Allahu Akbar

Title: Allahu Akbar – Understanding the Great Mughal in Today’s India
Author: Manimugdha S. Sharma
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2019 (First)
ISBN: 9789386950536
Pages: 305

History is written by the winners. That’s the only certain truth as far as historiography is concerned. India was reeling under the yoke of Islamic imperialism for nearly eight centuries. They conquered us, destroyed our temples, killed millions, took many millions of both sexes as slaves, forcibly converted several millions and did one other thing that was more shattering and everlasting than the others. They tampered with our cultural DNA and created a class of people who actually believe that India benefitted from the above-mentioned bouts of extreme repression. In the present day, the Left-Islamist nexus bankrolls them and offer them plum positions in academia and pliant journalism. The Mughals was just another Muslim dynasty that produced two centuries of hell in India’s long history. But one thing must be admitted here. Of the six monarchs who are considered Great Mughals, Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar’s rule was the most tolerant. If you scour Islamic history for tolerant kings, perhaps Salahuddin al-Ayyubi might be the only other person you’d find. This book is an effort to understand Emperor Akbar in today’s India. This is a highly censored version which is laudatory to Mughals and worthless as history. The book projects many medieval events onto modern sensibilities and raises political propaganda to claim that the present prime minister, Narendra Modi, is not fit to rule India which was once reigned by such greats as Akbar. Nehru and even Rahul Gandhi is favourably compared to Akbar in this book, but it claims that in view of the Gujarat riots of 2002, Modi broke India while Akbar united it. The book’s title signifies the Muslim battle cry which means that ‘God is Great’. By a clever twist, this also means that ‘Akbar is God’ which was used as a term of salutation by Akbar’s cronies. In that sense, the title is apt for the book because the author practically treats him as divine. Manimugdha S. Sharma is a Delhi-based journalist. He takes a keen interest in politics, military history, the Mughal and British empires and the two world wars. This is his first book in English.

The author confesses that this book was indebted to critical input from the Islamist historians Irfan Habib and Ali Nadeem Rezawi. This makes the author’s pitiable attempts to glorify the Mughals at least comprehensible. A crucial finding in the book is the intellectual and ‘rational’ bend of the Mughal mind. When Hamida Bano, Akbar’s mother, went into labour, court astrologers wanted to prolong it till a later propitious time. But the courtiers rebuffed them saying that ‘things would happen when God willed it’. This fatalistic remark is exalted as a ‘glimpse of the rational minded high society the Mughals had’. However, he notes that Akbar was born at the exact moment the astrologers predicted! Just a few pages later, he concedes that Humayun assigned commands and offices based on the star sign of officers (p.8). The irony is that on the same page he makes this observation, he cannot help remark that ‘Islam condemns soothsaying and endorses natural sciences’ (p.8). It’s a fair guess that it is in such innocuous-looking comments that we see the influence of Habib and Rezawi. The author disgraces himself by praising slavery which was rampant in Islam. He claims that a slave in an Islamic society could rise to become master one day and that slaves were often raised by their masters as their own children, giving them education, training, grooming and teaching them every skill required to rise high in society (p.256). Readers should keep in mind that he is simply sugar-coating the heinous institution of slavery! On the other hand, the author himself may be thought to signify how such a slave would look like in modern times – in the intellectual sense at least. There are several fabricated stories in the narrative such as Humayun recoiling in disgust from a dish of beef and Babur prohibiting cow-slaughter because he was a pragmatic king!

