[Book Review] The RSS: Challenging the secular polity of India

The Telegraph

The RSS: Challenging the secular polity of India

While it is crucial to scrutinize the RSS’s role, there are also deep concerns regarding its ideological agenda
By Shaikh Mujibur Rehman

Published 7.06.19, 1:26 AM

The return of Narendra Modi, a former pracharak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), as prime minister for the second term, and the tremendous majority that the Bharatiya Janata Party has garnered in nearly all regions of India barring the South underlines the significance of the role and contribution of the RSS in Indian politics. The RSS has good reason to boast that it has given two prime ministers to India: Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1998-2004) and Narendra Modi since 2014. While it is crucial to scrutinise the RSS’s role, there are also deep concerns regarding its ideological agenda. Some scholars are of the view that what comes out of the BJP campaign does not reveal enough about the RSS, which is why there is a need for a focused analysis of this organisation that has come very close to altering the foundational arguments of social harmony and political coexistence in India today. This seems to be driving the author’s attempt. He had earlier published a book titled The RSS and the BJP: A Division of Labour that was launched by Jyoti Basu in December, 2000.

This book -- The RSS: A Menace to India -- comprises 25 well-written chapters, which examine why and how the RSS came into existence, its role during the British days, and how it has operated and expanded in modern times to challenge — directly and indirectly — the secular polity of India. Some of these insightful chapters are titled as follows: “The RSS and Gandhi’s Assassination”; “The RSS, the Emergency and the Janata Party”; “RSS Selects India’s Prime Minister”; “RSS and Violence”; “RSS’s Progeny: ABVP, VHP, Bajrang Dal”. The book is dedicated to Nehru, Azad, Rajagopalachari and M.A. Ansari: the four towering personalities who played critical roles during the anti-colonial movement. The book opens with a quotation by B.R. Ambedkar from his Pakistan or the Partition of India that reads as follows: “If HINDU RAJ does become a fact, it will, no doubt, be the greatest calamity for this country... Hindu Raj must be prevented at any cost.” The prime minister in his maiden speech to the National Democratic Alliance MPs of the 17th Lok Sabha recently mentioned Ambedkar, but it would be helpful if he and his government paid attention to the reasons Ambedkar cited when he was giving a warning about a majoritarian Hindu State and its implication for India’s democracy.

The book has a long Introduction, in which the author has deliberated on many dimensions of the Indian debate on secularism — particularly on the legal side of the arguments, which I found very enriching. He has made elaborate comments on the J.S. Verma judgment that declared Hindutva was a way of life like Hinduism; scholars who argue for secularism are deeply critical of such juridical interpretations.

The following observation by the author perhaps best summarises the argument that he has built up and that runs through the entire book. He writes, “In 1994, the Supreme Court ruled that secularism is part of the unamendable basic structure of the Constitution. But no law can effectively deter a government from flouting this by administrative measures.” Further, he cites four factors in order to show how and why challenges to secularism have been confronted: firstly, secularism has been part of India’s political struggle that dates back to 1885; secondly, the history of Hindu revivalism can also be traced to the same period although it got institutionalised as the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha later; thirdly, these organisations have been fighting secularism from their inception; and lastly, they were collaborators of the British colonial regime and played no role in India’s freedom movement.

However, in spite of the constitutional guarantee, it is possible that the RSS and the BJP would be able to pursue the communal agenda: the past few years have presented enough evidence in this regard. That is why there is a need to strengthen the resolve to fight these forces and their agenda politically instead of merely hoping that nothing would happen to India owing to the Constitution. All in all, this is a fascinating book, rich in analysis of various legal and political aspects — and almost convinces the reader of this veteran author’s description of the menace as indeed a serious one.


The RSS: A Menace to India; By A.G. Noorani; LeftWord, Rs 1,500

Book Review: Revati Laul's 'The Anatomy of Hate'

The Hindu, January 05, 2019


‘The Anatomy of Hate’ review: Life after violence
Harsh Mander


A journalist traces the stories of three very different men who participated in the mass hate crimes of 2002

India has been the site of recurring episodes of horrific hate violence, which target people disadvantaged by caste, religious identity and gender. In all such episodes — of Dalit atrocities, communal killings, lynching, gang-rapes — we tend to imagine the perpetrators of these crimes who rape, murder and loot in frenzies of hate and bigotry, as faceless homogenous blurs of unmitigated evil. [. . .]



https://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/the-anatomy-of-hate-review-life-after-violence/article25911256.ece

Book Review: Understanding Hindu-Muslim violence in Uttar Pradesh in the 2000s

Reviews

'Everyday Communalism: Riots in Contemporary Uttar Pradesh' review: Not a spontaneous outburst

  Manjari Katju

http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/everyday-communalism-riots-in-contemporary-uttar-pradesh-review-not-a-spontaneous-outburst/article23699623.ece

Book Review: Force of Hindutva

The Hindu, October 14, 2017

Reviews

Force of Hindutva

G. Sampath

Hinduising Democracy: The Vishva Hindu Parishad in Contemporary India Manjari Katju New Text ₹495

An overview of the breadth and scale of the VHP’s operations and why it is such a potent outfit

The Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) was founded in 1964 to advance the project of a Hindu Rashtra. It first shot to prominence in the 1980s with the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign, and kept gaining momentum until the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.

Today, VHP leaders occupy influential positions within the secular-democratic framework of the Indian polity, with Yogi Adityanath and Sakshi Maharaj being the most famous names among many others. The question of how and why avowedly majoritarian religious leaders rise to the top in a secular democracy has been a subject of intense debate among political scientists.

In Hinduising Democracy: The Vishva Hindu Parishad in Contemporary India, Manjari Katju, a professor of political science at the University of Hyderabad, tries to answer this question by breaking it down into smaller, sharper ones: What is the VHP’s understanding of democracy? What is its idea of freedom? What is its vision of citizenship? And what kind of influence does it wield over Indian politics and social life?

To answer these questions, she tracks the VHP’s activities between 1995 and 2015, and over eight chapters traces the evolution of its strategies in response to changing political realities.

Demolishing democracy

On the VHP’s vision of democracy, Katju observes that it attempts to “conflate the notion of parliamentary democracy with the will of the religious majority,” so that democracy in India comes to signify nothing but the rule of the Hindu majority, thereby “obfuscating the understanding of democracy itself.”

The VHP’s idea of freedom is “articulated mainly as religio-cultural freedom of the Hindu community.” Freedom, for the VHP, is “an exclusive domain of the Hindu community and is considered substantiated only with the political ascendancy of Hindu nationhood.”

Why so? Because in its view the “‘oppression’ of the Hindu community did not come to an end in 1947, but has continued under the rule of the so-called secularists.” In other words, ‘freedom’ for the Hindu community would only come with the ‘liberation’ of the Ramjanmabhoomi, which would presumably mark the moment when Hindus finally take ownership of the Indian state. This is why the construction of the Ram temple at the disputed site in Ayodhya is at the top of the VHP’s agenda.

An interesting aspect of the VHP’s influence that Katju dwells on is its “dual power”, which it leverages by representing itself, both, as the will of the ‘marginalised’ or ‘victimised’ Hindus, and also as the voice of the dominant Hindu majority, in whose name it challenges the constitutional framework.

Though the VHP is synonymous with shrill national campaigns on issues such as the Ram temple, abrogation of Article 370, and a call for banning the conversion of Hindus to other religions, it is the section on its quiet grassroots work that is the most fascinating one in the book.

In the chapter titled ‘Building Hindu Nationhood in Towns and Villages’, Katju presents an overview of the breadth and scale of the VHP’s operations in parts of the country where the developmental reach of the state is either minimal or non-existent.

Pointing out that “one of the three aims of the VHP is sewa or service (the other two being suraksha and sanskar),” Katju notes that “it continuously works at this aim with the larger aim of Hindu rashtrawad in India.”

The VHP runs thousands of projects across the country in the fields of education, health, social welfare and self-reliance — ranging from schools and hostels to libraries, sewing centres, mobile clinics, and dispensaries. It is also active in organising festivals, melas, and yatras, which offer an avenue for aggressive public display of Hindu religiosity.

In urban areas, the VHP works primarily in working class and lower middle class localities and slums. These are overcrowded neighbourhoods with mixed populations of Dalits, Muslims and OBCs. By playing on economic insecurities, aspirations for social recognition, and pitting neighbours against each other, it becomes possible to build “institutionalised riot systems” that can be activated almost on demand, typically before elections.

In the countryside, especially tribal villages, the VHP’s work of “Hinduisation”, Katju points out, has communalised relations between tribals and non-tribals, especially Dalits.

Double-decker approach

A common feature of the VHP’s work is a clever double-decker approach to Hinduisation that first creates a strong base of community-based welfare work, on which it then builds, on the one hand, Hindu identitarian pride, and on the other, hatred and suspicion of minorities.

The VHP’s approach to building Hindu unity, Katju writes, is based on a strategy of bringing “the upper and the marginal castes under the same ideological umbrella without challenging caste structures.” One explanation for why this strategy often succeeds, forwarded by sociologist Achyut Yagnik and which Katju endorses, holds that it is because Dalits, tribals and OBCs see in Hindutva “an opportunity to achieve social acceptance from the savarna society.”

