Akhand Bharat, the Hindutwabadi ‘khayaal’
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
— “Kubla Khan” by S T Coleridge :
One also remembers Mirza Ghalib’s famous “Dil ke behlane ko Ghalib ye khayaal achchha hai” when he thinks about the BJP’s Akhand Bharat (Greater/Undivided India) map that has been placed as a mural in India’s new parliament building which was inaugurated by the prime minister Narendara Modi on May 28. India’s external affairs minister, S Jaishankar, who has become increasingly chauvinistic these days, just recently explained that the mural depicts Mauryan Emperor Ashoka’s kingdom as a reminder of India’s history with other cultural motifs.
The new parliament complex was supposed to be inaugurated by the president of India, but Narendra Modi is one leader who always wants to be in the limelight and he did not miss the opportunity to project himself on this nationally auspicious occasion. He ceremonially inaugurated the parliament building with heavy Hindu religious rituals in the presence of a large team of sadhus and gurus. For him and others, it was purely a religious event. The world of Ramayana and Mahabharata, the two Indian epics, has come back!
Since the Akhand Bharat mural was opened, it elicited angry responses from countries whose sovereignty has been erased in the map. Shahriar Alam, Bangladesh’s state minister for foreign affairs, after many days of inauguration, broke the silence and commented on the mural with his casual ‘it’s nothing to do with politics’ and ‘asked’ Delhi for an explanation about it. There was nothing serious in his voice. His naivety was just appalling.
But Bangladesh’s opposition political parties as well as decorated freedom fighters reacted sharply against the mural with the BNP secretary general, Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, terming it a ‘serious intervention’ in the independence of Bangladesh.
Nepali politicians on both sides of the political divide also protested the move. The Pakistan government condemned the mural calling it a manifestation of a ‘revisionist and expansionist’ mindset that seeks to subjugate the identity and culture of not only India’s neighbouring countries but also its own religious minorities. Pakistan flawlessly articulated the matter, and S Jaishankar knows it very well, and that is why he attacked Pakistan in a chauvinistic manner implying that there was none in the country to ‘understand’ the context of the mural.
One need not search for, through Google, what could be the reaction from the Afghan Emirate of the Taliban! It is imaginable.
Since the British left India, India calls itself a secular democracy, but it has always been a Hindu democracy even during the periods when Congress was in power, as American democracy is a Christian democracy or Turkish democracy is a Muslim democracy irrespective of the party that comes to power with their varying treatment for the minorities.
The problem is not there. But the idea of a Hindu state, Christian state or Islamic state is different. The problem begins when the minority populations in a country are denied equal participation in the affairs of the state and are forced to remain out of power. Those who are aware of India’s Partition history know that this representation question of Muslims in the government of the newly liberated India was the bone of contention between the Hindu and Muslim leaders that tragically split India, and later Pakistan was divided into two states with its Eastern wing becoming Bangladesh.
Whatever S Jaishankar said about the mural, the vision of Akhand Bharat as a Hindu state among the Hindutwabadis of India is real. The peripheries of Akhand Bharat as has been on the mural not just include the present Pakistan and Bangladesh, now two sovereign states, but also the other sovereign Afghanistan, the Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal and Bhutan in the region. The project is huge and romantically imperialistic, and of course, reminiscent of the ancient past.
In Akhand Bharat—a constitution of it has already been written—only the Hindus will have voting power, says Mohan Bhagwat, the present RSS chief, though Muslims, Christians and people belonging to other religions will be there as citizens. But how does the BJP and its ideological patron RSS, or similar nationalistic organisations such as Vishva Hindu Parishad, Hindu Mahasabha or Shiv Sena, want to materialise this huge project? There are two ways: by way of arms and conquest, or by way of reconciliation and negotiation, or both. Ram Madhav, the former national general secretary of the BJP and a member of the National Executive of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) once used that through “good will” of people of countries involved this could be made real. He specifically referred to Pakistan and Bangladesh.
If the Subcontinent’s recent history is anything to go by, neither way this Hindutwabadi project could advance itself. That this is impossible can be better illustrated by the example of Kashmir which has been divided into two with one belonging to Pakistan (POK as India calls it) and other ‘held’ by India. Using the word ‘held’ (‘Maqbuja’ Kashmir in Urdu) is appropriate because of the conditions of its annexation with India and the huge military presence India has built up there since then to contain the Kashmiri freedom fighters.
Kashmir is a thorn for India. On the one hand, it is a prestige issue if India allows Kashmiris freedom, on the other hand, it is an economic drag for its huge military spending, not to mention the continuous international pressure it faces to ensure the rights of Kashmiris with specific reference to the United Nations Security Council Resolution 47 that urges holding of a plebiscite so that Kashmiris can decide on their own fate regarding whether they want to live with India or live as a free and sovereign country. India is not willing to hold such a plebiscite for the obvious reason.
The Hindutwabadi dream of Akhand Bharat is a futuristic vision and in the centuries or millennia to come, Hindutwabadis want this vision to be fulfilled. But Is this historically realistic to think that way?
Let’s do some historical fact checking. After its advent around 1400 years ago, Islam took no time to arrive in India as it travelled to other parts of the globe and it is still going to newer shores. In India also, Hindus of all castes converted and are converting to this religion because of its all pervading truth and shining humanity. After 14 centuries, Islam has changed the religious demography of India permanently and it is still changing it. In the coming millenniums there is every possibility the meaning of the word ‘Hindu’ be completely shifted from its religious and cultural meanings to only the spatial one. The word may survive only as denoting geography as it was originally used by the Persians. Many even now take this word only in this original geographical sense, a person is a Hindu who lives in the plain beside the Indus River. Zakir Naik, a Muslim preacher whom the BJP government chased out of India because of his power to convert Hindus peaceably through public speeches, calls himself a Hindu. Many Hindus themselves do not use ‘Hinduism’ for their religion as it was coined by the British, the outsiders, instead they invented a new term “Sanatan Dharma” (the eternal religion) that ironically needs continuous changes in its rules and practices as Hindu societies grow rationally. Very positively, one such movement is going there in Bangladesh regarding inheritance rights of Hindu women.
Kubla Khan’s Xanadu does not exist in reality, it never did. Like Kubla’s, the Hindutwabadi’s vision of Akhand Bharat has no basis in the history of the past that was inhabited, nor its ferrywallahs rationally see the living present from where they imagine it. Since it only exists in the phantasmagorical vision, only the romantic heart that imagines it gets elated. But there is a difference between the poets and the Hindutwabadis: Ghalib calls his is khayaal and Coleridge calls his “vision in a dream” with the additional “A Fragment”. But the Hindutwabadis who take words of poets as infallible truths want to continue having the dream of Akhand Bharat with the mural as the stimulator as poets need such stimulators to dream.
(The writer is Associate Editor of
The New Nation).
