THE INDIAN IDEOLOGY

By Perry Anderson

Bismillahirrahmaanirrahim

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The Indian ideology written by Perry Anderson is a book that ponders upon the emergent Interstate system of leading powers like India. His previous works have covered United States, China, Russia, Brazil etc. He says that in the new world countries like Turkey and India are the products of national movements of the early 20th century whose history has become the object of official versions of the past and have dominated the popular discourse. The Indian Ideology deals with not just a prevailing set of ideas but also the conditions and events that generated them.The questions addressed in the book are : the beliefs and actions of Gandhi as the central figure of the struggle for independence, the transfer of power from the Raj to Congress, partition, the ideology of Nehru, social anchorage of democracy in India and the bearing of caste on it, the place of religion in the union and the cost of unity of the nation. The principle carrier of the Indian ideology is the liberal mainstream of Indian intellectual lives which also substantially permeates to the left of this mainstream. The record of Indian communism from its late birth is certainly one replete with errors, strategic and tactical, many imposed by the Soviet party in his heyday, others unforced. Among the various errors of the Indian left, one is the passive accommodation to the myths of Indian Ideology and the crimes of the state committed in their name. If the left is to regain a stronger place in the intellectual scene a break with these is desperately needed. The left would do well to recapture some of the insolence of Ambedkar or Ramaswamy.

Independence

Indian academiques and noted personalities have always marveled over the fact that any cultural civilization should have this continuity for 5000- 6000 years or more,and how the dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization, how India is the boldest statement ever of social democracy. From Meghnad Desai to Ramachandra Guha to Pratap Bhanu Mehta to Amartya Sen, are all strong believers in the miraculous democracy of India in such a diverse and large country. All countries have fond images of themselves and big countries have bigger heads than others.  To the Idea of India, the four central tropes are the couplets of antiquity-continuity, diversity-unity, massivity- democracy, multiConfessionality- secularity. Each has in its own way become a touchstone of the Idea of India and enjoys an overlapping consensus.

According to Gandhi India was one undivided land made by nature in which we were one nation before British came to India. This has been widely accepted even by Nehru and has been propagated as a fact in independent India. The facts prove otherwise. The subcontinent has actually never formed a single political, cultural unit in premodern times. Its lands were divided in various middle sized kingdoms and even the three larger empires Maurya, Mughal  and Gupta never covered the territory of today’s India. Maurya and Mughal control extended to contemporary Afghanistan and did not go beyond Deccan and never came near Manipur. The area of Gupta control was considerably less. Beneath the changing mosaic of regional rulers there was more continuity of a social pattern: caste. The Idea of India was essentially a European, not a local invention. No such term as “India” existed in any indigenous language; it is a Greek coinage taken from river Indus and the Greeks took this in  turn from earlier Persian reference to the land. It was the British who saw this fragmented  society and with the relative ease gained control of it using one local power against the other. India’s segmented society made it easier for the British to take power as it is said, “Indian troops conquered the country for British”. For centuries after the seizure of Bengal, the Indian soldiers in East India company outnumbered British soldiers 6:1. After the mutiny of 1857, this ratio was shaken up and then it became 2:1. Wood, Secretary of State for India said, “I wish to have a different and rival spirit in different regiments so that a Sikh may fire into a Hindu, Gorkha into either, without any scruple in case of need. Then Eden Commission would subsequently explain, “As you cannot do without a large native army in India, our main object is to make that army safe and next to the grand counterpoise of a sufficient European force comes counterpoise of natives against natives; for example, that distinctiveness which is so valuable and which while it lasts makes the Mohammedan of one country despise the Mohammedan of another”. The mutineers in Delhi sought the restoration of Mughal powers and hence Muslims came to be seen as suspect by the British. There after, no all-Muslim units were ever to be allowed within the army. Recruits came from the least literate groups and no natives could become officers. The peacetime strength was around 250,000 and the Indian army was the largest employer in the Raj and absorbed a third to half of its revenue. Its services included provision for soldiers for imperial expansion in Middle East, Africa, South Asia and cannon fodder in the First World War but its primary function remained domestic intimidation. Simultaneously a large police apparatus already won 50,000 regulars by the 1880s and paraded as the forward screen of repression against resentment.

Coercion of course never sufficed so it was complemented with collaboration such that 2/5th of the territory of the Raj and 1/5th of its population were left in the hands of princes mostly Hindu, under the watchful guidance of the British residents. In the rest of the subcontinent under British rule, landlords were beneficiaries of the colonial regime. Moreover it was the official policy of the colonial regime to produce native elite educated to metropolitan standards, which were Indian in blood and color by English in taste, opinions, morals and intellect. Two generations later a layer of articulate professionals had emerged, the seedbed of Congress nationalism. The British had taken over the subcontinent with such ease because it was politically and socially so fragmented. They unified it as an administrative and ideological reality for the first time in its history. The “Idea of India” was theirs.

 Congress was founded in the 1880s for a meager demand of colonial self government. The first outbreak of radical nationalist agitation occurred by Hindu anger at Curzon’s division of Bengal two decades later. The liberal government of Britain elected in 1906 introduced a legislative machinery of the Raj allowing for 2% of Indian population to vote. The aim was to avoid any further shifting of balance and provide a vent for nationalist anger. Congress while regretting provision for separate electorates for Muslims welcomed the changes and expressed its loyalty to the emperor in 1911. Three years later it gave unstinting support to the empire in the Great War. This is when Gandhi stepped on the national movement scene, on his arrival in Bombay in  1914 after 21 years in South Africa. Within two years he had transformed Indian politics leading the first mass movement to rock British powers  since the mutiny and remaking Congress as a popular political force. He launched three mass movements in 1919 to 1921, 1930-31, 1942- 43. He was a first class organizer and fundraiser who rebuilt Congress from top to bottom, he was an excellent mediator and an exceptionally  fluent communicator which made him immediately popular.

In the  20th century, leaders of several national movements were  men of religion like the grand Mufti , archbishop Makarios, Ayatollah Khomeini, Abe but for most their faith was subordinate to their faith. Within this gallery, Gandhi is an exception; for him alone religion mattered more than politics. The first scrupulous account of Gandhi’s religious life comes from the account of Kathryn Tidrick’s, “Gandhi:A Political and Spiritual Life”. She showed that Gandhi’s faith was born of a cross between Jain inflicted Hindu orthodoxy, garbled ideas of karma, reincarnation, ascetic self perfection with western spiritualism. His aim in life was to attain moksha and to become one with God. He said, “When I am a perfect being, I have simply to say the word and the nation will listen”.

In giving up desires it did not just include vegetarian prohibitions by his caste background but also in his sexual life. He mixed Christian fears of sex with Hindu phobias of pollution and looked down upon any “animal indulgence” except for perpetuating the race. Complete continence, “brahmacharya” was of such importance that an involuntary ejaculation at the age of 65 was matter for an anguished public communique and at 77 he tested himself by sleeping nude with his great niece. He wrote his fundamental beliefs in his “Swaraj” in 1909 in  which he explained that machinery represented a great sin, that railways have spread the bubonic plague and increased the frequency of famines, accentuating the evil nature of man and hospitals are institutions that were propagating sin, that a peasant needs no knowledge of letters add education would only make him discontent with his lot. He said that India will never be godless and to restore it to its pristine condition, it was imperative to drive out western civilization. Politically speaking this was in effect a call for home rule on Irish lines. He believed that Swaraj was a religious imperative and political aims were only secondary to it. The method of his struggle was passive resistance or nonviolence which he had learned from Tolstoy. Gandhi on drawing on his ideas gave them a distinctively Hindu cast and used the term “satyagraha”, that is, truth-force. Gandhi’s takeover of Congress not only made it popular but injected a massive dose of religion, mythology, symbologies, theology into the national movement. But how could the millions of Muslims be rallied in the same idiom? In South Africa Gandhi had been a staunch advocate of Hindu Muslim unity because they were bound together there by a white racism of which they were indifferent victims. But in India it was clear that one religion was more equal than the other, Hinduism was indigenous to the subcontinent.  He could not win over the Muslims on a secular basis because it went against everything he himself believed in. The solution he hit upon was to rouse Muslims to action against the Raj under the banner of Islam itself. After the Ottoman Empire fell in the First World War ,Gandhi saw an opportunity to encourage Muslims to agitate in support of the caliphate. Under the Raj, Muslims steadily lost ground after the mutiny, and were left behind Hindus in government service, industry and profession. In the subcontinent, with no experience of Ottomon rule, the fall of empire was perceived by many Muslims as a humiliation which resonated emotionally with their own descent . A clamor began that the caliphate itself was in danger and this was what Gandhi cashed upon. The more secular Muslims including Jinnah noticed that the issue was not merely irrelevant but also regressive. Jinnah greatly resented Gandhi for making Ottomon empire and the caliphate as the primary point of Muslim resistance in India. On the other hand Gandhi referred to the Treaty of Sevres’s that wound up the Ottoman Empire as a “staggering blow to the Indian Mussulmans”. All India Khilafat committee was founded in 1919 which also became the scene of Gandhi’s first attempt at an All India satyagraha protesting the Rowlatt act. Response to the call proved patchy and after Jallianwala bagh massacre, faded quickly.

