“I’m on my way out”: Siddhartha Shankar Ray (1920-2010)…

November 7, 2010 — drsubrotoroy

 

 

 

 

 

November 7, 2010

I  am grieved to hear of the death of Siddhartha Shankar Ray last night.

I was introduced to him by an uncle who had been his college-buddy, and he took up a grave personal matter of mine in the Supreme Court of India in 1990 with great kindness, charging me not a penny, being impressed by a little explicit “civil disobedience” I had had to show at the time towards Judge Evelyn Lance.

He also told me he and his wife had been in London on May 29 1984 and had seen *The Times*’s leader that day about my critique of Indian economic policy. He invited me to his Delhi home where I told him about the perestroika-for-India project I had led at the University of Hawaii since 1986, at which he, of his own accord, declared

“You must meet Rajiv Gandhi.  I will arrange a meeting”.

That led to my meeting with Rajiv Gandhi, then Congress President & Leader of the Opposition, on September 18 1990, which contributed to the origins of India’s 1991 economic reform as has been told elsewhere. https://independentindian.com/thoughts-words-deeds-my-work-1973-2010/rajiv-gandhi-and-the-origins-of-indias-1991-economic-reform/

Rajiv’s assistant George told me Rajiv had said he had not heard more fulsome praise.

In Bengal, he took me as a guest to visit the Legislative Assembly in session when he was Leader of the Opposition; it was the legislature of which my great grandfather, Surendranath Roy, had been a founder, being the first Deputy President and acting President too; Surendranath had been friends with his maternal grandfather, CR Das, leader of the Congress Party before MK Gandhi, and he said to me in the car heading to the legislature about that relationship in Bengal’s politics some seven decades earlier “They were friends”.

He introduced me to all the main leaders of the Bengal Congress at the time (except Mamata Banerjee who could not come) and I was tasked by him to write the manifesto for the State elections that year, which I did (in English, translated into Bangla by Professor Manjula Bose); the Communists won handily again but one of their leaders (Sailen Dasgupta) declared there had never been a State Congress manifesto of the sort before, being as it was an Orwell-like critique of Bengal’s Stalinism.

In a later conversation, I said to him I wished he be appointed envoy to Britain, he instead came to be appointed envoy to the USA.

In Washington in September 1993, he said “You must meet Manmohan Singh”, and invited me to a luncheon at the Ambassador’s Residence where, to Manmohan Singh and all his aides, he declared pointing at me

“The Congress manifesto (of 1991) was written on his (laptop) computer”.

In later years I kept him informed of developments and gave him my publications.   We last met in July last year where I gave him a copy, much to his delight, of *Margaret Thatcher’s Revolution: How it Happened and What it Meant*.

I said to him Bengal’s public finances were in abysmal condition, calling for emergency measures financially, and that Mamata Banerjee seemed to me to be someone who knew how to and would dislodge the Communists from their entrenched misgovernance of decades but not quite aware that dislodging a bad government politically was not the same thing as knowing how to govern properly oneself.

He,  again of his own accord, said immediately,

“I will call her and her main people to a meeting here so you can meet them and tell them that directly”.

It never transpired.

He and I were supposed to meet a few months ago but could not due to his poor health; on the phone in our last conversation I mentioned to him my plans of creating a Public Policy Institute — an idea he immediately and fully endorsed as being essential though adding

“I can’t be part of it,  I’m on my way out”.

“I’m on my way out”.   🙂

That was Siddhartha Shankar Ray — always intelligent, always good-humoured, always public-spirited, always a great Indian.

I shall miss a good friend, indeed my only friend among politicians other than the late Rajiv Gandhi himself.

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Seventy Years Today Since the British Government Politically Empowered MA Jinnah (2009)

September 4, 2009 — drsubrotoroy

Seventy Years Today Since the British Government Politically Empowered MA Jinnah

by

Subroto Roy

The bloated armies of Indian and Pakistani historians and pseudo-historians have failed to recognize the significance of the precise start of the Second World War upon the fortunes of the subcontinent.  Yet, twenty years ago, in the book I and WE James created at an American university, Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s (now in pdf), one of our authors, Professor Francis Robinson of the University of London, had set out the principal facts most clearly as to what flowed from the September 4 1939 empowerment of MA Jinnah by the British Government.