Ultimately, what has made the VHP such a potent force is its ability to use the pluralistic spaces and democratic freedoms offered by the Constitution to undermine those very spaces and freedoms.

It goes without saying that those with a vested interest in constitutional freedoms need to be vigilant of the forces that endanger them.

Hinduising Democracy is a valuable resource for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of an outfit that has become one of the largest, most energetic, and most uncompromising proselytisers of Hindutva.

Hinduising Democracy: The Vishva Hindu Parishad in Contemporary India; Manjari Katju, New Text, ₹495.

[Book Review] Shadow Armies: Fringe Organisations and Foot Soldier of Hindutva (Reviewed by Pragya Tiwari)

The Wire

The Foot Soldiers of Hindutva Have been Lurking in the Shadows For a Long Time
By Pragya Tiwari on 04/05/2017

The ‘shadow armies’ of Hindutva profiled in Dhirendra K. Jha’s book seek to propagate a problematic definition of nationhood using historical falsehoods, hate speech and hooliganism.

Demonstrators react as they burn Pakistan’s national flag during a protest organised by activists of Bajrang Dal, a Hindu hardline group, in Jammu, against Sunday’s attack at an Indian army base camp in Kashmir’s Uri, September 20, 2016. Credit: Mukesh Gupta/Reuters/Files

Ever since the Narendra Modi government came to power in the 2014 general elections, the air has been rife with liberal lament. Every day opeds, tweets and Facebook posts eulogise the secular fabric of the country that seemed to hold despite odds until, suddenly, hate-fuelled frenzy took over the country. The flaw with this construct is that the forces that are tearing through the secular fabric today have been lurking in the shadows since the birth of the republic, nurturing an alternative idea of India. Dhirendra K. Jha’s Shadow Armies: Fringe Organizations and Foot Soldiers of Hindutva, profiles eight such groups and their leaders who have travelled a long distance to reach this turn.

Four of these organisations – the Bajrang Dal, the Bhonsala Military School, the Hindu Aikya Vedi and the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat – are affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Others – the Sanatan Sanstha, the Hindu Yuva Vahini, the Sri Ram Sene and Abhinav Bharat – are outside the structure of the RSS, but, according to Jha, are “on the same page” as the Sangh parivar. “Like the RSS and its affiliates, they claim to derive their ideological raison d’être from V.D. Savarkar’s Hindutva:Who is a Hindu?”.

Dhirendra K. Jha
Shadow Armies: Fringe Organisations and Foot Soldier of Hindutva
Juggernaut, 2017

Arguably, this is not entirely accurate. The well-documented differences between Savarkar’s Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS, which deepened in the 1940s, were not merely about tactics. While Savarkar’s tract clearly influenced M. S. Golwalkar’s We or Our Nationhood Defined, once the latter took over as the head of the RSS in 1940, he distanced himself gradually from the more radical bigotry in Savarkar’s writings, and the RSS still maintains that they do not subscribe entirely to Savarkar’s vision.

That said, there is plenty of common ground between the Hindutva of the RSS and that of Savarkar. In fact, the very term Hindutva was coined by Savarkar who described it as the essence of Hindu identity. He asserted that India belongs to Hindus – those who consider it their holy land, carry the ‘blood of the great race of Vedic people’, and conform to ‘Hindu Sanskriti.’ For both rigid Savarkarites and those who have distilled their ideology from his original ideas – ‘Hindu-sthan’ is primarily defined by what they see as the ‘cultural unity’ of its ancient inhabitants, the Hindus – not the principles enshrined in India’s constitution. The shadow armies profiled in this book seek to propagate this problematic definition of nationhood using historical falsehoods, hate speech, and hooliganism.

Another reason why it might not be inaccurate to link Savarkar to the RSS is because over the decades, it has crowded out all other claimants to Savarkar’s legacy – including the Hindu Mahasabha – and emerged as the agenda setter for proponents of Hindutva.

Structurally, in Jha’s book, the RSS comes across as a shape-shifting hydra with an elusive legal identity. This elusiveness is at the heart of the organisation being able to function on multiple ethical and operational levels. Of the RSS bodies profiled in the book, the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat, seeks to bring Sikhism within the fold of Hinduism, denying the former a separate identity. The Bhonsala Military School trains and indoctrinates young men looking to go into the armed forces. The Hindu Aikya Vedi uses real and imagined history to deepen caste and communal divides in Kerala, and, come elections, ‘transfers’ its leader to the BJP to harvest votes from consolidated vote banks. And the Bajrang Dal does, what Jha calls, the RSS’s “dirty work”– its members have been implicated in the destruction of the Babri Masjid, riots in Gujarat, the murders of Graham Staines and his children, and harassment of artists like M. F. Hussain. The larger purpose of all these activities, as documented by Jha, is the same – to ‘reorganise’ and ‘reenergise’ the Hindu society into a consolidated majority that subscribes to a singular idea of India and nationalism.

The organisations outside the RSS share a peculiar relationship of resentment and regard with it. Jha’s book does the important work of drawing out the complexities of these relationships. Colonel Purohit, of Abhinav Bharat – the organisation that allegedly masterminded the Malegaon blasts and other terrorist activities – was a pupil, and later, trainer at the Bhonsala Military School. His co-accused Pragya Thakur, was an ABVP activist. And the founder of Hindu Yuva Vahini, Yogi Adityanath, is the chief minister in Uttar Pradesh. Yet both Abhinav Bharat and Yuva Vahini have had fraught relations with the RSS.

The tussles within the Hindu right are a key part of the larger picture, and often ignored in mainstream narratives. While reporting on the subject I have often been struck by how bitter some of the smaller Hindutva outfits can be towards the RSS, while apparently craving its approval and attention. In my conversations with Vishnu Gupta, the head of Hindu Sena, for instance, I found it hard to keep him on the subject of issues he rakes up for TV cameras. Off camera he would rather be criticising the RSS – for giving up on Ram Mandir, for controlling the Hindutva agenda, for not accommodating groups like his, and several other such “missteps”.

The RSS, for its part, is self-assured in its might, but no less equivocal when it comes to the ‘fringe groups’. I have come across sections within it that strictly oppose the ‘upstarts’ and their violent means, while others are in favour of keeping a channel of support and communication open with them. This dichotomy of collusion and collision is best illustrated by Sri Ram Sene’s quandary as presented by Jha. Led by Pramod Muthalik, a former pracharak, the Sene sought the RSS’s blessings, but the RSS chose to revive a defunct affiliate, Hindu Jagaran Vedike, to compete with the Sene and poach the latter’s leaders, driving Muthalik to destruction.

Dhirendra K. Jha. Courtesy: Author

Jha writes that Muthalik, who had begun to feel stifled in the RSS, left in 2005 and joined forces with other former RSS workers who were in the process of setting up the Sri Ram Sene. Interestingly, unlike Muthalik, the latter group did not break away due to personal discord. They were all from the lower castes and had begun to feel that despite rallying them for votes and groundwork, the Brahmin dominated RSS leadership would not allow them to rise up the ranks. However, eventually they found it difficult to sustain their me-too outfit without the RSS’s support. As Jha puts it, even if the backward cadres revolt, “they hardly look for an ideological alternative.”

This is also reflected in Jha’s account of the Thakur takeover of Adityanath’s Gorakhnath Math. He writes that the dalits and backward castes continue to remain attached to the math, “despite it growing antagonistic and distant from the original concept it was founded on.” Sharp as this observation is, it is of course but one part of the story. The evolution of the RSS’s stance on and work with the backward classes, and the latter’s increasing buy-in into the organisation, have several other aspects, many of them beyond the scope of the book, and this review.

However, one aspect of the draw for thousands of young men who join these organisations is relatively straightforward. From the profiles one can construe how rampant unemployment and underemployment contribute to the growth of these shadow armies. In his profile of the Bajrang Dal, Jha writes, “As it stands today, most Bajrang Dal activists are poorly educated young people who are either unemployed or who regard their jobs as unsatisfactory. Though the leadership belongs to the upper or intermediary castes, a substantial segment of the foot soldiers is drawn from the backward castes and even Dalits.”

In this context it is not difficult to see why young men with abysmal job prospects might take on the tasks set by the leaders of these organisations with fervour, in the hope of a small-time political career, a misplaced sense of purpose and self-worth that otherwise eludes them, or simply impunity to make a little money off crime and extortion.

Starker than the shortfalls of growth and redistribution, is the failure of India’s criminal justice system and rule of law – a failure that underpins Jha’s account of the proliferation of these organisations. He writes about a Bajrang Dal leader in Mangalore who runs a security agency that coerces Muslim businesses into hiring from the agency by threatening them with violence. In Chittorgarh, the police arrest Kashmiri students for allegedly cooking beef in their hostel room at the behest of Bajrang Dal activists, and brandish their powerlessness by claiming they did so to ‘protect’ the students from being beaten. In other places, Jha notes that despite a thoroughly compiled dossier against the Sanatan Sanstha, little action was taken against it; that the National Investigation Agency tried to pressurise public prosecutor Renu Salian into being lenient with the accused in the Malegaon and Ajmer blasts despite damning evidence against the latter; and that the CB-CID’s long pending request to prosecute Adityanath now lies at the latter’s desk in the state home ministry – a portfolio the chief minister has retained for himself.

