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26. May 2010 by admin.
Remembering a War: Sino-Indian War of 1962
The Rediff Special/Claude Arpi
If someone asked me what is the greatest scam since Independence, I would have some difficulty answering. I might initially consider the ‘Jeep case’ involving Krishna Menon, or the smoking guns of Bofors.
But in the end, the one that I find the most stupid, and perhaps the most harmful to India’s interests in the long run, is the confiscation of history by government babus under the Public Records Act.
These rules vaguely state that “unclassified public records more than 30 years old should be made available to any bona fide research scholar, but subject to such exceptions and restrictions as may be prescribed”.
Because of the last part of the sentence, the people of India are today not able to know about their recent history. One of the main casualties is the 1962 war with China. As a sad result of this policy, the Chinese version of history is often prevalent, even in India.
A few weeks after the debacle of October-November 1962, Lieutenant General J N Chaudhuri constituted a committee to study the causes of the ‘Himalayan blunder’. An Anglo-Indian general called Henderson Brooks was requested to go through the official records and prepare a report on the war. Sometime in 1963, the general presented his study to Nehru and a couple of his ministers. The report was immediately classified ‘Top Secret’.
One can understand that at that time the prime minister did not want the report made to be public, as he may have had to take responsibility for the unpreparedness of the army and, most probably, resign.
The tragedy is not that the report was ‘classified’ in 1963, but that it continues to remain classified today. Forty years later, nobody has still seen the report. That is, except for one person: a British foreign correspondent named Neville Maxwell. The rumour is that a senior minister passed on the report to him.
Nine years after the war, when Henry Kissinger made a secret trip to Beijing to prepare President Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972, he stayed five days in China and had a series of 10 crucial meetings with Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier.
The transcripts of these talks, which were recently ‘declassified’ by the US administration, are mind-opening, particularly in the above context. Here are some of Kissinger’s remarks to Zhou Enlai: “I read the book by Maxwell that the prime minister recommended to me last time, and it is our view, certainly at the White House, that the Indians are applying the same tactics to that situation as they did to you.”
Kissinger refers to Maxwell’s book India’s China War, which shows India as an aggressive nation that bullied China during the 1962 war. Later in the discussion, the Chinese premier comes back to Maxwell’s book: “We [the Chinese] understand best the traditions of India. After having read the book of Maxwell you also believe it [that bullying others] is the traditional policy of India.”
It is amazing that Maxwell, thanks to the Government of India’s propensity for secrecy, is the only person who has managed to see the Henderson Brooks report. Maxwell stated himself in the Economic & Political Weekly in 2001: “The report includes no surprises and its publication would be of little significance, but for the fact that so many in India still cling to the soothing fantasy of a 1962 Chinese ‘aggression’.”
Yes, the theory put forward by the Chinese and Maxwell is that the war was only due to Nehru’s aggressive policy and China had no other choice but to launch a ‘pre-emptive attack’ on October 20 on the slopes of Tagla ridge.
Not only did India lose the Aksai Chin and other territories in Kashmir in the 1950s, but India became the bully, the ‘expansionist’ nation.
One can only be sad that 40 years after the event, the Government of India is still adding water to the Chinese half-baked history mill by continuing to hide what is most probably a quite insignificant report.
The burial of the Henderson Brooks report, however, raises several other questions. When one reads Indian newspapers, one gets the impression that the people of India (or at least the journalists of India) are greatly interested in history. For the past few years, not a day has passed without one comment or another on the history textbooks that have been revised by the NCERT; or the HRD minister who is supposedly spending his time ‘rewriting’ Indian history, or adding colour to historical facts.
But tell me, what is wrong in ‘rewriting’ history books when it is necessary? The great son of India, Gautama Buddha, once told his disciples: ‘As the wise test gold by burning, cutting and rubbing it on a piece of touchstone, so are you to accept my words only after examining them and not merely out of regard for me.”
As long as there is new information, new inputs or documents, history needs to be researched and researched again, in the Buddha’s fashion. Is it not in the interest of a nation to know her past?
The great misfortune in the case of the 1962 war is that there is no will from the government’s side to give the means to those inclined to do this research to obtain a truer picture of the past.
Personally, I faced a similar problem when I tried to research my two pet subjects: Tibet and Kashmir. Going through the painful exercise of trying to access some documents at the time of the Chinese invasion of Tibet (1950) was a nightmare.
At the National Archives of India, I was told that all documents for the NEFA area (which included Tibet and Bhutan) were ‘classified’ after 1913 and nobody could access them. For ‘Gilgit area’ [read Kashmir], the date is 1923. This colonial terminology gives an indication of the backwardness of the historical studies in India. Have not the British left India 55 years ago?
What about the famous ‘Nehru’s Papers’? They are kept in the Nehru Library by a private trust, chaired by the leader of the opposition, and you have to obtain her consent to see them. In any case, you cannot see them, as they are ‘restricted’.
Only ‘official’ historians are able to study them. The very helpful staff can only tell you: “Sorry, sir, this is the rule.” India must be the only nation where the prime minister’s official papers belong to his family and not the state!
In my case it was even more stupid because most of the political files regarding Tibet from 1914 till as late as 1952-53 were freely available for researchers in the India Office Library and Records in London. The moral of the story: go to London to study Indian history.
Different reasons are given as to why historical documents should not be ‘declassified’. The most current and irrelevant argument is that these old documents are of a ’sensitive’ nature and their circulation may jeopardize India’s security.
I believe that some years ago, a ‘group of secretaries’, the most dreaded order of the babu species, stopped the publication of the report of the 1965 war because: “it gave information about certain aspects of command and control.” Luckily, a Good Samaritan managed to get hold of a copy and post it on an Internet site.
