Attiya Warsi & the Nyayo Bus Company.

As a child in Nairobi, I often travelled on the buses operated by the Kenya Bus Service which was owned by a British Company -United Transport Overseas Services (UTOS). After Independence, the Nairobi City Council had given it a monopoly franchise to operate a bus service in return for a 25% shareholding stake. Sadly, UTOC pulled out of Africa in the Eighties & Nineties because of competition from other entities and the booming, unregulated, 'para-transit' (mini-buses) sector. Stagecoach- another UK company- took over but it too was forced out after a few years. One problem was the collapse of the insurance market. Self-insurance meant that claims would be offset against dwindling revenue which in turn meant that more and more buses would be seized in distraint and sold off.

When I moved to Delhi in 1974, I saw that the Delhi Government's DTC buses were good but, sometimes, it made sense to take a private 'mini-bus' though the charge was higher. Since then, of course, the air-conditioned Metro has come to Delhi and though the mix of transport facilities may look chaotic (In the late Nineties, I initially used to take a cycle rickshaw to cross the highway because there seemed no safe way to cross it. After a week or so I remembered I was a cow-worshipping Hindu and thus could safely cross the road in the manner of a particularly imbecilic cow.)

I was reminded of this today when I read an article, in Aeon magazine, which colourfully evokes the history of Nairobi bus transport. It is by Attiya Warsi, a Professor of Fiscal Law in Kenya. She is the author of 'Financing Africa. (2019)

This passage stood out-  

I was six years old the first time I understood that a bus could be something different from matatus and boda bodas. The Kenya Bus Service  still ran then (this would have been in 1980)  It was a real bus, the kind that could carry 80 people upright without requiring a conductor to shout or a passenger to fold herself into a space the human body was not designed to occupy. I remember looking out of the window at the same road and thinking, without quite having the words for it, that the world felt orderly. That there was a system, and I was inside it.

The Brits had only departed some 17 years ago. Things were still pretty good in Nairobi back then.

Warsi, strangely enough, isn't lamenting the departure of the Brits. She is parleying her British PhD in useless shite into a way of making money from Soros's Open Society Foundation.

Rights require money

They require incentive compatible remedies under a bond of law. In other words, the obligation holder must have an incentive to provide the remedy for a right violation or entitlement failure.


If the Government is providing the right, then its fiscal solvency is what matters. It is a good idea to spend tax money to provide remedies for some 'right violations' (e.g. robbery, kidnapping) because otherwise the productive sector shrinks. Smart people run away. On the other hand, if Law & Order prevails, there will be more investment, higher productivity & thus higher tax receipts.


It is a bad idea to throw money into a bottomless pit. You will run out of money. Poor countries have to prioritise productivity raising activities. They can't mollycoddle the poor more particularly if they keep having more and more babies. 

Talk as much as you like about human rights, nothing will change until the architecture of global finance is reformed

Sadly, global finance can only be reformed only once Galactic finance is reformed and the richer Solar Systems send us lots of cool shiny stuff for free. However, nothing stops a country from following sensible fiscal policies rather than saying 'there is a fundamental human right to getting lots of cool stuff for free'. 

The problem with the sort of shite this lady got a PhD in is that she can't give policy advise on how to raise the tax take without creating a disincentive effect. She doesn't know Econ. What she is doing is 'Grievance Studies'.  

I spent years thinking about Nairobi’s transport the way most people do, as a problem of

Kenyan politicians being stupid and corrupt? 

infrastructure. Build the roads, regulate the operators, fund the buses.

Which is what Dar es Salaam did with the help of the World Bank. Its rapid transit system is considered pretty good. However, private operators charge less & the Government has to provide a subsidy.  Some would say it benefits the better off who get quicker journeys but that fewer private operators can make a living and that the poorest can't afford the fares. 

But the longer I have spent studying how African governments raise money, spend it, lose it, and borrow it back again, the more clearly I see that what looks like a transport problem is really a question of political economy.

Which is about fiscal and monetary policy. How to pay for stuff & what happens if you just print money to pay for stuff.  

At the heart of political economy is the issue of human rights.

No. Rights only exist in the Law. The Court can say 'X has the right to this thing. Y must give it to X' but if Y doesn't do so, there is little more the Court can do. Getting the judgment is one thing. Enforcement is another thing altogether. If it is too costly, there is no effective remedy. Thus Madoff owes lots of money to his investors. But, there is no way for them to get it back. 

There is a conventional way of talking about human rights.

It is the conventional way of talking high falutin' bollocks.  

It is a language of courts and covenants, constitutions and obligations, of states that are either compliant or in breach.

But lawyers tell you not to bother bringing an action because the cost of enforcement will be too great. Even if you get 'title'. The other guy has 'control'. Possession is nine-tenths of the law.  

It is a language I respect and have spent my career working within. But it has a blind spot. Rights require money.

Everything requires money. Even this bullshit of Atiya was paid for by the Open Society Foundation.  

You cannot protect the right to healthcare without funding hospitals.

Nor can you fund hospitals without protecting the right of the hospital to that funding. If some politician steals all the cash, there won't be no fucking healthcare. 

Sadly, even if you protect the guys running hospitals such that they get the money you allocate to them, the capacity of the hospital is limited. Healthcare will have to be rationed one way or another. Either the price is high or beds are allocated to those with power or there are long waiting lists. 

You cannot guarantee the right to education without paying teachers. You cannot deliver justice without funding courts. And you cannot ensure the right to movement and economic participation without building the infrastructure and regulating the service providers to make it possible. The people of Nairobi know this with their bodies every single morning.

Thus poor countries should not guarantee rights. They should do sensible things to raise productivity and hence income and hence tax receipts.  

This is not a controversial claim in principle. Most human rights frameworks acknowledge it, at least implicitly.

Because they are all bullshit- 'Nonsense on stilts' as Bentham said.  

The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights obliges states to realise these rights ‘to the maximum of [their] available resources’.

No President ever said 'I am doing the minimum for the poor'. They all pretend they are Santa fucking Claus.  

The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights goes further, protecting rights to health, education, work, and a satisfactory environment in language that has direct fiscal implications. Rights, in other words, have price tags.

So does bullshit. All the guys working on those Charters were getting paid.  

The problem is that the people who design global financial rules

None such exist. Global financial rules are not a single set of laws, but a decentralized network of international standards, treaties, and agreements. One may say such and such practices exist. Some subset of them are fully legal and represent 'best practice'. Others are 'grey market' while still others are 'black'. 

and the people who design global human rights frameworks

i.e. bullshit 

have, for most of the past half-century, operated in entirely separate rooms.

No body cares in what rooms bullshitters are operating.  

Finance ministers talk to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Human rights lawyers talk to the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council. The budgets that determine whether rights can be realised are set in conversations where human rights are rarely on the agenda.

No. If you say 'lend me a billion to set up a Gulag where I can rape kids', the guys from the World Bank is obliged to refuse. Say you need it for a rapid transport system & they may be more helpful provided you have a reputation for some basic level of competence and integrity.  

Nairobi’s transport system is what happens when those conversations never meet.

No. This is a story about Africanization. Both UTOS & Stagecoach were British companies. There was a Government supported service but it was crap and ran out of cash.  

The worker who spends three hours a day commuting from Mathare to the Central Business District, packed into a vehicle that may or may not arrive, paying a fare that rises when demand is highest and her wages are the same, is not merely inconvenienced. She is experiencing the consequence of

living in a country with a high fertility ratio. When I left Kenya in 1974, it was 8 kids per woman. It came down to about 5.4 in the Nineties and now be around 3. Fifty years ago the population was 14 million. It is now 57 million. 

a state that does not have the fiscal resources required to guarantee her right to move through her own city. That is a rights failure with a fiscal cause.

Economic and Demographic causes. If the population hadn't tripled, real per capita income is likely to have quadrupled rather than risen by only 50 percent.  

When we ask why those fiscal resources are not there, we

are pretending to be more ignorant and stupid than we really are.  

enter territory that is far bigger than Nairobi, far bigger than Kenya, and far older than any government currently in power. This is where the real story of African public finance begins – not in the budgets that ministers read out each year, but in the flows of money that never reach them.

African governments are not poor. They are made poor.

Just as I am prevented from becoming a billionaire because nobody will lend me even a measly trillion dollars.  

This is the argument I make in my book Financing Africa (2019), and it remains the most important claim anyone can make about development finance on this continent.

It is foolish and useless. 

The evidence is not subtle. According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Africa loses an estimated $88.6 billion every year to illicit financial flows: money that leaves the continent through trade mis-invoicing, transfer pricing abuse, and the routing of profits through offshore jurisdictions designed to make them invisible to tax authorities.

When I was a kid, it was Whites & Asians who were blamed for this 'capital flight'. Once Africanization was achieved all that profit would be reinvested in the country. Uganda did get rid of the Asians. But then its tax base collapsed. Museveni brought them back in.

The truth is, Africans do capital flight same as other people. But they also invest in particular places in Africa where they believe they will get a decent return. 

That figure represents 3.7 per cent of the continent’s entire gross domestic product (GDP). To place it in context: it is roughly equal to the combined total of all official development assistance and foreign direct investment Africa receives annually. From 1980 to 2018 alone, sub-Saharan Africa lost a staggering $1.3 trillion to these flows.

Don't invest in Sub-Saharan Africa. Smart peeps are getting their money out- even risking prosecution in order to do it. 

Every dollar shifted offshore is not an abstraction. In my work as a UN independent expert on foreign debt and human rights, I have said this in negotiating rooms in New York and in lecture halls in Nairobi: every dollar shifted offshore is a hospital unfunded, a classroom without a teacher or, as in the city I grew up in, a public bus network barely built.

In other words, for the guy who owns that dollar, it isn't money pissed against the wall of some imaginary hospital or school or bus service.  

Then there is debt. Most of it was not chosen freely.

Sovereign countries can renege on debt. The problem is that they may not be able to borrow. 

Some was inherited from colonial administrations at independence, when newly sovereign African states were billed for the costs of their own colonisation.

i.e. the assets that they were taking over. 

Some was pressed on African governments in the 1970s by Western banks recycling petrodollars,

Many African Ministers were raped by prostitutes. The Ministers did not choose to have sex with them. To add insult to injury, the prostitutes took money from them.  

then repriced sharply upwards when interest rates rose in the Global North – the so-called Volcker shock of 1979. Some was raised on international bond markets in the 2010s, when yields elsewhere were too low to satisfy investors hunting for returns.

Also prostitutes, who were unable to marry billionaires who looked like Richard Gere, raped a lot of African politicians.  

African countries paid approximately $74 billion in debt service in 2024, more than four times what they paid in 2010.

Really? In that case maybe it's a good idea to invest there.  

More than 30 African countries now spend more on servicing debt than on public health.

Lots of young people spend more money on servicing student debt than they do on their own health. Old people tend to 'dissave' because of increased health needs.  

In more than half of African countries, debt service now exceeds public spending on health. This is not the consequence of reckless borrowing. It is the consequence of a global credit system that

is based on wanting to get repaid, with interest, for loans.  

prices African sovereign debt at a premium that reflects not economic fundamentals but accumulated assumptions about African state capacity that colonial history produced

Kenya has been independent for 50 years. If it was ruled by White people, it would be rich.  

and financial markets have never found a reason to revise.

Smart Africans emigrate. You want to be the next Elon Musk, don't stick around in the continent of your birth.  

Zambia waited three years for debt relief after its 2020 default,

Copper prices are booming. Zambia plans to triple output over the next few years.  

three years during which austerity cut into the services its most vulnerable citizens depended on. Ghana’s adjustment programme has pushed deep into the social sector.

Had Nkrumah listened to Arthur Lewis, Ghana would have continued to be richer than South Korea.  

Kenya faces rising repayment pressures as the cost of living climbs. These are not isolated cases. They are the predictable, structural outcomes of

Africans running things?  

a debt architecture that places the greatest fiscal burden on the governments with the smallest fiscal space.

No. Governments with the smallest fiscal space couldn't get loans. Still, we understand that this lady is saying that African leaders were stupid. They fell into the clutches of usurers. They wasted whatever money they got on white elephant projects. White people should have intervened- not by recolonizing Africa- but by paying off the debts of their former wards and letting them make a clean start till, once again, they fell off the wagon. Afterall, there is a human right to inherit billions from some nice White dude which darkies are being cruelly denied.  

Beneath both illicit financial flows and debt repayments lies the long shadow of structural adjustment.

i.e. having to stop pissing money against various walls & start to pretend that you mean to pay your creditors back.  

The conditionalities attached to IMF and World Bank loans through the 1980s and ’90s prescribed privatisation,

 Because stuff run by the Government turned to shit. Take the Nyayo Bus Service, the state-owned public transport system in Nairobi, Kenya. Launched in 1986, it collapsed by the mid-1990s due to mismanagement and fleet degradation.  The initial fleet of green buses was donated by the Dutch government. They were primarily managed and operated by the National Youth Service (NYS) before transitioning into a distinct corporate entity.  At its peak in 1988, the corporation boasted a fleet of 89 buses and reported a profit of 9 million Kenyan Shillings.

