The End of India

The End of India is a book of essays by Khushwant Singh, published by Penguin Books India in 2003. Written after the Gujarat violence of 2002, it argues that communal politics, not religion itself, is the force pulling India apart, and it warns that the country could come undone.

About the book

The book runs to 163 pages. Its starting point is personal: Singh was a witness to the violence of Partition in 1947, and he writes that he thought then that he had seen the worst India could do to herself. The Gujarat carnage of 2002 convinced him the worst might still be to come.

The argument is stated plainly in the publisher's description of the book: fundamentalism has less to do with religion than with politics, and communal politics is only the most visible of the demons India has nurtured and let loose upon itself. Singh's evidence runs from insurgencies in Kashmir and the north-east, through caste wars in Bihar and scattered Naxalite movements, to the ghettoisation of minorities in Indian cities.

What does Singh argue?

Singh's case is that India is being undone from within by its own obsessions: caste, region, religion and race. The publisher's summary of his argument puts it bluntly: Singh forces the reader to confront what it calls the absolute corruption of religion, a corruption that has made Indians among the most brutal people on earth.

What makes the book more than a lament is its history. Singh does not treat 2002 as a sudden break. He traces the communalisation of Gujarat back through the decades, and he sets the Gujarat violence beside Partition, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 and the killing of the missionary Graham Staines and his children, as chapters of one story rather than separate tragedies.

The case of Gujarat

The heart of the book is the long essay on Gujarat, part of which the magazine The Caravan later republished. Singh describes the attack on the train at Godhra as pre-planned, and the revenge that followed as pre-planned too: within hours, he writes, armed mobs were out with detailed lists of Muslim homes and establishments, and several hundred Muslims were hacked to death or burnt alive, women raped, homes and shops looted and burnt down.

His charge is against the state itself. The police, he writes, stood by like spectators; when the army arrived it was not deployed; orders to shoot at sight came only after many lives had been lost; and officers who tried to do their duty were transferred out. A year after the rioting, he writes, many Muslim victims were still homeless, and those who had returned had been forced to withdraw their complaints.

To show that none of this was new, Singh reaches back to a report from another time: Judge Madon's summing up after the Bhiwandi and Jalgaon riots of 1970, a journey, the judge wrote, through a land of hatred and violence, of prejudice and perjury. Singh had visited Ahmedabad himself in 1970, five months after its riots, and he quotes his own report from that visit. The 1969 Ahmedabad riots, he argues, were the first triumph of the RSS in Gujarat, and the divisions he saw then were never allowed to heal.

Partition, 1984 and the pattern Singh saw

Singh's authority in the book comes from having seen it before. He writes, 'I have seen it before with my own eyes in 1947 and 1984.' Singh was born in Hadali, in the Punjab that became Pakistan in 1947, and the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 showed him the same pattern in the capital: mobs, a police force that looked away, and a state unwilling to stop them.

The burning of the missionary Graham Staines and his children belongs in the same list for Singh: violence against Christians as well as Muslims, and the targeted killings by terrorists in Punjab and Kashmir complete a picture of a country where no community is safe from the politics of hatred.

ਲੇਖਕ

Khushwant Singh was born on 2 February 1915 in the village of Hadali, in what is now the Punjab province of Pakistan. He was educated at St Stephen's College in Delhi, Government College in Lahore and King's College London, worked for India's ministry of external affairs, and served as press officer in Ottawa and London. From 1980 to 1986 he was a member of the upper house of the Indian parliament.

He was one of India's most widely read writers: the author of Train to Pakistan, I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, Delhi: A Novel, The Company of Women and The Sunset Club, a two-volume History of the Sikhs, and the autobiography Truth, Love and a Little Malice. His newspaper column, With Malice Towards One and All, was syndicated across India. He died on 20 March 2014, at the age of 99.

Reception and legacy

The publisher calls The End of India a brave and passionate book, a wake-up call for every citizen concerned about his or her own future, if not the nation's. The Caravan's republication of the Gujarat essay more than a decade later shows how the book stayed in argument long after its publication.

The book is Singh's angriest work, and its title is a provocation rather than a prediction: a warning that a country can be lost not to invasion but to the hatreds its own politics feeds. In the Kosh it stands beside Train to Pakistan, Delhi and The Company of Women as the record of a writer who watched India for almost a century and refused to look away.