Hindustan Ki Aankhein
And while we're all on the topic of India...
India was not a united nation, but a unified one. It was hammered into a singular entity by effort and force. Though the Revolution itself was achieved relatively easily in 1917, it only gained solid control over Delhi and the Ganges plain. Meanwhile, the border provinces broke away and the southerners took up arms. The Unitarians decided to write off the former and focus on the latter, but in doing so they realized that they lacked knowledge of the land, of possible allies, and of sworn enemies. In short, the Unitarians needed intelligence. The Unitarian armies in the Deccan developed clandestine-operations wings that recruited locals as translators and fifth columns, and began using the tools of the southern rebels— darkness, plausible deniability, and concealed arms— against them. After the assassination of Ranjit Nijasure in 1919, his brother Sanjay— now sole Chairman of the Unified Indian State— took the opportunity to administratively unify these various agencies with the former Mughal weapons laboratories, creating the Hindustan Ki Aankhein (Eyes of India). The former Nizam’s palace in Hyderabad was repurposed as a training facility for the Aankhein. Known simply as the Hyderabad School, it became a rather dark way of achieving social mobility. Though enrollment in the School was open to anyone, the promise of a new life exerted a special pull on the poor and disadvantaged. The Muslim poor and Hindus of low or no caste, some of whom had already joined the Unitarian militias on their march through India, constituted a large minority of students and graduates. After six years, the 4,000 men and women of the Hyderabad school’s first graduating class, literate in Urdu [1] and competent in practical skills ranging from survivalism to the cold-reading practiced by fortune-tellers, set out to mold history to Nijasure’s liking.
The United Indian State in 1922, long before its western campaigns. The L marks the location of Lucknow [2].
The administrative reforms of 1922 sorted the institutions of Indian governance into three levels: subprefectural, prefectural, and national. The sub-prefectural pargana (a group of villages and the surrounding countryside) and mahalla (a town or small city) were, just like in the time of the Mughals, the smallest and most basic revenue-making entities. Several parganas and mahallas could be placed under the rule of a single prefecture (the corresponding Urdu word is simply prefektura, a loan from the Unitarian language), of which there were initially 408 in total. The new prefectures replaced the old subahs—which might have served as power bases for ambitious provincial governors or core regions of future nations—with smaller administrative units that could not become vehicles for regionalism [3]. The duties of each prefecture included administration, revenue collection, record-keeping, the creation of a police force to maintain law and order, and management of the environment (this also implied the power to ignore the environment, which is what usually happened while Accelerationist industrialization was in progress). Prefectures in charge of sparsely populated or tribal areas tended to rival the size of the provinces they replaced, while smaller prefectures ruled denser populations. A special class of urban prefecture, or nagar, ruled metropolises like Surat, Mysore, Dhaka, and Delhi, but notably excluded Lucknow. The Nijasure brothers, who were originally middle-class Marathis from Ahmednagar, had first grown to national prominence by organizing Lucknow’s labor movement. The city had been both headquarters and refuge for the Indian Unitarians, and its people provided resources and manpower for the Revolution of 1917. Lucknow gave the Unitarian leadership a sense of safety that the stormy mood of post-Revolution Delhi could not, and in 1918 it became the capital of the UIS. The reforms of 1922 gave Lucknow the unique status of a shahar, and its municipal rulers were thereafter handpicked by the national government.
The Aankhein occupied an ambiguous place in this framework. Though they were a wing of the national military, they typically interacted with and received missions from the regional bureaus. Created over the course of the 1920s, the regional bureaus simplified the headache of having to deal with over 400 administrative subunits. Each bureau, acting on behalf of Lucknow, coordinated and oversaw the activities of 20 to 30 prefectures, which were typically grouped together on the basis of being economically similar or complementary (the Kaveri river, populated by Malayalis and Tamils, was entrusted to a single bureau). However, the regional bureaus were not themselves governing institutions, and had few independent powers. A bureau might recommend the construction of a new industrial city and furnish funds for its establishment, but the prefecture the city was built in would be entrusted with governing it. The Aankhein were frequently commissioned by the bureaus to watch prefectural officials for corrupt or subversive activities and root out rebels. By the 1930s, the Carnatic Region had become the site of a silent war between the Aankhein and a loose collection of nationalist rebels that, while ostensibly led by the Vetrivel (Victorious Spear) Association, tended to act independently, have unstable pools of membership, and fight amongst themselves over increasingly radical interpretations (and misinterpretations) of Tamil nationalist ideology.
