Shashi Tharoor's 'An Era of Darkness' makes two remarkable claims
1) Brahmins got control of the Raj and this created the obnoxious aspects of the caste system.
He writes-
The Brahmins enjoyed British patronage
This isn't true. The Brits were Christians and had no use for Hindu priests. The Brahmins enjoyed patronage from Hindus alone. Tharoor's Nair community did give Nambudris a pretty enviable position but over most of Hindu India, Brahmins remained poor in proportion to their piety.
over other groups and began considering themselves above all other castes, whom the British, internalizing Brahmin prejudice, thought of as lower castes.
This is crazy shit. Nairs may have 'internalized Brahmin prejudices' but the Brits thought Brahmins were shit because all Indians were shit.
The result was a remarkable preponderance of Brahmins in positions of importance in the British Raj. Brahmins, who were no more than a tenth of the population, occupied over 90 per cent of the positions available to Indians in government service, except the most menial ones; they dominated the professions open to Indians, especially lawyering and medicine; and they entered journalism and academia, so it was their voices that were heard loudest as the voices of Indian opinion.
So, under a foreign government, Brahmins came to the fore purely on the basis of merit. How wicked of them!
India had arguably been a far more meritocratic society before the British Raj settled down to enshrine the Brahmins in such a position of dominance.
The reverse must be the case. The British had no racial, cultural or religious reason to favor any particular type of Indian.
Tharoor himself is a member of a party of a dynastic type. Since Rahul claims to be a Saivite Brahmin, it follows it is a Brahmin dynasty. Interestingly, this dynasty is descended from a 'vakil' or legal representative of the British East India Company. Nehru described himself as the last Englishman to rule India. The current President of Tharoor's party is of Italian heritage.
By Tharoor's logic, Independent India remained an 'Area of Darkness' so long as this anglophone Brahmin dynasty ruled the country.
2) Tharoor also believes that the British used, not their Navy and Army, but Knowledge based strategies to control India. This was very wicked of them. India should be ruled by ignorance. There shouldn't be any laws. This begs the question as to why independent India has continued to use knowledge based instruments to improve policy making and governance.
Tharoor makes his case by the simple but effective strategy of telling obvious lies. Thus he writes-
The Indian Penal Code is no easier on straight women than on gays. Section 497,criminalizing adultery, punishes extramarital relationships involving married women but not married men. A husband can prosecute his wife for adultery, and a man having sexual relations with his wife, but a woman cannot sue her husband for having an extramarital relationship, provided his partner is not underage or married.
This was not true. There was a presumption that the wife had been coerced. A husband could not prosecute his wife for adultery, nor could she bring a criminal action against him. However, a man who seduced a married woman could be prosecuted. This conformed to Indian, not British, morality because Indians believe that women, by nature, are more pure than men. That's why India's Parliament did not change this law. The Bench struck it down because it conflicted with the basic structure of the constitution which requires gender equality.
Why does Tharoor pretend that a law which clearly says a woman can't be prosecuted for adultery actually says she can be so prosecuted? The wording of the law is clear. If someone abducts or seduces your wife, the police can jail the guy and liberate her. You don't have to go running to some gangster to get revenge. Of course, if the guy is a cop or a big time gangster you are shit out of luck.
497. Adultery.—Whoever has sexual intercourse with a person who is and whom he knows or has reason to believe to be the wife of another man, without the consent or connivance of that man, such sexual intercourse not amounting to the offence of rape, is guilty of the offence of adultery, and shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years, or with fine, or with both. In such case the wife shall not be punishable as an abettor.
Tharoor appears to be unaware that some American states continue to criminalize adultery.
This double standard, exposed in a series of recent cases, again reflects Victorian values rather than twenty-first century ideas of morality.
Whose twenty-first century ideas? That of Muslims? That of Syrian Christians? That of Hindus? Tharoor represents Muslims, Christians and Hindus from Kerala- not Canada.
Ironically, in all three cases, the British have revised their own laws, so none of the offences they criminalized in India are illegal in Britain.
But six American States retain laws against 'criminal conversation' and 'alienation of affection'.
One of the worst legacies of colonialism is that its ill effects outlasted the Empire.
India changed all sorts of laws. It got rid of polygamy for Hindus but it retained laws against sodomy and adultery. Why? The answer has nothing to do with some supposed colonial legacy. It has to do with the socially and religiously conservative nature of Indian society.
I do not mean to blame the British alone for the persistence of these injustices.
Indian legislators could have changed the laws in those respects from the Nineteen Thirties onward. They chose not to do so. From 1937 onward there were elected Governments in the Provinces. But the new rulers were more conservative than their predecessors.
But the British enshrined these laws that have proved so difficult to amend.
Lots of laws have been amended. There is nothing difficult about it at all. Why pretend that Indian Society isn't much more conservative than that of advanced Western countries? It is no accident that only Fiji, of all the 'New Commonwealth' countries had decriminalized sodomy- that too, as happened in India, by an action of the Bench.
Strikingly, no less an eminence than India’s head of state, President Pranab Mukherjee, chose the 155th anniversary of the Indian Penal Code to underscore the need for its thorough revision. Our criminal law, he declared, was largely ‘enacted by the British to meet their colonial needs’.
But those 'colonial needs' were the same as the needs of the State, no matter who runs it.
It needed to be revised to reflect our ‘contemporary social consciousness’ so that it could be a ‘faithful mirror of a civilization underlining the fundamental values on which it rests’.
Sadly, that 'civilization' is severely missing in India.
That Indians have not done this so far is, of course, hardly Britain’s fault, but by placing iniquitous laws on the books, Britain has left behind an oppressive legacy.
But Indians, by reason of being utterly shit at fighting, caused the British to rule over them. Thus the fact that India was 'oppressed' was a legacy of Indians being shit. Remarkably, after Independence, India became more, not less, shit. It turned into one vast begging bowl unable to feed or defend itself. It is this Nehruvian legacy- along with the cretin Rahul- which India is struggling to repudiate.
It is time for twenty-first-century India to get the government out of the bedroom, where the British were unembarrassed to intrude.
The Brits were not interested in Indian bedrooms. They were interested in securing the rule of law and putting down vigilantism and vendettas. It made sense to throw guys who fucked other people's wives or sons in jail. The alternative was to leave it to the aggrieved party to stick a knife in that fucker's back.
