“The Heathen in his Blindness”: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion.

S.N. Balagangadhara 2^nd ed.

Manohar, New Delhi, 2005 (1994), pp. xii + 503, Rs. 595.00

Reconceptualizing India Studies

S.N. Balagangadhara

Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2012, pp. ix + 270, Rs. 750.00

Balagangadhara’s primary target is the unpacking of the ‘how’ of knowledge production consequent to the interaction between India and the West over the last few centuries. However, the range and implications of his work are far wider and yet hardly exploited for their potential. Much of The Heathen and Reconceptualizing, as well as his other writing, are devoted to uncovering how the West produces knowledge of the world in general and about India in particular. This has disappointed those who have not understood his work or prematurely expected to find more knowledge about India. My own exposure to its reception indicates that Western scholars, outside of his own research programme at the University of Ghent, in Belgium, and a group of committed researchers in India, have almost unanimously side-stepped his work, even if they pretend to have a passing acquaintance with it. It may well be the case, as Balagangadhara himself indicates in Reconceptualizing, that India is where most of the energy required to extend the programme will be found and, indeed, that it is Asian scholars who will be asking new questions about human beings in the coming century.

Balagangadhara is unapologetic about dissecting how the West experiences the world. His argument is that this task is necessary in order to clear the ground before the contribution of Indian culture can be assessed. It is made necessary because, over the last few hundred years, systems of knowledge worldwide, certainly in academic contexts, have been dominated by questions that Europe has asked of itself and about the rest of the world. This particular way of asking questions means that academia has not asked questions in other ways. The conditions for this way of inquiring about the world are shaped and constrained by the Western culture. Such constrained inquiring has spread worldwide, with intellectuals from other parts of the world having adopted a way of asking questions the West considers appropriate. Whether adopted by Western or non-Western intellectuals, who parasitically formulate problems according to it, that way is tied to Western culture. So, for example, questions asked about India, by both Western and Indian intellectuals, are framed by how the Western culture looks at the world. Only if that process is understood, by first generating theories about Western culture, can the ground be cleared to discover how Indians could ask different questions about the world, thus leading to an understanding of what Indian culture is and what its contribution to the world may be. Balagangadhara’s work explicitly notices and establishes how little we have understood Western culture. Just because Indians speak a Western language does not mean that they understand what Western culture is.

A central part of Balagangadhara’s research programme, reflected in the books under review, is devoted to developing how a comparative science of cultures can be conceived of. For him, a culture is how a particular social group, as it goes about in the world, generates a process of learning as well as a process of learning to learn (meta-learning). While other such processes may be present in a particular culture, what distinguishes and gives shape to a culture are the ways of learning and meta-learning that dominate and crystallise to structure its way of going about in the world. Conversely, these learning processes dovetail into teaching processes so that they can be transmitted to future generations. The structuring of processes of learning and teaching, leading to configurations of learning, occurs and stabilizes over a period of centuries, and cultural differences are tied to these configurations of learning. As The Heathen discusses, for the West, religion lends structure to its way of going about in the world. Religion generates the dominance of theoretical knowledge and it creates a way of going-about predominantly guided by knowing-about. For Indian culture, ritual lends identity to its configuration of learning, this culture imparts practical knowledge, and performative knowledge dominates there.

In Reconceptualizing, Balagangadhara defends the use of ‘culture’ in the sense of a configuration of learning for a comparative science of cultures. In doing so, he dismisses some standard objections to its use as articulated in anthropological theorizing, and he enables us to see how a derivative instance of it proves useful. Elaborating on what it means to be ‘cultural’, he shows how this adjectival use allows us to individuate culture when considering how a person uses the resources of his socialization. Important for comparative studies is Balagangadhara’s question regarding the work that cultural differences do. In other words: what kind of difference is cultural difference and what difference does it make? “Some difference between individuals is a cultural difference if it entails a specific way of using the resources of socialization.” This deceptively simple formulation carries enormous potential because it allows Balagangadhara to isolate what is a cultural as opposed to a psychological or social difference in any set of anthropological accounts. In Reconceptualizing, this provides the opening for Balagangadhara to embark on a series of case studies evaluating how the encounter between Western and Indian cultures tells us something important about both.