The banner of the Vetrivel Association. Though it was once a cohesive party that fought toe-to-toe with the UIS for control over the Tamil lands, internal and external stresses made it a mostly symbolic entity by the 1930s.
After 1935, however, such activities were usually outsourced to prefectural police while the Aankhein, presented with great opportunities abroad, transformed into a foreign intelligence agency. Foreseeing an eventual westward campaign to retake Afghanistan at the very least, Lucknow added classes in Pashto, Baluchi, and Persian to the Hyderabad School’s curriculum. Such training, along with the immense practical experience acquired during domestic operations, paid enormous dividends. The UIS conquered Afghanistan, Baluchistan, and eastern Persia in a matter of months because local Aankhein agents had already sown the seeds for victory. Over the next year, the Aankhein built up links with the newly established Indian Marine Corps, and assisted the latter during the conquest of France’s Southeast Asian colonies. Together, the two institutions became the implements of “controlled revolution.” Upon landing in Prey Nokor, the capital of French Indochina, Indian forces intervened in the dispute for Unitarian leadership. Phan Đình Khải, leader of the Anarchist faction, died thereafter in unexplained circumstances, and Chan Sim became Chairman of the Union of the Mekong River. This would create something of a headache for the Indians—by picking a Khmer candidate for leadership and eliminating a non-Khmer one, they unwittingly turned up the heat on a simmering ethnic conflict.
The lands of the Mekong Union had once been ruled by the Khmer kingdom as late as 1870. Though the Vietnamese state once openly fought the Khmer over control of the former kingdom of Champa, by the 1800s it had acquiesced to Khmer control of the disputed territory. Vietnamese citizens, however, traveled as individuals or in small groups to explore the opportunities of the south. Entering a land populated by at least three major ethnic groups (Khmer, Mon, Cham) and at least three religions (Buddhism among the Khmer majority, Hinduism and Islam among the Cham) the Vietnamese became businessmen, land speculators, tenant farmers, and traveling tradesmen. After the French conquest, the Vietnamese of Indochina often took up the label of Dainamese (người Đại Nam, person of the Great South) to avoid associations with the Vietnamese state and people to the north. This split was not just political. The Dainamese dialect diverged significantly from the northern standard, and the French developed a Latin-based script to transcribe it. The Vietnamese made Chữ Nôm, a mix of standard Chinese characters for loanwords and new characters for native Vietnamese words, their official script in 1875. Despite this, the Khmer viewed the Dainamese as foreigners, and competition between the two groups for high status in the economy, French military, and civil service did not help matters. The Indochinese labor movement tended to be more accepting of differences— while the trade unions in the Dainamese-majority coastal enclaves and the Khmer-majority inland towns tended to be dominated by their respective ethnicities, the Unitarian associations in mixed zones like Nha Trang and Prey Nokor tended to include contingents of both. Chan Sim, however, did much to destroy this consensus. Though the Indians sought only a marriage of convenience against the Anarchists, Chan Sim used Indian might against major figures in the Dainamese community in general. The Mekong Union, Chan Sim seemed to imply, was a Khmer nation in which the Dainamese lived as guests. In time, opposition figures both Dainamese and Khmer would come to resent the overbearing Indians and even Unitarianism in general.
The flag of the Mekong Union.
After the collapse of the (original) Union, the Aankhein were deployed to western Persia to oversee the slightly easier task of establishing Indian control there, and propping up the restorationist government in Baghdad. They did not succeed at the latter— they were, after all, fighting on immensely hostile territory— but when the Indians withdrew from the Middle East, they took the Union’s funds, resources, and personnel with them.
In contrast to the system of bureaus and prefectures in India proper, control in the territories annexed since 1939 was in the hands of Oversight Committees— military governments entrusted with keeping order in a particular region. In time, Lucknow planned to hand over the Committees’ powers to newly established prefectures. Though this process was already underway in some places— Kabul, Quetta, and Penang had gained nagar status by 1943— it was predicted that the large-scale establishment of civilian government could only proceed after the creation of local Unitarian cadres and institutions in the conquered regions.
