On the "Hindu Perspective"

My post about Neeraj Pandey's obnoxiously anti-Muslim movie “Baby” brought an accusation from a reader that I did not have a suitably Hindu “perspective.”

That raises the question, “What is the Hindu perspective?”

One answer lies in the attitudes that Hinduism has promoted throughout its millennial course.

Hinduism began with our ancient rishis compiling the lore of India’s diverse tribes into the Vedas, thus creating a work all could venerate.

That allowed the tribes to stop their endemic conflicts and settle into interdependent castes.

Intense discussions (Upanishads) then drew from the Vedas the concepts that lie at the heart of Hindu belief.

Primarily, the rishis conceived of a universal spirit, Brahman (one who strengthens).

Brahman is manifest as the Sanatana Dharma (Eternal Law) holding all Creation in control.

The philosophic implication of that belief is expressed in Vasudeva kutumbhakam (God’s family). It is the basis of India’s unity in diversity and constitutes the fundamental Hindu perspective.

Another important contributor to the Hindu perspective is the confidence that comes from an acute age-old capacity to understand and meet the challenges facing our society.

The Vedas settled warring tribes into castes.

The Upanishads anchored the resulting peace in a profound philosophy of family relationships.

The Ramayana and the Mahabharata made that wisdom available to everyman/woman.

When superstition and ignorance blocked understanding of the Dharma the Buddha cleansed it.

When Buddhism lost its reforming zeal, Adi Sankara energized and brought back the old faith,

When caste and invasive Islam caused deep fissures in society, Kabir and Guru Nanak initiated the healing that developed into the modern Indian renaissance of Chatrapati Shivaji, Rammohun Roy, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi.

That progression makes one thing very clear: Hinduism has never been a blind faith. We have always studied problems, debated issues and come up with insightful and creative solutions.

Our failure to do that in the depths of the Kali Yuga is the primary reason why India fell victim to foreign invaders over the last two millennia.

Now, as we recover from that period, it is critically important that Hindus retrieve their traditional capacity to understand and meet the numerous challenges facing Indian society.

This blog has warned at great length about the greatest danger we face at present, the British campaign, with much help from Indian mass media proxies, to cloud our understanding of issues.

An important part of that campaign has been aimed at poisoning Hindu-Muslim relations.

The creation of Pakistan with its permanent siren call to jihad has, of course, done a great deal of work in that direction already, and if Hindu understanding is to defeat British intentions we must re-examine what actually happened.

To that end, the following section looks at the origin and development of “Islamic terrorism.”

“Islamic Terrorism”

There is no denying that Islam has an enormously violent history, but no more so than Christianity. Since their founding nearly seven centuries apart both religions have been almost ceaselessly at war within their own realms, and, since the 7th Century, with each other.

However, when Christian colonial expansion began in the 15th Century Islam was a generally quiescent faith with an Ottoman Caliph in Istanbul ruling most of what is now called the Middle East, and Persia (encompassing modern Iran, Iraq and a number of adjoining areas), presiding over most of the world's Shia.

The transformation of Islam from that torpor to its current jihadist frenzy is almost entirely due to British policy.

It involved the creation of three States (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Israel), and the promotion of the violent Muslim Brotherhood as the fount of “Islamic terrorism.”

The Brotherhood had its first mosque paid for by the British in the colonized “Suez Canal Zone” of Egypt, and its initial use was against anyone threatening British assets or allies anywhere in the Middle East.

The Cold War made it a tool against Communists and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan made it the source of a “Mujaheddin” army that became Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In that progression, the three British-created States had a key role.

Saudi Arabia came into existence before World War I when the British found in Kuwait the 16-year old scion of the former ruling family of Riyadh and sponsored him to take it back from Ottoman rule. The Saudis brought with them to power the violently extremist Wahhabi sect, long considered “Haram” by mainstream Islam.

What the British did to create Pakistan is fairly well known, so I will not dwell on the details; suffice it to say, they used murderous violence to support the Hindu and Muslim proxies who actually ripped India apart.

Pakistan emerged as a failed State and has remained one with the support of enormous amounts of aid from Saudi Arabia and the West; in return it has become their handy drug dealing rent-a-terrorist supplier, hitting not just India but Afghanistan, Russia, all of Central Asia, Uighur China and South East Asia.

Britain’s record in Palestine – later Israel – is unequaled in treachery.

