Pakistan and India: Political Legacies from the Colonial Era

The Basham Lecture, ANU Public Lecture Series 2002

by Professor Anthony Low
former Vice-Chancellor
of the Australian National University

Thursday 19th June 2002, McDonald Rm, Menzies Library, Australia's National University

It gives me great pleasure to be giving the Basham lecture.

After an already notable career at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London he came to the ANU as Professor of Asian Civilizations in 1965 and was Dean of the Faculty of Asian Studies here between 1968 and 1970. I remember reading his great work The Wonder that was India on a sea voyage in 1964, and on my return to the ANU in the 1970s it was a great boon to find him amongst us as the unquestioned doyen of studies in the Indian field and well beyond as well. It is a remarkable fact indeed about this university that in Professor Basham we had here the twentieth century's most distinguished historian of ancient India, as we also then had in Ranajit Guha the twentieth century's most innovative historian of modern India. I know of no other university which could match that pairing. Beyond the ANU, `Bash’, as we all knew him, was variously a Vice-President of the Academy of Humanities, President of the Congress of Orientalists, a key figure in the International Society of Traditional Asian Medicine, and played a notable part with those of us who in the 1970s launched the Asian Studies Association of Australia. It is highly appropriate that there should be opportunities like this to celebrate his memory, and I am delighted to be able to add my halting tribute to those, which others have made before me.

As some of you have already heard me say elsewhere one of the major publishing triumphs of recent years in the study of the history which concerns us all has been the five volumes of the Oxford History of the British Empire published in the two years, 1998-99, with 149 chapters by 128 different authors and amounting in total to 3300 pages. For my purposes this evening I want to begin by focusing on two sets of arguments, which the Oxford History advances, which seem to me of first importance for our understanding of present day South Asia. One of these is scattered through three or four chapters in its first and second volumes on the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, while the second is concentrated in one chapter in the third volume on the Nineteenth Century.

The first of these arguments relates to the question of how and why it was that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century the British conquered India. The Oxford History faithfully records the scholarly argument between those who hold to the traditional thesis that this principally occurred as a result of the collapse of the Mughal empire at the centre - because of the onset of unremitting factionalism at the court, Emperor Aurungzeb's ill-fated attempt to turn India into a purely Islamic state, and some deep seated socioeconomic crises - and the counter thesis of my Cambridge colleague, Chris Bayly, that it was not so much collapse at the centre which undermined the Mughal regime but the growth of the economic prosperity and military power of the regional powers upon the periphery - in the Carnatic, Bengal, Mysore, Hyderabad, the Mahratta country, Avadh and so on. At the same time the Oxford History fully endorses Bayly's related thesis that the British were enormously assisted in their conquest of India by the financial backing they won from India's merchant communities, who were deeply disturbed by the immense damage the political fragmentation of the country was inflicting upon their subcontinent wide commerce. Professor Rajat Ray of Calcutta University goes so far indeed as to say that it was less superior European technology and powers of organisation, which made Britain’s eighteenth century conquest of India possible as their ‘ability to mobilise a flow of resources through the good offices of India’s bankers’. To which I have always wanted to add the now Oxford historian, David Washbrook's argument, that in the eighteenth century the British were uniquely well placed to establish their dominion over India since they alone possessed three bases - Calcutta, Madras and Bombay - from which to mount a pincer movement by which to bring the greater part of it under their control.

The Oxford History serves to remind us, however, that there was a further dimension to this whole story, namely intense intra-European rivalry. Interestingly it gives little prominence to my Oxford supervisor, Vincent Harlow's long established thesis that ‘with the loss of the American colonies the British made a swing to the east’. Rather in a succession of chapters it places the British conquest of India in a very much more 'western, and much more specifically British context than has ordinarily been the case.

The scene is set at the end of volume one where the point is made that by the end of the eighteenth century, thanks to the growth of its naval supremacy, Britain had already become unquestionably Europe's dominant maritime and colonial power. During the long eighteenth century that followed as British historians call it - between that is 1688 and 1815 - there were, however, no less than seven large-scale intra-European wars in each of which Britain became deeply involved, and in which its most formidable enemy was always France. Those wars not only spread over large parts

of the world. They brought to the British as much failure as success. Certainly there were spectacular victories; at Quebec and Plassey, for example, in 1759. But two decades on they suffered their greatest reverse in the War of the American Revolution. Britain was only saved, so the argument here runs, because of the early industrialisation of its workforce, the steady development of an effective fiscal state, the resolute determination of its perceptive landed class, but above all by the Royal Navy, by far the largest in Europe, whose principal task, as the Oxford History emphasises, was invariably to safeguard the British Isles against invasion. To that end the main fleet was concentrated for as long as possible in wartime out to sea in what have long been known as the 'Western Approaches' to the English Channel from where it was matchlessly placed to pounce on any hostile French or Spanish fleet which ventured out of harbour.

