In an interview with Scroll magazine, Ram Guha says India is an 'unnatural Nation'. This could certainly be said of Pakistan but not India which, like Egypt and China has been recognized as a Nation for thousands of years.
You describe India as an unnatural nation. How did you reach that conclusion?
The original title of this book was actually “Unnatural Nation”. I’m glad I eventually chose something more bland and more descriptive because that phrase comes from reflecting on the history of European nationalism. The Greeks were not nationalists,
They were Pan Hellenic from at least the fourth century BC.
nor was the Mauryan empire.
The Mauryas fought against 'mleccha' invaders- including Greeks- and expelled or assimilated them.
Nationalism is a modern phenomenon
No. It is ancient. It evolved out of tribes which shared a language coming together to either resist invasion or to grab territory from neighboring Nations or Empires.
dealing with a modern nation state which constructs boundaries – boundaries that are rigorously policed.
Nonsense! Plenty of nations don't bother policing their borders. The expectation is that immigrants will assimilate.
In that territory, which is now circumscribed and defined and claimed by a particular nation, there are certain markers of national identity.
There may be or there may not be. Nationality is a Tarskian primitive. Consider the conflict in Ukraine. It comes down to a question of whether Ukrainian with Russian as a mother tongue belong to Russia. It appears that many such people are now consciously learning and speaking Ukrainian. Putin has only succeeded in making Ukrainians more nationalistic.
In 19th century Europe, these markers were a common religion, a common language and a common enemy.
This is false. An Alsatian Protestant or Jew felt he was French not German. Many such- e.g. Alfred Dreyfus- moved to French territory and enlisted in the Army hoping to win back Alsace and Lorraine for France.
So in England, Catholics were considered second-class citizens,
only to the same extent as Jews and Non-Conformists. But that had ended by about 1830.
while in France, Protestants had that status.
till 1789.
India was very different in its constitutional conception.
Not really, non-Muslims had second class status in Muslim ruled territories. This ceased to apply in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century as British power expanded.
As I say in this new edition, the object of the current regime is to make us more of a natural nation, with one religion, one language and one enemy.
This happened in 1946. Muslims voted overwhelmingly for the League and got Partition. But Gandhi, in 1939, said the INC was a Hindu party. He demanded that the Brits hand over all power- especially over the Army- to the INC.
Pakistan was a natural nation.
Nonsense! The very word was invented by a crackpot whose property was confiscated by Liaquat. The poor fellow was deported back to England where he faced considerable financial difficulty. His old College is said to have paid for his burial.
Everyone must speak Urdu.
Plenty of Baloch and Pathans refuse to do so. Anyway, the country was split up. Bangladesh went its own way. Sadly, that way did not preclude persecuting Hindus.
It is a Muslim country and India is the enemy.
India only coheres because it is a Hindu country. Where Hindus are not in the majority, there is separatism. But plenty of nations have a fringe of this sort.
It is a perfect European nation in South Asia – and we are becoming a mirror image of that, a sort of Hindu Pakistan.
That happened in 1947. Nehru passed a law preventing Muslims refugees who had fled across the border from returning to claim their property and take Indian citizenship.
Or at least the attempt is to make us that.
This happened a long time ago. Muslims were deprived of reserved seats and any type of affirmative action (e.g. for Muslim Dalits) by Nehru and Ambedkar. Hindi in Devanagari script and cow protection were written into the Constitution of 'India that is Bharat'.
As you chronicle India’s triumphs and tumults over the past 75 years, you note four main axes of conflict. What are they and what is preeminent at this point?
Once Muslims had been chased away or cut down to size, the first threat of conflict independent India faced had to do with the Communists. They were beaten or killed till they learned to play nice.
The second conflict had to do with reducing the power and autonomy of the 'Presidency' states and concentrating power in the hands of the PMO. The financiers of Congress were deprived of further influence. The Planning Commission and the License Permit Raj made Capitalists into supplicants.
The third conflict had to do with the reorganization of the States and Union Territories on various grounds.
Finally, when Congress became openly dynastic and corrupt, there was a conflict about kicking out its stupid or useless hereditary leaders, unless- of course- they were simply assassinated.
There are probably more than four but there’s religion, language, caste, class, gender.
