17 Quotes by Ramachandra Guha

So the UCRW commandeered a bunch of film projectors from Delhi, and set them up in Kurukshetra. Among the movies shown were Disney specials featuring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. With large cloth screens allowing for two-way projection, crowds of up to 15,000 could watch a single show. This ‘two-hour break from reality’, commented a social worker, ‘was a lifesaver. The refugees forgot their shock experiences and misery for two golden hours of laughter.

What is a democratic Central Government to do with a Communist state?’ he asked. ‘What would theAmerican administration do if California or Wisconsin suddenly – and I admit, somewhatunexpectedly – turned Communist? And again, how is a Communist government itself to behave withdemocratic overlords sitting on its neck?

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

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.

What is now in the past was once in the future.

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.

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

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.

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.