Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘New Normal’ heralds a new age. It marks the zenith of the decolonisation of the Indian mind that he set in motion, and reverses a thousand–year-old norm of invasions from the Northwest by soldiers of Islam. From Mahmud of Ghazni to the terrorists in Pahalgam, there has been a long series of violence inflicted on India. We fought these invaders, but always in defence—a paradigm of defeatism that achieved little more than temporary respite.
The invaders kept returning, and because of our policy of defence, we lost our freedom for centuries. This was the cost of not taking the battle to the enemy. Then came Modi. He turned the paradigm of defeatism on its head. With Operation Sindoor, he propounded the doctrine of the New Normal. The historical trend of a thousand years has been reversed. Modi has broken the mental barrier that made it impossible for India to take the battle to the heart of the enemy.
Recall the helplessness that seized us after the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, when India couldn’t even think of responding in kind. It was feared that a retaliation would dent the ruling coalition’s vote bank. We were hostages to the devils of our political narratives. No longer.
We must be clear that India’s war on terror is actually a war against an ideology. We must understand what Pakistan embodies.
Whatever its legal and juristic status, Pakistan in reality symbolises the lingering presence of Muslim political power in India. It keeps alive the memory of the Islamic invasions that began in 712 CE, when Muhammad bin Qasim invaded Sindh. It names its missiles Ghaznavi and Ghori, after invaders of India. Its prime minister calls his fighter pilots Shaheen (raptor), the bird whose predatory spirit poet Allama Iqbal wanted to breathe into the Muslim body.
The idea of Pakistan?
There is no real “idea” of Pakistan. The nation is not the embodiment of an idea, but the expression of an emotion—hatred for Hindus.
It’s the reason the leaders of the Pakistan movement couldn’t clearly define what kind of nation they wanted to build. To this day, Pakistan remains caught in an identity crisis. This is because Pakistan originated from a subconscious urge rather than a well-conceived thought. Its leaders were not inspired by a higher ideal; they were driven by an instinct — primal, primaeval, primitive. They neither had the intellectual ability to conceptualise their demand nor the integrity to admit that the actual reason behind it was so impolitic, it was best left unsaid.
Thus, it fell upon the critics of the Pakistan movement to make sense of it. BR Ambedkar wrote Pakistan or the Partition of India (1945), and Rajendra Prasad wrote India Divided (1946), both bulky treatises. Nehru dwelled upon Pakistan’s creation in The Discovery of India (1946). Patel’s writings on the subject have been compiled into a full–length book. Maulana Azad’s essays, speeches, and interviews would fill a substantial volume. And it was C Rajagopalachari’s formula that became the “mutilated and moth–eaten Pakistan”.
On the Indian side, a huge corpus of literature was produced by erudite, thoughtful, and evolved leaders. On the Pakistani side, there was Jinnah and his cohort, who wouldn’t utter a word explaining their vision. Perhaps they knew their constituency instinctively understood what they really stood for.
“There is not an inch of the soil of India which our fathers did not once purchase with their blood. We cannot be false to the blood of our fathers. India, the whole of it, is therefore our heritage and it must be reconquered for Islam,” wrote FK Khan Durrani in The Meaning of Pakistan (1944).
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Spanish Paranoia of the Muslim elite
Pakistan is not a state in the conventional sense, certainly not in the way India is. It is to India what Granada was to the Spanish Reconquista—the last post of Islamic retreat. There is a difference, though. In Spain, Muslim rule was entirely foreign; very few native Spaniards had converted to Islam. So when the Nasrid dynasty fell, Muslims in Spain had to leave, much like how the British left India after their rule ended.
Muslim rule began in Spain in 711 CE, around the same time as it did in India. It ended with ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’ and the fall of Granada in 1492. In India, however, a second phase of Muslim rule began in 1526 with Babur’s victory over Ibrahim Lodi at the First Battle of Panipat. And when that rule finally ended in 1857, there was no question of Muslims leaving. Not because the British were still present, but because the polytheistic Hindus were different from the monotheistic Christians. Polytheism is pluralistic. It’s about tolerance, accommodation, and coexistence. Islam could live in peace with Hinduism — but only if it could first be at peace with itself.
The material reason Islam didn’t meet the Spanish fate in India was simple: a large number of the Indian population—about one-third—had converted to Islam. In the northwestern and eastern regions, Muslims formed a majority and were distributed across the subcontinent.
The Muslim ruling class, or Ashraf—descendants of foreign conquerors—successfully got the native converts on their side, making them their foot soldiers and cannon fodder. With such a large support base, the Ashraf could still hope to be co-rulers, or have a separate state of their own.
Garrison state
But the Ashraf were too proud of their foreign lineage to become part of a nation with their former subjects. So, the Two-Nation Theory was posited to make two states out of one country. But the matter did not end there. Pakistan was a pause, not a full stop. The dynamics of Islam in India wouldn’t allow peaceful coexistence between two nation states in one country.
