Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Edible oil Local production in Pakistan

 

 


Introduction to Oil Seed Crops

Introduction to Oil Seed Crops

Oil Seed Crops are primarily grown for the oil contained in the seeds and widely used in cooking across Pakistan. The oil content percentage in oil seed crops varies from 20 % to 60 % depending upon the size and variety. Many oilseed crops are grown in Pakistan predominantly as a source of vegetable oil. The commonly grown varieties are Rapeseed mustard, groundnut and sesame, which are grown in the country for a long period. Sunflower, soybean and safflower have been introduced recently in the country. There are also some oilseed crops, which are mainly used for industrial purposes, such as linseed and castor. Presently, local production of oilseeds meets only about 32% percent of the total country's requirements for edible oil. The Benefits of Oil Seed Crops

 

Import

Edible oil is Pakistan’s largest food import commodity ranking third in the import list after petroleum products and machinery. Pakistan is dependent upon other countries to fulfill more than 80% edible oil requirement and spending a big amount of foreign exchange every year.   The country’s annual import of edible oil stands at a staggering $4 billion, causing a significant drain on the country’s economy.

 

Local production

The local production of edible oil is less than 20% of country’s requirements. The gap between production and consumption of edible oil is still increasing due to increase in population and increase in per capita consumption of edible oil in our daily diet. Directorate of Oilseeds, Ayub Agricultural Research Institute, Faisalabad (Pakistan) is carrying out research activities to develop oilseed crop varieties/hybrids including Canola, Rapeseed, Mustard, Sunflower, Sesame and Soybean having better adaptability under the scenario of climate change. As an outcome of research activities, Directorate of Oilseeds evolved more than 30 varieties of above-mentioned oilseed crops which significantly played important role in enhancing provincial and national production of oilseeds. In recent years, ORI Faisalabad worked on enhanced pace and developed high yielding varieties of Canola i.e. Sandal Canola, Super Canola and AARI Canola. AARI Canola is the Pakistan’s 1st Canola version (00) variety in Mustard group and got much popularity among farmers due to short growing period, shattering tolerance and high omega-3 oil. With the collaborative efforts of Directorate of Oilseeds and other stake holders, especially Agriculture extension wing, the farming community was inspired to grow oilseed crops which significantly enhanced crop area in the province. Use of quality seed of better oilseed varieties and adoption of appropriate production technology also enhanced the average per acre production of oilseed crops during last two years. However, mechanization in cultivation of oilseed crops can further accelerate the growth of oilseeds sector. 

