Dinyar Patel & Parsi Liberalism

 There was once an Indian Liberal Party. It reached its acme of influence at the Second Round Table Conference and with the striking of the Mody-Lees agreement. After that it declined. Its existence was a reflection not of Indian Society but of British Society. As the Brits withdrew from India, Liberalism declined and disappeared.

Dinyar Patel, a Parsi History Professor,  must know that though the first Parsi elected to Westminster was a Liberal, the next was Conservative because Liberals were no longer indulgent of wogs. Indeed, the Libs had become more elitist than the Tories. The third Parsi to get into Parliament told Sant Nihal Singh that only the Commies would give him a ticket (in return for which he attacked 'sweated labor' imports from India) even though he was a cousin of the Tatas. However, it must be said that Dadhabhai Naoroji, the first Parsi MP, was also moving to the left- he attended the Second International alongside Rosa Luxemburg- and thus we can conclude that Parsi political affiliation was opportunistic- not ideological. 

 With the rise of Gandhi and Jinnah, however, Parsis ceased to play much of a political role anywhere. The sensible ones migrated to where Whitey still ruled. They did well because they worked hard and were smart. Not all of them, but even the most imbecilic could get by as a Professor of a shite subject. 

This reflection brings us to Dinyar  who writes in Scroll

In the 75th year of Independence, let us not forget the deep liberal roots of modern Indian society

Indian constitutional law may have liberal roots. Indian Society does not. The last Indian politician who could be called Liberal was Minoo Masani- a Parsi who started off on the Left. But he couldn't get elected anywhere after 1971. Piloo Mody too has been described as a Liberal. But he was an architect with low IQ. He was a chum of Bhutto's and a member of the Rajya Sabha when his pals abolished the fundamental right to property. 

From the 19th century, leaders set out a vision for India which was inclusive, democratic, and relatively open-minded.

But it was not those visions which prevailed.  

In the Hindu majoritarian atmosphere of India today,

like the Hindu majoritarian atmosphere of the Congress ruled Provinces from 1937 onward 

liberals have been scorned as out-of-touch, Westernised elites, alienated and disconnected from the pulse of a country of nearly 1.4 billion people.

The Mahatma took down their pants and then the Leftists made fun of their puny genitals. This made them cry and cry. 

They have been branded as being inauthentically Indian, hostile towards Hinduism, and “anti-national.”

They prevented economic development by virtue signaling and allying with foreign NGOs which had their own commercial and geopolitical agendas. That's why Manmohan cracked down on foreign contributions to these nutters. Scroll itself is foreign financed. But the West now realizes that banging on about Human Rights hasn't helped it retain hegemony. The reverse is the case. China has risen up and is now integrating more and more of the developing world into its own Trade and Financial networks.  

Indian liberals have long suffered from crises of identity and legitimacy.

Not really. Their identity is as part of a foreign enclave. Ultimately, they will emigrate, if they haven't secured European or American passports already.  

Architect of the Indian Constitution BR Ambedkar wondered aloud whether liberal democracy would be “only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic”.

Ambedkar spoke sooth. A situation where it raises no eyebrows that one Prime Minister is the daddy or mummy of a subsequent Prime Minister can only arise in an essentially undemocratic country.  

However, as India celebrates its 75th anniversary of independence, it is important to remember that the nation was built on a solidly liberal foundation.

No. India was built on Hindu foundations. Pakistan was built on Islamic foundations. Sri Lanka and Burma were built on ethno-Buddhist foundations.  

Liberalism constitutes modern India’s original political ideology.

No. It constituted a minor aspect of the British Raj's ideology which peaked during Ripon's Viceroyalty but declined subsequently. Reading was a Liberal before he came to India. After dealing with the Mahacrackpot he changed his mind. The same could be said of Olivier who started off as a radical on the Indian question. 

Its champions were not self-serving elites:

Yes they were- if successful. The unsuccessful, are not elite. They are losers. 

they constructed an increasingly universal and democratic vision of rights and freedoms which would bridge India’s religious, ethnic, and linguistic faultlines.

Which is why Pakistan is still part of India. Jinnah was a Liberal. Whatever happened to him?  

These politicians nurtured liberal roots in Indian society, which are far deeper, stronger, and more pervasive than meets the eye.

But they are wholly imaginary.  

To understand these roots, we must return to the 19th century, well before the generation of MK Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru which led India to independence.

No. We must return to the Eighteenth Century and then the Seventeenth Century when the decision was made to keep the India trade for the private sector rather than permitting it to enrich the King thus making him independent of Parliament. Liberalism is about Civil Society gaining countervailing power over Crown and Church by holding the purse strings  

It was here that Indian leaders steered emerging politics onto a thoroughgoing liberal trajectory.

