Shashi Tharoor, a U.N. diplomat and novelist, introduces his
new book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium, as "not
a survey of modern Indian history, though it touches upon many
of the principal events of the last five decades....It is a subjective
account."
A highly engaging subjective account it is, making great use
of the author's well-honed novelistic techniques. One of the best
chapters, "Scheduled Castes, Unscheduled Change" narrates
the story of his childhood's forbidden friend, Charlis, an untouchable
boy in rural Kerala, who rises to become an I.A.S. officer. Charlis
makes it, thanks to the "world's first and most rigorous
affirmative-action program." India's affirmative-action laws
reserve a minimum of 49.5 percent of federal government jobs for
the previously disadvantaged or backward classes. Tharoor notes
that opponents, now, often complain about reverse discrimination:
"You can't go forward unless you are a Backward."
Like many other observers, Tharoor sees "bureaucratic corruption
and criminalization of politics as two of the most widespread
problems facing India." Bureaucratic corruption is largely
a result of "the permit-license-quota Raj" ushered in
by Nehruvian socialism. Nehru was not personally corrupt, but
his legacy of socialism has recently come under increasing attack.
Tharoor cites as "the most dangerous phenomenon of independent
India's political life, the criminalization of politics, for many
a lawbreaker has found it useful to become a lawmaker." In
the current government (United Front), one of the first appointees,
Taslimuddin, minister of state, had 18 criminal cases pending
against him. The current defense minister, it is widely believed,
won his seat by pandering to the Muslims and the students who
wanted to be freed of laws restricting their cheating opportunities
on exams! According to Harkishen Singh Surjeet, himself a member
of Parliament, out of the 535 members of the Parliament in 1996,
as many as a 100 have criminal records. (It is encouraging to
read in this week's news an announcement by Dr. M.S. Gill, chief
of the Election Commission, that in the next election no candidates
with criminal records will be allowed to stand for elective offices.)
"As with so much else, the rot set in under Indira Gandhi,"
notes Tharoor. Agreeing with other political analysts like Arun
Shourie, Kuldip Nayar, and Khushwant Singh , Tharoor places the
full blame for the Punjab crisis on Indira Gandhi herself for
having "primed [it] for narrow partisan purposes." She
"encouraged (and reportedly even initially financed) the
extremist fanaticism" in the Punjab.
Rajiv Gandhi's corruption "was common knowledge: Galli-galli
mein shor hai/Rajiv Gandhi chor hai 'Hear it said in every nook,
Rajiv Gandhi is a crook.' " Moreover, Rajiv Gandhi's efforts
to buy Muslim votes by appeasement in the famous Shah Banu alimony
case laid bare the Nehruvian pseudo-secularism of the Congress
party. As the opposing Bharatiya Janata Party has rightly charged,
the Congress Party "had long disbursed government grants
to Mullahs while at the same time denying any assistance to impoverished
Hindu priests." Tharoor urges rejection of "the pseudo-secularism
that has made the state hostage to the most obscurantist religious
figures among the minorities."
Democracy in India has a long history. Tharoor cites Dr. B. R.
Ambedkar: "Indian democracy was as old as its ancient village
republics. India had political assemblies with elaborate parliamentary
rules of procedures at a time when most of the rest of the world
suffered under despotism or anarchy." Tharoor asks: 'This
democratic system, India lost. Will she lose it a second time?"
Like several other prominent political analysts, Tharoor suggests
decentralization as a possible safeguard. Actually, in the early
years of independent India, Clement Attlee proposed the U.S. presidential
system as a model. Unfortunately, Nehru, ironically, rejected
it -- out of his anglophilic delusion that the "British system
was the only real one for democracies." Attlee noted: "I
had the feeling that they [Nehru and his followers] thought I
was offering them margarine instead of butter." Nehru's misplaced
anglophilia is fully corroborated in Stanley Wolpert's recent
biography Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny, which reveals Nehru confiding
in John Kenneth Galbraith, the American ambassador: "Galbraith,
I am the last Englishman to rule India."
Writing about the early history of India, Tharoor does not take
into account the recent work of scholars like S.R. Rao, Subhash
Kak, David Frawley, Natwar Jha, and Navaratna Rajaram, and Sita
Ram Goel, which has discredited the Aryan invasion myth. Their
work has established the date of composition of the Rig Veda as
3750 BC and deciphered the writing on the Indus seals as Vedic.
Nonetheless, Tharoor provides some dazzling glimpses into India's
glorious pre-Islamic period: "In the fifth century, the Malayali
astronomer Aryabhatta deduced, a thousand years before his European
successors, that the earth is round and that it rotates on its
axis, it was also he who calculated the value of pi (3.1614) for
the first time;.... Bhaskacharya's understanding of gravitation
a millennium before Isaac Newton; about the invention, credited
largely to Gritasamada, of the zero and the entire system of decimal
numbers." The so-called Arabic numbers, quadratic equations,
and trigonometry are among India's many gifts to world science.
Equally impressive are early India's contribution to literature
and philology.
Writing about his native Kerala, Tharoor proudly notes its 100
percent literacy rate compared to the national 52 percent. (Updated
studies indicate Kerala's literacy as 91 percent -- still the
highest in the nation.) Reading his review of Kerala's history,
one notices that Tharoor seems to be unaware of Tipu Sultan's
slaughter and forcible conversion of thousands of Kerala Hindus
to Islam in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. (The
evidence is convincingly presented in "Tipu Sultan: Villain
or Hero?" edited by Sita Ram Goel and originally published
by the Bombay Malayali Samajam.)
Tharoor has good words for New Delhi, "the first truly postcolonial
Indian city.... There are more plays, exhibitions, and concerts
on any single day in New Delhi than anywhere else in India."
He lauds the Punjabi Sikh and Hindu refugees for making New Delhi
what it has become.
I strongly recommend the book with just a minor caveat: At times
Tharoor's deformation professionelle shows up as evasion -- diplomatic
evasion -- in naming easy-to-guess names.
