EDITORIAL: Last week, India’s Hindu extremist Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a new parliament building in New Delhi, adorned with a mural of Akhand Bharat (ancient India) depicting adjoining states, including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, as part of India.
True to his brand of politics he had deliberately scheduled the occasion to coincide with the 140th birth anniversary of Babarao Savarkar, ideologue of the far-right Hindu nationalist organisation, the RSS, and a fawning admirer of Hitler’s Nazism and Mussolini’s Fascism.
Installation of the mural, heralding an irredentist idea, in the country’s highest legislature forum implies India has claims over the neighbouring modern independent states.
Although various leaders of the ruling BJP-RSS combine have been promoting the pipedream of Akhand Bharat, hanging its map in the parliament suggests it has a wider endorsement as state policy.
Spokesperson for the Foreign Office (FO) in Islamabad strongly reacted to the provocation at her weekly media briefing, saying the gratuitous assertion of Akhand Bharat is 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 religious minorities.
In Nepal also the mural drew angry statements from politicians across the party lines, asking their prime minister visiting India to raise the issue with Modi and get the mural removed. A former prime minister Baburam Bhattarai warned that the mural “may stoke unnecessary and harmful diplomatic row between the two countries.” It has the potential, he added, of further aggravating the trust deficit already vitiating the bilateral relations between most of the immediate neighbours of India.
Other countries may react in a similar fashion. As for the Sangh Parivar’s claims, they have no basis in reality. Old India, like elsewhere in the world, was divided into several kingdoms fighting with one another for territorial gains and the resources they contained until the Mughals conquered most of them uniting them under a vast empire.
And later the British colonials governed all of what then constituted India. True, the Maurya king, Ashoka, ruled over a huge empire extending in all directions during 268-232 BCE. But it is a travesty that Hindutva zealots should profess to be the inheritors of Ashoka’s legacy who had renounced Hinduism to embrace Buddhism. In any case, revival of ancient India is undoable in this day and age.
The BJP, its spiritual fountain head, the RSS, and their cohorts, of course, know that but use it to advance their parochial political agenda by igniting religious passions to win votes. With their focus on the national election due in less than a year’s time they do not care if the mural annoys the neighbouring nations, hoping it will help Modi return to power.
The regional interests can be best served, as the FO spokesperson averred, by resolving disputes with neighbours and working with them to build a peaceful and prosperous South Asia. That though is not going to happen as long as Modi-led BJP is at the helm in New Delhi.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023