‘Over-centralised State monoliths don’t suit us... a flexible federal unity would’

Independent India is 75 years old. How would you reflect on its journey?

We have had a number of important successes but I am not entirely happy with the progress that we have made. On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of South Asian Independence and Partition in 2023, we organised two conferences at Harvard and Tufts, titled “Empire, Nation, Federation” and we will probably publish that as a book.

What happened in 1947 was that some of the best political and economic ideas that had animated our freedom struggle in the early decades of the 20th century lost out at the formal moment of political decolonisation.

For example, I think it is possible to see Partition ostensibly along religious lines, which involved the partition of Punjab and Bengal, as a failure to achieve the more enlightened vision of anti-colonial federalism. Many of our leaders had very creative ideas of how we could somehow pool our diversities, religious, linguistic or otherwise, into a large union.

But we tended to fail in that project. And we felt, on the 75th anniversary, that some of those ideas which may have lost out in the moment of formal political decolonisation have become more relevant and salient today. Certainly India and Pakistan should think in terms of a federal union.

Over-centralised State monoliths don’t suit our diverse societies. Diversity is our strength and we ought to know how to create that kind of a union. We made economic progress in many ways, but we haven’t yet tackled as well as we should have the problem of inequality.

So even if macroeconomic indicators look good and we can be proud of saying that the size of India’s economy is greater than that of the United Kingdom, our former colonial masters, but everyone should have an equitable share of that economic fruit.

Could you elaborate on the salient points that were lost out at the moment of decolonisation that are relevant today?

What happened at the end of the day in 1947 was that the Congress high command of that time inherited the British Raj’s unitary centre. And they were even prepared to pay the price of partition to take power at the helm of the centralised State apparatus. The more farsighted political thinkers and leaders had always believed that India’s unity can only be of a federal type. And that you have to acknowledge the distinctiveness of the various regions, respect various religious and linguistic diversities, and then build an overarching Indian unity.

So our greatest leaders, Mahatma Gandhi and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, were always respectful of the expression of differences, and then by assuring equality to everyone, whatever their particular identity might be, they wanted to build unity. I think that spirit did not find realisation because of the nature of the transfer of power in 1947. And even today, I feel that there is a tendency to go for over-centralisation.

And that centralisation is today based on some kind of religious majoritarianism. I think that is not the best way to achieve Indian unity. A flexible federal unity forged from below would be a stronger union.

So what’s the formulation in your mind of that?

Have more power for the states, but also give the different states, including smaller ones, a stronger voice in decision-making at the Centre. We should not be going just for more autonomy for the states. Much more important is to think about what should the Centre look like.

There are many who feel they don’t have a strong enough voice in decision-making at the Union level. We have to work out arrangements so that we are able to achieve that. Punjab was partitioned along with my home province Bengal. Just imagine, an undivided Punjab and an undivided Bengal would have played such a major role at a subcontinental level. But Punjab has 13 MPs, while UP has 80. So, naturally, there are those imbalances. How do we make sure that every state feels that it has a stake at the Centre?

What in your view caused Partition?

I don’t think you can identify a single cause. The British of course resorted to divide and rule. What is more, they decided to define majority and minority by privileging the religious distinction.

As a result, at the all-India level, for the first time, we began to think of Hindus as a majority and the Muslims as the most significant minority. But that equation got flipped in provinces such as Punjab and Bengal. So it wasn’t just religion, but religion being the basis on which to define majority and minority, that was the problem.

Ayesha Jalal suggested that Partition was a failure to work out an equitable power-sharing arrangement. If you don’t know how to share sovereignty, then you end up dividing land. And when you divide land, however you might draw the line of partition, you will leave vulnerable minorities. So it is always much better to share power than to divide land. But Partition is a historical reality.

Had Netaji been alive in 1947

Mahatma Gandhi may have missed his rebellious son, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, in 1947 because Netaji had shown how you could unite Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians... Had Netaji been there, he would have done his level best to work out an equitable sharing of power… I don’t think Partition would have happened.

