The Army Between the “Quad” and the Unifying Narrative (2 of 4)

Dr Al-Dardiri Mohamed Ahmed
Before comparing the various aspects of the independence narratives in India and Sudan, let us first compare the elites that forged those narratives.
India’s struggle for independence took a long, complex course spanning more than a century. It evolved from scattered local resistances into a nationwide movement that began violently, then assumed a peaceful form. The Indian National Congress was established early, in 1885, for the purpose of dialogue with the British, not confrontation. In 1915, Mahatma Gandhi returned from South Africa and introduced the principles of Ahimsa (non-violence) and Satyagraha (civil disobedience), making them methods of struggle and supreme ethical ideals for all.
The first thing to note about the Indian elite is that it founded the Congress Party sixty-two years before independence and remained united throughout that period. Second, the Indian elite made Congress an inclusive platform, transcending the national, religious and sectarian forms that had prevailed before it. Third, Congress paid meticulous attention to the countryside, making its heritage a beacon and inspiration for the struggle. It then built an organisational network stretching from villages to cities, composed of district and state committees, and gave each region room to express its particularity within the party’s overall structure. Fourth, Congress did not allow any single current to dominate it: left, right and moderates were balanced within it. Gandhi, Nehru and Patel were granted supreme symbolic leadership within a collective leadership. This trio succeeded in uniting India despite its extraordinary mosaic and continued to inspire after independence. Over this long span, through such prudent policy, the Indian National Congress transformed from an elite forum into a mass national liberation movement embracing all strata of Indian society and its political currents. It even succeeded in turning the independence narrative into a narrative of the future—of stability and development.
By contrast, the Sudanese elite sought to copy the Indian Congress experience—which had inspired it—by establishing the Graduates’ Congress in 1938. That organisation united graduates of the middle and higher schools (Gordon Memorial College and Kitchener Medical School), transcending their sectarian and regional affiliations. In 1942 it successfully submitted a memorandum to the Governor-General demanding the right to self-determination for Sudan after the end of the Second World War. That memorandum was the actual founding moment of the Graduates’ Congress, and indeed the birth of Sudan’s “Independence Narrative”: a unifying discourse that rose above the traditional divisions of North/South and Ansar/Khatmiyya.
However, the weakness exploited by the coloniser on the one hand, and by the two religious sects on the other, was the Congress’s failure to escape the ivory tower of the elite. Membership remained confined to certificate-holders, thereby excluding, by default, influential constituencies such as tribal leaders, traditional merchants, farmers’ leaders and townspeople. It preoccupied itself with the concerns of its small stratum—jobs and “Sudanisation”, representation in the administration, and constitutional development—at the expense of rural and illiterate issues such as land, water, agricultural schemes, and taxation. Nor did it attend to methods of mass mobilisation: when it resolved to demand self-determination, it sent its memorandum to the coloniser without first building a popular mandate. Yet it could have made that demand the subject of public action—lectures, demonstrations and civil disobedience—around which the masses would rally. It also neglected the countryside, failing to adopt a discourse that drew on its heritage and spoke to its concerns, as Congress leaders did in India.
This made it easy for the two religious sects to monopolise the countryside, control the loyalty of the non-educated, and claim to represent the majority of the people. The result was that the elite became dependent on the sects. Worse, the already small stratum that had formulated the independence narrative split. The coloniser played its familiar game, and sectarian loyalties intensified within the Graduates’ Congress, which split in 1944 into two camps: one “Independence” and the other “Unionist”, each sheltering under a leader and relying on his sect to win popular support. Instead of building an entity that embraced all Sudanese, the elite flung itself into the arms of sectarian loyalties, depending on pre-colonial—indeed pre-modern—entities as the basis of party formation, and making personal allegiance to spiritual leaders its means of political gain. The rhetoric between the two camps accordingly deteriorated, inflamed by newspapers and public speeches, to a pitch that at times reached popular confrontations. The rift between the parties and the sects grew so wide that a mere handshake between the two Sayyids on 25 January 1953 was deemed historic. Meanwhile, internal competition among politicians for the spiritual leader’s favour was at its height. We now turn to compare the narratives produced by the movements of these two elites—Indian, then Sudanese—beginning with their impact on constitution-making.
Because the Indian elite united around Congress, the content of India’s independence narrative broadened and diversified. Though Gandhi and Patel disappeared from the scene shortly after independence—through the assassination of the former and the death of the latter—the symbolism of unifying leadership persisted in Nehru, the senior figure to whom people rallied and appealed. This enabled India to complete the constitution in less than three years after independence: the Indian Constitution was promulgated on 26 January 1950, making it the first constitution outside Europe and the Americas. At over four hundred articles, it was the longest and richest in content in the world—evidence of how densely the Indian narrative was stocked with shared meanings. Compare this with Sudan’s Independence Constitution, the 1956 Transitional Constitution, which contained 58 articles—almost like the charter of an association—and was drafted in a single night, copied from the 1953 Self-Government Statute drawn up by the British. Or with the 1985 Transitional Constitution (96 articles). All our transitional constitutions followed this telegraphic pattern, save the 2005 Constitution, which had 226 articles and six lengthy schedules.
