Malevolent Republic

Malevolent Republic

A Short History of New India

by

Completed: February 10, 2021
★★★★

Somewhere between 3 and 4 stars for me. What I didn’t particularly like:

  • The subtitle - A Short History of New India - is terrible. This is not a history book by any stretch. The author doesn’t pretend that it is a history book. Just a very poor subtitle chosen by the editor/publisher.
  • Pet peeve, but there is a lot of unnecessarily ‘complex’ vocabulary in the first half of the book. In some instances, the word chosen fits, but often a ‘simpler’ word would in fact have been more apt and clear, but the English vocabulary fetish among the ‘highly educated’ Indians continues. It’s very noticeable, hence I’m pointing it out, but I don’t think it should otherwise detract from the book.
  • I wasn’t a particularly big fan of the second half of the book (a rant about the current governance structure). It’s not my opinion on the opinions offered but just that it is comparatively less dense in substance compared to the first half of the book.

Otherwise, I very much recommend the book. The first half covers a lot of ground and weaves together many important milestones and themes in India’s post-Independence history. It’s an engaging read. It’s very opinionated, but the author doesn’t pretend otherwise and is generally very clear about his opinions and the basis for him.

Some excerpts:

In India, complains a character in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s novel English, August, ‘from washing your arse to dying, an ordinary citizen is up against the government’.

A staggering social disparity has arisen between Muslims and Hindus, as the results of a survey commissioned by the government in 2010 show. Only 4 per cent of all Indian Muslims are graduates, 5 per cent have public employment, a majority of Muslims remain locked out of public institutions, their access to government loans and education severely restricted.

Measured purely by his excesses, Sanjay Gandhi was in many respects India’s Ceausescu. Emotionally bruised, intellectually arid, a failure at everything he attempted in a family that typified success, Sanjay effectively took over the Indian government for two years as his criminally indulgent mother suspended the Constitution, declared a state of internal emergency, terminated civil liberties, censored the press, banished her political opponents to prison and presided over the protracted detrition of the republic founded by her own father.

Mahatma Gandhi, repelled by the authoritarian temptations supplied by the exalted position it occupied in the Indian imagination, called for Congress’s immediate disbandment after Independence. He was ignored.

In 1937, a year after he was elected president of Congress for a second time, a Calcutta magazine carried a widely-circulated article urging Indians to be wary of Nehru. ‘Men like Jawaharlal,’ it warned, ‘are unsafe in democracy.’ Nehru, the piece cautioned, ‘calls himself a democrat and a socialist, and no doubt he does so in all earnestness, but every psychologist knows that the mind is ultimately a slave to the heart and logic can always be made to fit in with the desires and irrepressible urges of a person. A little twist and Jawaharlal might turn a dictator sweeping aside the paraphernalia of a slow-moving democracy.’ The author of this remarkable essay, published under a pseudonym, was none other than Nehru himself.

A year after becoming prime minister, Indira had a revealing exchange with an American journalist. ‘Do you think any of them,’ she said, referring to her colleagues in Congress, ‘could hold this thing together?’ By ‘this thing’, did the prime minister mean the Congress Party, inquired the interviewer. ‘I mean India,’ she replied.8 In her haughty self-regard and easy contempt for others, Indira was typically Nehruvian.

For much of his life, Nehru believed that he was fated to lead India to its destiny. His own ascendancy in Congress was studiously choreographed by his wealthy father, with a helping hand eagerly extended by Mahatma Gandhi who, exuding a fatherly affection for the young socialist, deployed his moral authority to decapitate Nehru’s more accomplished rivals.

The principled anti-imperialist and acolyte of Mahatma Gandhi, who never tired of dispensing prelections about peace to foreign leaders, had few misgivings about utilising disproportionate force against people he claimed as his own. In Kerala in the south, he engineered the overthrow of a democratically elected Communist government. In Kashmir in the north, he presided over an anti-democratic farce. In Nagaland to the east, he authorised the bombing of Christians who had had the temerity to demand from India what India had sought from the British. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, an extraordinarily repressive piece of legislation enacted by parliament in 1958 to grant impunity to agents of the state dispatched to stamp out insurgencies in India’s peripheries, embodied Nehru’s ruthless resolve to preserve the Indian union at any expense.

