Insecurity, then, drove Hastings into devising the “system of conciliation”, essentially a vanity project that entailed winning over the déclassé intellectual elites of India to the Company cause. And so, surrounded by a coven of Hindu and Muslim clerics and thinkers, he was able to reinvent the Company man as a patron of the native intelligentsia. The upstart merchant-mercenary of yesterday was now the enlightened scholar-statesman of the new dispensation. As it was, the overwilling Hindu and Muslim pundits cynically, and perhaps understandably, treated the whole exercise as a power grab, letting on to the Company’s pen-pushers that they were the repositories of India’s unchanging laws. Their spurious claims about the existence of a fairly coherent body of “Hindu law” and “Muslim law” were taken at face value and willed into being.

With a few minor tweaks, it’s a system that still exists in India today. Under its original terms, the state abdicated responsibility on matters relating to inheritance, marriage, and divorce, ceding control over “personal law” to hastily appointed ultraconservative religious authorities. The upshot for Indian Muslims was a legal regime of shariatic derivation in which unilateral divorce without alimony was a male prerogative. The inheritance law was of a piece with this vision: sons were entitled to twice the share passed to daughters. This was just as well for the “orientalists” of the East India Company, enamoured of “authentic” native custom, even if no such thing existed. It likewise suited its more hard-nosed businessmen, anxious to rule on the cheap. Public law — land contracts, taxes — was kept in British hands, while pesky personal law was offloaded to priests.

Over the past quarter-millennium, no universalising countervailing influence has been able to breach this identitarian consensus. Indeed, only two serious stabs have been made by rationalists to undermine religious authority, the first of which was the zestful Utilitarian attack of the early 19th century on a range of religious customs. The second was the largely passive revolution of 1947, when the baton passed from an English to Indian elite, committed notionally to secularism. But Hindu and Muslim personal law remained on the books.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that Hastings is to blame for Modi, or that a direct line can be drawn from 1772 to 1992, when Hindu fanatics sparked nationwide riots after tearing down Babur’s Mosque, a pivotal episode in the rise of Hindu nationalism. Rare though it was, precolonial India was no stranger to confessional violence between Hindus and Muslims, not least over matters of cow worship and slaughter. Yet the fact remains that Indians, in the main, clung to their primary identification as members of this and that sect and subcaste. It took British legal reform and Hindu and Muslim religious revivalism in the 18th century to convince a great many to start thinking of themselves above all as Hindus and Muslims.

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Devolution added a further fillip to fanaticism. As the franchise expanded from the 1860s on, and first councils and then provinces fell into Indian hands, religion offered a crude shorthand for political difference. Hindus and Muslims milked votes through their respective positions on cows, and increasingly the stakes went beyond bovine blood, also encompassing human flesh. Here was the unholy alliance between votes and violence that would have crippling consequences for the country after independence. And the arrival of the new intellectual current of nationalism only compounded this confessional problem. Deciding to mine the rich vein of national identity, the Hindu-dominated Congress Party, established in 1885, propounded an anticolonialism which amounted to a sentimental tribute to Hindu gods. It unsurprisingly found itself at loggerheads with the Muslim League, founded in 1906, which successfully lobbied for a Muslim quota in the services and in parliament, essentially an electoral extrapolation of the Hastings principle. If still far from a foregone conclusion, the road to Partition was now clear.

By the time the cantankerous and identity-obsessed Mohandas Gandhi seized control of the Congress in 1920, it was, in a sense, already too late for course correction. Rather favourably disposed to Muslims unlike many a rabidly prejudiced Congressman, Gandhi nevertheless inaugurated a political style that precluded any semblance of common ground between Hindus and Muslims. “My Hindus” could strike deals with, even befriend, “you Muslims”, but any alliance between the two faiths could only ever be skin-deep. The chasm between Hindu and Muslim was far too existential to warrant any meaningful connection with a member of the opposite team. More dismayingly, Gandhi’s handpicked henchmen didn’t so much as even pay lip service to the official ideology of secularism. By 1937, a mere 2.2% of the party membership was Muslim; at the time, one in four Indians swore by Islam. When the bulk of the provinces fell to the Congress that year, the trial run at independence revealed what a farcically one-sided affair the party was. Cow slaughter bans were introduced. In schools, idolatry was forced down the throats of hapless Muslims. Not long after, in 1940, Jinnah’s Muslim League would demand a separate homeland for Muslims.

So it was that when the Brits Brexited the subcontinent seven years later, the transfer of power was accompanied by a carve-up: a largely Hindu India achieved independence sandwiched by two pools of Pakistan snipped from its sides.