The principal aim of the Indian Constitution was to embody the national independence narrative and to express it through an inclusive democratic system that redefined India as an independent, multi-identity nation after centuries of colonial rule and ethno-national divisions. It was framed as a social contract among all India’s religions, nationalities and far-flung regions, founded on guaranteeing fundamental rights for all. It was flexible and far-sighted: though parts of it were entrenched, over the past eight decades, more than a hundred amendments have been introduced to its flexible aspects, keeping it a living, growing, responsive entity. Thus, the Indian independence narrative quickly stood upright, sent its branches high, and turned into a living constitutional text: mined in every election and invoked in every crisis.
By contrast, Sudan’s independence occurred amid elite division. The “meeting of the two Sayyids” failed to produce genuine unity. The Independence Front it yielded was a tactical alliance that merely froze differences without dissolving them; they remained latent and charged at the popular level. The most the Front achieved was to unify the negotiating position with Egypt and Britain and form the Sudanisation Ministry in 1953 to oversee the transfer of posts from the British to Sudanese. As for the great national questions after independence—social contract, system of government and its form, and centre–periphery relations—they were not addressed at all for lack of a minimal national consensus. As soon as independence was achieved at the start of 1956, the Front lost its raison d’être and the two parties returned to the struggle over power and resources, reflected in parliament’s performance.
After independence, it was decided that parliament would transform into a Constituent Assembly to draft the constitution, in the hope that this merely formal step would overcome political conflict. But changing the form meant little in the absence of content: the Assembly reproduced the same cleavages rife in parliament. Its greatest impasse was the southern MPs’ demand for a federal constitution; the northern majority rejected that demand outright, paralysing the Assembly’s work. A further formal device was then tried: the “Committee of Fifty-Five” was formed in 1957 to break the deadlock. With no agreement on substance, the committee also stalled. Nor was that the only disagreement. Had it been resolved, other conflicts would have emerged no less acute—foremost, whether to adopt a parliamentary or presidential system. This was not, as often dressed up, a constitutional or jurisprudential dispute; at bottom, it was a power struggle. With its apparent parliamentary majority, the Umma Party favoured parliamentarism to place true authority in the hands of the Prime Minister. The Unionist Party, lacking such a majority, preferred an alternative system that might elevate its more charismatic leader, Ismail al-Azhari, to the presidency through alliances without a parliamentary majority. This reveals the Sudanese independence narrative’s lack of shared, actionable content that could be steadily expressed in a permanent constitution, as in India. Because of this early failure, our modern political history was reduced to a single question: the quest for a permanent constitution. We turn now to consider the effect on national unity in India and Sudan.
During the long years of struggle, the Indian elite dreamed of unifying the entire Indian Subcontinent—then known as British India—those lands under direct British rule or British suzerainty: Greater India (including Pakistan and Bangladesh), Sri Lanka (then administratively tied to India), Burma (now Myanmar), Bhutan and Nepal. Hence, religious, ethnic and linguistic diversity became the foundation of India’s independence narrative under the slogan “Unity in Diversity”. When Greater India fragmented at independence—Pakistan and Bangladesh seceded, and Sri Lanka drifted away—the dream of a united Subcontinent evaporated. Hindus became the absolute majority (80%) in independent India. Yet this did not tempt the Indian elite to turn inward and recast the narrative on a “Hindu India” basis. The “Unity in Diversity” thesis was retained as the chief content of the independence narrative, and flexible federalism was preserved—although it had originally been designed to address the Muslim minority problem (most of which departed with Pakistan and Bangladesh) and to attract the Buddhist regions of Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal and Burma. It remained a federal system giving wide powers to the states, limiting the centre’s intervention to emergencies.
By contrast, the Sudanese narrative entirely dropped the South from consideration. Though the 1943 self-determination memorandum spoke of all Sudan, it made no reference to the South’s particularity. In a predictable reaction, some of the earliest southern educated figures—most notably Benjamin Lwoki, Santino Deng and Toby Madut—founded, in 1951, a party independent of the Graduates’ Congress and the two national-movement parties and their demands. They called it the “Southern Sudan Party”, advocating that the South be a region with self-government within a united Sudan, under the slogan “Federalism after Independence”. Strikingly, the party did not demand secession; it sought a fair political partnership. This did not prompt the elite to broaden its narrative’s horizons as India’s had done. They failed to see the embers smouldering under the ash. And although southerners feared that educational backwardness in the South relative to the North would turn Sudanisation into a means for northern domination, the Sudanisation Government formed in 1953 did not allay those fears by setting special criteria for appointments in the South. The far-reaching consequences of this for Sudan are too well known to recount. We move to the final comparison point: orientation toward the countryside.
