SACW | April 12-14, 2007 Bangladesh: wrong turn / India's twisted stance in Kashmir ; Hindu Right Defies Secular Election Laws ; Minorities Under scanner / South Asian History - A critical review of William Dalrymple
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at mnet.fr
Fri Apr 13 20:05:31 CDT 2007
South Asia Citizens Wire | April 12-14, 2007 | Dispatch No. 2388 - Year 9
[1] Bangladesh: Wrong turn for our rights (Jalal Alamgir)
[2] Kashmir:
(i) New Delhi should heed the voices of
dissent in the valley (Ashok Mitra)
(ii) Mission Kashmir (Balraj Puri)
[3] India: Hindu Party Defies Secular Election Laws (Praful Bidwai)
[4] India: [Minorities tag] Not just a status symbol (Mushirul Hasan)
[5] South Asian History: Inevitable Revolutions
- A review on William Dalrymple / historians of
empire (Gyan Prakash)
[6] Upcoming Events:
(i) Public Discussion: "Left Politics After Nandigram" (New Delhi, 14 April)
(ii) Tribute to Basker Vashee / The 40th
Anniversary of the LSE Sit-In (London, 20 April)
____
[1]
New Age
April 11, 2007
WRONG TURN FOR OUR RIGHTS
The right to due process is afforded to citizens
to ensure protection from abuses of authority,
intentional or unintentional. It is neither a
constitutional footnote, nor a mere convenience.
It is uncompromisingly fundamental to securing
justice, writes Jalal Alamgir
The interim government is cracking down on
corruption, and doing so apparently in a
spectacular fashion. Six Islamist extremists have
also been hanged recently. Although-suspiciously
enough-they were not allowed to speak and reveal
the names of their patrons, the government has
promised to try and uncover the kingpins.
But alongside, there is a simultaneous
subversion of justice that will exact a heavy
toll on the integrity of our legal system and
political institutions.
In the last three months, according to
Odhikar, 79 citizens have been killed
extrajudicially, an average of about 26 per month.
Supporters of hard power-and there are
many-may be tempted to think that this is not a
big number, given the rampant corruption and
violence the country had experienced in the past
five years.
Actually it is higher than the record of most
previous years since democracy was established in
1991.
The 2001-2006 tenure by BNP, which far
surpassed its predecessors in such deaths,
averaged about 12 extrajudicial killings per
month. Only the average in 2005 is higher, about
30 a month. But 2005 was really the Year of the
RAB, the worst year of extrajudicial killings in
Bangladesh since human rights records are
available systematically.
Is this the standard to which we should be holding our caretakers?
The right to life is inviolable by our
constitution, even in a state of emergency. Such
killings also contravene several international
conventions on human rights that Bangladesh has
signed and is bound to uphold. The UN Special
Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions was right
to voice strong concern that these activities
amount to 'using murder as a policing technique.'
And what of the arrested? By Odhikar's
estimate, a staggering 1,26,968 people have been
detained across the country in the last three
months. Most have been detained under the two
'black laws' of the country abused widely by
every government: the Special Powers Act of 1974,
and Section 54 of the Criminal Procedure Code.
Both of these allow arrest and detention without
a warrant.
The way media headlines have run, one would
think that most of these people are already
guilty beyond doubt, just by virtue of getting
arrested. But consider this sobering fact: in the
nearly 11,000 petitions against arbitrary arrests
filed in the High Court between 1974 and 1995,
the Court found less than 9 per cent of
detentions to be valid.
There is really no reason to expect that the
proportion will be wholly reversed this time. For
the innocent, however, recourse to law has been
restricted severely.
The government wants speedy trials. Speedy
trials are always suspect, since they favour
efficiency over the protection of rights.
Moreover, it will be impossible to dispense
justice for so many people quickly. Assembly
lines may be good for producing cars but they are
never defensible as a means of conviction.
With the increased powers given to the
Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC), corruption
charges can be brought against anyone on
virtually any basis. The accused, once arrested,
can be denied bail-a move that militates against
long-standing international legal principles for
such cases. While detained, they will then have
to supply an accurate account of their entire
life's income and expenses within 72 hours, an
impossible task for even the most meticulous.
Any discrepancy between the information
supplied and what the government expects-and the
government unilaterally decides what constitutes
a discrepancy-can result in seizure of their
properties, a provision which, under normal
circumstances, would contravene a host of
fundamental rights enunciated in Articles 26
through 43 of our constitution.
Most damagingly, there is no scope of appeal
in a higher court against such seizure, which
under normal circumstances would directly violate
Article 44 of the constitution that guarantees a
citizen's right to move the High Court to protect
his or her fundamental rights.
Now, one may argue that fundamental rights do
not matter now, for we are in a state of
emergency and we need to root out corruption.
But can corruption be rooted out by corrupting
legal principles and citizens' rights?
This is precisely when fundamental rights
should matter the most; they're the only
institutional protection citizens have when
authority becomes highly centralised. And the
real test of a decent government is in the extent
to which it can hold on to fundamental principles
during times of crisis, when it becomes both
tempting and convenient to jettison them.
Many of those arrested are guilty, no doubt.
But many of them may also be innocent. It is not
possible to guarantee integrity when thousands
are being added to prison rosters every day. It
is also apprehended that some cases have been
motivated politically in order to silence the
people.
The right to due process is afforded to
citizens to ensure protection from abuses of
authority, intentional or unintentional. It is
neither a constitutional footnote, nor a mere
convenience. It is uncompromisingly fundamental
to securing justice.
And it is vital to creating a 'level playing
field,' a goal to which this government has
committed itself over and again.
But instead, the government has stacked the
cards heavily in its own favour by cutting
citizens' rights and subverting due process. It
is easier than ever before for the government to
imprison and punish citizens summarily. By the
same token, the government has put up extremely
high barriers for
citizens to mount a credible defence.
Unless fundamental rights are put back on the
right track, talk of a 'level playing field' will
remain mostly a rhetorical ploy.
Dr Jalal Alamgir is assistant professor of
Political Science at the University of
Massachusetts, Boston.
______
[2] Jammu and Kashmir
(i)
The Telegraph
April 13, 2007
PERCEPTIONS IN KASHMIR
- New Delhi should heed the voices of dissent in the valley
by Ashok Mitra
The crisis looming in Jammu and Kashmir following
the People's Democratic Party's threat to
withdraw from the state's ruling coalition has,
for the present, blown over. But the impasse on
the basic issue involved continues. The PDP and
the National Conference are not exactly
negligible categories. Between them, they
represent the overwhelming section of the Jammu
and Kashmir electorate. At least they constitute
a clear majority of those who, voluntarily or
otherwise, choose to exercise their franchise in
the state. In the view of both these parties, a
strong correlation exists between the presence of
Indian army personnel in the vicinity of
residential areas in the valley and the incidence
of so-called encounter deaths and custodial
killings. They have been drawing attention to the
most heart-wrenching spectacle witnessed in
recent weeks: women of different age groups
regularly assembling in parks and street corners
in Srinagar and other towns, and wailing for
their sons, brothers and husbands who have
disappeared after being picked up, either openly
or clandestinely, by security forces. Bodies of
some of these persons nabbed, say, in Srinagar,
have often been discovered, several months later,
in impromptu graves in a village two hundred
kilometres away, or not discovered at all. Nobody
is around to account for such incidents nor is
there any way to check the veracity of the
official versions regarding how or where the
claimed encounter deaths have taken place. The
protesting women know what they are talking
about, a plaintiveness mingles with their raging
fury.
