Ponniyin Selvan in the light of History: Some Highlights

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Ponniyin Selvan, the literary extravaganza created by Kalki still remains, nearly seven decades after is initial publication, one of the most popular novels of contemporary Tamil Nadu. Rightly so. Well written, with a tight narrative, revolving around the intrigues of succession in the Chola court, against the background of the Chola invasion of Sri Lanka, this novel fulfils all the criteria of a Historical Novel enumerated by George Lukcas. The setting of the plot is reasonably accurate, the characters are plausible in that they are situated in the glare of History, and there is no overt "fictionalizing" or the introduction of extra historical details. Like we cannot tae Sir Walter Scot's Waverly Novels as a record of medieval history, we cannot assume that Kalki has got his facts or perspective right. And that was not his goal.

The chronological framework of the Novel (PS) was derived from   Nilakanta Sastri's magnum opus, The Cholas which was published by the Madras University. The role of the Palluvettaraiyars, the clan to which Nandhini belonged was loyal to the Cholas right to the bitter end when Jatavarman Kulasekara Pandya triumphed over the Cholas in the thirteenth century and therefore the huge question mark over the loyalty of this Clan is not backed by evidence, though the twist does impart a dramatic dimension to the plot. The death of Rajaditya in the Battle of Takkolam in 949 AD is attested to by historical records like the Tiruvanladu Copper Plates and it also records the "disappearance" of Aditya, a subtle euphemism for the assassination, as shown in PS. The removal of Aditya the son of Sundara Chola Parantaka II (956-923) paved the way for Arulmorrivarman to ascend the throne as Rajaraja I (985-1014). A silence in the historical record is transmuted into an eloquent conspiracy, and this indeed, may have been so, but the records are silent. 

The Big Temple at Tanjavur has been studied by this Historian in the M S Najaraja Felicitation Volume and in the K V Ramesh Memorial Volume and so I will not go over those details here. However there are two curious details from the cinematic depiction of PS that are important.  These pertain to the use of the Horse as a fighting platform and the state of Naval Technology in Chola Tamil Nadu. Of course, Kalki has used his imagination and we are not faulting him for that. We are merely testing the cinematic depiction against contemporary records,

The figure on the left is from the Mandapa od the Srirngam Ranganatha Swami Temple. This sculpture depicts a horseman and belongs to the 15th century, after the temple had been rebuilt and reconsecrated by the Vijayanagara Rayas. What is to be noticed here is the absence of the stirrup, that vital innovation that is a force multiplier, the speed and weight of the horse to hurl the mounted soldier against his adversary. It is the stirrup that enables the rider to stay bolt upright and balance himself on the horse. The stirrup was unknown in South India until the advent of the Muslim Conquest in the fourteenth century. The battle scenes shown in the film PS show horses with saddles to which are attached stirrups, and as such anachronisms, in the bright glare of History.

The ships and water crafts shown in PS celebrate visual design not historical accuracy. Only one solitary example of a 13th century Indian Ship has been found so far and that too in distant Kerala. The Lateen sail shown on ships plying between Chola Ports and Sri Lanka were introduced only in the 13th century, and the Arabs were probably responsible for this technological advance. B Arunachalam in his Chola Navigation Package has illustrated Chola sea crafts of the time of Rajaraja I.

The Chola vessels were certainly sea worthy and the claim of Rajendra I that he conquered lands across the "rolling seas" is certainly true as they are attested by inscriptions found in the Gankaionda Chola Puram Temple. However, the shape and design and technical details are still unknown. And the reason is due to the heavy dose of identity politics and fanciful theories that dominate the field.

In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo=Ocean Railway and the Tragedy of French Colonialism ( A Review)

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Forest of No Joy

  Forest of No Joy: The Congo Ocean Railway      and the Tragedy of French Colonialism

   J P Daughton

   W W Norton and Company

    New York 2021.

   

   This book has been shortlisted for the               Cundill      Prize in History and it will not         surprise me if      it wins the Prize. Post             Colonialism in contemporary       historical       scholarship   privileges a set of themes which reinforce the  dominant ideological themes in western  society: political correctness, black lives matter, and a belief in race equity. In this book we have all three in good measure. 