In the War with the American colonies and their French and Spanish allies in the 1770s and 1780s this long established naval strategy, however, fell apart - because it became necessary to disperse the Fleet across the Atlantic to support the scattered and beleaguered British forces fighting there. That was to have momentous consequences. For by the early 1780s it placed Britain in the gravest danger of a cross-Channel French invasion such as it had never faced before since the days of the Spanish Armada two centuries earlier. That in turn frightened the life out of great swathes of British public opinion. With the consequence that with the onset of the French revolutionary wars in 1792, which extended almost continuously thereafter through to 1815, the British leadership (Pitt and Dundas more particularly) became absolutely determined to expropriate totally France's colonial resources, destroy completely France's naval power, and altogether eradicate every vestige of French power and influence in the outside world. None of that was easily accomplished. But over a twenty year period, as a consequence of what Dundas called 'prodigies of exertion', not only had every overseas possession of France and her dependents fallen by the end of 1811 into British hands. By 1816 Britain's twenty-six colonies of 1792 had escalated to forty-three.

For my present purposes the essential point here is that, highly extraneous as it may seem, that lacerating threat to the very safety of the British Isles which in the early 1780s so unnerved the British leadership far away in western Europe, left huge marks on the whole subsequent history of South Asia. For it was as a consequence of the unremitting determination of the British leadership at the turn of the eighteenth century to eliminate every one of France's overseas enterprises, that the British embarked in the late 1790s upon a protracted and uncompromising campaign to root out every remnant of French influence and presence in India wherever it was to be found there. That had two crucial consequences. It propelled the English East India Company out of its previously limited enclave in Bengal into the systematic conquest of the greater part of the sub-continent, and it was that in turn which subjected India to a fateful twenty five years of warfare - beginning with the onslaughts upon Mysore in 1792 and 1799 through to the final defeat of the Marathas in 1818.

It is at this point that this story meshes with a central argument in an Oxford History chapter by David Washbrook on India between 1818 and 1860 where he persuasively argues that the two principal British conquistadors in the middle and later years of the eighteenth century, Clive and Hastings, developed what he calls the Clive-Hastings model of Indian Empire. Both, he reminds us, were 'Soldierly men', who had no doubt that dominance in India depended on armed force, and that British rule there should be built upon the model of India's inherited practices and institutions. The former involved the establishment of a military-fiscal regime in which the monetary and other resources of the state were principally extracted to pay for the maintenance of an army, while the latter entailed the adoption of an ‘Oriental despotism’, in which the state (not to mention its rapacious officials) possessed virtually unlimited power.

When in the 1780s some understanding of what this involved seeped back to Britain there was very considerable outrage there. Burke fulminated. Hastings was put on trial, and in 1786 Cornwallis was sent out to govern Bengal: to curb the ensuing rapine; separate civilian from military power; disentangle the judiciary from the executive; create a 'civil service, dependent on official salaries rather than private trade, and inaugurate a system of law that would guarantee private property. A good deal of this aggressive Anglicisation lived on, particularly in Bengal. It was especially strongly cultivated at the new East India College at Haileybury, where Malthus and his colleagues drummed the idea of their 'civilizing mission, into the heads of the Company's administrative recruits. But with the advent of the French revolutionary wars, and India's consequent plunge in the 1790s into nearly a quarter of a century of warfare that followed upon Britain's utter determination to eradicate every vestige of French influence from India, there was a sharp reversion to the militarism and ideology of the 'Clive-Hastings era'. For in the course of those wars, which stretched as I have said from 1792 to 1818, not only did soldiers come once again to the fore. Government in the newly acquired territories fell into the hands of the soldiers who had conquered them, and most notably, in what I will call the Munro-Metcalfe years, into the hands of that great quartet of early nineteenth century British administrators, Munro, Metcalfe, Malcolm and Elphinstone, everyone of them professionally and at heart a soldier to his bootstraps.

