India and Pakistan, celebrated their 70th independence day last month but they couldn’t change their attitude of hatred towards each other. Indeed, on the one side India’s students are taught in their textbooks that Muslims are bigoted, hatred, traitors and Indians never accept the existence of Pakistan and on the other side, in Pakistan, the case is same but against India. According to US Government Commission Report 2011, a textbook in Pakistani schools foster prejudice and intolerance of India and the same case is present in India for Pakistan. Moreover, media is also playing a negative role on both sides as ‘Indiaone.com’ reported that Pakistan teaches their students in alphabet that K for knife, R for Rocket, T for Tank and S for Sword. India and Pakistan are also actively assassinating the character of each other’s leader during partition, Gandhi and Jinnah. Indeed, Mahatma Gandhi was a great leader with many traits, even Martin Luther King Jr, also followed the same philosophy, which Gandhi followed – non-violence. On the death of Gandhi, Quaid-e-Azam in his condolence statement used the word “great” for him thrice. Nehru’s sister also said that if a hundred Gandhis and two hundred Abu Kalam Azads were in Muslim league and one Jinnah in Indian National Congress, Pakistan would never have been created. On August 7, 1947 leaving from India to Pakistan, Jinnah appealed to both Hindu and Muslims to ‘bury the past’ and wished India success and prosperity. In this regard, the media should play the role of pinpointing the distortion of history in the very basic textbooks taught in Pakistan. We should shun the hatred, bury the past and as our Quaid appealed move forward from the old rivalry. A good place to start would be a purge of the distorted textbooks as it is a long belated first step. MIR MUHAMMAD BIJAR Kandhkot Published in Daily Times, September 24th 2017.