It is hardly surprising that those who hold democratic institutions in contempt should try to capture or subvert them. What is surprising is how easily it is done. On closer examination therefore, political economy and institutional factors have contributed enormously to the rupture we tend to attribute solely to ideological and social pressures.

Whatever the motivations of its foot soldiers, it is evident that they are being deployed for political and ideological battles. If India’s institutions have failed to disincentivise them, so has the feeble counter-narrative and ideological imagination of the majority of liberals who lament this rampage.

Across profiles Jha also makes a case against opposition parties who chose not to stop these forces for short-term political gains. He reminds us that the Sanatan Sanstha got away despite a Congress government at the centre and in Maharashtra, and once the Congress was out of power, the former chief minister Prithviraj Chavan and the former union home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde publicly blamed each other for showing a “lack of seriousness on the matter”. In Kerala, Jha writes, the CPI(M) opened the door for polarisation, on the one hand, by allying with the radical Muslim leader Abdul Nazer Maudani, and on the other, by portraying its own leader E.M.S Namboodiripad as Lord Krishna in election posters. These are but two of several examples of the self-destructive myopia and cynicism of the political opposition to the BJP and RSS combine – their failure to see that ultimately, as Jha puts it, “the objective of these activities is always the same: to create a false fear among Hindus and stoke the polarisation of their votes in favour of the party leading the forces of Hindutva.”

However, if Jha is implying that political victory is the only goal of Hindutva forces, he would be mistaken. The majority of these shadow armies, advertently or otherwise, are cogs in a larger machinery and political victories are means, not the end for the Hindutva project. The continued efforts of the project’s myriad socio-cultural affiliates, now fortified by BJP’s electoral triumphs, are gradually turning this nation against its own constitutional morality.

While ideological, institutional, and political responses are falling short, Jha’s book shows that, ironically, the Hindutva project is facing considerable resistance from at least some temples and gurudwaras that are afraid of being usurped. But it is hardly enough. To read Shadow Armies is to look a looming threat in the eye and take stock of India’s journey to a crossroad where its future looks terrifyingly different from the dreams of its founding fathers.

Pragya Tiwari studied law as an undergraduate and postgraduate, and is about to complete an executive masters in public administration from the LSE. She’s worked as an editor and writer on politics, culture, and policy for several publications in India, and is currently working on a book on the RSS.

Book Review: Looking Back at the Colonial Origins of Communal and Caste Conflict in India | Steve Wilkinson

The Wire 21 - February 2017

Ajay Verghese’s The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence looks at the colonial past to understand why some parts of India suffer from communal conflict while others suffer from caste conflict.

Policies followed by the British were diverse over the country, and the repercussions of these policies can still be felt in the communal violence or caste violence that an area experiences today. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In the past two decades, economists and political scientists have increasingly turned to India’s colonial past to understand the present. Scholars such as Abhijit Banerjee, Lakshmi Iyer, Nathan Nunn and Shivaji Mukherjee have shown how colonial indirect rule and land administration policies, often implemented with little consideration of local conditions, explain how levels of conflict and economic development vary so much across South Asia today. The very randomness of these colonial policies makes them ideal ‘natural experiments,’ it appears, for estimating the true effects of different kinds of government interventions.
The latest work in this area, Ajay Verghese’s The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India, looks to the colonial past to understand why some parts of India seem to suffer from communal conflicts while others suffer from high levels of caste conflicts. Generations of historians have pointed to religious divide-and-rule policies as perhaps the most distinctive and damaging aspect of British colonial rule. But Verghese’s revisionist thesis emphasises the role of the colonial administration, after 1857, in highlighting caste identities in its provincial governments and policies, most importantly in its land settlement and land administration policies. These provincial policies, he says, led to an increase in caste polarisation and conflict in British India. The cross-cutting nature of these caste cleavages also had at least one unforeseen benefit, however, by helping to defuse larger religious conflicts in the provinces between Hindus and Muslims. In princely India, by contrast, Verghese argues that rulers sought religious legitimacy and also practiced religious discrimination in their administrations, therefore increasing long-term religious grievances and conflicts but in doing so, also helping to reduce caste conflicts. Independence did not represent a sharp break with these patterns, but rather helped to entrench them. Areas that that had been part of British India continued to have higher levels of caste conflict, while former princely states had higher levels of communal conflict.

Ajay Verghese
The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India
Stanford University Press, 2016

The most important evidence for Verghese’s thesis comes from his careful historical analysis of two pairs of cases, the former princely state of Jaipur and the British territory of Ajmer in present-day Rajasthan, and the former princely state of Travancore and British district of Malabar in Kerala. He argues that Jaipur had high levels of Hindu-Muslim tension and conflict before independence, but low levels of caste conflict, and that these levels continue today. Ajmer on the other hand had very low levels of communal conflict before 1947 but higher degrees of caste conflict, and these patterns too have continued after independence. The story in Kerala is much the same. He argues that the British in the Malabar region de-emphasised religion and highlighted caste inequalities and identities, which continue to dominate politics today, while the princely state of Travancore highlighted religious identities and discrimination, which continues to dominate politics in that area. Such differences explain, for instance, why the RSS and BJP have done better in Travancore, and why Naxals are more prevalent in Malabar.
There is a lot to like in this book. Verghese is surely right to highlight the fact that different identities were important at different levels of the colonial Indian state, and that, through the prism of the 1930s and partition, we tend to assume that religion was much more central to colonial policy than it might have been, and that we are too ready to discount the importance of caste and other identities. One other very appealing aspects of the book is the way in which Verghese integrates so many different kinds of evidence – fourteen months of archival research and fieldwork, careful historical and case studies, as well as large-n analysis. Verghese also anticipates some of the possible counter-arguments to his analysis, for instance by conducting a fascinating historical study of the former princely state of Bastar, to explore the reasons why that state has such high levels of tribal and Naxal conflict despite seemingly possessing the (princely state) factors that elsewhere in the book associates with religious conflict.
But, as is often the case with revisionist arguments, Verghese sometimes pushes the evidence a bit too far in support of his thesis. First, outside the province of Madras, where the post-1910 backward caste revolution and Justice Party rule in the 1920s and 1930s make a clear case for the importance of caste identities, it is hard to sustain his overall thesis that caste was more important than religion at the provincial level throughout British India. We can in fact point to a very large number of British provincial policies, from separate electorates in provincial governments, to religious reservations in state police and civil service employment, to language policies declaring the use of Urdu versus Hindi, which did focus on religion rather than caste, and which therefore help to explain the large amount of conflict along religious lines in British India. The UP administration, as Francis Robinson, Paul Brass and others have explored, recruited many staff on the basis of religious preferences before independence – Muslims, with 14% of the population, were guaranteed a third or more of the positions in the police and civil service – but had far fewer preferences on the basis of caste. The same was true in most other provinces. The legislative debates from provinces like Bengal, Punjab, Bihar, and CP before independence also have a lot more questions about religious proportions in government service, and religious conflicts, than they do about caste cleavages, which again suggests that these identities were more important than caste identities to politicians and their constituents. Hindu-dominated elected governments in Congress provinces after 1937 were accused of favouring their co-religionists in a very similar way to the rulers in princely states, as publications such as A.K. Fazlul Huq’s, Muslim Sufferings under Congress Rule (Calcutta, December 1939) make clear.
A second issue is that teasing apart caste from communal motivations in order to prove that princely India equals religious conflict and British India equals caste conflict, is harder than it seems. Verghese’s argument that the Malabar was an area of relative communal peace before independence, for instance, will likely come as a surprise to readers, because the Mappila rebellion of 1921 has frequently been characterised as one of the worst instances of Hindu-Muslim conflict before independence. Verghese recognises that the Malabar is a problematic case for his argument, and he therefore goes to considerable lengths to show that the rising was at its core driven by caste and economic concerns. He uses the fact that many Muslims were low caste converts, that many landlords were Hindu upper castes, and that some low caste Hindus were involved in the uprising (albeit in the initial stages) to argue that, “At its core, the Mappila unrest was agrarian…in essence an expression of long-standing agrarian discontent, which was only intensified by the religious and ethnic identity of the Moplahs and by their political alienation.” This caste interpretation may be plausible, but he provides no conclusive evidence to show that this is the only reading possible for events that clearly had a variety of economic, caste, agrarian and religious motivations, nor for his contention that communal tensions dramatically declined in Malabar after 1921 and 1947, while caste identities remained salient.
A related question, while we are on the subject of categorisation, is how we can we squeeze the fluidity and complexity of history into the hard categories of social science and especially statistical analysis. In his Bastar chapter – my personal favourite – Verghese argues that the exceptionally high violence in pre-1947 Bastar was not really an exception in terms of his overall characterisation of princely India, because Bastar had actually been run for much of the pre-1947 period directly by the British. The British controlled the region’s forests, exploited the natural resources and the tribal populations and, when it suited them, took over the princely state directly for long periods on some pretext or other. Thus, the distinction between the British and the princely is not as clear as we may think. Some British territory was clearly administered differently and with more of a nod to local precedent, interests, rulers and customs than others and on the princely side some areas like Bastar clearly had much less autonomy than others, and were administered directly or indirectly by the British for long stretches.
But if we do accept that distinctions such as British-princely, indirect rule-direct rule, or Zamindari-Ryotwari-Mahalwari land systems are really continuous variables, with lots of regional and local differences in policy and implementation, rather than hard-and-fast categories, then is the recent large-scale use of such variables in statistical analysis –including by Verghese in this book – defensible? In truth, as Verghese’s qualitative analysis makes clear, some states such as Hyderabad had enormous autonomy, others much less so, while in other states rulers were autonomous for some periods but were under heavy British supervision or even direct rule for others, in a way that makes statistical dummy variables seem inappropriate.

