"RSS Doesn't Speak for All Hindus" : Vikram Sampath

 

This BJP govt is easy to understand. If you read what Modi, Shah, Nadda read when they were young

Shekhar Gupta in The Print

In this heavy headline- and intrigue-laden political environment, we run the risk of missing out on three vital pointers. Let’s go chronologically.

First, on the day of the consecration of the Ram temple at Ayodhya, many key handles of the Bharatiya Janata Party shared the ‘original’ version of “Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram”. Or what’s called the Ram Dhun, composed by maestro, late Vishnu Digambar Paluskar.

Then, the prime minister, in his latest Mann Ki Baat, displayed the original first page and Preamble of the Constitution – that’s without the words “secular and socialist” that Indira Gandhi added in her sixth-year parliament in 1976.

And finally, Nirmala Sitharaman, in her budget speech, introduced the idea of a committee to look at the “challenge of population growth”. Each of these represents key elements of the BJP/RSS thinking and helps us understand the politics of the Modi government.

If you are curious why the Ram Dhun is an issue, do note that the original being shared now does not have the second line we have all sung through three generations and which we presumed was part of the original: “Ishwar, Allah tero naam, sab ko sanmati de Bhagwan” (Ishwar or Allah, you are the same God, please bless everyone with wisdom). This line was a Gandhian modification to give the composition a secular flavour.

On the day of the Pran Pratishtha, the BJP was reminding us which Ram Dhun, in its view, was secular, and which pseudo-secular. The tune also made an appearance at the Beating the Retreat ceremony later in the week (after 2016), and you’d wonder which words were being hummed by the BJP’s leading lights.

The context of the original Preamble is BJP is reminding you the word “secular” is a latter-day insertion by an illegitimate Lok Sabha (its term extended in the Emergency in 1976). Like that Ishwar-Allah line in Ram Dhun. Population growth is another old RSS/BJP concern, never mind that Indian birth rates are already at replacement levels and declining. In fact, we risk facing the challenge of declining and ageing population by the time our per capita incomes are at around $3,500, while the Chinese find a crippling threat at the $12,500 figure today. Never argue with ideological beliefs, however.

Now, we come to harder politics. Over its decade in power, the Modi government has acquired a reputation of keeping everything close to its chest, of always succeeding in surprising the closest watchers of Indian politics.

But is this government really so mysterious and inscrutable? Is there a key to breaking the code of this BJP’s politics, a window to its mind? The key lies in understanding its ideological commitment.

We have to be sobered by how cruel this Modi-Shah, and now Modi-Shah-Nadda approach has been. Particularly cruel to the reputation of the dwindling tribe of senior political journalists. This particularly includes many claimants to inside knowledge, and who were acknowledged to be, and also see themselves as being close to the BJP.

Nobody saw demonetisation coming, or the choice of Yogi Adityanath in Uttar Pradesh, the overnight changes in Jammu & Kashmir, passing of CAA, ban on triple talaq, crackdown on those seen as the radical Left sympathisers – whom the BJP calls Urban Naxals. And the latest choices for the three Hindi states’ chief ministers.

We might have been less surprised if we had paid more attention to understanding the BJP/RSS ideology.

For Modi’s critics, some of this comes from the abhorrence and contempt for that ideology. They are also seen as not particularly intellectually endowed. The fact is, they are in power for a decade and, instead of fading away, keep getting stronger. There is, therefore, juice in that ideology for enough voters.

If India’s rulers for a decade haven’t read the literature that shaped the older, generally Congress-friendly ‘secular’ ideology, it isn’t as if they haven’t been reading anything. They’ve read their contemporary scriptures, from Hedgewar, Golwalkar, and Savarkar to Deen Dayal Upadhyaya.

The Modi government’s economic moves, for example, would be less of a surprise if you’d read two works by Deen Dayal Upadhyaya: Integral Humanism, and The Two Plans: Promise, Performance, Prospects. You will then have a clearer understanding of why the Modi government ensures the delivery of so many benefits, especially free foodgrains and cash, directly to the poorest.

If you are daunted by entire books, please do google Antyodaya. It is Deen Dayal Upadhyaya’s idea of the state’s first responsibility being to the last man standing, of ensuring nobody is left out. To that extent, it isn’t so different from Gandhi’s: “I will give you a talisman…recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman]…”.

The other book, The Two Plans, is his critique of Nehruvian planned economics. More specifically, it talks about the first and the second five-year plans. It is just that when the book was published, nobody took the Jana Sangh (BJP’s original avatar) and the RSS so seriously. But you’ve got to acknowledge that the RSS minds plugged on, undaunted.

Some of the latest emphasis on “aatmanirbharta”, shepherding and patronising Indian entrepreneurs to become big and rich, protecting them from global competition, are all ideas you can see trickling down from here. Every Sarsanghchalak has spoken about these. The idea of one nation, one election comes, by the way, from Golwalkar. You can check out golwalkarguruji.org. It’s been resurrected by his followers in the 50th year of his death.

You can’t ignore these texts however much you dislike the BJP/RSS ideology. Unlike the texts of the Left, they do not lean on the great global names of the 19/20th century political history: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao. Unlike Nehru’s Discovery of India for the Congress, these aren’t so enjoyable. The RSS/BJP Gurus are Indian.

Very few voters are familiar with them, unlike the writings of Nehru and Gandhi in our school textbooks. But that doesn’t matter. The most important thing is, people are voting for those following these texts. The coming generations of Indians will also be reading them in their school textbooks.

The essential difference between the BJP and the Congress governments of the past is the commitment to ideology. The Congress leaderships had much greater flexibility. Ideology guided its policies, but never governed them. For the BJP, it is different. Its commitment to ideology is almost fundamentalist.

The changes in Kashmir, Muslim personal laws, building of the Ram temple and consecration under the prime minister’s watch, and a whole lot of the economic changes, including import restraints and PLI incentives, were all drawn from this ideology. If you delve deeper, even demonetisation. If we were reading their texts, we’d be less surprised.

That’s why, read again the three instances I listed earlier on. Going ahead in the Modi-BJP (read RSS) epoch, we should expect a concerted “cleaning up” of what’s seen as pseudo-secular contamination, from the Ram Dhun to the Preamble. And population growth (read Muslim population) will be a focus area.

Late Prof Stephen Cohen was asked why the CIA failed to pick anything on the Vajpayee government’s Pokhran-2 tests. He famously said the problem with intelligence people is, they never read anything that isn’t marked classified. Like the BJP election manifesto. If only they had read it, they would’ve known the tests will follow soon after they were sworn in. Apply the same test to our understanding of the Modi government and the BJP now. Start reading their texts. None is marked classified.

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Why India’s wealthy happily donate to god and govt but loathe helping needy and poor

Be it Amitabh Bachchan or Virat Kohli, India’s rich and famous are quick to lecture or follow PM Modi’s diktat. But selfless charity is missing among most Indians writes KAVEREE BAMZAI in The Print


Migrant workers in Delhi trying to get back to Uttar Pradesh amid the nationwide Covid-19 lockdown | Photo by Suraj Singh Bisht | ThePrint


The modern world is facing its worst crisis in coronavirus pandemic and what are Indian celebrities doing? Well, many clapped and banged pots and pans on 22 March at 5 pm following  Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call, and filmed themselves while doing so. Others are showing us how to do dishes and clean the home, participating in mock celebrity bartan-jhadu-poncha (BJP) challenges. The rest of the world is trying to help find a cure for the deadly virus or providing monetary assistance to the poor or arranging equipment for medical workers, underlining yet again the generosity gap between other countries’ and India’s elite.

