Partition Not A Settled Fact, Says Bhagwat
Opening yet another front, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has said that ‘partition of the country was not a settled fact’ and that ‘division of the sub-continent would have to be undone for everyone’s good’.
“We are often told to forget about this (Partition), but those who forget are condemned to repeat it. Partition is not a settled fact, and it shall have to be undone. When we refer to Bharat, it’s always Akhand Bharat. Those who think otherwise have been brought up on a western value system in the name of progress,” he said at the release of a booklet called Bharat Vibhajan – Ek Trasadi, Ek Kalank (India’s Partition – A Tragedy, A Blot).
It should be noted that Bhagwat’s remarks are contrary to the prominent stream of thought on ‘India and its Neighbourhood’ in the BJP.
In 1999 during the NDA regime, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then prime minister, paid a visit to Minae-e-Pakistan, while in 2005, senior BJP leader LK Advani visited Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s mausoleum in Karachi – two steps that BJP consider as significant in according Pakistan legitimacy as an independent country.
Late Deen Dayal Upadhyay, Bharatiya Jana Sangh ideologue, had mooted ‘a confederation of South Asian states’, Bhagwat didn’t specify his own blueprint for ‘Akhand Bharat’. He, however, added that “no truth could be established without adequate force” and that a “common Hindu past alone could be the basis of emotional integration for the subcontinent” and that it would be the basis for everyone’s happiness.
He also claimed that “recent research findings on DNA mapping have established that the inhabitants of this sub-continent in the last 40,000 years have had similar DNA”, and “thus no one could be called minorities in the country”.
Bhagwat indicated that Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tibet, Nepal, Myanmar and Sri Lanka once formed “Akhand Bharat”.
