The New India, Indeed

In considering the rise of India, now capable of nuking Chinese cities, we must be mindful that we are not necessarily dealing with India as we have known her.

The Hindu nationalist BJP is now about as likely as the Congress Party to be the principal party of government. Within and allied to the BJP are violently fascistic elements such as the Shiv Sena and those who massacre Christians in Orissa. Leadership is passing to Narendra Modi, who is heavily implicated in Gujarat’s anti-Muslim pogroms in recent years. But the party centrally is increasingly seeking to join forces with political Islam around such causes as the strong nationalism that has always been expressed by the Darul Uloom Deoband, the conduct of Waqf Boards, and the recognition of Urdu as one of the “authentically” Indian languages to be promoted at the expense of English. However, the BJP has little or no understanding that patriotism must include economic patriotism.

The hope that the Sikhs, prominent in the Indian Army, will remain a bulwark of the old culturally Anglophile, politically pro-American Indian elite is not assisted by the realisation that the staunchly Sikh SAD relies on the BJP to deliver its majority at State level in Punjab, and therefore supports the BJP at Union level. If there is a third force in India, then it is made up of Far Left parties, it is led by the party that followed Mao when he broke with the Soviet Union, and it includes the successors of Subhas Chandra Bose, who raised an army in support of the Japanese during the Second World War. All in all, India’s nuclear weapons, like those of Israel and perhaps also those of the United States, should be regarded with no less trepidation than those of Pakistan or North Korea, and with considerably more so than those of China, Russia or, purely hypothetically, Iran.

Speaking of Pakistan, the politicians are not even allowed the nuclear codes. The generals keep those to themselves. With the generals comes their intelligence agency, the ISI. And with the ISI comes a veritable cornucopia of Islamist factions. But none of them wants to bomb Britain. Unless we give them some cause. Let’s not. The “Taliban” have no existence apart from the Pashtun in general, who are old Indian allies. “Al-Qaeda” does not exist at all. But as for the ISI’s backing of “Islamist militant groups” or what have you, sooner rather than later, and at least arguably already, what else will Pakistan have? What else will remain of her founding dream of a distinct Muslim nation on the Subcontinent, acting as such? Especially if she is to be sandwiched between India and the restored, Indian-backed “Taliban”.

No wonder that the “Taliban” are open to this. The scholars at Deoband strongly rejected Jinnah’s theory of two nations. So did plenty of other people: just as there have always been more Irish Catholics in the remaining United Kingdom than the entire population of the 26 Irish counties that seceded, so there have always been more Muslims in India than the entire population of Pakistan.