Since independence, Indians have struggled to make one nation out of two communities. Already in the early Fifties, a purge of Muslims had left the higher echelons of the civil service entirely devoid of minorities. More recently, the Hindu nationalist BJP — in power since 2014 — has given carte blanche to Hindu militias to break up interfaith marriages and bulldoze Muslim homes. Its new citizenship law is designed to disenfranchise millions of Muslims in the borderlands. In cities such as Ahmedabad, laws have been passed preventing Muslims from buying and renting property in Hindu areas.

Detached observers will rightly point out such enormities are par for the course in young democracies, where the demos falls hostage to the ethnos. Indeed, the Indian dilemma is far from unique. As in the former colony, so in the metropole. Postwar Britain, too, was after a fashion a new nation, having just emerged out of the British Empire. It is no accident that the rise of English nationalism in the mid-century was roughly coeval with the rise of Hindu nationalism. As the historian Olivette Otele has recently reminded us in African Europeans, race mattered rather little in Europe in the age of empire; prejudice turned instead on religion.

The experience of black Britons in the 20th century confirms this. In their brilliant sociology of the British elite since Victorian times, Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman recall an interview with a black British woman who contrasted her experience of Oxbridge in the Seventies (“Don’t come to my room while my parents are here. They don’t like coloureds,” she was told) with that of her parents in Thirties Oxbridge (they “absolutely loved it, so I had a slightly rose-tinted view of the whole thing. So I walked into the kind of prejudice that my mother never met. She was met by a lot of curiosity, but not overt racism”.)

Their strikingly different experiences point to a broader phenomenon. As a rule, modern empires have handled diversity better than nation states. In the latter, parochialism has all too often trumped cosmopolitanism; and prejudice, toleration. So it shouldn’t surprise us that the experience of a black Briton in the Thirties, when Britain was still an empire with at least a smidgen of commitment to ethnic plurality, was altogether different from that of her daughter in the Seventies, when Britain was in the throes of a rabidly intolerant postimperial nationalism. It is the reason why, despite being a Brexiteer, I maintain a theoretical sympathy to supranational projects, even the one that has gone horribly wrong next-door. For it can hardly be denied that Britain’s return to cosmopolitanism, in great part of Europhilic stamp, took the edge off English nationalism.

If Hindu nationalism has succeeded where English nationalism has failed, it is because identity politics has won out in India. Segregation in all its declensions — legal (the long shadow cast by Hastings and the orientalists); electoral (the marriage of votes and violence); social (Modi’s war on miscegenation and mixed neighbourhoods) — has been placed on a pedestal. Contrariwise, in England, a steady universalisation of laws has resulted in the dismantling of the pillars of minority oppression — Catholic emancipation in 1829; decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967; abolition of blasphemy laws in 2008 — all the while steering clear of the kind of identitarian quotas and carve-outs, exemptions and exceptions, that have gained ever greater currency in India. It is no accident that, beyond the crenellated confines of the ivory tower, so few Brits set any store by racial or religious identity politics today. Compare Tommy Robinson’s itsy-bitsy fan base with that of Enoch Powell’s in his prime. Small wonder the far-Right’s brat summer proved to be such a damp squib.

Today, the Indian prime minister, well into his second term in office and facing elections next year, is accused of condoning pervasive violence against religious minorities, introducing of a stealthy religious test of citizenship, destroying India’s secular character, fostering crony capitalism and criminalising dissent. And yet to ascribe the wretched state of Indian democracy solely to one man is to engage in a form of self-deception. The consolidation of Modi’s authoritarian rule would be inconceivable in the presence of an effective democratic opposition.

Modi’s rise has been facilitated by an opposition that now exists solely to provide subsistence to one family: the Gandhi dynasty, which seized total control of the Congress Party in the Seventies and converted it into a family fief. Despite handing two historic electoral victories to Modi and his Hindu-first Bharatiya Janata Party, the governing apparatus of Congress — the “secular” alternative to the ruling party — has clung religiously to the Gandhis.

The great-grandson of India’s first prime minister, Rahul Gandhi is the seventh member of his family to occupy, formally or informally, the pinnacle of Congress. His conduct radiates an almost feudalistic contempt for his obligations. He has one of the worst attendance records in parliament. Between 2015 and 2019, as Modi subverted autonomous institutions, sanctifying murderous Hindu supremacism and building a cult of personality unrivalled in the democratic world, Gandhi averaged about five foreign trips a month. Virtually every time Modi created an opening for the opposition to push back against the government, Gandhi was abroad, leaving his party without leadership and the nation without an opposition. With the exception of Maha Vajralongkorn, the notoriously dissolute monarch of Thailand, it is difficult to think of another Asian leader who has spent more time away from his country in times of need.

