"Veer" Savarkar As Benedict Arnold - How Indian History Should View A Revolutionary-Turned-Collaborator

During the American War of Independence, a man by the name of Benedict Arnold fought on the side of the fledgeling United States. Arnold won some key battles against British forces, and was injured in the foot at the Battle of Quebec. He was promoted to the rank of Major-General in recognition of his many contributions.

Later on, however, as a result of perceived slights at the hands of his superiors, Arnold turned traitor and attempted to hand over his command of West Point to the British. He failed in that attempt, but escaped to British lines and fought against his former compatriots thereafter.

How does the US remember Benedict Arnold today? How does an often comically over-patriotic nation handle the memory of a man who was both patriot and traitor?

There is no statue erected in honour of Benedict Arnold. Arnold is remembered in the US today by the Boot Memorial.

The Boot Memorial in Saratoga National Park, New York

The Boot Memorial honours the injury that Arnold suffered in the cause of American Independence, but does not mention him by name because he turned traitor later.

In India today, the legacy of a man called Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, is being fiercely debated.

VD Savarkar fought for Indian Independence against the British. Unlike Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, he did not choose the path of non-violent, passive resistance and non-cooperation. He believed in violent revolution, so when he was captured by the British in connection with a suspected conspiracy, he received a severe sentence. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison in the infamously harsh Andaman islands in the Indian Ocean.

While in the Andamans, Savarkar wrote numerous mercy petitions to the British, and was finally released after serving just 10 years of his 50 year sentence.

After his return to the Indian mainland as a free man, Savarkar was as good as his word and never again worked against the British. What he did do was work against the Indian National Congress, which suited the British very well indeed.

Gandhi and the Congress aimed to secure Hindu-Muslim unity, and to work towards Indian independence from the British as a undivided political entity. Savarkar, on the other hand, worked to unify the "Hindu nation" against the Muslims, and eventually became the President of the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha. In this, he effectively took the same side as Jinnah, who also believed in the "Two-Nation Theory" that Hindus and Muslims were separate "nations" and could not share a single state. The actions of Jinnah and Savarkar thus deepened the divide between Hindus and Muslims. Indeed, Jinnah's Muslim League and Savarkar's Hindu Mahasabha became unlikely coalition partners in many provincial governments when the Congress resigned from those governments to protest certain actions of the British.

Savarkar's writings acquired a distinctly fascist tone, and he became more interested in the "independence of the Hindu nation" from Muslims and Christians than with the independence of India from British rule. He turned from being a revolutionary into a collaborator. His being a collaborator is clear from  the fact that he got into no more trouble with the British authorities. The trouble he was giving to the Congress played right into the hands of the British.

How must India remember Savarkar today? The Hindu right-wing insists on calling him "Veer" (brave) Savarkar, but there is little that smacks of bravery in the grovelling letters he wrote to the British during his incarceration in the Andamans. India certainly needs to acknowledge his early contributions to the freedom struggle which earned him his prison sentence, but this acknowledgement must be tempered by the knowledge of his subsequent betrayal of that freedom struggle and his actions that favoured the British.

India needs to erect a monument in honour of Savarkar's early contributions, but this monument should not acknowledge him by name on account of his later actions as a collaborator. Only word of mouth should associate him with the monument, just like Benedict Arnold is only unofficially associated with the Boot Memorial.

An Early Prediction For India's 2019 Election

In financial markets, two types of analysis are common. Fundamental Analysis goes into all the factors that affect markets, and attempts to predict them, and thereby their impact on the prices of assets. But Technical Analysis completely ignores fundamentals. Operating under the idea that "price discounts everything", Technical Analysis looks purely at the movements of prices, and attempts to discern patterns from time series data.

I've decided to do some Technical Analysis of the Indian Lok Sabha (parliamentary) elections. I'm going to look at vote shares and seat shares, without worrying about the fundamentals that impact them. We will see that this approach has some merit too.

The Indian parliamentary elections of 2019 are likely to be the biggest in the world, as usual

First off, I noticed a curious fact, i.e., that the sum of the seats of the two main parties, the Congress and the BJP, has been virtually the same in the last two elections, suggesting that the gains of one come mainly at the expense of the other and not any third party.

[In 2009, the Congress had 206 seats to the BJP's 116, for a total of 322. In 2014, the BJP had 282 seats to the Congress's 44, making a total of 326. The strength of the house is 543.]

