“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe.
“Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer.
"My 80% friend isn't my 20% enemy" Ronald Reagan.
On May 18, standing before the House of Commons, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will offer a full apology for the Komagata Maru incident. File Photo
Canadian leader Justin Trudeau is to tender a full apology for the Komagata Maru incident of 1914. It should trigger similar repentance elsewhere for other sins of the past.
History rarely produces moments of epiphany, where politics appears as a creative act of redemption and the future becomes a collective act of healing. Each society carries its wounds like a burden, a perpetual reminder that justice works fragmentarily. Suddenly out of the crassness, the crudity of everyday politics, comes a moment to treasure. On May 18, standing before the House of Commons, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will offer a full apology for theKomagata Maru incident.
The drama of the ritual, the act of owning up to a wrong and voluntarily asking for forgiveness is rare in history. One immediately thinks of Willy Brandt, the West German Chancellor, kneeling down during his visit to the Warsaw Ghetto and apologising to the Jews. The act was moving. For once instead of the mere word, the body spoke in utter humility as Brandt knelt before the monument. It was a sheer act of courage, responsibility and humility, an admission of a politics gone wrong, a statement of a colossal mistake that needed redemption.
Hundred years to atonement
This movement for forgiveness is important. Forgiveness adds a different world to the idea of justice. To the standard legal idea of justice as retaliation, compensation, forgiveness adds the sense of healing, of restoration, of reconciliation. Society faces up to an act of ethical repair and attempts to heal itself. Memory becomes critical here because it is memory that keeps scars alive, and memory often waits like a phantom limb more real than the event itself.
The Komagata Maru incident is over a hundred years old. But like the Jallianwala Bagh atrocity, it is a memory that refuses to die easily. It is a journey that remains perpetually incomplete, recycled in memory as Canada would not allow the homecoming.
Komagata Maru was a ship hired by Gurdit Singh, a Hong Kong/Singapore-based Sikh businessman, a follower of the Ghadar Party, who wanted to circumvent Canadian laws of immigration. The journey of 376 Indians, 340 of them Sikhs, began from Hong Kong. They finally reached Vancouver where a new drama of attrition began. British Columbia refused to let the passengers disembark, while Indians in Canada fought a rearguard struggle of legal battles and protest meetings to delay the departure. Passengers even mounted an attack on the police showering them with lumps of coal and bricks.
The ship was forced to return to Calcutta, 19 of the passengers were killed by the British and many placed under arrest. Komagata Maru was a symbol of racism, of exclusionary laws, a protest to highlight the injustice of Canadian laws. When Mr. Trudeau apologises, he will perform an act of healing where Canada apologises not only to India but to its own citizens, many of whom are proud Sikhs. The index of change is not just the ritual apology but another small fact. The British Columbia Regiment involved in the expulsion of the Komagata Maru was commanded between 2011 and 2014 by Harjit Sajjan, now Canada’s Minister of National Defence.
Apology and forgiveness
This incident echoes the need for similar apologies, acts of dignity which can repair political rupture. Imagine the U.S. apologising to Japanese prisoners imprisoned in World War II. Imagine Japan apologising for war atrocities. Think of the U.S. apologising for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Press even further and dream of Narendra Modi apologising to the victims of the Gujarat riots of 2002. One senses some of these dreams are remote and realises that, after nearly two years in office as Prime Minister, Mr. Modi does not have the makings of a Willy Brandt. Truth and healing are still remote to the politics of the majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party.
The very act of apologising and forgiveness reiterates the importance of memory and the vitality of the community as a link between past, present and future. It raises the question of the responsibility for the past and its injustices. Somehow for many politicians, the past is a different country for which they have no responsibility. Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard refused to apologise to the Aborigines, contending that present generations cannot be responsible for the past. Tony Blair was ready to apologise for the mid-19th century Irish potato famine but refused to apologise for the depredations of colonial rule. One is not asking for facile or convenient apologies, one is asking for a rethinking of politics. David Cameron, in February 2013, came close to an apology for Jallianwala Bagh. More than that, I think what one needs is a British apology for the Bengal famine of the 1940s which eliminated over three million people. It is a pity that it has not received a Nuremberg or a Truth Commission. I realise apology is a mere moral act without the materiality of reparation, but apology returns to the victim and the community the acknowledgement of human worth and dignity. Without the axiomatics of dignity, no human rights project makes any sense.
One must emphasise that forgiveness and apology are not sentimental acts constructing melodramatic spaces creating what French philosopher Jacques Derrida called “the grand scenes of repentance and theatricality”. Here, as Derrida claimed, is that rare moment where the human race shaken against itself examines its own humanity. Anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu is even more hard-headed when he says, “In almost every language, the most difficult words are ‘I am sorry’.” Mr. Tutu adds that spurious reconciliations can only lead to spurious healing. For him forgiveness is a wager, an ethical wager on the future of a relationship. This is why the few events of apology which stand up to critical scrutiny deserve to be treasured.
India’s own chequered past
One must realise the past haunts India. Truth-telling, truth-seeking and the dignity and the courage of rituals of apology and forgiveness may do a lot to redeem the current impasses of Indian politics. Indians have not forgiven history or what they call history for its injustices. Yet, the language, the philosophy of forgiveness adds to the many dialects of democracy. I am merely listing moments of apology which could change the face of Indian politics. I am not demanding a census of atrocity but a set of ethical scripts whose political possibilities could be played out. The effort is not to provoke or score points, but to help create a deeper reflection and reflexivity about the growing impact of violence in the Indian polity.
First, I would like Narendra Modi to apologise to the Muslim community and to India for the horror of the 2002 riots. The genocide of 2002 froze Gujarat and India at a point, and the thaw can only be an ethical one demanding the humility of truth and forgiveness. A lot has been written about the unfinished nature of the 1984 riots in which over 5,000 Sikhs lost their lives. I know Manmohan Singh did offer an apology, but the Congress’s behaviour has turned this into an impotent mumbling. In the rightness of things, the Gandhi family owes an apology to the Sikhs, something it has not had the ethical courage to venture. Third, as an Indian, I think one not only has to withdraw the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act but also apologise to the people of Kashmir and Manipur for the decades of suffering. One must request Irom Sharmila to end her 15-year-long fast demanding the withdrawal of the Act with dignity. There has been enough violence here, and it is time that we as a nation think beyond the egotism and brittleness of the national security state.
Each reader can add to the list and to the possibilities of a new ethical and moral politics which requires a Gandhian inventiveness of ritual and politics. What I wish to add is a caveat. The rituals of apology and the question of justice, reconciliation and ethical repair are not easy. They require a rigour and an inventiveness of ethical thinking which necessitate new experiments with the idea of truth and healing in India.
Mr. Tutu makes this point beautifully and wisely. He talks of the man known as the Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal. In his book, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Wiesenthal spoke of a Nazi soldier who had burnt a group of Jews to death. As the Nazi lay dying in his deathbed, he confessed and asked for absolution from Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal found he could not forgive him. In the end, he asks the reader, “What would you have done?” — and The Sunflower is an anthropology of various responses.