Nonsense! What was happening during the second half of the Nineteenth Century was that the power of Princes and Zamindars increased as did that of the intermediaries they employed. Eventually the intermediaries prevailed. The Nehrus, like the Mahatma, had got their start as 'Divans' to the aristocracy. Some Princes could be called 'Liberal'- the Aga Khan, the Maharaja of Cooch Behar- and the same could be said of some zamindari families like the Tagores. But their Liberalism took a  Religious form- e.g. the  Brahmo Samaj. For White Liberals- like A.O Hume- Theosophy represented the path by which they came to (in Hume's case) Vedanta and Vegetarianism etc. Thus Religion trumped Ideology even back in the Nineteenth Century.  

The 19th century was a moment of horror, humiliation, and hopelessness for most Indians.

No. The aftermath of the Mutiny was a horrible time for the Doab. But other provinces were rising up and an increasingly well educated middle class was coming into existence over the length and breadth of British India. However, as Keir Hardie noticed when he visited India in 1907, outside Bengal and the Hindu urban areas of Punjab, most parts of the country were relatively peaceful and focused on parish pump issues.  

India’s textile manufacturing economy largely collapsed,

But textile mills in India began to appear from the second half of the century.  

leading to mass impoverishment. Indian political authority and agency

if it was shit at fighting. Gurkhas were good at fighting. Nepal remained independent. 

crumbled as the British Raj consolidated its control of the subcontinent.

but if Indian princes weren't utterly shite, they kept their domains. Indeed, they enjoyed an unprecedented security and ostentatious luxury.  

Tens of millions died from a spate of devastating famines:

But the Brits put an end to excess mortality by the end of the Century. Famines revived in Bengal because power was transferred to corrupt or incompetent elected leaders. Bangladesh had a big famine in 1974. India too would have seen a big famine in the Sixties if America hadn't sent PL 480 shipments.  

the British journalist William Digby estimated that the death toll was at least 28.8 million for just the period between 1854 and 1901.

India and China had had plenty of famines previously.  

Yet India’s first modern political leaders did not throw up their hands in despair.

They used their brains to make money and raked it in with both hands. 

Instead of hate, they offered hope, looking to contemporary Western politics for solutions.

They did well for themselves and looked around for ways to increase their own power and influence. But they were useless.  

Reformer Rammohun Roy was the first to imbibe Western liberal ideas of rights and freedoms and put them in an Indian context.

He lobbied Westminster to lift curbs on White settlement in India. Why? He knew only the Brits could prevent Bengal returning to Muslim rule.  

With the encouragement of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, he was even prepared to represent India as an MP in the British Parliament “to pave the way for his countrymen”.

By purchasing a rotten borough? Very Liberal indeed. 

By the 1850s, Indians formed their first modern political associations, petitioning the British Parliament for political reform

Modern political associations don't petition foreigners. Medieval ones may have done so.  

On paper, their demands could seem moderate, hemmed in with cloying language about the benefits of British rule. But it was clear that many of them had more ambitious goals in mind. As early as 1859, Bhau Daji Lad, a Bombay doctor and civic leader, declared at a public meeting that “the time will surely come when that first principle of free governments shall be introduced with safety into India”. India would be “a nation of free men”.

But the Mutineers of 1857 made no such bombastic claim.  

Indian liberals clamoured for representative government.

But they represented nobody. They were clamoring for their own disintermediation.  

Instead of marginalising certain groups or promoting majoritarianism, they sought out political systems which would reflect India’s diversity.

Which is why they went extinct. It's like what happened to the Indians in Burma who clamored for Burmese independence. They were turkeys voting for Christmas . 

Liberals therefore scrutinised governing models employed around the world.

By 1922, it became clear that Imperialism would give way to ethno-confessional states with big population transfers. The Liberals realized their days were numbered. Even in England the Liberal Party was in decline. Their ideology only had salience under a restricted franchise and before organized Labor gained countervailing power over the Capitalists.  

In 1867, WC Bonnerjee, fresh from having qualified as a barrister from London’s Middle Temple, looked to the United States for inspiration. He suggested a bicameral Indian assembly which, per the American model, could have veto power over the executive branch – in this case, the British viceroy.

Why not propose that the British viceroy come and wipe the bum of every Indian peasant? 

Bonnerjee, who in 1885 would become the first president of the Indian National Congress, pointed to traditional panchayats to argue that ordinary Indians possessed the capacity for self-government. “To understand the people, you must go to them direct,” he stated. “You will find that they possess a remarkable degree of intelligence.”

It was smart to keep Pax Britannica which was based on British Naval supremacy. It was stupid to, as Netaji Bose did, ally with the Japs to invade India so as to create a far more brutal and extractive foreign regime. 

He rubbished the idea, propounded by many colonial officials, that India’s religious diversity – and Hindu-Muslim tensions in particular – would make representative government unworkable.

