Quotes from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“What is now in the past was once in the future”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“So long as the Constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails, so long as citizens can speak and write in the language of their choosing, so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army, and — lest I forget — so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung, India will survive”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“It is in the nature of democracies, perhaps, that while visionaries are sometimes necessary to make them, once made they can be managed by mediocrities.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“In India, the sapling was planted by the nation’s founders, who lived long enough (and worked hard enough) to nurture it to adulthood. Those who came afterwards could disturb and degrade the tree of democracy but, try as they might, could not uproot or destroy it.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“In 1951 Dec 20th, Nehru, while campaigning for the first democratic elections in India, took a short break to address a UNESCO symposium in Delhi. Although he believed democracy was the best form of governance, while speaking at the symposium he wondered loud...
the quality of men who are selected by these modern democratic methods of adult franchise gradually deteriorates because of lack of thinking and the noise of propaganda....He[the voter] reacts to sound and to the din, he reacts to repetition and he produces either a dictator or a dumb politician who is insensitive. Such a politician can stand all the din in the world and still remain standing on his two feet and, therefore, he gets selected in the end because the others have collapsed because of the din.
-Quoted from India After Gandhi, page 157.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“in India, Bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be the road to the salvation of a soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“If Jawaharlal Nehru was the Maker of Modern India, then perhaps Potti Sriramulu should be named its Mercator.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“in the post-Gandhian war for power the first casualty is decency’.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“British journalist Don Taylor. Writing in 1969, by which time India had stayed united for two decades and gone through four general elections, Taylor yet thought that the key question remains: can India remain in one piece – or will it fragment? . . . When one looks at this vast country and its 524 million people, the 15 major languages in use, the conflicting religions, the many races, it seems incredible that one nation could ever emerge. It is difficult to even encompass this country in the mind – the great Himalaya, the wide Indo-Gangetic plain burnt by the sun and savaged by the fierce monsoon rains, the green flooded delta of the east, the great cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It does not, often, seem like one country. And yet there is a resilience about India which seems an assurance of survival. There is something which can only be described as an Indian spirit. I believe it no exaggeration to say that the fate of Asia hangs on its survival.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“a mere five years after the last maharaja had signed away his land, Indians had ‘come to take integrated India so much for granted that it requires amental effort today even to imagine that it could be different’.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“My own view – speaking as a historian rather than citizen – is that as long as Pakistan exists there will be Hindu fundamentalists in India. In times of stability, or when the political leadership is firm, they will be marginal or on the defensive. In times of change, or when the political leadership is irresolute, they will be influential and assertive.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“The Constitution of India recognizes twenty-two languages as ‘official’. The most important of these is Hindi, which in one form or another is spoken by upwards of 400 million people.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“It’s no conspiracy [for the Hindu] to make me a refugee in the very country of my birth It’s no conspiracy to poison the air I breathe and the space I live in It’s certainly no conspiracy to cut me to pieces and then imagine an uncut Bharat.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“India is no longer a constitutional democracy but a populist one.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“Then, in January 1961, a religious riot broke out in the central Indian city of Jabalpur. A Hindu girl had committed suicide; it was alleged that she took her life because she had been assaulted by two Muslim men. The claim was given lurid publicity by a local Jana Sangh newspaper, whereupon Hindu students went on a rampage through the town, attacking Muslim homes and burning shops. In retaliation a Muslim group torched a Hindu neighbourhood. The rioting continued for days, spreading also to the countryside. It was the most serious such incident since Partition, its main sufferers being poor Muslims, mostly weavers and bidi (cigarette) workers.52”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“Thus, Rajaji wrote of the need to try and think fundamentally in the present crisis. Are we to yield to the fanatical emotions of our anti-Pakistan groups? Is there any hope for India or for Pakistan, if we go on hating each other, suspecting each other, borrowing and building up armaments against each other – building our two houses, both of us on the sands of continued foreign aid against a future Kurukshetra? We shall surely ruin ourselves for ever if we go on doing this . . . We shall be making all hopes of prosperity in