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Oppositions, freedom fighters decry India’s ‘Akhand Bharat’ mural
Ahammad Foyez | Published: 23:26, Jun 03,2023
Bangladesh oppositions, FFs decry India's ‘Akhand Bharat’ mural
Opposition parties and decorated freedom fighters have reacted sharply to the ‘Akhand Bharat’ map of the Indian subcontinent depicted in a mural on the newly inaugurated parliament building...www.newagebd.net
Photo shows ‘Akhand Bharat’ mural placed in new parliament building of India that triggers huge criticisms in Neighbouring countries. — Photo courtesy News9
Opposition parties and decorated freedom fighters have reacted sharply to the ‘Akhand Bharat’ map of the Indian subcontinent depicted in a mural on the newly inaugurated parliament building of India.
On May 28, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the mural with the concept of Akhand Bharat, meaning ‘Undivided India,’ which refers to the idea of a undivided Indian subcontinent, encompassing present-day India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar.
The Pakistani government and Nepalese politicians separately expressed their grievances over the idea of ‘Undivided India’ incorporating their countries into the scheme.
The government of Bangladesh has yet to come out with any reaction, while the ruling Awami League’s international affairs secretary has refused to comment on the issue.
Talking to New Age on Saturday, freedom fighters and politicians said that such an action by India was a threat to sovereignty and would create controversy in regional politics.
When approached, AL international affairs secretary Shammi Ahmed denied making any comment.
Bangladesh’s foreign ministry also did not make a statement on the issue until Saturday evening, while the foreign minister, the state minister for foreign affairs, and the foreign secretary could not be reached for comments.
State minister Md Shahriar Alam even did not respond to the text message seeking the government’s reaction on the matter.
In 2015, Indian right-wing organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leader Ram Madhav, when asked about a map that showed Pakistan and Bangladesh as part of India, told Al Jazeera, ‘The RSS still believes that one day these parts, which have historical reasons separated only 60 years ago, will again, through popular goodwill, come together and Akhand Bharat will be created.’
India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, is one of several organisations through which the RSS promotes the idea of a Hindu nation.
The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party secretary general, Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, said that it was a serious intervention in the independence of Bangladesh.
‘This is a shameful move by India for Bangladesh and other neighbouring countries. Bangladesh government should have protested the incident immediately,’ Fakhrul said.
Decorated freedom fighter and Krishak Sramik Janata League president Abdul Kader Siddique said that it was a bad decision by India.
‘I think that the intention of India behind the incident was bad, and it created a bad example in regional politics,’ he said.
Workers Party of Bangladesh president Rashed Khan Menon said that it was a wrongdoing by the Indian government.
‘It would create a new political controversy on this subcontinent,’ he said.
Jatiya Party chairman Golam Mohammad Kader said that he was not aware of the matter.
‘The government has not reacted to the matter, has it? I am not aware of it,’ he said.
Freedom fighter Shahjahan Omar said that the issue was a matter of the country’s sovereignty.
‘So, the government should protest the move of India,’ he said.
Political alliance Ganatantra Mancha coordinator Saiful Haque said that the move by India was provocative and would highly undermine the independence of neighbouring countries, including Bangladesh.
‘This is a part of the BJP’s intention to create unrest in the subcontinent on the basis of religious and nationalist extremism,’ he said.
He urged the government to clear Bangladesh’s position on the matter immediately.
In a statement, Rastra Sanskar Andolan condemned India’s move.
‘We very clearly call on the government, on behalf of the people of Bangladesh from all walks of life, to immediately express strong protest against such heinous actions of the Indian ruling party,’ the statement said.
Since the inauguration of the map, it has triggered protests in Nepal and Pakistan.
‘The controversial mural of ‘Akhand Bharat’ in the recently inaugurated new parliament building of India may stoke unnecessary and harmful diplomatic row in the neighbourhood, including Nepal. It has the potential of further aggravating the trust deficit already vitiating the bilateral relations between most of the immediate neighbours of India,’ former Nepali prime minister Baburam Bhattarai said in a statement, the Hindu reported.
It reported that the mural had drawn attention when prime minister Modi inaugurated the new parliament building and dedicated it to the nation on May 28. India’s parliamentary affairs minister, Pralhad Joshi, was among the first to describe the mural as ‘Akhand Bharat’.
The issue dominated Nepalese media even though Nepali prime minister Prachanda started his four-day visit to India and held official talks with Modi.
