Who was here first? A new study explains the origins of ancient Indians

THE BURNING QUESTION(S)

By Rohan Venkataramakrishnan | April 3, 2018

bioRxiv/Screenshot
It’s a long story.

A new paper authored by 92 scientists from around the globe that was posted online this weekend could settle some major questions about the subcontinent’s history and what that means for various theories of Indian civilisation. The paper, titled “The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia,” which still has to go through peer review, uses genetics to examine the ancestry of ancient inhabitants of the subcontinent. Below is a quick summary of what you need to know.

Who authored the study?

There are 92 named authors on the study, including scholars from Harvard, MIT, the Russian Academy of Science, the Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleosciences in Lucknow, the Deccan College, the Max Planck Institute, the Institute for Archaeological Research in Uzbekistan and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad. Among the co-directors of the study is geneticist David Reich, whose new book has inspired much recent discussion about ancient human history and racial theory.

How was the study conducted?

The researchers looked at genome-wide data from 612 ancient individuals, meaning DNA samples of people that lived millennia ago. These included samples from eastern Iran, an area called Turan that now covers Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and South Asia. Of the 612, the DNA of 362 ancient individuals was being examined for the first time. They then compared this data with that taken from present-day individuals, including 246 distinct groups in South Asia.

What were they looking for?

A lack of sufficient ancient DNA as well as proper inquiry into the matter has meant that we still do not understand how central and South Asian populations were formed. There have been various theories about this, with some very closely connected to politics both in South Asia and abroad. The Nazis, for example, helped propagate the Aryan Invasion Theory in which blue-eyed fair people swept into the Indian subcontinent on horses, conquering everyone they saw along the way. Hindutva proponents have argued the opposite altogether, what is known as the Out-of-India theory, claiming that, if anything, Indo-European languages originated in India and spread out westward from there.

DNA and other human science-based research has thrown up confusing signals in the past, with mitochondrial DNA, which is only transferred from female to female, being mostly unique to the subcontinent. This suggested that the inhabitants of India have been indigenous for thousands of years. However, Y chromosomes, which are passed from male to male, showed much more connection to West Eurasians, whether Europeans, people of the Irani plateau, or Central Asians.

Amid all this, there is the question of whom the Indus Valley people were. Were they more connected to those we now know as Dravidians, only to be pushed south by migrating Aryans? Or were they themselves Aryans, who eventually moved southward?

In many ways, the study set out to resolve this contradiction and answer some part of the question: Who are the people of the subcontinent and how did they get there?

What did they find?

The paper, which you can read in full here, builds on the genetic understanding that there were two separate groups in ancient India: Ancestral North Indians and Ancestral South Indians, or ANI and ASI. These two groups were, as Reich explains in his new book, “as different from each other as Europeans and East Asians are today.” But where do these two populations, which solidify in around 2000 BCE, come from?

There are three potential groupings that, when mixed in various combinations, could be responsible for the creation of the Ancestral North Indian and Ancestral South Indian populations.

•     The first are South Asian hunter-gatherers, described in this study as Ancient Ancestral South Indians or AASI, the oldest people of the subcontinent, related to modern-day Andaman islanders.
•     Then there are Iranian agriculturists, who were known to have come to the subcontinent, possibly bringing certain forms of cultivation of wheat and barley with them.
•     And finally, there are the Steppe pastoralists, the inhabitants of the vast Central Asian grasslands to the north of Afghanistan, who were previously known as “Aryans.”

There is another important population with South Asian connections that sits somewhere amidst these three: the Indus Valley population.

In Turan, the area north of modern-day Iran also known as the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex, there was a huge community of ancient people who seem to have little genetic connection with the inhabitants of the subcontinent. Yet the authors found three individuals from this ancient complex that did have some connection to India, specifically an ancestry mix of Iranian agriculturists and South Asian hunter-gatherers or Ancient Ancestral South Indians. This matched individuals from the Swat Valley in Pakistan, another Indus Valley site. Because the researchers didn’t have direct access to ancient DNA from India’s Indus Valley sites, the paper prefers to call them Indus Valley periphery individuals. These three individuals are key to the findings.



Where does the Indus Valley fit in?

The reason the researchers call them Indus Valley periphery individuals is because they cannot be sure that their genetic makeup is the same as most of those who lived in the Indus Valley, because they did not have access to ancient DNA from Indian sites. But for the most part they seem to use these individuals as proxies for the people of that civilisation.

The make-up of Indus Valley periphery individuals is straightforward: a mixture of Iranian agriculturists and the South Asian hunter-gatherers, or Ancient Ancestral South Indians.

The study finds that these two ancestries are also there in both of the subsequent populations, of Ancestral North Indians and Ancestral South Indians, except for a couple of key differences.

•     First Ancestral South Indians have the same basic mix: South Asian hunter-gatherers and Iranian agriculturists, with a higher amount of the former.
•     And second, importantly, Ancestral North Indians have one more ancestry mixed in that is not to be found in Ancestral South Indians: the Steppe pastoralists or, to use the old term, Aryans.

