*Another Partition: Some Questions about the Ayodhya Judgment

One of the most keenly awaited judicial decisions in independent India was handed down on September 30^th by the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court when it passed judgment on the title suits regarding ownership of the disputed land on which once stood the Babri Masjid.  There is something askance, one might say, in the language that I have used, since the question of “title suits” appears to obscure the brute fact of the demolition of the mosque on 6 December 1992.  One might easily argue that the court was not called upon to comment on the demolition, but that view too easily permits one to obliterate the very fact that, in some respects, riveted the nation’s attention upon the title suits.  Who would have been paying attention to the title suits had the Babri Mosque not been brought down?  The judges may not have had any legal obligation to address the question of the demolition of the mosque and assign responsibility, though one may assume that none of them condones the mosque’s destruction, but what of the ethical burden placed upon them?

The judgment, not yet two days old, has already been replayed endlessly across television screens, and reasonable people have had to add the proviso that all interpretations of the judgment must be viewed as tentative until such time as it has been studied at length.  Running to close to 8,200 pages, the High Court’s judgment is very unlikely to be read in its entirety, and we shall have to await the assessment of assiduous aspirants for the doctorate degree to get some sense of the small print.  Yet, the bold brush strokes with which the judgment has been painted permit one to pose some striking questions.  What does it mean, for example, that questions of theology and theology should have to be resolved by a court of law?  Courts in other democracies are not generally called upon to adjudicate such questions as were brought before the three judges.  Has it become something of a habit in India to turn to our courts for matters that cannot by a sensible person be viewed as falling under the purview of jurisprudence or legal reasoning?  What does it say about civil society in India that a court should have been asked to adjudicate whether the ‘disputed site’ was the birthplace of Rama, and what can a court tell us on this matter that might not have been told to us by historians, archaeologists, or other scholars?  Do we not have enough resources among us as a people to be able to come to some common understanding on these matters?

Justice Sharma gave it as his opinion that one could not speak of the destruction of a mosque since no mosque ever stood on the alleged Ramjanmasthan site.  He does not deny that a building was brought down on 6 December 1992, but he denies that the building was a mosque, even if it bore the name of ‘Babri Masjid’.  On Justice Sharma’s view, the structure that came to be known as the ‘Babri Masjid’ was not built according to the tenets of Islam, and therefore it cannot be construed as a mosque.  Perhaps the detailed judgment will reveal how Justice Sharma came to this conclusion, but even then some questions will persist on the politics of the knowledge that he embraces.  One would think that this matter ought to have been left to Muslim theologians and legal experts, who perhaps are best positioned to pass judgment on what standards a building must meet before it can be viewed as a mosque.  I do not recall encountering in the voluminous literature surrounding the mosque or ‘disputed site’ this particular argument.  If Justice Khan could not think of any objection to calling the Babri Masjid a mosque, why should this matter have struck Justice Sharma?  Since when did Justice Sharma become an expert on Islam and the protocols that guide the construction of mosques?  And, most tellingly, how does Justice Sharma presume to speak for Muslims, in effect telling them that they have not been scrupulous in adhering to the canons of their faith and that it behooves them to consider whether the Babri Masjid ever bore the characteristics of a mosque?

A “massive Hindu religious structure”, Justice Sharma intoned in his judgment, is proven to have existed at the same site where the ‘Babri Masjid’ once stood.  Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that he is right.  But how can that fact, if fact it is, be construed to mean that it was the site of a temple built to mark the precise spot where Rama took birth (i.e., the Ramjanmasthan)?  Even Justice Khan does not deny that the Babri Masjid was most likely built with the remnants of a Hindu temple.  Yet, the two arguments are dramatically different both in intent and in their command over how the past can be best put to interpretation.  Many temples were built and destroyed, not always or even often at the hands of the Muslim conqueror; some fell to the elements, others were vandalized, and yet others bore the brunt of battle, sometimes between Indian rulers.  Who can deny that the architects and masons picked up pieces of temple sculpture and wove them into the architecture of the new mosque?  It would have been foolish to do otherwise; and if at all one is going to speak of facts, as Justice Sharma purports to do, then it is instructive that not only Muslims but Hindus and Jains in India, and Christians elsewhere in the world, did exactly the same, utilizing the remains of previous religious structures to build new ones.  Much of history, one might go so far as to say, is nothing but spoliation – we plunder and rob not only religious structures but the past, sometimes as the only way of making the past alive, co-terminus with the present.

