Why Ram Madhav’s Akhand Bharat is more fiction than fact?

Ram Madhav BJP general secretary on lien from RSS, has said the RSS believes that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh will one day reunite again not by war but through “popular goodwill”, comments that were made public on the night Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a surprise stopover in Lahore for a meeting with Nawaz Sharif.”The Rashtriya Swayamsevak SanghRSS) still believes that one day these parts, which have for historical reasons separated only 60 years ago, will again, through popular goodwill, come together and Akhand Bharat will be created,” he told Al Jazeera, the Doha-based channel.The BJP general secretary said, “As an RSS member, I also hold on to that view.”

Madhav, an RSS pracharak himself, added that India is “a land where a particular way of life, a particular culture or civilisation, is practised.”. “We call it Hindu – do you have any objection? India has one culture. We are one culture, one people, one nation,” he told the channel. Madhav also referred to the respective unifications of Germany and Vietnam and asked rhetorically if the two could unite, why not India?

Broken down and disaggregated, Madhav’s assertions are sheer rhetorical extravagance. They may sound good to RSS and VHP activists, but they flounder on the rocks of reality, so to speak. The reasons are both prosaic and profound. Prosaically, ‘Akhand Bharat’ is a pipe dream and never really existed except in the imagination of a few. Yes, there was historical India. But historical India was more or less a colonial construct-be it the Mughal or the British variety-which was given shape by expansion and consolidation of various Imperiums. Prior to these, India was a congerie of small Kingdoms which were in constant competition and rivalry with each other. Then there is Modern India- an entity or a nation state that emerged from anti-colonial struggles and was kind of reified by the partition of the subcontinent. Modern India is a concatenation of different religions and ethnicities; holding together these differences has indeed been the feat of modern India. But this is not the only identity of Modern India. This India drew also its ideational structure by defining itself against Pakistan. The same holds true for Pakistan.

Cut down to the bone, the  ‘Othering’ of India and Pakistan is premised on religion. That is to say, in essence the dispute between India and Pakistan is over religion; it’s a Hindu-Muslim dispute. The gulf between the two is so large that this Hindu-Muslim rivalry became the predicate for partition of historical India.   History demonstrates that religious differences are the most recalcitrant ones; while different religions may co-exist or devise a modus Vivendi for this co-existence , but one religion cannot be the solvent of another. Then there is the question of different ethnicities. The co-existence or even conjoining ethnicities do not pose an insuperable problem. A judiciously crafted federalism overlaid by ‘protection of ethnicities’ and an expansive nationalism can obviate the problem of different ethnicities in a polity. Now, returning to Madhav’s assertions, it would appear that the BJP’s General Secretary is guilty of reductionism- a crude variant which attempts to collapse history, relgion, ethnicity in the vortex of ideology.

Insofar Madhav’s parallel with the European Union (or even Vietman) is concerned, the European experience cannot be really replicated in South Asia- precisely because of religion and the huge difference that undergirds South Asia. Germany and Western Europe shared a common culture and outlook. The same holds true for Vietnam. This became the premise for a deeper Union or reunion. No such common outlook or culture exists in South Asia. Moreover, the European Union has not meant the entire dissolution of state sovereignty; it still is an experiment which was almost brought to an end by the possibility of a ‘Grexit’. States are states that guard their sovereignty and independence jealously. Modern day war emanated largely from alleged or real infringement of sovereignty by aggressor or revanchist states.

Madhav’s assertions then are an instance of a hyperactive imagination fed by ideology. Prudence would suggest that Madhav focus on safeguarding and promoting the modern day Idea of India rather than day dreaming and making his imagination run amok. Let peaceful co-existence be his mantra than ideological gloss.

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