The regime, which this stellar quartet instituted in India in the first forty years of the nineteenth century, Washbrook neatly specifies for us, had a number of quite distinctive characteristics. A great deal of what we may call traditionalisation occurred. India's Princes and warrior noblemen, its Rajput and Bhumihar martial communities, its high caste bureaucratic gentries, along with a great array of lowlier village officials were granted a security of tenure none of them had ever possessed before. High caste Brahmanic and Sanskritic authorities were given a greatly privileged position in the newly established Anglo-Hindu courts of law. There was at the same time considerable growth in peasantisation, as, with the erosion of other employments - soldiering, artisan craftsmanship, and such like - petty-commodity production became much more widespread than before. Civil, military and judicial functions were once again concentrated in a single pair of hands. But above all in the first forty -years of the nineteenth century India became, as Washbrook puts it, 'A Very Military State', in which the army asserted itself as the dominant institution in the state, remained highly visible, made frequent recourse to martial law, and despite the long term depression which overtook India from the end of the 1820s through to the 1840s mulcted most of the state's available resources. Became in fact an altogether typical military-fiscal state.

It was not indeed until the 1840s when the first Haileybury graduates started to achieve senior civilian office, and when with the appointment of Dalhousie as Governor-General between 1848 and 1856 India once more came under the rule of an uncompromising 'westernizer’ (as Cornwallis had been in Bengal in the 1780s and 190s) that radical change came about once again. But when it did so under Dalhousie it came in a great rush. The intimate relationship of the Munro-Metcalfe years between military and civil administration was quickly dismantled. Several Indian princes were toppled from their thrones, and saw their states absorbed into 'British, India. Privileges previously enjoyed by Rajputs and Bhumihars in the army were substantially reduced. Christian proselytation was openly licensed, and the state's resources were increasingly devoted not to meeting the requirements of the army but to the construction of railways and telegraphs, the founding of India's first universities, and various other modernising developments of that kind.

The immediate result was, however, altogether devastating. For the range, precipitancy and depth of these changes incensed such a wide coalition of previously privileged and increasingly angry forces that when in 1857 the East India Company's army mutinied they were speedily joined by a whole host of quite disparate elements who soon transformed the initial army mutiny into a very much larger civil rebellion; the 'Great Revolt' of 1857-8.

Over the course of the ensuing year and more that was brutally suppressed. But this concurrence left an indelible mark upon British policy in India, which henceforth was characterised by a deep dualism. While railways and telegraphs continued to be built, a boom occurred in the Indian economy as its primary products like cotton and jute and tea began to penetrate the world market. Western-style schools and universities proliferated, other anglicising thrusts towards radical reform of the Cornwallis-Dalhousie kind were, however, henceforward sharply moderated. India's remaining princes were promised that there would be no more annexations of their states. Far greater caution was displayed in confronting traditional social forms and institutions than Dalhousie had displayed. Legislation was passed to curb the freedom of private property owners to imposing rapacious tenancies and rents on peasant cultivators, and similar reversions of a variety of other kinds occurred as well.

The result was to create a persistent tension in India after 1857 between the westernising and orientalising faces of colonial rule, a tension which more especially left is mark, as Washbrook has argued, on India's nascent nationalist intelligentsia, whose nationalism was henceforth always caught between a desire for a modern western future and a commitment to a distinctly Indian past.

All these developments had another major consequence as well. For despite Dalhousie's reforms and the trauma of the 1857 mutiny, the military-fiscalism which Washbrook discusses for the first forty years of the nineteenth century lived on in British India during the latter half of the nineteenth and throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It did so, however, in a way that none could have foretold: in a manner which was profoundly conditioned by these tumultuous events; and to an extent that left an indelible mark on the sub-continent's whole future history.

A crucial part of the story here has its origins in north-western India in the late eighteenth century when at the end of a protracted conflict, one of the Sikh war band leaders, Ranjit Singh, managed to establish himself as Maharaja over all the Punjab, and thereafter developed a classic example of a regional Indian military-fiscal state in which all available monetary and other resources were principally devoted to maintaining the pre-eminence of the army. In the terms which Dirk Kolff, the Dutch scholar, has taught us to employ, Ranjit Singh's army was principally recruited from India’s north-western military labour market in the Punjab and surrounding areas consisting mostly of Muslims and Sikhs, at a time when the English East India Company's army was primarily enlisted from India's north central military labour market of Brahmins and Rajputs chiefly from the main Ganges valley. So successful was Ranjit Singh in consolidating his regime in the Punjab with the support of his army that rather than trying to conquer the Punjab, the British, under the terms of their Treaty of Lahore of 1809 with Ranjit Singh, agreed to fix the north-western boundary of their Indian empire at the Punjab border, and were content to leave it there for all of the next 30 years.