Justice Sharma similarly insists, again rather erroneously, that it is a proven fact that this is the site where Rama was born.  This site, and no other?  No Hindu text bears testimony to such an assertion.  Tulsidas has nothing to say about the exact birthplace of Rama; indeed, Rama’s most righteous devotee, who was writing around the time that the temple would have been destroyed, is stunningly silent on the question of the alleged destruction of the temple.  Now, had Justice Sharma really gone with the softer version of his argument, he might have had a better case:  he could have maintained that it is a proven fact that Hindus have believed that this is the birthplace of Rama, the Ramjanmasthan.  But, even then, there are pressing questions:  since when did Hindus begin to believe so strongly in the Ramjanmasthan in Ayodhya?  Did they always believe this, or did they begin to profess this belief after the Babri Masjid was built?  And if such a belief can only be traced to relatively recent times, might it have something to do with the particular ways in which Hinduism was starting to get political in the nineteenth century?

In a further post, I hope to speak briefly on a question on which I have written extensively in the past, namely the particular role of historical discourse in the conflict over the Babri Masjid – Ramjanmasthan.  Meanwhile, readers can turn to my long 1994 paper, “The Discourse of History and the Crisis at Ayodhya”, available online at http://www.vinaylal.com, and subsequently included in a revised version in my book, The History of History:  Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Oxford University Press, 2003; new rev. ed., 2005).

Read Full Post »

*Eulogy for the Unsung: The Death of Bo and Boa Sr.

The Great Andamanese relaxing by the water, 1920.

Great Andamanese Couple, 1876

Great Andamanese children & Maurice Portman, 1874

An indescribable feeling of sadness crept over me when I read some days ago of the passing away of Boa Sr., the last known speaker of Bo (also known as Aka-Bo and Ba), one of ten languages belonging to the Great Andamanese group.  Though Boa Sr. had learnt Hindi and was able to converse with the outside world, over the last three decades she remained Bo’s sole speaker.   What great many thoughts could she not convey to others?  How must she have felt to know that she was the only surviving speaker of a language and the link to a world that only she could apprehend?  How must it feel to know a language and yet not be able to communicate in it with anyone else?

In an earlier time, Boa Sr. would have been rendered into a museum piece.  Her death brought to mind the fate of Truganini, the last of the Tasmanian Aboriginals.  The few thousand Tasmanian aboriginals encountered by European colonizers had, through genocide, disease, and murderous neglect, been reduced to 47 women, men, and children by 1847, and for the last three years, before her death in 1876, Truganini led a solitary existence in Hocart as the last Tasmanian aboriginal.  Shortly thereafter, her skeleton would be exhibited for the benefit of the curious-minded and the scientific-minded alike.  Those were the indignities to which people such as her, and the Andamanese, have been subjected since they came into contact with what is called ‘civilization’.  In the barbarous language of the day, occasionally still encountered when, for example, the Americans come into contact with ‘unruly’ tribesmen in Afghanistan, the unquestionable duty of the Europeans was to pacify the wild islanders.

The Andamans have long been the haunt of anthropologists and criminologists. In the mid-19^th century, the British established a penal colony at Port Blair, reserving the infamous ‘circular jail’, also studied by those who are entranced with the idea of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, for political prisoners transported for life.  A man sent across the kaala paani [literally, ‘the black waters’], so the British figured, was as good as dead, and not merely because no “convict” was expected to return alive to civilization.  Before the convict entered into what we might call ‘social death’, he was supposed to have suffered what we might understand as ‘psychic death’ since the passage across ‘the black waters’ was deemed to have led the person to lose caste.  That, in the British view, was horrible enough a suffering for a caste Hindu.  Later in the 19^th century, as anthropometry and craniology, among many of the other supposed sciences gifted by the West to the rest, became the rage among European and American scientists, anthropologists, criminologists, and psychologists, the British began to arrive in the Andamans with rulers and other measuring instruments.  The intent was to ascertain where the Great Andamanese belonged in the ‘scale of civilization’, a determination that apparently could be made by measuring the distance from the navel to the nose, from the nose to the eyebrow, and so on.  No wonder idiocy is known by many names!  The only firm lesson to be learnt from all this appears to be that if one wants to lead a European somewhere, lead him by the nose.

