What Unites India?

A few days before our 62nd Independence Day, someone asked me this question over dinner during a treat. Needless to say like every other question ever asked to me in a restaurant this too was disposed of with spartan minimalism so that I could continue with the sumptous fare the host had to offer. However after a day of reading status messages that proclaimed their one-day patriotism I decided that the one word I had chosen back then needed a rethink. In hindsight I believe I should have chosen 2 words instead of one.

Ofcourse a pre-requisite to this would be the answer to the question 'What is India?'. On this ground although I already had a head-start. A week or so ago I had the good fortune of reading a Rushdie extract addressing the same question. For reasons I will go into later, I had decided back then India is simply the collective community which had fought for its freedom and achieved its bitter-sweet success 62 years ago on this same date. Of course by almost a clever bit of verbal jugglary I had managed to exclude our friendly neighbours, since they happen to enjoy an extra day of independence.

The need to go back to the British Raj in the quest for the identity of India is simple. Before the Raj there was no India. Ofcourse as Rushdie very aptly puts it there was a piece of land seperating Pakistan and Bangladesh but the political identity that defines India was conspicuous only by its absence. This need for a united India manifest it for the first time only when there was no other alternative to freedom from an unjust external rule. The only factor which did unite India of a cenury ago was not something internal to be found within but simply an external stimulus.

So then 62 years after ridding ourselves of our sole reason of unification the question that 'What Unites India' acquires even greater pertinance. This directly brings me to the first word that came to my mind. Sloth. To put simply what unites India is that we are too lazy to Balkanize. Ofcourse a lot of people might consider such a remark in really bad taste. The point being that every nation, community or ethnic group that ever needed freedom needed something to be free off. So what I mean to say is we prefer to stay as Indians and not as Hindus, Maharashtrians or Mumbaikars is simply because there is no reason to seperate. It is true that we dont have every thing we want, that iphone, everlasting prosperity and unshakeable peace of mind may still elude us. But none of them is good enough to float a nation-state of our own. In the absence of this good reason to seperate our sloth takes over and we are happy to remain as one.

What appeared to me then as an irrefutable argument, unfortunately had a fatal flaw which my nourishment deprived mind was unable to catch in the midst of dinner. The argument is plainly a symptomatic treatment (kind of like giving every person with a cold a dose of Tamiflu). The real question is why are we so content with what we have? The reason to this brings us a full circle to what I prefer to define as India. To reiterate India is that political entity became free of the British Raj on 15th August 1947. The reason I choose to ignore those who jumped the gun by a whole 24 hours is because it the India of the 15th August which finally adopted the Constitution we abide by. The reason why we are so happy with the things we have is that India we chose to create back then is an India of the rule of law. We choose to remain united inspite of our differences only because of the reassurance that someone wont be treated better just because they are different. I do not Balkanize because I realize that after all the effort I put into creating my very own Chiraagland I will end up living by the same rules that I live in India. Given my predisposed laziness I choose not to put in this wasted effort. So then I choose a second word to my argument: contentment.

In conclusion the next time someone asks you "What Unites India" in the middle of your dinner the reply is simply "How would a divided India make your life better?"