How India Became Democratic

Title: How India Became Democratic – Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise

Author: Ornit Shani

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9780670090754

Pages: 284

When Britain finally divested itself from India in 1947, the leaders of the newly independent nation had had no confusion at all on the future political path they would undertake. The colonial political institutions had established the fundamentals of a democratic state, but the installation of a fully responsible and popular government was neither the intention of the British nor in their best interests. Severe eligibility restrictions were in place for a citizen to register as a voter to provincial legislatures which enjoyed very limited powers of its own. Only about 11 per cent of the populace could vote in the election to the Constituent Assembly. This made the law-making machinery elitist and not a representative of the entire country. Once of the very first legislative measures of the body was to establish the concept of universal adult franchise as the solid bulwark of Indian democracy. Such a notion was somewhat novel even in some of the developed states in Europe at that time. French women voted for the first time only in 1945 and in Belgium, it took three more years, finally granting women the vote in 1948. India’s constitution makers decided to package universal franchise from the word go. This required a tremendous bureaucratic effort, first of all for preparing an electoral roll of all eligible voters. Since the Constitution itself was not in place, institutions such as the Election Commission were nonexistent. The task of coordinating the enumeration of eligible voters in the provinces and princely states of India was handled by the Constituent Assembly Secretariat (CAS). This book tells the story of the unsung Herculean effort of the CAS in placing the foundation stone of democracy in India by compiling a list of 170 million voters, almost four-fifths of them voting for the first time. The author, Ornit Shani, is a scholar of the politics of modern history of India. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her current research focuses on the modern history of democracy and citizenship in India.

This book points to the moment in time when democracy was institutionalized in India. With a painstaking research of the Constituent Assembly’s records to support it, this narrative offers a fresh perspective on the embedding of democracy at the birth of the nation state. Many view India’s democracy as an inheritance of the British Raj, an extension of its bureaucratic structures and legal framework. This is not entirely true. Many other colonies with similar colonial constitutional structures failed to develop. In Pakistan, it took more than two decades to prepare an electoral roll that came about during elections in 1970. In India too, the colonial administrative structure supported only a rudimentary form of democracy. The Government of India Act 1935 envisaged seventeen different types of seats and five distinct categories of women voters. Separate electorates were in place for Sikhs, Muslims, Anglo-Indians, Indian Christians and other categories. This book acknowledges the hard work put in by many, but knowledge of their efforts had never previously reached the public. The roll-making exercise was held under the leadership of Benegal Narsing Rau, who was the Constitutional Advisor. S N Mukerjee, Joint Secretary, K V Padmanabhan, Under Secretary and P S Subramaniam, Under Secretary of the CAS are also acknowledged.

Immediately after independence, the CAS initiated proceedings by requesting the provincial states to imagine the quantum and nature of the work required to enumerate eligible voters. This was in November 1947, and took place even before the draft constitution was adopted by the Assembly in February 1948. Judging by the pace of normal government work, it fills us with wonder to realize that the Secretariat’s actions were in anticipation of the constitutional provisions under the Assembly’s consideration. In March 1948, they formally instructed the states to go ahead with the work and the Assembly approved the proceedings only in January 1949 with retrospective effect. The most amusing part of it all was that even the criteria for citizenship was not finalized when the actual work of enlisting voters started.

Preparation of electoral rolls created peculiar challenges, solving which turned out to be indicators of a healthy democracy in the making. There were some states such as Surguja, in which no elections of any sort had taken place before, while in Travancore, they were planning to conduct elections in February 1948 with universal franchise as part of the legislative reforms in the state. As such, the state had already prepared the list. The Travancore model was thus emulated in other provinces too.

Shani addresses the importance of deference to the constitution as a basic feature of any democracy. She quotes Ambedkar’s speech in the Assembly on the issue of constitutional morality which makes informative reading. Citing George Grote, he defined it as “a paramount reverence for the form of the Constitution, enforcing obedience to authority acting under and within these forms, yet combined with the habit of open speech, of action subject only to definite legal control…with a perfect confidence in the bosom of every citizen amidst the bitterness of party contest that the forms of the Constitution will not be less sacred in the eyes of his opponents than in his own” (p.195).

