CC Blog
Has A New Slave Dynasty
Taken Power In South Asia?By Jawed Naqvi
28 March, 2007
Countercurrents.orgLast week the Indian government plainly told parliament that it was no longer pursuing its promise to bring back the remains of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor who died in Rangoon in exile and was buried there, carefully hidden from public gaze after leading the failed 1857 uprising against British colonialism. "It was decided that the proposal need not be pursued," Culture Minister Ambika Soni tersely told parliament, without elaboration. There was no news of any MP protesting the outrage.Last week was also the 75th anniversary of the hanging of three South Asian heroes who valiantly sought to organise yet another armed revolt against British rule. Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were hanged in Lahore on March 23, 1931. To mark the anniversary of the heroes last week, India's ministry of information inserted a quarter page ad in newspapers and that was that.
But people still have not forgotten Bhagat Singh and his comrades. About 200,000 assembled in Delhi alone in memory of the martyrs. Old and young, men and women, many of them impoverished landless labourers from far away Jharkhand or Andhra Pradesh or West Bengal travelled in packed suffocating trains to the Indian capital to salute those who had gallantly fought colonialism. Not surprisingly, though, there wasn't a word in any of the major newspapers, much less on TV, of this amazing rally of the poor — the marginalised comrades of Bhagat Singh. Interestingly, to many of these seemingly uneducated and impoverished visitors to Delhi an instructive aspect of Bhagat Singh's life was that born a Sikh, he had died an agnostic. His letters from prison, many of which reflect a misty-eyed dream for a free, secular and equitable India are well recorded in two remarkable books by Messrs A.G. Noorani and Kuldip Nayyar.
So why do you suppose the Indian government decided to abandon its own widely awaited project to retrieve Bahadur Shah's remains from Rangoon? The answer is not far to seek. The memory of Bahadur Shah Zafar should haunt our rulers, not just in India alone but also in Pakistan and Bangladesh, if not also Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, like Banquo's ghost had stalked his usurpers. Zafar's tragedy has too many close resemblances with what is happening in Iraq or in Afghanistan, and is being planned for Iran today, to be of comfort to our rulers.
In fact the cruelty perpetrated by British colonialism in India in the aftermath of 1857 remains in many ways unmatched even by the measure of the brutality witnessed in occupied Iraq. At least 27,000 Indians, mostly Muslim Indians, were hanged by trees in and around Delhi alone. Many times more Hindu sepoys were similarly hunted or blown up with cannons across the northern Indian region. The city of Delhi was levelled to the ground with nearly its entire population driven from the precincts of the fallen Mughal capital. Only a very few were left behind to witness the carnage, among them Mirza Ghalib, by then a heart broken poet, one of Zafar's favourites.
If there is any confusion in our heads therefore about the origins of today's racist ideology of neo-con marauders pillaging Iraq or Afghanistan, lessons of 1857 should help remove the more intractable cobwebs.
It is incontrovertibly recorded that after the British assembled a force of Pathans and Sikhs, and exploited the martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur a hundred years earlier to sow seeds of hatred against the Mughals (much like what they are doing with Shias, Sunnis and Kurds in Iraq) the royal family surrendered peacefully. Yet most of the emperor's sixteen sons were tried and hanged, while three were shot in cold blood, having first freely given up their arms, then been told to strip naked: "In 24 hours I disposed of the principal members of the house of Timur the Tartar," Captain William Hodson wrote to his sister the following day. "I am not cruel, but I confess I did enjoy the opportunity of ridding the earth of these wretches." There is even a greater irony in the fact that many of India's current rulers, both in politics and within the steel-framed bureaucracy, have been educated at the exclusive La Martiniere College in Lucknow and Calcutta. One of the four school houses — Hodson House — is named precisely after this
primeval neo-con pervert. A second school house is named after Lord Cornwallis, the man who ordered the killing of valiant Tipu Sultan over half a century before 1857.I saw a bit of this colonial servility at Karachi's prestigious Sindh Club, where I had the opportunity to stay for a few days earlier this month. The entire etiquette of the club revolves around the few British officers whose names are inscribed on its main hall, possibly the founders of the club. Similarly the Madras Club till recently had the picture of the British monarch in its main hall, not the Indian head of state. These are but mere reflections of the wider servitude that continues to mark South Asia's former British colonies. For one, there is today an unambiguously pro-west "interim" ruler in Bangladesh, backed to the hilt by its military. Sri Lanka too has signed a landmark agreement to become a virtual base to American warships. Not many years ago India was screaming its head off because Colombo had allowed the United States to set up a small transmitter supposed to be meant for the Voice of America. Today all those protests sound so unbelievably unreal. With India, Pakistan and Afghanistan held securely in the talons of the United States, economically, politically and militarily, next month's summit of South Asian countries in Delhi looks all set to be an occasion to consolidate the neo-con world view in the region.
In the late 12th century in India, Afghan invader Shahabuddin Ghauri had raised thousands of slaves like his sons. It is said that Ghauri had the habit to buy every talented slave he came across. He would then train them in the way royal children were trained. During his regime, slaves occupied all key positions in the government machinery. Ghauri never nominated his successor but it was obvious that he was to be one of his slaves. Given the revolving doors that link our rulers with the World Bank and IMF, it is fair to ask: is there a new slave dynasty straddling across South Asia today?
Writer Arundhati Roy said in an interview last week that at least India's growing middle class was reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive greed. "Unlike industrialising Western countries, which had colonies from which to plunder resources and generate slave labour to feed this process, we have to colonise ourselves, our own nether parts. We've begun to eat our own limbs."
That is why perhaps the memory of Bahadur Shah Zafar is proving to be such an embarrassment to our ruling elite, not only because the man symbolised Hindu-Muslim unity, or that he stood up steadfastly against a foreign occupation of India, but also because he was waylaid by some of his very own people, people who still continue to collude and conspire against their very own.
Jawed Naqvi can be reached at [email protected]
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