Produced nearly two decades earlier, The Heathen is a sustained meditation on the same question but studied through the problem of religion and, specifically, the claim that religion is a cultural universal. The Heathen furnishes a major set of insights, yet to be exploited by the academic world. That should not be that surprising, considering that Balagangadhara has sustained a research programme despite the context of Western dominance, with its in-built proclivities for dismissing certain kinds of questions as being unimportant. Yet Balagangadhara has identified key components of Western culture through his study of religion and has been able to demonstrate their importance in structuring the Western experience of the world. The Heathen is where we find the basis of the argument that there is a discontinuity of epistemology between Western and the pagan settings of Greece, Rome and India. It is the kind of epistemological discontinuity that depends on very different configurations of learning. In The Heathen we find an explanation for why accounts generated about other cultures by the West cannot provide a factual description of those cultures. This is also where we find substantiated why Western culture finds it necessary to think of other cultures as being its variants. This is where we find the basis for the claim that India is a corrupt culture, which is where the variation bites. All themes find further elaboration and deepening in Reconceptualizing.

The key is religion. Religion is an explanatory intelligible account of itself and the cosmos. As such religion fuses a causal and an intentional account. The reason why the universe came about is because God intended it to be so. The reason why religion came about lies in the same source: God’s intention. Judaism, Christianity and Islam share such a claim, which is why they are the only instances of religion we have. They are also the best instance of what a worldview is; it seems that only religions have worldviews. Multiple things follow from Balagangadhara’s identification of the West as a culture constituted by religion. Having religion means that other cultures are also seen as having rival religions, whether or not they have religion at all. It is the fulfilment of a theological claim in Christianity that all cultures have religion. As the West explored, colonized and expanded, religions were found elsewhere. This did not depend on empirical investigation; Westerners found what they already expected to find. The dominant configuration of learning to which religion gave rise led to the suppression of contrary evidence. No society was permitted to be without religion, although different kinds of religion could be admitted. When Westerners accumulated evidence about India, the heathenism their theology spoke of Indians practising was further developed into the different religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. This claim has now been secularized because this is also what the social sciences tell us today about India. Theological claims have become the ‘facts’ of contemporary theories.

In this way religions were ‘constructed’ in India and other parts of the pagan world. But what is the ontological status of such constructions? This is where we can start to unpack the epistemological discontinuities between the West and pagan cultures. If members of one culture consistently claim that another culture has religion, namely, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, does that give rise to the existence of religions in that culture? Prior to contact with the Semitic religions, Indian culture possessed neither explanatory intelligible accounts nor worldviews. The multiplicity and inconsistency of stories of ‘creation’ in Indian culture is testament to that. How does the experience of one culture, the West, which says that another culture, the Indian, which the former experiences as having religion somehow endow Indians with religion? Balagangadhara tackles this basic problem by showing that while the West must experience other cultures as having religion, because that is entailed by how the West structures its experience of them, it does not follow that those cultures are somehow endowed with it. He saves our experience of Asian cultures as having religion by showing why we need to think that, even though it is not so. This is fatal to the claims of those who proclaim the existence of Hinduism. It also undermines the claim of those who might accept that there was nothing like Hinduism prior to colonialism, but still insist that there is something like that now. Those Indians and Westerners who say that Hinduism always existed, perhaps in the form of dharma, have a problem because they need to show how dharma is identical to an entity imagined by the West. These claims about Hinduism are hallucinatory because they require that the imagination of one culture have the effect of constituting religion in another. Many Indians, including those in the diaspora today, talk as though Hinduism exists and is a religion, but they do not know what this means to Westerners.

