While many people know that lowering their blood pressure is a good thing, many people aren’t quite sure why. Their doctor may try to explain the health risks of a high blood pressure reading, but without a simpler explanation, it can be difficult to decipher. In order to motivate yourself to keep your blood pressure down, here are the healthy benefits you’ll enjoy with a lower blood pressure reading.
Lower Risk of Strokes and Blood Clots
When your heart beats hard, you will have a higher blood pressure reader. Though this sounds harmless, it is not. As the blood is being forced through the body more forcefully, you will increase the risk of clots breaking off in parts of your body and traveling to places where they should not go – the lungs, the heart, and the brain. A clot which travels to the lungs is a pulmonary embolism while a clot that travels to the heart is a heart attack and a clot which reaches the brain and cuts off blood flow is a stroke. Though many of these conditions can be treated, when caught early enough, these are serious conditions which could also result in death.
Better Blood Vessels
If your heart isn’t beating as hard as it would with a higher blood pressure reading, you won’t be putting undue stress on the blood vessels in your body. This is a good thing. When your blood vessels are beaten up, they can become thinner, also increasing your risk of clots and other serious disorders. And over time, even if you get your blood pressure controlled, these thinner blood vessels can still pose a risk of problems. For those who might have thinner blood vessels due to age, making sure that blood pressure readings are normal or below normal will help to keep the body strong.
Improving Your Blood Pressure
There are many simple ways you can begin to reduce your blood pressure reading. You should begin by cutting out the salt from your diet in order to help your numbers fall, but adding exercise to your daily routine is another good way to help strengthen your blood vessels and improve your readings. Studies are also showing that those who take steps to reduce the stress levels can also experience less stress and lower blood pressure readings as a result. In addition, those who strength train also have lower blood pressure readings.
When you lower your blood pressure, you improve your health – it’s as simple as that. By taking the time to ensure your blood pressure readings are as low as possible, you can make sure your body is as healthy as it can be.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Sunday, June 6, 2010
The Fragments of Bamiyan
All that is left of the statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan are fragments. The most recent news suggests that these fragments are perhaps ending up in the bazaars of Peshawar, where traders are reportedly vying for the pieces to sell to tourists. A report in the Hindustan Times on 2 April 2001 states that the dealers are convinced that these fragments "would be prized in the same way as pieces of the Berlin wall." No one doubts, notwithstanding the immense difficulties of German reunification and the resuscitation of neo-Hitlerite sentiments among considerable segments of the German youth, that the Berlin Wall had to come down, but surely we cannot say the same of the Bamiyan Buddha statues? By what reckoning did the Bamiyan Buddhas become a Berlin Wall for the Taliban? Moreover, when walls break into fragments, does it not behoove us to ask how fragments can create their own walls? Are the stories that fragments tell necessarily fragmentary?
Writing shortly after World War II, Adorno described the meditations that make up Minima Moralia as "fragments from a damaged life". Adorno did not think it merely impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz; all the grand Enlightenment narratives appeared as so much debris, even offensive and chillingly optimistic. Not only had war devastated Europe, but his own civilized countrymen, the intellectual heirs and descendants of Goethe, Beethoven, Schiller, Kant, Hegel, Novalis, Herder, Schumann, and Schubert, had descended to the nadir of human experience in dispatching, with all the energy and ingenuity that a regime enamored of social engineering, the precise orchestration of life, and bureaucratic efficiency is capable of, six million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and mentally ill people to their death. Adorno must have thought a good deal of fragments those days: scarred lives, broken families, shattered buildings, and charred landscapes stared at him in the face, and -- not less alarmingly -- the lofty hopes which promised the sovereignty of reason and saw the story of humankind as an increasing progression towards the attainment of liberty and democracy stood largely in ruins. His contemporary and fellow theorist, Walter Benjamin, who perished in the war and scarcely saw the worst of what the troubled project of modernity could sow, had nonetheless the prescience to declare, "There is no monument of civilization that is not at the same time a monument of barbarism."
The idea of "fragments" has a chequered history, and in recent years South Asian intellectuals have furnished some other fragments of the story. Both Gyanendra Pandey and Partha Chatterjee have reminded us that the nation has its own "fragments", those sectors who have been excluded from the enterprise of the modern nation-state, or are repeatedly thwarted in their attempt to claim the privileges attendant upon citizenship. Relegated to the periphery, these fragments -- women, religious and linguistic minorities, Adivasis, the lower castes, Naxalites, and radical dissenters, among many others -- have at different times and in varying literatures been known as the oppressed, the excluded, and the people without history. Thus some scholars have asked whether Pandey’s eloquent article, "In Defense of the Fragment", is anything more than a postmodern variant of what the Americans call "multiculturalism", or an eloquent plea to allow minorities and the underprivileged their rightful place in the political and social life of the nation. It is sometimes suggested that the avowed attachment to such terms as "fragments" is a sign of postmodern excess, yet another endeavor to decentre the grand narratives -- none grander than the idea of the nation-state -- bequeathed by modernity. Yet the customary languages by which we seek to designate the excluded or -- in the idiom of the day -- the subaltern classes scarcely convey the resonance that the term fragment does: around fragments lies the debris of much history. Whatever postmodernism’s disenchantment with the totalizing narratives of nation-state and history -- history of which Europe is always the central reference point -- it is useful to recall that even the militant Hinduism of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad thrives on the idea of fragments. The most prominent, not to mention brazenly provocative, Hindutva websites demonstrate an extraordinarily keen interest in those Hindu temples which are alleged to have been destroyed or reduced to ruins by Muslim invaders. The Hindutvavadis understand, perhaps more than their adversaries, that the more compelling and cementing narratives are written around tales of destruction, around the fragments which remain and betoken imagined as much as real histories. So charmed is the VHP by Hindu temples rendered extinct, mutilated, or left in ruins that it construes these sites as the sure sign of a Hindu presence, a reminder of the fact that the Hindu has everywhere been the victim of more malignant and aggressive religions and ideologies.
But fragments do not a whole make, as the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas so palpably demonstrates. What histories, counter-histories, and myths can we, then, write from the fragments that remain of these Buddhas that, chiseled into the face of a mountain, stood forth in majestic silence for well over a thousand years? The most sustained modern myth about such acts of terror -- terror, not the terrorism that becomes the pretext for yet another display of American self-aggrandizement and chastisement, for terror it is when beauty is so cavalierly sundered apart -- is to suppose that they are expressions of feudal rage, a regression to the barbarism of the pre-modern age and manifestation of the "medievalism" to which many under-developed nations are still believed to be bound. This argument is conjoined with the observation that one could not have expected otherwise from a regime which is sworn to uphold a rigid and puritanical conception of Islam, though the edict of February 26 -- "These idols have been gods of the infidels" -- handed down by Muhammad Omar, the supreme commander of the Taliban, appears to furnish, to those who wish to read it as such, an indictment of Islam as a whole. Indeed, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas brings with astonishing ease to many lips the epithet, "Islamic medievalism". If the dominant stereotypical conception of Islamic fundamentalism, which gorges on tales of Taliban fanaticism, the evil genius of Osama bin Laden, Muslim terrorist networks around the world, the contamination of the noble idea of education in tens of thousands of madrassas, and the relentless subjugation of women and girls, is to be believed, ‘medieval Islam’ is a wholly belabored idea: Islam was always medieval. The ‘modern West’ and ‘medieval Islam’ are supposed to stand in natural and diametrical opposition to each other.
For all the wide acceptance of the twin ideas of ingrained Islamic fundamentalism and feudal or medieval rage as the two most constituent elements of the narrative which seeks to explain the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, it is heartening to note that some commentators have dismissed these gross reductionisms. One strategy is to take recourse to other strands of political commentary: for instance, it is scarcely irrelevant that the Taliban are under strict sanctions mandated by the American-dominated Security Council, though many member states of the UN rightly took the view that the only productive way to engage with the Taliban is to enter into a dialogue with the regime. These sanctions have doubtless compounded the Taliban’s difficulties, and are seen as particularly onerous and unjustified at a time when Mullah Omar is credited with having helped to destroy the poppy (used to make heroin) crop whose eradication was sought as a precondition for the restoration of normal relations between the Taliban and the West. Indeed, the area of Afghanistan under Taliban rule has recently been certified by an UN inspection team as ‘poppy free’. Thus the destruction of the statues is construed as an expression not only of the Taliban’s anger but of its sense of betrayal, its feeling of isolation, and its profound disappointment that it should not have been suitably rewarded on the one occasion when it subscribed to some norms of international political engagement. Two decades ago, realpolitik bound together Afghanistan and the United States in a modern variation of ‘The Great Game’, and one should not be allowed to forget that Ronald Reagan welcomed the Mujahideen to the White House as "freedom fighters"; at this juncture in history, it is still the relentless zero-sum of politics which makes the United States and its adversary Afghanistan look strikingly akin. The fanaticism of the powerful and the fanaticism of the powerless have much in common.
