Death of the Raj: Subcontinent in the Third Millennium

For nearly four thousand years of its history the Subcontinent has mostly been a fluctuating patchwork of regional principalities that were interlocked in a dynamic equilibrium. Occasionally, however, there were forceful fits of imperial consolidation. Much like the European continent which was every once in a while partially united for brief periods such as during Roman times, the reign of Charlemagne, the Hapsburgs, the Napoleon era, the Third Reich and the Soviet Empire. As with Europe, only by force of arms was the natural centrifugal tendency of the Subcontinent's various regions ever thwarted. As soon as the imperial forces weakened the normal decentralized pattern re-emerged. This centrifugal trend is the one constant which the Subcontinent has witnessed since the days of the early Indus Valley Civilization. There were sporadic and infrequent periods of consolidation such as those seen in the times of the Maurya dynasty, especially under Ashoka, and then six hundred years later under the Gupta dynasty and then another eight hundred years later during the on-again, off-again, chaos of the Sultanates of Delhi. Then came the Mughals followed by the British.

The most recent pre-British decentralization began at the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 but it did not become obvious until after the short and sad reign of his grandson Jahandar Shah (1712-13) which was ended ignominiously when the Sayyid brothers installed a minor, the royal nephew Farrukh'siyar, on the throne. Then after Nadir Quli Shah invaded Punjab, plundered Delhi and stole the peacock throne, in 1739, the decentralization of the Subcontinent became a complete reality. The Subcontinent remained more or less decentralized for over a century until the British Imperialists consolidated their empire following the Anglo-Indian civil war of 1857.

This started another ninety year period of Imperial centralization under the British which took a major blow in 1947. The British Raj underwent a metamorphosis in that year but it remained alive and well standing firmly on its three pillars of power: (a) the imperial military, (b) the colonial bureaucracy and, (c) the feudal aristocracy.

What happened in 1947, was a mere "change of the palace guards". The imperial structures only substituted their cold western professionalism with native nepotism and malaise, otherwise they remained intact, and the masses were none the better off. The Empire, in spirit, continued after 1947, though not as a monolith, but as a bi-polar imperial structure under native masters.

The Empire would not have split up but for one fact. By the early 1940s the Muslim aristocratic elite of British India had realized that it had no hope of grasping power and privilege in a parliamentary form of government where a Hindu electoral majority would vote in the Hindu aristocratic elite. It was this insecurity that prompted an intense struggle to split up the pie that was British India so that a separate state with a Muslim electorate could be carved out and thus secure a constituency for the Muslim aristocracy. Had it not been for this consideration, the Empire may well have remained remained intact.

The foreign rulers departed from the shores of the Subcontinent in 1947, but they left their favorite subjects on the two daughter-thrones; those who were cast in their own image, that is, the conservative quasi-westernized elite.

This phenomenon was not new to the Subcontinent. In 1206 the throne of Delhi fell into the hands of Qutb-ud-din Aybak who was, technically, a slave of the assassinated Mohammed Ghauri, the Turkic-Afghan sultan of Delhi. This ended the "foreign rule" of the Turks but the foreign imperial structure remained intact. That Slave Sultanate was just as alien to the Subcontinent as are its two present day successors, the Slave Empires of Islamabad and New Delhi.

The closing decade of this millennium is unrelenting in its ferocity for change. Artificially propped up multiethnic federal states cannot withstand the gales of time. Especially imperial style federal bureaucracies based on one ideological fiction or another have out lived their epoch as the fates of Moscow and Belgrade will starkly testify. The so-called Pakistan and Hindustan, as they exist today, are anachronisms. It is merely a matter of time before they vanish like whiffs of smoke in the winds of history.

The splitting of the British Indian Empire into a bipolar model was done around the same time when the Great Powers were beginning to split up into a bipolar world among themselves. The seeds of ethno-centric chauvinism and militant bigotry in the Subcontinent were similar to the one which laid the foundations of the Cold War between the Great Powers. However, fifty years later, in this post Cold War era of common markets, free trade zones and consortiums of independent states there is no room for such antiquated inconveniences as a perpetual state of hostility and distrust between neighboring states.