: There are many benefits and advantages of growing oil seed crops such as: Grown in any Farm System: Almost all the varieties of oil seed crops can be grown in any farming system. These crops are mostly weather resistant and can be grown in all sorts of weather conditions and have the following advantages:  These crops are easy to grow and doØ not require any till farm practice.  Oil seed crops can be easily grown inØ mulch till as well as no till farms.  No specific mechanization is requiredØ and can be easily grown through conventional farming methods. Rotational Crops: Out of all the varieties of oil seed crops, some of them are summer varieties and others are winter varieties. So they can be used as a form of rotational crops between the conventional crops grown in summer and winter season which leads to soil fertility and enhances the nutrient composition of soil for other crops to be grown. Support for Pest Management: Oil seed crops are ideal for pest hit land as when grown, they change the chemical pesticide formulation to assist in weed and disease control. All the varieties of oil seed crop helps in reducing the grassy weed hence providing optimum produce. These crops are also resistant to insects. Addition to Soil Health and Quality: As these crops also serve the purpose of rotational crops, their farming helps in making the soil fertile thus increasing the soil sustainability. Oil seed crops are tap root crops so they break the tillage pans by utilizing the different moisture profiles. These crops also help in reducing the soil erosion and help in keeping it firm thus increasing the chances for soil microbial activity which is required for the optimum crop growth and production. Economic Value: The main advantage of oil seed crops is that they provide alternative opportunities in marketing in the form of oil and meal byproducts which can be used on farm after processing to reduce energy and feed costs. Additionally, the crops grown after the harvesting of oil seed crops, always give higher yield because of the soil sustainability factor gained through planting oil seed crops. Oil seed crops have diversified markets for assisting with farm sustainability. Oil Seed Crops 2 Small and Medium Enterprises Development Authority (SMEDA) Nutritional Value: Fats and oils are essential nutrients, comprising about 40% of the calories in the average diet intake. Edible vegetable oils are used as salad or cooking oils, or may be solidified (by a process called hydrogenation) to make margarine and shortening. These products supplement or replace animal products (e.g., butter, lard), supplies of which are inadequate to meet the needs of an increasing world population. Oil Seed Crop Varieties: Following are the commonly grown and used varieties of oil seed crops: Rapeseed-Mustard and Canola: Rapeseed-Mustard and Canola is a rich source of oil and protein. The seed has oil as high as 46-48 percent, Whole seed meal has 43.6 percent protein. Rapeseed meal is an excellent feed for animals. Salient characteristics of this crop is that it has high yielding potential and better tolerance to stresses like drought and extreme cold. Commonly used varieties in Pakistan are:  DGL·  Toria-A·  Raya L-18·  Poorbi Raya·  Raya Anmol·  Khanpur Raya·  Punjab Canola·  Faisal Canola· Sunflower: Sunflower has been accommodated between the two major crops in a cotton and rice-based cropping system, or on fallow land in summers. Moreover, sunflower displays good intercropping compatibility with other crops. The commonly used sunflower varieties are:  PARC-92E·  SMH-9706·  SMH-0907·  SMH-0917· Soybean: It is one of the most important oilseed crops in the world. It contains 18 to 22 percent oil and is highly desirable in the diet and have 40 to 42 percent of good quality protein. Therefore, it is the best source of protein and oil and truly claim the title of the meat/oil that grows on plants. Generally, it is used in the food industry for flour, oil, margarine, cookies, biscuit, candy, milk, vegetable cheese, lecithin and many other products. Oil Seed Crops 3 Small and Medium Enterprises Development Authority (SMEDA) Soybean is a dual season crop and a high yielding produce as well. The most commonly grown variety is:  Faisal Soybean· Sesame: It is widely naturalized in tropical regions around the world and is cultivated for its edible seeds, which grow in pods. Sesame seed is one of the oldest corn-seed crops known, domesticated well over 3000 years ago. It was a major summer crop in the Middle East for thousands of years, as attested to by the discovery of many ancient presses for sesame oil in the region. Sesame is drought-tolerant and is able to grow where other crops fail. Sesame has one of the highest oil contents of any oil seed. The commonly grown varieties SG-51·  SG-43·  SG-30· Linseed / Flax Flax is an annual plant, 18 -36 inches tall, with small and thin leaves and blue flowers. Flax is cultivated both for seed as well as for fiber. The different portions of the plant have been utilized to produce fabric, medicines, paper, dye, fishing nets in addition to soap. A vegetable oil known as linseed oil or flaxseed oil is produced by the seeds. In addition to this flaxseed meal is used as animal feed. According to researchers, there is an evidence that flaxseed is good for improving overall health or preventing diseases. The commonly used variety is:  Chandni·

 

Coastal area potential

Experts suggest that the coastal areas of Sindh have high potential for the production of palm, sesame, and canola oils, but it is imperative that the government takes swift action to increase production and reduce reliance on imports.

 

President Sindh Chamber of Agriculture Miran Mohammed Shah highlighted that the Southern Divisions of Sindh, including the areas of Hyderabad, Mirpurkhas, and Shaheed Benazirabad, are already making advances in growing oilseed crops

 

Governments support

Due to non-standardised approaches, locally cultivated different edible oil plant varieties have not been able to achieve desired results. For example, in Mianwali, Canola is being cultivated significantly now, but the non-approved Canola variety of UAF-11 used by the majority of farmers contains around 20% euric acid, exceeding the maximum limit of euric acid for edible oil, which is less than 5%. This lack of standardisation has resulted in a rise in smuggling due to the hike in prices of edible oil.

“The edible oil industry doesn’t want to a pay fair price to the local farmers, but seems to be willing to pay more to foreign growers,”  

 

Local farmers are not getting any support from the government side in the development of these seeds, including incentives like subsidised rates and ensuring the availability and development of such seeds.

 

Policy

There is a huge opportunity in Pakistan to grow oil seeds with a sustained long-term policy. This policy should  include the provision of quality seeds/plants, proper pricing, and extension work so that growers can attain proper yields and return on the crop.

Despite identifying the opportunity to grow oil seeds in Pakistan for more than a decade, there is still a lack of attention from the government in agriculture to develop a long-term sustainable policy, he said.

