Category pakistan

Rethinking the Indus Valley civilisation – Nanditha Krishna

VOI

Mohenjo-daro Dancing Girl (ca. 2300-1750 BCE).

Vasant Shinde, who has excavated several Harappan sites, was fortunate to isolate DNA from the skeleton of a Harappan lady at Rakhigarh. The result was a South Asian gene spread all over India, with no Steppe or Iranian ancestry. But Harappan genomes have been found in Iran and Turkmenistan, giving credence to the Out of India theory. – Nanditha Krishna

A seminar on ‘Art in the Indus Civilization’ was recently held in Chennai. Why art? Because the unverifiable readings of the Indus script are a major impediment, art becomes the most reliable source of information. This Bronze Age civilisation covered a vast area, from Balochistan in the west to Western UP in the east, from Afghanistan in the north to Gujarat in the south, the largest “empire” of the ancient world. Remains of agriculture from 6500 BCE are found in Mehrgarh, Balochistan.

Although Kalibangan (in India) was discovered first, Mohenjo Daro and Harappa were reported first but went to Pakistan during Partition. Subsequent excavations revealed that 75 per cent of the Indus civilisation is situated along the Ghaggar-Hakra, now identified with the river Saraswati. However, it is still known as the Indus Civilisation because the first sites were excavated there. Kalibangan, Dholavira, Lothal and Rakhigarhi are among the important sites subsequently excavated. In 1924, the Indus civilisation was declared a site of remote antiquity by the British, who had earlier maintained that Indian history began in 600 BCE!

The art of the Indus civilisation includes terracottas, ceramics, glyptics, sculpture, jewellery made of carnelian, steatite, gold, silver and, faience and beads. Art “expresses important ideas or feelings” of a people. Early terracottas are primitive, made of pressed clay and pinched, with huge holes for eyes. The mature period produced beautiful images of trees, animals, birds and deities engraved on seals and paintings on pottery. The art residues are distinctive spokespersons for this civilisation. The seals were made of steatite, faience and terracotta and used commercially and ritually. Dogs with collars and elephants with rugs over their back suggest that they had been domesticated. Images of horses, rhinos, monkeys, rams, other animals and birds appear either as toys or on seals. Ornaments, shells, turquoise and lapis lazuli were moved from 500 to 1500 km away.

Why is the naked bronze dancing girl presumed to be dancing? Why is the stone priest-king of Mohenjo Daro presumed to be a priest-king? There are no answers. Several images of yoga poses exist, while two naked male torsos of grey lime are outstanding. One twists a leg, a male dancing figure comparable to the Nataraja pose. The other is in samabhanga, perhaps a Tirthankara (Yajurveda mentions three). 

The earliest worship scene in India is a seal from the Indus Civilisation where a three-horned male figure stands inside a stylised pipal tree. There are several seals of male figures with three pipal leaves protruding from the head, recalling the Ashvatavriskshastotram. The second important seal type is a tree with prickly thorns and small leaves, the khejari or shami, with a female figure seated on a branch and a tiger below, reminiscent of the paalai or desert described by Tolkappiyar, whose goddess is Kotravai or Durga and plant, the prickly kotran. Durga’s vehicle is the tiger. In the Vedas, ashvata and shami were rubbed together to produce fire. Three-headed male figures meditate in yogic moolabandhaasana. All these are Harappan and Vedic iconography. Popular animal stories from the Panchatantra are painted on jars.

Vasant Shinde, who has excavated several Harappan sites, was fortunate to isolate DNA from the skeleton of a Harappan lady at Rakhigarh. The result was a South Asian gene spread all over India, with no Steppe or Iranian ancestry. But Harappan genomes have been found in Iran and Turkmenistan, giving credence to the Out of India theory. According to Dr Shinde, the dominant gene in most south Asians is 25 to 30 per cent Harappan. By craniofacial reconstruction, he found that Harappans resembled contemporary Haryanvis.

Radha and Krishna playing chess.