This book captures a rare instance in which the Secretariat’s experience in dealing with recalcitrant local governments helped fine tune the provisions of the Constitution. There have been frequent complaints from Assam that its bureaucracy was conspiring to exclude the East Pakistan refugees from finding a place in the electoral roll. Thousands of Tamils residing in Devikulam taluk of Travancore raised the issue of reluctance of the local administration in granting voting rights to them. Both governments were not willing to accommodate the Secretariat’s instructions to provide equal rights to any person who satisfied the condition of a certain residency period in the area. Since the draft constitution provided for separate election commissions for the centre and the states, differences in the criteria for franchise was to be expected between states and there was a limit only up to which the federal body could make individual provinces follow suit. The Secretariat very quickly understood the risks involved. The articles related to the founding of a unitary Election Commission at the centre came about in this way. Article 289 of the Constitution was revised, thereby denying the states freedom to make laws regarding voter’s eligibility.

Ornit Shani’s book is the first historical study of the preparation of India’s draft electoral roll on the basis of universal adult franchise. The text is arranged in a structured fashion, but the huge number of often very long footnotes included along with the main narrative is distracting and reduces readability. Readers feel that by omitting these footnotes, they are losing out on the content. The book is written in the style of an academic paper, with separate pieces of introduction and conclusion for each chapter. This sets the stage for unnecessary repetition of important concepts much number of times. Verbatim reproductions of CAS press notes and letters from and to the public also make the going tedious for the ordinary reader.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Third Battle of Panipat

Title: Third Battle of Panipat

Author: Abhas Verma

Publisher: Bharatiya Kala Prakashan, 2013 (First)

ISBN: 9788180903328

Pages: 326

Emperor Aurangzeb’s death sounded the death knell of the Mughal Empire. Though it lingered on for 150 years more, paramountcy was conceded to other players and the emperors lived under the shadow of their former glory. Marathas rose to prominence at this stage and their writ ran through the entire length and breadth of North India. The Muslim nobles and aristocrats who had ruled the country for nearly six centuries found it suffocating to remain under Maratha domination. Nadir Shah Afzar and Ahmed Shah Abdali, who were reigning over Persia and Afghanistan respectively, were invited to invade India and keep the Marathas at bay. Both of them made successful campaigns against India, sowing death and destruction in their wake and pillaging the country’s wealth. It is said that gratified by the riches he plundered from India, Nadir Shah exempted the people of his country from taxation for two years. Abdali made several incursions into North India and inflicted a crushing defeat upon the Marathas on Jan 14, 1761 in the Third Battle of Panipat. Abdali’s win put paid to Maratha aspirations of subjugating North India, but didn’t prevent the Mughal dynasty from continuing on their slide through the slippery slopes of history to its eventual doom. This book explains the historical inevitability of the Panipat battle and how it affected the course of events. Abhas Verma is a software engineer by profession with his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Communication. He is claimed to have put in four years of research into the preparation of this book.

What first strikes the reader is the haphazard nature of the presentation with tons of spelling and grammatical errors. Punctuation marks are nonexistent in many pages which points to sloppy proofreading. Unnecessary details are sometimes sourced from other books which includes even a paragraph on basket-making to cross rivers (p.67). In one instance, a single gigantic paragraph spans four full pages.

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the entire North India lay cowering under the might of Maratha cavalry. They extracted tribute from local lords and meddled with imperial appointments of the Mughal court. Even the Rajput kingdoms felt threatened by the onslaught of the southerners. For the Muslim rulers like Najib Khan, the situation was unbearable. Instigated by the spiritual reformer Shah Waliullah, he invited Ahmed Shah Abdali of Kabul to invade India. Najib Khan was a Rohilla Muslim and wanted to crush the Maratha, Jat and the rising Sikh powers for the revival of Islam in India. That Abdali also shared the religious zeal is evident from his avowal of the intention to wage a holy war. He claimed that he had come to the country solely for God’s sake, to help his fellow clansmen – the Muslim community (p.209) – even though the native born Muslims were held in contempt by the nobles who were born in Persia or Central Asia.

