Prof. Pulapre Balakrinshan writes in his new book 'India’s Economy From Nehru to Modi'
As I had pointed out, international comparison of economic development indicators is often met with the criticism that we could be comparing across political regimes.
There's nothing wrong in doing so. Democracies can do the harsh things that Dictatorships do just as well or, indeed, in a more brutal and effective manner.
However, this is irrelevant in a comparison within India where the states are all under the umbrella of one governance system, namely political democracy.
Which may mean the rule of gangsters in some districts or the rule of market friendly technocrats in other places.
What we found in such a comparison is that a wide variation in human development exists.
But such 'wide variations' are found within any big city or big enough country.
While at least some states appear to be inching towards the global standard of development in some dimensions,
because of demographic transition
democracy in India coexists with low human development in states accounting for a large part of the country.
because the very poorest are still having babies like crazy.
In a country as large as India is, some regional variation may be expected.
This guy lives in India. He must have noticed that there is considerable variation within his own neighborhood.
However, the divergence can be considerable and has been long lasting, not having been erased in seventy-five years.
Rapid development means much much more inequality and 'divergence'. Why does the Professor not know this?
As all states function under a common set of rules,
No. Different states are ruled very differently. Actual rules diverge from theoretical ones.
there must be something unique to the states that differences of such magnitude persist into the twenty-first century.
Not if more than one state is in the same boat- which is indeed the case. Unique means 'not like any where else'.
Why is it that democracy has not been able to eliminate basic deprivation in large parts of India?
Because democracy has no magic power. Fuck is wrong with Indian professors? Why do they think that having a particular bunch of rules will have a magical effect? Suppose Ashoka University adopted the rule 'all professors must prove P=NP' will he himself suddenly outshine Terence Tao in mathematical genius?
A clue may be found in the disquisition on democracy by the sociologist Barrington Moore,
who was a fucking sociologist- i.e. as stupid as shit.
who has studied the transition to democracy across the world. Moore sees the prior revolutions that took place in Europe and the United States as crucial in the transition to a democracy there. When it comes to India, he says: “. . . the nationalist movement did not take a revolutionary form,
yes it did, which is why the Brits hanged people like Bhagat Singh.
though civil disobedience forced the withdrawal of a weakened British Empire.
Civil disobedience had zero effect. The Brits imposed whatever solution was convenient to themselves. The reason Wavell wanted to evacuate the White population was that the civil administration had collapsed in some parts of India and was fragile almost everywhere. Moreover, India was a drain on the Treasury at a time when Britain was on its knees financially speaking. America refused to pay to keep the Brits in India and so they struck a good bargain with Nehru and Jinnah and left.
The outcome of these forces was indeed political democracy,
for Hindus- sure. Where Muslims ruled the roost, no such animal magically appeared.
but a democracy that has not done a great deal toward modernizing India’s social structure.
Because 'modernizing' involves buying modern stuff which costs money. But getting money involves not letting pointy headed intellectuals fucking over the economy. If you must have economists, make sure they are Sikhs. Even the smartest Sikh won't fuck up the economy for some ideological reason.
Hence famine still lurks in the background.”
Moore was writing this in the Sixties. Why quote him now? How fucking stupid is this Professor?
Strangely, when it came to India, Moore seems to have inverted his thesis to suggest that democracy can alter the social structure, presumably through parliamentary means.
This is fucking obvious. Parliament can pass laws redistributing land and criminalizing things like bonded labor and untouchability.
However, his general thesis, that a social transformation is essential for democracy to attain its potential, is useful in understanding the regional variation that we observe in India.
This is not a thesis. It is a tautology. Democracy has the potential to do 'social transformation'. If 'social transformation' is achieved then that potential is realized. Adding the word 'essential' alters nothing.
Arguably, the regions of India that have seen the most development, including the elimination of illiteracy and extreme poverty, are regions that have witnessed social transformation that eliminated the old order.
It is equally arguable that the regions of India that have seen the least development are regions that have witnessed the elimination of the old order. Where in India do you find the Maharajas and Zamindars of the Thirties? Nowhere at all. Goonda Raj was unknown under the Brits.
This is most pronounced in the case of Kerala, where as early as 1957 an elected communist government initiated a process of improvement of the conditions of life for the mass of the population.
Only because unelected monarchs had initiated that process many years previously.
This mainly involved the spread of health and education, resulting in a social emancipation of the lower orders of its society.
A process which was well underway under the old order.
A significant event in this transformation was the land reforms initiated within weeks of the installation of the government.
Kashmir had already had similar land reform. Why not simply say 'Congress was shit'?
This led to the ending of landlordism and the associated suppression of the labouring classes. So the social structure was altered, awareness grew, and with it an unstated but recognisable demand for a better life.
Whereas Biharis kept demanding a worse life- right?
Competing political parties had no option but to respond with policies that enhanced human capabilities if they were to survive.
Fuck off! They responded with stupid policies which forced the people to migrate and remit money. It is only now that Kerala has a CM who says he wants to be the Deng Xioaping of India. Indian Communism is a mere 40 years behind China.
Though the culmination of the social transformation in Kerala was the installation of a communist party, the transition was long. Having commenced in the late nineteenth century, it had involved a caste-reform movement that initiated social mobility, the work of Christian missionaries that spread literacy, and an enlightened public policy of the princes who had ruled a large part of what is now Kerala.
The Communists fell when they tried to fuck with the Christians. But, it must be said, Kerala's Communists are perfectly sensible. They condemn 'Love Jihad' if that can get them a few votes.
A transformation of a kind took place in Tamilnadu too, though its origin was a caste-based movement
a film industry based movement. The Justice Party had collapsed long ago.
aimed at eliminating the hegemony of the Brahmins. However, it could come to power only by riding on ethnic nationalism fuelled by the attempt to impose Hindi as the sole official language of the country.
There was no such attempt. There were other non-Hindi speaking states. They would have noticed. It was the film industry which enabled T.N to escape the orbit of the utterly useless Congress Party.
Since then the “Dravidian movement” has had great political success and parties that draw inspiration from it have now been in power in the state for over half a century. As with the rise of the communists in Kerala, so too has the Dravidian movement left its imprint on society. Tamilnadu has achieved relatively good development indicators, though they are yet to reach the levels achieved in Kerala.
Because a much smaller proportion of the population goes to the Gulf to work.
No social change comparable to that in Kerala and Tamilnadu has taken place in the three other states in our sample in Table 5.3. Not even Zamindari abolition in UP and the land reforms of the Left Front in West Bengal seem to have achieved a similar success in the social sphere, necessary to bring about development in the sense that we use the term.
So, being ruled by a Communist party does not correlate in any way with better social welfare outcomes.
These states have higher poverty and poorer social indicators than Kerala, the shortfall in women’s literacy being particularly noticeable.
Kerala exports nurses. UP exports coolies. Sad.
The case of Gujarat suggests that overall economic prosperity may be insufficient to bring about the expansion of freedoms of the population.
No it doesn't. It suggests that if you are prosperous you have more, much more, freedom. But simply being Gujerati wont' make you hard working and enterprising. Sad.
We saw in Table 5.3 that though it is one of India’s richest states, it harbours significant poverty and its social indicators are not much better than the national average.
But its statistics are better. The fact is a well run State has statistics showing higher poverty because this means it can then get its mitts on more funds from the Center. A badly run state doesn't bother because everybody knows the money would just get stolen anyway.
A change in social structure that redistributes power appears to be essential to widespread development in a society, including the elimination of poverty.
Why not say a change in magical power is essential to bring about a change in social structure? The fact is social structures supervene on an economic substructure. You could try going down the Hugo Chavez route and redistribute power but, it turns out, that will destroy society.
Interestingly, in his final speech to the Constituent Assembly, Ambedkar had recognised the role of the social structure in perpetuating social and economic inequality when he pointed out that, in the India that was to come,
“In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognising the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?
Not long if you are diabetic. Sad.
How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril.”
Ambedkar was wrong. America had political democracy and Jim Crow at the same time. He knew it but, after all, he was a politician and needed to compete with other shitheads in talking bollocks.
Ambedkar was prescient in seeing that political democracy is no guarantor of the expansion of freedoms,
No prescience was involved in seeing that America was a democracy where Blacks were denied plenty of freedoms.
an insight that is crucial to our understanding of the history of both democracy and development in India.
If you want to have a truly shitty understanding it may be crucial that your read this tripe.
Quite often, when it is suggested that India’s democracy is diminished by the presence of deprivation on so large a scale,
our reply is that Sen-tentious shitheads are diminished by their appetite for dog turds.
it is asserted that democracy is really a form of government by discussion,
but this is only asserted by people who scour the streets for doggie doo-doo which they eagerly devour
and expecting it to deliver human development is to see it merely as an instrumentality.
rather than a nice steaming pile of puppy poo which they can eagerly devour.
An antidote to this line of argument is offered in Moore’s recounting of the history of democracy. He sees its development as “a long and certainly incomplete struggle” to do three related things: (1) to check arbitrary rulers, (2) to replace arbitrary rules with just and rational ones, and (3) to obtain a share for the underlying population in the making of rules.
These conditions may be met by an Enlightened Despot or a One Party State.
He sees the ending of monarchy,
the guy had obviously never heard of Britain or Belgium or Sweden or Denmark all of which are monarchies.
the efforts to establish the rule of law
which existed under the Stuarts
and the power of the legislature,
ditto
and, later, use of the state as an engine of social change
like in Soviet Russia?
as the best known aspects of these three aims. The definition of democracy as “government by discussion”, attributed to Bagehot,
is foolish. There was plenty of discussion at the Tzarist Court.
may well reflect a consensus on how it was intended to function, but remains ahistorical, and leaves us blind to its potential to improve the conditions of life for the mass of the population, a matter of urgency in India.
What possible benefit could India gain by discussing stuff with Sen-tentious cretins?
Democracy in India has received worldwide attention, especially from observers based in Western democracies.
But nobody pays any attention to them.
The cynic might observe that the admiration has turned particularly vocal ever since India’s economy has billowed out. Some recent congratulatory reviews of India’s democracy emanating from overseas have been those by Mathews (2015), Shani (2017), and Desai (2017).
Desai? Would that be a Nicaraguan Desai or a Japanese Desai?
These observers have generally marvelled at one or the other of two features of Indian democracy – such as that a country of such great diversity has held together.
It has done so because Hindus would rather hang together than succumb once again to Muslim salami tactics.
Others have remarked upon not only the successful conduct of elections but also the peaceful transition once they are completed, both quite remarkable in a poor country which till recently had very low levels of literacy.
Yes, yes. India is a shithole. But shitholes can have elections just as often as nice places.
Surprisingly, none of them has wondered why poverty is tolerated to such an extent in India’s democracy.
