The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
Virtuous talk of unity in diversity and secularism has been replaced by a barefaced Hindu nationalism: The tattered old masks, and the gloves, have come off. The state, colonized by an ideological movement, is emerging triumphant over society. With the media’s help, it is assuming extraordinary powers of control — telling people what they should eat at home and how they should behave in public, and whom to lynch.
Source: nytimes
By PANKAJ
MISHRAAUG. 11, 2017
Credit
Daniel Zender
August
15, 1947, deserved to be remembered, the African-American writer W.E.B. Du Bois
argued, “as the greatest historical date” of modern history. It was the day
India became independent from British rule, and Du Bois believed the event was
of “greater significance” than even the establishment of democracy in Britain,
the emancipation of slaves in the United States or the Russian Revolution. The
time “when the white man, by reason of the color of his skin, can lord it over
colored people” was finally drawing to a close.
It is barely
remembered today that India’s freedom heralded the liberation, from Tuskegee to
Jakarta, of a majority of the world’s population from the degradations of
racist imperialism. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, claimed
that there had been nothing “more horrible” in human history than the days when
millions of Africans “were carried away in galleys as slaves to America and
elsewhere.” As he said in a resonant speech on Aug. 15, 1947, long ago India
had made a “tryst with destiny,” and now, by opening up a
broad horizon of human emancipation, “we shall redeem our pledge.”
But
India, which turns 70 next week, seems to have missed its appointment with
history. A country inaugurated by secular freedom fighters is presently ruled
by religious-racial supremacists. More disturbing still than this mutation are
the continuities between those early embodiments of postcolonial virtue and
their apparent betrayers today.
Du Bois
would have been heartbroken to read the joint statement that more than 40
African governments released in April, denouncing “xenophobic and racial”
attacks on Africans in India and asking the United Nations Human Rights Council
to investigate. The rise in hate crimes against Africans is part of a
sinister trend that has accelerated since the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi
came to power in 2014.
Another
of its bloodcurdling manifestations is the lynching of Muslims suspected of
eating or storing beef. Others include assaults on couples who publicly display
affection and threats of rape against women on social media by the Hindu supremacists’ troll army. Mob frenzy in
India today is drummed up by jingoistic television anchors and vindicated,
often on Twitter, by senior politicians, businessmen, army generals and
Bollywood stars.
Hindu
nationalists have also come together to justify India’s intensified military
occupation of Muslim-majority Kashmir, as well as a nationwide hunt for
enemies: an ever-shifting and growing category that includes writers, liberal intellectuals, filmmakers
who work with Pakistani actors and ordinary citizens who don’t stand up when the
national anthem is played in cinemas. The new world order — just, peaceful, equal
— that India’s leaders promised at independence as they denounced their former
Western masters’ violence, greed and hypocrisy is nowhere in sight.
Back in
1947, Du Bois had good reason to hope that India would offer a superior
alternative to the West’s destructive modernity. His hero, Mohandas K. Gandhi,
had lived on three continents by the time the first phase of globalization
violently ended with World War I. Gandhi had intimately experienced how Western
imperialists and capitalists blended economic inequalities with racial
hierarchies, entrenching, as Du Bois wrote, “a new industrial slavery of black
and brown and yellow workers in Africa and Asia.” Gandhi was determined not to
let postcolonial India replicate the injustices built into modern civilization
or, as he put it, “English rule without the Englishman.”
From that
perspective, Gandhi may seem to have chosen his protégé unwisely: Nehru was the
scion of a family of rich Brahmin Anglophiles. But Nehru received his own
education in global inequities through people he met in international left-wing
networks. On a wide range of international issues, the two men shared a
rhetoric that expressed a preference for solidarity, compassion and dialogue
over violence.
Gandhi
claimed to “understand the longing of a Jew to return to Palestine,” but warned
Zionists against doing so “under the shadow of the British gun.” As early as
1946, Nehru, then prime-minister-in-waiting, sacrificed India’s lucrative trade
links with South Africa in protest against apartheid. In 1947, India voted at
the United Nations against the partition of Palestine because, Nehru explained
to Albert Einstein, the Zionists had “failed to win the good will of the
Arabs.” Distrustful of American motives, Nehru spurned a potentially rewarding
partnership with the United States during the Cold War.
