In between Mao’s ‘Five Fingers’ and Hindutva India’s ‘Akhand Bharat’

As we head towards our 112th National Day, it is a moment of pride for us that we never have to celebrate an ‘Independence Day,’ with Bhutan never being colonized in its history, but it is also a time to reflect and not take our security and sovereignty for granted.

Many Bhutanese are familiar with a term attributed to Chairman Mao who in the 1950s is reported to have said, ‘Tibet is the palm of China and Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and NEFA (Arunachal) are its five fingers.’  There was also talk among the Chinese troops in Tibet in the 1950s to also ‘liberate’ the five fingers.

The Chinese later expunged this from its official government position and carried on a much more conciliatory policy towards Nepal and Bhutan, especially after the 1960s, emphasizing on the sovereign status of both the countries.

While relations today are much better and the above is history, it did, however, betray an expansionist mindset in the early stages of the People’s Republic of China.

Heading to 1975, most in Bhutan are well aware of the machinations that took place in New Delhi and Gangtok to controversially integrate Sikkim into India.

Cut to today, there is much turmoil in the neighboring Indian state of Assam, other North-Eastern states and other parts of India over the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) passed by the current BJP government in India.

The turmoil is because the CAB grants citizenship to ‘persecuted’ Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Parsees and Christians from the nations of Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, but excludes Muslims.

Many within India and outside have said that the CAB violates India’s Constitution and is part of the current government’s implementation of its domestic ‘Hindutva’ politics that gives primacy to Hindus and identifies India as a Hindu nation.

The controversy within India is to do with the exclusion of Muslims which is seen as an attempt to sideline the Muslim community as part of its domestic politics, and hence, consolidate the Hindu vote for BJP.

However, what many are missing out is the geo-strategic logic behind CAB and Hindutva of which CAB is a part.

The three Islamic countries in the CAB Bill are coincidentally the same three countries that form the major constitutents of ‘Akhand Bharat’ or ‘Undivided India/Greater India’ under the Hindutva philosophy.

 Akhand Bharat is propounded by India’s Hindu Right Wing RSS organization which is also the parent body of the ruling BJP. At separate times, the BJP and all major Hindu Right Wing organizations have promoted and subscribed to this view.

The RSS, after the partition of India in 1947, came up with the concept of Akhand Bharat that sought to reunite Afghanistan, Bangladesh (then East-Pakistan) and Pakistan with mainland India based on the territorial expanse of India’s Mauryan Empire under Emperor Ashok, which briefly held these areas or at least parts of them.

For equal measure, the RSS and its affiliates have included Bhutan, Nepal, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and the Maldives as part of Akhand Bharat in maps which are even published to this day. The trade union wing of the RSS carried dairies with an Akhand Bharat map including all the above countries.

This is based on their logic that anything south of the Himalayas and north of the Indian Ocean is part of Akhand Bharat, as published in several publications and maps of the RSS according to an Indian Express article in January 2016.

Never mind that the Mauryan Empire never included Bhutan, Nepal, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, or that the claim on Myanmar is based simply on its British occupation around the same time as India.

So far, one can dismiss the above as ‘fringe elements’ or ‘fringe views’ within India and that those in power know better, but this may no longer be the case.

The BJP National General Secretary Ram Madhav, in an interview to Al Jazeera on 26th December 2015, said that one day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh would reunite through popular goodwill into an Akhand Bharat.

On 17 September 2019, The Hindu reported that Indian Home Minister Amit Shah as saying that the abrogation of Article 370 in the Indian Constitution cancelling Jammu and Kashmir’s special status was a ‘significant step towards the motto of Akhand Bharat.’ The use of this word by the official No. 2 in the Indian government must give pause of thought.

In an Indian Express article, the Indian Prime Minister’s home state of Gujarat on 30 June 2014 passed an order ordering 42,000 primary and secondary schools in the state to translate nine Hindi Books by an author named Dina Nath Batra into Gujarati for compulsory reading in the schools. Gujarat’s education minister had officially released the books.

The books show the map of India as including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Tibet as part of Akhand Bharat.

The chapter ‘Undivided India,’ says: ‘Undivided India is the truth, divided India is a lie. Division of India is unnatural and it can be united again.’

