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Book: Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power by Robert D. Kaplan
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Authors: Robert D. Kaplan
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Chauthai-wale, a molecular biologist, told me, “Muslims in India must de-link themselves from the memory of [Mughal kings] Babur and Akbar, and from terrorism, and should become purely of India.”
Purely of India
. This is a significant statement, which telegraphs a deliberate revision of history that the Indian media and school textbooks are partly responsible for propagating. The very Islamic migrations that make for today’s dazzlingly multicultural India, with many Arabic and Persian loanwords embedded in Hindi and Gujarati, are wholly repudiated because of the undeniably awful sufferings and plunder of cities and religious sites that they brought upon Hindus (although armed conflicts between Muslim rulers probably outnumbered those fought between Muslims and Hindus in Indian history). 10 Even the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great, so named because of the religious pluralism he practiced (though a Muslim, he was accepting of Hinduism and spent his later life in search of a cosmic deity that spanned religious divides), is considered by Hindu nationalists just another Muslim subjugator.
Gone in significant measure in this worldview is the all-inclusive secular Indian version of history, originally subscribed to by the Congress Party during the Nehruvian era of the 1950s and 1960s, which emanated ultimately from Mahatma Gandhi’s gentle humanistic vision of excluding no one from the national project, and which sought to bridge the historical differences between religious groups. The aura of legitimacy and romance that invested the Congress Party—the party of independence, after all—was shattered during the dictatorial emergency decrees enacted by Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s. Following that, a new logic was required to mobilize the Indian masses and particularly the emerging middle class, a segment of the population that arose in Gujarat sooner than in many other Indian states, supported by its history of successful trading.
This logic was provided perversely by information technology and higher education. Information technology has allowed for standardized and ideologized versions of Hinduism and Islam to emerge from the multiplicity of local variants: Just as Shiites became united across the Middle East, Hindus became united across India, and the same for SunniMuslims here. But it was particularly so with the Hindus, for whom before the age of mass communications their religion existed more as a series of local cults, making a united Hinduism as such an expression rather than an actual fact. 11 Meanwhile, education has made people aware of their own histories for the first time, and thus supplied them with historical grievances that they never previously had. “The Hindu poor are blissfully ignorant of Mahmud of Ghazna. It is the middle class that now knows this history,” explained one local human rights worker. That is why Hindu nationalism is strongest not among the poor and uneducated, but among the professional classes: scientists, software engineers, lawyers, and so on. The same phenomenon can be observed among Islamic extremists, from al-Qaeda to the Muslim Brotherhood. In the eyes of this new right-wing middle and upper-middle class, India was a civilization before it was a state, and while the state has had to compromise with minorities, the civilization originally was unpolluted, Hindu that is, even if the truth is more complex.
This search for a reinvented national greatness among middle-class Hindus of India also applies to the new Muslim middle classes of Pakistan and Iran, which is why all three are intoxicated about the idea of nuclear weapons. Whether it is the Mauryan Empire in India, or the Achaemenid Empire in Persia, for millions lifted out of poverty and recently educated, the
bomb
now summons forth these great kingdoms of antiquity.
In India such yearning was further ignited by the economic reforms of the 1990s, which brought India truly into the vanguard of globalization. Because the
Purely of India
. This is a significant statement, which telegraphs a deliberate revision of history that the Indian media and school textbooks are partly responsible for propagating. The very Islamic migrations that make for today’s dazzlingly multicultural India, with many Arabic and Persian loanwords embedded in Hindi and Gujarati, are wholly repudiated because of the undeniably awful sufferings and plunder of cities and religious sites that they brought upon Hindus (although armed conflicts between Muslim rulers probably outnumbered those fought between Muslims and Hindus in Indian history). 10 Even the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great, so named because of the religious pluralism he practiced (though a Muslim, he was accepting of Hinduism and spent his later life in search of a cosmic deity that spanned religious divides), is considered by Hindu nationalists just another Muslim subjugator.
Gone in significant measure in this worldview is the all-inclusive secular Indian version of history, originally subscribed to by the Congress Party during the Nehruvian era of the 1950s and 1960s, which emanated ultimately from Mahatma Gandhi’s gentle humanistic vision of excluding no one from the national project, and which sought to bridge the historical differences between religious groups. The aura of legitimacy and romance that invested the Congress Party—the party of independence, after all—was shattered during the dictatorial emergency decrees enacted by Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s. Following that, a new logic was required to mobilize the Indian masses and particularly the emerging middle class, a segment of the population that arose in Gujarat sooner than in many other Indian states, supported by its history of successful trading.
This logic was provided perversely by information technology and higher education. Information technology has allowed for standardized and ideologized versions of Hinduism and Islam to emerge from the multiplicity of local variants: Just as Shiites became united across the Middle East, Hindus became united across India, and the same for SunniMuslims here. But it was particularly so with the Hindus, for whom before the age of mass communications their religion existed more as a series of local cults, making a united Hinduism as such an expression rather than an actual fact. 11 Meanwhile, education has made people aware of their own histories for the first time, and thus supplied them with historical grievances that they never previously had. “The Hindu poor are blissfully ignorant of Mahmud of Ghazna. It is the middle class that now knows this history,” explained one local human rights worker. That is why Hindu nationalism is strongest not among the poor and uneducated, but among the professional classes: scientists, software engineers, lawyers, and so on. The same phenomenon can be observed among Islamic extremists, from al-Qaeda to the Muslim Brotherhood. In the eyes of this new right-wing middle and upper-middle class, India was a civilization before it was a state, and while the state has had to compromise with minorities, the civilization originally was unpolluted, Hindu that is, even if the truth is more complex.
This search for a reinvented national greatness among middle-class Hindus of India also applies to the new Muslim middle classes of Pakistan and Iran, which is why all three are intoxicated about the idea of nuclear weapons. Whether it is the Mauryan Empire in India, or the Achaemenid Empire in Persia, for millions lifted out of poverty and recently educated, the
bomb
now summons forth these great kingdoms of antiquity.
In India such yearning was further ignited by the economic reforms of the 1990s, which brought India truly into the vanguard of globalization. Because the
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