The twin processes of pacification and assimilation had the unsurprising consequence of decimating the population of the Andamanese and other tribes on the Andaman islands.  Some tribes were rendered extinct – the Aka-Kol in 1921, the Oko-Juwoi and the Aka-Bea by 1931.  In 1858, when the Great Andamanese first came into contact with the British, they numbered around 5,000 people.   Attempts with which we are familiar from the long history of colonialism to ‘civilize’ them were, of course, nothing but another name for genocide.  In one experiment, children born between 1864 and 1870 were placed in what came to be called ‘Andaman Homes’, but none of the 150 children lived beyond the age of two.  Nevertheless, the colonial administrator Maurice Portman gave it as his opinion that ‘Under any circumstances the Homes should certainly be maintained until the whole of the Andaman Tribes are friendly’ [quoted in Madhusree Mukherjee, The Land of Naked People (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 66].  One way to ensure that people are friendly, which is to say not hostile, is to eliminate them.  In 1901, the Census still recorded 600 Great Andamanese, but by 1951 their numbers had been reduced to 23.  The Sentinelese, who have miraculously evaded all attempts at contact, had been reduced to 10 in number by 1951. Today, according to the Indian linguist Anvita Abbi, who came to have a close association with Boa Sr. over the last decade and whose work in the Andamans is reflected in the “Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese” (VOGA) project, there are about 50 Great Andamanese still alive.

The Great Andamanese, we are told in this obituary of Boa Sr. published in Survival International, “are thought to have lived in the Andaman Islands for as much as 65,000 years, making them the descendants of one of the oldest human cultures on Earth.”  If it were true, one should marvel at this fact – and consider the possibility that, in this age of dazzling technology, that unbroken link may be snapped before our own eyes.  Either way, the question of just who the Andamanese are, and what they represent for the history of humankind, is not easily resolved.  For even the most well-intentioned linguists and anthropologists, the Great Andamanese – and the other three main groups on the islands, namely the Jarawa, Onge, and Sentinelese – still represent principally a crucial picture of the puzzle about the origins of human societies, language groups, the migrations of people and their languages, and so on.  The quest to know everything, manifested in Enlightenment-inspired projects to create vast compendiums of knowledge, remains undiminished, even if we are committed to multiculturalism and diversity and are more cognizant of the genocidal policies that led to the extermination of entire tribes and their cultures.  How we can best be committed to such ecological survival of plurality without instrumentalizing humans, animals, or nature is an ethical question that may determine the course of the future.

Read Full Post »

*Terrorism’s Drones: Cowardice and the New Front of American Warfare

Mrs. Clinton, we are told, has been having a tough time in Pakistan, where students and journalists have apparently been subjecting her to some ‘grilling’. The intellectual standards of American media being what they are, namely pathetic, one should not marvel at the fact that any serious questioning is immediately termed ‘grilling’. It is not any less interesting that such ‘grilling’ as takes place occurs largely in countries that the US otherwise imagines as ‘unfree’.

Under the “remorseless gaze of the Pakistan news media”, says today’s New York Times, Mrs. Clinton returned punch for punch. She castigated Pakistani officials for allowing al-Qaeda safe havens, and in turn was asked whether she did not think that American predator drone attacks in South Waziristan and elsewhere in Pakistan’s frontier areas constitute terrorism. “No, I do not,” Hilary Clinton replied.

Terrorism, as we all know, is not something that the Americans engage in: it has long been an article of faith that America wages (just) wars, engages in defensive conduct, or otherwise acts to free the world of the scourge of terrorism. In recent years, Americans – functionaries of the state, policy experts, and the numerous ‘independent’ commentators whose sole ambition appears to be to authorize the actions of the state — have been particularly insistent in advancing the view that their actions always seek to minimize civilian casualties, and that technological advancements have given them the capacity to wage relentless war with precision attacks that spare civilian lives.

