Israel: A Pitiable, Pathetic, Paper Tiger

Vinay Lal

Israel has long flaunted its military prowess and much of the world has believed it. After all, the small Jewish state, foisted upon the Palestinians by a Europe that could not find a way to accommodate the gifted, liberal, often supremely enlightened, and enterprising Jewish people, defeated a coalition of Palestinian Arabs, Syrians, and Egyptians in 1948-49 and secured its independence. Then, in 1967, in what is called the six-day war, Israel took the wind out of the sails of the Arab states—largely Jordan, Syria, and Egypt—and rightfully claimed a conclusive and momentous victory, even taking the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula into its possession. Though its military triumphs would scarcely be as decisive in more recent decades, and Israel and Hezbollah fought to a standstill in 2006 after a bitter monthlong war, Israel’s military has nonetheless continued to enjoy a reputation as a great disciplined and professional force.  The reputation that Israel enjoys as a no-nonsense state, one that allegedly knows how to deal with terrorists, may be gauged by the fact that its retired generals enjoy sinecures and consultancies in countries such as India.

However, the present conflict between Hamas and Israel shows Israel for what it truly is:  a pitiable, pathetic, paper tiger. Such a description will appear surprising, perhaps somewhat absurd, to most considering that, after Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel at once declared war and in quick order began a relentless attack from the air upon the entire population of Gaza. By the end of 2023 alone, Israel had dropped, according to the Gaza Media Office, 45,000 bombs weighing more than 65,000 tons, or more four times the tonnage of the atomic bomb that eviscerated Hiroshima.  Moreover, less than a month after Hamas went on the offensive, Israel commenced operations on the ground.  By January 24, on the World Bank’s estimate, 45% of the residential buildings in Gaza had been destroyed by the Israel Defense Force (IDF), though The Times of Israel reported, on 30 December 2023, that 70% of the homes in Gaza had been destroyed or damaged.  Now, in early March, that figure is certainly much higher; indeed, as many reports suggest, Gaza is practically uninhabitable.  This appears to be the response of an aggressive, vengeful, muscular nation-state, not a paper tiger.

Let us, nevertheless, consider what Israel’s short-term war aims have been and whether its achievements thus far, as well as it military actions, have been congruent with those war aims. We will not take into consideration the precipitous decline of its international reputation, if only because Israel, to be blunt about it, is largely indifferent to its reputation. It has habitually considered most of the world to be hostile to both the Jewish state and Jews, though of course many who are not sympathetic to the Jewish state do not hold the same views with regards to the Jewish people; more importantly, it is arrogant enough to think that its virtuous righteousness is enough to sustain it in the face of an onslaught from the rest of the world.  We may, thus, confine ourselves to Israel’s stated war objectives, the two principal ones being the rescue of the hostages taken by Hamas (and Islamic Jihad) and the complete annihilation of Hamas.  In early February, Israel reported that it had destroyed 17-18 out of Hamas’ 24 batallions, and Netanyahu has on several occasions boasted that Israel is well on the way to “total victory”.  The BBC reported at the end of February that the Israeli embassy in the UK estimated that it had killed 10,000-12,000 Hamas fighters.  Hamas has not corroborated those figures and the verification of estimates provided by IDF is nearly impossible, all the more so since just who constitutes a “Hamas fighter” is far from clear.  Let us recall that none other than the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, less than a week into the war, declared at a press conference that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible”:  if there are no innocent civilians, then one reasonable inference is that, from the Israeli standpoint, every civilian is a potential terrorist—and that, moreover, every civilian is a legitimate target. It is not hard to fathom why Israel can, on this reasoning, conduct a merciless war against civilians with the self-assurance of utter impunity, but let me return to this point later.

Just exactly how fighters are to be distinguished from civilians is but one problem.  Let us now, however, turn to the conduct of the war and assess Israel’s “achievements”.  A few days after the onset of the war, I wrote on the very pages of this blog an article suggesting that, with or without the support of the United States, Israel would exact a terrible vengeance and pulverize Gaza. Of course, to conduct a protracted war, Israel must doubtless rely on a continuing supply of arms and ammunition from the United States. Hamas has similarly been aided with occasional rocket launches fired by Hezbollah, but unlike the state of Israel, which for its size has a formidable army and receives the highest-grade weapons from the US, Hamas has neither any aircraft nor any tanks. The first intifada of 1987-1993 is also known as the “stone intifada” for nothing:  it was waged largely by the young with stones and captured the world’s imagination. The present resistance has gone well beyond stones, even if Hamas has in other ways displayed the ingenuity of the besieged Palestinians, but it is still nevertheless true that the gulf between the military power that Israel has brought to bear upon the Palestinians and the resources that Hamas can wield is enormous.  Hamas is practically a guerilla fighting force and, as countless number of articles have shown, it developed an extraordinary—one might call it, purely from the engineering standpoint, wondrous—system of tunnels which appear to constitute a veritable city.  These tunnels, running for hundreds of miles, were used to ship arms, ferry people from one part of Gaza to another, and much else:  as the Modern War Institute at West Point points out in a report, “Israeli forces have unearthed massive invasion tunnels two and a half miles long, underground manufacturing plants, luxury tunnels with painted walls, tile floors, ceiling fans, and air conditioning, and a complex, layered, labyrinth underneath all areas of Gaza.”

Underground Gaza, as it is sometimes called, was built under the noses of the Israelis. The failures of Israeli military intelligence have obviously been colossal:  what to speak of the fact that Hamas literally blew its way into Israeli settlements, Israel appears to have had little knowledge of the complexity and enormity of Hamas’s tunnel city.  Besides aircraft, sophisticated drone systems, missiles, radar system, the Iron Dome air defense system, tanks, and military intelligence, Israel is also an apparent pioneer in cyberwar, and there is good reason to think that Israel was responsible for the cyberattack that disabled the electricity grid in portions of Iran some weeks ago.  So, considering the vast arsenal that Israel has at its disposal, just what has it achieved of its stated war goals?  First, as I have already suggested above, there is little reason to believe that Hamas has been nearly obliterated. If it has been, one might also ask why north Gaza, where IDF spent three months flattening the landscape and reducing the population into starvation, is seeing renewed fighting.  It is certainly far too early to speak of a decisive military defeat; indeed, a “decisive” military defeat is wholly illusory, unless one is prepared to believe that tens of thousands of Palestinians, moving into the future, will not arise from the graveyard to which Gaza is being reduced and will not be prepared themselves to offer resistance even unto death.  Secondly, five months into the war, Hamas (and, perhaps, Islamic Jihad) continue to hold a hundred Israeli civilians and soldiers captive.  There is little reason to believe that the IDF or Israeli military intelligence even knows where these captives are being held.  Israel’s inability to rescue the hostages is striking, and we can anticipate that Israel’s response is that it is somewhat handicapped in its response since Hamas does not fight a fair war, or, to put it in more dramatic language, Hamas is a despicable terrorist organization that uses civilians as shields. Israel expects victory to be handed down to it on a platter, but its argument is all the more bizarre considering that it has a massively disproportional advantage over Hamas. And this is apart from the question that almost no one has dared to ask: why is that we should not view the thousands of Palestinians held in Israel’s jails as “hostages”.

Thirdly, none of Hamas’s senior political leadership has been apprehended.  Israel declared Hamas’s most important political leader, Yahya Sinwar, a “dead man walking”, but five months into the conflict Sinwar has proven to be adept in keeping even his whereabouts unknown to the outside world.  Israel has eyes and ears on the ground, but its celebrated intelligence has been unable to pick up either Sinwar, Marwan Issa—whose son Muhammad was killed in an IDF strike in late 2023—or Mohammed Deif, the head of the al-Qassam Brigades who has survived repeated assassination attempts and earned the nickname, “the cat with nine lives”. Deif was arrested by the Palestinian National Authority at Israel’s request in May 2000 but escaped several months later; he is believed to be the “mastermind” behind the surprise attack of October 7^th, and the IDF sought to exact vengeance by targeting Deif’s father home with an airstrike which killed three family members, including Deif’s brother.

Having been unable to obliterate Hamas, capture or kill its senior leadership, or rescue the hostages, Israel has set out to criminalize, terrorize, and pulverize Palestinians. That has been the sum of its verifiable achievements:  the widespread infliction of pain, suffering, and death on a largely defenseless population; the elimination of large sectors of the Palestinian intelligentsia, the destruction (in whole or in part) of all twelve of Gaza’s universities, and cultural genocide; the deliberate starvation of the Palestinians as a means of waging war; the forcible and repeated displacement of a people, and most unforgivingly to areas that have falsely been promised as safe havens; and much else that defies the imagination. Israel will say in its defense that it is only doing what every nation-state has a right to do, namely mount self-defense against an enemy that does not recognize the right of Israel to exist. Whether everything Israel has can be done can be forgiven or even grudgingly justified in the name of self-defense is one thing; it is also an ethical and philosophical question whether self-defense allows the wanton and widespread killing of a people.  It is still another question, one those who lend their support to the Palestinian cause, whether Hamas does not bear some responsibility for the death and destruction of the Palestinians. Hamas surely would have known that Israel would exact a deadly even monstrous price from the Palestinians for its savage attack of October 7^th, and that innocents, including children, would shoulder most of the burden of this vengeance.  None of these considerations, however, exculpate Israel.

If Israel is, as I submit, a paper tiger, we have to logically ask what happens to paper tigers. Most readers will be unaware that it was Chairman Mao who first used the term in contemporary times in an interview that he gave to the American journalist, Anna Louis Strong, in August 1946.  “The atom bomb is a paper tiger”, Mao said, “which the U.S. reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn’t. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new types of weapons. All reactionaries are paper tigers.” That people decide the course of war may sound fanciful, but Mao had in mind the experience of the Chinese people and the history of anti-colonial struggles.  Less than two decades later, the ignominious retreat of America from Vietnam would once again suggest the merit of his view.  Israel is a paper tiger because, having been humiliated by a new type of guerrilla armed force, and unable to subjugate its enemy, it chooses to wage a war against a civilian population; in doing so, it has yet to understand that the story of Palestinian self-determination will eclipse any narrative that Israel may put forward.