What does the paper conclude?

•     In simple terms, the mixing of Iranian agriculturists and South Asian hunter-gatherers first created the Indus Valley population.
•     Then around the 2nd millennium BCE, Steppe pastoralists moved south towards the subcontinent encountering the Indus Valley population in a manner that was likely to have caused some amount of upheaval.
•     What appears to happen afterwards is that some of the Indus Valley population moves further south, mixing more with South Asian hunter-gatherers to create the Ancestral South Indian population
•     Meanwhile, in the north, the Steppe pastoralists are mixing with the Indus Valley population to create the Ancestral North Indian grouping.
•     Most subsequent South Asian populations are then a result of further mixing between Ancestral North Indians and Ancestral South Indians.

This also means that the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation are the bridge to most extant Indian populations. “By co-analyzing ancient DNA and genomic data from diverse present-day South Asians, we show that Indus Periphery related people are the single most important source of ancestry in South Asia.”

What does all this mean?

Many things that would be hard to summarise. Journalist Tony Joseph, explains a number of implications in this piece, but here are a few main ones:

•     Some form of “Aryan” migration did take place, even if that term is not used. The introduction of Steppe pastoralists into the subcontinent might have been the way what we know as Indo-European language and culture spread, since it was the same lot of Steppe peoples that also moved West into Europe.
•     Moreover, there may be connection between the Steppe migration and priestly caste and culture. The researchers say they found 10 out of 140 Indian groups with a higher amount of Steppe ancestry compared to Indus Valley ancestry. These two were titled “Brahmin_Tiwari” and “Brahmin_UP”. More generally groups of priestly status seem to have higher Steppe ancestry, suggesting those with this mixture may have had a central role in spreading Vedic culture.
•     The Out-of-India theory is now even more unlikely, at least at the genetic level. The researchers say early Iranian agriculturists did not have any significant mixture of South Asian hunter-gatherer ancestry, “and thus the patterns we observe are driven by gene flow into South Asia and not the reverse”.
•     That said, there is some evidence of movement of the Indus Valley people out towards the Turan area, based on data from the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex. Ancestries of people there suggest some very small amount of South Asian hunter-gatherer mixture, and the presence of the three outlier individuals is believed to possibly be proof of Indus Valley inhabitants migrating to Turan.
•     The Indus Valley Civilisation ancient DNA data from the Haryana site of Rakhigarhi, which was supposed to be released last month, should add to this picture of the ancestry of South Asian populations.
•     For further reading, see these two pieces by Razib Khan and the aforementioned analysis by Tony Joseph.

This piece was first published on Scroll.in. We welcome your comments at ideas.india@qz.com.

Source: qzcom

Ancient rock carvings in India hint at a 12,000-year-old lost civilisation

THE DARK AGE

By Maria Thomas | October 11, 2018

Blast from the past.

In the late 1980s, while exploring around the villages of Maharashtra’s coastal Konkan region, Sudhir Risbud came across a big square pattern engraved near the road to the beach town of Ganpatipule.

The electrical engineer and bird-watcher had no idea at the time that it was a petroglyph, a form of rock carving associated with prehistoric people, that was one of the earliest depictions of art created by humans in the Konkan region. Nor did he know that it dated from a time that archaeologists have dubbed the area’s “dark age,” for which no historical information was previously available.

Risbud and fellow explorers Dhananjay Marathe and Surendra Thakurdesai spotted a few more examples over the years, but it wasn’t until a historian accompanied them on one of their trips that they learned about the potential significance of these engravings. So, in 2012, they began to search for more in earnest.

Sudhir Risbud
Risbud and his fellow explorers have uncovered a number of human figures.

“For the earlier period of about two years, we were just groping (in) the dark. The villagers themselves, too, were not aware that such rock arts do exist in their villages,” Risbud, 45, told Quartz in an email. “But then, one day, an octogenarian from the Dhangar (shepherd) community told us about one site, and then on we trudged ahead using the thread provided by him, and hence started our mission of exploring the petroglyphs.”

In April 2015, they stumbled upon a cluster of 42 petroglyphs, depicting birds, animals, and human figures. In the years since then, the trio has uncovered over 1,200 engravings at 90 different sites across Sindhudurg and Ratnagiri districts, the latter best-known for its sweet Alphonso mangoes.

“All these sites are located in remote places on (the) laterite plateau quite far away from the villages,” Risbud explained. Exposed to the elements and out of sight for most villagers, no one had yet investigated the importance of the petroglyphs nor given any thought to their preservation.

“As we started exploring these sites, it dawned upon us that they were under the threat of destruction from various activities such as mining, road construction, and plantation,” he added.

So, they appealed to the Maharashtra state government’s department of archaeology and museums for help.

Tejas Garge, director of the department, says some of the figures had come into official records as far back as the 1990s, when a bystander had spotted a few while a road was being constructed towards the village of Nivali. But it took over two decades before the state department officially got involved in exploring and recording the sites, which it began last year.