The fanaticism of the Taliban should by no means be allowed to stand forth metonymically for the barbarism of the pre-Enlightenment age or the alleged fanaticism of Islam. In the early seventh century, if the testimony of the Chinese scholar Hiuen-tsiang is reliable, Bamiyan was flourishing as a centre of Buddhist learning, and it was home to thousands of monks settled in several monasteries. Though Kabul and Kandahar were overrun by the Arabs in the late seventh century, Bamiyan remained under Buddhist rule for at least another century. The conversion to Islam among Bamiyan’s political elite transpired under the Abbasids. Bamiyan’s two gigantic Buddhas, which were installed at least three centuries apart, the latter between 500 and 700 AD, were spared by Mahmud of Ghazni. Subsequent invaders, such as Genghiz Khan, appear to have been less indifferent, and there seems to be some evidence that he had cannon fire directed at the Buddhas. Numerous commentators, keen on validating the commonly held view which ascribes to Aurangzeb a puritanical hatred for the infidels, have noted that he initiated an assault upon Bamiyan, but those who wish to bestow ecumenical credentials upon him point to the fact that notwithstanding his military activity in the Deccan over two decades, he left untouched the Ajanta and Ellora caves. But in all of this there is little to substantiate the view that in the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas is writ large the medieval mentality. The recent bombarding of the National Library at Sarajevo, and indeed the decimation of nearly the entire city, which was "multicultural" for long before the capitals of Western Europe acquired a semblance of pluralism and tolerance, stands forth as testimony to the fact that modernity has been much less hospitable to diffused, unbounded, and multiple identities than we have commonly supposed. If the idea of cosmopolitan pasts -- Bamiyan lay on the silk route, and here merged multiple number of ethnic, religious, and linguistic histories -- is now under assault, and yet "universal" cities appear to be emblematic of late modernity, then the burden is to establish how modern cosmopolitanisms differ from pre-modern cosmopolitanisms. The universalisms of late modernity must be juxtaposed not with the supposed particularisms of the pre-modern era, but rather with the less oppressive universalisms of those times that we mistakenly characterize as pre-Enlightenment.
It is not less significant, since much is often made of Islam’s supposed irrationality, that all the Muslim states have emphatically repudiated the Taliban’s actions, and even Saudi Arabia, which fancies itself as the guardian of an authentic and orthodox Islam, declared itself unequivocally opposed to the destruction of the Buddhas. The Arab group in UNESCO termed the Taliban’s action "savage". Nothing in the Sharia, or in the pronouncements of various Islamic schools of law, encourages the destruction of monuments which are not the sites of religious worship and cannot therefore be construed as "idols". Most poignantly, the call to jihad, which is described by the Taliban as having furnished it with the warrant to take action at Bamiyan, has been stripped of its endearing promise. The authorized translation of the Holy Quran, published by the King Fahd Holy Quran Printing Complex, states that the essence of jihad consists in abiding by a "true and sincere faith, which so fixes its gaze on Allah that all selfish or worldly motives seem paltry and fade away". It warns against the vulgarization of the concept by explicitly opposing "mere brutal fighting" to "the whole spirit of Jihad", and calls upon the believer to wage jihad against himself or herself, so that one can learn to listen to the voice of Allah or (in the idiom of Gandhi) to the "still inner voice" within. Yet, despite this lofty conception of jihad, the onus appears to have been placed upon Islam to exonerate itself. This "act of vandalism", editorialized the Times of India (4 March 2001), "is likely to be detrimental to the larger interests of the entire Islamic world unless the governments and clergy of those countries speak out strongly against the Taliban." Well-intentioned as is this sentiment, it is a marvel that Islam should be called upon to demonstrate its innocence. No one took it as axiomatic that when the Bosnian Muslims were being butchered, and the monuments of their culture were razed to the ground, that Christianity had to endeavor to save its name by publicly and repeatedly disassociating itself from the actions of its self-appointed emissaries. Though the editorial appears to be understandably generous in pronouncing that the "Taliban is not defending the true faith; it is grievously undermining it", there is a presupposition that Islam, perhaps more than any other faith, is always on the brink of falling into a fanatical mode.
What interpretive and ethical framework remains, then, for understanding the madness that has transpired to efface the gentle colossus that stood at Bamiyan? One has heard the phrase "brotherhood of fundamentalists": the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the Bamiyan Buddhas can be distinguished in some respects, but fervent secularists do not doubt that the advocates of Hindutva, the Taliban, Zionists, and the evangelical Christians in Kansas who succeeded in having creationism placed alongside evolutionism as an account of the origins of the universe in school textbooks are all molded from the same clay. They see in the tragic events of Bamiyan the insistent and maniacal unfolding of fundamentalism. Though the gross inadequacies of this view are all to evident, just as secularism remains impenitent about its own intolerance for competing worldviews, the comparison between the Hindutva advocates and the Taliban is illuminating in some respects. Traditionally, one mark of distinction between religion and politics was to describe the former as "self regarding" and the latter as "other regarding", but what is striking is how far the Taliban and Hindutvavadis are concerned with the religion of others rather than with their own faith. Many of the most zealous spokespersons for Hindutva give the distinct impression of being less interested in Hinduism than in Islam, and the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas betrays a similar anxiety. It is not so much the admixture of religion and politics, of which no less a person than Gandhi was a firm proponent, that is problematic as much as the transformation of religion into "other regarding" and politics into "self regarding".
What the Taliban have disowned is the pluralistic pasts of both Afghanistan and Islam. It can reasonably be argued that Afghanistan is much more than its present Islamic existence, though perhaps the more arresting formulation is that woven into the Islam of Afghanistan (not to mention neighboring Pakistan) are all the previous strands of Afghanistan’s history. Islam in Pakistan and Afghanistan is afflicted with profoundly disabling anxieties about authenticity, cosmology, and identity; it persists, not always self-consciously, in seeing itself as a second-hand, inferior version of the Prophet’s religion as it is housed in Mecca and Medina. This Islam has almost nothing of the confidence of Indonesian (and especially Javanese) Muslims, who have embraced the Ramayana and the Mahabharata as their own and have interwoven Islamic practices into "Hindu" cosmologies. Java has no Hindus, and yet a massive statue of Arjuna’s chariot being driven by Krishna adorns one of the central thoroughfares in Jakarta. Such a dialectic of presence and absence is perhaps itself the source of anxiety: commentators point to the absence of Buddhists in Afghanistan to express their bewilderment that the Bamiyan Buddhas should have been construed as a threat, but it possible to imagine that even a faint Buddhist presence might have been more reassuring to the Taliban and helped to save the Buddhas.
Ironically, much as the Taliban would be loathe to admit it, their most eloquent spokesman is the hyper-rational Naipaul, who has stated with supreme confidence that all non-Arab Muslims are mere converts and consequently imperfect specimens of their faith. This suggests that the pathology of rationality is at least as interesting a discursive field as the pathology of irrationality; self-hatred is by no means a prerogative of those whom we wish to condemn as irrational. Previously Naipaul, writing in the pages of the New York Review of Books, the vehicle of the secular, liberal intelligentsia of the United States and some wider worlds, spoke of the destiny of humankind to embrace what he calls "our universal civilization", a civilization predictably rooted in the values of the modern, secular, liberal West. Taken together, Naipaul’s pronouncements point to no conclusion but this: either the peoples of the non-West can choose to enter into the "universal civilization" or, by their defiance, they can place themselves outside the pale of the community of the civilized. Even Samuel Huntington’s hysterical framework of the "clash of civilizations" seems charitable by contrast, since many are inclined to see in the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas a clash between the civilized and the uncivilized. Such an impoverished view of the Taliban must be unequivocally rejected not only because it is deeply injurious to an entire people, but because discursive views, strengthened by the vast paraphernalia of modernity, from media in its various manifestations to the force of sanctions, have the power to create the very object of their inquiry.