Israel and the United States: The Catastrophic Synergy of Two Settler Colonial States

Of all the remarkable and still unfolding geopolitical aspects of the present war in Palestine, what stands out most is the unstinting support given to Israel by the United States from the very moment that the barbaric attack carried out by Hamas in Israel came to the attention of the world.  The US was not alone in unequivocally condemning Hamas, but President Joe Biden, characterizing the terrorist attacks as “pure, unadulterated evil” in a speech delivered on October 10, made it known that the “United States has Israel’s back”:  “We’re with Israel.”  Days later, in an extraordinary demonstration of just how “rock solid” American support of Israel is, Biden took the risk of traveling to Israel. By this time, at least 2,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, had also been killed in the relentless, indeed merciless, aerial bombing of Gaza. Biden met with Jewish survivors of Hamas’s attack, holding some of them to his chest in a warm and consoling embrace; but, not surprisingly, he made no pretense of any similar commiseration with Palestinians.  Throughout, the United States vetoed resolutions in the United Nations calling for a cease-fire.  Since Hamas carried out its attack nearly two months ago, some 16,000 Palestinians, the greater majority of them women and children, have perished in a devastating orgy of fire, wrath, and destruction.

Gaza, Bombed Out of Existence: “An Empty Land” in colonialist Thinking, Now a True Wasteland

It is not only with Britain, but with Israel as well, that the United States has long had a “special relationship”.  On 14 May 1948, less than an hour after Israel proclaimed its independence, the US became the first country in the world to recognize Israel as a sovereign state. Ever since, Israel has been backed by American arms, recently to the tune of $3 billion every year, and the two countries have celebrated their ties as an enduring partnership of two democracies allegedly inspired not merely by mutually shared interests but by the love of liberty.  Several commentators have pointed to the great many sources of this unusual relationship.  The US has the world’s second largest Jewish population after Israel, but there are several other, lesser explored, aspects of this relationship, not the least of them being the fact that the modern American university, and nearly every sphere of scientific and humanistic inquiry, has been disproportionately shaped by Jewish intellectuals.

However, in all the vast commentary on the unwavering support that Israel has received from the United States in the last 75 years, the most critical factor has been rarely discussed.  Both Israel and the United States are settler colonial states. Though the idea of “settler colonialism” is now a staple of scholarly discourse, it has made scarcely any inroads into the common understanding of colonialism.  School textbooks down in the United States down to the present day do not use the term “settler colonialism”, and here I will not take up the matter of whether the extermination of American Indians has received even remotely the kind of recognition that it needs.  (“Recognition” barely gets us to the question of “justice”, but that is still more remote a possibility.)  But it behooves us to have at least an elementary sense of how settler colonialism provides another lens on the more general phenomenon of colonialism. The British in India, to take a well-known example of colonialism, absorbed ever greater parts of the country into British India after their initial conquest of Bengal in 1757, and some British families put down roots in India extending over the course of several generations. Though the relationship was often exploitative in the extreme, the British did not seek to exterminate the population and generally did not treat the local population merely as slave labor.

Settler colonialism is an altogether different phenomenon.  It is, in the first instance, predicated on the legal fiction, one that the Europeans boldly even merrily advanced, of terra nullius—that is, the notion that the lands they had encountered were “empty”. These lands were construed as sparsely populated, and that too by those viewed as savages bereft of civilization, and otherwise as unproductive.  Europeans thought nothing of claiming these lands as their own: however, it is not merely when they encountered opposition that they killed the indigenous people, since extermination was but a blood sport. Indigenous populations were nearly wiped out, but many of the natives were also taken into slavery.  Settler colonialists could not countenance even remotely the idea of accommodation and, without exception, settler colonialism resulted in the replacement of Europeans for the indigenous populations.  The other word for this phenomenon is genocide—even if, in the aftermath of the Second World War and especially in the last few decades, the world has settled upon a more capacious understanding of what constitutes “genocide”.

The United States, much like Australia, has evolved from being a settler colonial state into becoming a fundamentally immigrant society, but the periodic recrudescence of virulent white nationalism in both countries suggests that they continue to be guided by the instincts of settler colonialists.  There is but no question that the origins of the modern nation-state of Israel lie precisely in a similar kind of settler colonialism.  The founding of Israel was only made possible by the mass expulsion of Palestinians who term their displacement, and the dispossession of their lands, as nakba. Even as astute, learned, and sensitive a philosopher as Martin Buber was susceptible to the idea that it was given to Jewish settlers alone to make the land productive: “This land recognizes us, for it is fruitful through us: and precisely because it bears fruit for us, it recognizes us.” The land had thus far been unproductive, merely waste land: as Buber opined in an open letter to Mahatma Gandhi on 24 February 1939, “The Jewish farmers have begun to teach their brothers, the Arab farmers, to cultivate the land more intensively.”  Buber had at least the decency, utterly wanting in the present generation of Israeli leaders and their unthinking supporters in the United States, to add that “we do not want to dominate them; we want to serve with them …”

Palestine does not exist: one American, and not merely Israeli, politician after another has pronounced this as an unimpeachable fact over the last several decades. At my own university, the Chancellor, in his first message to the university community days after October 7^th, while deploring the “heinous” attack by Hamas, found himself incapable of even mentioning Palestine. A week after his first message, and that at a time when a few thousand lives in Gaza had already been snuffed out, the Chancellor of UCLA could only muster up enough “courage”, if that is the word for so supine and cowardly a gesture, to say that what was happening in Gaza was “troubling”.  If Palestinians cannot even be named, they certainly do not exist.  The United States and Israel together have woven a dance of death which has been catastrophic for their own countries and will undoubtedly prove to be an unmitigated disaster for the entire world.

First published in the Indian Express (online), 27 November 2023, as “Israel and the United States: The synergy of two settler-colonial states, a disaster for the world“

Hamas’s Insurgency and Israel’s Vengeance

Vinay Lal

It is now forty-eight hours since Hamas initiated a multi-pronged attack on the state of Israel, creating shock waves around the world and sending the Jewish state into mourning and rage. Israel’s politicians and generals are seething with the desire for revenge, and some are calling for the utter annihilation of Hamas and the abject and complete submission of Gaza to a renewed Israeli occupation.  Over 1,100 people, quite likely many more, are already dead—and the majority of these are  presently Israelis, though at least 400 Palestinians have been killed thus far as well.  Before one proceeds any further to analyze this extraordinary and tumultuous state of affairs, the repercussions of which will doubtless resonate for years in West Asia and beyond, one must first clear the ground on how Hamas might be characterized. 

Israel, the United States, Canada, and the countries of the European Union (EU) designated Hamas as a ‘terrorist organization’ years ago, but it must be stated emphatically that this is not the view of much of the world. China, India, Russia, Brazil, and Turkey are among the countries which have resisted the call to declare Hamas a ‘terrorist organization’.  Indeed, a resolution introduced in the 193-member UN General Assembly in December 2018 to condemn Hamas as a ‘terrorist organization’ did not pass, with only 87 countries voting in favor of the resolution.  Though Prime Minister Modi has now declared that India stands by Israel, his government was among those that in 2018 cast a vote of abstention.   

Hamas, which is an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement, is at once a nationalist organization and a political party; it has a militant wing (al-Qassam Brigades) as well as a social service wing (Dawah), but what is almost invariably neglected in Western accounts of Hamas is its presence as a political party.  It contested the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, an election that the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel desperately attempted to swing in favor of the Palestinian Authority. International observers, including those from the EU, declared that the election had been ‘competitive and genuinely democratic’; stunningly, Hamas won by a substantial majority, handily defeating Fatah 76-43. The US, Canada, and later EU froze all financial assistance to the Hamas-led government, sabotaging not only Hamas but, clearly, the will of the Palestinian people.  To this day, Hamas exercises a majority in the Palestinian National Authority parliament.

It should not be surprising that this history is being altogether obscured by the commentary now emanating from the West in the face of Hamas’s daring if bloodthirsty assault on Israel.  Certainly, with its indiscriminate and horrific killing of civilians, Hamas has done nothing to commend itself to the world’s attention as an organization that might be taken seriously as a political player at the negotiating table. The 250 some Israelis killed at a music festival just a few hours into the attack had no inkling of the murderous assault that was coming their way.  One must condemn, in the most unequivocal terms, the killing of civilians, whether women, men, children, or the elderly, and similarly denounce the taking of hostage as outrageous and antithetical to all canons of civilized behavior.

Just what the long-term outcome of this ‘war’, as so declared by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will be no one quite knows. For the present, however, it suffices to consider two of the many considerations or questions that form part of the present debate. First, the overwhelming question for many commentators has simply been this:  just how did Hamas manage to launch such a full-scale and coordinated attack from air, land, and sea and take Israel completely by surprise? I would like to suggest that this question, while not unimportant, is less interesting than is commonly supposed.  Israel has been celebrated for some time as a tough, or no-nonsense, state with some of the world’s most sophisticated military technology, the most advanced surveillance technologies, and a small but exceedingly well-trained army with a large number of reservists that is the envy of much of the world. Writing for The Guardian, Peter Beaumont reflects a commonly held view in arguing that Hamas’s ‘surprise attack on Israel … will be remembered as the intelligence failure for the ages.’  He reminds us, as have others, that the Pegasus spyware originated in Israel, and the country’s cyberwar unit, 8200, ‘is now the largest unit’ in the Israel Defence Forces. 

For all of this extraordinary sophistication, Israel was, it seems, wholly unprepared for Hamas’s stupendous infiltration into Israel.  Even Hamas’s most virulent critics, one suspects, must be secretly marveling at their ingenuity in firing thousands of rockets and thus overpowering the Iron Dome air defence system, using bulldozers to bring down a section of the Israel-Gaza border fence, and, most spectacularly, paragliding Hamas fighters into Israeli territory. Just why Israeli—and American—intelligence could not foresee any of this has also been put down to Israeli arrogance, the distractions created by the internal political turmoil that has been roiling Israel for close to one year, and the tendency to see Hamas as largely a spent force comprised of ragtag bunch of fighters. 

