11-30-2005, 12:59 PM
Shaurya
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->1. It was the intent of Britain to break India before leaving<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--> Let us take the first of your points for which you demand proof (incidentally i fnd it ironic that you make the facile remark that the INC was started by sympathetic Brits,an assertion for which you neither demand nor seek proof).
Surely we need no proof of this other than the existence and creation of Pakistan. If you read the news reports in western newspapers during the fifties,a common theme was the breakup of India,the only question being when (and not if).It was common to refer to India as the land of thousands of languages and flatly denying there was anything in common between the people of various parts of India.This was of course a holdover from colonal times.In my essay on the Indian identity I write
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In denying such an identity for the people of the subcontinent, the British wished to take credit for the formation of the modern political nation state called India and perhaps more to the point, to deny an independent civilizational status to the Indics. It would become very inconvenient to explain to the British public that given the antiquity of the cultural and civilizational status of the Indics, there was any need for the British to exert the role of Colonial overlord in the continent much less a role where they assumed absolute suzerainty over the people of the subcontinent. It was far easier to keep up the façade that Britain had a civilizing role in the subcontinent, if the presumption was made that there was no civilization to speak of prior to their arrival. Hence the constant attempt to deny any kind of civilizational status and to say whatever there was in existence on their arrival was in large part due to the advent of the Mughals and prior conquests and invasions. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->.The typical European view is summarized very well in the following quotes (again from my essay on the Indian identity)
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->An English authority, Sir John Strachey, had this to say about India: ...... this is the first and most essential thing to learn about India -that there is not and never was an India or even any country of India, possessing according to European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political . His was not an isolated opinion. Reginald Craddock, Home Minister of the Government of India under Hardinge and Chelmsford, in The dilemma in India (1929) denied the existence of an Indian nation: An Indian Nation, if such be possible, has to be created before it can exist. It never existed in the past, and it does not exist now. Do we flatter ourselves that we created it? If so, it is sheer flattery. There is no word for 'Indian' in any vernacular tongue; there is not even any word for 'India'. Nor is there any reason why there should be an Indian Nation. The bond or union among the races to be found there is that they have for the last century and a half been governed in common by a Foreign Power. P. C. Bobb sums up Craddock's views nicely: By this account 'Indian' was the same kind of misnomer, applied by the English, as the term 'European' when applied to the English (as it was in India). According to Craddock, India was merely, like Europe, a subcontinent within the vast single continent of Europe and Asia, whose peoples had "roamed over the whole" in prehistoric times. Down the centuries nationalities had become localized, until Europe and India, for example, each contained well over twenty separate countries, divided by race and language. India looked like one country only if seen from the outside, from ignorance or distance. India's cultural diversity, and lack of political unity has often invited its comparison with Europe.
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Nurtured as they were on views such as these , is it any wonder that the average Englishman , who had an opinion of this subject wanted India to break up or at the very least expected her to break up.
I remain astonished that any Indian would ask for proof of the above proposition.
You ask for motives . This enters into the realm of speculation, but that is merely because we have an 'embarassment de choix' as the french put it elegantly. We will tackle the question of motives in greater detail later, but again i will quote myself from chapter 2 of the book)
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Why do such disparate groups as the foreign policy establishment (by no means monolithic) of the US and the leftists of India desire the demise of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious Indian Republic with such fervor and single minded purpose? The answer to this question is multifaceted and one can only speculate, listing the obvious reasons. We have already alluded to some of these reasons. There is the commonality of the Abrahamic faith. Much of the weltanschauung of the western world is one that they share with the Islamic Ummah namely the concept of a monotheistic ideology, the aggressive proselytization of their belief systems, and the facile resort to violence, crusades and Jihad for purely religious reasons. In contrast, the Sanatana Dharma is regarded as a pagan and moribund faith bedeviled by exotic forms of idolatry and steeped in superstition or worse. Politics makes for strange bedfellows and in this instance the Indian left, under the tutelage of China, has made common cause with influential sections of the media, church, and the State Department in the US in undermining and preventing the maturation of democratic institutions in the Indian Republic. It is difficult at this point in time to gage the depth of this relationship. Writes Rajiv Malhotra, alluding to the analogy of the Stockholm Syndrome in the link mentioned earlier âHinduism is squeezed both from the American right and from the Indian and American left. The right backs the Christian fundamentalist goals of converting India and targets Hinduism as the last remaining and most resilient bastion of pagan culture in the world. The intelligentsia of the left is more complex and diverse in its reasons for the thoroughgoing bias against Hinduism and Hindus: (i) there is a holdover from an era of allegiance to pro-Communist movements; (ii) there are fifth-column opportunist double agents; (iii) there is a fundamental discomfort due to misunderstandings that Hinduism runs counter to modernity; and (iv) there are social stigmas that article's such as the Post's promulgate. The net effect of this is that many Hindus are intimidated into accepting every insult that is hurled at them, for fear of being subjected to further harassment. This may be viewed as a sort of societal Stockholm Syndrome. â
As an undercurrent to the above, it might be remarked as a corollary that there is general agreement that a state with an ancient and still thriving civilization is less amenable to blandishments from outside and is therefore less malleable in the hands of a superpower. Long years of dealing with the Hindu had convinced the British that he would prove to be a harder nut to crack than the pliable Ashrafs from Pakistan. Both the British and later the Americans have publicly expressed their preference for dealing with the Pakis while expressing distaste for the difficult negotiating tactics of the Hindu.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->1. It was the intent of Britain to break India before leaving<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--> Let us take the first of your points for which you demand proof (incidentally i fnd it ironic that you make the facile remark that the INC was started by sympathetic Brits,an assertion for which you neither demand nor seek proof).
