The 1000 Years Frame Erases 80% of India

girmit, high signal as ever as the Comment threads threaten to get engulfed in flames (the Crescentiate are being more provocative than usual). Will return to this properly in a separate post. as an aside when we see girmit, we think Kermit. Probably one of our wises voices in BP.

Indians and their gratitude for Partition

You will be hard pressed to find a normal person in India who doesn’t accept this. If you listen to young people talk they would treat the fact that India-Pakistan were once part of the same polity as some kind of surprising trivia. My point is that, while TNT was used to litigate for partition , and the results of that have been accepted by all parties, the *further* application of TNT will find no takers among liberals. An example would be a statement like “Kashmir should have gone to Pakistan because of having a muslim majority”. There are excellent reasons why one can argue for Kashmir as an independent state in 1947 or even part of Pakistan, that don’t depend on TNT. The foremost being the idea that the process of accession was corrupted somehow. J&K had the same exact right to self-determinaton as Travancore for instance. But the underlying principal is self-determination in the Wilsonian sense i suppose, not TNT. (This goes both ways, as Indians use an imperial logic of their own that a fully intact successor state to the british raj was their entitlement, which is quite outageousely grandiose to be fair).

BJP is a broad tent

I’m tempted to disagree here, because BJP is a bigger tent than you estimate. You are imputing “anti-muslim” as the sine non qua of its mission. It is as much a hindi-language supremacist,gangetic culture centric, and anti-communist party hence the original slogan , “hindi, hindu, hindustan”. Unlike other regional parties it exported and adapted well in a few other regions and does well among the educated, urban bougie demographic. Also the RSS/BJP is not earnestly religious, at its most extreme it may be a type of fascism, but not a theocracy like JI. Finally, it does not require separation of religious communities in its vision, let alone partition. It is agnostic to whether India is 35% muslim or 15% muslim.

On the myth of a Universal Millennia-long “Islamic Supremacy”

Fwiw, I think a sufficient number of hindus and others would agree with Kabir’s point here, to make this non-provocative. A 1000 years is a huge stretch in the periodization of islamicate India. It would be very generous to say the second battle of tarain (1192) was a starting point around delhi, and by 1737 we have the regular sackings of delhi by marathas. So even in the most iconic islamicate imperial metropole of India we have <550 years of supremacy. We dig further and we will find that most of this period had sizable inclusion of hindu nobilty, not to mention hindu and jain land revenue officials and banking thriving and wielding immense power over the muslim nobility. Now once we consider that the story in the deccan, deep south , orissa and assam and many other regions had unperturbed native elites practically throughout the entire epoch, to varying degrees, it makes someone as esteemed as a prime minister seem intellectually dishonest to repeat this slogan perpetually. If not, we are dealing with someone with a childlike grasp of history, which I doubt. Moreover, the maximalist claim puts the punjab and gangetic plain at the center of indian historiography, at the expense of 80% of the remaining territory of the country, which raises other questions about national identity and whose history we are interrogating.