Quoting a top Australian media story  the W&J Council regrets in a statement that Adani Mining “engaged a private investigator and equipped security guards with body cameras as part of obtaining a Supreme Court order”, adding the “interim injunction specifically bans First Nations land owners, Adrian Burragubba and Coedie McAvoy from returning to the ceremonial site.”

Asserting that it would “prevent” all other W&J Family Council members from exercising their rights and practicing their culture on that land without Adani’s “permission”, the statement says, “We will not be bullied into submission by Adani, who doesn’t know the first thing about First Nations laws and customs and hides behind the power of a colonial property law system.”

Text:

An ABC News report this morning shows that Adani made legal moves to expose two W&J land owners to possible jail time if they return to a ceremonial camp on the company’s Carmichael mine site. The report says Adani Mining engaged a private investigator and equipped security guards with body cameras as part of obtaining a Supreme Court order.

Adani’s interim injunction specifically bans First Nations land owners, Adrian Burragubba and Coedie McAvoy, from returning to the ceremonial site on the area where native title was recently extinguished by the Queensland Government for the mining company. It would prevent all other W&J Family Council members from exercising their rights and practicing their culture on that land without Adani’s “permission”.

The W&J Council says this move continues the attack on its people for opposing the destruction that Adani’s mine would cause to their ancestral lands and waters, and denies them their fundamental rights.

Wangan & Jagalingou cultural leader and Council spokesperson, Adrian Burragubba, says: Adani continues to harass and denigrate us through the courts and the media. We are not protestors and activists; we are First Nations land owners practicing our laws and customs on our country.

We are the people from that land that Adani wants to destroy with its Carmichael Mine. We are standing up for our international law rights as Indigenous people and holding Adani to account”.
 

A W&J dance

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Ahmedabad: “A biographer of Gandhi cannot teach a course on Gandhi in Gandhi’s own city,” said renowned historian and biographer Ramachandra Guha, after it was reported that he will not be joining Ahmedabad University (AU) as a professor. The decision to rescind his offer came from AU when ABVP protested his appointment and called him anti-national.
 

 
On October 16, it was reported that Guha will join as the Shrenik Lalbhai Chair Professor of Humanities and Director of the Gandhi Winter School at the Ahmedabad University’s School of Arts and Sciences. He was to join the institute on January 1, 2019.
 
“I am absolutely delighted to be joining the faculty of Ahmedabad University. I am impressed by the University’s interdisciplinary approach, its mix of sagacious older and superb younger faculty, and its visionary leadership… I have known and loved Ahmedabad ever since my first visit there 40 years ago; to now return, to teach and work in the city where Mahatma Gandhi made his home and nurtured the freedom movement, excites me beyond measure,” Guha had then said.
 
On Thursday he tweeted he will not be joining the University as a professor due to “circumstances beyond my control.”
 

 
Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the RSS, staged protests against his appointment and demanded that the University rescind the offer. Three days after the University made the announcement, the ABVP submitted a memorandum to the registrar of the University claiming that Guha was a “communist” and if he is invited to Gujarat, it would cause a “JNU-kind anti-national sentiment,” the Indian Express report said.
 
A letter by ABVP was accessed by Scroll and it said that days after AU made Ramachandra Guha’s appointment public on October 16, ABVP threatened the institution with a “radical movement” if the historian continued with “anti-national activities” after joining.
 
The ABVP’s letter to the university’s vice chancellor was written on October 19.
 
“The letter sought the cancellation of Guha’s appointment with immediate effect “in the interest of education and the nation”. The outfit’s city secretary, Pravin Desai, described Guha as a “so-called historian” and a “directionless person”, and claimed that his books and articles “have proven to be destroying Hindu culture and disintegrating the nation”. The writings had “strengthened the activities of national disintegration, reckless behaviour in the name of personal freedom, freeing of terrorists, [and] freedom of Jammu and Kashmir” on campuses such as Jawaharlal Nehru University and Hyderabad Central University, Desai said. “To appoint someone controversial like Dr Ramchandra Guha, who has dislike or contempt for our ancient great nation, our best democratic system, best Indian culture accepted by the world…what lessons of humanity will he teach to students is a grave question,” he wrote,” the report said.
 
“We came to know of Guha’s decision only through his tweet,” Ahmedabad University registrar BM Shah told Mirror. “Our vice-chancellor Pankaj Chandra is currently travelling”, he said. University sources confirmed that Guha had already started designing a multi-disciplinary curriculum also. At least six academicians Mirror spoke to say that Guha’s assignment was following ‘pressure from Right Wing,’” reported Ahmedabad Mirror.
 
“If such persons will co-operate with anti-national activities and activities for the disintegration of India with the help of your institution, Vidyarthi Parishad will lead radical movement against your institution and you will be solely responsible for it,” Desai told the vice chancellor.
 
“We made a representation before AU Registrar B M Shah. We said that we want intellectuals in our educational institutes and not anti-nationals, who can also be termed as ‘urban Naxals’. We had quoted anti-national content from his (Guha’s) books to the Registrar. We told him, the person you are calling is a ‘Communist’. If he is invited to Gujarat, there would be a JNU-kind anti-national sentiment,” he said in the report by Indian Express.
 
The memorandum is addressed to the Vice-Chancellor and demands cancellation of Guha’s appointment. It describes his work as “critical of India’s Hindu culture”. “His such writings have encouraged divisive tendencies, alienation in the name of independence of the individual, freeing terrorists in the name of independence of the individual, and separating Jammu and Kashmir from the Indian union, in well known universities like Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Central University, Hyderabad,” the memorandum states as reported by IE.
 
On October 16, announcing Guha’s appointment, VC Chandra had said in a statement: “With the interest in liberal education gaining impetus in India, Dr Guha will bring his interpretation of history including environmental, political, contemporary and even cricket history to develop interesting and powerful programmes and research that stand at the confluence of various disciplines. Equally important, his presence will help the University build our own dialogue around (Mahatma) Gandhi.”

“Guha’s announcement that he will not be able to take up the teaching assignment in Ahmedabad comes hours after he had tweeted that with his megalomaniac ambitions, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was closer to Emperor Bokassa. Bokassa was a self-proclaimed emperor of Central Africa known for his brutality, outrageous extravaganza, human rights violation and megalomania. Emperor Bokassa, who died in 1996, had special economic relationship with France which was alleged to have struck friendship with the poor Central African regime’s dictatorial emperor for its diamonds and uranium,” Mirror reported.
 

 
Ahmedabad University offers undergraduate, graduate and doctoral programmes in areas including engineering, business management, science and the humanities. The university was set up in 2009 by the 83-year-old Ahmedabad Education Society.

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Gandhi during the Salt March, March 1930. Credit: Yann via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 Public Domain.

Once again I’m thinking back to the 16th of February 2003. By that time, my own experiments with nonviolence had formed my lukewarm (at best) opinion of the marches and rallies currently in fashion. But February 16th was not a day to let skepticism reign. The Iraq War was imminent and people were taking to the streets. I knew I ought be among them. And, while I cannot claim that I stepped out on that winter morning with every bit of my hard-earned skepticism left at the door, I did step out. With an earnest and open heart, I stepped out.

Downtown, I met up with a small group from my Quaker meeting. We wove among many thousands of our fellow San Franciscans, adding our voices to a resounding “no,” collectively and clearly pronounced in the face of the looming re-invasion of Iraq. It was an exhilarating day. It was a day of passion and purpose. Perhaps most dazzling and heartening was the knowledge that our voices were lifted in concert with millions of others the world over.

Remember that? We were experiencing a taste of the immense potential of people and of the great underlying solidarity that bound us together. It was a marvelous day. And, it was one of the loneliest days of my life. The profound loneliness I experienced wasn’t simply a case of my skeptic shadow getting the best of me. On the contrary, it was the relaxed grip of my skepticism that opened me to the truth I encountered that day. In the painful isolation I had that singular experience of clearly seeing something for the first time that at some level I had known all along.

Amidst the day’s exhilaration it was plain to me that something essential was missing—that there was, in fact, a gaping void at the very heart of it all. Deep down, I knew that this marvelous day was a day of certain failure. I knew that our massive mobilization to stop the war would inevitably and necessarily fade, and it would do so quickly. During the march, my eyes were invariably drawn by particular phrases scrawled on several of the signs and banners. And I couldn’t help but think of the person behind those catchy one-liners: Gandhi.

Like every great prophet Gandhi is customarily placed on a pedestal. We revere him as a patron saint of nonviolence, a mahatma—the Sanskrit term of veneration meaning great soul—a larger-than-life figure we can never hope to fully emulate. We hold him at this comfortable distance, deeply impressed and inspired, while remaining free and clear from what he actually taught. Gandhi himself bristled at the thought of being called mahatma, doubting his worthiness of the accolade, and knowing well that such veneration would necessarily distract people from what he was actually doing. Gandhi urged his fellow Indians not to exalt him but to look at the nuts and bolts of nonviolent transformation.

Over the last decade, I’ve seen my primary work as that of taking Gandhi down off the pedestal. I’ve studied him closely, including his teachings about Satyagraha, a term coined by him and variously translated as “truth force,” “soul force” or “clinging to truth,” generally used in reference to nonviolent resistance or a specific nonviolent campaign. I am committed to listen to Gandhi as a trusted guide with concrete instructions relating to my here-and-now, day-to-day life. Following February 16, 2003, this quest became particularly focused. I felt compelled to understand both the gaping hole I experienced that day and the nature of its possible remedy. I hoped Gandhi’s life and work would offer guidance. And in due time, I found this guidance in the space of a single paragraph penned by Gandhi at a critical point in his life.

On February 27, 1930, two short weeks prior to launching the Salt Satyagraha, a pivotal episode in India’s struggle for independence from the British Empire, Mohandas Gandhi wrote a short article for a national publication. The article was called “When I am Arrested.” While the Salt Satyagraha has been the subject of immense interest to scholars and activists, this article appears to have gone mostly unnoticed. This is understandable, given the drama of the “great march to the sea” and the massive civil disobedience that followed it.

The British, in order to maintain their monopoly on the salt industry, had prohibited any unsanctioned production or sale of salt. Gandhi defied British imperialism by leading a 385-kilometre trek to the Dandi seashore and lifting a now-iconic fistful of salt above his head in contravention of the salt laws. It stands as one of the most potent touchstones in the history of nonviolent resistance. 
It’s hard not to get lost in the drama, power and personality of the Salt Satyagraha, but if we look closely at “When I am Arrested,” we catch a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the inner workings and design of India’s independence movement. Gandhi published the article to put the masses of India on alert and to give them a final set of instructions. It also offered an impassioned battle cry, culminating with Gandhi’s declaration that this time not a single nonviolent devotee of Indian independence “should find himself free or alive at the end of the effort.”

Within this call to action I found the paragraph I believe we activists most need to hear. The paragraph refers to the ashram that was Gandhi’s home, a place where religious devotees lived, raised their food and worshipped together. It was also the starting point of the march to the sea.
 

“So far as I am concerned, my intention is to start the movement only through the inmates of the Ashram and those who have submitted to its discipline and assimilated the spirit of its methods. Those, therefore, who will offer battle at the very commencement will be unknown to fame. Hitherto the Ashram has been deliberately kept in reserve in order that by a fairly long course of discipline it might acquire stability. I feel, that if the Satyagraha Ashram is to deserve the great confidence that has been reposed in it and the affection lavished upon it by friends, the time has arrived for it to demonstrate the qualities implied in the word satyagraha. I feel that our self-imposed restraints have become subtle indulgences, and the prestige acquired has provided us with privileges and conveniences of which we may be utterly unworthy. These have been thankfully accepted in the hope that some day we would be able to give a good account of ourselves in terms of satyagraha. And if at the end of nearly 15 years of its existence, the Ashram cannot give such a demonstration, it and I should disappear, and it would be well for the nation, the Ashram and me.”

What struck me that day in San Francisco, on the eve of war, was that we peace-minded folk were entirely unprepared for the battle at hand. Our so-called “movement” lacked the depth necessary to sustain it. It came as no surprise, then, to see that after the bombs started dropping, we returned, with few exceptions, to our lives—to business, “progressive” though it may have been, as usual. Though committed nonviolent practitioners dappled the crowd that day, the marching thousands were not grounded by the presence of a core group such as that which gave such depth to India’s independence movement or the civil rights movement, which drew heavily on Gandhi’s teaching and example. Try as we might to organize faithful and effective nonviolent resistance, if we proceed as though the battle doesn’t require that kind of depth, discipline and training, our efforts will necessarily continue to come up short. And where does such depth come from?

In Gandhi’s article, “When I Am Arrested,” he offers us a valuable clue: 78 people prepared for 15 years. In community life, they underwent the training of spiritual discipline and constructive work of social uplift. Though they were the core of the Salt Satyagraha, those 78 did not carry it out on their own. The great power of that movement was many-layered, involving literally millions of individuals responding to the direction of a superlative leader. But the role of that core of 78 was essential to the Salt Satyagraha’s success and the ultimate success of India’s struggle for independence.

If we want to truly benefit from Gandhi’s guidance here, we need to enter into a deep and soulful investigation of this ashram experience, and discover what Gandhi meant when he said that the Salt Satyagraha would only be started by those who had “submitted to its discipline and assimilated the spirit of its methods.” Gandhi calls for true transformation, a trading in of old lives for new. What is remarkable about Gandhi the teacher is not that he introduced novel concepts—he said himself that nonviolence is as “old as the hills”—but that he so deftly systematized the transformative work of building a nonviolent life, and that he did it in a way that can be effectively translated for our time and place.

Gandhi’s approach to nonviolence, which was the foundation of his ashram communities, points us to interrelated, mutually supportive spheres of experimentation. Nonviolence scholar Gene Sharp notes three such spheres in Gandhi’s writings: personal transformation, constructive program (work of social uplift and renewal), and political action, prioritized in that order. At the heart of Gandhi’s approach to social change is his understanding that the building blocks of a nonviolent society are the vibrant, productive, nonviolent lives of individual women and men.

Effective nonviolent political action does not spring from a vacuum; it grows out of daily living grounded in personal and communal spiritual practice, and in constructive service to one’s immediate and surrounding communities. Nonviolence on the political stage is only as powerful as the personal and community-based nonviolence of those who engage in it. The importance of the ashram experience flows from this understanding.

This fundamental aspect of the Gandhian design almost entirely eludes us in our North American context. Here, we most often employ the reverse order of Gandhi’s threefold approach, seeking a political response first, the building up of a constructive alternative second and the stuff of all-out personal reformation third, if at all. This reversal allows North American activists of faith to sidestep some of the most foundational aspects of Gandhi’s nonviolent recipe: namely, radical simplicity, solidarity with the poor and disciplined spiritual practice.

Because we do not believe nonviolence requires these of us, we miss the necessity of the ashram experience. No one can build a nonviolent life as an individual. I may be able to practice some measure of piecemeal nonviolence more or less on my own, but if I’m going to pluck the seeds of war from every part of my life that I possibly can, if I am going to renounce and abandon the violence of my first-world way of life, I need to be surrounded by others whose knowledge, wisdom and experience will complement mine, and whose example and company will inspire me to stay the course.

The 78 members of Satyagraha Ashram who were the cadre of “foot soldiers” Gandhi chose to be the nucleus of the Salt Satyagraha were doing all of this for one another for a period of nearly 15 years. This prepared them for the high level of self-sacrifice that Gandhi foresaw when he said, “Not a single believer in nonviolence as an article of faith for the purpose of achieving India’s goal should find himself free or alive at the end of the effort.” Until faith communities embrace this level of commitment and clarity of purpose, it is up to those of us who feel called in this direction to seek each other out.

We need to hold one another accountable to this magnificent charge. We need to manifest our shared strength and leadership. We need to move together toward the key ingredients in Gandhi’s nonviolent recipe—radical simplicity, solidarity with the poor and disciplined spiritual practice. As we walk that long, disciplined, grace-filled path we and our religious communities will be rightly stretched. And in time, I trust that we will be gradually readied for sustained nonviolent struggle.

Syndicated from www.earthlingopinion.files.wordpress.com.This article originally appeared in Geez magazine. Geez is an independent quarterly Canadian magazine dealing with issues of spirituality, social justice, religion, and progressive cultural politics. A version of this article appeared in Friends Journal, April 2006.

Chris Moore-Backman has been involved in human rights accompaniment in Colombia as well as tax resistance and car-free living. He now lives in Bisbee, Arizona and leads workshops on the teachings of Gandhi.

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/
 

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Forget RSS-run Shishu Mandirs and Muslim madrassas. Textbooks prescribed by even ‘secular’ central and state education boards in the country promote religious, caste and gender prejudice

What we learn and teach about history and how the process of this learning has been crafted or developed, shapes our understanding of the events of the past. This understanding of the past influences our ability to grapple with the present and therefore also the future. Such knowledge, if both rich and varied, can also make and break convictions of both the teacher and the taught.

