Book Review: Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India by K. S. Komireddi
What Komireddi’s
pithiness belies - like those of so many current politicians and commentators
who invoke History - is the complex subjectivity of historical data that cannot
be captured in brevity… Komireddi ought to have considered that ‘Europeans’ are
‘imperialists’ because they never settled in India and made it their home; the
Muslims did. And it is that choice of settlement in what was to Muslims
initially a foreign land that what Komireddi sarcastically calls a ‘cultural
exchange programme’ occurred. History is not for bytes, nor for the present; it
is a discipline to study the past. Perhaps this is too fine a point to make
here, but in a world where non-historians invoke History and its ‘wrongs’ to
disaggregate the present to justify victimhood, and downward spirals of
violence and discrimination against co-citizens, a case ought to be made for
greater responsibility by all.
In Malevolent
Republic: A Short History of the New India, author K. S.
Komireddi examines the rise of the BJP and Narendra Modi, and the
impact of his right-wing Hindu nationalist government on India. While the book
offers an open and unabashed critique of the recently re-elected Prime
Minister, Nilanjan Sarkar finds an informative, pithy
and attention-grabbing book that also offers a trenchant critique of the
Nehru-Gandhi ‘Dynasty’.
Not much is left to expectation
when a book has ‘malevolent’ and ‘New India’ in its title. As the world lives
through a civilisational turn towards majoritarian insecurity and its politics
thereof, Komireddi’s book is an open and unabashed critique of the right-wing
Hindu nationalist government in India, led by its poster-boy Narendra Modi,
‘the worst human being ever elected Prime Minister’ (p. 211). But before one
castigates the author for his prejudiced perspective, it should be noted that
the book begins approximately from 1964 (the death of India’s first Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru), and more concertedly from the time of India’s
period of political Emergency (1975–77) that was unleashed by the Congress.
The book is in 2
unified parts: the first 4 chapters comprise the ‘Antecedents’ to the rise of
the Bharatiya Janata Party/Narendra Modi, while the remaining 6 chapters are on
‘India under Narendra Modi’. A final ‘Coda’ apprehends the national elections
of May 2019 (the book was published before the elections, which has brought the
BJP back to power with a greater majority for another 5-year tenure). Whilst
seemingly about Modi, the book in fact is also a trenchant critique of the
Nehru-Gandhi ‘Dynasty’- beginning with the matriarch Indira (and her lawless
son, Sanjay), then Rajiv, Sonia, Rahul (and a bit of Priyanka/Robert), a
singular line of political leadership made motley by the interregnums of
stooges Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, the only two non-Gandhis to have been
made Prime Minister in 40-odd years.
Others (Prime Minister Shastri; Home
Minister Sardar Patel; &c) make fleeting appearances: together they
underline, amplify or mourn malevolence, malfeasance or missed opportunity;
cumulatively, this covers almost everything that happened in India’s public/political
sphere in the last 50 years. These, and the consequent chapters on the BJP/Modi
(including the earlier prime ministership of BJP patriarch Vajpayee), cover a
vast, complex and crowded timespan.
To its credit, while
almost everyone will find things to disagree with, the book manages to hold the
reader’s attention. And here lies an important trick of the book: its language,
twinned with detail. Komireddi is master of pithy sentences (‘People victimised
by Old India saw [Modi] as one of their own: for some, an agent of their hopes;
for others, an embodiment of their rage’, p. 98) which gives speed to his text,
and forgotten facts ([Pakistan’s] ‘General Ayub offered himself as pall-bearer
for Shastri’, p. 29) which re-centres the reader’s attention at irregular
intervals. For someone like this reviewer who has lived through almost the
entire time period covered in this book, I was struck by how it was able to
keep me engaged, even as my mind alternated between old and immediate causes of
despair, resignation and rage. Komireddi’s language is brutal (‘in Sanjay
[Gandhi] there wasn’t even a residue of democratic inclination’, p. 32), and
the brutality relentless ([Yogi Adityanath] ‘is an unadulterated bigot […] a
feral priest enrobed in saffron’, pp 134–35); there is no place to hide
([Manmohan Singh] ‘made history by losing it [the secure Congress seat of Delhi
in the 1999 elections]’, p. 80), and he attempts to hide almost nothing (‘The
new establishment did not mourn the dead man [Akhlaq]. It supplied alibis for
his executioners’, p. 127), sometimes with revolting detail (‘stray dogs tore
at the remains of [Narasimha Rao’s] partially cremated body’, p. 78).
The frame of the book
is a personal anecdote: the dynamics of the author with his childhood friend
Murad. It sets the tone of the partisan, polar and communal reality in the text
that follows; it also embodies the hopelessness of the few in New India. A
second trick of the book is thus the combining of opinion (‘Muslims were being
told by Hindu nationalists — just as they had been told by Muslim
segregationist Jinnah — that they could not be Muslim and Indian’,
p. 13) with judgement (‘Secularism, it turns out, was a great deal more than
the private fetish of a deracinated post-colonial elite. It was, with all its
defects, the condition of India’s unity’, p. 189), amplifying the inherent
faultlines that keep majoritarian insecurities in place.
It is against this
complex background of the remorseless failures of an arrogant Congress that
Komireddi articulates his distress at the election of Narendra Modi as Prime
Minister, ‘the hand grenade hurled by all those who had been sneered at,
stamped upon, marginalized, subjected to cultural condescension and objectified
for anthropological amusement by the preening cast of English-speaking elites
fostered by India’s venal secular establishment’ (p. 98). His anguish is
heartfelt, and some of his predictions (from pre-May 2019) ring true ([India]
‘can no longer invoke the foundational arguments of the state to retain non-Hindus
within its fold. Delhi can only hold on to them by force — as second tier
subjects of a Hindu imperium …’, p. 190), while some are now redundant
([Modi’s] ‘Hindu nationalism is not even theoretically equipped to defuse
the crisis of legitimacy that stalks the state in Kashmir’, p. 190). Kashmir is
no longer a state but a dismembered set of Union Territories governed directly
from Delhi.
Malevolent
Republic is readable,
even when one disagrees. The pithy style which lends dramatis to the text also
carries the liability of generalisation and, occasionally, dangerous
superficiality. While discussing the discipline of History-writing in India,
ostensibly under the influence of Nehruvian secularism, Komireddi says:
‘Imperialism, in other words, was destructive only when Europeans did it. When
Asians did it, it was a cultural exchange programme’ (p. 70). What Komireddi’s
pithiness belies - like those of so many current politicians and commentators
who invoke History - is the complex subjectivity of historical data that cannot
be captured in brevity. To counter this statement from a slightly more informed
perspective, Komireddi ought to have considered that ‘Europeans’ are
‘imperialists’ because they never settled in India and made it their home; the
Muslims did.
And it is that choice of settlement in what was to Muslims
initially a foreign land that what Komireddi sarcastically calls a ‘cultural
exchange programme’ occurred. History is not for bytes, nor for the present; it
is a discipline to study the past. Perhaps this is too fine a point to make
here, but in a world where non-historians invoke History and its ‘wrongs’ to
disaggregate the present to justify victimhood, and downward spirals of
violence and discrimination against co-citizens, a case ought to be made for
greater responsibility by all. Otherwise we risk not just distorting History
and humanity, but losing much else in this bellicose march towards majoritarian
nationhood.