Post colonialism has essentially hitched its wagon to the dominant ideological discourse emanating from western media and academia. Race Equity, identity politics and racial justice. Obviously the enormous human cost involved in the construction of this railway makes it an attractive proposition for such investigation that can stir the liberal western/white "Conscience" while skirting all important political and economic issues. For example, Racism can be critiqued as the institution animating western dominance over Africa and indeed other parts of the world. But the diplomatic and political contexts are to be studiously avoided. The defeat of France at the hands of Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 provided the immediate spur to colonialism in Africa and Germany encouraged this by essentially allowing France a free pass, wink-and-nod at the leap across the Mediterranean on the part of the Chancellor Bismarck. The entire edifice of western domination was built on racial ordering of the human race and the ideology of Progress made colonial societies inured to the costs they imposed on societies they ruled. In the case of the Congo-Ocean Railway too, we find the same allure of Progress an philosophical conceit that virtually dehumanises non white peoples and cultures. The author recognises this aspect when he states that European history recorded its achievements not the trauma of indigenous societies. Since the recognition of the Holocaust as a fact of History, Historians have adopted the eschatology of bearing witness and we find this element in the present book.

The route

   The French acquired the Congo       after the Congress of Berlin             when Belgium was given a part       of the same region. While the           horrors of Belgian Congo are           well documented, little is known     about French Congo. Before the       advent of the French, Dahomey,       the most powerful state in                 Central   Africa was the backbone of the Atlantic Slave Trade supplying slaves to both the Arab and European Slavers. This important fact is not even mentioned in this book, a bow towards political correctness. 

A cartoon lampooning the Railway 

   The Congo-Ocean Railway linked Brazzaville to Pointe-Noire on the Atlantic coast, very close to the notorious Slave Coast of Atlantic Africa. In terms of todays costs the entire 512 km railway cost around 2 billion US dollars and in terms of lives lost, around 17,000 men women and children as Child labour was not discouraged. Till this day the Congo-Ocean Railway is still the only railway track in the region.

The author documents in extreme detail the miserable conditions in which the workers toiled.  Since the region was forested and thinly populated, the colonial administration guaranteed the construction company, Bartignolles, the labour force it needed and this proved to be the original sin. Workers had to be "recruited" from Chad nearly 1500 kilometers to the north and all sorts of methods were employed. Chiefs were required to supply a quota of men and if they did not comply they were subjected to beatings in front of their villagers. Further able bodied men were kidnapped and taken in rows bound by coffle to the neck in the same humiliating fashion of slaves and any resistance was met with brute force. Men were shot and beaten to death and no questions were asked. Andre Gide who visited the region when Pacha was the Administrator wrote about the cruelties inflicted upon the people of the region. The Deputies, particularly the Socialists, raised questions in the Assembly and soon the furore died down. The living conditions of the workers was horrible and there was hardly any medical assistance at hand. Even the International Labour Organization did little more than ask a few perfunctory questions.

This book makes sad reading and even if we do not doubt the humanitarian spirit of the Historian, the larger question is: What are we do when confronted with such immense moral issues. Societies that have profited from such exploitation must give a percentage of their GDP as reparations to the affected region. This is the need of the hour. Not pious thernodies.

SALVATORE BABONES AND THE DEFENSE OF INDIA, INDIAN DEMOCRACY AND CIVILIZATION; AN ESSAY

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Dr Salvatore Babones

  Dr Salvatore Babones,a Sociologist trained in the John Hopkins University and now an Associate Professor of Sociology in Sydney University, Australia, has kicked up a huge storm by coming out in defense  of India, with all guns blazing. While there is a sharp polemical streak in his popular writings, Dr Babones as a Sociologist he is essentially a sympathizer  of the Left with a bias towards World Systems approach pioneered by Immanuel Wallerstein. Therefore, he does not take the received discourse at its face value. He excavates the evidence and vivisects te data for possible errors and inconsistencies. Nothing remarkable about the method as Historians have been doing just that for over 2000 years, What is new and novel is the ease with which Dr Babones is able to deconstruct the hegemonic discourse from Western Capitals and of course, his own homeland, the USA. 