 By 1995, the service had virtually collapsed. Massive looting of spare parts, siphoning of funds, and a lack of proper internal controls ruined the corporation.

fiscal contraction and the withdrawal of the state from public goods provision at precisely the moment when African governments might have been building the infrastructure their populations needed.

Sadly they were shit. If you can't run a bus service, how the fuck are you gonna do 'infrastructure'?  

Those prescriptions were the product of economic theories that have since been substantially revised or quietly abandoned.

Because guys who work for the IMF or IBRD don't want to be harangued by woke harpies. Back in the Nineties, there was a notion that 'tough love' could get rid of dictators like Suharto. Anyway, if a country defaulted, a profit opportunity was created for vulture funds. Let smart people make money while mediocrities earn their much smaller salaries doing nothing because the activists won't let them.  

But the infrastructure they prevented from being built has not been quietly constructed. The matatu on the Limuru Road is its memorial.

Very true. World Bank economists looted spare parts from the Nyayo Bus service. They smuggled them out of the continent and sold them for 5 trillion dollars- which is more than the entire GNP of the continent! 

When I say the system was designed, I mean it precisely. The global tax architecture that governs how and where profits are taxed was constructed largely without African input, to serve the interests of wealthy states and the multinational corporations domiciled in them.

There are national tax architectures and bilateral or multilateral agreements re. double taxation etc. Kenya has such an agreement with UK and some other European and other countries.  

The foundational rules were written in the early 20th century,

There are no such 'foundational rules' 

at a time when most of Africa was under colonial administration and had no voice in international governance. They were updated periodically by the OECD, a club of wealthy nations, and handed to the rest of the world as settled matters.

No. Kenya negotiates its agreements with some other countries or else sets its own rules unilaterally. 

The basic principle that profits should be taxed where they are generated,

if a firm in London buys sisal from Kenya and fabricates sisal carpets in Bangladesh before selling them to a Department Store in the USA, the profit is generated in London and taxed there. Everything else is a cost of production. Kenya taxes the sisal producer. Bangladesh taxes the value added in Dacca. If the London firm does merchandising of sisal carpets in US through a subsidiary, then US tax would be payable. 

rather than where they happen to be booked through accounting arrangements, sounds obvious. The rules have historically ensured something rather different.

What she means is that there may be 'under-invoicing' in Kenya or Bangladesh or even London. The lion's share of profit may be booked to a firm in a tax haven. 

The result is that more than half of African countries still mobilise less than 15 per cent of their GDP in tax revenues, below the 20 per cent threshold the UN itself identifies as the minimum necessary to fund basic public services.

No. The reason this happens is because low productivity means low income means low tax revenue. On the other hand, it is true that many hobos are not billionaires because of 'accounting arrangements' made by people who aren't hobos.  

The IMF estimates that low-income countries lose more than $200 billion a year to corporate tax avoidance alone.

Sadly, they might lose more if they crack down on it. Still, for the moment, there can be no doubt that tax revenue is increasing. Some say that, longer term, there will be exit or a failure of SMEs to scale up. However, if the Government spends money on stuff which raises total factor productivity then there is a virtuous circle. 

These are not the symptoms of poor administration or weak governance. They are the outputs of a system that was designed, at the level of its foundational rules, to produce this exact outcome.

In which case, it is pointless to do anything sensible. The system will fuck you over one way or another. Prostitutes will continue to rape African officials. Even the African worker will be tricked into stealing spare parts, smuggling them out of the country, and selling them for trillions of dollars.  

Consider what digitalisation has done to this dynamic. Companies can now extract enormous value from countries where they have little or no physical presence: advertising platforms, data processing, subscription services, streaming. A country like Kenya is obliged to look on while profits generated from Kenyan consumers are routed to the Netherlands or Mauritius and taxed there, or not at all. The arrangement is no longer economically credible. It is barely politically sustainable.

Which is why Kenya should shit itself and scream hysterically.  

The SACCO

Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies. There are several such for private mini-bus operators. 

on Nairobi’s roads illustrates this same logic at a micro level. When a public function is left unfilled long enough, private interests move in.

Some Kenyans are greedily growing vegetables in their shamba and selling them for profit. The Government alone should be permitted to grown vegetables.  

Once installed, they develop an institutional stake in the gap remaining open.

Bastards! Why do they want to feed their own families? How can they be so greedy!  

The SACCO does not want a rationalised public transit system because such a system would make its bus routes less valuable.

These voluntary associations of hard working people are very evil. Government should fulfil everybody's human right to education, travel, health etc by taxing evil Capitalists in America or Europe or Japan.  

Multinational corporations do not want a reformed global tax architecture because it would mean paying more.

Who wants to pay more?  Corporations make useful things and want to get paid for doing so. 

The structural logic is identical;

people who work hard doing useful things, want to get paid.  

only the scale differs. This is not, in either case, a conspiracy. It is rational behaviour within a system constructed to reward it.

We reward those who work hard and are useful to us. We tell bullshitting shitheads to fuck off. Soros may pay you but that's the reason we hate Soros.  

Changing the behaviour requires changing the system.

which involves conquering Europe, America and China.  

I said at the outset that rights require resources.

Not bullshitters.  

The argument runs equally in the other direction: resources – the capacity to raise them, spend them, and distribute their benefits fairly – require rights.

If there is no right to private property, it won't disappear. Those who can kill with impunity, will have it. Those who don't will need to come under their protection. This is how 'Stationary Bandits' get their start. The Government is the ultimate 'Stationary Bandit'.  

The fiscal systems of many African countries suffer not just from a lack of

Whites?  

money but from a lack of the conditions under which money can be governed legitimately.

Whites.  

In Financing Africa, I drew on the work of Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century North African scholar whose analysis of states, taxation and legitimacy remains the most penetrating framework I know for understanding why some fiscal systems endure and others collapse.

Khaldun is a Muslim. The author is a Muslim. He wasn't stupid but he was writing about warlike tribes create Kingdoms and enslaving lots of folk. Sadly, Africa is no longer allowed to export slaves.  

His argument was that justice is not one principle among several in a fiscal system.

No. He said it was a fundamental prerequisite for the societal cohesion ( 'asabiyyah ) of the ruling caste. Even if they inherit the old fiscal system or impose some new and very unjust one (e.g. taxing infidels more); even if they enslave or commit atrocities on indigenous populations ; their cohesion will be maintained provided the ruler treats his own people with justice and mercy. Otherwise, they will rebel or seek to ally with an invader- or even indigenous insurrectionists. 

It is the bedrock. Not a pillar to be traded off against efficiency or pragmatism, but the foundation without which nothing else holds.

Khaldun was wrong. The Ottomans did well even though they kept killing on incarcerating their male siblings. Islamic jurists decided that such fratricide was justified on the grounds of public policy. Incidentally, within a few decades of Khaldun's death, his ancestral home came under Ottoman rule. It turned out, he was wrong about everything. Social cohesion does not matter if you kidnap Christian boys from the Balkans and turn them into soldier-slaves.

A debt architecture built on opacity is a debt architecture built on injustice.

No. The fact that I don't want people to know how much I've borrowed doesn't mean the loan is unjust on unconscionable. 

On the other hand, if this lady doesn't shit in public, it must be because there is something unjust about her shitting.

Opacity is precisely what characterises the current system. Parliaments in debtor countries are frequently excluded from the negotiations that determine their sovereign debt terms.

This always happens. In some countries, a loan has to be approved by parliament. But the negotiation is separate.

Citizens cannot see the contracts under which their natural resources are extracted.

That is a matter for their Government. 

Creditors – bilateral, multilateral, and private – face no consistent obligation to disclose the conditionalities attached to their lending.

People are allowed to do anything legal with their own money. 

The secrecy is not incidental. It is functional: it protects the interests of those with power to set terms against the scrutiny of those who must endure them.

Why is this lady not allowing everybody to watch her shit? Is it because she is shitting gold & diamonds? These Asians are very cunning you know.  

Transparency, accountability and the participation of citizens in decisions about how their money is raised and spent are not soft supplementary virtues.

They are a waste of time.  

They are the rights that make all other rights possible.

In which no rights have ever been possible.  

Without them, you can change the numbers in a debt restructuring agreement without changing who bears the cost of adjustment.

The lender. Debt restructuring is another word for 'write off'.  

You can reform a tax treaty without changing who captures the benefit.

Governments get tax money. That's not going to change.  

The architecture looks different; the outcomes remain the same.

This stupid lady just said the architecture is occulted. Who can say what it looks like? 

This is why the negotiations currently taking place at the UN matter so much.

The UN simply does not matter.  

Writing from New York between sessions of the fourth Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, I find them genuinely remarkable: 110 member states have signed on to the Terms of Reference. The fault lines are visible and contested in public: developing countries are pushing for taxing rights based on where customers are located and where value is genuinely created, not on physical presence alone. That is not a technical nicety. It is a question of whether countries like Angola will ever be able to meaningfully tax the multinationals operating within their borders.

You can present anyone with a tax bill. The problem is that if they have no assets you can seize (because they are not in your jurisdiction) then there is nothing more you can do. 

There is a separate problem with digital services. I want to charge porn tax on people on my country who watch porn on the internet. The problem is that only Porn Corp located in LA knows who watched porn and for how long. I demand they tell me their names and addresses so I can send them a tax demand. They say 'sorry! Digital privacy.' I then ask them to collect money from viewers and send it to me. They tell me to fuck off. What's my next move? Get the Chinese to build me a separate internet system? That costs money. Will the World Bank lend it to me? No. For some reason, they thinking I should be focussing on growing peanuts or extracting copper from the ground.  

The talks are moving forward because the alternatives have run out. Governments across the Global South have watched the OECD minimum tax agreement get hollowed out before it was even implemented. The United States carved out its own companies of the global minimum rate, and the incentive for others to follow is growing. The lesson is clear: when the rules are written by and for wealthy states, developing countries are handed the costs and denied the benefits.

Did you know Kenya used to export a lot of slaves? Guess who stopped it from doing so? Whitey. Them kuffar want us to be poor!

A convention negotiated with all member states, in the open, on the record, is different in kind, not just degree.

This is why it is important for Kenya to join Iran in declaring war on the US. Only after the US is conquered can we all follow the precepts of Ibn Khaldun  and enslave kaffirs & establish asabbiyah.  

It is a human rights project. The money that a fair tax convention would allow governments to raise is money that could fund hospitals, schools and public transport systems.

Nairobi did have a public sector bus company. It went bust because everything got stolen.  

Every year the convention is delayed is a year in which those things remain unfunded. Rights and resources are not parallel tracks. They are the same track.

This lady has a one track mind. Sadly, it is transports nothing but shit.  

The first time I saw a tram was in the Netherlands. I remember the feeling: not wonder, but something like recognition. The vehicle was articulated, two carriages joined by a concertina spine, moving along a dedicated track through a city that had simply decided, at some point in its history, that this was how its people would move. There was a schedule, and it was kept. I had a similar feeling in London, watching a double-decker pull away from a stop, and again in Buenos Aires, where the Subte, Latin America’s oldest metro – imperfect, overstretched, but genuinely transformative – has done more for the mobility rights of the city’s poorest residents than a generation of microfinance programmes.

These are countries where Whites are still in charge.  

I am not romanticising. London’s transport is expensive and exhausting. Buenos Aires’s system strains at its seams. Addis Ababa’s light rail, opened in 2015, demonstrates that African cities can build rail infrastructure; its financing challenges show the importance of getting the terms correct in the beginning. Singapore invested in mass transit when it was far poorer than it is now, because the decision preceded wealth rather than waiting for it.

Kenya's GNP is 118 billion dollars. Singapore has invested  $111.4 billion in its new mass transit system. This crazy lady thinks Kenyans have a human right to something equally good. Whitey should pay because of Colonialism- right?

What these examples share is simple: a political decision that public transport is a public good and that the state is responsible for financing it. Not because the market cannot fill the gap – the SACCOs are proof that markets are extraordinarily creative – but because market logic, operating alone, cannot guarantee the equitable, reliable, dignified movement through a city that ought to be every citizen’s right.

Abolishing death would greatly help families around the globe. It is a public good. Sadly 'market logic' is not abolishing it at all. Fuck you 'market logic'! Because of you my beloved pussycat can no longer say meow! 

A tram line is the materialised form of a state that has decided its people deserve something.

No. It is merely something which it costs a certain amount of money to build. Amsterdam built one and it made a decent enough profit for many years.  

Building one in Nairobi would require fiscal sovereignty: the ability of Kenya’s government to raise and spend its own revenues

it already has this. The problem is that Kenyan incomes are only 2 to 3 percent that of Singapore. I

without the constraints imposed by debt conditions and a global tax architecture it did not design.