“We are documenting them scientifically, and we are trying to gather data from stone tools and other evidence which would be helpful to date them,” Garge told Quartz.

The stone tools they’ve found so far are from the mesolithic era, otherwise known as the Middle Stone Age, dating back to about 10,000 BCE. Based on this, Garge and his team estimate that the petroglyphs could date from between 10,000 BCE to 2,000 BCE.

“They were not done in one shot, there’s successive generations of people who were doing this,” Garge explained. “This activity may have prolonged for centuries.”

So far his team has explored 45 sites in Ratnagiri, where they’ve broadly categorised the figures into fauna, human figures (often seen with their legs spread, believed to have some relation to fertility), and abstract geometric patterns that they haven’t been able to interpret yet. But what’s most interesting is that the animal, bird, and amphibian figurines include a number of creatures that aren’t found in the region today, such as the one-horned rhino, suggesting that they may have once been present in the area.

While the process of documenting and analysing the figures is still in the early stages, archaeologists believe they could solve the mystery of how the Konkan region transitioned from a stone-age society to a settled one.

“If you look at the cultural record of Konkan, you have the Middle Stone Age (upper Paleolithic period) and you have evidence of the early historical era,” Garge said. “In between, there is a gap of 25-30,000 years; there’s no evidence for human habituation. It was sort of the dark age of the Konkan.”

Now, this dark age is starting to become a little clearer.

It will take a few more years before archaeologists can accurately interpret the petroglyphs. So far, 15 of the sites have been protected, and the archaeology department wants to eventually draw tourists to the area. In the meantime, Risbud and his fellow explorers are raising awareness among the people living in the vicinity, so that the public knows they’re in the presence of the rare remnants of India’s ancient history.

Sudhir Risbud
One of the animal figures engraved on the rocks.

Sudhir Risbud
One of the largest engravings, located near the Kasheli village.

  

Sudhir Risbud
Besides animals and human figures, some of the engravings feature abstract shapes that experts are trying to decode.

Source: qz.com

The History Thieves by Ian Cobain review – how Britain covered up its imperial crimes

This engrossing study identifies secrecy as a ‘very British disease’, exploring how, as the empire came to an end, government officials burned the records of imperial rule

British colonial secretary Iain Macleod (centre left, holding hat) attends a reception in Rurungu, Kenya, in 1959. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images

Ian Jack

Thursday 6 October 2016 15.00 BST Last modified on Saturday 8 October 2016 00.05 BST 

Britain’s retreat from empire is remembered in a popular iconography that contains only a little violence. Gandhi goes on hunger strikes and performs acts of passive resistance; the Suez debacle calls time on our pretensions as a world power; Macmillan heralds the wind of change in Africa. All is done and dusted in the space of 15 years. For a postwar generation like mine, too young for national service and a troopship to the colonies, most of it happened inside the local Regal or Odeon. Movietone footage would show Princess X or Prince Y standing on a podium to witness a ceremony of national independence, smiling at the native dancers as fireworks explode overhead. This book supplies a more troubling image: as the sun sets on the greatest empire the world has ever seen, long columns of smoke fill the tropical skies. In a thousand bonfires, Britain is burning the historical evidence.

At first, the process was rather carefree. When Britain quit India in 1947, a colonial official noted that “the press greatly enjoyed themselves with the pall of smoke which hung over Delhi with the mass destruction of documents”. By the time of Malayan independence in 1957, the authorities were learning discretion. British soldiers drove cratefuls of papers in a civilian truck from the colony’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, to what an administrator referred to as “the Navy’s splendid incinerator” in Singapore. This 220‑mile journey to a secret burning exemplified the “considerable pains” taken by the colony “to avoid exacerbating relationships between the British government and those Malayans who might not have been so understanding”. Four years later, in 1961, the colonial secretary Iain Macleod laid down some groundrules for British territories preparing for independence. No documents should be handed over to the successor regime that might embarrass Her Majesty’s Government or its police, military and public servants; or that might compromise its sources of intelligence or be used “unethically” by the country’s new government.

Bonfires alone were too blunt a method of concealment. A newly liberated country might wonder why it inherited so few archives, while Britain might need to retain, for sentimental or other reasons, documents that in the wrong hands could damage its interests. The Colonial Office devised a system known as “Operation Legacy” that worked on the principle of parallel registries. Reliable civil servants, which in the government’s eyes meant only those who were “British subjects of European descent”, were given charge of identifying and collecting all “sensitive” documents and passing them up the bureaucratic chain. This meant that when the moment of independence came, if not before, they could either be destroyed on site or removed (“migrated” became the official term) to the UK. As to the so-called “Legacy” files that the colony’s new government would inherit, it was important that they gave an impression of completeness, either by creating false documents to replace those that had been weeded out or by making sure there was no reference to them in the files that remained.

