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Who are the Rohingya?

28 Thursday Sep 2017

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The plight of the Rohingya in Burma has yet again surfaced and momentarily captured international attention. Tens of thousands of Burma’s Muslim minority, residents of the western Burmese province of Rakhine, are fleeing across the border into Bangladesh to escape persecution. Typically, global attention has been fixated on ameliorating the immediate human tragedy while ignoring the deeper causes for the periodic unrest. As a result, there has been the inadvertent yet inevitable conflation of several fissures such as separatism, a fear of Islamism, and Buddhist nationalism; it has largely escaped notice that the Rohingya are often the targets of not just the Burmese military but also Rakhine Buddhists. The previous round of violence in 2012, for example, was precipitated by the military government’s move to grant many Rohingya citizenship (although the cassus belli was the gang rape of a Buddhist woman).

The latest spiral of violence began on August 25 when over 150 Rohingya terrorists launched a coordinated attack on a military base that housed the 552nd Light Infantry Battalion and 24 police stations across Rakhine. The predictable military reprisal has left tens of thousands homeless and some reports suggest that half the Rohingya population may have fled Burma. Two observations need to be made here: the first is the obvious that the roots of this violence go far back to even before Burmese independence in 1948, and the second is that the nature of the conflict has been shaped by external political realities and evolved over time.

Early Arakan was ruled by Indian kings and the province served as a launching point for Mauryan Buddhist missionaries on their way to Southeast Asia. The Muslim kingdom of Mrauk-U was established in 1430 with the help of the Bengal sultanate, though Islam is said to have reached the region by the tenth century. Arakan was only peripherally a part of the Burmese empire until 1784 when Mrauk-U fell to Bodawpaya of the Burmese Konbaung dynasty. However, a predominantly Buddhist socio-cultural milieu pulled Arakan in a manner that political suzerainty did not.

With the British annexation of Arakan into the Raj after the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1826 came the first modern waves of Muslim migration to avail of new agricultural opportunities. Returning local peasants who had fled the wars found that their land had been given away by the British to Bengali immigrants. So severe was the migration that Muslims, who constituted barely 10 percent of the population of Akyab (northern Rakhine) in 1869, were well over 33 percent by 1931. A 1941 British Report on Indian Immigration noted with some concern that the rapidly changing demographics “contained the seed of future communal troubles” and had foreboding remarks on the Islamicisation of Arakan.

World War II crystallised the cleavages between the migrant Muslims and the local Buddhists as the former sided with the British and the latter with the Japanese. By the end of the fighting, Muslims found themselves concentrated in Akyab while the rest of Arakan was held by the Buddhists. The brutality of modern war in the jungle created wounds between the communities that never healed and rumours began to surface that Akyab may be ceded by the British to Bengal to become part of the future state of (East) Pakistan than join Burma. There is no evidence this was considered seriously but both Archibald Wavell and Mohammad Ali Jinnah briefly flirted with the idea before turning it down.

Interestingly, Rakhine Buddhists, who are of a different ethnicity yet same religion from the majority Bamar, began an armed agitation for independence the same time the Rohingya were rebelling for a separate state in 1946. Yangon managed to remove the sting from these groups by the mid-1950s but over 50 armed ethnic groups remain in Burma and have been the targets of periodic offensives by the military. Many of the grievances of the Rakhine were resolved by the 1974 Burmese constitution; Prime Minister Ne Win’s Revolutionary Council renamed Arakan as Rakhine with the understanding that Burma is a federation of ethnicities. The same reforms rejected Rohingya appeals as it was argued that the term ‘Rohingya’ does not appear in any British document during their 122-year rule over Burma. The closest word to the term was ‘Rooinga,’ derived from Bengali and referring to geography rather than ethnicity.

In the 2010 elections, the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party won 35 of the 44 seats in the state legislature; it also became the second-largest bloc in the national House of Nationalities, which they have used to give voice to Buddhist concerns across Burma.