Donald Trump’s use of the phrase “a thousand years” in the context of Kashmir may be politically incorrect, but it captures the truth. Earlier, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had used a similar expression.
India was Islam’s last frontier, and even then, it had been largely a story of failure. Despite centuries of Muslim rule, two–thirds of it remained Hindu. To restore Muslim rule, the whole country had to be converted, which wasn’t possible without reconquest. A base was needed to relaunch this campaign.
Pakistan is that base—the rallying point of a retreating Islam and the military base for reconquest. It needed an ideology. Ghazwa-e-Hind provides precisely that.
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Decoding Ghazwa-e-Hind
Ghazwa-e-Hind is a purported prediction of Prophet Muhammad, according to which India was going to be conquered for Islam. It is Pakistan’s not-so-hidden ideology, which it has been putting in action through terrorist organisations such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba.
As an ideology, Ghazwa-e-Hind may be of relatively recent provenance, but the term itself appears in Sunan an-Nasa’i, one of the Sihah al-Sitta (the six authoritative Hadees books). “The Messenger of Allah said: ‘There are two groups of my Ummah whom Allah will free from the Fire: The group that invades India, and the group that will be with ‘Isa bin Maryam’,” reads entry 3175 in Sunan an-Nasa’i, in Kitab al-Jihad, subchapter Ghazwat-ul Hind.
The problem with this Hadees is manifold. According to the Islamic science of Isnad (the study of transmission chains to prove authenticity), this narration is considered Za’eef (weak)—a euphemism for fabrication.
The main method for assessing the authenticity of a Hadees is Asma-ur–Rijal, the study of biographical details of its narrators. The process is similar to Lower Criticism in Biblical studies, which involves comparing manuscripts for any mistakes or anomalies. On the other hand, Higher Criticism, which uses historical context and linguistic analysis to evaluate texts, has not yet been applied in Hadees studies. If it were, the anachronistic use of the term ‘Ghazwa’ would expose the spuriousness of this Hadees.
In classical Arabic, the term ‘Ghazwa’, from the verb ‘Ghaza’, referred to the traditional Arabian practice of raiding and plundering enemy caravans. However, in Islamic literature, ‘Ghazwa’ has a narrower, highly specific meaning. It denotes military campaigns personally led by the Prophet Muhammad. Other campaigns, commanded by his companions, are known as Saraya (singular: Sariyya). The meaning and usage of both ‘Ghazwa’ and ‘Sariyya’ have been limited to the Prophet’s lifetime. After his death, there has been neither a Ghazwa nor a Sariyya, even though Islamic wars (jihad) continued unabated.
Prophet Muhammad never led an expedition to India, so there was no Ghazwa-e-Hind. He also didn’t send any army to the subcontinent, so there was no Sariyya either. Indeed, India was invaded and conquered by various Muslim dynasties, but those were acts of naked aggression and despoliation. There is no justification for involving the Prophet in this wrong.
There never was a Ghazwa-e-Hind. There never will be.
Prophet Muhammad and India
One may ask, why would Prophet Muhammad want an invasion of India, which was too distant to cause the mildest of provocations? If he visualised an invasion simply because Indians followed their own religion, what does that suggest about the Prophet and the religion he founded? Are those who believe in this Hadees ready to deal with these inevitable implications?
Before Ghazwa-e-Hind was appropriated as an ideological tool by jihadists, the most famous narration about India in the Prophetic tradition speaks of the Prophet sensing a “cool breeze” from the land of India on his skin. For a desert–dweller living under the scorching sun, there could be no greater comfort than the cool breeze, and there could be no higher praise for a land than the metaphor that the Prophet used for India. Iqbal immortalised it in his poetry:
“Mir-e-Arab ko aayi thandi hawa jahan se
Mera watan wahi hai, mera watan wahi hai”
(From where the cool breeze reached the Lord of Arabia,
That is my homeland, that is my homeland)
The Arabs admired India for its high culture. Aristocratic Arab women were often named “Hind”, including Hind bint Utba, mother of Mu’awiya I, who founded the Umayyad Caliphate, Islam’s first dynasty. The finest swords in Arabia were called Muhannad—literally ‘made in India’. The subcontinent was their source of higher knowledge and the best quality of goods. No wonder the Islamic Golden Age owed as much to Indian science and mathematics as to Greek philosophy. Even Arabic numerals are referred to by the Arabs themselves as ‘Hindsa’—“from Hind”.
There was no plausible reason for Prophet Muhammad to view India with hostility. If anything, he looked at it with admiration and fondness.
Those who fabricated the Hadees about the so–called Ghazwa-e–Hind, and those who played it up to conjure an anti–India ideology, have sinned against humanity and civilisation. Ghazwa-e–Hind is a falsehood—the false ideology of a false political project, built on a false Hadees.
