Spectator's Journal: India's Nasty Currents
Aikman, David
S PECTATOR'S JOURNAL by David Airman India's Nasty Currents president Clinton no doubt meant to flatter Indians this summer when he spoke about that nation's achievement since gaining...
...By the end of the nineteenth century, Mangalwadi writes, so did a significant majority of nationalist-minded Indians...
...For most of the first two centuries of British rule—after East India Company commander Robert Clive won control of "Bengal" in 1757 ?the East India Company treated the colony as little more than a cash cow...
...By the 1830's, Mangalwadi writes, Evangelical reformers were able to use their growing influence in Parliament to demand a long-term investment in India's future by the country's British rulers...
...The Indian mutiny in 1857 slowed this movement, and even introduced a nasty element of racism among British administrators...
...The reason for all this44 The current disquiet stems directly from the serious erosion of British social and cultural values...
...But the fact that most Indians didn't whoop it up last August 15, the actual anniversary of their "midnight hour" release from British control in 1947, should tell us something...
...That, and the country's meddlesome bureaucracy, explains why the Economist didn't even bother to list India in its May list of the Top 30 investment opportunity nations...
...From first-hand observation the great historian Lord Macaulay could only describe India under Clive as "the rule of an evil genie" and the East India Company as "a gang of public robbers...
...I f Mangalwadi has a villain in India's current decline it is the concept of Hindutva, or Hindu cultural nationalism, whose political adherents, the BJP, actually won the largest number of seats of any party in the 1996 elections...
...This is not to belittle the country's genuine achievements: a functioning political democracy that has weathered eleven national elections...
...The American Spectator • October 1997 65 Not that Mangalwadi has any illusions about British wickedness...
...Gandhi eventually paid with his life for this stance when a Hindu ultranationalist assassinated him in 1948, and according to Mangalwadi, the fragile national consensus on such non-Hindu notions as freedom and justice has been breaking apart ever since...
...It would be Britain's "proudest day," he said, when India would be ready for self-government...
...His most provocative point: that India would have never been able to function as a country at all without the social and cultural values forced on it over 190 years of British rule, and that the current disquiet stems directly from the serious erosion of those values...
...More corrosive than corruption is a lurking fear that the secular democracy cobbled together by Gandhi and Nehru to keep the country unified is being replaced by a "post-modernist" state in which there is no agreement on shared political or cultural values, and a political landscape increasingly marked by assassinations, mob violence, and demands for the imposition of a Hindu cultural nationalism that doesn't hide its reliance on Nazi-like thinking...
...If I suggest a story that is pro-BJP, the editor immediately approves it...
...Indian intellectuals began to acquire the ability to look at their country objectively...
...That may be unduly pessimistic...
...One obvious source of disquiet is the country's ubiquitous corruption...
...As he putsit: "If our democracy becomes diseased, one reason is that the intellectual leadership of our liberal democracy—our press, professors and parliamentarians—lacks the intellectual framework and moral courage to provide the direction for the healing of our nation...
...But if there is no new reconstitution of the national consensus on the just society—and Mangalwadi as an Indian Christian believes it has to come through the Gospel, i.e., through policies that essentially codify a Judeo-Christian notion of freedom and the sanctity and dignity of human life ?widow-burning may become even more widespread, along with book-burnings, murders of political opponents, destruction of non-Hindu places of worship, and other mayhem...
...Mangalwadi is no ivory tower thinker...
...But he's probably never been more compelling than in his latest work, India: The Grand Experiment...
...and in Bangalore, Karnataka State, one of the most vibrant high technology centers anywhere in the world, the Silicon Valley of Asia...
...Its main theorist, M.S...
...before returning to the countryside "to try to understand poverty...
...His seven books range in subject matter from Indian gurus and New Age thinkers to Western missionaries in India...
...66 October 19 9 7 ?The American Spectator That search for "perfection" has some chilly overtones...
...We are free, we are civilized to little purpose," Lord Macaulay declared in a parliamentary debate in 1833, "if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilization...
...But it did not stop it...
...Five years later, Charles Trevelyan, Macaulay's brother-in-law and an Evangelical, said flatly that it was Britain's duty to train Indians to acquire the educational and political skills in order to acquire "happiness and independence...
...We have become a corrupt, violent people who are unable to work together as a team...
...His work in Uttar Pradesh focused on such elementary matters as helping peasants to grow vegetables locally so they would no longer have to buy them, at a price-controlled markup, from distant states...
...Well, it's fair to say that even many Indians would have a different view of the world's second-largest nation (population: 95o million...
...Hardly a Pimms-drinking Anglophile—he didn't learn English until he went to college — Mangalwadi came to his pro-British conclusions through serious economic and philosophical observation...
...for a birth certificate, $4 for a cremation...
...There was a sense of justice, of law and order during and immediately after the British rule...
...I have no illusions left," Khushwant Singh wrote in New Delhi's Sunday Review...
...Mangalwadi is appalled by not only Hindutva's finding inspiration in Nazi Germany, but its totalitarian conviction that it could create a "new man" and a perfect social order if only a new, corporate Hindu state were established...
...17 reforming zeal was all the more remarkable: to prepare Indians for eventual independence...
...In July, rioting in Bombay against lower castes resulted in eleven deaths...
...His opposition to the cast concept of "untouchability" was, as Mangalwadi asserts, "as anti-Hindu as any Christian's stance," and his nationalism, granting equal status under law to Hindu and Muslim, high-caste and low-caste, "came directly from Christian England...
...Mangalwadi also happens to be a Christian, which has angered local Brahmin notables...