The northern Indian Ocean in 1948. Persia, Malaya, and the various island chains are all ruled by Oversight Committees, and may be considered integral parts of the UIS. The Mekong Union is a fairly dependable puppet of India, but the other three minor Unitarian states (East Africa, Aceh, Burma) have significant autonomy and uphold unique variants of Unitarian ideology. Assam, a non-Unitarian kingdom ruled by the restored Ahom dynasty, has served as a neutral meeting place for representatives of India and China in the past.
By 1948, Sanjay Nijasure had served as a diarch and later supreme leader of a superpower for over three decades— but he clearly could not rule for three more. After the Netaji refused any appearances in person or on the Sengupta for almost the entire month of February, Lucknow’s rumor mill was quick to connect this odd event with a possible heart attack, stroke, or other debilitating event. From this point onward, key figures in the government began to position themselves as successors to the "Blue Badshah". Priya Nijasure, the wife of Sanjay, was very much a woman of the old guard. Though she had privately developed interesting ideas for the education system and the place of Indian languages other than Urdu in it, she generally aligned with Sanjay on matters of foreign and military policy. At the time, it was still unknown if the somewhat unnecessary help lent by Mamnoon Khan, Speaker of the Unitarian Congress, to Priya’s short and successful campaign for membership in the Congress was a sign of political support or a misplaced attempt to win her affections. The Director-General of the Aankhein, Prakash Naidu, also rose to prominence in this period. Despite being a stunning example of the “Accelerationist Man” whose command of Urdu could almost be considered an art, Naidu broke with the Nijasurist consensus on several counts. In his articles in the Qaumi Akhbar (a national newspaper in which members of the government could write op-eds as long as they fit within acceptable ideological bounds) Naidu included all the requisite praise for Nijasure’s policies but also pondered the effects of scaling back domestic spending, acting less confrontationally against the rest of the world, and liberalizing the economy. It is possible that his South Indian roots (Naidu was born in a Telugu-speaking prefecture) led him to consider policies that didn’t always align with those of the North Indians who dominated the government. However, Naidu was no regionalist— his leadership of the Aankhein involved the brutal crushing of anti-Unitarian movements, and assassinations in cities from Kermanshah to Kuala Lumpur. The twin disadvantages of South Indian ancestry and a well-deserved reputation for coldheartedness slimmed Naidu’s chances of paramount leadership. They did not, however, dampen his resolve to place his own mark— even if it meant working with others— on India’s future.
[1] The Devanagari and Arabic scripts have both been steadily phased out in favor of the Latin script. To the chagrin of traditionalists and calligraphists, the Unitarians wished to achieve universal literacy and signal contempt for both Hinduism and Islam. Other Indian languages are allowed to use their traditional scripts, but the state doesn’t use non-Urdu above the prefectural level, doesn’t really care about them, and privately hopes that they will die off and let Latinized Urdu take their place. However, the Indian underground publishing industry, in which any language and any script can find a niche, continues to be the biggest remaining affront to Unitarian rule.
[2] The lack of a British Raj in this TL means that there’s no reason for this city’s name to not be spelled as “Lakhnau” (or for Haidarabad to be "Hyderabad"). But I like the Anglicized spellings more and I’m going to stick with them.
[3] Japan’s system of 47 prefectures (and the unitary centralized state that rules over them) was an inspiration.
***
The outskirts of Thanjavur, 1948
Suresh, naturally, could recognize his captors even in the dim moonlight. The tall, thin one was simply known as “Ilango.” His last name, if he had one, was not known to the records of the Aankhein. The other one was Vijay the Dog-Handler. Vijay had been released from some Mughal jail in the time of the Revolution and, true to his name, used the stray animals he befriended as weapons and as ways to dispose of evidence. The two men had broken with the Vetrivel leadership a few years before, and—
“Keep moving, you untouchable!” Vijay hissed.
Suresh scowled, but obliged. The nerve, the absolute nerve these men possessed to use such outdated terms in a age of progress. According to his father, Suresh’s family had once been the sort of people that Vijay described so tastelessly. They put up with the insults of empty-headed men and women who thought they were better and more worthy of enjoying life. But the sarkar, the government, did not care about such things. That was why Suresh wore the badge of law and justice.
