Having visited the Haifa Indian Cemetery in Israel in 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has now paid respects at the Heliopolis (Port Tewfik) Memorial in Egypt where the war cemetery commemorates Indian soldiers who died in World War 1. This is indeed an interesting and welcome development.
The dominant Indian intellectual class of the post-Independence variety has been of the Leftist persuasion. They have always been embarrassed and uncomfortable that “mercenary” Indian soldiers fought for the “racist-capitalist-imperialist” British cause. These entrenched powerful Leftists were quite okay with the Second World War, especially after July 1941 when Comrade Joseph Stalin told them that it was a “good” war. That is why they were uncomfortable with Subhas Chandra Bose aligning with Stalin’s enemies. Clearly, there was no nuance or contextualising for them. If Moscow and the Comintern told them that something was bad, then it was obviously bad.
Unfortunately for us — hapless students of the ’60s and ’70s — the ruling dispensation, despite its claims of being non-aligned, bowed to the Leftist pseudo-historians. The fact that Mahatma Gandhi supported several British imperial military ventures was glossed over. That Indian soldiers in the British Indian Army were volunteers and not conscripts was never mentioned. That ‘soldiering’ was considered an honourable profession by many Indians was not brought up even once. The entire role of the British Indian Army — and of Indian soldiers, particularly — was underplayed. I suppose we were meant to be a tad ashamed that we had actually fought along with the British.
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No pride for its own
Many years later, when I read a book about General Kodandera Subayya Thimayya, I discovered that Motilal Nehru was actually supportive of Indian officers who had joined the British Indian Army. His son, Jawaharlal Nehru, was different and wrote disdainfully about polo-playing Army officers. And perhaps that prejudice influenced others. The near-traitorous Krishna Menon, either on his own or in order to pander to Nehru, decided that it was his job to “decolonialise” and, by implication, weaken the Indian armed forces. Menon encouraged dodgy favourites — KM Nanavati and General BM Kaul. He dismissed Thimayya’s warnings of a Chinese build-up as a plot by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to ruin the ‘Hindi-Chini’ friendship. And, of course, any associations of the Indian armed forces with their pre-Independence traditions were anathema to Menon.
This excessive embarrassment with the role of Indian personnel continued for many decades, well after Menon’s ouster. India was reluctant to participate in any of the anniversary functions of World War I or World War II even as other allies took part in the solemnities. New Delhi officially stayed away, refusing to acknowledge the sacrifices of Indian soldiers in those global conflicts. British General Edmund Allenby would not have conquered Jerusalem in 1917 if his Indian contingents had not fought so well. The Australians were and are proud of their involvement with British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in North Africa during World War II.
Our government chose not to claim credit for the fact that Indian soldiers were important factors in Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein. And incidentally, Indian universities and think-tanks have rarely bothered to investigate General Charles Townshend’s notorious betrayal of Indian soldiers at Kut in 1915. Our soldiers in uniform were somehow not our men and deserved no attention in victory or surrender.
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Keeping with the politics
Fortunately, things have changed now. Former vice-president Venkaiah Naidu inaugurated a memorial at Villers Guislain in northern France dedicated to Indian soldiers who fought during World War I. This memorial had been sponsored earlier by then-foreign minister Sushma Swaraj. That memorial stands in those poppy fields today. This was a belated and overdue recognition of the valour and fighting spirit of our countrymen. But the real fillip to India’s participation in commemorating its soldiers has now been given by PM Modi’s visits to Haifa and Heliopolis. The Indian dead will now be honoured without the caricatured reality of the Left inhibiting us.
As an aside, those who accuse the PM of narrow-mindedness should note that large numbers of the soldiers commemorated in these cemeteries are Punjabi Muslims from the villages of present-day Pakistan. This was a direct consequence of the changes introduced in the British Indian Army by Field Marshal Frederick Roberts. He reduced the numbers in the Madras and Maratha regiments and disbanded the Mahar regiment altogether. It took a lot of agitation from public figures like BR Ambedkar to partially reverse Roberts’ racist policies. The Field Marshal preferred to focus on the recruitment of “martial” Punjabi Mussalmans, who became the largest contingent in the Army. Although aware of this anomaly, Modi has had no hesitation, and, in fact, has been proud to pay homage to the lives of soldiers who were all Indian in their day.
Modi’s gesture is in keeping with his visit to the medieval Al-Hakim mosque in Cairo on 25 June 2023. This mosque is dear to the Bohra Muslims, a large population of which resides in India and Pakistan. Whether intended or not, Modi’s presence in this mosque made an important, if subtle, point — that some 800 years ago, India was a safe haven for small endangered Muslim sects like the Bohras. And today, the Bohras and other groups like the Khojas and the “non-Muslim” Ahmadiyyas live peacefully and prosperously in India. Modi is a friend of these groups as he is of the ancient community of Syrian Christians in India, who, too, prospered freely in the past as they do now. Incidentally, Modi’s outreach to the infinitesimally small Parsi and Jewish communities in India cannot be attributed to his need for their votes. It stems from a grounded engagement with the diversities of our land. The PM’s open encouragement to his party members to cultivate Pasmanda Muslims is going to become very important and consequential in the years to come.
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Dear Obama, leave Indian history alone
It might be worthwhile for the omniscient Amanpours and Obamas of the great United States to try and understand the nuances, the knotted histories, and the lived realities of our complex country. The former US President’s nonchalant concern for 200 million Indian Muslims, treating them as a monolith, is self-evidently absurd. It can only be the complete ignorance of his interviewer that can let him get away with it.
Nobel Laureate Obama, please try and understand that this fantasy of a monolith facing persecution will be completely rejected not just by the Bohras and hapless Ahmadiyyas but also by large numbers of Pasmandas and small numbers of Siddis, who are treated with disdain in neighbouring Pakistan but live with dignity in India. In fact, most of Obama’s support is bound to come only from the nominally Hindu Leftists who are prominent in American academia and their Ashraaf Muslim clients. Using the simplistic American lens of racial categories and words like “majority” and “minorities” makes no sense in India. The Muslim minority in India did not arrive in slave ships. They were not and have never been a disenfranchised community. For long periods of our history, even when in a numerical minority, Ashraaf Muslims ruled large parts of our country just like the Afrikaners did in South Africa.
In the absence of the homework needed to understand these complexities, it might be better for Obama to retire to his palatial mansion in Martha’s Vineyard and sip his favourite wines. He should leave Indian history and contemporary India severely alone.
Modi is a politician, and he surely wants to win the next election. He is also a draftsman with a long-term idea bubbling inside him. It is not accidental that he has invested so much time and effort in the Middle East; that he has openly discarded the earlier embarrassment associated with the British Indian Army; that he honours Indian soldiers of all backgrounds; that he cultivates the friendship of hitherto neglected groups, irrespective of their religious affiliation. It is Modi’s connect with the reality of India’s past and its present that provides us with sanguine hopes about his constitutional vision for the India of the future. We can wish him well or we can keep quiet. To give him patronising and condescending advice à la Obama is both comical and absurd.
Jaithirth Rao is a retired businessperson who lives in Mumbai. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)