Mahasweta Devi’s Santiniketan, comrades and the mullahs, the BJP’s rise and more 

Welcome to this edition of  The Hindu on Books Newsletter.

We have been reading a host of books by feisty women, and a little gem by Mahasweta Devi,  Our Santiniketan (Seagull Books), translated by Radha Chakravarty. It was first published in Bengali in 2001 by Srishti Prakashan for the annual book fair in Kolkata, and has finally been translated into English. Mahasweta Devi spent her childhood days in Santiniketan in the 1930s at Tagore’s university, and the early experiences shaped her personality. By the time she passed away in 2016 at the age of 90, the writer and matchless activist left behind a rich oeuvre of novels, short stories and essays. “From Santiniketan I received the inspiration to work tirelessly and continuously…,” Mahasweta Devi would often say. Chakravarty writes in the introduction that through lively vignettes of Mahasweta Devi’s student life, “she offers us glimpses of Tagore’s innovative ideas on education” as they were put to practice. “They would plant in our minds the seeds of great philosophical ideals, like trees,” recalled Mahasweta Devi. The methods were unorthodox – “identifying trees, raiding fruit trees, and in the rains running towards the Kopai [river]…learning how to swim in those red, muddy waters…” The reminiscences, says Chakravarty, also reveal a shared interest in nature, environment and ecology that connects Tagore’s vision of co-existence between human, natural and animal worlds to Mahasweta Devi’s later environmental activism. 

In reviews, we read about India’s grand strategy for the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war, the rise and rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Wajida Tabassum’s women and more. We also carry an excerpt from  The Comrades and the Mullahs: China, Afghanistan and the New Asian Geopolitics (HarperCollins) by Ananth Krishnan and Stanly Johny.

Perhaps the most significant conceptual argument that Chandrashekhar Dasgupta makes in his book,  India and the Bangladesh Liberation War (Juggernaut), is how Indian policymakers stitched together a multidimensional grand strategy to achieve the liberation of Bangladesh. In his review, Happymon Jacob writes that Dasgupta defines grand strategy as “a comprehensive and coordinated plan for employing all the resources available to a state – diplomatic, military and economic – to achieve a defined political objective”. The book also, somewhat indirectly, prompts one to raise several questions about India and its experiments with grand strategy. “There is little doubt that what we witnessed in 1971 was one of those rare moments when India articulated and implemented a grand strategy. The Kargil conflict was another example when India was able to press its military, political and diplomatic resources to successfully beat back Pakistani territorial aggression. These were of course crisis moments and India performed well. Yet what is it about us that we manage to get our act together only when there is a crisis? For sure, a crisis demands a grand strategic response, but the real test of a country’s ability to adopt grand strategic responses is whether it is able to do so consistently, thoughtfully, and in the long term, in less politically riveting situations.” 

India and the Bangladesh Liberation War review: The question of grand strategy

Nalin Mehta’s book,  The New BJP : Modi and the Making of the World’s Largest Political Party (Westland), is an exhaustive look at the factors behind the rise of the BJP to a position of hegemony in Indian politics. How did India become a BJP-centric polity, from first being ruled mostly by the Congress, to a period of coalitions drawn from regional players and socialists and then a bipolar system? Mehta examines all these templates. In her review, Nistula Hebbar says the BJP’s electoral success cannot be explained without going into its history, the ideological challenges it faced, and the efforts the party made to transform its support base from being a largely upper caste to one based on solid support of Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in significant States in north India. “The book has interesting chapters on strategy and experiments it carried out on issues like digital engagement with the electorate, where the BJP had a first-mover advantage, and creating a “labarthi” or “beneficiary” vote bank out of those who receive welfare goods due to schemes and programmes run by BJP-led governments.”  

The New BJP: Modi and the Making of the World’s Largest Political Party review: Strategy, experiments, digital push: explaining the BJP’s rise