'I thought the nation was coming to an end,'
wrote Khushwant Singh, looking back on the violence of Partition that he witnessed over half a century ago. He believed then, and for years afterwards, that he had seen the worst that India could do to herself. Over the last few years, however, he has had reason to feel that the worst, perhaps, is still to come. In this fierce, uncompromising book, he shows us what few of us wish to see: why it is entirely likely that India will come undone in the foreseeable future.
Analysing the communal violence in Gujarat in 2002, the burning of Graham Staines and his children, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, and targeted killings by terrorists in different parts of the country, Khushwant Singh forces us to confront the extreme corruption of religion that has made us among the most brutal people on earth. We have always been too easily tolerant of extremist ideologies, but the rise of religious fundamentalism among the Hindus threatens our democracy and everything else that we take for granted. With sections of the ruling coalition openly supporting the divisive and retrograde agenda of the fundamentalists, it is the very idea of India that is at stake. 'Unless a miracle saves us,' Khushwant Singh writes, 'the country will break up. It will not be Pakistan or any other foreign power that will destroy us; we will commit hara-kiri.'
A brave and passionate book, The End of India is a wake-up call for every Indian citizen concerned about his or her own future, if not the nation's.
Cover photograph by Shailesh Raval/India Today
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE END OF INDIA
Khushwant Singh was born in 1915 in Hadali, Punjab. He was educated at Government College, Lahore and at King’s College and the Inner Temple in London. He practised at the Lahore High Court for several years before joining the Indian Ministry of External Affairs in 1947. He was sent on diplomatic postings to Canada and London and later went to Paris with UNESCO. He began a distinguished career as a journalist with All India Radio in 1951. Since then he has been founder-editor of Yojana, and editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, National Herald and Hindustan Times. Today he is India’s best-known columnist and journalist.
Khushwant Singh has also had an extremely successful career as a writer. Among his published works are the classic two-volume History of the Sikhs, several works of fiction including the novels Train to Pakistan (winner of the Grove Press Award for the best work of fiction in 1954), I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, Delhi and The Company of Women and a number of translated works and non-fiction books on Delhi, nature and current affairs.
Khushwant Singh was a member of Parliament from 1980 to 1986. Among other honours, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974 by the President of India (he returned the decoration in 1984 in protest against the Union Government’s siege of the Golden Temple, Amritsar). His autobiography, Truth, Love and a Little Malice, was published in 2002.
THE END OF INDIA
Khushwant Singh
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First published by Penguin Books India 2003
Copyright © Khushwant Singh 2003
Some of the materials used in the essays first appeared in the Illustrated Weekly of India and in the Hindustan Times.
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ISBN: 978-01-4302-994-6
This Digital Edition published 2011. e-ISBN: 978-81-8475-056-0
Digital conversion prepared by DK Digital Media, India.
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To all those who love India
Contents
Copyright
Introduction
The Case of Gujarat
The Sangh and Its Demons
Communalism—An Old Problem
Is There a Solution?
INTRODUCTION
These are dark times for India. The carnage in Gujarat, Bapu Gandhi’s home state, in early 2002 and the subsequent landslide victory of Narendra Modi in the elections will spell disaster for our country. The fascist agenda of Hindu fanatics is unlike anything we have experienced in our modern history. After Partition I had thought we would never again experience a similar holocaust. I may be proved wrong. Far from becoming mahaan (great), India is going to the dogs, and unless a miracle saves us, the country will break up. It will not be Pakistan or any other foreign power that will destroy us; we will commit hara-kiri.
At the time India won its independence in 1947, most India-watchers did not foresee this danger. Their concern was the left. They predicted that within a few years communists would take over the country. Marxist pedagogues assured everyone who cared to listen to them that India was like a rotten apple hanging on the branch of a rootless tree that could fall with the slightest tremor of the earth. There were enormous disparities between the few very rich and privileged on the one side and the teeming millions of the impoverished, underprivileged and discriminated against on the other. It was only a matter of time before the peasants and workers would rise en masse and sweep the bourgeoisie into the sea.
There were good reasons to believe that this would be the shape of things to come. Between 1939 and 1945, the years of the Second World War, while Congress leaders were behind bars for not co-operating with the government, communists who supported the British and their allies against fascists were allowed to consolidate their strength. They came to dominate workers trade unions across the country; they set up kisan organizations committed to depriving landlords of excess land. In every university they had Marxist students unions; they had progressive writers unions, people’s theatre groups and bodies like Friends of the Soviet Union. They had infiltrated the army, navy and police. They were confident that no sooner the war ended and the British packed up to leave, they would take over the country.