Germany invaded Poland on September 1 1939 and Britain declared war on Germany on September 3. The next day, Linlithgow, the British Viceroy in India, started to treat MA Jinnah’s Muslim League on par with the Congress’s nationalist movement led by MK Gandhi. Until September 4 1939, the British “had had little time for Jinnah and his League. The Government’s declaration of war on Germany on 3 September, however, transformed the situation. A large part of the army was Muslim, much of the war effort was likely to rest on the two Muslim majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal. The following day, the Viceroy invited Jinnah for talks on an equal footing with Gandhi” (Robinson, in James & Roy (eds) Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy 1989, 1992).

Jinnah himself was amazed by the new British attitude towards him: “suddenly there was a change in the attitude towards me. I was treated on the same basis as Mr Gandhi. I was wonderstruck why all of a sudden I was promoted and given a place side by side with Mr Gandhi.”

Jinnah’s political weakness had been made obvious by the electoral defeats the Muslim League had suffered in the 1937 elections in the very provinces which more or less came to constitute West Pakistan and today constitute modern Pakistan. Britain, at war with Germany and soon Japan, was faced with the intransigence of the Congress leadership.  It was unsurprising this would contribute to the British tilt empowering Congress’s declared adversary, Jinnah and the Muslim League, and hence make credible the possibility of the Pakistan that they had demanded:

“As the Congress began to demand immediate independence, the Viceroy took to reassuring Jinnah that Muslim interests would be safeguarded in any constitutional change. Within a few months, he was urging the League to declare a constructive policy for the future, which was of course presented in the Lahore Resolution. In their August 1940 offer, the British confirmed for the benefit of Muslims that power would not be transferred against the will of any significant element in Indian life. And much the same confirmation was given in the Cripps offer nearly two years later…. Throughout the years 1940 to 1945, the British made no attempt to tease out the contradictions between the League’s two-nation theory, which asserted that Hindus and Muslims came from two different civilisations and therefore were two different nations, and the Lahore Resolution, which demanded that ‘Independent States’ should be constituted from the Muslim majority provinces of the NE and NW, thereby suggesting that Indian Muslims formed not just one nation but two. When in 1944 the governors of Punjab and Bengal urged such a move on the Viceroy, Wavell ignored them, pressing ahead instead with his own plan for an all-India conference at Simla. The result was to confirm, as never before in the eyes of leading Muslims in the majority provinces, the standing of Jinnah and the League. Thus, because the British found it convenient to take the League seriously, everyone had to as well—Congressmen, Unionists, Bengalis, and so on….”(Robinson in James & Roy (eds) Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy,  pp. 43-44).

Even British socialists who were sympathetic to Indian aspirations, would grow cold when the Congress seemed to abjectly fail to appreciate Britain’s predicament during war with Germany and Japan (Gandhi, for example, dismissing the 1942 Cripps offer as a “post-dated cheque on a failing bank”).

By the 1946 elections, Muslim mass opinion had changed drastically to seem to be strongly in favour of the creation of a Pakistan. The intervening years were the ones when urban mobs all over India could be found shouting the League’s slogans: “Larke lenge Pakistan; Marke lenge Pakistan, Khun se lenge Pakistan; Dena hoga Pakistan; Leke rahenge Pakistan” (We will spill blood to take Pakistan, you will have to yield a Pakistan.)

Events remote from India’s history and geography, namely, the rise of Hitler and the Second World War, had contributed between 1937 and 1947 to the change of fortunes of the Muslim League and hence of all the people of the subcontinent.

The British had long discovered that the mutual antipathy between Muslims and Hindus could be utilised in fashioning their rule; specifically that the organisation and mobilisation of Muslim communal opinion in the subcontinent was a useful counterweight to any pan-Indian nationalism which might emerge to compete with British authority. As early as 1874, well before Allan Octavian Hume, ICS, had conceived the Indian National Congress, John Strachey, ICS, was to observe “The existence side by side of these (Hindu and Muslim) hostile creeds is one of the strong points in our political position in India. The better classes of Mohammedans are a source of strength to us and not of weakness. They constitute a comparatively small but an energetic minority of the population whose political interests are identical with ours.” By 1906, when a deputation of Muslims headed by the Aga Khan first approached the British pleading for communal representation, Minto the Viceroy replied: “I am as firmly convinced as I believe you to be that any electoral representation in India would be doomed to mischievous failure which aimed at granting a personal enfranchisement, regardless of the beliefs and traditions of the communities composing the population of this Continent.” Minto’s wife wrote in her diary that the effect was “nothing less than the pulling back of sixty two millions of (Muslims) from joining the ranks of the seditious opposition.” (The true significance of MAK Azad may have been that he, precisely at the same time, did indeed feel within himself the nationalist’s desire for freedom strongly enough to want to join the ranks of that seditious opposition.)

If a pattern emerges as to the nature of the behaviour of the British political state with respect to the peoples of this or similar regions, it is precisely the economic one of rewarding those loyal to them who had protected or advanced their interests, and penalising those perceived to be acting against their will. It is wishful to think  of members of the British political state as benevolent paternalists, who met with matching deeds their often philanthropic words about promoting the general welfare of their colonial wards or subordinate allies. The slogan “If you are not with us you are against us” that has come to be used by many from the Shining Path Maoists of Peru to President George W. Bush, had been widely applied already by the British in India, especially in the form “If you dare not to be with us, we will be certainly with your adversaries”. It came to be used with greatest impact on the subcontinent’s fortunes in 1939 when Britain found itself reluctantly at war with Hitler’s Germany.

British loyalties lay with those who had been loyal to them.

Hence in the “Indian India” of the puppet princes, Hari Singh and other “Native Princes” who had sent troops to fight as part of the British armies would be treated with a pusillanimity and grandeur so as to flatter their vanities, Sheikh Abdullah’s rebellion representing the Muslim masses of the Kashmir Valley would be ignored. And in British India, Jinnah the conservative Anglophile and his elitist Muslim League would be backed, while the radicalised masses of the Gandhi-Bose-Nehru Congress would have to be suppressed as a nuisance.

(Similarly, much later, Pakistan’s bemedalled army generals would be backed by the United States against Mujibur Rehman’s impoverished student-rebels, and India’s support frowned upon regardless of how just the Bangladeshi cause.)

Altruism is a limited quality in all human affairs, never more scarce than in relations between nations. In “Pakistan’s Allies”, I showed how the strategic interests of Britain, and later Britain’s American ally, came to evolve in the Northwest of the subcontinent ever since the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar as long as a Russian and later a Soviet empire had existed. A similar evolution of British domestic interests in India is distinctly observable in British support for the Pakistan Movement itself, leading on August 14 1947 to the creation of the new Dominion of Pakistan.

Sheikh Abdullah’s democratic urges or  Nehru’s Indian nationalism or the general welfare of the subcontinent’s people had no appeal as such to the small and brittle administrative machinery in charge of Britain’s Indian Empire — even though individual Britons had come to love, understand and explain India for the permanent benefit of her people. This may help to explain how Britain’s own long democratic traditions at home could often be found so wonderful by Indians yet the actions of the British state abroad so incongruent with them.

 

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Why has the Sonia Congress done something that the Congress under Nehru-Indira-Rajiv would not have done, namely, exaggerate the power of the Rajya Sabha and diminish the power of the Lok Sabha?

May 21, 2009 — drsubrotoroy

We in India did not invent the idea of Parliament, the British did.  Even the British did not invent the idea of a “Premier Ministre”, the French did that, though the British came to develop its meaning most.  Because these are not our own inventions, when something unusual happens in contemporary India to political entities and offices known as “Parliament”, “Prime Minister” etc, contrast and comparison is inevitable with standards and practices that have prevailed around the world in other parliamentary democracies.

