Chapter 1
Introduction
Obstacles to Maturation of Indian nationhood
1971 a watershed year
1971 was a watershed
year in the history of Post Independence India. It was the year that India decisively defeated Pakistan in a war that she did not
desire, consequent to circumstances not of her making. Rarely has there been a
conflict that ended in so short a time and resulting in such a massive captures
of huge numbers of prisoners of war. We will discuss the war and the events
leading up to it later in the book, but the aftermath of the war has been
noteworthy from several different aspects. There was the realization, if such
indeed was necessary, that to equate India
and Pakistan
militarily was an exercise in futility and not borne out by the reality of the
disparate sizes and economies of the two countries. Old habits die hard
however, and there remain significant numbers in the US foreign policy
establishment including the State department that continue to indulge in the fantasy
that India and Pakistan are roughly equivalent in their military and economic
capabilities. They practice the hyphenation of India
and Pakistan
with disastrous consequences for the region and the world. There is also
growing realization in India
that in spite of the intellectual and informational resources available, the
foreign policy elite in the US
is incapable of viewing the Indian subcontinent in strategic terms that would
be of mutual benefit to the US
and India.
The suspicion is growing that the US
is mired in a perpetual cycle of tactical moves to keep the dictators in Islamabad happy and
content.
The 1971 war also
demolished the notion of the two-nation theory even as the antediluvians of Pakistan
cling precariously to this outmoded and medieval vivisection of a land based
solely on religious criteria. The two nation theory has its origins in Islamic
theology that postulates the world as divided in two halves, Dar-ul-Harb (World
of Conflict) and Dar-ul-Islam (World of Islam). The variant proposed by
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founding leader of Pakistan was that the subcontinent
was in actuality the home to 2 nations one Muslim, one Hindu. This simplistic
view of course ignores the immense diversity of the peoples of the Indian
subcontinent that has been home to a bewildering variety of beliefs and
Darshanas (world view or Weltanschauung) as well as a plethora of cultural and
ethnic groups over the millennia. Clinging to the fig leaf of the two-nation
theory, Pakistan laid claim and continues to do so, to any and all territory in
the subcontinent, where there dwelt Muslims, even if their percentages in the
overall population of the subcontinent were negligible. With the creation of Bangladesh in 1972, this notion was effectively
decimated and Pakistan
could no longer claim to be the legitimate home to ‘all’ the Muslims of the
subcontinent. The Bengali speaking population of Bangladesh effectively discarded
the notion that religion is the sole determinant of nationhood. This was
especially galling for Pakistan which had refused to acknowledge that the
majority of Muslims in the erstwhile state of Pakistan (prior to 1971) actually
lived in Bangladesh or what was then called East Pakistan and would not allow a
Prime Minister to be named from that region even though they won the majority
of the seats in the assembly.
The 1971 war was also
a psychological boost to India,
which was saddled with a history, as recounted by the English, who in turn took
great pains to emphasize that India
had rarely won her decisive battles. It was also clear that the notion,
assiduously cultivated by the British, that India had a preponderance of
non-martial ethnic groups who would succumb easily to any threat of invasion,
was a facile and false one.
But the newfound confidence
exhibited by India
in the aftermath of the 1971 war had its contrarian consequences as well. There
were many in Western capitals who were alarmed at the military progress of India and their fears were magnified when India
detonated its first nuclear device in Pokhran in May 1974. The disparate groups
of people who were not thrilled with the prospect of a nuclear India, now came
together and decided to chart a course of action that was adversarial to the
Indic civilization, the main purpose being to bring down the Indian tricolor a
peg or two by using means which were primarily non-military. The military
option of using Pakistan, to
act as a counterweight to India,
clearly had not worked after repeatedly being put to use over 3 decades. It is
this course of action or actions and the resulting challenges to India
that will be the subject of discussion of this chapter.
Challenges faced by India
What then are the
pre-eminent challenges to the Indian republic? Simply put, it is convenient to
classify such challenges as external, internal and civilizational
External threats can
be grouped under threats to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India, threats to the economic growth and
prosperity and business interests of India
and threats to the lives of Indian citizens inside and outside India
due to state-sponsored terrorism.
Nations intent on
bringing down a powerful rival whose philosophy, as originally founded, was
compelling and entirely opposite from that nations own, resort to a stratagem
to help them destroy themselves from within. This is especially true of a
country that it would not or could not be able to confront militarily from the
outside. When the rival country is destroyed from within, the destruction is
accomplished by using that country's own resources and population. No blood is
spilled in the process and the physical infrastructure is left undamaged.
Internal threats can be grouped as threats to national unity as manifested by
divisive events such as riots, and alienation of different sections of society
caused by a breakdown of law and order in safeguarding the lives and property
of Indian citizens, threats of anti-social elements such as criminal gangs to
the overall well being and economy in the country, threats from the secessionist
and terrorist elements in various parts of the country both covert and overt
(ably aided and abetted by purveyors of first group or some form of indigenous
movements that are expressions of opposition to the established legal authority
by alienated sections of the population), and threats from illegal aliens and
refugees from across the border (threat of reduction in per capita income due
to human inflows an also potential of anti-national activities of such aliens).
Threats due to political instability and weak political structure due to
manipulation from major powers are pertinent to this topic. The causes of such
a threat are discussed in this and succeeding chapters.
Civilizational Threats
A particular threat to
the Indian civilization is caused in part by the aiding and abetting of
internal potentially divisive elements by external agencies such as, Madrassah
(Religious schools) funding by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), and possible
divisive agendas of Christian missionary organizations from overseas,
especially in the North East. There is also the threat to the integrity of India
due to the divisive agendas of anarchist media, leftist parties and
intellectuals. The issue is not one of freedom of speech or freedom of choice
but one of secession from the rest of India as a consequence of such
proselytizing. This threat will be analyzed in detail in this document and we
will examine trends which show how the Civilizational memory of the Indic
traditions and Indus valley are sought to be
erased in a long term plan. The final goal is to erase the ‘idea of India’ from the people of India and break up the state. In
any country, there are but a few key
areas that determine how the citizens of that country mature, live, and
develop their beliefs. These are the focal points that must be attacked to
destroy the nation. In his book, On War,
Clausewitz
referred to this concept of identifying and then focusing on a few select
points as attacking the center of
gravity of a nation state. The center of gravity is that key element, which
if controlled or destroyed, would most hurt the opponent and thus is the
critical factor to achieving the objective. In this case, when taking control
of or destroying a country from within, the key is to attack and control the mind of the inhabitants—one must shape the
way people view life and the values upon which their life is based. Shape
the mind of the people and major powers control their direction. Control their
direction and major powers can lead them down a beguiling pathway to uncharted
destinations.
The three centers of
gravity chosen by an adversary to shape in orchestrating a enemy country's
destruction in the long term from within are the enemy country’s
1. Perception of
current truth,
2. Political philosophy
and
3.
Future generations – the shaping of their thought processes.
We will elaborate on
the application of these ideas by state and non-state agencies external to the Indian Republic.
But we are getting
ahead of ourselves. We need to go back to the beginning to an earlier era in
order to understand the manner in which these threats developed. A good place
to start is the European incursion into India in the 16th
century.
The early lead that
the Europeans established as a result of their explorations of the new world
gave them an advantage over the Asian powers who had lost their earlier
inquisitiveness and adventurousness, about the nature of the world. The control
of the Middle East by the Ottoman Empire
forced the Europeans to circumvent their dominions and expand their naval
power. The pre-eminent naval powers of that day were Spain,
Portugal and England,
although the Dutch played also a not inconsequential role. It is instructive in
particular to dwell on the example of the European conquest of India.
Ascendancy of the western powers
There was a military
revolution of far reaching dimensions that permitted the European powers to
take control of the world’s oceans and vast portions of territory around the
globe, beginning in the 15th century. The "military
revolution" refers to the technological and organizational innovations
that enabled Europe to replace Asia as the
world's dominant military power between the Renaissance and Industrial
Revolution. During the late middle Ages, Asian armies routinely crushed
European forces, as demonstrated by the collapse of the Crusades, the Mongolian
invasion of Central Europe, and the Turkish
conquest of the Balkans. The success of the Ottoman Turks in particular offered
a powerful indictment of the superiority of Asian infantry and cavalry tactics,
gunpowder weaponry, command hierarchies, and
logistical support over the feudal armies of the West. Yet the military might
of western Asia paled in comparison to the power of eastern Asia.
The Ming Dynasty of China in the 15th century and the Mughal Empire of India
in the 16th century each employed large standing armies armed with
sophisticated weaponry and centralized bureaucracies. Nevertheless, by the late
18th century a revolution had occurred: European powers were routinely and
decisively defeating Asian armies, as demonstrated by the Russia's conquest of the Crimea, the British
East India Company's conquest of Bengal, and the French invasion of Egypt.
China's
turn at military humiliation would come with the First Opium War (1839–1842).
This transfer of military superiority was the result of Western flexibility and
Eastern rigidity with regard to technical and organizational changes. The
motivation of Europeans to invest continuously in naval, siege, and field
warfare innovations during the military revolution was a direct response to
their interminable political conflicts.
Illustrating this
process was the rise of Western naval supremacy during the 16th century.
Especially critical was the Portuguese work of the 15th century under Prince
Henry the Navigator and King John II. The Portuguese developed oceangoing
vessels that relied on inanimate power for both propulsion and defense, and
astronomical science for navigation. The result was the employment of the light
and maneuverable caravel, and the heavy, fortresslike carrack for ocean
voyages. By the early 16th century, these vessels employed both lanteen and
square sails, and were armed with muzzle-loading artillery. Their navigators
used the compass, quadrant, and tables of solar declination
to determine latitude, as well as a Ptolemaic mapping
system
to chart their course. Equally significant was the carrack's ability to
function simultaneously as a commercial and military vessel. Western naval
rivalries stimulated the innovation of increasingly powerful warships during
the late 16th century, including the oar- and sail-propelled galeasse that the Hapsburgs used to
crush the Turks at Lepanto in 1571, and the sleek galleon that the English used
to deflect the Spanish Armada in 1588. Such naval innovations accelerated
during the 17th century with the use of increasingly specialized naval vessels,
including bomb ketches for offshore bombardments, frigates for long-range privateering,
heavy warships with multiple gun decks for concentrated engagements, and the flutte for economical transportation.
Consistent funding of scientific education and research also became a standard
naval strategy in 17th-century Europe. The
Royal Observatory founded by Charles II and the Paris Academy of Science
founded by Colbert and Louis XIV are the most direct examples. The political
demand for a practical technique to measure longitude, in fact, motivated much of the
astronomical and horological research conducted during the 17th and 18th
centuries.
On land, the Ming and
Qing Dynasties of China, as well as the Mughal and Maratha Empires of India
built enormous fortresses that were virtually impregnable to heavy siege
artillery. They routinely employed gunpowder weaponry in their active defense
as well. The Ottoman Empire, on the other
hand, excelled in assaulting fortresses. Their siege of Constantinople in 1453
was a brilliant example of coordinated artillery, naval, and infantry action,
while their sieges of Rhodes in 1522 and of Cambria
in 1669 demonstrated a mastery of mining attacks. In terms of developing a
comprehensive system of siege warfare, however, Western siege armies were
outclassing their Asian counterparts by the early 16th century. Although
Europeans had used large-caliber bombards to both assault and defend fortified
positions during the second half of the 14th century, their enormous weight
rendered them difficult to transport, while their stone projectiles made them
difficult to supply. Towards the end of the Hundred Years' War (1338–1453), the
French developed smaller caliber guns with higher muzzle velocities and placed
them on stable carriages for greater mobility. The employment of corned
gunpowder and iron shot further increased such artillery power. Thus armed, the
French reduced all British strongholds in France
except Calais
during 1450–51, and crushed English field armies at Formigny and Castillon.
Armed with such artillery, the Spanish reduced the Moslem fortresses in Granada to wrap up the Reconquista by 1492.
Another central
element in the military revolution was the transition from small decentralized
armies focused around feudal cavalry forces to disciplined national armies
dominated by infantry and artillery firepower. This transition began during the
14th. The vast training needed to use the longbow effectively, however, led to
the crossbow's becoming the dominant missile weapon for
Western infantry forces during the 15th century, followed by the harquebus or
matchlock during the 16th century. The Spanish ability to discipline and coordinate
their infantry to fight in such an integrated formation rendered them virtually
invincible in 16th-century field warfare, as demonstrated in the conquest of
the Aztec and Inca Empires, the Battle of Pavia (1525), and the field actions
of the Dutch Revolt. Nevertheless, such infantry innovations hardly gave the
West a decisive advantage over Asian military armies. Europeans, after all, did
not dare engage the Ottoman Turks in a large-scale battle for most of the 16th
and 17th centuries.
By the late 17th and
early 18th centuries, however, the strength of Asian field armies was in
decline. Western European field armies were routinely employing innovations in
military technology that gave them significant advantages. As initiated by
Maurice of Nassau during the Dutch Revolt and developed by Gustavus Adolphus
during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), such drill enabled infantry units to
concentrate their fire in devastating volleys even under terrifying combat
conditions. The growing strength of Western field warfare in the 18th century
also depended on artillery innovations. While the basic smoothbore-artillery
design of the 15th century remained, a series of artillery reforms created both
powerful and maneuverable field artillery systems. This began with Gustavus
Adolphus's introduction of the three-pounder regimental artillery piece into
the Swedish army during the 1620s. The trend accelerated during the mid-18th
century with the artillery reforms of Austria
and France
that furnished the first heavy field guns that could be moved routinely in
combat. Equally significant was the way such 18th-century artillery was used.
Following the ballistics research conducted during the War of the
Austrian Succession, the killing efficiency of Western field artillery improved
significantly when directed by officers trained in Newtonian science.
The Portuguese used
their naval innovations to control the coast of Africa and enter the Indian Ocean by 1494. Their initial probe into Chinese
waters, however, was decisively crushed in 1522 by the gunships of the Ming
Dynasty. Chinese naval power was demonstrated during the early 15th century
when Admiral Cheng Ho's fleets of war junks dominated the Indian
Ocean. Changes in political priorities rather than technical
conservatism led the Ming Dynasty to abandon its commitment to naval expansion.
This left a partial vacuum in the Indian Ocean
that the Portuguese quickly exploited. This paved the way for the Europeans to
enter India.