When the other becomes so radically other in our sensibility, it is an ineradicable sign of our unwillingness to adhere to a vision of a communicative universe; it points to the moral defeat of all humankind. When the Bamiyan Buddhas were reduced to rubble, it was not Islam that was degraded; it was not even Buddhism which was demeaned. To admit as much is not only to take solace in the observation that the Buddha is much larger than his statues, and that the actions of the Taliban cannot dint the armor of the Buddha’s supreme intelligence, benevolence, and compassion. The Buddha’s teachings have always stressed the impermanance of the material world, and it is not for nothing that the monks blow away the sand mandalas over which they have labored with such care. Other sensibilities, however, demand a more political reading. Had the Indian media, for instance, been less parochial in its intellectual disposition, it might have been more careful in lavishing sole attention upon acts of cultural desecration in South Asia, while ignoring the numerous tragic events with which the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the Bamiyan Buddhas share a family resemblance, stretching from the destruction of Sarajevo, the callous (and much worse) representation of war victims as "collateral damage", the exceedingly modern massacres in Rwanda carried out through primitive weapons, and the genocidal elimination of Iraqis through the purported non-violence of a sanctions regime. Politics has for long been a zero-sum game, but the categories of contemporary political knowledge and practice -- "rogue states", sanctions, "the international community", among others -- have tightened the noose around the powerless. That is one aspect of the politics of knowledge surrounding the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Bamiyan compels us to ask: what are the conditions of the soul’s survival and well-being in modernity? That, however, is the subject for another meditation.
Writing shortly after World War II, Adorno described the meditations that make up Minima Moralia as "fragments from a damaged life". Adorno did not think it merely impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz; all the grand Enlightenment narratives appeared as so much debris, even offensive and chillingly optimistic. Not only had war devastated Europe, but his own civilized countrymen, the intellectual heirs and descendants of Goethe, Beethoven, Schiller, Kant, Hegel, Novalis, Herder, Schumann, and Schubert, had descended to the nadir of human experience in dispatching, with all the energy and ingenuity that a regime enamored of social engineering, the precise orchestration of life, and bureaucratic efficiency is capable of, six million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and mentally ill people to their death. Adorno must have thought a good deal of fragments those days: scarred lives, broken families, shattered buildings, and charred landscapes stared at him in the face, and -- not less alarmingly -- the lofty hopes which promised the sovereignty of reason and saw the story of humankind as an increasing progression towards the attainment of liberty and democracy stood largely in ruins. His contemporary and fellow theorist, Walter Benjamin, who perished in the war and scarcely saw the worst of what the troubled project of modernity could sow, had nonetheless the prescience to declare, "There is no monument of civilization that is not at the same time a monument of barbarism."
The idea of "fragments" has a chequered history, and in recent years South Asian intellectuals have furnished some other fragments of the story. Both Gyanendra Pandey and Partha Chatterjee have reminded us that the nation has its own "fragments", those sectors who have been excluded from the enterprise of the modern nation-state, or are repeatedly thwarted in their attempt to claim the privileges attendant upon citizenship. Relegated to the periphery, these fragments -- women, religious and linguistic minorities, Adivasis, the lower castes, Naxalites, and radical dissenters, among many others -- have at different times and in varying literatures been known as the oppressed, the excluded, and the people without history. Thus some scholars have asked whether Pandey’s eloquent article, "In Defense of the Fragment", is anything more than a postmodern variant of what the Americans call "multiculturalism", or an eloquent plea to allow minorities and the underprivileged their rightful place in the political and social life of the nation. It is sometimes suggested that the avowed attachment to such terms as "fragments" is a sign of postmodern excess, yet another endeavor to decentre the grand narratives -- none grander than the idea of the nation-state -- bequeathed by modernity. Yet the customary languages by which we seek to designate the excluded or -- in the idiom of the day -- the subaltern classes scarcely convey the resonance that the term fragment does: around fragments lies the debris of much history. Whatever postmodernism’s disenchantment with the totalizing narratives of nation-state and history -- history of which Europe is always the central reference point -- it is useful to recall that even the militant Hinduism of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad thrives on the idea of fragments. The most prominent, not to mention brazenly provocative, Hindutva websites demonstrate an extraordinarily keen interest in those Hindu temples which are alleged to have been destroyed or reduced to ruins by Muslim invaders. The Hindutvavadis understand, perhaps more than their adversaries, that the more compelling and cementing narratives are written around tales of destruction, around the fragments which remain and betoken imagined as much as real histories. So charmed is the VHP by Hindu temples rendered extinct, mutilated, or left in ruins that it construes these sites as the sure sign of a Hindu presence, a reminder of the fact that the Hindu has everywhere been the victim of more malignant and aggressive religions and ideologies.
But fragments do not a whole make, as the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas so palpably demonstrates. What histories, counter-histories, and myths can we, then, write from the fragments that remain of these Buddhas that, chiseled into the face of a mountain, stood forth in majestic silence for well over a thousand years? The most sustained modern myth about such acts of terror -- terror, not the terrorism that becomes the pretext for yet another display of American self-aggrandizement and chastisement, for terror it is when beauty is so cavalierly sundered apart -- is to suppose that they are expressions of feudal rage, a regression to the barbarism of the pre-modern age and manifestation of the "medievalism" to which many under-developed nations are still believed to be bound. This argument is conjoined with the observation that one could not have expected otherwise from a regime which is sworn to uphold a rigid and puritanical conception of Islam, though the edict of February 26 -- "These idols have been gods of the infidels" -- handed down by Muhammad Omar, the supreme commander of the Taliban, appears to furnish, to those who wish to read it as such, an indictment of Islam as a whole. Indeed, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas brings with astonishing ease to many lips the epithet, "Islamic medievalism". If the dominant stereotypical conception of Islamic fundamentalism, which gorges on tales of Taliban fanaticism, the evil genius of Osama bin Laden, Muslim terrorist networks around the world, the contamination of the noble idea of education in tens of thousands of madrassas, and the relentless subjugation of women and girls, is to be believed, ‘medieval Islam’ is a wholly belabored idea: Islam was always medieval. The ‘modern West’ and ‘medieval Islam’ are supposed to stand in natural and diametrical opposition to each other.
For all the wide acceptance of the twin ideas of ingrained Islamic fundamentalism and feudal or medieval rage as the two most constituent elements of the narrative which seeks to explain the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, it is heartening to note that some commentators have dismissed these gross reductionisms. One strategy is to take recourse to other strands of political commentary: for instance, it is scarcely irrelevant that the Taliban are under strict sanctions mandated by the American-dominated Security Council, though many member states of the UN rightly took the view that the only productive way to engage with the Taliban is to enter into a dialogue with the regime. These sanctions have doubtless compounded the Taliban’s difficulties, and are seen as particularly onerous and unjustified at a time when Mullah Omar is credited with having helped to destroy the poppy (used to make heroin) crop whose eradication was sought as a precondition for the restoration of normal relations between the Taliban and the West. Indeed, the area of Afghanistan under Taliban rule has recently been certified by an UN inspection team as ‘poppy free’. Thus the destruction of the statues is construed as an expression not only of the Taliban’s anger but of its sense of betrayal, its feeling of isolation, and its profound disappointment that it should not have been suitably rewarded on the one occasion when it subscribed to some norms of international political engagement. Two decades ago, realpolitik bound together Afghanistan and the United States in a modern variation of ‘The Great Game’, and one should not be allowed to forget that Ronald Reagan welcomed the Mujahideen to the White House as "freedom fighters"; at this juncture in history, it is still the relentless zero-sum of politics which makes the United States and its adversary Afghanistan look strikingly akin. The fanaticism of the powerful and the fanaticism of the powerless have much in common.
