Is British Imperialism Reinventing Itself – Again?

In the decades after World War II, when the British Empire seemed to die, it actually reinvented itself as a global engine for money laundering and organized crime; recent international developments indicate that something similar is happening now.

Britain achieved its earlier resurrection by forging the much celebrated “special relationship” with the military-industrial complex of the United States and setting off the Cold War.(See here)

That was, in effect, a coup against American democracy, and it gave London free reign in making a host of international rearrangements, including:

• Partitioning India to create Pakistan as a proxy for use in South Asia and, in alliance with Saudi Arabia (an earlier British creation), the Islamic world.

• Developing the Muslim Brotherhood from a social service organization in Egypt into a transnational Middle Eastern support system for terrorists.

• Continuing its colonial control of Africa’s great mineral wealth through apartheid South Africa, a number of other white minority regimes, and continued subversion of independent African States.

• Expanding its colonial era interests in drug trafficking by developing, first, the “Golden Triangle” in Southeast Asia as the world centre for the production of opium and heroin, and after the end of the Vietnam War, shifting operations to Afghanistan under cover of the "Mujaheddin" war against Russian occupation.

• Developing the first large flow of cocaine from Colombia to the United States by providing transit and money laundering facilities in the Bahamas.

• Setting up a global system of off shore “tax havens” where organized crime of every sort could safely deposit income and arrange for London bankers to invest it.

By the end of the 1970s, these initiatives had resulted in Britain controlling a multi-trillion dollar underground economy rivaling the GDP of the United States. It gave Britain an unparalleled capacity to corrupt, subvert, manipulate and punish anyone, including governments, that got in its way.

In the case of India, punitive British action has involved the subversive use of our corrupt "elite" media, the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, and efforts to foment insurrections in several parts of the country, most visibly in West Bengal (the Purulia arms drop case), and in the Khalistan uprising in the Punjab.

In the United States it has involved the brutal early Cold War alliance with the military-industrial establishment that saw the McCarthy black list and the Kennedy/King assassinations, followed by the more nuanced manipulation of politics through proxies, especially the Bush family with its three terms in the presidency, two of which involved rigged elections. 

British influence in the United States eroded after the end of the Cold War and there were increasing transatlantic conflicts of interest, especially in oil-rich Arab States and as a result of American efforts to end money laundering.

The 9/11 attacks at the beginning of the first rigged Bush Jr. presidency ended that erosion by concentrating the power of the military-industrial elite in the deeply undemocratic “Homeland Security” arrangements. New wars followed, and there was rampant growth of domestic surveillance and militarized urban police.

In the last decade, those trends have again been reversed. The Obama administration has drawn down wars and increased pressure on British money laundering. Edward Snowden’s revelations have shone a light on the surveillance State. The “Occupy” movement has focused public attention on the vast gulf between the ultra-rich 1% and the rest of American society. Popular protests have erupted time and again over the actions of storm-trooper police forces.

Meanwhile, the rise of developing countries as a new force in world affairs has put increasing pressure on British drug trafficking and money laundering systems. In recent years Latin American countries have called for a fundamental re-examination of the prohibitionist drug conventions that make trafficking so lucrative to organized crime. African States have called for an end to "tax havens" that drain trillions of dollars from their economies.

British responses to these challenges underlie a number of recent international developments:

• The outbreak of Ebola in Africa, posing as it does, a considerable threat to other regions of the South, will certainly ease pressure from developing countries to end drug trafficking and money laundering. (The statement by former UNAIDS chief Peter Piot that the strain of Ebola in the current outbreaks is different from the one in previous incidents of the disease needs urgent investigation; where did it come from?)

• The sudden appearance of a well-funded and brutal new terrorist “Islamic State” is threatening to reverse the American draw back from foreign wars. Its televised beheading of Westerners has only one purpose, to build public support for American intervention on the ground; if that happens, the old military-industrial set in the United States will quickly regain much of its lost clout.

• The British announcement last week that it will float bonds denominated in Chinese Yuan will undoubtedly undermine the US$ role as the international reserve currency. That is clearly intended to reduce American capacity to challenge Britain's money laundering and other criminal enterprises.