But something is even more incongruous. While the Government of India is holding the Henderson Brooks report close to its chest, a very historic international conference was held in Cuba recently.
Many will remember that the week the Chinese troops entered in the Northeast and in Ladakh, humanity was coming very close to its first nuclear war. This was the Cold War’s climax: the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in Cuba over the installation of ballistic missiles targeting American cities threatened to degenerate into World War III.
To commemorate the stupendous events of the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban government, with the National Security Archive of George Washington University, organized a conference titled “The October Crisis: Political Perspectives 40 Years Later”.
Some of the veterans who participated in those historic days were invited to discuss the conflict between Khrushchev and Kennedy.
During the last session of the conference, the participants, including Cuban president Fidel Castro and former US secretary of defence Robert McNamara discussed some newly declassified documents.
The documents show that the Soviet nuclear-armed tactical weapons in Cuba stayed there after the missiles were withdrawn, and may even have been intended for Cuban custody.
“Documents released today included verbatim Soviet records of the contentious meetings between top Soviet leader Anastas Mikoyan and top Cuban leaders, including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, during Mikoyan’s trip to Cuba in early November; Soviet orders first preparing the tactical weapons for training the Cubans and then, on November 20, ordering their withdrawal; and a prophetic summary of the crisis written by the British ambassador to Cuba, who predicted that the crisis could ultimately rebound to the benefit of the Castro regime and the long-term survival of Communism in Cuba,” said a press release.
Some may think that Cuba is a totalitarian banana republic, but Fidel Castro did organise the conference and participate in it.
We cannot dream of such a debate in India today. Why? I have no answer.
We have in Delhi many universities, policy centres, think-tanks, a host of retired ‘thinking’ generals (as if the serving generals are not able to think). Why can’t any of them take up the challenge and open a debate on what really happened in 1962? Many fields of research have remained untouched. To give a few examples:
*When was Aksai Chin really occupied? Why did the government react so late?
*The relation between the 1959 uprising in Lhasa and the 1962 war (one very symptomatic fact is that the Chinese followed the same route as the Dalai Lama took when he escaped to India in 1959) as well as the Panchen Lama’s petition against the party in 1962;
*The importance of the split between Moscow and Beijing, which came into the open in October 1962; and Moscow’s sudden change of stance vis-à-vis India in the midst of the conflict;
*The relation between the Cuban crisis and the 1962 Indo-China war;
*When did China prepare the 1962 operations and what were her real motivations;
*The internal political factors in China and Mao Zedong’s own motivations (he was facing strong opposition from within the Communist Party after his disastrous Great Leap Forward and was sidelined);
*The reasons for the sudden unilateral withdrawal by the Chinese;
*The role of the Indian Communists during the war;
*The non-intervention of President Ayub Khan.The recently ‘declassified’ documents available in the Russian, Cuban, and East European archives, as well as the already available materials collected by organizations such as the National Security Archives or the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington, DC, could certainly be of great help.
But is India interested? This seems to be the main problem. If the media and the public had made the same amount of noise for the Henderson Brooks report and other archival materials to be released as they have done for the so-called ‘rewritten’ textbooks, we would have had a truer picture of 1962 war history today. No harm in hoping!
(Claude Arpi, author of The Fate Of Tibet (HarAnand), which has also been translated into French, writes regularly for rediff.com)
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17. October 2009 by admin.
How Gandhi and Nehru assassinated the Hindu nation. Both were a creation of the British to do their dirty work for them on the hapless Hindus. I have posted excerpts from Eclipse of the Hindu Nation: Gandhi and his freedom struggle by Radha Rajan
Excerpts:
When Savarkar was exonerated on charges of criminal conspiracy to kill Gandhi, one of the conditions during his release was that he should not be given any public reception nor should there be any public demonstration of rejoicing. This condition was inspired by Gandhi’s exhortation in 1937-38 to the political prisoners of Bengal not to be a party to any celebration, not to hold meetings or make speeches or hold celebratory processions.
The political doctrine, that Hindu nationalists must be neither seen nor heard, was beginning to gain ground. Savarkar was arrested again on 5th April, 1950 in the wake of the extremely foolish Nehru-Liaquat Pact, which like its infamous predecessor, the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, gave more than it got in return. According to the Pact, the governments of India and Pakistan agreed that each shall ensure to the minorities throughout its territories, complete equality of citizenship, irrespective of religion; a full sense of security in respect of life, culture, property and personal honour.
It also guaranteed fundamental human rights of the minorities, such as freedom of movement, speech, occupation and worship. The pact also provided for the minorities to participate in the public life of their country, to hold political or other offices and to serve in their country’s civil and armed forces.
Savarkar opposed the Pact vehemently. He prophesized that while the Indian Government would keep its promise, the Pakistani Government would go back on the same; and the life, freedom and dignity of the Hindus in Pakistan would continue to be in jeopardy. Needless to say, Savarkar was proved right about the Muslim psyche not only in Pakistan but also in Jammu and Kashmir.
But Nehru whose determination to incarcerate Savarkar for life had been thwarted in 1948, was determined to either keep him in prison for the rest of life or silence his fiercest political critic forever. Towards this end, when it was driven home to Nehru that Savarkar could not be kept in prison endlessly without reason, his release on 13 July 1950 came with the debilitating condition that he would remain confined to his home and would abjure politics completely. Nehru continued where Gandhi had left off but with greater force because Nehru, like the British government before1947, could back his intent to decimate Hindu nationalists with ruthless use of state power. Nehru was determined to clear the country’s political arena of Hindu nationalists and he was enabled in his de-Hinduising mission by the Indian Constitution which was drafted and approved by a Constituent Assembly where the Congress was in the majority and Congress members were hand-picked by Gandhi and Nehru. The Indian Constitution, slanting decisively towards religious minorities, owed much to the Motilal Nehru Report.
