South Asia - The End of India by Khushwant Singh

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 counterproductive 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 educatedunemployed 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 Kushwant Singh

Posted on 17 February 2013

By Jaspreet

If you want to see what happened to Buddhism, just check out what has been happening to Sikhism. Legally Sikhs do not exist in India but are just Hindus. Sikhs refused to sign the Indian constitution due to that. Sikhs were declared a criminal tribe as soon as the British left. In the 80s and 90s, hundreds of thousands of Sikhs were slaughtered, mainly the Amritdharis. So it became very scary to be a Sikh. Then all this preaching by people like the RSS started, to declare Sikhism a part of Hinduism. They dont just go preach, they also commission art showing the Sikh Gurus to be Hindu gods basically and have written all sorts of books to distort Sikh history. Basically famous Sikhs like Banda Singh Bahadur have their names changed and are described as Hindus. Even Maharaja Ranjit Singh is said to be a Hindu by these people. Though there is a Sikh PM, he was appointed. He is a guy who worships penises at Hindu temples but cannot tell France to listen to the UN and let Sikhs wear turbans. He also works with and has promoted killers who led mobs that went around burning Sikh temples and killing, maiming, and raping any Sikhs they could hunt down in their homes, in their vehicles, on public transportation, hiding in the Gurdwaras, or anywhere else. When Sikhs in other places protest against his genocidal MPS and ministers, the bastard hates it. He feels Canada can be bullied as India successfully carried out a plane bombing and got it blamed on Sikhs (a plane whose pilots were Sikhs and most of the passengers on it were Sikhs too). So this so-called Sikh,Manmohan the coward and rat, had the audacity to throw his weight around against Canada and say Canadian Sikhs are causing problems (though the police in Punjab denied it and so did CSIS). Since then, he and his government have said it lots of times, so much so that the Canadian politicians seem to have gotten sick and tired of it and have said Sikhs have the right to freedom of expression in Canada and can campaign for a separate Sikh state if they wish as long as it is peacefully done in response to Indias demands though they did not want to say anything initially. It is just not good for trade but the Indian are just so ***, obnoxious that they never know when to quit. The immigration minister a few months ago even told them there is nothing wrong with advocating Khalistan if it is done peacefully after they asked him to start deporting Sikhs who are Indian nationals in Canada if they campaign for a separate Sikh state. Anyway, their formula for trying to get rid of Sikhs ranges from genocide and all out murder, killings of Amritdharis, art, books, movies (Bollywood plays a role in the ethnocide and ridicule of Sikhs in a big way), and there is financial suppression too. As well, many of our religious leaders are puppets of India through fear and greed. A lot of the Sikhs killed in the name of terrorism dominated certain industries according to Kushwant Singh in his book The End of India. The end result is this, people of Sikh origins who come from India are surprised to see all these people of Sikh origins practicing Sikhism and Sikhism flourishing in places like Canada where the state does not repress it. Well, it seems like some of the ancient Buddhists were glad when invaders came according to Hindus. I for one am a Sikh who would be very happy if China were to conquer India.The way it kills and maligns those who are not of the majority, well I dont wish it well trust me.