The Hindu : Lessons of empire

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jun 24, 2003

Opinion

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Lessons of empire

By Amitav Ghosh

India is faced with the prospect of re-enacting one of the ugliest and most repugnant aspects of its colonial history... India has much to lose and nothing to gain from this.

THE RECENT war in Iraq has been replete with chilling reminders of the history of empire. Among the most dismaying of these is the proposal, now being considered by the Government of India, that Indian troops be used for the policing of Iraq.

Today, in the 56th year of independence, India is faced with the prospect of re-enacting one of the ugliest and most repugnant aspects of its colonial history. During the Raj, Indian soldiers were used both for the expansion of the empire and for the suppression of anti-colonial rebellions, at home and abroad. For more than a century, they battled insurgents in East Africa, Burma, China, Malaya and of course, Mesopotamia (the present-day Iraq). Independent India has yet to live down this shameful legacy: in many parts of the world Indians are still remembered as Imperial mercenaries, as slaves who allowed themselves to be used without reflection or self-awareness.

The aspect of this that would be most repellent, if it were not so pathetically poignant, is that many of these soldiers genuinely believed that their exertions on behalf of the Raj would put them on an equal footing with their rulers. The discovery that they were no more and no less than what they appeared to be — tools, instruments — often came as an almost unsustainable shock, eventually prompting some to turn against their masters.

A similar dynamic appears to be at work again today: some policy-makers appear to believe that the rendering of certain services can gain India entry into the innermost circles of global power. Our history has truly been suffered in vain if it has failed to teach us that this is not how the world works.

Let us make no mistake about the role that Indian troops will serve if they are deployed in Iraq: they will not be `policing' the country; they will be fighting a war. No matter what the spin, it is clear that the war in Iraq is far from over; in a sense it has only just begun. The small group of American and British neo-conservatives who initiated this war did so in the belief that the situation in the Middle East could best be resolved through the use of overwhelming violence. They have succeeded only in transforming great multitudes of people into instruments of collective resistance. The Anglophone countries that took the lead in this war — the United States, Britain and Australia — prevailed easily in the conventional phase of the war. But they are now faced with the prospect of a protracted low-intensity conflict. This is exactly the sort of struggle that is most to their disadvantage, not least because of the four-and five-year election cycles to which the rhythms of their wars are typically tuned.

As the Israeli military historian, Martin van Creveld has observed, it is impossible to indefinitely sustain a war of the mighty against the weak. With the passage of time, this conflict will become less and less defensible, politically, morally and militarily, even within the core constituencies of the belligerents.

As an Indian who has spent a great deal of time in the U.S., I have a deep, but not unquestioning, attachment to that country. While welcoming the warmth of India's present relations with the U.S., I recognise also that this intimacy carries a burden that was absent from the earlier relationship of guarded distance. Most importantly it imposes the obligation to think of the long term rather than of immediate rewards and benefits. This being so, it is incumbent on the policy-makers of the South Block to think about the likely outcome of the present U.S. policy in the Middle East.

No matter what the polls may suggest, there is massive and growing opposition to the policies of the Bush administration: the millions of Americans who demonstrated against the war in Iraq on February 15 of this year have not disappeared and will soon be heard from again. The very extremism of the Bush administration's stance, in economics as in foreign affairs, makes it certain that these policies will, in time, be forcefully repudiated. It is to that time, which is no more than six years away, that Indian policy-makers must look. In identifying themselves too closely with the policies of the current administration, they may well run the risk of a future marginalisation.

To make a desolation and call it peace has ever been the chosen method of empires. It is not difficult to imagine a time in the near future when the U.S. and Britain will extricate themselves from Iraq after declaring a victory. Indeed the embroilment of India, Poland and so on, is clearly a step along that path. But the doors that permit the exit of the major powers will not be open to India. The countries of the Arab world are our neighbours and will remain so forever. Great numbers of Indians live and work there and will do so into the foreseeable future.

There is a sense in which the Indian Government's responsibilities do not end at the borders of India. The historic circumstances under which Indians came to be dispersed around the world, has given it an obligation to consider also the well-being of the Indian diaspora. The Indians of the Middle East have long played a vital part in shoring up India's foreign exchange reserves: it is imperative that the Indian Government take their interests into account in deciding on the deployment of its troops.

Suppose there were a circumstance in which Indian troops had to open fire on an Iraqi crowd, killing a number of civilians. It is quite likely that every Indian in the Arab world would feel the repercussions. This is surely one of the most elementary lessons of our sad history of military deployments abroad. There is the example of the uprising of 1930 in Burma. Led by Saya San, this movement was, in its origins, directed against British rule. The British suppressed it with great brutality, using Indian troops, and the rumours generated by the campaign led to savage reprisals against Indian civilians, of whom there were then more than a million in Burma. This in turn, resulted in a situation that allowed the British to present the uprising as being directed against Indians, rather than against the Empire itself. This was one of the more remarkable achievements of the accomplished tradition of spin-doctoring to which Tony Blair is heir.

It is in the light of experiences such as this (there are many others) that we should consider what may result from the presence of Indian troops in Iraq. Were these soldiers to find themselves in a situation where they had to use lethal force there would be no lack of spin-doctors to cast their actions in the worst possible light. Given the context of communal violence in India, there is no story that would not be believed.

And to take the scenario further: what if the violence were to occur in An-Najaf or Karbala, places that are revered by great numbers of Indians? The potential for harm is almost beyond computation.

As a nation that treasures its hard-won independence and democracy, India's deepest commitment must be to the rule of law, at home and in the world. The present situation in Iraq has its origins in an action that was clearly in breach of international legal conventions. To send troops to Iraq now would be a step towards the retrospective normalisation of this situation. India has much to lose and nothing to gain from this.

The United Nations and the conventions that govern it are far from perfect. But these conventions were brought into being in the wake of decolonisation, and they represent a genuine and serious attempt to imagine an alternative to a global system of empires.

India, of all countries, cannot assent to the undermining of this body of law and convention: it would be a repudiation of the lessons of our history and a betrayal of the ideals of our independence.

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