Such terms were not extended the Rohingya for a couple of reasons. The 1948 citizenship law clearly stated that only those whose ancestors lived within the borders of present-day Burma before 1823 would be eligible for citizenship, disqualifying the enormous wave of migrants that settled in Arakan under the British. While critics have argued that the 1982 law would have allowed a gradual, three-generation process of assimilation by recognising different classes of citizenship for those who moved to Burma before 1948 – associate, naturalised, and full – this was poorly implemented in the provinces due to the Rakhine fear of Islamicisation among the Rohingya.

Reports have surfaced at regular intervals of ties between Burmese Muslims and Pakistani intelligence, al Qa’ida, the Taliban, and Saudi Wahhabists. Fearing the introduction of jihadist tendencies in their country, the Rakhine have campaigned hard – politically as well as violently – against bringing the Rohingya into the Burmese fold. In fact, there was uproar in Burma when the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party tried to grant citizenship to the Rohingyas prior to the 2010 elections to counter the success of the RNDP in the polls.

As Anthony Ware of Deakin University has argued, the Rohingya-Rakhine hostility can best be explained by Michalis Michael’s theory of a double minority complex. In such a situation, the majority in a country feel as if they are a threatened minority competing for territorial survival and nationalistic autonomy. The Rakhine feel overwhelmed by the constant and centuries-old religious and territorial encroachment by their Muslim neighbours, their own minority status with respect to the ruling Bamar majority, and the international media that is hell-bent on ignoring their concerns for the sake of political correctness.

The minority Rohingya view of history is that Arakan was never Burmese until 1784 and the Muslim Mrauk-U kingdom validates their claim to the region. According to the Rohingya, the population influx from Chittagong was not of new migrants but the return of Muslims who had fled Burmese occupation. With the demographic and military power balance skewed against them, the Rohingya feel intensely insecure in a Burmese national narrative they neither wish to partake in nor belong.

Although it is easy for outsiders to proffer solutions to the Rohingya imbroglio, this is ultimately a question for the Burmese themselves: for the Buddhists if they can live with their Muslim neighbours as part of their nation or at least imagine Burma as a multi-national state, and for the Rohingya, if they can let go of Islam’s perpetuity clause on real estate, its harsh exclusivity practices, and belong to an infidel nation without making demands for special considerations and rights. Even then, this question may continue to fester as Burma’s demographic composition alters and may have to be revisited in a generation. After all, democracy does not reward who is right but only who is more plentiful. In that case, all we would have accomplished is to kick another problem on to our descendants.

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The Roots of Indian Foreign Policy

04 Saturday Mar 2017

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making-of-indias-foreign-policyPrasad, Bimal. The Making of India’s Foreign Policy: The Indian National Congress And World Affairs, 1885-1947. Delhi: Vitasta Publishing, 2013. 301 pp.

It is easy to forget, sometimes, that the roots of a country’s foreign policy are always embedded in its domestic politics and experiences. Postcolonial states are no exception to this rule, but a rupture in the continuity of self-rule – usually at a critical time in world history when the global order was undergoing major economic, technological, and political upheavals – left them inexperienced in the ways of the international community. Some states, such as India, were newly created and had no memory of ever having had to navigate international politics while holding together a state that defied every understanding of nationalism. Originally published in 1960 but reprinted in 2013 at the urging of former foreign secretary Muchkund Dubey and columnist C Raja Mohan, Bimal Prasad’s The Making of Indian Foreign Policy: The Indian National Congress and World Affairs delves into the formative period of a modern Indian international outlook to suggest the antecedents that have informed Indian foreign policy in its independent era.

The Indian National Congress did not begin in 1885 as an organisation opposed to British rule of India. Rather, in its early years, it affirmed the loyalty of Indians to the Crown and worked to create for them a position of equality within the British imperial system. This is not much different from the position of Mohandas Gandhi, who until the end of World War I, argued against racial and exploitative policies of the Raj rather than its imperial venture.

