Democracy in India Continues to Decline

Ramnath Goenka (1904-91), the fearless Indian journalist and newspaper owner after whom the Annual Ramnath Goenka Lecture organized by the Indian Express group of journals is named, was someone I knew well. From 1985 to 1987, I was the editor of the Chennai and Madurai editions of his flagship daily, Indian Express. For more than forty years, starting in 1980, articles by me appeared regularly in all editions of the paper. 

This association with Goenka was in some ways a continuation of the professional and personal relationship between him and my father Devadas Gandhi. Four years older than Goenka, my father ran and edited the Hindustan Times in New Delhi from the 1930s, which was when Goenka acquired the Indian Express in Chennai. 

During the 1942 Quit India rebellion against British rule, a secret collaboration between my father in Delhi and Goenka in Madras (as Chennai was then known) resulted in India Ravaged, a powerful expose of the injuries to India from wartime excesses by British authorities. More than three decades later, during independent India’s 1975-77 Emergency, Himmat, the journal my friends and I had started in 1964, was among the small number of newspapers, led by Indian Express, that defied and foiled censorship. 

Offering bitter proof of India’s fall from democracy, it was Narendra Modi, under whose continuous rule from 2014 the Indian media has been controlled far more effectively than it was during the 19-month Emergency period of the 1970s, who was invited to deliver the Annual Ramnath Goenka Lecture on November 17. 

Opposite of Courage

Brave online writers in India have commented on the irony of a leader who has not held a single press conference during his extensive premiership being given one of the Indian media’s most prestigious platforms. That gesture doesn’t sit well with “Journalism of Courage,” which remains the Indian Express’s masthead tagline.

The central call of Modi’s lecture was for the new emergent India to shed its legacy of colonial rule, in particular Macaulay’s legacy, which allegedly has been sedimented deeply in Indian society via an educational system and the English language. In the prime minister’s view, the English language and western thoughts have inhibited indigenous Indian thinking and created a breed of Indians who look Indian but are British at heart. 

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was a renowned British historian, poet, and politician who spent four years, 1834-38, in India. In this short period, Macaulay impacted India’s future in two major ways. He ensured that ambitious Indians would adopt English as their first language, and he wrote the detailed Indian Penal Code, which remains, nearly two hundred years later, the principal law against crime in India. 

Requiring gifted young Indians to migrate mentally to an English world was certainly a controversial policy, but in his lecture Modi went far beyond making that criticism. Let me quote A. J. Philip, who was writing in the portal The Wire:  

“[Modi] went back 200 years to attack Thomas Babington Macaulay, quoting a fraudulent passage that has circulated widely but has no scholarly basis. 

Did He Ever Say That?

“The fabricated quotation claims Macaulay travelled across India, found no beggars or thieves, admired India’s wealth and morality, and concluded that Britain must destroy India’s cultural backbone. There is no evidence – none – that Macaulay ever wrote or delivered such a statement. Scholars have debunked it repeatedly. It does not appear in his writings. He was in India when he supposedly said these words in the British Parliament. 

“True, Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education reflected a belief in European superiority. He was a colonial administrator, not a champion of Indian culture. His father was a missionary who instilled in him values which Modi, alas, cannot comprehend. But facts matter. Quotations matter. History matters. The prime minister of India has no right to quote fabricated history in a memorial lecture dedicated to a legendary newspaperman. 

“Modi also seemed unaware – or unwilling to acknowledge – what education in India was actually like before the British. Education was restricted to a few privileged castes. Lower castes and women were barred from reading Sanskrit texts. Ideas of universal schooling did not come from the Hindu social order. Missionaries, reformers, and colonial administrators played major roles in expanding education. The world knew about the Vedas when Max Müller was commissioned by the British East India Company in 1847 to translate the Rigveda, a project that took 27 years to complete. One may critique their motives, but one cannot erase their contributions. 

“Macaulay also gave India the Indian Penal Code, still one of the least amended laws in the country.” 

Is Modi not concerned about what people in Britain might think about current policies, attitudes, and statements in India? Won’t their reaction affect men and women of Indian origin living in the UK? For a significant section of the British population, Macaulay is a figure of pride and admiration. For people anywhere who enjoy good writing, Macaulay would be an excellent choice. Prime Minister Modi narrating an imaginary story to demonize him can only hurt India’s standing, India’s interests, and Indo-British relations. 