After getting command of the territory through a League of Nations Mandate, it allowed unrestricted Jewish immigration from Europe, ostensibly to create a "Jewish Homeland." It then sponsored Arab terrorism against Jews. During WW II a “Jewish Brigade” in the British Army shaped the core of the Israeli Self Defence Force that beat back invading Arab armies in 1948.

One thing important to note about this whole scene is that the Arabs, who had not ruled themselves for over 800 years, were manipulated at every turn by Britain and France.

After WW I, when London and Paris created a number of new countries in the former Ottoman territories, they consistently arranged for political instability.

In Sunni majority Syria they gave power to the Shia; in Shia majority Iraq they empowered the Sunni. France created Lebanon to give power to Christians. With British prompting, Saudi Arabia took the territory containing Mecca and Medina, vaulting Wahhabi Islam to unprecedented global influence.

In surveying this history it is important to note that the Muslim populations of the Middle East and Pakistan have been the worst victims of “Islamic terrorism.” They have shed the most blood, lost the most resources and suffered the worst political manipulations.

An Indian Perspective

There can be no “Hindu perspective” in dealing with this situation for several reasons.

First and most important, our entire tradition depends upon each person being free to accept God in any form and worship in any way; those are matters decided by individual karma in which no one else can interfere. Sri Krishna says explicitly in the Bhagavad Gita: “do not disturb the faith of another. No matter to whom a person bows, he bows to me.”

Beyond the question of religion is that of politics, and there too is a strong argument not to strive for a “Hindu perspective.” Indian Muslim perceptions of their co-religionists elsewhere are likely to be far more acute, and it would be silly for Indian policy not to benefit from that.

If we want to help steer the world out of its current vortex of “Islamic terrorism,” it is essential that Muslims be part of the Indian team. They already are in the Ministry of External Affairs, but we need greater cultural heft in what is now purely policy.

It is only when Muslims in Pakistan see Indian Islam as a viable political alternative that we can wash back the blood-dimmed tide that Britain drowned us in; only in such circumstances can Arabs and Jews exchange Salaams and Shaloms in the Middle East and mean it.

The Weight of History

To foresee Hindu-Muslim unity as the foundation of India is hardly visionary. Guru Nanak set off the modern Indian renaissance five centuries ago by declaring “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim;” his first disciples (Sikhs), were drawn from both religions and all castes.

He was, in fact, making a formal statement of what had become part of life. In the centuries since Islam's entry into India Hindu and Muslim kings never stopped fighting each other; but they made liberal use of soldiers of both faiths.

One of the greatest of Indian national heroes, Chatrapati Shivaji, now celebrated as an icon of Hindu resistance to Mughal rule, endowed and prayed at Sufi shrines and employed Muslims at every level in his armies.

Perhaps nothing exemplifies the easy interfaith coexistence of those times as Netaji Palkar, one of his commanders who joined the Mughal army, converted to Islam and spent ten years fighting the Afghan tribes under the name of Quli Mohammed Khan; after that he returned without fuss to Hinduism and Shivaji's service.

The Mughals meanwhile were equally tolerant. Akbar’s main general was his former enemy, Man Singh. After Akbar the Mughals were by blood as Indian as alien, and culturally they were entirely indigenous. Aurangzeb, the most intolerant of them, endowed Hindu temples even as he destroyed others.

As British colonial rule spread over India, the resistance was nowhere divided along communal lines.

Tipu Sultan exemplified that unity: all his top commanders were Hindus and his capital took its name from the Vishnu temple of Sri Ranga Patnam which he endowed and prayed at. Tipu was finally defeated and his stronghold taken after a Persian Islamic scholar he had favored opened a door in the outer wall to British forces. Tipu's body was found under several others, all Hindus who had died to prevent the British from taking and desecrating it. The great Sultan remains a living memory: last November a mass rally at Haveri in Karnataka celebrated the 264th Tipu Jayanthi.

The British poisoned that long and liberal tradition. It is up to modern Indians of all faiths to reclaim our national heritage.

History as Karma

During the colonial era Europeans considered themselves unique in having a sense of history. All the rest of us, including the Chinese with their exact millennial court records, were deemed to have a sense of passing Time but not of history.

That assessment had two elements. One was a sense of racial superiority born of easy dominance over all other regions.