Sanjay never did finish school. All he talked about was cars. So he was sent away in 1964 to England to apprentice at the Rolls-Royce factory in Crewe. It was a three-year programme. Sanjay dropped out in the second year. When he returned to India, in 1966, Nehru and Shastri were gone, and his mother was India’s prime minister. Sanjay’s rise in the Congress Party replicated Indira’s own trajectory under her father’s reign. But the self-moderating complexities present in Nehru seemed to attenuate with each generation in his bloodline. Indira was animated most of all by despotic impulses; in Sanjay, there wasn’t even a residue of democratic inclination. Congress was the laboratory in which Indira tested the limits of her power. If she could make Congress bend to her will, she could subjugate India.

The last remnant of autonomy in the government, the Supreme Court had repeatedly hindered her efforts to disfigure the Constitution. In 1973, shredding convention, she appointed a junior (and pliant) judge as the Chief Justice of India. The gravest attack to date on the independence of the highest court in the country, the decision provoked protests in every major city. India’s maiden Solicitor General emerged from retirement to decry the ‘blackest day in the history of democracy’.18 But the prime minister could survive the backlash: she had come to be revered, since defeating Pakistan in 1971, as a semi-divine figure.

The war itself had been swift. That year, the Pakistani state, invented explicitly to safeguard Muslims, staged the worst atrocities ever committed against a predominantly Muslim population. Three million people in East Pakistan were butchered, ten million displaced, and more than 400,000 women coerced into sexual servitude.19 It was a holocaust precipitated by West Pakistan’s unwillingness to honour the results of the first free election, swept by East Pakistan, in the Islamic Republic’s history. Zulfi Bhutto, the loser in the vote, refused to accept the outcome—and the army, egged on by the feudal megalomaniac, went on a murderous splurge. America, dependent on Pakistan to make inroads into Mao’s China, ignored the piling dead bodies and warned India to keep out. Indira, to her credit, spat at Nixon and Kissinger, and aided the Bengali rebels. In December, the Pakistani air force inexplicably offered India a casus belli by launching a series of pre-emptive strikes on Indian targets. Indira ordered her generals to punch into Pakistan. Within two weeks, Pakistan was vanquished and Bangladesh born.

By the mid 1970s, the party’s finances came almost entirely from ‘rich industrialists, the rich traders and … the richest smugglers’. At the same time, rural India, replete with stupefied skeletal figures surviving on watery gruel, devolved into a theatre of inexpressible wretchedness. Urban India sought comfort in atavistic fantasies. Travelling in Delhi, Ved Mehta was met with ‘constant talk about the glories of ancient India—about how the Hindus in Vedic times travelled around in “flying machines”, talked to each other on “skyphones”, and constructed “bridges of stones” spanning oceans’.

On 25 June 1975, Indira’s advisers, having hastily pored over a copy of the Constitution borrowed that morning from the library in Parliament House, drafted an ordinance declaring a state of internal emergency to maintain the ‘security of India’, which they said was ‘threatened by internal disturbances’. The president of India, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, signed the document. Electricity supply to newspapers was cut off that night and the police were ordered to sweep up Indira’s critics. Indians woke up the next morning in a dictatorship.

For the next nineteen months, Sanjay terrorised the country. His thinking was always plain. He wanted to construct casinos in the Himalayas. He wanted to ‘beautify’ Delhi. He wanted to curb population growth. He did not like the sight of slums, so he yelled orders to pull them down. Where would the people go? He did not care to know. When an activist complained about the demolition of stalls outside Delhi’s grand mosque—its imam had urged congregants to resist Indira—police carried him away in the dead of night, tortured him, then paraded him in chains in the old quarter of the capital.

