Climate of opinion needs to change

We are fond of calling out country as the oldest living civilization. But what kind of civilization is this that tolerates violence in the name of supposedly hallowed regional pride? What kind of democracy is India if the country’s biggest cinema icon, Amitabh Bachchan, is humiliated by the thuggish Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) and a great cricketer, Sachin Tendulkar, is snubbed by the equally thuggish Shiv Sena?
And what kind of climate of opinion we are condemned to suffer? It could not get more polluted. It is indeed a testimony of the rottenness of public debate that the indubitable criminality of Raj Thackeray and his MNS has been bestowed a semblance of respectability. A few things are manifestly true. The MNS legislators assaulted Samajwadi Party legislator Abu Azmi inside the Maharashtra Assembly because he insisted on taking oath in Hindi. They were ordered or instigated to do so by Raj. The MNS chief had said before the oath-taking ceremony, “If any MLA does not take oath in Marathi, the House will see what happens.”
The offenders have not denied the assault; at any rate, there is television footage which has recorded the outrage. Yet, nothing substantial has been done to punish the wrong-doers; they have been barred from the Assembly for four years, but this is not commensurate with the offence, which is much graver. Further, an unnecessary language debate has begun, engendering meaningless questions and issues. Is it wrong to take oath in the nation language, Hindi? Should a legislator speak only the language of his state? Did Azmi intend to demean Marathi? The chatter is endless; and this endlessness ends up fading the felony: that is, physical violence against a legislator on the floor of the House.
Worse, politicians of other parties have jumped in the fray—not to establish the rule of law but to make political capital. Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray had the brazenness to castigate cricket icon Sachin Tendulkar for the latter’s comment: “Mumbai belongs to India. That is how I look at it. And I am a Maharashtrian and I am extremely proud of that but I am an Indian first.” Bal Thackeray wrote in the Sena mouthpiece Saamna, “There was no need for him to take a cheeky single by making such remarks.” Well, Mr Thackeray, Tendulkar does not need any cheeky singles; he has done pretty well both on the ground and off it to score a brownie point. He did not make any political statement; he stated a geographical truth and a historical fact. It is another matter that you are so upset with the declining fortunes of your party that you cannot accept truths and facts.
Then there is the Congress which is trying to score a few brownie points. Congress leader Rajiv Shukla, in his capacity as a member of the Board for Control of Cricket in India, said that the Shiv Sena chief was talking like Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Meanwhile, his party has ensured that no action is taken against the outrage in the Maharashtra Assembly. He has also given fodder for another meaningless debate: are Bal Thackeray and Jinnah similar?
There is an urgent need to change the climate of opinion; the way public discourse is currently carried out is an affront to reason and decency.

Clichés as foreign policy

Do we have a foreign policy? A look at the events all over the world makes it difficult to answer in the affirmative, for pusillanimity, stodginess, and gross ineptitude have become the hallmark of Indian diplomacy.
While the geopolitical situation is increasingly becoming hostile to our national interests, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government is responding with a timorousness which borders on idiocy. A day after China screamed about the Dalai Lama’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh, the authorities asked him to amend his programme; the reporters covering his trip were asked to leave Tawang. Did anyone in Arunachal have any problems with the Dalai? No, they gave him a hearty welcome. Did anybody—that is anybody other than the known Beijing lackeys—in other parts of the country have any problems with his visit? No. But the mandarins in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) get jittery every time China screams. And, obviously, they lack the courage to have hard talk with Beijing, which has been fomenting trouble in the North-East and supplying arms to Pakistan, our mortal enemy and a terrorist state.
The latest instance of Beijing’s villainy is its decision to sell Pakistan 36 fighter aircraft for a consideration of $1.4 billion. And now another revelation has come: China provided Pakistan with a “do-it-yourself” kit and weapons grade uranium for making two nuclear bombs in 1982. According to The Washington Post, the deliberate act of proliferation was part of a secret nuclear deal struck in 1976 between Chinese leader Mao Zedong and Pakistan’s prime minister Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto.
“Upon my personal request, the Chinese Minister... had gifted us 50 kg [kilograms] of weapon-grade enriched uranium, enough for two weapons,” the notorious nuclear smuggler, AQ Khan wrote in a previously undisclosed 11-page narrative of the Pakistani bomb programme. But the MEA is still determined to placate Beijing.
Similarly, the MEA has miserably failed to influence US policy, which is increasingly becoming more pro-Islamabad, the epitome of which is the Barack Obama Administration’s decision to appoint Robin Raphel as coordinator for non-military aid to Pakistan
It is a well-known fact that Raphel is a rabid and despicable India-hater. She is notorious for her sympathies with Pakistan who, as Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, said in 1994 that Kashmir was “disputed territory”; she questioned the legitimacy of the Instrument of Accession. Obama’s decision to proffer a high office mocks at his stated antipathy towards keeping lobbyists in Washington’s power structure, for a lobbying firm recently made a disclosure that she worked earlier with it. But so committed is Obama to the cause of Pakistan that he had little compunctions in violating his own Administration’s code of ethics regarding appointments.
Raphel is already part of the Administration, having joined it in August, her entry being facilitated by Richard Holbrooke, US Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Before her appointment by the US President, she worked with the lobbying firm, Cassidy and Associates. The firms had a $1.2-million contract with Pakistan. Obama has turned a blind eye to such blatant conflict of interests. The question is: what has the UPA regime been doing all along? While the political leadership’s failure is spectacular in matters related to diplomacy, our Indian Foreign Service officers have not covered themselves with glory. It is quite evident that they, like our politicians, are apt only at making hackneyed remarks and meaningless statements.

Playing with fire

Is there any end to obscenity in the political arena? For how long has Indian democracy to suffer Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) and its thuggish chief, Raj Thackeray?
The egregious act of four MNS legislators assaulting Samajwadi Party legislator Abu Azmi inside the Maharashtra Assembly will go down in history as a black day in the history of modern India.
A good thing is that all parties have condemned the disgraceful act in categorical terms. The Congress reaction, however, reeked of hypocrisy and duplicity. Chief Minister Ashok Chavan called the MNS legislators’ action as goondagardi. Senior Congress leader Satyavrat Chaturvedi said, “Any such activity should be strongly criticised.” Yes, that is right but the question is: why has Raj Thackeray’s goondagardi been tolerated for so long? He has been bullying the people from UP and Bihar living in Mumbai; his goons have indulged in violence against Hindi-speaking people; the MNS has been openly intimidating film stars. All this has been done not by whisper campaigns or in a surreptitious manner; Raj and other MNS leaders have openly threatened to implement their agenda. Yet, little has been done against them. Raj gets arrested—and in no time he is bailed out, much to the delight of his supporters. He receives a hero’s welcome.
Even before the oath-taking incident, Raj had threatened, “If any MLA does not take oath in Marathi, the House will see what happens.”
One need not be a political analyst to find the reason for the appeasement of Raj: he has gnawed into the Shiv Sena’s vote base, and this is a (if not the) most important reason that the Congress-led coalition is back in office after the state elections despite five years of pathetic governance. Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson Prakash Javadekar has a point when he says that “the Congress and NCP owe an explanation because their tacit support has built up MNS to what it is today. They have created a monster just for political purpose—to divide Opposition votes.” Fortunately, there are some signs of hope. There are some good and gallant people in politics, the people who neither scream about their love for the mother tongue nor advertise their gallantry. Congress legislator Amin Patel from Mumbadevi is one of them; he took his MLA oath in Hindi. The simple, dignified move was a big slap across the face of Raj Thackeray. “I had come prepared to take the oath in Marathi, but after what happened earlier in the Assembly I have decided to take the oath in Hindi,” he said. Congress MLA Ramesh Singh Thakur (Kandivali East) also took his oath in Hindi.
The grand old party should laud and follow the leaders like Patel and Thakur, and not the cynical party managers who try to extract political mileage out of MNS hooliganism. The Congress has been successful in the short run; it should be content with its short-term success; it should not try to perpetuate the electoral cynicism. It is time to dump Raj Thackeray and send him where he belongs to—behind the bars. Lest the short-term success becomes long-term pain.

