Modi and the Looming Spectre of Authoritarianism

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As Ambedkar had warned, Indians have a curious predilection towards bhakti and hero-worship in politics, one that has caused the country much harm. Given Modi’s iron grip within the BJP, we must guard against repeating old mistakes.

The last few days have been especially eventful for the always hectic Modi campaign. The BJP disciplined three of its patriarchs, Advani, MM Joshi and Jaswant Singh, imposing on them firmly the party’s diktat. Advani’s move to contest from Bhopal was scotched, being seen as an attempt to prop up a Shivraj Singh Chouhan-led centre of power, one that was obviously not to Modi’s liking. Joshi was made to contest from Kanpur rather than Varanasi, where he is the sitting MP, so that Modi could contest from the holy city, touted as a “safe seat” for the BJP. And Jaswant Singh was summarily expelled over the phone when he threatened to oppose the High Command’s decision to not nominate him as the BJP candidate from his home constituency of Barmer. All three incidents point to a significant strengthening of Modi within the BJP, as all other centres of power are either made to fall in line or removed. A more subtle indication of this power shift was provided by Rajnath’s Singh’s move of replacing the “Modi” in BJP’s official slogan, Ab ki baar Modi sarkaar, with the word “BJP”. The incident was sought to be papered over by claiming that it was an inadvertent mistake but by then tongues had already started to wag. Of course, all of this is small change compared to the popular slogan “Har Har Modi”, which raises Modi, literally, to the level of god (the original slogan, “Har har Mahadev” is a celebration of Lord Shiv). When the Shankaracharya of Dwarka Peeth objected to this “vyakti puja”, Modi hurriedly advised his supporters, via a tweet, to desist from the slogan. However, this literal deification of Modi was just one of the many indicators which point to his almost complete domination of the BJP.

The last time someone held such a sway on his or her own party was when the indomitable Mrs Indira Gandhi ruled over the Congress. Appointed as a consensus candidate after the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri, she soon ousted the Congress old guard and took full control. An authoritarian to the core, she went about methodically increasing her personal power at the expense of various systemic checks and balances. She tried to break the independence of the judiciary, discontinuing the practise of appointing the senior-most judge as chief justice, choosing her own candidate instead. The bureaucracy was made firmly subservient to the political executive, as her secretary, PN Haksar, pushed the concept of “committed” civil servants. She also significantly eroded the federal nature of India’s polity, concentrating power in the Centre. As Bidyut Chatterjee writes in his book, Indian Politics and Society since Independence, during Indira’s rule “centre-state relations were practically reduced to a state of near non-existence and unitarism triumphed under the aegis of a strong state”.

This is, of course, not to single out Indira. In the absence of checks, power corrupts everyone and anyone. Even her father, usually hailed as a pukka democrat, had a crushing hold on his party and his government and it was probably this dominance that led to the “Himalayan blunders” of 1962—surrounded by his lackeys, Nehru’s disastrous China policy just did not have the opposition and, consequently, the balance that was needed. To go even further back, in parallel with the deification of Modi, Gandhi was hailed as a saint and awarded the title of “Mahatma”. However, even he was not averse to misusing some of this power. In 1939, Subhash Chandra Bose won the elections for the presidency of the Congress, defeating a man, who as it so happened, was the Mahatma’s candidate. Rather than accept this democratic verdict, Gandhi used his iron grip on the leaders of the Congress to get 12 of the 15 members of the Working Committee to resign. Crippled, Bose was forced to quit and leave the Congress in disgrace.

This seems to be a particular Indian trait: we love to lionise our leaders, make them into gods, literally even. On 25th November 1949, Dr Ambedkar, in his famous Grammar of Anarchy speech delivered to the Constituent Assembly, had warned of exactly this. “There is nothing wrong in being grateful to great men who have rendered life-long services to the country,” he said, but also warned that “in India, Bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship. .” (emphasis mine)

India, unsurprisingly, seems to have ignored Ambedkar’s prophetic words. When Indira Gandhi first announced the Emergency, amazingly, India’s middle class actually cheered it on. Khushwant Singh wrote how it “was generally welcomed by the people. There were no strikes or hartals, schools and colleges re-opened, business picked up, buses and trains began to run on time.” Mrs Gandhi was seen as the “strong leader” India needed. Just like in 1975, even today, Ambedkar is being ignored and the Great Indian Middle Class is hankering again for a “strong leader”. This time that leader is Modi, who is to deliver India from her chaos and bedlam, ironically, by defeating Indira’s grandson at the hustings. The more things change…

Vijay Prashad, writing in The Guardian also acknowledged the authoritarianism inherent in the rise of Modi but argued that the fact that India does not have a presidential but a diffused parliamentary system of government is what will act as a check against Modi’s power should he win the elections. This, on paper, is correct. Our Westminster system, in theory, makes the government responsible to the legislature. For Modi to continue in office, he will have to have the confidence of at least 271 members of the Lok Sabha, not an easy task.

In practise, however, things are not that rosy. The peculiar way in which the executive is chosen in the Westminster system means that it must necessarily be one that enjoys the confidence of Parliament. In other words, while Parliament is meant to check the executive, given that both draw their power from the same organ, the ruling party, this is a weak check indeed. A conflict of interest is almost built into the system by default. This peculiar nature of the Westminster system was highlighted by Lord Hailsham in his now famous Richard Dimbleby Lecture at the BBC in 1976, where he memorably called this feeble arrangement of checks and balances an “elective dictatorship”. It also must be noted that the “elective dictatorship” of the UK becomes even more despotic in India, given that we have that most undemocratic of instruments, the Anti-Defection Law. In the UK, in extreme circumstances, governments could still be reined in by, say, a backbench revolt. Given that an MP in India is a slave of his party high command, such a scenario is, literally, impossible. The ruling party has full control of both the executive and the legislature, the latter farcically meant to provide a check on the former. In the US Presidential system, on the other hand, the complete separation between the executive and legislature means that even an extremely strong president can be held in check, as has happened multiple times in the current Obama administration.

It is, therefore, no surprise that this system has once allowed one individual, Indira Gandhi, to completely dominate the country, making Parliament and even institutions like the cabinet, completely subservient to her. One year before the emergency, DK Barooah had even gone so far as to proclaim that “India is Indira. Indira is India”, his sycophancy providing an apt expression of Indira’s iron grip on the government, even if not, as claimed, India. This time, Modi’s supporters and, indeed, many BJP leaders have gone even one step further, comparing him to Lord Shiv himself. And while, even if for appearance’s sake, Indira fought on the basis of slogans of development such as “gharibi hatao”, the BJP slogan is starkly Modi-centric: “Ab ki baar Modi Sarkar”, the absence of the BJP in its very own slogan being a stark reminder as to how personality-centric Modi’s campaign is.

Some might argue that Indira Gandhi is an extreme case and there is no way the BJP would even be able to get close to the number of seats the Congress held under the “Indira Wave”. This is a valid point and there is a good chance that the exigencies of coalition politics would hold in check many of Modi’s more authoritarian tendencies. Nevertheless, given his absolute power within the BJP and the harm authoritarianism has already done to India, we must keep Ambedkar’s warning in mind: “in politics, bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation”.

First published in NewsYaps

A Short History of the 1962 War and its Lessons

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Cross posted on Tarikh Par Tarikh

On Tuesday, Nevile Maxwell, a former journalist with The Times, posted in Delhi, published sections of the Henderson Brooks–Bhagat Report on his personal website. The report was an investigation into the 1962 military debacle and is still classified as ‘Top Secret’ by the Government of India. Maxwell wrote that he was publishing the report on his website after efforts to release it to the Indian press had failed with editors backing out. “So my dilemma continued,” he wrote. “Although with the albatross hung, so to speak, on Indian necks as well as my own. As I see it now I have no option but, rather than leave the dilemma to my heirs, to put the Report on the internet myself.”

The release of the document, by itself, is no great addition to our understanding of 1962. Maxwell has had the report with him for many decades and uses it as one of the principal sources for his book, India’s China War. His account, already widely disseminated, would now be open to be scrutinised alongside its principal primary source thus adding more weight to his narrative. Till now, the report being classified, we had to take Maxwell’s word for it.

Nevertheless, the release of the report does raise some important points.

The first thing it does is lay bare the almost autocratic way in which the government in our country functions. The lifeblood of any democracy is information, on the basis of which the electorate can make decisions. This level of secrecy—the Henderson Report has been under wraps for more than 5 decades now—is odd for a country that calls itself a democracy. Most Western countries, even organisations such as the CIA, declassify documents after more than 30 years. This is just one example of the paternalism which the Indian state has inherited seamlessly from the Raj. Our government still has a tendency to rule rather than govern which is why it can so easily keep this report away from the prying eyes of its own citizens. With regard to 1962, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that communist China has been more open than democratic India.