Ajay Verghese. Credit: University of California, Riverside, website

A third point, in any study that wants to establish continuity with the past, is the question of whether we are we sure we have got the past right? Verghese seems confident on the basis of his archival work that he has his facts about the past correct, and that others do not. He argues that scholars such as the historian Ian Copland, who have argued that Ajmer was as communally sensitive as Jaipur before independence are just wrong: “Ajmer had only two minor riots prior to Partition” while Jaipur experienced several more riots than listed by Copland.  Verghese himself however has missed a few riots in Ajmer. In addition to the two ‘minor’ riots he lists in 1923 and 1936, by my count there seem to have been at least three more in Ajmer before the end of 1947 – one in 1926, a riot in May 1928 in which 25 Muslims were injured, and one in December 1947 in which more than 50 persons, mainly Muslims were reported killed December 1947. In addition there was a reported Hindu-Muslim riot over a Holi procession at Bhinai, outside Ajmer, listed in the 1912 administration report. There may, of course, be more cases. So overall it is hard to see Ajmer as a complete bastion of communal peace prior to India’s independence, and without that clear difference the ‘continuity’ argument that Verghese makes between levels of communal peace before and after 1947 in Ajmer starts to look more doubtful.
One final question is about the role of post-1947 politicians in determining the pathway that these different regions have taken? If we focus so much on past colonial policies in explaining outcomes such as caste and communal conflicts, or the number of roads and schools in a region, does that absolve the post-1947 politicians, parties, and agents of the state from blame, and what does that mean in terms of our agency to change things in the present? Verghese properly acknowledges this tension, but one thing I would have liked to see more of in the book is a more explicit consideration of how much he thinks the historical institutions he explores gave post-1947 Indians, and Indians today, the freedom to change things, and reduce levels of conflict, Naxal and caste violence today.
Steven Wilkinson is Nilekani Professor of India and South Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Yale University.

Book Review: Audrey Truschke on Cynthia Talbot. The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200-2000

H - Asia

Cynthia Talbot. The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 325 pp. $99.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-11856-0.

Reviewed by Audrey Truschke (Rutgers University - Newark)
Published on H-Asia (February, 2017)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha

Those looking for the true story of Prithviraj Chauhan, an Indian king famous today for his failed stand against the invading Ghurid army in late twelfth-century North India, will not find it in Cynthia Talbot’s The Last Hindu Emperor. At the outset Talbot states that her interest lies not in the hard history of Prithviraj but in the idea of him. Indeed, even the title of Talbot’s book invokes a misleading characterization of Prithviraj. As Talbot tells us, the appellation “the last Hindu emperor,” first applied to Prithviraj by colonial scholar James Tod, is a patently false descriptor.

Talbot argues that what is most interesting and compelling about Prithviraj is not his true story (which we know little about anyway) but rather memories of him and their development over the centuries. She is right, and her book takes the reader on a compelling journey through the shifting sands of stories told about Prithviraj. Prithviraj is one of India’s longest remembered kings, and Talbot traces remembrances of the ruler over the better part of a millennium, from the late twelfth century until the 1940s.

The Last Hindu Emperor proceeds chronologically. Talbot begins in chapter 2 with early mentions of Prithviraj in texts and inscriptions, written in both Sanskrit and Persian, in the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. She devotes chapters 3 to 5 to Rajput memories of Prithviraj from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, largely accessed through the early modern Hindi work, the Prithviraj Raso. Chapters 6 and 7 narrate the colonial treatment of Prithviraj’s tale, especially the Raso, and the epilogue provides some thoughts on memories of the king in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Talbot gives a succinct overview of her book by chapter in the introduction, and so rather than repeat that structure here I will draw out some of the many striking features and threads that run throughout Talbot’s thought-provoking work.

Talbot’s sources are almost entirely textual and yet she does an admirable job reconstructing the social world in which those texts were written and consumed. She discusses Sanskrit and Persian texts, especially in chapters 2 and 3 (she also discusses, in a more limited manner elsewhere in the book, images produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries). But most of all she is preoccupied in the book with the Raso, a Braj Bhasha telling of Prithviraj Chauhan’s life, probably first written in the late sixteenth century for the Rajput elite of Mughal India. It is difficult to get a grip on the Raso. Readers will find some information about the Raso scattered throughout the book, and the rest is outlined in an appendix on the Raso’s textual history. The text exists in roughly 170 manuscripts, which can be roughly divided into four recensions that vary considerably from one another in terms of their content and length. Part of Talbot’s project of reconstructing how Prithviraj came to be remembered as a hero involves tracing the development of certain recensions of the Raso, especially the long recension produced in the Mewar between 1635 and 1703. At other times, the work of reimagining Prithviraj took place outside of the Raso and can be detected by reading texts in other traditions or, later, by reading scholarly articles.

While Talbot’s archive is almost entirely restricted to the written word, she executes a sensitive reading that allows her to furnish a nuanced picture of the communities that wrote and read such works. Especially rich is Talbot’s description of the Rajput elites for whom the Raso was a central text beginning in the late sixteenth century. Talbot underscores that these elites lived in Mughal India, and accordingly she turns to Mughal court texts, especially Abu al-Fazl’s A’in-i Akbari, to help understand the value that Rajput elites found in remembering Prithviraj (chapter 3). In chapters 3 and 4, she offers some close readings of sections of the Raso in order to delve into its Rajput martial ethos. She discusses, for example, how the text focuses on Prithviraj’s many samants (military subordinates) who came from different Rajput lineages and thereby consolidated an aristocratic Rajput identity. The Rajput community was neither uniform nor stable, however, and Talbot gives attention to such nuance especially in her discussion of how the Raso was rewritten in Mewar in the early eighteenth century to showcase Sisodiya superiority.

While overall Talbot traces the development of the historical memory of Prithviraj from the twelfth century to the Raso to Tod and to the present, she also allows herself tangents at times, and these are some of the most interesting tidbits in the book. Talbot emphasizes that there were competing images of Prithviraj at any given moment in history, and she recognizes that some images fell away as time went on. She pauses to describe some of the failed visions of Prithviraj, such as fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Sanskrit texts that envision him as an incompetent, even a lazy, king (chapter 2). In chapter 6, she details Sufi hagiographical memories about Prithviraj interfering with Chishti religious activities and oral Alha legends that portray Prithviraj as an oppressor, rather than as a savior. Such passages—almost asides in the grand narrative arc of the book—are rich in detail and well worth the reader’s full attention.

Talbot stresses identity shifts throughout the nearly eight-hundred-year period that she covers in the book. Often she talks about how the memory of Prithviraj changed. He began as king of Ajmer and later became remembered as king of Delhi, for example. Given the importance of Delhi from the thirteenth century onward as a political center in North India, this shift was critical to Prithviraj’s longevity as a site of memory. Talbot is at her best when she discusses how the identity of those who found it valuable to remember Prithviraj changed over time. She traces, for example, how the Raso morphed from being a text for elite Rajputs in the Mughal Empire to being relevant across Rajasthan through the work of Tod, an early nineteenth-century colonial figure who was quite taken with Rajput culture. Other British thinkers in the nineteenth century treated the Raso as the first work written in Hindi (as opposed to Hindustani or Urdu), which made the Raso an important work of cultural heritage for Hindi-speaking Hindus, an even broader community. Starting in the late nineteenth century, Prithviraj’s tale became coopted into a religious patriotism and was recast, largely in vernacular Indian languages, as a story for all Hindus that crystallized Hindu identity in opposition to a common Muslim enemy. Talbot argues that these shifts were man-made, and she identifies the relevant historical actors where possible. But she also tells parts of the tale where the historical causality remains murky, and thereby she allows her readers to glimpse the evolution of historical memory even when we cannot see who was operating behind the scenes.

Talbot offers an insightful discussion of colonial-era views on Prithviraj, espoused by both British colonialists and Indians from a range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, that challenges some common assumptions about the nature of colonial knowledge. As Talbot points out, basic identity markers do not indicate what a given nineteenth- or twentieth-century individual thought about Prithviraj and the Raso. Tod, a British agent, understood the Raso as a genuine historical account of Prithviraj that dated to the late twelfth century (chapter 6). Tod’s views held sway for fifty years until they were repudiated by Kaviraj Shyamaldas, an Indian with no formal historical training who could not even write in English (chapter 7). Yet Shyamaldas used the tools of Western historiography to make a case that most historians still accept today: the Raso dates to the sixteenth century and is not a reliable resource on Prithviraj’s life. Many Indians (and some Westerners) cried foul at Shyamaldas’s revelations, and today, as Talbot points out, English-medium and Indian vernacular histories of Prithviraj tend to treat the Raso in distinct ways. One larger point that comes out of this discussion is that crude ideas about colonial agents misunderstanding Indian texts and Indians protecting their cultural heritage do not help us understand the historical memory of Prithviraj. Talbot uses a complicated historical toolset to make sense of this delightfully convoluted historiographical tale.

