India in Europe’s Mirror

IN MY 2012 BOOK, Punjabi Parmesan: Dispatches from a Europe in Crisis, I had argued that the European Union (EU) might do well to look at India for inspiration. At the time the EU was beset with the fallout of the 2010 euro crisis, which had Germany and Greece squaring off. Economic policies of austerity had laid bare the region’s north-south division; a chasm that had remained unbridged, despite decades of effort to work towards “an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe”—the principle upon which the 1957 European Treaty was based.

Notwithstanding the EU’s penchant for lecturing the developing world on their policy choices, I had come to believe that the EU could do worse than to learn a lesson or two from India. After all, India was a proto-European Union, having stitched together a large region of diverse social and cultural fabric into a political and economic union.

Like the EU, it was the antithesis of the concept of the 19th century European nation-state, where a single religion, a single language and a common enemy supposedly formed the ‘natural’ basis for the only sustainable kind of political unit. Over the course of its then 65 years as an independent nation, India had defied the exclusions of this ideal. It was a testament to the fact that it was possible to successfully create a strong, common identity, out of seemingly fractured multiplicity.

Were the European Union to care enough to look, I wrote, India could serve as hope, if not guide, for the EU’s own momentous project of rejecting the homogenising tyranny of the ‘nation’ state, and choosing instead to celebrate aggregation. By its very existence against the odds of modern political convention, India had something to teach Europe.

In a chapter on Islamophobia in Europe, I once again pointed to India’s civilisational acceptance of pluralism and the absence of an insistence on singular truths, gods and loyalties. India defied the linear, European narrative of modernity, which entailed a steady march ‘forward’, from the feudal religious practices of the Middle Ages to the homogenising secular modernity of the present. India provided a third way, I believed, between European-style secularism and theocracies.

Ten years later, my thesis is in tatters. Politically, the ideals of Hindutva are ascendant. Hinduism has emerged as the first amongst equals in our cultural tableau. The movement for a single national language, Hindi, in lieu of the smorgasbord of 22 official languages that currently make up our country’s aural geography, is gaining ground.

India’s own north-south divide, long on simmer, is gradually boiling over. It is likely that following the next Census, there will be changes to the configuration of Parliament on the basis of demographic changes. This will skew the parliamentary composition in favour of developmentally backward, but populous, northern states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, while reducing those of southern states where population growth has slowed down considerably as standards of living have improved.

To date, India’s achievements have been more political than economic. It has failed to transform into an economic behemoth of China proportions, but it has also belied the predictions of its inevitable balkanisation in the aftermath of Independence.

But a question mark now looms over this achievement. Have the last 70 years been but a waystation to the eventual emergence of a Hindu Pakistan? The eminent historian, Ramachandra Guha, has pointed out that on traditional European parameters of the ideal nation-state—one religion and one language—it is Pakistan rather than India that counts as a success. It is this kind of success that India now seems to be courting.

But we would do well to keep in mind the price that Europe paid for its contemporary, tidy, “nation-states”. In fact, multiculturalism was not an alien phenomenon in Europe. The continent was once a tapestry of intricately overlapping languages, religions, and communities. Cities like Sarajevo, Trieste and Odessa were amongst the world’s most syncretic and multi-textured.

But that Europe was smashed between 1914 and 1945. The paroxysm of violence that rent the region during World War II formed the foundation for post-war Europe where, as the historian Tony Judt puts it, “thanks to war, occupation, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own countries.”

The massive scale of ethnic cleansing and population transfers in the lead-up to, and in the immediate aftermath of, World War II, is bone-chilling. Between 1939 and 1941, the Nazis expelled 750,000 Polish peasants east, from Western Europe. The vacated lands were offered to Volksdeutsche, or ethnic Germans from occupied Eastern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of Germans from Romania, Soviet-occupied Poland and the Baltic states responded to Hitler’s offer, all of whom were in turn expelled a few years later, once the war ended.

As a project, the European Union is an attempt to rebuild the unity of the continent from its 20th century wreckage. Its foundational idea is to check the historic antipathy and violence between the warring states of Europe. But India is dismantling its own foundational idea

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Judt’s magisterial work, Post War: A history of Europe since 1945 makes for grim reading. Between the havoc wreaked by Stalin and Hitler, “30 million people were uprooted, dispersed, expelled, deported and transplanted.” For example, one million Poles fled, or were expelled, from western Ukraine, while half-a-million Ukrainians left Poland between October 1944 and June 1946. Jews facing post-war pogroms in Poland, ironically, fled to Germany in large numbers. (Over 63,300 Jews arrived in Germany from Poland between July and September 1946 alone.)

In Czechoslovakia, Germans had their property placed under state control and were stripped of their Czech citizenship. Three million ethnic Germans were then expelled into Germany. Before the war, Germans had comprised 29 per cent of the population of Bohemia and Moravia. By 1950, this was down to 1.8 per cent.

And so, in the course of a few months, centuries-old regions of intermixed faiths and languages were disaggregated into separate, mono-ethnic territories. These population transfers were tantamount to ethnic cleansing. Although they mostly took place in Eastern and Central Europe, they were agreed to by all major Western European powers, as ostensibly the safest solution to the continent’s minority predicament.

Thus Poland, whose population was only 68 per cent Polish in 1938, became ‘Polish’, just as Germany became ‘German’. The ancient diasporas of Europe—Greeks and Turks in the south Balkans and Black Sea, Italians in Dalmatia, Hungarians in Transylvania, Jews across the continent—were greatly reduced. From the ashes of this bonfire of atrocities was born the historically anomalous, ethnically homogenous Europe of nation-states.

The Indian subcontinent has already suffered the bloody ravages of Partition. And yet, or so believers in Hindutva maintain, its history remains unsettled; the past unreckoned with. Perhaps there is some truth to this claim. But there is also truth to the fact that history is never settled; every reckoning holds another within it, like an infinitely vengeful matryoshka doll.

As a project, the European Union is an attempt to rebuild the unity of the continent from its 20th century wreckage. Its foundational idea is to check the historic antipathy and violence between the warring states of Europe. The EU is an imperfect creature that does not always live up to these ideals.

But India, which once did have the credentials to prove that an EU-like project could work, is dismantling its own foundational idea. And if Europe’s history is any indicator, it does so at great peril. Horrors on an unspeakable scale are champing to burst through India’s constitutional lid. We should be terrified.

About The Author

Pallavi Aiyar

Pallavi Aiyar is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has spent the last two decades reporting from China, Europe, Indonesia and Japan. Her most recent book is Orienting: An Indian in Japan. She is a contributor to Open

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