...He believes that it will erode even more, and eventually perish, unless there is a renewal of belief in the philosophical —and ultimately theological ?rationale for the very principle of freedom...
...Bureaucratic bigwigs swaddle themselves in luxury from low-level bribes extorted to ensure the simple installation—millions of times over—of domestic phone lines...
...Historians are unanimous," Mangalwadi writes, "that during the first phase of its rule in Bengal, the corruption in the East India Company devastated the local economy...
...a life expectancy that since 1947 has nearly doubled from 32 to 62...
...Golwalkar, spoke openly of his admiration for Hitler, and neither the BJP nor any of the other nationalist groups has repudiated Golwalkar...
...At least a dozen former government ministers from the Congress Party currently face corruption charges, including former prime minister P.V...
...As outdated as these practices might seem, they're being justified by a resurgent Hindu nationalism...
...According to a senior reporter for a major Indian news organization, "Even the intellectuals are beginning to support the idea of Hindu nationalism...
...Soon enough these missionaries were transforming India's social and educational system...
...This brought about a new legal code, the outlawing of widow-burning (sati), a civil service recruited through competitive examination, and by the late 1850's the founding of universities across the country...
...The British parliament became home to men like William Wilberforce (later famous for abolishing the British slave trade) and Charles Grant, a reformer who demanded that the East India Company govern decently, provide education for Indians, and allow Protestant missionaries into Company-controlled areas...
...A graduate of Allahabad University in Madya Pradesh, he studied Indian gurus for his M.A...
...Though the missionaries made few conversions, they and other reformers succeeded in transforming the philosophy of government and justice among the Indian intelligentsia...
...Mangalwadi's persusal of British parliamentary and colonial documents led him to discover an awakening Evangelical conscience in early Victorian Britain...
...Has the country squandered its inheritance...
...By far the most persuasive exponent of this sober view is a remarkable Indian sociologist, historian, and political activist, Vishal Mangalwadi, 47, who has spent two decades thinking and writing about India's condition and organizing the rural poor in Uttar Pradesh State...
...He realized quickly that Nehru's grandiose state socialism was robbing the Indian countryside to finance Soviet-style industrial five-year plans...
...A senior leader of the Janata party even tried to organize public rallies in support of sati...
...Even Gandhi, for all of his Hindu peasant clothing and asceticism, derived his pacifism not from Hindu sources but from Quaker and Tolstoyan influences from his time in England...
...How did this situation ever change...
...He also quickly grasped that Nehru's ideas originated in the intellectual swampland of Fabian socialism into which virtually every Indian Anglophone progressive had sunk in the first half of the twentieth century...
...Even though the government in London was often far from truthful or just in its dealings with Indians, British civil servants recruited into the Indian Civil Service clearly believed in truth and social justice, entirely non-Hindu concepts, and did their best, year in and year out, to practice this belief...
...It's no accident that when the Indian National Congress was formed in 1885, it chose a constitutional, rather than a revolutionary, route to Indian national power...
...India has surprised doom-sayers in the past more than once...
...Meanwhile, there are about 500 registered cases of bride-burnings a year, the murder of young women whose financial offering to the groom is considered insufficient...
...in Bihar, a mob of Hindus attacked a Christian meeting and killed the Indian pastor who was leading it...
...Widow-burning has returned to thousands of Indian villages that have no police on hand...
...One of the ablest, William Carey, established at Serampore in 1818 Asia's first vernacular-language university...
...the ability to feed itself and even export grain...
...It would certainly be a tragedy if India, having benefited from the best that one European nation had to offer, were now to defend itself by relying on thinking that came out of another European nation at its lowest point ever...
...It was not the wickedness of the British heart that delayed India's independence by at least four decades," he writes in his new book, "but that of the Indian heart...
...While the BJP's growth is partly a reaction to the incompetence and galling corruption of the Congress Party and its old-line politicians, the party is also an offshoot of the militantly Hindu RSS and its long-standing calls for a totalitarian, corporate state in which "each cell feels its identity with the entire body and is ever ready to sacrifice itself for the sake of health and growth of the body...
...There is hardly anyone who would fight for democracy," Mangalwadi says, "who would die for it...
...Within a few decades, he and other missionaries fired up a native-language press throughout the country that exposed Company abuses and indeed demanded social and other changes...
...If the story is critical of the party, he says 'Let's hold off on that...
...In confusing freedom with independence, Indians "have lost the spirit of freedom...
...The state controlled the terms of trade and siphoned off wealth to finance the industrial sector," he says...
...S PECTATOR'S JOURNAL by David Airman India's Nasty Currents president Clinton no doubt meant to flatter Indians this summer when he spoke about that nation's achievement since gaining independence from Britain fifty years ago...
...Clive himself called British rule "a scene of anarchy, confusion, bribery, corruption and extortion...
...For hying to improve the condition of the "untouchables" among India's caste-ridden society, he's been jailed four times on trumped-up charges and even threatened to his face with murder by an angry local police inspector...
...an adult literacy rate that has risen to a respectable 52 percent from 4 percent...
...Outlook, an Indian periodical, came up with a "national bribe index": $14 DAVID AIKMAN is a former Time magazine foreign correspondent...
...India," he said, "has become a model for other nations and people around the globe who are still striving to build civil societies, to institutionalize democratic values of free expression and religion and to find strength in their diversity...
...In a recent interview, he pointed to the anniversary reflections of a distinguished Indian journalist who was a witness to the 1947 independence...
...Narasimha Rao...
Vol. 30 • October 1997 • No. 10