Sham disinvestment

Disinvestment is generally seen as a reforming measure. When Arun Shourie was disinvestment minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, he privatized many public sector enterprises (PSEs), and the move was hailed in tune with the belief that the business of government is not business.
But there is little related to liberalisation in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government’s decision to offload equity up to 10 per cent in all profitable Central PSEs, including fresh listings. The Government decision puts 12 PSEs on the anvil as in these government stake is over 90 per cent; there are scores of PSEs which will get listed. This is expected to yield Rs 28,000-32,000 crore.
The authentic rationale of disinvestment is cutting down reduction of state intervention in the economy. Only privatization—that is bringing down government stake in PSEs below 50 per cent and handing over management control to private parties—is genuine disinvestment; for it means the exit of politicians and bureaucrats from the functioning of a business entity.
In the present instance, nothing of this sort is going to happen. Neither the Government will hand over PSEs to private companies, nor the money accrued by equity sale be used to retire public debt.
At the Cabinet meeting in which the decision was taken, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee is said to have made a case for generating funds from divestment and diverting it for expenditure in various social sector schemes. “I need this for at least three years,” the Finance Minister told his Cabinet colleagues.
What this means that the Government exercise has nothing to do with the rationale of disinvestment: the role of politicians and bureaucrats in PSEs will not be reduced; and the money generated by minority stake sale will be used to increase the size of government.
But there can be yield if and when the decision is carried out. It is not just the Left—which, fortunately, is not in the reckoning—that is screaming. The Trinamool Congress (TC), an important ally, has already resisted the move. “It is clearly stated in our party manifesto that there should not be any disinvestment in profit-making PSUs. If the Central Government’s desired objective is to use this money for the social sector, we are against it. Our party believes that it is the Government’s job to look after the social sector and earmark funds for the purpose,” TC’s Leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal assembly, Partho Chatterjee, said.
Then there is the DMK, which is also known for its anti-disinvestment stance; earlier, it had successfully opposed the UPA I decision to sell stake of Neyveli Lignite Corporation. It has been silent so far, but you never know with allies.
Reformists in the Government are happy, though. Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia was “delighted at the decision.” So were the capital markets, which became bullish after the Government announcement. Perhaps this is the only way to stay happy in a world where state intervention in economy is increasing by the day. Let appearance make you happy, even if the reality can’t.

Moonstruck: India’s tryst with serfdom

If there was any period in history which metamorphosed mankind, it was the eighteenth century, also called the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason.

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that swept across Europe and North America. It was the crystallization of the Western intellectual tradition, incorporating ancient Greek, Latin, and Christian elements.

Human autonomy has been called “the means and end of Enlightenment.” The ‘light’ in the Enlightenment is invariably the light of reason, using which individuals can acquire knowledge, improve their lives, and declare their freedom from authority (ecclesiastical as well as political) to determine their own course of action.

In the essay, ‘What is Enlightenment’ (1784), Immanuel Kant wrote, “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’—that is the motto of Enlightenment.”

Kant sought to place reason on a pedestal. He wrote, “Nothing is required for this Enlightenment, however, except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters. But on all sides I hear: ‘Do not argue!’ The officer says, ‘Do not argue, drill!’ The taxman says, ‘Do not argue, pay!’ The pastor says, ‘Do not argue, believe!’… In this we have examples of pervasive restrictions on freedom. But which restriction hinders Enlightenment and which does not, but instead actually advances it? I reply: The public use of one’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among mankind.”

The tectonic movements in the Western intellectual tradition translated into fundamental changes—political, economic, social, religious, cultural, literary—not only in England and Scotland and Holland and France and Germany and America but also, indirectly, in the entire East and Africa. The story of the Age of Enlightenment transforming Western countries, strengthening their economic muscle, enhancing technological prowess, increasing military power, and augment political might, and ultimately helping them embark on the imperialist project is too well-known to be outlined in this essay. From our point of view, two aspects of this globalization are pertinent. First, the Enlightenment also begot a few ideals which militated against the spirit of the eighteenth century. Second, the globalization that was accelerated by the developments of the eighteenth century was propelled, directly and indirectly, as much by the Enlightenment ideals as by the illegitimate progeny of the Enlightenment.

Illegitimate progeny of Enlightenment

We shall discuss the ideals which were apparently similar to—and were even derived from—the Enlightenment ideals, but these invariably militated against and enfeebled the spirit of the Age of Reason. The most prominent among them was the concept of ‘positive’ liberty. Isaiah Berlin discussed it, along with ‘negative’ freedom, in his celebrated essay, ‘Two Concepts of Freedom’ (1958). According to him:

To coerce a man is to deprive him of freedom—freedom from what? Almost every moralist in human history has praised freedom… I do not propose to discuss either the history of this protean word or the more than two hundred senses of it recorded by historians of ideas. I propose to examine no more than two of these senses—but they are central ones, with a great deal of human history behind them, and, I dare say, still to come. The first of these political senses of freedom or liberty (I shall use both words to mean the same), which (following much precedent) I shall call the ‘negative’ sense, is involved in the answer to the question ‘What is the area within which the subject—a person or group of persons—is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’ The second, which I shall call the ‘positive’ sense, is involved in the answer to the question ‘What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?’ The two questions are clearly different, even though the answers to them may overlap.

I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act. You lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by human beings. Mere incapacity to attain a goal is not lack of political freedom…

By being free in this sense I mean not being interfered with by others. The wider the area of non-interference the wider my freedom. This is what the classical English political philosophers meant when they used this word.

The concept of negative liberty is predicated on the negations or absences—the absence of state supervision, social control, etc. I can be free if I can express myself without any interference by anybody. I should be allowed to make a movie (or write a book, publish a newspaper, etc) on the most incendiary subjects and with the most controversial of contents (say, about the sex lives of gods, guru, or prophets) if I can be called free. Similarly, my freedom of action should also be absolutely without any restrictions subject only to the effect of my actions on others. This is the outlook of classical liberalism, contemporary libertarianism, and much of conservatism.

The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty,’ writes Berlin, derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. Notice that there is scarcely any difference between the two concepts of liberty over the driving force. In the negative liberty, too, the individual desires to be his own master. The question is: how does or should this mastery become effective? For man is not always guided by reason or the ‘higher self’ alone; often irrational, even dangerous, impulses prod his actions. All of us have seen people indulge in irresponsible behavior: smoking, doping, gambling, casual sex—even the people who are aware of the risks of lung cancer, metabolic collapse, financial ruin, the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV-AIDS, continue to indulge in these vices. Besides, there are a large number of people—especially in countries like India—who are uneducated, who are unaware or not fully aware of the risks involved in smoking, alcoholism, etc.

At any rate, these people are not guided by reason. As Berlin says

This dominant self is then variously identified with reason, with my ‘higher nature’, with the self which calculates and aims at what will satisfy it in the long run, with my ‘real,’ or ‘ideal,’ or ‘autonomous’ self, or with my self ‘at its best’; which is then contrasted with irrational impulse, uncontrolled desires, my ‘lower’ nature, the pursuit of immediate pleasures, my ‘empirical’ or ‘heteronomous’ self, swept by every gust of desire and passion, needing to be rigidly disciplined if it is ever to rise to the full height of its 'real' nature. Presently the two selves may be represented as divided by an even larger gap; the real self may be conceived as something wider than the individual (as the term is normally understood), as a social ‘whole’ of which the individual is an element or aspect: a tribe, a race, a Church, a State, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn. This entity is then identified as being the ‘true’ self which, by imposing its collective, or ‘organic,’ single will upon its recalcitrant ‘members,’ achieves its own, and therefore their, ‘higher’ freedom.

This truth about the two selves, one under guided by reason or wisdom and the other by gross instincts, is not unknown to India. The Katha Upanishad says:

Know the Self (atma) as the master sitting within the chariot which is the body (sarira), know again the understanding (buddhi) as the charioteer and the mind (manas) as the reins.

The senses, they say, are the horses; the objects of sense, what they range over. . . .

He who is ever of unrestrained mind, devoid of true understanding, his sense-desires then become uncontrollable like the wild horses of a charioteer.

But he who is ever of controlled mind, and has true understanding, his sense-desires then are controllable like the good horses of a charioteer. . . .

The desires are superior to the senses, the mind is superior to the desires, the intuition (understanding) is superior to the mind, the great Self is superior to the intuition.

The Bhagavad-Gita also elaborates over achieving self-mastery:

A man is said to be confirmed in spiritual knowledge when he forsaketh every desire which entereth into his heart, and of himself is happy and content in the Self through the Self. His mind is undisturbed in adversity; he is happy and contented in prosperity, and he is a stranger to anxiety, fear, and anger. Such a man is called a Muni [wise man]. When in every condition he receives each event, whether favorable or unfavorable, with an equal mind which neither likes nor dislikes, his wisdom is established, and, having met good or evil, neither rejoiceth at the one nor is cast down by the other. He is confirmed in spiritual knowledge, when, like the tortoise, he can draw in all his senses and restrain them from their wonted purposes. The hungry man loseth sight of every other object but the gratification of his appetite, and when he is become acquainted with the Supreme, he loseth all taste for objects of whatever kind. The tumultuous senses and organs hurry away by force the heart even of the wise man who striveth after perfection. Let a man, restraining all these, remain in devotion at rest in me, his true self; for he who hath his senses and organs in control possesses spiritual knowledge.

