The Gorkhas in the Freedom Struggle of India

Title: The Gorkhas in the Freedom Struggle of India

Author: K KMuktan

Publisher: Concept Publishing, New Delhi, 2015 (First)

ISBN: 9789351251460

Pages: 159

India and Nepal share a unique culture and serves as a role model for other Asian countries in bilateral political relations. Citizens of both countries can visit the other and reside for any length of time without any legal formalities. They are also entitled to engage in trade and prosper. Consequently, a lot of Nepalis reside in India on a permanent basis without any feeling of alienation. The flow of populations had started around 1815 when the British unsuccessfully tried to annex Nepal to the empire of the English East India Company. The Gorkhas’ indomitable fighting spirit endeared them to the British who enlisted them in the army. The families of these service personnel followed them and Gorkha settlements sprang up at many places such as Dehradun, Darjeeling and Assam. Over time, they became thoroughly indigenous and fully integrated with the local community. They opposed the British when the spirit of nationalism emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century. Many Gorkhas participated in the country’s freedom struggle on an individual capacity led by Gandhi. The Gorkha soldiers of the British Indian army, which was defeated in Malaya and Singapore during the Second World War, also changed sides along with their other compatriots and joined Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army (INA). They fought against their former masters and reached the gates of India at Imphal and Kohima. This book takes stock of Gorkhas’ contributions in these two areas of freedom struggle. K K Muktan is a retired bureaucrat-turned author who was born and brought up in Assam. He served in the Assam and Meghalaya civil services and had acted in the capacity of district sessions judge. Himself a Gorkha, he has authored another book on Indo-Nepalese socio-cultural dimensions.

Muktan clears a general confusion among the people of the difference between the terms ‘Nepali’ and ‘Gorkha’. Here in this book, both words are interchangeably used and the author assures us that there is no harm in doing so. ‘Nepali’ is the geographical epithet used for a person who is a national of Nepal. In the strict sense, ‘Gorkha’ is an ethnic term derived from Lord Gorakhnath, the patron saint of the principality of Gorkha in Nepal. So, technically all Gorkhas are Nepali, but not vice versa. The origin of Gorkha settlement in India can be traced back to 1815 when the East India Company started recruiting Gorkha sepoys for Indian army immediately after the Treaty of Segauly. With the two world wars, the recruitment assumed added momentum and the soldiers settled in India. The British encouraged Gorkha population to grow in India with a view that the children of these Indian Gorkhas could be recruited to the military. They established Gorkha Regimental Homes at several army headquarters in 1864 to provide accommodation for the Gorkha families. The author estimates the present Gorkha population in India to be around six million. Article 7 of the Indo-Nepal Treaty of Peace and Friendship 1950 granted the nationals of both countries the same privileges in the matter of residence, ownership of property, participation in trade and commerce, movement and other privileges of a similar nature. No passport or visa is required to cross the open border. Many Gorkhas still serve in the Indian army and Muktan affirms that India is forever safe in the hands of loyal and redoubtable Gorkha soldiers.

In 1942, Singapore fell to Japan and 45,000 Indians were taken as prisoners of war. Out of this, around 20,000 were Gorkhas. Subhas Chandra Bose had formed the INA to fight the British with Axis support. The POWs were given the choice between war and incarceration. Either they could join the INA and fight or remain under detention. There was not much to choose from and most of them sided with Bose’s army. The Gorkhas faced a dilemma. Their loyalty to their masters was legendary and to desert them now would be a deed extremely shameful to them. However, the author claims that they rose to the call of the Indian nation and realized that their ultimate loyalty should be to India, which is their motherland for the last four to five generations. However, British historians deny this claim and argue that only very few Gorkhas switched sides. Anyway, the INA eventually lost the war along with their Japanese allies and prominent Gorkha military men who served in it were brought to Delhi after the war and hanged after court martial. Gorkhas in India commemorate August 25 as Balidan Divas (Martyrs’ Day) to pay respect to Major Durga Bahadur Malla who was executed on that day at Delhi in 1944.

This book includes a brief history of India’s freedom movement as a backdrop to Gorkha participation in it. This narrative never rises above that of a high school text book in substance. Many Gorkhas participated in the struggle, especially so in Assam where many of them were employed as civilians in the tea estates and oil companies. The experience gained by eager participation in peaceful struggle was exported to Nepal itself to fuel the anti-Rana agitation. But this was brutally suppressed. The Gorkhas were also attracted to Arya Samaj, with its motto of swaraj, swabhasha and swadharma. Seeing the unity of Gorkhas, the British tried to sow seeds of discontent among them. They were classified into martial and non-martial battalions based on castes. This attempt to breed disunity and ill-feeling among them was realized by Gorkhas.