One of Talbot’s strongest and more far-reaching arguments in The Last Hindu Emperor is that older historical memories make claims on invocations in the present. For instance, for hundreds of years, people have remembered that Prithviraj ruled Delhi, and yet the older memory that he ruled Ajmer thrives still. Talbot opens the book by discussing a statue of Prithviraj in a memorial park in Ajmer. Prithviraj has been cast into the unlikely role of a hero over time, but the basic story that he was in fact killed by the Ghurids has not been altered much throughout time (although the details have shifted in various retellings). In fact, some versions of the Raso dwell on the costly military conflict between the Chauhans and Jaychand’s kingdom of Kanauj—the major military confrontation of the Hindi text according to Talbot and an all-Hindu conflict, to use modern terms—in order to explain why such a great warrior was weak enough to later be killed by Muhammad Ghuri. Many modern South Asianists work with ideas about historical memory, and Talbot usefully outlines how new memories do not unfold against a blank slate but rather carry the weight and, sometimes, the details of prior reiterations with them.

My criticisms of Talbot’s The Last Hindu Emperor are few and far between. One wonders if she sells short modern visions of Prithviraj. She says explicitly at several points that memories of Prithviraj are never singular but rather always varied, even today. Yet in the epilogue she seems to flatten the modern-day Prithviraj, going so far as to say, speaking of the long recension version of the Raso, that “its complex meanings have been muted and mutated” in nationalist visions of the king (p. 275). Such nit-picking criticisms are a testament to a great book that is rich in detail and even richer in its overarching arguments about historical memory and the relationship between social identities and texts.

India: Omair Ahmad Goes Ga-Ga Over Nalini Rajan's Graphic Novel ‘Story of Secularism’

The Wire

The Timely ‘Story of Secularism’

By Omair Ahmad on 29/01/2017

The Story of Secularism is a great introduction to a complex topic and a good way for young readers to start thinking about a difficult subject.

Credit: Priyanka Kumar

At a session dedicated to explaining the RSS at the Jaipur Literary Festival this year, the moderator, Pragya Tiwari, asked about secularism. Manmohan Vaidya, the All India Prachar Pramukh, or media in charge, responded by dismissing the term in two ways – by saying that it was merely a descriptor used to malign a certain set of people and keep them out of power, and that, since India had never had a theocratic state, secularism was neither needed or demanded. This response is illustrative of the confusion around the term.

Nalini Rajan
The Story of Secularism: 15th-21st Century
AuthorsUpFront, 2016

This is what makes Nalini Rajan’s, The Story of Secularism: 15th -21th Century, illustrated by Priyanka Kumar, so timely. The book is meant to be an introduction to the concept of secularism, looking at how it is practiced in France and the US, but primarily focussing on how these relate to Indian conditions. It is also meant to be a ‘graphic book’ – although what this means is unclear. A graphic novel would have meant that the whole text is explained largely through illustrations. Unfortunately while Kumar’s illustrations are excellent, they are, at best, either used to introduce or conclude a point. Given their quality, it is a shame, as it is possible to imagine the whole book as a graphic novel – in the style of Joe Sacco, or David Mazzucchelli’s adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass.
The book begins with examples from Vijayanagara and the Mughal Empire, illustrating how power in undemocratic societies was deeply dependent on the vagaries of the rulers, thus it was less a principle than a whim. The choice to leave out Ashoka – who far preceded these rulers – is a little odd if we are supposed to look at secularism in history. As Sten Widmalm shows in his book on democratic roots in India, Ashoka’s evocation of dhamma – without defining the details of that dhamma – allowed the accommodation of religious difference without it impinging on citizenship. This is the kernel and core of the secularism that Rajan is talking about.
This chapter ends with Rajan speaking about three principles that are negotiated in a secular state, that is state neutrality, equal citizenship, and freedom of religion, ending with:

Credit: Priyanka Kumar

Remember, there is no ideal secular state. There is always room for negotiation in a secular state. If one emphasises the principle of state neutrality or equal citizenship, one is forced to tone down the principle of religious freedom, and vice versa.

These are excellent points, and well worth remembering.
The next chapter, on ‘Secularism in France’, could possibly be better called ‘Secularism in Europe’, since major actors and their contribution such as Martin Luther, John Calvin and Karl Marx were anything but French, and their actions and writing are – as Rajan demonstrates – central to the ideas of the French Republic. It is somewhat strange to see Voltaire – with his well-documented anti-Semitism (“in his Treatise on Toleration (sic), 1763, wrote that the Jews are, “the most detestable [nation] ever to have sullied the earth…”) – as part of the exemplars of secularism. Luther and Calvin’s vicious sectarianism also goes unmentioned. For the sake of amusement it is worth reading the Catholic Encyclopaedia on Mohammed, which happily quotes Luther’s vicious diatribe against Mohammed (“a devil and first-born child of Satan”).
Rajan’s contention that, “Perhaps also no other country has faced challenges to secularism in the present day as has France,” is also a little funny. If you visit France you will find lovely churches and cathedrals, all maintained at public expense and free to the public. When a state spends more than 700 million Euros per year for the maintenance of the places of worship of one particular community it has limited right to call itself secular – either in the equal treatment of those from religious community or in separation of state and church. That aside, Rajan’s articulation about the current issues related to secularism in France, especially related to the hijab, is both well-told and detailed. The role of women’s organisations such “Ni Putes, Ni Soumises (‘Neither Whores, Nor Doormats’)” is important and helps give a good example of organisations that are able to challenge dominant discourses, whether from their own communities, or from the state.

Credit: Priyanka Kumar

The next chapter is on the United States, which is somewhat odd, as Rajan has previously mentioned that the US Revolution preceded (and, in fact, inspired) the later French Revolution. One of the defining factors of the US war of independence is the establishment of the first modern, constitution-based, democracy – one which has existed relative stably since 1776, unlike France’s history of revolutions, coups, and counter-revolutions. At the centre of US constitution are two immensely important concepts – the first, being the articulation of equal rights of all people, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…), and the second, the separation of church and state.
Although Rajan mentions that the second principle became embedded and actualised into law rather late, it is worth remembering that the original British “pilgrims” who founded US colonies were also fleeing the religious repression they experienced in their own countries. The framers of the US constitution, therefore, spent considerable effort in creating that distance. It is also worth noting that Mohammed III of Morocco became the first head of state to recognise the United States. While it is possible to overstate the consequences of this, the US history of dealing with people of differing faiths is a rich and long one.
As Rajan shows, this has not necessarily worked out so well in practice. She focuses on particular legal cases, especially those challenging the teachings of Darwinian evolution and its challengers. This makes for great reading, but there is a more obvious example of religious discrimination. In the more than two centuries of the country’s existence, it has elected 45 presidents. All except one were Protestant Christians – John F. Kennedy Jr – and he was assassinated. The prejudice against Catholics is obvious in the racist undercurrent in jokes against Italians, the Irish, the Poles and the Hispanic community and has a long and violent history. When the Pope contributed a stone for the Washington monument, political rebels sank the boat carrying it in the middle of a river. For some reason Rajan does not remark on this dominance by a particular sect of Christians controlling access to the most powerful positions in a country for so long.
After these overviews of the French and American cases, Rajan dives back into India. Using the examples that she has presented in the sections on France and the US, Rajan turns her attention to three major anti-secular arguments: (i) that Indic spiritual traditions are very different from European ones, (ii) that communalism is a new thing and that communities could live in peace without secularism, and (iii) that in practice the state can never be neutral between religions. Taking apart these arguments, Rajan does a commendable job in showing how these arguments depend on cherry-picking facts while ignoring large amounts of verifiable history.

Credit: Priyanka Kumar

Lastly she focuses on two main issues – that of religious conversion and the Uniform Civil Code and women’s rights, giving a detailed overview of the debates.
This is a great little book, informed by the 15 years that Rajan has been teaching the subject at the Asian College of Journalism. If it has lacunae they emerge out of two problems – firstly this is a hard subject to simplify and as demonstrated above, you can easily leave out many, many interesting details. Secularism, as Rajan herself states, has been pursued differently by different polities, with no perfect solution. The second problem is that Rajan’s writing reflects a certain Socratic model of question and answer teaching. This is fine in a classroom and is to be recommended. It works less well in book form, as the recipient of the lecture cannot debate, question or ask for an explanation, as they would in an academic setting.
That said, this is a great introduction to a complex topic and a good way for young readers to start thinking about a difficult subject that we will continue to debate for many years to come.

Book Review: Vollmer on Hofmann, 'The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915-1952'

H-Net

Reto Hofmann. The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915-1952. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. 224 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8014-5341-0.