What makes this book not even worth the paper on which it is printed is the political and Islamist propaganda it carries against the present Narendra Modi government in India. You can of course criticize the government for whatever reason, but what does a history book on Mughals has to do with present-day party politics? This book seems to be part of a paid effort that works with political targets in mind written to coincide with the 2019 general elections in India. The author claims that BJP’s election campaigns since 2014 have hinged on Goebbelsian propaganda (p.20). Akbar’s birthday is not certain. He compares this to Modi and says, “Narendra Modi himself has been in the eye of the storm throughout his term for alleged discrepancies in his date of birth as well” (p.7). And, ‘Modi government has a medieval impulse on vilifying opposition’ (p.61). Babur and Akbar erected towers of skulls of enemies vanquished in battle. This is compared to the Modi government’s alleged tendency to seeing minorities as the ‘other’ (p.75). As you can see, the examples are not congruent with the argument but the author compulsively makes these deranged exercises like an obsession. Moreover, he cites several episodes from history and concludes that ‘Akbar was not doing anything that hadn’t been done before and wouldn’t be done again’ (p.78), probably meaning the erection of skull towers. Modi’s scrapping of the outdated and anachronous Planning Commission and putting in NITI Aayog in its place is compared to Akbar’s regent, Bairam Khan, assuming more powers to himself (p.87). Another allegation is that exaggeration is seen in Modi regime’s success stories (p.82). Modi issues ‘diktats to schoolchildren, bureaucrats or factory workers to show up at state or party events since 2014’ (p.14). Also, mass killings were not acceptable in Mughal times as it is now (p.111). Akbar captured Delhi defeating Hemu, who briefly held Delhi by ousting Humayun’s army. Hemu rose from humble origins and the author remarks that ‘one doesn’t get too many instances of someone rising through the ranks like this’ (p.51). However, he does not make the obvious comparison to Modi at this point, who had also risen from a very poor and socially backward family. Graciousness is not a virtue of this wily and partisan journalist who had written this book.

This book glorifies the invaders and slave-masters and vilifies the hapless natives who went down fighting these monstrously destructive powers. Sharma has no compunction to portray an act of blood-curdling cruelty as necessary for a monarch. He claims that Humayun fought his brothers without hating them (!); he loved all his brothers; he had a guilt complex in fighting them (p.28). But in reality, the incident of Humayun blinding his brother makes a terrible read. He pierced a sharp, hot needle through his own brother Kamran’s eyes after capturing him. Dirk Collier notes in his excellent book The Great Mughals and Their India that ‘the lancet was pierced into both eyes about fifty times to make the deed fool proof. The prince bravely withstood the torture, but at the end of it when a mixture of lemon juice and salt was sprinkled on the wound, he broke down and cried out loudly in pain’ (read review here). The author berates the Rajputs entirely as a class – those who fought the Mughals to the last man committing jauhar and saka and those who submitted to them and gave away their daughters to the Mughal harem. Sharma notes with contempt that Rajput ruling families managed to survive until modern times by bowing to every ascendant star on the political horizon, just like grass blades that weather every storm by bending. Some Rajputs fought on the Mughal side against fellow Rajputs. It is interesting to observe how the Mughal chroniclers viewed these fratricidal contests. Badaoni, the Mughal biographer of Akbar through his book Muntakhab ut-Tawarikh, claims that this was a ploy to get kaffirs (infidels) killed by their brethren and to save Muslims the trouble (p.207). But our journalist author chips in with a salvaging comment that Badauni’s remark ‘was not the Mughal state’s view’. How does he deduce this against the written word of a contemporary who knew things better?

Manimugdha Sharma quite literally imagines or wishes that the Mughals gave strict punishment for rape. This ruse is only to make them more appealing to modern sensibilities. He claims that Jahangir demoted Muqarrab Khan, the governor of Gujarat, because he raped a Hindu woman. He is not able to find a reference for this assertion on the period texts, but suggests that his patron, Prof. Ali Nadeem Rezawi of the Aligarh Muslim University, had told him so (p.144). It is amusing that on the immediate previous page, it is asserted that the Mughal Islamic state mandated the testimony of four witnesses to attest to the victim’s version to award sentence to the offenders (p.143). He then maliciously compares the rape of a minor Muslim girl at Kathua to this incident and implies that Hinduism is involved in this brutal incident. To establish the culpability of patriarchal polytheistic religions in sanctioning rape, he describes the story of Medusa from Greek mythology. Medusa was raped and then punished by the gods. Akbar promoted eunuchs in bureaucracy much unlike his predecessors. Those outside the court was still treated with contempt. Even today, Indian politicos and the society at large have not been able to do better than Akbar (p.122). After several rounds of grandstanding, the author ruefully admits that Akbar mercilessly slaughtered tens of thousands in the siege of Chittor in 1568. The emperor then went straight to the shrine of Moinudeen Chishti in Ajmer and proclaimed that his mujahids (holy warriors) defeated kaffirs at Chittor. To iron this out, Sharma slyly assures that this was only a ‘religious rhetorical invocation’ (p.168).