This could be said of Lichtenstein!
And now, there’s a sixth – region – North vs South.
Which is also true of the UK or Italy! A historian must look at what makes the country he is studying different from other countries.
I think religion is emerging as the pivotal point not just of conflict but also of discrimination because there’s a systematic attempt to make Indian Muslims second-class citizens.
That happened long ago! The Muslims were one third of Delhi's population when Nehru came to power. Within a year, there were only five per cent left! The Custodian of Evacuee Property kept persecuting wealthy Muslims till they ran away.
It’s an attempt that is political, ideological, legislative, social and economic.
Nonsense! After 9/11 many countries have passed laws which, prima facie, target Muslims. But as the terror threat subsides, Islamophobia subsides. Voters understand that the problem is caused by a handful of people whom the police are welcome to crack down upon.
But the other conflicts are also playing out. That’s part of the reason I describe India as a reckless political experiment:
This is crazy. Pakistan was a reckless experiment which failed spectacularly in 1971. Indira's dynasticism was a reckless experiment- but assassination tempers autocracy. The plain fact is that India is 'anti-fragile' precisely because it isn't an experiment at all. It is a continuation of what the British created. But they too were building on pre-existing institutions.
so large, so diverse, so divided and yet trying to hang together by a thread
Hinduism's sacred thread- which, it turns out, is plenty strong.
and also trying to run its politics democratically.
Dynasticism is not democratic.
The historian Eric Hobsbawm, who
was a Lefty nutter whom the English ignored.
was a notorious sceptic about the Indian democratic experiment, said that multinational, multi-linguistic states don’t work except in the Soviet Union
where Russian predominated
and the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Where German predominated. Hobsbawm hadn't noticed that plenty of people in the UK speak Welsh. Canada has a lot of French speakers. America has plenty of Hispanics. As for countries like India or South Africa or Nigeria- English is good enough as a link language though, no doubt, Hindi has spread much faster than many would have envisaged when I was a young man.
India was trying to defy that.
It didn't need to defy anything. It just took and improved on the machinery left by the Brits. It is true that Kamraj thought he couldn't be PM because he wasn't fluent in either English or Hindi. But Deve Gowda showed the thing could be done- if the Dynasty permitted it.
That is the greatness of our national experiment and I still hope we don’t lose sight of this.
No fucking experiment is involved in taking over and improving on stuff the Brits had spent a century and half building up.
I’d say religion is the most visible fault line today particularly because it is a tacit aspect of the ideology of the ruling party, not an obvious, explicit aspect.
Yet Gandhi said the INC was a Hindu party in 1939! It was obvious that Hinduism is the glue holding the country together.
If you look at Hindutva, it’s a peculiar mixture of paranoia and triumphalism – we will certainly win, we will rule the world, but everyone is against us.
The West was certainly against Islam- 1.3 million Muslims were killed and tens of millions were displaced by the 'War on Terror'. Hindus are right to fear the Hinduphobia of the American Academy. Rahul explicitly demands support from America to re-establish the reign of his dynasty. Guha is a useful idiot who parrots Congress propaganda.
Hindus feel besieged in their own country.
Unless they run away from Muslim majority areas- e.g. Kashmir Valley. Indeed, Rajiv Gandhi won by a landslide in an Election where Congress asked the question 'will the border move close to you'? Rajiv himself was projected as Lord Rama. Sonia, it must be said, was an obedient 'pativrata'.
This is something that is uppermost in my mind, but other conflicts also simmer. In my book, I talk about the North-South conflict and what that might mean – particularly in 2026 if we lift the freeze on delimitation of Parliamentary seats and the more backward, reactionary patriarchal parts of India have an even greater role in our national politics.
The seat redistribution will have to wait for the 2031 census. Still, Stalin should find a better partner at the National level than the idiot Rahul.
So there are different faultlines in the Republic and at different points of time one or the other is more dominant.
Currently, there is only one 'fault-line'- viz. the utterly useless Rahul. Only once he is out of the picture can a rival candidate to Modi (or, after Modi, Yogi) emerge.
Even as you note the axis of conflict you say that there are forces that bind us together. What are these forces that have kept India together?
