Notes from India (5) - The Ghost of Churchill Lives On

Above: Old Town Jodhpur, Rajasthan. 09 April 2024.
Scene at center shows an Islamic woman dressed in black chador.

India is fractured by a matrix of cultural fault lines, segments which include religion, caste, class and race/language. The British, during eighty-nine years of parliamentary rule, 1858 to 1847, managed to stich the various segments together by creating institutions such as railroads, civil service and an army of Indian sepoys reporting to British officers. Enter the Indian National Congress in 1885, colloquially the Congress Party, the first nationalist movement to arise in the British Empire. While Indian soldiers fought for the British in the two world wars, the push for India independence by the Congress Party gained strength. A lot of summarizing here, but finally on 15 August 1947, India was granted her independence by Britain.

The Indian leaders at the time of Independence were Mahatma Gandhi, the sainted champion of nonviolence as the successful key to colonial resistance, Jawaharlal Nehru, an Oxford educated, secular aesthete, Vallabhbhai Patel, a barrister and close associate of fellow Gujarati, Gandhi, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, a secular, primarily English-speaking Muslim lawyer from Mumbai.

Britain was sapped at the end of World War II and realized the inevitability of her having to give up her "jewel in the crown," India, to independence. Even so, no one thought the experiment would work. The Brits, while looting India, had held together the polyglot cultural matrix that is India, but could Indians replace them? Churchill, who detested Gandhi, knew an independent India was an experiment doomed to fail. Jinnah, the self-appointed representative for India's Muslim community, then twenty-five percent of the Indian population, so doubted the success of a plan to forge an independent India absent the Brits that he, to Gandhi's great disappointment, insisted that Muslims be offered their own country. The discussions of independence were refereed by Britain's Louis Mountbatten, who try as he might to get Jinnah to reconsider breaking India apart, failed. Jinnah became the first prime minister of newly created Pakistan.

The boundaries between India and Pakistan were haphazardly drawn. An exodus of Indian Muslims moved north from south of the partition line to Pakistan and Hindus, moved from north to south. The sectarian violence between Muslims and Hindus that occurred as India was broken apart is well rehearsed having cost a staggering two million lives. This cataclysmic partition of India seemed to validate the expectations of naysayers like Churchill that the independence experiment was not going to work. Nehru and Patel, seemingly over their heads in running the new India had to call back Mountbatten to serve as a closet PM. Gandhi was assassinated only six months after Independence in January of 1948. His assassin was a Hindu nationalist upset about Gandhi's role in breaking India apart.

Somehow the Indian leaders, Nehru, and later his daughter Indira Gandhi, got India moving, albeit in a highly regulated, socialist, low growth mode. 2014: Enter Narendra Modi, former governor of the state of Gujarat, from a rival party to Congress, BJP, who introduced significant economic reforms. During Modi's leadership India's economic growth rate has averaged above 6%. She is self-sufficient in food production. She is due to have surpass Germany and Japan in economic output within four years. So, time heals all wounds. We have a success story, right? Not so fast. The ghost of Churchill lives on.

Having lived in India for three years during the 1970's and during our several trips to India over the last two decades, we have been well aware of India's sectarian fault lines. The largest fault line, of course, is between Hinduism and Islam. Today, Muslims (not all went north to Pakistan, now an Islamic Republic) number 200 million, the second largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia, and 15% of India's total population. Mostly, we have witnessed a go along get along relationship between Hindus and Muslims. We saw many examples in villages of Hindu and Muslim cooperation. In one village, the Muslim tailor would sew wedding garments precedent to a Hindu wedding, and, in another village, the Hindus ceded burial spots form their own burial grounds to Muslims. We noted, in one small town, Hindus and Muslims cooperating ensure the completion of a Hindu temple. It seems that this MO at the rural level, where sixty five percent of India's population is, is generally intact.

But, in confirming Hindu/Muslim cooperation at the village level, we weren't looking closely enough. A Hindu nationalist movement in India is on the rise in larger population areas. It makes itself manifest at religious festivals where rowdy young Hindus, sporting saffron-colored clothes and carrying swords, march through a Muslim neighborhood shouting pro Hindu slogans. They are met with Muslim boys throwing stones back at them. The government typically dampens the demonstrations as isolated phenomena. But the government is now run by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and many of its officials are vocal Hindu nationalists who were once part of the saffron shirted boys raising havoc in Muslim neighborhoods during religious festivals. The demonstrations have been growing more frequent in recent years and the response from BJP party head, and Indian PM, Modi, has been silence.

Since partition in 1947, notwithstanding the seeming cooperative spirit between Muslims and Hindus at the village level, the secular principles enshrined in India's constitution show decay. In 1992, Hindu extremists demolished a 16th century mosque in the city of Ayoda. Hindus ended up winning the legal battle by having the Supreme Court award them the land. A 2000 Islamic terror attack on the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, conceived in Pakistan, didn't help matters on the sectarian front. The BJP brazenly uses anti-Islamic rhetoric to get votes. In 2022, in the BJP run state of Karnataka (Bangalore) authorities introduced rules to ban veils in schools, ban public prayers, ban the Muslim call to prayer and ban Muslim street traders from plying their wares near Hindu temples. At the extreme, speakers at public rallies in BJP run states have issued threats against Muslims, from mass rape to mass expulsion. Minority Christians and Sikhs have not been spared from this rise in Hindu nationalist rhetoric. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by one of her Sikh bodyguards as a response to anti Sikh pogroms initiated by Hindu nationalists.

Most Hindus in India are said to believe that the actions of the extremists are over the top. Also, the broader Muslim community has acted with restraint for the most part in the wake of Hindu surliness. But Modi's seeming indifference to rising anti Muslim rhetoric and demonstrations plays in the face of potential Muslim violent response. 1947 is a long way back, but not so far back that memory of severe secular violence between Hindus and Muslims is forgotten. India has progressed greatly in seventy-six years of independence. Still, Modi needs to be careful, that notwithstanding his successful leadership in spurring economic growth in India over the last ten years, he is not the catalyst to a sectarian cataclysm to prove Churchill right all along.