India: The Seige Within

Mj Akbar

Description

ndia: The Siege Within is a non–fiction work by M J Akbar, who is the national spokesperson for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and an influential journalist. He has authored many political non-fiction works like Kashmir Behind The Vale, Riot After Riot and Nehru: The Making Of India. M J Akbar was editor–in–chief for India Today and The Deccan Chronicle and also launched a weekly newspaper called “The Sunday Guardian” in 2010. India: The Siege Within is a riveting attempt by this journalist and gives an account on how present India exists and what role unity plays, with its diverse population. The book also addresses the issues relevant to the Hindu and Muslim diaspora.
M J Akbar regards his book as an account of the policies that India has adopted for democracy and how some of the policies have both worked and failed. The book traces the origin of real Indian polity, which starts from 1947 and how prior to that there was not much deliberation on the separation of Hindu and Muslim states. He also points out the role of the British administration of the time and how he believes that nationality should have nothing to do with what religion you belong to. He says he is an Indian first, especially at a time when the freedom of his nation is concerned. India: The Siege Within also highlights the origins of the cracks in the unity of India, which have traces in the history of nation’s freedom struggle.
The book is a well-documented and researched work, which delves into the emotions which binds and unites a nation, which has undergone massive changes with regard to the political affiliations of the people within. Author M J Akbar tugs at the heart of India’s development as a united country on the global map. The new edition of the book was published by Roli Books in 2003 and is available in paperback.
Key Features:
India: The Siege Within–Challenges To A Nation’s Unity sheds light on the present and past political scenes that made India what it is today.
This book is an accurate and detailed account have been accumulated by M J Akbar, making this an interesting and engaging read.

Sujets

• Political Science
• Hindú
• Diáspora
• Musulmán
• The Deccan Chronicle
• Golden rule (law)
• Unity in diversity
• M. J. Akbar
• Policy
• India Today
• Bharatiya Janata Party
• Politics
• Non-fiction
• Muslim
• Hindu
• Asian
• World
• Muslim ben al-Hajjaj
• Democracy
• Challenges
• Independence
• BJP
• Partition
• Population

Informations

• Publié par: Roli Books
• Date de parution: 08 février 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788193600979
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

MJ Akbar is among those who have made a significant impact on Indian society by their writing, whether as authors or editors. Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the seminal newsmagazine, Sunday , in 1976, and The Telegraph in 1982, he revolutionized Indian journalism in the 1970s and 80s. In the 1990s he launched The Asian Age , a multi-edition daily that once again had substantive impact on the profession. He has also served as the Editorial Director of India Today , Headlines Today and as the editor of the Deccan Chronicle and the Sunday Guardian .
MJ, as he is popularly known, first entered public life in 1989, when he was elected to the Lok Sabha. He went back to media in 1993, and returned to the political area in 2014, when he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and became the party’s national spokesperson during the 2014 campaign led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In July 2016, he was named the Minister of State for External Affairs by Prime Minister Modi.
His seven books have achieved great international acclaim: Kashmir: Behind the Vale ; India The Siege Within ; Nehru: The Making of India ; Riot-after-Riot ; The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity ; Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan ; and Blood Brothers , his only work of fiction. In addition, there have been four collections of his columns, reportage and essays.
 
OTHER TITLES BY MJ AKBAR
Blood Brothers: A Family Saga
Byline
Have Pen, Will Travel: Observations of a Globetrotter
Kashmir Behind the Vale
Nehru: The Making of India
The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity
OTHER LOTUS TITLES Ajit Bhattacharjea Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah: Tragic Hero of Kashmir Anil Dharker Icons: Men & Women Who Shaped Today’s India Aitzaz Ahsan The Indus Saga: The Making of Pakistan Alam Srinivas & TR Vivek IPL: The Inside Story Amarinder Singh The Last Sunset: The Rise & Fall of the Lahore Durbar Amjad Ali Khan My Father Our Fraternity: The Story of Haafiz Ali Khan B.K. Trehan & Indu Trehan Retired But Not Tired: Retirement Made Easy Indira Menon The Madras Quartet: Women in Karnatak Music Jaiwant Paul The Greased Cartridge: The Heroes and Villains of 1857-58 John Lal Begam Samru: Fading Portrait in a Gilded Frame Lakshmi Vishwanathan Women of Pride: The Devdasi Heritage Roli Guide Madan Gopal My Life and Times: Munshi Premchand Madhu Trehan Tehelka as Metaphor Rachel Dwyer Yash Chopra: Fifty Years in India Cinema Ralph Russell The Famous Ghalib: The Sound of my Moving Pen Salman Akthar The Book of Emotions Sharmishta Gooptu Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation Shrabani Basu Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan S. Hussain Zaidi Dongri to Dubai Sunil Raman & Rohit Aggarwal Delhi Durbar: 1911 The Complete Story Swapan K. Bandyopadhyay An Unheard Melody: Annapurna Devi an Authorised Biography Thomas Weber Going Native: Gandhi’s Relationship with Western Women Thomas Weber Gandhi at First Sight Zubin Mehta Zubin Mehta: The Score of My Life FORTHCOMING TITLE Shahrayar Khan Bhopal Connections: Vignettes of Royal Rule Aruna Roy The RTI Story: A People’s Movement for Transparency
 