Tennis star Roger Federer donates $1.02 million to support the most vulnerable families in Switzerland during the coronavirus crisis; India’s former cricket captain Sourav Ganguly gives away Rs 50 lakh worth of rice in collaboration with the West Bengal-based company Lal Baba Rice, in what is clearly a sponsored, mutual brand-building exercise. Chinese billionaire Jack Ma donates one million face masks and 500,000 coronavirus testing kits to the United States, and pledged similar support for European and African countries; Amitabh Bachchan uses social media to spread half-baked information — such as ‘flies spread coronavirus’ — and wonders if the clanging of pots, pans and thalis defeats the potency of the virus because it was Amavasya on 22 March (he later deleted the tweet).

Hollywood’s golden couple Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds announce they will donate $1 million to Feeding America and Food Banks Canada that work for low-income families and the elderly; while Indian cricket and Bollywood’s beautiful match Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma get into familiar lecture mode, asking everyone to “stay home and stay safe”. This follows Anushka Sharma’s earlier run-in with a ‘luxury car’ passenger where she ticked him off for violating PM Modi’s diktat of Swachh Bharat. 

Where the rich are charitably poor

What makes rich and famous Indians so quick to lecture, especially on issues in congruence with government initiatives, but so loathe to help the poor desperately in need? The 2010 Giving Pledge by Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, to which five wealthy Indians are signatories, was meant to give a gigantic push to philanthropy worldwide. This was followed by India’s then minister of corporate affairs Sachin Pilot making it legally mandatory for companies to put aside charity funds for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) projects, making India the first country in the world to pass such a legislation. This year, an attempt to criminalise non-compliance was eventually softened after an uproar from corporates.

Philanthropy is up. According to Bain and Company’s annual Philanthropy Report 2020, domestic philanthropic funding has rapidly grown from approximately Rs 12,500 crore in 2010 to approximately Rs 55,000 crore in 2018. Contributions by individual philanthropists have also recorded strong growth in the past decade. In 2010, individual contributions accounted for 26 per cent of private funding, and as of 2018, individuals contribute about 60 per cent of the total private funding in India, estimated at approximately Rs 43,000 crore.

But in a prophetic warning, the report underscored the need for philanthropy ”to now consciously focus on India’s most vulnerable” and called for targeted action for the large population caught in a vicious cycle of vulnerability — precisely those worst hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

“The disadvantaged,” it said, “are unable to adapt to unpredictable situations that can push them deeper into vulnerability, such as climate change, economic risks and socio-political threats.” Even Azim Premji, who recently made news by committing 34 per cent of his company’s shares — worth $7.5 billion or Rs 52,750 crore — to his continuing cause, the public schooling system in India, has not set aside anything specific for those affected by the coronavirus. India’s second-richest man was the first Indian to sign The Giving Pledge.

Vaishali Nigam Sinha, Chief Sustainability Officer at Renew Power, started charity a few years ago to promote giving. Her experience has been less than happy. Indians, she finds, have refrained from planned giving for broader societal transformation. “Giving is individualistic and not driven via networks, which can be quite effective as we have seen in other parts of the world like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And in India, giving is usually done to get something back – to god for prosperity, to religious affiliations for advocacy of these platforms, and to government for business returns. Wealthy Indians need to learn to give in a planned way for greater social impact and transformation,” she says.

Little surprise then that India was ranked 124 in World Giving Index 2018 — and placed 82 in the 10th edition of the index compiled by Charities Aid Foundation looking at the data for 128 countries over the 10-year period. 

All of us are in the same boat

But it’s not about celebrities or wealthy Indians alone. We are all in it together. Special planes are sent to bring back Indians stuck abroad due to the pandemic, but labourers and daily wage workers are left to walk hundreds of kilometres to reach their villages. Doctors treating coronavirus patients will be applauded but not allowed to enter their homes.

JNU sociologist Maitrayee Chaudhuri calls it a potent mix of selfishness, self care and entitlement. ”We have a complete disregard for people on the margins and on whose labour we sit. It is all about us and our safety,” she says. This communal selfishness is very different from the churning in the 19th and early 20th century, which led to enormous social reform movements. The slow and meticulous destruction of ‘secularism’, ‘socialism’ and ‘liberalism’ has helped. As has the rise of neoliberal ‘individual self centredness’. “Not to talk about smartphone dumbness,” she adds. There is an absence of empathy everywhere, filled instead with the noise of thalis being banged and bells being rung to show symbolic gratitude to those who serve us.

The examples of those who are giving are few and far in between. There is comedian Kapil Sharma, who is giving Rs 50 lakh to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund and southern superstars Pawan Kalyan, Ram Charan and Rajinikanth. But in general, our stars have chosen to share very little. Former cricket captain M.S. Dhoni, for instance, has been reported to have donated Rs 1 lakh to a charity trust in Pune, which led to some criticism and a counter from his wife Sakshi, even though it wasn’t immediately clear which incident she was alluding to.

India Inc hasn’t fared much better either. When PM Modi asked everyone to show their support for health workers fighting coronavirus by applauding them, one of the country’s most proactive industrialists was among the first to tweet his support, and also one of the first to be trolled for it. He quickly responded by offering to manufacture ventilators, among other things. Reliance is reportedly donating a hospital for coronavirus patients, weeks after Isha Ambani had hosted a Holi party on 7 March — when the number of coronavirus cases had rapidly begun to rise. Her mother, after all, is the queen of giving, contributing to an array of eclectic causes, and has been honoured for it by getting elected to the board of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019 or by becoming the first Indian woman in 2016 to be elected to the International Olympic Committee for supporting the sporting dreams of seven million Indian children.

But for India’s corporate class, it took a nudge from the Principal Scientific Adviser K. Vijay Raghavan to remind them that healthcare and preventive healthcare are covered under Schedule VII of the Companies Act: “Hence supporting any project or programme for preventing or controlling or managing COVID19 is legitimate CSR (CSR) expenditure.” He also quickly got an office memorandum issued by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs a day later. 

Elites’ capitalist worldview

Is there a kindness deficit in India’s business elite as well, which mirrors the lack of empathy of the country’s middle class? Business writer and bestselling author Tamal Bandyopadhyay says there are exceptions but culturally, the Indian business community is not exactly fond of opening up its purse on its own unless there is a compulsion. “Even when the companies are compelled, they find ways to evade it. We all know how many of them handle their CSR activities through creation of trusts. When it comes to buying electoral bonds, the story is different.

“Similarly, some of them get excited and rush to do certain things to express solidarity with the government in power. For instance, when the push is on digitalisation, there are takers for adopting towns for digitalisation in constituencies which matter. Essentially, most of them don’t believe in doing things no strings attached. Of course, there are people who believe in doing things quietly but they are exceptions,” he says.

In Western nations such as the US, philanthropy has deeper roots, with the practice essentially starting through donations to religious organisations. By the late 19th century, there was a rise of secular philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, which Stanford professor Rob Reich has noted as being controversial and one way of cleansing one’s hands of the dirty money.

In his book Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (2018), he has noted: “Big Philanthropy is definitionally a plutocratic voice in our democracy, an exercise of power by the wealthy that is unaccountable, non-transparent, donor-directed, perpetual, and tax-subsidised.”

A similar critique has come from Anand Giridharadas, whose Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World makes the argument that the global financial elite has reinterpreted Andrew Carnegie’s view that it’s good for society for capitalists to give something back to create a new formula: It’s good for business to do so when the time is right, but not otherwise. According to Reich, philanthropy works when it is able to find a gap between what governments do and what the market wants.

