India After Gandhi Quotes

“What is now in the past was once in the future”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“So long as the Constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails, so long as citizens can speak and write in the language of their choosing, so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army, and — lest I forget — so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung, India will survive”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“It is in the nature of democracies, perhaps, that while visionaries are sometimes necessary to make them, once made they can be managed by mediocrities.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“In India, the sapling was planted by the nation’s founders, who lived long enough (and worked hard enough) to nurture it to adulthood. Those who came afterwards could disturb and degrade the tree of democracy but, try as they might, could not uproot or destroy it.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“in India, Bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be the road to the salvation of a soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“In 1951 Dec 20th, Nehru, while campaigning for the first democratic elections in India, took a short break to address a UNESCO symposium in Delhi. Although he believed democracy was the best form of governance, while speaking at the symposium he wondered loud...
the quality of men who are selected by these modern democratic methods of adult franchise gradually deteriorates because of lack of thinking and the noise of propaganda....He[the voter] reacts to sound and to the din, he reacts to repetition and he produces either a dictator or a dumb politician who is insensitive. Such a politician can stand all the din in the world and still remain standing on his two feet and, therefore, he gets selected in the end because the others have collapsed because of the din.
-Quoted from India After Gandhi, page 157.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“In India the choice could never be between chaos and stability, but between manageable and unmanageable chaos, between humane and inhuman anarchy, and between tolerable and intolerable disorder. ASHIS NANDY, sociologist, 1990.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“If Jawaharlal Nehru was the Maker of Modern India, then perhaps Potti Sriramulu should be named its Mercator.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“in the post-Gandhian war for power the first casualty is decency’.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“India is no longer a constitutional democracy but a populist one.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“the differences between the countries of Europe were much smaller than those between the ‘countries’ of India. ‘Scotland is more like Spain than Bengal is like the Punjab.’ In India the diversities of race, language and religion were far greater. Unlike in Europe, these ‘countries’ were not nations; they did not have a distinct political or social identity. This, Strachey told his Cambridge audience, ‘is the first and most essential thing to learn about India – that there is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India possessing, according to any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious’. There was no Indian nation or country in the past; nor would there be one in the future.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“British journalist Don Taylor. Writing in 1969, by which time India had stayed united for two decades and gone through four general elections, Taylor yet thought that the key question remains: can India remain in one piece – or will it fragment? . . . When one looks at this vast country and its 524 million people, the 15 major languages in use, the conflicting religions, the many races, it seems incredible that one nation could ever emerge. It is difficult to even encompass this country in the mind – the great Himalaya, the wide Indo-Gangetic plain burnt by the sun and savaged by the fierce monsoon rains, the green flooded delta of the east, the great cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It does not, often, seem like one country. And yet there is a resilience about India which seems an assurance of survival. There is something which can only be described as an Indian spirit. I believe it no exaggeration to say that the fate of Asia hangs on its survival.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“I have no doubt that if British governments had been prepared to grant in 1900 what they refused in 1900 but granted in 1920; or to grant in 1920 what they refused in 1920 but granted in 1940; or to grant in 1940 what they refused in 1940 but granted in 1947 – then nine-tenths of the misery, hatred, and violence, the imprisonings and terrorism, the murders, flogging, shootings, assassinations, even the racial massacres would have been avoided; the transference of power might well have been accomplished peacefully, even possibly without Partition. LEONARD WOOLF, 1967”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom,”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“Thus, Rajaji wrote of the need to try and think fundamentally in the present crisis. Are we to yield to the fanatical emotions of our anti-Pakistan groups? Is there any hope for India or for Pakistan, if we go on hating each other, suspecting each other, borrowing and building up armaments against each other – building our two houses, both of us on the sands of continued foreign aid against a future Kurukshetra? We shall surely ruin ourselves for ever if we go on doing this . . . We shall be making all hopes of prosperity in the future a mere mirage if we continue this arms race based on an ancient grudge and the fears and suspicions flowing from it.27”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“a mere five years after the last maharaja had signed away his land, Indians had ‘come to take integrated India so much for granted that it requires amental effort today even to imagine that it could be different’.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“Ambedkar knew that while there were enough influential Hindus – such as Jawaharlal Nehru – who were behind progressive legislation, among the Muslims the liberal contingent was nowhere near as strong. The government, he said, could not be so ‘foolish’ as ‘not to realize the sentiments of different communities in this country’. That was why the code at present dealt only with the Hindus.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: A History