The most notable, and increasingly visible, arsenal in American warfare technology is the invisible predator drone. The drone attack has become the new front of American warfare, and its incidence has increased markedly over the last two US administrations, and most notably since Barack Obama occupied the White House. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, especially, drone attacks are bitterly resented, but not only because many civilians have been killed. To take one instance, only into the third day of Obama’s administration, on January 23rd, one of two predator strikes run by the CIA eliminated the entire family of a pro-government tribal leader just outside Wana in South Waziristan.

Whatever the rhetoric about precision attacks and the reverence for life that is the supposed feature of American liberal democracy, there is but no question that drone attacks permit the execution of an untamed and aggressive foreign policy in new and unheralded ways. Though President Gerald Ford’s executive order of 1976 banning American intelligence agencies from carrying out political assassinations has in principle never been repudiated, predator attacks are only the latest and most shameless instantiation of the repeated violation of this order. That some of the people who have been assassinated, such as the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud — killed (along with much of his family) by a Predator drone in early August — themselves led lives of violence is not disputed. There is yet a more significant consideration: if histories of war stress, in ancient times, the face-to-face combat and the rules of chivalry that guided combat, we have now moved to the other extreme where the entire intent is to wage as faceless a war as is possible. Apparently bravery, in an extension of merciless air power, now consists in bombing people into extinction, all the while ensuring that no lives should be lost on one’s own side.

As Obama struggles to reach a decision on American involvement in Afghanistan, an increasing number of voices purport to take the middle ground. The US, these voices argue, cannot win the war in Afghanistan, certainly not without a major escalation of the conflict and increase in commitment of troops; on the other hand, the US cannot merely abandon Afghanistan. The question of ‘losing face’ aside, the ‘Great Game’ must continue, unless the US is prepared to concede ground to all others who have eyes on Afghanistan, including Iran, China, Russia, and Pakistan. The war, then, must be waged off-shore, with a full deployment of intelligence, cruise missiles, drones, guerrilla units, and so on. What rules of conduct will apply to this warfare? The military and the CIA, as a policy of matter, already do not make public any information on drone attacks, but the entire idea consists in ensuring that there shall be no accountability for American attacks. This is indeed the new front of American warfare: faceless, cowardly, geographically indeterminate, indeed groundless in every respect. Let us recognize terrorism’s drones for what they are.

Read Full Post »

*Gandhi’s ‘Relevance’: One More Round of Humbug

It is that time of the year when reverence will be paid to Bapu, the ‘Father of the Nation’.   There will be prayer meetings at Rajghat, the national memorial to Gandhi and, in a manner of speaking, his final resting place.  The prayer meetings will be led by the President, Prime Minister, and other dignitaries of the state.  October 2 is Mohandas Gandhi’s birthday, and the politicians, leaders of society, and other well-wishers and do-gooders in India will be lined up to garland statues of Gandhi, utter a few homilies to the great man, and proclaim his (ever-increasing, it will be affirmed) ‘relevance’ to the world.   And then some of these leaders and politicians will head home – home being one place where the laws of prohibition, a cause dear to Gandhi, cannot be enforced on Gandhi Jayanti – to chat on their cell phones, strike a few business deals, and cook up a few new ways of screwing the much-celebrated ‘common man’.

According to some of Gandhi’s detractors, the old man ought more appropriately to have been designated as the ‘Father of Pakistan’.  His assassin was unquestionably of that view, and many others in India have thought the same though in Pakistan it will be impossible to dislodge the Qaid-e-Azam from his pedestal.  Whatever similarities and differences there may be between Pakistan and India, the laudatory and hagiographic view of Jinnah has not yet taken the kind of beating to which Gandhi has been subjected in India, notwithstanding the halo of divinity which surrounds Gandhi in official pronouncements.

The characterization of Gandhi as ‘Father’ of the ‘Nation’ hides much more than it reveals in many other respects.  It has been argued that Gandhi could be ‘father’ to the nation, but found it difficult to be a father, or at least a good one, to his own sons; but perhaps the more interesting way of putting the designation of father into question is to probe whether he was not also a mother to many.  His assassin, and Nathuram Godse’s admirers among some who serve in high office in Gujarat, never doubted that the effeminate Gandhi was not fit to lead an emergent nation-state in a world that shows no mercy to those who are soft.  Gandhi just didn’t have enough manliness about him, a point that Narendra Modi, who fancies himself a ‘Chota Sardar’, seeks to make by flaunting his masculinity and flashing a sword.  There was, as I argued many years ago in the pages of Manushi, too much of the ‘mother’ in the ‘father’ to make Gandhi palatable to the restless modernizing elements in Indian society, and we are not surprised that one of his constant companions in the last years of his life wrote a book entitled, Bapu, My Mother.

