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Contours of India’s civilisational fate – Gautam Sen

VOI

Narendra Modi

The dynamics of historical forces on the fate of a country is usually of greater significance than the actions of mortal politicians, though they might occasionally seek to redirect it. – Dr. Gautam Sen

An air of optimism pervades the perception of many educated Indians about their country’s place in the contemporary world. Yet others are dismayed at an alleged collapse of values of tolerance and plurality that supposedly informed India’s socio-political life during the early decades after Independence in 1947. Neither view is a truthful or realistic depiction of India’s history and how it has unfolded in recent times since the accession of Narendra Modi as India’s prime minister in 2014. The long hand of the inexorable dynamics of historical forces on the fate of a country is usually of greater significance than the actions of mortal politicians, though they might occasionally seek to redirect it. Events like Peter the Great’s decisive moulding of Russia’s future, its twentieth century revolution, or changes wrought by the earlier French Revolution and American Civil War or indeed the upheavals in China following the accession of Mao Zedong are rare.

India came into its own, not as most believe as an independent country that had suddenly severed the umbilical cord of British rule overnight in 1947, but with much of the past association intact. It remained a Dominion of the British empire, with a British head of state and its armed forces led by British officers. Of course it experienced the momentous event of Partition, imposed due to the brutal sleight-of-hand of British geopolitical purposes. It was a fateful outcome that has come back to haunt the world with serious dangers as Pakistan emerges as the axis of global terrorism. The principal conspiratorial aim of establishing a military cantonment in the shape of Pakistan in northern India has been frustrated subsequently owing to developments that have bequeathed the strategic territory of Pakistan to China, now the greatest rival of the Anglosphere. Only the original aim of its deployment by Britain and then the US to constrain and harass India remains unaffected.

The India of Jawaharlal Nehru and his immediate successors was never quite so pluralist and tolerant as claimed by some. It was easier to rule since it was a more politically quiescent and less turbulent country during the first two decades after 1947.Yet, during Nehru’s premiership the democratically-elected communist government of Kerala was ejected and journalists and other critics were highhandedly incarcerated for offending his government. Of course it reached the unprecedented high water of a suspension of Indian democracy itself in the mid-1970s under the rule of his daughter, Indira Gandhi. By contrast, contemporary India continues with its raucous traditions of rivalry without pause. However, two distinctive changes of idiom are taking place, which are a genuine transformation of India’s socio-political landscape. Long established political parties are experiencing an apparent abiding decline in popularity and fortunes and that alone provokes accusations of autocratic misrule. There is also a willingness under the current dispensation to use the full force of the law to curb the illicit political funding of predecessors and rivals, which incumbents would previously ignore.

All the indicators suggest India has recently begun the surge of an historic economic trajectory that has its roots in changes first initiated more than thirty years ago. The list of indicators is long and intricate and include a major transformation of the nation’s infrastructure, a prerequisite for broader economic advancement, regulatory reform, the growing digitisation of the economy and the emergence of new commercial agents that promise to dominate India’s economic future. There is also an apparent change in political consciousness in important areas of the country, with more concern among voters about the quality of governance than parochial identity politics. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is still uneven and remains a potentially significant challenge to stable governance. The upshot of these economic and political developments has been evidence of India coping with the on-going global economic disruptions better than most. It has also managed to deal, so far, with the serious Covid pandemic with an impressive display of political self-confidence and organisational prowess.

Yet, such changes, of the kind being witnessed in contemporary India and accelerating since 2014, after a decade-long hiatus, are embedded in a significant political context. Its importance cannot be underestimated nor is there any guarantee that this arguably positive political context is inevitably durable. A major factor of the present political setting is the primacy of prime minister Narendra Modi in Delhi and his wider political role. He has been the driving force of contemporary change in India with a focus that is unique and, likely, problematic to replicate. There are some other examples of economic transformation within India that are also notable, for example, in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra for a period, the latter perhaps experiencing a possible renaissance now too. But the phenomenon of Narendra Modi’s is probably unique and the principal reason for the change in the quality of governance and the economic transformation that have been unleashed in India nationally. Weighty foreign policy successes have also been registered and these two layers of change, domestic and foreign, have reinforced each other.