Make no mistake about it that I fully share the author’s conviction that Akbar was the most tolerant of the Mughals – especially in the latter half of his reign. He built the ibadat khana for religious discourse which admitted only Muslim theologians at first. When the emperor realised the hollowness of their arguments, he invited speakers from other religions too. He never joined any of them, but introduced one himself called din e-ilahi, which was nothing more than a kind of personal worship of the emperor. A doubt which is usually pointed at Akbar’s religiosity (or the lack of it) is that whether he had turned ex-Muslim (in the modern sense of the term). The author does not even pronounce it, because his Islamist mentors would not allow it; but gives subtle hints that it may be so. He remarks that since Akbar didn’t go through the formal education process of the time, which involved theological lessons, he had a relatively unencumbered mind that was open to receiving different ideas (p.239). The author quotes Badaoni in such a way as to hint that the emperor had become an apostate. Badaoni sullenly points out that ‘His Majesty had the early history of Islam read out to him and soon began to think less of the companions of the Prophet; soon after, he felt the five prayers, fasts of Ramadan and the belief in everything connected with the Prophet were vain superstitions’ (p.218). When Jahangir rose in revolt against his father, one of the accusations was that Akbar had converted many of the mosques into storehouses and stables. Badaoni also mentions that Akbar dropped all references to the name ‘Muhammad’ and shortened his own name to ‘Jalaluddin Akbar’ (p.227). He assumed the title of amir ul-Mominin (commander of the faithful) which was a break from tradition and a snub to the Ottoman caliphs. The author then argues that ‘this was the reason why Muslim soldiers of the Indian army had no qualms about going to war against the Ottoman empire and Indian Muslims never bothered about the Ottoman caliph’ (p. 222). This is a plain falsehood and raises the question whether he had heard about the Khilafat agitation, which was a bloody episode in India’s freedom struggle and the only instance when Muslims came out in support of Gandhi and his party.

This book is a feeble attempt to understand Akbar in his own time and examine his relevance in our own time. Unfortunately, the author has made the latter part a political slugfest on Narendra Modi. He admits that he has picked some episodes from Akbar’s life story and left out some others (p.xxv) which means that it is a sanitized, if not censored, version. This is a fairy-tale book on Akbar fit for indoctrinating young minds who have not developed the faculty of critical thinking. The author claims himself an Ekalavya and the Islamist historian Irfan Habib as his Dronacharya and consoles that he has not lost his thumb at the end of it. He may have retained his thumb, but certainly has lost common sense and self-pride. This book pompously describes battle stories from European wars in a bid to compare them with Mughals’ experiences and to appear erudite. Most of these stories are irrelevant and uninteresting. They seem to be selected by AI. Sharma calls his detractors ‘weekend historians’ and ‘Twitter professors. He himself fits the bill. His logic is preposterous in the case of many observations. The book declares that Rahul Gandhi comes close to Akbar in unconventional ways because ‘he has ridden bikes and ate with Dalit families’ while Modi has not (p.252-3). The book also includes a discussion on movies such as Jodhaa Akbar and TV serials depicting the Mughal emperor.

This petty political baggage of a book is not recommended.

Rating: 1 Star

The Conscience Network

Title: The Conscience Network – A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship
Author: Sugata Srinivasaraju
Publisher: Vintage, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9780670096787
Pages: 554

If you are in the habit of judging a book by its cover, this one would look like another run-of-the-mill product on Emergency for which there is no dearth. It describes the organisation and the methods through which Indians in the US – staying there for study or employment – resisted the Emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in India in Jun 1975 to Mar 1977. The organisation followed a path independent of Cold War leanings and was guided by nonviolent Gandhian action. It recounts a nearly forgotten story of resistance to the Emergency, its manner of construction, its philosophy and pursuance which is fascinating and a compelling read. This story is put together by a string of individuals in the USA. The role of Gandhians and Socialists and the networks they ingeniously made possible in the US to fight the Emergency have been underplayed and unrecorded and this book claims to endeavour a correction on this aspect. Sugata Srinivasaraju is an independent journalist, author and columnist who has written for nearly three decades at the intersection of politics, culture and contemporary history. In the past, he has edited newspapers and run television channels and digital news platforms. He has four other books to his credit.

