After almost three months of providing medical relief work, shortly before their departure from the country in August 1946, Rajabali Jumabhoy (1898–1998), a prominent businessperson and philanthropist of Indian origin, praised the Congress Medical Mission at a tea party in Singapore for being a promoter of Indo-Asian unity. One year later, a book titled Congress Mission to Malaya was published by C. Siva Rama Sastry, one of the mission's members. The Indian National Congress (INC) politician and mission organiser Bidhan Chandra Roy (1882–1962) provided the foreword. Roy stated, ‘We the people of India, feel proud of their [the mission members’] achievement and appreciate with gratitude the services they rendered in the name of the Congress.’ In both instances, the work of the Congress Medical Mission to Malaya was presented as successful; this success was based partly, but not exclusively, on the mission's effective promotion of domestic and foreign policy objectives of the INC.

In the history of humanitarianism, the Congress Medical Mission to Malaya has been forgotten. It does not figure in the research on the transitional period between the end of the global Second World War, late colonial rule, and early decolonisation in South Asia, nor does it figure in the standard accounts of Indian nationalism, although it is at times mentioned in passing in the histories of Malaysia. Nevertheless, examining the humanitarian undertaking of the INC, the anticolonial organisation that would soon become the party leading India's postcolonial government, is crucial, as the mission represents the last instance of Indian non-state nationalist humanitarian aid provided to civilians in need outside the South Asian subcontinent during the period of colonial rule.

Prohibitioning and the Constitution of India

Prohibition was reviewed and re-conceptualised following the achievement of independence, when the foundations of the modern Indian state were formally established. In the long run, the prohibition ideal filtered through new administrative and legal frameworks that nevertheless bore the imprint of both colonialism and the struggle against it. As the independent Indian republic was premised upon the founding principles of secular democracy and federalism, prohibition had to reckon with both debates relating to personal liberties and issues of state autonomy.

Following independence, the national democratic state – having won the mandate of representing national society – sought to intervene in that domain in order to transform it. The processes that had accompanied the birth of the Indian nation had brought forth institutions, structures and practices that enabled policies like prohibition to be operationalised through the workings of the state. However, the problem remained that a national society still had to be fashioned anew from the fluid, overlapping identities that made up the fabric of Indian social life. Amidst such a ‘recalcitrant social’, which, Prathama Banerjee argues, continued to function as ‘a network of multiple nodes of caste, community and regional sovereignties’, postcolonial governmentality appeared from the very outset ‘a compromised project’.

In this, however, postcolonial governmentality did not constitute as radical a rupture from the colonial past as Banerjee's discussion would suggest. The careful balancing act that the nationalist government attempted to strike between ‘mobilising the social and mobilising the political’ had already set the tone for things to come before independence was achieved; prohibition's colonial-era origins are a case in point.

While Donald Trump's ruthless, reckless, aggressive, multi-pronged assaults are threatening American democracy in unprecedented ways, India nevertheless stands out when viewed against broader trends of democratic backsliding (Haggard and Kaufman 2021). Since 2014, liberal democracy in India has come under increasing pressure from Hindu nationalism. Commentators and scholars who are sympathetic to liberal democracy express grave concern, if not alarm, about the state of Indian democracy: ‘The blaze is at our door’ (A. Roy 2022) and ‘The Hindu Rashtra [Hindu Nation] is … indeed underway’ (Jaffrelot 2019a, p. 64). One writes that ‘India's Democracy Is Dying’ and notes that democracy watch organizations now classify India as a ‘hybrid regime’, an ‘electoral autocracy’ or a ‘flawed democracy’ (Tudor 2023).

Electoral democracy remains intact in India, but civil freedoms, minority rights, and institutional constraints on executive power have been substantially weakened (Varshney 2022), and ‘India's standing as an inclusive, diverse nation with an independent judiciary, rule of law and free media was degraded’ (Patel 2021, p. 460).

During the past decade, prime minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has ‘tethered religious nationalism to right-wing populism’ (Basu 2021, p. 278) and prioritized Hindu nationalism over the Indian constitution, as ‘an ideology that promotes the idea that Hinduism is the authentic religious and cultural identity of the Indian people’ (Yilmaz and Morieson 2023, p. 185). ‘The BJP has thus moved Hindutva beyond right-wing nationalism and toward a civilisational struggle between Hindus and “others”’ (ibid., p. 198).

