I dream of a time when the feudal rhapsody of sovereigns, their kin (cf 'bloodline'), and their property deals (cf 'wedding'), will cease to be a daily feature of British public life. I yearn for the day when servile, sentimental crawling to their majesties will be interred in a funereal parade of union jack draped boxes. But to hanker for a wholly rationalised capitalist state, to put right what Britain's bourgeois revolution failed to achieve, is to covet a mirage.

It is a theoretical possibility, but in my opinion an extreme improbability, that Britain would be rid of its monarchy short of a social convulsion on a par with, or close to, revolution. The British capitalist state has been defined by its successes as an imperialist state. It was the world's first capitalist empire, and it is as an imperialist state that it has most tightly embraced the monarchical principle - in victory against republican France, for example, and in its colonial conquests, from the Opium Wars, to the Raj, to the Mandates. It was as Empress of India that Victoria re-invented a previously ramshackle and endangered monarchy in the face of a rising mass democracy. It was flush with the wealth of the colonies that the British royal family, itself always a very successful family of capitalist entrepreneurs and not just rentiers, regained its lost exuberance and vitality.

Even if our biscuit tin monarchy (as Will Self has called it) is no longer riding a wave of colonial success, it remains at the apex of an imperial matrix whose 'role in world affairs' (as our professional euphemisers would have it) relies heavily on the accumulated cultural capital embodied in the Commonwealth. Windsor has also entrenched itself as a domestic power. It has assiduously courted a popular base, which perforce requires it to act as a silent partner in the class struggle - a source of legitimacy for the bourgeoisie, by dint of its apparent (only apparent) disentanglement from the daily grind of capital accumulation. And British capitalism has not run out of uses for these sojourners from the German low-lands. That this is so can be easily checked: no significant pro-capitalist political force in the UK is interested in republicanism. The bourgeois modernisers of Blair's court, for all their initial constitutional radicalism, never had any desire to challenge monarchical power, least of all its residues in parliament which guaranteed Number Ten such strong executive powers. Blair, who went weak at the knees in the presence of the rich, is said to have been genuine in his sentimental, star-struck adoration of the royals.

The monarchy still functions as the guarantor of a caste within the ruling class, which any good bourgeois wants admittance to - give an old chief executive an OBE, and he will consider himself to have truly lived. It still bestows social distinction - more than that, it upholds and perpetuates the superstitious belief in distinction, in meritorious 'honour' as well as 'honour' by birthright. Its systems of ranking still structure hierarchies within the state, notably the police, the navy, the air force, and the army. It is still the major patron of 'Britishness', the myth of a temporally continuous and organically whole national culture, which every legislator in search of an authoritarian mandate invokes. It is the sponsor of martial discourse, inviting us to believe that the British ruling class and its stately authorities, notably its armed forces, cleave to 'values' other than those of egoistic calculation. Its festivals of supremacy still mediate our experience of capitalism, suggesting that beneath the daily experience of conflict and confrontation, there is a more essential, eternal unity in the British polity. They still summon deference, in an era of political secularism. Windsor is susceptible to secular decline in that respect but this decline is, if I may say so, taking an awfully long time. Longer than is reasonable. And its adaptibility, its resilience in the face of the prevailing weltanschauung winds, suggests that it has successfully woven itself into the fabric of British capitalism, particularly the British state, such that to be an effective republican one must first be a socialist.

Today, a ruling class offensive is once more accompanied by the promise of a royal wedding spectacle, this time between a balding first-born prince - who has already sought to prove his fitness to rule in the frontiers of Afghanistan - and a high street fashion clerk. One must not expect that this will have any bearing on making the cuts, or the government, any more popular. It will not do that, any more than 1981's connubials rescued Thatcher from the doldrums. Its message is more subtle than that. Yes, capitalism may be in crisis. Yes, the ruling ideology may be in crisis. Yes, there may be strikes, protests and conflagrations. There may be tumultuous, rising democracy. But for all that, the message states, the firm continues. It reproduces itself, through birth (bloodline), and through marriage (property), each spawning a proliferation of imperial bunting as the media pipes patriotism into the mainline. As long as British capitalism continues, as long as the empire state continues, as long as the butcher's apron flies, so long lives Britannia and its personified fleshers.

“The Vanguard of Anti-Imperialism...”
Gerald Horne is an historian who has been revealing neglected aspects of African American history for several decades, particularly those relating to class struggle, communism, and what W E B Du Bois referred to as the global ‘colour line’.

