Sri Aurobindo Was Certainly Not For The Disintegration Of India

Secular intellectuals obfuscate the obvious, by which I mean, they use every intellectual argument to undermine what is pretty obvious to the common man. Of late, the idea of breaking India has been flaunted by the secular brigade under the cover of free speech.

Fortunately, the majority of Indians will not give much credence to this outright falsehood. Imagine what would have happened to the country if it was left to this band of berserk intellectuals! They would have shouted themselves hoarse, “To ensure human rights, give Kashmir to Pakistan, hand over Arunachal Pradesh to China, form a Dalitsthan for the backward caste, a Naxalsthan for the Red soldiers and carve out another mini Pakistan.”

Then they would have enthusiastically proceeded to redefine the borders of India according to the democratic aspirations of people.

But what does the common man think about it? He will say that this chorus for the disintegration of India is absurd, that India is one in spirit though diverse in language, one in culture though diverse in expression, that not only the rituals and celebrations but even food habits unite Indians from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.

He will say that above all, there is a living spiritual unity which encompasses all Indians whatever religion they belong to, and this spiritual truth is addressed by all of them in their daily life.

Praying in mosques or offering flowers at the feet of the deity or chanting mantras or meditating at the appropriate time in the morning—it is in these acts that lies the essential unity of India, indefinable but very palpable to the common man, invisible but real to him. Of course, you would object saying that people in other countries also do the same. I say, nothing like the way it is in India! This is India’s forte and will keep it together in the long run despite the vicious politics that some political parties indulge in.

Coming to what Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP in the Lok Sabha, Sugata Bose said on the floor of the House. I was surprised when he quoted Sri Aurobindo to support what I would term as the disintegration of India. He was of course speaking against the ruling party in the Lok Sabha. He said Sri Aurobindo wrote (in the Foundations of Indian Culture) that the rishis of the Vedic Age had propounded “the ideal of the Chakravarti, a uniting imperial rule, uniting without destroying the autonomy of India’s many kingdoms and peoples from sea to sea.”

That the ancient ideal was “not an autocratic despotism but a universal monarchy supported by a free assembly of the city and provinces and of all the classes”. That, according to this ideal, unification “ought not to be secured at the expense of the free life of the regional people or of the communal liberties and not therefore by a centralised monarchy or a rigidly unitarian imperial state”. He then concluded, “We are a democracy, but the nationalism that is being talked about from the other side of the House represents centralised despotism.”

This is being quoted totally out of context. Sri Aurobindo was referring to the Rajasuya Yagna conducted by Yudhishthira in the Mahabharata. The practice in ancient India was to invite smaller kings to the Yagna in order to declare the sovereignty of the king who performed the Rajasuya Yagna. If the smaller kings participated in the sacrifice, it meant that they accepted the king’s sovereignty over them while retaining their regional autonomy; if they did not, they had to be vanquished by the king in order to prove his sovereignty.

How is this ancient practice relevant to the present-day political situation of India? When these Yagnas were conducted, India had not yet become a nation and this was only one among several other attempts in the history of India to achieve political unity, all of which failed to permanently unite it.

According to Sri Aurobindo, India could never achieve political unity in spite of it being spiritually and culturally one, because of the stress on the inner psychological union more than the outer. This is given as a reason by Sri Aurobindo to defend India from the criticism of not having attained political unity, not as a justification for it.

Why would he (who played such a leading role in the revolutionary movement of India), or for that matter anybody want his own nation to be disunited? This is the fundamental logical flaw in Sugata Bose’s argument. He is actually playing the politician and not speaking as a serious scholar when he makes such statements.

Secondly, the chapter on Indian Polity that Sugata Bose is quoting from was written by Sri Aurobindo in 1919-1921, long before the independence of India. It would be therefore interesting to quote from his famous Independence Day Message of 15 August, 1947:

It is clear that Sri Aurobindo stood for the political unity of India and was disappointed by its partition into two states. He was satisfied that there were no further sub-divisions and that India did not “relapse into the chaos of separate States which preceded the British conquest”.

He was also hopeful that the Constituent Assembly would solve the problem of the depressed classes without schism or fissure. The one thing that he repeats in this passage and elsewhere is that the partition of India should go “by whatever means” for, “if it lasts, India may be seriously weakened, even crippled: civil strife may remain always possible, possible even a new invasion and foreign conquest.” How relevant is this passage in the present day context!

There was a certain practical side of Sri Aurobindo that not many people are acquainted with. With regard to the partition of India, he told the following to K.M. Munshi in 1950. I quote from this interview:

Pakistan “must be brought under India’s military ambit,” means sanctioning the use of force when necessary, though in the present scenario of nuclear weapons, it would surely not be advisable. But the very fact of supporting the use of force when it was indeed possible, implies that Sri Aurobindo was not deceived by so-called “human rights violations” or “democratic aspirations of people”, which are often the cover under which certain militant groups operate to fulfil their own agenda of forceful occupation.

India’s natural penchant for stressing more on the inner psychological unity than the outer political union in the process of nation-building cannot be overly insisted upon when the nation has already been built.  It was because India failed to unite politically over several millennia despite being spiritually and culturally one,

that it opened itself to foreign attack and conquest. It was the British occupation which finally welded it into a nation, though they left it after deliberately splitting it into two separate states.

There was also the wrong notion that the states in India are too diverse in language, religion and culture and that India will naturally break up after the British left. But there was always a substratum of spiritual and cultural unity in India despite all the differences between the constituent units. Sri Aurobindo says:

It is from this point of view that Sri Aurobindo supported the linguistic divisions of India in his message to the Andhra University in 1948. But he supported them when India was already welded into a nation and its national boundaries were quite safe. He did it for promoting diversity in unity, and not to encourage diversity at the detriment of national unity which can lead to the disintegration of India.