The other lay in the European belief that history was a fluid intellectual construct amenable to countless Orwellian revisions: those who control the present control the past; those who control the past control the future.

In that perspective the Indian view of the past as an unalterable karmic progression seemed “fatalistic,” and it led the British to imagine that by creating their own narrative of Indian history they could control the country’s future.

The first effort at such rewriting, paid for and published by the East India Company, was by James Mill (1773-1836), a London journalist who wrote a six-volume history of India without ever visiting the country or knowing any of its languages. Mill trashed Indian history as a “monstrous and absurd” concoction of legends and myths. He thought Indian society “presented a very uniform appearance during the long interval from the visit of the Greeks [under Alexander] to that of the English,” and that their “annals … from that era until the period of the Mohomedan conquests, are a blank.”

Since that early 19th Century work, there has been a huge outpouring of British writing reinforcing those themes, almost all of it racist, much of it intellectually disreputable in terms of motive, and some blatantly dishonest.

An author who bundles all those elements is John Keay, whose books can be found in most bookshops and libraries in India. The following is my review of one of his books (done for the Amazon web site).

Propaganda as History

“Two hundred years ago India was seen as a place with little history and less culture,” says a blurb on the back cover of John Keay’s “India Discovered,” originally published in 1984. The book credits the British for transforming India into a country now “revered for a notable prehistory, a magnificent classical age and a cultural tradition unique in both character and continuity.”

Keay makes his case with a massive amount of distortion.

For instance: “It is hard to appreciate now that as late as the end of the eighteenth Century nothing whatsoever was known of Indian history prior to the Mohammedan invasions.”

That is utter nonsense. India has never lost sight of its literary tradition dating back many thousands of years to the ordering of the Vedas. That tradition includes the philosophy of the Upanishads, the great epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, and the teachings of the Buddha. All of them constitute an understanding of the past that is incontrovertibly “history,” and much of it has remained common knowledge down to the village level.

The Buddhist tradition in particular is specifically historical, yet Keay asserts that the British were responsible for the “realization” that the Buddha was “not a god but a historical figure.” A Buddhist scholar is likely to laugh out loud at that.

Another laugh-out-loud assertion is that Warren Hastings promoted the study of Sanskrit because he “loved the people of India and respected them to a degree no other British ruler has ever equaled.”

If Hasting loved Indians, Hitler loved Jews.

Edmund Burke’s blistering indictment in the British parliament when it moved to impeach Hastings for a variety of high crimes and corruptions made clear just how much the former East India Company honcho in Calcutta cared for Indians.

Of the tortures the Company’s tax collectors used in Bengal under Hastings, Burke said, “Virgins whose fathers kept them from the sight of the sun were dragged into the public Court [and there] vainly invoking its justice, while their shrieks were mingled with the cries and groans of an indignant people, those virgins were cruelly violated. …. The wives of the people of the country only differed in this; that they lost their honour in the bottom of the most cruel dungeons … they were dragged out naked and exposed to the public view, and scourged before all the people … they put the nipples of the women in the sharp edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies.”

Hastings assembled the first group of “Orientalists” to study Sanskrit for only one reason: to comprehend the financial records of temples so he could tax their vast hidden wealth. In a few years his taxes drained the resources that had always before supported a great variety of social services, from village school teachers and vaids (doctors) to maintenance of roads, upkeep of water works and famine relief.

The East India Company’s fierce exactions destroyed not only that system but the entire agricultural economy of Bengal and pushed it into the first of the great “man-made famines” the British brought to India. In the first decade of its rule some 7 million people starved to death, fully a third of the population of what had been the richest province of the Mughal Empire. By the time colonial rule ended in 1947, the death toll from British “man-made famines” would be estimated at several hundred million.

Keay also engages in a great number of subtler distortions that are hardly unimportant.

For instance, in referring to Hastings as the “first Governor General of India” and adding parenthetically that “Clive had been Governor of Bengal only,” he creates the impression that British rule was far more extensive than it was. In fact, it remained virtually unchanged under Clive and Hastings; the main difference was that the latter had the title of “Governor General of India.”

Under both, the East India Company continued to collect taxes on behalf of the Mughal Emperor in Bengal and to extort revenues in lieu of debt repayment from the indigent Nawab of Arcot in Madras.