Some scholars believe that the second urbanisation of 1000 BCE was disconnected from Harappa, with a dark Vedic Age in between. This is false, says Prof Michel Danino, because the same technologies in pottery, water management, metallurgy and crafts are pursued throughout Indian culture. Fire altars and lingas, sindoor and Mother Goddess figurines, lost wax technique to cast bronze statues, and more have continued since Harappa. Tribal women wear Harappan-style bangles on their arms, and chessmen from Lothal and dice from Harappa are still popular games. Swastika and tree worship still prevailed, while the Harappan weight system continued throughout Indian culture. Check dams to avoid flooding, bathrooms with commodes and drainage lines with manholes for cleaning are Harappan legacies. So, did “untouchability” begin there? Unlike Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Indus people didn’t build pyramids and ziggurats, but made life comfortable for the common person in well-built cities.

When people travel with their musical instruments, they retain their names. The piano and violin retain their names everywhere. Shail Vyas researched Mesopotamian references to Meluha (as the Indus Valley was known there) and found the names of 30 Indian musical instruments and 60 items of trade, including animals, birds and timber species, from Meluha, all in Sanskrit, with similar Mesopotamian equivalents. These had gone with the sea-faring Meluhans of the Indus.

It is time to rethink the Harappan civilisation, a culture with much archaeology but little literature. Vedic culture is all literature, and no material remains—is it possible? The Vedas speak of copper, not iron, making it a Bronze Age civilisation like Harappa. The Vedic civilisation was riverine and agricultural, like the Harappan. The Early Harappan Period lasted from 3300 to 2900 BCE, the Mature period from 2900 to 1900 BCE and the Late Harappan from 1900 to 1500 BCE. By 1000 BCE, the Painted Grey-Ware of the Mahabharata period had appeared, so the Vedas would have to be much earlier. The Vedas do not speak of any homeland outside India. The two civilisations were contemporary, probably the same, for Meluhan Sanskrit in Mesopotamia is compelling evidence. It is time our history books reveal the truth. – The New Indian Express, 12 march 2023

> Nanditha Krishna is an author, historian, educationalist and environmentalist.

Sindhu-Saraswati (Indus Vally) Civilisation Map

Britain and Pakistan: India fails to learn from its past – Gautam Sen

VOI

Narendra Modi & Rishi Sunak

One must admire the gall of the British establishment which has taken to the most egregious slander against Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the BBC, trying to incite Muslim revolt in India with blatant lies, even as it is negotiating the Free Trade Agreement (FTA). – Dr. Gautam Sen

The background to Pakistan’s dire predicament today, economic and political chaos and unexpected clashes at the border with Afghanistan, need unsparing historical analysis. The hungry millions of Pakistan are already taking to the streets crying for atta, no different from Parisian mobs demanding bread on the eve of the French revolution. The emotions of Pakistan’s impoverished masses, converge with the visceral distaste of the TTP for Pakistan’s corrupt elites, whom they also regard as irreligious. There’s every possibility the mobs may turn on the homes of Pakistan’s elites as the TTP is doing with the nation’s security forces. It is reported members of the families of Pakistan’s wealthy chartered a plane, only three weeks ago, at vast cost, to fly to London to celebrate New Year while the leaders of the bankrupt country went begging for help in the capitals of the world.

This grim ground reality of Pakistan being encountered by millions of ordinary Pakistanis today originated in cynical British imperial intrigues, as it did for so many countries. It is Britain’s involvement and arbitrary creation of borders in the Middle East that left behind serious problems, which other imperial powers are still using to their advantage cynically. The most unjust and illogical partition was experienced by Iraq, which was left fundamentally unviable as an economy. The British drew a map around some oil wells and called it Kuwait, an area that would have legitimately been vital for a viable Iraqi polity. Not much needs to be said of British misdeeds in Palestine that have resulted in a homeless people and endless conflict. India too is a victim, with much of its continuing divisive domestic politics, stemming directly from British machinations that date back to the nineteenth century.

The creation of Pakistan was almost entirely the product of British geopolitical strategy to deal with a presumed Soviet threat from the north and associated aims in the Middle East. The fact that an intense debate was also occurring within the Indian Muslim religious and political community about partition, which was won by its proponents, was fortuitous and convenient for British plans. However, British political leaders at Westminster and its most senior military leaders were not collectively convinced at the outset that partition was altogether desirable. Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck was the most senior military officer who did not regard the partition of India as the best outcome for the withdrawing British. In fact, he refused a peerage in protest at the carnage that ensued with the hasty partition insisted on by Lord Louis Mountbatten. Shockingly, Jawaharlal Nehru made him India’s first Governor-General despite the man’s criminal role over partition. He even acquiesced to the destruction of the memorial for fallen INA soldiers, the first act of Lord Louis Mountbatten when he reached Singapore on victory over Japan.