A similar theme comes up in Rudyard Kipling’s famous inspirational poem, ‘If.’ Among other things, it says,

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;…

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

It is the individual who has to strive to become his own master. He has to train and discipline himself. Hinduism, Lord Krishna, the imperial poet, classical liberalism—everything and everybody talk about the need of individual endeavor for self-mastery, “to be a man.” There is considerable unanimity over self-mastery—across the continents, civilizations, and eras. Great minds think alike.

Or so it seems.

For in the last two centuries, there have been a large number of philosophes, thinkers, and public intellectuals who have doggedly refused to accept the time-honored truths and the cogent arguments of classical liberal philosophers. Classical liberalism respects human existence and accepts the freedom of expression and action; one of its cardinal principles is that the unfettered individual is capable enough to take care of his own good. ‘It’s my life’, ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’—these are the mottoes. It is this attitude towards the individual that makes classical liberalism the true heir of the Enlightenment.

But this attitude was not accepted by all. The concept of negative liberty—as expounded by John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Constant, and others—was questioned, doubted, undermined, and ultimately discarded by major thinkers of positive liberty.

It was a long, arduous process; the austere philosophy of negative liberty was shown as barren and useless. It was austere because it did not—indeed could not—offer any utopia, that best-selling item in the market of enthusiastic philosophes and hot-blooded revolutionaries and nationalists. At best, it could offer the slave a mantra and a doctrine to free him from his chains; it cannot offer him the crown. But, as Albert Camus wrote, “The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.” The ideologues of positive liberty entice the slave; they sell him the meretricious charms of their utopias and fantasies.

Once sold, these utopias and fantasies undergo a metamorphosis; they invade the real world—usually with deplorable consequences. The denouement? As Camus wrote in The Rebel, “slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman…”

The fundamental problem with positive liberty is that invariably and inexorably it leads to some sort of collectivism—socialism, communism, nationalism, fascism, Nazism, or any other pathology. For an ideology oriented around a concept of positive liberty inescapably would need a group of people who are supposed to comprehend the reality, who are rational enough to understand the needs of the ‘real’ selves of the masses (The people in Leftist phraseology are usually referred as ‘masses,’ for they are presumed by the ‘knowing’ commissars to be such. They are masses in need of direction, instruction, prescription, and proscription). So, ‘the vanguard of the proletariat,’ Hitler’s coterie, and similar cliques always arrogate all powers to themselves. All in the name of a New World, New Society, New Man, or Master Race.

In the Indian context, traditionally self-master has always been individual-oriented but not citizen-oriented; all instruction was to the individual—for this life as a householder (but not as a citizen) and for afterlife. Philosophers, saints, seers, scriptures, and law-givers concentrated upon him (as a householder) to seek his own salvation. A few remarks need to be made about the summon bonum of human existence. Indian philosophy has little to do with salvation in this world, which in any case is Maya; for Indian philosophers of various schools, this is the basic premise. This is the reason the intellectual tradition does not have any political philosophy. Indian philosophers knew focused on epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and logic but not political philosophy. We did have discourses on religion and politics, but these were almost always prescriptive and proscriptive, not analytic.

The second remark emerges from the first one: since there was no political philosophy, there was no concept of molding the state and society in a certain fashion; India never had a counterpart of Plato’s Republic.

This leads us to the third point: traditionally, Indians had little idea about and interest in political or public life; the tradition persists. Consider the case of Prince Siddhartha. When he comes to know about suffering, he does not take any political or public action to ameliorate it; he does not even seek refuge in or patronize scholarship so that ways could be found to end or mitigate human misery; he seeks refuge in forests—and comes out of them as Lord Buddha, preaching mankind about redemption (not in this world) and the ways to achieve it. He escaped political and public life, leaving it to fend for itself; the escape was from the political and public to the metaphysical realm.

The Indian always escapes from the public and political. A rich man would spend a fortune to build and embellish his house; he would take utmost care to keep it neat and clean; but he would not bat an eyelid while dirtying the surroundings outside his home: he would throw the empty plastic bottle, chips packet, etc, while traveling in car; he would not think twice messing a park during picnic. He teaches his kids about discipline, etiquettes, and manners; he wants decorum at home; but he talks loudly on mobile phone at a public place and is least bothered about the inconvenience it causes to other people.

The businessman would find lobbyists, fixers, and touts in New Delhi to get his work done in economic ministries. He does not know that there is something called enlightened self-interest. If there is a wrong policy, he would not fight it; he would find ways to circumvent its ill-effects. Often, he would find means to benefit from it. In the bad old days of socialism, for instance, many an industrialist fattened on the licence-permit-quote regime.

Well, lobbyists and middlemen also exist in the US but there are also foundations whose budgets run into billions of dollars; these foundations have played a crucial role in not only bringing in material, social, and cultural improvements, but also in molding public discourse and, thus, keeping it free from the clutches of government.

In India, businessmen are loath to do much that can improve public or political life; they want to remain apolitical. At the most, they build temples, inns, even schools, colleges, and public places, but they do not do anything to influence the climate of opinion, to protect or enhance human liberty, to keep the society open and the government small.

So, even as India embraced the concept of positive liberty (with the intention of bringing greater glory to the nation), it lacked the institutions to carry out the duty. Society was not equipped to do that; its moorings and mores were not suited for any civil or public purpose. The state was the only institution which could fill in the vacuum. It did.

In India, positive liberty assumed the shape of nationalism. The genesis of Indian nationalism is worth studying.

When the twain met

We shall study the rendezvous between the West and India after the British established their supremacy in the country. It was an encounter of epic proportions. India had been defeated many times before that—the Greeks, the Kushans, the Shakas, the Huns, the Muslims. But almost always the conquerors were conquered by the culture, ethos, and easy modus vivendi of the vanquished; most of the victorious tribes ended up as becoming a caste or a community, getting absorbed into and becoming indistinguishable from Hinduism. Even the Muslims, with their exclusivist religion and their almost uninterrupted 600-year rule, developed an Indian identity, though it was not monolithic. In general, in the northern and north-western parts, India was Islamized—with the Hindus adopting the language, culture, and manners of Muslims—where in eastern and southern areas, Islam was Indianized—with the Muslims speaking Bengali, Malayalam, etc., and adopting Hindu manners.

The Muslim conquest, however, did not fundamentally change the Hindu. Hindu society, facing the onslaught of Islam, did not reform itself much; rather, historians tell us that caste rules often became stricter and generally social restrictions intensified, a few of them being the stiffer bar on sea voyage and disparagement of certain economic activities such as agriculture.

There was the Bhakti or Devotion Movement (800 AD to 1,700 AD) in the medieval period. As the name suggests, it was a Hindu religious movement in which devotion to God was the principal spiritual practice for the attainment of salvation. With its origins in South India, it gradually spread to the North. It was a popular movement which often enjoyed the sanction of great philosophers and the patronage of royalty. The great saints and poets wrote passionately against the rigidities of Brahminical orthodoxy and helped mitigate the severities of the social system.

Yet, despite its essentially humanitarian message and passionate compassion, it was not an intellectual movement; it was not even a shadow of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. No questions about the individual and his role in society were ever asked; human freedom was never discussed in secular terms. If at all, liberty and human condition was the concern for, in the words of Isaiah Berlin, a “retreat into an inner citadel,” a yearning for the “noumenal self.” In fact, it was an insidiously anti-intellectual movement, for its soothing, humane temperament lulled men and women to seek solace in the flights of divine fancies and in the labyrinths of mythological splendors. The Devotional Movement was indeed, to use Marx’s words, “an opiate of the masses.”

The beginning of the nineteenth century saw the consolidation of British power in India. This brought the two great civilizations, the Indian and the Western, face to face. Interestingly, the civilizational rendezvous did not begin with a clash, despite the background of decades-old political and military conflicts between the two sides, and the righteous indignation expressed by the Christian missionaries about the pagan darkness prevalent in the country. The result was the phenomenon of Orientalism. I use the term in an ideology-neutral sense, without Edward Said’s baggage.

Indian historians of almost all persuasions view Orientalism as the product and function of the needs of the East India Company (this is an essentially nationalist assumption which I do not agree with, but more of it later). The Company, we are told, wanted to know what India was all about. Warren Hastings, the first governor general of India (1773-1785), said, “To rule effectively, one must love India; to love India, one must communicate with her people; to communicate with her people, one must acquire her languages.”

