JNU, BJP and Jeremiah Wright’s prayer book

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn


EASTER is as good a time as any to recall Rev Jeremiah Wright’s admonition of the American political class. The noxious attack on Delhi’s premier Jawaharlal Nehru University by Delhi Police and their Hindutva cheerleaders is another fine reason to remember the pastor who baptised President Obama’s children but remains in bad odour with the right-wing political class in his country.

In a powerful sermon, he illustrates how to criticise your country and not be lynched or jailed. His slamming of America is not rooted in hatred of his country but in his love for its people as he loved people everywhere. Pastor Wright, like other ordinary people, does not have a nationalist bone.

War, he told a congregation not too long ago, does not make for peace. “Fighting for peace is like raping for virginity…When your wife or your children have been crushed by the enemy, when your mother or your father have been mowed down by the military, peace is not on your mind. Payback is the only game in town.” Are Jeremiah Wright’s words subversive for our region?

“Occupying somebody else’s country doesn’t make for peace. Killing those that fought to protect their own homes does not make for peace … We confuse government and God…We believe God sanctioned the rape and robbery of an entire continent. And [they want] us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no. Not ‘God Bless America’; God Damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people!” It’s a long speech.

 Many Americans strongly disagreed with Jeremiah Wright. President Obama distanced himself from his sermons in an election year. But no statute or law book was thrown at him, nor was he harassed or threatened with lynching as happens in India these days. The object lesson here is that America can be accused of a million wrongs, but it remains a confident democracy that allows for dissent at home, though not be always abroad.

The Wright example is relevant for India as last week’s assault on JNU came from an insecure state that is not confident enough to take sharp criticism. The assault, ostensibly invited by some Wright-like words, triggered a heavy bout of nationalist fervour. Sadly, every party, from the left to the right, was pleading to be counted as nationalist as if that would save anyone from the state’s insidious rightist trap.

Nationalism, which Wright shunned, has traditionally been a sly, opportunistic, street-smart, malleable idea, which doesn’t do any good to any society coming under its sway. But it has always been useful for the national elites more or less everywhere, since decades. Ziaul Haq claimed to be a nationalist, so did his quarry, Z.A. Bhutto. Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif, ditto. Mujib and Ziaur Rehman likewise. Hitler rode to power on nationalism, and with him his trusted aide Ernst Rohm. However, when Rohm, the head of the dreaded Nazi SA, posited that socialism in National Socialism was as important as nationalism, Hitler got him shot.

Nehru was instinctively an internationalist, but opposition pressure turned him into a nationalist albeit grudgingly, with soft hands. Then Narendra Modi arrived and declared the first prime minister as the harbinger of the nation’s dark ages. By implication, Nehru was India’s essential foe. Modi struck up a conversation with Bangladesh while assiduously hiding away the role of Indira Gandhi in its creation. Gandhi had shored up the idea of Bangladesh to claim her own nationalist baton. Modi has striven to steal her thunder but may not succeed.

His stated objective in this endeavour is, therefore, to finish off the Congress, to weed out from the roots India’s original beacon of nationhood, and, not unknowingly, supplant it with the nationalist fervour of Hindutva’s lynch mobs.

To this end Modi took into confidence the audiences in Beijing about the plot. Indians, he told the world through them, without naming names, were living a life of inferiority complex under decades of Nehru-Gandhi rule. With his advent they had got back their spine.

That spine was in evidence last week in JNU, India’s premier institution of high academic interface with the world. Calls for shooting JNU’s leftist students could be an example of the reinforced spine. Shut down the university counselled another Hindutva acolyte. The agenda to dismantle the “hub of leftism”, of course, precedes by decades last week’s meeting of some as yet unidentified students to commemorate an executed Kashmiri militant.

The Afzal Guru meeting became a ruse for a terrifying police invasion of the campus. The student leader picked up for grilling is a Marxist and it is not his politics to slam the Indian state as Rev Wright would. That may not help though. The Hindu right is hunting for communists, not Kashmiri separatists who the army takes care of.

Therefore, perhaps the most tragedy-prone nationalists anywhere today are India’s communists, not the least because they were never cut out for the job. Their creed up until early 1990s was internationalism. Then they seemed to have run out of foreign partners.

Of the internecine communist battles the world over, two or three mannerisms are staple: brotherly greetings, marginalisation of former comrades and debunking of each other. Their task was to dismantle an unequal world, but Indian communists turned the challenge into a game of blind man’s bluff. Having ground down each other more viciously than they ever did their class adversaries they have unwittingly exposed themselves to the state’s vicious moves against them, as sitting ducks. What happened in JNU had much to do with that.
Jeremiah Wright’s sermon could yet guide the comrades to their old self-assured internationalism, and wean them away from an ill-fitting nationalist makeover. Happy Easter, comrades.

It’s time for Europe to turn the tables on bullying Britain

Joris Luyendijk in The Guardian


So far all the talk has been of David Cameron’s demands. But the EU would hold all the power in post-Brexit negotiations, so it should spell out how it would make an outgoing Britain suffer

 

‘The best way forward for Europe is to threaten to hit the English as hard as we can.’ Illustration: Robert G Fresson

As the European Union faces the worst and most dangerous crisis since its creation, not only is Britain refusing to help, it is actually using this historic moment of weakness to extract “concessions” from its fellow members. This is the back story to the “Brexit” referendum, in which the government is threatening to leave the EU unless its demands for a “better deal for Britain” are met. Indeed, why merely kick a man while he’s down if you can go through his wallet too?

The negotiations in Brussels over this deal are entering their final stages: last week cabinet members were told they’d be free to campaign for an exit whatever the outcome of the talks. So this makes it high time for Europeans to take a cold and honest look at the British. Or rather, the English. Scotland is largely pro-EU while Wales and Northern Ireland, with their smaller populations and the less imminent threat of secession, have far less influence. How to deal with the English, then, over Brexit?