 In 1920, Non-cooperation movement was launched which included renunciation of titles, resignation from positions of civil service, resignation from police and army and finally refusal to pay taxes. The ultimate weapon was tax strike since the structure of Raj heavily dependent on land revenue and without it it could not be sustained. On 1st February, 1922 Gandhi announced that in the face of British obduracy it was time to refuse to pay taxes in Bardoli district of Gujarat. Three days later, a police in the small town of Chaurichara in UP  fired on a crowd protesting food prices killing three demonstrators. The infuriated crowd barricaded the police station and set it on fire. On learning the news of this event Gandhi declared a five day fast of penance and withdrew the movement.  He could do this because by this time the Congress has granted him “sole executive powers” and he justified that the Indian masses were not yet spiritually advanced enough to adhere to nonviolence.

This incident is used to show his commitment to nonviolence but in reality his attitude to violence had always been quite ambiguous. For example at the start of his career he twice volunteered for active service for British colonialism in South Africa, first in the Boer War and then in crushing the Zulu rebellion in 1906. When the First World War broke out he organized ambulance corps for the British war effort in 1914 and in mid 1918 he tried to recruit people for the imperialist slaughter in Flanders. He said, “The ability to use physical force is necessary for a true appreciation of satyagraha. He alone can practice nonviolence who knows how to kill, in fact, in the practice of ahimsa it may even necessitate  killing”. In 1942, he told reporters, “In India rivers of blood might be the price of freedom” and in 1946 he told the viceroy, “If India wants blood she shall have it”. He said that it was God who was inspiring him and things will shape as he wills. If God wants to destroy the world through violence using Gandhi as his instrument then how could he prevent it. Gandhi's truth was not objective but simply what he subjectively felt at any given time. He wrote in his autobiography titled “The Story of My Experiments with Truth” that truth was merely what he felt was right from his point of view at a given time. He was free from any requirement of consistency. “My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements but with truth as it may present itself to me at a given time since I am called the great soul”, he wrote. The result was a license to say whatever he wanted regardless of what he had said before.  Even though he stood against railrways and hospitals he was still using railways and doctors for his own personal usage. He defended himself in 1945 by writing, “It is not necessary for me to prove the rightness of what I said then; it is essential only to know what I feel today”. He claimed to be growing from “truth to truth” and claimed, “Whenever I have been obliged to compare my writing even or 50 years ago with latest I have discovered no inconsistency between the two”.

The goal of non-cooperation was Swaraj within a year but Gandhi spelled out what it did NOT mean, “Assuming that Great Britain alters her attitude, it will be religiously unlawful for us to insist on independence”. He advocated that India should seek a status like South Africa within a Commonwealth of equal partners that retained the British connection. The incident at Chaurichara made him realize that a demand to evict the British was to give rise to social upheaval. The revolution was a greater danger than the Raj. Any semblance of revolution was bound to challenge Hindu social structure which he did not want. The Congress he commanded was a coalition of industrialists, traders,professionals etc but it did not include the urban workers, rural poors, who formed the vast majority of the population. A revolution would pitt these groups against the employers or landlords and would bring forward the class conflict. He said, “In India we want no political strikes and there must be no discord between landlords and tenants and tenants are advised to suffer rather fight in the cause of preserving national unity. Property was a trust that had to be respected and protected”. At all cost their momentum must be stopped.  And in order to evade a revolution and a  countrywide resistance movement that would lead to the breakdown of not just the Raj but the Indian societal structure, Gandhi withdrew the non cooperation movement.

Muslims once roused to action and then unceremoniously abandoned by Gandhi never trusted him again. Jinnah, a member of Congress long before Gandhi had already left the Congress by 1916 in a mixture of dismay at the radicalization of its practices and disgusted at the overt religious symbols once Gandhi took over. Disliking the caliphate campaign by Gandhi, he thought of a second arrangement between the League and Congress which was to demand a vote to 6% of adult males at central and provincial level. In 1927 he proposed a pact that would reserve for Muslims 1/3rd of seats in central legislature; which Nehru at first accepted then later reduced the quota to ¼th and rejected any reservations in Punjab and Bengal where Muslims were a majority of the population. Elsewhere he remarked they could be settled, “by throwing them a few crumbs here and there”. At an all party conference in Calcutta Jinnah’s attempts at amendments were shouted down.

By 1928, Congress membership had increased from 80,000 to 4,50,000. Gandhi again launched his 2nd great campaign in March 1930 of Civil disobedience against the state’s salt tax.  The response was geographically wider but communally narrower, virtually no Muslims took part. In order to call off the movement the viceroy presented a deal to Gandhi and invited him to attend the Roundtable conference in London.  At the conference, Gandhi was shocked by Muslim and Sikh insistence on separate electorates and worse by the untouchable leader Ambedkar. Returning empty handed to India he resumed civil disobedience but by 1932, the movement had been defeated and London announced that untouchables would be granted separate electorates. Gandhi’s religious beliefs were put to a direct political test. What was his attitude to caste?  He said that untouchability was a heinous crime but it had nothing to do with caste itself which was not a human invention but an immutable law of nature itself. He said that the caste system is not based on  inequality and that reincarnation of Hindus maintained the balance in life. He believed that  interdrinking, interdining, intermarrying are not essential for the promotion of the spirit for democracy. Overtime he would tune down such claims and then explain that varna was not to be confused with subdivisions of jati. Apparently jati or caste were corrupt practices whereas varna are institutions that helped each one earn their bread following their ancestral calling. Overtime he would even try to dilute varna with palatable egalitarian opinions but he never abandoned the core identification with Hinduism itself. The demand for separate electorates for untouchables would confirm that untouchables were external to Hinduism and caste was indeed a vile system of discrimination.  Taking mathematical consideration, the breaking up of untouchables from the Hindu bloc may give predominance two Muslim community. Gandhi confided in a colleague, “Might not untouchables accorded separate identity then gang up with Muslim hooligans and kill caste Hindus?”. Thus Gandhi vowed to fast unto death until the separate electorate was taken back and untouchables were bundled back into the Hindu electorate. Under colossal pressure Ambedkar yielded to Gandhi’s blackmail. A pact was reached to give a larger number of reserved seats to untouchables selected not by their own people but by Hindus at large so that the Congress could pick its own stooges for this post. Ambedkar argued that there was nothing noble in the fast, it was a foul and filthy act, the fast was not for the benefit of untouchables, it was against them to force them to agree to live on the mercy of the Hindus.In 1934 Gandhi announced his resignation from the Congress but he could rely on Motilal Nehru, the head and his son Jawaharlal Nehru not to challenge his authority if he chose to exercise it.

By the end of the decade there was some promotion for Congress to adopt socialism as a goal but Gandhi always rejected any talk of socialism as a breach of the sacred trust in which capitalist property was legitimately held. The leader of the new left wing current Subash Chandra Bose heading the Congress youth organization also stood for a coalition with the Muslim peasant party in his national province of Bengal. This was unacceptable to Marwari businessmen of Calcutta. The wealthiest of these, G M Birla not only bankrolled Congress  millions of rupees but was also  intimate with Gandhi and hence Gandhi did everything to terminate Bose’s intercommunal initiative. Soon Bose was elected the president of Congress and in the following year re-elected defeating Gandhi’s candidate. This was an unprecedented affront to Gandhi therefore he toppled Bose in an inner party coup and then forced him out of Congress altogether.