Constructing religions in Asia is merely a part of what Orientalism is. As Balagangadhara elaborates in Reconceptualizing, Orientalism is the structuring in the experience of one culture, the West, of the Orient, which is the experiential entity. As such, while it may be full of rich and elaborate accounts, it is also an imaginative and structuring exercise on the part of the West. It tells us something about how the Western culture structures its experience. This is how Balagangadhara offers a re-reading of Said’s Orientalism, observing that Said provides an Archimedean point from which to reorient the way the world appears to a former colonial because it makes the familiar unfamiliar. It forces us to reckon with the realization that Orientalist accounts do not provide a factual description of Oriental societies and cultures at all, but a representation of how the West brings together certain phenomena, according to how it structures its experience of the world. Just as the Western accounts brought unrelated items and put them together to constitute something now known as Hinduism, so the West has performed a similar operation with so many other dimensions of knowledge. Differing from Said, however, Balagangadhara argues that the social sciences as currently practiced cannot correct Orientalism by the furnishing of new evidence as they are completely tied to Orientalism, just as Orientalism is supported by the social sciences. It cannot be corrected by adducing factual evidence because the basis of its structuring enterprise lies elsewhere. Decorating Orientalism more elaborately does not disrupt its basic structure. According to the same logic, doing better studies of Hinduism will not disrupt the imaginative entity that it is; they will simply decorate it.

An important dimension of this structuring process takes us back to the religion that Christianity is. It lends identity to the Western culture and acts as its root model of order. The explanatory intelligible account which religion is acts as the model of learning and thus teaches that humans are intentional beings and that beliefs lie behind human practices. In The Heathen, Balagangadhara locates this manoeuvre in Christianity’s early encounter with the Roman pagan milieu in which it found itself, when it had to defend itself against pagan criticism. Christianity, it was said, was novel, and not like the ancestral practices of the pagan traditions, which went back to the ancient past. Christians responded by claiming that their doctrines were ancient, representing a move by religion against tradition which has played a crucial role ever since. In so defending themselves, Christians had completely transformed the pagan question regarding tradition. The pagans argued on the basis of the antiquity of their practices. Christians took a stand on the antiquity of their doctrines on which, they claimed, their practices were based. The reference for religio, which for pagans was traditio, was thereby transformed by Christians. Belief and doctrine dominates, explains and justifies practices, a way of knowing about human beings that expanded and became rooted as Christianity did.

It is important to observe here that religion requires practices to be justified, founded and defended by reference to doctrines. The ancient pagan traditions and the Indian traditions that Christians encountered did not justify or ground practices in that way. Behind their traditions lay ancestral practices. They were part of ordinary human knowledge passed on from generation to generation, naturally changing in the process. This could refer to knowledge of a slice of the world. They did not claim the kind of knowledge that religion did, which was not ordinary human knowledge at all, but the truth revealed by God. Because it presented itself as God’s revelation, religion could also claim to possess an all-encompassing view of the world, rather than partial knowledge of slices of the world. When cultures that have religion speak of human practices they refer to something different from those who do not have religion. Again, there is a discontinuity. Given that descriptions about human practices are framed around the configuration of learning of a religious culture, an asymmetrical relationship between Western and Indian cultures arises. The Heathen goes on to show that when Christians encountered India, they also sought foundations for Indian practices in their doctrines. They sought out the content of Indian beliefs in their scriptures. A study of these lay behind the identification of the different religions, which sprang out of the earlier framework which had merely told of the heathenism and rank idolatry of the Indians. Paying attention to the scriptures allowed the identification of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism as distinct, albeit false religions. Hinduism in particular became identified as the false religion of India. Brahmins got identified as the ‘priests’ of this religion. They kept people in ignorance of the true religion, which the Indians once had. Christian theology had said that all peoples were given the revelation; the Vedas were the Indian version. Brahmins corrupted it by fooling people into following idolatrous practices. These involved worshipping Satan and his minions, the false gods of Hinduism. Not worshipping the true God, but the devil, is what made Hinduism a false religion.