Besides, a report in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn on June 2 said that Pakistan had expressed grave concern over the idea of Akhand Bharat (Greater India), which was being increasingly peddled by the ruling Indian dispensation.
Speaking at a weekly press briefing Thursday, Pakistan’s foreign office spokesperson, Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, regretted the installation of a mural at the new parliament building in New Delhi.
The mural depicts so-called ‘ancient India’, including areas that now constitute parts of Pakistan and other countries.
‘We are appalled by the statements made by some BJP politicians, including a union minister, linking the mural with ‘Akhand Bharat,’ she said.
The Pakistan foreign office spokesperson said that the gratuitous assertion of Akhand Bharat was a manifestation of a revisionist and expansionist mindset that seeks to subjugate the identity and culture of not only India’s neighbouring countries but also its own religious minorities.
The issue also created controversy in the domestic politics of India.
The new parliament building inauguration event was boycotted by 20 opposition parties, who said that Modi had violated protocol to inaugurate the new complex and grab the spotlight when it should have been done by the president, the highest executive of the country.
‘To open a new parliament building without the opposition, it does not mean there is a democracy in the country. It’s an incomplete event,’ Supriya Sule, an opposition leader, told news agency ANI.
According to a Times of India article, the Sangh Parivar has long imagined an Indian nation that existed from the time of the Ramayana, covering the landmass stretching from today’s Afghanistan to Myanmar and Tibet to Sri Lanka.
A map titled ‘Punyabhoomi Bharat’ published by the RSS-run Suruchi Prakashan, labels Afghanistan as ‘Upganathan’, Kabul as ‘Kubha Nagar’, Peshawar as ‘Purushpur’, Multan as ‘Moolsthan’, Tibet as ‘Trivishtap,’ Sri Lanka as ‘Singhaldweep’, and Myanmar as ‘Brahmadesh’.
Back in 1944, as the Muslim League pressed for a separate Pakistan, the historian Radha Kumud Mookerji first articulated the idea of Akhand Bharat in his presidential address delivered at an ‘Akhand Bharat Conference.’
My understanding (might be wrong) was this mural depicts the history rather than the future fantasy from fanatics.
If its history I would like to Propose additional murals too, my submission Would be this for purely historical purposes of course
But this is interesting and i am fre so will dig more into wtf is going on here.
More or less similar thoughts, though the author rambles from one paragraph to next too much.Cherry-picking of India’s heritage
Jawed Naqvi | Published: 00:00, Jun 07,2023
https://www.newagebd.net/article/203577/cherry-picking-of-indias-heritage
A handout photograph taken on May 28, released by the Indian Press Information Bureau, shows India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, third from right, holding the Sengol, a Tamil sceptre along with priests during the inauguration ceremony of the new parliament building in New Delhi. — Agence France-Presse/Press Information Bureau
IT WAS Nehru’s death anniversary on May 27, an occasion that sees little state involvement today, leaving the Gandhi family and a few Congress leaders offering rose petals at his shrine. The next day was VD Savarkar’s birthday, May 28, when a new parliament was inaugurated. That Nehru laid the foundations of a liberal democracy, and the current prime minister is set on destroying, it is a scarcely contested reality.
Nehru was a learned scholar who dreamt of India taking its place in the comity of free nations. His confessional appraisal of the challenges facing the new nation could not be missed when he described the responsibility of leading a complex and impoverished people. ‘Now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.’
The current prime minister is incapable of anything that resembles modesty. Forget Nehru’s scholarship, Modi has placed an official bar on inquiring into his educational qualifications, which many say are suspect.
The worrying thing though is that Nehru was a popular and charismatic prime minister, and so is Narendra Modi. Ergo: you can establish a thriving democracy and be popular, and you can destroy a robust democracy and become popular. There are two distinct strands in Janus-faced India, one that looks to as great a future as is humanly tenable, and the other that finds nourishment in pronounced atavism, which these days passes for high culture.
Under the circumstances, what should one consider as truly disagreeable: the release of convicted killers and rapists on the country’s independence day, not without political calculation, or the beating up of women wrestlers by the police after they accused the head of the wrestlers’ federation, a ruling party MP, of sexually molesting them?