In 1839, however, Ranjit Singh, died, and as Andrew major has described in a seminal book researched at this university, the Sikh leadership in the Punjab thereupon fell apart into an utterly disastrous internecine conflict. As a consequence the security of British India's northwestern borderlands quickly crumbled, and before long that precipitated the British into two successive wars against the Sikhs in 1845 and 1848 - the latter under Dalhousie's Governor-Generalship -, which culminated in the final annexation of the Punjab by the British in 1849. The essential point here is that in the course of these wars the British successfully pitted the army they had recruited from India's north central military labour market against the Punjab's northwestern military labour market, and thereupon peremptorily disbanded the northwestern military labour market all but completely.

Eight years later, however, there was an astonishing twist to this whole story. For when in 1857 Britain's north central Indian military labour market army mutinied against them, the British, as Major has shown, speedily summoned the north-western military labour market which they had lately disbanded to their aid, and with their reenlistment and support successfully suppressed the Great Revolt.

The question then was: what in the aftermath would the British do? As the Singaporean scholar Tan Tai Yong has shown, they at first reconstructed their Indian army by enlisting a balance of recruits from both the northwestern and the north central Indian military labour markets. But, for at least two reasons, which the British scholar, Clive Dewey has emphasised, the balance increasingly tilted towards the northwestern market. In the first place it stood closer to the Himalayan passes through which the main perceived threat at the time, a Russian invasion would come; while since its members were nurtured in the more rolling country of the Punjab, with the advent of the long- range rifle they proved to be more adroit at using cover than the Brahmins and Rajputs of the flat Ganges plain who were more suited to the increasingly antiquated musket.

There were two major consequences. Despite the fateful disbanding of the Punjab's north-western military labour market at the end of the Anglo-Sikh wars, with its re-enlistment it was the Sikh-Punjabi rather than the Brahmin-Rajput tradition of military fiscalism which now became conjoined with the residuum of the Clive-Hastings model of British military fiscalism which had been sustained through the Munro-Metcalfe years to underpin the British army in India of the future. And thereupon it was the Punjab which became the principal military buttress of the British raj in India throughout the last half-century of its rule and more.

As Dewey has also shown the Punjab benefited enormously from this outcome, particularly from the pay, pensions and cantonment building, which the British lavished upon it. Moreover as the Pakistani historian, Iran Ali, who is with us this evening, has described when the British came to allocate the vast increase in irrigated land which the immense irrigation works they constructed in the Punjab yielded - from under 3 million acres in 1885 to about 14 million acres in 1947 - it was military involvement of one kind or another which secured for the Punjab's military classes the lion's share of this prime irrigated land. It was in such terms that under the British in India in the late nineteenth century military-fiscalism came to be concentrated in, and largely confined to, the Punjab.

In the course of the twentieth century's two World Wars and throughout the two decades in between these developments proceeded considerably further. For as Tan Tai Yong has further shown, not only did the Punjab see an immense increase in military recruitment, but (if only to keep demobilised soldiers content during peacetime, and to enhance their recruitment in wartime) a very close conjuncture developed in the Punjab, as nowhere else in India, between the provincial administration and the military administration. All of which fed into what Imran Ali has called the retardation of nationalism. For between the wars, almost uniquely in provincial India, neither the Indian National Congress nor the All-India Muslim League managed to secure any significant leverage in the Punjab's politics. These were almost entirely monopolised by the Punjab's Unionist Party, which drew together its three communities of Muslims, Sikh's and rural Hindus in support of their common military interests, and proved to be markedly muted in its nationalist demands.

With, however, the advent of independence in the 1940s a totally new and altogether tumultuous turn of events fell upon the Punjab. For from previously standing largely aloof upon the political sidelines, quite fortuitously the one part of India that sported a full-blown military-fiscal regime suddenly found itself thrust into the very d6ntre of the maelstrom. For territorially Punjab, or at all events a considerable part of it was absolutely crucial to the effective establishment of the separate Muslim state of Pakistan, that in the event could only be affected by its traumatic partition into its Muslim and Hindu majority areas. And that was immediately followed by the outbreak of the dire conflict over Kashmir.