How the ongoing current transformation of India will likely impact its longer-run historical evolution is not easy to anticipate despite confident predictions about its global economic status within the next twenty-five years. As far as one can infer, the political economy of prime minister Narendra Modi’s strategy seems, in the main, to be the delivery of a whole range of essential public services to the mass of ordinary people, combined with effective methods for doing so. These have been unequivocally spectacular and unprecedented and clearly the reason for the high esteem in which voters hold him. There have also been a host of symbolic religious gestures and social policies that have inspired the majority community. These economic and political measures have combined with major foreign policy accomplishments that are carrying an appeal for many. Yet, no far-reaching and durable attempt has been made to mobilise India’s majority and especially in the imperative BJP heartland, by adopting policies that would galvanise them and inhibit the possibility of their electoral defection indefinitely.

On the contrary, Hindu temples remain under the occupation of hostile secular forces. They are systematically destroying the heritage of India’s ancient civilisational identity with alarming long-term consequences not achieved by earlier iconoclasts. In addition, there has only been a dismayingly feeble attempt to alter India’s dangerously corrosive prevailing national narrative without imaginative countermeasures, forcefully implemented. There are also apparently two startling ideas that hold sway over the current political dispensation as well as the leadership of its wider national socio-political base. The first is that good governance will conquer the political terrain across the religious divide, which appears to be a case of triumph of hope over experience. The second seems to have been somewhat unthinkingly adopted out of perceived contingent necessity. It entails a conviction that India’s historic transformation can be achieved through the existing bureaucracy, with the help of American management consultants. These are staggeringly optimistic beliefs and one searches in vain for a convincing rationale. The potential consequences if the NDA falters as a result of such missteps would be a threat to India’s very survival as a sovereign polity, with the catastrophic electoral triumph of a fractious coalition national government, compromised by foreign interests.

While a mood of jubilation, even triumphalism, has overtaken much of India’s chattering classes they seem largely oblivious to ominous signs of structural forces unfolding relentlessly within their polity and society though adversaries of Indian nationhood have quite clearly understood them. One immediate contingent issue that has potential to destabilise India’s painfully won progress is Narendra Modi’s succession. There is a strong likelihood of an unholy struggle to become his successor and that could descend into a deadlock that anti national political forces will eagerly exploit, turning any drama into crisis for India. Such a scenario is what India’s foreign adversaries are awaiting, in order to intensify the internal subversion of India and the effective seizure of its domestic process. This will occur through assets already created by global evangelists, their Jihadi allies and others, who are clutching a MoU with India’s most dangerous enemy close to their chest.

Key Indian border states remain in virtual revolt and all the clever strategies to secure their stability will turn to dust the moment coalition opportunism and horse trading are normalised again in Delhi. The Punjab, West Bengal and Kerala sporadically turn their face against Indian federal obligations and their sullen acquiescence to them could suddenly become an open challenge to Indian political unity itself. Separatist sentiment remains fully alive south of the Vindhyas and their alliance with Anglo American evangelists acquired deep roots in the decade before 2014. At an opportune moment, the indissolubly entrenched soldiery of a Kashmir Caliphate will once again look to the neighbourhood for resolute help to recommence rampant jihad. Others, not excluding Turkey further afield as well as China, will find taking advantage of any fresh Indian troubles an irresistible temptation.