Step one is to ask if this referendum is actually a once in a lifetime opportunity to cut the English loose. Why not let them simmer in their splendid irrelevance for a decade or more, and then allow them back in – provided they ask really, really nicely. The English will still be in Nato, and what are they going to do? The United States values Britain as its proxy seat at the European table. With that seat empty, why would Washington keep its poodle?

Meanwhile half of British trade is with the EU, but only 11% of EU trade is with Britain. As the Oxford-educated Polish politician Radoslaw “Radek” Sikorski – one European who knows how to talk to the English elite – characterised the balance of power post-Brexit: “No prizes for guessing who would have the upper hand in the negotiations.” So if the English want to be a little Russia or mini-Turkey – former empires suffering from debilitating withdrawal symptoms – why not let them?

But then there is the unprecedented refugee crisis, the euro mess, the ever-growing terrorist threat, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Together they make this a really bad time for further instability. Yes, we would strangle or crush the English in the post-Brexit negotiations, the way any group of nations comprising 450 million people would to an opponent eight times smaller who has just tried to blackmail them.

But here’s step two. We must recognise that the English elite has chosen its moment well. Europe is vulnerable, and we just cannot afford another distraction from our real problems. Which means we must help the pro-EU camp in England.

One way to do this would be to meet at least some of the English demands. This is what David Cameron is clearly hoping for, but it would be a historic mistake. If the UK is rewarded for its cynical act of extortion there will be referendums all over the place, paralysing Europe for a decade.

This is why the best way forward for Europe is to threaten to hit the English as hard as we can. We must stop treating membership of the EU as a favour granted by England, and instead make the English feel their vulnerability and dependence.

First and foremost, this means a change of tone. For many mainland Europeans the EU offers the promise of freedom from the threat of nationalism. But the English have a different experience. They are taught to believe that nationalism is what saved them from Adolf Hitler and, as a consequence, they see no need for a post-national political entity. This is why for England, the EU is an economic rather than a cultural and political project. Read pro-Europe newspapers such as the Financial Times or listen to English pro-Europe politicians, and every argument is framed around the country’s national interest.

In other words, the English attitude towards the EU is transactional rather than transformational – therefore appealing to the European ideal or England’s better self is pointless. Instead we need to spell out all the ways in which we will make the English suffer if they leave. Using explicit threats may seem to be a very un-European thing to do, but think again: for nearly all England’s mainstream politicians and pundits, “un-European” is a compliment.

So let us start talking now, out loud in Brussels as well as in Europe’s opinion pages and in national parliaments, about the offer we are going to make to the Scots, should they prefer Brussels to London in the event of Brexit. Let’s also discuss in which ways we are going to repatriate financial powers from London to the European mainland. It is strange enough that Europe’s financial centre lies outside the eurozone, but to have it outside the EU? That would be like placing Wall Street in Cuba.

‘How electrifying it would have been if Cameron had demanded an end to the insanely wasteful practice of moving the European parliament back and forth between Strasbourg and Brussels.’ Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

Clearly multinational corporations from China, Brazil or the US cannot have their European HQs outside the EU. So let’s have an EU summit about which European capitals these headquarters should ideally move to. Make sure the English can hear these discussions, and in the meantime keep an eye on how the value of commercial real estate in London plummets.

Or consider the UK-based Japanese car industry – would Greece, with its excellent port and shipping facilities, not be its ideal new home? Oh yes, and sooner or later, the 1.3 billion Indians will object again to not having a permanent seat on the UN security council when 55 million English do. Let’s work out what favours we want from India in exchange for our support.

The best way for the EU to prevent Brexit is to start preparing for it, loudly. But this is not enough. European politicians and pundits must not be shy of cutting England down to size. This is the chief problem for those in England trying to make the EU case: they must acknowledge first how irrelevant and powerless their country has become. Except that is still a huge taboo.

Seen from China or India, the difference between the UK and Belgium is a rounding error: 0.87% of world population versus 0.15%. But this is not at all how Britain sees itself – consider the popular derogatory expression “a country the size of Belgium”.
But alas, what a missed opportunity this referendum is. A child can see that the EU needs fundamental reform and just imagine for a moment that England had argued not for a better deal for Britain, but for all of us Europeans.

How electrifying it would have been if Cameron had demanded an end to the insanely wasteful practice of moving the European parliament back and forth between Strasbourg and Brussels. If he had insisted on a comprehensive overhaul of the disastrous common agricultural policy, on the long overdue reduction in salaries and tax-free perks for Eurocrats, and on actual prosecution of corrupt officials. Instead he has set his sights on largely symbolic measures aimed at humiliating and excluding European migrants, safeguarding domestic interests versus those of the eurozone and, no surprises here, guarantees for London’s financial sector.

Ultimately, as far as the EU is concerned, the English are only in it for themselves. All the more reason, then, for Europeans to stop imploring them to stay in, and begin using their strength in the negotiations. 

Blatant lies taught through Pakistan textbooks?

 

By Herald Exclusive in The Dawn

Updated 42 minutes ago

The backdrop of a stage shows portraits of Former President Ayub Khan and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. — Photo by WhiteStar

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Nationalism and patriotism in Pakistan are contested subjects. What makes us Pakistanis and what is it that makes us love our land and nation?

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The answers to these questions vary widely depending on who is being asked. A large part of our national identity stems from our sense of history and culture that are deeply rooted in the land and in the legacy of the region’s ancient civilisations. Religion has also played a big part in making us what we are today. But the picture general history textbooks paint for us does not portray the various facets of our identity.