Indian nationalists and the INC voiced opposition to British adventures in Afghanistan, Tibet, and elsewhere at the expense of India’s development. They were not convinced of the London’s paranoia about the security of the jewel in the English imperial crown, and condemned operations against Russia and China in much the same tone as international opinion surrounding the American invasion of Iraq in the noughties. The break came, oddly, with the signing of the Treaty of Sevres on May 14, 1920, which dismembered the Ottoman Empire and terminated the Caliphate. Indian Muslims were agitated by the events unfolding in the Middle East, and Gandhi saw it as unduly harsh and uncaring of the sentiments of millions of the Crown’s Indian Muslim subjects. Additionally, the refusal to accede to India dominion status cemented a distrust of British motives in India. This late divergence is curious, given English behaviour ever since they rose to power in the subcontinent in the mid-18th century.

The Indian world view was always outward looking. Even three decades before Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-alignment would become a pillar of Indian foreign policy and a pan-Asian gefühl its flavour, Indian nationalists were not isolationist and particular but sought international cooperation against imperialism. In 1920, for example, the INC paid homage to the memory of Irish patriot Terence MacSwiney and send a message of sympathy to the Irish people. As Gandhi declared in his presidential address to the Congress in 1924, “the better mind of the world desired not absolutely independent states warring one against another, but a federation of friendly interdependent states.” Nehru set up a Foreign Department within the Congress in 1930 and within a year, it had made contact with over 400 groups, organisations, and individuals worldwide. Henceforth, the party would also get regular reports from around the world on important political ideas and developments.

Nehru’s views on the Soviet Union, commonly understood to have formed in his college-day flirtations with Fabian socialism, were influenced more profoundly by the events of the 1920s. Gandhi, Nehru, and others began the decade being critical of Bolshevism and Marxism. The change came in 1927 when Nehru attended the Brussels Congress and attended the committee meetings of the League against Imperialism. Not only did the future prime minister develop sympathies for the Third International, he was amazed by the changes sweeping the Soviet Union. Nehru believed India and the Soviet Union to be in the same boat – recipients of Western hostility/imperialism, largely agrarian, and with a large, mostly illiterate population. If the Soviets could catapult themselves to the forefront of nations with their new methods, India would do well to learn from them. This is not to say that Nehru was blind to the totalitarian nature of Iosif Dzhugashvili’s state but his contagious enthusiasm for the scientific and technological revolution taking place to India’s north spread among his fellow Congressmen.

Admiration for the Soviet Union was fanned by imperialist misbehaviour worldwide. As the Jewish question came to a boil in the Middle East, Nehru and Gandhi came to view the Balfour Declaration as another example of the imposition of imperialist whims on a defenceless subject population. Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1936, the abdication of responsibility of European powers in the Spanish Civil War the same year, silence at the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, and the supplication of the victors of Versailles to Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1938, all while the Soviet Union alone spoke stridently against imperialism understandably had an effect on Indian nationalists.  Nehru came to believe that London and Paris were deliberately stoking fascism in Europe as a counter to Bolshevism. “Perhaps what moved these reactionary governments in so-called democratic countries,” he wrote with reference to Munich, “was not fear of defeat but fear of victory, for that victory would have been a victory of real democracy and possibly an end of fascism in Europe. Fascism had to be kept going in Europe whatever the cost.”

Although India recognised Israel in September 1950, the INC did not wish to pursue full diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. Following recognition, the Indian prime minister explained that Delhi would have recognised Israel even sooner but did not wish to offend the sentiments of India’s “friends in Arab countries.” The Congress antipathy towards Israel – despite acceptance of occasional covert assistance – was that neither Gandhi nor Nehru sympathised with the idea of a Jewish national home. They saw no reason why Jews should not, like other communities, make their country of birth or residence their home. This did not mean that there was no sympathy for the plight of the Jews in Europe: Nehru wrote, “Few people could withhold their deep sympathy from the Jews for the centuries-long oppression to which they have been subjected all over Europe. Fewer still could repress their indignation at the barbarities and racial suppression of the Jews which the Nazis had indulged in during the last few years.” Gandhi added, “if there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified.”

Then, as now, the fever of symbolism ran high in the Congress: May 9, 1936, was observed as Abyssinia Day, September 27, 1936 was recognised as Palestine Day, and June 12, 1938, was celebrated as China Day. “Let the Czechs know,” Gandhi cabled, “the [Congress] Working Committee] wrung itself with pain while their [Czechoslovakia] doom was being decided.”