Singapore didn't design it either. Nor did South Korea or Taiwan. To be fair, Kenya was underpopulated and thus was able to greatly increase its population. If it follows sensible policies, it will rise rapidly.  

As a Swahili proverb has it: wealth, if you use it, comes to an end; learning, if you use it, increases.

Sadly this lady used wealth to learn stupid shit. If Kenya follows her Gospel, it will sink.  

The bus we never built is a record of what happens when rights and resources are separated. Every morning on Limuru Road, I watch the accumulated cost of that separation pass in a cloud of exhaust. I also watch, in the people who board those matatus without complaint and arrive late and exhausted and still manage to build something extraordinary, evidence that the will is not lacking.

This lady was 12 when the Government launched the Nyayo Bus Service. Initially it was good. Then mis-management took its tool. I suppose this lady was studying in England when it perished. Still, it is odd that she praises a British owned company set up during the Colonial era but fails to mention an example of the very thing she is advocating. 

Is this intellectual dishonesty? No. She has shit for brains. Shit can't be dishonest. It's just shit is all. 

R.C Majumdar on Freedom Struggle

 In my previous post, I looked at Tara Chand's History of the Indian Freedom Struggle. In this post I will briefly remark on R.C Majumdar's rejoinder to it.

 Political exigencies gave rise to the slogan of Hindu-Muslim fraternity.

& the slogan that Britain was draining all India's imaginary wealth.  

An impression was sought to be deliberately created that the Hindus and Muslims had already shed so much of their individual characteristics, and there was such a complete transformation of both and a fusion of their cultures that there was no essential difference between the two.

Ganga-Jamuna tehzeeb. Also, it was very difficult to tell a Muslim man from a Hindu woman. Firaq Gorakhpuri was constantly having sex with the former under the impression that it was the latter he was embracing. 

Though every true Indian must ever devoutly wish for such a consummation, it was, unfortunately, never a historical fact. Sir Syed Ahmad, M. A. Jinnah and other Muslim leaders who never believed in it entertained more realistic views in this respect than either Mahatma Gandhi or Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.

Who only pretended to believe in it.  

To accept as a fact what is eminently desirable but has not yet been achieved, though perhaps attainable by prolonged efforts, is not only a great historical error, but also a political blunder of the first magnitude, which often leads to tragic consequences. So it has been in the present case. The Hindu leaders deliberately ignored patent truth and facts of history when they refused to recognize the fundamental differences between the Hindus and Muslims which made them two distinct religious, social and political units.

They had got it into their heads that Muslims were stupid and that they could hoodwink them. Just say 'we will give 5000 percent reservations! Just acquiesce in our getting control of the Army. After all, Hindus are totally non-violent. Army is needful to protect us from Firaq Gorakhpuri. Sodomy, you know, is condemned in Islam.' 

The consequence was that no serious effort was ever made by the Hindu leaders to tackle the real problem that faced India, namely how to

raise productivity so the country could feed & defend itself? Fuck that! Majumdar was Indian. He didn't think productivity mattered at all.  

make it possible for two such distinct units to live together as members of one State.

By raising productivity together. You get along well enough with others who are equally engaged in solving a collective action problem.  

Whether the solution of such a problem was within range of practical politics, no one can say today with any degree of certainty.

Just get everybody working on raising total factor productivity by raising taxes from those who would most benefit by infrastructure investment, agronomic research, better financial markets etc.  

But with the examples of Canada or Switzerland before us, the attempt was worth making, But such an attempt was never made in India,

the British did make that effort. But India didn't want a Federation.  

as the existence of two such fundamentally different political units was never fully realized by the Hindu, leaders. Even today the Indian leaders would not face the historical truth, failure to recognize which has cost them dear.

i.e. there will be demographic change & by the time the Hindu reacts it will be too later.  

They still live in the realm of a fancied fraternity and are as  sensitive to any expression that jars against the slogan of HinduMuslim bhai bhai, as they were

to those who said 'Hindi-Chini bhai bhai' was eye-wash.  

Being a Bengali, Majumdar knows that the Hindus in Bengal welcomed the Brits or other Europeans as a means to escape Islamic rule. Even the predatory Marathas were preferable. 

 A strong feeling of antipathy towards the Muslim rule is expressed by the great Bengali poet Bharatchandra in his magnum opus, the Annadamangal, composed in 1752 A.D. only five years before the Battle of Palasi (Plassey). He denounces the iconoclastic activities of Nawab Alivardi Khan and refers to the Maratha ruler as the chosen instrument of god Siva for punishing the wicked Yavana. 

The traditional Hindu aversion to Muslim rule was voiced by Raja Rammohan Roy, who was the greatest personality in Bengal at the beginning of the 19th century and is justly regarded as the representative of the most advanced political thinking of the time. He was a sound scholar in Arabic and Persian and adopted Muslim diess and food ; so nobody can accuse him of anti-Muslim bias. His views on the point at issue are scattered in his writings, but the following extract from his petition to the King in Council in 1823 is enough to indicate them. "The greater part of Hindustan having been for several centuries subject to Muhammadan Rule, the civil and religious rights of its original inhabitants were constantly trampled upon, .and from the habitual oppression of the conquerors, a great body of their subjects in the southern Peninsula (Dukhin), afterwards called Marattahs, and another body in the western parts now styled Sikhs, were at last driven to revolt ; and when the Mussalman power became feeble, they ultimately succeeded in establishing their independence ; but the Natives of Bengal wanting vigor of body, and adverse to active exertion, remained during the whole period of the Muhammadan conquest, faithful to the existing Government, although their property was often plundered, their religion insulted, and their blood wantonly shed. Divine Providence at last, in its abundant mercy, stirred up the English nation to break the yoke of those tyrants, and to receive the oppressed Natives of Bengal under its protection.” Rammohan concludes his final Appeal to the Christian Public with the following words : "I now conclude my Essay by offering up thanks to the Supreme Disposer of the events of this universe, for having un¬ expectedly delivered this country from the long-continued tyranny of its former Rulers, and placed it under the government of the English : — a nation who not only were blessed with the enjoyment of civil and political liberty, but also interest themselves in promoting liberty and social happiness, as well as free inquiry into literary and religious subjects, among those nations to which their influence extends”

Niradh Chaudhuri, it seems, was writing in the finest tradition of his race when he demanded that White people return to rule over Bengal. 

Dwaraka Nath Tagore, by no means an orthodox Hindu, writes in a letter to the Englishman, dated 6 December, 1838 : "The present characteristic failings of natives are want of truth, a want of integrity, a want of independence. These were not the characteristics of former days, before the religion was corrupted and education had dis¬ appeared. It is to the Mahomedan conquest that these evils are owing, and they are the invariable results of the loss of liberty and national degradation. The Mahomedans introduced in this country all the vices of an ignorant, intolerant and licentious soldiery. The utter destruction of learning and science was an invariable part of their system, and the conquered, no longer able to protect their lives by arms and independence, fell into opposite extremes of abject submission, deceit and fraud. Such has been the condition of the Natives of Hindustan for centuries."

Byron and others had supported the Greek struggle for Independence. They were a hardy people but, it was obvious, they had lost much of their lustre under Islamic rule. 

Majumdar gives a good account of various insurrections against British rule in Greater Bengal. Those of a Muslim character alienated Hindus but so did others where the estates of co-religionists (or even relative) were attacked. There was economic discontent but no understanding or willingness to find a peaceful solution by coming together to solve collective action problems and thus raise productivity. Thus, though British rule was expensive it was preferable to Anarchy.  Incidentally some 'revolts' were purely non-violent. But palliative methods could not succeed because the root problem was stagnating productivity. 

Majumdar took note of the problem of indigo (Gandhi's first foray into Indian politics was in this connection)

The outrages perpetrated by the indigo-planters in Bengal •constitute one of the blackest chapters in the history of British rule in India.

because some of the planters were White though the land they leased was owned by Indians.  

The cultivators were forced to sow indigo against their will though it meant a heavy loss to them ; recalcitrant -cultivators were arrested, severely beaten, tortured, and confined in the dark dungeons of the factories for months ; their houses were burnt ; and it was frequently alleged that the modesty of their women was outraged. All this was not unoften done with the connivance, if not with the active support, of the British officials.

Otto Trevelyan says otherwise. He blames the 'Anglo-Saxons' (i.e. Europeans who settled in India to make money unlike the 'Anglo-Indians' who were ICS officers like himself) 

At last unable to bear the oppression which went on for half a century the Bengali cultivators organized, themselves in 1858 and refused in a body  to cultivate their lands with indigo even “at the sacrifice of their hearth and home, nay of their lives". This heroic stand, which was rewarded with success, had also a bearing on the future struggle for freedom in India.

It was as wholly irrelevant as Gandhi's sojourn in Champaran.  

The following passage in the Amrita Bazar Patrilta of 22 May, 1874, clearly elucidates this view, as it struck a contemporary young Bengali patriot. “It was the indigo disturbances which first taught the natives the value of combination and political agitation. Indeed it was the first revolution in Bengal after the advent of the English. If there be a second revolution it will be to free the nation from the death grips of the all-powerful police and district Magistrate.

In which case, anarchy would prevail.  

Nothing like oppression ! It was the oppression which brought about the glorious revolution in England and it was the oppression of half a century by indigo planters which at last roused the half-dead Bengalee and infused spark in his cold frame." 

Dwijendranath Tagore- Rabindranath Tagore's eldest brother- was adverse affected by the non-violent campaign of the Pabna tenant-farmers who formed an Agrarian League in 1873. Their demands were fully met by the 1885 Rent Act. The landlords dreamed of a day when the Brits were gone & they could raise rents to their heart's content while slaughtering anyone who resisted. 

The differences between the Hindus and the Muslims were undoubtedly accentuated by the policy of ’Divide and Rule systematically pursued by the British throughout the 19th century.

Nonsense! If the ruler doesn't distinguish between two types of people, differences between them decrease.  

As far back as 1821 a British officer wrote in, the Asiatic Journal : “Divide et Impera should be the motto of our administration,”

'Should be' doesn't mean 'is'. Carnaticus was a young Irish Captain who served in the Madras Army. What he thought Company policy should have been was irrelevant because he was merely a mercenary.  

and the policy was supported by high British officers.

No. Their policy was to unite, gain economies of scope and scale and thus turn a higher profit. 

At first the policy was to favour

the loyal & fuck up the disloyal  

the Hindus at the expense of the Muslims, for, as Lord Ellenborough put it. “that race is fundamentally hostile to us and therefore our true policy is to conciliate the Hindus.”

Because they were loyal. Reward what you want more of.  

It was not till the seventies when the Hindus had developed advanced political ideas and a. sense of nationalism that the British scented danger and began to favour the Muslims, now turned docile, at the expense of the Hindus.

They were cool with Hindus who did useful things. Blathershites they had no time for.  

From about the eighties it became the settled policy of the British to

slap down Hindu or Parsi blathershites. Those who waged war against the Queen were killed out of hand or shipped off to the Andamans.  

play the Muslims against the Hindus and break the solidarity of the people.

There was none. 

Since then the British argument against conceding the political demands of the Congress has always been 'that it would be impossible for England to hand over the Indian Muslims to the tender mercies of a hostile numerical majority.’

What they meant was 'you blathershites are shit at fighting. Muslims aren't. Shut the fuck up.' 

This British policy was undoubtedly productive of great evil, but it would be a mistake to suppose that the Hindu-Muslim cleavage was a creation of the British or even of the Aligarh Movement. The cleavage was there from the very beginning, as mentioned above the British policy merely exploited it for the safety of the British rule, and the Aligarh Movement widened it in order to serve the Muslim interests.

British policy was to sensible things. The Hindus might say 'their diabolical policy was to make us stupid and useless.' The Muslims might say 'their satanic conspiracy caused people to think Christianity isn't completely shit'. But guys who run countries don't care what stupid shitheads say.  

One question which puzzled me was why Parsis tended to feel closer to Hindus than to Muslims.

A serious riot took place in Bombay in 1851. An article written by a Parsi youth on the Prophet of Arabia gave umbrage to the Muslims. At a meeting held on 7 October, 1851, they proclaimed a jihad (holy war) against the Parsis. They overwhelmed the small police force on duty and marched triumphantly to the Parsi quarters of the Bombay town. The Parsis were belaboured mercilessly by the rioters.” "For weeks together that part of Bombay was a scene of pillage and destruction, and the Parsis had to put up with shocking atrocities such as defilement of corpses.” Throughout the trouble the Parsi community failed to secure any police protection.

It appears that the police had special maps prepared by the mid 1850s showing relative concentration of Muslims and Parsees and places of safety- e.g. Government buildings to which civilians could be evacuated. The odd thing is that Parsees probably outnumbered Muslims in 1851.  They should have been able to protect themselves or hire sturdy locals to do so. 