It is important to remember that for the Western mind, India was the East. The entire geopolitical nomenclature involving the word ‘east’ is oriented around the concept of India being the East. The Near East is what is near to the West (which was Europe till the New World was discovered and colonized); the Middle East was a little farther; the Far East was the farthest outpost of mankind; India was the East.

More than any other country or civilization, it was India which had excited, roused, and stirred the scholars and adventurers. The Middle East was not much unfamiliar; its prominent religion, Islam, was after all Semitic in origin and, therefore, cognate to Christianity. The West had an antagonistic relation with Islam, with hostilities going back to the Crusades and the problems with the Ottoman Turks in later centuries. The Far East was too distant. For the West, it was India which was exotic, rich, and full of marvels. Vasco de Gama and Columbus undertook hazardous voyages to reach India. Yet, despite curiosity about India, not much was known about it. So, the Orientalists—fired by the Enlightenment ideals of humanism, rationalism, and classicism, and supported by the newly established colonial authority—began their studies in philology, archeology, history, and Indian classics in the 1770s.

Governor general Wellesley set up the College of Fort William in 1800. It emerged as the major centre of Orientalism in India. A big library was founded; books were published in not only the classical languages, Sanskrit and Persian, but also in Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, and Hindi. Sanskrit and Persian scholars were engaged. The college translated and published more than a hundred Sanskrit texts.

These developments introduced not only the West but also India to the Indians for the first time in recorded history. Bengal’s elite acquired knowledge about the country’s past and imbibed many Enlightenment ideals. Hence the Bengal Renaissance.

In this context, it is pertinent to distinguish the thinking and feeling of the leadings lights of the Bengal Renaissance like Raja Rammohun Roy and Ishwarchand Vidyasagar from those of the nationalists of the late 19^th and 20^th centuries. The former were inspired by patriotism, which is love of one’s country, and wanted modernization and progress; in this endeavor, they wanted the British to play a key role. On the other hand, the primary goal of later nationalists was ouster of the British.

First to get acquainted with the progress made by the West, the early patriots were acutely conscious of the rot that had set in every aspect of their own country—political, social, cultural, philosophical, scientific, and technological. In the early 19^th century, Britain (representing the West) was making great strides. The political system was well in place and properly functioning. Its navy ruled the waves. Its army was defeating or subduing prince after dissolute prince. Its economy was booming, thanks to the Industrial Revolution which was in full swing.

Western philosophy—Burke, John Stuart Mill, Voltaire, Rousseau, et al—reached the Indian shores as a whiff of fresh, enlivening, and invigorating the climate of opinion. It was not that philosophers did not exist in India before the advent of the British. In fact, the profundity of many streams of Indian philosophy impressed a lot many Orientalists and, especially, the metaphysically sophisticated Germans. Unsurprisingly, the leading Indologist Max Mueller—after whom a road is named in New Delhi—was a German. Schopenhauer was influenced by Indian thought.

Yet, the Indian philosophical tradition—profound and abstruse though it was—could never break free of recondite metaphysics and nerve-wrecking epistemology; it had little, if any, relationship with public life or politics. For instance, the classical six schools of Indian philosophy scarcely ever touched the issues such as the relation between the individual and the state, the plight of Shudras, and the morality or rationality of inhuman practices like suttee. In this backdrop, the imported ideas of liberty, equality, humanism, individual’s rights, and limited government metamorphosed entire generations of Indians.

The metamorphosis made them see India in a way no other Indians them had seen their country before. There were moved by and enraged with the barbarous practices like suttee, the dehumanization of the lower strata of society, the inhuman caste rules, and other social rigidities. It was love of their country that aroused and galvanized them to launch various social and religious reform movements in the country.

The seeds of nationalism, which grew in vehemence over time, were sown at the time when the British finalized the contours of the education system in India. Thomas Babington Macaulay, the British poet and historian, was Secretary to the Board of Control from 1832 until 1833. After the Government of India Act, 1833, was passed he became the first Law Member of the Governor-General’s Council. He came to India in 1834. Between 1834 and 1838, he served on the Supreme Council of India. Apart from drafting the Indian Penal Code in the 1850s, he chalked out the modern education system by convincing the Governor-General and others to adopt English, rather than Sanskrit or Arabic, as the medium of instruction in higher education, from the sixth year of schooling onwards.

In his famous (or infamous) ‘Minute of 2 February 1835 on Indian Education,’ he wrote, “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

This sentence 43-word sentence from a minute containing about 5,500 words is often quoted to substantiate the thesis that the British, after militarily conquering India, launched the enterprise to vanquish it culturally, ideologically, and spiritually; that they wanted to obliterate the Indian civilization. Worse, they wanted to use a section of Indians in this vile venture; they sought to transmogrify a class of Indians and use them to rule the country.

The fact is that Macaulay’s intentions were admirable. He wanted the Enlightenment to reach India and help the Indians to lead a good life. He wanted the Indians—at any rate, a section of Indians—to be familiar with the best that the West could offer. He wanted them to be familiar with science, history, literature, and other modern subjects for material and intellectual progress. He exhibited European arrogance when he said that “all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.” Further, “I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” But this arrogance was not without grounds, as the traditional scholarly pursuits in those days were little more than an exercise in barren intellectualism and pedantic speculation. Conventional scholarship was ignorant of the scientific and geographical developments of the previous few centuries; it was nothing by semantic hair-splitting.

It was in this background that Macaulay wrote:

There are in modern times, to go no further, two memorable instances of a great impulse given to the mind of a whole society,—of prejudices overthrown,—of knowledge diffused,—taste purified,—of arts and sciences planted in countries which had recently been ignorant and barbarous.

The first instance to which I refer, is the great revival of letters among the Western nations at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. At that time almost every thing that was worth reading was contained in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of Public Instruction has hitherto acted; had they neglected the language of Cicero and Tacitus; had they confined their attention to the old dialects of our own island; had they printed nothing and taught nothing at the universities but Chronicles in Anglo-Saxon, and Romances in Norman-French, would England have been what she now is? What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India. The literature of England is now more valuable than that of classical antiquity. I doubt whether the Sanscrit literature be as valuable as that of our Saxon and Norman progenitors. In some departments,—in History, for example, I am certain that it is much less so.

Another instance may be said to be still before our eyes. Within the last hundred and twenty years, a nation which has previously been in a state as barbarous as that in which our ancestors were before the crusades, has gradually emerged from the ignorance in which it was sunk, and has taken its place among civilized communities.—I speak of Russia. There is now in that country a large educated class, abounding with persons fit to serve the state in the highest functions, and in no wise inferior to the most accomplished men who adorn the best circles of Paris and London. There is reason to hope that this vast empire, which in the time of our grandfathers was probably behind the Punjab, may, in the time of our grandchildren, be pressing close on France and Britain in the career of improvement. And how was this change effected? Not by flattering national prejudices: not by feeding the mind of the young Muscovite with the old women’s stories which his rude fathers had believed: not by filling his head with lying legends about St. Nicholas: not by encouraging him to study the great question, whether the world was or was not created on the 13th of September: not by calling him “a learned native,” when he has mastered all these points of knowledge: but by teaching him those foreign languages in which the greatest mass of information had been laid up, and thus putting all that information within his reach. The languages of Western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar.

This is true. Macaulay’s insistence on English proved to be correct even after the British had left India. Many linguistic fanatics sought to promote vernaculars at the expense of English has had deplorable consequences; it has created a new caste system, with the higher caste comprising those proficient in English and the lower one with people who don’t know much about it. It is a typical instance of oriental hypocrisy: the politicians who vociferously championed the cause of vernaculars sent their own children to English-medium schools, thus equipping them to thrive in the real world; but their policies meant that the ordinary people, who rely on government schools, could not offer proper education in English.

On the whole, almost all Indians have viewed Macaulay’s insistence on the English language and his project of civilizational engineering—forming “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”—as evidence of the wicked imperial design to subjugate India. This essentially nationalist theory overlooks or obscures two important facts. First, Macaulay wanted to promote the universal, Enlightenment ideals, which most of Indians, over the years, started viewing as a set of British ideals devised by the imperialists. Macaulay’s impatience with oriental mumbo-jumbo, especially the “extravagantly absurd” Hindu religion, did not endear to the nationalists.

