If it doesn’t learn from the past, the West can lose India (again)

In 1885 a leaflet began circulating in Indian metropolises. Signed by the leading associations of the era, including the British Indian Association in Calcutta, the Sarvajanik Sabha in Poona, and the Mahajan Sabha of Madras, it bore an eye-catching title: Why Do Indians Prefer British to Russian Rule?

The leaflet was a response to a dramatic event. Since the early 19th century, Britain and Russia had been engaged in the ‘Great Game’, a contest over who would dominate Central Asia. Over the decades, the Russians had subdued the khanates or principalities scattered over modern-day Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. In 1885, they reached Pandjeh, an Afghan border town on the route to Herat and Kabul. With the Russians now only a few hundred miles from British India, rumours of an impending invasion swirled in bazaars. The question of “what sort of treatment” Indians would receive from the Russians began “severely exercising” the minds of “all classes”.

It was in the midst of this general panic that the aforementioned leaflet appeared, making its case in twelve crisp bullet points. “It is the deepest and the firmest conviction of every educated Indian”, it declared, that in spite of “the serious defects of its rule”, England was “the champion of liberty”. Since Indians appreciated liberty, and believed that Britain would eventually grant them more of it, they had no desire to “exchange” Pax Britannica for “the Russian system of military aggression abroad and official repression at home”.
In the end, the anticipated invasion did not materialise as the Russians directed their energies toward Japan. With the passage of time, the so-called ‘Pandjeh incident’, and the leaflet it inspired, receded from public consciousness.

But consider what followed. Less than two decades later, the much-vaunted “bond” between India’s English-educated metropolitan elites and their British patrons lay in tatters. Contrary to what the authors of the leaflet had anticipated, practically every important figure in the generation that followed came away from their English education disaffected with the British. Perhaps no person symbolised the divorce more vividly than Aurobindo Ghosh, who went from studying Latin and Greek in Cambridge to writing paeans to a rising Japan.

This disenchantment is typically attributed to Indian unhappiness with British policies in India, but it also stemmed from Britain’s conduct overseas. Educated Indians saw clearly the chasm between Britain’s wholesome words and unwholesome deeds. The British praised equality but condoned racism in South Africa; they declared themselves enlightened but forced opium on China; they advocated free trade but imposed unfair tariffs on India; they spoke of justice but gunned down Zulus. Little wonder then that by the end of World War I, the leading ideological movements in India were not only anti-colonial, they were also deeply skeptical of the West.

There is a lesson to be drawn from this history. When we share values, we become aware of each other’s deviations from these values. What makes these deviations especially painful is hypocrisy — or the pretense that the flaws are on one side only. It was one thing for the British to describe Indians as “uncivilised”, it was quite another to do so while Britain was dismembering China and overpowering Egypt. Consider what Bhaskar Pandurang Tarkhadkar, one of the first Indians to receive a modern English education, had to say in the Bombay Gazette in 1841, when news of the First Opium War reached India: “Where is your integrity and good sense which you so much boast of — ugh! Self-interest is all in all to you, and to secure it you would do anything”. The British response was to send the editor of the Bombay Gazette packing, bringing Tarkhadkar’s stinging editorials to an end.

In recent times we have seen this pattern — where India is berated for deviating from “civilised norms” and then berated once more for having the temerity to remind others of their deviation from “civilised norms”— in full play. The charged commentary on India’s nuanced position on Russia and Ukraine, a conflict it neither created nor desired, is the most recent manifestation of this trend. Europeans must have natural gas from Russia, but India, where inflation threatens to send millions into poverty, is castigated for wanting the same. Meanwhile, those who highlight the West’s self-dealing, are decried as vestiges of the past prone to “anti-Americanism”.

We may be tempted to shrug off such frictions as part and parcel of international politics. But a little awareness of history should induce caution. Like the authors of the 1885 leaflet, there is reason to think that education and markets are making India and the West “natural allies”. But if the “rules-based order” that we hear so much about shapes up to be diktats that Indians are supposed to quietly obey, then trouble lies ahead. For, our history teaches that between friendly nations, there are things other than interests that govern relations, one of these being a sense of fair play.