Yet that is what happened in 1946-47. 

Indians, Bonnerjee maintained, were united by a common nationality.

He was wrong. His province was divided so that Hinduism might survive there. 

While they did not advocate anything approaching universal enfranchisement – hardly a mainstream idea in the 19th century –

This guy has never heard of the Chartists! But the French had adopted universal male suffrage in 1792. The thing didn't last. The sad fact is, the vast majority of any country isn't interested in stupid ideologies.  

Indian liberals envisioned a robust, expansive future electorate for the country.

From which they would get zero votes. I may believe that if everybody has a vote then I will be voted Miss Teen Tamil Nadu. But people would laugh at me if I stated this belief.  

They did not simply advance the interests of their fellow English-educated elites.

Yes they did- if they had any influence at all. 

Allan Octavian Hume – the founder of the Congress, a Scotsman who identified as a “native” of India –

because he had turned Vegetarian and Vedantist through Theosophy 

designed an electoral system for Congress representatives which incorporated a wide cross-section of the Indian peasantry and accommodated minority representation.

Within his life-time, Congress split into a 'tepid' and 'hot' wing. But it was the League- Jinnah in particular- who represented Muslims. In 1939, Gandhi described Congress as a High Caste Hindu party.  

By 1887, this electorate numbered three million – more than the electoral turnout at British parliamentary elections, Hume was quick to point out.

 In Britain, working-class Chartists had been demanding the vote for decades. In India, only a small proportion of the population knew or cared about voting. 

At its 1889 session, the Congress included female delegates – a radical departure, at the time, for any political organisation worldwide

Ten women out of nearly 2000 is not very much.  

– and featured a brief debate on Indian female suffrage. Despite deep-set patriarchal norms in India, many liberals expressed remarkably progressive ideas about women’s rights.

But it was things like Cow Protection which enabled Congress to achieve Mass Contact.  

Dadabhai Naoroji argued for gender equality in India and actively campaigned for female suffrage in Britain. In 1917, two years before the United States gave women the right to vote, the Congress selected as its president Annie Besant, the fiery Anglo-Irish matriarch.

She came to India after converting to Theosophy. Religion, not Liberal ideology, was the motivating factor. Beasant was championing Jeddu Krishnamurty as the new Universal Messiah.  

The Congress advocated a multi-pronged agenda of comprehensive reform, keeping in mind the poverty and destitution of the average Indian.

Which, taking power, they contributed to. An agricultural nation which could not feed itself- that was Congress's India.  

Its leaders railed against corruption in the police force,

Though the soon became much more corrupt once they got to hold office.  

worked towards empowered municipal bodies, and fought against systemic discrimination in the judicial system.

This guy is a comedian. Compare what Congress was, when Whites like Hume and Beasant were in charge and look at what it is now. Okay. A White is still in charge but she is Italian not British. 

Congress politicians championed universal education, vocational and industrial training, and policies to stimulate industry and commerce. They thought in big, bold terms, suggesting the establishment in India of cutting-edge educational institutions modeled on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the London School of Economics.

I believe Jamshed Tata and Vivekananda discussed setting up a Scientific Institute when they met on a ship returning from Japan. The LSE did receive a lot of money from the Tatas around the same time they started financing the Maha-crackpot.  

In contrast to India today, where the media’s independence has eroded,

Scroll isn't independent. It does what its financiers want. 

liberals – who cut their teeth as journalists and newspaper editors – were staunch defenders of freedom of the press and freedom of speech.

Then Nehru amended the Constitution. As for Indira, don't even ask.  

They pushed back against government censorship, and some of them, like Surendranath Banerjea, editor of the Bengalee of Calcutta, went to jail for their outspokenness.

Jail for 'outspokenness' compares favourably with being executed for waging war on the King Emperor. The problem with outspokenness is that anyone can talk.  

It was in newspaper columns that Indians spoke truth to power, attempting to hold their colonial rulers to account.

Why not simply scribble 'Viceroy sucks ass' on a toilet wall? The fact is, it was a British Editor of a British owned paper who broke the story of the Bengal Famine. But he was smart enough to shift the blame to New Delhi- which is what his proprietor wanted.  Bengalis kept silent for fear of Suhrawardy's knife wielding goons. Anyway, they could be dismissed as Hindu fanatics if they raised their voice. The plain fact is that those with power already know the truth. If there is no one with enough power to replace them, they need do nothing.  

At the same time, liberals used the press to inform Indians about the rest of the world.

Journalists did so. Some may have been liberal. Others just wanted to make money.  

While intensely proud of their country, they did not possess a smug satisfaction about India’s innate civilisational superiority.

