BOOK
REVIEW India: Becoming poignant, pertinent,
pragmatic The End of
India by Khushwant Singh
Reviewed
by Piyush Mathur
"The young are given to
analysis ... The elderly tell stories." - Ashis Nandy
from Time Warps (2002).
When a
nationally respected octogenarian bursts out publicly in
agony and rage at the state of his nation, it is more
than just "a scene" - particularly when that
octogenarian is, at the same time, reputed for his zest,
wit, forthrightness, raunchy humor, journalistic
objectivity, erudition, monetary riches, diplomatic
savoir-faire and standing in both majority and minority
communities. When such is the case, then his scream can
be ignored only at the severe peril of the entire
nation.
Dedicated to "all those who love India",
The End of India - a groaning response by
Khushwant Singh, born in 1915, to religion-inspired
political coercion and civic lawlessness in that nation
- cannot be ignored.
However, insofar as this
163-page pocketbook defies strict, generic definition,
as much as the mainstream political rhetoric of
contemporary India, it recuses itself from conventional
parameters of review - thus asking for a patient,
discerning read.
Just to give a much-needed hint
of where one stands with respect to our octogenarian
author, Singh, 89, is 32 years older than the
nation-states of India and Pakistan, and 56 years older
than Bangladesh.
For the past several
generations of South Asians he has been a rather
reliable, tasteful and humane emissary from the bygone
era of British colonialism and subcontinental unity. He
also is one of those few vibrant, old minds that can
write authoritatively about the pedigrees of the rich
and/or the powerful and tell personal anecdotes from the
early years of India's independence from British rule
and its partition from Pakistan.
Having been
born and partially educated in an area that has since
become part of Pakistan, Singh is as much of an insider
for the Pakistanis as he is for the Indians; and having
lived on the cusp of ethnic and religious territories as
an agnostic member of the Sikh minority community within
India, he has also typically enjoyed a broad and
appreciative audience.
The playful personality
of the man has exerted itself in all his projects,
including television appearances, media interviews,
high-profile journalistic and political interventions,
and writings. Singh has also connected exceedingly well
to South Asia's youth through his advice and other
syndicated columns in major Indian newspapers and
websites, through borderline-pornographic fiction and
his artful gossip about the high and mighty of the
subcontinent and the rest of the world. In fact, I feel
obligated to credit Singh with pioneering gossip
as a proper literary and journalistic genre within the
world of English: Singhian Gossip is an original
cocktail of rambunctious tittle-tattles about the
author's experiences with diplomats, politicians,
powerful bureaucrats, celebrities and other elite - even
those belonging to the hoary days of yore and long dead.
It is out of that colorful ethos that The End
of India pops as a shock of sorts to Singh's typical
admirer. My survey of previous reviews of the book shows
that Singh has also managed to unsettle the Hindu right
about as much as India's free-market enthusiasts,
straitjacket academics and even Hindu liberals. In a
nutshell, Singh has refused to share the so-called "feel
good" factor that the Indian ruling elite, urban
bourgeoisie and mainstream media have purportedly
internalized and promoted to the rest of the nation and
the world in the wake of the nation's (saffronized)
economic liberalization. The standard academic, on the
other hand, seems to have been offended by Singh's
undisciplined writing, which not only lacks footnotes,
but also is accursed with public relevance.
What
exactly does the book offer? On the face of it, The
End of India provides a fearless, sometimes vulgar,
admission and realistic portrayal of the cumulative
growth of Hindu extremism in India, especially through
the past two decades. I call it an "admission" - before
anything else - insofar as Singh does not write like
some highbrow, accusatory outsider to the Indian
cauldron; he views himself as much a victim as a default
social accessory to the declining communal situation in
India.
"India is going to the dogs," he screams,
adding, "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"
(pp 3-4).
The immediate cause for Singh's
despondence is the Gujarat riots of 2002 and the
politics that followed them. In the riots, Hindus
mutilated and sexually tortured a great many Muslims in
addition to massacring more than 3,000 of them, often
with the support of the state. The riots themselves were
in retaliation against the torching of a train allegedly
performed by some Muslim miscreants at the railway
station in Godhra. The fire killed scores of politically
mobilized Hindus that were going by the train to the
controversial religious site of Ayodhya.
"The
carnage in Gujarat ... and the subsequent landslide
victory of Narendra Modi in the elections will spell
doom for our country," Singh warns (p 3). Throughout the
rest of the book, however, he goes well beyond auditing
the forces of Hindutva to give us a sketch of the
evolution of the religious question through the regional
history of the state of Punjab, the subcontinental
Independence Movement, and the history of post-colonial
India.
No religious community or political
constituency is spared criticism in Singh's account. His
objectivity, however, is not merely a matter of being
even-handed (as the dictum is in much of contemporary
journalism), but of being truthful, honest and
self-critical. As such, he attacks hypocrisy and
political opportunism, both as a genuine nationalist and
a liberal cosmopolitan, and admits to his own past
errors and fallibilities.
One such notable error
includes his endorsement of L K Advani - the hawkish
leader of the Hindu right and deputy prime minister of
India - for the New Delhi parliamentary seat in 1989 (p
20). Singh blames that error on his disillusionment with
the Congress party that, under the leadership of Rajiv
Gandhi, had done little to bring justice to those guilty
of the fatal torching in 1984 of more than 3,000 Sikhs
in Delhi, and the murder of many others in other parts
of India. (Many of the guilty were regular members, and
even leaders, of the Congress party.)