I then plotted the correlation between the BJP's vote share and its number of seats between 2009 and 2014, interpolating for all the percentages in-between. A screenshot of the spreadsheet is below.

A straightforward analysis with some stark results

In interpreting this spreadsheet, I made two fundamental assumptions.

1. The BJP's vote share of 31% in 2014 is unsustainably high, since it represents a swing of 12% in a single election. It will have to drop in 2019.

2. However, the BJP's vote share is unlikely to drop below its 2009 level of 19%. That represents its core base.

Hence, we have to look at all the vote share percentages from 20% to 30% (inclusive) to assess the likely outcomes.

And two facts are immediately obvious from this analysis:

1. The BJP will not succeed in replicating its absolute majority in 2019. Even a 1% drop in vote share will take its seats tally to 268, which is below the 272 required for an absolute majority. Hence a coalition government is virtually guaranteed even if the BJP does return to power. It will have to be as part of the larger NDA coalition.

2. It is highly unlikely that the Congress-led UPA will return to power. The BJP's vote share will have to fall from 31% all the way down to 22% or less, for the UPA to have a chance at returning to power. In no case will the Congress get an absolute majority on its own.

In spite of these fairly certain outcomes, the power dynamics after the results are out are likely to be very interesting. A lot depends on the personal characteristics of Modi himself. His flexibility, humility and ability to reach out to different groups in a spirit of compromise will be on test. So far, he has shown discomfort in dealing from anything but a position of absolute power.

Those days now look numbered.

How To Govern And Misgovern A Diverse Country - The Akbar And Aurangzeb Models

A recent news article reported that the BJP, which has had a comfortable majority in India's lower house of parliament, had just emerged as the single largest party in the upper house. In time, as the upper house numbers begin to reflect the strength of the party in newly elected state legislatures, the BJP could acquire an outright majority there too. With a weak and divided opposition, the BJP is expected to continue its winning spree into the indefinite future, leading many to conjecture that it will only be a matter of time before the party has the wherewithal to amend the constitution itself, and begin to institute fundamental changes to the nation's very charter.

Indeed, the party's vision, as enunciated by its president Amit Shah, is to dominate every elected body "from parliament to panchayat (village council)". It is a winner-takes-all, take-no-prisoners philosophy that seems to be spectacularly successful at present.

What will a future under such a powerful ideological dispensation look like?

Numbers do not always tell the whole story, and I believe the BJP will fail to hold the country in its grip if it ignores some fundamental governing principles that have nothing to do with raw power.

A diverse country is governed by a combination of hardware and software. The hardware is the physical apparatus of government -- the organisational bodies at the union, state and local levels, the office-holders, the machinery of reporting and communication, the means of enforcement, etc. The software is the set of protocols governing the functioning and interaction of these hardware components. The constitution and the set of laws on the statute books spell out these protocols.

The system of elections is the most critical element of software, because it bestows all-important legitimacy on every other element of software and hardware.

It is my contention that next to regular elections which constitute the fundamental protocol of representative democracy, the protocol governing centre-state relations is the most important element of the software of governance. The constitution of India divides the portfolios of government between the centre and the states by defining a Union List, a State List and a Concurrent List, and this is the basis of a federal system of government. My contention is that only a federal system of government will work in a diverse country like India, and any attempt at over-centralisation will backfire. Attempts at centralisation are a form of misgovernance, and will be punished by the electorate.

To illustrate that these contrasting models of federalism and centralised authoritarianism are not new, I will go back into history.

Indian history is ancient, and there are possible examples like the Maurya and Gupta empires. However, I will use a more recent pair of examples from the Mughal empire. Not only is a more recent example likely to be more relevant than an ancient one, but having two models from the same dynasty provides a more effective contrast. Besides, as we shall see, the two were in existence for an almost identical duration, which makes the comparison between them more meaningful.

The two governance models I will use are those of Akbar and Aurangzeb. Aurangzeb was the great-grandson of Akbar, and their reigns were almost exactly a century apart, aside from being of the same duration. Akbar ruled for 49 years from 1556 to 1605, and Aurangzeb ruled for 49 years from 1658 to 1707.

Here is my first exhibit - the extent of their respective empires when they died.

Akbar (top left) and Aurangzeb (top right), and the extent of their empires at the time of their deaths (click to expand). Aurangzeb's empire is nominally larger, but size doesn't tell the whole story.

