Jairus Banaji on the history of Indian capitalists; and the BJP's ongoing assault on basic human rights
From Jairus Banaji’s Facebook
post, December 20, 2019
India’s ruling duo
live on a different planet from the mass of Indians, so completely divorced are
they from the lives of the vast majority who struggle to make ends meet. They
love the company of Mukeshbhai and Mehulbhai, love to dress expensively and to
strut around like peacocks, waving to cameras. One loves to travel and is
obsessed with embracing powerful male heads of state (as long as the cameras
are watching). The other obviously eats very well, unlike 85% of
Indians, and tells us human rights are irrelevant. This sets the clock of
modern society back several centuries, to before the days when the rights of
the individual began to matter.
They both seriously think they can arrogate the
power of life and death over many millions of their fellow citizens by having
the right to decide who is and isn’t a citizen, who will and will not be
stateless. Basically this is because they see their citizens (*all* citizens)
as subjects, not citizens. The detention centres will become embodiments of a
religious hierarchy strongly reminiscent of the racial hierarchies of the Nazi
state.
Shah’s own family
migrated to Bombay from a princely state, the town of Mansa, which lay outside
the jurisdiction of British India and thus of *India* as it was politically
constituted at the time. His family were pure immigrants. Had India’s colonial
rulers been half as reactionary as today’s home minister, they may well have
seen him as an “illegal” immigrant, except that his great grandfather was a
wealthy capitalist and of course the British placed no restrictions on the
mobility of either capital or labor.
From Jairus Banaji’s Facebook post, December 12; 2019
The right to have rights, that is, the right to belong to some kind of organized community, is the most fundamental right there is because all other rights depend on it. The universal form this takes in the modern world is citizenship. Depriving people of their citizenship, rendering them stateless, is thus the most insidious of the various “crimes against humanity”, because it entails expelling humans from humanity itself.
Hannah Arendt saw this happen on a massive scale between the wars. She wrote, “The first loss which the rightless suffered was the loss of their homes”, and explained that with all of Europe besieged by some form of nationalism, “What is unprecedented is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one”. No nation-state would take the unwanted of other nation-states. The mass detention centres the Indian government is currently building are perfect emblems of this ghastly state of limbo. They are India’s counterparts of the fascist concentration camps. That a government can actually set out to create this situation of rightlessness for millions of its country’s citizens, hiding the crime it is commiting behind pure humbug (Shah’s speeches in parliament) and hypocrisy (Modi’s inane tweets), is the ultimate self-goal any government can score. It will be remembered by all future generations with pure hatred and scorn when the present madness (दीवानगी) has passed.
From Jairus Banaji’s Facebook post, Oct 28, 2019
The cardinal fact that
stands out in any history of India in the 18th and 19th centuries is that it
was the Hindu and Jain merchant communities that bankrolled the annexation of
India by the East India Company. This was first argued systematically by
Lakshmi Subramanian in Indigenous Capital and Imperial Expansion (1996) where
she could show that the bigger Surat banias opted for the British (in the
mounting conflict between them and the Marathas that goes back to the
late 18th century) and that “the Banias extended sustained support to the
Company” (p.145). In her most recent book she claims “Indian merchants and
bankers remained firmly on the side of the new rulers” and that “most merchant
groups had committed their purse strings to imperial conquest and expansion”
(Three Merchants of Bombay, p.200).
It’s worth recalling
this because at a recent seminar in Benares Hindu University, Amit Shah is
reported to have “appealed to historians to stop cursing and abusing British
historians and leftists for writing a wrong history of India. It is our
responsibility to write our history. How long are we going to blame the
British?”. The most interesting part of all this is the mystifying reference to
“blaming the British”, almost suggesting that Shah thinks critiques of
colonialism are now irrelevant.
Like the Ambanis, Shah
himself comes from the country’s quintessential merchant/banking community, the
Gujarati Vaishnav banias. Next to the Nagar Brahmin banker Trawadi Arjunji
Nathji, also Surat based, it is they who played the decisive role in
facilitating the expansion of the Company across large swathes of India.
Indeed, the support extended by various merchant communities to the British was
so pervasive that in his recent book A Business History of India (2018),
which one could scarcely accuse of being “leftist”, Tirthankar Roy even claims,
“Without the support of Indian businesses of the time, the British would have
lost their Indian rule in 1858” (p.76).
A strong claim, but
not one that Shah would want any young student to contemplate seriously. Hence
the construction of 1857 as a homogeneous unified nation liberating itself from
the foreign yoke. “Our history” is essentially a history designed to deflect
attention from the extensive collaboration of those “classes among the
Hindoos”, viz. the “trading and banking class”, as an Allahabad magistrate
described them, that were always seen as *the most reliable allies* of the
colonial state and its imperial project.
But let’s be clear
here. Of course Shah prefers the abstraction of “nation” to the materialism of
class, but in reality he is always guided by the latter. It is class which
circumscribes the tight nexus between Shah as political manager of the Indian
state and Mukesh Ambani as its dominant capitalist. (Modi is simply an
investment that both of them have made.)
Indefinite curfew imposed in Guwahati, violent protests in Assam over CAB
Academics Demand Withdrawal of Citizenship Bill / Bharat Bhushan: Citizenship Amendment Bill is a bid to fashion an ethnic democracy
Academics Demand Withdrawal of Citizenship Bill / Bharat Bhushan: Citizenship Amendment Bill is a bid to fashion an ethnic democracy
see also
Do our leaders want to certify political assassination?
Tavleen Singh: Without rule of law there can be no democracy
Tavleen Singh: Without rule of law there can be no democracy