Indeed we in India did not even fully invent the idea of our own Parliament though the national struggle led by the original Indian National Congress caused it to come to be invented.  The Lok Sabha is the outcome of a long and distinguished constitutional and political history from the Morley-Minto reforms a century ago to the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms and Government of India Act of 1919 to the Government of India Act of 1935 and the first general elections of British India in 1937 (when Jawaharlal Nehru briefly became PM for the first time) and in due course the 1946 Constituent Assembly.   Out of all this emerged the 1950 Constitution of India, drafted by that brilliant jurist BR Ambedkar as well as other sober intelligent well-educated and dedicated men and women of his time, and thence arose our first Lok Sabha following the 1951 General Elections.

About the Lok Sabha’s duties, I said in my March 30 2006 article “Logic of Democracy” in The Statesman

“What are Lok Sabha Members and State MLAs legitimately required to be doing in caring for their constituents? First of all, as a body as a whole, they need to elect the Government, i.e. the Executive Branch, and to hold it accountable in Parliament or Assembly. For example, the Comptroller and Auditor General submits his reports directly to the House, and it is the duty of individual legislators to put these to good use in controlling the Government’s waste, fraud or abuse of public resources.   Secondly, MPs and MLAs are obviously supposed to literally represent their individual constituencies in the House, i.e. to bring the Government and the House’s attention to specific problems or contingencies affecting their constituents as a whole, and call for the help, funds and sympathy of the whole community on their behalf.  Thirdly, MPs and MLAs are supposed to respond to pleas and petitions of individual constituents, who may need the influence associated with the dignity of their office to get things rightly done. For example, an impoverished orphan lad once needed surgery to remove a brain tumour; a family helping him was promised the free services of a top brain surgeon if a hospital bed and operating theatre could be arranged. It was only by turning to the local MLA that the family were able to get such arrangements made, and the lad had his tumour taken out at a public hospital. MPs and MLAs are supposed to vote for and create public goods and services, and to use their moral suasion to see that existing public services actually do get to reach the public.”

What about the Rajya Sabha?  I said in the same article:

“Rajya Sabha Members are a different species altogether. Most if not all State Legislative Councils have been abolished, and sadly the present nature of the Rajya Sabha causes similar doubts to arise about its utility. The very idea of a Rajya Sabha was first mooted in embryo form in an 1888 book A History of the Native States of India, Vol I. Gwalior, whose author also advocated popular constitutions for the “Indian India” of the “Native States” since “where there are no popular constitutions, the personal character of the ruler becomes a most important factor in the government… evils are inherent in every government where autocracy is not tempered by a free constitution.”  When Victoria was declared India’s “Empress” in 1877, a “Council of the Empire” was mooted but had remained a non-starter even until the 1887 Jubilee. An “Imperial Council” was now designed of the so-called “Native Princes”, which came to evolve into the “Chamber of Princes” which became the “Council of the States” and the Rajya Sabha.  It was patterned mostly on the British and not the American upper house except in being not liable to dissolution, and compelling periodic retirement of a third of members. The American upper house is an equal if not the senior partner of the lower house. Our Rajya Sabha follows the British upper house in being a chamber which is duty-bound to oversee any exuberance in the Lok Sabha but which must ultimately yield to it if there is any dispute.  Parliament in India’s democracy effectively means the Lok Sabha — where every member has contested and won a direct vote in his/her constituency. The British upper house used to have an aristocratic hereditary component which Tony Blair’s New Labour Government has now removed, so it has now been becoming more like what the Rajya Sabha was supposed to have been like.”

The Canadian upper house is similar to ours in intent: a place for “sober second thought” intended to curb the “democratic excesses” of the lower house.   In the Canadian, British, Australian, Irish and our own cases, the Prime Minister, as the chief executive of the lower house has immense indirect power over the upper house, whether in appointing members or even, in the Australian case, dissolving the entire upper house if he/she wishes.

