BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav's comments on the concept of "Akhand Bharat" (Composite India) in an interview to Al Jazeera channel have triggered some debate and controversy. What is this all about and, frankly, despite Madhav's personal beliefs, how is it politically relevant at all in these times?
The idea of an undivided, composite Indian civilisational territory being threatened became current in the 1940s as a reaction to calls for a separate Muslim homeland. In the emotional upheaval of the moment, which extended into the early years after Partition, the slogan of "Akhand Bharat" had many takers, not necessarily limited to the RSS and the refugee communities, from Sindh, West Punjab and East Bengal, that had to migrate from their ancestral homes to a new location in free India. There is some evidence that even Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel believed Partition was temporary and Pakistan was unviable.
Seventy years on, history has provided sobering lessons. While it is true that many in the early 1950s didn't quite know how Partition would pan out - leading to the millenarian call for an Akhand Bharat and other similar responses - it is clear today that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have emerged as three separate nation-states with different identities and destinies. To interrogate the inviolability of those national borders is pointless. If nothing else, it gets the smaller countries worried that the big neighbour is questioning their right to exist.
When he travelled to Lahore as prime minister in 1999, Atal Bihari Vajpayee was careful to go to the Minar-a-Pakistan, built on the location of the Lahore Resolution, adopted by the Muslim League in 1940, that formally called for a Muslim homeland to be carved out of British India. This gesture was Vajpayee's attempt to bury the ghosts of the past, and stress that even he - a right-of-centre politician with an RSS and BJP background - was completely reconciled to Pakistan's distinct identity and nation-statehood.
It is another matter that some Islamist bigots in Pakistan sought to "purify" the Minar-e-Pakistan shortly after Vajpayee's visit, claiming it had been desecrated by a Hindu and an Indian.
Separate political identities should not and must not come in the way of emphasising the shared cultural legacies of the countries that make up the sub-continent, or South Asia if you prefer. Some of these legacies are rooted in an ethos that is decidedly pre-Islamic and can only be described as Hindu. Take for example the 52 Shakti Peeths - the shrines to the Mother Goddess Sati - that have been places of worship since ancient times. The easternmost of these is Kamakhya, in Guwahati, Assam, to the east of Bangladesh. The westernmost is the Hinglaj Mata temple, in Balochistan.
Yet, to hark back to some ancient and supposedly nativist idea of the subcontinent is both unrealistic and unfair. As Nehru so beautifully put it in
The Discovery of India, India is "an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously". That is why not just Hindu shrines, but Buddhist monuments, the Muslim cultures of the medieval era and even the impact of the British colonial epoch are a part of our shared heritage. To deny any one of these is to deny (part of) our history.
As such, those in Pakistan who pretend their country has no history before Muhammad bin Qasim invaded Sindh or that Ranjit Singh didn't leave his imprint on Lahore are ever going to be regarded as a fringe, however large their number. To be honest, that Peshawar is a part of Pakistan and not Afghanistan is entirely due to the Sikh conquest of the city from the Afghans in the early 19th century. Of course, it needs to be said that the increasing and intensifying Islamist tendencies in Pakistan's polity make such a compatibility with Pakistan's non-Muslim history decidedly difficult.
In India too, the loose and rhetorical references to "1,200 years of occupation" are better avoided, especially by those in government, and ultimately serve no purpose. They are not the appropriate mechanism to build a composite, plural and modern identity. Also, if one decides to go back to an "untainted" period, how far does one go? Among India's greatest emperors was Kanishka, a Buddhist who ran the Kushan Empire in the second century. His empire extended from modern Xinjiang (western China), covered today's Afghanistan and Pakistan, and ended in the plains close to contemporary Delhi. Should this then become the negotiating basis for reunification of Akhand Bharat?
Civilisations are defined by common identity markers and forms of worship. They survive, however, due to the flourishing of trade and commerce. That is why, to take a random example, the Shore Temple at Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu, was both a place of worship and a sort of "departure terminal", from where merchant ships got permission to leave on trading missions to Southeast Asia - part of India's sphere of influence and, by a leap of logic, as likely to form part of Greater India and Akhand Bharat as, say, Balochistan.
The subcontinent could have lived with the divisions and territorial cleavages of 1947. What really hurt it was the destruction of an age-old and organic trading system, one that saw Myanmar as the rice bowl of South Asia and fruits from the Northwest Frontier making it to Bombay (now Mumbai) by the Frontier Mail and being sold in markets there. Any updated version of Akhand Bharat cannot but aim to reconstruct that trading system - one where national boundaries may well be sacrosanct but energy corridors, river-development projects and expressways would cross these boundaries at will.
To look upon Greater India - the basis for Akhand Bharat if you will - exclusively in territorial or continental terms is decidedly limiting. It has a strong maritime component, a gift of the sea-faring nature of our ancestors. It was George Nathaniel Curzon who as viceroy over 100 years ago described the strategic frontiers of India as extending from the Straits of Malacca to the Gulf of Aden. Elements of such thinking continue to motivate India's emerging 21st century Indian Ocean doctrine.
Does this make Curzon, or Kanishka some 2,000 years before him - not to speak of the Mauryas and the Cholas and the Mughals, all of whom managed vast subcontinental or transoceanic empires - only one of many available models of Akhand Bharatiyas?
(The author is senior fellow, Observer Research Foundation. He can be reached at malikashok@gmail.com)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.