the future a mere mirage if we continue this arms race based on an ancient grudge and the fears and suspicions flowing from it.27”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“Srinagar, there was a grave of a Christian soldier from Travancore, which had the Vedic swastika and a verse from the Quran inscribed on it. There could be ‘no more poignant and touching symbolof the essential oneness and unity of India’.61”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“More notable perhaps were the names of those who were not from the Congress. These included two representatives of the world of commerce and one representative of the Sikhs. Three others were lifelong adversaries of the Congress. These were R. K. Shanmukham Chetty, a Madras businessman who possessed one of the best financial minds in India; B. R. Ambedkar, a brilliant legal scholar and an ‘Untouchable’ by caste; and Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, a leading Bengal politician who belonged (at this time) to the Hindu Mahasabha. All three had collaborated with the rulers while the Congress men served time in British jails. But now Nehru and his colleagues wisely put aside these differences. Gandhi had reminded them that ‘freedom comes to India, not to the Congress’, urging the formation of a Cabinet that included the ablest men regardless of party affiliation.6”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“This leprous daybreak, dawn night’s fangs have mangled – This is not that long-looked for break of day, Not that clear dawn in quest of which those comrades Set out, believing that in heaven’s wide void Somewhere must be the stars’ last halting-place, Somewhere the verge of night’s slow-washing tide, Somewhere the anchorage for the ship of heartache.10”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“The history of the twentieth century, he pointed out, is replete with instances of the tragedy that overtakes democracy when a leader who has risen to power on the crest of a popular wave or with the support of a democratic organisation becomes a victim of political narcissism and is egged on by a coterie of unscrupulous sycophants who use corruption and terror to silence opposition and attempt to make public opinion an echo of authority. The Congress as an organisation dedicated to democracy and socialism has to combat such trends.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“Among the VIPs was Dr Syed Mahmud, a veteran freedom fighter who had been with Nehru at Cambridge and in jail. Like the others, he had to disembark from his car and walk up the steeply sloping lawn that fronted the prime minister’s residence. Austin saw a weeping Mahmud given a helping hand by Jagjivan Ram, a senior Congress politician and Cabinet minister of low-caste origin. This was truly ‘a scene symbolic of Nehru’s India: a Muslim aided by an Untouchable coming to the home of a caste Hindu’.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“An early gesture was to rename Harrington Road after a hero of the world communist movement, so that at the height of the Vietnam War the address of the United States Consulate was 7 Ho Chi Minh Sarani, Calcutta.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“Learn all the handicrafts’, said the Mahatma, ‘that’s the way to peaceful independence. If you use rifles and guns and tanks, it is a foolish thing.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“By the terms of the Partition Award, Bengal had been divided, with the eastern wing going to Pakistan and the western section staying in India. Calcutta, the province’s premier city, was naturally a bone of contention. The Boundary Commission chose to allot it to India, sparking fears of violence on the eve of Independence.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“Ghalib’s poem was composed against the backdrop of the decline of the Mughal Empire. His home territory, the Indo-Gangetic plain, once ruled by a single monarch, was now split between contending chiefdoms and armies. Brother was fighting brother; unity and federation were being undermined. But”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“No event of any importance in India is complete without a goof-up. In this case, it was relatively minor. When, after the midnight session at the Constituent Assembly, Jawaharlal Nehru went to submit his list of cabinet ministers to the governor general, he handed over an empty envelope. However,”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“They assured him that the president was bound to act with ‘the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers and cannot act independently of that advice’. As they saw it, the position of the president of India was even weaker than that of the British monarch.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“The first such avenue was education. After Independence there was a great expansion in school and college education. By law, a certain portion of seats were reserved for the Scheduled Castes. By policy, different state governments endowed scholarships for children from disadvantaged homes.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“Peking followed Lenin’s dictum that ‘promises, like piecrusts, are meant to be broken’.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“1980, Rajiv Gandhi said that there was ‘no question of my stepping into [Sanjay’s] shoes’. Asked whether he would take up a party post or contest elections, Rajiv answered that he ‘would prefer not to’. He added that his wife was ‘dead against the idea of my getting into politics’.14 Nine months later Rajiv Gandhi was elected an MP from his brother’s old constituency, Amethi. When asked why he had changed his mind, Rajiv answered: ‘The way I look at it is that Mummy has to be helped somehow.”
― Ramachandra Guha, quote from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

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