Christians also had another problem with the Brahmins. Hinduism was a corrupt religion and the Brahmins, its false priests. They were also identified as preventing people from converting to Christianity. The caste system, believed to have been instituted by the Brahmins, was part of the problem. That system only served to underline the corruption of Indian society and culture, even though this corruption was not to do with any socio-economic assessment of caste, which was never made. To be sure India has jatis until today. However, as indicated in Reconceptualizing, it remains a mystery what made the caste system into a system and what kept such a system in place. Alongside these mysteries, however, there is also the conviction in the West, and shared by many an Indian since the colonial period, that such a thing as the caste system exists, it is an evil, and it underlies the corrupt social structure of Indian society, such that the immoral practice of caste discrimination is made obligatory. From this framework sprang explanations of the necessity of Buddhism, which was a protest against Hinduism and its caste system. In The Heathen, Balagangadhara shows how this could not have been the case as dialogues attributed to the Buddha concerning the nature of Brahminhood point to how ‘caste’ was presupposed in them as part of the background framework. Still the version of Buddhism as a protest movement is the frame according to which it is widely understood. This applies equally to the various bhakti movements, which tend to be viewed as protest movements against ‘Brahmanism’ of one sort or another. This again underscores how accounts infused with Christian theological assumptions have gained widespread currency in the social sciences and elsewhere.

At various points so far, we have had occasion to notice that much of the Orientalist account of Indian society was and is accepted by Indians. This is often proclaimed as evidence of the continuity between Western and Indian cultures. There is no rupture of understanding and, where the Orientalist or colonial accounts have been wrong, as post-colonial scholars tend to claim, facts need to be supplied to correct them. However, we have also noticed that theological assumptions are part and parcel of Orientalism as well as theorizing in the social sciences. The Christian-Orientalist story about non-Western cultures on its own was never actually convincing on cognitive grounds. For instance, both The Heathen and Reconceptualizing show how Christian accounts of Indian society were often resisted by Indian interlocutors who argued, from within their framework, that it was not necessary for them to accept the Christian story or to convert. That religion suited Westerners just as the Indian traditions suited Indians. At some point, however, the Christian-Orientalist account did become acceptable to Indian intellectuals. They accepted the terms on which Westerners described their societies, including accounts of its backwardness, its corruption, its deficient religions, its caste system, and so on. This phenomenon extends to intellectuals of independent India. How can we explain this? 

To do so, Balagangadhara deploys the concept of ‘colonial consciousness’ in Reconceptualizing. This refers to the effect of colonialism upon the colonized. He shows that colonialism is not just a political and economic enterprise, but also an educational project. Colonialism forces the colonized to accept the Western experience of his culture as his own. It is not convincing on rational or cognitive grounds, so the Western experience is made acceptable to the colonized by force or violence. This is why the colonial project is an educational project and why it succeeds to the extent that it survives formal decolonization. The colonial regime’s attempted substitution of the colonizer’s experience for that of the colonized, using violence, also makes it an immoral project. However, although the colonized accepts the colonizer’s experience as his own, neither his own experience of the world nor that of the colonizer is truly accessible to him. Both the Indian and Western cultures are alien to him. Balagangadhara exhorts Indians to first accept the fact of being colonized in this sense rather than jumping to ‘explain’, in distorted ways, the nature of Indian culture. Indians have to mount a critique of colonial consciousness before they can move to the next level. Simply mimicking the West, as post-colonials might argue for, is also immoral because it accepts, justifies and celebrates what the colonizer said: that the colonized is untrustworthy. Mimicry merely underwrites the inauthenticity of the colonized.