The fanaticism of the Taliban should by no means be allowed to stand forth metonymically for the barbarism of the pre-Enlightenment age or the alleged fanaticism of Islam. In the early seventh century, if the testimony of the Chinese scholar Hiuen-tsiang is reliable, Bamiyan was flourishing as a centre of Buddhist learning, and it was home to thousands of monks settled in several monasteries. Though Kabul and Kandahar were overrun by the Arabs in the late seventh century, Bamiyan remained under Buddhist rule for at least another century. The conversion to Islam among Bamiyan’s political elite transpired under the Abbasids. Bamiyan’s two gigantic Buddhas, which were installed at least three centuries apart, the latter between 500 and 700 AD, were spared by Mahmud of Ghazni. Subsequent invaders, such as Genghiz Khan, appear to have been less indifferent, and there seems to be some evidence that he had cannon fire directed at the Buddhas. Numerous commentators, keen on validating the commonly held view which ascribes to Aurangzeb a puritanical hatred for the infidels, have noted that he initiated an assault upon Bamiyan, but those who wish to bestow ecumenical credentials upon him point to the fact that notwithstanding his military activity in the Deccan over two decades, he left untouched the Ajanta and Ellora caves. But in all of this there is little to substantiate the view that in the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas is writ large the medieval mentality. The recent bombarding of the National Library at Sarajevo, and indeed the decimation of nearly the entire city, which was "multicultural" for long before the capitals of Western Europe acquired a semblance of pluralism and tolerance, stands forth as testimony to the fact that modernity has been much less hospitable to diffused, unbounded, and multiple identities than we have commonly supposed. If the idea of cosmopolitan pasts -- Bamiyan lay on the silk route, and here merged multiple number of ethnic, religious, and linguistic histories -- is now under assault, and yet "universal" cities appear to be emblematic of late modernity, then the burden is to establish how modern cosmopolitanisms differ from pre-modern cosmopolitanisms. The universalisms of late modernity must be juxtaposed not with the supposed particularisms of the pre-modern era, but rather with the less oppressive universalisms of those times that we mistakenly characterize as pre-Enlightenment.
It is not less significant, since much is often made of Islam’s supposed irrationality, that all the Muslim states have emphatically repudiated the Taliban’s actions, and even Saudi Arabia, which fancies itself as the guardian of an authentic and orthodox Islam, declared itself unequivocally opposed to the destruction of the Buddhas. The Arab group in UNESCO termed the Taliban’s action "savage". Nothing in the Sharia, or in the pronouncements of various Islamic schools of law, encourages the destruction of monuments which are not the sites of religious worship and cannot therefore be construed as "idols". Most poignantly, the call to jihad, which is described by the Taliban as having furnished it with the warrant to take action at Bamiyan, has been stripped of its endearing promise. The authorized translation of the Holy Quran, published by the King Fahd Holy Quran Printing Complex, states that the essence of jihad consists in abiding by a "true and sincere faith, which so fixes its gaze on Allah that all selfish or worldly motives seem paltry and fade away". It warns against the vulgarization of the concept by explicitly opposing "mere brutal fighting" to "the whole spirit of Jihad", and calls upon the believer to wage jihad against himself or herself, so that one can learn to listen to the voice of Allah or (in the idiom of Gandhi) to the "still inner voice" within. Yet, despite this lofty conception of jihad, the onus appears to have been placed upon Islam to exonerate itself. This "act of vandalism", editorialized the Times of India (4 March 2001), "is likely to be detrimental to the larger interests of the entire Islamic world unless the governments and clergy of those countries speak out strongly against the Taliban." Well-intentioned as is this sentiment, it is a marvel that Islam should be called upon to demonstrate its innocence. No one took it as axiomatic that when the Bosnian Muslims were being butchered, and the monuments of their culture were razed to the ground, that Christianity had to endeavor to save its name by publicly and repeatedly disassociating itself from the actions of its self-appointed emissaries. Though the editorial appears to be understandably generous in pronouncing that the "Taliban is not defending the true faith; it is grievously undermining it", there is a presupposition that Islam, perhaps more than any other faith, is always on the brink of falling into a fanatical mode.
What interpretive and ethical framework remains, then, for understanding the madness that has transpired to efface the gentle colossus that stood at Bamiyan? One has heard the phrase "brotherhood of fundamentalists": the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the Bamiyan Buddhas can be distinguished in some respects, but fervent secularists do not doubt that the advocates of Hindutva, the Taliban, Zionists, and the evangelical Christians in Kansas who succeeded in having creationism placed alongside evolutionism as an account of the origins of the universe in school textbooks are all molded from the same clay. They see in the tragic events of Bamiyan the insistent and maniacal unfolding of fundamentalism. Though the gross inadequacies of this view are all to evident, just as secularism remains impenitent about its own intolerance for competing worldviews, the comparison between the Hindutva advocates and the Taliban is illuminating in some respects. Traditionally, one mark of distinction between religion and politics was to describe the former as "self regarding" and the latter as "other regarding", but what is striking is how far the Taliban and Hindutvavadis are concerned with the religion of others rather than with their own faith. Many of the most zealous spokespersons for Hindutva give the distinct impression of being less interested in Hinduism than in Islam, and the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas betrays a similar anxiety. It is not so much the admixture of religion and politics, of which no less a person than Gandhi was a firm proponent, that is problematic as much as the transformation of religion into "other regarding" and politics into "self regarding".
What the Taliban have disowned is the pluralistic pasts of both Afghanistan and Islam. It can reasonably be argued that Afghanistan is much more than its present Islamic existence, though perhaps the more arresting formulation is that woven into the Islam of Afghanistan (not to mention neighboring Pakistan) are all the previous strands of Afghanistan’s history. Islam in Pakistan and Afghanistan is afflicted with profoundly disabling anxieties about authenticity, cosmology, and identity; it persists, not always self-consciously, in seeing itself as a second-hand, inferior version of the Prophet’s religion as it is housed in Mecca and Medina. This Islam has almost nothing of the confidence of Indonesian (and especially Javanese) Muslims, who have embraced the Ramayana and the Mahabharata as their own and have interwoven Islamic practices into "Hindu" cosmologies. Java has no Hindus, and yet a massive statue of Arjuna’s chariot being driven by Krishna adorns one of the central thoroughfares in Jakarta. Such a dialectic of presence and absence is perhaps itself the source of anxiety: commentators point to the absence of Buddhists in Afghanistan to express their bewilderment that the Bamiyan Buddhas should have been construed as a threat, but it possible to imagine that even a faint Buddhist presence might have been more reassuring to the Taliban and helped to save the Buddhas.
Ironically, much as the Taliban would be loathe to admit it, their most eloquent spokesman is the hyper-rational Naipaul, who has stated with supreme confidence that all non-Arab Muslims are mere converts and consequently imperfect specimens of their faith. This suggests that the pathology of rationality is at least as interesting a discursive field as the pathology of irrationality; self-hatred is by no means a prerogative of those whom we wish to condemn as irrational. Previously Naipaul, writing in the pages of the New York Review of Books, the vehicle of the secular, liberal intelligentsia of the United States and some wider worlds, spoke of the destiny of humankind to embrace what he calls "our universal civilization", a civilization predictably rooted in the values of the modern, secular, liberal West. Taken together, Naipaul’s pronouncements point to no conclusion but this: either the peoples of the non-West can choose to enter into the "universal civilization" or, by their defiance, they can place themselves outside the pale of the community of the civilized. Even Samuel Huntington’s hysterical framework of the "clash of civilizations" seems charitable by contrast, since many are inclined to see in the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas a clash between the civilized and the uncivilized. Such an impoverished view of the Taliban must be unequivocally rejected not only because it is deeply injurious to an entire people, but because discursive views, strengthened by the vast paraphernalia of modernity, from media in its various manifestations to the force of sanctions, have the power to create the very object of their inquiry.
When the other becomes so radically other in our sensibility, it is an ineradicable sign of our unwillingness to adhere to a vision of a communicative universe; it points to the moral defeat of all humankind. When the Bamiyan Buddhas were reduced to rubble, it was not Islam that was degraded; it was not even Buddhism which was demeaned. To admit as much is not only to take solace in the observation that the Buddha is much larger than his statues, and that the actions of the Taliban cannot dint the armor of the Buddha’s supreme intelligence, benevolence, and compassion. The Buddha’s teachings have always stressed the impermanance of the material world, and it is not for nothing that the monks blow away the sand mandalas over which they have labored with such care. Other sensibilities, however, demand a more political reading. Had the Indian media, for instance, been less parochial in its intellectual disposition, it might have been more careful in lavishing sole attention upon acts of cultural desecration in South Asia, while ignoring the numerous tragic events with which the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the Bamiyan Buddhas share a family resemblance, stretching from the destruction of Sarajevo, the callous (and much worse) representation of war victims as "collateral damage", the exceedingly modern massacres in Rwanda carried out through primitive weapons, and the genocidal elimination of Iraqis through the purported non-violence of a sanctions regime. Politics has for long been a zero-sum game, but the categories of contemporary political knowledge and practice -- "rogue states", sanctions, "the international community", among others -- have tightened the noose around the powerless. That is one aspect of the politics of knowledge surrounding the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Bamiyan compels us to ask: what are the conditions of the soul’s survival and well-being in modernity? That, however, is the subject for another meditation.