With the country’s reliance on imports and rising prices of edible oil, urgent action is necessary to boost the local production of edible oil in Pakistan. The potential for the production of palm, sesame, and canola oils in the coastal areas of Sindh can be harnessed with the government’s intervention and support for standardized approaches and the development of quality seeds/plants. A sustained long-term policy is needed to improve the agriculture sector’s production of edible oil in Pakistan.

 

 

Thursday, March 16, 2023

China has shattered the assumption of US dominance in the Middle East

 

China has shattered the assumption of US dominance in the Middle East

Nic Robertson

Analysis by Nic Robertson, CNN

Published 12:21 AM EDT, Wed March 15, 2023

 

With a grandiose diplomatic flourish China brokered a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, in the process upending US calculus in the Gulf and beyond.

 

While the United States has angered its Gulf allies by apparently dithering over morality, curbing arms supplies and chilling relations, Saudi Arabia’s King-in-waiting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, has found a kindred spirit in China’s leader Xi Jinping.

 

Both are bold, assertive, willing to take risks and seemingly share unsated ambition.

 

Friday’s announcement that Riyadh and Tehran had renewed diplomatic ties was unexpected, but it shouldn’t have been. It is the logical accumulation of America’s diplomatic limitations and China’s growing quest to shape the world in its orbit.

 

Beijing’s claim that “China pursues no selfish interest whatsoever in the Middle East,” rings hollow. It buys more oil from Saudi Arabia than any other country in the world.  

 

Xi needs energy to grow China’s economy, ensure stability at home and fuel its rise as a global power.

 

His other main supplier, Russia, is at war, its supplies therefore in question. By de-escalating tensions between Saudi and Iran, Xi is not only shoring up his energy alternatives but, in a climate of growing tension with the US, also heading off potential curbs on his access to Gulf oil.

 

Xi’s motivation appears fueled by wider interests, but even so the US State Department welcomed the surprise move, spokesman Ned Price saying, “we support anything that would serve to deescalate tensions in the region, and potentially help to prevent conflict.”

 

Iran has buy-in because China has economic leverage. In 2021 the pair signed a trade deal reportedly worth up to $400 billion of Chinese investment over 25 years, in exchange for a steady supply of Iranian oil.

 

Tehran is isolated by international sanctions and Beijing is providing a glimmer of financial relief.

 

And, in the words of Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last year, there’s also the hope of more to come as he sees geopolitical power shifting east.

 

Asia will become the center of knowledge, the center of economics, as well as the center of political power, and the center of military power,” Khamenei said.

 

Saudi has buy-in because war with Iran would wreck its economy and ruin MBS’s play for regional dominance. His bold visions for the country’s post fossil-fuel future and domestic stability depend on inwardly investing robust oil and gas revenues.

 

US State Department spokesman Ned Price pictured in July 2022.

US State Department spokesman Ned Price pictured in July 2022.

Stefani Reynolds/Pool/AFP/Getty Images

US influence on the wane

It may sound simple, but the fact the US couldn’t pull it off speaks to the complexities and nuance of everything that’s been brewing over the past two decades.

 

America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have burned through a good part of its diplomatic capital in the Middle East.

 

Many in the Gulf see the development of the war in Ukraine as an unnecessary and dangerous American adventure, and some of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s territorial claims over Ukraine not without merit.

 

 

What the global West sees as a fight for democratic values lacks resonance among the Gulf autocracies, and the conflict doesn’t consume them in the same way as it does leaders in European capitals.

 

Saudi Arabia, and MBS in particular, have become particularly frustrated with America’s flip-flop diplomacy: dialling back relations over the Crown Prince’s role in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi (which MBS denies); then calling on him to cut oil production swiftly followed by requests to increase it.

 

These inconsistencies have led the Saudis to hew policy to their national interests and less to America’s needs.

 

During his visit to Saudi last July, US President Joe Biden said: “We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia, or Iran.” It seems now that the others are walking away from him.

 

China steps up

On Beijing’s part, China’s Gulf intervention signals its own needs, and the opportunity to act arrived in a single serving.

 

Xi helped himself because he can. The Chinese leader is a risk taker.

 

His abrupt ending of austere Covid-19 pandemic restrictions at home is just one example, but this is a more complex roll of the dice.

 

Mediation in the Middle East can be a poisoned chalice, but as big as the potential gains are for China, the wider implications for the regional, and even global order, are quantifiably bigger and will resonate for years.

 

 

Yet harbingers of this shake-up and the scale of its impact have been in plain sight for months. Xi’s high-profile, red-carpet reception in Riyadh last December for his first overseas visit after abandoning his domestic “zero-Covid” policy stirred the waters.