This purging of the record happened across the world, in British Guiana, Aden, Malta, North Borneo, Belize, the West Indies, Kenya, Uganda – wherever Britain ruled. In the words of Ian Cobain, it was a subversion of the Public Record Acts on an industrial scale, involving hundreds if not thousands of colonial officials, as well as MI5 and Special Branch officers and men and women from army, navy and air force. All of them, whether they knew it or not, were breaking a legal obligation to preserve important official papers for the historical record, in the expectation that most would eventually be declassified. The British government took extraordinary measures to make sure that the fate of these papers remained a secret, whether they had been “migrated” to the UK or destroyed abroad.

According to official instruction, the waste left by bonfires “should be reduced to ash and the ashes broken up”. If burning was thought to be too difficult or unsuitable, then the sea offered an alternative. Officials in Kenya were told that documents could be “packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-free waters at maximum practicable distance from the coast”.

Governor general Lord Mountbatten salutes India’s National flag alongside his wife, Edwina, and prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru during India’s first Independence Day celebrations in New Delhi, 1947. Photograph: AP

Most of the files that survived – the concealed “migrated archive” – found their way to Hanslope Park, a country estate just off the M1 near Milton Keynes, where the Foreign Office maintained an enormous cache of documents under the title “Special Collections”. By Cobain’s reckoning, 15 miles of floor-to-ceiling shelving was packed with files that dated from the 17th century to the cold war and the Troubles in Northern Ireland – files so numerous that their catalogue entries measured the metres of shelf space they occupied. Officially, none of these documents existed.

Some discreet research by the Foreign Office in 1979 showed that only two (Kenya and Malta) of 37 former colonies were aware that their annals had been secreted in Britain or destroyed. The truth, so far as we now know it, emerged only because personal injury lawyers and the American historian Caroline Elkins pursued the evidence of a far crueller British response to Kenya’s Mau Mau insurgency than the available public records suggested. In 2011, the FO finally conceded that it had somehow “overlooked” its secret documentary hoard at Hanslope Park, where the Kenyan files alone took up 60 metres of shelving. Two years later more than 5,000 Kenyan claimants received £19.9m in compensation and expressions of regret from the then foreign secretary William Hague. “We believe there should be a debate about the past,” said an FO official. “It is an enduring feature of our democracy that we are willing to learn from our history.” But that particular lesson had never been intended.

Why were British governments so determined to obscure and bowdlerise their country’s colonial record? Some reasons are understandable: to spare individuals from embarrassment or prosecution; to help secure the loyalty of successor regimes during the commercial, military and political competition of the cold war. But Cobain goes further: Operation Legacy was intended to ensure that “the British way of doing things” would be remembered with “fondness and respect” – that the conduct of its imperial retreat would be seen as exemplary. To go to such lengths of deception for something as intangible and imponderable as a place in history’s good books may seem unlikely, but it was surely for these reasons, rather than any security concern, that, for example, British officialdom asked its servants to destroy or return to Britain any papers that “might be interpreted as showing religious intolerance on the part of HMG” as well as “all papers which might be interpreted as showing racial discrimination against Africans (or Negros [sic] in the USA)”.

There is something else. We like secrets. Cobain recounts the history of British state secrecy from 1250, when the members of England’s Privy Council first swore to keep their proceedings private. The oath has remained unchanged for the nearly 800 years since, while secrecy as a habit has grown via legislation (particularly the Official Secrets Act of 1911) and the confidentiality clauses contained in the humblest contract of employment. Cobain refers to it as “a very British disease”, and while he makes no comparison with other modern democracies – it would have been helpful to know, for example, how seriously the French state takes the duty of transparency – his conclusion that government secrecy in Britain is not “just an occasional necessity but the fiercely protected norm” is hard to refute.

In the 1950s, the distinguished American sociologist Edward Shils decided that the explanation lay with a ruling class that was “unequalled in secretiveness and taciturnity”, whose members were so close and comfortable with one another that they had little fear of hidden secrets. Cobain largely supports this view. Class deference combined with a relatively benign and trusting view of the state’s behaviour may explain “why the peculiarly uncommunicative nature of the British state does not provoke greater resentment and unease among the British public and media”.

Edward Snowden is a case in point. When his disclosures about the UK and US governments’ practice of mass electronic surveillance were published (first in the Guardian) in 2013, the reaction in Britain was mild compared with the outrage expressed in many other countries. Inter-newspaper jealousies, the conservatism of the BBC, the rightwing nature of the British press: all these may have played a part in muting our concern. But it may also be that as a society we continue to believe in secrets and the people who make and guard them, despite everything Cobain reveals in this engrossing book.

Source: theguardian

The long read

Uncovering the brutal truth about the British empire 

 by Marc Parry

The Brexit of 1947: ‘Scotland is more like Spain than Bengal is like the Punjab’

BOOK EXCERPT

The differences between the countries of Europe, said the British then, were much smaller than those between the ‘countries’ of India.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Jun 24, 2016 · 03:14 pm

Ramachandra Guha

By 1888 the British were so solidly established in India that they could anticipate, if not a thousand-year Raj, at least a rule that extended well beyond their own lifetimes. In that year a man who had helped put the Raj in place gave a series of lectures in Cambridge which were later published in book form under the simple title India. The man was Sir John Strachey. Strachey had spent many years in the subcontinent, ultimately becoming a member of the Governor General’s Council. Now in retirement in England, he set his Indian experience against the background of recent political developments in Europe.