We need an equivalence of The Sunflower experiment to ask Kashmiri Pandits, Kashmiri Muslims, Manipuris, Dalits, tribals, women what it would take for forgiveness after an act of atrocity. In fact, each one of us is a potential citizen, as perpetrator, spectator and victim, in that anthology. Is forgiveness and healing possible in the history of our lives? Democracy needs to think out the answers.
“I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” the Queen told Alice in Through the Looking-Glass. By lunchtime on Saturday that number would have been fast approaching double figures. The leftwing stalwart Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership election. His first act as leader would be to address a huge rally welcoming refugees.
Romping home in the first round with 59% of the vote, Corbyn’s victory was emphatic – the biggest electoral mandate of any party leader in British political history. There aren’t enough Trotskyists, entryists, devious Tories and random renegades to explain such an overwhelming victory. As his campaign gained momentum, many have been in denial. But no one can now deny he was the party’s choice. On Saturday afternoon you could see his supporters wandering around, badges proudly displayed, in a dazed state of glee and disbelief, not quite able to comprehend the enormity of what they’d done, what he’d done and what might come next.
Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of that choice, the transformational nature of it is beyond question. It has revived debates about nationalisation, nuclear deterrence and wealth redistribution and returned the basis of internal Labour party divisions to politics rather than personality. It has energised the alienated and alienated the establishment. The rebels are now the leaders; those who once urged loyalty are now in rebellion. Four months after losing an election, a significant section of Labour’s base is excited about politics for the first time in almost a generation while another is in despair.
Ascetic and unassuming, slight of stature and soft of timbre, Corbyn was always as unlikely a recipient of his own “mania” as the diffident tennis player Tim Henman. He’s a man of conviction but little charisma.
But then little of this is really about Corbyn. He is less the product of a movement than the conduit for a moment that has parallels across the western world. After almost a decade and a half of war, crisis and austerity, leftwing social democrats in all their various national guises are enjoying a revival as they seek to challenge the neo-liberal consensus. In the US, the self-described “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders is outpolling Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in key states. Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece and Die Linke in Germany are all posing significant challenges to mainstream centre-left parties.
Beyond the left, Corbyn’s ability to answer questions in a clear and straightforward manner amounts to a rebuke to the political class in general. In this and many other respects, his strengths were accentuated by the weakness of his leadership opponents. With their varying degrees of milquetoast managerialism, they were not only barely distinguishable from each other but had platforms that were forgettable even when they were decipherable. Short of perhaps a speeding ticket, they didn’t appear to have a single conviction between them. There is nothing to suggest any of them were more electable than Corbyn.
So for Labour members seeking a leader who stood for more than office, Corbyn was the obvious choice. Nobody, least of all Corbyn, saw this coming.
His trajectory these last few months has conformed to that dictum for radical reformers generally attributed to Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
He scraped on to the ballot with seconds to spare with the help of MPs who didn’t support him but wanted to ensure the voice of the Labour left could at least be heard – a tokenistic gesture to demonstrate the party still had roots even if they weren’t showing. Nobody expected that voice to be heard so clearly, understood so widely or taken so seriously by the membership. Party grandees thought his presence would offer a debate about austerity; few assumed he would win it. His candidacy was supposed to be decorative but never viable.
From the moment it was clear that assumption was flawed, the political and media class shifted from disbelief to derision to panic, apparently unaware that his growing support was as much a repudiation of them as an embrace of him.Former Labour leaders and mainstream commentators belittled his supporters as immature, deluded, self-indulgent and unrealistic, only to express surprise when they could not win them over. As such this reckoning was a long time coming. For the past couple of decades the Labour leadership has looked upon the various nascent social movements that have emerged – against war, austerity, tuition fees, racism and inequality – with at best indifference and at times contempt. They saw its participants, many of whom were or had been committed Labour voters, not as potential allies but constant irritants.
The slew of resignations from the party’s frontbench after the result was announced and apocalyptic warnings from former ministers about the fate of the party under a Corbyn leadership illustrate that this attitude hasn’t changed. The party has spoken; its old leaders would do well to listen but for now seem intent on covering their ears. They won’t win it back with snark and petulance. But they can make their claims about unelectability a self-fulfilling prophecy by refusing to accept Corbyn’s legitimacy as party leader.
Not only is Corbyn not being granted a honeymoon, relatives are determined to have a brawl at the wedding.
Nonetheless, the question of whether Corbyn is electable is a crucial one to which there are many views but no definitive answers. We are in uncharted waters and it’s unlikely to be plain sailing. May revealed that the British electoral landscape is both fractured and wildly volatile. What works in London and Scotland may not work in middle England and the south-east. To some extent Corbyn’s success depends on how he performs as leader and the degree to which his supporters can make their enthusiasm contagious.
It is a big risk. In the early 80s when Tony Benn made his bid for the deputy leadership, there was a huge trade union movement and peace movement to buttress him if he won. Corbyn inherits a parliamentary party in revolt and a determined but as yet unorganised band of followers. Clearly many believed it was a risk worth taking. In the words of the American socialist Eugene Debs: “It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.”
Some left-wing activists these days are worriedly discussing post-16th May India. According to them Narendra Modi’s consummate victory on this day last year marked a paradigm shift in the nation’s politics — for the worse, they assert. Others who shared the traumatic perspective changed their view earlier this year after Arvind Kejriwal emerged as Modi’s unlikely foil and bête noir.
Before we continue with Kejriwal’s near mythological role in stalling the rightist juggernaut led by Modi, let us briefly look at the prime minister’s Achilles heel, which, ironically, happens to be the clear majority he won exactly a year ago. In other words, a majority in parliament in the Indian system is no assurance of stability, a weakness that was best illustrated by Rajiv Gandhi’s turbulent tenure.
Gandhi’s four-fifths majority in the Lok Sabha remains unmatched to this day. Ideally, it should have given him five years of solid, stable government between 1985 and 1990. Instead, what he got was a crippling defence procurement scandal that haunted him till his death. His own party acolytes deserted him and some even conspired to topple the young prime minister.
Amitabh Bachchan, Arun Singh, Arun Nehru were among the younger lot who had come close to the prime minister after his mother’s assassination. They left him before his term was over. Others from the Gandhi Camelot moved over to the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). His trusted aide Vishwanath Pratap Singh subsequently became prime minister in 1990. The BJP and the communists supported him.
Look at the contrast. Indira Gandhi who split her party to be able to become prime minister at the head of a minority government in 1966, ruled with far greater confidence with support from communists and other assorted liberals.
Worried leftists should unequivocally thank Kejriwal for relieving them of their trauma over the Indian PM.
Her legacy still energises Indian politics, its economy and culture too. The banks that were nationalised by her remain state-owned. The two words she added to the preamble of the constitution — secular and socialist — have resisted periodic assaults from the right. The liberal arts and the scientific spirit she gave the academia with no impressive majority in parliament is planted as firmly as a sturdy molar that can only be uprooted by a painful surgery.