Reviewed by Klaus Vollmer (Ludwig Maximilian University)
Published on H-Nationalism (December, 2016)
Commissioned by Cristian Cercel

Reto Hofmann has written an illuminating volume which is an original contribution not only to the study of the reception of Italian fascism in a non-Western context, but also to global intellectual history and the history of Japanese thought and culture in the prewar era. "Fascism needs to be examined through its relations" (p. 2), Hofmann claims in his introduction. While in previous research this has most often meant looking at fascism's relation to other ideologies (e.g., Marxism, liberalism, etc.), Hofmann intends to examine the relationship between fascisms in different national contexts, taking Italy and Japan as examples. This approach is significant because it "expose(s) a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this ideology" (p. 2), namely the contradiction between particularism (fascism as an ideology in a specific country, i.e., Italy) and a universalist claim, as fascism aimed to overcome the crisis brought about by capitalist modernity and which had global effects in the first decades of the twentiethth century. Hofmann's study convincingly demonstrates that the discourse on fascism in Japan "simultaneously emanated from Italy and emerged domestically" (p. 3) and that Japanese intellectuals, politicians, and right-wing activists were very much aware of the problems that emerged from the contradiction mentioned above. How to strictly insist on the cultural uniqueness of Japan while at the same time acknowledging the power of fascist ideology to address and possibly solve the problems of modernity and capitalism that had affected Japanese society was an issue occupying the minds of many intellectuals of almost all political orientations. In fact, Hofmann's detailed narrative drawing on a wide variety of sources--books, academic and popular journals, newspapers, and visual materials--reminds us to what extent fascism was at the center of debate in the 1920s and 1930s. 

In reevaluating fascism as a global ideology discussed in Japan during these decades, it is thus more adequate to conceive fascism as a process rather than a clear-cut model with fixed elements. In this way it becomes possible to view the assertions of Japanese uniqueness and its vocabulary ("national polity," kokutai; "imperial way," ôdô) and even the nominal rejection of (Italian) fascism as "part of the fascist logic itself, its drive to generate a politics of cultural authenticity" (p. 3). So when, for example, Japanese intellectuals questioned the need for a leader like Mussolini or Hitler because according to their view the emperor system provided the basis for politics more adequately in Japan, this should not be taken as a rejection of fascism in general: "they regarded fascism as open-ended, as a new politics of the right that began with Mussolini but that would find different, and possibly more sophisticated, expressions in Japan" (p. 3).

The slim but densely written volume contains five chapters. After the introduction in which the author explains his approach and assumptions, some of which were summarized above, the first chapter introduces the reader to Shimoi Harukichi (1883-1954), today a little-known Japanese poet and writer. As a long-term resident of Italy, where he moved in 1915, he later became an admirer of Italian fascism and an acquaintance of Mussolini. In 1917 he toured the front and even took part in the occupation of Fiume in 1919, where he worked as liaison for Gabriele D'Annunzio. In Hofmann's narrative, which revisits Shimoi’s later activities frequently in other chapters, he acts as the "mediator of fascism" to Japan. On many occasions, Shimoi subsequently served as tour guide and interpreter in both countries. Chapters 2 and 3 ("The Mussolini Boom, 1928-1931" and "The Clash of Fascisms, 1931-1937"), covering the first decade of the turbulent Shôwa (1926-89) era, outline in detail the intellectual debates centering on the interpretation of Italian fascism and the possibilities of adapting fascism to Japanese society. Chapter 4 ("Imperial Convergence: The Italo-Ethopian War and Japanese World-Order-Thinking, 1935-1936"), which is a revised version of an article published by Hofmann recently in the Journal of Contemporary History, presents a close reading of the complexities involved in the Italo-Ethopian war, which highlighted the expansionist ambitions of Italian fascism. In Japan, not only the camp of right-wing Pan-Asianists but also the general public condemned the brutal military attack on Ethopia that smacked of old-fashioned European colonialism and imperialism and temporarily even disrupted diplomatic relations between the countries. On the other hand, this was a moment when the debate on fascism became linked more closely to broader questions of international relations. For some right-wing intellectuals and bureaucrats, Mussolini's war in Africa dealt a welcome blow to the world order of international liberalism dominated by Anglo-American rule and foreshadowed the fascist Axis and its policies that formed later in the 1930s. This is the topic of chapter 5 ("Fascism in World History, 1937-1943"), which discusses the Japanese discourse on the alliance with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, again employing a wide variety of sources ranging from philosophical debate to propaganda materials which introduced Italian culture and history to broader Japanese audiences. The short epilogue ("Fascism after the New World Order, 1943-1952") traces the fate of the concept during the occupation era and argues "that the long-standing Japanese association with fascism became an inconvenient truth for the Allies after the war, when Americans decided to rehabilitate Japan as their best friend in Asia in the fight against communism" (p. 7). While the concept of fascism as a solution to the problems of global capitalist modernity had carried a sense of open-endedness and the potential to adapt to specific cultural and historical contexts from the late 1920s to the wartime era, it was now largely relegated to the politics of interwar Italy. In regard to Japan the term "ultranationalism" gained universal acceptance although Marxist and left-wing circles continued to discuss prewar and wartime Japan as "emperor system fascism." 

Hofmann has drawn on a large number of primary sources from Italian and Japanese archives and secondary sources in English. Given his multilingual background and his linguistic competence, it is surprising and at times even disturbing, however, that Hofmann hardly mentions any German-language scholarship, naturally abundant when it comes to studies on Axis politics, but also on Japanese relations to Nazi Germany and fascist Italy or, to give one more specific example, on Japanese debates regarding the issue of Grossraumpolitik and the thought of Carl Schmitt that Hofmann discusses in chapter 5 (pp. 133-134). From the perspective of this reviewer, who specializes in Japanese history, it would have been mandatory to refer to, for example, the seminal work of Urs Matthias Zachmann on the discourse on international law and its reappropriation and application in interwar and early postwar Japan or the volume on Karl Haushofer and the reception of his ideas of geopolitics in Japan by Christian Spang.[1] Both monographs were published in 2013 (the bibliography mentions an English-language paper by Spang published in 2006). It is unfortunate that the author has not consulted or even mentioned these and other recent scholarly works in German extensively treating issues that Hofmann elaborates on in his volume. Besides Max Weber's venerable Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922) and Wolfgang Schieder's recent book on German visitors to Mussolini, the bibliography contains only two, rather dated, works in German, by Bernd Martin and Theo Sommer.[2] These shortcomings notwithstanding, this book is a timely contribution to the ongoing reevaluation and contextualization of fascist discourse in the first half of the twentieth century and also a welcome addition to the study of the Axis from the point of view of global history.

Notes

[1]. Urs Matthias Zachmann, Völkerrechtsdenken und Außenpolitik in Japan, 1919-1960 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2013); Christian W. Spang, Karl Haushofer und Japan. Die Rezeption seiner geopolitischen Theorien in Deutschland und Japan (Munich: Iudicium, 2013).

[2]. Wolfgang Schieder, Mythos Mussolini. Deutsche in Audienz beim Duce (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsberlag, 2013); Bernd Martin, Deutschland und Japan im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Vom Angriff auf Pearl Harbor bis zur deutschen Kapitulation (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1969); Theo Sommer, Deutschland und Japan zwischen den Mächten, 1935-1940. Vom Antikominternpakt zum Dreimächtepakt. Eine Studie zur diplomatischen Vorgeschichte des Zweiten Weltkriegs (Tübingen: Mohr, 1962).

Madhav Godbole's 'Secularism: India at a Crossroads' - Review by Jatin Desai

Free Press Journal

Secularism: India at a crossroads- Review
— By Jatin Desai | Oct 23, 2016


Secularism: India at a Crossroads: Review
Author: Madhav Godbole
Publisher: Rupa
Price: Rs. 995
Pages: 429

Political analysts believe that since mid-eighties a systematic, organised campaign began to defame word Secularism. Words like Pseudo-Secularist were used by the right wing leaders to charge Congress and other parties. What BJP means by Pseudo-secularist is that these parties are not secular in its true sense but it is a mean to exploit vote bank. This is BJP’s answer to Congress’s contention that BJP is interested in Hindu communalism and in polarizing Indian society.

Threat to secularism is a threat to Indian nationhood. India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was aware of this reality. He was categorical when he addressed officers of Indian Foreign Service in 1959 and said, “the danger to India, mark you, is not communism. It is Hindu right-wing communalism.”

Also Read : Democracy and Dissenters

Madhav Godbole’s new book Secularism: India at a Crossroads throws light on the importance of secularism. Mr. Godbole was former union home secretary. The book looks at the constitutional and administrative issues the nation has faced since the Indian Constitution came into existence. It will be interesting to know that his lecture on Is India a Secular Nation? organised by the Maharashtra branch of Indian Institute of Public Administration was cancelled couple of days before he was to speak on April 4, 2016.

Since Narendra Modi led government came to power in May 2014, various right wing fringe groups started questioning secularism. A BJP member has moved a private member’s bill in the Lok Sabha in 2015 to change the word ‘India’ to ‘Hindustan’ in the Indian constitution. Supreme Court has already made it clear that secularism is a part of basic structure of the Constitution and so parliament will not be able to amend or dilute the secularism. Even in the Constitution Assembly, lengthy debate took place on the use of word secularism in the Constitution.

However, differences prevailed and it could not be agreed. But, the provisions of the Constitution make it abundantly clear that it is meant to be secular. The Indian freedom struggle was secular and the spirit reflects in various articles of the Constitution.

The word secular became part of the preamble of the Constitution only in 1976, during emergency, through a Constitution amendment. “For a country to be secular, it is not enough that its Constitution is secular and its government respects all religions alike or is equidistant from all religions, or does not give the status of a State religion to any one religion. It is equally necessary that its society is secular and its individual citizens are secular”.

