Democrats and Dissenters by Ramachandra Guha Penguin Random House; Price: Rs.699; Pages: 302

Although he wrote over half a dozen books in the 1990s and early noughties, warning the nation about the ecological and environmental disasters which have since enveloped the country, Ramachandra Guha burst upon the national scene as a popular historian with the publication of his widely admired history of post-independence India, titled India After Gandhi (2007). Since then, this prolific multi-disciplinary (sociology, anthropology and history) writer has authored several deeply researched and elegantly written histories including Patriots and Partisans (2012) and Gandhi Before India (2013) which have beamed a powerful and overdue spotlight on the dozens of extraordinary leaders of India’s freedom movement who were ignored or obfuscated in history textbooks, written by British Empire propagandists/apologists. And by insufficiently learned post-independence native historians unequal to the imperative of challenging the dominant Western historical perspective of the Indian subcontinent. 

In his latest oeuvre Democrats and Dissenters, an eclectic collection of essays some previously published but updated and divided into two parts ‘Politics and Society’ and ‘Ideologies and Intellectuals,’ Guha lives up to his reputation. Part I comprises eight engaging essays written in felicitous prose which enables easy but thought-provoking reading. In the first essay in this section, the author narrates the sad history of the Congress party, now reduced to a pathetic dynastic fiefdom that is unlikely to “ever become the dominant pole of Indian politics again”. 

In the second essay in Part I, Guha warns against “eight threats” to the freedom of expression in contemporary India. Other engrossing chapters in Part I include a debate between independent India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and formidable socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan; two insightful travelogues of China and Pakistan which expose the majoritarian Han domination of China and the slavish ownership of Pakistan’s academic and intellectual community of the subcontinent’s Islamic heritage, including its worst excesses. And the last essay in this section speculates about which are India’s worst years since independence during which the country’s democracy and national unity were severely endangered. 

Part II of this informative and intellectually stimulating compendium contains a second batch of eight mainly biographical essays. Among the brilliantly original scholars and thinkers profiled in this section are the maverick British Left-wing historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012); China-born Irish scholar Benedict Anderson (1936-2015) who deeply studied Indonesian history, politics and society; Indian Sanskrit and Pali scholar Dharmananda Kosambi “a world authority on the language and culture of early Buddhism”; Andre Beteille, professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics for over four decades and described as the “wisest man in India”; economic historian Dharma Kumar, perhaps the country’s first feminist scholar, and U.R. Ananthamurthy (1932-2014), the celebrated Kannada writer and literary giant who in Guha’s opinion “redefined the terrain of Indian literature”.

The author’s celebration of the lives and work of these hugely under-appreciated scholars and true intellectuals is inspiring and reassuring to people despairing the neglect of research and deep scholarship in the country’s floundering higher education institutions. 

Although an essay titled ‘Arguments with Sen, Arguments about India’ in which Guha takes on the formidable Nobel laureate Dr. Amartya Sen for investing great leaders of ancient India with modern sensibilities and values, is engrossing, perhaps the best essay of this collection is the one in which the author examines the drought of Conservative intellectuals — defined as scholars who conduct primary research and author books — in contemporary India. The answer is plainly obvious: for over six decades, academics with Right-wing views and convictions were locked out of the country’s Left-dominated academy by leftist intolerance and ridicule which is visible even to this day.

A member of post-independence India’s liberal/left priviligentsia and a self-confessed Nehruvian, Guha rightly describes Nehru as an uncompromising champion of Hindu-Muslim unity and architect of independent India’s secular state. But he tends to dismiss the great man’s grave sins of neglecting primary education and imposition of the inorganic public sector-led Soviet-inspired industry development model upon the nation, as minor misdemeanours.

However these acts of omission and commission are anything but minor aberrations. They have destroyed the modest material hopes and aspirations of two generations of free India’s citizens and have transformed high-potential post-independence India into arguably the most wretched society on earth. 

In the circumstance, while Guha’s lament about the poverty of Right-wing intellectuals and his well-meaning suggestion to Indian conservatives to examine the writings and philosophy of C. Rajagopalachari (1878-1972) for inspiration though constructive, cannot obfuscate the mean-spirited hegemony of the Left-liberal priviligentsia of the academy which systematically blocked the development of a Conservative Right-wing intellectual fraternity. 
Be that as it may, there’s no denying that with its deep study and investigation and elegant, unforced prose, Guha’s latest insights-rich oeuvre is thought-provoking and has enhanced the reputation of this “pre-eminent chronicler of Indian democracy”. 