Over the next century the Company would continue to collect taxes in the name of the Mughal as it slowly added to its territories. The British Crown would assert sovereignty only after the national uprising of 1857. After that, it would rule some 3/5ths of undivided India for just 90 years, a third of that in steady retreat before the strengthening nationalist movement under Mahatma Gandhi.

Given that reality, how do we explain the undeniable zeal that fired so many Englishmen, most of them with other day jobs, to search out the Indian past?

The explanation is rich in karmic ironies.

Warren Hastings initiated the work of the “Orientalists” to get more taxes. They brought to light not only a great mass of public wealth but the riches of the Indian past. That had the effect of reconnecting modernizing Indians to their national roots: Gandhi, for instance, first read the Gita in London, in Edwin Arnold’s English translation.

What sustained the zeal for discovery into the 19th Century?

It was the theory of an Indo-Aryan language family proposed by William Jones, the most brilliant of the first Orientalists. It was misinterpreted to mean there was an actual flesh and blood “Aryan race,” a possibility the British seized on eagerly because they could be the “original Aryans” and thus legitimate rulers of India. Thereafter, everything they did to uncover Indian history was driven by the hope of finding concrete evidence of that link.

Meanwhile, the karmic current of the “Aryan race” gained enormous energy in Germany and France, where it was seen as justifying White supremacist racism. Hitler epitomized that view, and his reach for Aryan supremacy precipitated World War II.

As if to underline this whole string of karmic ironies, the armies that devastated Britain’s capacity to hold on to India marched under the ancient Indian symbol of good luck, the Swastika.

Keay’s flat self-serving presentation of the British Indian relationship is typical of almost everything that has been written on the matter since colonial times. It reflects at one level a basic incomprehension of the multi-layered subtleties that have been in play, and at another, a determined refusal to see India for what it is.

What can break that pattern as accelerating changes in international relations force once powerful countries to turn in small corners will be a pressing issue in the years ahead.

************ end of review ************

The British seem to have learned nothing about karmic consequences from their experience of ruling India. They are undoubtedly behind such initiatives as the EPIC Channel and the attempt by the Hindu Mahasabha to glorify Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse. They will inevitably spur Indians to a reawakening of their spiritual and political history that would have taken much longer otherwise.

Britain and Hinduism 5: The Path of Karma

The story goes that Shiva and Parvati were watching from Kailas one day as a poor old man trudged along a desert road hungry, thirsty and miserable.

“Why don’t you help him?” Parvati asked.

“I can’t” said Shiva. “It is his karma.”

“You are all-mighty God,” said Parvati. “You can change his karma.”

“I can’t” said Shiva. “The Law of Karma is unbreakable and unbendable.”

“Surely, you can change little things” Parvati argued. “What’s to stop you from giving that wretch some food and drink and making him rich?”

“Watch this,” said Shiva. He waved his hand and on the road in front of the man there appeared a table laden with a rich feast and a pot of gold.

Just at that moment the old man thought to himself, “All my life I’ve walked around with my eyes open. Now here’s a straight road with nothing to see. Let me walk with my eyes closed for a change.” So he closed his eyes and walked past the table.

The story has two lessons. One is that our individual karma determines how the world affects us. The second is that to appreciate God’s gifts we must keep the eyes open, and not just to see but to understand.

Individual Karma

Once, when the Buddha was preaching, he noticed that a leper on the side of the audience had quietly, instantly, understood his whole aim and purpose. The Enlightened One pointed out to the audience what had happened and explained that it was the man’s meritorious karma that allowed such comprehension. We normally never think of our karma in such a direct way, but if we do, it is clear that for good and ill, the past is a profound presence in every moment of every life.

If we imagine that our eyes do not see in space but in time, it is possible to envision that reality: each person would appear as the end of a very convoluted flagellum stretching back to Creation/Big Bang. That scene is easier to picture as a single enormous body containing all life – the Purusha of our Creation Myth. Far from being fanciful imagination, that is the exact scientific truth: each of us is a long and complex causal chain with mind-boggling millions of tangles in the backward stretch.

The karmic energy that drives each individual life is thus not entirely a distinctive factor; it is closely connected to everything around it and operates in synchrony.

So how do we “understand” our individual karma?

Jesus summed it up beautifully in “Consider the lilies of the field. They toil not. Neither do they spin. Yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.”

To “understand” it is necessary to drop all shows and affectations and be your-self.