Most importantly, the accelerating demographic transformation of India will only compound any intractable eventual predicament. It is likely to bring the problems closer to the chic salon life of Delhi, with a whole swathe of territory across the heart of India already only nominally governable by either legitimate state or central authority. Delhi’s own recent internal communal violence ought to have already been a foretaste of things to come. Parts of one city alone, Meerut, only a short distance from Delhi, typifies the acquisition of the embryonic elements of concrete self-rule by a single community that derives from demographic pre-eminence. The demographic checkmate has already resulted in the de facto loss of authority in swathes of Indian territory, where the sovereign writ of the central government is barely enforceable. It was most graphically and egregiously evident in West Bengal where a 1,000 or more Hindu women, where sexually assaulted without redress and many others fled the state for having voted for the wrong political party. The killings of nationalists continue unabated in Kerala and threaten to spread elsewhere in the wider region.

India’s domestic vulnerabilities are embedded within a vortex of faithless predatory international intrigue in which opportunism alone rules. Its neighbourhood remains a cesspool of festering resentment and loathing camouflaged only by India’s oversized regional economic and military footprint. The three international players of significance to contemporary India are becoming hazardously unreliable and potentially inimical towards its fundamental national interests. India continues to remain afloat and able to assert its sovereign autonomy in a world of precarious cross-cutting conflictual cleavages and shifting mutual interests by virtue of an accident of fate that the gods alone could have decreed. Contemporary India has sufficient material resources to spend unconscionable sums on military hardware to deter adversaries and adequate balance of payment reserves to swim in the shark-infested waters of the international economy. That India has done so with a degree of adeptness is also fortuitous. It is due to a team of capable ministers and advisers around the prime minister as well as officials running the foreign ministry and supervising the nation’s finances and, of course, the heaven-sent gifts of its prime minister himself.

The US can hardly be regarded as anything other than a duplicitous peril to India’s integrity and autonomy. It only cares for Indian manpower, and infrastructure facilities as a signal to China for a highly unlikely actual military engagement with it, while the contours of their condominium are defined to the accompaniment of militarised tensions. India’s growing middle class market and its technically skilled domestic manpower are an important subsidiary additional attraction for the US. India has become a destination for outsourcing production of US consumption needs for digital services, with or without temporary rights of presence for Indians in the US for delivery. But virtually open war has been declared against India by US government agencies like USCIRF, its shameless arms-length media proxies and a malicious American academia.

The US refurbishing Pakistani F-16s while its national military planning, including nuclear strategy, are fully integrated with China’s war plans against India, is nothing short of treachery. This episode will no longer be dismissed as minor, as some in India have done, if China helps arm Pakistani F-16s with advanced missiles and India’s border standoff with China turns into real combat. The abiding US attempt is regime change in the hope of implanting the kind of accommodating political elite every other US ally is apt to become. If there are any doubts, the willingness of Europeans to contemplate national suicide to comply with US injunctions over the Ukraine should be a wake-up call for complacent Indians.

India’s new-found intimate friend, France, is ruthless in calculating national interest and immediate advantage though there is an absence of any obvious conflict between their respective contemporary national goals. But the bonhomie is essentially actuated by Indian purchase of French military hardware that lowers the average cost of exorbitant R&D commitments through larger production runs that exports to India allow. The rationale of overdone Israeli solicitude for India is not dissimilar since nothing apparently holds back its global cosmopolitan intellectual elite from unsparing attacks on India and its civilization, from the sanctuary of media houses and by vicious academics in the West. Both countries have relatively small markets for their own defence output and exports are an essential aspect of reducing average costs and ensuring affordability for domestic use. One only hopes the evident cynicism underlying the dynamics of the situational logic of their relationship with India has dawned on its own decision-makers.

The Indo-Russian relationship has long antecedents that justify indulgence in some sentimentality about its allure. Russia has been a reliable friend since the early 1950s, Stalin dispatching food grains to India when Russia’s own post-war situation was still appalling beyond imagining and the US response to India’s plea for supplies had been humiliating. The USSR could not offer succour to India in 1962, having already fallen out with China earlier and preoccupied with the climactic Cuban missile crisis. It rose to the challenge in 1971, mobilising forty divisions at the Sino-Soviet border as a warning against any intervention during India’s liberation war in East Pakistan and the rest is history. But India’s alleged strategic partner, the US, has managed to undermine this imperative partnership with Russia and the reliance on it to keep the mainstay of its air force flying, by forcing Russia into the arms of China in recent months.

