Winston Churchill, the arch-imperialist Prime Minister of Britain, was passionately devoted to retaining India in the British Empire. He stated that India is no more a nation than the Equator. The concept of Nation States emerged in the late medieval period in Europe. Italy and Germany became Nation States only in the last decades of the 19th century. India became a Nation State in that sense in 1947, though India has been a nation and a civilisation state from the dawn of history. All major religions of India have their most sacred shrines in the four corners of our country, binding India together.
The four dhams (shrines) of Hindus are Badrinath in the north, Jagannath in the east, Rameshwaram in the south and Dwarka in the west. Kashi Vishwanath in Varanasi, in India’s heartland, is one of the most ancient and revered Hindu shrines. The Sikhs have their sacred shrines at Hemkund in the north, Patna in the east, Nanded in the south and Amritsar/Nankana Sahab in the northwest. Islam has its most sacred shrine at Ajmer Sharif, in the centre of India. Mohammad Iqbal, the great Urdu poet whose ancestors were of Kashmiri Pandit origin, composed a song underscoring the unity of the Indian nation: “Sare Jahan Se Achchha Hindustan Hamara… Mazhab nahin sikhata apas men bair rakhna, Hindi hain hum watan hai Hindustan humara.”
Our great leaders like Chhatrapati Shivaji or Mahatma Gandhi are adored all over the country as India’s natio-nal heroes, unmindful of their regional identity. Our freedom struggle under the Mahatma mobilised Indians from all parts of the country. We won our freedom in a unique manner in the history of mankind. Post-Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru became the architect of our secular democracy and of our Nation State. He aptly described our nation as an example of “unity in diversity”. We are a Rainbow Nation with different ethnicities, languages and religions; like the different colours of the rainbow.
Late 19th century onwards, the contribution of eminent leaders and the masses of diff-erent regions of our coun-try have further bound us together as one nation. After Independence, we could overcome separatist movements in Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Assam. The separatists were brought back to the national mainstream. Kashmir is a different case because of the ongoing conflict with Pakistan and antagonism of China. It is generally not realised that the majority of the population of India-administered Kashmir is happy to remain a part of India. The focus in India and internationally has been on Kashmiri-speaking Muslims in the Valley. They are a numerical minority in the state. The majority reside in nearly 90 per cent of the state’s territory.
Unlike Pakistan, which lost its eastern half due to linguistic separatism, we overcame linguistic separatism in Tamil Nadu through democratic means. We pay rich tributes to our three great leaders on their birth anniversary in October — Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Lal Bahadur Shastri. This is also the month in which we should recall the contribution of our towering national leaders from different regions of the country. They have cemented our nationhood. In the early 20th century it was rightly said, “What Bengal thinks today, the rest of India thinks tomorrow”.
Our great national leaders from Bengal in different fields were Swami Vivekanand, Rabindranath Tagore, C.R. Das, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. From Assam we had Lokpriya Gopinath Bordoloi; from Bihar Dr Rajendra Prasad and Lok Nayak Jayaprakash Narayan; from Uttar Pradesh Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Zakir Hussain and Chandra Shekhar Azad; from Punjab Lala Lajpat Rai and Sardar Bhagat Singh; from Bombay Province Dadabhai Naoroji, B.R. Ambedkar, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Jamshedji Tata; from Madras (now Chennai) C. Rajagopalachari, Dr S. Radhakrishnan, Sir C.V. Raman and Sir Srinivasa Sastri. This is by no means an exhaustive list.
Three leaders from Gujarat had an impact on world history — Mahatma Gandhi as the “Father of the Nation”, Quaid-i-Azam, Mohammed Ali Jinnah as the “Breaker of the Nation” and Sardar Patel as the “Integrator of the Nation”. We now have a leader from Gujarat who has created waves in the world besides a tremendous wave within the country which swept him to power. In a short time he has raised great hopes with his innovative ideas that are getting duly implemented.
The writer, a retired lieutenant-general, was Vice-Chief of Army Staff and has served as governor of Assam and Jammu and Kashmir