Large chunks of Strachey’s book are taken up by an administrative history of the Raj; of its army and civil services, its land and taxation policies, the peculiar position of the ‘native states’. This was a primer for those who might work in India after coming down from Cambridge. But there was also a larger theoretical argument to the effect that ‘India’ was merely a label of convenience, ‘a name which we give to a great region including a multitude of different countries’.

In Strachey’s view, the differences between the countries of Europe were much smaller than those between the ‘countries’ of India. ‘Scotland is more like Spain than Bengal is like the Punjab.’ In India the diversities of race, language and religion were far greater. Unlike in Europe, these ‘countries’ were not nations; they did not have a distinct political or social identity. This, Strachey told his Cambridge audience, ‘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 any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious’.

There was no Indian nation or country in the past; nor would there be one in the future. Strachey thought it ‘conceivable that national sympathies may arise in particular Indian countries’, but ‘that they should ever extend to India generally, that “men of the Punjab, Bengal, the North-western Provinces, and Madras, should ever feel that they belong to one Indian nation, is impossible. You might with as much reason and probability look forward to a time when a single nation will have taken the place of the various nations of Europe.

Strachey’s remarks were intended as a historical judgement. At the time, new nations were vigorously identifying themselves within Europe on the basis of a shared language or territory, whereas none of the countries that he knew in India had displayed a comparable national awakening. But we might also read them as a political exhortation, intended to stiffen the will of those in his audience who would end up in the service of the Raj. For the rise of every new ‘nation’ in India would mean a corresponding diminution in the power and prestige of Empire.

Ironically, even as he spoke Strachey’s verdict was being disputed by a group of Indians. These had set up the Indian National Congress, a representative body that asked for a greater say for natives in the running of their affairs. As the name suggests, this body wished to unite Indians across the divisions of culture, territory, religion, and language, thus to construct what the colonialist thought inconceivable – namely, a single Indian nation.

Very many good books have been written on the growth of the Indian National Congress, on its move from debating club through mass movement to political party, on the part played by leaders such as Gokhale, Tilak and (above all) Gandhi in this progression. Attention has been paid to the building of bridges between linguistic communities, religious groupings and castes. These attempts were not wholly successful, for low castes and especially Muslims were never completely convinced of the Congress’s claims to be a truly ‘national’ party. Thus it was that when political independence finally came in 1947 it came not to one nation, but two – India and Pakistan.



This is not the place to rehearse the history of Indian nationalism. I need only note that from the time the Congress was formed right up to when India was made free – and divided – there were sceptics who thought that Indian nationalism was not a natural phenomenon at all. There were, of course, British politicians and thinkers who welcomed Indian self-rule and, in their own way, aided its coming into being. (One of the prime movers of the Indian National Congress was a colonial official of Scottish parentage, A. O. Hume.) Yet there were many others who argued that, unlike France or Germany or Italy, there was here no national essence, no glue to bind the people and take them purposively forward. From this perspective stemmed the claim that it was only British rule that held India and the Indians together.

Among those who endorsed John Strachey’s view that there could never be an independent Indian nation were writers both famous and obscure. Prominent in the first category was Rudyard Kipling, who had spen this formative years in – and was to write some of his finest stories about – the subcontinent. In November 1891 Kipling visited Australia, where a journalist asked him about the ‘possibility of self-government in India’. ‘Oh no!’ he answered: ‘They are 4,000 years old out there, much too old to learn that business. Law and order is what they want and we are there to give it to them and we give it them straight.’

Where Kipling laid emphasis on the antiquity of the Indian civilization, other colonialists stressed the immaturity of the Indian mind to reach the same conclusion: namely, that Indians could not govern themselves. A cricketer and tea planter insisted, after forty years there, that

    “[c]haos would prevail in India if we were ever so foolish to leave the natives to run their own show. Ye gods! What a salad of confusion, of bungle, of mismanagement, and far worse, would be the instant result.

    These grand people will go anywhere and do anything if led by us.

    Themselves they are still infants as regards governing or statesmanship. And their so-called leaders are the worst of the lot.

Views such as these were widely prevalent among the British in India, and among the British at home as well. Politically speaking, the most important of these ‘Stracheyans’ was undoubtedly Winston Churchill. In the 1940s, with Indian independence manifestly round the corner, Churchill grumbled that he had not become the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

A decade previously he had tried to rebuild a fading political career on the plank of opposing self-government for Indians. After Gandhi’s ‘salt satyagrafra’ of 1930 in protest against taxes on salt, the British government began speaking with Indian nationalists about the possibility of granting the colony dominion status. This was vaguely defined, with no timetable set for its realization. Even so, Churchill called the idea ‘not only fantastic in itself but criminally mischievous in its effects’. Since Indians were not fit for self-government, it was necessary to marshal ‘the sober and resolute forces of the British Empire’ to stall any such possibility.