In 1947, India made a historic tryst with destiny. Independent yet partitioned, after extensive and careful deliberation, we opted for a democratic structure outlined in the Indian Constitution. Whether state –
directed or autonomously ensured, education in such a democratic polity should have been committed to free enquiry, fair and equal access to knowledge, both quantitative and qualitative, inculcation of the right to debate and dissent. The only restrictions and limits to when and at what junctures what kind of information could be shared with the child should have been pedagogical.

In short, the equality principle in any democracy simply must extend to education. In quantitative terms, this means the right of every Indian child to primary and secondary education. UNICEF figures shamefully record how we have failed, having as we do 370 million illiterates (1991), half a century after we became independent. 
But qualitatively, too, the equality principle within the Indian education syllabus, especially related to history and social studies teaching, in state and central boards, is sorely wanting. 

Wedded to the equality principle, the democratisation of our history and social studies syllabus should have meant a critical revision of both the periodisation, approach and content of the material taught because, pre-Independence, history writing under the British was infested with colonial biases. This has not happened. As a result, in most of our texts and syllabi we continue to perpetuate the colonial legacy of portraying ancient India as synonymous with the Hindu and the medieval Indian past with the Muslim. We have, over the years, further accentuated the colonial biases with sharp and more recent ideological underpinnings linked with the rapid growth in the political sphere of the Hindu Right. 

Hate language and hate-politics cannot be part of history teaching in a democracy. But, unfortunately, prejudice and division, not a holistic and fair vision, has been the guiding principle for our textbook boards and the authors chosen by them.

Over the years, our history and social studies texts, more and more, emphasise a prejudicial understanding and rendering of history, that is certainly not borne out by historical facts. Crucial inclusions and exclusions that are explored through abstracts from state board texts, ICSE textbooks and college texts as well, quoted extensively in stories accompanying this essay, bear this out. 

What the RSS and other rabid organisations with a clearly political objective would have us believe about history has been succinctly summed up by the accompanying abstract of an NCERT (National Council for Educational Research and Training) report. The report enumerates instances that clearly reflect the bias of the organisation that has sponsored them.

Hate language and hate-politics cannot be  part  of the history project in a democracy

What is far more worrisome and needs careful and equally studied examination is how the textbooks in use in most of our states under the ambit of the state textbook boards, as well as the texts of prominent national boards, echo the same historical precepts, misconceptions and formulations. Sometimes in a diluted or scattered form, but more often with the same resultant damage.

The dangerous patterns woven through the syllabus in general and the history and social studies curriculum in particular, for the young mind, need to be traced carefully. They reveal how the average Indian text looks at the historical and present question of caste-based discriminations, community-driven stereotypes and, as significantly, what we teach students about the status of women, then and now.

These patterns, distorted and prejudicial as they are, will open our eyes to the process that has actually contributed to mainstream secular space being dominated by the discourse dictated by the Right. We will then begin to understand how certain manipulated discourses and imageries that have been pulled out for public consumption over the past decade–and–a–half find instant and widespread resonance in civil society.

What am I referring to? How come the crude allusions to Muslims as ‘Babar ki aulad’ in the mid–eighties and the charge of ‘forced’ conversions against Christians in the late nineties finds a silent acceptance in the marketplace of popular ideas, and even dominates the media? This is because many of post–Independent India’s textbooks have been unable to offer a clean, holistic, rational and multi–dimensional vision of the past that includes a historically honest portrayal of how different faiths arrived on the shores of this sub-continent. Our textbooks are, similarly and suspiciously, silent on the motives behind thousands of Indians converting to different faiths over generations. Instead, through allusions and exclusions, they strengthen the false claim that in a vast majority of cases these conversions happened under force. 

Are we, as citizens, concerned about whether our education system encourages the creative and thought processes, develops the quality of thinking in our young, whether our attitude to learning and teaching engenders the processes of inquiry? If yes, we need to examine whether our school textsbooks tackle the question of free inquiry, dissent and debate.  We need also to pay attention to specific inclusions and exclusions within the content of these texts.

Other crucial questions also need to be raised.  How do Indian texts specifically deal with the fundamental question of race, origin, culture and faith on the sub–continent?

It is surely impossible to speak about apartheid in the world context without linking it to the birth of South Africa under Nelson Mandela as an independent nation. or to understand slavery in the modern context without knowledge of the role of colonial powers in Africa or, equally pertinently, the whole phenomenon of the American War of Independence and Abraham Lincoln. But do Indian textbooks reflect the ability to examine social inequality, specifically the caste system, as it emerged and was legitimised historically and how it continues to exist today, perpetrating an exploitative and unjust social order? 

Can a young student of social studies really seek to understand the caste system without, first of all, being informed of modern–day social and economic apartheid that 16–17 per cent of the Indian population continues to be forced to live under today? There is hardly any Indian text that honestly and candidly sketches out the indignities that continue to be perpetuated on Indian Dalits today.

The life–sketch of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar is restricted to his contribution as the ‘architect’ of the Indian constitution. The serious challenges he posed to the pre–Independence struggle and the Brahmanical order, or his radical conversion to Buddhism as a method of ‘social and political emancipation’ (10 lakh Dalits converted to Buddhism on October 14, 1948) find scant or no mention at all in ‘secular’ Indian textbooks. 

This blinkered vision of Indian social disparity extends to the fashion in which Dr. Ambedkar is portrayed for the young and the struggles that he led are depicted. On December 25, 1925, Ambedkar burnt copies of the Manu Smruti at Mahad village in Maharashtra. This was a strong political statement against the domination suffered by Dalits, epitomised in this Brahmanical text that has laid down the code of a social order which regards ‘shudras’ and ‘women’ together as deserving of no rights. The incident finds no mention at all in any Indian school textbook, revealing a sharp upper caste bias that has excluded real inquiry into these events and movements. There is no attempt at a critical look at texts like the Manu Smruti that have, since their being written several centuries ago, reflected the attitudes of vested interests. In fact this Brahmanical text itself receives favourable mention in Indian school textbooks.

As extension of the same argument, some of our average Indian textbooks continue to label Christians, Muslims and Parsees as ‘foreigners,’ and moreover depict Hindus as “the minority in most states of the country”. They selectively speak about the “immoral behaviour of Catholic priests in the middle ages” while exonerating the Brahmins and the Indian ruling classes. What is the message that we send out to the growing child with these factual misrepresentations and deliberate exclusions of some historical events and modern day social realities when it comes to the conduct of the Brahmanical elite? 

Our textbooks are, similarly and suspiciously, silent on the motives behind thousands of Indians converting to different faiths over generations. Instead, through allusions and exclusions, they strengthen the false claim that in a vast majority of cases these conversions happened under force

The same college textbook in Maharashtra that speaks at length, and with a fair degree of venom, about Islam and its violent nature is silent on what many ancient Indian kings did to Buddhist ‘monasteries’ and bhikus during the ancient period. (King Sashanka of Assam is reputed to have destroyed several monasteries). What then are the conclusions that a critic needs to draw about the motivation behind these selective inclusions and exclusions?
Exclusion is a subtle but potent form of prejudice. If, therefore, the average Indian textbook is silent on the motivations of many a ‘Hindu’ king who employed officials to raid and destroy temples in the ancient and medieval periods, simply because he could be certain to find wealth there (King Harshadev of Kashmir is one such, referred to by Kalhana in his Rajatarini), is there a not–so–subtle attempt to allow the popularly cherished belief that temple breaking was the ‘Muslim’ rulers favoured prerogative, to fester and grow? 

Rabid observations on Islam and Christianity are overtly visible in excerpts of the books conceived by the RSS and used for ‘teaching’ in the Shishu Mandirs. For discerning observers and educationists, this commitment to indoctrination that pre-supposes injecting small yet potent doses of poison against an ‘enemy other’ is not really surprising when we understand the true nature of the ideological project of these outfits. 

The content of RSS texts has invited sharp criticism by the NCERT committee (see accompanying document). To find blatantly damaging statements within the texts of schools run by the RSS is one thing. But to have ‘secular’ Indian textbooks — ranging from those produced by some state textbook boards, to recommended texts for the study of history at the graduation level, as also some ICSE texts — containing discernible strains of the same kind of caste, community and gender prejudice reflects how mainstream Indian thought has not only swallowed a biased and uncritical interpretation of history but is cheerfully allowing this myopic vision to be passed down to future generations.

Take, for instance, a textbook recommended for the final year Bachelor of Arts students in history in Maharashtra. The chapter titled ‘Invasion of Mahmud of Ghaznavi’ is cleverly used by the author to launch a tirade against Islam itself. The content of this textbook could compare favourably, chapter and verse, with sections of Shishu Mandir texts that, are in other parts, far more direct, having nothing positive to say about Islam or Christianity. 

As critically, how do our history and social studies’ textbooks approach the complex question of gender? What is the underpinning of analysis on critical gender issues within these books? How do our textbooks explain notions of ‘pativrata’(worship of the husband), sati (widow burning), child marriage, burning of women at the stake (called ‘witch hunting’ during the medieval ages), polygamy, polyandry etc. to the child?

There could be no more derogatory references to women than those contained in the Manu Smruti, an ancient Indian Brahmanical text. But it receives uncritical and passing mention in most Indian textbooks.

There is no attempt to outline the oppressive ‘Brahmanical Hindu’ code contained within the Manu Smruti. The code outlined in this text has significantly influenced how women have and continue to be treated within the family structure and in society, as also the base fashion in which treatment to ‘shudras’ has manifest itself in Indian society. 

What were the variegated facts, and, therefore, what is the multi-layered truth behind the emergence of different faiths on the sub-continent? The historical account is not an over-simplified one of Babar ki aulad, armed with swords, forcing reluctant victims to convert and smashing down their temples in the bargain. Unfortunately for proponents of a hate-driven history, facts tell a different story. 

The tale of the often-ruthless methods that Portuguese Christians took to effect conversions in Goa may be more recent but it is by no means the whole story of how Christianity arrived on the shores of the sub-continent and found deep and abiding routes. That is an inquiry that is more complex, more varied and far richer in detail. 

In a Maharashtra college level text, he chapter on Mahmud of Ghaznavi is used as ripe occasion to launch  a tirade against Islam itself

The record of persons opting to convert to different faiths, be it Buddhism, Jainism, Christianity Islam or Sikhism, is a worthy exploration in itself. Honestly told, it could offer vital insights on the impulses of ideas and motives as they have driven humankind over the ages. It is, however, a subject that has been significantly ignored except through banal references to ‘syncretism’ and ‘synthesis’ that are left thematically and conceptually unexplored. 

The subject of shifts and changes to different faiths is educative, simply because if fairly approached, the process will throw up different sets of reasons and varying motivations for these actions, these changes of faith that persons opted for. The differences and variety would depend upon the period when the change took place, the region within India that we would be looking at and, finally, the method employed for the conversion itself.

None of the mainline Indian textbooks really do justice to this subject. We often find a single sentence reference to the fact that Islam first came to the shores of the Malabar coast through the regular visits of Arab traders who enjoyed a long-standing relationship of trade and commerce with India. But the next sentence immediately shifts gear to the other way that Islam came to the Indian sub-continent — through the ‘invasions’ in Sind. From thereon our children are told in graphic detail of the numerous ‘invasions’ but nothing of the coming of Islam through trade and the formations of living communities that resulted. 

Many conversions to Islam or Christianity in the modern period of history have also coincided with the passage of emancipatory laws liberating bonded labour. This allowed oppressed sections the freedom to exercise choice in the matter of faith. These sections, then, exercised this choice, rightly or wrongly, perceiving either Islam or Christianity to be more egalitarian than Hinduism’s oppressive system of caste.

There were several instances of conversions during the second half of the 19th century in Travancore, for instance. Educational endeavours of missionaries and the resultant aspirations to equality of status encouraged many persons of ‘low’ caste to change faith and through this to a perceived position of equality. For example, the first ‘low’ caste person to walk the public road near the temple in Tiruvalla in 1851 was a Christian. Around 1859, many thousands converted to Christianity in the midst of emancipatory struggles that were supported by missionaries in the region: for example, the struggle of Nadars on the right of their women to cover the upper part of their body, a practice opposed by the upper castes!

There are so many fascinating examples. Large-scale conversions to Islam took place on the Malabar coast not during the invasions by Tipu Sultan but during the 1843-1890 period. These were directly linked to the fact that in 1843, under the British, slavery was formally abolished in the region. As a result, large numbers from the formerly oppressed castes, bonded in slavery to upper caste Hindus moved over to Islam, which they perceived, rightly or wrongly to preach a message of equality and justice.

Trade and commerce finds dry and peripheral treatment in our texts as do the impact of technological developments through history. Religious interpretations and explanations often pre-dominate, with little attempt to explain how ideas and thought-processes travelled across continents and borders; the means and modes of communication etc. are hardly explored. 

Our secular texts are completely silent on the ideology that killed the Mahatma despite the fact that the RSS was banned by the government of India following his assassination

Within the Indian sub-continent, this century saw the emergence of different streams of thought that contributed significantly to the struggle for independence against the British. It also saw the emergence on the sub-continent of processes, fully encouraged by the British, of exclusivist and sectarian trends within the broader national movement that chose to articulate their worldview in terms of narrow religious identities.

Within a few years of each other, we saw the birth of organisations like the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League, as also the Akali Dal and the Rashtriya Sayamsevak Sangh. This process of the emergence of different communalisms that contributed in no small measure to the final vivisection of the sub-continent, with all its attendant stories of vengeance and horror is extremely selectively dealt with in Indian textbooks.

Put simply, all these texts speak at length about the birth and misdemeanours of the Muslim League, the Muslim communal outfit that contributed significantly to the politics of the period. No mention is at all made to the birth around the same time of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, both Hindu communal outfits that contributed in no small measure to the sharp polarisations and schisms at the time. 

Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination is fleetingly mentioned without the ideology that drove Godse to kill him being mentioned, leave alone explored. The fact that the RSS had to face a ban on the question, too, is blotted out to the young student of modern Indian history.

With these kinds of interpretations and inclusions of historical facts in our regular texts, coupled with the repetitious discourse within civil society that has, in recent times, taken a vicious form—and which selectively heaps the blame for partition squarely on the Muslim— is it any wonder that communities and citizens of the country continue to carry the burden of being dubbed ‘traitors’ and ‘anti-national?’

The young student of history in India, therefore, can without compunction put the entire blame of the partition of the sub-continent on the Muslim League and Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s shoulders. The bias does not end here. While the Muslim League receives detailed treatment in the average Indian text, it does not give a single line to Hindu communal outfits. 

In furtherance of the same theme, there is no attempt to either explain or detail that the Muslim League enjoyed a limited hold over only sections of the Muslim elite and landed gentry; that many hundreds of thousands of Muslims participated actively in the struggle for Independence against the British; that the idea of Partition was backed by a miniscule section of Indian Muslims; that the artisan class which constitutes a large section of Muslims demonstrated actively against Partition.

In short, if you read an average Indian text, be it from the state or central boards, the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS bear no part of the historical blame for Partition. The crime is worse compounded by the fact that Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination is glossed over, often receiving no more than one sentence in explanation. 
The ICSE History and Civics textbook, Part II for Std. X, devotes a whole chapter to the ‘Formation of the Muslim League’. But there is no mention at all of Hindu communal organisations. 

And to top it all, here is what the same ICSE text has to say about Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination: “Mahatma Gandhi toured the hate-torn land of Bengal, trying to put a stop to the communal frenzy and salvage the people from ruthless communal slaughter. While celebrations and riots were still going on the architect of the nation was shot dead on 30th January by Nathuram Godse”. There is no further comment on the assassination, or the ideology that drove the assassin. Neither is there any mention of the fact that the government of India banned the RSS following Gandhi’s murder because of Godse’s close association both with the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha. There is no information on the trial of the assassins of Gandhi, the justification by Godse of his act and so on.

Similarly, the Social Studies text for standard VIII of the Gujarat State Board, has a tiny sub-section titled, “The Murder of Gandhi”. This reads thus: “After Independence there were severe communal riots in India. Gandhiji tried his utmost to suppress it. Many people did not like this. Gandhiji was murdered at the hands of Godsay on 30th January 1948. ”

Again, no words of explanation of the ideology that was responsible for the murder of Gandhi though painstaking efforts are made in this and other texts to explain the ideology that partitioned the sub-continent. 

It appears logical and inevitable for the stated political project of the RSS and its Shishu Mandir-style education to offer such an immutable approach, a series of unquestionable absolutes, to the young mind. How else can the RSS organisation, whether it be at the shakha or the Shishu Mandir level, create a social and political atmosphere where selectively half-truths and blatant falsehoods dominate all discourse? How else does one create an environment where critical questions are never asked, leave alone answered? And, worst of all, prevailing social inequalities, indignities and humiliations are left unaddressed. In short, leave the social and economic hierarchy unchallenged?

But the fact that independent and democratic India’s ‘secular’ texts reflect, with sometimes uncanny similarity, the very same disregard for a growing and inquiring mind, apart from being laced with a series of questionable formulations that hide gender, caste and community–driven bias is what requires urgent and specific attention. And remedy.   

