Three Muslim youth have been booked in Agra, UP for raising pro-Pakistan slogans during an Independence Day rally while waving the tiranga.

They were triple-seated on a scooty and driving through Gokulpura area when they raised the ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ (long live Pakistan) slogan. Unfortunately for them, their act was recorded on a mobile by a passerby who happens to belong to a Hindu organization.

He took the evidence to the Loha Mandi police station, where an FIR was registered against Faizan, Shadab, Mohazzam. Police is looking to arrest the accused. A news report tells us that such incidents of raising pro-Pakistan slogans are not new in Agra.

A few days back, a Muslim family had raised the Pakistan flag on top of their house in Kushinagar, UP after returning from Moharram celebrations. Such pro-Pakistan sentiments are observed in pockets of Muslim society all over the country, since our secular state has done nothing to eradicate the centers of separatist thought which played a key role in the Pakistan movement.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s photo hangs in AMU to this day. A few Deobandi and Barelvi maulanas openly batted for Pakistan, while the rest including likes of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who are ironically heralded as ‘patriots’ and ‘freedom fighters’, were pan-Islamists who only opposed partition as it would divide Muslim power in the sub-continent.

The hardline Muslim religious schools and organizations which dot India’s landscape, and operate unchecked to this day due to ‘minority privilege’ granted by our secular state, provide the intellectual and theological firepower for Islamic extremism in not just our part of the world, but across the whole world.

So ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ slogans by Indian Islamists are just a natural expression of that Muslim supremacism and its natural corollary, Muslim separatism. Such slogans and plans for Ghazwa-e-Hind are two sides of the same coin. The end goal is the destruction of ‘kufr’ i.e. non-Islamic religions and ideologies, and dominance of Islam.

Some Islamists also see no contradiction between waving the Indian tricolor/swearing allegiance to the Constitution or to the idea of territorial nationalism, and their ultimate goal of Islamic dominance. In their mind, the former are just outer symbols of nationhood, and they are free to carry out dawah and increase their demography within India. Unlike Hindus, they also have the clarity that flags and constitutions are man-made, impermanent entities.