In 1998, when India went nuclear, some stalwarts of the Shiv Sena were heard stating with euphoria, ‘We have shown them [Pakistanis and enemies of other varieties, including, one should assume, secular and ‘pseudo-secular’ Hindu liberals] that we are not eunuchs.’  Assuming, then, that the use of nonviolence did not render him into a eunuch, and that Gandhi did not fail his sons at every moment, did Gandhi abide very much by the idea of the ‘nation’?  Architect of the independence struggle that he was, Gandhi continued to harbor much ambivalence about the nation, or certainly about the nation-state.   His presence in Delhi on 15 August 1947 might have sanctified the idea of the nation-state, but Gandhi chose to be in Calcutta where he was attempting to broker the peace between Hindus and Muslims – more ammunition, of course, for those who always thought of Gandhi as too attentive to the needs of the Muslims.  Gandhi presents an extraordinary anomaly of a political figure who, though having led a country to freedom, had almost no emotional, cultural, intellectual, or spiritual investment in the idea of the nation-state.

So, when the prayers are sung and platitudes fill the air at Rajghat, it also becomes necessary to inquire what it means for the samadhi of the ‘Father of the Nation’ to be at Rajghat, the Ghat of Kings.  There is a civilizational touch, no doubt, in the idea that a commoner – for, in the last analysis, Gandhi held no office and was singularly devoid of possessions – alone commands the place of King of Kings.   At least in principle the idea of celebrating Gandhi’s life by inscribing his presence at Rajghat is congruent with the notion that Indian civilization has honored renunciants, and men and women of wisdom, more than kings.   But Rajghat has become a crowded place, and its other occupants are, with one exception, all previous office-bearers, Prime Ministers and President of India, distinguished and otherwise.  That exception is the wannabe King of Kings, Sanjay Gandhi.  One does really begin to wonder how Mohandas Gandhi landed up in Rajghat.

Read Full Post »

*Prabhakaran’s Death and the Politics of the Double

It is reported that when the Americans captured Saddam Hussein, one of the first questions that arose in their minds was whether their captive was the ‘real’ Saddam. Their captive, over intense questioning, denied that he had ever manufactured his double. But I suspect that the rumor of Saddam’s double will never entirely disappear, not even after many books have been published, each purporting to give the true and real story of Saddam. The question of the ‘real’ Saddam has many more layers than the Americans can imagine, and one must begin with the question of how real Saddam was to his subjects. He led a shadowy existence, one might say: by his own confession, for fear of his life, long before the American invasion of Iraq, he moved from one spot to another and rarely slept in the same bed twice. So, even when he was not being hunted, he lived the life of a fugitive. Saddam also imagined himself as a Saladin, a Haroun Rashid, even a Hammurabi. When Saddam denied that he had a double, he meant it in more than the literal sense. What is a double to one with multiple identities?

With the death of Prabhakaran, the question of the double will doubtless come up again. Men such as Prabhakaran are always believed to have a double: the mythography of the ‘spectacularly evil one’ can entertain no other outlook. The double is supposed to confound the opponent; but the double is also a sign of the evil one’s moral turpitude, a clear sign of the fear in which he lives. If the villain plots to have his double, his opponents are even keener that he should have one – as if that were a vindication of their moral superiority.

I have read on Tamil diaspora websites that the LTTE denies that Prabhakaran has been killed by the Sri Lankan armed forces. The man who has been identified as Prabhakaran is, according to his supporters, his double. And it would not be surprising if the LTTE were to produce a photograph or two of Prabhakaran purporting to establish that he is alive, most likely watching with bemusement his body being displayed before TV audiences.

