India After Gandhi

Author: Guha, Ramachandra

• Because they are so many, and so various, the people of India are also divided.

• In the spring of 1827 the poet Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib set out on a journey from Delhi to Calcutta. Six months later he reached the holy Hindu city of Banaras. Here he wrote a poem called ‘Chirag-i-Dair’

• Ghalib’s poem was composed against the backdrop of the decline of the Mughal Empire. His home territory, the Indo-Gangetic plain, once ruled by a single monarch, was now split between contending chiefdoms and armies. Brother was fighting brother; unity and federation were being undermined. But even as he wrote, a new (and foreign) power was asserting its influence across the land in the form of the British,

• After the events of 1857 the Crown took over control of the Indian colonies. A sophisticated bureaucracy replaced the somewhat ad-hoc and haphazard administration of the old East India Company.

• By 1888 the British were so solidly established in India that they could anticipate, if not a thousand-year Raj, at least a rule that extended well beyond their own lifetimes. In that year a man who had helped put the Raj in place gave a series of lectures in Cambridge which were later published in book form under the simple title India. The man was Sir John Strachey.

• Large chunks of Strachey’s book are taken up by an administrative history of the Raj; of its army and civil services, its land and taxation policies, the peculiar position of the ‘native states’.This was a primer for those who might work in India after coming down from Cambridge.

• But there was also a larger theoretical argument to the effect that ‘India’ was merely alabel of convenience, ‘a name which we give to a great region including a multitude of different countries’.

• In Strachey’s view, the differences between the countries of Europe were much smaller than those between the ‘countries’ of India.

• This, Strachey told his Cambridge audience, ‘is the first and most essential thing to learn about India – that there is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India possessing, according to any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious’. There was no Indian nation or country in the past; nor would there be one in the future. Strachey thought it ‘conceivable that national sympathies may arise in particular Indian countries’, but ‘that they should ever extend to India generally, that men of the Punjab, Bengal, the North-western Provinces, and Madras, should ever feel that they belong to one Indian nation, is impossible. You might with as much reason and probability look forward to a time when a single nation will have taken the place of the various nations of Europe.’3 Strachey’s remarks were intended as a historical judgement. At the time, new nations were vigorously identifying themselves within Europe on the basis of a shared language or territory, whereas none of the countries that he knew in India had displayed a comparable national awakening. But we might also read them as a political exhortation, intended to stiffen the will of those in his audience who would end up in the service of the Raj. For the rise of every new ‘nation’ in India would mean a corresponding diminution in the power and prestige of Empire. Ironically, even as he spoke Strachey’s verdict was being disputed by a group of Indians. These had set up the Indian National Congress, a representative body that asked for a greater say for natives in the running of their affairs. As the name suggests, this body wished to unite Indians across the divisions of culture, territory, religion, and language, thus to construct what the colonialist thought inconceivable – namely, a single Indian nation.

• This, Strachey told his Cambridge audience, ‘is the first and most essential thing to learn about India – that there is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India possessing, according to any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious’.

• that men of the Punjab, Bengal, the North-western Provinces, and Madras, should ever feel that they belong to one Indian nation, is impossible. You might with as much reason and probability look forward to a time when a single nation will have taken the place of the various nations of Europe.’

• Ironically, even as he spoke Strachey’s verdict was being disputed by a group of Indians. These had set up the Indian National Congress, a representative body that asked for a greater say for natives in the running of their affairs.

• Attention has been paid to the building of bridges between linguistic communities, religious groupings and castes. These attempts were not wholly successful, for low castes and especially Muslims were never completely convinced of the Congress’s claims to be a truly ‘national’ party.

• I need only note that from the time the Congress was formed right up to when India was made free – and divided – there were sceptics who thought that Indian nationalism was not a natural phenomenon at all.

• (One of the prime movers of the Indian National Congress was a colonial official of Scottish parentage, A. O. Hume.)

• Yetthere were many others who argued that, unlike France or Germany or Italy, there was here no national essence, no glue to bind the people and take them purposively forward.

• In November 1891 Kipling visited Australia, where a journalist asked him about the ‘possibility of self-government in India’. ‘Oh no!’ he answered: ‘They are 4,000 years old out there, much too old to learn that business. Law and order is what they want and we are there to give it to them and we give it them straight.’

• Politically speaking, the most important of these ‘Stracheyans’ was undoubtedly Winston Churchill.

• In 1930 and 1931 Churchill delivered numerous speeches designed to work up, in most unsober form, the constituency opposed to independence for India.

• Churchill argued that ‘to abandon India to the rule of the Brahmins [who in his opinion dominated the Congress Party] would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence’.

