Quotes from Ramachandra Guha

What is now in the past was once in the future

So long as the Constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails, so long as citizens can speak and write in the language of their choosing, so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army, and — lest I forget — so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung, India will survive

It is in the nature of democracies, perhaps, that while visionaries are sometimes necessary to make them, once made they can be managed by mediocrities.

in India, Bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be the road to the salvation of a soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.

In India, the sapling was planted by the nation's founders, who lived long enough (and worked hard enough) to nurture it to adulthood. Those who came afterwards could disturb and degrade the tree of democracy but, try as they might, could not uproot or destroy it.

India is no longer a constitutional democracy but a populist one.

in the post-Gandhian war for power the first casualty is decency'.

If Jawaharlal Nehru was the Maker of Modern India, then perhaps Potti Sriramulu should be named its Mercator.

At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom

In India the choice could never be between chaos and stability, but between manageable and unmanageable chaos, between humane and inhuman anarchy, and between tolerable and intolerable disorder. ASHIS NANDY, sociologist, 1990.

a mere five years after the last maharaja had signed away his land, Indians had 'come to take integrated India so much for granted that it requires amental effort today even to imagine that it could be different'.

My religion is a conspiracy My prayer meetings are a conspiracy My lying quiet is a conspiracy My attempt to wake up is a conspiracy My desire to have friends is a conspiracy My ignorance, my backwardness, a conspiracy.

As that wise Indian, André Béteille, always points out, what we must strive for is reasonable equality of opportunity, not absolute equality of result. That we have plainly not achieved

My own view – speaking as a historian rather than citizen – is that as long as Pakistan exists there will be Hindu fundamentalists in India. In times of stability, or when the political leadership is firm, they will be marginal or on the defensive. In times of change, or when the political leadership is irresolute, they will be influential and assertive.

It's no conspiracy [for the Hindu] to make me a refugee in the very country of my birth It's no conspiracy to poison the air I breathe and the space I live in It's certainly no conspiracy to cut me to pieces and then imagine an uncut Bharat.

An early gesture was to rename Harrington Road after a hero of the world communist movement, so that at the height of the Vietnam War the address of the United States Consulate was 7 Ho Chi Minh Sarani, Calcutta.

You gave us a lawyer; we gave you back a Mahatma.

In his speeches on Azad Hind Radio, Subhas Bose referred to Gandhi as the 'Father of the Nation'. This seems to be the first time Gandhi was called this. The usage soon became ubiquitous.

The Indian commitment to the semantics of socialism is at least as deep as ours to the semantics of free enterprise . . . Even the most intransigent Indian capitalist may observe on occasion that he is really a socialist at heart. J. K. GALBRAITH, economist, 1958

Had Shastri been given another five years, there would have been no Nehru–Gandhi dynasty. Sanjay Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi would almost certainly still be alive, and in private life. The former would be a (failed) entrepreneur, the latter a recently retired airline pilot with a passion for photography. Finally, had Shastri lived longer, Sonia Gandhi would still be a devoted and loving housewife, and Rahul Gandhi perhaps a middle-level manager in a private sector company.

Writing in 1959 – a decade and more after Independence – an Indian editor who was bitterly opposed to Nehru was constrained to recognize his two greatest achievements – the creation of a secular state and the granting of equal rights to Untouchables.

A common civil code will help the cause of national integration by removing disparate loyalties to laws which have conflicting ideologies.

Srinagar, there was a grave of a Christian soldier from Travancore, which had the Vedic swastika and a verse from the Quran inscribed on it. There could be 'no more poignant and touching symbolof the essential oneness and unity of India'.61

However, by the end of 1947, P.C. Joshi found his line challenged by the radical faction of the CPI. They claimed that the freedom that India had obtained was false—'Ye Azaadi Jhooti Hai', the slogan went—and asked that the party declare an all-out war against the Government of India.