The asymmetrical relationship between the Indian and Western cultures, already noted, is concretized further in Reconceptualizing through a series of case studies from contemporary descriptions of Indian culture. These accounts also speak of dialogues in the context of asymmetry and violence. The kinds of violence spoken of are exemplified in the psychoanalytical accounts given in books by American academics, Courtright on Ganesha and Kripal on Ramakrishna. The violence ascribed to such books is considered psychic in nature because it surfaces in dialogical moves within asymmetrical conditions. On the surface, the accounts provided by the writers portray their subjects as exhibiting some sort of repressed sexuality. It also provokes reactions in terms of threats of or actual violence and criticism, not only on the part of Hindutvavadins. They feel there is something wrong in the accounts provided by the authors but are, at the same time, forced into a position of having to come up with rival theories to account for why the authors are wrong to write in the way they do. That Courtright’s and Kripal’s accounts of their subjects are based on the ad hoc attribution of certain psychological states is easily demonstrated by Balagangadhara. But he goes further to explain why the kind of dialogical moves they engage in silence Hindus even as they are provoked into outrage. He shows that the argumentation involves a number of moves that also prove why the burden on the Hindus is asymmetrical. The authors attribute implicit premises to the Hindus; these attributed premises are transformed into explanatory schemes of which the scholar assumes the truth; the explanations also place the phenomena discussed within a structure; the Hindus are logically compelled to defend the moves by the scholars. In such dialogical manoeuvres lie a number of unproven assumptions of which the protagonist does not have to demonstrate the truth, thus underwriting the skewed nature of the dialogue. Yet the Hindus are forced to take a pre-dialogical position by having to take stand on the explanatory adequacy of the psychoanalytical theories. In such contexts, dialogues may not be antidotes to violence; in asymmetrical situations, they may actually provoke it.

The constraints of a review do not allow the sharing of much more in the contents of both books. Balagangadhara discusses the twin dynamic of Christianity of proselytization and secularization; how the West remains a religious culture; how the secular state may provoke religious conflict in a predominantly pagan milieu like India; how Indians lack normative thinking; and how the criterion of reasonableness in normative political theory is only accessible to those who share a common Western history. The Heathen tells us how a comparative science of cultures would look like by plotting the differences between the Western and an Asian culture, the Indian. Reconceptualizing takes that agenda further through a number of contemporary problems on which further light is shed when they are recast as part of a larger comparative science of cultures. The promise of the first is partly fulfilled in the second, although much more clearly remains to be done. The books under review should constitute a serious challenge, but they are also an inspiration. One hopes that Asian scholars are listening.

Detailed exploration of his works could lead us to radical reappraisal of the Indian image constructed by the Europeans and even by the contemporary scholarship of India. He authored many important texts like Panchayat Raj as the Basis of Indian Polity: An Exploration into the Proceedings of the Constituent Assembly (1962), Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century (1971), Civil Disobedience and Indian Tradition (1971), The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (1983), Bhàratiya Chitta Mànas and Kàla (1993), Understanding Gandhi, Rediscovering India, Despoliation and Defaming of India: The Early 19th century British Crusade, The British Origin of Cow-Slaughter in India: with some British Documents on the Anti-Kine-Killing Movement 1880-1894, The Madras Panchayat System, Vol II: A General Assessment and so on, among other seminal works.

I want to briefly sketch an initial introduction to his work, Civil Disobedience and Indian Tradition which is more relevant today than when it was written. When we observe the social movements and protests that occurred in the past decade, we can clearly see a lot of confusion over the issues raised and the foundations of the claims of certain movements. Thanks to social media it has become clear that general public has lost interest in such movements.

Even the over-exposure to media has not brought people together to fight for many causes that we think are important. The mockery of the situation is best expressed by a Kannada intellectual who says that people have lost interest in the so-called people’s movements. The question is why it is the case and how could people like Gandhi, not only draw attention of large masses but also could sustain such movements for very long time. This is exactly where Dharampal becomes very relevant today.

Let us remember how we talked about our freedom struggle. Normally we invoke people like Gandhiji, Nehru, Bose and the revolutionaries. Though there is a lot of discussion about these legendary figures and their role in resisting colonial regime, we seem uninterested to find out from what cultural resources Gandhi derived ideas of civil disobedience and non-cooperation. Dharampal’s work on this very issue shows the roots of Gandhian resistance. In his book, Civil Disobedience and Indian Tradition, Dharampal tries to examine the sources of Gandhian resistance. Some claim that Gandhi derived his ideas on civil disobedience from Thoreau, Tolstoy, Ruskin and other western intellectuals.

Others opine that it was Gandhi’s own invention, and he may have got this from Indian Itihasas from characters like Prahalada. Contrary to these claims, Dharampal recognises the Gandhi’s view through Hind Swaraj, wherein he says, “in India the nation at large has generally used passive resistance in all departments of life. We cease to co-operate with our rulers when they displease us”. Dharampal gets into various historical material to examine this claim.

To his surprise, he discovers that in 1680, there were records of peaceful protest against the rulers in Madras Pattinam. It is recorded that people protested in a novel way by using trumpets and other instruments. Further, Dharampal gives another account of a similar protest which spread like wildfire from Bengal to Banaras, Patna, Mursheedabad, Sarun and other places. This movement during 1810-11 were against certain tax levied on house and shops. In these passive resistances, people closed shops, stopped all kinds of transactions and production till the rule was withdrawn by the rulers.

Dharampal says, doing ‘dharana’ to attract the attention of the rulers was a common thing. Dharampal argues that Gandhi had an insight into this nature of Indian society and devised strategies of resistance through those ideas that could actually hold Indians together. Dharampal says that Gandhi had the ability to understand as how Indians act and react to various issues. He was able to find out the inner core of Indians and his call for independence movement was more successful. Not that Gandhi discounted the role of the revolutionaries in the independence movement, but that was not his way.

Dharampal further observes from the British records that the Moghul Sultans were wary of such civil disobedience movements by the Indians, and they were very guarded and extremely careful while levying taxes on house, businesses, or temples. There seems to be a fear amongst the Islamic rulers about these kinds of protests by Indians. There is another significant passive resistance in 1830, which Dharampal makes a note of wherein around 11000 farmers all over Canara region of Karnataka protested.

The list of the nature of resistance shown by Indians are plenty in 19th century. What do these records tell us? There are many things to learn today from these records that British documented. Primarily, these documents point us towards how Gandhi was drawing his resources from Indian traditions to develop a resistance to colonialism which was never heard hitherto. It also tells us that it is not possible to mobilise Indian people until and unless one shows them certain serious moral grounds which Indian society has been considering very crucial for centuries. It is also clear that the ordinary people from Indian culture, though labelled subservient and backward had an unbelievable mode of resistance against their rulers irrespective of whether they are Indians or invaders or colonial masters.

Given this attitude of Indians, one could see why a large majority of India disapproves of these resistance movements based on ideologies or identity politics. It is also the same ground on which entire India was hurt by witnessing the Republic day violence. Here we understand what insights Gandhi had about India. This is the reason why, for Gandhi, civil disobedience was not just a resistance but a “Satyagraha”, a way of being in this world. Today that Gandhian understanding can be seen in the response of Indians. This is also exactly the reason for which even in 21st century, Indians who are allegedly labelled as illiterate, backward villagers disapprove of these movements. It also tells us how one should think about building movements in India and why most of the ideological and identity-based movements do not succeed in India.

It is high time that our universities and other institutions of higher learning should open their eyes widely to not just appreciate the agile intellect of the phenomenon called Dharampal but also to challenge the contemporary image of India. This could be a mark of respect to such a giant scholar on his birth centenary.

Rashtrotthana Sahitya, Bengaluru has initiated publications of these texts by Dharampal under the title “Dharampal Classic Series”. Soon we will have the Kannada translation of most of his works under Kuvempu Bhasha Bharati, Government of Karnataka. These publications would open new vistas for a better understanding of India and her traditions.