Now yesterday apparently Shrimati Sonia Gandhi, as the duly elected leader of the largest political party in the 15th Lok Sabha, accompanied by Dr Manmohan Singh, as her party’s choice for the position of Prime Minister, went to see the President of India where the Hon’ble President apparently appointed Dr Singh to be the Prime Minister of India – meaning the Prime Minister of the 15th Lok Sabha, except that Dr Singh is not a member of the Lok Sabha and apparently has had no intent of becoming one.

In 2004 Shrimati Gandhi had declined to accept an invitation to become PM and instead effectively recommended Dr Singh to be PM despite his not being a member of the Lok Sabha nor intending to be so.   This exploited a constitutional loophole to the extent that the drafters of our 1950 Constitution happened not to have explicitly stated that the PM must be from the Lok Sabha.  But the reason the founders of our democratic polity such as BR Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru did not specify that the PM must be from the Lok Sabha was quite simply that it was a matter of complete obviousness to them and to their entire generation that this must be so — it would have been  appalling to them and something beyond their wildest imagination that a later generation, namely our own, would exploit such a loophole and allow a PM to be appointed who is not a member of the Lok Sabha and intends not to be so.

Ambedkar, Nehru and all others of their time knew fully well that the history and intended purpose of the Lok Sabha was completely different from the history and intended purpose of the Rajya Sabha.  They knew too fully well that Lord Curzon had been explicitly denied the leadership of Britain’s Tory Party in 1922 because that would have made him a potential PM  when he was not prepared to be a member of the House of Commons.  That specific precedent culminated a centuries’-old  democratic trend of  political power flowing from monarchs to lords to commoners, and has governed all parliamentary democracies  worldwide ever since — until Dr Singh’s appointment in 2004.

When such an anomalous situation once arose in Britain, Lord Home resigned his membership of the House of Lords to contest a House of Commons seat as Sir Alec Douglas Home so that he could be PM in a manner consistent with parliamentary law.

Dr Singh instead for five years remained PM of India while not being a member of the Lok Sabha.  Even if reasons and exigencies of State could have been cited for such an anomalous situation during his first term, there was really no such reason for him not to contest the 2009 General Election if he wished to be the Congress Party’s prime ministerial candidate a second time.  Numerous Rajya Sabha members alongside him have contested Lok Sabha seats this time, and several have won.

As of today, Dr Singh is due to be sworn in tomorrow as Prime Minister for a second term while still having no declared intention of resigning from the Rajya Sabha and contesting a Lok Sabha seat instead.   What the present-day Congress has done is elect him the leader of the “Congress Parliamentary Party” and claim that it is in such a capacity that he received the invitation to be Prime Minister of India.   But surely if the question had been asked to the Congress Party under Nehru or Indira or Rajiv: “Can you foresee a circumstance ever in which the PM of India is not a member of the Lok Sabha?” their answer in each case would have been a categorical and resounding  “no”.

So the question does arise why the Congress under Sonia Gandhi has with deliberation allowed such an anomalous situation to develop.  Its effect is to completely distort the trends of relative political power between the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha.  On the one hand, the Lok Sabha’s power is deliberately made to diminish as the chief executive of the Government of India shall not be from the Lok Sabha but from “the other place” despite the Lok Sabha having greater political legitimacy by having been directly elected by India’s people.   This sets a precedent that  might  get repeated in India  in the future but which contradicts the worldwide trend in parliamentary democracies over decades and centuries in precisely the opposite direction –  of power flowing in the direction of the people not away from them.   On the other hand, the fact this anomalous idea has been pioneered by the elected leader of the largest political party in the Lok Sabha while her PM is in the Rajya Sabha causes a member of the lower house to have unexpected control over the upper house when the latter is supposed to be something of an independent check on the former!

It all really seems an unnecessary muddle and a jumbling up of normal constitutional law and parliamentary procedure.  The Sonia-Manmohan Government at the outset of its second term should hardly want to be seen by history as having set a poor precedent using brute force.  The situation can be corrected with the utmost ease by following the Alec Douglas Home example, with Dr Singh being given a relatively safe seat to contest as soon as possible, if necessary by some newly elected Congress MP resigning and allowing a bye-election to be called.