(This article has relied heavily on the research work that the writer has 
undertaken as the Co–ordinator of KHOJ, a secular education project)

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 1999, Anniversary Issue (6th) Year 7  No. 52, Cover Story 1

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January 30^th 1948 will remain etched forever in the conscience of the nation. On that fateful day at evening prayer, Mahatma Gandhi fell to the bullets of his assassin Nathuram Godse, in Delhi. Godse represented the fascist, fanatic, fundamentalist and ‘feku’ forces, which abhorred the values which Gandhi espoused all his life and particularly the idea of an inclusive, pluralistic and secular India. These forces unfortunately are still very alive in India and in several parts of the world today!
 
There are certainly those who disagreed with Gandhi during his lifetime and there are many who disagree with his philosophy and his methodology even today. Nevertheless, few will be able to contest the fact that Gandhi was a man of principles who lived and died for a cause. His life was frugal and exemplary and unlike several politicians today, he did not care leave alone crave, for the privileges and the trappings of power.
 
In his lifetime, he internalized and propagated two cherished values: truth (Satyagraha) and non-violence (Ahimsa). This twin doctrine is today more than ever needed, as sizeable sections of India and other parts of the world fall easy prey to falsehood and hate; to divisiveness and violence.
 
Gandhi believed in the spirituality of inclusiveness. For him, the Hindu Scriptures ‘the Bhagvad Gita’ and Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” (particularly the section on the ‘Beatitudes’) had to be read and meditated upon simultaneously since he was convinced that they resonated with one another. He refers to this in his autobiography, My Experiment with Truth.

There was plenty of violence and bloodshed in the run –up to India’s independence. Gandhi truly desired an undivided India, in which Hindus and Muslims would live in peace and harmony.

The world today is in a turmoil as never before. In ways both subtle and direct; through discriminatory policies and executive orders; through manipulations and coercions, we witness the gradual break-up of our world, even as hasty and unwanted walls are built to keep people out.

In October 1946, he spent weeks in Naokhali (today in Bangla Desh) literally bringing to a halt, in a non-violent way, massacres and mayhem between the two communities.

On August 15 1947, as India celebrated her independence, there were no celebrations for Gandhi; he was back in Calcutta with his protégé Abdul Ghaffar Khan. He encouraged people to be non-violent and peaceful; he himself prayed, fasted and spun yarn. Those actions of his had a profound impact on the people- peace was restored.

When C Rajagopalachari, the first Governor- General of Independent India, visited and congratulated Gandhi for restoring peace in the city, Gandhi said he would not be satisfied "until Hindus and Muslims felt safe in one another's company and returned to their own homes to life as before." He sincerely cared for those who were forcibly displaced.

On the day Gandhi was assassinated, Pandit Nehru, India’s Prime Minister in an emotional address to the nation said, “the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere!” He was just stating a fact.

Darkness continues to envelop a good part of the world today; the very forces that murdered Gandhi continue to murder all that he epitomized. True there are some hypocritical gestures like usurping the place of Gandhi at the spinning wheel, for a picture on an official calendar. Gandhi never subscribed to showmanship nor was he arrogant. He fought against sectarianism and racism and would have left no stone unturned today to take sides with the refugees and other forcibly displaced people of the world.

Indian Catholics will observe a “Day of Peace” on January 30^th. Significantly, in a message for the Fiftieth World Day of Peace (celebrated officially on January 1^st 2017) entitled, ‘Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace’, Pope Francis emphatically states that, “violence is not the cure for our broken world.” 

He calls for a new style of politics built on peace and non-violence, and at the same time for disarmament and the eradication of nuclear weapons. Both Mahatma Gandhi and Abdul Ghaffar Khan are referred to in this message as icons of non-violence and peace. We certainly have much to learn from them.

The world today is in a turmoil as never before. In ways both subtle and direct; through discriminatory policies and executive orders; through manipulations and coercions, we witness the gradual break-up of our world, even as hasty and unwanted walls are built to keep people out.

We need to do all we can to prevent the triumph of these forces who are inimical to the cherished ideals and values of Gandhi, the Apostle of Nonviolence. We must cry halt to their murderous march now!

(Fr Cedric Prakash sj is a human rights activist. He is currently based in Lebanon, engaged with the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) in the Middle East on advocacy and   communications… Contact: cedricprakash@gmail.com)             
 
 

The post Gandhi’s Murderers are Alive and Killing, even Today appeared first on SabrangIndia.

गांधी जी की ख्‍वाहिश थी कि हर घर से चरखा का संगीत सुनाई दे. गांधी जी का यही चरखा पिछले दिनों खूब सुर्खियों में रहा. गांधी जी की रूहानी ताकत चरखे में थी. इसीलिए जब वे चरखा की बात करते हैं तो वह सिर्फ सूतकताई या खादी तक नहीं सिमटा है.

गांधी जी के लिए चरखा गरीबों की ओर समाज का ध्‍यान करने का जरिया है. छोटे और घरेलू उद्योगों की वापसी का रास्‍ता है. आर्थिक तकलीफ दूर करने का कुदरती तरीका है. शोषण से मुक्ति का रास्‍ता है. इंसानियत की सेवा है. उत्‍पादन और वितरण का विकेन्‍द्रीकरण करने का विचार है. आर्थिक रूप से मजबूत होने का साधन है. गांवों को बचाने और आत्‍मनिर्भर बनाने का जरिया है.

ले़किन सबसे दिलचस्‍प और अहम बात है कि गांधी जी के लिए चरखा अपनाना अहिंसाहिन्‍दू-मुस्लिम एकता छुआछूत खात्‍मा स्‍त्री सम्‍मान के लिए जरूरी शर्त है. 1921 में मद्रास की एक सभा में वे कहते हैंचरखा इस बात की सबसे खरी कसौटी है कि हमने अहिंसा की भावना को कहां तक आत्‍मसात किया है. चरखा एक ऐसी चीज है जो हिन्‍दू और मुसलमानों को ही नहींबल्कि भारत में रहने वाले अन्‍य धर्माव‍लम्बियों को भी एक सूत्र में बांध देगा. चरखा भारतीय नारी के सतीत्‍व का प्रतीक है… हमने अछूत मानकर अभी तक जिनका तिरस्‍कार करने का पाप किया है चरखा उनके लिए सांत्‍वना का स्रोत है.

गांधी जी पहले बड़े ऐसा नेता हैं जिन्‍होंने स्‍वराज की राह में अंदरूनी रुकावट को सबसे बेहतर तरीके से समझा था. इसलिए उनका मानना था कि स्‍वराज के लिए भारत के दो बड़े धार्मिक समुदायों के बीच नफरत की दीवार गिरनी चाहिए. छूआछूत खत्‍म होना चाहिए. इस काम के लिए चरखा और खादी की ताकत पर उनका भरोसा जबरदस्‍त था. वे कहते थे तुम मेरे हाथ में खादी दो और मैं तुम्‍हारे हाथ में स्‍वराज्‍य रख दूंगा. अंत्‍यज्‍यों की तरक्‍की भी खादी के तहत आता है और हिन्‍दू-मुस्लिम एकता भी खादी के बल पर टिकी रहेगी. यह अमन की हिफाजत का भी जबरदस्‍त जरिया है.

गांधी जी हिन्‍दू-मुसलमानों की एका की पुरजोर वकालत करने वाले ऐसे नेता थे जो इस राह से पसंगा भर डिगने को तैयार नहीं थे. यह बात उनकी सियासी जिंदगी से आखिरी वक्‍त तक अटूट थी. यही उनकी हत्‍या की वजह भी बनी. सन 1922 में हकीम अजमल खां को लिखी उनकी चिट्ठी गौर करने लायक है… बिना हिन्‍दू- मुस्लिम एकता के हम अपनी आजादी प्राप्‍त नहीं कर सकते. … हिन्‍दू-मुस्लिम एकता को हमें ऐसी नीति के रूप में ग्रहण कर लेना चाहिए जो किसी भी काल अथवा परिस्थिति में त्‍यागी न जा सके. साथ ही ऐसा भी नहीं होना चाहिए यह एकता पारसी यहूदी अथवा बलशाली सिख जैसी दूसरी अल्‍पसंख्‍यक जातियों के लिए त्रासदायक बन जाए. यदि हम इनमें से किसी एक को भी कुचलने का विचार करेंगे तो किसी दिन हम आपस में ही लड़ मरना चाहेंगे. … मेरी राय में तो हम लोग जब तक अहिंसा को ठोस नीति के रूप में नहीं स्‍वीकारेंगे तब तक हिन्‍दू-मुस्लिम एकता स्‍थापित होना मुमकिन नहीं है.

और ये धार्मिक समुदाय एक कैसे होंगे इसका सूत्र उन्‍होंने चरखा में तलाशा. वे इसी खत में आगे लिखते हैं:

… मेरी नजर में तो सारे हिन्‍दुस्‍तान की ऐसी एकता का जीता जागता नमूना और इसीलिए हमारे राजनीतिक मकसद को पाने के लिए अहिंसा को अनिवार्य जरिया मानने की भी जीती निशानी बिना शक अगर कुछ है तो वह चरखा यानी खादी ही है. केवल वही लोग जो अहिंसावृत्ति के विकास और हिन्‍दू-मुसलमानों में चिरस्‍थायी एकता कायम करने के कायल होंगे नियम और निष्‍ठा के साथ चरखा कातेंगे.

गांधी जी ने खिलाफत आंदोलन के दौरान हिन्‍दू-मुसलमानों को एक मंच पर लाने की कोशिश चरखा के जरिए ही की. वे चरखा और खादी अपनाने पर न सिर्फ जोर देते हैं बल्कि इसे एकता के लिए जरूरी मानते हुए मजहबी फर्ज तक कह डालते हैं. हकीम अजमल खां के तुरंत बाद वे मौलाना अब्‍दुल बारी को एक खत लिखते हैं. वे उनसे कहते हैं… खुद मैं बहुत गहराई से सोचने पर इस नतीजे पर पहुंचा हूं कि ऐसी एक ही चीज है जिसे हिन्‍दू-मुस्लिम एकता का साफ और असरदार निशानी माना जा सकता है और वह है इन दोनों समुदायों के आम लोगों में चरखे का और हाथ के कते सूत से हाथ करघे पर बुनी शुद्ध खादी को अपनाना. … जब तक स्‍वराज्‍य हासिल नहीं हो जाता है तब तक हर एक मर्द औरत और बच्‍चे को अपना मजहबी फर्ज समझकर रोज चरखा चलाना चाहिए.

बतौर कांग्रेस अध्‍यक्ष गांधी जी 1924 में मोहम्‍मद अली को एक खत लिखते हैं. इस खत में भी एकता की बात वे दोहराते हैं और दो टूक लफ्जों में कहते हैं… यह बिल्‍कुल साफ है कि हिन्‍दू मुसलमान पारसी ईसाई तथा दूसरी जातियों की एकता के बिना स्‍वराज्‍य की बात करना ही व्‍यर्थ है…. यदि हमें आजादी हासिल करनी है तो विभिन्‍न समुदायों को मित्रता के अटूट बंधन में बांधना ही होगा… अगर हम देश में बढ़ती मुफलिसी की हालत के बारे में सोच सकते हैं तो सोचें और यह समझें कि चरखा ही इस रोग की अकेली दवा है तो वही एक काम हमें (आपस में) लड़ने के लिए फुरसत नहीं मिलने देगा.

गांधी जी के लिए चरखा आपस में लड़ने से बचने का रास्‍ता है. तो दूसरी ओर यह गांव और गरीब से जुड़ने का जरिया भी है. पटना में खिलाफत सम्‍मेलन में गांधी जी लोगों को खद्दर अपानाने को कहते हैं क्‍योंकि … हिन्‍दू- मुसलमान दोनों के लिए गांव के गरीबों द्वारा काते गए सूत से बने खद्दर को छोड़कर अन्‍य वस्‍त्र धारण करना पाप है. …भारत के गांवों में ऐसे लाखों हिन्‍दू और मुसलमान हैं जिन्‍हें दोनों वक्‍त खाना भी नसीब नहीं होता है. … गांव में भूखे मरने वालों की खातिर खादी और चरखे को अपनाएं… खद्दर को अपनाने से दो उद्देश्‍य सिद्ध होंगे. एक तो आपको अपने लिए कपड़ा मिल जाएगा दूसरे आप गांवों के लाखों भूखे गरीबों की सहायता कर सकेंगे. खुदा के वास्‍ते और गांवों के लाखों गरीबों के वास्‍ते आप सब आज ही बल्कि इसी क्षण से चरखा और कताई को अपना लें.

ऐसा नहीं है कि गांधी जी महज रणनीति के तहत हिन्‍दू-मुसलमान एकता के नाम पर चरखा अपनाने की बात कह रहे हैं. गांधी जी के लिए यह यकीन का सवाल था. उन्‍हें यकीन था कि चरखा ही सभी लोगों को एक साथ जोड़ेगी. एकता की ऐसी शिद्दत भारत के किसी दूसरे नेता में नहीं दिखाई देती है. बकौल गांधी जी… जब तक हम सूत कातने की इस साधना को नहीं अपनाएंगे तब तक प्रेम की गांठ नहीं बंधेंगी। यदि समस्‍त जगत को आप प्रेम की गांठ से बांध लेना चाहते हैं तो दूसरा उपाय ही नहीं है. हिन्‍दू मुसलमान प्रश्‍न के लिए भी दूसरा कोई उपाय नहीं है…

… मेरी इस प्रार्थना को समझकर रोज आधा घंटा चरखा अवश्‍य चलाएं. उससे आपकी कोई हानि नहीं है और उससे देश की दरिद्रता दूर होगी. यदि आप अस्‍पृश्‍यता दूर न कर सकें तो धर्म का नाश हो जाएगा… आज तो वैष्‍ण्‍व धर्म के नाम पर अंत्‍यजों का नाश हो रहा है… असपृश्‍यता निवारण हिन्‍दू-मुस्लिम एक्‍य और खादी यह मेरी त्रिवेणी है.

उत्‍पादन के किसी औजार का ऐसा समाजवादी तसव्‍वुर किसी नेता नहीं किया जैसा गांधी जी ने चरखा का किया है. गांधी जी चरखे के जरिए हर तरह के विभेद को खत्‍म करने की बात करते हैं. उनके लिए चरखा कई तरह की गैर बराबरियों परेशानियों का एकमात्र इलाज है. चरखा वह मंच है जिसका चक्र घुमाते ही सब एक जैसे हो जाते हैं. इसलिए वे एक जगह लिखते हैं… काम ऐसा होना चाहिए जिसे अपढ़ और पढ़े-लिखे, भले और बुरे बालक, और बूढ़े, स्‍त्री और पुरुष, लड़के और लड़कियां , कमजोर और ताकतवर – फिर वे किसी जाति और धर्म के हों- कर सके. चरखा ही एक ऐसी वस्‍तु है जिसमें ये सब गुण हैं. इसलिए जो कोई स्‍त्री या पुरुष रोज आध घंटा चरखा कातता है वह जन समाज की भरसक अच्‍छी से अच्‍छी सेवा करता है…

शायद इसी लिए गांधी जी के लिए जो‍ सिद्धांत जिंदगी में न उतारा जा सके वह बेकार है. वे जो कहते हैं उसे अपना कर दिखाते हैं. इसलिए वह सत्‍याग्रहियों से भी यही चाहते हैं कि चरखा और अहिंसा को जीवन में अपनाएं. यंग इंडिया में छपी एक टिप्‍पणी में वे कहते हैं… मैंने जीवन में सदा यही माना है कि सच्‍चा विकास तो भीतर से ही होता है. यदि भीतर से ही प्रतिक्रिया न हो तो बाहरी साधनों का प्रयोग बिल्‍कुल निरर्थक है.

… अच्‍छा तो अब ऐसे विकास के लिए न्‍यूनतम कार्यक्रम क्‍या हो सकता है मैं बराबर कहता आया हूं कि वह है चरखा और खादी तमाम धर्मों की एकता और हिन्‍दुओं द्वारा छुआछूत का परित्‍याग. … मैं तो राष्‍ट्र के तमाम कार्यकर्ताओं को सलाह दूंगा कि ये चरखा कातने एकता बढ़ाने और जो हिन्‍दू हों वे छुआछूत दूर करने में ही अपनी सारी ताकत लगा दें.

गांधी जी को कुछ चीजें लगातार परेशान करती रहीं. इसलिए वे बार-बार उन चीजों पर बात करना नहीं भूलते थे. वे हर मौके पर वे चीजें दोहराते थे. जैसे, 1924 में वे कहते हैं… थोड़ा ख्‍याल करके ही हम देख सकते हैं कि हमारे अमली कार्य में बाधा डालने वाली सबसे बड़ी वस्‍तु है हिन्‍दू-मुसलमान के बीच में अंतर पड़ जाना. सर्व साधारण को एकत्र करने में बाधा डालने वाली वस्‍तु चरखा और खद्दर के प्रति हमारी उदासीनता और हिन्‍दू जाति को नष्‍ट करने वाली वस्‍तु असपृश्‍यता है. इस त्रिदोष को जब तक हम नहीं मिटाते तब तक मेरी अल्‍पमति मुझको यही कहती है कि हमारे भाग्‍य में अराजकता हमारी परतंत्रता और हमारी कंगाली बदी हुई है….

