‘India, Pak must reunite under a secular govt’

Justice Markandey Katju

India and Pakistan have been one country since Mughal times, and we share the same culture. When I meet Pakistanis I feel no different from them. We look like each other, we speak the same language, Hindustani, we have the same food habits, the common love for Urdu literature, etc.

Indians and Pakistanis socialize abroad as if there had never been a Partition. In fact, we are one country, artificially divided, which is why we must reunite.

The Partition of India in 1947 was done on the basis of the bogus two-nation theory that says that Hindus and Muslims are two separate nations. If religion is the basis of a nation then almost every country will have to be partitioned, because there are Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc in almost every country, for example. in the UK, US, France, Germany, etc.

As pointed out in detail in my article ‘The Truth about Pakistan’ published in the Pakistani newspaper The Nation (https://nation.com.pk/02-Mar-2013/the-truth-about-pakistan), The Partition was a historical British swindle, a culmination of the divide and rule policy, whose purpose was to keep Hindus and Muslims fighting each other and thereby keep the subcontinent poor and weak, and a big buyer of foreign arms. We were befooled by the Britishers into thinking Hindus and Muslims are enemies see ‘History in the Service of Imperialism’ by B.N.Pande (http://www.cyberistan.org/islamic/pande.htm) but how much longer must we remain befooled? How much longer must blood flow between us.

Today India is the biggest buyer of foreign weapons in the world, and we spend billions of dollars on this money, which should be used for the welfare of our people.

When I said that India and Pakistan must reunite under a secular government most people said I was daydreaming. But when Giuseppe Mazzini spoke of Italian unification he was also called a daydreamer. Yet his dream came true under Count Cavour and Giuseppe Garibaldi. Vietnam was reunited in 1975, and Germany in 1990. So to say that much water has flown since 1947 is neither here nor there.

Some say there is a lot of hatred between the people of the two countries, and so we cannot reunite. But this hatred is artificial. In fact, when Indians go to Pakistan they are overwhelmed by the love and affection they get, and the same happens when Pakistanis come to India.

No doubt, reunification will not happen easily, because those who divided us will not like to see a united India emerge as a huge industrial giant, like another China. But it is bound to happen though it will take time.

However, the time has come to put forward the idea of Indo-Pak reunification. It is like planting a seed, which may take 10-15 years to grow into a fruit-bearing tree, but that is what all of us must do, overtly or covertly, if we wish to enjoy the fruits.

[Justice Markandey Katju, former Judge, Supreme Court of India. The views expressed are his own]