The Motilal Nehru report was also the harbinger of the potentially divisive linguistic states as also the western liberal-Christian political tenet that the state shall not have any religion; ominously for the Hindus of the country, not one of these principles, which eventually went on to define the new Indian state after 1947, was challenged successfully in the Constituent Assembly.
The Indian Constitution derived equally from the Government of India Act 1935. Hindus and their interests were thus trampled under the feet of the combined might of a de-Hinduised Constituent Assembly, the Motilal Nehru Report and the GOI Act, 1935. They remain trampled till today. Nehru’s Congress in his lifetime and Nehruvian secular polity after Nehru continued to traverse the path of anti-Hindu politics of minority-ism; its results are there for all to see: Hindus have lost territory to Islam and Christianity in the North, North-East, East and West.
The anti-Hindu polity that prevails today has turned a Nelson’s eye to the rapidly changing religious demography in the country’s border and coastal districts. In stark contrast to how Nehru dealt with Hindu nationalists immediately after independence, the Muslim League, the Jamait-e-ulema-e Hind and its members suffered no persecution. They neither disbanded themselves nor were they banned by Nehru’s government. They lay low until such time that Nehru and Nehruvian secularism had rendered the Hindus completely impotent to reverse vivisection or even its consequences, and have now reared their heads again and this time the Hindus are confronting not just one Khilafat Committee, but innumerable jiahdi outfits with roots across the country and across the country’s borders, and with the same objectives as the Jinnah-led Muslim League before independence. So far, both secular Indian polity and Hindu organizations have proved incapable of handling the threat and they continue their jihad against the Hindus and their bhumi successfully and with little cost to them. Gandhi and the Indian National Congress did to our revolutionaries and warriors of armed resistance what the British Government did to Aurobindo and Savarkar – laid debilitating conditions for release. Hindus must confront the ugly truth that while the British Government and the Gandhi-Nehru Congress adopted the same methods to disarm and decapitate Hindu nationalists, Hindu nationalists of the 19th and 20 centuries have also lost strength and spirit in the midst of war, leaving the battle-field unchallenged to their tormentors. The kshatriya had indeed been effectively disarmed and banished from public gaze. Indian polity and the country’s public spaces have been de-Hinduised by state power and Hindus have been politically disempowered also by state power. Hindu interests and minority interests have been made into a zero sum game also by use of state power, as witnessed in the most recent turbulence in Jammu and Kashmir over the issue of land allotment for Hindu pilgrims during the Amarnath Yatra and the unchecked license permitted to Christian missionaries who hide behind the constitutional provision of freedom to practice and propagate one’s religion.
This book is intended to demonstrate to Hindus the origins and path of their disempowerment and to kindle in them a burning desire to capture and put in place self-conscious Hindu state power or Hindu rajya to protect and defend the Hindu rashtra. The Hindu nation must begin by questioning the concepts of freedom of religion, minority-protection and right to self-determination because the Hindu bhumi historically and without an Indian Constitution had made all religions and their adherents welcome to this land. This Hindu trait of not looking upon any faith as being inimical to dharma and the failure by Hindus to take note of the ultimate political objectives of all Abrahamic faiths has cost the Hindus and the Hindu nation very dear. If the nation has to deal resolutely with forces and ideologies which threaten the territory and people of the rashtra and this includes jihad, the evangelical Church and anti-Hindu communism, then the nation has to assert its nationhood; one aspect of such an assertion will be the nature of the state or rajya which must necessarily be Hindu in ethos. Separatism, demographic imbalance, and increasing attacks against the state by Naxalism and other terrorist outfits owning allegiance to Communism, have to be dealt with not as law and order issues, but only as ideological issues which confront the core question of the basis of nationhood of this bhumi.
Secularism, for obvious reasons has failed to check and neutralize all threats to the nation’s territory and people only because it is in a state of denial, and has therefore failed to put in place structures and laws which will approach the threats rooted in the sense of Hindu nationhood. National security is best ensured only when the sense of nationhood is faultless and the threats to the nation or rashtra are perceived as threats to nation, nationhood and nationalism. Needless to say, the book seeks to demonstrate that there is no other nationalism on this bhumi other than Hindu nationalism.
The superficial convergence of interests between Hindus and Muslims in 1857 interrupted the continuing Hindu civilisational resistance and struggle against Islam, while Gandhi-inspired Nehruvian secularism has rendered all Hindu resistance to both Islam and the Church hors-de-combat. Hindu nationalists understand that the civilisational struggle against Islam and the Church has to be revived in order that it may be resolved decisively. The destruction that has been wreaked by state power can be corrected without bloodshed only by return of state power to self-conscious Hindus. Only self-conscious Hindu state power can arrange the nation’s affairs to serve dharma and the dharmi. For such a state of affairs we must begin to question political ideas and concepts that originated in the West as a reaction to the predatory Church, to slavery and to colonialism’s invasion and forcible occupation of foreign lands.
Thus the concepts of religious freedom, self-determination, human rights became necessary to protect the disempowered victims of White Christianity – the natives of lands occupied by European colonizers whose numbers have been reduced to negligible numbers, and for victims of slavery. With great foresight European colonialist countries created the United Nations with a charter which, if one were to read the fine print with sound political sense, only serves to deter and punish any idea of revenge or determined correction of the legacy of colonialism in post-colonial independent nations.