The Sino-Russian engagement continues to deepen daily and casts a cloud over the Indo-Russian relationship. India has embarked on deft diplomacy to ensure the continuation of friendship with Russia, but it can no longer be taken for granted in a moment of crisis. Such a crisis will involve China whose covetousness of Indian territory has only grown over time, whetted successively by its dramatic economic advance since the late 1980s. China first seized Tibet formally in 1950, followed by Aksai China in 1962 and has since added Tawang to its list of demands as well as Arunachal Pradesh in its entirety. Demands for the strategic prize of J&K will likely follow if the Chinese economic and military gap with India continues to widen. India has deterred the insolence of the Middle Kingdom by mobilising militarily and it must remain constantly prepared for this challenge, the greatest historic direct and indirect threat to its integrity. – Firstpost, 30 November 2022

› Dr. Gautam Sen taught international political economy for more than two decades at the London School of Economics. 

Indian and Chinese troops face-off along the LAC.

The intellectual war being waged against India – Gautam Sen

VOI

chess-map

Contrary to popular perception, ingrained in the Indian national psyche of complacency, contemporary foreign attempts to seize control of India’s future trajectory is occurring mostly through indirect potential control. It is exercised by nurturing myriad collaborators within it though specific territorial assaults against its integrity. – Dr Gautam Sen

Intellectual hegemony has since time immemorial been a paramount vehicle for the exercise of political and socioeconomic power within society and between them internationally. A long line of intellectuals has observed the nature of the exercise of power, both political and personal, through the dominance of ideas. A recent history of the early Church by historian David Lloyd Dusenbery provides an authoritative account of the advance of Christianity through acrimonious debates over ideas propagated during the late third and early fourth centuries by major protagonists, like the anti-Pagan Firmianus Lactantius, a key imperial adviser to the first Christian emperor Constantine and the original progenitor Christian antisemitism. Another important Christian ideologue was the theologian and historian Eusebius of Caesarea to be followed later by the formidable late fourth and early fifth centuries trio St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo and another powerful ideologue of Christianity, St. Jerome.

In the modern world, the exercise of intellectual hegemony by the ruling order has been the subject of astute excavation by the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci and a host of formidable thinkers of the so-called Frankfurt School and others, some of the most revelatory among them, Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno as well as another pioneering French thinker, the highly influential Michel Foucault. A powerful post-modernist interpretation was subsequently unleashed by Jacques Derrida, who questioned and deconstructed the outward integrity of meaning in texts, his own oeuvre underpinned by the earlier work of the philosopher Edmund Husserl and the linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Yet, only modest attention has been paid to the practical consequences of the exercise of ideological power in the contemporary world over India’s place in it. The very exercise of this ideological power has dictated the boundaries of the debate, impaling the discourse on India in terms of narrow concepts like secularism that constrain serious understanding of its extant societal dynamics.

Interpreting the impact of dominant ideas on the imputation of India’s place in the world requires a prior understanding of the nature and exercise of political power between societies in the international arena. The key terms that encapsulate international relations are the compulsion towards dominance, duplicitous “bad faith” and their inevitable corollary of treachery. The practical implications of such a depiction of world politics are its abhorrence of a political vacuum in international relations that unerringly predisposes the subjugation of the weak by the strong and deployment of force, in all its dimensions, to achieve dominance and primacy. Indeed, it is significant that the ancient Greek synonym for man was soldier and the Roman empire that succeeded it was principally defined by the exercise of military power, which always remained its preeminent characteristic. The entire history of the Western world since has been inspired by and informed by this Greco-Roman legacy, whether it is imperial Britain or the Nazis or the subsequent US imperium. Islamic empires also adopted the antecedent practices of the eastern Roman empire they replaced as well as the example of conquered Persia, the militarised imperial alter ego of ancient Greece.

Without sentiment and prevarication, it might be noted that for over a thousand and more years the Indian subcontinent has exhibited attributes of a political vacuum, of divided and warring statelets, unable to resist challenges from better militarily endowed and determined marauders from the north. As a result, India has long been a potent pole of attraction for conquerors, enticed by its vast human and natural resources. The contemporary Indian situation is not fundamentally different from its long historical past despite the establishment of an outwardly modern statehood, with its various accoutrements of power and autonomy, from political and socioeconomic institutions to military capability. Thus, contrary to popular perception, ingrained in the Indian national psyche of complacency, contemporary foreign attempts to seize control of India’s future trajectory is occurring mostly through indirect potential control. It is exercised by nurturing myriad collaborators within it though specific territorial assaults against its integrity are also unmistakably visible.

The profound underlying latent divisions of the Indian polity have been laid bare in recent years, with major political regions declining to acquiesce to full participation in all essential dimensions of a singular nationhood. Why this has happened is a fascinating but separate question, but its reality can hardly be denied, with regional political parties blatantly refusing to comply with their constitutional obligations of belonging to a single nation. Some of them are almost also asserting quasi de facto independence, with their political instincts also plainly articulating foreign ideological and accompanying extra national political attachments. The welcome accorded to vast numbers of illegal migrants and granting them citizenship rights in some states is a startling expression of this challenge to India’s sovereignty. The recent attempts of the dominant political dispensation at the Centre to enhance a sense of greater common national purpose and loyalty have in fact provoked further serious popular dissent and accentuated separatist sentiment. The fractious history of the Indian subcontinent has reared its alarming head with unexpected vengeance and de facto regional separatism threatens to become the espousal of a de jure posture for it.

In this context, it is vital to understand the wider global ideological edifice, in all its extraordinary sophistication and complexity, that underpins and fuels India’s national divisions. The key feature of the ideological thrust of foreign adversaries to subvert India in order to exercise control over its conduct is the determined and systematic repudiation of its moral legitimacy and historical identity. Indirect control is the aspiration since physical inroads are, for the present, only feasible at the margins on India’s borders though a major setback along them could precipitate a cascade in the shape of the assertion of independence by some already restless regions. In the meantime, the ideological assault against India continues relentlessly and the original roots of its constant and widespread hostile deconstruction can be traced back to India’s tutelage under British imperial rule and the critique of Hindu civilisation by, in the main, the Protestant Church. A basic overriding contention, repeated by its adversaries like China, even today, has always been that India is comprised by many nations and a racially-inspired Brahminical ideology has sought to impose the primacy of an earlier band of conquerors, the Aryans, who have no greater legitimacy to claim India than subsequent conquerors, the Muslims and the Europeans.

The intellectual warfare against India occurs from innumerable venues in academia and the media. Indian domestic intellectual life itself is largely an expression of an unreconstructed colonial heritage and domestic discourses a mere echo of well-established historical critiques of Indian civilisation. They are constantly being renewed, acquiring real substance and momentum from intellectual assaults from abroad. The critical modus operandi of ideological assault is still inspired by the original essentially Protestant critique and denunciation of the legitimacy of the moral integrity of the heritage of ancient India to which its people might look for their contemporary identity. The international media’s depiction of India, almost in entirety, and its offensive on it today adopts a simple strategy, which is to slander and libel without respite and ignore the truth and any alternative narrative that might contradict its own blatant fabrications. This global media obtains additional legitimacy for its serial disinformation campaigns by paying individuals who enjoy personal prominence in society and are willing to do the bidding of India’s adversaries for payment and other forms of social recognition.