It is also past time to realize that the range of political opinion permissible in a lively and contentious democracy cannot be reconciled with the existence of a pernicious sedition law.
But India is a country where there has been massive extra-judicial killing to deal with genuine sedition. It makes sense to throw troublemakers into jail- or at least drag them through the courts for the next ten years- rather than wait for an insurrection which has to be put down by para-military forces sweeping through districts shooting anyone they think looks suspicious.
Tharoor, in his book blaming the Brits for all Ind's ills, quotes plenty of European scholars. What he is odd is that he comes from a part of India which was not ruled by the Brits and where the Indian Penal Code did not apply. Tharoor's own community had no problem with adultery etc but by the 1920's this had begun to change. Interestingly, it was the Travancore Legislative Council which took the lead in abolishing matriliny with the 1925 Nair Regulation Act and other similar acts for other communities. The Government of Madras followed this example to get rid of matriliny in 1933 while Cochin followed suit in 1938. In other words, the move to democracy in Tharoor's part of the world involved 'heteronormativity' and reduced female autonomy.
A similar point may be made about male homosexuality. In India and China, it was seen as 'pre-modern'. The thing needed to be stigmatized otherwise our lads in the Army would be constantly mounting each other rather than goose stepping on the parade ground. The Communists decided that adultery and sodomy represented 'bourgeois individualism'.
Kerala, of course, was a 'madhouse of caste'. Tharoor, who belongs to the dominant caste, knows this very well. Yet he pretends that casteism too was Britain's fault.
In his seminal book Castes of Mind, Dirks has explained in detail how it was, under the British, that ‘caste’ became a single term ‘capable of expressing, organizing, and above all “systematizing” India’s diverse forms of social identity, community, and organization.[A]s the result of a concrete encounter with colonial modernity during two hundred years of British domination…colonialism made caste what it is today.’
Nepal wasn't conquered by the Brits. Yet its caste system is similar to what obtains across the border. Clearly, this Dirks dude- who used to visit South India some fifty or sixty years ago- is as stupid as shit.
Dirks is critical of the British imperial role in the reification of caste, using their colonial power to affirm caste as the measure of all social things.
This 'reification' started happening because of pressure from Caste Associations in the late Victorian period and picked up pace with the transition to representative government from the 1920s onward. It increased greatly from the late Eighties in independent India.
In fact, caste, he says, ‘was just one category among many others, one way of organizing and representing identity. Moreover, caste was not a single category or even a single logic of categorization, even for Brahmins, who were the primary beneficiaries of the caste idea. Regional, village, or residential communities, kinship groups, factional parties, chiefly contingents, political affiliations, and so on could both supersede caste as a rubric for identity and reconstitute the ways caste was organized…
But, representative government has been associated with caste becoming the be all and end all of electioneering and democratic politics.
Under colonialism, caste was thus made out to be far more pervasive, far more totalizing, and far more uniform than it had ever been before.’
Only to the extent that the administration had to accommodate caste based countervailing power. But it is 'post-Mandal' politics which has turned caste into the most pervasive and totalizing force in Indian politics. The only silver lining is that Religion can trump caste- but only once ethnic cleansing appears likely.
This Dirks sees as a core feature of the colonial power to shape knowledge of Indian society.
When Dirks first came to India- in 1963- it was plausible to say that the wily Brahmins had got the Brits to impose caste and heteronormativity and homophobia on an innocent hippy population which was wholly preoccupied with gender bending orgies regardless of caste and creed. Once the Dravidian parties came to power, caste would disappear and great conga-lines of buggery would form across the length and breadth of the State. But caste in Tamil Nadu is now more important than ever- though, it must be said, Stalin has won on a less casteist, more pro-growth, platform than his opponents. But how long will this last?
Quite deliberately, he suggests, caste ‘became the colonial form of civil society’,
This is mad. There is no 'civil society' in a Colony unless it is progressing to self-governing status in which case it is ceasing to be a Colony. Caste only gained salience as this began to happen.
or, in Partha Chatterjee’s terms, the colonial argument for why civil society could not grow in India; it justified the denial of political rights to Indians who were, after all, subjects, not citizens and explained the unavoidable necessity of colonial rule.
Sinn Fein created a parallel legal system. Gandhi failed to do so. A society has to want to become 'Civil'. The thing can't be done by fiat.
Scholars who have studied precolonial caste relations dismiss the idea that varna—the classification of all castes into four hierarchical groups, with the Brahmins on top and even kings and warriors a notch beneath them—could conceivably represent a complete picture of reality (Kshatriya kings, for example, were never in practical terms subordinate to Brahmins, whom they employed, paid, patronized, heeded or dismissed as they found appropriate at different times).
Everybody dismisses varna, but then everybody also dismisses 'scholars'.
Nor could such a simplistic categorization reasonably organize the social identities and relations of all Indians across the vast subcontinent; alternative identities, sub-castes, clans and other formulations also existed and flourished in different ways at different places. The idea of the four-fold caste order stretching across all of India and embracing its complex civilizational expanse was only developed, modern scholars assert with considerable evidence, under the peculiar circumstances of British colonial rule. The British either did not understand, or preferred to ignore, the basic fact that the system need not have worked as described in theory.
This is deeply silly. The Brits did not admit the existence of varna. There was equality before the law- though, no doubt, the rich or those of higher status were let off lightly. The fact is much of India had been under Islamic rule before it came under the British. The vocabulary of the law and of the administration was Persianate. Hindu rulers themselves employed Muslim Dewans. Kayasths and Niyogi administrators prided themselves on their knowledge of Persian.
However, the transition to self-rule saw the rise of Sanskritic vocabulary and traditional Hindu ideas of how Society should be regulated. Thus Caste returns in Hindu majority parts of the Raj because Hindus- but nobody else- think in that shitty manner.
It is a separate matter that different endogamous communities may have their own inheritance laws. If a person dies intestate in a particular jurisdiction, a Judge may be obliged to inquire into what customary rules apply even if that jurisdiction has statute law in this respect.
Since Justice is a service industry, it makes sense for jurisdictions to promulgate codes applicable to particular sects so as to attract this type of , often very lucrative, legal work.