First the Portuguese invaded the coastal ports of Western
India, followed by the Dutch, the English and the French in quick
succession.
Discovery of India and the
genesis of European Perspectives on India
When
the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama landed at
Calicut in 1498, he was restoring a link between
Europe and the East that had existed many
centuries previously. The most widely publicized connection between the two
regions had been Alexander the Great's invasion of the Punjab,
327–325 BC. In the 2nd century BC, Greek adventurers
from Bactria had founded
kingdoms in the Punjab and the bordering
areas. Western contact with Indian civilization was around the period
1500 AD. However, not until rather late did the West begin to understand and
appreciate the spiritual heritage of India. While it is true that
sketchy accounts of India
(mainly French and some Dutch) began to appear in Europe
in the 16th and 17th centuries, these were decidedly contemptuous and
dismissive.
More substantial and
positive assessments began to circulate only in the latter half of the 18th
century. At that time, a few generally sympathetic Englishmen, brought to India
by the British conquest, began a more serious examination of the history,
philosophy, and literature of the "Hindoos." Of these, some of the
most important were Charles Wilkins, who provided the first translation of The Bhagvat Geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon; Sir
William Jones, (the first expert in the field of what was to be known later as
Indology), whose early essays "On
The Hindus," "On the Gods
of Greece, Italy and India," and "On the Chronology of the Hindus" were widely read in England
and Europe; and Thomas Colebrook, who contributed the first serious analysis of
the Vedas by a Westerner. All of these works were to travel across the Atlantic, importantly influencing the philosophical
development of American philosophers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The perception of India
by the west as a complex, religious country has been projected to the rest of
the world for the last 300 years and this view is the dominant view prevalent
in the west. This view is not too favorable to India currently and will need a
major update by Indians. The ethnicity
in the sub-continent according to such a view is divided as Muslims and
non-Muslims among whom the Muslims are connected to the outside world from their
history of conquest. In this perception, the Muslims were the invaders of the
subcontinent and the current Indian population is comprised essentially of the
remnants of a conquered civilization.
Contrary to such
perceptions in the West, the influence of India on her neighbors, specifically
those in Central, East, and Southeast Asia, has long been recognized, largely
because peoples of these other nations went to great lengths to accurately
translate and disseminate Indic knowledge into their own languages and cultural
idioms. This resulted in an accurate transmission that maintained respect for
the cultural source. Indians had immense trading networks that ran through
Central Asia and Eastern Europe until as late
as the 1700s. Why did this trading network collapse completely and what were
its consequences?
It is instructive here
to digress with a brief overview of Indian colonization of the Far East. By the time of the first 5 centuries of the
Common Era Indian traders actively participated in trade with the Far East and
established trading colonies in the Siam,
Cambodia, Vietnam and Malay peninsula.
They were accompanied by several Kshatriya and Brahmana immigrants who started
establishing Indian-styled monarchies in the region. Most of the early
Brahmanist colonies were localized to Takua
Pa, Nakhon Sri and Dhammarat in
the peninsula. By 400 AD the Shrivijaya
Kingdom was founded in the Island of Sumatra by Kshatriyas. By 500 AD the
Kshatriya Purnavarman founded a kingdom in Western Java.
By around 600-700AD Kshatriya Sanjaya founded a mighty kingdom in Central Java. By around mid 700s the Shailendra Empire
arose in Java who started one of the most remarkable series of conquests of the
Eastern Indic potentates. They annexed all the pre-existing Indic states in Malaysia, Java, Sumatra, Bali, Borneo and
further islands of modern Indonesia.
Subsequently they raided Vietnam
and Cambodia
and established control over these regions for some time. Their empire known as
Suvarnadvipa established diplomatic relationships with the Cholas and Palas in India and with the emperor of China. They also built a university
modeled after Nalanda and Kanchi in Java. The great tantric Dipamkarashrigyana
from Bengal studied there at some point. The
Shailendra emperor Maravijayottungavarman was a great ally of Chola emperor
Rajaraja, who helped him with the construction of Vihara in Java. The
Shailendras fell out with the Cholas after an apparent dispute over trade with China.
This resulted in Rajendra launching a massive amphibious assault on the
Shailendras. It resulted in a total rout of the Shailendras with the Cholas
seizing the Malay Peninsula, Java and Sumatra.
In the West, however,
this transmission of Indic knowledge occurred largely indirectly and remained
confined to a small number of academics, with the result that the vast majority
of the population in America
and Europe remains ignorant about the source
and scope of Indic knowledge. It is
rather unfortunate that when Europe and India did directly encounter each
other it was under coercive conditions, resulting, ultimately, in the
colonization of the latter by the former. Such a grossly inequitable
relationship is not naturally conducive to mutual understanding and respect. As
a result, European portrayals of India were riddled with depictions
of Indians as irrational, mystical savages. Occasionally, when Europeans did
borrow from Indian thought, they denied the source of these findings because to
openly acknowledge that the West had something to learn from India was to implicitly undermine
the myth of cultural superiority, the flimsy justification for colonial
exploitation.
India's cultural diversity and lack of political
unity has often invited its comparison with Europe.
Certainly, India
is not a homogeneous country, by any classification. Also the boundaries of India
have changed very often. The present boundaries of India
do not include all the regions that have been part of 'Classical India' at some
time or another in history, and doubtless, the nation-state of India
as we see it today is a very recent political entity. There is no pretense on
the part of the current Republic to lay claim to all the geographies that were
once part of the Greater Indic civilization.
According to the European
perception that has currency even today; the people of India were broadly categorized as
Aryans who were synonymous with the upper caste (class) and Dravidians who are
the lower class. It is important to recognize that the word Aryan has no basis
in traditional Vedic literature, as a noun. Its use in the Vedas is primarily
as an adjective (e.g. Aryaputr) and not as a noun. In a recent exposition
Thomas Trautman has recounted the
manner in which Aryan came to signify race and ethnicity in the European mind
rather than as a behavioral trait which is the context of the word as used in
the Vedas. This is a significant issue and the dual use of the word Arya as a
noun and as an adjective tends to obfuscate discussion and that in turn has
given rise to spurious notions of racial superiority based on the mythical
concept of an Aryan race.
There is substantial
evidence that the vast majority of the Muslims in India share significant genetic
material with the non-Muslims of the subcontinent. Nevertheless the British
went to extraordinary lengths to drive a wedge between the Muslims and
non-Muslims belonging to the subcontinent and constructed a narrative in which
the Muslims were more connected genetically and culturally to the outside world
from their history of conquest than they were to their Hindu brothers and
neighbors. So it was that a myth was propagated where the Muslims were regarded
as the original (prior to the British) invaders of the native people and the
Hindu was assigned the role of a conquered subject.
Civilizational States
Both China and India are ancient empires that
produced brilliant civilizations. Empires are states that rule over a great
diversity of peoples and extend over huge tracts of lands. Civilizations are
cultures on a vast scale. And culture can be defined as the ways people live,
work and think together.
Some empires rest on the creation of great civilizations, others do not. The
former last very long while the latter do not. China
and India
are the world's greatest examples of the former. And great empires like these
seek peace and prosperity. It's the short-lived empires that stir up wars, like
the ones led by Napoleon and Hitler.
The Indians and Chinese have three or four millennia of civilization embedded
in the minds and souls of their huge populations. Now they also have
well-functioning states highly respected throughout the world. It's not
coincidental that Indian and Chinese youngsters do well in many areas of
education. They are all immersed in stories about great heroes and heroines
that mould their minds and give their souls direction. Their most powerful
direction is education. Furthermore, both civilizations radiated out to many
countries, near and far. These collateral youngsters perform just as well as
those of the root civilization. For one thing, they share the traditional
stories of the root civilization. Even way back in history when foreigners
ruled India and China
these rulers accepted much or all of the great civilizations that surrounded
them.
And over the centuries
many of those foreign rulers gave their Indian and Chinese subjects the peace
that provided security to farmers, traders and intellectuals. The governments
of both countries now know that the combination of a strong state and a brilliant
civilization can give their huge populations what they most want, peace and
prosperity.
After the collapse of
the Western Roman Empire in 476 B.C., Europe
only had only short-lived empires. Charlemagne's attempt lasted less than two
decades. Napoleon crowned himself Emperor in 1804 and met his Waterloo in 1815. Hitler's Thousand Year
Reich didn't even last a decade. Around the beginning of the second millennium Europe did create a civilization, the Renaissance, that
still sends rays of knowledge and beauty all over the world. But they were not
able to create a Roman-style empire in Europe.
Britain built a vast empire
all over the world but shunned Europe. France's dominion over Europe died at Waterloo. Like many
empires, Austria
had great diversity but was never able to create a strong state. And today,
while Europe is still struggling to build a strong European state, India and China are using their historical
capital to create both brilliant civilizations and strong states.
What’s in a name; ‘India’ and the ‘Indian’ Identity
Other Asian
civilizations such as the Chinese civilization have Civilizational memories of India,
her culture and her people. Even the Arabs before Islam and after Islamic
civilization have a Civilizational memory about the people of India through trade and commerce.
However, such memories have been superseded by the viewpoints of the Anglo
Saxon world. The rest of the world even today has views about India/Hindus set
by Europeans [Anglo Saxons] and missionaries in the 1800 and 1900s. Hence the
country and Indians/Hindus are already stereotyped with particular set of
images and perceptions for the most part from the British and colonial
perspective. The British due to their interaction with India from the early
17th century and later their long experience with colonial rule became the
global power by the end of 19th century and were able to influence and build a
worldwide image of Hindus, the non-Muslims, along with India and Indian
civilization, an image that was in accord with their views of the world. This
is very critical to understand in the 21st century. This British image of
Indians and India
was perpetuated throughout the 20th century with the advent of the
communication revolution. India
has never been able to change the perception much after independence. Europeans
by the time of World War II looked at India and Indians, Muslims and
non-Muslims in certain way from their historical experience. An English
authority, Sir John Strachey, had this to say about India: ...... this is the first and most essential thing
to learn about India -that there is not and never was an India or even any
country of India, possessing according to European ideas, any sort of unity,
physical, political .
His was not an isolated opinion. Reginald Craddock, Home Minister of the
Government of India under Hardinge and Chelmsford,
in The dilemma in India (1929) denied the
existence of an Indian nation: An Indian
Nation, if such be possible, has to be created before it can exist. It never
existed in the past, and it does not exist now. Do we flatter ourselves that we
created it? If so, it is sheer flattery. There is no word for 'Indian' in any
vernacular tongue; there is not even any word for 'India'. Nor is there any reason why
there should be an Indian Nation. The bond or union among the races to be found
there is that they have for the last century and a half been governed in common
by a Foreign Power. P. C. Bobb sums up Craddock's views
nicely: By this account 'Indian' was the
same kind of misnomer, applied by the English, as the term 'European' when
applied to the English (as it was in India). According to Craddock, India
was merely, like Europe, a subcontinent within the vast single continent of
Europe and Asia, whose peoples had
"roamed over the whole" in prehistoric times. Down the centuries
nationalities had become localized, until Europe and India, for example, each contained
well over twenty separate countries, divided by race and language. India looked
like one country only if seen from the outside, from ignorance or distance.
India's cultural diversity, and lack of political unity has often invited its
comparison with Europe.
As we have already
remarked, cultural diversity and ethnic diversity are two different aspects of
society and one can have one without the other. It is our contention that India
is culturally unique while being ethnically diverse.
The renowned Islamic
scholar, Mawlana Syed Sulaiman Nadwi develops a variant of a widespread idea
about the origin of the name 'Hind': Before the advent of the Muslims, there
was no single name for the country as a whole. Every province had its own name,
or rather a state was known by the name of its capital. When the Persians
conquered a province of this country, they gave the name 'Hindu' to the river,
which is now known as Indus, and which was
called Mehran, by the Arabs. In the Old Persian and also in Sanskrit, the
letters 's' and 'h' often interchange. There are many instances of this. Hence
Sindh became in Persian Hindu, and the word 'Hind' derived from Hindu, came to
be applied to the whole country. The Arabs, however, who were acquainted with
other parts of the country, restricted the word 'Sind'
to a particular province, while applying the word 'Hind' to other parts of the
country as well. Soon this country came to be known by this name in distant
parts of the world. The Western nations dropped the 'h' and called the country Ind or India.
All over the world, now, this country is called by this name or by any one of
its many variants. (Nadwi, Mawlana Syed Sulaiman Nadwi, Indo-Arab Relations (An
English Rendering of Arab O' Hind Ke
Ta'alluqat) By (Translated by Prof. M. Salahuddin), The Institute of
Indo-Middle East Cultural Studies, Hyderabad, India P. 8). An influential
historian, André Wink, writes about the fashioning of "India" from whatever geographical and
cultural and human materials were present in the region now known as India: We
will see that the Muslims first defined India as a civilization, set it
apart conceptually, and drew its boundaries. The early Muslim view of India includes, to be sure, a close parallel to
the Western Mirabilia Indiae in the accounts
of the "aja'ib al-Hind". It also includes a number of stereotypes
which were already familiar to the ancient Greeks: of India as a land of
self-absorbed philosophers, high learning, "wisdom", the belief in
metempsychosis, of sacred cows, elephants, and, again, great wealth.
The Arab geographers
are perhaps uniquely obsessed with Indian idolatry and polytheism, "in
which they differ totally from the Muslims". But the Arabs, in contrast to
the medieval Christians, developed their conception of India in direct and prolonged
contact with it. In a political-geographical sense, "India" or al-Hind, throughout
the medieval period, was an Arab or Muslim conception. The Arabs, like the
Greeks, adopted a pre-existing Persian term, but they were the first to extend
its application to the entire Indianized region from Sind and Makran to the
Indonesian Archipelago and mainland Southeast Asia.
It therefore appears to us as if the Indians or Hindus acquired a collective
identity in interaction with Islam. (Wink),.
According to this view, the idea of "India" or "Hindus"
itself emerged in interaction with Islam. The Arabs must have called a vast land
'al-Hind' as a shorthand term, just as a modern textbook of geography might
club diverse nations under the umbrella term 'Middle East'.
Another example is the term Sudan.