The major thrust of this important battle lasted for only half a day in which the Marathas were routed, their generals killed and their camp followers captured by the Afghans. Traditional Indian armies travelled with a huge entourage in which the noncombatants outnumbered the fighters in the ratio 4:1. About a tenth of them were women. This was necessitated because the men who would do cooking and cleaning utensils were averse to grind corn for the meal which was considered a feminine chore. The horses were the soldiers’ own property and any injury to it in the course of the battle had to be compensated from his own pay. Such a ragtag army was no match against the superior fighting prowess of the Afghans. Verma estimates the casualty suffered by the Marathas. Out of the 60,000 soldiers, almost 30,000 perished in the battle which included generals like Vishwasrao, Sadashivrao Bhau, Jaswantrao Puar, Tukoji Sindhia and others. When the camp followers are also taken into account, the mortality figure shoots up to 50,000. Surprisingly, no reckoning of the dead among Abdali’s forces is seen.

Even though Abdali was invited by Muslim nobles, the forces which opposed him included Muslims as well, the shining one among them being Ibrahim Khan Gardi. After he was caught by the enemy at the end of a gallant struggle, he was beheaded and his corpse was flung away as a punishment for siding with kafirs. Afterwards, ropes were tied to his feet and in this way his body was dragged through the Shah’s camp and at last left as food for crows and kites (p.257). However, most of the Afghan soldiers serving under the Maratha general Vithal Shivdev refused to fight at the moment it was clear to them that the tide was turning in favour of Abdali. They also pillaged the Maratha camps in an instance of blatant treachery. The receding Maratha soldiers after defeat fell victims to Muslim villagers on the way. The news of the defeat had emboldened them to beat and loot the soldiers in the Mughal territories of Delhi where they were thought of as kafirs (p.254). But it should not be construed as a fight of Hindus against Muslims. King Madho Singh of Jaipur invited the Maharana of Udaipur to join him in an anti-Maratha alliance with Abdali (p.131).

Verma attempts to belittle the losses suffered by the Marathas in terms of men and material. He even consoles himself that most of the captured women belonged to dancing and other lower classes and not highborn. This futile exercise stares in the face of readers in mocking contradiction of the importance of the battle that killed Marathas’ rise to hegemony. They were down, but not out. That had to wait till 1818 when the gleam of Maratha suzerainty was finally put out by the British. In that sense, the British reaped the benefit accrued out of the Third Battle of Panipat. It also marked the end of foreign invasion from the northwest corner of the country.

The book is disappointing, but easy to go through. With a little more attention to the structure of the text and getup, a second edition may just be able to salvage something out of this wreck and do justice to the topic. It is shocking that a book of this genre came out without an index or glossary at all.

The book is recommended only to serious readers of history.

Rating: 2 Star

Leonardo and the Last Supper

Title: Leonardo and the Last Supper

Author: Ross King

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2013 (First published 2012)

ISBN: 9781408831182

Pages: 336

The Last Supper and Mona Lisa are the most famous paintings in the world. Even those who have no exposure to the world of art recognize these two pictures as the epitome of craft and style that made its beginning in Renaissance Italy. After a long gap of five centuries since they were painted, the pictures continue to evoke a sense of wonder in enthusiasts and remain a source of fascination in which new definitions and discoveries are still being made. Leonardo da Vinci painted both these pictures and was considered as the supreme master of the art during his lifetime itself. Few people realize that the Last Supper is not a painting done on canvas or wood, but rather a huge mural artwork (covering a staggering area of 400 square feet) made on the northern wall of the refectory of church Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy. This book tells the story of how this amazing picture came to life. It is actually a mix of three individual strands of narration harmoniously commingling in an immensely appealing flow of facts and anecdotes. It describes the life of da Vinci, the biography of the painting and Milanese history during its tumultuous decade from 1490 to 1500. Ross King is a Canadian novelist and non-fiction writer. He began his career by writing two works of historical fiction in the 1990s, later turning to non-fiction and has since written several critically acclaimed and best-selling historical works.