When Second World War broke out, Gandhi admired Hitler as a fellow ascetic since, “He has no vices; he has not married;his character is said to be clean”. He zig-zagged from initial support of British declaration of war on Germany in 1939 to requiring individual demonstrations of satyagraha in 1942 to asserting that British must be driven away from the continent in 1942. He launched the Quit India movement in which he not only called for tax strike but warned that violence may break out. Riots erupted across the country, police stations were attacked, rail tracks torn out will.The rebellion without training or leadership was put down with 60,000 arrests, 4000 casualties after which Gandhi described it as a calamity. His last mass movement like the previous two ended in utter failure. 

 Satyagraha had not been a success, each time Gandhi had tried it the British had subdued it. His great achievement lay elsewhere: in the creation of a nationalist party, for in the end independence did not come from passive resistance.  In 1929, a scheduled 10 year review of the system put in place after the First World War led to the passing of the Government of India act of 1935 in the British parliament. The act extended the franchise from 6 to 35 million voters. By 1938, 8 out of 11 provinces were under Congress rule and party membership had soared to 4.5 million. The wine of electoral success had done what the water of nonviolence had failed to do, give Congress a political weight and strength. Important sections of Indian political society like the poor peasantry, tribals factory, workers and people of princely states were left out and the Congress was indifferent, suspicious, resentful and above all paternalistic towards them. Like the British Raj, the Congress claimed it knew what was good for the Indian people. Its provincial governments often proved as repressive of labor or the left as the colonial authorities. The raj was not threatened by any popular upheaval from the Congress. What changed  the situation was an external influence when Japanese armies swept through Southeast Asia. Singapore, Rangoon and Colombo had fallen by February, March and April respectively. The effect in London was electric and Cripps was dispatched to deal with major parties in India where he promised Dominion status in exchange for full support to the British war effort. Congress became bold and demanded immediate formation of an Indian government instead, which led to the deal being rejected. Meanwhile Bose had reached Singapore where he took command of 60,000 Indian prisoners of war there as the Japanese ally. Under Bose, the dedication and courage of Indian National Army in battle against British in Manipur and  Burma won widespread admiration even from Gandhi. Superior American might overpowered Japan by 1945 but the blows the Japanese army had dealt European colonialism in Southeast  and South Asia where irreparable. At  war’s end, the independence of the subcontinent was a foregone conclusion. What was not decided was the form it would take.

Partition

By 1945, the era of Gandhi was over and that of Nehru had begun. Nehru had fallen under the spell of Gandhi in his late 20s when he had little political ideas of his own. At nearly 40, he was still writing to him as, “Am I not your child in politics though perhaps a truant and errant child”. Even if he initially disagreed with some of Gandhi’s decisions, he would eventually justify them to himself. Even at the height of his communist philosophy in 1936, Nehru wrote, “What a wonderful man Gandhi is after all”. By 1939 he was simply exclaiming, “India cannot do without him”. Gandhi’s affinity to Nehru was due to calculations of mutual interest. As long as Nehru controlled the Congress, Gandhi could count on him to never act against him. Meanwhile Nehru could count on Gandhi to prevail over rivals to head Congress and after independence to rule the country. Unlike Gandhi, Nehru had enjoyed higher education but he seems to have learned very little at Cambridge, scraping a mediocre degree in natural sciences and performed poorly in his bar exams. The contrast with Bose, a brilliant student of philosophy at Cambridge who was the first native to pass the exams into the elite ranks of Indian civil service and decline  it on patriotic grounds is striking. It would even be more unfair to compare Nehru to Ambedkar who was intellectually much superior over most Congress leaders.  Even though Nehru was not a believer he identified  Hinduism with the nation explaining that “Hinduism became the symbol of nationalism and it was indeed a national religion”. He claimed that, “Caste was a group system based on services and functions and it was meant to be an all inclusive order. It was infinitely better than slavery even for those lowest in scale as within each caste there was equality and a measure of freedom, each caste was occupational and applied itself to its particular work”. Later even though he mentioned caste had become a barrier to progress he never so much touched on the subject of untouchability. Nehru’s first real test as a political leader came with the elections of 1937 when he was the president of Congress. He announced that now there were only two political forces that mattered in India: the Congress and British government. By this time the membership of Congress was 97% Hindu. Across India it could not even find candidates to run in close to 90% of Muslim constituencies. In Nehru’s own province, Uttar Pradesh, Congress had swept the board of Hindu seats but it had not won a single Muslim seat. The Muslim League sought a coalition between the two parties that would give some sort of representation to Muslims in the ministry which Nehru vehemently rejected. Ambedkar would describe the mentality of high caste Hindus as monopolised as Congress claimed a monopoly of legitimacy in the struggle for independence. When Muslims refused to vote for Congress in large numbers Nehru launched a mass contacts campaign to convince them. But he had little success with the masses and even little experience so his efforts soon fizzled. In fact it was the last time he would ever try to engage with the masses from below. During the Second World War, the Congress instructed all provincial governments to resign in protest at the viceroy’s declaration of war on Germany without consultation with the people of India. Due to the political vacuum created, Jinnah aware that London badly needed some show of loyalty stepped up with assurance. He expressed support for Britain in its hour of need and earned in exchange its wartime favor. He was the uncontested leader of the Muslim League but the Muslim population of subcontinent were far from united. Historically the culture and political heartland of the Muslim elite lay in UP where the League was the strongest but only 1/3rd of the population was Muslim. Far away to the west, Sind, Baluchistan and Northwest Frontier were overwhelmingly Muslim. But they were a rural backwater dominated by local leaders who did not speak Urdu and felt no allegiance to the League. In two of the richest provinces of India, Punjab and Bengal Muslims formed a majority but in neither was the League a dominant force. In Punjab the Unionist Party controlled the province which was a coalition of big Muslim landlords and rich Hindu jat farmers. In Bengal the League was led by aristocratic land owners owning huge estates in the east of the province, it was a mass peasant based party the KPP that made the political running. Thus wherever observers looked Muslim League was weak, either locked out of power by Congress or bypassed by rival formations in Muslim majority zones. What saved it was Jinnah standing as the only Muslim politician capable of operating with sufficient skill and calibre  at an All India level to make the Unionist,KPP and other leaders willing to let him represent them in negotiations with the British at the centre. The war however would rapidly alter this configuration

The British who viewed the Muslims with suspect after the mutiny now came to see Muslims as the safest counterweight to the rise of Hindu nationalism, granting them separate electorates to ensure they would not automatically form a bloc with it in common struggle against the Raj. Though Jinnah was thoroughly secular in his outlook and mode of life, he was still rebuffed by Congress because he clearly saw the sociological reality of the party that was essentially a Hindu party. Jinnah was aware of the weakness of his base so he avoided formulating any too specific demands of the Raj. At Lahore in 1940 he announced that there were two nations not one in the subcontinent and that independence would have to accommodate their coexistence in a form that gave autonomy and sovereignty to those areas where there was a Muslim majority. He did not mention the word Pakistan anywhere which Jinnah later complained was being pinned on him by Congress. He was faced with a dilemma. Even if majority Muslim areas were possible candidates for independence, what would happen to the minorities they left behind? Wouldn’t these minorities need some protection from the arbitrary exercises of Hindu will under Congress? Nehru in his autobiography dismissed any possibility of a Muslim nation in India. In 1938 he informed an American audience that there is no religious or cultural conflict conflict in India. Even in 1941, he reasserted that there was no force which can break up the unity of India.