• With every death of a prime minister has been predicted the replacement of democracy by military rule; after every failure of the monsoon there has been anticipated country wide famine;

• With every death of a prime minister has been predicted the replacement of democracy by military rule;

• Notably, India’s existence has been a puzzle not just to casual observers or commonsensical journalists; it has also been an anomaly for academic political science, according to whose axioms cultural heterogeneity and poverty do not make a nation, still less a democratic one.

• On my way to work I had to pass through Rajpath (formerly Kingsway), the road whose name and location signal the exercise of state power.

• In 1998 the police decided this would not do either. The shanties were once again demolished, but, as a newspaper report had it, ‘as far as the authorities are concerned, only the venue has changed – the problem persists.

• When I lived in Delhi, in the 1990s, I wished I had the time to walk on Rajpath every day from the first of January to the thirty-first of December, chronicling the appearance and disappearance of the tents and their residents. That would be the story of India as told from a single street, and in a single year.

• ‘Caste’ is a Portuguese word that conflates two Indian words: jati, the endogamous group one is born into, and varna, the place that group occupies in the system of social stratification mandated by Hindu scripture.

• The Constitution of India recognizes twenty-two languages as ‘official’.

• A vast majority of the billion-plus Indians are Hindus. But India also has the second largest population of Muslims in the world – about 140 million (only Indonesia has more).

• As a laboratory of social conflict the India of the twentieth century is – for the historian – at least as interesting as the Europe of the nineteenth. In both the conflicts were produced by the conjunction of two truly transformative processes of social change: industrialization and the making of modern nation-states.

• Conflicts are also more visible in the subcontinent since, unlike nineteenth-century Europe, contemporary India is a democracy based on adult suffrage, with a free press and a largely independent judiciary.

• One way of summarizing the history of independent India – and the contents of this book – would be through a series of ‘conflict maps’.

• The press nowadays – broadsheet and tabloid, pink and white, Indian and Western –is chock full of stories of India’s economic success, this reckoned to be so much at odds with its past history of poverty and deprivation. However, the real success story of modern India lies not in the domain of economics butin that of politics. The saluting of India’s ‘software boom’ might be premature. We do not yet know whether this will lead to amore general prosperity among the masses. But that India is still a single nation after sixty testing years of independence, and that it is still largely democratic – these are facts that should compel our deeper attention.

• Viewed thus, independent India appears as the ‘third moment in the great democratic experiment launched at the end of the eighteenth century by the American and French revolutions’.

• If, for Indian children, history comes to an end with Independence and Partition, this is because Indian adults have mandated it that way. In the academy, the discipline of history deals with the past, while the disciplines of political science and sociology deal with the present.

• The difficulty is that in the Indian academy the past is defined as a single, immovable date: 15 August 1947. Thus, when the clock struck midnight and India became independent, history ended, and political science and sociology began.

• property dispute in a small north-Indian town came to enjoy an overwhelming importance in the life of the nation.

• the RSS journal Panchjanya complained that the three leading male actors in the Hindi film industry were all Muslim (Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, and Salman Khan). The journal saw in this coincidence a dark conspiracy, whose agents apparently were mafia dons who funded these actors’ films and multinational corporations whose products the actors endorsed. To thwart the conspiracy, Panchjanya called upon its readers to promote an up-and-coming actor named Hrithik Roshan, the lone ‘Hindu’ challenger to the monopoly of the Khans.

• There were two critical events that, as it were, defined this epoch of competitive fundamentalisms: the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits.

• while there have been hundreds of inter-religious riots in the history of independent India, there have been only two pogroms: that directed at the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and that directed at the Muslims of south Gujarat in 2002.

• The decline of the Congress has come in two phases. The first phase, which began in Kerala in 1957 and peaked in Andhra Pradesh in 1983, saw Congress hegemony challenged by parties based on the identities of region, language and class. The second phase, which began in north India in 1967 and has peaked in the same region in the last decade, has seen the Congress losing ground to parties basing themselves on the identities of caste and religion.

• The alliance in power in New Delhi tends to favour those state governments run by their own people. A World Bank study for the period 1972-95 found that states ruled by parties which were also in office in Delhi received 4 per cent to 18 per cent more from central funds than did states that did not enjoy this status. Another study, by two Indian economists and for amore recent period, estimated that grants were 30 per cent higher when the same party was in power in the state as well as the centre.10

• India was rapidly moving ‘from a defence dependent upon diplomacy to a diplomacy strengthened by a strong defence’.

• The great German sociologist Max Weber once remarked that ‘there are two ways of making politics one’s vocation: Either one lives “for” politics or one lives “off” it’.

• Political corruption was not unknown in the 1950s, as the cases of the Mundhra scandal and the Kairon administration in the Punjab demonstrate.

