A new book authored by Prof. Asiananda, a professor of philosophy at Intercultural Open University (Netherlands), was released in New York city at a program organized by the India League of America on March 18th at the Maharaja Restaurant in Manhattan. The book was released earlier on March 3rd in London by Lord Navnit Dholakia at the House of Lords. At the New York launch, the book was presented to Dr. Thomas Abraham, Chairman of the Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO). The author was presented by Prof V.T. Patil, former Vice Chancellor of Pondicherry Central University who spoke on the importance of the new book. 

According to Asiananda, Jinnah’s name stands for partition of the subcontinent and the uncompleted legacy of the Indo-British civilizational encounter; the ‘causal ground’ of partition was an accidental personality conflict rather than a nationality conflict, taking up the thread of which in a historical reassessment within a creative new world order vision is what has been attempted in this book. 

The Book in Nutshell
The people of India and the world at large take 1947 for India’s birthday, which is also the birthday of Pakistan, free Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Maldives, later also of Bangladesh. The birth of these nations in 1947 was not the truth but the accident of Indian history – an accident of a simple personality clash - as argued out in this book. For, the pre-1947 India that was known to the Victorian Britain, or British Raj, that stretched from Afghanistan to Burma, Pamirs to Cape Comerin; the Mughals knew it as Hindustan that stretched from Tashkent to Golconda, Somnath to Kamarup; the classical Hindus knew it as Bharatvarsha that was the subcontinental space from the Himalayas to the three oceans; during the subcontinent’s Buddhist high noon the same space was known as Jhampudwipa which broadened the notion of Bharatvarsha to include also the stretch of Southeast Asia and Indo-China where India met China; the Saptha-sindhu we know was the Aryan beginning of this Bharatavarsha, whose vedic notion broadening across the three imaginary tangents of the Ashwa-kranta, Radha-kranta and Visudhi-kranta then goes to embrace the whole planet the global village of our human family, Vasudhaivakutumbakom - this India alone is humanity’s vision and custodian of peace harmony civilizational convergence, the confluence of human family; this is the true post-independence India that would have came about in 1947, possibly much earlier, but for the Gandhian non-cooperation and the Gandhi-Jinnah personality conflict that fathered the 1947 partitions in the shadow of which the Indic race has lived ever since, without the chance of fulfilling its destiny in history, now also under nuclear peril, with inexorable consequences, since the nuclear India & Pakistan are now giving birth to declared and undeclared nuclear states like North Korea and others like Iran waiting in the wings..

Pax Indica of the Spirit
The book is the search of this true ‘India’ that would have really been there in 1947; there would thus have been a ‘South Asia Home’ or Commonwealth, the geo-strategical balancing principle of a reconciled Asian continent, the world leader of PEACE co-existence and fraternity in the service of humanity and in affirmation of the inherent spiritual home-coming of Man. The corrective reading of Indian history undertaken here strives towards such a vision of the Indic truth; in this vision Indian history is conceived in terms of its three Megacycles – Pre-vedic, the Post-vedic, the Trans-vedic Megacycles; the unfolding of the latter which is bound to give substance to humanity’s postmodern third millennium and divert it from its presently dangerous nuclear path to a peace path and which is described in this book as the Pax Indica of the Spirit, remains checkered due to the 1947 partitions of the subcontinent and the unsettled problems issuing therefrom. For half a century India strove to address these issues through its traditional ‘peace and disarmament path’ of what came to be known as its ‘Principled Geopolitical Idealism’, which alas was sadly rejected by the world powers. Naturally then India resorted to the course of Pokhran II, which enjoyed then and also 
today near national consensus, but it also took the lid off the nuclear Pandora box virtually scrapping the NPT and creating the state of affairs 
of several declared and un-declared mini-nuke states endangering human survival upon our brittle planet. NPT has cemented the system of the 
geopolitical apartheid, which is as unacceptable as was the practice of apartheid in South Africa or the racial segregation in the pre-civil rights 
United States. 

Thus the book calls for re-negotiating the NPT within a geo-strategical conception of ‘civilizational con-cordance’, i.e. the ongoing process of UN 
Security Council reform process must be linked to the primacy of Civilizational Homes [that subsumes the present nation-state] in the model of the EU, to be followed by a ‘South Asia Home’ showing up the path to the Arab-Islamic, the African, the Latin American Homes, and so forth. India’s calling thus is to reviving the Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan initiating something of a South Asian Glasnost within the framework of what may be called a ‘Conference of Security and Cooperation in Asia’ negotiating a ‘South Asian Peace Nuclear-free Zone’ pointing to an Asian Peace Order and a millennial Global PEACE Order, which is what is meant by the second sub-title to this book, ‘Envisioning a South Asia Home as Corner Stone of a post-nuclear and con-federal New United Nations’. 

The book understandably is a proposal of far reaching magnitude implying synergic global cooperation of the coming decades, for realizing which the book provides in its part III a ‘Vedico-Quantum New Conception of History’ thus ‘Laying Foundations for a Post-materialist Planetary Order’ in its fourth part, and showing a ‘Way out of the Kashmir and the Ayodhya Deadlocks’ in its final part. 

The book is available through website, www.sriaurobindocenter.org or E-mail: jnpind@rediffmail.com