The Penguin History of the World

It was an ominous symptom of reaction to the dangers of division that in 1971 an orthodox and deeply conservative Hindu party made its appearance in Indian politics as the first plausible threat to the hegemony of Congress, and held office for three years. That hegemony persisted, none the less. Forty years after independence, Congress was more visibly than ever not so much a political party in the European sense as an India-wide coalition of interest groups, notables and controllers of patronage, and this gave it, even under the leadership of Nehru, for all his socialist aspirations and rhetoric, an intrinsically conservative character. It was never the function of Congress, once the British were removed, to bring about change, but rather to accommodate it.

This conservatism was in a manner symbolized by the dynastic nature of Indian government. Nehru had been succeeded as prime minister by his daughter, Indira Gandhi (who had begun her divergence from his wishes by setting aside his request that no religious ceremony should accompany his funeral) and she was to be followed by her son, Rajiv Gandhi. When he was blown up by an assassin (he was not in office at the time), Congress leaders at once showed an almost automatic reflex in seeking to persuade his widow to take up the leadership of the party. In the 1980s, though, there were signs that dynasticism might not prove viable much longer. Sikh particularism brought itself vividly to the world’s notice in 1984 with the assassination of Mrs Gandhi (who was once more prime minister at the time), after the Indian army had carried out an attack on the foremost shrine of Sikh faith at Amritsar. In the next seven years, more than 10,000 Sikh militants, innocent bystanders and members of the security forces were to be killed. Fighting with Pakistan over Kashmir, too, broke out again in the later part of the decade. In 1990 it was officially admitted that 890 people had died that year in Hindu–Muslim riots, the worst since 1947.

Once again, it is difficult not to return to banal reflection that the weight of the past was very heavy in India, that no dynamic force emerged to throw it off and that modernity arrived slowly and patchily. As memories of pre-independence India faded, the reassertion of Indian tradition was always likely. Symbolically, when the moment for independence had come in 1947 it had been at midnight, because the British had not consulted the astrologers to provide an auspicious day and a moment between two days had therefore to be chosen for the birth of a new nation: it was an assertion of the power of Indian ways that were to lose little of their force in the next forty years. Partition had then redefined the community to be governed in much more dominantly Hindu terms.

By 1980 the last Indian Civil Service officer recruited under the British had already retired. India lived still with a conscious disparity between its engrafted western political system and the society on which that has been imposed. For all the great achievements of many of its leaders, devoted men and women, the entrenched past, with all that means in terms of privilege, injustice and inequity, still stood in India’s way. Perhaps those who believed in its future in 1947 simply failed to recognize how difficult and painful fundamental change must be – and it is not for those who have found it hard to accomplish much less fundamental change in their own societies to be supercilious about that.

India’s neighbour Pakistan had turned more consciously to Islamic tradition (or at least modern incarnations thereof) and so soon found itself sharing in a movement of renewal which was visible across much of the Muslim world. Not for the first time, western politicians had again to recall that Islam was strong in lands stretching from Morocco in the west to China in the east. Indonesia, the largest South-East Asian country, Pakistan, Malaysia and Bangladesh between them contained nearly half the world’s Muslims. Beyond those countries and the lands of the Arabic culture, both the Soviet Union and Nigeria, the most populous African country, also had large numbers of Muslim subjects (as long ago as 1906, the tsarist government of Russia had been alarmed by revolution in Iran because of its possibly disturbing effect on its own Muslim peoples). But new perceptions of the Islamic world took time to appear. Well into the 1970s the rest of the world tended to be obsessed by the Arab countries of the Middle East, and especially the oil-rich among them, when it thought of Islam much at all.