Hinduism. That's why Indira fought a court case to get her sons declared Hindu. Even Sonia ensured that her daughter went through a Hindu form of marriage though she asked for the Catholic Church to bless the union. The Delhi Archdiocese refused.
Historically, there’s the Constitution,
which was immediately amended
there’s the federal system,
there is no federal system. The 1935 Act had made provision for the creation of a Federal Government but nothing of the sort ever materialized. The Constitution is unitary. Still, in the nature of things, for most people, it is the State Government, not the Central Government, which is more important. The question is whether Modi will go down the road of 'subsidiarity' and 'Tiebout sorting'.
there was the Congress but it isn’t really a pan-Indian party anymore
It is dynastic but the dynasty is dying nasty.
so it doesn’t play that role. There’s the market, freedom of movement.
Less so than under the Brits- more's the pity.
There’s always a battle between forces that unite and forces that divide.
Guha is with the latter.
It’s an open question where this will go.
In South Asia, Religion has high Income elasticity of demand. Hinduism will get stronger. So will Islam- but Muslims will concentrate on getting ahead through 'Tijarat'- i.e. hard work and enterprise. But so will everybody else. There will be more Dalit millionaires and, sooner or later, a Dalit Prime Minister. That's a very good thing.
One of the slightly depressing things about reading the book is you realise that some conflicts have never gone away – Kashmir being the prime among them. You’ve thought a lot about Kashmir. How do you see a just resolution in Kashmir?
Stop throwing money at the problem. The Valley will remain a 'spite-slum' funded more and more by its own diaspora. But this scarcely matters to the rest of the country.
Of course, now it is so much more difficult. But in the very recent past, we could have got somewhere near a just resolution of the Kashmir conflict, both during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s term as prime minister and under Manmohan Singh.
Nonsense! Both were credulous fools. Still, Vajpayee gained by seeming 'Nehruvian'.
There are many reasons why we didn’t, but I’ll just focus on one –
Pak sponsored terrorism. That is obvious. But Guha is too stupid to say so.
the mala fide and malicious role of the Opposition.
After Vajpayee went by bus to Labore in 1999 and there was talk about a resolution of the Kashmir dispute, he made a famous speech in Srinagar
in April 2003
where he said the solution was in the realm of humanity, not just the Constitution.
Terrorism isn't very humane is it? The fact is Vajpayee's Kashmir policy was an abject failure. He put his own place in the history books ahead of the country's interests.
At the time, the state government of Kashmir was a coalition of the People’s Democratic Party and the Congress. He was the first Indian prime minister to go to Srinagar in almost two decades and make a speech of peace and reconciliation, and the Congress boycotted it. I would hold Sonia Gandhi as Congress president responsible here.
This is foolish. Mufti Mohammad Saeed, who was Home Minister during the exodus of the Pandits from the valley, had the deciding voice. Within Congress, it was Ghulam Nabi Azad who gained most- or so it appeared at the time.
Fast forward to 2007 when Manmohan Singh as prime minister was in conversation with the Pakistanis. A lot of able diplomats on both sides were trying to work out how to convert the Line of Control into an official border. What happens? The BJP starts an agitation, blocking the road to the Valley from Jammu so that even medical supplies can’t go in.
That didn't matter in the slightest. It was the attack on the Taj hotel which killed off any possibility of rapprochement.
Now it’s bleak, particularly because of the awful abrogation of Article 370.
Which was only possible because the Bench, in 2016, said J&K had 'no shred of sovereignty'.
It’s been three-and-a-half years. They’re still a Union Territory. There’s no sign of elections. God knows what kind of redistricting is going on.
But none of this matters in the slightest. There are votes to be had for striking back at Pakistan based terrorists. There are none in babbling about 'humanity' and peas and lurve.
But if you look at those two extraordinary missed opportunities,
there were no opportunities. Only by hitting Pak based terrorists can you hope for peace. Having an offensive doctrine is what matters.
you would have to blame first the Congress and then the BJP for putting their petty party interests over not just national interest but also the possibility of peace in South Asia.
It is the Pakistani Army which destroyed the possibility of peace along its borders. But a bankrupt Pakistan will have no choice but to become more peaceful- more particularly as it becomes the target for more and more terrorism.
Staying with the bleak, just past the halfway mark, we get to the Emergency – the period of darkness that’s frequently invoked by the BJP and the RSS as a time in which their ideological predecessors mounted a glorious resistance to Indira Gandhi’s dictatorship. What role did the RSS and the Jan Sangh really play during that period?
First Lohia and then JP brought the RSS into opposition politics. Sadly, 'dual membership' is the issue which sank the ungainly Janata coalition. The BJP did ultimately emerge as the one competent successor to Janata but this was by no means inevitable. All in all, the Jan Sangh took a hit for being part of that disastrous coalition. It was the Rath Yatra which put them on the path to power. India is mainly Hindu and Hindus want a big Ram Temple in Ayodhya. Thanks to the Bench, that is precisely what they are going to get.
They played some role. The major Jan Sangh leaders were in jail
because the RSS had provided the man-power for both JP's 'sampoorna kranti' as well as 'Nav Nirman' in Gujarat. The ABVP, in particular, kicked ass.
along with the major socialists and the old Congress and Swatantra Party leaders. Some student leaders of the RSS were in jail.
Others played a less glorious role. The sarsanghchalak Balasaheb Deoras was in correspondence with Indira Gandhi. But they were a part of the democratic opposition – that cannot be denied.
To their credit, they weren't interested in sabotaging the country. What they opposed was misgovernment.
And now, the Emergency is frequently invoked today by critics of the Modi government when they point to suppression of dissent and free expression. How appropriate is that comparison?
It isn't. The fact is 'dissent and free expression' has turned into anti-national Hindu bashing. Ram Guha is saying India is 'unnatural' whereas Pakistan is perfectly fine. This sort of stupidity helps the BJP. People like me- whose families have always been pro-Congress- suddenly started to think well of Modi. He is smart and focuses on doing his job properly.
There are very interesting parallels and similarities.
Where in India today is there a politician with the status of JP? Equally, where is there a Sanjay Gandhi? Rahul may be a mooncalf, but he is not a homicidal thug.
I was a college student in Delhi at the time, so I remember it quite vividly, apart from having studied the records and written about it.
Did Guha go underground to overthrow the Dictator? No. He understands nothing about that time. Frankly, few Tambrams did. We agreed with Vinobha that 'anushasan' (discipline) was the need of the hour.
And, of course, we are living through this time.
Modi has arrested Stalin and is torturing him just as Indira had him arrested and tortured.
The parallels are clearly the attack on institutions by the Union government and the creation of a personality cult around the prime minister.
But, under Manmohan- who had no personality- those 'Institutions' were shown to be corrupt and useless.
In this new edition, I quote some remarks by JP Nadda, the president of the BJP, on Narendra Modi’s 71st birthday, which are very similar to the kind of things that Dev Kant Barooah as president of the Congress used say about Indira Gandhi.
But they are not as bad as what Govind Vallabh Pant said about the Mahacrackpot- viz. that he was the Il Duce and Fuhrer of India. The difference is that Modi rose by merit and is currently the most popular elected leader in the world.
There are also differences, some which are cheering. For example, the fact that during the Emergency, the Congress was in control of every major state except for Tamil Nadu.
Karunanidhi- who had allied with Indira to become CM- was dismissed in January 1976. 25,000 DMK workers were arrested. Karunanidhi's son, Stalin was tortured. The health of some others was permanently affected. Prominent party functionaries like C Chittibabu MP and Sattur Balakrishnan lost their lives. President's Rule was imposed in February 1976. Ram Guha is himself of Tamil origin. He is a few years older than me. If I can remember what happened when I was 12 in my ancestral State, why can't he though he was a College student at that time?
Today, the BJP does not rule over large parts of Southern and Eastern India, nor does it rule over the important state of Punjab.
It lost Himachal because Congress put up a good fight and Rahul stayed away.
But there are some differences that are depressing, particularly the majoritarian cast of the ruling party and the prime minister, which was absent in the Congress of the 1970s.
It was dynastic. Sycophancy alone- and a willingness to get your hands dirty- led to promotion. The alternative was torture in a jail cell.