देश बंट चुका है. आजादी मिल चुकी है. गांधी जी अंदर से काफी टूटे हैं. मगर जिस चीज का यकीन उन्‍हें 40 साल पहले थे वह डिगा नहीं था. वह था चरखे की रूहानी और करामाती ताकत पर यकीन. 13 दिसम्‍बर 1947 यानी हत्‍या से डेढ़ म‍हीना पहले मारकाट के माहौल के बीच प्रार्थना सभा में जो बात वे कहते हैं वह गांधी जी के लिए ही मुमकिन था. वे कहते हैंचरखे में बड़ी ताकत है. वह ताकत अहिंसा की ताकत है… हमने चरखा चलाया पर उसे अपनाया नहीं… आज जो हालत है वह होने वाली नहीं थी. अगर हमें अहिंसक शक्ति बढ़ानी है तो फिर से चरखे को अपनाना होगा और उसका पूरा अर्थ समझना होगा. तब तो हम तिरंगे झंडे का गीत गा सकेंगे. … पहले जब तिरंगा झंडा बना था तब उसका अर्थ यही था कि हिन्‍दुस्‍तान की सब जातियां मिल-जुलकर काम करें और चरखे के द्वारा अहिंसक शक्ति का संगठन करें. आज भी उस चरखे में अपार शक्ति भरी है… अगर सब भाई-बहन दुबारा चरखे की ताकत को समझकर अपनाएं तो बहुत काम बन जाए. … अहिंसा बहादुरी की पराकाष्‍ठा है आखिरी सीमा है. अगर हमें यह बहादुरी बताना हो तो समझ बूझ से बुद्धि से चरखे को अपनाना होगा.

हिंसा समुदायों के बीच नफरत, दलितों के साथ भेदभाव, स्त्रियों के साथ गैरबराबरी आज भी हमारे स्‍वराज्‍य की सबसे बड़ी चुनौती है. इसलिए आज गांधी जी को याद करने का मतलब है उस चरखे की तलाश है जिसके इस्‍तेमाल से अहिंसा एका की ताकत मिलती हो गैरबराबरियां दूर होती हों… क्‍योंकि गांधी जी के लिए चरखा अहिंसा, स्‍वराज्‍य, एकता की रूहानी ताकत थी. आर्थिक बदलाव का मजबूत औजार था. उनके इस करामती चरखे की तलाश के लिए गांधी जी की नजर वाली एनक पहननी पड़ेगी. उनके चरखा-दर्शन को जिंदगी में उतारना पड़ेगा. 

The post अहिंसा, हिन्‍दू-मुसलमान एका, छूआछूत खात्‍मा और गांधी जी का करामाती चरखा appeared first on SabrangIndia.

For people of my generation, Javeed Alam had become a legend in the 1970s. His marriage to Jayanti, following their Sapru House romance,had been seized by the Jan Sangh (as it then was called) to whip up a smirch campaign all over Delhi about how a Muslim youth had abducted a Hindu girl. Posters had suddenly appeared everywhere asking ‘Where is Jayanti?’, as if she had been abducted. The Left political parties in the city and teachers of the Delhi University, led by Kumaresh Chakravarty, stood rock solid behind Javeed. The situation became so explosive that a meeting had to be arranged between the young couple and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi herself, at which Jayanti told her in person that she had married Javeed of her own free will. Normalcy returned only after Salwan College, where Javeed had been teaching, rescinded its order terminating his services because of the struggle carried out by the Delhi University Teachers’ Association. Javeed’sand Jayanti’s incredible fortitude during the crisis impressed and moved us all.

I was resident abroad at the time, but news of this incident and of the remarkable young couple at the centre of it had filtered through even to the cloisters of Oxbridge. When my wife Utsa and I returned to India in 1973 to take up teaching assignments at the newly created Centre for Economic Studies and Planning of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, and decided to visit Chail during a summer break shortly thereafter, it was but natural that I should plan a ‘pilgrimage’ to Shimla across the hills to visit this incredible person, by then an icon of the Left, who was teaching at the Himachal University at the time, and his equally extraordinary wife.

My ‘pilgrimage’ itself was, in retrospect, quite amazing. All I had been told by our common friend, Rajendra Prasad, in Delhi was that Javeed lived ‘somewhere in Kaithu’. I took a bus from Chail to Shimla in the morning and walked all over Kaithu for two and a half hours before coming to a house that looked promising (because, as the neighbours informed me, some ‘university teacher’ lived there), only to find that nobody was at home. After a further wait of an hour and a half, Javeed finally turned up with his family and I introduced myself. I have never got along so well with anybody within seconds of the first meeting. It was as if we had been close friends all our lives. Rajendra Prasad’s remark to me before we had started, ‘You will like Javeed’, was a gross understatement!

After that first meeting, our visits to Shimla became more frequent. Once Javeed had booked us into the Shimla Kali Bari on top of the Ridge, where, as one would expect, there was an acute shortage of water. It was often that the Patnaik family would troop down to his house for a bath. It was also by no means infrequent for the Alam family to drop in at the Kali Bari for a fish-curry lunch (his son Aniket, known to all Javeed’s friends by his Bengali pet name Mishtoo, being extremely fond of food as a child). And all this was quite apart from our convivial meetings in Kaithu every evening. On another occasion when we stayed at the University Guest House at Summerhill, I remember the long daily walks by the two families from Kaithu to Summerhill with my son Nishad perched on Javeed’s shoulder, and their
seeing us off into the quaint little Kalka-bound train at the end of our visit.

What drew me to Javeed was not just his passion for ideas and for intense discussions, or even the closeness of our views; it was above all his total guilelessness, his absolute straightforwardness and honesty. One instance of this guileless honesty readily comes to mind. Some of us were visiting China as part of a Social Scientist delegation under the leadership of Professor Irfan Habib, the renowned historian. As is customary on such occasions, each side had to present its views on a range of subjects. Irfan Saheb discussed with us one night what he, as the leader of the delegation, was going to say the next morning. When it was Javeed’s turn to express his opinion on the proposed speech, he said with his usual candour and artlessness: ‘Whatever you say, be coherent!’ After a moment of startled silence, all of us burst out laughing; Irfan Saheb’s laughter was the loudest and he loved Javeed all the more for
that remark.

With Javeed there were never any half-measures. Joining the Party (the Communist Party of India [Marxist]) for him was not just paying his levy in time and dabbling occasionally in teachers’ politics while being primarily engaged in the usual ‘small change’ of academic life. He threw himself body and soul into Party work in Himachal Pradesh, and was greatly responsible for building up the CPI(M) in that state, where it has a notable presence to this day. In the process he faced much unpleasantness and victimization from the authorities in that state, dominated as it is by Hindutva forces.

Kolkata, which was Jayanti’s home city and where he moved for a while from Shimla, and later Hyderabad, Javeed’s own home base where he spent his last teaching years at the Central Institute for English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL) and where he finally settled, brought some respite from this unpleasantness. But his enthusiasm for Party work never waned, not even when, as a sensitive, creative and extremely thoughtful Marxist, he developed misgivings about some aspects of the theory of organizational structure and the associated mode of functioning of the traditional Communist parties. At a seminar held in Columbia University, New York in 2010, where several persons from the Indian Left were participating, Javeed was the only one who was forthright in declaring his political adherence to a Communist Party. When I was working for a while at the Kerala State Planning Board, Javeed was for me a valuable source of support and ever willing to lend his services to the Left-led state government, until of course his assuming the Chairmanship of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) made it impossible.

It was typical of Javeed that when he was retiring from the CIEFL and was offered an extension, while a distinguished colleague with whom he had well-known intellectual and political differences was not, he promptly turned it down, stating that he would accept the extension offer only if the colleague was made a similar offer. The nobility underlying that gesture, which very few in the academic world are capable of making, is inherited, some would say, from his father Alam Khundmiri, who was so influenced by the purity of a pir that he even took over his name for himself. But perhaps
it also derives from Javeed’s total intellectual and emotional commitment to the cause of human emancipation.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

The post Marx, Gandhi and Modernity – Essays Presented to Javeed Alam appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Royal tomb mask from Calakmul, Mexico, ca. 7th c. / National Geographic

Indian liberalism makes a formidable claim: that the Republic is grounded in such a structurally elaborate and ideologically hegemonic liberal-democratic institutional framework that political forces of all hues are forced to consent to this framework, stake their claims and test out their fortunes within it, go in and out of the corridors of power through procedures of electoral democracy, and thereby further strengthen the liberal framework itself.

It is further claimed that since all political forces, from the communist to the fascist, are compelled to accept the norms of universal franchise and multi-party elections, they are further compelled to move closer to the liberal Centre as soon as they begin to participate in the exercise of governmental power. For the political Centre of this power is itself circumscribed by equally powerful institutions of the civil bureaucracy, an independent judiciary, a freewheeling fourth estate, as well as a vibrant and highly articulate civil society. And, indeed, more than enough empirical evidence is available for one to construct a plausible narrative of post-Independence India on such premises. Its plausibility is what gives to the claim such persuasive power.

On the other hand, the basic trajectory of Indian political life over roughly the past quarter century — 1990 to 2015 let us say, especially as it comes into sharper relief after the elections of 2014 — indicates a steady rightward shift that is both quantitatively and qualitatively so significant that it is not so much the right that moves closer to the liberal Centre, occasional tactical concessions notwithstanding, but the liberal Centre that keeps moving further and further to the right. The Indian polity of today seems to be undergoing a historically unprecedented process: the irresistible rise of the extreme right to dominance in vast areas of culture, society, ideology and economy, albeit with commitment to observe virtually all the institutional norms of liberal democracy.

This will to a 'long march through the institutions’ and to capturing total state power not through frontal seizure — as was once customary for revolutions of the left as well as the right — but through patiently engineered and legally legitimate takeover of those institutions by its personnel from within, while keeping the institutions intact, raises a very different kind of question: is there really an irreconcilable contradiction, an unbridgeable gap, between institutions of liberal democracy and takeover of the State by the extreme right? In other words, can the extreme right rule and pursue its own agenda through liberal institutions?

We shall come to some factual details shortly. Suffice it to say here that a power bloc has undoubtedly become dominant in India in whose ideology a religio-cultural definition of nationhood functions very much the way theories of race used to function in the Nazi ideology; and that the powerful backing in word and deed that Narendra Modi, the present prime minister, received during his bid for power by virtually the whole of the corporate apex, does remind one of Mussolini’s famous definition of fascism as a form of State in which government and corporations become one.

Unlike all the inter-war ideologies of the European irrationalist, extreme right — whether Nazi or fascist or merely militarist and unlike their Islamist counterparts — the Hindutva extreme right has fashioned no comparable discourse of rejection of or contempt for liberal democracy as such.

The question of fascism in this context will be addressed briefly in a later section of this essay. It is worth remarking, though, that unlike all the inter-war ideologies of the European irrationalist, extreme right — whether Nazi or fascist or merely militarist and unlike their Islamist counterparts — the Hindutva extreme right has fashioned no comparable discourse of rejection of or contempt for liberal democracy as such. The phrase 'extreme right’ here does not apply to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the current ruling party. The BJP functions as a political party but is, in its essence, a right-wing front of the extreme right that is represented primarily by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Instead they train hundreds of thousands of their cadres to build a well-oiled, invincible electoral machine for contest at the polls. They do propose many significant changes in the Indian constitution.

However, there is no rhetoric against constitutional, liberal democratic form as such, in contrast even to the Indian communist left which ritually criticises 'bourgeois democracy’ while participating, indeed, giving most of its energy to participating in all its rituals and procedures. This unconditional public commitment to liberal democratic norms contrasts sharply, however, with the self-organisation of Hindutva’s central organ itself, as we shall see below. In practice, this commitment to liberal democratic form is most pronounced in the arena of electoral politics. In the social life of the country, though, organised mob violence is utilised routinely but always presented as a response to misconduct by the Muslim and/or Christian minorities. Whether this absence of open opposition to liberal constitutionality is an abiding commitment or a pragmatic decision open to repudiation at a later stage remains unclear.

The intricate, multi-layered networks of this extreme right are spearheaded in today’s India by the RSS and, secondarily, by its political front, the BJP, while the RSS also commands, quite literally, thousands of fronts across the country, for every conceivable social category in Indian society, whether defined by caste or profession or language or region or whatever. This organisational form highly centralised in its fundamentals, multi-faceted and flexibly organised in others responds strategically to the fact that India is by far the most heterogeneous society in the world and welding it all together into a single hegemonic political project would take an enormous act of imagination and organisation that would have to be sustained over an unpredictably long period of time. The objective is not merely to win elections and form governments but to transform Indian society in all domains of culture, religion and civilisation. Acquisition of political power is seen as a means toward that end.

The RSS was founded ninety years ago, in 1925, on an uncannily Gramscian principle that enduring political power can arise only on the basis of a prior cultural transformation and consent, and this broad based cultural consent to the extreme right’s doctrines can only be built through a long historical process, from the bottom up.

The RSS was founded ninety years ago, in 1925, on an uncannily Gramscian principle that enduring political power can arise only on the basis of a prior cultural transformation and consent, and this broad based cultural consent to the extreme right’s doctrines can only be built through a long historical process, from the bottom up. What follows from this ideological articulation of the long-term strategy is that if the RSS succeeds in constituting a certain sort of social subjectivity for the great majority of Hindus in India who are said to constitute some 80 per cent of the Indian population (we shall come later to this claim) and if they can all be unified, positively, in pursuit of a civilisational mission, and, negatively, in permanent opposition to a fancied enemy (Muslim and Christian minorities in the countries), as the Nazis sought to unite the German nation against the Jews, then the demographic majority can be turned into a permanent political majority. In that case, what the left might designate as the extreme right could rule comfortably through the institutions of liberal democracy in India that have already adjusted themselves to low-intensity but punctual use of violence against religious minorities.

There is no analogue for this particular structure of thinking in the irrationalist authoritarianisms in the Euro-American zones during the inter-war years or after. The only approximate example I can think of is that of certain, not by any means all, but some strands in the Islamist political right: Rashid Rida and the group from whom the original conception of Salafism is descended; the foundational ideas of the Ikhwanal-Muslimun (the Muslim Brotherhood) of Al-Banna and others; some contemporary tendencies descended from that original Ikhwan, such as al-Nahda in Tunisia and Hamas in Palestine; highly influential and sophisticated Islamist intellectuals of the Brotherhood vintage located in the West today, such as Tariq Ramadhan.

The idea is, in essentials, the same: secure religio-cultural ideological dominance first, taking advantage of the fact that liberal institutions do not necessarily obstruct the power of the extreme right. And build enduring political power over time by combining religio-cultural conservatism and majoritarian violence with neoliberal capitalism within the belly of imperialism, as well as liberal democratic institutions of governance domestically. 

The RSS has also sought to address in practice a historic dilemma regarding the possibility of revolution in the liberal age, whether from the left or the right. Gramsci is, of course, the great thinker who addressed this dilemma at great length and with great intellectual splendour. However, he addresses it conceptually, never on the organisational level: how could he, organisationally, from inside a prison? The RSS has addressed the dilemma in its organisational practices, over decades, through trial and error, with remarkable success so far, even though it is unclear whether or not they will be entirely successful eventually. That dilemma has been posed to the Leninist tradition in the following terms: revolutions are made by cadre parties, the ones who are able to create something of a counter-state against a State seen by the people as illegitimate (Czarism; the colonial master), able to counter state violence with revolutionary violence, and, in a moment of ultimate revolutionary crisis, able to seize power through frontal attack, dismantle that state, erect a State of a new type.

However, once a liberal democratic system of representative government in all its intricacies has been erected, universalising a bourgeois political subjectivity which believes in norms of liberal legality and the primacy of representative democracy, the revolutionaries face a situation in which they can either refuse to participate in this "bourgeois democracy" and get politically marginalised, or they can participate in the electoral world of liberal democracy, renouncing the ambition of creating a vanguard revolutionary party and committing themselves to socialist transformation through electoral means.

This is a real, inescapable dilemma. In India, Maoism chose the path of revolutionary violence, condemning themselves thus far to political marginalisation and internal degeneration. The parliamentary left, as represented by both communist parties, CPI and CPI(M), chose the electoral way, effectively recognising the legitimacy of the liberal state and the specific form of Indian constitutionality, thus foreclosing the revolutionary option, rhetorical stances notwithstanding. There has been a blockage at both ends.

RSS documents are at best turgid and unreadable for the stupidity of their content. Their organisational practices, by contrast, have often been frighteningly brilliant.

The RSS addressed that question from the extreme right, not theoretically but organisationally. Their documents are at best turgid and unreadable for the stupidity of their content. Their organisational practices, by contrast, have often been frighteningly brilliant.

How so? That will be part of the argument below.

