George R. R. Martin has set a new standard for me in fantasy, but Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series still holds up pretty well. Before They Are Hanged continues in the same direction as The Blade Itself, with smart and somewhat satirical sword and sorcery. It’s entertaining, and it’s not stupid. I like it.

I avoided fantasy for years after a Robert Jordan binge in the 90’s, and I’m still suspicious enough to put down a novel at even the first sign of epic elves, but I’m a fantasy reader at heart, and I’ll always be a sucker for a barbarian swordfight. Of which there are many here.

Speaking of Robert Jordan, one fantasy novel I didn’t finish reading recently was Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. It was bad and generic. Then I learned that he’s been hired to finish the Wheel of Time series, after Jordan died two years ago. Which means that the next time I reach for a Wheel of Time novel will be if I am in sudden need of a blunt, heavy object with which to strike an intruder in the head.

One thing that surprised me in Ramachandra Guha’s (ironically titled?) India After Gandhi is the degree to which India defined itself from the beginning as a secular state, a country that would embrace multiple religions, languages, ethnic groups, and castes, without favoring any of them. They set out to make something most outsiders, (including the Muslims who created Pakistan), thought was impossible: A truly pluralistic, secular democracy.

Why hasn’t India failed, (yet)? It’s not for lack of challenges. Insurrections, massacres, assasinations, and even a two-year semi-dictatorship. Guha speculates that what many thought was India’s greatest weakness, its democracy and pluralism, is actually the source of its resilience. (Sri Lanka and Pakistan tried to enforce one language, and got civil war.)

Another thing that surprised me was how relevant Indian politics is to Europe. Their struggle to build a transparent democracy out of very different states is relevant to our European Union. And the debates about Hindu-Muslim relations sound disturbingly familiar to our own debates about integration and immigation. Should the state favor a common cultural identity, or play a religiously and culturally neutral role? Our more aggressive European secularists may be surprised to find they have more in common with Hindu nationalists than with Indian secularists.

There are few direct analogies between India and Europe, but India’s experiences add contrast and perspective to our own, as well as plenty of warnings about paths nok to take. My advice to anyone who is interested in European politics: Look to India.

While there have been hundreds of inter-religious riots in the history of independent India, there have been only two pogroms: that directed at the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and that directed at the Muslims of south Gujarat in 2002. There are some striking similarities between the two. Both began as a response to a single, stray act of violence committed by members of the minority community. Both proceeded to take a generalized revenge on the minorities as a whole. The Sikhs who were butchered wered in no way connected to the Sikhs who killed Mrs Gandhi. The Muslims who were killed by Hindu mobs were completely innocent of the Godhra crime (which may anyway have been an accident).

In both cases the pogroms were made possible by the willed breakdown of the rule of law. The prime minister in Delhi in 1984, and the chief minister in Gujarat in 2002, issued graceless statements that in effect justified the killings. And serving ministers in their government went as far as to aid and direct the rioters.

The final similarity is the most telling, as well as perhaps the most depressing. Both parties, and leaders, reaped electoral rewards from the violence they had legitimized and overseen. Rajiv Gandhi’s party won the 1984 general election by a very large margin, and in December 2002 Narendra Modi was re-elected as chief minister of Gujarat after his party won a two-thirds majority in the assembly polls.

- Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi

In [D. R. Goyal’s] rendition, the core beliefs of what the Sangh Parivar calls ‘Hindutva’ are as follows:

“Hindus have lived in India since times immemorial; Hindus are the nation because all culture, civilisation and life is contributed by them alone; non-Hindus are invaders or guests and cannot be treated as equal unless they adopt Hindu traditions, culture etc; the non-Hindus, particularly Muslims and Christians, have been enemies of everything Hindu and are, therefore, to be treated as threats; the freedom and progress of this country is the freedom and progress of Hindus; the history of India is the history of the struggle of the Hindus for protection and preservation of their religion and culture against the onslaught of these aliens; the threat continues because the power is in the hands of those who do not believe in this nation as a Hindu Nation; those who talk of national unity as the unity of all those who live in this country are motivated by the selfish desire of cornering minority votes and are therefore traitors; the unity and consolidation of the Hindus is the dire need of the hour because the Hindu people are surrounded on all sides by enemies; the Hindus must develop the capacity for massive retaliation and offence is the best defence; lack of unity is the root cause of all troubles of the Hindus and the Sangh is born with the divine mission to bring about that unity.”

- Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi

It is difficult precisely to date Sanjay Gandhi’s own interest in family planning. His Surge interview in August 1975 does not mention the subject at all. Yet a year later, the Illustrated Weekly of India was speaking of how ‘Sanjay has given a big impetus to the Family Planning Programme throughout the country’. [..] He epxressed himself in favor of compulsory sterilization, for which facilities should be provided ‘right down to the village level’.

[..]

In his tours around India, Sanjay Gandhi catalysed a competitive process between the states of the Union. Sanjay would tell one chief minister of what another had claimed to have done – ’60 000 operations in two weeks’ – and encouraged him to exceed it. These targets were passed down to district officials, who were rewarded if they met or exceeded them and transferred otherwise. The process led to widespread coercion. Lower government officials had to submit to the surgeon’s knife before arrears of pay were cleared. Truck drivers would not have their licences renewed if they could not produce a sterilization certificate. Slum dwellers would not be allotted a plot for resettlement unless they did likewise.

[..]

Local officials prepared lists of ‘eligible men’, that is, of those who already had three or more children. Police vans would come and take them off to the nearest health centre. Some men fled into the hills to escape the marauders. Those who had undergone a vasectomy were too embarassed to talk about it.

- Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi

To make the protection of British lives the top priority was pretty much state policy. In February 1947 the governor of Bengal said that his ‘first action in the event of an announcement of a date for withdrawal of British power … would be to have the troops “standing to” and prepare for a concentration of outlying Europeans at very short notice as soon as hostile reactions began to show themselves’. In fact, in the summer of 1947 white men and women were the safest people in India. No one was interested in killing them. But their insecurities meant that many army units were placed near European settlements instead of being freed for riot control elsewhere.

[..]

The decision of the CPM to join the government was preceded by a bitter debate, with Jyoti Basu speaking in favour and Promode Dasgupta against. Ultimately the party joined, only to create a great sense of expectation among the cadres. An early gesture was to rename Harrington Road after a hero of the world communist movement, so that at the height of the Vietnam War the address of the United States Consulate was 7 Ho Chi Minh Sarani, Calcutta.

- Ramachandran Guha, India After Gandhi