In the elections of 1945 The Muslim League won every single Muslim seat in the central elections and 89% of them in provincial elections. Nehru who had been proven wrong, the position of League in the Muslim community was the same as that of Congress in the Hindu community. The labor government dispatched a cabinet mission to negotiate a constitutional framework for independence which bore some resemblance to the arrangements evoked by Jinnah. At first both parties agreed to this arrangement but soon Nehru changed his mind and single handedly rejected it. Jinnah lost his patience and declared a day of direct action to demonstrate that Muslim patience with constitutional road was now over. A politician skilled in maneuver at elite level, he had no experience of mass action and hence communal slaughter ensued in Calcutta. Even though it was initiated by Muslim thugs it ended with many more Muslims killed than Hindus. Wavell called an interim government into being, headed by Nehru, Patel as interior minister and Jinnah’s deputy as finance minister. Each party was determined to thwart the other. Such was the situation in February 1947, when the Atlee government announced that India would have independence by June 1948 and dispatched Mountbatten to take over as viceroy.. The labor regime in Britain viewed Congress as the Indian party closest to its own outlook and now the Imperial policy towards religious divide in India came full circle. During the second half of the 19th century Muslims were suspect to the Raj as first movers of mutiny, in the first half of 20th century favors were reversed and Hindu nationalism became more assertive so Muslim aspirations were patronized. Now on the last lap, London returned violently back towards the political expression of the majority community. Britain had made, of a dispersed subcontinent, for the first time in history a single political reality and it wanted to preserve the most remarkable creative achievement of the empire. Alongside ideological investments in the unity of the subcontinent, Britain still had material positions in Asia which could have been under the threat of a communist insurgency. Division of the subcontinent could play into the hands of the Russians and if the gates of South Asia were to be barred securely against communism, The West required the bulwark of a united India. This indicated that Muslim League once a tactical experience for the Raj was now an obstacle to a satisfactory settlement of its affairs. Jinnah  hardly received the same favors as the leaders of the Congress but to this imbalance was added the influence of Mountbatten

Mountbatten was a mendacious, intellectually limited hustler who had suddenly realized he had been made the most powerful man on earth. He had two overriding concerns, to cut a figure fit for Hollywood as the last ruler of the Raj and above all to ensure India would remain a Dominion within the Commonwealth. If the Raj had to be divided then it was the larger part that mattered for British purposes so naturally Congress was  the preferred partner in planning the future of the subcontinent. In Nehru, Mountbatten found delightful company. Within weeks not only was the congressman fast friends with the viceroy but soon thereafter in bed with his wife to the satisfaction of all concerned.

Affairs of heart rarely affect affairs of state but in this case the erotic ties of the triangle tilted British policy towards the Congress. For Mountbatten Jenna was a “lunatic”, “a bastard”, “a clot” and for Nehru, “a paranoid heading a party of hitlerian leadership and policies” , for Atlee,  “that twister” .Communal riots were raging in Punjab as Mountbatten arrived and since the deadlock between congress and League could not be overcome, Mountbatten decided that partition was inevitable.But how was this partition supposed to be accomplished? Six years after Lahore Jinnah had still not found any way to square the circle of sovereignty for Muslim majority provinces with safeguards for Muslim minorities in Hindu majority provinces. Jinnah had hoped that the British confronted with the incompatibility of League and Congress would ultimately impose a confederation on which both the parties would agree in which the Muslim majority zones of the subcontinent would be self governing with the central authority weak enough not to impinge on them but strong enough to protect Muslim minorities in self governing Hindu majority zones. In the event the cabinet mission had produced a plan close enough to this vision. Jinnah had hoped that this plan would be followed instead of a partition. But for Nehru such a scheme was worse than partition since it would deprive his party of total control at the center. To Nehru, it was better to enjoy a full monopoly of power in a divided India than to have to share it in an undivided India. Nehru could be confident of his favor from the side of Mountbatten and he was right. For Mountbatton, of paramount importance was the objective of keeping whatever states were to emerge from the Raj within British Commonwealth. That meant they must accept independence as dominions. The League had no objections but Congress  rejected any future as a Dominion. For Mountbatten, this was an issue since his loyalty lied with Congress but Congress would not concede to his aims. How was this contradiction to be solved?  The answer came from V P Menon, a Hindu functionary from Kerela working on Mountbatten’s  personal staff and a close compatriot of Patel. He advised that Congress should be offered a divided India in which it not only had a much bigger territory and population but it would also have a larger share of military and bureaucratic machinery of the Raj. In return for this favor, Congress must accept to be a Dominion of the British Raj. In addition to this,Menon suggested why not also hand over the princely states to Congress. Mountbatten was overjoyed, later writing to Menon said, “It was indeed fortunate that you were the reforms commissioner on my staff. You were the first person I met who entirely agreed with the idea of dominion status and you thought of the solution which I had not thought of”.

Mountbatten due to his friendship towards Nehru, felt that he should show the plan to him before it was officially ruled out. Nehru was furious as the plan did not adequately acknowledge that the Indian unit would be the actual successor state of the Raj and Pakistan was barely a secession from it. How can the two be put on similar footing?Again this discrepancy was sorted out by the invaluable hand of Menon and he redrafted the plan to Nehru’s satisfaction. In the first week of June, Mountbatten announced that Britain would transfer power on August 14. The rules laid down for territorial division of the Raj excluded any consultation with the population ; instead the legislative assembly of each province decided which state it wanted to belong with three exceptions. In Punjab and Bengal the assembly would be given the option of dividing the province and in the northwest frontier there would be a referendum. In Punjab the Muslim majority in the assembly voted for Pakistan, the Hindu and Sikh minority for India. Bengal was another matter. With nearly four times the population it had a stronger common identity, a richer cultural intellectual tradition and more advanced politics.In the Hindu community, a movement led by Bose’s brother Sarat and in the Muslim community by the local head of the League joined forces to call for united Bengal as an independent state adhering neither to Indian or Pakistan. Mountbatten wanted only two dominions in the subcontinent though he did not completely rule out a third. Jinnah too said he would not oppose a unitary Bengal. Leading a violent attack on the idea of a united Bengal was the ancestor of today’s BJP, the rabidly confessional Hindu Mahasabha. The first mass upsurge of Indian nationalism had come over the division of Bengal now the roles were reversed. Hindu chauvanists insisted that Bengal be partitioned on religious lines. Nehru himself was not in favor of an independent Bengal unless closely linked with India as he said that partition now would anyhow bring East Bengal into Hindu stand in a few years. But soon the Congress realized that the independence of Bengal would mean the dominance of Muslim League in Bengal and so the Congress party rallied behind the mahasabha whipping up Hindu demands for its partition, Gandhi in support. In the Bengal assembly, the vote was 126 to 90 in favor of unity but when representatives of West and East cast ballots, the west voted for partition, the East against it  and hence Bengal was divided along religious lines.

Coming to North west frontier, the region had seen prevalence  of a strong Muslim anti-colonialist movement: The Red Shirts. Led by a local landlord Badshah Khan, it was affiliated to Congress though by no means always in the line with. The red shirts had won a majority in the provincial election of 1946 but when Nehru paid them a visit in autumn of that year he was given a hostile reception. Muslim League also had been very weak in the province but as communal tensions rose it started to gain strength. The red shirts had campaigned on the platform for a united India but the northwest frontier was 95% Muslim and geographically separated from the rest of the Congress held subcontinent. Congress opposed any kind of referendum about partition, accepted one in the NWFP only on the condition that they should not be given the option of independence. For Badshah khan,Nehru’s acceptance of partition was a betrayal of innumerable promises and the exclusion of any choice for an independence in a referendum was a double betrayal. The Redshirts boycotted the referendum along with half of the voters, but the rest rallying behind the League gave an overwhelming majority for joining Pakistan.

Congress could not have cared less because it did not want a detached borderland from the mainland. Moreover it is often said that Nehru was so vain that he might have even let go of the provinces because of the unceremonious treatment he had received during his visit. Badshah Khan is supposed to have told Gandhi, “You have thrown us to the wolves”.

A bloodless winning of independence was accompanied by an unimaginably  bloody communal carnage. Though communal killings occurred across North India there was significant difference between Punjab and Bengal. Huge waves of refugees crisscrossed  Bengal with relatively little violence. In Punjab, on the other hand with inter-culture bond  weaker and a traditionally militarised ambiance, religious hostilities exploded in a reciprocal massacre. 4 ½ million Hindus and Sikhs were driven out of their homes to East Punjab, 5 ½ million Muslims to West Punjab in a communal inferno. The trial to this was set in motion on July 7 when  Radcliffe was sent to India to determine the boundaries of the two states India and Pakistan. He knew nothing of the subcontinent but there already existed a detailed plan to divide it drawn up by none other than V P Menon and another Hindu bureaucrat   B N Rao. Radcliffe adhered closely to it when Mountbatten intervened at the behest of Nehru to also include in 2 pivotal Muslim majority districts in Punjab rather than to Pakistan, one controlling the only access road from Delhi to Kashmir, the other containing a large arsenal. The plan of partition would have required at least an year of orderly admistration and preparation. It’s conveyance within six weeks was a sentence of death and devastation to millions. The eagerness of Congress for the prize money of an instant division was the local motive of the disaster.

In the ensuing violence, Congress made good a primary objective. It earned the  successful status to the Raj with its seat at the United Nation and control of the capital and ¾ of territory and population of British India. 14 out of 20 armored regiments, 40 out of 48 artillery regiments,  21 out of 29 infantry regiments fell into its grasp. Of the 160000 tons of ordnance legally allotted to Pakistan, no more than 23,000 ever reached it. The princely states were given the choice to choose their future. In practice if any of them declined  to join one of the two states,none had the means to resist annexation. The overwhelming majority  550 out of 560 were Hindu rulers with Hindu populations and were swiftly rounded up for India. In Junagadh (present Gujrat) a Muslim ruler ruled a Hindu population and opted for Pakistan. Congress sent in its troops without further ado to secure the state for India overriding the choice of the ruler. The vastly larger state of Hyderabad, the Nizam wished to maintain his independence was seized with an invasion.

In Kashmir there was a Hindu ruler ruling over a Muslim population. It had been sold by the East India company to a Dogra adventurer in the 1840s whose senior officers were exclusively Hindu and downright secretarian. Till 1920 there was death penalty for Muslim peasants most living in abject misery should they kill a cow. In that decade a Muslim conference led by Sheikh Abdullah came into being and adopted a social program drafted by communists within the party envisaging an independent Kashmir. Abdullah landed in jail after collaboration between Maharaja and British. Kashmir had never been significant in Jinnah’s political outlook. The six provinces that he was demanding for Pakistan included Assam  but not Kashmir. Opposite was true of Nehru. Though himself raised in UP, his ancestors had come from the elite of Kashmir, thus offering a sentimental investment in the region. He commemorated his experiences in Kashmir in sexual gushes enough to embarrass the lowest tourist brochure. Kashmir was also a strategic road out commanding the approaches to Central Asia. Moreover it was an ideological price for Congress to show that it was a secular state in which a Muslim province could take its place among Hindu provinces. Nehru cried before Patel that Kashmir meant more to him than anything else, adding to Edwina that “Kashmir affects me in a peculiar way” and later simply whining “I want Kashmir”.

In Kashmir the dogora ethnic cleansing started to drive out Muslims even before partition. Inflamed by reports of massacre, Muslims in Punjab and UP backed by Pakistan and Pathan tribesmen pulled down from the northwest frontier towards Srinagar killing and plundering in their path; the maharaja fled to Jammu.  Mountbatten was aware of Nehru’s demand for Kashmir and as early as nine days after the arrival of Radcliffe in India he was instructed by Menon that for India to have access to Kashmir,it required passage to the district of Gurdaspur in Punjab, the only overland route from Delhi to Srinagar and though it had a Muslim majority Radcliffe duly awarded it to India. There was never any doubt where Mountbatten’s sympathies lay. But legal cover was still required for military intervention by India and on October 26 this was provided by Menon with a forged Declaration of Accession to India by the Maharaja supposedly brought back by him from Srinagar when in fact he was still in Delhi. A document recently discovered on which the Indian state bases its entire claim to Kashmir but was unable to produce for a half a century. Patel airlifted troops into the city and under mountbatton’s supervision took control of Kashmir. Still it remained too obvious that a province with an overwhelming Muslim majority had been acquired by force. The backdated instrument of accession justifying  Indian seizure of Kashmir that could not be found after the event was an embarrassment that apologists have since only worsened with false stories. India had famously brushed aside princely decision in favor of popular preference to take over junagadh and Hyderabad but in case of Kashmir it was the popular preference that was brushed aside. Abdullah’s National Conference  wanted integration with India so he was installed as the Prime Minister by Delhi and Congress hoped that his popularity would bring a positive result for Congress whenever a referendum was held. But it was soon clear that the Kashmiri masses could not be turned towards the Congress and hence all promises of referendum disappeared. 

The concluding act of partition was hence a military conquest of a familiar stamp: territorial expansion by force of arms in the name of nationalism. What was Gandhi’s stance on this occupation of Kashmir? He’s known to have said, “Do I imagine that several crores of Muslims in India will be loyal to India in a  fight against Pakistan? It is easy to pose such a question but difficult to answer them.If they later betray you, you can shoot them. You may shoot one or two or a certain number. Everyone will not be disloyal. Kashmir belongs to Maharaja because Maharaja still exists.The government is composed of patriots and no one will do anything that is in conflict with the interests of the country”. He further said, “I feel so proud when I hear the noise of those airplanes; at one time I was feeling very miserable when I heard this but when this Kashmir operation began I began to feel proud of them and every aeroplane that goes with materials and arms and ammunition and requirements of the army I feel proud”. Patel himself was not in favor of stopping just at the occupation of Kashmir. He said, “If all the decisions rested on me I think I would be in favor of extending this little affair in Kashmir to a full scale war with Pakistan. Let us get it over with once and for all and settle down as a united continent”. Nehru himself believed that Pakistan was such a rickety structure that it had no chances of surviving. The delusions of Congress nationalism issued by Gandhi to Hindu specifications died hard. Only Ambedkar was clear sighted enough to see that self determination could not be denied to Muslims if they wanted it. He published the only serious work on the issue which would determine the outcome of the struggle for independence “Pakistan or partition”.  He did not advocate for separation of two communities but he proposed referenda to determine popular wishes. He would call for a division of Kashmir to allow its Muslim majority zone including the valley to join Pakistan. The condition of Ambedkar’s sanity was that he had broken up with Hinduism. The condition of Nehru’s obduracy was that he had not.

When the Indian army took over Hyderabad, massive Hindu pogroms against the Muslim population broke out and an investigation team was later set up at the behest of Maulana Azad. Conservative estimates say around 27 - 40,000 Muslims had been slaughtered in the space of a few weeks after the Indian takeover dwarfing the killings by Pathan raiders enroute to Srinagar which India had ever since used as a leverage for annexation of Kashmir. After its victory in Hyderabad Nehru announced that “not a single communal incident had marred the Indian  triumph”. 20 years later when news of the report finally surfaced, his daughter Indira Gandhi banned any publication or document as “injurious to national interests”.

The standard nationalist version in India is that British policies of Divide and Rule was responsible for partition. Historically British power had indeed always rested on divisions but in the 19th century divide and rule was not the primary instrument of control for the British because there was a danger of  aggregating dangerously wide blocks of religious identity. The Raj preferred safer subdivisions. Even though it initially stoked religious tension it later found an ideal arrangement which was the condition of Punjab, Inter confessional unity around a strong regional identity loyal to the Raj against which neither Congress nor Muslim League made any headway in the inter-war years. Popular conceptions in India blaming the creation of Pakistan on British plot are false legends. Jinnah was an early architect of Hindu-Muslim unity but had little mass following down to the end of 30s. Till quite later he aimed at a confederation rather than complete separation and it was not Jinnah who had injected religion into the vocabulary of the national movement, it was Gandhi. Even his demand of separation was not sectarian nor was it calling on Muslims to  defend the caliph in the same breath as Hindus to restore the Golden age of Rama. He did so out of political consideration  and safety of minority Muslim population under a strong Hindu central government.

By mid 30s Congress as the party was close to monolithically Hindu iwith just 3% of its membership being Muslim. It also commanded loyalty of an overwhelming majority of the Hindu electorate but had minimal Muslim support. The Congress did nothing to bridge this gulf and  refused any arrangement with Muslim League. In 1928,  it reduced the allocation of Muslim seats from 1/3 to ¼, in 1937 coalition government in UP was rejected, in 1942 Cripps mission was redrafted for allowing constituent units freedom to choose whether or not to join a future Indian union, in 1947 Nehru killed off the cabinet plan as a Confederation for giving too much leeway to areas where the Muslim League was likely to dominate. Central to these was the claim that India had existed as a nation time out of mind with a continuous identity and overarching harmony prior to the arrival of British. The Congress was hell bent on proving that imperialism had sought to set community against community which had lived in perfect peace till now. The facts were however different. The variegated Hindu populations had never formed a subcontinent state of these dimensions As one historian has written, “It was the persistent Congress claim to speak for the whole country as the only alternative to British rule that precipitated the crisis and made partition inevitable”. It is true that well before Gandhi the first stirrings of nationalism in Bengal were sold with modernized Hindu appeals. Bankim chatterjee’s Anandanath that would supply Congress with its anthem Vande Mataram, already extolled whole sole destruction of Muslims as alien underlings of the British while Tilak was leading his compatriots in Maharashtra with a new cult of the elephant headed God, Ganesh. All this was peppered with Gandhi’s claims, “if religion dies then India dies”. The truth is that partition could have been well avoided if Congress had acted wisely and had conceded to some demands of Muslim League and the masses themselves. On the other hand Congress took scarcely any intelligent steps to avert it and in many cases,it caused it to  take the cruelest form with the worst human consequences. Of partition Gandhi said in 1928, “I am more than ever convinced that the communal problem should be solved outside of legislation and if in order to reach that state there has to be a civil war so be it”. In 1947,he told Mountbatten that the only alternatives were a continuation of British rule to keep law and order or an Indian bloodbath. “The blood bath must be faced and accepted”. To an Indian journalist he said he would rather have bloodbath in a united India after British quit than accept partition on a communal basis. To his credit when the programs erupted in 1947 he did what he could to prevent them to good effect in Calcutta but still strapped in the Hindu nationalism he cheered on the seizure of Kashmir. Nehru on the other hand was eager to acquire his inheritance and believed that all subtractions from it would only be temporary.

Republic

Nehru and his colleagues sat crosslegged around a sacred fire in Delhi where Hindu priests chanted hymns and sprinkled holy water. 3 hours later on a date and time stipulated by Hindu astrologers the stroke of midnight on 14th August 1947 Nehru told his listeners that their “tryst with destiny” was consummated and had given birth to the Indian Republic as the rest of the world was asleep.( London and New York were wide awake lol). Within a fortnight a constituent assembly was appointed to draft a constitution and it was chaired by Ambedkar. It took two years to come up with a charter of 395 articles and came into force on 26th January 1950. It combined a strong central executive with a symbolic presidency, a bicameral legislature with reserved seats for minorities, a Supreme Court with robust provincial governments in a semi feudal structure. India’s democracy is impressive not because of its virtue but because of its size. The stability of Indian democracy came because there was no overthrowing of the power of the Raj but a transfer of power by it to Congress as its successor. The colonial bureaucracy and army was left intact minus the colonizers.  Along with British machinery of administration and coercion, Congress inherited its tradition of representation. The constituent assembly that gave India’s constitution was a British created body from 1946 for which only one out of seven of the subjects of the Raj had been allowed to vote. Once independence was granted Congress could have called for new elections but fearing that outcome might be less convenient than what they had in hand, it took special care to not conduct any elections. No election on an expanded franchise was held till 1951. Some 250 out of 395 articles of the constitution were taken word for word from the Government of India act passed in 1935. A mere six articles out of nearly 400 dealt with elections but these laid down that the victors would be those first past the post in any constituency. For 20 years across 5 polls between 1951 and 1971 Congress never once won a majority of votes. Its average share of the electorate was 45%. At the national level it had no political opposition but had there been any opposition the centre had power to swiftly deal with it. These two were heirlooms of the Raj appropriated by Congress.Congress made use of preventive detention that dated back to a Bengal State Prisoners Regulation of 1818 and was later approved by Nehru and Patel to be retained in the constitution. Similarly intervention by the  viceroy to override elected governments was authorized by the section 93 of Government of India Act of 1935. The same powers now reappeared in article 356 of the constitution transferred to the president of the Republic. Nehru and Patel wasted no time in showing the use of the first, sweeping communist leaders and militants into jail across the country within a few months of independence. In Kerala where the communist governments were intermittently elected president’s rule was imposed five times from 1959 onwards. By 1987 there had been no less than 75 of these takeovers by the centre affecting virtually every state in India.

There’s a peculiar characteristic about Indian electorate where the poor form not just the overwhelming majority of the electorate but  vote in larger numbers than the better of.  Everywhere else the ratio of electoral participation is without exception by reverse, the better of population votes more than the underprivileged population. So why was it that the massive power that lay in the hands of the impoverished masses was not able to overthrow an oppressive government. The answer lay in the historic pecularities of Indian system of social stratification:caste. Virtually all ruling classes enjoy an advantage over the ruled in the capacity for collective action. Subordinate classes always tend to be organizationally outflanked. Nowhere has this condition being more extreme than India. But the truly deep impediments to collective action lay in the impossible trenches of the caste system. Hereditary, hierarchical, occupational through and through with phobias and taboos Hindu social organization fissured the population into some 5000 jatis. Caste system accorded the structural significance and the ultimate secret of Indian democracy. Gandhi declared that caste alone had preserved Hinduism from disintegration. Ambedkar  famously remarked, “We’re going to enter a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. We must remove this contradiction at earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this assembly has so laboriously constructed”. This inequality  was not a contradiction of the democracy to come, it was the condition of it. India would be a caste- iron democracy.

The test of undeclared federalism of Indian constitution came with emergence of movements for linguistic redivision of territorial units inherited from the Raj. Even though the Congress was instinctively hostile to this but it was forced by popular pressures in the Telugu zone to accept the creation of Andhra in 1953. Top down reorganisation brought Karnataka, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh three years later. The Bombay presidency had to be split into Maharashtra and Gujarat in 1960. At independence there were 14 states, today the number is 28 and still counting. Therefore the notion that the preservation by the Indian state of the unity of the country is a feat so unique as to be little short of a miracle is just vanity. A glance at the map of postcolonial world is enough to show that no matter how  artificial the boundaries of any given European colony may have been, they continue to exist today. Meaning to say that no matter how arbitrarily the European colonizers may have drawn the boundary of nations, they persist to this day for most nations. The motto of independence in former colonies has invariably been, “what the empire has joined, let no man put asunder”. In this general landscape India represents not an exception, but the rule.

Typically military force deployed to preserve post colonial unity has meant military government in one guise or another, state of emergency in the periphery, dictatorship at the center. India has escaped the latter but has exhibited the former with a vengeance . Coming to the northeast of India, the British had conquered an area larger than UP of densely forested mountains inhabited by tribal people of Tibeto- Mongloid origin untouched by Hinduism. In the valleys three Hindu kingdoms had long existed, the oldest in Manipur, the largest in Assam. So detached are these areas from India that when Burma was detached from the Raj in 1935, officials came close to allocating them to Rangoon rather to Delhi. Only 2% of northeast borders are contiguous with India. The ruler of Manipur had been adequately rounded up by VP Menon in 1947 and by 1949 was resisting full integration into the union. Within days the Maharaja was kidnapped and surrounded by troops and made to sign his Kingdom into oblivion at gunpoint. In Assam about half the native population of 1.5 million made it clear that they did not want to be impressed into the future Indian state. Nehru dismissed the idea of Naga independence as absurd. Undeterred Nehru claimed, “Whether heavens fall or India goes into pieces and blood runs red in the country whether I’m here or anyone else Nagas will not be allowed to be independent. The Naga National Council was derecognized, police raids multiplied. By late 1955 a Naga feudal government had been proclaimed and full scale war for independence had broken out. Under the commander in chief of the Indian army two divisions and 35 battalions of the paramilitary Assam rifles,a largely Gurkha force notorious for its cruelties were dispatched to crush the uprising. In 1958, Nehru’s regime enacted perhaps the most sanguinary single piece of repressive legislation in the annals of liberal democracy, the Armed Forces Special Powers Regulation which authorized the killing out of hand of anyone observed in a group of five persons or more if such were forbidden and forbade any legal action whatsoever against any person in respect of anything done in exercise of the powers of this regulation unless the central government so consented. With this license to murder Indian troops and paramilitaries were guaranteed immunity from atrocities and made ample use of it. Half a century later the armed forces special powers act is still required to hold the region down.

