04-23-2009, 04:12 AM
Mental slaves
Although Indian intellectuals take pride in fierce independence, some have from time to time allowed themselves to be mentally enslaved by foreign hegemons. âMacaulayâs childrenâ, like Janakinath Bose and Satyendranath Tagore, emerged from British-educated institutions in the late 19th century to buttress Western colonial rule. Without such articulate but pliant native collaborators, says historian Niall Ferguson, âBritish rule in India simply would not have worked.â
Thankfully, Indiaâs fertile soil also produced their foils. Seers like Aurobindo Ghosh, who wrote the stirring New Lamps for Old in 1893, named British imperialism for what it was ~ oppressive alien rule. Even as the intellectual space was being smothered by the colonial educational apparatus and its assembly line of privileged ânativesâ, the counter-narrative of nationalism could not be eradicated.
Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a new strand of sycophancy emerged in India as a satellite of the Soviet Russian state. Not all Indian communists condoned the excesses of Stalinâs Russia though. Mahendra Nath Roy decided as early as 1929 that he could no longer defend a totalitarian state in which âpurgeâ and âGulagâ substituted for governance. Ideologically rigid Indian Marxists, however, accused Roy of deviation from the âMoscow lineâ.
Well until the collapse of the USSR, India had a gaggle of intellectuals that unquestioningly toed the dictates of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They argued against objective factual reality that the Soviet invasions of Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1979) were beneficial to the victims for allegedly freeing them from Western imperialism.
Quick to condemn the atrocities of the USA in countries like Vietnam and the Congo, dogmatic Indian Marxists got tied up in moral knots when Moscow committed crimes against humanity.
In the 1960s, mirroring the Sino-Soviet split, a breakaway faction of Indian Marxists shifted allegiance to the âBeijing lineâ. Disguised as âinternationalistsâ, they threw their lot behind Maoâs violent totalitarianism and supported Chinaâs war against India in 1962. The choice was not difficult for this lot since their homeland was a âcapitalist stateâ, while the dreamland to the north of the Himalayas was a âsocialist stateâ.
Procrustean loyalty to China robbed Indian fellow travellers the freedom to analyse international questions with an open mind. As Maoâs military machine rolled into Tibet and committed nothing short of cultural genocide in the 1950s and 1960s, pro-Beijing Indians parroted official Chinese propaganda that the land of the lamas was being emancipated from âserfdomâ.
Teleological Marxist visions of linear stage-by-stage ascent from one mode of production to the next was so ingrained in the minds of pro-China Indians that they could justify the destruction of Tibetâs age-old autonomy and non-materialistic civilisation as necessary for âprogressâ.
By regurgitating the occupying powerâs doctored history of Tibet, Indiaâs Maoist mavens revealed the hollowness of their anti-imperialism. Unspeakable horrors perpetrated on Tibetans in the name of modernisation were repackaged and presented by Chinaâs Indian friends as âliberationâ.
The saving grace was that covering up Chinaâs crimes in Tibet was a minority position in Indiaâs intellectual spectrum. Even socialist leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru could see through the smokescreen and felt deep sympathy for Tibetans under Chinese yoke. New Delhiâs decision to offer asylum to the Dalai Lama and hundreds of thousands of his persecuted people was an affirmation of Indian independence.
But China-worshipping Indian ideologues kept hammering away in their mouthpieces that the Dalai Lama was an agent of Western imperialism and that his Central Tibetan Administration based in India was a travesty.
World public opinion has been firmly behind Tibetan non-violence and spirituality as alternatives to consumerism and violence. But Indiaâs Maoist intelligentsia harped on about pre-1949 Tibetan âserfdomâ.
Mass murder and demographic re-engineering, radioactive nuclear testing, super-exploitation of minerals and other acts of impunity by the Chinese state in Tibet never tugged at the heartstrings of these zealots who only saw the bright side of communism. Hitler was visible to them but not Pol Pot.
Some contemporary Indian media luminaries are continuing this tradition by visiting Tibet at the official invitation of Beijing to act as eyewitness to the alleged benefits that Tibetans had received from being forcibly incorporated into China. Like âembedded journalistsâ who went along with the occupying US army into Iraq after 2003, these figures are being shown the sanitised version of Tibetâs âliberationâ.
Glowing tributes to Chinaâs crushing of the Tibetan spirit emanate from their pens, reiterating the old Indian Maoist shibboleths of how Tibetans were saved from âfeudal slaveryâ by Maoâs marauders.
Happily reliant on the pre-arranged itineraries of their hosts in Beijing, Indiaâs China admirers cannot admit the simple truth that more than 300,000 PLA troops had invaded the bodies and homes of ordinary Tibetans and terrorised them.