That takes the utmost seriousness of spirit without being heavy. It requires quiet time in which to shed your various roles and stresses and breathe free. People often call this meditation, and there is a lot of mumbo jumbo about watching candle flames, breathing incense and so on, but essentially all it involves is relaxing and gently sidelining any stressful thoughts that well up in your mind. The mind achieves first a state of calm and then of joy. That joyful feeling indicates you are in touch with your karmic self – a term that is a synonym for God here, for the one is the face of the other.

In such a state you can ask any question, express whatever aim you have in life, and there will be a creative response. To quote Jesus again, “Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find.”

What you get will be direction. Gandhi in moments of crisis would consult his “still small voice” and be guided fully by it.

Experience at a humbler level, my own, allows me to say that once you find the inner voice you have to hang on no matter how difficult the guidance. If it takes you over rough terrain, consider it necessary. In my case, it involved quitting a career contract at the top level of the United Nations professional cadre and striking out as the editor/publisher of an independent newsletter on the UN, an occupation comparable in status and security to the itinerant vending of vegetables. What made it especially difficult in my case was that the formidable American national security Establishment found the venture suspicious and ensured that it would not be a commercial success. I stuck it out by doing a number of odd jobs, including stringing for The Times of India (under Dileep Padgaonkar), and undertaking a wide variety of freelance assignments. As the difficult years went by, I developed an altogether new perceptual and critical quality in my writing, had an altogether more nuanced appreciation of the United Nations, and began to see shape and structure in the chaotic progression of international affairs. I doubt that if I had remained with the Secretariat any of that would have happened. Things have not got any easier now that I am back in India, for the fuzz here have taken up where the Americans left off, and there is nothing a writer can do in self defence; but I have no doubt about my path even though it could dip me into new miseries at any moment.

That brief personal aside is to underline that what I write about is not all theory. It is also to highlight the significance of the message the ancients telegraphed by putting the hymn to Agni at the opening of the Rig Veda and making the sacred fire Witness to every Hindu ceremonial of sacrifice, marriage, death and remembrance. Agni leaps the cusp of matter and energy. It symbolizes our material and spiritual being. It is God with us and within us, the life force, the karmic energy.

Agni signals also the magical nature of the universe, its unfathomable size, brilliance and energy, every aspect miraculous in our mundane sight.

The fortunate among us learn early that the sense of the magical is the basis of all faith, that it leads the truly blessed to Bhakti, a prayerful devotion that is at one extreme the last resource of the powerless, and at the other, the common secret of the successful, of grace under pressure, of champions in every field.

The mute unexplained strength of Bhakti is karmic energy, and it is the primary driver not only of individual lives but of all human affairs. We can trace its flow from the beginning in India.

The Saptarishis who put the Vedas in order, the anonymous authors of the Upanishads, Valmiki the lowborn brigand who became a poet to celebrate Ramrajya, and Vyasa the grandsire of the Bharata clan, all mustered an awesome karmic force. So did the Buddha in replacing Hinduism when it grew decrepit, and Adi Sankara in reviving the old faith when Buddhism flagged.

From South India, the modern Bhakti movement passed across India in several generations of saint poets during the first third of the last Millennium to help sustain Hinduism against invasion in the north. At a time when Babur was still a youth in Ferghana, Kabir and Guru Nanak initiated what became, after the interruption of two empires, the current Indian Renaissance. Raja Rammohun Roy gave it firmer structure in opposing the British in Bengal, and after him, it became countrywide. With Gandhi, first in South Africa and then in India, the struggles for human rights and national liberation spilled into the rest of the world and led to the great transformations of the 20th Century.

What is remarkable about this entire sequence is that soldiers, bureaucrats and kings had nothing to do with primary initiatives; they came wholly from individuals who saw what had to be done and did it.

All this should jar readers, especially the young inured to the post-colonial expectation that government is the solution to all our problems.

Government played little part in the life of traditional India; it rose in importance because of its colonial role as Chief Thief and Exploiter. Since independence, there is an expectation that government should solve all problems and provide compensation for misfortunes. That attitude, promoted by a pandering, sensationalist Press, is deeply unhealthy. Government intervenes in the life of society at the cost of liberty. The monetary compensation it provides is not care and comfort; it is a cold bureaucratic gesture and index of control.