Few people exemplify this better than Bill Gates, who has for long donated to the cause of global healthcare. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already contributed $100 million to contain the virus, which he declared a pandemic even before the World Health Organisation did. The Foundation’s newsletter The Optimist is also performing a key role in spreading critical information about the Covid-19 pandemic and dispelling myths. 

Indian philanthropy isn’t secular

In India, the twain of religious giving and secular funding has not met. Management expert Nirmalya Kumar calls it a sensitive subject and says it is related to the philosophical concept underlying Indian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism that believe in reincarnation. “Our soul starts life again in a different physical form based on the karma of previous lives. As such, as has been sometimes articulated to me, the lack of charity is an unwillingness to interfere with the consequences that God has determined appropriate. Who am I to come in between the person and their God?”

But the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is traditionally known for engaging in social seva (not just swayam seva , or self service), evidenced by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s decision to feed five crore people during the 21-day lockdown. Sikhism has a well-developed tradition of Guru ka langar, and it was on full display at Shaheen Bagh when ordinary Sikhs served food to people protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

Some business families also do philanthropic work, among them the Nilekanis, the Murtys and the older Bharatrams (their founder Lala Shri Ram founded Delhi Cloth Mills and set up several educational institutes like Shri Ram College of Commerce and Lady Shri Ram College). Radhika Bharatram, joint vice chairperson, The Shri Ram Schools, recalls growing up in a middle class, progressive home where her sister and she were encouraged to volunteer at the Cheshire Home and Mother Teresa Home. Marriage, she says, brought her into a home where making contributions to society was in the family’s DNA and she is now involved as a volunteer with organisations such as Delhi Crafts Council, Blind Relief Association, SRF Foundation, the CII Foundation Woman Exemplar Programme, and Cancer Awareness Prevention and Early Detection. What drives her is empathy: When “you come from a position of privilege, there is joy in making a difference to someone else’s life”. She says it motivates her when the purpose is greater than the individual.

Unfortunately, the middle class and the elites have tended to keep self interest above public interest. In the new world after the coronavirus pandemic, this is one attitude it must change.

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In Hindi

It’s a fight between Hindus

THE assault by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) on West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has roots in India’s pre-Partition intra-Hindu battle lines. While the most cited example of this bitter rivalry is Mahatma Gandhi’s murder by Nathuram Godse, the pre-Independence standoff continues to stalk Indian society just as menacingly writes Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

The murders of Gauri Lankesh and her rationalist colleagues — allegedly by members of a Brahminical group suspected in Gandhi’s assassination — confirms this narrative. Theatre icon Girish Karnad who died of a prolonged illness on Monday was on the hit list of the group.

Banerjee is a Bengali Brahmin of a secular hue and the RSS is a Brahmin-led body of the Hindu right with origins in the intense intra-Brahmin rivalry that goes back to pre-Independence Poona, now Pune. It was here that nationalist leader B.G. Tilak took a violently hostile stance against M.G. Ranade’s social reformist interventions at annual Congress sessions. Tilak’s men would raid Ranade’s camps with sticks and stones, not dissimilar to the hooligans unleashed by the Hindu right today.

Given the spurious but all-pervasive critique of Indian liberalism under way, blaming them for the opposition’s rout by Narendra Modi, this equation between Brahmins and Brahmins (or Hindus and Hindus) needs to be clearly borne in mind. In today’s context, Prime Minister Modi is vocal about a Congress-free India, which in the Hindutva echo chamber may sound like Muslim-free India.


It is difficult to understand the grudge against Indian liberalism, when that is all one has to save and fight for.


But the real targets are reformist and secular Hindus. Tilak wanted a Ranade-free India. W.C. Bonnerjee, the socially regressive president of the Indian National Congress, would have preferred a Brahmo Samaj-free India. The Samaj was the progenitor of reformist Ishwarchand Vidyasagar, whose bust was razed by Hindutva hooligans in their anti-Mamata melee recently. Likewise, in ancient India, the nastiks or non-believers (from the Hindu fold) challenged Brahmin hegemony and suffered for it.

Gleaning from several recent reviews of the landslide Modi win, it appears to have become fashionable to accuse an imagined airy-fairy, unintelligent intellectual class, supposedly unconnected with the masses and allegedly confined to the upmarket Khan Market and British-built Lutyens’ Delhi, for the political debacle of the Congress and the left. The truth is that barring the excellent Bahri bookshop that still holds true to its intellectual purpose, Khan Market was transformed into a hub of flashy consumerism bereft of any thinking capacity from the 1990s, offering a fertile ground for the arriving right-wing menace to grow and prosper. As for Lutyens’ Delhi, that is where Hindutva leaders reside, including Prime Minister Modi, mostly in quarters vacated by assorted architects of Nehru’s India. It is difficult to understand the grudge against Indian liberalism, when that is all one has to save and fight for.

The flip side is just as true. The point apparently missed by Muslim votaries of Partition to everyone’s detriment in the subcontinent was that the more real fight had existed towards the end of British rule not between Hindus and Muslims, but between Hindus and Hindus and between Muslims and Muslims. Imagine if Jinnah had met Gauri Lankesh or Girish Karnad and joined their fight against regressive Hinduism. What if they had struck up an alliance with the Dravida social justice movement of southern India and other equally progressive Hindu (though some called themselves anti-Hindu ideologues)? The Muslim League might have had a different view about the future of a united India.

Just as there emerged regressive forces to disrupt Jinnah’s secular quest in Pakistan, the intense rivalry between Tilak and Ranade presaged the contest between a secular opposition and the RSS. Tilak represented British India’s reactionary impulses laced in narrow nationalism, which were to be co-opted by Hindutva forces.

Many of his heirs have lurked on in the Congress. They include those who bear hostility towards Dalit reformist Ambedkar and other progressive groups. Ranade, the reformist stalwart, embodied the best in India’s quest for social equality, an amalgam of progressive forces set into motion in Bengal by Ram Mohan Roy, and in Maharashtra by Jyotiba Phule and several others.

History is witness to this phenomenon on both sides of the border. Soon after the Quaid’s death, his dream of a secular state was smashed by those lurking in the shadows of Muslim revivalism. In India, Nehru, who dreamt like Jinnah of a parliamentary democracy with an egalitarian intent, was overwhelmed in his own cabinet by stubbornly regressive but powerful satraps. (Read Nehru’s desperate letters to the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh under whose watch the early Ayodhya-centric communal campaign was unleashed.)

Detractors of the Nehruvian worldview gained enormously from the rise of the Hindu right, which was spurred unwittingly by Manmohan Singh’s economic reforms, although he claims to be an ardent devotee of the first prime minister. Singh helped create a nouveau-riche middle class with definitive regressive and feudal social features. This new urban populace can hardly qualify as a liberal vanguard of anything. Rather it has swamped the main opposition Congress as much as it has spurred the consolidation of the RSS and its many arms, including the BJP.

It may disturb some in the left to be reminded that the neo-liberal consumer society did not spare their rank and file either. If after 70 years of struggle for the Orwellian sugar-candy mountain, all that the left have to show for their cultural legacy is the annual Durga Puja in Bengal, then it becomes easy to see how the cadres slip out occasionally to vote for the BJP or desert the party altogether. Worse, the left’s innate sectarianism does not allow for a pause to see that if Mamata Banerjee goes, the Hindutva sway over Bengal would be complete.

