WE ARE ONE

Pakistan and Bangladesh are both India in my mind still, for when I read the history of the freedom movement it is so evident. The subsequent Partition I reject from the bottom of my heart. However, this is pure effusion on my part, I know, and has no political bearing that I attach to it, for I do not attach any such intent in any mean measure as well. This is just to raise the awareness of what we were and what we have become through the perfidies of the times. United we were and united shall again be, for, essentially, united we still are. The land of the rishis is not possible to politically divide for they have in the Sama Veda sung the eternal song of the integrated life. It is but a matter of time --- and in the flowing field of moving history, a few decades are nothing, an insignificant entity bearing little meaning, --- before the subcontinent will be one, for the light that led us to freedom will inevitably lead us to unity as well, so said the mighty prophet of nationalism, the seer and the sage, the divine Sri Aurobindo. India must not misconstrue the people of Pakistan to be enemies for they are the unfortunate children of the Mother, temporarily banished by the historical heresy of Partition unto the other side of the border where they daily suffer a living death at the hands of the dictatorial armed forces and have to perforce subscribe to their national agenda of eternal war with India. But in their heart of hearts they would much prefer union with India, for they are one with us and have been so for centuries and no amount of indoctrination of religion or political propaganda may prevent their feeling of empathy with us on this side of the border, for we have fought a common war against a common enemy, the British, before we have been made to fight with each other. Civilisation does not begin overnight nor does it die in a flash. The heritage of India, millenia-old, bears down on Pakistan and Bangladesh and beckons them to unite with the motherland. But like a schism takes time to manifest, so does the healing process take its due time before old adjustments are restored and the polity gains solidarity. So shall it be in the case of our benighted nations as well, the trinity that shall seek union in its original contemplation. The rishis discovered the Vedas on the banks of the Sindhu, the Saraswati and the Ganga, and it shall be the good fortune of future generations to see the motherland integrated and whole. Till then we must keep our hopes high, our aspirations for oneness throbbing in every pulsation of our being, a union not only human, cultural and spiritual but political as well, for only then the blood of the martyrs of either side of this artificial border will not have been spilled in vain and the sacrifices and suffering of millions of soldiers of the soul and their kith and kin not been a wasted deal in the barter that life profane is. And it ought not to be so, for these valorous beings that donned the earthly garb to free the motherland from the octopus-hold of the barbarous British, did no double dealing with the mother they dearly loved, and so, far transcended the realm of the bartering self to the domain of the divine within, the real Self that is at the heart of existence. To them freedom of the motherland was consonant with the spiritual freedom of the self and the struggle to bring about such transformation in the fate of the nation an austerity to which they had pledged their heroic heads. History does not take a straight course but curves upwards along a mountainous detour, here evolving with tortuous pace over centuries, there revolving in a flash over a few volcanic years, but advancing, nonetheless, the same. The civilisation of this nation is stretched over several millenia and dates back to then when there was no timekeeper, such is the antiquity of this culture we claim to be our own, and do so rightly too. We who are the inheritors of this grand movement of the masses, this march of the Grande Armee, the common men and women of hoary Bharatvarsha, we owe it to our motherland to love every single soul inhabiting the subcontinent and to hold none in hate, for in this integrated national feeling lies our future fate, our destiny as a nation, united and strong, with her amputated limbs relocated and healed and her peoples welded into a single national family to which the freedom fighters pledged as they gave their selves up on the scaffold. Vande Mataram! Jai Hind!