The other thing this hullabaloo does is bring 1962 back into the spotlight. The renewed interest in India’s greatest military debacle would help shape India’s response to further conflicts, hopefully in the correct manner. Till now, with very little information available (and Maxwell’s views under heavy criticism), the debate around 1962 has been severely hampered. One half of the efforts have been spent in proving Nehru’s contention that China “stabbed us in the back”—the official Indian view of the war. The other half, critical of Nehru, have blamed his appeasement of China for the defeat. Surprisingly, even this half unquestioningly accepts Nehru’s version of Chinese perfidy, only berating Panditji for letting down his guard.  As luck would have it, both stances are largely incorrect.

In 1947, as India emerged as a free country, it saw that its borders with its largest neighbour, China, had been left largely undefined by the British. In the eastern sector (now Arunachal Pradesh), the border was demarcated by the McMahon Line, an agreement formalised between British and Tibetan representatives at the Simla Conference of 1914. The Chinese do not formally recognise this line. They argue that the Tibetans were not sovereign in 1914 and hence did not have the authority to decide a border. In the western sector, things were even fuzzier. As late as 1950, India itself had produced maps marking the border in this sector as “undefined”.

Initially, this ambiguous border wasn’t an issue. China emerged from World War II a broken country torn apart by civil war. The power equation between the two countries can be judged from the fact that for the Bandung Conference, Nehru sent over an Air-India aeroplane to fly Zhou Enlai (China’s first premier) to Jakarta. This unusual aircraft lending was done because at the time, strife-torn China did not even have an airline.

However, in 1950, China invaded Tibet, bringing itself to India’s doorstep and very soon built itself up as a stable power. Around the same time as India and China committed themselves to the lofty (but, as time would tell, hollow) principles of Panchsheel, friction emerged between the two countries with regard to the border. Matters were more or less settled on the eastern sector. Even though China did not formally accept the McMohan line (and still does not), the area had been under Indian control for some time and Zhou Enlai had stated that “now that it is an accomplished fact, we should accept it”. In the western sector though, India, curiously, used a shaky treaty from 1842 to unilaterally claim a fixed boundary (the Kashmir-China boundary shown in Indian maps today). This is an area that the British has never really had any jurisdiction over, neither de facto nor de jure. China, on the other hand, claimed it had controlled the area for over two centuries and, most importantly, it had certainly been under Chinese control since 1950, ever since it invaded Tibet. When India first drew a definite border for Aksai Chin (articulated in Nehru’s letter to Zhou in 1959) China was already in control of Aksai China for almost a decade (roughly mapping to its present area of control).

This maximalist claim by India, the weaker side, might strike one as odd but starts to make more sense when taken to be a bargaining counter. India wanted China to formally accept its claims in the east in return for which it would accept China’s claims to Aksai Chin. This claim was therefore never meant to be an actual military posture—just a diplomatic bluff. The logic of democracy married with jingoism, though, put paid to Nehru’s strategy. Once the border in the west had been demarcated and put on a map, it took a life of its own. Public opinion staunchly opposed the idea of a barter, or even the ceding of an inch of Indian land—which now included Aksai Chin, a region which had never been in India’s control but was now a part of the country by the occult powers of cartography. Nehru himself acknowledged this pressure lamenting that “if I give them that I shall no longer be Prime Minister of India”. President Radhakrishnan also warned that the maps could not be changed “if only because public opinion will not tolerate this”.

The end result was that when Zhou Enlai flew to India in January 1960 (this time, presumably, in his own aircraft) he was ready to negotiate the border but Nehru was in no position to cede land from areas that had already been demarcated by his government as India’s. To further press home the public opposition to any ‘concessions’ to China, Zhou’s visit was marked by protests and demonstrations including a massive dharnaa staged by the Jan Sangh outside Nehru’s residence (it is therefore, ironic, that today the BJP criticises Nehru for 1962—a mistake he committed partially by giving in to pressure from the Hindutva wing). The east-west ‘barter’ first thought up to solve the problem—the ‘logical solution’ as per Neville Maxwell—was a nonstarter. India would not, could not, shift from its claims either in the east or the west.

In spite of these reverses, it still did not mean conflict was inevitable. In fact, the situation in 1960 is also the situation today—India holds the McMohan line and China holds Aksai Chin.

What eventually lead to war was something known as Nehru’s Forward Policy.

In November 1961, the Government, under massive public pressure, issued instructions to the Army to set up posts all along India’s claim lines and "especially in such places as might be disputed". This bizarre strategy, known as the Forward Policy was based on completely misplaced intelligence from the IB that the Chinese were unlikely to use military force against India even if they were in a position to do so. NB Mullick, part of Nehru’s coterie, supplied this fantastic assessment. At Army HQ, Nehru’s other two acolytes, Lt General BM Kaul and Army Commander, Thapar accepted this order rather than, as should have been done, protest it from a military point of view.  Valid and urgent objections from the Western Command (in-charge of operations in Aksai Chin) stating that it severely lacked forces to carry out the task (much less face the Chinese should they retaliate) were summarily overruled by Army HQ.

Matters reached a head in June 1962 as India established a post in the eastern sector at Dhola, which lay around 1.5 kms north of the McMohan line. As explained by Brigadier John Dalvi in his seminal war memorial, Himalayan Blunder, “the Thagla-Dhola area was not strictly territory that we should have been convinced was ours as directed by the Prime Minister, Mr Nehru, and someone is guilty of exceeding the limits prescribed by him.”

By September, China had attacked and taken over the post. Political compulsions now forced the government to act and attempt to evict the Chinese from Dhola—a move not short of suicide given the strength of the Chinese, the climate and the harsh geography of the area. When the army resisted this move, the government promptly replaced the intransigent General Umrao Singh (XXXIII Corps) with General Kaul, sweeping aside all opposition to its plans. The Indian force that was eventually sent to evict the Chinese from Dhola was heavily attacked by some 800 Chinese troops supported by heavy mortars. For the first time, the fiction the IB had spun, that the Chinese would not retaliate with force, came crumbling down. General Kaul’s first shocked reaction to the Chinese action is said to have been “Oh my God! You are right, they mean business.”

By 20 October, the Chinese had launched major offensives in the west as well as the east, citing “self-defence” against India’s aggression; ironic because India’s Army was in no possession to defend itself much less be aggressive. The false bravado of the Forward Policy had collapsed.

Within a month, the Chinese had swept through the west and east and, having achieved their war aims, declared a unilateral ceasefire. They withdrew to the Line of Actual Control as it existed in 1959 (and still more-or-less exists today), which maintained the McMohan line in the east but also firmly kept Aksai Chin with them. As might be noted, this is a compromise that, at one time, the Chinese were willing to do at the negotiating table. India’s Forward Policy had achieved nothing other than a humiliating defeat for its army. While 1962 laid bare the army top brass and political leadership, it must be pointed out that most Indian Army units showed exceptional courage in the face of almost impossible odds, fighting a far-more well equipped enemy as well as their own bumbling leadership.

India has a lot of lessons to learn from this debacle. One is the double-edged sword that media attention is in a democracy. Media and public pressure plays a remarkably important role most of the time but in 1962 it also forced Nehru’s hand, compelling him to take unsound decisions such as the Forward Policy. This lesson is as valid today as it was in ’62, maybe even more so given how much more stronger the media is as compared to 5 decades back. The 2013 Daulat Beg Oldi incident is a case in point. Defence minister AK Antony protested the media reaction, insinuating that television news media overplayed the face-off by showing old footage of Chinese “incursions” on what is still an undemarcated boundary—a situation similar to 1962.

It also calls for a reappraisal of Nehru—something both his supporters as well as critics need to do. In 1962, Nehru’s position of being “stabbed in the back” was clearly a bit misleading. During the war, he flatly contradicted a lot of the qualities he is admired for: Third World solidarity, non-alignment (Nehru appealed fervently for US support in 1962 and was turned down) and democracy (removed all opposition to his 1962 policies, staffing every level with ‘yes men’). His critics, mainly from the Right, also seem to have gotten the wrong end of the stick. For example, in his book Are We Deceiving Ourselves Again? Lessons the Chinese Taught Pandit Nehru But Which We Still Refuse to Learn,  Arun Shourie paints Nehru as a Sinophile, a Kumbaya-singing peacenik who was fooled by the wily Chinese, thus, ironically, buying into the Government’s excuse of being “stabbed in the back”. Of course, as we see, Nehru was hardly fooled by his own rhetoric of Hindi-Chini bhai bhai. Nehru understood realpolitik very well, thank you, and could, be aggressive (in this case, over-aggressive) as and when needed.