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It’s not about Kashmir
Does anyone believe that if Kashmir were to be given to Pakistan, all would be well between the two countries? Pakistan’s hostility toward India is not because of geopolitical issues or border disputes. It’s quintessentially religious antagonism, driven by Islamic hostility toward Hinduism’s idol worship and polytheism.
Pakistan’s very raison d’être is anti–Hinduism. Peaceful coexistence with India goes against its foundational ideology. To survive, it has to remain in a perpetual state of war against Hindu-majority India. But if it persists with this war, it wouldn’t survive for long. It’s a Catch–22 situation.
Islam’s New Normal
For Pakistan to live in peace with India, it will have to reimagine its foundational ideology of religious antagonism. And for that to happen, Islam has to become tolerant of other faiths. Most importantly, it has to switch from Ghazwa-e-Hind to “Mir-e-Arab ko aayi thandi hawa jahan se”. Islam needs its own New Normal.
Ibn Khaldun Bharati is a student of Islam, and looks at Islamic history from an Indian perspective. He tweets @IbnKhaldunIndic. Views are personal.
Editor’s note: We know the writer well and only allow pseudonyms when we do so.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
A great article full of truths! The idea behind Pakistan’s formation is that they are “PAK” or clean-hearted”, hence the name Pakistan. So yes the writer is perfectly right that Pakistan is created with the base thinking of converting the all the dirty-minded polytheist Hindus to Muslims. That is a suicidal idealism really. But it is to be noted that this idealism has failed as per historical facts. By God’s grace Sikhism started in the 15th century whose warriors were enough to defeat the Muslim hegemony through Ranjit Singh and there was no need for Hindus to even fight. After independence, there are four full-fledged wars between India and Pakistan if the localized war 1999 Kargil war is not considered. The number of days for the wars of 1948, 1965, 1971 and 2025 to end is 435, 49, 13, and 4 respectively. So probably the any next war will end in a matter of hours probably. And in almost all wars it ended with Pakistan loosing much more than what India lost. And so in the next war Pakistan probably will cease to exist. In any case, Hinduism being polytheistic is tolerant enough to live side by side with Muslims. Muslims have to learn that.
That Pakistan needs to shed its antagonistic attitude towards India is unquestionable. But looking at how the article has forgotten the fact that, as a modern nation, we have fought Pakistan successfully in the past and tries to project it as if we have have done so only now, shows that the writer is from the right wing camp. The pseudonym is such a give away too
Dear Ibn Khaldun Bharati,
Another interesting article, but forget Pakistan, let us try to focus on the Indian Muslims at home. Yes, the Islamic religion in both India and Pakistan needs reformation. Before we even talk about Pakistan, we need to focus on Indian Muslims. Islam hates polytheism, there is no other way to put it. I remember reading parts of the Koran (many, many years ago) and was appalled that it does not like polytheists, considers its version of “Abrahamism” to be the “purest” (despite the fact that Judaism and Christianity predate Islam by many, many years, centuries even). All religions are imperfect, let me include Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and its allied religions and of course, Islam. Unlike Islam, other religions/sects/faiths are learning to adopt themselves to the modern world and are even acknowledging their mistakes. Any argument, even if it is to the point and non-offensive against Islam, would result in death threats or worse still, heads rolling. Yes, Ghazwa-e-Hind does not appear in the Koran, but that did not stop the Mughals from doing their very best (or worst) from trying to destroy Hinduism as much as possible. How many Muslims are even talking about these problematic verses with their kids, family and relatives? Can we have a decent argument about it and survive to tell it? While one can have a loud and aggressive and even an abusive discussion about problematic verses in the Holy books of any other religion, Islam does not even allow even a decent and nuanced discussion about the problematic verses in the Koran. Don’t get me wrong, your article is up to the mark and makes valid points, but these points would not matter to any Muslim who thinks that polytheists should be killed. Once again, a well written article.
A brilliant article addressing the root cause
Interesting read with some errors, if I may. As the author has deduced correctly, Pakistan was a country based on ideas or ideals that had no positive intent. Also, the inability to think logically has plagued the community from the start.
Spain too had massive conversions. The Christian push back led to reconversions on a grand scale. Also, Muslim hegemony in India effectively ended with death of Aurangzeb in 1707. The Mughals had no real authority after that and it all ended in a rush in 1857. Hindu Kingdoms fought back vigorously right from 711 CE. In fact in 740 CE Arab armies from Damascus were decimated leading to the collapse of the Ummayud caliphate.
Why should a nation be based on differences and hate? Can’t we do better? These are questions all of us should mull over.
The elephant in the room is, of course, can such an Islam even exist, given everything the Holy Book has to say about polytheists and idolators?
Pakistani Punjabis are fallen and converted kshatriya, who are now hating their own brethren who still follow their ancestral religion. We need a Parashuram, to defeat this evil. The Pauranic Parashuram did exactly the same thing.