 

During that trip Saudi and Chinese officials signed scores of deals worth tens of billions of dollars.

 

China’s Foreign Ministry trumpeted Xi’s visit, paying particular attention to one particular infrastructure project: “China will deepen industrial and infrastructure cooperation with Saudi Arabia (and) advance the development of the China-Saudi Arabia (Jizan) Industrial Park.”

 

The Jizan project, part of China’s belt and road initiative, heralds huge investment around the ancient Red Sea port, currently Saudi’s third largest.

 

 

Opinion: What to make of China's role in the handshake heard round the world

Jizan lies close to the border with Yemen, the scene of a bloody civil war and proxy battle between Riyadh and Tehran since 2014, sparking what the United Nations has described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

 

Significantly since Xi’s visit, episodic attacks by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels on Jizan have abated.

 

There are other effects too: the plans to upscale Jizan’s container handling puts Saudi in greater competition with the UAE’s container ports and potentially strains another regional rivalry, as MBS drives to become the dominant regional power, usurping UAE’s role as regional hub for global businesses.

 

Xi will have an interest seeing both Saudi Arabia and the UAE prosper, but Saudi is by far the bigger partner with higher potential global economic heft and, importantly, massive religious clout in the Islamic world.

 

Rivals share common ground on Iran policy

Where the UAE and Saudi align strongly is eschewing direct conflict with Tehran.

 

A deadly drone attack in Abu Dhabi late last year was claimed by the Houthis, before the rebels quickly rescinded it. But no one publicly blamed the Houthis’ sponsors in Tehran.

 

biden saudi crown prince split

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A once shaky ceasefire in Yemen now also seems to be moving toward peace talks, perhaps yet another indication of the potential of China’s influence in the region.

 

Beijing is acutely aware of what a continued war over the Persian Gulf could cost its commercial interests – another reason why a Saudi/Iran rapprochement makes sense to Xi.

 

Iran blames Saudi for stoking the massive street protests through its towns and cities since September.

 

Saudi denies that accusation, but when Iran moved drones and long-range missiles close to its Gulf coast and Saudi, Riyadh called on its friends to ask Tehran to de-escalate. Russia and China did, the threat dissipated.

 

Questions remain over nuclear weapons

Tehran, despite US diplomatic efforts, is also closing in on nuclear weapons capability and Saudi’s MBS is on record saying he’ll ensure parity, “if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.”

 

Late last week US officials said Saudi was seeking US security guarantees and help developing a civilian nuclear program as part of a deal to normalize relations with Israel, an avowed enemy of Iran’s Ayatollahs.

 

Indeed, when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel late January, concerned over a rising Palestinian death toll in a violent year in the region, potential settlement expansions and controversial changes to Israel’s judiciary Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to Blinken about “expanding the circle of peace,” and improving relations with Arab neighbours, including Saudi Arabia.

 

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (left) with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in May 2021.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (left) with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in May 2021.

Haim Zach/Government Press Office/Getty Images

But as Saudi seems to shift closer to Tehran, Netanyahu’s mission just got harder. While both Saudi and Israel strongly oppose a nuclear-armed Iran, only Netanyahu seems ready to confront Tehran.

 

“My policy is to do everything within Israel’s power to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons,” the Israeli leader told Blinken.

 

Riyadh favors diplomacy. As recently as last week the Saudi foreign minister said: “It’s absolutely critical … that we find and an alternative pathway to ensuring an (Iranian) civilian nuclear program.”

 

By improving ties with Tehran, he said, “we can make it quite clear to the Iranians that this is not just a concerns of distant countries but it’s also a concern of its neighbors.”

 

For years this is what America did, such as brokering the Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA, in 2015.

 

Xi backed that deal, the Saudis didn’t want it, Iran never trusted it, Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump’s withdrawal confirmed Iran’s fears and sealed its fate, despite the ongoing proximity talks to get American diplomats seated at the table again.

 

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman welcomes Chinese President Xi Jinping in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on December 8, 2022.

5 key takeaways from Xi's trip to Saudi Arabia

Iran has raced ahead in the meantime, massively over-running the bounds of the JCPOA limits on uranium enrichment and producing almost weapons-grade material.

 

What’s worse for Washington is that Trump’s JCPOA withdrawal legacy tainted international perceptions of US commitment, continuity and diplomacy. All these circumstances perhaps signaled to Xi that his time to seize the lead on global diplomacy was coming.