On all fronts, there is an undoubted effort to reverse positive current trends, with Britain the primary beneficiary.

The only thing that can prevent it from succeeding is an informed global public, capable of seeing through the torrents of British propaganda spread by a host of proxies.

Those proxies include such "liberal" founts as The Guardian, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, the International Clearing House and, in India, operators ranging from our "elite Press" to such two-bit outfits as Counter Currents. A sure confirmation of proxy status is their total blindness to the entire scenario outlined above.

MacUrquhart and Hammarskjold's Restless Ghost

I just came across an interview of former United Nations Under-Secretary-General Brian Urquhart on the UN News Centre web site. It was supposedly conducted in 2011 to mark the 50th anniversary of Dag Hammarskjold’s death in September 1961. How I missed seeing it for over a year is a mystery, but it’s never too late to comment on what Urquhart said. But before I do, here’s a bit of necessary background:

Hammarskjold was a little known Swedish diplomat who was appointed Secretary-General of the United Nations primarily because of expectations that he would not rock the boat at a time of high Cold War tensions. His predecessor, Trygve Lie, had thrown the organization into a crisis by alienating the Soviet Union with his too fervent support of UN intervention in Korea.

In an understated Swedish way, Hammarskjold turned out to be a spectacular surprise. Among his historically important achievements were the negotiations in China for the release of 17 imprisoned American airmen; the fielding of a UN peacekeeping force that helped resolve the messy crisis created by the British-French-Israeli attempt to take back control of the Suez Canal; and beginning the UN Secretariat’s involvement in opposing apartheid in South Africa.

His last, fateful achievement was to defend the newly independent Republic of the Congo after that enormously mineral rich country was thrown into chaos by Belgium, its former ruler.

As a UN peacekeeping force battled Belgian mercenaries in the breakaway province of Katanga, Hammarskjold went on a peace mission to the region and was killed when his aircraft crashed near Ndola in what was then the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

A British-Rhodesian commission of inquiry ruled that pilot error had caused the crash. A UN investigation could neither confirm nor deny that finding and left on the table the suspicion that Hammarskjold’s plane had been shot down.

In 2011, a Swedish aid worker in Africa stirred up those suspicions when he published a report recounting eyewitness accounts of people in Ndola who remembered the crash.

The Urquhart interview is clearly meant as a rebuttal but it has the effect of heightening and broadening suspicions. This is the relevant part of the interview:

“UN News Centre: Over the years, you’ve been very firm in your belief that the plane crash that killed Hammarskjöld was an accident. What do you make of claims that his aircraft was deliberately shot down due to foreign mineral interests in Katanga?

Brian Urquhart: You know, the older I get the more absolutely convinced I am that the conspiracy theories don’t hold out at all. There are about 50 of them and if one’s right, all the others are wrong for a start. That puts out 49 of 50.

The present so-called revelations, which come from interviewing 86-year-old charcoal burners in Zambia, are not new at all. These same people, when they were much, much younger 50 years ago, were interviewed by the Commission of Inquiry for five days on the ground where they’d been when the crash took place.

This new theory is based on the charcoal burners believing they saw a small plane following steadily behind the big plane when it crashed. Well, the Commission of Inquiry were not stupid. They came to the conclusion that what the charcoal burners had seen was the navigation beacon on the high tail-fin of the DC-6, which was a great feature of that aircraft. And of course it was following steadily – it was part of the aeroplane!

People seem to assume that you just jump into an aeroplane in the middle of Africa in the dark and say “’bye chaps, I’m going to shoot down Dag Hammarskjöld, see you in the morning!” It’s nonsense. There were no aircraft in that part of the world with night-flying control, no aircraft with proper ground control, and finding an aeroplane in the middle of Africa at midnight is not something you just do.

At the point the plane crashed, it was in the landing mode. It had its wheels down, it had its air-brakes on, and it was exactly ten feet too low to clear the trees on the top of a little mound which was on the run-in path and it hit them. Frankly, I don’t really think that the conspiracy theories help very much.

UN News Centre: Why do you think there is this fascination about his death?