It was the Arabs who named a vast tract of land (without delimiting it exactly)
as Bilad al-sudan -"land of the blacks". The various peoples of that
region did not refer to themselves as 'Sudanese' until modern times‘‘ Yet the alert reader who reads the above
excerpt would surely notice that the concept of an Indianized region stretching
from Makran (Baluchistan) to Indonesia has somehow wriggled its way into a
discourse which would deny (a priori) the existence of an "India". A
question arises immediately: What was it about the region from Sind to Indonesia that merits the term
'Indianized', which caused the Arabs to call this region collectively as
'al-Hnd'? A partial answer to this question can be formulated by
quoting what Vincent Smith, an authority on early India
had said: "India,
encircled as she is by seas and mountains, is indisputably a geographical unit,
and as such is rightly designated by one name."
Wink's statement says:
"We will see that the Muslims first defined India as a civilization, set it
apart conceptually, and drew its boundaries. The fact that the word "India"
is ostensibly of foreign origin; is used to insinuate that the very idea of an
Indian nation is a contribution by outsiders. No matter how the name India originated, it eventually came to mean
something quite well-defined, and the use of a single term, India, is justified, and not only
as a shorthand for a hazy notion. Vincent Smith
explains: “The most essentially fundamental Indian unity rests upon the fact
that the diverse peoples of India
have developed a peculiar type of culture or civilization utterly different
from any other type in the world. That civilization may be summed up in the
term Hinduism. India
primarily is a Hindu country, the land of the Brahmanas, who have succeeded by
means of peaceful penetration, not by the sword, in carrying their ideas into
every corner of India.
Caste, the characteristic Hindu institution, is utterly unknown in Burma, Tibet,
and other borderlands, dominates the whole of Hindu India, as well as in
distant outposts of Indian civilization such as Bali,
and exercises no small influence over the powerful Muslim minority. Nearly all
Hindus revere Brahmanas, and all may be said to venerate the cow. Few deny the
authority of the Vedas and other ancient scriptures. Sanskrit everywhere is the
sacred language. The great gods, Vishnu and Shiva, are recognized and more or
less worshipped in all parts of India.
The pious pilgrim, when going the round of the holy places, is equally at home
among the snows of Badrinath or on the burning sands of Rama's Bridge. The
seven sacred cities include places in the far south as well as in Hindustan. Similarly, the cult of rivers is common to all
Hindus, and all alike share in the affection felt for the tales of the
Mahabharata and Ramayana. India
beyond all doubt possesses a deep underlying fundamental unity, far more
profound than that produced either by geographical isolation or by political
suzerainty. That unity transcends the innumerable diversities of blood, color,
language, dress, manners and sect.”
The reader may not
agree with all that Vincent Smith says but the idea of a culturally united India
-call it a nation, or a civilization --clearly did not depend upon the Arabs/
Muslims. Nor was the idea born out of the labors of the Western Orientalist or
the British colonial administrator. "India"
--the name which launched a thousand ships, and which has fired the imagination
of explorers for ages, predates the emergence of Islam and Western
Indology, by centuries, if not millennia.
The studies of India and of Indians - Indians are
moldable and ‘like this onlee’
The history of modern
western social science started with colonial India to study the kinship pattern
and different social behaviors of Indians. Among the observations of Indians as
distinct from other ethnics that the British made were the following.
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1. The Indians were
easily colonized
2. They are small,
dark, and short in stature
3. They have a
unique religion and civilization
4. The Indians as a
people, or at least the vast majority of them, have lost the memory of their past
and history of their civilization. The Indians do not keep a record of their
history and they have lost the origin of their civilization. This was the
perception of Englishmen like Macaulay and the most famous of all Indologists
Friedrich MaxMueller. Whether there is much truth in this observation the
fact remains that this is the perception in the west that has been
assiduously cultivated and spread. So confident were they in this assertion
that it prompted MaxMueller to invent Indian History by essentially conjuring
the Aryan Invasion Theory out of thin air in 1860s.
5. The British soon
came to realize that the Indians made no special distinction, at least during
the first few decades, when it came to the Europeans and regarded them merely
as the latest in a wave of invaders dating back to several centuries. Every
analyst including H Kissinger quotes this observation. This fascinates them
and the consequences of this deeply held belief by the British needs to be
studied by Indians.
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The modern perception
about Indians/Hindus and India
by the west and in particular by the Anglo Saxons include the following traits.
Namely that the Indian
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Can easily be
shamed to be subservient.
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Is easy to
brainwash
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Converts to another
religion without excessive effort or persuasion
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Believes in what
he hears without questioning much, especially from a westerner.
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Is susceptible to
be colonized.
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Is partly
superstitious in nature and unscientific.
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Falls for deceptions
and lies more easily
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In the early 20th
century, Sir John Woodroffe,
a scholar and writer on Indian philosophy, published a book entitled, Is India Civilized? He wrote it in
answer to negative criticism of Indian culture by the English drama critic
William Archer. There is persistence, to this day, of many of the negative
ideas and images of Indian culture, which many have addressed over 80 years
ago. This document will try to describe and discover the underlying reasons for
the endurance of these negative portrayals.
The critical juncture
in India’s
modern intellectual and political history was the Indian War of 1857, fought
between the British and their Indian subjects. After the war, Whitehall
assumed direct responsibility for the
administration of India,
ending 250 years of rule by the British East India Company. In the then British
view of the time, Whitehall’s
administration proved a triumph for the forces of progressivism. The British
government moved quickly to establish new universities modeled on Cambridge and Oxford and
intended specifically to train future generations of leaders for India.
This policy had far-reaching consequences, for it permanently redefined
the Indian political elite. The
consequence of this policy was that the elite of the west needed only to deal
with the elite of India who
are already educated in the west or western style of education in India
with English as the medium of learning. The elite of India
are assumed to have a commanding role in shaping the values and opinions
in the country, and by changing the
perception of the elite in India
the west hopes to change Indian society and political structure permanently to
their advantage.
But the west, more
particularly the Anglo-Saxons hides their intent about the sub-continent. John
Mearsheimer writes in his book
'The tragedy of great power politics', p.26 "It should be obvious to
intelligent observers that the US
speaks one way and acts another. In fact policy
makers in other states have always remarked about this tendency in
American foreign policy. As long ago as 1939 for example, Carr pointed out that
states on the European continent regard the English speaking peoples as
'masters in the art of concealing their selfish national interests in the guise
of the general good' adding that 'this
kind of hypocrisy is a special and characteristic peculiarity of the Anglo
Saxon mind'".
Nehru remarks on this
penchant among the Anglo Saxon leadership class also in 'Discovery of India'.
In reality, this is widespread among nations; however, the Anglo Saxons indulge
in this practice with great gusto and panache, a behavior that we now call
'spin'.
One of the
self-imposed missions of the English colonial powers was to civilize Indian
society, which for all practical purposes meant the Hindu society, the part of India
to whom they had greater access. This is considered one of the proud
achievements of the English in India
and it is even today an achievement in which the British take inordinate pride.
The seeds of this policy were laid out 150 years ago during the time of
Macaulay in 1835. Karl Marx had proclaimed that the British have a "dual
mission" in India:
they were there to destroy and rebuild
Indian society. First, they must dismantle those archaic institutions that had
produced centuries of barbarism and stagnation in India, blocking her progress to
higher forms of economic organization. Once this historical debris had been
removed, the British would lay the foundations of a civilized society, duly
equipped with property rights, labor markets and an indigenous bourgeoisie. India
would then be ready to join the civilized world as a near equal of European
nations. India
proved to be more refractory than Marx had anticipated. As a result, when the
British left India,
some two hundred years after they began their dual mission, it was hard to tell
if they had completed or were still completing the first phase of their
mission. But when they left they created enough leverage within the people of India
so that they could get what they wanted. The split of the sub-continent for the
geo-political needs of the Western alliance planted the seeds of change inside
India in order that one day it would sprout into a full grown Islamic jihad
tree , a tree that will revive inside India in the future. Anglo-Indian
protagonist of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, sees
it all coming when he writes to an English friend in 1940, I think that there's no doubt that in the last twenty years—whether
intentionally or not—the English have succeeded in dividing and ruling, and the
kind of conversation I hear ...makes me realize the extent to which the English
now seem to depend upon the divisions in Indian political opinion perpetuating
their own rule at least until after the war, if not for some time beyond it.
They are saying openly that it is "no good leaving the bloody country
because there's no Indian party representative to hand it over to."
They prefer Muslims to Hindus (because of the closer affinity that exists
between God and Allah than exists between God and the Brahman), are
constitutionally predisposed to Indian princes, emotionally affected by the
thought of untouchables, and mad keen about the peasants who look upon any Raj
as God ...
In 1500, India was wealthy, by contemporary standards,
and an active participant in the world economy, with trade caravans heading
westward to Arabia and eastward to China, and Indian products
featuring strongly in European markets. The revenue of the Aurangzeb Empire was
in the range of $450 million in 1700. The next wealthiest king in the European
continent Louis XIV was 10 times less rich. In 1913, India
was still a big participant in the world economy, albeit primarily in the free
trade yet ordered market of the British Empire
-- exports in that year totaled the equivalent of $830 million. In 1948, India's
share of admittedly shrunken world merchandise exports was a still substantial
2.2 percent. In 1985, that share had shrunk to 0.5 percent, and while it has
since recovered, it languishes at 0.7 percent in 2000. All these happened due
to the direct intervention of the colonial masters and geo-political events
before and after the independence. China’s
domestic production in 2001 is $1,100 billion and per capita domestic
production is $887 whereas the comparative figures for India are $426 billion and $424
respectively. Within a span of twenty years i.e., 1979-99, China's export has reached 18 per
cent of its Gross Domestic Product, including it within the top ten exporters
in the world. The share of industrial production has been 50 per cent in China whereas in India it is about 23 per cent.
Foreign investment in China
is about $40 billion annually but in India it is only about $3 billion.
Its income from exports is six times more and the foreign currency reserve is
about three times more than that of India.
The role of the Indian Diaspora
Throughout the
centuries or at least until a thousand years ago Indians were inveterate
travelers and plied the oceans in search of trade opportunities and to spread
their unique civilization without any coercion. After a hiatus, caused by
invasions and turmoil in the land Indians have renewed their wanderlust and in
the modern era have started to emigrate to the west from late 19th century and
this trend has merely accelerated through the 20th century. The
liberal movements after the world war led to rapid emigration for better life
in the western modern economy. The immigrants during the cold war were
astonished when they discovered the different and mythical perceptions about India
resulting from the thousand yearlong isolation of the Indic civilization from
the rest of the world. However, the immigration of Indians to foreign lands
continued to increase. The maximum increase in Indian emigration to the
European Union (EU) and US was in the 90s. Their experience in the west will
result in a totally different version than the previous generations who
migrated to the west. The isolation from the West that India experienced during her
occupation by invading armies continued, albeit to a lesser degree for around
30 years due to the cold war( a deliberate policy) and only a small number had
experience with the west. Even after 170 years of contact with the west there
are merely 20-30 million people of Indian origin who are living outside India
and in comparison to the Chinese Diaspora the numbers are far smaller.
The Indian population
in the United States
has witnessed a tremendous growth since 1965, and the global Indian Diaspora
has now become an important part of world culture. There are now 1.8 million
Indians residing in the United States,
and in countries as diverse as Fiji,
Mauritius, Trinidad, South Africa,
and Malaysia Indians account for a significant portion of the population, even,
in some cases, constituting the majority of the population. Though many
commentators have spoken of the globalization of India,
others prefer to call attention to the Indianization of the globe, pointing to India's
export of its samosas, gurus, sitar music, even beauty queens. Bollywood, as
the Indian movie capital in Mumbai is popularly referred to in India, while always popular in the Middle East,
North and East Africa, Russia,
and elsewhere, is now becoming globally known.
The increased presence
of Indians globally is one of the causes for the rekindled interest in India
and the Indic civilization. Some of the key anthropological questions being
studied by the western universities are: How are questions of race and color
negotiated? How are the animosities of the Indian sub-continent reflected in
the Diaspora, and what are the anxieties of a largely middle-class,
professional Indian Diaspora in the US? Do notions of Indian
"culture" get refined, contested, transmuted, and in what ways? Does
the Indian nation state live in its Diaspora as well, does it indeed receive
succor from the Diaspora, or can the Diaspora become a site from where the
politics of the nation-state can be productively challenged?
The west has observed
that the average Indian is unaware of the change in the outside world and have
taken advantage of these perceived flaws in the Indian psyche. The Indian way
of thinking as expressed by Max Mueller in the 1860s: includes inconsistency,
an apparent inability to distinguish self from non-self, and a lack of
universality. This uninformed nature of the general Indian public is used to
the maximum and exploited by the western media, academics and policymakers. The
Indian leftist and intellectual follows the western academic in looking at an
average Indian in a similar way. In other words the colonial British after 1950
have created an entire class of Indians leftists who look at the rest of
Indians similar to the western academic.
Each of these questions
involve new experiences for the Indians and these questions are being asked
while simultaneously Indians are forming new relationships and associations in
the west. It is not surprising that the West would like to shape the perception
and loyalty of these global Indians towards India.
The Geopolitics of Recent History
There have been
geo-political events such as world wars and cold wars in the last 150 years in
the Eurasian landmass that have profoundly affected India and her surroundings. A significant
policy initiative begun by India’s
first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was based on the premise of
Non-alignment. For a country with few real cards to play in the international
system after independence in 1947, non-alignment ostensibly offered a viable
route to promote its diplomatic profile on the world stage. It allowed India
to become one of the few countries in the world to receive economic assistance
from both camps in the international system, and yet retain the right to
criticize both the Eastern and Western alliances on specific international
issues. The focus on non-alignment did not prevent India from developing a security
policy that was sensitive to shifting alignments in its neighborhood. Its
productive relationship with Moscow had the
effect of balancing American military ties with Pakistan during the early Cold War.
But non-alignment while suiting the personality and prejudices of Nehru was a
flawed weltanschauung both in concept as well as execution right from the
outset.
The reality has been
that Pakistan has
consistently been able to parlay its strategic location as a neighbor of India
to boost its importance far beyond that warranted by its attributes such as
size, population, economy. It has been able to do this primarily at the cost of
India.
When a de facto strategic consensus emerged between Pakistan,
China and the United States at the turn of the 1970s, India was constrained to deepen its relationship
with the Soviet Union through a ‘peace and
friendship treaty’ in 1971. 1971, as we mentioned at the outset, was a seminal
year for the future of the subcontinent while the testing of a nuclear device
in 1974 triggered events, which made India, a target of major powers for
eventual balkanization. The 1979 Iranian revolution increased US interest in Sunni Islam and US
tried to create a political center of Sunni Islam and a Islamic geo-political
block without much success.