The result of expecting the government to be a nanny is a learned helplessness in society. Young people today should consider that the quality of daring is the clearest difference between Indians today and those held out as exemplars of nobility and achievement in our sacred literature. The two outstanding examples Hindu children learn of are Prahlada and Eklavya, one a prince, the other a teenager from the low Nishada caste.

Prahlada is a bhakt who resists tyranny so steadfastly that his karmic energy calls up Narasimha, the half-man half-lion incarnation of Vishnu; the Universe itself bends to the power of his faith.

Eklavya’s story is among the most painful and disturbing in the Mahabharata, and it is to the great credit of the epic's numerous editors down the centuries that the story remains in all its unvarnished brutality, an unmistakable indictment. He comes to Drona, teacher of war to the Pandavas, asking to study archery; but the high-caste warrior will not consider it. Undeterred, Eklavya goes off into the forest, builds a clay figure of Drona and practices before it until he is better than Arjuna. Drona, who has promised to make Arjuna the best in the world, deals with the situation by demanding that Eklavya give him the thumb of his right hand as the gift due to a guru. The boy cuts it off without a plea.

The lesson to draw from the story of India as a whole, and those of Prahlada and Eklavya in particular, is that in a world of many inequities the aroused karmic force cannot rest. If Maya does not hide from our eyes what needs to be done, it is imperative to do it. If something is incomprehensible, it is necessary to struggle until it is clear. Every victory contributes to the next one. Failure does not matter, only the effort does: it makes your karma more powerful.

How humanity will fare in the 21st Century now hangs in the balance. We are now at a critical period in the evolution of world order, when the momentum of the European industrial era has weakened almost to a standstill. What will come in its place is going to depend very largely on what we in India do.

Part 6 of this essay will look at the emerging world scene and India's potential role.

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Britain and Hinduism 2: Murder as Policy

Over the centuries religion has been a standard tool of the British imperial elite. In manipulating victim populations ranging from Northern Ireland to the Middle East and India, their modus operandi has been simple: create a sense of grievance or entitlement in a religious group and use the resulting conflicts to serve British interests.

This worked well with Christian and Muslim populations with their well-established collective sense of their faith, but in India the technique came up short because our group identities compound religion with culture, caste, language and province. The extremist proxies the British promoted – the Muslim League under Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Hindu Mahasabha under Vinayak Damodar Savarkar – had very limited impact until the colonial regime introduced a historically unprecedented element: communal violence.

They did so first with the “Maplah (Muslim) Rebellion” in Kerala immediately in the wake of Gandhi’s first nation-wide Satyagraha in 1920. It succeeded in destroying the Hindu-Muslim amity created by the Khilafat Movement but there was no permanent communal split nationally.

The next stage came in the run-up to the 1937 elections, when “Hindus” suddenly began to make a series of unprovoked and inexplicable attacks on Muslims. The Muslim League blamed the Congress for the attacks in a series of written reports that made no mention of the Hindu Mahasabha (newly under Savarkar). The reports described the assaults with Dickensian bathos: the victims were invariably pious people at prayer or celebrating some happy holiday; the attackers came to their bloody business shouting “Gandhi ki jai!” Suspicion that it was all a British command performance was widespread, and the Viceroy (Linlithgow) only reinforced that with a series of unctuous speeches expressing his “deep conviction that upon [Hindu-Muslim] unity depend the position and prestige of India before the nations, and her capacity to take her due place in the world.”

The violence was meant to scare Muslims into supporting the League but it did not work. Within their reserved vote banks and in the general electorate, Muslims voted overwhelmingly for other parties. The North-West Frontier Province, with a population over 90 per cent Muslim, voted solidly for a close ally of the Congress, the Redshirt Party led by the great Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. The Punjab, with a Muslim majority of about 53 per cent, elected the Unionist Party led by Sikander Hyat Khan who had broad Hindu and Sikh support. In Bengal, which also had a thin Muslim majority, a regional party won a plurality with support from all communities. Jinnah could not gain control even of his own native province, Muslim-majority Sind; the local leader, Khan Bahadur Allah Bux, opted to ally himself with the Congress.

Both Hyat Khan and Allah Bux rejected the notion that Hindus and Muslims were different “nations” and they would have been formidable obstacles to Partition. But neither lived to oppose it: Hyat Khan died suddenly of an alleged “heart attack” at the age of 50 and Allah Bux was assassinated. 