Dilip Thakore 

Long march to democracy

Myanmar: A Political History by Nehginpao Kipgen Oxford University Press; Price: Rs.745; Pages: 230

Burma/Myanmar has a chequered political history and has passed through different phases — from colonial rule to independence. In the initial years, some form of parliamentary democracy existed, followed by two years of caretaker military rule which transferred power to an elected government only to be overthrown within two years by a coup under military strongman General Ne Win in 1962.

Ne Win’s rule came to an end in 1988 following massive unrest in the country, which was brutally suppressed by his successors in the military which kept the country under its strict control for almost another two decades. It then began its social and political engineering leading to framing of a Constitution adopted in 2008 and to an election in bringing a quasi-democratic government under General turned civilian Thein Sein.

Even though dominated by old military leaders, Thein Sein’s government initiated political and economic reforms that allowed a free and fair election in 2015 in which the National League for Democracy (NLD) of Aung San Suu Kyi won an absolute majority in both houses of Parliament and formed a civilian government under President Htin Kyaw, one of her trusted aides. 

While Suu Kyi is still barred by the Constitution of 2008 to occupy the position of Head of State because of the foreign origin of her children, as state councillor and foreign minister in the new government, she is calling all the shots and is de facto leader of the new government. But she inherits a country that has been at civil war for 60 years and where that civil war is yet to conclude, despite several ceasefire agreements, and where there are hundreds of different ethnic and linguistic groups, many inhabiting remote mountain areas, where there are hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the fighting. 

When the traditional order collapsed entirely, the British Raj, which ruled the subcontinent for almost two centuries, tried to transplant familiar institutions — a civil service judiciary, a professional police force and army, and eventually an elected legislature — but these remained largely alien institutions, unwedded to local society, and the abrupt end of colonial rule meant they didn’t long survive British withdrawal from the Indian subcontinent. 

There was some attempt in the U Nu days to fashion a democratic state, but these efforts were crippled from the start by the civil war, the Chinese invasions of the 1950s and the consequent steady growth of General Ne Win’s military machine, which further decimated whatever remained of civil society in Burma. Arguably, if the army had not staged a coup in 1962, even while it faced the demands from the Shans and other ethnic communities for autonomy, U Nu’s popularly elected government could possibly have evolved mechanisms like a federal structure to mitigate some of their grievances vis-a-vis the central authority dominated by Burmans, the majority community.

Today, as the country is transiting from an authoritarian political system to democracy, the military machine is still intact. So the problem with Myanmar on its path to democracy is not simply getting the military out of the business of government, but also creating state institutions that can replace the military from scratch. And the military state exists not merely in governance and administration, but has entrenched itself in the country’s economy. The civil bureaucracy completely dominated by the military, has also developed a political culture that doesn’t allow any democratic decision-making.

In Myanmar: A Political History, Nehginpao Kipgen tries to unravel this complicated history by offering his own interpretation of the issues at the heart of Myanmar’s current democratic reform process and national reconciliation. The common theme that runs through this narrative is mistrust between the ethnic minorities and successive Central governments led by the dominant Burman majority. This is the root of the problem and the success of the country’s national reconciliation and democratic transition is largely dependent on restoring this broken trust.

As a corollary, the author argues that if Myanmar is to build a unified country today, it will have to address this ongoing ethnic conflict, and this will require “sincerity, honesty, and the participation of all ethnic groups”. 

Though the author claims he has used primary sources for research, the footnotes and bibliography contradict this assumption. 

Unfortunately, this is generally a collection of the author’s essays written at various times in disparate journals and newspapers. It is full of repetitions of facts and events in every chapter and long quotations from the author’s own writings.While there’s nothing wrong in including one’s articles already published, proper editing is required to avoid repetition and to ensure the chronology of events isn’t disturbed.

Unfortunately, this book is a classic example of an author in a hurry to publish. Even though the date of the publication shows 2016, the elections of 2015 and the NLD ushering in a civilian government with Aung San Suu Kyi in the driver’s seat, are conspicuous by their absence. Thus despite its analyses of ethnic issues being quite competent, overall, the book is a disappointment from the scholar’s perspective. 

Baladas Ghoshal (The Book Review, October 2016)