 

Yet the Chinese leader seems to accept what Netanyahu won’t and what US diplomacy is unable to prevent: that sooner, rather than later, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. As such, Xi may be fostering Saudi-Iran rapprochement as a hedge against that day.

 

So Netanyahu looks increasingly isolated and the Israeli leader, already under huge domestic pressure from spiking tensions with Palestinians and huge Israeli protests over his proposed judicial reforms, now faces a massive re-think on regional security.

 

Pieces of regional puzzle shifting

The working assumption of American diplomatic regional primacy is broken, and Netanyahu’s biggest ally is now not as hegemonic as he needs. But by how much is still far from clear.

 

It’s not a knockout, but a gut blow, to Washington. How Xi calculates the situation isn’t clear either. The US is not finished, far from it, but it is diminished, and both powers are coexisting in a different way now.

 

Earlier this month, the Chinese leader made unusually direct comments accusing the US of leading a campaign against China and causing serious domestic woes.

 

Wang Yi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission attends a meeting with Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani and Minister of State and national security adviser of Saudi Arabia Musaad bin Mohammed Al Aiban in Beijing, China March 10, 2023. China Daily via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY. CHINA OUT.

Iran and Saudi Arabia signal the start of a new era, with China front and center

“Western countries led by the United States have contained and suppressed us in an all-round way, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our development,” Xi told a group of government advisers representing private businesses on the sidelines of an annual legislative meeting in Beijing.

 

Meanwhile, Biden has defined the future US-China relationship as “competition not confrontation,” and he has built his foreign policy around the tenets of standing up for democracy.

 

It is striking that neither Xi, nor Khamenei, nor MBS are troubled by the moral dilemmas that circumscribe Biden. This is the big challenge the US president warned about, and now it’s here. An alternative world order, irrespective of what happens in Ukraine.

Monday, January 30, 2023

India against Gandhi: Gandhi is now a major hate figure in Modi's India by Ramachandra Guha

 

India against Gandhi: Gandhi is now a major hate figure in Modi's India by Ramachandra Guha

 

https://www.ft.com/content/a0b17ed9-092d-4e83-90fe-2a6cea952518

 

Gandhi is the major hate figure (in Modi's India).

 

He is blamed for emasculating Indians by preaching non-violence; blamed for choosing the modernising Jawaharlal Nehru as his political heir instead of a more authentically “Hindu” figure; blamed for not stopping the creation of Pakistan; blamed for insisting that Muslims who stayed behind in India be given the rights of equal citizenship.

 

BJP members of parliament hail Gandhi’s assassin Godse as a true “deshbhakt” (patriot); praise for him trends on Twitter every January 30; there are periodic plans to erect statues to him and temples in his memory.

 

YouTube videos mocking Gandhi and charging him with betraying Hindus garner millions of views.

 

Seventy-five years after his assassination, the ‘father of the nation’ is a problem for Narendra Modi — but the country still needs his ideas

 

Born in 1958, a decade after Gandhi’s death, I grew up in an atmosphere of veneration towards the Mahatma.

 

One of my great-uncles helped to edit Gandhi’s Collected Works; another founded a pioneering initiative in community health inspired by Gandhi. These familial influences were consolidated and deepened by the public culture of the time.

 

Gandhi was the father of the nation, the leader of the struggle for freedom against British rule, whose techniques of non-violent resistance had won admirers and imitators across the world. It was largely because of him that we were free and proudly independent, and it was largely because of him that — unlike neighbouring Pakistan — we gloried in the religious and linguistic diversity of our land.

 

 In our school assembly we sang a 17th-century hymn that Gandhi was particularly fond of, which he had rewritten to reflect his vision of the India he wished to leave behind. Hindus saw God as Ishwar; Gandhi’s adaptation asked us to see him as Allah too.

 

And it was to these lines that our teachers drew our particular attention. The first criticisms of Gandhi that I remember encountering were in a book I read as a student at Delhi University.

 

This was the autobiography of Verrier Elwin, an Oxford scholar who became a leading ethnographer of the tribes of central India. Elwin knew Gandhi well, and at one time considered himself a disciple.

 

In later years, while he retained his admiration for the Mahatma’s moral courage and religious pluralism, Elwin became sharply critical of Gandhi’s advocacy of prohibition, which he thought damaging to tribal culture (where home-brewed alcohol was both a source of nutrition and an aid to dance and music), and of his exaltation of celibacy, which Elwin thought damaging to everyone

 

. In Amritsar in 2006, members of the Congress party place garlands on a statue of Gandhi to mark the anniversary of his birth © Narinder Nanu/AFP via Getty Images Elwin’s strictures were mild, even timid, when compared with those of the Marxist intellectuals of Kolkata, whom I encountered in the 1980s when beginning my academic career.

