The Vedic Solution

So in the last column I bitched about Pervez Musharraf. No surprise as one of the themes of this space is debunking the Pakistani elite's mindset.

Having jhankoed inside our Pakistani girebaan for a while, may I now grab the girebaan of the other (in the best Indo-Pak tradition of tit for tat)?

A Delhi based columnist, Veeresh Malik, for www.chowk.com (a web-site run by Pakistanis based in the US) responding to the Agra summit has written:

"The simple single solution is that Pakistan should declare itself to be a Vedic nation. India should declare itself to be another Vedic nation. People can then go home or to the temple or the mosque to practice whatever religion they want to.

Consider: here is a Nation. It has on one side the Hindukush mountain range. It has Harrappa, translated as 'The city protected by Lord Shiva', which if anything was the centre of Vedic civilisation...This nation was one of the oldest religions and cultures in the world, but thanks to colonial history books, got stuck with a myth that it was 'invaded' by the Aryans from the

Kazakhistan-Uzbekistan region.

It used to practice a religion referred to as 'Vedic Dharm' , later on given the name 'Hinduism' by foreigners. The main prayer of the Vedic Dharm, also known as the Gayatri Mantra, originated from this region, and was 'Aum bhu-bhva svah tat sevitr varay niyem bargoh de vas ya dhi ma hi diyeo yo na prachodayat'.

Or 'O Lord, Thou are the protector of life and of breath, dispeller of miseries and bestower of happiness. Thou are the creator and the most acceptable intelligence, possessing eternal qualities. May Thine qualities and Thy inspiration pass to us.'

Brevity. Surprisingly similar sentiments are found in the Holy Koran, as in other holy books.

It has one of its main cities named after Bhagwan Ram's son, Lav, and the main fort there was constructed by the ancient Hindu Kingdom of Singhapura, by the way, after all, how many Singapores can we have? But can anybody deny the existence and spread of the Gandhara Empire, which spread Vedic culture to Central Asia? Nahrankot, Shalkot, Pushkalavati, were these Sanskrit names with Vedic histories?"

These are funny concepts. Especially if we see how they are Iqbal and Jinnah's phantasmagorias. Substitute Hindu for Muslim and India for Pakistan and you have (from Iqbal) Hindu hum watan hehn, sara jahan hamara; and (from Jinnah) now that we have India everyone is free to go to their temples, gurdwaras, churches and mosques.

The columnist from Delhi is right. Pakistanis are Hindu, but he did not plumb the depths of it. The more I travel to and fro India and Pakistan, the more this fact sinks in.

Holy Cow! When we sing our naat, our marsiyaa, when we marry, the profusive use of geenday kay phool, the roona dhoona at the rukhsati!

Take a good look at that cloth we wrap our Quran in, feel that aesthetic, and then go to a mandir and you'll know what I am talking about. Whether we are Deobandi, or Barelvi or Shia, hell, when all those Deobandis with their big pugs and beards have their annual jalsa in Raiwind (just outside Lahore) it looks like the roll call of the fearsome Ranjit Singh cavalry.

In fact, I would like to know when it is that we are Arab, when we call our chooras chooras, or when we call jhoota jhoota?

But the columnist from Delhi should have pointed out that Pakistanis want to be Brahmin.

Reminds me of a conversation with the late Girelal Jain in his house 10 years ago. Murtaza Razvi (now assistant editor at Dawn) and I were young writers from The Frontier Post on our first visit to Delhi visiting this journalist emeritus, the ex-editor of The Times of India.

He offered us Scotch and said, "In young musulmanon ka imaan to kharaab karein." We laughed. He was talking expansively (how else!) of some notion he was calling Hindu, of finding room for one and all. "We can," he paused for effect, "even take all of you back."

Murtaza and I exchanged glances and later wondered whether the joke that rather naturally followed from this would have gone over well.

Why thank you very much sir, but can we choose the caste we come back as?

A friend of mine in Delhi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, pointed out an intriguing thing about the beginning of the movie Hey Ram! The Kamal Haasan character and the Shahrukh Khan character, two friends who are going to be thrown apart at Partition, are shown digging in Mohenjodaro (or was it Harappa? No matter).

The place Mohenjodaro/Harappa, says my friend, was a time when you were not Muslim and I was not Hindu.