However, the truth is that neither the countries forcefully advocating democracy and liberal political values, nor Islam which has never subscribed to contemporary, liberal Christian political ideology, nor the Jewish-majority Israel have been hamstrung by these concepts when they perceived a threat to their national identity and sense of nationhood. Till the present day we still see wars between nations, fought by the full might of state power, which are essentially Jewish Israel versus Islam, Jews versus the evangelical Church, West versus the rest and Islam versus the rest.
It is only in India that a de-Hinduised and virulently anti-Hindu political culture thwarts Hindus from resisting and fighting the predatory intentions of Islam and Christianity because as we pointed out in the Introduction, it is only in India that we have a state which does not derive from the culture and ethos of its majority populace and is therefore not obliged to protect Hindu interests and Hindu sensibilities. This state of affairs must change if the nation has to deal effectively with jihad and with disaffection and separatism arising from the untrammeled license enjoyed by the Church in India. Concepts of minority-protection, self-determination and religious freedom cannot apply to the adherents of Islam and Christianity on Hindu bhumi under cover of democracy and constitutional rights. These provisions have to be reviewed, given the ultimate goal that these two minority religions have already achieved in Jammu and Kashmir and in the North-east.
That Pakistan and Bangladesh came into being because the Indian National Congress never had a sense of this nation, and because the continuing de-Hinduising trend in Indian polity has resulted in the perverted polity of J&K and growing separatism in the North-east, must goad Hindu nationalists into first reviewing and then correcting the course of anti-Hindu Nehruvian secularism as the guiding spirit of Indian polity. Such a course correction is mandated if there has to be real harmony among communities in this nation and not false peace resting on the artificial and un-natural idea of Nehruvian secularism, which is the Indian derivative of alien political ideas and trends which have little
to do with Hindu-civilisational tradition of statecraft and polity. The time has come to set down the coffins of Gandhi and Nehru from the unwilling shoulders of this nation.
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28. September 2009 by admin.
Behind Every Jinnah, there is a Gandhi- III
Radha Rajan
Gandhi’s INC: tap-dancing to nowhere:
The contrast between Jinnah’s Muslim League and Gandhi’s INC could not have been more glaring. In August 1947, Jinnah, the Muslims and the Muslim League were not only free from colonial rule, but had also successfully torn the Indian nation apart; while Gandhi’s INC watched the British leave India at the time and manner of their choosing, a torn and bleeding nation in which the sense of nation and nationhood of Gandhi’s Hindus had been perverted beyond belief by Gandhi’s satyagraha and non-violence, while the pride, dignity and valour of Hindu nationalists lay in ruins. At the Surat Congress in December 1907, the Indian National Congress split into two distinct ideological groups, the Moderates and Nationalists. The Nationalist group headed by Tilak, Lajpat Rai and Aurobindo set complete political freedom as its objective. The INC split exactly one year after the creation of the Muslim League in December 1906. - “The ‘Moderate’ Indian politician aspires to be an Imperial citizen. His ambition has at last been screwed up to the point of seeking equality with his ‘colonial brother’. His loyalty draws him towards the Empire and his politics draws him towards self-government and the resultant is self-government within the Empire. Colonies have been granted self-government within the Empire and it logically follows that if the Indians try, try and try again, they too will gain their end because nothing is impossible to perseverance. Thus two birds will be killed with one stone. The ruling people, whose immense power can be turned against us any moment if they happen to be irritated, will be pleased with our desire not to break away from the Empire and, at the same time the spirit of independence which is constantly urging us to demand a greater and greater measure of self-government will have its full play. Such a compromise, such a smooth scheme of accommodating comprehensiveness is being welcomed everywhere as suddenly revealed to a political prophet who is going the round of the country with the inviting message: ‘Come to me, all ye that are heavy-laden, and I shall give rest unto you’.” (Aurobindo, Yet there is Method in It, Bande Mataram, February 25, 1907) Aurobindo had summed up succinctly the political objectives that Gokhale, Naoroji, Surendranath Bannerjea and the dominant Parsees in India and London had set for the INC – greater participation in government but within the Empire; that is, while the English educated Indians would become ministers in the Viceroy’s Council or the Governor’s Council, the nation would remain enslaved under British colonial rule. Gandhi returned from South Africa to fill the vacuum in the INC intentionally created by the British by removing Tilak and Aurobindo from public life. It is worth repeating that when Gandhi came back to India his ‘Mahatma’ halo was waiting for him. He climbed to the highest position in the INC with the assurance that the halo gave him, facilitated by the absence of Gokhale who had passed away, Tilak who was weakened by age and colonial persecution, and Aurobindo who had removed himself to Pondicherry for the safe pastures of spiritual practice. From 1917, the INC was under the effective and despotic control of Gandhi and Gandhi only; all other leaders came a distant second and played at best only second fiddle. Subhash Bose, KM Munshi and Rajaji who had serious differences with Gandhi’s policies and the direction in which he was leading the INC, were summarily thrown out of the party by Gandhi with harsh