The Western academic discourse on India is the bedrock for institutionalising a negative perception of it among dominant global elites who refract and diffuse the public’s ideological outlook. Such an ideological orientation has two important operational features that function with potent sublimity. They are wholesale psychological intimidation and occupation of the intellectual space and its denial to those who do not conform to the extant narrative of assault against India. The practical consequence of such a situation is the denial of opportunity to enter the academic world through openly discriminatory recruitment policies, curbing of professional advancement of dissenters, hampering their ability to sponsor seminars and curtailing the ability to publish, especially in prestigious journals. The intimidatory psychology arises from the sheer weight of the established canon and the existence of deified names who underpin the Western intellectual environment in its totality. Their effectively divine stature always pervades any intellectual journey, which sets the parameters of even plausible dissent. This intellectual climate may not necessarily be the direct source of specific challenges to India’s integrity and political identity, but it empowers hostile protagonists to question India and all its evil works by providing the counterpart of generalised covering fire. An expert on philosopher John Rawls or Jacques Derrida can call out India’s human rights record on caste, though it may be without intrinsic merit, because the shadow of Rawls and Derrida loom large in the background to legitimise them socially.

The examples of intellectual intimidation range from asserting one’s identity as a leading scholar on Jacques Derrida and using the legitimacy arising from it to engage in slander by illegitimately and deliberately misleading audiences. One Columbia scholar engaged in virtue signalling by hyperventilating on the predicament of Myanmar Rohingyas, implying the imperative of admitting them to India, supposedly en masse, while the academic simultaneously expressed angst over the alleged murder of a Muslim in India in a dispute over the consumption of beef. One cannot recall if the same scholar ever found occasion to express concern for the plight of ethnically-cleansed Kashmiri Pandits, subjected to rape and murder or indeed comment on the horrors of the Rwandan genocide. Another LSE scholar has asserted the flight of Pandits from J&K was due to actions taken by the then governor Jagmohan. The duplicity and dishonesty persist with little prospect of rebuttal because the established intellectual space denies access to challenges through institutional control over who can speak at seminars and conferences. Thus, egregious libel is spread under the cloak of the high scholarship of experts on intellectual life. The fulcrum of the discrediting of Indian society is the allegation of innate hierarchical caste racism, stemming from a “false religion” and the multitudinous resultant spin-offs of everything, from patriarchy to inequality, which are supposedly validated by a fundamentally unethical conception of social relations in the Hindu world-view.

There has grown a shrill and urgent recent cry of loathing at the path India has ostensibly embarked upon under the leadership of Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. However, the entire discourse on the horrors allegedly unfolding in contemporary India are rarely identified empirically and examined in comparative historical perspective. Yet, academics in hallowed Western portals and public intellectuals have risen in virtual unison to denounce contemporary India’s supposed lurch in an appalling right-wing direction though, once again, the crimes alleged lack empirical pinpointing. Significantly, the academic chorus of faux intellectual hand-wringing seems to parallel a deeper historic unease among major foreign governments about the potential rise of India as an economic and therefore military power. It is easily forgotten that the current intense hue and cry about India long predates its ongoing political and economic dynamics. But the present multifaceted policy endeavours threaten the possible realisation of the goal of autonomy and military strength long sought by every post-independent Indian leadership that is apparently irking many abroad.

Intellectual life has always been an essential instrumental conduit in the pursuit of national goals of dominant powers, notwithstanding all pretensions to the contrary. The great strength of its contemporary manifestation is the sheer scale of the production of intellectual output that also institutionally integrates within it any critique of itself that presumes to question existing political order and societal arrangements. The latter phenomenon neutralises protest by also extending material and institutional succour to dissension. Thus, dissenters end up benefiting from complicit participation in institutions supervising intellectual labour that serve the larger goals of the state, including its traditional imperial ventures. The hapless individual from the third world only participates in this oversized intellectual enterprise by finding a feigned nonconformist niche that allows self-delusion about their ultimately comprador role. But they are in no position to challenge the grand narrative of the institutionalised intellectual colossus of the host nation. Once someone from the third world has stood in awe inside the Cambridge’s King’s College chapel or one of the grand libraries of Harvard or Oxford a thoroughgoing inner depersonalising is set in motion and nothing matters more to that individual than playing some bit part in this resplendent and indefinable eternal universe.