Dr Salvatore Babones knows how to handle Big Data and subject them to critical scrutiny. All the Data that the ranking agencies lie V-DEM, Freedom House, and the Economist deploy in their Reports are all available in public domain and are generated by the Government of India through its own specialised Statistical wings like the National Sample Survey, Niti Ayog, Reserve Bank of India, and of course, Crime Statistics compiled by the Ministry of Home Affairs. The Ranking Agencies do not contest the validity of the Data and when China provides falsified and inaccurate data none of them dare call out the communist entity due perhaps to the heavy load of western investments there. The narrative report created by the ranking agencies are based on the information provided by "intellectuals, journalists and professors" in the target countries. Dr Babones is certainly right when he says, and he received considerable flak for his intellectual honesty, that Indian "intellectuals" are anti India and are willing partners in the international game of demonising India and vilifying the country. He  however takes a Pollyanna view when it comes to the Ranking Agencies themselves and he says that they are objective but are misled by the Indian informants. I think the answer is not so simple. The Western Ranking Agencies choose "experts" who are known for their political views and ideological pretenses. They essentially round up the usual suspects and ask them to provide an analysis which the "expert" gladly does thereby winning the kudos from his backers and can strut in India with the injured look of a martyr who "speaks truth to Power". 

Where does the problem start, at the Indian end or in Europe and USA. Dr Babones has rightly stated in his now famous article in The Quadrant that  the fall in India's ranking as a Democracy dates back to 2014, the very year Narendra Modi came to Office following an electoral landslide in his favor. And the criticism grew even sharper after he repeated his victory in 2019. It is obvious that the discourse on Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights, carries a huge burden of western liberal expectations, and has nothing to do with  ground realities. Some of the prominent figures who are known to be pro western and who are able to get published in the liberal platforms such as Washington Post, New York Times and the Guardian have been booked by the Government of India for fraud and that has nothing to do with their journalism but more related to crowd funded scams for COVID relief which were conveniently transferred to personal accounts. Even USA has laws against Money Laundering, Wire Fraud and the like. The context is deliberately obscured and a discourse of Freedom of the Press being threatened with the active collusion of such hucksters.

The fall in India ranking in the Hunger Index caused considerable consternation in India with loud mouths in India latching on to what appeared to be a drastic fall under the watch of Narendra Modi. Even I was taen by surprise as I have mentioned in my Blogs that the Direct Transfer Benefits to the low income groups and the free distribution of food grains directly to the target population were some of the innovations introduced by Modi through the linking of National Identity Card (AADHAR) with Bank Accounts.  Babones pointed out that the fall in ranking was due to the false data given in 2013 by the UPA regime which was not corrected by the new Government. In a poor resource constrained country like India, targeted distribution is the only solution. There can be no Universal Distribution Scheme  in India and if ranking agencies cannot understand the rationale, India could care less.

Indian Social Sciences is a discipline that mimics, imitates and copies the intellectual trends in western countries and so we are not surprised that "Social Scientists" in India have a Pavlovian response to the promptings of their handlers and so play ball. Most of the assessments provided by the Indian informants are either misleading or deceitful as Dr Babones has stated on several occasions. Another flawed method used to downgrade India and its Civilization is to use absolute figures, especially crimes against women, and paint a dreadful picture. However when factored for population, then India comes across as a safe country. While I do not want be belabor the point, there is no escape form the fact that the false reportage is due to the complicity of Indian "experts". And most of them work in Public funded Universities and face no administrative or legal issues shows that academic  freedom/license is indeed very high and is systematically misused against India and its image.

People of India must be grateful to scholars like Dr Salvatore Babones for their trenchant rebuttal of the fae narratives pedaled against India.

Was Rajaraja I a Hindu? Let the Historical Evidence speak fr itself

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

 Rajarajesvara Temple, Tanjavur

  Rajaraja I (985-1014), a splendid   monarch, has now become the   centre  of an unseemly controversy   over his depiction in Mani Ratman's   magnum opus, Ponniyin Selvan, a   film based on Kalki's novel of the   same name, published more than 70   years ago. Virulent debates over   identity  and ideology are the stuff of Indian public discourse, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The term "Hindu" was first used by Al-Biruni in his book/kitab on India and he used that term to designate the indigenous people of India, as opposed to the invading Turks/ turushka as they were called in Indian records. Obviously then we cannot hope to find a "Hindu" identity expressed as such in the contemporary Chola records. However, the fact remains that the Cholas were deeply embedded in the practice and propagation of Saiva religion with a pronounced leaning towards Saiva Siddhantha. Aghorasivacharya and Umapatisivacharya were both important commentators on Raurava Agama, a foundational text of Saiva Siddhantha.

In the nineteenth century, Saiva Siddhanta became the ideological armature of the nascent Dravidian Movement and hence tried to distance  itself from mainstream Saivism and the hangover of this ideological rupture exists until this day. Let us look at the contemporary evidence and see where it leads us.