What all of this overlooks is the ineluctable fact that there is not now, and never has been anywhere in the world, a foolproof system of security. This is but one of the delusions of those who abide by a purely realpolitik view of the world.  Moreover, no security system in the world can prevail against a people who are determined to gain their freedom and who are unwilling to tolerate the suffocation of the cage into which they have been locked.  The Gaza strip is just that—a cage in which some 2.5 million people have been locked since Israel imposed a draconian and lawless blockade on Gaza in 2007. Not every Palestinian supports Hamas, but there isn’t a Palestinian who does not aspire to freedom—though this is far from the mind of supposedly enlightened Western commentators such as the numbskulled Thomas Friedman, whose only explanation for why Hamas undertook to attack Israel at this juncture is the common geopolitical view that Hamas is keen on sabotaging the Saudi-US rapprochement and similarly the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. It would be naïve to suppose that Hamas did not also have this in mind, but by far the greater consideration is the desire of the Palestinian people to secure justice, freedom, and dignity for their people.

This, then, brings us, if briefly, to the second and related consideration. Politicians and commentators in the United States and Europe, speaking as if they were part of a well-rehearsed choral group, are unanimous in describing Hamas’s attack as ‘unprovoked’.  It is seventy-five years since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the newly created state of Israel and its principal backers, the United States and the United Kingdom.  Dozens of resolutions have been passed in the UN General Assembly proclaiming the right of Palestinians to self-determination. Their only effect has been to embolden Israel, which has ever so gradually been encroaching upon Palestinian territory. Jewish settlers in the West Bank have, especially since the last election in Israel which brought far-right Jewish extremists into power and into Netanyahu’s cabinet, gone on a rampage through Palestinian villages and terrorized Palestinian civilians. There is scarcely a people in the world who have lived under such sustained provocation over decades as have the Palestinians. The US has done over these years what it does best, namely act as the world’s greatest mercenary and arms supplier, while mouthing platitudes about being the world’s torchbearer of liberty.

As I have noted, and as merits constant reiteration, one must unconditionally condemn violence and, in this case, Hamas’s attack upon Israel.  Hamas cannot prevail in a military conflict with Israel:  with or without further US military assistance, Israel will pulverize Hamas.  Still, while we recognize the cycle of violence to which Hamas has most unfortunately given yet another lease of life, we must remind ourselves that it is also possible to degrade and kill an entire people in slow motion.  The world must ensure that the Palestinians, who have endured much, are henceforth spared this cruel fate.

First published at abplive.in under the title of “Hamas’s Insurgency and Israel’s Humiliation” on 9 October 2023. Two small but important errors inadvertently appeared in the first edition of this essay as circulated to subscribers but have now been corrected.

Gandhi’s Secularism in the Age of Muscular Hinduism

Vinay Lal

(On the occasion of Gandhi Jayanti, or, Mahatma Gandhi’s Birthday)

Mohandas Gandhi forged such a distinctive path in so many spheres of life that it should come as no surprise that his conception of secularism is also at odds with nearly every commonplace understanding of secularism. Indeed, as my argument unfolds, it will become amply clear that Gandhi’s adherence to secularism entailed a deepening of religious belief; as he was to tell some English friends who came to see him on the evening of 31 December 1947, ‘what I want to do and what I have been eagerly doing for the last sixty years is atmadarshan [self-realization]…. I do not boast of my perfect success at it. But, little by little, I am inching towards it. And my every worldly (secular) engagement is carried out just from this perspective.’

The adherents of a rigorous conception of secularism have long subscribed to the formula of the separation of ‘church’ and ‘state’. Whether such a conception of secularism has existed anywhere even in the West is doubtful, but certainly, as is widely recognized, secularism so understood never had any traction in India except among a miniscule number of people who self-consciously styled themselves atheists, rationalists, and sometimes even humanists. What prevailed in India was not the view that the state might not promote religion, but rather that it was not to bestow favours on one religion at the expense of other religions. Many people have thought that such a view can fairly be said to characterize Gandhi’s own position.

Some of Gandhi’s pronouncements certainly appear to support the view that his secularism, to the extent that the word seems apposite for a man who remarked that not a leaf moved without the will of God, could not countenance the possibility that the state might concern itself with religious matters much less promote one religion. Writing in the pages of his journal Harijan in February 1947, as independence was imminent, he warned that the state ought not to ‘concern itself or cope with religious education’. Shortly after the attainment of independence, he firmly opined on the necessity of an Indian ‘Government for all. It is a “secular” government, that is, it is not a theocratic government, rather, it does not belong to any particular religion.’  There can be no doubt that he would have found the idea of a Hindu rashtra utterly repugnant.

However, the question of Gandhi’s secularism calls for interrogation from other perspectives. Some scholars hold to the view that the more palpable demonstration of his secularism resides in establishing that for him religion was in no wise incompatible with reason. His views on Hindu scriptures may be summoned as an illustration: his unstinting admiration, even reverence, for Tulsidas’ Ramacaritmanas did not stop him from rejecting one of its verses as misogynistic and thus reprehensible. He took a similar view in regard to Islam, and was critical of a Muslim clergyman who defended the stoning to death of Ahmadis on the grounds that it was sanctioned in the Quran: as Gandhi averred, ‘every formula of every religion has in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal justice if it is to ask for universal assent.’

Gandhi had from the outset advocated for a position that is often described as ‘religious politics’. In the concluding chapter of his autobiography (1927-29, he observes that he was drawn into politics owing to his ‘devotion to Truth’, and that ‘those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.’  He had declared as much when he accepted the presidency of the Indian National Congress in 1924, adding the caveat that he had in mind ‘not the religion of the superstitious and the blind, religion that hates and fights, but the universal Religion of Toleration. Politics without morality is a thing to be avoided.’

Gandhi at prayer, around 1948; photographer unknown.

The present turn in Indian politics, with the demonstrable rise of an ugly and xenophobic Hindu nationalism, suggests however the perils of invoking ‘religious politics’—even with the caveats that Gandhi had put forward repeatedly and his plea for a ‘universal Religion of Toleration’.  It is tempting to think that as Gandhi saw India increasingly slipping into communal violence from the late 1920s onward, he may have stepped back from the ‘religious politics’ that he had advocated. His ‘secularism’ is often ascribed to this very set of circumstances, and the liberal interpretation has insisted that he eventually came to adopt something like the bourgeois conception of secularism as a political ideology that was supremely respectful of individual rights.

In plain English, Gandhi, on this reading, increasingly thought that religion was strictly a private affair and should nowhere be dragged into the public. But Gandhi never adhered to the idea of the private and public as distinct and discrete spheres of life.  It is critically important, as well, to recognize how his evening public prayer meeting, a full-length study of which is still awaited though there are countless number of books on his religious life and practices, evolved over the decades.  It may be argued that what is more representative of his outlook is the stupendously radical idea that if the Muslim prays, he should pray that not that the Hindu should become a Muslim but rather a better Hindu; that if the Hindu prays, he should pray not that the Muslim should return to the Hindu fold but rather become a better Muslim; and thus with the Christians, Sikhs, and others.

In addressing a gathering of Buddhists on the occasion of Buddha Jayanti in 1925, Gandhi recalled that Muslims often mistook him for a Muslim, the Jains for a Jain, and his Christian friends for a Christian. The Christian missionaries who met Gandhi soon realized that it was pointless to make an attempt convert him to Christianity since he was a much better Christian than any they had ever encountered. It is Gandhi’s profound religious belief and sensibility that made him resolutely secular; his secularism, and his worldly obligations, each of which was but an attempt to strive for self-realization, deepened his religious belief.  His veneration for other faiths made him more, not less, of a Hindu. The advocates of a militant and muscular Hindu nationalism are in this matter entirely clueless—scarcely surprising given their ferocious disdain for self-reflexivity or anything that may remotely be called thought.

First published in print and online in the Indian Express, 2 October 2023, as “Gandhi’s Secularism Drew on His Profound Religiosity”. The present version is slightly longer.

Tagore’s Dak Ghar in the Warsaw Ghetto: The Art of Living in the Art of Dying

Something remarkable happened exactly this time of the year, perhaps almost to the day, in 1942.  A play by Rabindranath Tagore, Dak Ghar, would be performed, of all places, in the Warsaw Ghetto.  Some days later, in early August, the Nazis started to empty out the ghetto with the transportation of its residents to Treblinka, among the most notorious of the extermination camps in the vast, almost incomprehensible, labor and death camp universe created by the Nazi regime. The children who acted in the play and its director, who headed the orphanage in the ghetto, all went to their death in Treblinka and disappeared without a trace.  Some will say, therefore, that what happened was not so much remarkable as ordinary:  those who vanished into the darkness of the night were only among the six million who suffered a similar fate, and whatever “light” the play may have cast was soon extinguished. One of the difficulties in comprehending the Holocaust, of course, is that the scale of the killings renders each death, the death of six million, remarkable–as in noteworthy, calling itself to our attention–and ordinary at the same time.

Monument to Janusz Korczak, Warsaw.

The fact that Janusz Korczak, a pediatrician, writer of children’s literature, and advocate of children’s well-being, should have chosen to perform Dak Ghar [the post office] in the face of death is in itself of singular importance and presents something of a puzzle. Just why did Korczak seek to mount something like a spiritual resistance to oppression by resorting to a play by an Indian writer?  Did he seek to prepare the children under his charge for death?  Did he think that the art of dying is just as important as the art of living?  Did his embrace of Tagore at this juncture signify his willingness and indeed aptitude to transcend the barriers of time and space?  The circumstances under which Korczak was moved to embrace the play are best comprehended with brief considerations of the origin of the ghetto, the outline of Tagore’s play, and the worldview that Korczak most likely came to adopt.

Poland capitulated to the German blitzkrieg just days after the country was attacked on 1 September 1939 and the Nazis at once enforced draconian anti-Semitic measures besides subjecting many Jews to forced labor.  In October 1940, the Nazis announced the establishment of a Jewish ghetto, and by the following month nearly all the 375,000 Jews in Warsaw—constituting a third of the city’s population—had been forced into the ghetto, which occupied just 2.4 percent of the city’s surface area and was fenced off from the rest of the city by a wall that Jews were forced into building. The ghetto was designed to keep Jews isolated from the world, and not only from the rest of the city; economic activity was largely branded illegal and food was in such short supply that deaths from disease and starvation mounted.  The ghetto would, doubtless, have been eliminated in time, considering that at least by 20 January 1942, when the Nazi leadership struck upon the plan euphemistically if not chillingly coined as the “Final Solution” at the Wannsee Conference, the idea had taken root that all of Europe’s Jews would be put to death.  In 1943, following an uprising, the Warsaw Ghetto was razed to the ground; however, months before, in July 1942, the transportation of Jews to the killing center known as Treblinka, 60 miles to the northeast of Warsaw, had commenced.