All their calculations went awry because they had grossly misread the mood of the people. As soon as the war was over and Congress leaders set free, people condemned communists as collaborators of the hated British. Their new heroes were Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and others of the now defunct Indian National Army which had fought on the side of the Japanese against the British. The com
munists had also underestimated the hold of Mahatma Gandhi on the Indian masses; the Mahatma had no compassion for Godless Marxists. Above all, it was Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, who took the wind out of the communists’ sails by making India a socialist country. The strength the communists had gathered withered away. I recall Kingsley Martin, editor of the left-wing New Statesman and Nation and a friend of Nehru’s, telling me on one of his visits to India, ‘My dear fellow, how can you take Indian communists seriously? They play cricket matches against teams of anti-communists!’
All this while a new threat was growing, slowly but surely. Nehru was the first and probably the only leader of the time who sensed that the challenge to India’s democracy would come not from communism but from a resurgence of religious fanaticism. He had spent the best part of his nine years in jail studying Indian and world history. He knew that every organized religion harkened back to an imagined glorious past and opposed change. In Europe, secular forces had to wage battles with the church and compel it to restrict its activities to matters spiritual. This did not happen in the Islamic world. As a consequence, Muslim nations remained backward and largely undemocratic. What would become of predominantly Hindu India, now that it was truly independent for the first time in centuries? Indian democracy was fragile, and unless it struck strong secular roots, it would crumble and fall. India had religious minorities like Muslims (12%), Christians (3%) and Sikhs (2%). Muslims and Christians were scattered across the country and not likely to create problems. Sikhs were concentrated in the Punjab but were too small in numbers, too closely related to the Hindus and therefore manageable. The main danger to India’s secular democracy would be the resurgence of religious fundamentalism among Hindus who formed over 80% of the population. Nehru was able to fight it off as long as he lived. It might be recalled that when Dr Rajendra Prasad agreed to inaugurate the newly rebuilt temple at Somnath, Nehru sent a strong note protesting that the President of a secular State had no business to involve himself in religious matters. Unfortunately, the leaders who came after Nehru were not as upright and staunchly secular. Hindu extremist groups began to grow in strength.
The feeling that Hindus had been deprived of their legacy and humiliated by foreigners had deep roots. For eight centuries, Muslim dynasties had ruled over the country, and many Muslim rulers had destroyed Hindu temples, made forcible conversions and imposed jazia (discriminatory taxes) on their non-Muslim subjects. This was not peculiar to the Muslim rulers of India. In almost all ancient and medieval societies this was the norm. Hindu rulers too, for instance, had persecuted Buddhists and Jains and destroyed their places of worship. The British, who followed the Mughals, tried to be even-handed in their dealings with Hindus and Muslims, but allowed Christian missionaries to open a vast network of schools, colleges and hospitals, preach the gospel of Christ and win converts to their faith.
It was during British rule that Hindu nationalism took birth. The most powerful movement, the Arya Samaj, began under the leadership of Swami Dayanand Saraswati (1824-1883). His call ‘Back to the Vedas’ received wide response, particularly in northern India. Amongst the Arya Samaj converts was the Punjabi Lala Lajpat Rai (1865-1928) who was both an ardent Hindu and a leader of the Indian National Congress. So was Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920) of Maharashtra who revived the cult of Ganapati and coined the slogan ‘Swaraj is our birthright’. In due course of time, Hindu militant organizations took birth. The most important of these was the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) founded in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889-1940) in Nagpur. He propagated the cause of a Hindu rashtra, a Hindu state. He was anti-Muslim and also anti-Gandhi, because the Mahatma strove for equal rights for all religions. Hedgewar was succeeded by M.S. Golwalkar, who was followed by Balasaheb Deoras. Together, these leaders, all charismatic and all unashamedly communal, strengthened the organization through fascist propaganda, strict discipline and targeted social work among the Hindus during calamities like earthquakes and famines and during Partition.
By 1990, the RSS had over one million members, who included, among others, Atal Behari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti—the last three charged with the destruction of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992—and Narendra Modi, the present poster boy of the Hindu right who presided over the pogrom in Gujarat. The RSS was, and is, anti-Muslim, anti-Christian and anti-left. It could be dismissed as a lunatic group as long as it remained on the fringes of mainstream politics. Not any more. Its political offshoot, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, today’s Bharatiya Janata Party, had only two MPs in the Lok Sabha in 1984, but by 1991 it had 117. Today, with its allies, it rules the country.