But of course, given our ostrich-like attitude towards history—will the Henderson Report ever be declassified?—it remains to be seen how much we learn from this incident.

First published on NewsYaps

Faiz is Beautiful but Can You Really Call Him a People's Poet?

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I recently came across a short debate I had with Mr Sohail Hashmi on Kafila. I found rereading it quite interesting so thought I’d post it up here for posterity.

Mr Hashmi, of course, is a writer I much admire and I have, especially, read his writings on the architectural heritage of Delhi with great interest. In this instance he wrote a lovely piece on Faiz, Urdu’s greatest poet of the modern era. What I took issue with, though, is Mr Hashmi’s characterisation of Faiz as a “people centric” poet and one whose “ideas glisten with the truth and democratic ideals that enlighten the hearts of the overwhelming majority of our people”

My first comment on the article was:

“Thanks for this fascinating account Mr Hashmi.

Although, personally, I’ve always battled with the notion that Faiz’s poetry was “people centric”. If it was, it was in a very top-down, almost patronising sort of way. Can any poetry, written in Rekhta (and here I make a very stark distinction between Urdu and Rekhta as should be done) ever be truly “people centric”? Are “people centric” themes enough to award Faiz with the honour of the subcontinent’s most imprtant poet, this hardly a handful people in the sub-continent could actually understand his overtly Persianised Urdu? You must admit, to claim to talk on behalf of the people, when the people can’t even understand you is a bit rich.

Urdu is one of the few languages which exhibits such extreme literary diglossia that the literary form (at least in poetry) is almost incomprehensible to its native speakers. Bengali is another sub-continental language which did exhibit a similar trait with an artificially sanskritised form of the language (shadhubhasha: cholit bhasha :: Rekhta:Urdu) but thankfully, that elitist trend has died out and almost all literature in Bengali today is in cholit bhasa (i.e. the normal spoken language).”

To which Mr Hashmi replied:

“You have touched upon some very complex issues and no simple explanations are possible.

Between the time that Faiz began writing to the time that he died, Urdu ceased to be a language of public discourse in large parts of the subcontinent, at least in the parts where it was born as Hindavi, that is the Ganga Jamuna doab and in the parts where it grew into a full fledged language that is Deccani .

The language became a victim of the divisive politics of language equals religion that began with the Fort Williams college in 1825 and culminated with the adoption of the resolution to make Sanskritised Hindi as the national language of India instead of Hindustani written in both the Nagri and the Persian scripts, the latter had the backing of Gandhi but the constituent assembly went against the old man’s wishes and voted against Hindustani.

URDU became the official language of Pakistan where it was the mother tongue only of the Muhajirs and was banished from the land where it was the language of Prem Chand, Kanhaiyalal Kapoor, Krishan Chand, Ram Lal, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Tilok Chand Mehroom, Firaq, Arsh Malsiyani and also of Josh,Sahir, Shakeel, Jazbi, Majaz, Majrooh and Kaifi. Faiz could only write in the language that he was comfortable in, his mother tongue might have been Sialkoti Punjabi but all his initial education was in Urdu, Persian and Arabic and this is the linguistic discourse that he was familiar with.

The other issue is do you have to , of necessity, write in the language of the people if you are writing about issues that concern them? I don’t know how many blacks had access to the English in which Langston Hughes wrote his anti racist poems, how many Russians understood Yevtushenko or Maykovsky, when they wrote on issues that concerned the working class of Russia.

We had a literacy rate of 13% when we became independent, so 87% of our population was illiterate in all languages, which language should the writers have written in. Tulsi’s Ram Charit Manas written in Awadhi,because he wanted the image of the ideal being to be presented before the people, has had to explained to Awadhis for the last 400 years, the same is true of Jaisi’s Padmavat and Rahim’s Dohas.

some of what a great poet writes about the people is understood by them immediately, some takes a while to be understood and some is understood after a couple of generations. it is this that makes him/her a great poet. the only way a poet can be understood totally by the people is for the poet to write not only in the language of the people but also write only about the here and now. This way lies 15 minutes of glory and impermanence and an absence of literature that speaks to generations. you can not demand that literature that lives beyond its time and deals with issues that go beyond the immediacy of now must also be understood totally, fully and completely by those who live at the moment of the creation of that literature.

Faiz has fortunately written both kinds of poetry, the time bound and the time less and that is one of the reasons of his being recognised as the greatest poet of the 20th century. He has written BOL, he has written Tarana, he has written Hum Dekhengegy, all three have become slogans of our times, he has also written hazar karo merey tan se, Nisar mein teri galiyon pe, Do aawaazen etc that need to be understood gradually. Why do you want all political poets to be political activists too. Let the political activist do what he is good at and allow the poet to do what he is good at.“

Me:

“Thanks for that detailed reply. Couple of points:

I should have done this earlier, but let me define the term Urdu (since the term means so many things). From my first post, I used ‘Urdu’ to mean the common spoken language of the urban people of much of North India. What you might call baazaari Hindustani. The term ‘Hindustani’ when used to mean a sort of middle language between High Hindi and High Urdu is fairly new. The term Hindustani was coined by the British and throughout the Raj the term was used as a synonym for what we call Urdu today. For example, John T Platts dictionary calls qaaf the “twenty-seventh letter of the Urdu or Hindustani alphabet”. In most of modern India, Hindi is also used as a synonym for Urdu. For example, Hindi Movies etc.

The language became a victim of the divisive politics of language equals religion that began with the Fort Williams college in 1825 and culminated with the adoption of the resolution to make Sanskritised Hindi as the national language of India instead of Hindustani written in both the Nagri and the Persian scripts, the latter had the backing of Gandhi but the constituent assembly went against the old man’s wishes and voted against Hindustani.

I fail to grasp how this is relevant to getting Faiz to write in a register which is widely understood but, for what it’s worth, the GoI’s attempts to invent a new standard (sanskirtised) register of Hindi-Urdu have failed rather miserably. That Gandhi anecdote is nice but only half true. Gandhi oscillated quite a bit on the language question (which was typical of him) between Hindustani in both scripts as well as only using the Devanagri script.

Faiz could only write in the language that he was comfortable in, his mother tongue might have been Sialkoti Punjabi but all his initial education was in Urdu, Persian and Arabic and this is the linguistic discourse that he was familiar with.

That might be one reason. Or it just might be that he wanted to occupy a literary space that only Urdu could provide. Either way, Faiz is not at fault. What I am wondering is whether applying labels such as ‘people centric’ etc to his poetry is not misleading.

We had a literacy rate of 13% when we became independent, so 87% of our population was illiterate in all languages, which language should the writers have written in. Tulsi’s Ram Charit Manas…

Uh-oh. ‘Literacy rate’ refers to written not spoken language, Hashmi sahib. Jaahil bhi bol aur sun paate hain. If recite Bidrohi by Nojrul to an illiterate Bengali he will understand it. Prem chand would be understood by all Dehlavis; even Krishan Chandar. I doubt that the same could be said of say ‘Aaj Bazar Mein’.

The other issue is do you have to , of necessity, write in the language of the people if you are writing about issues that concern them?

IMO, it would be crushingly patronising to not do so; reminds me of Gandhi’s pledge to not allow Harijians to run the Harijan Sabha but for it to be run by upper castes and Ambedkar’s rage at this.

Why do you want all political poets to be political activists too. Let the political activist do what he is good at and allow the poet to do what he is good at

Exactly my point; let us admire the beauty of Faiz without clouding his appraisal with terms that take his poetry beyond poetry into political activism. Art for art’s sake and all that; because as soon as we start assigning it some utilitarian function, say, we state that his poetry, to, quote Zaheer from your piece, carries “democratic ideals that enlighten the hearts of the overwhelming majority of our people” when the only a microscopic minority can even understand what he’s saying, that we start sounding rather hollow.”

Sohail Hashmi:

“you are absolutely right in using the term Urdu for the spoken language of much of North India, Urdu was the language of this region till a little after 1947, with the selection, on paper, of Hindi as The Official Language the spoken language of much of north India has undergone drastic changes in the post 1947 period and Urdu has by and large been replaced with a strange mixture of what you call the Bazaari Hindustani and the Sanskritised Hindi constructed by the Rahtra Bhasha Samitis in the post independence India.

