Indian unity under threat.....

Came across an old 2003 interview of Jim Rogers, the author of book Hot Commodities and Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip. In between his predictions for a secular commodities bull run, ticking gender disequilibria in Asia etc. he made an ominous prediction for India in particular that the country was only waiting to be engulfed in the fires of regional / religion / caste divide and break up into several smaller countries based on the wide diversity that exists in this country.

Jim speaks, and I quote:
“And the country, of course, is going to split up. It is not a real country. The English mushed it together in 1947 in a panic and the borders of India as we know it will not survive.”

“…There are different religions, different languages, different everything. I mean, it is not a country.”

Any enlightened patriotic Indian knows how qualities like tolerance, compassion, empathy and sacrifice are ingrained in all Indian cultures. So much so, that the founding father of our constitution have put that as the foundation of the constitution.

But then, look at us now.
If we are not busy fighting Naxal-ites in the villages; busy driving away the Indian “outsider” from our cities, we are, as a nation busy trying to either witch hunt (Christians in Orissa, Sadhvi Pragya, Muslims en masse etc.) or busy trying to fool the nation into bleeding the fiscal (underpricing of Oil) and …..

The list goes on…

The lack of visionary Political leadership and a myopic public both blinded by their own vested interests make weak arguments to fight back dooms-dayers like Mr. Rogers.

Hopefully, like many of his predictions like a Japanese revival etc., the prediction that India will disintegrate soon will come wrong too.

However, some of the recent incidents and the trend of the things likely to follow in future don’t give me too much confidence that Mr. Rogers is too off the mark this time around.