Essay - Still Together After All These Years

“Why don’t you be a good boy and just die?”

          - Sean Bean as Alec Trevelyan 006, in Goldeneye (1995)



The disintegration of the modern Indian union of states has oft been predicted, but somehow hasn’t happened yet. Most recently, in his award-winning novel River Of Gods the British science fiction author Ian McDonald posited an India in 2047 broken up into 12 semi-independent states!

     Perhaps among the first to start the ball rolling was Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck, the last British Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army. This worthy intoned that the 1947 partition of India was a harbinger of further future divisions of the sub-continent. Or words to that effect...

     This was rightly seen at the time as a case of sour grapes (See, you won’t be able to hold yourself together without the paternalistic guiding hand of the British Raj!)  on the part of a retreating colonialist towards a country that didn’t want or need him. More importantly, this prophecy remains unfulfilled to date.

...unless, of course, you count the violent divorce between West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) after a small war in December 1971. Or the many (so far) unsuccessful attempts of  sundry Kashmiri, Sikh, Bodo, Naga and Mizo secessionists to carve out independent states based on ethnicity, from the Indian union.

Auchinleck’s boss, that arch-imperialist Sir Winston Spencer Churchill also predicted that the fledgling Indian republic wouldn’t survive disintegration without the guiding hand of not-so-Great Britain beyond two years after independence in 1947. Churchill passed away in 1965; even well before that it was evident to most observers, paraphrasing Mark Twain, that rumors of India’s death were greatly exaggerated. When confronted with the embarrassing fact of India’s survival as a political entity well beyond the stipulated two years, Sir Winston flatly denied making that prediction in the first place!

During the 1960s and 70s, some first world economists and political scientists played a then-popular parlour game of predicting the imminent demise and disintegration of the Indian union. The product of one of these, Asian Drama by the Norwegian economist Gunnar Myrdal even won the Nobel Prize for literature!  Based on a biased and inaccurate reading of socio-economic data, this overrated tome (wrongly) predicted that a combination of famine, overpopulation and atavistic, regressive Hindu belief systems would soon doom the young republic of India.

Myrdal had reckoned without Professor M S Swaminathan and Dr Verghese Kurien; the Green and White revolutions they helped spearhead.  He also hadn’t factored in the gradual erosion of caste practices and traditional beliefs caused by increasing urbanization and exposure to western-style liberal education.  Anyway, these beliefs and practices were never an integral part of official Indian government policy, the way Apartheid was for the former white minority regime in South Africa.

The problem with most prophets of doom is that they invariably anticipate extreme outcomes - not realizing that real-world scenarios mostly tend to fall somewhere in the median between normal and catastrophic.

The Norwegian Nobel Prize committee of that time must be wishing their embarrassingly ill-advised award has been conveniently forgotten by now.  India is presently an exporter of food to neighbouring countries of the Middle East and South Asia. Population growth in certain regions of the country has stabilized - to the extent that some experts believe that Nigeria might even overtake India as the world’s second most populous country by 2020!

Fantasies about conspiracies to destabilize India were a favourite of the chattering classes during the 1970s and 80s. Yet despite the best efforts of the “foreign hand”, India has stubbornly refused to politically fragment in the Yugoslav manner. Secessionist movements in the North-East and Punjab have withered away. Even insurgency in Kashmir (despite enthusiastic Pakistani support) appears to be in a stagnant phase at present. If there really was a foreign hand at work, it doesn’t seem to have been very effective – or successful. 

“You have a nasty habit of surviving, Mr. Bond”, hissed the frustrated villain of the 1983 movie Octopussy, coincidentally set in India. The country has an equally nasty habit of confounding complacent anticipations of its impending demise. 

Lt. General Hamid Gul, late of Pakistan’s infamous ISI, once smugly declared that “India is too big. It will have to be broken up first.”  

Unfortunately for the late General Gul, our perversely contrary country persistently refuses to oblige him – besides others of his ilk, as well.