In The Deepest South, he disclosed the efforts by Deep South slavers to form a pact with Brazil and build a southern empire that would protect white supremacy. At the same time, he revealed, Lincoln and the northern establishment looked toward schemes that would result in the removal of former slaves from the United States, perhaps to indentured plantations in the British Empire. Again, in The White Pacific, he followed the trail of former slave-owners as they set out across the Pacific, to Australasia and the Pacific Islands, where they engaged in a form of slavery known as ‘blackbirding’. In Cold War in a Hot Zone, he demonstrated the links between African American struggles during the Cold War and militancy in the Caribbean as the British empire was replaced by American dominance. And in Black and Red, he anatomised the African American response to the Cold War, noting that “US Blacks have been among the vanguard of anti-imperialism”.

In this, his penultimate volume, African American anti-imperialism is at the fore again, as Horne assesses the relationship between the Indian struggle for independence from the British empire and the African American struggle against Jim Crow. It is reasonably well known that Martin Luther King was influenced by Gandhi’s doctrine of satyagraha (non-violent resistance), and perhaps less so that Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, Pauli Murray and others also drew on Gandhi’s doctrines. Nehru’s speech at the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement of Third World states paid moving tribute to the struggle of Africans, and particularly of African Americans, whose liberation he pledged India would support. A more recondite affinity drawn out by Horne is the influence of the Ahmadiyya movement of Indian Muslims on African Americans in the early 20th Century – an influence that would later be felt through the Nation of Islam.

Horne traces these connections, from prehistorical origins to the twentieth century, with the overwhelming focus on the decades leading up to Indian independence and the culmination of the civil rights struggle. The shared historical destinies of black America and India arguably began with the American revolution, when some revolutionaries looked to India as a potential anti-colonial ally. Their fate was subsequently bound together through the production of cotton and the circulation of slaves between south Asia, Africa and the United States. Opposing antebellum slavery in the United States, abolitionists in England deplored the country’s manufacture of cloths from slave-produced cotton when it might just as well have been obtained using free labour from the banks of the Indus, at less cost. The Indian rebellion of 1857 carried grave race warnings for the United States. For some, it showed the madness of trying to permanently rule over non-white people. Andrew Carnegie, visiting Lucknow in 1879, fretted that “these bronzed figures which surrounded us by millions” may once again “in some mad moment catch the fever of revolt”. It showed what a “dangerous game” it was for the US to try to conquer neighbouring islands populated by black majorities. Carnegie would go on to become a generous benefactor of the Anti-Imperialist League when it was founded in opposition to the Spanish-American war of 1898. Similarly, the Civil War of 1861-65 which was to end in the abolition of slavery (quite against the original intentions of the North) was closely determined by the availability of cotton from India, not least because it dissuaded English capitalists from throwing their weight behind the Confederacy to defend their cotton access.

Interwoven destiny
African American activists, cognisant of such an interwoven destiny, sympathised with the plight of Asia. Booker T Washington and Jawaharlal Nehru both sympathised with Japan in its 1905 war with Russia, hoping that victory for the former would boost Asian chances of independence from would-be racial oppressors. African American journals considered that a victory for the Tsarist empire would be a “triumph for color prejudice”. The grounds for direct solidarity with Indians were enhanced by the treatment of Indian labourers who migrated to the United States and were treated by racist politicians, including the presidential contender William Jennings Bryan, as a great “peril” to the American way of life.

As a result of this oppression, Indian labourers tend to live among and associate with African Americans. But the first sign of a direct political connection between India and black America was the emergence in 1889 of the Ahmadiyya movement by Mirza Ghulam Ahmed. Early on, the movement despatched a mission to the United States, just as African American Christian missionaries had – with less success – visited the Indian subcontinent to find converts. The movement hinted at a new racial synthesis that was also increasingly emerging in the thoughts of Islamic modernists such as Jamāl-al-dīn al-Afghani: a pan-Islamic alliance that would unite Indian anti-colonialism with Pan-Africanism.

Marcus Garvey had direct links with the Ahmadiyya movement, which would go on to win up to 10,000 African American converts by 1940. Certainly, the critique of Christianity as a primary motive force in racial oppression had a profound influence on Garvey’s movement, though Garvey himself remained a Christian. The movement’s influence was not uncomplicatedly positive, for its leadership forbade revolt against London, and was seen by many in India as a British tool – and there is some evidence for the idea that Britain, as part of its traditional divide-and-rule strategy, promoted the Ahmadiyya movement among Indian Muslims. Nonetheless, Islam gripped the imagination of a minority of African Americans in part because it added to the political struggle a spiritual dimension, a war against Christian ideas, which were seen as the ideas of the slave masters. African Americans who were forming the most exploited layer of the working classes, and experiencing racism not just from their bosses but from white workers as well, were offered the option of a spiritual alliance with an East that, Ahmad said, had never seen the kinds of racial evils that were practised in America because “Islam knows nothing of segregation and discrimination”.