In the late eighteenth century, when the East India Company was establishing its stranglehold on India and its senior officials included some with a genuine interest in understanding the country, the British began to study the shastras, so they could develop a set of legal principles to help them adjudicate disputes in Indian civil society. Governor General Warren Hastings hired eleven pandits to create what became known as the Code of Gentoo Laws or the Ordinations of the Pandits. As the British could not read or interpret the ancient Sanskrit texts, they asked their Brahmin advisers to create the code based on religious Indian texts and their knowledge of Indian customs. The resulting output was an ‘Anglo-Brahminical’ text that arguably violated in both letter and spirit the actual practice: in letter, because it was imprecise in regard to the originals, and in spirit, because the pandits proceeded to take advantage of the assignment to favour their own caste, by interpreting and even creating sacrosanct ‘customs’ that in fact had no shastric authority. This served to magnify the problem of caste hierarchy in the country.
The Brits were looking for a Hindu equivalent to Auragazeb's al-Hidaya and Fatawa-i Alamgiri. Since the Judges were British, not Hindus or Muslims, they were free to reject inequitable suggestions made by Court Pundits or Maulvis. Thus British courts attracted custom precisely because the Pundit and Maulvi's authority was circumscribed though, the appearance was, the rules of Religion were being complied with.
Prior to this, scholars argue, disputes in Indian civil society were settled by jati or biradri, i.e. a person’s fate was decided within a community or clan by his own peers in accordance with their local traditions and values and without needing approval from any higher caste authority.
People were welcome to stick with this sort of collective decision making. However, there had always been a right of appeal to the ruler.
The pandits, instead of reflecting this widespread practice, cited doctrinal justifications from long-neglected texts to enshrine their status as the only authority figures, and most of the British took them at their word. (Some had their doubts. The most learned of British Orientalists, William Jones, who in 1797 founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta and served in the Supreme Court of Judicature, remarked, ‘I can no longer bear to be at the Mercy of our pandits who deal out Hindu Law as they please, and make it at reasonable rates, when they cannot find it ready made’. But Jones died tragically young and his wisdom was not replicated in his successors.) It was evident from a cursory look at Indian society that actual social practices did not necessarily follow the official or ‘shastric’ code, but the ancient texts were now cited, and given an inflexibility they did not in fact possess, essentially to restrict the autonomy of society and so control it more easily in the name of religious authority. This served the interests of British policy, which explicitly sought to ‘enumerate, categorize and assess their [colonial] populations and resources’ for administrative purposes.
What is remarkable about the Brits is that they themselves unearthed forgotten texts and gained a reputation for superior scholarship and ratiocinative skill. Thus the revival of Mitakshara law was due to the efforts of firstly Colebrooke and then Macnaghten. One result was that traditional Hindu Mimamsakas couldn't take the competition and were reconciled to Legislative codification on a non-Shastric kind.
It is in the interest of any Government to have smart scholarly judges. The Brits were good at this. Why? Law attracted, and still attracts, the brightest and the best. A lawyer consider elevation to the Bench to be a great privilege. In India, 'barristocrats' preferred to go into politics.
Ethnic, social, caste and racial classifications were conducted as part of an imperial strategy more effectively to impose and maintain British control over the colonized Indian population.
Nonsense! Killing people and taxing them heavily is how you control them. Once British bureaucrats started conducting Censuses, their power began to collapse.
The process also reaffirmed their initial conviction that the Brahmins, with their knowledge of the Vedas, were the most qualified and best suited as their intermediaries to rule India.
The British ruled India through Princes, very few of whom were Brahmins, and zamindars some of whom may have been. However, traditional administrative castes- e.g Kayasthas, Niyogis, Khattris etc continued to have salience.
The Brahmins enjoyed British patronage
No. They enjoyed patronage from Hindus alone. Tharoor's Nair community did give Nambudris a pretty enviable position but over most of Hindu India, Brahmins remained poor in proportion to their piety.
over other groups and began considering themselves above all other castes, whom the British, internalizing Brahmin prejudice, thought of as lower castes.
This is crazy shit. Nairs may have 'internalized Brahmin prejudices' but the Brits thought Brahmins were shit because all Indians were shit.
The result was a remarkable preponderance of Brahmins in positions of importance in the British Raj. Brahmins, who were no more than a tenth of the population, occupied over 90 per cent of the positions available to Indians in government service, except the most menial ones; they dominated the professions open to Indians, especially lawyering and medicine; and they entered journalism and academia, so it was their voices that were heard loudest as the voices of Indian opinion.
So, under a foreign government, Brahmins came to the fore purely on the basis of merit. How wicked of them!
India had arguably been a far more meritocratic society before the British Raj settled down to enshrine the Brahmins in such a position of dominance.
The reverse must be the case. The British had no racial, cultural or religious reason to favor any particular type of Indian.
Nineteenth-century ideas of race also got into the mix. The American scholar Thomas Metcalfe has shown how race ideology in that era defined European civilization as being at the peak of human attainment, while the darker-skinned races were portrayed as being primitive, weak and dependent on European tutelage in order to develop. Indians internalized many of these prejudices, instilled in them by two centuries of the white man’s dominance and the drumming into them of the cult of British superiority.
Tharoor is darker than Rahul whose Mum is White. Unlike Tharoor, Rahul finished his education in Britain. Rahul can't get elected by Hindi speakers. He is now an MP from Kerala. Yet Tharoor must remain eternally under the thumb of either Sonia, who is of European heritage, or Rahul who is of Brahmin caste. Sad.
I recall reading, as a child, the account of an early Indian visitor to England, astonished that even the shoeshine boys there were British, so completely had the mystique of English lordliness been internalized in India.
People were astonished when Sonia nominated Pratibha Patil- who was accused of shielding her brother in a murder case- for the Presidency. Then the story went around that Pratibhaji was humbly bringing fooding for Indiraji and so it was right and proper she should get Presidency. Obviously, if shoe-shining had been required, some more robust person would have been chosen.
The young prince, and later cricket star, Ranji, arriving in England as a student, was taken aback by ‘the sight of Britishers engaging in low-caste work’ (he was assured the stevedores were ‘only Irishmen’).
Actually, there already were Indians doing low-caste work in London during the Regency. Sadly, during the Mutiny, many such crossing sweepers were beaten or even killed by furious mobs. By the late Seventies, Indian visitors were taken aback to see the toilets at Heathrow being cleaned by ladies wearing salwar kameez.
British cartography defined spaces the better to rule them; the map became an instrument of colonial control.
All rulers- unless they are completely shit- use maps and other instruments to control territory. Tharoor does not understand this. Why? It is because he used to work for the UN- i.e. he is a useless tosser. The cretin believes in voodoo. If you have a little wax doll of someone, you can make that person do what you like.