The author is clear, for a successful secular state, secular society is needed and so creation of secular society needs to be priority. The author argues in favour of separation of religion from politics. He says that founding fathers and mothers of the Constitution had fully realized the importance of separation of religion from politics. Unfortunately, till today it has not materialized.
In July 1993, P V Narasimha Rao Government introduced the Constitution (Eightieth) Amendment Bill for the separation of religion from the politics and the Representation of People (Amendment) Bill. Unfortunately, it did not get enough support and was ultimately withdrawn.

In the Constitution Assembly, Tajamul Hussain suggested an interesting amendment. He said, “No person shall have any visible sign or mark or name and no person shall wear any dress whereby his religion may be recognized needs to be added in article 19”.
Hussain was aware that his proposal will not be accepted. But, had it been accepted it would have made a lot of difference. Mr. Godbole suggested two electoral reforms and they are 1, Making
voting compulsory and 2, Making 50 per cent plus 1 vote necessary to win.

He feels unless all eligible voters participate in elections, the accountability of political parties cannot be established fully.
Voting is compulsory in around 30 nations including Australia, Brazil, Belgium, Argentina, Austria and Switzerland. But, the issue is making voting compulsory also takes away ones right to not to vote. None of the Above (NOTA) cannot be seen as an alternate to not to vote.

To compel someone to vote can be seen as suppression of his/her rights. It is also not practical in a large country like India. I agree with the spirit behind his second suggestion but it is also quite impractical. It may become reality in small country.

In fact, in our neighbouring Maldives and Afghanistan to get elected President must get more than 50 per cent vote. Now there is a talk to ban on triple talaq. Supreme Court is hearing the matter. Muslim women have come forward and challenged the medieval law.

At the same time, Law Commission of India has sought public opinion on Uniform Civil Code and ending anti-women customs in three major religions. Radical Muslims have, as expected, opposed the reforms.

It will be interesting to know how the debate on these issues took place in the Constitution Assembly. Nehru was for the Uniform Civil Code. Some of the debates of the Constitution Assembly are reproduced by the author.

During the deliberations M R Masani, Hansa Mehta and Amrita Kaur sent their note saying, “We are not satisfied with the acceptance of a Uniform Civil Code as an ultimate social objective set out in clause 41 as determined by the majority of the sub-committee. One of the factors that have kept India back from advancing to nationhood has been the existence of personal laws based on religion which keep the nation divided into water-tight compartments in many aspects of life. We are of the view that Uniform Civil Code should be guaranteed to the Indian people within a period of 5 or 10 years in the same manner as the right to free and compulsory primary education has been guaranteed by clause 24 within 10 years.” We lost opportunity then and it should not be lost now.

Gudavarthy's review of From The Margins To The Mainstream: Institutionalising Minorities In South Asia by Gorringe, Jeffery and Waghmore

The Book Review, VOLUME XL NUMBER 6 June 2016

Radicalizing Institutionalization

Ajay Gudavarthy

FROM THE MARGINS TO THE MAINSTREAM: INSTITUTIONALISING MINORITIES IN SOUTH ASIA
Edited by Hugo Gorringe , Roger Jeffery and Suryakant Waghmore
Sage, Delhi, 2016, pp. 332, Rs. 950.00


The process of institutionalizing radical protest politics and their demands include a swathe of dilemmas and complexities that include the possibility of de-radicalizing and blocking the political and collective sense that such politics grounds them on. Thus, radical politics on the one hand wishes to witness institutionalization and mainstreaming of their politics to redefine political landscapes, while on the other, they wish to continue as radical protest politics maintaining the fervour and the process of wedging open social narratives that had little space hitherto. It has often been witnessed that political movements that institutionalize themselves in law, policy, and formal institutions carry the anxiety of deradicalizing themselves. The protests get entangled in legal dilemmas as has happened with the sub-caste politics, where mass mobilization was replaced by technical detailing of who is or is not eligible for reservations, or as has been the case with domestic violence where with 468(a) the issue was individualized, and became a matter of accessing the judiciary, or it could be the way sexual minorities have been waiting for Art 377 to be repealed with the judiciary oscillating between legalizing and criminalizing sexual preferences. In all of these cases debate on power dynamics including dominant social mores, in a sense, was replaced by arguments on the vagaries of procedural justice and nitty-gritty of legal proceedings. In this sense, law and policy can be deeply depoliticizing and have de-radicalizing effects; however, institutionalization remains an important goalpost to avoid the tenuous nature of political and social battles and to achieve the universalizing potential of justice in each of these demands. The volume under review opens up this labyrinthine terrain for interrogation in assuming ‘institutionalization as a contested process rather than a simple transition’ (p. XXXIV). Alongside the formal-legal and institutional-dynamics lie the informal public spaces that include language, popular symbols, codes, and idioms that the dominant social groups instituionalize and imbricate with practices that legitimize their own modes of existence. Here, the threat is often, as the editors point out in their introduction, one of backlash from the dominant groups, which can ‘take the form of repression, co-option or negotiation’. These processes are more live, everyday and lack the anonymity of the institutional facelessness. For instance, when Dalits belonging to the Madiga sub-caste decided to use their caste tag as part of their surname, what was hitherto an often used abuse became a way ...

source URL: http://www.thebookreviewindia.org/articles/archives-5029/2016/June/6/radicalizing-institutionalization.html

Gutsy and brave Rana Ayyub blows the whistle with her under cover investigation on Gujarat - her book 'Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover-Up' released in Delhi to a packed audience

[Fantastic book release of Rana Ayyub's 'Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover-Up'to a jam packed audience at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi on the 27th May 2016. Hundreds were seen standing and or sitting on the floor since there was no room. This is a very important book that people across India should read. Secularist circles in India should celebrate this gutsy journalist with pat on her back for self publishing this breath taking investigation. Bravo Rana, you deserve a medal of honour from the civil society. Hoping people are listening - Editor, Communalism Watch]

Picture via twitter

QuickReview: Rana Ayyub's book Gujarat Files is a tale of gritty journalism, with a heart
Somi Das @Somi_Das | 27 May 2016

http://www.catchnews.com/narendra-modi/quickreview-rana-ayyub-s-book-gujarat-files-is-a-tale-of-gritty-journalism-with-a-heart-1464338163.html

An Excerpt from Rana Ayyub's "Gujarat Files" - The Caravan
http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/lone-soldier-excerpt-rana-ayyub-gujarat-files

How Rana Ayyub had to become Maithili Tyagi for her investigations in Gujarat - The Scroll
http://scroll.in/article/808702/how-rana-ayyub-had-to-become-maithili-tyagi-for-her-investigations-in-gujarat



Listen to excerpts on this facebook video:


or the longer recording up at youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7rVgzqneyg

Review of Shamsul Islam's book 'Muslims Against Partition: Revisiting the Legacy of Allah Bakhsh and Other Patriotic Muslims' by Professor Anand Teltumbde

Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 51, Issue No. 18, 30 Apr, 2016
Book Reviews
Sinners of the Partition
Anand Teltumbde

Anand Teltumbde (tanandraj[at]gmail.com) is a writer and civil rights activist with the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai.

Muslims against Partition: Revisiting the Legacy of Allah Bakhsh and Other Patriotic Muslims by Shamsul Islam; Pharos Media, 2015; pp 216, ₹250.

Think of the darkness and the great coldIn this valley, which resounds with misery.

— Brecht, The Threepenny Opera

Those who have somehow reconciled with the mythologised history of ancient India will surely be surprised by the continuing trend of myth-making even in modern times. Partition of India has largely been covered by thick layers of deliberate untruths to construct communal narratives demonising Muslims. Not many people know that a majority of Muslims did not approve of the idea and large numbers of them actually opposed it. These facts, however, remain largely unexplored except in a few scholarly treatises. The present book by a noted scholar and a progressive activist-thinker Shamsul Islam, devoted to exposing these truths to the larger public, is not only a welcome contribution but also a timely one, given that Hindutva forces are falsifying our history with a fascist zeal.

False Two-nation Theory

Pakistan is a product of the infamous “two-nation theory” that urged Hindus and Muslims to constitute two nations, instead of a single unified nation. It is based on the cultural, political, religious, economic and social dissimilarities between them. In spite of living together for centuries, they could not forget their individual cultures and civilisation.

The question is not about the invalidity of the two-nation theory, it is about who originated it. India’s right-wing establishment projects Muslims, who have been its biggest victims, as the originators of this idea. The truth is that it was actively propagated ideologically and organisationally by Hindu nationalist leaders much before any organisation of the Muslims was born and was more vigorously pursued during later years, culminating into partition.

It is clear that the upper caste/class Hindu elites could not stomach a history of Muslim rulers for nearly half a millennium (from the 12th to the 17th century) and dreamt of re-establishing their supremacy when the British left India. While they wanted to see India re-emerge as an economic power and adopt capitalism, they were equally nostalgic about their status in the bygone era. There was thus a reform movement to tinker with customs and traditions without affecting the basic structure of the classical Hindu society. In this schema, they perceived the presence of the Muslims as an obstacle. This anti-Muslim sentiment existed even before the emergence of the Hindu Mahasabha, the extremist torchbearer of Hindu interests. The book provides details of how the Hindu nationalists had propounded the idea of the two-nation theory much before the Muslim League practitioners came to emulate them.