Even if the grisly stories of instant official
awards for liquidating supposed militants are
taken at less than their face value, the
magnitude of the insensitivity being exhibited in
the matter by the authorities concerned evokes
both alarm and despair. The credibility of the
reports on excesses committed by the army and
security personnel can hardly be denied
wholesale: they are in accord with the tradition
dexterously built in the country since
independence to crush the resistance of those
rising in revolt against State power. What
happened in West Bengal in the Seventies and is
happening, on and off, in the North-east,
especially in Manipur, represents a pattern:
security contingents in Kashmir are treading the
path of that tradition. After all, since the
valley is claimed to be an inalienable part of
India, the modus operandi of officially
sanctioned activities in the name of maintenance
of law and order cannot be any different there.
Besides, as everybody knows, army personnel are
by training somewhat rough: one cannot expect, it
will be said, normal civilities to be observed by
them on every occasion; some young men picked up
in Srinagar, Baramulla or Ganderbal will, it
follows, disappear one day and their families
will be unable to trace them, even if they try
for decades on end; they will fail to trace even
their bodies.
Given this background of events, what the PDP has
proposed - and the National Conference has
endorsed - is eminently reasonable. Insurgency
activities have, to an extent, subsided in recent
months, cross-border infiltration too has gone
down; dialogue intended to understand each
other's point of view has ensued between the
governments of the two countries. In the context
of the seething discontent of Kashmiris over
so-called encounter and custodial deaths and the
lengthening list of young people who have
vanished into thin air, a diminution of army
presence, particularly from densely residential
areas, could contribute to a cooling of emotions.
It might also have the incidental advantage of
reducing the discontent of householders whose
dwellings have been forcibly taken over by the
army. Of equal - if not greater - significance,
the gesture could have helped to reduce the
degree of general animosity in the valley against
those who plot their destiny in New Delhi.
There is the parallel issue of abolition - at
least an abridgement - of the provisions of the
Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, which is in
effect carte blanche for troops to go on a
rampage, and for which they are not held
accountable. Reservations concerning the act are
not exclusively a Kashmir-centred phenomenon;
other state governments, individually as well as
collectively, have in the past asked the Centre
either to annul the act altogether or introduce
substantive modifications in its corpus. An
official committee presided over by a retired
judge of the Supreme Court has made identical
recommendations. The authorities, however, have
till now refused to budge.
All that the PDP has been campaigning for is a
stage-by-stage reduction in troops posted in the
valley. To argue that even a phased withdrawal of
forces will tempt Pakistan to launch a surprise
attack across the line of control is specious; it
could be suggested with equal felicity that a
de-escalation of military bandobast on this side
of the border would actually induce Pakistan into
making a reciprocal gesture.
The Congress party does not like the idea of
losing control over the administration of yet
another state, which the PDP's walk-out from the
coalition will entail. It has therefore sought
the device of a three-tier official committee to
be presided over by the defence minister to
examine some of what are described as the
'problematic aspects of the situation' in Jammu
and Kashmir. Mufti Muhammad Sayeed and his party
have, reluctantly, agreed to wait for decisions
the committee arrives at. Committees are, as
everybody knows, intended to buy time. Besides,
an army spokesman has sought to pre-empt the
matter by arguing against the feasibility of any
troop reduction in the area in the immediate
period. The prospects therefore are hardly
cheerful.
Some outspokenness is called for. Both the
Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party have
their own reasons for procrastinating; once
Kashmir disappears from the day's agenda, the
parties of the establishment would have to
discover another alibi for not attending to the
basic problems afflicting Indian society, such as
food, clothing, health, education and housing,
for the nation's millions. The eclipse of Kashmir
from the roster of problems is also bound to lead
to a clamour for a cutback in defence outlay, and
a consequential decline in earnings from
commissions. Such nightmares cannot but frighten
the ancien regime.
During these goings-on in Srinagar and New Delhi,
there is one dog that did not, quite
intriguingly, bark in the night; it waited till
daybreak. The Indian army is not advancing the
cause of any popular democratic revolution in
Kashmir. What stands then in the way of the
country's Left from openly coming out in support
of the demand formulated by the PDP? A phased
withdrawal - not a wholesale retreat - of army
contingents involves few risks. This is one
instance where it is possible to have recourse to
a genuine empirical experiment. In case the
partial withdrawal does not lead to a reduction
in the level of tension, it should be possible to
reconsider the decision. The statement issued on
behalf of the leading constituents of the Left is
therefore somewhat disappointing. It rightly
condemns the dilatory tactics of the Centre the
setting up of so-called expert committees amounts
to, and yet adds an exasperating rider, "All
measures required for meeting the terrorist
menace [in Kashmir] must be undertaken and there
can be no lowering the guard in this respect".
Is there any realization in any quarters of the
consequence of what might ensue if a disenchanted
PDP at some point pulls out of the state
government? Corresponding to the so-called threat
perception, should not a perception in minds that
matter exist of the extent of alienation of
Kashmiris from New Delhi, and its implications?
Perhaps these same minds assume tomorrow to be a
postponable day. But low-key noises by the
Pakistan prime minister at the South Asian
Association for Regional Cooperation sessions may
be no clincher; the danger, all of a sudden, of
an internal combustion in the valley can scarcely
be ruled out.
o o o
(ii)
Times of India
March 30, 2007
MISSION KASHMIR
by Balraj Puri
The overwhelming focus on the Indo-Pak peace
process has led to the neglect of regional
aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
This is obvious in the regions of Jammu and
Ladakh. Issues of state policy like grants of
various departments and recruitment and promotion
are now fiercely debated on the basis of regional
claims.
In this situation, BJP is trying to emerge as the
most vocal voice of discontent in Jammu. It is,
however, giving a nationalistic slant to the
regional discontent and is opposing the proposals
for enlarging the autonomy of the state "as a
step towards its eventual secession".
As a more desperate measure the party has revived
the demand for a separate Jammu state. But its
inherent weakness lies in the fact that BJP is
not trusted by Muslims, who comprise a majority
in three out of six districts of the region.
In the recently concluded session of the state
assembly, six out of seven members from Rajouri
and Poonch districts made a demand for separate
regional status. Similarly, an associate member
of the Congress from Doda, another Muslim
majority district in Jammu, moved a Bill for a
similar status for it.
In the third region of the state, namely Ladakh,
in the election to the Autonomous Council in
Buddhist majority Leh district, 25 out of 26
seats were won by the Union Territory Front while
the Congress won the remaining Muslim majority
seat.
The demand for a separation of the region from
the state, however, has no support in the Muslim
majority district of Kargil.