A history of Akbar's reign reveals that the early years were characterised by tumult and challenges to his rule, but the latter half was remarkably stable and peaceful. A history of Aurangzeb's reign reveals that he was almost constantly at war throughout, not just conquering new territory but also putting down rebellions that seemed interminable. His empire was nominally larger than his great-grandfather's, but also far more fractious.

Perhaps the most striking difference between Akbar's empire and Aurangzeb's was in the area of durability. Akbar's empire lasted more than a century after his death. Aurangzeb's empire did not long survive his death. It broke into multiple parts a few years later.

It would appear that in spite of its smaller size, Akbar's empire was held together by much stronger software.

Much has been made of the difference in tolerance between Akbar and Aurangzeb. Akbar is widely believed to have been more tolerant of difference (especially religion), while Aurangzeb was believed to have been more hardline. However, the real difference between their regimes was the protocol that governed "centre-state relations", or in the language of the time, the relationship between the empire and its vassals.

Akbar instituted a remarkably far-sighted policy under which it was tremendously advantageous for rulers of smaller kingdoms to become his vassals. Not only did they continue to enjoy considerable autonomy in the running of their kingdoms, they were also protected from their external enemies by the formidable army of the empire. In return, all they had to contribute to the upkeep of that empire were monetary tributes and their own armies when the empire required them. It was a win-win system that kept all players vested in its success. No wonder Akbar's empire soon settled into a period of peace and stability after the initial wars he waged to establish his authority.

In contrast, Aurangzeb's need for centralised power alienated vassals and governors alike, and it is no wonder that he saw rebellions and revolts throughout his reign. The software of governance under Aurangzeb had become so flawed that it simply failed to function. It was the software of misgovernance. Sure enough, once his own forceful personality exited the stage, his successors were unable to keep his empire together, and it fell under the combined onslaught of its own internal schisms and external enemies.

The lesson is instructive, because it applies to this day. Only governments that respect federalism can govern a country of India's diversity effectively. Those that try to enforce centralised control will fail.

In the years since independence, India has seen many governments of different political hues. But remarkably, the Akbar and Aurangzeb models are not correlated with parties at all! They can both be discerned even within the same political party.

Consider these prime ministers from the Congress party.

(Click to expand.) Jawaharlal Nehru, Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh (left) are remembered as nation-builders because they respected federalism. Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi (right) are widely considered institution wreckers because they had an authoritarian streak that did not respect independent institutions or opposition-ruled states.

Jawaharlal Nehru could be said to have birthed several of the features of India's federal polity. The constituent assembly worked during his first term to write the constitution, which was adopted in 1950. It was during his time that the first of the linguistic states was created. And although he was initially loath to split the Bombay presidency into the linguistic states of Gujarat and Maharashtra, popular protests during his visit to Bombay convinced him otherwise. Both Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh were known as gentlemen and diplomats, who preferred negotiation and consensus to adversarial conduct.

In contrast, the mother-son duo of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi took the very existence of opposition parties as a personal affront. Opposition-ruled states received blatantly step-motherly treatment by their governments, violating key tenets of the federal protocol. They did a lot of damage and weakened India during their terms.

A very similar theme can be seen playing out with the BJP.

AB Vajpayee (left) was a consensus politician who gave and commanded respect across the aisle. Modi (right) is an authoritarian personality who centralises decision-making and brooks no opposition.

AB Vajpayee, who was India's first BJP prime minister, was in office for a five-year term between 1998 and 2004. Another gentleman and diplomat, he was well-respected even by the opposition parties, and he reciprocated that respect in his dealings with opposition-ruled states. He is widely remembered with respect and affection to this day.

Narendra Modi, India's current prime minister, is cast in the Aurangzeb mould. Federalism is not a virtue in his eyes. He and his party president Amit Shah are cut from the same ideological cloth, and they hate to share power. From parliament to panchayat, the duo aims to impose their party's writ on every elected body. Their attitude is redolent of Mike Maples, Microsoft's Executive VP of the Worldwide Products Group, who said, "My job is to get a fair share of the software applications market, and, to me, that's 100 percent."

