I am sitting here reading Galbraith interview in Rediff, and it says "
There should be no doubt about the fact that one of the great failures of the 20th century was the division of what would have been a truly great country into three different parcels." The division of India happened on a physical level. Pakistan became another country, and then further splintered into Bangladesh. Partition, however, never happened on a philosophical level. India never agreed or acquiesced to the two (or is it three) nation theory. India may not have had the borders to justify it, but it retained its commitment to a pluralistic and multicultural India. Taken to its logical extreme, in its ideal, it was what every Pakistani and Bangladeshi aspiring to a secular, democratic country could aspire to. Pakistan's nationalism, in principle, was never territorial. The fact that it was filtered through Punjabi chauvinism was not its intent. So, India and Pakistan were two very opposite ideas for what India should be. The territory they acquired were the arbitrary consequences of an ill-thought out deal. What made predominantly Hindu Lahore have more affinity for a religious state than predominantly Muslim Lukhnow. A civil war, as threatened, may have settled these territorial claims just as arbitrarily.
The fatal flaw for progressive Indians was to relinquish our claim to represent that territory. Pakistan may have been bequeathed a territory to implement its retrograde philosophy, and it may have done so passionately, but there was no reason for us to agree with that consequence. One of the great anomalies of post-Independence India is our reluctance to recognize Israel, a religious state, while recognizing and doing business with a religious state that undermined the Indianness of India. Without threat of violence, progressives could have disagreed with the idea of Pakistan, while recognizing its de facto existence. We could even do business with it, and we did, without relinquishing our philosophy that a multicultural and secular democracy was the ideal that all people of the Indian subcontinent must practice. There was no need to ask the ideals that informed our independence movement to screech to a halt at Wagah.
Doing so allowed the idea of Pakistan to acquire moral equivalency to the idea of India. We recognized and accepted Pakistan's idea of what a nation is, and asked only to be left alone. Pakistan, to its credit, never accepted our ideal. Not content to disagree in the abstract, it has backed its idea of a nation with a foreign and defense policy that follows no rules. All we ask is to be left alone. Have we ever asked the people of Lahore, Karachi, or Rawalpindi, whether they would like to live in a multicultural society? In our haste to make peace, we forgot that we must make the peace of the brave. For me, the idea of India remains the only road to peace. There is no alternative to a multicultural democracy. Having forfeited the ability to influence the territory of Pakistan, we must actively push the idea across the Radcliffe line, and hope for a day where Pakistan can establish a multicultural society. What is needed is not a better understanding between ordinary Pakistanis and Indians, but more confidence in what the ideal of India is, and what that ideal offers the people of Pakistan. In doing that, we must refuse to recognize the moral equivalency of a religious state.
But…yes, no question of it, the idea of India and the reality of India are starkly different. While this dichotomy is present in every country, it can be particularly glaring in India. While India can be amazingly multicultural at times, it has also at times failed to guarantee even the most basic right to life of its citizens based on their religious differences. These failures can only strengthen our resolve to move closer to the ideal. Recently, however, a greater danger has emerged. The Sangh Parivar threatens the very idea of India. The logical conclusion of the Hindutva ideology is an India that is a religious republic – the mirror image of Pakistan. While the Sangh Parivan pays lip service to the Indian ideal, its actions point to a different interpretation. India equals Hindu. Secularism, commonly the separation of church and state, and at the very least equality of all religions in the polity, for the BJP means mere tolerance for minorities. While publicly committed to the ideal of India, their interpretation of that ideal rejects secularism and multiculturalism wholly. Their practice of that ideal is merely the belated completion of partition, in theory and in practice.
For an Indian committed to secularism, the enemy within, and the enemy without, are equally challenging. The Sangh Parivar has joined the minds of the hearts and minds of Indians earnestly, and we have been found wanting. Pakistan has challenged our territory while rejecting the basis of our ideals, and we have pled "live and let live." Our answer to both must be the same – our founding father got it right – Indians want a multicultural, secular democracy, and we must forcefully reject all alternatives. This is the battle we must take to the people of the Indian sub-continent.