In 1957 China had already completed a 700 mile road from Sin kiang to Tibet passing through the uninhabited Aksai plateau claimed as a part of India without anyone in Delhi even being aware of it. Aksai Chin was of use to China whereas it was of so little significance to India it had not even noticed that China had built a road through the region. Had Nehru shown a grain of historical common sense or political realism he would have settled on that basis but he said, “If I give them that I shall no longer be Prime Minister of India. I will not do it”. He claimed that the  MacMahon line coincided with the borders of India for nearly 3000 years as testified by the Upanishads. Shastri announced that if China did not vacate the disputed areas India would eject it from them. In the first round of fighting lasting a fortnight in October, Indian troops attempting to advance in northeast were thrashed. US, British and Israeli weapons were hastily summoned to bulk up the national arsenal. On 14th November Indian troops launched a counterattack  and within less than a week they disintegrated completely as a military force.  Had China wished, the PLA could have marched without opposition to Calcutta. But Chinese leadership had already achieved all that it intended to do and its control of Aksai Chin now beyond challenge withdrew its troops back in a move of olympian closure virtually as humiliating to Nehru as his crushing defeat in the field. Psychologically broken and physically diminished he lingered in office for another 18 months before his death in the spring of 1964. 

In retrospect, Nehru stock has risen among Indian intellectuals of liberal or left persuasion as that of the political class that came after him has fallen. Bent on retaining power for himself he took care to appoint no deputy premier to succeed him. Ambedkar whom Nehru feared and whose funeral really pointedly failed to attend was rapidly edged out. Bose the only leader Congress ever produced who united Hindus Muslims and six lay buried in Taiwan.Nehru accumulated more power than he could handle, permanent foreign minister as well as Prime Minister, not to speak of defense minister, head of Planning Commission, and president of Congress at various times. It was a one man show. He was a poor judge of character, surrounding himself with incompetent henchman and an even worse administrator. Throughout his years as Prime Minister, Congress enjoyed enormous majorities in parliament and controlled virtually every provincial government in a caste divided society. Political scientists called it  a “one party democracy”. In 1961 he made it a crime to question the territorial integrity of India in writing or in speech punishable with three years imprisonment. The nagas whom he started to bomb in 1963 were unbeaten when he died. Three years later a full scale rebellion broke out  among the neighboring Mizo. By the end of the decade Manipur, Tripura and Assam were all in flames.

Nehru normalized sycophancy and hereditary principle within the party. His successor, his own daughter was more authoritarian than her father and within weeks her first action was  to call for the ouster of the government of Kerala. She would later go on to declare an emergency and jailing 140000 citizens without charges. These actions were straight from the handbook of the Raj. In the struggle for independence the legitimizing ideology of Congress had always been a secular nationalism but the word “secular” was nowhere mentioned in the constitution. There would be no uniform Civil Code and Hindus and Muslims would continue to be subject to their  respective customs of their faith. Nor would there be interference with religious hierarchies in daily life, untouchability was banned but caste itself was left untouched. Protection of cows and prohibition of alcohol were enjoined and seats were reserved in parliament for two minorities, scheduled caste and tribes , but not Muslims. In 1951 Ambedkar introduced a Hindu code bill for marital inequality. The bill and Ambedkar both were abandoned by Congress and he left the party. In 1947 he had been inducted into it by Patel and Nehru because they feared the alliance between his party the Scheduled Castes Federation and Jinnah’s Muslim League which had actually elected him from Bengal to the constituant assembly; the combination of untouchables and Muslims that Gandhi had dreaded in the 30s. Ambedkar said that the position of his own people had not altered much as the same old tyranny, the same old oppression existed and perhaps in a worse form. He knew he had been used by Congress and said two years later, “People always keep on saying to me, you are the maker of the constitution. My answer is I was a hack. What I was asked to do I did much against my will”.

Congress had failed to avert partition because it could never bring itself honestly to confront its composition as an overwhelmingly Hindu party. Only within a few years of independence it was rebuilding with much pomp the famous Hindu temple in Somnath and authorizing the installation of Hindu idols in a famous mosque at Ayodhya.How have Muslims fared under the secularism of India?In 2006 government appointed Sachar  Commission found that out of 130 million Muslims in India numbering some 13.4% of the population less than three out of five are literate and one out of three were among the most destitute layers of Indian society. ¼ of their children between the ages of 6 to 14 were not in school. In top 50 colleges of the land 2 out of 100 post graduates were Muslims, in the elite institutions of technology 4 out of 100. In the cities Muslims had fewer chance of any regular job than Dalits or Adivasis and higher rates of unemployment.  The report confessed Muslims shares in employment in various departments  are abysmally low at all levels not more than 5% . In state governments the situation could be still worse nowhere more than in communist run West Bengal which with a Muslim population of 25% posted a figure of just 3.25% of Muslims in its service. It is possible moreover that the official number of Muslims in India is an underestimate. In a confidential cable to Washington released by WikiLeaks, the US embassy reported that the real figure was somewhere between 160 and 180 million. Were that so Sachar’s  findings would need to be further deflated. The discrimination against Muslims began with the constitution itself which accorded rights of representation to minorities but denied it to them. Scheduled castes and  scheduled tribes were granted special  seats in Lok Sabha and later  still more Hindu groups under “Other Backward Classes” acquired reservations. But Muslims were refused both on the grounds that conceding them would violate the precepts of secularism by introducing religion into matters of state. In mechanics such as these Indian secularism is Hindu confessionalism by another name. All told, the security agencies of the Indian union as the Sachar report politely calls them, number close to 2 million. How many Muslims do they contain? The report notes no figures are available for ¾ of these. Put simply, Muslims are not wanted in their ranks, the fewer the better. In 1999, a former defence minister let it slip that the number was just 1% out of 11,00,000 regulars. In the Research and Analysis Wing and intelligence Bureau, it is an unwritten code that there should be not a single Muslim, so too in the national security guards and special protection group in the Secret Service Corps. As with other oppressed minorities in society is keen to advertise their pluralism, a sprinkling of celebrities, a batsman, a film star, a scientist or a symbolic officeholder here and there may be found but this does not alter the position of the overwhelming majority of Muslims in India. They are second class citizens.

In areas where Hinduism has no influence such as Kashmir, Nagaland, Mizoram and Punjab the rule of AFSPA has fallen upon them. To be successful in India there is no need to be a Hindu in any sense other than by birth. Descent not piety is the criterion.  Much of the making of Congress’s secular ideal are based squarely on the Hindu community. Neither the state nor the party has ever made any serious effort to improve the social or political position of his Muslim minority. Neither party nor state has ever contemplated doing that because both have rested, sociologically speaking, on Hindu caste society. The continued dominance of upper castes in public institutions -administration, police, courts, universities, media- belongs to the same metrics. 