It's because if you stop tolerating poverty you will stop tolerating Indian democracy. Then you will stop tolerating India. Finally you leave or die of frustration.
It is understandable that some in India should feel elated by the praise
who? Modi? Shah? Yogi? They don't give a shit about some Shani or Mathews.
but it should also leave us circumspect.
why not circumcised? Is Balakrishnan a closet Hindutvadi? I demand that he immediately cut off his foreskin to show respect to the Jewish religion! Shanit will write something nice about him and he will feel very elated.
Is democracy about procedural routines such as elections and guidebooks such as written constitutions, or is it about the transformations wrought after its adoption as the form of government?
The former. Only if the economic substructure changes will there be any 'social transformation'.
To paraphrase Moore, how much has democracy done for India?
It has kept together the Hindu parts though, no doubt, non-Hindu areas harbor secessionist sentiments unless threatened by the Chinese.
The evidence on human development in the country implies that the praise needs to be tempered.
Neither praise nor blame matters when stupid academics teaching worthless shite are dishing it out.
Significant deprivation exists in the country even after seventy-five years of its formation.
This is also true of England and Amrika.
This has not received as much attention, but it is high time it does.
But attention from cretins won't make things better. Let them scour the streets for dog turds which they can eagerly devour.
Few democracies have tolerated so much deprivation for so long.
Nonsense! All democracies extant in 1939 tolerated worse for longer.
The substantial divergence in the progress of human development across the country implies that it is possible to eliminate its worst forms through public policy.
No. The implication is that public policy can't do shit. People can by moving to the Gulf to work and send money back to their families.
I conclude by asking to what extent India’s impressive Constitution can advance this outcome.
It has no magical power to advance anything. On the other hand, a dysfunctional judiciary can retard things unless people figure out cheap ways to disintermediate it.
For liberal-minded observers of Indian society,
he means mindless virtue signaling libtards.
the recent celebration of 75 years of independence has been an occasion – if one was needed – for outpourings of lament.
vomit is the mot juste.
In print and online media – television has largely become impervious to serious debate
as has academia
– in India and around the world, a variety of writers have movingly chronicled the illiberalism and the assiduously nurtured bigotry of the past eight years as personal grief.
We didn't believe them. They were merely play acting.
In these writings, the years since 2014 have been set off against earlier histories
lies aren't histories
of multiple bonds between Hindus and Muslims,
like what? Jinnah and Nehru taking turns bumming the Mahatma?
traditions of syncretism in music, philosophy, food and cinema,
but syncretism doesn't mean ethnic cleansing is off the table. Ask the Sikhs.
constitutional guarantees of equality in all respects
which were wholly meaningless
and a “natural” acceptance of diversity in various forms.
including a natural acceptance of ethnic cleansing.
Yet, in all this stock-taking – frequently powerful and moving
for the bowels- maybe
– there is something missing.
Intelligence- that is what is missing.
What are the changed social and cultural realities that confront the formal and wished for indicators of a decent national life – the Constitution,
Srivastava lives in England which does not have a written Constitution
laws, the judiciary, poetry, fiction, cinema, for example?
why lump poetry and fiction with the law and the judiciary? The latter are economic and represent 'mechanism design'. The former are wholly imagnative.
What of the people themselves? What circumstances make them what they are?
Economic circumstances. That's not stuff an anthropologist has much of a grip upon.
Thinking about this is not easy
It is easy enough for an economist.
as we are not led to any straightforward answers to the predicaments of the present.
Yes we are so long as we don't consult stupid anthro-fucking-apologists.
However, to not address it leads us to an even more difficult – if not absurd – perspective: that as soon as the 2014 general election results were declared, a substantial section of the Indian population suddenly changed from what it was to its complete antithesis. That one day, many Indians believed in Hindu-Muslim unity and the next, they either began to promote or, at the very least, tolerate bigotry.
Yet it is precisely this absurdity which this cretin has sought to address. Why not ask why British men started having vaginas instead of penises after Mrs. Thatcher became Prime Minister?
To avoid this absurdist line of analysis, a follow-up question must be asked:
It is 'are you by any chance an anthropologist? If so- fuck off.'
what changes can be identified in conditions of Indian life over the past few decades that may have prepared the grounds for shift in attitudes?
Islamic terrorism. The thing was a global nuisance. There was no point appeasing the unappeasable. It was a question of kill or be killed.
What are the possible histories of such easy movements from moments of apparent tolerance and liberalism to their opposite?
Had Rahul stepped up to the plate Congress would have cobbled together a coalition in 2014. Then, like Rajiv, Rahul would have fallen because of a corruption scandal.
This will avoid the untenable point of view that “that’s the way we are, just an irredeemably illiberal people at heart”.
It is not illiberal to want terrorists to be killed before they get around to slitting your throat.
Thankfully, however, the cultural history of this part of the world shows no evidence of an inclination for violence and bigotry that is in excess of that in other parts of the planet.
Very true. I recall the anti-Sikh riots in London and Washington in 1984. Delhi wasn't exceptional at all.
A more useful avenue might be to think of some of the recent changes in Indian society that might be the grounds for the normalisation of intolerance and hate.
Sikhs in America were attacked after 9/11. Recently, when COVID began Asian Americans were attacked. A lot of them have bought guns and learned how to use them. They are a sensible people.
These might be the grounds for the political harvest whose blighted wheat sheafs surround us.
Why the fuck would a farmer bother to sheaf together blighted stems?
One of the most significant contexts for the current institutionalisation of majoritarian politics in India relates to the maturing of the Indian diaspora in the west.
This is nonsense. The Indian diaspora did have some role in the Independence struggle. Khalistan did receive diaspora support. But diaspora politicians- Bobby Jindal, Kamala Harris, Priti Patel, Rishi Sunak etc.- have zero influence in India.
By the early 2000s, Indians of Hindu background had become well enmeshed in the “multicultural” politics of their adopted homelands.
In Britain, Indians of Hindu background were well enmeshed in mainstream politics by the Seventies. In America, the first Indian origin Congressman was elected in 1957.
This involved their ability to translate Indian culture in terms of a Hindu religious identity.
But 'Hindu religious identity' encodes Indian culture. The two are indistinguishable.
Diversity of religious belief is a significant aspect of the idea of “tolerance” that underlies discourses of western multiculturalism.
But nobody in the West- aside from a couple of academics- gives a fuck about that discourse. Politicians would buy votes from darkies by playing up to their absurd shibboleths.
In Christian-majority countries, the idea of non-western identity is primarily understood in religious terms.
Coz American racists believed Dr. Martin Luther King belonged to the jiggaboo religion- right? When I put on a crucifix, English people mistake me for Boris Johnson. That's why I sport a star of David and a yarmulke.
An Arab Marxist or an Indian Humanist would be unrecognisable categories.
Very true. Indian humanists are frequently mistaken for public urinals.
It is this understanding of multiculturalism that Indian Hindus have engaged with in terms of constructing their diasporic identities.
Coz they didn't want to be incessantly pissed on by Whites who mistook them for public urinals.
Temples in the United Kingdom are
either Hare Krishna or else created by a particular caste- e.g. Patels who provided us the superb Neasden Swaminarayan temple.
both signs of the success of British multi-culturalism
Nope. Neasden reflects the success of the mainly East African Gujerati Hindus who settled in North London. They are an excellent people.
as well as Indian identity. As this community prospered, their success translated sub-continental beliefs about Hindus and Hinduism on a “world” stage.
If by 'world' you mean Neasden or New Jersey- sure.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s 2014 success, its electoral strategies leading up to it and since then, has built upon a religious nationalism that is “global” in nature.
because irreligious anti-nationalism is totes parochial- right?
Indian nationalism in its current phases is as much western as Indian.
just as the West is as much Eastern as it is Western and cats are as much dogs as dogs are cats.
The heritage politics foregrounded through overseas Indian populations and their dealing with their host societies led to significant spinoffs in India
name one. You'd have to go back to the Ghaddar movement to find any such thing.
that have also aided the current majoritarian moment.
Very true. When Advani called on Modi to help his Rath yatra, he did so in the belief that Modi was a prosperous orthodontist from Miami.
One of these relates to the rise of New Religious Movements that particularly appealed to rising new middle-classes.
Nineteenth Century or early Twentieth Century religious movements are not new. Ambedkarities may be said to belong to a new religious movement. It is certainly true that Punjabi Ravidasis etc. in England rediscovered Ambedkar but they were already rising through hard work and enterprise. Buddhism, of course, is flourishing in the West.
In keeping with the new visibility of Hinduism in the west,
The Hare Krishnas did make Hinduism visible in the West but that was 50 years ago. Then came Rajneesh. But he wasn't particularly Hindu.
a rapidly growing population of white-collar professionals in India was particularly ready for spiritual guides who spoke the languages of “global” success: management jargon, self-improvement and the capacity to marry spirituality with consumerism.
Consumerism is wicked. Srivastava wears khadi and lives simply in a grass hut. Fuck knows which Guru turned his brains to shit.
In both explicit and implicit ways, Indian new religious movements have been handy allies of majoritarianism through effectively inventing a “modern” Hinduism that is promoted as a necessary part of being Indian:
Nonsense! A necessary part of being Indian is actually living in India. That has nothing to do with religion. The Brahma Kumaris would as gladly enroll my White neighbor as they would enroll President Murmu.
a Hinduism for global Indians that makes them both Indian as well as Global.
This is silly. A Hindu who spends a lot of time jetting around the world is Global as well as Indian if he is based in India or plans to return there soon.
Just as importantly, new religious movement gurus frequently invoke a history of “wrongs” against Hinduism and leave unaddressed uncomfortable aspects such as caste.
Srivastava would prefer them to dilate upon the horrible massacres of Muslims which Hindu invaders perpetrated upon Saudi Arabia.
The dramatic change in living patterns forms the third possible aspect through which that which seems to have come upon us suddenly in 2014
only because Rahul was gun-shy.
might have been in the making for some time.
Or may have always been there from the get go. It is plausible to say that Nehru's generation was defeatist. Indira's generation a little less so and so on.
Since the mid-1980s, gated communities have become a significant form of residential accommodation. This has also meant the consolidation of mono-religious ghettoes.
But medieval towns all over the world had this feature! The very word 'ghetto' is medieval and refers to segregation of Jews. But there were also Huguenot areas and, later on, Quaker housing estates and so forth. In America, the thing may have been novel. But it may also have been a reaction to the repeal of Jim Crow type laws though, of course, there was plenty of informal discrimination in any case.
In most parts of India, gated communities tend to largely contain Hindu populations.
Because the population is largely Hindu. Also Hindus tend to be quicker to leave Muslim areas because they don't like being raped or knifed every so often.