and insulting words as in the case of Bose, or with sweet reasonableness as with KM Munshi and Rajaji. But the fact remains Gandhi did not tolerate dissent or differences of opinion when the opinion was his. If Jinnah was successful, he owed his success in no mean measure to Gandhi’s leadership of the INC. British colonial rule of India ended with the vivisection of the Hindu bhumi. Hindu nationalists reject the projection of August 15, 1947 as Independence Day; not the least because it was only self-rule day as the British monarch continued to remain Head of the State until January 1950, but primarily because ending colonial rule was predicated on vivisection. This is the truth that our stalwarts in Nehruvian-secular academe, and the Hindu stalwarts in the Congress and the BJP do not want to see, much less articulate – that the British, tactically using the Cabinet Mission proposals, made their leaving India conditional upon vivisection. Vivisection of the Hindu bhumi became a certainty because –
- Gandhi and the Hindus in the INC did not understand the political objectives of Islam, or if they did, they had no objections
- Gandhi did not understand that colonialism (in this case the British government) was only a derivative of the White Church and had the same political objective as Islam with regard to non-Christian nations and peoples
- Gandhi carried back to India in 1915 the conviction from his years in South Africa that British colonialism civilized the Empire’s enslaved people and lifted them up from sloth, superstition and barbarity
- Gandhi did not understand in the critical 1940s decade that western nations – America and the nations of Europe, were confronted by anti-Christian and anti-capital Soviet Union and that this intra-Western nations’ conflict and inter-play was impacting the enslaved nations in Africa and Asia in a manner that would determine post-colonial world order
- In spite of knowing what was happening in Indonesia and Mountbatten’s role in aborting Indonesia’s fledgling independence from colonial rule, Gandhi not only allowed Louis Mountbatten to come to India as the last Viceroy, but had such faith in Mountbatten’s British sense of justice and fair-play that he asked Mountbatten to be the “umpire” (Gandhi’s words) between himself and Jinnah, “not as Viceroy, but as a man” (whatever in God’s name that meant)
- Gandhi did not choose to correct the gross misconception that Satyagraha - a political instrument, and non-violence - a personal choice, were one and the same
- Gandhi inflicted upon the INC his personal articles of faith, Satyagraha and non-violence as uncompromising, non-negotiable Congress Creed; and finally,
- Gandhi had only one tool of engagement with the British – first Satyagraha and then dialogue, and only one strategy to deal with the Muslims – chasing the holy grail of Hindu-Muslim unity It was Gandhi, Gandhi all the way. Let us start at the beginning – what was the ultimate objective of Gandhi’s INC between 1915 when Gandhi came back from South Africa and 1947 when the Hindu nation was vivisected by Islam? We must first rid our minds of all hagiographic accounts of Gandhi and Gandhi’s life and go back to the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) for the truth. The INC from 1910, when all the Nationalist leaders had been either exiled or imprisoned, until 1917 when Gandhi assumed leadership, and even after 1917 and until 1946, did not move decisively or proactively towards freedom. From 1910 the INC was either in limbo for protracted lengths in time or was tap-dancing in the same place. Notwithstanding the frenzied energy with which the dancer shakes his legs while tap-dancing, we know he is not moving from place to place. He is dancing on the same spot. Gandhi’s INC was similarly tap-dancing in the so-called freedom movement even as the Muslims used the Khilafat Committee and then the Muslim League to move decisively towards creating the Islamic state of Pakistan from the body of the Hindu nation. Was there a freedom struggle?
Gandhi began his political career in India with the much touted Champaran and Kaira (Kheda) Satyagraha which allegedly put the British government on the back-foot and compelled them to concede to Gandhi’s demands. The fact is, Gandhi struck a deal with the Viceroy – grant me my demands with regard to the farmers of Champaran and Kaira and not only will it be seen as a victory for non-violent satyagraha, but I will go back to Kaira and get every able-bodied man to recruit in the army to fight World War 1 for Britain. Gandhi also assured the Viceroy that this concession was being sought only as a “war measure” and that he would ensure such demands would not be made again, and that these concessions would not set a precedent for the future. - “I would make India offer all her able-bodied sons as a sacrifice to the Empire at its critical moment; and I know that India by this very act would become the most favoured partner in the Empire and racial distinctions would become a thing of the past”. Unnerving echoes from Aurobindo’s “The ‘Moderate’ Indian politician aspires to be an Imperial citizen! His ambition has at last been screwed up to the point of seeking equality with his ‘colonial brother”. What Aurobindo said in 1907 of Gokhale, Naoroji and other Moderates turned out to be just as true of Gandhi in 1918. It is clear now why the British government had no objections, and in fact may have secretly welcomed it, when Gokhale passed on the mantle of leadership to Gandhi, and not to Tilak or Lajpat Rai. - “In Champaran, by resisting an age-long tyranny, I have shown the ultimate sovereignty of British justice.
Thus, Champaran and Kaira affairs are my direct, definite and special contribution to the war.
I write this because I love the English nation, and I wish to evoke in every Indian the loyalty of the Englishman”. (Excerpts from Letter to Viceroy, Delhi, April 29, 1918, CWMG, Vol. 17, pp 7-10)
- “It will also enable me to fall back for war purposes upon my co-workers in Kaira and it may enable me to get recruits from the district.
