Azadi for Kashmir is not likely to have as much repercussions in rest of India as the ultra-nationalist fear.
"… THEN I secede," declared the creator of God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy, in her thought-provoking and celebrated essay "End of Imagination". She was merely exerting her choice to keep away from the tremors of jingoism in the wake of Pokharan nuclear blasts. But she made a much more powerful point than that with her deceptively simple statement: collective identity ceases to be of importance the moment one of its constituents feels sidelined, or worse, alienated.
The unitary form of the Indian state is a post-colonial creation. Right from the village republics of Vedic period, through the Pallavas, Mauryas, Kushans, Chalukyas, Cholas, Mughals and the British, the geographical entity called India has always been a home of many national identities. Even when some imperial powers did succeed in bringing a large part of it together under a single rule, the character of the state remained loosely federal. Apart from paying obeisance to the central authority, local governors or rulers were largely left to fend for themselves. The British did use their ´power of paramouncy´ when needed, but even they were reluctant to overuse it, despite the interpretations of nationalist Indian historians to the contrary.
In Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru used rose-tinted glasses to project the idea that nationalistic India was something that had always existed, only dormant and waiting to be ´discovered´. In the event, he ended up creating it —on the scaffolding erected by the piety of Mahatma Gandhi and the perseverance of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Once the two went out of the scene, Nehru had to face the reality of a crumbling identity that was forged for the particular purpose of gaining independence, and was glued by the charismatic personalities of the struggle for it. But then Nehru was a pragmatic person, a liberal to the core. He rose to the challenge and applied the lessons that he had learnt from the history of Europe. He recognised the aspirations of linguistic movements and agreed to the reorganisation of states.