The turbulence and turmoil in the world did not alter Gandhi’s mind about the value of non-violent struggle. In matters of defence, Nehru was the pragmatic one. While Gandhi advocated a post-independence guarantee of protection from Britain, Nehru believed in a world balance of power; while the former looked to civil disobedience, the latter wanted a speedy reconstruction of defence forces. The idea of an Asian federation of state had been popular with INC leaders of the 1920s but Nehru clarified that this arrangement of collective security must be based upon a complete elimination of imperialism. Pacts led by certain Western governments in the furtherance of their narrow imperialist intentions were no solution to the problems of the world.

Clearly, the material for the formulation of independent India’s foreign policy was forged in its struggle to throw off the yoke of British imperialism. The INC’s partiality towards the Soviet Union stemmed from the fact that it was the only major world power that reliably spoke out against imperialism in the two and half decades between the Congress’ disillusionment with British rule at the end of World War I  and independence. With constant provocations from imperial Europe, it is not difficult to see why early Indian leaders would develop an affinity for the USSR. This remained the mindset during the Nehru years and ossified into a reflexive policy, albeit with some justification, after his death. Critics may fault the prime minister’s intellectual nimbleness as the whole world changed after 1945 but not the initial grounds for attraction.

Similarly, India’s Israel policy seems to have been based on its domestic experience. Opposed to the idea of a confessional Muslim state being carved out of India, the Congress could hardly support a Jewish state being carved out of a no man’s land that had been inhabited by Muslims and Arabs for the last two millennia. The INC leadership had no practical solutions to the Jewish question but to term their position as ignorant of history is not entirely accurate either. Again, critics of India’s Israel policy seem to have a stronger case against the Congress’ inflexibility between 1950 and 1992 than against the original logic behind Nehru’s position on the Jewish state.

Nehru’s talk of an Asian federation petered out after independence and he was not keen on the alphabet soup of pacts the United States was forming around the world to contain communism. Loy Henderson, the second US ambassador to India (not counting Benjamin Joy), has opined that Nehru’s anti-Americanism came from his days at elite English institutions of public education. This may be partially true but another source could well be that, from the perspective of Indian nationalists, the United States did little to aid India’s independence despite its rhetoric. The efforts of Indians living in America and even Americans, clergy, journalists, and politicians, endeared the former British colony to Gandhi. Political pressure upon London was also gratefully accepted. However, the 20th century saw the US inching closer to Britain on a number of issues due to geopolitics. In this need for greater bonhomie, the Indian cause was put on the back burner. In 1942, Gandhi told an American journalist that India was willing to accept UN troops on its soil to ward off a potential Japanese invasion if Washington would intercede with London on Delhi’s behalf to leave the subcontinent. The Congress believed that India was in danger merely because she was a Crown colony and Tokyo would otherwise have no interest in South Asia. Franklin Roosevelt was not convinced, and Indian independence meant little to him during a war that was tearing down the very edifice of Western civilisation. This indifference, combined with the lack of faith in US-led multilateral defence organisations, may have soured Nehru to the United States as much as his aristocratic schooling.

Prasad’s book presents a useful background to the development of Indian foreign policy and is an important contribution to the field. Its proximity to events and figures makes up for its datedness, and although it may not have the turgid prose expected of academic research these days, it makes a persuasive argument with a good footing in the documents available to the author then. It is easy to see why anyone would urge for The Making of Indian Foreign Policy to be republished: in a time when India is undergoing another political and socioeconomic transition, it is always a good idea to briefly glance back at whence we came to understand where we may want to go.

Not Our War

13 Monday Jun 2016

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Karnad, Raghu. Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War (London: William Collins, 2016). 320 pp.

Khan, Yasmin. The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War (Gurgaon: Vintage Books, 2015). 448 pp.

Raghavan, Srinath. India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939-1945 (New Delhi: Allen Lane, 2016). 550 pp.

