Malevolent Republic Quotes

“Imperialism, in other words, was destructive only when Europeans did it. When Asians did it, it was a cultural exchange programme.”
― KS Komireddi, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India

“History cannot be revenged. The best we can do is strive to emancipate ourselves from its punishing torments by being honest about it.”
― K.S. Komireddi, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India

“And it is only in its early stage. All those who believe they will remain untouched by its wrath are delusional. If Ehsan Jafri, a former member of parliament with a line to the deputy prime minister’s office, could be dragged out of his home and gashed and burned alive, what makes anyone think he or she will remain unharmed? If Aamir Khan, one of India’s biggest film stars, can be unpersoned; if Gauri Lankesh, one of its boldest journalists, can be shot dead; if Ramachandra Guha, one of its greatest historians, can be stopped from lecturing; if Naseeruddin Shah, among its finest actors, can be branded a traitor; if Manmohan Singh, the former prime minister, can be labelled an agent of Pakistan by his successor; if B.H. Loya, a perfectly healthy judge, can abruptly drop dead; if a young woman can be stalked by the police machinery of the state because Modi has displayed an interest in her—what makes the rest of us think we will remain untouched and unharmed? Unless the republic is reclaimed, the time will come when all of us will be one incorrect meal, one interfaith romance, one unfortunate misstep away from being extinguished. The mobs that slaughtered ‘bad’ Muslims will eventually come for Hindus who are not ‘good’.”
― K.S. Komireddi, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India

“Unless the republic is reclaimed, the time will come when all of us will be one incorrect meal, one interfaith romance, one unfortunate misstep away from being extinguished. The mobs that slaughtered ‘bad’ Muslims will eventually come for Hindus who are not ‘good’. India’s tragedy is that just when it is faced with an existential crisis, there exists no pan-Indian alternative to the BJP.”
― K.S. Komireddi, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India

“Murad said: ‘I seriously thought about becoming a terrorist.’ He could have, he said. The old city swarmed with agents fishing for recruits. And there were times when he wanted to join them. More than his own torture, he told me, it was the torment of others that made him restless. He could not for some reason expunge from his mind the face of a little girl in the documentary about Gujarat who reminded him of his own sister. He could not make sense of the lack of remorse among Gujarati Hindus. He felt deceived. ‘I never thought I could, but I really hated all Hindus. I wanted to kill them all. I had no emotions left inside me.’ But memories intruded. What I let myself forget in London, he, who grew up without being befriended by another Hindu, held on to in Hyderabad. ‘I remembered that your father sent you to this school to study with us.’ There must be other Hindus who are like me, he thought to himself. ‘Aap ki yaad ne mujhe rok diya,’ he said. ‘It is the memory of you that stopped me.”
― KS Komireddi, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India

“One of the blessings of learning history, say historians, is that it prevents us from likening every atrocity to the crimes of the Nazis. And yet the newsmagazine India Today, surveying the wreckage of the Emergency, was far from being obtuse when it wrote that the torture that inmates endured in the Emergency months was ‘of a kind that would make the Nazi interrogators lick their lips in approval’. The only distinction was that the horrors in India were perpetrated by a ‘sovereign democratic government which had pledged itself to the dignity of the individual’.47 Sanjay superintended the sterilisation of 6.2 million people—fifteen times the number of people sterilised by the Nazis.48 It is difficult to think of a personality in modern South Asian history who distributed such intense agony among so many of his own people. Nor was the New Yorker exaggerating when it wrote that Indira was on the threshold of ‘ushering in an Indian version of Hitler’s National Socialist regime, with private ownership of industry, farms, and service enterprises’ before her defeat.49”
― KS Komireddi, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India

“When a travelling American journalist asked a member of the Oberoi family, India’s top hoteliers, for her opinion of the Emergency rule, she replied: ‘Oh, it’s wonderful. We used to have terrible problems with the unions. Now when they give us any troubles, the government just puts them in jail.”
― KS Komireddi, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India

“Narendra Modi was the newly appointed chief minister of Gujarat when this happened. He was asked by a foreign reporter if he had any regrets. Yes, he told her. He wished he had handled the news media better. The man on whose watch the murders and rapes and arsons by Hindus raged was, if not criminally complicit, then criminally negligent. If not criminally negligent, then he was, at the very minimum, the most incompetent administrator in India at the time. His political career should have come to an end in that moment. Instead, in 2014, a dozen years after the riots in Gujarat, Modi was the top contender for India’s highest political office; and, agonisingly for those with vivid memories of Gujarat, he was being applauded as a competent leader. Twenty-two years after the demolition of Babri, butchering Muslims—or failing to intervene and stop them from being butchered—was not a disqualification in Indian politics. It was a prelude to success.”
― KS Komireddi, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India

“Such comforting certitudes were upended only a few years later when a repentant Hindu priest, captured by India’s National Investigation Agency, volunteered a shattering confession: that the attack at Mecca masjid had been one of several staged by a militant Hindu group which, he said, was intimately connected with the parent body of the BJP. The organisation counted among its members, the swami disclosed, an officer of the Indian Army.7”
― KS Komireddi, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India

“In the 1940s, Congress—the dominant secular party that led India to independence from Britain, and was assailed by both Jinnah and the RSS—heroically withstood the demand of aggrieved Hindus to respond to Pakistan’s birth by turning India into a Hindu state. Nehru, as India’s first prime minister, frequently raced to scenes of communal clashes on his own, often chasing vengeful Hindu and Sikh refugees expelled from Pakistan without regard for his personal safety. ‘If you harm one single hair on the head of one Muslim,’ he told a mob plotting a massacre of Muslims, ‘I will send in a tank and blast you to bits’.”
― KS Komireddi, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India

“Consider the view from the eyes of an ordinary Muslim family: encircled by the violence precipitated by Partition, their co-religionists were fleeing in the millions to Pakistan; Muslim businesses were being plundered and burnt to the ground; Hindu and Sikh fanatics were hunting Muslims for slaughter and rape; the possibility of being betrayed by neighbours and friends was very far from remote; families were permanently fracturing; powerful functionaries in the government were openly hostile to Muslims—hostility which no doubt would have been seen by many Hindus as tacit endorsement of their savagery. In spite of all this, millions of Muslims remained.”
― KS Komireddi, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India

“Thousands of Hyderabadi Muslims resettled in Pakistan. The many thousands more who remained, who refused to vacate the hell that was Hyderabad despite the blandishments of paradise in Pakistan, voted for India with their lives. India’s Hindus never had to make that choice. Its Muslims did.”
― KS Komireddi, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India