Towards the end of the book, you refer to a work written by Rajni Kothari in 1970 in which he spoke of the Congress system of Indian politics. Kothari noted that for many years after Independence the Congress had “presented itself as the authoritative spokesman of the nation as well as its affirmed agent of criticism and change”.
Congress could kill you or lock you up if it didn't like the look of you.
That Congress system has since been replaced by the BJP system. What characterises this BJP system?
Booth management and 'last mile delivery'. But other parties are catching up. They hire Prashant Kishore. They don't listen to cretins like Guha- who has turned into the Huccha Venkat of modern Indian historiography.
The BJP, like the Congress, is a pan-Indian party.
It is becoming so. By contrast, Congress had a branch in every town, and many villages, by 1930.
It has national ambitions. It wants to be here forever. It has a charismatic prime minister. It wants to impose its ideology on not just political and public life but on the legislative system as well.
This is true of any and every political party.
It’s a different ideology from that of the Congress of the freedom struggle for sure
not really. Congress was nationalistic and promoted things like Cow Protection and Hindi as the National Language. In 1937, when Congress Ministries were formed, many Government Schools introduced the singing of 'Vande Mataram'. That's why the League became intent on Partition.
– but it is a one-party dominant system, comparable to that of the 1950s and 1960s when the Congress was in the position the BJP is in now.
No. Opposition parties tended to represent factions which had previously been with Congress but which had ideological differences with it. This was not the case in TN where the DMK could be said to continue the policies of the Justice Party. Punjab's Akali Dal, too, was separate as were the Communist parties.
I quote C Rajagopalachari, who had left the Congress in the late ’50s to start the Swatantra Party.
Because Congress had embraced Socialism at the Avadi Conference in 1955. The Second Five Year plan showed Nehru meant business.
This is what he wrote in 1958 about the Congress, which was then hegemonic.
“If subservience and slavish adulation take the place of independent thinking
i.e. stop worshipping Nehru. He is a vain and stupid man.
and criticism is never resorted to but with fear and trepidation, the atmosphere quickly breeds the political diseases peculiar to democracy.
Rajaji was a nominated member of the Madras Assembly. He quit in 1956. Was he pushed or did he jump? The truth is that Rajaji did not get on with Nehru- who was soft on Commies. He had left the Central Cabinet in 1952 itself on the grounds of 'health'- though the fellow was to remain hail and hearty for another 20 years. Since Congress didn't do very well in the Madras elections in 1952, it was obvious that Rajaji (whose imposition of Hindi was still remembered with vehement hatred) was the last person Nehru should have imposed on Madras as CM. Why did Nehru do so? I suppose it was because Rajaji had strong anti-Communist feelings. He had opposed clemency for those involved in the Telengana uprising. But he was also a 'sambandhi' (relative by marriage) of the Mahacrackpot. Furthermore the Americans liked him. Still he was CM for only two inglorious years. It has been said that it was the Governor who imposed Rajaji- that too by nomination. Still, Nehru went along with it. I suppose Rajaji saw his role as CM as involving saving Madras for Tamil Nadu. He rejected the notion that Andhra Pradesh could share the City for even one day. I think this helped his 'Congress Reform Committee' to do quite well in subsequent elections. Still, the times were not propitious for a Right Wing party to gain much electoral support because the mass of the people needed an expanded Public Distribution System and many more schools- not 'caste based' instruction as Rajaji envisaged.
'Without the free and critical atmosphere of a well-balanced democracy, India is witnessing the growth of the weeds of careerism. intrigue and various types of degrees of dishonesty.
Rajaji was a nominated CM- a bad one. Kamaraj was the man who understood the needs of the ordinary Tamil.
And opposition is the natural preventative for such poisonous weeds and opposition is therefore indicated by the symptoms.”
Rajaji's career proves otherwise. But then, even Kamaraj and Bhaktavatsalam screwed up. By 1968, T.N was a Left 'Dravidianist' enclave. 'Reel Society'- i.e. film stars and scriptwriters- took over 'Real Society'. They did a better job than Gandhian nutters or Marxist lunatics or the stupid mathematical economists Nehru relied on.
He also says, “When one party always remains in power and dissent is dissipated among unorganised individuals and relatively insignificant groups, when these groups do not and cannot coalesce, government will inevitably become totalitarian.”
