In 1994, India’s population, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, was 913747000 the doubling time of which was predicted to be 36 years, implying that by 2030, the number of Indians would go up to 183 crore. The break-up of religious affiliation then was shown as Hindu (80 per cent); Muslim (11 per cent); Christian (2.4 per cent); Sikh (2 per cent); Buddhist (0.7 per cent); Jain (0.5 per cent); Zoroastrian (0.1 per cent) and the total land area as 1222243 sq miles i.e. 3165596 sq kilometres.
In 2009, Encyclopaedia Britannica reported that the Indians number 115 crore, (with 72.04 per cent Hindus; 12.26 Muslim; 6.8 Christian; 1.87 Sikh; 0.67 Buddhist, 0.51 Jain and 0.02 per cent Zoroastrians), would end up doubling in 44 years. Thus, there would be 230 crore Indians in 2052. The only stable factor of India, however, is its landmass which (even today) continues to be what it was in 1994.It certainly does not require any demographic “expert” to visualise the possible scenario and the fallout of this static land with a geometrical process of population explosion. There is bound to be an increasingly demand-supply mismatch thereby resulting in an exploding demand curve. There will be an all round shortage of land, food, job, housing, railway tickets, power and drinking water. In this unique “shortage of economics”, only a microscopic minority is likely to thrive by virtue of its holding the knob of the state machinery and power.
Feeling of an impending insecurity and apprehension of an uncertain future is bound to ignite the suppressed anger of the marginalised and deprived to violent action. Lack of probity and integrity, coupled with acts of extortion and loot have already started making the marginalised regional satraps resort to call for virtual independence from within the “system” of the Indian state. The call of various separatist movements seems to be gaining unprecedented momentum.
From ‘Azadi’ (emancipation from the bondage of the Indians), to “separation from the dominance of majority ethnic group” etc, New Delhi’s present dilemma is pregnant with the negation of the valiant enterprise of Sardar Patel in the 1940s and 1950s the outcome of which was the unprecedented historical “Story of the integration of the Indian states”, as referred to by another great Indian civil servant V.P. Menon.
Indeed, what the Patel-Menon duo stood for in the 1950s against all odds suddenly appears to be a distant dream. Whereas the combined brains of Patel-Menon turned the impossible into possible by ensuring 562 states/ principalities/ taluks/ estates join the Indian states, new opportunities beckon a vast section of Indians to undo the unfinished task of consolidation they had initiated.
As history of geography shows, India has rarely been as big as it is today as a single politico-military- geographical unit under a single command power centre as a nation state. Thus every India, under the rule of external invaders, in the 16th century had three-tier system of sovereignty encircled by suzerainty.
The first category consisted of the “areas integrated within the empire” (including watan jagirs). The second was made of “areas partly independent and partly in vassal states”. And the third was the “area incompletely integrated” (nominal vassals and theatres of military operations). There was so much confusion about the Indian ruler’s territorial jurisdiction that even today there exists serious difference of opinion on the territory held by Akbar.
Vincent Smith in Akbar, the Great Mughal (1917); Wolseley Haig in Cambridge History of India (Vol 4) (1937); P Saran in The Provincial Government of the Mughals (1941); C.C. Davis in An Historical Atlas of the Indian Peninsula (1949); R.P. Tripathi in Rise and fall of the Mughal Empire (1956); A.L. Srivastava in Akbar the Great (1962); Irfan Habib in Agrarian System of Mughal India (1963); A.B. Pandey in Later Medieval India (1963) and A Historical Atlas of South Asia of University of Chicago Press (1971) taken together fail to conclude as to what constituted the exact political map of Akbar’s territory.
India’s political geography had a “great” ruler but even he was unsure and unaware of the changing contours of his own empire’s frontiers. Such is the dynamics of change in Indian soil. Change of ownership or possession and forced occupation or eviction have been a constant and steady factor keeping the ruler and the ruled at tenterhooks all the time in India.
Thus, one is neither surprised nor shocked to hear the sudden burst of somewhat cacophonic, yet concerted chorus of statehood demand, “liberation” front and movementwallahs, “separation”, “autonomy”, “Azadi”, “independence” and what all you can possibly have to share the spoils of the soil’s fruit, literally, metaphorically and symbolically.
India may be a 62-year-old democracy but in the blood veins of every Indian flow the feudalism and monarchy of 6000 years. Turn the pages of Indian history and one finds a plethora of monarchy and autocracy with hardly any democracy.
Even after 1947, it took several years for the Patel-Menon team to persuade, cajole and threaten the 562 “independent” rulers/ rajas/ maharajas to submit to the nascent democratic engine of the Indian state. Today’s open and somewhat chaotic democracy, however, has given birth to an emotional and charged feeling to take things by force.
One is at a loss to assess which way the unguided missile of an intolerant movement and civil war-type action would lead India to. The scenario does not look rosy. The way things are happening and heading, one can safely infer that the good work done by Patel-Menon duo is being undone by a band of emotionally charged people led by a few leaders.
Tactically, and in the short term, this violent action and hatred may bear fruit but the long-term implications are pregnant with the fall of the Indian nation. Sardar Patel’s thesis of integration seems to be turning into antithesis, i.e. disintegration. Patel and Menon immortalised their folklore as “the story of the integration of Indian states” in mid-20th century. One hopes that the 21st century does not turn into a “saga of the disintegration of Indian states.”
Source: The Tribune, Chandigarh, India.
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