The deity enshrined in the Great Temple consecrated by Rajaraja I on the 20th day of the 26th year of the reign of Rajaesari, the regnal title of the King was Dakshina-Meru-Vittankar. a definite indication of adherence to Isvara/Siva. On the same occasion Rajaraja I assumed the title, Siva-pada-sekara, a potent exhibition of a leaning towards Saiva faith. Another important piece of evidence is the reference to Pasupatas and Kalamukas, radical Saivite sectarian groups who were placed in charge of the funerary shrines built by Rajaraja I (pallippadai) at Melpadi for Arinjiya.

Rajaraja I signature

K A N Sastri on whom Kalki depended for the historical details has stated that Rajaraja I was an "ardent follower of Siva" and the titles that he displayed on the walls of the Temple at Tanjavur stand testimony to his religious faith.

The beautiful mural found in the Temple is a depiction of the king with his Saiva preceptor, and this mural puts paid to any lingering doubts one may entertain about the religious affiliations of Rajaraja I.

The term Hindu carries with it, at least in the medieval period, the sense that the term refers only to the indigenous inhabitants of Bharatvarsha and was not used to express the religious identity. The confusion between an ethnic label with a religious identity which was distinct from Islamic identity was caused by the Turkish Sultans who began to talk of non Moslems as Hindus. And it appears that the confusion still persists.

Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India A Review

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Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India

Jessica Namakkal

New York Columbia University Press, 2021.

Pondicherry has perfected the art of the revolving door politics. Political loyalties are fluid and personalities matter more than party ideology or organization. Jessica Namakkal has studied the politics of the French Colony from the middle of the nineteenth century till the establishment of the township of Auroville in 1968, a dream project of the Mother of the Ashram. Are the two institutions, the Ashram created by Sri Aurobindo and the township of Auroville inspired by the utopian ideal of finding perfection in human societies. Her argument that both these institutions represent a continuity with the colonial past makes sense in the light of recent developments. 

Pondicherry merged with the Indian Union in 1954 and the process of achieving the "merger" was fraught with both drama and hard nailed real politik. This book unpacks some of the main contours of the social and institutional changes that took place in the region as a direct consequence of French policies initiated during the Third Republic. Her area of study is restricted to the Pondicherry region and ignores the developments in Chandranagore near Calcutta now Kolkata. An aspect of recent history that all historians dealing with what is grandly termed "decolonization" ignore is the fact that French territories in India, as distinct from Indo-Chine was the allegiance to Fighting France under Charles de Gaulle during the years of the Second World War. As an ally, French authorities were ably assisted by the Police and other agencies of British India. In the interwar years a number of political prisoners took refuge in Pondicherry including Sri Aurbindo, V S S Iyer, Vanchinathan and Bharathi. After the outbreak of World War II the tide turned towards repression and the use of non state muscle men called "goondas" in the local patios. Jessica uses the same term throughout the book without the least irony or explanation. 

Pondicherry during the Third Republic was the site of a republican experiment that tries unsuccessfully to weld the revolutionary idea of Egalite or equality with the new fangled ideas of Racism and civilizational hierarchies were being discussed in the Parisian saloons and intellectuals. The justification for French colonialism was their mission civilisatrice or Civilizing Mission. The republican adherence to the values of the Revolution meant that citizenship was extended to colonial subjects and in this France under the Third Republic was certainly more progressive than the Portuguese, Dutch and the British colonizers. This progressive measure was tempered by the formal renunciation of Indian customs and religion. The introduction of this policy created conditions that were to complicate the transition to Indian statehood. The author seems to imply that the French authorities freely deployed armed men to attack and sometimes even kill those who were in favor of Indian statehood/merger in the contrived linguistic use in Pondicherry. 

The fact is that the conditions of World War II and the relatively smooth relations between French and British authorities introduced an element of uncertainty as far as the future of Pondicherry was concerned. And given the caste configuration of Pondicherry, the French authorities unlike the British permitted the tapping of toddy and settled a sizeable number (nadar/gramini/ udaiya) in areas lie Saram, Mudiliarpet, Bahour and Karaikal. The lucrative liquor vends were largely in the hands of these privileged groups and so a steady pool of armed men ready and able to enforce the will of their French masters was readily available and this was a factor that contributed to the violence that Rajkumar and B Krishnamurthy have spoken of.