Revolution and anti-colonialism
However, more militant and leftist forms of international solidarity arose through the early decades of the twentieth century. Ideological sympathies were given some expression in, for example, the comradeship between the Indian socialist intellectual L L Rai and W E B Du Bois, himself a member of the National Council of Friends of Freedom for India. And as migration from south Asia to the United States increased in the 1910s, Indian migrants expressed astonishment at the severity of white supremacy as practised in the United States, particularly the treatment of African Americans. Rai himself, comparing India and the United States, considered the forms of oppression in both countries to be remarkably similar, arguing that America was “doubly caste-ridden”.

The combined experience of racial oppression in the United States and British colonialism led to the formation of the California-based movement, Ghadar. It was a revolutionary movement for Indian independence which proclaimed socialism as its ideology and supported military actions against the British, which the latter invariably described as ‘terrorism’. It was influenced in part by the anti-racist leftism of the International Workers of the World, and among its founders was the anarchist Indian intellectual Har Dayal. The organisation was implicated early on in its existence in an alleged Kaiser-funded plot to time an Indian rebellion against British rule with Germany’s campaign in Europe. That such allegations touched on American anxieties about its own developing imperial role was indicated by Secretary of State Robert Lansing’s complaint that German Americans and British Indians intent on stirring revolt in India had arrived in the Philippines, the base of US colonialism in the region.

The Ghadar case aroused sympathy among African American journals, such as the NAACP’s The Crisis and A Philip Randolph’s The Messenger, especially as the suspects were convicted and deported to their fate at the hands of the British authorities. The Messenger also noted, with approval, the refusal of West Indians called on by the British to help quell growing Indian revolt, to raise arms against “the Hindu people in their struggle for freedom”, and referred to Haiti as “America’s India”. India and its emerging generation of Marxist intellectuals exerted a profound influence on African American militants such as Alain Locke. And while Tokyo had once been the lodestar of resistance to white world supremacy, the emergence of an anti-imperialist, socialist Russia came to unite south Asians and African Americans in opposition to racial oppression of all kinds.

The new anti-imperialist pole of opinion was given expression at the 1927 International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism. Nehru, in attendance, was impressed by the presence of both black and white Americans at the congress. The NAACP, surveying the new world situation created by the Russian revolution and the growing anticolonial revolts, exulted that the African American struggle now had two major allies in Russia and India. An African-American publication known as The Crusader, allied with the nascent communist movement, foresaw an “Afro-Asiatic League” which would oversee a coordinated response to imperialism. The forces of white domination could win, the publication argued, when rebellions broke out separately. But with “coordination and simultaneity of revolution”, “not all the might of Europe or the League of Damnations will be able to stop the onslaught for Freedom”. It urged African Americans to show solidarity with the Indians, where it saw soviets developing in opposition to an increasingly desperate imperial power. The same sense of the importance of global solidarity had led to the formation of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, in Chicago in 1920, with Indian delegates in attendance.

It was not just the left that was inspired by the new era of militancy. Garvey’s pan-Africanism drew on the example of Ghadar and its anti-sectarian approach to resisting white domination. “If it is possible for Hindus and Mohammedans to come together in India,” he averred, “it is possible for Negros to come together everywhere”. In general, the Garveyites focused considerably more attention on the fate of the British Empire and its consequences for African Americans, than most others. They also expressed profound admiration for Gandhi whom they, in the greatest compliment they could offer, compared to Garvey himself.

However, it was Du Bois and the NAACP that led the campaign to forge solidarity between African Americans and India. These relations were sometimes strained by the red-baiting of prominent members such as the Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes, who supported Indian independence but was deeply hostile to all communist influence in a way that was not true of the mainstream Indian anti-colonial movement. Nonetheless, the inspiration was reciprocated. Reading Du Bois’ work from London, the Indian activist A K Das wrote to ask why it was not possible to unite “what is called the coloured races”. A R Malik, writing from Punjab, saw Du Bois’ struggle to liberate “the Negroes from the bondage aristocrats and capitalists” as analogous to India’s struggle, declaring that Indians “naturally view the struggle of the Negros with great sympathy”. The NAACP provided information for Indians seeking to rebut myths of their racial inferiority, and Du Bois’ journal, The Crisis, became a sought after source of polemical nourishment in Punjab and elsewhere. Throughout the 1930s, a growing number of African Americans travelled to India to study its difficulties and draw lessons from its intricate race and caste order, and found an audience interested in the struggles of African Americans. And when India was traduced by the American writer Katherine Mayo, in a number of popular books rationalising British colonialism, Indian writers responded by pointing out the barbarism of the American racial order. America, they noted, claimed the right to independence from Britain despite maintaining a gruelling system of oppression – why should India, which did not have this flaw, be denied the same right?