Rather than holding her alliance with Muslims responsible for the BJP’s victory in Bengal — a dishonest assessment — the left should make an existential accord with Mamata to stave off its own and ultimately India’s disastrous denouement.

“Subhashit Vidya Vivadaya…” - The Deep Roots of RSS's Anti-Intellectualism and its Disregard for Dissent

The history of the organisation makes it clear that its ranks have been taught to develop an aversion to fresh thinking. Mohan Bhagwat's comments confirmed that this is the case last week when Pranab Mukherjee attended an RSS event in Nagpur.

Vidyadhar Date in The Wire




The antipathy of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to liberal values is well known. But even then, it is astonishing that RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat should have condemned as wicked those who use vidya or knowledge for dissent.

He did this in the presence of former president Pranab Mukherjee at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur on June 7 by quoting a Sanskrit saying that begins, “Subhashit Vidya Vivadaya…” . This observation seems to have attracted little attention in the media.

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat speaks as former president Pranab Mukherjee looks on, June 7, 2018. Credit: PTI

What an unhappy contrast Bhagwat’s observation makes to the understanding of vidya by Mahatma Jyotirao Phule and Dr B.R. Ambedkar, two of the foremost and relevant social thinkers of Maharashtra.

Back in the 19th century Phule had said, “Vidyevina Mati Geli…”, essentially that a lack of education leads to lack of wisdom, which leads to lack of morals, which leads to lack of progress, which leads to lack of money, which leads to the oppression of the lower classes (see what havoc lack of education can cause).

And Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s main exhortation to the downtrodden masses was: “Educate, Agitate, Organise“.

So, for these wise men, education and knowledge was the basic need for the common people. For the RSS, an enlightened mass of people are a severe threat to the established order. This is perhaps why it fears dissent and harbours a hostility towards it.

Maharashtra has a formidable tradition of learning and dissent in the modern period since the 19th century and it is not surprising that the RSS should be so uneasy with it. Lokmanya Tilak, though seen by many as a conservative, also had strong working class sympathies, so much so that Shapurji Saklatvala, a Communist MP of Britain, wrote to him in 1920 to launch an international communist labour party in India, (as quoted in an article on Karl Marx and class conflict by Prof J.V. Naik, the well known history researcher).

V.K. Rajwade, a fiercely independent historian in the early 20 century wrote a radical history of marriage in ancient India. The then young Communist S.A. Dange thought it was in line with Engels’s treatise Family, Private Property and the State. Rajwade also wandered all over Maharashtra at his own expense, collecting valuable records that became a great source for other historians.

Such was the passion for knowledge of S.V. Ketkar, a sociologist trained in the US in the first decade of the 20th century, that he single-handedly compiled an Encyclopedia in Marathi, also working as its publisher and salesman. For this he came to known as Dnyankoshkar .

The anti-intellectualism of the RSS and its role as a counter revolutionary force in politics and cultural life needs to be seen in this light.

Much of the thinking and teaching of cadres in its set-up is extremely uninspiring, monotonous, repetitive and boring as one of its former insiders, S.H. Deshpande, an ex-professor in the department of economics in Mumbai University has recorded in his writings of his days in the RSS. In contrast to the RSS leadership, V.D. Savarkar, Hindutva exponent, at least had a highly poetic imagination and was a creative writer of no small standing. Some of his poems sung by Lata Mangeshkar, including one about the longing for a return to the motherland, are moving.

V.D. Savarkar.

In contrast to the RSS’s aversion for fresh thinking, Savarkar emphasised the acquisition of knowledge. He said the moderates had produced many men of eminence. Can you name among you any man of the calibre of Gopal Krishna Gokhale or R.C. Dutt, he asked his followers.

Like Deshpande another dissenter was Raghunath Vishnu Ranade, (who happens to be my maternal uncle), political science professor who was close to M.S. Golwalkar, the then RSS chief, before he turned into a Marxist and a supporter of all progressive causes.

The leading light of the RSS in the thirties, Gopal alias Balaji Huddar, rebelled totally, became a Communist, fought in the Spanish civil war against Franco’s fascism in 1937, was imprisoned there for six months and had assumed the name of John Smith. He fought in the international battalion named after Sakaltvala, who had passed away a year earlier. Huddar had gone to Spain after studying in London and when he returned he was publicly felicitated in London at a meeting presided over by no less than Rajni Palme Dutt, a theoretician of the Communist Party of Britain and author of several books including India Today. No wonder the RSS does not like internationalism and dissent. (Huddar’s son, an engineer in the electricity board, lived in the same housing colony as mine in Nagpur during my younger days – he used to talk to me about his father.)

In contrast to Balaji Huddar, another Nagpur leader, B.S. Moonje of the Hindu Mahasabha, embraced the fascists and had a personal meeting with Mussolini in Italy in 1931. Nehru had studiously avoided meeting Mussolini during his visit to Europe.

In contrast to men like Moonje, the Communists produced a galaxy of stalwarts, internationalists and men of science. Dr Gangadhar Adhikari, a founder of the Communist party in India, had done his Ph. D. in chemistry in Germany and drawn inspiration from Einstein and Max Planck.

His nephew Dr Hemu Adhikari, who passed away in Mumbai last month, was a leading campaigner for promoting a scientific temper and rationality; he was a prominent stage and film actor and also a scientist in BARC, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. So it was natural that he should have played a prominent role in Marxist Bertolt Brecht’s play Life of Galileo. Dissent is at the core of the play.

Hemu Adhikari was also very particular that one should not only acquire knowledge of science and other subjects, one should also develop a scientific temper. That is why he was troubled when some of his scientist colleagues behaved unscientifically during the solar eclipse, considering it as inauspicious, closed their windows.

One organisation which came close to rivalling the RSS in terms of cadres and drills and shakhas was the Rashtra Seva Dal formed by socialists like N.G. Goray , Shirubhai Limaye, V.M. Hardikar and S.M.Joshi in 1941. Congress and socialists leaders woke up when their own children began getting attracted to the RSS and started attending shakhas.

Some socialists spread out to other states to launch work there like Bapu Kaldate went to Bihar where picked up Bhojpuri. Sane Guruji, a revered Gandhian writer, did a lot of work for the Dal with his satyagraha for entry of Dalits to the Pandharpur temple .

The Dal had a rich cultural repertoire with many prominent figures including poet Vasant Bapat, P.L. Deshpande, Nilu Phule and it influenced many including actor Smita Patil.

However, some Congressmen, who wanted to take over the Dal, were biased against the socialists and Morarji Desai, the then home minister of the Bombay state, placed curbs on the activities of the Dal in 1947 and the organisation subsequently went into a gradual decline.

In contrast to the RSS, Phule’s excellent movement was aptly named Satyashodhak Chalwal, dedicated to the pursuit of truth with an independent mind, education and social reform. But then some people converted the movement into a movement against Brahmins, not Brahminism and it was led by the upper class who kept out Dalits. That shattered the dream of creating a new society based on social and economic equality.

The RSS stands in opposition to this fine tradition of progressive thinking and debate in Maharashtra. By speaking out against dissent so openly, Bhagwat made it clear, even before waiting to see what Pranab Mukherjee would say, that he had no interest in debate and was not open to other ideas. Instead of talking about social ills, the RSS has closed all its windows.

The courts and matters of faith

Peter Ronald deSouza in The Hindu


We need to make a distinction between matters of conscience and matters of faith


There is an uncanny similarity of argument between the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) on controversies that have to do with belief. This is illustrated best in their respective positions on the Ram Setu and the triple talaq debates.