Brian Urquhart: Well, there is about everybody who dies a violent death, particularly if they’re famous. Look at JFK or anybody you can think of. And people who like to see their names in the paper can do it easily now, particularly on anniversaries, by saying they’ve got new evidence.

I would be the first to wish to discover someone who had murdered Dag Hammarskjöld. I think the world lost an incredibly valuable citizen in that disaster. But I’ve been thinking about it for 50 years and I’ve never been able to see the smallest evidence of this at all, or indeed that it was possible.

Incidentally, he wasn’t flying in his own aircraft. He changed aircraft two hours before he took off so that Lord Lansdowne, who was the undersecretary for the colonies, I think, for the British Government, could go to Ndola, which was then in northern Rhodesia [now Zambia], to prepare a reception for Hammarskjöld. So if they were going to shoot the plane down, they would have shot down the one with Lord Lansdowne in it.”

There are a number of significant omissions and distortions in what Urquhart said.

Perhaps the most important omission is Urquhart’s failure to mention that he was in the Congo at the time and that he had been a British Intelligence operative. If I remember rightly the research done many years ago, the notes of which are not with me, he was also involved in arranging the logistics of Hammarskjold’s travel.

The most serious of his distortions is the assertion that the UN Commission of Inquiry interviewed the men whose testimony Göran Björkdahl recorded in his 2011 report. As The Guardian reported in August of that year, it did not.

Urquhart’s attempt to palm off their testimony as ignorant is contemptible. There is no way that what they thought was an attacking aircraft could have been the rear beacon of Hammarskjold’s own aircraft. This is what the reporters from The Guardian wrote about the eyewitnesses they interviewed in verifying Björkdahl’s report:

“Dickson Mbewe, now aged 84, was sitting outside his house in Chifubu compound west of Ndola with a group of friends on the night of the crash. ‘We saw a plane fly over Chifubu but did not pay any attention to it the first time,’ Mbewe told the Guardian. ‘When we saw it a second and third time, we thought that this plane was denied landing permission at the airport. Suddenly, we saw another aircraft approach the bigger aircraft at greater speed and release fire which appeared as a bright light.’

‘The plane on the top turned and went in another direction. We sensed the change in sound of the bigger plane. It went down and disappeared.’

“In the morning at about 5am, Mbewe went to his charcoal kiln close to the crash site, where he found soldiers and policemen already dispersing people from the area. According to the official report the wreckage was only discovered at 3pm that afternoon.

“‘There was a group of white soldiers carrying a body, two in front and two behind,’ he said. ‘I heard people saying there was a man who was found alive and should be taken to hospital. Nobody was allowed to stay there.’

“Mbewe never came forward with that information earlier because he was never asked to, he said. ‘The atmosphere was not peaceful, we were chased away. I was afraid to go to the police because they might put me in prison.’

“Another witness, Custon Chipoya, a 75-year-old charcoal maker, also claims to have seen a second plane in the sky that night. ‘I saw a plane turning, it had clear lights and I could hear the roaring sound of the engine,’ he said. ‘It wasn't very high. In my opinion, it was at the height that planes are when they are going to land.

"’It came back a second time which made us look and the third time, when it was turning towards the airport, I saw a smaller plane approaching behind the bigger one. The lighter aircraft, a smaller jet type of plane, was trailing behind and had a flash light. Then it released some fire onto the bigger plane below and went in the opposite direction.

"’The bigger aircraft caught fire and started exploding, crashing towards us. We thought it was following us as it chopped off branches and tree trunks. We thought it was war so we ran away.’

“Chipoya said he returned to the site the next morning at about 6am and found the area cordoned off by police and army officers. He didn't mention what he had seen because: ‘It was impossible to talk to a police officer then. We just understood that we had to go away,’ he said.

“Safeli Mulenga, 83, also in Chifubu on the night of the crash, did not see a second plane but witnessed an explosion.

"’I saw the plane circle twice,’ he said. ‘The third time fire came from somewhere above the plane, it glowed so bright. It couldn't have been the plane exploding because the fire was coming onto it,’ he said.

“There was no announcement for people to come forward with information following the crash, and the federal government didn't want people to talk about it, he said. ‘There were some who witnessed the crash and they were taken away and imprisoned.’