Subroto Roy

Posted in 15th Lok Sabha, Academic research, Alec Douglas Home, American democracy, Asia and the West, Athenian democracy, Bengal Constitutional Politics, Bengal Legislative Council, BR Ambedkar, Britain, Britain in India, Britain's monarchy, British history, Canadian Senate, Comparative Government, Congress Party, Conservative Party Britain, Constitutional law, Constitutional monarchy, Constitutional Politics, Curzon, Democracy, Expertise and democracy, France, Freedom, Government accounting, Government of India, India's 2009 General Election, India's Constitution, India's constitutional politics, India's Democracy, India's Electorate, India's History, India's independence, India's Jurisprudence, India's Lok Sabha, India's Nationalism, India's nomenclatura, India's Parliament, India's Polity, India's Presidency, India's Rajya Sabha, India's Rule of Law, Indian National Congress Origins, Indira Gandhi, International Law, Jawaharlal Nehru, Law, Manmohan Singh, Parliamentary Government, Parliamentary Procedure, Political Philosophy, Political Science, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi. 2 Comments »

Bengal Legislative Council 1921

February 28, 2009 — drsubrotoroy

This is a 1921 photograph of the Bengal Legislative Council with the Governor of Bengal, the Earl of Ronaldshay (later Secretary of State for India and  known as the Marquess of Zetland) at the centre. To his immediate right is Surendranath Roy, then President of the Council. Seated second to the left of the Governor is Surendranath Banerjee, the eminent leader of the Indian National Congress (and mentor of GK Gokhale and other “moderates” in the national movement); he and Surendranath Roy were friends and political colleagues.

1921legcouncil3

Posted in Asia and the West, Bengal, Bengal Constitutional Politics, Bengal Legislative Council, Bengal Primary Education Bill 1919, Britain, Britain in India, British history, Conservative Party Britain, Constitutional law, Constitutional Politics, GK Gokhale, Imperialism, India's constitutional politics, India's History, India's Nationalism, India's Parliament, Indian National Congress Origins, Roys of Behala, Surendranath Roy. Leave a Comment »

Origins of India’s Constitutional Politics: Bengal 1913

October 12, 2008 — drsubrotoroy

This is a 1913 photograph of the Indian members of the  first Bengal Legislative Council elected (in 1912)  after the 1909 Morley-Minto reforms; the members apparently were being greeted by gentlemen of the sub-urban areas south of Calcutta.  The Englishman sitting at the centre  seems to be Sir Henry Cotton (1845-1915), the 1904 President of the Indian National Congress and a  great political friend of India.   To his right sits Surendranath Roy, who may have been the Council’s first President.

 

Academic studies include notably those by JH Broomfield, “The Vote and the Transfer of Power: A Study of the Bengal Election 1912-1913” Journal of Asian Studies, Feb 1962, his book Elite Conflict in a   Plural Society: 20th Century Bengal (Berkeley 1968); and Rajat Kanta Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal 1875-1927 (Oxford 1984).  Professor Ray writes about the 1912 election: “Only  a few candidates of the “Popular Party” — Surendranath Banerjea, Abul Kasim, Byomkesh Chakravarti and Surendranath Ray — scraped through…. (A) sympathetic moderate wrote in 1919: ‘The Popular Party is a bundle of disjoined units which cannot resist the slightest pressure from without.’  This charge was eventually disproved by the stand taken by (the Popular Party) in the Bengal Legislative Council.  It showed no sign of wilting under the pressure exerted by the European group…”

 

Other studies of the period include John R McLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress (Princeton 1977), Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Cambridge 1971),  Gordon Johnson, Provincial Politics and Indian Nationalism (Cambridge 1973) etc.

By way of incidental reference, the young Jawaharlal Nehru had returned from his studies in England in 1912; MK Gandhi was still in South Africa and would not be returning until 1915.  The Tilak-Gokhale clash though had been in full swing since 1907.