The Hindu Right Wing in India and the BJP routinely lampoon all Congress leaders from Nehru to Rahul Gandhi, and sometimes even Mahatma Gandhi is not spared by its more radical elements.

However, there is an honorable exception and almost a soft corner for Indira Gandhi. Some criticism is made of for her imposition of Emergency, but there is genuine appreciation for her splitting of Pakistan and creation of Bangladesh in 1971, and the absorption of Sikkim in 1975.

In the early 1970s, India Gandhi had untrammelled powers with the imposition of Emergency in the country, and no real opposition to speak of and an aggressive foreign policy.

Many in India have compared the current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Indira Gandhi, in terms of political domination, economic policies and a certain style.

However, all of the above does not suppose that the Congress is a dove when it comes to regional foreign policy and that the BJP is a hawk. Both are hawks, and largely on the same page when it comes to foreign policy. As shown above, it was under the Congress that Sikkim was absorbed and the first ‘mega-surgical strike’ was the creation of Bangladesh.

The Congress governments also did not hesitate to send in troops across the international border into Myanmar or across the Line of Control in Kashmir to carry out punitive strikes against militants. One key difference is that it was not publicized like BJP is currently doing which creates a bigger expectation and appetite for such risks.

Anyone who supposes Congress will be softer on foreign policy in the region is living in a fool’s paradise.

However, these are still two different types of hawks.

While one supposes that almost every country has a romantic concept of a greater territory, based on historical conquests, real or imagined, however, the key difference is how RSS and its associates still use Akhand Bharat maps, teach it in schools and bring it up in national political discourse at the highest levels.

The Indian government under the Congress was a hard-nosed realpolitik state that did not hesitate to play bad and ugly in the neighbourhood, if it saw its interests being compromised or a soft opening. The rise of LTTE in Sri Lanka provides an example.

However, even in all that there was a certain predictability and ‘rules of the game’ that surrounding countries could adapt to.

Bhutan played this game the best by not doing anything to compromise India’s security interests and generally staying on its good side. 

The BJP is the same, but with one crucial difference which is the unfolding, but still relatively unknown geo-political and foreign policy ramifications of its Hindutva project.

By all indicators, the BJP government was supposed to do badly, and even possibly lose, in the 2019 General Elections. However, according to many analysts in India, the Pulwama Terrorist attacks, the subsequent Balakot strikes and the warlike atmosphere provided a tremendous nationalist boost and it got an even bigger mandate than in 2014.

With a slowing economy and record unemployment, it is now clear that the BJP is offering a muscular Hindutva to its Hindu majority (around 80 percent).

The princely state of Jammu and Kashmir saw its Hindu King (ruling over a pre-dominantly Muslim population) joining India with special assurances of autonomy under Article 370.

However, on 5 August 2019, the largely symbolic guarantees by the Indian state stood withdrawn by the Indian government. This wildly popular move, even though it went against historical Constitutional guarantees, received support from all sections including leaders of the Congress party who felt pressured to join the ‘new normal.’

This has now been followed by the CAB as explained earlier above. In the case of Bhutan, the immediate impact is turmoil in neighboring state of Assam, as the indigenous people of Assam feel they could be swamped by Bangladeshi Hindus. The reverberations are also going beyond to other north-eastern states who have similar fears of being demographically engulfed and losing their culture and identity.

Another example is the indigenous Bhutias, Lepchas and Sherpas of Sikkim who are now just 20 percent of the population protesting against CAB as they feel it can lead them to being marginalized further in their own land.

What is relevant for Bhutan is that CAB, and the inherent insecurities it unleashes in India’s North-East and particularly Assam, can impact Bhutan’s security and economy, as past experiences have shown, including 2003, when Bhutan had to launch ‘Operation All Out’ led by His Majesty The Fourth King to drive out Indian militants camped along Bhutan’s densely forested International border with India.

The strikes in Assam are already impacting Bhutanese traders and businesses from farmers to manufacturers.

However, there is something even more insidious and sinister happening.

But before that, remember that the traditional Indian Foreign Policy is now more nationalistic than before and is linked to its domestic politics of Hindutva where Hindus get primacy.

