There are some features of domestic politics during moments of national crisis such as this one that are invariably relegated to the level of footnotes regardless of their momentary importance in the media. How many, to cite a recent example, will care to remember the buffoonery of a Congress leader from Uttar Pradesh using lime and chillies tied to a toy aeroplane to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the Rafale aircraft purchased from France by the Narendra Modi government? Arguably, its relevance will be even more fleeting than the gratuitous anti-war comment of the Karnataka chief minister, Siddaramaiah, and the equally needless reply by the former chief minister, Jagadish Shettar, of the Bharatiya Janata Party that he should consider moving to Pakistan. These indiscretions by Congress politicians have been gleefully exploited by the ‘patriotic’ media in Pakistan to bolster its view that India’s claim to military one-upmanship is spurious. The Indian media does the same with Pakistani motormouths.
The belief that war or even a situation of imminent war leads to spectacular assertions of national solidarity is an idealised version of reality. An over-romanticised version of how Britain single-handedly fought off Adolf Hitler in 1940-41 suggests a national grittiness and bulldog temperament personified by the doughty Winston Churchill. Some of this is undeniably true, but historians have subsequently unearthed the extent of domestic opposition to Britain fighting a war over distant Poland, a country many had never even heard of. The social histories of the Blitz have also reconstructed colourful details of the thriving black market and underground trade in artefacts stolen from bombed buildings. The TV serial, Foyle’s War, centred on the life of a police detective based in the coastal town of Hastings, gives a fictionalised, but nevertheless accurate, portrayal of the tensions that gripped the home front during the six-year war.
The India-China war of 1962, which was unquestionably a military disaster for India, did result in the country rediscovering the virtues of patriotism. The accounts of women queueing before banks to donate their gold jewellery to the National Defence Fund and knitting sweaters for our soldiers deployed in the Himalayas without adequate protection from the snows have become the stuff of legends. What is less known is that a section of India’s communist leadership, including the likes of Jyoti Basu —now regarded as a model of rectitude — publicly ridiculed India’s resistance to the advancing Chinese armies and had to be jailed to prevent the emergence of a fifth column. It is interesting that even to this day the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has never regretted its decision to stay aloof from the patriotic mainstream during the 1962 war.
Going against the national mood was to become a signature tune of the Indian communists, or at least sections of the communist movement. During the 1971 war, a big section of the Naxalite breakaway from the CPI(M) was opposed to India’s encouragement of the Bangladesh movement. These groups opposed the break-up of Pakistan because the stated policy of China challenged Indian ‘expansionism’ and the ‘social imperialism’ of the Soviet Union. On its part, the CPI(M) wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about India’s role in the conflict. However, its slogan equating Indira Gandhi with Pakistan’s permanently inebriated President Yahya Khan struck a jarring note inside India.
There is also the case of the widespread internment in 1962 of the ethnic Chinese population across the country, but mainly in Calcutta that boasted a thriving Chinatown. This is broadly similar to the expulsion of Pakistan passport-holders in the wake of the India-Pakistan tensions following last month’s massacre of tourists in Pahalgam. Perhaps a major difference was that there is no real evidence that the community of ethnic Chinese in India had any significant pro-Beijing leanings. Somehow, the popular resentment against Chinese restaurants, shoemakers, dentists and laundries was taken too far, with tragic consequences for the cosmopolitan profile of Calcutta.
The fear of a fifth column has been a feature of most wars, not least World War II. Inside Britain, the principle of habeas corpus was quietly suspended in 1940 and was accompanied by the prolonged incarceration of Sir Oswald Mosley and members of his British Union of Fascists. In India, the Defence of India Rules were always available to the administration to lock away those it deemed as suspect. If these regulations were used in 1962 against the ethnic Chinese and the pro-China faction of the Communist Party of India, they acquired a communitarian character during the subsequent conflicts with Pakistan.
During the 1965 war, preventive detention was widely used against local Muslim leaders in different parts of India. If the police records in different parts of India are scoured, they will reveal an interesting list of notables held on suspicion of harbouring pro-Pakistan sympathies. By the time the 1971 tensions with Pakistan surfaced, Muslims exercised a much greater leverage over the Indira Gandhi government at the Centre. At the same time, there was considerable tension among the handlers of the Awami League in Mujibnagar (located in Calcutta’s Shakespeare Sarani) at the apparent hostility of local Muslims to the demands for independence by the Bengalis in East Pakistan. There is only anecdotal evidence of how this potentially delicate problem was handled by the Indian authorities but it is interesting to note the detention of a former mayor of Calcutta and pre-Independence Muslim League stalwart, Syed Badrudduja, before the hostilities broke out.
It is interesting that in all the conflicts with foreign powers since Independence, the government has always benefited from a supportive role of the media. In a recent article on the post-Pahalgam strains in India-Pakistan relations in the New Left Review, the veteran British-Pakistani Marxist, Tariq Ali, lamented that India does not have a Haaretz, an English language Israeli newspaper that has always struck a discordant note. He is, of course, almost right. When it comes to what is perceived as the national interest, the government of the day is always given large-hearted support. This is more so if outside forces are perceived to be picking on India.
A curious case of this happening was during the liberation of Goa from Portuguese occupation in 1961. Jawaharlal Nehru was fiercely berated in the West for junking India’s non-violent credentials. Although there was a reluctance to come out too strongly in favour of a Portugal ruled by the authoritarian president, António Salazar, the temptation to paint India as the villain was compelling. Dom Moraes, then a Bohemian poseur in London, even tore up his Indian passport before the BBC cameras.
It is inconceivable that such an outrage would have been viewed so indulgently today. Today’s India is more democratic and even more intolerant of contrarian nonsense.