Easily the best example of someone without a majority who completed three full terms, first as finance minister and two as prime minister, is Manmohan Singh. He introduced sweeping economic reforms though his government had to bribe a few tribal MPs to stay in majority. He got support from the communists in his first tenure as prime minister and earned enough brownie points to win a second term. He faltered after he evicted the left, not because he did not have a majority in parliament.
Atal Behari Vajpayee was invited to form a bizarre minority government in 1996. It lasted all of 13 days. How could the president invite anyone who did not have the remotest proximity to finding a majority? Indian presidents have not always been transparent. Anyway it was a two-week government that signed the damaging Enron electricity deal, majority or no majority.
My worried leftist friends should unequivocally thank Kejriwal for relieving them of their trauma over Modi. The Aam Aadmi Party he heads has single-handedly changed the contours of possibilities for India’s political cobblers. When I see former BJP minister Arun Shourie laying into Modi on the eve of his completing his first year in office, the criticism reminds me of Rajiv Gandhi’s disloyal friends. However, Shourie could only speak because of Kejriwal’s amazing victory, which took the wind out of the prime minister’s sails.
If Mufti Mohammed Sayeed in Indian Jammu and Kashmir got the BJP MLAs to swear by the Kashmiri constitution they were loath to, he had his way because AAP’s victory in Delhi had emboldened him. Sonia Gandhi, ever so reclusive since the drubbing of her party by Modi, suddenly found spring in her walk. She led the entire opposition, including communist leader Sitaram Yechury, to the presidential palace to protest Modi’s land acquisition bill. Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and the backward caste satraps in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have benefited from Kejriwal’s humbling of Modi. Even Modi’s ally the Shiv Sena is now growling thanks to AAP.
Modi’s choreographers, which include the bulk of the media, are projecting his foreign policy in glowing terms not the least to mask his reneging on most domestic promises — rural, urban, rich, poor. With his claims of head transplants in ancient India, the prime minister has also become a caricature of the tough cookie he was thought to be. His gag measures against certain NGOs have boomeranged, inviting an earful from foreign governments.
He might have felt close enough to President Obama to call him by his first name, but it was more gracious for India that Obama called Manmohan Singh his learned guru.
Examples are galore of leaders being spurred by domestic difficulties to make foreign policy choices, and visits. Rajiv Gandhi was laying into Pakistan with Operation Brass Tacks before the Bofors scandal broke. When the scam raged he found himself signing a major agreement with Benazir Bhutto for nuclear safety with Pakistan.
Modi can wear any headgear in China, but he can’t approach the simple handshake between Deng Xiaoping and Rajiv Gandhi nor Narasimha Rao’s game-changing 1993 agreement with premier Li Peng for “peace and tranquillity on the borders”. In Mongolia, as I write, Modi is having a great time. Who showed him the way?
Indira Gandhi got Mongolia to second the resolution for the recognition of Bangladesh at the UN in 1972. The job done, she invited the Mongolian prime minister to Delhi, took him out for a quiet chat under a tree at Teen Murti House. When she offered him a cigarette, the guest hesitated. She lit one herself, helping her friend to pick one from the pack.
Both Nathuram Godse and Mahatma Gandhi read the Bhagavad Gita but one became a martyr and the other a murderer
January 30 reminds us of the fact that even the holiest of texts can have subjective and differential meanings.
The sacred Indian verses of Shrimad Bhagavad Gita has been in the news for various reasons in recent months. Prime Minister Narendra Modi presented a copy of the Bhagavad Gita to United States President Barack Obama when he visited the White House last year and one to Emperor Akihito of Japan. He has declared that the Gita would be the gift that he would carry for all world leaders. More controversially, Union Minister Sushma Swaraj advocated that the Gita may be declared the national book of India. Most recently, the BJP government in Haryana declared its intention to teach the Gita as part of the school curriculum.
To say that religion and politics should not be mixed has not only become a cliché, but may be missing the point altogether. Many tall leaders found the reason for their political action in their religious faith. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr are examples. President Obama mentioned in his town hall speech in Delhi last week that his faith strengthened him in his life. It is also true that many kings and emperors of the past used religious faith to justify killings and destruction.
Martyr and murderer
Many individuals and organisations advocate and indulge in violence today, and justify it on the basis of religious texts. January 30, the day Nathuram Godse killed Mahatma Gandhi, is the starkest reminder in the history of humankind of how the same text can be read differently. Both read the Bhagavad Gita. One became Gandhi. The other became Godse. One became a martyr. The other became a murderer. Jawaharlal Nehru, for whom the Gita was “a poem of crisis, of political and social crisis and, even more so, of crisis in the spirit of man,” wrote in the Discovery of India: “... the leaders of thought and action of the present day — Tilak, Aurobindo Ghose, Gandhi — have written on it, each giving his own interpretation. Gandhiji bases his firm belief in non-violence on it; others justify violence and warfare for a righteous cause ...”
What is curious is the fact that the two opposite interpretations of the Gita that Nehru refers to were responses to the same shared reality that their respective proponents encountered — colonialism and Christianity. Two strikingly different responses emerge to the same situation. The divergence is evident from the debate between Gandhi and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. In 1920, Tilak wrote to Gandhi: “Politics is the game of worldly people and not of Sadhus, and instead of the maxim, ‘overcome anger by loving kindness, evil by good,’ as preached by Buddha, I prefer to rely on the maxim of Shri Krishna, ‘In whatsoever way any come to me, in that same way I grant them favour.’ That explains the whole difference.” Gandhi replied: “For me there is no conflict between the two texts quoted by the Lokamanya. The Buddhist text lays down an eternal principle. The text from the Bhagavad Gita shows to me how the eternal principle of conquering hate by love, untruth by truth can and must be applied.”
For Tilak, the Gita was a call for action, political and religious. He declared that the Gita sanctioned violence for unselfish and benevolent reasons. While Tilak’s interpretation of the Gita that he wrote while in prison inspired a generation of warriors against British colonialism, it also informed Hindutva politics. Godse used similar arguments to justify the killing of the Mahatma, and quoted from the book during his trial. For Gandhi, the Gita and all religious texts were not excuses for exclusion and bigotry, but inspiration for compassion and confluence. In The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi — incidentally, the book that Mr. Modi gifted Mr. Obama — the Father of the Nation wrote: “But there is nothing exclusive about the Gita which should make it a gospel only for the Brahmana or the Hindu. Having all the light and colour of the Indian atmosphere, it naturally must have the greatest fascination for the Hindu, but the central teaching should not have any the less appeal for a non-Hindu as the central teaching of the Bible or the Koran should not have any less appeal for a non-Christian or a non-Muslim.”
