Reactions To My Essay "Indians Don't Understand History"

It has been almost 2 months since I put up my essay "Indians Don't Understand History" on Medium, with an accompanying PDF version.

These are some of the reactions I've received. I've blurred out surnames for privacy.

1. From Indians

There were a number of positive reactions. Some of the commenters expressed the wish that more Indians could read it.

But of course there were negative reactions too, all along expected lines. The main points of contention were:

1. The Aryan Invasion Theory and the genetic evidence for it
2. The view about Muslim rulers
3. The view about China

I'm not surprised at the mixed reaction, and I'm not disheartened at the negative views either. I view the essay as a conversation-starter. I find that Indian thinking on the topic of China has fallen into a predictable rut, with a depressingly uniform (and racist) view that the Chinese are an inherently untrustworthy and treacherous people. The popular and incorrect narrative after the military debacle of 1962 is responsible for this. If this essay challenges such thinking and spurs some debate, it would be a positive development. I'm not seriously expecting Indian foreign policy to change as a result of my essay.

2. From Chinese people

My wife sent the essay to a Chinese friend (Christina), and her response is below.

Another Chinese person on Twitter took the trouble to translate it into Chinese and post it on Weibo, and I then created an account on Weibo to follow up.

In contrast to the Indian reactions, which were a mixed bag, the Chinese reactions were almost uniformly positive. They appreciated the sentiment of collaboration and believed India and China should work together.

These were general comments on my Weibo page:

The only negative opinion was around whether it would be practical given how far gone India seemed to be in terms of Western influence.

3. From Westerners

And finally, as expected, the general response from Western readers (especially Anglo ones) was one of disagreement. There were some positive responses too.

But the negative views seemed to predominate. One of my wife's colleagues (Gavin) told her on the phone (so I don't have it in writing) that he read the whole essay in one sitting because he found it full of fascinating information that he didn't know before, but that he disagreed on my conclusion that India should ally with China. His objection was that China was not a democracy.

Other negative views are as below:

The question raised by Gavin, Brian and Lionel regarding democracy is important. My response is in two parts.

1. Alliances between countries are based on a congruence of interests, and have nothing to do with systems of government.
2. Systems of government are not manichean but range across a spectrum.

I elaborate on these below.

Alliances and systems of government: I grew up in India during the Cold War. One of the strange ways in which the Cold War played out in the Indian subcontinent was how the democratic US backed a series of military dictatorships in Pakistan, while the communist USSR stood behind democratic India. And this was not an ephemeral line-up either. The arrangement lasted for over two decades and was remarkably stable. So the takeaway is that systems of government are far less important to alliances than a congruence of interests.

The spectrum of freedom within systems of government: Looking back again to the Cold War, the difference in the degree of freedom enjoyed by citizens of democracies and those of authoritarian states was striking. The Berlin Wall epitomised the complete lack of freedom of the countries behind the Iron Curtain, with guard towers and machine-guns meant to keep citizens from escaping to the West. That black-and-white distinction has been erased in today's world. Not only have the autocracies become less cartoonishly repressive, but the democracies too have unfortunately regressed. Let's take a quick survey.

China: The Soviet Union rarely allowed its citizens to travel abroad. Stories of Soviet citizens defecting and seeking asylum in Western countries were common. Today, millions of Chinese travel abroad every year, and willingly return home. Chinese also apply for permanent residence in Western countries through regular channels, and it isn't considered defection. Internally, Chinese citizens seem to have a fair amount of freedom to complain and criticise their government. Only some kinds of protest, dissent and discussion are deemed threatening to the stability of the state and clamped down upon. The Chinese political system in the post-Mao era also seems to have worked out mechanisms to be responsive to the needs of their people without being a full-fledged democracy in the Western sense. The end result is that the Chinese government seems to enjoy the trust and approval of the people even without a system of regular elections at the national or provincial levels.

Russia: Technically, Russia is a democracy in the sense that it holds regular elections. However, the levers of power are manipulated to keep one man in power indefinitely. Compared to the days of the Soviet Union, Russian citizens can travel freely abroad and even emigrate to other countries without worrying about guard towers and machine-guns. They are thus freer than they were in the past, especially in a market-capitalistic sense, and yet they do not have a functioning democracy in spite of the appearance of elections.

India: Regular elections give India the bragging rights to being a democracy. There is an independent judiciary, and no visible controls on the press. However, Indian governments too have worked out mechanisms to ensure obedience to authority, and the Modi government has refined these to a fine art. Institutions that should be independent have been suborned in a variety of ways. Judges who are compliant while in office are rewarded with governorships and ambassadorships after retirement, and this well-understood system of carrots ensures the servility of the theoretically independent judiciary. The press is kept in line by the subtle means of diverting the significant amounts of money in government advertising away from overly independent outlets towards more sycophantic ones. Prominent personalities who are publicly critical of the government find themselves under immediate investigation by the tax authorities, a form of harassment that stops as soon as they toe the line. The historian Ramachandra Guha has referred to India as an "electoral autocracy", where elections are held like clockwork, but freedom itself is subtly constrained.

Western democracies: The dual personality of the Western press has been known for decades. Domestic politics is aggressively covered, challenged and investigated, but foreign policy is rarely questioned. The government and media act in coordination to portray allies and adversaries as good guys and bad guys, regardless of what they actually do. Saudi Arabia and Israel get a free pass for their myriad human rights abuses, and China's commendable progress in poverty alleviation and protecting people from the pandemic are downplayed or reported with a "but at what cost?" slant. In recent times, freedom in absolute terms is increasingly constrained. Under the guise of curbing hate speech and preventing misinformation, a variety of mechanisms have been used to shut down contrary views and silence dissent. The fact that channels of communication are now increasingly under the control of a few electronic media giants makes it far easier to throttle undesirable opinions. Algorithms can subtly channel content to filter out inconvenient voices. The deplatforming of Donald Trump by social media channels was a dramatic example of censorship. Most recently, after the start of the Ukraine crisis, the demonisation of pro-Russian opinion as state-sponsored disinformation has completely silenced dissenting voices. Russia Today is banned in the EU, and the many independent voices it hosted are gone with it. A pro-Russian audience member was thrown out of an Australian TV show. Only the approved political line is allowed to be heard anymore.

And so, the argument that a democracy like India should not align with autocratic countries like China and Russia seems idealistic and naive. A cynical view could be that the various parodies of democracy that the modern world exhibits can group together in any way they wish without seeming incongruous.