Second, Macaulay did what was desired by Raja Rammohon Roy, the noblest and most open-minded Indian of the first half of the nineteenth century. On December 11, 1823—that is, 12 years before Macaulay wrote his famous Minute, Roy opposed the decision to set up a new Sanskrit school in Calcutta. In his petition to William Pitt, he wrote

We understood that the Government in England had ordered a considerable sum of money to be annually devoted to the instruction of its Indian Subjects. We were filled with sanguine hopes that this sum would be laid out in employing European Gentlemen of talents and education to instruct the natives of India in Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy and other useful Sciences, which the Nations of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of other parts of the world.

We already offered up thanks to Providence for inspiring the most generous and enlightened of the Nations of the West with the glorious ambitions of planting in Asia the Arts and Sciences of modern Europe…

[But] we now find that the Government are establishing a Sangscrit school under Hindoo Pundits to impart such knowledge as is already current in India. This Seminary (similar in character to those which existed in Europe before the time of Lord Bacon) can only be expected to load the minds of youth with grammatical niceties and metaphysical distinctions of little or no practicable use to the possessors or to society. The pupils will there acquire what was known two thousand years ago, with the addition of vain and empty subtleties since produced by speculative men, such as is already commonly taught in all parts of India.

The Sangscrit language, so difficult that almost a lifetime is necessary for its perfect acquisition, is well-known to have been for ages a lamentable check on the diffusion of knowledge.

… the Sangscrit system of education would be the best calculated to keep this country in darkness.

Was Roy also a tool of the British?

A couple of remarks need to be made at this juncture. First, what brought disrepute to the Macaulayan project was not its inherent immorality and malevolence; it was the gulf between the ideals of the project and the racist arrogance of the British, especially in after the advent of nationalism in India. Over the decades, the mistrust between the British and Indians grew in intensity. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, especially after the Revolt in 1857, many British officials disliked the Indianization of civil service.

Their resentment found expression in their opposition to the Ilbert Bill. The 1883 legislation proposed by the Viceroy, Lord Ripon, would allow Indian judges and magistrates the jurisdiction to try British offenders in criminal cases at the district level. The Bill evoked loud, even racist, protests from the British, particularly British tea and indigo plantation owners in Bengal.

Ironically, the class which Macaulay and earlier imperialists wanted to create “who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern” came to harbor the bitterest feelings against the Empire. In fact, it was this class which started expressing dissent over various issues. Further, being the buffer between the British and Indians, the spiritual progeny of Macaulay bore the brunt of imperial superciliousness and racial discrimination. It is not surprising that the earliest issue raised by this class was regarding government jobs, especially civil services. Consider the case of Sir Surendranath Banerjea, who came from a distinguished (kulin) family of Brahmins. After college education, he applied in England to enter the Indian Civil Service. But his case was rejected citing the ground of misrepresentation of age. Banerjea, however, won his appeal. He was sent to Sylhet, which is now in Bangladesh, but was dismissed in 1874. The entire episode of his appointment and dismissal caused considerable clamor in the genteel society (bhadralok) of Bengal. It proved to be a landmark in India’s modern history (Banerjea embarked on a teaching career for the next 37 years. He became an active public and political figure. He set up associations; he twice became president of the Indian National Congress).

Men like Banerjea, who were members of the nascent middle class, increasingly suffered the slights hurled at them by the British. Meanwhile they were also organizing themselves in modern ways: they were setting up associations, organizing meetings, analyzing and sometimes criticizing official policies, petitioning the authorities to carry out or expedite social reforms, publishing newspapers and magazines, printing pamphlets.

By their work, the early patriots prepared the ground for nationalism. While patriotism is simply love one’s country, nationalism—being love of one’s nation—is quite complex. First, the term ‘nation’ is never without ambiguity. What defines a nation—race, ethnicity, creed, language, culture (but then what is culture?), or a permutation or combination of all these? There is no clarity or consensus among scholars. Patriotism, on the other hand, is much simpler, being firmly rooted in land—even literally, as it is derived from the Latin ‘patris’ or father. Hence the term ‘fatherland.’

Patriotism is spontaneous, often inarticulate; nationalism is well-thought out and passionately reasoned. Patriotism is; nationalism argues.

I will give an illustration. If there is a calamity—earthquake, flood, etc—the patriotic response would be: ‘Do whatever to save lives.’ That would include help from other countries. The nationalist response, however, would be cautious and complicated; there would diffidence, even reluctance, to seek help from other countries. How would this reflect on us; can’t a great nation like ours solve our own problems—this is how the nationalist mind works. National glory is more important than human life. This happened in the wake of the Gujarat earthquake of 2002: the Indian Government got but did not seek foreign help from others—at least, that was the official position.

This brings us to the more important difference between patriotism and nationalism; it pertains to defining and building a nation. In this process, valorization—that is, attaching fictitious attributes to, or embellishing and amplifying the attributes of, economic classes, social groups, occupations, and policies—plays the most substantive role. Imaginary qualities are attributed to some theoretical construct. Mythologies are conjured up to suit the political imperatives; history is molded or distorted to suit the interests of the political class; fairy tales fashion folklore with national leitmotifs; truths, half-truths, and untruths blend to prepare a concoction to the liking of the collective psyche of a people. This is what valorization does.

Even before the Enlightenment project could mature fully, before the Indians could fully imbibe the ideals of individual liberty and reason, before liberty could be harmonized with order, before the concept of limited government could be properly comprehended, the nationalism enterprise found a firm footing. It was mainly an exercise in asserting national self-esteem, which was frequently wounded by the haughtiness of the British.

In the eyes of the educated Indians, the British were far ahead of us in all aspects but one, the spiritual. As we noticed earlier, it was only in the realm of metaphysical speculation that India could boast of some depth—and even the Orientalists recognized this. It was this aspect which was concentrated upon and magnified by nationalists. In an address in 1897, Swami Vivekanand said, “Let others talk of politics, of the glory of acquisition of immense wealth poured in by trade, of the power and spread of commercialism, of the glorious fountain of physical liberty; but these the Hindu mind does not understand and does not want to understand. Touch him on spirituality, on religion, on God, on the soul, on the Infinite, on spiritual freedom, and I assure you, the lowest peasant in India is better informed on these subjects than many a so-called philosopher in other lands. I have said, gentlemen, that we have yet something to teach to the world. This is the very reason, the raison d’etre, that this nation has lived on, in spite of hundreds of years of persecution, in spite of foreign rule and foreign oppression. This nation still lives; the raison d’etre is it still holds to God, to the treasure-house of religion and spirituality.”

Notice the stupendous valorization: the great saint endows the Hindu mind with all the glories of spirituality, almost completely overlooking the corruptions in Hindu society. When he spoke these words, millions of Hindus, the untouchables, lived a subhuman existence; many of them were bound by tradition to carry human excreta. A mere touch of these unfortunate people was considered polluting for caste Hindus. There was scarcely any education for women; most of them were married at an early age; the mores of “the treasure-house of religion and spirituality” granted them few legal rights.

Yet, the Swami sang of the eternal splendors of Hinduism: “In this land are, still, religion and spirituality, the fountains which will have to overflow and flood the world to bring in new life and new vitality to the Western and other nations, which are now almost borne down, half-killed, and degraded by political ambitions and social scheming.”

Such discourses gave rise to the Indian spiritualism-Western materialism dichotomy. The dichotomy went on to shape Indian nationalism. Hubris played a major role in the shaping up of nationalism. It always plays an important role in fashioning any nationalism; sometimes, the consequences are apocalyptic, e.g., in Germany. In India, the result was not jingoistic aggression, but a closing up of the mind.

Nationalist pride acquired mythological proportions. Many Indians started claiming—many still do—that several of the modern wonders like airplane and missiles were known to our ancestors. What else was Pushpak Vimaan? What were the devastating firearms mentioned in the Mahabharata?—they ask.

This pride walked hand-in-hand with the weakening of the social reform spirit and the concomitant resurrection of rot in Hindu society. As Nirad C. Chaudhuri wrote in The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, “Towards the end of the [nineteenth] century the Hindu counter-reformation swung to the opposite pole of grotesqueness. From late Sanskrit scholasticism it passed to scientific claptrap. Every Hindu custom and every Hindu taboo found its justification in some theory of electricity and magnetism. At times even the science of bacteriology, new at the time, was invoked. It was proclaimed that if a Hindu kept a pigtail it was only as an electromagnetic coil; if he bathed in the Ganges it was because an unspecified European (for preference, German) scientist had demonstrated that Ganges water killed bacteria instantaneously; if he fasted at full and new moon it was only to counteract the gravitational forces of the sun and the moon; the Diwali illumination was supposed to be collective lighting of fire for burning up the poisonous gases given off by the earth on that evening.”