A free and independent nation “of dark people”...
The perspective enjoining the unity of ‘coloured’ peoples faced a particular challenge during World War II. The African American left had largely been critical of Japan in the years prior to 1941, while Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist movement extolled a pro-Tokyo line, noting the implications of Japan’s rise for European control of China and India. Yet, much of the left, including Langston Hughes who had criticised Japan’s policies in China, sympathised with Japan’s unique status as a free and independent nation “of dark people”. Similarly, Indian journals such as The People and The Independent had covered Japan sympathetically, as part of the broader resistance to white world supremacy.

As Horne has previously covered in his Race War!, London and Washington were deeply concerned to counter this sympathy, and particularly the charge that a ‘war for democracy’ was hypocritical when India was not allowed to be free. Powerful voices in both capitals thought the best way to do this was to make some concessions to African Americans and to consider independence for India, but they were ranged against entrenched lobbies. At the very least, though, statesmen had to attenuate the force of any public sermons on behalf of white supremacy. Sensing the possibilities opened up by the war, African American leaders such as Walter White of the NAACP lobbied for Indian independence. White met personally with Lord Halifax to request a commission be set up for the purposes of determining the future of India, a proposal that did not amuse Halifax. He also urged the United States to support independence for India, noting that racial inequality was driving sympathy for Japanese propaganda and would potentially lead to Japan acquiring the Indian subcontinent. White also gave London headaches with his visit to India, and his expressed desire to see Nehru and Gandhi, at a time when Britain was jailing the Indian leadership. Throughout the war, African Americans and Indians pressed their demands in growing coordination. Thousands of African Americans applauded Paul Robeson and Kumar Goshal in the Manhattan Center in 1942 when they demanded a free India as the best condition for defending India against Japan. Goshal went on to write regularly for the Negro Quarterly, a journal for which Ralph Ellison was the managing editor, advising readers in the indissoluble link between the fate of African Americans and Indians, especially as the former defended the latter from Japanese conquest.

The US was sometimes capable of responding pragmatically to this situation, as when military top brass noticed that African American soldiers fighting in India demonstrated an ability to relate to Indian civilians that surpassed that of white soldiers, and were thus an asset – despite the generally racist perception of black soldiers as incompetent, lazy, and so on. Nonetheless, with a segregated army and a war in the name of a ‘freedom’ most African Americans did not receive, such understandings were of limited use. The situation of both India and African Americans would have to change if the dominant position of the US was to be secured. According to Horne, whatever the reality of Japanese policy, the perception that it was waging a ‘race war’ against the white world made conditions more favourable for Indian independence and improvements for African Americans.

From race war to Cold War
While the Cold War that followed WWII proved unfavourable for the African American Left, the NAACP emerged the strongest African American organisation in the US. The NAACP has often been belaboured for aligning with Cold War ideology, its leadership arguing that race reform was an integral part of the struggle against communism. Some historians, such as Penny Von Eschen, have argued that the NAACP’s decision shut down possibilities for raising more radical conceptions of social and economic justice that would later come to the fore, and limited the scope for international anticolonial solidarity. Manning Marable argued that the NAACP effectively acted as the “left-wing of McCarthyism” in the early Cold War period.

Horne has been known to share this broad line of argument, and here he acknowledges the limits placed on the NAACP by Cold War ideology, lamenting the decreasing internationalism in the African American movement at just the time that the Indian anti-colonial movement was denouncing apartheid, launching the Bandung Conference to give Africa and Asia a global voice, and founding the Non-Aligned Movement, to escape the restrictive embrace of anticommunism. The anticommunist leadership not only refused to show solidarity with those being put on trial by the state for communist activity, which included many African Americans. Its stance also meant that it had to depart from any idea of an independent foreign policy which would challenge the very global order that Washington was seeking to conserve and reform in its own image. The leadership rarely deigned to express a view that differed from established Washington opinion, and Walter White ended up effectively counselling President Truman on India, steering the NAACP toward a position of trying to influence India in favour of anticommunism. The old internationalism reached a nadir when W E B Du Bois was expelled from the NAACP for attempting to persuade an Indian delegation to the UN to raise the plight of African Americans before the body’s general assembly, a move that would have reflected poorly on Washington’s new stance as a global protector of human rights.

Still, the relationship to India did not vanish overnight. In the year preceding Indian independence, the NAACP was capable of a vigorous campaign on India. Outside the NAACP, African American missionaries to India tried to use their experiences to help overcome the communal divisions that ripped through the subcontinent at a cost of millions of lives as the British opted to ‘divide and quit’. The African American left was profoundly critical of the British division of India, and Congress militants themselves pointed to the evil of racial hierarchy in the US to warn against any attempt to exclude or subordinate Muslims in an independent India. Some worked through YMCAs to develop contacts with Indian militants. Bayard Rustin made contact with local capitalists the better to forge allies among India’s newly independent ruling class.