After some time, captors and captive reached a dilapidated apartment block. It might have been built as part of Ranjit’s short-lived permanent-housing construction campaign. Ilango reached the front door first, opened it, and turned around.
“You once killed our sister.”
Suresh could not hold back a reply. “I’m sorry, you must have the wrong person—”
A great golden something hit him in the chest, and he nearly coughed up a lung. Catching his breath, Suresh saw the Ilango had withdrawn a spear from a niche in the hallway beyond the door. A vel, as Suresh’s father might have called it. The man was Tamil and taught his son the language, but did not say anything about this particular word’s spiritual connotations. Suresh suspected that there were some, and that Ilango was just as ignorant of them as he was.
“She is dead, because of you. You great horde of peasants and mud-bathers, you’ve ruined everything. And Vetrivel could not stop you. They were the party of our fathers, but our fathers were weak.”
The vel shone very brightly, even in the garish electric light of the apartment’s lamps. Suresh thought about asking where the power came from, but stopped himself. The vel was very pretty. It threw light in all directions, purifying whatever it reflected. It did not belong with men as dark-hearted as Ilango and Vijay.
“I don’t know how much I care about that,” Vijay said. “All I know is that I tried working in your system, Sarkar-ji. After the Revolution, I got myself a job in that steel mill nearby. For ten years I slaved away, I even went deaf in my right ear from all the noise. But what happened? The low-caste and Muhammadan filth scuttle up the ladder, while poor old Vijay sits at the bottom, hammering away at metal. Well, I got sick of it. You know what I did afterward. I bet your sarkar knows everything, except for where you are right now.”
This story was new to Suresh, but ones similar to it were not. These men were radicals, without the support of the larger independence movement or the Tamil public. They were rebels without causes, and both money and reason were successful tools of negotiation with them in isolated cases.
“As I was saying, I have never personally killed anyone. And my rank is too low for me to have ordered a killing. So why kidnap me?”
Ilango supplied a response.
“You are all as faceless insects. Isn’t that what you want us all to become? Mere ants in a hill? Any one of you is as good as any other. Now come, apologize to her.”
The dog-handler led Suresh through the hallway. The lights flickered. As the two men approached a door of an apartment at the far end, Suresh did not know what to expect. A quaint little shrine, perhaps? It would be just the thing for medieval fools like these.
A great noise made Suresh blink. Vijay had kicked the door down, tearing the hinges from their frame. Inside the apartment lay a box. Vijay motioned for Suresh to come closer, and he complied, and—
They… they exhumed her. Recently. Perhaps for this very occasion.
Who would do this to their own kin?
Ilango had caught up with them, great golden vel in hand. His rasping commands lacerated the fetid air, but the corpse’s ruined hands seemed to reach out and grab Suresh’s tongue. His mind raced, but not a single breath escaped his lips. His eyes clouded.
“Apologize, apologize! Then we can finally cremate her!” Ilango barked.
Suresh muttered a hasty and tearful “I’m sorry,” but the vel’s shaft met the back of his head all the same. He yelped in pain and surprise.
“No, no, no! You fool, do you really think that’s enough?”
The force of the blow knocked Suresh to his knees, and his eyesight clouded further.
“Do it… do it again. Do it better!”
Suresh’s voice, however, turned out in force.
“...s-stop. Please, hold on. You…"
Suresh gulped down a breath of air.
"I’m supposed to be the monster here, right? Is that how the script goes? Me and all the people I’ve learned from and worked with. You people think we’re all terrible. We probably are, we’ve let certain things happen for the sake of our cause, and some of it probably wasn’t worth it but... but… no, we’d never do this.”
He did not care what else he was inhaling.
“We’d… we’d have the decency to leave the d-dead where they lie. A decency that you backward people will never understand! And when my comrades come looking for me they will hunt you down like rats!” Suresh raised his fist in a Nijasurist salute. “Hindustan ki aankhein, sare jahan—”
“Sarkar-ji, Sarkar-ji… that vanity is dangerous.”
As the vel parted Suresh’s vertebrae, fresh stains obscured its luster. It was soon unable to reflect a single speck of light.