Whatever be the merits of the claims of BJP in
Jammu and the Union Territory Front in Ladakh,
their demands, in effect, mean separation of
Hindu majority districts in Jammu and Buddhist
majority district in Ladakh region from the state.
Their moves receive support from the Kashmir
region also, in particular in the lengthy
266-page document titled Achievable Nationhood,
recently released by Peoples' Conference leader
Sajad Gani Lone.
It suggests that every district be given the
option to "opt out of the arrangement where a
majority of the people feel that their rights are
better protected by not being a part of the J&K".
More specifically, it concedes that "voices
emanating from districts Jammu, Kathua and Ladakh
would suggest the utilisation of the opt-out
option".
The net effect of these moves is to divide the
state on religious lines and carve out a Muslim
state. It hardly needs to be emphasised that
Kashmiri Muslims are Kashmiris as well as
Muslims. Likewise, there are non-Kashmiri
speaking Muslims who are as proud of their
Kashmiri identity.
Other non-Kashmiri Muslim communities include
Gujars, Pahari speaking, Sheena speaking, Dogri
speaking and Ladakhi Muslims who in many respects
are closer to their co-ethnic non-Muslims than to
Muslims.
Kashmiri Muslims have to decide whether they
should submerge their unique identity in a Muslim
state an option which they had rejected in 1947.
Regional identities are the greatest secularising
force in the state. The question, therefore, is
how to reconcile the interests and urges of the
three regions to make a harmonious personality of
the state. Only a federal and decentralised
polity can preserve emotional and political unity
in a diverse state like J&K.
Jawaharlal Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah declared on
July 24, 1952 that the constitution of the state
would provide for regional autonomy.
Again the J&K state People's Convention, convened
by Abdullah in 1968, unanimously accepted a draft
on internal constitution of the state which
provided for regional autonomy and further
devolution of power to the district, block, and
panchayat levels.
The Regional Autonomy Committee submitted a
report in 1998 which discussed further details of
the constitutional framework of a five-tier
set-up, providing for political, economic and
cultural safeguards to all regions and ethnic
communities.
In particular, it suggested an eight-point
formula for allocation of funds to regions and
districts. These ideas can provide a basis for a
wider discussion to evolve a consensus for
building a stable and secular identity of the
state.
The writer is a political commentator.
______
[3] COMMUNAL CHALLENGE TO INDIA's DEMOCRACY AND ELECTORAL SYSTEM.
Inter Press Service
April 12, 2007
HINDU PARTY DEFIES SECULAR ELECTION LAWS
by Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI, Apr 12 (IPS) - The pro-Hindu Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), which led India's coalition
government between 1998 and 2004, has mounted an
aggressive challenge to the country's legal and
electoral system.
It has defied India's election law by
distributing inflammatory anti-Muslim material
while soliciting votes in this month's elections
to the legislature of Uttar Pradesh, India's
largest state and the world's sixth most populous
political entity after China, India itself, the
United States, Indonesia and Brazil.
The material includes a compact disc (CD) which
vilifies Muslims and seeks votes for the BJP by
claiming it is the sole guardian of the interests
of the Hindus, and hence of India. But the BJP
feigns innocence and says it is not responsible
for the CD.
India's statutory Election Commission has
objected to the CD. The Commission, which is
autonomous of the executive branch of government,
is empowered to take disciplinary and punitive
action against any political party. Its decision
will have major consequences for the current
assembly elections.
Uttar Pradesh accounts for 15 percent of all
seats in India's Parliament. It lies in the heart
of India's Hindi belt and plays a trend-setting
role in politics. Of the state's 175 million
people 18 million are Muslims.
In recent years, new political alignments have
appeared in Uttar Pradesh, including the meteoric
rise of parties representing the lower orders of
society, including Dalits (former Untouchables)
and middle and lower castes (called Other
Backward Classes -- OBCs).
No government in Uttar Pradesh has completed its
full term for 40 years. The current elections are
also expected to produce a hung Assembly. Which
parties can form the next government will be
decided next month.
Many colourful personalities, including Rahul
Gandhi, son of Congress President Sonia Gandhi,
have entered the campaign with its hectic
schedules and cross-country trips on appallingly
bad roads.
The CD in question was released by the BJP's top
leaders in Uttar Pradesh at a ceremony on Apr. 3,
four days before the first round of polling in
the seven-phase election, staggered over a month.
But the party's officials hurriedly withdrew it
and claimed that they were not aware of its
content and had not approved it; it had been
unauthorisedly cleared and issued by an
"over-enthusiastic" junior functionary who has
since been removed.
However, the commercial firm that was
commissioned to produce the CD says that top BJP
leaders were consulted "at every stage" of its
writing, modification and editing.
Campaigning based on hate-speech and on maligning
a religious group is explicitly banned under
Indian law. Just over 80 percent of India's
population is Hindu. But India also has the
world's second largest Muslim population and its
Constitution is solidly secular.
The CD can cause a serious setback to the BJP if
the law is properly applied. It depicts Indian
Muslims as treacherous "anti-Hindu" citizens who
will again divide India. It uses a series of
dramatised fictional sequences with a script that
says Muslims are duplicitous: they kidnap,
forcibly marry and convert Hindu women; they
deceitfully and illegally kill cows; they run
"anti-national" madrasas; and are not loyal to
India.
The CD's appeal for votes is unambiguously based
on stoking hatred towards Muslims. It says: "(If)
you don't vote for the BJP, disaster will strike
this country. The country will be destroyed. The
BJP is a party that thinks about the country. It
thinks about the Hindu religion. à All other
parties are agents of the Muslims."
"The CD is calculated to provoke a strong
reaction from Muslims -- and possibly a Hindu
backlash", says Achin Vanaik, political scientist
and author of a book on Hindu fundamentalism,
religion-based politics and threats to democracy.
"The BJP probably hopes that this will prevent
the erosion of its caste-Hindu support and win it
some ultra-nationalist votes."
Adds Vanaik: "This is a familiar tactic of the
BJP and its predecessor, Jana Sangh, which are
both creations of the secret society-style
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The BJP has
routinely tried to win votes by stoking hatred on
religious grounds. It's now doing so brazenly and
in a crude, rustic manner."
The CD is not the sole instance of such political
abuse of religion. The BJP has also taken out
lurid full-page advertisements in many newspapers
in western Uttar Pradesh, where polling is due on
Saturday.
These advertisements, emblazoned with the lotus
(the party's election symbol) and chief
ministerial candidate Kalyan Singh's picture,
accuses the BJP's opponents of shielding
anti-national terrorist forces, defending
Islamicist-extremist education in madrasas,
opposing the symbols and deities of "Hindu
India", and appeasing Muslims.
The advertisement shows a neighbourhood with
Islamic flags hoisted from every housetop, with a
slogan that reads: "kya inka irada pak hai?" (Is
their intention pure?) This plays on the
Hindi/Urdu word pak (pure), which is also
shorthand for Pakistan.
