Kashmir and the idea of a United India

Talking about nations, Tagore had said, “The peoples are living beings. They have their distinct personalities. But nations are organizations of power… Nations do not create, they merely produce and destroy.”

On 15^th August 1947, two nations were “produced”, not created, but the India or Hindustaan or Bhaarata Varsha, thriving with its diverse peoples and cultures for many millennia, was destroyed.

India can’t afford to be destroyed once again.

It’s not for no reason that Sri Aurobindo had cautioned on that day, which was also his 76^th birthday, “India today is free but she has not achieved unity… In whatever way, the division must go; unity must […] be achieved, for it is necessary for the greatness of India’s future.” It was therefore not a surprise to anyone in the know, when the spiritual flag of united India, designed by him, was hoisted at the Aurobindo Ashrama in Pondicherry after the Article 370 had been abrogated by the Govt. of India in order to integrate Kashmir completely into India. Aurobindo had wanted the flag to be hoisted whenever a separated part of India would rejoin, thus celebrating the idea of a united India.

Tagore didn’t survive to see the birth of the two decapitated nations, much of his lands and people in East Bengal becoming part of a nation (Pakistan) he might not have been excited about. His anxiety at the partition of India might have been similar to that of Aurobindo’s. So, let’s try to understand the reason behind the anxiety, and at the same time, the idea behind a united India or Bhaarata Varsha.

Many people have often commented that India as a nation never existed and that it was the creation of the British. In the same breath it has also been claimed that India was never united till the British came to rule India in the eighteenth century.

Yes, India was never a “nation”, in the western sense, and in the sense Tagore had referred to it as “organizations of power”. India, Hindustaan or the more ancient Bhaarata has been rather a “varsha”, which literally means a “division of the earth” in Sanskrit. Bhaarata Varsha is then a place on earth peopled by disparately diverse human beings, with as much diverse cultures, languages, shapes and colors, but still having a very distinctive common aspect which made all of them look homogenous, when seen from a distance. This homogeneity, we will see, is nothing but the spiritual unity of the peoples of the entire landmass from the Gandhara (parts of present Pakistan and Afghanistan) in the west to Magadha (present Bengal-Bihar) in the east, from Kashmira in the north to the Dravida in the south.

Interestingly the Sanskrit term “varsha” in Bhaarata Varsha, the land of Bharata, is akin to “varshaa”, rains, implicating that the former would have come from the sense of the land of the rains that support the lives of its peoples. (It also means a period, a year, coming from the periodic nature of the rains). So, more than the power that rules a nation, it’s the rains, the symbol of life and growth, that signifies Bhaarata. With the same line of thought it can be realized that, it’s this “life” or rather the way of life of the diverse peoples of Bhaarata that has always appeared quite homogeneous to anyone external. That explains why despite the diversity, India has always been seen as one unit, one entity, which came about to be designated by the name of the mighty river anyone must come across the moment she stepped into India from the west – Sindhu, Indus, Hindu.

The first occurrence of the term “Hindu” as the designation of a land is found in the Avesta, the earliest scriptures of the Zoroastrians, written in a language very close to the Rig Vedic Sanskrit in Eastern Iran sometime around 1000 BC, where it appears as “Hapta Hendu”, the Avestan words for Sapta Sindhu, referring to the land of the Seven Rivers, which surely points to the undivided Punjab. Very soon various forms of the word “Hindu” came about to mean not only the Punjab, but the entire Indian subcontinent. By the time Alexander reached the Sindhu, in fourth century BC, Megasthenes, the Greek historian, started writing about the Indian history and when he completed he named his magnum opus Indica. It was just a matter of time that the Hapta Hindu became Hindustan, but it retained the same original meaning of Bhaarata Varsha – a sea of Great Humanity, Mahaa Maanava, as Tagore would put across.

