''A three-member team of archaeological experts left here Saturday for India to search for idols of Hindu deities to be installed in restored temples in Pakistan.'' Believe it? Pakistan Government officials looking for Hindu idols from India for temples in Pakistan? Yes, this is what the media in Pakistan reported ten days back on January 20. The Pakistan team in search of Hindu idols are currently in India and will be here till January 31. How come this U-turn is taking place in Pakistan?

Recall this story of where to where in the last 60 years. Any keen student of true history will know that the seed of religious Islam inhered in the birth of Pakistan but that did not determine its character. This was because, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, himself was not a religious Muslim. If anything he was irreligious, if not anti-religious. Most of the religious Muslims, including Abul Kalam Azad, had opposed the partition. It was Jinnah's political articulation of Islamic identity and the colonial British anxious to leave India truncated that created Pakistan.

But theocratic Islam which incubated in the political Islamic doctrine began unfolding after partition. The anti-Indian mindset of early Pakistan polity turned both anti-Hindu and pro-Islamic fanaticism. Successive military defeats compelled the Pakistan army to look to Koranic warfare to conscript its soldiers to target India. Later the General Zia rule in Pakistan completed the process of Islamising Pakistan's governance. Under Tabligi Islamic influence which asks Muslims to give up their pre-Islamic customs, the Barelvi Islamic practices which had accommodated local pre-Islamic customs declined. The exclusive Islam of Deoband that rejected all local customs of the Muslims and insisted on pure Islamic character for the Muslims filled its place. This set the stage for the emergence of a new Pakistan that was more Arabic than Indian in its umbilical ties. Later, with the Afghanistan war turning into the first modern Jihad, Taliban became the new icon in the curriculum of the emerging extremist Islam. The result was that Pakistan was slowly becoming almost an all-Muslim state.

In this whole process lasting half a century, the Hindu population in Pakistan which was around 11 percent before partition, dwarfed to less than one percent. By the turn of the 21st century, Pakistan had all but turned back to become qualitatively a medieval Islamic regime. A low cost war by terror against India was openly propagated, manned and funded by Pakistan's religious establishment with political and executive support. The whole world, particularly the US, turned a blind eye to an India that bled by fanatical Islamic terror operating from across the borders.

All this started to change one day. The day on which the Islamic terror struck at the US. The US forthwith threatened General Musharraf to be its ally or, in default, its enemy. The General succumbed. But the US demand could not be met by a fanatic Pakistan with theocratic drift. This seems to have set off a process of introspection and moderation in Pakistan, partly under pressure and partly by design. Properly guided, it has the potential to undo the perversions of Pakistan under Zia.

In Pakistan's politics and media, there are now noises of moderation and conciliation which was unthinkable a decade ago. Last year the Pakistan Government had invited L.K. Advani, the Leader of Opposition in India, to lay the foundation stone for a large Hindu temple complex at Katasraj. What is Katasraj? That is where, the Hindus believe, the Pandavas spent 12 years of their hiding and where the Yakshaprasna took place. The Pakistan Government has budgeted Rs 100 million for the Katasraj temple project, which may top a billion rupees, with the Indian Government also promising to chip in. Chaudhary Shujat Hussain, the head of the ruling party of Pakistan and the Chief Minister of Punjab, has sent the team of archaeologists that is now in India looking for Hindu idols.

It is not just that the Pakistan Government is constructing the Katasraj temple. General Musharraf went to Shiva temple in Karachi last November and declared that ''historical places of all religions including that of Hinduism are the integral part of Pakistan's cultural and geographical history''. More, Shivratri worship is being planned in Katasraj on coming February 7! These words and acts are of course symbolic. But more substantive is the open calls in the media asking the Muslims in India and Pakistan to disown their Persian-Turk-Mogul past to achieve peace in future.

Pleading with the Muslims to recognise horrors of the Persian-Turk-Mogul invasion and rule over Hindus, Irfan Hussain, a leading columnist writing in the ''Daily Mail'', says that ''a study and understanding of the past will promote better understanding between the two communities''. He adds ''the vast majority of Muslims in the subcontinent have more Hindu blood in their veins than there is Arab, Afghan, Turkish or Persian blood''. While recalling the past, he asks the ''Hindus grasp the central fact that their Muslim neighbours cannot now be held responsible for the persecution of their ancestors'' and tells the ''Muslims'' that ''they are not the political heirs of the emperors Babar and Akbar''.

The question is whether the seculars in India ask the Muslims to disown Babar and Akbar even as they tell the Hindus not to hold the present day Muslims responsible for the wrongs of the Turk-Mogul past. In short, will the seculars here resonate with the new tunes heard from Pakistan?

Courtesy: www.newindpress.com, January 30, 2007