Araingang: Pakistani American nationalist and internet troll

//This is such BS. What can I say? Tatya tope, Mangal Pandey, Lakshmi Bai//

Did you not understand what I said? The army maybe Brahmin-Thakur majority but the emperor they were fighting for was Mooslem (so much for your anti Muslim rhethoric). The British blamed the Muhammadans, and the Hindu elite took advantage of that, started with trying to split the lingua franca along religious lines. For them, they were just replacing one master with another. Anyone saying India was ”one country” should just read in detail about how the British took control of India, culminating in 1857 where majority of Indian rulers were fine with British rule. I mean the goras could conquer us, but how dare those men from UP/Bihar conquer us.. classic India backstab.

//Yeah LoL! now go laugh at Mandela and Luther King too. Congress ran civil disobedience and quit India campaign, did a grass roots organisation and capacity building//

Reading Azad’s book ”India Wins Freedom”, it is quite clear that the Congress was a toothless organization. Guy was trying to make best out of worst situation during the war but he was always opposed by stupid Gandhiji who going mental with Ahimsa, and influencing all other Congress leaders, except Nehru. It were the Americans who were forcing teh British hand on Indian independence, otherwise Congress and Gandhiji would have settled for another few decades of useless hunger strikes.

Calling congress a toothless organization is disingenuous. In retrospect Only India of the countries getting independent has avoided dictatorship and military rule and has to certain extent working institutions. Without the Congress organization and freedom struggle its not imaginable how India could have got that.
You cant find any examples of working democracies anywhere else. Especially on this scale.
Arguably Pak/ Bdesh / SL are perfect countries on european nation state models – Democratically they have been far less successful than India.
Hindus like to give the credit for the Indian experiment to Hinduism – i am skeptical of it and would give more credit to Indian freedom struggle – WHICH was more of a national consciousness builder than mere fighting of the British.

There is an essay by Gandhi called the Anatomy of a Bomb – about Bhagat singh and revolutionaries.

While to cursory view his Ahimsa might appear childish and too idealistic – i argue its pragmatic.
Dont wanna go all pedantic – but once weapons are used on the Other it doesnt take much to turn them and find new others to fire them on.
And all revolutions are historic examples of that. Even the Bangladesh struggle didn’t immediately result in Democracy nor did Tamil.

Its fascinating to note that Hindutva leaning folks and by experience – Pakistani (nationalist or otherwise) tend to agree on this view of Gandhian Congress struggle. Maybe its a certain worldview in principle that leads to these ideologies which appear antagonistic

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/remembering-the-fall-of-delhi-in-september-1857-4837042/

In 1857, nation states weren’t exactly that popular when you compare it to the early 20th century when modern nation states were all the rage. If you look at the conflict through the modern lens that there was an ‘Indian’ nation, then your analysis will fail.. 1857 was by and large a revolt in the Hindi belt by Hindustani soliders and Hindustani elites (not even Bengalis were that keen on it). The Hindustanis (Hindu and Muslim alike) hated the Marathas and that feeling was mutual, Maratha strongholds would never fight to restore the Mughal emperor. The Purbiya soldiers also had recently conquered Punjab 10 years ago, and the Punjabis (sikhs primarily but also muslim, hindu) were not happy with that defeat and found a way to get back at them during 1857 by supporting the British)

The Hindustani sepoys of the Bengal regiment were majority Brahmin and Rajput, but a significant majority of Hindustani elites backing the rebellion were Muslims. The Muslim ulema in these regions had already raised a ”religious slogan” of Jihad against the British.

The aftermath of 1857 proves that the British held Muslims directly responsible for the revolt, Delhi was pretty much ransacked and destroyed, 80% of the buildings raised down or defaced. The city was Muslim majority before 1857, but Muslims were banned from returning for almost a decade after. The British murdered Muslim Ulema wholesale, often by artillery fire, and many Muslim men who had any relations with the rebel were shot, beheaded or hanged.

I mentioned Syed Ahmed Khan here because he was a loyalist during 1857 and a huge anglophile. He was already declared a ‘murtad’ for his stance in 1857, and if it wasn’t for him later establishing Aligarh, he would not be remembered kindly by Muslims. Even Sir Syed was forced to write these pamphlets under the threat of being charged as seditious by the British, to explain to the British why they should have such a malicious view towards the Muslims post 1857.

@Bhimrao

Seems like you guys are taught a Hinduized version of history just like Pakistanis are taught a Islamicized one.

I already posted a link about the sack of Delhi,

I mentioned Syed Ahmed’s pamphlet. If you don’t believe me, his Wikipedia entry is a good start

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syed_Ahmad_Khan#Causes_of_the_Indian_Revolt

Not that I have anywhere denied that the majority of the sepoy army was Hindi. It was about 70-80% Hindu. My claim is simply that the British did not care about the religious makeup of this army. They presumed that this was the work of the Muslim elite that dominated the Hindi belt, and the fact that the rebellion had an aim to restore the Mughal Emperor was the proof that they needed. The British considered it a Muhammadan conspiracy because they were aware that they were replacing Muslim rule in India with their own.

There is much written about the aftermath of the revolt of 1857. The book ‘The Aftermath of Revolt. India, 1857–1870’ by Dr. Thomas Metcalf is one of them, disclaimer: I have not read this book, but read an essay citing paragraphs from this book some time back.\

You can draw your conclusion, but nowhere am I appropriating 1857 for the Muslims. I am simply claiming that the British presumed and blamed the Muslims, and punished them heavily for it in the aftermath. The Hindus simply moved right on. Infact the entire Hindi-Urdu controversy arose because of these two outcomes, the British fanned this division and rest is history.