In 1930 and 1931 Churchill delivered numerous speeches designed to work up, in most unsober form, the constituency opposed to independence for India. Speaking to an audience at the City of London in December 1930, he claimed that if the British left the subcontinent, then ‘an army of white janissaries, officered if necessary from Germany, will be hired to secure the armed ascendancy of the Hindu’. Three months later, speaking at the Albert Hall on ‘Our Duty to India’ – with his kinsman the Duke of Marlborough presiding – Churchill argued that ‘to abandon India to the rule of the Brahmins [who in his opinion dominated the Congress Party] would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence’. If the British left, he predicted, then the entire gamut of public services created by them – the judicial, medical, railway and public works departments – would perish, and ‘India will fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages’.

A decade and a half after Winston Churchill issued these warnings, the British left India. A time of barbarism and privation did ensue, the blame for which remains a matter of much dispute. But then some sort of order was restored. No Germans were necessary to keep the peace. Hindu ascendancy, such as it was, was maintained not by force of arms but through regular elections based on universal adult franchise.

Yet, throughout the sixty years since India became independent, there has been speculation about how long it would stay united, or maintain the institutions and processes of democracy. With every death of a prime minister has been predicted the replacement of democracy by military rule; after every failure of the monsoon there has been anticipated country wide famine; in every new secessionist movement has been seen the disappearance of India as a single entity.

Among these doomsayers there have been many Western writers who, after 1947, were as likely to be American as British. Notably, India’s existence has been a puzzle not just to casual observers or commonsensical journalists; it has also been an anomaly for academic political science, according to whose axioms cultural heterogeneity and poverty do not make a nation, still less a democratic one. That India ‘could sustain democratic institutions seems, on the face of it, highly improbable’, wrote the distinguished political scientist Robert Dahl, adding: ‘It lacks all the favourable conditions.’ ‘India has a well-established reputation for violating social scientific generalizations’, wrote another American scholar, adding: ‘Nonetheless, the findings of this article furnish grounds for skepticism regarding the viability of democracy in India.’

The pages of this book are peppered with forecasts of India’s imminent dissolution, or of its descent into anarchy or authoritarian rule. Here, let me quote only a prediction by a sympathetic visitor, the British journalist Don Taylor. Writing in 1969, by which time India had stayed united for two decades and gone through four general elections, Taylor yet thought that

    the key question remains: can India remain in one piece – or will it fragment? . . . When one looks at this vast country and its 524 million people, the 15 major languages in use, the conflicting religions, the many races, it seems incredible that one nation could ever emerge.

    It is difficult to even encompass this country in the mind – the great Himalaya, the wide Indo-Gangetic plain burnt by the sun and savaged by the fierce monsoon rains, the green flooded delta of the east, the great cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It does not, often, seem like one country. And yet there is a resilience about India which seems an assurance of survival. There is something which can only be described as an Indian spirit.

    I believe it no exaggeration to say that the fate of Asia hangs on its survival.

The heart hoped that India would survive, but the head worried that it wouldn’t. The place was too complicated, too confusing – a nation, one might say, that was unnatural.

In truth, ever since the country was formed there have also been many Indians who have seen the survival of India as being on the line, some (the patriots) speaking or writing in fear, others (the secessionists or revolutionaries) with anticipation. Like their foreign counterparts, they have come to believe that this place is far too diverse to persist as a nation, and much too poor to endure as a democracy.

Excerpted with permission from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, Ramachandra Guha, Picador India.

We welcome your comments at  letters@scroll.in.

Source: scrollin

This is why they hate us: The real American history neither Ted Cruz nor the New York Times will tell you

Wednesday, Nov 18, 2015 06:00 AM EST

We talk democracy, then overthrow elected governments and prop up awful regimes. Let's discuss the actual history

Ben Norton

 Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush (Credit: AP/Reuters/Jason Reed/Photo montage by Salon)
The soi-disant Land of the Free and Home of the Brave has a long and iniquitous history of overthrowing democratically elected leftist governments and propping up right-wing dictators in their place.

U.S. politicians rarely acknowledge this odious past — let alone acknowledge that such policies continue well into the present day.

In the second Democratic presidential debate, however, candidate Bernie Sanders condemned a long-standing government policy his peers rarely admit exists.

“I think we have a disagreement,” Sanders said of fellow presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. “And the disagreement is that not only did I vote against the war in Iraq. If you look at history, you will find that regime change — whether it was in the early ’50s in Iran, whether it was toppling Salvador Allende in Chile, or whether it was overthrowing the government of Guatemala way back when — these invasions, these toppling of governments, regime changes have unintended consequences. I would say that on this issue I’m a little bit more conservative than the secretary.”

“I am not a great fan of regime changes,” Sanders added.

“Regime change” is not a phrase you hear discussed honestly much in Washington, yet it is a common practice in and defining feature of U.S. foreign policy for well over a century. For many decades, leaders from both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats, have pursued a bipartisan strategy of violently overthrowing democratically elected foreign governments that do not kowtow to U.S. orders.