It should be clear from these historical examples that Modi's is the software of misgovernance. There is no win-win system that gives other stakeholders an incentive to be vested in its success. Even within his own party, the Modi-Shah duo has emasculated everyone, including cabinet ministers and chief ministers. All decisions are taken by "two-and-a-half men" (with Arun Jaitley contributing the half). Modi's India increasingly resembles Aurangzeb's empire, crackling with a million mutinies waiting to erupt.

Much as Modi would hate to be compared to any Muslim ruler, let alone Aurangzeb, the cap fits, both literally and figuratively.

And so the raw numbers that seem to measure the BJP's strength in various legislative bodies may not indicate the true extent of the party's power. Under Modi, the software of India's governance has been tremendously weakened. The BJP itself will inevitably pay the price in electoral terms, but in the meantime, the country as a whole will pay a steep price too.

India's Perfect Storm - And Its Likely Aftermath

India is facing a perfect storm from a combination of political, social and economic crises that are rapidly converging and have already begun to have an impact.

The political and economic crises are more tangible, but their resolution will be comparatively simpler. It is the social crisis that will have a much heavier long-term cost.

India's political landscape is fractured. 1984 was the last year when a general election resulted in a single party winning an absolute majority. Since 1989, elections have thrown up hung parliaments and only coalition governments have been the norm. The splintering continues unabated. Although disenchantment with the UPA coalition government has never been higher, there are strong doubts about whether the opposing NDA coalition will succeed in winning enough seats and allies to obtain a parliamentary majority and form the government. It is likely that the hung parliament that emerges after the 2014 election will be so badly splintered and (more importantly) irreconcilably divided that a government may not emerge. If one does, it will probably not last long, and fresh elections may need to be called mid-term, with no guarantee of a more stable result. In some ways, the election will probably clear the air by showing the vocal urban right-wing minority just how much of a minority it really is, but in other ways, the poisonous hatred between political groupings will only intensify.

There are mixed signals on the economy, whose heady 9% growth of just a few years ago has now slowed to about half that value, and I am not enough of an economics heavyweight to sift through the noise and form an independent opinion. In blunt terms, one opinion is that India is stuffed, and without drastic reforms that take place very quickly, is doomed to remain a poor country for the foreseeable future. The other viewpoint is that a whole swag of infrastructure projects is already in the works, and when these start to come on-line in the next 3 to 5 years, growth will improve and establish itself at a permanently higher level. As I said, I have no independent means to say which viewpoint is correct.

The third area, the social front, is where I am most concerned. The recent riots in Muzaffarnagar are disturbing, because they are a watershed. They were politically engineered of course, as all good riots are, but this one is probably the first to occur in a rural area. Communal riots have generally taken place in urban areas, usually in lower- to lower middle-class localities, where social cohesion between recent migrants has never been high. This riot has shown, disturbingly, how easy it is to sunder the more cohesive fabric of the hinterland as well. I have the uneasy feeling that a line has been crossed somewhere, and India will never be the same again. I can sense the bottomless sense of insecurity that a Muslim would now feel in post-Muzaffarnagar India. The Indian Muslim's native land has suddenly become an alien land. This India will suffer the negative effects of widespread minority insecurity for many decades. And it was totally unnecessary.

There is a way out of the political and economic logjam. That is to make the centre less relevant. The way government financing works today is untenable and cannot continue. I have the following information from a very knowledgeable friend and old classmate:

a.  70% of all tax revenues collected go to the Centre. All the states share the remaining 30%.  This is as per a Constitution mandated Finance Commission.
b.  The centre during our socialist era under a strong Mrs Indira Gandhi used this money leverage to kill state leadership and play power politics. But since the 70s, her Congress party has been vanquished in several states.
c. The tax sources for states primarily revolve around real estate taxes, octroi and excise duty (euphemism for booze). So states that have gone outside of government sources to do stuff, have typically leveraged land - e.g., Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan. Other than land and waiving taxes there is not much they can do, money wise.
d.  States can't borrow directly on their own books - they don't have a revenue base worth talking about and don't run surpluses, by and large. All big foreign aid has to be approved through the Central government's Ministry of Finance. 

I wrote before that India's salvation would be a true federation of states, where states have much more power and autonomy vis-a-vis the centre. In that post, I neglected to mention financing arrangements, because I did not have my friend's depth of knowledge. After reading his inputs, I believe the regional parties must get together in the next parliament, and regardless of other affiliations, vote for an amendment to the constitution to give the states more financial independence. A part of all tax revenue collected should compulsorily go to the state where the revenue was generated. The states should also be free to solicit and get funding from overseas sources without having to go through the central government. This will free them from political interference. When the states compete for investment, the free-market energies that have been shackled by decades of socialistic central planning (which was needed in the early stages of development) will be unleashed.