The term Urdu, used for the language that was commonly spoken in the north Indian plains itself is also a rather recent development, the prose of Ghalib when it was first published was given the name Oud-e-Hindi by Ghalib, and Rekhta that Meer and Ghalib wrote their poetry in was derisively called Rekhta – mixed Language by the Persian Ustads of the immediate post wali period. So Urdu that was known as Hindi/Rekhta written in the Persian script by and large till the time of Ghalib and a little later was transformed at Fort Williams into Hindustani/ Urdu if written in the Persian script and Hindi if written in the Nagri Script

My reference to the divisive politics that created the language equals religion discourse was to the process, initiated at the fort williams and carried forward by the votaries of Hindi/ Hindu/ Hindustan and Urdu/Muslim/Pakistan that changed the very nature of the language that was commonly spoken and understood till the immediate pre independence period. It is this changed nature of the language that has created the situation in which most of Faiz’s poetry and also the poetry of Sahir, Majrooh and Kaifi and others begins to sound unfamiliar to those whose grandparents would have had no problem in understanding it.

As for literacy and illiteracy the point that I am making is that there is a difference between the vocabulary of the illiterate and the literate and therefore written language is always a little if not very different from the spoken add to that the difference that has always existed between the language of Poetry and that of Prose, Meer in his time and Firaq much later were two poets who wrote in a language that was closest to the spoken Hindi/ Hindustani/ Rekhta/ Urdu and still there is much in their writing that an illiterate will not understand.

Faiz was writing in a language whose literary traditions and style he was more familiar with and could therefore express himself better in. to my mind He wrote in a language that he thought he could best express himself in, that was a language he inherited as the language of literary discourse and he wrote on issues that were dear to him or he felt strongly about, issues that he grew up with and held dear I think he wrote poetry with a strong political message, you might not think so. So be it.”

Hindi Nationalism

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Cross posted on Tarikh Par Tarikh

Relating an incident related to the formation of the Eight Schedule of the Constitution (which contains a list of India’s official languages), Alok Rai says:

“Nehru had asked him [M. Satyanarayan] to draw up a list of languages, and he came up with a list of the twelve major regional languages of India. Nehru added a thirteenth, Urdu, before putting the list to the Committee. When “a Hindi friend” asked whose language this Urdu was, Nehru replied angrily:

Yeh merī aur mere bāp-dādā’oñ kī bhāshā hai (This is my language, the language of my ancestors!)

Thereupon the “Hindi friend” retorted:

Brāhman hote hue Urdu ko apnī bhāshā kehte ho, sharam nahīñ ātī? (Aren’t you ashamed, being a Brahmin, to claim Urdu as you language?)

Nehru did not reply. The Eighth Schedule was finally approved by the Constituent Assembly with the addition of one more language, Sanskrit.”

Of course, what the “Hindi friend” didn't know is that Kashmiri Brahmins (such as Nehru) as well as other upper-class urban Hindu communities such as Kayasts and Khatris had traditionally learnt and used Urdu before the creation of Shudh Hindi and its installation as the official language of India in 1947.

In fact, it is this act of creation that Alok Rai (who, coincidentally, is Hindi-Urdu author Premchand's grandson) outlines beautifully in his book Hindi Nationalism, from where this extract is taken. To quote again from the book itself, Hindi Nationalism is “a narrative of the violence done to the people vernacular Hindi by and in the name of “Hindi” [Shuddh Hindi], the Sanskritic usurper.” It is an account of how, Indian and Hindu nationalism intertwined in the late 19^th century to produce the hyper-Sankritised register of “Shudh Hindi” which is now the official language of India and forms the core of our education system. The book charts how this “Shudh Hindi” battled the already entrenched register of literary Urdu (in which the ancestors of Nehru had made their living), other forms of Hindi-Urdu such as Braj Bhasha as well as everyday spoken Hindi-Urdu (Bollywood language, if you will) to emerge as the primary language of the government of India.

If you've ever wondered why, say, the language of train announcements is so arcane or struggled with the bombastic vocabulary of Dinkar as a school student, this is a highly recommended read.

Bonus read:

A Debate Between Alok Rai and Shahid Amin Regarding Hindi: an engaging debate between historian Shahid Amin and the author Alok Rai around the book, amongst other things.

A Short History of the Blasphemy Law Used Against Wendy Doniger And Why it Must Go

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The main stick used by Dinanth Batra to silence Wendy Doniger was a law called Section 295 (A) of the IPC.

I have a piece up on Scroll.in which goes back to 1920s Lahore and explores the history of how this blasphemy law came about [link].

P.S: Have you checked out Tarikh Par Tarikh?

Dedh Ishqiya and Urdu in India Today

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First published in NewsYaps

In a riotously funny scene from recently released comic thriller Dedh Ishqiya, Jaan Mohammad (played by Vijay Raaz) aggressively threatens a very drunk Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) to leave town so that he can win the hand of the beautiful Begum Para (Madhuri Dixit). In a twist typical of the film, fist fights and gun brandishing suddenly give way to poetry, as Khalujaan picks up the word “wādā” (promise) used by Jaan and starts taunting him using a sher. A gangster by profession and somewhat removed from the world of poetry, Jaan retorts as best he can by racking his brains and coming up with the only sher he knows on “wādā. This change of playing field from violence to poetry, though, can only end badly for Jaan. His verse induces derisive laughter from Khalujaan who then points out that Jaan’s original sher spoke of “bādā” (wine) and not “wādā” at all. Jaan just confused the two rhyming words.

It is credit to the competence of director Abhishek Chaubey that the Bombay theatre I was in found the wordplay funny and laughed along with Khalu, in spite of the fact that very few would have been able to point out Jaan’s mistake themselves. Anupama Chopra, movie critic for the Hindustan Times, though, might have empathised more with Jaan and his struggles with High Urdu. While generally praising the film, she did end her review with one small regret: “I also struggled with the Urdu,” she said. “It was melodious but I wish I understood more of it.”

This frank admission, and the fact that Dedh Ishqiya is the only Bollywood film I’ve ever seen with English subtitles, contains within it some stark irony for an industry which, it could be said, was born into Urdu. As Mukul Kesavan has pointed out, Bollywood with its fantasy, musicals and location (Bombay) was an almost direct successor to Parsi theatre. And like the theatre, the new film industry adopted Urdu, given that it was the only language at the time which had any sort of pan-national appeal. To churn out words for this new industry, were recruited large numbers of Urdu writers and poets from North India. Bollywood’s Golden Age from the 40s to the 60s was studded with Urdudāns such as Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Saadat Hasan Manto, Sahir Ludhianvi, Shakeel Badayuni and, most relevant to this movie, Ismat Chughtai. Lihāf (Quilt), Chughtai’s story of lesbian love between a begum and her maid, forms one of the principal subplots within Dedh Ishqiya. The movie itself has a subtle hat tip to this sourcein the scene where Khalujaan and Babban have been tied up by Para and Muniya (Huma Qureshi). As the shadows of the two woman making love flit across the screen—in itself a symbol from Lihāf—Khalujaan remarks impishly to Babban, “thand lag rahī hai? Lihāf māng le!” (Feeling cold? Ask for a quilt).

To grant Chopra her limited point, the language of Dedh Ishqiya is particularly “high” for the average film of today. But go back just 50 years, and you would find a very similar linguistic standard prevalent in the industry, especially in the music. Wonder how a film reviewer reconciles her job as a critic when a film of just 50 years back would be inaccessible to her. But then in an industry where Katrina Kaif, a person who plays all her roles with a thick British accent, is the dominant star maybe Chopra is doing all right. And of course, there is the point that Chopra would hardly be alone. Whatever be the origins of Bollywood, the fact is that a very large majority of Indians would be unable to understand the sort of High Urdu that the movie uses—it’s not for nothing that the film carried English subtitles.

In a mark of the intelligence of the film though, one of the themes of Dedh Ishqiya is this very hollowness of Urdu in India today. Urdu started life as a standardised register of the local language of Delhi. As SR Faruqi points out in his book Early Urdu Literary Culture and History, “Urdu” itself is a metonym for the city of Delhi. The name “Urdu”, though, is very recent and the language has variously been called Hindvi/Gujri/Rekhta/Dakhani and even Hindi; as late as the early 20th century, the words “Hindi” and “Urdu” were being used interchangeably.

