India’s promised new world order nowhere to be seen
AUGUST 15, 1947, deserved to be remembered, the African-american writer WEB du Bois argued, “as the greatest historical date” of modern history.
It was the day India became independent from British rule, and Du Bois believed it was of “greater significance” than the establishment of democracy in Britain, the emancipation of slaves in the US or the Russian Revolution.
It is barely remembered now that India’s freedom heralded the liberation, from Tuskegee to Jakarta, of a majority of the world’s population from the degradation of racist imperialism.
India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, claimed there had been nothing “more horrible” in human history than the days when millions of Africans “were carried away in galleys as slaves to America and elsewhere”.
As he said in a resonant speech on August 15, 1947, long ago India had made a “tryst with destiny”, and now, by opening up a broad horizon of human emancipation, “we shall redeem our pledge”.
But India, which turns 70 next week, seems to have missed its appointment with history.
A country that was inaugurated by secular freedom fighters is presently ruled by religious-racial supremacists.
More disturbing than this mutation are the continuities between those early embodiments of post-colonial virtue and their apparent betrayers today.
Du Bois would have been heartbroken to read the joint statement that more than 40 African governments released in April, denouncing “xenophobic and racial” attacks on Africans in India and asking the UN Human Rights Council to investigate.
The rise in hate crimes against Africans is part of a sinister trend that has accelerated since the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi came to power in 2014.
Another of its blood-curdling manifestations is the lynching of Muslims suspected of eating or storing beef. Others include assaults on couples who publicly display affection and threats of rape against women on social media. Mob frenzy in India today is drummed up by jingoistic television anchors and vindicated, often on Twitter, by senior politicians, businessmen, army generals and Bollywood stars.
Hindu nationalists have also come together to justify India’s intensified military occupation of Muslim-majority Kashmir, as well as a nationwide hunt for enemies: an ever-shifting and growing category that includes writers, liberal intellectuals, film-makers who work with Pakistani actors and ordinary citizens who don’t stand up when the national anthem is played in cinemas. The new world order – just, peaceful, equal – that India’s leaders promised at independence as they denounced their former Western masters’ violence, greed and hypocrisy, is nowhere in sight.
India’s lynch mobs today represent the latest and most grisly expression of cynical political ideologies. As the sheer brutishness of Modi’s populism becomes clear, the memory of the aristocratic Nehru becomes more sacred, especially among politicians and commentators from India’s English-speaking upper castes. But Modi has also turned that legacy of high-flown promises to his political advantage.
Nehru and his followers had articulated an influential ideology of Indian exceptionalism, claiming moral prestige and geopolitical significance for India’s uniquely massive and diverse democracy. Only many of those righteous notions also reeked of upper-caste sanctimony and class privilege. Modi has effectively mobilised those Indians who have long felt marginalised and humiliated by India’s self-serving Nehruvian elite into a large voting bank of resentment.
Modi’s rule represents the most devastating, and perhaps final, defeat of India’s noble postcolonial ambition to create a moral world order.
And so one can mourn this August 15 as marking the end of India’s tryst with destiny or, more accurately, the collapse of our exalted ideas about ourselves. But it confirms that the world as we have known it, moulded by the beneficiaries of Western imperialism and anti-imperialist nationalism, is crumbling, and that in the East as well as the West, all of us are now called to fresh struggles for freedom, equality and dignity.
Mishra’s most recent book is Age of Anger: A History of the Present.