Surely we need no proof of this other than the existence and creation of Pakistan. If you read the news reports in western newspapers during the fifties,a common theme was the breakup of India,the only question being when (and not if).It was common to refer to India as the land of thousands of languages and flatly denying there was anything in common between the people of various parts of India.This was of course a holdover from colonal times.In my essay on the Indian identity I write
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In denying such an identity for the people of the subcontinent, the British wished to take credit for the formation of the modern political nation state called India and perhaps more to the point, to deny an independent civilizational status to the Indics. It would become very inconvenient to explain to the British public that given the antiquity of the cultural and civilizational status of the Indics, there was any need for the British to exert the role of Colonial overlord in the continent much less a role where they assumed absolute suzerainty over the people of the subcontinent. It was far easier to keep up the façade that Britain had a civilizing role in the subcontinent, if the presumption was made that there was no civilization to speak of prior to their arrival. Hence the constant attempt to deny any kind of civilizational status and to say whatever there was in existence on their arrival was in large part due to the advent of the Mughals and prior conquests and invasions. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->.The typical European view is summarized very well in the following quotes (again from my essay on the Indian identity)
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->An English authority, Sir John Strachey, had this to say about India: ...... this is the first and most essential thing to learn about India -that there is not and never was an India or even any country of India, possessing according to European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political . His was not an isolated opinion. Reginald Craddock, Home Minister of the Government of India under Hardinge and Chelmsford, in The dilemma in India (1929) denied the existence of an Indian nation: An Indian Nation, if such be possible, has to be created before it can exist. It never existed in the past, and it does not exist now. Do we flatter ourselves that we created it? If so, it is sheer flattery. There is no word for 'Indian' in any vernacular tongue; there is not even any word for 'India'. Nor is there any reason why there should be an Indian Nation. The bond or union among the races to be found there is that they have for the last century and a half been governed in common by a Foreign Power. P. C. Bobb sums up Craddock's views nicely: By this account 'Indian' was the same kind of misnomer, applied by the English, as the term 'European' when applied to the English (as it was in India). According to Craddock, India was merely, like Europe, a subcontinent within the vast single continent of Europe and Asia, whose peoples had "roamed over the whole" in prehistoric times. Down the centuries nationalities had become localized, until Europe and India, for example, each contained well over twenty separate countries, divided by race and language. India looked like one country only if seen from the outside, from ignorance or distance. India's cultural diversity, and lack of political unity has often invited its comparison with Europe.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Nurtured as they were on views such as these , is it any wonder that the average Englishman , who had an opinion of this subject wanted India to break up or at the very least expected her to break up.
I remain astonished that any Indian would ask for proof of the above proposition.
You ask for motives . This enters into the realm of speculation, but that is merely because we have an 'embarassment de choix' as the french put it elegantly. We will tackle the question of motives in greater detail later, but again i will quote myself from chapter 2 of the book)
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Why do such disparate groups as the foreign policy establishment (by no means monolithic) of the US and the leftists of India desire the demise of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious Indian Republic with such fervor and single minded purpose? The answer to this question is multifaceted and one can only speculate, listing the obvious reasons. We have already alluded to some of these reasons. There is the commonality of the Abrahamic faith. Much of the weltanschauung of the western world is one that they share with the Islamic Ummah namely the concept of a monotheistic ideology, the aggressive proselytization of their belief systems, and the facile resort to violence, crusades and Jihad for purely religious reasons. In contrast, the Sanatana Dharma is regarded as a pagan and moribund faith bedeviled by exotic forms of idolatry and steeped in superstition or worse. Politics makes for strange bedfellows and in this instance the Indian left, under the tutelage of China, has made common cause with influential sections of the media, church, and the State Department in the US in undermining and preventing the maturation of democratic institutions in the Indian Republic. It is difficult at this point in time to gage the depth of this relationship. Writes Rajiv Malhotra, alluding to the analogy of the Stockholm Syndrome in the link mentioned earlier âHinduism is squeezed both from the American right and from the Indian and American left. The right backs the Christian fundamentalist goals of converting India and targets Hinduism as the last remaining and most resilient bastion of pagan culture in the world. The intelligentsia of the left is more complex and diverse in its reasons for the thoroughgoing bias against Hinduism and Hindus: (i) there is a holdover from an era of allegiance to pro-Communist movements; (ii) there are fifth-column opportunist double agents; (iii) there is a fundamental discomfort due to misunderstandings that Hinduism runs counter to modernity; and (iv) there are social stigmas that article's such as the Post's promulgate. The net effect of this is that many Hindus are intimidated into accepting every insult that is hurled at them, for fear of being subjected to further harassment. This may be viewed as a sort of societal Stockholm Syndrome. â
As an undercurrent to the above, it might be remarked as a corollary that there is general agreement that a state with an ancient and still thriving civilization is less amenable to blandishments from outside and is therefore less malleable in the hands of a superpower. Long years of dealing with the Hindu had convinced the British that he would prove to be a harder nut to crack than the pliable Ashrafs from Pakistan. Both the British and later the Americans have publicly expressed their preference for dealing with the Pakis while expressing distaste for the difficult negotiating tactics of the Hindu.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->