Why should it bother becoming any such thing? The best 'monopoly profit' is a 'quiet life'. Rajaji did not understand that there must first be Social Democracy before Market based reform becomes sustainable. You have to grow the market so that economies of scope and scale become available.
This is Rajagopalachari writing in 1958 about Nehru’s Congress and it’s so strikingly resonant when you think of Modi’s BJP today.
How so? Is Modi a Socialist who is implementing 'license permit Raj' and going after Conglomerates which took the place of the Managing Agencies?
In a volume she edited three years ago, Niraja Gopal Jayal
who does not understand that rights are meaningless unless they are linked to incentive compatible remedies- even absent a bond of law
noted that the BJP doesn’t just want to reform India, it wants to re-form India.
Because reform re-forms things. Why not say 'the BJP doesn't just want to make India stronger, it wants to make stronger the country that is India'?
What are the disjuncts you see with the past that the BJP has effected so far?
Modi is less crap than any PM we've had since Nehru's first term.
We’ve already talked about religion and how it wants to remake India as a Hindu majoritarian state in theory and in practice.
Which is what Nehru & Co did back in 1947
Some elements in the BJP – not the prime minister, but the home minister – want to impose Hindi on the South and the East, for sure.
Nope. They want Hindi speaking states to be able to replace English with Hindi. But Karnataka is welcome to replace English with Kannada. Hindi won't be imposed on anybody- especially not Mallus because then all the best Hindi speaker will be from Kerala. The rest of us will get jelly. I put up with Mallus because I can't understand their jibber jabber. Imagine my feeling of inferiority and self-loathing if I could understand what those highly intelligent and artistic people are actually saying!
They are undermining our institutions. So in that sense, it’s a reshaping, a re-forming of the Indian Republic. Some people have talked about the making of a Second Republic. I think that’s premature but the intentions are clear.
Why the fuck would the ruling party want to replace that which is working so well for them?
Going back to the Emergency in the post-Emergency period, what were the forces that allowed us to reinvigorate our institutions?
Assassination. That's what tempers Dynastic autocracy. Rahul has a lively fear of being killed. That's why he thinks 'power is poison'.
What can we learn from that for the period when perhaps the BJP system has passed?
Killing Modi won't change anything. Shah will take his place and then Yogi and so forth. Assassination has no power against meritocratic, cadre-based, parties.
To begin with, undoing the amendments to the Constitution.
The right to property was abolished by Shanti Bhushan. Anyway, Constitutions don't matter very much. The Bench's Collegium isn't in the Constitution but it still prevails.
I’m reminded of a remark made by JB Kripalani during the Emergency. The great freedom fighter who had left the Congress after Independence to go into Opposition was by the time of the Emergency very old and sick. He was in hospital with all kinds of tubes passing through him.
That was JP. Kriplanai died in 1982.
A young follower went to see him. As you would do when an elderly relative is ill, he put his hand on Kripalani’s forehead. The old man woke up and told his young friend, “I have no constitution left – all that remains are amendments.”
Kripalani was witty- that much is true.
The lawyer Shanti Bhushan, who was law minister under Morarji Desai and who recently passed away, was one of the architects of the restoration of the Constitution.
He was also a founding member of the BJP and remained its treasurer till the mid Eighties. He quit when Vajpayee and Advani refused to back his petition alleging that Rajiv won the election on a 'communal' platform. The truth was obvious. India is a Hindu country which doesn't like it when a Hindu woman is gunned down by her own security guards.
Some people argue that the revival of the Supreme Court really took place in the ’90s when we did not have majority governments at the Centre.
But judicial activism turned out to be no panacea. A rights based approach to Development fails if there is no money to provide the remedy. The plain fact is that the early Nineties saw extra-judicial killing on an industrial scale. Ultimately, that is what holds the country together.
Some economists believe that coalition governments have been much better for economic growth as well.
Unless they are worse.
They are certainly better for federalism.
Unless they are worse. What Guha is getting at is the notion that King Log is better than King Stork. But a log of wood can do nothing to defend the country.
The thing to hope for if you are an Indian democrat who wants a reinvigorated Supreme Court, a free press, more robust federalism and better and more balanced economic growth in India is – no single party should get a majority in 2024.