Hindustan Ki Aankhein: The Indian Secret Service
India was not a united nation, but a unified one. It was hammered into a singular entity by effort and force. Though the Revolution itself was achieved relatively easily in 1917, it only gained solid control over Delhi and the Ganges plain. Meanwhile, the border provinces broke away and the southerners took up arms. The Unitarians decided to write off the former and focus on the latter, but in doing so they realized that they lacked knowledge of the land, of possible allies, and of sworn enemies. In short, the Unitarians needed intelligence. The Unitarian armies in the Deccan developed clandestine-operations wings that recruited locals as translators and fifth columns, and began using the tools of the southern rebels— darkness, plausible deniability, and concealed arms— against them. After the assassination of Ranjit Nijasure in 1919, his brother Sanjay— now sole Chairman of the Unified Indian State— took the opportunity to administratively unify these various agencies with the former Mughal weapons laboratories, creating the Hindustan Ki Aankhein (Eyes of India). The former Nizam’s palace in Hyderabad was repurposed as a training facility for the Aankhein. Known simply as the Hyderabad School, it became a rather dark way of achieving social mobility. Though enrollment in the School was open to anyone, the promise of a new life exerted a special pull on the poor and disadvantaged. The Muslim poor and Hindus of low or no caste, some of whom had already joined the Unitarian militias on their march through India, constituted a large minority of students and graduates. After six years, the 4,000 men and women of the Hyderabad school’s first graduating class, literate in Urdu [1] and competent in practical skills ranging from survivalism to the cold-reading practiced by fortune-tellers, set out to mold history to Nijasure’s liking.
The United Indian State in 1922, long before its western campaigns. The L marks the location of Lucknow [2].
The administrative reforms of 1922 sorted the institutions of Indian governance into three levels: subprefectural, prefectural, and national. The sub-prefectural pargana (a group of villages and the surrounding countryside) and mahalla (a town or small city) were, just like in the time of the Mughals, the smallest and most basic revenue-making entities. Several parganas and mahallas could be placed under the rule of a single prefecture (the corresponding Urdu word is simply prefektura, a loan from the Unitarian language), of which there were initially 408 in total. The new prefectures replaced the old subahs—which might have served as power bases for ambitious provincial governors or core regions of future nations—with smaller administrative units that could not become vehicles for regionalism [3]. The duties of each prefecture included administration, revenue collection, record-keeping, the creation of a police force to maintain law and order, and management of the environment (this also implied the power to ignore the environment, which is what usually happened while Accelerationist industrialization was in progress). Prefectures in charge of sparsely populated or tribal areas tended to rival the size of the provinces they replaced, while smaller prefectures ruled denser populations. A special class of urban prefecture, or nagar, ruled metropolises like Surat, Mysore, Dhaka, and Delhi, but notably excluded Lucknow. The Nijasure brothers, who were originally middle-class Marathis from Ahmednagar, had first grown to national prominence by organizing Lucknow’s labor movement. The city had been both headquarters and refuge for the Indian Unitarians, and its people provided resources and manpower for the Revolution of 1917. Lucknow gave the Unitarian leadership a sense of safety that the stormy mood of post-Revolution Delhi could not, and in 1918 it became the capital of the UIS. The reforms of 1922 gave Lucknow the unique status of a shahar, and its municipal rulers were thereafter handpicked by the national government.
The Aankhein occupied an ambiguous place in this framework. Though they were a wing of the national military, they typically interacted with and received missions from the regional bureaus. Created over the course of the 1920s, the regional bureaus simplified the headache of having to deal with over 400 administrative subunits. Each bureau, acting on behalf of Lucknow, coordinated and oversaw the activities of 20 to 30 prefectures, which were typically grouped together on the basis of being economically similar or complementary (the Kaveri river, populated by Malayalis and Tamils, was entrusted to a single bureau). However, the regional bureaus were not themselves governing institutions, and had few independent powers. A bureau might recommend the construction of a new industrial city and furnish funds for its establishment, but the prefecture the city was built in would be entrusted with governing it. The Aankhein were frequently commissioned by the bureaus to watch prefectural officials for corrupt or subversive activities and root out rebels. By the 1930s, the Carnatic Region had become the site of a silent war between the Aankhein and a loose collection of nationalist rebels that, while ostensibly led by the Vetrivel (Victorious Spear) Association, tended to act independently, have unstable pools of membership, and fight amongst themselves over increasingly radical interpretations (and misinterpretations) of Tamil nationalist ideology.
