fading illusion called Akhand Bharat

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A fading illusion called Akhand Bharat(Undivided India)

 

R V Pandit

Posted online: Thursday, July 07, 2005 at 0956 hours IST

Updated: Thursday, July 07, 2005 at 1543 hours IST

 

India Who can tell what Jinnah would have done, had he lived for a

few years more, to give substance to what he declared as the national

purpose in the Constituent Assembly? Most certainly, he would have

shaped the country as he had wanted, and more importantly, he could.

 

Sadly, for most years of its existence, the successive grabbers of

power in Pakistan have dictated that Pakistanis live not by what the

Quaid-e-Azam prescribed as a way of life for his people but by

conduct that Jinnah would have found reprehensible; sometimes it

appears that the only connection between the founder of Pakistan and

those who ruled or rule after him is the Jinnah photo they

prominently display everywhere for a variety of self-serving ends.

The Pakistan of today bears no semblance to the Pakistan its founder

fervently wanted his State to be. But that only means a temporary

distortion, a dislocation: history verily encompasses centuries, not

just decades. The Muslims of Pakistan, in a decade or two, even

earlier, will break out of the quagmire they are stuck in; look at

what is happening in Iran, officially a State ruled by the clerics.

 

That founding father's words are relevant for Pakistan today, even

more so, for they succinctly diagnosed in his prescription the

essentials of what ailed his people, and what he was, precisely and

accurately, apprehensive about. Anyone carefully studying the Quaid-E-

Azam's specific words against what is most ailing Pakistan all these

decades on an increasingly alarming scale will realise how imperative

it is for the Pakistanis to get back to their founder's prescribed

path as a way of life for his people. For the path of cooperation, of

forgetting the past, burying the hatchet, and the categorical

implication of equality and secularism he charted in that historic

speech to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan is the only path that

will lead to Pakistan's happiness and prosperity.

 

Fifty-five years later, and after 9/11, the wise and the liberal in

much of the Muslim world are prescribing the same Jinnah-charted path

for lifting their respective countries out of incendiary pits. And

the rest of the world is waiting, and watching. India cannot, and

must not be indifferent. Indeed, India must do all it can to make

Pakistan secure, secular, happy and prosperous. Despite the past, we

also must bury the hatchet. Akhand Bharat is an illusion we must

discard.

There are lessons from our own past we can hardly ignore: for more

than a thousand years, from the 8th Century invasion of our

motherland by a few thousand marauders from Iraq to Clive's conquest

of the Moghuls in 1765, we allowed the invaders to defile us in every

manner, forcibly converting millions to Islam. Come Clive, and a few

thousand Europeans fought and vanquished the earlier invaders and

established a British empire all across India, including what is

today Pakistan and Bangladesh. At no time during these invasions did

the Hindus deploy even a fraction of our vast numbers to thwart the

invaders or seriously fight the occupiers. So let us not fool

ourselves by undoing what we have merrily allowed to happen — the

mass conversions to Islam, and as a long-term consequence of that

indifference, the Partition. Ignoring this past, or blaming

Jawaharlal Nehru for all our post-WW II ills is to expose the trait

we have of abdicating what responsible citizenship entails.

 

A prosperous Pakistan will not need theocracy as a prop. A secular

Pakistan will not need the jehadis. And a Pakistan where religion is

not the business of the State, as Jinnah vowed, will make the land

fertile for democracy. A secular, democratic Pakistan will make

Jinnah's dream of happiness and prosperity for the people of Pakistan

a distinct and speedy reality. Pakistanis deserve to be lifted out of

the devastation and frustration of a virtually failed State. And

America, Japan, China, UK, and Western Europe must help in this

effort, at the least to atone for their Cold War era intrigues

against India, for which the propping up of desperate, un-elected

regimes in Pakistan was a handy instrument — the State and the people

of Pakistan alone suffering the long-term consequences of the Anglo-

American intrigue.

 

The Pakistani sheltering of Taliban was the unavoidable burden of

theocracy; their engineering of terrorism against India a symptom of

the frustrated State's failed attempts to slow down secular and

democratic India despite all the props the American and the Chinese

had proffered in the past, and the vanity of its supercilious army.

The Kargil adventure of Musharraf was the most recent example of how

the Armed Forces justify their lust for power, and end up eating

crow. Yet, in a possible new irony of history, Musharraf may just be

the General who will pack the troops back to the barracks, and will

come to terms with India — for a change, the Americans have told him

some home truths, but they need to do more, for their own good also.

In that event, Advani's visit to Pakistan, and what he did and said

there will go a long way in putting an end to the nearly six-decade

long destructive animosity between the two countries.

 

For India, there is more to the softer, wiser public face of L K

Advani. India desperately needs and deserves a distinct two-party

political system for our democracy to mature evenly, and most

certainly the BJP is that second party. Shyama Prasad Mukherji and

Deen Dayal Upadhayaya built it. Atal Behari Vajpayee and Advani

nurtured it to the national level in a matter of years. For the

present and near future however, only Advani has the stamina and

national stature to groom the party for the next general elections,

which will be very crucial for the country because of the divisive

profile and the dynastic inheritance of the Congress Party's present

keeper. A modernising India needs also to shed feudal impositions.

 

(To be concluded).

 

The writer can be reached at rvp

http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=50174