India has always been diverse, disparate but still not disintegrated. The people from outside the subcontinent wouldn’t see the granularity. But in reality, even the Rig Veda (RV Book 7, Hymn 18), written not later than 1500 BC, talks about a Sudaas, the King of the Tritsu tribe and a descendant of the legendary Bharata the subcontinent eventually would be christened after, fighting against ten other tribes – Bhrigu, Druhyu, Turvasha, Paktha, Bhalaanas, Alina, Vishaanin, Shiva, Anu and Puru – and uniting them. Even during the time of the Rig Veda some of these tribes and their languages and cultures were so different from each other that the speech of the Purus appeared scornful, mriddhra, to others (RV Book 7, Hymn 18, Verse 13), and it was a matter of shock to some that the people of Kikata, perhaps Magadha of the later times comprising modern Bengal and Bihar, didn’t follow the ritual of preparing the milky draught, aashira, by heating it in the kettles (RV Book 3, Hymn 53, Verse 14).

Till now we’ve been only talking about the spiritual unity – unity in the way of the lives of the peoples of India. But any form of unity that doesn’t result in the overall growth and prosperity of the humanity is meaningless. Talking about growth and prosperity, the topics like governance, economy, security etc. can’t be ignored. It was very clear at an early stage of our civilization that it was also essential to have a homogeneity in the governance, a uniformity in the administration. It was needed not for anything else, but to foster better trade and commerce between its every part and create a self-sustaining economy. This would eventually give the peoples enough safety and security to be “free” in the real sense, with the “strength to our activities and breadth to our creations”, as Tagore said about freedom.

But what could have been the binding force to create this uniformity? Interestingly, it’s the inherent spiritual unity that would again bind the peoples, and it’s in this context that Buddha played a great role. In the Bengali period novel Maitreya Jaatak, centered around the life of Buddha and His interaction with Bimbisaar, the King of Magadha, the author Bani Basu very wonderfully recreated the times with the need and inspiration for such a political unification of the sub-continent. It might be controversial to say that Buddha was the main force behind the first political unification of India, but when we see that few centuries later Ashoka did exactly the same, using the teachings of Buddha as the master glue or the value proposition, we understand the role of Buddha. Ashoka not only unified the entire Indian subcontinent politically but also created a large Asian Union comprising almost all the existing governments in South and South East Asia, enabling seamless trade and exchange of commodities, peoples and cultures across a very large area, something much more than the recent European Union.

So, along with the spiritual unity, India was now united politically and administratively. The popular narrative that Ashoka had a sudden change of heart after the devastating Kalinga war and that he henceforth wanted to tread the path of Dhamma (dharma) might be more of a calculated PR stint. In reality, everything might have been as per Chanakya’s (the ace economist and master strategist of Ashoka’s grandfather Chandragupta Maurya) game plan of controlling the economies rather than territories. Using Buddha’s doctrines of peace and happiness was no doubt a much more effective way of doing so, rather than indulging in wars and incurring heavy economic losses. Perhaps Buddha Himself wanted the same – uniting people through spirituality rather than warfare. And it did work. It worked again two millennia later, with Gandhi’s non-violence.

During Ashoka’s time India was the largest economy comprising almost 35% of the world GDP. (China’s GDP was around 25% and that of the Greeks little more than 10%). India’s dominance in the world economy remained intact for the next two millennia, always maintaining a staggering 25-30% share of the world GDP, till the beginning of the 18^th century, when the British arrived. There’s indeed a reason behind this.

Jawaharlal Nehru pointed out a very interesting thing in his Discovery of India, about India’s dominance over the past two millennia. Since Ashoka’s time, he said, irrespective of the power (Kings or Emperors) at the helm, there was an unwritten thumb rule across the entire subcontinent that no warfare should ever destroy the crop and economy. It’s not for no reason that battles were always fought at designated desolate places, away from localities and cultivable lands, so as to minimize the collateral damage. Also, no warring Kings ever destroyed the Pan-India trading infrastructure that had existed since Ashoka’s time. So even though there were innumerable kingdoms and kings and emperors over the past two millennia, and as many battles, but when it came to trade and commerce, the entire subcontinent always behaved as though it were a single unified and uninterrupted market place. In fact, the people often didn’t even know who their rulers were. The entire Indian subcontinent functioned very much like a country with a single federal system whose sanctity and robustness was maintained not by the rulers, but by its peoples and at the center was the economy.