 

 

Subroto Roy

Nota Bene: The text and photograph in this post may be considered in the public domain and may be freely used for purposes of a Wikipedia article or any other publication in the common interest.

Posted in Asia and the West, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bengal, Bengal Constitutional Politics, Bengal Legislative Council, Britain in India, Congress Party, Constitutional Politics, GK Gokhale, India's Constitution, India's constitutional politics, India's Democracy, India's independence, India's Jurisprudence, India's Nationalism, India's Panchayat local democracy, India's Parliament, India's Politics, India's Polity, India's Rajya Sabha, Indian National Congress Origins, Jawaharlal Nehru, MK Gandhi, Roys of Behala, Sir Henry Cotton 1845-1915, Surendranath Roy. 1 Comment »

On Indian Nationhood (2007)

May 25, 2007 — drsubrotoroy

On Indian Nationhood
From Tamils To Kashmiris And Assamese And Mizos To Sikhs And Goans

First published in The Statesman, Editorial Page

May 25 2007

By Subroto Roy

In the decades before 1947, imperialist critics of Indian nationalism accused the movement of being less about creating Indian nationhood than about supplanting British rule with local Indian oligarchies. Sydenham, for example, in the upper house of Britain’s Parliament in August 1918, gleefully quoted from the “Madras Dravidian Hindu Association” (forerunners of today’s DMK etc): “We shall fight to the last drop of our blood any attempt to transfer the seat of authority in this country from British hands to so-called high-caste Hindus, who have ill-treated us in the past and will do so again but for the protection of British laws.” Also quoted were “Namasudras of Bengal”, allegedly numbering “ten million men”, protesting “gross misrepresentation” by “so-called high-caste leaders” of the desirability of “Home Rule or self-government”. Besides caste and class there was always religion too by which India’s inhabitants could be classified and divided, and it must have delighted Sydenham to quote the “South Indian Islamic League” saying “Nothing should be done which will weaken British authority in any manner whatsoever, and hand over the destinies of the Moslem community to a class which has no regard for their interests and no respect for their sentiments”.

Home Rule League

Sydenham was attacking the Montagu-Chelmsford Report which had stated that India had “a core of earnest men who believe sincerely and strive for political progress; around them a ring of less educated people to whom a phrase or a sentiment appeals; and an outside fringe of those who have been described as attracted by curiosity to this new thing, or who find diversions in attacking a big and very solemn Government as urchins might take a perilous joy at casting toy darts at an elephant.”

Annie Besant, herself an Englishwoman, was, along with BG Tilak and MA Jinnah, a pioneer of Indian nationalism at the time and headed the new Indian Home Rule League on the Irish pattern. The League stated its membership at 52,000. Sydenham multiplied that by five and asked if a quarter million could purport to rule 244 millions in an Indian democracy. Where, he demanded, was the “voice that cannot yet be heard, the voice of the peoples of India”? The imperialist jibe was that the British Raj would be replaced at best by a “Vakil Raj” of “high-caste” Hindus and at worst by anarchy and bloodshed.

Thirty years later India’s was partitioned and independent under Attlee’s Labour Party. Churchill took over the imperialist mantle and found solace in the new India agreeing to remain in Britain’s “Commonwealth”, saying that India doing so as a Republic did not impair “the majesty of the Crown or the personal dignity of the King”.

The ghosts of Churchill and Sydenham today would heartily cheer our Republic’s current President APJ Abdul Kalam agreeing to receive the “King Charles II Medal” from the Royal Society, and our current PM Manmohan Singh accepting honorary British degrees also while in office. Britain’s Crown Prince has proposed a cricket match between India and Pakistan to mark the 60th anniversary of 1947, and what, after all, could be less inappropriate to mark the event in British eyes? All that Indian nationalism would have been firmly put in its place.

