Political History – Brown Pundits

Kabir’s defence of Nehru as the moral compass of the Indian republic reveals something deeper than nostalgia for secularism. It exposes how much of India’s founding moment was shaped by a single man whose class background insulated him from the material and psychological stakes of Partition; stakes that Gandhi, Jinnah, Bose, Ambedkar, and even Savarkar understood far more viscerally.

Nehru was unique among the major players of his era. He was the only one born into national leadership, the only one who inherited a political position, and the only one whose life had been marked not by struggle but by access. While others were shaped by jail, exile, poverty, or ideological intensity, Nehru was shaped by privilege, and privilege has its own blind spots.

This matters because 1947 was not a moment for abstract idealism. It was a moment for negotiation between communities whose elites no longer trusted one another. On that task, Nehru was the least prepared of the principal actors.

I. Nehru’s Privilege Was a Constraint, Not a Qualification

Continue reading Nehru, Privilege, and the Missed Settlement of 1947

I was speaking recently with a cousin who grew up in India. Their family has been Bahá’í for generations, but their older relatives once lived as Sunni merchants in Old Delhi. When they visited their grandparents as a child, they noticed something striking: in many lanes of Old Delhi, long after Independence, the sentiment was not Indian nationalism but Pakistan-leaning nostalgia. This was not hidden. It was ambient.

That single observation exposes something almost no one in Indian liberal discourse wants to say aloud: post-Partition India inherited a large Muslim population whose political loyalties were, at best, ambivalent. That is not a moral judgement. It is a historical one.

And once you notice this, a second truth becomes obvious: Kabir’s secularist vision of an emotionally unified India makes sense only in a world where 1947 never happened.

Continue reading The Partition of Elites: India, Pakistan, and the Unfinished Trauma of 1947