Hindu nationalists have always maligned India's
Muslims, now numbering some 160 million, as more
loyal to Pakistan. For them, Pakistan is India's
main external enemy, just as Muslims are its main
internal enemy.
Amidst large-scale violence and a major exchange
of populations, Pakistan was created out of India
on the basis of religion when the sub-continent
was decolonised in 1947.
At the time of writing, the Election Commission
has not taken action against this offensive
advertisement, but may do so.
It is currently hearing the BJP's argument on why
it should not be de-recognised as a political
party for violating the election law and the
Indian Penal Code, which forbid appeals to
religion to gain votes, and prohibits/punishes
the use of inflammatory communal material.
Several sections of the Code prescribe severe
punishment for trying to create enmity/hatred
among religious communities and using
inflammatory campaign material -- on pain of
disqualification of the concerned candidate.
India's Election Commission also prescribes a
'model code of conduct', which disallows such
practices.
The code's violation can lead to disqualification
or attract other punitive action. De-recognition
of a party by the Commission means it cannot
contest elections. At the very least, it cannot
use the symbol allotted to it by the Commission.
"There can't be the least doubt that the BJP is
guilty on all these counts in the present case,"
argues Tanika Sarkar, a modern Indian historian,
and author of several papers on
Hindu-nationalism, propaganda and violence. "The
CD is typical of its propaganda methods, of
spreading fear and hatred, and fomenting
violence."
The BJP produced a similar CD this past December,
during a meeting of its national office-bearers
in Lucknow. This too vilifies Muslims. This was
handed out to journalists in a media kit. The
party says it owns it up fully, but duplicitously
disassociates itself from the new CD.
"Double standards come naturally to the BJP",
adds Sarkar. "That apart, the CD uses idioms and
images that are the trade-mark of the
Hindu-nationalist movement. This movement has
shrewdly, and effectively, used audio-visual
material for more than 20 years to spread its
message. It uses such means to a far greater
extent than any other party."
Confronted with the Election Commission's notice
at a critical juncture in the electoral process,
the BJP has resorted to two tactics. It has
self-righteously pleaded innocence and claimed it
is being victimised. Secondly, it has tried to
turn the tables on the Commission by personally
targeting one of its three members, Naveen Chawla.
It accuses Chawla, a highly-placed retired civil
servant, of prejudice against it and of
sympathies for the Congress party. And it demands
that Chawla recuse himself from the hearing. The
Commission has not yet decided the recusal issue.
"These are low-level intimidatory tactics", says
Vanaik. "One can only hope that the Election
Commission does not cave in to the BJP's bullying
and sticks to the law by de-recognising it. The
BJP got away with murder in the past because
India's establishment failed to apply the law of
the land and pandered to Hindu majoritarianism."
Adds Vanaik: "This happened after the BJP and its
cohorts razed the 16th century Babri mosque at
Ayodhya in 1992, unleashing further violence. It
again happened during a pogrom of Muslims in
Gujarat five years ago. The BJP has never been
disciplined or punished for any of these
illegalities and its assaults on democracy. It
must not escape punishment now."
Millions of Indians await the Election
Commission's verdict as the second phase of
polling in the seven-phase election approaches.
At stake is India's character as a plural,
multi-religious, multi-cultural society. Whatever
its content, the EC's decision will have profound
consequences for the future of politics in the
world's largest democracy. (END/2007)
______
[4]
Hindustan Times
April 10, 2007
NOT JUST A STATUS SYMBOL
by Mushirul Hasan
The political scientist, Rajni Kothari, observed
that one way to think about India is as a people
and a land made up of a series of minorities. He
was right. In the first all-India census in 1881,
the enumerators found that Muslims numbered only
19.7 per cent of the population. They uncovered a
geographically dispersed aggregate of Muslims
forming neither a collectivity nor a distinct
society for any purpose, political, economic and
social. Out of a total population of about 50
million, the Muslims in Bengal spoke Bengali and
those in Punjab used largely Punjabi as their
language. Those living in Tamil Nadu spoke Tamil;
those settled on the Malabar coast spoke
Malayalam.
The enumerators found Muslims whose religious
rituals had a very strong tinge of Hinduism and
who retained caste and observed Hindu festivals
and ceremonies. In Bengal, between the 15th and
the 18th centuries, many Muslim cultural
mediators wrote in Bengali. They expressed Islam
in the local cultural medium, an idiom greatly
enriched in the same period by translations of
the great Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata, into Bengali, and the expression of
Nath and Vaishnava teachings.
The entry of Muslims in South Asia through so
many and such separate doorways, their spread
over the subcontinent by so many different
routes, and the diffusion of Islam in different
forms from one area to the other, ensured that
this religion would present itself in those
different forms. Neither to its own adherents nor
to non-Muslims did Islam seem monochromatic,
monolithic or indeed mono-anything.
The notion of 'majority' and 'minority' is a
colonial invention. It did not exist under the
Mughals: the lines of division then were regional
and ethnic (in the way they are in the United
States today) rather than religious. Under
colonial rule, however, the introduction of
representative institutions in late 19th century
raised fears of minorities being swamped by the
majority. They were echoed by Syed Ahmad Khan of
Aligarh and, importantly enough, by the Hindu
Sabha and the Akalis in Punjab where the Hindus
and the Sikhs were in a minority. In December
1916, the Congress concluded the Lucknow Pact
with the League on the principle that the Muslims
were a religious minority. The Nehru Committee
Report in 1928 lent its approval to the notion of
a Muslim minority in need of constitutional
safeguards.
The Muslim spokesmen had a three-fold aim: to
trace the historical evolution of an imaginary
community as an antithesis to the Congress theory
of 'Unity in Diversity'; to emphasise its
distinct identity in order to extract concessions
from the government; and to invoke Islamic
symbols in defence of 'Muslim aspirations'. This
is how 'Muslim nationalism' gained legitimacy in
the eyes of the Muslim landed and urban-based
professional classes who were apprehensive about
their position in the newly-created power
structures. Hence every single step from 1909 to
1935 towards the devolution of authority to
Indian hands lent weight to notions of majority
and minority rights.
The British government had created a Muslim
identity in Indian politics through the Acts of
1909 and 1919. Now, in the 1940s, they could draw
comfort from M.A. Jinnah repeating much the same
arguments in support of a formal minority status
through separate electorates, weightages, and
reservation in the councils and public services.
Later, they backed his Pakistan project as a
reward for his supporting the war effort.
After Independence and Partition, leaders like
Maulana Azad questioned the standard definition
of a minority, arguing that "their heads are held
so high that to consider them a minority
deserving special concessions makes no sense".
Nobody heeded such advice. Muslims regard
themselves as a minority and there is nothing one
can do to change that self-perception. This
perception is grounded in history and, what is
more, it draws legitimation from the
constitutional provisions guaranteeing minority
rights. These cannot be taken away by an
executive fiat or a judicial judgment. Let us
remember that the issue at hand was not the
minority status of Muslims but to find ways and
means of integrating them into the
nation-building project.