II

We can pick up the story with the general elections of 2014 and then trace it backwards. For those elections were in significant respects unique but their true significance can emerge only if we understand their context, not just immediate political context but their place in the larger historical process. The victorious party, the BJP, is not a normal right-wing party, like the British Tories or even the US Republicans. Its uniqueness in the general configuration of right-wing parties in the world is that it is not an independent party at all but only a mass political front of a seasoned and semi-secret organisation, the RSS, which describes itself as "cultural" and "non-political" but whose declared intention is to altogether transform India’s political, social, religious life, from the bottom up, and which has at its disposal, if we take into account all the front organisation it has spawned, what is easily the largest political force in the world of liberal democracies. And it has displayed a remarkable degree of what one can only call Olympian patience. It has pursued its objectives single-mindedly for ninety years and is still in no hurry.

From that standpoint, victory in one election is just one episode among others. Let us look at this episode and then assemble the necessary fragments of a deeper analysis.

The last time a political party garnered a majority of seats in the Indian parliament was in 1984 when the Indian National Congress Party swept the polls on an immense wave of sympathy after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her own bodyguards. Since then, it has come increasingly to be believed that the days of single party rule were over, that India had entered an irreversible era of coalition governments, that coalition governments were far more representative of India’s regional diversities and the strongly federalist structure of its polity, and, more dubiously, that coalition partners would exercise restraining influence if the leading party in the coalition tried to pursue any adventurist or extremist policy.

Such wisdom was laid to rest in 2014 when the BJP won 282 seats, up from 116 in the outgoing parliament and ten more than required to form a government all on its own. It had gone into the elections as part of an alliance of diverse political parties, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), and chose to form a coalition government with insignificant partners that it does not need.

Equally significant, and perhaps more stunning, was the debacle faced by the Congress which was reduced from 206 seats in the previous parliament to a mere 44 in the new one, by far the lowest number since the founding of the Republic in 1947, and this, immediately after heading two successive  governments over the last decade, 2004-14. Another way of putting it is that it was able to win barely one seat out of every ten it contested. The Congress has dominated Indian politics for over a century, commands the aura of having led India to independence from colonialism, and has been seen by Indian liberalism subsequently as the natural party of rule, while this liberalism has typically looked at the BJP as an interloper.

There is something almost mysterious about the size and timing of this debacle, considering that there is hardly any difference between the two parties on a whole range of policy positions, except for a significant difference on what in India is called "communalism". This deep recession in its fortunes is historic, and it seems unlikely that the Congress will regain any of its past power in the foreseeable future. It continues to possess an elaborate, well-entrenched electoral machine and may get more seats in future elections, but paths to glory are now closed. The BJP owes some of the size of its electoral victory to the depth of the Congress collapse. There are other very significant factors contributing to the BJP’s success, however, which will be dealt with below.

Equally significant in its own way is a parallel decline in the electoral fortunes of the leading communist force in India, the CPI(M). Ten years ago, in 2004, the party won 43 seats in Parliament, with over 22 million votes, 5.66 per cent of all votes counted. Ten years later, it had been reduced to only nine seats, with its vote share declining to just below 18 million in a significantly enlarged electorate, thus being reduced to 3.25 per cent of the total. In 2004, the Left Front, led by the CPI(M) had 59 members, roughly 10 per cent of the strength of the House; in 2014, the Front won only 16 seats.

For the first time since Independence, the communist left has no significant presence in the Indian Parliament. By contrast, the average asset value of individual members of parliament has risen to $2.3 million, almost three times as much as was the case in the previous parliament ($850,000). In a country where the majority lives on less than $2 dollars a day, this is overwhelmingly a parliament of the rich.

Central to this configuration, as symbol and as chief actor, is the unique figure of the current prime minister, Narendra Modi. At least three aspects of this phenomenon can be isolated at this point. As the main accused in the pogrom-like ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Gujarat during 2002 when he was chief minister there, Modi is the most aggressive symbol of the extremist ethno-religious violence in India. As the elections approached and his victory at the head of the BJP became imminent, embassies of the US and the UK went into a frenzy because he had not been able to enter those countries thanks to charges related to the pogroms; the US had, in fact, formally denied him a visa.

By contrast, all the polls taken among the urban middle classes over more than five years inside India showed him far ahead of all others as the favourite prospective prime minister of the country. So belligerent were the middle classes on this issue, and so far-reaching the unity of major purpose between the BJP and the Congress, that Dr. Manmohan Singh, the liberal prime minister of India in the Congress government, had formally protested against the US denial of a visa to Narendra Modi.

That someone so well known for perpetrating ethnic cleansing should emerge so quickly as the darling of the middle classes, and would be defended by the Congress prime minister, speaks volumes about how far the Centre of gravity has shifted in India’s social imagination, and how much the liberal Centre has moved toward the extreme right.

That someone so well known for perpetrating ethnic cleansing should emerge so quickly as the darling of the middle classes, and would be defended by the Congress prime minister, speaks volumes about how far the Centre of gravity has shifted in India’s social imagination, and how much the liberal Centre has moved toward the extreme right. All this was already there well before the elections, indeed well before the hugely financed and stunningly executed election campaign got going with such power that it seemed unstoppable from the very start.

The second major aspect of Modi’s irresistible rise to power has been the fact that never in the country’s history has the fraternity of leading corporate CEOs united so strongly and volubly to promote a single politician to prime ministership as they did for Modi. Gujarat is the most industrialised state in India (and Gujarat’s poor among its most wretched), and the magnates of Gujarati capital are deeply connected with their counterparts in Bombay, India’s financial hub and home to some its leading industrialists, as well as with capitalists of Indian origin living in the UK, US and elsewhere.

As chief minister of Gujarat for a decade and a half, Modi did as much as he could to turn the state into a fief for crony capitalists, from inside Gujarat and elsewhere, eventually receiving enormous financial and other kinds of support from them. This helped greatly in transforming his image in the corporate media, electronic and print alike, from that of a bloodthirsty extremist to that of an economic genius who had single-handedly led the state of Gujarat from rags to riches, a veritable Development Man (Vikaas Purush) whose firm and visionary leadership India needed in this decisive moment of opportunity on the global stage.

This corporate support also helped him spend on his electoral campaign roughly the same amount as Obama had spent on his, while not a fraction of it was available to his opponents. With such resources Modi’s campaign went presidential on the model of the US electoral system; it all became an affair of electing one unique man, in what was until then a very different campaign style, more in keeping with the parliamentary system.

This money did wonders for Modi. It made him relatively independent of his own party; the money that builds the personality cult can also sideline and even buy off one’s opponents within the party. The money made him marginally independent even of the RSS that had nurtured him since he was a young kid; the phalanxes of the RSS cadres who streamed into his election campaign could now be paid off with corporate cash, so that they became more dependent on the electoral machine he had assembled than on the parent organisation.

Who does Modi represent? The simple answer is: the RSS and the corporate elite. But he is also filled to the brim with immense, megalomaniac self-love. Who will serve whom is yet to be seen.

The third truly notable aspect of Modi’s rise to power is that this is the first time that a man who had spent most of his adult life as a fulltime organiser/preacher (pracharak) in the shadowy wings of the RSS, a semi-secret organisation to start with, has become the country’s chief executive. AB Vajpayee, who headed a previous government of the BJP, was also a member of the RSS, as are virtually all the key leaders of the BJP. However, Vajpayee and others of his kind were mere members while they led other public or professional lives and went into politics early in their youth to become part of the rough and tumble of parliamentary life.

Not so Modi. We know that he joined the RSS as an adolescent but we know little else about the first thirty years or so of his life; and what we know comes only from him. By the time he came fully into public view, as an RSS organiser in and out of BJP offices, he was close to forty. When he was parachuted into Gujarat as chief minister, on RSS direction, he had had no career in electoral politics. He has become prime minister without any prior experience in Parliament. His closest crony in the national capital, Amit Shah, is his closest crony from Gujarat, a sinister fellow generally credited with many a murder.

Who does Modi represent ? The simple answer is: the RSS and the corporate elite. But he is also filled to the brim with immense, megalomaniac self-love. Who will serve whom is yet to be seen.
 

Burial figurines from Calakmul, Mexico, ca. 7th c. / National Geographic
 
III

What, then, about the "Long March" of the RSS? We will first address issues related its original formation and ideological articulations, followed by comment on its organisational innovations in the next section.

At the broadest level, the RSS arose in 1925 as part of a wider proliferation of such organisations across many countries during the inter-war years, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, that were part of a global offensive of the right in response to the Bolshevik Revolution, as well as a wider upsurge in workers’ movements and communist parties. The anti-Enlightenment European right lost faith in liberal democracy itself as having the capacity or the will to fight off such dangers, not just because its leaders were seen as weak-willed, but also because liberalism itself came to be seen as a variant of that same legacy of the French Revolution that had elsewhere led to Bolshevism. Regarding the rise of such parties in Asia or the Middle East primarily as effects of European fascisms would be erroneous; in all cases, domestic roots and exigencies were much too strong for that characterisation. However, a certain inspiration was also undeniable, even though different organisations imbibed it differently.

We don’t have space here to trace the fascinating parallels between the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Indian RSS. Both subscribed to variants of religious majoritarianism and religio-cultural revivalism. Both found the Nazi ideology deeply attractive for its definition of nationalism in terms of race and religion, in opposition to the definition of nationhood descended from the French Revolution and based on the idea of equal citizenship for all regardless of race, religion, etc.

Some of the leaders of Hindu nationalism said openly that the German "solution" for the Jews could be fruitfully applied to Indian Muslims. From Mussolini, they learned the political uses of the golden classical past; and from Nazis and fascists alike, they learned the strategic uses of force, violence, militias and spectacular public rituals in the creation of a new, hysterical kind of political will. And they imbibed the cult of the leader, a politics of mass obedience as well as contempt for the democratic form in their own organisation.

The career of the RSS is remarkable: it reserves the classically Nazi organisational form of extreme centralised authoritarianism for itself, uses a variety of other fronts for exercise of violence and defiance of constitutionality whenever it so desires, even as it allows and organises obedience to constitutional norms for its political front, the BJP, the currently ruling party of India.

The career of the RSS is remarkable in this regard: it reserves the classically Nazi organisational form of extreme centralised authoritarianism for itself, uses a variety of other fronts for exercise of violence and defiance of constitutionality whenever it so desires, even as it allows and organises obedience to constitutional norms for its political front, the BJP, the currently ruling party of India.

There are moments when the BJP itself deviates from legality but, once the fruits of deviation have been reaped, it is brought back to the norm. In playing this game of a central cadre-based formation answerable to none, a political front that functions very much like a normal party in the Indian liberal-democratic milieu, and a plethora of other fronts that function at various levels of legality and illegality, the RSS has honed the "good cop, bad cop" technique to sinister perfection. We shall return to this point.

The RSS arose not as a unique expression of what came to be known as "Hindu nationalism" (as contrasted to the canonical "secular nationalism" of Gandhi, Nehru, etc.), but as one of many. Founded in 1913, some twelve years before the RSS, the Hindu Mahasabha remained by far the larger organisation of that kind well into the 1950s when it began to decay and many of its members got assimilated into the RSS and its affiliates. Ironically, the Mahasabha continued to function from inside the professedly "secular" Indian National Congress until 1938; and after Independence, Shyama Prashad Mukherjee, one of its illustrious leaders, resurfaced as a minister in the cabinet of none other than Nehru himself. Certain strands of Hindu extremism and conservatism were thus not entirely alien to what I have called India’s canonical nationalism and which never tires of asserting its purportedly pristine secularism.

In its original formation, leaders of the RSS had hardly any ideology of their own and borrowed most of their beliefs from VD Savarkar, a fascinating and rather enigmatic character, certainly fascistoid in his thinking but also a one-time anti-colonial nationalist who had fallen out with Gandhi on the question of the legitimacy of violence and was inspired, rather, by methods of the "revolutionary terrorists" of Bengal. Even though he published Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, pretty much the Bible of the Hindu right, in 1923, just two years before the RSS was founded, and then lived on until 1966, Savarkar never in fact joined the RSS and preferred to take over the presidency of the Mahasabha before gradually withdrawing from politics altogether.

Overlaps and alignments were, however, so close that while the RSS was banned in response to Gandhi’s assassination, Savarkar was tried in court for involvement in that conspiracy; it so happens that Savarkar was acquitted and the ban on RSS was lifted quite soon. Founders and early leaders of the RSS, Hedgewar and Golwalker in particular, borrowed and reframed his idea for their own organisation, and it is only after the RSS emerged as the united church of Hindu nationalism, from the 1960s onward, that Savarkar came to be seen increasingly as its own chief ideologue.

Parenthetically, we should note that even today the RSS is by far the most important organisation of the Hindu right but by no means has any exclusive monopoly of it. There are many outside its own umbrella (or family — parivar — as its fronts like to be called). The most notable is the Shiv Sena, but countless small groups of the most violent sort keep cropping up all the time, and it is not always possible to know which of them are covertly
RSS outfits and which are not. 

Nor were the Mahasabha and the RSS the first originators of this outlook, or the first political expression of it. Certain upper caste clusters in late nineteenth century Bengal had provided a rather impressive nursery for the incubation of revivalist longing and nostalgia for a Hindu Golden Age in the classical past; some of these ideas had played a powerful role in the Swadeshi movement in early years of the twentieth century. At the other end of the country, highly influential political, social and educational movements were emerging already in late nineteenth century Maharashtra to combat the Brahminical caste order, for advancement of the untouchable castes and so on.

This challenge to Brahminism served to unite much of the Brahmin elite to defend their caste privileges but, predictably, as defenders of "Hindus" as such. It was recalled that the Peshwai kingdom of the Maharashtrians was the last to have been defeated by the British in India; as such, the Maharashtrian elite had not just the duty but the right to devise and lead a new kind of nationalism, a "Hindu nationalism" that excluded the Muslim usurpers and that would resurrect the ancient glory of the Hindus, purifying the culture of the land. The majority of the founders and early leaders of the RSS turned out to be Maharashtrian Brahmins.

There were countless such developments, large and small, not only among Hindus but among sections of Muslims as well. There is no space to retrace those histories. Even so, it would be useful to understand at least conceptually some fundamental aspects of the colonial dispensation that served to greatly strengthen the political valence of religious and caste identities.

The basic fact is that a colonial subject is not a citizen, and no colonial society can be based on rights of common citizenship. Conditions were thus exceptionally unfavourable for secular, democratic institutions and practices to take root and grow despite the sort of administrative modernity that the colonial authorities had assembled. Lack of the structures of popular representation, such as universal suffrage, meant that representatives were either appointed from above or claimed to represent "the people" by virtue of their class privilege, when no one had chosen them to do so.

Development of the classes of modern society itself remained weak, thanks to the colonial blockage of industrial development, which was then reflected in the weakness of class organisations and the proliferation of non-class pressure groups, organised from above; the proletariat remained small and rather few among the numerically very small modern bourgeoisie, who were particularly bourgeois in their social and cultural outlooks.

In such circumstances, organisations of the modern type arose more in the social arena than in the political, and most such organisations arose along the already available fault lines, such as denominational community, religious sect and caste association. Under colonial conditions, such entities lost much of their earlier amorphous character and gave to themselves, with no little encouragement by the colonial government, far greater solidity in social life and representational claim in the newly emergent political arena.

Prohibitions on the politics of equality, even in the simple juridical domain, served to enhance savageries in the politics of difference. Even the types of social organisation that worked for reform, such as educational societies or philanthropic trusts, arose mainly to serve caste and communal ends. If much "modern" education was dispensed through caste societies and denominational schools and colleges, most of politics was similarly conducted in the form of deputations and conferences representing castes and denominations.

In other words, the emergence of modern forms of power, in the shape of the state of colonial capital, required the emergence of corresponding political forms through which the colonised could represent themselves. However, in blocking collective representation in the form of equal citizenship rights and universal suffrage, the colonial state fragmented the emergent nation into its social units and greatly accentuated the existing cleavages, even though the fact of being governed by the same colonial state gave to each of these units a certain investment in nationalist rhetoric and some rudimentary form of nationalist consciousness.

The contribution of colonialism to the growth of communal and caste politics was thus not merely tactical ("divide and rule") but structural. So overwhelming was the weight of religion in all this, and so reluctant were the Indian liberal modernists to confront that power frontally, that even the canonical, multi-denominational, professedly secular nationalists simply redefined secularism as not a separation of religion and politics but as "equal respect for all religions."

Such remained the structure of the colonial polity until after the First World War. When the era of mass politics began, Indian colonial society was already organised, socially as well as politically, around the axes of caste, religion and region. The contribution of colonialism to the growth of communal and caste politics was thus not merely tactical ("divide and rule") but structural. So overwhelming was the weight of religion in all this, and so reluctant were the Indian liberal modernists to confront that power frontally, that even the canonical, multi-denominational, professedly secular nationalists simply redefined secularism as not a separation of religion and politics but as "equal respect for all religions", in the telling and broadly accepted phrase of Dr. Radhakrishnan, a conservative Brahminical scholar who served as the  second president of independent India.

That was quite consistent with Gandhi’s famous dictum that he regarded as sinful any politics that took its distance from religion. The specific ideological positions of Hindu nationalism need to be seen against the backdrop of this much wider landscape of heightened religiosity.