Which party forms the government at the centre and who becomes prime minister will then be much less relevant to the daily life of the average citizen, because the centre's role in daily life will have been much diminished. Smaller states, each with financial and political autonomy, closer to the local people and more accountable, will become more efficient units of governance that will deliver quality of life improvements much faster. [I remember a relative from the US telling me that in any US state, "the governor is at least ten times bigger than the president."]

That single change could solve India's political and economic problems within a couple of years and place the country on a permanently faster path to growth and prosperity.

Which leaves us with the serious social problem. I blame the Congress party for pandering to Muslim leaders (as opposed to instituting measures to improve the life of the average Muslim). I also blame the Hindutva parties for stoking a problem that they cannot resolve, which will benefit them electorally but cost the country dearly. Together, their short-sightedness has seriously damaged India's social fabric and will continue to do so.

India has a significant Muslim minority of 15%, or about 180 million people. Any sensible and realistic person will see at once that such a large minority cannot be wished away by any means, no matter how fascist one's rhetoric may be (e.g., "let them all go to Pakistan", "drive them into the Arabian Sea", etc.) Coexistence is the only practical way forward. For coexistence to be viable in the long term, what is needed is a strong system of social justice, civil rights and fairness in all dealings by the state (government and judiciary). And this should have been easy, since India's diverse society has been inherently predisposed to coexisting. On the ground, there has been remarkable social cohesion between the communities, otherwise for a population of this size, there should have been widespread and bloody clashes occurring every day with a death toll going into the hundreds of thousands. The fact that violent incidents are so few and far between means that there is no inherent social tension.

Any problem that exists today has been politically manufactured. Political parties stand to gain by polarising the electorate and sharpening communal divides. The Congress has done a fair bit of damage over the years by yielding to hard-line Muslim leaders (as opposed to listening to and ensuring the welfare of ordinary Muslims). The shameful Shah Bano case comes to mind, in which the Rajiv Gandhi government overturned a secular court decision on granting alimony to a poor Muslim widow by deeming such issues within the purview of Muslim personal law. The widow then got no money under Sharia law, which weakened the average Muslim citizen's rights compared to other Indian citizens. The only beneficiaries were the hardline leaders of the Muslim community (who did not speak for the majority of the Muslims in any case), and the Hindutva parties, who gained from the Congress party's appeasement of the Muslim leadership by stoking and exploiting Hindu outrage. The Hindu parties have exploited every Congress mistake and gained from every incident since then, including the court-ordered unlocking of the Babri Masjid, which they then demolished a few years later, and went on to commit more and more aggressive acts, winning votes for themselves from a larger and larger segment of polarised Hindus, but weakening the country's social fabric in the process.

The Muzaffarnagar riot was in a way an expected consequence of the fractured four-way vote split in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Clearly, a more effective carving of the pie was called for, and what better way than for two of the four to gang up against the other two? The BJP and SP, nominal enemies, seem to have conspired to play the roles of majority spokesman and minority protector, aiming to win votes from the Hindus and Muslims respectively, at the immediate cost of the Congress and BSP.

Both the Congress and the RSS-led Hindutva parties have mortgaged India's long-term future to win short-term electoral battles. There was a time when I trusted in the wisdom and sagacity of the average Indian voter to see through these games when voting in aggregate, and ensuring sanity of political results. Alas, I no longer believe that the electorate is, in aggregate, wise. I fear that infection by communal poison has crossed a tipping point, and the average voter is now more self-destructive than wise. In this climate, the BJP has dropped the mocking term it earlier used ("pseudo-secularism") and begun to use the word "secularism" itself as a pejorative!

In summary, I think India has a chance to weather its political and economic storms with a simple change to the way states are financed. But its fractured civil society will probably never heal, and could lead in the future to a bloody civil war.

As a bankrupt Pakistan struggles through what could be its last decade of existence as a viable country, it may have the bitter satisfaction of seeing the Two-Nation Theory proved right after all. Hindus and Muslims can never live together in one country. Cynical politicians from opposing camps have cooperatively moulded the will of the people to a self-destructive end.