However, the key event
that transformed American interest in the region was the Soviet invasion of the
Afghanistan.
This action by the Soviets, a step into a region that the Czars coveted and
would have dearly loved to accomplish as
part of the Great Game between Britain
and Russia,
but did not, created a huge dynamic process, which is still reverberating in
the south Asian region.
….”
T Sreedar of IDSA says:
“THROUGHOUT THE 1980s
and the 1990s, India looked
at the developments in Afghanistan
with a certain amount of dismay. It could not fathom the former Soviet Union's
invasion of Afghanistan
in December 1979. Initially, the policy makers in New Delhi
tried to find a political way out —gently persuading the Soviet
Union to withdraw. India
even offered to work with Pakistan
to find a political solution. But Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq refused to
oblige. The Cold War politics practiced by the Great Powers in Afghanistan was too complex for India
to intervene effectively.
After the Soviet
withdrawal in 1989, India
kept a close watch on Islamabad's
game plan. New Delhi's
moves such as helping Burhanuddin Rabbani met with extremely limited success.
Alarm bells began ringing with the
Taliban's arrival on the scene in 1994. India
saw a link between the developments in Jammu and Kashmir,
the Taliban's creation and the way it was consolidating its position in Afghanistan.
India's
efforts to sensitize the great powers about this development had no success.
After the capture of Kabul
in September 1996, India
closed down its mission there.
….”
"According to the
official view of history," Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national
security adviser, admitted in an interview in 1998, "CIA aid to the mojahedin began during 1980, that
is, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan... But the reality,
secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise." At Brzezinski's
urging, in July 1979 Carter authorized $500m to help set up what was basically
a terrorist organization, an organization that was eventually become the core
group of Al-Qaida. The goal was to lure Moscow,
then deeply troubled by the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in the Soviet
central Asian republics, into the "trap" of Afghanistan, a source of the
contagion. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, the chessboard was passed
to the Clinton
administration. The latest mutation of the mojahedin, the Taliban, now ruled Afghanistan. After the collapse of the
Soviet till 1997 The US turned a blind eye to the rampant Islamic extremism and
terrorism that was being exported from Afghanistan,
in the hope that it was for the greater good of the Western
Alliance, by furthering their oil interests and creating a western
controlled oil and gas pipeline. In 1997, US state department officials and
executives of the Union Oil Company of California
(Unocal) discreetly entertained Taliban leaders in Washington and Houston, Texas.
They were entertained lavishly, with dinner parties at luxurious homes in Houston. They asked to be
taken shopping at a Wal-Mart outlet and flown to tourist attractions, including
the Kennedy Space
Center in Florida
and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota,
where they gazed upon the faces of American presidents chiseled in the rock.
The Wall Street Journal, bulletin of US
power, effused, "The Taliban are the players most capable of achieving
peace in Afghanistan
at this moment in history." In January 1997, a state department official
told journalists in a private briefing that it was hoped Afghanistan would become an oil protectorate,
"like Saudi Arabia".
It was pointed out to him that Saudi
Arabia had no democracy and persecuted
women. "We can live with that," he said. The pipeline
"dream" faded when two US embassies in east Africa were bombed in
1998 and al-Qaida was blamed and the connection with Afghanistan was made. The child
that the US
had spawned in the 80’s had grown to become a Frankenstein and had begun to
bite the hand that fed him.
The aftermath of the
Afghan war created a pan-Islamic world vision, which used the globalization in
the 90s to expand far and wide. This pan Islamic movement resulted in the
change of history with the attacks on WTC in United
States of America on 911.This document looks at various
covert and overt pressure on India
in the last 40 years by the superpowers in their geo-political games
surrounding India.
In this evolution the major powers have also looked at the vast swath of the
Eurasian landmass in the southern region from Middle East to the Indonesia
and planned out a strategic geo-political block, which will take care of
Western Interest. This block is supposed to be Islamic in nature and will hold
steady for several centuries. By creating this block the western powers
intended to have a surrogate power(s)(Littoral states) across the entire
southern oceanic base of the Eurasian block( Indian Ocean Region) for the next
few centuries. The only obstacle to this plan was the presence of India as a non-Islamic country, which juts out
from the Eurasian landmass into the Indian Ocean. The strategic position of Indian southern
peninsula is not really talked about in the open but is a major threat to major
powers in their security of energy resource. The SLOC and proximity to the ME
oil resource; Central Asia future oil resource and SE Asia emerging economy
make India
a target of major powers. The main alliance in the Eurasian landmass was
between China, US and Saudi Arabia during the cold war against the Soviet Union. Japan
and South Korea
were partners with US. After the cold war other alliance such as Russia, China
and India
were proposed. Iran
is also becoming a player in the Asian landmass and in the future the Eurasian
land mass is gaining importance as an economic region.
The British
colonization of India
was instrumental in categorizing the people of the subcontinent primarily as
Muslims and non-Muslims. With the exception of Muslims, Asians (and I include
Indians in this category) in general have not paid primary importance to
religion as an identifier of one’s individuality. This insistence by the
British on using religion as a primary identifier has had a profound impact on
the geo-political evolution and demographics of the sub-continent.
Author and Journalist
Christopher Hitchens has this to say: In the Subcontinent the empire tended to
classify people as Muslim or non-Muslim, partly because the Muslims had been
the last conquerors of the region and also because—as Paul Scott cleverly
noticed—it found Islam to be at least recognizable in Christian-missionary
terms (as opposed to the heathenish polytheism of the Hindus). The British were closer to Muslims of the
sub-continent and employed them, in greater proportion to their population, for
their global leadership during the First World War and 2nd world war. This
entente was continued after the British withdrawal in 1947 and they had the
leverage and still pulled the strings of Pakistan. The UK and the US
acted as a pivot between India and Pakistan for most of the
independent history. The British control over the subcontinent was in effect
replaced after 1947 by the US
immediately under George Marshall. India did attain her freedom but
her leaders and institutions maintained a colonial approach to most decisions
and Indian leaders starting from Nehru did little to shake the established
world order. The new generation of Indians after 1990 has effectively broken
the link from the colonial and major powers. During the cold war Pakistan was closer to the western camp due to
the historical soldier connection in the British Indian Army and strategic
position with Afghanistan.
The culmination of Pakistan’s
moment of glory under the sun was the afghan war fighting with the mujahideens
in the 80s against the advancing Soviet Union.
Simultaneously, Pakistan
went through a transformation with a Islamist ideology taking over the country
under Gen Zia. The major powers tried hard to change India
in the 50 years to their geo-political goals but could not other than engage India
by the end of the decade in 2000. It is hard to break a lifetime of habits of
thought and there remain influential elements among the elite of the major
powers who continue to maintain that India and its population and
religion can be changed to suit their geopolitical interests.
There remains
considerable skepticism that the Indian nation state and the republic for which
it stands is a viable entity. The longevity of the Indian republic is in
question. The perception is still that country is really not one and the people
do not have sense of one single country and hence does not need any attention
as one country and be given political legitimacy. The main method long term to
reduce India and make it
impotent; is to split India
into multiple warring states. The other parallel method is to work on the
population so that they are not monolithic and do not create a nationalistic
ethos. Yet another approach is to push the process of evolution with an Islamic
character inside India
so that the country becomes an Islamic one in the long term with a Islamic
political center.
US policy on India
has been mostly one of detached interest and support to India’s rivals after 1971. India was neglected as part of the cold war
policy due to the India’s
tilt with former Soviet Union and India could only come out of the
closet after 1991 but in a increasingly globalized world. Only three US presidents visited India – Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter
and Bill Clinton in the last 56 years. There is a certain ambivalence about
Indians and Indian culture by the elite and the policymakers in the US.
This can be explained by the experience of Americans in their history from 1945
and this is discussed later in this document. Samuel Huntington says that China
has been successful in creating a idea of a Chinese civilization and a class of
homogeneous people(Huns) who are nationalistic and modern. This has given the
Chinese an identity and a place on the world map. China
has created an entire economy, which can drive the economies of other
surrounding countries from Japan,
Koreas to South
East Asia. It has even come close to driving the destiny of the
south Asian countries and much of the Asian land mass. Nobody talks about India or its Indian civilization or Hindu
identity in the world in a similar manner as they talk about China. This is avoided and the
ancient Indic civilization is rarely talked about and actively negated in the
western world. The entire Indian state and civilization is given less coverage
in the media and academic world.
In the best of all
possible worlds Chinese analysts would like to assign India a status of an illegitimate
power that does not have the right to a regional power status. What they mean
is that the Indian state was born out of providence and that there is no
previous history of such a land mass with a civilization and therefore cannot
be a legitimate nation state now or in the future. Or so the Chinese would have
the rest of the world believe. The inordinate attention that China gave India
in 1962 by taking great pains to humiliate India
militarily belies such a public posture and indicates that the Chinese pay far
more attention to India
than they would have us believe.
Long Term Legacy of the Cold War
The current assault
and challenge on India
is multi dimensional and has been executed for more than 50 years as part of
the cold war policies. The threat to India as we have mentioned already
is external, internal, civilizational and long term in nature. Some of the most far reaching plans are still
being executed inside and outside India to negate the idea of India in the long run. A recent
manifestation of such a cold war legacy
is to confer MNNA (Major Non-NATO Ally) status to Pakistan.The
long term plan is part of the cold war plan where Pakistan (and other Islamic
states such as Saudi Arabia) is one of the partners and has helped the major
powers to win the cold war. This plan is to bring about sufficient change
inside India,
which would help them in their common goals.
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1. One of the most penetrating long term plans is to
change the interpretation of Indian history and society in the eyes of
Indians in the long run. Influence of historians and social research projects
by US and other western government from 70s is very deep. Research funding
for subaltern studies in Indian universities spurned the growth of Indian
experts in social anthropology and Indian leftists who were influenced to
negate the Hindu ethos and Hindu history and to deny the existence of a
Indian/Indic civilization. By this process for a long time the aim was to
create a civilization vacuum inside the minds of Indian people and Indian
people. How long is this going on. It is hard to find out but can be traced
to the time when the Aryan invasion theory was postulated which was around
1863. This reduces the ‘idea of India’ and never builds a
Civilizational identity among the new generation of Indians.
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The British during colonial
rule, attempted to erase out of the Indian mind every vestige of Indian
heritage, but not through sheer brute force as the Muslims had done. As we
know, besides their primary object of plunder, they viewed—or perhaps
justified—their presence in India
as a “divinely ordained” civilizing mission. They spoke of Britain as “the most
enlightened and philanthropic nation in the world” and of “the justifiable
pride which the cultivated members of a civilized community feel in the
beneficent exercise of dominion and in the performance by their nation of the
noble task of spreading the highest kind of civilization.” Such rhetoric was
constantly poured out to the Britons at home so as to give them a good
conscience, while the constant atrocities perpetrated on the Indian people were
discreetly hidden from sight.
The major change in
Indian history teaching in current times came after the 1971 war and separation
of Bangladesh.
The Indian Council of Historical Research [ICHR],
a major academic body was constituted on 27 March 1972 that comprises reputed
historians and archaeologists. This 27-member council was constituted as an
*autonomous* body with the mandate of setting high standards of research for
the writing of Indian history. It currently operates under the Department of
Education of the Human Resource Development Ministry, administers several
historical projects (such as the "Towards Freedom" research and
publication ventures), awards various fellowships and scholarships, and
provides leadership for research in the disciplines of history, archaeology and
so forth. Indian historiography and Indian historians have built a globally
high reputation over the last few decades. But the hidden agenda was to
reinterpret Indian History with a bias towards Mughal history and revive the Pakistan ideology even after separation of Bangladesh.
This is discussed in more detail later.
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2. It is important to note that in the case of most
"civilizations" the states are in control over how their history is
taught, which influences their societies self image and thus prepares the
populace for the future. The Chinese, Europeans, Americans and other centers
of civilization all have their own grand narratives about who they are. In
the case of India
however, its history has been consistently in the hands of outsiders’ up to
this day. These outside interests have found it very useful to manipulate
Indian History to suit their own agendas. This is a fundamental cause for a
contested history and the debate between different civilizations and cultures
inside India.
Negation of Indian history outside India is a long-term plan by other powers
to stamp out all the Indic symbols which are outside and inside India so that
India will neither reclaim the history and nor the external land. Indian
population growing to be the largest in the world in the next 40 years has
created worry among many big powers apart from Pakistan. The plan to negate the
Indian history was rejuvenated around 1971 after India
rolled back one part of history with the creation of Bangladesh. To stop this rollback
and reclaiming of Indian history by Indians in the future there is a slow
negation of Indian history across all academic and political areas around the
world.
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3. External pressure from Pakistan
in the form of incursions along the Line of Control (LOC) in Kashmir, threats and diplomatic pressure at various
international forums has been relentless. This created a sense of a blown up Pakistan, which is equal in strength to India and can defeat India in case of war. The US tapped the pride of the Ashrafs in Pakistan
in their Mughal history to bolster the confidence of the Pakistani elite
after their defeat in 1971. The pride and the confidence of Pakistani Ashrafs
were blown up by the major powers so that it can become a counter weight to
the growing power of India
and help Pakistan
create a powerful Islamic political center. Subtle use of media and image
creation inside India was
used to brainwash the general masses inside India. This is actually a
long-term plan of the major powers.
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One of the interesting
proclivities that the West has indulged in, that Rajiv Malhotra has pointed out
is the danger of U-turns wherein Christian missionaries penetrate Hindu
organizations, and hijack them and steal Hindu ideas like Yoga etc This mosaic
of Hinduism which is not monolithic is advantageous to outsiders who have
ulterior motives. Since there is no central repository and a central authority
to lay claim to the Indic traditions and practices there is a free for all
attitude to the interpretations of the Indic practices. Only books written by
the western authors are acknowledged. No book written by Indian authors about
Indian history is fully praised including the favorite authors of the western
academics. Quote about a book written by Romila Thapar titled [preferred author
for the west] EARLY INDIA:
“Written in dense academese, it opens
with a long theoretical introduction containing the usual cap-doffing to Edward
Said and Orientalism. It is more than 70 pages before we meet our first
hunter-gatherers. There is little sense of narrative progression and the
writing is far from colorful. This is all the sadder as there are precious few
well-written accessible histories of India,
John Keay's excellent India:
A History being a notable exception. This,
as much as anything else, has allowed myths to replace history among India's
voraciously literate middle class. Unless Indian historians learn to make their
work elegant and intelligible, attractive to a wide audience, unhistorical
myths will continue to flourish”.