Independent India
India acquired independence on 15 August 1947 though sections of the country were carved out and stitched together to create another new country, Pakistan. The “institutional” road to independence was perhaps laid down by the Government of India Act of 1935, where the gradual emergence of India as a self-governing entity had first been partly envisioned. Following India's independence in 1947, the Constituent Assembly deliberated over the precise constitutional future of India. On 26 January 1950, India became a Republic, and the Constitution of India was promulgated. Jawaharlal Nehru had become the country’s first Prime Minister in 1947, and in 1952, in the country’s first general election with a universal franchise, Nehru led the Indian National Congress to a clear victory. The Congress had long been the principal political party in India, providing the leadership to the struggle for independence, and under Nehru’s stewardship it remained the largest and most influential party over the next three decades. In 1957, Nehru was elected to yet another five-year term as a member of the Lok Sabha and chosen to head the government. His ‘regime’ was marked by the advent of five-year plans, designed to bring big science and industry to India; in Nehru's own language, steel mills and dams were to be the temples of modern India. Relations with Pakistan remained chilling, and the purported friendship of India and China proved to be something of a hoax. China’s invasion of India's borders in 1962 is said to have dealt a mortal blow to Nehru.
Nehru was succeeded at his death on 27 May 1964 for a period of two weeks by Gulzarilal Nanda (1898-1998), a veteran Congress politician who became active in the non-cooperation movement in 1922 and served several prison terms, principally in 1932 and from 1942-44 during the Quit India movement. Nanda served as acting Prime Minister until the Congress had elected a new leader, Lal Bahadur Shastri, also a veteran politician who came of age during the Gandhi-led non-cooperation movement. Shastri was the compromise candidate who, perhaps unexpectedly, led the country to something of a victory over Pakistan in 1965. Shastri and the vanquished Pakistani President, Muhammad Ayub Khan, signed a peace treaty at Tashkent in the former Soviet Union on 10 January 1966, but Shastri barely lived to witness the accolades that were now being showered upon him since he died of an heart attack the day after the treaty was signed. Shastri’s empathy for the subaltern classes is conveyed through the slogan, “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan”, “Hail the Soldier, Hail the Farmer”, which is attributed to him and through which he is remembered at Vijay Ghat, the national memorial to him in New Delhi in the proximity of Rajghat, the national memorial to Mohandas Gandhi.
On Shastri’s death, the Congress was once again engulfed by an internal struggle. Gulzarilal Nanda once again served as the acting Prime Minister, again for a period of less than a month, before being succeeded by Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter. By the late 1960s, Indira Gandhi had engineered a split in the Congress, as the only means to ensure her political survival, and the Congress party, which with every passing year was losing something of its shine, now went into a precipitous decline. In 1971, India crushed Pakistan in a short war that also saw the birth of Bangladesh, and Indira was now at the helm of her powers. But the Congress was now a mere shadow of its former self, and as domestic problems mounted and popular movements directed at Indira Gandhi began to show their effect, she resorted to more repressive measures. An internal emergency, which placed almost the entire opposition behind bars, was proclaimed in May 1975, and only removed in 1977; and the same opposition, which hastily convened to chart its strategy, achieved in delivering the Congress party its first loss in national elections. This government, serving various political interests and led by the victorious Janata Party, which had been formed out of various opposition parties, lasted a mere three years. It was led by the controversial Gandhian and Congress stalwart, Morarji Desai, for two years, and for another year by Chaudhary Charan Singh (1902-1987), who came from a Jat farming community with roots in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. The Lok Sabha or Lower Assembly never met during Charan Singh’s Prime Ministership and the political alliance crumbled. Indira Gandhi rode a spectacular wave of victory in 1980. But she did not live to complete her term: shot by her own Sikh bodyguards, who sought to avenge the destruction unleashed upon the Golden Temple, the venerable shrine of the Sikh faith, by Indian government troops given the task of flushing out the terrorists holed in the shrine, she was succeeded by her son, Rajiv Gandhi, in late 1984.
In the December 1994 Lok Sabha elections, Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress party won a landslide election. But Rajiv’s premiership was to be marked by numerous political disasters, and Rajiv’s own name was tainted by the allegation that he had received huge bribes from a Swedish firm of Bofors, manufacturers of a machine-gun for which the Indian army placed a large order. His own finance minister, V. P. Singh (1931-), once a Indira Gandhi loyalist who had been picked by her in 1980 to serve as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, was to turn against Rajiv; and in 1989, V. P. Singh led the Janata Party to an electoral rout over the Congress. However, the revived Janata party mustered only 145 votes, and it had to take the support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by L. K. Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayee, in order to form a government. It is at this juncture that India truly entered the era of coalition governments. V. P. Singh would soon be brought down by two disputes: one over the status of the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque that Hindu militants claimed had been built over the Ram Janmasthan [birthplace], and the second over the recommendations of the Mandal commission pertaining to quotas for various elements of India’s underprivileged masses. On 7 November 1990, by a vote of 356-151, V. P. Singh lost the confidence of the Lok Sabha, and some days later Chandra Sekhar (1927-), with the support of Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress, was sworn in as the next prime minister. However, Congress withdrew its support in March 1991, and elections were called in May.
On 21 May 1991, as intense electioneering was taking place, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a Sri Lankan suicide bomber. The mantle of Congress leadership fell on the veteran P. V. Narasimha Rao (1921-2004), who led the party to triumph, even as the BJP raised the number of its seats in Parliament from a little over 80 to 120. On 6 December 1992, acting in defiance of Supreme Court orders, Hindu militants destroyed the Babri Masjid, and so initiated one of the most intense crises in India’s post-independent history. Rao weathered many a storm, and presided over the liberalization of the economy -- the architect of which was Manmohan Singh, then Finance Minister and, since 2004, the Prime Minister of India. But Rao could not keep the BJP and its friends in check. In the general elections of 1996, the BJP emerged as the largest party, but its 194 seats were not enough to give it a working majority in the 545-seat Lok Sabha, and Atal Behari Vajpayee’s first government lasted a mere twelve days. A 13-party coalition of the United National Front and the Indian left was brought into power, and Deve Gowda, the Chief Minister of Karnataka, was raised to the office of the Prime Minister; but after less than a year in office, he resigned and was succeeded by Inder Kumar Gujral, whose main contribution in office was to bequeath “the Gujral doctrine” – a reference to his genuine attempts to mend India’s relations with its South Asian neighbors, based on the principle that as the largest country, India could afford to be generous, and did not have to require reciprocity for all its munificent actions.
But Gujral’s government similarly lasted less than a year; and in the general elections of February 1998, the BJP emerged again as the single largest party, this time with 200 seats. Vajpayee was invited to form a government, and did so with a coalition of several parties, including the AIADMK, led by Jayalalitha. Nothing that the BJP did was so ripe with consequences as the decision to turn India into a nuclear state with a series of nuclear tests in May 1998. The coalition, not unpredictably, broke down; but the general elections of September 1999, in which the BJP again emerged as the single largest party, and the Congress had a poor showing at the polls, despite being led by Sonia Gandhi, a scion of the ‘Nehru dynasty’, were to reinforce the impression that regional parties and politics have fundamentally altered the state of Indian politics. Under Vajpayee, the BJP presided over the country’s destiny until 2004, even though it was becoming inescapably clear that the dominance of any one party is no longer a foregone conclusion and that coalition politics appears to be the way of the future. Many commentators were rightfully alarmed by various ominous developments that transpired during the BJP’s years in office, such as the coercive Hinduization of the country, the inability of the state to guarantee the rights of religious minorities, and other obvious manifestations of an utter disregard for human rights, such as state-sponsored killings in Kashmir, the north-east, and elsewhere, or the oppressions unleashed upon Christians and women. On the other hand, Vajpayee and the BJP are not only credited with having administered a crushing blow to Pakistan’s adventurism on the Himalayan mountain tops at Kargil, but with having spearheaded a rapid expansion of the Indian economy.