Prabhakaran’s supporters and his detractors are, then, equally invested in the idea of the double. For many of Prabhakaran’s supporters, the will to believe that it is his double that is being displayed is the last desperate act of fealty. It may be well and good to believe that your hero is immortal, but for the present the imperative is to deny the fact of his death and claim that the struggle is alive. For his opponents and detractors, the double points to the moral cowardice of Prabhakaran. The cowardly leader sends others to their death, but has a morbid fear of plunging into death himself. That the idea of the double, however, need not be so utterly compromised or morally vacuous is amply demonstrated by Kurosawa’s film Kagemusha, “The Shadow Warrior.” Set in medieval Japan, the shadow warrior or impersonator, none other than a common thief, plays the part of Lord Shingen, whose death is to be kept a secret for three years. With great skill, the kagemusha creeps into Shingen’s skin and begins to play the part so well that he himself is confounded about his own identity. As Shingen, he keeps the enemies at bay; and when, towards the end, his fall from a horse reveals his ‘real’ identity to others and he is dismissed from the royal household, the members of the clan begin to perceive that the man they had taken to be a mere double was the fount of their reality. With the double’s ignominious departure, the Takeda clan changes course and is sent to a crushing defeat. The kagemusha himself becomes a martyr – but martyr to what, one might ask?

Read Full Post »

*Prabhakaran: In the Shadow of Che?

Velupillai Prabhakaran, the much-feared and notoriously secretive leader of the Tamil Tigers, is dead. The obituaries come pouring in, but it seems somewhat odd that Prabhakaran should be remembered with an obituary. An obituary is not merely a notice of the death of some well-known personality; it is an appreciation of a life that has come to a close. Perhaps, in the very appearance of obituaries of Prabhakaran in the New York Times and the Guardian, there is an implicit acknowledgment that Prabhakaran, who was among the most wanted ‘terrorists’ of the world, also had the approbation of many Tamils, in Sri Lanka and wider diasporic communities, who looked to him as the embodiment of their aspirations and the person most likely to turn the dream of Tamil autonomy into something like reality?

One famous photograph of Prabhakaran, the one featured in today’s Guardian, shows him seated below a large framed print of Che Guevara, flanked on either side by an armed bodyguard. Every armed revolutionary over the last several decades has attempted to lay claim to Che’s legacy, though it has been reliably said of Prabhakaran that he spent the greater part of the last twenty years, when he made rare public appearances and was holed up in his jungle hideouts, watching Clint Eastwood’s films and practicing the fast draw. Prabhakaran’s lifestyle was surely not calculated to earn him a large following as a renowned revolutionary. Leaving aside the question of whether the portly Prabhakaran could have been, in the market-driven economy of the modern world with an accent on the cool and the sexy, a match for the irrepressibly handsome features of a youthful but pensive-looking Che, Prabhakaran’s influence appears to have been confined to the band of the hard-core following that he had acquired among Tamils at home (and especially abroad).

It is true as well that Che’s posters are plastered everywhere, while Prabhakaran barely had a public presence in the ordinary sense of the term except in the posters and pamphlet literature of the LTTE. Once every year, on the occasion of Maveerar Naal, or Great Heroes Day, his speech to LTTE cadres would be keenly awaited for signs of his thinking or political and military strategy. And, yet, in a curious way, Prabhakaran seems to have held his own against Che, and might even have had a more lasting impact. His presence in the Tamil diaspora can only be underestimated at great peril: the anger even despair of his many ardent supporters in the Tamil diaspora may subside over time, but the diaspora’s dreams persist long after the country imagined as the ‘homeland’ has been transformed. Many Tamils will continue to swear by Prabhakaran even if fundamental political changes are effected in Sri Lanka. Secondly, there can be little question that while Che remains an enduring even romantic symbol of the revolution, or rather I should say the unfulfilled revolution, Prabhakaran did far more to transform insurgent warfare than anyone else one can think of in the last few decades. The LTTE, under his leadership, was among the first armed organizations to deploy the internet effectively to raise funds. Before there were Palestinian, Iraqi, and Pakistani suicide bombers, there were LTTE cadres who showed the way. Among their most prominent victims was Rajiv Gandhi, the former Prime Minister of Gandhi. Indeed, in virtually every innovation of insurgent warfare or (as some would say) terrorism, Prabhakaran’s LTTE has been the pioneer.