“John Ngongo, now 75, out in the bush with a friend to learn how to make charcoal on the night of the crash, did not see another plane but he definitely heard one, he said.

"’Suddenly, we saw a plane with fire on one side coming towards us. It was on fire before it hit the trees. The plane was not alone. I heard another plane at high speed disappearing into the distance but I didn't see it,’ he said.”

The Guardian story also mentioned an important element completely missing from the UN News Centre interview: “At the time of his death Hammarskjöld suspected British diplomats secretly supported the Katanga rebellion and had obstructed a bid to arrange a truce.”

That element casts a new light on Urquhart’s role in managing the memory of Hammarskjold, for after the assassination he was given the job, as the UN News Centre puts it, of helping “organize his private papers.” Urquhart subsequently wrote what has become standard biography of the Secretary-General.

Asked about the experience, Urquhart told the UN News Centre: “In the first place, his papers were quite exiguous. It wasn’t just 285 boxes or anything like that. He had kept everything like his library. It was sort of pruned every year and everything essential was kept and all the froth and everything had gone – at least I think that must be the case – so that it was a very intensive business to go into his papers. But you weren’t overwhelmed at the sheer bulk, and I think that was deliberate on his part.”

We are left to wonder if the papers contained any “froth” about Hammarskjold’s suspicions about the British role in Katanga. Were they organized into oblivion?

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.

Who Killed Mrs. Gandhi?

It is amazing how unexamined Indira Gandhi’s death remains 27 years after her assassination. Almost everything I have read on the matter skips critically important detail; in fact, the accounts are so unvarying in the details they do provide the authors could well have been working from a shared template. To help the generation now coming of age to understand what happened, I present a non-template version below.

In June 1984, the Indian Army ousted a band of heavily armed terrorists occupying the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar. The operation damaged the holiest of Sikh shrines, deeply offending the community and setting in motion a decade of troubles in the Punjab, bringing to its knees India’s most prosperous state.

With support supposedly from the Sikh communities in Britain, Canada and the United States a terrorist movement emerged almost immediately after the assault on the Golden temple. Pakistan’s ISI was also rumoured to be helping the terrorists. The most vociferous centre of external support was in London, where a Sikh activist called for the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi on a BBC broadcast. India lodged a formal diplomatic protest but the British government said it could not interfere with the freedom of the Press.

 On 31 October the same year, two Sikh members of the Prime Minister’s security detail assassinated her. They were standing guard at a gate she had to pass through to get to a BBC television crew set up for an interview. The occasion for the interview was the visit to Delhi of Princess Anne, with whom the Prime Minister was to dine that evening. The interview was delayed a half-hour at the last minute, just the time needed for one of the two assassins to begin his shift at the spot where the killing occurred. Initially, suspicion fell on one of Mrs. Gandhi's aides for making the change, but the official inquiry exonerated him. The investigating judge noted the involvement of a foreign intelligence agency without explaining what that meant. As a part of the report remains secret we cannot say definitely if there was mention of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). For what it is worth, the BBC interviewer waiting for Mrs. G on that fatal day was the actor Peter Ustinov who was not entirely unconnected with British Intelligence; at the minimum, he had a family connection: his father was a British spy.

 When Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in Delhi for Mrs. Gandhi’s funeral, Indian reporters asked her about Britain’s earlier refusal to take action against the man who had openly called for the assassination. She responded: “Whether or not what he [the Sikh on the BBC] said actually amounted to a possible crime was a matter for the director of public prosecutions and the police, not for a politician. But I believe they looked at it, looked very carefully at what was said, and came to the conclusion that they could not in fact prosecute. You know there are sometimes very difficult cases. But whether they decide to prosecute or not is a matter for them. But they did not and that must have been because there was in their view not a sufficient case to prosecute.”