Even the valuable British legacy, the museum,
which was a legacy from Greece to Rome to Britain
was devised in furtherance of the imperial project because here objects, artefacts and symbols could be appropriated, named, labelled, arranged, ordered, classified and thus controlled, exactly as the people could be.
No wonder UPA is unelectable. It believes in voodoo.
Just as ‘Brahmin’ became a sought-after designation enshrining social standing, the census definition of an individual’s caste tended to seal the fate of any ‘Shudra’, by fixing his identity across the entire country.
That had already happened many centuries ago. I suppose it could be said that certain communities only gained an identity as Muslim or as Hindu at this period. But, when we look a little closer this wasn't really the case. Nizari Ismailis may have had Hindu names at one time but there was nothing Hindu about their beliefs. Muslim Rajputs who had Hindu marriage ceremonies weren't any the less Muslim for that reason. On the other hand, prior to the British census most Indians moved freely between genders.
Whereas prior to British rule the Shudra had only to leave his village and try his fortunes in a different princely state in India where his caste would not have followed him, colonialism made him a Shudra for life, wherever he was.
Would a Nair who moved to Maharashtra or Bengal have been able to change his caste from Shudra to Kshatriya? Perhaps. But only if he was prepared to go through the sacred thread ceremony and enroll with a family purohit and so forth. He may also have felt obliged to give up non-veg food. Who in their right mind would take that deal?
The British belief in the fighting qualities of the ‘martial races’ also restricted the career possibilities of those not so classified, since British army recruitment policies were usually based on caste classifications.
This was certainly true of the oldest regiment in the Indian Army- the Nair regiment which only admitted non-Nairs in 1954. I've read British accounts of a 'quinsap' caste- Queen Victoria's own sappers- Madras sappers who according to some British officers who had served with them, had formed their own endogamous caste.
The whole point about 'martial races' is that they were not castes at all, though- no doubt- agriculturists from the North West- where the Brits faced a military threat- or people from higher altitudes were given preference.
In the old days, any individual with the height and musculature required could make a livelihood as a warrior, whatever his caste background.
No. Only those trained in the use of weapons could make a livelihood in this way. What changed under the Raj was that the Army would give you all the training you needed. Thus, when demand for soldiers exceeded supply- e.g. during the two World Wars- the Army would even take Gujaratis. However, height did not matter. Short Gurkas tend to be the best fighters. Tall Gurkha soldiers tend to be in support roles. At any rate, this is what a British Gurkha officer told me many years ago.
In British India, this was far more difficult, if not impossible, since entire regiments were constructed on the basis of caste identities.
No. The Nair brigade, formed by Tharoor's ancestors, was indeed constructed on the basis of caste identity but that was because it wasn't created by Britishers. All regiments formed by the Brits had a territorial, not caste, identity- though sometimes this was bogus ; e.g there were few Baloch in supposedly Baloch regiments. Only the so called 'Mahar regiment'- which however recruits from all communities in India- is identified with a caste but it was only raised in 1946.
Census-taking in British India differed significantly from the conduct of the census in Britain, since unlike in the home country, the census in India was led by British anthropologists seeking to anatomize Indian society, the better to control and govern it.
Tharoor may be astonished to hear that the British census has always been led by British civil servants. They want to anatomize British society the better to govern it. Incidentally, governing a country involves controlling stuff within it. In 1881 the Brits decided to do a census of their entire Empire. Why? They wanted to know what human resources were available for Imperial defense. This was also the reason they had their first census during the Napoleonic wars.
As I have mentioned earlier, Indians in precolonial times lived in imprecisely-defined ‘fuzzy’ communities
and they had fuzzy gender identities
with overlapping cultural practices,
British people had and have 'overlapping cultural practices'- indeed, everybody does.
minimal self-awareness
like rocks and the less intelligent type of plant
and non-existent consciousness of the details of their differences from other communities, except in the most general terms.
It may well be that a villager knew little about the wider world. But that villager, in India, belonged to an endogamous jati. His marriage and his children's marriages would be arranged within that jati. Very precise information was available under this rubric. That is why Indian DNA has such marked caste characteristics.
This is underscored by the scholar Sudipta Kaviraj, who observes that precolonial communities had imprecise (‘fuzzy’) boundaries because some collective identities are not territorially based, and because ‘part of this fuzziness of social mapping would arise because traditional communities, unlike modern ones, are not enumerated’.
Modern communities have very fuzzy boundaries. Premodern communities have sharp boundaries. Shamima Begum would be recognized by people from her parent's home district as definitely one of their own. But she was born and bred in London. She travelled to Syria on a British, not a Bangladeshi, passport. Is she still British? The Government says- 'no. She has been 'denaturalized'. Perhaps the Supreme Court will disagree with the Government. Perhaps not. Even if the law is clarified, the thing will remain fuzzy politically. If she is returned to Bangladesh she faces the death penalty. Would a future Labour Home Secretary (assuming such a thing is possible) really abandon her to her fate?
Traditional communities may not be able to count higher than 3 but they have a very precise notion of oikeiosis- or belonging. You may, like Richard Harris in 'A man called horse', get accepted into an indigenous tribe- but you first have to go through a pretty thorough initiation. The nice thing about being modern is that we can have an identity without having any detailed knowledge about what constitutes that identity. What matters is whether we are good at our job- which lots of other people all over the world might be doing just as well. Thus Mr. Khan or Mr. Sharma or Miss Jones or Mrs. Yi may all know very much more about dentistry than they know about their ancestral culture or language. This does not mean they aren't proud of their identity. But that identity gets fuzzier and fuzzier as the decades roll on. In retirement, one may return to it- but the thing is now wholly ersatz.
The census, of course, changed that, as did the more stable territorial lines drawn by the colonists on their new, and very precise, maps.
Sadly, those maps weren't precise enough- which is why Nehru's final days were such an anti-climax.
In the precolonial era, community boundaries were far more blurred, and as a result these communities were not self-conscious in the way they became under colonial rule.
The opposite is the case. Tharoor's great-great grandparents had a very precise and self-conscious notion of their identity which in fact was more variegated then. From the 1920s these start to blur. By the 70's even the difference between North Indian and South Indian was eroding. Nobody thought there was anything unusual about Tharoor, a South Indian Shudra, marrying a Kashmiri Pundit. On the other hand, charges of abetment to suicide are still hanging over Tharoor's head in that connection. That's about as fuzzy as such things can get.