“A common civil code will help the cause of national integration by removing disparate loyalties to laws which have conflicting ideologies.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“An early gesture was to rename Harrington Road after a hero of the world communist movement, so that at the height of the Vietnam War the address of the United States Consulate was 7 Ho Chi Minh Sarani, Calcutta.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“the key question remains: can India remain in one piece – or will it fragment? . . . When one looks at this vast country and its 524 million people, the 15 major languages in use, the conflicting religions, the many races, it seems incredible that one nation could ever emerge. It is difficult to even encompass this country in the mind – the great Himalaya, the wide Indo-Gangetic plain burnt by the sun and savaged by the fierce monsoon rains, the green flooded delta of the east, the great cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It does not, often, seem like one country. And yet there is a resilience about India which seems an assurance of survival. There is something which can only be described as an Indian spirit. I believe it no exaggeration to say that the fate of Asia hangs on its survival.9”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“The Indian commitment to the semantics of socialism is at least as deep as ours to the semantics of free enterprise . . . Even the most intransigent Indian capitalist may observe on occasion that he is really a socialist at heart. J. K. GALBRAITH, economist, 1958”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“More notable perhaps were the names of those who were not from the Congress. These included two representatives of the world of commerce and one representative of the Sikhs. Three others were lifelong adversaries of the Congress. These were R. K. Shanmukham Chetty, a Madras businessman who possessed one of the best financial minds in India; B. R. Ambedkar, a brilliant legal scholar and an ‘Untouchable’ by caste; and Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, a leading Bengal politician who belonged (at this time) to the Hindu Mahasabha. All three had collaborated with the rulers while the Congress men served time in British jails. But now Nehru and his colleagues wisely put aside these differences. Gandhi had reminded them that ‘freedom comes to India, not to the Congress’, urging the formation of a Cabinet that included the ablest men regardless of party affiliation.6”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“My religion is a conspiracy My prayer meetings are a conspiracy My lying quiet is a conspiracy My attempt to wake up is a conspiracy My desire to have friends is a conspiracy My ignorance, my backwardness, a conspiracy.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“Then, in January 1961, a religious riot broke out in the central Indian city of Jabalpur. A Hindu girl had committed suicide; it was alleged that she took her life because she had been assaulted by two Muslim men. The claim was given lurid publicity by a local Jana Sangh newspaper, whereupon Hindu students went on a rampage through the town, attacking Muslim homes and burning shops. In retaliation a Muslim group torched a Hindu neighbourhood. The rioting continued for days, spreading also to the countryside. It was the most serious such incident since Partition, its main sufferers being poor Muslims, mostly weavers and bidi (cigarette) workers.52”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“My own view – speaking as a historian rather than citizen – is that as long as Pakistan exists there will be Hindu fundamentalists in India. In times of stability, or when the political leadership is firm, they will be marginal or on the defensive. In times of change, or when the political leadership is irresolute, they will be influential and assertive.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“Srinagar, there was a grave of a Christian soldier from Travancore, which had the Vedic swastika and a verse from the Quran inscribed on it. There could be ‘no more poignant and touching symbolof the essential oneness and unity of India’.61”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“It’s no conspiracy [for the Hindu] to make me a refugee in the very country of my birth It’s no conspiracy to poison the air I breathe and the space I live in It’s certainly no conspiracy to cut me to pieces and then imagine an uncut Bharat.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“Writing in 1959 – a decade and more after Independence – an Indian editor who was bitterly opposed to Nehru was constrained to recognize his two greatest achievements – the creation of a secular state and the granting of equal rights to Untouchables.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“The great Cambridge historian F. W. Maitland liked to remind his students that ‘what is now in the past was once in the future’. There could be no better maxim for the historian, and especially the historian of the recent past, who addresses an audience with very decided views on the subjects about which he presumes to inform them. An American historian of the Vietnam War is read by those who have mostly made up their minds on whether the war was just or not.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“பஞ்சாபும் மதராஸும் ஒரே அரசியல் அமைப்பில் பங்கு பெறுவதைக் கற்பனை செய்தும் பார்க்கமுடியாது என்று 1888-ல்தான் ஸ்ட்ராச்சி எழுதியிருந்தார். ஆனால், 1947-ல் அது மட்டுமின்றி, ஸ்ட்ராச்சி ‘தனித்தனி தேசங்கள்’ என்று கருதிய வேறு பலவும்கூட அந்தக் கூட்டமைப்பில் இணைந்தன. 1947-ல் ஒற்றுமை பெரும்பாலும் அரசியல்ரீதியாக மட்டுமே இருந்தது எனலாம். ஆனால் அடுத்த பல பத்தாண்டுகளில் இந்த இணைப்பு, பொருளாதார, கலாசார, ஏன் உணர்ச்சிரீதியாகக் கூட ஆகியுள்ளது. ஒருவேளை பல காஷ்மீரிகளும் நாகர்களும் தங்களை அந்நியராக உணரக்கூடும். சில புரட்சிக்காரர்கள், இந்தியா என்பது பல தேசங்கள் வசிக்கும் ஒரு நிலப்பரப்பு என்று ஒருவேளை நம்பக்கூடும். ஆனால், சட்டப்பூர்வமான இந்தியக் குடிமக்களில் பெரும்பான்மையோர், தங்களை இந்தியக் குடிமக்களாக மகிழ்ச்சியுடன் நினைத்துக்கொள்கின்றனர். ஐந்தில் நான்கு பங்கு நிலப்பரப்பில் வாழும் ஐந்தில் நான்கு பங்கு மக்கள், தங்களை ஒரே தேசமாகவே கருதுகின்றனர்.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy