The new year has begun with a kick to our national funny bone. Nepal, the only Hindu rashtra in the world, has turned its pent-up fury on that high priest of the Hindu rashtra, K.R. Malkani. It's like the Catholics throwing eggs at the Pope for being an apostate. Or red-blood communists desecrating Karl Marx's grave at Highgate cemetery in London. The short-term lesson is that we must put in order our relations with Nepal. The long-term lesson is that religion has nothing to do with nationhood. The tone for Indo-Nepal relations was set three centuries ago when Aurangzeb ransacked and smashed the Kashi Viswanath mandir at Varanasi. He had been entrusted with the care of a Nepalese princess, whom he thoughtfully lodged at the Vishwanath mandir when passing through the city. He believed no place to be more suitable for a Hindu princess of royal blood than a Hindu temple of the highest renown. That night, within the sacred precincts of the temple, Hindu priests molested their distinguished Hindu guest and other ladies of her entourage. Aurangzeb - furious that his honour had been stained at his having failed to save the honour of a Hindu of high honour - unleashed on the temple the full fury of the Emperor of Hindustan. The Gyan Vapi masjid was later built on a part of the site that was demolished. The sanctum sanctorum, the garba griha, was, however, untouched and has never ceased to be a holy place of Hindu worship. The source for my story is the remarkable revisiting of the alleged communalism of Aurangzeb in an Eighties' lecture delivered in Patna by the great Gandhian historian, Bishambar Nath Pande. I had read about the incident and wrote to him. He graciously sent me the printed text of his lecture. It is the 'liberation' of this Gyan Vapi masjid that is second only to Ayodhya in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-Vishwa Hindu Parishad-Bharatiya Janata Party game-plan for the establishment of the Hindu rashtra in the Union of India. The Hindu rashtra is their understanding of our nation's true nationhood. Which is why they equate Hindutva with nationality, and 'Hindu' with 'Indian'. Thus, Lal Krishna Advani - Atal Bihari Vajpayee's startling choice for the Union home minister - has repeatedly affirmed that all Indians are Hindus, whatever their religion, and, therefore, an Indian Muslim must acknowledge himself a 'Hindu Muslim', and an Indian Christian a 'Hindu Christian', before the sangh parivar can accept their credentials as reliable Indian nationalists. Malkani and Advani became communalists together in their early youth in Sindh when, in the late Thirties, the separation of Sindh from the province of Bombay led to a passionate upsurge of Hindu communalism. The socio-religious status of the Hindu community changed from being members of the Hindu-majority composite province of Bombay to a religious minority in the new province of Sindh. The origins of the Partition of India lie in the tortured history of this tangled partition of Bombay. It is entirely significant that in the sub-committee set up after the Round Table conferences to consider the highly emotional controversy over the administrative separation of Sindh from Bombay, Mohammad Ali Jinnah was pitted against B.S. Moonje of the Hindu Mahasabha as the advocates on either side of the communal divide. The forensic skills of both did nothing to hide the essential communal mindset of these two great legal minds. For those interested in a more detailed account, I recommend a recent Pakistani publication brought out by Ferozesons of Lahore, the biography of Ayub Khuro by his historian daughter, Hamida Khuro. Brilliant. And for those who want the full documentation of the separation of Sindh from Bombay, they will have to get in touch with Malkani, who has been gifted a set by Hamida Khuro! Malkani has pro- mised to let me have another look at these documents which I first perused when posted in Karachi two decades ago. Jinnah's mistake about the basis of nationhood is the same as has led Malkani into the present mess of his own creation. The Muslim League confused the ummah of Islam with nationhood, not asking themselves why, if Islam constituted a nation, there should be a political boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan or Pakistan and Iran. In exactly the same vein, Malkani is unable to understand the passion for a separate nationhood in Nepal when it is more Hindu than India. In the Malkani view, the Hindu ummah needs Nepal within the embrace of akhand Bharat and, therefore, ferrets out a curious reading of King Tribhuvan's relations with Jawaharlal Nehru - His Majesty's liberator from the tyrannical hold of the ranas - to trot out what to the Hindu communalist is the self-evident proposition that since Nepal is a Hindu rashtra it must be part of the Greater Hindu rashtra. It is from 'friends' like these that Nepal seeks to protect its wholly separate identity. As a former Indian foreign service officer, it is my firm conviction that it is the arrogance of most Indian diplomats who have served over the last half-century in Nepal that is at the root of Nepal's continuing crisis of identity vis-à-vis India. Notwithstanding exceptions of distinction, like K.V. Rajan, our former man in Kathmandu and now secretary in the ministry of external affairs, and Dalip Mehta, now dean of the Foreign Service Institute, the overwhelming majority of our diplomats have been unforgivably arrogant in their dealings with Nepal, albeit faithful to the arrogant instructions they receive from South Block. Not until the ministry of external affairs liberates itself from the superiority complex engendered on Raisina Hill can there be a fundamental improvement in Nepal's perceptions of India. And how is that possible when the ministry at the political level is presided over by the very peas raised in the same pod as Malkani and his ilk, the ilk in question spreading down from Atal Bihari Vajpayee to Advani to Murli Manohar Joshi and hitting rock-bottom at Uma Bharti? Do you think one Jaswant Singh, standing alone like the boy on the burning deck, can stop this ship of state from sinking in the communal sea? He cannot. Which is why the 'secular' Jaswant Singh sees nothing but the 'Muslim votebank' in the rationale of India's support for the Palestinian cause and lets the Advani-Malkani drum-beat determine the course of India's relations with our most important neighbour.