However, the governor general and viceroy, Lord Archibald Wavell, Mountbatten’s predecessor until February 1947 and a field marshall himself, was convinced partition alone could address Britain’s geopolitical interests and was determined to see it through at all cost. In his view, the Soviet threat from the north and British interests in the Middle East could best be secured by a reliable ally through partition. Lord Wavell had correctly concluded independent India would not cooperate despite only achieving dominion status in August 1947. The request for the British navy to use the port in Bombay was refused and Karachi therefore became absolutely vital for the British navy. Lord Wavell’s concern with Britain’s geopolitical interests was shared by Winston Churchill. He opposed Indian independence and was a bitter antagonist of the “Hindu Congress” while he was wartime prime minister, conspiring assiduously with Mohammed Ali Jinnah to achieve British political aims.

Lord Wavell himself was not a man given to sentimentality, having served in the brutal Boer War, where concentration camps had first been invented, later copied by the Nazis for mass slaughter. However, Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife Edwina were to prove much more adept than the brusque Lord Wavell at manipulating the Congress leadership, especially Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. It is now known from the recollections of their daughter, Lady Pamela Hicks, nee Mountbatten, and CIA archives, that Nehru was involved with Edwina Mountbatten. He formed an enduring intimate relationship with her until her death in February 1960. This was to prove fateful for India’s history because the Mountbattens and British chiefs of India’s armed forces, shockingly retained by Jawaharlal Nehru after independence, plotted successfully to ensure Pakistan retained a strategically significant part of Jammu and Kashmir thanks to Nehru’s wanton cupidity. Their treasonous role has been recorded by Lt. Gen. L.P. Sen who commanded Indian forces in Jammu and Kashmir, as brigadier, during 1947-48.

In order to signal to London and others like Field Marshal Auchinleck, wavering over the idea of partition, Lord Wavell wanted to give them a stark demonstration of what might happen across the length and breadth of India if Muslims did not get their homeland. He hatched a conspiracy to precipitate bloodshed through the Great Calcutta Killings of mid-August 1946, followed by violence in Bihar and Noakhali. The actual instigation of the mass killings, horrendous rapes with naked women hung from meat hooks next to joints of beef were fronted by Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Calcutta and Bengal were chosen as the venue for the bloodletting because the Muslim League was in power in the state and its was a Bengali leader, Fazlul Huq, who had proposed the Lahore Resolution on partition. Bengal’s incumbent chief minister was the ruthless playboy confidante of Jinnah, Huseyn S Suhrawardy, who proved a faithful co-conspirator in the grim mayhem.

Governor Frederick John Burrows, the local police and the military commander were instructed by Lord Wavell to stand aside while the violence took place. It was organised by Huseyn Suhrawardy in a chilling public speech at the Calcutta Maidan after he had ensured the Muslims came to the public meeting armed and prepared. It was only possible to stage such an event in Bengal because Muslims were both in power in the state and also the majority population, unlike any other part of India, including the Punjab.

It is this contextual backdrop that accounts for the subsequent history of Pakistan and its evident unenviable and unsurpassable current predicament. Pakistan’s objective was, as Jinnah’s voluminous correspondence and records of his public utterances confirm, nothing short of inflicting permanent fatal injury to India and not merely the creation of a Muslim homeland. The aspiration was a corridor through the heart of India between West and East Pakistan as well as the attenuation of India into a patchwork of independent polities, an outcome that must have been music to the ears of the India-baiting Churchill and Wavell.

The insistence that Jammu and Kashmir be ceded and the war to snatch it from India, despite the hostility of its people towards the prospect under Sheik Abdullah’s leadership, was only the first step in the yearning to wage jihad against Hindu India. The intention was to replicate the genocidal wars waged by the Ghaznavids and assorted Turkic and Persian invaders like Timur and Nadir Shah, a fate which the Muslim League had actually threatened in 1946 if the demand for Pakistan was not granted.