How does one draw up the balance sheet on Indian
democracy? It is generally agreed that the
Constitution balances well the commitment of a
democratic and liberal State to provide equal
status for all and the need to take account of
weaker and backward groups. The Muslims, on the
other hand, have been economically marginalised
and are disproportionately located towards the
lower end of the socio-economic hierarchy. They
lag behind the majority in income, in education,
in participation in the major institutions of the
country.
In June 1983, the Gopal Singh Committee had
stated in no uncertain terms that the Muslims
were "the hewers of wood and drawers of water".
Now, in November 2007, the Sachar Committee's
findings point to the "deficits and deprivation
in practically all dimensions of development",
and to the absence of any great schemes that
would stir the Muslims from a long sleep and
beckon them to a prosperous future.
Why do the Muslims lag behind the majority? What
does one do to mitigate the effects of those
factors that make so many of them so much more
poorer and backward than other Indians? Somebody
must have the answers. The Manmohan Singh
government, proceeding on the right assumption
that the Muslims constituted a minority and
recognising their uneasiness over their economic
status, has initiated certain administrative
measures. They deserve unqualified support.
Let me draw your attention to another compelling
need. One of the crucial functions of most
Constitutions is to protect minorities against
the tyranny of the majority. This protection
ensures equal respect for each and every citizen,
a value at risk in any organisation run by
majority votes. Therefore, the need is to
preserve the idea that all citizens deserve to
enter public space on equal terms and conditions.
Indeed, as Malini Parthasarathy, the former
editor of Hindu, pointed out, "It is time that
those Indians who pride themselves on being part
of the global community yet have bought
unquestioningly the notion that the minorities
are responsible for some imagined economic
deprivation, ask some hard questions. By driving
the minorities to the margins of a civil society
of which they are equal inheritors and thereby
polarising Indian society, rendering it more
vulnerable to bitter internal conflicts, how can
the dream of a modernising India becoming part of
a wider global community, sharing a vision of
faster economic growth and greater prosperity,
really materialise?"
Minorities do not expect miracles to transform
their lives, but they expect the State to
guarantee them their right to observe and
practise their religion, and provide them the
opportunity, regardless of their faith, to lead a
dignified and self-respecting existence. "A
majoritarian democracy is no democracy at all,"
declared Justice M.N. Venkatachaliah. "It is only
a participatory, representative and inclusive
democracy that can take a pluralistic society
further and make it conflict-free."
Whether Indian secularism can survive in any
meaningful sense in the 21st century will depend
on how religious minorities can share power and
privilege and, at the same time, preserve and
safeguard their religious and cultural interests
that are enshrined in our Constitution.
Jawaharlal Nehru had proclaimed in September
1950, "People should learn the great lesson that
the inscriptions on Asoka's pillars teach that a
man respecting the religion and culture of others
increases the value of one's own. If the religion
or culture of others is run down, to that extent
the value of one's religion and culture is
lowered."
Mushirul Hasan is Vice Chancellor, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi
______
[5]
The Nation
review | posted April 12, 2007 (April 30, 2007 issue)
INEVITABLE REVOLUTIONS
Gyan Prakash
E.M. Forster's A Passage to India ends with a
poignant exchange between Aziz, a young Muslim
doctor, and Fielding, a Briton sympathetic to
Indians. Though Aziz is acquitted of the false
charge of molesting a British woman, he is deeply
wounded by the experience and wants nothing to do
with the colonial race. Fielding, an old friend,
seeks him out and asks why they cannot be friends
again.
But the horses didn't want it--they swerved
apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks
through which riders must pass single file; the
temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the
birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came
into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau
beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their
hundred voices. "No, not yet," and the sky said,
"No, not there."
This is how the novel ended, written in 1924
against the backdrop of the first mass
nationalist upsurge against British rule. Gandhi,
who led the movement, was a product of the Indian
encounter with Western culture. He trained as a
barrister in London and spent more than two
decades in South Africa, developing his doctrine
of nonviolent struggle in campaigning for Indian
rights. Western ideas deeply influenced his
political philosophy, and he maintained lifelong
friendships with a number of Europeans. But
anticolonialism formed the bedrock of his
relationship with the West. Despite good
intentions, there could be no friendship in the
abstract. You could not simply wish away empire
when it formed the setting in which the members
of colonizing and colonized cultures met.
Historians of empire have always understood this
chasm in human relationships created by the fact
of one culture ruling over another. But a
reappraisal of this truth has been under way for
some time now at the hands of revisionist
historians of the British Empire. These
historians dislike Edward Said and the
postcolonial critics who cite French theory and
argue that the British Empire established lasting
Orient/Occident and East/West oppositions in
politics and knowledge. Uncomfortable with the
political passion and theoretical language of
these critics, the revisionists counsel us (in
mainly British accents, with some American
intonations) to lower the anti-imperial
temperature and write old-fashioned narrative
history. They contend that empire is the oldest
and one of the most widely practiced forms of
governance.
The Romans did it, the Spaniards did it, the
Russians did it, the Chinese did it, even the
newly independent nations have done it. Everybody
oppressed everyone else. Pax Britannica may have
ruled over one-fifth of humanity, but the
conquerors, soldiers, administrators and scholars
were also human. Why bring in such abstractions
as Orientalism and colonialism? Underneath it
all, the story of the British Empire is a
narrative of individuals caught up in human
encounters between cultures.
True, the revisionist argument continues, Britons
went to distant lands to profit and conquer. But
vastly outnumbered by the local population and
pitted against powerful adversaries, they were
deeply conscious of their vulnerability. This was
particularly true in the eighteenth century, when
the British were all too aware of the power and
grandeur of the Ottomans and the Mughals. The
Barbary corsairs and Algerian slave owners
harassed them in the Mediterranean, the Indian
tribes challenged them in North America and the
French engaged them in imperial wars. Then, their
American territories fell. On the Indian
subcontinent, the Mughal Empire was reduced to a
shell, but successor states posed a serious
challenge to the East India Company's military
position. Embattled, the British were forced to
depend on indigenous allies and could not afford
to treat native populations and cultures as
inferior. Forcibly or willingly, many crossed
cultural borders. They shed European trousers for
native pajamas, grew Hindu mustaches and Muslim
beards, married local women and kept concubines,
and collected indigenous texts and artifacts. A
human story of interest and immersion in other
cultures, languages and artifacts--not
mastery--underpinned British imperial expansion.
Stroke by stroke, this revisionist historiography
seeks to redraw the portrait of the British
Empire. This picture has received prominent
attention in British publications, including
leftist ones, eager to mark distance from their
imperial past while trying to rescue some
cultural value from it for the present. In this
version of the story, set against the current
spectacle of an arrogant and dangerous American
imperialism, we are told the British Empire
developed willy-nilly as a collection of
territories and cultures; it was never the
project that nineteenth-century imperialists
claimed and that present-day postcolonial critics
allege. The conquerors, particularly in the
eighteenth century, are seen not as agents of
colonial oppression and exploitation but as
hapless imperialists caught in a hostile
environment; weak and embattled, they eagerly
embraced indigenous allies and cultures.