• And some others have shown an unfortunate penchant for showmanship, as in a Madurai judge who, while allowing anticipatory bail to an MLA charged with criminal intimidation, instructed him to spend five days in the city’s Gandhi Museum, reading Gandhian literature.70

• Sixty years after Independence, India remains a democracy. But the events of the last two decades call for a new qualifying adjective. India is no longer a constitutional democracy but a populist one.

• India is no longer a constitutional democracy but a populist one.

• The state’s chief planner, P. C. Mahalanobis, had surrounded himself with Western leftists and Soviet academicians, who reinforced his belief in ‘rigid control by the government over all activities’.

• One less obvious aspect of recent economic history is the change in the social composition of the entrepreneurial class. Once, the major capitalists in India came from the traditional business communities – Marwaris, Jains, Banias, Chettiars, Parsis. However, in the past three decades a range of peasants castes have moved into the industrial sector. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs of late have been Marathas, Vellalas, Reddys, Nadars and Ezhavas -from castes who for centuries have worked the land. Again, some of the best-known software start-ups – such as Infosys – have been initiated by Brahmins, a caste that traditionally served the state or the academy and regarded commerce with disdain. There have also been some very successful Muslim entrepreneurs, such as Azim Premji of the software giant WIPRO.17

• These are the people who service the middle class yet will never be part of it. They ‘sell newspapers they will never read, sew clothes they cannot wear, polish cars they will never own and construct buildings where they will never live’.22

• It is tempting to view Bangalore as the benign face of economic liberalization. There, the opening of foreign markets has generated skilled employment and enormous wealth, shared fairly widely among the population. It is also tempting to see tribal Orissa as the brutal face of economic liberalization.

• The economic debate in contemporary India is conducted between two schools, whom the columnist T. N. Ninan calls the ‘reformists’ and the ‘populists’.52

• Intriguingly, political parties tend to be in favour of economic reforms when in power, and against them when in opposition.

• Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs celebrated ‘India’s historic escape from poverty’. He also spoke of how ‘the return of China and India to global economic prominence’ would ‘reshape global politics and society’ in the twenty-first century.69

• With every communal riot it was said that India would break up into many different fragments. With every failure of the monsoon it was predicted that mass starvation and famine would follow. And with every death or killing of a major leader it was forecast that India would abandon democracy and become a dictator ship.

• The first Indian feature was made in 1913 by a printer named Dadasaheb Phalke, who was inspired by a pictorial life of Jesus to film the life of a legendary prince, Raja Harishchandra. Eighteen years later the first Indian sound feature appeared, Ardeshir Irani’s Alam Ara.

• From the 1940s to the 1980s films were watched by two kinds of Indians -young men in all-male groups, and families.

• besides, each region had its own form of folk theatre, where dialogue was usually interspersed With song and dance. Known as jatra in Bengal, natya in Maharashtra, and Yakshagana in Karnataka,

• in Afghanistan, music of all kinds had been banned by the Taliban. But when that regime fell, it was reported that the briskest business was done by barbers who cut beards and by vendors who sold photos of Indian film stars.

• If one looks at what we might call the ‘hardware’ of democracy, then the self-congratulation is certainly merited. Indians enjoy freedom of expression and of movement, and they have the vote. However, if we examine the ‘software of democracy, then the picture is less cheering. Most political parties have become family firms.

• Is India a democracy, then? The answer is well, phipty-phipty.

• The three major secessionist movements in independent India – in Nagaland in the 1950s, in Punjab in the 1980s and in Kashmir in the 1990s – have affirmed religious and territorial distinctiveness, not a linguistic one.

• Stalin insisted that ‘a national community is inconceivable without a common language’, and that ‘there is no nation which at one and the same time speaks several languages’.

• If India is roughly 50 per cent democratic, it is approximately 80 per cent united.

• One might think of independent India as being Europe’s past as well as its future. It is Europe’s past, in that it has reproduced, albeit more fiercely and intensely, the conflicts of a modernizing, industrializing and urbanizing society. But it is also its future in that it anticipated, by some fifty years, the European attempt to create a multilingual, multireligious, multiethnic, political and economic community.

• The older American model of assimilation was called ‘the melting-pot’. Individual groups poured all their flavours into the pot, then drank asingle, uniform – or uniformly tasting – drink.

• political ideologues such as M. S. Golwalkar and by political parties such as the Jana Sangh and the BJP. They have argued that India has ‘got to have a dominant culture’, and that this culture is ‘Hindu’. As it happened, those views were not endorsed by the founders of the Indian nation, by those who wrote the Indian Constitution and led the first few governments of independent India. Thus India became a salad-bowl nation rather than a melting-pot one.

• Speaking now of India, the nation-state, one must insist that its future lies not in the hands of God but in the mundane works of men. So long as the constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails, so long as citizens can speak and write in the language of their choosing, so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army, and – lest I forget – so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung, India will survive.