UK’s Potential

Moreover, is it a helpful exercise to go back to the India of 200 years ago and find someone to blame? I suppose it is, for it might deflect attention from the condition of today’s schools in India– and from the absence of jobs for those completing school and college. 

Modi is not the only Indian who has swallowed the concocted story or stories about Macaulay. A meticulous study of what Macaulay said or did not say in India and about Indians would be an excellent research subject for a modern scholar in India or in the UK and would help with India-Britain relations. 

I should add that a chance I’ve just had to interact virtually with a team of democracy-loving Indians in the UK confirms in my mind the potential of people in the UK to aid the fight for human rights in other parts of the world, and to assist also in efforts to bring conflicted groups to dialogue. 

“We are here because you were there” has been (so I’ve learned) the crisp response of British Indians and other non-white Brits to extreme British nationalists objecting to the presence in their country of people from lands colonized in earlier centuries. Such verbal exchanges, however, are only a tiny part of a bigger story, which is about the scale and depth of multiracial relationships in a country small in area but bold in vision that ruled distant waves and fields in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. 

Over the last several months, the whole world got an infusion of hope as people in Britain rose for the defence of the most basic rights of the Palestinian people: the right to life, the right of their children for food and water, the right not to be pushed out of what’s been their ancestral home for centuries. 

The English Language

One reason why British Indians and all Brits matter is that it is in the English language that much of the world argues, quarrels, weeps, celebrates, and campaigns. 

A second reason is that the free speech and free debate that Indians are defending today was at times modelled on Hyde Park, on the British press, and on past debates in the House of Commons. 

Struggles in India have been inspired by poets in Britain of liberty, justice, equality, and humanity. In most nations today, equality and inclusion or inclusiveness may or may not be in a commanding place or in power. But if we foster an inclusive circle today, the inclusive nation will come tomorrow. Be the circle of any size, as long as its members cherish and respect one another, there is hope. As long as people in the circle can pull each other’s leg, there is hope. 

Britain has many such circles. The history of Britain is not merely or primarily a history of pomp, power, and imperialism. I see British history as a history of courage, of welcoming the “other,” of honoring the dissenter, of friendship across supposed barriers of creed or racial origin. The relationships built in the UK between different races in hospitals, universities, and elsewhere is a wonderful piece of the story of our world’s progress. 

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Anand Teltumbde is an IIT professor, a corporate director, and a biographer of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, whose granddaughter Rama he married in 1983. He is also one of India’s frankest and sharpest intellectuals. From August 2018 until November 2022, he was kept in prison on baseless allegations of involvement in a violent conspiracy. Finally, citing the absence of any evidence to support the allegation, the Bombay High Court ordered Teltumbde’s release. 

Commenting in The Wire (Nov. 17) on the large majority obtained by the Modi-led National Democratic Alliance in this month’s elections to the legislature of Bihar state, Teltumbde has underlined the partiality of India’s Election Commission and recalled the amendment that removed India’s Chief Justice from the panel, headed by Modi, that picked the EC’s three members. The large-scale revision of the list of Bihar’s voters whereby hundreds of thousands of names were deleted and a similar number added was also marked by Teltumbde. 

Manipulation

In his words, “the Opposition’s defeat coincided with documented manipulation of electoral rolls – an exercise impossible without the active connivance of the Election Commission.” Teltumbde also criticized the Election Commission’s failure to act against the glaring violation of the law by Bihar’s outgoing NDA ministry when it transferred Rs 10,000 as a gift into the bank accounts of seven-and-a-half million women when the election to the state assembly was announced. 

But Teltumbde also took to task Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress, who is the leader of the opposition in the national parliament. Visible in parliament and in some state legislatures, the Congress Party is however absent from India’s streets. Holding Rahul Gandhi accountable for this failure, Teltumbde also criticizes him for not “forging durable unity among the opposition parties.” In today’s climate, recreating active political organizations on India’s streets is a tough demand, and uniting political leaders cannot be easy either, but Teltumbde’s focus is valid.