Events take a turn for the worse when, in one of the protests zones, plans are made to block off another arterial road in emulation of moves elsewhere in the capital. The local residents object and tensions build up. Imams and the police try to persuade the Muslim protestors to withdraw but are attacked instead. Residents take matters into their own hands and violence erupts between the different groups. From some high-rise blocks, shots are fired at residents and the police. Some policemen and residents die as a result. In a manner reminiscent of attacks against American forces in Iraq, it is as though the events have been carefully choreographed by external agents over the weeks leading up to the city’s worst riots in living memory. Residents are physically and mentally scarred and fearful of the future. The impression conveyed in the international media is one of police brutality against students and peaceful, mostly female Muslim protestors. The British authorities are condemned by celebrity academics worldwide and the UN’s Secretary General.

Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story, a book by Monika Arora, Sonali Chitalkar and Prerna Malhotra tells of just such a story of violent protests and riots. But they do not take place in London. They occur in India. The story is not an imaginary dystopic vision of a future Britain but relates the chain of events that occurred from mid-December 2019 to end-February 2020 in Delhi, India’s capital city. The protests were ostensibly about the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 (CAA). That legislation was designed to fast track the citizenship of those religious minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan already in India. It benefits just over 30,000 persons who, having completed a 5-year residence period in India, would be able to submit their application for citizenship upon the legislation coming into effect, rather waiting to meet the usually applicable 10-year requirement.

The intent of the legislation is benevolent and mirrors legislation in countries around the world in as much as it makes concessions to specific refugee groups or targets of past persecution. The legislation doesn’t treat Muslims from the three countries as presumptively persecuted but neither does it bar them from qualifying for citizenship in the usual way. In all of the three countries, where Islam is the official religion, the non-Muslim populations essentially have second class status or worse, their numbers have declined considerably over the past decades, and those that remain are exposed to a series of human rights violations that only occasionally hit the headlines, as did the Asia Bibi case. Daily acts of humiliation against non-Muslims in each country are well documented, even if considered unpalatable for polite discussion in politically correct circles. No Raoul Wallenberg has emerged to organise their exodus although some such initiative is now desperately required to rescue the remaining population who will otherwise disappear by forced conversions or by other means.

Criticism of the CAA is a clever manipulation to misrepresent its effect. Links were made to two other programmes in India – the National Population Register (NPR) and the National Register for Citizens (NRC) – which are of limited application so far. These are long-standing aspects of policy supported by successive governments and not some evil design of the Modi government. Nevertheless, the suggestion that there was a plan to deprive India’s Muslims of citizenship was circulated with some success, often rebounding via international coverage of the issue. Although the authors do not address it, there may well be backstory to why the NPR and NRC programmes got falsely linked to the CAA. Ample anecdotal evidence suggests of mass influxes of irregular migrants especially from Bangladesh and Myanmar. It is widely suspected that many of these migrants have become part of Delhi’s demographic landscape given decades of non-enforcement of immigration laws. The rolling out of the two programmes would have impacted these influxes and the criminal networks that sustain them.

As in our imaginary story, the manipulation to make the violent protests and rioting appear justifiable occurred not only within India but externally too in the international media and in the way prominent figures in academia and the UN Secretary General have made pronouncements criticising the Indian government for the CAA. Such narratives were given added adhesion by other measures of the central government which became prominent topics of sloganeering in Delhi. One was the ending of any ambiguity about the status of Jammu and Kashmir, thereby cutting off prospects of a Muslim-led secession of the province. The other was the Supreme Court judgement in favour of rebuilding the once-destroyed temple at Ayodhya.

The book’s three authors were part of an original five women investigation team who, in turn, are part of a much wider Group of Intellectuals and Academics (GIA). Arora is a practising lawyer while the other four are academics at Delhi University. The team had gone on an on-site investigation, talking to more than 20 people and visiting public institutions, including schools, destroyed in the affected areas. They document some of the cases of injury and loss of life by speaking to affected local residents. These accounts, together with pictures, are provided in a separate chapter which is drawn from a fact-finding report already published by the team of five.

