India is up for grabs. The Sikh demand for a separate homeland, the resolution that the Maharashtra (Bombay) Assembly unanimously adopted on June 17 demanding absorption of villages in neighboring states where people speak Marathi, and the refusal of several southern states to agree to an equitable sharing of the waters of the Krishna and Kavery rivers all indicate that sectarian Royalties are making savage inroads into the national ideal.
As Nani Palkhivala, an eminent Parsi jurist, laments, there are Hindus and Muslims, Bihar is and Gujarat is aplenty among the country 700 million people neither but nor hardly any Indians.
Some historians even feel that while India’s political unity was the gift of British colonialism, the concept of a single nation was invented by Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and other Congress Party leaders to persuade the British that their departure would not be followed by disintegration.
Lacking his grandfather’s vision, Nehru’s grandson, Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, seems to be obsessed by vote banks and demo graphic equations that will ensure his political survival. In the process, he has given an impetus to regional and communal forces that can emerge more strongly only if the country as a whole becomes weaker.
Race and religion are the prime movers of Indian society, with language and caste following closely behind. They can also overlap, as with the Hindu, Hindi speaking Punjabis who are now fleeing the Punjab which is seen more and more as the exclusive homeland of 12 million Sikhs,
The old British province of the Punjab was split in 1947 with the Muslim majority western districts going to Pakistan. But Indian Punjab was again divided 19 years later because Sikhs and Hindus could not live in harmony. The two successor states the Punjab and Haryana continued to regard Chandigarh, the garden city laid out by Corbusier, as their joint Capital. But the decision has been taken that Chandigarh will revert to the Punjab. Haryana is up in arms, first because the Sikhs flatly refuse to give up any territory i return, not those villages that according to Sikhs have falsely recorded Hindi as their mother tongue and are not contiguous to Haryana, and secondly, because the Punjab is not prepared to give up its constitutional right to the Beas Ravi River Waters, major share of which has been given to Haryana and Rajasthan through Unilateral political awards.
Article extracted from this publication >> August 8, 1986