As urban India was subjected to Sanjay’s prettification programmes, rural India was put through a more intimately degrading form of terror. Forced sterilisation was by far the deadliest exercise undertaken by the government during the Emergency. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank had periodically shared with Delhi their fears about an uncontrolled rise in India’s population levels. Democracy, however, was a hurdle: no government could conceivably enact laws limiting the number of children a couple could have without incurring punishment at the ballot box. But with dictatorship in place, they fell behind forced vasectomies. Visiting India in 1976, Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank, was full of praise for Indira. ‘For the first time, I sensed in India,’ he said, ‘a disciplined, realistic approach to development programmes; and a willingness to find practical solutions to economic problems rather than an attitude of falling back on “socialist ideologies” and didactic debate’. He left India ‘feeling that a growth rate of 3 per cent per capita per annum is possible in the next ten years’ if India continued down the path inaugurated by the prime minister’s suspension of the Constitution.

Foreign journalists were expelled. ‘In ten years of covering the world from Franco’s Spain to Mao’s China,’ Newsweek’s India correspondent wrote, ‘I have never encountered such stringent and all-encompassing censorship’. ‘In my four years in Moscow,’ the New York Times’s correspondent added, ‘I was never pulled out of an interview by the police as I was here.’ … ‘The Indian citizen,’ declared Indira’s Solicitor General in earnest, ‘has absolutely no right to his liberty, even if he is totally innocent.’

There was no redistribution of wealth during the Emergency—only the usurpation of power. True, the prime minister and her son pronounced themselves tribunes of the poor. But the faction that most sedulously supported the tyranny of the pair—and was most lavishly recompensed for the support—was composed almost entirely of India’s gilded elite. Big business energetically backed the Gandhis. Naval Tata, India’s most eminent industrialist, queued up with his wife to ‘pay our respects’ to Sanjay when the princeling held court in Bombay.40 When a travelling American journalist asked a member of the Oberoi family, India’s top hoteliers, for her opinion of the Emergency rule, she replied: ‘Oh, it’s wonderful. We used to have terrible problems with the unions. Now when they give us any troubles, the government just puts them in jail.’ The Emergency budget was the most pro-business to date. And it wasn’t by accident that, while the government deactivated the articles of the Constitution concerning free expression and liberty, it preserved the provisions protecting property rights.

She had expelled Krishan Kant from Congress for warning her in parliament that ‘when you stifle the flow of information to the people in this country, you are blocking the channel of information to yourself’.

In a plaintive letter to the prime minister before the elections, Jai Prakash Narayan, the Gandhian freedom fighter thrown in jail for leading protests against her, had pleaded with Indira: ‘Please do not destroy the foundations that the fathers of the nation, including your noble father, had laid down. There is nothing but strife and suffering along the path that you have taken. You inherited a great tradition, noble values, and a working democracy. Do not leave behind a miserable wreck of all that. It would take a long time to put all that together again.’

Before the assault on the Golden Temple, the Khalistan project appeared destined to disintegrate because an overwhelming majority of Sikhs in Punjab rejected secession and favoured unity with India. At the summit of Bhindranwale’s terror, Andrew Major, a scholar of Punjab, emphasised that ‘genuine commitment to the creation of a separate Sikh state is still rare within the Punjabi Sikh community’ Khalistan always was the obsession of ‘overseas Sikhs’, who, fattening themselves in the cosmopolitan havens of the West, financed violent sectarianism in the land they had left behind. It was in Canada that Air India Flight 182 was hijacked and blown up by Sikh terrorists, killing more than 300 passengers from nine countries. It was in Britain that the self-appointed president of the ‘Republic of Khalistan’, Jagjit Singh Chauhan, headquartered his operations for many years. He flew to Pakistan from London, issued his own currency and expressed the gentle hope on the BBC that Sikhs would soon ‘behead’ the Gandhi family.