This book is written in a style and tenor of a "post colonial" narrative. There are important issues that have been left out and the thesis that the Ashram and Auroville represnt colonial legacies can be contested. However this is an important contribution to the recent history of Pondicherry.

Imran Khan, History and Political Rhetoric: The Islamic Republic of Pakistan is falling apart

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Battle of Plassey, 1757

   Imran Khan, the recently deposed Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is shaking things up in his country. Pakistan is caught in the vice like grip of two crises of its own making: the Islamic militancy or Taliban attacks from Afghanistan and the rising volume of attacks from the militants fighting the Army in Baluchistan. Added to this is the economic crisis that is inexorably leading Pakistan to an economic collapse, And Sri Lanka comes immediately to mind. China, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates have all refused to bale out the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and default of its debts is on the cards. Against this grim scenario let us see what the cricketing hero Imran Khan has been doing.

Ever since his removal from office, He has been criss crossing the country in a chopper commandeered from the Government of Khyber Pakahtunwa, where Imran Khan's PTI is in office and has addressed massive gatherings (jalsa) in Islamabad, Attock, Jallalabad, Faisalabad, and several other important cities. In spite of all the road blocks thrown up by a shaky regime, Imran Khan has succeeded in taking his message to the very heart of the Electorate. It does not take a psephologist like our own C Voter Organization to predict a substantial victory for the PTI in KP, Sind and parts of Baluchistan. In Punjab the Sheriff Family has a substantial base. Everywhere Imran Khan has been driving home the same message: betrayal of the mandate by a corrupt criminal gang out on bail. He is of course hitting out against the Sheriff Family including Nawaz who stands convicted and the present Prime Minister, Shabazz Sheriff who is out on bail. Khan's rhetoric is so impassioned that it draws immediate reaction from the crowd. The disturbing element in his political strategy is the deliberate use of Islamic Religious identity to sell his political image. Drawing on the Koran he has constructed a political theology that essentially states that a good muslim will stand with Imran Khan against traitors who conspired with internal and external enemies of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Of course, USA is singled out as the external enemy.

Imran Khan political rhetoric combines historical examples and searing contempt for the present rulers. When I was a boy Cherry Blossom was only a shoe polish. In Pakistan Cherry Blossom is the preferred term of endearment for Shabazz Sherif. Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto is often spoken of as a Bimari (disease) that rhymes with Zardari. The most devastating attack is reserved for Nawaaz Sherif and Shabaaz Sheriff who are called Mir Jafer and Mir Sadiq. It is not quite clear  who is identified by these names.

In his use of History, Imran Khan is  much too careless. He repeatedly states that Siraj ud Daullah, the Nawab of Bengal, was the representative of the Mussalman Mughal rulers. Nothing can be further from the truth. The Mughals had ceased to be a factor in Indian politics by the first decade of the eighteenth century when the Mahrattas rose to prominence and were raiding territories from Punjab to Bengal. In fact Siraj ud Daullah's maternal grandfather Alivardi Khan had stopped even recognizing Mughal Hukkumat (regime). Mir Jafer was the candidate propped by  Ghasiti Begum, the widow of the late ruler who himself had seized the throne by deposing Safraz Khan. In the Battle of Plassey, Mir Jaffer held back his troops thereby Robert Clive claim his first major military victory in India. Of course, the Battle of Plassey and later the Battle of Buxar paved the way for the rule of the East India Company. Given the factional nature of loyalties in precolonial India, Mir Jaffer was not betraying his state. He was only furthering his factional agenda. Mir Sadiq, is said to have betrayed Tipu Sultan.

Imran Khan is setting fire to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. He is effectively using the themes of treachery, slavery, economic collapse, foreign debt and the War on Terror as effective weapons against the current regime. It is certain that his message resonates with the youth.

The Nine Lives of Pakistan Dispatches' from A Divided Land by Declan Walsh A Review

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The Nine Lives of Pakistan Dispatches from a Divided Land

Declan Walsh

Bloomsbury 2021

I heard of this book in a YouTube pod cast of the Lahore Book Club presented by Shri Adnan Moiz and since I am a keen observer of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and have been following the byzantine politics of the Garrison State rather closely. The dramatic events leading to the exit of Shri Imran Khan has had the nation transfixed even as the Soap Opera unfolded over an entire month. It seems that the Establishment, the Paistani euphemism for its Deep State consisting of the Army and its Secret Service finally had its way. 