This revisionist view of the British Empire
underpins William Dalrymple's deeply researched
and beautifully written The Last Mughal. The
subject of his study is the 1857 Uprising against
British rule in India. It was an event that,
according to Dalrymple, marked the end of the
eighteenth century's "relatively easy
relationship of Indian and Briton" and the onset
of "hatreds and racism" that became so
characteristic of the nineteenth-century Raj.
"The Uprising, it is clear, was the result of
that change, not its cause."
When the Uprising broke out, Company rule in
India was already a century old. During this
time, the Company had acquired effective military
and political control over nearly the entire
subcontinent. The imperial Mughals, a dynasty
that traced its lineage back to Timur (Tamerlane)
and had ruled India since 1526, still enjoyed
nominal authority. The aging Mughal emperor,
Bahadur Shah Zafar, lived in Delhi. Clutching
hollow emblems of authority, Zafar presided over
the royal household and harem. Real power lay
with the Company, which used it to build a modern
empire. The Company annexed territories,
established courts, laid telegraph and railway
lines, collected taxes and instituted land
settlements that caused widespread discontent.
The developing ideology of liberal imperialism,
buttressed by evangelical Christianity, left
little room for existing cultures and traditions.
The old nobility and landholders were summarily
cast aside, and Thomas Macaulay declared that all
the accumulated products of Oriental knowledge
were worth a single shelf of a Western library.
The simmering discontent against British rule
boiled over with the "greased cartridge"
controversy. At the end of 1856, the Company
army, which consisted of both Hindu and Muslim
sepoys (recruits) commanded by British officers,
introduced the new Enfield rifle. Loading the
rifle required biting open the cartridge, which
was greased to ease pushing the ball down the
barrel. Initially, the grease was made of cow and
pig fat, defiling to both Hindus and Muslims.
This was quickly changed to beeswax and linseed
oil, but the damage was done. A rumor spread that
the British were deliberately using pig and cow
fat to violate the sepoys' religions.
The Uprising began on May 10, 1857, with a mutiny
of Indian soldiers in the military barracks of
Meerut. The mutineers killed their British
officers and marched thirty miles south to Delhi,
where they were joined by the sepoys in the
regiments stationed in the city. Together, they
"restored" Zafar as their emperor. The spirit of
rebellion spread to other garrisons in North
India and turned from a limited mutiny into a
widespread revolt of peasants, artisans,
laborers, religious leaders and the old gentry.
For more than a year, the fire of the Uprising
raged. European officers, women and children were
massacred. British authority crumbled in large
parts of North India until it was restored with
brute force in the summer of 1858. Zafar's glory
ended even earlier. Within a few months, the
rebel position in Delhi fell. The emperor was
tried and convicted for hatching an international
Muslim conspiracy against his English
benefactors, and exiled to Burma. The charge was
legally and factually absurd. Since Zafar had
never renounced sovereignty over the Company, he
could not possibly be guilty of treason. In fact,
Dalrymple explains, "from a legal point of view,
a good case could be made that it was the East
India Company which was the real rebel, guilty of
revolt against a feudal superior to whom it had
sworn allegiance for nearly a century." Equally
groundless was the allegation that Zafar was
behind an international Muslim conspiracy
stretching from Constantinople to Delhi. "The
Uprising in fact showed every sign of being
initiated by upper-caste Hindu sepoys reacting
against specifically military grievances
perceived as a threat to their faith and dharma;
it then spread rapidly through the country,
attracting a fractured and diffuse collection of
other groups alienated by aggressively
insensitive and brutal British policies." The
British "bigoted and Islamophobic argument"
reduced the complexity of the rebellion to an
oversimplified and fictional picture of a "global
Muslim conspiracy with an appealingly visible and
captive hate figure at its centre." Back in
England, the Uprising and the aftermath of
British bloodlust shocked the Parliament into
assuming direct rule over India. Company rule was
abolished, and Queen Victoria became the Empress
of India.
Understandably, the Uprising aroused heated
emotions. The British officials and civilians
caught up in it captured the experience in their
writings. Several fictional and historical
accounts were published, including Flora Annie
Steel's novel On the Face of Waters (1896) and
John Kaye's three-volume History of the Sepoy War
in India (1877). In the British imperial
imagination the Mutiny was remembered as the
moment when Indians bared their barbarian souls.
In Indian nationalist mythology, it was the first
war of independence. Outside these stock images
and myths, there exists a substantial body of
sophisticated and complex historical work on the
Uprising, notably the writings of Rudrangshu
Mukherjee, Gautam Bhadra and Eric Stokes. But
historians have largely ignored Delhi's
experience of the cataclysm, preferring to focus
on areas where the revolt was more protracted.
Dalrymple, a British travel writer and historian
who divides his time between London and Delhi,
sets out to correct this neglect. Writing with
obvious affection for Delhi and appreciation for
Mughal culture, he shows that the experience of
the rebellion in the city was quite distinct. It
was the seat of the imperial Mughals and the
center of high Indo-Muslim culture. Even if Zafar
no longer exercised real power, the emperor, as
the rebel proclamation demonstrated, still
exercised tremendous symbolic significance. From
his palace in Delhi's Red Fort, Zafar wrote
accomplished poetry and presided over a refined
court milieu. Living under his patronage was
Ghalib, possibly the greatest poet ever in the
Urdu language, and one who went on to record his
experiences of the Uprising. Using sources in
Persian and Urdu along with voluminous British
papers, Dalrymple has written a riveting and
poignant account of the events of 1857 in Delhi.
When the mutineers descended on Delhi, the city
initially welcomed them. Dalrymple shows that
Zafar was gratified by the "restoration" of his
imperial sovereignty but chafed at the lack of
proper deference the rebels showed. He complained
bitterly about the violation of imperial
protocols and the country manners of the largely
Hindu sepoys and was alarmed by the jihadi rebels
who arrived from the North Indian town of
Bareilly to add religious zeal to the Uprising.
Trapped between the imperious British and the
rude sepoys and zealous jihadis, Zafar
reluctantly assumed the mantle of rebellion.
However, he was too weak, too indecisive and
utterly incapable of assuming the role assigned
to him. The Uprising floundered and the elite
opinion in the city turned against the violence
and the unsophisticated culture of the lowly
sepoys. Bandits and roving rebels ruled the roost
on highways, making escape from the city
hazardous.
