Indian reunification


Indian reunification refers to the potential unification of India with what is now Bangladesh and Pakistan, the latter of which was partitioned from British India in 1947.

Background

In 1947, British India was partitioned into the modern Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan, the latter of which included northwest India and part of eastern India. Those who opposed the vivisection of the country often adhered to the doctrine of composite nationalism. The Indian National Congress, as well as the All India Azad Muslim Conference, opposed the partition of India; the president of the All India Azad Muslim Conference and Chief Minister of Sind, Shadeed Allah Bakhsh Soomro, stated that “No power on earth can rob anyone of his faith and convictions, and no power on earth shall be permitted to rob Indian Muslims of their just rights as Indian nationals.” Khaksar Movement leader Allama Mashriqi opposed the partition of India because he felt that if Muslims and Hindus had largely lived peacefully together in India for centuries, they could also do so in a free and united India. Mashriqi saw the two-nation theory as a plot of the British to maintain control of the region more easily, if India was divided into two countries that were pitted against one another. He reasoned that a division of India along religious lines would breed fundamentalism and extremism on both sides of the border. Mashriqi thought that "Muslim majority areas were already under Muslim rule, so if any Muslims wanted to move to these areas, they were free to do so without having to divide the country." To him, separatist leaders "were power hungry and misleading Muslims in order to bolster their own power by serving the British agenda."
The author of Composite Nationalism and Islam, Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani, a Deobandi Muslim scholar and proponent of a united India, argued that in order to maintain their divide and rule policy, the British were attempting to "scare Muslims into imagining that in a free India, Muslims would lose their separate identity and be absorbed into the Hindu fold", a threat that "aim at depoliticizing the Muslims, weaning them away from struggle for independence." In the eyes of Madani, support for a two-nation theory resulted in the entrenchment of British imperialism.
The pro-separatist All-India Muslim League, on the other hand, campaigned for a separate country, Pakistan, and their demand for the partition of India took place. Since that time, various individuals and political parties, as well as religious groups have called for Indian reunification.
Mahatma Gandhi, for example, had wished to settle in Noakhali in order to start a campaign for Indian reunification among the Muslim community of Pakistan.
Indian nationalists felt that following the departure of the British from the Indian subcontinent, Pakisan would destabilize and reunite with India; both the British, as well as the Indian National Congress thus thought it would be best for the British to leave sooner. On the other hand, Muhammad Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League wished to delay the departure of the British as he felt that it would allow the newly created state of Pakistan to receive its share of join assets.
In August 1953, several newspapers in India reported that meetings held on United India Day presented Indian reunification as the goal of patriots. One of them, Parbhat wrote that: "Pakistani leaders are well aware of the fact that the majority of the Indian population does not accept the partition of 1947 and will come out in the open to do away with it at the first opportunity."
In the 1950s, the Sri Aurobindo Sevak Sangha included in their programme "Annulment of the ill-fated partition and reunification of India." On 4 February 4 1957, the Muslim League's Morning News published an article stating that "there is a party even in Pakistan which is working for reunification and it is growing in strength", with reference to the Awami League, possibly in an attempt to lambast it.
Lord Listowel remarked that "It is greatly to be hoped that when the disadvantages of separation have become apparent in the light of experience, the two Dominions will freely decide to reunite in a single Indian Dominion, which might achieve that position among the nations of the world to which its territories and resources would entitle it."
The subject of undoing the partition and reunifying India has been discussed by both Indians and Pakistanis, especially in recent times.

Views

Political thinkers

In The Nation, Kashmiri Indian thinker Markandey Katju has advocated the reunification of India with Pakistan under a secular government. He stated that the cause of the partition was the divide and rule policy of Britain, which was implemented to spread communal hatred after Britain saw that Hindus and Muslims worked together to agitate against their colonial rule in India. Katju serves as the chairman of the Indian Reunification Association, which seeks to campaign for this cause.
Pakistani historian Nasim Yousaf, the grandson of Allama Mashriqi, has also championed Indian Reunification and presented the idea at the New York Conference on Asian Studies on 9 October 2009 at Cornell University; Yousaf stated that the partition of India itself was a result of the British interests and their divide and rule policy that sought to create another buffer state between the Soviet Union and India to prevent the spread of Communism, as well the fact that a "division of the people and territory would prevent a united India from emerging as a world power and keep the two nations dependent on pivotal powers." Yousaf cited former Indian National Congress president Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who wrote in the same vein:
Yousaf holds that "Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the President of the All-India Muslim League and later founder of Pakistan, had been misleading the Muslim community in order to go down in history as the saviour of the Muslim cause and to become founder and first Governor General of Pakistan." Allama Mashriqi, a nationalist Muslim, thus saw Jinnah as "becoming a tool in British hands for his political career." Besides the pro-separatist Muslim League, Islamic leadership in British India rejected the notion of partitioning the country, exemplified by the fact that most Muslims in the heartland of the subcontinent remained where they were, rather than migrating to newly created state of Pakistan. India and Pakistan are currently allocating a significant amount of their budget into military spending—money that could be spent in economic and social development. Poverty, homelessness, illiteracy, terrorism and a lack of medical facilities, in Yousaf's eyes, would not be plaguing an undivided India as it would be more advantaged "economically, politically, and socially." Yousaf has stated that Indians and Pakistanis speak a common lingua franca, Hindustani, "wear the same dress, eat the same food, enjoy the same music and movies, and communicate in the same style and on a similar wavelength". He argues that uniting would be a challenge, though not impossible, citing the fall of the Berlin Wall and the consequent German Reunification as an example.
French journalist François Gautier wrote that:
Lal Khan, a Pakistani political activist and founder of the Marxist organization The Struggle, suggested that undoing the partition is a necessity because it would resolve the Kashmir conflict, as well as reduce the power of the "security-bureaucratic machine", thus guaranteeing a true secular, socialist and democratic society. Advocating for a common revolution, Khan declared that "Five thousand years of common history, culture and society is too strong to be cleavaged by this partition." His views are described his book "Crisis in the Indian Subcontinent, Partition: Can it be Undone?" in which Khan states that "revolutionary transformation of the economies and societies is an essential prerequisite for the reunification of the subcontinent."
Educationalist P. A. Inamdar commented at the Rangoonwala College of Dental Science in July 2017 that the reunification of Pakistan and Bangladesh with India would "keep India prosperous and peaceful".

Religious groups

observed that "Hindus... have not forgiven the Muslim League for destroying the unity of the subcontinent when the British agreed to independence." Many Hindus were devastated by the fact that "part of the motherland envisaged in the ancient Hindu scriptures" was partitioned from India. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh, a Hindu political organisation held the creation of Akhand Bharat as one of its objectives; in this context, Akhand Bharat's borders were that of India, before its partition in 1947. Ram Madhav, a spokesman for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist organisation, stated that “The RSS still believes that one day these parts, which have for historical reasons separated only 60 years ago, will again, through popular goodwill, come together and Akhand Bharat will be created.”
A group of 200 Islamic clerics gathered in Pune in July 2017 and issued a statement calling for Indian Reunification:
The musician Mehdi Hassan, when visiting Ajmer Sharif Dargah, always prayed for the "reunification of India and Pakistan in some peaceful form or the other."
The Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba has framed the prophecy of Ghazwa-e-Hind, as one in which India is defeated and united with Pakistan, unifying the Indian subcontinent under Muslim rule.