And there was still a profound awareness of the fact that thousands of Indians lived in the US and suffered racial oppression alongside African Americans. But even here, potential problems arose. A minority of Indian residents of the US chose to argue that their legal rights should be respected on the grounds that they were properly categorised as Aryans, which raised the question of whether anti-racist organisations should campaign for people of South Asian origin to be respect as ‘white’. The major barrier to sustained solidarity, though, was the atmosphere of anticommunism, a political perspective that did not bode well for relations with a country that had pioneered non-alignment, and which had two mass, influential communist parties. The fear of being charged with being communist sympathisers drove many internationally oriented African Americans away from even discussing global affairs. The era of internationalism would return with the next upsurge of the civil rights struggle, but it would come with the breakdown of the liberal Cold War consensus.

The fact that the African American struggle for liberation was compromised in the way that it was by Cold War repression does not mean that it was no longer dependent on global struggles. The very fact that millions of newly free Indians (and Asians of all backgrounds, and Africans) were open to the idea of a systemic alternative to Washington-dominated capitalism was, as Horne’s narrative makes clear, one of the main reasons that the destruction of Jim Crow became a political goal of the liberal wing of US power. America’s global standing became far more important to its long-term advantage than the preservation of its peculiar institution of white supremacy.

In keeping with his long-standing efforts to revive the forgotten international contours of African American history, Horne has done an enormous service in illuminating the anti-imperialism at the heart of black America’s struggle. He has also, in the course of this, brought to light a myriad of class, gender, national and caste issues that intersected with this story. There are times when one would wish for a more critical appraisal of the role of the USSR, whose conduct gave much succour to the anticommunists Horne berates, and whose international stance was often profoundly conservative – its long support for French colonialism in Algeria and Zionism in Palestine, for instance, suggests that it could hardly be depended on as an ally of the victims of white supremacy. At other times in the narrative, it is more evident that African Americans and Indians had a shared destiny, than that substantial political forces among either understood this. And it would have been useful to have an engagement with critics, such as Manfred Berg, who have mounted a defence of the NAACP’s position in the Cold War period. Nevertheless, these are minor criticisms. Horne has written another powerful ‘history from below’, as it were, in which the main agents of liberation are the oppressed themselves. Their stories, and their ideas, are so infrequently told that one can only welcome the fact that such a gifted historian as Horne has chosen to relate them.

Yes, you could talk about the fact that Afghanistan's 'election drama' (a phrase that has seemed oxymoronic in the UK of late) is becoming more farcical by the day. The US-groomed former Talib and ally of Northern Alliance warlords is, apparently, a massive fraud. His rival, a US-supporting warlord named Abdullah Abdullah, is withdrawing from the electoral spectacle on precisely those grounds. And the UN is sending its supremo in to have a bit of a nosy, and tell the natives to buck up their act and at least pretend that the freem-n-moxy that was graciously conferred on them by the US is more than a paper-thin oligarchy. Yes, as I say, you could talk about that.

Or you could talk about the regional apocalypse that is developing within the bloody embrace of NATO and Obama-style multilateralism. I wish it were redundant to spend too much time talking about the terrorising of the Afghan population by the occupiers, but it plainly isn't. Johann Hari sometimes does a good job of drawing attention to the humanitarian consequences of the war. Here, he notes that according to Lt Col Kilcullen, in recent aerial attacks the US has killed 98 civilians for every two 'insurgents' killed. If that ratio holds for the air war as a rule, then consider that the US is currently boasting of having killed up to 25,000 insurgents. 25k is 2% of 1.25m. Lacking a Lancet-style cluster survey, one can only make an educated guess as to whether such a figure is approximately realistic. There was one cluster survey carried out for the first nine months of the invasion and occupation, which estimated that 10,000 civilians had been killed, the majority from air attacks. A similar survey today would be reporting the effects of a far more intense aerial campaign, in a war lasting for eight years now. Who can say that the soaring use of cluster bombs, daisy cutters, 'smart' missiles aimed at wedding parties, drone-based ordnance, and the usual deposits of unexploded ordnance, will have harvested a negligible number of bodies? I just venture that, were this to be properly investigated, levels of mortality way well exceed those in Iraq.

Further, nowhere is the point sufficiently taken that these consequences are an intended, deliberate, and considered outcome of the aggression. It is not just that as the US transfers the risks of its operations to the civilian population through high-octane aerial attacks, it necessarily leads to a perhaps undesired but accepted level of civilian slaughter. It is that the distinction between civilian and combatant is being eroded as rapidly as it was in Vietnam. The Afghan population has simply become, in the context of a guerilla war, part of the enemy. NATO planners know full well that the insurgency couldn't sustain a heavy presence in 80% of the territory, and effectively take over the Nuristan province, without the backing of a socially significant layer of the population. I would infer that the intention of constant attacks on civilian population centres is to terrorise the population - perhaps with the hope that whatever measly and corrupt civilian programmes are being promulgated can 'win hearts and minds' at some point in the increasingly distant future.