Coming to the growth of explicitly right wing parties BJP, their success was due not just to the faltering of the first wave of officeholders of Congress but due to their ability to articulate openly what had always been latent in the national movement: which is Hindu confessionalism.Half a century passed after independence when the BJP started to gain office.RSS,a mutation of the Hindu mahasabha with which Gandhi had been on good terms, it played a very little role in the independence struggle if hardly any. It was only during partition where it led huge campaigns to divide Bengal along religious lines pulling Congress in along with it. In the RSS, the BJP had a disciplined mass organization behind it. The time for hindutva the vision of a revolutionary fighter(Savarkar /s) incarcerated by the Raj on the Andamans before Gandhi ever set political foot in India had come. The rise of BJP was likened to fascism by several intellectuals. This was a category mistake, there was no working class threat, no economic slump, no revanchist drive to produce any subcontinental equivalent of the interwar scene in Europe. It flourished because the Indian state had never been able to develop any systematic critique of Hinduism. On the contrary another discourse embellishing Hinduism as preeminently a faith of tolerance pluralism and peaceful harmony was popularized. For Amartya Sen, “no other religion has so capaciously included even atheism in it along with monotheism, polytheism, pantheism and any other sort of theism”. Long before Sen, Savarkar cast the generous mantle of Hinduism over atheists. The idea was that the BJP does not oppose but upholds secularism, for India is secular because it is Hindu. About 25 words in an inscription of Ashoka became testimony to Hindu peace and harmony and hence ignoring a whole of Sanskrit literature which bear testimony to the incorrigible militarism of the Hindus. According to Nirad Chaudhry there is not one word of nonviolence in the theory and practice of statecraft in the whole of Sanskrit literature. Generalization for generalization, who could doubt which Bengali judgment is more historical?(lmao XD)

BJP is able to appropriate the language of secularism because Congress made a steady disposal of so called soft hindutva and the communist parties preferr and publicize versions of a “purer” and “truer” Hinduism closer to popular religion as they understand it. Is such a process of competitive desecularisation, the initial advantage could only lie with the BJP. Its breakthrough came in 1992 with a national campaign to demolish the mosque at Ayodhya designated as the supposed birthplace of Rama. The triumphant destruction of the mosque  gave the BJP the momentum that put it into office in Delhi by the end of the decade. In the time of Nehru Congress had ruled a segmented society divided by caste. After the emergency imposed by Nehru’s daughter, the carapace of the Congress system of caste subordination was cracked with wealthy farmers breaking away from it to lead the rebellion that brought the first non Congress coalition to power in 1977. The reservations for scheduled caste scheduled tribes fixed initially at 12.5% and 5% was later increased to 15 and  7.5%. It was then that the mandal Commission recommended that other lower castes amounting to half the population should be accorded 27% of public sector jobs. The upshot was to galvanize an entire spectrum of hitherto apathetic, resigned  or intimidated lowercastes into active political life. A year later and then another two years in Lucknow had the first Dalit chief minister in history, Mayawati. Congress has never recovered in what was once Nehru’s electoral fief.It represents a rise of the lower classes amounting to a silent revolution if one yet to be fully consummated. But castes are not classes. Castes have no permanent friends when it comes to politics, electoral alliances of brahmins and kshatriyas  with untouchables against OBCs can be seen in one part of the country while higher caste armies wage vicious rural wars on dalits in another. The BJP as a party aiming to unify the nation under its true Hindu banners thus found caste blocking its path. Realizing that it could not hope to win national power without attracting middle and lower caste it set about broadening its appeal and by the time of its first major electoral success in 1998,won 42% of the OBC vote in North India.

Congress and the BJP are each pursuing at home a neoliberal economy and abroad a strategic rapprochement with the United States. Culturally they now bathed in a common atmosphere in which religious Insignia, symbols, idols and anthems are taken for granted in commercial and official spaces alike. Congress relies on Muslim and tribal vote banks by pointing to the BJP as a greater sectarian danger. The BJP calls itself secular but it can rely on the fervor of the devout and the attraction of a more muscular nationalism. Practically though the differences are very few. Where communalism suits them there is little to choose between the two. More died in the program of 1984 in Delhi covered by Congress than of 2002 in Gujarat covered by the BJP although the latter’s active political complicity was greater. Neither compare with the massacres in Hyderabad under Patel and Nehru. 

Pervasive corruption dates back to 3rd generation of Nehru family rule. The cost of securing a seat in parliament have risen vertically so it has become a club of the super rich. One out of five MPs is a dollar millionaire and the total assets of its 543 members can be reckoned at 2 billion dollar in a society where over half the population lives on less than $2 a day. In the present Lok Sabha some 150 ministers have a total of more than 400 criminal charges against them. A third of all Congress MPs have inherited their seats by family connection.The tidal wave of corruption in Indian public life has been a byproduct of neoliberal turn of state since the 90s. Among the BRIC powers the Indian economy is the second largest in size. Services account for over half of the GDP in a society where agriculture accounts for more than half of the labor force, yet less than 50% of the GDP. Cultivable land is 40% more than  China, but the demographic dividend is not being cashed, for 10 million new entrants in the labor force each year just 5 million jobs are being created. The greatest economix success of the past 20 years has been achieved in IT but it accounts for only 2% of the labor force. Just 66 resident billionaires control assets worth more than 1/5 of the country’s GDP. Capital at large is 3 times more concentrated than in the United States. Infant mortality is 3 times as high as China. Undernourishment is much worse even then in sub saharan Africa afflicting over half of all Indian children under the age of five. 2/3 of all government subsidies go to the relatively well of rich farmers. Over 80% of expenditure on healthcare is private. Military expenditure virtually equals spending on all antipoverty programs combined

The Indian intelligentsia is another matter. There, India possesses a range and quality of minds that perhaps no other developing society in the world can match. Yet compared with social criticism, political critique is typically less comprehensive and less searching.  They are always buttressed by its apparatus of repression. Local literature rarely ever mentions repressive law such as armed forces special powers act, unlawful activities prevention act, prevention of insults to national honor act, maintenance of internal Security Act, national Security Act, terrorism and disruptive activities act, prevention of terrorist activities act, unlawful activities amendment act. Out of 53,000 people  arrested under the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities Act only 434 could be convicted seven years later. Torture is routinely practiced in most police stations and death in police custody is a frequent phenomena. The police practice of getting rid of suspects through staged encounters is unfortunately all too common. In the 60s the army was deployed in “aid of the civil power” some 476 times.

 To this political inhibition was added a cultural difficulty. Sociologically Hinduism was not a realm of belief or practice separate from the rest of existence but permeated as the ubiquitous texture of popular life. Hence even secular progressive affront were threatened by losing popular sympathy if they tried to detach from Hinduism. The great epics of Hindu legend the Mahabharata and Ramayana are dramatized on television not just as entertainment but occasion many a little act of worship before the small screen.

In the Trimurti of much boasted Indian values: democracy may be imperfect, Secualrity ambiguous but Dissent comes close to banishing altogether. The nation and the land belonging to it has become virtually unquestionable. The idea of India is suffused with religious and mythical meanings so is the territory it covers. Just how Nehru explained to Zhou Enlai that mahabharata promised him the McMahon line.The narrative of nationhood becomes simply territorial integrity. The reality is otherwise. There should be little need for any reminder of the fate of Kashmir or northeastern states. Brazen celebration of India’s goodwill in Kashmir is a staple of the media. To question the territorial integrity of the union is a crime punishable at law. 

An ideology to be effective  must always in some measure answer to reality. The idea of India is not a mere tissue of myths. The realities of the union as a whole are more complex many of them much darker. Once any independent state has emerged from an anti colonial struggle, what was once a discourse of awakening can easily become one of intoxication. In India that danger is great  both because of the size of the nation and the particular character and outcome with the way it came into being. Indian intellectuals will often contrast the happier condition of their country with that of Pakistan but given their respective starting points, not to speak of the responsibility of the stronger in doing their best the comparison risks pharisaism. Though the military loom larger, today the media are more outspoken in Pakistan, though it is yet poorer there is less undernourishment and better health care in Bangladesh. 

Congress had its place in the National Liberation struggle. Gandhi who had made it the mass force it became called at independence for its dissolution. He was right. Since then the party has been a steadily increasing calamity for the country .Its exit from the scene would be the best single gift Indian democracy could give itself. The BJP of course now a more dangerous force cannot be wished out of existence because it represents a substantial political phenomena which has to be fought actively. These political ills are not sudden or recent maladies of a once healthy system. They descend from its original composition. Today the world’s tallest statue of Patel is being commissioned by BJP. It honours a Congress leader who wanted the RSS to join his party. It is time to put away these effigies and all they represent.

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Review: What strikes the most about The Indian Ideology is the absolute non-euphemistic, unapologetic tone of Anderson. Laced with brazen commentary and dry humor, Anderson makes it helluva ride through the various myths of the Indian ideology finally culminating in the conclusion that the projected “idea of India” is false. If anything, the idea of India is not about unity, diversity and secularism but crypto Hindu confessionalism and caste-iron democracy. I would have liked to see some more attention to history of “India” before it became India and how Gandhi and Nehru built this image of a pre-modern united civilisation that never was. Nevertheless, the book covers a significant period of time and issues , deconstructing the ideological basis of India that has dominated the popular discourse.

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