On the Muslim side these events precipitated a major crisis. For they immediately generated a quite desperate need to concoct a workable national government for the new state of Pakistan where none had existed before. Despite the seeming dominance of the Muslim League, such was the fragmentation of Muslim politics in the country between Punjabi ex-Unionists, Pathan ex-Congressmen, Sindhi separate nationalists, Urdu-speaking Muhajirs, let alone the eastern Bengal Muslim majority, that that could not be assured by Pakistan's political forces. And thus it was that in this critical situation the position was only saved by the mobilisation of remnants of a Punjab administration which over the preceding decades had been increasingly oriented not to independence but to military needs, and by the availability of a large proportion of the former British Indian army that being Muslim stood at hand to provide the new Pakistan state with the essential military formations to secure its very existence.

The force of this point can perhaps best be emphasised by remarking that had by chance India at independence been partitioned along, say, linguistic lines between Hindustan in the north and Dravidistan in the south, and had they then fronted up against each other militarily as Pakistan and India now did over Kashmir, Dravidistan could not have survived. For Dravidistan had no army. As it was thanks to the history, which several historians have now recorded, Pakistan at independence did have the elements of an effective army and an administration that was closely geared to its needs. In the parlous circumstances in which they found themselves it is hardly surprising, therefore, that they should soon have seen themselves as the only guarantors of the future existence of the state. All the more so since the Muslim League, once its main objective, the creation of a separate Muslim state, had been secured, began to fall apart, particularly once its two leading figures, Mohammed Ali Iinnah and Liaqat Ali Khan, had each met an untimely death.

The consequence of all of this should not occasion surprise. Democratic institutions did not long survive in Pakistan. As early as 1951 its military and civil bureaucracy assumed effective control of the state, and in October 1958 the first of Pakistan's four military dictators, who have now ruled the country for over half of its years since independence, finally took full control of its governance. Pakistan thus slipped inexorably into what the Pakistani scholar, Ayesha Jaial, has termed 'The State of Martial Rule'. Thereafter it took 24 years from the start of independence before a general election on the basis of universal adult franchise came to be held. One index of what all this involved lies in the telling fact that during Pakistan's first decade of independence 'defence along with the cost of civil administration swallowed more than three-quarters of the central government's revenue budget'.

In the light of past history as we now know of this, it is not too difficult to see, therefore, why Pakistan on independence should in all these circumstances have become a deeply entrenched military-fiscal state. For it stands in a direct line of succession from the Clive-Hastings model of a British military-fiscal state in the eighteenth century, through the very military state' which in the course of the French revolutionary ways and their aftermath the Munro-Metcalfe generation of British administrators constructed on a much wider' scale, that then became conjoined in the Punjab - in the quite extraordinary circumstances of the 1857 Mutiny - with the military-fiscal heritage of Ranjit Singh's four-decades-long Sikh kingdom, to become the fundamental military bulwark of the later British Raj, before being ultimately forged into its present form in the further extraordinary circumstances of the traumatic Partition in 1947, the unending conflict with India over Kashmir, and the desperate need at independence somehow to hold a ramshackle new state together. For all sorts of reasons habits persistently reinforced over two centuries and more are not to be easily sloughed off.

We thus reach the somewhat unusual conclusion that in view of past history, as we now understand this -it is no longer the character of post-independence Pakistan that remains a puzzle. It is the very different political character of post independence India that now needs to be examined with a great deal less of the assurance that has hitherto been accorded to it.

I can only scratch at the surface here, but let me offer some initial thoughts. It is perhaps worthwhile to begin by reverting to Washbrook's closing argument that ‘because of the contradictory processes by which colonial India was made ... Indian nationalism was ... torn between attempts to pursue a modern western future and to evoke a glorious, unchanging, and distinctly ... Indian past'.

Let me suggest two preliminary points about that. First it is not very difficult to pair off a long succession of Indian nationalist leaders who while united in their common cause variously exemplified each of these two poles: Gokhale and Tilak, Motilal Nehru and Madan Mohan Malaviya, Subhas Chandra Bose and Mahatma Gandhi, Jawarharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel, Rajagopalachari and Rajendra Prasad.

Secondly, I do not sense from David Marr's wonderful book on Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 that any such cleavage was true of Vietnamese nationalism. Vietnamese nationalists deliberately determined if I read him aright, to distance themselves from their Confucian past, and unequivocally concentrate upon establishing quite new traditions of Vietnamese political thought. There was no such single-mindedness on the Indian side.