The second point is that we are witnessing anew the way in which imperialism and nationalism can intersect to bloodily reconstruct the geography and political economy of whole regions. Such is the history of the Indian subcontinent during and after colonial rule. There was little in the history of Muslims and Hindus in India to give rise to any apprehension of the schism that would arise in the 1930s, never mind the calamity that would unfold with partition in 1947 - 90 years after an uprising uniting Muslims and Hindus had delivered India's first body blow to the British behemoth. The story of India's division is an extraordinarily rapid one, in which the divide and rule policies of the British - some of whose deadly fruits were borne again this year in Sri Lanka - interacted with the independence struggle that took off in the 1920s following the Russian revolution and the 1919 Amritsar massacre. In Uttar Pradesh, a highly mixed region notable for its role in the 1857 uprising, the British authorities had already used such tactics by, eg, acceding to demands that Hindi be the official language of the region. As Indian struggles wrung forms of electoral representation from the British, the colonial power insisted that voters identify themselves on a communal basis. One major example of such divide-and-rule was the attempted partition of Bengal in 1905, then a mixed state in the east of India. That was succesfully resisted, but the basic policy of attempting to foment divisions based on confession remained.

This became important in the independence struggle as upper and middle class Indian Muslims whose position had been established through the colonial state sought to be included in any future settlement. The Muslim League, founded in 1906, was initially loyal to the British crown, and sought to promote these interests, and had supported the partition of Bengal on the basis that it was good for Indian Muslims. The British patronised the League for this reason. Until the 1937 elections, however, the majority of Indian Muslims had sought representation in a future independent polity through the Indian National Congress. The turn to other forms of political expression, some class-based and others confessional, resulted from Congress refusing to work in coalition with the Muslim League in government, which aroused fears that it would be a de facto communal power. (In truth, the Congress had allowed a certain blurring of the edges between secular nationalism and Hindu communalism by permitting joint membership of Congress and Hindu Mahasabha until the early 1930s. Much of its leadership was reactionary and sectarian, and the inspirations for avowedly secular Indian nationalism often included dubious Hindu communalist figures such as the writer Bankim Chattopadhyay.) By 1940, the Muslim League was campaigning for a Muslim state to be named Pakistan, including Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan, the North West Frontier Province and Bengal. Jinnah, who was no sectarian and had attempted to broker unity with the Congress, had concluded that Muslims and Hindus were two nations.

It turns out that there were more than two potential nations in there. India was first divided at the cost of 1 million lives. Then, as the Pakistani state came under the domination of the military in 1957, it escalated its practises of discrimination and oppression against the more populous eastern 'half' of the country, and thus sparking an independence struggle which it unsuccessfully attempted to suppress with near genocidal violence. It might have succeeded had it not provoked Indian intervention. But Pakistan was divided at a cost up to 3m civilian lives. Kashmir has remained a running sore and an object of military rivalry between India and Pakistan. Whatever happens to Kashmir, it has cost up to thousands of lives every year. And today, the authority of the Pakistani state over substantial swathes of its territory is in question - not because of fundamentalism, but because the state is unable to meet the needs of the population, and is instead devoting resources and firepower to fighting its own front in the 'war on terror'. Obama's $7.5bn aid package is supposed to help overcome this, but the conditions that come with this commit the Pakistani state to a prolonged, expensive and destabilising war (admittedly with the assistance of Xe, née Blackwater). It also infringes further on the polite fiction of Pakistani sovereignty by demanding more and larger US permanent military bases in the country. The military is divided over this strategy, and - despite much bravado - is unable to control south Waziristan or the Swat valley. It is taking sustained blows in major cities such as Rawalpindi, Lahore, and Islamabad. Some of the attacks reportedly aren't even coming from Talibs, but are mutinies from within. The Federally Administered Tribal Areas, created by the British to contain Pashtun revolt, are now a faultline in the 'war on terror'. The North-West Frontier Province, originally annexed from the Emirate of Afghanistan, may as well now be an autonomous region of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan's viability as a national state is also now in question. The US has attempted to control the country using largely Uzbek warlords, with a handpicked, carefully groomed and scented Pashtun leader. Whoever 'won' the Afghan election wouldn't be able to claim much legitimate authority outside of Kabul. Lacking much of a fiscal base, it is almost entirely dependent on US and donor funding, aid projects, World Bank programmes etc. Even if the Taliban and its associates were decisively defeated, it is hard to see this fractious bunch of mercenaries emerging into a coherent national ruling class, since their brand of highly profitable narco-capitalism comes with military competition and territorial struggle built in. The insurgency (not yet convinced by the insights of satyagraha for some reason), has marginally better chances. It has more national cohesion than the warlord factions do, but is inherently self-limiting by its rootedness in one dominant ethnic group and its reactionary ideology. Of course, the Taliban have proven to be capable of reinventing themselves, but that still doesn't mean they have a remotely plausible social vision. At best, they would be capable of forming an authoritarian nationalist coalition with some defecting warlord groups. It is hard to see a coherent national movement emerging here. If anything, the trend is toward a combination of regionalism and localism.