In 2005, on the Ram Setu issue, the RSS stated that their opposition to the UPA government’s plan to dredge a canal between Rameswaram, off the coast of Tamil Nadu, and the islands of Mannar, near Sri Lanka, was a “matter of faith and hence required no substantiation”.

Twelve years later the counsel for the AIMPLB has offered a similar argument in the Supreme Court when making his client’s case on the practice of triple talaq. A Constitution Bench of five justices is to decide on whether the practice of divorce by triple talaq is consistent with the protections guaranteed to individuals by the Indian Constitution. In opposition to pleas that the practice be considered unconstitutional, the AIMPLB counsel stated that triple talaq “is a matter of faith. Hence there is no question of constitutional morality and equity”.

This argument that matters of faith be given special status needs to be assessed. Why should matters of faith be given immunity from scrutiny?

Three responses can be offered to this question. Let me, on grounds of brevity, refer to them as (i) the special status of faith, (ii) the issue of validity, and (iii) ethical codes in modern democracies.

Special status of faith

At the outset we must acknowledge that faith, as religious belief, must have special status in any constitutional order. It constitutes the core of an individual’s sense of self and is the basis of a believer’s conscience.

Belief is a matter of personal choice and no external authority, whether state, cultural community, or religious congregation, can tell an individual what her beliefs should be. To do so is to violate the individual’s freedom of conscience guaranteed by most constitutional systems and human rights covenants. But on matters of faith, an important distinction has to be made.

All ‘matters of conscience’ are ‘matters of faith’, but not all ‘matters of faith’ are ‘matters of conscience’. It is only matters of conscience that are protected by the freedom-granting provisions of the Constitution. Matters of conscience are individual-centric. They have an ethical core that guides the choices that an individual makes.
They endow the world with meaning and give the individual purpose. In contrast, the ‘matters of faith’ which the RSS and the AIMPLB are referring to — while they may look similar to ‘matters of conscience’ — are not so for they are group, not individual, centric. They have a component that is based on evidence, whether this is textual, historical, or empirical. In other words, the belief is contingent on the evidence. For example it would take the following form: ‘we believe X because it is said so in our holy book’.

It is the ‘because of’ component that demands analytical and scientific scrutiny of the matters of faith. Does the holy book actually say so? Did Lord Ram really build the Setu?

Further, when matters of faith have harmful social consequences, they must be subject to scrutiny since the Constitution guarantees the individual protection from harm.

This is the basis of all social reform in our history.

When the AIMPLB says that triple talaq has evolved in the last 1400 years, it has inadvertently conceded that the practice is not cast in stone. Let the court’s intervention be part of that evolution.

The issue of validity

The many advances in linguistics, cultural anthropology, gender studies and, of course, the natural sciences can make the probing of the ‘because of’ component of the belief very exciting. For example, a textual analysis of a holy book using a study of old and new grammar, or the etymology of the word, or its placement in a sentence are all ways of arriving at the meaning of the statement.

Textual analysis has advanced considerably and hence is available to determine the validity of the interpretation being offered by scriptural authority. The many schools of Islamic jurisprudence are testimony to this plurality of interpretations.

To that can be added the modern tools of linguistic analysis, gender studies, human rights jurisprudence, and cultural anthropology. The validity of triple talaq must be subject to textual interpretation. Similarly with the Ram Setu claim. It too must be scrutinised by modern science.

Ethical codes in democracies

The most difficult issue in this debate is how to respond to the situation where, after scrutiny, the matter of faith is found to be valid but considered by many in need of change such that it conforms to the contemporary ethics of human rights.

When the counsel for the AIMPLB says that there is “no question of constitutional morality and equity” in matters of faith, he is building a wall, a fashion these days, behind which the orthodox will police their community. Such a wall must not be built. It has no place in a constitutional democracy.

An Economist's Guide to Debating Bhakts

A cheat-sheet for an intellectual argument with the Right. Warning—it's not pithy or witty enough for social media

SHAILESH CHITNIS in Outlook India

 

June 2004, deep in the heart of George Bush's presidency, the Onion, a satirical magazine, ran a story on how America's liberals were suffering from outrage fatigue. The article explained that liberals were overwhelmed with stories of abuses of civil liberties, unchecked military aggression and policies that ran roughshod over the environment. Most liberals were just exhausted from protesting and had decided to take a break. They couldn't sustain their anger anymore. 

Like any good satire, it was funny because it was close to the truth.

India's liberals probably feel the same today. From the mundane to the sublime, every facet of our society is now a cultural battleground. Each week is a new fight, from the meat we eat to the size of our nationalism. The prevalence of social media has only served to amplify differences and harden opinions. If you can't say it in a witty sentence that neatly fits in a Tweet or a Facebook post, it's probably not worth saying.

I've frequently thought of engaging with people who are ardent BJP supporters. But the thought of defending against charges of being a Congress agent or a closet Pakistan supporter (the horror!) makes me keep my opinions to myself.

But what if there was a genuine discussion? What if you were able to get more than 140 characters across? Here's an attempt at imagining an intellectual argument to four assertions frequently trotted out by the right.

(BS = Bhakt says)

[BS]: India needs a strong, authoritarian leader to develop faster. Look at what Singapore and China has achieved.

The idea that a benevolent autocrat can transform a chaotic country into a disciplined economic engine is very seductive. Unfortunately it has no basis in fact. Data shows that autocracy is a gamble, the country could be governed by a Lee Kuan Yew or a Mugabe.

The economist William Easterly has shown that the chances for the latter scenario are much higher. He measured countries that had experienced big growth success and failure over a forty year period. Easterly found that the probability of sustained high growth under an autocracy are only 10 per cent, it's more likely that the country implodes or experiences sluggish growth. Democracy doesn't yield spectacular gains either, but it does limit the chances of total failures. Human fallibility assures that more centralised societies will have more volatile performances.

Given our history with leaders who experienced total power, we are better-off taking our chances in an imperfect democracy than a perfect autocracy.

[BS]: The minorities (i.e. Muslims) have been coddled for too long

This is an easy claim to refute. Successive government and independent agencies have found that the socio-economic indicators of Muslims are the lowest among all groups, only marginally better than SC/STs. The poverty rate among urban Muslims is 38 per cent compared to national average of 23 per cent. Only 24 per cent of Muslims complete high school, against a national average of 43 per cent.

It's not just human development indicators. A recent study found that even though Muslims constitute 13 per cent of the population, only 2.6 per
cent are senior executives at BSE 500 companies. And in the last 2 years, Muslims got only 2 per cent of the priority loans from public sector banks. What the statistics mask is that the dismal state of Muslims in India isn't a recent phenomenon. It reflects a steady decline since the country's independence relative to all other groups.

In light of these numbers, it's entirely fair to ask why aren't the country's Muslims angrier?

[BS]: Why can't they just respect the wishes of the majority?

This argument rests on the utilitarian idea of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. If a certain policy brings happiness to 80 per cent of the population, but leaves the rest 20 per cent worse-off, surely the society as a whole is better off. But this view isn't compatible with protecting everyone's rights.

The philosopher John Rawls proposed a fairer way to decide on justice and rights. He suggested that before deciding any rules, members of a society stand behind a veil of ignorance. Behind this veil no one knows their class, gender, race, wealth, religion or any other detail that gives them a hint of their place in society. The laws that this group decides will, by its very nature, be just and equal. Since no one knows their position in society once the veil is lifted, they'd want to make sure they were protected.

Rawls' veil is a thought experiment of course, but it does seek to illustrate the fallacy of using majority to determine rights.