There was again a similar riot in Bombay in 1874, °f which there are eye witnesses' accounts from two great Indian leaders like Dadabhai Naoroji and Pherozeshah Mehta. In a book written by a Parsi vaccinator there was a reference to the Prophet which was regarded as objectionable by the Muslims. The publication, was accordingly suppressed by the Government and the author was made to apologize for the  affront he might have inadvertently offered. Nevertheless, there was "a brutal and unwarranted attack on Parsis by a mob of Mohamedans.” They “invaded Parsi places of worship, tore up the prayer- books, /extinguished the sacred fires and subjected the fire-temples to various indignities. Parsis were attacked in the streets and in their houses and free fights took place all over the city. Thanks to the weakness and supineness of the police and the Government, hooliganism had full play and considerable loss of life and damage to property were caused.”

It was the Parsees who were weak and supine.  

The riot continued for several days till the military was called out. Both Pherozeshah Mehta and Dadabhai, whom no one would accuse of having any special animosity against the Muslims or the British Government, have laid emphasis on the callousness of the police and the indifference of the Government. “The attitude of the Commissioner of Police was particularly hostile and objectionable. Even the Governor advised a Parsi deputation, that waited on him, to make its peace with the Muhammadans and to learn the lesson of defending itself without dependence on the authorities.”

What's wrong with that? Don't start a fight you can't finish. Beat the shit out a publisher from your community who prints shite which causes riots and thus harms peaceful commerce. 

Majumdar having shown, with innumerable examples, the dramatic difference between what Muslims wanted or thought important and what non-Muslim nationalists hoped for, condemns Congress making a pact with Khilafat in no uncertain terms. The problem is that nobody really believed non-Muslims (or Shias for that matter) gave a fart for the Ottoman Caliph. 

The Hindu leaders failed to realize that the Khilafat agitation was really inspired by the Pan-Islamic movement,

No. The clue was in the name. Khilafat means Caliphate- i.e. Muslims ruling over everything.  

and the policy of Hindu-Muslim entente was merely an ingenious device on the part of the Muslim leaders to secure help against British imperialism,

what help? Hindus were useless.  Majumdar quotes Gandhi as saying (in 1921) “ I claim that with us both the Khilafat is the central fact, with Maulana Muhammad Ali because it is his religion, with me because, in laying down my life for the Khilafat, I ensure the safety of the cow, that is my religion, from the Mussalman knife.’ The problem here is that Gandhi didn't lay down shit. Also he knew very well that it was the anti-beef riots in Bihar in 1917 which saved the cow. He himself was sent to Champaran to distract attention from this. The Muslims were prepared to trade Khilafat for cow-protection if cow-slaughter was in any case off the table. 

then regarded as the greatest enemy of Islam. There was no reason to suppose, as subsequent events clearly proved, that the Muslim leaders were inspired by a genuine desire to make up their differences with the Hindus in order to form an Indian nation. The Hindu leaders fell into the trap.

No. They thought they were hoodwinking the Muslims some of whom may have believed that supporting Khilafat was the first step to converting to Islam.  

Too eager to arrive at a political settlement with the Muslims at any cost, they jumped at what they conceived to be a unique opportunity for achieving that end,—an oppotunity which, as Gandhi put it, might not occur in a hundred years' time.

Muslims are stupid. We can lead them down the garden path. What would be hilarious is if they took to spinning cotton. 

Why did Gandhi call off the Non Cooperation movement. Majumdar does not know. But the thing is obvious. Gandhi had himself visited Chauri Chaura. Lots of the rioters had paid a small sum of money and joined the Congress party. Some were bound to turn approver and say 'the Mahatma told us to kill policemen'. Gandhi & Co could be charged with 'waging war on the King Emperor'. They could be transported to the Andamans. Their property could be seized. By contrast, doing a spot of porridge for 'seditious libel' was a walk in the park. 

 The first phase of Non-co-operation movement ended with Gandhi’s cry of halt, and any chance of its revival at an early date was removed by

the fact that Ataturk was winning the war. He had stopped the Greek offensive the previous year. By September he had chased out the Greeks. He ended the Sultanate in November. It suddenly occurred to the Muslims that the Brits wanted the Caliph as a puppet. Anyway, it turned out, the Viceroy had been quietly lobbying for them while Gandhi & Co had promised much but delivered zilch.  

his confinement behind the walls of prison, for, the whole movement centred round one person, and his disappearance gave a deathblow to it at least for the time being.

He had said he would deliver Swaraj if a certain sum of money was collected. It was, but he didn't deliver shit.  

It is not indeed a sign of healthy public life in any country that a great movement should rest upon the exertions and guidance of one man alone.

It wasn't a great movement. In Egypt, Allenby forced the hand of the British Govt. to capitulate & bring back Saad Zaghloul. Why? Because the uprising there was genuinely spontaneous. It hadn't been cooked up by blokes who hoped to profit immensely after the Brits fucked off.  

But in the case of Non-co-operation movement, it was even worse still, for it depended wholly upon the personal whims and predilections of Gandhi

suppose he had been transported to the Andamans & the unrest worsened. They the Brits would have to give India what they gave Ireland & Egypt & Afghanistan. The problem was that an independent India wouldn't need Gandhi. He was welcome to fuck off to some village and spin cotton there.  

which did not always appeal to his followers as based upon a clear process of reasoning intelligible to them. Nevertheless, he was obeyed without question, and retained the implicit confidence pf millions, such as has never fallen to the lot of any other political leader before or after him.

Nobody obeyed him unless they wanted to do stupid shit. Why? You feel stupid if you are doing stupid shit off your own bat rather than because some Mahatma told you to do it.  

The secret of it lies in the combination of a saint and a political leader in his person. Gandhi, by his loin cloth and high ideals of an ascetic life of renunciation, succeeded in canalising the traditional reverence and unquestioning faith in a spiritual guru in India to the service of politics.

No. He got money from textile mill owners by getting people to burn foreign cloth. But, it must be said, he could be very useful. When Nehru's sister married a Muslim, he broke up the marriage & even found a suitable Brahmin boy for her to marry.  

Whether Gandhi was the most saintly politician or the most political saint, will ever remain a matter of opinion.

He was a crackpot who needed money for his stupid schemes. By pretending he could deliver Swaraj he gained obligatory passage point status. But no Swaraj was delivered. Thus, he pretended he was uplifting the Dalit or embracing the Mussalman of helping the weavers or encouraging 'Basic Education' without the Education or other such shite. If only he had taught yogic levitation he could have become a billionaire like the Maharishi.  

But the combination of the dual capacity in him introduced a new element in Indian politics—the idea of a political guru—which worked wonders during his life and which he left as a legacy to this country.

i.e. shitheads like Vinobha Bhave or Anna Hazare.  

In the meeting of the All-India Congress Committee at Delhi Gandhi had tried hard to maintain that the resolution of suspension did not in any way nullify the resolution on Non-co-operation passed in the Nagpur session of the Congress.

He was right. All that Congress was doing was non-cooperating with itself to do non-cooperation.  

But neither his eloquence nor his prestige could conceal the fact that Non-co-operation was dead. This was fully admitted by the Congress Enquiry Committee, which observed ; '‘There can be no doubt that the principle and policy laid down at Ahmadabad were completely reversed to the great disappointment of an expectant public", and the Congress "failed to create sufficient enthusiasm to carry on the constructive programme

it had none 

with the earnestness it deserved’’.

The thing was stupid. Spinning cotton on a chakra destroys the value of the cotton. Weavers want good quality Mill yarn.  

The last is a very significant admission, and should be borne in mind in making a proper study of the Nonco-operation movement, both in 1922 and thereafter. It means that the enthusiasm which sustained the movementwas really kept up by its fighting programme, and the constructive programme, such as weaving and spinning,

which destroyed the value of cotton 

removal of untouchability etc. 

why not cooperate with the Brits to do that? They don't have any such practice.  

which was not likely to involve any collision with the Government, really fell flat upon the masses who looked upon them as merely of secondary importance, to be tolerated for the sake of Gandhiji, if not as an unnecessary hindrance to the real fight.

The real issue was land. Where was the Indian Lenin who would let the peasant kill the landlord and take his land?  

The Congress Enquiry Committee had also the candour to admit that ‘'no man other than the Mahatma could lift the wet blanket thrown upon most of the workers by the Bardoli and Delhi resolutions, or effectively divert the course of Congress activities into the channels marked out by these resolutions.

By then, nobody gave a fuck about its resolutions.  

They believed that if Gandhi could "make one of his lightning tours through the country", the whole aspect of things would have been changed. This may be seriously doubted in view of the callous indifference which which Gandhi’s imprisonment was looked upon by the public. As has been remarked, not a leaf stirred in this vast country on that occasion. The Congress inquiry Committee and the orthodox followers of Gandhi have taken pains to explain this indifference as merely ‘the homage of reverence which the people paid to Gandhiji by observing that exemplary self-restraint and perfect nonviolence which were so dear to his heart . One is constrained to observe that these were no less dear to his heart in 1919, when the mere rumour of his arrest created serious troubles in the Panjab and Bombay ; in 1922, only a few months before, when Chauri Chaura incident took place ; or in 1942, when Gandhi was again arrested and put into prison.

The difference is that Gandhi unilaterally surrendered & then cooperated fully with the prosecution by proclaiming his own guilt and asking for the law's highest penalty.  Basically, Gandhi admitted that India was not ready for Independence. First everybody should give up sex and eating nice food and punching a bloke who tried to fuck them in the ass. 

We must, therefore, look for some other reasons to explain the all-pervading calm after Gandhi’s incarceration in 1922.

I just gave it. Gandhi begged to be put in jail.  

That these included popular resentment at his action and the consequent waning of his popularity will probably be disputed by none, except the blind followers of Gandhi. The Congress Enquiry Committee rightly observed that it would be "unprofitable to inquire what would have happened if Mahatma Gandhi had not been arrest-ed and sent to prison.'

Some Khilafati might have knifed him.  

What actually happened admits of no doubt. The first phase of the Non-co-operation movement had ended and there was no chance of its revival, so^ long af least as Gandhi was in prison

He was let out early but stayed quiet for the entire duration of his sentence. 

As a Bengali, Majumdar naturally focuses on 'Direct Action Day' in 1946 as the cause of Partition. He blames Nehru though Nehru wasn't Bengali. Azad's dad had been a big 'Pir' in Calcutta. But he was useless. Suhrawardy was in the saddle. The only way he could be defeated was by Hindu goons, assisted by Sikhs & Gurkhas & financed by Marwaris, to slaughter Muslims on a bigger scale. That's what happened.

the real spirit of the 'Direct Action' was expressed by Jinnah himself immediately after the resolution was passed by the League Council. He said : ‘*What we have done today is the most historic act in our history. Never have we in the whole history of the League done anything except by constitutional methods and by constitutionalism. But now we are obliged and forced into this position. This day we bid goodbye to constitutional methods."

In other words, the League could no longer ally with non-Congress forces. It would be a war to the knife. Muslims in non-Muslim majority areas were fucked. So were non-Muslims in Muslim majority areas- but that was already the case prior to the establishment of the British Raj. I suppose Jinnah finally realised that to gain a place in history, you must either link yourself to religion or else found a dynasty. His daughter had married a Christian Parsi. He himself was dying. 'A moth-eaten' Pakistan might grow by itself. He would be reminded as its founder. 

"He recalled that throughout the fateful negotiations with the Cabinet Mission the other two parties, the British and the Congress, each held a pistol in their hand, the one of the authority and arms and the other of mass struggle and non-co-operation." "To day," he said, "we have also forged a pistol and are in a position to use it.'’

Oddly, Gandhi seemed to approve. He told Wavell- if India wants a blood-bath, India must get a blood-bath. Nehru was more conciliatory.  

Whatever Jinnah might have in view when he uttered these words, the 'Direct Action' was interpreted in the light of these remarks by the Muslim League in Bengal with the full backing and support of the Muslim League Ministry under Mr. H. S. Suhrawardy, ruling over that unfortunate Province. The ‘Direct Action’ in certain localities in Bengal was merely a camouflage for an organized anti-Hindu campaign of loot, arson and indiscriminate murder of men, women and children in broad daylight with impunity. The worst holocaust took place in Calcutta. The League Ministry had declared 16 August as a public holiday. Long processions were taken out by the Muslim League along the prominent streets of Calcutta, and suddenly the members of the procession began to attack and loot the Hindu shops. Then the horrors of Muslim goondaism in its worst form were let loose upon the Hindus in the predominantly Muslim areas in Calcutta. The Hindus were taken unawares and had the worst of it at the beginning; they were butchered like sheep, their women were ravished, and their houses looted and occasionally burnt. It has now been proved beyond all doubt that this great killing and outrage were deliberately organized beforehand with the active support of the League Government. It was even then openly alleged that the Chief Minister, Suhrawardy, shielded the worst ruffians in Calcutta and encouraged them to do their worst without any fear. Azad writes : I found there ( Dum Dum, Calcutta ) a large military contingent waiting in trucks. When I asked why they were not helping to restore order, they replied that their orders were to stand ready but not to take any action.