In the absence of the ‘focused and intense allegiances’ of the modern era, precolonial groups were less likely to be antagonistic to each other over perceived community or communal differences.
The reverse is the case. Modernity is about specialization and the division of labor. Collective duties are discharged by professionals- they are not incumbent on all members of the sept. If someone from another community kills or rapes one of our own we call the police. We don't rush out to find one of theirs to kill or rape. One may harbor great prejudice or hostility against another group but, during office hours, this may not at all be evident. One reason, the Indian village might have seemed harmonious was because of caste based occupational specialization. But increased monetization and technological change made it untenable. Still, caste couldn't tear India apart because
1) there were too many castes and too much variation within castes. In any case, the thing only survives as a solution to the stable marriage problem.
2) Religion trumps Caste.
They have become so only as a consequence of their ‘definition’ by the British in mutually exclusive terms.
Islam made a sharp distinction between Muslims and infidels. It has been suggested that Hinduism did not have such distinctions before Islam arrived. But, for 'caste' (i.e. sacred thread wearing) Hindus, such a distinction already existed.
The British could find no one to tell them authoritatively where or in what number any particular community was;
This is because only God can say 'authoritatively' where or in what number any community may be.
the census commissioners discovered that boundary lines among Hindus, Sikhs and Jains barely existed,
This is the 'Hindutva' view.
and that several Hindu and Muslim groups in different parts of the country shared similar social and cultural practices with regard to marriage, festivals, food, and worship.
This was a strong argument for the creation of a separate Muslim nation. The danger was that Muslims living in a largely infidel nation would sooner or later turn idolatrous.
This went against the colonial assumption that communities must be mutually exclusive
There was no such colonial assumption. There were claims made by colonized people to have pre-existing mutually exclusive collective identities. In Tharoor's native Kerala, Princely States started to face push back from lower caste Associations from the 1870s precisely because they were reforming their administration along the lines of British administered territory.
and that a person had to belong to one community or another. The British then simply superimposed their assumptions on the Indian reality, classifying people by religion, caste or tribe on the basis of imprecise answers to the census commissioners’ questions.
By 1881 the Brits had accumulated more information about India than any group of Indians possessed. The Census was an example of the Brits increasing their epistemic lead over Indians. The problem was that the guys collecting Census or other such information were barely literate cretins. This is still a problem with Indian statistics. Modi is hoping to get better answers by forcing respondents to choose from a list rather than self-declare. But the British Census too has to do something similar coz there are cretins like me who are likely to tick Irish, under ethnicity, on the grounds that Iyers are originally from Iyerland.
The British approach inevitably suffered from the prejudices and limitations of the age: thus, the ICS’s Herbert Risley, census commissioner for the 1901 census and author of the compendious
The People of India, took an anthropological and eugenicist approach, making physical measurements of Indian skulls and noses on the then-fashionable assumption that such physical qualities reflected racial stereotypes. (It was he who announced that 1901’s would be an ethnographic census, and led it personally.)
So what? Mahalanobis too initially dabbled in what had once appeared to be cutting edge science.
Backed up by extensive photographs of facial features and social practices, Risley’s work helped the British use such classification both to affirm their own convictions about European biological superiority over Indians, and to construct racial, social and ‘tribal’ differences between different segments of India’s people which served to reshape and substantiate ‘the dominant paradigms of social knowledge’.
What was the upshot? After 1905, progressive intellectuals- like Sidney Olivier- thought India's progress to self-government would be more, not less, rapid. By the time Olivier became Secretary of State for India, he had changed his mind. But that was Gandhi's fault. This had nothing to do with 'racial' differences. It had to do with the fact that the Indian Nationalists were a bunch of cretins. Thus India didn't get what Ireland and Egypt and Afghanistan got. The British Umpire was necessary because even the nicest Indians tended to go a bit crazy from time to time and thus had to be sent to the penalty box to cool down.
Indians questioned by Risley’s team predictably asserted both their caste identities and their entitlement to special privileges over other castes, accentuating the very differences the British wanted to see and had brought to the fore.
Tharoor has clearly never met a Census official. They sit with you and tick boxes. If you try to explain to them that you are actually a very superior type of leprechaun from Iyerland, they wear you down till you finally admit you fit into the British of Indian origin box.
There has been a bit of an academic availability cascade about Risley. This is because stupid academics are trying to impose a Foucauldian 'bio-politics' framework on a country which is nothing like France. Only a fool, like Tharoor, would repeat this garbage.
By so doing they sought benefits for their group—admission to certain military regiments, for instance, or scholarships to some educational institutions—at the expense of, or equal to, others.
They had been doing that before there was any Census. Indeed, the thing was visible under the Mughals and even before that. Why? Traditionally, in agricultural Empires, groups which offered some service to the State got to pay less in tax.
Such caste competition had been largely unknown in pre-British days; caste consciousness had never been made so explicit as in the late nineteenth century.
Where competition takes the form of killing people, guys who are good at killing people get rewarded. The British Raj had created a profound peace at the price of economic stagnation over large parts of India. Competition for jobs and status became more intense but the game was scarcely worth the candle.
All these classifications
had not been necessary to conquer the country and its neighbors or to use its soldiers to further increase the Empire in the MENA and elsewhere.
in turn served the interests of the colonizers by providing them with a tool to create perceptions of difference between groups to prevent unity amongst them, and justifying British overlordship—which alone could be seen as transcending these differences and guiding the Indians to a higher, more civilized, plane of being, under the benign tutelage of the well-meaning Empire.
Or the benign tutelage of the Gandhi dynasty.
The British made these divisions such an article of faith that even a writer seen as broadly sympathetic to Indians, E. M. Forster, has his Indian protagonist, Aziz, say in, ‘Nothing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing ’.
While Bahaguna said 'India is Indira and Indira is India'. Aziz, as Forster well knew, was on the path to Iqbal's idea of Pakistan. Indira and Rajiv were killed by people who harbored separatist ideas. Perhaps the reason Rahul refuses to step up to the plate is that he doesn't want to be the one who 'embraces the whole of India' and thus ends up getting shot or blown up.
This colonial process of identity-creation in British India occurred even in the formation of linguistic identities. Both David Washbrook and David Lelyveld believe that territorially-defined linguistic populations came into being out of the British colonial project to categorize, count and classify—in order to control—Indian society.