[BS]: Reform takes time; it'll take time to see the results

On this issue, the Bhakt has a point. The pass-through benefits from structural reforms take time. India's growth rate surged in the 80s, with the loosening of a few regulations. But the big reforms of the 90s didn't lead to a corresponding burst of growth in that decade.

The economist, Arvind Virmani, has found a J-shaped growth curve. Following structural reforms, growth initially falls and then begins to rise. In the 90s, the removal of import restrictions and currency volatility were a shock to the protected industries, resulting in lower productivity. As firms learned to cope and then benefit from the new technologies, output improved dramatically from the 2000s.

But as we complete two years of the Modi government, we have yet to witness any meaningful reforms — no GST bill, no significant disinvestment of PSUs and no major labour market reforms. We aren't at the bottom of any J-curve, nor should we expect a growth spurt a few years later.

[You ask] While on the economy, it's a good idea to pose the paradox of BJPs economic ideology. Narendra Modi is a self-professed free-marketer, who believes in less government. Free markets are open; open to capital, open to ideas. And yet, the RSS continues to espouse the glories of Swadeshi economics that seeks Indian solutions to Indian problems. How can Mr. Modi reconcile such opposing views?
Now observe how the BJP defenders try to square their love of the "Gujarat model" with their fealty to the RSS.

If you have made it this far without being called sickular, AAP-tard or any such pejorative, stop and congratulate your Bhakt. You are speaking with a right-wing supporter who is respectful and is confident in their views. A rare species. May their tribe grow.

Next, pinch yourself to interrupt your musings. A discussion like this can only happen in your imagination.

The State of India

Part 1

Part 2

The Doctor and the Saint

Splitting India II

Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed continues his exclusive series for The Friday Times on the partition and its aftermath 

In my article dated 20 September 2012, I had inadvertently given February 1940 as the date for the fall of Singapore. It was February 1942. That mistake, however, does not detract from the fact that the British were determined from the very start of WW II, and especially after the Congress ministries resigned in September 1939, to crush any challenge to their hold over the Indian empire which was a matter of great pride for them and a major supplier of troops for the war. These resignations were a major Congress miscalculation whose damage to their political influence was second only to the even more disastrous Quit India movement they launched in August 1942. These two decisions greatly undermined their ability to influence the course of the freedom struggle as all their cadres were incarcerated from August 1942 to June 1945.

During that absence from the political arena the Muslim League swept the key north-western provinces of Punjab and Sindh and made inroads into NWFP with their message that the creation of Pakistan would bring to an end the tyranny of the caste system and the economic exploitation of the moneylender. Thus the creation of Pakistan appeared to be a rational choice to the Muslims and they expressed it in the 1946 provincial elections when they voted overwhelmingly in favour of Pakistan. The Congress got the general votes including those of Hindus, Christians, Jains and others for a united India and the Sikhs of Punjab voted for the Panthic parties that wanted the Punjab partitioned, if India was partitioned. Such polarization meant that negotiations on the future of India were headed for a deadlock and the failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan of May 1946 confirmed that. Nehru's ill-considered July press conference in Bombay saying that the Congress would 'enter the Constituent Assembly unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise' provoked an angry reaction from Jinnah who gave the call for direct action. The violence that broke out in Calcutta in August 1946 followed by more violence in Bihar, Garhmukhteshwar in UP and then Hazara district of KP finally engulfed the Punjab in March 1947.

Under the circumstances, Viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten's 3 June 1947 Partition Plan to which Nehru, Jinnah, Baldev Singh and others tamely acquiesced was premised on an entirely false assumption: that the transfer of power would be peaceful. The warnings of Punjab's Governor Sir Evan Jenkins did not warrant such complacency at all.

The whole thing was based on a woefully flawed concept: while civil and military officialdom would have the choice to opt either for India or Pakistan the ordinary people would stay put! Mahatma Gandhi alone among all the leaders could sense that rivers of blood would flow and warned about it. On the other hand, Sardar Patel was prepared to let the Sikh leaders have a free hand in driving the Muslims of East Punjab out, though he probably did not realize that they were planning to use it to create, for the first time in history, a compact Sikh majority in some parts of East Punjab. Later, the Khalistan movement, which emerged in the 1980s, came to haunt the Indian state. Equally, since March 1947, local and Punjab-level Muslim League leaders were complicit in the attacks on the Hindus and Sikhs in the western districts. Neither Jinnah nor Liaquat Ali Khan took any steps to warn the Muslims of East Punjab that on 23 June 1947 the Punjab Assembly had voted to partition the province and a grave possibility existed of rioting. It is impossible to believe that they were not in the know of what was happening in the Punjab. On the other hand, the Congress leaders kept telling Lahore's Hindus and Sikhs to stay put as that city would be given to India, even when the Muslims were in a majority of 60 per cent there. All these details, along with extensive interviews with survivors are fully covered in my book, The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012).

In this regard, let me address a major criticism some readers have made of my argument that the partition of India was not necessarily the best option for Muslims. They have pointed out that the Indian Muslims have remained one of the poorest groups in secular India. Therefore the creation of Pakistan was necessary to save the Muslims from permanent Hindu domination. In principle this is a compelling argument in favour of creating Pakistan, but it needs to be put into perspective.

Mr Jinnah had prepared his brief on a separate Pakistan on the basis of categorical rejection that a Hindu-majority government could ever be fair to the Muslims. When he was asked what would happen to the most vulnerable, deprived and poor sections of Muslims from Muslim-minority provinces if they were left behind in India, he had asserted that one-third of Muslims should not prevent two-thirds of them escaping Hindu domination. It was a typical utilitarian argument deriving from the notion of the greatest good of the greatest number rather than the greatest good of all. However, in August 1947 when some reporters asked him before he left Delhi for Karachi as to what message he wanted to give to the Muslims who would remain behind he said that they should become loyal Indian citizens and he expected the Indian government to treat them fairly. His line of argument had thus changed fundamentally - it acknowledged that a Congress government (upper-caste Hindu dominated) could treat them fairly.

As I said in my previous article, only three per cent of the Muslims from the Muslim-minority provinces of northern India, mainly the intelligentsia migrated to Pakistan. The RSS, Hindu Mahasabha and many Hindu and Sikh refugees who had lost family and property in what became Pakistan wanted each and every Muslim driven out of India. Mahatma Gandhi's last fast-unto-death was not only to press the Indian government to pay Pakistan Rs 550 million as its rightful share of the colonial treasury, but also to insist that the campaign to expel Muslims should cease. It culminated with his assassination at the hands of Nathu Ram Godse, but it compelled the Indian government to adopt strict measures to prevent attacks on Muslims. I must give full credit to Jawaharlal Nehru that while he was prime minister he tried his best to protect the Muslims.

It is not possible to explain in detail in a media column why Congress governments after Nehru deviated from their protective policy towards Muslims. Suffice it to say that after Mrs Indira Gandhi came to power Nehruvian secularism became less of a matter of principle and more of expediency and electoral calculation. Later Congress governments were led by men of straw and the Babri Mosque attack by BJP goons in December 1992 could take place because the Congress government of Mr Narasimha Rao remained passive. It is only after Mr Manmohan Singh came to power that the sad plight of the Muslim minority was given some attention. The Sachar Committee appointed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2006 submitted a 403-page report which stated that the status of Indian Muslims was somewhere between Hindu OBCs (other backward castes) and the scheduled castes and tribes. No doubt this has happened because discrimination takes place against the Muslims in a systematic manner even though formal (constitutional) secularism does not discriminate between citizens on the basis of their creed or ethnicity.