In its formative phase, Hindu nationalist ideology had three distinctive components. First, there was the nationalism of "blood and soil" descended from right-wing Romanticisms of the European nineteenth century which got re-inscribed in terms of race and religion in many nationalisms of the twentieth century, including the cultural nationalism of the Hindu right. Second, right-wing nationalism also inherited a colonialist reading of India’s history, already canonised by James Mill in his iconic six-volume The History of British India that started appearing in 1817, as comprising three historical periods: that of the Hindu Golden Age; that of the defeat and fall of Hindu civilisation at the hands of Muslim tyranny; and the then-dawning phase for which the British were represented as liberators of Hindus from that tyranny.

When Hindutva ideologues speak of the Hindus having suffered under "foreign rule", they routinely refer to the period of the Muslim dynasties, not to the British.

The latter element accounts for the great ambivalence of Hindu nationalism toward colonialism and imperialism. When Hindutva ideologues speak of the Hindus having suffered under "foreign rule", they routinely refer to the period of the Muslim dynasties, not to the British. And although they would like to claim some anti-colonial lineage, there is scant evidence of their actually having participated much in those struggles. Thanks to these powerful ideological legacies, their nationalism of today is remarkably devoid of any anti-imperialist positions and, thanks to the neoliberal consensus, devoid even of the sort of ideologies of self-reliance that Gandhian/Nehruvian variant of nationalism had envisioned for the development of Indian capitalism.

The "blood-and-soil" nationalism and mythologies of Muslim tyranny were combined with something else as well: anxieties among large sections of the upper caste elites as they were pressed by the upsurge of the lower castes from one side, and the rise of a multi-religious, multi-caste nationalism that was fast becoming a veritable mass movement with Gandhi’s shepherding of the Congress, especially after 1919. Ideas of the Hindu Golden Age and Muslim tyranny were elements often imbibed from colonial education, hence widespread among the educated Hindu elites.

In that respect, Hindu nationalism could appeal to them quite credibly. The intensities of Brahminical caste anxieties were a different matter, however, and those remained a major source for the isolation of the RSS in the heyday of the anti-colonial movement, 1919-47, and during the early decades of the Republic.

The Indian national movements mobilised more peasant households for mass agitation than any other political movement in history, a mobilisation that was, in this respect, rather comparable to the Chinese Revolution. Gandhi could not have achieved this level of agrarian unrest under bourgeois hegemony without anchoring his organisational structure for the countryside in the middle and rich peasantries who tended to be drawn from the middling castes, or without waging highly publicised campaigns on the question of untouchability, to appeal to the oppressed menial castes. That necessarily earned him the ire of the more orthodox among the upper castes even though Gandhi never rejected the basic four-fold division (the varna ashram) of the Brahminical caste system.

And one forgets now that Muslims counted for a quarter of the Indian population before the Partition, before two-thirds of them got regrouped in what we now know as Bangladesh and Pakistan. No leader or organisation that sought to represent the whole of British colonial India could afford to ignore this demographic fact or to define India as a purely Hindu nation. So leaders of the Congress declared themselves "secular" with varying degrees of commitment or conviction. By the same token, the hostility of Hindu nationalism to this "secular" nationalism was boundless.

Savarkar, the chief ideologue in the whole spectrum of Hindu nationalism, drew a sharp and enduring distinction: Gandhi’s was a "territorial nationalism" which debased the idea of the nation by associating it with mere territory, whereas his own was a "cultural nationalism" of the "Hindu Race" for which culture was synonymous with the whole way of Hindu life, including politics, society, civilisational heritage, family structures, form of government, etc. a primordial, all-encompassing Being of the "Race", as it were.

Some aspects of this cultural conservatism resonated with sections of Hindu society but, beyond a closed circuit of its adherents, this extreme definition of the Hindu nation had few takers as the anti-colonial movement kept gaining more and more demographic weight and diversity across the land, and it had few takers even after Independence as the Republic was sought to be organized on the basis of universal suffrage and what Nehru quaintly called a "socialistic pattern". The RSS remained a relatively marginal force until after the dust of Gandhi’s assassination had settled in the 1950s, even though sensibilities amenable to ideas of Hindu nationalism were far more widespread than the ideologues of Indian liberalism concede.

IV

For the first quarter century of its existence the RSS displayed no tendency toward innovation and concentrated on self-preservation and expansion, with the distinct novelty that it concentrated on recruiting as many young boys into its local branches (shakhas) as possible, in keeping with the view that cultural transformation can be deep-rooted only if a corps of cadres are indoctrinated into its protocols from an early age. Strikingly, it stipulates that any boy who comes to its shakha must do so with the prior consent and daily knowledge of elders in his family, assuming that there are countless families in the country who would welcome such an opportunity for their son and who will then get directly involved in the social life of the organisation.

During this first phase, the RSS seems to have wanted to shelter itself under state patronage, while it carried out its more or less clandestine work under the banner of "culture". It repeatedly proposed mutual cooperation with the British colonial authorities in opposition to the Congress and the communists. Soon after Independence, and even after it was briefly banned following Gandhi’s assassination, it proposed cooperation with the Congress against the communists who had emerged fleetingly as the main opposition in parliament.

It floated its first front organisation under duress for women, in 1936 to protect its own all-male character and to ward off pressure from some particularly enthusiastic and vocal women who wanted membership to be offered to women as well. No membership in the masculinist fraternity, the RSS declared, but you can have an organisation (a Samiti) for yourself under our guidance. Then a lukewarm attempt was made in 1948-49 to float a students’ front during the period when the RSS itself had been banned, but that attempt went nowhere and the students’ front got going seriously only a decade later. Today, that front plausibly claims to be the largest students’ organisation in the country.

The real turning point came in 1951, on the eve of the first general elections, when a political front was floated in the shape of a brand new political party to participate in the polls, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), which was then dissolved in 1977 to be immediately reincarnated as the BJP. The BJS won three seats in 1951 but as many as 35 seats in 1967, with 9.41 per cent of the vote, having united much of the Hindu right under its umbrella by then. But the majority of the Indian bourgeoisie continued to support the Congress, at times grumbling and sullen, and the minority of investors and traders who did not support it worked through other parties such as the short-lived Swatantra Party.

The RSS itself did not grow much between Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 and Nehru’s death in 1962; the aura of the Congress as the unrivalled leading light of the anti-colonial movement still held. After that the RSS grew steadily and at times rapidly, even though some of that aura lasted for the Congress through the Indira Gandhi years and collapsed only after she had abrogated civil rights and declared a State of Emergency in the country in 1975.

Other fronts followed thereafter. The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) for the working class, floated in 1955, has, by now, become the single largest central trade union organisation in India, claiming a membership of over ten million workers and affiliation of over four thousand trade unions. [8] The Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) came in 1964, with the purported aim of propagating Hindu culture abroad, and remained in the shadows for two decades when, in 1984, this particular front was selected to spearhead the vast machinery of violence and rabid ideological hysteria that rolled across the country over the next decade and which brought the BJP to power in Delhi, for 13 days in 1996 and then, at the head of a broad based coalition of political parties, for six consecutive years from 1998 to 2004.

BJP leaders have asserted time and again that its ability to rise from an isolated minority fringe in 1984 to secure governmental power by 1998 was owed very significantly to the mass mobilisations and the periodic pogroms that reached a particular intensity between 1989 and 1992, culminating in the spectacular destruction of the Babri Masjid.

BJP leaders have asserted time and again that its ability to rise from an isolated minority fringe in 1984 to secure governmental power by 1998 was owed very significantly to the mass mobilisations and the periodic pogroms that reached a particular intensity between 1989 and 1992, culminating in the spectacular destruction of the Babri Masjid, that the Supreme Court had sought to protect through agencies of the Indian government. However, Indian liberalism itself has never acknowledged that the reaping of such rich electoral dividends from years of violence by the RSS and its affiliates, and the fact that so many large and influential political parties have joined the coalition led by the BJP means that something very fundamental has changed in the very fabric of the Republic.

It was during those two years that Modi, the current prime minister, saw what was there for all to see: that communal killings, images of Hindus killing members of Christian and Muslim minorities, are good for winning elections. Since staging his own ethnic cleansing in 2002 he has not looked back. He increased his majority in the state assembly by a solid 10 per cent in the aftermath of those killings, won two more state assembly elections, and then led his party to spectacular victory in the recent national elections.

The RSS plays its fronts like pawns on the chessboard of Indian politics, mixing legality and illegality, electoral politics and machineries of violence, in full view of agencies of law and organs of civil society. This is rather a sinister variant on the famous formula : "hegemony = consent + coercion".

The RSS plays its fronts like pawns on the chessboard of Indian politics, mixing legality and illegality, electoral politics and machineries of violence, in full view of agencies of law and organs of civil society. This is rather a sinister variant on the famous formula : "hegemony = consent + coercion". And coercion has had and will continue to have a specific form: small doses, steadily dispensed; no gas ovens, just a handful of storm troopers, here and there, appearing and disappearing; and a permanent fear that corrodes the souls of the wretched of the land, while the liberal democratic machinery rolls on no formal suspension of civil liberties!

That, then, is the first innovation; a large inventory of very different kinds of fronts, to perform very different kinds of functions, at different times and in different spheres of society, to see if violence that is required for a revolution (from the extreme right) can be practiced alongside the pursuit of legitimacy through parliamentary elections as bourgeois legality and subjectivity require. Second is the issue of the relationship between political parties and affiliated organisations (fronts, in common parlance).

It is normal in India for large political parties to have fronts for different sections of society: women, students, workers, peasants and so on. The Congress has them, as do the parliamentary communists. By contrast, the innovation here is that the RSS, which floats and controls the fronts, is not a political party but intervenes comprehensively in all aspects of political and social life without taking any responsibility for what it does through its fronts ; that the political party, the BJP, is not, strictly speaking, a political party but only a front in which virtually all the key leaders and organizers are drawn from the RSS.

Moreover, all the other fronts are also fronts of the RSS, an extra-parliamentary entity; the BJP, being a front itself, has no control over those fronts. Fourth innovation: none of it is secret, as all is public and comprehensively documented, time and again just a normal part of liberal democratic freedom. Fifth, intricacies of law and constitution are carefully sifted through to determine exactly to what extent the RSS itself can function in the public domain as a legally constituted entity without having to reveal much of what it is and what it does. As a self-styled "cultural" organisation it is exempt from the kind of accountability that is required of political parties. Liberal protections are thus utilized for secretive authoritarian purpose.

In all this there are two distinct claims which the RSS throws around as if they were identical. It emphatically claims to be a purely "cultural" organisation, uninvolved in politics and, therefore, exempt from requirements imposed on political parties, such as revealing its membership or keeping accounts for public scrutiny. Simultaneously, it claims that it has a right to guide in all aspects of politics because, far from being an autonomous sphere, politics in Hindu society is one area of "culture", just as "culture" itself is an all-encompassing expression of the religion of the Race. The two claims are of course incompatible. Not for nothing did Mussolini declare that "we fascists are super-relativists".

And the final, most far-reaching innovation: the sheer number of fronts, running surely into the  hundreds, possibly thousands no one knows. The Anthropological Survey of India holds that the Indian population is comprised of thousands of distinct communities, sociologically so defined by custom, speech, location, cuisine, spiritual belief, caste, sub-caste, occupation, what have you. The RSS is the only organisation in India which has the ambition to have fronts for as many of these diversities as possible and does indeed go on creating more and more of them.

In this sense, it is a spectacular missionary organisation, and the mission is religious, cultural, social, economic, educational and of course political. The heart of this problem for the RSS is that even though the word "Hindu" is used by all as if the word referred to some homogeneous religious community or a unified social category, the reality is that all these diversities even immense differences of custom and religious belief exist among precisely the 80 per cent of the Indians who are considered "Hindu".

RSS' commitment to creating a cultural homogeneity out of this ocean of diversities, and to translate that cultural homogeneity into a unified political will, means that it wishes to become both Church and State simultaneously.

Contrary to this reality, the RSS has fairly precise ideas of what it means to be a Hindu, based on its own doctrine that being a Hindu is not merely a religious category, divorced from other kinds of subjectivity or conduct, but an entire way of life, from cradle to grave. It wants to make sure that the ideal type it has invented becomes the normative standard among that 80 per cent. Its commitment to creating a cultural homogeneity out of this ocean of diversities, and to translate that cultural homogeneity into a unified political will, means that it wishes to become both Church and State simultaneously. That ambition is at the heart of its fight against secular civility and the specific content of its authoritarianism. That so comprehensive a civilizational project would wholly succeed appears implausible. The undertaking is audacious, however, and the success so far, although partial, is also undeniably impressive.
 

© Ghulam Rasool Santosh, Untitled / Autarmota
 
V

India’s post-Independence history can be broadly conceptualised in terms of three phases. The first lasted from 1947 to 1975. It was premised on four values of the Nehruvian paradigm: secularism, democracy, socialism, non-alignment. The practice did not always correspond to precepts, and the paradigm kept fraying, especially after the India-China War of 1962, and Nehru’s death soon thereafter. Even so, a certain degree of liberal-left hegemony did survive and got eroded only gradually. Eventually, the accumulating crises came to a head with the outbreak of massive, right-wing, populist agitation in the mid-1970s and, in response, Indira Gandhi’s suspension of civil liberties and Declaration of Emergency.

The end of the first phase and the beginning of the second coincide in the massive ambiguities of that movement famously led by Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), an aging Congressman and once a friend of Nehru, who now forged a far-reaching alliance with the RSS and gathered a whole range of rightist forces as well as youth groups under the slogan of 'Total Revolution’, calling upon state apparatuses, including the security agencies, to mutiny. The RSS, with its thousands of cadres, provided the backbone of the anti-Emergency movement and then of the Janata Party government that arose out of the end of the Emergency, when Bharatiya Jana Sangh’s share of parliamentary seats rose from 35 in 1967 to 94 in 1977, with Vajpayee and Advani, veterans of the RSS, rising to occupy key cabinet posts.

That outcome of the anti-Emergency agitation leading to the first non-Congress government in the country is still celebrated in the (non-Congress) liberal circles as a moment when the sturdiness of Indian democracy prevailed over Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial tendencies. Yet that was precisely the process that served to legitimise the RSS as a respectable force in Indian politics and to confer on its political front a significant place in government for the first time in Indian history. I might add that the RSS made exponential strides between 1977 and 1982, for five years after the Emergency was lifted, owing to its newfound reputation as a defender of democracy against dictatorship.

On the whole, though, that force also got splintered owing to its own contradictions and the phase of relative political crisis of the bourgeois state in India continued, in which the older power bloc, led by the Congress, was no longer capable of stable rule but none other had emerged to replace it either. That crisis lasted for over two decades, ending fully only with the advent of the second BJP-led government in 1998 (the first had fallen after thirteen days in 1996).

The neoliberal policies that the Congress had inaugurated almost ten years earlier had by then taken root, inaugurating a new phase in which a drastically reorganised power bloc, consisting of all the non-left parties and ranging from the Congress to the BJP, gave a new stability to bourgeois rule in India regardless of which coalition of those parties wins the elections at one point or another. The decisive turning points had, of course, come earlier, nationally and internationally, during those momentous three years from 1989 to 1992.

Internationally, those years witnessed the historic collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and in southeastern Europe more generally, with the US becoming an unrivalled global hegemon. The whole of the Indian ruling class and its state structures could now openly unite behind this "lone superpower" with no internal friction at all. Inside the country, those same years witnessed the onset of the neoliberal regime with the so-called Rao-Manmohan reforms, and that decisive turn in the institutionalisation of communalism in structures of the Indian state, which began with the tacit agreement between the Congress and the VHP at the time of Shila Nyas in 1989 and even more dramatically during the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Conditions remained highly unstable for a few years, however.

By 1998 neoliberalism had become a consensual position among the propertied classes and their representatives in various spheres of the national life. At the same time, the far right had made rapid gains and began concentrating on consolidation of its newfound power. Extreme violence of the early 1990s was no longer required. It was much more important now to give the BJP a mildly liberal face so that it could be accepted as a party of bourgeois rule and an alternative to the Congress. The coalition government it formed in 1998 lasted for six years, leading then to ten years of a Congress- led government that only ended with the return of the BJP in 2014 with a firm majority in parliament.

Remarkably, these changes in government have witnessed no appreciable changes in policy. In this sense India has become a mature liberal democracy in the neoliberal age, like the US and UK, where the two main competing parties or coalitions of parties function as mere factions in a managing committee of the bourgeoisie as a whole. At the heart of this new consensus in the Indian ruling class is close alliance with imperialism externally, and the imposition of neoliberal order domestically.

In hindsight one could even propose that the promulgation of neoliberalism was the necessary moment for the various factions of the ruling class — hence the various parties that represent capitalist interest at the federal and regional levels — to obtain a firm base of unity and a new type of alliance with US capital in the altered national and international conditions. All these parties compete with each other now for the spoils of office, not on matters of policy or even ideology. This neoliberal order is what I call extreme capitalism and it has so far had broadly analogous consequences in the India of high growth rates and in the EU of low growth rates.