The British project was to rule India. That is now the project of Indians. The sensible way to do it is by using the mother tongue as the language of administration. That is why the linguistic reconstitution of the States accelerated after Independence. But there are non-linguistic reasons to carve up big Provinces into more cohesive and manageable States or Union Territories.
The very notion of linguistic identities, they suggest, emerged from the nineteenth-century belief in language as the cementing bond of social relations, and the implicit conviction that ‘races’or ‘nations’ spoke a common language and lived within defined territorial locations.
This is a foolish academic availability cascade. Nations were always defined linguistically. A King might hold the Crown of more than one Nation- e.g. the British Monarch whose son, as Prince of Wales, learned Welsh. Monarchs, like Queen Victoria, might turn into Emperors with lots of Kings and Princes under them. But though Empires might be centralized, they were decomposable into Nations which had existed previously on linguistic grounds.
Incidentally, in their zeal for classification, the British even subsumed ancient, and not dishonorable, professions like devadasis (temple dancers) or baijis (court musicians),who in some respects served functions akin to the geishas of Japan, into a rough-and-ready category of ‘prostitutes’, thus casting them out for the first time from respectable society.Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act (also called the Tamil Nadu Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act or the Madras Devadasi Act) is a law that was enacted on 9 October 1947 just after India became independent. The truth is, as middle class Indians gained in power and influence, a more puritanical moral code became normative and this was reflected in the law.
However, the British attempt to separate the Depressed Classes was of a different order, since it was the first time that separate electorates were being proposed within a religious community, and the strategy of fragmenting Indian nationalism and breaking the incipient unity of the Indian masses was clearly apparent to Congress leaders.
Muslims had got separate electorates from the get go. Given that there was a restricted franchise, 'depressed' classes - more particularly if they believed, as Tharoor appears to do, that Brahmins were very cunning and were monopolizing all offices of profit- were entitled to demand something similar. Since Gandhi had broken the Hindu Muslim compact by unilaterally surrendering, it was inevitable that the next group to repudiate the INC would be the non-Brahmins in the South and Dalits elsewhere.
Gandhi demanded that the representatives of the Depressed Classes should be elected by the general electorate under a wide, and if possible universal, common franchise, and undertook a fast unto death in 1932 that riveted the nation and compelled the British and the Dalit leadership to give in.
The British never needed to give in to Gandhi's fasts. The Dalits, who might have been slaughtered if Gandhi died, had to back down. Congress got its Uncle Tom MPs but, for a while, Ambedkar and JN Mandal and so forth could fight on. Incidentally, in 1937, Dalit Muslims became eligible for affirmative action. Needless to say, after Independence this was taken away. Only Hindu Dalits secured reservations. Later Sikhs were included and later still, Buddhists. But Christians and Muslims are still excluded.
Under a political compromise, known as the Poona Pact, that year separate electorates for the Depressed Classes were abandoned but additional seats were reserved for them in the provincial and central legislatures—an increase from71 to 147 in the former and to 18 per cent of the Central Legislature. (Interestingly enough, the leader of the Dalits who clashed with Gandhi over the issue,Dr B. R. Ambedkar, went on to serve after Independence as chairman of the DraftingCommittee for India’s Constitution, and ensured that his country would have the world’s first and farthest-reaching affirmative action programme for his community.
But not Sikhs or Muslims or Christian Dalits. Incidentally, Ambedkar's ally- J.N Mandal, who had foolishly opted for Pakistan, was Jinnah's first Law Minister. Then the poor man, along with many of his people, had to flee to India. Caste, it seemed, was nothing compared to Religion. Those who dream of a Dalit-Muslim combine build but Castles in Spain. Power has passed to dominant agricultural castes who are ceasing to be agricultural and are forging ahead in every field. They can see with their own eyes that they are just as good as traditionally 'educationally forward' groups. Congress's big mistake- at least as far as Tamil Nadu was concerned- was to back Gandhi's crackpot 'Basic Education'- which meant that if you came from an educationally backward caste, educationally backward you would remain. Kamaraj, it must be said, was the Man with the Plan which turned Congress to shit. Had he stayed on as Chief Minister in Madras, he would have backtracked on Hindi imposition. Bhaktavatsalam's intransigence on the language issue was the gift to the Dravidian parties which just keeps giving. More generally, getting people who are good at their job to resign and go do 'Party work' is a recipe for incompetence on the one hand and a cringing dynasticism on the other.
In 1937, when Congress ministries were elected in eight provinces and for the first time enjoyed control over education, Gandhi put forward a plan called the Wardha Scheme for Education, which envisaged seven years of basic education for rural children, including vocational training in village handicrafts.
In other words, the only thing they'd be taught which their parents couldn't teach them would be Hindi- which is why Tamils hate Hindi to this day.
It was never fully implemented, but it would certainly have imparted the basics, including literacy in the mother tongue, mathematics, science, history, and physical culture and hygiene, in addition to crafts. It is difficult to argue against the proposition that the Wardha scheme would have been a vast improvement on what little colonial education was available in rural India.
It would have been worse. If you can't go to school, at least you know you are missing out on education. If you go to school and learn nothing, you don't know you've missed out. All that has happened is that your time has been wasted.
The true significance of the Wardha scheme- apart from pissing off the Madrasis- was that it alerted Muslims to their likely fate in independent India- denied Urdu & forced to sing Vande Mataram in 'Vidya Mandirs'.
Tharoor cobbles together his books by lazily copy and pasting stuff he has written at different times. The man has literally learned nothing and forgotten nothing. As such he is typical of a dynastic party now dying nasty.
Tharoor may be forgiven for knowing little about India. His career was in international diplomacy- working for the UN. Perhaps the conclusion to his book, where he looks at the global picture, may be less fatuous-
CAST A LONG SHADOW: RESIDUAL PROBLEMS OF COLONIALISM
The colonial era is over. And yet, residual problems from the end of the earlier era of colonization, usually the result of untidy departures by the colonial power, still remain dangerously stalemated.
The break up of Empires- whether in Europe or elsewhere- did indeed leave certain territories which remain bitterly contested.
The prolonged state of chronic hostility between India and Pakistan, punctuated by four bloody wars and the repeated infliction of cross-border terrorism as a Pakistani tactic against India, is the most obvious example.
Yet India has a peaceful border with Bangladesh. It is notable that Pakistan is also meddling with Afghanistan in a similarly mischievous way.
