Patriots and Partisans: From Nehru to Hindutva and Beyond

308 Pages·2012·1.33 MB·English

by  Guha

RAMACHANDRA GUHA
Patriots and Partisans
CONTENTS
~
Dedication
Preface: The Case for Polemical Moderation
PART I: DEBATING DEMOCRACY
1. Redeeming the Republic
2. A Short History of Congress Chamchagiri
3. Hindutva Hate Mail
4. The Past and Future of the Indian Left
5. The Professor and the Protester
6. Gandhi’s Faith and Ours
7. Verdicts on Nehru: The Rise and Fall of a Reputation
8. An Asian Clash of Civilizations?
The Sino-Indian Conflict Revisited
9. The Beauty of Compromise
PART II: THE WORD AND THE WORLD
10. The Rise and Fall of the Bilingual Intellectual
11. Pluralism in the Indian University
12. In Nehru’s House: A Story of Scholarship and Sycophancy
13. Life with a Duchess: A Personal History of the Oxford University Press
14. Turning Crimson at Premier’s
15. The Gentle Colossus: Krishna Raj and the EPW
Sources
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
ALSO BY RAMACHANDRA GUHA
The Unquiet Woods:
Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya
Savaging the Civilized:
Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India
Environmentalism:
A Global History
The Use and Abuse of Nature (with Madhav Gadgil)
An Anthropologist among the Marxists and Other Essays
A Corner of a Foreign Field:
The Indian History of a British Sport
The Last Liberal and Other Essays
How Much Should a Person Consume?
Thinking Through the Environment
India After Gandhi:
The History of the World’s Largest Democracy
EDITED WORKS
Social Ecology
The Picador Book of Cricket
Nature’s Spokesman: M. Krishnan and Indian Wildlife
Makers of Modern India
For Rukmini (Rinki) Banerji
Good Bihari, better Indian
If a modern Diogenes were to hunt out for Indians with his lantern in these days, he would
be sure to come across fervid Hindus, bigoted Muslims and fanatical souls deeply engrossed
with the problem of tirelessly finding out how unjustly their own particular community was
being treated, and he would have to ask in sorrow: ‘Where are the Indians?’
—Syed Abdullah Brelvi, editor of the Bombay Chronicle,
writing in May 1926
By independence, we have lost the excuse of blaming the British for anything going wrong.
If hereafter things go wrong, we will have nobody to blame but ourselves.
—B.R. Ambedkar, speaking to the Constituent Assembly
of India, 26 November 1949
Preface
The Case for Polemical Moderation
~
I
I am a person of moderate views, these sometimes expressed in extreme
fashion. This makes me an anomaly, an oddity even, for polemics are normally
the preserve of the right and the left. My friend and teacher Dharma Kumar—
whose shadow and example hangs over many of the essays in Patriots and
Partisans—once complained in print that Indian liberals ‘were a supine lot’.
They did not fight their corner vigorously enough. Offering their views
tentatively, hesitantly, liberals tended to be rolled over in public discourse by the
more committed (in all senses) extremists of the left and right.
In the 1950s and 1960s, most Indian intellectuals and writers would have
been happy to own the label ‘liberal’. The characteristic features of their brand
of liberalism were four. First, they believed in reform, not revolution; not in
utopian schemes for upturning or rehauling society, but in incremental social
change based on patient, steady hard work. Second, they urged, and often
worked for, the creation of impersonal, rule-bound institutions within the state
(as in universities and law courts), and in civil society (as in cooperatives or
women’s groups). Third, they kept their distance from political parties and
(especially) from individual politicians. Their allegiance was to the democratic
ideals of the Indian Constitution, namely, a multi-party political system based on
adult franchise, a secular state, a multilingual polity, equal rights for women, and
special privileges for disadvantaged sections such as Dalits and tribals. It was
not to any partisan rendering of these ideals. Finally, those Indian liberals
practised an unselfconscious and understated patriotism. They loved this country
and wished to leave India a better—or at least less discontented—place than it
was when they entered it.
In the 1970s and beyond, there was a rise of illiberal tendencies in Indian
society. The Indian Constitution had always been unpalatable to Marxist-