NATO imperialism is thus intersecting with national and regional politics in such a way now as to accelerate the centrifugal trends already in evidence. The legacy of British 'nation-building' in southern Asia has at times commanded applause and admiration from some of the intelligentsia, but it is a legacy that we are constantly living with no less than with the current reality of US empire. In both the long and the short view, the 'divide and quit' settlement has actually been catastrophic. Its problems may have been resolved more amicably and less bloodily if not for constant outside subventions, the pressures of the Cold War, the coopting of the Pakistani military, the creation of a layer of reactionary Wahabbis to fight Afghan communists and then the USSR etc. That the one force capable of subverting the barbaric heritage of colonial nation-building, international socialism, meets the present challenge in an historically weak state, only adds to the presentiment of grave danger.

Guest post by Ajit Hegde:

Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who address you in the language of master to slave, and are answered in the language of slave to master; who are worshiped by you with your mouth, while in your heart -- if you have one -- you despise yourselves for it.

-- Mark Twain in Mysterious Stranger

Benazir Bhutto's life can be regarded as a microcosm of Third World liberal aristocracy's betrayal of their Countries. The sordid record liberal aristocracy which she represented can be summed up as follows.

(1) Gain power promising people liberation from their sorry state of affairs and outright destitution.

(2) When in power , simply betray people who believed them and elected them, Indulge in obscene levels of corruption, behave as if the people who elected you simply doesn't exist.Build a cult of personality which may make even Stalin green with envy.

(3) Get kicked out of power, sometimes by rightwing political parties , sometimes the military.

(4) Start all over again.

The vicious cycle continues, Ad Nauseum.

This has been the story, more or less, of the South Asian nations like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. If anyone is responsible for driving the people of these countries into the hands of diabolical religious fundamentalists of all sorts, then it should be the Liberal Aristocrats like Bhutto of these countries. In India, this role is played by Congress Party, the family heirloom of Nehru Gandhi Family. In Pakistan It is Pakistan People's Party(PPP), the family heirloom of Bhutto Family.

Third world Aristocrats are the kind who helped the Westerners of a bygone era to loot their countries and then simply took over when the Westerners shuffled home.

Benazir and her fellow Aristocrats of every country have only contempt for the masses. We are fooling ourselves if we think they really care for us. For them, the masses are simply raw materials for their boundless ambitions. They are egomaniacs with a sense of entitlement. I have seen quite a few aristocrats in my life. Whatever difference they may have there are some things which are surprisingly consistent. It is their contempt for the masses. Of course they wouldn't talk down to people like they do to their servants in public. It would be suicidal to do so. But now and again, there is some story about them which gives an insight into the mindset of these elites.

A couple of examples would suffice to show the nature of Benazir's relationship with the masses she claimed to represent.

(1) Fawzia Afzal Khan who teaches at Montclair State University was a student in Radcliffe College when Benazir came there to give a speech. After listening to a particularly unimpressive speech Fawzia and others stayed in the lecture hall to ask her some questions. When her turn came Fawzia asked a rather innocuous question "what was her election platform or manifesto by which one could gauge the sincerity and depth of her commitment to a truly democratic agenda?" Fawzia describes Benazir's reaction.

"I thought she was about to have an epileptic seizure by the way her eyes glazed over, then started to turn bloodshot, and the foam began forming at the corners of her bright red lips ... She virtually spat out her answer, anger and arrogance on display in every word she uttered. 'Do you know who I am?' incredulity at my naivete hissing through her words. 'Cassettes of my speeches sell like hotcakes in every market in Pakistan,' and when my expression must have betrayed some level of incomprehension, she lashed out, 'that means the people of Pakistan love me, they know how I have suffered for them when I was jailed following my father's execution, just because as his daughter and the one groomed to be a future leader of Pakistan, the army just could not take the chance of my being free to assume that mantle.' Her final comment to me-which led to a young man standing next to me pulling me away and advising me to leave before things got really ugly-was something to the effect that she would 'see me outside.' Was that a veiled threat, in the manner of a feudal lord to a servant who has spoken out of line, or an invitation to speak to her 'outside' after the evening was over?" (Fawzia Afzal Khan, Counterpunch, 29/20 December 2007)