Challenged by Christian missionaries, Gandhi learned more about his own religion, but more importantly, he imbibed Christian values rather than rejecting them. “Gandhi integrated several aspects of Christianity in this brand of increasingly redefined Hinduism, particularly the idea of suffering love as exemplified in the image of crucifixion. The image haunted him all his life and became the source of some of his deepest passions. He wept before it when he visited Vatican in Rome in 1931; the bare walls of his Sevagram ashram made an exception in favour of it; Isaac Watts’s ‘When I behold the wondrous Cross,’ which offers a moving portrayal of Christ’s sorrow and sacrifice and ends with ‘love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all,’ was one of his favourite hymns...” Bhikhu Parekh writes. Gandhi was accused of being a ‘closet Christian’ and ridiculed as ‘Mohammad Gandhi’ by Hindu radicals.
Support for Godse’s reading
Godse’s reading of the Gita appears to gather more supporters in contemporary India. BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj knew what he was talking about when he praised Godse. Several individuals and organisations have become active in propagating the ideas of Godse. There is also a move to build a temple for him.
After gifting the Gita to the Japanese emperor, Mr. Modi wondered whether his act would irk secularists. The greatest of Indian secularists, Nehru, had this to say: “During the 2,500 years since it was written, Indian humanity has gone repeatedly through the processes of change and development and decay; but it has always found something living in the Gita...The message of the Gita is not sectarian or addressed to any particular school of thought. It is universal in its approach for everyone… ‘All paths lead to Me,’ it says.”
Oh dear! The year 2015 has not started well for Robert Vadra — once known as the nation’s son-in-law. The income tax department wants a few critical answers about certain land deals. And understandably, Mr Vadra is not amused. In fact, he is said to be rather cross. The poor guy was made to believe he belonged to a breed known as “Super Indians” which is above and beyond scrutiny . They are not to be asked any questions, nor does anybody expect any answers. It’s been this way for decades. And when a young chap gets used to some very special privileges, such as skipping security checks at airports and so on, he naturally gets annoyed when pesky IT officers want to get into his company affairs and conduct the sort of probes ordinary, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens are subjected to.
Nobody has obviously informed Mr Vadra that things have changed in India. There is a new regime in place, in case he hasn’t noticed. New netas are calling the shots in Delhi. His mother-in-law is no longer the all-powerful mataji of old. Her cronies have been cut down to size and old loyalists are looking for fresh pastures. Zamana badal gaya hai. He should ask his sweet brother-in-law-that is, if Rahul baba himself has woken up and discovered there is no chair to sit on.
Some people may call it a witch hunt and say the poor ‘damaad’ is being unfairly targeted. Or that he is being made to pay the price for being Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law. Even if that is true, there is just one question to ask: are there gross irregularities in his land dealings or not? If he has been unfairly singled out for such scrutiny and his nostrils are clean, then, no worries! Even his most vocal critics will take back their harsh words. But if, as several investigators are claiming, there have been blatant and gross violations, then, sorry bro … it’s payback time. This is the downside of being famousnotorious. When the going is good, everything in life is tickety boo. But when the chips are down, the wheel comes full circle. The very people who once bowed, scraped and grovelled at your feet bring out the knives and dance over your grave. This is how it always goes.
It is not as if India is collectively gloating over Robert Vadra’s fall from grace. It is not just about Mr Vadra and his alleged unaccounted assets. There are other promoters and land owners who have made an even bigger killing. What most citizens are reacting to, has a different narrative. What got everybody’s goat is that Robert Vadra did not hold any official position. Nobody knows what exactly he did for a living. But everybody is aware that he was treated like a VVIP, minus any duties and responsibilities. It was this open flouting of rules that did him in. Had he been more discreet and conducted his business with more caution, had he not been as in your face, perhaps he would have received a slightly more sympathetic public reaction to his current situation.
Now what? India would like to see a logical end to these fresh investigations. People expect Robert Vadra to be treated like any other citizen. If the charges against him are established in a court of law, then he must bear the consequences like anybody else. Skylight Hospitality allegedly made Rs 50 crore in just one transaction. High-profile builders had apparently rushed to offer Vadra hefty loans. Not a single question was raised for years. When a reporter dared to ask Vadra about his business dealings, his reaction was priceless: “Are you serious … are you serious?” he asked, his expression giving away the whole story. Mr Vadra was aghast and incredulous that anybody could have had the temerity to question him.
Let’s hope someone sensible is prepping the son-in-law to face hundreds of even more pointed questions in the near future. For starters, his mother-in-law can give him a crash course in dealing coolly with lesser beings doing their jobs. Once he masters that, without flipping out, he can hire a competent lawyer — he is probably going to need one pretty soon. If Robert Vadra ever goes to jail, thousands of citizens will send up a silent cheer. Not because they are wicked or sadistic. But because they believe the law in India is the same for all!
Arundhati Roy’s fans have been waiting for a follow-up to her Booker-prize winning debut novel since 1997. Meanwhile she has thrown herself into political activism – raising hackles among India’s growing bourgeoisie with fierce polemics against capitalism. A second novel is promised – but will she ever get it finished?
Arundhati Roy: ‘Most of what I’ve written is to do with being in solidarity with resistance movements.’ Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer
Like India and Walt Whitman, Arundhati Roy contains multitudes. She is, however, far from large. Small, delicately boned, a beguiling mixture of piercing dark eyes and bright easy smile, she is a warm presence. She turns 53 tomorrow and the grey tint to her curls lends depth to a still strikingly youthful face. Looking at her, it’s not hard to detect the author of the richly empathetic The God of Small Things, her debut, Booker-prize winning novel about family life in Kerala, that John Updike described as a “massive interlocking structure of fine, intensely felt details”.
That was 17 years ago and photos from that period show a captivating figure, at once shy and fiercely proud, wary and utterly self-possessed. The book was a huge international hit and the publishing world readied itself to cash in on a phenomenal new talent, galvanised by the fact that so photogenic an author would be a dream to market.
But the follow-up novel didn’t arrive. Instead Roy directed her considerable energies towards political activism, most especially in India where, despite her success, she has remained. It was a path that has led her to express solidarity with groups – such as Kashmiri separatists and Maoist guerrillas – that are seen by many Indians, with some reason, as terrorists. As a result Roy has become a controversial figure, an outspoken heroine in certain radical quarters, but loathed by large sections of Indian society, not least Hindu nationalists.
She has also become a prolific essayist and polemicist. She currently has two extended, book-length essays out. One, entitled The Doctor and the Saint, is an examination of caste, a subject she explored in The God of Small Things, and it forms the long introduction to a new edition of BR Ambedkar’s classic work The Annihilation of Caste. Roy’s essay traces the difficult relationship between Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi. She portrays the neglected Ambedkar – born an “untouchable” – as the true hero of India’s poor, while Gandhi is controversially depicted as a self-dramatising defender of the status quo.
The other essay is called Capitalism: A Ghost Story. It’s written in a very different style from The Doctor and the Saint, which, for all its contentious opinions, is a carefully constructed argument. By contrast Capitalism reads like an extended rant, strident, intemperate, conspiratorial, and relentlessly one-eyed in its outlook. The shrill prose is hard to reconcile with the softly spoken middle-aged woman sitting opposite me in the Soho offices of her publishers.