Among the ghetto’s residents Janusz Korczak, born in 1878 as Henryk Goldszmit, was doubtless among the most recognized figures in Warsaw.  A pediatrician by profession, he had by his late 20s already gained something of a reputation as a writer of children’s books, and in 1911-12 he assumed the position of director of an orphanage for Jewish children.  Korczak embraced a conception of childhood that was breathtakingly radical: while he allowed children every latitude as children, recognizing childhood as a special form of dispensation, he also saw children as entirely capable of exercising their own agency.  Children were treated as the equals of adults, and rights and duties were assigned to them as they were to adults; according to the US Holocaust Museum online “Holocaust Encyclopedia”, the orphanage was “run as a ‘children’s republic.’  The young residents  regularly convened a court to hear grievances and dispense justice.”

Korczak with children.

When all Jews including Korczak were forced into the ghetto, the number of children under his charge grew as disease and starvation rendered more of the children orphans.  His principal concern throughout remained sheltering them from suffering, though life in the ghetto scarcely permitted such an outcome, and Korczak strove to maintain their physical and mental well-being.  On the eve of the commencement of the deportations to Treblinka, his friends offered to help him escape; reportedly even some of the German officers who were admirers of his work claimed that they could help Korczak to safety.  Korczak refused all such offers of assistance and insisted that he would have to remain by the side of the children.  In “A Generation” (1956), the first film by the master of Polish cinema, Andrej Wajda, Korczak is seen leading the children in singing a song as they march, almost merrily, to the deportation site (umschlagplatz).

It may be said that Korczak’s other response to offers to help him avoid the fate of other Jews was to stage Tagore’s Dak Ghar.  But why this play?  The protagonist of Tagore’s play is an orphaned boy, Amal, who has some terminal illness; though his adoptive uncle and aunt have brought him up lovingly, on the doctor’s advice he is prevented from going out in the open air and is confined to a room within the house.  Amal spends most of the day by the window, looking out on the world; he strikes up conversations, through the window, with passers by, among them a group of boys, a flower girl, and the village watchman.  He fantasizes about places that he would like to visit and the journeys that he might yet undertake.  Across the road, a post office is being built, and Amal hopes to receive a letter one day from the King; as the play nears its end, Amal believes that the letter has arrived.  The King’s herald enters with a splash and lets it be known that the King himself will make a regal entry at the stroke of midnight, and the King’s physician then follows in anticipation of the visit of His Majesty.  Seating himself by Amal’s bedside, he commands everyone to be silent and whispers:  “Sleep is coming over him.  I’ll sit by his pillow; he’s dropping into slumber.  Blow out the oil-lamp.  Only let the star-light stream in.  Hush, he slumbers.”

Izaak Celnikier, “Umschlagplatz (Korczak)”, another title: “Death of Janusz Korczak (detail). Izaak Celnikier (1923-2011) was a ward of the Korczak Orphanage from 1934 to 1938. He survived several concentration camps. This is how he imagined Korczak’s arrival at the Umschlagplatz. Collection: Jewish Historical Institute.

In his preface to The Post Office (1911), William Butler Yeats recognized “deliverance as the theme of the play”:  though Amal dies at the end, he does so not merely with dignity but almost regally.  The room may have confined him physically, but it could not constrain his imagination.  Indeed, death is but a deliverance:  though on the base level it is the freedom from the shackles of an existence where generally the development of the soul is crippled, the imagination fettered by petty thinking, and life reduced to a series of misfortunes, deliverance may also be actively courted as the very affirmation of life—even as, paradoxically, the only form of eternity.  In the stuffy and still life of the cramped quarters of the ghetto, with hundreds of children to one Amal, it would have been an enormous challenge to stage the play and bring the light of a starry night to tender souls whose lives had been blighted by those who had forsaken their own humanity.

The Warsaw Ghetto would, the year after Korczak and the children under his care were sent to their death at Treblinka, erupt in an uprising.  The Nazis retaliated in the language to which they were accustomed and with the tools of their trade:  they killed thousands of Jews in retaliation, bombed and burned every building in turn, released gas into the sewers, booby-trapped manholes, and more.  The ghetto was reduced to rubble, yet not to naught:  from dust we come to return to dust. Here, in the staging of the play, Korczak by contrast sought to play with the very idea of defiance, showing that defiance may express itself in more than the customary languages of defiance.  There is, unquestionably, something remarkable—no, let us describe the phenomenon by a more glamorous, more telling word, and call it wondrous—that, practically on the eve of their death, the children at Warsaw Ghetto would be guided into staging a performance of The Post Office.  Korczak had conveyed two subtle and yet inexpressibly messages that he sent through the post office. In the art of dying is the ultimate art of living.  And, secondly, victory may be more catastrophic for the victor than for the defeated. We are, it seems, yet to receive those letters.

This is a slightly modified version of an article first published under the same title at abplive.in on 20 July 2023.

The Feverish, Beautiful Madness of the World Cup

Saudi Arabia mid-fielder Saudi Arabia Salem Al-Dawsari (center) celebrating with a flip after scoring a spectacular goal that gave Saudi Arabia the lead and the win in the Group stage match against Argentina at Lusail.

The World Cup started in Qatar less than a week ago and, my oh my, it has set the world on fire. What else is there in life to compete with the feverish, beautiful, almost inexplicable madness of the World Cup?

There is, in reality, only one World Cup.  India and a few other countries that, with the exception of the late entrant to cricket, The Netherlands, inherited the game from England as former colonies recently competed in the ICC T20 World Cup. There is similarly the ICC One Day International version.  America has the gumption to call its baseball finals the “World Series” and similarly the National Basketball Association (NBA), which is confined to the United States (with a slight nod to Canada) and until a couple of decades ago barely even had any players from outside the US, describes the winners of the finals as “world champions”.  But the inescapable truth is that these are all comparatively parochial exercises in sports.  The only event that merits the designation of World Cup is the global battle for football supremacy.

In our day, as has been the case for some time, nationalism is inextricable from sports.  Thirty-two teams, having gone through the qualifying rounds, are competing this year in Qatar for the champion’s trophy, and in 2026 the number of countries that will field team increases to 48.  The fans come decked in their country’s colours.  The thrill that passes through their entire body when their country scores, sending them into convulsions, is akin to sheer bliss.  And, yet, it is the particular feature of what the Brazilians call “the beautiful game” that nationalism is just as often transcended as it is reinforced.  But let us not get ahead of ourselves.

To get a glimpse of what moves the world, what animates people, and the passion that impels men to invest their life savings and travel thousands of miles to follow their beloved team, one must turn to the World Cup.  It is a phenomenon quite unlike any other:  many suppose that the splendour of the Olympics is more than a match for the World Cup, but that is a wholly erroneous view.  There is something quite staid and officious about the Olympics; it projects power in a dull and orderly fashion.  To be sure, every now and then an Usain Bolt comes along and acts like a lightning rod, and likewise the female gymnasts and the divers with their synchronized moves before they plunge into the water impress and earn not only a name for themselves but cultural capital for the countries that they represent.  But the Dionysian – the ecstatic, sensuous, emotional, Bacchanalian – element that characterizes the World Cup is missing from the Olympics.  It is no surprise that China has over the last two decades made its way to the top besides the United States in the Olympics medals standings but is a non-entity in the World Cup.  The boring monstrosity that is the Chinese Communist Party would be lost at sea in the excess and ecstasy that is the World Cup.

This edition of the World Cup in Qatar has had its share of scandals, stories, and surprises—and the event is still in its early stages, with Brazil just having played its opening game.  There are rumours that the Qataris bribed their way into becoming the Chosen Ones.  For Europeans, from whom the rest of the world has learned a great many abominations such as racism, colonialism, and genocide, to pretend that that this alone is scandalous is something like the kettle calling the pot black.  Qatar is very hot in the summer, the usual time of the year when the World Cup is staged, and so it was moved to November-December, a comparatively “cooler” time of the year in a country where it remains at least warm throughout the year.  Perhaps the timing of the world’s most famous sporting event is inconvenient for Europeans, but it is time that Europe, which receives far more slots than any other continent, learned that it is no longer the center of the world.

There is much grumbling that Qatar is not permitting fans to wear armbands that display support for LGBTQ+ rights and European fans are scandalized that the sale of beer at World Cup stadiums has been prohibited.  But, if one had to speak of the scandalous, far more pertinent is the fact that several hundred migrant labourers, whose story I will convey in a separate piece, have died building World Cup stadiums in Qatar.  Their deaths will be put down to the usual weary disclaimer, “That is the way of the world.” Meanwhile, FIFA, the international football governing body that organizes the World Cup, has revenues of $5 billion and many of the players themselves earn tens of millions of dollars annually. 

Nevertheless, unless we think that the beautiful does not have a sordid side to it, this World Cup has already been a joyous explosion of talent, generating a feverish excitement and results that have stunned those who love this game that, at its best, is absolutely mesmerizing.  Spain demolished Costa Rica, 7-0, even if at times it appeared to be just playing a practice match.  Iran, which is being hammered by protests back home—another story which the world should watch with utmost attention—received a different kind of drubbing on the field as England made mincemeat of it, 6-2.  France had a spectacular beginning and, by a score of 4-1, made short work of Australia.  But this World Cup has been nothing if not a mélange of the predictable and the unpredictable, reason and superstition, the mundane and the extraordinary—and the unpredictable is always more promising. Who would have thought that Japan would send Germany, a powerhouse of football, into misery?  Two goals from two Japanese strikers were more than enough to neutralize and subdue the Germans who had one goal from a penalty. 

It is said that Japan’s victory had been foretold.  The day before the match, Taiyo, a river otter at an aquarium, had placed a miniature football in a blue bucket adorned with a Japanese flag, ignoring both the red bucket with a German flag and the yellow bucket that signified a drawn game.  In an earlier generation, the Europeans would have chuckled at this story and described it as a species of “Oriental superstition.”  But the world is now chuckling at the Germans.  The Japanese are calling upon the government to declare a national holiday—and thus emulate Saudi Arabia, which brings us to the most astonishing surprise unleashed thus far at this World Cup, or indeed in international sports.  No one expects anything much from the Saudis:  the oil-rich kingdom is, in the common imagination, good for nothing, its opulence having derived from neither from the labour nor the skill or intelligence of its own citizens. The country has made many strides in becoming green, while making the rest of the world dependent upon oil.  It is known the world over for many other unpleasantries, from unattractive potentates to forbidding women (until just some months ago) from driving cars.