I suggest that action in this matter be taken as war measure. This will obviate the fear of relief being regarded as a precedent”. (Letter to JL Maffey (Secretary to the Viceroy), Nadiad, April 30, 1918, CWMG, Vol. 17, pp 10-12) It is doubtful if any Indian of the times knew of this deal. This secret deal between Gandhi and the Viceroy (much like the little-known letter that Gandhi wrote to Lord Ampthill in October 1909) which saw the British government responding positively to Gandhi’s demands, achieved two things for Gandhi – it projected his satyagraha and non-violence (falsely as we now know) as the best tool of engagement with the British because (or so the ordinary people thought) it succeeded in getting the government to retreat; it also gave Gandhi’s ‘mahatma’ halo an additional coat of polish and gave him the status of undisputed leader with the ordinary people of India. The excerpts from Gandhi’s letters to the Viceroy and the Viceroy’s secretary at the time of the Champaran and Kaira satyagrahas have been reproduced for a purpose. This article was necessitated by the dishonest public debate where one side blames Jinnah alone for Partition, while the other side holds Nehru and Patel also, besides Jinnah, guilty for Partition. No one in post-independence India, no one in public life, has asked if partition could have been averted and if yes, how could it have been averted. It suits the nation to hold Jinnah and the Muslim League (not the Muslims; now that is an intellectual tight-rope walk) alone to blame for partition. But the guilt attached to the Muslims, Muslim League and Jinnah is only a very small portion of the whole truth. Jinnah is not all. Which brings us back to the most important question – what was the political objective of the Gandhi-led INC? This article is not intended to add dead weight to the sterile academic debate about Jinnah, Gandhi and partition, but aims to correct our political discourse by inextricably linking vivisection with independence, and also intends to reassess Gandhi’s role in the freedom movement to better understand why Hindus lost and are continuing to lose territory to the two genocidal and predatory Abrahamic monotheisms even sixty years after ending colonial rule in 1947. The article is an attempt to break the conventional silence about Gandhi’s catastrophic-for-Hindus political activism which led to vivisection. If there was indeed a freedom struggle movement under Gandhi’s leadership as state-funded history writers have been telling us, then freedom can only be understood as ending colonial rule and achieving total political freedom, accompanied by the British quitting India lock, stock and barrel. But Gandhi in 1918, in sharp contrast to Tilak and Aurobindo, is writing to the Viceroy about how he loves the English nation and how he wishes to invoke in every Indian the same love and loyalty for the Empire as that of an Englishman! Now this is not the language or the sentiment of a man leading a political party towards freedom from colonial rule. This was in 1918. In 1920, the Gandhi-led INC issued the call for Swaraj. But between 1918 when Gandhi wrote gushingly to the Viceroy about his love for the English nation, offering his services to the Viceroy as recruiting agent for the war, and the 1920 Nagpur Congress where Gandhi called for Swaraj, the British government demonstrated the full might of the power of the state. In spite of Gandhi’s sycophantic recruiting agent act, the British government slapped the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act or the Rowlatt Act on Indians with one hand, while with the other it passed the Government of India Act 1919.
The draconian Rowlatt Act gave the government sweeping powers to imprison without trial any individual who picked up arms against the British government and people or conspired against the colonial state. Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, with the full knowledge of Michael O’Dwyer, Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, also issued the infamous and humiliating ‘crawling order’ against the people of the province; 1919 was also the year of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
The GoI Act 1919 gave Indians some measure of participation in government, a sop for the Rowlatt Act, “crawling order” and the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh. Gandhi’s declaration of love for the English nation must have sent the comforting signal to the British government that under Gandhi’s leadership the INC would not make any demand for complete political freedom. Thus, even as the British government was using the stick of the Rowlatt Act against us and turning the full military might of the state against ordinary people, it also dangled the carrot of self-government before us. - “The ruling people, whose immense power can be turned against us any moment if they happen to be irritated, will be pleased with our desire not to break away from the Empire and, at the same time the spirit of independence which is constantly urging us to demand a greater and greater measure of self-government will have its full play. Such a compromise, such a smooth scheme of accommodating comprehensiveness is being welcomed everywhere as suddenly revealed to a political prophet who is going the round of the country with the inviting message: ‘Come to me, all ye that are heavy-laden, and I shall give rest unto you’.” Astonishing how Aurobindo’s discerning analysis of and scathing attack against the leaders of the INC in 1907 was just as true in 1919. Little had changed in the INC’s objectives and even less had changed in the character of its leaders. We cannot help but think that Gandhi was just such a political prophet who had worked out “a smooth scheme of accommodating comprehensiveness” with the British Indian government. At the Amritsar Congress, 27 December 1919 – January 1 1920, Tilak and CR Das expressed sharp criticism of the Montague-Chelmsford reforms report which formed the basis for the GoI Act 1919, calling it “inadequate, unsatisfactory and disappointing”. In what would be the precursor to 1946, when Gandhi would once again hastily welcome the Cabinet Mission proposals, Gandhi took exception to Tilak’s criticism of the report and after perfunctorily appealing to Tilak to withdraw his amendment, actually threatened to undertake a tour of the country to explain to the people of India why he disagreed with Tilak and why he wanted to place on record the INC’s gratitude to Montague for the reforms report! Exactly one year after placing on record his gratitude to Montague for enabling the GoI Act 1919, Gandhi issued the cry for Swaraj at the Nagpur Congress. People have the right to know why, if Gandhi thought the Montague-Chelmsford reforms report and the GoI Act 1919 were marvellous things for Indians, did he demand Swaraj in Nagpur and what did his Swaraj mean? Gandhi also declared at Nagpur that he wanted Swaraj within a year. This is 1920. Ten years later, at the Lahore Congress in 1929, Gandhi demanded Purna Swaraj. Gandhi’s Purna Swaraj was a significant improvement on Tilak’s simple Swaraj, although the nation does not know why Gandhi issued the call for ‘Swaraj within a