The Chinese traveler Hiuen Tsang (also written Xuanzang), who visited India in the seventh century (almost a millennium after Ashoka) during the reign of Harshavardhana, rightly wrote, “It (India) was anciently called Shin-tu (Sindhu), also Hien-tau (Hindu); but now, according to the right pronunciation, it is called In-tu (India)… The entire land is divided into seventy countries or so… Each country has diverse customs…” So India, according to him was a super country of seventy or so countries. Megasthenes too, a millennium before, had referred to the “entire land” by one name – Indica. And the Persian polymath Al-Biruni, four centuries later, wrote the book Taḥqīq mā li-l-hind min maqūlah maqbūlah fī al-ʿaql aw mardhūlah, Confirming (tahqiq) all Topics (maqul) of India (Hind), Acceptable (maqbul) and Unacceptable (mardhul), referring to India as Hind, in the 11^th century. The Arabs still refer to India as Hind – the granularity of the provinces and languages and ethnicities are not visible from outside, as it has been over the past few millennia.

In just 120 years, between 1700 and 1820, India’s GDP fell from 25% to 15% of the world GDP, and by 1947, when India was partitioned, it was at a mere 4%. So what exactly did the British do? They just broke the scaffolding which supported the Indian economy for millennia – the security of uninterrupted production and the safety of free trade across the entire subcontinent. They broke the federal structure of the subcontinent that functioned like an efficient and united country for millennia, and disintegrated it into isolated regions, cutting the seamless trade. The entire economy collapsed in no time. Suddenly the people of India were not allowed to produce and trade freely. Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy is the best chronicle of this devastation. People who had been cultivating their own food aplenty were suddenly forced to cultivate opium and indigo, and trade only with the British. Soon, for the first time, India saw hungry people, and famines.

India’s independence in 1947 didn’t do much good. The truncated India was severely bereft of the entire trade network which was the lifeline of her economy for more than two millennia. The “Kabuliwala” (immortalized by Tagore in a very poignant eponymous short story), the Afghans, who were household names in Bengal disappeared soon, like the Kashmiri shawl not much later, from Bengal and elsewhere. Free movement of people and trade collapsed between the frontiers.

Moreover, the spiritual unity of India was broken forever. What became Pakistan is a very important part of India’s cultural heritage and identity. The first urban Indian civilization in the Indus valley; Punjab, the place where the first book of the mankind – the Rig Veda – was written; Gandhara, one of the regions where Buddhism thrived for the longest in the subcontinent – all became Pakistan, which ironically went ahead to eradicate all the pre-Islamic identities and legacy. Thus, with the partition, not only was our economy crippled, a big part of our heritage was also left to die.

More legacies would die if Kashmir or any other part of India is lost. We can’t let that happen. Let’s now turn our attention to Kashmir.

Booker prize winner and Human rights activist, Arundhati Roy, while addressing a seminar titiled "Whither Kashmir? Freedom or enslavement?” and organized by Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) in Srinagar in 2010, said, “Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact.” It’s a matter of conjecture as to what India she was referring to and what history she had dug into. Let’s do some simple fact check.

A verse from the Rig Veda, The Ode to the Rivers, (Book 10, Hymn 75, Verse 5) goes like this:

Shutudri stomam sachataa Parushni aa| Asiknyaa Marudvridhe Vitastayaa Aarjikiye shrinuhya aa Sushomayaa ||

O Shutudri (Sutlej), O Parushni (Ravi), [you] favor this hymn [of mine]. With Asikni (Chenab) [and] with Vitastaa (Jhelum), O Marudvridhaa (the combined river of Chenab and Jhelum); with Sushomaa (Sohan) O Arjikiyaa (upper Indus), hear [my hymn].

All the major left tributaries of the Indus are enumerated in anti-clockwise manner, starting from Sutlej, barring Beas. It can be argued that the mere mention of Jhelum (Vitastaa) doesn’t mean that Kashmir was a part of the Rig Vedic India. But the fact that the ancient word Vitastaa is still preserved in Vyeth, the Kashmiri name for Jhelum, surely says something else. The very next verse talks about three rivers Trishtaamaa, Susartu and Sveti, which, from the order they are mentioned, could be very well the right tributaries of Indus in Kashmir, with a possibility that Sveti could be Gilgit. But much more striking, as the Harvard Indologist and Vedic scholar Michael Witzel has pointed out, is the fact that the Sanskrit word Sindhu, which gave the identity to India, her peoples and cultures, is very likely a loan word from the much older Burushaski language, remnants of which are still spoken in few isolated pockets of Kashmir. In the Burushaski, Shina and Dumaki languages of Kashmir “sinda” means river and that explains why there are multiple rivers in Kashmir with the name Sind (Sonmarg is on Sind).