Saudi Arabia has barely a presence on the international sport scene, except perhaps in falconry, and its football team is home-grown with little experience in international matches. Their opening match was with Argentina—a country that, much like Brazil, dreams football. Argentina came into the World Cup fresh from its victory over Brazil in COPA 2021, the championship that establishes football supremacy in South America.  Saudi Arabia’s leader, Mohammed bin Salman (known generally as MBS), had apparently instructed the players to go and enjoy themselves, and not think about winning.  The Saudi footballers more than enjoyed themselves; they disobeyed MBS and pulled off a stunning victory over Argentina, a win all the more spectacular as it came off an extraordinary goal—a demonstration of enormous skill, a flight of pure joy—by Al-Dawsari.  MBS declared the following day a national holiday in Saudi Arabia.

How far Saudi Arabia will go in this World Cup is anyone’s guess.  There was, a decade ago, the Arab Spring—a rather more momentous development in world politics. It did not last very long; some will say that it eventually led to chaos and lawlessness, even facilitating the rise of autocratic leaders such as Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the President of Egypt who rules with an iron hand.  Saudi Arabia’s victory over Argentina is being described as a miracle, almost as an awakening of the Arab world.  It suggests that football, too, is being democratized:  the day when neither a South American nor European team wins the World Cup may not be very far off into the future.  The ascent of African, Asian, and Middle Eastern nations in the football world is a lovely thought. 

But this victory too can only be seen as bittersweet. MBS is, to use a colloquialism, a nasty piece of work, at least privately thought by the US and European countries to have ordered the gruesome killing of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018.  He has been looking for ways to rehabilitate himself and one can be certain that he, much as many other autocratic “leaders” have done, will use the victory of the Saudi national football team over Argentina to flaunt himself as a genuine leader, a visionary who is opening the country to the West and inspired the players to outdo themselves. The World Cup has never been only about football:  power, politics, and nationalism are intrinsic to the game.

Yet, there is, still, the artistry and elegance of that delivery into the net by Al-Dawsari that sent the world into a tizzy.  It is all this that makes for the beautiful, feverish madness of the World Cup.

First published in English at abplive.in under the same title on 25 November 2022.

Hindi translation published as विश्व कप की बेकरारी, बेताबी वाला खूबसूरत सा पागलपन फीफा on 25 November 2022.

Telugu translation published as ఫుట్‌బాల్ ప్రపంచ కప్! ఇది కేవలం ఆట కాదు అంతకుమించి! on 25 November 2020 at telugu.abplive.com

Bengali translation published as বিক্ষোভ, প্রতিবাদের মিছিলেও কাতার মেতেছে ফুটবল উৎসবে on 25 November 2020

A Patrician and Statesman at the Helm: India under Nehru

This essay has been written on the occasion of the birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru (14 November 1889 – 27 May 1964).  It is perforce necessary at this time since the very name of Nehru has become anathema, to the BJP and its leaders as much as to many middle-class Indians; indeed, some of the criticism astonishes owing to the barely disguised and virulent hatred that it displays towards its subject.  Th essay seeks not to eulogize Nehru, but to offer a candid assessment of someone who was recognized in his own time not only as a world statesman, but as someone who shepherded the newborn nation-state of India at a critical juncture in world history.  His economic policies have been omitted, not because they are insignificant, or perhaps because he is more vulnerable to criticism on that front than on any other, but because the subject is complex and deserving of a separate companion piece.

Jawaharlal Nehru commenced his long stint as the first and, to this day, the longest-serving Prime Minister of India in exhilarating and yet difficult and unusual circumstances.  His speech as the country’s chosen leader on 14-15 August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly famously spoke of India’s “tryst with destiny”.  It was a moment long wished for, but Nehru recognized that the man whom he knew to be the mastermind of the freedom struggle, Mohandas Gandhi, was not there to celebrate India’s independence. Gandhi had lodged himself in Calcutta in an effort to bring peace to the riot-torn city. The blood feud between India and Pakistan would leave a long trail of dead and wounded, generate the world’s largest flow of refugees, traumatize tens of millions of people, and even send the two countries to war. Less than six months later, the Mahatma would be felled by an assassin’s bullets, and the nation would be plunged into grief. If the newly minted leader of a fledgling state had not enough on his hands in trying to keep the country together and comfort the afflicted, he now had the unenviable task of presiding over the funeral of a person who had become a world historical figure and was being apotheosized as a modern-day Buddha and Christ.  It is said that, in the midst of the elaborate and taxing preparations for the last rites to lay Gandhi to rest, Nehru, who was habituated in seeking Gandhi’s advice at difficult moments, turned to some of the men around him and said, ‘Let us go to Bapu and seek his guidance.’

Nehru with President John F. Kennedy in 1961.

The task before Nehru was immense.  The leaders of other colonized nations had doubtless their own challenges, but the challenge before India under Nehru was greater.  Over 300 million Indians, living in half a million villages, towns, and cities, encompassed a staggering diversity—whether with regard to religion, caste, the mother tongue, cultural inheritance, or socio-economic standing.  Most Indians, moreover, were desperately poor, itself a damning indictment of two hundred years of unremittingly exploitative rule of India, and to most witnesses and commentators the political institutions that India inherited from the colonial ruler had seemingly been designed for vastly different circumstances.  There was really no precedent in history for catapulting such a country into what the Constitution of India, itself crafted over a year-long intense and at times brilliant debate in the Constituent Assembly, called a modern “sovereign democratic republic.” There was much else that was singular to India:  alongside undivided British India, there were 562 native states presided over by hereditary rulers, and the vast majority of these states had willy nilly to be ‘absorbed’ into India. Students of Indian history have described this process as the ‘integration of Indian states’, but it would not be incorrect to say that the task before Nehru and the ruling Congress party was yet greater—the consolidation of the idea of India as a modern nation-state.

One might, in a more exhaustive survey of the nearly seventeen years during which Nehru shepherded India into modernity and the global stage, rightfully offer an inventory of his triumphs and failures. One cannot underestimate, for instance, the enormity of the accomplishment represented by the first general election held in India between 25 October 1951 and 21 February 1952. As a democratic exercise in universal franchise, there was nothing in the world that approached its monumental scale, all the more remarkable in that the traumas and wounds of partition were still everywhere present.  Nearly 106 million people, or 45 percent of the electorate, cast their votes—and this in a country where the literacy rate in 1951 was just over 18 percent.  The same exercise was carried out in 1957 and 1962, the last general election before Nehru’s death in May 1964, and certainly the same cannot be said of almost any other country that went through the process of decolonization. If this alone can be summoned as an instance of Nehru’s propensity to observe democratic norms, it is nonetheless also true that he imposed President’s rule on eight occasions, and his dismissal of the elected communist government in 1959 led by EMS Namboodiripad in Kerala is often cited as an instance of his inability to tolerate dissent. 

One may go on in this vein, but it would be far more productive to delineate, howsoever briefly, the idea and ethos of India under the Nehruvian dispensation.  India had inherited parliamentary institutions from the British and, under Nehru, these institutions were further nurtured, sometimes with an intent of making them more responsive to Indian conditions and even reflecting an Indian ethos or sensitivity to the history of social institutions in India.  Democratic institutions, on the whole, showed stability and maturity, the higher Indian courts showed a capacity for independent judgment, and the press largely exercised its freedoms without hindrance.  The Lok Sabha Debates of that period show that, though the Congress exercised an overwhelming majority in Parliament, the opposition was no walk-over and Nehru and his ministers were often put to the test. The office of Election Commissioner was established before the first general election to oversee the fair conduct of elections.  The stability of political institutions can be gauged by the fact that, unlike in neighboring Pakistan, or (say) in Indonesia which had acquired its independence from Dutch rule, the military was prevented from exercising any influence over the civilian government.  In this respect, Nehru rigorously ensured, as any democracy must do so, that the military would follow the civilian authorities.

While India under Nehru was not entirely free of communal disturbances after the partition killings had subsided in the early part of 1948, his own adherence to the idea that the minorities should feel safe in India cannot be doubted.  Most communal incidents were minor, and not until 1961 can one speak of a fairly significant outburst of communal violence in Jabalpur, M.P., where the rise of a successful Muslim entrepreneurial class generated some anxiety in the Hindu community. Nehru’s own courage in trying to stem communal violence has been widely documented, and the eminent American writer Norman Cousins was among those who witnessed Nehru boldly intervening personally to put a halt to communal altercation, sometimes placing himself between rioters on the street. It may be argued that Nehru was fundamentally committed to the idea of the dignity of each individual, irrespective of caste, religion, sex, socioeconomic status, and so on.  In this, I daresay, he took his cue not merely from the liberal tradition but, more importantly, from India’s numerous sant traditions and the example of Gandhi.  The cynics and critics may argue that the rights of the untouchables—as they were then known—barely advanced under Nehru, but such a view is not sustained by a close study. It is, however, certainly the case that, notwithstanding the constitutional safeguards offered to the Dalits, their progress in being accepted as full members was far slower than envisioned and hoped by B. R. Ambedkar himself.  Indeed, India is far from having made the progress in this matter that one could consider as even minimally acceptable even today.

Speaking retrospectively, it also seems to be indisputably true that, in addition to Nehru’s own belief in the inherent worth of each individual, India was a more hospitable place under Nehru than it would be under his successors.  Nehru could be intolerant and authoritarian, as I have suggested apropos of his dismissal of the Kerala government, but one must distinguish between the political choices that he made on the one hand, and the culture of tolerance and debate that was fostered in Nehruvian India on the other hand. There was a serious investment in the cultural sphere, as manifested for instance by the creation of various national academics of art, music, dance, and literature, just as there was an effort to promote the higher learning. Nearly every account of Nehru references his determination to make India modern, and even to turn India into a scientific powerhouse, and the establishment of the Indian Institutes of Technology—Kharagpur (1951), Bombay (1958), Madras (1959), Kanpur (1959), and Delhi (1961)—is often touted as his greatest achievement. Certainly, these original IITs remain India’s most well-known form of cultural capital in the world of higher learning today, besides some departments at a handful of universities such as Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University and a few other institutions such as the Indian Institute of Science (established in 1909). 

Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi, and Sardar Patel at the meeting of the All India Congress Committee, Bombay, 1946.

However, the culture and ethos of hospitality to which I advert had other dimensions, none more important than Nehru’s firm and resolute adherence to the notion of secularism.  It is being increasingly said that Nehru was too Anglicized and ‘out of touch’ with the masses to understand the common Indian’s allegedly unquenchable thirst for religion, but this argument is preposterous just as it is insensitive to the fact that Nehruvian secularism did not at all disavow the place of religion in Indian public life. Rather, such secularism as Nehru embraced was rooted, not in the repudiation of religion, but rather in the explicit disavowal of turning India into a Hindu nation-state or in appearing to convey the impression that the Hindus would be given preference over the adherents of other religions in jobs, university seats, and so on.  It is for this reason that in 1951, on the occasion of the inauguration of the newly reconstructed Somnath temple, Nehru was appalled to hear that Rajendra Prasad, who as the President of India represented all Indians and not merely Hindus, had accepted the invitation to preside over the occasion.

In any consideration of India under Nehru, one must not be oblivious to his conception of India in the world. Here, too, a contemporary assessment of this question in India has become well-nigh impossible owing to the relentless hostility towards Nehru among large segments of the middle class who have been animated by the notion that it is time to assert the prerogatives of Hindu India.  It is increasingly being said that India under Nehru was ‘irrelevant’ in world politics, and there are apocryphal stories of the Indian prime minister having foolishly abandoned a promised UN Security Council seat in favor of the Chinese—who, on this view, returned the favor with an unprovoked attack on India in November 1962 that mightily contributed to the heart attack from which he died sixteen months later.  What is, rather, indisputably a fact is that, after Gandhi’s assassination on 30 January 1948, it was Nehru who was easily the public face of India to the world:  no Indian came remotely close to having the kind of influence that he wielded on the public stage, and he did so not, as some would rather believe, merely because he was Westernized, charming, learned, and in every way a suave and even effete gentleman.  Critics scoff at his many friendships with leading intellectuals, writers, and even scientists around the world, viewing them as part of his affect and his eagerness to cultivate an international audience, but such friendships—with Albert Einstein, Paul and Essie Robeson, and Langston Hughes, among others—are a testament to his ecumenism and catholicity of thought.  The late Nelson Mandela repeatedly went on record to express his admiration for Nehru.

Jawaharlal Nehru representing India at the Bandung Conference in 1955.

To speak of India under Nehru, therefore, is also to speak of India’s place in the world at the time.  The very idea of what is today termed the ‘Global South’ was, in considerable measure, the outcome of Nehru’s keen desire to cultivate relations with other countries that had been colonized, to forge links of solidarity among coloured peoples, and to renew conversations among the colonized that would not have to be routed through the metropolitan capitals of the West.  The 1955 Bandung Conference of Asian and African countries, where Nehru had a prominent role, was the most well-known manifestation of that worldview. It was also the leading milestone in what was known as the nonalignment movement which was Nehru’s brainchild as much as that of anyone else.  Nehru positioned India during the Cold War as a country that would ally itself neither with the United States nor with the Soviet Union, though, given the constraints that geopolitics imposes, in actuality India often had to lean one way or the other, and most often, or so the conventional opinion holds, leaned towards the Soviet Union. His choice of non-alignment, it may be said, reflected his Gandhian outlook and a decided preference for a third path or space in the international sphere.  If India was, on the whole, a much gentler place under Nehru than it has been in recent decades, it may well have been because the shadow of Gandhi was always there to remind Nehru of the imperative to adhere to the ethical life even in the grim and grime-ridden world of politics.

First published at abplive.in under the title, “Mentor to a Fledgling Nation:  India under Nehru”, on 14 November 2022.

Telugu translation published at telugu.abplive.com under the title నెహ్రూ హయాంలో భారత్- అది రాచమార్గం కాదు సవాళ్ల సవారీ! on 15 November 2022.

Marathi translation published at marathi.abplive.in under the title नेहरुंच्या काळातील भारत, नवख्या राष्ट्रांचा मार्गदर्शक on 14 November 2022.

‘Har Ghar Tiranga’: The Heart, the State, and the Indian Constitution

On the occasion of the 75^th anniversary of Indian independence, August 15

In the wake of the “Har Ghar Tiranga” campaign, a campaign designed to encourage every Indian home (har ghar) to display the National Flag (tiranga, literally tri-colored), it is useful to think briefly about the evolution of the national flag, its place in the nationalist imagination during the anti-colonial struggle, and the particular way our relationship to the flag is a matter of the heart, the state, and the Indian constitution. Some people have thought that the orange in the flag represents the Hindu constituency, the green the Muslim community, and that all “others” are represented by the white in the flag.  Gandhi had said as much, in an article for Young India on 13 April 1921, except that at that time red took the place of orange, but he also added that the charkha or spinning wheel in the middle of the flag pointed both to the oppressed condition of every Indian and simultaneously to the possibility of rejuvenating every household.  The Constituent Assembly debates, which led to the adoption of the tricolored flag on 22 July 1947, suggest that some members were more inclined towards another interpretation, seeing the green as a symbol of nature and the fact that we are all children of ‘Mother Earth’, the orange as symbolizing renunciation and sacrifice, and white as symbolic of peace (shanti).  That may be so, but the tiranga cannot be unraveled without some consideration of how it emerges from the three-forked road of the heart, the state, and the constitution.

Just what, however, is a national flag and why do all nation-states have one?  The national anthem and the national flag are the bedrock of every nation-state; nearly all also have a national emblem, as does India.  India has a complicated history around the national anthem, “Jana Gana Mana”, and the country officially also has a national song, “Vande Mataram”; and, then, there is an unofficial anthem, “Saare Jahan Se Accha”, which has wide currency.  This makes the national flag especially and supremely important in India as an unambiguous marker of the nation-state. The honor and integrity of the nation are supposed to be captured by the flag, and the narrative of the nation-state everywhere offers ample testimony that the national flag is uniquely capable of enlisting the aid of citizens, giving rise to sentiments of nationalism, and evoking the supreme sacrifice of death.  In a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and highly polyglot nation such as India, the national flag is there to remind every Indian that something unites them:  before their allegiance to a language, religion, caste group, or anything else, they are Indian. Thus, in every respect, the national flag commands, not merely our respect, but our allegiance to the nation.

The Ministry of Culture’s “Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav” website, of which the “Har Ghar Tiranga” campaign is one component, adds something quite different to the discussion. It states that “our relationship with the flag has always been more formal and institutional than personal”, and the campaign seeks to evoke in every Indian a “personal connection to the Tiranga” and “also an embodiment of our commitment to nation-building.”  The idea, it says candidly, “is to invoke the feeling of patriotism.” To understand just what this means, we have to disentangle two elements:  first, the question of patriotism; and, secondly, the fact that the relationship of Indians to the national flag is sought to be altered from a formal, stiff, and institutional relationship to a more personal and engaged one. Let us first turn to the second point, before returning to complete the broader discussion on patriotism.

Unlike countries such as the United States and Canada, India for a long time did not in fact permit ordinary citizens to fly the flag from their residence or business. This right was preserved as the prerogative of the state.  “The Flag Code-India”, overhauled in 2002 and replaced by the “Flag Code of India”, and the Prevention of Insult to National Honour Act, 1971, set down the protocols to be observed in flying the national flag. In a now little-remembered but highly significant ruling on 21 September 1995, the Delhi High Court directed that the then “Flag Code-India” could not be interpreted so as to prevent an ordinary citizen from flying the National Flag from their business or residence. This eventually brought into existence the “Flag Code” of 2002, which permits unrestricted display of the tricolor consistent with the dignity and honor that is owed to the National Flag. However, aside from the question of the material to be used for making the National Flag, which has been the subject of considerable discussion in recent days, the Flag Code still imposed restrictions, such as being flown only “from sunrise to sunset “ (Para 2.2, sec. xi). The changes, moreover, were never public knowledge, and as a consequence it is safe to say that Indians have had a distant and formal, rather than personal and intimate, relationship to the National Flag. It is precisely this relationship that the “Har Ghar Tiranga” initiative has sought to change.

What is striking, and no longer seems to be a part of public or even institutional memory, is that in the two to three decades before independence, Indians did indeed have a personal relationship to the Congress flag or, as English officials with some derision described it, the Gandhi flag—the very flag that, after modifications, including the replacement of the charkha with Ashoka’s Lion Capital, would become the National Flag adopted by the Constituent Assembly.  Congressmen and women fought government officials with zeal for the right to hoist their flag.  They found that hoisting the flag invariably attracted the wrath, and often the vengeance, of British officials, and invariably ordered the flag to be brought down. On the rare occasion that a government official allowed the Congress flag to fly, he would receive an instant reprimand from the colonial government.  This happened in 1923 in Bhagalpur, where the official consented to have the Congress flag flown alongside the Union Jack, albeit at a lower height.  Not only the Government of India, but the British Cabinet issued a stern note saying “that in no circumstances should the Swaraj or Gandhi Flag be flown in conjunction with even below the Union Jack.” During the Salt Satyagraha, boys as young as eight years old were whipped for the offense of flying the flag or trying to hoist it.  The indomitable Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, in her riveting memoirs, has described the tussle over the flag during the Salt Satyagraha, with the Congress Volunteers hoisting the flag time after time, and the police lowering it each time.  “Up with the Flag”, “Up with the Flag”—the echoes kept ringing in her ears.

The right to fly the National Flag, in other words, was won after an arduous struggle.  The flag evolved over time:  it was Bhikaji Cama, who edited the newspaper Bande Mataram and closely networked with Indian revolutionaries in Europe, who unfurled the first Indian national flag at the 2^nd Socialist International Congress at Stuttgart in 1907,  and Kamaladevi rightly points out that she “installed India as a political entity” by doing so.  The same flag had been hoisted for the first time in Calcutta in 1906.  By 1921, the charkha had been installed at its center at Gandhi’s instigation, and the flag was again modified in 1931.  As Gandhi had written, “a flag is a necessity for all nations.  Millions have died for it.  It is no doubt a kind of idolatry which it would be a sin to destroy.”  Seeing how British hearts pounded with pride at seeing the Union Jack fluttering in the wind, Gandhi asked whether it was not similarly necessary that all Indians “recognize a common flag to live and to die for”?  If the Congress flag accompanied every campaign, artists similarly positioned the flag prominently in their artwork.  In a 1945 color print celebrating Subhas Bose and the heroes of the Indian National Army who were put on trial on charges of treason, we see the Congress flag with the charkha, and the INA flag with the springing tiger, on either side of Subhas Bose (see fig. 1).  Martyrs fell along the way, but their struggle was not in vain:  in Sudhir Chowdhury’s print from 1947, the heads of the martyrs, among them Bhagat Singh and Khudiram Bose, lie at the feet of Bharat Mata, who hands the tiranga to Nehru on the eve of independence (see fig. 2).  In her various hands, she holds the other iterations of the national flag before it evolved into the tiranga.

