It is not a wonder that the Pakistani youth are extremely confused about history and identity. Recently writing in the Urdu press, self-styled historian Dr Safdar Mahmood made a startling revelation: Pakistan was founded in 1192 and the real founder of Pakistan was Sultan Shahabuddin Muhammad Ghori. The basis for this claim is a letter that he claims Sultan Ghori wrote to Raja Prithviraj Chohan of India in which he asked for the separation of areas that now constitute Pakistan from the rest of India. Apparently, that one letter has more weight than the constitutional and democratic struggle the Muslim League was involved in during the closing stages of the British Raj. Nationalists often like to imagine primordial identities for their modern nation states. It is some sort of a psychological need. Gandhi spoke of the wisdom of ancient India. Nehru laid out the contours of one Indian nation by imagining a glorious past before the British Raj going back thousands of years. Israeli Zionists cling on to the ancient memory of original Israel from thousands of years ago. In that sense, Dr Safdar Mahmood may well be seen as just another nationalist trying to find an ancient logic for Pakistan’s existence but, as with other nationalists, it reveals much more of the insecurity and unease with the present than it does to justify it. Even in Pakistan an alternative vision of history was given by lawyer-politician Aitzaz Ahsan in the form of his much better argued Indus saga. Inevitably, all such exercises, however well-intentioned, detract from the actual facts about how Pakistan came into being. There are some inalterable truths about the independence struggle and the creation of Pakistan that nationalists on both sides — in India and Pakistan — have been fighting in vain. First and foremost, India was never one political unit till the British came and gave it this unity, with two possible exceptions. The first exception was the Pan-Indian rule of Asoka the Great of the Maurya Dynasty from 269 BC to 232 BC. The second exception was the Pan-Indian rule of Aurangzeb Alamgir, the Mughal emperor who briefly held almost the entire subcontinent. Both emperors were men of faith, Asoka of Buddhism and Aurangzeb of Sunni Islam, who were driven in part by religious zeal. Both empires rapidly declined immediately after the deaths of these two emperors. It was thus the British who gave India legal and constitutional unity in the sense of it being one legal realm. Even then it was essentially two different political systems: the British Indian provinces and the princely states that had accepted the suzerainty of the British Empire. How to bring about a federation of India that would be acceptable to all provinces and princely states was the question that vexed the rulers and leaders of the independence struggle greatly. Against this backdrop was the other big struggle of the time: how to find a constitutional formula that would satisfy the requirements of Indian diversity, in particular the two main religious communities of the subcontinent i.e. Hindus and Muslims. Jinnah — the eventual founder of Pakistan — spent a career trying to bridge the gap between Hindus and Muslims on the one hand and between his own all India vision with the requirements of his constituents i.e. the Muslims of India, who formed majorities on the north west and north east of the subcontinent. As a constitutional lawyer, he argued that on the basis of the majorities in the north west and north east extremities of India, Muslims were a nation, not a community, and therefore any constitution that was to be formed must be made by consensus between Hindus and Muslims, not by sheer majority. It was not a call for separation from the get go. More importantly, at no point did the Two Nation Theory — as it came to be known — ever postulate that the two nations could not live together. Indeed, the Lahore Resolution provided for the coexistence of the two nations in either state. Muhammad Sharif Toosi, writing under the pseudonym MRT, compiled a series of articles and speeches both by Jinnah and himself explaining the League’s theory of nationalism. The case for Muslim nationhood, as given by this book, which was published at Jinnah’s behest, is based entirely on the western theory of nationalism and not its rejection. It bases the claim on the existence of contiguous majority areas forming homelands of the said nation. Here, the minorities — non-Muslims — would be part of the overall Pakistani nation. Meanwhile, it boldly claimed that Muslims outside the homelands were to be minority communities in the Indian nation. It further provided for reciprocal safeguards for minorities and did not rule out some kind of broader overarching union or treaty organisation between India and Pakistan. Interestingly, one such article in this book stated poignantly that India had room for many mansions. Jinnah’s own article in the book spoke of the joint governance of their common motherland as the objective of the Muslims. The name of the book chosen by the author and Jinnah himself was The Problem of the Future Constitution of India. Had the Cabinet Mission Plan been allowed to work, there may well have emerged a Pakistan without partition i.e. a Pakistan within an overall Indian federation. In 1947, Jinnah and the Muslim League attempted to woo the Sikhs into Pakistan in order to keep Punjab united. This does not square off with the idea of primordial separatism that Dr Safdar Mahmood would like to imagine. Another outrageous claim that Dr Safdar Mahmood makes in his article is that Bengal was not included in the Lahore Resolution but only came into it after 1946. This is outright intellectual dishonesty. The Lahore Resolution stated: “That geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions, which should be constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority as in the north western and eastern zones of (British) India should be grouped to constitute ‘independent states’ in which the constituent units should be autonomous and sovereign.” The resolution was moved by A K Fazlul Haq of Bengal. However, Safdar Mahmood would have us believe that the Lahore Resolution in 1940 was only to satisfy the primordial desire of Sultan Muhammad Ghori to separate Punjab and Sindh from the rest of India as he expressed in 1192. There has to be some end to such a distortion of history. The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com