year’ at Nagpur and then issued a call for Purna Swaraj nine years later. Either there is Swaraj or no Swaraj. Purna Swaraj inter-alia implies something called Apurna Swaraj, which is like half a hole. After Nehru hoisted the flag of complete political independence on the eve of New Year, 1930, Gandhi entered into the infamous Gandhi-Irwin Pact. Gandhi had presented to the nation his version of passive resistance and non-violence as the only instruments for engagement with the British. But with the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, Gandhi also surrendered the right to Satyagraha and even non-violent protest. From Swaraj to Purna Swaraj, from the Gandhi-Irwin Pact to the second GoI Act – that is, from 1919 to 1929 to 1931 to 1935, Gandhi’s INC was tap-dancing without moving the nation even a fraction forward towards freedom. The British government used the carrot and stick effectively against the Hindus in 1935 just as effectively as it had used it in 1919; and knowing full well from past experience that the INC will suffer the stick in shameless inaction and silence as long as the carrot is visibly shown to the ordinary Indians, the British government proclaimed the GoI Act 1935 by which Indians were allowed to contest elections in the Provinces to constitute provincial governments. The GoI Act 1935 was the carrot being dangled before the INC as a palliative measure for hanging Bhagat Singh. The British government sensed the anger of ordinary Indians against Gandhi and his INC for failing to save Bhagat Singh from the gallows, and knowing that discrediting Gandhi at this stage may render him ineffective, thus paving the way for triggering the volcano of seething dissatisfaction among the ordinary people, the British government’s propaganda machinery successfully promoted the idea that the GoI Act 1935 was in response to Gandhi’s non-violent Dandi March which allegedly shook the Empire. If the INC had been serious about Swaraj in 1920, then it ought to have followed Tilak when he expressed disquiet over the reforms report; it was expected that if Swaraj meant total political freedom, then the GoI Act 1919 was only clever temptation to divert the INC away from the road to freedom and trap the slaves in the honey-pot of sharing political power with their masters. The trap was set enticingly again in 1935 and the INC demonstrated its willingness to bite the bait yet again. Sharing power, self-government within the Empire, self-rule – these were the colonial catch-words to keep India firmly enslaved and keep the INC going round and round in circles. Aurobindo’s “political prophet” was conducting the INC’s tap-dance to nowhere with “accommodating comprehensiveness”. The Muslim League and the British government had good reasons to feel delighted. Gandhi’s INC was going nowhere and the freedom movement led by Hindu nationalists for a brief while between 1907-1909 had been effectively aborted.
(To be continued)
The author is editor, www.vigilonline.com
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28. September 2009 by admin.
Behind every successful Jinnah there is a Gandhi – 1
History’s can of worms
Post-independence official history of the ending of colonial rule in India is a hagiographic narration of Gandhi’s life and times. Hagiography is the reverential documentation of the life of a saint by his acolytes. Thus the history of India’s freedom struggle is a narration of the making of the Mahatma in South Africa, culminating in the motivated ensconcing of the Mahatma as the nation’s civilisational emblem.
The inevitable fallout of such a construct of official history was that all significant personages of the time, and all events, were positioned around and in relationship to Gandhi, as heroes, lesser heroes or villains. Such personages (and events) who did not lend themselves to this motivated hagiography were either kept out of the official historical narrative or relegated to the margins of history.
Thus Aurobindo and Tilak of the pre-1910 years, Ambedkar’s serious differences with Gandhi, the fact that from around 1942, all top leaders of the INC except Nehru, including Gandhi’s close associates and colleagues in his social mission, and even his son Devadas, had all distanced themselves from him, are kept out of the historical narrative of the freedom struggle.
Post-independent history writers have refused to even consider the adverse impact that Gandhi’s estrangement with the Congress Working Committee had on the extremely critical tripartite negotiations which the INC was then engaged in with the British government and the Muslim League.
The other heroes of our times, Bhagat Singh, Subhash Bose, Ambedkar and Savarkar, and all those ordinary Indians who suffered tortuous incarceration or died for Gandhi, and the broad contours and details of events leading up to the bloody vivisection of 1947, have not merited even a whole paragraph in our history books. Few outside of academe would have heard of Madanlal Dhingra, the Chapekar brothers, MR Jayakar, Tej Bahadur Sapru or the Sapru Committee Report. Fewer still would know that Gandhi machinated the expulsion of Bose from the INC, or that Gandhi had insisted on the resignations of Rajaji and KM Munshi too from the Congress party, because these details did not mesh seamlessly into the hagiography
This dishonest rendering of history of the most important years of this enslaved nation’s existence has made out the freedom struggle to be the achievement of one man whose moral authority resting on non-violence was so overwhelming that the British government shriveled in awe before its force and slinked away in shame. To sustain the incredible fiction of this “non-violent freedom-struggle”, Nehruvian polity’s history writers have chosen to sweep away from sight the violent reprisal of the colonial government against ordinary Indians who followed Gandhi to the streets. A despotic public opinion machinery dubbed Gandhi the Father of the Nation; if that is a given, then equally true is the fact that Gandhi was also the father of the vivisected Hindu nation.
Popular history has intentionally thrown a veil over why the Cabinet Mission failed in June 1946, leading to Direct Action, except to lay the failure dishonestly at Jinnah’s door. Needless to say, for Nehruvian secular politics of minority-ism, while Jinnah remains history’s villain, his vehicle, the Muslim League, is now wearing the false mustache of secularism.
Year after year after year, the nation celebrates its independence from colonial rule; the de-Hinduised secular nation celebrated Nehru’s fiftieth anniversary of his tryst with destiny with a romantic midnight session of Parliament. The nation and its Father and Nehru may have woken up to independence at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, but Hindus woke up to a nation severed of her limbs, torn and bleeding. Nehru’s India and her historians have ensured that while August 15 would always be celebrated, it would never be observed as a day of mourning, of grief and of determination to reverse and avenge the consequences of Direct Action and vivisection. Nehru’s secular India did not allow Hindus to nurse a sense of victim-hood or nationhood.
