St Thomass Anglican Cathedral in central Mumbai (former Bombay), India, is a cool, airy retreat from the hubbub of the modern city. Founded in 1676, it bears witness to almost the entire history of the colonisers as they saw themselves through the changing times.
So, the memorial to Thomas Mostyn, which records that he was a "faithful Servant to the East India Company" (died in 1779 aged 48 years), belongs to an age of stratagem as the British carefully picked apart Mogul power in India. Of a cool discerning mind, he was Skilful in the Politics of Hindostan [and] resided several Years in a public Character at the Mahratta Court".
By contrast, Captain George Hardinge, who died a generation later in 1808 aged 28, took part in the high noon of conquest (its a story that takes the wind out of the sails of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Hardinge, commanding the San Fiorenzo of 36 guns and 186 men on the Indian seas, chased and brought into action upon three successive days the [French] enemys frigate La Piedmontaise who had 50 guns and 566 men. He achieved a most brilliant conquest but fell with glory in the last and critical period of the heroic enterprise).
And in the long afternoon of what sometimes seemed to the imperialists to be effortless superiority, Henry Robertson Bowers of the Royal India Marine went off on an awfully big adventure, to die, in 1912 aged 28, beside Captain Scott in the Antarctic.
While the British glorified Britannias Sons, less heroic aspects of the Raj, such as mass famine, were quietly forgotten or studiously ignored. Imperial policies in late 19th century India led directly to the death of tens of millions of people (see Past Hunger and Present Ghosts). One of the worst of the famines struck large parts of India from 187679 after the rains failed continually. Between 6.1 million and 10.3 million people died.
The mass death was predictable and entirely preventable. But it was not the deliberate aim of British imperial policy. This policy, unspeakably cruel as it often was, cannot be termed genocide. The Brits wanted to make money, not kill people.
The same cannot confidently be said of todays Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Hindu nationalists who may retain power in Indias imminent general election as Congress, the main opposition party, stagnates under dynastic leadership and a weakening organising base.
The BJP was founded as the political arm of a neo-fascist paramilitary organisation, the Association of National Volunteers (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS). The RSS and the BJP both believe, as the centrepiece of their ideology, that India is in essence a Hindu nation. Muslims may live there only on sufferance. Their doctrine of Hindutva has as ultimate goals both the eradication of more than 150 million Muslim Indians (plus a few tens of millions of other minorities such as Christians), and also of erasing a rich history of interaction and cultural development.
Madhav Gowalkar, the early RSS leader still known simply as the Guru, was inspired by Adolf Hitlers treatment of Germanys minorities. To keep up the purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by purging the Semitic race, he wrote in We, or Our Nationhood Defined. National Pride in its highest manifestation has been manifested there. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures having differences going to the root to be assimilated The non-Hindu people in Hindustan must learn to revere the Hindu religion, and must entertain no idea but the glorification of the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving nothing. The consequences of this doctrine can be seen most clearly in Gujarat.
Its hard to say how far globalisation Indias opening to ever greater change, where all that is solid melts into air will temper, or exacerbate, the psychopathic introversion of the ruling partys core doctrine and other regressive forces in India that play on the fears of 600-900 million have-nots. It may be that increasing trade (not least with other southern countries, as in an agreement with the BJPs new best friend Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) will focus peoples minds on earning money fairly rather than on purifying the nation or criminalising the polity.
It may also be that ripples from events like the recent World Social Forum in Mumbai will contribute to a mind-shift in the direction of global solidarity that will make the task of 21st century genocidaires harder.
Acts of solidarity, crimes of silence
Because sometimes there can be something new under the sun. For example, as Adam Hochschild argues in a new book, while uprisings of the oppressed have erupted throughout history, the anti-slavery movement that began in late 18th century England was the first sustained mass campaign anywhere on behalf of someone elses rights:
Sometimes Britons even seemed to be organising against their own self-interest. From Sheffield, famous for making scissors, scythes, knives, razors, and the like, 769 metalworkers petitioned Parliament in 1789. Because their wares were sold to ship captains for use as currency to buy slaves, the Sheffield cutlers wrote, they might be expected to favour the slave trade. But they vigorously opposed it: Your petitioners...consider the case of the nations of Africa as their own. Consider the case of the nations of Africa as their own. The words spark across 215 years. Disenfranchised and claiming no mandate but their common humanity, these Yorkshire metal-workers saw themselves as global citizens for whom atrocity was not only unacceptable but also preventable.
The ideal frame of mind bore fruit both in the ultimate abolition of slavery and in achievements like the Genocide Convention, (as ably documented by Samantha Power in A Problem from Hell). It is now enshrined in official acts of remembrance like Britains annual Holocaust Memorial Day, which falls on 27 January and this year marked both the Final Solution and Rwanda, the most efficient genocide in history which started ten years ago this April.
Such moves are welcome. But they should not be mistaken for effective and durable commitment by elected governments to act when necessary. The Rwandan case shows this clearly. As David Rieff writes in A Bed for the Night: humanitarianism in crisis:
The US was not so contemptuous of international law that it was willing to thumb its nose at the Genocide Convention. Rather, through the person of its then UN ambassador and future secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the Clinton administration made sure that the word genocide was never applied to what was taking place in Rwanda while the killing was actually going on. The goal of U.S. policy was not to have to do anything about the mass slaughter in Rwanda. The means chosen was to ensure that what was taking place was called a humanitarian crime, not genocide. And when the position became untenable, the US State Department retreated to the stance that while acts of genocide might be taking place in Rwanda, genocide was not. One of the reasons for this intransigence was the shadow of an earlier debacle in Somalia. Over-reacting to humiliation, the US government and popular sentiment turned away from a situation where tragedy could have been prevented.
Intervention and moral choice
Could future action to prevent genocide have been made more difficult by the recent US-led attack on Iraq because it discredits the idea of armed intervention? openDemocracys Paul Rogers concurs with Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch when the latter says that calling the action in Iraq humanitarian breeds cynicism about the use of military force for humanitarian purposes [which] could be devastating for people in need of future rescue (importantly, Roth rejects the arguments that US complicity in past Iraqi repression should necessarily have precluded any US intervention in Iraq on humanitarian grounds). If such a pessimistic assessment is right, the odds of future mass atrocities may have increased.
Reasons for military intervention by powerful states are likely to continue to be complex and at times contradictory. In the case of Iraq, they included protection of oil supplies, enhancement of Israeli power, the sheer intoxicating force of war (as analysed by Chris Hedges) and what Ill term hyperactive democracy deficit disorder. They may also have included Gladstonian liberal imperialism.
This raises a key question for 21st century public culture, namely whether the positive motives of liberal intervention can take on new and more beneficial forms. Can the practical imagination of global citizens, like those seen at the World Social Forum, achieve such renewal?
The question may sometimes be answered by acts of choice and solidarity made by people like Paul Rusesabagina, sometimes called the Rwandan Schindler.
Rusesabagina showed that there is no sharp line between moral and physical courage. Its a lesson that, ironically, lies at the heart even of some imperial endeavours like those of Henry Robertson Bowers, the young Antarctic explorer, about whom a witness wrote: as the troubles have thickened about us, his dauntless spirit ever shone brighter and he has remained cheerful, hopeful, and indomitable to the end.
The question must always be asked even though hope and determination are often not enough, as attested by - for example - a candle that burns in Kielce, Poland to remember 46 Jews murdered there on their return home after surviving the Final Solution.