India’s neighbors are furious. The new Parliament inaugurated in New Delhi with great fanfare by Narendra Modi, on May 28, displays inside the building a map of India, in the form of a mural fresco, including part or all of their territory. It is a representation of the Akhand Bharat, which means “Individed India”, the old dream of the Hindu nationalists – of which the Prime Minister is the representative –, to create a nation that would extend from Afghanistan, on the western flank of India, to Burma in the east, encompassing Pakistan, Bangladesh, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Maldives. This territory resembles the contours of the old British Empire, but for Hindu nationalists it corresponds to a fantasized time of a greater India founded on the influence of Hinduism.
Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mumtaz Zahra Baloch denounced “a manifestation of a revisionist and expansionist mindset that seeks to subjugate the ideology and culture not only of India’s neighbors but also of its religious minorities”. The Nepali Prime Minister, who has just made an official visit to New Delhi, did not react, but his predecessor, KP Sharma Oli, was moved to see his country integrated into the borders of India. “If a country like India, which considers itself an old and strong country and a model of democracy, puts Nepalese territories on its map and hangs it in Parliament, we cannot speak of fairness”, did he declare. Bangladesh asks New Delhi to clarify the situation.
The Indian government contented itself with replying, through the spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that the mural “represented the expansion of the ancient Mauryan empire”, between 321 and 185 BCE, during which Emperor Ashoka reigned, and symbolized “the idea of responsible and people-oriented governance”.
“A powerful act of revisionism”
This imperialist vision of national geography is at the heart of Hindutva, the ideology conveyed by Indian nationalists whose objective is to create a Hindu nation, to repair the fractures of the partition of the country carried out by the British in 1947 with the creation of Pakistan and to restore a hegemonic Hindu India. Regularly, the Hindu nationalists promise that India will find its old borders. In April, for example, Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the flagship organization of the nationalist galaxy, declared that the Akhand Bharat was “the undisputed truth and that a divided Bharat is a nightmare”. He had assured that one day the separated parts would be reunited again.
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