But, then, in March, the scion of the storied Nehru-Gandhi dynasty found himself sentenced to two years in jail on charges of defamation, for mocking Modi’s name in a 2019 speech. Since his punishment met the statutory minimum prescribed in law for disqualification from membership of parliament, Gandhi was served a notice of eviction within 24 hours of the trial. The rapidity with which he was removed was staggering. “I am fighting for Indian democracy,” he declared as he announced his intention to appeal. But far from being a martyr for Indian democracy, Rahul Gandhi is complicit in its slow murder.

Those who have questioned Gandhi’s record and challenged his paramountcy have found themselves stamped upon or driven out of the Congress Party. In 2020, during an important state election in Bihar, Gandhi went away on a Himalayan holiday midway through the campaign. A senior figure who objected to this and faulted the leadership for another Congress defeat was severely upbraided and subjected to disciplinary action. That same year, as defeats piled up in state elections across India, a group of 23 Congress leaders issued a call for internal reform of India’s oldest political party.

The Gandhis retaliated with a scorched-earth response. The reformists were shouted down, bullied, heckled, insulted, told to leave the party and punished in petty and humiliating ways. The party’s politburo tightened the screws with a unanimous resolution to “strengthen” the Gandhis’ control of Congress “in every possible way”, pledging never to permit anyone to “undermine or weaken” their hold on it, and praising them for inspiring “a generation of Indians”. 

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The degeneration of Congress into a family-run despotism ought to dismay all who claim to be concerned about the state of democracy in India. Congress is more than a political party. It is the institution that incubated Indian democracy. Founded by a Scotsman in 1885 as a forum for the expression of native aspirations in British India, it grew under the supervision of Mahatma Gandhi into the engine of India’s freedom movement. Aspiring democrats in Africa and Asia came to regard it as a model for their own countries. “In the upsurge of anti-colonial and freedom struggles that swept through Asia and Africa in the postwar period,” Nelson Mandela wrote from Robben Island in 1980, “there could hardly be a liberation movement or national leader who was not influenced one way or another by […] the All India Congress”.

Following India’s independence, the values of Congress — secularism, socialism, democracy, neutrality in foreign affairs — became the values of the republic. The reverence for Congress ran so deep that elections were a formality: until the Seventies, the party had no challenger. Then, in 1975, confronting the prospect of disqualification from parliament after being convicted by a lower court of violating election rules, prime minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of internal emergency, suspended the constitution and ruled as a dictator for 21 months.

During this period, internal democracy vanished completely from Congress. As party propagandists produced slogans extolling the prime minister (“Courage and Clarity of Vision, Thy Name is Indira Gandhi”), Indira’s older son, Sanjay, a dropout with no formal title in the government, gangsterised the party machinery by inserting his henchmen into its highest echelons, raided state banks and established a reign of terror. Fixated on “beautifying” the country and curbing the growth of population, he ordered the demolition of Muslim slums, paraded in chains those who defied him, and superintended the forcible sterilisation of 6.2 million men — 15 times the number of men sterilised by the Nazis.

Congress was booted out of office in 1977 when Indira Gandhi, desperate to redeem her standing in the West and assured by her intelligence officers of an easy victory, called a snap election. It was an extraordinary affirmation of Indian democracy as an overwhelming majority of mostly illiterate voters threw out a family that had come to regard itself as a native aristocracy.

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Indian democracy opened up to competition; Congress, however, hardened into a hereditary dictatorship. The mystique of the dynasty has hypnotised generations of Westerners. Even during the most violent phase of her dictatorship, Indira Gandhi received praise, rather than rebukes, from figures as ideologically apart as Michael Foot and Robert McNamara. A decade later, when her son Rajiv addressed the US Congress after his administration presided over a pogrom of Sikhs, the Washington Post gushed: “Watching him, you had to believe in genes.” Barack Obama admitted in his memoir to being struck by the “dark, probing eyes” and “quiet, regal presence” of Rajiv Gandhi’s Italian-born widow (and Rahul Gandhi’s mother), Sonia. Her position, Obama wrote, was proof of “the enduring power of the family dynasty”.

Since Indira Gandhi’s defeat in 1977, the British Labour Party, the sister party of Congress, has elected a dozen leaders. Barring a brief interregnum in the 1990s caused by a death in the family, Congress, operating in the most populous democracy on earth, has not known a single leader outside one dynasty. Not even the existential threat to India from Modi’s sectarian rule has been able to galvanise it into democratising itself. Under Rahul Gandhi, it has been reduced to a paltry 52 seats in the Lok Sabha, the 545-seat lower house of parliament.