The banner of the Vetrivel Association. Though it was once a cohesive party that fought toe-to-toe with the UIS for control over the Tamil lands, internal and external stresses made it a mostly symbolic entity by the 1930s.
After 1935, however, such activities were usually outsourced to prefectural police while the Aankhein, presented with great opportunities abroad, transformed into a foreign intelligence agency. Foreseeing an eventual westward campaign to retake Afghanistan at the very least, Lucknow added classes in Pashto, Baluchi, and Persian to the Hyderabad School’s curriculum. Such training, along with the immense practical experience acquired during domestic operations, paid enormous dividends. The UIS conquered Afghanistan, Baluchistan, and eastern Persia in a matter of months because local Aankhein agents had already sown the seeds for victory. Over the next year, the Aankhein built up links with the newly established Indian Marine Corps, and assisted the latter during the conquest of France’s Southeast Asian colonies. Together, the two institutions became the implements of “controlled revolution.” Upon landing in Prey Nokor, the capital of French Indochina, Indian forces intervened in the dispute for Unitarian leadership. Phan Đình Khải, leader of the Anarchist faction, died thereafter in unexplained circumstances, and Chan Sim became Chairman of the Union of the Mekong River. This would create something of a headache for the Indians—by picking a Khmer candidate for leadership and eliminating a non-Khmer one, they unwittingly turned up the heat on a simmering ethnic conflict.
The lands of the Mekong Union had once been ruled by the Khmer kingdom as late as 1870. Though the Vietnamese state once openly fought the Khmer over control of the former kingdom of Champa, by the 1800s it had acquiesced to Khmer control of the disputed territory. Vietnamese citizens, however, traveled as individuals or in small groups to explore the opportunities of the south. Entering a land populated by at least three major ethnic groups (Khmer, Mon, Cham) and at least three religions (Buddhism among the Khmer majority, Hinduism and Islam among the Cham) the Vietnamese became businessmen, land speculators, tenant farmers, and traveling tradesmen. After the French conquest, the Vietnamese of Indochina often took up the label of Dainamese (người Đại Nam, person of the Great South) to avoid associations with the Vietnamese state and people to the north. This split was not just political. The Dainamese dialect diverged significantly from the northern standard, and the French developed a Latin-based script to transcribe it. The Vietnamese made Chữ Nôm, a mix of standard Chinese characters for loanwords and new characters for native Vietnamese words, their official script in 1875. Despite this, the Khmer viewed the Dainamese as foreigners, and competition between the two groups for high status in the economy, French military, and civil service did not help matters. The Indochinese labor movement tended to be more accepting of differences— while the trade unions in the Dainamese-majority coastal enclaves and the Khmer-majority inland towns tended to be dominated by their respective ethnicities, the Unitarian associations in mixed zones like Nha Trang and Prey Nokor tended to include contingents of both. Chan Sim, however, did much to destroy this consensus. Though the Indians sought only a marriage of convenience against the Anarchists, Chan Sim used Indian might against major figures in the Dainamese community in general. The Mekong Union, Chan Sim seemed to imply, was a Khmer nation in which the Dainamese lived as guests. In time, opposition figures both Dainamese and Khmer would come to resent the overbearing Indians and even Unitarianism in general.
The flag of the Mekong Union.
After the collapse of the (original) Union, the Aankhein were deployed to western Persia to oversee the slightly easier task of establishing Indian control there, and propping up the restorationist government in Baghdad. They did not succeed at the latter— they were, after all, fighting on immensely hostile territory— but when the Indians withdrew from the Middle East, they took the Union’s funds, resources, and personnel with them.
In contrast to the system of bureaus and prefectures in India proper, control in the territories annexed since 1939 was in the hands of Oversight Committees— military governments entrusted with keeping order in a particular region. In time, Lucknow planned to hand over the Committees’ powers to newly established prefectures. Though this process was already underway in some places— Kabul, Quetta, and Penang had gained nagar status by 1943— it was predicted that the large-scale establishment of civilian government could only proceed after the creation of local Unitarian cadres and institutions in the conquered regions.