Could the Congress leadership of the time have done better?

They could have. I think Mahatma Gandhi did not want the outcome that he had to accept. I do think that the Congress high command, both Nehru and Patel, could have done better because the idea of our freedom struggle was a united and Independent India. The price of Partition was a very high one to pay.

My own view, if I may offer a counterfactual, is that Mahatma Gandhi may have missed his rebellious son, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, in 1947 because Netaji had shown how you could unite Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians — everybody, Punjabis, Tamils, give them all a sense of belonging to the Indian nation. And you saw that unity at the time of the Red Fort trials even in late 1945-1946. So I think Gandhi felt that he was somewhat elbowed aside by his erstwhile political lieutenants while his rebellious son had shown the way, but was not there to prevent the tragedy.

Would history have taken a different course had Netaji been there maybe?

I do believe that had Netaji been there, he would have done his level best to work out an equitable sharing of power so that everyone felt that they belonged to an Indian nation.

I don’t think Partition would have happened. In his INA, he united the regional and linguistic groups. There were professional soldiers who may have been from Punjab but the civilian recruits were very often from Tamil Nadu. And he genuinely believed in the equality of genders. So equality was the foundation of building unity.

The government has been shedding colonial markers. Is that enough to erase the colonial legacy?

That is not enough. And also it partly depends on what you describe as colonial. I don’t think that we as Indians ever felt conquered by a colonial power until the British came. And, therefore, if you try to completely erase Mughal history, I think it does some violence to historical truth. What this government is doing is to talk about decolonisation.

And sometimes they do take the right steps in some of the renaming. But they don’t actually shed what are the most pernicious of our colonial inheritances. So, even the over-centralised State monolith that I was talking about a little while ago is a colonial inheritance.

When a government passes let’s say an amendment to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act as it did in 2019, it was in a sense bringing back the Rowlatt Act of 1919 with a vengeance. The British had introduced laws which enabled them to imprison Indians without trial, without charge. And we are seeming to want to rename or change the language of these laws into Sanskritic Hindi, but keep the essence of what the British repressive laws were all about.

Amended UAPA like Rowlatt

When a govt passes an amendment to UAPA as it did in 2019, it was in a sense bringing back the Rowlatt Act of 1919 with a vengeance. The British had introduced laws which enabled them to imprison Indians without trial, without charge. And we seem to want to rename or change the language of these laws into Sanskritic Hindi but keep the essence of what the British repressive laws were all about.

How do you see the developments in Bangladesh; your family had contributed to its liberation, Netaji Bhavan especially.

It is truly tragic. Netaji Bhavan was a major centre for supporting the Bangladesh liberation struggle. I met so many leaders of the Bangladesh freedom struggle at Netaji Bhavan. I used to go with my father to the Bangladesh border. I was a high school student in those days. My father, Shishir Kumar Bose, used to run a Netaji field hospital where wounded soldiers of the Bangladesh Mukti Bahini used to be brought and Indian doctors and surgeons would be taking care of them. He was also a paediatrician looking after the children in the refugee camps.

I have great regard for Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. It is just that in more recent years, Bangladesh under the Awami League seemed to take an authoritarian turn. Now there are many countries in the world where democracy is receding in the face of authoritarianism, or we have all manner of elected authoritarians all over the world. If you don’t leave any space to an Opposition, that can create real problems.

So the implications for India are worrying because we had put all our eggs in one basket and there has been a change of regime, and the movement which brought the Awami League and Sheikh Hasina down was not primarily of a right wing or of a religious fundamentalist kind. But then, what does the future hold? Sometimes, these popular movements are not able to translate themselves into an effective political alternative and in that kind of a scenario, you have political forces which are inimical both to the best interests of Bangladesh and of course of the region as a whole that could take advantage of such a situation. So we do face a major challenge and it’s not just Bangladesh.

I think one of the areas where we should have done better is in managing better relations with most of our smaller neighbours.

