Here is the third part of our exclusive serialisation of a new book on the history of class struggles in India, written by a long-time supporter of the Workers’ International Network. In this section the writer exposes how India’s British imperial overlords promoted communal divisions inorder the “divide and rule”.
Divide and rule
Some learned professors have tried to explain communalism as a psychological phenomenon. But society follows its own laws, independent of the individual impulses of its constituents. Social processes amount to more than the aggregate of individual behaviour. In physics or biology, the behaviour of particles or individual organisms is governed by laws quite different from those relating to the mass or the species. So, too, the insights of psychoanalysts into individual consciousness or behaviour fail to explain even such apparently irrational or psychotic outbreaks of mass hysteria as communal riots. In analysing their participants’ blood-curdling accounts of atrocities or the rabble-rousing tirades of demagogues, they entirely miss the social and historical explanation for them. It is as if special studies had been made on the typography of the print of Hitler’s Mein Kampf or the topography of Auschwitz. Life’s paradoxes dazzlingly outshine the grey print of even the best textbooks.
The waxing and waning of communal conflict over the ages is rooted in historical processes: in this case, in the successive victories and frustrations of the liberation struggle and the respective brilliance and dimming of hope and purpose; the waxing and waning of a wider national or even global perspective. Rioting is only an extreme manifestation of intolerable frustrations, disenchantments and social breakdown. The combustible raw material of prejudice is stoked up and exploited by demagogues and gangsters. The virulence of communal and caste conflict is rooted in the betrayal of the hopes of the Indian national movement and aggravated beyond endurance by the politicians’ cynical verbiage and hollow tokens, such as job reservation and holy icons.
Using its time-honoured strategy of divide-and-rule, so successfully deployed in Ireland, the British met the threat of national rebellion by systematically fostered communal discord.
Actually, the very concept of “Hinduism” was largely a 19th-century British invention. When the British landed in India in the 18th century, they were “mesmerized by the profusion of gods, temples, shrines, cults and sects” they found there. These included the ancient Vedic religion with its ritual sacrifices, the cults of Rama and Krishna, the worship of Shiva and Vishnu, the network of ashrams, and the mystical Islamic sect of sufism, all of which had flourished side by side and even merged under Moghul rule, while millions of low-caste Hindus converted to Islam. There were no rigid divisions between these faith groups. In medieval times there had actually been more cases of communal friction between the rival worshippers of Shiva and Vishnu than between “Hindus” and Muslims. And, as we have seen, Hindus and Muslims had fought shoulder to shoulder in the 1857 uprising.
“The colonial state… used communalism to counter and weaken the growing national movement and the welding of the Indian people into a nation”, writes the Indian historian Bipan Chandra. Once the standard justifications for British rule were wearing thin – its “civilising mission”, the “white man’s burden”, etc. – they were replaced by the professed need to “protect minorities” and “keep rival communities apart”. “Every existing division of Indian society was encouraged to prevent the emerging unity of the Indian people. An effort was made to set region against region, province against province, caste against caste, language against language, reformers against the orthodox, the moderate against the militant, leftist against rightist, and even class against class. It was, of course, the communal division which survived to the end and proved the most serviceable… It was to become the main prop of colonialism.”
It was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century that the poison of communalism began to take root. If responsibility for the injection of this virus can be laid on the shoulders of any single individual, the Muslim aristocrat Sir Syed Ahmed Khan bears most of the blame. He had previously insisted that Hindus and Muslims in India constitute a single nation: “Hindus, Muslims and Christians who live in this country are by virtue of this fact one qaum [nation or community],” he said. But once Congress had been founded, he joined forces with the feudal zamindars and with India’s colonial overlords to counter the rising democratic movement along caste and communal lines by pioneering the poisonous myth of “two nations”. He opposed Congress’ demand for democratic elections and its appeals for social equality between the “lowly” and the “high-born”, and peddled the delusion that British rule was the best safeguard of Muslim interests. “The colonial rulers were quick to see the inherent logic of communalism… and from the beginning actively promoted and supported communalism.”
By a symmetrical process, an equally reactionary parallel development was taking place. In the twentieth century, Hindu communalism festered and grew, drawing its inspiration increasingly from Europe’s growing cult of fascism. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh consciously modelled itself on the Fascists and Nazis, praising Italy and Germany as “two countries where the ancient race spirit has once again roused itself”, repeating for added emphasis: “Our race spirit has once again roused itself.” Golwalkar raged against Congress even for merely acknowledging the existence of an Indian national identity, accusing it of “hugging to our bosom our most inveterate enemies and thus endangering our very existence” and classing us “with our old invaders and foes under the outlandish name ‘Indian’… We have allowed ourselves to be duped into believing… our old and bitter enemies to be our friends… We Hindus are at war at once with the Muslims on the one hand and the British on the other.”
And just as most of the other key flashpoints in the world today represent the bitter legacy of the British colonial strategy of ethnic conflict and “divide-and-rule” in Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Cyprus, Sri Lanka, East Africa, and many more – so too is its exclusive responsibility for South Asia’s contemporary flashpoints: the partition of India and Pakistan, the secession of Bangladesh, border clashes and wars, constant communal riots, the running sore of Kashmir, etc. These are all a direct consequence of British rule.
To quote Bipan Chandra: “The colonial state… used communalism to counter and weaken the growing national movement and the welding of the Indian people into a nation… Every existing division of Indian society was encouraged to prevent the emerging unity of the Indian people. An effort was made to set region against region, province against province, caste against caste, language against language, reformers against the orthodox, the moderate against the militant, leftist against rightist, and even class against class. It was, of course, the communal division which survived to the end and proved the most serviceable… It was to become the main prop of colonialism.”
In 1905, the Viceroy of India Lord Curzon arbitrarily partitioned Bengal into a Muslim-dominated east and Hindu-majority west. H.H. Risley, home secretary at the time in the government of India, explicitly justified this act of mutilation with the barefaced admission that “Bengal united is a power; Bengal divided will pull in several different ways. That is what the Congress leaders feel. Their apprehensions are perfectly correct… One of our main objects is to split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule.” (The Proudest Day, Read and Fisher.)
Why Bengal was their first target was obvious. Since the Bengalis had been the first to gain access to an English education, they were at the forefront of resistance, and It was Bengalis who spearheaded the movement for independence. So to maintain Bengal intact as a united province posed a constant threat to British rule, and splitting it along communal lines was a shrewd technique of repression. The next step along this path was the Morley-Minto Act of 1909, by which the British cleverly drew up separate electorates for Muslim voters, as a means of creating communal friction. The enforcement of separate electorates for Muslim voters was a tactic overtly calculated to divide the population along communal lines, promote fratricidal conflict, poison inter-community relations and erode India’s age-old traditions of communal harmony. This cynical device represented a first deadly step towards the coming wholesale partition of India: an anticipation of the later even more brutal vivisection of the entire sub-continental land mass, in order to 'divide and rule'.
Next in this series…
CLASS STRUGGLES IN INDIA part 4: The birth of Congress
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