The development of Urdu as an elite language though was a rather late development in the history of North India. Throughout the medieval period, Persian had been the region’s lingua franca and official language. In fact it was so ingrained in India that when the British proposed to do away with Persian in 1839, 500 citizens from Dhaka, split almost equally amongst Hindu and Muslim, vigorously petitioned the government to desist from such a foolish move. In spite of this, the British did replace Persian and, in North India, introduced Urdu in its place as an official language. Unfortunately, the legacy of Farsi was less easy to shake off. The Urdu that took root in the offices of the Raj was corpulently Persianised. This was maybe a deliberate tactic by the clerks—mostly upper class Muslims, Kayasths, Kashmiri Brahmins and Khatris—who controlled the language and profited from the fact that the general populace was totally dependent on them for something as simple as comprehension. In many ways, this attitude was not dissimilar to that of the current Anglophone class which break out into paroxysms every time anyone so much as talks of replacing English with the local languages of each state.

As a reaction, the rural classes—who were mostly Hindu—championed the cause of Nagari using organisation such as the Nagari Pracharini Sabha (of Banaras) and the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan (of Allahabad), both founded at the turn of the century. In this way, the origins of modern Hindi were utilitarian and commonsensical—it aimed to simplify Urdu. Unfortunately, this straightforward matter of language, as we all know, got violently communalised and to top it all, the end result was a register which was de-Persianised, as promised, but also corpulently Sanskritised, leading us all back to square one as far as ease of comprehension goes. Alok Rai calls this new register “school Hindi” and wryly remarks that this leads to children across the length and breadth of North India to valiantly struggle to learn a language which is supposed to be their mother tongue. It is no wonder that all popular culture in India, such as Bollywood, steers clear of either extreme and sticks to the spoken speech of Hindustan.

In 1947 though, the sharp politicisation of the Hindi-Urdu issue meant that this “School Hindi” was adopted as India’s official language. Suddenly, in places like Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, the birthplace of Urdu, Urdu stopped being taught and used in government. This lack of patronage had little effect on the everyday Urdu (or Hindustani) of spoken speech, a large portion of the language which was shared in common with Shudh Hindi. It did however have the effect of severelycurtailing the sphere of influence of High Urdu. A high or literary register without patronage is, by definition, not going to get very far and that is what happened. Post-1947, Urdu atrophied dramatically.

Normally, if this was any other country, High Urdu would have a dignified death much as Ottoman Turkish did when Ataturk changed the official language of Turkey to Modern Turkish. Indeed, since Urdu offers almost no economic benefits, the only people who study it today as a primary language are people who get this education free at madrasas and are too poor to pay for anything else. In India, though, the communal history of Hindi-Urdu, made Urdu one of various meaningless markers of Muslim identity that can be taken out and flogged whenever necessary. As an example, when AAP want to reach out to Muslims in Delhi, it releases an Urdu pamphlet. This is unneeded because firstly, a large number of Delhi Muslims would be unable to read the Urdu script in the first place and secondly, even those that do, will almost certainly read the Devanagri script better or, at least, just as well. If all AAP wanted to do was to communicate with Muslims, a Hindi pamphlet would have done a much better job. And of course, this was just a minor example. Governments have, for decades, used the “Muslim” symbolism of Urdu—a sort of internal Orientalism if you will—to great effect employing it as a diversionary tactic to get away with non-performance on rather more pressing issues such as health or sanitation.

Given that a majority of its characters are Muslims, Dedh Ishqiya might be classified as a modern “Muslim social”. True to its genre, the film does explore the stereotypical elements of elite Indo-Islamic culture. Dedh Ishqiya has havelīs, nawābs and begums, flowing sherwanīs and, of course, stars High Urdu. Unlike a traditional Muslim Social such as Umrao Jaan or Pakeezah (which would have High Urdu through and through), the movie functions on multiple planes of language. At the almost surrealistic mushairā-cum-swayamwar that Begum Para holds to choose a suitor for herself, the most mellifluous Urdu is spoken and, indeed, Chaubey and Bhardwaj take advantage of the register to produce some crackling repartee and wit. Things though start unravelling in the character of Jaan Mohammed, a local gangster looking to gentrify himself by marrying a begum. Respectability though needs to be earned and before he gets to become a nawāb he’ll have to get the language right.

Jaan’s battles with Urdu lead to some curious results. Throughout the movie he uses some high vocabulary (“shamshīr” for “talwār” and “gauhar” for ”hīre-motī”/) but slips up on the simplest of Urdu words, mispronouncing “Ishq” as “Issak” or “shart” as “sart”. And not only Jaan, for all the other characters, this High Urdu is just a mask put on to impress. Khalujaan, who is otherwise a talented poet, talks to his closest friend Babban in their common earthy register of Bhopali Urdu. The one time he does put on airs as a fake nawāb, Babban tells him rather plainly that “tumhārī sārī nawābīyat hai nā, picchwāde main ghusaid doongā” (I’ll stuff your airs up your ass). And when right towards the end of the movie, Jaan Mohammad despotically orders Para and Khalujaan to dance for him, one of his flunkies pipes up to complain, “Yeh itne dinon se ghazlein-wazlein sun ke nā badhazmī sī hoga’ī hai, sāli. Inse item number karwāte hain.” (I’m tired of all this high-falutin’ poetry. Let’s get them to do some item numbers).

This sort of linguistic meta-commentary is rare in Bollywood (Chupke Chupke is one exception which comes to mind), which is odd given how integral language is to the art of cinema. But Dedh Ishqiya does take a shot at it and skilfully uses the nuances of language to explore different shades of the story as well as make a larger point about the state of Urdu in India today. And that is just one the many reasons which make the movie a treat to watch.

A related post on the language Bollywood uses can be found here.
If this is the sort of thing that interests you, all posts filed under language can be found here.

Which Calendar are You?

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First published on NewsYaps

This New Year and the celebration around it reminds me of some rather contrarian graffiti outside my engineering college in Ranchi from many moons ago. It read, in bold, angry crimson Devanagri letters, “Angrezi saal hataao” (or something to that effect, at any rate).

That was all there was: a three-word angry rant. There was no real solution. The protester did not bother telling us what he wanted in place of this Gregorian calendar he so disliked. Did he want to go back to Bengali Calendar that was in place in Jharkhand before the “Angrezi Saal” became popular? The calendar was introduced by Akbar as a tax collection tool and did a wonderful job of helping him siphon of revenue from the rich lands of Greater Bengal to the imperial capital of Agra. To Akbar’s credit the calendar still does a wonderful job of telling Calcuttans exactly when Durga Pujo is to be held, so maybe it wasn’t all that bad. But maybe the megalomania inherent in the calendar—its year 1 is dated from Akbar’s coronation—might have put off our local graffiti artist. He seems a bit of nonconformist, really.

So then do we go back even further into Mughal history to the Hijri or Islamic calendar? It is probably the only purely lunar calendar still in use which gives the whole exercise a wonderful air of surprise since months no longer confirm to seasons. Some years, Ramzan might fall in the winter, making the dawn-to-dusk fast easier and shorter. Some years, during the summer, making thirst a major problem and the wait for sunset never ending. Unfortunately, what is ‘surprise’ to the optimist is ‘inaccuracy’ to the glass-half-empty sort. Due to its nonconformity to the solar calendar and consequently, stuff like harvests and seasons, most places on the globe, even Islamic countries, have traditionally not used it as a civil calendar.

But our search for calendars in a land as diverse as India would be a short one. India has no less than 30 traditional calendars (the most popular one being the Vikram Samvat which is still used widely as a Hindu liturgical calendar in North India). Once upon a time they were used for purposes both religious and secular but in today’s godless times, most of them have been relegated to setting festival dates. This multiplicity of calendars was sought to be remedied after Independence by Nehru using a by now predictable “scientific approach”. But fighting the forces of time and history is not easy and for that the Government of India had to unsheathe its most powerful weapon: the committee. The Calendar Reform Committee appointed by the Government of India in 1952 and was headed by a person no less than Meghnad Saha. All of this resulted in something called the Indian National Calendar which you’ve probably never heard of. Not to worry—neither has anyone else.Science is all very fine but India, after trying out Hindu and Islamic calendars, wanted a Christian calendar not some anodyne “science” calendar. Try as Nehru might, India was going to go for the Gregorian calendar.

