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