The infamous Jinnah debate, triggered first by Advani and now Jaswant Singh, if anything has only emphasized that –
- Jinnah will continue to remain the sole villain of recent history
- Nehruvian secular polity, which has successfully de-linked the Muslim League from Jinnah, will not scrutinize the Muslim League and other Muslim parties and organizations for similar intent
- There is none so stupid or so sick with “purblind sentimentalism” as the Hindu social, intellectual and political leadership; the writer is not at all sure that the cupidity is not a mask for calculated villainy to maintain the status-quo in political discourse
- Hindus today in the main have abdicated their responsibility to their religion and nation; Hindus are broadly either cowards unprepared to die for their religion and nation, or are so consumed by self-interest that not only will they not live for their religion and nation but are prepared to betray them for small personal gains
Typical of this purblind sentimentalism of the Hindu intellectual is a column by the renowned Magsaysay awardee, investigative journalist, and author, Shri Arun Shourie, who was so eager to fault both Jinnah and Jaswant that he took refuge in another editor, the late Shri Girilal Jain, who is supposed to have remarked that the vivisection of 1947 was good for India and the Hindus. Shourie recollects, “I have come to realise that Girilal Jain was the one who was right. You are dead wrong, he told me, after reading what I had written about Jinnah. The best thing that has happened for us is the Partition. It has given us breathing time, a little time to resurrect and save our pluralist culture and religions. Had it not happened we would have been bullied and thrashed and swamped by Islamic fundamentalists”.
It is doubtful if Girilal Jain would have used the phrase ‘pluralist culture,’ which is a 1990s decade ‘liberal’ Christian political subterfuge for seeking accommodation for religious conversion in non-Christian nations; it is certain he would not have talked of ‘religions’ in plural. If Girilal Jain, who died in July 1993, six months after the historic demolition of the Babri Masjid, and wrote and spoke in an era of rising Hindu Consciousness embodied in the Sri Ram Janmabhoomi movement, made this remark, it is obvious he did not envisage the subsequent capitulation of the political elite across the spectrum to Islam in succeeding years, which has climaxed in the disgraceful Sachar Committee Report and demands for reservations on religious lines – for minorities!
Shourie ought to have understood in 2009 – regardless of who said what 20 years ago – that as long as even one Muslim remained in the vivisected Gandhi-Nehru secular nation, then he, his wife and children belonged to the transnational Muslim ummah with the inevitability of separatism leading to secession always hanging over our heads. For there are innumerable instances of unresolved issues caused by Muslim intransigence continuing to keep Indian society in a state of unrest, with jihad raging not only in J&K but in different parts of this ‘partition is good’ nation. Anyway, if a writer quotes another person without refuting the quote, it has to be assumed that the writer is in broad agreement with the quote. To better understand the tortured routes that self-justifying sentimentalism takes, let us look at what lies beneath Shourie’s Girilal Jain fig-leaf.
Jaswant Singh, in the same breath that he lauded Jinnah, also held Sardar Patel and Nehru responsible for Partition. As pointed out earlier, there is none as cowardly or villainous as the Hindu who will not serve the Hindu cause. It is unclear in Shourie’s column where Girilal Jain ends and Shourie begins, but Shourie concludes his amazing partition-was-good declamation with panegyric ode to Gandhi, Nehru and Patel. “So, my lament is the opposite of Jaswant Singh’s today. And it also so happens that I am an adorer of Sardar Patel as of the Lokmanya, and a worshipper of Gandhiji.”
Politically correct of course, but it could almost have been a school-girl speaking of Rajesh Khanna or Sachin Tendulkar. But do facts of history support Shourie’s ode to Gandhi and Nehru? Maulana Azad poses a severe problem for writers of popular history. Is he black or is he white? The Congress, in the wake of the Jaswant’s Jinnah book, has declared its intention of employing historians to look into the history of the times in the minutest detail, but simultaneously has declared its intention to hold nation-wide meetings in praise of Nehru, Patel and Azad.
The most reliable sources of history are the primary sources, and one of the most important sources is the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG), which is a treasure house of the tiniest detail about Gandhi’s life; and this extraordinary compendium includes original British government documents declassified under ‘Transfer of Power’. The writer’s book, “Eclipse of the Hindu Nation: Gandhi and his Freedom Struggle” has relied exclusively on CWMG as one of the four primary sources for critically examining the nation’s freedom struggle between the critical years 1890 to 1947; the other three being Sri Aurobindo’s writings prior to and up to 1910, volume 8 of Babasaheb Ambedkar’s writings published by the Maharashtra state government, and RP Kangle’s three-volume magnum opus on the Kautiliyan Arthasastra.
The writer’s conclusions about the last phase of the freedom struggle between 1942 and 1947 is contrary to official history, and rejects Shourie’s motivated ode to Gandhi and Nehru. The writer holds Gandhi and Gandhi alone responsible, not only for the failure of the Cabinet Mission in June 1946, but also for the vivisection of the Hindu nation. Sardar Patel and Rajaji, KM Munshi and Madan Mohan Malaviya, were in the same position that Pranab Mukherjee finds himself in today, while Nehru may be placed in the same category as Shashi Tharoor, and Maulana Azad may be considered the role model for the BJP’s Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi.
Advani and Jaswant Singh have done Hindus a favour by opening a can of worms. It is the responsibility of Hindu nationalists to undertake a study of the history of the times and nail all lies big and small, one by one.
(To be continued…)
The author Raja Rajan is Editor. www.vigilonline.com
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