In the debate, Sanders addressed three examples of U.S. regime change. There are scores of examples of American regime change, yet these are perhaps the most infamous instances.

Iran, 1953

 A tank in the streets of Tehran during the 1953 CIA-backed coup
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Public domain)

Iran was once a secular democracy. You would not know this from contemporary discussions of the much demonized country in U.S. politics and media.

What happen to Iran’s democracy? The U.S. overthrew it in 1953, with the help of the U.K. Why? For oil.

Mohammad Mosaddegh may be the most popular leader in Iran’s long history. He was also Iran’s only democratically elected head of state.

In 1951, Mosaddegh was elected prime minister of Iran. He was not a socialist, and certainly not a communist — on the contrary, he repressed Iranian communists — but he pursued many progressive, social democratic policies. Mosaddegh pushed for land reform, established rent control, and created a social security system, while working to separate powers in the democratic government.

In the Cold War, however, a leader who deviated in any way from free-market orthodoxy and the Washington Consensus was deemed a threat. When Mossaddegh nationalized Iran’s large oil reserves, he crossed a line that Western capitalist nations would not tolerate.

The New York Times ran an article in 1951 titled “British Warn Iran of Serious Result if She Seizes Oil.” The piece, which is full of orientalist language, refers to Iranian oil as “British oil properties,” failing to acknowledge that Britain, which had previously occupied Iran, had seized that oil and claimed it as its own, administering it under the auspices of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which later became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and eventually British Petroleum and modern BP.

The Times article noted that the U.S. “shares with Britain the gravest concern about the possibility that Iranian oil, the biggest supply now available in the Near East, might be lost to the Western powers.” The British government is quoted making a thinly veiled threat.

This threat came into fruition in August 1953. In Operation Ajax, the CIA, working with its British equivalent MI6, carried out a coup, overthrowing the elected government of Iran and reinstalling the monarchy. The shah would remain a faithful Western ally until 1979, when the monarchy was abolished in the Iranian Revolution.

Guatemala, 1954

 A CIA cable documenting Guatemalan dictator Castillo Armas’ plan to overthrow the elected government (Credit: CIA FOIA)

Less than a year after overthrowing Iran’s first democratically elected prime minister, the U.S. pursued a similar regime change policy in Guatemala, toppling the elected leader Jacobo Árbenz.

In 1944, Guatemalans waged a revolution, toppling the U.S.-backed right-wing dictator Jorge Ubico, who had ruled the country with an iron fist since 1931. Ubico, who fancied himself the 20th-century Napoleon, gave rich landowners and the U.S. corporation the United Fruit Company (which would later become Chiquita) free reign over Guatemala’s natural resources, and used the military to violently crush labor organizers.

Juan José Arévalo was elected into office in 1944. A liberal, he pursued very moderate policies, but the U.S. wanted a right-wing puppet regime that would allow U.S. corporations the same privileges granted to them by Ubico. In 1949, the U.S. backed an attempted coup, yet it failed.

In 1951, Árbenz was elected into office. Slightly to the left of Arévalo, Árbenz was still decidedly moderate. The U.S. claimed Árbenz was close to Guatemala’s communists, and warned he could ally with the Soviet Union. In reality, the opposite was true; Árbenz actually persecuted Guatemalan communists. At most, Árbenz was a social democrat, not even a socialist.

Yet Árbenz, like Mosaddegh, firmly believed that Guatemalans themselves, and not multinational corporations, should benefit from their country’s resources. He pursued land reform policies that would break up the control rich families and the United Fruit Company exercised over the country — and, for that reason, he was overthrown.

President Truman originally authorized a first coup attempt, Operation PBFORTUNE, in 1952. Yet details about the operation were leaked to the public, and the plan was abandoned. In 1954, in Operation PBSUCCESS, the CIA and U.S. State Department, under the Dulles Brothers, bombed Guatemala City and carried out a coup that violently toppled Guatemala’s democratic government.

The U.S. put into power right-wing tyrant Carlos Castillo Armas. For the next more than 50 years, until the end of the Guatemalan Civil War in 1996, Guatemala was ruled by a serious of authoritarian right-wing leaders who brutally repressed left-wing dissidents and carried out a campaign of genocide against the indigenous people of the country.

Chile, 1973

Pinochet’s soldiers burning left-wing books after the 1973 U.S.-backed coup in Chile (Credit: CIA FOIA/Weekly Review)

September 11 has permanently seared itself into the memory of Americans. The date has also been indelibly imprinted in the public consciousness of Chileans, because it was on this same day in 1973 that the U.S. backed a coup that violently overthrew Chile’s democracy.

In 1970, Marxist leader Salvador Allende was democratically elected president of Chile. Immediately after he was elected, the U.S. government poured resources into right-wing opposition groups and gave millions of dollars to Chile’s conservative media outlets.

The CIA deputy director of plans wrote in a 1970 memo, “It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup… It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [U.S. government] and American hand be well hidden.” President Nixon subsequently ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream” in Chile, to “prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him.”