When the vast majority of Tibetans living under Chinese colonialism decided to boycott Losar, the Tibetan New Year, to mourn the killing of hundreds of protesters by the PLA last year, some blinkered Indians announced to the delight of their Chinese hosts that they found Tibetans in a festive mood filled with excitement.
In recent tributes to the Chinese stateâs celebration of âSerf Emancipation Dayâ (the day the PLA occupied Tibet and dissolved the Dalai Lamaâs government in 1959), Indiaâs pro-China lobby not only dished out the formulaic servile praise for Beijing but also critiqued âpseudo-scientificâ history of the âso-called Tibetan government-in-exile.â It cited unabashedly from âdocuments in the possession of the Chinese governmentâ as if they were paragons of objectivity.
Some of these lobbyists are using their bully pulpits to influence Indian readers in the English language just as the PLA âre-educatesâ recalcitrant Tibetans after rounding them up for dissent.
The current-day manifestation of meek dependency in sections of the Indian literati is not limited to moral bankruptcy on the question of Tibet. Some among them are embellishing authoritarian credentials by staunchly promoting the militaristic government of Sri Lanka, which is prosecuting a vicious war in contravention of humanitarian and human rights laws.
By advertising personal friendships with âethnocraticâ rulers of the Sri Lankan state who epitomise Sinhalese chauvinism and by reducing the war in Sri Lanka to their distaste for the terrorism of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, these Indian opinion makers are reifying the genuflecting tendency which has a long history.
Likewise, there is a constituency of elites in India which defends the egregious policy of Indian cooperation with the military junta in Myanmar on the grounds that this serves âpragmaticâ national interest.
Paradoxically, despite living in a free and democratic environment in which they can express their views publicly, these Indians have no appreciation of the freedom that human beings around the world are struggling to obtain from repressive political structures. They define the parameters of âfreedomâ selectively in order to further personal prejudices or to act as public relations fronts of foreign interest groups.
The challenge before Indiaâs intellectuals is to rise above the partisanship of pseudo-progressives and to determine an independent line on every major international question, be it Tibet, Sri Lanka or Myanmar. Should they fail to do so, India would be left burnishing âold lampsâ of untruth and groping in the dark for a distinct place in world affairs.
(The writer is a researcher on international affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs in Syracuse, New York)
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?...ess=1&id=251919
Although Indian intellectuals take pride in fierce independence, some have from time to time allowed themselves to be mentally enslaved by foreign hegemons. âMacaulayâs childrenâ, like Janakinath Bose and Satyendranath Tagore, emerged from British-educated institutions in the late 19th century to buttress Western colonial rule. Without such articulate but pliant native collaborators, says historian Niall Ferguson, âBritish rule in India simply would not have worked.â
Thankfully, Indiaâs fertile soil also produced their foils. Seers like Aurobindo Ghosh, who wrote the stirring New Lamps for Old in 1893, named British imperialism for what it was ~ oppressive alien rule. Even as the intellectual space was being smothered by the colonial educational apparatus and its assembly line of privileged ânativesâ, the counter-narrative of nationalism could not be eradicated.
Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a new strand of sycophancy emerged in India as a satellite of the Soviet Russian state. Not all Indian communists condoned the excesses of Stalinâs Russia though. Mahendra Nath Roy decided as early as 1929 that he could no longer defend a totalitarian state in which âpurgeâ and âGulagâ substituted for governance. Ideologically rigid Indian Marxists, however, accused Roy of deviation from the âMoscow lineâ.
Well until the collapse of the USSR, India had a gaggle of intellectuals that unquestioningly toed the dictates of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They argued against objective factual reality that the Soviet invasions of Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1979) were beneficial to the victims for allegedly freeing them from Western imperialism.
Quick to condemn the atrocities of the USA in countries like Vietnam and the Congo, dogmatic Indian Marxists got tied up in moral knots when Moscow committed crimes against humanity.
In the 1960s, mirroring the Sino-Soviet split, a breakaway faction of Indian Marxists shifted allegiance to the âBeijing lineâ. Disguised as âinternationalistsâ, they threw their lot behind Maoâs violent totalitarianism and supported Chinaâs war against India in 1962. The choice was not difficult for this lot since their homeland was a âcapitalist stateâ, while the dreamland to the north of the Himalayas was a âsocialist stateâ.
Procrustean loyalty to China robbed Indian fellow travellers the freedom to analyse international questions with an open mind. As Maoâs military machine rolled into Tibet and committed nothing short of cultural genocide in the 1950s and 1960s, pro-Beijing Indians parroted official Chinese propaganda that the land of the lamas was being emancipated from âserfdomâ.
