Adil Najam
Today is August 15. India’s Independence Day.
ATP sends all Indians sincere and heartfelt Independence Day greetings and the very best wishes.
Each year since All Things Pakistan started, we have written a post on this day with the same headline and the same opening words (here, here, here, here). Today, for the fifth time, I write the same words dipped in the same feeling the very same intensity of emotions. Let me begin, this time, with the prayer I ended last year’s post with: May the best hopes of both Mr. Jinnah and Mr. Gandhi come true for both our nations. May all our futures be good futures.
As we wrote last year, these posts have carried a trilogy of imagery our post in 2006 sought to revisit our imagery of our past (here), in 2007 we highlighted the changing imagery of India-Pakistan relations in the present (here), and in 2008 we called upon our readers to re-imagine our visions of the future (here).
But the same imagery has also held a constancy of purpose: An investment in the hope that relations between these countries will, in fact, become better and reflect what we believe are the true aspirations of most Pakistanis as well as most Indians.
This year these hopes have been challenged on both sides. Talks restarted amidst cautious hopes, but the images coming out of them have been of tense nerves rather than real relationships. It also does not bode well that the news today is that the Pakistan government is still deliberating whether to accept an offer of aid from India to help its flood victims, or that the Indian Prime Minister is again vexing hawkish fingers towards Pakistan. Neither should really be news and one realizes that there are political compulsions on both sides that could explain these moves. But one wishes that this were not so.
The statesmanship, it seems, is coming not from the leaders on either side, but, instead, from within the people rather than the political classes. But maybe that is only to be expected since politicians seems too entrenched in their own rhetoric. I have long believed, and continue to believe that if indeed there is going to be headway it will be pushed by people-to-people processes and the best that we can expect from leaders of either side is that they will then follow the aspirations of their own people.
So today, on India’s Independence Day, we the Pakistani people send the fondest of greetings to the people of India. May all our shared futures be prosperous and peaceful. May our tomorrows be always better than our todays. May our tomorrows be marked by friendship, by peace, by prosperity, by goodwill, and by understanding.
Happy Independence Day, India.
@Zameer
This is indeed news to me that Allama Iqbal had regretted his nationalistic period and called it his days of ignorance. He had died in 1938 when he was still an Indian national. How could he disown his nationality as an Indian and his Knight-hood as British subject. These are matters of fact. I put a question to you: did the prophet of Islam disowned his nationality as an Arab. No, he called himself as “Arbiun, Ummiyun”. I wonder what would have happened if Mujiburrehman had adopted the name of Pakistan for his new state instead of Bangladesh, which he had every right to do representing the majority of the Paky nation, but he hated the very name of Pakistan. For your information the world still generally knows us Pakys as ethnic Indian. Even Saudies call Pakys as ‘Hindi Miskeen’.
Btw, will you please furnish me with any proof of the very important statement you made about repenting of Iqbal about his Indian nationality? In fact we are living in dour-e- jahalat when we try to deny the truth and facts of history?
I applaud Najam for congratulating the citizens of our brotherly state of Bharat but I would like to know if he had ever congratulated the Bangladeshies also on their independence day? If not, why not?
Of course one may say that Iqbal’s latter life was really his “ayaam – e – jahilia” (days of ignorance), as he transformed from a forward-thinking, broad-minded secularist, to a narrow Islamicist in later life.
Both Jinnah and Iqbal (grandchildren of a Gujarati Hindu Rajput and Kashmiri Pandit respectively) started broad and ended narrow. Notwithstanding claims to the contrary, forming a nation on a religuous basis for “Indian Muslims” is *fundamentally* incompatible with secularism. The consequences of the wrong-headed religuous obsession for the expediency of creating Pakistan by Iqbal and Jinnah is just starting to unravel, leaving all of us to the pay the price.
Just as the broad and secular leadership of Gandhi is starting to bear fruit in our eastern neighbor and has continued to inspire the likes of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela the world over.
I sincerely believe we have to start Pakistan afresh and not be afraid to debunk the leaders who put us on the wrong side of history and set us back centuries. It is time embrace new secular heroes and join the world of nations as a liberal democracy.
Ahmed
Dear ATP,
Thank you for your wishes, and ours to you as well.
We live in troubling times. Both our countries’ leadership has a lot of answer for. Perhaps it is time for both to put bruised feelings aside and join together to help out our brothers and sisters caught in this natural disaster. Aid should not be given grudgingly, nor should it be rejected for political expediency.
To my brother Asif, I know you read this page, so my best wishes to you, and I hope you’re alright..
readinglord,
You probably don’t know that Allama Iqbal himself regretted writing that song. Later in his life he called his nationalistic period his “ayaam – e – jahilia” (days of ignorance).
@Gohar
I wonder at the education being imparted to the post-partition generation who are ignorant of the fact that India is the mother country of both Bharat and Pakistan as Pakistan is the mother country of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Bharat usurped the English name ‘India’ actually coined by the British for the sub-continental India, including, inter-alia, all the three states listed heretofore. Bharat did have some right to assume the name, being the majority state but the post- Bangladesh Pakistan which included only the former West-Pakistan, which though the minority wing of Pakistan, retained the name of Pakistan, as the eastern majority wing abhorred this name. So the subcontinental India, which may be called Mother India, fathered by the British, gave birth to various states which are further breaking up into smaller and smaller states, which may lead ultimately to Pre-British anarchy in India, when it was divided in many warring states.
So we sang in schools the ‘Taranah-e-Hindi’ of Allama Iqbal:
“Sare jahan se achha Hindostan hamara
Ham bulbulein hein iski yih gulstan hamara
Mazhab nahein sikhata aapas mein beir ralhna
Hindi hein ham watan he Hindostan hamara”
and so on…
Will we ever sing this song again?