How big is this plan?
It could be as big as a clash of the Ummah with the Indian civilization in the
long run. Aspirations of a global Sunni Political Islam were present for a long
time and it was the deliberate policy of the US after the 1979 Iranian
revolutions to nurture such aspirations with a long term plan to create a core
state of Islam. This core state would create the political center and be
representative of Islamic civilization in the world. Turkey
and Pakistan
were considered ideal countries for this role. Pakistan was one of the aspirants
due the history of Mughal rule and familiarity of the Ashrafs to the
Anglo-Saxons with Ashrafs who held the respect of the rest of the Muslims in
the sub-continent. The concept of the Pakistan
flag on the Red Fort in Delhi
has significant political meaning among the Muslims of the subcontinent. Shah
WaliUllah a Islamic scholar in 1700s had expressed a vision of creating a
center of political Islam in the heart of India to become the center of
Islamic world. This has been actively encouraged by the Western powers and China
during the last 50 years. By pushing the aspirations of the Sunni political
Islam to the sub-continent the major powers have deflected all the Islamic
jihadi energy and confrontation with the west against India. Traditional adversaries such
as Islamic predatory institutions from Islamic countries such as Pakistan and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
are used to change the identity of Indian minorities and to create chaos in the
Indian political and social sphere. Islamic pressure through funding of
madrassas all across India
by Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan
is actively encouraged by internal groups and external countries from the west.
In India,
an increasing number of madrassas are being taken over by the even more extreme
Jamiat Ahle Hadith and Tablighi Jamaat groups, which does not bode well for the
world's largest democracy.
Creating examples out
of Kashmir with experiments in supremacy of
Islam (Nizam e Mustafa) was a plan to change the psychology of an Islamic
society. The creation of Taliban in Afghanistan was noteworthy as it
was the first Islamic state to be so created in 100 years. LeT and HuM openly
flaunted the security and law of the land to kill innocent Indians with
impunity. The psychological impact on rest of India was being monitored every
year and is still done. Global terrorism
report from the State Dept did not put the center of terrorism to South Asia until the year 2001. This may be due to the
earlier cozy relationship between the terrorist groups, Pakistan and US agencies.
Successive US Governments have had a stake in the continuation of jihadi
activities at least in the sub-continent for their long-term goals as
enunciated here.
The implications for India for developing a strategy against Pakistan
are profound. Pakistan, in
such a paradigm would no longer be interested in the military conquest of India.
The goal of the elite in Pakistanis, and some in the West, would be the breakup
of India
preferably from within and the establishment of several warring states amongst
whom a Mughalistan patterned along the Caliphates of the medieval era would be
a pre-eminent power. Such a scenario would suit the geopolitical interests of
the superpowers and would thereby negate the emergence of an alternate center
of power.
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4. Threat from internal subversive groups such as academic
and influential intellectuals who are aligned with the western powers
knowingly or unknowingly is most devastative. This threat is the most
dangerous in a free and totally open society such as India and most of the Indian
leftists intellectuals are pawns in this game. The leftists, academia, social
anthropologists and intellectuals have been cultivated in the last 40 years
in the western universities with south Asian chairs. The perception of these
intellectuals is actually that they are doing something to change and
civilize the Indian society [ in this desire they are reminiscent of their erstwhile
colonial masters from whom they have imbibed a Macaulayite theology ] which
is mired in ‘old culture’ into a progressive culture. So most of the Indian
studies in the western universities are actually a project to map the Indian
society and come up with a plan to change the society to suit the aims of the
western powers. On such example is to create chaos among a ethnic minority
during the time of need to put pressure on the Indian government. The Indian
elite has been the eyes and ears of the major powers to observe and change
the Indian society. The most significant aspect of the unique Indian society
has been its perceived diversity and this has been used to a great extent by
the major powers for their goals. Significant sections of the illiterate
population and less privileged section in the society have been susceptible
to influence from these Indian elite, NGO and western organization including
the religious ones.
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5 The demographic threat is a long term threat to
the Civilizational identity of India. The British understood the
need to study the Indian population in a more detailed manner to create
schism with the society. The first census was conducted in 1881. The emphasis
of the census was on categorizing the Indian population primarily by caste. It
was the expectation of the colonial master that such a taxonomy would attain
canonical status and be accepted as reality by his Indian subjects. That
expectation has arguably been realized in large measure by the Indian Republic as she has used the List of
Scheduled Castes and Tribes originally developed by the British in 1881to
drive a divisive wedge in Indian society, to fashion her quota and
reservation policies, which are the cornerstone of her affirmative action
policies. Recent studies by Center for
Policy Studies in association with the Indian Council of Social Science
Research show the current trend of demographic changes in India, Pakistan
and Bangladesh
in the last 100 years. With globalization and creation of liberal society in
the last several decades there has been steady change in the demographic
profile of the country with reduction in Indian religionists due to
conversion. There were two spurts of growth of population of India. One
was during the period after 1965 and the other was after 1985. There were
major policy changes by other powers against India at these two data points.
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The percentage of
Hindus according to the study (including Buddhists, Jain and Sikhs, for which
the three authors have given a common term of Indian Religionists) would be
reduced to minorities in the second half
of the century. The study says the percentage of Indian religionists in
the region had dropped from 78 per cent to 67 per cent in a century. This is a
fairly large decline for a single religious community and 57 per cent of the
population lived in two-thirds of the country, where Hindus constituted more
than 90 per cent of the population. However, there were some pockets of
Muslim-dominated areas and some Christian-dominated ones. On the Gangetic belt,
comprising 19 per cent of the area and 38 per cent of the population, the share
of Indian religionists had come down by four per cent, which cannot be
considered a normal phenomenon. In the border districts of India, the share of Indian
religionists had come down by seven per cent, which he said was very high,
while those in Kerala had declined by 12 per cent. Alarming was the condition
of several states of the northeast, where the Christian population was
increasing very fast. Now there are only small pockets, which were dominated by
Indian religionists. The British were perhaps even more contemptuous of the
fundamental Civilizational and religious principles of India than the Turko-Afghans and
Mughals. They, through their patronage and propagation of Christianity,
introduced another source of religious heterogeneity in India. But more than the spread of
Christianity, the British contributed to
the increase of heterogeneity by systematically negating and suppressing the
civilizational homogeneity of India.
Thus, even though the growth of Christianity in India during the British rule was
less than spectacular, the share of adherents of indigenous religions began to
decline precipitously during this period. This decline has not been arrested
yet.
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6
Uneven development in critical regions in India
close to the borders is threatening the integrity of India. From
UP to Assam
there are 400 million people whose per capita income is below international
standard and the GDP growth is less
than the population growth. The breakdown of the civil administration and law
enforcement has made the region ungovernable and non-developmental. This area
was the target of leftist campaign to bring about revolution from 1970s
resulting in total collapse of the government. This region is a prime target
of various external organization including religious ones for change and
eventual disorder. Marxist organization to communal organization control
large areas of the countryside.
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South Asia Studies
South Asian studies
department may have started during the early decades of the British raj when
Macaulay laid the foundation of education using English in India. Western style academic study
of India's traditions was
started in the 19th century colonial era as the field called Indology - the
study of India
by the West for the West. Even today, Indians seeking to advance in the study
of their own traditions face the conventional power structures that survive
decades after colonialism. They must at the very least 'prove' their
objectivity sometimes by alienating themselves from Indian ways of thinking,
including having to adopt the use of Western categories and language for their
work. Given the natural ambitions of many Indians to study about India,
numerous Indian scholars become 'Macaulayites', exactly as hoped for by Lord
Macaulay in 1835, when he re-engineered India's education to "form
a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a
class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions,
in morals, and in intellect." Over time, a theology which we will
term Macaulayism was planted within Indian minds, invisible and harder to fight
than physical dominance. The endgame was the universalizing of colonial ideas
and values, through prominence of their writings. This subliminal adaptation has
helped many Indians to enter, survive and advance in the field of Religious
Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, or Social Studies. Those who have tried
to stand up to such a hegemonic situation have often been blatantly declared as
fundamentalists, or else marginalized in subtle ways. Max Mueller was one of
the principal figures in the interpretation of the Indian culture and text and
Indian behavior/psychology for the Europeans. It is no coincidence that Max
Mueller was hired by Macaulay for the express purpose of exposing all that was
indefensible in the Vedic and Puranic texts from a modernist perspective. Many
universities such as Yale, Columbia
and other Ivy League campuses have a continuing south Asian/Indian studies
dept. After independence these studies continued with many Indian scholars
taking over many departments but they still had the colonial mindset and
interpretation of the Indian sub-continent.
Quote about India
in the 1930s -
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Lastly there is this
further point to which attention should be paid: the attachment (such as it
is) of the Mohammedan world in India to English rule is founded
mainly upon the gulf between the Mohammedan and Hindu religions. Every
step towards a larger political
independence for either party strengthens the Mohammedan desire for renewed
power. The Indian Mohammedan will more and more tend to say: "If I am to
look after myself and not to be favored as I have been in the past by the
alien European master in India
which I once ruled I will rely upon the revival of Islam." For all these
reasons (and many more might be added) men of foresight may justly apprehend,
or at any rate expect, the return of Islam. But after 1971 (and the creation
of Bangladesh)
a new thrust was given to the south Asian studies with focus on the subaltern
studies and Muslims of the subcontinent. To contain Soviet influence, the US
State Department allocated funds to American universities for studying the nonwestern
world, and the new field was called 'Area Studies'. Under this rubric, the
notion of a 'South Asia' was born, along with far reaching consequences of
balancing India with Pakistan,
and trying to 'South Asianize the identity of Indians and Indian
civilization. This grouping of countries is a politically correct way of
referring to former British colonies. The fundamentalmotive
fortheseA]SouthAsiaStudies was to exorcise the dominance of India in the subcontinent.
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It is the American
equivalent of colonial Europe's field of
Indology. Within these area studies, are somewhere between three and five
faculty positions for East Asia (China,
Japan, etc) studies, for
every one position for South Asia. The
government's funding was based on geo-political importance at a given time
based on its strategic interests. The studies were more strategic and were
designed to create experts in anthropology and social scientist who would work
with the western experts. The leftist groups and NGO and media were also
cultivated to create a gigantic network in the name of social studies and
progressive culture. The progressive ‘culture’ in India gained momentum by early 80s
and was dominant by mid 90s. The purpose of the new studies and greater focus
on India
is explained in the next few sections. Anthropologists have positioned the
Indians being studied as ‘native informants’ in an asymmetric relationship.
Given the power imbalance, often these native informants supply the data that
is expected of them to fit into the western scholars’ paradigm, and the
representation tends to be that of a primitive people as compared to the
superior, ‘rational’ west. Hinduism has been studied when the new discipline
‘Indology’ was created in late 1800s. This started as a study of comparative
language between Sanskrit and European languages but later took up the study of
Hinduism and other religious texts. Academic scholars of religion reduce Hindu
into exotica, sociology and anthropology, a story depicting backwardness in
wait of western cures. Psychology scholars have been appropriating meditation, kundalini,
tantra and related Hindu- Buddhist ideas, repackaging them into ‘new age’ and
western representations, while letting the traditions' roots die out. Adept yogis/meditators
are often reduced to laboratory subjects in the same manner as laboratory rats,
when in fact they deserve to be co-scientists and co-investigators of the inner
realm. The colonial missionaries laid the foundation of distorting the Indian
religious traditions for their long-term motive and created academic
traditions, which are still followed in universities across the world. In the
forum for south Asia called Religions of the South Asia
[L-RISA] every religion is studied except Hinduism. Hinduism is denigrated as
much as possible and is never treated as a equal religion to be researched. The
religion is negated as far as possible in every forum and the concept of a
tradition is ignored as nonexistent. The western academy of philosophers has
largely boycott non-western philosophies, and many openly proclaim that there
is no such thing as non-western philosophy. India's own Macaulayite elitist
intellectuals have often sold out their traditions, rather than championing the
revival and proper place of these traditions for the benefit of all humanity.
Most of the western experts are proselytizers and use colonial lens and are
Judeo-Christian controlled within an institutional fortress. They focus on
negative stereotypes while ignoring the positive aspects.
Among academicians in
American universities who are specialists in South Asian Studies and also in
History departments in many institutes of higher learning in India, there is a
tendency, perhaps an unwritten rule, a consensually agreed upon approach that
systematically discourages objective discussions of the early years of the
Islamic interface in the Indian Subcontinent. Academia has for decades
sidetracked and stonewalled research projects or in-depth discussions that focus
too closely on the destruction and dislocation associated with the many
incursions led and organized by medieval Central Asian invaders who entered
into the Indian Subcontinent over the course of five or six centuries. Hindus,
Buddhists, Jains, and later Sikhs endured hundreds of years of what could be
called "medieval imperialism" initially characterized by a tremendous
amount of religious intolerance and iconoclasm. Military adventurism inspired
by Islam, brought serious pressures on indigenous religious, cultural, and
political institutions. These indigenous Indian communities were able to
sustain and continually reassert themselves. Strangely, their resistance,
resilience, and cultural tenacity are not topics found in most treatments of
Indian history. It is a period almost devoid of indigenous Indian voices.
A well-known group of
"Marxist/Leftist/Progressive" Indian intellectuals, who refer to themselves
as "The Delhi Historians' Group" has during the past three decades
created an academic blockade that, has been very effective and nearly
impossible to transcend. The strident efforts of this group of Indian scholars
have helped to institutionalize the widely accepted taboo against teaching
about the topic of medieval terrorism and Islamic imperialism. In academic
institutions in many countries in the west and in India -- in departments of South
Asian Studies -- there is a prejudice against the study of indigenous
resistance to Imperial rule. The indigenous response that resisted the
pressures to Islamize created by centuries of the political and military
presence of Islamic
ruled states, kingdoms and fiefdoms is a taboo topic. At present, there is no
room in the academic world for such research, which by inference must have
referents to the violence which characterized that period of military
aggression, violence brought on by invasions, circa 1000 CE onwards. Some of
the quotes from the leftists are as follows about Hinduism compared to other
religions.