Mahatma Gandhi, the most effective foe of British rule, had become the target of deadly assault much earlier. The first attempt on his life was on 25 June 1934, when an unknown assailant threw a bomb at a car in which he was supposed to be travelling. As Tushar Gandhi (the Mahatma’s great-grandson), noted in his 2007 book Let’s Kill Gandhi! the bomb injured several policemen but “surprisingly, there [was] no record of any investigations or arrests.” As he also underlined, the attack took place in Pune, the base of operations for the gang that tried repeatedly to kill Gandhi and finally succeeded on 30 January 1948.

A second attempt on Gandhi’s life was in July 1944 at the small resort of Panchgani near Pune where he was recuperating from the near death experience of his final imprisonment. The assailant, Nathuram Godse, rushed at him with a dagger but was stopped and disarmed. Gandhi invited him to stay and talk but Godse stalked off; no police action followed. In September the same year, Godse tried again, joining a group at the entrance to Sevagram Ashram armed with a dagger; the police confiscated the weapon but once again, failed to take any action.

These incidents occurred well before the massive atrocities at the time of Partition that supposedly enraged Godse into killing Gandhi in 1948. They make clear that Godse's statement prior to his execution expressing outrage at the afflictions of of the Hindu community was pure propaganda. The available facts, especially the scandalous police inaction that extended from 1934 to 1948, point firmly to a long-standing conspiracy supported by the British and centred on Savarkar, Godse and Narayan Apte.

Apte has been generally viewed as little more than Godse's sidekick but he was in fact a key figure. A womanizing part-time recruiter for the Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF), he declined a coveted permanent commission at the height of the Great Depression to continue his marginal existence as Savarkar’s henchman. The only believable explanation for that decision is that he was already employed full-time as an operative of British Intelligence.

A third plotter, Madanlal Pahwa, was a former radio operator in the Navy and probably kept Savarkar in touch with his British controllers. Another factor indicating a wider conspiracy to murder Gandhi is the mystery surrounding the provenance of the murder weapon. It was initially reported stolen from the armory at Nasik; later accounts said it was an almost brand new Beretta automatic brought to India from Italy by a former Army officer.

The 1944 attempts on Gandhi’s life followed his providential escape from death in custody, at a time when British leaders wanted him dead. Winston Churchill responded to news of his 21-day fast in 1943  by sending a “most secret encrypted message” to the Viceroy (Linlithgow) urging him against “any show of leniency.” Linlithgow assured the Prime Minister he would “feel no compunction” in letting Gandhi die. A later cable contained Churchill’s cold query why Gandhi was not dead yet. His survival probably had something to do with the interest Franklin Roosevelt took in the matter; at one point he had the State Department summon the British Ambassador in Washington and tell him flatly “Gandhi must not die in prison.”  

Gandhi fasted in prison to protest the "man-made famine" in Bengal with which the colonial regime responded to the Quit India movement. That punitive intent is clear in the fact that as some 3 million people starved to death, Churchill turned down requests to divert any of the numerous supply ships passing within hours of Calcutta carrying food from New Zealand to Britain. British diplomats also declined a Canadian offer of free grain.

Another object of Gandhi's protest was the brutal repression of the leaderless Quit India Movement. The colonial police and Army routinely beat, machine-gunned and bombed nonviolent demonstrators; torture and custodial death were common. Sushila Nayar's diary recorded that Indian sources within the government estimated the civilian death toll at some 50,000; she noted that the actual toll was higher.

Not all murders the regime committed were open and violent. There were also many quiet deaths  supposedly from natural causes. Three of Gandhi’s closest aides were eliminated in that manner. His nephew Maganlal, who founded and ran Sabarmati Ashram, the person the Mahatma considered his political “heir,” died inexplicably in 1928; that was when consultations were beginning for the declaration of Purna Swaraj the next year.

The next to go was the formidable business magnate Jamanlal Bajaj, who founded Sevagram Ashram in Wardha, where Gandhi moved in 1930. He dropped dead of a supposed brain haemorrhage in February 1942, as Congress was gearing up for what became the Quit India movement. It was reported to be a "staggering loss" to Gandhi, the most serious blow he had suffered since Maganlal's death.

Less than six months later, Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s private secretary, the only person who knew all of the Mahatma’s vast network of contacts and correspondents, dropped dead in prison. The three deaths not only affected Gandhi’s capacity for action at crucial times, they eliminated those most capable of carrying on his legacy.