The book includes some anecdotes that bring to light the closely woven relationship between Gorkhas and the Indian national movement. Many of us wonder why India’s national anthem is in the Bengali language rather than Hindi. Subhas Bose, who was a Bengali, was very fond of the song Janaganamana penned by Rabindranath Tagore and used this as an anthem of the INA. This song was put into martial tune as we listen to today and orchestrated in full military band by Ram Singh Thakuri, a Gorkha bandmaster in INA. This was later recognized as the national anthem after independence. He had also composed the much popular marching song of INA called kadam kadam badhaey ja. The book also showcases life sketches of Gorkha freedom fighters, trade union leaders and politicians such as Ram Singh Thakuri, Bhakta Bahadur Pradhan, Bishnulal Upadhyaya and Dalbir Singh Lohar.

This book is truly special of its kind, displaying the sociopolitical links of an ethnic community that had settled in India from the early nineteenth century. However, this can only be termed an amateur effort when you look at its structure and depth of research. Many facts are needlessly repeated, sometimes half a dozen times, in various contexts. As can be expected, the author focuses only on the positive aspects of Gorkha presence in India and does not mention the First War of Independence 1857 when the Gorkhas fought with the British and Jallianwala Bagh 1919 where the soldiers who accompanied Reginald Dyer were Gorkhas handpicked for the purpose. But of course, it is true that they were only following superiors’ commands in their line of duty in support of their sworn allegiance to the British Crown.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Malevolent Republic

Title: Malevolent Republic – A Short History of the New India

Author: K S Komireddi

Publisher: Context/Westland Publications, 2019 (First published 2018)

ISBN: 9789387894969

Pages: 228

India is a federal democracy that allows the right of association and freedom of expression to its citizens. Except during the internal emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975-77, this right has been effectively used. Indian politics underwent a decisive shift in 2014 when the people entrusted the BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, a decisive majority on its own. It reconfirmed the verdict in the 2019 elections as well. Narendra Modi, who is the leader of the party and the nation’s prime minister, enjoys wide popularity among the people. He is tough, decisive and unfailingly result-oriented. As in any democracy he has his critics in ample measure, and they let loose a maelstrom in the media accusing him of many wrongdoings. This is the hallmark of a healthy democracy in which the leader is continuously examined in detail and his actions repeatedly put under the scanner. Unfortunately, the so-called militant liberal intellectuals have internalised the notion that their opinion is the gospel truth and get irritated and resentful when the common people happily ignore them and march behind Modi. They have started using another strategy to account for the irrelevance of their advice. Liberals now claim that dissent is stifled like in the Emergency days but that also crumble under impartial scrutiny. The privilege to claim that there is no democracy in the country itself is a sure indicator of the right of freedom of expression. Try doing this in North Korea or China and see the difference! The liberals put up a combined effort to undermine Modi's chances in the 2019 elections and this book is a long charge sheet of his presumed ‘failures’ and a request to the voters to oust him at the next opportunity. Kapil Satish Komireddi was born in India and educated in England. His commentary, criticism and journalism have appeared in major publications around the world. This is his first book.

Komireddi surveys India's history from about 1930 onwards to set the stage for Narendra Modi’s ascent to power. The author is unhesitatingly disdainful of India – her systems of politics, politicians and the society itself. He criticizes the Nehru family to no end and stoops to the level of the gutter by examining their personal lives and suggesting an extramarital affair between Kamala Nehru and Feroze Gandhi, her son-in-law. Such is the level at which Komireddi operates! He calls Nehru a 'deracinated interloper' and claims that the Indian republic was a project floated on the supposition that democracy would contain rather than intensify the yearnings for consolidation among India's Hindus who for the first time in history would be an enfranchised majority in a politically united India devoid of a foreign master. He takes a dig at the ditching of secularism by Congress through favouring minority vote banks without any semblance of a right perspective. Throughout India's post-independent period, Muslim women were being thrown out of wedlock by their husbands by casually uttering talaq three times as allowed in Islamic law. Religious scholars always defended the husbands’ religious right to cast aside their wives without providing for them. Alluding to the Shah Bano case of 1985-86, the author alleges that the Nehruvian state recognised this ‘right’ and proved its secularity. The Nehru family also robbed the people’s democratic rights during the Emergency. It was India's forsaken multitudes – whose suitability for democracy was repeatedly questioned and whose disenfranchisement high-mindedly rationalized away by the country's post-colonial elite – who resuscitated the republic (p.23).

