I wish you hadn't tagged me,
@Nilgiri; this is the kind of thread that I like to observe from a great distance. There are only a handful of members on PDF worth conversing with, and the people involved here are mostly - mostly - not among them.
So what do I make of this?
Simply this: "I TOLD YOU SO".
For whatever I say next, I am specifically excluding you,
@Nilgiri, not for the sake of sentiment or any inbuilt bias, but for the simple reason that I see you as being both conservative, in the Minoo Masani, Piloo Mody, Chakravarthy Rajagopalachariar vein, and simultaneously an iconoclast, not inclined to give sacred cows even a farthing of support. With that exception, and also with the honourable exception of
@Kaniska and
@Jackdaws,
@Krptonite and several others, I am addressing all those who then and now think that Modi and the far broader movement that he represents is in any degree, at any time, in any manner tolerable in decent civilised society.
Let me make it clear: I am addressing Indians, not Pakistanis and not Bangladeshis, certainly not the Chinese. Those nations have their own issues and moral hazards, their own clear and present dangers to the ship of state; none of them is in a position to criticise us as a national of those nations, nor are Indians fit to criticise them as Indians. Individuals, with their own points of view, do not come under this rubric of the forbidden degrees of refusal. But it is a problem that faces India that we are concerned with.
It is not a Pakistani fan-boy illusion that India as a nation is afflicted with a virus, a social and ideological virus - not theological, what the disarrangement of normal thought and behaviour that this virus entails has nothing to do with religion, everything to do with religiosity, a very different thing altogether. This virus was created in a laboratory, but was not unique; it was derived from other, earlier strains, whose clumsy beginnings go far before these latest experiments. There is no doubt that Indian society in north India, distinct from Indian society in south India, or Indian society in west India or east India, was an oppressive society; one where members of one religion dominated the others, far larger than them in number, with their grip over the levers of state power, one where it could pass into social practice, never into law, that the highest point of one sort of religious structure was never to exceed the highest point of another; one where a suitable defence against a felony was conversion; one where forced conversion was so frequent that it passed without mention; one where the privilege of rule was restricted to that dominant religion; one where the tenets of that religion governing the relations with minorities, or with those with different beliefs was violated daily.
I mention this because in Indian history, such as it is, riddled with a propensity to dispense with the written record on one side that continues to this day, left to us solely (until recent times and innovative scholarship came into the picture) through the written record of one segment of society and therefore redolent of bias and prejudice, the narrative of the Gangetic Plain was the dominant narrative. At that time, the dominant religion and its practitioners still had no desperate need to prove their identity and to establish it in space and time; the glorious Indus Plain was left to a later day and age, to an Aitzaz Ahsan ably backed up by no lesser than a PDF member. So it was what was done and what happened in the Gangetic Plain that determined social structure and social thinking.
It was with this rooted problem of the Gangetic Plain that the latest invader had to deal when he found he had to take administrative decisions. Understanding as they did nothing of the complexity of Indian society, north, south, east or west, they applied their rulers and compasses and straightened things out to their own satisfaction. This found many expressions; my blood brothers and hostile interlocutors from across the border make much of a particular dialect in Bengali having been elevated above all others, at the cost of the rich cultural tapestry that had been developed around other dialects in other parts of the region, and this was one of the expressions, one that had painful consequences many years later. One of the straightening measures that the new rulers applied was to distinguish between the religions in explicit terms; what was always part of the background and never dragged out for surgical dismemberment and organic analysis now became the subject matter of one devastating report after another. The Hunter Commission Report was the first;it was not the last, and it spawned a whole family of dangerous, tendentious studies, including studies of the caste system, that mired Indian society in a thousand little debates, arguments, quarrels, and pitched battles.
Besides these sociological experiments and analyses, we also find two insertions that have had potent repercussions in later days. One was the discarding of the existing judicial system, that had been inserted into Indian society in bits and pieces, and by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had taken firm root; again, we are concentrated on the Gangetic Plain, matters were radically different in other parts of India. In its place, and in the place of the Persian that was the administrative language, were injected English Common Law, and the English language. A great reversal of fortunes followed this one step, but worse was to come.
The second massive intervention was the imposition in miniature of the English system of education. It is on record that the education system of the Punjab, for instance, was considerably superior to what was imposed in its place, after the British victory over the remnants of the Lahore Durbar; we do not have sufficient investigation of the equivalent in other parts of India to judge what happened there. Suffice it to say that visiting American intellectuals were staggered to find that the British budget for education for the whole of India was a fraction of the budget for schooling in one district of Massachusetts.
There was a direct impact on Indian society due to these two disastrous steps, far more damaging than even a mellifluous Shashi Tharoor has ever dared to project. First, the so-called rule of law that was introduced was the introduction of a particular kind of law in place of what had earlier been the law at least in the cities; in the villages, it had always been the decision of the panchayat that had determined a matter of adjudication, and this, more or less, prevailed even under the superficial British system of jurisprudence. The result, as eminent sociologists such as Bernard Cohn (he actually called himself an anthropologist) have pointed out, was a divided system of law and adjudication; the proceedings in the British courts were the tip of the iceberg, and even in that tip, the decision was often made outside the court proceedings, and matters dressed to suit that outcome.
So the people of India learnt that the rule of law was nothing but the decision of the social leadership, suitably disguised to placate an unpredictable foreign overlord.
Second, in the sphere of learning, there was a thin film of educated people, educated in the sense of that infamous Minute by Macaulay, and an enormous bulk of those educated in other ways, very many not even notionally literate, not even capable of signing their names, able only to 'make their cross', as the English put it to cover their own shameful record in their own home countries. The consequences are what we see in play today, and what has triggered this thread. The absence of any formal education left us with a village, and also largely an urban society with no structure, no framework with which to measure the workings of the world and of the universe. These were left at the mercy of prevailing prejudices, and led to such developments as the institution of a goddess whose only religious root was a popular film. It is this unthinking prejudice and adoption of the wildest nonsense that afflicts us today, in spite of the veneer given to it by training that masquerades as education.
As long as the British held us all under an iron fist, seldom distorted by the intervention of anything as effete as a velvet glove, especially after 1857, all was well. The master whipped the slave; the slave cringed and crept away. Nothing disturbed the illusion of a peaceful administration, except the periodic famines that ravaged the land, famines of a sort that had never been seen before, and famines that the British continue, to this day, to deny. Oh, there was one exception to this; various members of the British royal family, who were titular emperors wholly separated from anything to do with brute reality in India other than to serve as a convenient fons et origo for the honours system, came to India,as Princes of Wales, or even as Emperors, and were severely disillusioned about the rank racism that prevailed. As they were titular rulers only, their discomfort found expression in favouring Indian servants, and that was promptly branded as sexual misdemeanour, at the very least, if not downright sexual felony. So much for that.
And then came Surendranath Bannerjee.