 

These scholars identified with the Naxalites, a band of insurgents who were inspired by Mao Zedong and who vandalised and destroyed Gandhi statues wherever they found them.

 

Books were written arguing that Gandhi was an agent simultaneously of the British colonial state and of the Indian capitalist class; non-violence was presented as a cunning device to wean the masses away from the revolutionary path. I had many arguments with my Marxist friends about Gandhi.

 

I sought to persuade them that his adherence to non-violence arose out of a disinclination to take human life. I asked them to give Gandhi at least the qualified praise that Mao himself had bestowed on Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the Chinese republic, as creating a rudimentary national consciousness on which was built a superior socialist consciousness.

 

 On these subjects my interlocutors at least talked back, but our relations came to breaking point when I chose to focus my own research on a forest protection movement led by Gandhians, which the Marxists dismissed as a bourgeois deviation from the class struggle.

 

Those debates with Marxists shaped me profoundly, personally as well as intellectually. Yet recalling them here perhaps conveys a whiff of antiquarianism. For now, in the 2020s, the main attacks on Gandhi in India come from the other end of the ideological spectrum.

 

For the past eight and a half years, the Hindu right has been in power in India, and Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence and his commitment to interfaith harmony are anathema to it.

 

 While he is still officially the “father of the nation”, with his birthday a national holiday and his face on the currency notes, the public mood has turned hostile to Gandhi.

 

To understand why Gandhi is increasingly unpopular in his homeland, one must go back to the circumstances of his death 75 years ago.

 

 Gandhi was murdered on January 30 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a member of a secretive paramilitary organisation called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

 

 Founded in 1925, the RSS believed — and still believes — in the construction of a Hindu theocratic state in India. Its leaders and cadres insist that demographic superiority and the Indic origin of their faith makes Hindus natural and permanent rulers of the land.

 

They have a particular suspicion of Muslims and Christians, on account of the fact that their religions originated outside India and their sacred shrines are outside India too.

 

 Mahatma Gandhi c1947 © Mirrorpix ‘It was largely because of him that we were free and proudly independent, and it was largely because of him that — unlike neighbouring Pakistan — we gloried in the religious and linguistic diversity of our land’ Gandhi, on the other hand, held the view that India belonged equally to all its citizens, regardless of their religious affiliation.

 

After the subcontinent was partitioned in August 1947, separating Hindu-majority India and Muslim-dominated Pakistan, he worked strenuously to stop violence against those Muslims who remained in India, going on a fast in Kolkata and later in Delhi. Gandhi’s fast in Delhi was conducted in a home opposite the office of the British High Commission. Having watched events unfold, the deputy high commissioner wrote in a report to London that “day in and day out,

 

Muslims of all classes of society, many of whom had also suffered personal bereavements in the recent disturbances, came to invoke his [Gandhi’s] help.

 

 Normally too fearful even to leave their homes, they came to him because they had learned and believed that he had their interests at heart and was the only real force in the Indian Union capable of preserving them from destruction.” Gandhi’s efforts to maintain religious harmony enraged the head of the RSS, an intense bearded man named MS Golwalkar.

 

A police report of an RSS meeting in Delhi in December 1947 tells us that, “referring to Muslims”, Golwalkar remarked that “no power on earth could keep them in Hindustan.

 

They would have to quit the country. Mahatma Gandhi wanted to keep the Muslims in India so that the Congress may profit by their votes at the time of election. But, by that time, not a single Muslim will be left in India . . .

 

 Mahatma Gandhi could not mislead them any longer. We have the means whereby such men can be immediately silenced, but it is our tradition not to be inimical to Hindus.

 

If we are compelled, we will have to resort to that course too.” A few weeks later, Gandhi was murdered in Delhi by the RSS’s Godse. The organisation was immediately banned, and Golwalkar himself put in prison. After it agreed to abide by the Indian constitution, the RSS was unbanned.

 

In the decades that followed, it steadily built up its following across India. In deference to the status that Gandhi then enjoyed, its members even occasionally praised him, albeit merely as one patriot among many.