New Delhi and Islamabad, I believe, need to be shelved in the historical archives of their bipolar world era. They are mentally stuck in an age which began after World War II and ended in the early 1990's. These are two of world's poorest countries that cannot possibly remain on a war-time footing in this day and age. Times have changed and the Cold War model of a bipolar Subcontinent cannot be justified or even sustained.

The problems faced by the Subcontinent are demographic, ecological and economic. The population growth rate, in Pakistan for example, is one of the highest in the world. Over half the population is under 18 years old. This signals a coming tidal wave of masses of angry youth ready to die or kill on the most dubious of pretexts. These waves of masses are growing up to face very dismal prospects. Intolerance, ignorance, prejudice and chauvinism are actively encouraged in order to keep the hostile climate alive.

The defense related expenditure is so enormous that if it is not abandoned, there will be nothing left to defend. There is almost no meaningful resource allocation for improving education, health care, labor retraining or infrastructure upgrading. Over seventy percent of the population is supposed to be involved in agriculture yet the region seldom seems to be self sufficient in food. More fertile land continues to be lost than is reclaimed.

The biggest hurdle in the way of progress is the old Cold War mentality of the Lords of Islamabad and New Delhi. The subcontinent must be demilitarized.

The nature of centralized bureaucracies is such, that there is no possibility that the existing establishments will voluntarily slay the military industrial dragon and begin the long and arduous task of building better lives for the common person. The only way to demilitarize the Subcontinent is to dismantle the existing bipolar nation-state structure and replace it with an interdependent multi-polar structure based on economic priorities and not ideological ones.

The destiny of Sindh lies just as close to Rajastan and Gugrat as it does to The Punjab. Baluchistan and Sarhad (or all the area west of the Indus) are more a part of the turbulent Central Asia than they are integral to the Subcontinent. That region, from the Indus to the Oxus, is a transit zone between the Turkic Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent. Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Nagaland have far more to share with Burma and South East Asia than they do with Punjab or Rajastan.

The time may have come for such prospects as the "Independence and Reunification" of not only Jammu and Kashmir, but also, The Punjab and Bengal. It is not hard to visualize, for example, the Republic of Punjab, with Lahore as its capital, or a Greater Bengaladesh under the folds of Calcutta, coexisting peacefully among the Commonwealth of Indian Subcontinent (CIS) states.

The Indian Subcontinent of the Third Millennium should be more like the European Union, that is, a Commonwealth consisting of loosely aligned or independent states carved around ethno-linguistic and economic blocks. The Hindu heartland of Ganga river plains, Deccan, Cariala, Mysore, Karnatak, Orissa, Beihar, Bengal and Assam, Punjab (including Harriana and Himachelpardesh), Jammu & Kashmir, Sindh, Rajputana and Maharashtra (including Gujrat and Junagarh) and some other enclaves are the potential successors of New Delhi and Islamabad.

Several multicolored flags should replace the two drab ones that presently symbolize the repressed Subcontinent from their lofty heights over the citadels of New Delhi and Islamabad.

Therein may lie the only hope: where the punchait assumes the role of local government and the revenue collectors are scrutinized and held accountable at the local level; where the destiny of a community is in its own hands; where the administrative authority is accountable and decentralized; where the Deputy Commissioners, like the mansabdars of the Mughals, are entirely abolished and where the prime minister in Islamabad or New Delhi has no influence over who runs the town affairs of Mirpur khas in Sindh or Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu.

That can be where people look ahead to the future rather than dwell in the myths of past glory and self congratulation and where leaders and followers take responsibility for their own actions instead of blaming the CIA or KGB or CNN or Zionism or Communism or Atheism or Secularism or the Drug Lords, or Other peoples' religion or race or Rock n'Roll music or any other cartel or conspiracy.

No matter what happens, that will still be a better situation than the sorry state of affairs at the present feast of vultures over the carcass of the British Indian Empire. The empire must be given a decent burial and be put to rest, allowing the natural pattern of history to be restored whereby the Subcontinent exists as a commonwealth, like Europe, and swords are melted and reshaped into plowshares.