Instead it offers quite a convoluted description of who we are. The distortion of historical facts has in turn played a quintessential role in manipulating our sense of self. What’s ironic is that the boldest fallacies in these books are about the events that are still in our living memory. Herald invited writers and commentators, well versed in history, to share their answers to what they believe is the most blatant lie taught through Pakistan history textbooks.

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The fundamental divide between Hindus and Muslims

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The most blatant lie in Pakistan Studies textbooks is the idea that Pakistan was formed solely because of a fundamental conflict between Hindus and Muslims. This idea bases itself on the notion of a civilisational divide between monolithic Hindu and Muslim identities, which simply did not exist.

The stress on religion ignored other factors that could cut across both identities. For instance, a Muslim from most of South India had far more in common, because of his regionally specific culture and language, with Hindus in his area than the Muslims in the north of the Subcontinent.

Similarly, the division of the historical narrative into a ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ period, aside from the ironic fact that this was actually instituted by the British, glosses over the reality that Islamic empires also fought each other for power. After all, Babar had to defeat Ibrahim Lodi, and thus, the Delhi Sultanate, for the Mughal period to begin.

Therefore, power and empire building often trumped this religious identity, that textbooks claim, can be traced linearly right to the formation of Pakistan.

These textbooks tend to have snapshot descriptions of the contempt with which the two religious communities treated one another. This is specifically highlighted in descriptions of the Congress ministries formed after the elections of 1937.

Other factors that contributed historically to these shows of religious ‘contempt’ in South Asian history are often ignored. Indeed, Richard Eaton’s classic study of temple desecrations shows that in almost all cases where Hindu temples were ransacked, it was for political or economic reasons.

In most cases, it was because the Muslim ruler was punishing an insubordinate Hindu official. Otherwise, the Mughals protected such temples. Jumping ahead, this sort of inter-communal cooperation aimed at maintaining political control could also be seen in the Unionist Party, which was in power in Punjab all the way up until 1946.

As Pakistan was formed barely a year later, the notion that its formation was based on a long-standing and fundamental conflict between Hindus and Muslims is deeply problematic.

— Anushay Malik holds a PhD in history from University of London and is currently an assistant professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences

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Eulogising leaders

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In his preface to the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun warned of seven mistakes that he thought historians often committed. One of the seven is “the common desire to gain favor of those of high ranks, by praising them, by spreading their fame.”

This particular mistake, or lie rather, has plagued history writing for school texts in Pakistan since the 1950s and has been used as a political tool to project successive rulers – whether civilian or military – in a eulogistic format.

Moreover, another mindless inaccuracy is the absence of the ‘other’, where India and Congress are needlessly ignored and a one-sided version of history is deemed necessary for creating a nationalistic mindset.

This gap continues in the historical narrative for school students post-partition. Hence, some of the most blatant lies and subversion of historical facts exist in the textbooks mandated by the federal and provincial textbook boards.

Furthermore, maligning the ‘enemy’ is done quite overtly and mindlessly in official history school texts which, unfortunately, is also the case with some Indian school texts documented by discerning authors on both sides of the border.

Most nation states during the 19th and 20th centuries used official versions of history in order to create a homogenous and nationalistic identity. Pakistan’s first education minister, Fazalur Rehman, set up the Historical Society of Pakistan in 1948 so that history for the new nation could be rewritten in a fair and balanced manner using authentic and reliable sources.

Successive governments did not further this goal and history written for schools in Pakistan became the victim of fossilized textbook boards ratifying the work of unethical and unscholarly authors for public school consumption. Vested interests continue to triumph despite the open door policy since 2004 for private publishers to bid for quality textbooks.

— Ismat Riaz is an educational consultant and author of the textbook, Understanding History

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Excluding and manipulating historical periods

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The most blatant lie in textbook accounts of Pakistan’s history is by virtue of omission, which is in effect the denial of our multicultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious past. It is a common complaint that Pakistan’s history is taught as if it began with the conquest of Sindh by the Umayyad army, led by the young General, Muhammad bin Qasim in 711 AD.

Most textbooks in Sindh at least do mention Moenjodaro and the Indus Valley civilization, but it is not discussed in a meaningful way and there is no discussion about its extent and culture. Important periods and events during subsequent centuries are also skimmed over, like the Aryan civilization which introduced its powerful social system and epic poetry (Mahabharata in which Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa play important roles), the Brahmin religion, a thousand years of Buddhism with its universities and the Gandharan civilization which was spread throughout present day Pakistan.

No students of Pakistani schools can tell us that Pakistan was once part of the empires of Cyrus the Great and Darius of the Achaemenid Dynasty and later of the Sassanian Empire with the legendary rule of Naushirwan, “the Just”. Similarly, hardly anyone would be aware that Asoka whose capital was in Pataliputra in the east of the subcontinent also counted Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab as part of his domain.

The result of these omissions is disastrous on the minds of the youth in Pakistan. Instead of seeing themselves as heirs of many civilizations, they acquire a narrow, one-dimensional view of the world. This is contradicted by what they subsequently see in this global world of information technology and shared knowledge. That this is also in direct contravention of Islamic teachings does not occur to the perpetrators of a lopsided curriculum in our schools.

The first assertion in the Holy Quran is Iqra bi Ism I Rabik [and no restrictions are put on the acquisition of knowledge].

Instead, we have bans on books, digital platforms such as YouTube and even newspapers in this Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

— Hamida Khuhro is a historian and former education minister for Sindh

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The other view

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Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan accompanied by members of Muslim League.

To say a large part of Pakistan’s history is shared with India would be stating the obvious. Yet it is this period of both our histories, or the portrayal of such, that is tampered with the most and has been used as a political tool by either side. The Herald invited renowned Indian historian and currently a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow, Mushirul Hasan, to give his take on the lies taught through textbooks on both sides of the border.