Quite unusually for a typical liberal intellectual, Komireddi unveils a scathing criticism of the secular historians and their criminal complicity in suppressing the horrible pillage done by Muslim invaders in India. He considers the historiographers’ adulteration of medieval history in some detail (p.45). Mediaeval India, despite all the evidence of its methodical disfigurement, was depicted in school books as an idyll where Hindus and Muslims coexisted in harmony and forged an inclusive idea of India which the British came and shattered. Congress-sponsored history papered over the overwhelmingly contradictive evidence – from the ruins of Hindu liturgical buildings to the ballads of dispossession passed from generation to generation – arrayed against it. As an illustrative example, Komireddi quotes a portion from Alauddin Khilji’s historian Vassaf’s journal in which he talks about the subjugation of Gujarat which included such heinous acts as temples destroyed, idols smashed, wealth looted, infidels killed and 20,000 beautiful children of both sexes raped and sold into sexual slavery! Moreover, it was the mission of secular historians and public intellectuals of India to locate mundane causes for carnage by religious zealots. And when these reasons could not be found, they trivialised the gruesome deeds of the invaders and emphasized their good traits. All imperialism is vicious but that is not the standard adopted by India’s secular historians. Portuguese and other European atrocities such as forced conversions are recorded as such, but Muslim invaders were said to be ‘enriching the Indian culture’. The author then makes a great observation: “Imperialism, in other words, was destructive only when the Europeans did it. When the Asians did it, it was a cultural exchange program” (p.47). Unfortunately, sticking to the existing secular custom, he omits to mention the only Asians who invaded India by name.

This book assails India's Kashmir policy as a moral blot, criminal enterprise, brutalization of its majority and an anti-democratic farce. He refers to the hanging of Afzal Guru – without mentioning his name – the Kashmiri terrorist who masterminded the suicide attack on Indian parliament in 2001 as ‘the legal murder of a defenceless’ man (p.68). This was in spite of all due judicial procedure that took nearly ten years to complete! Lack of research and awareness of India's Constitution is painfully evident when he mocks at Narendra Modi’s election pledge to dismantle the Article 370 of the Constitution that conferred special privileges to Kashmir. The author claims it to be an entrenched provision of the Constitution that could not practically be repealed (p.174). However, within a few months of the publication of this book, Modi did exactly the same. This might have infuriated the author to no end! He expresses another vicious hope of the dismemberment of India by claiming that ‘South India is imperceptibly inching away from the north’ as if it is a preordained tectonic activity.

The entire purpose of this book is to provide a seething criticism of Modi for the opposition to use in the 2019 elections. The prime minister must be criticized in a democracy and facing such censure is part of his job. But Komireddi’s all-out attack often lowers the status of the entire discourse to the personal level. The author himself confesses that ‘the presence of Modi, the worst human being ever elected prime minister, in the office hallowed by Nehru and Shastri was a source of debilitating distress for me” (p.217). He rues that Modi's career did not end the moment the Gujarat riots of 2002 raged and untruthfully maintain that ‘if you happen to be a Muslim, Gujarat was a pit of horror and humiliation’ (p.82). To prove his credentials in offering such a heavyweight invective, Komireddi boasts that he had visited more mosques (most of them abroad) than Hindu temples, even though he was born a Hindu.

Komireddi’s hatred towards Modi is palpable and readers can literally discern the frothing foam at the corners of his mouth after his vengeful tirade of non-stop accusations against the democratically elected leader. Modi rose from a very humble background. His mother washed dishes in the neighbourhood and his father sold tea in the nearby train station to feed their family of six children. His regular education was hence curtailed at high school, but later he took graduation through distance learning. It is mercilessly mean on the part of the British-educated author to make fun of Modi on his low level of education. He compares Modi one-by-one to Hitler, Mao, Putin, Erdogan, Tughluq and Ceausescu. I just counted the venomous epithets he uses to describe Modi in this book’s pages and it merits an amusing glance from the readers. Komireddi portrays Modi as 1) boastful 2) shameless 3) megalomaniac 4) bigot 5) implacably malevolent 6) permanently aggrieved 7) hare-brained 8) foul man 9) tin pot tyrant 10) benighted 11) vainglorious 12) innately vicious 13) culturally arid 14) intellectually vacant 15) fascist 16) prospective killer 17) future mass-murderer 18) atrociously incompetent 19) despot 20) liar about his accomplishments 21) self-conceited strong man 22) inhabitant of a foetid political swamp and 23) the worst human being ever elected prime minister. So much for Komireddi’s objectivity, impartiality and tolerance!