The northern Indian Ocean in 1948. Persia, Malaya, and the various island chains are all ruled by Oversight Committees, and may be considered integral parts of the UIS. The Mekong Union is a fairly dependable puppet of India, but the other three minor Unitarian states (East Africa, Aceh, Burma) have significant autonomy and uphold unique variants of Unitarian ideology. Assam, a non-Unitarian kingdom ruled by the restored Ahom dynasty, has served as a neutral meeting place for representatives of India and China in the past.
By 1948, Sanjay Nijasure had served as a diarch and later supreme leader of a superpower for over three decades— but he clearly could not rule for three more. After the Netaji refused any appearances in person or on the Sengupta for almost the entire month of February, Lucknow’s rumor mill was quick to connect this odd event with a possible heart attack, stroke, or other debilitating event. From this point onward, key figures in the government began to position themselves as successors to the "Blue Badshah". Priya Nijasure, the wife of Sanjay, was very much a woman of the old guard. Though she had privately developed interesting ideas for the education system and the place of Indian languages other than Urdu in it, she generally aligned with Sanjay on matters of foreign and military policy. At the time, it was still unknown if the somewhat unnecessary help lent by Mamnoon Khan, Speaker of the Unitarian Congress, to Priya’s short and successful campaign for membership in the Congress was a sign of political support or a misplaced attempt to win her affections. The Director-General of the Aankhein, Prakash Naidu, also rose to prominence in this period. Despite being a stunning example of the “Accelerationist Man” whose command of Urdu could almost be considered an art, Naidu broke with the Nijasurist consensus on several counts. In his articles in the Qaumi Akhbar (a national newspaper in which members of the government could write op-eds as long as they fit within acceptable ideological bounds) Naidu included all the requisite praise for Nijasure’s policies but also pondered the effects of scaling back domestic spending, acting less confrontationally against the rest of the world, and liberalizing the economy. It is possible that his South Indian roots (Naidu was born in a Telugu-speaking prefecture) led him to consider policies that didn’t always align with those of the North Indians who dominated the government. However, Naidu was no regionalist— his leadership of the Aankhein involved the brutal crushing of anti-Unitarian movements, and assassinations in cities from Kermanshah to Kuala Lumpur. The twin disadvantages of South Indian ancestry and a well-deserved reputation for coldheartedness slimmed Naidu’s chances of paramount leadership. They did not, however, dampen his resolve to place his own mark— even if it meant working with others— on India’s future.
[1] The Devanagari and Arabic scripts have both been steadily phased out in favor of the Latin script. To the chagrin of traditionalists and calligraphists, the Unitarians wished to achieve universal literacy and signal contempt for both Hinduism and Islam. Other Indian languages are allowed to use their traditional scripts, but the state doesn’t use non-Urdu above the prefectural level, doesn’t really care about them, and privately hopes that they will die off and let Latinized Urdu take their place. However, the Indian underground publishing industry, in which any language and any script can find a niche, continues to be the biggest remaining affront to Unitarian rule.
[2] The lack of a British Raj in this TL means that there’s no reason for this city’s name to not be spelled as “Lakhnau” (or for Haidarabad to be "Hyderabad"). But I like the Anglicized spellings more and I’m going to stick with them.
[3] Japan’s system of 47 prefectures (and the unitary centralized state that rules over them) was an inspiration.
***
The outskirts of Thanjavur, 1948
Suresh, naturally, could recognize his captors even in the dim moonlight. The tall, thin one was simply known as “Ilango.” His last name, if he had one, was not known to the records of the Aankhein. The other one was Vijay the Dog-Handler. Vijay had been released from some Mughal jail in the time of the Revolution and, true to his name, used the stray animals he befriended as weapons and as ways to dispose of evidence. The two men had broken with the Vetrivel leadership a few years before, and—
“Keep moving, you untouchable!” Vijay hissed.
Suresh scowled, but obliged. The nerve, the absolute nerve these men possessed to use such outdated terms in a age of progress. According to his father, Suresh’s family had once been the sort of people that Vijay described so tastelessly. They put up with the insults of empty-headed men and women who thought they were better and more worthy of enjoying life. But the sarkar, the government, did not care about such things. That was why Suresh wore the badge of law and justice.