In death as in life, Prabhakaran remains elusive. I shall say more on that tomorrow.

Read Full Post »

*A Pyrrhic Victory? The ‘End’ of the LTTE and the ‘Tamil Question’

The Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapakse, has proclaimed the end of the three-decades old civil war that reportedly has taken more than 100,000 lives. In a speech to the nation, Rajapakse has declared that Sri Lanka has achieved a military triumph over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) or, as they are commonly known, the Tamil Tigers. The LTTE leadership has been killed, and among the dead are, reportedly, the secretive Prabhakaran, who forged a unique if ferocious and unrelenting fighting force and led it in a bitter war to the end with the Sri Lankan army and state; Pottu Amman, the LTTE’s intelligence chief; and Soosai, commander of the Tiger’s naval forces.

Many more details of the last stage of the war will surely emerge as human rights organizations and journalists, who had hitherto been barred from the scenes of military action, swoop into the pockets of northeast Sri Lanka from where the Tigers staged their last futile acts of resistance. But this much is already clear: in its drive for military supremacy, the Sri Lankan army put tens of thousands of Tamil civilians at great risk, often in sheer defiance of calls to ensure the safety of civilians, and the 7,000 odd Tamils who lost their lives in the last stage of conflict stand forth as mute testimony to the reckless disregard for human life shown by both the Sri Lankan army and the Tigers. The Sri Lankan army claims, as official armies generally do on such occasions, that the Tigers used the civilians as ‘human shields’; the Tigers, on the other hand, allege that the Sri Lankan army, in its single-minded and bloody pursuit of a victory that had seemed ever so elusive, was determined that nothing, not even the lives of innocents, would be allowed to stand in the way of total victory. That both views should have some credibility is evidence enough of the reputation that both the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tigers had deservedly acquired for brutality, senseless killings, and the callous disdain for human lives that have signaled the hostilities in this long-drawn war. It is characteristic of both the Sri Lankan armed forces and the Tamil Tigers that, down to the very end, they should have been so fiendishly true to the reputations that they wore around themselves as ornaments of their sincerity.

Wars have been described as tragic and senseless by countless number of commentators, though there is no end to them in sight. When it is the rebels or insurgents who triumph, they often find that a military victory is perhaps more easily accomplished than the task of reconstruction. Rebels have, as well, been known to become dictators. But the triumph of states over insurgents is almost always a pyrrhic victory, unless one is willing to accept the idea that a nation-state can be something other than a repressive force in history. For the present, the question is: having compelled the LTTE into submission, is the Sri Lankan state prepared to treat the Tamil as equals? Is it prepared to take seriously the question of autonomy within a federal republic, and is it willing to persuade the Sinhalese that they have to disown some of their privileges? Had these questions not been ignored in the first place, what might have been the need for LTTE? Much the greater part of the task of the state, which does not inspire much confidence, is before it: not only will it have to work with a subjugated and angry Tamil population, it will have to keep the hounds among the Sinhalese at bay. So much for victories.

Read Full Post »

*The centre will hold (with apologies to Yeats): Reading the Indian Elections of 2009

The people of India, supremely indifferent to the prognostications of policy makers, psephologists, political scientists, and the various other pandits that populate the public sphere, have gone about their business and delivered a verdict at the polls that has delivered an emphatic victory to the Congress party and the United Progressive Alliance that it leads. Last year, having survived a no-confidence vote in the Lok Sabha, and, a few months later, a terrorist assault upon the nation that had left many wondering about the government’s ability to thwart terrorist threats, Manmohan Singh and the Congress may not have appeared to be the fittest candidates to serve out another five-year term. One might, on the other hand, quite reasonably argue that Manmohan Singh, who started his tenure as a something of a reluctant Prime Minister and has established a reputation as a man of unimpeachable integrity and decency, had shown his mettle when he outclassed Prakash Karat and his other detractors over the nuclear deal. If Manmohan Singh’s triumph at that time should have sent signals to Karat and many others that he could be shrewd, savvy, and determined in his ability to persevere against unremitting and often unprincipled opposition, those signs were obviously not read by many who were predicting, until just before the counting commenced, difficult times ahead for Congress. Similarly, notwithstanding the somewhat inept handling of the crisis that erupted in Mumbai when the city was taken hostage by a handful of terrorists late last November, it is clear that the electorate refused to be taken in by the thunderous criticism that the government was ‘soft’ in its handling of terrorism and that the reigns of power should be handed over to a party that prides itself on an apparently more masculinist and hard-nosed response to terrorism.