But there are others. The dramatic events in East Timor in 1999 led to the last major transfer of power to an independence movement.
There are other areas in that part of the world where Christian Muslim tensions, or tensions between more orthodox and less orthodox Islamic peoples continue to flare up.
Yet at least closure has occurred there, unlike in Western Sahara or in those old stand bys of Cyprus and Palestine, all messy legacies of European colonialism.
But conflict between Greek and Turk or between Turk and Egyptian in Libya etc would have existed in any case. Similarly, even if America had been the mandatory power in Palestine, there would be a problem re. Zionism.
Fuses lit in the colonial era could ignite again,
but those 'fuses' pre-existed the colonial era.
as they have done, much to everyone’s surprise, in the Horn of Africa, between Ethiopia and Eritrea, where war broke out over a colonial border that the Italians of an earlier era of occupation had failed to define with enough precision and where peace simmers today amidst much uncertainty.
But such conflicts would have occurred in any case as we currently see in Yemen. The fact is, Italy- and later Britain as the mandatory power- integrated Eritrea into Ethiopia. It became independent in 1993 after the Soviet Union, which had supplied Ethiopia with weapons, collapsed. Evil Communists, not Colonialists bear most blame here.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, by which the British and the French agreed to carve up the former Ottoman territories between themselves and which set the boundaries between independent Syria and Iraq, is another relic of colonial history that haunts us today.
But this would have been solved by the creation of a United Arab Republic. It was Saddam who put an end to this dream.
For when ISIS (‘Daesh’) advanced ruthlessly in those countries, it railed against the iniquities of that Anglo-French agreement and avowed its determination to reverse the Sykes-Picot legacy—making the imperial era compellingly current once more.
Daesh represented Sunni supremacy. The roots of its ideology go back to the early days of Islam.
But it’s not just the direct results of colonialism that remain relevant: there are the indirect ones as well. The intellectual history of colonialism is littered with many a wilful cause of more recent conflict. One is, quite simply, careless anthropology: the Belgian classification of Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi, which solidified a distinction that had not existed before, continues to haunt the region of the African Great Lakes.
Yet tribal conflict is pervasive in that part of Africa. Conflicts tend to spill over borders because tribes expand and contract on the basis of conflict. Had Museveni not been from a tribe linked to the Tutsis, it may be that there would have been no genocide.
A related problem is that of motivated sociology: how much bloodshed do we owe, for instance, to the British invention of ‘martial races’ in India, which skewed recruitment into the armed forces and saddled some communities with the onerous burden of militarism?
Perhaps Tharoor is thinking of India's problem with Khalistanis. However there were plenty of other martial races- Nairs, Coorgis, Garwhalis, Gurkhas etc- who haven't shed any blood.
The point about Sociology is that it has to pick out actually existing social groupings. It can't invent them out of thin air. Still, it must be said, Sociologists are useless.
And one can never overlook the old colonial administrative habit of ‘divide and rule’, exemplified, again, by British policy in the subcontinent after 1857, systematically promoting political divisions between Hindus and Muslims, which led almost inexorably to the tragedy of Partition.
The INC continued these divisive policies. It promoted vote banks rather than focusing on good governance.
Such colonial-era distinctions were not just pernicious; they were often accompanied by an unequal distribution of the resources of the state within the colonial society.
But this inequality was pre-existing. There is some DNA evidence to suggest that Tutsis are of Nilotic paternal origin.
Wikipedia states- Kigeli IV Rwabugiri (1840 - November 1895) was the king (mwami) of the Kingdom of Rwanda in the late 19th century. He was among the last Nyiginya kings in a ruling dynasty that had traced their lineage back four centuries to Gihanga, the first 'historical' king of Rwanda whose exploits are celebrated in oral chronicles.[3] He was a Tutsi[4] with the birth name Rwabugiri. He was the first king in Rwanda's history to come into contact with Europeans. He established an army equipped with guns he obtained from Germans and prohibited most foreigners, especially Arabs, from entering his kingdom.
By the end of Rwabugiri's rule, Rwanda was divided into a standardized structure of provinces, districts, hills, and neighborhoods, administered by a hierarchy of chiefs.
The chiefs were predominantly Tutsi at the higher levels and with a greater degree of mutual participation by Hutus.The redistribution of land, enacted between 1860 and 1895, resulted in an imposed patronage system, under which appointed Tutsi chiefs demanded manual labor in return for the right of Hutus to occupy their land. This system left Hutus in a serf-like status with Tutsi chiefs as their feudal masters.
Under Mwami Rwabugiri, Rwanda became an expansionist state. Rwabugiri did not bother to assess the ethnic identities of conquered peoples and simply labeled all of them “Hutu”. The title “Hutu”, therefore, came to be a trans-ethnic identity associated with subjugation. While further disenfranchising Hutus socially and politically, this helped to solidify the idea that “Hutu” and “Tutsi” were socioeconomic, not ethnic, distinctions. In fact, one could kwihutura, or “shed Hutuness”, by accumulating wealth and rising through the social hierarchy.
Tharoor rejects the evidence in favor of a just-so story about evil Belgians.
Belgian colonialists favoured Tutsis, leading to Hutu rejection of them as alien interlopers; Sinhalese resentment of privileges enjoyed by the Tamils in the colonial era in Sri Lanka prompted the discriminatory policies after Independence that in turn fuelled the Tamil revolt.
It was Buddhist nationalism- the idea that Sri Lanka is specially dedicated to protect the Buddhist creed- which set the conflict in motion. It is no accident that Solomon Bandarnaike and U Nu in Burma started backing Buddhist polices at around the same time thus sealing their own doom.
India still lives with the domestic legacy of divide and rule, with a Muslim population almost as large as Pakistan’s, conscious of itself as a minority striving to find its place in the Indian sun.
The Muslims always had this feeling. Consider the famous Reza Khan. He refused a land grant and demanded money payment precisely because Bengal was 'dar ul harb'- even though the ruler was Muslim. This ideology predates the arrival of the British.
A ‘mixed’ colonial history within one modern state is also a potential source of danger.
Only if pre-existing tensions between populations existed. India faced no great difficulty in incorporating Portuguese or French possessions.
When a state has more than one colonial past, its future is vulnerable.
e.g. the USA where we see areas which were once under the Spanish or French or Russian Emperors have never accepted incorporation into a Union founded by ex-British colonies.
