Pankaj Mishra Quotes
Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians.
Mishra, Pankaj. "Exit Wounds." The New Yorker, Condé Nast, 13 Aug. 2007.
As early as 1933, 14 years before Indian independence, there was a movement for a separate Muslim nation within India. Ironically, Hindu India was never a nation in any sense of the word, but was a series of independent principalities much like Italy before its unification. However, with the Muslim conquest of the various Indian states, there was a central authority, ruler, and nation for the first time. Later the Muslims had to argue that India was not a country when it was they who had made it such. When the Muslim Emperors were in power, they argued that India was one country under their authority. But when they lost power, the Muslims argued the other side of the issue.
The Partition was accompanied by over 2 million murdered Indians as India was divided into a smaller India with almost all the Hindus and Sikhs and a slight majority of the Muslims and Pakistan with all Muslims who made that choice. Pakistan has been trying to de stabilize the area ever since to gain control of more land and became a theocracy and military dictatorship—sometimes de facto and sometimes de juro.
This quotation is an excellent example of the early, militant Gandhi. It is typical of militant theocracies of the Islamic world today.
They were the “untouchables”. Under English rule and law, they had more opportunity, equality and protection than ever before. They opposed the idea of home rule and passing rule to an Indian parliament and ministers as ol the upper castes would dominate and control the government and would discriminate against them as they had always done before English rule. What they worried about came of to pass, but the Congress Party which dominated much of Indian politics was opposed to the Caste system and went out of their way to make it illegal and to institute affirmative action. However, regardless of the law, the Cast System still exists, and the discrimination is a current problem for India and the untouchables.
Other vibrant democracies also have such restrictions on freedom of speech such as Germany and Israel.
Pankaj Mishra is an Indian essayist and novelist and a recipient of the 2014 Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction.