The reasons for this are both economic as well as – if anecdotal and media accounts are to be believed – deliberate barriers to entry for Muslims.
and even more deliberate attempts to kill them before they can kill you
While, there may never have been traditional neighbourhoods characterised by complete inter-mixing between communities, the nature of India’s gated communities has substantially diminished whatever intermingling there might have existed in more open localities.
Only in the sense that the persistence of horses significantly diminish our chance of meeting a unicorn.
It is not at all unremarkable to come across children from Hindu families who may live in gated communities and attend private schools and who have never interacted with anyone but their co-religionists.
But it would be remarkable to come across a SOAS professor who wasn't a drooling imbecile.
This too undergirds the new normality of majoritarianism, producing the Indian-Hindu equation.
What produced the partition riots? There is nothing new about a majoritarianism which triumphed in 1937 when some Muslims withdrew their kids from schools in Congress ruled provinces because they were forced to sing 'Vande Mataram'.
The Indian fascination for the heroic leader
As opposed to what? The American fascination with the leader who shit himself any time Putin or Xi or the Ayatollah shouts at him?
derives as much from the legacies of the anti-colonial movement as from the belief that only a person of superhuman powers can deal with the nature of our problems.
Very true. People thought Rajiv Gandhi flew around the country without using an air-craft.
However, at different times in our post-colonial history, we have been attracted to different types of charismatic personalities and not all of them have promoted sectarian religious interests.
Though this is precisely what JP and Lohia and Kripalani are accused of doing. It was they who brought the RSS into mainstream politics.
What is particular to this moment is the conjunction of factors that have made religious sectarianism the norm.
There is only one fucking factor- viz. Rahul is as stupid as shit.
The apparent guarantors of a decent national life – the Constitution and its instruments, for example –
never guaranteed shit. Which fantasy world has this cretin been inhabiting all these years?
may not provide the answers to questions about “where do we go from here?”
They are not designed to. The answer is that Kejriwal and Prashant Kishore's new party and other successful regional outfits will cobble together a good rival Prime Ministerial candidate by the end of the decade. True, Hindu-bashing is off the agenda though Rahul & Co are welcome to keep at it from the political wilderness outside Parliament.
As we have discovered, constitutional guarantees are easily bent according to political will.
No. Constitutional remedies are ineffective if resources are unavailable or enforcement is difficult.
Political strategies are, in turn, based on an understanding of broad cultural and social circumstances. Just as politicians do, we should also come to grips with them.
By refusing to listen to Anthropologists or other such useless nitwits.
Zareer Masani, the son of Minoo Masani- a Socialist who turned into a proponent of laissez faire Liberalism- writes in the Spectator.
'Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.’ Imagine if those famous words had not been spoken by Jawaharlal Nehru 75 years ago today, as Pakistan and India announced their independence, but instead by a confederation of the whole Indian subcontinent.
In other words, imagine Nehru as the Prime Minister of a united India. But Nehru was unacceptable to the Muslim League. The only way there could have been a united India is if there had been a Muslim-Dalit-Mahasabha alliance supported by the Princely States. But in that case the first Prime Minister would have been either a lawyer like Sapru or an affable Princeling.
In this counterfactual, imagine this new united state as an independent dominion, like Canada and Australia, with the British monarch as king-emperor. It has a weak central government and strong, autonomous provinces like undivided Punjab and Bengal.
Which soon get divided when communal riots break out and escalate into ethnic cleansing. In the Punjab, some Princely states were using their own troops to foment violence.
The big problem was that both the Army and the Administration had already been 'communalized'. Patel soon discovered this when Liaquat, as Finance Member, was able to block anything he tried to do in the Home Dept.
Its constitution is based on the British government’s Cabinet Mission Plan of 1945, accepted by both the predominantly Hindu Congress and the separatist Muslim League.
The sticking point here was 'groupings'- in plain terms this meant whether Muslim majority Bengal would also get Assam and Muslim majority Punjab would also get the Sikh/Hindu districts. The answer to this was 'fuck off!'
To persuade Mohammed Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League, already dying of tuberculosis, to abandon his largely tactical demand for Pakistan,
'Groupings' gave the Muslims more territory than Pakistan. Hindus and Sikhs knew very well that they would quickly become a very vulnerable minority under a 'grouping'. In the case of the Punjab, from where a lot of soldiers were recruited, they would fight to keep those areas where they were in the majority. Even the Hindu Bengalis showed some fight in this respect.
Mahatma Gandhi has given him the premiership of a coalition government at the centre.
Had Nehru not got the premiership, he'd have gone over to the Socialists. The Congress vote would be split. Indeed, the Mahasabha would have taken most of the votes of conservative Hindus.
Nehru, whose arrogance and insistence on the top job had alienated Jinnah,
Who had already been alienated by Gandhi. It must be said that Motilal Nehru had primed Jinnah to oppose Non Cooperation- which is what destroyed his career within Congress. Motilal himself, it is said, was emotionally blackmailed by his son to support it. However, since the Mahatma had broken up Motilal's daughter's marriage to a Muslim- Gandhi even arranged a 'suitable' Brahmin boy for her to wed- Motilal owed Gandhi big time.
Anyway, the plain fact is, Congress wanted to do a deal with mofussil town Mullahs, not with clever urban lawyers representing the rising Muslim professional and mercantile class.
has been slapped down
Nehru couldn't be slapped down by anybody. His friends had come to power in London. The Americans approved of him. Gandhi was considered a crackpot who was responsible for the foolish 'Quit India' movement. In 1929 Gandhi could blackmail Nehru by threatening to publish his letters expressing skepticism of Gandhi's crackpot schemes. By 1943, Nehru was ready to break with Gandhi. A couple of years later, when Gandhi threatened him again, Nehru said the equivalent of 'publish and be damned!'
in a realignment of the Congress leadership: Gandhi joining forces with anti-Nehru conservatives like Sardar Patel and Chakravarty Rajagopalachari (Rajaji).
Rajaji had already come out for Pakistan. He had also opposed Quit India. Patel was a big wheel within the Party but little known to the wider public.
Nehru had been collaborating closely with Lord ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, sent as viceroy by the new Labour government to ‘cut and run’ as quickly as possible. But the Nehru-Mountbatten axis is seriously discredited by a scandal about Nehru’s affair with Lady Mountbatten, including insinuations that the bisexual ‘Dickie’ was a willing participant in a menage a trois.
Who would have believed such a story? The Statesman, on orders from its owners, on orders from both Delhi and London, would have rubbished it. Those promoting it would have gone to jail on obscenity charges while publishers would have been bankrupted. London could cover up the Governor of Madras's stealing from the Red Cross. It could cover up the passing of naval secrets to the Japanese by a British Lord. As for Mrs. Simpsons scandalous past and her involvement with the Prince of Wales, the Press Barons ensured that the British public was kept almost entirely in the dark.
Mountbatten is packed off home in disgrace, while his perspicacious predecessor, Lord Wavell, returns as viceroy, resuming negotiations for a more gradual transfer of power to a united subcontinent.
But it was Wavell who had authored 'Operation Madhouse' for the evacuation of the White population. Atlee recalled ' ‘Wavell was frankly pretty defeatist by then. He produced a plan worked out by his ICS advisers for the evacuation of India with everybody moving from where they were by stages right up through the Ganges valley till eventually, apparently, they would be collected at Karachi and Bombay and sail away. Well, I thought that was what Winston would certainly quite properly describe as an ignoble and sordid scuttle and I wouldn’t look at it.'
This slowly results in a new national unity coalition between Jinnah and the Congress conservatives.
Why not one between the Communists and the Princes or better yet, a coalition of national unity between cats and dogs?
With Jinnah as his Muslim prime minister, Rajaji, a Hindu Brahmin, in due course succeeds Wavell as the first Indian governor-general of the newly independent dominion.
But Rajaji had no power base even in Madras precisely because he was a Brahmin and a promoter of Hindi and caste based education. Jinnah would have had no power over the Muslims because under the Cabinet Mission Plan, it was Chief Ministers, not the Prime Minister, who held power. Jinnah would have been ground down between the upper mill stone of the Princes and the lower mill stone of the Provincial Premiers. Meanwhile communal violence would have been sparked by all those who felt left out in the new dispensation. The Naokhali blood-letting had such an origin.
Hindu-Muslim tension, ratcheted up by the Pakistan demand and the Congress opposition to it, now subsides.
But such tensions were a feature of the Twenties and Thirties before there was any Pakistan demand!
Prime Minister Jinnah’s main powerbase, the influential Muslim minority of India’s central Hindi belt, is delighted with the new power-sharing deal.
But Congress workers aren't. They were perfectly capable of using 'cow protection' or some such claim to start slaughtering Muslims.
For them, Pakistan was always a tactical rather than a practical demand, because it would uproot them from their homes in a partitioned India.
But, in 1917, during the anti-cow slaughter riots, the Muslims of Bihar had been shown that majorities get their way by fair means or foul.
The two largest Muslim-majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab are equally pleased, because they remain undivided with powerful, devolved governments of their own.
But the elected Government in Bengal chose to profit from famine and then launched 'Direct Action Day' seeking to prevail in Calcutta even though Muslims were in a minority and were soon the victims rather than the victors in the bloodletting.
A year later, Jinnah dies, and his successors as leaders of the Muslim League, lacking either his charisma or ambition, accept the role of second fiddle to the Congress.
Jinnah's successor would have been Liaquat- but for whom Jinnah would not have been able to make a political comeback. The thought of an erudite aristocrat like Liaquat playing second fiddle to Patel or Nehru is laughable.
Gandhi’s gamble has paid off, and he lives happily on for another decade, instead of falling victim to a fanatical Hindu assassin.
But Gandhi stops getting money for his Ashrams and crackpot schemes the moment Jinnah becomes PM. His gamble means he loses obligatory passage point status. He fades into obscurity.
Is this just a far-fetched, counterfactual scenario born of nostalgia and wishful thinking?
It is a fairy tale.
Or could it have become a reality if the partnership of Clement Attlee, Lord Mountbatten and Nehru hadn’t rushed through a premature transfer of power to satisfy their own personal and ideological ambitions?
No. A Muslim PM would have been expected to deliver Muslim hegemony. If he failed, he would lose votes to a more Islamist rival. True, a Muslim military dictator- like Ataturk- could hew a secular path but to keep it on that trajectory he'd have had to become a Shahenshah like Reza Khan. That didn't end well did it?
The historical evidence suggests that there was no inevitability about Partition
Indeed. But the alternative would have been a policy of whole hearted co-operation from 1923 onward which tackled thorny subjects like land reform, creation of an all India Zollverein, equitable fiscal policy, reform of personal law, outlawing caste based discrimination, discouraging purdah, curbing the arbitrary powers of the Princes etc, etc. The plain fact is, neither Congress nor the League nor the Communists were prepared to supply any such thing. The 'Freedom Struggle' was about pushing out the Brits and moving into their nice bungalows or taking over their business enterprises at fire sale prices.
and that the key decisions were rather finely balanced.
If so, those decisions were reversible.
It’s something of a myth that Indian independence was won by direct action and that Partition was the inevitable price exacted by a colonial power determined to divide and rule.
It is a convenient myth. The truth, however, is obvious. Muslims want Islamic rule and, absent a dictator or powerful monarch, that is precisely what they get where they are the majority. It may be that an affluent and administratively strong Muslim State would protect minorities. But one which is poor, administratively weak, and where there is 'land hunger' will witness ethnic cleansing unless, as in Indonesia, Hindus and Muslims could get together to slaughter Commies.
Effective independence was implicit in the constitutional reforms of the Raj in 1909
No. It wasn't till 1917 that it became clear that the age of Emperors had come to a close. Colonies had to become Dominions to be credible and capable partners in collective defense. After the War, 'Geddes Axe'- i.e. defense cuts- made devolution or dyarchy the inevitable prelude to dominion status. The head of the Army, soon to be assassinated by the Irish, said that Britain could not hold India, Ireland, Egypt- indeed, in the event of a Bolshevik uprising, the Army hadn't the troops to be sure the Crown would prevail even in England's green and pleasant land. That's why Egypt, Afghanistan and Ireland got independence in 1922 after Gandhi unilaterally surrendered thus permitting Britain to maintain its position in the MENA and South East Asia. This would have been fine if Congress had cooperated and used dyarchy to gain administrative experience. It did not. It split into two deeply silly factions while communal tension increased.
and 1919, well before Gandhi launched his civil disobedience movement.
He should have done a deal with Reading as Sapru wanted. He first overplayed his hand and then folded ignominiously. During his sedition trial he admitted that India could not feed or defend itself without the Brits. That's why he resented them and had embarked on a crazy course which would have led to a catastrophe. He pled guilty and asked for the longest sentence possible under the law. He was let out early but remained quiet for the duration of the original sentence. As he told Hasrat Mohani in 1922, India could not become independent unless Hindus and Muslims were united and though Khilafat had indeed achieved this, still Hinduism and Islam were separate and would remain so for countless generations. In other words, fighting for Independence was like fighting for Niceness. The goal would never be achieved till everybody couldn't be nicer though it would still be nice if they tried.
The Congress was knocking at an open door: the real point at issue was how to introduce parliamentary democracy in a subcontinent so diverse and largely illiterate.
The answer was by stages. Start with a limited franchise and expand. Ceylon got universal suffrage by 1931. It was richer and much smaller than India but the same mechanism could have been applied. After all, India was still very poor, diverse and largely illiterate when its first General Election was held.
The central problem with elected legislatures was to safeguard the interests of the Muslim minority, still rooted in its feudal past and fearful of domination by the more successful Hindu business and professional elites.
Muslims weren't a beaten down and dispirited people. Dalits were.
The solution accepted by a reluctant Congress was to have separate electorates for additional, reserved Muslim seats.
and reserved seats for Dalits, Zamindars, Europeans, Organized Labour, Cat fanciers, Dog walkers, etc.
What had still to be resolved was how to guarantee Muslim representation in newly devolved governments in the provinces and eventually at the centre.
Hilarious! What was never resolved was to how stop a Muslim majority ethnically cleansing kaffirs. On the other hand, it must be said, Muslims were also prepared to slaughter fellow Muslims if kaffirs were in short supply. I suppose the same could be said of Sikhs. We Hindus must do better in this department. People will think we are lazy.
Matters came to a head with the new 1935 constitution, under which provincial elections were held on a greatly expanded franchise. In the United Provinces, the largest province, the Congress swept to power, in alliance with the Muslim League against the loyalist landlords’ party. The logical outcome was a Congress-League coalition government, but Nehru turned down the League’s coalition offer and the Congress formed a majoritarian government on its own, leaving the League in opposition. This was precisely the scenario that Muslims dreaded at the national level, if independence were to mean majority rule.
Whereas the Hindus dreaded being killed, forcibly converted and turned into a permanent serf class as had happened in the past.
The United Provinces fiasco was a turning point in the radicalisation of the Muslim League and its very moderate, secular-minded leader, Jinnah.
After the Treaty of Lausanne and the partition of Ireland, it was obvious that 'moderate' or even 'secular' nationalists would want partition and even some degree of population exchange. The pure Islamists were internationalists and feared that Islamic territorial Nationalism (e.g. that of Ataturk or Reza Shah) would stand in their way. Iqbal vacillated on this issue. Jinnah, however, had no use for a Caliphate which could scarcely appeal to Shias.
The death of Jinnah's wife- who had been something of an embarrassment to him- was providential for the revival of his career. Since he lacked any constituency of his own and was an able enough negotiator, he was brought back into Indian politics by younger people like Liaquat in order to do a deal with provincial leaders giving them local power in return for the appearance of a united front at the centre. This meant Jinnah had no substantive power or patronage till he became Governor General. But this also meant he hadn't made enemies or been accused of corruption.
It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely founder of a theocratic Islamic state than this whisky-drinking, pork-eating barrister,
But it is easy to imagine an anti-Ahmadiya poet philosopher- Dr. Iqbal- using impeccable Punjabi logic to arrive at the ludicrous conclusion that Muslims had to separate from Sikhs and Hindus so as to establish Socialism or whatever shite it was Mussolini had achieved in Italy.
with his London education and his immaculate suits, his love marriage to a glamorous Parsi socialite, and his disregard for Islamic rules.
Pakistan did not start of as a theocratic state. It wasn't till the Seventies, under Bhutto, that the Ahmadis were classed as non-Muslim. Sharia courts only came with Zia in the Eighties. Pakistan was like Lebanon- a state created so a minority could be a majority. It came into existence at about the same time as Israel- which was founded by secular Jews.
What turned this patriotic, pro-Congress Muslim into the sectarian separatist of the 1940s?
He was specifically brought back into Indian politics by UP Muslims some of whom got a soft landing in Pakistan though the vast majority lived to regret his return- if they lived.
Two of his recent biographers, Ayesha Jalal, a Pakistani-American academic, and Jaswant Singh, a former foreign minister of India, have converged on the same answer: the arrogance and intransigence of Congress leaders – Nehru in particular –
who was pro-Muslim. If these guys couldn't stomach Nehru fuck would they have done if faced with a Patel?
and the pro-Nehru bias of the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten.
Labour had a pro-Nehru bias just as the Tories had a Muslim League bias. Mountbatten had a brief to get out without loss of European lives. He succeeded very well. His friendship with Nehru gave Britain a voice in India till Nehru's death. After that Mountbatten's own career came to an end.
‘Partition was the last thing Jinnah wanted,’ says Jalal,
In which case, he was a shit politician who fucked up totally.
and she agrees with Jaswant Singh that his demand for it was essentially a bargaining ploy.
True. Demanding Mike Tyson suck you off may be a bargaining ploy. You'd be happy to settle for an autograph. But you won't get Tyson's autograph. He will knock your fucking block off.
Previously, the Burmese demanded and got separation from India. The Sindhis demanded and got separation from Bombay Presidency. It was far from clear whether bigger states like Kashmir, Hyderabad etc would remain within the union. In the latter two cases, the issue was decided by force. It is difficult to see what 'bargaining ploy' is involved in any of this. Either you can control and defend your own territory or you can't. If you can, you still won't get any extra territory just for joining or not joining a larger union. Muslims could keep contiguous Muslim majority areas and so could the Hindus. True, the Hindus didn't do much ethnic cleansing but that could always change.
A vague 1940 Muslim League resolution adopting the goal of Pakistan left wide open whether it would be a single or multiple entity, a sovereign state or an autonomous state within a state.It wasn't vague at all. It specified that 'areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority as in the North-Western and Eastern Zones of India, should be grouped to constitute “Independent States” in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.'
Jalal emphasises that Jinnah’s two-nation theory was not a territorial concept, but a demand for parity between Hindus and Muslims.
Jalal is a cretin. When a demand is made and the demand is for territorial sovereignty and that demand is made good, then there is a 'two nation' theory which has prevailed. Pretending Pakistan was created so as to raise up the Hindu minority there to a status of equal security with the Muslims is just foolish.
Most Muslims, after all, were minorities in Hindu-majority provinces, while the Muslim-majority provinces depended heavily on the commercial and professional skills of prosperous Hindu minorities.
Who stopped being prosperous quickly enough. Indeed, most had to run away or else were killed.
Gandhi’s Quit India movement of 1942 proved a spectacular own-goal for the Congress party, because
Gandhi's forte was the own-goal.
it landed most of its leaders and active cadres in jail for the rest of the second world war,
Safest place for them really. Look what Bose got up to.
while Jinnah filled the political vacuum, dramatically expanding his power base across India’s diverse Muslim communities.
Jinnah's standing rose and he did indeed become the 'sole spokesman' because Gandhi, who claimed that role for Congress, made him his interlocutor. But Jinnah felt he had been fooled before and would not be fooled again. Nehru, on the other hand, felt Jinnah had been appeased before- which was the only reason he had any standing among Muslims- but he wouldn't be appeased again. If he insisted on a Muslim state let him perish there himself.
At the end of the war, constitutional negotiations resumed under the viceroy Field Marshal Lord Wavell, a remarkable soldier-statesman with long Indian experience appointed by Churchill.
This is foolish. Churchill had been forced by the Americans, who were obsessed with China, to clear the Japs out of North Burma so that the 'Burma Road' to supply the KMT could be cleared. Wavell was the CinC, India. He was overoptimistic and committed poor quality troops to that theatre in the winter of '42-43 with bad results. He was kicked upstairs to the position of Viceroy because he was not considered a good general. Eventually, it was Slim- considered to be of lower middle class origin- who won honours in South East Asia. I believe he was the first CIGS to have served in the Indian Army.
His objective was to transfer power to a united India and for Britain to stay long enough to broker a workable settlement.
Wavell informed Whitehall that this was no longer possible.
But for the new Labour government headed by Attlee, the priority was a rapid exit,
because the Americans wouldn't pay to keep Britain in India
winding up an expensive empire that had long ceased to pay for its keep.
The Brits were careful to keep, or try to keep, the profitable bits. Mossadegh in Iran was toppled because the Navy needed cheap Iranian oil. Still, the Brits did a good job ridding Malaya of Commies and standing up to Sukarno's threats.
Attlee sent out the Cabinet Mission, which did its best to reconcile the Congress goal of a majoritarian, unitary state with the Muslim League demand for effective safeguards and full autonomy for Muslim-majority provinces.
i.e. the right to kill Hindus and Sikhs while also holding onto Hindu and Sikh majority territory. That wasn't going to fly.
The outcome was an ingenious three-tier scheme in which sovereignty would be shared in a pyramid, with the provinces at its base, groups of provinces with either Hindu or Muslim majorities above them, and at the apex, an all-India centre for defence and foreign affairs.
Which the Muslims would only accept if they got Hindu majority territory. But the days of Muslim appeasement were over. Minorities were welcome to fuck off to where they were the majority. They would be slaughtered if they wagged their tail or were rumoured to have blasphemed or eaten the wrong type of meat.
This would have been a unique constitutional experiment, more akin to the present European Union than a nation-state, but well suited to India’s political diversity.
But Hindus decided there was a sufficiently strong Muslim and Commie threat to hang together rather than risk 'salami tactics'. That is why India still coheres. Also, it is very funny to hear guys with Hindu names pretend they care deeply about Muslims.
Both the Congress and the League reluctantly accepted the plan, but then fell out over its interpretation.
Nobody really accepted anything. There was manoeuvring but no forward motion.
‘What the Cabinet Mission intended and the way we interpret what they intended may not necessarily be the same,’ Gandhi told the viceroy.
Cripps had made the mistake of talking to that old crackpot. But it was Congress as a whole which was the stumbling block. The days of tactical Muslim appeasement were over. The Hindus were determined to be masters in their own house.
‘This is lawyer’s talk,’ said an exasperated viceroy Wavell. ‘Talk to me in plain English. I am a simple soldier. You confuse me with these legalistic arguments.’
To this, Nehru quipped, ‘We cannot help it if we are lawyers.’
They weren't lawyers. They were liars. Most politicians are.
The coup de grace for the Cabinet Mission Plan was delivered by Nehru in July 1946, when he publicly announced that a new constituent assembly, which would obviously have a large Hindu majority, would modify the Plan as it pleased.
This is why Nehru prevailed. Congress, not the Mahasabha, was the muscular Hindu party.
The Muslim League promptly seized on this to back out as well, reiterating its demand for a separate Pakistan and launching ‘direct action’ to achieve it.
Direct Action Day in Calcutta started with Muslims killing Hindus but the majority soon got the upper hand. Thus Calcutta remained with India. Jinnah got a moth-eaten Pakistan and Indian Muslims lost all the supposed 'safeguards' enshrined in the 1935 Act.
Two of Nehru’s closest colleagues have laid the blame for this breakdown squarely at his door.
Why have colleagues if you can't shift blame to them?
Maulana Azad called Nehru’s statement ‘one of those unfortunate events which changed the course of history’, lamenting the fact that ‘he is at times apt to be carried away by his feelings’. Sardar Patel, too, criticised Nehru for acting ‘with childlike innocence, which puts us all in great difficulties quite unexpectedly.’
Nehru's decisiveness on this issue ensured Congress remained the muscular right arm of the 'High Caste Hindus' who, Gandhi said in 1939, composed the INC.
Nehru himself maintained that he had acted out of the conviction that partition was preferable to a loose federation.
Which was true- for Hindus. Muslims would kill them in any case, unless the Hindus were united and had a big Army at their disposal. Still, in a Muslim majority area even Nehru's own clan would not be safe. This may change.
He wanted to be master in his own house, free to implement his socialist policies through centralised economic planning;
Nehru's first Finance Ministers were conservatives.
and the Muslim League, in control of large, autonomous provinces, would have been an unwelcome brake on all this.
It would have been a slaughter-house for Hindus. Indeed, that was the actual outcome.
Most important of all was Nehru’s visceral hatred of Jinnah,
Nehru would have no importance in Indian history if he had lurved Jinnah and tried to appease that old cadaver.
recorded with brutal candour in his diaries: ‘Jinnah…offers an obvious example of an utter lack of the civilised mind. With all his cleverness and ability, he produces an impression on me of utter ignorance and lack of understanding…. Instinctively I think it is better to [have] Pakistan or almost anything, if only to keep Jinnah far away and not allow his muddled and arrogant head from interfering continually in India’s progress.’
Gandhi had an even more muddled and arrogant head. Godse got rid of that problem. Odd how three people surnamed Gandhi have been killed to the great profit of the INC.
Wavell, who was trying to bring both sides back to the negotiating table, lamented in his diary early in 1947: ‘There is no statesmanship or generosity in the Congress.’
Wavell had started the war well but then came a string of defeats. Churchill was under the impression that he was stupid but a dependable 'nightwatchman' who would keep Gandhi & Co in prison. Sadly, Wavell was like Allenby. He let Gandhi out of jail. That cretin immediately crapped himself by negotiating with Jinnah- i.e. ensuring that Jinnah would be seen as the leader of the Muslims. Wavell then came to the conclusion that the only way to avoid Civil War was for Congress to appease the Muslims. His defeatism also led him to come up with a crackpot 'Operation Breakdown' which was like 'Madhouse'. But, if the Brits were to get out, it was better if they did it quickly and all at once. Atlee grasped the nettle and sacked Wavell and put in Mountbatten to achieve this end.
But Attlee decreed otherwise and summarily replaced Wavell with another, far more glamorous soldier-statesman. Earl Mountbatten of Burma came armed with the aura of his military victories, his royal lineage and his ‘progressive’ politics.
Actually, Wavell was still admired for his initial victories at a time when Britain was losing every battle in other theatres. Wavell himself thought that if he hadn't been undermined by Cripps and other such emissaries of Whitehall then he could have made the Cabinet Mission Plan work. This was because Wavell was as stupid as shit. Partition was the only solution. Civil War would not occur because the sub-continent was too poor. It would have to settle for ethnic cleansing. Genocide is more cheaply done with agricultural implements.
In what Churchill called ‘a premature, hurried scuttle’, Attlee announced that, regardless of a political settlement, Britain would quit India by June 1948.
It is to Mountbatten's everlasting credit that he got Britain out ahead of schedule though he, personally, was asked by Nehru to stay on as Governor General.
Both Attlee’s deadline, and his choice of the man to implement it, proved disastrous.
Not to Britain. As for India- there was a 'responsible' indigenous Government which signed off on the transaction and thus had to take responsibility for what subsequently transpired.
Could the bloodletting be avoided? Yes, if the Indian Army remained cohesive. Indeed Cariappa made a bid for power but the fact is that the Army was already split on communal lines.
Mountbatten’s vanity was legendary.
It was his efficiency- he got through the files in double quick time- which permitted Britain's rapid exit.
His chief concern on the eve of his departure for India was what he should wear on arrival.
No. His chief concern on deciding what to wear on arrival was what to wear on arrival. Mountbatten understood the importance of the Press and 'P.R'. This was a lesson the War had taught all the great military pro-consuls.
‘They’re all a bit left wing, aren’t they?’ he asked one India expert. ‘Hadn’t I better land in ordinary day clothes?’
Should I wear a dhoti?
He was delighted to be told: ‘No, you are the last viceroy. You are a royal. You must wear your grandest uniform and all your decorations and be met in full panoply.’
The Empire was the gift of the Royal Navy. Sadly, only the last Viceroy was a sailor. But his influence with Nehru endured.
Three months after his arrival, Mountbatten suddenly announced that he was bringing forward the British departure to August 15, 1947, and transferring power to two successor states carved out of Hindu and Muslim majority areas.
So, he exceeded his brief. What's more he got the Whites out safely. The bonus was that both dominions remained in the Sterling zone.
‘The date I chose came out of the blue,’ he later boasted. ‘I chose it in reply to a question. I was determined to show I was master of the whole event.’ He was even more cavalier at a public reception on the eve of Partition, saying that the best way to teach a youngster to cycle was to take him to the top of a hill, put him on the seat and push him down the hill – by the time he reached the bottom, he’d have learnt to cycle.
If you take a bunch of lawyers to the top of a cliff and push them off it then only the one wearing a parachute will survive. Mountbatten needed to get rid of the chatter-boxes by pushing the country off a cliff. Nehru had the parachute and thus would emerge as the supreme leader. Thus, Nehru was grateful to Mountbatten who, it must be said, had first reassured himself that Patel would sweat the small stuff.
Rushing through Partition before the security forces were ready for it,
the security forces were mutinous and polarized along communal lines. It turned out the Pakistani Army could do genocide off its own bat.
Mountbatten made little attempt to explore the alternatives.
There were none. Either the Brits relinquished authority before the big blood-letting occurred or they ended taking the reputational hit for its occurrence. India was not different from Palestine in that respect.
In a meeting with the viceroy, Gandhi suggested that the existing interim government led by Nehru be dismissed and Jinnah invited to form a new one.
But Jinnah had refused such offers before. Gandhi said 'able advocacy' would enable Jinnah to get Congress to vote his way. This was a fantasy. A PM who does not have the confidence of the House is impotent. Gandhi was talking nonsense.
‘What would Mr Jinnah say to such a proposal?’ Mountbatten asked in surprise. The reply was: ‘If you tell him I’m the author, he will reply, “Wily Gandhi!”’ The viceroy made no attempt to follow up Gandhi’s wily offer, which might have changed the course of history by offering Jinnah an honourable retreat from Partition.
The Viceroy did talk to Nehru and Azad and so forth. They didn't think Jinnah would accept and pointed out the obvious problems that would arise if he were crazy enough to do so.
A major reason for Mountbatten’s failure to conciliate Jinnah was
that like Wavell he couldn't get the Hindus to appease the Muslims. The plain fact is, all the concessions previously made by Hindus were hypocritical. They would lapse once the Hindus- i.e. Congress- gained power. Azad had noticed this happening in 1937. Nehru could have put in a Parsi as Premier of Bombay and a Muslim as Premier of Bihar. He put in Hindus. He refused to form a coalition with Fazl ul Haq in Bengal. Moreover, he was an implacable opponent of 'Federalism'.
his all too obvious intimacy with Nehru.
This is a foolish argument. If Mountbatten was Nehru's puppet then Nehru could have persuaded him to do what Gandhi proposed.
Widely rumoured at the time, and now confirmed by the memoirs of his daughter, Mountbatten facilitated a love affair between his beautiful, wealthy and very independent wife and his handsome Congress premier. ‘She and Jawaharlal are so sweet together,’ he wrote to his elder daughter. ‘They really dote on each other. Pammy [his younger daughter] and I are doing everything we can to be tactful and helpful.’
This was a period when Churchill had used his own daughter-in-law to influence American generals. Duff Cooper used his wife, Diana, to influence Ernie Bevan. The aristocracy had its own way of doing things. What is certain is that Dickie retained great influence over Nehru from which Britain profited till 1964. Edwina had died previously. This was a bond between two men who had complementary qualities. Dickie understood military matters. Nehru was a Socialist statesman of an Internationalist type.
While his daughter saw this as ‘a happy threesome’, the bazaar gossip was less charitable. There’s one account of a handful of love notes between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten reaching Jinnah, who chivalrously returned them.
According to another account- mine- he chivalrously returned them after jizzing copiously over them. Still, it is a fact that if only Edwina had raped Jinnah repeatedly, India would now be an Islamic Emirate.
The most appropriate epitaph on the Raj was provided by the Punjabi official who declared: ‘You British believe in fair play. You have left India in the same condition of chaos as you found it.’
That may be Punjabi logic, but it isn't true. The British left India with the Hindu, for the first time in their history, united against the Muslims and Europeans. As for the Punjab, it had been under Sikh domination when the Brits arrived. Sadly, this was not the case when the left. The Sikhs suffered most from Partition. The Brits would gas on about their love for the Sikhs but they left them in the lurch.
As for Nehru, he first crowed about the mangled Muslim state that emerged from the cutting up of Punjab and Bengal, saying, ‘The truncated Pakistan that remains will hardly be a gift worth having.’
Unless the Pakistanis did sensible things which- because they have an enterprising and industrious middle class- they did from time to time.
But a year later, he said, ‘Perhaps we acted wrongly… The consequences of that partition have been so terrible that one is inclined to think that anything else would have been preferable… Ultimately, I have no doubt that India and Pakistan will come close together… some kind of federal link… There is no other way to peace. The alternative is… war.’ Even as he spoke, the two new states were already at war over Kashmir.
Nehru was worried that a Hindu backlash would bring the Mahasabha to power in the elections. The truth is, Congress should have followed a policy of cooperation in which case State capacity would have increased and, if Partition was inevitable, an orderly exchange of population would have occurred.
For Jinnah, to get even a moth-eaten Pakistan was, as a leading imperial historian put it, ‘an amazing triumph, the outcome not of some ineluctable historic logic, but of the determination of a single individual.’
If it hadn't been Jinnah, it would have been Liaquat. If there was a single individual who determined the outcome, that individual was Atlee.
It is sobering to consider what might have happened if Mountbatten, instead of bringing forward the date, had delayed it. Jinnah, already in the final stages of tuberculosis, died 13 months after partition.
But the rioting had started before Mountbatten arrived. He transferred power in the nick of time because, the truth was, he only had enough power to evacuate the Whites.
The state he left behind was born to fail,
It has not failed.
and most Congress leaders expected that this malformed offspring would soon return, tail between its legs, to Mother India.
Nonsense! India would never again do 'reserved seats' or any other type of Muslim appeasement. Henceforth India would veer between Bureaucratic, rent seeking 'Secular' Socialism, doled out by elite Hindus and a militant Hindutva helmed by vernacular politicians closer to the mofussil.
It had virtually no industry, with the markets for its agricultural produce left behind in India; although it produced three-quarters of the world’s jute, the processing plants were all in India.
In other words, it had the potential to quickly set up industries using up to date plant and equipment. That was a good thing.
The predominantly Hindu entrepreneurial classes had fled with their capital and expertise.
Thus creating openings for the Muslim mercantile castes
The ruling elite of the Muslim League were mostly refugees from India and soon at odds with the predominantly Punjabi population they governed. The Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan had little in common with the western half, a thousand miles away.
But it wasn't ruled by Nehru. That was a great boon.
Little wonder that Pakistan fell prey to
a stupid Governor who thought that the Army would administer martial law while leaving him in power. The military is like a vampire. If the civilians invite it into the house of power, then it will take over. This is what happened in both Pakistan and Burma. It didn't happen in India or Ceylon because the Army was never invited in.
a series of corrupt and repressive military and civilian regimes and that its eastern wing, after
the first free and fair election
another bloody war and an estimated 3 million casualties, broke away in 1971 to become Bangladesh. After the Soviet invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan in 1979, Pakistan became the base for militant Islamists fighting the Russians, which further weakened its civil society and radicalised a younger generation that had already been incensed by India’s occupation of Muslim Kashmir.
Pakistan is the gift which keeps giving- to the BJP but only once Vajpayee's Nehruvianism had been abandoned.
The counterfactual story would have been far more positive. Granted, a united Indian federation, based on the Cabinet Mission Plan, would have had its share of friction and tensions;
Hindus would still have been ethnically cleansed from Muslim majority areas. The problem is that some such Hindus would have been spirited enough to return the favour.
but, over time, the glue of shared power might have held the Congress and the Muslim League together, at least on issues of external security.
Afghanistan would have used Islam to support an insurgency along the frontier and down into Baluchistan. Getting shot of Pakistan meant India did not have to pay for the defence of the North West Frontier.
India, without Nehru’s pro-Soviet brand of non-alignment, would probably have allied with the West
in which case it would have faced a Communist insurgency in the East and the South.
and, like the Raj, would have seen Afghanistan as a vital buffer state from which the Russians must be excluded.
But Afghanistan has a claim over Pakhtoon and Baloch areas. It wasn't a buffer state. It was the source of previous invasions.
Under Indian protection, Afghanistan would have remained a benevolent, westernising monarchy with little scope for the Taliban.
Coz India would have been militarily stronger than the USSR- right? It would also have been able to keep the Dalai Lama in power in Tibet and force Burma to hew to the path of democracy. Why stop there? Why not say India could have forced the Boers to give up Apartheid and secured the rights of homosexuals in a democratic Iran and Saudi Arabia?
Without a hostile Pakistan on its borders,
Pakistan is much smaller than India. It should be fearing Indian hostility, not the other way around. Americans aren't trembling in their boots because of a hostile Cuba.
India would also have been far better able to check communist China’s ambitions.
Ambitions don't matter. Hard work does. The Chinese worked hard and, if they did sensible things, rose up. India was democratic- i.e. preferred senseless talk to sensible policies
The Raj had seen an independent Tibet as a necessary buffer against Chinese expansionism. ‘Rather than see a Chinese occupation of Tibet’ a British general had warned in 1946, ‘India should be prepared to occupy the plateau herself.’
This would only have been possible with American money. But America was a big fan of the KMT- it had wanted to hand Hong Kong to them- so it would only have been interested in defending Tibet after the Communists came to power. But Nehru was soft on the Reds.
In 1959, a serious Indian ultimatum would probably have prevented China from occupying Tibet and ending its autonomy under the Dalai Lama.
Whereas a comic Indian ultimatum would have no such effect. The reason Chairman Xi is defying Biden is because the latter sticks chopsticks up his nose and tells Benny Hill jokes anytime they chat on Zoom.
If so, India would have been spared military defeat in the disastrous 1962 Sino-Indian War, for which the Nehru government was so patently ill prepared.
This was only possible if Nehru had not been Prime Minister. But the voters loved Nehru.
A decentralised union of sovereign provinces would not have been any less efficient or productive than today’s India, with its strong regional parties.
But a strong Centre was needed so as to reconfigure the States so as to bring together linguistic groups- e.g. Telugu speakers- or religious groups- e.g. Sikhs in Punjab- or to improve administration- e.g. Chattisgarh, Telengana etc.
Over time, the Hindu-Muslim religious divide would perhaps have faded,
It may have done in the Fifties and Sixties and even the Seventies. But from the Eighties onwards there was a great resurgence of Islam across the globe. The truth is a Socialist tyrant is worse that an orthodox Religious leader who has no objection to people rising through their own hard work and enterprise.
given the myriad ethnic, regional and linguistic identities that make up the Indian mosaic. The union would also have been cemented by rapid growth, as a dynamic private sector, unshackled by Nehru’s state socialism, outstripped the mini-tiger economies.
The Indian private sector wanted the State to set up new industries but then privatize them and use the proceeds to set up higher value adding industries thus creating a virtuous circle. There were three problems with this- firstly Indian entrepreneurs were shit. Most British firms taken over by Marwaris quickly went bankrupt. Secondly, Labour was too militant. The only thing which would have worked would have been labour intensive industries employing girls from rural areas. But there is still resistance to this in much of India. The third problem was that public sector enterprises were ab ovo misconceived even if they were not badly run- the worst example was the Indian Railways- and accumulating losses drained the Treasury. They could only be privatized if loss making units were shut down. But this would harm depressed Regions disproportionately and thus would have political ramifications.
In the end, if there had been no Planning Commission and the Finance Ministry had just focused on raising revenue by encouraging labour intensive exports and letting foreign exchange accumulate to fund further import of capital goods, then India would have had a decent five to seven percent secular growth rate. But the bigger problem- which the Brits had always recognized- was that there had to be transfers from the littoral states or those with a better entrepreneurial culture to the involuted agricultural regions. Indian democracy seems to have managed this well enough. The more advanced areas are also better at administration and thus get more funding under specific central schemes. The poorest areas also have the worst, most corrupt and criminalized, administrations and thus get much less than they should in the way of transfers.
Yes, a united subcontinent could have entered the 21st century as the world’s second largest economy, well ahead of China.
Alternatively, a subcontinent which remained united in 1948 could have split into hundreds of warring states by 1958. In addition to the Nizams and Maharajas you might have dynastic principalities founded by Congress or Muslim League politicians.
Masani assumes that Islam did not have a political horizon in the same way that Hinduism appeared to lack one. But the truth may be quite different. Hinduism may have needed Democracy and Socialism to move to a conception of Hindutva free of caste or gender bigotry. There is no reason Hindu India can't move forward rapidly simply by doing more of what works and less of what has obviously failed to work. As for Pakistan, now the war on Terror is over and it is securely allied with China which in turn is more closely allied with Russia than ever before, it may catch up with Bangladesh and surpass India. That is a healthy type of rivalry and would militate for an EU type arrangement so that intra-industry can burgeon and the entire area moves up the value chain.
We may not like Jinnah but we have to admit that his two Nation theory has stood the test of time. This does not mean any country gains by being nasty to its minorities. The fact is, minorities rise up if the concentrate on commercial, not political, activities. Fortunately, India does not have a culture of envy. The Parsis and Jains and Bohras and Marwaris were congratulated on their business success. Large groups- e.g. Patels, Sikhs, 'Andhrapreneurs'- gained a reputation for commercial savvy as well as agricultural prowess. They are being emulated by other groups with increasing success. Much has been achieved in India because au fond the people are hard working. Sadly, climate change is posing a bigger and bigger threat. But we are all in the same boat as far as that is concerned.
25 years ago Salman Rushdie, currently in hospital having survived a Hezbollah inspired assassination attempt, spoke as follows to India Today-
The narrator of Midnight's Children describes it (independent India) as a kind of collective fantasy.
Rushdie studied History at Cambridge. He should have known that India was admitted to the League of Nations in 1919. The thing was a de jure reality, not a fantasy. Furthermore, from 1917 onward, Britain was committed to 'responsible' (which increasingly meant representative) government in India. One may say that the British created India at some date in the early nineteenth century. But Warren Hastings was simultaneously saying that 'the day was not distant' when the only relationship between Britain and India would be one of friendship and commercial and cultural exchange. Indians may have had different plans for the Indian polity. But a plan is not a fantasy. One may say 'Gandhi was a fantasist' but Gandhi's plan was never adopted by the INC though some lip service was paid to khadi and nai taleem and so forth.
I suppose what he - or I, through him - was saying was that there never had been a political entity called India until 1947.
Yes there had. The 1833 Government of India act had specified a political and juristic entity called India which already existed de facto. There had been a succession of such acts. Burma was split off by the 1935 Act which gave India provincial autonomy. There was a provision for a Federal Government at the Center. But the Indians could not agree to establish this.
The thing that became independent had never previously existed,
It had existed in statute law and international law since at least 1833
except that there had been an area, a zone called India.
There was never any such zone. There were the 'Indies' but the West Indies were on the other side of the world from the East Indies.
So it struck me that what was coming into being, this idea of a nation-state, was an invention.
If so, it dates back to the invention of the plough.
It was an invention of the nationalist movement.
Was there a nationalist movement in 1833? Raja Ram Mohun Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore were lobbying Westminster to permit unrestricted European settlement in India. Why? They believed only the Brits could save the Bengali Hindu from Muslim tyranny.
There wasn't much of a nationalist movement when A.O Hume and others created the INC. The plain fact is that economic and administrative considerations militate for the creation of nation states wherever possible. In India, this possibility was turned into a successful and enduring reality. The question was whether Muslim majority areas would consider themselves Indian or whether they would see themselves as a nation apart. They chose to go their own way.
Rushdie himself left India and, via Britain, went to Pakistan where he was briefly employed by Pakistani TV.
Pakistan was certainly an invention. It wasn't successful because the (then) more populous East Wing broke away.
And a very successful invention.
One could argue that nation-states are that kind of collective fantasies.
If one were a cretin- sure. Otherwise the thing is foolish. Nation states have always existed. Egypt has been around for at least 5000 years. We may say 'God is a collective fantasy. There is no scientific proof that God exists'. But religious belief is a matter of faith not fantasy. Wanking may involve fantasizing. Worship does not.
Very similar things happened with the unification of Italy, with the unification of Germany.
Nonsense! Wars were fought to secure Italian and German unification.
The history of India is a history of independent nation-states.
No it isn't. It is a history of kingdoms and Empires of fluctuating size and authority with diverse populations.
It is a history of Oudh or Bengal
ruled by foreign Princes belonging to minority religious sects
or Maratha kingdoms.
Marathas ruled plenty of non-Maratha territory
All those independent histories agreed to collectivise themselves into the idea of the nation of India.
Only if they were predominantly Hindu and even then only because there was a fear of Muslim (or, later, Communist) 'salami' tactics. Hindus had to hang together otherwise, as Tagore warned, they would once again fall prey to the more cohesive and much more bellicose Muslims or Christians.
In the case of Pakistan, it was less successful. Pakistan was under-imagined. It did not survive as a nation-state.
It survived as a truncated nation-state. Its Army appears powerful enough to crush the Baluchis. Sindhi separatism seems to have disappeared. On the other hand, if the Taliban in Afghanistan turns hostile, it may face recurring problems in Swat and Waziristan and so forth.
If you ask people in general, they would have absolutely no problem with the idea of India at all.
If they are Hindu- sure.
I think, in a way, the strength of the nationalist idea is shown by its ability to survive the extraordinary stresses that it was placed under.
What stresses? India's strength lies in the fact that it can do torture and extra-judicial killing on an industrial scale when it gets a bit stressed. But this is not a function of nationalist sentiment.
I think the stresses of things like communalism, the high degree of public corruption, of regional rivalries, of the tension between the Centre and the states, the external pressures of bad relations with Pakistan - these are colossal pressures which any state could be forgiven for being damaged by.
Not if those pressures are self-generated. Gandhi, in 1939, said Congress was a High Caste Hindu party which is why it would be very nice and sweet and would always obey the commands of the Ahimsa fairy. But everybody knew it was corrupt. Under Nehru, economic power was centralized thus creating 'tension' between the Centre and the States. This got worse under Indira who undermined regional satraps.
I think the thing to say about the success of the idea is that it remains an idea though people might not find it very easy to give a simple definition of it.
But this idea had received a precise legal definition since at least 1833! The definition of India is provided for us by International Law.
But that it does exist and that it is something to which people feel they belong, I think is now the case.
Unless, like Rushdie. they have managed to get a British or American passport or, better yet, both.
That it survives these stresses is an indication of the strength of it.
Or an indication that those 'stresses' were inconsequential.
I'm not interested in an idealised, romantic vision of India.
Indians are. They have to live there. I'm interested in idealised romantic vision of my g.f. because if I see her as other people do then I won't be able to get an erection and she will stop cooking for me.
I know it is the great pitfall of the exile.
An emigrant is not an exile any more than a cow which moves to where the grass is greener.
So you know for me, always, the issue of writing about India has been not to write as an outsider.
The only 'issue' when it comes to writing is whether you can make money doing so. If not, then you may as well be an actual insider.
On the other hand, evidently something has changed in the last 10 years, which is that as a result of various circumstances,
the Iranian fatwa
I've not been able to return.
Rushdie should have been safe in Amrika. Sadly, a lot of Amrikans be kray-kray.
All I can say is that I have felt it as the most profound loss and I still do. There have been many losses in this last decade but the loss of the easy return to India has been for me an absolute anguish, an inescapable anguish. I feel as if I've lost a limb. I am very anxious to bring that period to an end.
Vajpayee put that period to an end for Rusdhie. India, it turned out, wasn't keen on Islamic terrorism.
I do think that one of the most interesting phenomena for India as a country is the phenomenon of the Indian Diaspora.
Rushdie belongs to the Pakistani diaspora. He and Tariq Ali had a soft spot for India because it wasn't Pakistan. But as Dr. Taslima Nasrin discovered, it wasn't that different when it comes to containing large numbers of fanatics eager to behead 'blasphemers' and 'apostates'.
I often think Indians-Indian Indians - find that very hard to understand. In England, when people call themselves British Indian, they mean both halves of that. And yet, what it means to be a British Indian is very alien to an Indian Indian.
Nonsense. We understand by the term 'British Indian' that you clean toilets at Heathrow and then come home on holiday pretending you are a big shot. On the other hand Indian Americans are respected. They are either Doctors or techies who will become billionaires once their stock vests.
The same is true in the Caribbean, in Africa, in Canada, in the United States, and so on. The thing that has interested me is that there are now many, many ways of being something which you can legitimately call an Indian.
This is nonsense. There is only one legitimate way of calling an Indian an Indian. Is he or she a citizen of India? Unlike Pakistan, India does not permit dual nationality.
Being an Indian in India is just one of those ways.
You can also be an NRI. At one time it was believed that 'Overseas Citizenship of India' (OCI) would be just as good as dual nationality but this does not appear to be the case.
On the other hand, you can be an American while claiming to be 'asli desi' because your name is Hiawatha.
The forces of disintegration are always there. I think in every society there is the tension between the forces that bring it together and the forces that pull it apart. I'm worried above all, of the communal issue because half a century is no time at all in the eye of history, and half a century ago something of colossally horrible proportions took place. The fact that it hasn't happened for 50 years on quite the same scale means nothing. It could still happen tomorrow.
But it would not affect the Hindu majority. That is the sad but inescapable truth.
One of the things that I remember very vividly, being there 10 years ago at about the time of the killings that took place in Assam, is discussing this with good friends and fellow writers. And I remember somebody said to me, until we understand that we are capable of these things, we can't begin to move beyond them.
Gandhi found that Congress leaders in Bihar were very capable of killing innocent Muslims. A year after the Nellie massacre, intellectuals in Delhi could see that all sorts of people- including Bangladeshi Muslims- were more than capable of slaughtering Sikhs who, it must be said, are no slouches in that department.
Because it's a very easy response to atrocities to say: oh those terrible people did that, and we are not like that. I think the difficult response is to accept we are capable of that, the thing that happened there could also, in certain circumstances, be something that we were able to perpetrate. The civilising influence is what prevents most of us from giving vent to those terrible urges. Those urges are part of humanity as well as the more civilised urges.
Rushdie supported the 'War on Terror' which was a gift to Iran. Was he shocked by Abu Ghraib? The fact is America has always led the world in genocide and fucking over darker complexioned peeps. That's why everybody wants to move there.
Of course, I fear in India the recurrence of communalist or regionalist inter-community violence.
But it was in America that Rushdie got stabbed.
I fear the long-term damage to a democracy that can be done by mass corruption.
Corruption represents short term damage. Medium to long term, the corrupt are disintermediated.
I think corruption is in a way a subversion of democracy
of a bureaucracy- sure. But all sorts of regimes are dependent on bureaucracy.
and the commonplace view in India is that corruption is everywhere. In a sense, you could say, that is not a democratic society.
Only in the sense that India is not a democracy coz only White peeps be democratic.
If money, favour and privilege is what makes the place work, then that's not a democracy.
Yes it is if the guys currently running things can be booted out by voters a couple of years down the line.
At least it runs the danger of being no longer able to call itself a democracy.
North Korea calls itself a democracy. I used to call myself the Democratic Republic of Iyerland. Sadly, I got drunk and seceded from myself to establish the not-demo-fucking-cratic-at-all Galactic Empire of Iyerland. Now I just call myself a leprechaun.
I was struck by a remarkable paradox: that, in a country created by the Congress's nationalist campaign,
India already existed. A British ICS officer helped create the Indian National Congress.
the well-being of the people might now require that all nationalist rhetoric be abandoned. —Essay (1987)
The well-being of the people required getting rid of a corrupt, incompetent, dynasty. Nationalist rhetoric enabled the BJP to replace a party run by a lady from Italy.
What was happening, I thought, was that people were trying to seize control of that rhetoric. That is to say, special interest groups - you could say Hindus are a very large special interest group.
Rushdie does not want the Hindu majority to run India. Tough titty.
If any group inside such a complex and many-faceted country tries to define the nation exclusively in its own terms, then it begins to create terrible stresses.
Not if they are more than 80 percent of the population. Minorities, however, may find things pretty stressful.
I do think that the kind of attempt to define India in Hindu terms is worrying for that reason. It creates backlashes,
which trigger much much bigger backlashes.
it creates polarisations,
Who created the polarization which resulted in Rushdie's stabbing?
and it creates the risk of more upheaval. Partly, I am saying this as a kind of objective observer, but nobody is an objective observer.
I come from an Indian minority,
But became part of the Pakistani majority by moving there.
I no doubt have a minority perspective. I can't ignore that and nor would I wish to. Partly also I am speaking temperamentally. That is to say, the kind of religious language in politics is something I find temperamentally unpleasant. I don't like people who do that, whether they be sectarians in Northern Ireland or India.
Some people who don't like Rushdie stick knives into him. But they tend to belong to his ancestral religion.
I believe in, if possible, separating one's personal spiritual needs and aspirations from the way in which a country is run.
More particularly if you have run away very far from that country and are in fact barred from visiting it.
I think in those countries where that separation has not taken place, one can see all kinds of distortions of social and ordinary life which are unpleasant.
Rushdie got knifed in a country where social and ordinary life features school shootings and mall shootings and a large section of the population stockpiling automatic weapons for the Zombie apocalypse.
Iran is an obvious example. The country in which that kind of separation has completely broken down.
For something to 'break down', it has to exist in the first place. The Shah's regime wasn't big on 'separation of the powers' was it?
The mosque at Ayodhya was destroyed. Alphabet-soupists, 'fanatics', or, alternatively, 'devout liberators of the sacred site' (delete according to taste) swarmed over the seventeenth-century Babri Masjid and tore it apart with their bare hands, with their teeth, with the elemental power of what Sir VS. Naipaul has called their 'awakening to history'. —The Moor's Last Sigh
They were avenging the deaths of pilgrims at the hands of 'Mullah' Mulayam Singh Yadav. That strategy paid off. Yogi just beat the pants off Mulayam's son.
Where Naipaul is right, although I don't share his conclusions about it, but I think where he is right, is in saying that this is a great historical moment.
Vajpayee didn't pick up the ball and run with it. That's why the RSS wanted Advani to take over.
One reason why the 50th anniversary is interesting is that it does seem to represent the end of the first age and the beginning of a second age.
The first age ended in 1972 when Indira won a war and erased Nehru's humiliation. The second ended in 1997 which was about the time when the BJP began to appear a possible rival for the INC. The third age ended in 2022 with Congress and the Left (save in Kerala) on the way to annihilation. But AAP has won Punjab. Maybe the new party which Prashant Kishore is setting up in Bihar will succeed and give a template for other such citizen led initiatives. Meanwhile Nitish looks set to give Modi a run for his money in 2024. (I'm kidding. Nitish is useless) Whatever direction India is headed in, it is a more democratic one where Cambridge educated ninnies are ignored.
And to that extent that is true now, if someone was born today, they would be born into a very different set of cultural assumptions and hopes than somebody born 50 years ago.
Also, sex has changed- a lot. Rimming is compulsory if you are under 30. Or so I have been told.
We were entirely sold on the Nehru-Gandhi kind of plan.
There was no Nehru-Gandhi plan. Why not speak of the Tolstoy-Lenin plan?
We grew up and that was the portrait of the nation we had hung on our wall, and to the extent that you never entirely lose those formative ideas, that's still the picture of the country I've got hung on my wall.
But daddy moved the family to Pakistan. Sonny boy, quite sensibly, decided to stay in Britain where his USP was being posher than the Queen's tits.
But it's clear that for somebody being born now, they are being born into a very different country.
Unless their parents didn't escape India in which case they were born in the same country.
I also think - to take the Naipaul point on - what would happen if the BJP were to form a government. Well, what I would like to think is that in order for the BJP or anybody of that persuasion to form a government, they would have had to change. There is even some kind of suggestion that it may even be happening a little bit because they are intelligent people. They understand their weaknesses as well as their strengths. Clearly, for a Hinduist party to become the government of the country, is not at all unlikely.
Congress was the ultimate Hinduist party. Rushdie believed that Nehru decided things based on astrological advise. Indira, of course, had her own personal Yogi who improved her health with his dick.
So, I think, one does have to engage with that in the same way as many people in this country who, like myself, were not remotely in tune with the Thatcherite revolution but had to engage with it because it was in fact happening, and kept winning elections, and the world was not going to go back. So, of course, both people inside the Hindu political enterprise and people outside it will have to shift. I am optimistic about India's ability to force those changes that are necessary because I do believe it is not fundamentally an intolerant country and will not fundamentally accept intolerant politics.
Unless, fundamentally, it does because Rushdie's opinions don't matter in the slightest to anybody.
On the other hand, there has to be a reckoning with the fact that these are ideas which are gaining in popularity. I'll tell you where I would draw the line myself. I think there was a great historical mistake made in Europe about the Nazi party. People attempted to see whether they could live with it and discovered very rapidly that was a mistake, that appeasement was a great historical mistake.
But that mistake only arose because, it turned out, Europe could not live with a Communist party holding power in Moscow and encouraging Communist Parties elsewhere to take power by hook or crook. The upshot of the Second World War was that the West paid in blood and treasure for Moscow to control more of Europe than ever before.
So, it seems to me, the question is: What do we make of this political enterprise? Is it fundamentally democratic or fundamentally anti-democratic? If democratic, then we must all learn to make the best of it. If anti-democratic, then we must fight it very hard.
From Britain or America- sure.
What happened in India happened before the book (The Satanic Verses) had actually entered. It happened because of an article in INDIA TODAY which, I must say, I thought was an irresponsibly written article. Because it was written by somebody who, as a friend, asked me for an early copy of the book, and then presented that book in the most inflammatory sort of way. I know, because people who became active in the campaign against the book, said that they had based their views on INDIA TODAY's article. That's just history and fact.
Presumably this was Madhu Jain's article in Sept. 1988. The problem here is that Penguin India had already decided not to publish the book under its own imprint on advise from Khushwant Singh who was a barrister before becoming one of the foremost men of letters in India. Khushwant had read the typescript. He had warned Penguin's H.O which didn't listen because they thought Rushdie- as a Muslim- must know what he could get away with. But Khushwant was bound to repeat his opinion once the book itself came out. Thus Jain didn't really stab Rushdie in the back. The fellow was so deracinated and ignorant that he made himself a target for any zealot with a knife. Twenty five years later, some basement-dwelling loser has seized his opportunity for wealth and fame. Presumably it will be his dad back in Lebanon who will get the money. But sonny boy will be out of prison in ten years time, if not sooner under a prisoner exchange, and there will be four beautiful virgins waiting for him.
This was one of the things that disappointed me, that after a lifetime of having written from a certain sensibility, and a certain point of view, I would have expected people in India to know about it since it was all entirely about India.
But not an India, Indians recognized. It was a fairy-land where it was 'absurd that a book could cause a riot'.
It was written from a deep sense of connection and affection for India.
Those Rushdie hates and satirizes do well. God protect you if he professes affection for you.
I would have expected that I had some money in the bank. That is to say, if Salman Rushdie writes any book, then we know who he is.
A prancing ninny.
He is not some idiot who just arrived from nowhere shouting abuse.
No. He was an idiot who Cambridge trained to hurl abuse.
This is somebody whose work, whose opinions, whose lectures and whose stories we know.
and know to be shit.
I would have hoped that my work would have been judged in the context of what people already knew about me.
I thought Rushdie would go down an Akhbari Sufi path. His first book was titled Grimus (Simurgh spelled backward) and his second featured a parliament of kids rather than birds.
Instead, it seemed as if everything I had been in my life up to that point, suddenly vanished out of the window and this other Rushdie was invented who was this complete bastard who had done this terrible thing.
His ex-wife has described this other Rushdie who is a complete bastard.
There did not seem to be any attempt to correct that or to combat that.
Because Rushdie didn't play the Kashmir card and say 'I'm being persecuted for drawing attention to the plight of the Valley'.
I was surprised and disappointed it did not. It didn't happen here either. It didn't happen anywhere in the world. It was as if the force of history, the force of a historical event was so huge that it erases all that goes before it.
The force of history is the power of hysteresis or path-dependence. This is annulled by 'ergodic' economic forces. Rushdie thought he could make money by distorting history. He did in fact do so. But everything comes at a price.
Just recently, I surprised myself by turning down a lucrative proposition which, however, offended against my moral code as a socioproctologist. I received an email offering me a substantial sum of money in return to nude pictures of myself of a suggestive type. I was tempted- I admit. But I refused. Why? Well, if women around the world had access to such pictures they would pleasure themselves so incessantly that they would cease to be economically productive. Civilization would collapse. I'd be richer by hundreds of pounds but the world would have been ruined. That's why I turned down the offer which, I may mention, came from a very wealthy Nigerian Princess who needed my Bank Account details so as to transfer the money.
The negative response to The Satanic Verses - let us remember that there was also a positive response - was such that it erased my personality and put in its place some other guy who I didn't recognise at all. Anybody who knows anything about these countries - and I do know something about these countries - knows that every cheap politician can put a demonstration in the streets in five minutes.
But there were big demonstrations- indeed, there was an attack on Parliament- in Britain itself.
That doesn't represent in any sense the people's will. It represents a certain kind of political structure, political organisation. It doesn't represent truth.
Whereas Rushdie does- right?
But I always believed - I still believe - that India would come back. I never believed that the loss of India was forever. Because India is not Iran, it's not even Pakistan, and I thought good sense will prevail in India because that's my life experience of Indian people and of the place.
Vajpayee let Rushdie back into India. We don't care greatly about him. Why? Because India is overwhelmingly Hindu. Till that changes, liberal Muslims are safe enough.
Post Script.
Rushdie offered these thoughts to Scroll.in on India's 75th Independence anniversary. They were published after he was stabbed.
Then, in the First Age of Hindustan Hamara,
Hundreds of thousands of Muslims were massacred- in retaliation, it is true, but massacred nonetheless. Millions more migrated in fear.
our India, we celebrated one another’s festivals,
Muslims were constantly doing Durga Puja- right? Gandhiji was famous for eating plate after plate of mutton biryani to celebrate Eidh.
and believed, or almost believed, that all of the land’s multifariousness belonged to all of us.
Rushdie's daddy- like thousands of others being harassed by the Custodian of Evacuee property- realized India didn't belong to its erstwhile Muslim rulers. But Pakistan did. That's where he resettled his family.
Rushdie himself was barred from India for about ten years after Satanic Verses.
Now that dream of fellowship and liberty is dead, or close to death.
Rushdie was close to death after being stabbed. God alone knows which dreamland he was living in to attend a public event without an ex-fucking-Mossad body-guard to protect him.
A shadow lies upon the country we loved so deeply.
A shadow lay upon Rushdie. The guy hadn't noticed the uptick in blasphemy killings. He truly was as stupid as shit.
Hindustan isn’t hamara any more.
It stopped being Rushdie's when he acquired British citizenship as a boy.
The Ruling Ring – one might say – has been forged in the fire of an Indian Mount Doom.
One might say this if one dealt only in facile cliches. Still, it is good to know that Rushdie- atheist though he now claims to be- is still Muslim enough to consider Hinduism to be evil and to have a 'Dark Lord'.
Can any new fellowship be created to stand against it?
The 'sar tan se juda' gang could be called a fellowship. Where Hindus are in the majority it will fail. But where Muslims are the majority Taseers will be shot. It appears, in Christian America, even Rushdies are not safe. The smart thing to do is to get an ex-Mossad minder. But Rushdie was never smart.