- First, tribal people
exposed to conditions of modern life and modern education desire a transition
to a broader social and cultural life than those available under their ancient
tribal institutions. Hinduism with its numerous taboos and pollution norms
makes this transition difficult and hedged with restrictions. Christianity
makes for an easier and more democratic transition. However, Christian
preachers and priests often instill a kind of exclusiveness bordering on
bigotry among the converts. Militant faith and convictions lead to more
antagonistic relationships with the neighboring Hindus; and indeed with their
own animist" brethren, also significantly turned "Hindus" by
Christian preachers.
Quote from Yvette C. Rosser an academic with
interest in the history of the subcontinent. In 1993, when I began graduate
school as a student of South Asian Studies, I noticed a bias. This bias was
seemingly addressed and partially engaged by a number of thoughtful scholars
spurred on in the eighties by Edward Said's Orientalism movement and in the
nineties by Ron Inden's novel approach to Indic studies. However, as the bias
spun on the many analyses in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, it
took on the proportions of a typhoon. The Hindus were all somehow thrown
together with fascists and Hinduism was blown into fragments so it was not even
a religion at all, just a collection of cults. Even Sanskrit studies had to
erect a facade to protect its pundit purity from association with actual
Hinduism and practicing Hindus. Indology became a socio-economic area of concern
or a playground for Freudian analysis. Hindutva in many ways became synonymous
with Hinduism. In a field that has become guided by a quest for the exotic
and/or focused on the negative, there seemed to be very little room for the
personal appreciation and respect that I felt for the traditions of India.
Antonio de Nicholas, now retired as Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and
Religion at SUNY writes:
"Christianity,
Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, even Shinto studies have found a place in the American Academy and are being taught by scholars
of those traditions. All but Hinduism, the earliest of all ancient cultures
recorded in writing, the store house of our own internal habits of soul, mind,
society, mortality, immortality; the reference of later cultures and mystics,
the mother, literally, of our own human possibilities has neither found an
autonomous voice in the Academy nor have the children of this culture, Hindus,
allowed to represent themselves in the American Academy when Hinduism is taught
by non-Hindus, or patronized or vilified or simply ignored."
Force of History
This doctrine says
that a certain evolution of history is always going on and in a particular
direction and there is a historical order of things. In the case of India
and the sub-continent it means that the process of Islamization going on from
1000 years will continue to its logical end. Hindus do not pay much attention
to the historical order of things," wrote Al Biruni in 1030 AD. "They
are very careless in relating the chronological succession of things." The
millennium-old censure of the Hindus' lack of historic sense by a medieval
Muslim historian appears to still apply, particularly to the Indian historians
of the present day. This has been exploited by the Islamists, British and modern
day communists in India for the last 200 years and continued by the western
academics The Islamist believes in this doctrine of history since it is part of
the Islamic history as represented by Islam and is read by all the students who
go training under the ulema and madrassas. The Islamic history has been
preserved for a long time with accuracy and also has been presented with a
sense of force of
history. This makes
the faithful to believe that the faith will take them to the destination, which
they strive for. This is the reason why Pakistan
army and the Islamic parties are confident of in the long run to change the
history of south Asia to their advantage. By
showing Islam as a winning religion in the sub-continent the non-Muslim
tradition could be totally wiped out of the sub-continent or made a minority.
According to this
doctrine of force of history, creation of Pakistan
and Bangladesh
is part of the evolution from the Middle Ages ( a third phase of expansion of Islam)
and the entire sub-continent will also one day will be a Islamic country.
During the cold war the US
and Pakistan forced this
history as the final destination of south Asia.
The hatred of Hindus particularly the Brahmins by the ashrafs and sections of
Anglo Saxon (because to the independence in 1947) created a powerful pact
between them along with
Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia, which resulted in a
cold war plan to change the history of south Asia
forever to their advantage.
The protection of Pakistan by Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia and US[ and China]
for so many decades is for this reason of force of history and for
geo-political goals of the hyper power. The reason is that by supporting and
protecting the center of Islam inside the sub-continent the force of history
will work its own way to force change with the population. This process of
evolution is still going on working for the
last 35 years since 1971 even after the collapse of FSU. US with its
vast resources and control of the world media is providing the powerful push to
this force of history to become a reality. US with the help of proxies inside
India is also doing its social reengineering and conversion to break the Indian
society [kinship and old traditions] and accept an Islamic govt. The US policy to treat South
Asia as one entity–
consisting
of Muslims and
non-Muslims – is to make sure that non-Muslims do not gain dominance(
culturally, leadership) over the Muslims and in due time over the course of
history all the people will be of same ethnicity – Muslims. The communists
believe in this doctrine since they consider revolution as the modern version
of the process of the evolution of history. The revolution in the communist
world is similar to the jihad in the Islamic world. Hence Indian leftist and
communists are also part of this game and have similar views about the future
destination of India and are
collaborating with the external organization to bring about the change in India.
How much is the interaction and to what extent is the link is yet to be
determined. The perception of the leftists and communists about non-Muslims in
the subcontinent is the same as of their earlier colonial masters. The force of
history is believed to change the non-Muslims to final destination.
Doctrine of Phases
This doctrine proposes
that a series of events and sequence in time will lead to a course of history.
It may take few days or many months and year even decades but the course of
events (history) is such that it will move in a particular direction. One example
is that of the Palestinians against the Israeli state. The ultimate goal is to
make the state Palestinian and the Jews second-class citizens of that state.
Something similar is going on Kashmir. The
sequence of events is by now all too familiar; first the protest, next the
killings, next the political dialogue and then international attention. The
killings transformed the society into a nizam-e-Mustafa, which is supremacy of
Islam in the Kashmir valley over the
non-Muslims. So every gruesome murder
was a jihad and for the benefit for Islam.
When the population in
a predominant Islamic society gets radicalized they adopt jihad to change the
status quo and is done in stages. In Kashmir
the madrassas were radicalized in the 70s. So by early 80s by the middle of 80s
many Kashmir youths were fighting in Afghanistan as mujahideens. This
gave them sufficient support to start a jihad for their old nationalistic
grievances in their hometown. By 1989 the jihadis had started the jihad in Kashmir and reached the peak by 1994. The Pakistan increased the scope of this jihad after
1992 for the entire country with the aim of radicalizing the entire Muslim
population within India
and start a bigger phase in its doctrine. The aim was to weaken the state and
make it easy to spread Islam throughout India.
Negationism in Indian History
This topic borrows
heavily from the book by Koenrad Elst,
Negationism in India.
Negationism means the denial of historical crimes against humanity. It is not a
reinterpretation of known facts, but the denial of known facts. The term
Negationism has gained currency as the name of a movement to deny a specific
crime against humanity, the Nazi genocide on the Jews in 1941-45, also known as
the holocaust (Greek: fire sacrifice) or the Shoah (Hebrew: disaster).
Negationism is mostly identified with the effort at re-writing history in such
a way that the fact of the Holocaust is omitted. The negationists themselves
prefer to call themselves revisionists, after all they think that there is
nothing to deny or negate, and that
the known facts of history are a
fabrication which will be exposed when history is given a second look or revised. Many commentators use the two
terms interchangeably, and it has become impossible to use the word revisionism (once used as a Maoist term
for Khrushchev's destalinization) except in the sense of Negationism. Only a few purists, like the Flemish scholar Gie van
den Berghe, insist on the distinction between Negationism alias revisionism,
and the legitimate revisionism.
Revisionism stricto
sensu is then defined as the normal activity of historians, viz. the
reassessment of given historical facts. By contrast, in negationism, facts are
not re-interpreted but denied. Since about 1920 an effort has been going on in India
to rewrite history and to deny the millennium long attack of Islam on Hinduism.
Today, most politicians and English- writing intellectuals in India will go out of their way to
condemn any public reference to this long and painful conflict in the strongest
terms. They will go to any length to create the illusion of a history of communal amity between Hindus and
Muslims. Making people believe in a history of Hindu-Muslim amity is not an
easy task: the number of victims of the persecutions of Hindus by Muslims is easily
of the same order of magnitude as that of the Nazi extermination policy, though
no one has yet made the effort of tabulating the reported massacres and
proposing a reasonable estimate of how many millions exactly must have died in
the course of the Islamic campaign against Hinduism (such research is taboo).
On top of these there is a similar number of abductions and deportations to
harems and slave-markets, as well as centuries of political oppression and
cultural destruction. The American historian Will Durant summed it up thus:"The Islamic conquest of India
is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its
evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex
of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by
barbarians invading from without or multiplying within." The original
source material leaves us in no doubt that conflict often erupted on purely
religious grounds, even against the political and economical interests of the
contending parties. The negationists' tactic therefore consists in keeping this
original testimony out of view. A good example is Prof. Gyanendra Pandey's
recent book, The Construction of
Communalism in Colonial North India. As the title clearly says, Pandey
asserts that communalism (the
Hindu-Muslim conflict) had been constructed
by the British for colonial purposes and out of colonial prejudices, was
later internalized by Indians looking for new, politically profitable forms of
organization in modern colonial society. But the negationists are not satisfied
with seeing their own version of the facts being repeated in more and more
books and papers. They also want to prevent other versions from reaching the
public. Therefore, in 1982 the National
Council of Educational Research and Training issued a directive for the
rewriting of schoolbooks. Among other
things, it stipulated
that: "Characterization of the
medieval period as a time of conflict between Hindus and Muslims is
forbidden." Under Marxist pressure, Negationism has become India's
official policy. The political context of the first attempts at Negationism was
chiefly the attempt of the independence movement, led by the Indian National
Congress, to eliminate all factors of disunity between Hindus and Muslims. The
Congress leaders were not yet actively involved in the rewriting of history.
They were satisfied to quietly ignore the true history of Hindu-Muslim
relations. After the communal riots of Kanpur
in 1931, a Congress report advised the elimination of the mutual enemy - image
by changing the contents of the history-books. The next generation of political
leaders, especially the left wing that was to gain control of Congress in the
thirties, and complete control in the fifties, would profess Negationism very
explicitly. The radical humanist (i.e.
bourgeois Marxist) M.N. Roy wrote that Islam had
fulfilled a historic mission of equality and abolition of discrimination, and
that for this, Islam had been welcomed into India by the lower castes. If at all
any violence had occurred, it was as a matter of justified class struggle by
the progressive forces against the reactionary forces, meaning the feudal Hindu upper castes.
Around 1920 Aligarh historian Mohammed
Habib launched a grand project to rewrite the history of the Indian religious
conflict. The main points of his version of history are the following. Firstly,
it was not all that serious. One cannot fail to notice that the Islamic
chroniclers (including some rulers who wrote their own chronicles, like Timur
and Babar) have described the slaughter of Hindus, the abduction of their women
and children, and the destruction of their places of worship most gleefully.
But, according to Habib, these were merely exaggerations by court poets out to
please their patrons. Secondly, that percentage of atrocities on Hindus, which Habib
was prepared to admit as historical, is not to be attributed to the impact of
Islam, but to other factors. Sometimes Islam was used as a justification post
factum, but this was deceptive. In reality economic motives were at work. The
Hindus amassed all their wealth in temples and therefore Muslim armies
plundered these temples. Thirdly, according to Habib there was also a racial
factor: these Muslims were mostly Turks, savage riders from the steppes who
would need several centuries before getting civilized by the wholesome
influence of Islam. Their inborn barbarity cannot be attributed to the
doctrines of Islam. Finally, the violence of the Islamic warriors was of minor
importance in the establishment of Islam in India. What happened was not so
much a conquest, but a shift in public
opinion: when the urban working-class heard of Islam and realized it now
had a choice between Hindu law (smrti) and Muslim law (shariat), it chose the
latter. The Aligarh
school has been emulated on a large scale. Soon its torch was taken over by
Marxist historians, who were building a reputation for unscrupulous history
rewriting in accordance with the party line.
In this context, one
should know that there is a strange alliance between the Indian Communist
parties and the Muslim fanatics. In the forties the Communists gave
intellectual muscle and political support to the Muslim League's plan to
partition India
and create an Islamic state. After independence, they successfully combined
(with the tacit support of Prime minister Nehru) to sabotage the implementation
of the constitutional provision that Hindi be adopted as national language, and
to force India into the
Soviet-Arab front against Israel.
Under Nehru's rule these Marxists acquired control of most of the educational
and research institutes and policies.
Moreover, they had an
enormous mental impact on the Congress apparatus: even those who
formally rejected the Soviet system, thought completely in Marxist categories.
They accepted, for instance, that religious conflicts can be reduced to
economic and class contradictions. They also adopted Marxist terminology, so that they always refer to conscious
Hindus as the communal forces or elements (Marxism dehumanizes people
to impersonal pawns, or forces, in
the hands of god History). The Marxist historians had the field all to
themselves, and they set to work to decommunalize
Indian history writing, i.e. to erase the importance of Islam as a factor
of conflict. In Communalism and the
Writing of Indian History, Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia and Bipan Chandra,
professors at Jawaharlal Nehru University
(JNU, the Mecca of secularism and Negationism) in Delhi, write that the interpretation of
medieval wars as religious conflicts is in fact a back- projection of
contemporary religious conflict artificially created for political purposes. In
Bipan Chandra's famous formula, communalism
is not a dinosaur; it is a strictly modern phenomenon. They explicitly deny
that before the modern period there existed such a thing as Hindu identity or
Muslim identity. Conflicts could not have been between Hindus and Muslims, only
between rulers or classes who incidentally also belonged to one religious
community or the other. They point to the conflicts within the communities and
to alliances across community boundaries.