Secessionism, after all, can be prompted by a variety of factors, historical, geographical and cultural as well as ‘ethnic’. Ethnicity or language hardly seem to be a factor in the secessions (one recognized, the other not) of Eritrea from Ethiopia and the ‘Republic of Somaliland’ from Somalia. Rather, it was different colonial experiences (Italian rule in Eritrea and British rule in Somaliland) that set them off, at least in their own self-perceptions, from the rest of their ethnic compatriots.
This is silly. Both Somalia and Ethiopia had terrible Governments. This is 'State failure'- perhaps with a Cold War component.
A similar case can be made in respect of the former Yugoslavia, where parts of the country that had been under Austro-Hungarian rule for 800 years had been joined to parts that spent almost as long under Ottoman suzerainty. The war that erupted in 1991 was in no small measure a war that pitted those parts of Yugoslavia that had been ruled by German-speaking empires against those that had not (or had resisted such colonization).
There is an obvious problem here- namely that territories ruled entirely by German speaking Emperors too had their irredentist or other territorial claims against each other. After the Second World War, some traditionally German territory was ceded to Poland and Russia and Czechoslavakia etc. Hungary lost a lot of territory. In view of the carnage and shifting borders of Central Europe in the Twentieth Century, what happened in the Balkans appears just par for the course.
Boundaries drawn in colonial times, even if unchanged after independence, still create enormous problems of national unity.
All contested boundaries create problems. But this true of European countries which were never colonized and is also true of China and Thailand which were never colonized.
We have been reminded of this in Iraq, whose creation from the ruins of the Ottoman empire welded various incompatibilities into a single state.
But those 'incompatibilities' existed a thousand years ago! Had Saddam not prevented the union of Syria and Iraq, who is to say that whether the situation would have been worse or better?
But the issue is much more evident in Africa, where civil conflict along ethnic or regional lines can arise when the challenge of nation building within colonially drawn boundaries becomes insurmountable.
These problems become 'insurmountable' when good governance itself appears an impossible dream.
Where colonial constructions force disparate peoples together by the arbitrariness of a colonial mapmaker’s pen,
those people can agree to go their own way. The Czechs and the Slovaks have parted company without any bloodshed. Norway and Sweden parted amicably over a century ago. The maps of colonists have no magic power.
nationhood becomes an elusive notion. Older tribal and clan loyalties in Africa were mangled by the boundaries drawn, in such distant cities as Berlin, for colonially created states whose post-independence leaders had to invent new traditions and national identities out of whole cloth.
So what? Kenya and Tanzania get along just fine. Uganda, sadly, was ruled by cretins and so Tanzania had to intervene.
The result was the manufacture of unconvincing political myths, as artificial as the countries they mythologize, which all too often cannot command genuine patriotic allegiance from the citizenry they aim to unite.
This is nonsense. If people can see that the State is trying to improve their lives then they don't need 'mythologies'.
Civil war is made that much easier for local leaders challenging a ‘national’ leader whose nationalism fails to resonate across his country.
Civil wars happen when the National Army appears too weak to crush an insurrection. 'Resonating' does not matter. Good governance does.
Rebellion against such a leader is, after all, merely the reassertion of history over ‘his’ story.
No. Rebellions happen if rebels think they can win by killing soldiers sent against them.
State failure in the wake of colonialism is another evident source of conflict,
It is the only source of conflict. So long as the state monopolizes the means of coercion- i.e. kills anyone who tries to kill its soldiers- there will be no conflict. There will simply be nutters who get shot the moment they try to wag their tail.
as the by-product of an unprepared newly independent state’s inability to govern. The crisis of governance in many African countries is a real and abiding cause for concern in world affairs today. The collapse of effective central governments—as manifest in Darfur, South Sudan and eastern Congo today, and in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Somalia yesterday (and who knows where tomorrow?)—could unleash a torrent of alarming possibilities: a number of ‘weak states’, particularly in Africa, seem vulnerable to collapsing in a welter of conflict.
This may worry some UN officials. But who else greatly cares?
Underdevelopment in postcolonial societies is itself a cause of conflict.
The ability to get your hands on weapons is a cause of conflict.
The uneven development of infrastructure in a poor country, as a result of priorities skewed for the benefit of the colonialists,
is what permits those countries to have a modern nation state. The colonists created infrastructure so that the colony could export stuff so as to buy stuff which would enable the bureaucracy and the military and the police etc. to do their job.
can lead to resources being distributed unevenly, which in turn leads to increasing fissures in a society between those from ‘neglected regions’ and those who are better served by roads, railways, power stations, telecommunications, bridges and canals.
Such inequalities exist even in Europe, Japan and America. People respond by relocating.
Advancing underdevelopment in many countries of the South, which are faring poorly in their desperate struggle to remain players in the game of global capitalism, has created conditions of desperate poverty, ecological collapse and rootless, unemployed populations beyond the control of atrophying state systems—a portrait vividly painted by Robert Kaplan in his book
Having lots of babies would have the same result even if underdevelopment was retreating- as indeed it was during the Sixties.
The Coming Anarchy , which suggests the real danger of perpetual violence on the peripheries of our global village.
Kaplan did not predict China's rise as an exporter of infrastructure. The rest of the world need not bother about parts of the world where the motor of development will be in Chinese hands. Once the virtue signalers and UN bureaucrats have been disintermediated, pragmatic solutions will be found- if it is worth finding them.
As we embark upon the twenty-first century, it seems ironically clear that tomorrow’s anarchy might still be due, in no small part, to yesterday’s colonial attempts at order.
Clearly Tharoor is copy and pasting something he wrote twenty years ago. This book of his came out in 2016. Before the rise of China became obvious, it was plausible to gas on as if there was a 'rules based' world order presided over by the West. Now Biden is saying only that China won't overtake America on his watch- but that watch may only last four years.
I have no wish to give those politicians in postcolonial countries whose leadership has been found wanting in the present, any reason to find excuses for their failures in the past.
Who cares what Tharoor gives to anybody? He is a cretin.
But in looking to understand the forces that have made us and nearly unmade us, and in hoping to recognize possible future sources of conflict in the new millennium, we have to realize that sometimes the best crystal ball is a rear-view mirror.
Nonsense! Crystal balls are just balls made of crystal. To understand what will happen requires us to understand what is happening. But that is a subject Tharoor is blissfully ignorant about.
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