The popular perception of the Gregorian calendar as a “Christian” calendar, though, is a bit of a misnomer—the origins of the calendar are more imperial than religious since it is itself a modification of the Julian calendar introduced by Julius Ceasar. Inaccuracies in the Julian calendar though meant that Christian festivals like Easter were veering dangerously off course, a fact that much alarmed the Catholic Church. The Julian calendar was reformed in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII leading to, you guessed it, the Gregorian calendar. While an obvious improvement over the earlier Julian calendar,Protestants were suspicious of this new innovation as a plot to convert them to Catholicism(a variant of this conversion technique has been adopted by companies such as Pirelli and Kingfisher whose calendars have some very staunch devotees). Due to this apprehension it took almost two centuries for the Protestant British to adopt it by which time things had really gotten out of hand with the inaccurate Julian calendar. As a correction it was decided to knock out 11 whole days from the Julian calendar as Britain update itself to the Gregorian one. As a result, in the year 1752, the 2nd September was not followed by the 3rd of the month but by the 14thof September—one of my personal favourites, when it comes to odd facts.

In spite of this minor hiccup, the Gregorian calendar was remarkably accurate, producing an error of only a day in about 3,000 years, with respect to the solar year. Pretty good for the average Joe. And of course, once this had been adopted by the British Empire,it was just a matter of time, some brutal colonisation and Empire before almost the entire world (Ranchi included) had adopted it.

All that didn’t impress our graffiti artist though, for whom this calendar business was strong enough motivation to whip out his can of paint and begin painting. But for the rest of you who don’t mind Pope Gregory’s invention, have a great 2014.

Babur Ki Aulad: Medievalism and Section 377

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Today, the honourable Supreme Court of the Republic of India criminalised (or rather, re-criminalised) homosexuality. You can read an NDTV report on the matter here.

The court hid behind the argument that only Parliament can make and amend laws, not the judiciary. Technically correct but hugely hypocritical given the spate of judicial activism that's been the norm for some time now.

The reaction from the chattering classes was immediate and it was sharp. Social media dropped like a ton of bricks on the judgement and rightly so. In this charge, one of the more common adjectives used to criticise this judgement was "medieval". Here are a few screen-grabs from Twitter:

Living in medieval times are we? #377
— Ankita Chaudhuri (@Ankitawrites) December 11, 2013

Sad sad verdict Sec 377. Back to

 medieval era? Total violation of an individual's right to EXIST! C'mon!!
— Nalini Rathnam (@nalinirathnam) December 11, 2013

The Supreme Court judgement on Article 377 is a step backwards towards barbarism and medievalism.
— Ramachandra Guha (@Ram_Guha) December 11, 2013

While a lot of humanity has certainly gotten better since medieval times, the use of the adjective "medieval" is simply inaccurate here in this context. India has never criminalised or stigmatised homosexuality, and certainly did not in the medieval age.

This here is a passage from Babur's autobiography, the Babarnama:

In those leisurely days I discovered in myself a strange inclination, nay ! as the verse says, 'I maddened and afflicted myself for a boy in the camp-bazar, his very name, Baburi, fitting in. Up till then I had had no inclination for any-one, indeed of love and desire, either by hear-say or experience, I had not heard, I had not talked. At that time I composed Persian couplets, one or two at a time ; this is one of the them : 

May none be as I, humbled and wretched and love-sick;

No beloved as thou art to me, cruel and careless.

From time to time Baburi used to come to my presence but out of modesty and bashfulness, I could never look straight at him ; how then could I make conversation (ikhtildt) and recital (hikayat) ? In my joy and agitation I could not thank him (for coming); how was it possible for me to reproach him with going away? What power had I to command the duty of service to myself? One day, during that time of desire and' passion when I was going with companions along a lane and suddenly met him face to face, I got into such a state of confusion that I almost went right off. To look straight at him or to put words together was impossible. With a hundred torments and shames, I went on. A (Persian) couplet of Muhammad Salih's came into my mind:

I am abashed with shame when I see my friend ;

My companions look at me, I look the other way.

That couplet suited the case wonderfully well. In that frothing of desire and passion, and under that stress of youthful folly, used to wander, bare-head, bare-foot, through street and lane, hard and vineyard. I shewed civility neither to friend nor anger, took no care for myself or 'others.

Out of myself desire rushed me, unknowing

That this is so with the lover of a fairy-face.

Sometimes like the madmen, I used to wander alone over hill and plain; sometimes I betook myself to gardens and the suburbs, lane by lane. My wandering was not of my choice, I decided whether to go or stay.

Nor power to go was mine, nor power to stay ;

I was just what you made me, o thief of my heart.

As is quite clear, not only does Babur have romantic feelings for a person of the same sex, in the society of the time they are completely "normal". Babur has written of them openly in his autobiography. Not only that, 50 years later, his grandson, Akbar would have this translated from the original Turki to Persian by his courtier Rahim (him of the dohas) and even then no one found anything in the Baburnama that was illegal or would cause embarrassment.

This Indian attitude that we have towards homosexuality is a uniquely modern affliction. No use randomly slandering the blameless medieval age for it.

Note: The Baburnama translation used is by Annette Beveridge; first published: 1922

Modi and the Sardar: Same Same but Different

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First published on NewsYaps

Last week saw the resurrection of a rather old controversy: who owns the legacy of Vallabhbhai Patel? Invited by the Prime Minster to inaugurate a museum on Patel, Modi, with characteristic rudeness, used the platform to attack Nehru, bemoaning the fact that Patel wasn’t chosen as the first Prime Minster of a Free India. Singh, though, came back with a spirited reply, pointing out the fact that Patel, just like himself, was a Congressman and believed in secularism.

This is the latest outbreak of a long simmering controversy, the biggest expression of which (literally) is the Statueof Unity that Modi plans to build. A statue of Patel, the monument will be the tallest statue in the world and will cost a whopping Rs 2,500 crore. To put this in perspective, this is almost equal to the Rs 2,700 crore the entire state of Gujarat spent on education last year. Of course, in spite of this monumental wastage, unlike Mayawati’s rather more modest statues (2,987^th tallest in the world) there has been no brouhaha over it amongst the urban middle class. Welcome to post-caste India, ladies and gentleman, where some statues are more #1 than others.

Of course, much of this is a manufactured controversy. While Singh was factually correct when he pointed out that Patel was a Congressman, his implication that his legacy only belonged to the current-day Congress was not.

The fact of the matter is the both the Congress and BJP are miles away from the pre-independence Congress built by Gandhi and Singh’s party has no monopoly over claiming this legacy. Firstly, the Congress has ignored almost every politician who isn’t a Nehru-Gandhi. Ironically, even Nehru stands forgotten by the current party, with Rajiv towering over his naana if we measure stature by counting things that each have named after them. Patel’s forgotten legacy was ripe for the picking.

Secondly, given Patel’s largely Right-wing bent, it is hardly unnatural that the BJP/RSS would look to his legacy as a source of inspiration. Given how the hard Right (the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha) were mostly absent during the freedom struggle, Patel is a best fit.

In this whole rush by some sections of the Congress and the media to delegitimise the current Right’s claim on Patel, what is often forgotten is that the pre-independence Congress party was largely a Right-of centre part. It was pro-capitalist (being controlled by the middle and upper classes) and religion was a huge and, indeed, integral part of its functioning. It was also, almost exclusively, a Hindu party (in membership, not necessarily in ideology), its programmes being almost completely devoid of Muslim participation, a natural consequence of which was that in 1946, it failed to win even a single Muslim seat across the sub-continent (in the central assembly, which later on went to become the Constituent Assembly).

Of course, the Congress did have a Left-wing but it was feeble and largely ineffective. Socialist like JP and Kripalani were so powerless within the party that they eventually left the Congress to form socialist parties of their own.

Post-1947, though, Nehru, using his enormous utility as a vote-catcher, tried to effect a significant turnaround. Economically, contrary to the generally held view, Nehru was fairly open to foreign capital; indeed, he was desperate for it. Relations with Britain remained strong—the USSR alliance is more a creation of Indira than her father. It was with respect to religion in politics though, that Nehru was able to launch a determined and, in retrospect, remarkable rear guard action. In speech after speech, Nehru insisted that India was not going to become a "Hindu Pakistan" and that religion had no space in the business of governance in India.

In this, Patel, the tallest leader of the Right-wing (which was, remember, still the strongest bloc within the party) was less than impressed. Till his death Patel clashed constantly with Nehru and often had his way, installing Rajendra Prasad as the first President (whose abiding contribution to our history will remain his opposition and delaying of the Hindu code bills which modernised Hindu personal law) and PD Tandon as the Congress President, defeating Nehru’s candidate Kripalani. Patel was also the person responsible for initiating the Somnath Temple project and if it wasn’t for his death and Nehru’s opposition, Independent India might have started its innings as a modern nation by spending its time and resources building places of worship. But, of course, what endears Patel most to the BJP might be his hard-line stance on Muslims, post-Partition. The Sardar made it very clear that he did not trust Muslims after their role in supporting the League. In a letter to Nehru, Patel bluntly wrote:

“Muslim citizens in India have a responsibility to remove the doubts and misgivings entertained by a large section of the population about their loyalty [to India]”

In another remarkably Orwellian incident (that occurred, ironically, the same year that 1984 was published), Patel’s Home Ministry wrote a letter to the secretaries of all other departments instructing them to produce a list of all Muslim employees whose “loyalty to the Dominion of India is suspected”. Once identified for committing this Thoughtcrime, the members of this list would be excluded from “holding key positions or handling confidential or secret work.”