With such a climate of opinion, it is not surprising that the desire to look inwards—to detect the shortcomings in society, its moorings, and values—weakened. One of the results, therefore, was a false sense of self-sufficiency: yes, there are problems in our society, but we are capable of tackling them. Long before Jawaharlal Nehru led the nation on the path of self-sufficiency and self-reliance in the sphere of economy, nationalists started viewing social evils in the national perspective: not only we will take care of our society, but the British should steer clear of them.

In any case, the biggest problem, in the eyes of nationalists, was not social but political: indeed British rule was the problem. Important people of India had stopped looking inwards; they were not scrutinizing, debating, or critiquing their own society, culture, mores, and values; they had found an enemy to fight with—and to criticize endlessly for every affliction that affected us. Criticisms by others were also dismissed with remarkable cantankerousness. For example, when Katherine Mayo wrote a scathing book, Mother India, the Indians were enraged. No less a person than Mahatma Gandhi called it a “drain inspector’s report.” It was a typical response: we were unwilling to take criticism in the right spirit, especially from an outsider. This was true nationalism—my country, right or wrong.

It was because of such a national mood that the enemy, the British Empire, was negatively valorized and blamed for all the ills of the nation. And since we had convinced ourselves that British rule was responsible for all ills, its abolition would mean the end, or the beginning of end, of all problems.

Gradually, as the nationalist movement gathered steam with the strengthening of the Indian National Congress, social reforms were sucked into it. Under Mahatma Gandhi’s stewardship, they became an integral but minor part of the nationalist movement. The Enlightenment project took the backseat; few talked about individual liberty, open society, limited government, etc; the nation was of paramount interest. For Congress leaders and members in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, national freedom became the overriding concern.

It was in this backdrop that Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945) came into prominence. He was the worst tyrant we never had (though most Indians adore this admirer of Hitler and Mussolini and think that his untimely death was one of the most tragic events for the nation in the twentieth century). In Bose, the pathology of nationalism reached its zenith and almost touched Fascism and Nazism. His blind and rabid nationalism made him the greatest enemy of the core Enlightenment ideals in India in his time.

In his inaugural speech as mayor of Calcutta in 1930, spoke about “a synthesis” of “Socialism and Sascism. We have here the justice, the equality, the love, which is the basis of Socialism, and combined with that we have the efficiency and the discipline of Fascism as it stands in Europe today.”

It was not a young man’s fascination for the two most murderous collectivist ideologies; it was a typical twentieth century Big Brother’s preamble for a Gulag that, luckily, never came into being. He worked hard for the great synthesis. In 1944, addressing students at Tokyo University, he favored a political system “of an authoritarian character… To repeat once again, our philosophy should be a synthesis between National Socialism and communism.”

A perennial adolescent, he could never get rid of his admiration for the meretricious attainments of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; he was mesmerized by the apparent order, discipline, unity, and efficiency in totalitarian countries. He was also inspired by the personality cult that grew around the tyrants Hitler and Mussolini; when Bose organized his ragtag outfit (grandiloquently named the Indian National Army) of deserters from the British Indian Army, he even got the chance to imitate his heroes—replete with military uniform, peak cap, knee-length boots, et al. Even before donning the mantle of national liberator, and still part of the staid Congress, he showed great predilection for pomp and personal glory. At the 51st session of the Congress party at Haripura in 1938, where he had been elected party president, Bose’s entry was spectacular. He was escorted by 51 girls in saffron saris; his chariot was pulled by 51 white bullocks; the two-hour procession passed through 51 specially-constructed gates; there were 51 brass bands.

As with many 20^th century dictators, he also had an epithet, Netaji, or ‘revered leader.’ Bose clearly encouraged the use of Netaji.

His entire life was a crusade against the most cherished Enlightenment concept, individual liberty. He wrote in 1935, “One is inclined to hold that the next phase in world-history will produce a synthesis between Communism and Fascism. And will it be a surprise if that synthesis in produced in India?... In spite of the antithesis between Communism and Fascism, there are certain traits in common. Both Communism and Fascism believe in the supremacy of the State over the individual. Both denounce parliamentary democracy. Both believe in party rule. Both believe in the dictatorship of the party and in the ruthless suppression of all dissenting minorities. Both believe in a planned industrial reorganization of the country. These common traits will form the basis of the new synthesis.”

The purpose of describing Bose and his thoughts is to demonstrate how the fever of nationalism had gripped India in the decades preceding Independence on August 15, 1947. Here was a man who was entranced by the most anti-Enlightenment ideologies, Communism and Fascism; concomitantly, he had little regard for the individual. Notice how insouciantly he talks about “the supremacy of the State over the individual”—and then he goes on to synthesize the two facets of modern evil. And he became the leader of the Congress Party. In fact, in 1939, he won the election for party president against Mahatma Gandhi’s preferred candidate, Pattabhi Sitaramayya. Such was the sway that this mélange of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini had on the people of India.

Nobody has mentioned this, but Gandhi’s greatest contribution to India was not that he led the nation against the British but that he shielded us from the twentieth century. This was the century in which violent ideologies, both from the Left and the Right, brought untold miseries to mankind; millions died in wars and armed conflicts; many more perished in the endeavors for the creation of New Man and New Society. But Gandhi somehow managed to keep the quixotic passions and ferocious enthusiasms of the twentieth century at bay. His philosophy may not have been mature or valuable, but his personal charisma and astute leadership did not allow the pathologies of the twentieth century to become full-blown cases. The meteoric rise and the subsequent marginalization of Bose show that the ground was fertile for violent nationalism in India, but the danger was tackled primarily by Gandhi. Needless to say, Gandhi’s pacifism infuriated Bose.

The us-them chasm became sharper: we were nationalist Indians with the solitary objective of political liberation; they were the British, whose exit, we presumed, would bring deliverance.

My country, always right

With politics gaining ascendance, the reforming spirit evaporated; whatever association with the Enlightenment ideals had survived the onslaught of nationalist mythology almost completely disappeared after India gained Independence from the British on August 15, 1947. Reason took back seat; everything that did not fit into the project of ‘nation-building’ was maligned, negatively valorized, and finally banished.

The Indian state grew in size, strength, and scope. Concomitantly, freedom of expression and economic liberty were the first casualties. Consider the case of Nirad C Chaudhari. His first book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, published in 1951, was hailed as a masterpiece. But it also had many remarks and observations which infuriated the nationalists. What, however, brought trouble for Chaudhuri was the book’s dedication:

To the memory of the British Empire in India,

Which conferred subjecthood upon us,

But withheld citizenship.

To which yet every one of us threw out the challenge:

“Civis Britannicus sum”

Because all that was good and living within us

Was made, shaped and quickened

By the same British rule.

Chaudhuri faced considerable persecution. He was forced to give up government job, denied his pension, and blacklisted as a writer in India. It was perhaps the only case in the history of mankind that an author faced the wrath of the authorities because of the dedication of his book. As Chaudhuri’s friend and author Khushwant Singh commented, “The wogs took the bait and having read only dedication sent up howls of protest.”

Nationalism did not lose its virulence after Independence. Human autonomy, “the means and end Enlightenment,” fell victim to the First Amendment of the Constitution, which took place after just 15 months of the Constitution coming into effect on January 26, 1950. The website of the Ministry of Law & Justice lists the Statement of Objects and Reasons appended to the Constitution (First Amendment) Bill, 1951 which was enacted as the Constitution (First Amendment) Act, 1951.

During the last fifteen months of the working of the Constitution, certain difficulties have been brought to light by judicial decisions and pronouncements specially in regard to the chapter on fundamental rights. The citizen’s right to freedom of speech and expression guaranteed by article 19(1)(a) has been held by some courts to be so comprehensive as not to render a person culpable even if he advocates murder and other crimes of violence. In other countries with written constitutions, freedom of speech and of the press is not regarded as debarring the State from punishing or preventing abuse of this freedom. The citizen’s right to practise any profession or to carry on any occupation, trade or business conferred by article 19(1)(g) is subject to reasonable restrictions which the laws of the State may impose “in the interests of general public.” While the words cited are comprehensive enough to cover any scheme of nationalisation which the State may undertake, it is desirable to place the matter beyond doubt by a clarificatory addition to article 19(6). Another article in regard to which unanticipated difficulties have arisen is article 31. The validity of agrarian reform measures passed by the State Legislatures in the last three years has, in spite of the provisions of clauses (4) and (6) of article 31, formed the subject-matter of dilatory litigation, as a result of which the implementation of these important measures, affecting large numbers of people, has been held up.