The Congress serves as the formally secular face of this class consensus while the BJP serves as its communal face, even though the Congress is quite capable of its own pragmatic uses of communalism as much as the BJP is often quite willing to have the more provocative aspects of its programme suspended so that it may remain at the apex of power in a broad coalition. Accordingly, Modi based his prime ministerial bid not on the Hindutva plank of blood-curdling rhetoric, which had propelled him into halls of power in the first place, but on exactly that rhetoric of "growth" and "development" that the BJP shares with the Congress.

Indeed, the Congress has always said, with much justice, that its own policies are what the BJP then implements. Modi is not uniquely a candidate of all corporate capital; it is just the case that he has united many more of the top CEOs behind him, much more openly, than his counterparts in the Congress ever could even when they tried.

Not that the punctual uses of violence as a strategic imperative have declined, killing of some members of the religious minorities is a common affair. A couple of Christians here, five or ten Muslim there; nothing spectacular, just low-intensity and routinised, nothing to disturb the image of a liberal, secular, deeply democratic India. There is no longer a significant political party in the country, with the exception of the communist left, that has not colluded with the BJP at one point or another since 1996 and especially so since 1998. At the time of the ethnic cleansing of Gujarat in 2002 numerous political parties united to prevent even a discussion of it on the floor of the House.

A majority of the liberals no longer know how much they themselves have moved toward the communal, neoliberal right.

Even the Congress colludes when necessary but rather quietly, not overtly because it is, after all, the main electoral adversary. Increasing communalisation of popular consciousness can now proceed from two sides. There is of course the mass work by the RSS and its affiliates which have gained more and more adherents over some eighty years, in what Gramsci called the quotidian, molecular movements in the quality of mass perceptions at the very base of society the creation of a "new common sense".

A majority of the liberals no longer know how much they themselves have moved toward the communal, neoliberal right. And now, for many years, these same shifts can also come from the side of the State, its political parties, educational enterprises, repressive apparatuses, often even the judicial branch. As India increasingly becomes a national security state, the bases for an aggressive, masculinist right-wing nationalism are bound to go deeper into society at large.

VI

Where, then, does the question of fascism fit into all this? I must confess that, in the wake of the spectacular events of 1992, this author was the first to raise this question comprehensively, first in a lengthy lecture delivered in Calcutta and then in another equally lengthy lecture delivered in Hyderabad. Several other prominent scholars, Sumit Sarkar and Prabhat Patnaik in particular, had expressed similar misgivings. There emerged on the left a broadly shared thinking that the RSS, its affiliates and allies had been distinctly influenced by the Nazi/fascist combine at the very moment of their origin, that they had carried many of those sympathies and principles into their own organisations and modes of conduct, and that many of their more recent strategies and practices were distinctly fascistic.

The CPI(M), a political party caught up in debates ranging all around it, even adopted the term "communal fascism" to stress a certain degree of fascist content as well as to specify the uniquely Indian twist to that content. I had further argued that the type of politics that we broadly (and sometimes imprecisely) call "fascism" is a feature of the whole of the imperialist epoch. Not for nothing did French "Integral Nationalism", sometimes credited as being the original form of fascism, arise in precisely those closing decades of the nineteenth century, which were, in Lenin’s typology, the original moment for the rise of what he called "imperialism".

In short, so long as one was not suggesting that the replication of the German and Italian experiences was at hand, it was perfectly legitimate to place the RSS into a certain typology of political forces that are fairly widespread even inside contemporary Europe itself, from Greece to France and from Austria to Ukraine. I had also argued, tongue in cheek, that "every country gets the fascism it deserves" in accordance with the "physiognomy" (a favourite metaphor of Gramsci) of its history, society and politics; and, I would now add, the historical phase that the country is going through.

What we have to grasp about every successful movement of the fascist type is not its replication of something else in the past, but its originality in response to the conditions in which it arises.

In other words, what we have to grasp about every successful movement of the fascist type is not its replication of something else in the past, but its originality in response to the conditions in which it arises. There is no getting away from the materiality of the "here and now". All revivalism is a contemporary rewriting of the past, a radically modern neo-traditionalism. All the contemporary parties of the fascist type respond to their own national milieux and to the broader fact that, with few and only relative exceptions, the working classes are supine globally, beaten back by neoliberal successes in the reorganisation of capital, and that political liberalism has itself made its peace with this extreme capitalism.

In this situation the proper stance is not: watch out, Nazis are coming. The real question is the one that Kalecki posed at the time of Goldwater’s bid for the US presidency in the 1960s: what would fascism look like if it came to a democratic industrial country that had no powerful working-class movement to oppose it? That is the general question, and I think it applies with particular force to the India of today: the far right need not abolish the outer shell of the liberal democratic institutions because these institutions can be taken over by its own personnel altogether peacefully and because most others are quite willing to go along with it so long as acts of large-scale violence remain only sporadic and the more frequent low-intensity violence can be kept out of general view, by media monopoly combined with mutual agreement between liberalism and the far right.

Meanwhile, the communists are now too small a force to be considered even for a ban. Of course, the question of fascism of the classical type may well resurface if a powerful socialist movement were to be re-founded, on whatever new premises and strategic perspectives that may now be necessary for that act of re-founding and reconstruction.

(Aijaz Ahmad is a leading Marxist thinker, critic and commentator. Among his books are Ghazals of Ghalib; In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures; Lineages of the Present: Political Essays; and Afghanistan, Iraq and the Imperialism of Our Times).

We thank the EMS Smrithi Organising Committee, Ayaanthole for allowing us to publish this essay from the Idea of India, Background Papers, EMS Smrithi Series compiled by MN Sudhakaran et al, Thrissur, June 2016.

This article was first published in indianculturalforum.in

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When I see the fundamentalists of today proclaiming their version of nationalism, I wonder whether the pluralism for which our forefathers fought has disappeared. My first encounter with the predecessors of today’s Desh Bakths was on  January 31, 1948 when some of them went round distributing sweets to celebrate Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination the previous day.

Like those who celebrate Godse today, they too did not want the diversity that Gandhi and the freedom fighters stood for. One has, therefore, to ask whether the Hindu Rashtra that the rightist forces would like to build will allow diversity. Or is it to be exclusive like Hitler’s Germany? I was just six when the world war ended so I did not know much about Hitler but I studied about him at school.

And I ask myself whether I am imagining what look like parallels between his Nazism and what the rightist forces propagate in my country today. Is their nationalist exclusive and the opposite of the inclusive nationalism amid unity in diversity that independent India stood for? Hitler’s exclusive Nazism was founded on a Germany that belonged only to the Aryan race which he defined as blonde and tall though he himself was short and somewhat on the darker side.

Those who did not belong to his pure race, for example Jews and gypsies, and others like trade unionists and Communists who disagreed with him, were jailed or sent to the gas chambers. The difference with the “nationalists” of today’s India is that they are ready to tolerate Muslims, Christians, Dalits, Tribals and Women in their Bharat, as long as they accept to be subordinate second class citizens under the “owners” of the country.

My first encounter with the predecessors of today’s Desh Bakths was on  January 31, 1948 when some of them went round distributing sweets to celebrate Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination the previous day. 

The events of the last few days and weeks make me wonder whether there is a second similarity. Hitler and his propagandist Himmler created an army of hooligans to attack their opponents.

They would first create myths showing their opponents in a bad light as anti-national and then attack them. One sees it happening in our country too. Those who shout slogans or write what the “nationalists” do not like are called traitors. Some of them like Pansare and Kalburgi have been eliminated, a few others like Prof. Kancha Illaiah, Dr Sandeep Pandey and Dr Sai Baha have been ostracised after accusing them of being Naxalites or anti-national.

Many others, for example the teachers and students of JNU and journalists who were covering their case, have been beaten up by lawyers and law makers. The freedom fighters stood for a different type of nationalism. The instructions of Gandhi to his followers were to exhibit their nationalism in the service of the poor.

That is what I witnessed in my childhood in persons like our neighbour homeopathic doctor Shastri (cricketer Ravi Shastri’s grandfather). He was the ward Congress president but he gave up politics and spent his life serving the poor particularly children in whose medicines he specialised.
The spirit of nationalism was thus shared in service, not imposed through violence and today’s “nationalists” seem to think that they should do. The police look the other way when they beat up their opponents even in a court of law as it happened in the premises of Patiala House.

The Nazis came to power by using the democratic system. Once in power they used the army of hooligans to destroy its institutions. One sees a similar process in India today. 

It is difficult to believe that the police can behave the way they did without instructions from those who control their department. The “nationalists” first created a myth that anti-national slogans were raised by the students of JNU and then beat up the “traitors”. The police arrested some students for sedition despite a Supreme Court judgement that slogans do not constitute sedition and that only a call for violence does.

That call has come from the “nationalists” some of whom have gone on record that they are ready to repeat their violent acts and even shoot some traitors. All that the police have done is to issue arrest warrants against some lawyers. They have not been arrested though they are highly visible and are staging demonstrations. They arrested an MLA, gave him tea and snacks and let him off after fifteen minutes. But some of those whom the “nationalists” accuse of being traitors are in jail or are under threat of being arrested because they made statements that the self-styled protectors of Bharat dislike.

Thirdly the Nazis came to power by using the democratic system. Once in power they used the army of hooligans to destroy its institutions. One sees a similar process in India today.

Dissent that is a basic feature of a democracy is considered sedition. People are beaten up inside the court premises thus preventing the judiciary from doing their duty. Their position of power is used to take control of the educational and research institutions because all thinking has to support their concept of nationalism.

Universities that encourage students and teachers to think for themselves become subversive. A democratic principle is that dissent has to be tolerated even when it goes beyond what moderate elements may consider unacceptable as long as it does not preach or encourage violence. But today’s “nationalists” invent sedition in all forms of dissent of questioning of established positions. Violence takes the place of debate and lawlessness overtakes law abiding citizens.

These developments should challenge people who love the country to come together and reflect on the type of India they want. India has the option of behaving as a civilised nation that encourages debate, dissent and creative thinking or join the banana republics in which creative thinking is sedition.

(The author is a former founder-director of North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati is at present senior fellow in the same institution; this article also appeared in the Shillong Times)

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January 6, 1947 was the day that the Partition Resolution was accepted formally by the Indian National Congress. The attitude of different political players to the vivisection has been a matter of great public debate and academic de-construction. We shall bring to our readers the complex circumstances leading up to this divisison that uprooted and displaced six million lives and was the cause of untold brutality in killings and gendered violence, periodically
 
In this solemn and sacred hour, when our organisation is meeting for the first time under the flag of a free and independent India, it is our privilege and duty on behalf of ourselves and of students of Indian history in generations yet to come to pay our humble tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and the leaders of the Indian National Congress for their world-historic achievement. This is not a question on which the opinion of well-informed contemporaries can be overthrown by the researches of posterity. At a time when, in an atmosphere of inexpressible gloom, our country was lying helpless under the heel of the foreigner, without self-respect, without vision and without hope, it pleased the Lord to send to us the greatest Indian teacher of all times; and under his divinely inspired guidance we have, after a bloodless, struggle of thirty years, liquidated peacefully and by mutual agreement one of the most powerful empires the world has seen.
 
Neither the foreign ruler nor his Indian underling has suffered anything in the process; he wounds and the sufferings have been entirely ours, and ours also the glory of the moral endeavour and accomplishment. No Revolution so pacific and so momentous is found in the history of any land.
 
But this great achievement, unfortunately, has been accompanied by a great failure and tarnished by a greater disgrace. Soon after the Mutiny, the British Army Commission evolved the formula of ‘counterpoise of natives against natives’; and this formula was taken up by the civil administration and applied to every sphere, including the subsidisation of pseudo-religious movements, whose main purpose was the creation of friction and bitterness.

With the institution of communal electorates, a hideous arrangement which no western democracy would have tolerated for a moment, a political platform was prepared for the perpetuation of communal conflicts. Normally the representatives of a people are by their very position driven to seek the interests of the people as a whole, and the reconciliation of conflicting interests is one of their primary duties. But the artificial arrangement of communal electorates provided that a representative would be primarily judged not by what he did for the country or even for his community, but by what he did against the rest. The differences of religion, inevitable in a large country like ours, were thus fused into two opposite political groups, and their increasing hostility was inevitable as with each succeeding election, and an expanding body of voters, all representatives were required to appeal exclusively to masses of their own denomination.

It was obviously calculated that in this struggle the minority would lean more and more on the foreign power, and try to prove worthy of its support by sabotaging the national movement. So, finally, both east and west of our constitutional, secular and democratic Republic, they have created the Dominion of Pakistan under the pretence that it is a ‘Muslim State’. Of the horrors with which this Partition has been accompanied—of the six million people or more uprooted from the homes of their ancestors, of corpses that no one has been able to count, and of crimes seen and credibly reported—this is not the place to speak.

But no amount of provocation by the guilty can justify retaliation against those who are perfectly innocent. Musalmans, Sikhs and Hindus have proved themselves almost equally guilty; and this mark of disgrace on the forehead of our generation will be remembered for years to come. As a result of this hideous criminality, the like of which is not to be found in the whole history of our ancient land, no Hindu minority worth mentioning has been left in West Pun-jab and the Frontier Province; and as an inevitable consequence, which everyone with common sense could have foreseen, the Muslim minorities have been driven out of East Punjab and the adjoining Indian States.

At the moment it seems that the blame for the destruction of the Hindu minority in West Punjab and the Frontier rests entirely on the League leaders in Pakistan, while responsibility for the destruction of the Muslim minority, as a retaliatory measure, rests on the Hindu and Sikh leaders of the area concerned. But it is evident to the discerning even now, and will be accepted as an incontrovertible fact in course of time, that another agency has been at work and is responsible for the situation that has inevitably led to this holocaust. Alone among the political groups of this country, the Congress High Command has retained its sanity and balance and has adhered, in spite of increasing difficulties, to its conception of a democratic and secular state, which derives its strength from the age-old moral and spiritual traditions of our people. Judging from what it has accomplished, the Nehru Cabinet gives us a fine vision of the future National Governments of India.

When our organisation is meeting for the first time under the flag of a free and independent India, it is our privilege and duty on behalf of ourselves and of students of Indian history in generations yet to come to pay our humble tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and the leaders of the Indian National Congress for their world-historic achievement.
 
It is absolutely unnecessary to state that, so far as the historian of India is concerned, the country has always been one and indivisible, and will always continue to be so. The unity of India is one of the fundamental postulates of Indian moral consciousness, and the longing for a centralised administration has been one of the most visible and persistent demands of the political spirit of the Indians throughout the ages. All the greatest achievements of our past have somehow gone along with the establishment of a central administration at Pataliputra, Kannauj, Ujjain or Delhi. The breaking up of India into two separate States, or law-making organisations with exclusive citizenship, which creates a spirit of hostility, and in any case of independence and separateness, not only between the governments but also between the people, and the establishment of one of these States on a purely religious and communal basis—this sort of monstrosity has never been known to the history of our land. The public opinion of the Indian Union persistently demands a re-unification of the country. I will humbly put it to our rulers here that they are not only responsible to their electorate and their party-organisation but also to history—to the generations that have gone and the generations that are yet to come. National freedom without national unity loses three-fourths of its value, and the reunion of India should be one of our primary aims. But if the universal verdict of history is of any value, this reunion should be brought about by peaceful methods. Force in modern times creates more problems than it solves, and the alternative to peace is death. No intelligent Indian should talk of civil war.
 
Our demand for unity is based on the fact that, in spite of the present political arrangements, the conception of a common citizenship continues on both sides of the present artificial frontier. Given wise, statesman-like and patient guidance—even on one side— this conception will in due course re-assert itself in the political institutions of our people.
 
Current political problems do not come within the scope of our Congress, but the study of Indian civilisation in all its aspects is our primary aim. It is also (as Carlyle puts it) the duty of the historian ‘to tell what o’clock it is in the history of mankind’.
 
On the fundamental unity of our country—the sacred land where the black gazelles graze and the munja grass grows and the pan-leaf is eaten, and where the material and the spiritual are organically interwoven—there has been no difference between the Indian intelligentsia at any time. But the character of that unity has differed from age to age, and I will content myself with examining one aspect of it, which in some respects is of supreme importance.
 
Of the founders of Indian unity and Indian civilisation during the Indus Valley period and the centuries preceding it, no memory remains either in legend or song. But it is possible to define the character of the civilisation of the Hindus or the Indians (both these words are derived from our frontier river, the Indus) as a unified growth within the historic memory of our people. Its basis is Dharma, the universal law of morality which must always regulate the relation of man and man. Hinduism has no known founder, no dogma or exclusive standpoint and, interpreted in its largest sense; it has no scriptural texts in which all are required to believe. The Khwarazmian scholar, Abū Raiḥān Alberūnī, in trying to discover a universal principle in the religion of the Indians in the early eleventh century, thought he found it, first, in the doctrine of metempsychosis, and, secondly, in the belief in the one and unseen God; the Hindu intelligentsia, he tells us, ‘would never dream of worshipping an image manufactured to represent Him’. But philosophical atheism has been freely tolerated in our land and belief in metempsychosis has not been so universal as Alberuni supposed.
 
