It was something outrageous the other day. An ad issued by the regional government of Catalonia, one of Spain’s 15 regions where Barcelona is located, claims that the Olympic Games are being held in Country of Catalona. And it does not mention Spain anywhere.

IT is something like the Asian games being staged in Jalandhar and the Punjab government telling the world that the games are being played in the country of Punjab.

Most countries have separatist movements in some form or the other like the Basque separatists in Spain and Sikh and Kashmiri secessionists in our country. But now with the breaking up of the former Soviet Union into 11 states and Yugoslavia in to three .  it’s perhaps time for us to think of the unthinkable: whether our country could splinter in the years to come.

The first truth about India is that like the ex-Soviet Union, it is multi-racial, multi-lingual, and multi-religious society. The Kashmiri, for instance, with his fair color and sharp features is racially central Asia and completely different from the small, dark Tamilians, And different from both these racial groups is the Indian in the work stock who has slit eyes and high cheek-bones.

India’s diversity in terms of language and religion is even more glaring. We have Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and so on. Religion-wise, we have Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Christianity and Buddhism.

World-over, separatist: movements gather momentum in regions where people differ from the rest of the country in terms of race, language or religion, Also, they are invariably border regions running along another nation or they live on a coast with direct access to the oceans.

Kashmir is typical of such a breakaway region. Its people are racially apart from the rest of the country, they have a different religion, a different language and they live in a border state contiguous with Pakistan. Similarly, the Sikhs in Punjab have a separate religion, a different appearance, plus they have border with Pakistan, But their secessionist movement is weaker than that of Kashmir’s for one reason: there are very few Kashmiri outside Kashmir, but the Sikhs of Punjab have tens of thousands of close relatives in the rest of India, relatives who are thriving economically and are dead against Punjab breaking away.

North-eastern India has always been troubled by several separatist groups, There too, the same ingredients are present. The inhabitants of Assam, Tripura, Manipur, Bag land, Mizoram, Meghalaya and Arunachal are racially more like the Vietnamese or the Burmese, In Nagaland, the people are Christians and speak English and the seven sisters of the north-east share a border with Bangladesh, Burma and China,

It’s significant that when the DMK used to talk of secession in the mid-60s, one factor encouraging it was Tamil Nadu’s access to the sea. Objectively speaking, how does holding on to our part of Kashmir benefit India? It doesn’t for two reasons, One, it is ungovernable and no longer attracts foreign tourists. Two, not only does Kashmir not cam money, it also drains our exchequer. As Kashmir is our only dispute with Pakistan, resolving the issue would mean that both India and Pakistan can stop spending those hundreds of crore of rupees to arm themselves against each other.

Maybe a day would come when Pakistan’s and our part of Kashmir would unite to form an independent state. The reason is that the most homogeneous groups of people divided by war invariably come together, Thus, the East and West Germans have united, like the North and South Yemenis and the North and South Vietnamese. And it is only a matter of time before North and South Korea become one,

So a macro-view of the world suggests that the changes we see elsewhere could well happen in India. If the ex-Soviet Union can break up into 11 states, why can’t the same thing happen in the Indian sub-continent? A Sikh in Punjab has more in common with a Pakistani than with a Tamilians, A Bengali shares the same culture as a Bangladeshi, and not a Gujarati. Yet all these people are divided by man-made lines drawn in the aftermath of wars, or when the great colonial empires faded away.

The break-up of the Soviet Union, almost without bloodshed, is a momentous happening that opens our eyes to a fundamental truth: that if a region doesn’t want to remain with a federal government, it’s cheaper to let it go than to hold on to it.

Coming back to Kashmir, why shouldn’t India and Pakistan let the two parts unite, give the new state independence or limited autonomy, and live in peace forever, spending their armament budgets on building industries, schools, and hospitals? I am sure that someday the day will come maybe in the next20 years.

Article extracted from this publication >> Aug 14, 1992