Why stop there? Why not hope that all the politicians just fuck off and die already?
Then there may be a way of reviving these institutions.
The press is always going to be shit. The thing only exists to make money.
Long before the BBC aired “The Modi Question”, you wrote a column saying that Modi should apologise for the Gujarat riots.
Guha should apologize for them because, unlike Modi, he had nothing to lose by their occurrence. I too must apologize for my ginormous dong which has caused millions of women, denied access to it, to hang themselves in despair.
His followers, of course, say that the Supreme Court has given him a clean chit.
Because the case against him was fabricated
Why do you think he should apologise?
Because Guha has shit for brains.
It’s not a question of the Supreme Court. There was a clear dereliction of duty. If you look at books written or edited about that period by Siddharth Varadarajan,
a notorious liar who made crazy allegations against Meta
by Revati Laul,
who has made a little money by telling stupid lies about the post-Godhra riots
by RB Sreekumar
a cop turned jail-bird whom, the Bench believes, fabricated evidence. They wrote- 'it appears to us that a coalesced effort of the disgruntled officials of the State of Gujarat along with others was to create sensation by making revelations which were false to their own knowledge".[9
and also the Editors’ Guild report from that time and all the contemporary journalism – it’s clear that the administration should have done much more but let the riots happen.
But Modi, who had only recently come to power, and his Home Minister- another fresh face- had most to loose. The truth is only the Army could have stopped the riots. Fernandes, as Defense Minister, took personal responsibility for ensuring that the jawans obeyed orders.
Even if Modi wasn’t personally guilty, he was the chief minister of Gujarat.
Which is why the Gujarati voter knew he was completely innocent. Originally, the charge against Modi was that he was stupid and fanatical. Yet, over the subsequent twenty years we have all come to see that he is smart and pragmatic.
If you look at 1984, the anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi could have been stopped by the prime minister
yes.
or home minister
no. Narasimha Rao couldn't do shit without Rajiv's say so.
if they had wanted. At that time, I was a student in Calcutta, where there were probably 50,000-60,000 Sikhs – many of whom were taxi drivers. They were marked out by their turbans. But West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu told the police to ensure that not even one of them was harmed.
Why the fuck would Basu object to Indira being killed?
Jyoti Basu was not a great chief minister in other respects but he had been a young man when Mahatma Gandhi went on fast in 1947 in Beliaghata. He knew how dangerous and poisonous communal conflict was.
But Communist violence kept him in power. He presided over the Marichjhapi massacre of Dalits.
There were many parallels between 1984 and 2002.
There were none. Congress avenged the death of the Mahacrackpot by killing innocent Maharashtrian Brahmins. They avenged the death of Indira by killing innocent Sikhs. They couldn't avenge the death of Rajiv because they were out of power.
Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, to their credit, apologised.
Because they didn't want to be killed.
This is something that will always hang over Narendra Modi.
and thus get him the Hindu vote. Look at the recent BJP landslide in Gujarat.
It’s irrefutable that as Chief Minister Modi could have done more to stop the violence but did not.
What he did was end the cycle of politically instrumentalized communal rioting. Consider the Akshardam terror attack. Modi got ahead of the media cycle by putting all the blame on the ISI. That was why voters rewarded him. Riots and curfews are bad for the economy. Just fucking 'encounter' the bad guys- or bulldoze their houses- and peace is restored.
You’ve written frequently – all too frequently, some people would say – about how the Gandhi family is facilitating Hindutva by
not coming out of the closet as 'janeodhari' Brahmins. Sonia, in 2002, had said she'd build the Ram Temple, if the Bench allowed, with the aid of a Shankaracharya who had done her 'Grha Pravesh' ceremony. It wasn't her fault that nutters like Arun Singh pushed an anti-Hindu agenda.
staying in power in the Congress. After those heroic images of Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra, have you changed your opinion about him – just a wee bit, perhaps?
Rahul's achievement is to unite almost all other parties against Congress though, truth be told, Kharge must share some of the blame.
I’ve always said he’s a decent man. But as someone who is a historian of Indian democracy, as someone who has grown up in the 1960s, I cannot abide a fifth-generation dynast leading the party of the freedom struggle. I think it’s morally wrong.
