Don’t blame Britain for Modi’s plan for a ‘new India’

History has a sarcastic sense of humour, just ask Francis Fukuyama. Or eminent historians and literary ornaments of India like Ramachandra Guha, Arundhati Roy, and Shashi Tharoor, who are now mourning the loss of a secular liberal India under a Hindu majoritarian quasi-imperial centre. These four and their fellow academics are the first ones to blame India’s turn for the worse on the British empire, and all that it ‘made, shaped and quickened‘. This is somewhat ironic, given that Modi’s march to Kashmir is as rebellious and subaltern as it gets. Yet India’s post-colonial moral guardians are worried. ‘The passing of the act (which allowed Narendra Modi to overturn 70 years of status quo on Kashmir) was welcomed in (India’s) parliament by the very British tradition of desk-thumping’ Roy wrote. ‘There was a distinct whiff of colonialism in the air,’ she claimed. Even in her daftest misunderstanding of history, Roy cannot resist a dig at the Raj.