One of the greatest attributes of India is in its diversity and in lies its admiration, and that it pronounces the soul and success of the country....but it yields a panorama of enchantment and disenchantment
Thousands of years ago, Aryans from Central Asian steppes migrated to the northern India conquering the local tribes and enslaving them as Dasa (male) and Dasi (female). The immigration of the Aryans, according to some historians, is supposed to have begun around 1750 BC, and their first sacred book, Rigveda, (“Verses of Knowledge”) composed around 1500 - 1400 BC. Mainstream history says that the Aryans, who spoke Sanskrit, one of the oldest Indo-European languages, came from central Asia and Persia to India between 1000BC and 2000BC. Thus Sanskrit came to India from abroad and then it developed further and flourished in India.
In her book, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, Romila Thapar, India’s most respected ancient historian, demolishes the myths that the “Aryans” were indigenous to northern India, inhabitants of cities of the Indus Valley civilisation. Instead she shows how the pastoralist speakers of Indo-Aryan migrated to India from the Levant, since the earliest inscription in that language is found not in India but in northern Syria.
The Aryans’ holy book was a mixture of philosophy; prayers and stories addressed to various Aryan gods and solicit their bounty. Thus came a core tradition of Hinduism, prayers, festivals, and countless retellings in drama, sculpture and painting across India. A verse of the Rigveda enshrines the original fourfold caste division. God made man, the verse says, the learned priestly Brahmin who emerged from his forehead, the warrior Kshatriya from his arms, the farmer-merchant Vaishya from his thighs, and the labourer-artisan Sudra from his feet.
The Untouchables, unfortunately, remained outside the classification and thus outcasts. Each caste, to make the matter confusing, has many sub-castes. Caste like apartheid, the original term for it, Varna meant, “colour” in Sanskrit. The light-skinned Aryans who invaded north India and who wanted to put down the darker indigenous inhabitants probably introduced the caste system for governance. The caste system where Brahmin, as an elitist caste, was the top of the ruling class was an important pillar of the system of class exploitation in India. Though sometimes it is claimed that India is mainly a Hindu country but Buddhism was the dominant religion in India for many hundreds of years and Jainism has had an equally long history and in fact their large presence are still today.
“Hinduism is more a way of life than a form of thought,” Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, formerly India’s President, explained in The Hindu View of Life (1926). Though the term Hindu was said to have devised by the Persians and Arabs, after the river Sindhu or Indus but Pankaj Mishra, a young successful Indian novelist, points out that the very word “Hinduism” was invented by the British in the 19th century. Prior to that, it was a complex web of folk beliefs. Once it had been defined as a single faith, it became the foundation of an ambition to be a modern state. Mishra sees this as the dangerous dream of an ambitious Indian elite suffering from Europe envy. Mishra has written: “Their agenda – a militaristic nation-state with a culturally homogenous population of Hindus – resembles not so much anything in the Bhagavad-Gita as it does the nation – the empire-building project of the 19th-century Europe.”
In his book, The Argumentative Indian, Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen argue, “When the number of Hindus is counted, and it is established that the vast majority of Indians are in fact Hindus, this is not a counting of religious beliefs, but essentially of ethnic background. But when generalisations are made about, say the divinity of Rama, or the sacred status of the Ramayana, beliefs are invoked. But using the two approaches together, a numerical picture is constructed in which it is supposed that a vast majority of Indians believe in the divinity of Rama and the sacred status of the Ramayana. For a large proportion of the Hindus, however, that attribution would be a mistake, since hundreds of millions of people who are defined as Hindus in the first sense do not actually share the beliefs which would be central to the second approach.”
Some Dalits argue that Hinduism is not really a religion, but an ideology designed to sustain the status of Brahmins. Dalit leaders put the question starkly. Can Hinduism exist without caste? Can caste exist without discrimination?
Then came succession of Muslim conquerors again mainly from Central Asia and ruled India for a very long time. “Today the educated world has rejected the vulgar theory that the rise of Islam was a triumph of fanaticism over sober and tolerant people”, M N Roy, India’s distinguished scholar, wrote in the early 1930s a fascinating chapter of human history. “No invader can establish an abiding domination over conquered peoples, except with their active support or tacit toleration.” M N Roy went on, “Islam rose as a protection against religious persecution and refuge for the oppressed... It was altogether misconception that the progress was due to the sword alone. The sword may change an acknowledged national creed but it can not affect the consciences of men.”