India’s independence narrative did not merely “attend to” the countryside; it made it the starting point, source of inspiration and legitimacy, and ultimate aim. Gandhi made rural India a symbol of national identity—“the soul of India”. He coined the famous maxim that guided the independence generation: “Real India is not in Delhi or Bombay but in seven hundred thousand villages.” Rural life was not labelled “backward” in Indian discourse but “authentic”, portrayed as the place where India remained true—untainted by the West. The narrative drew its imagery and symbols from the countryside: leaders’ attire was traditional, not European suits; the hand-spinning wheel (charkha) held pride of place in India’s first flag, embodying Swadeshi—self-reliance; the use of colloquial language and popular foods took on national meaning. After independence, Nehru linked modernity to rural development, saying that major projects—dams, electrification, irrigated agriculture—belonged in the countryside, as “the temples of modern India”. When the constitution was framed, the countryside was institutionally and legislatively embedded in the state’s core. Thus, in India’s national imagination, the countryside was a source of the state’s moral and political legitimacy, an actor in daily politics—not merely its object. Let us now consider the countryside’s place in Sudan’s independence narrative.
Sudan’s independence narrative was fashioned within an urban space that neither represented nor embodied “traditional” or rural Sudan. There was no conception of building the state from or around the countryside. Under colonial rule, indirect rule kept the countryside distant from the city by reserving it for native administration; post-colonial “modernity” preserved the same marginal position. The countryside was seen as a “traditional” space in need of modernisation, not a partner. Modernisation, in this view, was the means by which the countryside would acquire an urban character after shedding its “backward” garb. “The nation” in public discourse was framed in terms that centred on the major cities, not the countryside or diversity. The post-independence “Sudanese” in discourse was typically the educated person, professional or tradesman residing in the city. The countryside—its tribes, dialects, cultures, and agrarian and pastoral interests—was absent.
The result was that Sudan’s independence narrative granted the countryside neither symbolic standing nor an emotional place in the meaning of the nation. Gradually, the countryside became “the periphery” and the centre became “the nation”. Symbolic justice vanished before economic justice did. The countryside did not appear in the constitution or public policy as a source of national vision; it appeared as a “problem”: the Nuba Mountains problem, the Blue Nile problem, the Abyei problem, Darfur, the East. Hence, when armed conflicts erupted in northern Sudan, they took the form of rural revolts against the metropolis—revolts of “the marginalised”. The independence narrative became bound to the centre—to the capital—where ministries, the army, universities, factories, electricity, clean water and tarmac roads are found, and where the model “Sudanese” resides. The narrative did not seek genuine representation for the countryside or self-government in the regions; Khartoum governed all. While the state spent on urban infrastructure, the countryside remained without water, electricity, roads, banks, universities, factories or productive projects—little reached it until the second decade of the Ingaz.
We must stress that nothing said here lends the militia’s tawdry propaganda the least credibility. To say the public discourse was urban is not to say it was confined to particular ethnicities. Sudan’s major cities brought together elites from many tribes and regions, generating interactions that weakened older identities and replaced them with a more open, hybrid urban identity. The process of detribalisation and its replacement with modern forms of belonging—based on profession, education and new domicile—was vigorous, though neither swift nor linear. Omdurman has led this since the 1920s. Consider ‘Abd al-Mun‘im ‘Abd al-Hay (1922–1975), an Omdurmani by birth and upbringing, Dinka by mother and father, one of the heralds of the independence generation: how proudly he proclaims his urban belonging in his masterpiece “I am Omdurman”, even saying: “I am Omdurman—ask the Two Niles about me / and about the resolve of my youth when tested; / the best of your sons, O Sudan, are from me!” The “best of Sudan’s sons”, for him, are Omdurman’s people—not out of ethnic chauvinism, but out of allegiance to the urbanness of all Omdurmanis, including his own kin, urban Dinka. Nor is this a stance against urbanisation: it plays a role in making national belonging a unifying identity—the beginning of a post-tribal society. But not all rural people have moved to the cities—nor should they. Our point is that the countryside remains, and it was an error to excise it from public discourse.
This, then, is the story of India’s independence narrative—the narrative that endowed diverse India with a shared belief enabling its democracy to endure and flourish, earning it the epithet “the world’s largest democracy”. It is also the foundation of India’s current economic success, which has made it one of the largest economies. In this instalment we compared our failed narrative with a successful one; in the next we will compare it with another failed narrative—one that, once it decayed, its authors revisited, renewed and transformed into a success story—whereas we cast our Independence Narrative behind our backs and replaced it with divisive narratives that inflamed our conflicts and brought us to the bottom.

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