interesting observations on India no.1

"India and Pakistan were supposed to become independent simultaneously on August 14, 1947. However, astrologers discovered the 14th was inauspicious, so secular India postponed its freedom until one minute after midnight, and ever since it has observed August 15 as Independence Day."

(Arthur Bonner, Averting the Apocalypse, 1990, p. 8)


"Fuel is always the last thing bought with the family's supply of cash. Men will buy food, clothing, and maybe a radio, but they're seldom willing to spend money for fuel. It's a woman's job to go out and forage for it. If the surrounding trees are cut, the woman has to walk farther and farther and spend hours a day just to get fuel to cook a meal. A man is perfectly willing to cut and sell a tree to get cash, but a woman wants the trees nearby so she can collect twigs and leaves. Thus it's often the woman who cherishes and protects the environment, not the man."

Sunita Narain

(Arthur Bonner, Averting the Apocalypse, 1990, p. 4)

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The Paradox of Mahatma Gandhi

In India, as in the West, political theories based on charismatic leaders and institutionalized parties no longer have meaning. The belief that a particular individual can recognize and fulfill an historical process has been shown to be the starting point for political programs that, at best, have kept the poor in chains and, at worst, have led to violence and totalitarianism.
While social movement actors in the West quote the thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi and regard his nonviolent principles as meaningful for the nuclear age, Indian activists do not look to him for moral inspiration. The West sees Gandhi in terms of his abstract teachings, while modern Indians who are determined to change society see him in terms of his life.
He conceived nonviolent noncooperation as a process for breaking the material and metaphysical chains of slavery, but he tied himself so closely to the interests of the ruling castes that he could not possibly put his beliefs into practice. As he confessed shortly before his death, the nonviolence practiced in India was mere pacifism willing to coexist with the traditonal oppressive power structure.
It was through the instrumentality of Gandhi that power was transferred in India in what Antonio Gramsci called a "passive revolution." By this he meant a process presided over by established elites who use what are propagandized as revolutionary changes to maintain and consolidate a supremacy based on narrow consensus that ignores most of the population except as cheering crowds in the background.

(Arthur Bonner, Averting the Apocalypse, 1990, p. 4-5)