Last year, as Congress found itself out of power in all but two of India’s 28 states, the party reluctantly agreed to hold a leadership election — the first in nearly a quarter century. Since the electoral college was stacked entirely with voters handpicked by the Gandhi family, Rahul Gandhi chose not to enter the race in the hope of giving it the appearance of a fair contest.

But the election was a farce. The Gandhis nominated a proxy candidate: Mallikarjun Kharge, an 80-year-old subservient acolyte of the family from the southern state of Karnataka. Having spent two decades pitching Rahul Gandhi as the hope of India’s young, Congress picked as his surrogate a man born in the reign of George VI, the last emperor of British India.

Kharge’s opponent in the election was Shashi Tharoor, perhaps the only figure with the oratorical prowess, charisma and profile to rival Modi. As a high-ranking diplomat at the United Nations until 2007, Tharoor oversaw a gargantuan bureaucracy, supervised a complex international relief operation for refugees during the Vietnamese boat people crisis and helped negotiate the end of hostilities in the former Yugoslavia. A late entrant to Indian politics, he won three successive terms to parliament from the communist bastion of Kerala in southwestern India.

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Tharoor’s record would make him a frontrunner for the leadership of almost any centrist party in the democratic world. In Congress, however, he was exposed to relentless abuse because he threatened, by virtue of his competence, to eclipse Gandhi. As the campaign got underway, Tharoor, who was among the most passionate advocates of internal reform in Congress, was instructed to withdraw in favour of a “consensus” candidate. When he did not, rumours were circulated to suggest that he was quitting the race. Some leaders took great pains to be seen to spurn him. Others hurled abuse at him. Jairam Ramesh, one of the most powerful functionaries in the party, undermined the election by calling it a “sideshow” even before a vote had been cast. Ramesh, the kind of buffoonish bawler found in every despotic set-up, is emblematic of so much that is wrong with Congress: a self-regarding sciolist who has never exposed himself to a lone popular election in his life and yet wields enormous clout by toadying up to the Gandhi dynasty.

Tharoor was prevented from campaigning in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous and politically important state, given voter lists without contact details and denied audience with state leaders of the party, who received Kharge with great fanfare. The unfairness of it all was obscured by the Bharat Jodo Yatra, a so-called “unity march” led by Rahul Gandhi that traversed the length of India as the internal elections happened. The objective of the march was not so much to “unify” India as to burnish Rahul Gandhi’s bruised reputation. He was made the focus of an expensive campaign designed to evoke comparisons with Mahatma Gandhi’s historic Salt March in 1930 against the British Empire.

It all paid off. Kharge was “elected” leader. And his first order of business was to pay tribute to the Gandhis by anointing Gandhi as the party’s prime ministerial candidate in the 2024 general election. Tharoor and his supporters were mercilessly marginalised. In March, a veteran of the Congress Party told me that there was a serious effort underway to make an “example” of Tharoor by stamping on his backers and engineering his defeat in the next general elections. 

Congress, built by India’s most revered founding fathers, remains the only political organisation that can rival the BJP’s reach and recognition across India. But its ability to restore democracy to India is being fatally undermined by its preoccupation with preserving dynastic despotism within the party. Its recent victory in the statewide election in Karnataka in southern India — naturally credited to Gandhi’s leadership — has deluded some Congresspersons into the belief that their party is poised to defeat Modi in next year’s general elections, and given rise to an ever more militant contest to display loyalty to the Gandhi dynasty. The result: Congress is arguably more feudal today than it was before the leadership contest.

Democracy is a collaborative enterprise: it cannot last if the opposition abdicates its duty. That’s why the prime minister does not wish to finish off Gandhi — his conviction will eventually be overturned by the higher courts — but wants to revive him, energise him with insults and help make him the sole face of opposition to Modi in the minds of voters. That is his path to winning a historic third term, and making secular democracy in India history. Gandhi, by refusing to vanish, is determined to help him achieve his goal.

Yesterday in Plymouth one such statue was unveiled of Nancy Astor, the first female MP to take her seat in the House of Common. Viscountess Astor had won the constituency of Plymouth Sutton in 1919, and after Sinn Féin’s Constance Markievicz had refused to take her seat the previous year, became the first woman to sit in the House.

Both the former prime minister Theresa May and her successor Boris Johnson posed by the statue of the former Tory MP, who held the seat until 1945; Mrs May said the whole country should be “proud of the great strides Nancy Astor made for equality and representation”.