New Delhi, March 2006: Roy attends a protest at the government’s lack of support for hundreds of women whose farmer husbands committed suicide because of failed crops.Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Her basic argument is that the reforms that liberated India’s economy in the early 1990s and thrust it into the global marketplace may have created a vibrant new middle class, but have been devastating for the country’s poor. She writes of the “800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us [the 300 million members of the middle class]”.
The poor in India are of course not a recent creation. It’s been said that India’s historic problem was the redistribution of poverty, whereas now the issue is the redistribution of wealth. As Roy makes clear, there are vast and intolerable inequalities in today’s India. But the implication of her words is that to make 300 million Indians richer, 800 million Indians have become poorer in real, rather than relative, terms. As she doesn’t supply any supporting evidence for this claim in the book, I ask her if that’s what she means.
“What happens,” she says, “is that statistically people keep playing games with the poverty line. It’s not that people get richer or poorer but they keep moving the line up and down redefining what poorer means.”
She then goes on to say that you only have to visit the suffering villages of India to see the terrible plight of the poor, in particular the mass suicides of farmers whose land has been destroyed by mineral exploitation and industrialisation. This may be true, but has the rapid growth in India’s middle class caused the poor to become poorer?
She continues talking about access to water, the drying up of land etc, until I push her once again on what seems to me a crucial matter of fact. “Well, I think so,” she says finally. “For example, just things like food grain intake has actually reduced.”
This is true, though there are various arguments put forward to explain the drop, including the increase in the consumption of other foods. But there is also compelling evidence to suggest that, while India has become a much wealthier country over the last couple of decades, a hefty percentage of its population continues to experience low employment, malnutrition andother major social deprivations. It’s just that Roy never really gets to grip with the evidence.
She prefers a scattergun approach in which she attacks everything from philanthropy and the “hegemony of the United States” to NGOs funded by Coca-Cola. You could easily get the idea, for example, that arms dealing was a function of capitalism – yet there is no mention of Russia (the biggest arms exporter) or China (the third biggest). Similarly she quotes Pablo Neruda’s poem attacking the Standard Oil Company but makes no mention that he was an unabashed cheerleader for Stalinism when he wrote it. When I ask her about the omission she says she’s written about Stalinism in another essay and doesn’t want to keep repeating herself.
It’s the sort of screed that will bring head-nodding agreement from her core anti-capitalist audience, but it will do little, or at least not enough, to persuade those who genuinely want to know whether or not the new India, for all its many flaws, is an improvement on the old.
Roy is kissed by supporters in 2002 after being released from Tihar Jail in New Delhi. She had been jailed during a campaign against a new dam.Photograph: MANISH SWARUP/AP
She’s used to this sort of criticism, and her answer is that it’s not a subject that she can be dispassionate about. Dry, academic analysis doesn’t alter the conditions of the poor, so someone needs to raise the temperature, invoke some much-needed shame and outrage.
But her detractors argue that Roy’s posturings do nothing to help the poor either. Her fellow novelist and essayist Aatish Taseer wrote in 2011 in the online cultural magazine the Nervous Breakdown: “I don’t think she’s a friend of the poor at all. She would like to doom them to a permanent state of picturesque poverty… The people who get her into the streets [ie in protest] are the new middle classes. This class, still among the most fragile in India, people who have newly emerged from the most dire conditions, are despicable to her. She mocks their clothes; their trouble with English; she hates their ambitions.”
Indeed Roy writes of the “aggressive, acquisitive ambition” of the middle class in Capitalism. Is Taseer on to something?
“Well look,” she replies, unflustered, “obviously mine is a very definite point of view and there are many people who disagree with me vehemently. The only thing I will say is that I’m not a lone operator. Most of what I’ve written is to do with being in solidarity with many resistance movements. I’m not at the front of it. I’m not preaching to the poor what they should be thinking. I’m learning from their arguments.”
Naturally Roy’s wealth exposes her to accusations of hypocrisy. She lives alone in the exclusive Jor Bagh district of New Delhi in a large apartment. Aren’t the acquisitively ambitious simply seeking to gain the material comforts she has in abundance?
“I don’t come from a privileged background, I just happened to write a book that sold a lot. My mother was literally dying. She had nothing. She left her drunk husband. She started a school. I left home at 16, I lived on the streets. I had nothing. Then I wrote a book. I lived for a long time, yes, with a man who had privileged parents but then that had nothing to do with me.”
This seems like a slightly romantic summary of her early life. She was born Suzanna Arundhati Roy in north-east India to a Syrian Christian, Mary, who is still alive. Her father, a Bengali Hindu, was an alcoholic who managed a tea plantation. The marriage ended when Roy was two years old. Her mother took her and her older brother to Tamil Nadu and then to Kerala, where her mother, who suffered from asthma, set up an independent school.
Roy was sent to boarding school where she gained a reputation as an indefatigable debater. From there she went to secretarial college, which she quit at 16, moving to Delhi to study at the architectural school. She lived with her boyfriend at the time in a slum, then after a spell in Goa, worked for the National Institute of Urban Affairs, where she met her husband, Pradip Krishen, a widowed former history professor and Oxford graduate from a wealthy background.
The couple made several documentaries and films together, in the first of which Roy played the female lead. But eventually she became dispirited with the elitist film world and spent more time writing, leading eventually to the publication of The God of Small Things in 1997. It was a literary sensation that went on to sell more than 6m copies worldwide.
In a vital sense, as Roy says, her background and material circumstances, whatever they are, should not be the means to assess her ideas. “I’ve never understood the logic that if you’re privileged you should take the point of view of the privileged and argue for more privilege.”
Yet in Capitalism she writes of being compromised by connections with the corrupting worlds of corporations: “But which of us sinners was going to cast off the first stone? Not me, who lives off royalties from corporate publishing houses.”
What does that mean? She breaks out into a big smile. “Yeah, I’ve also thought about that. I was just thinking, living off royalties from corporate publishing houses? In fact those corporate publishing houses are making money off me, and giving me 5%!”
She laughs at herself and says that perhaps she got that wrong. “The thing is no one is pure. I am certainly not a pure saint who lives in a loincloth and eats goat’s cheese and doesn’t have sex and says ‘I’m poor’”, she says in an obvious dig at Gandhi. “It’s crap.”
Moreover, she is no armchair revolutionary, cooped up in the safe confines of her apartment. She does go to dangerous places and she does make powerful enemies: Hindu nationalists, dam builders, mineral extractors, large corporations and the Indian military. And despite a great many threats, she is not easily intimidated.
But danger runs both ways. The picture Roy paints of India is of a vast military occupation, a colonial suppression enacted by the Indian state on its own people. She speaks of hundreds of thousands of troops stationed in secessionist Kashmir and the vicious paramilitary operations in central India against the Maoist or “Naxalite” guerrillas.
