pakistanis Convention in April 2025, publicly revived the Two Nation Theory by asserting that Hindus and Muslims were different in religion, customs, traditions, thoughts and ambitions, and urging Pakistanis to preserve this distinction in the memory of future generations. Such a statement is not merely a historical observation. Coming from the head of Pakistan’s most powerful state institution, it gives contemporary official weight to a doctrine that was used to justify the division of British India in 1947. The significance lies in the position from which these words were spoken. A military chief is not simply another political commentator. In Pakistan, the armed forces have historically exercised considerable influence over national policy. When the head of such an institution presents religious difference as a defining distinction between two peoples, the statement inevitably acquires a wider political meaning.

Pakistan has also witnessed repeated political mobilisation around hostility towards India, with slogans invoking the destruction of India, perpetual conflict, a thousand-year war and Kashmir as the country’s jugular vein. Such rhetoric may generate emotional nationalism, but it can also divert public attention from the darker realities within the country: poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, disease, corruption, inflation and terrorism. Mass hysteria over an external enemy cannot provide jobs, educate children, control prices or improve healthcare.

The central issue is therefore not whether Pakistan should remember its history, but whether historical grievance should continually be used to distract citizens from the failures of the present. A state demonstrates its strength not by the intensity of its hostility towards a neighbour,  but by the security, dignity, education and opportunities it provides to its own people. When leaders repeatedly ask citizens to look towards an external enemy, they should also be prepared to answer a more immediate question: what is being done to improve the lives of those at home?

THE HISTORY THAT CANNOT BE ERASED

Pakistan is a South Asian country whose Muslim majority inherited an ancient subcontinental civilisation. India is a South Asian country with a large and extraordinarily diverse Muslim population. Bangladesh is a South Asian country whose Muslim majority possesses a distinctive Bengali civilisational inheritance. None of these truths cancels the others. The future does not require Indians and Pakistanis to deny their separate national identities. Nor does it require Muslims to surrender their faith. It requires a recognition that political nations are comparatively recent constructions, whereas civilisations are older, layered and far more complicated. The subcontinent cannot change the fact that its peoples share deep historical connections. Religion can shape faith, values and community. It can change identity. It can change political history. But it cannot change the ancestry of an entire people overnight. It cannot turn the Indus into Arabia. It cannot turn Punjab into Arabia. It cannot turn Bengal into Arabia. It cannot erase the civilisations that existed before the arrival of Islam. And it cannot make a person culturally foreign to the land of his ancestors merely because he follows a different faith.

The bitter fruits of Partition will not disappear by denying religious differences. They may begin to lose their bitterness only when religious identity is allowed to coexist with historical truth, when national identity is separated from permanent hostility, and when the peoples of South Asia recognise that shared civilisation is not a betrayal of faith. Faith can change belief. Faith can change history. But faith cannot change the past. It can never ever change DNA.

 

( Avtar Mota )

 

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