Sayeed Hasan Khan wrote recently of RSS founder Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966) and Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889 - 1940) being the original proponents of the separatist Two-Nation Theory. This seemed to me to be a contradiction in terms. Why would the leaders of a majority community advocate separatism, I wondered? When I mused on this with Mahboob Ahmad a young laureate of immense calibre, he immediately questioned my surprise and presented a parallel from colonial history. Whether in India or in Africa, the initial resistance from the local religious leaders against colonial invasion was predicated on the concept of the coloniser being ‘the other’. He also referred to Achille Mbembe’s work On the Postcolony. In this book, Mbembe argues that the postcolonial nation inherits the colonizer’s structures of otherization, whereby the native or the colonised is always less than a citizen. Indeed, in the works of Frantz Fanon and AimeCesaire, the native is always less than human to the invaders. When the lens is reversed, one realises that the native also always views the colonizer as something other than human, as somebody who is never the same as "us."

Sayeed Hasan Khan comes from the democratic liberal tradition, with an orientation towards the political left. This is evident in his autobiography Across the Seas: Incorrigible Drift. This tradition of democratic liberalism has faced a serious challenge over the past couple of decades. Thus, when the followers of this school of thought see the rise of radical Hindutva, fundamentalist Islamand Western Islamophobia, their sensibility is shocked at the futility of their idealism. The democratic liberal tradition has always questioned the Two-Nation Theory and its articulation in the Objectives Resolution in Pakistan. So, when the rise of BJP-led Hindutva seems to strengthen the narrative of two nations long attributed to Muslim separatist leaders, the historical underpinnings that shaped democratic liberal sensibilities come under serious question. The liberal left in Pakistan has for long looked at India as the beacon of Nehruvian secularism. With India touted as the "largest democracy" and a "secular" state, the liberal left is used to presenting Nehruvian idealism as the cornerstone of progress and as a role model for the Pakistani state. Unfortunately, in recent times, this role model of secular democracy is no longer viable. To the liberal democrats’ great consternation, the Two-Nation Theory does seem vindicated today in the case of India, with Savarkar and Hedgewar having been reinvented as its true leaders.

Ironically, today Pakistan appears to be a more accommodating state than India. The suppression of free expression might be a concern, but social media is still allowed to provide an alternate and flexible narrative, with space to manoeuvre. In India, the state of Kashmir over the past two months has been subjected to the worst communication paralysis, with all voices gagged. There are no reports on the loss of life and property from the recent earthquake in the region. Such a blackout of information is not possible in Pakistan, where the government faces media criticism every day. This is an important point to make in light ofthe liberal left’s past idealisation of Indian secularism.

I have written recently that Pakistan has never had its colonial moment. I wish to now add that so far Pakistan has not had its liberal moment either. I concede that the space available for free expression and thought is in no way ideal, but I must stress that the atmosphere is now more conducive to liberalism and more welcoming of dissent than it has been before. I know that the 1960s and the 1970s appear more idealistic in their nostalgic hues of liberal spaces and progressive thoughts, but one has to remember that those spaces and ideas were available to a very limited elite, whether financial or intellectual. Often the two coincided. With the advent of social media specially, a more democratically and less expensively accessible space has risen for the articulation of dissent and liberal thought. It is crucial that we acknowledge the relative safety accorded by these new spaces.

I am not discounting the widely reported attempts to curtail media independence and freedom of expression in Pakistan, but I want to reiterate that liberalism is in decline in India while in Pakistan it is currently in the ascendant. The state’s approval and support of two recent events - the Aurat March and the Climate March, as well as its quiet and slow but sure attempts to redress historical injustices in blasphemy cases are tremendous beacons of hope that an overly pessimistic liberal tradition fails to grasp. This is a sensitive topic, but one has to understand that comparing the missing persons issue (which the state is slowly rectifying) with the situation in Indian-occupied Kashmir is not an equation that works. The sheer scale of India’s regression of human rights and its declaration of intolerant religious extremism in the election of Yogi Adityanath and the re-election of Narendra Modi have led to a complete takeover of formerly liberal spaces like the Jawaharlal Nehru University. In Pakistan, while misplaced attempts to enforce religious and gender segregation on university campuses are highlighted on a daily basis, they also get socially rebuffed and resisted. If the issue of missing persons is one of a post-colonial society, the Indian actions in Kashmir are the signs of a blatant colonial invasion.

The purpose of this article is not to discredit the liberal struggle or to dismiss its concerns. In fact, the great point of concern for all liberal and free thinkers should be that this liberal moment, which I reiterate is belated in our context, does not seem likely to last very long. Perhaps the answer lies in an internal realignment of the liberal tradition. If such a self-critique is not initiated, it would result in the rejuvenation of fundamentalist tradition that is currently receding. To prevent this, the liberal tradition will have to find its anchors not in India or the America-led West, but in an indigenous milieu. Progressive liberals like Sayeed Hasan Khan will hopefully initiate this process.