Allende’s democratic government was violently overthrown in Operation Ajax, on September 11, 1973. He died in the coup, just after making an emotional speech, in which he declared he would give his life to defend Chilean democracy and sovereignty.

Far-right dictator Augusto Pinochet, who combined fascistic police state repression with hyper-capitalist free-market economic policies, was put into power. Under Pinochet’s far-right dictatorship, tens of thousands of Chilean leftists, labor organizers, and journalists were killed, disappeared, and tortured. Hundreds of thousands more people were forced into exile.

One of the most prevailing myths of the Cold War is that socialism was an unpopular system imposed on populations with brute force. Chile serves as a prime historical example of how the exact opposite was true. The masses of impoverished and oppressed people elected many socialist governments, yet these governments were often violently overthrown by the U.S. and other Western allies.

The overthrow of Allende was a turning point for many socialists in the Global South. Before he was overthrown, some leftists thought popular Marxist movements could gain state power through democratic elections, as was the case in Chile. Yet when they saw how the U.S. violently toppled Allende’s elected government, they became suspicious of the prospects of electoral politics and turned to guerrilla warfare and other tactics.

Modern example: Egypt, 2013

Protesters in the August 2013 Raba’a massacre, carried out by Sisi’s U.S.-backed coup government (Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Flickr/Mosa’ab Elshamy)

These are just a small sample of the great many regime changes the U.S. government has been involved in. More recent examples, which were supported by Hillary Clinton, as Sanders implied, include the U.S. government’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Qadhafi in Libya. In these cases, the U.S. was overthrowing dictators, not democratically elected leaders — but, as Sanders pointed out, the results of these regime changes have been nothing short of catastrophic.

The U.S. is also still engaging in regime change when it comes to democratically elected governments.

In the January 2011 revolution, Egyptians toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak, a close U.S. ally who ruled Egypt with an iron fist for almost 30 years.

In July 2013, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, was overthrown in a military coup. We now know that the U.S. supported and bankrolled the opposition forces that overthrew the democratically elected president.

Today, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a brutal despot who is widely recognized as even worse than Mubarak, reigns over Egypt. In August 2013, Sisi oversaw a slaughter of more than 800 peaceful Egyptian activists at Raba’a Square. His regime continues to shoot peaceful protesters in the street. An estimated 40,000 political prisoners languish in Sisi’s jails, including journalists.

In spite of his obscene human rights abuses, Sisi remains a close ally of the U.S. and Israel — much, much closer than was the democratically elected President Morsi.

In the second Democratic presidential debate, when Sanders called Clinton out on her hawkish, pro-regime change policies, she tried to blame the disasters in the aftermath in countries like Iraq and Libya on the “complexity” of the Middle East. As an example of this putative complexity, Clinton cited Egypt. “We saw a dictator overthrown, we saw Muslim Brotherhood president installed, and then we saw him ousted and the army back,” she said.

Clinton failed to mention two crucial factors: One, that the U.S. backed Mubarak until the last moment; and two, that the U.S. also supported the coup that overthrew Egypt’s first and only democratically elected head of state.

Other examples

The political cartoon “Ten Thousand Miles from Tip to Tip,” published in the Philadelphia Press in 1898 (Credit: Public domain)

There are scores of other examples of U.S.-led regime change.

    In 1964 the U.S. backed a coup in Brazil, toppling left-wing President João Goulart.
    In 1976, the U.S. supported a military coup in Argentina that replaced President Isabel Perón with General Jorge Rafael Videla.
    In 2002, the U.S. backed a coup that overthrew democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Chávez was so popular, however, that Venezuelans filled the street and demanded him back.
    In 2004, the U.S. overthrew Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
    In 2009, U.S.-trained far-right forces overthrew the democratically elected government of Honduras, with tacit support from Washington.

The list goes on.

Latin America, given its proximity to the U.S. and the strength of left-wing movements in the region, tends to endure the largest number of U.S. regime changes, yet the Middle East and many parts of Africa have seen their democratic governments overthrown as well.

From 1898 to 1994, Harvard University historian John Coatsworth documented at least 41 U.S. interventions in Latin America — an an average of one every 28 months for an entire century.

Numerous Latin American military dictators were trained at the School of the Americas, a U.S. Department of Defense Institute in Fort Benning, Georgia. The School of the Americas Watch, an activist organization that pushes for the closing of the SOA, has documented many of these regime changes, which have been carried out by both Republicans and Democrats.

Diplomatic cables released by whistleblowing journalism outlet WikiLeaks show the U.S. still maintains a systematic campaign of trying to overthrow Latin America’s left-wing governments.

By not just acknowledging the bloody and ignominious history of U.S. regime change, but also condemning it, Sen. Sanders was intrepidly trekking into controversial political territory into which few of his peers would dare to tread. Others would do well to learn from Bernie’s example.

Ben Norton is a politics staff writer at Salon. You can find him on Twitter at @BenjaminNorton.

Source: Salon