When elections were announced, the RSS, sworn foe of Indira, campaigned for her son, who refused to disavow their support.20 Riding the wave of sympathy generated by Indira’s assassination, when Rajiv was returned in December 1984 to government with 415 out of 543 seats in parliament—the largest mandate recorded in the republic’s history—he radiated uncertainty rather than confidence. He had no convictions and what passed for his political philosophy was a collage of banalities. He railed against corruption, but became embroiled in a massive corruption scandal. He spoke of the importance of secularism, but crumbled before religious nationalists. Fixated on keeping power, he oscillated between capitulations to fundamentalist followers of Islam and militant votaries of Hindu nationalism.

When elections were called, in 1989, Rajiv desperately attempted to out-Hindu the Hindu nationalists by launching his campaign from Faizabad, the district headquarters of Ayodhya, with the promise to inaugurate Rama Rajya—the rule, the kingdom, of Rama. What remained of the secular character of India after the slaughter of Sikhs and the cascade of concessions by Congress to competing communal claims was now on the line. Muslims abandoned Rajiv. Hindus who wanted Rama Rajya had more authentic alternatives on offer. Having started with the biggest parliamentary majority in Indian history, Rajiv led Congress to its second defeat. Hindu nationalists, accounting for two seats in 1984, returned with eighty-five members of parliament.

After Hyderabad was incorporated into the newly independent India, and then appointed capital of the newly created state of Andhra Pradesh, Rao was elected to the provincial legislature. He stumbled through a number of ministries before Indira Gandhi, disregarding caste-based opposition, made him the state’s chief minister. Rao forced through an ambitious land reform act, forcing feudal landlords, many of them his colleagues, to distribute their enormous holdings to landless peasants. He, in turn, gave up most of his own inherited estate. Such reformative zeal was not welcome in a centralised party that answered to one family. When Indira dismissed Rao’s government and summoned him to Delhi, he was over fifty but sufficiently pragmatic to grasp the secret of survival in Congress: never display autonomous drive or initiative.

Visiting Havana in 1980, he received instructions from Indira to persuade the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement to move their next summit from Iraq—then at war with Iran—to India. Rao disarmed the gathering by arguing India’s case in Spanish to the Cubans, Persian to the Iranians, Arabic to the Iraqis and the Egyptians, French to a host of African representatives and Urdu to the Pakistanis.

Historiographers tasked by the secular Congress establishment to clarify India’s past, motivated by the desire to do good, caused immeasurable harm by blurring it. They applied recondite techniques and treatments to source material, ladled their prose with jargon and, lost in disciplinary sport, neglected the needs of the lay persons outside the priesthood. Students emerged from exposure to their output without a rudimental apprehension of their difficult past. Medieval India, despite all the evidence of its methodical disfigurement, was depicted in schoolbooks as an idyll where Muslims and Hindus coexisted in harmony and forged an inclusive idea of India which the British came and shattered. This fable was so wholly internalised by the secular establishment which dispensed it that, as late as 1998, K.R. Narayanan, India’s first Dalit president, was able to tell an audience in Turkey that the most ‘amazing fact’ about his homeland before it was defiled by ‘European intrusion’ was ‘that the interaction between the old civilisation of India—the Hindu civilisation—and the Islamic civilisation was a friendly experience’.12 Such a thesis was always going to struggle against the overwhelmingly contradictive evidence—from the ruins of Hindu liturgical buildings to the ballads of dispossession passed from generation to generation—arrayed against it. The chronicles of the subcontinent’s medieval rulers are full of pornographic descriptions of the horrors with which the place teemed.

The general retort of the ‘secular’ historian confronted with writings of this vein tended to be that they were an exaggeration meant to impress the rulers—without any meditation on the nature of the rulers who might be flattered by such graphic descriptions of gore staged in their name—or to read into them motives the text did not support, or to discredit them as British propaganda. Unfortunately for them—and for the national project they were serving—the grand mosques of northern India are decorated with stone tablets in which you can still see traces of the pre-existing liturgical monuments that were razed to furnish the building materials for them. But pick up a history textbook taught at state institutions and you will find no explanation of what happened. It was the mission of ‘secular’ historians and public intellectuals of India to locate mundane causes for carnage by religious zealots. And when those reasons could not be found, they papered over the gruesome deeds of the invaders with nice-nellyisms and emphasised their good traits. A standard history textbook written for Indian schoolchildren by Romila Thapar follows up the admission that the Ghaznavid ruler Mahmud was ‘destructive in India’—a phrase that omits so much—with the mitigation that ‘in his own country he was responsible for building a beautiful mosque and a large library’.14 All imperialism is vicious, but that is not the standard adopted by India’s secular historians…. Imperialism, in other words, was destructive only when Europeans did it. When Asians did it, it was a cultural exchange programme.