Elsewhere,
Singh attacks V D Savarkar for "propounding the
two-nation theory, referring to the Hindus and Muslims
as separate nations" (p 46); the Congress party,
especially under the leadership of Indira Gandhi, for
disallowing Muslims "to flourish" and for fanning the
Sikh militancy of the 1980s until it got completely out
of hand (p 113); and, of course, the Sangh Parivar for
making communal stress the order of the day by enforcing
Hindutva in all aspects of Indian public life.
Most notably perhaps, Singh, the grandfather of
English-language Indian journalism, takes a swipe at the
falsely glorified, self-righteous and chauvinistic
journalist Arun Shourie (who has been disinvestment
minister with the National Democratic Alliance dominated
by the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP). The octogenarian
accuses Shourie, as well as Praful Goradia, another
powerful journalist and author, of giving us "selective
information and plain lies" for the sake of their own
political gains (p 121).
Perhaps the only
prominent figure that comes out unscathed in Singh's
account is Jawharlal Nehru, whom Singh credits, on one
hand, for taking "the wind out of the communists' sail
by making India a socialist country" and, on the other,
for providing a secular foundation for Indian polity (p
6). Even as Singh concedes the virtue of genuine
spirituality, as practiced and advocated by Mahatma
Gandhi, he deems it impossible to retrieve it in
contemporary India. "Time has shown that as far as
secularism is concerned, Nehru was right; Gandhi and
[Abul Kalam] Azad were wrong," he concludes (p 137).
In arguing for secularism, Singh attacks
theocratic polity, but he also rallies against
simplistic or inaccurate positions taken by sections of
liberals and other secularists. For example, he asserts
that it is "wrong and counter-productive to pretend that
communalism is something the Sangh Parivar invented in
India". Instead, the "Sangh's genius was in creating a
monster out of existing prejudices" (p 80).
Furthermore, Singh also attempts to remove
popular misconceptions about religions and religious
conflicts within India and elsewhere and reports highly
relevant facts that have been barely publicized within
the Indian information sphere. The latter include the
number of innocent Sikhs - more than 5,000 men and women
- killed in the crossfire between Sant Jarnail Singh
Bhindarawale's men, members of the radical Sikh
organization Damdami taksal, and the Indian army inside
the Golden Temple during Operation Blue Star in 1984,
and the 10:1 proportion of Muslim loss of life and
property to its Hindu counterparts through most Indian
communal conflicts.
With appreciable success,
The End of India also shows the reader the
hollowness of some prominent arguments and concepts that
New Age spiritualists, transcendentalists and theocrats
have proffered in their favor within the region. Through
all that, Singh attempts to persuade the Indian reader
by invoking patriotism, nationalism, materialism,
utility, rationality, commonsense and non-violence.
"Ask yourself," Singh urges at one place, "if a
developing nation like India can afford to expend so
much time in pursuits that produce no material benefits?
Also ask yourself, does strict adherence to the routine
of prayer or telling beads of the rosary make someone a
better person? Is it not true that even dacoits pray for
the success of their mission before they set out on it,
and that the worst black marketers and tax evaders are
often very devout?" (pp 156-157).
Observing that
religion retains within it enough irrationality to lend
itself to political abuse, Singh nevertheless goes on to
argue that it be restricted to the personal domain
through strict administrative means. In calling "for
summary trials of mischief-makers" and their "public
flogging", Singh seems to fall victim to his frustration
at the situation within India, but also to the local
idiom of speech (which should not be read too literally)
(pp 134-135). However, while Singh's expressed
preference for a heavy-handed secular state may be
excused for now, perhaps less supportable is his
conviction in modernity as the force against theocratic
irrationalism.
So, for example, Singh's idea
that Germany "succumbed to the most irrational sort of
prejudice" despite being highly literate, and that India
is contrarily more vulnerable to prejudice because of
its low literacy rates, holds little ground (p 54).
There is enough evidence to suggest that literate
education could be used as a vast apparatus for the
propagation of statist dogma and world views, and that,
as such, modernity may well be equally, if not more,
vulnerable to systematic prejudice. In fact, the rise in
the rate of literacy in India has been coterminous with
the rise in Hindu extremism and the deterioration of the
communal situation.
In line with the above, and
as Singh himself concedes elsewhere in the book, "The
instigation [of Hindu religious violence] usually comes
from the educated middle class of tradesmen
(incidentally, the constituency of the BJP) and
politicians (except perhaps the communists); their
instruments are lumpen elements and the
educated-unemployed and ... the dispossessed who can be
swayed by a dangerous cocktail of passionate rhetoric,
attractive lies, and plain hard cash" (pp 91-92).
Fortunately, Singh realizes at some level that
the tough secular state may not be the answer - and that
it's certainly not the only answer. Hence, he ends up
proposing a new religion for modern India, but does it
in a way that stops short of contradicting his genuine
dismissal of theocratic religion. Declaring that "good
life is the only religion" (p 163), he in fact brings to
a full circle his prior assertion that in his religion
"God has no place" (p 149).
Notably, Singh's
religion is customized for India and is based on
environmental conservation, non-violence and a strong
"work ethic". Insofar as Singh himself is a famously
jovial workaholic, it should come as little surprise
that his religion provides "leisure time to recoup one's
energy to resume work", but discourages "uncreative
pastimes" (p 160). In accordance, Singh declares: "Work
is worship, but worship is not work," and he offers it
as "the motto for modern India" (p 161).
To that
one my response may sound altogether too cliched: Amen!
The End of India by Khushwant Singh.
Penguin Books: New Delhi, 2003. Price US$17.95 (Rs200),
163 pages.
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Mar 13, 2004
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"The young are given to
analysis ... The elderly tell stories." - Ashis Nandy
from Time Warps (2002). 