Because there was Provincial Autonomy. The Premier called the shots.  

Throughout Calcutta, the Military and the Police were standing by, but remained inactive while innocent men and women were being killed.  This was indeed the strangest and the saddest part in the whole tragic episode ! The British Governor, all the while in Calcutta, sat inactive, and the Central Government did not take any effective step even though they received secret official reports that the Muslim League Goveinment was at the back of the whole affair.

The story would become similar in the Punjab. A Parsi journalist was invited by British officers to observe how the entire population was arming itself while the Government did nothing. The Parsi praises a Sikh commanding officer for trying to protect lives regardless of creed. But, it was obvious, the politicians simply didn't care. As Gandhi said, India would have its blood-bath. This could be seen as a 'Vishodhan'- a ritual cleansing like that which occurred at Kurukshetra in the Mahabharata.  

This unwillingness of the British Government to maintain law and order for which they were still responsible under the existing Constitution

This would have involved ejecting the elected administration in Bengal. Nehru did not ask Wavell to instruct the Governor of Bengal to dismiss Suhrawardy. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee did. But he could be dismissed as a 'Hindu Mahasabha' bigot whose party got only one seat in the Jan 1946 election. Suhrawardy had 114 seats. Congress, notionally under Sarat Bose, had 86. But Sarat was a chum of Suhrawardy (and previously of Fazl). If Nehru had twisted Atlee's arm & got Wavell to dismiss Suhrawardy, there would be new elections. Hindu Mahasabha might gain seats at the expense of Congress.  

rendered the Hindus desperate and forced them to organize themselves. Then followed what may be described as a Civil War between the Hindus and Muslims, members of each community indiscriminately killing those of the other whenever any opportunity offcied itself. When it was realized by the Government that the butchery, pillage and arson were no longer one-way traffic, they cried halt and peace was restored after about a week. No regular inquiry was made, but according to a rough official estimate at the time, nearly 5,000 lives were lost, over 15,000 persons were injured, and about 100,000 were  rendered homeless. According to Mosley, ‘'between dawn on the morning of 16 August 1946 and dusk three days later, the people of Calcutta hacked, battered, burned, stabbed or shot 6,000 of each other to death, and raped and maimed another 20,000.

Small potatoes. Things got worse after the Brits handed over all power.  

The Statesman wrote on the Calcutta riot of 16 August : “The latest estimate of dead is 3,000, who have lain thick about the streets. The injured number manythousand and it is impossible to say how many business houses and private dwellings have been destroyed. This is not a riot For three days, the city concentrated on unrestrained civil war. Upon whom the main guilt for it rests is manifest. ... Where the primary blame lies is where we have squarely put it—upon the Provincial Muslim League Cabinet... and particularly upon the Chief Minister. “

Sarat was happy to play footsie with Suhrawardy in pursuit of a chimeral 'United Bengal' scheme.  

During an interview with the Viceroy Maulana Abul Kalam Azad “severely criticized the Bengal ministry (Premier Suhrawardy in particular) and alleged that, although the Government of Bengal had apprehended trouble, they had not taken sufficient precautions ; that they had been much too late in enforcing Section 144 and a total curfew, and in calling out the troops. The declaration of a public holiday on 16 August had made the hooligans of Calcutta's underworld believe that they had the licence of the Government to behave as they liked.''

Why was Azad so utterly useless in Calcutta? He was supposed to be a great Maulana. How come Muslims in Bengal ignored him completely? Why did the League get 113 out of the 118 reserved seats?  To be fair, Azad wasn't Bengali. He was an Urdu speaker and did get elected from Rampur in 1952. 

VI. INTERIM GOVERNMENT Far-sighted observers could realize that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to bridge the river of blood that flowed between the Hindus and the Muslims in Calcutta during August, 1946. Azad mournfully observes that “the turn that events had taken made it almost impossible to expect a peaceful solution by agreement between the Congress and the Muslim League.''

The agreement was implicit. India would get a blood-bath.  

He justly regards this as "one of the greatest tragedies of Indian history”, and, "with the deepest regret", lays the main responsibility for this at the door of Jawaharlal Nehru,

who had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Sarat was the INC leader in Bengal. He wasn't demanding dismissal of Suhrawardy's administration. Indeed, in April, he had proposed a united Bengal pact alongside Suhrawardy & Kiran Shankar Roy. This was shot down by the High Command. Patel said 'we must have Calcutta'. This was the outcome of the violence. The Hindu majority prevailed. 

though he adds : "Jawaharlal is one of my dearest friends and his contribution to India’s national life is second to none".

Azad wanted Muslims to have disproportionate power in a united India. Nehru wanted Congress, under his command, to have the same thing. However, what the Brits had found easy to do, the Indians found impossible. Why? They were incompetent and untrustworthy. 

But Nehru does not seem to have fully realized the consequences of his own folly.

What folly? He had nothing to do with the Bengal Congress. He was a Hindi speaker from the cow-belt where he prevailed. 

While Calcutta was the scene of an unprecedented holocaust, Nehru was busy negotiating with the Viceroy about the Interim Government.

What should he have been doing instead? If Sarat was cool with Suhrawardy, who was Nehru to demand his dismissal?  

On 17 August, i.e., the very next day after the "great killing" had begun, but not ended, nor shown any sign of abating, he submitted his proposals to the Viceroy, and after discussion for a week the personnel of the Interim Government was announced on 24 August, 1946, in the following communique. "His Majesty the King has accepted the resignation of the present members of the Governor-General’s Executive Council. His Majesty has been pleased to appoint the following : Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Dr, Rajendra Prasad, Mr. M. Asaf Ali, Mr. C. Rajagopalachari, Mr. Sarat Chandra Bose, Dr. John Matthai, Sardar Baldev Singh, Sir Shafaat Ahmad Khan, Mr. Jagjivan Ram, Syed Ali Zaheer and Covesji Hormusji Bhabha.  Two more Muslim members will be appointed later. The Interim Government will take office on September"

So, Sarat was signing off on this. The plain fact is Bose sold the pass. If the younger brother couldn't establish Japanese hegemony, the elder would try to establish Muslim hegemony over a united Bengal.  

In a broadcast on the same day, the Viceroy made an earnest—almost pathetic—appeal to the Muslim League to join the Government. "The door of coalition is not closed," said the Viceroy, and he gave all possible assurances to remove misgivings about the Congress tyranny, but Jinnah refused to budge an inch.

Because of Punjab where Congress was part of a coalition. There had to be further polarisation and blood-letting. West Punjab was where most Muslim soldiers came from. Bengalis are shit at fighting. Pakistan would be nothing without the greater part of Punjab.  

Majumdar's thesis- which has much truth as far as his native Bengal was concerned- was that the essential factor was Hindu-Muslim enmity which the Brits were able to overcome. Once they decided to quit, Partition was inevitable. For those, like Niradh Chaudhuri, who were from the East, it was perfectly sensible to praise Britain and lament their departure. 

The end of the Second World War in 1945 also marked the end of India’s struggle for freedom which had commenced just about a quarter of a century before.

After 1917, multi-ethnic Empires were doomed. Gandhi prevented India getting what Ireland, Egypt & Afghanistan got but the truth is India could not defend itself and thus freedom would have been largely cosmetic. The Second World War completed what had begun with the Great War. This time around, you had a lot of young officers- not NCOs- with military experience. In any case, British naval hegemony was in terminal decline. There was no alternative to complete independence. Never again would British soldiers turn up to secure the borders of India (though Malaya- which had valuable raw materials- did get the benefit of British Army support to end its Communist insurgency).  

TheNon-violent Non-co-operation and Civil Disobedience movements had practically come to an end in 1933.  The violent revolutionary movement which had started early in the twentieth century spent its force by 1935. A combination of the above two movements in August, 1942, was ruthlessly crushed by the Government before the year was over. Lastly, the efforts of Subhas Bose to fought the battle for India’s freedom with the help of foreign powers, culminating in the campaign of Azad Hind Fauz or Indian National Army on the eastern frontier of India, came to an end with their retreat along with the Japanese forces in July, 1944- So, in the early months of 1945, when the end of the War was within sight, the prospect of India’s achieving freedom from the British yoke looked very gloomy indeed.

Not in England. Churchill was considered insane on the topic of India. Once the war was over, the Tories would bypass him with American help and complete what they had begun with the 1935 Act. In the event, Labour won a majority. But rising Tory stars like R.A. Butler- who was from a Punjab ICS family- had no desire to hang on to the place. He knew that the working class Tory voter had grown suspicious of Imperialism. It was a form of 'outdoor relief' for the Aristocrats who got to escape rationing at home on the pretext that they were preserving British glory in some sunny tropical clime.  

The power which refused to grant freedom to India in the darkest hours of its national peril was not likely to concede it in the days of its triumph and glory.

Bankruptcy. The UK needed American money to survive. They called the shoots. Only if there had been a Communist threat in India could lingering there be justified. However, the 'Cold War' mindset didn't fully develop till the 'loss' of China. But Marshall had getting fed up with Chiang Kai Shek in 1946. Since Commies were virtually wiped out in the 1946 elections and since America didn't have a dog in a fight between non-Christian religions, it followed that even Churchill, had he been re-elected, would have had to withdraw from India. Atlee just did it faster.  

Such misgivings must have haunted the minds of Indians in general. But the future of India was being shaped by unforeseen factors. It did not take Britain long to realize that she had after all won a Pyrrhic victory. She saved herself and her empire by inflicting a crushing defeat upon Germany and Japan, but this fight to a finish exhausted her manpower and economic re8ource% to such an extent that she could never hope to recover her old power and prestige.

She didn't want it. In the Thirties, UK decided that its first line of defence must be the air-force. After Hiroshima, the race was on to get first the Atom bomb in 1952 & the H-bomb in 1957.  

Majumdar invokes the spectre of the British Empire turning into a bunch of British Umpires. But countries can't be ruled by Umpires. 

. The British were now sincerely anxious to grant freedom to India, but the Indians were slow to take it, for they could not decide among themselves what form it should exactly assume. The role of the British was that of a mediator between two disputants, sometimes degenerating into that of a judge in a boxing bout between two prize-fighters.

This was untenable. Either they could unite and rule or divide & run the fuck away. But this was also true of the new nations. They went in for centralization not subsidiarity or devolution. Instead of serving as umpires, the Police & Army took one side and smashed the other to smithereens. 

Majumdar concludes thus.

It is hardly necessary to say that August 15 was hailed with joy all over India, and no words can adequately describe the tumultuous scenes of wild rejoicings witnessed in every city and every village. Lord and LadyMountbatten, driving in state, were greeted with resounding cheers by the enthusiastic crowds that lined the streets. This heralded a new era of goodwill between India and Britain. Stories of many hard and bitter stiuggles between India and Britain, and of animosities between the Indians and the British fill the pages of this work. Let it end with a note of goodwill, trust, and confidence which manifested itself on the streets of Delhi on 15 August, 1947. How the author wishes that he could have closed this volume with a similar note in respect of the relation between India and Pakistan. But that was not to be. Instead of an era of goodwill, the independence ushered in one of communal hatred and cruelty of which there is perhaps no parallel in the recorded history of India.

Majumdar explains why. There had to be a river of blood between Muslim & non-Muslim for the Muslim League to prevail in Pakistan. Sadly, the League was shit. Pakistan became a military state.  

It -is unnecessary to recount that story of shame and barbarity as it falls beyond the period under review. It will suffice to quote a few lines written by Leonard Mosley, by way of indicating the price which India paid for her freedom : "Both sides had signed, on 20 July, at Mountbatten’s behest, a declaration that they would respect the rights of minorities. But Mountbatten was right in suspecting that they did not know what they were signing.'

They didn't care what they were signing.  

TheSikh policy was to exterminate the Muslims in their midst. The Muslims, with their eyes on the rich Sikh farmlands, were content to drive the Sikhs out and only massacre those who insisted on remaining. It is sad to have to admit that in their deliberate disobedience of their signed pledge they were encouraged by the British Governor of West Punjab, Sir Francis Mudie, who wrote to Mr. Jinnah on 5 September, 1947 : T am telling everyone that I don’t care how the Sikhs get across the border ; the great thing is to get rid of them as soon as possible.’

Not as horrible as it sounds. Sikhs & Hindus needed to make their own arrangements & fuck the fuck off. The Government was useless. Why? Darkies were in charge.  

“600,000 dead. 14,000,000 driven from their homes. 100,000 young girls kidnapped by both sides, forcibly converted or sold on the auction block.” Mosley continues : “It need not have happened. It would not have happened had independence not been rushed through at such a desperate rate. A little patience and all the troubles might have been avoided.. ..Jinnah was dead within a year. A little patience. A refusal to be rushed.”

Lots of money from Uncle Sam so as to keep the show on the road? Maybe that would have helped. Maybe not. Mountbatten got the Whites out safely. It's all Wavell thought he himself could accomplish. Incidentally, the previous Viceroy, Linlithgow seems to have agreed with Wavell.  

