Political violence escalating, says Manmohan Singh’s daughter

LUCKNOW: Political violence has existed throughout India’s history, is inherent to the state, and is worryingly escalating in today’s times, said Upinder Singh, historian and daughter of former PM Manmohan Singh at the Lucknow Literature Festival on Sunday.
“Today’s thinkers need to dwell on the problem of political violence just as their counterparts in ancient India did.Political violence is escalating in today’s world and needs to be controlled,” Singh said during a discussion on her book, ‘Political violence in ancient India’, at the festival.
Singh cautioned against labelling eras as “golden” and “non-golden”, and identifying historical figures as heroes and villains. “This kind of simple storytelling isn’t what history is about. Indian history is replete with diversity, debate and differences of opinion, where a variety of religious traditions, including atheism, existed,” she said.
“Now a major problem is that there is a divide in the history being written by historians, and the history floating in the public domain. Often, there is no connection between the two. This is happening partly because historians sitting in ivory towers have been unable to communicate effectively with the public,” she said.
Though non-violence is deeply embedded in Indian psyche, India, like every other part of the world, has seen violence throughout its history, including the period between 600BC and 600AD, which she maps in her book. The bestknown mascots of non-violence in India — Ashoka, Buddha, Mahaveer, and later Mahatma Gandhi —spoke so strongly in its favour because they lived in societies full of violence, she said.