 
ROLI BOOKS
This digital e published in 2018
First published in 2003 by
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Copyright © M.J. Akbar, 2003
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eISBN: 978-81-9360-097-9
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For Ammiji and Abbaji with love and gratitude
 
CONTENTS
Introduction
I. THE BIRTH OF PAKISTAN AND THE SURVIVAL OF INDIA
1. The Rationale of 1947
2. Mullah Power in Pakistan
3. Masters, Not Friends
4. The Believer
5. ‘Is the Weather Freezing?’
6. A Home for Gandhi’s Soul
7. The Rise of the Jailbird
8. The Man Who Changed the Map of India
9. The Roll-Call of Honour
10. The Great River
11. Past and Future
II. PUNJAB
1. The State of a Problem
2. An Old Fear
3. A Faith and Two Religions
4. Punjab versus Delhi: The First Sikh Homeland
5. The Identity Crisis
6. ‘Pagri Samhal, Jatta’
7. The Complex Minority
8. The Bargain Hunters
9. The Politics of Faith
10 Searching for Khalistan
11. Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale
12. Punjab: Death of a General
III. KASHMIR
1. Democracy in Paradise
2. Kings and Peasants
3. The Lion of Kashmir
4. Raiders of the Lost Cause
5. Nothing Proved
6. To Die an Indian
7. The Second Trial
8. Guilty till Proved Innocent?
9. ‘Glory to Mother Bharat’
10. A Phenomenon of Democracy
Index
 
INTRODUCTION
Carving up countries and kingdoms is as old as history. Boundaries, until quite recently, were no more than a measure of military strength or royal/national ambition. Partition was therefore the unsurprising fate of the defeated, or the merely unfortunate.
Before Europe set out to carve the world, it was busy carving itself up. The process was partially parallel; as some European powers seized the world, others tried to seize Europe. The logic of conquest in the tumult of nineteenth-century Europe often demanded partition. When wars were won by alliances, a division of the spoils became necessary. Victors supped on the vanquished, and sated themselves until their mistakes or miscalculations led to another shift in the balance of power, and perhaps role reversal. A country unlucky enough to be both strategically placed and weak, like Poland, was continually being redistributed in the name of someone else’s security. Maps were redrawn at great conferences or in secret deals, where greed, deceit, chicanery and maneuvering between kings and diplomats were far more complex than the comparatively straightforward encounters between generals on a battlefield.
The defeat of Napoleon, and the end to the havoc he created throughout Europe, released the energy of the victors for different, and dramatic, pursuits. The prevailing impetus of the age was empirical, in both the direct and implied senses of the term. Colonial rampage and expansion soon acquired a moral halo as victory fed notions of superiority which in turn were attributed to divine reward for earthly merit. The white man’s burden was easily nourished by sermons. Imperceptibly, the divine right of kings morphed into the divine right of races.
The two major victors of the Napoleonic wars were Britain and Russia. Whether because of the accident of geography, or the craft of good sense, they got out of each other’s way. Britain chose the sea routes to build her empire; Russia stretched towards the vast landmasses of the east and Muslim Central Asia. The pace of expansion echoed the sweep of Muslim armies in the seventh and eighth centuries and the Mongols of Chengiz Khan four centuries later.
France, understandably, withdrew from the race for the world, in which it had been heavily engaged before the Napoleonic storms; but later resurfaced to pick up parts of Africa and a nerve centre of South East Asia. Italy was too fragmented through the nineteenth century to be a world power. Spain stuck to the west of the Pope’s Line drawn in the fifteenth century to keep Spain and Portugal out of conflict with each other: Spain was assigned the Atlantic and Portugal the Indian oceans. Portugal consolidated her rich African colonies and Indian outposts.
Two European powers disturbed this comfortable distribution of the world. Austria and Germany sought their empires in Europe, leaving East Europe and West Asia to their World War I ally, the Ottomans of Turkey. As Austria waned in the nineteenth-century Germany waxed, united and energized. Germany’s ambitions sought space both to its east and west. It took two wars, the first a bit mistakenly called a world war, in the first half of the twentieth century for German ambition to self-destruct. The 1914–1918 war was bitter, costly, brutal and inconclusive because Germany, although defeated, was not ready to accept defeat.
Nor was the post-war world ready for a new order. America was as uncertain about the consequences of victory in 1918 as Germany was obstinate about her rejection of defeat. Britain, weakened, was yet to lose the arrogance of a nineteenth-century master race. The victors of World War I had no ideas beyond greed as they began to salivate over the carcass of the Ottoman empire and the colossal reserves of oil in the Arab and Persian deserts. It was still bright, but this was the evening light of the long English summer day. Winston Churchill might insist that the sun would never set on the British empire, but the vision of his class was impaired.
The British ruling class, a thin upper crust, could neither see the social upheaval created by the war at home, nor recognize the power of giants beginning to stir in the colonies. Mahatma Gandhi, with his acute eye, reached out to the British working class, even after boycotting their manufacture, and found a warm response. From their different perspectives, the workers of Britain and the enslaved of the colonies had one thing in common: both were hostile to the traditional British ruling class. Both wanted change. And both would get it at the same time, immediately after the World War II. It was not a coincidence that India became free when a Labour government was