The Pakistan that was established on the apparent basis of religious commonality proved to be a fragile artificial construct. It became the victim of the assorted conflicts over issues like language, political power and equity that bedevil most societies. In the case of Pakistan, Punjabi Muslim racism towards the darker-skinned Bengalis of smaller physical stature was to become an incendiary contributory theme that underpinned genocide in Pakistan’s eastern province in 1971. The disputes between the two halves of Pakistan began almost immediately with the caprice of imposing Urdu as a national language. It succeeded to a degree in West Pakistan, where historical regional mother tongues were virtually obliterated with even the dominant Punjabis abandoning it, whereas Bengalis rioted against the attempted imposition.

The denouement came when the Awami League won a majority in Pakistan’s first democratic elections in 1970, large enough for its Sheik Mujibur Rahman to become entitled to the premiership of Pakistan as a whole. This was unacceptable to the racially conscious Punjabi Muslim military caste that had usurped political power in Pakistan. Another dire specific fear also animated their animosity, which was the possibility of East Pakistani reluctance to fund the national defence budget for wars against India. The house of cards collapsed in short order with the single largest slaughter of Hindus in history that India and the world have striven to forget, not the least the upper castes of West Bengal.

Pakistan had become a garrison state at the outset, with formal military control seized in 1958 by Field Marshal Ayyub Khan. The Western powers came to regard Pakistan as a military cantonment, like other bases around the world, but much more substantial and with a dual purpose. It was a collaborator against Soviet Communism in the region and beyond and a useful constraint on India, unwilling to kowtow to the West and was friendly towards the USSR. Pakistan joined SEATO in 1954 and CENTO in 1955, the Baghdad Pact earlier, the latter along with Iran, Iraq and Turkey. Both these Cold War alliances operated under US leadership. These ties were to prove fateful because the Anglo Americans inferred that Pakistan’s role and military commitments in the anti-communist alliance needed to be insulated from the cut and thrust of any homegrown frivolous democratic political upheaval.

Although, in practice, the contingent raison d’etre for domestic public consumption was the alleged existential threat posed to Pakistan by Hindu India and its illegitimate occupation of Muslim Jammu and Kashmir. These were to become the overarching compelling justifications of the primacy of Pakistan’s military in the country involved in a permanent institutionalised conflict with India. Although the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir provided extraordinarily handy legitimacy, Pakistan’s armed forces must have baulked at any prospect of its resolution. The result was quiet Anglo-American welcome to the military coup of 1958 and inauguration of the absolute primacy of Pakistan’s military over its polity, economy and society, which has endured ever since. In the estimation of Pakistan scholar Christine Fair, elected Pakistani prime ministers are no more than the equivalent of the mayor of a city. But absolute power tends, as Lord Acton once averred, to corrupt absolutely.

The predictable outcome of military dictatorship, all outward fictitious appearances to the contrary, was the inevitable full-blown corruption of the officer corps of Pakistan’s armed forces. It was facilitated by organised plunder of national assets through over generous land grants to army officers and their gradual usurpation of most productive activities of the country as well. The corruption also acquired a parlous ethnic basis with the Punjab dominating the army officer corps, their relatives constituting the privileged landed gentry or recruits to the higher bureaucracy. The moral compass also ebbed in personal conduct with the astonishing sexual licentiousness among senior politicians and army officers alike.

The ordinary citizen was perfectly aware of the unspeakable rot and found nowhere to turn except to embrace religious motifs of protest. Such religious protest experienced a colossal boost when the Pakistani state, under General Zia-ul-Haq, sponsored the augmentation of militarised religious zealotry during the anti-Soviet intervention of the West in Afghanistan. These huge new militant religious assets were then found useful to deploy against India, especially in the aftermath of the nuclearisation of both countries. It seemed to diminish the threat of Indian retaliation against terrorist assault despite its superior conventional forces though that reverie has been disabused by Balakot.

The absence of democratic accountability has not unexpectedly proved to be the principal reason for the contemporary downfall of the entire artificial edifice left behind by the British and put to shameless use by the US, which armed and nurtured Pakistan over decades. Without the constant democratic feedback mechanisms that motivate politicians to adopt sane utilitarian policies for their own survival as public agents, corruption and looting reached catastrophic proportions. Pretty much all players in Pakistan’s public life are only exercised to increase their foreign assets and make retirement plans abroad, with London being a favoured destination. It is extraordinary that virtually everyone in Pakistani public life is a dual national and with their assets located abroad any commitment to national well-being cannot but be suspect.