In provincial elections held in several states in late 2003, the BJP registered impressive triumphs and the party leadership was led into thinking that, in calling for early elections, it could consolidate its gains with a magisterial showing in national elections. The BJP waged a campaign on the slogan of “India Shining”, trumpeting the emergence of India as a major power. However, the Indian electorate once again showed that it was not to be taken for granted, and the BJP and its allies lost to a coalition headed by the Congress party. [See India’s Moment: Elections 2004.] The Fourteenth Lok Sabha convened on 17 May 2004 and Manmohan Singh (1932-) assumed the office of the Prime Minister at the head of what is known as the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government. The UPA is supported by the Left Front, a coalition of parties headed by the CPM, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
Nehru was succeeded at his death on 27 May 1964 for a period of two weeks by Gulzarilal Nanda (1898-1998), a veteran Congress politician who became active in the non-cooperation movement in 1922 and served several prison terms, principally in 1932 and from 1942-44 during the Quit India movement. Nanda served as acting Prime Minister until the Congress had elected a new leader, Lal Bahadur Shastri, also a veteran politician who came of age during the Gandhi-led non-cooperation movement. Shastri was the compromise candidate who, perhaps unexpectedly, led the country to something of a victory over Pakistan in 1965. Shastri and the vanquished Pakistani President, Muhammad Ayub Khan, signed a peace treaty at Tashkent in the former Soviet Union on 10 January 1966, but Shastri barely lived to witness the accolades that were now being showered upon him since he died of an heart attack the day after the treaty was signed. Shastri’s empathy for the subaltern classes is conveyed through the slogan, “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan”, “Hail the Soldier, Hail the Farmer”, which is attributed to him and through which he is remembered at Vijay Ghat, the national memorial to him in New Delhi in the proximity of Rajghat, the national memorial to Mohandas Gandhi.
On Shastri’s death, the Congress was once again engulfed by an internal struggle. Gulzarilal Nanda once again served as the acting Prime Minister, again for a period of less than a month, before being succeeded by Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter. By the late 1960s, Indira Gandhi had engineered a split in the Congress, as the only means to ensure her political survival, and the Congress party, which with every passing year was losing something of its shine, now went into a precipitous decline. In 1971, India crushed Pakistan in a short war that also saw the birth of Bangladesh, and Indira was now at the helm of her powers. But the Congress was now a mere shadow of its former self, and as domestic problems mounted and popular movements directed at Indira Gandhi began to show their effect, she resorted to more repressive measures. An internal emergency, which placed almost the entire opposition behind bars, was proclaimed in May 1975, and only removed in 1977; and the same opposition, which hastily convened to chart its strategy, achieved in delivering the Congress party its first loss in national elections. This government, serving various political interests and led by the victorious Janata Party, which had been formed out of various opposition parties, lasted a mere three years. It was led by the controversial Gandhian and Congress stalwart, Morarji Desai, for two years, and for another year by Chaudhary Charan Singh (1902-1987), who came from a Jat farming community with roots in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. The Lok Sabha or Lower Assembly never met during Charan Singh’s Prime Ministership and the political alliance crumbled. Indira Gandhi rode a spectacular wave of victory in 1980. But she did not live to complete her term: shot by her own Sikh bodyguards, who sought to avenge the destruction unleashed upon the Golden Temple, the venerable shrine of the Sikh faith, by Indian government troops given the task of flushing out the terrorists holed in the shrine, she was succeeded by her son, Rajiv Gandhi, in late 1984.
In the December 1994 Lok Sabha elections, Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress party won a landslide election. But Rajiv’s premiership was to be marked by numerous political disasters, and Rajiv’s own name was tainted by the allegation that he had received huge bribes from a Swedish firm of Bofors, manufacturers of a machine-gun for which the Indian army placed a large order. His own finance minister, V. P. Singh (1931-), once a Indira Gandhi loyalist who had been picked by her in 1980 to serve as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, was to turn against Rajiv; and in 1989, V. P. Singh led the Janata Party to an electoral rout over the Congress. However, the revived Janata party mustered only 145 votes, and it had to take the support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by L. K. Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayee, in order to form a government. It is at this juncture that India truly entered the era of coalition governments. V. P. Singh would soon be brought down by two disputes: one over the status of the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque that Hindu militants claimed had been built over the Ram Janmasthan [birthplace], and the second over the recommendations of the Mandal commission pertaining to quotas for various elements of India’s underprivileged masses. On 7 November 1990, by a vote of 356-151, V. P. Singh lost the confidence of the Lok Sabha, and some days later Chandra Sekhar (1927-), with the support of Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress, was sworn in as the next prime minister. However, Congress withdrew its support in March 1991, and elections were called in May.
On 21 May 1991, as intense electioneering was taking place, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a Sri Lankan suicide bomber. The mantle of Congress leadership fell on the veteran P. V. Narasimha Rao (1921-2004), who led the party to triumph, even as the BJP raised the number of its seats in Parliament from a little over 80 to 120. On 6 December 1992, acting in defiance of Supreme Court orders, Hindu militants destroyed the Babri Masjid, and so initiated one of the most intense crises in India’s post-independent history. Rao weathered many a storm, and presided over the liberalization of the economy -- the architect of which was Manmohan Singh, then Finance Minister and, since 2004, the Prime Minister of India. But Rao could not keep the BJP and its friends in check. In the general elections of 1996, the BJP emerged as the largest party, but its 194 seats were not enough to give it a working majority in the 545-seat Lok Sabha, and Atal Behari Vajpayee’s first government lasted a mere twelve days. A 13-party coalition of the United National Front and the Indian left was brought into power, and Deve Gowda, the Chief Minister of Karnataka, was raised to the office of the Prime Minister; but after less than a year in office, he resigned and was succeeded by Inder Kumar Gujral, whose main contribution in office was to bequeath “the Gujral doctrine” – a reference to his genuine attempts to mend India’s relations with its South Asian neighbors, based on the principle that as the largest country, India could afford to be generous, and did not have to require reciprocity for all its munificent actions.
But Gujral’s government similarly lasted less than a year; and in the general elections of February 1998, the BJP emerged again as the single largest party, this time with 200 seats. Vajpayee was invited to form a government, and did so with a coalition of several parties, including the AIADMK, led by Jayalalitha. Nothing that the BJP did was so ripe with consequences as the decision to turn India into a nuclear state with a series of nuclear tests in May 1998. The coalition, not unpredictably, broke down; but the general elections of September 1999, in which the BJP again emerged as the single largest party, and the Congress had a poor showing at the polls, despite being led by Sonia Gandhi, a scion of the ‘Nehru dynasty’, were to reinforce the impression that regional parties and politics have fundamentally altered the state of Indian politics. Under Vajpayee, the BJP presided over the country’s destiny until 2004, even though it was becoming inescapably clear that the dominance of any one party is no longer a foregone conclusion and that coalition politics appears to be the way of the future. Many commentators were rightfully alarmed by various ominous developments that transpired during the BJP’s years in office, such as the coercive Hinduization of the country, the inability of the state to guarantee the rights of religious minorities, and other obvious manifestations of an utter disregard for human rights, such as state-sponsored killings in Kashmir, the north-east, and elsewhere, or the oppressions unleashed upon Christians and women. On the other hand, Vajpayee and the BJP are not only credited with having administered a crushing blow to Pakistan’s adventurism on the Himalayan mountain tops at Kargil, but with having spearheaded a rapid expansion of the Indian economy.
In provincial elections held in several states in late 2003, the BJP registered impressive triumphs and the party leadership was led into thinking that, in calling for early elections, it could consolidate its gains with a magisterial showing in national elections. The BJP waged a campaign on the slogan of “India Shining”, trumpeting the emergence of India as a major power. However, the Indian electorate once again showed that it was not to be taken for granted, and the BJP and its allies lost to a coalition headed by the Congress party. [See India’s Moment: Elections 2004.] The Fourteenth Lok Sabha convened on 17 May 2004 and Manmohan Singh (1932-) assumed the office of the Prime Minister at the head of what is known as the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government. The UPA is supported by the Left Front, a coalition of parties headed by the CPM, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
Public Interest Litigation
Though the Constitution of India guarantees equal rights to all citizens, irrespective of race, gender, religion, and other considerations, and the "directive principles of state policy" as stated in the Constitution obligate the Government to provide to all citizens a minimum standard of living, the promise has not been fulfilled. The greater majority of the Indian people have no assurance of two nutritious meals a day, safety of employment, safe and clean housing, or such level of education as would make it possible for them to understand their constitutional rights and obligations. Indian newspapers abound in stories of the exploitation -- by landlords,factory owners, businessmen, and the state's own functionaries, such as police and revenue officials -- of children, women, villagers, the poor, and the working class.