We’ve seen earlier that the western travelers/historians always referred to India as a single country, despite the various countries within.

The Greek historian Hecataeus, in his description of India, referred to Kashmir as Kaspapyros (surely related to Kashmir’s old name Kashyapapura, the city of the Rig Vedic sage Kashyapa), in the sixth century BC.

Then, Hiuen Tsang in the sixth century AD talked in length about Kia-shi-mi-lo (Kashmir) as an Indian kingdom “enclosed by mountains… The neighboring states that have attacked it have never succeeded in subduing it. The capital of the country on the west side is bordered by a great river.”

Rajatarangini, the first Indian book of secular history written by Kalhana in the 12^th century, is a chronicle of the history of Kashmir and India since the time of the Mahabharata war. The 102^nd and 104^th verses of its first book says, Ashoka, who has killed all his sins, shaanta-vrijina, embraced the doctrines of Jina (Buddha), prapanna jina-shaasanam, built the city of Srinagari.

So the discourses on Kashmir not being a part of India can rest for ever. Like any other part of India, it has been, and should remain an integral part of India. Now let’s look back and try to analyze why there has been so much fuss about Kashmir’s special status since 1947.

When India was partitioned, most of her peoples were never asked which part they wanted to be in – India or Pakistan. Bengal and the Punjab were attempted to be partitioned allocating the Muslim majority areas to Pakistan and retaining the rest in India. But that left out numerous regions on either sides with contrasting demographics – Hindu majority areas in Pakistan and Muslims majority in India. People of these regions were never asked whether they were fine with their fates – especially the hapless minorities who decided to stay back in Pakistan.

Moreover, there were some major anomalies, all of which favored Pakistan. The whole of Khulna district of Bengal with 50.7% Hindu population was awarded to (East) Pakistan. To decide which country they wanted to join, Sylhet, a part of Assam, was offered a referendum, which was thoroughly rigged in favor of Pakistan. When plebiscite was offered to the princely states of Junagarh, Hyderabad and Jammu & Kashmir, Jinnah insisted that the decisions should be left to the rulers and not to the peoples, because he was more interested in Hyderabad, a Hindu majority princely state ruled by a Muslim, than J&K, exactly its opposite. Given this, Pakistan shouldn’t have had any problem when the Hindu king of J&K wanted to join India. Period.

So, from the very beginning Pakistan’s actions in matters of Kashmir were uncalled for. Their attacking Kashmir in 1947 in a bid to free it from India could be similar to India trying to free Khulna, Sylhet (in East Pakistan) and the North West Frontier Province (under Frontier Gandhi, they wanted to join India) from Pakistan, which very logically India never did. And for the millions of people who became victims of the partitions and who were not consulted before their fates had been decided by someone else, they learned to accept the eventuality and move on, building their lives from scratch. Extending the same logic to Kashmir, it would be ludicrous to even accept the argument that their accession to India was unjust. The accession, like any other part of India, should have been unconditional from the day one, just to maintain the parity with the rest.

The reality is, even the Kashmiris eventually learned to move on. Till the eighties there hasn’t been any disturbance. Not a single incident could be pointed out to vindicate that the Muslims in the valley were being subjugated by a Hindu majority India. On the contrary, the Kashmiri Pandits can’t remember since when they stopped celebrating any festival outdoor, fearing reactions from their Muslim “neighbors”. There was of course this dream of the two sides of Kashmir (J&K and POK) uniting someday, like many, who had to leave their homes in East Bengal and settle in India, still living with the utopia of a reunited Bengal. But that didn’t lead to any violence or terrorism, till Pakistan, in the eighties, started indoctrinating the youths in the valley, first with communism and revolution, with inspiration from Guevara, Castro, Nietzsche, Chomsky et al, and then slowly with radical Islamization.

