“In reality, war is not the way to make India undivided once again. War can achieve geographical unity, but not national unity. Sovereignty is not just a geographical idea; it is also a cultural and national idea. The country was divided because of the principle of two-nation theory and the tendency to make many compromises. The idea of Akhand Bharat will be achieved if we stay on that principle completely. Those Muslims who lack nationalism now will also come with us later. But only if we stop compromising on the issue of nationalism, that which seems impossible today, can become possible tomorrow. We just have to keep alive the idealist within us.”
– Pt. Deendayal Upadhyaya, in his seminal book ‘Akhand Bharat Kyon?’ (Why Undivided India?) as quoted from a booklet published by the Bharatiya Janata Party under Pt. Deendayal Upadhyaya Prashikshan Mahabhiyan in September 2015
In September 1960, when Nehru signed the controversial Indus Waters Treaty with Ayub Khan, mediated by the World Bank, the then Prime Minister justified it as ‘we purchased peace’ with Pakistan. Can one buy peace for a nation? We need a deeper understanding of what the Nehru-dynasty-led Congress has been trying to achieve, which has proved very costly for Bharat as a sovereign republic.
When Bharat was partitioned, the Nehruvian idea provided similar logic. Even after experiencing the blackmailing and bullying of the Islamists from the Khilafat in the 1920s to the 1946 Calcutta killings, Nehru did not anticipate the violence. On the contrary, he believed, as remarked in his interview with American TV host Arnold Michaelis in 1964, ‘it is better to have Partition than this constant trouble’. He further remarked, “We expected that Partition would be temporary, that Pakistan was bound to come back to us. None of us guessed how much the killings and the crisis in Kashmir would embitter relations”. Really? Did we eliminate constant trouble, or did we invite more woes within and on the borders? Was it an assessment of a statesman or person who was disconnected from the ground reality? Protecting ‘personal laws’ will bring in peace; making Waqf like arbitrary provisions would make ‘them’ secure, recognising ‘Kashmir’ as a ‘secular jewel’ because of the Muslim majority – denying Constitutional rights to people of Jammu-Kashmir would solve Hindu-Muslim tension, all these and many were nothing but the continuation of the same strategy to buy peace.
Unfortunately, when the entire Parliament was in uproar, the same formula was applied while signing the disastrous Indus Waters Treaty ‘in a spirit of goodwill and friendship’. Leaders across the party line and ideological spectrum questioned Nehru, the then Prime Minister, who initially deployed his Irrigation Minister when the discussion was forced in Parliament on the unjust provisions of the treaty. One of the Congress leaders had alleged during the debate that Bharat’s honour was destroyed and respect was sold through the treaty signed in Karachi. The extraordinarily generous water-sharing treaty in favour of Pakistan was the only agreement in the world that compelled the upper riparian state to jeopardise its interests to satisfy the downstream state’s ego. The parity of rivers, with three each flowing from the eastern and western regions, was another flawed argument presented, as the quantity of water carried by these rivers is 4:1. The water crisis in the States of Haryana, Punjab, and Rajasthan could have been resolved if we had harnessed these resources. Jammu-Kashmir was sold with the fallacious idea of special status when all its water resources were given away to a terror-sponsoring nation. What we got against the unfair treaty was terrorism and radicalism.
Peace is not a commodity that you can buy in the international market. It is a process that needs to be enforced in which negotiating or signing a treaty is just one of the instruments. Unless you negotiate from a position of strength, peace cannot be enforced. The negative and exclusionary ideology of Islamism on which the idea of Pakistan was tossed up and eventually materialised would never understand the language of ‘goodwill and friendly feeling’. The Nehruvian Congress never understood this simple and historically proven fact, for which Bharat has paid a hefty price without peace. Following the Pahalgam terror attack, when the Modi-led NDA Government decided to put the treaty in abeyance, there is scope for wider deliberations and resetting the agenda for water diplomacy. Instead of succumbing to pressure and blackmailing techniques, Bharat should ensure strategic, sustainable and prudent utilisation of water resources. If China, as an upper riparian state, can harness the potential of the Brahmaputra basin, so can Bharat, in the case of the Indus river.