After postulating that
conflicts between Hindus and Muslims as such were non-existent before the
modern period, the negationists are faced with the need to explain how this
type of conflict was born after centuries of a misunderstood non-existence. The
Marxist explanation is a conspiracy theory: the separate communal identity of
Hindus and Muslims is an invention of the sly British colonialists. They carried
on a divide and rule policy, and
therefore they incited the communal separateness. Yet, the negationist belief
that the British newly created the Hindu-Muslim divide has become an article of
faith with everyone in India
who calls himself a secularist. More
Marxist wisdom we encounter in Romila Thapar's theory (in her contribution to
S. Gopal's book on the Ayodhya affair, Anatomy of a Confrontation) that the
current Hindu movement wants to unite all Hindus, not because the Hindus feel
besieged by hostile forces, not because they have a memory of centuries of
jihad, but because "a monolithic
religion is more compatible with capitalism" (to borrow the
formulation of a reviewer). She thinks that the political Hindu movement is
merely a concoction by Hindu capitalists, or in her own words "part of the attempt to redefine
Hinduism as an ideology for modernization by the middle class", in
which "modernization is seen as
linked to the growth of capitalism". She reads the mind behind the
capitalist conspiracy to reform Hinduism thus: "Capitalism is often believed to thrive among Semitic religions
such as Christianity and Islam. The argument would then run that if capitalism
is to succeed in India,
then Hinduism would also have to be molded in a Semitic form".
Subaltern Studies
Subaltern studies are
the studies of the marginalized and minorities in any nation or society and
this field started albeit at a slow pace after Independence
in India
and given recognition by vested interests in western academic circles after
1970. Such studies were sponsored mostly by western academic institutions in
the last 30 years and were mainly focused on the Gangetic plains where the
Muslim population of India
was the most concentrated. The new interpretations and concocted history have
found roots in American academe and given a "scientific" label for
recognition. Some Indian historians and their particular take on the events of
the past and present have found resonance in American academe so that their
influence in India
is enhanced.
The ICHR has been the conduit for patronizing scholars
through travel grants. It isn't just the foreign trip that the grants get one.
More important are the impressions that are created; the "scholar"
gets known abroad as a leading historian of India, his drivel comes to be
regarded as the Voice of Indian History; and back home, each trip redoubles his
influence -- for one thing, by confirming the fact that he is close to the
sources of patronage. So, since 1972, who has got how much of these travel grants
? But these [the former members of ICHR]
are not just partisan 'historians’ but are nepotists also. Their doings in the ICHR have been true to pattern. How is it that over
twenty five years persons from their school alone have been nominated to the ICHR ? Dedicated as they were to the cause of the
illiterate downtrodden Indians argued they must have the works of leading
historians translated into our regional languages. And which were the
"historians" whose books -- old, in many cases out-of-date books -
got selected for translation ? R. S. Sharma : five books. Romila Thapar : three
books. Irfan Habib : two books -- one being a collection of articles. Bipan
Chandra :two books. Muhammad Habib : three books. D. N. Jha : two books. S.
Gopal : four books. Nurul Hasan : two books. Even sundry leaders of the
Communist parties got the honor -- E. M. S. Namboodripad, P. C. Joshi, even Rajni
Palme Dutt, the leader of the British Communist Party who functioned as the
controller and director of the Indian Communists in the forties. As a result,
the books and pamphlets of these fellows are available in all regional
languages, but the works of even Lokmanya Tilak are not available except in
Marathi! Second, in 1972, almost simultaneously with the establishment of the ICHR, a project was launched to collect and publish
a record of the Freedom Struggle from the Indian point of view. The British had
launched their Transfer of Power Documents series -- which deliberately made
out that the British, were ever so ready to leave, and it was only the
cussedness of and discord among Indians which delayed their doing so. The
project was to be based on Indian documents. New interpretation of the Indian
people and Hinduism has created a neocolonized generation of Indians in the last
30 years. Rajeev Malhotra ( Infinity Foundation )says: “While subaltern scholars have depicted Hinduism as elitist and Brahmana
controlled, the sadhus have been subaltern people; the bhakti saints were
almost always subaltern people; tantrikas were subalterns and not Brahmins; and
the Purana rituals have traditionally been performed by all jatis. Hence, these
scholars have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, because they simply
assumed Marx' conclusions about Abrahamic religions as being universally applicable
to all cultures - the blind spot from becoming neocolonized.”
Such changes and wrong
depiction of Indian society and culture is done to change the perception of
newly educated Indians about India
and Indian culture. It creates a class consciousness within the Hindu society
and also creates a elite which can be demonized for past wrongs. Social
fragmentation is one of the purposes of these studies. This was one of the
major campaigns for the reservations for the SC/ST category of the Hindus before
and during the independence. Insurgency attracted special attention when the
subaltern studies in the 70s were being done on the history of India.
In India,
the 1857 centenary had stimulated new histories of rebellion, some directly
inspired by rebels like Kattabomman Nayakkar. Romantic heroism was attached to
old rebel histories, but in addition, the sixties and seventies raised concern
about revolution in the present. Even the Indian Home Ministry feared
revolution and this was being noted by the western academic and more
importantly the strategic and policy makers in the western capitals. In this
context, more scholars took up studies of insurrection and elements of its
intellectual history go back to the twenties, when early Indian studies of
Indian rebels sought to recuperate insurgent mentalities. Indigenous Indian
theories of peasant revolt had emerged in the thirties, among communists and in
the Kisan Sabha but in the sixties, the academic study of insurrection came
into its own. The western powers have nurtured various insurgencies inside India with the help of Pakistan for several decades [circa
from 50s] waiting for upheaval on significant section of the population.
The interaction of
these studies with the western universities helped them to understand the
nature of these insurgencies and nurture them if they wanted to. The year 1972[
After the Bangladesh war] proved to be a turning point. It was the year of
formation of major and pioneer organizations of nearly all the new social
movements and of regional-national organizations as well. The Jharkhand Mukti
Morcha, the AllAssam Students Union, the Self-Employed Women's Association
(SEWA), and such farmers' organizations as the Zamindari Union of Punjab, the
Tamilnadu Agriculturalists' Association, and the Khedut Samaj of Gujarat were all founded in that year. In addition, the
Anandpur Saheb Resolution (demanding autonomy for Punjab) was drafted in 1972,
and India's
most famous environmental movement, Chipko, began at that time. But of all the
new organizations, the one that most immediately caught the imagination of
youth and progressive intellectuals throughout India was that of the Dalit
Panthers, the organization of ex-untouchable (or dalit, literally "downtrodden") youth of Maharashtra
which represented the first wave of a new anti-caste movement. In the
seventies, this possibility of
revolution had become a serious problem, because state institutions had
remained substantially unchanged despite
many decades of popular insurgency, nationalist agitation, and tumultuous
independence not only in 1947 (India and Pakistan) and 1948 (Sri Lanka) but
also in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Modern states did not prevent
rebellion, but insurgency had not become revolution. Why did nationalism
provoke Revolution in China
and Vietnam, but not India?
How do oppressed people take over governments? How do nations redesign states?
Why not revolution in South Asia? More
attention was paid to UP and Bihar due to
large Muslim population. These were pressing questions for India mainly the Marxists whose aim
was a revolution and willing to wait as long as possible. But the real aim for
the western academic was to find a way to create centrifugal forces inside India
for eventual split. This was being monitored by the western strategic community
and institutions and being passed on to Pakistan intellectuals. Pakistani
commentators during the 90s keep referring to 27 insurgencies going on inside India
simultaneously for several decades and report that no country can survive that
many. But their understanding of the insurgencies inside India is due to the US
information given to them from the US academic studies. Subaltern
Studies joined debates about insurgency and nationality at the breach between
popular unrest and state power during the 70s( the unrest was of course
supported by the agencies in the western governments to create chaos/disorder
inside India).
1975-6 is taken to be turning point in many discussions of recent trends in
Indian political culture. The year is significant since it was the year of
emergency and Government led by Indira Gandhi exploded the first atomic test in
May 1974 and after that there was serious policy initiatives by the US as
part of the cold war policies. The US
was not happy with India supporting
insurgency in Pakistan.
Till 1977 the Indira Gandhi government actively worked for the democratic
aspirations of the Baluchis and Pathans. Baluchi fighters were trained in the
deserts of Rajasthan. India
also provided them with financial and diplomatic assistance. With Bangladesh free, Indira Gandhi reckoned that
Sindh, Baluchistan and Pakhtunistan should
follow. After her electoral defeat in 1977, Vajpayee as the Janata government's
foreign minister made his first attempt to normalize relations with Pakistan
by withdrawing the help to Baluchi and Pushtuns. In India , the breach between
insurgency and nationality was widening at the time, in part because, despite
rampant crises, dominant state institutions had managed to survive as though secure inside a mountain fortress high above the
plains. Muslims had acquired a separate political history (and this was the
final objective of the western powers in the subcontinent and supported by the
western institution and scholars such as Stanley Wolpert. By creating a rival
political center their goal is to create a rival and ultimately replace the
Indian state) that became more prominent in the context of Hindu
majoritarianism. One of the goals of US during the 70s and 80s was to make sure
that Pakistan
had a secure Muslim political history derived from the history of the
sub-continent. The problem of self-identity for Muslims in subcontinent began
when Muslim imperial rule ended. Till 1857 the Indian Muslim who was capable of
thinking seriously looked upon himself as a "ruler", a member of the
elite, a part (even a cog is a part) of the imperial machine. This feeling was
indefinable, vaguely comprehended, imperfectly conceived, and not commonly
expressed in writing or speech. General Zia ul Haq from 1980 in the name of a
debatable patriotism and a supposititious ideology, made his control over
history writing and teaching complete, arbitrary, coercive and totalitarian. He
(1) subjected all textbooks of Social Studies to the scrutiny and approval of
the Federal Ministry of Education, i.e., a group of civil servants, (2) created
a new subject of "Pakistan Studies";
made it compulsory for all undergraduates in arts, sciences, medicine
and engineering, and all graduates in law; and got a special textbook prepared
for it by several committees and panels of experts working in close
collaboration, and (3) dictated that all these books must meet the requirements
of an ideology. After 1980, an expanding gulf in India between the histories of
peoples and states ripped many old bonds between academics and politics.
Scholars who claimed to speak for people who had been left out of nationalism
marched away from scholars who continued to fuse popular history with national
politics. Social fragmentation of the kind not seen before became common. But
more importantly for many others, Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in 1975 made the
Indian state blatantly dictatorial. As new popular movements arose from many
quarters in India
-- communal, regional, and expressing radical aspirations among women,
peasants, workers, and tribal groups -- old nationalism lost legitimacy and the
Left and the Right fought for its legacy. To quell the disturbances of Punjab and other places the army was called in many times
during the 80s. During 81-82 the army was called in more than 60 times, in
82-83 more than 90 times and during 83-84 the army was called more than 150
times. This gives the scale of insurgency inside India which was planned from
outside. The leftist gained in strength by late 70s and they started a campaign
to reduce the kinship between various social classes. The old kinship and order
was systematically being broken in every sphere in India from early 70s. Leftists with
active support from the western agencies started defamation campaign against
upper castes and upper caste government officials on a large scale including
trade union strikes. This started to break the old kinship and order to bring
about social fragmentation of castes, religious and labor class. This campaign
was started after some detailed social economic study of various communities of
India
in the south Asian studies department in western universities. How long have
they been doing this? This could have been planned and executed for several
decades with studies possibly from even a century when the first census was
done in 1881 under the British rule. The social changes and unrest; was being
watched by the academic and the India
watchers in the west with obvious interest. They were forming their own
conclusion about the loss of old nationalism. One conclusion was that there
would be no new nationalism in future and the state would become weak due to
constant dissent and eventually break apart. By using education and media new
nationalism was never allowed to flourish. Most of the focus was in UP and Bihar since they had the largest representation in the
national political structure. Any fragmentation of the polity within these two
states will weaken the central political structure of the country. Popular
resistance to state power became a prominent academic theme in the eighties. In
1986, James C. Scott's Weapons of the
Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance announced a broad move away from
studies of revolution into the analysis of localized, personal resistance to
the power of the elite and states. Foucault’s influence was spreading. By the
nineties, an array of scholars inside and outside India
had made everyday resistance a basic feature of life in South
Asia. Left-wing extremism, which includes Naxalites and Maoists,
was turning out to be a major law and order problem in States like Andhra
Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. Many Naxalite leaders like
Kanu Sanyal and Charu Majumdar had become icons in the late 60s till mid 70s.
The movement had attracted many urban youths as well including many from
middle-class families. The nation was facing a severe economic crisis and
social unrest. Many producers such as
Khwaja Ahmed make movies glorifying the Naxalites. The conclusion the western
political analyst and the strategic community which they may have drawn
watching the development in 70s and 80s was that India was ripe enough for
political instability and long term social disorder and eventual balkanization.
The analysts gained insights into weakness in the formation of the political
structure at the center in Delhi and in states
specifically UP and Bihar containing large
Muslim population. The supporters for Pakistan
and pro-Pakistan policymakers in the US
administration were in the forefront of south Asia policymaking during the 80s
and early 90s and they had come out with a strategy to cap and rollback the WMD capabilities of the Indian state and eventual
collapse of the Indian state just like the former Soviet
Union. The other conclusion they may have derived is that the
country gets united when a major war is waged against India since there is a enemy political center
which is identified such as the state of Pakistan. But what is observed is
that when low intensity conflict is waged in one corner of the country without
a political center, the public opinion is divided and is not able to rally to
support the government. This is one of the reasons that low level insurgency
keeps simmering in different parts of the country but does not get the
attention of a critical mass of the population.. By using the press not to
focus on the political center of the threat the public can be deceived into
complacency. This has allowed Pakistan
to continue the low intensity conflict in Kashmir
under a nuclear shield without any repercussions during the last 13 years. The
last major offensive that took place along the mountain heights of Kargil, was
also planned the same way with the Pakistan officials denying the
involvement of the government and hence a political center behind the war. The
threat perception of the Indian public is vague and can be easily reduced
through media and other propaganda. The political parties can be easily subdued
with coercion and bribery to reduce their rhetoric against threat to the nation
or any community. By reducing the old historical kinship among communities the
long term plan was to create sub nationalism and political identity which can
be given support to reduce the political nation. The revolution method was one
which was tried in the early decades to reduce the bonds among communities and
in the last few decades after the globalization of religious conversion, is
being used as a tool to break old social bonds and kinship among communities throughout
the country. India
has never been remotely as united or strong as it is today, and neither is it a
Hindu state. Because of this lack of any precedence the other powers are not
able to read correctly the strength
and future of Indian state and social dynamics inside India.
But is it possible
that such a large scale gigantic conspiracy is being waged against India
for several decades even after independence. It is hard to believe but the
facts and writing of large number of people show a pattern where a large number
of Indians have been mental slaves of foreign institutions and have been
subverting India
without realizing it.