Hindu–Muslim antagonism is one of the main, if not the main, features of the Sangh Parivar's politics. For a long time, this antagonism was considered merely in religious terms. Despite the presence of extensive literature on the economic features and implications of contemporary Hindutva (Bobbio 2017; Chacko 2019; Desai 2011; Gopalakrishnan 2009, 2006; Iwanek 2014; Karat 2014; Kaul 2017; Kumar 2018; Nanda 2011; Patnaik 2019; Saxena and Sharma 1998; Siddiqui 2017; Sinha and Nayak 2021; Spodek 2010), there is a widespread tendency among scholars to consider the Hindu–Muslim rivalry as connected to identity, religious, or communal factors. This chapter aims to prove that an intimate connection between communal and economic factors existed from the colonial period and that communal strife was not determined by religious but by economic causes. It adds to Gyanendra Pandey's (1999) masterly demonstration of how the British constructed communalism by leveraging economic forces. However, Pandey examines only the economic and social transformations brought about by colonization, but does not consider the interrelation between economic and identity factors as part of the colonial game that I foreground in this chapter.

The chapter explains how the British colonizers deliberately targeted Muslim rulers, who throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the main political and economic competitors of the East India Company (EIC), and that, in order to undermine the powers of the Muslim rulers, they implemented both economic and cultural devices, as well as military and political ones.

The Congress Medical Mission to Malaya was the last Indian non-state relief initiative that was sent abroad to provide humanitarian aid during late colonial rule and in the early postcolonial years. Whereas South Asian humanitarian initiatives had provided comprehensive aid for Indian and Allied soldiers at various fronts during the world wars and had given assistance to war victims in China and Malaya, the summer of 1946 became a turning point for their work when in mid-August, Calcutta was ravaged by the communal violence that broke out between Hindus and Muslims. Trapped in the riotous city for a few days was Dr C. Siva Rama Sastry, who was part of the Congress Medical Mission that had just returned from Malaya. When Sastry was finally able to return home to south India, he had to leave all his belongings behind.

After the so-called Great Calcutta Killings, the violence spread throughout British India, leading to riots and massacres in East Bengal, Bihar, Bombay, the United Provinces, Punjab and in other places before reaching its climax with partition. The end of colonial rule with the formation of two new nation states, India and Pakistan, in August 1947, was accompanied by large-scale violence that may have caused up to 1 million deaths and led to the displacement of approximately 12 million people.3 The unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in South Asia, however, did evoke a mixed international response. Several non-state humanitarian organisations from around the globe forwarded aid in cash and kind; some also sent relief workers to South Asia or already had volunteers on-site.

That the decade of untrammelled power Narendra Modi enjoyed before losing his majority in his 2024 victory so humiliatingly represented a new phase in the ruinous advance of Hindutva is clear. What is less clear is where the novelty lies. For some, it lies in the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) parliamentary majority, the first for any party since 1984; the centrality of Modi's personality; and the combination of populism, nationalism, majoritarianism, and authoritarianism (Chatterji, Hansen, and Jaffrelot 2019, p. 1). For others, it lies in the Modi regime being a ‘governmental formation with considerable institutional heft that converges with wider global currents and enjoys an unprecedented level of mainstream acceptance’ (Hansen and Roy 2022, p. 1).

These assessments appear staggeringly placid. Under the Modi regime, minorities—Muslims throughout India, Christians in the north-east and Adivasi lands—and dissident intellectuals are systematically persecuted, often to death; working people are assailed by wilfully brutish experiments—demonetization and draconian COVID-19 lockdowns to take the most egregious—leaving lasting damage. Meanwhile, the topmost corporate capitalist class rejoices in sympathetic legislation, light oversight (if any), and aid in foreign operations. To get power and keep it, the government displays ‘unprecedented’ and ‘sweeping disregard for the constitution’, particularly its federalism (Savera 2019), and razes political institutions—the Supreme Court, the Central Vigilance Commission, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)—with the bulldozer of its parliamentary majority.