But
Indian leaders very seldom practiced domestically what they preached
internationally. Though committed to parliamentary procedures, Nehru never let
go of the British-created colonial state and its well-oiled machinery of
repression. The brute power of the Indian police and army was used in 1948 to
corral the princely state of Hyderabad into the Indian Union. Up to 40,000
Muslims were killed, and the episode remains the single-largest massacre in the
history of independent India.
Nehru
shared with Hindu nationalists a mystical faith in the essential continuity of
India from ancient civilization to modern nation. Determined to hold on to
Kashmir, for example, he abandoned his promise of organizing a referendum to
decide the contested region’s political status. In 1953, he deposed a popular
Kashmiri politician (and friend) and had him sent to prison, inaugurating a
long reign of puppet leaders who continue to enrich themselves under the long
shadow of the Indian gun.
As early
as 1958, Nehru’s regime introduced the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the
forerunner of repressive legislation that today sanctions murder, torture and
rape by Indian soldiers in central India and border provinces. It was under
Nehru that Indian troops and paramilitaries were unleashed on indigenous
peoples in India’s northeastern states in the 1950s and ’60s. It was Nehru who
in 1961 made it a crime to question the territorial integrity of India,
punishable with imprisonment.
Yet in
the eyes of the world, India maintained its exceptional status for decades, as
many promising postcolonial experiments with democracy degenerated into
authoritarianism, if not military rule. The country’s democratic politics
appeared stable. But they did so only because they were reduced to the rule of
a single party, the Congress, which was itself dominated by a single family —
Nehru’s. And far from being socialist or redistributionist, Nehru’s economic
policies boosted India’s monopoly capitalists. His priorities were heavy
industries and elite polytechnics, which precluded major investments in primary
education, health and land reform.
The
Congress’s reliance on reactionary upper-caste Hindus also prevented the very
possibility of emancipatory politics for dalits until the early 1990s. (It was
those upper-caste Hindus, incidentally, who were the first in the republic’s
history to ban cow slaughter, in several states in the 1950s.) By the 1980s —
after Nehru had been replaced by his daughter, Indira Gandhi, at the helm of
both the Congress and the country — the party had chosen Hindu majoritarianism,
and hostility to Muslims and Sikhs, as the low road to electoral success. It
was a nasty and dangerous strategy, which emboldened extremists on all sides.
Many more people died in the Congress-led anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 than in the
2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat that Modi is accused of supervising while
he was the state’s chief minister.
India’s
lynch mobs today represent the latest and most grisly expression of such
cynical political ideologies. As the sheer brutishness of Mr. Modi’s populism
becomes clear, the memory of the aristocratic Nehru becomes more sacred,
especially among politicians and commentators from India’s English-speaking upper
castes. But Mr. Modi has also turned that legacy of high-flown promises to his
political advantage.
Nehru and
his followers had articulated an influential ideology of Indian exceptionalism,
claiming moral prestige and geopolitical significance for India’s uniquely
massive and diverse democracy. Only many of those righteous notions also reeked
of upper-caste sanctimony and class privilege. Mr. Modi has effectively
mobilized those Indians who have long felt marginalized and humiliated by
India’s self-serving Nehruvian elite into a large vote bank of ressentiment.
Virtuous talk of unity in diversity and secularism has been replaced by a barefaced Hindu nationalism: The tattered old masks, and the gloves, have come off. The state, colonized by an ideological movement, is emerging triumphant over society. With the media’s help, it is assuming extraordinary powers of control — telling people what they should eat at home and how they should behave in public, and whom to lynch.
Mr.
Modi’s rule represents the most devastating, and perhaps final, defeat of
India’s noble postcolonial ambition to create a moral world order. It turns out
that the racist imperialism Du Bois despised can resurrect itself even among
its former victims: There can be English rule without the Englishman. India’s
claims to exceptionalism appear to have been as unfounded as America’s own.
And so
one can, of course, mourn this Aug. 15 as marking the end of India’s tryst with
destiny or, more accurately, the collapse of our exalted ideas about ourselves.
But a sober reckoning with the deep malaise in India can be bracing, too. For
it confirms that the world as we have known it, molded by the beneficiaries of
both Western imperialism and anti-imperialist nationalism, is crumbling, and
that in the East as well as the West, all of us are now called to fresh
struggles for freedom, equality and dignity.
Pankaj
Mishra’s most recent book is “Age of Anger: A History of the Present.”
