The manipulation of history and colonialism in India today

Wissam Saada

The case of India today shows how far "manipulative" expansionism can take the concept of colonialism.
The authoritarian Hindutva doctrine since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014, based on the equation that India is the national home of the Hindu religion, since it is the sacred land of the Hindus, is a doctrine whose concept of colonialism extends not only to the British East India Company's expansion into Bengal after the 1757 Battle of Plassey in which the company's soldiers crushed the local rulers, but also to the period of the British East India Company's expansion into Bengal. These local Muslim rulers, known as the Nawabs of Bengal, were then supported by the French and officially subordinate to the empire of the Mughal dynasty of India (with Genghis and Timurid roots) with its capital at Dehli (now Delhi). The Company extracted from these local rulers their agency on behalf of the Mughal emperor to collect revenues and levies, and then proceeded to tighten its grip on the local rulers. It then proceeded to tighten its grip on the entire subcontinent, until it put down with bloody brutality the rebellions that broke out against it in 1857, thus ending the last milestone of the Mughal Empire, since the last occupant of its throne, Bahadur Shah II, was a symbol of this Sepoy uprising, and he died in exile in Burma after the English executed his sons and grandsons.
British colonization in India is basically divided into two eras, the East India Company from its agency for the Mughal emperor to the destruction of the Mughal dynasty, and then the British Raj 1858-1947, in which the reins of government passed from the East India Company to the British Crown, leading to the dissolution of the company on the one hand, and Queen Victoria's proclamation as Empress of India in 1877 on the other. In the first era, India was in the process of being colonized not by the monarchy but by a company whose legal status was still being determined, between those who saw it as a dangerous subversive entity that subverted constitutional institutions and the rule of law in Britain itself, and those who defended the company as the backbone of British imperial expansion. In the second era, the Company's victory over rebellions against it and the overthrow of the Mughal throne, of which it was a proxy, led to the dissolution of the Company itself and the creation of an unprecedented type of colony: "colonial-imperial" because Victoria remained Queen of Britain on the one hand and Empress of India on the other. Unlike the term "British Raj" for India and its annexes, the term "British Empire" was never formally established, to match its common usage when talking about the United Kingdom and its colonies in Asia, Africa, and America.
Ignoring the differences between the multiple modes of colonialism and the widely varying forms of urban-periphery relations within it often turns colonialism itself into a "quintessential" statement that relieves its user of any need to scrutinize context, distinguish between eras, and be aware of the interconnectedness of colonialism in the ways it operates and the ways it justifies itself in ways that seem, or indeed are, unfamiliar to the idea of colonialism itself. For India to be colonized by a "company" rather than a "state" and then for the company to be terminated after completing its colonial mission and entrusting India to the crown, but at the same time elevating the colony to the status of an "empire" in its own right - even if at the level of illusion - are two examples of what cannot be jumped over as if it were merely a decoration in construction.

By turning "colonialism" into an "essentialist" narrative in which there are only indigenous people on the one hand and alien invaders on the other, the religious-nationalist movement (India for Hindus) was able to overtake the nationalist-nationalist approach (India for all Indians)

By transforming "colonialism" into an "essentialist" narrative in which there are only indigenous people on the one hand and alien invaders on the other, the religious-nationalist movement (India for Hindus) was able to overtake the nationalist-nationalist approach (India for all Indians).
The nationalist approach was linked to the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, his "dynasty" and the Congress Party, and was not free from hypocrisy and confusion in many places, as shown by the British historian Perry Anderson in his book "Indian Ideology" (2012), in which he argued that the nationalist idea of Gandhi and Nehru was permeated by elements of Hindu supremacy that could not coexist, for example, with a unified subcontinent and a higher proportion of Muslims in the umbrella state. Anderson also highlighted Gandhi's and Nehru's conservatism over the caste-religious hierarchy (the kast system) within Hindus themselves. However, a more holistic view would show that this inclusive nationalist approach, for all its fabrications, was always concerned with a confrontation on its right with the religious-nationalist movement and the importance of pulling the rug out from under it, which in the end did not work In the end, what has happened in the last decade is that the rug has been completely pulled out and returned to the religious-nationalist movement, which sees India as a homeland for Hindus first and only for Hindus second, and which does to the Congress Party what Anderson does to the Congress Party - only in reverse. Anderson accused the Congress Party's ideology of harboring an implicit Hindu hegemony and for this reason it was convenient for the peripheral provinces to secede to create Pakistan, thereby reducing the proportion of Muslims in independent India. Symbols of religious nationalism accuse Gandhi, Nehru, and the Congress Party of not seeking with determination and vigor to preserve the unity of India, not in terms of a unity to be achieved with the Muslims, but on the contrary, at their expense, they wanted it to be done, crudely, alienatingly, and impossibly. Anderson accuses Nehru of preserving the system of privilege and caste behind his progressive slogans, but the religious-nationalists say the same thing - from their angle, of course. They present the Congress Party as living off the continuation of this caste division among Hindus and present their own party, the Bharatiya Janata Party Modi himself is not from the first three castes in the quadrilateral, and that he started his life as a poor chowdhury selling tea on the streets, unlike the Brahmanical origin of Pandit Nehru's family and Mahatma Gandhi's descent from the merchant caste, unlike the Brahmin origin of Pandit Nehru's family. The irony is that this rhetoric coexists within the ruling party while the Brahmans continue to hold sway in the ruling party and in the nationalist volunteer organization with enormous and often violent mobilization capacities. The religious nationalist right does not see this as a contradiction, but rather explains that its idea of Hindu unity as a melting pot and as a nation is for Hindus to increasingly model themselves on the Brahmins at the top of the hierarchy.
Hence, Hindutva is horribly linked to a manipulative form of colonialism. For them, anything that threatens Hindu national and religious unity is colonialism. At the same time, anything that threatens the Brahmin ideal within Hindus as a social model to be emulated is colonialism. This is true of history as well as the present. Thus, colonialism is no longer about the British or the Europeans. For Hindutva, the depth of colonization is six centuries of Muslim dominance in India. The National Council of Educational Research's recent decision to remove the Dahli Sultanate and Mughal India from official school curricula is further evidence of this trajectory, which in recent years has been popularized by the claim that India was the victim of "Middle Eastern colonization."
The "Indian ideology" - as Anderson called it - primarily the nationalist idea as pursued by Jawaharlal Nehru, was in this respect trying to hold the middle ground. For example, to combine a fundamentally Hindu view of India's long history with the inclusion of the era of the Muslim sultans, and to distinguish among these "Mughals of India" between those who sought openness and rapprochement with Hindus, like Jalaluddin Akbar, and those who rushed to persecute them and destroy their temples, like Akbar's descendant, Aurangzeb Alamgir, 1618-1707. This syncretic ideology thought it could accommodate such exclusionary tendencies by distinguishing between an enlightened Mughal and a closed Mughal. But this did not work for long. Not only because the nationalist-religious movement rose up against it. But above all because this binary division between the righteous Akbar and the aggressive Aurangzeb is more superstitious than historical, and when you open the door to superstition, the pioneers of Hindutva will tell you: We're the first!

(Source: Al-Quds Al-Youm)