Delhi Riots focuses in on the different stages of escalation with separate chapters for each development – from the universities, to the protest sites across Delhi, and then (after the February 2020 Delhi elections) to the events of late February that saw the worst clashes in specified areas of the city. The book’s authors relate how the manipulation regarding the CAA and other programmes became a pretext and cover for mass mobilisation of student actors and especially Muslims, instigating them to acts of incivility that, in the worst instances, led to the loss of life of fellow citizens and the policemen who had tried to bring the violence under some control. The forbearance of the police is remarkable as are their attempts to diffuse the threat of violence by enlisting the help of locally respected imams and mullahs. Such attempts at diffusion may be put down to field-level practical knowledge that police acquire over years. Only that, this time, in light of the different nature of the threat, such know how seemed obsolete.

This points to the far more eerie dimension characterising the violence as well as the events leading up to it. The suggestion is made in various parts of the book that the way in which the events unfolded during those months provides grounds for thinking that unprecedented coordination made the violence quite unlike the periodic and rather more spontaneous communal incidents. The authors further suggest that the coordination must have come from the strategic involvement of far-left organisations, termed ‘Urban Naxals’ in Indian public discourse after Vivek Agnihotri’s book of the same title. The Naxals, a Maoist group, are the largest terrorist network active in India. As Sankrant Sanu’s foreword to Delhi Riots 2020 points out, they have the dubious distinction of being the most murderous of terror groups. The term Urban Naxals isn’t arbitrary; the Maoists’ own playbook describes them as the civilian counterparts who work within Indian institutions, including academia. They are meant to support the rural cadres by providing propaganda, securing supplies and so on.

The other strategic involvement, they suggest, must have come from the jihadist network from within and outside India. It is these two main agents who appear to have coordinated by blocking off of transport routes in and out of Delhi; making material preparations for violent attacks in the affected areas; unprecedentedly placing women in the frontline of protests; securing the presence of non-locals at the protests, a finding which comes up frequently in the book; and killing security personnel brutally as though a signal was being sent to the state authorities. These suspicions in turn lead to concerns about security vulnerability, and the authors make relevant recommendations about these and others of their findings. In fact, even before the book’s release date, another Muslim riot hit India, this time in the IT capital Bengaluru. Suggestions have been made that its pattern mirrors Delhi in some respects.

Delhi Riots 2020 may have become yet another book on India’s periodic riots and its security vulnerability. Yet it has now catapulted to unanticipated fame. Bloomsbury India withdrew the book at the instigation of Bloomsbury’s UK headquarters after pressure was brought on the publisher. On the eve of the book’s launch in Delhi, the authors were told by Bloomsbury India that, while the publisher sympathised with them, they were compelled to withdraw the book. Bloomsbury’s behaviour has been put down to the persistence of British colonial attitudes. This reviewer has written to Bloomsbury UK for an explanation but hasn’t received one. The book’s subtitle may have come true, with the story it tells remaining untold. The readership reacted, however, and another publisher, Garuda Prakashan, took the book on, with over 15,000 pre-orders being received on the first day.

While this book provides a disturbing account of events in Delhi, it is of much wider significance. The authors show that conventional policing cannot deal with the recruitment of a substantial section of the population to the service of civil unrest damaging to lives and property. Their account also suggests that foreign intervention in India using criminal terrorist networks is at an advanced stage stooping to using what was meant as humanitarian legislation for refugee populations as a pretext for organised unrest and violence. If not met with a rapid and appropriate response, the perpetrators will get emboldened, and the tipping point into mass violence and civil war may not be far off. Organised criminal networks will be drawing lessons from the Delhi conflagration but so must the Indian authorities. The international community, whose members have either remained indifferent to India’s plight or colluded in spreading fake news, must also decide what they favour: flirtation with terrorism or mutual cooperation to beat it.

Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story by Monika Arora, Sonali Chitalkar & Prerna Malhotra is published by Garuda Prakashan, 2020, ISBN 9781942426295, xvi + 174 pp, $9.95.

Prakash Shah is a Reader in Culture and Law at Queen Mary, University of London.