Anthropology
The history of Indian
anthropology was never given due importance by Indian anthropologists. It neither
formed a part of the teaching curriculum nor a subject of research. A few like
Vidyarthi first reviewed in detail the developments after the introduction of
anthropology as an academic discipline in an Indian University
in 1920. Although some scholars made brief attempts, no one has discussed the
pre-1920 history in detail. In the early years of teaching of anthropology
during British days in India,
Vedas, Upanishads, Samhitas, Puranas and
other ancient Indian texts formed a part of the curriculum. Later the study of
these ancient Indian texts was discontinued and the subject became heavily
dependent on the ‘Oxbridge tradition’ since Oxford
and Cambridge
became the centers of Indian studies. After 1960 the influence of American
anthropology especially that of the ‘Chicago-Cornell school’ prevailed over the
British school. U Chicago and Cornell U had taken over the Indian studies from
the British by 60s. From the 70s after the partition of Pakistan ; Colombia
and U of California, Berkeley
had become the centers of Indian Studies. Thus Indian anthropologists were
never free from western influence and consequently Indian anthropology lacked a
distinct identity. Most of the Indian interpretations were actually the
interpretations of the west since they were heavily influenced by the western
thought.
Internal Disorders and Strategic Security of India
A western perception
of India’s internal crisis -
National Events: A Spate of Crises describes India with troubled history.
”Even by the standards of India’s troubled history since
independence, the domestic situation in the 1980s was grim. As the center
concentrated more and more power, relations with the states became warlike.
During these years, the increased use of the army was a measure of the civilian
bureaucracy’s failure to redress genuine grievances. Although some of the
domestic crises were inevitable, others were created by the poor relationship
between New Delhi
and the state capitals. “The army has been increasingly employed for long
periods to counter various separatist and insurrectionary movements. The
seriousness of the threat is revealed by the number of people killed—16,000
since the Punjab movement began in the 1980s, 5,000 in Assam since 1979. This has led to
the deployment of the army from the borders to within the country for internal
security duties. According to one estimate, three and a half divisions had to
be withdrawn from the border with China. In Punjab,
120,000 troops have been used for internal security; some of these troops were
previously part of the strike corps and had to trade their armor for rifles and
machine guns.
A Pakistan view of Indian political scene
describes India
as an
argumentative democracy. “India’s is an
argumentative democracy cobbled with complex and fluid coalitions. Economic
inequality will easily corrode the delicate social contract. The initial growth
burst in the early 1990s saw Western states (Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat, and Maharashtra) tear away from the pack. Now it is the South
(led by Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka). But the gigantic states in the Center,
the North and the East (Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Laloo Prashad’s
Bihar) accounting for a third of the population and two-thirds of India’s
poor are mired in caste politics, mis-governance and economic deprivation. For
maintaining India’s
political cohesion, the challenge is to create employment and income
opportunities in these states, and this will not be easy. The threat of
communal discord to India’s
economic ambitions cannot be underestimated. While Hindutva appeals to
upper-caste Hindus and binds them together, it causes great discomfort to
Sikhs, Muslims and Christians, all significant minorities in India. Combine these with Harijans
and other low-caste
Hindus marginalized by
Hindutva and you have a large segment of the population that is deeply
concerned about the excesses of the new found ideology. An ideology that
appears to be blessed by the State at the highest levels. More incidents such
as the one in Gujarat last year could unleash
retaliatory action that would seriously undermine the investment climate.” The
wrong impression and perception of Indian society and social movement by the
elite in Pakistan
could be used for taking wrong conclusions and actions by their military.
Chronology of Key Internal disorders
1974 – May - Testing
of first bomb in Pokhran in Rajasthan in India.
1974,November –
Internal problems in Congress Party and increase in dissent with the help of
outside agencies. This change after the Indian testing of the Bomb in May 1974
created enough disorder in the government and society that with the global oil
crisis put the economy under pressure.
1975,June - Emergency declared. There was wide spread
dissent and resistance. There are strikes, chaos and anarchy in many places.
But government offices and public sector were running efficiently.
1977 - Lifting of
emergency. The leftist and other parties were received by the western agencies
and academic by giving them support during the persecution
1979 - Nationalization
of Indian business and Indian banks. Fall of the first non-congress govt. 1980
– Punjab problem with the help of Pakistan.
1981 - The army was
called more than 60 times for internal duty
1982 - The army was
called more than 80 times for internal duty
1983 - The army was
called more than 160 times for internal duty
1984 - Assassination
of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Punjab
problem with riots
1986 - Operation
Brasstacks. Punjab problem at its peak
1989 - Bofors scandal
which was started to put pressure on RG government to withdraw from the
Brasstacks formation in the western border and remove him from office, Rajiv
Gandhi never recovered from this, April start of Kashmir
terrorism
1990 - Kashmir problem intensifies
1990 - V.P. Singh
Government - ordinance was withdrawn by Mr. Singh on October 21, 1990, by which
the disputed structure and the land around it were acquired for handing it over
to the VHP. As it was vehemently opposed by Muslim leaders and imams, the then
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Mulayam Singh Yadav, had threatened that he would
not allow the ordinance to be implemented.
1991, May - killing of
Rajiv Gandhi. Four prime ministers since 1989-1991. The conclusion among
western policymakers was that the Congress Party would wither away to a rump
organization and would also bring about the downfall of India.
1992,December -
Ayodhya incident and riots in 1993
1996 - Unstable
government at the center with Deve Gowda and IK Gujral as PM till 1997. India
has seven Prime Ministers in 10 years between 1988 and 1998
1998 - Election and
new government which is a coalition of 23 parties. Pokhran II nuclear testing.
1999 - Fall of
Government with a vote of confidence and Kargil war in May.
George Perkovich in
his book India’s
Nuclear Bomb refers to internal disorder many times and during those times the
western policy makers have observed that Indian polity looks inwards and does
not react to external events. Pakistan
looks at the internal political disorder inside India as a ‘continuous crisis of
leadership’ since 1989, and down hill national resolve’. General Sundarji
remarked in his book that between 1975 and 1985 the national security of the
country was neglected and there was no focus on the external threat. This
decade is called the neglected decade in Indian security. This decade was also
the decade of maximum turmoil in Indian independent history with emergency
declared. In the book American Prosperity the authors talks about
creating/starting strikes inside India if there is increase of
productivity which threatens the industries in the west because of cheap
imports. From a vantage point the Indian society and economy is seen as
something which can be manipulated to the advantage of the western countries.
The perception of internal disorder inside the Indian army and polity is very
important to understand how the Pakistan
leadership makes decision. This is the general analysis by Pakistani military
establishment about the India
army during the 80s and early 90s. Typical of such Pakistani viewpoints is the
following;
“The Indian military,
since the early 1980s, has been a victim of Indian bureaucratic inefficiency
and as a result of that, has been extremely curtailed in its military posture
and its ability to wage offensive actions, as seen in the recent crisis, has
often been questioned. Starting with the bribery allegations in the Bofors
scandal, the Indian military has consistently watched as petty political
infighting has denied it the resources necessary to maintain its force in a
credible war-fighting mode. The Indian Army was so desperate for financial
assistance that it could not even pay its officer corps with the result that
most of its best and brightest officers left the service to pursue lucrative
jobs in the Private sector. This created a potential leadership gap in the
Indian Army and hindered the viability of its infantry units, the backbone of
any professional army, to carry out their objectives. The Indian middle class,
who had traditionally staffed the officer corps of the Indian Army, was leaving
it in droves and the army was becoming a hollow shell without any officers to
lead it. This shortfall of financial resources has prevented it from
modernizing its forces and most of its units are operating equipment, which has
far outlived its life expectancy. In a more critical sense, this lack of
funding has made it difficult for the Indians to deploy new weapons systems and
they have been gradually losing their qualitative, but what is even worse their
quantitative edge over the Pakistani armed forces since the mid 1980s. Another
troubling omen for the Indian Army was the penchant of the Indian politicians
to use it as an well organized riot police to quell domestic political
agitation within India
itself. Since the political disturbances, which lead to the Indian Army's
involvement in the Golden
Temple crisis of the
early 1980s, it has been periodically used to prevent sectarian violence, often
as a result of the Indian politicians' own shortsighted policies. In the
process, especially in the case of the Golden Temple
crisis, it has seen its traditions of non-involvement in politics questioned
and by being repeatedly being embroiled in such instances, it has witnessed a
loss of morale in its officers and enlisted personnel. This is, because the
purpose of an army is to defend its countrymen and not seek to be their jailers
by fulfilling a role, which can best be done by the local constabulary. The end
result of all this has been that the Indian Army lacks a strategic doctrine
spelling out its mission and seems to be divided over its role as a local
policeman in Indian politics. As if to add insult to injury, the Indian
politicians expect the Indian Army to undertake such duties willingly. They do
not seem to realize that, in lieu of receiving no monetary aid from New Delhi, the army has to
use its own budgetary resources, which are poor at best, to finance its
newfound role, bequeathed to it courtesy of the Indian politicians.”
Pakistan from 1998 has been
looking at the political situation inside India as crisis of leadership and
will take the opportunity to increase its leverage by being aggressive. The
debate between the secular and the Hindu right inside India is also seen as a weakness inside India
to be exploited. Pakistan
has increased its leverage inside India with various NGO to instigate
internal disorders such as riots. The presence of a large minority population
and other disenfranchised people has been taken up by Pakistan as a Trojan horse to be
exploited.
The trade unions and
the leaders of the radical parties have been influenced by the west to create
disturbances and other chaos in key industries and public sectors which can
cripple the government and also bring the government to its knees. This has
been used effectively by the western powers to bring the Indian government to
the table to talk and yield to pressures. In Indian public sector and
government department; one department takes up issues against another
department and goes to the court to solve their differences instead of the
administration being the mediator to solve differences for a common goal of
national interest as in other countries. The period before emergency with
strikes was a period of anarchy which forced the government to declare
emergency. Leaders such as Jaya Prakash Narayan were in the forefront of
agitation but were really influenced by outside agencies. Certain section of
the polity has been already influenced by the western academic world and during
the cold war the non-communist left has been systematically cultivated so the
west can influence the course of politics right inside India.
Since 1975 the
internal disorder has been watched very carefully by the major powers. They are
extremely aware of the fecklessness of the Indian politicians. The major years
which had them change their policy towards India are 1975, 1977, 1984, 1989,
1991 and 1996. All these years the political disorder was seen as a crisis in
leadership and withering of the largest national party – congress party and
which was also seen as the beginning of the division of India. The widespread perception
was that a weakened central political core will increase centrifugal forces.
One of the reasons for this assessment is that the western policy makers have
not been familiar with any party which is non-Congress and which is totally
removed from the independence era. India had seven Prime Ministers in
10 years between 1988 and 1998. Most of the non-Congress party rule was during
this period. Stephen Cohen of Brookings Institute opines that the Indian domestic politics is chaotic,
faction ridden and violent in many states but is expected of a developing
country undergoing simultaneously economic, class, caste and ideological revolutions.
He also says that the center is weak and is unable to create national policy
for the entire country. When there is political unity especially during the
earlier congress regime of Indira Gandhi internal dissent have been encouraged
to break the political structure starting from 1975. The political decisions
have been to known to be taken by few key people and this provides ample
opportunities to create disorder by creating suspicion. Whenever there is a
strong political unity among Indians anywhere in the Diaspora the adversaries
have found ways to break the unity. Some riots or controversy can be started
which immediately makes the Indian groups to squabble without looking at the
big picture political unity for long term. This tendency has been exploited by
the anti-India groups against Indian origin people in US, UK and other countries. Recent
riots in Gujarat has been exploited by Pakistan and Indian leftist to create
wedge inside Indian American community and accuse Hindu groups with alleged
support for funding riots in India.
In 1975 ABVP-led Nav
Nirman movement in Gujarat and the Sampoorna Kranti agitation led by
Jayaprakash Narayan (J.P.)( funded by external agencies) in Bihar
had made an impact in those States. Indira Gandhi appealed to the Supreme Court
for an absolute stay order against the High Court judgment. On June 24, the
Supreme Court granted her a conditional stay, depriving her of voting rights in
the Lok Sabha, but allowing her to continue as Prime Minister. On June 25, J.P.
and other Opposition leaders, including Morarji Desai, held a public rally at
the Ram Lila grounds in Delhi
where they declared that Indira Gandhi should resign; they urged the people to
join them in a non-cooperation movement. The following morning, Indira Gandhi
announced a national Emergency assumed in view of "threats to national
security". The Nav Nirman and the J.P. movements were described as among the threats to national stability.
Opposition leaders were arrested, censorship was imposed, and a ban was soon
announced on grassroots organizations.
Campaigns for discipline and productivity were instituted, including
Indira Gandhi's 20-point program, but what became most controversial was Sanjay
Gandhi's five-point program. Two of those five points were mainly pursued,
namely, sterilization campaigns, allegedly aimed disproportionately at Muslims,
and urban "beautification" drives beginning at settlements in the
Jama Masjid area in Delhi.
The backlash against these campaigns was widespread. After this the congress
party lost its supporters and the old bond among regions and regional congress
blocks due to earlier nationalism withered away. This was the ultimate motive
of the outside powers to reduce the political cohesion of Indian union formed
by the earlier nationalism. When Shah Bano petitioned the lower courts for
continuing maintenance from her former husband in 1986, she could little have
imagined that her name would become synonymous with the rightists' charge of
'Muslim appeasement' by so-called secular parties. After three rounds in the
courts, the Supreme Court finally found in her favor, noting for good measure
its deep regret that some of the
interveners who supported the appellant [ie, the man; Shah Bano was the
respondent in this case], took up an extreme position by displaying an
unwarranted zeal to defeat the right to maintenance of women who are unable
to maintain themselves.] The
divisive political debate on this case created a set of motions which went out
of control. The secular and right wing debate became shrill after this
legislation. That broad swipe by the supreme court at the despicable conduct of
the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, however, didn't cut any ice with a
government bent on maintaining its political support from minorities,
engineered through the machinations of religious figure-heads. Making possibly
the worst judgment of his forgettable tenure at the helm of the Congress Party,
Rajiv Gandhi turned to his landslide majority in Parliament to help the
extremists reassert control over everyday Muslim life. From there, one might
observe, it has been plainly downhill, and 'appeasement' has become the
catch-phrase of rightists' criticism of the secular parties.