Because the place was a shithole. Gandhi's genius was explaining that living in a shithole was a good thing coz you could keep doing satyagraha and hartal and other such stupid shit till the place got yet shittier.  

Instead, they believed that India had much to learn from other societies.

Another Society had taken over the place and had set up schools and colleges to teach its Language and culture and Arts and Sciences. This cretin thought that Indians of the period didn't notice this till some liberal journalist published an article explaining that India had much to learn from England and Amrika and Yurop and Japan.  

Sant Nihal Singh (who, with great literary flourish, anglicised his first name to “Saint” or “St”),

which in English is pronounced Sin. Thus Norman St.John Stevas's name was pronounced Norman Sin-Jin Stevas. It is my firm belief that he drank a bottle of Gin before sinning with Mrs. Thatcher. 

became India’s first roving world correspondent, translating his travels into lessons for his fellow Indians.

He was the first Indian correspondent to work for foreign newspapers. There had been vernacular language journalists and writers who described their travels in foreign lands from the 1860s. 

Surveying Meiji Japan’s achievements, he impressed upon Indians the importance of universal education and women’s rights.

As opposed to what?- universal ignorance and beating Mummy to death?

In the American South, he visited the Hampton Institute, the black college which counted Booker T Washington, a prominent Black leader and adviser to US presidents, among its alumni, and pleaded for a similar institution to be founded in India to promote agricultural and industrial education.

The Brits had already set up engineering and artisanal institutions. The Pusa Indian Agricultural Research Institute received its original funding from an American pal of Viceroy Curzon.   

Liberals were not hostile towards India’s religions.

They would frequently pat them on the head or offer them a biscuit or a banana.  

Far from it: many were deeply religious, and several were authorities on Hinduism and Sanskrit literature. But they were, by and large, not bigots.

Maybe not, but they were ruled by people who were plenty bigoted against darkies and Orientals and dark Orientals.  

They celebrated the glories of India’s past, but they could be quite clear-eyed and realistic about pseudo-historical fantasies, the kind of which have gained increased traction in recent years.

Lots of Liberals were Theosophists or believed in the supposed superiority of the ancient Aryans.  

“We cannot afford to be dreamy and self-contained, and turn back from our present opportunities to a past which cannot be recalled,” judge and reformer Mahadev Govind Ranade, himself a noted expert on Maratha history, remarked in 1893.

He founded a Religious sect- the Prarthana Samaj- and advocated widow remarriage though he himself conformed to orthodox convention and married a little girl, not a widow, after his first wife died.  

Admittedly, Indian liberalism had numerous blind spots. Public enthusiasm for social reform and women’s rights did not always translate into practice in their homes. Despite strenuous efforts to broaden their base, the liberals achieved nothing like Gandhi’s success after 1919 in generating popular enthusiasm for nationalism.

But Tilak and Cow Protection and, later, the campaign against the partition of Bengal all did generate popular enthusiasm- among Hindus. Gandhi glommed onto Khilafat- which appealed to Muslims- but quickly betrayed that cause and surrendered unilaterally to the Brits.  

Most egregiously, liberals could be quite dismissive about caste discrimination and the plight of lower castes and Dalits.

Unless it paid them better to pretend to care about such things.  

In my own research, I have been struck by the sheer absence of these issues in the writings and correspondence of many liberal leaders.

On the other hand, they kept banging on about homosexual rights- right?

That being said, liberals did accomplish one remarkable achievement: setting out a vision for India which was inclusive, democratic, and relatively open-minded.

But people who wanted democracy, wanted it for every country. If Indians came late to that party it was because it was always obvious that democracy in the sub-continent would not be 'inclusive' or 'open minded'. It would be confessional and majoritarian though, no doubt, a couple of academics and scribblers might be paid a little money for pretending otherwise.  

This vision was further nurtured by Gandhi, Nehru, and Ambedkar. It survived the horrors of Partition, the many unfulfilled promises of Indian independence, and lurches towards authoritarianism like Indira Gandhi’s Emergency.

But, Patel will tell us- because that is what he is paid to do- it doesn't survive any more. The fucking Hindus have taken over. 

On the 75th anniversary of its independence, however, it remains to be seen how much longer that original liberal vision of India will last.

It will last if people are paid a little to pretend it is lasting or in peril or whatever.  Dinyar is Parsi. Working class Parsis realized that their life-chances would dwindle if the Brits left. Many emigrated and have done very well for themselves. They are too small a community to be anything but Liberal in politics though, for sound financial reasons, they are extremely exclusionary when it comes to the product of mixed marriages. Still, Jinnah's lineage is now Parsi because they are as rich as fuck. That's perfectly understandable. Still, I wonder why Indians- who are overwhelmingly Hindu- would want to be lectured on bigotry by people who came to India as refugees fleeing Islamic hordes. If they love Muslims so much why not return to Iran?