This Western intellectual colossus and its institutions are a full partner in imperial glory and propensity for genocide, undertaking research into deadly weaponry and engaging in espionage even as it permits a chorus of dissent at the margin. However, the radical denunciation of all things Indian by its own former citizens who espouse human rights, feminism, equality, religious freedom and pluralism to challenge the legitimacy of their erstwhile former nation are all functional to the real purposes of India’s foreign adversaries. It serves their goal of attempting to weaken the possible rise of India by discrediting purposeful governance in it. In the end, intellectual life remains an unavoidable adjunct of national goals for the dominant powers of the Western world. – Sunday Guardian Live, 5 June 2021

› Dr Gautam Sen taught international political economy for over two decades at the London School of Economics.

Why-attacks-on-Hindus-Hinduism-Hindustan-increased-recently-PGurus

Nehru & Patel: Serious differences over China’s invasion of Tibet – Claude Arpi

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Sardar Patel

Senior Congress leaders, led by Patel, violently opposed Nehru’s suicidal policy of appeasement with China, which led India to lose a peaceful border. – Claude Arpi

On October 31, the world’s tallest statue, the Statue of Unity dedicated to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, was unveiled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The work on the 182-metre tall statue has been completed after round the clock work by 3,400 labourers and 250 engineers at Sadhu Bet island on Narmada river in Gujarat. Sadhu Bet, located some 3.5 km away from the Narmada Dam, is linked by a 250-metre-long long bridge.

Unfortunately, for several reasons, scarce scholarly research has been done on the internal history of the Congress; the main cause is probably that a section of the party would prefer to keep history under wraps. Take the acute differences of opinion between Sardar Patel, the deputy prime minister, and “Panditji”, as Nehru was then called by Congressmen. In the last weeks of Patel’s life (he passed away on December 15, 1950), there was a deep split between the two leaders, leading to unilateral decisions for the PM, for which India had to pay the heaviest price.

The most serious cause of discord was the invasion of Tibet by the Chinese “Liberation Army” in October 1950. In the course of recent researches in Indian archives, I discovered several new facts. Not only did several senior Congress leaders, led by Patel, violently oppose Nehru’s suicidal policy, but many senior bureaucrats too did not agree with the Prime Minister’s decisions and objected to his policy of appeasement with China, which led India to lose a peaceful border.

On November 11, 1950, the deputy prime minister of India addressed a meeting organised by the Central Aryan Association to commemorate the 67th death anniversary of Swami Dayanand Saraswati. It was to be his last speech. What did he say? The Sardar spoke of the potential dangers arising from what was happening in Tibet and Nepal, and he exhorted his countrymen: “It was incumbent on the people to rise above party squabbles and unitedly defend their newly won freedom.” He cited the example of Gandhi and Swami Dayanand.

Sardar Patel then criticised the Chinese intervention in Tibet; he asserted that to use the “sword” against the traditionally peace-loving Tibetan people was unjustified: “No other country in the world was as peace-loving as Tibet. India did not believe, therefore, that the Chinese government would actually use force in settling the Tibetan question.” He observed that the Chinese government did not listen to India’s advice to settle the Tibetan issue peacefully: “They marched their armies into Tibet and explained this action by talking of foreign interests intriguing in Tibet against China.” The deputy prime minster added that this fear was unfounded; no outsider was interested in Tibet. The Sardar continued by saying that “nobody could say what the outcome of Chinese action would be. But the use of force ultimately created more fear and tension. It was possible that when a country got drunk with its own military strength and power, it did not think calmly over all issues.” He strongly asserted that the use of arms was wrong: “In the present state of the world, such events might easily touch off a new world war, which would mean disaster for mankind.”