(2) Owen Bennet Jones, a BBC Journalist, once visited Benazir's ancestral Home in Larkana, Sindh. After having the dinner with 40 people, Benazir moved into a large hall. Read what happened later in his own words, "On the outer fringes of the throng around Benazir Bhutto that night in Larkana eight years ago were the local villagers who had somehow blagged their way in. They were welcome enough - as long as they stayed in their place. But one had a camera and took a picture. The flash had not even faded away before - with a ferocious imperious expression - Benazir Bhutto pointed in his general direction. Her minders, who had obviously been mingling in the crowd for just such an eventuality, wrestled him to the ground, grabbed his camera, ripped out the film and hurled him out of the door into the courtyard. I looked at her surprised, shocked." (Owen Bennett Jones, 'Face to Face with Benazir Bhutto', 29 December 2007)

Thus the so called saviour of democracy treated her alleged equals. It is not much different from what a Feudal lord in Europe might have done in his heyday. She was simply a pathetic woman who had no concern for the millions of her countrymen and women who live a life of destitution. She proved it again and again. Life is too short. We wouldn't give a benefit of doubt to a used car salesman or a conman who has already deceived us once. Why not do the same in politics, a far more important arena than personal finance? Benazir got two chances. That was one too many in my books. She screwed up both times.

There is a lot of talk about Benazir's courage. Even some leftist commentators are saying she was a woman of great personal courage. For them I can only quote Gore Vidal who said "There is something strangely infantile in this obsession with dice-loaded physical courage when the only courage that matters in political or even 'real' life is moral." Benazir and courage. The word courage is disgraced and degraded by such uses. Actually they are misdiagnosing her. It was not courage but a gambler taking his or her chances. Politics, especially in a country like India and Pakistan, is a dangerous business. If you win you will rule like a Roman Emperor or Empress. If you lose there is a high probability of going bust.

Now the word comes Benazir has appointed her 19 year old son as her heir to Pakistan People's Party(PPP) in her will. Just like her father gave her the PPP. Kind Reader, when I see this I am reminded of Karl Marx's aphorism about History repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. If Bill Clinton or George Bush did such things in their will I am sure there will be howls of derision across America.

The people of India, Pakistan or for that matter any other nation must wise up quickly. They should not degrade themselves by giving free rein to discredited autocrats who treat their parties as their personal property. At least Musharraf, that megalomaniac general, gave his country a whole new crop of leaders, albeit unintentionally. Musharraf sacked the Chief Justice of Pakistan in March 2007. But the Judge didn't simply walk away. He decided to fight his unjust dismissal. His rather extraordinary courage in resisting the dreaded Generals inspired an entire nation to wake up from it's slumber. The lawyers were at the forefront of the movement. There were pitched battles between Musharraf's goons aka Army and Police on one side and the Lawyers on the other.

It was possibly the most extraordinary movement of people in that country's history. The lawyers actually won the battle. Emboldened by the resistance of lawyers the supreme court judges threw out Musharraf's case against the Chief Justice. Never before in history the Supreme Court of Pakistan dared to disobey the Military Masters. The Lawyers movement threw up a number of potential leaders who offer a real alternative to the Bhutto clan. Aitzaz Ahsan (he was actually Benazir's lawyer), Ali Ahmad Kurd, Munir Malik all of them played major role in resisting the Generals. Nobody in Pakistan's history has addressed the military overlords in such belligerent tone on live TV as Ali Ahmad Kurd. Kurd is the man who literally held the audience spellbound with his oratorical skills.

"He is not a man who has no passion, and that passion is useless that does not challenge general Pervez Musharraf. Enough of this fooling around! Enough of this fooling around! Today a man on the basis of his arrogance! Today a man on the basis of his haughtiness has dared to challenge the Chief Justice of Pakistan. If you are men you'll stay in the battlefield and not turn your back."

“Today, Pervez Musharraf has again said that no reference (against Chief Justice of Pakistan) will be withdrawn. When did we ask you to withdraw the reference? We say it is a war! It is a war! If you (Pervez Musharraf) are in your uniform, then so are we (the lawyers). Come fight us! Come fight us! No power in this world can defend this reference." (Read more about this extraordinary man).

Any society should be proud of people like Kurd. It takes guts to challenge the Generals of Pakistan who have time and again proved they have no compunction in shedding the blood of their own countrymen.

It is true Musharraf quickly hit back within a couple of months. And sacked the reinstated Chief Justice , purged the Supreme Court and imprisoned his Lawyers. But it is more like the final desperate attempt by a cornered crook to hang on to power. The Lawyers and others will definitely fight back. And what did Benazir do for her country's most extraordinary movement against the Rulers? Well, She didn't even lift her pinkie to support the lawyers' movement. She actually was busy cutting deals with Musharraf at that time.