Two elections in the eighties were rigged in Kashmir, but all elections in Bengal and Bihar have been rigged till the nineties. So, that was no justification for resorting to violence and terrorism, but it was very smartly exploited to begin with the ethnic cleansing of the Hindus and Sikhs in the valley.

Over six months, starting with the winter of 1989, the entire Pandit population was terrified with rampant killings and rapes, threatened with dire consequences and finally forced to leave, with the masjids announcing openly: Yetiy banega Pakistan, batav rosti batanivy saan, This will be Pakistan, without the Pandit men, but with their women; Raliv, Galiv, ya Tschaliv, Merge, Die or Flee. All the while, during this short period of six months, the Indian government kept silent, when chits were being pasted on the doors of the houses of the Kashmiri Pandits daily, announcing who should leave next.

The present militarization of the valley was only after this.

The truth is that the issue has never been a fight for Kashmiriyat. It was always, like Pakistan, to do away with everything else than Islam, totally obliterate all the non-Islamic identities that have thrived for millennia and try to create, futilely though, an Islamic identity. It’s nothing but the popular slogan Iqbal had coined: Pakistan ka matlab kya la illaha illalah, which translates word by word to “Pakistan’s meaning is there is no god but Allah”. This obsession with carving out an Islamic identity, disowning the millennia old unalienable Indian history, heritage and connections is the root cause of Pakistan’s identity crisis, which explains why they are a failed state. Totally contrast to this is how the few other non-Arab Islamic countries like Bangladesh, Iran, Malaysia and Indonesia have so well preserved their non-Islamic rich cultural heritages.

The people who are spearheading all the “struggle” in the valley are least interested in Kashmiriyat. Most of them don’t even speak the language – they prefer Urdu, I’m told. During the Swadeshi movement, when the Indians wanted to boycott everything British, they didn’t slyly send their kids to Britain for education – they created their own institutions like Jadavpur University in Calcutta and Banaras Hindu University. On the contrary none of the separatists’ kids study in the valley. It’s also not about their hatred for India. Otherwise so many Kashmiris wouldn’t have had business interests across India, pointed out a Kashmiri Pandit friend of mine. A Chechen separatist, she added, would rarely enter into any business with Russia. A little fact check will reveal that nothing of Kashmiriyat has been preserved in POK, but still no Kashmiri separatist or activist ever talks about that.

Moreover, I myself figured out during my trip to the valley in 2017 that the minority Shias are not at all antagonized to India. Nor are the Hanzis, the boatpeople who are not part of the mainstream Islamic communities. Both these communities have been marginalized. Pehle Kafir (Hindus and Sikhs), phir Shia, phir Hanzi, that has been the agenda and the clarion call. The fact that the Shia majority Gilgit-Balistan in POK today has a totally different demographics should say it all.

It could be argued that India should have honored the special status given to Kashmir (in the form of Article 370) and promised as a part of the accession pact. But then, India did honor the commitment in spirit as the demographics in the valley didn’t change at all over the years (apart from the 100% exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits, for which of course the Indian government was not responsible) whereas that in POK did drastically. And as to honoring the commitment in letter, it’s up to the Supreme Court to judge if the abrogation of Article 370 really violated anything.

So practically, the entire issue about Kashmir is a Sunni Wahabi narrative perpetuated forcefully by a few with vested interests and supported by Pakistan. That’s the root cause of everything. It’s also perhaps, as pointed out to me by a Kashmiri friend of mine, a hidden agenda fueled by the racial supremacy of the ruling class of Pakistan, who didn’t want to share the power with the dark skinned and Bengali-speaking Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (he would soon become the first Prime Minister of Bangladesh) even though he had got a massive majority in the 1970 general elections in Pakistan, just because they felt he was racially inferior.

India has to put an end to all these. India needs to be united, not because she has been such all along, but because, that’s how she can survive longer, as a strong economy and a prosperous and free place.

The need of the hour is to gain the confidence of the indoctrinated Kashmiris and convince them that it’s for mutual benefit that we all stay together.