Islam projects Raj Narain Basu (1826–99), the maternal grandfather of Aurobindo Ghosh, and his close associate Naba Gopal Mitra (1840–94) as the co-fathers of the two-nation theory and Hindu nationalism in India (p 55). Basu, as he observes, not only propagated the superiority of Hinduism over other religions but also justified casteism. He was the first person to conceive of the idea of Maha Hindu Samiti (All India Hindu Association) and helped in the formation of Bharat Dharma Mahamandal, a precursor of Hindu Mahasabha. Naba Gopal had organised Hindu melas from 1867 to 1880 and propagated the idea of national unity on the basis of Hindu religion. He believed that through this organisation Hindus would be able to establish an Aryan nation in India (Singh 2000). The noted historian R C Majumdar rightly called him the progenitor of the two-nation theory, half a century before Jinnah came out with his. These activities inspired many Bengali intellectuals like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (father of neo-Hinduism) and Aurobindo Ghosh to reinforce the ideas of the Hindu nation.

Before any Muslims claimed division on religious grounds, the Hindu nationalists had several movements during colonial times to segregate people according to their religion. The most prominent of them was the Arya Samaj founded in April 1875 whose dominant mission was shuddhi (purification), which was reconversion of Muslims and Christians into Hinduism (Berglund 2004). The prejudice was evident in the term shuddhi as though Islam and Christianity were impure.

Many a people who were associated with the Arya Samaj began mobilising the Hindu masses. In Punjab, Lala Lajpat Rai, a prominent Arya Samaj leader, who would emerge as a leader of one of the militant factions of the Congress, known by the triumvirate—Lal-Bal-Pal (Lal for Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal for Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Pal for Bipin Chandra Pal), was actively involved in organising Hindu sabhas in Punjab and later the Hindu Mahasabha. Lokmanya Tilak, the other leader of the triumvirate, belonged to the Chitpawan lineage in Maharashtra which revolted against the British to regain its lost kingdom in Peshwai (rule of Peshawas). Tilak is credited as the fountainhead of the idea of Hindutva, developed later formally by V D Savarkar. He had constructed the “Aryan theory of race,” claiming a white racial stock for upper caste Indians and accepted Vedas as their core literature. Tilak was also the first to try and unite a large section of the masses around Brahminical leadership around the celebration of Ganesh festival to win back the popular participation of lower caste people who participated in Muharram festival, under the influence of Sufi saints (Morey and Tickell 2005). Later Tilak went on to launch the celebration of the birth anniversary (jayanti) of Shivaji, not as a national hero but as one who broke the Mughal hold on Western India and opened the way for rampage of Maratha armies through much of India. Tilakites’ projection of Swami Ramdas, a Brahmin, as Shivaji’s guru, reflected the re-establishment of Brahminical hegemony. Tilak’s nationalism thus had strong undercurrents of Brahmanical supremacy and dislike of Muslims. Similar anti-Muslim prejudice, albeit not so blatant, has been highlighted by scholars in Bipin Chandra Pal. Even other so-called moderate leaders of the Congress were imbued with a Hindu bias, thus gradually alienating the Muslims. Madan Mohan Malaviya and B S Munje, for instance, lent support in creating a communal divide in India.

Organisations for the Divide

It is generally recorded that the foundation of Hindu Mahasabha in 1915 was in response to the founding of the Muslim League in 1906 in Dhaka and the subsequent Morley–Minto reforms of 1909 that granted communal representation to the Muslims. But this is completely erroneous as seen before. A brief history of the Hindu Mahasabha is that its precursors, Hindu sabhas, had sprung up in Bengal since 1867 and in Lahore since 1882, even before the birth of the Indian National Congress. In Punjab, these sabhas were established in almost every district by 1906. On the foundation of these Hindu sabhas, Lala Lajpat Rai, Lal Chand and Shadi Lal founded the Punjab Hindu Sabha in 1909 (Bapu 2013). The Hindu Mahasabha was founded much later in 1914 in Amritsar with its headquarters in Haridwar, where it held its first session in 1915. V D Savarkar, after his release from the Cellular Jail in 1921 as per the terms of his clemency that he would not participate in any revolutionary activities, seemingly devoted himself to help the colonial regime by promoting Hindu communalism. He wrote a treatise, Hindutva, espousing Hindu nationalism. As is well known, the Hindu Mahasabha catalysed the birth of another organisation, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925, on the pattern of the fascist organisation in Italy to execute the project.

The Muslim League was born from a literary movement begun at the Aligarh Muslim University, called the Muhammadan Educational Conference. It was founded by Syed Ahmad Khan in 1886, with a self-imposed ban on discussing politics. At its December 1906 conference in Dhaka, the conference removed this ban and adopted a resolution to form an All India Muslim League as a political party, with the objective of defining and advancing the civil rights of Indian Muslims. Pakistan figured much later in its agenda when in its 1940 conference at Lahore, Mohammad Ali Jinnah justified the two-nation theory and creation of Pakistan, as the homeland for the Muslims. The Lahore Resolution adopted on 23 March 1940 in this conference formed the foundation for Pakistan’s first constitution. However, even this did not go unchallenged. The Muslim League split on the issue opposing Jinnah’s speech. The All-India Jamhur Muslim League (AIJML) was formed to oppose the idea of Pakistan, which was later merged with the Congress. Most people on the Muslim side still talked of autonomy and not physical partition. Even Jinnah had the same conception and met Gandhi in 1944 in Bombay but failed to achieve agreement on an autonomous region within a single-state solution.

Vested interests still attribute Pakistan to the intransigence of Jinnah. It may be noted that the partition was actually announced openly for the first time by Lala Lajpat Rai, who was then the president of the Hindu Mahasabha in his newspaper Tribune in 1925. It was a full eight years before Chaudhry Rehmat Ali who is credited with the idea of Pakistan wrote the “Now or Never” pamphlet proposing a separate homeland for the Muslims; five years before Allama Muhammad Iqbal’s first exposition of the two-nation theory in his presidential address in the conference of Muslim League on 29 December 1930; and 10 years before Jinnah would articulate his justification for Pakistan. Except for Rehmat Ali, both Iqbal as well as Jinnah, while justifying the two-nation theory, did not mean separate state of Pakistan. The Hindu leaders always meant physical separation.

Contributions of the Book

Beyond the Muslim League the two-nation theory as well as the idea of Pakistan was vehemently opposed by many Muslims. As its name suggests this has been the core theme of the book. Islam devotes full four chapters of his book—Chapters 5 to 8—to these details. Three of them are focused on the main hero of this opposition movement, Allah Bakhsh, a prominent politician of Sindh. Within a month of the Lahore Declaration, he had organised a massive conference, Azad Muslim Conference, at Delhi from 27–30 April 1940, which, judged by the number of delegates and popular enthusiasm, appeared much more representative of Muslim opinion in the country than the Muslim League (p 81). While refuting the argument for Pakistan Allah Bakhsh made many profound points such as common nationality and composite culture shared by Hindus and Muslims (pp 89, 91); and that communalism was the creation of ruling castes and classes among Muslims and Hindus (p 90). Bakhsh was murdered after three years by three professional assailants. In Chapter 8, Islam provides salient details of many Muslim organisations and individuals which fought against the “divisive” politics of the Muslim League in order to build an all-inclusive India (p 117).

In order to prove that mass sentiments were not in favour of partition and that many Muslims emoted in favour of a united India, Islam marshals instances in Urdu poetry. In the next chapter he discusses the reasons for the failure of the “patriotic” Muslims to thwart partition and indicates Muslim League’s reign of terror, Hindutva politics of polarisation, and Congress vacillation and betrayal to be the reasons. He surprisingly misses out the role of the colonial rulers in engineering communal divide, skilfully accentuating it in its own strategic interests and the later role of imperialism in shaping the Indian subcontinent in a manner which would serve its long-term interests. Of course, it would not have been possible if there had not been comprador classes of elites with ambitions that resonated with the imperialist plan. Another point that may disturb a discerning reader is that the book despite possessing all requisite facts makes it out as though the Muslim League was the culprit for partition. It might serve the purpose of highlighting patriotism of the Muslims who opposed the partition but it reinforces the popular notion that the Muslim League was the main culprit which, in view of the above facts, is grossly erroneous. The real sinners of the partition have to be located among the Hindu elites, who wanted to revive their supremacist rule once the British left the country. Muslim League came much later, in reaction to their demand for separation.

In the present context of extremist overtures of the Hindutva outfits against Muslims backed by the massive Gobblesque propaganda, this book will definitely prove to be a valuable contribution to the small band of secularists in the country. Although the fascist machine does not run on truths, it is certainly scared of them. And in that this book will surely prove to be a weapon in the arsenal of people who are resisting the Hindutva juggernaut, which is fast creating conditions in the country which might threaten its unity.

References

Bapu, Prabhu (2013): Hindu Mahasabha in Colonial North India, 1915–1930: Constructing Nation and History, New York: Routledge, p 17.

Berglund, Henrik (2004): “Religion and Nationalism: Politics of BJP,” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 39, No 10, 6 March, pp 1064–70, http://www.epw.in/journal/2004/10/special-articles/religion-and-nationalism.html, accessed on 16 March 2016.

Morey, Peter and Alex Tickell (eds) (2005): “Introduction,” Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism, Amsterdam: Rodopi, p xiii.

Singh, Nagendra K (2000): Encyclopaedia of the Indian Biography, Delhi: APH Publications, pp 588–90