Let me return to this issue before I finish, as before doing so I want to canvass two very much larger themes which go much more directly to the question I am now concerned to ask: how was it that while one can do much to illumine Pakistan's post-independence propensity towards a militarily dominated state by pointing to its heritage of military-fiscal regimes over two centuries and more, how can one explain the very different prevalence in India after independence of elected parliamentary government ?

In spite of periodic suggestions to the contrary, it is difficult to discern any roots here that go back nearly as far as Pakistan's. With, moreover, military-fiscalism being confined in late colonial India almost entirely to the Punjab we are looking for essentially new developments, and substantial ones at that, rather than the reiteration of any earlier model. Novel developments, however, as we all know, have a marked tendency to be very fragile. Fifty years and more of elected parliamentary governments in one of the poorest countries in the world with now over a billion people scarcely seems, however, a passing phenomenon. How has all this come about?

There will be numerous explanations. I principally want to canvass a conjoining of two. The first came from the fortuitous conjunction in India of three largely different social formations. This story is well known, but let me nevertheless briefly rehearse it.

Following some relatively confined developments in Bengal in the first half of the nineteenth century, and in the context of a vast inheritance of religious and scholarly learning, the years after the middle of the nineteenth century saw the gradual emergence, principally out of India's high caste bureaucratic communities, of a new Indian nationalist intelligentsia, increasing numbers of whom had spent their formative years in the quite new anglicised schools and universities which the British and their own elders had established. Famously in 1885 small clusters of these people from the four corners of the sub- continent came together to form the Indian National Congress. Apart, however, from some passing exceptions they made no attempt for nearly three decades to turn this into a vigorous nationalist movement. That only happened in and after the First World War.

As it chanced, and that seems to me the appropriate term, that occurred at precisely the moment when a rather different social formation quite suddenly shifted towards a nationalist position too. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as Bayly and Ray have cogently argued, India’s merchant communities played a major role in facilitating the British conquest of India by mobilising their extensive commercial and information networks in their support. A great deal more work still needs to be done about the courses that these merchant communities pursued in the nineteenth century, but there is nothing so far to suggest they ever resiled from their initial commitment to the British regime. All that, however, changed with the First World War, when strapped for the financial resources needed to pay for India's war effort, the British imposed a series of excise duties, and, worse still, an altogether unacceptably intrusive income tax, both of which fell particularly heavily on India's merchant communities. That had the immediate effect of impelling large numbers of them into supporting Gandhi's first nationwide nationalist agitation in 1919, and thereafter into providing Congress with its principal financial backers and its most extensive cross-country networks. There then followed a still more portentous convergence. As I remarked earlier, in the Munro-Metcalfe years in the earlier part of the nineteenth century existing processes of peasantisation were considerably advanced. Thereafter, as Ravinder Kumar recounted for western India from this university over thirty years ago, and others have for other areas too, a great deal of differentiation then opened up in India's village societies between their better-to-do peasants and their many subordinate groupings. Thereafter, in ways which several of us have now traced out, between the end of the first World War and independence in 1947 a whole succession of rich peasant cohorts from across the length and breadth of India became determined to secure for themselves a place in the political sun, and, thanks to the energy of Gandhi and more particularly of several of his principal lieutenants, they principally proceeded to do so by linking up with the Indian National Congress.

As a result by the late 1930s Congress became the formidable, conjoined vehicle for the national is aspirations of three of India's principal elites: the intelligentsia, the merchant communities and a good many of its rich peasant cohorts. Whilst, of course, only a proportion of their members were prepared to be politically active, in 1941 no less than 26,000 of them quite voluntarily went to jail in support of their demand for India's independence in a campaign of defiance against the British.

Not only was that an immense number for the British to incarcerate. So great was the commitment that they showed that they very soon won massive popular support well beyond their own ranks.

As independence came their now consolidated collaboration placed them in an altogether unchallenged position. Thereafter whilst the intelligentsia continued to supply the Congress with its principal national leaders, out in the new states, which grew out of British India's provinces, political predominance now passed into the hands of their rich peasant leaders in full consonance with all the evidence we have about the structures of rural society at that time. There it was to remain for several decades to come.