The main objects of this Bill are, accordingly to amend article 19 for the purposes indicated above and to insert provisions fully securing the constitutional validity of zamindari abolition laws in general and certain specified State Acts in particular. The opportunity has been taken to propose a few minor amendments to other articles in order to remove difficulties that may arise.

This was the beginning of the curtailment of freedom of speech and expression and property rights. The concept of “reasonable restrictions” was brought in to curb the freedom of expression. The First Amendment proved to be the Original Sin, for the concept of reasonable restrictions is deeply flawed.

We were rendered, at best, partially free, for the “reasonable restrictions” appended to the Right to Freedom of Speech and Expression in Article 19 (a) empowered the State to curb this Fundamental Right whenever it wished to. Restrictions can be imposed for the maintenance of “the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.” Since the concepts of the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign States, and maintenance of public order or decency are comprehensive enough to restrict the freedom of expression in every conceivable manner, the sphere of freedom has shrunk considerably. For instance, the government cannot be accused of betraying the Constitution if it comes down heavily against an author who exposes the role of any country, including Pakistan, in fomenting violence in India. Technically, a ban on his writings would not be mala fide, if the government says that it wants to improve ties with Pakistan and his writings may jeopardize the improving Indo-Pak relations. Similarly, decency and morality are vague and, therefore, can be applied arbitrarily.

It needs to be mentioned that the curtailment of Article 19 was not the result of some tyrant scheming to intellectually subdue the people. The ruler at that time, Jawaharlal Nehru, Independent India’s first Prime Minister, was the embodiment of toleration, liberalism, and gentleness. It was the desire of the nation, rather than the mischief of Nehru or his coterie, that the freedom of expression be restricted. Never at ease with the main Enlightenment ideal of individual liberty, the Indian nation manufactured chains to shackle the citizen. This was the reason that there was hardly any resistance to the curbing of the freedom of expression. This was a danger greater than the wickedness of a dictator. The people, as citizens and as constituents of the nation, had fallen in love with the chains that bound them.

So, it is not surprising that not a single day passes when some political party, social organization, religious group, or downright publicity-hungry outfit does not demand a ban on some movie, book, exhibition, video remix, etc. The Hindus want ban on the nude painting of Saraswati by M.F. Husain; the Muslims want anything even vaguely against Islam to be proscribed; a few Sikh groups campaigned against the film, Jo Bole So Nihal, even though it was cleared by their supreme body, the SGPC; many Christians were against the showing of The Da Vinci Code movie. Then there are governments and politicians that love moral-policing. Former Union health minister A. Ramadoss wanted to ban the depiction of any smoking scenes in films and on television screen. A few years ago, the Maharashtra government last year ordered the closure of dance-bars in Bombay and other parts of the state, thus rendering thousands of dancing girls without vocation—all this in the name of securing the moral health of youths. There are myriad examples of assault on the freedom of expression.

What is worse is that such assaults continue unabated; they do not cause revulsion among people at large; on the contrary, some actually enjoy considerable public support. I remember listening to a radio phone-in programme over the issue of ban of smoking scenes in films; most of the callers favored the ban.

The ban mania can become endemic—as it has in India—in two cases: people, openly or tacitly, support bans; or they are not bothered. While the former implies that the people have started seeking a variety of chains for their own bondage, the latter suggests that they are casual about being free or in thralldom. In neither case, we can be called a free society.

We do not pass the town-square test as devised by Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky. This calls for a little introduction of the man who has emerged as an evangelist of freedom. Sharansky was born in the Ukraine, and graduated with a degree in mathematics from the Physical Technical Institute in Moscow. His early association with the human rights movement was as an English interpreter for Andrei Sakharov, before emerging in his own right as a foremost dissident and spokesman for the Soviet Jewry movement.

In 1973, Sharansky applied for an exit visa to Israel, but was refused because of “security” reasons. He remained prominently involved in Jewish refusenik activities until his arrest in 1977. Convicted in 1978 of treason and spying on behalf of the United States, Sharansky was sentenced to thirteen years imprisonment. He spent sixteen months in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, frequently in solitary confinement and in a special “torture cell,” before being transferred to a notorious prison camp in the Siberian Gulag.

During the years of his imprisonment, Sharansky became a symbol for human rights in general and Soviet Jewry in particular. A campaign for his release was waged tirelessly by his wife, Avital, who emigrated to Israel immediately after their wedding with the hope that her husband would follow shortly. Intense diplomatic efforts and public outcry for his release were unsuccessful until 1986, when Sharansky was released as part of an East-West prisoner exchange. Freed on the border of a still-divided Germany, he was met by the Israeli ambassador who presented him immediately with his new Israeli passport under the Hebrew name of Natan Sharansky. He arrived in Israel on February 11, 1986, and was greeted by leading government officials, including then Prime Minister Shimon Peres, was given a hero's welcome. He later became a Cabinet minister in Israel.

In Sharansky’s scheme of things, there are two kinds of societies, free societies and fear societies. “Free societies are societies in which the right of dissent is protected. In contrast, fear societies are societies in which dissent is banned. One can determine whether a society is free by applying what we call the ‘town-square test.’ Can someone within that society walk into the town-square and say what they want without fear of being punished for his or her views? If so, then that society is a free society. If not, it is a fear society.”

We are clearly a fear society and not a free society. Whatever freedom of expression we can boast of today is also getting eroded. The most depressing aspect of this erosion is that it is mostly we, the people of India—rather than the government of India—who are guilty.

For the freedom of expression is facing relentless assaults. A wide array of forces—the Left and the Right, the pre-modern mullahs and postmodern intellectuals, publicity-hungry outfits and rabid busybodies—have donned the mantle of Inquisition. Persecution by mobs has become more dangerous and widespread than illiberal prosecution by the state.

Unlike the original Inquisition—which was an ecclesiastical tribunal or institution of the Roman Catholic Church for combating or suppressing heresy—the contemporary enemies of individual liberty and open society are a multifarious lot who want to proscribe anything and everything that can “hurt the sentiments” of any community, creed, or group. They inveigh against books, movies, songs, etc; often the protest becomes violent.

Worse, a large number of liberals have meekly surrendered to the inquisition mobs. The most deplorable aspect of this surrender is that they have not capitulated to the brute force used by the enemies of liberty; they have actually accepted the logic of the illiberal brigades. Consider Bibek Debroy’s article in The Indian Express on November 28, 2007. In the article, titled ‘Politics of bans and rights,’ he wrote: “Freedom of expression is a relative right and reasonable curbs on it are acceptable. Ipso facto, free exercise of that right has to be determined on a case-by-case basis.”

It is a sad commentary that people do not see anything wrong in the restrictions on the Right to Freedom of Expression. I believe that such restrictions can never be “reasonable.” Freedom of expression has to be absolute. Restrictions, howsoever “reasonable,” make you at best ‘almost free.’ But then ‘almost free’ is like ‘almost virgin’: both conditions are non-existent.

I believe that the curbs on freedom of expression are bound to be arbitrary, subjective, and nebulous, for there are no humanly known methodologies to determine restrictions on freedom of expression. Heresies of today become truths of tomorrow (and often dogmas the day after tomorrow).

As John Stuart Mill wrote, “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind… the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

Classical liberalism has it that all curbs on freedom of expression are obnoxious, whether by the state or society. Many, however, have accepted and internalized the tenets of contemporary liberalism, which has become synonymous with political correctness. Debroy says, “The liberal position shouldn’t be that a ban is outright condemnable. That becomes dogma, the antithesis of being a liberal, since it involves denial of other people’s points of view. Attitudes towards bans are also culture and context-specific and evolve… For a liberal position to be credible, articulated either by civil society or the state, there must also be equality across religions.”

If one equates the anti-ban position as “denial of other people’s points of view,” one cannot be outraged by demands for bans. This is a perverted use of the liberal stance to prove the most illiberal abomination—ban. Indeed, it is the ban that is the “denial of other people’s points of view,” as it straitjackets thinking and undermines freedom of speech and expression. Nothing stops pro-ban people to express their views in a civilized manner. If I write a book that is construed or misconstrued as derogatory of a community or class, they also have the right to write books, articles, pamphlets, etc, against me. Why should the supposedly offended group seek state help to get even with me? And why should the state enter into a dispute which is in the civil domain? After all, when there is a dispute between two individuals, the state is not a party. The state enters when there is a criminal case, or when the interests of the state are affected in a civil dispute, as in tax matters.