History is only of use for its lessons, and it is the duty of the historian to see that they are properly taught. Very few in the subcontinent heed this advice. Both in India and Pakistan the intellectual climate has thrown the historical profession into disarray.

Such is the power and influence of the polemicists that a growing number of people are abandoning the quest for an objective approach. With the recent appointment of a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-oriented Chairman of the Indian Council for Historical Research, liberal and secular historians are worried about the future of their discipline.

The diversity of approaches has been the hallmark of Indian historiography. As a result, the making of Pakistan and its evolution as a nation state is interpreted differently in various quarters.

The ghosts of partition was put to rest and not exhumed for frequent post-mortems. Moreover, the liberal-left historians did not repudiate the idea of Pakistan. On the contrary, they criticised the Congress stalwarts for failing to guide the movements they initiated away from the forces of reactionary communalism.

This was true of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Ram Manohar Lohia, the Socialist leader. The Maulana, in particular, charged Nehru for jettisoning the plan for a Congress-Muslim coalition in 1937 and the prospect of an enduring Hindu-Muslim partnership.

Tara Chand’s three-volume History of the Freedom Movement in India held its ground until the Janata government decided, in 1977, to rewrite the secular textbook. With the establishment of the BJP-led government in October 1999, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-RSS combination began its subversion of academia through its time-tested method of infiltration and rewriting of textbooks and ‘fine-tuning’ of curricula.

Saffronization of education will breed fanaticism, heighten caste and communitarian consciousness, and stifle the natural inclination of a student to cultivate a balanced and cautious judgement. Increasingly, it may be difficult for some of us to establish historical truths or to defend the cult of objective historical inquiry.

As the radical currents are being swept aside by the winds of right-wing discourse, it is pertinent to recall the Saidian (Edward Said) dictum that “nothing disfigures the intellectuals’ public performance as much trimming, careful silence, patriotic bluster, and retrospective of self-dramatizing prophecy.”

The story in Pakistan runs on different lines. Starting with I H Qureshi and Aziz Ahmad, scholars in our neighbours have tenaciously adhered to the belief that the creation of the Muslim nation was the culmination of a ‘natural’ process.

They have pressed into service the ‘two-nation’ theory to define nationality in purely Islamic terms. In the process, they have turned a blind eye to the syncretic and composite trajectory of Indian society, which began with Mohammad Iqbal’s memorable lines Ae Aab-e-Rood-e-Ganga! Woh Din Hain Yaad Tujh Ko? Utra Tere Kinare Jab Karwan Humara [Oh, waters of the river Ganges! Do you remember those days? Those days when our caravan halted on your bank?].

The same poet talked of “Naya Shiwala”, a temple of peace and goodwill. Again, the same poet gave lessons of religious understanding and tolerance in yet another poet.

Sadly, these thoughts are hardly reflected in our textbooks. We don’t emphasize the virtue of living with diversity and sharing social and cultural inheritances. We don’t introduce our students to the vibrant legacy of Kabir, Guru Nanak, Akbar, and Dara Shikoh. Instead, we dwell on the imaginary kufr-o-imaan ki jung, on the destruction of temples and forcible conversions. Increasingly, young students are introduced to the Islamist or the Hindutva world views that have caused incalculable damage to State and civil society.

Saadat Hasan Manto described an existentialist reality – the separation of people living on both sides who had a long history of cultural and social contact – and the paradoxical character of borders being a metaphor of the ambiguities of nation-building. He offered, without saying so, a way of correcting the distortions inherent in state-centered national histories.

Ayesha Jalal is right in pointing out that as “old orthodoxies recede before the flood of fresh historical evidence and earlier certitudes are overturned by newly detected contradictions”, this is the time to heal “the multiple fractures which turned the promised dawn of freedom into a painful moment of separation.”

In the words of the poet Ali Sardar Jafri:

Tum aao gulshan-e-Lahore se chaman bardosh, Hum Aayein subh-e-Benaras ki roshni le kar, Himalaya ke hawaaon ki taazigi le kar, aur uss ke baad yeh poochein ke kaun dushaman hai? .. [You come forward with flowers from the Garden of Lahore, We bring to you the light and radiance of the morning of Benaras, The freshness of the winds of Himalayas, And then we ask who the enemy is?].

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Wars with India

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The most blatant lies in Pakistani history textbooks are about the events that are still in our living memory. Among the many examples, the three given below are about the wars of 1965 and 1971, and the partition carnage of 1947. The reason for the falsehood lies in our distorted view of nationalism. Rather than let children learn from our historical mistakes, we show them a false picture. Thus we are doomed to repeat the mistakes generation after generation.

The following excerpt regarding the 1965 war is taken from fifth grade reading material published by the NWFP Textbook Board, Peshawar in 2002 — “The Pakistan Army conquered several areas of India, and when India was at the verge of being defeated she ran to the United Nations to beg for a cease-fire. Magnanimously, thereafter, Pakistan returned all the conquered territories to India.”

The Punjab Textbook Board published the following text on the causes for the separation of East Pakistan in 1993 for secondary classes — “There were a large number of Hindus in East Pakistan. They had never truly accepted Pakistan. A large number of them were teachers in schools and colleges.

They continued creating a negative impression among students. No importance was attached to explaining the ideology of Pakistan to the younger generation.

The Hindus sent a substantial part of their earnings to Bharat, thus adversely affecting the economy of the province. Some political leaders encouraged provincialism for selfish gains. They went around depicting the central Government and (the then) West Pakistan as enemy and exploiter. Political aims were thus achieved at the cost of national unity.”

