“The First Partition of India: Muhammad bin Qasim, Not Jinnah”
India was not divided in 1947. That was only the closing act of a play that began in 712, when Muhammad bin Qasim’s armies stormed Sindh, defeated Raja Dahir, and planted the flag of Islam in Indian soil. The first mosque erected over a razed temple was the real Partition; Jinnah’s Pakistan was only its belated formalization.
India had endured invaders before—Greeks, Scythians, Kushans, Huns. They came with armies, not with theology. They left coins, bloodlines, dynasties, and eventually blended into the subcontinent. None denied the gods of India their legitimacy. Islam was different. It did not arrive to coexist, but to erase. Temples were desecrated not for gold but for doctrine. The conquered were not subjects alone, but dhimmis, second-class by divine decree.
That is why the familiar story of “centuries of coexistence” is a sentimental half-truth. Neighbors may have lived side by side, but the gods did not. A Hindu could revere a Sufi saint, but the Quran could never sanctify an idol. Akbar’s brief experiment in synthesis collapsed the moment Aurangzeb ascended the throne. The Mughal empire itself was Partition in rehearsal: one nation ruled, another endured.
The British did not invent the fracture; they exploited and hardened it. Their censuses, electorates, and patronage transformed the community into a political destiny. When Jinnah demanded Pakistan in 1940, he was not creating a new divide. He was cashing in on a millennium-old debt. To say Jinnah divided India is like blaming the final tremor for an earthquake whose fault line had been shifting since the fall of Sindh.
Partition was inevitable the moment one creed arrived, declaring all others false. The massacres of 1947 were not sudden eruptions of neighborly hatred, but the fulfillment of a logic introduced when the first temple fell to the sword of theology. Jinnah may have flown the green flag in Karachi, but Qasim planted it on the banks of the Indus. The rest is commentary.
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