Still, the first foreign scholar, who made a critical study of Indian ‘culture-groups’, could not fail to note that supreme principle of Indian civilisation—the principle of toleration—without which the co-existence of the ‘culture-groups’ would not have been possible. But he underrated its importance. ‘On the whole,’ he says, ‘there is very little disputing about theological topics among themselves; at the most they will fight about words, but they will never stake their souls or their bodies or their property on religious controversy’.
 
It was not to be expected that in a country so large all people would develop the same world-philosophy or agree on a uniform mode of living. So almost from the beginning of our recorded history every Indian, who had the capacity to do so, has been free to organise any sort of sect, philosophical school, religious order or sangha. The process, as we all know, still continues. There was, if anything, too much of freedom and even criminal practices were tolerated where outsiders were not concerned. These culture-groups were by their nature expansive and lived by proselytisation. One and all they tried to get an all India status, for without such a status their footing could never be secure. And in the course of their organisational work, they inevitably drew closer the bonds between the various parts of the country. All that is great in the history of the Hindu period is due to the achievements of the culture-groups. The free development of these culture-groups was only possible on the basis of tolerance; religious persecution is totally alien to the spirit of our land. But it followed as a necessary corollary that every Indian had to be a member of some culture-group. The man with no culture-group to protect him and to guarantee his behaviour was a complete outlaw.
 
The advent of Islam made no essential difference in the general character of our country. But in order to lift the curtain that, for political purposes, has been laid over the history of our middle ages, I feel bound to make a few explanatory remarks. There is no term in classical Arabic or Persian that can express the conceptions of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘state’, which Europe evolved in the sixteenth century. The conceptions themselves are absent. The term ‘Allah and His Prophet’ are used by the Quran; but all educated Muslims have during the last thirteen centuries agreed with Imam Abu Hanifa that there could be no question of continuing the government of ‘Allah and His Prophet after the death of Hazarat Ali.
 
All Muslim governments, thereafter, have been secular organisations, combinations of politicians for their political objectives, bourgeois affairs. Neither in India nor elsewhere did medieval Islam ever postulate a ‘Muslim state’ as distinct from a government by Muslim officers—apart perhaps from a sort of spirit-consoling dream that the government of ‘Allah and His Prophet’ would be possible once more when Jesus Christ arises or Imam Mahdi returns. Concerning existing governments, and their possible alternatives, Muslim religious consciousness of the higher type has always adhered to the traditions of Imam Hambal and Imam Abu Hanifa and regarded them as sinful organisations whose service is forbidden to the true seekers after Allah. In the religious literature of the Indian Muslims, there is no idolisation of the great rulers of Delhi and, so far as possible, even reference to contemporary rulers is avoided.
 
The overwhelming mass of the Muslims of this land have an undoubted Indian paternity. It is true that there are innumerable Muslim families in India who claim a foreign origin, but this affiliation is purely fictitious. Owing to the Suljuq, Ghazz and Mongol invasions of Central Asia and Afghanistan, such Turkish fugitives as could do so migrated to our country in distress during the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. It is these fugitives, and not the so-called ‘invaders’, who have given us the only block of immigrants worth mentioning in the history of the Middle Ages. But their identity has been completely lost, and no one meets Central Asian Turkish families in India today. As to the Indian Muslim ‘foreigners’ of the last four or five centuries, the general practice has been that a Rajput converted to Islam is called a ‘Pathan’, while a converted working man and peasant is pushed still higher and becomes an Arab of the Quresh tribe. Most converts to the new faith belonged either to the lower peasantry of the countryside or to the working classes of the cities, and mostly to the latter. There is a complete historical justification for the claim of the ‘Quresh’ and ‘Ansar’ political organisations that, between themselves, they represent 80% of the Musalmans of India. Their proportion is in all probability higher still. The Muslim culture-group or millat has always been what it is today—a body belonging primarily to the indigenous working class and the petit bourgeoisie. This is also the primary reason for its survival, in spite of the complete disappearance of the Turkish governing class.

At the moment it seems that the blame for the destruction of the Hindu minority in West Punjab and the Frontier rests entirely on the League leaders in Pakistan, while responsibility for the destruction of the Muslim minority, as a retaliatory measure, rests on the Hindu and Sikh leaders of the area concerned.
 
In days when we were suffering from an inferiority complex owing to the brutal fact of a foreign government, which seemed unshakable, we made the best we could of our medieval Rajput Rajas and Turkish Sultans. That attitude is no longer necessary; and the plain truth has to be told that all our medieval governments were intensely exclusive aristocratic organisations. Some of them worked for the public good; others most certainly did not. But one and all they were confined to the cream of the aristocracy— Rajputs among the Hindus, Turkish and Afghan bureaucrats and nobles among the Muslims. War and politics were games which only the well-born were allowed to play. The governments were in no sense governments of the people. An analysis of the officers of the Moghul and the pre-Moghul governments of Delhi will reveal the plain and sad fact that Muslims of Indian birth were rigidly excluded from the higher military and civil offices of the state. An Indian Muslim had as little chance of becoming a warlord of the Empire of Delhi as a Hindu Shudra had of ascending a Rajasthan throne. The so-called Muslim period of Indian history is really the Turkish period with two Afghan interludes in between. It seems ironical giving the name of Muslim period to a time when the Musalmans of India, by the unfortunate fact of their birth, were excluded from all high offices. The position of the Indian Musalmans in the middle ages was, if a very rough simile be allowed, not unlike that of the Indian Christians during the British period. The democratic spirit of Islam and its principle of equality has been a powerful social influence among the indigenous Muslims, but it would be vain to regard our medieval period as an expression of Islamic democracy or Islamic equality. Neither of the two great Empires of the middle ages gave to the Indian Muslims the representation they have got in the present Congress regime.
 
To sum up: Government during the Hindu period had been a function of the aristocracy, never of the culture-groups or their leaders. The same principle of political organisation continued during the Turkish period with a change in the personnel of the governors.
 
Two reforms in this time-honoured system, which was becoming unworkable, were attempted by Akbar the Great. First, he combined the Turkish and Rajput nobility into the bureaucracy of the Moghul Empire with remarkable success. Secondly, in consonance with his policy of sulh-i-kul (universal peace), he made a vigorous attempt to harmonise all Indian culture-groups. In the semi-religious and non-religious spheres, like architecture, painting and music, his success was significant. But in the purely religious sphere he failed completely. We need not be surprised at the fact that the greatest of our medieval rulers failed in achieving what Indian public opinion alone can accomplish.
 
The English government succeeded against its European rivals because, among other things, it was out to establish not the dominance of a Christian culture-group but merely of an English governing class with the help of existing Indian vested interests, and of interests specially created to support the foreign power. So, on the one hand, it subsidised a conflict of culture-groups and established for itself the prestige of being the sole possible arbiter between them. On the other hand, it felt that as a governing authority it would not be able to function successfully unless it deprived the culture-groups of a large sphere of their power. It is to this fact that we owe the establishment of the modern judiciary and the promulgation of the Anglo-Indian codes. But even here it had a historical precedent to follow. Criminal law even in ancient times had been a function of government. The Moghul Empire had developed its own system of criminal law, independent of the shariat and the shastras, along with principles of adjudication where litigants of two different culture-groups were concerned.
 
The problem must not now be viewed in its medieval setting. The situation has completely changed. While, on the one hand, Akbar and all previous rulers could only give us an all-India or imperial government, the national movement has given us a sovereign or law-making State. On the other hand, the culture-groups have also completely altered their basic character along with their aims and objects during two centuries of British rule. The old culture-group provided for its members the road to salvation. Incidentally it also promised a ‘culture-group paradise’ and denied that paradise to all other culture-groups. But since their points of differences could only be settled in the other world, there was no difficulty in working on the principle of religious toleration here below. The modern culture-groups have completely shifted their ground; they have become ‘communities’ seeking their material interests at the expense of other communities and the general body. There is little or no theological conflict in the land worth mentioning; only the material interests of the old historic groups are involved. And since material interests, unlike spiritual values, are believed to be hostile, so that one group can have nothing except at the expense of another, the conflict has become increasingly bitter. The only relation between the modern community and the old culture-group is the fact of physical descent and such historic continuity as physical descent involves. The spiritual values so dear to the culture-groups of the past have almost completely vanished; simultaneously what was best in the moral and spiritual acquisitions of the old culture-groups has become the inheritance of all Indians. The tragedy of it from the view-point of the Indian nationalist lies in the fact that while the historic culture-groups are more and more inclined towards materialism and, I feel sorry to add, even to gangsterism, the hold of the ‘community’ over the individual is as complete today as it was in the middle ages. It is impossible even now to be an Indian without being member of an Indian community. There is, I believe, at present no graveyard in the land to which an Indian could lay claim merely on the basis of his Indian citizenship, and admission to every one of them lies through some community-rite. Apart from the meagre and insufficient provisions of the Act of 1873, the Indian citizen has neither a law of marriage nor a law of inheritance. Social conventions and social prejudices, stronger than they have ever been in the past, strengthen the slavery of the individual. He is completely at the mercy of the community and its leaders in every sphere, including even the sacred sphere of his personal and domestic life.
 
This, I believe, is the real challenge of the hour. The old culture-groups have (as already remarked) no longer any specific spiritual concepts nor any particular modes of life, except such as have survived through dead habit. It has been generally accepted in India since Akbar’s time that there is little or no difference between the fundamental principles of religions, and our communal leaders do not raise the religious issue. The struggle is entirely between the self-seeking communities, descended from the old culture-groups, and the national welfare as represented by the State. The present-day ‘communalist’ is a creature of tradition, a tradition so vitiated as to be next door to barbarism. The future ‘citizen’ will be a creation of laws consciously planned for the public good. The fundamental task of the Indian State, therefore, is to create ‘a National Culture-group’ or ‘a National Community’, which may inherit all that is best in the culture-groups of old, and set us free from the vicious interests, which are seeking to dominate our lives. The process requires a thorough uprooting of old and proved evils and a careful co-ordination of elements of proved value. Differences of religion there are and will be; in this there is no harm. But unless the Revolution succeeds in creating one State, one Law and one National Community for the whole land, we will be faced with a period of anarchy such as India has never witnessed in the course of her long and much-troubled past.
 
The history of the British period can now be written, and it is to be hoped that it will be written without enmity or resentment— that all defects of Indian character and Indian institutions, which made the foreign rule possible, will be frankly confessed and every element of value that we have received from the British will be gratefully recognised. The material for it in this country, though not complete, is both extensive and unexplored.

The unity of India is one of the fundamental postulates of Indian moral consciousness, and the longing for a centralised administration has been one of the most visible and persistent demands of the political spirit of the Indians throughout the ages.
 
We have, further, to squarely face the fact that our historical vision will and must undergo a complete change with reference to all our past. History, of course, begins with fact-finding. But there are always gaps between facts, and these have to be filled up by some sort of hypothesis. History at its very foundation cannot, therefore, get rid of a certain pragmatic element. There is, on the other hand, the personal equation of the writer—the tendency, for example, of many historians like Froude, Emile Ludwig and Harold Lamb and, I add with considerable hesitation, a fairly large section of our own writers on ancient and medieval India, to live in a dream world of their own construction. The temptation of pandering to the fanaticism of our culture-group or community, I feel confident, most of us can resist. But we have to take care that the traditions of our culture-group do not subconsciously colour our vision. History, as a Persian writer has rightly remarked, is quickly exported from the academy to the bazar and ‘shopkeepers, who cannot distinguish white from black and black from white, confidently venture to pass judgments on historical matters’. In the peculiar conditions of our country, when history as a subject of basic education will be taught to an increasing number of raw youths on a nation-wide scale, we cannot be too particular about the moral issues involved. The historian must speak the truth. On that question there can be no two opinions. But history is a normative science; the historian is not only concerned with facts but also with judgments; and this involves a conception of morality and justice. The Greek historians wrote to show the supremacy of the free-born Greeks over the barbarians, and the Romans to harp on the right of the aristocracy of their City to dominate the world. A very large number of English histories of the nineteenth century were written to serve the cause of British imperialism. The Indians also have to find some standard, subjective, as well as objective. If we are true to the teachings of our greatest thinkers from the composers of the Vedic hymns to Mahatma Gandhi, our moral standards will be universal and absolute. Every man and every movement must be judged by the highest standards of morality of which that age was capable. Humbly, but confidently, I feel that if we here could adopt for history the standards accepted by our ancestors for the highest interpretation of religion and ethics, it will be a refreshing and much-needed contribution to the historical vision of mankind. If on the other hand, we merely write to justify the exploitation of one group of Indians by another in our own country—or of man by man anywhere—our freedom has been won in vain.
 
It is to be hoped that the National Government will be able to do something about a matter that has been distressing most of us— provision of the basic material of history.
 
The National Archives is an excellent institution, but its scope is limited. The Archæological Department deserves the gratitude of all students of history, but its sphere of work has to be expanded. The basic material for the history of a country like ours would include everything from the stone-implements of the earliest man to the latest government records, and my humble suggestion is that we should have at Delhi a National Institute similar to the British Museum and Provincial Institutes at the provincial capitals. The material collected should not be confined to history only; everything that concerns Indian culture should be there. The unfortunate fact is that individual effort and enterprise can do very little in this sphere, and the development of sound Indian scholarship is conditioned by the state undertaking this necessary task. Without it we are helpless. All available material should be provided at one place or at a few easily accessible spots. My humble suggestion is that we should put our heads together and submit a complete and detailed plan for the consideration of our Governments.
 
The proper and necessary sphere of state-action is the provision of material, including all other steps that are necessary for its proper utilisation, such as the publication of photographic copies and of translation which private enterprise will not take up. But the state should not interfere in the question of interpretation. Organisations like ours are entitled to partial help from the state, but these grants should be unconditional. The writing of histories should not, as a rule, be directly subsidised by the state and the creation of monopolies in text-books is objectionable on many grounds. In those rare cases where a work of great historical merit, or of merely local value, cannot find a market, its publication should be left to state-aided and semi-official bodies. Under the old regime we wrote in a spirit of constraint; even when we wrote courageously, the fact of foreign domination deflected our minds in some direction or other. Our national leaders should now be willing to pass on to us a fraction of the freedom they have obtained. A state-dominated interpretation of history is one of the most effective means of sabotaging democracy. A free India implies a free history of India in which every point of view has a right to be heard. Free and untrammelled discussion will lead us to the truth; and there is no other way of reaching it.
 
The last consideration I wish to submit is necessary in view of the changing conditions of our country, and the fear that it may raise controversies does not justify silence. Most writers of Indian history in the past, it has to be frankly confessed, have belonged to the ‘bourgeois culture group’ and this fact has inevitably coloured their vision. Modern works on Indian history do not show any antipathy to the peasants and the working classes, but their attitude to the higher classes has been one of uncritical adulation.
 
So apart from some specific phases—the constitution of the Hindu village organisation, for instance, or our medieval land tenures—the life of the Indian working classes has received scant attention at our hands. The general tendency has been to turn away from the problem; the little good that has been done to them by our revenue administrations and royal and aristocratic charities has been boastfully recorded. The great misfortunes under which they have laboured throughout the centuries go completely unnoticed. I do not wish to postulate the theory of class-conflicts, nor am I unaware of how difficult the application of this theory becomes when, regardless of the fact that it is based on the experience of Europe during the modern machine age, it is applied to all countries and all times. That the lower classes have always been taxed heavily to maintain their superiors is undeniable; but considering that man over the larger part of the earth’s surface—Australia, Africa south of the Sahara, Siberia and the two Americas—has been unable to make any progress in the course of history, it is difficult to decide whether, in the interest of humanity as a whole, aristocratic and bourgeois leadership has, or has not, deserved the price it has exacted.
 
Still the fact remains that we are content, like our predecessors, to survey the Indian social landscape from the foot of the royal throne. The lot of the Indian worker and everything connected wish it—his wages, the prices of commodities necessary for the maintenance of his family, the struggles of his life, his joys, his sufferings and his hopes—all these are a virgin field for the historical investigator. The material is not so plentiful as one could wish, but industrious investigation will enable us to get a fairly complete picture. The same applies to the culture of the working class groups; a few elements of it have worked their way into recognition, but most of them have only been noticed in order to be condemned. The free India of today demands an urgent rectification of this ‘oversight’.
 
We are at the threshold of the machine-age. Most of our future problems will be labour problems and problems of social reconstruction. It is not our duty to knock down old temples; every element of value in them must be preserved. But we have to build a new shrine. The tendency towards socialism will gain in weight and volume as with every succeeding year the working classes strive to come to their own. The historian must not fail to do his duty by India as, in the generations to come, she marches forward courageously and hopefully to prostrate herself with reverence and devotion at the mist-shrouded steps that lead to the shrine of her new-found, classless God.
 
(Presidential Address by Professor Mohammad Habib at the Indian History Congress, Bombay, December 1947; the title of the original was The Present and The Past, Our Approach to History)

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