The 1990s problem in Bhutan is one of the most traumatic and unfortunate parts of modern Bhutanese history.

Bhutan saw the circumstances under which Sikkim got absorbed into India in 1975, and the two main lessons it learnt was on ensuring that it does not get demographically swamped, and that its indigenous culture does not become so diluted that it becomes unrecognizable from another Indian state.

So as Bhutan tried to carry out a census to verify citizenship and also strengthen its national identity, there was misunderstanding and poor implementation on the ground, and so protests and violence broke out in the south.

Ever mindful of Sikkim’s fate coupled with the Gorkha agitation in Darjeeling Hills and revolutionary turmoil in Nepal, the authorities in Bhutan reacted in fear, more than any cold calculation, and as one thing led to another there were excesses on both sides.

Cut to today, the issue of 1990s is well behind Bhutan including among the southern Bhutanese. The issue of the people in the camps is also almost sorted with the vast majority of them resettled in the West, and especially in the USA.

Today, no government can come to power in Bhutan without the southern vote. Around one third of MPs in the Parliament are from the south, and currently three of the ministers, out of 10, are from the south.

Southern Bhutanese enjoy equal rights under the Constitution, and economically they have done well for themselves with commercial agriculture and trade. They are a part of the mainstream and one of the main and indispensable pillars of Bhutanese society and the nation.

The issue of what happened in the 90s was covered in the international and regional press and still gets the occasional mention today. Perhaps, the strongest voice in this at the time was the ‘Kathmandu Press,’ for obvious reasons, but that was it.

However, there is an interesting revision of history happening in the Hindutva Right Wing eco-system in India that likes to imagine the majority Hindu community in India being under threat from its minorities in some diabolical plot.

This paranoid but popular perception is also getting projected internationally, given that India’s right wing has taken leadership of international 'Hindus’, and is increasingly seeing the neighbourhood and world through this new religious lense.

The issue is no longer about national interest, but where politically beneficial, also about the interest of Hindus.

The right wing in India, mainly on social media, apart from an online right-wing media outlet has, in the last few years, re-discovered what happened to Bhutan in the 1990s.

All past international reports on the 90s issue in Bhutan has framed it as an ethnic conflict, even though Bhutan has a different view.

However, an increasing number of the right wing in India is re-branding this as a Buddhist and Hindu conflict, given that it could not be farther from the truth as Southern Bhutanese are also comprised of Buddhists and religion was never an issue at the time.

There are online videos and stories among the right wing in India talking about the how Hindus were persecuted or expelled from Bhutan. This is not only inaccurate but a gross misportrayal of what actually happened.

As India becomes more and more 'Hindu' in its policies and outlook, this lie is getting repeated more and more, even among prominent figures in India sympathetic to the right, to fit in neatly with the theory of Hindus being persecuted around the world, including in India, itself.

Now to put the matter in perspective, diplomatic ties between Bhutan and India are absolutely fine and no BJP leader has even raised a little finger against Bhutan on any religious issue.

The 1990s issue is also an issue of the past, and a resolved one as far as Bhutan is concerned.

However, it is also true that the current Indian government, under its Hindutva project, has not hesitated to wreck its ties with the large and important nation of Bangladesh, that has a pro-India government, for domestic political considerations in the CAB Bill.

The point of the article here is not to pass a moral judgment on India, but to point out a new aspect that is now influencing Indian foreign policy drawn from its domestic Hindutva politics, and hence, to be prepared for any eventualities.

While the traditional pillars of Bhutan-India friendship still remain, it is important to also be familiar with an entirely different dispensation that is now in power in Delhi, and the new ideology and dynamics at play.

So, as Bhutan heads to its largest 112th National Day celebrations till date, it is important to remember that we cannot take our sovereignty and security for granted, and be it the north or the south, we must be ever vigilant and on guard in a tough and sensitive neighbourhood.

We must also keep our ears to the ground, and be aware of even the slightest tectonic shifts that can impact us at any point of time.

The writer is the Editor of The Bhutanese paper but the views here published in this personal blog are entirely his own and does not represent any media house or any organization.