Thread by @shrikanth_krish

In a civilizational sense, India has not been one but two in the making, ever since the acquisition of Sindh by the Arabs in 8th century

It took several hundred years since that time for religious demography to change irreversibly at the edges.

Things came to a head in 1947

https://twitter.com/akshayalladi/status/1152839473677230080

Hindu Right, with which I have some affinity, tends to pretend as though there is no such thing as a "Muslim India"

Hence all this talk of Akhand Bharat

But any hard headed observer will see that there is a HIndu India. and a Muslim India

Jinnah was spot on

Sections of the Hindu Right tend to think throwing off the yoke of Muslim rule, what with the decline of Mughal rule and the formal termination of the Empire in 1857 somehow put an end to that "other" India

No. That's an illusion

The reality is - About a fifth of Indian subcontinent has been non-Hindu for a very long time now - a few hundred years at least.

It's just that the Hindu mind grasped this very late in late 19th century when British census brought this to the fore

Today of course that % is about 63% (i.e Hindu percentage in Greater India)

But even back in 1880, it was below 80%.

Akhand Bharat is a romantic illusion nursed by those who want to somehow deny this

Deny the fact that we lost 20% market share v v long time ago.

And we can't get it back

The Congressmen intellectually grasped what Jinnah was driving at

They knew the two-nation theory was intellectually sound. Their problem was not so much with Jinnah's thought but with implementation

Clearly this idea was hard to implement as India would be home to a very large % of religious minorities even after the so-called Partition

So they chose to play down the idea, and instead position ourselves as a "secular" state

Not a bad thing. Most gentlemen in most eras would have thought that as the decent thing to do

The secularism angle was overdone ofcourse

But regardless of that they sort of succeeded in their mission

India is a secular state, and is a going concern.
No signs of breaking up. More robust than Pakistan in more ways than one

Perhaps it deserves a Hindu tilt while it remains a secular state. And you are getting that with the rise of the Right over the past 3 decades

But as BJP is discovering it is hard for that Hindu tilt to be anything more than a pronounced tilt

Because civilizationally that "other India" remains with us. In every town. Every other street. And we have to figure out a way to co-exist

The Right's quibble will be - We don't even have a Hindu tilt today

If anything the tilt is to the other side (in the name of secularism)

That's a completely fair counter

So this tug of war on ensuring that tilt will continue, but is not a serious threat to the Indian state

Was Akhand Bharat ever a possibility? Could things have been different?

Yes, I just feel the Hindu intelligentsia woke up way too late on this issue

It was only as we approached the end of 19th century that the Hindu mind grasped what had happened on the ground

We had lost Punjab and Bengal. Forever.

The census reports brought home this fact

My hunch (and yes it is a hunch) is that nobody had thought hard enough about this till then

Yes, you had the Arya Samaj movements which sort of preceded this by a decade or two

But it is the census which really told us what the situation on the ground was

If this realization had struck the H-mind some 150-200 years earlier, (maybe at the dawn of 18th century when the Maratha rise to pre-eminence began), then we could have had extremely aggressive Ghar-wapsi efforts among neo-converts (many who may have converted in 16th/17th cen)

But by the time the enormity of the situation was grasped it was late 1800s. And too late

Civilizationally India was two. Not one. In mid 19th century. Held together uneasily by the British Raj

And it could not be undone

Also none of this is really unexpected

Because you don't expend Kings and Queens and their ministers to think too hard about religious demography in what was a very diverse country

Religious demography started to matter as an important factor only towards the end of 19th century as mass Democracy became a viable idea that could be realized in not so distant future