Komireddi is not able to maintain a balanced attitude towards the nature of things and consciously or unconsciously works to enhance the wretchedness of the loser in a struggle as if to keep him aggrieved and on the lookout for revenge. In response to Pakistani newspapers’ lament in 1971 that its defeat was the first time in a thousand years that Hindus had won against Muslims, he lists out the leading Indian army officers and ‘prove’ that none of them are Hindu. He designates the anti-Sikh riots that ravaged Delhi in 1984 as a Hindu-Sikh riot whereas it was orchestrated by the Congress party in power to ‘teach the Sikhs a lesson’ on the assassination of their leader Indira Gandhi by two Sikhs in her bodyguard. The shallowness of research for this book is too evident to cast a shadow of worthlessness on the entire text.

The book is still recommended as a helpful way for readers to observe the off-kilter antics of a biased author.

Rating: 2 Star

Politics, Women and Well-Being

Title: Politics, Women and Well-Being – How Kerala Became a ‘Model’

Author: Robin Jeffrey

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2001 (First published 1992)

ISBN: 9780195656220

Pages: 285

Kerala is a small, picturesque coastal state of India located in the southwest corner of the country. Both geographically and by population it constitutes less than five per cent of India as a whole, yet the human development index of Kerala is far above the national average and is on a par with developed countries. This comes as a curious paradox as the state is long thought to be a hotbed of militant labour and its society is aligned against free enterprise by ideological conviction. This book analyses the puzzle of Kerala’s high literacy rate, high life expectancy, low infant mortality rate and high levels of the presence of women in public services and attempts to list out the reasons behind these above-normal parameters as compared to other states in India. The book also argues that there was no ‘Kerala Model’ in the sense of a package of shrewd policies that may be picked up and applied with predictable results in other places and times. It charts Kerala’s twentieth century history to show where that history was unique and where it had implemented policies that may work elsewhere. Robin Jeffrey is a Canadian-born professor with primary research interest in the modern history and politics of India, especially with reference to Punjab and Kerala. He has authored many books, of which the review of ‘The Decline of Nayar Dominance’ was posted here earlier.

The plight of women in Kerala was better off to begin with on account of a special custom called marumakkathayam (matriliny) in which inheritance passed through the female line. But matriliny did not mean matriarchy. Women did not rule families but old men did as karanavars (functioning head). He bequeathed the family property not to his son as in patriarchy, but to his nephew. This system, which made most men redundant except for the act of procreation, was developed to cater for the specific requirements of the Nair community which took up soldiering as its main occupation and wanted free men in the militias without too much attachment to his wife and children. Once the British disarmed the Nairs throughout Kerala in the 1810s, the matrilineal joint family was forced to cope with peace, which deprived young Nairs of soldiering and led to an increase in population. This stressed the production of food grain from available land. Matriliny tottered on the brink for many decades until it finally came crashing down through legislation in the 1920s. However, matriliny was much more liberal with girls. It allowed them to attend local schools when they opened by the middle of the nineteenth century. When education prepared them for professional service, the families were quite willing to send young women into salaried work.

Jeffrey claims that Travancore, which was the most prominent of the three segments which combined to form the Kerala state in 1956 was at the forefront of Indian princely states on social parameters during the British period itself. This was in spite of the severe caste restrictions existing in the kingdom as compared to other principalities. As long ago as 1857, the House of Commons noted Travancore as ‘something like a model Native State’. The Maharaja was generous to European missionaries and established a British-style administration that began to open up the country to plantation agriculture. By the 1840s, more than a dozen protestant missionaries pressed the Travancore government to modernise, told the world about the prospects for plantation crops and made education available to the Hindus they sought to convert. This ushered in a cash economy that made many lower caste families gain wealth as they processed coir and toddy. The change in demography and acceptance of the girl child in the family was confirmed in Travancore’s first census in 1875 which revealed that the state had more females than males – 1010 to 1000.