The history of World War II is the most popular college course in the United States. Each year, thousands of undergraduates pour into classrooms to learn about, in that cloying phrase coined by Studs Terkel, the last good war. Young Americans learn how their grandfathers – perhaps great grandfathers – fought and won on the distant battlefields of Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific. The narrative is, not surprisingly, centred around the American war effort; most history, at least at the introductory levels, still focus on forging citizens rather than cosmopolitan elites. No wonder, then, that similar courses in Britain would drill the island’s lone and courageous resistance to the Germans, and in Moscow, take credit for the greatest Nazi casualties despite immense losses and suffering.

Yet another view can be had from India. Then a part of the British empire, the colony – which then comprised of modern-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh – was dragged into the war by its imperial overlords without as much as a by-your-leave to the elected Indian representatives in the administration or to the leaders of the independence movement. This is perhaps one reason why Indians never saw the war as quite their own; another reason could be that the Indian republic has never celebrated the profession of arms, save for the annual Republic Day parade. In India, the military is not particularly visible in mainstream public life as it is in other countries such as the United States. There are few national memorials for those who fell in in its wars; what chance would the memories of a conflict not its own have?

The centenary celebrations in Europe of the Great War and the diamond anniversary celebrations of the Second World War have turned the attention of some, especially in this era of our globalised community, to India’s role in the conflagration the previous century. In these archival excavations, a fuller story of the war emerges – not necessarily surprising but damning in many ways – that apportions credit for Allied victories more fairly.

Farthest FieldRaghu Karnad’s Farthest Feld: An Indian Story of the Second World War is not as much a historical work as it is a quasi-biographical novel. Nonetheless, the tale he recounts offers a glimpse into a certain segment of middle class India of the late 1930s. This is a far cry from the overwhelming majority of Indian conscripts, to be sure, yet there emerge a few threads common to the pan-Indian experience. These are held together by the broader historical and political events that shaped Indian views on the European war.

The war came to India first by way of rising prices, followed by the tugs of ideology and opportunism. These were not necessarily aligned and it showed in how South Asia’s myriad communities responded differently to the war. The Communists boycotted it until the Soviet Union was invaded in June 1941; the Congress, burned by the poor returns despite their enthusiasm during the previous war, opposed it unless London was willing to guarantee political concessions; the nobility, completely dependent on the Raj for their very existence, worked tirelessly to provide the British with materiel; some communities, such as the Parsis, embraced the economic windfall that war meant for merchants; and a very few felt a familial loyalty towards the Crown and enlisted.

In the upper middle class setting of Karnad’s quasi-novel, the war was initially seen as a grand adventure. However, as the fighting crept closer to India from Dunkirk and Manchuria, as scarcity and inflation set in, the rosy tint evaporated. In the Pacific theatre, the widely spread Indian diaspora were overrun by the rapidly expanding Japanese co-prosperity sphere towards the end of 1941 and into 1942. As England, France, and the Netherlands lost their possessions, over half a million Indian labourers employed in British work camps began stream west to the relative safety of their homeland.

The Raj at WarThough Farthest Field gives a general feel of wartime India, it still telescopes a very thin socio-economic slice of the Indian populace as any quasi-biography is wont to do. Still, it raises several troubling hypocrisies in the British war propaganda that others like Yasmin Khan have explored further in The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War.

True to its subtitle, Khan offers a thorough exposition of the home front during the turbulent years of World War II. Khan’s work, an academic tome, makes extensive use of not just personal diaries and memoirs some soldiers may have left behind but also government and military archives around the world. The Raj at War does not delve into the politics as much as one might expect but analyses the national experience and social disruptions World War II brought India.

In the early days of the war, the British could afford to be choosy about whom they recruited into the imperial army and they maintained their theory of martial races despite it having been proven wrong in the great European war just a quarter century earlier. However, as time passed and Axis gains became overwhelming, London was forced to expand its selection pool to all of Indian society. From the Indian side, the reasons for enlisting were varied and not usually patriotic. Some young men signed up because they hailed from a martial tradition that had sent at least one son into the army for generations – which political authority that army served seemed not to matter. Others joined up to escape marriage proposals, debt collectors, or law enforcement; yet others were lured by pecuniary enticements offered them or their families by the maharajas who sought to curry favour with the Crown in anticipation of the difficult post-war years. Many saw the military as an employer or even an educator who would provide skills that would prove useful after the war. It is not clear if any of these volunteers ever saw a contradiction in fighting for a country that had colonised and oppressed their own; did nationalism not exist in the Indian heart even as late a 1939 or were these decisions simply about daal-chawal? Khan does not venture into the Indian soldier’s mind.

