God Forbid: Why Akhand Bharat Will Be A Nightmare

Is the idea of Akhand Bharat even remotely feasible in an era marked by jihadism and the use of aggressive conversion technologies?

BJP leader Ram Madhav created a storm the other day when he said that his ideological parent, the RSS, still believed in the idea of Akhand Bharat. He is quoted as saying:

The RSS still believes that one day these parts (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh)… will again, through popular goodwill, come together and Akhand Bharat will be created… as an RSS member, I also hold on to that view.

God forbid. Akhand Bharat is actually closer to an Islamist’s or Maoist’s dream and would be a Hindu nightmare, given current demographics. With our religious, caste, and ethnic fault lines, India is difficult enough to govern even with a “technical” Hindu majority of just under 80 percent (79.8 percent, according to the 2011 religious census).

If one were to add the populations of Pakistan (191 million, of whom 95 percent are Muslim) and Bangladesh (90 percent Muslim in a total population of around 157 million), to India’s 1,252 million, we will get a demography that is impossible to manage: a 31 percent Muslim population, against around 65 percent Hindu, but even this theoretically two-thirds majority is mythical, given our age-old fault-lines, since they include a large Dalit and tribal population who are technically and civilisationally Hindu, but not necessarily Hindu in the full religious sense of the term. Remember, Dalits were formally kept out of Hinduism and rendered “untouchable”, and tribals have co-evolved in parallel to mainstream Hinduism.

If one were to exclude Dalits and tribals from the Hindu mix (a collective population of over 300 million in India’s current borders), what you may get is a bare Hindu majority in Akhand Bharat – which will make for an unstable polity given extraordinary efforts to convert tribals to Christianity, and the growing politics of Dalitism, which outside powers will fund and encourage to weaken India.

Akhand Bharat sounds more like an anarchist’s dream, and in anarchy it will be the extreme ideologies – of Islamism or Maoism or any of the other absolute “isms” of faith and ideology – that will gain ground. India is better of being a smaller country with more manageable contradictions than in an Akhand Bharat.

To be fair to Ram Madhav, his hope was that Akhand Bharat will happen through “popular goodwill”. But is that looking even remotely feasible in an era marked by jihadism and the use of aggressive conversion technologies?