Fig. 1, Sudhir Chowdhury, I.N.A. officers with Netaji, c. 1945.

If Indians fought for the national flag with zeal, they did so because they believed in what it stood for and they did so from their own volition against colonial oppression.  The affection for the flag came from within, as a mandate from the heart rather than from the state.  In any discussion of what the flag means today, it must be borne in mind that though the business of the state is to produce patriotic citizens, a patriotism that is manufactured by the state cannot endure and is as ephemeral as a market commodity.  It is no less pertinent that the Constitution of India has nothing to say on the national flag.  Though former Chief Justice Khare, heading a three-member bench of the Supreme Court, stated in 2004 that the citizen had a fundamental right to fly the flag as guaranteed by Article 19 (1)(a) of the Constitution, the article in question is about the freedom of speech and expression, and the right to fly the flag was interpreted as being subsumed by the larger right specified by Art. 19 (1)(a).

Fig. 2: Sudhir Chowdhury, “Worship of Martyrs”, c. 1947.

The Constitution has, of course, nothing to say explicitly on thousands of subjects, and Chief Justice Khare did what courts must do, namely interpret the Constitution.  That is well and good, but we must confront the fact that many who honor the flag do not necessarily honor the Constitution. The state may be no exception; indeed, it is far likely to honor the flag rather than the constitution.  A rogue can fly a flag as much as a saint; it takes almost nothing to show one’s patriotism.  If patriotism can be purchased on the cheap, for a 5-rupee (7. 5 cents) plastic flag put together in China, which the present regime in India has derided as the mortal enemy, it is practically worthless.  That larger right to freedom of speech and expression which subsumes the right to fly the flag is critically important, but it is also equally important to recognize that the Constitution, as the supreme law of the land, itself subsumes the National Flag.  Now that the citizens of India have won the right to hoist the National Flag without restriction, consistent with respect to the National Flag, it is perhaps time to think about the corresponding duty they owe to respect the freedom of speech and expression, and the obligation, which the present government has shown little if any interest in honoring, to protect the Fundamental Rights promised in the Constitution to every citizen.

First published under the same title in a slightly shorter form at abplive.in, here.

Gujarati translation by abplive.in available, here.

The Art of the Freedom Struggle in India

As India prepares to celebrate the 75^th anniversary of its independence on August 15^th, attention will naturally gravitate towards those who were the principal architects of the movement that gave us azaadi. In the current mood, and under the present political dispensation, one can be certain that even though the putative “Father of the Nation”, Mahatma Gandhi, will be mentioned in the usual pious tones, many others will be celebrated as the greater architects of the freedom struggle.  The marginalization of Gandhi has, of course, been going on for some time, indeed long before the present BJP government came into power, and the extraordinary success of the South Indian film “RRR” tells us something about the film culture of our days, the political sensibility of many Indians, and the manner in which the narrative of the freedom struggle is being rewritten. The film is a visual extravaganza that celebrates most of the “real warriors” who delivered India from the yoke of colonial rule, and it comes as no surprise that neither Gandhi nor Jawaharlal Nehru are deemed worthy of inclusion in the galaxy of heroes. Quite predictably, the film invokes, particularly towards the end, the legacies of Subhas Bose, Bhagat Singh, and Sardar Patel among others.  The screenwriter of the film, Vijayendra Prasad, has gone on record as saying that online posts—from Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp—from some friends made him question five years ago whether Gandhi and Nehru had done anything for the country, and he says he began to reject the orthodox historical narrative that was being taught in Indian schools when he was a child.  When you learn your history from WhatsApp and Twitter, what you get is “RRR”—a visual spectacle, but absolutely brainless, and one that is curiously devoid of any understanding of the language of cinema. This is, of course, apart from the question of what the makers of the films understand by India’s adivasi culture, or their interpretation of caste and its political histories.

One way to comprehend what was transpiring during the freedom struggle and in its immediate aftermath is to understand how artists at that time responded to the events unfolding before them.  A very small if sophisticated body of work has emerged around this subject, but what has been written on it—often in obtuse language—is largely for scholars, all the more ironical because much of the art of that time is ephemeral, more like bazaar art, and one would imagine that the scholars who have sought to rescue this work from oblivion are sensitive to the fact that bazaar art is after all for the bazaar, that is for common people.  What becomes evident from a perusal of the art is that the artists and printmakers saw in Gandhi the supreme embodiment of the aspirations of a people striving to be free.  They unhesitatingly turned Gandhi into the presiding deity of the political landscape.  By far the greatest number of nationalist prints, as they may be called, feature him and the political events and the political theatre to which he gave birth—whether it be the Champaran Satyagraha, the noncooperation movement, the no-tax campaigns such as the Bardoli Satyagraha, the Salt Satyagraha, or the Quit India movement.  What is even more extraordinary is that the printmakers and artists also unhesitatingly placed him, and him alone of all the political luminaries of that time, as akin to the founder of religions and as the true inheritor of the spiritual legacy of Indian civilization.  Thus, for example, in the poster by P. S. Ramachandra Rao that appeared from Madras in 1947-48 entitled “The Splendour That is India”, Gandhi is placed in the pantheon of “great souls”—Valmiki, Thiruvalluvar, the Buddha, Mahavira, Shankaracharya, the philosopher Ramanuja, Guru Nanak, Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharishi—who are thought to have animated the spiritual life of a people (see fig. 1).

Fig. 1: P. S. R. Rao, “The Splendour That is India”, Madras, 1947-48.

Let us turn, however, to some more modest prints that came out of a workshop in Kanpur established by Shyam Sundar Lal, who described himself as a “Picture Merchant” and set up a business at the chowk. It is not possible to go into the details of how Kanpur came to have such an important though not singular place in nationalist art, but it is useful to recall that Kanpur [or Cawnpore, as it was known to the British] was the site of critical events during the Rebellion of 1857-58.  As a major manufacturing hub and production centre for supplies required by the army by the late 19^th century, Kanpur also became important for labour union organizing and it was a city where communists and Congressmen both jostled for power.  We do not know exactly how these prints were circulated, distributed, or used.  Did they pass from hand to hand? Where they pasted on walls in public places or framed and displayed in homes?  We do not even know how many copies were printed of each print, and indeed how many designs were in circulation for around the twenty to thirty years that the workshop was in business. But the prints that have survived make it possible to draw some inferences about how printmakers viewed the nationalist struggle.

One of the artists who produced prints diligently for Sundar Lal’s workshop was Prabhu Dayal and we may confine ourselves to three examples of his artwork. In a print entitled “Satyagraha Yoga-Sadhana”, or the achievement of satyagraha by the discipline of yoga, Gandhi is shown centre-stage, with Motilal Nehru and his son Jawaharlal positioned at either end of the Mahatma (see fig. 2).  He sits meditatively on a bed of thorns, reminiscent perhaps of the dying Bhishma as he lay upon a sheaf of arrows and delivered a last set of teachings on the duties of the king and the slipperiness of dharma. There are no rose bushes without thorns; similarly, there is no freedom without restraint and discipline. The resolution for purna swaraj had been passed in December 1929 by the Congress at the annual meeting in Lahore presided over by Jawaharlal, and it is the rays of full independence or “poori azaadi” that shine upon the three.

Fig. 2: Satyagraha Yoga-Sadhana, print by Prabhu Dayal, published by Rashtriya Chitra Prakashak Karyalaya, Kanpur.

More remarkable still is a print from 1930 which casts the epic battle between Rama and Ravana as a modern-day struggle between Gandhi and the British, between ahimsa (nonviolence) and himsa (violence), between satya (truth) and asatya (falsehood; see fig. 3). The ten-headed Ravana is incarnated as the hydra-headed machinery of death and oppression known as the British Raj. This struggle is represented as the Ramayana of our times. In this “struggle for freedom” (“swarajya ki larai”), Gandhi’s only weapons are the spindle and the charkha, though just as Rama was aided by Hanuman, so Gandhi is aided by Nehru.  There is no mistaking the fact that Nehru is rendered as the modern-day Hanuman, who, in his hunt for the life-saving drug (sanjivini), carried back the mountain.  A forlorn-looking Bharat Mata, Mother India, languishes in one corner of the print, cast in the shadow of the architecture of the new imperial capital built by the British as a monument to their own power. Gandhi in his rustic dhoti, bare-chested, presents a stark contrast to the Hun-looking British official in high boots whose hands bear a multitude of weapons of oppression: artillery, the baton of the police, military aircraft, indeed the entire arsenal of the armed forces and the navy. The oppressive and power-crazy British also wield Section 144 of the Indian Penal Code, which restricted the assembly of people and was used by the colonial state to foil nationalist demonstrations—and is still being used in independent India.

Fig. 3: Prabhu Dayal, “Struggle for Freedom” (“Swarajaya ki Ladai”), c. 1930, published by Shyam Sunder Lal Agarwal, Kanpur.

Prabhu Dayal, however, was ecumenical in his comprehension of the different strands of the freedom movement.  Contrary to the view which some had then, and which is increasingly becoming popular among those who deride nonviolence and imagine that Gandhi was an effete individual who placed before his country a worldview for which a muscular nation-state can have no respect, Dayal did not see Bhagat Singh or Subhas Bose as having an antagonistic relationship to Mahatma.  Much of his work suggests the complementariness between Gandhi and Bhagat Singh as in, for instance, this print entitled “Swatantrata ki Vedi par Viron ka Balidan”, or “The Sacrifice of Heroes at the Altar of Independence” (see fig. 4).  Here Bhagat Singh, Motilal, Jawaharlal, Gandhi, and countless other Indians are lined up before Bharat Mata with the heads of the immortal martyrs, ‘amar shahid’, who have heroically already laid down their lives for the nation: Ashfaqullah [Khan], Rajendra Lahiri, Ramprasad Bismil, Lala Lajpat Rai, and Jatindranath Das.  Prabhu Dayal did not doubt the sacrifice of the “Lion of the Punjab”, Lala Lajpat Rai, or of the many young men who took up arms in their quest for India’s independence.