The business of the 1970s Emergency is still an unfinished business in India because the Congress party, which declared the Emergency and suspended democracy in this country for 21 months, have still not owned up the culpability nor regretted it. In other words, Congress still has not accepted the mistake of Emergency. In Jan 1978, Indira Gandhi herself took the entire responsibility for all the mistakes and excesses committed, but she caveated it by saying she did what she did to save the nation. In Mar 2021, Rahul Gandhi admitted that the Emergency was a mistake, but again qualified it by saying that the Congress at no point had attempted to capture India’s institutional framework. This was a plain lie because the Emergency saw the worst corruption and capture of India’s institutions. Raju observes that it was the dynastic succession of the Congress party that prevents it from fully owning up and regretting the Emergency which should have elicited an unqualified apology in any other civilized context. In fact, the political dynasty itself was a product of the Emergency. This book does not cover the excesses committed during that dreadful period in India where tens of thousands of innocent people were imprisoned for no reason and without trial. The repressive measures adopted by the Indira regime against overseas Indians who were part of the resistance movement such as revocation of their scholarships or impounding of passports are described in good detail. The book also indicates that Nehru had also exploited this provision in the Constitution for his political expediency. Nehru imposed the Emergency in 1962 during the China invasion and did not lift it for many months even after the ceasefire. It was also misused to repress citizens for innocuous and unconnected acts after labelling them as anti-nationals (p.150).

Even though the book is fairly huge at 554 pages, it is eminently readable and a pleasant experience. The resistance movement in the US was powered by a few individuals – S R Hiremath, his wife Mavis Sigwalt, Ravi Chopra, Anand Kumar, P K Mehta and Shrikumar Poddar. The first two chapters describe their backgrounds and how they ended up in America. It also discusses the political situation in India and the US in the 1970s. Jayaprakash Narayan (hereafter JP) started a movement called Citizens for Democracy (CFD) to fight the rot in economic and social spheres in India under Indira Gandhi. The expatriates created another organisation to mirror it and named it Indians for Democracy (IFD) which consolidated support and spearheaded the resistance program in the US. Despite the contradictions in the ideologies of the IFD constituents, the organisation firmly decided to adopt the Gandhian model and were not caught up in petty streams of power games back home. Amidst all the currents and undercurrents of ideology circulating around IFD, it remained steadfast to Gandhian ideals and methods. It could build support among pacifists, Quakers and the enlightened civil society of America only because Gandhi and his non-violent methods had cast a total spell in those circles. Noted Quaker leaders like Horace Alexander who had enjoyed a warm friendship with Gandhi and Nehru, intervened on behalf of the protestors and sent fact-finding teams to India. Indira allowed herself to be interviewed by them but nothing much came out of these meetings. The western press saw JP as another Gandhi-like figure and his was another freedom movement to rid India from corruption and dictatorship. There was a Cold War angle too, as JP was fighting Indira, who was a bosom friend of Moscow.

Emergency was a heinous assault on our democracy and there is absolutely no doubt that it should have been avoided. Still, the role of the Opposition in fomenting violent protests which were encouraged to be verging on open rebellion is traditionally not examined seriously. This book also follows this paradigm. Probably if Indira Gandhi had restricted the arrests to some leaders and refrained from muzzling the media, she might’ve had a presentable case. This book describes some activities of the Opposition leaders which would make us think that they were exceeding the limits of democratic decency. JP’s exhortation of Sampoorna Kranti (total revolution) was an indirect call to arms, even though he later wriggled out of such interpretations. He has been making revolutionary utterances on a continuous basis for a year before the Emergency. In June 1974, he demanded closure of all schools and colleges in Bihar for a year. He encouraged a no-tax campaign to paralyse the government. In July 1974, he exhorted the police personnel in Bihar to be guided by their conscience rather than illegal orders from their superiors. In Oct 1974, he directed student volunteers to set up parallel, ‘revolutionary’ peoples’ governments. In the same month, he threatened to hold parallel elections in Bihar if the elected assembly was not dissolved. On June 25, 1975, he repeated the threats he had been using in Bihar in Delhi and the police scooped him out to jail on the same night. George Fernandes was a firebrand trade union leader who led a 20-day railway strike in May 1974. He asked the railway workers to realise their collective power. A 7-day strike by them would close down every thermal power plant in the country. 10-days’ strike would shut down every steel plant which would then take up to a year and considerable expenses to restart. Moreover, L N Mishra, who was the Union railway minister and a crony of Indira Gandhi, died in a bomb blast at the Samastipur railway platform in Bihar. The perpetrators were not found. In view of all these, the ethics of the Opposition protests should be re-examined by a neutral party now – at a distance of fifty years chronologically from those fateful incidents.