By the time of India’s Independence in August 1947, Hyderabad’s Muslim overlord was the world’s richest man, and his subjects numbered among its poorest people. Rao’s fiction contains poignant descriptions of the terror visited upon the natives by the Nizam’s mujahideen—villages torched, men hacked apart, women molested—as they sought to subsume Hyderabad into Pakistan. Rao witnessed the carnage and would have known the people who became its casualties.

History cannot be revenged. The best we can do is strive to emancipate ourselves from its punishing torments by being honest about it.

Nehru had erected the Indian republic on four pillars: democracy, secularism, socialism and non-alignment in foreign affairs. Rao took a hammer to what remained of them four decades later. He implemented Manmohan Singh’s economic policies by subverting democracy: critical reforms were made as executive decisions, prices were hiked when parliament went into recess, and parliamentary opposition was overcome by exploiting legal technicalities and blackmailing recalcitrant MPs with the intelligence agencies’ files on them.36 The Indian state’s commitment to secularism also collapsed under Rao’s rule. It did not occur when Advani’s Hindu hordes tore down Babri.

Rao was the first Indian leader who made foreign industrialists feel as if they were in the presence of a ‘chief executive’, not a politician—an early incarnation of praise which, sanctified by years of repetition at Davos, became the highest aspiration of third-world ‘modernisers’. But in applauding him and Singh for supposedly correcting the failures of Nehru, the beneficiaries of New India at home and abroad overlooked the seeds of discontent planted by the pair. Those seeds matured soon after Rao left office. Across India’s most impoverished regions, untouched by material development, armed Maoists intensified their guerrilla warfare against the state. Rao’s own ancestral estate was seized by Maoists in the nineties and distributed among the poor.

Rao led India out of one of the worst economic crises in its history, opened it up to the world, tore down the licence–permit–quota raj, dismantled old orthodoxies and pursued unthinkable new friendships. In doing so, he corrupted India’s democracy and crippled its commitment to secularism. He left behind an India that was wealthier (but more unequal), confident (but less empathetic) and integrated into the world economy (but closed off to its poorer citizens). He is now reviled in his own party, forgotten by the world and neglected in India. He remains the only departed prime minister to be denied a memorial in the country’s capital. It is under him that India made the most total break from its foundational beliefs. His embrace of capitalism, quickening the rise of Hindu nationalism, demonstrated to all those aspiring to succeed him that you could vandalise the values of the republic and still be vaunted—so long as you pleased the markets.

Those who profited from Singh’s abjectness, in the long run, were Muslim extremists in Pakistan and Hindu supremacists in India. But if his actions were anything to go by, what mattered most to Singh was a pat on the back from Washington: he chose to spend the first anniversary of the worst terrorist atrocity on Indian soil in the twenty-first century not with the victims of Mumbai but among his admirers in the White House. The Americans, for all their florid proclamations of friendship, neither halted their sale of weapons to Pakistan nor granted India extensive access to the Pakistani-American double-agent in their custody whose knowledge was instrumental to piecing together the planning behind Mumbai. Nobody could blame them: they were serving their own interests—to India’s misfortune, so was India’s prime minister.

