In The National, Pankaj Mishra is dyspeptic about partition, which has led both India and Israel into a "moral wilderness" of nationalism. (I do wish he'd pointed out that the Pakistanis got a state, the Palestinians didn't.) He says in spite of "fierce PR," India's democracy has a scary underbelly, a long tradition of Hindu nationalism, now ascendant:
the Hindu nationalist-ruled state of Gujarat, while Mein Kampf remains
popular at bookstores – is one of the many sinister aspects of “rising”
India today. This cult of Hitler as a great “patriot” and “strategist”
grew early among middle-class Hindus. MS Golwalkar, the much-revered
Hindu leader and ideologue, wrote in 1938 that Nazi Germany had
manifested “race pride at its highest” by purging itself of the
“Semitic races” – and yet Golwalkar was also an admirer of Zionism.
This simultaneous veneration of Hitler and Israel may appear a
monstrous moral contradiction to Europeans or Americans who see Israel
as the homeland of Jewish victims of Nazi crimes. However, such
distinctions are lost on the Hindu nationalists, who esteem Nazi
Germany and Israel for their patriotic effort to cleanse their states
of alien and potentially disloyal elements, and for their militaristic
ethos. Many Indians and other colonised peoples hoped for Nazi Germany
and Japan to at least undermine, if not defeat, the British Empire. My
grandfather was among the Indians with a misplaced faith in Germany’s
military capacity. He would have been horrified by the facts of the
Holocaust if he had encountered them. But like so many Hindu
nationalists, his main political anxiety during those years after the
Second World War was whether Mother India would be partitioned into two
countries; the subsequent creation of Pakistan as a separate state for
Indian Muslims pushed all other historical traumas, especially those of
distant Europe, out of view.
