Quotes from Rajmohan Gandhi

the Empire was naturally attracted towards the foes of its chief Indian foe, the Congress

In 1919, when loyalist Sikhs were willing, even after the Amritsar massacre, to honour Dyer, other Sikhs formed a new pro-independence body, the Sikh League, with the Sialkot-born Baba Kharak Singh (1868-1963), who had been galvanized by the massacre, as its chief.

Extremism is not confined, however, to Muslims, and non-Muslims too have perpetrated terrorist acts.

The chief reason for this shameful defeat was our excessive passion for the ideology of non-violence… I feel the war of 1962 has done good to us because it opened our eyes and [punctured] our fanciful idealism… We soon realized the importance of the army and weapons.

When given military control over a suba, the mansabdar was called a nazim or governor. If given financial control as well, he was something like a viceroy and called the subahdar.

Each suba contained a dozen or so sarkars, each of them led by a faujdar, usually a military officer.

Each sarkar contained a number of parganas or mahals, and there were several villages in every mahal or pargana. Most sarkars contained at least one town, where a kotwal was in charge of security.

The Intelligence Bureau was mistakenly of the opinion that the Chinese would not react to our establishing new posts and were not likely to use force against any Indian post even if they could.

stooges of the Raj, this well-entrenched, Raj-preferred party of landlords and landowners—Muslims in the province's west

This was contrary to the military intelligence, which clearly indicated that the Chinese would resist by force any attempts to take back territory held by them.

stooges of the Raj, this well-entrenched, Raj-preferred party of landlords and landowners—Muslims in the province's west, Sikhs in the centre, and Hindu Jats in the east

In 1574, when the third Guru's daughter was getting married to one who would become the fourth Guru, the Mughal emperor gave, as a wedding gift, an area of land in a place in the Bari doab not yet called Amritsar.

Marx observed that by organizing native regiments in their Indian Army the British had unwittingly created 'the first general centre of resistance which the Indian people was ever possessed of'.

The fact that Hindus and Muslims had worked jointly, 'renouncing their mutual antipathies', also interested Marx.

Daily Tribune, 5 August 1853: England has to fulfil a double mission in India, one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.

deceived by that winning and imposing frankness of manner, which it has pleased Providence to give to the Afghans, as it did to the first serpent…

His cap may be emblazoned with equality, but Anderson's pen smacks of racism, which was true also of the undoubtedly great Karl Marx.

Ranjit Singh used money and clan rivalries to divide the tribes and, from time to time, the kingdom's organized force to subdue them.

In his view, an Indian peasant and an English monarch were equal as human beings. For Marx and Anderson, on the other hand, some races are superior, others inferior

Muhammad Ali Jauhar, who for three remarkable years (1919-1922) championed Hindi-Muslim partnership, dismissed the 'divide-and-rule' explanation for India's problems. 'They don't divide,' Jauhar pointed out. 'We divide and they rule.

Gandhi refused to accept that tanks and bombs constituted a nation's ultimate strength. To him, the health, education and unity of a nation's people were more important.

Iqbal, using Urdu and also Persian, would be the poet of Islam rather than of India.

Defiance of Sikh rule would, however, continue in the Pashtun country, at times supported by Kabul.

Umar Hayat's father, Malik Tiwana, provided soldiers to the British for the recapture of Delhi and for combat against the Rani of Jhansi.