India in Europe's Mirror

The vengeful matroyshka doll that is History.

Ni Hao GJ Friends,

Following on from Shinzo Abe’s shock assassination last week, another sombre post, in which I argue how India, once a potential model for the European Union’s political project, is currently more akin to the Europe that preceded the EU. Given today’s political tribalisms, Lest We Forget, has never been more important, even as historical amnesia is the unfortunate condition du jour.

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In my 2012 book, Punjabi Parmesan: Dispatches from a Europe in Crisis (published as New Old World in the U.S), I had argued that the European Union might do well to look at India for inspiration.  At the time the EU was beset by the fallout of the 2010 Euro-crisis, which had Germany and Greece squaring off. Economic polices of austerity had laid bare the region’s north-south division; a chasm that had remained unbridged, despite decades of efforts to work towards, “an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe,” – the principle upon which the 1957 European Treaty was based.

Notwithstanding the EU’s penchant for lecturing the developing world on their policy choices, I had come to believe that the EU could do worse than to learn a lesson or two from India. After all, India was a proto-European Union, having stitched together a large region of diverse social and cultural fabric into a political and economic union.

 Like the EU, it was the antithesis of the concept of the 19th century European nation state, where a single religion, a single language and a common enemy supposedly formed the “natural” basis for the only sustainable kind of political unit. Over the course of its, then 65 years as an independent nation, India had defied the exclusions of this ideal. It was a testament to the fact that it was possible to successfully create a strong, common identity, out of seemingly fractured multiplicity.

 Were the European Union to care enough to look, I wrote, India could serve as hope, if not guide, for the EU’s own momentous project of rejecting the homogenizing tyranny of the “nation” state, and choosing instead to celebrate aggregation. By its very existence against the odds of modern political convention, India had something to teach Europe.

In a chapter on Islamophobia in Europe, I once again pointed to India’s civilizational acceptance of pluralism and the absence of an insistence on singular truths, gods and loyalties. India defied the linear, European narrative of modernity, which entailed a steady march “forward,” from the feudal religious practices of the Middle Ages to the homogenizing secular modernity of the present. India provided a third way, I believed, between European-style secularism and theocracies.

Ten years later, my thesis is in tatters. Politically the ideals of Hindutva are ascendent. Hinduism has emerged as the first amongst equals in our cultural tableau. The movement for a single national language, Hindi, in liue of the smorgasbord of 22 official languages that currently make up our country’s aural geography, is gaining ground.

India’s own north-south divide, long on simmer, is gradually boiling over. It is likely that following the next census, there will be changes to the configuration of parliament on the basis of demographic changes. This will skew the parliamentary composition in favour of developmentally backward, but populous, northern states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, while reducing those of southern States where population growth has slowed down considerably, as standards of living have increased.

To date India’s achievements have been more political than economic. It has failed to transform into an economic behemoth of China proportions, but it has also belied the predictions of its inevitable balkanization in the aftermath of independence. 

But a question mark now looms before this achievement. Have the last seventy years been but a waystation to the eventual emergence of a Hindu Pakistan?  The historian, Ramchandra Guha, has pointed out that on traditional European parameters of the ideal nation state - one religion and one language - it is Pakistan, rather than India that counts as a success. It is this kind of success that India now seems to be courting.

But we would do well to keep in mind the price that Europe paid for its contemporary, tidy, “nation-states.”  In fact, multiculturalism was not an alien phenomenon in Europe. The continent was once a tapestry of intricately overlapping languages, religions, and communities. Cities like Sarajevo, Trieste and Odessa were amongst the world’s most syncretic and multi-textured.

But that Europe was smashed between 1914 and 1945. The paroxysm of violence that rent the region during the Second World War formed the foundation for post-war Europe, where as the historian Tony Judt puts it, “thanks to war, occupation, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own countries.”

The massive scale of ethnic cleansing and population transfers in the lead up to, and in the immediate aftermath of, the Second World War, is bone-chilling. Between 1939 and 1941, the Nazis expelled 750,000 Polish peasants east, from western Europe. The vacated lands were offered to volksdeutsche, or ethnic Germans from occupied Eastern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of Germans from Romania, Soviet occupied Poland and the Baltic states responded to Hitler’s offer, all of whom were in turn expelled a few years later, once the War ended.

Judt’s magisterial work, “Post War: A history of Europe since 1945,” makes for grim reading. Between the havoc wrecked by Stalin and Hitler, “30 million people were uprooted, dispersed, expelled, deported and transplanted.” For example, one million Poles fled, or were expelled, from western Ukraine, while half a million Ukrainians left Poland between October 1944 and June 1946. Jews facing post-war pogroms in Poland, ironically fled to Germany in large numbers. (Over 63,300 Jews arrived in Germany from Poland between July and September 1946 alone.)

In Czechoslovakia, Germans had their property placed under state control and were stripped of their Czech citizenship. Three million ethnic Germans were then expelled into Germany. Before the war, Germans had comprised 29 percent of the population of Bohemia and Moravia. By 1950, this was down to 1.8 percent.

And so, in the course of a few months, centuries-old regions of intermixed faiths and languages were disaggregated into separate, mono-ethnic territories. These populations transfers were tantamount to ethnic cleansing. Although they mostly took place in eastern and central Europe, they were agreed to by all major western European powers, as ostensibly the safest solution to the continent’s minority predicament.

Thus Poland, whose population was only 68 percent Polish in 1938, became “Polish,” just as Germany, became “German.” The ancient diasporas of Europe – Greeks and Turks in the south Balkans and Black Sea, Italians in Dalmatia, Hungarians in Transylvania, Jews across the continent – were greatly reduced. From the ashes of this bonfire of atrocities was born the historically anomalous, ethnically homogenous Europe of nation states.

The Indian subcontinent has already suffered the bloody ravages of partition. And yet, or so believers in Hindutva maintain, its history remains unsettled; the past unreckoned with. Perhaps there is some truth to this claim. But there is also truth to the fact that history is never settled; every reckoning, holds another within it, like an infinitely vengeful matroyshka doll.

As a project, the European Union is an attempt to rebuild the unity of the continent from its 20th century wreckage. Its foundational idea is to check the historic antipathy and violence between the warring states of Europe. The EU is an imperfect creature that does not always live up to these ideals.

But India, which once did have the credentials to prove that an EU-like project could work, is dismantling its own foundational idea. And if Europe’s history is any indicator, it does so at great peril. Horrors of an unspeakable scale are champing to burst through India’s constitutional lid. We should be terrified.

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On that cheerful note, I will leave you for this week. Am off to Ibiza and then Switzerland with the family for a brief (by European standards) summer vacation, but will keep posting, even when on the road. We have some wonderful guest posts coming up including on the adventures of the trailing spouse by one of the funniest writer alive, the inimitable Brigid Keenan, as well as on the fascinating story of the Irish diaspora in Spain.

Until then,

Pallavi

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A version of this article was first published here.