In the meantime, the survival of the grossly mismanaged economy became dependent on handouts provided to Pakistan, as a useful military cantonment, by vulturine countries which barely regarded its citizens as human. As such, there was always a price to be paid and the recent entry of China into the equation is proving the most noxious. Chinese funding is always in exchange for physical assets or commitments to purchase costly services from Chinese firms allotted the task of creating utilities and infrastructure. Sovereign control of Gwadar port has effectively been surrendered to China, much like large areas of Gilgit-Baltistan in 1963 and now the idea of ceding it in entirety is the subject of much speculation. One wonders at the eventual fate of Karachi port too, which could prove extremely useful to China because of Western military threats to its imports through other routes.

The existence of Pakistan in its present form is surely in doubt unless it finds many hundreds of billions of dollars to reset the economy, which seems highly unlikely, and the military is decisively ousted from public life and confined to barracks. Perhaps only the Punjab will remain a functioning polity with most of the remainder of the country enjoying quasi sovereignty since Islam has proved an inadequate basis for solidarity and nationhood. Some of these newer quasi-independent entities might even look to India for succour and support. But it seems likely India will inherit a much more formidable foe, in the chaos of Pakistan’s disintegration. There is a danger China, not given to international norms and niceties, will occupy the whole of Gilgit-Baltistan and very likely, for strategic reasons, PoK as well.

Yet, the British are getting ready for a triumphant return to India despite ultimate responsibility for the dreadful situation for India’s borders, with China poised to surround it on several sides. Apart from placing India in an unenviable territorial quandary, Britain is the culprit which sowed the seeds of the festering wounds of Khalistan, Dravidianism as well as the poison of truculent Bengali Leftism. India is apparently intent on a free trade treaty (FTA) with Britain, though the benefits are uncertain and the negative consequences palpable. Yet, one must admire the gall of the British establishment which has taken to the most egregious slander against Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the BBC, trying to incite Muslim revolt in India with blatant lies, even as it is negotiating the FTA. Unfortunately, it seems some self-serving British Indian-origin Ugandans, well-connected in Delhi’s corridors of power, favour a FTA and may well have the final say irrespective of its intrinsic merits for India’s future. Their rapid and unexplained enrichment since 2014 will only grow. – FirstPost, 20 January 2023

› Dr. Gautam Sen taught International Political Economy and Political Science for more than two decades at the London School of Economics. 

BBC Hinduphobia and Indiaphobia

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.

Time to reclaim India’s history – David Frawley

VOI

Greater India Map (US 1864)

The existing historical accounts of India starting with the Aryan Invasion Theory, reflect political and religious biases by groups who have sought to politically control or convert India, exploit it commercially, or divide India into smaller countries they can more easily dominate. – Dr. David Frawley

There remains a crucial need to correct the history of India from distorted accounts that have prevailed since the British era. As a New India arises with confidence in its own civilisation and global stature, this reductionist view of India as primitive, divided, politically incorrect and lacking in continuity is suspect and appears as India seen through the shadow of foreign rule and hostile ideologies.

India so far has not adequately reclaimed its history in the post-Independence era in a way that shows the true stature, duration and influence. Even after 75 years of Independence, the main history of India taught is coloured by derogatory interpretations of those with little respect for India’s great traditions, though a new movement to counter it is steadily rising.

The history of India as commonly given in textbooks and media accounts worldwide is the view of scholars who have little direct knowledge of India’s way of thought and view of culture, who prefer to interpret India according to their own cultural biases as if these were unquestioned truths.

Such a view of India’s history reduces India’s profound 5,000-year dharmic civilisation and its vast cultural, yogic and intellectual traditions to a mere footnote to Western culture and politics of the last few centuries, in which India has little relevance, and is often a subject of abuse and hoped for reformation.

The new reduction of India to South Asia

Recent views of India’s history add a new negationism. For them there was no India, but only a few temporary, disjointed cultures and kingdoms, with outside dominated empires like the Mughals or the British, and no enduring or characteristic Indic civilisation behind these.

Such scholars see only a nebulous South Asia region, without much cohesion or contribution to world civilisation, so no separate or unique place in history is required for India apart from the diverse groups and cultures of the region. This is a contrary position as compared to China, which is given its historical identity and cultural continuity, even though China borrowed much of its philosophy and spirituality from India through Buddhism.