Fig. 4: Prabhu Dayal, “Swantantrata ki Vedi par Viron Ka Balidan” (The Sacrifice of Heroes at the Altar of Independence), c. 1930, published by Shyam Sundarl Lal Agarwal, Kanpur.

Much of this artwork has only in recent years begun to receive the critical scrutiny of historians and other scholars.  These prints do not only tell the story of the freedom movement; rather, they helped to forge the identity of the nation.  What kind of art will do the same at this critical juncture of India’s history remains to be seen.

Note:  All the prints are part of the author’s own collection. This article is related to, and in part drawn from, his forthcoming book, Insurgency and the Artist (New Delhi:  Roli Books, c. Oct 2022).

This is a slightly revised version of a piece first published under the same title at abplive.in on 12 August 2022.

Published in a Marathi translation at ABP Network, here.

Also available in Bengali translation at bengali.abplive.in, here.

And in a Gujarati translation at gujarati.abplive.in, here.

Making Meaning of the Crime of Nagasaki: American Power and Dehumanization in the Nuclear Age

It is on this day, August 9, seventy-seven years ago, that the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan.  Several air-raid alarms had sounded early that morning, but such warnings had by now become routine.  The Americans had been firebombing Japanese cities for months, and there was little reason to suspect that this morning would be any different. Two B-29 Superfortresses, as the gigantic bombers were called, had left Tinian air base and arrived at Kokura, the intended target, at 9:50 AM, but the cloud cover was too thick to drop the bomb with any degree of accuracy and the planes departed for the secondary target, Nagasaki.  Here, once again, visibility was sharply reduced owing to thick clouds, but then, fortuitously for the animated plane crew, the veil was lifted momentarily—just enough to drop “Fat Boy”, as the bomb was nicknamed, at 11:02 AM.  Nagasaki had thus far not been laid to waste: a deliberate decision, since the effect of the bomb could not be judged if it were dropped on a city that had already been reduced to rubble.  The clouds had parted, and the virginal city was now open to being ravished by “Fat Boy”.

Nagasaki, the Morning After: 10 August 1945. Photograph: Yosuke Yamahata.

At the moment of detonation, less than a minute later, something like 40,000 people were killed instantly.  Over the next five to six months, another 30,000 died from their injuries; the casualties would continue to mount over the years, some succumbing to their injuries, others to the creeping radiation.  At least 100,000 people had died within a few years in consequence of the bombing.  Almost ninety percent of the buildings within a 2.5-kilometre radius of the hypocenter, or “ground zero”, were entirely destroyed.  The following day, August 10, following the expressed wishes of the Emperor, the Japanese government conveyed its surrender to the Allied forces, though the American insistence on an “unconditional surrender” continued to be a stumbling block for several days.  It was not until August 15 that Emperor Hirohito, taking to the airwaves to speak to his people directly for the first time, announced Japan’s surrender.  On September 2^nd, the Japanese foreign minister signed the instrument of surrender, and the hostilities of World War II were formally brought to a close.

Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signs the Instrument of Surrender on behalf of the Japanese Government, on board USS Missouri (BB-63), 2 September 1945. Photograph from the Army Signal Corps Collection in the U.S. National Archives.

The atomic bombing of Nagasaki has been, comparatively speaking, little explored and it is similarly less recognized and commemorated than the bombing of Hiroshima three days earlier.  It is, of course, the singular misfortune of Hiroshima that it ushered humanity into the nuclear age and catapulted humanity to new and heightened levels of barbarism.  “Little Boy”, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, killed 70,000 people instantly—at the moment of detonation.  The city was leveled, utterly ruined, and transformed into a mass graveyard.  The graphic photographs that survive tell the same story, but in different idioms.  There is the photograph of a young girl who survived initially but whose eyes were hollowed out; she was blinded by the bright light emitted by the explosion.  Thousands of people were literally rendered naked:  the intense heat and the fireballs stripped them of their clothes, and on one woman’s back the kimono’s pattern was seared into her flesh.  This is one kind of barbarism.

Blinded by the light and by “Little Boy”: Hiroshima, 6 August 1945. Photograph: Christer Stromholm.

It is another if related kind of barbarism to adopt the view, in the words of an American military officer at that time, that “the entire population of Japan is a proper military target.”  Fewer than 250 people who were killed in Hiroshima were soldiers; the targets, in other words, were the elderly, women, and children, Japanese men of fighting age already having left the city to serve in the armed forces or auxiliary services. The hyper-realists have always adhered to the position that, whatever restraints on warfare international law might impose, and whatever the ethical sentiments that soft-headed people may have, war is a brutal business and that at times nothing is forbidden in the pursuit of victory.  Historians generally encompass this view under the rubric of “total war”.

It is still another kind of barbarism, however, to continue to defend both the atomic bombings years and decades later, as many Americans especially do, on grounds that are at best specious.  As late as 2015, seventy years after the bombings and considerable scholarship calling into question the conventional view, a Pew Research Center survey indicated that 56 percent Americans supported the atomic bombings and another 10 percent declared themselves undecided.  Many arguments have been advanced in defense of the use of the bomb.  Some commentators resort to what I have already described as the argument that, in conditions of “total war”, nothing is impermissible.  Since such an argument often sounds crass and unforgiving, others prefer to speak of “military necessity”.  The defense of the bombings often hinges around Japan’s obdurate refusal to surrender on the terms that Americans had every right to impose.  

However, at rock bottom, there is but one fundamental claim on which the proponents of the bombings rest their case.  It is the argument that the atomic bombings saved lives.  We can all envision scenarios, so goes the argument, where one preserves lives by taking other lives.  Had the bombs not been dropped, the Americans would have had to undertake a land invasion, and the battle of Iowa Jima had shown the Americans that the Japanese would be prepared to defend their country to the last man—and perhaps woman and child.  Tens of thousands of American soldiers would have been killed.  The somewhat more sensitive adherents of this view, mindful of the fact that Americans are not the only people fully deserving to be viewed as “human”, insist on reminding everyone that hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians would also have been killed.  Thus, it is not only American, but also Japanese, lives that were saved when the United States decided to unleash destruction on a scale the like of which had never been seen in history. 

President Truman’s remarks on August 11 unequivocally suggest that saving Japanese lives was certainly not on his mind—and neither was it on the minds of the military planners or even the scientists charged with bringing to fruition the Manhattan Project:  “The only language they [the Japanese] seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.  When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him like a beast.  It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.”  There is but no doubt that the Japanese had been entirely dehumanized.  In prosecuting the war against Germany, the United States always made it clear that the Nazis, not ordinary Germans, were the enemy; however, no such distinction was observed in prosecuting the war against Japan.  Military planners and most ordinary Americans alike saw themselves as being at war against the Japanese, not just against the Japanese leadership.  The savage lampooning of, and racism against, the Japanese is to be found in countless number of cartoons, writings, and official documents, as well as in the expressly pronounced views of people in the highest positions in the American government and society.  The Chairman of the US War Manpower Commission, Paul V. McNutt, said that he “favored the extermination of the Japanese in toto”, and President Franklin Roosevelt’s own son, Elliott, admitted to the Vice President that he supported continuation of the war against Japan “until we have destroyed about half of the civilian population.”

A case can be made that the United States, in undertaking the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, committed war crimes, even crimes against humanity, and engaged in state terrorism.  Quite reasonably, we may expect that such a view will be aggressively countered, though the argument that the dehumanization of the Japanese—even if precipitated to some extent by Japan’s own wartime atrocities, some on a monumental scale—played a role in the bombings seems to be unimpeachably true.  Those who seek to defend the bombings appear, moreover, to be unable to comprehend that the nuclear bombs were not simply bigger and far more lethal bombs, and that the bombings were not merely a more aggravated and ferocious form of the strategic bombing carried out first by the Luftwaffe and then the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the U.S. Air Force. The atomic bombings breached a frontier; they constituted a transgression on a cosmic scale, bringing forth in the most terrifying way before humankind the awareness that the will to destroy may yet triumph over the will to live.  The sheer indifference to the idea of life, any life, on the planet suggests the deep amorality that underlies the logic of the atomic bombings.  In this sense, we may say that the crime of Hiroshima is the primordial crime of our modern age.

Still, is it also possible to argue that the crime of Nagasaki was yet greater than the crime of Hiroshima?  Why did the Americans have to drop a second bomb?  Why could they not have waited a few more days for Japan to surrender?  The defenders of the Nagasaki bombing argue that, since the Japanese had not surrendered immediately after the Hiroshima bombing, it was quite apparent to the Americans that they were determined to keep fighting on.  The Japanese may have believed that the United States had only one bomb; some argue that surrender was not an option for the Japanese since the warrior culture was pervasive in their society and “Oriental culture” does not permit such an ignominious ending.  On the other side, it has been argued that American military planners had a toy, and what use is a toy if it is not going to be put into play.  

As I have argued, and many others have argued this long before me, the atomic bombings were never just intended to induce Japan to surrender. Before the war had even ended, the United States was already preparing for the next war, and that against a mortal enemy—the Soviet Union. Japan, at this time, was an entirely decimated power; it was, indeed, of comparatively little interest to the Americans.  If this sounds implausible to some, consider that Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, the Director of the Manhattan Project, himself confessed that “there was never from about two weeks from the time that I took charge of this Project any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted on that basis.” It was imperative to convey to Stalin that the United States would not be prepared to allow the Soviet Union to spread the poison of communism around the globe and seek world domination; as Secretary of State James Byrnes remarked, “The demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia with America’s military might.”

With Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States sought to deliver a one-two punch:  knock out Japan and put the Soviet Union on notice that the United States was prepared to exercise its Manifest Destiny as the one indispensable country in the world.  “Power corrupts,” John Dalberg-Acton [Lord Acton] famously pronounced; “absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

First published under the same title at abplive.in on 9 August 2022.

Available in a Marathi translation, here.

Available in a Tamil translation, here.

Available in a Telugu translation, here.