Did he know that it was his last message? “Do not let cowardice cripple you. Do not run away from danger. The three year-old freedom of the country has to be fully protected. India today is surrounded by all sorts of dangers and it is for the people today to remember the teachings of the two great saints and face fearlessly all dangers.”

The deputy prime minister concluded: “In this Kalyug we shall return ahimsa for ahimsa. But if anybody resorted to force against us we shall meet it with force.” He ended his speech citing Swami Dayananda: “People should also remember that Swamiji did not get a foreign education. He was the product of Indian culture. Although it was true that they in India had to borrow whatever was good and useful from other countries, it was right and proper that Indian culture was accorded its due place.” Who is ready to listen to this, even today?

Days earlier, Patel had written a “prophetic” letter to Nehru, detailing the implications for India of Tibet’s invasion. In fact, Patel used a draft done by Sir Girja Shankar Bajpai, the secretary-general of the Ministry of External Affairs and Commonwealth Relations. However, Nehru decided to ignore Patel’s letter.

Witnessing the nefarious influence of K.M. Panikkar, the Indian ambassador to China, who ceaselessly defended China’s interests, Bajpai, the most seasoned Indian diplomat, had lost his cool. On October 31, in an internal note, he detailed the sequence of events which followed Tibet’s invasion and the role of Panikkar, whose attitude was compared to Sir Neville Chamberlain’s towards Hitler.

Bajpai’s anger demonstrates the frustration of many senior officers; the account starts on July 15, when the governor of Assam informed Delhi that, according to the information received by the local intelligence bureau, Chinese troops, “in unknown strength, had been moving towards Tibet from three directions.” Not only was Panikkar unable to get any confirmation, but he virtually justified Beijing’s military action by writing: “In view of frustration in regard to Formosa, the Tibetan move was not unlikely.” During the next three months, the Indian ambassador would systematically take the Chinese side.

After receiving Bajpai’s note, Patel wrote back: “I need hardly say that I have read it with a great deal of interest and profit to myself and it has resulted in a much better understanding of the points at issue and general, though serious, nature of the problem. The Chinese advance into Tibet upsets all our security calculations. … I entirely agree with you that a reconsideration of our military position and a redisposition of our forces are inescapable.”

Some more details of the seriousness of the situation filters through Inside Story of Sardar Patel: The Diary of Maniben Patel, the daughter of the Sardar. In an entry on November 2, 1950, Maniben wrote: “Rajaji and Jawaharlal had a heated altercation about the Tibet policy. Rajaji does not at all appreciate this policy. Rajaji very unhappy—Bapu (Patel) did not speak at all.”

Later in the afternoon, “Munshi complained about Tibet policy. The question concerns the whole nation—said he had written a personal letter to Panditji on Tibet.”

Later, Patel told K.M. Munshi: “Rajaji, you (Munshi), I (Patel), Baldev Singh, (C.D.) Deshmukh, Jagjivan Ram and even Sri Prakash are on one side, while Gopalaswami, Rafi, Maulana (Azad) are on his side.” There was a vertical split in the Cabinet; and it was not only about Tibet. The situation would deteriorate further during the following weeks.

On December 12, Patel was divested on his portfolios. Nehru wrote: “In view of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s ill-health it is absolutely necessary that he should have complete rest and freedom from worry, so as to be able to recuperate as rapidly as possible. … No work should be sent to him and no references made to him in regard to the work of these ministries.”

Gopalaswami Ayyangar, from the “other side”, was allotted the Ministry of States and Nehru kept the Ministry of Home. The Sardar was only informed after the changes were made. He was a dejected man. Three days later he passed away. – Deccan Chronicle, 8 November 2018

» Claude Arpi is a French-born author, journalist, historian and tibetologist. He is the director of the Pavilion of Tibetan Culture at Auroville, Tamil Nadu.

Patel & Nehru