We wouldn't mind even a fifteenth generation leader- if he wasn't utterly shit.
We don’t recognise the damage that the family control of the Congress party has done to Indian democracy. Indira Gandhi started it by
letting Congress twist her arm into joining the Cabinet. But the alternative was that her aunty- whom she loathed- rising up. Similarly, Nehru- who said he wanted to retire in 1958- had to stay on because otherwise Congress would rope in Indira- and her husband whom Nehru loathed.
Sanjay was a special case. The boy was unemployable. Thus the only job Indira could get him was as her successor. Thankfully, the fellow crashed his plane. Sonia then turned Indira against Maneka with the result that Varun is now in the wrong party.
bringing Sanjay Gandhi in 1975.
He had already amassed plenty of influence.
Only recently, in Tamil Nadu, Stalin
son of Karunanidhi.
made his son a minister.
But the son isn't a cretin.
The DMK was a great party of regional pride.
It is thuggish and corrupt. Still, Tamil women have raised up the State. 'Amma' had her good points.
It has stood for caste and gender equality, for good administration. Now, it’s a family party.
This cretin does not seem to understand that DMK has been dynastic for donkey's years. The only question was which sibling would inherit power. Thankfully, it was Stalin.
Look at the Akalis. The Akali Dal is the second-oldest political party in India.
But the IUML is the direct successor the Muslim League which was founded in 1906. There are many Akali Dals. The Badal wing is also known as the 'Badal Dal'.
It has a noble and admirable lineage. But the Badals made it a family party because
the Akali Dal had splintered for reasons we all know
they saw what Indira Gandhi was doing.
She had been dead for a decade by the time the Badal Dal was founded.
The Thackerays do the same thing, the Yadavs do the same thing, the Raos do the same thing. It’s absolutely dismaying for Indian democracy to have family control over one set of parties and personality cults over another set, with people such as Kejriwal, Mamata Banerjee and Modi at the helm. As an Indian democrat, I find both repugnant.
A historian should ask why dynasticism prevails. The answer is that it solves a coordination problem and reduces factionalism and 'rent dissipation'. Personality cult is a Marxist term. The meaning is that the leader does not have a deep understanding of dialectical materialism- which, sadly, is worthless shite.
The subtitle of this book is different. The first edition was India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. Now it’s India After Gandhi: A History.
Because Guha doesn't like Modi- the most popular elected leader in the world.
It may change again. I have to ask the publishers and whether it’s permitted to change it for the paperback or for the next reprint, which may come out in six months. Perhaps it could then be called India after Gandhi: A History of the World’s Most Populous Nation.
Why not 'a History of the World's most populous Hindu nation?"
What are you working on now?
I’m doing something very different. India after Gandhi is 940 pages long. I’ve been set a challenge by a young writer I admire (but whom I shall not name) to write a book under 200 pages.
Yet younger writers would challenge him write a book of under one page.
It’s a book about my relationship with my first editor Rukun Advani,
who says Guha was already an anti-Hindutva fanatic
who actually made me a published writer. He taught me how to write social history, helped me when I wrote biography, who encouraged me to write on cricket, and who still is kind of a sounding board. So it’s a writer’s tribute to this self-effacing and faceless editor.
This book is based on our correspondence over 40 years. Rukun doesn’t like speaking, but he likes writing – he’s got an acerbic wit and a marvellous sense of style. So it’s a book about the making of books based on a literary and personal friendship of four decades.
Advani, for his part, has this to say about Guha
His agenda even then was anti-Hindutva,
Because Hindus were in the forefront of opposition to Indira's tyranny
though it took a peculiar shape because it had become mixed up with his interest in cricket. . His aim in those days was to disprove the Hindu idea of reincarnation by circumventing his own afterlife through becoming either Bishan Singh Bedi or Erapalli Prasanna in this life. Failing either of those two options, he seemed to have resigned himself to a third, which was to become Gundappa Vishwanath.
Say 'Huccha Venkat' and you hit the mark. Guha is a hysterical fool. He is proof that Tambrams are uneducable and thus must receive Extremely Backward- not to say Retarded- Caste status with retrospective effect.
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