A reporter asked if there was not a case “for tightening up or altering the law” on “incitement to violence.” She replied, “Incitement to violence – I think the law is fairly clear. Sometimes it is not easy to get the precise evidence but we will have a look at it if need be. … But we must recognize again what is an apparent paradox, that if you are a free country then you are free to say what you think within the law, but a free society offers many more opportunities for doing the wrong thing than of course a tyranny. But then of course, who would wish to live under tyranny? And there are occasions when you do have a difficult question to ask. Do you resort to the methods of a tyrannical society in order to preserve freedom? You can see the paradox. Now I believe that we have got just about the right answer in Britain. But we are very well aware of the difficulties of violence and of the difficulties of getting evidence sufficient to enable our police and those who are responsible for indicting these people to bring cases to court.”

For the record, the BBC has never been an exercise in independent journalism; it was, from its founding, an organ of State propaganda and the World Service continues to be funded from the Foreign Office budget. Some prominent BBC "journalists" are clearly spies; see http://shaphan.typepad.com/blog/bbc/index.html.

A month after Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination and anti-Sikh riots in Delhi, a set of multiple safety-system failures at Union Carbide’s chemical plant at Bhopal caused the “world’s worst industrial accident.” There was every indication that it was sabotage, but the new Rajiv Gandhi government sagely decided not to publicize that angle for fingers could have pointed to a Sikh employee; clearly, whoever sabotaged the plant wanted to set off another assault on the community.

A few months later, in June 1985, another atrocity was blamed on “Sikh terrorists,” the blowing up of Air India Flight 182 over British waters as it made its way from Montreal to Delhi. All 329 people on board died. Canadian prosecutors are still trying to prove the heavily circumstantial case.

In the light of these facts, it would be well to keep in mind that although Mrs. Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards shot her, those who plotted and arranged for her death were most probably British. To understand why the British would want her dead we have to look at Britain's role as the Cold War "manager" of South Asia -- and that must be a story for another day.

The Indian Press - 5: Disgraceful "Elite"

After independence, as British-owned newspapers passed into Indian hands, they moderated their overtly anti-national agenda, but retained a manifestly alien worldview. It is important to understand why and how this happened, for the English-language Press became the dominant “elite” of Indian mass media, a primary force in shaping the country’s political life.

Three factors constrained the development of an indigenous worldview in modern India’s mass media “elite.” One was the nature of the Indian renaissance. Rooted in the Bhakti movement of the 15th and 16th Centuries, it defined a sensibility capable of political engagement but – as exemplified in the string of nationalist leaders from Rammohun Roy to Gandhi – essentially spiritual and ideologically inchoate.

The second factor has been the nature of those who have controlled the development of Indian mass media. With the exception of the Kasturi family that owns The Hindu, they have been business people with no background in journalism. None has had the combination of intellectual capacity and political acumen necessary to understand and define a particularly Indian perspective.

The third factor has been a continuing effort by Britain to maintain and promote its colonial era influence over the Indian intelligentsia and political system.

In the rest of this post I look at the first of these three factors.

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 A decade after independence, Susheela Nayar, the young doctor who was part of Mahatma Gandhi’s small group during his final internment under British rule (1942-1946), published her prison diary.

Among the conversations she noted was one initiated by Pyarelal (her brother, who became Gandhi’s secretary in 1942 after Mahadev Desai’s sudden death). Pyarelal asked Gandhi why he did not “write a treatise” explaining his political philosophy and activism.

“The trouble is that I have to be Marx as well as Lenin,” Gandhi replied. “I have it all in my head. When the occasion comes I take out what is applicable to the situation.”

Pyarelal pressed him. “You can see the situation and decide as to what should be done. ... But who will give lead to the people when you are gone?”

Gandhi replied, “I cannot do what you want me to do. It is beyond my power. ... I am not the man who can write a treatise. I speak under inspiration. I cannot decide as to how I shall tackle a particular situation until I am faced with it.”

Gandhi was being overly modest. He had outlined his beliefs and action plan as early as 1910 in the small book, Hind Swaraj, and in the decades since then had explained his actions tirelessly in articles and speeches. However, what he had to say – that Indians should be guided by the verities of their own civilization and not be seduced by Europe’s deadly way of life – was so far from the political mainstream of the day that “practical” men dismissed it as moonshine. The Congress Working Committee refused even to discuss the proposals in Hind Swaraj – and that was after Gandhi had become the undisputed leader of the nationalists.

Was there no one within Gandhi’s own following that could have propagated his political legacy?