Leonardo di Ser Piero da Vinci was born in 1452 out of wedlock in the tiny village of Vinci near Florence. Being an illegitimate child, he couldn’t follow his father’s career as a notary. His mother might probably have been a slave girl. Judging from da Vinci’s fingerprints, there are speculations that his mother might have belonged to the Middle East. Leonardo’s father legitimized him and arranged for his son to learn painting as an apprentice of Andrea de Verrocchio, who was a distinguished artist of Florence. There are some interesting pieces drawn by Verrocchio in which Leonardo’s contribution is strongly suspected. Renaissance Florence was a nice place for a creative painter to be, as it had an astonishing proliferation of architects, sculptors, and painters. However, painters were a part of a guild that included drapers, candle makers, hatters and Glovers who worked with their hands. By the same logic, it included doctors and apothecaries too. The young Leonardo was physically strong. He was said to be able to straighten a horse shoe with his bare hands. By around his early thirties, he secured commissions in Florence through both his talent and connections with powerful friends. Most of these commissions met with unhappy fates. Leonardo was not a man who finished his job on time. A combination of distractions, experimentation, a quest for perfection and a general intellectual restlessness made his clients irritated and unhappy with his work. He also indulged in underhanded acts to secure commissions. Once he tried to get the job of designing and casting the bronze doors of Piacenza’s cathedral and wrote an anonymous letter to church officials extolling his talents.

Leonardo moved to Milan in 1482 where the ruthless Duke Lodovico Sforza was making the city smarter and grander with increased taxes and consequent loss of his popularity. Da Vinci wanted a career change as an architect and military engineer rather than continue as a painter because he reached his forties without truly having achieved a masterpiece that would fulfill everything his astonishing talents portended. He had designed numerous machines for the textile trade, such as handlooms, bobbin winders and a needle-making machine. In Milan he wanted to sculpt the figure of Francesco Sforza, the duke’s father, on a horse. Whatever might be Leonardo’s aspirations to become a military engineer, Sforza always used him as an interior decorator and stage designer. The church of Santa Maria delle Grazie was Lodovico’s spiritual abode and he was at great pains to embellish it with works of art and endow it with new buildings. When the question of adorning the walls of the refectory came up, the Duke didn’t think much beyond Leonardo as its creator, even though he tried to wriggle out of the assignment at first. Knowing the great artist’s delaying tactics, he was paired with an undistinguished local painter Giovanni Donato da Montorfano, who was assigned to paint a scene of crucifixion on the wall facing opposite to the Last Supper.

King describes the manners and idiosyncrasies of da Vinci in considerable detail and also his methods of observation and study of men and their actions. Leonardo always went about observing, noting and considering the circumstances and behaviour of men in talking, quarrelling, laughing or fighting together. He continually searched for a fantastic face among the people to make up a repertoire so that each painting differed from others. The difference between a photograph and a painting of the Renaissance era is neatly explained by the author. While a photograph reproduced the pose of a man in an instant, Leonardo captured the man and also the intention of his mind. The first was easy, but the second was devilishly difficult by representing the gestures and movements of the parts of the body. Moreover, a person looking at a painting is like a deaf man studying an animated conversation. He could understand what was happening only through the language of gestures depicted in the image. Since Leonardo was not conversant with fresco painting, what he achieved was a workaround called oil in tempera that was fine to behold in the early years, but contributed to flaking off of paint. Fresco painting must be performed while the plaster is still damp and extremely troublesome. The plaster must not be spread over a larger portion of the surface than can be painted in one day. It must have been a daunting challenge for Leonardo as painting with oil had allowed him to capture the startling visual effects that won him reputation as a painter.

