This refers to the article: "Creator of Pakistan, a hero in India" (October 23). At a time when Sir Syed Ahmed Khan's 200th birth anniversary was being celebrated with 'tributes to a legend', last week, it was heartening to read Balbir Punj's article demolishing "the charade of secularism" in regard to the "father of Muslim separatism" and the "two-nation theory". Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was also the founder of the Aligarh Muslim University which was considered by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, liaquat Ali Khan and the Aga Khan as the nursery where the idea of "an independent sovereign nation of Pakistan".
With all the publicly available material on Sir Syed's perfidy in building a British-Muslim union against the majority community in the 19th century, cited by the writer, one has no doubt that talk of promoting Hindu-Muslim unity attributed to Syed Ahmed Khan by his admirers is just a façade. Another writer, Ashok Patnaik, in a review of BR Nanda's book Witness to Partition-A Memoir published by The Pioneer on 29 August, 2004, noted that "...a movement for Muslim separatism had been gathering strength since 1877, the year Syed Ahmed Khan founded the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College...Jinnah and other heavyweights of the Muslim league carried forward the(Syed Khan's) idea of a separate Muslim nation..."