Leninists, since it did not privilege a particular political party (their own); and to
Hindu radicals, since it did not privilege a particular religious faith (their own).
Ever since Independence, religious extremists and left-wing revolutionaries have
made repeated attempts to impose their dogmas by force. In recent decades, a
third threat to democratic functioning has manifested itself—namely, the
corruption and corrosion of the constitutional centre, via the capture of public
institutions, and of political parties, by individuals, families and caste groups.
Dharma Kumar had lived through the heyday—the complacent heyday—of
Indian liberalism. As she grew older, she saw her fellow liberals wavering in the
face of these three challenges. Some writers and scholars, out of weariness or
opportunism, became courtiers of the Congress party. Others, out of disgust with
this sycophancy, walked into the arms of the Bharatiya Janata Party (thus
implicitly, at least, endorsing its ideal of the Hindu theocratic state). A third set
of intellectuals, out of guilt or foolishness, became apologists for the
revolutionary Maoists gaining influence in the forests and hills of central India.
It may be because I live in Bangalore, and not Delhi, that I have been able to
maintain my independence from political parties. Specific essays in this book
detail my disagreements with the Congress, the Sangh Parivar, and the
parliamentary Left. The Maoists and their fellow travellers dislike me too—one
of this ilk, writing on the website CG Net, attacked me for my ‘anti-left views’,
claiming that I had ‘strong ties to the Congress establishment’ and ‘stronger ties
to the American establishment’.
In truth, the only ‘establishment’ that I count myself close to is that which
runs Koshy’s Parade Café in Bangalore. However, the fellow traveller was right
in identifying me as a critic of the Maoists, whom I regard as being as great a
threat to decency and democracy as the corruption of the Congress or the bigotry
of the Sangh Parivar.
Whether writing of extremists of the left and right, or of opportunists and
dealmakers at the Centre, I have sought to affirm my liberalism in ways that
would not be considered ‘supine’. I have followed my teacher’s advice most
faithfully in newspaper columns. And I have departed from it most radically in
works of historical scholarship. When one has to state a case in a few hundred
words one can, perhaps must, do so vigorously. When one has a few hundred
pages to work with, it is best to let the depth of your research carry the burden of
your argument.
These distinctions in tone are linked to the respective time horizons in which
these genres operate. A column is written for the moment—the newspaper it is
written for constitutes the next morning’s rubbish. A book is written to endure;
to be read—or so the author hopes—for months and years after it is published.
One can be opinionated, even extravagantly so, in a column; one is obliged to be
more careful, and restrained, in a book.
Intermediate between the column and the book is the essay. Here, one can be
both passionate and substantial; thus to allow oneself into the narrative, while
stiffening it with a core of new or at least little-known facts. In five thousand
words (better still, ten thousand) one can develop the contours of an argument,
rather than simply state it. Its nuances and complexities can be expanded upon.
Its limitations and caveats can be underlined. And yet, since this is an essay and
not one long, continuous book, the personality of the writer can—for good or for
ill—still be allowed to exhibit itself.
The fifteen essays in Patriots and Partisans explore different facets of the
Republic of India’s heroic and flawed compact with nationhood and democracy.
Some essays appear here in print for the first time; the others have all been
revised, updated and, in several cases, substantially expanded for publication in
this book. I have sequenced the essays so that they better convey the thrust of the
larger argument as well as the author‘s presuppositions. Some essays, published
originally in scholarly journals, carried footnotes and references; these have here
been dispensed with.
The nine essays in Part I of this book deal principally with political matters;
the six essays in Part II principally with the life of the mind. However, there are
some reflections on scholars and writers in Part I, and much reflection on the