It didn’t take long for the scams—and the hideous nexus between politics, finance, journalism—to come to light. Phone calls between Niira Radia, a political lobbyist on the payroll of India’s billionaires, and some of the country’s most distinguished journalists, intercepted by the tax office, were aired on television networks in 2010. Men and women who would go on to reinvent themselves as the resistance under Modi were heard energetically pimping themselves to the rich. They were willing to convey Radia’s employers’ choice of politicians for key ministries to the Congress Party’s leadership—or make the case for them in their columns. ‘What kind of story do you want?’ Vir Sanghvi, the former editor of Hindustan Times, was heard asking Radia. ‘Because this will go as Counterpoint [the title of Sanghvi’s column], so it will be, like, most-most read, but it can’t seem too slanted, yet it is an ideal opportunity to get all the points across.’

But the scams of the time seemed almost trivial in comparison to the scandals that began erupting on Singh’s watch in 2011, the twentieth anniversary of his original market reforms. One senior Congress leader, Suresh Kalmadi, was placed in judicial custody at Delhi’s Tihar jail on charges of pocketing millions in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Billed as the coming-out party for ‘superpower’ India, the games cost ten times the estimate and were a national embarrassment. Another inmate at Tihar was Singh’s communications minister, Andimuthu Raja—the man promoted by Radia—who stood accused of defrauding the national treasury of US$ 40 billion by selling bandwidth spectrum at grossly undervalued rates. Raja was subsequently found not guilty, and the integrity of the comptroller general whose audit implicated him is now in question.21 But what remains beyond doubt is the pernicious inroads made by big business into the highest offices of the state.

Unanswerable to parliament, above the Constitution, beyond the traditional checks and balances of democracy, and its incorruptibility apparently assured because its functionaries were to be drawn primarily from a pool of distinguished prize winners, Jan Lokpal as devised by Team Anna was a crystallisation of the emergent Indian middle class’s yearning for a benign dictatorship. Coming on the heels of what then looked like pro-democratic revolutions in the Arab world, the assault on democracy in Delhi seemed strange. But there was an internal rationale to this clamour for authoritarianism. The Indian middle class experienced democracy primarily as an impediment to its progress. It spared them the ignominy endured by people in nearby dictatorships and gave them bragging rights in other third-world countries, but it did not enhance their standard of living.

The RSS, alarmed by the personalisation of power, stayed away from the 2007 election. This suited Modi well. He had no opponents left in Gujarat. The one man who challenged him was Haren Pandya. A charismatic Brahmin with a storied RSS pedigree, Pandya dissented from the chief minister in 2002 as Gujarat burned, and deposed before a fact-finding mission. Modi’s office ordered the state’s intelligence director to keep an eye on the renegade. Pandya was shot dead one morning in 2003. A group of Muslims was later picked up, charged with Pandya’s murder and thrown in jail. Nearly a decade later, the High Court of Gujarat acquitted all of them. But the question of who killed Pandya remains unresolved to this day. It is difficult to brush aside the impression that Modi’s Gujarat, like Putin’s Russia, was a place where circumstances fell into the habit of becoming mysterious when it came to the departure of the leader’s enemies.

The prime minister has held meticulously choreographed public meetings with members of the Indian diaspora in almost every foreign capital he has visited since taking office. He even stole time from official business during a visit to London in the summer of 2018 to be interviewed by an ingratiating former copywriter in front of a handpicked group of worshippers. The audience at all such meetings is made up mostly of Hindus who, having long ago discarded their Indian passports, search for redemption from their diminished status as immigrant minorities in the shade of Modi’s strongman leadership. These rallies in the first world—London’s Wembley Stadium, New York’s Madison Square Gardens—are adduced as proof at home of the prime minister’s wild popularity abroad.

Two years later, a report of the ministry of home affairs carried an arresting photo above the caption: ‘floodlighting along the border.’ Illuminating India’s borders is a supremely strenuous job: how did Modi do it in three years? On closer examination, the picture turned out to be of an island-border between Spain and Morocco. But the lie could not be recalled. It had already made its way into millions of WhatsApp accounts.