The Greek author Megasthenes at the time of Alexander over two thousand years ago wrote a book called Indika about India, which the Greeks honoured. There was extensive trade between Rome, the Middle East and China with a land called India for many centuries. Note terms like Hindusthan for the region, or Bharat Varsha and its sixteen regions or Janapadas found in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain texts. Geographical terms like Indian Ocean, Indo-Pacific, Indochina and Indonesia have long been used and show the importance of India but are similarly now being rejected.

India’s contribution to science, medicine and philosophy, for example, though India gave much more than just decimal mathematics to the world, is similarly seldom highlighted. Rather the British view of Macaulay, who tried to destroy India’s extensive educational system, or the communist views of Karl Marx, are given precedence, as if India’s contribution to world civilization was minimal in all respects.

Contrary to such views, India in its Sanskrit and regional dialects has produced the largest and oldest literature in the world, replete with historical references, names of kings, kingdoms, peoples, geographical regions, sages and cultural practices. Note the many Vedas, Agamas, Puranas, Jatakas, Sutras, and local accounts for such literature.

The influence of modern India

In addition to this negation of ancient India is an attempt to negate modern India and its influence. Since Swami Vivekananda, Indic-based traditions of Yoga, Vedanta, Ayurveda, Tantra, Sanskrit, Indian music and dance have spread globally and gained a dedicated following in almost every major country and region of the world. Great yogis and gurus from India have travelled and gained followers globally

Yet in accounts of modern India the role of Indic civilisation in spiritualising the world, is hardly mentioned. Nor is the fact that Indian immigrants to the US or UK have wonderful temples and a thriving community contributing to the peace and welfare of the countries where they now arise. The youth in the West after their studies of history can scarcely name any figures of civilisational importance from ancient or modern India.

The contrary idea is given that India as a nation was created by the British and only gained its identity with India’s Independence in 1947, which can be attributed largely to Jawaharlal Nehru who was an Anglophile. Meanwhile India’s history books have largely been written by Marxists and reflect their political agenda. The idea of a superior Socialist/Nehruvian India arose to counter or even erase ancient Bharat Varsha.

The effort to reclaim India’s history

Yet sadly today, when Indian thinkers try to correct this slanted history, they are accused of political, nationalistic and religious biases, as if they had no credibility. The fact is that existing historical accounts of India starting with the Aryan Invasion Theory, reflect political and religious biases, but coming from outside of India, by groups who have sought to politically control or convert India, exploit it commercially, or divide India into smaller countries they can more easily dominate.

Certainly, independent India, for its 75th anniversary, needs to reclaim its history, just as many countries free of colonial influence are doing. An Indic criticism of Western civilisational influences should also have its place in the discussion. There should be no monopoly on history by one group or another, though efforts to control history have long occurred among colonial, communist, leftist and fascist regimes.

The fact is that a history of India without an Indian voice or point of view, given India as one the cradles of civilisation, remains incomplete and presents a distorted view not only of India but also of the history of humanity, which has an inner yogic dimension, not simply an outer political expression.

India’s textbooks need major changes providing an Indic/Bharatiya view of its place of respect. This is part of an open pursuit of truth, in which all sides must be heard. Today there seems to be an apartheid in academia and the media in which an Indic view, particularly a Hindu view, will not be given a voice.

India’s view of civilisation as the pursuit of dharma and higher consciousness, cannot be reduced to materialist concerns or to those of exclusivist beliefs. Indology has perhaps been the worst aspect of Orientalism. Time for it to be put in the dustbin of history. India’s civilisation has the most in depth cosmic dimension to its view of world and Self, which transcends all such outer historical theories, and must be examined accordingly.

Howsoever we view history, it is clear that the human race remains an unevolved species in terms of consciousness, still caught in massive violence and prejudices, which we find throughout the world.

Honouring the sages of India can help all humanity. But to truly appreciate these great yogis, rishis and gurus, we must recognise their enduring role in India’s civilisation and history, and their influence on the whole of Asia and beyond that is spreading globally today to the entire planet.

› Dr. David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri) is the director of the American Institute of Vedic Studies and the author of more than 30 books on yoga and Vedic traditions. He recieved of the prestigious Padma Bhushan award in 2015.

Indian History Timeline