Now Pakistan mostly goes unmentioned in the history of Indian nationalism because the new Pakistanis as of 14 August 1947 hardly felt or even wished to be independent of the British. Instead they longed only to acquire control over any kind of Muslim-majority Government that they could, and as much of the resources and joint military assets of the old India they could get their hands on.

The Kashmir dispute and India-Pakistan conflict have not been ones between Hindus and Muslims, regardless of what the BBC, CNN etc make themselves believe. As much as for any other reason, Kashmir escalated out of control because of British irresponsibility during the process of disintegration of the old Indian Army between the two new Dominions. Newly demobilised Mirpuri soldiers who had formed loyal British battalions were drawn into the cycle of Partition-related communal violence and reprisals in Punjab, which inevitably spilt over into Jammu and culminated in the attack on J&K State that commenced from Pakistan’s NWFP in October 1947 ~ plunging J&K into civil war with Sheikh Abdullah and Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad’s National Conference allied to the new secular India and Sardar Ibrahim’s Muslim Conference allied to the new and soon to be Islamic Pakistan. Field Marshal Auchinlek, the Supreme Commander of both Indian and Pakistani Armed Forces, had the decency to resign and abolish the so-called “Supreme Command” as soon as he realised his own forces were at war with one another.

It would not be too inaccurate to say Pakistan and Britain continued in a neo-colonial relationship throughout the 1950s and 1960s ~ all the way until Ayub Khan (who had been warmly entertained at Chequers during the Christine Keeler-Profumo matter), overplayed his hand by attacking India in 1965. That war followed by the East Pakistan cyclone in 1969 brought to a head the inherent political contradictions of the Pakistani state accumulated until that time, and soon led to Bangladesh’s creation in 1971. Britain has had no real interest in Bangladesh but as Pakistan had allowed dual nationality with Britain, Britain found itself with a lot of Bangladeshi immigrants whose “Indian” restaurants give modern Britons today something to look forward to every weekend.

Britain and its American ally continued to have deep interests in Pakistan, mostly because of the geopolitical importance of Pakistani real estate and the generally obsequious and compliant nature of the Pakistani military and diplomatic elite. All that began to change fundamentally when the real declaration of Pakistani independence occurred in the world with the AQ Khan nuclear bombs exploding in 1998 followed by the September 11 2001 attacks upon the USA.

Nationalism today

As for ourselves in India, we have developed some coherent and recognisable design of a modern political economy with a Union Government and more than two dozen State Governments, and we have abolished the imperialist lackeys known as the “princes”. Our Governments at Union and State levels change peacefully by periodic elections under the 1950 Constitution. This in itself would be seen as an astonishing democratic achievement relative to where we were one hundred years ago at the time of the Morley-Minto policies. Thanks to Jawaharlal Nehru, we have had universal franchise since 1952 (at a time when the USA still had its Jim Crow laws against black citizens) ~ yet the imperialist jibe of an infinitesimally small elite purporting to represent hundreds of millions of India’s people remains to be addressed.

It would be interesting to know how many descendants of the 52,000 members of Annie Besant’s Home Rule League remain in India and how many have emigrated to the USA, Britain, Australia etc. The children of our top military, bureaucratic, business, professional and academic elite have cheerfully led an exodus out of the country. E.g. the son of a former commanding general of the Indian Army’s Artillery Regiment is now a British businessman and member of Tony Blair’s new House of Lords. Indian Nationhood in the 21st Century no longer has to include Bangladeshis and Pakistanis who have ended up seeking to develop their own nationalisms, but it remains hard enough to try to include everyone else ~ from Tamils to Kashmiris and from Assamese and Mizos to Sikhs and Goans. Cleaning up our government accounting and sorting out our public finances nationwide so as to establish a sound money for everyone to use for the first time in sixty or seventy years, is among the first steps in defining our common goals as an independent nation.

(Postscript: The original text stated Independence and Paritition came “forty years” after the only date mentioned until that point in the text, which is of the 1918 Montagu-Chelmsford period.   Unconsciously, I was counting from the Morley-Minto period of 1906-1908 which was the constitutional precedent to Montagu-Chelmsford.)

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