China initiated a surprise multi-pronged attack against India in 1962, occupying a substantial portion of contested territory on the Tibetan plateau. Nehru’s comrades in the Non-Aligned Movement were of little use. Egypt’s Nasser was rebuffed by China and Yugoslavia’s Tito was denigrated as ‘a lickspittle of US imperialism’ for appearing to side with India. It was Washington that rushed military aid to India. But just as American jumbo jets, flown to bolster India’s retaliation, began landing in West Bengal, Beijing announced a unilateral ceasefire. The war ended quickly, but India, thoroughly worsted, never recovered from the experience. Delhi took great pains thereafter to maintain the fiction that it was on excellent terms with Beijing. Routine provocations by China—incursions into Indian territory, sponsorship of anti-India insurgencies, and clandestine nuclear assistance and lavish subventions to Pakistan—did nothing to temper the tributes flowing eastward from Delhi.

The US has gone from being a donor of food aid to India’s largest trading partner. But the courtship of India by the US in the post-9/11 years—when Washington, seized by a zeal for spreading democracy, began viewing India as a ‘democratic counterweight’ to China in the long run—infected India’s financial and political elites with deleterious delusions. Years of isolation had made them dangerously susceptible to flattery. Goaded by the US, they began to envisage an external role for India that the country’s internal realities could not support. A burgeoning cast of ‘strategic experts’ began exhorting India, where most people do not have access to clean water or toilets, to act like a global power. The world, to quote from a book on Indian foreign policy, is apparently ‘looking to India to shape the emerging international order’. Anybody who has actually travelled in the world and interacted with people outside of the circles of academia and think tanks will find that statement ludicrous. But well-heeled Indians became so besotted with the vision of high status crafted in Washington that, in 2003, the Indian government contemplated sending soldiers to Iraq as part of Bush’s coalition.

‘Never was a man treated as a mind’ in India, Rohith wrote in a note. ‘As a glorious thing made up of stardust.’ He killed himself.

Nehru had wanted to promote a ‘scientific temper’ in the Indian mind. Modi has fostered an anti-science outlook. At the Indian Science Congress of 2015, inaugurated by the prime minister himself, academicians from across the land that once produced boffins such as C.V. Raman and Jagadish Chandra Bose tabulated the scientific achievements of ancient Indians. Among other things, Indians, they said, had built jets capable of interplanetary travel and placed a man on Mars. Indian cows, meanwhile, converted the grass they ingested into ‘24-carat gold’. As chief minister of Gujarat, Modi had written a preface to a ‘history’ book for school students which informed them that the Hindu god Rama had flown the first aircraft.

Religion was a secondary concern for the Muslim Kashmiris who sought union with India. It was Singh and his Hindu-nationalist brethren—and their Muslim-nationalist counterparts in Pakistan—who injected the poison of religion into Kashmir.

A third of Kashmir had fallen to Pakistan by the time hostilities subsided. It should have been left to Indian forces to recover it. But Nehru, acting on British advice, referred Kashmir to the United Nations. It was a grievous mistake: it insulted the ordinary Kashmiris who had rallied behind India, created a costly diversion from the urgent task of rebuilding Kashmir and made Pakistan a party to what now became a legal dispute. The UN devised a sequential prescription in 1948 for the resolution of the conflict: first, Pakistan would have to retreat from the Kashmiri territory it occupied; second, India would have to pare its troop levels down to numbers essential only for the maintenance of security; third, Kashmiris would have to be given a referendum to decide their future.10 It is possible that Kashmiris may have voted for independence. But given that it was Kashmir’s status as a sovereign independent state in 1947 that invited Pakistan’s war of annexation, it is far more probable that they would have voted to ratify the Instrument of Accession backed by Abdullah and remain part of India. But the plebiscite never took place because the UN formula was sequent: the first condition had to be satisfied before the parties could move to meet the second, and the second before the third. Pakistan, rather than vacate the portion of Kashmir it took, continued a low-intensity fight to upend the status quo. And with Pakistani troops massed across the persistently violated ceasefire line, India maintained a strong military presence in Kashmir to deter a second invasion. A vote looked doomed from the beginning. The UN’s plan, built on the preposterous presumption that a state that had just waged an illegal war would act in the interests of the victims of that war, effectively embalmed Kashmiris—divided between two powerful adversaries—in an intractable limbo.