Given these facets of Patel, it's very understandable that the RSS/BJP would look to cast him as their political predecessor.

That said, for all his warts, Patel was still very removed in degree, if not in orientation, from the current ideology of the RSS/BJP.  This gulf becomes the sharpest when one recalls that Patel actually did what no Indian government could do after him: he banned the RSS. He called the RSS a “clear threat to the existence of the Government and the State” and blamed them for vitiating the atmosphere which led to his mentor’s murder. “The followers of the Sangh have celebrated Gandhiji's assassination by distributing sweets, " Patel complained bitterly in a letter to SP Mukherjee.

Even more remarkable was Patel’s position on the Babri Masjid controversy that had just broken out in 1948. In a letter to PD Tandon (and a key mover in getting the then functional masjid converted into a temple), Patel warned Tandon that “there can be no question of resolving such disputes by force. In that case, the force of law and order will have to maintain peace at all costs.” He also made it clear that the solution would have to be a joint one and “such matters can only be resolved peacefully if we take the willing consent of the Muslim community with us." A rather far cry from the BJP chant of “Babar ki Aulad, Wapas Jao” and “Ek Dhakka aur Do” as it illegally tore the mosque down.

And, of course, in what would be called “minority appeasement” today, Patel in a speech in the Constituent Assembly said, “it is for us who happen to be in a majority to think about what the minorities feel and imagine how we would feel if we were treated in the manner in which they are treated." How very sickular.

Right and Left are relative terms, and their meaning depends much on time and context. In Pakistan, the PPP, a party which banned Ahmedis from calling themselves Muslim (I would use the term ‘Orwellian’ but what’s the use), is considered Leftist.  In the Indian context, it's instructive to see how much the definition of the Right has changed. Patel—a man who banned the RSS, called for consensus on the Babri Masjid issue and spoke about the plight of minorities in post-Partition India—was once the leader of the Right wing in India. Today, the leader of the Right-wing in India is an RSS swayamsevak, belonging to a party which literally demolished the Babri Masjid and thinks that minorities, far from being oppressed, are “baby-making factories” which are being mollycoddled by the state.

Possibly, the real lesson from this attempt by Modi to draw a descent from Patel is to contrast the two and see how drastically and fanatically to the Right, India has shifted in the 60-odd years since Independence.

Bhagat Singh's Last Petition

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(First published on NewsYaps on Bhagat's Singh's birth anniversary)

Today is Comrade Bhagat Singh’s birth anniversary, an apt day to point you to his last petition written to the governor of Punjab before he was executed.

Bhagat Singh’s trial had created a furore. So much so that the British Government had to promulgate an ordinance which dispensed with the need for a defence counsel, defence witnesses and even the presence of the accused during the trial. To quote that brave crusader, Shri Rahul Gandhi, on another ordinance, this rendered the trial to be “complete nonsense” and little more than a farce. It was recently described by the Supreme Court as “contrary to the fundamental doctrine of criminal jurisprudence" because there was no opportunity for the accused to even defend themselves.

In spite of this obvious injustice (the technical term for it is, I believe, a British sense of fair play), Singh refused to ask for any sort of clemency or concession. In fact, the tone of his final letter—this is after he had been sentenced to death—is a cocky mixture of defiance and sarcasm. He mocks the British Government by actually requesting to be shot dead as behoves a man who has been held guilty of waging war against the government. The last line in his petition reads:

“We request and hope that you will very kindly order the military department to send its detachment to perform our execution.

Notice the “kindly order”. I mean, wow. This man is on death row and he’s not above requesting for a kind order to shoot him dead.

The only time bitterness creeps in is when he’s discussing the activities of the Congress. Gandhi, who was in discussions with the British at the time (which would eventually lead to what would be called the Gandhi-Irwin Pact),  comes in for criticism for doing nothing to help “even the homeless, friendless and penniless of female workers who are alleged to be belonging to the vanguard and whom the leaders consider to be enemies of their utopian non-violent cult (ouch!)  which has already become a thing of the past” .

And, of course, let me highlight parts of the letter in which Bhagat Singh strives to point out the fact that his vision for India is that of a ”Socialist Republic” since it’s amazing and bewildering how comrade Bhagat Singh of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association has become a right-wing hero, of all things:

“Let us declare that the state of war does exist and shall exist so long as the Indian toiling masses and the natural resources are being exploited by a handful of parasites. They may be purely British Capitalist or mixed British and Indian or even purely Indian. They may be carrying on their insidious exploitation through mixed or even on purely Indian bureaucratic apparatus. All these things make no difference...But that war shall be incessantly waged without taking into consideration the petty (illegible) and the meaningless ethical ideologies. It shall be waged ever with new vigour, greater audacity and unflinching determination till the Socialist Republic is established and the present social order is completely replaced by a new social order, based on social prosperity and thus every sort of exploitation is put an end to and the humanity is ushered into the era of genuine and permanent peace. ”

In case this is not strong enough, please also note that Bhagat Singh sent this telegram to the Third International while in prison:

“On Lenin Day we send hearty greetings to all who are doing something for carrying forward the ideas of the great Lenin. We wish success to the great experiment Russia is carrying out. We join our voice to that of the international working class movement. The proletariat will win. Capitalism will be defeated. Death to Imperialism. ”

Of course, the fact that there is an organisation called the Bhagat Singh KrantiSena which takes up solidly Leninist causes such as protesting against the shortening of the duration of the Amarnath yatra would have surely warmed the cockles of Singh’s heart were he alive. As will the fact that Narendra “Hindu Nationalist” Modi invokes his memory without having the faintest idea of what he died for.

This corruption of Bhagat Singh’s ideals does not stop at Socialism but extends even into his personal faith (or the lack of it). Singh was an avowed atheist and his pamphlet Why I am an Atheist, written a few months before he was murdered, is a crisp read which ends with a guarantee that he will remain a non-believer till the day he dies.

“One of my friends asked me to pray. When informed of my atheism, he said, “When your last days come, you will begin to believe.” I said, “No, dear sir, Never shall it happen. I consider it to be an act of degradation and demoralisation. For such petty selfish motives, I shall never pray.”

By all accounts, he lived up to his promise. And ever since he seriously entered politics he had given up even the external vestiges of his original Sikh faith. He didn’t wear a turban or sport facial hair. Yet, so many stylised drawings of Singh today have him both wearing a dastaar as well with a beard. It’s like modern India is uncomfortable with the idea of an irreligious man, so it’s trying so hard to make Singh into something he was not; a rather unfortunate state of affairs. You might not agree with Bhagat Singh’s irreligiosity, his Socialism or any of his the other ideals that he died for, but given the extreme bravery and sacrifice that he displayed, the least you can do is to not distort his life.

When Jinnah defended Bhagat Singh

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While reading up on Bhagat Singh on his 106th birth anniversary, I came across an interesting article by AG Noorani on Jinnah's defence of Bhagat Singh and his opposition to the amendment to the Criminal Procedure Code empowering the court to proceed with the case even in the absence of the accused if he “has voluntarily rendered himself incapable of remaining before the court”. Jinnah was speaking in his capacity as a member of the Central Legislative Assembly, the closest thing British India had to a parliament.

In spite of obvious differences in their political ideology (Jinnah was a classic liberal who believed in constitutional methods; Singh was a communist who favoured armed struggle) Jinnah's speech was forceful and rousing. Drawing out the difference between a common criminal and someone like Singh, Jinnah said:

"Well, you know perfectly well that these men are determined to die. It is not a joke. I ask the honourable law member to realise that it is not everybody who can go on starving himself to death. Try it for a little while and you will see… The man who goes on hungerstrike has a soul. He is moved by that soul and he believes in the justice of his cause; he is not an ordinary criminal who is guilty of cold-blooded, sordid, wicked crime."