This seems to be too optimistic a view. The question whether Mountbatten or his critics were right may be safely left to the verdict of history.

Mountbatten covered for Atlee provided because the moment you start blaming him, you remember that he was a sailor with zero knowledge of India. 

History's verdict favours Majumdar not Tara Chand. Islam really does have a different political horizon from that of the Kuffar. However, a Muslim country may prefer to protect minorities for commercial reasons. Nothing wrong in that at all.  

Tara Chand's history of the freedom movement

Tara Chand, in his 'history of the freedom movement' began thus- 

In the eighteenth century India passed under the sway of Britain.

Parts of it did. But other parts of it had passed under the sway of the Portuguese in 1510 

Almost for the first time in her history an alien people whose homeland lay at a distance of several thousand miles from India assumed the reins of her government and the guidance of her destinies.

It was by no means obvious that the Brits would retain much territory in India till it prevailed in the Napoleonic wars. Ultimately, it had to withdraw from its Empire in the East because it had to focus on a threat from across the Channel.  

Such an occupation of the country was a new experience.

No. The Moghuls claimed descent from Genghis Khan & spoke Chaghtai Turkish- a language wholly alien to India. But there had once been Indo-Greek kingdoms. Demetrius reached Patna in Bihar.  

For, although in the past India had suffered many invasions, and from time to time parts of die Indian territory had fallen temporarily under the dominion of the conquerors, the occasions had been few and their duration short.

What Tara Chand means is that the invaders became Indianized or else imposed their own religion and culture on their subjects. But Britain could be said to have done the same thing in India. Nehru himself described himself as the last Englishman to rule India.  

What is odd about Tara Chand's work is that it came out in 1967. India had not only been partitioned on the basis of religion, it had fought two wars with Pakistan which claimed to be a completely separate 'nationality' on the basis of its people spiritual and cultural inheritance from Arabia. 

The only conquerors who established permanent empires

not permanent at all as Tara Chand could clearly see 

over the greater part of India were the Turks

who originate amongst the Altai mountains in far away Mongolia. 

The achievement of freedom by India is a unique phenomenon.

Nonsense! Burma, Ceylon, Pakistan etc. became free at around the same time. The Brits had wanted to make their colonies self-administering and self-garrisoning as far as possible. They hoped India would become a Federation like South Africa or Canada. Instead, the country split on the basis of religion. First Buddhist Burma broke away and then, ten years later, Muslim majority provinces formed themselves into Pakistan. The Hindus of India chose to hang together rather than once again repeat the mistakes of the past. 

It lay in the transformation of a civilisation into a nationality.

Like Rome merging into Italy or China becoming unified under Qin Shi Huang.  

It is the fulfilment or nationality through the establishment  of national sovereignty.

Like Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria etc. becoming free of Ottoman rule.  

It is throughout the course of its advance a movement directed an much against the violence of the other as against the unreason of the self.

Fuck off! The country split up because of ethnic cleansing. Did Tara Chand not remember 'Direct Action Day'? Had he forgotten the vast blood letting of Partition?  

In essence it is an ethical struggle both in relation to the foreigner as well as members of its own body.

What was so ethical about killing those of another religion? When Nehru became PM in Delhi, its Muslim population represented one third of the whole. One year later it had dropped to five percent.

The fact is, if India had lost the 1965 War there would have been massive ethnic cleansing of Muslims.  

And where similar struggles have been accompanied with bloodshed, the movement in India, though intense and accompanied with much suffering, was non-violent.

People were non-violently stabbed to death.  

The history of freedom is a dialectic process,

No. It is the history of killing those who try to take it away. England was free because it killed lots of Frenchies or Krauts in periodic wars.  

Its first step was antithetical in so far as it amounted to the destruction of the old order.

Not in India. The new Emperor or Prime Minister took over the existing administration & revenue system.  

This is the argument of the process which started in the middle of the eighteenth century

when the East India took over the Diwani (tax farming rights) of Bengal. It then took over the Nizamat (administration). Bengal remained peaceful enough under their rule. Sadly, when they departed, the place turned to shit.  

and culminated in the revolt of 1857.

Only two of the Company's 5 armies revolted. The Sikhs were happy to ally with the Brits to crush the rebels in Delhi.  

The second step is the emergence of a new order which gradually gathers momentum after 1857.

The Brits started to reform the administration after Direct Rule was established. By the 1880s there was some attempt to create 'representative institutions'. Sadly, the Indians liked talking bollocks rather than raising productivity by solving collective action problems. Thus the Brits dictated the scope and scale of devolution of power.  

,The third step is one of conflict and synthesis of the spirit of the old order and the new, of the East and the West, and the coming into the world of a new individual -the Indian nation State.

Which was admitted to the League of Nations in 1919. BTW, the Republic of India is the successor state of the Dominion of India which was the successor state of the Indian Empire which was the successor of the Mughal Empire which was the successor of the Sultanate. 

Remarkably, the whole of the first two volume of 'History of Freedom Struggle' has no information on any such thing. Finally, in the fourth volume, the central question is addressed- viz. was Congress a Hindu party or did it really represent the whole of India? If it was Hindu it should have pushed for partition & thus got what the Irish got in 1922. If it wasn't Hindu- what the fuck was it? 

He mentions the Labour Party's initial support for Indian Independence

After assuming office the tune changed.

Why? Gandhi had unilaterally surrendered in 1922. Thus Olivier, not Col. Wedgwood, became Secretary for India.  

The accepted maxim of British politics that the Indian question was not a party question but a matter of national policy guided the Labour Government, as Reading told the Assembly on January 31, 1924, “It is the policy of the British nation and not of any party.”

Reading was a Liberal.  

All the old well-worn arguments were trotted out by the Labour spokesmen in Parliament. The claim of the Congress that its demand embodied the national will was denied. The Congress was declared a Hindu organisation.

Churchill would later add that it was a High Caste Hindu organization which aimed to oppress the Muslim and the 'depressed class' Hindus. Ambedkar & Mandal heartily agreed.  

Coatman, the editor of India, the official annual publication of the Government of India, writes : The Congress Party “is in fact, almost entirely a Hindu party, and from its beginning in the middle eighties has never been anything but predominantly Hindu.

Gandhi admitted this in an article he published in 1939. Congress was indeed Hindu but since Hindus are non-violent, the Brits should hand over the Army to Congress because otherwise the Muslims & the Punjabis (regardless of creed) would grab everything for themselves.  

Outside India the belief is widely current that Congress is a democratic party. This is literally the exact reverse of the truth.

It was under the thrall of the Maha-crackpot before becoming a wholly dynastic party owned by Nehru's descendants by primogeniture.  

The Congress Party is pre-eminently the party of privilege and vested interest. The success of the Congress Party’s agitation would mean the replacement of British rule by the rule of a theocratic and plutocratic oligarchy. Further, the Congress Party adopted some,, and anticipated other features of the characteristic technique of Fascism.”

e.g the Congress Seva Dal. 

 

When Labour returned to power in 1929, things looked more promising. The Viceroy returned from London to announce on October 31, 1929 that a Round Table Conference would be held as early as possible. Moreover it contained the following declaration : “I am authorized on behalf of His Majesty’s Government to state clearly that in their judgement it is implicit in the declaration of 1917 that the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress, as therein contemplated, is the attainment of Dominion Status.'

Surely, that should have been the end of the story? It had become clear that Dominion status meant independence (because Canada's refusal to engage militarily against Turkey had proved this). 

A conference of Indian leaders of various parties met at New Delhi immediately after the Viceroy’s announcement and after two days’ discussion issued a statement on November 2 1929. It accepted the Viceroy’s declaration subject to certain conditions, namely, that the discussion at the Round Table Conference should be on the basis of Dominion Status for India, that the representation of progressive political organizations should be effective and that among them the share of the Indian National Congress should be predominant, and that in order to create a calm atmosphere a policy of general conciliation should be adopted.

In other words, Congress was demanding that power- including control of the Army- be transferred to them. Also, their activists should be left alone to do what they liked- i.e. de facto, they would be in charge immediately.  

To Jawaharlal Nehru, the President-elect of the Congress of 1929 it was a bitter pill to swallow. It caused him great distress to give up the demand for independence, but for the sake of avoiding a split he allowed himself to be coaxed to sign.

The alternative was to go back to sulking in a jail cell. Half a loaf is better than no bread.  

But hardly had the ink on the manifesto dried when a debate was raised on the announcement of Irwin in the House of Lords. Reading, the ex-Viceroy,. called attention to the statement of the Viceroy and asked the Government to state why the announcement was made before the Commission had reported, and whether it indicated a change of policy regarding the period in which Dominion Status could be attained. He objected to the use of the term Dominion Status, which was likely to raise false hopes in India. Birkenhead in a strongly worded speech accused the Government of yielding to the threat of civil disobedience, charged it with mishandling the situation and affirmed : “No man who has or who ought to retain a character for sanity or responsibility can assign any proximate period to the date at which you can conceive of India becoming a Dominion Status.” Both the Liberal and Conservative Lords expressed their disapproval and annoyance. But Lords Parmoor and Passfield on behalf of the Labour Government assured the House that the arrangement did not mean any departure from settled policy, for all that the Viceroy had done was to remove doubts concerning the ultimate goal of British policy as defined in the proclamation of August 20, 1917. Lord Parmoor agreed to “the necessity of keeping political matters out of all India affairs and questions; there was not the slightest difference between Lord Reading and the Government”.

Irwin had been appointed by a previous administration. On taking over from Reading, the biggest problem he faced was communal riots. He was foolish enough to think Gandhi could help in this matter. His declaration was on the basis of his conversation with the new PM & the Secretary of State to India. It was a different matter than the administration decided to walk-back on what had previously been their policy.  

In the House of Commons Baldwin, leader of the Conservatives, and Lloyd George of the Liberals were critical. Both deplored that the Viceroy’s announcement was made before the Commission had reported. Lloyd George categorically stated, “Both political parties (Conservative and Liberal) protested before the Declaration was issued. .. . That means that they were opposed to it. ... The first time action has been taken which has divided the nation in reference to India.”

Labour realised that its voters had no interest in India. They couldn't afford to expend Parliamentary time and political capital on the matter. Let there be a consensus or else let the thing drag out while they got on with addressing issues which directly affected the working class.  

He asked the Government to explain what it thought about the Indian interpretation of the obscure phrases in the Declaration, for “it has created an impression in India that it is intended immediately, without delay, to confer full Dominion Status on India, and that the Joint Conference which has been summoned is for the purpose of framing a scheme. Baldwin said he had given his personal approval subject to the condition that the consent of the Simon Commission was previously obtained, which, he pointed out, was not done.

Congress should have welcomed Simon & Co to get them to sign off on the thing.  

Lloyd George maintained that “the ultimate goal could only be attained by stages and the length and number of those stages must be determined gradually from time to time by the success that attended the experiment at each stage.” Wedgwood Benn, the Secretary of State for India, in his reply gave two reasons why the announcement was made. In the first place, it was necessary to allay the doubts which had arisen in India regarding British intentions; and secondly, “to make a good atmosphere for the Report'’. He was sure that the two objects had been achieved and a great change had taken place in the spirit of India, and that justified the action of Government. He refused to answer Lloyd George’s question whether he agreed with the interpretation put upon the declaration by the Indian leaders.

He wasn't a mind reader. Who knows what darkies on a distant sub-continent think about anything?  

The debate in Parliament and specially the statements of the representatives of Government had a devastating effect on Indians. It was clear to them that they had been misled in their belief that the Conference would discuss the question of the constitution of India on the basis of Dominion Status.

This is perfect true. In 1927 my grandfather met a White dude who said 'Good morning'. He interpreted this to mean 'If you take off all your clothes and prance around with a radish up your bum, the British Parliament will make you Emperor of Yorkshire.'. He felt very bitter that he had been misled by this cunning Whitey.  

Whatever might have been the intentions of Irwin, he was badly let down both by the leaders of the opposition and the Government.

No. When Labour came to power, he changed tack. When they fell, he was vindicated because, like Reading before him, he'd given Gandhi just enough rope to hang himself. The next Viceroy would not need to bother with talking to Congress. Either they took what they were offered or they could rot in jail. 

I should explain, Gandhi's demand, at the Second Round Table Conference, that the Army be handed over to Congress alienated all the other parties. 

The much disillusioned and irritated Indian leaders met on 18th November at Allahabad to review the developments since their Delhi meeting. They, however, resolved to stand by the Delhi manifesto and await till the Lahore Congress session for further action.

At Lahore symbolic Independence was declared.  

Subsequently Patel and Sapru saw Irwin and then on December 23 Gandhiji, Motilal, Patel, Sapru and Jinnah interviewed the Viceroy, who explained that it was impossible in any way to prejudge the action of the Conference or to restrain the liberty of Parliament. Thus the demand that the Round Table Conference should meet for the purpose of drafting the Indian constitution on the basis of Dominion Status was finally turned down.