 

The gulf between his ideals and their ideology remained vast. A rally for the Hindu nationalist RSS in the 1970s, with (right) a portrait of MS Golwalkar © Sondeep Shankar/Getty Images Narendra Modi at an RSS event in Ahmedabad in 2006, when he was chief minister of Gujarat © Shailesh Raval/The India Today Group via Getty Images

 

The RSS is the mother organisation of the Bharatiya Janata party, which has been in power in India since May 2014. The prime minister, Narendra Modi, joined the RSS as a young man, as did many of his ministers.

 

 In control of the state, of education and propaganda, and with a very efficient social media machine, the BJP and the RSS have assiduously attempted to rewrite the historical narrative. Past Muslim rulers of India are portrayed as cruel marauders, and Muslims today made to answer for their (mis)deeds.

 

The leadership of Gandhi and his Congress party in the freedom struggle is denied, and those who advocated armed revolution against the British extolled as the true patriots.

 

The formative role of the progressive and secular constitution of 1950 in shaping the democratic republic is ignored. Instead, Indians are told that they have been a Hindu nation from time immemorial. Professional historians derisively refer to these claims as “WhatsApp history”, but the tragic truth is that they are gaining ever wider currency.

 

In this new narrative, Gandhi is the major hate figure.

 

He is blamed for emasculating Indians by preaching non-violence; blamed for choosing the modernising Jawaharlal Nehru as his political heir instead of a more authentically “Hindu” figure; blamed for not stopping the creation of Pakistan; blamed for insisting that Muslims who stayed behind in India be given the rights of equal citizenship. BJP members of parliament hail Gandhi’s assassin Godse as a true “deshbhakt” (patriot); praise for him trends on Twitter every January 30; there are periodic plans to erect statues to him and temples in his memory.

 

YouTube videos mocking Gandhi and charging him with betraying Hindus garner millions of views. Gandhi with Nehru in 1942 © Photo12/Universal Images Group ‘In the new narrative, Gandhi is blamed for emasculating Indians by preaching non-violence; blamed for choosing the modernising Jawaharlal Nehru as his political heir instead of a more authentically “Hindu” figure’

 

This decertification of Gandhi has been aided by the hypocrisy and misconduct of the Congress party. In its many decades in power, the Congress invoked Gandhi often, while in practice moving ever further from his ideals.

 

Congress politicians ostentatiously wore homespun cotton while promoting cronyism and corruption. They centralised power in the state and harassed human rights activists. The political rise of the Hindu right has been accompanied by the construction of a colossal personality cult around Modi.

 

While his followers revile Gandhi, Modi himself has adopted a position of strategic ambivalence.

 

 On the one hand, he professes veneration for VD Savarkar, a Hindu nationalist who detested Gandhi and Muslims with equal vehemence, and whom Godse regarded as his ideological mentor. On the other hand, recognising that Gandhi is the best-known Indian globally, Modi has instrumentally used him to advance his own profile by taking visiting presidents and prime ministers on tours of Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad. Narendra Modi pays tribute to VD Savarkar at Parliament House in New Delhi in 2014 . . .  © Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times via Getty Images . . . and at a statue of Gandhi in Washington the same year © Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images On October 2 2019, the 150th anniversary of the Mahatma’s birth, the New York Times published an article in praise of Gandhi, written by Modi.

 

The piece was artfully constructed; it began by speaking of the admiration for Gandhi expressed by one great American, Martin Luther King Jr, and ended by speaking of the admiration for him expressed by another great American, Albert Einstein. Modi proclaimed: “In Gandhi, we have the best teacher to guide us.

 

From uniting those who believe in humanity to furthering sustainable development and ensuring economic self-reliance, Gandhi offers solutions to every problem.” What was most striking about the article, however, was what it did not say.

 

There was not a word about the cause for which Gandhi lived his life, indeed for which he gave his life — that of inter-religious harmony. The omission was not accidental.

 

For the idea that India is a land that belongs equally to people of all faiths is not something that Modi shares with Gandhi. Modi sees himself as a Hindu first and foremost; indeed, even as a redeemer sent to avenge the insults and injustices, real and imagined, heaped on his co-religionists down the centuries.

 

Gandhi visits Muslim refugees in New Delhi as they prepare to leave for Pakistan © ACME/AFP/Getty Images ‘Gandhi held the view that India belonged equally to all its citizens, regardless of their religious affiliation.

 

After the subcontinent was partitioned, Gandhi worked strenuously to stop violence against Muslims’

 

 Such is the broader context for the now widespread animosity towards Gandhi in the land of his birth. It has principally to do with his commitment to religious pluralism.