In Walking with the Comrades, her book about joining up with the Maoists, she wrote about a Congress politician called Mahendra Karma, whom she said was responsible for orchestrating a campaign of murder, rapes and displacement in the Bastar region. In May 2013 Maoist guerrillas killed Karma, stabbing him 78 times, and 24 other people, including 11 other Congress members, in a truly gruesome attack on a convoy. When asked to comment immediately after the assault, Roy refused to speak.
Incidents such as these have prompted the charge that she is a dilettante, a literary tourist who can beat a retreat whenever it suits her. If that’s true then it’s also a fact that India’s democracy is riven by nepotism and corruption and violence and it suits many who are getting rich to look the other way. The statements Roy makes are often provocative, naive and arguably counterproductive, but the presiding nationalistic silence is perhaps more worthy of condemnation.
And the issue on which India has learned to be most tight-lipped is that of caste. It’s a subject on which Roy has always been refreshingly vocal, quick to remind those who might wish to forget of the immovable social structure that underpins Indian society. InThe Doctor and the Saint she returns to the theme but this time she sets it against two different visions of reform: Gandhi’s and Ambedkar’s.
Roy portrays Gandhi as ‘a backward-looking egomaniac’.Photograph: REX/REX
Gandhi wanted to abolish the designation of “Untouchables”, the lowest caste that is today referred to as Dalit. But Ambedkar wanted to get rid of the caste system in its entirety. Although she had always been suspicious of the Gandhi cult, she was largely ignorant of the dispute between Ambedkar and Gandhi before a publisher asked her to write an introduction to The Annihilation of Caste.
“I thought I’d just write three pages of politeness and give it to him,” she says. “Then I started to read and I was shocked by what I was reading and it turned into a huge thing.”
Gandhi emerges as a backward-looking egomaniac who had to be dragged into modernity by the more ambitious and radical Ambedkar. The respected historian Ramachandra Guha, who is in the middle of a two-part biography of Gandhi, has taken Roy to task for “selectively quoting Gandhi out of context [so] that she can paint him as a slow-moving reactionary”.
Guha, whose earlier work looked at forestry in northern India, has clashed with Roy before over her environmental advocacy, which he described as “self-indulgent” and “self-contradictory”. “Ms Roy’s tendency to exaggerate and simplify, her Manichean view of the world, and her shrill, hectoring tone, have given a bad name to environmental analysis,” he wrote back in 2000.
She dismissed his criticism back then as “smug”. She says that she’s quoted Gandhi from 1893 to 1948, “across his adult life. Of course every quote has to be selective. I can’t quote the whole nine volumes.” She says that “it’s dishonest to suggest that Gandhi was an incrementalist or a man of his times”. And in any case, she adds, Guha is a Brahmin, the caste that is at the top of the social hierarchy – if you like, the ruling class.
It has been argued by some that it’s unfettered capitalism that has done most to undermine caste in India, but Roy notes that only a tiny percentage of marriages are cross-caste. She writes that the only way caste can be annihilated is if “those who call themselves revolutionary develop a radical critique of Brahminism”. I quote her a statement from a well-known Indian writer and ask her to guess who it is. The author speaks of his Brahmin identity as being crucial in giving him a sense of “dignity” and through it the ambition not to settle for “some badly paid government job”.
She puts her hands over her face and says “Pankaj?”
Pankaj Mishra, who is now based in London, has built a formidable reputation as radical critic of imperialism, ever vigilant to the incidence of western racism both on a geopolitical and personal level. He was also the first publisher to champion The God of Small Things, when he worked for HarperCollins in India, and thus a longstanding friend of Roy’s. Is he on the revolutionary side of the argument?
“On this one, I don’t think so,” she says. “There are a lot of critiques about many Brahmins who at some point do want to mention that they are Brahmins. The issue is a very vexed one. Look at all the major politburo members, including the Maoists, they are usually Brahmins.”
You sense that one of the reasons Arundhati was drawn to reappraise Gandhi is the consensus he enjoys as an embodiment of decency and tolerance. She has recently caused a stir for downplaying another widely admired figure, Malala Yousafzai. After she gave a TV interview in which she suggested Malala was a pawn in game of global politics, the Pakistan writer Pervez Hoodbhoy wrote an article asking why it was that Malala bothered many on the left, citing Roy as an example.
Even Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel peace prize winner, has been the subject of criticism from Roy.Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
“I have no doubt she did something wonderful,” she says. “But that was not the point I was trying to make.” She says she wanted to draw attention to the fact that Dalit women are similarly mistreated in India but are never heard about. But that doesn’t make Malala a puppet. She stood up against male oppression. Isn’t that an unambiguously good thing?
“I don’t think you can isolate Malala and say ‘Oh this is wonderful.’” Why not? “I don’t think this world of prizes and awards is an innocent world. It is loaded and it’s precious to suggest it’s not.” She thinks Malala’s Nobel peace prize was an extension of the politically corrupt process that awarded one to Obama, whom she characterises as a warmonger, adding, “I’m not trying to take anything away from Malala.”
But of course she is.
I admire her willingness to confront sacred cows, but can’t help thinking that she sees dark conspiracies where sometimes nobler intentions lie. And in her rush to embrace the oppressed, she can blur the lines between victim and perpetrator.
Enough of the politics. What about fiction? There have been rumours going back to 2007 that she is writing a novel.
“I have been working on it for quite a few years,” she acknowledges. “If those characters are still hanging around in my house, swinging their legs and smoking their cigarette butts, they’re not going to go away, so there must be something there.”
Yet she says she put the novel aside to write The Doctor and the Saint. Writing non-fiction is for her a tense and urgent business. She has to get it out. “It’s like the body doesn’t have room for its organs,” she says, and reading her non-fiction one can see what she means.
She is a different person altogether when writing fiction, which she says she’s able to relax into. “I don’t mean because it’s easy to write but I trust its rhythms and I don’t have to get it out there. There’s no urgency. It’s like cooking, it takes its time. I rather like the idea of just living inside it and not coming out of it.”
That’s an idea that will torment all those millions who have been waiting so many years for her second novel. It may also trouble those critics of her polemical work who hope that she’ll return to fiction at the earliest opportunity. But if there is one thing that is certain about the multifaceted Roy, she will continue to do what she wants to do when she wants to do it.
It is open season on Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. No opportunity is lost to demonise and denigrate father and daughter. Even October 31, the day the lady was assassinated, became a day-long festival for celebrating her wickedness, besides proclaiming she was no martyr but a case of self-destruction. Fortunately, we are told, a set of rulers, or shall i say ruler, is at hand, with the wisdom and vision to repair the damage.
We need to talk about Jawaharlal and Indira. That’s for sure. But we also need to keep some touch with historical veracity. For their lifelong opponents truth lies in the eye of the beholder. Consequently, 2014 onwards provides an excellent window to demolish once and for all the myth about their contribution to nation-building. What they built, so the argument goes, is their family dynasty.