The book provides a good coverage of the activities of the Indians for Democracy (IFD) organisation in the US. Several times they marched to the Indian embassy or local consulates holding placards and raising slogans. Official propaganda meetings were intercepted and tough questions asked to the local or visiting dignitaries. They also organised a 200-mile walking procession to rouse awareness of India’s fall along a slippery slope to authoritarianism. With press censorship in full throttle in India, the only arena left for the counterargument to exist was the international stage, especially the US and the UK. However, the monotony and low-key of the protests turned even the ardent volunteers off. About seven months after they had begun, the program slowed down because they were only repeating the speeches and was far away from home. All of them had other regular and full-time academic and professional duties to attend to. The regime retaliated with brutal swiftness. Scholarships of several students who participated in the protests were revoked and several passports were impounded. Anand Kumar of Chicago had a tough time managing a year without financial support. When the Janata government came to power after the Emergency, his scholarship was restored with retrospective effect. The year 1976 was not like the previous year for the protestors in America. The Western press took a graver turn when the general elections scheduled for that year was indefinitely postponed. It was a kind of confirmation of dictatorship. Some Indian leaders escaped from India through adventurous means to reach the US. Their work on foreign soil are also catalogued in the book. Subramanian Swamy set up the Friends of India Society International (FISI) which had RSS links. IFD had an uneasy relationship with it due to its socialist bias, but they got on well in view of the common enemy who was browbeating both. Ram Jethmalani also escaped to the US and obtained political asylum there in 1976, becoming the first Indian to get asylum from the Indira regime.

We also read about some eminent individuals who either came in support of the Emergency or were not vocal enough in opposing it. Non-political scientists and other professionals were understandably reluctant to take the plunge which was sure to divert them away from their academic pursuits. However, the leaders of the IFD were also professionals or scientists, so there was no hard and fast rule on who could qualify for volunteering for democracy. Noted physicist S. Chandrashekhar, later a Nobel laureate, and A K Ramanujan, eminent linguist and litterateur (not to be confused with the famous mathematician) were in the University of Chicago at that time engaged in research, but they were not interested in supporting the protests. There is a chapter on T N Kaul, who was India’s ambassador to the US during the Emergency, and was personally so close to the prime minister as to address her ‘Indu’, stoutly defended the Emergency at every step as directed by Indira. But after a few years since stepping down, he changed tone and admitted that Indira was surrounded by self-seeking sycophants and democracy was indeed in danger at that time. Powerful Christian groups in the US wholeheartedly supported the Emergency and came out in vocal agreement with it when the US Congress constituted a committee under Donald Fraser. James K Matthews, Bishop of the Washington area of the United Methodist Church and Charles Reynolds, secretary of the Ludhiana Christian Medical College, took the trouble to testify before the Congressional committee to extol the Emergency, but the prudent committee did not take them seriously.

Raju has followed a non-partisan approach throughout the narrative with a distinct negative bias. He includes the arguments against a particular organisation or individual without bothering to look deep into it or attempting to verify it. However, he leaves no party untainted and in that sense, keeps a fair and neutral stand. His characterizations are stellar and deeply convincing. He claims that the police ran the country during the Emergency and each police station was an independent republic with its own set of arbitrary rules, applied differently to different people. His observations on the extreme left faction, who were called Naxals, are noteworthy. Organisations like the IPANA were Naxal-minded. They were not angry with Indira Gandhi alone for having proclaimed the Emergency; they were angry with everything connected to the freedom struggle and since India’s independence. The book sports excellent diction. Rarely do we come across books of this genre. It was a pleasure to read Raju’s turns of phrase and assimilate the fine nuances. The book was written based on personal interviews conducted during the early-2020s, but the passage of half a century has not dimmed the colour nor dulled the pungency of the narrative of the protests which was a labour of conscience.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star