From New Lines Magazine.
A day after Narendra Modi first came to power in 2014, the Indian election received a certificate of decolonization from an unexpected quarter. An editorial in the British daily The Guardian titled “India: Another Tryst With Destiny,” declared that the day “may well go down in history as the day when Britain finally left India.” The headline was borrowed from one of the most popular political speeches of the 20th century, titled “Tryst with Destiny,” delivered by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, shortly before midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, when India gained independence from the U.K.
The 2014 election was a change of direction for India for several reasons — the foremost being that it was the first time that the right-wing Hindu nationalists could form a government with an absolute majority in the Indian parliament. The Bharatiya Janata Party had won 282 out of 543 seats. The editorial recognized this as a fundamental departure from independent India’s postcolonial trajectory, marking the end of an era in which India was governed by structures of power that were not very different from those during the British Raj.
“India under the Congress Party was in many ways a continuation of the British Raj by other means,” it said, a sentiment echoed strongly by the Hindu nationalists themselves.
They rue that in the aftermath of British colonialism, India continued to be ruled by a tiny Westernized elite, epitomized by Nehru, whose worldview, lifestyles and political and social aspirations were closer to the erstwhile colonial rulers than to those they ruled. It is only since 2014, they say, that political power has passed to those who truly represent the social and cultural ethos of India. This new Hindu nationalist elite claims that India is now being fundamentally decolonized in a departure from the seven decades that preceded Modi’s rule.
Formally, decolonization refers to that period when several countries across Asia and Africa gained political independence from European colonial rule in the mid-20th century and emerged as sovereign nation-states. But over the decades it has come to signify that political liberation alone cannot shed the continued legacies of colonialism that manifest in the political, social and cultural psyches of the colonized, including the lingering belief that Western civilization is the pinnacle of human history and progress.
Around the world, particularly in the intellectual and academic circles of the West, this idea of decolonization has gained a new currency over the past few years. The movement’s demands have included changing Eurocentric syllabuses in university classrooms; reparations for slavery, genocide and plunder in erstwhile colonies; and returning looted artifacts that adorn the grand museums of Europe. Statues of imperialists have been toppled. From the continuing devastating effects on the physical health of the colonized to the colonial roots of climate change, newer generations are coming to terms with colonization’s lingering effects and increasingly attempting to decolonize different aspects of life affected by colonial rule.
In the West decolonization has mostly been a project undertaken by the liberal and radical left, while in contemporary India it is the right-wing Hindu nationalists who have become the ideological and political force aggressively pushing the decolonization agenda into the mainstream.
Sanya Dhingra is a New Delhi-based journalist and writer.
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