The concept of the ‘Last Supper’ as a theme was not new in Christian art and in fact, it suited the purpose of the refectory (dining hall) as well. One of the oldest surviving examples of the Last Supper is a mosaic from the basilica of Sant’Appollinare Nuovo in Ravenna done in the fifth century, a full millennium before Leonardo’s work. Artists took this scene as part of a cycle showing snippets from the life of Christ. Several amusing facts concerned with ‘The Last Supper’ are described. This book disabuses the readers on some myths in wide circulation such as the same person had modeled for Christ and Judas. This is certainly wrong for the simple reason that the painting took only three years to complete. Leonardo searched the ghettos of Milan for a year to find a man with a suitably vile face. The model for Christ’s face was a soldier from a noble family while his arms were copied from another person. The irony of representing the prince of peace by a military man might not have lost on the great master. The apostles in the picture are replicas of eminent courtiers of Sforza. Leonardo himself is also deemed to have been portrayed in it. Christ’s face is at the geometric centre of the image and a small hole is still visible in his right temple where Leonardo had driven a nail to mark the diminishing point in the picture showing perspective. It is interesting to learn that the Last Supper marked the first time Leonardo drew the adult Christ. In a technique known as hieratic perspective, the figure of Christ is drawn substantially larger in proportion to the other apostles. King also estimates the reward Leonardo received for the painting, which comes to $350,000 in today’s money.

Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’ was an enormous best seller that portrayed da Vinci as the head of a secret society which preserved Christ’s supposed bloodline into modern times. King clarifies a few allegations made in the book which confused most readers of Brown’s book. What Dan Brown claimed for the figure of Mary Magdalene in the ‘Last Supper’ is in fact Saint John, whose youthful, effeminate and beardless face signified the aesthetic peculiarities of the period that showed adolescent boys with a feminine makeover. A lot of such examples and a convincing reasoning are given in the book. Anyone who still doubts whether the figure of Saint John is actually a woman need only to look at the painting titled ‘St. John the Baptist’ made by Leonardo himself. Some inconsistencies in the book are also to be noted. King claims that Matthew’s Gospel is the oldest, but Bible scholars ascribe that position to Mark’s. King’s narration is lovable and hugely appealing. The extremely small print size of this edition of the book is the only factor that goes against it.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 5 Star

Communal Riots in the Punjab 1923 - 1928

Title: Communal Riots in the Punjab 1923 - 1928

Author: Amrit Kaur Basra

Publisher: Shree Kala Prakashan, 2015 (First)

ISBN: 9789385329012

Pages: 416

Indian society was already long riven into Hindus and Muslims when the British first came on the scene. The bifurcated communities were not at all homogeneous as they were further split into castes and sects. Strange as it may seem, but the downtrodden castes saw their upper caste taskmasters as belonging to their own broad community than a Muslim nobleman who might even have been benevolent to them. Things didn’t change much after the 1857 Rebellion and rudiments of political activity began as part of making a modern state. Early political workers came from aristocratic and elite sections of the society and their parlour politics of continually petitioning the authorities to bring about change didn’t encompass the masses. With the 1909 Reforms, elected Indian members found their place in legislative bodies for the first time. The electorate was severely curtailed by constraints of income restrictions, but the way forward was clear to savants. It was a given that as time goes on, mass participation in politics and administration was not long in coming. A new face was required to steer the most prominent political organization of the time, the Indian National Congress, to take up popular issues and work among the people. Mahatma Gandhi was conveniently called back from South Africa at this instant and tasked with the onerous duty of making the Congress a mass-based party. Unfortunately for Gandhi, Congress and India, he touched upon the issue of reinstatement of the Khilafat, which was ready at hand, but socially irrelevant for India. What was in the ordinary Indian’s interest to bring back a sultan, who was totally blind to the political landscape of Europe, alienated from his subjects and nobles and was stupid enough to ally with the obviously losing side in the First World War? Khilafat was, however, a strong rallying cry for Muslims who wanted the rule of their religion over other petty rivals like nationalism and secular territorial sovereignty. The Hindus flocked to this banner because they trusted the Mahatma, but as soon as the real motives of Muslim fanatics to create an Islamic state was clear, they backtracked. It was quickly discovered that they were riding a ferocious tiger and didn’t know how to get off its back. Fierce communal riots broke out all over the country. In the southern district of Malabar in 1921, it assumed the dimensions of ethnic cleansing as thousands of Hindus were raped, killed and forcibly converted to Islam. Punjab was a crucial province of India which possessed a sizeable share of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in its population. This province reeled under a series of communal riots – thirteen major riots in a span of just five years. Unlike in Malabar, the Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs were an organized lot by forming strong associations and they fought back the onslaught. This book analyses the reasons, the buildup, the flare up and the aftermath of these riots. This book is the PhD thesis of Amrit Kaur Basra, who is a Professor of History at Delhi College of Arts and Science.