“While the Muslims provided all sorts of help to those non-Muslims desiring to leave Pakistan [during partition], people of India committed atrocities against Muslims trying to migrate to Pakistan. They would attack the buses, trucks and trains carrying the Muslim refugees and murder and loot them.” The latter except was taken from an intermediate classes textbook — Civics of Pakistan, 2000.

Some more examples of totally contorted and misleading, yet ingenious and amusing, narrations of the history of Pakistan can be extracted from a single text, A Textbook of Pakistan Studies by M D Zafar.

“Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs led by Muhammad bin Qasim occupied Sindh and Multan. Pakistan under the Arabs comprised the Lower Indus Valley.”

“During the 11th century the Ghaznavid Empire comprised what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. During the 12th century the Ghaznavids lost Afghanistan and their rule came to be confined to Pakistan”.

“By the 13th century Pakistan had spread to include the whole of Northern India and Bengal. Under the Khiljis Pakistan moved further South to include a greater part of Central India and the Deccan”.

“During the 16th century, ‘Hindustan’ disappeared and was completely absorbed in ‘Pakistan”.

“Shah Waliullah appealed to Ahmad Shah Durrani of Afghanistan and ‘Pakistan’ to come to the rescue of the Muslims of Mughal India, and save them from the tyrannies of the Marhattas…”

“In the Pakistan territories where a Sikh state had come to be established, the Muslims were denied the freedom of religion.”

“Thus by the middle of the 19th century both Pakistan and Hindustan ceased to exist; instead British India came into being. Although Pakistan was created in August 1947, yet except for its name, the present-day Pakistan has existed, as a more or less single entity for centuries.”

— A H Nayyar is a physicist and retired professor. He co-edited an SDPI report titled “The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan.

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Pakistan was made for Muslims

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Dawn newspaper announces the death of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. on September 12, 1948.

The most blatant lie that covers page after page of history textbooks is that Pakistan was created for the promotion and propagation of religion. In fact when the Muslim League was established in Dhaka in 1906 one of the foremost principles was the creation of loyalty to the British rulers and to promote greater understanding between Muslims and the British government.

The idea of religion barely entered the discourse of the Muslim League until the elections of 1937, when the League lost elections and the Congress won decisively. It was at that time that religious nationalism was invoked vigorously to create a feeling of unity among the Muslims of Uttar Pardesh (UP), Bengal and Punjab in order to provide the League an ideational basis of support.
Pakistan was mainly created for the protection and promotion of the class interests of the landed aristocracy which formed the League. The meeting at which the League was formed was attended mainly by the landed elite which feared that if the British left India and representative government was established, the traditional power of the loyal Muslim aristocracy would erode, especially since the class composition of the Congress reflected the educated urban and rural middle classes seeking upward mobility and a share in political power.

The peasant movement in Bengal was mobilised for purely political purposes since its aims and ideology conflicted radically with those of the landed aristocracy.

The urban educated middle classes of UP which joined the League later and enunciated the Hindu-Muslim difference argument in 1940, eschewed Muslim nationalism soon after independence because it had outlived its political use. The nature of the state outlined by the educated urban class in 1947 was based on a pluralistic vision of a state based on religious and citizenship equality.

— Rubina Saigol is a scholar and has authored several books on education and society and co-edited books on feminism and gender.

'Do you love your country?' is a trick question

Alan Rusbridger was asked by the home affairs select commitee if he loved his country, but national pride is a slippery concept

• 
• • Anne Perkins
  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 4 December 2013 11.42 GMT

'Nationalism depends on a kind of exceptionalism.' Photograph: Murad Sezer/Reuters

Do you love your country? When Keith Vaz, the MP who chairs the home affairs committee put the question to the Guardian's editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, midway through yesterday's evidence session on the NSA leaks, it was, almost certainly, meant helpfully. It was that lawyerly thing of getting out into the open the answer to the opposition's charge (the rather hefty one of treason) before the opposition had a chance to put it themselves. Cue unqualified affirmation!

But do you love your country? Well do you? Quite right, it's a trick question. The answer's not what you say, or even the way that you say it. The answer is in the pause between the end of the question and the start of the answer. If you need to stop and think about it, then you might just as well say no. You almost certainly don't love your country in the way that the person who asked the question meant.

All the same, it's a question that needs answering. Because the more nebulous the idea of country becomes – the more multi-layered national identity and the less certain national boundaries – the more important it is to understand how you identify yourself, if only to see off the people who want the answer to be an unqualified yes, delivered with all the plausibility of a besotted suitor. Just see the Mail's attack on Ed Miliband's father to see how potent it can be. The question can't be avoided, so it has to be reframed.

People have been making communities probably at least since they discovered two people could hunt down a bison better than one. That's what got us where we are. But all sorts of things happen once you begin creating communities. For a start, it has some implication of exclusion. Probably early hunting tribes weren't all that kind to people who were a bit rubbish with a bow and arrow. Recognising people we think are like us is not just about self-definition, it's about self-protection.

In time, an evolutionary convenience developed, the way these things do, into a handy way of keeping people in line. That's why Samuel Johnson declared patriotism the last refuge of the scoundrel (leaving Boswell to explain that he meant the kind of patriotism that was really a mask for self-interest). But Johnson had already spotted its capacity to be a lethal political idea. Sure enough it became the deadly force that moulded 19th and 20th-century Europe into warring factions, the glue to empire and a straitjacket for the social order. Feel free to add in your own particular grudge. Patriotism has a long history as the weapon of the establishment against the challenger.

But it has also, from time to time, been a way of defending what matters against an establishment with other ideas. When John of Gaunt first defined England as a sceptred isle, he was despairing of Richard II who was going to leave it "bound in with shame". Alex Salmond is running the referendum campaign on similar lines. He's framing it in the context of how the union is stopping Scotland being the country that destiny intended. He's suggesting it's impossible to be truly Scottish if you also think of yourself as British.