Gandhi did not consider the deaths of his primary aides to be natural. On 2 March 1944 Sushila Nayar’s diary noted that he told her: “One after the other, you may all be taken away and I may be left alone. That will be a pathetic state.”

The death of his wife in prison also weighed heavily on Gandhi. In a rare personal complaint, he wrote to Viceroy (Wavell) disputing the regime’s public claim that Kasturba had been provided the best medical care and pointing out the many “pinpricks” the old couple had endured in prison. British “historians” have continued to repeat the canard that Kasturba’s death resulted from Gandhi’s refusal to permit the use of penicillin. Nayar’s diary makes clear that she (as the doctor in attendance), had asked the prison authorities for penicillin but was told it was unavailable.

All the foregoing pales in the light of the mass murders the British engineered in the final two years of their control of India. To understand why they did that we have to appreciate the global context.

World War II had pauperized Britain. Its main creditor, the United States, was pressing hard for an end to its Empire. Churchill’s hopes that Britain would have room to manoeuver by using the Soviet Union to counterbalance American power came to an abrupt end in 1945 when the United States became the world’s only nuclear Power. Without hope of holding India in the face of its massive nationalist mobilization and increasingly mutinous army. British strategists headed by Churchill decided that India had to be split.

David Monteath, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the British Foreign Office, summed up their rationale in a note for the file. “If India falls apart we may, I suppose, expect the Muslims to try and enlist British support by offering us all sorts of military and political facilities, to commit ourselves to what would be in effect the defence of one Indian state against another.”

To make India “fall apart” became the British objective from mid-1946, and the first step towards that goal was the "Great Calcutta Killing" initiated by the Muslim League on its “Direct Action Day,” 16 August. Jinnah was then secretly getting political advice from Churchill, who had arranged for letters to be routed through his private secretary, Miss E.A. Gilliat, at 6 Westminster Gardens in London.
The idea of using mass murder for political gain probably originated in that correspondence, for Jinnah was too fastidiously lawyerly to have come up with such an egregiously criminal plan on his own.

Whatever the origin of the plan, there is no doubt that the British actively facilitated the killings. The police did nothing as a crowd of Muslim League "hooligans" (as The Statesman described them), dispersed after Friday prayers on the Maidan and went on a spree of murder and arson, targeting Hindus and Sikhs. The Army, which had withdrawn all its outposts in the city the previous day, remained firmly ensconced in Fort William as thousands of people were beaten, hacked and burned to death over the next 72 hours. Retaliatory killings of Muslims did not get under way in the city until, on the third day of murder and arson, a group of Marwari businessmen assembled a band of hardened criminals and announced a bounty. Whether they did so under instructions from the British is a question that needs to be asked because without retaliation their whole project would have stalled.

The events in Calcutta set off a murderous rampage in the Muslim-majority area of Noakhali now in Bangladesh, and that led to mayhem in Bihar, and across North India. Descriptions of this process have commonly used the phrase “communal madness,” as if it were a natural contagion; but that distorts what actually happened. Those who witnessed the 1946-1947 riots up close have invariably reported that the killings were organized, and that goondas, criminals without any tint of faith, were always in the forefront of action.

Peace activist Muriel Smith who ran a relief centre at Noakhali made an additional important point when she wrote: “Perhaps the only thing that can be quite positively asserted about this orgy of arson and violence is that it was not a spontaneous uprising of the villagers. However many goondas may live in Bengal, they are incapable of organizing this campaign on their own initiative. Houses have been sprayed with petrol and burnt. Who supplied this rationed fuel? … Who supplied the weapons? The goondas seem to think that they really are the rulers of this beautiful area of Bengal. One sees no sign of fear [or] anxiety as to future punishment ….” Only the colonial authorities could have offered them impunity.

The tale of Partition has been told many times, but no historian has tried as yet to identify the Indians who helped organize the events that led to the murder of a million of their compatriots and rendered 14 million homeless in their own ancient lands. It is important to do that if only to see what role they have continued to play in the post-colonial evolution of Indian politics.

It is also necessary to bring into post-colonial perspective the evolution of the poisonous concept of "Hindutva" the British injected into Indian politics to dismember the country. That will be the focus of Part 3 of this essay.