The results of the Indian election of 2009 may be parsed for many arresting developments and portents of things to come, but it will be difficult to resist the overwhelming impression that the electorate has embraced a party that is a centrist in Indian politics. The voters, it seems, have embraced the Congress as a party most likely to furnish political stability to the nation and also steer it, under the able hands of a Prime Minister who as an economist first ushered in the reforms that moved India beyond its infamous ‘Hindu rate of growth’, to safety and even growth at a time when the word has been beset by a financial crisis of proportions that are unsettling to people in two generations. However, it appears to me that what the electorate voted for is much less clear than what they rejected. What the voters repudiated, in the first instance, is the Hindu nationalist agenda of the BJP, as poisonous a brew as any that has been put before the Indian public. Those who are interested in the future of the BJP can engage in rumination over the causes of its comparatively poor performance, from the lack of young faces in the party to the evidently egregious error of casting the election as a Presidential battle between Manmohan and Advani. But it is the punishment meted out to the Left Front, and in particular to the CPM, that is in some respects the most interesting result of this election. One might say that Karat has now had to pay the price for his decision to withdraw support to the UPA over the nuclear deal, but this would be far too generous an assessment of the limitations of the CPM. The CPM has long thought of itself as the guardian of the interests of farmers and the working class, but the events at Nandigram showed amply the party’s inability to tolerate dissent, as well as the huge distance between the commitment of some of its cadres to grass-roots political changes and the capitulation of much of the party’s leadership to the free market economy.

Though it would be distinctly premature if not foolish to speak of the demise of the CPM, the fact can barely be disguised that the party had succeeded in rendering itself irrelevant. The post-mortem will doubtless suggest where the party leadership erred, but the party’s demise at the electoral booths calls for the kind of introspection that party apparatchiks, Karat and Buddhadeb included, have seldom shown themselves capable of displaying. The party leaders have long fancied themselves as the vanguard leading the listless, misled, and unenlightened masses to freedom, and at the heart of this bureaucratic and official Marxism lies a deep-seated contempt for the very masses in whose name revolutions are to be fought. The Marxists in West Bengal certainly have, for the most party, displayed the same kind of contempt for the masses that the advocates of Hindutva have for Hinduism, the very religion that they purport to defend and champion. It is these twin pretensions, at the opposite ends of the political spectrum, which have been put to rest in this election. The fact that so intellectually vacuous and unprincipled a person as Mamata Banerjee, at the helm of the Trinamool Congress, could prevail in West Bengal suggests the depths to which the CPM has shrunk in public estimation.

In 1977, supremely confident that she would stand vindicated by the electorate, misled perhaps into thinking that she had won the affection of the masses by, so to speak, making the trains run on time, Indira Gandhi called for elections and suffered a crushing defeat. She had underestimated the people of India, the same people in whose ability to distinguish between right and wrong Mohandas Gandhi — who knew a thing or two about politics, popular passions, and the wisdom of the illiterate — had something of an abiding faith. That was not the only revolt of the masses. The BJP ran a ‘shining India’ campaign in 2004, and it was, as I was to write at that time, a ‘shining moment’ in Indian democracy when the voters sent the BJP to a humbling defeat. The same loud noises which pass for ‘analysis’ were content to point to the anti-incumbency factor in Indian politics, but luckily they will have no easy satisfactions this time. As I wrote in the postscript to the new edition of my The History of History (Oxford UP, 2003, 2005), ‘Whatever the shortcomings of electoral democracy in India, the untutored Indian voter still retains the capacity to surprise and inflict punishment.’ The voter in Andhra, for instance, did not mistake the posturings of Chandrababu Naidu, who paraded himself as a CEO as much as a CM and was busy earning the applause of the elites as a technology-savvy politician while the farmers in increasing numbers committed suicide, for progress, growth, and social change. We can say that, with the election of 2009, the Indian electorate has once again established itself as one of the most formidable forces for democracy anywhere in the world today.

Read Full Post »