For nationalism depends on a kind of exceptionalism. National pride means imagining that your country has something unique and irreplaceable about it. It becomes all too easily an intolerant concept. I love my country, in so far as I love inanimate objects at all. But I love my country, and quite likely it's different from yours.

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Patriotism is not the same as spineless adoration of the Establishment

Owen Jones in The Independent

I would want to honour courageous, often faceless Brits who stood up to power

“Do you love your country?” The smirking phantom of the pinko-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy hovered over Labour’s Keith Vaz as he uttered those words. Who knows if they were intended to menace or support the Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who was being interrogated by the home affairs committee over the Edward Snowden leaks. But the phrase is creepy nonetheless, not least in the febrile atmosphere over the National Security Agency revelations. Newspapers that have wailed over Leveson as a mortal threat to press freedom have indulged Government threats over the leaks. There is talk of journalists being locked away: and indeed, if the state begins prosecuting those who hold power to account, Britons interested in protecting our freedoms must surely take to the streets.

But patriotism is often subverted and manipulated by those with wealth and power. Loving your country means being subservient to the Establishment, or so goes their logic. Make the ruling class and the country interchangeable concepts, then those challenging the powerful can simply be swept aside as near-treasonous fifth columnists. To engage in a debate with those who question the ruling elite means legitimising their criticisms, treating them as reasonable criticisms, however wrong they may be. Far easier to discredit them instead, as those who despise the nation and whose motives are to do it harm.

The “Do you love your country” card is probably most notoriously used at times of war. It is patriotic to send young men and women to foreign countries to be slaughtered and maimed, but it is unpatriotic to bring them home to safety. It is used to strip civil liberties away, too, in the name of national security. Stripping away freedoms that our ancestors fought for becomes patriotic; defending our hard-won liberties becomes unpatriotic. It is used to oppress minorities. The rights of gay Britons becomes an insult to British “family values”. Immigrants may have helped build this country, but they are posed as a threat to national identity.

Questioning patriotism is a long-standing technique to crush dissent, not least from the left. Margaret Thatcher smeared the miners and their allies as “the enemy within” who, she claimed, were more of a threat than “the enemy without”. The Daily Mail recently, and infamously, smeared the socialist Ralph Miliband as “the man who hated Britain”. The absurdity of a newspaper that backed Hitler’s genocidal regime smearing a Jewish immigrant who fought the Nazis has been widely ridiculed. But actually the entire episode underlined how the very concept of patriotism is like a Rorschach inkblot test, where we all look at “the nation” and see what we want to see: we love aspects, and dislike, or even loathe, other features of it.

When defending the Mail’s smear that Miliband despised his country, the paper’s deputy editor reeled off a list of “great British institutions” that the left-wing academic had criticised: the likes of the Royal Family, the Church, the military and “our great newspapers” (don’t all choke at once). But of course, it is possible to reel off “great British institutions” that those on the right froth about: like the NHS (once described by the Tory Nigel Lawson as “the closest the English have to a religion”), the BBC, the public sector, and trade unions (once championed by Winston Churchill as “pillars of our British Society”).

Our history inspires pride and regret in different people, too. Some might champion monarchs and governments of centuries gone by, where I would want to honour courageous, often faceless Brits who stood up to power and injustice: like the Chartists, the suffragettes or anti-racist activists who were ridiculed, attacked and persecuted in their time. Some may relish the traditions of Empire, out of jingoism or ignorance or a combination of both, while I would regard it as a shameful and murderous stain on our nation’s past.

I love living in London partly because of its diversity, a feature of modern British life that others despise. Some prefer the tranquility of the open English countryside; others find it dull and claustrophobic, opting for the chaotic excitement of urban life instead. There are those of us who spend Sundays in Church, while others regard all incarnations of religion as a toxic blight on humanity. Some, like myself, hold that free-market capitalism is the engine of a profoundly unjust distribution of wealth and power; others devoutly believe that it is the catalyst for growth, prosperity and progress.

Not a single living Brit can honestly claim to love everything about something as complex and contradictory as Britain. But whatever Britain is, it certainly is not synonymous with those who rule it. And those who attempt to hold power to account as somehow un-British need to be faced down. We owe it our British ancestors who, in the teeth of opposition of other privileged and often tyrannical Brits, built this democracy, at such cost and with such sacrifice.

Alastair Campbell's attack on the Mail was terrifying – and brilliant

Why is the left obsessed by the Daily Mail?

The Guardian has published an extensive critique of the Daily Mail and its reporting of Labour, press regulation and the Snowden leaks. We invited Mail readers to join in that debate. Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief, asked for the opportunity to comment. Here is his contribution

• 
• • Paul Dacre
  • The Guardian, Saturday 12 October 2013

Paul Dacre: 'Our crime is that the Mail constantly dares to stand up to the liberal-left consensus that dominates so many areas of British life.' Montage: Guardian

Out in the real world, it was a pretty serious week for news. The US was on the brink of budget default, a British court heard how for two years social workers failed to detect the mummified body of a four-year-old starved to death by his mother, and it was claimed that the then Labour health secretary had covered up unnecessary deaths in a NHS hospital six months before the election.

In contrast, the phoney world of Twitter, the London chatterati and left-wing media was gripped 10 days ago by collective hysteria as it became obsessed round-the-clock by one story – a five-word headline on page 16 in the Daily Mail.

The screech of axe-grinding was deafening as the paper's enemies gleefully leapt to settle scores.

Leading the charge, inevitably, was the Mail's bête noir, the BBC. Fair-minded readers will decide themselves whether the hundreds of hours of airtime it devoted to that headline reveal a disturbing lack of journalistic proportionality and impartiality – but certainly the one-sided tone in their reporting allowed Labour to misrepresent Geoffrey Levy's article on Ralph Miliband.