However, here too we need to consider some complications. The Muslims of northern India have always consisted of two distinct groups: the high-born ashraaf who claim descent from forbears of foreign origin and the vast majority who are converts from the lower rungs of Hindu society. I have seen reports which name Muslim zamindars and taalukdars of northern India who were active in the struggle for Pakistan, but when partition took place they stayed on to retain ownership of their properties. Some of them later sold off their land and other assets and then migrated to Pakistan or to the West. Some devised novel ways of having the best of both words. Nothing compares to the genius of Raja Sahib Mahmudabad, famous as the financier of the Muslim League and one of the closest associates of Mr Jinnah. He left his son and wife in Mahmudabad while he shifted to Pakistan with his daughters. The Indian government had impounded his vast property worth currently Rs 30,0000 million on grounds that it was 'enemy property' since he had migrated to Pakistan. His son contested the case saying that he was the rightful heir as his father had transferred his property to him before he shifted to Pakistan. In 2005 the Indian Supreme Court restored the properties to him. So, the rich and powerful were not hit by the calamity of the partition. Nawabzada Liaqat Ali Khan did lose his estate in eastern Punjab as did Nawab Mamdot but that happened because the Sikhs and Congress joined hands to force the partition of Punjab on the same lines on which the Muslim League had demanded that India should be partitioned - on the basis of contiguous religious majorities in some parts of the subcontinent and its provinces. The same happened to Muslim-majority Bengal.

It is therefore the Muslims from artisanal and landless working backgrounds - Muslim Dalits - who potentially would suffer most from a partitioned India. Historically they were always despised by the ashraaf. I have read both Barelvi and Deobandi texts where the superiority of the ashraaf has been justified on grounds that they alone represent true Islam. Of course there are exceptions especially in Deobandi writings. In this regard I might as well add that traditional Shia social and political theory is even more hierarchical than that of the Sunnis. In Pakistan we practice caste prejudices but pretend that since Islam has no caste there is no caste oppression among us. Moreover, caste-like discrimination and persecution in Pakistan has also taken a sectarian form and our wrath is directed against all those we classify as non-Muslims.

At any rate, when the Muslim intelligentsia left for Pakistan the ulema, whose standard refrain has always been that Muslims should not integrate into mainstream society because that would dilute their Islamic identity, took over the leadership of the poorer sections of Muslim society. Instead of encouraging them to get a modern education they fostered a siege mentality and tried to insulate the Muslims from modernizing social trends. Consequently the level of education among these poor Muslims is very low, even lower than the Dalits, who because of the reservation system, have been helped to get education and jobs. A movement has now started gaining pace among Muslims of artisanal and Dalit backgrounds demanding that they too should be included in the reservation system. It remains to be seen if the Indian government would extend them that 'privilege'. The Sachar Report stopped just short of recommending it; it instead recommended special educational inputs from the government to help the Muslims. I need not overemphasize that the RSS and other Sang Parivar groups are always opposed to Muslims being included in the reservation policy. The attacks on Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 were also masterminded by these groups.

Here, I pose a moral question: are we in Pakistan prepared to help such vulnerable Muslims? All I know is that we have not even accepted the Biharis who sided with Pakistan during the 1971 civil war in the former East Pakistan. Unlike Israel which welcomes all Jews from anywhere in the world to settle in Israel, because it is a state created for the Jewish people, we have no open-door policy for oppressed Indian Muslims. So our moral concern for them is hypocritical. There is a way to bring to an end their agony: let us open our arms and welcome them. Let us declare that the 180 million Indian Muslims are entitled to enter Pakistan and become its citizens because Pakistan was created to protect them from Hindu domination and discrimination. The fact is many won't because I know the secular-minded Muslims find Pakistan a difficult proposition as they are used to a less conformist lifestyle than what exists in contemporary Pakistan. Still millions might want to migrate to Pakistan because they may believe that as an Islamic state it would be fair to them.The Sindhis would assail my solution, saying that they have had bitter experience with an open embrace to the Mohajirs - it resulted in them (Sindhis) effectively being sidelined and marginalized in the towns and cities of Sindh, including Karachi and Hyderabad. On the other hand, the Mohajirs now realize that given their smaller numbers they would in the long run be swept away by the much bigger nationalities of Pakistan. They feel beleaguered and threatened. Consequently, if there is no scope for Indian Muslims to find refuge in Pakistan then we can only hope that enlightened Indian rulers would protect the Indian Muslims just as Mahatma Gandhi wanted and Nehru tried. I see no other option to this sad legacy of a partitioned India.  

Splitting India 1

Dr. Ishtiaq Ahmed in The Friday Times

There are two philosophical standpoints from which one can support or oppose societal events and situations, one absolutist, the other utilitarian. The former stands for a categorical rejection of the principle of partition as a solution to national disputes while the latter has to do with pragmatism with regards to the pros and cons of partitioning territory to solve national disputes.

Let me admit that although partitioning territory to solve disputes between adversarial nationalist movements and parties is not something I am intellectually comfortable with because it validates tribalism rather than human empathy and solidarity for building community, at times it is the only solution which is morally and practically correct. Partitioning former Sudan to let the Black Africans escape genocide at the hands of the putative Arabs of northern Sudan was an appropriate solution; East Timor getting out of the clutches of the Indonesian state has also been the best option. I hope one day the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are liberated from brutal Israeli rule.

There can be no doubt that the idea of separate states for Muslims was born in the viceroy's office

However, I don't think the partition of India and of Bengal and Punjab belong to the category of intractable disputes that could not have been managed through appropriate democratic arrangements. The so-called Hindu-Muslim problem that dominated politics in British India from the twentieth century onwards till it culminated in the biggest forced migration of people in history and one of the most horrific cases of genocide and ethnic cleansing- 14-18 million forced to flee and between 1-2 million killed - left large minorities in both states. The only difference being that in India the Muslim minority could stay put after some three per cent of the Muslims from Muslim-minority areas migrated to Pakistan but Hindus and Sikhs had to leave almost to the last man in Punjab and the settled areas of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Very few could stay behind in the tribal areas and in Balochistan. It was only in interior Sindh that a community of some significance could remain behind. Not surprisingly, such upheaval bequeathed a bloody and bitter legacy of fear and hatred to India and Pakistan. The three wars and the Rann of Kutch and Kargil miniwars and constant tension along the Line of Control drawn in the former Jammu and Kashmir State has meant not only huge, wasteful expenditure on military and defence but also a profoundly vitiating impact on democracy, development and pluralism.

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad warned that a partitioned India would mean a partitioned Muslim community, engender Hindu nationalism and create a Pakistan of sectarian conflicts that would become easy bait for the West

The Muslim League's demand for the partition of India was initiated by Viceroy Linlithgow in March 1940 when he instructed Sir Muhammad Zafrulla to convey to the League leadership that the government wanted them to demand separate states. The colonial government was hoping to checkmate the Indian National Congress's ambition to force a British withdrawal from India while WW II was raging and the British had suffered their first defeat in more than 200 years at the hands of an Asian power -the Japanese, who forced a humiliating surrender in Singapore in February 1940. It is not important who is the real author of the two-nation theory but there can be no doubt that the idea of separate states for Muslims was born in the viceroy's office. Let me say that the British were not at all thinking of partitioning India at that time nor was the Muslim League confident that such an idea could be realized without major upheavals taking place.

In these series of articles I am not going to present my version of how India and the two Muslim-majority provinces were partitioned or why. I am going to present some arguments to suggest that it was not necessarily the best solution for anyone, especially the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. In this regard I must invoke Maulana Abul Kalam Azad's forebodings that a partitioned India would mean a partitioned Muslim community and it would help Hindu nationalism in India while creating a Pakistan that would get embroiled in sectarian conflicts and become easy bait to the West. The Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind had a similar standpoint. Consequently, important sections of the Muslim population of India had reservations against the partition, though by 1945 a large majority had begun to support the idea of Pakistan.

Let me list my objections and reservations on the three partitions:

	Viceroy Linlithgow first came up with the idea of a separate Muslim state

The so-called Hindu-Muslim problem was not really solved by the partition: it simply converted it into an India-Pakistan confrontation with wars that resulted in disastrous consequences for democracy, development and pluralism. In India, it created a discourse of Muslim betrayal during the freedom struggle, which was then held against the Muslims who remained in India (nearly as many as were in West Pakistan, now Pakistan). In Pakistan, it generated the intractable controversy about who is a Muslim. As we know each attempt to define a Muslim has meant more people being excluded from that category on the basis of them holding beliefs contrary to the beliefs of a particular sect or sub-sect. In both cases it gave impetus to majoritarian nationalism, which has since then preyed on the minorities as unwanted, fifth columnists. Indian Muslims are routinely demonized in RSS, Shiv Sena and other members of the Sangh Pariwar of Hindu extremists while in Pakistan we have effectively been making life difficult for the miniscule Hindu minority. There is, however, a fundamental difference. The Indian constitution and legal system do not discriminate between religious groups when it comes to their political rights. In Pakistan they do.

The creation of Pakistan began to be presented as a way of ending Hindu domination

The demographic structure of pre-partition India was such that no group had absolute majority. The rough percentage was 7: 4 Muslims (200 million Hindus 90 million Muslims). Now, the Hindu group was stratified into at least three caste compartments: the three upper castes of Brahmins, Kshytrias and Vaishyas (15-20 percent), and the other backward classes or castes (some 50 per cent at least), comprising various farming and other communities, quite powerful locally in different parts of India, and the so called scheduled castes and tribes (22.5 per cent).

Among the three Hindu caste compartments there were some shared religious and cultural features but also demarcations, so all Hindus somehow as one body oppressing all Muslims was very unlikely. On the contrary, it meant that Hindus needed to continue reforming and modernizing towards greater equality. The Muslims were at least 25 per cent of the population, dispersed everywhere and concentrated in two very significant geo-strategic zones of north-eastern and north-western India. The Muslims were not a compact group either. Differences of sect and ethnicity existed even among them. Then there were millions of Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and so on. Additionally, there were regional leaders and parties. All this prepared India for a grand experiment in pluralist democracy where it would have been in the best interest of the groups and sub-groups to work together in power sharing and sharing of resources.

Contrary to a widely held view that Muslims everywhere lagged behind Hindus and Sikhs in employment, the fact is that the Muslims (especially Punjabis and Pathans) constituted some 36-40 per cent of the British Indian Army. In the Muslim minority province of UP more than 50 per cent of the police were Muslims as compared to the 17 per cent of their population strength. In both Bengal and Punjab, which had Muslim majorities the police were Muslim in far greater numbers than their proportion of the population. Thus for example in the Punjab 73 per cent of police was Muslim as against only 57.1 per cent of their population strength. The British always employed minorities in the police and military, for obvious reasons. In other branches of the administration the Muslim percentage was increasing though Hindus and Sikhs were ahead of them. Sir Fazl-e-Hussain had introduced quotas for Muslims in some important educational institutions and that had helped the steady increase in percentage of educated Muslims .



Muslims who went to school and sought employment had a fair opportunity to find one. The problem was that the negative Muslim state of mind induced in the aftermath of the 1857 uprising which brought to an end even symbolic Muslim suzerainty over India, and the propaganda of the ulema that Western education would mean Muslims converting to Christianity prevented the Muslims from taking to education whole-heartedly. The British brought with them a new economic order based on banking, investments, stock exchange - all considered inappropriate in dogmatic Islamic terms. The Hindus and Sikhs made use of the new opportunities and moved ahead. I know many Muslim families of Lahore whose elders educated themselves and were as successful as Hindus and Sikhs in acquiring property and were part of the elite.

No doubt commercialization of agriculture resulted in the Muslim peasantry getting trapped in debts to moneylenders. The alternative was the landlord who extracted more out of the peasants through unpaid services on his lands and in his household and the Muslim peasants preferred to go to the Hindu karar or moneylender who was a local person who offered loans on quite reasonable terms. Some moneylenders were extortionists but not all. In any case, the debt burden was a problem in the Punjab and Sir Chhotu Ram, the leader of the Punjab Unionist Party introduced legislation in 1937 which cancelled past debts. However, that did not mean the needs of the peasants for capital also came to an end. Money-lending continued through Muslim front men but as an institution it was certainly greatly weakened and modern banks began to be established in the Punjab.

When the focus of the Muslim separatist movement shifted from northern India, (where the Muslim landed elite was its main protagonist) to the Muslim-majority provinces of north-western India in 1940, the creation of Pakistan began to be presented as a way of ending Hindu domination, at least in areas where Muslims were in a majority - i.e. the north-western and north-eastern zones of the subcontinent. The partition riots resulted in Hindus and Sikhs being expelled from the Muslim majority provinces of north-western India and thus a lot of businesses and property came into the hands of Muslims. It also meant that Muslims found space to make upward mobility which was obstructed while these non-Muslims were based there.

I sometimes wonder if those who consider this as a legitimate solution to Muslim poverty ever think of how it would affect Muslims and other immigrants in the West if anti-immigration parties succeed in expelling immigrants on grounds of property and jobs that ought to be made available to the indigenous white population to solve the problem of unemployment. I am sure no Muslim in Europe who has worked hard and made progress would consider it a fair and legitimate way of bringing relief to unemployed Europeans. Some people argue that the Pakistan movement was a class struggle between Hindu and Sikh haves and Muslim have-nots. This is at best vulgar Marxism. The landlord class was the mainstay of the Muslim League and to believe they were allies in a liberation struggle to establish a fairer society is sheer lunacy.

One thing more, let's suppose that the partitions of Punjab and Bengal had not taken place even if India had been partitioned. That would have meant the Hindus and Sikhs retaining their properties in Pakistan. How would that have solved the problem of Muslim economic backwardness in one go except by confiscating the properties of non-Muslims. The other way would be to help Muslims get interested in education despite their reservations. That was already happening in undivided India in the Muslim-majority provinces and would have continued had India remained united. India was never ever conceived as a unitary state. It was going to be a federation. Thus the partition of these two provinces only helped a quicker change of property ownership from Hindu-Sikh to Muslim hands by driving the Hindus and Sikhs out.

The fact is that the Hindus and Sikhs took to western education and adjusted to the modern capitalism economy with ease and thus progressed economically. They worked hard and acquired wealth. They did not steal it from Muslims who were negatively inclined towards modern education as well as modern business and commerce. The moneylender developed in the context of the new economy of commercial crops and since Muslims were not willing to move into it, the Hindus and Sikhs did. Sir Chhotu Ram's reforms of 1937 to a large extent weakened the moneylenders and with modern banking their relevance decreased even more. So, efforts were underway to rectify such lopsided economic relations. On the other hand, research shows that the landlords (mostly Muslims) used to lend capital informally to the peasants and exploit them even more completely by making them work for them on their lands and making their womenfolk serve in the household. The landlord, the true parasite never got identified as an exploiter the same way as the moneylender.