The book gives a succinct review of the profound transformation that occurred in Kerala from the year 1800 onwards. Before 1810, Kerala was part of a world market, but few Malayalis had to deal with it directly, because the state exercised monopoly of the resources and traded directly with foreign merchants. They relinquished this right and by the 1920s, Malayalis could hardly avoid the lure of trade. Land became a saleable commodity when the Maharaja transferred ownership to powerful families and middlemen. The introduction of cash crops like coffee (1830s), tea (1880s), rubber (1890s) and the increasing value of Kerala’s ancient spice and coconut trade steadily monetised the economy. At the same time, renovation of the human resources was also on the cards. New government positions needed education in a formal school or college which was costly. A typical matrilineal family provided free food and bed to its members, but had no means to distribute cash among them to pay for school or college fees. Matriliny begin to crumble when individualism was taught in schools and matriliny was universally mocked at as universal concubinage. Joint families were permitted per capita division of property by various legislation from 1925 onwards though it was fully abolished only in 1976. Kerala is known for the wide acceptance of political participation of the people. This was greatly facilitated by the collapse of the joint family in the 1930s. Whereas elsewhere urban intellectuals led the struggle, in Kerala, rural, primary educated upper-caste men led the people.

The author also explains the repercussions events like the Great Depression and the Second World War had had on Kerala’s transient social customs. The price of coconut, rice and rubber plummeted during the Depression but soared during the War. Tropical farmlands in Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia had changed hands with the Japanese conquest of these countries and the price of rubber shot up 750 times its pre-war figure. This conferred much wealth on a class of land-owning families. At the same time, the fall of Burma in 1942 stopped the import of rice. Millions died in Bengal due to the famine it caused, but Kerala managed to stave off famine deaths by instituting statutory rationing of essential items to the whole population. Kerala produced only half of its rice demand and the communists made clever use of the hardships on the civil society for their own political aggrandizement. Military service took almost three per cent of the people to move and work beyond Kerala’s boundaries. The idea that the state ought to perform functions for its people gained currency during this period.

Through the upheavals of the first quarter of the twentieth century, Kerala stumbled upon a right formula to extract maximum benefit from the administration. Large scale political participation of the people formed the right background for this change. In 1920, meetings, speeches, leaflets, marches and civil disobedience were shocking novelties. But in the space of a generation, such public political activity became an accepted part of daily life. Demanding people prodded governments into activity and the governments’ response to organised demands encouraged still further claims. Extensive social collapse engendered by the crash of joint families destroyed rigid ideas of hierarchy and forced people to organise and participate in public life. Intense political competition in a vigorous democratic system extracted programs and services from governments desperate to win support to retain power. The outcome has been the ‘Kerala Model’, of longer life, fewer infant deaths and a falling birth rate (p.204).

Jeffrey also takes stock of the cracks found in the Kerala Model in the 1970s. Agricultural productivity declined, probably due to the redistribution and resultant marginalisation of farmland to labourers as part of land reforms. This came at a time when the green revolution was producing significant increases elsewhere. Also, the author doubts whether the advancement of Kerala women had really contributed to their empowerment. Women may do more things in Kerala than elsewhere in India, but they do not enjoy equality with men. To go to school, read a newspaper, attend an office, draw a salary or seek trained medical care are widely approved activities for women. But if they venture to leave the accepted spheres like entering public politics, they face innuendo, ridicule and disappointment. This was the author’s observation in the early 1990s, but wide-ranging reforms in local administration brought in at the national level had offered half of the politically contested seats in the local bodies to women.

Kerala is known as a fortress of the communists as it had voted in a communist government to power in 1957. This is in fact quite wrong. The state vigorously follows a two-party system and alternates them in power for the last half century. But still, the strength of leftist organisations offer hassles to free enterprise which turns out to be a slur on the state's reputation to attract private investment. The Kerala Model itself may be thought of as a speculative countermeasure by leftist economists to showcase something good which came about by communist influence. The real reasons for Kerala’s growth, however, have no relation to the presence of the communists. The author is heavily influenced by scholars from the Centre for Development Studies (CDS) in Thiruvananthapuram which is a warren of researchers openly affiliated to the Communist Party of India (Marxist), CPI(M). This book invokes a lot of communist leaders in many social contexts even though their contributions were often marginal. After 1960, the description almost looks like a manifesto of the CPI(M) as seen in one of Jeffrey’s remarks which is typical: “In 1980, a CPI(M)-led government established an old-age pension scheme for agricultural labourers, which was paying Rs. 45 a month to more than 170,000 people within a year. When the CPI(M) returned to office in 1987, it raised the pension to Rs. 60” (p.184). The CDS itself is nothing but an avenue for rehabilitation of political wrecks and for providing easy doctoral degrees for the party workers rather than an arena for serious research. But the author notes naively that ‘the existence of institutions like the CDS and the deep investigation of Kerala’s problems by Malayalis themselves, suggest reasons to believe that solutions or significant amelioration are possible’ (p.227).

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star