[Assam] Book review : India After Gandhi- Bengal democracy

Wed Sep 26 23:07:37 CDT 2007

>I myself know an IRS officer now posted in Coorg district of Karnataka. He is from UP and from a very lower middle class background. However >after 15 years in the services, his english is as good as anyone else's and he has good working knowledge of Kannada.

If the guy knows good English, it actually proves my original point that in India in ancient when one had to learn Sanskrit to be in the elite class, now one has to be good in English to be in the elite class.

Barua

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: SANDIP DUTTA 
  To: A Mailing list for people interested in Assam from around the world 
  Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 10:45 PM
  Subject: Re: [Assam] Book review : India After Gandhi- Bengal democracy

  Rather than coming to conclusions about whether this attributes to dictatorship - why not involve someone from that state in this discussion to see if he concurs with this view.

  Ditto for IAS/IPS officers coming from vernacular mediums. Contrary to belief, such officers actually have very good (if not excellent) knowledge of English and at times local languages wherever they are posted.

  I myself know an IRS officer now posted in Coorg district of Karnataka. He is from UP and from a very lower middle class background. However after 15 years in the services, his english is as good as anyone else's and he has good working knowledge of Kannada.

  No wonder we see most of the demands for sovereignity and seperation from foreign settled people who have got disconnected with the way this country works (and still works).

  Rgds,

  Sandip

  ----- Original Message ----
  From: barua25 <barua25 at hotmail.com>
  To: umesh.sh05 at post.harvard.edu; A Mailing list for people interested in Assam from around the world <assam at assamnet.org>
  Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2007 8:00:10 AM
  Subject: Re: [Assam] Book review : India After Gandhi- Bengal democracy

  >a  nexus  prevents  anyone  from voting against the "party"  or  else face ex-communication a-la erstwhile Pope's rule in Europe in medieval times ->as per a Bengali researcher .

  This is in fact what is called 'elected dictatorship' going on in West bengal in name of democracy.
  Rajenda

    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: umesh sharma 
    To: A Mailing list for people interested in Assam from around the world 
    Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 11:52 PM
    Subject: Re: [Assam] Book review : India After Gandhi- Bengal democracy

    Rajen-da

    Good example of India-Shining rhetoric. 
    But just becos there is peace (despite armed militancy in 25% of India's districts- NE, Kashmir, Bihar, Central India, LTTE South India etc etc) and not many are dying of starvation and voting not by reading election manifestos but by recognizing cartoons (election symbols) of political parties . 

    Even democratically elected communist govt (an anamoly) of West Bengal is allegedly  in power for past 25 years non-stop since  a  nexus  prevents  anyone  from voting against the "party"  or  else face ex-communication a-la erstwhile Pope's rule in Europe in medieval times -as per a Bengali researcher .

    But ofcourse noone can deny that despite is shortcomings the India that is Bharat is growing  - despite spoofs like Hollywood's "Borat" movie (Bharat ??) from Kazakhstan (Rajasthan???)

    Umesh

    Rajen & Ajanta Barua <barua25 at hotmail.com> wrote: 
      Following may be added from another review about the book:

      India is the country that was never expected to ever be a country. In the late 19th century, Sir John Strachey, a senior British official, grandly opined that the territory's diverse states simply could not possess any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious. Strachey, clearly, was wrong: India today is a unified entity and a rising global power. Even so, it continues to defy explanation. India's existence, says Guha, an internationally known scholar (Environmentalism: A Global History), has also been an anomaly for academic political science, according to whose axioms cultural heterogeneity and poverty do not make a nation, still less a democratic one. Yet India continues to exist. Guha's aim in this startlingly ambitious political, cultural and social survey is to explain why and how. He cheerfully concludes that India's continuing existence results from its unique diversity and its refusal to be pigeonholed into such conventional political models as Anglo-American liberalism, French republicanism, atheistic communism or Islamist theocracy. India is proudly sui generis, and with August 15, 2007, being the 60th anniversary of Indian independence, Guha's magisterial history of India since that day comes not a moment too soon. 32 pages of b&w illus., 8 maps.  
        ----- Original Message ----- 
        From: Rajen & Ajanta Barua 
        To: assam at assamnet.org 
        Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 10:42 PM
        Subject: [Assam] Book review : India After Gandhi

        Good review of a grand 900 page book on India recently published:

        India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha  

        From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
        Reviewed by George Perkovich
        A toast to India on its 60th birthday: No country has more heroically pursued the promise of democracy. Against the odds of staggering poverty, conflicting religious passions, linguistic pluralism, regional separatism, caste injustice and natural resource scarcity, Indians have lifted themselves largely by their own sandal straps to become a stalwart democracy and emerging global power. India has risen with epic drama -- a nonviolent struggle for independence followed by mass mayhem and bloodletting, dynastic succession and assassination, military victory and defeat, starvation succeeded by green revolution, political leaders as saints, sinners and sexual ascetics. And yet, the Indian story rarely has been told and is practically unknown to Americans.
        India After Gandhi masterfully fills the void. India needs a wise and judicious narrator to convey its scale, diversity and chaos -- to describe the whirlwind without getting lost in it. It needs a biographer neither besotted by love nor enraged by disappointment. Ramachandra Guha, a historian who has taught at Stanford and Yale and now lives in Bangalore, has given democratic India the rich, well-paced history it deserves.
        Much will be new to American readers. Large-scale conflicts in India's northeast between tribal groups and the center have been as enduring, and in some ways as important, as the more familiar violence in Kashmir. The framing of India's constitution from 1946 through 1949 should induce awe, especially in light of Iraq's post-Saddam experience.
        In the midst of Hindu-Muslim bloodshed, a flood of 8 million refugees, starvation, and other profound conflicts, Indian representatives worked out constitutional provisions to protect minorities, keep religion out of state power, correct thousands of years of caste discrimination and redistribute power and wealth accumulated by still-regnant princely states. This was done with no external guidance or pressure. The drafting committee was chaired by an "untouchable," B.R. Ambedkar -- analogies are inexact, but imagine if James Madison at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention had been a freed slave.
        Specialists will quicken over insights from the private papers of Indira Gandhi's confidant, P.N. Haksar, who gave his papers to Guha. These documents reveal, among other things, that it was the Soviet Union that proposed the 1971 treaty of cooperation and friendship between the two countries, and that suspicion of China motivated both nations more than was appreciated at the time.
        Miniature biographies of grassroots leaders and movements also enliven Guha's storytelling. Jay Aprakash Narayan -- "JP" -- plays a leading role. A onetime friend of Nehru who became the bête noir of his daughter, Indira Gandhi, JP led a massive movement for radical governmental reform in 1974-75, which moved Indira Gandhi to declare a national emergency and suspend democracy.
        Some themes go under-explored: For example, why has the Indian Army abstained from interfering in politics, unlike the military in many other developing countries? And why has India given short shrift to primary education, even as it has developed technological institutes that rival M.I.T?
        Many chapters begin or end with India's future in doubt. "India is almost infinitely depressing," Aldous Huxley wrote in 1961, "for there seems to be no solution to its problems in any way that any of us [in the West] regard as acceptable." He predicted that "when Nehru goes, the government will become a military dictatorship." Guha records that "ever since the country was formed there have also been many Indians who have seen the survival of India as being on the line, some (the patriots) speaking or writing in fear, others (the secessionists or revolutionaries) with anticipation."
        Yet, marvelously, India's survival as a democracy seems more assured than ever. Less clear is the nature of its relationship with America. Since 2005, the U.S. and Indian governments have moved toward nuclear cooperation, reversing 30 years of U.S. policy against nuclear assistance to countries that refuse to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
        Washington clearly views India as a counterbalance to China's strategic power. But Guha records an important historical parallel.
        In 1962, China crossed disputed boundaries in the northwest and northeast of India. A shocked Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru abandoned nonalignment and pleaded for emergency U.S. military assistance. Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith wrote to President Kennedy: "The only Asian country which really stands in [China's] way is India and pari passu the only Western country that is assuming responsibility is the United States. . . . We should expect to make use of India's political position, geographical position, political power and manpower or anyhow ask."
        Four decades later, another Harvard professor-cum-American ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, championed the proposed nuclear deal with similar reasoning. As different as the presidents they served, Blackwill and Galbraith were tempted by strategic abstraction and a desire to raise "their" country -- India -- in American priorities. Yet supplying arms to India in 1962 did not make India any more deferential to U.S. foreign policy. Washington will delude itself again if it thinks that nuclear India will be a pliant instrument in its geostrategy. As long as India is a democracy, it will go its own way.
        To comprehend India's achievement, imagine if Mexico became the 51st of the United States, followed by Brazil, Argentina and the rest of Central and South America. Add Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to give this union the Sunni-Shia mix of India. The population then represented in Congress would still be smaller and less diverse linguistically, religiously, culturally and economically than India's. If such a state could democratically manage the interests and conflicts swirling within it, and not threaten its neighbors, the world should ask little else from it. If we were such a state, we would feel that our humane progress contributes so much to global well-being that smaller, richer, easier-to-manage states should not presume to tell us what to do.
        Sixty years after Gandhi, India has earned greater appreciation than we give it.
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    Umesh Sharma

    Washington D.C. 

    1-202-215-4328 [Cell]

    Ed.M. - International Education Policy
    Harvard Graduate School of Education,
    Harvard University,
    Class of 2005

    http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/index.html (Edu info)

    http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ (Management Info)

    www.gse.harvard.edu/iep (where the above 2 are used )

    http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/ 

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