Party politics can and is used to float falsehoods with the help of state power. Witness how the fable concerning our glorious Vedic past is being represented triumphantly (in which allegedly plastic surgery and stem cell research flourished) without a murmur of incredulity, or a titter of mirth. If truth is the first casualty in war, it is the second casualty in times when, as Lawrence Durrell puts it, “truth is what contradicts itself”.
The systematic and organised campaign to vilify the Nehru legacy and replace it with the more ‘muscular and patriotic’ legacy of Sardar Patel is top of the agenda. The exercise is ludicrous and an insult to the great Sardar. But let us leave that falsehood alone for the moment.
At the heart of the demolition project is the announcement that a new Idea of India, contrary to the one proposed by Nehru, is available, and in need of urgent execution. It is an abiding irony that the sole politician in the current pantheon of saffron leaders the present prime minister pays obeisance to is Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who ruled the country with Nehru as his lodestar.
What is this new Idea of India? I think we should be told. Alas, its architects have provided no blueprint except to declare it exists. If i were say Mani Shankar Aiyar, i would argue it consists of one part jingoism and one part xenophobia. Perhaps that is a slight exaggeration. More accurately, it rejects the legendary poet Raghupati Sahay aka Firaq Gorakhpuri’s thesis, “Sar zamiin-e hind par aqwaam-e alam ke Firaq/ Kaafile baste gae, Hindustan bantaa gayaa”. (In the sacred land of Hind, caravans of the world Firaq went on settling, and Hindustan kept on being formed.)
If one takes the short view of history, Nehru is an easy target, and Indira even easier. To compile a list of ‘sins’ the duo committed would be superfluous since the compilation has already been lovingly done by the Sangh Parivar. Many of the sins are not without basis but they are not black and white either, except the Emergency. They were committed at a specific moment in history. Happily, we have access to material which provides us with full, balanced assessments – warts and all. We are therefore neither astonished nor shocked when these transgressions are presented. No verdict on Nehru or Indira is possible without its share of criticism.
Perhaps this is the right time to ask the hunters looking for two prized scalps some questions. Where did Narayana Murthy and the entire information technology industry come from? Where did Indra Nooyi come from? Where did Warren Buffett’s financial wizard, Ajit Jain, come from? They all came from the IITs, IIMs and other world-class education centres Nehru had the foresight to set up.
If India has the ‘bomb’ and internationally renowned research labs, the credit must go to the same man. At a time when the republic struggled, he insisted a newly independent, backward nation be fully engaged with the contemporary first world through advanced learning and progressive thinking. Nehru ensured a society steeped in superstition, ritual, religious dogma and belief in kismet embraced a scientific temper so that the temptation to wallow in a mythical ‘glorious’ past could be resisted. The modern nation state – outward-looking, open, rational, argumentative, sceptical – armed with universal adult franchise, is the creation of Jawaharlal Nehru. Rubbish that if you like.
I yield to no one in my abhorrence for aspects of Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership. Because i entered journalism in 1974, i experienced the full horrors of civilian dictatorship. That she wrecked critical democratic institutions is undeniable. But we must also remember she dismembered Pakistan and made sure it could never pose a threat. There is a good Indira and a bad Indira.
Incidentally, when i read opinion polls reveal she is easily the most popular prime minister the country has produced, when i see long queues outside her Safdarjung Memorial, I wonder if our Iron Lady needs more than one yardstick (Emergency) to assess her term in office.
If Nehru’s legacy is the real obstacle holding India back, why don’t its adversaries throw it into the wastepaper basket? And govern on the majoritarian doctrine? Not a chance. When it comes to self-preservation, the new rulers are wise. They know they would soon be out of a job, if they abandoned the idea (secularism) which has held the country together.
In my article dated 20 September 2012, I had inadvertently given February 1940 as the date for the fall of Singapore. It was February 1942. That mistake, however, does not detract from the fact that the British were determined from the very start of WW II, and especially after the Congress ministries resigned in September 1939, to crush any challenge to their hold over the Indian empire which was a matter of great pride for them and a major supplier of troops for the war. These resignations were a major Congress miscalculation whose damage to their political influence was second only to the even more disastrous Quit India movement they launched in August 1942. These two decisions greatly undermined their ability to influence the course of the freedom struggle as all their cadres were incarcerated from August 1942 to June 1945.
During that absence from the political arena the Muslim League swept the key north-western provinces of Punjab and Sindh and made inroads into NWFP with their message that the creation of Pakistan would bring to an end the tyranny of the caste system and the economic exploitation of the moneylender. Thus the creation of Pakistan appeared to be a rational choice to the Muslims and they expressed it in the 1946 provincial elections when they voted overwhelmingly in favour of Pakistan. The Congress got the general votes including those of Hindus, Christians, Jains and others for a united India and the Sikhs of Punjab voted for the Panthic parties that wanted the Punjab partitioned, if India was partitioned. Such polarization meant that negotiations on the future of India were headed for a deadlock and the failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan of May 1946 confirmed that. Nehru's ill-considered July press conference in Bombay saying that the Congress would 'enter the Constituent Assembly unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise' provoked an angry reaction from Jinnah who gave the call for direct action. The violence that broke out in Calcutta in August 1946 followed by more violence in Bihar, Garhmukhteshwar in UP and then Hazara district of KP finally engulfed the Punjab in March 1947.
Under the circumstances, Viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten's 3 June 1947 Partition Plan to which Nehru, Jinnah, Baldev Singh and others tamely acquiesced was premised on an entirely false assumption: that the transfer of power would be peaceful. The warnings of Punjab's Governor Sir Evan Jenkins did not warrant such complacency at all.
The whole thing was based on a woefully flawed concept: while civil and military officialdom would have the choice to opt either for India or Pakistan the ordinary people would stay put! Mahatma Gandhi alone among all the leaders could sense that rivers of blood would flow and warned about it. On the other hand, Sardar Patel was prepared to let the Sikh leaders have a free hand in driving the Muslims of East Punjab out, though he probably did not realize that they were planning to use it to create, for the first time in history, a compact Sikh majority in some parts of East Punjab. Later, the Khalistan movement, which emerged in the 1980s, came to haunt the Indian state. Equally, since March 1947, local and Punjab-level Muslim League leaders were complicit in the attacks on the Hindus and Sikhs in the western districts. Neither Jinnah nor Liaquat Ali Khan took any steps to warn the Muslims of East Punjab that on 23 June 1947 the Punjab Assembly had voted to partition the province and a grave possibility existed of rioting. It is impossible to believe that they were not in the know of what was happening in the Punjab. On the other hand, the Congress leaders kept telling Lahore's Hindus and Sikhs to stay put as that city would be given to India, even when the Muslims were in a majority of 60 per cent there. All these details, along with extensive interviews with survivors are fully covered in my book, The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012).
In this regard, let me address a major criticism some readers have made of my argument that the partition of India was not necessarily the best option for Muslims. They have pointed out that the Indian Muslims have remained one of the poorest groups in secular India. Therefore the creation of Pakistan was necessary to save the Muslims from permanent Hindu domination. In principle this is a compelling argument in favour of creating Pakistan, but it needs to be put into perspective.
