The address delivered by PML-N President Mian Nawaz Sharif at SAFMA Lahore on Saturday on the theme of "Let us write a new story" is as revealing of his longing for normalising relations with India, as it shows a shocking disregard of the rationale for the very creation of Pakistan. And all this to build bridges of trade with India He surprisingly went out of his way virtually accepting the Hindu logic against the need for an independent state for the Muslims of India so vigorously and convincingly argued by the Quaid-i-Azam. If Muslims and Hindus had the same God to worship, the same culture and the same language, as he maintained, what was all that fuss for a separate homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent? The attributes of the Hindu deities do not have a shred of resemblance with those of Allah Almighty, and the Hindu gods are, perhaps, as numerous as in Greek mythology, as against the Muslims One and only One Who has no equal. Those Muslims in Pakistan, who have lived side by with the Hindus before partition or lived elsewhere in close proximity to them, would vouch for the huge cultural variations between the two communities, in their style of living, habits, dress and eating preferences. Mian Nawaz had it all wrong when he talked of the same food Muslims and Hindus eat. Some overlapping in these matters is bound to occur between neighbours, but that also is hardly visible in the two communities. History bears evidence that, most probably, the first inkling that prescient Muslims had of the difficulties the community would have in making a common cause with Hindus when in the mid 19th century, the Hindu leadership began demanding that Hindi, in Deonagri script, should replace Urdu. In the light of this, it is hard to deny that a mindset of separate ways existed among the Hindus as far as back as that. Interestingly, while in one breath Mian Nawaz went out of his way to agree to the Hindu view on the basic rationale for Pakistan, on the other, at another function, he wanted to take Quaids Pakistan to glorious heights and bring back the real face of Pakistan, as the Quaid-i-Azam conceived, revealing a disconnect in his ideas. While Musharrafs proposal to set aside the UN resolutions on Kashmir continues to receive the nations opprobrium, the PML-N President has come up with a similar idea: Both Pakistan and India should abandon their traditional stand. Though the outlines of his proposal are not yet known, it is strange that he should be ready to exchange with India the birthright of the people of Kashmir with normalisation of relations with it. That hundreds of thousands of lives the beleaguered Kashmiris have laid down in their struggle to get freedom from the stranglehold of the cruel Indian occupation seem to have no value for him. The Indians themselves moved and accepted the UN resolutions granting them the UN-sponsored vote in a free and fair plebiscite to decide about their future. In this principled stand also lies the lasting solution of the water dispute, and it must not be changed under any circumstances whatsoever.