After some time, captors and captive reached a dilapidated apartment block. It might have been built as part of Ranjit’s short-lived permanent-housing construction campaign. Ilango reached the front door first, opened it, and turned around.
“You once killed our sister.”
Suresh could not hold back a reply. “I’m sorry, you must have the wrong person—”
A great golden something hit him in the chest, and he nearly coughed up a lung. Catching his breath, Suresh saw the Ilango had withdrawn a spear from a niche in the hallway beyond the door. A vel, as Suresh’s father might have called it. The man was Tamil and taught his son the language, but did not say anything about this particular word’s spiritual connotations. Suresh suspected that there were some, and that Ilango was just as ignorant of them as he was.
“She is dead, because of you. You great horde of peasants and mud-bathers, you’ve ruined everything. And Vetrivel could not stop you. They were the party of our fathers, but our fathers were weak.”
The vel shone very brightly, even in the garish electric light of the apartment’s lamps. Suresh thought about asking where the power came from, but stopped himself. The vel was very pretty. It threw light in all directions, purifying whatever it reflected. It did not belong with men as dark-hearted as Ilango and Vijay.
“I don’t know how much I care about that,” Vijay said. “All I know is that I tried working in your system, Sarkar-ji. After the Revolution, I got myself a job in that steel mill nearby. For ten years I slaved away, I even went deaf in my right ear from all the noise. But what happened? The low-caste and Muhammadan filth scuttle up the ladder, while poor old Vijay sits at the bottom, hammering away at metal. Well, I got sick of it. You know what I did afterward. I bet your sarkar knows everything, except for where you are right now.”
This story was new to Suresh, but ones similar to it were not. These men were radicals, without the support of the larger independence movement or the Tamil public. They were rebels without causes, and both money and reason were successful tools of negotiation with them in isolated cases.
“As I was saying, I have never personally killed anyone. And my rank is too low for me to have ordered a killing. So why kidnap me?”
Ilango supplied a response.
“You are all as faceless insects. Isn’t that what you want us all to become? Mere ants in a hill? Any one of you is as good as any other. Now come, apologize to her.”
The dog-handler led Suresh through the hallway. The lights flickered. As the two men approached a door of an apartment at the far end, Suresh did not know what to expect. A quaint little shrine, perhaps? It would be just the thing for medieval fools like these.
A great noise made Suresh blink. Vijay had kicked the door down, tearing the hinges from their frame. Inside the apartment lay a box. Vijay motioned for Suresh to come closer, and he complied, and—
They… they exhumed her. Recently. Perhaps for this very occasion.
Who would do this to their own kin?
Ilango had caught up with them, great golden vel in hand. His rasping commands lacerated the fetid air, but the corpse’s ruined hands seemed to reach out and grab Suresh’s tongue. His mind raced, but not a single breath escaped his lips. His eyes clouded.
“Apologize, apologize! Then we can finally cremate her!” Ilango barked.
Suresh muttered a hasty and tearful “I’m sorry,” but the vel’s shaft met the back of his head all the same. He yelped in pain and surprise.
“No, no, no! You fool, do you really think that’s enough?”
The force of the blow knocked Suresh to his knees, and his eyesight clouded further.
“Do it… do it again. Do it better!”
Suresh’s voice, however, turned out in force.
“...s-stop. Please, hold on. You…"
Suresh gulped down a breath of air.
"I’m supposed to be the monster here, right? Is that how the script goes? Me and all the people I’ve learned from and worked with. You people think we’re all terrible. We probably are, we’ve let certain things happen for the sake of our cause, and some of it probably wasn’t worth it but... but… no, we’d never do this.”
He did not care what else he was inhaling.
“We’d… we’d have the decency to leave the d-dead where they lie. A decency that you backward people will never understand! And when my comrades come looking for me they will hunt you down like rats!” Suresh raised his fist in a Nijasurist salute. “Hindustan ki aankhein, sare jahan—”
“Sarkar-ji, Sarkar-ji… that vanity is dangerous.”
As the vel parted Suresh’s vertebrae, fresh stains obscured its luster. It was soon unable to reflect a single speck of light.
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