Mr Jinnah had prepared his brief on a separate Pakistan on the basis of categorical rejection that a Hindu-majority government could ever be fair to the Muslims. When he was asked what would happen to the most vulnerable, deprived and poor sections of Muslims from Muslim-minority provinces if they were left behind in India, he had asserted that one-third of Muslims should not prevent two-thirds of them escaping Hindu domination. It was a typical utilitarian argument deriving from the notion of the greatest good of the greatest number rather than the greatest good of all. However, in August 1947 when some reporters asked him before he left Delhi for Karachi as to what message he wanted to give to the Muslims who would remain behind he said that they should become loyal Indian citizens and he expected the Indian government to treat them fairly. His line of argument had thus changed fundamentally - it acknowledged that a Congress government (upper-caste Hindu dominated) could treat them fairly.
As I said in my previous article, only three per cent of the Muslims from the Muslim-minority provinces of northern India, mainly the intelligentsia migrated to Pakistan. The RSS, Hindu Mahasabha and many Hindu and Sikh refugees who had lost family and property in what became Pakistan wanted each and every Muslim driven out of India. Mahatma Gandhi's last fast-unto-death was not only to press the Indian government to pay Pakistan Rs 550 million as its rightful share of the colonial treasury, but also to insist that the campaign to expel Muslims should cease. It culminated with his assassination at the hands of Nathu Ram Godse, but it compelled the Indian government to adopt strict measures to prevent attacks on Muslims. I must give full credit to Jawaharlal Nehru that while he was prime minister he tried his best to protect the Muslims.
It is not possible to explain in detail in a media column why Congress governments after Nehru deviated from their protective policy towards Muslims. Suffice it to say that after Mrs Indira Gandhi came to power Nehruvian secularism became less of a matter of principle and more of expediency and electoral calculation. Later Congress governments were led by men of straw and the Babri Mosque attack by BJP goons in December 1992 could take place because the Congress government of Mr Narasimha Rao remained passive. It is only after Mr Manmohan Singh came to power that the sad plight of the Muslim minority was given some attention. The Sachar Committee appointed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2006 submitted a 403-page report which stated that the status of Indian Muslims was somewhere between Hindu OBCs (other backward castes) and the scheduled castes and tribes. No doubt this has happened because discrimination takes place against the Muslims in a systematic manner even though formal (constitutional) secularism does not discriminate between citizens on the basis of their creed or ethnicity.
However, here too we need to consider some complications. The Muslims of northern India have always consisted of two distinct groups: the high-born ashraaf who claim descent from forbears of foreign origin and the vast majority who are converts from the lower rungs of Hindu society. I have seen reports which name Muslim zamindars and taalukdars of northern India who were active in the struggle for Pakistan, but when partition took place they stayed on to retain ownership of their properties. Some of them later sold off their land and other assets and then migrated to Pakistan or to the West. Some devised novel ways of having the best of both words. Nothing compares to the genius of Raja Sahib Mahmudabad, famous as the financier of the Muslim League and one of the closest associates of Mr Jinnah. He left his son and wife in Mahmudabad while he shifted to Pakistan with his daughters. The Indian government had impounded his vast property worth currently Rs 30,0000 million on grounds that it was 'enemy property' since he had migrated to Pakistan. His son contested the case saying that he was the rightful heir as his father had transferred his property to him before he shifted to Pakistan. In 2005 the Indian Supreme Court restored the properties to him. So, the rich and powerful were not hit by the calamity of the partition. Nawabzada Liaqat Ali Khan did lose his estate in eastern Punjab as did Nawab Mamdot but that happened because the Sikhs and Congress joined hands to force the partition of Punjab on the same lines on which the Muslim League had demanded that India should be partitioned - on the basis of contiguous religious majorities in some parts of the subcontinent and its provinces. The same happened to Muslim-majority Bengal.
It is therefore the Muslims from artisanal and landless working backgrounds - Muslim Dalits - who potentially would suffer most from a partitioned India. Historically they were always despised by the ashraaf. I have read both Barelvi and Deobandi texts where the superiority of the ashraaf has been justified on grounds that they alone represent true Islam. Of course there are exceptions especially in Deobandi writings. In this regard I might as well add that traditional Shia social and political theory is even more hierarchical than that of the Sunnis. In Pakistan we practice caste prejudices but pretend that since Islam has no caste there is no caste oppression among us. Moreover, caste-like discrimination and persecution in Pakistan has also taken a sectarian form and our wrath is directed against all those we classify as non-Muslims.
At any rate, when the Muslim intelligentsia left for Pakistan the ulema, whose standard refrain has always been that Muslims should not integrate into mainstream society because that would dilute their Islamic identity, took over the leadership of the poorer sections of Muslim society. Instead of encouraging them to get a modern education they fostered a siege mentality and tried to insulate the Muslims from modernizing social trends. Consequently the level of education among these poor Muslims is very low, even lower than the Dalits, who because of the reservation system, have been helped to get education and jobs. A movement has now started gaining pace among Muslims of artisanal and Dalit backgrounds demanding that they too should be included in the reservation system. It remains to be seen if the Indian government would extend them that 'privilege'. The Sachar Report stopped just short of recommending it; it instead recommended special educational inputs from the government to help the Muslims. I need not overemphasize that the RSS and other Sang Parivar groups are always opposed to Muslims being included in the reservation policy. The attacks on Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 were also masterminded by these groups.
Here, I pose a moral question: are we in Pakistan prepared to help such vulnerable Muslims? All I know is that we have not even accepted the Biharis who sided with Pakistan during the 1971 civil war in the former East Pakistan. Unlike Israel which welcomes all Jews from anywhere in the world to settle in Israel, because it is a state created for the Jewish people, we have no open-door policy for oppressed Indian Muslims. So our moral concern for them is hypocritical. There is a way to bring to an end their agony: let us open our arms and welcome them. Let us declare that the 180 million Indian Muslims are entitled to enter Pakistan and become its citizens because Pakistan was created to protect them from Hindu domination and discrimination. The fact is many won't because I know the secular-minded Muslims find Pakistan a difficult proposition as they are used to a less conformist lifestyle than what exists in contemporary Pakistan. Still millions might want to migrate to Pakistan because they may believe that as an Islamic state it would be fair to them.The Sindhis would assail my solution, saying that they have had bitter experience with an open embrace to the Mohajirs - it resulted in them (Sindhis) effectively being sidelined and marginalized in the towns and cities of Sindh, including Karachi and Hyderabad. On the other hand, the Mohajirs now realize that given their smaller numbers they would in the long run be swept away by the much bigger nationalities of Pakistan. They feel beleaguered and threatened. Consequently, if there is no scope for Indian Muslims to find refuge in Pakistan then we can only hope that enlightened Indian rulers would protect the Indian Muslims just as Mahatma Gandhi wanted and Nehru tried. I see no other option to this sad legacy of a partitioned India.