In other words, Labour has lost interest in India. British voters saw the mess made in Ireland. Why fix what isn't broken? If Congress liked sulking in jail, jail them by all means.  

The Viceroy wrote after the interview to the Secretary of State, “They (the protagonists of Congress) really were very impossible and left me more than usually depressed about the lack of political sense that extremist politicians habitually betray.”

Congress had convinced itself that was itself the Indian Parliament. The British Parliament should treat it as an equal. But, it was the British Parliament which commanded the Army and Civil Service in India. Congress commanded nothing. All it could do was go sulk in jail from time to time.  

His impression was that the Congress leaders were convinced that they would not be able to surmount the deep-seated difference among the Indian representatives and would consequently fail to present an agreed scheme of the constitution.

In other words, they knew that non-Congress people didn't think Congress was an actual Parliament.  

Therefore they were trying to find excuses for not attending the Conference. 

They didn't attend the First Conference but let Gandhi attend the Second because Jail is very boring- yaar. Consider Nehru's position-  he was arrested on April 14, 1930  and released on October 11. Then he was arrested again in October 19, 1930  and held till January 26, 1931. The Gandhi-Irwin pact came in March but Gandhi's attendance of the Round Table Conference was a failure and so Nehru was back in jail from December 1931 to 1935. Congress then had a choice. Either accept what the Brits had unilaterally imposed and fight elections and form Ministries or get bypassed completely. They chose the former course but resigned when war was declared. Jail had become a habit. 

Tara Chand was a scholar of Islam & had been an Ambassador to Iran. However, he could not envisage Islam as a political program- which is what it became in Iran after the fall of the Shah. This blindspot of his meant that he could not bring himself to admit that Pakistan was a separate country.

Against Jawaharlal’s contention that there were only two parties in India, Jinnah’s outburst asserting the existence of three was justified.

Which is why Pakistan exists.  

But the argument by which it was supported was false, for by no stretch of imagination could the two propositions of Jinnah involved in his assertion be accepted, viz,, (1) that the Hindus and the Muslims had nothing in common, and were, therefore, two separate nations,

yet such is the case 

and (2) that all Muslims of the Indian subcontinent constituted a separate nation, and therefore needed a separate state.

but that is what they wanted and that is what they got.  

Apart from the fact that the differences between the Hindus and the Muslims in culture and modes of living were highly magnified,

one may say the same of the Catholic Irishman and the Protestant Ulsterman.  

it is relevant to point out that even in the matter of religion the Indian Muslims were more Indian in outlook than foreign Muslims.

So what? They were closer to foreign Muslims in their hatred of Kaffirs. Hindu Indians were closer to Christian Greeks in their hatred of Muslim oppressors.  

An eminent authority on Islam and a sympathetic observer of Pakistan affairs writes: “Islam in the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent is sui generis on account of centuries of proximity with Hinduism and of long Muslim minority rule over a Hindu majority.”

Pakistan was and is sui generis in its hatred of India. Turks or Iranians or Saudis have no particular desire to slaughter Hindus. 

Another equally serious cause of misunderstanding was the conffict of views concerning the Muslim League’s demand for ensuring the security of Muslim interests. Jawaharlal asked what were these interests. For they were either cultural and religious, or political. So far as the first type was concerned, the Congress had solemnly declared, not once but many a time, that they would be safeguarded by the Constitution to the complete satisfaction of the Muslims.

Also, if the Constitution abolished death, nobody would die.  

With regard to the second type, his view was that the political interests were by and large economic interests, interests concerned with the production and distribution of wealth.

Nehru didn't seem to understand that Muslim entrepreneurs wanted the Government to give contracts to Muslims. Hindu contractors wanted the opposite.  

By their very nature they were bound to be common to all the Indian people, irrespective of religious, social and cultural differences.

The interest of Coca Cola are the same as Pepsi Cola- right? That is why Pepsi often publishes advertisements saying 'If you like Pepsi, why not try Coke?'  

They could not, therefore, admit of differentiation on the basis of community.

Nehru himself has written that the British government gave contracts to British firms. He knew very well that the party which controlled the Municipality favoured those who contributed financially to it. Moreover, as Jinnah said, Muslims in Congress were 'show-boys'. Azad records his disappointment that Nehru didn't appoint non-Hindu CMs though qualified candidates existed in Bihar & Bombay.  

The creation of Pakistan was good for Muslim bureaucrats, soldiers and business magnates. The creation of India was good for Hindus (and elite Parsis and Christians) in the same manner. 

With Labour's victory in 1945, Freedom for the Sub-Continent became inevitable. Atlee wanted to get out as quickly as possible. The British working class did not want to waste a single drop of blood on India.

On September 16, Wavell returned to India and on 19th September made the important announcement on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, firstly, that it was intended to convene as soon as possible the constitution-making body, and immediately after the elections to ascertain from the representatives of the Legislative Assemblies in the pro¬ vinces, “whether the proposals contained in the 1942 declaration are acceptable or whether some alternative or modified scheme is pr ferable secondly, that it was intended to consult the representatives of the Indian States in what way they could take part in the const tution-making body; thirdly, that the government were considering the draft of a treaty which would be concluded between Great Britain and India; fourthly, that a new Executive Council would be brought into being with the support of the main Indian parties to deal with the economic and social problems and work out the future position of India in the new world order. Attlee made a broadcast on India from London on the same day, viz., 19th September, and drew attention to the King’s Speech which promised,, “My Government will do their utmost to promote, in conjunction with the leaders of Indian opinion, early realization of full selfgovernment in India.”

How was this different from Congress had previously demanded? The answer is that Congress would not inherit everything. Places which voted for them would be theirs. Places which didn't wouldn't. Some of the Princely States might be viable on their own. Others would have to make their own arrangements with the successor state.  

He announced that the Government would act m accordance with the spirit and intention of the Cripps offer. Then he went on to repeat the announcement made by Wavell in India. The All-India Congress Committee met at Bombay from September 21 to September 23. Vallabhbhai Patel moved the resolution on the Wavell proposals, as follows : “that the proposals now made are, in the opinion of the AICC, vague, inadequate and unsatisfactory”, and “in order to demonstrate the will of the people, especially on the issue of the immediate transfer of power, the AICC resolves that the forthcoming elections be contested.”

In other words, Congress had to take what was on offer otherwise the Brits would pass power to some other party.  

An amendment was moved to the resolution “urging that the elected representatives of the Constituent Assembly of areas in which the Muslims were in a majority should be free to mould their own destiny and to make their own decision whether they should join the Indian Union or not”, was opposed by Jawaharlal Nehru and Patel and lost.

Congress didn't want to be blamed for partition.  

To give effect to the second part of the resolution of the All-India Congress Committee and to make preparations for the coming elections the Congress Working Committee met early in December at Calcutta. The Committee drew up the election manifesto which

was a pack of lies 

declared : The goal of India was a free democratic republic with fundamental  rights and liberties of all citizens guaranteed.

till the First Amendment took them away 

The republic would be a federation with autonomy for the constituent units,

It was highly unitary. The centre could create or dissolve Provinces at will.  

and legislatures elected under universal adult franchise.

Ceylon already had this.  

The federation would be a willing union of parts, in which the federal union government would be given a minimum of common and essential subjects, with a list of additional subjects which might be entrusted by the provinces.

This was pure bluff. Nehru had always been against a Federation.  

Besides the structure of the independent state of India, the manifesto explained the objectives and functions of the state, and India’s foreign policy. But the dominant note of the manifesto was freedom for India had been  won through confidence and strength.

The confidence and strength of the Allies who had prevented it being conquered by the Japanese.  

I think, the crucial question was always command of the Army. Once enough Muslim officers (as well as their bureaucratic counterparts) had come together, the League could proceed with their demand for Pakistan because they would have enough trained people to run a country. Some were pessimistic. How will you deal with the frontier tribes or an Afghan invasion? It must be said, once Jinnah got rid of 'the Frontier Gandhi' his people were able to do good enough deals not to get bogged down in a tribal war. 

Gandhi & Nehru were incapable of seeing any issue save from their own crazy point of view. Tara Chand follows them. He had seen Pakistan fight two wars with India. It was not a 'mirage'. Though much smaller than India it was so much better armed that the '65 war had been a close call.

The fact is that for forty years the British rulers had been inciting the Muslims to counter the Congress in order to thwart the demand for self-government.

Moreover, the Brits had somehow convinced them that Islam is not against idol-worship or eating beef.  

The culmination of this course of policy was the Muslim League demand for Pakistan which received the blessings of Churchill, Amery, Linlithgow, as well as the sympathy of the Labour Party leaders—Attlee, Greenwood etc.

It was also accepted by Gandhi, Nehru, Patel etc.  

The Second World War brought home to the British leaders the futility of the attempt to maintain the integrity of the Empire.

No. It strengthened their resolve to turn it into a Commonwealth. This had already been done for South Africa. Sadly there were too few Whites in India for a similarly speedy transfer of power.  

But now although they were convinced that the transfer of power could not be withheld, they differed concerning the future of India—unity or division.

They wanted Federation. But whoever controlled the Army could tear up the Federation. Once the Army polarised on religious grounds, partition was inevitable.  

This difference was reflected in the opinions of the Cabinet Mission ministers, and was responsible for its failure. Once again the British bureaucracy in India and its chief the Viceroy sticking to their notorious anti-Congress stance,

British bureaucrats had worked well enough under Congress Ministries.  

prevented the solution of the deadlock, destroyed the chances of the realisation of a united and free India and helped to establish the entirely crazy and inherently unworkable state of Pakistan.

Yet Pakistan existed and still exists. Meanwhile Indira turned Congress into a Dynastic party. House of Windsor was replaced by House of Nehru.  

Unfortunately the mirage of Pakistan had so hypnotized the Muslims and their leaders that their faculties of critical examination were benumbed.

Sadly, it was the idea that Muslims would be fairly treated in Nehru's India which proved to be a mirage. Once the Custodian of Evacuee Property decided you were planning to emigrate, you had not choice but to do so and hope you could get some compensation in Pakistan. 

Tara Chand holds firmly to the theory that Britain followed a 'divide and rule strategy' when the truth is they unified the country & permitted people of every religion to hold office. Look at the 'Chieftain's schools' they set up. Mayo or Aitchison admitted Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. In the Army, there were troops of all faiths. 

The British policy was to magnify the differences partly no doubt because it was necessary for the preservation of the Empire,

it was hazardous to it. Communal riots destroy the tax-base and tie up troops.  

partly also because they came to believe in the impossibility of the Hindus and Muslims developing the consciousness of a common nationality.

Because Muslims said they had a different nationality.  

This belief became a dogma that underlay all thinking about constitutional reforms of all parties—Conservative, Liberal and Labour.

This is itself a dogma which may have been plausible at a time when people expected Pakistan to collapse and beg to be admitted to the Indian Union.  

Morley, Montagu and Lloyd George, the Liberals, were as much influenced by it as MacDonald, Olivier, Attlee, Cripps and PethickLawrence, the Labourites, and as Birkenhead, Templewood, Amery, Chamberlain and Churchill, the Conservatives.

Why? Because Hindu leaders made demands only intelligible to Hindus. Gandhi, in particular, was a crack-pot. A Hindu who followed Gandhi might say 'true, spinning khaddar is not beneficial in any way BUT by doing so I will be re-born on the paradisal planet of Vaikunta where there is no sex or dirty pictures or delicious kebabs to eat.' A Muslim who followed Gandhi was either stupid or an opportunist or both stupid and an opportunist.

Sadly Nehru's obsession with Socialism meant that India was not able to rise in the manner of Japan etc.- viz. by first gaining economies of scope & scale in textiles etc. Islam was founded by a 'tajir'- a Merchant'. Tijarat- free enterprise is the foundation of prosperity- 'Imarat'. West Pakistan soon began to rise above India in per capita GNP.  There was some truth to the jibe 'nanga bhooka Hindustan'- hungry, naked India. 

The difference between the parties did not relate to the communal question, but to the question of transfer of responsibility and self-government. Strange as it might appear, all the parties seemed to agree on the subject of Indian unity, yet all of them followed the course which led to division.

Why? If they couldn't keep Ireland united- though it was on their doorstep- fuck could they do about India ?  

Morley and Montagu condemned separate electorates—the seed of partition—in theory,, but introduced them in the Acts of 1909 and 1919.

Because they didn't want Indian Muslims to run amok. This would harm Britain in the Islamic world.  

Simon and Attlee criticised them and declared them injurious to nation-building yet recommended them for the Act of 1935.

Because Gandhi had alienated even the Sikhs and Non-Brahmin Madrasi Hindus at the Second Round Table Conference. Churchill wasn't stupid. His attack on Congress is exactly the same as the current Muslim/Ambedkarite attack on the BJP- viz. that everything it does is to further Brahmin domination. The problem is that Modi is 'backward caste'. It is Rahul who is the 'janeodhari' Brahmin.  