This book by Declan Walsh, a correspondent of the New York Times and The Guardian, who spent a decade covering Pakistan from the closing years of the Premiership of Benazir Bhutto through the years of Nawaz Sheriff follows the developments on the political stage by in-depth interviews with men and women not the movers and shakers but humble folks. Friends in low places help us understand reality better than friends perched higher up the ladder. He seeks out human rights activists like the woman lawyer Asma Jehangir, the "encounter specialist" of the Karachi Police and follows the adventurers of a true believer in the Islamic Jihad, Colonel Imran as he sped from Taliban hideouts in Waziristan to a dusty death on the road to Peshawar. Like a cat Pakistan has had Nine Lives and how many of them has it used.

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan made wrong political and ideological choices and the society is paying a huge price for them. The whole idea of Pakistan as a home for Indian Muslims which culminated in the state being created by the British did not involve even the courtesy of a perfunctory consultation with the indigenous populations of the region that came to be called Pakistan. Thus Punjab, Sindh, North West Frontier Province now called Khyber Pukhtunwa  were not taken into confidence. The result is the huge fault line the divides the Mohajirs from India and the rest of the population. The Mohajirs are a discriminated lot and have turned to urban terrorism in Karachi in order to carve out political space for themselves. The MQM is a potent political force and its exiled leader Altaf is able to control the city from his exile in London. 

The other fault line is more elemental and this goes back to 1893 when the Durand Line was established. I have given the link of my study of the Durand Line here.https://wordcraftandstatecraft.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-great-game-all-over-again-durand.html. The Historical and geopolitical aspects of the 1893 Boundary are spelt out in my essay. More important is the fact that Zia ul Haq the Military Dictator of Pakistan walked into the American trap in Afghanistan with his eyes wide shut. A Soviet occupied Afghanistan could have been prevailed upon to accept the Durand Line as the international border. Instead the Pakistani Army and its ISI entered th war against the Soviets by acting as conduits for supplying weapons and arms to the "mujahudeedn" the freedom fighters who were recruited on a pan Islamic basis thereby laying the foundation for the Global Jihad that we see all around us. The second mistake was to fall under American threats and signing up on the War on Terror in 2001. US for reasons that are as yet unclear decided that al Qaeda was behind the attack on the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11. Consequently Pakistani Army was forced to fight the very Taliban it had created trained and helped capture power in Afghanistan. Now the War of Terror turned out to be a disaster both for Pakistan and Afghanistan. The unrestricted use of drones in their war killed large number of civilian non combatants. Link:http://bahuvirupaksha.joeuser.com/article/426514/president-barack-obamas-play-station-war In this Essay we have assessed the impact of Drone attacks and Declan Walsh has drawn attention to the fact that only Imran Khan condemned the attacks. The American War on Terror turned Pakistan into an enemy and the Taliban have not forgotten that betrayal and unfortunately the Army and its leadership seems to be quite indifferent to the ground reality.

The most fascinating part of the book is his use of personal stories to flesh out the rancid realities of politics in Pakistan. The life of the Imam of the Red Mosque who became the founding member of the TeT and the life of Salmaan Taseer are both done to bring out the deepening social divide in Pakistan. The western elite lead a life insulated from the harsh realities of price rise, fuel shortages, lack of medicines and health facilities while the poor have only their Allah and their religion for comfort. The result is a deadly cocktail of social unrest and religious fanaticism and Wash uses the example of Qadri the man who shot and killed Salmaan Taseer to show how deep the poison of religion has seeped. And this toxic legacy is here to stay.

Walsh is careless in his research. On page 70 he writes that Gandhi was killed by the RSS. This narrative was pushed by Nehru and his cohorts but the reality is that the Courts and three Commissions of Inquiry appointed by the Government of India has shown conclusively that the RSS had nothing to do with the killing of Gandhi. By lining Gandhi's assassination with the RSS Nehru sought to gain political mileage in the  days  following the Partition. It is not necessary for a western journalist to repeat this canard even in a book for a general audience. 

I liked this book as I am familiar with the main events. However there are larger questions that Walsh ignores. Pakistan today is caught in a quagmire of Jihadi inspired militancy, Taliban assertion, Baluchi resistance and Sindhi Nationalism. Its survival is now seriously in doubt as the leaders have made wrong choices at each and every critical moment of its history. The War on Terror is the most recent and accepting Chinese loans for the CPEC is another. India will watch what is happening and will not interfere.