The misogyny seems to run deep. There is the case of a high court judge who recently ordered the study of the horoscope of a rape victim because her assaulter allegedly refused to heed the court’s advice to marry her, claiming the woman’s stars were unpropitious. And the court evidently set out to investigate if indeed the woman was star-crossed.
The flip side is that there is a sensible supreme court currently that is ready to rein in such outrages in its realm. Point to note is that the beating of the Olympian wrestlers happened as the prime minister rehearsed for the opening of the new parliament building, which he had ordered built a couple of years ago.
‘2023 BC!’ The remonstrative five-column headline could be a reference to any of the occasions of marching into the past. Shown alongside in the remaining three columns on the front page of Kolkata’s Telegraph was Modi in a slow march into the spanking new Lok Sabha. He wore a dhoti signifying an ancient Hindu tradition, discarding his preferred pajamas, and carried a brass sceptre he had plucked from a museum of Nehruvian memorabilia in Allahabad.
The Sengol, the Tamil name for the sceptre, was a symbol of sovereign power used by the Chola kings of southern India. Modi’s spin doctors claimed the stick depicted righteousness. The retrieved sceptre was passed on to the sadhus, obviously, with instructions to hand it back to the prime minister in the glare of TV cameras, thereby heralding the garishness with which the new parliament building was opened.
There was little that critics could do about the inappropriateness of unelected religious busybodies let loose in the heart of India’s once-fabled but now clearly troubled secular democracy. Opposition parties stayed away, and others exchanged editorials, cartoons, caricatures and witty one-liners in the absence of a political mechanism to stop the slide.
Newslaundry’s online Hindi programme ‘Tippani’ (comment), one of my new favourites, carried a telling comparison with another event. Its footage showed King Charles walking to the throne carrying not one but two sceptres, one in each hand. The Archbishop of Canterbury and some other senior priests ambled behind the new king in an ornate ceremony. The other half of the Newslaundury screen showed Modi in a poor re-enactment as it were, carrying the Sengol to the accompaniment of a bunch of sadhus chanting praise to Hindu deities.
The mind strays to former Congress minister Kapil Sibal when he was not an MP. The lawyer was pleading a case against a supreme court judge’s possible impeachment. Sibal addressed the Lok Sabha members from the fringe of the house. A wicket barrier was set up to not permit the lawyer to step an inch beyond his assigned place near the door.
The rare hearing during the Narasimha Rao era went on for days, with Sibal eventually winning. There was a certain grace and decorum about the event. A non-member could be heard but only from the door of the Lok Sabha.
But now there was the spectacle of the sadhus with their Falstaffian girths looking every bit invidious for the easy access they enjoyed with India’s prime minister, plonked inside the chamber created exclusively for the people’s elected representatives. Such transgressions are not unknown in the odd country here or there. Afghanistan is a prime example.
Whatever else may have happened in ancient India, including 2023 BC, it is important to our reality that there was a persistent challenge to the hegemony of the Brahminical order led by the much-maligned atheists, or the ancient nastikas and charvaka.
That being the legacy of India’s ancient society, what gives the right to anyone to cherry-pick aspects of the heritage today, thereby excluding what was brilliantly Indian about the past: the questioning spirit, the challenge to the old order? Charvaka holds direct perception, empiricism, and conditional inference as proper sources of knowledge.
It embraces philosophical scepticism and rejects ritualism and supernaturalism, making it rather different from the spectacle on offer at the new parliament.
Dawn.com, June 6. Jawed Naqvi is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
one day, my motherland from sadiqabad to Jammu and Hazarawal to ambala will become one province of our republicMy understanding (might be wrong) was this mural depicts the history rather than the future fantasy from fanatics.
If its history I would like to Propose additional murals too, my submission Would be this for purely historical purposes of course
But this is interesting and i am fre so will dig more into wtf is going on here.
, every speck of soil where my ancestors walked shall become one fortress of peace, love, prosperity 
Many hindu Brahmins converted to islam hundreds of years ago and their great grand children are now eating cow...if these cow eating muslims' ancestors were asked if their descendants would one day eat cow they would have said emphatically and vehemently no...a hindu Brahmin eating cow is more unimaginable than a Muslim becoming idolater...anything is possible in future.
Looking at the pathetic state of Muslims in south Asia in terms of their own countries economies and seeing how Indian Muslims still have better opportunities because of Hindus may persuade them. This may be understood now but in few generations this is happening IMO.
As if anyone wants to become a hindu. But yeah keep dreaming.