Europeans found their houses ransacked, their
property looted and their lives endangered. Upon
victory, the British celebrated their triumph by
letting loose a reign of terror on the fleeing
insurgents and Delhi's inhabitants. The princes
who had participated in the Uprising surrendered
unconditionally to a British officer, William
Hodson, with the hope that their lives would be
spared. Hodson stripped them naked and shot them
in cold blood. Then he promptly proceeded to
strip the corpses of their rings and amulets,
which he pocketed. Satisfied with the killing and
the loot, Hodson wrote to his sister: "I am not
cruel, but I must confess I did enjoy the
opportunity of ridding the earth of these
wretches." Edward Vibart, who participated in
what he called the "murder" of defenseless
civilians, wrote about the horror of hearing
women scream after witnessing their husbands and
sons being butchered. "Heaven knows I feel no
pity--but when some old grey bearded man is
brought and shot before your eyes--hard must be
that man's heart I think who can look on with
indifference," he wrote. But horror quickly
shifted to bravado and justification: "And yet it
must be so for these black wretches shall atone
with their blood for our murdered countrymen--my
own father and mother--sister and brother all cry
aloud for vengeance, and their son will avenge
them." Slaughter followed slaughter. In the Kucha
Chelan neighborhood, Dalrymple writes, about
1,400 residents were cut down: "After the British
and their allies had tired of bayoneting the
inhabitants, they marched forty survivors out to
the Yamuna, lined them up before the walls of the
Fort, and shot them." Among them were some of the
most distinguished poets and artists of Delhi.
The victors made little distinction between
insurgents and civilians. George Wagentrieber
wrote with satisfaction in the Delhi Gazette
Extra: "Hanging is, I am happy to say, the order
of the day here." Believing that the rebels had
sexually assaulted their women (a charge proved
false by a subsequent inquiry commission), "the
British officers did little to stop the raping of
the women of Delhi." To escape the victors'
wrath, most of Delhi's residents fled to the
surrounding countryside, finding shelters in
tombs and ruins and scavenging for food. Looters
went house to house, seizing whatever they could.
"To all of us [soldiers]," wrote one officer,
"the loot of the city was to be a fitting
recompense for the toils and privations we had
undergone." Prize Agents stalked the city,
confiscating native property and delivering it to
Europeans. To punish the residents for having
supported the Uprising, the British considered
leveling the entire city. Fortunately, cooler
heads prevailed. "Even so, great swathes of the
city--especially around the Red Fort--were still
cleared away." Many fine mosques, Sufi shrines,
palaces and the houses of notables were
demolished. Ghalib grieved that, under wanton
destruction, "the whole city has become a
desert." Dalrymple relates this story in all its
horror, quoting extensively from the melancholy
descriptions written by Delhi's literary elite
and from accounts by the victors, who gleefully
recorded the terrible vengeance they wreaked on
the vanquished in what became known as the City
of the Dead.
Dalrymple mourns the passing of an age, the end
of Delhi's urbane milieu in which the Europeans
had taken a deep interest. Now that the "beating
heart of Indo-Islamic civilization had been
ripped out," the British-Indian racial divide
ripped open the body politic. Contrary to
received opinion, Dalrymple argues that the
Uprising did not cause this divide; rather, the
blame should be placed on "the Victorian
Evangelicals whose insensitivity, arrogance and
blindness did much to bring the Uprising of 1857
down upon both their own heads and those of the
people and court of Delhi, engulfing all of
northern India in a religious war of terrible
violence." The rebel violence and the British
retribution merely widened the gap between the
rulers and the ruled that had already opened
before 1857. He tells this story with an eye on
the current phenomenon of an evangelically
inspired American imperial power locked in battle
with jihadi Islam. He sees ghosts of the past in
the present good-versus-evil war: "Today, West
and East again face each other uneasily across a
divide that many see as religious war. Jihadis
again fight what they regard as a defensive
action against their Christian enemies, and again
innocent women, children and civilians are
slaughtered." The contemporary passion for
absolutes, he argues, inflicts irreparable damage
on ordinary interactions and exchanges between
cultures and religions.
As critical as Dalrymple is of the current
ideological war of opposites, he is equally
impatient with Edward Said and postcolonial
critics. Writing with the traditional British
suspicion of theory, he sees them as purveying
the abstract concepts of Orientalism and
colonialism. These abstractions, according to
him, do injustice to the human interactions
across identities that were common in the
eighteenth century. Before nineteenth-century
racism and colonial arrogance took over, the
British and Indians bridged the distance of
language and religion.
Dalrymple is on familiar ground here. He has
published two acclaimed books that celebrated
Europeans who crossed racial and religious
boundaries. In City of Djinns, a book about his
year in Delhi, he uncovers the ghosts of the
city's turbulent and varied past. Among them was
William Fraser, a Scotsman sent by the Company to
Delhi in 1805 to pacify the brigand-infested
countryside around Delhi. Cut off from his
compatriots, Fraser gathered a private force of
Indians and set about his business. Always ready
to abandon the routine of the office desk for the
excitement of the battleground in the Company's
wars, he surrounded himself with a community of
Indian followers whom his contemporaries likened
to Scottish Highlanders. He adopted native dress
and customs, and he fathered "as many children as
the King of Persia" from his harem of Indian
wives. Dalrymple compares him to Mr. Kurtz in
Conrad's Heart of Darkness; like Kurtz, "he saw
himself as a European potentate ruling in a pagan
wilderness." The Company officialdom did not
trust him, but Fraser was no power-hungry brute.
He was a philosopher who took a deep interest in
Sanskrit, composed Persian couplets and
befriended the poet Ghalib. His younger brother
found him unrecognizable; he had turned "half
Hindoostanee." In a curious twist, Dalrymple's
research uncovered that Fraser was a distant
cousin of his wife.
This mixture of the personal and the intellectual
also animates Dalrymple's White Mughals. While
researching the book, he discovered that his
great-great grandmother was born to a Hindu
Bengali woman who had married a Frenchman. This
discovery awakened his interest in the unwritten
history of interracial unions under empire. In
White Mughals, he tells the fascinating story of
James Kirkpatrick, the British Resident in the
court of Hyderabad between 1797 and 1805.
Kirkpatrick fell in love with 14-year-old Khair,
the grandniece of a powerful Muslim noble, and
married her despite official disapproval. Khair
bore him two children, who were promptly packed
off to England. After Kirkpatrick died, she had
an affair with his assistant, who eventually
deserted her. Khair was exiled from Hyderabad,
lost her house and money and never got to see her
children again. In telling this story of love and
betrayal, Dalrymple weaves in accounts of other
"White Mughals," men like Sir David Ochterlony,
the British Resident in Delhi, who lived the life
of a Mughal nobleman. He dressed in Indian
clothes, had a fondness for hookahs and dance
girls and strolled Delhi every evening with his
thirteen wives, each mounted on an elephant.
The Last Mughal returns to this territory of
Frasers and Ochterlonys. Dalrymple writes that
there were a number of landed families in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
who walked the fault lines between Islam and
Christianity, the Mughals and the British.
Several of these families descended from European
mercenaries who had married into the Mughal elite
and practiced a hybrid lifestyle. They were
Christians but had adopted Mughal customs and
manners. All this cultural borrowing came under
increasing scrutiny and critique with the
consolidation of Company power and the arrival of
the evangelicals by the 1830s. An intolerant
spirit was in the air. The winds of change were
blowing on the Muslim side as well. Zafar himself
was born of a Hindu mother, not untypical of the
Mughals. He promoted a form of mystical Sufi
Islam and was revered by many as a saint. Delhi's
literary culture was also open and tolerant,
suspicious of orthodox theologians. But the
orthodox opinion began gaining strength, setting
the stage for the clash of fundamentalisms.