The genesis of that piece lay in Ed Miliband's conference speech. The Mail was deeply concerned that in 2013, after all the failures of socialism in the twentieth century, the leader of the Labour party was announcing its return, complete with land seizures and price fixing.

Surely, we reasoned, the public had the right to know what influence the Labour leader's Marxist father, to whom he constantly referred in his speeches, had on his thinking.

So it was that Levy's article examined the views held by Miliband senior over his lifetime, not just as a 17-year-old youth as has been alleged by our critics.

The picture that emerged was of a man who gave unqualified support to Russian totalitarianism until the mid-50s, who loathed the market economy, was in favour of a workers' revolution, denigrated British traditions and institutions such as the royal family, the church and the army and was overtly dismissive of western democracy.

Levy's article argued that the Marxism that inspired Ralph Miliband had provided the philosophical underpinning of one of history's most appalling regimes – a regime, incidentally, that totally crushed freedom of expression.

Nowhere did the Mail suggest that Ralph Miliband was evil – only that the political beliefs he espoused had resulted in evil. As for the headline "The Man Who Hated Britain", our point was simply this: Ralph Miliband was, as a Marxist, committed to smashing the institutions that make Britain distinctively British – and, with them, the liberties and democracy those institutions have fostered.

Yes, the Mail is happy to accept that in his personal life, Ralph Miliband was, as described by his son, a decent and kindly man – although we won't withdraw our view that he supported an ideology that caused untold misery in the world.

Yes, we accept that he cherished this country's traditions of tolerance and freedom – while, in a troubling paradox typical of the left, detesting the very institutions and political system that made those traditions possible.

And yes, the headline was controversial – but popular newspapers have a long tradition of using provocative headlines to grab readers' attention. In isolation that headline may indeed seem over the top, but read in conjunction with the article we believed it was justifiable.

Despite this we acceded to Mr Miliband's demand – and by golly, he did demand – that we publish his 1,000-word article defending his father.

So it was that, in a virtually unprecedented move, we published his words at the top of our op ed pages. They were accompanied by an abridged version of the original Levy article and a leader explaining why the Mail wasn't apologising for the points it made.

The hysteria that followed is symptomatic of the post-Leveson age in which any newspaper which dares to take on the left in the interests of its readers risks being howled down by the Twitter mob who the BBC absurdly thinks represent the views of real Britain.

As the week progressed and the hysteria increased, it became clear that this was no longer a story about an article on Mr Miliband's Marxist father but a full-scale war by the BBC and the left against the paper that is their most vocal critic.

Orchestrating this bile was an ever more rabid Alastair Campbell. Again, fair-minded readers will wonder why a man who helped drive Dr David Kelly to his death, was behind the dodgy Iraq war dossier and has done more to poison the well of public discourse than anyone in Britain is given so much air-time by the BBC.

But the BBC's blood lust was certainly up. Impartiality flew out of the window. Ancient feuds were settled. Not to put too fine a point on things, we were right royally turned over.

Fair enough, if you dish it out, you take it. But my worry is that there was a more disturbing agenda to last week's events.

Mr Miliband, of course, exults in being the man who destroyed Murdoch in this country. Is it fanciful to believe that his real purpose in triggering last week's row – so assiduously supported by the liberal media which sneers at the popular press – was an attempt to neutralise Associated, the Mail's publishers and one of Britain's most robustly independent and successful newspaper groups.

Let it be said loud and clear that the Mail, unlike News International, did NOT hack people's phones or pay the police for stories. I have sworn that on oath.

No, our crime is more heinous than that.

It is that the Mail constantly dares to stand up to the liberal-left consensus that dominates so many areas of British life and instead represents the views of the ordinary people who are our readers and who don't have a voice in today's political landscape and are too often ignored by today's ruling elite.

The metropolitan classes, of course, despise our readers with their dreams (mostly unfulfilled) of a decent education and health service they can trust, their belief in the family, patriotism, self-reliance, and their over-riding suspicion of the state and the People Who Know Best.

These people mock our readers' scepticism over the European Union and a human rights court that seems to care more about the criminal than the victim. They scoff at our readers who, while tolerant, fret that the country's schools and hospitals can't cope with mass immigration.

In other words, these people sneer at the decent working Britons – I'd argue they are the backbone of this country – they constantly profess to be concerned about.

The truth is that there is an unpleasant intellectual snobbery about the Mail in leftish circles, for whom the word 'suburban' is an obscenity. They simply cannot comprehend how a paper that opposes the mindset they hold dear can be so successful and so loved by its millions of readers.

Well, I'm proud that the Mail stands up for those readers.

I am proud that our Dignity For The Elderly Campaign has for years stood up for Britain's most neglected community. Proud that we have fought for justice for Stephen Lawrence, Gary McKinnon and the relatives of the victims of the Omagh bombing, for those who have seen loved ones suffer because of MRSA and the Liverpool Care Pathway. I am proud that we have led great popular campaigns for the NSPCC and Alzheimer's Society on the dangers of paedophilia and the agonies of dementia. And I'm proud of our war against round-the-clock drinking, casinos, plastic bags, internet pornography and secret courts.

No other newspaper campaigns as vigorously as the Mail and I am proud of the ability of the paper's 400 journalists (the BBC has 8,000) to continually set the national agenda on a whole host of issues.

I am proud that for years, while most of Fleet Street were in thrall to it, the Mail was the only paper to stand up to the malign propaganda machine of Tony Blair and his appalling henchman, Campbell (and, my goodness, it's been payback time over the past week!).

Could all these factors also be behind the left's tsunami of opprobrium against the Mail last week? I don't know but I do know that for a party mired in the corruption exposed by Damian McBride's book (in which Ed Miliband was a central player) to call for a review of the Mail's practices and culture is beyond satire.

