It is my belief that the first column of a New Year should try to be cheerful no matter how bad the times. So, despite the attempt to bump off our new Home Minister in Guwahati on New Year’s Day I am not going to say more than one sentence about terrorism this week. Here is that sentence. May the attempt to assassinate him make Shri P. Chidambaram realise that no amount of national investigative and policing agencies will make any difference if ordinary policemen remain untrained and under-equipped and if intelligence gathering at the level of the local police station remains as abysmal as it is across India.

Now for something cheerful. As someone who loathes the self-loathing writers, historians, hacks and politicians who became such a noisy chorus in the international media after the attack on Mumbai, I want to have fun this week demolishing their myths about India. The first of these myths is that India itself is a myth. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are myths that were written by men who lived in a place without geography or history. Sanskrit came from this same nebulous arena as did the Vedas and the mathematicians who invented the zero.

The idea of India did not exist until the British created it is the contention of India’s self-loathing ‘liberals’. In the words of a historian of recent celebrity, India is an ‘unnatural nation as well as an unlikely democracy’. He does not bother to explain what he means by ‘unnatural nation’ since the nation state itself did not exist till not very long ago. Long, long before that there was a country called Bharat whose borders were clearly defined and whose certainty continues to be perfectly understood by ordinary Indians across India.

... contd.