Though India's higher courts and, in particular, the Supreme Court have often been sensitive to the grim social realities, and have on occasion given relief to the oppressed, the poor do not have the capacity to represent themselves, or to take advantage of progressive legislation. In 1982, the Supreme Court conceded that unusual measures were warranted to enable people the full realization of not merely their civil and political rights, but the enjoyment of economic, social, and cultural rights, and in its far- reaching decision in the case of PUDR [People's Union for Democratic Rights] vs. Union of India [1982 (2) S.C.C. 253], it recognized that a third party could directly petition, whether through a letter or other means, the Court and seek its intervention in a matter where another party's fundamental rights were being violated. In this case, adverting to the Constitutional prohibition on "begar", or forced labor and traffic in human beings, PUDR submitted that workers contracted to build the large sports complex at the Asian Game Village in Delhi were being exploited. PUDR asked the Court to recognize that "begar" was far more than compelling someone to work against his or her will, and that work under exploitative and grotesquely humiliating conditions, or work that was not even compensated by prescribed minimum wages, was violative of fundamental rights. As the Supreme Court noted,
Though India's higher courts and, in particular, the Supreme Court have often been sensitive to the grim social realities, and have on occasion given relief to the oppressed, the poor do not have the capacity to represent themselves, or to take advantage of progressive legislation. In 1982, the Supreme Court conceded that unusual measures were warranted to enable people the full realization of not merely their civil and political rights, but the enjoyment of economic, social, and cultural rights, and in its far- reaching decision in the case of PUDR [People's Union for Democratic Rights] vs. Union of India [1982 (2) S.C.C. 253], it recognized that a third party could directly petition, whether through a letter or other means, the Court and seek its intervention in a matter where another party's fundamental rights were being violated. In this case, adverting to the Constitutional prohibition on "begar", or forced labor and traffic in human beings, PUDR submitted that workers contracted to build the large sports complex at the Asian Game Village in Delhi were being exploited. PUDR asked the Court to recognize that "begar" was far more than compelling someone to work against his or her will, and that work under exploitative and grotesquely humiliating conditions, or work that was not even compensated by prescribed minimum wages, was violative of fundamental rights. As the Supreme Court noted,
The rule of law does not mean that the protection of the aw must be available only to a fortunate few or that the law should be allowed to be prostituted by the vested interests for protecting and upholding the status quo under the guise of enforcement of their civil and political rights. The poor too have civil and political rights and rule of law is meant for them also, though today it exists only on paper and not in reality. If the sugar barons and the alcohol kings have the fundamental right to carry on their business and to fatten their purses by exploiting the consuming public, have the chamars belonging to the lowest strata of society no fundamental right to earn an honest living through their sweat and toil?Thus the court was willing to acknowledge that it had a mandate to advance the rights of the disadvantaged and poor, though this might be at the behest of individuals or groups who themselves claimed no disability. Such litigation, termed Public Interest Litigation or Social Action Litigation by its foremost advocate, Professor Upendra Baxi, has given the court "epistolary jurisdiction"
BRITISH INDIA
The British presence in India dates back to the early part of the seventeenth century. On 31 December 1600, Elizabeth, then the monarch of the United Kingdom, acceded to the demand of a large body of merchants that a royal charter be given to a new trading company, "The Governor and Company of Merchants of London, Trading into the East-Indies." Between 1601-13, merchants of the East India Company took twelve voyages to India, and in 1609 William Hawkins arrived at the court of Jahangir to seek permission to establish a British presence in India. Hawkins was rebuffed by Jahangir, but Sir Thomas Roe, who presented himself before the Mughal Emperor in 1617, was rather more successful. Two years later, Roe gained Jahangir's permission to build a British factory in Surat, and in 1639, this was followed by the founding of Fort St. George (Madras). Despite some setbacks, such as the Company's utter humiliation at the hands of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, with whom the Company went to war between 1688-91, the Company never really looked back.
Shortly after the annexation of Awadh, the Sepoy Mutiny, more appropriately described as the Indian Rebellion of 1857-58, broke out. This was by far the greatest threat posed to the British since the beginnings of their acquisition of an empire in India in 1757, and within the space of a few weeks in May large swathes of territory in the Gangetic plains had fallen to the rebels. Atrocities were committed on both sides, and conventionally the rebellion is viewed as marking the moment when the British would always understand themselves as besieged by hostile natives, just as the Indians understood that they could not forever be held in submission. If in the early days of the Company's rule a legend was constructed around the Black Hole of Calcutta, so signifying the villainy of Indians, the Rebellion of 1857-58 gave rise to an elaborate mythography on both sides. Delhi was recaptured by British troops in late 1857, the Emperor Bahadur Shah, last of the Mughals, was put on trial for sedition and predictably convicted, and by mid-1858 the Rebellion had been entirely crushed. The East India Company was abolished, though John Stuart Mill, the Commissioner of Correspondence at India House, London, and the unacknowledged formulator of British policy with respect to the native states, furnished an elaborate but ultimately unsuccessful plea on behalf of the Company. India became a Crown colony, to be governed directly by Parliament, and henceforth responsibility for Indian affairs would fall upon a member of the British cabinet, the Secretary of State for India, while in India itself the man at the helm of affairs would continue to be the Governor-General, known otherwise in his capacity as the representative of the monarch as the Viceroy of India.
The proclamation of Queen Victoria, in which she promised that she and her officers would work for the welfare of their Indian subjects, ushered in the final phase of the British Raj. Among Indians, there were debates surrounding female education, widow remarriage, the age of consent for marriage, and more generally the status of women; and in the meanwhile, with increasing emphasis on English education, and the expansion of the government, larger numbers of Indians joined government service. There was, similarly, a considerable increase in both English-language and vernacular journalism, and in 1885 the Indian National Congress, at first an association comprised largely of lawyers and some other professionals, was founded in order that educated Indians might gain something of a voice in the governance of their own country. However, nationalist sentiments could not be confined within the parameters set by a gentlemanly organization such as the Congress, and both in Maharashtra, where the radicals were led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and in Bengal armed revolutionaries attempted to carry out a campaign of terror and assassination directed at British officials and institutions. In 1905, on the grounds that the governance of Bengal had become impossible owing to the large size of the presidency, the British partitioned Bengal, and so provoked the first major resistance to British rule and administrative policies in the aftermath of the Rebellion of 1857-58. It is during the Swadeshi movement that Indians deployed various strategies of non-violent resistance, boycott, strike and non-cooperation, and eventually the British had to agree to revoke the partition of Bengal. The partition itself had been attempted partly with a view to dividing the largely Muslim area of East Bengal from the western part of Bengal, which was predominantly Hindu, and the communalist designs of the British were clearly demonstrated as well in their encouragement of the Muslim League, a political formation that came into existence in 1907, on the supposition that the interests of the Muslims could not be served by the Indian National Congress. The capital of the country was shifted as well from Calcutta to Delhi, where a new set of official buildings designed to reflect imperial splendor led to the creation of New Delhi.
During World War I, when Britain declared that India was at war with Germany as well, large number of Indian troops served overseas, and the declaration by the Secretary of State Montagu in 1917 to the effect that it would be the intent of the Government of India to increase gradually Indian participation in the administration of the country was seen as an encouragement of Indian ambitions of eventual self-rule. But following the conclusion of the war, the British sought to introduce draconian legislation to contain the activity of people presumed to be political extremists, and the Punjab disturbances of 1919, including the notorious massacre by General Dyer of nearly 400 unarmed Indians at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar in April, marked the emergence of a nation-wide movement against British rule. The events of 1919 also brought to the fore Mahatma Gandhi, who would henceforth be the uncrowned king of the Indian nationalist movement. Gandhi led the non-cooperation movement against the British in 1920-22, as well as a campaign of civil disobedience in 1930-31, and in 1942 he issued the call to the British to 'Quit India'. Negotiations for some degree of Indian independence, led by Gandhi, first took place in 1930 at the Round Table Conferences in London, but shortly thereafter the Congress decided to adopt a resolution calling for purna swaraj, or complete independence from British rule. Meanwhile, relations between the Hindus and Muslims had deteriorated, and during the latter years of World War II, when the leaders of the Congress, including Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sardar Patel were incarcerated, the Muslim League, which declared itself in support of the British war effort, had a free hand to spread the message of Muslim separatism. When, in the aftermath of the war, and the triumph of the Labor party, the British Prime Minister Clement Atlee declared that the British would grant India its independence, negotiations were commenced with all the major political parties and communities, including the Sikhs, the Congress, and the Muslim League. In launching Direct Action Day in 1946, which led to immense communal killings in Calcutta, the Muslim League sought to convey the idea that an undivided India was no longer a possibility; and the eventual attainment of independence from British rule on 15 August 1947 was accompanied not only by the creation of the new state of Pakistan, comprised of Muslim-majority areas in both the eastern and western parts of India, but by the unprecedented horrors of partition. At least 500,000 people are estimated to have been killed, and many women were abducted or raped; and it is estimated that no fewer than 11 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs crossed borders, which to this day remains the single largest episode of migration in history.