As long as Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state, remains part of the Indian union, Pakistan’s self-conception as the authentic home of India’s Muslims—the reason for its existence—will remain unfulfilled. But the Pakistan that was invented in 1947 ceased to exist in 1971.18 What conceivable moral right did the rump state that clung on to the neologism ‘Pakistan’ have to cast itself as the defender of Muslim destiny after having perpetrated the worst atrocities ever committed against a predominantly Muslim population in what is today Bangladesh? If Pakistan was motivated by a sincere impulse to emancipate Kashmiris, it would not have signed away to its paymasters in China, as it did in 1963, large chunks of Kashmir over which it had no sovereignty.19 Over the past three decades, Pakistan has created, trained and armed militants in the Valley. It has treated Muslim Kashmiri human beings as weapons delivery systems.

Indian unity, even beyond Kashmir, is not divinely ordained. The founders recognised this and were consumed by the union’s fragility. But the persistent anxiety about India’s viability that haunted every prime minister dissolved in the solvent of the new wealth generated in the 1990s. Under Modi, the old divide between north and south has once again opened up. The Hindu-nationalist emphasis on Hindi has alienated non-Hindi speakers, especially in southern India.

The trouble is not that Modi is antagonising the south. It is more serious than that: the south is imperceptibly inching away from the north, and Modi’s brand of nationalism is supplying a pretext for its acceleration. The fault is not the north’s because the true source of the deepening division is not culture or language. It is wealth. India used to be lauded as an audacious experiment for being floated in a poor country, but the poverty may in fact have made it easier to bridge divides. An impoverished India was also a more malleable India. A wealthier India, not so much: new money has already torn communities apart and incubated new strains of mercenary attitudes that make the excesses of the pre-liberalisation era seem tame. The south today is richer and more efficient than the north. And it is the ideas being seeded by the stimulus of those riches that pose perhaps the greatest threat to the Indian project. For the first time, the grievances of the south are anchored in the language of economics: their real complaint is not that they aren’t receiving enough from the union—it is that they are giving too much away. If this trend continues, one parliamentarian from Andhra Pradesh threatened, ‘all southern states might have to come together to form a separate entity’.

There’s nothing natural or preordained about Indian unity. Indian civilisation is antique; Indian unity is rare and recent. And it is far from clear that it can be supported by a radical departure from the conditions in which it was forged.

All those who believe they will remain untouched by its wrath are delusional. If Ehsan Jafri, a former member of parliament with a line to the deputy prime minister’s office, could be dragged out of his home and gashed and burned alive, what makes anyone think he or she will remain unharmed? If Aamir Khan, one of India’s biggest film stars, can be unpersoned; if Gauri Lankesh, one of its boldest journalists, can be shot dead; if Ramachandra Guha, one of its greatest historians, can be stopped from lecturing; if Naseeruddin Shah, among its finest actors, can be branded a traitor; if Manmohan Singh, the former prime minister, can be labelled an agent of Pakistan by his successor; if B.H. Loya, a perfectly healthy judge, can abruptly drop dead; if a young woman can be stalked by the police machinery of the state because Modi has displayed an interest in her—what makes the rest of us think we will remain untouched and unharmed? Unless the republic is reclaimed, the time will come when all of us will be one incorrect meal, one interfaith romance, one unfortunate misstep away from being extinguished. The mobs that slaughtered ‘bad’ Muslims will eventually come for Hindus who are not ‘good’.

We inhabit the most degraded moment in the history of the republic, the culmination of decades of betrayals, the eruption of a long-suppressed rage. But the good thing about bad times is that they are great clarifiers. We can see where we stand. The past five years have shattered so many illusions, dispelled so much fog. We can begin to accept how we arrived here: a journey lined with corruption, cowardly concessions to religious nationalists, demeaning bribes to the minorities, self-wounding distortions of the past and wholesale abandonment of the many for the few.

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