Lastly, another assertion here is that 1857 was a regional revolt. The Hindu dominated Bombay and Madras regiments stayed loyal to the British because the Hindustanis were foreign to them just as the British were. Similarly, the Punjab regiment supported the British because they hated the Hindustani sepoys who just 10 years earlier had conquered their country and hurt their ‘martial’ pride.

Here is another link from Major Amin (whose journals are regularly posted here) that provides these details of different divsions

http://www.defencejournal.com/2001/august/sepoy.htm

Kuresi, I appreciate you putting in the work to reply. But this is clearly not good evidence and you are being unreasonable. Sir Syed could have believed in whatever (convenient/self-serving idea) he wanted but that doesn’t make it the truth.

“Lord Canning, the governor-general, and Sir Bartle Frere accepted it as a sincere and friendly report. The foreign secretary Cecil Beadon, however, severely attacked it, calling it ‘an extremely seditious pamphlet’. He wanted a proper inquiry into the matter and said that the author, unless he could give a satisfactory explanation, should be harshly dealt with. Since no other member of the Council agreed with his opinion, his attack did no harm.”

So much coercion! Sir Syed was an idiot (see link below), racist, communal collaborator,…. He is no hero, not even one of those grey ones, and because of his bias and history he is not (for our current discussion) a reliable primary source.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pakistan/comments/f75j9i/til_one_of_the_first_paper_wrote_by_sir_syed/

@Bhimrao

I mentioned Syed Ahmed Khan precisely because of the fact that he was a British loyalist, however the British heavy handedness towards Muslims in his region made him uneasy. He played an important role in trying to convince the British go more easy on the Muslims, and tried to act as a bridge. However he is not the focal point of the argument and neither do I consider him some kind of Muslim hero.

The facts are that the British fired primarily all the Muslim civil servants, put a ban on Muslim inhabitants of Delhi from returning and generally trying to suppress the Muslim elite by confiscating their properties and executing their heirs, is really quite accepted. Hindus by and large were spared in the period 1858-1871. [By Hindus and Muslims here, I am only restricting the scope of this to Hindus and Muslims of UP/Bihar/Oudh/Delhi]. This Muslim elite actually got divided from 1857 onwards, one strain went onto form the Dar Ul Uloom at Deoband, which was an very anti-British movement, its other aim was to modernize Islam. The other modernizing movement was the Aligarh movement, founder was Syed Ahmed Khan who embraced Western education and form of government. The members produced by the Aligarh movement were always British loyalists (so was the Muslim League). But the Muslim League was not popular among the Muslims until the 1940s.

Nope, you are going off tangent about Syed Ahmed Khan, it’s besides the point.

It’s widely accepted that the British held ”Muhammadans” more responsible than the Hindus for 1857. Just read about the aftermath of 1857, Muslims were executed, tortured and their properties confiscated, ban on them reentering Delhi.. many were fired from civil service.

The British considered Muslims as their arch enemies in 1857 because they were replacing the Muslim rule in India. To them, the fact that the 1857 revolt aimed to restore the Mughal empire, meant that they blamed the Muslim elite in conspiring. This is not a controversial view that was ever contested.

You make the mistake that Paknationalism started in 1857, the concept of Pakistan did not even exist until 1930 and the name Pakistan was first adopted by the Muslim League in 1940.

If you were referring to ”Muslim” nationalism, yes that started after 1857. After 1857, the Deoband Movement came about which talked about pan-Islamism and made efforts in spreading this idea across India and wider Muslim world. Ironically, this movement was also against Pakistan and the Muslim League.

This is a fault in your worldview, because you are looking at history from the scope of modern Indian politics which is Muslim Vs Hindu these days, all Muslims being associated with Pakistan and Pakistan nationalism.

Muslim nationalism is much older than Paknationalism, but Paknationalism (the idea that Muslims should have their own country) was particularly in response to the growing Hindu nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s.

One can argue that Hindu nationalism was in response to Muslim nationalism, but not Pak nationalism.

Even today, some extreme Paknationalist theories about Pakistan being Indus civilization only exist online, as a way to counter Hindutva’s online influence. There is no actual discussion on such theories within Pakistan and no mainstream media in Pakistan has every forwarded these theories.

In contrast, you have significant portion of Indian media that seek to forward fantastical Hindutva theories about Akhand Bharat and misinformation about Muslims.

Muslims have been ruling for almost 1000 years in the Indian subcontinent. If Hindu nationalism was a “reaction” then why was this 900 years too late?

If Hinduism was one religion, and India was one country, surely they had 900 years to organize and react. But they didn’t, so it throws doubt over Hindus having any conception of themselves as a ‘nation” before the arrival of the British who defined them as being ‘not Moslems’.

And the Maratha fetish seems to be a purely modern concoction. The Sindhis, Punjabis, the Rajputs, the Bengalis and most definitely the Hindustanis, all hated them and just ranked them slightly better than the Afghans in pillaging and plundering. Anyone I don’t want to get into discussing the Marathas so pip pip. I think we can agree to disagree but I mostly agree with Araingang, except the theories about Pak being some Indus civilization. (not sure if he made such claims)

That’s fine by me, at least you accept that the Marathas are being repainted in a modern light as Hindu warriors saving Hindus from Mughal rule, rather than foreign brigands they were considered back then by Hindus/Muslims alike in the north. It might even be good for modern Indian nation building to repaint them as such, as they did shatter the myth of Muslim invincibility in India.

Key difference though with Islam is that Islam’s pan Islamism is coded into its very fabric as it’s found in Quran and also preached by Prophet Muhammad himself. So Shias/Sunnis/Turks/Afghans/Arabs etc etc can continue feuding but they eventually have to align with the texts because texts are of primary important in Islamic religion. Such a parallel is not found in Hinduism, so India will need probably a couple of centuries of state building to really hammer pan-Hinduism into something that won’t be lost in decline.