AN important outcome of the path-breaking talks between the national security advisers of India and Pakistan on Tuesday was their acknowledgement that a daunting problem they both face was rooted in their respective social fault lines and not necessarily in the perverse streak, common among intelligence agencies the world over, to harm each other.

In a parallel lane, South Asia`s two veteran journalists — Pakistan`s Asif Noorani and India`s Kuldip Nayar — imply in their new book that many of these social fault lines have been with us since 1947 though I would put the date back to 1526. In other words, the NSAs — India`s M.K. Narayanan and Pakistan`s Mahmud Ali Durrani, who are evidently close and trusting friends — may need to accept history as an arch-villain in their equation which stands in the way of better ties between the two countries.

Nayar and Noorani in their book, Tales of Two Cities — so called since they were both forced to migrate from their homes to a strange new city in a new country — cast a keen eye on the fault lines that were exacerbated by a blood-soaked freedom that India and Pakistan had got. Nayar was 24 years old when his idyllic family, including a doctor father who was popular among the city`s Hindus who were his patients, was ejected from their luxurious home in Sialkot.

His vivid description of the nightmarish journey to Delhi is an unusual example of detail and irony by a journalist who witnessed the carnage. Noorani was only five years old at Partition. He sailed with his mother from Bombay, where he lived, to Karachi in September 1950 aboard SS Sabarmati. He did not seem to have the social or political compulsions that other migrants to Pakistan or India had faced. His life thus cocooned in innocence, he could in fact find the liberty to quiz a Hindu classmate whether he was a Shia or a Sunni. Nayar`s trauma rankles even today, which is why he burst into tears when he visited Muslim ghettos in Gujarat after the 2002 communal frenzy.

India`s security think tank would better understand the shaping of the home-grown terrorism they are grappling with by leafing through a few blood-curdling pages from Nayar`s account. They have relevance even today. Nayar describes a Muslim saint`s shrine next to his Sialkot house where the family routinely paid obeisance. When Partition happened, a bunch of Muslim zealots from east Punjab, not knowing that the Nayar family had the highest respect for the pir, demanded right of passage to the shrine through their backyard. They got the permission with such shocking ease that it became a bad investment for the trouble-mongers to bother to return to the shrine ever again. Does that hold lessons about how to defuse a potentially life-threatening crisis?

Nayar, who was forced by circumstances to travel alone with an Indian army major, writes “As the jeep drove along the Grand Trunk Road, I saw dead bodies on both sides, the smouldering remains of burnt vehicles and pieces of luggage strewn all over. More hideous was the sight of children impaled on swords or spears or women and men cut to pieces. They bore testimony to the hell that the people on both sides had gone through. And all in the name of religion which was supposed to represent values.” So what has changed in 60 years?

“We had killed one million of one another and uprooted twenty million. Temples, mosques and gurudwaras had been demolished in hundreds. The subcontinent`s composite culture and pluralistic society going back hundreds of years lay in tatters.” Is Nayar giving us a glimpse of history or is he describing our future? A Muslim childhood friend had got him to emboss a star and crescent on his (Nayar`s) arm. The symbol of Muslims, if it is only that, got Nayar nearly lynched by a group of Sikhs who dragged him out from the train at Amritsar.

A Manto-like scene ensued. Nayar survived then, but would he have survived today? If the pots of communalism are kept boiling, as they are in India today, how long would it be before the seething bad blood gets harnessed to a new technology of revenge and mayhem? We are seeing early signs of the bad omen. Mr Narayanan told Mr Durrani that it was time to look at our own domestic social fault lines for clues to the challenges of a new and more intractable genre of terrorism. They should make Kuldip Nayar and Asif Noorani their consultants.

But 1947 has little or no relevance for a more serious conflagration threatening to engulf the region. I am inclined to look at the turmoil in Afghanistan and its impact on both as rooted in 1526 if not earlier. That year the First Battle of Panipat was fought just north of Delhi between Mughal adventurer Babar and Delhi`s Pathan ruler Ibrahim Lodhi. To my mind the Uzbeks and the Tajiks of Afghanistan`s recent Northern Alliance, and Kabul`s current dominant rulers, form the corner once represented by Babar, who became India`s first Mughal emperor after winning at Panipat.

Incidentally, that battle`s verdict was influenced by a superior technological prowess that came in the form of gunpowder and cannons, which Babar had introduced for the first time in Indian warfare. The challengers, the still ill-equipped but tenacious Pashtuns, seem to closely represent the forces that once belonged to the former fellow Pathan ruler of Delhi.

The venue of the still continuing stand-off between two of South Asia`s most fiercely unrelenting Muslim groups has shifted from Panipat to the regions around an artificially created Durand Line but much of its energy seems to still derive from the historically ingrained fault lines seen in 1526. Add to this the element of the colonial Great Game in a new, more lacerating avatar, predicated on a bizarre if elusive hunt for a few subversives, and we can grasp the genesis of the ferocious confrontation that the NSAs seem to have agreed to face jointly.

The writer is Dawn`s correspondent in Delhi.

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