 There were three, but sudden and premature death claimed them all.

Maganlal Gandhi, who suggested the word Satyagraha when his uncle was searching for a term to describe his nonviolent activism in South Africa, was the mainstay of the Sabarmati Ashram; he died in 1928, as preparations got under way for the declaration of Purna Swaraj. It was a staggering loss, for Maganlal was the one person who had intimate knowledge of Gandhi’s thinking and the full range of his political contacts.

The two other sudden deaths occurred within months of each other in 1942, just before and during the critical Quit India Movement. Jamanlal Bajaj, who established Sevagram Asharam at Wardha to which Gandhi moved after quitting Sabarmati, was a business tycoon; he would have been an invaluable apostle. Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s closest aide for 25 years, was the one after Maganlal’s death upon whom the Mahatma rested his hopes for the continuation of his political legacy. He died a week after moving with Gandhi into the malarial confines of the Aga Khan’s palace at Pune.

The cause of death in each case remained unclear. The three deaths eliminated those most capable of carrying on Gandhi’s political legacy after his own assassination in 1948.

Ironically, Jawaharlal Nehru, who declared eloquently at Gandhi’s death that his light would endure, was primarily responsible for dimming it in India. He set the country on a course emulative of European modernity that Gandhi had explicitly warned against; it became fashionable under him to consider India's traditions and civilization as problems to be overcome. Under such circumstances, the failure of the Indian Press to articulate a national worldview is excusable. However, it is not entirely comprehensible, for the intellectual vigor characteristic of Indian civilization seemed suddenly to desert the country’s intelligentsia. Sri Aurobindo, writing of the Renaissance in India in 1918, described that earlier energy:

 “When we look at the past of India, what strikes us next is her stupendous vitality, her inexhaustible power of life and joy … her almost unimaginable prolific creativeness. For three thousand years at least – it is indeed much longer – she has been creating abundantly and incessantly, lavishly … republics and kingdoms and empires, philosophies and cosmogonies and sciences and creeds and arts … palaces and temples and public works, communities and societies and religious orders, laws and codes and rituals, physical sciences, psychic sciences, systems of yoga, systems of politics and administration, arts spiritual, arts wordly, trades, industries, fine crafts – the list is endless and in each item there is almost a plethora of activity. …

“This supreme spirituality and this prolific abundance of the energy and joy of life and creation do not make all that the spirit of India has been in the past. … the third power of the ancient Indian spirit was a strong intellectuality, at once austere and rich, robust and minute, powerful and delicate, massive in principle and curious in detail. Its chief impulse was that of order and arrangement, but an order founded upon a seeking for the inner law and truth of things and having in view always the possibility of conscientious practice. … [India] searched for the inner truth and law of each human or cosmic activity, its dharma; that found, she labored to cast into elaborate form and detailed law of arrangement its application in fact and rule of life. …

“There is no historical parallel for such an intellectual labour and activity before the invention of printing and the facilities of modern science; yet all that mass of research and production and curiosity of detail was accomplished without these facilities and with no better record than the memory and for an aid the perishable palm-leaf. Nor was all this colossal literature confined to philosophy and theology, religion and Yoga, logic and rhetoric and grammar and linguistics, poetry and drama, medicine and astronomy and the sciences; it embraced all life, politics and society, all the arts from painting to dancing; all the 64 accomplishments, everything then known that could be useful to life or interesting to the mind, even, for instance, to such practical side minutiae as the breeding and training of horses and elephants, each of which had its Shastra and its art, its apparatus of technical terms, its copious literature.

“In each subject from the largest and most momentous to the smallest and most trivial, there was expended the same all-embracing opulent, minute and thorough intellectuality. On one side there is an insatiable curiosity, the desire of life to know itself in every detail, on the other a spirit of organization and scrupulous order, the desire of the mind to tread through life with a harmonized knowledge and in the right rhythm and measure. Thus an ingrained and dominant spirituality, an inexhaustible vital creativeness and gust of life and, mediating between them, a powerful, penetrating and scrupulous intelligence combined of the rational, ethical and aesthetic mind each at a high intensity of action, created the harmony of the ancient Indian culture.”

 To be continued.