Though the political narrative dominates in accounts of the history of British India, as in the preceding pages, the social and cultural histories of the British Raj are no less interesting. There are doubtless enduring, though not necessarily desirable, influences of British rule in contemporary India. The elites of the country write and converse largely in English, and are connected amongst themselves, and to the larger world outside, through the English language. The Constitution of India, howsoever noble a document, has been decisively shaped by the Government of India Act of 1935, which was scarcely designed to alleviate the distress of the predominantly underprivileged population of India, and not much thought seems to have been given to considering how appropriate a parliamentary system, with roughly the same number of seats in the lower (elected) house, the Lok Sabha, as in the House of Commons, might be for India when it is infinitely larger than Britain. The political and administrative institutions of independent India operate on the assumption that the country is still under colonial rule, and that the subjects are to have no voice in governance, unless they make an extreme fuss. The legal structure was handed down by the British, and the presumption remains that it does not exist to serve the common person, any more than does the vast apparatus of 'law and order': it is no accident that the police always arrive late in the popular Hindi film, when communities have already successfully taken the law into their own hands. The only innovations which have of been use in meeting forms of extreme oppression and injustice, such as Public Interest Litigation, are those which have effected a departure from the colonial model of justice.
India inherited from the British its present university system, and the origins of the summer migration of the middle class and elites to hill stations date back to the early nineteenth century. Social institutions such as clubs and gymkhanas, which persist down to the present day, were a critical part of British life, as E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Orwell's Burmese Days, and the novels of John Masters and Paul Scott so amply suggest. Though the Indian languages were well developed before the arrival of the British in India, the standardization of these languages, and the creation of the first grammars and dictionaries, was achieved under British rule. The influential school of Kalighat painting emerged in late nineteenth century, and can scarcely be understood without a reference to the creation of a modern market, and similarly the printing press, which arrived in India in the sixteenth century, heralded the age of mechanical reproduction in India. In sports, the abiding passion remains cricket (once a preeminently colonial game), and the favorite drink of the Indian middle class male remains scotch and soda. One could point to a thousand different manifestations of the British presence in India, and slowly, one hopes, our histories will also alert us to the transformations wrought in British institutions and practices in post-independent India.
Gateway of India, Bombay
In 1757, on account of the British victory at Plassey, where a military force led by Robert Clive defeated the forces of the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daulah, the East India Company found itself transformed from an association of traders to rulers exercising political sovereignty over a largely unknown land and people. Less than ten years later, in 1765, the Company acquired the Diwani of Bengal, or the right to collect revenues on behalf of the Mughal Emperor, in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. The consolidation of British rule after the initial military victories fell to Warren Hastings, who did much to dispense with the fiction that the Mughal Emperor was still the sovereign to whom the Company was responsible. Hastings also set about to make the British more acquainted with Indian history, culture, and social customs; but upon his return to England, he would be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. His numerous successors, though fired by the ambition to expand British territories in India, were also faced with the task of governance. British rule was justified, in part, by the claims that the Indians required to be civilized, and that British rule would introduce in place of Oriental despotism and anarchy a reliable system of justice, the rule of law, and the notion of 'fair play'. Certain Indian social or religious practices that the British found to be abhorrent were outlawed, such as sati in 1829, and an ethic of 'improvement' was said to dictate British social policies. In the 1840s and 1850s, under the governal-generalship of Dalhousie and then Canning, more territories were absorbed into British India, either on the grounds that the native rulers were corrupt, inept, and notoriously indifferent about the welfare of their subjects, or that since the native ruler had failed to produce a biological male heir to the throne, the territory was bound to "lapse" into British India upon the death of the ruler. Such was the fate of Sambalpur (1849), Baghat (1850), Jhansi (1853), Nagpur (1854), and -- most tragically -- Awadh (1856). The Nawab of Awadh [also spelled as Oudh], Wajid Ali Shah, was especially reviled by the British as the worst specimen of the Oriental Despot, more interested in nautch girls, frivolous amusements -- kite-flying, cock-fighting, and the like -- and sheer indolence than in the difficult task of governance. The British annexation of Awadh, and the character of the Nawab, were made the subjects of an extraordinary film by Satyajit Ray, entitled The Chess Players ("Shatranj ke Khilari"). |
| An English baby girl being carried on a palanquin by Indian bearers, on the road fo Nainital. Photograph dated 1904. |
The proclamation of Queen Victoria, in which she promised that she and her officers would work for the welfare of their Indian subjects, ushered in the final phase of the British Raj. Among Indians, there were debates surrounding female education, widow remarriage, the age of consent for marriage, and more generally the status of women; and in the meanwhile, with increasing emphasis on English education, and the expansion of the government, larger numbers of Indians joined government service. There was, similarly, a considerable increase in both English-language and vernacular journalism, and in 1885 the Indian National Congress, at first an association comprised largely of lawyers and some other professionals, was founded in order that educated Indians might gain something of a voice in the governance of their own country. However, nationalist sentiments could not be confined within the parameters set by a gentlemanly organization such as the Congress, and both in Maharashtra, where the radicals were led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and in Bengal armed revolutionaries attempted to carry out a campaign of terror and assassination directed at British officials and institutions. In 1905, on the grounds that the governance of Bengal had become impossible owing to the large size of the presidency, the British partitioned Bengal, and so provoked the first major resistance to British rule and administrative policies in the aftermath of the Rebellion of 1857-58. It is during the Swadeshi movement that Indians deployed various strategies of non-violent resistance, boycott, strike and non-cooperation, and eventually the British had to agree to revoke the partition of Bengal. The partition itself had been attempted partly with a view to dividing the largely Muslim area of East Bengal from the western part of Bengal, which was predominantly Hindu, and the communalist designs of the British were clearly demonstrated as well in their encouragement of the Muslim League, a political formation that came into existence in 1907, on the supposition that the interests of the Muslims could not be served by the Indian National Congress. The capital of the country was shifted as well from Calcutta to Delhi, where a new set of official buildings designed to reflect imperial splendor led to the creation of New Delhi.
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| Memsahib in Rickshaw, photograph from South India, C. 1895. (Click image for a large view.) |
Though the political narrative dominates in accounts of the history of British India, as in the preceding pages, the social and cultural histories of the British Raj are no less interesting. There are doubtless enduring, though not necessarily desirable, influences of British rule in contemporary India. The elites of the country write and converse largely in English, and are connected amongst themselves, and to the larger world outside, through the English language. The Constitution of India, howsoever noble a document, has been decisively shaped by the Government of India Act of 1935, which was scarcely designed to alleviate the distress of the predominantly underprivileged population of India, and not much thought seems to have been given to considering how appropriate a parliamentary system, with roughly the same number of seats in the lower (elected) house, the Lok Sabha, as in the House of Commons, might be for India when it is infinitely larger than Britain. The political and administrative institutions of independent India operate on the assumption that the country is still under colonial rule, and that the subjects are to have no voice in governance, unless they make an extreme fuss. The legal structure was handed down by the British, and the presumption remains that it does not exist to serve the common person, any more than does the vast apparatus of 'law and order': it is no accident that the police always arrive late in the popular Hindi film, when communities have already successfully taken the law into their own hands. The only innovations which have of been use in meeting forms of extreme oppression and injustice, such as Public Interest Litigation, are those which have effected a departure from the colonial model of justice.
India inherited from the British its present university system, and the origins of the summer migration of the middle class and elites to hill stations date back to the early nineteenth century. Social institutions such as clubs and gymkhanas, which persist down to the present day, were a critical part of British life, as E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Orwell's Burmese Days, and the novels of John Masters and Paul Scott so amply suggest. Though the Indian languages were well developed before the arrival of the British in India, the standardization of these languages, and the creation of the first grammars and dictionaries, was achieved under British rule. The influential school of Kalighat painting emerged in late nineteenth century, and can scarcely be understood without a reference to the creation of a modern market, and similarly the printing press, which arrived in India in the sixteenth century, heralded the age of mechanical reproduction in India. In sports, the abiding passion remains cricket (once a preeminently colonial game), and the favorite drink of the Indian middle class male remains scotch and soda. One could point to a thousand different manifestations of the British presence in India, and slowly, one hopes, our histories will also alert us to the transformations wrought in British institutions and practices in post-independent India.
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