But the unveiling is not just an opportunity to commemorate the centenary of women being involved in Parliamentary politics in the UK. Its erection — like that of any statue — reveals several interesting facets of our age.

In recent years Britain, like the United States, has had an ongoing set of “statues wars”. In the decade before this, while he was Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone (sadly so often ahead of his time) had an outburst when he chose to dismiss some of the plinth-dwellers of Trafalgar Square.

In 2000 Livingstone explained that the statues of Major General Sir Henry Havelock and General Sir James Napier should be removed from their plinths because “I have not a clue who two of the generals there are or what they did”. Needless to say, Livingstone saw the fault here as being Havelock’s and Napier’s, rather than his own. By contrast generations of schoolchildren yet unborn can be expected to sing choruses and roundelays about the noble endeavours and accomplishments of Ken Livingstone while Mayor of the capital.

By the time that Marc Quinn’s statue of Alison Lapper Pregnant was unveiled half a decade later it was perfectly uncontroversial to say that the likenesses of Havelock and Napier should be removed because they had been responsible for imperialist oppression and that Trafalgar Square should have no room for such imagery.

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Without any explicit governmental announcements an important transition had already taken place within the nation, and “diversity” had replaced heroism as the most celebrated virtue in British society.

The ensuing years have embedded this impression. During this decade Britain has seen the arrival of a Gandhi statue in Parliament Square and a campaign to pull down that of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford. As with the statue wars in America none of this is completely new, since such effigies have always come and gone. But the question of who goes up and who goes down — or at least who’s targetted for pulling down — reveals an interesting cross-section of our current priorities.

The figure of Gandhi must have seemed like a godsend to the Conservative Government that announced and oversaw its construction. It was also a useful little diplomatic tool; the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, found it diplomatically helpful to announce the memorial while on an official visit to India in 2014. But Gandhi’s arrival in Parliament Square was definitely helped by a wider sense that the statuary in the centre of London needed to be “diversified”. The statues of the nation must — like everything else — be less male, stale and pale.

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Yet even if this is the main impetus, the determination with which we are holding to it also tells us something more about our current orders of priorities. Nancy Astor, for instance, was a very remarkable woman: determined, witty and accomplished. She was also the beneficiary of considerable privilege, through birth and marriage — none of which is generally looked on with forgiveness in our age.

More significantly, in her day she also had views which we would not ordinarily now encourage. She was, for instance, intimately bound up with the upper-class appeasement movement of the 1930s. And as Harold Nicholson (among others) noted in his diaries, she was perfectly willing to indulge in the kind of ugly, reflexive anti-Semitism that was thought to be “smart” in aristocratic circles in those days.

None of this is to take away from Astor, or to indulge in the kind of gleeful hindsight-presumption that now laces nearly all writing about historical figures. But it is interesting, because ordinarily in the current era people are neither admired nor forgiven — let alone celebrated — if they are deemed to have been racist. Ordinarily when any tribute is paid to a dead person — however great their accomplishments — a slew of critics emerge to counter that said individual had bad opinions which must neither be overlooked nor celebrated.

Gandhi — whose statue happily strides aloft his plinth in Parliament Square — was also a type of racist. As students at the forever right-on Manchester University noted when a bust of him was given to their city, he had views about black Africans which would not be forgiven in a person today. In his early writings while in South Africa, he had repeatedly referred to Africans in highly derogatory terms.

So perhaps the choice of statues reveals something which, if accepted, could be potentially helpful for our current era — that perhaps our society has a better understanding of human complexity than we are currently willing to let on. In the present day we are obsessed with “cancelling” and otherwise lambasting people if they have got even one thing wrong in their life, even if that “wrong” thing is something that everyone used to get “wrong”.

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But with some historical figures perhaps we recognise that things are messier than that. That good people do bad things, and that there are more complex weight and balance systems than the loudest voices in our societies might now like to pretend. If that is the case, then it might be worth trying to learn from it, and discover how an air-pocket of subtlety around the past might be extended into the present.

More likely is that there is simply a pecking order among the priorities of the age — as in every age before. A woman may be celebrated even though she had racist views. An Indian may be forgiven even if he had racist opinions. But it seems unlikely that any more statues will be going up to a heterosexual white male who had a single abhorrent thought in his life.

And that is not just because there are enough pale, male statues already. It is a simple demonstration of the fact that we are keener to stress diversity than any other value in our age — even anti-racism. The importance of celebrating women in politics or Indian political figures in London supersedes everything else; the virtue and goal of the age is diversity, and it turns out that — like the gods of previous ages — it will be pursued whatever the contradictions: indeed in spite of them.