But if the logic of bans is accepted, it is presupposed that the state has a role to play in determining what is good and what is bad. One has to be ludicrously naïve to believe that our politicians and bureaucrats—who mess up everything they touch, thanks to their anti-Midas attributes—can ever have the wisdom to discern between the good and the bad, the moral and the immoral.

Accepting bans will also mean bigger government and more public expenditure. Right now, there is a censor for cinema; if the current trend of the shrinking of the sphere of liberty continues, there would be many such publicly-funded bodies.

Further, discernment between the moral and immoral cannot be left to certain, what Leftists fashionably call, ‘civil society groups’ or some representatives of communities. It is quite well known that such groups and representative bodies are often fronts of vested interests and political organizations.

Still, further most of the demands of bans are made on the grounds that this or that book, movie, song, etc, “hurt the sentiments” of some communities. But ‘sentiments’ are again arbitrary and subjective. Some Hindus’s sentiments may not get hurt by M.F. Husain’s Saraswati painting, while others are indeed hurt. Ditto with Taslima Nasreens novels vis-à-vis the Muslims and The Da Vinci Code movie vis-à-vis the Christians.

Therefore, there is absolutely no case for a ban on anything. Freedom of expression should be absolute. The alternative is increasing assaults on individual liberty, more prominent state role, and more violent behavior of rabid social bodies.

The other objective of the First Amendment to the Constitution was to undermine the Fundamental Right of Property; the inexorable logic of the arguments posited by the Amendment ultimately led to the abolition this right from the list of Fundamental Rights; a 1978 Amendment downgraded it to a mere legal right.

In India and many other countries, generations have been tutored into believing that the institution of property is evil, that it is an essential feature of capitalism which is based on ‘profit-making’ and which necessarily involves ‘exploitation of man by man.’

But, in reality, property is inextricably linked with human freedom. As John Locke, the father of classical liberalism, wrote that “every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”

In terms of ontology, man is more than ‘labour of his body, and the work of his hands,’ and working of his mind: he is the embodiment of self-affirmation. The history of man is nothing but the story of his desire and endeavor to affirm his existence in the world. The entrepreneur who launches a business, the general who seeks glory, the soldier who volunteers for a dangerous mission, the martyr who dies for a cause, the revolutionary who endures torture, the politician who insists on a policy, the pontiff who preaches, the bureaucrat who brandishes the rulebook, the architect who takes up a challenging assignment, the engineer who decides to build a bridge against all odds, the painter who loses himself in the canvas, the sportsman who punishes his body to excel, the scientist who engrosses himself in abstractions—all these and other people do not strive merely for pecuniary gains and material comforts. Of course, physical well-being is extremely important, but there is also a desire to leave one’s mark in the world; and for this, man strives to go beyond the necessary and the obvious, to go where no man has gone before. In the process, he reaches out of himself. As Camus said, man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

This reaching-out is the being of man; though Sartre would object to any being or essential feature of man, the reaching-outness is, in Sartean terminology, pour-soi.

The attack on the institution of property is, therefore, an attack on the essential feature of man, an attack on his reaching-out. “Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life,” wrote Ayn Rand. “The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.”

Actually, the denial of the concept of property is worse than that; it is much more than the individual versus state issue: the attack on property is actually the negation of the being of man. It deprives the individual of his humanity. Man is rendered a subhuman entity, incapable of surviving in the world. His lot is made worse than that of a slave, for if I enslave somebody and force him to dispose of his product, I may still regard him as human; it is only under coercion that I snatch what belongs to him. But the doctrines which are against the institution of property ontologically belittle the human being. The resultant political ideologies just follow the inexorable logic of ontological dwarfing. All these ideologies are essentially collectivist; and all of them, in varying degrees, opposed to freedom.

As Friedrich A. Hayek wrote, “What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves. If all it be nominally that of ‘society’ as a whole of that of a dictator, whoever exercises this control has complete power over us.”

Therefore, by curtailing the freedom of expression and the right to property, the First Amendment to the Indian Constitution was quite comprehensive in its assault on human liberty per se; the comprehensiveness and the intensity of the assault increased in subsequent Amendments.

One would have hoped for some substantive resistance to, if not stalling of, the shrinking of liberty. The 1950s and the 1960s could boast of a number of sincere politicians—for whom politics was not bereft of certain ideals and values. There was also a large intellectual class, trained in the universities and familiar with Enlightenment ideals and values.

Unfortunately, most politicians could not garner the courage to check the depredations of nationalism and socialism. It was only a small set of politicians, represented by Swatantra Party, who championed the cause of individual liberty and free enterprise. Founded by a prominent national leader, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, in August 1959, it could boast of towering intellectuals like Minoo Masani and K.M. Munshi. The party’s 21 principles, as enshrined in its manifesto, were generally in line with classical liberal lines.

At the hustings, the party began well, getting 6.8 per cent of the total votes and 18 seats in the third Lok Sabha (1962-67). In four major states—Bihar, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Orissa—it emerged as the main Opposition party. It was the single largest Opposition party in the mid-1960s in Parliament with 8.7 per cent of the total votes and 44 seats in the Fourth Lok Sabha (1967-71).

But it could not survive the onslaught of aggressive socialism, which was the hallmark of Indira Gandhi’s ascendance. At any rate, the limited and temporary success of Swatantra Party was more due to the sterling personality of its leading lights and the association of princes rather than the popularity of the ideas it propagated among the people. It was the socialist rhetoric that was becoming popular and politically remunerative.

And it was the intellectual class which—instead of upholding the genuine Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty and limited government—disseminated the socialist concepts among the people. It behaved just like the priestly class of yore. The priests in earlier times fabricated genealogies for whichever brigand became the king, linking him to gods or mythical heroes; they also wrote the religious and secular laws to suit the interests of the ruling class. Similarly, intellectuals manufactured economic and political theories to justify socialism as practiced by the Establishment.

While the political nation, assisted by intellectuals, tightened its grip over India, social reform was neglected. The great institutions founded by the pioneers in the 19^th century became trusts run by the pillars of society, by social entrepreneurs and bureaucrats, by the men and women of Establishment. Since members of the Establishment are not in the habit of raising fundamental questions and challenging conventional wisdom, there was hardly any reformer after Independence, with zeal of a Swami Dayanand or the drive of a Vidyasagar.

A couple of concomitant developments took place. First, the Indian state—which under Nehruvian socialism was anyway arrogating to itself all economic powers—donned the mantle of the social reformer. Second, a new type of social reformer came into being: the one relying on state action. The trend became prominent in from the 1960s, when the Left-leaning intellectual, disillusioned by the mainstream communist parties, took upon himself to change the system. While the 19^th century pioneers were rooted in tradition and just wanted to remove the rot in society to be removed, the new reformer viewed tradition per se as rot; the latter did not find any redeeming feature in the tradition and culture of the country. While the 19^th century reformer sought state intervention when it was unavoidable, his 20^th century counterpart in Independent India primarily relied on state. This was despite the fact his vehicle was ‘non-governmental organization.’

This did not mean that the new reformers lacked idealism, commitment, or the capacity to sacrifice material comforts, though it is also true that a number of NGOs were into racketeering. But the bigger problem was that ideology rather than idealism was the motivating factor for the new reformer. His paradigm was fundamentally different from that of the 19^th century reformer. Wedded to the Marxian principle that political power in the hands of people can redeem the society, he was more interested in legislation and government finances for reform.

The new paradigm engendered two developments. First, the reformer, convinced of the theory of class struggle, focused on the fault-lines in society: he took up the cause of landless laborers, tribals, slum-dwellers, etc. Instead of helping the poor by enabling them to get out of the culture of poverty—e.g., by building educational institutions, as Christian missionaries do or as the Arya Samaj did—the new reformer instigated the poor to demand more and more freebies from the state. He was and is interested in the quantifiable—more budgetary allocation for education, more outlays for education and the social sector, new schemes for landless laborers and for tribals, better ‘delivery mechanism,’ etc. And he had little inclination for the unquantifiable and intangibles like changing the attitudes of the poor, improving their habits pertaining to education, thrift, women, etc; nor was he interested in instilling the virtues of responsibility and self-esteem in them.

The new paradigm prompted another development—a heightened awareness about and greater demands for entitlements in all sections of the society and not just among the poor. All of us—farmers, tribals, slum-dwellers, students, teachers, journalists, even businessmen—strive for goodies and/or succor from the government. Even investors in the stock market want the government ‘to do something’ when there is a crash. In general, for any problem, we say: ‘the government should do something about it.’

Unsurprisingly, government is gaining size and strength, the individual is getting dwarfed, and India’s crusade against Enlightenment ideals is intensifying every moment.