What is your view on the fears that the Hindu minority in Bangladesh is being targeted?

Bangladesh was created as a secular and a socialist, sovereign country and never denied the importance of religion as faith. Whenever I went to Bangladesh and rose to give academic lectures, they would pay equal respect to all of the religions, Islam but also Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity. So yes, under the new dispensation, there have been attacks on Hindus and I think we have to call upon the government of a neighbouring country to make sure that minorities are protected and given equal rights. By the same token, we bear an equal responsibility to make sure that our minorities have all the rights of equals.

Is the rise of authoritarianism a postcolonial phenomenon?

I think it is not just a postcolonial phenomenon. Even though the postcolonial countries may have some special features of this democratic authoritarianism, even the US may be moving towards democratic authoritarianism if Donald Trump wins a second term. It is an election which could go either way. There are many countries in Europe which are also facing this spectre of democratic authoritarianism. But, in our own instance, I think it is related to what I said a little while ago about the British having taught us that majority and minority must be defined on the basis of religious identity. If you say that on the basis of religion there is one group that is in a majority, then that is in some important way undermining genuine democracy where a majority has to be earned.

A political party should offer a programme which will then enable it to win a majority and that majority should be allowed to shift. But if you say that majority is based on the fact of religious identity, then that in itself undermines democracy and that too is a colonial inheritance. We need to rethink our very definition of majority and minority.

And what should that be?

Majority has to be earned. A majority can shift. It ought to be based on drawing support from people and citizens who may have many different identities. So, that is real democracy. Religious majoritarianism is antithetical to genuine democracy.

Why do you think democracy is receding worldwide?

This should be a moment when we have active citizenship. Our responsibility as citizens should not end with our right to vote in periodic elections. We have to hold elected representatives accountable in a much more significant way. And that is because when we reduce democracy to elections, what we get is simply a choice between a greater evil and a lesser evil.

Our democracy is an ideal which we must constantly aspire towards and not be satisfied as if we have got the final product.

What about dynastic politics, it prevents common citizens from entering politics.

I am opposed to dynastic politics. Just as majoritarianism is antithetical to democracy, I believe that dynasticism is also antithetical to democracy. There is nothing wrong if sons or daughters of politicians want to enter politics, but what has happened in India now both at the all- India level but also at the regional level —think about all the one-state parties that we have, they have become dynastic in a very extreme sense that there are just families who own political parties and that is not the right way forward.

Sometimes I’m asked, you belong to a well-known family. But the point is that, yes, I’m proud of the fact that my grandfather and my father and, of course, my granduncle too played important roles in our freedom struggle. But interestingly enough, no Bose has ever been a minister in post-Independence India. My mother was an academic all her life and then she had three terms in Parliament. She started by being a Congress MP. But then in Bengal, there was a split. And so for her second and third terms in the 12th and 13th Lok Sabhas, she was with the Trinamool Congress.

Even though there had been delimitation and there was a 10-year gap between my mother having finished her three terms and then I served a term. But again, my primary identity is that of a historian and scholar.

You are an ex-MP of the TMC, you don’t plan to re-enter politics?

There are challenges in being too embroiled in party politics these days. Because, well, I suppose you cannot expect any party to be perfect. But I cannot possibly represent a lesser evil. I would always want to represent a better alternative.

How do you see the RG Kar agitation against the ruling TMC in Bengal?

First of all, it was a terrible tragedy. I was rather heartened to see that ordinary citizens came out and orchestrated a popular movement of protest. Finally, this tragedy has stirred the conscience of ordinary people in Bengal and I felt a sense of complete solidarity with this popular movement. Bengal faces a real challenge. Grievances have been building up and this tragedy seems to be the final straw. We somehow need to find a way of cleansing Bengal of unacceptable levels of corruption and criminality, while not succumbing to the politics of religious bigotry.

You are saying that the TMC needs to course-correct?

Oh yes. If the TMC is to survive, it needs a very major course correction. There has to be a complete purging of the corrupt and criminal elements which have received patronage in the past.