Akhand Bharat to Disintegrated India

(Part-I)

The clandestine of successive victories of the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) and the establishment of its rule in central India lies in wide-range propagation of the doctrine of Hindutva and Akhand Bharat by Hindu extremists who have acquired a deeper and broader ingress in the power corridors of India. The broadcasting and indoctrination of the ideologies of Hindutva and Akhand Bharat through all the means and resources of the state for several decades resulted in espousal acceptance of these beliefs in the Hindu majority India.  

According to the 42^nd amendment to the Indian constitution, India is described as a “sovereign, socialist, secular democratic republic” state that is supposed to provide equal rights to all of its citizens regardless of their religion, taking a fair and unbiased stand on religious matters. The drive to declare India a Hindu country, although started since the very beginning of the state of India, however, it gained momentum particularly after BJP took birth on April 6, 1980, from the Rashtriya Savak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu extremist paramilitary organization.

With negligibly small differences in their ideologies, the Indian society has copiousness of Hindu extremist organizations and Hindu militant groups such as Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), Bajrang Dal (BD), Shiv Sena (SS), Akhil Bhartia Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) collectively termed as Sangh Parivar (SP). Such organizations do not agree on equal rights to other religious or ethnic minorities.

Amongst these extremists, BJP succeeded in attaining the status of the largest party in the Indian parliament in a brief time. The BJP not only achieved a cutting-edge dominancy over its sister extremist organizations but also started serving as a shelter for growth and expansion of all the radical groups that fundamentally believe in the concept of Hindutva and Akhand Bharat with a minor variation.

Hindutva is an ideology that necessarily aims to implement a Hindu way of life to the entire population and establish the supremacy of Hindus in India. To achieve this dream, all the daughter organizations of the Sangh Parivar are working at a frightful pace to marginalize all other religious minorities. Several laws have been approved by the BJP-based central government to make life more painful for religious minorities.  Mob lynching, stabbing, burning the people alive, raping the women, attacking and destroying the religious places, and socio-economic boycott of the minorities are the very common tools employed by the BJP and other daughter organizations of the Sangh Parivar to intimidate the minorities. The members of the lower castes are also the prime victim of Hindutva. To get rid of the caste system’s repressive strictures, the members of lower castes adopt conversion to other religions as a way out towards freedom. To stop the conversion, in several states, local governments have also passed laws that make it illegal to convert to the religion. Mob lynching, beating, disgracing,  forcing the members of religious minorities to eat and drink cow-dung and cow-urine under the cover of Gao-Raksha (cow-protection) is another barbaric and terrorizing instrument adopted by the member organizations of the Sangh Parivar right under the nose of Indian secularism.  The ostensible purpose of all these measures is to compel the non-Hindus either to leave India or live in India as Hindus.

 On the same lines, the concept of Akhand Bharat is also an enthralling and exhilarating project that has a charismatic power to attract a  majority of fanatic Hindus. Hindu extremists are dreaming since ages about a Greater India whose geographical boundaries are far greater than existing India. In its original form, the idea of Akhand Bharat expands beyond the borders of present India to include the regions that once founded the empire of Chandragupta Maurya. In addition to Kashmir, the broader ambition of Sangh Parivar is to combine the nation-states of Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet, Burma, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, imposing the Hindu supremacy over the entire land. With the Indian military in the core, all extremist organizations under the canopy of Sangh Parivar, especially the BJP,  aspire to re-engineer a country identical to the magnitude and grandeur of ancient India – Akhand Bharat.

Although the life for the minorities has been miserable in India where Hindutva prevails in every walk of life, however, a sensible person can immediately see that such an ambitious project is a fantasy

(Indian endeavors to realize the concept of Akhand Bharat and its backfire to the integrity of the Indian state and  will be discussed in part-II)

(Dr. Saeed Ahmed is a freelance writer interested in the intersection of culture, politics, and society. He can be reached at saeed.ahmed21@gmail.com. )