Khurshid & Macaulay

There are charges of corruption against a charitable trust run by Salman Khurshid, Congress MP and India’s law minister, and his wife. The trust is accused of embezzling money meant to provide equipment to physically challenged people in Uttar Pradesh. The charges may or may not be true. It is likely they are exaggerated and that the degree of leakage is no different from any NGO that does similar work. It is possible, even probable, that Mr Khurshid and his wife, Louise Fernandes Khurshid, knew nothing about the false claims, if any.
Wherever the facts may lie, it is somewhat astonishing that the Khurshid controversy has adopted the contours of a class war. Articles have been written about the family background of both Khurshids. Mr Khurshid himself told a television interviewer it was stunning a person who had taught at Oxford would be charged with forgery. During the infamous media conference in Mr Khurshid’s residence — which collapsed into a brawl involving some journalists and the minister — a senior mediaperson tweeted of a “clash between Macaulayputras and dhartiputras”.
As a self-confessed Child and admirer of Macaulay (including of his writings and poetry), I must say all this left me bewildered. What had Mr Khrushid’s culpability or otherwise got to do with Macaulay? The reference in the tweet was to Macaulay’s Minute of 1835, which opened the doors to English-language, Western education in India and aimed to “form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”.
To understand Macaulay one has to explore his context and his family background. Many who jump to defend (or attack) the phenomenon of Macaulay’s Children don’t do this. Indeed it may be asked: What do they know of Macaulay who only Macaulay’s Minute know?
Macaulay was a complex, layered man, among the foremost intellectuals of his age. Contrary to what a few people think — and what hoax quotes attributed to him imply — he didn’t hate Indians and would have been aghast, in the framework in which he lived, to be told he was considered racist. His father, Zachary Macaulay, was an abolitionist and among those who worked hard to have slavery and the slave trade abolished. In his book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, historian Niall Ferguson writes of how the senior Macaulay and his compatriots in the Clapham Sect, as they came to the called, mobilised a “new generation of grassroots activists” and anticipated the international NGOs of the late 20th century.
The Clapham Sect was not a one-issue entity. It was moralistic and hence it opposed slavery. However, Zachary Macaulay and his friends were also men of the Church of England and believers in Britain’s civilising mission. They saw the export of Englishness (or Britishness, since the Macaulays were Scots) as a force for the good. The English language and Christian virtue were both integral to this process. Members of the Clapham Sect did not hate and dislike people from Africa or Asia; as genuine do-gooders they were convinced they were helping them.
That is why the evocative speech of Thomas Macaulay (Zachary’s son) in the House of Commons of 1833 is full of hope for and not hostility to Indians: “It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that having become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or to retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history.”
What has all this — and what has the quixotic social engineering project of the Clapham Sect — got to do with poor Mr Khurshid? To answer that one has to appreciate the constituents of the Macaulay mission. The English language is part of it no doubt. Yet so is individual morality and liberalism. In his personal life, Macaulay was an upstanding man. That he was ignorant of Indian culture or Vedic literature does not take away from that. As such, a Child of Macaulay may be schooled in the heritage of Greece and Rome and may know the Vedas only second or third hand, but he cannot reject the morality and liberalism Macaulay would have demanded.
In April 1992, Mushirul Hasan, then pro-vice chancellor of Delhi’s Jamia Milia Islamia, gave an interview to Sunday magazine in which he called for lifting the ban on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. “The banning of the book”, Mr Hasan said, “or any book for that matter, rarely helps. On the contrary, it lends the book greater notoriety”. The interview caused a storm. Students and teachers at Jamia protested. Mr Hasan was prevented from coming to work. When he attempted to do so after a prolonged period, he was beaten up. In reality, he had fallen victim to a Congress clique that wanted to “recapture” Jamia from academics allegedly affiliated to the CPI(M).
One of the Congress instigators was Mr Khurshid, then deputy minister for commerce. In The Book on Trial: Fundamentalism and Censorship in India, Girija Kumar writes: “(Khurshid) made the extraordinarily outrageous statement that the liberals like Prof Mushirul Hasan ‘should be willing to pay the price of a liberal’”. A CPI(M) statement of the time was categorical: “It is highly unfortunate that certain minority fundamentalist forces are being aided and abetted by certain Congress (I) leaders, including some ministers like Salman Khurshid”.
In his book, Kumar wonders why Sunday “interviewed a number of Muslim politicians and intellectuals on the subject of The Satanic Verses”. There was “much speculation about the reasons… to revive the dormant controversy”. In his report on the Jamia Milia incidents, Justice M.M. Ismail, who otherwise criticised Mr Hasan, too considered the Sunday article, Kumar writes, “as motivated, and ‘an attempt at deliberate adventure’”. Was the article calculated to
provoke a reaction? Only the person who wrote it can clarify. It carried the by-line of Louise Fernandes.

The writer can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com