At the Round Table Conference Wedgwood Benn expressed his strong disapproval, but Ramsay MacDonald in his Award not only upheld them for the Muslims but also prescribed them for the Depressed Classes and several other groups and interests.

Because they were under-represented in the bureaucracy. Jobs for the boys is what democratic politics is all about. Babbling about Ahimsa or Prophet Marx butters no parsnips.  

The Act of 1935 entrenched them in the constitution. Zetland, Amery and Linlithgow put the seal upon the Muslim separatism by granting the veto on constitutional advance and administrative reform to the Muslim League.

Whom Nehru refused to conciliate. The truth is, it couldn't be done. Congress really was a Hindu party though it didn't want to admit it even to itself.  

The War Cabinet under Churchill’s lead and with the acquiescence of Attlee and Cripps offered separation of provinces in the new constitution on communal basis. The Cabinet mission of three Labour Ministers seconded the proposal of the War Cabinet and provided the machinery to give it effect. The process was completed by Mountbatten, the agent of the Labour Government. In the face of this continuous, persistent British-backed design to accentuate communal separateness and the ceaseless propaganda through government’s policies and measures, and by British writer, historians, missionaries and officials, which hammered into the minds of the Hindus and the Muslims that their differences were deep and insoluble and their aspirations of national unity vain and intractable, is it surprising that people so dependent for their livelihood and for the satisfaction of their wants upon their rulers, should have succumbed to it ?

Very true. It is noteworthy that once the Brits fucked off, the Nehru-Liaquat plan caused the reunification of India & Pakistan. This proves Tara Chand's contention that Pakistan was a mirage.  

It is easy to blame them for yielding to such evil suggestions.

Muslim League blames Hindus for yielding to the evil suggestion that they shouldn't convert to the true religion immediately. Also, Bengali Hindus & Punjabi Sikhs should have refused to let their Provinces be partitioned. Sadly, they were dupes of British propaganda. 

But considering that throughout the nineteenth century when the Indian mind was opening to modern ideas and the Indians looked up to the British as not only divinely-appointed dispensers of peace and order in their country torn by dissensions, wars and anarchy, but also as their teachers in the arts of government and administration and in modern knowledge and science, it is not difficult to see why the propaganda succeeded so well.

Come to think of it, Hindus in Bengal did oppose the partition of their province for mainly religious reasons. But they changed their mind after bitter experience reminded them of what Muslims do to Kaffirs when they can act with impunity.  

What made Partition inevitable? The answer is that Liaquat, as Finance Minister, found that most Muslim officers were loyal to the league as were Muslim soldiers. Pakistan had enough trained personnel too come into being. Thus when Liaquat checkmated Patel (as Home Minister) & threatened to tax the Hindu industrialist out of existence- the die was cast. Hindu bureaucrats were already avowing their loyalty to Congress. Few Muslims could be trusted in the same way. Once the Army got polarised, it was obvious that the only way to abort the Pakistan proposal was by fighting a prolonged war. 

Even as late as 1946 when mutual suspicions and jealousies had been stoked into a raging fire, it was not absolutely certain that some form of political or constitutional unity would not be established. Till that year Jinnah was not sure he would achieve outright division.

Would there be enough Muslim officers? Would they be loyal? There is no point accepting the top job if nobody carries out your instructions either because they are incompetent or have divided loyalties.  

He was even making discrete enquiries from B. N. Rau, the Constitutional Adviser of the Constituent Assembly, concerning the implications of Federation.

There was a chance that the Muslims would get both undivided Punjab & Bengal & maybe extra representation at the Centre.  

His acceptance of the entry of the Muslim League in the Interim Government was significant. What clinched the matter was Mountbatten’s hasty resolve to give up the pursuit of unity which he was enjoined to ensure by Attlee, who had told him, “It is the definite objective of His Majesty’s Government to obtain a unitary Government for British India and the Indian States within the British Commonwealth.”

This was the Federal proposal with a weak centre. But this was already known to be unworkable.  

According to Mosley, “By the end of his first three weeks in India, the Viceroy may not have decided that a unitary India was impossible, but he had certainly reached the conclusion that the attainment of it would be a long and ticklish job, fraught with danger and uncertainty. And Lord Mountbatten was in India not to risk failure but to achieve success and quickly.”

Like Wavell he saw that the place could very quickly turn into a shit storm. Should the White population be evacuated? Mountbatten's great insight was that Indians hated each other much more than they resented the European. He handed over power before the blood-letting began. White people remained safe while darkies slaughtered each other.  

V. P. Menon confirms this. He writes, “In the course of his talks with the party leaders, particularly with Jinnah and his colleagues, he became more and more convinced that there was no prospect of an agreed solution on that basis. So he asked his ‘Dickie Birds’'- an all-British consultative committee—to produce a constitution on an alternative plan of partition. The broad principles of the plan were : (1) that the responsibility for partition, if it comes, is to rest fairly upon the Indians themselves;

His job was to shield Atlee from blame. After all, he was a sailor, not a lawyer or politician. By taking all the blame, Mountbatten was actually taking none of it. What was truly surprising was that Mountie became Nehru's best friend.  

(2) the Provinces, generally speaking, shall have the right to determine their own future; (3) Bengal and the Panjab are to be notionally partitioned for voting purposes; (4) the predominantly Moslem Sylhet district in Assam is to be given the option of joining the Moslem part of Bengal; and (5) general elections to be held in North-West Frontier Province.”

Basically, the plan was to hand over power to whoever was willing to take it and then scarper. Since Britain owed India a lot of money, the successor governments would have to do a deal beneficial to London in order to utilize 'sterling balances'. If you owe the Bank a little money, it owns you. If you it a fuck-ton of money, you own the Bank. The Empire turned into a Commonwealth because 'it was too big to fail'. India kept a British admiral till 1958.  

By May 2, the plan conceived in precipitate hurry and prepared in secrecy was despatched to England for the approval of His Majesty’s Government. Later it had to be scrapped because of Nehru’s strong dissent. The second draft was then produced by V.P. Menon, but in conditions of even greater haste, actually in four hours on 16th May.  The Menon draft made partition the basis of constitution-making but did not leave the provinces the right to determine their future.

Mountie knew that Menon was reporting to Congress. He saw partition was the best option for Nehru & that Atlee wanted him to put his thumb on the scale in Congress's favour. That's why he remained best pals with Nehru.  

It took just five minutes to secure the approval of His Majesty’s Government. In five minutes India’s destiny was stamped, sealed and delivered.

by VP Menon- who had to drop out of school after the Eighth standard. This didn't stop him rising to become the most important native official (Reforms Commissioner) under the Brits.  

On the 3rd of June, Pakistan—thanks to Mountbatten’s persuasive powers

He was a sailor not a silver tongued orator.  

which not only overcame the opposition of the Congress, the hesitations of the Muslim League, the fears of the Sikhs, and the misgivings of the Princes, but also the doubts of the Labour and Conservative parties—had become an accepted fact.

The fact is the Brits were bankrupt & wanted to return home to rebuild their bombed out cities. Within ten years, the British working man 'never had it so good'. This was also true of Indians in the Sixties or Seventies, who were able to settle in Britain.  

XIV. Mountbatten’s Strategy Misfires The most controversial measure of the Viceroy was the decision to advance the date of transfer of power from June 1948 to August 15, 1947. Mountbatten’s admirers praised him for “sheer intellectual range and vigour” (Ian Stephens),

Stephens was homosexual. He thought Mountie was a dreamboat.  

for accomplishing “a task before which anybody would have quailed, but it was one which seemed verily to tempt the gods” (V. P. Menon), for “the achievement by any reckom ing and however qualified, was very great” (Hodson) and for “the speed and decision with which he pursued its (plan’s) fulfilment. He made mistakes, pushed the wheel of history at times a little too forcefully, but few men could have done better and most would have done worse.” (Michael Edwardes).

Opinion would turn against Mountbatten soon enough. He came across as a vain and empty headed man who had done well because he was a semi-Royal and looked like a matinee idol. The truth is, whatever mistakes he might have made as a military man (which only naval experts can decide upon), he did the job Atlee assigned to him and continued to shield Atlee in the Nineteen Seventies.  

On this issue Mountbatten recorded his reasons in his conclusions appended to the Report on the Last Viceroyalty submitted to His Majesty’s Government in September 1948. His defence for expediting the transference of power to the Indians was on these lines : The Government had as early as February 20, 1947, declared its intention to quit, definitely by June 1948. This date was advanced to August 15, 1947, as a result of the Mountbatten plan of May 16, which had been communicated to the Congress and the League leaders, and announced on June 2. The earlier date was adopted in order to cut short the interval between the announcement and its implementation, because of the fear of growing impatience of the leaders and the increasing tension among the communities as the ominous incidents in Bengal, the Panjab and the North-West Frontier Province indicated.

In other words, Mountie would be a 'lame duck'. Nehru kept him on, because he trusted him and because (as Azad records) he was able to get through his files very quickly. Moreover, he was very good at maintaining esprit de corps. These are the qualities that distinguish the Naval officer.  

Delay might have jeopardised the precarious agreement between the parties achieved after years of wrangling. Then the earlier date was favoured both by the Congress and the League, and was therefore expected to ensure goodwill among the communities, to soothe ruffled tempers and minimise chances of conflict. 

Gandhi had said to Wavell, much to the latter's disgust,  'if India wants a blood-bath, it must have it'. Without the avoidable bloodshed of Partition (i.e. had there been an orderly exchange of population supervised by the Army) the two States might have created some sort of Zollverein or other such quasi-union. Why didn't this happen? One theory is that neither Nehru nor Jinnah wanted Bengal & Punjab to dominate the new countries. Afterall, Jinnah & (to a lesser extent) Liaquat were mujahirs for whom Pakistan was the promised land. The cow-belt in India, too, wanted to dominate even though it was poor and backward. 

Tara Chand concludes thus

So far as the British ruling class was concerned, its conduct was naturally determined by the principle of self-preservation.

No. That's why it didn't do a deal with Hitler. Like the British working class, the ruling was motivated by patriotism & a desire to preserve British liberties.  

Placed in the midst of the millions of India the empire could be preserved only by dividing the vast numbers into competing groups and by balancing the groups against one another.

No. The East India Company had grown and grown in India by uniting people of different faiths on the basis of their getting paid regularly. Also, if you killed your Uncle, you didn't inherit his property even if sent a goodly sum to the Governor. Instead you were tried for murder. The British Raj wasn't perfect but if you worked for the Government you got paid exactly what you were owed. The District Collector didn't say 'send me your wife for a couple of nights. After that, I'll think about paying you your arrears'. Also, a pension granted to a General who surrendered a fortress to the Brits would be paid punctually decade after decade, century after century. The Permanent Settlement really was permanent. The new Governor didn't take a bribe from your cousin to award the property to him. 

This policy needed justification which was provided by two convictions, (1) that the communities in India constituted irreconcilable social units which could never become a nation;

Yet the Brits ensured that India was admitted to the League of Nations.  If they had believed in 'divide and rule' then they would have created a few hundred separate states in the directly ruled part of India. 

and (2) in such an aggregation of societies and communities divided by race, language, religion, caste and custom it was impossible to discover a central representative core which could be identified as the self of the nation and to which the responsibility for the whole of the people could be transferred.

British officials like Hume & Wedderburn did set up the Indian National Congress. But it wasn't a Parliament. Pretending otherwise was foolish more particularly after Gandhi forced members to spin khaddar. Indeed, to become a member of Rahul's Congress you still need to declare yourself a 'habitual' spinner of not lies but cotton.  

In the second place the British sense of self-esteem and rectitude was supported by what they believed as the successful achievement of the British Raj—peace and order over a sub-continent in which 350 million human beings dwelt, a system of modern administration—^law and justice, a network of communications—railways, roads, post and telegraph—the organisation of a powerful army of defence, arrangements for social welfare—education, sanitation, and above all the arousing of the spirit of modernism—nationalism, secularism and science.

They could also point to British barristers like Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah etc.  

All that was needed for a healthy cattle-farm—wholesome food and drink, clean sheds and drainage, well-laid paths, security from the enemies—poisonous insects and beasts of prey—all with a purpose— fat abundant milk, rich meat and plenty—all was there, or at least much of it, but what differentiates the cattle-farm from the human habitat—the consciousness of self-direction—was absent.

Because Indians were stupid & didn't want to devote themselves to solving collective action problems such that productivity rose.  

But at last the dykes that imperialist engineering had built to keep the seas of freedom out were demolished by an immense tidal wave thrown up by many little-known tremendous forces rising out of the cavernous depths of the sea of humanity which engulfed the world and obliterated the familiar landmarks.

A lot of refugees were created. But a lot of 'familiar landmarks' remained. British built institutions survived- indeed, they thrive to this day in India. Sadly, Congress has become the property of a half Italian dynasty. But the BJP is purely indigenous. No doubt, if they remain in power, they will commission a series of books as stupid as Tara Chand's. Perhaps they already have. Nobody cares.