Teleological Marxist visions of linear stage-by-stage ascent from one mode of production to the next was so ingrained in the minds of pro-China Indians that they could justify the destruction of Tibetâs age-old autonomy and non-materialistic civilisation as necessary for âprogressâ.
By regurgitating the occupying powerâs doctored history of Tibet, Indiaâs Maoist mavens revealed the hollowness of their anti-imperialism. Unspeakable horrors perpetrated on Tibetans in the name of modernisation were repackaged and presented by Chinaâs Indian friends as âliberationâ.
The saving grace was that covering up Chinaâs crimes in Tibet was a minority position in Indiaâs intellectual spectrum. Even socialist leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru could see through the smokescreen and felt deep sympathy for Tibetans under Chinese yoke. New Delhiâs decision to offer asylum to the Dalai Lama and hundreds of thousands of his persecuted people was an affirmation of Indian independence.
But China-worshipping Indian ideologues kept hammering away in their mouthpieces that the Dalai Lama was an agent of Western imperialism and that his Central Tibetan Administration based in India was a travesty.
World public opinion has been firmly behind Tibetan non-violence and spirituality as alternatives to consumerism and violence. But Indiaâs Maoist intelligentsia harped on about pre-1949 Tibetan âserfdomâ.
Mass murder and demographic re-engineering, radioactive nuclear testing, super-exploitation of minerals and other acts of impunity by the Chinese state in Tibet never tugged at the heartstrings of these zealots who only saw the bright side of communism. Hitler was visible to them but not Pol Pot.
Some contemporary Indian media luminaries are continuing this tradition by visiting Tibet at the official invitation of Beijing to act as eyewitness to the alleged benefits that Tibetans had received from being forcibly incorporated into China. Like âembedded journalistsâ who went along with the occupying US army into Iraq after 2003, these figures are being shown the sanitised version of Tibetâs âliberationâ.
Glowing tributes to Chinaâs crushing of the Tibetan spirit emanate from their pens, reiterating the old Indian Maoist shibboleths of how Tibetans were saved from âfeudal slaveryâ by Maoâs marauders.
Happily reliant on the pre-arranged itineraries of their hosts in Beijing, Indiaâs China admirers cannot admit the simple truth that more than 300,000 PLA troops had invaded the bodies and homes of ordinary Tibetans and terrorised them.
When the vast majority of Tibetans living under Chinese colonialism decided to boycott Losar, the Tibetan New Year, to mourn the killing of hundreds of protesters by the PLA last year, some blinkered Indians announced to the delight of their Chinese hosts that they found Tibetans in a festive mood filled with excitement.
In recent tributes to the Chinese stateâs celebration of âSerf Emancipation Dayâ (the day the PLA occupied Tibet and dissolved the Dalai Lamaâs government in 1959), Indiaâs pro-China lobby not only dished out the formulaic servile praise for Beijing but also critiqued âpseudo-scientificâ history of the âso-called Tibetan government-in-exile.â It cited unabashedly from âdocuments in the possession of the Chinese governmentâ as if they were paragons of objectivity.
Some of these lobbyists are using their bully pulpits to influence Indian readers in the English language just as the PLA âre-educatesâ recalcitrant Tibetans after rounding them up for dissent.
The current-day manifestation of meek dependency in sections of the Indian literati is not limited to moral bankruptcy on the question of Tibet. Some among them are embellishing authoritarian credentials by staunchly promoting the militaristic government of Sri Lanka, which is prosecuting a vicious war in contravention of humanitarian and human rights laws.
By advertising personal friendships with âethnocraticâ rulers of the Sri Lankan state who epitomise Sinhalese chauvinism and by reducing the war in Sri Lanka to their distaste for the terrorism of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, these Indian opinion makers are reifying the genuflecting tendency which has a long history.
Likewise, there is a constituency of elites in India which defends the egregious policy of Indian cooperation with the military junta in Myanmar on the grounds that this serves âpragmaticâ national interest.
Paradoxically, despite living in a free and democratic environment in which they can express their views publicly, these Indians have no appreciation of the freedom that human beings around the world are struggling to obtain from repressive political structures. They define the parameters of âfreedomâ selectively in order to further personal prejudices or to act as public relations fronts of foreign interest groups.
The challenge before Indiaâs intellectuals is to rise above the partisanship of pseudo-progressives and to determine an independent line on every major international question, be it Tibet, Sri Lanka or Myanmar. Should they fail to do so, India would be left burnishing âold lampsâ of untruth and groping in the dark for a distinct place in world affairs.
(The writer is a researcher on international affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs in Syracuse, New York)
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?...ess=1&id=251919