Thus it was that in the crucial period during which India embarked upon its long sought independence its political regime came to be enveloped in an extraordinarily comprehensive alliance of elites that also enjoyed very considerable public support. There was no such combination at the outset of independence in those parts that became Pakistan. (Nor indeed in most other countries which were now becoming independent).

This outcome was then conjoined with another major development. Back in the 1860s the British had instituted the beginnings of legislatures in India to which they then appointed so-called representative Indians'. During the 1890s their number was increased, and a form of indirect election was introduced. Thereafter by the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 elected Indian representatives were placed in a majority in these legislatures; while by the Montagu- Chelmsford reforms of 1919 half the provinces' executive positions were transferred to Indian hands. Admittedly all this continued to be upon a narrow franchise, while the British retained effective control. Nevertheless it gave Indian electoral politics an unusually long gestation period. Forty years ago John Broomfield also from this university published an account of the general election in Bengal in 1912-13 that could well have passed for an election study of far more recent times. By independence legislative elections were thus already entrenched as a well-established part of Indian elite politics.

The crucial developments came, however, in 1937 and then more emphatically in 1946. Till that time Congress, within the narrow franchise, had had a somewhat chequered experience of electoral politics. Its principal efforts had gone instead into its major succession of nationalist agitations. Whilst these usually pushed the British to the brink, they never succeeded in breaking their hold altogether.

In 1935, however, by the new Government of India Act of that year, the British conceded that extensive executive control in the Indian provinces should pass to elected Indian hands. Whilst some Congressmen saw a trap here, they eventually decided to compete in the ensuing elections in 1937, and in due course took office in the eight out of eleven provinces where they headed a majority.

To their utter amazement, they not only found that in doing so they elicited immense political support well beyond the enfranchised electorate. By embarking upon executive office they very soon discovered that they really did secure very substantial control over their provinces, affairs. That proved to be a crucial lesson that was reinforced by the failure of two further nationalist agitations during World War Two once again to break the British.

As a consequence once the war was over instead of mounting a further nationalist agitation the Congress leaders concentrated their attention on winning the elections that were called in 1946. Their hope was that by winning resounding victories for a second time they could secure control of India's central government, and thereby bring to fruition India's long sought independence. In the event that was exactly what happened.

The essential fact here is that whilst nationalist agitations were of major importance in pressuring the British, they never brought independence to India of themselves. That, we need to remind ourselves, eventually came as a result of Congress' success in the 1946 elections. There was a marked contrast here with Pakistan, where in spite of the Muslim League's success in those same elections in reserved seats for Muslims, it failed to secure unequivocal support for its campaign for Pakistan in the provinces that were territorially crucial to its achievement. Unlike India, that is, Pakistan did not achieve independence as a result of a resounding electoral victory, but as a consequence of the fateful decision to partition the sub-continent. The difference here was seminal. It meant on the Indian side that the immense importance of Congress' electoral success in securing independence gave electoral procedures there an unchallenged legitimacy which persists to this day; and that when conjoined with Congress' enveloping hold over India's functioning polity, that gave the accompanying institution of parliamentary government in India a rousing send-off as independence then ensued.

It was not always plain sailing. There have been more breakdowns of parliamentary government in India than in Africa. The position in my view has been saved, however, because, following similar provisions in the 1935 Government of India Act, India's system of 'President's Rule, provides that on the breakdown of a provincial government the central government can take full control of its operations until further elections can be held and parliamentary government can be put back on its rails once again. There is no occasion for a military takeover. In practice the system has frequently been abused. But in the one case when the centre imploded - Mrs Gandhi's emergency in 1975 - it constituted the behavioural model that even she found it quite impossible to circumvent.

I have one last point. In the forty years following independence India saw itself, following Nehru's lead, as a secular socialist state. There was always, however, an alternative ideology, which might well, have surfaced earlier if Nehru instead of Vallabbhai Patel had met an early death. The young Indian historian, Medha Kudaisya is showing that this alternative view was espoused by, amongst others, India's leading twentieth century industrial capitalist, G.D.Birla. Its essence was neatly expressed in the titles of Birla's two publications: the Hindustan Times and the Eastern Economist. He sought, that is, not a secular socialist but a Hindu capitalist state. In view of the liberalisation of the economy since the 1990s, and the accession to power of the Hindu oriented BJP, this is perhaps what we are now seeing. It makes one wonder whether the earlier tension between the anglicising and the orientalising faces of Indian nationalism, which I earlier mentioned are not at last being reconciled. But we shall see.

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	Faculty of Asian Studies