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April 9 - May 15, 2019
when the clock struck midnight and India became independent, history ended, and political science and sociology began.
The violence of August–September 1946 was, in the first instance, instigated by the Muslim League, the party which fuelled the movement for a separate state of Pakistan.
petty one from Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who said that the death of his old rival was a loss merely to ‘the Hindu community’.
On Mahatma Gandhi!
This argued that ‘probably the main cause for the collapse of independent thinking’ in India was ‘the long reign of popular favourites without any significant opposition’.
A democracy run by a single party automatically becomes a tyranny;
At his trial Abdullah had insisted that he never expressed a desire for Kashmir to join Pakistan. India or independence – those were the only two options he had countenanced.
‘No Muslim in Kashmir will ever raise his hand against the minorities,’ he proclaimed.
Alas!
‘The future of the country is dark for many reasons’, said the Hindustan Times, ‘all of them directly attributable to 19 years of Congress rule.’
The history of the twentieth century, he pointed out, is replete with instances of the tragedy that overtakes democracy when a leader who has risen to power on the crest of a popular wave or with the support of a democratic organisation becomes a victim of political narcissism and is egged on by a coterie of unscrupulous sycophants who use corruption and terror to silence opposition and attempt to make public opinion an echo of authority.
‘Indira Gandhi has successfully magnified her figure as the one and only leader of national dimensions’. Then he added, ominously: ‘However, if power is voluntarily surrendered by a predominant section of the people to one person and at the same time opposition is reduced to insignificance, the temptation to ride roughshod over legitimate criticism can become irresistible. The danger of Indira Gandhi being given unbridled power shall always be present.’
He said we should realise that no Government in Pak[istan] can survive if it renounces, outright, its support to Kashmiris’ right of self-determination.’62
No wonder!
the Indians had, by assisting in the creation of Bangladesh, blown a big hole in the founding ideology of the Pakistani nation. To this there could be only one effective answer – to assist in the separation of Kashmir from India, thus to blow an equally big hole in the founding idea of Indian secularism.
As it happened, Sanjay’s car project was cleared with undue haste. Eighteen applications were received for a licence to make small cars; only that of the prime minister’s son was approved, despite his having no past experience in this regard.
What corruption???
On the other hand many lower-class and farming communities had changed from offering a brideprice to demanding a dowry, this a clear indication of the declining status of their women.
Female dictators are altogether rare – in the twentieth century Mrs Gandhi may have been the only such.
The 38th Amendment, passed on 22 July 1975, barred judicial review of the emergency.
Mrs Gandhi paid other political parties scant respect. She attended Parliament less regularly than Nehru, and spoke much less when in it.
By some accounts, Bhindranwale was built up by Sanjay Gandhi and the Union home minister Zail Singh (himself a former chief minister of Punjab) as a counter to the Akalis.
Rajiv Gandhi’s own comment on the riots was: ‘When a big tree falls, the earth shakes’.
There were an estimated 200,000 Pandits living in the Kashmir Valley.
In press conferences after the event, the term most often used by BJP spokesmen to describe the happenings at Ayodhya was ‘unfortunate’.
Speaking to a Pakistani reporter, the Lashkar chief claimed that ‘our struggle will continue even if Kashmir is liberated. We still have to take revenge [against India] for [the loss of] East Pakistan’.
The burqa was contrary to Kashmiri custom – here many women did not even wear head-scarves.
According to one estimate, in the decade of the 1990s, some 12,000 civilians died unnatural deaths: three-fourths at the hands of militants, the rest in the cross-fire.
Kashmir. And it reads “militants” not “army”.
There was also a sense of honour among thieves. In the run-up to an election the Opposition made a hue and cry about corruption in the ruling administration, but if it was elected it did not pursue cases against the previous regime,
Well well!
Moreover, once a party has caught the disease of dynasticism, it cannot or will not return to the meritocratic or ideological principles by which it was founded or once run.