There are now several other Hindu organizations as, if not more, militant than the RSS. There is the Shiv Sena led by the rabble-rouser Bal Thackerey, an admirer of Adolf Hitler. He started with a movement called ‘Maharashtra for Maharashtrians’ aimed at ousting South Indians from Bombay. His mission soon changed to ousting Muslims from India. In the last decade or so he has spread his tentacles across the country and boasts of his sainiks taking the leading part in destroying the mosque in Ayodhya. Perhaps as reward he has his quota of ministers in the central government. Besides the Shiv Sena, there are the more mischievous Bajrang Dal and the Vishva Hindu Parishad, currently leading the agitation to build a Ramjanmabhoomi temple on the exact site where the now-destroyed Babri Masjid stood—no matter what the government or the courts of law have to say. This is typical. Most members of the extended Sangh parivar regard themselves above the law of the land. They have arrogated to themselves the right to decide the fate of one billion Indians.
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We Indians have always been more concerned about the race, religion and caste we were born into than about our being Indian nationals. Ever since the BJP and its allies came to power, a sinister dimension has been added to this feeling of separateness. It is hard to believe that elements of the Sangh parivar have been able to convince a significant number of Hindus that they have been treated as second-class citizens in a country where they form eighty-two per cent of the population. Whence this inferiority complex? How have the likes of Narendra Modi, Praveen Togadia, Ashok Singhal and Giriraj Kishore succeeded in persuading the Hindus that they are discriminated against when there is no evidence whatsoever to substantiate their claims?
The juggernaut of Hindu fundamentalism has emerged from the temple of intolerance and is on its yatra. Whoever stands in its way will be crushed under its mighty wheels. We used to boast with rightful pride that Hinduism was the most accommodating of all religions and India, which is predominantly Hindu, among the most tolerant of nations in its treatment of minorities. Hindu savants like Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Swami Prabhupada, Osho and the sadhus of the Ramakrishna Mission took the message of Hinduism abroad, built temples and made many converts to Hinduism. Adherents of both Christianity and Islam, which have the largest and second largest following in the world respectively, conceded that Hinduism was unique in allowing that there were different ways of getting to the Truth of existence and everyone had the right to approach God in his or her own way. It laid no claim to monopoly over spiritual matters and was free of dogma and bigotry. In recent years, this image has taken a beating. Discrimination against Muslims culminating in the demolition of the Babri Masjid and then the massacres in Gujarat by Hindu terrorists destroyed the notion that Hinduism is more tolerant than Islam. The murder of Christian missionaries, attacks on churches and schools and the burning of Bibles have done similar damage to the perception of Hinduism among Christians.
The worst enemy of every religion is the fanatic who professes to follow it and tries to impose his view of his faith on others. People do not judge religions by what their prophets preached or how they lived but by the way their followers practice them. Christianity has a hard time explaining its inquisitors. Muslims will continue to be judged by the acts of groups like the Taliban and the Mujahideens who wage unending wars against the non
-Muslims. And now Hinduism will be judged by the utterances of people like Uma Bharti, Sadhvi Rithambara and Praveen Togadia and the doings of Dara Singh, Narendra Modi and Bal Thackeray.
Fascism has well and truly crossed our threshold and dug its heels in our courtyard. And we have only ourselves to blame for this. We let the fanatics get away with every step they took without raising a howl of protest. They burnt books they did not like; they beat up journalists who wrote against them; they attacked cinema houses showing films they did not approve of; they smashed the equipment of film-makers ready to shoot film scripts cleared by the government; they vandalized the studio and paintings of India’s leading artist (not surprisingly, a Muslim); they perverted texts from history books to make them conform to their ideas. We allowed them to do all this, as if none of this was our business. Now they openly butcher people for the crime of believing in a different God. They foul-mouth everyone who disagrees with them. To them we are pseudo-secularists. We failed to hit back because we were not a united force and did not realize the perils of allowing our country to fall into their hands. Now we are paying the price.
In her novel In Times of Siege, Githa Hariharan quotes a German Pastor, Reverend Martin Niemöller, who was persecuted by the Nazis:
‘In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I did not speak up because I was not a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak up because I was not a Jew.
‘Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak up because I was not a trade unionist.
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