This speech was one of many which made sure that the Assembly rejected the government's proposed amendment. It was a illusory victory though. The government bypassed the Assembly altogether and introduced the amendment as an ordinance. Noorani writes:

"Having lost in the Assembly, the governor-general promulgated an ordinance, which was not subject to approval by the Assembly and expired after six months. It set up a tribunal to try the case. The entire trial was vitiated by flaws. A member of the tribunal, Justice Syed Agha Haider, was removed from the tribunal because, unlike the two European judges, he questioned the witnesses closely and repeatedly dissociated himself in writing from their orders.

The tribunal which pronounced death sentences on the accused was itself under a sentence of death. The judges lost their office after six months. The accused were largely unrepresented by counsel and there was no right of appeal. The high court bar association set up a committee to consider the validity of the ordinance. Its report on June 19, 1930, found it to be “invalid”."

The trail was described by the Supreme Court as “contrary to the fundamental doctrine of criminal jurisprudence" because there was no opportunity for the accused to even defend themselves.

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Further Reading:

You can read Jinnah's speech in it's entirety here.

Even as Singh remains a minor political figure in his hometown of Lahore, a small but committed band of Pakistanis, fired by Singh's ideals, is bent on reviving his legacy by agitating to rename a chowk widely believed to mark the spot where Singh was executed.

An excellent web archive of all of Singh's work here.

A Journey Down Nehru-Gandhi Memory Lane

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(First published on NewsYaps)

To say that the Gandhi’s are not popular on the Internet would be stating the obvious. Rahul Gandhi is probably the most ridiculed person on Twitter and every few days or so, the pappu tag starts trending as Modi supporters up the ante. His mother doesn’t get off too easily either.  I see material constantly popping up on my Facebook feed which purports to prove that Sonia Gandhi is not an Indian Citizen (or has became one illegally), that she lied about her Cambridge education (a line of attack that is also used on her son), she had KGB links, she has links to Quattrocchi and even posts which, in typical Indian fashion, make fun of the fact that she once held a job as a waitress—a    recent status by stand-up “comic” Rivaldo is: “Rupee crosses 64! Well that's what happens when an Economist takes orders from a Waitress!”

Of course, as the full page ads on Rajiv Gandhi’s birth anniversary show, social media does not elect our rulers. Whether the twitterati like it or not, the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty is a curiously popular political force in the country.

Keeping all of this in mind, on a recent trip to Allahabad, I decided to pop into the Nehru-Gandhi's ancestral residence, Anand Bhawan, just to see where all of this began.

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My adventure, though, started even before I arrived in the city. Air India uses an ancient ATR 42 propeller aircraft to cover the Delhi-Allahabad route. The plane was literally falling apart: a few of the overhead storage boxes didn’t shut and the seat I got didn’t have the pocket in front for storing books or phones or what have you. While I didn’t complain too much, another lady had a proper row over cockroaches on the flight, one of which, rather dramatically, scurried onto her food while she was eating. Shrug.

Allahabad airport is probably the smallest airport there is and just about as big as your average office. It achieves this by doing away with needless luxuries such as, er... conveyer belts. Charmingly, your luggage is brought to you by attendants on carts. An insipid sign in front of the only office proclaims, “Hindi hain hum, watan hain Hindostan Hamara” proudly declaring that the verse is by “Sir Mohammed Iqbal”. Indian transporters, it seems, have a particular fascination for this line—I’ve seen it painted on railway carriages as well.

The journey from the airport to the hotel was just as eventful, conducted as it was in an auto with an extremely odd mix of religion and sappy romance. The vehicle was plastered with golden 786’s, a large painting of the Buraq, the mythological flying horse of Islam as well as the word aashique bookended with a pair of large, pink bulbous hearts.

Allahabad is precisely the sort of place for which Indian English had to coin the word “mofussil”. Dusty, congested roads, crumbling buildings and a refreshing lack of drainage; yep, Allahabad fits the Hindi-heartland-small-town template to the hilt. In all of this dust, heat and general North Indian small town-ness, though, rise the magnificent Indo-Saracenic spires of Allahabad University. I’ve grown up in Calcutta and lived in Bombay, so when I say that this was the most amazing specimen of the architecture I’ve seen, you know it’s a big deal.  An extremely tall gothic tower next to a huge Islamicate dome flecked with the remains of blue glazed tiles, the grandeur of (the now decrepit) Allahabad University harks back to a past somewhat rosier past than the present for this city.

It was 1877 and Allahabad was sort of a boomtown. The British had just set up a new province, the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (which corresponds to modern UP) and, with it, made Allahabad its capital.  To practise in this new capital, and its new high court, arrived Nandlal Nehru, elder brother of Motilal Nehru. Academically brilliant, Motilal also set up a roaring practise as a barrister in due course of time.  In 1900, to show off his new found wealth, Motilal bought a veritable mansion in the European quarter of the city and named it Anand Bhavan. Both his son and his granddaughter grew up in this house. In the next half century or so, this house remained the hub of Indian politics given that both Motilal and his son were major Congress politicians. Fittingly, given her role in cementing the role of dynasty in Indian politics, Indira Gandhi turned Anand Bhawan into a museum to the memory of the Nehru-Gandhi’s.

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Anand Bhawan is an oasis of peace in an otherwise noisy city. Primly manicured lawns house the large blue and white mansion. The structure is surrounded by a verandah which once, no doubt, had khas curtains to cool the Nehrus in the oppressive North Indian summer. Two storeys high, Anand Bhavan is topped off with a large chhatri on the terrace—a perfect spot for lounging about during the evening, I would think.

The main house has had its rooms frozen in time, and apart from the opulence, there really isn’t much to see. Nehru might or might not have been an extraordinary man, but his bedroom is rather ordinary, populated as it is with a bed (!), books and other such mundanities of daily life. The museum also takes great care to mark out parts of the house where “Gandhiji spent his evenings”, the exact spot where Feroze and Indira got married or the platform on which Nehru’s ashes were kept. It’s a testament to the Indian capacity for hero-worship that this sort of material actually makes up a whole museum. Of course, there was more to come.

The outhouse is more of a conventional museum, mostly populated with photos. A particular gem was a display of “Jawaharlal Nehru in different moods” which shows the man, as promised, in different moods: seriously walking out to bat, laughing at a joke, serenely staring into the distance and so on. There’s also a genealogical chart of the Nehru-Gandhi family, which has serious potential to embarrass. Did you, for example know that Rahul has a distant aunt who is called ‘Meenu’? Or an uncle called “Chunmun”? Or that a certain Nehru-Gandhi’s first name is “Lolita”?

The museum, like every other, also has its own souvenir shop where you can buy a range of metal key-chains embossed with the faces of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. Because that’s what you need to be cool: an Indira Gandhi keychain.

The only thing that actually caught my attention in the souvenir shop was a reproduction of the wedding card of Indira’s and Feroze’s wedding. It started off with an invitation in both Hindi as well as Urdu and then, interestingly, went on to describe the Hindu wedding ceremonies in great detail. Nehru, it might be noted, was against the marriage of Indira to Feroze, a Parsi born in Bombay. Personally, his objection had nothing to do with Feroze’s religion but was more to do with the fact that Feroze was, not to put too fine a point on it, a loser. He did not have a university degree, was unemployed and had no source of steady income. That said, however, Nehru was aware of the political objections such an inter-religious match could generate, given his role as India’s leading politician. Indeed, when news leaked out of the impending marriage, the backlash was furious. Many years later, Indira recalled how it seemed that “the whole country was against it” at the time. To counter this, Nehru had to issue a public statement, clarifying his stand in favour of the marriage. And to strengthen his protégé’s hand, so did Gandhi, explicitly supporting the marriage. To further lessen the fallout, the ceremony was kept unambiguously Hindu although, at the time, British Indian law did not recognize a marriage between two people of different faiths (even today, it’s extremely difficult). The wedding card it seemed, acted as an advertisement, broadcasting the Hindu-ness of the wedding. As luck would have it, many years later, this would come in handy as Maneka Gandhi challenged her mother-in-law’s status as a Hindu in court in a dispute over Sanjay Gandhi’s property. Since she had married a Parsi, Maneka argued, Indira was not a Hindu anymore. As proof of her being a Hindu, Indira’s explicitly Vedic wedding was presented as clinching evidence.

Photo montages of Nehru which much like Filmfare would carry of your reigning superstar, key chains with faces of Indira and Rajiv and genealogical charts of the whole Family, Anand Bhavan isn’t in the slightest bit apologetic about praising, what is after all only a family, to the skies. In some ways, that’s not surprising; Indians are hardly subtle when it comes to hero-worship. But it did leave me with a vague sense of unease, even foreboding, as the museum reminds us of the rather solid position dynasty has in politics and just how much power it had—and still has—over  India.