M N Roy further added: “If the sociological programme of Islam found support of Indian masses, it was because the philosophy behind that programme was better than Hindu philosophy which had been responsible for the social chaos from which Islam showed a way out for the masses of the Indian people.”
While most of Catholic Europe was given over to the Inquisition, and in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake for heresy, Akbar (1556 – 1605) was declaring, “no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.” He set up the earliest known multi-religious discussion groups, where groups of Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jains, Jews, Parsees and even atheists discussed where and why they differed and how they could live together – a tolerant society in action where multiculturalism thrived. Akbar was well ahead of his time in arranging state-organised inter-faith dialogue – perhaps the first in the world.
Muslims’ rich 800-year history of syncretism, intellectual heterodoxy and pluralism culminated into Hindu-Muslim hybridist that led to intermingled creativity what may be called as “chutnified” (to borrow Salman Rushdie’s phrase) to date. William Dalrymple, internationally acclaimed Scottish writer and historian describes India’s “composite culture” fittingly: “This cultural synthesis took many forms. In Urdu and Hindi were born languages of great beauty that to different extents mixed Persian and Arabic words with the Sanskrit-derived vernaculars of north India. Similarly, just as the cuisine of north India combined the vegetarian dal and rice of India with the kebab and roti of central Asia, so in music the long-necked Persian lute was combined with the Indian vina to form the sitar, now the Indian instrument most widely known in the west. In architecture there were similar process of hybridist as the great monuments of the Mughals reconciled the styles of the Hindus with those of Islam, to produce a fusion more beautiful than either.”
When the British, architect of independence and partition, (notably Viscount Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy) left India, after two hundred years of domination, in 1947, it failed in its responsibilities in handing over power in an orderly manner. The British, bankrupt after the Second World War, were determined to cut and run regardless of the impact on their restless subjects. India’s founding fathers, many of them lived and educated in England were though enlightened and liberal in their views were somewhat afar from the complex ground realities of their own societies. Amid mistrust and jostling to grab power the founding fathers hurriedly agreed with, soon to be gone, the British Raj and put their signatures to the documents declaring the partitioning of India into two – India and Pakistan – oblivious of the impending hurricane of mob violence about to sweep, in particular, the northern part of the country.
In his current book, Jinnah: India-Partition Independence, Jaswant Singh, India’s prominent politician raises the Partition issue: who’s guilty for the mess we are still trying to clean up? Was Jinnah, the isolated, lonely liberal who died wanting Hindu-Muslim unity, or the Congress, led by Nehru and Sardar Patel, too arrogant and impatient to accommodate his demand?
Jaswant Singh suggests that Mr. Jinnah, a secular man who drank and smoked, rarely visited mosque, has too long been demonised by Indian society. Furthermore, he argues that Jinnah only raised the prospect of a separate Pakistan with independence leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi as a bargaining tool and that it was the inflexibility of Jawaharlal Nehru, the man who became indeoendent India’s first prime minister that ultimately led to the division of the sub-continent.
Jinnah believed in federal system that kept the country as one. Nehru, by contrast, demanded a system that was centralised. “Nehru believed in a highly centralised policy. That’s what he wanted India to be,” Jaswant Singh in one of his televsion interviews remarked and added. “Jinnah wanted a federal polity. That, even Gandhi accepted. Nehru didn’y. Consistently he stood in the way of a federal India until 1947 when it became a partitioned India.”
However, according to Mushirul Hasan, from Indian academia, giving his view in India’s Outlook magazine, “It is ridiculous in a mass movement to hold one person responsible – I would say it was a collective failure of the nationalist leadership.”
In his book, Indian Muslims, Rafiq Zakaria noted Maulana “Azad felt apprehensive of the bloody consequences of partitioning the country; he told the Viceroy that he was playing with fire, but Mountbatten told Azad that once there was Partition, he shall see to it that there is “no bloodshed and no riot…I will order Army and the Air Force to act and I shall use tanks and aeroplanes to suppress anybody who wants to create trouble.”
Rafiq Zakaria added: “The aftermath shocked everyone, but Mountbatten never regretted the rivers of blood that flew.” Zakaria quoted Phillip Ziegler, the official biographer of Lord Mountbatten the Viceroy “could do all that he did in such a short time and so successfully because basically he was a showman with no touch of humanism in him.”
The partition of the subcontinent resulted in the death of at least 1 million people and up to 15m more were forced to flee their homes. Thousands of children disappeared and thousands of women were raped. The unseemly haste of the departure plan – brought forward by 10 months – that created hurricane of violence polarised communities on the sub-continent as never before. The pogroms and killing were organised by gangs, vigilantes and militias across northern, western and eastern India. Today the upheaval on both sides of the partition line would be described as ethnic cleansing on a gigantic scale. It left two traumatised, injured nations – suspicious and fearful of one another even to this day – where once there had been one country of loosely interwoven peoples.
Britain failed to organise and supervise any preparation or consideration of giving attention to the central issues of citizenship, security and property rights in the division of the country. Furthermore, the colonial power accepted no responsibility for the carnage that was taking place and they refused to allow the British troops still in India to keep order or protect people. The unruly end of British Raj was a shock of epic scale. No wonder, according to the historian Andrew Roberts, the accidental viceroy Lord Mountbatten should have been court-martialed when he got back to London.
Similar point was made in a rather harsh words in his book, Our Times, by A N Wilson in his allegation that “by gross mismanagement in India he {Earl Mountbatten} was in effect, if not by intention, a mass murderer.” Nonetheless, a canny negotiator, Lord Mountbatten bluffed his way though the biggest retreat in history and got away with Britain’s “majesty undiminished”.
Thus the result of the Partition was the largest migration of a human population in contemporary history that still carry and pass down a story of unimaginable pain, hate, horror and mistrust has left Kashmir trapped in a nightmare. Many thousands have been killed in the Indian sector of Kashmir over the last 20 years – estimate range from 60,000 to 100,000. Indian Kashmiris survive on antidepressants and the cost of quite has been a lost generation. 700,000 – over one half of the entire Indian army – soldiers are stationed there.
Even in the turbulent period many Muslims who did not believe in the partition of the country remained unmoved despite death of their relatives and destruction of their properties and businesses. Many Muslims, who may have been with the movement of Pakistan, on the benefit of hindsight, realised their own drift and exercised their choices to remain stayed to the land where their forefathers lived and were buried. The result is that currently the population of Indian Muslims numbering over 150m may be more than the total Muslims population of Pakistan.
One of the outcomes of the Partition is that over a period of time, now there is severe disenchantment amongst the Indian Muslims. Growing poverty, dwindling opportunity of education, lacking employment and business opportunities and surviving in ghettoes, that is what Muslim community in India could now be described as. Now Indian Muslims are politically marginalised except that they are useful vote-banks and are ceremoniously lured to line-up outside the polling booths during election rituals.
Indian Muslims are horror-struck to watch that “in 2002 the Hindu nationalist government of Gujarat supervised the killing of more than two thousands Muslims,” Pankaj Mishra in his column in London’s The Guardian goes on: “The state’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, who green lighted the mass murder, seemed a monstrous figure to many Indians; they then watched aghast as the citizens of Gujarat – better-educated and more prosperous than most Indians – re-elected Modi by a landslide after the pogrom. In 2007, a few months after the magazine Tehelka taped Hindu nationalists in Gujarat boasting how they raped and dismembered Muslims, Modi again won elections with contemptuous ease. Though prohibited from entering the US, Modi is now courted by corporate groups, including Tata, and frequently hailed as India’s next prime minister.” Nobody has been sentenced for the appalling murder of former MP Ehsan Jaffri in Gujarat’s slaughter. If Muslims say there is no justice for them in India, who is to disagree?
In his column in The Washington Post, Dileep Padgaonkar, a former editor of The Times of India, now editor of bi-monthly magazine India & Global Affairs, wrote late last year about matters relating to Muslims in India. In his words: “Terrorism suspects have been picked up at random and denied legal rights. Allegations of torture by police are routine. Questions have been raised about the “encounters” between police and terrorism suspects. Suspects have been held for years as their court cases have dragged on. Convictions have been few and far between.
Commissions set up to investigate particularly gory incidents of religious violence have taken their time to produce reports. Few are opened for public debate. The recommendations in these reports have been routinely ignored or else implemented in a highly selective manner. Muslims convicted in some cases have been punished while Hindus have been let off lightly or not punished at all. As a consequence, India’s Muslims have begun to lose faith in the Indian state, its institutions and its instruments. This has led to the radicalization of Muslims youths. Religious extremism has pushed men onto the path of violence.”
Indian identity is an idea forged in diversity, according to Shahi Tharoor, author and former under secretary general of the UN who argues “every one of us is in a minority.” Caste and language divisions put everyone a minority. “It is the idea of an ever-ever land – merging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy. The whole point of Indian pluralism is you can be many things and one thing.”
http://blogs.salaam.co.uk/article.php?story=20090914182913569