With more and more scholarship in recent years exposing Western hypocrisy about freedom in the first half of the 20th century, it would not come as a surprise to readers to discover that racism was rampant in the British military. Not only were Indian soldiers paid only about a quarter of what their British counterparts received, soldiers of colour were also not entitled to the same perks as white men in uniform. This included not just rations of tobacco and other war-time luxuries but extended even to the war front where Indian soldiers were assigned separate messes, hospitals, and even brothels! It is difficult to imagine what motivated Indians to remain in uniform despite suffering such indignities. Even more puzzling are some of the letters exchanged between home and front in which the men or their fathers expressed their prayers and good wishes towards the King of England. While the pre-enlistment sense of service and duty or pecuniary expectations might be explained away by utilitarian reasoning, differential treatment under fire is harder to fathom.

Khan also discusses the impact of the war on Indian industry. Although, normally, wars spur industrial growth, World War II had a mild effect on Indian businesses. Despite shortage of materiel in the Asian and African theatres, there was severe opposition from London to setting up advanced armaments plants, shipyards, and ammunition factories in India for the war effort, no doubt with a partial eye to the post-war colonial order. The more immediate concern was that if industry grew, wages would rise too and this would hurt recruitment. After all, why would anyone volunteer for a foreign army to fight on distant shores when there were opportunities to be had right at home? Even with the modest growth in Indian industry in the 1940s, this was exactly what happened.

It is interesting to note how Indians reacted to Japan’s early victories in Southeast Asia. Here was an uncolonised Asian power that was shellacking the Europeans out of the region. The mixture of awe and distaste – awe for the accomplishments and distaste for the inhumanity shown to the conquered fellow Asians – filled Indian leaders and people alike. While Khan does not explicitly talk about this, Japanese successes must have surely inspired confidence in the possibility of a technologically advanced, independent, and prosperous Asia in the near future. Until the fall of Singapore, it was just a plausible theory but since, it was a virtual certainty.

Khan’s The Raj at War is a splendid analysis of the impact of World War II on India – how the European war changed the Indian economy, society, and politics. Some of these changes would last – the skills Indian officers and soldiers picked up in Africa, Italy, and Burma, for example, would serve the new republic well in its own conflicts with the equally new and irksome western neighbour, Pakistan. It is beyond the scope of the book, however, to consider how many of these changes stuck – despite the nudge towards industrialisation and Jawaharlal Nehru’s scientific temper post independence, India steadily fell back in the community of nations in industrial production and scientific achievement. How much of this was due to stifling government policies and how much was simply because India was a largely illiterate country that was not yet ready for an industrial revolution?

indias-warTwo aspects Khan does not cover in her otherwise marvelous survey of India at war are the global and military dimensions. Khan’s focus was clearly on the domestic front, but over two and a half million Indian men were shipped abroad to fight England’s enemies around the globe. This lacuna is addressed by Srinath Raghavan in his India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939-1945.

Perhaps erroneously titled and sporting a slightly grandiloquent subtitle, Raghavan’s work is nonetheless a fantastic and much needed contribution to Indian military history. By this, I do not mean a dry recounting of battles and casualty figures interspersed by the occasional map, but a rich weaving of economics, politics, and war as any good military history ought to be. India’s War begins by explaining at length the various positions taken by the dramatis personae – London, the British government of India, the Congress party, the Hindu Mahasabha, and the Muslim League just to name the most prominent. At times, these positions would prove to be dynamic, depending upon the reactions of other parties. This may explain the near-bipolar Congress response to how the British dragged India into the war.