Basra propounds three objectives in the book. First of all, it seeks to study the interaction of political and socio-economic factors that caused communal riots. Assessment of the impact of communal riots on Punjabi society, national politics and the colonial government comes second. Filling the gap of published material on communal violence in Punjab is the third in view of the fact that many works do exist on the situation in Bengal and United Provinces. The assertion of communities began in the aftermath of 1857 Rebellion, in which Punjab didn’t take part because the local administration was efficient and the local Muslims didn’t support the cause of Bahadur Shah Zafar as they apprehended that the withdrawal of the British would result in the re-establishment of the Sikh state (p.30). Sikhs were till then thought to be a community or caste among the Hindus, but their separation as a religion – a qaum and not a panth – began in earnest. The differences were easy to show off – they were not idolatrous, didn’t wear the sacred thread, professed faith in Guru Granth Sahib, practiced a kind of baptism and their passage rites were as per the practices approved by Sikh gurus. To further strengthen their claim, idols were removed from the precincts of the Golden Temple in 1905. Basra records that the history of identity formation among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs was marked by inner contradictions and use of symbols, institutions and ideas. The process of socio-religious and intellectual regeneration from the 1880s was marked by the use of public debates, street preaching and taking out religious processions to forge community identity. It was the print culture that forged these activities.

The author elucidates the troublesome issues on which intercommunal antagonism hinged. The Muslims opposed playing of music as part of religious processions near their mosques. Even the celebration of Holi was identified as an affront against Muslims (p.108). Ringing of temple bells and blowing of conch shells which was an essential item on the Hindu ritual awoke resentment if a mosque was situated nearby. Eve teasing was another contentious issue. On the other hand, Hindus objected to the slaughter of cows even when the cow was the personal property of a Muslim and it was killed in his own premises. The spirit of rejuvenation and renewal offered by the reformist movements of Arya Samaj and Swami Shraddhanand instilled a new vigour in Hindus that they even began a campaign to reconvert people who were already lost to other faiths. This movement called Shuddhi invited wrath from Muslims who saw this as another attempt to hinder their legitimate share in power warranted by their numerical strength. By the early 1920s, communal consciousness encompassing rural and urban populations was fostered through newspapers and the Shuddhi, Sanghatan, Tanzim and Tabligh movements. In this period, the press was identified as a potent source responsible for exacerbating communal tension through virulent and scurrilous writings. The publication of a polemical tract titled Rangila Rasul which dwelt on the married life of the Prophet particularly vitiated the atmosphere. Most of the riots revolved around the twin issues of cow slaughter and regulation of religious festivals. Many were short-lived and suppressed by the British. The author remarks that as the British’s authority diminished around 1920, communal activities were strengthened and the spread of violence widened.

The book details the thirteen major communal riots that rattled Punjab in the five years starting from 1923. The narration is not consistent or structured. In a few cases, the author goes after the provocation while in some, she focuses on the violence and in other cases the response of administration is covered. Basra proposes class antagonism as the cause of the trouble. This convinces none except perhaps a few leftist mandarins inhabiting the inner sanctum of academia, whose formulaic analysis demands and usually obtains pre-ordained solutions to complex social issues. These riots were not originated as a class struggle of debtors against moneylenders and landowners. Moreover, Hindus and Sikhs always stuck together. The Ahmadiyya community sided with Muslims which was ironic when juxtaposed with what was about to happen to them in independent Pakistan. Indian civil officials lost all credibility among the masses as they were thought to be partial to their own communities. Seeing all this, one is led to believe in the absolute truth of Jinnah’s two-nation theory which articulated that Hindus and Muslims were two nations that can’t live in peace within one state. Jihadi elements had not infiltrated into the social milieu of this period but the outcome was still grim enough.

The book collates much data, but an overarching theory or vision is not presented. She misses the wood for the trees. The book is full of shocking typos and it seems that the publisher had bypassed proofreading of the text. A few maps are provided, but are meaningless and illegible. A huge collection of notes accompany each chapter. A glossary as well as an impressive bibliography is provided along with a good index.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star