This is a neat formulation, but it is also false.
The clash of religious fundamentalisms did not
cause the Uprising. A great majority of the
sepoys who mutinied and assembled in Delhi to
"restore" the Mughal emperor were Hindus. Despite
the presence of jihadi rebels, the rebellion was
a remarkable display of Hindu-Muslim unity in
Delhi and elsewhere. If it was a religious war,
it was one only insofar as the rebels opposed
what they thought was the British plot to impose
Christianity. The growing evangelical influence
was a factor in fomenting this opposition, but
the causes of the Uprising lay in colonialism
itself. Coercion, conflict and violence were
built into colonial rule, even when it was
imposed with the help of indigenous allies and
soldiers. As the Company government violently
displaced existing structures of power and
authority, it encountered endemic opposition. The
1857 Mutiny in the army over greased cartridges
served only to unify and escalate specific
grievances at different places and among
different groups into a widespread violent
opposition to the Company.
To argue, as Dalrymple does, that it was only
imperial arrogance and evangelical influence that
forced the rebels to engage in a life-or-death
struggle is to underestimate the depth of their
determination. Revolt and resistance against
colonialism were inherent in alien rule. Since
the beginning of the Company conquest in the
mid-eighteenth century, rebellions were endemic;
the Uprising was only the most widespread and
fierce expression of the built-in conflict
between the colonizers and the colonized.
Dalrymple overlooks this history and assumes that
but for the nineteenth-century imperial
foolhardiness, the imagined eighteenth-century
empire might have remained intact. This would be
like supposing that prior to present wars of
fundamentalisms, the West's history of domination
over the rest of the world was free of sharp
oppositions and discords. In drawing a parallel
between 1857 and the current "clash of
civilizations," Dalrymple makes precisely such a
suspect assumption. Whatever the role of the
"clash of civilizations" ideology in the current
conflict, the opposition to Western domination
did not begin with it, just as the insurgency
against Company rule in India did not start with
the arrival of Victorian evangelicalism but was
endemic to British rule. Empire has always
produced challenge and resistance. If Dalrymple
and like-minded writers were not so dismissive of
the "abstractions" of Edward Said and
postcolonial critics, they would not need the
reminder that colonialism was always a
fundamentally violent system.
Joseph Conrad wrote that the conquest of earth
was never a pretty thing if you looked into it
too closely, for it meant taking lands away from
people of a different color and appearance. Even
if racial superiority and the "civilizing
mission" were not marshaled to justify the
eighteenth-century empire, this does not mean
that it was a pretty thing. As Nicholas Dirks's
superb recent book The Scandal of Empire shows,
greed, duplicity, corruption, exploitation and
violence were present at the birth of Company
rule in India. With perceptive readings of the
British record in eighteenth-century India, Dirks
shows that the scandal of colonial violence and
oppression was systemic, and not just the product
of a few bloodthirsty and corrupt officials.
Edmund Burke's eloquent rage against the
Company's arbitrary power during Warren
Hastings's impeachment trial, for example, was
underpinned by his scorn for Indian customs and
traditions. He expressed sympathy for the plight
of native rulers deposed by Hastings, but what
really troubled him about the Company's conduct
was that it was being corrupted by India. One
day, he feared, this corruption would spread to
Britain. The scandal of Company rule had to be
expunged so that the record of the British Empire
would remain untarnished. Such an assertion on
behalf of the empire and its legitimacy is
unthinkable without a belief in Britain's right
to conquer and rule and a complete disdain for
Indians.
Consider the fabrication of European deaths in
the Calcutta Fort in 1757 into the mythical
"Black Hole" incident. Dirks points out that
combat rather than imprisonment caused most of
the deaths, and that there were far fewer
fatalities than initially claimed. But Europeans
were so quick to believe the lurid tale of
Oriental barbarism that the Black Hole soon
acquired a mythical status. When the Company
carried out sustained wars against indigenous
rulers in the last quarter of the eighteenth
century, the desire to punish native perfidy
encouraged the brutal campaigns.
As globalization compresses space and time, those
privileged and educated enough to travel between
cultures find themselves increasingly impatient
with the legacies of imperial racism and
nationalist myths. This is understandable. But to
retail the eighteenth century as a time when
Europeans and non-Europeans overcame racial and
religious boundaries is to fly in the face of
historical evidence. To see the crossing of
imperial borders in the lives of "White Mughals"
is to misrepresent both the nature of interracial
liaisons and imperial conquest.
Empire made the Frasers and the Ochterlonys
possible. It was because of empire, not despite
it, that Europeans took an interest in
non-European cultures. Colonial power enabled the
Europeans to enter into interracial unions, keep
concubines and father children, and learn native
languages and customs. This was largely a one-way
street on which mostly European men traveled to
"collect" Indian women, territory, texts and
artifacts. Astonishingly, Dalrymple fails to see
the sense of imperial entitlement that permitted
Company men to penetrate indigenous culture and
become White Mughals. He identifies William
Fraser with Kurtz but still insists that the
eighteenth-century conquerors could act without a
sense of racial privilege. This is to claim that
empire can permit "easy relationships" between
cultures, that human exchanges can occur outside
history. Not now, not then.
______
[6] EVENTS:
(i)
Scholars For Critical Practice
(Delhi University)
Invites you to a discussion on
"LEFT POLITICS AFTER NANDIGRAM"
Speakers:
Vaskar Nandy (trade unionist)
Sumit Chowdhury (film-maker and journalist)
Chair: Tanika Sarkar
The speakers are West Bengal-based activists who
have been involved in the struggle in Singur and
Nandigram and are in Delhi briefly.
Date: April 14, 2007
Time: 11 am
Venue: Department of Political Science (2nd
floor, New Arts Faculty Building, Delhi
University)
Apoorvanand, Madhulika Banerjee, Satish
Deshpande, Dilip Menon, Nivedita Menon, Prabhu
Mohapatra, Ujjwal Kumar Singh, Nandini Sundar,
Achin Vanaik
______
(ii)
TRIBUTE TO BASKER VASHEE / THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE LSE SIT-IN
Date 20 April 2007
Location London School of Economics
Speaker(s) Chair: Lord Meghnad Desai
Description
Steve Jefferys John Rose Sabby Sagall Joan Smith
on behalf of The LSE Socialist Society 1967
invite you to celebrate
The Life of Basker Vashee (1944 - 2005)
In response to the LSE authorities' decision to
appoint a new director from Rhodesia, Basker, a
political exile from the illegal regime, helped
spark the LSE sit-in, the first in Britain.
and
The 40th Anniversary of the LSE Sit-In
Chaired by Lord Meghnad Desai
The Old Theatre, LSE, Houghton Street, WC2
Friday 20th April from 5.00 to 8.00 pm
followed by
Buffet Dinner (£20 per head) in the Senior Dining Room
RSVP essential by 25th March to
Johnrose88 [at] yahoo.com /132 Lordship Road N16 0QL
Please indicate if you want dinner and if you
would like to make a five minute contribution at
the meeting
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. SACW is an independent & non-profit
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Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/
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