Certainly, the Mail will not be silenced by a Labour party that has covered up unnecessary, and often horrific, deaths in NHS hospitals, and suggests instead that it should start looking urgently at its own culture and practices.

Some have argued that last week's brouhaha shows the need for statutory press regulation. I would argue the opposite. The febrile heat, hatred, irrationality and prejudice provoked by last week's row reveals why politicians must not be allowed anywhere near press regulation.

And while the Mail does not agree with the Guardian over the stolen secret security files it published, I suggest that we can agree that the fury and recrimination the story is provoking reveals again why those who rule us – and who should be held to account by newspapers – cannot be allowed to sit in judgment on the press.

That is why the left should be very careful about what it wishes for – especially in the light of this week's rejection by the politicians of the newspaper industry's charter for robust independent self-regulation.

The BBC is controlled, through the licence fee, by the politicians. ITV has to answer to Ofcom, a government quango. Newspapers are the only mass media left in Britain free from the control of the state.

The Mail has recognised the hurt Mr Miliband felt over our attack on his father's beliefs. We were happy to give him considerable space to describe how his father had fought for Britain (though a man who so smoothly diddled his brother risks laying himself open to charges of cynicism if he makes too much of a fanfare over familial loyalties).

For the record, the Mail received a mere two letters of complaint before Mr Miliband's intervention and only a few hundred letters and emails since – many in support. A weekend demonstration against the paper attracted just 110 people.

It seems that in the real world people – most of all our readers – were far more supportive of us than the chatterati would have you believe.

PS – this week the head of MI5 – subsequently backed by the PM, the deputy PM, the home secretary and Labour's elder statesman Jack Straw – effectively accused the Guardian of aiding terrorism by publishing stolen secret security files. The story – which is of huge significance – was given scant coverage by a BBC which only a week ago had devoted days of wall-to-wall pejorative coverage to the Mail. Again, I ask fair readers, what is worse: to criticise the views of a Marxist thinker, whose ideology is anathema to most and who had huge influence on the man who could one day control our security forces … or to put British lives at risk by helping terrorists?

-------

Alastair Campbell's attack on the Mail was terrifying – and brilliant

Campbell's bravura performance took on the Mail's venomous world view, which is that, as an immigrant, you are only ever tolerated

• 
• • Alex Andreou
  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 2 October 2013 13.03 BST

So, to recap the effects of that Daily Mail article on Ralph Miliband: It robbed the Conservative party conference of the headlines it expected – it was ahead of any of their policy announcements all yesterday in most news bulletins, across most channels. It reinforced Ed Miliband's image, for the second week running, as someone of integrity who stands up to bullies. It secured him sympathy and support from most political opponents. It caused a social media reaction which refreshed everyone's memory about the Daily Mail's historical links with Mosley and Hitler. It even managed to revive interest in the Leveson inquiry's recommendations. All in all, it was the journalistic equivalent of a glorious Stan Laurel pratfall.

It also marked the moment when Alastair Campbell singled himself out as the natural successor to Jeremy Paxman. You know, the Paxman of old, when it was his line of questioning which caused a stir, rather than the configuration of his facial fuzz. It was all at once both refreshing to see someone properly "grilled" on Newsnight for the first time in months, and depressing that it had to be by another guest.

It was also, personally, a rather odd moment to find oneself rooting for Alastair Campbell. You got a glimpse of how utterly terrifying he must have been to deal with, when he was Blair's press pointman. How overwhelming and irresistible. A glimpse of how his ability to grind down anyone expressing a contrary view may have contributed to both the success and the hubris of the Labour party at that time. At the same time, as someone hoping that Cameron will be relegated to oblivion at the next election, I had to admit: if I could employ him to help bring that about, I would have to consider it. I may not like him, but – boy – is he good at his job!

Within 10 minutes, he got further than all the other television news political editors and correspondents put together did over 24 hours. He secured an admission from the Mail's deputy editor, Jon Steafel, that, at the very least, using a photograph of Ralph Miliband's grave was an "error". He succeeded in exposing internal rifts within the Daily Mail, by outlining the areas where even Paul Dacre's deputy refused to support him. The coup de grace was the phrase "the Daily Mail is the worst of British values, posing as the best". I suspect it will follow the Mail for many years to come. It was a bravura performance.

He even got close to unpacking the wider point. How is it that one can extrapolate hatred of Britain from criticism of its institutions? It seems that sections of the press (and, I'm sure, the public) are never far from the McCarthyist view, that wanting to change the way the state works makes one an enemy of the state. But there is a further point bubbling under the surface. Implicit in the Daily Mail's venom is the idea that being republican (in the wider, rather than US, sense), being suspicious of organised religion, being a pacifist or a socialist – all these things, which are upsetting to the Mail and its readership – become a cardinal sin if you are also a foreigner.

As a foreigner with strong opinions, I have come across this hundreds of times, in various permutations. As an immigrant one has no right to criticise any aspect of the UK. Regardless of how long one has been here, regardless of the validity of one's opinion, regardless, even, it seems, of serving in the military during a war, the immigrant's stake is limited. He is tolerated, but should watch himself. The invitation can easily be withdrawn. He should be grateful unconditionally. That Daily Mail article is just a longer version of, "If you don't like it here, you can fuck off back to your own country". It is an attitude that is not only still prevalent, but permeates the political rhetoric on Europe, trade, foreign policy and immigration.

It is this snobbery, resistance to new ideas and sense of inflated ego that are truly holding Britain back from being all it can be. It puts me in mind of something the American journalist and essayist Sydney J Harris wrote:

"Patriotism is proud of a country's virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, 'the greatest', but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is."