Raghavan’s analysis of the politics is not restricted to India and Indians just because his is a subcontinental story. In fact, India is shown as a more autonomous limb of the British Empire and a decision maker in its own right; it is also shown as a strategic region with a direct bearing on geopolitics in Southeast Asia as well as the Middle East. New to many readers will be the disagreements between London and its servants in Delhi on military strategy – for example, General Claude Auchinleck was convinced that an unsettled Iraq threatened Iran and Afghanistan and therefore India, while General Archibald Wavell did not want to be distracted from more important missions around the Mediterranean.

Of course, one might ask of what significance this is – a difference of opinion between London and its representatives in Delhi hardly makes it an Indian story. At best, Raghavan has shown that each command had its own priorities in the war in much the same way the Army, Navy, and Air Force compete with each other for strategic significance and hence the budget. In favour of the author, one can argue that this sort of autonomy was seen nowhere else in the British Empire – after World War I, the British mandate of Mesopotamia had technically fallen to India, not England. And towards the end of the war, India nationalists’ interests fascinatingly coincided with imperial interests in retaining Indian pre-eminence in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Still, even if not satisfactorily Indian for some, that (white) Delhi’s views on arms production and military strategy clashed with the High Command in London is an interesting facet of the history of World War II.

The sinews of war receive their share of Raghavan’s attention, too. India contributed not just men but also materiel to the war effort. Although modern industries such as armaments, heavy machinery, and vehicles was actively discouraged by London, Whitehall retained India in its traditional role as an exploited colony. The subcontinent provided ores, agricultural products, and other raw materials which were then fashioned into supplies. In monetary terms, these outflows were enormous. Since Britain insisted on administering India with local revenues alone – with fees and fines added for imperial upkeep, such as compensation to the British families affected by the 1857 mutiny or the Anglo-Afghan Wars, for example – the Raj had been in debt to Britain at the beginning of hostilities in Europe in 1939. By the end of the war, Britain owed India £1.3 billion.

This is not to say that these resources were spent on the defence of the subcontinent or even in training and equipping units raised from India. In fact, Indian units were frequently ill-equipped and insufficiently trained even when fighting far away from South Asia, in the Middle East or Europe. While the administration in India begged London for fighter planes, radios, artillery, and other equipment, these were luxuries for Indian troops even at the front.

An interesting nugget in India’s War is the revelation of the importance placed by Winston Churchill on American views. From the start, each major policy decision that involved India was additionally examined in the light of what effect it would have on American public and political opinion. Washington’s sympathies towards Indian independence are well known, and with wartime Britain’s desperate need for American aid, it seems only natural that these factors would come together. However, as the United States itself joined the war, one would have expected such considerations to take a back seat to the strategic imperative. Whether this was so in American minds or not, Raghavan explains that Whitehall was certainly not taking any chances.

Perhaps one of the most useful contributions Raghavan makes is his coverage of Indian troops under fire. Although the trend has so far been to depict World War II battles as a colossal clash between two Western (and white) sides, the fact is that millions of colonial troops – black, brown, and others – participated in the war in the British, French and other armies. India’s War lives up to its title at least in this regard, in volume of Indian blood spilled in the pursuit of European goals. Indian soldiers were deployed everywhere from Hong Kong to England and everywhere in between – France, Italy, Crete, Greece, Cyprus, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Somaliland, Yemen, Singapore, Burma, Thailand, Malaya – and fought with such bravery that even Churchill had to accept the “unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers.” After the war, they found themselves staying on to restore colonial regimes all across Southeast Asia.

Farthest Field, The Raj at War, and India’s War all portray a different history of World War II, a refreshing narrative that is not Manichean. The same Allies who fought in the name of holy liberty also enslaved half the world in the shackles of imperialism. As the Japanese advanced into Burma, the Raj preferred to use the few available lorries to evacuate their lawn furniture back to India over the tens of thousands of Indian men, women, and children caught up in the turmoil; many perished in the jungles during their long march. For all of India’s importance to the war effort – in terms of men, resources, strategic geography, money – Indians remained casual objects in the imperial scheme of things, ones that may be useful and cherished at times but ultimately not in the same hierarchy. The Second World War was not India’s war, though millions of Indians bled and fought in it.

This article first appeared in the February 2017 print edition of Swarajya.