[Assam] Book review : India After Gandhi- Sikh Holocaust

Thu Sep 27 04:19:58 CDT 2007

The Hindus who got killed got justice - Sikh Police chief KPS Gill got them (Sikh militants)  killed. 

What about 1984 Anti-Sikh riot victims - not a single person convicted though hundreds of Sikhs died - do you thinks Sikhs all over the world are total fools - just make a Sikh Indian PM and justice is supposed to be done to all Sikhs who were killed. Even school children (my former student) in sixth grade in DC  remembers how his mother's uncle was burned by buring a tire around his neck...

Umesh

SANDIP DUTTA <pseude at yahoo.com> wrote: They care a lot and regret it too. But what about the thousands of Hindus killed in Punjab by Bhindarwale's followers? Did their families get any justice as well?

 Lets not open old wounds just for the sake of a discussion. Most Sikhs in india have forgiven those ugly episodes and so have hindus.

 Rgds,
 Sandip

 ----- Original Message ----
From: umesh sharma <jaipurschool at yahoo.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 1:43:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Assam] Book review : India After Gandhi- Sikh Holocaust

I wonderif anyone in mainstream India cares for the Sikh holocaust . In the West it still raises hackles -as I saw at Vancouver, Canada last Sep (2006) and a year before on Jul 18th, 2005 outside White House where local Sikhs gathered outside protesting treatment of Sikhs while Indian PM ManMohan Singh met US Prez inside. I was walking down the road  from a meet with someone at World bank nearby.
http://www.mail-archive.com/assam@pikespeak.uccs.edu/msg14732.html

When Indians like to celebrate Bhangra dances abroad and in  India they should remember the injustices and take action. By pushing dirt under the carpet does not make it go away. Harvard supported project Facing History , Facing Ourselves says that.

Umesh

Umesh

umesh sharma <jaipurschool at yahoo.com> wrote: I was watching the Sikh Holocaust video again and am struck by the fact that Bhindrawale resembles Osama Bin Laden so much -same flowing beard and same sharp features with a smilar turban ---ofcourse Osama came on the scene much after Bhindrawale was dead. I do not know much about Bhindrawale nor regret that he is dead but it was wrong of Indira Gandhi to have attacke Golden Temple. They cold have laid a siege outside and let him starve to death else come out.

Osama seems to have sen these videos beforehand -having lived in the west for long and learned the use of mass media to fool Western audiences. Ofcourse, unlike Anti-Sikh riots in Delhi etc in 1984 nothing similar has happened against muslims  in the West.

Umesh 

umesh sharma <jaipurschool at yahoo.com> wrote: Rajen-da,

The dictatorship is too much of a term - it depends where you are in India - those in metros definitely are having full democracy and as you go into interiors where law and literacy are remote it becomes dictatorhip by the elected.

See the video of Indira's India of 1984 - Sikh Holocaust http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MasMHq7oUs&NR=1

Umesh

Rajen & Ajanta Barua <barua25 at hotmail.com> wrote:  Umesh:
 India is best described as 'an elected dictatorship'.
 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]