 

 While Modi stays silent, BJP leaders taunt and intimidate the 200mn-strong community of Indian Muslims, asking them without reason and provocation to prove their “loyalty” to the motherland. (Notably, among the 300 or so BJP members of parliament elected in May 2019, there was not a single Muslim.)

 

While Modi praises Gandhi — selectively — many of those who support and vote for him believe Godse was right in murdering Gandhi; indeed, that he should have murdered him earlier, before the Mahatma’s last fast in support of equal rights for those Muslims who chose to express their own patriotism by staying in our country, which was also theirs.

 

There are other ways in which the India of today bears little resemblance to the India that Gandhi had struggled to build. He would have been appalled, for instance, by the rapacious pillaging of the natural environment encouraged by successive governments since independence.

 

 He had precociously warned against emulating the resource- and energy-intensive model of industrialisation favoured by the west, writing in 1926 that to “make India like England and America is to find some other races and places of the earth for exploitation”.

 

 Hindu nationalists place garlands on a statue of Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin, in Meerut in 2020 . . .  © Smita Sharma/New York Times/Redux/eyevine . . . and activists from the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen gather near a Gandhi mural in New Delhi last year © Prakash Singh/AFP via Getty Images Without the access to resources and markets enjoyed by those two nations when they began to industrialise, India has had to rely on the exploitation of its own people and environment.

 

 Under both Congress and BJP regimes, the most brutal assault has been by large mining companies, to whom successive governments have given free licence to destroy forests, displace villagers and foul air, water and soil in search of massive monetary gains.

 

Many of the most polluted cities in the world are in India; our great and supposedly sacred rivers are biologically dead through untreated industrial and domestic waste; our aquifers are rapidly declining.

 

Writing for an international audience, our prime minister might laud Gandhian prescriptions for “sustainable development”, even as these prescriptions are being violated most thoroughly in his — and Gandhi’s — homeland.

 

Even without the threat of climate change, India is an environmental basket case. Consider next the perilous state of press freedom in India, which, as an independent-minded editor himself, Gandhi would surely have found distressing. The British Raj jailed Gandhi (and many other writers) for inciting “disaffection” merely through their words in print.

 

Gandhi hoped that the clause allowing such arbitrary arrest would be repealed when India became free. It remains on the statute book, increasingly used to imprison journalists, student leaders and social activists.

 

Leading 1930’s ‘Salt March’, a nonviolent protest against the British salt monopoly © United Archives/Getty Images ‘The unthinking adulation of Gandhi in the early years of Indian independence may have been extreme.

 

Yet what we now have is not revisionism or iconoclasm but parricide’ Gandhi, were he around today, would also have been dismayed by the deceit and dissembling of the political class, saddened by the growing gulf between rich and poor, and distressed by the continuing attacks on low castes and women.

 

His country has turned its back on its greatest modern figure in many respects.

 

The lives and legacies of major historical figures are always subject to reinterpretation, and that is how it should be. Consider thus the revaluation of American icons such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because of their complicity with slavery; or of the pre-eminent British war hero Winston Churchill, because of his imperialism and indifference to the deaths of Indians through famine.

 

 Revisionism and iconoclasm are infinitely preferable to idolatry. The unthinking adulation of Gandhi in the early years of Indian independence may have been extreme.

 

Yet what we now have is not revisionism or iconoclasm but parricide, the outright repudiation of the person who perhaps did more than anyone else to nurture this nation into being. India surely needs Gandhi’s ideas still, to check the slide of the republic into a Hindu Pakistan, to stall the destruction of the environment and the economic and social costs it imposes, to restore a semblance of civility in public discourse, to renew the institutions of civil society currently being crushed by an overbearing state.

 

 Many years ago, when the demonisation of Gandhi was first becoming apparent, I was speaking with my friend Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a diplomat and scholar and also, incidentally, a grandson of the Mahatma.

 

Gopal said that Gandhi’s posthumous fate might increasingly come to resemble that of the Buddha, scorned by the land where he forged his moral and social philosophy, yet with followers and admirers in distant parts of the globe that he had never visited and possibly did not even know about.

 

As that prediction comes starkly true, I find it simultaneously depressing and comforting. We Indians seem to have rejected Gandhi, as we once rejected the Buddha; no matter, humans elsewhere will take up and nobly affirm the ideals of those we have so cruelly and carelessly discarded. Ramachandra Guha’s books include ‘Gandhi: