Crisis and Change in Contemporary India 8170364108, 9788170364108

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Crisis and Change in Contemporary India

EDITORS

Upendra Baxi @ Bhikhu Parekh

India is passing through anxious times. The current policy of economic liberalisation, notwithstanding its obvious advantages, has the potential to unleash social tensions; while the recent challenges to secularism have given rise to grave political problems. These developments underscore the need for a ctitical look at the constitutive principles and the current predicament of Indian polity and society. This volume of original essays addresses these and related issues.

The first four essays critically analyse the contributions of Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar, the founding fathers of modern

India, to Indian political and social transformation. The evolution of India’s postIndependence polity, the formation of civic loyalty, the primordial politics of language and the crisis of governability in contemporary India form the second thematic cluster. The third group of contributors deal with communal riots and the problem of religious and secular identities in the framework of the construction of modernity. Issues relating to community and public health, the need for developing a new paradigm of critical psychology, a psychological understanding of the practice of power in contemporary India and the eco-politics of development activities are dealt with by the last set of essays. Bringing together internationally distinguished observers of India—who express a variety of viewpoints, cover a fascinating range of themes, and raise issues of both academic and practical importance—this book will be of considerable interest to students of politics, sociology, history, psychology, health, environment, development and South Asian Studies. It will be indispensable for anyone concerned about contemporary India.

Crisis and Change in Contemporary India

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/crisischangeinco0O000unse

Crisis and Change in Contemporary India

Edited by

Upendra Baxi and Bhikhu Parekh

s Sage Publications New

Delhi/Thousand Oaks/London in association with

The Book Review Literary Trust New Delhi

In Honour of Raojibhai Patel

Copyright © Upendra Baxi and Bhikhu Parekh, 1995

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First published in 1995 by Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd M-32 Greater Kailash Market New Delhi 110 048

Sage Publications Inc

I

Sage Publications Ltd

2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320

6 Bonhill Street London EC2A 4PU

Published by Tejeshwar Singh for Sage Publications phototypeset by Pagewell Photosetters, Pondicherry, Chaman Enterprises, Delhi.

India Pvt Ltd, and printed at

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crisis and change in contemporary India / edited by Upendra Baxi and Bhikhu Parekh.

p.

cm.

Includes index. |. India—Politics and government—1947— 2. _India—Politics and government—1977— I. Baxi, Upendra. II. Parekh, Bhikhu C.

DS480.84.C785

ISBN:

954.04—de20

0—8039-91827 (US-hbk) 81—7036—410-8 (India-hbk)

1995

94-21922

Contents

Acknowledgements . Introduction

Upendra Baxi . Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation Bhikhu Parekh

. The Doctrine of Swaraj in Gandhi's Philosophy Anthony J. Parel . Gandhi: Guru for the 1990s? Judith M. Brown

. Gandhi, Nehru, and Modernity Thomas Pantham

. Emancipation as Justice: Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Legacy and Vision Upendra Baxi . Interpreting Indian Politics: Rajni Kothari

A Personal Statement

. Civil Loyalty and the New India

122 150 169

Leroy S. Rouner

. The Great Language Debate: Politics of Metropolitan versus Vernacular

India

187

D.L. Sheth

10. Crowds and Power: Democracy and the Crisis of ‘Governability’ in India Subrata K. Mitra ue Personality Politics: Prakash N. Desai

A Psychoanalytic Perspective

12: The Politics of Application and Social Relevance in Contemporary Psychology Ashis Nandy

216 246

266

Crisis and Change in Contemporary India . The Health Scenario in India

280

Jayshree P. Mehta

. Religion, Politics and Modernity Sudipta Kaviraj

295

. Religious and Secular Identities Rajeev Bhargava

317

. Cultural Embodiment

and Histories: Towards Construction

of Self Gurpreet Mahajan

350

17. Communal Riots in Contemporary India: Towards a Sociological Explanation Pravin J. Patel 18. The Sardar Sarovar Project: Ecopolitics of Development Pravin N. Sheth ite). Raojibhai Patel (Mota): An Appreciation Bhikhu Parekh Notes on Contributors

436

Index

440

Acknowledgements

Dr. Gurpreet Mahajan enthusiastically joined us in editorial labours. Her contribution in putting the volume together was invaluable. Both Bhikhu Parekh and I regret her reticence in accepting a special mention in the editorial team. Professor V.N. Kothari, an ardent admirer of Raojibhai Patel, was fully associated with us in the conception of this volume. He was to essay an analysis of the recent changes in the theory and practice of Indian economy. But his deference to the vertiginous changes—national as well as global—prevented him, among other reasons, from contributing to this volume. Shri B.D. Madan, the Sr. Personal Assistant in my office, went much beyond the call of his duty in assisting us in sorting out a considerable number of difficulties, and more particularly the relentless queries from Ms. Niti Anand, Editorial Consultant with Sage Publications. Ms. Anand’s quest for high standards of accuracy has, in equal manner, delighted and discomfited the editors of this volume. Upendra Baxi

One

Introduction Upendra Baxi

This volume of essays in honour of Shri Raojibhai Patel (Mota) addresses, in a striking diversity of contributors and concerns, the

images of the future of Indian politics and society. Not all contributors knew Mota. While many contributors have had the privilege of working with him, some others have been, in one way or the other, influenced by the practice of his thought. The festschrift represents, In a substantial manner, a large number of concerns which Mota himself pursued in his life and work. As could be expected, this volume addresses Indian political and social transformation from many vantage points. First, some essays revisit the inaugural figures of modern India such as Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar, whose contribution to the freedom struggle and national development still continues to excite imaginative discourse. Second, the volume marks a concern, made poignant by contemporary developments in India since 6 December 1992. with the problematic of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ shaping religious and secular identities. Third, construction of civil loyalty and the primordial politics of language emerge as a part of a dialectic shaping of modern India; the crisis of governability and the nature of politics, in this background, also form a major thematic. Fourth, some essays in the volume deal with the issues which have not been salient to the study of Indian political and social change but are not less crucial for that reason. In particular, the issues of

Introduction

9

community and public health as well as the need for a transformative understanding of knowledges of psychology and health sciences stand articulated in some of the contributions. Fifth, the costs of development also form a major concern of this volume, whether these arise through the psychopathology of egopolitics or through communal violence or through the vicissitudes of eco-politics in India. It is neither possible nor desirable to provide an introduction or even a systematic tour dé horizon of this fascinating range of concerns and commitments. Such an effort is fraught with the possibility of depriving each of the contributions of this volume of its plenitude. But, perhaps, an attempt to seek some underlying unity of anxiety about the Indian future may not be wholly misplaced. As regards the inaugural figures, Bhikhu Parekh, Anthony Parel, Judith Brown and Thomas Pantham provide critical analyses of Nehru and Gandhi, and Upendra Baxi essays an understanding of Ambedkar. Nehru laid down both the basic goals of the Indian state and the most effective manner of realising them. The philos-

ophical rationale and limitations of the Nehruvian model form the central theme of Parekh’s paper. Parekh argues that Nehru’s pessimistic and largely ‘Orientalist’ reading of Indian history led him to conclude that the ‘degenerate’ Indian society could only be regenerated by an autonomous and active state led by a Westernised elite committed to modernising the country along Western lines. Nehru’s model was statist and elitist, hostile to the culture and sensibilities of the peasantry, and deeply nervous about the constant threat of ‘obscurantist’ forces lurking in the Indian ‘psyche’. Parekh argues that it had its strengths and limitations. As the latter became evident during the late fifties and as many of his cherished goals proved elusive, Nehru began to revise his model. He now welcomed the panchayati raj, stressed the importance of agriculture and primary education, and condemned both the ‘disease of giganticism’ and the obsession with imported ideas and institutions of which hitherto he had himself been a victim. Parekh argues that the older Nehru’s thought shows considerable fluidity and ingenuity, and provides some of the elements for a new model of development free from the vices of both excessive statism and the currently fashionable politics of the free market. In a lucid and illuminating essay, Judith Brown reiterates the

10

Upendra Baxi

message of the Mahatma for the modern world, at the end of the second millennia. In a remarkable exegesis, Brown reminds us that Gandhi’s secular contribution was not so much the moral technology of civil disobedience but rather his emphasis on quiet, steady work, on ‘reform and reconstruction’, outside the sway of

government benefit or control. His ‘small-scale experiments in non-violent reconstruction’ represent his most enduring ‘contribution to some of the dilemmas of late twentieth century.’ The other theme of Brown’s analysis (unusual in analyses of Gandhian discourse) is Gandhi’s emphasis on individual and public health. For him, the ‘interacting questions of health and medical care were . . essentially moral ones.’ Brown perceives an incipient approach to population planning in Gandhi’s notions of governance of sexuality—intercourse being legitimate only for procreation and the valorisation of bhramacharya. Contemporaneously reviewed, Brown’s analysis invites the thought that Gandhi’s notions of governance of sexuality were also oriented to an anti-imperialist struggle, which could be deeply fractured by a disorder of desire. Gandhi’s deft use of his body as a site and strategy of freedom struggle still awaits Foucauldian labours. At this point, Anthony Parel’s fascinating analysis of Gandhi’s notion of ‘embodied self’ establishes a cogent correlation between praxis of passive resistance and the body. ‘It is difficult to be a passive resister’, said Gandhi, ‘unless the body is trained.’ Attainment of swaraj is indispensably linked to the centrality of the body as a political resource; governance of sexuality lies at the core of the struggle for swaraj. Of course, the multiple ambiguities of the notion of swaraj in Gandhi's discourse encourage the relegation of the core of the embodied self to that meaning of swaraj which entails sovereignty of the moral self of an individual, political independence being merely an instrumentality of it. But integrity of body is also a political virtue and as such a resource for freedom from imperialism. Parel traces for us, among many significations of it, swaraj as liberty, that is the ‘ability to do what is right in a non-threatening way.’ Hence, Gandhiji’s critique of negative freedom and his emphasis on duties over rights. Parel applauds as among the most original ideas in Gandhi’s political philosophy the idea that swaraj is ‘an experience, and that as such it permits one to open oneself to another.’ Parel’s contribution, overall, offers a truly inaugural

Introduction

11

reading of Hind Swaraj, having considerable relevance in a world where postmodern, post-Marxist practices of knowledge and of power prevail. The problematic of construction of modernity is a theme of serious concern to many essays in this volume including those by Sudipta Kaviraj, Rajeev Bhargava and Gurpreet Mahajan. However, Thomas Pantham’s contribution addresses the problematic of construction of modernity through the discursive practices of Gandhi and Nehru. Pantham finds that Gandhi’s distinctive contribution was to ‘release both Indian tradition and Western modernity from the regressive pact’ between a doxa' of ‘traditionalism’ and the ‘exploitative’ rationalism of modernism. Reform of Indian tradition in Gandhi merges into the reconstruction of Western modernity and vice versa. In an interesting analysis, Pantham foregrounds the complementarity of Gandhi and Nehru. This complementarity is best summed up by Gandhi, as quoted by Pantham, that he and Nehru were ‘rivals in making love to each other in the pursuit of the common

goal.’ While this testifies, no doubt, to a creatively

tense complementarity between Nehru and Gandhi, it is significant to note (in terms of Prakash Desai’s terminology) a lack of ‘egopolitics’. Psychologically, students of politics will also read a great deal more than Pantham in Gandhi's reference to their rivalry in making /ove to each other! Overall, Pantham’s fascinating analysis of the conceptual resources of the Indian cultural traditions, through which the reconstruction of modernity were mediated, ts truly germinal. While a theoretical understanding of Indian transformation stands richly sedimented by a study of the thought and practice of Nehru and Gandhi, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar remains a liminal figure. Upendra Baxi’s contribution raises some difficult questions concerning the unwholesome marginalisation of Ambedkar’s serious theoretical interrogation of Indian society and politics. Baxi traces the evolution of Ambedkar in seven personae: as an authentic Dalit, an exemplar of scholarship, an activist journalist, a preGandhian

activist,

a Gandhised

leader, a constitutionalist, and a

Buddhist. Apart from the fact that Ambedkar is ‘the first. . . Indian thinker to have frontally posed the problematic of “lawless laws” ’, Baxi raises ten questions concerning Ambedkar’s theory of rights, justice and development. Some may find Baxi’s claim that Ambedkar was among the pioneering thinkers to innovate the

12.

Upendra Baxi

liberal paradigm of human rights a little exaggerated; but his justifications for this claim certainly deserve a close contention. Some readers may look askance at the rather sharp interrogation of the Mahatma articulated by Ambedkar; at the same time meditation on Ambedkar’s critique opens up interesting opportunities for a more rigorous attention to the dalit theory of Indian politics. Civil loyalty rooted in a vision of tradition enables a society and polity not just to cohere but to progress. Leroy Rouner argues that a political community is held together not so much by self-interest, the desire for protection or the fear of the hostile Other, as by a collectively shared conception of what it stands for. The shared conception, which he calls its ‘binding ingredient’, creates a sense of belonging, a shared identity, among its members and enables them to feel ‘at home’ with each other. Rouner analyses the American experience of welding together a disparate group of immigrants, and thinks that this has important lessons for India. What united the Americans in the past and continues to unite them today is the belief, encapsulated in the emotive idea of ‘the American Dream’, that the country stands for liberty, cultural diversity and opportunity for growth. Although the dream means little in practice to a large number of Americans, it constitutes the moral basis of the claims Americans feel entitled to make on each other and on their government and fills even the poorest with a hope of betterment. Rouner sees a similar process of collective self-articulation at work in India since the days of Rammohan Roy. A large body of influential leaders and writers have sought to fashion the ‘Indian dream’ of a society based on tolerance and cultural synthesis embedded in some form of epistemological pluralism. Rouner thinks that ‘loyalty’ to such a vision could form the spiritual basis of the Indian state. The development of a transcendent, communitarian loyalty rising above the ‘majority’-inspired reworking of Indian past and future is now a historic imperative. Recent events suggest the need at the very least to avoid the experience of an Indian nightmare, even if this involves deferment

of construction of an Indian dream. The erosion of the legitimacy of the state also imperils the nascent processes of formation of civic loyalty. Rajni Kothari traces the evolution of the post-independence polity. He argues that for several

years after Independence,

the Indian state was

autonomous not only because no class was strong and organised

Introduction

13

enough to control it, but also because national leaders pursued genuinely national goals and ensured that the state remained committed to economic development, redistribution of resources, and to a federal structure sensitive to regional aspirations. As new social groups emerged and sought a share in political power, the suitably opened up state accommodated them though not always without a struggle. For Kothari a number of factors began to distort this process, and he sees 1961, 1971, 1975, 1977 and 1989 as

important landmarks. He argues that the Indian state increasingly lost its autonomy and national commitment and fell into the hands of sectional interests, especially the industrial bourgeoisie working in close collaboration with the multinationals. Frightened of the rising popular demands and pressures, Indira Gandhi’s government sought comfort in a highly centralised and hollowed-out state. As the state began to lose its legitimacy, force stepped in to fill the vacuum created by the loss of authority. Political life was emptied of vitality; it no longer offered hope to marginalised groups; and the increasingly dominant ideology of privatisation left important areas of decision-making to an unholy alliance of the forces of the market and the bureaucratic—technological elite. Kothari thinks that the grassroots movements of marginal groups and committed activists alone have the power to revitalise the Indian polity. However, one sees, after 6 December 1992, an alarming profusion of ‘grassroots’ formations advocating a militant type of cultural nationalism. The space for social action by activist groups committed to constitutionalism was thus far exposed to intolerance/repression by the state; now, in addition, vigilante ‘grassroots’ activists add, from the side of civil society, to the mortal challenge confronting activist, dialogica] praxis. Renewal of Indian politics is taking

place along directions, which neither the liberal nor radical, activist, imaginative thought and praxis had anticipated. Formation of civil loyalty in a milieu of extreme cultural diversity must also attend to the problem of what Pierre Bourdieu identifies as ‘symbolic power’ or ‘capital’. The production and reproduction of legitimate languages, to which Bourdieu has paid indefatigable attention’, provide a deeply relevant perspective for understanding the battle over languages in India, and the class struggles which underlie it; state formative practices are shaped by the politics of language and the language of politics. Dhirubhai Sheth examines the nature and basis of the hegemonic role of English in India. He

14

Upendra Baxi.

argues that its power is ultimately derived from the dominant model of development and the social group privileged by it. As he rightly points out, leaders of our independence movement too had stressed the importance of English, but they were culturally bilingual and rooted in the Indian reality. The new generation coming out of English-medium schools lacks this bilingualism, and is shadowed by the equally monolingual product of government schools. Sheth shows how the rise of new social groups at the regional level has given prominence and power to regional languages, and rendered it difficult for English to continue to play its traditional role. The disagreement among the regional elites about the ‘link’ language, and the fact that English is deeply embedded in the structure of the state, make it extremely difficult to evolve

an effective substitute. Sheth thinks that Hindi can replace or at least take over most of the political and cultural functions of English only if its numerical advantage is reinforced by its full development in its regional home and by its openness to the influence of other languages. Sheth’s analysis has profound implications not only for national unity but also for India’s cultural integrity and coherence. The legitimation—deficit of the Indian state also leads to what Subrata Mitra insightfully describes as the dimensions of the crisis of governability in contemporary India. His emphasis on ‘India’s hesitant progress in the direction of an endogenous modernity’ leads him to plead tolerance towards a ‘certain degree of tentativeness’ which his approach could introduce to all institutions, and openness to change by politics of accommodation in the rules of the game. In a sense, Mitra would see opportunities for governance where others perceive crisis of governance. Although his analysis follows the language and idiom of liberal democratic theory, in its overall aspirational conclusion, his approach would also remain comfortable in post-modernist languages. Readers of the volume will, of course, try to comprehend Mitra’s complex analysis from the standpoint of a new historicity ushered in by events since 6 December 1992. The marker between politics of accommodation and inauguration of new rules of the game is increasingly now the contested site both for political practice as well as serious theory. Perhaps, to some it may even appear that a certain openness to tentativeness may itself endanger rather than engender future democratic prospects of India.

Introduction

15

Three papers in the volume deal with the problems of identity in the context of pluralism and secularism. Sudipta Kaviraj urges us to go beyond the emphasis on the ‘coevality’ of the colonial and modern. Among many reciprocal linkages between power and knowledge, Kaviraj suggests forcefully that contemporary ‘communalism’ in India while using ‘religion with great stridency’ is really ‘an ironically grotesque part of the process of depletion of religious beliefs.” Deploying the distinction between ‘thick’ religion, where an individual’s religious identity stands expressed in ‘beliefs

spread across a whole variety of levels’ of lived and shared experience, and ‘thin’ religion, wherein a communal religious identity stands characterised by ‘highly emotional but depleted sacrality’, Kaviraj draws attention to the spread of ‘thin’ religion beyond the realm of politics to ‘all aspects of daily life in India.” What emerges as a result is the creation of a ‘political religion’, manifest, in the author’s opinion, in the recent ascendancy of the BJP movement. Its indeterminacy is captured forcefully by Kaviraj in the question: ‘Is capturing of government a means of building the temple or is the slogan of the temple the means to securing victories in elections?’ If it is the latter, construction of a political religion is bound to clash with the needs of governance. A deeper question, of course, is whether it is possible for ‘religious consciousness to

acquire a modern ideological form, and stabilise into a historically stable form of consciousness’ which can counter the immanent destruction of democracy and the rule of law. Gurpreet Mahajan insists that the critics of the Nehruvian model of a modern, secular nation state make an important contribution when they displace the classical liberal conception of a freely choosing, autonomous self with a more complex understanding of plural identities. This conception of cultural embodiment of the self, however, is usually coupled, with the defence of communitarian forms of existence: a system where people participate in the political process as members of self defining communities. The critics counter the emphasis on abstract individualism with an equally uncritical defence of communities. They expect us to choose between the particularity of atomised existence and the unreflective unity of community existence. What remains unexplored in this debate is the third option in which space for individual action within communities is recognised and respected. Mahajan suggests that this alternative becomes available to us when we recognise

16

Upendra Baxi

that participation in a culture or a tradition is not a form of rule following. Tradition only provides the fore-conception of understanding—conceptions that get revised and reconstituted in the course of everyday life. She further suggests that we can arrive at a different conception of cultural embodiment and community life when we acknowledge the fluidity of community identities. One needs to recognise the space for individual negotiation and definition of identity, consistent with history and with the conflict of interests arising from equally privileged—chosen or given—identities. Rajeev Bhargava ventures a theory of identity, within a spectrum of four ideal-type ‘cultures’: culture of ‘unfettered desire’, ‘ultimate ideals’, ‘multiple values’, and ‘multiple values infused by a sense of high ideals’. Not wholly negotiable, nor wholly given, a repertoire of identities (integrally connected to language and community) remains available to contingent human choice. For religious identities, Bhargava also discerns four types: religion as ‘faith’, as ideology, as pastiche (‘spiritless’ religion) and lived spirtuality. With equal felicity, he is able to distinguish between secularist identities—those of unfettered desire, ideologue, zealot and believer. Bhargava’s insight that ‘religious and secular persons are informed by a lived spirituality’ is crucial to his claim that ‘incompatibility exists between different forms of cultural identity each of which subsumes both the religious and secular identity.. He pleads for a nonpolemical understanding of the interaction between the religious and secular outlooks, acknowledging the horrors of each as well as their emancipatory potential. It is not usual for students of politics and change in modern India to focus on sectors like public health or psychology. Read together, essays by Jayshree Mehta, Ashis Nandy and Prakash Desai continue the discourse on health so prominent in Gandhi's corpus. In a sense, the contemporary health policy objectives— nationally or globally—seem to enhance the Gandhian conceptions of health and well-being. But the practice as Jayshree Mehta’s contribution demonstrates is different. She draws attention to the fact that from ‘the nutritional point of view ours is a dual society’ and suggests that the egalitarian paradigm is incomplete if it does not include the tragic intransigence of nutritional inequalities. Her broad comparison of the state health care programmes and voluntary action testifies to the vitality of the latter (as prophesied by Gandhi) and enervation of the former. Of course, the class

Introduction

17

character of the Indian state has lent itself to a searching analysis and critique in the past, notably by Professor D.N. Banerjee. But the exposé of the health policy by Mehta in this volume would have served this task well if it focuses attention, both of state theorists as well as human rights activists, on the problematic of legitimacy of power from the privileged standpoint of meeting basic needs of the impoverished masses. Ashis Nandy, characteristically, raises profound interrogations concerning the political economy of contemporary theory and practice of psychology. He flaws ‘non-critical’ psychology on several counts. It is Eurocentric because it promotes and protects ‘as universal ideals’ only those traits which are conducive to the growth of modern cultures. It rejects holistic approaches. It emphasises ‘psychotechnology’. And its rigorous distinction between the health of society and that of individual is as problematic as its obliviousness to ‘politics of everyday life.’ In contrast, critical psychology makes ‘interventions in the contemporary social consciousness’, invokes the psychologist’s ‘creative authenticity’ engendered by her inbred receptivity to inequalities, cruelties and suffering, and mitigates the distinction between the ‘individual mind and shared consciousness’. As with every tradition of learned profession in the South, Nandy’s call—that psychologists avail a non-critical legitimation of modernity avoiding pale imitations of modernity in the Third World—summons practioners of knowledge to be shapers, rather than slaves, of the contingency of power. Prakash Desai, himself a practicing psychiatrist, provides one example of what Nandy has probably in view in his paradigm of critical psychology. Desai seeks to understand practices of power in contemporary India—with lineages of the classic Hindu past—in terms of the dynamic of ‘egopolitics’. Egopolitics entails on the one hand the ‘ascendant’s obstinacy’ and the contender’s refusal to ‘play the second fiddle’ and on the other the ‘unbounded’ fascination of the masses with practices of power politics. The nuances of the politics of abhiman, as well as of public morality play through which it is routinely denounced, provides the psychopathology of Indian politics. One of its major consequences is a ‘split level consciousness’ among politicians, marked by the emergence of double standards—one for ‘public display’, another for ‘private transactions and fantasy’. Factitiousness and de-idealisation are the inevitable products of the egopolitics. When we juxtapose

18

Upendra Baxi

Nandy and Desai, it becomes clear that non-mimetic modes of developing psychological knowledges yield a harvest of rich insights about the political dynamic. At the same time, the liberational aspiration of critical psychology still remains latent. One has to move beyond a critique of egopolitics to the deployment of psychological knowledges to make, as Nandy would wish, ‘interventions in the contemporary social consciousness.’ Desai’s provocative analysis prepares ground for thinking through strategies of transition beyond the libidinal economy of egopolitics. For far too long, it was blithely assumed by practitioners of power and knowledge that ‘progress’ or ‘development’ entailed social costs, some

of which

we

have

now

learnt to recognise

as

unconscionable, or at any rate of dubious legitimacy and legality. The proletariat was either the privileged bearer of historic suffering and exploitation for the maturation of capitalist societies, to be eventually overthrown in order to achieve the ends of a communist Utopia; or was to graduate through immiseration to revolutionary insurrection, transcending the laws of history privileged by Scientific Marxism. The liberal imagination, on the other hand, legitimated the here-and-now suffering of masses or people based on a faith that ‘democracy’ will proliferate, ensuring over an extended timehorizon the well-being of the maximum number. Each tradition, in its own distinctive and singular ways, normalised and naturalised suffering, even rendering it altruistic. The contemporary trend however, is to give here-and-now victims a voice and power, regardless of their place in the history of Jonge duree. Modern human rights activism focuses, impassionately, on the problematic of costs of development (whether under market or plan) inflicted wantonly on large masses of people. The costs may arise out of developmental activities or through aggravated deployment of violence by the state or civil society. The managers of the Indian state till recently did not have to face the acute dilemma involved in the complex notion of ‘sustainable development’; nor did they face informed public opinion or charismatic resistance to development projects on the ground of ecological destruction. Pravin Sheth describes the emerging eco-

politics in the context of the Sardar Sarovar Project. His analysis illustrates the difficult dilemmas not just of policy/politics confronting state action but also those bedevilling a sympathetic observer of resistance. Sheth is ambivalent towards activists. He is also

Introduction

19

unsympathetic to some of the ways in which the state has acted. Yet he is also unwilling to subject notions of development to the full logic of protection and promotion of the human right to a clean and safe environment. Sheth’s critique of the activists’ project and tactics is perhaps now somewhat undermined by the World Bank’s recent decision to withdraw project assistance. But regardless of the empirical instance, his reflections on the nature of relations between the state managers on the one hand and activists on the other invite contemplation. The critical issue, it would appear, is one of representation; on the one hand the government claims to represent the best interests of society in terms of the electoral ‘mandate’, and on the other activists also stake their claim to being the more authentic representatives of the victims. If the authority of the activist claim to represent victim groups is to be questioned on the general theory of democratic representation, then it is also possible to revisit this theory in the light of accumulative experience of the victims of development worldwide. Sheth’s notion of ecopolitics is to be understood not just at the level of how the agenda of power extends to appropriation of popular environmental concerns but also at the level of resistance to power directed at enhancing the more substantive notions of democracy as against the more formal ones. The persistence of the phenomenon termed ‘communal riots’ is matched by an equally persistent neglect on the part of the community of social and human scientists. ‘Communal riots’ remain unanalysed and untheorised; even archival data available in judicial commissions of enquiry remain almost unexamined and what is more, are wholly inaccessible even in the best of libraries in India. Pravin Patel’s analysis in this volume is one of the very few endeavours to redress this conspicuous lack in the understanding of contemporary India. His thesis, based on a close empirical study of Gujarat, reinforces the notion that the principal causative factor of such violence lies in the domain of economy and only secondarily in that of society. While ethnic, psychological and related tensions furnish the necessary variables for explanation, they are not suffi-

cient. His study illustrates how primarily economic conflicts tend to become ‘communalised’ and how they spread to ‘secondarily affected areas’ where the psychological, ethnic and other factors are already in operation. The framework of understanding of ‘communal riots’ or ‘communal violence’ now stands interrogated

20

Upendra Baxi

by the events since 6 December 1992 which marks the ascendancy of political nihilism in the onward march of the Will to Power. Of course, it would be contentious to maintain that a whole new epistemology or hermeneutics is now required, even for 4 retrospective understanding of the phenomenon of ‘communal’ violence before 6 December 1992. Patel’s analysis, in the changed circumstances, invites us to a troubled understanding of the role of

regime-sponsored violence in triggering ‘communalisation’ of secular conflicts and the impact of all this on the Indian social and political future. Perhaps, this synoptic glance at the diversity of concerns provides a glimpse into the unity of anxiety about India’s future in a traumatically changing world. The conspicuous lack in this volume is, of course, materiality—that is, economy and technology, as these inseminate deeper anxiety, especially in the halcyon days of globalisation/ghettoisation of India and the world. To this extent, this work remains somewhat incomplete. Yet, the anxiety stands, overall, authentically articulated. Only Gods among us should be able to say that the anxious interrogations indwelling this volume are misplaced. And Gods, as we know, are also fallible.

Notes

I. Particularly explained by Pierre Bourdieu as the belief in the established order which leads to the naturalisation of the arbitrary. See his Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 73-78. 2. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1991).

Two

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis, of Modernisation Bhikhu Parekh

The West invented the modern world and is its historical bearer. Not surprisingly modernisation and Westernisation have for the past few decades become synonymous terms. Partly as a result of their autonomous choices but largely under the impact of Western colonialism and post-colonial hegemony, leaders of the newly independent countries of the Third World felt that they could not hope to survive let alone flourish in the modern world without ‘modernising’ themselves and that there was no model of modernisation other than the Western one. As the modern world has run into unsuspected economic, ecological, cultural and other problems, the West today is confronted with the ‘crisis of modernity’ and has thrown up what are inaccurately called ‘post-modernist’ movements in most walks of life. The Western ‘crisis of modernity’ is accompanied by and has partly inspired the ‘crisis of modernisation’ in the Third World. While modernisation has been a force for good in the Third World and has brought in some of the expected economic, political and other advantages, it has also revealed its ugly side. It has failed to produce the much-vaunted trickle-down effect, to reduce vast economic and social inequalities and to empower the poor. It has created rootless and ‘mimic’ men and women who have bargained away their traditional values and skills in favour of those unsuited to their temperament and talents, and

22

Bhikhu Parekh

whose ways of life and thought remain depressingly shallow and confused. It has destroyed traditional sources of moral discipline and ways of solving conflicts without putting effective alternatives in their place and has created a climate of cynicism and a frightening moral and cultural vacuum. Many Third World leaders are therefore beginning to ask whether they were wise to embark upon the path of uncritical and unrestrained modernisation, whether they could have evolved a home-grown variety of it that took full account of their history and traditions, and how they should cope with its unfortunate consequences. In this paper, I intend to consider these questions in the context of India. From at least the early decades of the nineteenth century, Indian leaders had begun to wrestle with them and thrown up interesting ideas. I shall briefly summarise their views and devote the rest of the article to Jawaharlal Nehru who, as India’s first and longest-serving Prime Minister, faced these agonising questions and made decisive choices that shaped its future. I shall argue that for a variety of reasons he felt convinced that India had no choice but to replace its ‘degenerate’ traditional social structure with one based on Western lines under the tutelage of the state led by a Westernised elite. When he realised during the last few years of his life that his model of modernisation was proving inadequate to India’s needs, he began to retrace his steps and to explore an alternative suited to Indian conditions. He was by then too old and tired to radically redesign his model, but he did leave behind a body of interesting ideas that were later taken over and developed by Lal Bahadur Shastri. The latter did not break with Nehru’s modernist programme as is often argued. Nehru himself had made the break and paved the way for his successor.

Since the early decades of the nineteenth century, most Indian leaders were convinced that their country had become decadent and degenerate and desperately needed punarjanma (rebirth), punaruddhar (renaissance) or navnirman (radical reconstruction). They

were, however, deeply divided on the extent and causes of the degeneration and the ways of arresting and reversing it. Broadly

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

23

speaking their views fell into three categories which, for convenience, I shall call modernism, critical traditionalism and critical modernism. ! For the modernists the Indian degeneration was deep and extensive and had gone on for at least a thousand years. After a promising early start, when several periods of great creativity and achievements were thrown up, the Indian civilisation began to lose its sense of direction and purpose from around the seventh century A.D. The modernists generally traced the decay to the Indian social structure, especially the repressive, exclusive and hierarchical castesystem which, so they argued, had begun to gain ascendancy around that time. The oppressive society stifled individuality and initiative, suppressed dissent, frowned upon initiative and ambition, and rendered deeply divided Indians incapable of concerted action. Like an octopus it relentlessly extended its tentacles to all areas of life and obtunded all that came within its fatal embrace. It corrupted religion and reduced it to a set of mindless rituals, bizarre practices and reactionary dogmas. It confined people to hereditary occupations, conferred power and status on the basis of birth rather than personal achievement, discouraged enterprise and mobility, and hindered economic development. It reduced morality to the discharge of inherited social obligations and emptied it of social compassion, a sense of justice and personal autonomy. It fragmented the country, prevented the emergence of an autonomous and unified polity, and made India an easy prey to foreign invasion and internal decay. In the modernist discourse on Indian history, the caste-system was and is generally presented as the principal evil. . In the modernist view, India’s salvation lay in replacing the traditional social structure with a dynamic, open, individualistic and enterprising society constructed broadly along modern European lines. Obviously, such a task was beyond the means of the degenerate society, and could only be undertaken by the state. And the state could adequately execute it only if it was powertul, autonomous, able to stand up to society, and led by a Westernised elite free from traditional influences and conversant with European history and culture. Thanks to colonial rule, India already possessed such a state and elite. Although the colonial state was repressive

24

Bhikhu Parekh

and subserved imperial interests, its basic design was correct. Once it was democratised,it could become a powerful tool for Indian regeneration. The critical traditionalists shared some of the modernist aspirations, but took a very different view of the nature, causes and ways of reversing the Indian degeneration.” They argued that although the Indian civilisation had suffered a decline, it was ‘essentially’ and ‘fundamentally’ sound, which was why it had ‘survived’ Muslim, British and other challenges. Although the Indian social structure had its grave limitations, it also had its strengths, which was why it had remained more or less intact for centuries and kept Indians together. As for the Indian people, although they had become passive, lifeless, devoid of zeal and energy, they still possessed considerable creativity and enterprise as was evident in their ability to progress in different walks of life and to rise to the highest positions even under the racist foreign rule. Like any other society, the critical traditionalists argued, Indian society had a distinct character and history and had grown up with its people. It was too deeply interwoven with their conscious and unconscious memories, habits of thought, deepest urges and inspirations to be ‘discarded’ without a fatal cultural haemorrhage or for them to stand outside it and make a neutral assessment of its strengths and weaknesses. What the Indians should do, indeed all they could do, was to identify and mobilise their society’s creative resources for its regeneration, without losing its coherence and inner balance. For the critical traditionalists, India had much to learn from the West and needed to borrow and adopt, without guilt or shame, whatever in the West was valuable and capable of being assimilated. In the ultimate analysis, however, India had to work

out its political salvation itself, in a manner consistent with its traditions, temperament and circumstances. It could not passively imitate the Western model or path of development. Unlike the latter, its way of life was sociocentric and did not centre around the state. The state therefore could not and should not become the sole Or even a major instrument of social transformation in India. Instead the state should act as a catalyst and a co-ordinator encouraging society to mobilise its own regenerative resources, stepping in only when it appeared impotent or unwilling to change or in need of help, and in general working with it in a spirit of creative partnership. Unlike the modernists who were necessarily statists,

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

25

the critical traditionalists advocated a state-society partnership. Both alike appreciated the importance of the state, but deeply disagreed about its role and mode of operation.

The critical modernists occupied an intermediate but not quite half-way position between the modernists and the critical traditionalists. Although they admired some of India’s traditional values and institutions and criticised some aspects of modern civilisation, for all practical purposes they accepted the modernist assessment of traditional India and stressed the need for comprehensive modernisation. However they also shared the critical traditionalist view that India had a distinct history and character, of which a programme of modernisation should take full account. Rather than uncritically copy the West, India should indigenise Western institutions and practices, modify them to suit local conditions, and take a gradualist approach. While the modernists declared a war on tradition, the critical modernists who were no less critical

of the tradition wanted to use it to give modernity a vernacular colour and tone and a measure of cultural depth and familiarity. The modernists wanted to wipe the Indian slate clean and advocated both the Western model and path of modernisation, whereas the critical traditionalists wanted India to evolve its own distinct model of as well as path to a suitably chastened programme of modernisation. In contrast to both, the critical modernists accepted the Western model or goals of modernisation but preferred a distinct Indian path to it.’

From the very beginning Nehru’s understanding of India showed the influence of all three schools and contained a deep ambiguity. He was convinced that Indian society had become profoundly degenerate and that the causes of such a pervasive and long-lasting degeneration ‘must lie’ deep within its structure. ‘Much’ of India’s past therefore had to be ‘scrapped’, and the country had to be reconstructed on an entirely new foundation. However he was also convinced that since the Indian civilisation had ‘lasted’ for several millennia, ‘survived most ferocious assaults’, and was indeed the

‘only’ ancient civilisation still living, it ‘must have’ structural

26

Bhikhu Parekh

strengths and ‘hidden’ sources of energy and self-renewal. A sensi-

tive and skilful leader therefore needed to identify its ‘deep well of strength’, mobilise its regenerative resources, and combat its current decay. As Nehru put it:

What is this India? . . . . What did she represent in the past? What gave strength to her then? How did she lose that old strength? And has she lost completely? Does she represent anything vital now?* He proceeded to answer it himself:

India was in my blood and there was much in her that instinctively thrilled me. And yet I approached her almost as an alien critic full of dislike for the present as well as for many of the relics of the past that I saw. To some extent I came to her via the West and looked at her as a friendly Westerner might have done. I was eager and anxious to change her outlook and appearance and give her the garb of modernity. And yet doubts rose within me. Did I know India, I who presumed to scrap much of her

past heritage? There was a great deal that had to be scrapped, that must be scrapped; but surely India... could not have continued a cultural existence for thousands of years, if she had not possessed something very vital and enduring, something that was worthwhile. What was this something?° Nehru

went on:

The heavy burden of the past crushes it and a kind of coma seizes it. It is not surprising that in this condition of mental stupor and physical weariness India should have deteriorated and remained rigid and immobile, while other parts of the world marched ahead. Yet this is not a complete or wholly correct survey. If there had only been a long and unrelieved period of rigidity and stagnation, this might well have resulted in a complete break with the past, the death of an era, and the erection of something

new on its ruins. There has not been such a break and there is a definite continuity. Also, from time to time, vivid periods of renascence have occurred, and some of them have been long

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

27

and brilliant. Always there is visible an attempt to understand and adapt the new and harmonize it with the old, or at any rate with parts of the old which were considered worth preserving. Often

that old

retains

an

external

form

only,

as a kind

of

symbol, and changes its inner content. But something vital and living continues, some urge driving the people in a direction not wholly realised and always a desire for synthesis between the old and the new. It was this urge and desire that kept them going and enabled them to absorb new ideas while retaining much of the old. Whether there was such a thing as an Indian dream through the ages, vivid and full of life or sometimes reduced to the murmurings of troubled sleep, I do not know. Every people and every nation has some such belief or myth of: national destiny and perhaps it is partly true in each case. Being an Indian, | am myself influenced by this reality or myth about India, and I feel that anything that had the power to mould hundreds of generations, without a break, must have drawn its enduring vitality from some deep well of strength, and have had the capacity to renew that vitality from age to age.° Nehru embarked on a ‘great voyage of discovery’, determined to

fathom the ‘depth of the Indian soul’ and to ‘identify its strengths and weaknesses.’ Since the Indian degeneration, of which the colonial rule was a stark and daily reminder, was ‘obvious’ and self-evident, Indian weaknesses were beyond doubt. By contrast, its strengths were a matter of belief, an assumption, and not so obvious. Though Nehru was not sure what they were or whether they were there at all, he was convinced that they had to be there if

India’s survival were to make sense. This belief also had a psychological basis. Nehru could not bear to think that his country and its people were so bankrupt that nothing in their past was worth salvaging, for that made them an inferior ‘race’ and confirmed all the prejudices of their ‘alien critics’. As he put it, ‘pride, both individual and national’ demanded that such a belief must be rejected outright.* Even if it was a ‘myth’, no Indian could avoid believing in it.’ Nehru’s ‘voyage of discovery’ was flawed from the start. His concern to identify India’s strengths and weaknesses, ‘things’ that were ‘good’ and those that were ‘degenerate’, rested on the assumption that the two were separate and separable and that traditional

28

Bhikhu Parekh

attitudes, practices and institutions were either good or bad, sources of strength or weakness, to be preserved or rejected as the case

may be. He did not appreciate that the two could be dialectically related, that what was a source of strength in one context or period could become a liability in another, and that strength and weakness were not essentialist but functional categories depending on the way the social practices and institutions were interpreted and used. What

was even

more

important,

Nehru

was unclear about what

was to count as strength or weakness. For the most part he took survival as the main touchstone, and argued that those practices and institutions that had helped India ‘last so long? signified strength and were worth preserving, and that those that had repeatedly brought it to the verge of crisis or prevented it from Overcoming it were worth discarding. He did not appreciate that survival or ‘lasting long’ was a highly ambiguous notion. A civilisation that had repeatedly fallen under foreign rule and whose intellectual vitality had atrophied for centuries could hardly be said to have lasted long. And even if it could be, it was not easy to decide what specific practices and institutions had contributed to this. For example, one could say that castes and village communities had fragmented and weakened India and made it a prey to foreign rule; one could say equally plausibly that they had held it together under foreign rule and preserved some of the basic ‘values’ of Indian civilisation. At a highly abstract level and in the absence of detailed historical analyses, one could assert and get away with almost anything. Furthermore, even if a practice could be shown to have stood India in good stead in the past, there was no reason to believe that it would do so in the future. As Nehru repeatedly remarked, the modern industrial age was historically unique and

represented a radical break with the past. India’s traditional sources of vitality might therefore prove not only irrelevant but positively harmful in the present. Thanks to these and other questions which he never resolved, Nehru found it difficult to arrive at coherent

and convincing judgements about traditional Indian attitudes, practices and institutions. Nehru also faced another difficulty. He turned to Indian history to form an objective assessment of its strengths and weaknesses and to arrive at a well-considered response to colonial rule. But the history to which he turned was itself a colonial creation. There could be no history of ‘India’ so long as Indians did not see

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

29

themselves as a collective subject conscious of continuity in time and space and having a corporate sense of a shared past and a shared future. And that did not happen until the British consolidated their rule in India and gave the country a distinct geographical, political and administrative identity. British rule made the history of ‘India’ not only possible but also necessary. The British needed to write it in order to make sense of an unfamiliar country, to learn

lessons about how best to manage it and what mistakes of the earlier invaders to avoid, and to propagate a view of Indian history that justified their rule in their own and especially their subjects’ eyes. Their history of India was therefore necessarily distorted, not just in its substantive conclusions but also in the very manner of defining, individuating, conceptualising, and periodising the Indian past. In this respect the benign Orientalists were no different from their hostile or malign counterparts. Nehru thus had no independent and colonially unmediated access to his country’s history. His ‘voyage’ was amply signposted by the British historians and ‘discovered’ little that was new.

Nehru’s discovery of India, as articulated in the Autobiography, The Glimpses of World History and above all in his appropriately entitled The Discovery of India, then, was structured by contradictory assumptions. Not surprisingly, it remained confused and ambiguous. On some occasions, he took an optimistic view of Indian society and history. He argued that India’s current decline was temporary and in no way unique to it, for all societies and civilisations were subject to ups and downs. The British had conquered India because they were technologically superior, not because Indians were an inferior or degenerate people. India had created a great civilisation in the past that was second to none and had regularly thrown up periods of great creativity. Even when it later became static and weak and fell prey to foreign invaders, it retained enough vitality to expel them and to assimilate and ‘absorb those who could not be driven away.’” For Nehru, the Indian social structure was distinguished by great ‘resilience,’

‘wonderful

stability’ and

moral

‘resourcefulness’.

It

possessed a great ‘spirit of individualism’ which was just as robust

30

Bhikhu Parekh

as its current European counterpart and was constantly nurtured by its religions which made each individual the sole architect of his unique destiny. India also had ‘great vitality’ and an ‘amazing tenacity as well as some flexibility and capacity for adoption.’ The caste system was ‘noble’ in its original inspiration. And even when it later became rigid and oppressive, it fostered the valuable qualities of social co-operation, solidarity and collective self-help. Neither was India devoid of the modern scientific spirit. The ‘essential basis of Indian thought for ages past, though not in its later manifestations, fits in with scientific temper and approach.’ Indeed unlike the modern positivist science which ‘has still to bring the spirit and the flesh into creative harmony’, India had for centuries sought to attain the harmony by embedding science in a humanist metaphysics. All this meant that India was capable of developing its own distinct model and path of development rather than copy the West, that its traditional institutions could be suitably regenerated and made the basis of a progressive social order, and that rather than treat its people as passive objects the independent Indian state should energise and involve them in their development. Nehru berated the indigenous and foreign commentators who ‘talk glibly of modernism’ as if a society, especially one as old as India, could be, ‘wiped clean’ and mechanically replaced by another." For the most part, however, Nehru took a different and highly pessimistic view of India’s history and current predicament.” For a

millennium between the seventh century B.c. and about the eighth - century A.D., India was a ‘great civilisation’, rich, vigorous, full of zest and life and distinguished by great achievements in such fields as philosophy, literature, art, science, medicine and mathematics. It was also economically prosperous and had extensive trade contacts with many parts of the world. From about the eighth century A.D. it began to decline. There were no great works in philosophy

and literature after Sankara and Bhavabhuti in the eighth century, and no great scientists and inventors after the tenth. The great period of foreign trade ended around the same time, and there were no great migrations for colonial settlement in South-East Asia after the ninth century. Nehru had no clear explanation for India’s continuous decline. He was convinced that although foreign invasions were partly responsible, these were not a decisive factor, and that in any case they would not have succeeded if India had not already become weak. Nor did he think much of the currently popular economic,

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

political and other explanations.

31

In his view, a civilisation never

disintegrated so long as it remained internally strong. It might be conquered by a more powerful enemy but never for long. Nehru thought that India declined because it was seized by an ‘inner weakness’, a ‘slow and creeping’ paralysis of will and creativity. Since the decline was the result of its own weakness rather than foreign conquests, and since ‘by its nature’ internal weakness worked its way slowly, there was no ‘dramatic collapse’ of its civilisation as in the case of Greece and Rome. Nehru never explained the nature and origins of India’s ‘inner weakness’. However he was convinced that it was integrally connected with a healthy tension lying at the very heart of its way of life. Following Vivekananda, he argued that Indian civilisation was distinguished by an asymmetry between its religious thought and social structure." Its indigenous religions were all individualist, experimental and non-dogmatic. Salvation was an individual matter, within the reach of all, and attained not by subscribing to prescribed dogmas but by self-purification brought about by whatever methods suited an individual’s temperament and level of spiritual development. Thanks to the doctrine of karma which ruled out vicarious atonement, mediation and collective salvation, each individual was considered

unique, following his distinct spiritual journey through a cycle of births and a product of his own efforts in his past lives. By contrast, the Indian social structure was group-centred. Each individual was a member of one of the four varnas into which society was articulated, and followed his socially prescribed customs and practices. The functionally based and open varnas permitted social and economic mobility, and their prescribed duties left considerable room for choice. They combined the needs of the individual with those of society, and were conducive to both individual development and social cohesion and harmony. For Nehru, Indian civilisation was marked by a creative tension between the mutually regulating individualist and collective impulses informing its religious and social spheres respectively. The ‘amazing’ amount of freedom enjoyed at the religious level was balanced by the stress on social harmony, and was never allowed to subvert the social order. In turn, it nurtured the spirit of individuality and freedom and prevented the social structure from becoming collectivist and oppressive. So long as neither tendency gained ascendancy, the Indian society remained both free and united. Thanks to the process of decay which began in the eighth century

32

Bhikhu Parekh

A.bD., the balance was lost. For reasons Nehru nowhere

explains,

the social structure became rigid and static, making the varnas exclusive, hierarchical, oppressive, obsessively puristic and hereditary. It began to claim religious sanction and status for the new system of castes and obliterated the traditional dividing line between society and religion. Religion increasingly lost its transcendence, was centred around caste, and came to be reduced to rigid dogmas. With its decline, the spirit of individuality and freedom which it had nurtured for centuries also declined. The collectivist tendency of Indian civilisation gained unchallenged domination, making India ‘stationary, unprogressive and, later, inevitably regressive.’ As Nehru put it:

Life became all cut up into set frames where each man’s job was fixed and permanent and he had little concern with others... . Thus particular types of activity became hereditary, and there was a tendency to avoid new types of work and activity and to confine oneself to the old groove, to restrict initiative and the spirit of innovation... . So long as that structure afforded avenues for growth and expansion, it was progressive; when it reached the limits of expansion open to it, it became stationary, unprogressive, and, later, inevitably regressive .. . . Because of this there was decline all along the line—intellectual, philosophical, political, in technique and methods of warfare, in knowledge of and contacts with the outside world, in shrinking economy, and there was growth of local sentiments and feudal and small-groups feeling at the expense of the larger conceptions of India as a whole." Unlike the bulk of the Indian nationalist leaders, Nehru’s discussion of Muslim invasions and rule was relatively detached and free of

hostility. However, like them he too had read little Muslim history, and what he had read was largely written by the Orientalists. Not surprisingly, his overall assessment of the Muslim rule in India was slightly different from theirs. While conceding that Islam had some salutary effect on India, he insisted that its impact was limited. It had ‘long passed its zenith’ by the time it came to India and no longer possessed its radical egalitarian thrust." It brought with it no new methods of production and industrial organisation either. Most Muslim rulers were unimaginative and reactionary, the only

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

33

exception being Akbar who encouraged close contacts between the Hindus and Muslims in all areas of life and paved the way for brilliant syntheses in art, architecture, literature, music, philosophy and even religion. However, the overall effect of all this was ‘more or less superficial and the social culture remained much the same as it used to be. In some respects, indeed, it became more rigid.’ After Akbar’s death the ‘air of change and mental adventure which he had introduced subsided, and India resumed her static and unchanging life.’'® While

India

resumed

her slumber,

Europe

did the opposite.

After a deep and millennial sleepiness of the kind that had overwhelmed India for a roughly similar period, European countries woke up in the seventeenth century and set about changing their economic, social and political life with unprecedented energy and dynamism. Propelled by the desire for markets for their goods and supported by their newly developed states, they spread out all over the world and found static India an easy prey. Unlike the Muslim impact, the British impact on India was deep and decisive. The British represented a new, energetic and vibrant civilisation distin-

guished by a new vision of human liberation and progressive ways of thought and life. Although they caused grave economic damage, propped up feudal elements, and denied India full benefits of modern civilisation, they ‘shook it up’, winkled it out of its ‘deep

slumber’ and forced it to take note of the new light of reason. For Nehru ‘it was a good thing for India to come in contact with the scientific and industrial West.’ The manner of the contact was, no

doubt, most unfortunate. However, ‘only a succession of violent shocks could shake us out of our torpor. From this point of view the Protestant, individualistic, Anglo-Saxon English were suitable,

for they were more different from us than most other Westerners and could give us greater shocks.’”” In taking this view, which was canvassed and encouraged by colonial

rulers,

Nehru

was

no

different

from

the other

Indian

nationalist leaders including Gandhi. Their writings, too, were suffused with soporific metaphors, stressed the need for a shock, accepted colonial rule both as a punishment for India’s past karma and a welcome opportunity to strive for a better rebirth, and preferred British rule to the French, the Dutch and the Portuguese, of all of whom different parts of India had some experience. For Nehru, the ‘central lessons’ of Indian history were clear and

34

Bhikhu Parekh

needed to be burnt into the consciousness of every Indian."* Progress was the law of life. A society must either progress or go under; it can never stand still. It progressed only if it encouraged criticism, dissent and creative experimentation. And that happened only if it was open, mobile, egalitarian and democratic in its structure and ethos. No society, Nehru insisted, existed in isolation from others. If it became weak, it attracted the aggressive attention of the strong and powerful. It must constantly remain alert to the developments in the world at large and take care not to fall too far behind them. India had fallen prey to waves after waves of foreign invasions because it had become introverted and indifferent to the world around it. It must now ‘catch up’ with the advanced Western nations, learn the best they had to offer, and reconstitute itself on egalitarian and rationalist lines." Nehru’s attitude to India’s past, then, was highly critical. He admired and felt proud of its classical past, but was deeply ashamed of its medieval past. He was also pained by its immediate or colonial past. The reality of foreign rule pained him; its necessity pained and shamed him immeasurably more. The feeling that India had for centuries been devoid of regenerative resources and needed foreigners to revitalise it is expressedin the Discovery and elsewhere with great poignancy. At times he even seemed to think that the fact that the country had remained asleep so long indicated not only the degeneration of its civilisation but also the decay of its people. Like many other nationalist leaders, he frequently complained about the quality of the ‘human material’ in India, especially the ‘tremendous lack’ of basic social and political capacities in ‘any other class’ save some sections of the Westernised middle classes.” On other occasions he dismissed the implied notion of racial inferiority and argued that India’s misfortunes were common to all civilisations, historically acquired and politically corrigible. Though Nehru recognised that India’s future could not be disjoined from and should indeed be built on its past, he had great difficulty deciding which bits of the latter could form the building blocks of the future. He admired classical India’s literary, artistic and other achievements, but did not consider them politically relevant. He liked advaita and thought that it or something like it could form the basis of India’s national outlook. He greatly admired the Buddha and his doctrines and thought that some of these could be woven into India’s national morality. He admired Asoka and

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

35

considered him big and relevant enough to become the patron saint of the Indian polity. Indeed, as India’s first Prime Minister looking for a model of inspiration, he seems to have turned to Asoka, whom he had often in the past described as a wise and conciliatory ruler giving noble laws to his people, setting an example of great personal integrity, and carrying the Buddha’s message of non-violence to the outside world. When it came to traditional social, economic and political institutions, Nehru could not see that any of them were worth reviving,

reforming or even adopting to modern circumstances. Of the ‘three pillars’ of traditional India, he valued the joint family but saw no political role for it, and even thought that it would not last long in the modern mobile and individualistic world. He ioathed the castes and held them responsible for India’s degeneration. And as for the village communities, they had bred the ‘spirit of localism’ and were in any case doomed to extinction.” The Indian past thus was largely bankrupt, irrelevant and incapable of answering the needs of the future. For Nehru, India had therefore little choice but to begin afresh on an entirely new social foundation. Its intellectual heritage furnished odd fragments which it could profitably incorporate into its ways of thought, but its institutional legacy was a liability. Theoretically and even emotionally, Nehru appreciated the need to build on the past and to link it up with the present and the future but he could not see how this was to be done when a cool and realistic analysis found the past at best irrelevant and at worst an obstacle. He was not the only nationalist leader to reach such a depressing conclusion.

IV Since Nehru’s reading of Indian history and society was overwhelmingly pessimistic, he opted for the statist model of modernisation. Even if he had been less pessimistic, it is unlikely that he would have made a different choice. The colonial rulers had left behind a powerful and autonomous state standing above and insulated against society, and its attractions for a new government faced with immense problems were obvious. Unlike the partnership model, the statist model did not require much political creativity and intuitive understanding of traditional India. Nehru was also in

36

Bhikhu Parekh

a hurry and had neither the patience nor the time for the inevitably slow-working partnership model. Given

Nehru’s

statist model

of social transformation,

he had

available to him four major institutions on which to rely, namely, the Parliament, the Cabinet, the Congress party and the bureaucracy. He cherished and respected Parliament and paid close attention to its views. He set up important parliamentary committees, some such as the influential Estimate Committee in teeth of official hostility. He set up consultative committees, in which members of Parliament of all political parties had opportunities to discuss and generate new departmental policies. He encouraged debates on important issues and helped create both informed public opinion and consensually based policies. On several occasions, Parliament spoke for the nation and surprised the government, of which the reaction to the ‘Voice of America’ deal in 1963 and the debates of Nehru’s China policy were good examples. While all this was most valuable, Parliament had its obvious limits. It did not and could not implement policies, nor monitor their implementation, and hence its role was and remained largely critical, censorial and regulative. Its interest in any subject was necessarily episodic, fragmentary, discontinuous and to some extent partisan. Had Nehru not regarded the separation of powers as a sacred dogma, and had he involved Parliament in the general running of the country by bringing it into sustained and institutionalised contacts with government departments, the picture might have been different. He did try to do so on a couple of occasions but gave in to ministerial resistance. In the early years, Nehru’s cabinet consisted of the stalwarts of the independence movement who had their own ideas on how the country should move towards its agreed goals, and who did not hesitate to disagree with him. Once they were gone, he tended to appoint ‘quiet and rather colourless men of uncertain ability and distinction whose merit has been to avoid giving or taking offence.’” Increasingly, cabinet meetings became like tutorials, with Nehru doing most of the talking. The Cabinet ceased to be a centre of creative and independent thought and had little political weight or influence. The Congress party was the third institution available to Nehru. Gandhi, who had played a great role in shaping its structure and organisational culture, was anxious to ensure that it did not become a

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

37

political party in the conventional sense. As such, it had a distinct character. First, it was based not on a clearly defined set of political goals but on such general moral ideals as national regeneration, high personal morality and, above all, national independence. It was a moral, not a narrowly political, organisation. Second, it was a national body representing and admitting all Indians, not a party of ideological faithfuls. Third, it ran a wide range of social, economic and other activities in a tendem and was not merely political. Fourth, it permitted maximum independence to its members, including the right to disagree with its policies, and remained as loosely structured as Hinduism. Fifth, it permitted like-minded individuals to form formal and informal organisations within it, to act as pressure groups, and lacked strong organisational unity and discipline. Sixth, it allowed outside bodies including other political parties to operate within it, influence its policies and to participate in its activities and campaigns. Finally, the Congress was a movement constantly reaching out to and recruiting new groups, not a closed party limited to a specific constituency. Gandhi was convinced that though the Congress constituted along these lines was necessary during the independence struggle, it was ill-suited afterwards. While the other political parties were free to compete for power, he wanted it to remain an independent and non-partisan organisation keeping a critical watch on the government and attending to the vital task of social reform. The bulk of Congress rejected Gandhi’s advice. Since the Congress was continued in its earlier form after independence, Nehru had to decide on its structure and role. So far as the structure was concerned, he could have turned the Congress into a conventional political party and created a disciplined, cadrebased organisation united in terms of and committed to carrying out a clearly stated ideological programme. Or he could have kept it as it was—a loose organisation of diverse interests exercising minimal discipline and making minimal demands on its members. Or he could have combined the chief merits of both and turned it into a disciplined and cadre-based but open and expanding organisation committed to the goals of his ‘national philosophy’.” As for its role, again, he had three alternatives integrally related to but not necessarily determined by the three alternative models of organisational structure. He could have used it as a vehicle for winning elections, training leaders, providing coherence to and a check on

38

Bhikhu Parekh

the government, and sorting out internal party disputes. Or he could have used it as a general sounding board and a channel of diffused interaction between the government and its supporters. Or he could have turned it into a powerful tool of social transformation acting as a bridge between the state and society, generating new ideas and policies, mobilising the masses, and recruiting such

excluded groups as the poor and the rural and urban proletariat who were all sympathetic to his socialist ideas. Nehru was not an organiser and his political imagination and courage in that were limited. At the structural level, he did not want the Congress to become a conventional party for some, though by no means all, of the reasons that had weighed with Gandhi. He would have liked to adopt the third alternative but lacked the time, inclination and, above all, the required skill. He

therefore left it more or less as he had inherited it. As for its role, it is striking that Nehru gave little time and thought to the subject and said very little about it either in his major pre-independence writings or in his hundreds of post-independence speeches. He vaguely hinted at the third alternative but did not follow it up. He preferred the first but did not have the skill to build up the appropriate organisational structure. He therefore settled on the second alternative. After his bitter conflict with Sardar Patel, he became wary of giving the Congress much importance. Thanks to the earlier departure of the socialist and other progressive elements, he felt encircled by the right wing elements within it and found an additional reason for ignoring it. Since he knew that he could rely on his personal charisma to win elections, he did not need it as an electoral tool. He had already decided on the ‘national ideology’ and therefore did not have to rely on the Congress to generate new ideas. Since he increasingly found most of its members dull, reactionary and small-minded and felt socially uncomfortable with them, Nehru had little contact with them. For these other reasons, he thought it prudent to keep the Congress more or less as it was and to assign it little political role. After this conflict with Sardar Patel over the election of Tandon, Nehru resolved upon a contradictory course of action. He feared the power and interference of Congress and sought total control over it. But, since he did not have a very effective role for it, his

power did not have much positive use. He more or less completely took Congress over, becoming and remaining its president for

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

39

several years and later handing it over to his trusted lieutenants. He subordinated its organisational wing to the ministerial one and insisted that government ministers at all levels were not responsible to it but only to the electorate. Decisions as to who should contest elections and from which constituencies were made by the high command in Delhi. The Congress admitted all and sundry except the known communalists and remained a loose and flabby organisation, a party of parties permitting a wide variety of factions, bound by nothing more tenuous than a vague commitment to the ‘national ideology’. Not surprisingly, Congress ministers in different states and even at the centre spoke in discordant voices. The results were predictable. In the absence of a mediating and reconciling agency between the state and society, the state lacked a mass base and remained remote and insensitive to people’s moods. Nehru was acutely aware of this, but did and indeed could

do little. The organisational wing, which had the responsibility to organise elections and mobilise mass support but no political power, became demoralised. The ministerial wing, which had power but was neither accountable to nor checked by the party, tended to become arrogant and corrupt. Even as early as 1948, Nehru began to complain that the Congress was ‘losing all values and sinking into the sordidness of opportunist politics.’ Three years later he remarked, ‘I have felt recently as if Iwas in a den of wild animals.’ Charges of corruption became so common that he found it timeconsuming to separate the valid and worth investigating from the malicious and flimsy, and either dismissed them out of hand or demanded impossible standards of proof. Differences and quarrels within the party, between the state governments and between them and the centre, which would normally have been internally resolved by a well-organised party, were constantly brought to him and took up a good deal of his time and energy. Not surprisingly, he increasingly complained of being ‘smothered by routine’, feeling ‘stale and tired’, and being out of touch with the mood of the country and his party.” While Gandhi understood the importance of the Congress party, especially its organisational wing, but not of the state, Nehru made the opposite mistake. He failed to appreciate the indispensable ideological, pedagogical, disciplinary and organisational role of a political party in a vast, diverse, divided and poor country with only a weak and recent tradition of exercising impersonal power.

40.

Bhikhu Parekh

As a result and often against his own wishes, political life became highly personalised, and ‘After Nehru, who?’ was one of the most frequently asked questions. He did not fully realise either that the ‘national ideology’ needed an organisational bearer capable of nurturing, debating, clarifying and propagating it. In the absence of such a party the ideology remained vague, diffused and tended to degenerate into an empty rhetoric. Since only Nehru knew what the ‘national ideology’ meant, no one could challenge his interpretation of it, and thus he remained

above

criticism.

None

of his

successors understood the crucial role of the Congress either, with the result that it became over time little more than a recruiting ground for careerists and sychophants. Since Nehru rejected the Congress as the major tool of social

transformation women,

and filled the Cabinet

with mediocre

men

and

and since Parliament had its obvious limits, he relied on

bureaucracy as the central state agency for modernising India. His reasons for doing so were several. It posed no political threat to him. It consisted of Westernised men and women and thus had the ‘right’ ideas and ethos. It was professionally trained and had integrity. And if its training was found inadequate, Nehru thought that he could easily put that right. Since it attracted some of the most talented people in the country, it also represented the best available ‘human material’. Nehru also thought that since the bureaucracy had a well-developed system of self-discipline and was subject to constant ministerial, parliamentary and public scrutiny, it could not for long remain corrupt and inefficient. While Nehru was right up to a point and, with the exception of Sardar

Patel, understood

the state-building

role of bureaucracy

better than almost all the other nationalist leaders, he overestimated its virtues and role in the Indian context. The Indian bureaucracy was a legacy of the raj and was rigidly hierarchical. It was intensely jealous of its independence and hostile to public and even ministerial scrutiny and criticism. It saw itself as the embodiment of rationality and neutrality in an ‘obscurantist’ and factious society and treated the latter as a passive material to be moulded as it thought proper. Not surprisingly, it was suffused with the spirit of elitism, arrogance, insularity and omniscience. Not that Nehru was unaware of this. Ever since he entered public life in the 1920s, he had repeatedly attacked the ICS (Indian Civil Service) as ‘quintessentially. colonial,’ a concentrated reflection of most that was wrong with the raj. As he put it:

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

41

But of one thing I am quite sure, that no new order can be built up in India so long as the spirit of the ICS pervades our administration and our public services. That spirit of authoritarianism is the ally of imperialism, and it cannot co-exist with freedom. Therefore it seems to me quite essential that the ICS and similar services must disappear completely, as such, before we can start real work on a new order. Individual members of these services . will be welcome,

but only on new conditions.”

Nehru kept repeating the criticism and pressing for ‘fundamental’ and ‘democratic’ changes throughout his years in power but did little. In 1964 there were still about 160 ICS officers in senior posts in Delhi and elsewhere, broadly continuing the old style of administration. The IAS (Indian Administrative Service) was growing fast and had by then 2,100 officers, mestly in comparatively junior posts. Nehru seems to have taken little interest in them or their training, nor did he annually address the new recruits as a matter

of policy.“ He himself admitted shortly before his death that his ‘greatest failure’ consisted in not transforming the administrative machinery; ‘it is still a colonial administration’ and ‘one of the main causes of India’s inability to solve the problem of poverty.’” In the Discovery Nehru had stressed the need to embed the state in the cultural life of society. The masses could not be energised and their emotional resources mobilised, he had argued, without activating their ‘historical memories’ and appealing to their ‘subconscious mind’ by a skilful use of culturally evocative images, symbols and myths. On becoming Prime Minister he ignored his own advice. The bureaucracy on which he heavily relied was hardly in a position to activate India’s cultural resources. That was not its function, at least Nehru did not think so. And in any case its whole training and ethos were in the opposite direction. Had he paid greater attention to its training or at least replaced the colonial system of education,

of which

the IAS was a product, with one

rooted in Indian history and traditions, he would have gone some way towards giving the bureaucracy and the new Indian state a measure of cultural depth. Nehru’s statism was psychologically underpinned by and a political concomitant of a deep streak of racial inferiority from which he never managed fully to free himself. A poignant example beautifully captures the point. Since the British, especially the BBC, often ‘misspelt and mispronounced’ his name and found its

42

Bhikhu Parekh

length ‘terrifying’, he got ‘fed up’ with it. In despair he wrote to Krishna Menon in 1937, ‘Unfortunately I cannot change my name but I propose to make a slight change in the way it is written.’ He decided to split it into Jawahar and Lal! It is striking that rather than laugh at or ignore the incompetence of the BBC, he felt depressed about his name! This was symptomatic of and shadowed by a deep sense of unease at his country’s sorry state and its alleged inability to regenerate itself without foreign help. He largely accepted the hostile Orientalist view of India in preference to the alternative advocated by Gandhi and others and to which he was attracted in moments of defiance. However hard he tried to resist it, the gnawing feeling of racial inferiority remained. Indian independence did not exercise or even abate that feeling. As its Prime Minister he paid undue attention to and was guided by the advice and opinions of foreign commentators. Anxious that foreigners especially the British should think well of India, he went out of his way to give interviews, some inordinately long, to

foreign visitors even when they had little influence or power in their countries. Jayaprakash Narayan was guilty of only slight exaggeration when he accused him of valuing ‘foreigners’ chits’ far more than the considered opinions of even his ablest countrymen.” In his speeches and letters to chief ministers, Nehru made repeated references to foreign press comments on state governments’ violations of civil liberties or ill-treatment of specific individuals. His constant concern that India should ‘catch up’ with the West, ‘keep apace’ with the ‘spirit of the age’, and be noticed and admired by the world owed its origin to several factors, of which the sense of racial inferiority was one. The humiliated India yearned for equality with the West. That involved judging itself by the standards of the West and becoming like it as quickly as possible. That in turn involved a massive programme of modernisation under the tutelage of the State.

The paradoxical nature of this enterprise was not lost on a man as proud and reflective as Nehru. In trying to secure equality with the West by becoming like it, India implicitly conceded its cultural inferiority and heteronomy. From time to time he therefore insisted that India should not ‘merely copy’ the West and become authentic, true to itself, and make its ‘distinctive’ contribution to the world. That implied that India had a historical identity, a distinct system

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

43

of values, an outlook uniquely its own. But in that case, it is these that had to form the basis of its regeneration either by themselves Or in conjunction with appropriate borrowings from the West. Nehru could not consistently talk of India’s contribution to the world and also embark on a comprehensive modernist programme. When

he spoke

to the world,

he referred

to India’s

‘unique’

civilisation and heritage with great pride; but when he spoke to his countrymen, he only sang praises of the modern West. This systematic ambivalence was inescapable. Like many a nationalist leader he was deeply ambiguous in his attitude to India’s past, largely inclined to take a dim view of it yet intellectually, emotionally and politically unprepared for that. Nehru then sought to build India from top downwards. This was evident in all areas of public policy. In politics the state was the centre of national life. Within the state the central government was dominant. And within it Nehru, helped by the elite administrative service,

played the decisive

role. In the economic

realm central

planning and the public sector were the major instruments of modernisation. And within the public sector, heavy industries and huge irrigation projects were assigned a crucial transformative role. In the field of education Nehru concentrated on universities and institutes of advanced research and training. In the cultural arena he concentrated on the ‘high culture’ of the elite and set up literary, artistic and other academies. He sought to foster a ‘scientific temper’ among his countrymen not by setting up countless small centres of scientific education all over the country or by improving school laboratories, but by establishing such elite and centralised institutions as the five Indian Institutes of Technology and about thirty research laboratories. The expenditure on scientific research shot up from Rs. 24 million in 1947 to Rs. 550 million in 1964. In all walks of life and in all organisations Nehru relied on the elite to ‘leaven the masses’ and to set the tone and pace of development. He was convinced that in a degenerate society with substandard ‘human material’, a few enlightened men wielding political power offered the only hope of change. The belief in the so-called trickle-down effect was not confined to the economy but became the governing principle of a// areas of organised life.

44

Bhikhu Parekh

Vv The great gains of the Nehruvian model were obvious. It held the country together during the aftermath of the Partition, and created a sense of national unity strong enough to give him the confidence to concede the linguistic reorganisation of India. It contained the virus of communalism and gave the country a strong secular orientation. It laid the foundations of a vigorous liberal democracy, built up vital legal and political institutions, gave federalism a good start and involved opposition parties in the conduct of public affairs. Nehru built up the scientific, educational, administrative, industrial and technological infrastructure necessary for India’s autonomous economic development and launched it on its way to becoming one of the major industrial powers. By setting up an extensive public sector, he gave the state an economic base and a powerful economic presence which ensured its autonomy and guarded it against blackmail and manipulation by organised interests. And by recognising the vital role of the private sector, he secured its fullest cooperation and developed a healthy model of mixed economy encouraging initiative and enterprise within a carefully monitored framework. He saw to it that the consciousness of democratic rights permeated all sections of society and gave them a sense of dignity, power and stake in the new polity. By constantly accommodating new groups within the political process, he encouraged the hope that the system was open, unbiased and, given time, capable of serving the interests of those currently excluded. Nehru’s model, however, was one-sided, and that became a source of many of its problems. Since all political initiative and power were concentrated in the state, the various sources of political power that Gandhi had opened up and the several channels that he had dug for its smooth flow dried up. The state was the only conduit through which various parts of society related to one another and was a party to all disputes and conflicts. It therefore became the sole centre of all political ambitions and energies and an arena of powerful ideological passions. Predictably the nascent Indian state, still struggling to set up a robust institutional infrastructure, became overheated and congested. Though Nehru’s personal charisma acted as a great shock-absorber and deflected and diffused sources of tension, it was clear that troubles were being stored up for the future.

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

45

Under Nehru’s top-downwards model of development, the state also became increasingly isolated from society. It was seen as the sole agent of change and the only source of initiative, energy and new ideas. By contrast, society was considered passive, degenerate, a dark region inhabited by wild passions, blind faith, and ‘obscurantist’ and ‘reactionary’ ideas. Since Nehru had ignored the Congress and demoted the cabinet, the bureaucracy took over the mantle of the state and saw itself as the sole guardian of its collective interests. However, as he himself pointed out, it was

dominated by a ‘colonial mentality’ and unable to motivate, mobilise and involve the masses in the development task. It could not execute the vast task on its own and proved inefficient. Increasingly it also became corrupt. Between 1956 and 1964 over 80,000 complaints were registered with the Administrative Vigilance Division in the Home Ministry. As many as 63,000 of these were found worth investigating. Major penalties were imposed on over 6,000 government servants and minor penalties on just under 57,000. Nehru knew that the bureaucracy desperately needed to be reformed but took little interest in the subject and, when he did, he lacked

an alternative source of organised power with which to counter its fierce resistance. Since agriculture did not occupy an important place in Nehru’s view of the world, it received inadequate funds. The First Plan allo-

cated just over 15 per cent of the total outlay to agriculture and community development, the Second 11 per cent, and the Third 14 per cent. Since community development contributed little to agricultural production, the amount devoted to the latter turns out to be even

lower. Furthermore, Nehru thought of peasantry almost entirely in terms of rich landlords and poor peasants, and had only a limited appreciation of the role of the small and middle peasantry. When the draft resolution on co-operative farming at the Nagpur Congress session in 1959 proposed that surplus land be vested in the panchayats of ‘landless labour and small peasants’, he had the reference to small peasants deleted. Nehru was also slow to appreciate the importance of land reforms, especially the security of tenure to tenants, smaller irrigation projects, redistribution of land and co-operative farming. He thought that as in Europe industrialisation would spill over into and transform agrarian relations, and that the latter, being condemned to change under the ‘inexorable’ historical process, did not have to be directly attacked. When he

46

Bhikhu Parekh

later realised that that was not happening, he advocated land reforms but was defeated by the conservative landed interests which had by then acquired considerable power in the Congress. Furthermore, co-operative farming, on which he insisted, had no relevance in the context of unequal landholdings and a vast mass of landless labour. The farmers who had taken over from the zamindars were not prepared to merge their newly acquired estates in a joint enterprise, and such co-operatives as did exist were exploited by a small number of families to their advantage.

Nehru had stressed both economic growth and equitable redistribution. He now found that while the former was proceeding at a satisfactory rate, the latter was nowhere in sight. Indeed economic growth intensified the existing inequalities, swelled the ranks of the poor and unemployed, and made India a deeply divided and unstable society. The big bourgeoisie, some sections of the petty bourgeoisie, and the upper and middle peasantry improved their prospects, but the landless labourers, poor peasants and the industrial workers gained little. Prosperity did trickle down, but only to a limited degree. The newly rich middle classes were intensely greedy and most reluctant to share their gains. Nehru had set out to build socialism but found that he had done little more than broaden the base of capitalism, leaving intact almost all the evils he had attacked before independence. He found too that a small modern sector had absorbed most of the savings and starved the rest of the economy of vital resources. When the cumulative impact of these and other consequences became evident around the late 1950s, Nehru was worried. To his great credit, he welcomed and himself asked critical questions about his model of development and started revising it in several important respects. He was too convinced of the importance of the state to opt for the alternative Gandhian model of partnership between it and society. But he recognised that the state needed to be opened up, embedded in the daily lives of its people, and reconstructed on a participatory basis. He was unpersuaded by the loosely co-ordinated and bottomup neo-Gandhian model of development advocated by J.P. Narayan, Vinoba Bhave and others. He rightly thought that it fragmented the country, underestimated the role of the elite and the political parties, ignored the importance of industrialisation, higher education and scientific research, and displayed the traditional Indian tendency to turn its back on the world. He did, however, appreciate that the

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

47

neo-Gandhian model was right to emphasise the importance of the areas he had neglected and that the bottom-up development could be used to complement his model. Accordingly, he embarked upon a series of new policy initiatives. From the mid-fifties the Community Development Programme had been under way. It was initiated on a small scale under the guidance of American foundations and later extended with the help of funds from the American government. Though the Nehru government had welcomed it, it did not assign much transformative importance to it. As the reports by the Project Evaluation Organisation, individual investigators and finally by the Balwantray Mehta team pointed out, the Programme remained confined to a small area—covering barely a quarter of the rural population in 1956—and was bureaucratic and rigid. Instead of stimulating self-help, it had increased dependence on the government. And far from helping the weaker sections of society, it had been exploited by the dominant groups. The way to deal with all this, the critics argued, was to integrate the Community Development Programme into a new system of fully democratic local government. Nehru welcomed the idea. Local bodies at the village, block and district levels were now given considerable political power, including the power to control the regular and community development officials. Thanks to the new mood of the time and replacement of an American-inspired programme by one with indigenous roots, not only the political but also the administrative vocabulary changed. The new system was called panchayati raj, a strange but historically evocative term, one part of which pointed to traditional India and the other to the modern. The block development officer was now called vikas adhikari and such terms as panchayat samiti and zila parishad came into vogue. Nehru liked and popularised the new vocabulary and pressured state governments to introduce the new system of local government. Between 1959 and 1962 the number of block development officers and village local workers increased nearly threefold. In their work and orientation they were like Gandhi's samagra gramsevaks, working closely with the masses and both educating and in turn being educated by them. Nehru, who had begun to appreciate the importance of the Community Development Programme and had created a fullfledged Ministry of Community Development in 1956, now became

48

Bhikhu Parekh

an enthusiastic advocate of the panchayati raj. It was a truly ‘revolutionary movement’; it ‘strengthened India at its very roots’, ‘vitalised’ democratic institutions at higher levels, prepared millions to ‘shoulder public responsibility’, and encouraged local initiative and self-reliance. ‘I have full confidence in its success, because I have full confidence in the Indian people.’ He went on, ‘we must give power to the people even though it leads to hell.’ The village communities, which he had often ridiculed, were now seen as the

basis of new India and a source of its regeneration. They knew the local situation better than the ‘experts in Delhi’ and were wellequipped to discipline the arrogant, inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy.”” Hitherto Nehru had functioned within the framework of and been content to democratise the colonial state. He now saw the need to radically redesign it in harmony with Indian conditions and traditions. As the villages grew in political importance, they gained greater economic and cultural recognition. Nehru now began to assign agriculture greater importance than hitherto. ‘I am all for industry, I am all for steel plants . . . but I do say agriculture is far more important than any industry.’ Agriculture had to be the ‘first and essential’ component, indeed the ‘basis’ of the new strategy of economic development. ‘In India almost everything begins with agriculture . . .; industry itself depends on the growth of agriculture . . .; out of agriculture grows industry.’” He condemned the ‘disease of giganticism’, with which he had himself been hitherto infected. He thought that the large dams on which he had so far relied were too expensive, used up a lot of foreign exchange, took a long time to complete, and yielded little except electric power and limited irrigation. He now preferred little power stations and small scale irrigation projects. He observed: For sometime past, however, I have been beginning to think that we are suffering from what we may call ‘disease of giganticism’... . This is a dangerous outlook developing in India. I think that while, inevitably, we shall have to undertake big schemes or tasks in this country, we should always remember that it is the ten thousand small tasks that count ultimately much more than a few big ones. It is, as you also referred to it, Mr. President, the small irrigation projects, the small industries and the small plants for electric power, which will change the face of

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

49

the country, far more than half a dozen big projects in half a dozen places. Again, I am not, for instance, saying that we should not have big projects . . . . I merely wish, if I can, to replace the balance in our thinking, which has shifted too much towards gigantic schemes . . . . But this is all the relic of giganticism to which we have fallen a prey. We have to realise that we can also meet our problems much more rapidly and efficiently by taking up a large number of small schemes, especially when the time involved in a small scheme is much less and the results obtained are rapid. Further, in those small schemes you can get a good deal of what is called public co-operation, and therefore, there is much social value in associating people with such small schemes.”! Nehru now stressed not only the importance but also new models of land reforms. Land reforms were required not only on moral but also on economic grounds. As Wolf Ladejinsky of the Ford Foundation pointed out to him, granting tenants ownership rights and security of tenure increased productivity. Nehru was convinced; he urged his party to campaign for them and asked the state governments to enact appropriate legislation. He saw too that landholdings did not have to be large in order to be optimally productive and pointed to the example of Japan where small holdings produced high yields. As if disowning his own past, he observed, ‘the fact of the matter is that we, all of us who talk so much, have not got out

of the old zamindari mentality. We think in terms of large acres, large areas.’” The appreciation of the importance of agriculture went hand in hand with its cultural revaluation. For long Nehru had viewed it as a culturally inferior activity to be attached to the coat tails of the historically progressive industry: he had regarded the peasantry as a narrow-minded, fatalistic and reactionary group, only fit to follow the lead given by the Westernised middle classes and the industrialists. Not surprisingly, the peasantry had felt devalued and slighted, a disturbing experience for a group that had played an important part in and enjoyed high cultural and political visibility during the struggle for independence. It now began to be treated with respect and referred to by the evocative name of kisan (whose cousin the jawan was also now acquiring importance). Neither idealised as the custodian of the traditional civilisation as Gandhi had done,

50

Bhikhu Parekh

nor regarded as the enemy of the modern as Nehru had hitherto done, it was now viewed as a rational and calculating agent responding to financial incentives and capable of making proper use of state help and scientitic inputs. Its problems and needs attracted as much attention as those of the industrialists from politicians, civil servants,

scientists,

technologists

and financial

institutions.

The

result was the beginning of the ‘green revolution’ which banished the food scarcity endemic during most of the Nehru era. In this changed perspective Nehru began to appreciate the importance of primary education to which he had hitherto paid only limited attention. Ignoring it so long was ‘a tragedy, nothing short of a tragedy. I do not wish to use milder terms because the whole progress of India depends on the educational apparatus working from the bottom to the top.’ The keenly expected trickledown effect had not materialised because the poor lacked the ability to take advantage of the opportunities offered to them. Primary education provided part of the answer. It created a body of literate and well-informed citizens capable of standing up for their rights and not easily duped by the skilful middlemen. ‘I am convinced that it is better to do without some industrial growth than to do without adequate education at the base.” Nehru also began to stress the importance of the Congress party which he had hitherto ignored. It had a vital role to play, he said, in educating and mobilising the masses, and was not just an electoral

machine but an ‘agent of social transformation’. It brought the state and society together into a ‘fertilising contact’ and ensured that the former was never out of touch with the masses. It was ideally equipped to propage the ‘national ideology’ among the youth and to harness their énergies to the cause of national regeneration. Only a strong Congress could hold together such a vast and diverse country as India and provide an effective check on the government.

The Congress therefore had to be ‘revitalised’, built

up from bottom-upward and fashioned into a ‘self-disciplined’ and ‘cadre-based’ organisation. Its ideological and organisational basis had to be strengthened, and political energies and ambitions directed away trom office-seeking. Accordingly, he now insisted that its

organisational wing was just as important as, indeed more important than, the ministerial wing. One served the country not merely by occupying a government office but also by building up the party and working amongst the people. Not the state alone but the party

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

51

and the people were also sources of political power. It was in this context that Nehru eagerly welcomed the Kamaraj plan. It did, of course, enable him to get rid of Moraji Desai and others, but there

is no reason to disbelieve him when he said that ‘it was an ideal taking hold of the mind and growing by self.”“ He had been stressing the importance of the organisational work for some years past especially after the Sino-Indian war of 1962, the gains of the Swatantra party in the 1962 elections only three years after its birth, and the Congress losses in three by-elections in 1963. Nehru also now began to stress socialism more than he had done so far and to give it a more specific content.” The resolution on ‘Democracy and Socialism’ passed at the annual Congress session at Bhuvaneshwar in January 1964, just five months before his death, was a striking example of this. The Congress now reiterated its claim to work for ‘a revolution in the economic and social relationships in Indian society’ and the elimination of ‘privilege, disparities and exploitation’. It demanded ‘limitation of incomes and property in private hands’, especially ‘inherited wealth and urban property’, urged ‘much’ heavier taxes on unearned income, and stopped just short of committing itself to bank nationalisation. It pressed for a further expansion of the public sector, ‘particularly in the field of heavy and basic industry as well as trade in essential commodities’, and reaffirmed its usual commitment to land reforms.

_Realising that all this by itself did not mean much to the common man, the Congress committed itself to providing ‘a national minimum comprising the essential requirements in respect of food, clothing, housing, education and health’ by the end of the Fifth Five Year Plan. Rarely before had the Congress passed such a detailed, specific and radical resolution. Not that it amounted to very much in practice, but it was indicative of Nehru’s changed mood. A fine sense of historical continuity missing since 1947 now began to make an appearance, and Nehru increasingly stressed the need to link the country’s past and future. He attacked ‘rootless’ and ‘glib modernisers’, and insisted that wherever possible new institutions and practices should be related to and built on the foundations of the old. He urged that India’s traditional village communities could form the ‘basis’ of panchayati raj and cooperative farming. Each country, he argued, had ‘a certain special peculiarity and special genius.’ ‘Progress is easiest made if you are

52

Bhikhu Parekh

in tune

with that national

genius’, and India was no exception.

Over centuries it had developed ‘certain special traits’. If they were ignored or discarded, it would lose its bearings and roots, and ‘an uprooted individual or a group or a race gradually loses vitality.’ At the same time India also needed to assimilate the new and keep abreast of the world. That involved a ‘synthesis between what we consider of value in the old and... in the new.’ The central problem for the country was how to become modern without becoming ‘rootless and sapless’.” Nehru even began to talk of spirituality which he had stressed in the Discovery but discarded on coming to power. Science was important but it lacked wisdom, humility, a feel for the finer side of human

nature, and a sense of the unity of all life. It therefore

needed to be ‘supplemented’ by spirituality.” Science without spirituality was ‘lost’ and ‘stopped at the atom bomb’; spirituality without science was ‘confused’ and became esoteric and ‘mystical’. Modern age needed the ‘marriage of the two’. After 1961 Nehru kept repeating Vinoba Bhave’s ‘arresting’ remark that religion should be replaced by spirituality and that the latter be made the basis of science.* Nehru thought this an ‘interesting approach with which personally I respectfully agree.’ He said that as he grew older, he found himself moving away from Marx and drawing closer to the Buddha and Gandhi.

VI During the last few years of his life then Nehru was busy revising his earlier model of development. He saw that both the top and the base, the state and society, the elite and the masses, the universities and the primary schools, the big projects and small, the heavy as well as small industries, the past and the future were equally important and needed to be brought into a creative partnership. India could not be developed unless the complementary bottom-up and top-down processes were integrated, economic development run in a tandem with extensive cultural and social reforms, and modern institutions embedded in suitably regenerated indigenous values and practices. Accordingly, he reconsidered his old policies and priorities and planned several new initiatives. He was by now too old and tired and too deeply saddened by the SinoIndian war to have the energy.to articulate a new model. However,

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

53

he had begun to map out its broad outlines which Lal Bahadur Shastri largely followed and built upon. There was no radical break between Nehru and Shastri. The older and wiser Nehru had himself begun to make the break and paved the way of his successor’s new strategy of development. Nehru then had begun to move from uncritical to critical modernism, from a mechanical and indiscriminate adoption of the Western

model and path of modernisation to one sensitive to the history, habits and values of his countrymen. His critical modernism had greater moral and cultural depth and was able to activate their traditional skills and resources. Although the older Nehru’s vocabulary and politics brought him closer to the critical traditionalists like Gandhi, important differences remained. While Gandhi had sought to modernise tradition, Nehru was largely interested in

traditionalising modernity. The two shared several ideas and concerns in common, but their basic assumptions, starting points and long-term goals remained quite different. The older Nehru showed greater sensitivity to India’s cultural identity, placed greater confidence in its people, and paid greater attention to the need to build up the base than he had done hitherto. However he remained as hostile towards the end of his political life as he had been at the beginning to Gandhi's uncritical glorification of the traditional Indian civilisation and an equally uncritical condemnation of the modern. He saw more clearly than Gandhi that India’s traditional resources were far more exiguous than Gandhi and the critical traditionalists liked to believe, and the modern civilisation had far more to offer to India than they liked to admit. Gandhi had prophesied that after his death Nehru would speak his language. He was right, but only partially. The current ‘crisis of modernisation’ is not new to India. Nehru faced it over three decades ago and has left behind a body of insights, suggestive and useful though characteristically ambiguous and uncoordinated. He realised after a decade in office that uncritical or mindless modernisation—later favoured by his daughter in her second post-emergency incarnation and by his grandson— was not a desirable or even practical option for India. He personally preferred critical modernism, but he also developed a measure of sympathy for critical traditionalism. His ambiguity is deeply suggestive. It would seem that the very search for a single model and path of modernisation is itself a part of the ideology of uncritical modernism and deserves to be reconsidered. Both the Indian

54

Bhikhu Parekh

society and the project of modernisation are too complex to permit India to opt for a single and exclusive model and a set of simple and unambiguous choices. Its model must remain a disciplined but open-ended conversation between the differently structured but overlapping and partially complementary discourses of critical modernism and critical traditionalism, each checking the excesses and fertilising the insights of the other.

Notes

. For a detailed discussion, see my Colonialism,

Tradition and Reform (Delhi:

Sage, 1989), ch. 2. For a further discussion, see ibid., pp. 63f.

Detailed work on why M.N. Roy, J.P., and others moved from their earlier Marxist model of development towards a more indigenous and quasi-Gandhian one still remains to be done. Although the reasons varied from individual to individual, certain basic concerns were common to them all. . J. Nehru,

The Discovery

Memorial Fund Italics added.

of India (Delhi:

and distributed by Oxford

Published

by Jawaharlal

University Press,

Nehru

1985), p. SO.

Ibid., p. 49. Italics added.

Ibid., p. 54. Italics added. Ibid., pp. 56, 58, 59.

Ibid., p. 49. [bids pP.25: . Ibid., pp. S3f, 87f, 142, 178, 226, 247, S07, 509, 516, 517, 518, 526 & 563. See

also An Autobiography (London: Bodley Head, 1958), pp. 429f. . Ibid. . Discovery, pp. 221f. Nehru was aware that an analysis of national character was inevitably shaped by its context. Even as the jail acted as a ‘magnifying glass’ and heightened the prisoner's awareness of his weakness, ‘some such

effect worth 3), Ibid., 14. Ibid., 15. Ibid.,

is produced on the national character by foreign rule’ (ibid., p. 527). It is noting that almost all Nehru’s books were written in prison. pp. 144f, 225f, 252f and 517. p. 226. p. 267. Nehru’s view of Islam’s role in India in The Discovery is different

from that in the Glimpses of World History (Delhi: Oxford University Press,

1982). 16. Ibid., p. 264. Nis S. Gopal, ed., Jawaharlal Nehru: An Anthology (Delhi: Oxford Press, 1980), p. 31.

University

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Crisis of Modernisation

55

18. This point occurs not only in the Discovery but in almost all of Nehru’s writings. 19: Different nationalist leaders offered different accounts of Indian ‘personality’ and ‘character.’ Nehru had much to say on the subject which we cannot here discuss, except note that like them he too conceived India in feminine terms. However unlike them, he thought of India both as an old and wise mother and a ‘lovely,’ ‘beautiful,’ ‘enchanting’ and ‘proud’ young ‘lady’ of ‘legendary’ charm. See Discovery, p. 563 for a sensuous description of India as a ‘warm’ and ‘unconquered,’ but ‘occasionally perverse . . . sometimes even a little hysteric . . . lady with a past.’ Nehru was convinced that ‘the approach through affection produces tremendous reactions in Indian people’ and that that was the best way to deal with them. See B. Singh, ed., Jawaharlal Nehru on Science

and Society (Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 1986), p. 29. Nehru’s view that the ‘Indian personality’ has a strong feminine element is shared by such recent writers as Ashis Nandy and even Rajni Kothari. For Kothari, ‘the Indian personality is a very fine balance between the aggressive component of the human endeavour and the more feminine, soft, . . . conception.’ This was

written after the Emergency! It is worth noting that such a view of Indian personality is often associated with and even made the basis of a plea for a ‘soft’

and decentralised state. The modern ‘hard’ and ‘homogenising’ state is supposed to be meant only for the ‘masculine’ Westerners! See R. Kothari, Politics and People (Delhi: Ajanta Publishers,

1989), vol. II, p. 491.

20. Cited in B.R. Nayar, India’s Mixed Economy (London: Sangam, 1989), p. 158. ZA Nehru, Discovery, pp. 5OSf and 520f. a

W.H.

Morris-Jones,

The

Government

and

Politics of India

(Eothen

Press,

1987), p. 86. 230 For a discussion of what Nehru called ‘national philosophy’ or ‘ideology’ on which his model of development was based, see my ‘Nehru’s Conception of Politics’ in Indian Journal of Social Science, January (1990) and ‘Nehru and the

National Philosophy of India’ in Economic and Political Weekly, 5 January 1991. 24. In 1948 Nehru called corruption ‘rampant’ and a ‘problem of great magnitude.’ The complaint became bitter with the passage of time. See S. Gopal, ed., Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library,

1987), second series, vol. 6, pp. 37, 367, 438 and 439.

. Autobiography, p. 445. 26. Nehru does not seem to have addressed the new IAS recruits even once and generally asked Rajendra Prasad, Pandit Pant or someone else to do so. In the Journal of the National Academy of Administration published since 1956, there is nothing of consequence written by Nehru. See David Potter, ‘Nehru and the ICS/IAS,’ a paper presented at the Nehru seminar at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in November 1989 (mimeo). : Zips Nehru, Discovery, p. 358f. 28. In the course of arguing that the present national anthem should be preferred over its rival, Nehru referred to what had happened when it was played before an international gathering at Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. ‘It produced a sensation and the representatives of the foreign nations said that it was one of

56

Bhikhu Parekh the finest things as a national anthem they had heard. There was a tremendous demand for it among Americans as well as many others who were present.’ He went on, ‘We have consulted numerous eminent musicians including some of the biggest orchestra conductors in foreign countries’ (S. Gopal, ed., Selected Works, vol. 6, p. 282). Italics added.

29: Cited in S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), vol. III, p. 242f.

30. Ibid., p. 242. SH Singh, ed., Nehru on Science, p. 172. The speech was delivered in November 1958. 32s Cited in S. Gopal, A Biography, vol. II, p. 244. 33: Ibid., p. 243. 34. Ibid., p. 246f. Bs For a good discussion see Nayar, Mixed Economy, pp. 254f. 36. Singh, ed., Nehru on Science, pp. 189, 228f and 241f. 37. Ibid., pp. 77, 88 and 107. 38. Ibid., p. 88. Nehru addressed all the annual sessions of the Indian Science Congress with the exception of 1948 and 1961. An analysis of his fifteen speeches provides useful insights into the themes that interested him each year. The relation between science and spirituality dominated his speeches after 1959:

Three

The Doctrine of Swaraj in Gandhi's Philosophy Anthony J. Parel

I propose to argue in this chapter that the concept of swaraj holds the key to Mahatma Gandhi's political philosophy. This is not to minimise the importance of such doctrines as satyagraha, sarvodaya and non-violence, with which his name is rightly identified. What I am suggesting is that the significance and the effectiveness of these doctrines cannot be fully grasped unless they are placed within the framework of the concept of swaraj. Indeed when treated as though they stood by themselves, they can easily be misunderstood or misapplied. For only those who are capable of exercising real self-rule over themselves can put sarvodaya, satygraha and ahimsa into practice. As if to highlight the primacy of swaraj, Hind Swaraj, Gandhi's fundamental work in political philosophy, uses the very word in the title.

Swaraj and Home-Rule in Hind Swaraj Hind Swaraj is a short dialogue between an Editor and a Reader. The Editor stands for Gandhi. The Reader is actually a composite of several ‘readers’, four of whom

at least can be identified from

the internal evidence of the text: the Moderates and the Extremists of the Indian National Congress, the group Gandhi calls ‘the

58

Anthony J. Parel

nation’,

and

the Indian

terrorists.

The

Editor

and

the Reader

disagree on the nature of swaraj and home-rule—the one holding that real home-rule should be based on swaraj, the other disputing this. And it is in the course of the ensuing debate that the true meaning of swaraj and home-rule unfolds. Hind Swaraj is a book for the times and a treatise on political philosophy. As a book for the times it deals with issues affecting India at the turn of the century: the Congress movement (ch. 1), the partition of Bengal (chs. 2 and 3), the rise of the new middle class (chs. 11 and 12), the introduction of technology and modernisation (chs. 9 and 19), religious turmoil (chs. 7 and 10), the causes of colonisation (ch. 7), and the means of emancipation (ch. 14). The discussion of conditions in England (ch. 5) and Italy (ch. 15) also come under this rubric. Hind Swaraj as a political treatise deals with the age old questions of political philosophy: Who are we? How ought we live? How are we to be governed? Who ought to govern us? These questions are discussed in the context of a modern civilisation. This is accomplished by discussions on the nature of true and false civilisations (chs. 6 and 13), the nature of swaraj (ch. 4), of political violence (ch. 15), of satygraha (ch. 17) and of the educational system appropriate for a modern free society (ch. 18). The last chapter (20) proposes a programme of praxis consistent with the philosophical principles outlined above. The concept of self-government as used in Hindi Swaraj has a dual meaning. First, it means self-rule—of the individual by the individual; it is self-discipline and self-transformation or the metanoid that follows from it, and praxis consistent with both. Second, it means self-government—of the nation by the nation. It is political independence achieved and maintained through self-determination. Swaraj in the first sense is necessary for right human living at the personal level; self-government in the second sense is necessary for the right political ordering of a modern nation. While in the Gujarati text these two distinct meanings are conveyed by means of the same term, swaraj, in the English text they are conveyed by means of two different terms—swaraj in the first case and homerule in the second. The meaning of swaraj appears in a clearer and sharper light in the English text than it does in the Gujarati text.’ The consistency with which the distinction between the two terms is maintained is quite remarkable. It goes to show what a careful

The Doctrine of Swaraj in Gandhi's Philosophy

59

translator Gandhi has been. Those interested in getting an accurate picture of Gandhi’s meanings of these terms would do well to follow the English text. In attempting to answer the above questions and to clarify the meaning of the basic terms, Gandhi draws first of all from the resources of his own civilisation. Paradoxically, he was prompted to do so precisely because he had come into vital contact with modern Western civilisation. By virtue of the fact that he had lived in Britain and South Africa, he had a first hand understanding of the philosophy, institutions and practices of both British liberalism and British imperialism. Hind Swaraj is the outcome of that understanding, one of the most desirable outcomes in the twentieth century of East meeting West. The outcome has produced a fresh examination of fundamental questions concerning self-identity, national identity, ancient civilisation, modern civilisation, and self-

government. Simply put, the main thesis of the book is that homerule to be truly beneficial must be based on swaraj. What the modern notion of home-rule lacks is a basis in swaraj. And Hind Swaraj is nothing more than an attempt to show how the two may be harmonised. As everyone knows, swaraj is a protean Indian concept. Gandhi wrote in 1921: ‘The word Swaraj is a sacred word, a Vedic word,

meaning; self-rule and self-restraint, and not freedom from all restraint which “independence” often means.” His genius as a thinker and reformer enabled him to adapt this ancient concept to modern conditions and to endow it with new meaning and potentialities. Here, more than anywhere else, Gandhi proves himself to

be a political innovator of the first rank.

The Three Critiques To gain an uncluttered for Gandhi, we can do uses in the Hind Swaraj. present in the book: a and home-rule held by

idea of what swaraj and home-rule mean no better than make a close study of their These are embedded in the three critiques critique of the prevailing views on swaraj modernised Indians; a critique of modern

civilisation from which Indians derive their concept of home-rule;

and a critique of ancient Indian civilisation itself. These critiques form as it were the negative, often highly polemical, part of the

60

Anthony J. Parel

:

book. The positive part consists of the theory of swaraj, of its corollaries, non-violence and satyagraha, and of the principles whereby the theory may be put into actual practice. Turning to the first critique, the Indian National Congress (1885) had introduced the idea of home-rule into Indian politics. But by 1907 the Congress had split precisely on the issue of its meaning and the methods of attaining it. For the Moderates, home-rule meant autonomy of the type enjoyed by Canada and South Africa, that is, independence within the framework of the British constitution and the British empire. The means of attaining this status, it was argued, was the constitutional method of gradual reform of the existing machinery of the government of India. The Moderates had little or nothing to say about the inner dimensions of homerule; for them home-rule meant the constitutional arrangement of political power by the nation. _ The Extremists also understood by home-rule constitutional government but they differed from the Moderates on the question of the method of achieving it. Whereas the Moderates eschewed violence altogether, the Extremists were quite open to its use. They also believed that the physical withdrawal of the British from India was a necessary and sufficient requirement of true homerule. They would certainly want the complete physical withdrawal of the British; for the rest they would gladly retain their moral presence in India in the form of their political, economic, and military institutions. For the Extremists home-rule was rule of India by Indians. The questions of whether such a rule should be grounded on true swaraj did not seriously interest them. The book is also addressed to a group whom Gandhi calls ‘the nation’’—the new middle class which is desirous of home-rule but which belongs neither to the Moderate nor to the Extreme wings of the Congress. They include such groups as ‘doctors’, ‘lawyers’, and ‘the wealthy’. For them home-rule meant the establishment of the modern state that would satisfy their ambitions of becoming rich and powerful. They looked upon the modern professions not as a means of serving the nation but as means of their own selfaggrandisement. Thus, doctors pervert the ends of medicine: instead of seeing health as a balance of physical and mental health, they saw it in purely somatic terms and that too within the narrow scheme of wealth-making. They paid no attention to the need for temperance for good health and concentrated all their efforts on

The Doctrine of Swaraj in Gandhi's Philosophy

61

new medical technologies. The same distorted purpose characterised the modern legal profession: instead of promoting social peace they stimulated the spirit of litigation. For them, procedures of the law were more important than the substance of justice. Moreover, in Indian conditions, lawyers at the turn of the century had become the prop of colonial rule. The fourth group to whom the book is addressed is the knot of Indian terrorists living abroad, notably in London and Paris. By the turn of the twentieth century a significant segment of this group had become strongly attracted to ‘the philosophy of the bomb’. They were influenced by a hodgepodge of ideas originating in traditional religious fundamentalism, international Marxism, Russian nihilism and anarchism, and ultimately even Jacobin ter-

rorism. The role that armed violence had played in the Italian nationalist movement held a special fascination for them. Homerule for them meant self-government achieved through violence, assassinations, guerrilla warfare and the like. The preliminary conclusion that Gandhi reaches from the first

critique is that modern Indians understand home-rule in a wholly modern way. Instead of building home-rule on the foundations of swaraj, they have been trying rather pathetically to copy the West—mainly Britain, but also Italy and Japan. They are led to this by their wholly uncritical fascination with modern civilisation. The above realisation leads Gandhi to embark upon the second critique. Unless the mesmerised Indians can be shown what modern civilisation really stands for, there is no way of convincing them that what they were hankering after was not only alien but also potentially harmful. By modern civilisation he meant the modern industrial civilisation, resting on the multiple foundations of atheism, secularism, hedonism, egoistic individualism, rationalism, and the

idea of the modern state. Its concept of the self was confined largely to the notion of homo economicus; its ethic was derived mainly from political and economic liberalism. Its notion of rationality was defined in terms of instrumental reason, that is, reason at

the service of the passions, especially the passion for limitless accumulation and consumption. Its atheism discounted the human need for access to the divine; its secularism similarly made religion look either as an instrument of the state or as a form of superstition to be eliminated. Its hedonism grounded economics in human appetites, most notably those concerned with the acquisition and

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Anthony J. Parel

consumption of ‘property’. Its scientific individualism eliminated ‘social affection’ from economic and political affairs and installed in its place the notion of self-interest as the motor of progress and human development. Associated with all this was the cult of ‘machinery,’ that is, modern technology. Faith in the latter was as

self-augmenting as faith in consumerism. It is to Gandhi’s credit that by the turn of the twentieth century he had intuited the potential dangers inherent in modern technology—dangers that would threaten the physical health of the species, the purity of the environment, and of course human autonomy itself. The metaphors he uses to describe it are quite revealing: ‘snake-hole’, ‘craze’, ‘whirlwind’, ‘drift-net’, ‘the Upas tree’. ‘Machinery has begun to desolate Europe. Ruination is now knocking at the English gate. Machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilisation; it represents a great sin.‘ The general conclusion that Gandhi arrives at is that modern civilisation is a ‘disease’ of society, that it is civilisation only in name. ‘Under it the nations of Europe are becoming degraded and ruined day by day.” Unfortunately, the modern notion of home-rule uncritically accepts the principles of modern civilisation. But the critique of modern civilisation is not wholly negative; it is most important to bear this in mind, lest we identify Gandhi's position in wholly anachronistic terms. He was not pining for a long lost mythical past. What he is doing in Hivtd Swaraj is to make civilisation a humane environment for the development of the whole of humanity, not just the wealthy and the powerful. The correct Gandhian metaphor for modern civilisation is not ‘disease’ but ‘curable disease’: ‘Civilisation is not an incurable disease.” Hind Swaraj, in this respect, is a short treatise on ‘the malaise of modernity’,’ and Gandhi is one of its physicians. ‘He is a true physician who probes the cause of disease, and, if you pose as a physician for the disease of India, you will have to find out its true cause.”* And Gandhi thinks that in Hind Swaraj he has made the correct diagnosis. If the modern notion of home-rule is inadequate, and if modern technology is potenually harmful, what then are the new Indian elite to do? The answer to this question prompts the third critique. Not only must Indians take a critical look at modern civilisation, they must also take a similar look at their own traditional civilisation. They must discard without hesitation what is worthless but

The Doctrine of Swaraj in Gandhi's Philosophy

63

preserve what is worthwhile. The list of the things to be discarded is impressive indeed. It includes in the first place, the ancient regime of princely rule which he calls more tyrannical than the colonial rule.’ Secondly, it includes the ‘selfish and false religious teachers’, the mullahs, dasturs, and shastris who foment hatred and discord in the nation." It includes social abuses of all kinds,

especially those pertaining to women, such as child marriage, enforced widowhood, temple prostitution, polyandry, and niyoga."' Most remarkable of all, the list includes the traditional attitude towards labour, especially manual labour. Indians should discard the caste concept of labour and see in labour a universal means of levelling, humanising and regenerating society. The outward symbol of this new attitude would be what he calls ‘the sacred and ancient handloom.’” The third critique is absolutely essential for Gandhi’s argument. Without it his claim that Indian civilisation is preferable to modern civilisation would have lacked credibility totally. The critique strengthens his hand, for he has sifted the chaff from the wheat.

And what he has identified in Indian civilisation as worth preserving is none other than the concept of swaraj, and all that it entails. The latter includes the concept of the four purusharthas, the four great ends

of life—kama,

artha,

dharma,

and moksha;

respectively,

pleasure, wealth and power righteousness and the final self-realisation.

Of these, only the first three, he believes, belong to the

province of politics and political philosophy, while the fourth lies outside it. Even so, politics and political philosophy in his view ought to recognise it as the final end of all human striving. But politics per se is not the pursuit of moksha; politics in the strict sense is the ordering of kama and artha within the bounds of dharma. That is to say, pleasure, wealth and power are legitimate ends of human striving, but they must be striven after within a framework of righteous living. This vision of life, he feels, is the most valuable legacy of Indian civilisation, a legacy worth defending and incorporating into the modern notion of home-rule.

The Gandhian Anatomy of the Self At an elementary level of understanding, swaraj is self-rule, that is, the rule which the self exercises over itself. It is the right ordering of the various powers of the self. This raises the questions

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Anthony J. Parel

of what or who the self is. An inquiry into the nature of self or selfknowledge then becomes the starting point of the theory of swaraj. The need for true self-knowledge has special urgency for Gandhi precisely because modernity tends to present a distorted picture of the true self. Modern politics presents the self as a relentless competitor for and a rational accumulator and consumer of ‘property’. It considers all desires as worth pursuing so long as they are freely chosen, and so long as in pursuing them no harm is done to others. The modern self lives, moves and has its being in the closed circle of rational egoism and rational choice. And home-rule in the modern sense means using the coercive instrumentalities of the state for the preservation and the fostering of this conception of the self. It is the above conception of the self, the typically modern conception of it, that Gandhi's doctrine of the swaraj calls into question. He would like to modify this conception with the insights received largely from Indian civilisation. In this regard he relies mostly on the Bhagavad Gita; but the latter is supplemented at crucial points with ideas gathered from elsewhere, for example, the New Testament, Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreau, Emerson, Rajchand, Vaishnava and Jain devotional literature, and the poet

Tulsidas. According to the Gita there are two aspects to the self: the self in itself, the atman, the imperishable substratum of our being; and the embodied self, the dehin, the spatio-temporal self joined to the psychosomatic organism comprising body, senses, mind and soul. The main focus of the Gita is of course final self-realisation—the process by which the embodied self realises that fundamentally it is an atman that is not distinct from Brahman, the Universal Being. As one critic puts it, final self-realisation means ‘the felt experience of the self as timeless monad and particle of God’ which is the result of the ‘absorption of all the powers of the human personality into the self.’'’ But while yet in the embodied state ‘the self is at war with itself.’ That is to say, if the self and its ‘ally’, the soul, fail to restrain the mind, and the mind in turn fails to curb the senses, there is bound to be regression.'* However that may be, in itself the atman ‘is merely a spectator at a play enacted by the body, mind, soul, and the senses. This means spiritual freedom, the reverse is bondage.’ The anatomy of the self as found in Hind Swaraj follows substantially the Gita conception of the ‘twofold’ self. The political

The Doctrine of Swaraj in Gandhi’s Philosophy

65

tasks facing the embodied self constitute the basic subject matter of Gandhi's political philosophy. That is to say, he accepts as proven elsewhere that the embodied self is in the process of discovering its true identity as atman, and that atman is truly identical with Brahman. However, he does not think that it is the business of his political philosophy to demonstrate this: the demonstration is left to Vedanta philosophy. Be that as it may, the metaphysics implied in the notion of the embodied self poses an initial methodological difficulty to the reader of Hind Swaraj. The difficulty arises from the fact that the book is addressed not just to Vedantins, but to all Indians, whether Hindu,

Muslim,

Christian,

Buddhist,

Sikh or Parsi.

Indeed,

as

noted already, it is addressed even to ‘the English’. Given the book’s intended audience, is it to be supposed that they can accept and implement Gandhi's political philosophy only if they adopted the whole panoply of Vedanta metaphysics? I am inclined to think that such a supposition is unnecessary. For those who wish to become Gandhians in thought and practice, all that would be required, I think, is an equivalent metaphysic. If such a metaphysic can be found in other traditions, Gandhi

would be satisfied.

He

confirmed this view in 1926. Dharma, he said, is not dogma; it is ‘a quality of the soul’ through which we know ‘our duty in human life and our relation with other selves.’ We cannot know this duty unless we know the ‘self in us. Hence, dharma is the means by which we can know ourselves.’ And we can acquire these means from wherever we get it, ‘whether from India, or Europe or Arabia.’"* The adequacy of an equivalent metaphysic is strongly implied when he says that it is possible for Indians and Englishmen to meet on an ethical plane. ‘But that will happen only when the root of our relationship is sunk in a religious soil.’"’ Gandhi assumes that all major scriptures have a non-sectarian, metaphysical basis, a first insight which any human being can grasp and accept. This is also implied, I think, in his famous theory that there is a ‘religion’ which underlies all religions, which all human beings, without

prejudice to their sectarian loyalties, can accept. That ‘religion’ would teach that human existence has both temporal and atemporal dimensions; that the self is subject to some self-transcending principle or entity; that in principle one must be more active with respect to spiritual and moral affairs compared to material and

bodily affairs; and that finally, the real task before human beings is

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Anthony J. Parel

the patterning of their actual lives according to principles that transcend them. If this is what ‘religion’ that underlies all religions

means, and I think that this is what it means, then Gandhi is quite right in grounding his politics on such a foundation and asking his readers to find their own equivalent foundations. A subscription to an equivalent metaphysic, not to the specific metaphysic of Vedanta, would be sufficient as far as Gandhi is concerned. That being said, the first task facing every thinking human being in the political realm is that of putting order in the various powers and forces at work in the embodied self. How are its component ‘parts’—the body with its senses and passions, the mind, and the soul—related to one another? Putting order in the embodied self requires self-knowledge, self-improvement, self-transformation or metanoia. These produce an inner awakening in the embodied self which now comes to recognise that there are deeper layers to its being, and that to identify itself exclusively as a competitor, accumulator, and consumer—as the modernity would have us do—is really a travesty of the truth about ourselves. The actual process of putting order in the embodied self proceeds in several steps. First, it starts with training of the body. ‘It is difficult to become a passive resister, unless the body is trained.’"* Gandhi is aware of the havoc played on the Indian physique by such abuses as child marriages and indolent luxury. ‘We will have to improve our physique by getting rid of infant marriages and luxurious living.’ The great importance he attaches to daily bread labour or manual labour is part of his positive regard for the body. On the question of the need for bread labour he has gone beyond the Gita and Indian sources generally. The emphasis on the need for manual labour has revolutionary potential in the Hindu context. Briefly, the attainment of swaraj must start with’a proper care of the body since the latter has an indispensable constructive role to play in civic life. Moreover, training of the body involves the practice of the virtue of temperance with regard to food, drink and sex. Brahmacharya, or chastity, receives special mention. ‘Chastity is one of the greatest disciplines without which the mind cannot attain

requisite firmness.

A man who is unchaste loses stamina, becomes

emasculated and cowardly. He whose mind is given over to animal passions is not capable of any great effort.’”’

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67

Next, cultivation of the virtue of fearlessness or courage is necessary for swaraj. It secures the body against idleness and vain fear when facing difficult and dangerous tasks. It frees the self ‘from fear, whether as to their possessions, false honour, relatives, the government, bodily injuries, death.””

their

Finally, since the attitude towards property springs from a passion, moderation of what Gandhi calls ‘pecuniary ambitions’ or ‘voluntary’ poverty is also part of the process of ‘training’ the body.” He is not advocating the abolition of private property: what is being advocated

is a kind of trusteeship, a sense of high

minded responsibility in matters affecting property and possessions. ‘Those who have money are not expected to throw it away, but they are expected to be indifferent to it.” Swaraj is not possible without putting some order in our acquisitive habits. Turning now to the training of the mind, it is very important to note that in Gandhi's search for the self, the mind plays a pivotal role. Without a disciplined mind the senses cannot be brought under control nor can the soul proceed freely in its path of moral progress. The inspiration for this notion again is the Bhagavad Gita. According to the latter, the soul is the highest faculty of the embodied self. Though it possesses intuitive power and stands nearest to atman, and though by nature it looks towards atman, it is not free from the onslaughts of passions. It can be frustrated by the senses acting through the mind.” In other words, the soul cannot function properly unless the mind functions properly, and the mind cannot function properly unless the body functions properly. Thus the mind stands in the middle, between

the soul and

the body. Fickle and difficult to curb as the wind,” the mind needs requisite self-discipline. Following the Gita tradition, Gandhi recognises the uncritical mind as being an ambivalent faculty which can lead the embodied self either in the right direction or in the wrong direction. Even our daily language expresses the duality meant here: thus one could be in ‘two minds’, or be ‘fair-minded’, or ‘bloody-minded’, or not in the ‘right mind’ at all. Achieving steadiness of the mind is part of self-knowledge. ‘We notice that mind is a restless bird; the more it gets the more it wants, and still remains unsatisfied. The more we indulge our passions, the more

unbridled they become.’” ‘As a rule, the mind, residing in a body has become weakened by pampering, is also weak, and where

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there is no strength of mind, there can be no strength of soul.” The conclusion that Gandhi reaches is that swaraj is nothing other than the rule one exercises over one’s mind: ‘Real home-rule is self-rule or self-control.’”** And the highest happiness that the empirical self is capable of enjoying is ‘largely a mental condition.” Finally, the role of the soul in the search for self-knowledge. As far back as 1894, Gandhi began to take a serious interest in the question of the soul. In the famous twenty-seven questions he submitted to Rajchand, the question on the soul topped the list.“ The soul, Rajchand advises him, is consciousness. Knowledge is its essential attribute. But in so far as it is attached to the body there is always the danger of it being under delusions caused by the passions—greed, lust, anger, love of honour. The task in life is to attain deeper and deeper levels of self-knowledge, which becomes possible when the mind and the senses are properly disciplined. Shielding the soul from ignorance enables it to act in its natural way, that is, according to truth, love and dharma.

Once the soul is

free, truth-force or soul-force or love-force, as Gandhi variously calls the power of the soul, becomes more or less effective in life. Thus the purified soul is the truly free agent which can act according to truth, satya. Only a purified soul can exercise soulforce and hold on to truth with firmness and conviction, without falling prey to those ‘bandits on the road’'—anger and desire. Here we see the connection between self-knowledge, swaraj and satyagraha. These explorations into the nature of the embodied self reveal that a life wholly given over to the pursuits of bodily comforts and desires is not and cannot be a worthwhile life: and that when these are pursued without the guidance of dharma,truth and love, the human condition deteriorates. Truth or self-knowledge makes it possible for the embodied self to set its course in the right direction. Thus swaraj is seen as a state of affairs in which all factors of the human personality are brought under proper discipline—the mind ruling the senses, the soul ruling the mind, and the self ruling the soul. There is an existential tension between the soul and the body, the soul tending to follow the path of dharma and love, and the body tending to follow that of egoism. And in Tulsidas, Gandhi finds further support: ‘The poet Tulsidas has said, “Of religion, pity or love is the root, as egotism of the body. Therefore, we should not abandon pity so long as we are alive.” ~

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Swaraj as Self-Discipline and as Experience The first fruit of the analysis of the anatomy of the embodied self is the recognition that swaraj or self-discipline is absolutely necessary for any worthwhile political activity. But Gandhi goes one step further. He now claims that swaraj is also an experience, even a self-transforming experience. True swaraj gives us more than a notional understanding of inner freedom. Once the empirical self comes into contact with the deeper layers of its own being, once it sees itself as more than an accumulator and consumer of goods and services; it sees itself not as an isolated, atomised possessive individualist, but as one who is tied to other selves by bonds of love and friendly obligations. The self now recognises that its social dimension is as much a part of its being as is its individual dimension. It recognises that sociality is constitutive, not alien to it. It now recognises that its erstwhile identification of itself as a maximiser of goods and services is a mistaken conception of itself. To be conscious only of rights and claims on others and society is an existential delusion. It now realises that to think of freedom only in negative terms is to distort the true nature of liberty. To a self that enjoys swaraj, liberty is the ability to do what is right in a nonthreatening way; and others are seen not so much as competitors, but as friends to be trusted, loved and served. The idea that swaraj is an experience, and that as such it permits one to open oneself to others, is no doubt among the most original ideas in Gandhi's political philosophy. The claim that swaraj is an experience saves Gandhi from charges of utopianism and mere moralism. Far from encouraging utopianism or moralism, swara}] as experience opens up new vistas for political action. ‘Do not consider this Swaraj to be like a dream. Here there is no idea of sitting still. The Swaraj that I wish to picture before you and me is such that, after we have once realised it, we will endeavour to the end of our lifetime to persuade others to do likewise. But such Swara] has to be experienced by each one for himself. One drowning man will never save another. Slaves ourselves, it would be mere pretension to think of freeing others.’ In other words, swaraj is the root of Gandhian political dynamism; it makes one intensely engaged with the realities one sees around oneself. It makes one embark upon the path of social and political reform on the basis of an upright conscience and friendly persuasion. The

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commitment is lifelong, there is no turning back. And in all this, the enlightened self becomes quite incapable of violent behaviour. Here we see the moral and psychological roots of Gandhian ahimsa or non-violence. In Hind Swaraj there are three strands of thought respecting non-violence, and it is very important that we understand what they are, lest we attribute incorrect ideas on the subject to Gandhi. The first is that non-violence can be consistent with certain unavoidable types of physical injury. It is unavoidable that embodied entities be subject to this limitation. Thus he has no difficulty with non-vegetarians. He recognises with approval the fact that ‘many Hindus partake of meat and are not, therefore, followers of Ahimsa.“ The same is true of Muslims and others who are non-vegetarians. ‘Going to the root of the matter’, he writes, ‘not one man really practices such a religion (as ahimsa), because we do destroy life. We are said to follow that religion (of ahimsa) because we want freedom from liability to kill any kind of life.** Secondly, for an act to be violent in the Gandhian sense of violence, there must be an

intention to harm other human beings. Thus, acts that may appear to be violent, for example, the forcible restraining of a child rushing into tue fire, may not be violent because of a lack of evil intention. The child is forcibly restrained, not in one’s own selfinterests, but in the child’s own interest. ‘I hope you will not consider that it is physical force, though of a low order, when you would forcibly prevent the child from rushing towards the fire if you could.’* Thirdly, there is no claim that non-violence is effective in every instance; there may be instances where application of coercion is permitted. In other words, the norm of non-violence is not absolute. He only defends a relative superiority of nonviolence over violence: ‘in the majority of cases, if not, indeed, in all, the force of love or pity is infinitely greater than the force of arms.” Swaraj equips one not only to practise non-violence but also to accept the consequences of disobedience to unjust laws cheerfully. The liberated self will accept such sufferings if and only if the alternative is to act violently: ‘having experienced the force of the soul within themselves (those who have experienced swaraj) will not cower before brute-force, and will not, on any account, desire to use brute-force.’* Briefly, swaraj provides the psychological conditioning necessary for the acceptance of voluntary suffering.

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The overall effect of the experience of swaraj is the attainment of a new mental condition, a veritable metanoia.” It is this state of the mind that gives personality its force of character and fearlessness. In Gandhi’s own case his metanoia made him oppose colonialism with a mental and moral conviction that was more powerful than the terror advocated by the revolutionaries. The demands he puts before his imaginary British interlocutor in the dialogue, he says, are not ‘demands, but they show our mental state (manani dasaier,

Gandhi is now in a position to explain why modern civilisation is a disease of society and why it is necessary to look for a cure. It is to the credit of Indian civilisation that despite all its blemishes, it possesses that cure in the form of the doctrine of swaraj. The same could not be said of modern Western civilisation which began, at least since the Enlightenment, with a radical disavowal of its ancient morality. That Gandhi is not boasting should be clear enough. For one thing, Indian civilisation did not dramatically disown its basic patrimony. It did not have an ‘Enlightenment’ that would

disown

the doctrine

of swaraj.

For another,

Gandhi

saw

equivalences between the patrimonies of Indian and the preEnlightenment Western civilisations. This explains why he felt at home with Plato, the New Testament, Ruskin and Tolstoy, not to mention Newman’s ‘Lead, Kindly Light.’ He sensed that on the basis of their traditional values, East and West could communicate with one another. In his view Kipling’s famous lines ‘East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet’ are not so much expressions of cultural arrogance as of ‘despair.”*' He felt more in harmony with Tennyson’s ‘Vision’ foretelling ‘the union between East and West.” And as he told Henry Polak on the eve of writing Hind Swaraj, “There is no impassable barrier between East and West. There is no such thing as Western or European civilisation, but there is a modern civilisation, which is purely material.” The conclusion that emerges from all three critiques is that swaraj should be viewed as the principle of any decent civilisation. ‘Civilisation is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions (indriyon = senses). So doing, we know ourselves." Sense of duty, mastery over mind and body, self-knowledge—these are the true criteria of civilisation. As far as

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Gandhi is concerned, what modern civilisation has to come to terms with are these criteria. It is true that Gandhi does not conceive of civilisation in any historicist terms. Nor does he ascribe to economic factors any determining role in history. Consciousness for Gandhi is not a reflexion of material activity; on the contrary, consciousness of who we really are would determine the kind of material activity we should engage in. Neither does Gandhi's conception of freedom coincide with the liberal conception of freedom, that is. freedom as the ability to do what one desires without being impeded by external impediments. Gandhi would agree that freedom to do what one desires is true freedom, on one condition: that is, that what one chooses be the object of right desire. It is clear that for him all desires are not choiceworthy. Only a self that enjoys swaraj knows what is choiceworthy and what is not. Unless one’s desires are brought into harmony with a disciplined mind and a purified soul, they can lead one astray. The liberty implied in swaraj presupposes the ability to discriminate between moral evil and moral good. In Gandhi's view it is only swaraj understood in this sense that truly civilises us and makes us good citizens. It is because liberalism fails to distinguish between desires that it often produces contradictory outcomes—civil liberty at home and imperialism abroad. But that is not all that we can say about swaraj and liberalism. There is another side to liberalism which is that it, despite its ambiguity regarding desires, created the most humane civil society history has known up to the twentieth century. A Gandhi is unimaginable except in a more or less liberal society. He was able to conduct his political debate in Hindu Swaraj precisely because debate was recognised as a good liberal value. He would not have been able to conduct his political debate under fascism or communism or, for that matter, under any form of Ayatollaism. As noted already, he found the ancient regime of India more tyrannical than the colonial regime. Accordingly, the opposition between Gandhian notion of swaraj and home-rule on the one hand, and the liberal notion of liberty on the other, may not be pushed too far. We must not forget that one of the roles that Gandhi assumes in Hind Swaraj is that of physician of modernity. There is therefore a positive intent in the whole enterprise. Having diagnosed the nature of the disease, he as a responsible physician has the duty to recommend ways and means of administering a cure. In

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other words, the nght way of studying Gandhi’s doctrine of swaraj, I think, is to see it as a sympathetic diagnosis of liberalism and as a useful prescription for the cure of some of its ills.

Swaraj, Home-Rule and Political Practice We now come to the crucial question of how swaraj as a political theory and as experience can become also a basis for actual political practice. In other words, how does swaraj propose to modify modernity? As we have seen, the latter comprises a theory of the modern state—raison d’etat, national interest (prajana swarth), sovereignty—which does not recognise the primacy of dharma or natural law. We have also seen that it defends a theory of the self as consumer, competitor, and maximizer of pleasure. How is Gandhi going to face the challenges arising from such modern theories of the state and the self? In the first place, Gandhi would only conditionally recognise the sovereignty of the modern state: that is, he would give it obedience only if in turn it obeys the higher law of dharma or natural law. He writes: That we should obey laws whether good or bad is a new-fangled notion. There was no such thing in former days. The people disregarded those laws they did not like, and suffered the penalties for their breach. It is contrary to our manhood, if we obey laws repugnant to our conscience. Such teaching is opposed to religion

(dharma)

and

means

slavery ....

A

man

who

has

realized his manhood, who fears only God, will fear no-one else. Man-made laws are not necessarily binding on him... . If man will only realise that it is unmanly to obey laws that are unjust, no man’s tyranny will enslave him. This is the key to self rule or home-rule.” It is clear that Gandhi is not attacking the institution of the state as such; what he is attacking is ‘the new-fangled’ notion of it, namely that the state is above dharma and natural law. Here Gandhi's thought has a resonance with the natural law tradition of law and state in the West. He would agree with Aquinas’ spirit when the latter writes:

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Not all that a man has or is, is subject to political obligation: hence it is not necessary that all of his actions be considered worthy of praise or blame with respect to the political community. But all that a man is, and all that he has or can be, must bear a certain relationship to God. Hence every human action, be it good or bad, so far as it proceeds from reason is meritorious or demeritorious before God . . . . ‘all humanly enacted laws are in accord with reason to the extent that they derive from natural law. And if a human law is at variance in any particular with the natural law, it is no longer legal, but rather a corruption of law.’ It follows that satyagraha or Gandhi's technique of civil disobedience is a particular mode of swaraj reacting to the modern state. Gandhi argues for the limit of state power, not on the basis of individual rights or interests—which is the modern sense of state limit—but on the basis of the higher law of dharma or natural law. Gandhi has introduced satyagraha into the liberal state as a corrective to it. Gandhi gives political protest in liberalism a new technique. Gandhian practice was also concerned with such specific institutions as Parliament, the free press, political parties, the educational system, the institutions of labour, and the ideology of modern nationalism. In approaching each of these issues he was both critical and constructive, the guiding principle being that one must work with what one has and try to improve it. To take the example of Parliament: true, he uses very intemperate language and shocks his audience by calling the mother of parliaments ‘a sterile woman and a prostitute’—sterile because she does not do anything ‘of its own accord’; a prostitute because she is ‘under the control’ of prime ministers who change from time to time. Members of parliament are ‘hypocritical and selfish’, each thinking of ‘his own interest’. Prime ministers are more concerned with winning elections than with the welfare of Parliament; their ‘care is not always that the Parliament shall do right.” The point is that institutional practice must come closer to the ideals proposed by swaraj. In the end what Gandhi recommends for India is ‘Parliamentary Swaraj in accordance with the wishes of the people of India.” The criticism of the press follows a similar pattern. He criticises

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British newspapers for behaving as though they were the Bible. The fact is, he asserts, newspapers are ‘often dishonest’ and interpret truth ‘according to the party in whose interests they are edited.” However, Gandhi ascribes the greatest importance to the institution of free press. Nothing can illustrate this attitude than his use of the journalistic genre to write Hind Swaraj itself. The very first exchange between the Reader and the Editor, contains a statement of what the objects of a good newspaper should be. They are threefold: to understand and express popular feelings; ‘to arouse among the people certain desirable sentiments’; and ‘fearlessly to expose popular defects.” Gandhi uses the very institution of the free press to advocate the ancient idea of swaraj. Gandhi practised his karma yoga, in part, as a modern journalist as Indian Opinion, Young India, and Harijan would attest. The same pattern of constructive criticism is evident in his approach to modern political parties. These he feels are more concerned with manipulating power than with dispensing service. He would reverse the order in favour of service. His critique of the Indian National Congress stems from this insight. In one of the most poignant moments in the dialogue, the Editor asks: ‘And how can those who want to serve only, have a party?’ In this question we see the germ of the ‘Constructive Programme’ of 1941 and the ‘Manifesto’, written only two days before his assassination, for converting the Indian National Congress into a People’s Service Association.” His criticism of Macaulay and modern education of India is that in the zeal to produce ‘clerks’ for the government, they overemphasised book learning and neglected altogether dharma and the formation of character. It is typical of him that to support his agrument he would cite the authority of no less a modern than Thomas Huxley.” Hind Swaraj lays down principles of how a balance can be introduced in the educational system. His criticism of machinery, though severe, was inspired by the idea of sarvodaya, itself an ancient notion with classical and New Testament features. He accepts without question a modern notion that technology has the potential to improve the material condition of the human species. His criticism, however, is that up to now,

that potential has not been realised, precisely because

the

structure of technology is designed to benefit the rich, the powerful, and the holders of the secrets of technology. ‘I am not against

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Anthony J. Parel

machinery as such, but I am opposed to machinery that may be designed to displace the masses without giving them any adequate or satisfactory substitute.’ Perhaps, where the experience of swaraj has the greatest potential for political practice is in its understanding of the meaning of work, especially manual work. He recognised that modern Indians suffered under two handicaps in this regard. The first was the caste conception of work and the second, the modern conception of work as competition, means of profit accumulation and consumption.

A dangerous combination, as far as Gandhi was concerned.

He tried to save Indians from this double handicap by exhorting them to acquire a habit, regardless of caste, of daily manual labour and to establish ‘in thousands of households the ancient and sacred handlooms.’* The intent was not only economic and political, but also cultural—to make Indians see in work a levelling, democratising and morally regenerative force. Even the doctors, lawyers and the ‘wealthy’, who did not need to weave

for a livelihood, were

exhorted to do so, precisely because of its social and moral import. The charkha, the spinning wheel, for Gandhi represented both the principles of swaraj and manual work. Finally, swaraj had practical relevance with respect to Indian nationalism. He attempted to adapt modern nationalism to two principles of Indian civilisation—unity in diversity and assimilation of disparate elements. He paid special attention to the two issues that affected Indian nationalism most—the Hindu-Muslim conflict and the linguistic conflict.’ The implementation of the above two principles, he believed, would make India a genuinely multireligious, multilingual nation:

India cannot cease to be one nation because people belonging to different religions live in it. The introduction of foreigners does not destroy the nation, they merge in it. A country is one nation only when such a condition obtains in it. That country must have a faculty for assimilation. India has ever been such a country.”

He revived two other principles of Indian civilisation which he thought would contribute to national integration. They also give us a preview, as it were, of what later would come to be known as ecumenism. The first is that ‘religions are different roads converging

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77

to the same point’, and the second, that there is such a thing as ‘religion which underlies all religions.” If organised religions can comport themselves along these principles, a multi-religious nation can flourish and the average citizen would be able to avoid, he believed, the Scylla of scepticism and the Charybdis of fundamentalism in religious matters. The critic might well point out that partition of India dealt a heavy blow to Gandhi’s conception of religious toleration and to the thesis that true swaraj by itself is enough to promote toleration. The philosophy of swaraj worked with the British who had a liberal political philosophy; it failed, however, with Jinnah who had a closed political philosophy. Gandhi did not quite understand the combined force of the modern theory of home-rule espoused by Jinnah and the ancient Muslim theory of umma; nor the Muslim vision of the world as being a battleground of the war between dar ul hurb (the land of the infidel) and dar ul Islam (the land of the faithful). The idea that swaraj can dispose one to transcend the pressures of sub-nationalism is valid in itself; but if a determined

opponent does not accept it, there is nothing that the proponent can effectively do. Nevertheless, Hind Swaraj would retort that the alternative to home-rule based on swaraj is continuance of subnational hatred. No doubt Hind Swaraj’s first attempt to persuade Indian Muslims failed. The question is whether it would fail again? The answer lies with the Indian Muslims themselves, not others—

that is the transcending lesson of the book. The theory of swaraj as applied to Indian nationalism was intended to make Indians more self-critical about themselves. Out of such self-criticism they were to acquire more self-confidence and the truth about themselves. The Indians need to know that “The English have

not taken

India; we have given it to them.”

brought the English, and we keep them.”

‘We

Again, enlightened

Indians would know ‘that to blame the English is useless, that they came because of us, and: remain also for the same reason’;® ‘. . .

we keep the English in India for our base self-interest.’* Only selfknowledge arising from the experience of swaraj can grasp the truth of these plain words. The important question is-not whether the British rule India, but whether the Indians can rule themselves.

The posturing of the terrorists and the others is based on a mis-apprehension that there can be true home-rule without swaraj, without a metanoia. If home-rule comes without swaraj, there

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Anthony J. Parel

would only be ‘English rule without the Englishman’, ‘the tiger’s nature without the tiger’, Englistan, without Hindustan. ‘This is not the Swaraj that I want’, the Editor declares,” and ‘what you call Swaraj is not truly Swaraj.’” Gandhi’s final point is that structural changes, though indispensable, must follow, not precede, inner change, metanoia. In arguing this he is going against the spirit of modern historicism, modern social science and the so-called sociology of knowledge school, which works from the opposite premise: improve the environment, individual human beings ipso facto will improve. And violence is the way to guarantee that the ideal state will emerge. Gandhi puts a big question mark against all this. The force of the soul must flow from the interior to the exterior. Individuals transform institutions, not institutions the individuals. A letter written to Maganlal Gandhi, shortly after the Hind Swaraj was published, captures Gandhi’s idea on this point very well: Please do not carry unnecessarily on your head the burden of emancipating India. Emancipate your own self. Even that burden is very great. Apply everything to yourself. Nobility of soul consists in realising that you are yourself India. In your emancipation is the emancipation of India. All else is make-believe . . . . You and I need not worry about others. If we bother about others, we shall forget our own tasks and lose everything. Please ponder over this from the point of view of altruism, not of selfishness.”

The concept of the relation between the health of the soul and the health of the city has an authentic Platonic resonance. Plato’s Apology of Socrates was one of the works that Gandhi read, digested, and paraphrased for his readers in Indian Opinion. But there is one significant difference between Plato and Gandhi: whereas for Plato the philosopher only reluctantly comes down to the cave, for Gandhi the person who has acquired self-knowledge is required to come down to the cave and work for the emancipation of the last and the least. For Plato, philosophy or understanding of theoretical truth is the ultimate end and it is reached through philosophy. For Gandhi on the contrary, actual practice, according to the requirements of the time and place, is the way to the ultimate end. Gandhi is a karma yogi, not a gyana vogi. But these

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79

differences apart, the resonance with the Platonic tradition as that with the Thomistic tradition can increase our appreciation of Gandhi's political philosophy. One of the aims of Hind Swaraj was to clarify the meaning of swaraj and home-rule. The dialogue began with the metaphor of the ‘wave’ (in Gujarati, it is ‘wind’): a ‘Home Rule Wave’ is passing over India. It is a wave that originates in alien shores. It has swept many Indians off their feet. However, Gandhi has taken out time for calm reflexion and earnest debate. And the conclusion, as expressed in the very last paragraph of the dialogue, is that a new and correct understanding of the nature of the wave that is passing over India is available. And that understanding requires that Indians must undergo self-transformation and dedicate themselves to the hard work of improving the material condition of every Indian. They must pass from misapprehension, to truth, to action. ‘In my opinion, we have used the term “Swaraj” without understanding its real significance. I have endeavoured to explain it as I understand

it, and

my

conscience

testifies that my

life

(deh = body) henceforth is dedicated to its attainment.’™

Notes

1. The word ‘home-rule’ occurs thirty-nine times and ‘swaraj’ sixteen times in the English text. 2. Young India, 19 March 1931. 3. M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, pp. 99-100. The citations are from the first edition (Phoenix: International Printing Press, 1910).

4. Ibid., pp. 91-92. 5. Ibid., p. 26 6. Ibid., p. 30 7. I take this phrase from the title of Charles Taylor’s recent book (Toronto: Anansi, 1991). 8. Gandhi, Hind Swaray, p. 31.

9. Ibid., pp. 80-81. 10. [bid., pp. 35, 46, 90. 11. A custom permitting a man to have sexual intercourse with his childless ’ brother’s widow, or the wife of an impotent kinsman, in order to raise issue for the family concerned. 12. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, pp. 80-81.

Anthony

J. Parel

. R.C. Zaehner, ed., The Bhagavad Gita (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1969), p. 11. . Ibid., p. 12, 6.5-6. p Ibid pais. Sa. . M.K. Gandhi, Collected Works (New Delhi: Government of India, 90 Volumes,

1958-84), 32, p. 11. . Dharma kshetre, a very evocative Indian notion and the opening words of the Gita; Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. 99

. Gandhi, Hind Swarayj, p. 81

. Ibid. pL bide pro2. Ibid., p, 83. mibids pase » Maitils, (Oe, tore . Zaehner, ed., Gita, pp. 22-23, 2.63. . Ibid., 6.34. . Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, pp. 55-56. PLDT aero . Apna mananu

« Ibidss pi . Gandhi, . Zaehner, . Gandhi, wi bid= pe . Ibid., p. . Ibid. bids pe . Ibid., p. . [bid., p. . bid. . [bid. . Gandhi, . Ibid. 1 Ibid,, p. . Gandhi, sl PopTosa oi

rajya, ibid., p. 103.

55: Collected Works, 32, pp. 593-602. ed., Gita, 3.34. Hind Swaraj, p. 73. aus 46. ya 71. 100.

Collected Works, 9, p. 476.

479; Hind Swaraj, p. 55. The

. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, D’Entreves edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948), I-II, 21.4, 95.2. It is not surprising that there should be such resonance since we know from his Autobiography, I, ch. 24, that he had read Justinian in Latin.

. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, pp. 22-23. . Young India, January 1921. Dida Daan . Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. 9. eLOId Sy Paws 52: Gandhi, Collected Works, 90, pp. 526-28. . Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, pp. 85-86. . Gandhi, Collected Works, 36, p. 446. . Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, pp. 93, 100-101.

The Doctrine of Swaraj in Gandhi’s Philosophy

81

. Ibid., pp. 100-101. . Ibid, chs. 10 and 18.

. Ibid, . Ibid, . Ibid., . Ibid., pod. eo fbid:. ~ibid:. . [bid “a

p. 42. p. 43. p. 34. pp. 30-31. p. Ol; p: 102. p. 33. phe

Ibid: pe 22: . M.K. Gandhi

to Maganlal Gandhi, pp. 206-7. . Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. 104.

12 April

1910,

Collected

Works,

10,

Four

Gandhi: Guru for the 1990s? Judith M. Brown

Introduction M.K. Gandhi was unquestionably one of the great figures of the twentieth century. He is remembered primarily as India’s most famous nationalist leader from 1920 to 1947—in the realm of ideology he wrestled with the nature of India’s national identity and in practical politics he strove to organise and energies a mass movement of non-violent resistance to British rule. He generated much controversy among Indians, for many did not share his vision of the Indian nation, disputed its religious boundaries and attacked his programme for its future. Since his death historians have debated his role and significance and his contribution to the end of the raj.' Ironically, in view of his historical repute as a

political activist, Gandhi often said that his life and life-style were more important than his political achievements;’ and that he was prepared to withdraw from political work in Congress, as in 1934, for that was only part of the total, wide-ranging activity he undertook for India’s national renewal. He himself maintained that his best and most significant work was the most hidden, particularly in his ashram communities.’ Furthermore, he believed his message was international, relevant to entire world, though he had initially proclaimed and enacted it in India. Therefore, this discussion will highlight lesser known aspects of Gandhi’s thought and work; and

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show how he engaged with issues which seemed increasingly significant in the closing decade of his century—though they tend to receive little notice in studies concentrating on the drama of nationalist-imperialist confrontation—and indeed in his lifetime aroused concern, curiosity, and not a little humour.*

Foundations It is impossible to follow Gandhi's trains of thought, and to understand his practical priorities, without appreciating that at the heart of his life was a spiritual vision of the nature of ultimate reality and of humankind. This vision dawned on Gandhi gradually as he matured from a raw student who went to England in search of the skills which would enable him to join a privileged educated Indian elite, into the ascetic who eventually settled in India in 1915, divesting himself of the comforts and resources of family life and a successful legal career. Its origins lay deep in the Hindu and Jain traditions in which he had been brought up and which he continued to cherish, despite his radical criticism of certain contemporary aspects of Hindu belief and practice. It was clarified and sharpened by his contacts with Islam and Christianity and his acknowledged debts to such Western thinkers as Tolstoy and Ruskin.’ For Gandhi, man was part of a total cosmic order whose under-

lying law was a truth which he eventually spoke of and seems to have experienced as God. Men and women were therefore linked to all that lives by their participation in this divine truth; and each individual needed in a lifetime’s pilgrimage to attempt to discover the real, to follow its law, and to recognise the interconnectedness of all life, if he or she was to be fully human and increasingly ‘realised’. The only means appropriate to such an endeavour, whether for individuals or for groups, were non-violent ones because no one could ever perceive the totality of truth, and each must therefore respect others’ equally partial understanding of truth. In Gandhi’s eyes violent means were impermissible, even in apparently good causes, because they would corrupt the good end in view and start a train of evil. Although Gandhi drew heavily on Hindu and Jain traditions in his emphasis on ahimsa, he simultaneously broadened and deepened its meaning. For him it was a positive, activist quality, an energetic compassion let loose in all

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relationships; and for the individual who practised such loving service to even the weakest of beings, it was the pathway to discovering God, the means to perceiving the truth which pervades and undergirds the universe.° Non-violence,

ahimsa, was for him

the law of authentic, moral living, and the hallmark of true religion. Without it there could only be destruction and ruin. That is why he saw the Second World War as a horrific, cataclysmic crisis for the whole world, a conflagration which threatened to reduce civilisation

to ashes.’ That is why he tried to make non-violence the root of all his activities.*

Non-violence and Revolution Gandhi’s most publicised application of non-violence—and that which still powerfully attracts political thinkers and activists with the potential for organised, mechanised violence having increased so dramatically—was non-violent opposition to the British ray. His three great campaigns of 1920-22, 1930-34 and 1940-42, often on apparently trivial and perplexing issues such as the right to make salt or to proclaim opposition to war, were carefully considered attempts to seize the high moral ground for nationalist politics—in the eyes of Indians, the British and the world at large. In so far as he was able, given the pressures within Congress and the varied, loosely controlled groups on whom he had to rely for a following, he ‘designed’ his movements to weaken the roots of imperialism by working for fundamental moral change: a change of heart among the British, and an infusion of unity and moral courage among Indians. Of course non-violent non-cooperation also made obvious strategic sense in the particular circumstances of a raj thinly stretched, financially vulnerable, dependent on Indian collaborators, and also sensitive to world opinion. Despite popular estimations of Gandhi's ‘success’ in demolishing the raj, historians realise its end came because of various deep-seated historical forces at work over decades. Gandhi's campaigns only achieved tangible political results when

they were

small-scale and implemented

by small, cohesive

groups he could control, as in Kaira in 1918 or Bardoli in 1928. On a continental scale non-violent resistance brought numerous and

apparently insoluble problems. The people who were his adherents

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and activists were often far weaker and less inspired than he in their commitment to non-violence; and violence always erupted in the course of his national campaigns, with the exception of the carefully controlled individual protests of 1940-41. Increasingly, Gandhi came to realise that such violence was an inevitable risk in a popular, national movement; indeed he felt it was preferable to inactivity and a continuation of the current regime.’ By the end of his life he sadly accepted that his compatriots’ non-cooperation had never been marked by true ahimsa, that it had been the passive resistance of the weak rather than the satyagraha of the unflinchingly strong." Yet a further problem put to Gandhi and often raised subsequently was the viability of even the most peaceful opposition to a regime which was impervious to moral pressure and to international opinion. In relation to the Jews in Hitler's Germany Gandhi insisted that they should maintain non-violence even if it ended in a mass slaughter of their race; to him that would be their final act of trust in God, the vindication of their strength and authentic

humanity. There could be no further argument with one who felt that political achievement was not the highest good, and for whom death was not an end. Moreover, he refused to believe that even a Hitler was morally impervious: he reasoned that he only appeared so because he had never been exposed to the full regenerating power of non-violence." Few who know of Gandhi and witnessed events in China in mid1989 could have failed to draw parallels and see that the questions so many raised with him in the late 1930s, about non-violence against well-armed, authoritarian regimes, are still highly topical. The Chinese popular demonstrations also showed the fundamental problem for exponents of non-violence of switching gear, as it were, from opposition and protest to positive reconstruction. What many do not know is that Gandhi in his lifetime came to feel that the most significant mode of non-violence was not protest but reform and reconstruction,

undertaken

quietly and locally, without

the benefit of government or control of government machinery and resources. In retrospect this may seem to have been his most salient contribution to some of the political dilemmas of the late twentieth century. Early in his public life in South Africa, Gandhi developed a profound distrust of all centralised government and

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doubted its capacity as an agent of reform. To him governments were, or became almost inevitably, machines concerned with main-

taining their own power and patronage which had a momentum and rationale of their own. This fundamental distrust of all governments made him hope that India’s future would be in the hands of a decentralised government with real control at the village level—a hope he wrote of in Hind Swaraj (1909) and maintained until the end of his life.’ When the younger Nehru became involved in economic planning for a free India, Gandhi thought it a waste of time." He came to sense that even the Congress he had tried to nurture as an instrument for moral revolution was a governmental machine in the making, every bit as reprehensible as the British one it sought to oust; and almost his last piece of writing was a draft constitution suggesting that Congress should divest itself of political power and that its members should be servants of the community, working quietly and locally for the welfare of all." In contrast with Jawaharlal Nehru and most Congressmen, Gandhi believed passionately that the reconstruction of India must begin on a small scale, working at the real roots and laying lasting foundations for a new society and polity. In his own life he practised what he preached. He did not feel any sense of defeat when the political priorities of Congressmen relegated him from active political leadership, from wielding the levers of political power to working as an individual on a small scale. On the contrary, as a result of his understanding of the cosmic order, one good man, one real satyagrahi, one good deed, one experiment in moral community had a profound and vital significance because of the interconnectedness of all. The main thrust of Gandhi’s work on small-scale reconstruction was his ashram communities, first in Phoenix and Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, then in the Sabarmati ashram in Ahmedabad, and

from the mid-1930s in Sevagram in central India. Each was in turn an attempt to create out of quite ordinary people a model community which would be in microcosm what one day he hoped India would be; they were, as he admitted, experimental laboratories where he could work out solutions to large economic, social and religious problems. At the heart of community life was common daily worship and hard manual work for the common good including labour normally considered polluting to caste Hindus. People of all races, castes and communities were welcome, men as well as women; and numerous temporary members and fleeting visitors

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joined the small core of Gandhi’s relations and close devotees. The hallmark of ashram life was extreme simplicity of life-style including food, furnishings and amenities. Despite the ideal, there were frequent lapses—lifeless worship, squabbles over food, personality clashes, unexplained losses of possessions, jealousies and suspicions—and at times Gandhi wondered if he could continue to bear the burden of his community experiments, thinking that his political campaigns were easier work and that it would be something of a spiritual relaxation to be Viceroy instead!'* Even at the height of his political campaigns and most sensitive public work, he spent hours in discussion and correspondence with ashram members, advising on worship, work and personal relations. These experimental communities were a persistent drain on his energy and yielded apparently paltry ‘results’. Gandhi also knew that the motley crew of ashramites competing for his attention offended many of his political colleagues. Yet he persisted in believing that this was his best and most valuable work, that if he could work out here the practice of non-violence, with all its social and economic implications, then he would have found the key to India’s future." From 1935 there developed a new focus for Gandhi's small-scale experiments in non-violent revolution, namely ‘whole village work’. Whereas in the 1920s he had emphasised khadi in his work to alleviate poverty, unite Indians and loosen India’s economic links with Britain, now he felt he must concentrate on particular villages,

engaging with the whole spectrum of their needs and reforming every aspect of the villagers’ lives. One weapon in this new strategy was the All-India Village Industries Association, based at Wardha;

and his own chosen village was nearby, surrounding his

new ashram in the making, Sevagram. When criticised for his attention to such mundane matters as the food value of leafy vegetables and unpolished rice, or the best way of organising village latrines, rather than first winning political power in order to tackle the economic structure, he replied that these apparently small and unglamorous changes were the stuff of true, non-violent freedom." Moreover, if the poor, illiterate and unhealthy inhabitants of ‘his village’ could reconstruct their lives and become satyagrahis, then he would have discovered ‘the key to do the same work in the whole of India.”"” Hardly surprisingly, many Congressmen paid little attention to Gandhi's insistence that a wide-ranging ‘constructive campaign’ was the only real way to true independence.

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But it was no coincidence that late in 1941, when Gandhi was travelling by train to Bardoli for a crucial meeting of the Congress Working Committee which was to decide on a new war-time strategy, he wrote a lengthy and considered pamphlet on the meaning and place of the constructive programme. It dealt with communal and caste relations, economic organisation, village welfare, rural industry, education, health, hygiene and sanitation, prohibition and similar topics and hardly at all with non-violent confrontation with the raj. It deserves to be better known, for it is as much an apologia for his closing years as was Hind Swaraj for a young man’s vision. It concluded with a sentence which demonstrated that for him the small-scale work of non-violent reconstruction was even more vital than non-violence in the form of resistance to authority: ‘My handling of civil disobedience without the constructive programme will be like a paralysed hand attempting to lift a spoon.”

Non-Violence and the Economic Order Non-violence in practice was in Gandhi's mind inevitably linked with change in the economic order. His hostility to life-styles and political arrangements built on industrialisation as developed in the Western world was clear from 1908-9; when he returned to his homeland he had to work out the implications of this for India. From the viewpoint of the 1990s, his suggestions, seen then as retrograde and anti-modern, now appear topically ‘green’ and radical—the scaling down of production, the wise use of resources, utilisation of natural and recyclable material, and an abhorrence of waste. Yet there is a profound difference between Gandhi's vision and late twentieth-century ‘greenness’. The latter rests on scientifically-based apprehensions of a potential ecological catastrophe. No such challenge faced Gandhi's generation; and they lacked the sophisticated scientific knowledge available nearly a century later. Yet, among early Indian nationalist thinkers there had been a persistent strain of hostility to industrialisation and ambivalence rather than wholesale commitment to the creation of an industrial economy on Western lines.’! The starting-point for Gandhi's own ‘greenness’ was fundamental morality.” He believed that good economic organisation must aim for sufficiency for all, not for increasing consumption, a falsely perceived rising standard of life,

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and the proliferation of inessentials. Such economic goals pointed the way of violence and theft. Gandhi's fiercest criticism was of modern, large-scale industrialisation and its attendant evils. In his eyes these real evils were not pollution and the reckless consumption of natural resources; but the potential in industrial organisations and particularly in industrial cities for violence and the generation of inequality, and the increasing likelihood of unemployment as machines replaced men and women and their physical skills. Above all, industrial modes of production encouraged wrong standards of wealth and achievement, eroded spiritual values, and enabled patterns of living based on greed and consumption.” Many people thought he was totally opposed to all mechanisation and large-scale industry. But he was realistic enough to see that some modern developments did have a limited role in India’s future, and this was not to enrich a few or displace labour or produce things villagers could easily produce on a small scale. For example, he accepted the idea of shipbuilding, iron works, communally owned power houses to enable villagers to use their tools electrically, and heavy machinery to do public work. But machinery and industry must not destroy villages and their craft skills, as in the West and in contemporary India, but must serve and subserve the villages.” He felt that it was India’s duty to the whole world to adopt a simple way of life which demonstrated that there was an alternative to modern industrialisation—though he recognised that it was a risky experiment for his country in a world dominated by industrialised and heavilyarmed nations.” The key to a new economics and a moral economic order was, in Gandhi's eyes, revival of village life; the creation of small-scale communities where there was economic interdependence between people, full employment and sufficiency for all, and self-sufficiency in most things for each village community as a whole. In his later years he persistently proclaimed that in villages and the well-being of villages lay India’s future, whereas even when he returned to India from Africa he had still felt that the country’s future lay in its cities and the reform of urban life.” A major aspect of his village revival work was the rejuvenation of village industries to create work, alleviate poverty and lessen villagers’ dependence on urban, factory products. To begin with, he concentrated on khadi, handspinning and hand-woven cloth; the campaign was symbolised by the wheel, the charkha, of obvious political and economic value in

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the nationalist struggle too. But with the foundation of the AllIndia Village Industries Association in 1934 and his subsequent concentration on whole village work, the range of village industrial revival became greater and its intentions broader and deeper. Announcing the establishment of the AIVIA, he told the readers of Harijan:

It will give hope to the millions of villagers; it will turn the citydwellers, who are today their exploiters, into real helpers and servants; it will establish a living link between the intelligentsia and the illiterate masses; it will be instrumental in abolishing all distinctions between man and man, and it will turn the villagers from being mere creaters [sic] of raw produce, which they have practically become, into self-sustained units and caterers for most of the requirements of city-dwellers.” Based at Wardha, its working experiments naturally covered all the processes of spinning and weaving, and spread to papermaking, oil-pressing and rice-husking and tannery, dairying and bee-keeping. But Gandhi's village vision and work did not stop at village industry. He investigated and publicised good agricultural practices, the most productive use of manure, and the most desirable mode of village sanitation. He did not hesitate to call Indian villages dung heaps and said that possibly village sanitation was the most difficult task before the AIVIA. The Harijan article in which he made practical suggestions about constructing village latrines and turning excreta into valuable manure”® is a salutary reminder of the priorities and range of this enigmatic and visionary politician. A similar robust practicality marked Gandhi's study of food for villagers. The effects of different types of food on character and spiritual progress is a well-known theme in Hindu discourse. In Gandhi’s mind the link between food, health and morality had been made early as his student days in London. Experiments with his personal diet were a constant aspect of his own life-style, often to the dismay of his doctors and friends. But in the context of

village reconstruction his: concern was to find the cheapest and most nutritious food for villagers from locally available ingredients. His recommendations sound remarkably modern to a generation concerned about natural, whole foods; to his contemporaries they were startling and apparently primitive. He extolled the economic

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and health advantages of whole, unpolished rice; of whole-wheat flour retaining its natural bran; of village-made gur rather than refined, white sugar; of leafy green vegetables with their high vitamin content; and of soya beans. As ever, he practised what he preached. At one stage he experimented with a diet of uncooked food. He insisted that the food in his ashram should be made only with those ingredients available to their village neighbours, but should be used to create as ideal a diet as possible. He even demonstrated this through a meal to show how villagers and village workers could provide for themselves a cheap, nourishing and balanced diet.” There remained the thorny question of inequality of wealth which Gandhi could see around him, even in the villages he considered potentially egalitarian, co-operative fraternities. Equal distribution of wealth was one of the goals of Gandhi’s constructive programme; indeed he thought it was the solid foundation on which the whole programme must stand.” In this he was as radical as any communist or socialist:

The real implication of equal distribution is that each man shall have the wherewithal to supply all his natural needs and no more .... To bring this ideal into being the entire social order has got to be reconstructed. A society based on non-violence cannot nurture any other ideal. We may not perhaps be able to realize the goal, but we must bear it in mind and work unceasingly

to near [sic] it.” He felt they must make a start as individuals by simplifying their lives. The rich, though not divested of their wealth, should consider themselves

trustees of their wealth

and resources,

using for the

welfare of their neighbours all that was left after their own minimal needs had been supplied. Such was the way to peaceful social revolution for Gandhi, though he acknowledged that it was a new historical experiment which he passionately wished to convince people was worth conducting.”

Health and Well-being Gandhi’s

wide concern

for the well-being of villagers and the

reconstruction of rural life as the basis of a non-violent civilisation

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impelled him towards research into cheap, nutritious food. It also generated in his later years an interest in evolving medical care for the poor.” Yet his interest in and experiments with health had been a lifelong passion. He admitted that temperamentally he felt happy and fulfilled in the role of physician or nurse. As a young married man in Bombay and South Africa, he nursed members of his family in times of serious illness, actually delivered one of his own sons, and was prepared to reject the advice of Western-trained doctors even when his wife’s life was at risk. Part-time nursing was an aspect of his work for South Africa’s Indians which seldom receives notice. His major dietetic experiments also began in Africa. In his communities there he prescribed simple, vegetarian food, much of it home-grown or home-made including their bread, butter and marmalade. As an individual back in India, he experimented with different combinations of cooked and uncooked food, always in restricted quantity and variety, in the quest for natural good health, often to the despair of his doctors, relatives and supporters. His letters were also full of health advice to friends and colleagues; and this was as significant to him as high matters of state or political strategy. His basic concern was to find a healthy way of life which would prevent illness; in this he sounds remarkably modern, as does his awareness that in much ill-health and disease there is a significant psychosomatic element. The interlocking questions of health and medical care were for Gandhi essentially moral ones. He believed that good health resulted from a healthy life-style and harmony with the fundamental truth of the cosmic order; thus, good and bad health were alike reflections of an individual’s spiritual state. He became convinced that Western medicine was not only unnecessary but positively encouraged wickedness; for example, he believed that many Western drugs involved violence against animals in the research process or contained substances abhorrent to good Hindus. He was concerned that Western doctors only patched up people who had made themselves ill by immorality and self-indulgence, whereas their task should be to prevent people from falling ill. His passionate concern for a right approach to health and medicine was clear as early as his writing of Hind Swaraj.“ Later he became even more convinced of the rightness of his approach and more forthright in his exposition of it. Typical were his blunt assertions in 1944 and 1945 that illness was a sign of spiritual disorder:

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Illness itseif should be a matter of shame for man. Illness betokens some lapse. Illness should not beset one whose body and mind are wholly sound.» There is surely something wrong with a person who is supposed to be highly spiritual and yet is always physically ailing.”

Although himself a compulsive worker and often exhausted to the point of mental and physical breakdown, he chided those who overworked or neglected their health, telling one of his closest followers who was ailing, ‘I believe that one who neglects the body betrays the soul. Is not the body an abode of the atman? And therefore it requires the utmost care.’ Conversely, spiritual wholeness and harmony were physically reflected in good health.* This accounts for his distress at his own bouts of illness and exhaustion, or at the failure of his experiments to cure family and friends, as in 1947 when Manu, his granddaughter, had to have her appendix removed. Gandhi’s way was ‘Nature Cure’. This meant primarily teaching people how to lead a healthy life in tune with the laws of nature;” and if they did become ill, showing them natural methods of restoring balance and vitality. While in prison in 1942, he revised a series of pamphlets, orginally written in 1913, to which he now gave the title ‘Key to Health’.” Much of this dealt with a healthy, moderate, vegetarian diet. For him eating was a duty rather than an occasion for enjoyment: not surprisingly he rejected spices, tea, coffee, cocoa, and all intoxicants including tobacco. He expounded his long-held belief that sexual restraint was a precondition for a godly life and for good health. Finally, he made suggestions for natural therapies using the elements of air, water, light and earth; these included mud poultices, different types of water baths, steam baths, wet sheet packs, sleeping in the open air and sunbathing. In his last years he attempted to put these ideas into practice by founding a nature cure clinic, particularly with India’s poor in mind. He withdrew from an experimental clinic in Poona (1945-46) because he felt it did not serve the poor, and poured his energies instead into a village-based project."' Here his concern for natural good health and cheap medical care for the poor came together; they were for him as significant for a new India as the negotiations then preparing for British withdrawal. The continuing ill-health and malnutrition of India’s poorest,

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despite forty years of independence and the control if not eradication of some of India’s killer diseases, underlines the topicality of many of Gandhi’s concerns over diet, life-style and cheap, natural medi-

cine; as does a significant shift in the understanding of health in the more

affluent

West.

However,

on one

health issue Gandhi

still

seems at odds with prevailing views, namely artificial birth-control. In his ‘Key to Health’ Gandhi denounced such contraception. This was another long-standing aspect of his total moral vision. He believed that sexual intercourse was legitimate only if a married couple wanted children; like food, sex was not for pleasure. Only chastity could lead men and women to truth, make them strong enough to be non-violent, guard their health, and free them for a life of service. In his emphasis on brahmacharya Gandhi echoed a

persistent theme in Hindu tradition—that celibacy and spiritual strength were interdependent. He widened this idea, however, to interpret celibacy not as a precondition for individual spiritual exaltation but as a means of freeing the individual to render broadranging service, to extend his definition of the family for which he should have responsibility and care. Given his basic stance, it was predictable that he felt that artificial contraception, like much else in modern medicine, was destructive of true morality.” However, it must be added that contemporary India’s desperate concern and need for a lower birth rate, as an aspect of individual and public health and economic prosperity, only developed after Gandhi’s death when modern drugs had made a dramatic impact on mortality, particularly among mothers and infants. In his day population was not a critical issue. Yet Gandhi was far-sighted enough to see that even then the birth rate combined with disease to take a tragic toll of women’s and children’s health; and his concern for sexual abstinence included a compassionate wish to improve women’s lot and improve the health of the nation’s children.

Conclusion This brief essay has highlighted some lesser known areas of Gandhi’s deepest thinking and most committed action. It may surprise some in the 1990s to realise that he grappled with issues which touched people’s lives more intimately and radically than his much-publicised political campaigns; and that in doing so he formulated ideas

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which were highly suspect in his lifetime, even in India, but which, as our century closes, sound increasingly in tune with much modern thinking. However, Gandhi is in no simple sense a ‘guru for the 1990s’. His experiments and ideas cannot easily be borrowed across the barriers of time and culture because he thought, wrote and acted in a particular historical context and gave little serious consideration to some of the long-term implications of his ideas. (For example, what would be the international consequences for a nation which adopted his economic ideal? Can a heavily-populated planet feed its people without contraception and fully mechanised farming?) Yet it is worth recalling Gandhi’s practical experiments, his moral and intellectual struggles, because unlike most of his nationalist colleagues, he saw what were and would be the crucial

issues facing India and the whole world. Because his ideas were rooted in a total spiritual vision, he was in fact more radical than

most of the late twentieth century’s ‘green’ sympathisers. Perhaps, instead of providing easy answers to the questions of the 1990s, his life suggests to the late twentieth century that people should reconsider

the basis of radicalism,

and should

ask fundamental

questions about the nature of mankind and the goals of men and women if they are to be fully human.

Notes Abbreviations used: CWMG for The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 90 vols. (New Delhi: Government of India, 1958-1984). NMML for Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, New Delhi. 1. B.R. Tomlinson, for example, emphasises the weakening economic links between India and Britain in his articles ‘India & the British Empire, 1880-1935’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 12, 4 (1975) and ‘India & the British Empire,

1935-1947’, JESHR,

13, 3 (1976); and in The Political Eco-

nomy of the Raj 1914-1947: The Economics of Decolonization (London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979). The Subaltern Studies series disputes the significance of ‘high politics’ and its leadership; see R. Guha, Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982 onwards), vols. 1-7. Conversely, local and provincial studies in Indian

politics emphasise the local rather than all-India drives behind anti-imperial politics.

2. Gandhi to an ashram member, 4 June 1947, CWMG, 88, p. 70. 3. Discussion between Gandhi, Pyarelal and M. Desai, late June 1940, CWMG, 72, p. 211; Gandhi to Balvantsinha, 28 March 1945, CWMG, 79, p. 323.

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4. V.S.S. Sastri wrote in surprise to his brother on 10 January 1915 of Gandhi’s odd food and unwesternised life-style; see T.N. Jagadisan, ed., Letters Of The

Right Honourable V.S. Srinivasa Sastri (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1963), 2nd ed., p. 41. Even J. Nehru wrote of Gandhi's ‘fads and peculiarities’ in his Autobiography

(London: The Bodley Head,

1936), p. 73; and he was

uncomfortable in Gandhi’s ashrams with their strange collections of devotees. . M. Chatterjee, Gandhi's Religious Thought (London: Macmillan, 1983); Judith M. Brown, ‘Mahatmas As Reformers: Some Problems of Religious Authority in the Indian Nationalist Movement’, South Asia Research, 6, 1 (1986), pp. 15-26. I have tried to trace the development of Gandhi's religious vision in Gandhi. Prisoner of Hope (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1989). The best documentary collection illustrating Gandhi’s understanding of religion and

the influences on him is R. Iyer, ed., The Moral And Political Writings Of Mahatma Gandhi. Volume 1. Civilization, Politics and Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

. The most recent discussion of Gandhi’s relationship with and handling of Indian tradition is B. Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform. An Analysis of Gandhi's Political Discourse (New Delhi & London: Sage, 1989). Chapter 5 deals with non-violence. . Sarvodaya, January 1942; CWMG,

75, p. 272.

. Harijan, 12 October 1935; CWMG, 62, p. 28. . M. Desai to V.S.S. Sastri, 21 January 1940, NMML, Gandhi

in conversation

with

youth

workers,

V.S.S. Sastri Papers;

28 May

1942,

CWMG,

76,

pp. 159-60. . Gandhi in conversation with an American professor, August 1947, Harijan, 16 November 1947; CWMG, 89, pp. 62, 482. hie: Harijan, 26 November & 17 December 1938; CWMG, 68, pp. 137-41, 191-93. 12. Hind Swaraj, CWMG, 10, pp. 6-68; Gandhi to J. Nehru, 5 October 1945,

CWMG, 81, pp. 319-20. pp. 308-9.

See also Harijan, 26 January

. Gandhi to Amrit Kaur, 29 June 1939, CWMG,

1942; CWMG,

76,

69, p. 384; Gandhi to J. Nehru,

11 August 1939, CWMG, 70, p. 86. . See Gandhi's criticisms of and advice to Congress when it came to provincial power in the late 1930s, Brown, Prisoner of Hope, pp. 311-12; Gandhi in conversation

with two close women

Amrit Kaur Papers.

colleagues, 27 November

1940, NMML,

;

. Gandhi's draft for new Congress constitution, 29 January 1948, CWMG, pp. 526-28.

90,

16. Navayivan, 15 February 1925; CWMG, 26, p. 129. Wi Discussion between Gandhi, Pyarelal and M. Desai, late June 1940, CWMG,

72, p. 211. See also Gandhi to A. Kaur, 29 October 1939, CWMG, 70, p. 309; A. Kaur to J. Nehru, 24 May 1938, NMML, J. Nehru Papers. On the ashrams as his best creations see Young India, 3 December 1925; CWMG, 29, p. 291; speech, | February 1928, Gandhi to C.F. Andrews, 22 April 1928, CWMG, 36,

ppot; 251; 18. Hariyan, 11 January 1936; CWMG, 62, pp. 92-93. 19: Haryan, 28 July 1940; CWMG, 72, p. 310. 20). CWMG, 75, pp. 146-66.

Gandhi: Guru for the 1990s? . See

I. Klein,

‘Indian

Nationalism

and

Anti-Industrialization:

The

Roots

97 of

Gandhian Economics’, South Asia, 3 (1973-74), pp. 93-104. 12 January 1946, CWMG, 82, p. 450. Typical comments by Gandhi on these matters are to be found in CWMG, 73, p. 29 (1940); CWMG, 74, p. 59 (1941); CWMG, 88, pp. 221, 365 (1947). These are from his later life. Hind Swaraj (1909) contains one of Gandhi’s fiercest denunciations of modern industrialisation.

24.

Harijan, 27 January 1940; CWMG, 71, p. 130. See also Harijan, 22 June 1935; CWMG, 61, pp. 187-88; Harijan, 28 January 1939; CWMG, 68, pp. 258-59. 2S. Harijan, 1 September 1946; CWMG, 85, pp. 205-6. Speech, 3 November 1917, CWMG, 14, pp. 56-57. . Harijan, 21 December 1934; CWMG, 60, p. 17. See also the AIVIA Constitution which stated that its objectives ‘shall be village reorganization and reconstruction, including the revival, encouragement and improvement of village industries, and the moral and physical advancement of the villages of India’. Harijan, 21 December 1934; CWMG, 59, p. 452. 28. Harijan, 8 February 1935; CWMG, 60, pp. 190-92. 29. Speech about a workers’ meal, 22 October 1935, CWMG, 62, pp. 57-59; CWMG, 60, 62 & 63 contain references to Gandhi’s food reform campaign in articles and letters. 30. Harijan, 18 August 1940; CWMG, 72, pp. 378-81. a1, Harijan, 25 August 1940; ibid., p. 399. 32. Harijan, 25 August 1940; ibid., pp. 399-401. 33. Letters in 1947, for example, CWMG, 88, pp. 23, 24; CWMG, 89, p. 470. 34. See CWMG, 10, pp. 35-36. ape 26 December 1944, CWMG, 78, p. 394. 36. 22 April 1945, CWMG, 79, p. 437. a, Gandhi to Vinoba Bhave, 15 August 1945, CWMG, 81, p. 129. 38. See from 1945 & 1947 CWMG, 80, pp. 299-300; CWMG, 90, p. 61. a9. Hartjan, 26 May & 15 September 1946; CWMG, 84, p. 180; CWMG, 85,

p. 264. 40. CWMG, 76, pp. 411-12; CWMG, 77, pp. 1-48. 41. Instructions for rural clinic, March 1946, CWMG, 83, pp. 336-37. 42. CWMG, 77, pp. 24-25. Gandhi’s abhorrence of artificial contraception dated from very early in his adult life. For his denunciation of it when he was back in India see, for example, (1925) CWMG, 26, pp. 279-80; (1926) CWMG, 31,

pp. 309-12, 402-3, 411-14.

Five

Gandhi, Nehru, and Modernity' Thomas Pantham

The Modernity of Tradition or the Overcoming of Traditionalism and Modernism? In the various voices of the discourse of modernity, tradition appears either as destined to be replaced altogether by modernisation or as capable of existing in subordinate adaptation to modern-

ity. The former voice is that of the theorists of modernisation/ Westernisation, while the latter voice belongs to the theorists of the modernity of tradition. According to the former theory, the relationship between tradition and modernity is dichotomous or exclusionary. ‘Whoever wants progress,’ writes Hoselitz, ‘must get rid of tradition.” In this way, modernisation

is said to entail: (a) the replacement of substantive

rationality (imposed by tradition) by formal rationality; (b) the replacement of the assumption that our life is part of a larger cosmic order by the assumption that our life is one of unencumbered, pure, self-defining subjectivity; (c) the replacement of

collective,

communitarian,

affective,

individualistic, calculative, contractarian

spiritual orientations

by

values; and (d) the re-

placement of the undifferentiatedness of the value system by the differentiation of the value spheres of science, morality and art.* The modern side of each of these dichotomies is an abstracted feature of post-Enlightenment European/Western society. Hence

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the modernisation of the traditional societies is said to entail their Westernisation. The theory of the modernity of tradition (MOT) is a partial, sociological corrective to the ethnocentric/Westernist, unilinear, teleological theory of modernisation. Unlike the latter, the MOT theorists see reciprocity and adaptability between (Western) modernity and (non-Western) tradition. Their view, in effect, is

that the interaction between them leads to ‘the modernity of tradition’ and, correlatedly, to the incorporation, by modernity, of aspects of tradition.* With reference to Gandhi's role in the modernisation of Indian tradition, Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph distinguish between two aspects of his transformative vision and programme of action: (a) his ‘postindustrial critique of industrial civilization’ and the related espousal of ‘spirituality, the self-sufficient village, and non-violence’; and (b) his middle-level norms of modernising conduct, or this-worldly asceticism, which resembles the Protestant ethic of modernising Europe. Of these two aspects of Gandhism, the first (i.e. Gandhi’s postindustrial critique), say the Rudolphs, ‘no longer speaks to the needs of the politically active classes of the sixties.” Concerning the second aspect of Gandhi’s thought and practice, the Rudolphs maintain that it is of continuing relevance to the social and political modernisation of India. By transforming the traditional values of his religious heritage from an otherworldly and fatalistic ambience into activist and this-worldly concerns, Gandhi, say the Rudolphs, made a unique contribution to the modernisation of the Indian society and polity. The Gandhian middle-level norms of modernising conduct or this-worldly asceticism which they identify as of continuing relevance are the economising of time and resources, self-esteem and courageous behaviour, the

building up of modern, democratic political organisations and the promotion of national coherence and identity.” The MOT theorists have provided valuable sociological evidence of the capacity shown by some of India’s traditional organisations, for example, caste organisations, to adapt themselves to the structures of modernity. The MOT theorists have also shed light on how some of India’s traditional values and norms were reinterpreted and used by Mahatma Gandhi to make them serve modern purposes, such as the achievement of national unity and independence. In the present paper, I propose to take a step beyond the MOT

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interpretation to suggest that the Indian tradition and Western modernism have been critically reinterpreted by Gandhi not so much to make tradition subserve modernism as to overcome both traditionalism and modernism.° The Gandhian project, I shall argue, is not one of regression to Hindu traditionalism but of treading and cultivating the border zone between some aspects of the Indian cultural tradition and the ‘bright side’ of post-Enlightenment modernity. In Gandhi’s theory of the merger between the reinterpretation and adaptation of tradition and the reconstruction of modernity, we may see an anticipation of some aspects of the present-day post-structuralist deconstruction of the foundational ‘binary oppositions’ of the political theory of post-Enlightenment modernity. However, as I hope will become clear from this analysis, the Gandhian ‘mix’ of critical traditionality and critical modernity has a distinctiveness of its own; arising partly from the distinctive features of his native cultural tradition and partly from the fact that his political theory was meant to provide an exit from the ‘otherness’ assigned to him and to his peoples by Western postEnlightenment modernity.’ I shall also suggest that in the Gandhian project of bringing about an ‘articulation’ between satya and ahimsa on the one hand and parliamentary swaraj on the other we may see one of the grounds for the co-operation which Gandhi and Nehru had with each other.

Some Aspects of the Gandhian Critique of Modernity Western post-Enlightenment modernity is usually interpreted as a clear liberating break from the irrational constraints of tradition. The modern world, unlike the traditional world, is characterised as one in which humanist subjects think and act rationally and seek to realise autonomy through socio-political institutions of liberty. This conventional interpretation of modernity has recently been challenged by the poststructuralist theorists (Foucault and Derrida for instance).* They do grant that there is a diminution of arbitrary use of naked state power over the individuals living in the modern state than was the case under the traditional, feudal, pre-modern, a solutist state. They however point out that our life in the modern world is pervaded by disguised power relations in our language, in

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our institutions and even in our very ideas of subjectivity, self, rationality, normality, etc. Accordingly, the modern structures of thinking and action, which are conventionally described (in contrast to traditional structures) as structures of freedom or ‘enabling’, are

in fact ‘constraining’ structures, embodying that is, relations of domination

relations of power,

and subordination, inclusion and

exclusion, privileging and marginalisation, and normality and criminality. As the poststructuralists point out, the political theory and political institutions of European post-Enlightenment modernity are founded on a cognitive structure of binary oppositions between subject and object, self and other, reason and tradition, truth and illusion, good and evil, speech and writing, presence and absence, logical and ambiguous, normal and criminal, etc. These meaningendowing or foundational ‘binary oppositions’ of post-Enlightenment modernity are not naturally given but constructed by human beings living and acting in concrete relationships of power. In each pair of the dichotomies, the first part is meant to designate the privileged, foundational or teleological ‘self’ of modernity or progress or reason, while the second part is meant to connote the marginal, subversive ‘other’, which thereby becomes the devalued object of surveillance, discipline and punishment or violence. This ‘other of the violently hierarchic, foundational,

cognitive structure

of post-Enlightenment modernity may be other individuals or groups (e.g. the colonised peoples) or aspects of one’s own physical, psychological or spiritual life. This poststructuralist critique of the basic divisiveness or foundational violence of the political theory of the European Enlightenment or modernity was anticipated by Mahatma Gandhi in the first decade of this century. He condemned modern civilisation not because it was Western or because it was scientific but because he found its predominant character to be the exploitation of ‘the weaker races of the earth’ and the destruction of the ‘lower order of creation’ in the name of science and humanism.’ On several occasions, Gandhi clarified that he was not opposed to science or machinery as such, Far from opposing the progress of science, he admired the modern scientific spirit of the West and maintained

that the world needs ‘the marvellous advances in science and organization that the Western nations have made’. The basic error of the project of Western post-Enlightenment modernity, Gandhi

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pointed out, is its exploitation of, or violence to, its other. Speak-

ing to the Meccano Club, Calcutta, in August 1925 he said: Do not for one moment consider that I condemn all that is Western. For the time being I am dealing with the predominant character of modern civilization, do not call it Western civiliz-

ation, and the predominant character of modern civilization is the exploitation of the weaker races of the earth. The predominant character of modern civilization is to dethrone God and enthrone Materialism. I have not hesitated to use the word ‘Satan’. I have not hesitated to call this system of Government under which we are labouring ‘Satanic’."

In this passage, Gandhi not only singles out the exploitation of the ‘weak’ as the predominant character of modernity but also says that that exploitation gets ‘normalized’ in modernity because its political theory is based on the dethronement of God or Truth and the enthronement of Materialism.” In his celebrated Hind Swaraj (1909), he had condemned modern civilisation because it ‘takes note neither of morality nor of religion.’'’ Divorced from truth or morality, modern politics, economics and science are left to the self-destructive play of ‘brute force’ or ‘pure selfishness’. In 1919, Gandhi explained this to a friend in the following way: . enquiring of every country, you find them affected without exception by unrest of a deep seated character. In America, it is class warfare; in England it is labour unrest; in Russia, Bolshevism, and in India, it is an all round unrest due to repression, famine and other causes. This situation which now faces the Western nations was inevitable; for Western civilization, based

on the basic principle of brute force as a guiding motive, could have ultimately led only to mutual destruction." In a famous letter he wrote in 1910 to W.J. Wybergh, Member of the Legislative Assembly, Transvaal, Gandhi pointed out that ‘in everyday life under modern conditions’, there is a ‘complete divorce between politics and religion or spirituality.’ Resting on the foundational dichotomy of Matter vs. Spirit, science/reason vs. ‘tradition’, or politics/economics vs. morality, Western postEnlightenment modernity, according to Gandhi, lacks adequate

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normative criteria for de-legitimising the exploitation of, or violence to, its other. His satyagraha (political action informed by Truth and Nonviolence), he said, ‘seeks to rejoin politics and religion and to test every one of our actions in the light of ethical principles.’'’ In his view, when politics is rejoined with the ethical principles of satya (truth) and ahimsa (non-violence), every one of our activities, be it in the sphere of economics or in the realm of science, will also come to be governed by those principles. This is so because politics has come to play a crucial role in modern times. At this point in my analysis, I must pause to clarify that Gandhi uses ‘religion’, ‘ethics’, ‘moral’, ‘spiritual’ and dharma (moral law or ontological ethics) interchangeably. And by ‘religion’ he means not ‘formal religion or customary religion but that religion which underlies [or transcends] all religions.’ Gandhi recognises that the political rise of the masses represents the spirit of the times. He regards it as belonging to the ‘bright side’ of modernity. When politics is reintegrated with ethics or dharma, he says, the unity of mankind and the oneness of life will come to be respected or upheld in our economic, scientific and technological activities. According to Gandhi, the oneness of life and unity of mankind, ruptured by modernity, is upheld in the central strand of the Indian cultural tradition. He reinterprets that tradition and offers it as an alternative philosophical grounding for the politics of overcoming both traditionalism and modernism. In this reconstructive programme, as I shall try to show in the next section, there is no regression to Hindu traditionalism but a merging of the reconstruction of Indian tradition with the reconstruction of post-Enlightenment modernity.”

Conceptual Resources from Indian Cultural Tradition According to Gandhi, the exploitation and violence of postEnlightenment modernity cannot be transgressed without reintegrating politics and morality which, in turn, cannot be done without overcoming the political-philosophical dichotomies, ‘binary oppositions’ or ‘conceptual imperialism’ between self and other, matter and spirit, and ontological Reality and moral Truth. He finds some clues to the needed correction in the Indian cultural tradition.

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From that tradition, he derives a cognitive-evaluative framework of ideas, in which the categories of dualism or dvaitism are inter-

meshed with the ideas of non-dualism or advaitism. He writes that he had no difficulty in supporting both the advaita and dvaita philosophies and that he would have no objection to being called an anekantavadi (one who believes in the ‘manyness of reality’) or a syadvadi (one who believes in conditional or relative predications). In his moral-political thought, Gandhi rejected the post-Newtonian political theories of Herbert Spencer, Adam Smith, etc., who merely extended the laws of the physical and animal worlds to social life. He instead adopted the viewpoint of the rishis (seers), according to whom the twin principles of satya (truth) and ahimsa (non-violence), and not the laws of ‘brute force’, are the distinctive principles of human conduct. In particular, he was inspired by the idea which is emphasised in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad that the autonomy of the moral self is linked with the well-being of the ‘other’. Gandhi writes: I know that the essential difference between man and the brute is that the former can respond to the call of the spirit in him, can rise superior to the passions that he owns in common with the brute, and, therefore, superior to selfishness and violence, which

belong to the brute nature and not to the immortal spirit of man. That is the fundamental conception of Hinduism.”

In this passage, Gandhi is not claiming that the laws of the physical and animal worlds do not apply at all to human beings; he is only claiming that those laws, as they apply to, and are applied by, human beings, should be governed by the distinctly human principles of moral conduct, which go beyond the binary-logical positivities of post-Newtonian political theory. “The highest moral law’, Gandhi wrote, ‘is that we should unremittingly work for the good of mankind.’” Gandhi's idea that political actions should conform to the moral principles is linked to his basic philosophical standpoint that there is an ultimate non-dualism between the realm of moral truth and the ontology of Being. He writes: Truth in Sanskrit means sat. Sat means is. Therefore Truth is

implied

in is. God

is, nothing else is. Therefore

the more

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truthful we are, the nearer we are to God. We are only to the extent we are truthful.”

These passages convey Gandhi’s belief that there is an ultimate non-dualism between truth (satya) and reality (sat); sat stands for not only what exists but also as the ground of all possibilities. Since the ethics of truth (satya) is implied in the ontology of sat (being) and vice versa, the ‘real world’ of politics should not be regarded as divorced from the ‘ideal world’ of ethics or truth. The entire cosmos is governed by dharma (ontological ethics). Its eternal and universal principles are truth and non-violence which should, therefore, inform our political, economic, scientific and technological activities. In his autobiography, which he called The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Gandhi wrote:

for me, truth is the sovereign principle, which includes numerous other principles. This truth is not only truthfulness in word, but truthfulness in thought also, and not only the relative truth of our conception, but the Absolute Truth, the Eternal Principle,

that is God. There are innumerable definitions of God... . But I worship God as Truth only. I have not yet found Him, but I am seeking after him. . . . But as long as I have not realized this Absolute Truth, so long must I hold by the relative truth as I have conceived it. That relative truth must, meanwhile, be my beacon, my shield and buckler.”

Since ‘everybody is right from his own standpoint’, and since ‘it is not impossible that everybody is wrong’, Gandhi concludes that the actual conduct of the pursuit of truth has to follow the principle of ahimsa or non-violence. And since politics is of central importance in modern times, its integration with the twin principles of non-violence and truth becomes the crucial part of Gandhi’s project of reconstructing modernity. As we noted above in passing, Gandhi’s insistence that tolerance and non-violence should inform political conduct had to do with his commitment to the Jain doctrines of anekantavada (the multidimensional character of reality) and syadvada (conditional or relative predications). Gandhi writes:

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I very much like the doctrine of the manyness of reality. It is this doctrine that has taught me to judge a Mussalman from his own standpoint and a Christian from his . . . . My anekantavada is the result of the two doctrines of satya and ahimsa.” Gandhi experienced no difficulty in accepting different predications about a thing or a situation as true from different standpoints. His anekantavada and syadvada took him beyond the laws of binary logic, that is, beyond the laws of identity, non-contradiction and the excluded middle. In fact, his satyagraha way of conflictresolution is informed by an interplay of binary and non-binary thought.”

Beyond Traditionalism and Modernism In the previous section, I have tried to show that Gandhi finds some conceptual resources of the Indian cultural tradition to be relevant, cognitively and ethically, for the reconstruction of modernity. This does not mean that his reconstructive project was one of regression to Hindu traditionalism. Far from it; he was not less opposed to Hindu traditionalism than to Western modernism. In fact his entire political theory and praxis were directed against Indian traditionalism and its reinforcement by Western imperialist modernism. Gandhi, as we saw above, derived the ethical principles of satya (truth) and ahimsa (non-violence) from the Indian cultural tradition. But he does not claim that that tradition is a monolithic tradition, wholly based on those principles. He grants that there is the play of untruth and violence in Hindu tradition as in any other civilisation. He writes: ‘We are all guilty of having oppressed our brothers. We make them crawl on their bellies before us and rub their noses on the ground . . . . Has the English government ever inflicted anything worse on us?’ Again, there are two aspects of Hinduism. There is, on the one hand, the historical Hinduism with its untouchability, superstitious worship of stocks and stones, animal sacrifice and so on. On the other, we have the Hinduism of the Gita, the Upanishads and

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Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra which is the acme of ahimsa and oneness of all creation, pure worship of one immanent, formless imperishable God. Ahimsa, which to me is the chief glory of HinduBST ers

Thus, without denying the history of violence and oppression in Indian civilisation, Gandhi maintains that ‘the most distinctive and the largest contribution of Hinduism to India’s culture is the doctrine of ahimsa’, which, he adds, is a ‘living force in the lives of India’s millions even today.” Given the prominence of the value of ahimsa in the culture and ideology of the people, how does one explain that they were actually subjected to violence and oppression? This, in Gandhi’s view, had to do partly with the political ignorance and political inactivity of the ordinary people; and partly with the orthodoxy and selfishness of the priestly class whose members either withdrew from political or social life for personal moksha, or gave orthodox or dogmatic interpretations of the shastras (scriptures) witha view to safeguarding the privileges of the privileged, that is, the rulers and the upper castes. In his Hind Swaraj, Gandhi pointed out that during the glorious ancient period of Indian civilisation, ‘kings and their swords were (regarded) inferior to the sword of ethics’ and that ‘the sovereigns of the earth (were regarded) to be inferior to the rishis (seers) and fakirs (ascetics or mendicants).”* India’s fall from its ancient glory, he said, should be attributed first of all to ‘our inveterate selfishness, our inability to make sacrifices for the country, our dishonesty, our timidity, our hypocrisy and our ignorance.” This degeneration of Indian civilisation from a living tradition to an orthodox, decadent traditionalism has been compounded by an impetialist pact between it and the divisive or exploitative modernism of the West. Prior to the consolidation of British colonialism, the living character of Indian civilisation was maintained by the learned and virtuous saints and seers, who constantly reinterpreted and adapted the general, fundamental, moral principles contained in the shastras (scriptures) to the changing needs of the people. In his writings and speeches, Gandhi constantly referred to, and drew from, the folk-based reinterpretations and adaptations

of the Hindu scriptures by the Buddha, Mahavir, Kabir, Nanak,

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Mira, Ramkrishna, Raichandbhai and Narasinha Mehta. Such life-

maintaining reinterpretations and adaptations of the Indian tradition, Gandhi points out, have been arrested or hampered, since the 1857 Indian Revolt against British rule, by a sort of imperialist pact between the indigenous forces of traditionalism and the imperialist agents of exploitative modernism. After the 1857 Revolt, the British rulers propped up the feudal kings and the landlords. This was followed by the codification and legalisation of social norms and conventions for privileging the feudal hierarchy over the lower sections of the society. For instance, the dharma-

shastras which, as dharma rather than as law, had hitherto provided general normative principles for aiding in the evaluation and modification of customs and traditions, were ‘turned into the Hindu equivalent of the British civil code, and the pandits became the Hindu equivalent of British lawyers.*” Gandhi described the regressive nature of this pact between traditionalism and modernism in the following words:

In pre-British India there was no such thing as rigid Hindu Law governing the lives of millions. The body of regulations known as smritis were indicative rather than inflexible codes of conduct. They never had the validity of law such as is known to modern lawyers. The observance of the restraints of the smritis was enforced more by social than legal sanctions. The smritis were, as is evident from the self-contradictory verses to be found in them, continually passing, like ourselves, through evolutionary changes, and were adapted to the new discoveries that were being made in social science. Wise kings were free to procure new interpretations to suit new conditions. Hindu religion or Hindu Shastras never had the changeless and unchanging character that is now being sought to be given to them. No doubt in those days there were kings and their councillors who had the wisdom and the authority required to command the respect and allegiance of society. But now the custom has grown up of thinking that smritis and everything that goes by the name of Shastras is absolutely unchangeable." The distinctive contribution of Gandhi's intervention in the political thought and praxis of our times was to release both Indian tradition and Western modernity from the regressive pact between

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the substantive orthodoxy of traditionalism and the divisive or exploitative rationalism of modernism. His project or programme is one of overcoming modernism without regressing to traditionalism. In his approach, there is a merging of the reconstruction of Indian tradition and the reconstruction of Western modernity. The components of this project have been briefly spelt out by Gandhi in his Foreword to the Collected Speeches of his political guru, Gopal Krishna Gokhale. A lengthy passage from it is reproduced below:

Every age is known to have its predominant mode of spiritual effort best suited for the attainment of moksha. Whenever the religious spirit is on the decline, it is revived through such an effort

in tune

with

the times.

In this age,

our

degradation

reveals itself through our political condition... . We cannot rise again till our political condition changes for the better... . If the means employed are impure, the change will be not in the direction of progress but very likely the opposite. Only a change brought about in our political condition by pure means can lead to real progress. Gokhale not only perceived this right at the beginning of his public life but also followed the principle in action. Everyone had realized that popular awakening could be brought about only through political activity. If such activity was spiritualized, it could show the path to moksha .. . . In this age, only political sannyasis can fulfill and adorn the ideal of sannyasa, Others will more likely than not disgrace the sannyasi’s saffron garb. No Indian who aspires to follow the way of true religion can afford to remain aloof from politics. In other words, one who aspires to a truly religious life cannot fail to undertake public service as his mission, and we are today so much caught up in the political machine that service of the people is impossible without taking part in politics. In olden days, our peasants, though ignorant of who ruled them, led their simple lives free from fear; they can no longer afford to be so unconcerned. In the circumstances that obtain today, in following the path of religion they must take into account the political conditions. If our sadhus, rishis, munis, maulvis and priests realized the truth of this, we would have a Servants of India Society in every ViNlaSe ee ie

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As this passage shows, the ingredients or steps in the Gandhian programme of overcoming modernism without regressing to traditionalism are: 1. Political action by the masses. 2. Politicisation of spiritualism; that is, the pursuit of moksha (liberation, enlightenment),

not through

individualistic

or

world-negating sannyasa (renunciation) but through political action for the welfare of one’s fellowmen. 3. The spiritualisation of politics; that is, the conduct of politics according to the ethical principles of satya (truth) and ahimsa (non-violence).*

Of these ingredients, the first was derived largely from the ‘bright side’ of Western post-Enlightenment modernity, while the third was drawn largely from the Indian cultural tradition. The second ingredient was obviously an interlacing of the other two. In this way, the Gandhian project ruptures the dichotomy between tradition and modernity and erects a non-exploitative, two-way bridge between East and West.* In Gandhi, in other words, the reform of Indian tradition merges into the reconstruction of Western modernity, and vice versa. This can be attributed partly to the fact that he was an ‘insider-outsider’ to both Indian tradition and Western modernity. It can be attributed, more importantly, to the fact that India already incorporated Western modernity to some extent, and hence there was no question of any complete bypassing of it in the process of reforming Indian tradition.

The Gandhi — Nehru Complementarity Anyone trying to transform a social system through non-violent means cannot avoid working from within that system and using some of its institutions or values. Accordingly, Gandhi had to use not only some of the ingredients of the Indian cultural tradition but also some of the institutions and values of Western modernity. Unlike the reactionaries or traditionalists, Gandhi realised that the mere availability of non-dual notions of ontology and a non-binary mode of thinking did not suffice for transgressing modernity’s

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ways ©. organising life; the former had to be extended into nonbinary processes of political action. In this, Gandhi found that some of the values and institutions of modern politics were of relevance. Accordingly, he experimented with a combination of some of the values and institutions of modern liberal politics, that is, civil liberties, constitutional government and parliamentary democracy, with some values emphasised in Indian cultural tradition, that is, satya and ahimsa. He thus developed the satyagraha mode of political action for transgressing the binariness of modern politics. While Gandhi had a more or less consistent conception of the ingredients of the Indian cultural tradition which were relevant to his task, he was not equally clear or consistent on the question of what aspects of post-Enlightenment liberal modernity were similarly relevant and to what extent. Regarding the latter, broadly speaking, his theoretical position changed over the years from an outright indictment of the institutional trajectory of modernisation to a positive appreciation of the emancipatory relevance of some of the values and ideas of post-Enlightenment liberal modernity, which he incorporated into his notions of swaraj (autonomy?), sarvodaya (welfare of all), etc. This ideological change on his part was due, in no small measure, to the influence of his modernist political collaborator and ‘heir’, Jawaharlal Nehru. To be sure, Gandhi could not always

bring himself to feel as optimistic about the bright side of modernity as Nehru

and his followers did. In such situations, the benefit of

doubt was invariably given to Nehru, who was encouraged to pursue and implement his convictions for the benefit of the country. Thus,

on one

such occasion,

Gandhi

wrote

to Nehru:

‘I do not

want to interfere with your handling of the whole situation. For I want the maximum from you for the country... .”” A proper understanding of the interface between tradition and modernity in contemporary India, would entail a detailed analysis of the ideological relationship between Gandhi and Nehru. That would be a complex exercise falling outside the scope of the present paper. But it should suffice here to note that there was on Gandhi's part a Nehruvian turn towards the emancipatory relevance of modern science and parliamentary democracy, while there was on Nehru’s part a Gandhian turn towards the perennial and universal relevance of some of the values of India’s cultural.tradition. In 1909-10, Gandhi took an extremely negative and unrealistic

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view of modern civilisation and condemned such of its institutions and practices as the constitutional state, the parliament, law courts, modern medicine, railways, etc. Nehru found Gandhi's views to be

an ‘utterly wrong and harmful doctrine, and impossible of achievement.’” Its reasons, he said, were purely ‘metaphysical and mystical’. Gandhi, Nehru said, suffered from ‘a peasant’s blindness to some aspects of life.” He admitted that Gandhi was ‘superb in his special field of Satyagrahic direct action’ and that he was also ‘very good in working himself and making others work quietly for social reform among the masses.’” But his ‘history and sociology and economics’ appeared to Nehru to be ‘all wrong’.* Nehru however realised that Gandhi knew India far better than anyone else and that ‘a man who could command such tremendous devotion and loyalty must have something in him that corresponds to the needs and aspirations of the masses.’ Finding in him ‘the

quintessence of the conscious and subconscious will’ of the vast masses of the Indian peasantry, among whom he effected ‘a vast psychological revolution’,” Nehru placed himself under Gandhi's command, hoping that in the process of the actual struggle for independence Gandhi would come to appreciate socialism in particular and the bright side of modernity in general. Or, if there would be no such change on Gandhi's part, Nehru thought there could be a future parting between them. As it turned out, there was a partial or half-way ideological change both on the part of Gandhi and on the part of Nehru. As for the ideological differences that persisted, each one of them tolerated and encouraged the other to pursue the line of action that he felt convinced about. Such a tolerated ideological diversity between Gandhi and Nehru has given India the legacy of a rich and resilient political ideology that can be critical of both orthodox traditionalism and exploitative modernism.“ In what follows, I shall briefly illustrate (a) Gandhi’s clear recognition, in the later part of his public life, of the emancipatory relevance of the modern state and parliamentary democracy, and (b) Nehru’s realisation, in the final phase of his life, of the relevance of some of the values of India’s cultural tradition.” Throughout his life, Gandhi remained deeply appreciative of, and committed to, the civil liberties guaranteed by modern liberalism. In 1903, he argued that the rights and liberties of liberalism

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which had been granted to the Indian subjects by the Queen’s Proclamation of 1859 had to be extended to the Indian workers in South Africa. During the Indian freedom struggle, he prided himself for his ‘reformist liberalism’. Yet until the 1920s, his attitude

to constitutional government and the institutions of parliamentary democracy remained negative. But thereafter, he recognised their direct relevance to the ideal swaraj (freedom and self-rule) of his conception. In this, he acknowledged Nehru’s impact on him. Nehru, Gandhi said, had a ‘superior knowledge of the technicalities of democracy’.” In June 1928, Gandhi had said that constitution making did not

interest him much as he did not see it as part of the means to swaraj. Subsequently, under the influence of Jawaharlal Nehru and Deshbandhu

Chittaranjan Das, he revised his view and came

to be ‘more enthusiastic than Jawaharlal himself’ about setting up a Constituent Assembly in India. Gandhi now came to regard the Constituent Assembly as constitutive of ‘constructive satyagraha.’ Viewing ‘parliamentary swaraj’ as a necessary means to his ‘ideal swaraj’, he advocated ‘unadulterated adult franchise for both men

and women’ irrespective of their literacy or illiteracy.” In his Foreword to the 1921 reprint of his Hind Swaraj, he wrote that while remaining committed

to his ‘ideal swaraj’, he was devoting

his ‘corporate activity . . . to the attainment of parliamentary swaraj in accordance with the wishes of the people of India.’ We may conclude that it was Gandhi’s considered view that when it is articulated with satyagraha and constructive programme, parliamentary swaraj can bring about the rupture of the regressive imperialist pact between Western modernism and Indian traditionalism and thereby bring about a revolutionary transformation of both. Small wonder that even in his Last Will, while recommending

the disbanding of the Congress party in order to turn Congressmen into ‘constructive workers’, he willed that they should undertake, among other tasks, the registration of voters in the electoral rolls.

As Gandhi was so influenced by Nehru, the latter too was considerably influenced by the former. In the early phase of his political career, Nehru had a boundless or an unqualified optimism in the humanism and scientific spirit of Western modernity. He was dismissive of the metaphysical, mystical and religious character of Indian thought. But in consequence of his political work with

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Gandhi, he came to value some aspects of Gandhi’s social philosophy, especially the principles of non-violence, the divinity of life, and the rejoining of politics and science with dharma. In his Discovery of India, which he wrote after he came under Gandhi’s influence, he states: India,

as well as China,

must

learn

from

the West,

for the

modern West has much to teach, and the spirit of the age is represented by the West. But the West is also obviously in need of learning, and its advances in technology will bring it little comfort if it does not learn some of the deeper lessons of life, which have absorbed the minds of thinkers in all ages and in all countries.“ As if pointing out some of these ‘deeper lessons of life’, which have been probed in Indian thought, Nehru, in 1958, referred favourably to:

the old Vedantic conception that everything, whether sentient or insentient, finds a place in the organic whole; that everything has a spark of what might be called the Divine impulse or the basic energy of life-force which pervades the Universe.*

In his Azad Memorial Lecture of 1959, he said that the progress of science and technology needs to be combined with ‘the progress of the mind and spirit.’ In his last piece of writing, he stated that while we must welcome the advances in science and technology, ‘we must not forget that the essential objective to be aimed at is the quality of the individual and the concept of dharma underlying

Liss Regarding the creative tension between the political ideologies of Gandhi and Nehru, the former said in 1936 that he and Nehru were ‘rivals in making love to each other in the pursuit of the common goal.’ And Nehru, in spite of his persisting differences with Gandhi's views on modernity, acknowledged that the latter was a ‘tremendous revolutionary force’. Gandhi, Nehru said, conceived that revolution in terms of continuity and not in terms of a break. His language was one of continuity. In the popular mind, he is the tremendous link between all the past of

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India and all the future revolutions of India. There is no break between them.*

It is striking that Nehru ‘willed’ that he too be remembered as a link between India’s past and its future. In his will, written in 1954 and published after his death, he wrote that a handful of his ashes

be thrown into the river Ganga. He wrote:

. . though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and constrain her and divide her people, and suppress vast ,

numbers of them, and prevent the free development of the body and the spirit, though I see all this, yet I do not wish to cut myself off from the past completely. I am proud of that great inheritance that has been and is ours, and I am conscious that I too, like all of us, am a link in that

unbroken chain which goes back to the dawn of history in the immemorial past of India.”

In Conclusion Gandhi rejected a central assumption of modern political theory, namely, that as men originally belonged to a state of ‘nature’, they are bound to remain, even in a civil or political society, tied to the law of ‘brute force’, and that therefore a natural-scientific theory of politics, rather than any conception which ‘fused’ morality or spirituality with politics, was appropriate to the enlightened circumstances of modernity.

Gandhi, as I have tried to show above,

explicitly rejected the modernist political theories of Herbert Spencer, Adam Smith, etc., who, he felt, merely extended the Galilean and Newtonian laws of the physical world and the Darwinian law of the animal world to human/social life. Departing from those theories, Gandhi maintained that non-violence is ‘the law of our species as violence is the law of the brute.’” He regarded the rishis, who formulated the principle of nonviolence for the conduct of politics, to be ‘greater geniuses than Newton.’ Deriving inspiration from this tradition of the rishis, Gandhi regarded the twin principles of satya and ahimsa, and not the law of brute force, to be the distinctive values and ideals of our

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moral and political conduct. He did not indeed deny the incidence of brute force in politics, but he denied its inevitability and desirability and showed that it is both desirable and possible to have an ‘articulation’ of parliamentary swaraj with satyagraha—an articulation, which, as I have tried to show, may be seen as one of the ‘ideological’ grounds for the co-operation which Gandhi and his ‘political heir’, Nehru, had with each other.

The originality and relevance of this Gandhian ‘invention’ in the field of moral and political action have been recognised, most notably, by Toynbee and Einstein. I shall therefore conclude this paper by presenting their views. On the occasion of Gandhi’s birth centenary in 1968, Toynbee wrote that he (Gandhi) invented an approach to human emancipation that is doubly relevant to our times. Firstly, Toynbee noted, Gandhi's politics of satya and ahimsa sought to liberate both the oppressed and the oppressor from the imperialist system of organising social power. Hence Toynbee saw in Gandhi not only the Father of Indian independence but also a great benefactor of the British people, whose civilisation, as I have tried to indicate, he strove to reform by articulating some of its values with the ideals of satya and ahimsa. Secondly, Gandhi’s invention of the politics of truth and nonviolence is, according to Toynbee, of crucial relevance for saving mankind from annihilation by the newly developed forms of destructive power, that is, atomic weapons. He warns us that unless the progress of science and technology in the discovery of atomic energy is matched by the progress of morality in the field of politics, the former will lead to the destruction of human civilisation. Since politics is the field in which atomic power is applied to the conduct of human affairs, Gandhi's experiments in the politics of truth and non-violence are, in Toynbee’s view, of great relevance for the survival of mankind in the atomic age.” The originality and emancipatory relevance of Gandhi’s politics of truth and non-violence, which Toynbee has emphasised, have also been acknowledged by Einstein. On a few occasions, Einstein wrote to Gandhi out of ‘devotion and admiration’ for his nonviolent and moral approach to politics. In a tribute published in a festschrift for Gandhi’s seventieth birthday, Einstein writes: Gandhi is unique in political history. He has invented an entirely new and humane technique for the liberation struggle of an

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oppressed people and carried it out with the greatest energy and devotion. The moral influence which he has exercised upon thinking people through the civilized world may be far more durable than would appear likely in our present age with its exaggeration of brute force. For the work of statesmen is permanent only in so far as they arouse and consolidate the moral forces of their peoples through their personal example and educating influence.” When Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948, Einstein sent a

message to a memorial meeting, in which he wrote that reverence is due to Gandhi for his successful experiments in finding a nonviolent alternative to the ‘morally decadent’ politics of ‘naked power’. Some months later, Einstein wrote again pointing out the ‘world historical significance’ of Indian independence and of Gandhi's politics of truth and non-violence. Soon after Gandhi's assassins were executed in November 1949,

one Om Prakash Kaliol, professor of physics in a college in Punjab, wrote to Einstein protesting against his writings in praise of Gandhi. Kaliol pointed out that Gandhi's philosophy was the antithesis of ‘scientific rationalism’, whereas his assassins were scientific rationalists who valued Einstein’s theory of relativity. In his reply to Kaliol, Einstein reiterated that despite the fact that ‘Gandhi was to some extent anti-rationalist or at least a man who did not believe in the independent value of knowledge’, his ‘unique greatness’ as a morally fervent inventor of the non-violent method of moral-political action cannot be overestimated. Einstein went on to claim that Gandhi’s non-violent method of political action ‘is by far the greatest achievement in the political field in the last centuries—not only for India but for the whole of humanity.” In an instructive assessment of the grounds for Einstein’s admiration for Gandhi’s non-violent, moral method of political action, Bhikhu Parekh points out that the horrendous brutalities of the violent and immoral politics of the Second World War were greatly responsible for making Einstein appreciate the liberative significance of the Gandhian method. Parekh however feels that in his ‘celebration of the Gandhian method’, Einstein is not sufficiently alert to its limitations; it was not, writes Parekh, as effective an alternative to violence as Einstein believed it to be.™ Parekh’s criticism of Einstein’s assessment of Gandhi seems to me to require a slight qualification. Since Einstein’s theory of

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relativity (which incidentally figured in the correspondence between him and Kaliol) was in a way a corrective to Newtonian physics, he was well placed to appreciate the originality and significance of Gandhi's effort to go beyond the Newton-inspired tradition of political theory and political action. Gandhi, as I have tried to show above, was aware of this aspect of his moral-political invention; namely, that it was a departure from the natural-scientific theory of politics in that it was based on the assumption that ‘man is higher than the brute in his moral instincts and moral institutions’ and that therefore ‘the law of nature as applied to the one is different from the law of nature as applied to the other.’ Explaining the significance of satyagraha, he wrote: I have . . . ventured to place before India the ancient law of self-sacrifice. For satyagraha and its offshoots, non-cooperation and civil resistance, are nothing but new names for the law of suffering. The rishis, who discovered the law of non-violence in the midst of violence, were greater geniuses than Newton. They were themselves greater warriors than Wellington. Having themselves known the use of arms, they realised their uselessness and taught a weary world that its salvation lay not through violence but through non-violence.”

Notes

1. This paper is based on research carried out while I was a Visiting Scholar at St. John’s College, Cambridge, during the 1989 Easter Term. An earlier version was presented ir. a Joint India-China Seminar on Interactions between Tradition and Modernity, held at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing,

30 October

1989. Amit

Dholakia’s critical reading of an earlier version is

gratefully acknowledged.

. B.F. Hoselitz, “Tradition and Economic Growth’, in R. Braibanti and J.J. Spengler, eds., Tradition, Values and Socio-Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). 3. For a good overview of modernisation theory, see Eva Etzioni-Halevy, Social Change: The Advent and Maturation of Modern Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). 4. L.I. and S.H. Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); S.H. Rudolph, ‘Beyond nN

Gandhi, Nehru, and Modernity

119

Modernity and Tradition: Theoretical and Ideological Aspects of Comparative Social Sciences’, in R.J. Moore, ed., Tradition and Politics in South Asia (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1979); Rajni Kothari, Politics in India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1970); Rajini Kothari, ‘Tradition and Modernity Revisited’, Government and Opposition, 3, 4 (1968). . Rudolph and Rudolph, Modernity of Tradition, pp. 217-19. . It may be noted that my interpretation of the Gandhian intervention as a moment in the overcoming of traditionalism and modernism differs from Partha Chatterjee’s interpretation of it as constituting the ‘moment of manoeuvre’ of the passive revolution of capital in India, whereby he means that the

Gandhian intervention had the practical purpose and effect of bringing about ‘the political appropriation of the subaltern classes’ for that passive revolution. Cf..Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986). A brief examination of Partha Chatterjee’s interpretation may be found in my Political Theories and Social Reconstruction (New Delhi: Sage, forthcoming).

. See Ashis Nandy, Colonialism

The Intimate Enemy:

(Delhi: Oxford

Loss and Recovery of Self under

University Press, 1983).

. On Foucault, Derrida, etc., I have found the following books very useful: Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987); Fred R. Dallmayr,

Polis and Praxis (Cambridge,

Mass.:

MIT Press,

1984); Fred R.

Dallmayr, Margins of Political Discourse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).

. Young India, 17 December 1925. Gandhi's classic critique of modern civilisation is in his Hind Swaraj (1909), which is reprinted in R. Iyer, ed., The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), vol. I, pp. 199-265. Cf. also Nageshwar Prasad, ed., Hind Swaraj: A Fresh Look (New Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1985); and K.R. Rao, ‘Communication against Communication: The Gandhian Critique of Modern Civilization in Hind

Swaraj’,

in Bhikhu

Parekh

and Thomas

Pantham,

eds.,

Political

Discourse: Explorations in Indian and Western Political Thought (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1987); Ashis Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays on the Politics of Awareness (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987); and R. Roy, Self and Society (New Delhi: Sage, 1984). See also Note 31 below. . As quoted in B.N. Ganguli, Indian Economic Thought (New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill

Publ. Co., 1977), p. 247.

. Young India, 10 September 1925. . Gandhi writes, ‘I do not believe in a personal deity, but I believe in the Eternal Law of Truth and Love which I have translated as non-violence’, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division of the Government of India, Navajivan, 90 volumes, 1958-84), 77, p. 390. . Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. 214. . Collected Works,

15, p. 381.

. Indian Opinion, 21 May 1910.

. Ibid. . Gandhi, as quoted in R. Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (Dethi: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 45.

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18. Gandhi, according to Ashis Nandy, belonged to a society which ‘conceptualized the past as a possible means of reaffirming or altering the present’, Intimate Enemy, p. 57.

M.K. Gandhi, Socialism of My Conception (Bombay:

IS) 20. Dilly: 22, Doe 24.

Gandhi Gandhi

in Young India, 6 December in Harijan, 27 March 1949.

1957), p. 270.

1928.

Gandhi, Autobiography in Collected Works, 39, p. 4. Gandhi in Young India, March

1925.

See Thomas Pantham, ‘Habermas’s Practical Discourse and Gandhi's Satyagraha’, Praxis International, 6, 2 (1986), reproduced in Parekh and Pantham, eds., Political Discourse. Collected Works, 24, p. 211.

25. 26. Bite 28. 20% 30.

Iyer, ed., Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. II, p. 262. Iyer, ed., Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. I, p. 455.

Ibid., p. 232. Ibid., p. 307. Bhikhu Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform (New Delhi: Sage, 1989), Dasilk

Sik Collected Works, 35, p. 123, as quoted in Parekh, Colonialism, pp. 31-32. 328 Iyer, ed., Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 1, pp. 137-38. BB I have examined some of these aspects of Gandhi's political thought in Thomas Pantham, ‘Beyond Liberal Democracy: Thinking with Mahatma Gandhi’, in T.

Pantham and K.L. Deutsch, eds., Political Thought in Modern India (New Delhi: Sage, 1986), and ‘Postrelativism in Emancipatory Thought: The Significance of Gandhi's Swaraj and Satyagraha’, in A. Nandy and D.L. Sheth, eds., The Multiverse of Democracy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 34. Nandy, Intimate Enemy; Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi's Political Philosophy (London: Macmillan,

ee)Nn

. .

.

1989); Parekh, Colonialism,

Tradition and Reform, Fred R.

Dallmayr, ‘Gandhi as Mediator between East and West’, in his Margins of Political Discourse. Notable earlier works on this theme are Raghavan Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1973); and Rudolph and Rudolph, Modernity of Tradition. Quoted by B.R. Nanda in B.R. Nanda, P.C Joshi and Raj Krishna, Gandhi and Nehru (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 17. J. Nehru, An Autobiography (London: Bodley Head, 1986), p. 510. For a very stimulating treatment of the emotional and ideological relationship between Gandhi and Nehru, see Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Nehru, Autobiography, pp. 127-28. Ibid., pp. 72-73.

. 39. Ibid., pp. 127-28, 254-55. 40. See Nanda et al., Gandhi and Nehru; S. Gopal, A Biography of Jawaharlal Nehru (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), vol. II; B. Prasad, Gandhi, Nehru and JP (Delhi: Chaitanya 41. For an extended interpretation Pantham, ‘Understanding Nehru’s The Nehru Legacy: An Appraisal

Publ., 1985). of Nehru’s political ideology, see Thomas Political Ideology’, in Amal Ray et al., eds.,

(New Delhi: Oxford and IBH, 1991).

Gandhi, Nehru, and Modernity

121

. Gandhi in Harijan, 25 November 1939 and 14 and 21 July 1946. Reproduced in Iyer, ed., Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. III, pp. 305-8, 312-17 Iyer, ed., Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. II, pp. 305, 315. . J. Nehru, The Discovery of Inaia (New York: John Day, 1946), pp. 517-18. . Quoted in K.P. Karunakaran, The Phenomenon of Nehru (New Delhi: Gitanjali Prakashan, 1979), pp. 156-67. . Nehru’s Foreword to Sriman Narayan, Socialism in Indian Planning (Bombay: 1964). . Harijan, 25 July 1936. . Tibor Mende, Conversations with Mr. Nehru (London: 1956), p. 124. . S. Gopal, ed., Jawaharlal Nehru: An Anthology (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 647-48. . The Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1968), vol.

VI, p. 156.

. Arnold J. Toynbee, ‘A Tribute’, in S. Radhakrishnan, ed., Mahatma Gandhi, 100 Years (New Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1968), pp. 375-80. . Albert Einstein, ‘Gandhi's Statesmanship’, in S. Radhakrishnan, ed., Mahatma Gandhi: Essays and Reflections on his Life and Work (Bombay: Jaico Publishing House, 1956), p. 57. . Quoted

in Bhikhu

Parekh,

‘Einstein’s

Table, 320 (1991), pp. 471-72.

Assessment

of Gandhi’,

The Round

. Ibid. . Gandhi, ‘The Doctrine of the Sword’, in Radhakrishnan, ed., Mahatma Gandhi,

p. 411.

SIx

Emancipation as Justice: Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Legacy and Vision Upendra Baxi

I should begin this narration’ by a testimonial to a lack, an absence. The Indian social science landscape has disarticulated Babasaheb Ambedkar by studious theoretical silence. Even on the eve of his birth centenary, we do not have a complete corpus of his writings. Comparisons are odious, but we have organised corpus of texts of Mahatma, Nehru, Rajendra Prasad and Patel (to mention a few examples). But Ambedkar’s corpus has just begun to emerge and that too, at the initiative of the Government of Maharashtra. If the market for knowledges also operated according to the laws of supply and demand, we have to ruefully conclude that Ambedkar’s construction of the Hindu society, nationalist movement, and resurgent post-colonial India are commodities for which there is no organised demand either from epistemic entrepreneurs or cognitive consumers in India. Further, neither the autonomous academia nor the substantially funded monopoly of governmental knowledge industries (the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the Indian Council of Historical Research, the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, the University Grants Commission, etc.) provide spaces—curricular or research—for Ambedkar. Ambedkar remains a totally forgotten

Emancipation as Justice

123

figure. In the circumstances, the centenary celebrations, recently concluded, have generated largely hagiographic works, enriching the quality of national neglect of Babasaheb’s evolution both as an ideological thinker and a political activist. This complete disregard by the academia of Ambedkar poses a critical question concerning the modes of production of knowledges through the formal educational and research systems in India. How is it that these knowledge systems have produced a near total annihilation of the very author of Annihilation of Caste System? How is it that the most contemporary proselytiser of the Depressed Classes does not figure even as a representative of heretical thought, worthy even of a preliminary scientific discourse? How is it that after four decades of reservations, emergent communities of research scholars belonging to the Depressed Classes have also felt inhibited in organising the discourse around Ambedkar’s life and contribution? Even the Subaltern Studies have to pause after six volumes, to acknowledge Ambedkar! How do we characterise this lack or absence? Do we explain this by saying that Ambedkar does not redeem any theoretical labour? Or do we say that the lack betrays a collective conspiracy of silence on the part of Indian scholarship? Or do we take recourse to a benign class based explanation that the lack merely represents inadvertence on the part of communities of knowledge? Or do we say that the contemporary scientific mind is unable or unwilling to come to terms with what Jacques Lacan called the structures of ‘paranoid knowledge’? Ambedkar’s discourse represents, archetypically, the pervasive ‘fear of anonymous prosecutors’ typical of the structures of paranoid knowledge.’ In any case, the communities of knowledge and communities of power in India are united in their marginalisation of Babasaheb. Neither politics nor knowledge discovers in him a vision towards which India may move. Is this due to the possibility that practices of power and of knowledge in India are incoherent before a heretical discourse, especially when it emanates from an untouch-

able? These questions must be taken seriously if the centenary is to have any significance in terms of a collective self-understanding of the making of a modern India. I might add that this pursuit has already been hampered by the organised neglect of Babasaheb’s thought and work in the sense that our understanding of leading

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historic figures like Gandhi or Nehru is bound to remain incomplete, both in the sense of biography and history, in the absence of the grasp of their relations with Ambedkar. Babasaheb was the Other of the nationalist thought and practice which was being forged by Gandhiji and Nehru. The absence of such an understanding has flawed and fractured our grasp of the making of modern India.

In the absence of a corpus, and of any inaugural discourse, it is difficult to recall and represent to ourselves the image of Ambedkar. But, certainly, this much is clear: there is not one but there are many Ambedkars or there are many kaleidoscopic images. When we presume to celebrate the centenary of Babasaheb, it becomes crucially relevant to ask which Ambedkar we now choose to recall. And we must also ask: What is the moral logic of our preference? True, what I hereafter describe as seven Ambedkars merely represent successive steps in the lived experience of Babasaheb. And there is some danger in presenting an ‘evolutionary’ sequence of a life-history in terms of different personae. But all of us, in one way or the other, represent a repertoire of many mixed identities. To unravel each distinct identity as a persona need not entail a methodological sin. Centenary celebrations are organised political events having distinctive ideologies of recall and distinctive modes of appropriating a historic figure for the purposes of the present. In India, centenary celebrations simultaneously function as instruments of organising memory and forgetfulness; the Ambedkar that we choose to remember now will entail organised oblivion about other Ambedkars. The First Ambedkar:

An Authentic Dalit

The first Ambedkar that we may recall is the young student who bore the full brunt of the practices of untouchability—a young boy, who with his brother, was denied on his way home in a bullock cart a drop of water from evening till midnight; a young boy who was made to know that the razor of the barber would be defiled by contact with his hair while it could be used without fear of pollution in shaving buffaloes; a young schoolboy whose teachers

Emancipation as Justice would

not

touch

his notebooks;

a foreign-returned

125

Ambedkar,

required to serve Baroda state for ten years, being denied any accommodation in Baroda; a highly qualified scholar, respect for whom was withheld even from peons in the office who thought it morally wrong to hand him office papers and files, which they simply flung at him! This is the Ambedkar who understood existentially what it meant to be an untouchable in India. We tend to believe that conditions in India since independence have so substantially changed that we need not recall this Ambedkar. But without this Ambedkar there would have been no other Ambedkars. And no other Ambedkars have followed the Babasaheb after his death, simply because no one has been fully privileged by history and by power as was Ambedkar to articulate the horrors of untouchability which still prevail on as wide a scale.

Second Ambedkar: Exemplar of Scholarship There is the second Ambedkar: the student scholar Ambedkar. This Ambedkar worked for eighteen hours a day in Columbia University to obtain the MA degree in 1916 and published his doctoral thesis eight years later on the Evolution of British Provincial Finance in British India; an Ambedkar who grew into a bibliophile and purchased about 2,000 books in the city of New York; an

Ambedkar who for years went to London Museum and toiled there from dawn to dusk till the watchman had to seek him out to leave; an Ambedkar who lived on a frugal diet so that he could use his savings for buying books; an Ambedkar who then went to the London School of Economics to complete his D.Sc. and enrolment at the Bar. The second Ambedkar

is a voracious reader, a hard-

working student and a polymath. This Ambedkar is almost altogether forgotten; this ideal model of a first generation learner; this

incomparable pupil and an exalted figure in the nationalist movement has been robbed of his exemplarship. Even as opportunities for university education have grown very substantially, the methods of study and dedication which Ambedkar displayed as a student do not provide any more for the bulk of Scheduled Caste students a model of excellence; they only emulate models of mediocrity furnished by their reference groups among the urban middle class Indians. Privations and deprivations did not deter this fourteenth child of humble Mahar parents; indignities and humiliations inflicted

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on him only spurred him to achieve high levels of academic excellence; he took self-consciously to learning and education as instrumentalities for the eminent leadership of the Depressed Classes of India or the Atisudras (the ‘social and economic proleteriat’) as he was to later call them. Ambedkar the gentleman scholar has been all but erased. Is this a planned erasure? To allow him to be thus forgotten is to deprive ourselves of the notion that education can be a means of empowering the disempowered. To organise the oblivion of the second Ambedkar is to deny to the best and brightest of scheduled communities students access to an epic Indian narrative testifying to the critical relevance of the growth of powers of the mind for the maturation of the struggle for emancipation and equality. Not just this: by forgetting this Ambedkar we have also discouraged the growth of traditions of learning and teaching in our campuses, and made most of our teachers and students indolent, impertinent and incontinent. The Third Ambedkar:

Activist Journalist

The third Ambedkar is a militant Ambedkar who emerges as an editor and a journalist with the publication of the fortnightly papers, as early as 1920, entitled the Mook Nayak (Leader of the Dumb). The very first issue, we recall with Dhananjay Keer, compared Hindu society with a tower ‘which have several storeys without a ladder or an entrance’ in which one ‘was to die in the storey in which one was born.’ This was the Ambedkar who in another article categorically articulated that ‘it was not enough for India to be an independent country,’ that Indian freedom meant guarantees of equal status to all classes ‘offering every man an opportunity to rise in the scale of life and creating conditions favourable to his advancement.’ Ambedkar stated that ‘the Swaraj wherein no fundamental rights were guaranteed for the Depressed Classes would not be a Swaraj to them.’ It would, indeed, ‘be a new slavery for them.’ And indeed, he asserted vigorously that even ‘despicable men’ did not exist who ‘would object to the statement that if the Brahmins were justified in their attack upon an Opposition to the unjust power of the British government, the Depressed Classes were justified a hundred times more so in their opposition to the rulership of the Brahmins in case the transfer of power took place.’ This was the same Ambedkar who wrote in his

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editorial of the Bahiskrit Bharat on 29 July 1927: ‘If Tilak had been born among the untouchables, he would not have raised the slogan “Swaraj is my birthright”, but he would have raised the slogan “Annihilation of Untouchability is my birthright.”’ > By organising oblivion of this Ambedkar, a scholar-journalist-activist, modern India has also organised oblivion of his message; in the process it has robbed his vibrant concept of swaraj of its emancipatory plenitude. The Fourth Ambedkar:

A Pre-Gandhian Activist

The young boy who was denied access to drinking water led the first ever satyagraha of the Atisudras on access to minimum basic human needs—an initiative which should rightly have been one to be seized by the Mahatma! The events of 24 December 1927 have not been vividly recalled but compare in courage equally with the Mahatma’s finest hour in the Dandi march. The Mahar Conference which Ambedkar addressed demanded that Hindu society ‘should be reorganised on two main principles—equality and absence of casteism.’ The Conference adopted a declaration of human rights, an innovative enunciation proclaiming that ‘all men were born equal and continued to be so till death.” The Manusmriti, which was denounced by Ambedkar and his compatriots on 24 December 1927 as a monumental historic repudiation of human equality in India, was actually set on fire the next day. Dhananjay Keer is not far off the mark when he describes this event as ‘one of the greatest sacrilegious blows ever since the days of Luther upon the egoistic bigots, custom-mongers and no-changers on the earth.’ Keer was to describe this event in 1954 by the statement: ‘Mahad thus became the Wittenberg of India.” Keer forgets that while there is something in the Christian tradition which allows its own Luther and Wittenberg, the Hindu tradition has a way of organising an amnesia of heretical discourse, even of the most daring variety that Ambedkar manifested at Mahad. There was no occupation of the Chowdar Tank in December 1927; in fact, the protest was silenced by the British rule of law. Ambedkar, ever so ready to believe in the British as having the better potential to ameliorate the plight of Atisudras, yielded to the District Magistrate’s request not to storm the Tank in view of a stay order obtained from the court at the behest of the Mahad

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caste notables. The historic and symbolic significance of the Mahad satyagraha lies in four features. First, it establishes the emergence of Babasaheb Ambedkar as a leader of the Atisudra masses. Second, it symbolises protest against the worst aspect of Hindu hegemony which denies basic human needs to the untouchables: access to drinking water. Ambedkar thus inaugurates the discourse of equality in access to satisfaction of the most minimum basic needs in the history of Indian jurisprudence. Third, the Mahad satyagraha testifies to Ambedkar’s submissiveness to the concept of the rule of law, even when he perceives that the rule of law is no flaming sword with which to liquidate any of the manifold existential horrors and tragedies affecting his people. Fourth, the Mahad satyagraha innovates a tradition of protest (more cogently than the temple entry protests) which challenges the very foundations of the Hindu hegemony. As compared with temple entry, which only affects the spiritual sentiments of the priests as the keepers of the deity and of. the devotees as emaciated spiritual beings, the Mahad satyagraha strikes at the very root of temporal power of caste Hinduism which denies to Untouchables the right to be recognised as human beings. This Ambedkar, who is in a sense a pre-Gandhian Ambedkar, puts the techniques of satyagraha and civil disobedience to versatile uses for the emancipation of the untouchables. He is pre-Gandhian in the sense that he has not come into authentic contact with the deep structure of Gandhian thought and practice in adversarial and polemical ways which later led him to denounce Gandhi as an adversary of the Afisudras in India. The Fifth Ambedkar:

Gandhisation

The fifth Ambedkar is in a mortal combat with the Mahatma on the issue of legislative reservations for the Depressed Classes. The story of the Poona Pact, terminating with Gandhi's spiritual coercion over Ambedkar, needs its own narration and renarration. I attempt a narration in what follows. Suffice it to say that this Ambedkar is, at the end of the day, a Gandhised version of Babasaheb. In a curious and even perverse way, the Mahatma who thought (before he came to know Ambedkar) that Ambedkar was an earnestly compassionate Hindu animated by the desire to ameliorate the plight of the Afisudras had towards the end of their association reduced Ambedkar to a pale shadow of this image!

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Ambedkar’s

rhetoric

remained

radical;

his denunciation

129

of the

Mahatma and the Congress continued; but the post-Poona Pact Ambedkar became a precursor to many a latter-day Congress Scheduled Castes leaders. The Sixth Ambedkar:

The Constitutionalist

The sixth Ambedkar is a continuation of the fifth. Increasingly involved in the discourse on transfer of power, he was drawn into the processes of Constitution-making. So pre-eminent was his role that, in a deep irony, the man who made a bonfire of Manusmriti was hailed as a ‘Modern Manu’. But even this Modern Manu was ultimately reduced to a backroom boy—when the Constitution he helped make and move for adoption was acclaimed (as Eleanor Zelliot reminds us)by the Constituent Assembly, the incantation was ‘Mahatma Gandhi Ki Jav’.’ The process of co-optation of a radical Dalit leader was historically now complete. He was no longer relevant and useful. For full four years and fifty-six days, he remained as the Law Minister in Nehru’s cabinet. I urge you to read in full his statement (released on 10 October 1954) on the eve of his resignation from the cabinet." This poignant statement reveals his own sense of humiliation at not being treated as an equal. Not merely did he feel misled and betrayed by Nehru on the moving for parliamentary deliberation of the Hindu Code Bill, he also articulated his anguish and indignation at the ‘neglect of the Scheduled Castes by the Government.’ The Nehru government did not merely betray the promises of urgent ameliorative action for the Atisudras, it also treated Babasaheb with historic nonchalance. Indeed Babasaheb not merely complains that the Scheduled Castes are exposed to the ‘same old tyranny, the same old oppression, the same old discrimination which

existed

before’,

‘now...

perhaps

in a worst. form.’ But

he also complains of the reproduction of the marginalisation of their leader of three decades. He bitterly complains that he was given only the law portfolio—a portfolio of no administrative importance, ‘an empty soap-box, only good for old lawyers to play with.’ He desired labour and planning portfolios or at least some association with planning, given his excellent economics background, and the prerogative of influencing allocation of resources for the betterment of the weaker sections. But he complained that

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he was ‘always left out of consideration’; when his colleagues were given additional portfolios, he was denied even a temporary charge! The Seventh Ambedkar: Renunciation of Hinduism

The seventh Ambedkar is a renegade Hindu, not just in the sense of the man who set aflame the Manusmriti in Mahad in 1927 but in the symbolic statement on conversion in 1935 and his actual conversionto Buddhism in late 1954. The scholar in him stood by him in the last hours of life. At 11.15 p.m. on 5 December 1956 he asked his secretary to place on his bedside table the typescript of the Preface and Introduction of the Buddha and His Dhamma; he

was found dead the next morning by Savita Ambedkar. He recombined his emancipation from Hinduism with scholarly solitude in the hour of his dying. Which Ambedkar are we celebrating in this centenary? Which one ought we to celebrate? I think that, consciously or otherwise, we are celebrating the Ambedkar

whose spirit was domesticated, for

all practical purposes, by the Mahatma and whose national presence was marginalised by his political heir. We are celebrating the ‘Modern Manu’, not the iconoclast nor the rebel. By doing this we

diminish the historic significance and contemporary relevance of Babasaheb; and reconstruct him only as a memory of a Mahar whose presence on the scene was tolerated within limits by the gracious galaxy of Gandhi, Nehru and others; we are celebrating the tolerance of hegemonic nationalist leadership; we are celebrating an appropriation of Ambedkar which is, on all counts, opportunistically vandalist in ways carefully calculated to remove from the Dalit memory the incadescent luminosity of the real Ambedkar, lest it might give a precious contemporary insurrectionary identity to Babasaheb and threaten the hegemonic empires of present day political managers by the revival of the Ambedkar of the thirties and the forties. In this zodiac, the only way to combat the centenary-monger merchants of the Ambedkar icon is to reinstate and reappropriate Ambedkar’s vision of emancipatory politics for the Atisudras. This is the historic challenge posed, though inadvertently, by the centenary celebrations.

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Hil

The conflict between Ambedkar and Gandhi on the issue of the separate

electorates for untouchables

and the depressed classes,

and the way in which it was resolved, has affected very fundamentally the nature of political participation by the scheduled castes and tribes in contemporary India. That is my justification for revisiting a somewhat forgotten chapter of the history of independence movement. An additional and equally fundamental justification for focusing on this matter in some detail is that in the matter of amelioration of the lot of scheduled groups, Indian leaders have chosen a middle path or an amalgam, which has contributed to a situation of a crisis of credibility and a crisis of justice, both for the depressed classes and the upper classes. Ambedkar’s participation in the Round Table Conference in 1930 was really responsible for the ultimate policy announcement by Premier Ramsay McDonald. In a nutshell, the British proposal was that there will be a number of special seats for the Depressed Classes which will be filled by election from special constituencies in ‘which only the members of the “depressed classes” electorally qualified will be entitled to vote.’ Depressed Classes would also be entitled to vote for the general constituencies. The select constituencies were to be formed only in areas where ‘the depressed classes were most numerous’ and except in Madras ‘they should not cover the whole area of the Province.’ The British Prime Minister further clarified in a letter to Gandhi that the ‘number of special seats’ thus created ‘will be seen to be small’ and was just not intended to ‘provide a quota numerically appropriate for the total representation of the whole of the depressed class population.’ The arrangement was temporarily limited to twenty years. The Prime Minister emphasised that this proposal was different from the idea of ‘a communal electorate for the depressed classes.’ The entire purpose of this transitional arrangement was to ‘place them in a position to speak for themselves.’ He further clarified that the method of creating legislative reservation was not considered by the British government as helpful since it was unlikely to produce members who could genuinely represent the Depressed Classes ‘because in practically all cases, such members would be elected by a majority consisting of higher caste Hindus.”

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Gandhi responded to this reasoned proposal by the simple threat, which he carried out, to ‘resist with my life the grant of separate electorate to the depressed classes.” He began his fast in Yervada Prison on 20 September, ending it only on 24 September upon the signing of the Poona Pact. He undertook this fast ‘as a man of religion’ and also a leader of ‘numberless men and women who have childlike faith in my wisdom.’ (This is not exactly the language of humility.) Gandhi at no stage attempted to give reasons. or counter arguments to the British proposals, which Ambedkar wholeheartedly supported. But his main objection to the arrangement was that the separate electorates were ‘harmful’ for the Depressed Classes and for Hinduism; the separate electorate would simply ‘vivisect and disrupt’ Hinduism. The mere fact that Depressed Classes had two votes under the proposals, said Gandhi, ‘does not protect them or Hindu society in general from being disrupted.’ Such a system was tantamount to ‘the injection of poison that is calculated to destroy Hinduism and do no good whatever to the depressed classes.’ A ‘statutory separation even in a limited form, from the Hindu fold,’ will be harmful for them ‘as it would arrest the marvellous growth of the work of Hindu reformers who have dedicated themselves to the uplift of their suppressed brethren in every walk of life.’ Gandhi disputed the claim of the British, however sympathetic they might be, to ‘come to a correct decision on a matter of such vital and religious importance to the parties concerned.’ Gandhi made it crystal clear that for him the matter was entirely a religious one. Let us listen to this statement: ‘For me the question of these classes is predominately moral and religious. The political aspect, important though it is, dwindles into insignificance compared to the moral and religious issue.""' Ambedkar reacted violently to Gandhi's fast. He pointed out that the Mahatma’s arguments were strange and incomprehensible to the Depressed Classes. Ambedkar complained, ‘he has staked his very life in order to deprive them of little they have got.’ He counselled Mahatma that his determination to fast unto death is worthy of a far better cause.’ He urged the Mahatma to freely consult the members of the Depressed Classes in the full confidence that if they were given a choice, ‘between Hindu faith and possession of political power’ they would choose the latter and thus ‘save the

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Mahatma’. He charged him with ‘releasing uncontrollable reactionary forces’ and widening the ‘gulf between the depressed classes and the Hindus.’” Ambedkar maintained that the untouchables were an element separate from Hinduism and went to great lengths to prove it. He grasped the root of the matter when he said that the Hindus had much to lose by the abolition of untouchability, though they had nothing to fear from political reservations leading to this abolition. The matter was economic rather than religious. His resounding words need to be quoted extensively: The system of untouchability is a gold mine to the Hindus. In it the 240 millions of Hindus have 60 millions of Untouchables to

serve as their retinue to enable the Hindus to maintain pomp and ceremony and to cultivate a feeling of pride and dignity befitting a master class, which cannot be fostered and sustained unless there is beneath it a servile class to look down upon. In it the 240 millions of Hindus have 60 millions of Untouchables to be used as forced labourers . . . . In it the 240 millions of Hindus have 60 millions of Untouchables to do the dirty work of scavengers and sweepers which the Hindu is debarred by his religion to do and which must be done by non-Hindus who could be no other than Untouchables. In it the 240 millions of Hindus have 60 millions of Untouchables who can be kept to lower jobs .. . . In it the 240 millions of Hindus have the 60 millions of Untouchables who can be used as shock absorbers in slumps and deadweights in booms, for in slumps it is the Untouchable who is fired first and the Hindu is fired last and in booms the Hindu is employed first and the Untouchable is employed last.” Untouchability is not a religious system but which is worse than slavery.’" As to Gandhi’s claim that the proposals separation would arrest the ‘marvellous work’ Ambedkar’s response was blunt and cold, but He said:

an ‘economic system for limited electoral of Hindu reformers, true and memorable.

There have been many Mahatmas in India whose sole object was to remove Untouchability and to elevate and absorb the

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Depressed Classes, but every one of them has failed in his mission. Mahatmas have come, Mahatmas have gone. But the Untouchables have remained as Untouchables.”

But the fact that Gandhi had undertaken the fast was in itself a refutation of everything that Ambedkar said and could have said. It was not refutation on reason but on sentiment and moral coercion. The result was inevitably a compromise. Gandhi won on separate electorates; there were to be none.

The rest of the terms of the

Poona Pact show that Ambedkar made the best of a bad bargain. Ambedkar accepted a total of 148 reserved seats in all legislatures. Gandhi agreed to a collegiate procedure for election to reserved seats whereby a panel of four candidates belonging to the Depressed Classes would be ‘the candidates for election by a general electorate’: a kind of ‘primary’ election procedure. This system was to continue until ten years, unless ‘terminated by mutual agreement’. The pact also provided that there shall be no disabilities to anyone, by reason of his being a member of the Depressed Classes, for ‘election to local bodies or appointment to public services.’ There was further the agreement that an adequate sum shall be made available ‘for providing educational facilities to the Members of the Depressed Classes’ in every province. The Poona Pact no doubt gave more seats to the Depressed Classes: the Award had given them only 78 separate electoral seats while they had in 1937 as many as 151 seats. AsAmbedkar himself put it, its increase in seats could never compensate for the priceless privilege of the second vote given to the untouchables. The value of such a vote ‘as a political weapon was beyond reckoning.’ The 1937 elections under the Poona Pact, ‘disliked by the Hindus and disfavoured by the untouchables’, in effect gave only 73 victorious candidates ‘the true and independent representatives’, since 78 Untouchable candidates elected were Congress party members. Ambedkar could not help saying that the Congress made, through the Poona Pact, ‘a handsome profit on its political transaction.’ Ambedkar repented this decision bitterly all through his remaining life. Although he had appealed to the Mahatma not to drive ‘me to the necessity of making a choice between his life and the rights of my people’, this is what the Mahatma did. And although Ambedkar ended his comments on Gandhi’s fast by valiantly declaring that ‘I can never consent to deliver my people bound

_

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hand and foot to the Caste Hindus for generations to come’, this is what he was constrained to do. (The Indian Constitution, of which

he was the principal architect, merely reserves seats for the scheduled for separate electorates.) Nor did he have the strength of purpose to urge the continuation of the ‘primary’ system for such constituencies—the second best option. He himself could not, in one of the most enigmatic electoral reversals in India, return from Bombay in opposition to the Congress nominee. Ambedkar received 1,23,576 votes against Kajorolkar who secured 1,37,950 voies. It is

said that more than 50,000 votes, to be cast for the reserved constituency, were ‘purposely wasted’.” Indian history would have been written differently, and with it the destinies of the downtrodden untouchables, if Ambedkar had responded to Gandhi's threat to fast unto death, by himself offering

similar self-immolation as a strategy for persuading the Mahatma. Instead, he chose the strategy of compromise and denunciation. He derived satisfaction in calling Gandhi’s fast unheroic and an ‘adventure’, saying there was ‘nothing noble about it’ and that it was a ‘foul and a filthy act’.

These angry and bitter words of Ambedkar reveal the depth of his anguish and also outright frustration. Ambedkar had reached the end of this tether. He must have foreseen that if Gandhi died at that critical juncture, he and the Untouchables would never be

forgiven, not just by the caste Hindus but the majority of Indians. He also apprehended that Gandhi’s departure on this issue would invite unpredictable violence over the Depressed Classes and their prospects of orderly amelioration would be further deferred. He must also have realised that his own leadership would be liquidated. This picture of extreme consequences might have inhibited him even from thinking about a counter-fast. Had he thought about these, he might have been persuaded otherwise. He might have reckoned with a climb-down by Gandhi; he might have mobilised quite effectively the political consciousness and even allegiance of the Depressed Classes. It is idle to speculate for there is no indication that such thoughts ever crossed his mind. Gandhi knew that, all said and done, Ambedkar was a political

liberal. And Gandhi knew par excellence how to deal with liberals. Through his experience, Gandhi had acquired the shrewd insight that the mainstream political liberals do not usually know strategies of handling or coping with non-violently manufactured crisis other

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than those of procrastination or of compromise. Liberals, unlike revolutionaries, cannot comfortably face opponents who undertake to die for a manifest cause; nor can they easily offer to selfimmolate themselves in a like fashion or assume moral responsibilities for potential violence which might thus ensue. Gandhi knew his opponent well. During his public speech in London, defending his position on Untouchables, Gandhi complimented Ambedkar in following terms: ‘I have the highest regard for Dr. Ambedkar. He has every right to be bitter. That he does not break our heads is an act of self restraint on his part.’'* Gandhi ‘gambled’ on Ambedkar’s self-restraint and won. The costs of the victory would have to be recorded by an Untouchable historian of future India. But this much is clear. Whatever be the merits of the actual electoral proposals, Gandhi’s victory represented, for him and others, the victory of idea that the problem of untouchability was a social problem not a political one; and that it was a problem of Hindu religion and not of the Hindu economy. Subsequent evolution of the regime shows variations on this theme. One sincerely hopes that Gandhi was right, despite increasing evidence to the contrary, as otherwise historians in the coming centuries might deprive him of the cherished title of social reformer gifted with a unique vision of the authentic India. In the meantime, much though one may deplore this, just as Ambedkar denounced Gandhi, Ambedkar too may come to be denounced by the present and coming generations of untouchables for having yielded to Gandhi and Nehru. To avert this possibility, or at any rate to provide a perspective, it is necessary briefly to say that many distinguished students of the period have praised Ambedkar for his humanism and wisdom in yielding to Gandhi."”” And Gandhi himself stands condemned for what he did to Ambedkar. ‘Condemned’ may be too strong a word, but it is clear that history will not take kindly to Gandhi's intransigence On the issue of separate electorate for Untouchables. For example, it has recently been observed that the communal award, as it related to the Depressed Classes, was in itself ‘reason-

able and fair’ and ‘the alleged separatist tendency in it was more the result of sentimental apprehensions than a reality.’ It has been observed: ‘How the occasional act of voting in a separate constituency, that too after voting in a general constituency, by a depressed class voter would take him away from the Hindu fold passes one’s

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comprehension.’ Not merely was the act of fasting, a ‘drastic step’ but it is also ‘clear beyond any doubt to even a casual observer that while Gandhi's leadership of the untouchables was “sentimental” and “assumed”, the leadership of Ambedkar was natural and real.” It has also been persuasively suggested by Namboodripad that Gandhi's interest in ‘constructive work’ for ‘Harijans’ was more an aspect of political tactics ‘with a view to meeting a concrete political situation’ than an aspect of conscientious struggle to fundamentally change the social structure of Hinduism.*' Namboodripad argues that Gandhi's interest in Harijan cause and activities . . . should be considered as nothing but an effort on his part to disengage the Congress from the situation in which it had been placed following its break with the Government. It was an effort to find out points of contact with the British, to pursue the negotiations on constitutional reforms started and temporarily broken at the Second Round Table Conference, and to reorganize the Congress with a view to enabling it to meet this new situation.”

In other words, the problem was one of disengaging the Congress from the mass civil disobedience movement and cultivating legitimation for this decision. In the 1933-34 period, Gandhi used the tactics of fast, and consequent release from prison, for ‘intensive tours ostensibly for Harijan welfare work but really for informal consultations on the future of civil disobedience.” Though not wholly complimentary to Gandhi (particularly when Namboodripad describes him as an ‘astute political leader of a class—the bourgeoisie,in whose class interests he always acted’), this explanation of the events is certainly plausible in the light of contemporary events and subsequent analysis of the Indian independence movement. One does not have to deny Gandhi’s unquestioned commitment to the cause of ‘eradication’ of untouchability or his moral integrity in order to understand and accept Namboodripad’s analysis. But only some such analysis can help explain Gandhi's fast, of all the issues, on the provision of separate elec-

torate for Untouchables and his haggling till the last day of his fast on the period for which the reservations may last (‘Five years or my life’). The British were clearly surprised, as noted earlier, that

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Gandhi who had championed the cause of Depressed Classes at the conference should resort to such tactics; so was Ambedkar whose

life work was suddenly and rudely shaken by Gandhi. But as always, Gandhi shrewdly combined concern for the legitimation of his leadership, integration of the Congress party and ‘constructive’ work for the Untouchables. In the ultimate result, the Untouchables, so history may record, were the immediate and perhaps long-term losers.” The Constitution, as it emerged through the herculean labours of the Constituent Assembly, promised an all-out war against untouchability. It abolished, as a matter of fundamental right, untouchability and bonded labour. It declared, and this is truly unique, that it shall be an offence to enforce any disability on the ground of untouchability. The practice of bonded labour was also declared by the Constitution as an offence. As far as I know, the Indian Constitution is the only document which creates offences in its Bill of Rights provisions. This only underlines the mood of commitment to total abolition of untouchability. Discrimination of any kind on the basis of caste, religion or birth was made unconstitutional. Special solicitude for the ‘weaker sections’ was the distinctive theme of the Directive Principles. Government was given the power to ameliorate the plight of ‘other backward classes’. Reservations in education and employment were made possible. A Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Tribes was provided. It was in this context that the Constituent Assembly debated the question as to whether there should be any reservations at all for Scheduled Castes and Tribes. There was some suggestion that the system of separate electorates be considered but this was pressed only feebly since all other communities had agreed to dispense with ‘communal’ or separate electoral quotas. However, (in consultation with and in deference to the wishes of the scheduled group leaders) it was decided to provide for an interim system of legislative reservations for a period of ten years. No doubt, there were voices against this arrangement and Ambedkar himself, who had earlier tentatively canvassed for the idea of separate electorates, was later in favour of electoral integration. But he, and others, yielded to the transitional system. Apprehensions were, of course, voiced that the transitional system may, in course of time, become permanent. But somehow people were persuaded to believe that it would not be so since in independent India there-would occur swift

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and thoroughgoing ameliorative changes in the plight of the scheduled groups. People also felt reassured, particularly the Scheduled Castes,by the rapprochement between the Congress and Ambedkar manifest in the leading role he was assigned in the formulation of the Constitution and in his nomination as the first Law Minister of independent India. However, all this was short-lived. Ambedkar resigned from the Nehru cabinet. Although he resigned on the issue of the Hindu Code Bill, his publicly stated reasons concerned the slow progress in the amelioration of the plight of the Scheduled Castes. The Untouchability Offences Act was enacted only in 1955. Reservations in education and employment did not seem adequate. Ambedkar’s fear of Hindu domination was further nurtured by the fact that in all elections to reserved constituencies his own Scheduled Caste Federation (later the Republican Party of India) lost overwhelmingly to the Congress backed candidates. Ambedkar himself was defeated, as noted, in a by-election in 1954 from a Bombay constituency by a Congress nominee.

IV We have surveyed the formative context of Babasaheb’s struggle for the emancipation of Dalits. Obviously, a more sustained discursive analysis is needed to formulate responses to many theoretical/ ideological questions which necessarily arise. Some of these questions are: First, what conceptions of ‘freedom’, ‘rights’ and ‘justice’ animate Ambedkar’s thought and action? Second,

what

are

the conceptions

of swaraj

in Ambedkar’s

corpus? And how, in what precise ways, did they differ from the Mahatma’s and the Congress’s ideological mutations? Third,

what

are the cultural/historical

these conceptions in Ambedkar’s Four, did Ambedkar have an and law? Five, how did Ambedkar view in the nationalist movement? To

‘roots’ or ‘matrices’

of

thought? implicit theory of colonial state

the complexity and contradiction what extent did he innovate the theory of representation, both in terms of legislative representation and the participation of disadvantaged people in bureaucracy?

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Six, what kinds of theories/ideologies informed Ambedkar in his herculean labours to sculpt the endless normativeness of the Constitution and the apparatuses of governance? Seven, what role did Ambedkar perceive and endow to the movement of the depressed classes in India’s democratic future? Eight, did Ambedkar have a theory of relationship between state and religion? Nine, did Babasaheb have a distinctive approach to women’s oppression and gender justice? This question assumes importance when we recall that Dalit women are doubly oppressed: first as women and next as Dalits. Ten, how did Ambedkar view the problematic of ‘minority rights’ in general? How did, if at all, this relate to a special solicitude in his world-view concerning the ‘Scheduled Caste’? These ten questions are distinct, though related; they need, to be sure, more careful and imaginative formulation, which may even expand the number. It must be said at the outset that I know of no work on Ambedkar which even formulates this type of agenda for scientific/theoretical labour. Clearly, the centenary celebrations ought to provide a fertile theoretical provocation for the reconstruction of Ambedkar’s thought. In what follows, I examine briefly the first two questions. But before that I must pause to narrate Ambedkar’s critique of Hindu law and jurisprudence.

Vv Ambedkar emerges as a most articulate archivist of atrocities against the Atisudras. His corpus is full of contemporary testament of Dalit suffering; compared to this, much of the nationalist discourse is bloodless. Mahatma Gandhi's discourse, for example, on

the ‘removal of untouchability’ is not haunted by a single lynched Dalit corpse, or a single raped and bloodied Dalit woman. The apostle of non-violence sanitised the here-and-now violence against Untouchables and, remarkably, succeeded in putting the issue of untouchability on the reform agenda of Hindu social organisation. The Mahar Mahatma had no such sublimating options; he portrays, anguishedly, Hinduism (with apologies to Tennyson’s Nature) red tooth and claw.”

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As an incomparable archivist of human suffering, Babasaheb’s solitary place in modern Indian history is assured. But he also proceeds to unravel the structural sources of production of misery in Hindu ideology, religion and social organisation. In the process (as concerns my tiny jurisprudential domain) Dr. Ambedkar raises for the first time in Indian jurisprudence the problematic of ‘lawless laws’. Drawing scorchingly from the ‘sacred’ law-texts, of Manu, Yagnavalkya, Narada and Vishnu, Ambedkar presents the full horrors of the ‘classical’ Hindu law and jurisprudence. Not merely did it deny ‘equality before the law’ as a principle to the Untouchables, thus erecting a permanent edifice of legitimated subalternity over them down the ages. It inscribed, furthermore. what Georges Bataille terms as ‘heterogeneity’; that is, the extra territorialisation of whole communities of human beings and their castigation as being outside the pale of humanity. In terms of what Bataille calls a science of heterology, this ‘would permit us to foresee the effective social reactions that convulse the superstructure—and perhaps even to manipulate them to a certain degree.” Ambedkar’s characterisation of the Hindu law as a code of lawlessness is, by itself, a heterological practice. The classical lawless law of Hinduism celebrates the ‘illegality of rights’ as Michael Foucault was to describe the phenomenon in his Discipline and Punish.” But the terroristic ‘sacred’ law at every point aims to achieve its carceral political economy through unmitigated bloody-mindness. It would be instructive to list Ambedkar’s narration in a tabular form:

No.

Offence

Punishment

Organ

1.

mentioning names of high caste ‘with contumley’

mouth

2.

teaching ‘arrogantly’ the Brahmin or the King of his duty

an iron nail, ten fingers long, shall be inserted in mouth hot oil to be poured in mouth and ears

3.

hurt to a high caste

4.

raising of hand or a stick to a high caste sitting or trying to place onself on the same level as a high caste

5.

offending limb to be | cut off cutting off of the offending limb branding on buttock: buttock to be gashed

mouth ears

indeterminate hand foot buttock

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No. 6. 7. 8.

Upendra Baxi

Offence

Punishment

Organ

spitting on a superior urination on a superior ‘breaking wind’ before

cutting off both the lips cutting off the penis cutting off the anus

lips penis anus

cutting off hands

hands

‘

a superior (farting)

9.

10.

laying hold of a hair of superior touching a superior by

decapitation

neck, or the

scrotum

feet ;

11.

reading Vedas

12.

hearing Vedas

13.

reciting Vedas

blinding, gorging out of the eyes imposition of deafness. hot oil put

in both ears cutting off the tongue

(as the case may be) eyes

ears

tongue~’

The very act of enunication of these punishments suggests the plenitude of law as an act of terror. In characterising these laws as ‘lawless laws’, Ambedkar may appear anachronistically to subject the ‘classical’ Hindu jurisprudence to contemporary standards of liberal jurisprudence. But an alternate reading is surely open. Ambedkar may be seen here as narrating ‘the tradition of the oppressed’ which teaches us (in the striking words of Walter Benjamin) that ‘the “state of emergency” in which we |[i.e. the oppressed] live is not an exception but the rule.”“' Or, put another way, the rule of law always co-exists with a reign of terror.' A la Benjamin, Ambedkar here educates us into thinking that the ‘cultural treasure’ called ‘Hinduism’ has an origin which cannot be contemplated ‘without horror’. As Benjamin says, ‘There is no document of civilisation which is at the same time not a document of barbarism.”*» If the tradition of Hindu law is a mark of civilised jurisprudence, it is also at the same time a testament to barbarism. Ambedkar failed to initiate the nationalist leaders in the ‘traditions of the oppressed’, so much so that their successors, in celebrating Ambedkar’s memory as a ‘Modern Manu’, have also reduced his historic project of emancipation of the Atisudras—the Constitution of India—into a code of ‘lawless laws’. Ambedkar’s deeper point of critique of Hinduism is simply this:

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the jurisprudence of the dvija is a jurisprudence of (what Ranajit Guha has termed in the context of the colonial state in India) dominance without hegemony. But Ambedkar seems to insist, even if through a phrase, that the law cannot be reduced to pure dominance, that it is conceivable only as a hegemonic phenomenon. In exposing the lawlessness of the Hindu law, Ambedkar is implicitly committing himself to reading the history of Dalit India as one in which the necessary effort of manufacturing the consent of the Depressed Classes in the justice of their millennial oppression is simply improbable. Subaltern history should, assuredly, be able to sustain, refine and enrich this position, as and when its benign historiography becomes animated by contact with Ambedkar’s corpus. But from a purely jurisprudential standpoint, Ambedkar is the first, and so far the only major, Indian thinker to have so frontally posed the problematic of the ‘lawless laws’. And what distinguishes him from radical :usnaturalist thinkers like Gustav Radbruch (who was tormented by Nazism) and the post-modernist Jean Francois Lyotard (who made Auschwitz the metaphor for a radical rethinking of political and legal theory) is that Ambedkar interrogates the organised millennial lawlessness structured through the ‘sacred’ law of an ancient civilisation. The daring of this enterprise is simply unmatched in contemporary times.

Vi In a certain sense, Ambedkar’s conception of ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ derive from the liberal vision and tradition. The figure of human rights is pre-eminent in many a text of Ambedkar’s (available) corpus. But, given the horrible context of destitution, deprivation and disadvantage systematically haunting the depressed classes, and given the context of a colonial state, Ambedkar innovates thinking about justice, freedom and rights in a remarkable way. From today’s standpoint, his articulation may not sound all that original. But in terms of the history of ideas it may well be acknowledged as pioneering. Departing fundamentally from the liberal paradigm of rights and justice, Ambedkar sought to accomplish two unusual results. First, his theory of rights was addressed more to civil society than

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to the state; rights do not just appear as constraints and limits on the power of the state. Rather, they emerge as legal entitlements casting corresponding obligations on the members of civil society; rights, atypically, in Ambedkar’s thought legitimate an interventionist state, even the dominant colonial formation. In Hohfeldian

terms, Ambedkar’s essential juristic strategy was to innovate jural relations: the Depressed Classes had a nght, and the state a duty, to eradicate obdurate discriminatory practices in civil society; and the state had the power and members of civil society were under a liability to have their ‘cultural’ practices redefined. In other words, the state has a power coupled with duty to which the rights of the depressed classes corresponded. This remarkable detournement of the classical model of rights anticipates many a later-day development in thinking about rights. Ambedkar had the happy gift of consistency which is reflected in Articles 17 and 23 of the Indian Constitution which forbid discrimination on the ground of untouchability and exploitation of labour (trafficking in human beings, bonded and forced labour, etc.) and declare them to be offences. The constitutional articulation is remarkable in that it, in a chapter on fundamental rights, creates specific offences and that the rights themselves are limitations on the power of civil society rather than that of the state. Put yet another way, Ambedkar converts rights as instrumentalities of ‘negative’ liberties (that is restrictions on state power) into those of ‘positive’ liberties (that is requiring specific action by the state so that liberty may be availed by the Depressed Classes). The majority communities’ ‘rights’ to cultural and religious freedom stand fully curtailed normatively by the enunciation of the right to

social equality of the Depressed Classes. The juristic phrases pregnant with possibilities of history—such as ‘equality before the law’, ‘equal protection of the law’ and the ‘rule of law —transform themselves from being shields against state power to swords of sovereignty.

Second, Ambedkar presciently posed the problem of ‘rights’ and ‘basic needs’. The basic human needs of the Atisudras were both material and non-material. The latter comprise dignity and fraternity or respect for the Atisudra’s right to be human; the former include immunity from bodily and psychic aggression, access

to public facilities, a share in resources such as drinking water, and participation in government employment. Animating this last

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identification rustles a very distinctive theory of representation: political representation goes beyond /egislative reservations and extends to reservations in administration. The bare catalogue of needs thus identified and the sustained campaign to transform needs into rights is an astonishing facet of Ambedkar’s achievement. Babasaheb does not develop a theory of representation in general. But he does offer some insights. For example, in Mr. Gandhi and

Emancipation of the Untouchables he meets the Hindu contention against Untouchable representation in the executive on the ground that ‘the Executive must represent the majority of the Legislature.’ Ambedkar argues that legislative ‘majorities’ and ‘minorities’ are ‘fluid’ categories subject to the processes of party formation and electoral practices. The Hindu and Untouchable relationship cannot be encapsulated by these categories. Their difference is not one ‘in the point of views.’ Rather, they are ‘separated by a fundamental and deadly antagonism’; Hindus/Untouchables are not ‘fluid’ categories but they are ‘fixed as permanent communities.’* Obviously,

Ambedkar

does

not believe

that liberal

democratic

politics in its future Indian evolution will have the transformative potential of dissolving history into politics. In other words, he does not believe that power politics will redeem the ‘deadly antagonism’ between these ‘fixed permanent communities.’ Given the intransigence of Hindu culture and civilisation, with-

out representation in the legislature, the executive, public services and even ‘good government’ in India (from a Dalit standpoint) will always be a ‘communal government’.™ In public services, he urges, Untouchables possessing minimum qualifications should have a preference over Hindus who possess ‘qualifications higher than minimum qualifications.’ For, such qualifications can only be claimed ordinarily by Hindus. And fulfilment of minimum qualifications would provide for ‘efficient’ governance; it will also ensure: good government because it would ensure ‘self-government’. It is true that Babasaheb does not offer any theoretical framework for this jurisprudential feat. Partly, he treats the needs as self-evident and their redressal as morally natural. Partly, he appeals to millennia old practices of denial of humanity to the Alisudras as a iusnaturalist ground, as it were, for basic entitlement. Both Nature and (Hindu) History furnish unproblematic grounds for justifying conversion of needs into rights.

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Upendra Baxi

But, of course, his caste opponents perceived nothing in history or nature to legitimate this conversion. What is more, Ambedkar’s opponents marshalled a theory of illegitimacy of the colonial state as a powerful argument against transformation of needs into rights as this only enhanced the Leviathan of the British high colonial state.

Confronted by such views, Ambedkar seems to have mostly been content with the response that imposition of slavery on the Depressed Classes through religion, as a means of social control, is an incontestable feature of the history of evolution of the Hindu caste system. This history cannot be gainsaid. The surviving question then is: Is slavery justified? Ambedkar seems to have maintained two mutually reinforcing stances on this question: First, slavery is in principle never morally justifiable; second, even if arguably justifiable in other periods and modes (of production), by the standards of early and mid-twentieth century it is wholly unjustified. But what if slavery finds religious sanction? What if religion and ethics both assign moral standing to the master and slave united in a cosmic dharmic relation? To suchlike questions, Ambedkar’s response was not necessarily that no true religion can justify slavery but that Hinduism, which has been appropriated by Brahminism, must be reformed or abandoned through conscientious acts of conversion to religions which valorise equality and dignity of all human beings. As praxiological reasoning in aid of the struggle for equality and emancipation, Ambedkar’s positions are catalytically cogent. But an appeal to self-evident moral truths works best when preaching to the converted or about-to-be converted. With ‘ethical’ adversaries one needs a morally reasoned discourse, refuting the justification of slavery to be found in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. Widely read as he was, Ambedkar possessed the talent to refute Aristotle; it is rather sad that he never did find (except through sharp

polemical attacks on the absurdities and cruelties of a fossilised Hinduism) time to inaugurate an ethical discourse on liberation. Ambedkar’s conception of emancipatory politics proceeded beyond a comprehensive de-legitimation of slavery, which was but another name for untouchability. It proceeded, as already noted, to a wide-ranging

programme

of equality and equity measures

Emancipation as Justice

147

aimed at the fulfilment of a wide variety of material and nonmaterial needs. It is this total programme of societal transformation which constituted his conception of Swaraj. Swaraj was not just freedom (from the British); it was a just freedom. In contrast, the Mahatma’s (and the Congress’s) core conceptions of Swaraj vacillated in a variety of ways: participation in governance, dominion status, purna swaraj (azadi). Swaraj, in the latter sense, signified both political and economic liberation from the British hegemony and domination. At the highest, Swaraj was the restoration of sovereignty of an /ndian nation state in the making; at the lowest, it was (and we still use this phrase artlessly) a mere transfer of power. It is this creation of a morally vacuous (from the standpoint of Depressed Classes) space and time for a new nation state which Ambedkar opposed with all his moral might. He foresaw that transition from the British to Hindu masters signified no emancipatory potential for the masses of Atisudras. Indeed, it might mean the reincarnation of the horrors of casteist history even in ‘worse forms’. From a Dalit standpoint, this poignant and pathetic prophecy has almost wholly come true. To dare to recall Babasaheb invites vigorous confrontation with the question: Does liberal democratic politics in a society like India have any redeeming emancipatory potential for the Attsudras? If it has, how has this potential been so systematically deactivated for four long decades? And how does the recovery and reappropriation of Ambedkar assist the release of this potential? More concretely put, were Babasaheb with us today and beyond, how would he have responded to the promise and the peril of the present day politics of reservational equality conducted under the auspices of his name? And how would he have confronted, at the levels of ideology and action, the construction and reconstruction of backwardness for relegitimation of practices of power, wholly threatened with erosion of performative legitimacy? What symbolic and deconstructive politics would he have engaged in? (Would he have, for example, accepted a belated Bharat Ratna, in an Age of

Atrocity against the Atisudras?) For those who (perhaps vainly in the eyes of history) believe in the possibilities of emancipatory politics, there is no escape from rediscovering Ambedkar. Perhaps, in that lies the prospect of a

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Upendra Baxi

Discovery of India—an un-Nehruvian ‘discovery’ for change, for the real Atisudras of India.

Notes

1. This is one of the latest enlarged and revised versions of the lecture delivered as an inaugural oration at the Babasaheb Ambedkar centenary celebration at University of Madras on 5 March 1991. 2. J. Lacan, ‘Structures des psychosos paranoiaques’, Somain des Hopitaux de Paris Julliet, 1931, pp. 437-4S. 3. D. Keer, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Life and Mission (Bombay: Popular Prakashan,

1954), p. 41.

4. > 6. 7.

Ibid. bide pal. Ibid., p. 101. E. Zelliot,‘Gandhi and Ambedkar: A Study in Leadership’ in M.J. Mahar, ed., The Untouchables in Contemporary India (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1972), p..69. 8. Bhagwan Das, Selected Speeches of Dr. Baba Saheb B.R. Ambedkar (Jullundur: Bheem Patrika Publications, 1963), pp. 71-83. 9. B.R. Ambedkar, What The Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (Bombay: Thacker & Co., 1945), p. 85.

10. 11. 2 13, 14.

bbid., Ibid., eeLDid bid... Ibid.,

p. 87. p. 78. ayaa): py 196, pp. 196-97.

IS,

bids, Pe 320.

16m 17. 18. 19.

[bid..3ps 95. D. Keer, Ambedkar: Life and Mission, p. 437. Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done, p. 71 (emphasis added). See, for example, Ravindar Kumar, ‘Gandhi, Ambedkar and the Poona Pact’, XX Occasional Papers in History and Society, Nehru Memorial Museum and

Library, New Delhi, 1985 (mimeo). 20. A.M. Rajasekhariah, B.R. Ambedkar: The Politics of Emancipation (Bombay: Sindhu Publications, 1971), pp. 62, 103. 21. E.M.S. Namboodiripad, The Mahatma and the Ism (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1968), p. 63.

22. Ibid., p. 64. 235 OV: Ds 09: 24. See U. Baxi, ‘Legislative Reservations for Social Justice: Some Thoughts on India’s Unique Experiment’, in R.B. Goldman and J. Wilson, eds., Independence to Statehood: Managing Ethnic Conflict: Five African and Asian States (London: H. Pinter, 1984), pp. 221-23.

Emancipation as Justice 25.

149

V. Moon, ed., Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Speeches and Writings (Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1989), pp. 34-02. . Ibid., pp. 62-74. . G. Bataille, (F. Lawrence trs., Die Psychologische Structur des Faschimus Die Souveranitat, Munich, 1978), p. 42; ff quoted in J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Five Lectures (Massachusetts: 22...

MIT Press, 1987), p.

. M. Foucault, Alan Sheridan trs., Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 271-82. Ambedkar does not specifically mention the last three categories. On the ‘refined’ Kautilyan notion of vakparushyam (verbal violence) see R. Guha, Elementary Forms of Peasant Insurgency (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 45-48; see also P. Sinha, Smriti Political and Legal System: A Socioeconomic Study (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1982), pp. 74-84. . W. Benjamin, //uminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World), pt. 259.

U. Baxi, Marx, Law and Justice (Bombay: N.M. Tripathi Pvt. Ltd., 1993). Benjamin, ///uminations, p. 258. B.R. Ambedkar, Mr. Gandhi and the Emancipation of the Untouchables (Jullundur: Bheem Patrika Publications, 1943), pp. 30-31.

. Ibid., p. 34.

Seven

Interpreting Indian Politics: A Personal Statement Rajni Kothari

Having written on Indian politics and society for thirty years now, what I want to do in this essay is to conceptualise the changes that have come over it and which demand a lot of rethinking. There have been new concerns that have led me to rethink the premises on which the Indian political system needs to be addressed and to move beyond my earlier predominantly institutional framework of a participant democracy. A considerable agenda of thinking and reflection thus lay ahead when, starting in the early seventies, very soon after the publication in 1970 of Politics in India, | began my journey towards a new theoretical perspective. The need was to build upon one’s intellectual sensitivity, itself gained from having dealt with a changing socio-economic and political reality, to be able to deal with the new challenges faced by the Indian polity and society.

Themes of Indian Politics What I shall do in some basic themes from the late fifties of four interrelated

this essay by way of a beginning is to outline and considerations that informed my thinking to the publication of Politics in India. A cluster themes and considerations had emerged for

Interpreting Indian Politics:

A Personal Statement

151

understanding and interpreting what I had then described as the distinctive Indian model of state and nation-building. First, I had assigned to politics a pivotal role in social transformation—politics as a process that operated at various levels, conditioned social structures and norms, shifted the bases of allegiance and affiliation and produced new categories of understanding and commitment which led to a far-ranging process of change and challenge from within the social fabric. Politics was to be the catalytic domain that proved at once conservative and radical. I had in particular developed the notion of the autonomy of the political process, autonomous both of the socio-economic domain and the structures and interests that dominated it and of external forces that threatened to force the newly independent states into global strait-jackets. Second, a great deal of importance was given to institutions in the whole task of building, preserving and restructuring the state and the nation. It was through the working of key institutions and identification with and participation in them that the ‘new nation’ was being consolidated and a new framework of consensus and legitimacy built. Third, I had developed at great length the theme of diffusion and wide acceptance of values and norms, rules of the game and shared understandings. The whole edifice of democratic norms and the widespread belief and faith in the democratic process— among both the elite strata and various sections, classes and cate-

gories of the people—were crucial to the basic enterprise of building a new India. Neither the institutions nor the norms of democracy were to be viewed in isolation. Rather, it was the interplay between the two that provided the dynamics of democratic nation-building. Mere accent on values (as found in the latter day bemoaning of a ‘moral crisis’) would produce a romanticism that could become a plaything in the hands of demagogues, whereas mere emphasis on institutions would produce a highly mechanistic view of democracy. (When we entered an era of perversion of the democratic framework in the seventies, both these things happened). It was from this interest in the interplay of institutions and norms that my own way of looking at the notion of ‘political culture’ arose. The various ‘themes’ or dimensions of political culture that I had laid out in Politics in India were addressed to this basic concern. The theme of ‘tolerance of ambiguity—enabling

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Rajni Kothari

Indians to live simultaneously in different domains of both space and time, and making them capable of absorbing tensions and living with contradictions—allowed me to show how it became relatively easy for Indians to shift allegiance to secular politics which I had defined as the new all-India tradition that had overlaid various earlier traditions. The theme about trust and distrust in politics was used to explain how individuals were able to (or failed to) carry out institutional mandates and build collective endeavours. And fourth, following yet another dimension of political culture, I had laid considerable stress on the role of key individuals as norm-setters—how as both custodians of tradition and harbingers of change they could impart to the larger democratic process a personal imprint; how, through personal example and continuous communication, a considerable process of political education was undertaken as part of the enterprise of democratic nation-building. Hence much attention was devoted in my writings on the role of Gandhi on the one hand and Nehru on the other (as well as the role of many mini-Gandhis and mini-Nehrus throughout the length and breadth of the country), though always as part of a broader analysis. I had never thought of writing in a biographical vein on any individual leader. Later, with the shift of power to a different genre of dominant leaders, starting with Indira Gandhi, I (along with many others) devoted considerable attention to the new culture of populism, and of plebiscitary and alarmist appeals (if you do not give me all your loyalty, the country will disintegrate), while at the same time tried to understand why a phenomenon like Indira Gandhi became necessary with the dawn of the era of mass politics. Several of my earlier writings dwell at some length on this phenomenon. The theme recurs in my later writings when I was trying to probe into the reasons why the earlier institutional model went down and why individual charisma, like Indira Gandhi's, came to occupy such a dominant role.

Basically, what happened in Indian politics towards the end of the sixties was that those in charge of the system began to move away from its basic rationale and normative grounding which, incidentally, some of them, or their forebears, had themselves promoted. As the decade of the sixties moved on, a new generation of politicians and courtiers emerged who left that model in the lurch and moved on to a different conception of politics and its role in society.

Interpreting Indian Politics:

A Personal Statement

153

Changing Conceptions of Politics Again, the new conception that emerged was itself not a result of

some preconceived design; it developed from slow changes that took place in the political arena, through new conflicts that emerged at the helm of affairs, to a frontal seizure of the situation by those who felt themselves to be under attack. Three types of changes took place which gradually shifted the mass base of the political system and produced, on the one hand, a managerial response of containment and holding on and, on the other, a more drastic response aimed at a quick change of gears. In each case a major election heralded the changes. Thus 1962 revealed that new social formations had emerged as a result of shifts and mobility in the caste basis of politics. Both the rise of the Swatantra party—ideologically right-wing but socially drawing on rural awakening, particularly of lower-middle caste peasant groups that had been excluded by the dominant castes—and the considerably increased sway of the socialists, who had lately acquired a rural base among the Backward Classes, posed a new challenge to Congress hegemony. The Congress bosses in the various states failed to take cognisance of this while Nehru went on a spree of attacking the ‘right-wing menace’ posed by those opposed to his radical proposals on cooperative farming and the like, both within his party and outside. The year 1967 revealed something more basic—a combination of social conflicts within the traditional caste hierarchy and widespread public discontent with the Congress itself around issues of rising prices, the high-handedness of both Congress bosses and officialdom, corruption, growth of large pockets of poverty of which the administration had no clue, and, above all, a leadership

that had failed to inspire confidence in the people. In the meanwhile the Opposition had begun to acquire teeth and there was talk of a ‘changeover’ from Congress rule. This, plus the attempts by the ‘syndicate’ to checkmate Indira Gandhi, produced major currents of change, above all within the Congress party, which led to the most dramatic electoral outcome, that of 1971. By this time a clear shift in both the social basis of Indian politics and its party and governmental apparatus began to take place. Riding on the crest of social discontent and turmoil, Indira Gandhi both symbolised mass aspirations and in the end betrayed them, putting a lid on the very process of politicisation that she had spearheaded—

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Rajni Kothari

partly out of a sheer attempt to survive in power at any cost, both for herself and her heirs. There followed in quick succession the Emergency, the powerful upsurge of the people resulting in the Janata government, the disastrous failure of the latter to provide a clear alternative, the Bonapartist return of the secular messiah in

1980, only to produce even more discontent and the final denouement thereupon, giving rise to a state based upon communal and chauvinist appeals on the one hand and the promise of a technological paradise bought through borrowed capital and transferred knowledge on the other. In the meanwhile the whole development project on which the country had placed such faith fast turned out to be a source of growing disparities, discord and disenchantment. That such a swift series of both linear changes and turbulent turnarounds called for a new intellectual response that had necessarily to be different from the earlier simple modelling of a functioning system is hardly surprising. And yet it was not as if it could all be presented in black-and-white terms of single-stroke reversals in the nature of the state; nor indeed could it all be anticipated with any degree of correctness or specificity, no matter how determined one’s model of historic change could have been. All one could do was to detect major points of departure and the consequent tendencies that could be visualised though not necessarily fully prognosticated. The trauma of 1975 was not inherent in 1971 and the politics of garibi hatao, nor were the bloody events of 1984 inherent in the return of stable governance in 1980. By some stretch of the imagination 1967 could have been foreseen in 1962—the three 1963 by-elections, Nehru’s death, the almost total neglect of government in the preoccupation with settling party affairs that followed Shastri’s death, and the resulting decline in the standing and aura of the Congress party. But 1977 was not an extension of 1967 nor was the change that took place in 1989 an extension of 1977. (Even the break-up of the Janata party in 1979 and that of the Janata Dal in 1990 represent two completely different socio-political settings.) Above all, neither the changes in the opposition alignments nor the changes in the Congress, by themselves, provide any clues to the changes that have come over the people and their perceptions of politics and the Indian state.

Interpreting Indian Politics:

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Thinking on the Role of the State Let me now move from considering the nature of politics as process to the institutional setting of the same, in particular the role of the state in social change. The state in India has been subject to the operation of a political process of a liberal-democratic kind. It is important to see how things have changed in respect of the relationship between the state and the democratic process; how the dominant classes in India and their transnational patrons have been successful in hijacking the state and making it increasingly insensitive and immune

to democratic politics; and yet, how the

latter is by no means defeated and continues to offer resistance to the dominant classes and their capitalist and technocratic allies. The overall picture is highly complex and continuously changing and cannot be simply explained with reference to a few universal and static concepts. In order that the democratic forces can gain in their struggle against a repressive and centralised state, it is necessary to take full cognisance of the role of contemporary capitalism and both its dynamic surge forward and its limitations in launching a successful design for development in a country like India. In India, major shifts were already under way during the decade starting with the Emergency, which relegated the role of the state in promoting social change and regulating dominant interests, both domestic and global. The emergence of Sanjay Gandhi, the rule of the Janata party (which saw a striking growth in the power and confidence of vested interests, particularly in rural areas) and

the return of Mrs. Indira Gandhi (with the backing of the industrial and business class and the urban middle-class) had all contributed to this. These shifts were already in the offing when Rajiv Gandhi and his ‘computer boys’, drawn from the corporate sector and his NRI (non-resident Indian) friends, came on the scene. Let us look

at these shifts and their implications. A massive erosion of state autonomy has taken place in India. We began with a model of nation-building in which the state retained a large measure of autonomy, intervened in the socioeconomic spheres with its own agenda of social change, and was relatively free of class, caste and communal interests, at least at national and state levels. A concomitant of this was the autonomy and the primacy of the political process. It permeated different

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segments and levels of social reality and set priorities. If some areas were left uncovered, it was because our commitment to a democratic ideology and pluralistic society did not permit straitjacketing of the social order. Perhaps, locally, political leaders often found it expedient to operate through entrenched elites and available social structures. But neither of these prevented the state from pursuing its own polices. During the fifties, sixties and the early seventies, politics was not an epiphenomenon. The state was not just an agent of the ruling class. In fact, there was no homogeneous

ruling class. The term

makes more sense today than it did then. The prime actor was not some class but the state. Both the bourgeoisie and the landed gentry were weak and fragmented. And the people saw the state as an instrument of liberation from social inequity. This autonomy from dominant interests and the capacity for social good has now been eroded. The undermining of the party system, the federal polity and the intermediate structures through which local problems and conflicts used to be sorted out has deprived the state of this capacity for social reform and has made it vulnerable to dominant interests. Ironically, greater centralisation of power has made the state less autonomous. And ‘independence’ from the lower tiers of the federal system, from party and bureaucratic institutions, has made it dependent on the dominant structures of national and international power and privilege. It is important to gauge the precise nature of the shift in thinking among the elite in India on the role of the state. For some time, there was a belief in the positive role of the state, in both setting the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy and achieving a measure of self-reliance through ‘import substitution’, as the local bourgeoisie was too weak to undertake these tasks. These activities of the state enabled the same bourgeoisie to expand its base and gain access to large-scale financial resources mobilised by the state apparatus.

Such a role of the state proved most handy to the capitalist class. While the state retained the capacity to set an overall framework of policies and priorities, the private sector found such an arrangement expedient as it stood to benefit from it. This was the era of a ‘mixed economy’ in which state capitalism, rather than a socialist state, played a catalytic role. But even this began to change after the mid-seventies. Once their consumer needs were gratified through

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the setting up of an industrial infrastructure for the same, the elite had no use for state intervention in the economy. This was the time (1967-1977) when the aspirations of the masses started rising and the state was asked to take on the task of increasing the purchasing power of the peopie by resort to redistributive measures. Alongside, transnational agencies like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank came forward with a whole package of liberalisation, export orientation and technology transfer, through collaboration with multinationals, for modernis-

ing the economy and enmeshing it in the global market. The conflict between these two tendencies crystallised during the eighties, the latter overpowering the former and forcing it to take increasingly turbulent forms. The emerging convergence of trends—of the shift in local indus-

trial capital and the national elite thinking on the role of the state; the slowly growing affinity of international capital for India, promoted in the main by the World Bank; and the will to withstand

pressures for distributive justice within the country—set the stage for the Indian state to be conceived, for the first time, as an agent

and collaborator of world capitalism. Not only did the state lose its autonomy from dominant interests, it was also willing to give up its erstwhile role of ushering in basic social reforms. Meanwhile, public attention got focused on communal and religious issues, relegating the concern for justice and survival of the masses to the background. Alongside the decline in state autonomy Is its growing de-legitimatisation. The new elite has been discrediting the state by drawing on the left and liberal criticisms of the state and its agencies and by launching a tirade against government corruption and inefficiency. State instruments—government, bureaucracy, judiciary, Parliament, parties—are no longer considered efficient means for ‘progress’ and for the march into the twenty-first century. Instead, they have come to be looked down upon as impediments in that march, necessary perhaps for maintaining a democratic facade, but to be subsumed under the dynamic thrust of modern technology and management. The whole process of de-bureaucratising the state apparatus, the switch from the public to the private sector to achieve new ‘commanding heights’ through new technologies, the growing importance of autonomous corporations—in dairying, forestry, biotechnology, atomic energy, telecommunications—that

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are accountable neither to the Parliament nor to the ministries, are

all part of this massive shift from the state to the market as the agent of national development. The marginalisation of the masses, the destitution of the poor and the exploitation of natural resources for private industrial needs are accepted as necessary costs that the nation must pay for progress, for achieving national power and for ‘catching-up.’ Such developments have also undermined the consensus in Indian society about what ought to be the nature of the state—namely, that it had to be prevented from becoming too centralised and antithetical to the interests of the people at large and its autonomy vis-a-vis dominant interests and classes had to be preserved. In India, the state that came into being after independence had been conceived as a public arena, as a legally constituted structure of institutions that was publicly accountable and was supposed to function under public gaze. It was not just the reflection of some dominant force (whether a set of individuals or a class), but an entity that enjoyed legitimacy and authority by virtue of widespread consensus. Even if the deprived sections of the people and various peripheral communities did not enjoy access to the state as did the more privileged and upwardly mobile strata, it was still not a closed shop or a private domain. In fact, the idea was that opportunities for access and participation would expand—an idea in which the large masses of the people believed for a fairly long time. It was through the mechanisms of the state that the deprived and excluded strata saw their chance of being included. And this inclusion had

to be political in nature as there was little scope for them outside the arena known as the state. They had ‘rights’ vis-a-vis this state. Indeed, they had no rights outside the state (except perhaps in their own

communities)

and no course

was

left to them

but to

participate in the political process and, through that, press their claims on the state. This is what accounts for the long-held view that the Indian state was democratic, as well as the periodic affirmation of its being ‘socialistic’, if not socialist in its full ideological meaning. Three crucial elements had contributed to such an ideological predisposition. First, democratic politics was to be the main instrument of social transformation. Second, it was to operate through institutions that were conceived to be public in nature and hence accountable to the larger public. And third, the state was to

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occupy the central role in this process of transformation and was to do so not by aligning with some private interests but by being autonomous of those interests. It is not as if all these three elements operated in their fullness in actual practice. Some may even argue that none of them did. But there was at least a presumption that they would. And to the extent there were any lags, the democratic process as it unfolded would fill them up. These presumptions about the autonomy of the Indian state on the one hand and its accountability through its democratic functioning on the other are no longer valid. There has taken place a long process of erosion of democratic institutions, of the ‘rule of law’, and of accountability of government and other institutions of the state. This has happened over a long period of time—the weakening of the party system and the parliamentary and federal institutions under Indira Gandhi; the rise of political corruption that began under Sanjay Gandhi and has multiplied ever since; the increasingly centralised and arbitrary use of the public domain that has taken place with the decline of the political process that started before and during the Emergency and became more blatant after 1980. And yet, with all this, the state still retained its character as a public arena and its relative autonomy, particularly vis-a-vis external interests. No doubt, it had become vulnerable over these years because of the dilution of its democratic ethos. But what made for a basic turnaround and for it to become a captive of both transnational capitalism and private interests at home that were in league with transnational interests has been a basic shift of an ideological kind—it may have been growing in leverage over a long period but has taken the form of a manifest ideology only of late. This is the ideology of privatisation that is sweeping across the world and which is both taking hold of, and is in turn being fully utilised by, politicians and bureaucrats in the Third World. They have lost confidence in their earlier vision and perspective and have been looking for quite some time for some magic wand that will enable them to move out of the political mess they have gotten into. It is the power of this new thinking which at once compromises the autonomy and integrity of the nation-state in large parts of the world and undermines the democratic character

of the political process, thus marginalising and excluding large sections of society from the purview of the state; and which makes for a far more effective control of the state by corporate capitalist

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interests both at home and globally than was the case either during the national movement for independence or in the decades that followed when business interests were seeking to influence the running of the state.

Changing Context of Democratic Potitics We seem to be already in the middle of a massive process of depoliticisation. The high pitch of populist rhetoric providing a cover for the reality of growing marginalisation of the populace with respect to both the organised economy and organised politics; the consequent erosion of the institutional fabric and growing dependence on dominant individuals, existing and projected, for key decisions and allocations; a series of measures aimed at reducing the role of the state in economic transformation and gradual incorporation of the national economy into the global market—all point to the reduced span of politics. Politics is, in fact, being blamed for the current state of affairs and the ‘new thinking’ that is emerging in ruling circles is for minimising the role of politics and of public debate and handing over the affairs of the state to ‘scientific’ managers and technocrats and a new breed of ‘advisors—some of whom come from the voluntary sector itself! Much of this thinking crystallised in the group of people around Rajiv Gandhi during 1983-88 who, hitherto outside the political process, were brought to its centre based on a managerial model of the polity that led major areas of decisionmaking out of the democratic political process. Whereas Sanjay Gandhi’s model was based on penetrating the institutional as well as ‘grassroots’ bases of the polity through new political actors— mafia-style, assisted by the repressive arm of government—his brother’s model presented a seemingly less ruthless approach. It was one which replaced political functionaries by managers, though for some purposes mafia and police operations at the lower levels continued to be used. And this alignment of forces was conceived less in terms of political coalition-making or the consolidation of a social coalition—e.g., the well-known social coalition of Mrs. Gandhi's earlier years—and more in terms of a simple and straightforward manager-cum-mafia-cum-police raj. But to a considerable extent the opposition parties too were

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responsible for having given up on the more long-term politics of transformation and for getting far too embroiled in the short-term gains of electoral and legislative politics. And to some extent even the voluntary activists and leaders of various social movements outside the pale of party politics were also responsible for having opted for easier paths, whether of the mere polemicist and conferencing kind along some pure and usually imported ideological doctrines; or by becoming available for/accepting roles in a framework of co-operation with national official agencies and enjoying the facilities and resources and access to mass media and publicity that these provide. The erosion of concern and commitment has been on all sides, not just the governing elite; though, no doubt, the more clearly

destructive role has been that of the latter. The point is that if the politics of depoliticisation includes withdrawal from the dynamics of social struggle and from the afflictions and agonies of the poor and the downtrodden, then not just the Rajiv Gandhi regime and the regime of Indira Gandhi

after 1975 are responsible, but also

their adversaries, in particular the opposition parties. For all the tendencies described so far have continued during the National Front government, thanks largely to the role played by the bureaucracy and particularly by the Prime Minister’s Office under V.P. Singh.

The Challenge of Change It was against this overall erosion of basic democratic struggles and the larger conditioning of the mind along technocratic lines, that has held sway across diverse segments and which led to a retreat from the centrality of the political process, that any challenge to — the establishment—and the return of politics to centre stage—once again came to be contended at the end of eighties. Even before we had completed one year after the big change brought about by the electoral reversal of forty years of one party dynastic rule (with the brief interregnum following the Emergency), the conflicts inherent in the change-over came to the fore. Whatever one’s perception of the National Front government at the centre or in the states, there is no doubt that the popular mandate

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given to these governments was one of clear change of direction in both the polity and the economy, as also in the balance of forces in civil society. But, whereas the mandate was clear, it was still to be carried out by a system that was a carry-over from the past and controlled by the same interests that had been in charge of the Indian state for so long. What did the mandate include? It included a federal restructuring of the polity with greater autonomy for the states and further decentralisation at the district and lower levels. It included a major transfer of resources and opportunities to the rural areas as against the hitherto preferential treatment given to urban areas and metropolitan middle classes. It included a fair deal to the so far excluded and marginalised sections of society such as the Dalits, the tribals, the backward classes and women. It included a commitment to a clean environment and a model of development that was sustainable, as against one that was eroding the natural resource base of our people. It included, above all, a significant stress on employment generation as against mere growth targets as was implied in the commitment to the ‘right to work’. And it also included an opening up of information channels both in respect of the mass media and in respect of access to information on the whole span of decisions that affect the lives and livelihood of the people at large—in short, the promise of an open government. While all this did not add up to a platform of ‘revolutionary’ change, it did add up to a comprehensive programme of democratisation towards a decentralised, participatory, open, environmentally sensitive and people-oriented system of governance. Within the confines of a liberal democratic system this was the best that could be expected. What is more, such a programme of change resulted from a long period of struggle against a centralised bureaucratic, closed, elite-oriented and wasteful system, that had engaged in many excesses, and an increasingly repressive model of governance. Indeed, for the first time the various ‘rights’ demanded by the human rights and grassroots movements came to be accepted as obligations of the state—right

to work,

right to information,

right to participation through a decentralised structure of institutions, and the right to minimum living conditions for the deprived sections of society. In short, it was an act of major political change in moving from one kind of regime to another, even if this be within a not too radical framework of liberal democracy.

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Unfortunately, such an act of democratic will proved unacceptable to vested interests that had entrenched themselves in the earlier model of governance and socio-economic development. The political change heralded by the 1989 elections was up against contradictions that were inherent in that change—it was a change of regime, but not a change of the system. One should not be surprised at these contradictions and resistances. They were to be expected in any programme of change. The point was to muster enough political will and undertake necessary institutional restructuring, above all of the administrative machinery. Only then could the contradictions be resolved and resistances overcome,

and the

vested interests that lay behind them defeated. In this lay the challenge of change. This proved not to be easy to carry out. Experience of the past was in any case not too reassuring. Far more dynamic, courageous and visionary individuals have been swallowed by the quicksands of Indian politics. Ram Mahohar Lohia’s zumbesh (harnessing of popular initiative) against the colonial raj of the Nehrus ended up in the anaemic ‘Grand Alliance’ of 1967; Jayaprakash Narayan’s bid for ‘total revolution’ ended him up in the company of the Janata rabble. (In quite a different way this happened to Mrs. Gandhi after 1971.) Could V.P. Singh succeed where these far more powerful individuals failed? Let me state here something I have long believed in. There are serious limitations to what politicians by themselves can do, even if

they succeed in turning the corner at a particular moment (1967, 1971, 1977, 1989). Political leaders must no doubt play their roles

as catalysts of the historic process. But it is for many others to realise the promise of change in its fullness. The fundamental democratic challenge that faces this country, namely the challenge of making democracy an instrument of the oppressed and the victims of history, faces us all. It is a challenge that straddles the canvas of not just the state but also civil society, the cultural and intellectual terrain, the large voluntary base of this civilisation (to be distinguished from the so-called ‘voluntary sector’), the women,

the peasantry, the workers and toilers who inhabit slums, forests and thoroughfares.

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The Challenge of the Nineties The potential for generating a political process that spans both the local and the national (and the international) is, of course, immense in India. We are in the midst of a major convulsion of human consciousness, at all levels and within all strata (including, interestingly, in sections of the elite). This is also affecting institutions and making their operators turn a new leap in their professions—in journalism, in the judiciary, in research institutions, in the trade union field, in the organisation of the poor and the unorganised (as well as the unemployed and under-employed) whose ranks are swelling under the impact of new technologies and the new international division of labour. For the first time, this stirring of consciousness is getting transformed into political action and is slowly affecting deep-seated perceptions about the role and limits of specific institutions like the judiciary, the press and the academia. What is lacking is a more aggregate effort, articulated in a distinctly political idiom, pursued on a national scale, visible as a national alternative. It must draw on and, indeed, provide full scope to the various strands of local, regional and socio-economic struggles; draw also on new role perceptions and new energies generated in the functioning of major institutions which enable them to join in a political task. They all need to be informed by a common elan and thrust, the diverse voices joining in a symphony that cannot but be heard, respected and admired. The most central task that faces us is one of aggregating these diverse efforts towards a new crystallisation that is avowedly political but not in the way in which party politicians see things. At the root of the present crisis are two related but independent phenomena. One is the democratic upsurge among social strata which, till now inert and apathetic, are getting politicised. The other is fear and nervousness among the elite in the face of an awakened people; fear of politics which has turned into mass politics; fear of an open society—particularly when the openness is taken seriously by those kept out of positions and who are now gatecrashing, expressing their discontent, exhibiting their impatience and doing this in modes of public discourse and action that the elite finds disruptive of its own ways of thinking about the state and the affairs of society.

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As the years have rolled by and discontent and disillusionment have grown, understanding of the democratic process has moved from an almost exclusive preoccupation with parties and elections to deeper currents at work which the polity has been unable to grapple with. The period of erosion of parliamentary, party and federal institutions and decline of the authority of the state and of the national political leadership has also been one of the rise of new actors on the scene, new forms of political expression and new definitions of the content of politics. These new stirrings would have made the tasks of political management difficult even under fully functioning institutions of democracy. With the latter becoming weak and vulnerable to the rise of a highly personalised, ad hoc and arbitrary exercise of power, the tasks of governance have become unmanageable. With this there have grown deep doubts and skepticism, loss of faith and a diffuse sense of cynicism about the prevailing model of the polity, about the ‘system’ as a whole. This model was based on a conception of politics in which the main initiatives came from one or more centres of power and decisionmaking, the benefits of which would accrue to the people whose role was periodically to provide consent or withdraw it through the electoral process. As a system of managing the affairs of society, this ‘top-down’ model has failed. It is against this failure that the rise of new actors and levels, new forms of political expression and new definitions of the content of politics acquire significance. A democratic polity is supposed to be one in which the government and the people together create an open and civil society—an integrated whole that is brought and kept together by virtue of its being open; one in which the people participate not just in things like elections and development projects, but together in creating a common future. It is a ‘tryst with destiny’, nothing short of it. Representative institutions, plans, programmes, and information

and knowledge systems through which the state works are no more than contrived instrumentalities through which the ‘destiny’ is to be reached over time. If and as they fail to measure up to expectations, they need to be transformed. This is the essence of people’s action. As against the logic and dynamics of development there has also been the logic and dynamics of democracy. Precisely during the period when the formal institutions of governance and dispensation of justice and welfare have been eroded, new assertions of the

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popular will have been taking place at the grassroots. Precisely at a time when the party system is losing credibility and party leaders are themselves closing and contracting political spaces, new institutional spaces are opening up which have given rise to the phenomenon of the ‘non-party political process’ in almost all parts of the country. Precisely in a period that has witnessed a sharp decline in the federal system and in institutions of local selfgovernment, a variety of regional upsurges and movements for cultural autonomy and preservation of the rich diversity of the land are on the rise. Precisely when the state and corporate policies have destabilised the fine natural balance of our fragile landmass and forest cover, a wide range of ecological movements have emerged. Precisely when traditional notions of patrimony have been blown out of proportion by modern tendencies of reckless competition and consumerism, which have turned women into a commodity, a widespread stirring of feminine consciousness is slowly transforming a Western-type women’s movement into an indigenous grassroots movement. Meanwhile, there is also a rise of secular and anti-communal movements. And precisely when academic colonialism arising Out of the cultural servility of the Brahminic elite to the Western paradigm of progress and ‘modernisation’ has produced a university system and a research and development (R&D) set-up which are turning out a class of professionals without social commitment or passion, there is also emerging an intellectual ferment that is beginning to respond to these various social movements from below.

It is from this comprehensive response to a situation of shrinking spaces and closed options, launched from the variety of vantage points of an ‘alternative movement’, that the democratic process is likely to find its new bearings and new springs of sustenance over time. Some of it does come from conventional political struggle waged by political parties, trade unions and the like. But the bulk of it comes in the form of independent citizen initiatives, voluntary

and non-party formations, the struggle for civil liberties and democratic rights—in short, of people’s action. It consists of a stream of initiatives and responses, still highly scattered, often at cross purposes, involving quite a lot of fragmentation and tension and exhaustion, and yet in many ways the only real source of hope in an otherwise dismal scenario. It is also, despite all the scatter,

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crucial to the democratic process, in a period of declining opportunities for the deprived and shrinking institutional spaces for those outside the seats of power and privilege.

Response from Above The response of the establishment to this fast changing context of the democratic process has been an extremely defensive one. So long as ‘people’s action’ was limited to passive voluntarism, in effect co-operating with the government and business houses through agency work, it caused no ripples. It raised no awkward questions of a structural kind, on the whole kept away from politics (or became available to ruling party politicans at times of elections and the like) and hardly even

took on mobilisation

roles, at any

rate not of a confrontational nature. This has now changed. A lot of ‘voluntary’ effort is now taken up by people who are deeply concerned about the growing alienation between the state and the people; about the development process having turned against the poor and the dispossessed; and about the increasing marginalisation and destitution of millions of people who have been driven out of productive avenues, denuded of their resource base and denied access to both the institutions of the state and their own traditional structures of community and habitation. Inevitably, this new brand of voluntarism must adopt a political stance, take up cudgels with those in authority, and change hegemonic structures within the society and in the polity. Inevitably too, it will question the ruling assumptions on development, the organisation of the state, science and technology as well as the new faith in the market mechanism and the management creed. The system has responded in three major ways. The first and natural response of an elite that is fearful of expansion of the democratic process is to repress the sources of challenge. Increasingly the Indian state, spurred by the dominant interests which have acquired a hold over it, is becoming highly repressive. The second and in many ways a far more clever and sophisticated response, of relatively recent vintage, consists of co-optation of the sources of challenge, particularly of those emerging from the grassroots and the voluntary sector. More and more, the state is asked to wear a

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‘human face’, appear inviting and open vis-a-vis the social activists in the field, offer largesse, invoke patriotic feelings, and stress the spirit of partnership between the government and the grassroots. On the whole, a change appears to have taken place in official thinking, in recent years, with regard to voluntary action. The government itself seems to be willing to take the work of voluntary organisations somewhat seriously and has been eliciting their assistance in official programmes. Some elements in political parties, especially in the parties occupying centre and left of centre spaces, are keeping in touch with the efforts of voluntary and non-party organisations (mainly the sarvodaya segment involved in constructive work of the traditional type), as also with human rights and civil liberties groups, and, occasionally, even with still more struggleoriented radiéal groups. But then, recognition has its own costs. It may open the door to induction in official programmes of a variety that may not always be of lasting value to the cause of the people. It may seriously compromise the capacity to criticise the government. And it may polarise the voluntarist community into some being ‘in’ and the others being ‘out’. These issues may grow in importance in the coming years with governments, precisely because of their own fragility and incompetence, becoming more open to non-governmental citizen groups. This is precisely the time when these groups and activists involved in them should engage in collective thinking and a degree of soulsearching as to what precisely should be the direction of their effort and in what manner they can best contribute to the larger challenges and tasks involved in social transformation and, for the more politically inclined among them, in transformative politics and in transforming the nature of the state.

Fight

Civil Loyalty and the New India Leroy S. Rouner

To discuss the state in post-independence India without reference to those spiritual sensibilities associated with religion is comparable to discussing the state without reference to those physical facts associated with economics, since Indian culture is as saturated with religious ideas and values as it is structured by economic forces and conditions. Civil loyalty in India is therefore not entirely unlike the American ‘civil religion’, noted in Robert Bellah’s landmark essay.' For all its religious content, however, civil loyalty is a political phenomenon. It concerns the actual empirical causes which create concern for, and identification with, the political goals and purposes of the national community. This essay focuses on the issue of national unity. A fundamental task of contemporary Indian politics is maintaining the unity of the Indian Republic. Religion becomes relevant because it is one of those actual empirical forces which may help to maintain that unity. Thus far, however, traditional Indian religious communities have not helped the cause of national unity. On the contrary, they have frustrated national unity by fostering conflict among different groups of believers, and encouraging both superstitious practices and the thoughtless authoritarianism of a priestly class. Religion in India has been something of a ‘precious bane’. It is an indelible and definitive aspect of people’s lives which is often openly cherished and always at least secretly significant. It has clarified personal

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values and raised individual hopes; but it has also cemented differences, and forged separate and separatist identities among India’s various regions, language groups, castes and classes, and blood communities. The political paradox concerning religion in India is that precisely because religious ideas and values have been so much a part of India’s problem, they will have to be part of India’s solution. There is no empirical evidence that religion is waning as an influence in Indian political life’; hence, a realistic political strategy must incorporate religious energy in the service of national goals, or watch it continue to corrode them. Any newly independent nation is necessarily preoccupied with its unity as a national community. Its first task is to hold together, while carrying on. India, approaching her forty-fifth year as a Republic, still struggles with the radical diversity of her ethnic constituencies—communities of blood, region, language, caste or class and religion—which make the new national community peculiarly susceptible to what Lal Bahadur Shastri called ‘fissiparous tendencies’. The forty-four years of the Republic have seen calls for secession from India on the part of various regional ethnic groups, in Tamilnadu,

Kashmir,

Punjab

and elsewhere.

Since those

calls conti-

nue, the need to hold the Republic together must continue to be a primary political priority, lurking just below the surface of specific political considerations. Civil loyalty, as I invoke the phrase here, is simply that commitment to the larger community which takes people beyond their own particular community and identifies them with the common cause.

These larger concerns may seem secondary, awaiting attention until basic physical needs are met. We tend to think that the poor need bread before they can find the energy to reflect on the meaning of their lives. In fact, however, Marx’s reflections in the ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ of 1844 are much concerned with the primacy of ‘alzenation’ as a spiritual phenomenon among workers who can no longer identify personally with the products of their work. For Marx, ‘meaning’ was as crucial to life as bread.’ Iran provides further instruction regarding the relation between immediately material and larger ‘spiritual’ values. Mansour Farhang, Revolutionary Iran’s first Ambassador to the United Nations,

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argues that the Islamic revolution was a success (to everyone’s surprise, including both the American CIA and the Ayatollah Khomeini) because the urban poor were more concerned with reclaiming their traditional identity than they were with the immediate daily necessities of food and shelter. The modernisation programme of the Shah had neither included them nor given them a sense of belonging in the national community. The ayatollahs did not give them bread, but stony sermons. And they gave the ayatollahs their loyalty, and the revolution was a success.* William Ernest Hocking’s Experiment in Education, reflecting on the problem of re-educating Germany after World War I, made a comparable observation in a different context. Hocking argued that post-war Germany needed a focus to its programme of educational de-Nazification in order to restore meaning and purpose to national life. Rejecting both totalitarian ‘instruction’ and relativistic secular ‘progressive’ theories of education, he acknowledged that removing the burden of Nazism would be painful, and suggested that the new Germany required what he called ‘the will to create, through suffering.” A German student had written to him saying that Germany needed Die tragende Idee to embody this new will; Hocking translates this notion freely as ‘a load-lifting idea’, a functional absolute which a community can affirm, and, in

affirming, find renewed purpose and identity.° Hocking’s philosophy is strongly influenced by the pragmatism of his teacher William James, so this ‘load lifting idea’ is not an abstract concept; it is the crude name of an actual working phenomenon in everyone’s experience. This is why Hocking never made a purely logical case for a philosophical point of view, as though elegance of argument could convince an opponent. What convinces people is an illuminating interpretation of their own experience. Therefore, he appealed to the experience of the other. ‘This is my experience’, he would say. ‘Is it yours also? Does it have humankind in it?’ However, he was not persuaded that pragmatism could establish truth. There are, after all, a number of ways of doing certain things that ‘work’ after a fashion, for some time, but which do not give us

valuable clues to lasting truth. My car, for example, will ‘work’ without a cooling system, for a while. But the prudent car owner soon learns the pragmatic value of ideas such as ‘really working’ or ‘working properly’. These, of course, are ‘idealistic’ appeals to a

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normative standard. ‘Workability’, therefore, never seemed to Hocking to be a clear standard for truth. But a ‘negative pragmatism’ seemed to him absolutely reliable and he never tired of the announcement, ‘If it doesn’t work, it can’t be true.’’ He saw this as

common ground between much continental thought and virtually all American philosophy, and he regularly quoted Hegel’s much scorned statement that ‘the rational is the real’ by pointing out that Hegel’s claim for rationality was that it was wirklich, from the verb wirken, ‘to work’.® In the case of Germany, Hocking found this workable idea in the tradition of Kantian morality. The load of Nazism could be lifted by reaffirmation of a traditional German (and JudaeoChristian) ethical notion, that we must always strive to relate to some end of ours. Later, in The Coming World Civilization, he explored the role of religion in providing ‘the binding ingredient’ for a single world civilisation. He argued that ‘the best fruit of modernity’ is the dignity given to every individual by the notion of human rights,’ and he explored the sources of this universal intuition in Christian thought, in philosophies of natural law. These two ideas—the ‘load-lifting idea’ as ‘binding ingredient-— apply to secular democracies, especially those made up of radically diverse ethnic groups. They are surely the bumble-bees of political systems; there is no aparent way they can fly. Take people of varied ethnic backgrounds; tell them that they are all equal and have equal rights, especially the right to numerous heady freedoms; and then ask, why should they make common cause? There is no very good answer to this question from the storehouse of self-interest, apart from the minimal need to be protected from harassment. But even those huddled together against the storm of common danger will not move forward without some idea of goal and purpose. The proponents of realpolitik are probably

half right; greed and self-interest explain part of such decisions. But greed and self-interest do not explain loyalty and why people care about their common cause, often at great cost to themselves, even by giving their lives. It is this creative aspect of the ‘binding ingredient’ as ‘load-lifting idea’ in a pluralistic, secular democracy which I am concerned with here. Why are we loyal? And how does the idea around which our loyalty centres serve to lift loads in our common cause? Something

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is at work uere akin to what Royce hinted at, somewhat obscurely, when he spoke of ‘loyalty to loyalty’;'’ a conviction which draws on what John Dewey called A Common Faith", what Robert Bellah later called ‘civil religion’. The American experiment in nation building made a major contribution to world politics by creating a democracy out of ethnically diverse people. Independent India, however, establishes a democracy for a much more diverse cultural conglomerate than America ever imagined, so India now deepens and enlarges the American experiment. One could argue that the French and Russian revolutions in nation building are more appropriate predecessor models for India. My primary concern is that India’s adventure in democracy be recognised as critical for the future of the global village because it attempts to integrate extremely diverse sorts and conditions of folk into a national community. Intentionally democratic and based on religious freedom from the outset, it aims to integrate radically divergent peoples with different blood, regional, linguistic, caste/class and religious backgrounds, into a single community of common cause and common purpose. It is this initial, self-conscious, democratic intent which distinguishes India from comparable experiments in Russia, France and China. Since this was also the purpose of the American experiment, the American analogy may helpfully illuminate the issues in nation building for the New India. The American liberal tradition from Thomas Jefferson, through Abraham Lincoln, to John Kennedy, celebrated the American fascination for America and articulated the enormous prestige which the idea of America has come to have for Americans. Jeffersonian democracy, as functional substance of the American Dream, fashioned ethnic and cultural diversity into an American community based on openness toward those of different backgrounds and generous encouragement for their values and hopes.

Civil loyalty in America became that identification with the national community, its goals and purposes, providing the ‘binding ingredient’ and ‘load-lifting idea’, which helped throw off the Shackles of the Old World while holding a pluralistic, democratic society together. Hobbes’ view that the social contract is grounded in fear and self-interest seems partial, since when the contract between national communities breaks down (in times of war), that

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within the community comes to be based most strongly on civil loyalty and the spirit of self-sacrifice. The positive element of civil loyalty is at least as significant as the negative element of fear in making the social contract work. This is not to say that all national communities are ‘credal’, rather than ‘cultural’ (Friedrich) but I believe that a pluralistic democracy is the best government for our global village and that civil loyalty is a democratic necessity. In that sense, all future democratic governments will have to be ‘credal’. What, then, are the problems and prospects for civil loyalty in the new India? What strange alchemy makes Malayalis and Tamils, Sikhs and Kashmiris, Hindus and Muslims, identify themselves—if they do—as ‘Indians’? The problem posed by traditional ethnic bonds of blood, language, region, caste/class and religion is not simply that they are inherently strong and thus weaken a single national identity. The problem is that these strong traditional identities provide something essential for survival. They give people a sense of being ‘at home’ in the midst of the cultural maelstrom, and we cannot be expected to give up our primary ethnic communal identity until the new national identity provides something of this same sense of being at home. Hegel may have been the first to identify this problem. He noted that the Roman Empire was the first place where a person could become thoroughly lost. He recognised the seriousness of that psycho-political threat to personal well-being which we casually call pluralism. For in the Roman Empire folk from Europe, Western Asia and North Africa were told that they were now no longer what they had recognised themselves to be by virtue of their blood ties, region, language, caste or class and religion. Now they were to be Romans, even though Rome was far away, ruled by people who were not kin, who spoke an alien tongue, and worshipped strange gods. One was lost because one was no longer at home. There is, I believe, a visceral human instinct which makes us gravitate toward those of our own kind and fear the stranger. This yearning of like for like—surely a fundamental law of cultural physics—centres in the natural bonds of our tradition, no matter how ‘modern’ we may be. Here are our roots. To be part of this family; to be familiar with this place remembered from childhood; to know this language’s local accent and intimate meanings; to have a place, however low, inthis community; and to share with others the celebrations

of belief and commitment,

in which the

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deepest in us meets the deepest in our fellows—that is what it means to be at home." So while regionalism, casteism and the rest are regularly castigated in Indian political speeches and in the national press, these traditional identities probably still assure most Indians about who they really are. And, of course, the greater the maelstrom, the more that assurance counts. The difficulty is that traditional communities include some people only by excluding others. For all their warm personal reassurances, traditional identities do not directly serve civil loyalty to the New India. But in a modern, democratic state, everyone has a common stake in a common future. No one can be excluded. The American experiment provides an intriguing counter question. How did the idea of ‘America’ eventually become a ‘binding ingredient’ and ‘load-lifting’ idea, and therefore also ‘home’ for a

diverse immigrant population? That mysterious achievement was important because it showed that people of different backgrounds could work together, feel at home with one another, and find a common goal. Today India becomes a model for the peaceful hopes of our global village because of the radical cultural pluralism she integrates. Anyone who believes in both pluralism and peace has a stake in the success of the new India. India’s

ethnic

diversity,

however,

makes

American

diversity

seem very modest. The language problem in America, for example, was largely limited to Indo-European languages, whereas almost half of India has a Dravidian mother-tongue. The religious integration of Protestants, Catholics and Jews, of which Americans are so proud, is surely a minor achievement in the light of India’s integration of Muslims and Hindus, not to mention Sikhs, Parsees,

Christians and others. Perhaps most significantly, America developed from a modern immigrant population and in a very large expanse of what she decided was ‘virgin’ land. This meant that ethnic groups could settle together, transposing their old language and culture for a period, gaining self-confidence and a sense of place, before the ceaseless mobility of the New World eroded their traditionalism and gradually worked them into the mainstream of American life. So Minnesota is the land of Norwegian Lutherans, while the French Catholics flocked to New Orleans, and so forth. Indian regionalism, on the other hand, is ancient, immobile, and rooted in a villager social class which America never had. And the

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American Dream romanticised immigrant opportunity. It was the prestige of the American idea which drew people to America. Civil loyalty was not a creation of American life. People brought it with them from Europe. They had chosen to be Americans. They claimed the American Dream before they even landed in New York. One could almost say that the American Dream was a European invention. It had virtually no empirical basis, and it was not a reasonable expectation for what life actually turned out to be like in the New World. The mystery is not so much what generated it as how it held, in spite of endless empirical evidence to the contrary on the experience of new immigrants. The hymn to the Dream sang of a ‘beautiful . . . patriot dream, that sees beyond the years’ and of ‘alabaster cities’ which ‘gleam undimmed by human tears.’ New York? Chicago? Detroit? Alabaster cities, gleaming ‘undimmed by human tears’? Clearly not; yet still the hymn was sung, and with fervour. The myth held. What was the ‘cash value’ (William James) of this seemingly irrelevant Dream? The Dream was doing something for the Dreamers, or they would have angrily abandoned it as clearly ‘not true’. What was it doing for them that made them cherish it? It gave them a hopeful sense of identity with a new community. It gave them a common cause and a common purpose in building something which was not yet; but worth giving oneself to, even if it would never be, because wanting it and working for it was the best thing they had ever done. Loss was part of the immigrant mentality. Most immigrants to America had lost a great deal in their native land. Some had lost everything. America was a new beginning. But it was also a new recognition that life is short and that goal and purpose may be more important than actual accomplishment. Immigrants regularly live for the next generation, and purpose and cause are even better gifts to children than food and shelter. The hope of a new day in America is what they came for. And it was what Royce was to call the Hope of the Great Community” which sustained them. Indian civil loyalty, on the other hand, seeks to change the consciousness of a people who are not immigrants and have always been there, in the same place, for untold generations, with a deepseated traditional sense of themselves. How, then, does the idea of ‘India’ become ‘home’ for her diverse peoples? What is it in the idea of ‘India’ which lifts loads and binds people together? This

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transition from traditional communal values to modern values of individuality, secularism and freedom involves a major shift in the paradigms of self-understanding. In the communal world of tradition, individual selfhood is always a

derivative notion. I am who I am by virtue of my given communal identity. Because it is given in my blood condition, nothing can take it away; not death or divorce or some unaccountable act of God. I have no anxiety concerning my self-understanding, because there is no conceivable threat to it. I have very little freedom since so much social behaviour is prescribed. But I know who I am; and I have a ‘native place’ where I know I belong. In the social world of the free-standing modern individual, the only given is the blood relation between parents and children, and that counts less for us than it did even a short time ago. Apart from that, ‘nothing is written’, unless we write it, to quote that ‘prince of our disorder’, T.E. Lawrence. There may be no God, and no

intelligible order of things, but from Bacon and Descartes to Kant and the Existentialists, knowing is now a function of individual minds, not of a transcendental intelligibility which some God engenders. We are whom we know ourselves to be, in ourselvés: Freud may be right that there are dark caverns in the mind of this isolated and lonely self; Feuerbach may be right that our transcendental beliefs are only projections from our worldly commitments; Marx may even be right that choice is strongly influenced by class. But no one can lure us away from our conviction that we must be what we choose to be; for we become ourselves only by choosing ourselves. We are not derived from the community. The community, if there is to be one, must be derived from us. Or so the modern faith holds. Indian politics is therefore caught between the glittering new promises of voluntarism, secularism, and democracy; and the stained old assurances that our real polis is with the people who are like us, ‘our kind of people’, ‘our community’. Traditional identities will always be strong. India has even encouraged them by redrawing state boundaries to consolidate ethnic identities. But there will be no future without some universal Indian consciousness which can exist alongside them, and occasion-

ally override their more ‘fissiparous tendencies’. In The Discovery of India Nehru noted that India’s cultural continuity had been rooted in three major social forces: caste, the

autonomous village and the joint family." But in the new India,

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urbanisation, modernisation and democratisation gradually erode them all. So where does Nehru find the ‘binding ingredient’ of the new India? He is vague, not unlike his American counterparts in their celebration of the American Dream. He speaks of India as a ‘sentiment . . . (which) went far back into the remote periods of Indian history,’ and he also speaks of her as a ‘conflict... between two approaches to the problem of social organisation, which are diametrically opposed to each other; the old Hindu conception of the group being the basic unit of organisation, and the excessive individualism of the west, emphasizing the individual above the group.’” Somehow, he suggests, there must be a melding of these two, with religion, philosophy and science interrelated. He notes: We can never forget the ideals that have dreams of the Indian people through the the ancients, the buoyant energy and love our forefathers . . . . We will never forget pride in that noble heritage of ours."

moved our race, the ages, the wisdom of of life and nature of them or cease to take

But how do ancient religious and philosophical values meld with modern scientific and industrial ones? On one level the answer is that they do it willy-nilly, by coexisting long enough so that they reach some rough, workable, instinctive accommodation with one another. Every all-India institution—the Government of India, the army, the universities, large corporations and the like—over time, engenders just such an accommodation of values, and in so doing helps to shape a new national consciousness. In the early years of national independence this accommodation tends to be somewhat schizophrenic, however, and limited to the experience of the leadership class. The public life of this new middle class, including social and professional relations within the peer group, tends toward modern values of individualism and scientific thought because these pan-Indian institutions are modern. In their private lives and familial relations, however,

these same

people tend to maintain many

of their old

religious and philosophical instincts, values and persuasions. As

middle

class urban

life becomes

more

modern,

this class

becomes further removed from the rural life of the mass of Indian villagers. This socio-economic problem has been widely noted and

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much discussed. Less obvious, but equally important, is the personal and spiritual problem of people in this leadership class as they sense a certain inner alienation from themselves. They are not ‘at home’. Having two sets of values and living in two different worlds is at best discomfiting. Granted, life under the Raj made many a middle class Indian adept at living in two worlds. Nirad Chaudhun, the ageless enfant terrible of Indian letters, even suggests that the Janus model is indigenous to Hinduism.” Even so, one cannot be at home in the new India without finally being at home with oneself. So the political search for civil loyalty is related to the spiritual search for a measure of inner personal integrity. One possible solution to this dilemma on the part of the Hindu majority in India is to follow the theocratic lead of those neighbours like Pakistan and reconceive the Indian experiment as Hindusthan. The power of such ‘fundamentalist’ appeals stems from the unfulfilled need to restore inner spiritual integrity, not only among the middle class, but also for the urban poor. This appeal was noted prominently in Farhang’s analysis of Khomeini’s victory in the Iranian revolution. But it is now, happily, too late for that in India, if the Indian experiment in secular democracy is to survive. This is not to say that the Hindu fundamentalists may not win out in the end. It is only to say that, if they do, fissiparousness will be the order of the day, civil war will be the common plight of India’s ethnic groups, political balkanisation will result, and the dreams of both Nehru and Gandhi will have died. In Nehru’s fine phrase, India will no longer be India. And the rest of the world will

have to turn elsewhere for a model serving the coming world civilisation. When Nehru spoke of forces which could provide India with a cemmon goal, purpose and identity, he clearly had something more in mind than the pragmatic influences of India’s modern, urban institutions. Almost half of the brief Epilogue to The Discovery of India is given to an account of Emerson’s Harvard speech on “The American Century’, which was a plea to Americans to focus their intellectual attention on American

culture, rather

than the culture of Europe.” Here Nehru seems to sense an ‘Indian Century’ in the making. He pleads for a focus on India’s cultural heritage. He bemoans the decline in Indian culture which lasted into the nineteenth century, and calls for a revival of ideas and values which are indigenously

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Indian. But he pays relatively little attention to that modern religious movement known sometimes as the Indian renaissance, or the rise

of neo-Hinduism, beginning with the reform work of Rammohan Roy and reaching to the present day influence of Gandhi and himself. That development, stimulated by British colonial rule, modern

scientific education, and the Christian missionary move-

ment, both revived and revised a distinctive Indian spirituality which is now a crucial element in Indian civil loyalty.” The significance of this movement was real but modest. It was largely limited to an early group of Hindu middle class intellectuals and reformers. Their major inter-religious interaction was with the Christian Serampore missionaries and their successors who represented Western religious values and ideas. It was by no means a pan-Indian movement, and its continuing influence is uncertain. Nevertheless, it was the one cultural development in modern India which clearly reclaimed elements from India’s cultural heritage and fashioned them for service to the New India. That, of course, was the task which civil loyalty faced. Was it possible, somehow,

to ‘de-contextualise’

some

creative elements

of the religious tradition and make those elements available to modern, urban, middle class folk, as well as the urban poor and the mass of villagers, in a form which could retain its spiritual power while shedding its exclusivist context? Was it possible both to modernise and ‘Indianise’ critical elements in the religious and cultural context which had previously been traditional, fissiparous, exclusivist and anti-national? In order to be a ‘binding ingredient’ or a ‘load-lifting idea’ for a democratic society with India’s radical cultural pluralism, civil loyalty must be more than cultural nostalgia. It must be ‘credal’ in some sense. That is, it must celebrate some values which people believe, some virtues which, by transcending nationalism, create ‘brotherhood’ and ‘sisterhood’, both for the nation and for the larger human community. So, for example, ‘freedom’ to establish a government ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’, became the principal doctrine of the American creed. What is the principal doctrine of the Indian creed? Nehru seems not to move beyond nostalgia, at least in The Discovery of India. Nor does he seem to be aware that he was part of a movement which presents a coherent theme, from the early

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reforms of Rammohan Roy to the independence movement led by Gandhi and himself. The leading figures of the Indian renaissance—from Rammohan Roy, Keshub Chander Sen, the Tagores, Aurobindo, Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda down to Gandhi and Nehru—shared the conviction that Indian spirituality had a special contribution to make to the world. The message of Rabindranath Tagore’s Toward Universal Man, shared by others in this movement, was central. Tagore argued that India’s experience of cultural diversity had given her a special insight into tolerance, and that the rationale for that tolerance is the common humanity which we all share.* This idea features in the work of each major reformer in this movement. With Roy it was an openness to common cause with the missionaries to oppose sati (widow burning), along with his own conviction that the spiritual tolerance of the Hindu tradition must now be joined with a new social concern in defence of human rights. With Keshub it was a religious openness to various views which weie to be institutionalised in the Brahmo Samaj, a modern Hindu ‘church’

which borrowed much from Christian Unitarianism. Hinduism had not traditionally been an institution, it had been an aspect of culture and a personal persuasion. The worshippers at a given temple were not an organised community like a Christian congregation, nor were there institutional links among various Hindu temples. Now, with a new focus on social responsibility, neoHinduism turned toward institutionalisation in order to become an effective social force. The most striking and lasting example of this institutionalisation is the Ramakrishna Mission, which established

social welfare programmes, promoted modernised Hindu thought, and, through the genius and energy of Swami Vivekananda, became a missionary movement in the West as well as in India. With Aurobindo it was a view of the new Hindu as a transcendental man, a ‘Gnostic Being’ empowered with an unprecedented universality, capable of living the Life Divine.” But even this was not the old asocial transcendentalism of traditional Hinduism, for

Aurobindo had been a political activist and founded the global village of Auroville—a community reminiscent of the American Puritans’ ‘city set upon a hill’, for all the world to see. It was to be a model for a new world community, including all sorts and conditions of folk from every nation, and containing patches of soil

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taken from all the countries of the world. It was not widely influential, but the intent it embodied was characteristic of the movement. With Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Swami Vivekananda and the founding of the Ramakrishna Mission, however, the movement became more than pan-Indian, and did achieve wide influence.

Vivekananda became a world figure. He gave a widely noted speech at the Congress of World Religions in Chicago in 1897; was offered professorships in philosophy at two major American universities; and returned home in triumph, celebrating the theme of ex oriente lux, in contrast to the century old colonialist/missionary theme that the West was the bearer of light and the East was an area of darkness. For Vivekananda, the idea of ‘tolerance’ was no longer a defence against Western cultural encroachments in India; it was now a battle cry of the creative insight into India’s spiritual powers which were making her strong again. This new notion of ‘tolerance’ has, I think, become the ‘loadlifting’ idea providing a ‘binding ingredient’ among India’s various cultural groups. It is the idea which best summarises Nehru’s ruminations on what makes India truly India. It was not the old transcendental, stoic aloofness with its spiritual disregard for the historical world, for society and culture because it was prakriti (nature)

or maya

(illusion), whereas

the inner

world

of pursua

(spirit) or atma (soul/self) was the world which really mattered. The Indian renaissance turned that transcendentalism in a historic direction—aided by the twin influences of ‘British justice’ and the

social concern of the missionaries—so that the old schizophrenia between the intolerance of a caste-ridden society and the universal acceptance of all Brahman’s atman was gradually overcome. The new tolerance argued that, since it is spiritual, it must also be social. Without that equation, the idea lacks integrity. That new working principle became evident in Roy’s campaign against sati; Tagore’s educational reforms; the establishment of the Brahmo Samaj; the Ramakrishna Mission and Auroville; the Indian National Congress and the political movement for independence. Gandhi continues to be the key figure in this development, and his genius is nowhere more evident than in his reinterpretation of the idea of ahimsa, ‘non-violence’. If Nirad Chaudhuri is right, the only pre-modern use of ahimsa in a social context was by Ashoka in the third century B.c., and then only after considerable bloodshed.” Gandhi, however. almost succeeds in persuading an entire

Civil Loyalty and the New India _ 183

nation that this notion was the meaning of who they had always been. This is the most significant example of ‘de-contextualization’—taking a classical notion from one religious tradition and making it available to modern folk of whatever religious background. In so doing, Gandhi also provides a means for overcoming the schizophrenia which middle class Hindus experienced between their public and private worlds. Gandhi not only provided a principle for social action, he provided a way for modern, secularised Hindus to bridge the gap between private persuasion and public profession. Gandhi himself, devastated by the communal riots which accompanied Partition, died convinced that he had failed. But his reinterpreted doctrine of ahimsa may yet prove to be a success, not because India turns out to be more tolerant, in more accepting of the non-violent way, than other national communities, but because

India makes the non-violent, tolerant way the goal and purpose which she serves. Here pragmatism is strained, and the temptation to revert to the old, irrelevant, idealistic transcendentalism becomes acute. Never-

theless, one others,

must

for whom

ask whether freedom

Americans

are more

free than

is not the specific ‘load-lifting idea’

which ‘binds’ their national community together. It is dangerous to say that intent is more important than achievement, but in the matter of civil loyalty that is the case, as long as the distance between the two is not too great. In these matters, reach always exceeds grasp, but creative interchange requires proximity. ‘Tolerance’, in this complex sense, is no longer exclusively Hindu; but it is distinctively Indian. Swaraj (freedom), for example, as an outgrowth of this idea, is quite different from the American notion

of ‘freedom’ because of the special quality of Indian tolerance and universality. America’s ‘freedom’ is feisty and contentious. Gandhi’s revision of ahimsa drenches Indian notions of ‘freedom’ with a spirit of non-violence which the early American partiot Patrick Henry (‘Give me liberty, or give me death’) would have found anathema. For Patrick Henry, and most Americans, the fight for freedom means a willingness to kill the opponent. For Gandhi, on the other hand,

the fight for freedom

meant

a commitment

to

convert the opponent, at the risk of having the opponent kill you. These are different worlds of thought and action. Nehru, celebrating ‘the ideas that have moved our race’, includes

his forefathers’ ‘toleration of ways other than theirs, their capacity

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to absorb other peoples and their cultural accomplishments, to synthesize them and develop a varied and mixed culture.’ These values, he says, ‘lie embedded

in our subconscious minds’ and ‘if

India forgets them she will no longer remain India. . . .”” Civil loyalty is less concerned with the past than with the future, less a matter of accomplishment than of goal and intention. Always vague and visceral, it provides self-definition by commitment to a goal. Whether Indians are actually more tolerant than others is not as much the point as whether tolerance and universality are what India has chosen to stand for. The Indian renaissance articulated an understanding of what it means to be an Indian, and the significance of that achievement for India’s political future is considerable. The ‘fissiparous tendencies’ of traditional groups continue to threaten balkanisation. That tendency will not be countered by a politics of fear, or selfinterest, or inertia alone. The ‘binding ingredient’ of India’s civil

loyalty, the idea that will ‘hft the load’ of colonialism and make various ethnic groups feel ‘at home’ in India, is also necessary, and makes a contribution to the larger world community as well.

Notes

1. R.N. Bellah, ‘Civil Religion in America’, in Donald R. Cutler, The Religious Situation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 391ff. For a current view of this debate, see Leroy S. Rouner, ed., Civil Religion and Political Theology (South Bend: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1986). 2. See, for example, K.W. Kapp, Hindu Culture, Economic Development, and Economic Planning in India (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1963), especially ch. 1, ‘Hindu Culture and Economic Development’, pp. 3-20. 3. Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders, Socialist Thought: A Documentary History (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books of Doubleday/Company, Inc., 1964), especially p. 281. ‘The worker is related to the product of his labour as to an

alien object . . . it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.’ 4. M. Farhang, ‘Fundamentalism and Civil Rights in Contemporary Middle Eastern Politics’, in Leroy S. Rouner, ed., Human Rights and the World Religons (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), pp. 63-75. He notes: ‘Almost everywhere, this process (modernisation) seems to produce disturbances because it dramatically threatens the habits, customs, living conditions, and values of individuals and social classes. The nature of such disturbances

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185

cannot be generalized simply because they are variations in pre-modern conditions. Diversity in experience, past and present, leads to different results. Thus each society produces its own distinct response to the challenge or demand of

modernization. When the inevitable traditional resistance to cultural change is combined with feudal politics and the deepening of relative deprivation, as was

the case in Iran under the Pahlavis, then the social disruptions caused by the process of modernization could create anomie in the classical sense, which often results in the growth of anxiety, hostility, and fantasy’ (p. 67). . W.E. Hocking, Experiment in Education: What we can Learn From Teaching German (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1954), pp. 184-85; 163. . W.E. Hocking, ‘Marcel and the Ground Issue of Metaphysics’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 14, June (1954) ,pp. 439-69. For an overview of Hocking’s philosophy, see Within Human Experience: The Philosophy of William Ernest Hocking (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1969). . The Meaning of God in Human Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912), pp. 84ff. . [bid., p. xxxii. . W.E. Hocking, The Coming World Civilisation (New York: Harper and Bros., 1958), pp. 181-82. . J. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: The Macmillan Company,

1908), p. 241.

. J. Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934). . Carl Friedrich, ‘Pan-Humanism, Culturism and the Federal Union of Europe’, in Leroy S. Rouner, ed., Philosophy, Religion and the Coming World Civilization (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), pp. 330ff. 13. See my ‘To Be at Home: Civil Religion as Common Bond’ in Rouner, ed., Civil Religion and Political Theology, pp. 125-37. 14. ‘America’, (‘O Beautiful for Spacious Skies’) Katherine Lee Bates, 1859-1929. The hymn is widely published. I quote from The Methodist Hymnal (Nashville: Pantheon Press, 1966), Hymn number 543. The final verse reads:

O beautiful for patriot dream That sees beyond the years Thine alabaster cities gleam Undimmed by human tears! America! America! God shed his grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea.

.

J. Royce, The Hope of the Great Community (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916). . J. Nehru, The Discovery of India (London: Meridian Books), pp. 243ff.

. Ibid., p. 465. . Ibid., p. 242. eriDideapao22, . Nirad Chaudhuri, The Continent of Circe (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), chapter 5, ‘Janus and his Two Faces’, p. 97.

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21. Nehru, Discovery, p. 579. 22. J.N. Farquhar, Modern

Religious Movements

In India (1915). As a Christian

missionary in India, I regard the influence which Christianity had on the rise of neo-Hinduism as the major contribution of Christian life and thought to India. 23. Rabindranath Tagore, Toward Universal Man (Calcutta: Asia Publishing House, 1961).

24. Sri Aurobindo, Edition,

The Life Divine (New

1956).

25. Chaudhuri,

Continent of Circe ,pp. 98ff.

26. Nehru, Discovery, p. 522.

York:

India Library Society, Third

Nine

The Greai Language Debate: Politics of Metropolitan versus Vernacular India’ D.L. Sheth

The use of a regional language as the language of administration in a state and as the medium of instruction in schools is by now an established policy. It has been followed, although not uniformly, in almost all the states of the Indian union. About three years ago Mulayam Singh Yadav, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, chose to reaffirm this policy. And that precipitated a fierce attack from the powerful English language press in India. My interest in this event is not confined to commenting on the role that the English press played in countering the implementation of an established policy in an Indian state. Using that as a vantage point, I shall focus on the wider debate that this event generated after forty-four years of independence on the future of English language in India. More than articulating the issues involved in the policy as such, the debate brought to surface the changed relationships among social groups in politics, and the divergence of perspectives between the contending groups—the proponents and opponents of English—on language policy as a means of nation building. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to situate the language debate in the politics of social change and to show how the clue to the language issue may lie in viewing democratisation, rather than the continuing political hegemony of an elite class, as the means of nation building for India.

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The viciousness with which the press attacked Mulayam Singh Yadav was not surprising; the English language press has always reserved a special treatment for such rustic interlopers in our metropolitan world as a Raj Narain or a Tau. And for the Englishlanguage media, a Yadav, whether a Mulayam Singh or a Lallu Prasad, is a chip of the same vernacular block. What was remarkable, however, was the unity of opinion in support of the English language expressed by all shades of commentators, irrespective of their radically different ideological backgrounds. One is hard put to recall any such event in the recent past of our fractured public discourse. Even such issues as sati, violation of human rights, threats to our environment and to the livelihood of the poor through so-called development projects or even something like Bhopal, have failed to achieve such an unanimity of opinion and commonality of attitude in the press as was reflected on the issue of importance of the English language. One, of course, heard the odd dissenting voice but the main thrust of the writings in the English-language press was and has remained till today to support the continued pre-eminence of English over all other Indian languages, especially Hindi, in modern India’s life. Admittedly, the closing of ranks by the English language press was not a reaction to an imagined threat. Mulayam Singh Yadav did more than merely revive an old policy for implementation in the state of which he was Chief Minister. He declared his intention to give teeth to the policy which was only hissing till then, not biting any one. The mode of implementation he chose was radically different from the one that had been followed in his own state or, for that matter, in any other Indian state. In the process, he touched some raw nerves. Yadav was not content with making pious pronouncements about ‘promoting’ Hindi in a manner that did not threaten the prevalent role of English language in the education system and generally in our public life—this is how the policy has been ‘implemented’ in the states so far. His mode of implementation involved replacement of English, wherever it was used, by Hindi—both as a language of education and administration in his state and as a language of communication between his state and other states in India and the union government. In interstate communications he insisted on

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translations directly from one state language to another, without the mediation of English. The implications of such a step are not far to seek. Even thirty odd years after the creation of linguistic states, the language policy followed so far in several Indian states has not been able to establish the regional language as a universal medium of education and administration in a state. This half-hearted and partial implementation of the regional language policy has allowed the market principle of demand and supply to prevail over policy which, in effect, has given rise to a dual system of schooling in every state. One school system caters to those who can afford private schooling, the so-called ‘public schools’, in which English is the medium of instruction from the first standard. Even the nursery schools belonging to this system use English as the first language. In these schools children are discouraged to use the language they speak at home even as a peer-group language. However sound may be the pedagogical principle of using the mother tongue as the medium of teaching and learning in theory, it is contemptuously rejected by this system. As is the case in other realms of Indian society, such a principle is applied in practice only for the masses. The latter are served, if that is the word, by the other system, in which the mother tongue or a regional language is the medium of instruction. This system comprises almost all the government and the municipal schools in a state. The vast majority of parents have no alternative but to send their children to these schools. Yadav’s dispensation, had it been actually implemented, would have put an end to such a dual system of schooling, at least in the state of Uttar Pradesh. But that is not all. Beyond making specific policy announcements about using Hindi—which also happens to be the regional language of Uttar Pradesh—as a medium of education and administration in the state, Yadav made bold to air his views on the wider issue of what role and status the English language should have in India after over four decades of Independence. He even went further and referred to the self-serving interests of the class which supports the continued dominance of English in our public life and proceeded to elaborate on its lifestyles and motives. Coming as it did from a ‘mofussil’ elite, this was too much to take for a class which operates with the selfconsciousness of being the ‘Builders of Modern India’. In its support for English, or for that matter its stand on any other issue,

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this class of self-proclaimed nation-builders cannot admit of any motive other than that of protecting the ‘national interest’ both present and future. Its support for English, it is convinced, is for promoting the noble causes of development and national integration. Those who fail to share this altruistic logic lack, in its view, a ‘national perspective’ and are victims of such dreaded and atavistic ideologies as regionalism, traditionalism and obscurantism. Despite his bold stand later on the issue of secularism, a cause which a large section of the English language press loudly espouses, Mulayam Singh Yadav could not retrieve his lost ground with the press and generally with the metropolitan elite. In fact, this was one of the major factors that eventually brought his career as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh to an end. Yadav will have to fight his own political battles. But the debate on the language policy triggered off by him has brought to the surface issues that had remained dormant in the earlier debates of the sixties. Unlike in the past, the debate now is not about educational problems involved in the teaching and learning of the English language in India. Nor does it reflect such rational concerns as those of identifying the levels and areas of professional and public life for which English may be considered necessary and useful and those in which English can be replaced by the regional language and/or by Hindi. Least of all is there any concern about evaluating thirty years of experience of using the mother tongue or a regional language as the medium in schools and the language of administration. The fact is that a radical change has occurred in the basic terms of discourse on the language issue as a whole.

The discourse on the language policy today is primarily a political discourse. Unlike in the late fifties and the early sixties, when cultural identities were linguistically defined, today the discussions on the language policy do not pose a potent threat to such identities. Since the reorganisation of states on the linguistic principle, religion, rather than language has become the epitome of the culture of the people. Shorn of rhetoric, disputes concerning the language policy are now more openly stated, to use a hackneyed phrase, in terms of ‘who gets what and how in politics’. In more concrete

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terms, ihe discourse on the language policy has now been linked (along with other issues such as the reservations) to the wider conflict over power in the society between two elite groups: the nationally entrenched, pan-Indian English-educated elite and the new but ascendant elites which have lately emerged on the national scene but sans the trappings of an English education. The former has successfully managed to continue to tighten its

hold on the levers of power at the national level since independence. It controls the higher echelons of politics, bureaucracy, the armed forces, corporate business and the professions. Members of the latter group have, as a result of democratic politics, risen at the regional level and have come to exercise power in the states for the last three decades. They are now attempting to create for themselves spaces in the power structure at the national level. (They are known by various names: the regional elite, the rural elite, the ‘mofussils’, the vernaculars or simply and crudely the kulaks.) The differences between the two are indexed in terms of their urban-rural and caste backgrounds. While there is some overlap between the two in economic terms, the sharp differences between them in socio-cultural terms are marked by the language divide. In the life-world of the former, English occupies a central role; for the latter its role is at best marginal. The English-educated elites have so far enjoyed the privilege of determining the terms of discourse because they claim to represent a ‘national perspective’ on every issue; in fact they define what is ‘national’. But the regional elites have begun to operate with a newly acquired sense of confidence because of the numbers they represent. In the process, they are seeking to change not only the terms of discourse on the language issue in their favour but are generally proceeding to challenge the role the English-educated elites have been playing since independence, both as norm-setters and pace-setters of India’s public life. This dimension of intra-elite conflict wnich has overridden all other aspects of the language debate, is not a sudden, fortuitous happening. It is a denouement of a longer process of change in the balance of power in society brought about, among other things, by the functioning of open and competitive politics. It will, therefore, be misleading to view the debate merely in terms of intra-elite conflict. At the root of this conflict is the process of further democratication of the Indian polity.

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This process began with the granting of universal franchise by the Constitution of India, the exercise of which was vastly expanded over time. Universal franchise has brought into the political fold groups which for centuries existed on the peripheries of the Indian political order. For example, the erstwhile Sudras constitute today the numerous peasant and intermediate castes; according to the Mandal Commission, they make up over 52 per cent of the Indian population. By deploying their numerical strength, and basing themselves on the tradition of social solidarity of groupings among them, they have not only acquired electoral salience in politics but have lately been able to enter the legislatures and other structures of political decision-making in fairly large numbers. In the earlier phase of the ‘Congress system’ this process was monitored and gradualised, if not contained, through the horizontally factionalised structure of political accommodation and participation—a hallmark of the Congress system. But this structure was subordinated at the national level by the Nehruvian elite. The latter emerged victorious in the elite struggle for power which took place soon after independence, and succeeded in establishing its pre-eminence in national politics. In the process, it insulated the fragile institutional structure of democracy from being overwhelmed by the populist pressures released during the independence movement. But at the same time, it also resulted in creating a big divide between the elite and the masses which in today’s terms is often characterised as the divide between India and Bharat. Indeed, the Nehruvian elite did not rule by use of raw power. Instead, it established its political hegemony through defining the terms of national discourse for independent India which, along with other forces in its favour, helped it obtain a consent to rule. Although democracy (and modernisation) was its credo, the discourse appeared, at best, patronising and condescending to the vast majority of the neo-literate and illiterate rural masses. They neither had the aptitude nor the language to participate in this discourse. The Nehruvian clite dismissed them as a change-resisting population steeped in obscurantist traditions. The only way the masses could establish their fitness for modernisation was by subjecting themselves to self-denigration and unconditionally accepting the modernising national elite as their saviour. As was proved later, the problem of modernisation had nothing to do with the Indian farmer’s resistance to change. The alacrity

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with which he adopted the new practices of ‘scientific’ agriculture and took to the monetisation of the rural economy firmly repudiated the elite ‘theory’ of the change-resisting Indian farmer. But the same person showed disdain for such abstract ideas as ‘modernisation’, ‘secularism’ and ‘socialism’. For him these were disembodied ideas with no anchorage in real life. Their embodiment in real life required that the terms of discourse be adapted to the meaning system and the life-world of the Indian people. Instead they were couched in terms alien to the cognitive and experiential categories used by ordinary Indians. The problem, thus, was not so much with the ideas per se, but with the idiom and the language in which the ideas of change and modernisation were packaged. Simply put, modernisation became an elite discourse in postindependence India because it was by and large carried out in English (or at best in some kind of translatese). English became the language of modernity and of moderns in India and the indigenous languages began to be viewed as the medium of traditionalist, even obscurantist thought and life-styles. It took about a decade and a half after independence for the subjugated groups to establish their identity as Indian citizens and to express their resentment about the patron-client relationship between them and the Nehruvian national elite. Although this process started in the fifties with the participation of the masses in electoral and party politics, it acquired a big momentum in the decades of the sixties and seventies. It was during this period that the rural-urban and caste-class differences in the society acquired a strong political content and meaning. Several peasant based and regional parties emerged, some as split-away groups from the Congress; while some old ones acquired a new political salience. The system of one-party dominance came to an end, with nonCongress parties coming into power in several states and collectively posing a serious threat to the monopoly of the Congress party’s power at the centre; the threat was first posed in 1967 but it actually materialised in the 1977 elections. The Congress was unable to accommodate or contain the pressures that arose from the base of the polity and thus ceased to be the system that it was. It remained a ‘national’ party, but without strong roots in regional politics. Underlying these developments of the sixties and the seventies was the rapidly expanding process of institutional democratisation which in its first flush brought the large masses of

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peasant and intermediate castes onto the centre-stage of politics. In this process the upwardly mobile groups among them not only acquired political clout but also a material basis to their power in the rural economy. This significantly changed the balance of power in the society.’ While it is true that the politics of this period did not open up avenues to power for the people at the lowest rungs of the traditional social hierarchy, that is, the Dalits and the tribals, they at least entered the process by forging electoral alliances with the upper castes—this was the case in the 1971 elections. They are now pressing harder at the gates, in a bid to enter the political process on their own terms. By forming parties (like the Bahujan Samaj), they seek to convert their numerical strength into a durable political base. Nevertheless, the participation of people as full citizens is still an unfinished process in India and its full impact is yet to be felt at the centre of the political system. But, in the meanwhile, the vernacular elite has entrenched itself firmly in power at the local and regional levels. At the close of the decade of the eighties, the Congress party was removed once again from power at the centre with the regional elite moving closer to acquiring its hold on the levers of power at the national level. As we enter the decade of the nineties, the Congress has been again returned to power at the national level. This change, however, is least likely to reverse the process of ascendancy of the vernaculars. It is the Congress party which, to survive in power, will have to change its Nehruvian stance on such issues as the language, reservations, federalism and those partaining to the farm policy. Thus viewed, the intra-elite conflict illustrated by the language debate is an outgrowth of the democratic process of politics. The language policy, as also the other economic and social policies, will have to be adapted sooner or later, to this changing balance of power.

The regional language policy operating on the ground has, either by design or default, produced far reaching consequences for India’s public life, particularly for the educational system—among other things, it has made the status quo regarding English unmaintainable.*

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One unintended but a major consequence of the manner in which the language policy has been implemented is the mushroom growth of the English-medium schools at all levels of school education—pre-primary, primary, secondary and higher secondary. The question now being posed by those excluded from the ‘publicschools’ system is, why the protagonists of English do not take an honest view of this development and recommend universal use of English as the medium of instruction in all the schools throughout the country— public’ and ‘non-public’, private and governmental, and at all levels from pre-primary to the university? If English is so important for development and national integration, they argue, why should access to English education remain restricted to a few? The protagonists of English find any such suggestion ‘impractical’, even preposterous. Perhaps the idea of universalising English education in India hurts their pedagogic and nationalist sensibilities; while maintaining the status quo on English not only satisfies their ‘noble’ sensibilities, it can also be justified on the liberal grounds of freedom of choice. It is a different matter that the choice is not, and cannot ever become, real for the vast majority of Indians! Anyway, the fact remains that despite the increasing spread of English-medium schools a vast majority of children in India receive, and will continue to receive, schooling in the regional language. English can never serve as a vehicle for mass education in India. Another, but by and large an expected, consequence of the policy of promoting the regional language for mass education is that it has produced a whole generation of educated youth with little or no exposure to English and whose parents are either illiterate or at best first generation literate. They are taught English as a subject, but indifferently and at a fairly late stage of their schooling. They show little inclination to use even the little English they may have. When they use it they do so in a halting way, witha

strong regional accent. This gives them away as the mofussils they are; they have little chance of getting admitted in the charmed

circle of the metropolitan youth who have acquired their English through its use as a medium of education in ‘public schools’. Thus for a vast majority of educated youth, proficiency in English is unattainable and yet they face unequal competition for social mobility in the society in which English continues to be the mark of education. Today, about 80 per cent of the students graduating from colleges

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and universities have studied through the medium of a regional language.’ The ‘entrance examinations’ or the so-called qualifying tests and ‘interviews’ they have to take, either for jobs or for entrance in the professional institutions, are however held in English. Even if for pro forma’s sake when they are allowed to take such tests in Hindi or other regional languages, their chances of getting jobs and elite positions remain dim in the institutional milieu which is English dominated. A few gifted ones are able to make an entry, but for the vast majority of educated youth, English has become a barrier to their social and physical mobility. To overcome this disadvantage the non-English educated youth make pathetic-efforts by joining ‘English-speaking classes’ or reading up such books as The Rapid English Speaking Course. They do this almost towards the end of their educational career when it is too late for them to make good their ‘deficiency’. Obviously, this cannot equip them for competition, but it does bring them the derision usually reserved in society for the parvenus.° It may be a lop-sided view, but it contains an element of truth when it is said that the continued dominance of English in India has resulted in the emotional alienation of the non-English educated youth from the national mainstream. This divide between the metropolitan and the vernacular youth, brought about by the dual educational streams, has given a new twist to the language issue. The question now being raised is about the future of this mass of population of the non-English educated regional youth in the rural areas, whose life-chances are severely affected by their poor knowledge of English. Their frustrations, based on acute status anxiety, find political expression in linguistic and regional chauvinism. This often results in their joining, even founding, regionalist and separatist movements, especially in the non-Hindi regions. In the Hindispeaking regions, they express such anxiety by vociferously opposing the domination of English, and demanding that Hindi take its place; the enterprising ones fancy entering the world of high crime or of ‘politics’, or organisations like the Bajarang Dal or Shiv Sena, for joining and prospering in which knowledge of English may be a liability rather than an asset. The continuities of life-styles and aspirations once informed the relationship between the national political elite and the rural leadership, especially during the independence movement, linking national politics with regional politics. These continuities have

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been eroded in the course of the last three decades. The neocolonial elite, having acquired greater, almost exclusive, access to English education, have been able to develop for themselves new techno-managerial skills. In the process, they have struck roots in India’s growing metropolises. Their life-styles and aspirations are now linked to, and are more in tune with, the global metropolitan world. This has created a new gap between the so-called national elite and the regional elite. The gap now is not only political but also socio-cultural in nature. While the national elite has kept the regional elite at bay, India’s regional politics has also been displacing the upper-caste oriented, English educated elite from positions of power in the regions. This process is best illustrated by frequent waves of anti-Brahmin movements in the peninsular states of South India and in the western state of Maharashtra. Such movements predate independence but their nature has changed significantly in the post-independence period, especially since the early sixties. They are no longer the ‘protest’ movements they once were, expressing strong sentiments, through the symbolism of oppression and exploitation, against what they described as Brahminical domination in the society. The castes, which in the earlier phase were in the forefront of these movements, have now acquired political power in these states and are in the process of consolidating it by acquiring economic clout, control over the educational system, and over the job-market in the governmental sector. The language and symbolism they now use is of power and not of ‘protest’. The result is that significant sections of the upper-caste elites from these states, equipped with English education, have been elevated to the national level; quite a few among them have also migrated to countries of the developed world. Those who have

been left behind are unreconciled to the regionalisation of politics brought about by the ascendant middle and intermediate castes and to the consequent loss of their power. In the other states, where there have been no anti-Brahmin movements,

regional

politics is none-the-less dominated by the caste-class and sectarian factors. In these states, the numerically strong and upwardly mobile groups of the middle and intermediate castes have, by and large, succeeded in easing out the upper-caste elite from positions of power and to some extent from white-collar jobs as well. This ongoing process operates differently in different states. It is

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articulated in sectarian terms in states like Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, and in terms of ‘preserving the linguistic and cultural identity’ in a state like Assam. In any event, the consequences of this new, post-independence regional politics are similar in all the states in that a certain class of elite is displaced from power, with significant sections from among them moving out into the growing metropolitan world. The process is likely to be intensified in several states of northern and western India with the implementation of the reservations policy for the ‘Other Backward Classes’. When fully implemented, total reservations for jobs and college admissions in these states will at least amount to about 50 per cent. These development of the last thirty years have not only brought the regional elites into prominence but have radically changed the character and composition of the national elite. The old neocolonial upper-caste elite, with a long tradition of education in the language of the ruling elite of the time—this may be Sanskrit or Persian in the past or English today—still constitutes its core. However, the ranks of the ‘national’ elite have now expanded to include several new groups of castes, by and large of the dvija varna, which have acquired access to English education in the postindependence period. This has been made possible by the rapid expansion of English-medium schools which cater to these new aspirants. This development, combined with the push and pull factors described above, has not only contributed to the increase in the numerical strength of this expanded elite, but it has changed the character and function of the elite in the society. In this sense it is a different class of elite from the one which led the independence movement. This new formation is constituted by drawing together different elite elements in the society—the new as well as the old ones. Their commitment to the continued pre-eminence of English in India acts as a binding force for these diverse elite elements. This has not only shaped their attitude and role as the new panIndian elite operating in the national arena, but has also detached them from the world of regional politics and cultures. It will be a mistake to confuse this expanded new elite formation at the national level with the regional elites who operate in regional languages but still support the use of English, rather than Hindi, as a second language in their respective regions. Unlike the new national elite their primary commitment is to the regional language and not to English. In effect, their worldview is radically different from that

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of the pan-Indian elite in whose life-world English has a priority over their mother-tongue. Sociologically viewed, the ranks of the pan-Indian elite are drawn from several groups ousted from the regions, such as Punjabi Hindus, Kashmiri Pundits and South-Indian Brahmins. Then there are the traditional urban-oriented professional castes such as the Nagars of Gujarat, the Chitpawans and the CKPs (Chandrasenya Kayastha

Prabhus)

of Maharashtra

and the Kayasthas

of North

India whose members have joined the ranks, albeit more through responding to the pull factor than being subject to the push factor. Also included among them are the old elite groups which emerged during the colonial rule: the Probasi and Bhadralog Bengalis, the Parsis, and the upper-crusts of the Muslim and Christian communities with a pronounced secular and nationalist persuasion. Being uprooted from regions, they have become a new, somewhat homogeneous all-India group; usually their nationalism is unitary and their idea of the state is that of a centralised and hegemonic political entity. They see a close connection between knowledge and power and use English as a means of exclusion, an instrument

of cultural hegemony, by which they seek to defy the logic of numbers in politics and continue their hold over the levers of power at the national level. Although they operate with the subjective sense of a national elite, they lack the self-consciousness, ideological coherence and the strong will to rule. Their primary concern, it seems, is to somehow retain their hold on the Indian state in the face of radical, and apparently irreversible, changes that have occurred in the balance

of power in society. With their life-styles and aspirations now being hitched to global metropolitanism, they lack a cultuial basis to their political power. Theirs is a synthetically manufactured Culture, (with a capital ‘C’). While they may continue to give an ideological justification for their rule in terms of modernism,

its

validation in the wider society has become tenuous.

Although English has become central to the life-world of this national

elite, their bilingualism

is not of the kind a Gandhi,

a

Tagore or a Tilak represented during the independence movement. These leaders used their bilingual facility to transcreate the terms of national discourse in the regional world and thus seek the latter’s participation and involvement in nation-building. It is important to remember in this context that the national leadership of

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the independence movement self-consciously learnt English as a foreign language; it was indeed acquired assiduously and cultivated purposively. But the national leadership lived and by and large operated in the milieu dominated by the regional language and culture. It made creative contributions in different fields of knowledge through the medium of a regional language. The national discourse raised by this leadership was addressed to the issues of social reform and political independence and was carried out in regional languages; in the process, it also contributed to the growth of these languages. It was not accidental, for instance, that Gandhijis My Experiments with Truth, Tagore’s Gitanjali and Tilak’s Gitarahasya were written originally, in Gujarati, Bengali and Marathi, respectively.° The post-independence national elites on the other hand have become distant from the regional languages and cultures, with English having become virtually their-first language. Their use of the mother tongue or a regional language is by and large confined to the household or to the bazar. It is a language hardly ever used by them in any serious discourse, not even when the interlocutors among them may belong to the same regional language group. The result is that the political schism which always existed between the ‘national’ and regional elites has now widened along socio-cultural dimensions with the caste-class and rural-urban differences between them being overlaid by the language divide: the ‘national’ elite by and large operating in English, and the regional elite in the respective regional languages.

IV The socio-linguistic map of India has vastly changed since the restructuring of the states on the linguistic principle during the period between the late-fifties and mid-sixties. It created political units which became coterminous with large linguistic identities. Identification of the boundaries of a state on the basis of one language which was culturally predominant and also numerically preponderant in that region or province, and recognition of that language as the official language of the state created a strong and stable cultural base for the political-linguistic identities in the country. In the process, however, the other smaller languages and cultures in the regions have been marginalised. The ‘non-official’

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languages in the linguistic states do indeed survive today, but more as ‘spoken languages’ or as ‘dialects’ or media of expression for ‘folk cultures’. Their role in formal education and in the administration of these states has been almost erased.’ This has made regional languages the vehicle of mass literacy, formal education, and generally of public communication in the state. As a result, the regional languages themselves have undergone significant transformation. The socio-cultural groups which until recently had little or no access to formal education have now acquired significant levels of education through the medium of an officially recognised regional language. They are now contributing to the evolution of regional languages, bringing with them idioms and perspectives which these languages had shunned when literature was

the preserve

of the old, bilingual elite; in those

days, the

Sanskritic or English language sources were drawn on for the ‘development’ of these languages. The growth of the Dalit literature in several regional languages is one indicator of this change. Added to this, is the phenomenal growth of the print-media in regional languages which, among other things, has encouraged the participation of new generations of the literate population in a region in the production of signs and symbols relevant for mass politics.* These developments have significantly contributed to making the regional languages more pliable as vehicles of public discourse. The formally adopted language of a state has, in the process, established its primacy not only over the minority languages but also over English. While English has survived, thanks to the dual education system, its role as the language of cultural hegemony and political domination in the regions is on the decline. But there is little prospect for several ‘mother tongues’ or even full-fledged languages within a region to survive, with the predominant language of a region having established itself as the language of formal education and administration in the state. In political terms, this is a development unprecedented in Indian history. It has brought about political and cultural unification within what are today called linguistic states; and it is these that constitute the primary units of the Indian political system.” Several of these political units are larger in population and territory than many European countries. This particular development has far reaching implications for the future of Hindi in India. This language has been adopted as the

official language in seven Indian states. Four of these states are

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among India’s most populous: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The remaining three states of Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi are the smaller units. Together they comprise, according to the 1991 census, 43.36 per cent of India’s population. Even if we discount the non-Hindi-speaking population in these states, the fact remains that in the 1981 census about 40 per cent of the total household population in India reported Hindi as the language used in their households. As against this picture of spread of Hindi, the census figure for English appears

minuscule. Only 52,000 households in the whole of India, comprising about 0.04 per cent of the total household population, reported English as the language used in households. Another 0.5 per cent population reported English as its second language. Unfortunately, we do not have data on the third language used by people. It is however common knowledge that the increased proportions of interstate migrations and particularly out-migration of people from the Hindi belt to other parts of India in recent years, the now vastly expanded networks of the electronic media— the radio and the T.V.—relaying Hindi programmes, some of which have become quite popular outside the Hindi belt, the reach of Hindi cinema, and the growing integration of the market have all contributed phenomenally to the spread of Hindi in India after independence. Its use as a third language or in form of a bazar patois seems to have become quite widespread. As such, Hindi has emerged as the one language which is understood and used today by a majority of Indians, albeit with great variations in the degree of comprehension and use. There is thus little doubt that Hindi, in its natural course, has spread to different parts of the country—though more in some and less in others. And such spread has little to do with the work of Hindi proselytisers or with the socalled national policy on Hindi. ‘ Indeed, English has also spread extensively in recent years, figures for which are not adequately reflected in the 1991 census. According to the census data on English, 0.55 per cent of the households use it as either the first or the second language; 0.51 per cent use it as the second language and only 0.04 per cent as the first language. This however leaves out fairly large numbers of those who may be using English as the third language. For example an English educated Coorg will report Coorgi as the mother-tongue and Kannad as the second language, while he or she may be quite proficient in English. Similarly a Marathi- or a Gujarati- or a Punjabi-

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speaking Indian who is proficient in English, but uses Hindi in dayto-day transactions vis-a-vis those not knowing his/her mother tongue or English, is likely to report Hindi, rather than English, as the second language. The spread of English is also indicated by the increased circulation figures for English language newspapers and magazines in recent years, by statistics on those listening to news and commentaries in English on the electronic media, and by the number of high school and college graduates who may have learnt English as a subject for a few years of their education. There are also those who may have acquired a smattering of English through the trades they are engaged in, such as tourism and hoteliering. Even after taking all these factors into account, the figures for use of English in India continue to remain much smaller, even smaller than say Urdu which is spoken by 5.3 per cent of the Indians. Such a situation, in which Hindi represents the force of numbers and English the historical power of a small national elite and which is now linked with mobility aspirations of the country’s growing literate population everywhere, calls for a change in the perspective and approach of the debate, followed so far, on the language issue. The protagonists of English need to recognise the fact that the regional languages have become a great homogenising force for the politics and culture of the regions and now also serve as the media for mass education in the country. In light of these developments, English can no longer maintain the kind of hegemony and pre-eminence it has been enjoying in our national life. The protagonists of Hindi, on the other hand, need to change their priorities and concentrate more on its growth than spread. The cause of Hindi will be served better if their interventionist impulses and creative energies are applied simultaneously to the development and standardisation of Hindi as a language of the Hindi belt, and they leave its spread in the other parts of the country to the ground level forces which are already at work in favour of Hindi. While the protagonists of Hindi clamour for its national status, they do not seem to pay much attention to its development as the regional language of the Hindi-belt covering over 43 per cent of the Indian population. For Hindi to grow as a common language of people across all the states in the Hindi region, and also as the vehicle for serious scholarly discourse, the primary requirement is massive expansion of formal literacy as well as of higher and professional education in the Hindi-belt. Today, only 41.71 per cent of the population in Uttar Pradesh is

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literate, which is about 11 per cent lower than the national average of 52.11. The literacy rates for Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar are 43.45, 38.81 and 38.54, respectively. In the literacy ranking for all the states and union territories (N = 31), Madhya Pradesh ranks 26th, and Uttar Pradesh 27th. Rajasthan and Bihar occupy the bottom most position respectively at 30th and 31st in the rank order." One reason for this low performance of the Hindi-speaking states on the literacy front is the manner in which the Hindi used in the administration, schools and the government sponsored electronic media is sought to be ‘standardised’. There is no common policy guiding all these states about the use of basic terminology in administration or for translating concepts and terms from English or other languages into Hindi for their use in the school textbooks. At the same time, standardisation is imposed artificially from the top in an ad hoc manner in each state, all relying on opaque sanskritic terms and often disregarding those in common usage, but each producing a different terminology.'' The situation is further confounded by the fact that ‘official’ Hindi is not only confined to the language used by the administration in the state, but it has also invaded the textbooks and the classroom. Being falsely perceived as a literate language, it censors the use of words and phrases—notwithstanding its already narrow vocabulary base— coming from the ‘non-standard’ sources of Hindi spoken in the households and communities in the Hindi-belt. The result is the wide and artificial gap between the Hindi used in the school and the Hindi spoken in homes, in effect, making it difficult for the language to serve as a vehicle for mass literacy. According to the 1981 census, for example, about 48 variants of Hindi are being used in the households of the various regions in the Hindi-belt. In short, if Hindi has to serve as the medium of mass education in the Hindi states, its standardisation will have to be achieved through an evolutionary process rather than through administrative fiat." Meanwhile, at least at the level of the primary school, the distance between the Hindi used in the school and that in homes will have to be minimised. The pattern of growth Hindi has followed since independence is qualitatively different from its growth during the colonial period as well as from the one followed by other Indian languages. Its growth is being increasingly delinked from a specific linguistic

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culture with which it was once identified. While this has made it possible for Hindi to become a language used by a much wider population, today constituting the Hindi-belt, it seems to have lost its earlier cultural identity wherein it was territorially confined largely to the western and some parts of eastern Uttar Pradesh and was linguistically fused with Urdu." The result is, as it is written and spoken today, Hindi is not the language of any one identifiable territorial cultural group. It has evolved, and is evolving as a supra-language, overriding several languages across many Indian states. These are, among others, Avadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj, Marwari, Haryanvi, Maithili and Urdu. The supremacy of Hindi over these languages has largely been achieved through historical and political processes. Hindi today seems to be groping for a new cultural identity which it can no longer seek in any local culture of the region. Consequently, Hindi has come to be looked upon as the language for political issues, with potentials for mass mobilisation, in the entire Hindi-belt.

In the process, it has found basis in the

mass political culture of the region but is far away from acquiring a distinctive linguistic culture of its own, which it can find only through the growth of literacy and of higher education (through the medium of Hindi) in the entire Hindi region. For its growth as a truly universal language of the entire Hindi-belt, and as the second or a third language in other parts of the country, Hindi will have to also develop a capacity to incorporate, and draw sustenance from, the other cognate languages in the region. Again, for this to happen effectively the literacy frame will have to vastly expand, such that the increasing ranks of the literate coming from different regions and cultures of the Hindi-belt are freely able to enrich Hindi by bringing with them usages and idioms of their various mother-tongues, all of which are akin to Hindi. This is how many regional languages in India have grown since the formation of linguistic states. With a linguistic dynamism thus acquired Hindi may also become a pliable language for India’s literate population outside the Hindibelt. But the resistance to Hindi involves not just the issue of its linguistic capability or incapability. It has also to do with the somewhat negative attitude of the Hindi-speaking population to other Indian languages. This is exhibited by the striking degree of monolingualism prevalent among the Hindi-speaking population. With regard to the proportion of bilingual Indians, as against the

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national average of 13.34 per cent, only 4.74 per cent of the Hindispeakers are bilingual. The only other major language group in India approximating this ‘record’ of monolingualism are the Bengalis with 5.64 per cent among them having any second language." In sum, the socio-political context of the language issue has radically changed in the course of last thirty years, but the terms of debate on the issue have yet not adapted to this change. For one thing, the change has severely narrowed down the range of options available to the national elite interested in maintaining the status quo on English. For another, they pose a serious challenge to those interested in making Hindi the lingua franca of India, requiring them to simultaneously develop Hindi as a regional language in the six Indian states and make it acceptable to others in the nonHindi-speaking regions as the second or a third language. They cannot do this, as I shall presently show, by relying on power of numbers that Hindi represents.

Vv It was by relying on the democratic process that the vernacular elites in almost all the states could convert their numerical strength into political power. They now want to extend the logic of numbers to seek power at the national level. The Hindi-speaking elites among them, however, seem to believe that numbers is the essence of democracy and that they can settle the issue of national language by using numerical strength. They probably do not realise that the game of power in India is quite different at the national level. There the logic of numbers is not decisive. For validation of its power, the national elite must rely on established norms and procedures of the system in which numbers have only a subsidiary role. It is, therefore, not surprising that while the vernacular elites, adept as they are at caste-calculus in elections, could produce electoral victories about twice (1977 and 1989) in the course of the

last two decades, they found it difficult to secure continued legitimacy for their rule. Numbers are necessary but not sufficient to make an electoral victory sustainable at the national level. In reality, power at the national level does not reside in the majority or even in the party elected to form a government. It resides in the apparatus of the state which in India is wielded by

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the neo-colonial, Nehruvian elite to whom the power was transferred at independence. For its legitimacy, this elite only indirectly depends on numbers, which at the national level remain unaggregated on any issue. Since it is the members of this elite who usually supply terms of definition, the relationship between the merit of an issue and the weight of numbers behind it is generally kept unarticulated or obfuscated. It is true that by making connections between considerations of merit and of numbers a democratic leadership can bring about major transformations in the society. The ruling elite in India, however, tends not to make such connections. Instead, it prefers to wield power and seek legitimacy for it through setting broad parameters of the national discourse and by defining terms for issues which acquire prominence in the national politics. In effect, these issues get articulated within a framework of power established by such an elite. The national discourse is thus detached from the logic of numbers; the principle of majority is made to adapt itself to the normative requirements of the system generally laid down by the ruling elite. Indeed, the moment for a revolutionary change comes in a democracy but only when numbers are seen to bear merit or a proposition of merit attracts numbers. Such a moment it seems is yet to arrive in Indian politics. Meanwhile, the established power of the ruling elite at the national level will continue to play a decisive role in determining the terms for defining as well as ‘settling’ any issue considered by them to be of ‘national importance’. Its politics is to keep considerations of merit on any such issue unaligned with numbers. The language issue is not an exception to this general rule. The use of language by the elites as an instrument of social and cultural exclusion and, thus, as the means of their rule in the society is not a new phenomenon in Indian history. In the classical times Sanskrit performed this role. As it was considered the language of deities and celestial beings and their earthly/worldly surrogates

on earth, access to it was restricted, by and large, to the two upper varnas of the Brahmins and the Rajanyas. It was the only recognised vehicle of serious thought and scholarship. Even the rules by which the laity was supposed to lead its life, that is, the principles of dharma, were codified and interpreted in Sanskrit, rather than

in languages understood by the people. Put differently, by restricting access to Sanskrit, the mechanism of interpretation and mode

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of application of these rules were securely kept in the hands of the Brahmin-Rajanya dyad, without whose mediation ordinary people could not function in the dharmic world. A telling example of this is found in the classical Sanskrit plays in which Sanskrit is spoken by gods, Brahmins, and Rajanyas (and that too only by the males) and Prakrit is spoken by all others. It is no wonder that the profound thought and high ideals developed by the elite of classical India, but whose medium was not the people’s language, almost evaporated with their loss of power. The role of Persian and of English in our history has also been primarily that of serving as an instrument of elite rule. Of course, such monopoly over knowledge and power exercised through the dominance of an elite language was frontally challenged at least twice in India’s history, first by the Buddhist movement and later by the Bhakti movement. But these movements did not quite succeed in breaking the nexus between the elite language and the modes of producing and using knowledge, and between knowledge and power in the society. By rejecting Sanskrit and adopting the people’s languages, such as Pali(by the Buddhists) and Ardha Magadhi (by the Jains),as the language of discourse, Buddhism not only flourished for centuries in India, but posed a serious challenge to the elite rule that was associated with the exclusive use of Sanskrit. But equally interestingly, the decline of Buddhism, among other things, was associated with Sanskrit once again becoming the language of discourse for Buddhist thought and metaphysics in the classical and post-classical period. It eventually paved the way for Buddhism’s absorption into the mainstream of Vedantic thought. Similarly, the Bhakti movement used local

languages for its discourse and opened up the doors of the dharmic world to the masses by challenging the Brahminic monopoly of spiritual knowledge and the Brahmin’s role as a mediator in the performance of rites and rituals. However, the Bhakti movement basically did little more than translate the Vedantic discourse and codes of social behaviour associated with it in the language and symbolism of the people. This helped vertical integration of the elite and the masses which was breached when Sanskrit was the predominant language of this discourse but it only partially succeeded in making a dent in the ideological foundations of the Hindu society charactericed by the ritual hierarchy of the varna system.

The Great Language Debate In our

times,

we

are witnessing

a third movement,

209

namely,

democratisation of politics and through it the ascendancy of the vernaculars. This is different from the previous two movements in so far as it addresses the issue of production and distribution of knowledge—an issue which is integrally linked with the fact of English being an elite language—through effecting changes in the relationships of power and patterns of its distribution in the society. While this is an important historical development, making the continued pre-eminence of English in India a difficult proposition, it remains an Open question as to how the void created in this process will be filled. As we have already discussed, the reality of democratic politics is far too complex and cannot be comprehended in terms simply of numbers. While numbers cannot, of course, be ignored in a democracy, the process of democracy gets defeated when numbers are not aligned with larger systemic considerations. There is another reason why the Hindi-speaking vernacular elites, in their bid to challenge the domination of the Englishspeaking elite, cannot bring the force of numbers to bear upon the language issue. The numbers supporting the case for Hindi still remain, by and large, territorially confined. In such a situation, if Hindi, because of its numerical strength, is sought to be imposed over the non-Hindi-speaking states, it will produce severe negative consequences for India’s unity rather than help the cause of Hindi. This is especially so because the vernacular elite in India as a whole are internally divided on the issue of the ‘link’ language. On the one hand, the Hindi-speaking elite, which is by and large monolingual and in effect operates with one-language formula, wants Hindi to be the only ‘link language’ at the national level. The non-Hindi vernacular elite, on the other hand, although working assiduously towards reducing the pre-eminence of English in their own respective regions, wants to retain English as the only ‘link language’; they are loath to concede any ground to Hindi at the national level—not even as second link language, after English. Such a situation of intra-elite conflict among the vernaculars prevents those who want to downgrade the use of English at the regional levels from aggregating at the national level. In the meanwhile, the metropolitan elite for whom English has virtually become their first language has been able to muster support in favour of English vastly disproportionate to its minuscule numerical strength. This support comes from the growing populations of the literate

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everywhere in India who increasingly look upon English as a means of social mobility. It is another matter that only a few among them actually manage to cross this mobility barrier. In the process, not only have the urban elite succeeded in maintaining their edge in national politics and in the competition for social mobility vis-a-vis the large number of Indians educated in the regional languages, but they have also marginalised the role of the regional languages in the national discourse. As a result, the discourse has lost its dialogic character and has become a political exercise for dominance and hegemony. In articulating their opposition to the dominance of English at the national level, the Hindi-speaking vernacular elite will, there-

fore, have to find a common ground with the other regional elites. For this to happen the Hindi-speaking elites have to give up their monolingualism. More importantly, they will have to transcend the numerical and parochial terms in which they tend to define the issue; they must link the language issue with the larger problem of changing the nature and tenor of the national discourse as a whole. It is only then that the exclusivist character of the so-called national discourse, monopolised today by the English-speaking elite, will get exposed. In the long run, what is called for is much greater interaction among the vernacular elites themselves—both the Hindi and the non-Hindi-speaking ones—not just on the language issue but on all issues of national importance. It is through this process that the vernacular elites may evolve a self-consciousness of being a counter-elite or a ‘new’ national elite. So far they have been playing a role at the national level but with the mindset of regional politicians. Thus viewed, the issue of language in India will have to be treated both by the Hindi and non-Hindi vernacular elites, as well as by the others, not in the antagonistic terms of intra-elite conflict— English versus Hindi—but as part of the larger issue of making democracy, development and modernity accessible to the majority of Indians. The primary issue, thus, is about the prevailing bolbala of English, its pre-eminence in our national life, which by underlining the power of a small class distorts our national priorities and goals. What role Hindi should have at the national level is only a secondary issue. It, for a moment, the issue of Hindi replacing English at the national level, a proposition which has become a red herring in the

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language debate, is kept out and Hindi is treated as a regional language which, along with others, seeks spaces in the national discourse, a series of questions arise about the prevailing role of English in India. Does our woefully bad performance on the literacy front, which is worse than that of many underdeveloped countries, have to do with the dominance of English in our educational system? Has this

prevailing dominance distorted our priorities in education, where disproportionately larger allocations are made for English-oriented higher and professional education at the expense of primary education? Has it really resulted in cultivating ‘excellence’ in various fields of learning or has it only promoted international mobility for a small elite at a cost disproportionate to its claim on the national resources? Further, has the continued pre-eminence of English helped such causes, avowedly close to the hearts of our modernising elite, as popularising science, developing technological skills and instilling ‘scientific temper’ in our population? Or, to achieve these goals is it not desirable to reduce the influence of English and oring upfront the people’s own languages in the public discourse on all issues of national importance? (The efficacy of such a measure in our public life is amply demonstrated by such organisations as the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad). Has the continued predominance of English contributed to national integration or to creating a big divide

between

metropolitan India and mofussil India, between

the centre and the regions? These questions acquire great relevance, even urgency, if the language issue is viewed from a truly national perspective, rather than the narrow perspective of a small class of English educated Indians which, ironically, puts forward its sectional perspective as the national perspective.

Vi Viewed in the above context, reducing the pre-eminence of English emerges as the primary requirement for a national policy on the language issue. The case is obviously not about abolishing English, although the proponents of English are fond of raising such as scare. Nor is it any body’s case that English should not be taught in schools and colleges as a subject. Even its use as a medium of instruction for

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certain specified subjects at higher levels of education is not an issue. If the consensus among our educationists is that certain subjects are best taught in English, its knowledge, like competence in mathematics, can be made a prerequisite for offering such courses. Making knowledge of English a blanket requirement for entry into higher education is however not a sustainable policy. What is at issue is something else: Whether there is any pedagogic or political justification for the continuation of the dual system of education in which one stream of schooling uses English as the medium of instruction from the nursery level all through to the university level while in the other much larger stream its use is either mostly prohibited or introduced at a much later stage and that, too, indifferently.

The growing preference of the middle and lower-middle classes for English-medium schools is, in fact, due to the poor quality of teaching in general, and of English as a subject in particular, in the non-English medium schools; it is not an expression of their preference for English as the medium of instruction for their wards. In order to correct this imbalance, English must be uniformly and efficiently taught as a subject at an early stage of schooling in all the states and in all schools, but its use as the medium of instruction has to be discouraged and eventually abolished. Of course, the very small number of Indians whose mother tongue is English should be able to receive education through the medium of English just as those whose mother tongue is for example Tulu should have a similar facility. What we thus need is a national policy on English rather than on Hindi. If such a policy moves in the direction described above, it will considerably weaken, even obliterate, the prevailing dual system of education which cannot be justified either on pedagogical or political grounds. Such a policy will not abolish English altogether. English will survive, but more on functional terms than as an

instrument

of elite domination.

At

the same

time,

as has

already happened with vernaculars in other regions, Hindi as a regional language will have to progressively replace English in the Hindi-belt. It is intriguing as to why any attempt to replace English by Hindi in the Hindi-speaking region threatens our national elite who see any such attempt as a threat also to national integration! Of course, the spread of Hindi outside the Hindi-belt, as we have

already argued, should best be left to take its own course and to

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the ground forces o1 politics and the market. There, of course, are several complex issues involved in the process, but what is important is the clarity of the direction in which the policy should move. Clarity about policy options cannot be achieved unless the language issue, guided by our experience of the last thirty years, is formulated entirely in new terms. If conducted as a discourse in dominance, as is the case now, it will remain confined to the narrow terrain of intra-elite conflict where the issue tends to get polarised, articulated in terms of a hegemonistic contest between Hindi and English. It not only ignores the role of the regional languages, of which Hindi is indeed numerically the largest, but also keeps the national discourse on modernisation and social transformation inaccessible to the larger masses. Instead, the issue needs to be articulated in truly national terms which are in consonance with democratic politics in general and with the principles of pedagogy in particular.

Notes

1. The term vernacular is used in two senses: linguistic and cultural. In the former sense vernacular refers to all non-English Indian languages as a diffused countervailing reality confronting the pre-eminence of English in India. As such these languages comprise the constitutionally recognised Indian languages such as Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, etc., which in common parlance are referred as the ‘regional’ languages. In this context Hindi is also referred to as vernacular, although it is competing with English at the national level and is aspiring to become and being recognised as the lingua franca of India. Other Indian languages and the so-called dialects which have yet not acquired legalconstitutional recognition (such as Konkani, Dogri, Tulu, etc.) also comprise the vernacular languages. The term vernacular when used in the larger cultural context refers to a cultural identity in politics, of people and social-political elites who are identified as such for their non-use of English in the national political discourse. The use of non-English Indian languages by the ‘vernaculars’ (people, elites, etc.)

may be due to conscious preference or the inability to use English as their first language. In the pan-Indian discourse the non-use of English is uniformly associated with lack of sophistication, parochialism and cultural underdevelopment. And therefore all articulation and activity in Indian languages is seen as devoid of a genuine national perspective and modernist content. This has

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given rise to a counter cultural identity in politics, of people and elites not using English as the first language; they are variously described as regional, provincial, mofussil, indigenous or vernacular. . For a detailed analysis of the political change brought about during this period through increased participation and assertion of the upwardly mobile rural communities in politics, see writings of Rajni Kothari published around the 1967 elections. Especially see “The Congress System Under Strain’, “The Political

Change

of 1967’,:and

‘India’s

Political Transition’,

reproduced

in

Rajni Kothari, Politics and the People: In Search of aHumane India (Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1989), vol. I, pp. 59-79, 151-65, 166-79, respectively. . For the impact on the educational system created by implementation of the regional language policy in the states see Krishnamurti B.H., ‘The Regional Language vis a vis English as the medium of instruction in Higher Education:

The Indian Dilemma’,

in D.P. Pattanayak, ed., Multilingualism in India:

Multilingual Matters 61 (Philadelphia, Clardon), pp. 15-24. . Out of 185 million students enrolled in all educational institutions in India, 40

million (21.62 per cent) receive instruction through the English medium. Data presented in Mary S. Zurbuchen, ‘Wiping out English’, Seminar, 391 (1992), p.

48. . Peggy Mohan rightly points out that in India the problem of learning English is not seen as one of acquiring a foreign language. It is seen as making preparation

to enter the closely guarded citadel of an exclusive elite class. Learning the language late in one’s educational career for instrumental use may be a good pedagogic practice, but not the right strategy for those wanting to make entry into the citadel of the English-speaking elite. See, Peggy Mohan, ‘Postponing to Save Time’, Seminar, 321 (1986). . In contrast, it is interesting to note that Jawaharlal Nehru, the precursor of the post-colonial English speaking metropolitan elite, wrote his books, Autobiography and Discovery of India, in English. On the emergence of literate verna-

cular cultures through the colonial discourse, led by the bilingual elites, and generally on the relationship between elite power and national discourse, see Sudipta Kaviraj, On the Construction of Colonial Power, Discourse, Hegemony, Occasional Papers on History and Society, second series, 35, Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, 1991. . The problem of survival facing many small languages in India, under the threat of increasing linguistic homogenisation of every Indian state through the officially recognised regional languages, is poignantly posed by Sumi Krishna in her India's Living Languages (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1991). . For data on the growth of print-media in the regional languages, see ibid., pp. 139-53. . The extent of internal linguistic-cultural cohesion acquired by the states since they were formed on the basis of a predominant language of the region can be inferred from the fact that in the 1981 census 95.58 per cent of India’s total household population reported one of the 15 regional languages or its variants listed in the VIIIth Schedule of the Constitution as the language used in their households; 4.42 per cent of Indians spoke the other 106 languages not listed in

the VIIIth Schedule of the Constitution. (Figures from Series 1, Paper 1 of 1987). More significantly, the speakers of all the 106 non-scheduled languages

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(except for Garo, Wancho and Khasi) exhibit a high level of bilingualism, far exceeding the national average of 13.34 per cent. See Census of India, 1981 (Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India), Series 1: ‘Population by Bilingualism’ , Table C-8. 10. Figures on literacy rates are from Census of India, 1991: Provisional Population Totals (Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India), Paper-I of

1991, p. 62. 1. See, Krishna, India’s Living Languages, pp. 58-68. 2. On the problem of standardisation facing Indian languages see Krishnamurti, ‘The Regional language vis-a-vis English’, in Pattanayak, ed., Multilingualism in India. . See Krishna Kumar, ‘Quest for Self-Identity, Cultural Consciousness, and Education in Hindi Region 1980-1986’, Economic and Political Weekly, 15, 23 (9 June 1990), pp. 1247-55. . Data from Census of India, 1981, Series-1: ‘Population by Bilingualism’, Table C-8.

Ten

Crowds and Power: Democracy and the Crisis of ‘Governability’ in India’ Subrata K. Mitra

The new writing on Indian politics points towards a main theme: Is India ‘governable’?* The question is inspired by armed secessionist movements in Punjab, Kashmir and India’s North-East, and violent communal conflict in parts of India where such incidents used to be relatively rare. The scale and intensity of these challenges to the authority of the state stand in sharp contrast to the record of the four decades since independence. During those trying years of the

new Republic, India experienced democratic succession to the office of Prime Minister and stood as a beacon of orderly government to the vast majority of post-colonial states. Today, the scenes of rampaging crowds and frenzied mobs taking the law into their own hands and disturbing reports of deaths in custody and fake encounters with the police question the image of stable, orderly and effective government.* For some scholars and statesmen, the existence of a strong, modern state in India is a necessary precondition for her nationhood. From their points of view, all such outbreaks of public disorder and violent secessionist movements are misguided and are possibly ‘acts of the foreign hand’.' However, for the political actors, who see themselves as operating in the name of a wronged people, and who perceive the latter as their primary audience, sympathisers and implicit collaborators, each horrendous incident

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is a necessary step in the direction of a preferred future.* Though it is difficult to comprehend their action from within the paradigm of the modern state, these criminal-activists do not perceive themselves as necessarily opposed to the idea of orderly government. In a more profound sense, theirs is a search for better government; for what else is government except the agency with which people give concrete shape to their political vision? A detailed, narrative account of this theme which straddles the issues of order, legitimacy and the problem of government in India is beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, its more modest objective is to set the agenda for the larger inquiry on the basis of an examination of the discourse on India’s ‘governability’. The essay concentrates on the hegemonic writers of this theme® and, on the basis of this analysis, suggests a testable model for a detailed empirical study of the problem of governance and legitimacy in India. The model (specified in Figure 3 below) incorporates law and order management, redistributive policies, and strategic constitutional changes, intended to provide safeguards for identity, as explanatory factors. The theory based on these factors provides the missing link between effective government and challenges to authority from below. These variables, critical to the understanding of the problem of governance in India after Independence, carry the subconscious historical baggage of popular protest during the period of rapid social and economic change which has left its lasting imprint on the modern state in Europe. They also form part of the historical legacy and social psychology of ‘crowds’ and political power that have found their way into the political science of law and order management. The ambiguous relationship of leaders and the ‘people’ in Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha during India’s struggle for independence provides an example of the use of crowds to generate power, but perhaps in a manner that failed to create new institutions capable of producing both order and legitimacy. The essay will first look at some of these historical and theoretical factors. Next, the explanations offered for the frequent breakdown of law and order by specialists of Indian politics will be considered in the light of the larger historical and theoretical understanding of the problem. Finally, an explanatory model that draws on the general and specific aspects of the problem of government in India will be offered as a guide to further study.

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Problematising Governability The crisis of governability is a complex concept that makes implicit cultural, psychological and normative assumptions. It is used rather loosely to indicate a range of meanings that include a general rise in lawlessness, decline in the level of governance, breakdown of law and order, political instability, and ultimately, decline in legitimacy. At the heart of these empirical puzzles is the inability of a society to sustain self-rule.’ For some engaged in this discourse, India is inherently incapable of political order.* For the concept to be properly operationalised in the Indian context, it is important to understand its specific empirical ramifications. To reach this objective, we shall first look at the problem of governance in a crosscultural context. Next, we shall examine the rationality of the forms of protest action ranging from peaceful protest to crowds on the rampage. Finally, rather than assuming the institutions of the post-colonial state in India as the fixed points of reference for the analysis of her politics, the last section of the essay will seek to derive the appropriate institutional framework of government from the political and cultural tradition of the locality and the region. Governability in Comparative Perspective Since India’s problems of governance are seen by some as unique, culturally specific or idiosyncratic, it is useful to look into the past history of societies that now boast of fully-fledged effective, democratic governments. For an effective antidote to the alarmist view of the current state of India’s political institutions, we can look at

the history of popular discontent and disorder in England during the late eighteenth century. The picture that we get from a recent study” would be familiar to the students of contemporary Indian politics. Rampaging crowds, corrupt state machinery and ineffectual government on a scale that is current in many parts of India today were not altogether unknown in England two centuries ago. Benjamin Franklin, the London agent for the state of Pennsylvania in

1769, reported that within a year, he had witnessed riots in the country about corn; riots about elections; riots about work-houses; riots of colliers; riots of weavers; riots of coal-

heavers; riots of sawyers; riots of chairmen; riots of smugglers in which customhouse officers and excisemen have been mur-

dered and the king’s armed vessels and troops fired at."

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If Franklin were to look for examples of other disorderly instances, he would have noticed ‘riots against turnpikes and toll collectors, press gangs and schoolmasters, French footmen and Irish labourers, theatre prices, bawdy houses and the naturalisation of Jews." While in many of the eighteenth century English riots one special group vented its anger against another, the state was sometimes directly embroiled in them. Thus, an act passed in 1780 to give some minor relief to Roman Catholics provoked violent reactions from Protestant zealots. Thus:

. . . prisons and Catholic chapels were burned to the ground; the houses of politicians and judges were attacked; distilleries and shops were plundered. One mob attacked Downing Street; another mounted an assault upon the Bank. King George III, on the attorney-general’s advice, eventually authorised army officers to open fire on the mob without the intervention of a magistrate. By nightfall on the last day of the violence, almost a thousand people had lost their lives.” If the state itself was the target of civil violence, the other noteworthy feature of these riots was the outright inaction or lukewarm performance of the organs of law and order in putting them down.

Throughout the worst rioting, justices had been careful to keep out of sight. When they were found, being afraid of the mob’s displeasure, they could not be prevailed upon to read the Riot Act. The Lord Mayor, who had once been a waiter in a brothel, when urged to do his duty, replied evasively that the mob seemed ‘to have got hold of some people and furniture they did not like and were burning them, and where was the harm in that?’?

The English case is interesting but not unique in the history of social dislocation, political conflict and state formation in Western Europe. Tilly and Hobsbawm inform us of food riots and other challenges to public order throughout early modern Europe. The historical hindsight should help us understand the political nature of these riots which left a historical residue in the form of institutions meant for conflict resolution and the legitimacy of popular protest. The scholarship on the problem of governance in contemporary India has not been able to problematise it in a manner

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where it-can draw on cross-cultural knowledge of coping mechanisms through which European states met popular discontent during the period of rapid social change. Crowd Formation as ‘Rational’ Protest

Based on an extensive review of the literature on social dislocation and political protest, Lichbach questions the assumption that under the pressure of righteous anger arising out of relative deprivation— the differential between what one believes he is entitled to and what he actually receives in real life—people give vent to their collective frustration in a spate of irrational violence." In a different context, Charles Tilly has questioned such simplistic theories of political conflict. ‘The image’, as Tilly remarks, commenting on such theories, ‘is hydraulic: hardship increases, pressure builds up, the vessel bursts. The angry individual acts as a reservoir of resentment, a conduit of tension, a boiler of fury. But not as a thinking, political man operating on principle.” My objective in choosing ‘crowds’—an extreme form of everyday resistance—and the power that it generates against established order is to use these universal categories as reference points for the analysis of elite strategies of dominance and popular counter-strategies. Violent, unruly crowds have appeared on the scene at decisive moments of history. Introducing the crowd as a universal category, Elias Canetti suggests that the sense of togetherness of a crowd that pulverises notions of both political control and exclusive individua] space and thereby creates an inchoate mass, where ‘no

distinction counts, not even that of sex... [where] each individual seeks to rid himself as completely as possible of the fear of being touched’, is also the basis of its devastating and overwhelming power.'* Crowd formation is virtually always a threat to law and order. Under ‘normal’ circumstances, the potentially destructive crowd is tamed, institutionalised through individual roles allocated by the church, the state and the market. These institutions which evolved in course of the formation of the modern state in Europe have collectively achieved a functional duality in the concept of citizenship. The constraints of citizenship, operating within a civil society, simultaneously keep the crowd subjectively free but institutionally bound. Transformed into the people, members of the crowd feel free to unite in their common, democratic endeavour to

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promote their collective good as they see it, and bound in their individual capacities to productive, compliant roles that make orderly government possible. The situation is significantly different in post-colonial societies where the notions of individual rights, basic freedoms and legitimacy came from the political rhetoric of the coloniser. In their efforts to challenge the colonial power, leaders of the anti-colonial struggle held up the colonised people as a reservoir of vast energy, the pure spirit of nationhood, and true religion. The political freedom that eventually came to the colonised people, was delivered to them without the institutions which were responsible for political order in the society of the colonisers. The result was often tragic; for the crowds in whose name the national leaders had seized the mantle, started claiming power on their own terms, using any vehicle— language, religion, tribe or communal and ethnic identity—that lent itself to the purpose. To go back to Canetti once again, the greater the perceived fragmentation and degradation of the powerful crowd into a powerless subject people, the more violent and frantic were the attempts to retrieve the lost sense of community and power. The conditions that govern the formation of crowds and their dissipation into compliant and productive roles in the civil society are crucial to our analysis. Cast in the role of the Indian people (janata is the equivalent Indian category), the crowd is the ultimate basis of sovereignty and legitimacy. As a powerful mass (/ok shakti) which brings together isolated opposition groups, it is the primary actor which intervenes at critical historical junctures." In the course of the transformation of agrarian society, disorderly European crowds were also transformed into the mass base of the modern state and its political economy. The turmoil of the industrial revolution, food riots, agrarian uprisings and political upheavals describe the historical sequence through which largely agrarian societies and economies were transformed into stable, participatory, industrial societies in Europe. India, as an exemplar of postcolonial societies, provides a useful contrast because of its different historical sequence. The mobilisation of crowds around popular grievances and the institutional network that it gave rise to in Europe have not occurred

in the same way in India. Instead, the different temporal sequence in which the industrial revolution and the extension of franchise

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came in India, has further complicated the relationship of democracy and governance. The enfranchisement of ‘ordinary’ people in Europe followed only after the large scale dislocations brought about by the industrial revolution had laid the institutional framework of the modern state and economy. In India, where universal adult franchise was introduced in one fell swoop following independence from British colonial rule, the problems of governance are indicative of attempts by the government, operating within the institutional constraints of a liberal demacratic constitution, to transform a primarily agrarian society into an urban, industrial society. Liberal Democracy and Popular Resistance as an Indian Paradox While every political system has its own legitimising myth through which it seeks to combine the potentially destructive power of the crowd with control by the government, it is liberal democracy that makes this explicit statement a part of its creed and operational strategy. The ambiguity that characterises the attempts by elites to reconcile the need for accountability with governance is familiar to those who have studied the process of political bargaining in liberal democracies. The Constitution of India sought to achieve this dual purpose by providing a strong executive while making an equally categorical commitment to individual rights and popular accountability."* The brute fact of the matter, however, is that at the best of times, the holders of power anywhere are reluctant to share it with the victims of this power, institutionally relegated to an inferior position as patient, pupil or subject. Following the spirit of the times, elites set up elaborate legitimising myths to create the semblance of power-sharing." Within the political discourse of liberal democracy the clash between crowds and the establishment is articulated in terms of the conflict between the role of government and public accountability.”” The necessary tension between them, muted in authoritarian regimes, is ever present in the public eye in liberal democracies because, while the latter legitimise authority with reference to popular sovereignty, they also require, for the purpose of effective government, a certain measure of power and autonomy for the executive. Looking broadly at the history of liberal democracies, one can see that in some historical situations, the conflict of the

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two has been dialectical and the manner of its resolution has strengthened both accountability and governmental effectiveness. In some others, the clash has had negative consequences, leading to the destruction of political and civil institutions. During the short span of her post-independence history, India has experienced both forms of relationship between the government and the governed.

The Ambiguous Relationship of Leaders and Crowds within the Independence Movement Following the introduction of universal adult franchise, made effec-

tive through political competition over the allocation of material resources, post-independence India experienced a massive political change in the form of expanding notions of enfranchisement, entitlement and empowerment. Though our main concern here is the problematic nature of the relationship between elite decisionmaking and popular accountability after independence, the problem, as Masselos points out, goes back to the ambiguous role of the ‘crowd’ within the freedom movement itself.” The crowds entered the Indian struggle for independence in a serious way only after Mahatma Gandhi conceptualised their potential power in his construction of satyagraha and civil disobedience. The role of the crowd gained in importance as the effectiveness of the national movement under Gandhi’s leadership stood in sharp contrast to the ineffectual elite strategies of supplication and terrorism which preceded it. When Gandhi scooped up a handful of mud from the seaside at Dandi on 6 April 1930, the gesture marked the climax of his salt march and signalled the beginning of civil disobedience throughout the country... . It was an exemplar of Congress’s agitational mode at work in an urban context and one that affected

the ability of the British to govern.” The Congress strategy consisted of selected volunteers offering satyagraha and breaking the law (having first announced their intentions to the police) in the presence of an audience in order to give the nationalist programme wide publicity and to pressurise the colonial government into giving concessions. Links were established with the people by accommodating popular, local grievances

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into the’ national agenda, involving local leaders, integrating regional and sacred symbols into the secular, national and public struggle for independence. Political success came to the movement in the form of wider public involvement in the ‘political nationalist festival’ where, though the ‘physical separation [between Congress volunteers and the public] remained, [the] ‘emotional identification brought actors and audience together in what became more than a purely religious occasion’. Occasionally, however, things got a little out of hand, such as the incidents in Bombay reported by Masselos, where the crowd took it upon itself to light bonfires of foreign clothes and force passers-by to take off their caps to show respect to fallen martyrs. These points of crowd-formation where the police ‘charged out indiscriminately with lathis’*® were of great concern to the Congress leadership. The incidents reflect the emotions the campaign was arousing but it was not entirely to Congress liking. Two days later the BPCC forbade the collection of foreign caps though they might be voluntarily offered to Congress for later disposal; also forbidden were indiscriminate bonfires.” Congress made an ambivalent organisational distinction between its active participants in civil disobedience and the masses who were to be imbued with national sentiment by their participation as observers. If anything, the distinction re-affirmed the structural parallels. A Congress event clearly encompassed both elements, actors and audience, within the whole while it also

maintained the distinction between them as well as its public and private aspects.”’ The manner in which the Congress simultaneously drew on the crowd both for legitimacy and political power and sought to control it, failing occasionally and throwing both its top leaders and colonial adversaries into confusion, revealed the ‘ambivalence of a campaign that was tightly controlled but at the same time needed the widest possible support to achieve its anti-imperialist objectives.’ The ambiguity that characterised Gandhi’s conception of the role of the crowd is best brought out by the incident at Chauri Chaura which caused him to suspend the national struggle. This ambiguity,

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masked under such concepts as rule by consensus, and the juxtaposition of the principles of election for top jobs within the Congress organisation with that of co-option, carried it all the way into the institutions of post-Independence government.

Apart from these occasional discomfitures on the part of both the colonial government and their Congress adversaries about the crowd getting out of hand, we have little evidence of explicit attempts to create institutions or establish practices through which democratic accountability and orderly government could be reconciled. The problem has been reported by Saberwal who describes India’s political crisis: as a consequence of our collective difficulty in working with institutions of Western derivation which have been implanted in India during and after the colonial period: legislatures, courts, universities, banks and so forth. Our difficulty arises perhaps in a lack of fit between the principles which have gone into the designing of these institutions over many long centuries in Europe, and those which inform institutions to which we in India have traditionally been heir: family, caste, village, pilgrimage centre, little kingdom, and so forth.”

Nehru, of course, was aware of the problem and, as the Letters to Chief Ministers, 1947-64 indicate, spoke tirelessly about it. With hindsight, the startling conclusion one comes up with is how little public debate there was about the lack of fit between acquired institutions and the political culture. There appears to have been this naive belief that Nehru and the Congress party would somehow transform both. alien institutions and endogenous culture magically and create the political base for an endogenous modernity. No consistent attempt has however been made to derive or to adapt the principle of government to local and regional cultural and political traditions. The result, as Inden reminds us, is a nation-state that remains ontologically and politically *inaccessible to its own citizens. Its government continues to be, just like its immediate British Indian ancestor, merely a neutral enforcer of unity on a morselized society, continually in danger of being pulled apart by ‘centrifugal’ forces. It remains the instrument of an agent, a ‘divinity’ that stays beyond the reach of its own

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people and institutions. That divinity no longer has an external home country as a platform from which to enforce its impartial unity. What the Indian nationalists substitute for the transcendent divine kingship of the British Raj is the equally transcendent idea of Indian unity.”’ Nationalist discourse around the nascent Indian state, immaculately conceived and delivered by Nehru (one hears very little of Gandhi or Patel) has invented a new essence—a ‘civilization united by “social” harmony —as its legitimising myth.*! The unproblematic ‘civilisational state’ has replaced problematic and divisive caste, religion, region and community.” This idea of a modern, secular state has become a ‘non-sectarian transcedent Dharma’, an ‘essentialised ideal Oneness, dichotomously contrasted with... immanent divisiveness of India’s social and religious “reality” ‘which would somehow be transformed by a bureaucratic state grounded in a world-ordering reason that India had lost but would regain from the west’. Inden goes on to show how this modernist project, sponsored by the advocates of the modern state denied agency to non-state actors as well as to themselves in the name of a substantialised essence, an idealised Bharatmata—Mother India— which reduced problematic concepts of local, regional and sectarian politics into an unproblematic nationalism. Since that Dharma or Spirit is the premise and guarantee of the Indian nation-state itself, specific here-and-now agents could not negotiate with it or construct it... . National historians could ‘discover’ it in India’s ancient past, and nationalist politicians could invoke it and mobilize people in its name, but none of them could make it. Which is to say the nationalists have Indianized that old religious and scientistic dream of so many Europeans and Americans—a ‘society’ that would be free of politics because it hung from some immobile point in heaven or rested on an indisputable foundation.“

The Genealogy of the Governability Discourse in India The theme of ungovernability is not entirely unfamiliar to the student of Indian politics, having been made fashionable in the

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1950s by the celebrated /ndia, The Most Dangerous Decades of Selig Harrison.* More recently, Manor, Saberwal, Morris-Jones, Kothari, and Kohli have added their voice to it. Not to be outdone by academia, specialised organisations like the prestigious Amnesty International and the popular press in the West and in India have also joined in.” One could, of course, trace the genealogy of the doomsayer much further back into history. During the early years of the Raj, it was generally asserted by British administrators that without the firm and guiding hand of the colonial power, India would revert back to her natural state of internecine conflict and petty tyranny. With the steady accumulation of evidence on government in ancient India, following the translation of the Arthasastra into English, and on local self-government under colonial rule,” the conventional idea of India’s natural ungovernability looked increasingly like an ideological justification for British rule. As the national movement

became increasingly more strident, the pressure

for gradual transfer of power grew in volume and intensity. But when such powers were ceded to Indian hands, it was more a part of a larger strategy to buy time than the result of a conviction about India’s readiness for self-government.”™ Not much progress has been made since in the thinking about governance in India. The real irony of the situation is that the uncritical acquiescence in Nehru’s brand of parliamentary democracy following independence provides an unlikely parallel to the pre-independence refusal of the colonial power to recognise the indigenous people’s ability at sustaining self-rule. No attempt was thus made to derive government out of the cultural antecedents and historical legacies of native government. India was independent; the British had gone home; Nehru and the Congress party were safely ensconced in the Parliament. So there had to be a government by Indians and that was that. Faced with such an unproblematic conception of government from the early years, it is hardly Surprising that the political analysis of the problem of governance in India gets very rapidly transformed into a moral discourse about the motives and methods of India’s political elites.” With the possible exception of Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, the specialists of government and politics in India are very much in unison over the breakdown of orderly government in India. Voicing this common concern, Professor Morris-Jones questions the ‘complacent view’ of incremental, and by the same logic, linear growth

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of democracy, made possible through the peaceful interpenetration of the modern state and traditional society. “The process of interpenetration is certainly present and active but its character has become hugely conflictual and frequently manifested in violence.’ Morris-Jones finds evidence of lawlessness in the

. . . blood spilt on the streets of Ahmedabad in Gujarat where upper caste students became enraged when the state government, backed by the votes of the numerous ‘backward’ castes, announced enhanced proportions of students vacancies for these castes in engineering and medical colleges. [Further] In parts of Bihar a condition of intermittent civil war has become virtually normal, with caste-based ‘armies’ serving the interests of landlord groups by carrying out terrorist killings designed to discourage low-caste sharecroppers and untouchable landless labourers from getting ideas about land reform and cultivators’ rights about their station and from daring to organise to press their claims." Under the impact of this growing, violent conflict over the allocation of material benefits as well as issues of ethnic identity, political institutions have decayed, the ‘centre’ does not any longer ‘hold’. Joining Morris-Jones here are Paul Brass* who talks about the criminalisation of Indian politics and Rajni Kothari who presents a picture of an increasingly violent, authoritarian state turning against the democratic aspirations of upward mobility by underprivileged social groups. Professor Kothari’s views on the collapse of the democratic structure in India deserve careful consideration, not only because of their intrinsic interest but also because their status as the representative exemplar of a mode of thinking that has dominated the scholarly view of Indian politics for over a generation, both within India as well as among the larger community of scholars of Indian politics. During the 1960s, in a series of influential articles, and more specifically in his Politics in India,“ Kothari described the process of political change and integration in India in terms of the ‘Congress System’ where the Indian National Congress acted as the intermediary between the modern state and traditional society. The decline of the Congress, both the facilitator and the beneficiary of the interpenetration of the state and society, and the rise of

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popular authoritarianism under the leadership of Indira Gandhi became a puzzle that the ‘Congress System’ framework of analysis could not solve. Kothari’s response to this challenge to his earlier explanation has consisted mostly in wistful incantation of the need for morality in politics: Central to the moderation of State power is this insistence on a larger ethical code without which politics is bound to degenerate into a cold and cynical exercise in control and manipulation and ultimately its takeover by musclemen and mafias. This is what has happened over the past few years (emphasis added).” As Kothari, the ‘fairly severely analytical political scientist of the early years has become subsequently something of a seer with a mission’,* his understanding (and that of other hegemonic writers) of the problems of government in India has been increasingly dominated by a new essentialism constituted of the secular, modern,

institutionalism of Nehru. Following his disenchantment with the radical liberalism of Indira Gandhi, as she split the Congress party and allied herself with the Congress Young Turks and the broad left outside the Congress in 1969 eventually leading to the imposi-

tion of the Emergency of 1975, Kothari has increasingly placed his trust in political action by grassroots movements and allied himself with the concept of partyless democracy and non-party political processes. In Kothari’s depiction of Indian politics since he has turned ‘activist’, moral hectoring has increasingly taken the place of political analysis: Fascism in many ways is not only an Orwellian newspeak. It is more in the nature of a vitiated language seeking to hide in the noise of slogans. The epitome of such a contrived language was Sanjay Gandhi whose terseness, grunts, idiot-slogans mirrored the decline of language. Consider the arid poetics of such slogans, ‘Plan your family’, ‘one man, one tree’, ‘marry without dowry’, or ‘work more, talk less’. Or the more lurid texts of the highly provocative advertisements of the Congress(I) on the ‘last drop of my blood’ in turn resonating in the funeral songs of Khoon ka badla khoon. Or the invocations of badla in the maiden public speech of the new Prime Minister. [The reference here is to

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Rajiv Gandhi.] They all attested to the fact that the pathology of politics inevitably reflects itself in language." Professor Kothari’s reservations against the use of bazaar language as key categories of political campaigns or his more sophisticated arguments about the ‘deinstitutionalisation’ of Indian politics ignore two important facts. In the first place, the language of Indian politics increasingly reflects the efforts of political actors to integrate local and regional cultural symbols and practices into their political campaigns. Secondly, there was a consistent element of support from below for the type of popular authoritarianism embodied in the politics of Indira Gandhi.” Her defeat in the election of 1977 was not so much the result of loss of popular support as the harnessing of anti-Congress votes by the coalition of opposition parties that subsequently came to be known as the Janata party. Those who had equated the success of the Janata party in 1977 and subsequently in 1989 with the victory of ‘value based politics’ must have had second thoughts as the ‘cold and cynical exercise of control’, that Kothari vehemently criticised in the politics of Indira Gandhi, increasingly asserted its presence within the Janata governments as well. That virtually the same scenario repeated itself—in the initial euphoria over the victory of the National Front in the election of 1989, only to be dissipated in the political bickering that led to the defeat of the Janata government of V.P. Singh—does not appear to have created any serious second thoughts among the happy moralists of Indian politics. Moral platitudes, alas, are no substitute for political analysis. The mantra of deinstitutionalisation, nothing short of thinly disguised moral rhetoric, is conducted in terms of an acquired, liberal,

constitutional essence which denies agency to actors who do not articulate their arguments in this particular form. It is a formidable obstacle for the specification of India’s problems of government in terms of detailed empirical inquiry. That the essence of modern, secular institutions, a fixed point in deinstitutionalisation discourse, is not germane to the life world of the actors, who articulate agenda born out of their immediate, relatively unmediated perception of reality, is a matter of great importance for the understanding of politics in India today. The failure to register this point also accounts for the failure to come up with a serious theoretical account of the rise of popular authoritarianism in India.

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The Cyclicity of the Crisis of Governance in India The dire prognosis of gloom and doom by specialists of Indian politics should carry a compulsory health warning: overconsumption might lead to addiction. While the Indian state and government are often faced with serious problems and appear to be on the brink, they confound predictions of disaster by somehow bouncing back. The problem of government in India is complex, and far from being uniform, it is historically variable and often in contradiction with prediction. Thus, high governmental stability of the fifties was followed by the rapid rise and fall of governments and the first indications of the use of crowds by opposition parties to press their demands for political change in the sixties. Indira Gandhi's populist rhetoric, authoritarian politics and use of mass mobilisation as an alternative to parliamentary approval for her policies characterised the 1970s. The 1980s brought India back to the niceties of parliamentary democracy and saw the loosening of government control over the economy. But it also witnessed the mobilisation of large crowds on the rampage, intent on the assertion of the power and territorial exclusiveness of their communal identity. Going by the signs of the restoration of orderly rule both in India’s high politics and law and order at the lower levels of the system, the present government can claim to have restored India to a level where she ceases to be the subject of dire predictions. The position of the Rudolphs provides an interesting and useful contrast to the main thrust of the ‘governability’ discourse. Though they also talk about deinstitutionalisation of Indian politics, they find in the tensile character of the Indian state the necessary political resources to secure high stateness and effective government. In the Rudolph’s characterisation, Like Hindu conceptions of the divine, the state in India is polymorphous, a creature of manifold forms and orientations. One is the third actor whose scale and power contribute to the marginality of class politics. Another is a liberal or citizens’ state, a juridical body whose legislative reach is limited by a written constitution, judicial review, and fundamental rights. Still another is a capitalist state that guards the boundaries of the mixed economy by protecting the rights and promoting the interests of property in agriculture, commerce, and industry.

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Finally, a socialist state is concerned to use public power to eradicate poverty and privilege and tame private power. Which combination prevails in a particular historical setting is a matter for inquiry.”

The

Rudolphs’

state, as the above citation suggests, is part

essence and part agent and as such, is at least partly contestable. Its stateness” is surrounded by a zone of grey that admits actors whose political idiom may be putatively anti-state but whose substantive contribution to state formation is more positive than what one might conclude at the first encounter. However, while this characterisation of Indian politics points in the direction of an explanatory model of state formation and government, the specific empirical parameters remain at best implicit. We shall return to these parameters in Figure 3 when the empirical specification of the model will be discussed in detail. Though the governability discourse of the hegemonic writers provides no sustained explanation for the regenerative ability of the state in India, many among them make assertions to this effect on intuitive grounds. Several conclude their studies of political decay and governability crisis by a routine affirmation of the resilience of Indian democracy, the intrinsic ability of Indian culture to absorb conflict, to accommodate differences, and strive for a consensus. Kohli repeatedly asserts that his is not a doomsday scenario. The best is from Morris-Jones:

[The] sombre picture of social conflict and institutional decay as the heightened features of recent years [presents] some contrast with the earlier post-independence decades. But a sense of proportion requires that at the end one should say of India what Galileo said of the earth: ‘Eppur si mouve’—‘still, it moves.’ Certainly nothing in this Epilogue should incline the reader to imagine that changing India has become anything other than what it has ever been: by turns infuriating and fun to be with, always an absorbing delight to try to understand.” Against the background of this unsatisfactory state of explanation, the need is clearly to start with an assumption that requires of politics no more than the fact that political actors seek to maximise their share of power. Just as unregulated competition for power

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creates a Hobbesian state of nature where life can be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, given the effective constraint of institutions, civilised social intercourse and orderly rule become possible. A realistic model of government cannot escape the need of political actors to a mass power nor of the equally important necessity of institutions that constrain this competition for power. A model of government in post-colonial societies which intends to study the conditions under which the search for power by political actors can be successfully mediated by institutions should therefore incorporate at least four sets of parameters: a bureaucratic state machinery which combines policy responsiveness with law and order management; contribution to agenda setting by local protest movements; political elites using two-track strategies that combine protest and participation; and constitutional change as a political resource, to be treated along with other explanatory factors as a conceptual variable.

The Specification of an Empirical Model Atul Kohli, in what is now regarded as the standard text on the issue of mass political discontent and the problem of governability, differs significantly from other commentators by bringing out the necessarily political character of the ‘governability’ crisis.” Detailed investigation of local, regional and national politics leads to the proposition that the roots of India’s growing problems of governability are more political than socioeconomic; that is, they are located mainly in India’s political structure. A highly interventionist state dealing with a poor economy has become an object of intense political competition. The spread of egalitarian political values and the opportunities provided by democracy have, in turn, helped to transform what was once a heterogeneous social structure into many groups of mobilized activists. Failure of leaders to make timely concessions has only intensified political demands and activity. And, finally, the growing weakness of fragmented political parties, which both reflects and exacerbates this process of overpoliticization, has made it difficult for leaders to rule effectively.”

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There are of course no objective criteria to decide at what level political demands become ‘overpolitical’ except the threshold of what is considered tolerable by the modern state and experts who speak in its name. Ironically, while Kohli’s formulations indicate a new point of departure by restoring a sense of autonomy to the political process, it also indicates the limitations of an approach that remains beholden to the government, operating within the constraints of a liberal democratic constitution as the only legitimate agent of political action. Once we conceptualise the political process as an explanatory variable, the discourse on governability reveals a number of interesting factors, including civil disobedience, riots, caste and tribal conflict, insurgency and terrorism.” What unites these rather disparate acts is the fact that the government is invariably a key player at which the agitations are aimed. Underneath the challenge to the government of the day there usually lurks a political agenda which wholly or partly questions the legitimacy of the established authority. For that very reason, the articulation of such demands takes place outside conventional political institutions. In a broader sense, thus, the agents responsible for the ‘governability crisis’ are political actors—a status that the modern state (and its apologists) resolutely tries to deny them until it is no longer possible to do so. In the event of the outbreak of the problems of government, one of three things is likely to occur: persistent crises which slowly bring most social institutions to a standstill leading to a radical change in the constitutional rules governing conflict, for example, takeover by a military dictator; quick escalation of the crises into violent conflicts leading to civil war or military insurgency; or political accommodation of the agenda of the challengers through state action—administrative, legal or constitutional, Liberal democratic theory holds that the probability of the breakdown of law and order is low in a situation where political parties and pressure groups, capable of articulation and aggregation of political demands, act as intervening structures between the government and society. The state and the constitution within which it is embedded provide the overarching framework which cushions the competition, collaboration and occasional conflict of the concerned actors. An intelligent and effective government, that is, one that listens to society and where the bureaucracy manages to implement that which is legally ordained, can be presented in terms of the following model:

Democracy and the Crisis of ‘“Governability’ in India Figure

|

The Liberal Model of Society—Party—Government Society

235

Parties Pressure Groups

Linkage

Government

The political process described in Figure 1 becomes problematic in post-colonial societies where rapid economic and social change combined with inadequate institutionalisation and parties with narrow social base can lead to violent protest, crisis and decline of legitimacy. The theoretical linkage postulated by Huntington and Kohli is further reinforced by the suggestion of Gurr that discontent is felt most intensely by people experiencing relative deprivation as a result of rapid change. The implications of these observations can be specified in the form of a model presented in Figure 2. The factors that Kohli points out in his account of political change in India leading to the governability crisis, namely ‘the deinstitutionalizing role of national and regional leaders, the impact of weak political parties, the undisciplined political mobilization of various caste, ethnic, religious and other types of groups, and, the increasing conflicts between the haves and have-nots” are consistent with the Gurr-Huntington model.

Figure 2 The Huntington-Gurr ‘Polarisation’ Model Economic change

>

Inequality ——> Relative deprivation Ethnic Identity

Political mobilisation Deinstitutionalisation

>

Governmental crisis

-——>

Loss of legitimacy

While Kohli makes these general points about India as a whole based on his diachronic study of five districts which Myron Weiner had studied two decades earlier, the more interesting point of his study is the comparison of the levels of governability crisis in different states of India. Thus, whereas he finds Bihar virtually in a state of war of each against all and Gujarat caught in intense political conflicts on communal lines, West Bengal provides a contrasting case because of its generally successful conflict management.

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A reform-minded political party with a cohesive leadership and disciplined rank and file has managed to firmly plant itself between the people and the government. The West Bengal situation thus resembles that typified by the model presented in Figure 1. How did West Bengal achieve this level of conflict management, leading to orderly and lawful government? By his own reckoning, political parties are only intermediate level variables. In other words, instead of asserting that the reform-minded Communist Party of India (Marxist) is the ‘cause’ of West Bengal’s governability, we need to understand the ensemble of factors that created the environment within which the Left Front government could carry out its policies in West Bengal and the Congress its agenda in Maharashtra—a state which is probably just as ‘governable’, albeit without the benefit of Communist rule. These factors can be spelt out in terms of the model presented in Figure 3.

Figure 3

How Political Systems Cope with Discontent Economic change

—>

Inequality —> Relative deprivation Ethnic identity

Political conflict Crowd formation

—>

Elite response

—>

Political order

—>

Legitimacy

Law and order management Redistributive policies Constitutional safeguards =< for identity

Once again, the fixed perspective of the modern state and its apologists sets the criteria to distinguish ‘undisciplined’ political mobilisation from legitimate political participation. A degree of reality and dynamism can be added to a model of governability by leaving open the criteria of legitimate political action to political actors at the local and regional levels. The response of the government, in terms of law and order management, redistributive policies and constitutional change, acts as a feedback loop that affects the perception of the people at the local and regional levels. The perception of a flexible, manipulable and responsive state lowers the level of relative deprivation. Compared to the model presented

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in Figure 2, that in Figure 3 introduces a few additional parameters such as the presence of a ‘responsive’ state” with which competing elites—seen here as rational actors who choose their options in a manner that maximises benefits and minimises costs of transaction— negotiate on the basis of a complex repertoire that combines instruments of rational protest with elements of participation such as contacts with higher level decision-makers, lobbying, voting and sending petitions. India’s significant achievement in the area of positive discrimination, which has successfully severed the cultural and

emotional

links

between

caste

and

occupation,”

and

land

reforms and other social legislation, which has transformed social privilege into a politically contested concept,” bear ample testimony to the change that has come about democratically. When the results are redistributive policies and constitutional change, it leads to the reduction of state response to perceived inequality and provides the necessary political accommodation to such ‘transcendental’ issues as that of group identity. These issues, being in the nature of collective goods with deep implications for the rules of the game, are not amenable to transactional solutions within the

framework of the Constitution. However, once the transcendental issues are incorporated into the Constitution through appropriate changes in the rules of the game, politics within the reconstituted units reverts back to the transactional themes of material benefits.

A Roadmap for Further Research Explanatory accounts of government and legitimacy have so far mostly concentrated on redistributive policies as the main intervening factor. The exclusion of law and order management and constitutional change are due possibly to the liberal bias, indicative of the confidence that the civil society itself would provide the necessary institutional restraints on individuals for self-policing, leaving it to the state to legislate on the public goods. Nor does Western liberal democratic theory provide for the possibility that the majority might actually prefer illiberal values and use its legislative capacity to amend the Constitution away from the value premise it started with. Examination of these and possibly other implications of the model will require an analysis of the perceptions

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of representative actors of Indian politics over the four postindependence decades and state responses in the areas of law and order management, redistributive policies and constitutional change. While the full implications of the model are yet to be tested, my past work provides partial evidence of the functioning of the model. A comparative study of local politics in Gujarat and Orissa based on a survey conducted in 1979-80 shows how the twin-track strategy of protest and participation followed by local elites in Gujarat assured orderly transition from hierarchy based subsistence agricultural economy to one based on transaction and capitalist wage labour. The absence of effective local institutions like panchayats and cooperatives and local netas (leaders) who could combine rational protest with the instruments of conventional participation created a more radical and anomic political environment in Orissa which contributed to the instability of the regional government.” Kohli’s findings about the sharp rise in political violence in Gujarat during the 1980s provide an interesting contrast with the political environment of the 1970s where political transactions, mediated by an effective governmental structure, were the normal state of affairs. Why does post-1981 Gujarat get disorderly? Why did it prove difficult to accommodate the new political demands within the regional political process of the 1980s? It is difficult to answer these questions categorically in the absence of further field research. It is possible, however, to indicate a general conjecture about the nature of the underlying causes of intense public disorder in post-1980 Gujarat and a few other parts of the country based on the fragmentary evidence we get from secondary sources. By anticipating and accommodating part of the agenda of opposition groups, a transactional model helps dissipate opposition, strengthen the position of the government and contribute to political order. However, a transactional model ceases to be effective when the demands of opposition groups consist primarily of changes in the rules of the game, because the model is encapsulated in a Constitution that acts as an interface between the attitudes and behaviour of policy makers and those responsible for implementation: The demands that fuelled politics in Gujarat and Punjab in the 1980s were not only about ‘who gets what and how’, but about such transcendental issues as the conflicting boundaries of community and the state. It is not possible for a transactional model to accommodate

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demands for the political articulation of communal identity in the absence of constitutional change. Hence the gulf of miscomprehension that divides the intellectuals, politicians and policy makers of the modern, secular state, and the ‘overpoliticised’ and ‘undisciplined’ crowds and protagonists of communal politics who have increasingly spilled over from the regional arenas of Gujarat, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh to the national mainstream. The folklore wisdom of Indian politics” has it that India of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was dominated by issues of economic development which could be accommodated within the transactional political process. The process broke down as issues of ethnic identity and assertiveness started making their appearance in the 1980s. This is not entirely correct. Those with long memories would recall the first appearance of the demand for linguistic states in the early 1950s. Nehru resisted the demand as long as he could. For

him,

it was

a distraction

from

the rational,

scientific

and

modern plans for economic development which required the division of India in terms of units that optimised the resource endowments of the geographic units. With hindsight, it 1s possible to assert today that the creation of linguistic states in the 1950s, following the recommendation of the States Reorganisation Commission, has averted the severe political problems that affected Pakistan in the 1960s, eventually leading to the dismemberment of the state, and led to the creation of the Tamil problem of Sri Lanka.

As the creation of Gorkhaland

recently and Tamilnadu,

Nagaland, Mizoram in the past have shown, it is possible to take transcendental issues based on community, ethnicity and religion out of politics by giving constitutional recognition, territory, space and power to their protagonists. When Tamil identity is territorially secure, the important question is no longer to assert the glory of Tamil culture to the exclusion of other issues, but to enter the electoral arena to decide which group of Tamils will rule. Again, as the experience of Nagaland, Mizoram and the BJP in Uttar Pradesh shows, extremist movements in power tend to moderate their stand. The inclusion of constitutional change as a political resource adds a degree of dynamism to the transactional model. Pending further empirical enquiry, a dynamic policy of communal accommodation rather than continued commitment to ‘modern, secular institutions’ would reinforce the resilience of the state and effectiveness of government in India today."

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Conclusion

The intention behind the use of such universal categories as crowds and power in relation to political order and the crisis of governability in India has been to establish a frame of analysis that goes beyond the conventional practice of considering all challenges to established authority as indicative of deinstitutionalisation with the implicit moral reccommendation to restore the halcyon days of liberal, democratic institutions. On the basis of references to eighteenth century England, caught in the throes of rapid social and economic change, this essay establishes that the problems of India are not unique; that the Indian solution to the necessary tension between accountability and the role of government needs to be problematised in terms of the creation of institutions and practices that can provide for effective bargaining among all political actors. It also suggests that for politics to be the society’s most effective method of self-correction,” the domain of politics should encompass the constitutional structure as well. The essay takes issue with essentialist approaches that assert modern, secular institutions as a fixed point which constitutes the structure of reference for the evaluation of attitudes and behaviour of individuals and groups. In contrast, the essay suggests that actors and their agenda should be acknowledged as autonomous and legitimate in their own right. With an expanded domain of politics, an explanatory model of governmental effectiveness and accountability should be able to uncover new empirical data about the preferences of actors and their perception of costs and benefits about possible outcomes. Political analysis on these lines would be able to contribute to the accommodation of both transactional and transcendental issues, based on governmental strategies that combine law and order management, redistributive policies and changes in the rules of the game. The detailed empirical research necessary for the examination of some of the propositions made in this essay would require first of all a proper evaluation of the perceptions of the problems of order, legitimacy and government of the leaders of the Republic during its founding phase, expressed in their public discourse and private letters. This will help in appreciating the articulation of the problem of public accountability and effective government as it was perceived by leaders of the stature of Nehru, Patel and Tandon. Their thoughts need to be analysed along the three dimensions of

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law and order management, redistributive policies and constitutional change. The next group of public documents that need to be examined for the same purpose are reports of enquiry commissions, particularly those dealing with major breakdowns of law and order. Both sets of information will need to be collected, from the first indications of major problems of government as they manifested themselves in the 1960s, through the period of the rise of popular authoritarianism, to the bouncing back of constitutional democracy during the 1980s. The analysis of this empirical material will help us understand and evaluate India’s hesitant progress in the direction of an endogenous modernity—which, for the lack of a better expression, seeks to find an ‘Indian’ solution to the universal problems of crowds and political order; accountability and government; community and citizenship. An essentialist approach begins and ends with the modern state as its fixed point; the actor oriented approach adopted here treats both merely as a point of departure. If that introduces a certain degree of tentativeness to all institutions, then

it is a necessary price to pay, for in a democracy, the process of accommodation and changes in the rules of the game are part of the product as well.

Notes

1. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the annual conference of the British Association for South Asian Studies, Birmingham, March 1992, 2. The issue of India’s ‘governability’, raised most recently by Kohli (1990), has a respectable genealogy. The distinction I would like to maintain between my use of government and Kohli’s governability is deliberate. The latter entails an implicit cultural baggage of European liberal democracy. As I see their argument, Western societies are ‘governable’ as they are; others need to acquire the institutions of governable societies for them to be able to enjoy the benefits of lawful and orderly rule. I would like to think of government as a necessary attribute of all societies. Changing environments require changes in the rules of

government; changes which, to be legitimate, need to be drawn from the political tradition of the given society. The point is discussed further in section two of this essay.

3. With the publication of Nehru’s letters to Indira Gandhi, we are better situated now

to evaluate the glorious years during with Nehru could do no

242

Subrata K. Mitra wrong. A full evaluation would require further research on Nehru’s private correspondence, but what is already available is quite suggestive. Thus, Indira Gandhi, before she was inducted to high politics and gave full expression of her authoritarian

temperament,

wrote

to her father

in a fit of outrage

at the

attempts of a provincial government to take over the management of a newspaper: ‘If you don’t call [the Chief Minister] to order for interfering . . . in the business of a newspaper, then please stop . . . talking about democracy & the freedom of the press in India. With all our other ills let us not also have hypocrisy.’ See Firdaus Kanga’s review of Sonia Gandhi, ed., Two Alone, Two Together: Letters Between Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 1940-1964, (London: Hodder, 1992) in Sunday Times, 19 July 1992, p. 5.

. §. Saberwal, India: The Roots of Crisis (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. ix. The allegation of a conspiracy to destabilise India with the collusion of

foreign powers dominated the political rhetoric of Indira Gandhi in the 1970s. See Bharat Wariawala, ‘Security Issues in Domestic Politics’, in Subrata Mitra

and James Chiriyankandath, eds.,

A Changing Landscape: Electoral Politics in

India (Delhi: Segment, 1992).

. See B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). For a broad range of cross-cultural and historical evidence of the use of language, kinship and cultural networks as

vehicles for political movements with a modernising agenda, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). . Hegemonic texts are authoritative accounts of reality: ‘texts [that] scholars and

their administrative doubles in the world [use] to build and maintain the hegemony of their discourse over other knowledges’ according to R. Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 43. They focus attention on particular problems and specific ways of understanding them. The hegemonic writers on the problems of government in contemporary India discussed here are: P. Brass, The Politics of India since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); A. Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); R. Kothari, State Against Democracy: In Search of Humane Governance (Delhi: Ajanta Publishers, 1988); J. Manor, ‘Anomie in Indian Politics: Origins and Potential Wider Impact’, Economic and Political Weekly, Annual No., May 1983, pp. 725-34; W.H. Morris-Jones, Government and Politics of India (Wistow; Huntingdon: Eothen Press); and Saberwal, The Roots of Crisis. . Some Indians, who look back nostalgically to the days of orderly government when the British kept the law with the help of the big stick, today constitute a potential social base for despotic rule. They believe that Indian society is inherently incapable of self-rule and orderly government has to be imposed from outside. The British, when they ruled India, certainly did not discourage this belief. . Fora

discussion of the British justification of colonial tutelage over India, see,

B. Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi's Political

Discourse (New Delhi: Sage, 1989), pp. 25-27. . Sir lan Gilmour, Riots, Risings and Revolution: Governance and Violence in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Hutchinson, 1992). 10. Christopher Hibbert, ‘Crowds and Power’, The Sunday Times, 12 April 1992, p. 6.

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» Lbid.

. Ibid. . Ibid. . M.I. Lichbach, ‘An Evaluation of “Economic Inequality Breeds Political Conflict?” Studies’, World Politics, 41, 3 (1989), pp. 431-70. . C. Tilly, ‘Food Supply and Public Order in Modern Europe’, in C. Tilly, ed., The Formation of Nation-States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 390. . E. Canetti, Crowds and Power (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 2. He has drawn on English, German, Jewish, Indian and African history and culture to illustrate his extremely important conjectures about the formation of crowds and the power that is thus created. . Crowds (the sans culottes—Paris mobs during the revolution for example) have been responsible for the historic break-through that delivered the modern state out of the ruins of the ancient regime. More recently, the rampaging mobs of Eastern Europe gave the coup de grace to ailing Soviet regimes. The most recent experience India has had of this is the mobilisation of crowds by V.P. Singh against Rajiv Gandhi in 1989. . For ambiguities characterising the relation of accountability and the power of the executive underlying the Constitution of India, see G. Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, and U. Baxi, ‘The Indian Constitution at Crossroads’, The Fourth Annual Caparo Public Lecture, University of Hull, 1992 (mimeo).

. The point, emphasised by Gramsci and Foucault, is also made by Huntington, the leading liberal theorist of government in post-colonial societies. See, S.P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). 20. For European iliustrations of the taming of the crowd and creation of order through the creation of the citizen, see Tilly, ‘Food Supply and Public Order’, in Tilly, ed., Nation-States in Western Europe, and Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), particularly the chapter on ‘The Cultural Construction of a Citizen’, pp. 123-74. . J. Masselos, “Audiences, Actors and Congress Dramas: Crowd Events in Bombay City in 1930’, in J. Masselos, ed., Struggling and Ruling: The Indian National Congress,

1885-1985 (London: Oriental University Press, 1987).

222 thid-wp. 71. EE OR Goh 1) 25.

eld, Ds td, Indiscriminate beating, lathi or bayonet charges by the police are sure indicators

of crowd formation. Surging crowds are a source of fear for the state and the guardians of the law. ‘The police view was that the crowd refused to disperse, even after their Volunteer leaders told them to do so and therefore a lathi charge was necessary’ (Chief Superintendent Guider’s report, 11 April 1930, cited in Masselos, ‘Audience, Actors and Congress Dramas’, in Masselos, ed., Struggling and Ruling, p. 83).

el Did saps Jo:

_ Ibid., p. 77.

a! oe, TAle . Saberwal, The Roots of Crisis, p. 2. . Inden, Imagining India, pp. 197-98.

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ails Ibid., p. 197. S22 Ravinder Kumar, ‘India: Nation-State or Civilization State?’, Hull Papers in Indian Politics (Hull: University of Hull: 1989) is a startling example of the kind of historical anasthetic that dulls the edges of political analysis of the problem of government and state formation in India. ake}, Inden, /magining India, p. 198. 34. Ibid. 3B: S. Harrison, The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).

Amnesty International, India: Torture, Rape and Deaths in Custody (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1992). The wide publicity given to the cases of torture by Amnesty, first reported by India’s own active and aggressive human rights groups, has brought them international recognition and wide reporting in India. . See C.A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1880-1920 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1975) for an account of growing Indian assertiveness and evidence of self-government. 38. For a discussion of the theme of collaboration and competition that characterised the relation of the British masters and their Congress adversaries, see R. Sisson, ‘Congress and Indian Nationalism: Political Ambiguity and the Problems of Social Conflict and Party Control’, in R. Sisson and S. Wolpert, eds., Congress and Indian Nationalism: The Pre-independence Phase (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 1-19. 39) For a discussion of the reasons for which analysis of Indian politics ceases to be

36

analytical and becomes moral, see S. Mitra, ‘The Paradox of Power: Political

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

Science as Morality Play’, in the Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 26, 3 (1988), pp. 318-37. Morris-Jones, Government and Politics, p. 260. Ibid., p. 262. For the rise of lawlessness and the ‘criminalisation’ of politics, see Brass, Politics of India, and S. Kothari and H. Sethi, eds., Rethinking Human Rights: Challenges for Theory and Action (Delhi: Lokayan, 1989). For a report on the increase in ‘violence, defiant indiscipline and lawlessness’, by ‘not just the armed militants of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front or the Khalistan Commando Force, but ordinary people, lawyers, policemen, shopkeepers, civil servants, students, trade unionists’, see India Today, 31 August 1990, p. 7. R. Kothari, Politics in India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1970). Kothari, State Against Democracy, p. 34. Kothari concludes the essay with a discussion of the ‘Moral Dimension’ of Indian politics (pp. 34-36). W.H. Morris-Jones, “Thinking about Indian Politics’, Political Studies, 40 (1992), p. 342. R. Kothari, Politics and the People: In Search of aHumane India, vol. 2 (Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1989), p. 455. Italics in original. Morris-Jones concedes as much*. . . the draconian measures of autocratic rule were well received in certain rural elite circles. Threatened by the rising political influence of middle-level peasantry, they welcomed a regime which checked politicisation, above all at the level of local government’, in ‘Thinking about Politics’, Political Studies, p. 343.

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245

48. After the confusion that paralysed the government of V.P. Singh, a signtficant improvement appears to have been made in governmental effectiveness and law and order. One only needs to witness the tremendous achievement of a minority government in holding elections in Punjab, conducting organisational elections within the Congress party, surviving a monumental slip by the foreign minister on the Bofors issue and pushing through measures to liberalise the

economy. . L. Rudolph and S. Rudolph, Jn Pursuit of Lakshmi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 400-401. . For the concept of stateness, see J.P. Nettl, ‘The State as a Conceptual Vari-

able’, World Politics, 20, 4 (1968), p. 566. Morris-Jones, Government and Politics, p. 272. . This is in contrast to the dimensions highlighted by others. The cultural in Saberwal, The Roots of Crisis; the socio-psychological in Kothari, State Against Democracy, and the economic in P. Bardhan, The Political Economy of Development in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986). . Kohli, Democracy and Discontent, p. vii, emphasis added. . See, S.K. Mitra, ‘Room

to Manoeuvre

in the Middle:

Local Elites, Political

Action and the State in India’, World Politics, 43 (1991), pp. 390-413.

- Kohli, Democracy and Discontent, p. 387. . For the concept of the responsive state, see G. Hage, R.R. Hanneman and E. Gargan,

State Responsiveness and State Activism

(London:

Unwin

Hyman,

1989). as

See, B. Parekh and S. Mitra, ‘The Logic of Anti-reservation Discourse’, in Mitra, ed., The Politics of Positive Discrimination: A Cross-national Analysis (Bombay: Popular, 1990). 58. See, D.A. Washbrook, ‘Caste, Class and Dominance in Modern Tamil Nadu’, in F. Frankel and M.S.A. Rao, eds., Dominance and State Power in Modern India: Decline ofa Social Order, vol. | (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). ye: See Jan Breman, Of Peasants, Migrants and Paupers: Rural Labour Circulation and Capitalist Production in West India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985)

for field data on the hard negotiations that characterise peasant-state and peasant-labour relations in an environment of expanding agrarian economy. For a discussion of the two-track strategy used by local leaders in order to get the best terms from the state, see Mitra, ‘Room to Manoeuvre’, World Politics. 60. See, M. Weiner, The Indian Paradox: Essays in Indian Politics (Delhi: Sage,

1989). or. The point has been made in S. Mitra, ‘Desecularising the State: Religion and

Politics

in India

after Independence’,

Comparative

Studies in Society and

History, 33, 4(1991), pp. 755-77. 62. See A. Nandy, “The Making and Unmaking of Political Cultures in India’, in A. Nandy, ed., At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 1980).

Eleven

Personality Politics: A Psychoanalytic Perspective Prakash N. Desai

Introduction Politics in India is often described as personality politics, a characterisation which appears to have several meanings. Most generally it connotes a towering figure around whom much of power dynamics revolve; it also suggests that competing political figures vie for ascendance mainly on the grounds of personal issues. Another assumption is that an avowed ideology might be a facade, from behind which insults and accusations are hurled, the real targets of which are personality flaws. Personality politics also means, on the part of the masses, attitudes of hero worship (or its opposite) toward public figures. These attitudes are often reflected in expressions like “Who after Nehru?’, ‘only Indira can hold the country together’, etc. But the phrase ‘personality politics’ always means that substantive issues, those that really matter to the well-being of the people and the country at large, are subservient or peripheral or marginal. Such an experience.of politics and politicians naturally lends itself to a psychological inquiry. Although psychoanalytic interpretations of larger cultural phenomena have been criticised for neglecting the real social and economic problems and forces, I propose in this paper to demonstrate that this aspect of the Indian self-experience is vital to an understanding of the so-called personality politics. | am mindful of a myriad of other forces, for

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example, historical, economic, international, etc., and by no means suggest that these derive from the psychological since it is well known that both individual and group phenomena are determined by multiple forces. | am also aware of what is commonly suggested as an explanation for the turbulence in Indian politics. India’s rather recent experience in self-governance, especially in a democratic fashion, and undoubtedly the easy uprooting of fledgling democratic institutions is related to the time given for maturation. Some read in the turmoil an awakening of long suppressed aspirations and a tide of rising expectations, which too play no small part and are related to a new self-definition of the Indian people. In this task, I will rely mainly on indigenous constructions and formulations of the self-experiences, at the heart of which are the dynamics and attendant problems of self-esteem vulnerability activated under situations of stress, as in the conditions of leadership played out in the arena of power politics. Depth psychological observations will find their relevance in a better appreciation of the private concerns of an individual self spilling over into the public domain. Such an explication, hopefully, will add to reparative processes and strengthen our insights to better manage the noisy perturbations for cohesion and self-assertion. The appropriateness of a psychological interpretation of personality politics may be vouched for by the history of psychoanalysis in India itself. Despite an impressive beginning, psychoanalysis never found a comfortable home in India, But one word from that jargon remained—ego, which has found currency in the vernacular as well. The dynamics of self-esteem regulation will be viewed from a developmental and motivational perspective, and the indigenous formulation buttressed by the theoretical framework of psychoanalytic psychology of the self. Psychoanalytic theory in India has provided a frame of reference in the analyses of individuals, patients or otherwise, but more so in that of religion, mythology and social phenomena. The cornerstone of most, if not all, of these earlier attempts has been the paradigm of the Oedipus complex, viewed either from its orthodox instinct/ drive model or some of the later variants of object-relations. The model of the parent-child relationship driven by forces of incest and aggression, of patricidal rivalry and fear of or assumed retribution, have failed to yield a fully satisfying and convincing explanation of the Indian situation. Hindu persons and relationships are not

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easily understood in terms of this dominant paradigm. As Girindrashekhar Bose had remarked, taking objections to Freud’s formulation at the beginning of this debate, “The oedipus mother is very often a combined parental image and this is a fact of great importance.”' Accepting the value of the forces of incest and aggression, A.K. Ramanujam has offered an interesting variation: a reversal of the direction, that is, rather than from the child to the parent, the forces of incest and aggression are directed toward the child from the parent, the so-called Laius complex.’ The psychology of the self, developed by the seminal work of Heinz Kohut, provides yet another perspective. The self, seen as ‘a unit, cohesive in space and enduring in time, which is a center of initiative and a recipient of impressions”, is accorded a central place, with its own separate developmental line. Eschewing the conflict model of Oedipus complex, a bipolar self with a pole of ambitions and a pole of ideals, connected with a tension arc of skills and talents, is seen as the primary source of action. A person is viewed as led by his ideals and values (derived usually from the father by the son through an idealising merger) and driven by ambitions (derived usually from the mother through mirroringaffirming responses to the grandiose and exhibitionistic nascent self of the child). Thus the narcissistic needs of the self and the

culture are synergistic, unlike the Freudian formulation of the Opposition between instincts and civilisation. A child born in an empathic milieu, that responds both to the parts of the self and the whole person, experiences the caretakers as ‘selfobjects’, that is, extensions of the self. Optimal frustration leads to internalisation of parental imagoes and a set of beliefs and assumptions about the self and others. Failures in these early selfobject relationships (those that go beyond optimal frustration) lead to deficits, broadly speaking, in the sector of ambition and/or ideals which result in a variety of psychopathologies—products of a fragmenting self, as in destructive aggression, exaggerated drive-derivatives, etc. From the Indian vantage point, where the self has been at the centre of philosophical and psychological concerns for centuries, Kohut’s psychology of the self provides a model more consistent with and congenial to the phenomena at hand, albeit not entirely. Although Kohut emphasised the role of and need for selfobjects throughout life, equating them with oxygen, psychological maturity meant increasing and preponderant reliance on internalised parental

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imagoes. As Kohut himself noted, Hanly and Mason went as far as suggesting that Kohut’s formulations may be viewed as an offshoot of Indian philosophy.’

Popular Perceptions of Egopolitics Over the last four decades, Indian polity has become increasingly unstable. In my recapitulation of the problems, rather than attempt an analysis worthy of a social scientist which I am not, I will view them from the perspective and experience of an average person, the stuff made up of street corner debates, college campus harangues or village community vituperation. It does not take a sophisticated content analysis of the print media to discern in the voice of the people a deep restlessness. As I recall my childhood and teenage years, I can summon memories of pride in the new-found freedom. It was the euphoria of Independence that sustained some degree of cohesion and purpose in the initial decades. There was pain, but mitigated by hope in the resurgence of an ancient civilisation. Vigour and vitality were to be restored as India awakened from slumber. The suffering endured and sacrifices made to achieve this end were reminders of how precious the acquisition was, and there was a widespread sense of personal and collective ownership in that success. But even at that early stage there was a foreboding, arising in no small part from the experience of Partition. The cry of the day was national integration, a recognition of the forces that could rive India asunder. Although not particularly new, modern Indian politics has been

considered factious; fissiparous, to use a word from the Latiniséd Indian political lexicon; and new political parties have risen with the manifestation of every difference. Perhaps from the time of the Aryan conquest and subsequent emigrants, India has been driven predominantly by centrifugal forces. Hinduism lays claim to having permitted multiple centres of power, and geographic regions of India have sought differentiation, politically as well as culturally. Equally important to this dynamic may also be that groups, taking after the traditional Indian family, tend to concentrate power at the top since the only option besides orderly succession is disorderly secession.

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Fissions in a political party appear to be precipitated by major ideological or directional issues. But the popular mind perceives fragile egos as the root cause of party-splits. The Indian political landscape is strewn with the debris of mauled egos and unabated ambition. Pre-independence India saw many such breaks, the most notable being the one occasioned by Jinnah’s defection to the Muslim League, and another by Subhash Bose and the formation of the Forward Block. M.N. Roy formed a different party, ultimately resigning from active politics under the banner of Radical Humanism. The case of Jayaprakash Narayan is similar when he too resigned at one time from active politics. Both Roy and Narayan shunned party-politics to devote themselves to fundamental changes in the political culture, albeit with differing philosophical aims and justifications. We may speculate that these resignations were a form of tactical withdrawal, attempts to avoid competition and rein in the self to protect it from further injury. Many other names from that era come to mind: Tandon, Kripalani, Rajgopalachari, etc. In the post-independence era, the breaks and splits have been innumerable if one includes those occurring at the state level also. In a large number of cases, failures in rising to the top position in the party, especially the ruling party, has been a palpable reason. Even the Communist party, with the ideals that embrace the whole world (and in power at the state level from time to time) has been beset with factionalism, to be sure under the name of philosophical differences. Invariably the tensions between contending leaders and factions have failed to resolve, a reciprocal failure in accommodation. One might say that it is as much a matter of refusal to play second fiddle on the part of the contender as much as it is the ascendant’s obstinancy in not giving the other a share in power or platform, or at least a deserved due. Of course such stand-offs have been prevented when the apparent leader has been able to assuage the hurt, save the self-esteem of the competitor, and provide at least for face-saving as the popular refrain goes. The contenders, on their part, have reciprocated with accommodation, at least overtly, and biding for time. And then there are those factions in which the split is not actual but virtual; some other force holding them together in name only. These situations remind one of joint family arrangement between brothers who have their own families (wife and children) and therefore their own interests,

tensions being held just below the surface as long as the patriarch is alive and has not lost all effectiveness.

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At the popular level most political wrangling is understood as a play for power. Indian masses, and not just the elite they say, are politically aware and involved. It would be more accurate to state that popular fascination with power is unbound. Who.is in power, who has been ousted, how much power is wielded by a particular politician, and who has been outmanoeuvred is an integral part of the calculus of power people avidly monitor. It is relevant to note that in such debates each is an expert; debates are marked by a multiplicity of opinions, none cedes a point of view and defeat in an argument is humiliation. Another problem, that of public morality, is not a province of the politician alone. There is widespread recognition, and again this is not new, that a moral code of conduct applies differently to private and public arenas of belief and conduct. Religiosity, and the ethics that flow from it, are matters of conduct that have narrow and specific orbits, extending beyond the person along traditional and organic lines. In the private world these injunctions emphasise behaviour over intentions, suggesting that an actor’s consciousness is often at variance with his or her actions. One performs one’s tasks and behaves according to propriety even when these are unpleasant, as the message of the Gita goes. In the public arena these injunctions become more flexible, the only deterrent is the fear of being found out. Such then are the grounds of morality from which easily spring collusion and conspiracy, and ideals that are professed but divorced from action. I believe that an Indian has an intuitive grasp of thinly veiled rivalries, jealousies and ambitiousness. This talent is acquired in the traditional family, and even when there is neither courage nor strength to split-off, misgivings are harboured and secret wishes are kept inflamed. There is also the expectation that leaders should behave in ways that negate ambitiousness and are void of favouritism, that leaders should put aside their ‘petty differences’ to make the whole cohesive. Instinctive distrust, fuelled by the all too easy and common failure of leaders to rise above ‘self-interest’, leads to perceptions of contradictions, gaps between ayowed ideals and apparent actions. Erosion of public trust comes from repeated disappointments in leaders. The wish to idealise, perhaps overidealise, interferes with minor and human failures; the burden ona

leader to live up to heightened and emotionally charged expectations becomes onerous. As Raojibhai Patel once put it, “People may be corrupt, but they don’t want their Gods to be corrupt.”

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Public institutions are a ‘no-man’s-land’. The rules of respect for what is considered inside and outside the personal orbit are at variance with each other. At times there is a wide chasm, for example, between what is inside the home and outside it. Urban streets and rural alleys, stairwells of city apartment houses and the other side of the fence of a rural dwelling are poignant reminders. Government, Sarkar, is not seen as working for the people, and seeking patronage from politicians and bureaucrats is panacea to many problems. Like Hindu gods they can be fickle and capricious, and must be appeased. On the other hand, rampant tax-evasion and violation of any law that one can get away with suggest that there must be little identification with and responsibility for public institutions. It must be that the government is experienced as alien. Double standards have become the norm. Within established hierarchies an overt attitude of compliance and deference (even servility) prevails, when at the covert level there is gross indifference and often contempt. It is in this context that Gandhiji’s call to imbue public conduct, especially in politics, with personal virtues makes fullest sense. Vaishnav jan that he extolled was his model, I believe, for a political leader.

Indian Self Psychology If one is to make psychological sense out of this problematic behaviour of leaders and of masses, an indigenous construction of the nature and meaning of self-experience is a necessity. Dr. Girindrashekhar Bose, who had begun treating his patients along the lines of psychoanalytic theory, initiated a correspondence with Sigmund Freud in 1912. Even at this early stage a divergence had emerged.° Bose formulated a theory of opposite wishes; unlike the original formulation where these forces are seen as unconscious, according to his reinterpretation of repression and ambivalence, there was a conscious withholding and conscious opposition between feelings of love and hatred, emphasising suppression. As I said at the beginning, although psychoanalysis never struck roots in India, the word ego has caught on in public currency. The word ‘ego’, unlike the Freudian jargon but more like the popular usage in English, has become a part of the vernacular, is often used, as in ‘inflated ego’, ‘ego needing a massage’, ‘punctured

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ego’, and ‘egos that are destroyed’. Used thus, the term echoes the meaning conveyed by the Indian term ahmkara, a sense of I-ness, and almost synonymous with it. In the language of the Gita, this sense

of I-ness has to be overcome

and

abhorred,

is false and

inflated pride, conceitful and vain, an exaggerated sense of selfworth, an obstacle in the realisation of true knowledge. In the indigenous Indian self-psychology there are three categories of experience that deserve special attention. They are esteem (man), insult (apman), and pride (abhiman). The Indian words are from usage in Gujarati, but equivalents are to be found all over India. These, in my view, are the psychologically most potent and most valenced experiences in the self-experience of Indians, and play pivotal roles in the regulation of self-esteem. Interpersonal transactions in India reveal an acute awareness of the need to accord and to receive appropriate esteem. Rules governing such transactions are specific, according to status and rank, age, gender, caste or influence (professional, monetary or political). Specific transactions are stipulated that protect the esteem of transactors and affirm a person’s social sense of self. This sense of self-esteem may be regarded as the esteem in the other’s eye. In everyday life rules governing seating, feeding, greeting and salutations,

and

terms

of address

manifest

a consciousness

of social

esteem to be accorded and received. Alan Roland uses the term ‘radar sensitivity’ for an Indian’s vigilant watching out for the selfesteem of others.’ In addition, I believe, the hovering gaze is also a way of checking out how one is received by those in the visual field. To take just one example, weddings are occasions when the rules unfold in full form, beginning with invitations to the wedding,

adherence to which is a must for the hosts. The formal printed invitation must be complemented by a personal letter or a personal visit, and that too by various members of the host family according to the place of a guest in the hierarchy. The formalities of such transactions do not visualise a necessary correspondence with internal states of awareness,

and both transactors, the one giving and

the one receiving, accept and understand the perfunctoriness of the esteem accorded or received, although the pleasure is greater when such is found to be genuine and authentic. Public accolades, suspiciously exaggerated as they are, are often given and received with satisfaction. Princely court and contemporary public gatherings, dubbed ‘esteem-according’ (man samarambh), as a rule are

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known to be filled with vain praise. The ancient Vedic poets knew that even gods love praise, and as the Chandogya Upanishad says, people are dependant on praise and love it as they do being a celebrity.* The modern Indian lexicon has given rise to a new term,

chamcha—made famous by Salman Rushdie and translated literally by him as spoon-o, a sycophant—a laughing stock, known for his fawning and obsequiousness, and may also be translated as a ladle, as in ladling out of empty praise. In everyday life the action is termed buttering up (maska), a catering to someone’s assumed self-importance, of course with the expectations of patronage. It is important to distinguish between esteem accorded and that experienced by a person. Since the esteem accorded follows established rules of exchange, it is meant to give recognition to a person’s social standing; esteem experienced by persons as genuine penetrates into a deeper sense of self. The former is a must of social decorum, failure in which leads to insult; the latter being genuine leads to affectively gratifying mutual self-enhancement. In relationships that are not governed by rules of traditional transactions, for example, friendships, acquaintances and colleagues, the genuineness of esteem accorded and received plays a pivotal part in cementing relationships. Persons in such relationships experience each other as selfobjects, extensions of their own selves. If the psychopathology of everyday life were to be written, the sensitivity to slights, slurs and insults would deserve a whole chapter. Mythology, biography, folklore, popular literature and cinema leave little doubt about how widespread and vital is the experience of self-injury through insult in Indian interpersonal transactions. Insults,

whether

real or perceived,

wilful

or inadvertent,

can

result in narcissistic rage and disruptions in relationships depending on the degree of self vulnerability. Often, but not always, apman is the failure to follow the rules of how esteem is to be accorded and by whom to whom. Injury, occasioned by the failure to receive socially appropriate ¥steem, causes less severe and brief periods of shame, and punishment for such infractions are more or less well established. Greater disturbance and rage reactions reveal a deeply felt insult and a self of greater fragility. Insult from a person who has been made important, a source of well-being, means greater injury and a more deeply felt hurt. Durvasa, the ancient sage, is a classic example in mythology of a self experiencing an insult and the consequent rage. If the sage is

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not recognised on his arrival, or not received appropriately by the king, or given an inappropriate seat, he flies into a fit of anger and curses the king, the kingdom, and sometimes seven generations to come. Persons flying into a fit of rage from small slurs are often likened to Durvasa. As the myth shows, persons like this are equally susceptible to praise. The Mahabharata reveals many occasions which demonstrate various depths of injury through slurs and slights suggesting a scale of self-esteem from fragility to cohesiveness. Some have it that the seeds of the great war were planted when Draupadi snickered at the clumsiness and misperception of Duryodhana in the Mayamahal, and at the other end of the spectrum is Yuthisthrtira who is not easily perturbed by insults. In everyday life in India, the instances of potential insult are innumerable: failure to greet or to offer a place to sit, failure to rise when seated, feet on the table, smoking and so on. Even the occasions of group photographs, for example a college union photograph, are not exempt. Great care must be exercised in the seating and standing arrangements lest an impropriety result in an insult. Having to subordinate oneself, or pay obeisance to those who are regarded as actually lower, is a situation of chronic injury, as may happen in a modern workplace. When insulted and severely hurt, people forswear to speak with or eat from a particular family, or cut-off relations until appropriate apology is forthcoming. For insults experienced as grave, or directed at those who are powerful, men

lie prostrate, touching their heads to the feet of the insulted,

and women bow with a part of their saree spread in a begging fashion. A more abject posture of accepting humility (and I might add self-humiliation) is to place a blade of grass in the mouth, riding backwards on a donkey, or shoes on the head. Not long ago, Surjitsingh Barnala, former Chief Minister of the state of Punjab, was asked by the heads of the Golden Temple to clean the shoes of the members of the community as a penance for his role in the desecration when Indian troops marched into the temple. Although in a different context, for example, the reversal of the natural order as part of the Holi celebration,

Marriott describes how he

was made to act like a ‘witless bumpkin’ with a garland of shoes around his neck and variety of other reversals.’ In this sense not only is the injury grave when insulted but there is a strong tendency to hurl insults to avenge an earlier injury, or to declare dominance. A classic example might be the court herald, whose acclamation of

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the king’s arrival to the court is called bundi, which as a rule is a set of grandiose adjectives proclaiming the king’s sovereignty. The word bundi also means a prisoner; it was customary in the days of royal courts to force a defeated prince, taken prisoner, into the role of a court-herald, hence the term bundi. What such a pattern of susceptibility reveals is a self prone to losing cohesion, lacking stable internal supplies in the maintenance of self-esteem, given to narcissistic rage, and dependent on external sources of admiration for bolstering and boosting the self, and finding compensation in humiliation of others. Physical disfigurement, like mutilation of the nose and ears, is also a way of avenging insult and inflicting permanent humiliation. Such a self finds public regard and self-worth highly discrepant, almost always feeling short of getting the deserved due. Rage may recede but the injury is never forgotton, anger is easily reawakened, and the relationship may take a long time, sometimes years, to heal. This brings us to the third category—abhiman, swollen and excessive self-regard, conceit or vanity. The meaning most closely approximates that of ahmkara (a meaning somewhat different from the original, as we shall see later), folk wisdom regarding it as an inevitable cause of personal and interpersonal difficulties. Tulsidas, the medieval Hindi poet called it the root of sin (pap mool abhiman), and the Panchatantra” describes some of the qualities as unbroken haughtiness and abounding self-esteem, native zeal for unchecked power, ignorance of cringing speech, impatience, wrath, hauteur, etc. Those who are filled with an inflated sense of self worth find in a public persona of certitude and grandiosity, a compensation for their unconsolidated self, and covet public acclaim or kirti, the admiring populace becoming a selfobject. As a natural consequence, people with an inflated sense of self worth are more easily insulted and are more likely to experience narcissistic rage. For them compromise and subordination are tantamount to defeat and humiliation, their heads almost always held high regardless of circumstances as a measure of compensation for a private sense of emptiness. They experience a fear of being found out, a nagging sense of self-doubt, and are haughty and arrogant. Repeated admonitions through mythology, poetry, folk-tales and other moral railings against abhiman are a measure of the extent of this psychopathology. The more the strivings for a sense of self-worth and

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self-assertion are thwarted, the more serious pressure they exert for expression, and greater the proneness to vulnerability.

Evidence from the Classics The nature and the meaning of self and self-experience have been extensively discussed in ancient Indian texts, especially the Upanishads. A short review is in order for an appreciation of the concept of ahmkara, a self-awareness tinged with tragedy, a selfexperience of being unsated. In the evolution of the concept of prana, or the self, there are three different phases: physical, physiological, and psychological." 1. Physical: In the Rigveda and the Upanishads, we find prana as breath, equivalent to life, the absence of which is death. Prani is a living creature, and prana is the life-force of the universe, the breath of Purusha, the cosmic man. 2. Physiological: In this phase, the respiratory functions are elaborated. Breath is understood as pervading the whole body and presages the Ayurvedic humoral theory, in which wind is a principal dosha. It is also seen as that which connects and disconnects the parts of the body. 3. Psychological: When the narcissistic component of the self, particularly the consciousness of being a person, becomes an object of explicit reflection, prana is understood as that consciousness. Thus arise two kinds of self, one rooted in sense perception and one free from them: ahmkara and atman. The former is an agency of self-consciousness, the latter consciousness itself. The self-consciousness aspect of the self having gained ascendance, the life-function aspect of the self becomes separated as jiva and the atman becomes the true self. Ahmkara, the ego-self or the sense of phenomenal consciousness, is devoid of the power of the life-force, jiva, or the death defying and thus transcendental consciousness, atman, and comes to be equated with frailty, transience, dissolution, and is prone to decay. Atman, stripped of the psychophysiological functions, leaves

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behind ahmkara to carry the burden of the temporally conditioned body and its parts. The earliest idea of ahmkara designated a kind of self-awareness, the consciousness of being a person in a cosmogenic utterance of ~ the word ‘I’." The word is a cry and triumph of creation. But this act of self recognition, as the story proceeds, necessitated the recognition of the ‘other’ as well. In the Rigveda, the prolific creativity of Prajapati sprang from desire, the first seed, a wish to propagate himself. This act of selfconsciousness was an act of narcissistic self enhancement through one’s progeny, a falling apart in order to propagate. Creativity of this sort is linked with tragedy, and the experience of ahmkara, therefore, from the beginning has carried a bivalent meaning. In one telling, different organs of the body vie for personal superiority and pre-eminence (ahamshreyas)",and in another they strove among themselves, clamouring to do their own thing, and thus narcissistically preoccupied,were seized by death." The true self neither vies for superiority nor shows off. As both the Rigveda and the Brihadaranyaka Upanishada demonstrate, the components of selfhood include desire to be first, desire to propagate, the fear of being alone, and the need for delight in another’s eyes. This self is active, is wishing and wanting. Attachments are a natural consequence but they inevitably produce grief, for the need for admiration and affirmation are never completely gratified in a world of other ahmkaras, responding inadequately from their respective selfinterests. Injury to the self, in this circumstance, is always impending and one must brace oneself for that inevitable eventuality.

Developmental Considerations Self-esteem in India, as we have seen, is embedded in a social matrix and its regulation forms an integral part of the norms that govern interpersonal transactions. Not particularly Indian, the universal problem of maintenance of self-esteem is a precarious business, but in India not only is there an indigenous recognition of self-esteem vulnerabilities but it is held more precariously because the sense of self is derived from and enhanced by its social location. The pain and injury associated with these vulnerabilities reveal its intrapsychic character. Although it is understood that people

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exhibit a wide range and varying degrees of cohesiveness,

259

there

appears an intuitive realisation that cohesiveness can be readily lost. Various strategies, social and personal, are evolved to enhance esteem or keep one from losing it, although our culture regards some as pathological. How might we construct an ontogeny of the Indian self-esteem vulnerability? The origins of this characteristic, from a psychological point of view, have to be linked to child-rearing in a culture. Let us first look at what psychoanalytically oriented observers have to say about the culture and personality in India. Philip Spratt, who became associated with M.N. Roy and wrote for the Radical Humanist, was an early psychoanalytic observer to point to the issues of narcissistic preoccupation in the Hindu psyche. He pointed out that Hindu persons were not driven by guilt, self-reproach or remorse, products of the super-ego, considered by psychoanalytic theory to be the repository of values, morals and standards of conduct and the inheritor of the Oedipus complex. He postulated that the Oedipus complex, which produces a punitive type typical of the West, was not the Indian pattern. In India, he said, the narcissistic type prevails, love remaining cathected to the self and in turn the motor of the self. Although he overreached his evidence and painted the culture with an overarching brush, he noted that ‘Hindu parents [especially the mother] treat their male children with extreme indulgence’", and also that fathers generally maintain a great distance from their growing sons. His idea of narcissism was rather simplistic and failed to pay attention to the indigenous self-psychological constructs in which others play a significant role. There have been a number of other psychoanalytic observers who have studied India, notably G. Morris Carstairs, Ashis Nandy,

Sudhir Kakar and Alan Roland.'* Common to the first three is a description of early childhood in which mothers are experienced by the child, especially the male child, as both nurturant and overwhelmingly seductive, much after the images of Bengali goddesses Durga and Kali. They have shown that fathers are distant but powerful. Alan Roland describes the early childhood and the mother-son relationship in a more sympathetic way, where the mother is finely attuned to every nuance of a baby’s feelings. All of them describe an abrupt shift from an ‘unconditional regard’ to ‘conditions of worth’ for the growing child, especially the son at

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about the school going age, when he moves from the maternal to the paternal world. Carstairs emphasised body preoccupation, and a wide gap between intentions and actions, and Kakar, the vagaries of Indian sexuality. Nandy, in a shift in the plane of discourse, sought to enhance the selfhood of Indians by pointing to its erosion and the adoption, I may say, of a false self under colonial rule. The convergence of psychoanalytic opinion corresponds with native recognition of the place of male children in the Indian family: they are prized, coveted, and grow up without almost any experience of frustration. Not only the mother, but other women and maternal male relations also gratify every need. Mothers have ready breasts to offer at the slightest whimper even after the child has developed teeth and bites the nipple. What Carstairs called little tyrants grow up with an experience of untamed grandiosity. A form of indulgence is carrying a child on a hip or a shoulder long after the child is capable of walking. All this is only too good, and as Freud said, you can’t spoil a child with too much love.

But the other side of the equation is the /ndian mother. It is easy to implicate a seductive mother in an understanding of conflicts in adult male sexuality, but this is to ignore the tension in the selfhood of Indian women. It is not an exaggeration to say that for a vast majority of Indian women authentic selfhood is to become a mother, more so of a male child. A son is not only a potent source of self-enhancement but also ushers in a change in the family politics—the once lowly young woman becomes a symbol of power, the power to provide generational continuity. And she adores her source Of power and hangs on to it as a part of herself extended into the outside world. She cannot let him wander off away from her, nor can she tolerate being a bad mother that the child’s cry

accuses her of being. The problem is that the outpouring affection ends up being unempathic to an infant when he does not remain an infant. The developing skills and the unfolding capacities of the child are not admired and encouraged. Instead, if the child could remain a child or at least childish, he would be a recipient of maternal adoration. In other words, this kind of indulgence is regressive and promotes a false sense of power, not arising from the child’s potentialities but from being an extension of the mother. The child learns that he is not loved for himself but for being intensely attuned to the moods and movements of the mother (and hence others), believes that one can manipulate the caring of

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others, and is unable to tolerate being a second priority. As Lois Murphy pointed out, the ‘experience predominantly is of being with the rest of the family . . . the small child [is] rarely exposed to new experiences without the support of a trusted person . . . [and] provides an experience of kinesthetic and empathic richness’ but the aggression is unchannelled.’’ This also explains the intense sensitivity of body sensations, and why physical separation is traumatic. In such a world the system of affectional attachments hypertrophies, being emotionally entwined and merged with another produces intense pleasure and relieves tension, whereas judgement about inherent talent suffers. The ability to cognise the real situations is thwarted and the cognitive system does not achieve ascendance over the affectional. In the language of Samkhya, we may say that ahmkara has not been subordinated to buddhi. In adulthood the failure of those that matter in responding with a radiant gleam of admiration produces a sense of dissonance. Obviously, such a fate is more common to men than women, men enmeshed with their mothers who confirm their grandiosity; while women, unfortunately from the beginning, learn to accept their diminished selfhood. The cycle repeats itself when a man is unable to become engaged with his wife in mutual self-enhancement, and the wife turns to her sons. Turning to the realm of fathers, again most observers agree that fathers are remote, seen as powerful and yet unavailable to the growing son for an engagement. They fail to lend their strength to the boy to realise ambitions stimulated earlier. A young boy’s store of ideals remains unconsolidated because of a failure in engagement with a source of power. Thus, he does not develop an internal compass that can point to internal ideals of conduct. Heretofore, the boy was driven by contextual consideration; behaviour compliance with expectations was achieved by consideration of what pleases the other and what brings coveted responses of admiration. Further, when the child reaches school age without the foundation having been laid for interiorisation of norms and values, an internal compass, a ‘boom’, is lowered; there is an unquestioned expectation of adherence to rules of social conduct. The trauma reinforces inhibitions against assertiveness and initiative in deference to the family hierarchy and harmony, and leaves the child with a sense of anger which is suppressed. Thus impotent rage remains.

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The emphasis on a corporate identity forbids the expression of a sense of I-ness. A grown adult son avoids display of affection in public with his children, let alone with his wife, lest it convey a separateness, possessiveness or exhibitionism. But the father is indeed proud of the son, unbeknownst to the son. The father experiences an enhancement in his self and status with the birth of a son. In the relationship with the father the son experiences himself more as an instrument of his father, yearning to be intimate, aching to receive his approval which rarely comes forth. As against mothers, fathers are reserved even in private; it is not entirely clear why fathers maintain a remoteness, perhaps because familiarity is not conducive to obedience, unless the sons are reminders of their own mortality, the rollers of rice balls. The sraddha ceremony is a special feature of the father-son relationship, and it is generally understood that one needs a son to perform this rite after one’s death to assure a passage to the land of fathers. The rite involves the building up a body for the dead father with rice balls, to which are added smell, sight, clothing and finally breath; the son reconstituting the father and symbolically giving his own body to his dead father." The rite thus marks a reversal: the son is for the father rather than the father for the son. The son enhances the father by pouring himself into the father, in return for the father’s once having poured himself into the act of conception. This father-son dynamic is a theme in mythology, especially the epics. In Ramayana, Dasharath fails Rama, who in turn fails his sons. Father failure may also be called a major theme in the Mahabharata, where even surrogate fathers fail. Shantanu fails his son (Bhishma), who in turn fails his more deserving nephews (Pandavas); Pandu and Dhrutarashtra have to be conceived by their grandmother’s first son because their father died after seven years of marriage (Vichitravirya—what is in a name!);” Yayati, Pandu, and Dhrutarashtra fail as fathers; and finally even Krishna fails Abhimanyu.

Conclusion The major consequence of the modal development is that a person learns to cope with the inappropriate and unpredictable responses of others, the need for affirmation, by creating an inner and an

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outer persona. Two standards emerge: one for public display, another for private transactions and fantasy. The behaviour of a self operating at two levels of consciousness does not necessarily correspond to inner states; the actor and the action are split apart. Rules of social conduct may decree appropriate behaviour in spite of injury, but an inner awareness of hurt lingers on. For some, because

of a more

fragile sense

of self or the extent

of insult,

containment or suppression may not be easy. Here we may see a self in fragmentation, filled with rage or in a state of deflation, and when chronic, of enfeeblement. In the dynamic of self-esteem regulation of those who experience swings between feelings of grandiosity and emptiness, a common mode

of adaptation

is a split-level consciousness,”'

a condition

which finds comfort in philosophical justification in the concepts of ahmkara and atman, phenomenal and transcendental selves. Fantasies of grandeur (of wealth, fame or sexual conquest) predominate. The movie Garam Hava about Partition during the Raj, captures an image of the older brother of the protagonist, lying in bed imagining himself making a speech to thundering applause of an admiring crowd, who next day runs off to Pakistan. In a culture where a mother finds her selfhood uplifted and affirmed by her son, the two become entwined, enmeshed and the son is an extension of his mother. A heightened sense of power is not commensurate with untried budding potentialities. One side of self knows no second, requiring near constant applause and affirmation. The self becomes vulnerable to any rupture in close bonds, or insults, real or imagined. Failures in engagement with a father perceived as powerful but unavailable results in the pole of ideals remaining unconsolidated and unable to lead a person to a set of firm values. There persists a constant need for acclaim and a search for all powerful leaders. Hunger for gurus is common,

over idealisation the rule, and dis-

appointment all too common. Paradoxically, there may exist also a contempt for authority figures who do not and cannot measure up to the expectations of a hungry and resistant self. Leadership functions, when ambitions and ideals are sustained by energy and appropriate skills and talents, are obviously a healthy way to receive narcissistic supplies and experience an enhanced sense of self. But when the self is vulnerable, that is when ambitions outdistance talents or ideals are a way to compensate for fragile

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inner strength, a precarious situation results. Playing second fiddle becomes a task that erodes self-cohesion, and for that matter so does the capacity for maintaining an empathic bond with colleagues. Angry competitiveness, envy and self-preoccupation rupture previously held bonds with others. A self that noisily seeks superiority or pre-eminence is bound to fail to collaborate for long. On the part of the masses, leaders are over-idealised, seen as saviours, aS a measure of compensation for their own missing ideals. An over idealised bond keeps the admiring populace in heightened states of expectation, and ordinary failure can result in disenchantment. The loss of hope can quickly turn into rejection of the selfobject that failed to provide cohesion, calmness and soothing. Suspicion about the self-seeking nature of leaders is always present, and anytime a peg is found to hang a hat on, the de-idealisation of a leader is inevitable. Factiousness results from both ends, perceived failure of a leader to be genuinely committed to those who admire him and the second fiddle players who do not have a consolidated sense of esteem to tolerate a diminished status for long. Leaders who work selflessly, which often includes not seeking power, with an inexhaustible internal supply of self-worth and an untiring Capacity for being in tune with their admirers, succeed in confirming an authentic selfhood of others and contribute to an unfolding of their talents.

Notes

1. T.C, Sinha, ‘Development of Psychoanalysis in India’, /nternational Journal of Psychoanalysis, 47 (1966), pp. 427-39. ine)

A.K. Ramanujam, “The Indian Oedipus’ in Lowell Edmunds and Alan Dundes, eds., Oedipus: A Folklore Case Book (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1983), pp. 234-61. Also see for a Western interpretation, J.M. Ross, ‘Oedipus Revisited: Laius and the Laius Complex’, in The Psychoanalytic

Study of the Child, 37 (1982), pp. 169-200. 3. H. Kohut, The Restoration of the Self (New York: International Universities Press) 1977) pao

4. C. Hanly and J. Mason, ‘A Critical Reexamination of the New Narcissism’, in International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 57 (1976), pp. 49-66; and Kohut, Restoration of Self, p. xix.

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Personal communication.

. Sinha, ‘Psychoanalysis in India’, LJP. A. Roland, /n Search of Selfin India and Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

. Chandogya Upanishad, trans. by Max Muller (New York: Dover, 1962), in The Upanishads, pt. 1. . M. Marriott, ‘The Feast of Love’, in Milton Singer, ed., Krishna: Myths, Rites and Attitudes (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 200-212. . Panchatantra, trans. by Arthur W. Ryder (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1925), p: 23.

. P. Desai, Health and Medicine in Hindu Tradition (New York: Crossroads Continuum, 1989). . Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, trans. by Max Muller (New York: Dover, 1962),

‘In the beginning this was self alone, in the shape of a person (purusha). Looking around, he saw nothing but his self. He first said, “This is I”; therefore he became “I” by name’ (pt. 2. 1. 4. 1).

» BAU BAUS

6: 1. 7-13. TAS s215

. P. Spratt, Hindu Culture and Personality (Bombay: Manaktalas, 1966), p. 1. . G. Morris Carstairs, The Twice Born (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1967); A. Nandy, Alternative Sciences (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1980) and The Intimate Enemy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978); Shamans, Mystics, and Doctors (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982) and Intimate Relations (New Delhi: Viking, 1989).

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.

20. PAY

L. Murphy, ‘Roots of Tolerance and Tensions in Indian Child Development’, in Gardner Murphy, ed., /n the Minds of Men (New York: Basic Books, 1953). B.K. Ramanujam, ‘The Indian Family in Transition: Changing Roles and Relationships’, in Social Action: Quarterly Review of Social Trends, 22, | (1969), pp. 16-23; Alan Roland, ‘Psychoanalytic Perspective in Personality in India’, in /nternational Review of Psychoanalysis, 7 (1980), pp. 73-88. D. Knipe, ‘Sapindikarana: The Hindu Rite of Entry Into Heaven’, in F.E. Reynolds and E.W. Waugh, eds., Religious Encounters With Death: Insights from History and Anthropology of Religions (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977). Vichitravirya, which means peculiar or odd semen, could not impregnate his wives. This is also designated by the phrase ‘What’s in a name!’. P.N. Desai, ‘Learning Psychotherapy: A Cultural Perspective’, Journal of Operational Psychiatry 13, 2 (1982), pp. 82-87.

Twelve

The Politics of Application and Social Relevance’ in Contemporary Psychology Ashis Nandy

As the major Western ethnoscience of human

nature, modern

psychology particularly modern social psychology, has a strong pragmatic bias. For the last four hundred years, but specially since the Victorian times, the Western sciences have sought special sanction through technological feats and psychology has been no exception to this rule. As a part of this tradition, psychology has sought its raison d'etre in the additional control it promises to give us over Our human and non-human environments. It has tried to be useful by participating in the treatment of the mentally ill; in the selection and functional classification of individuals on the basis of ability, skills, aptitudes and productivity; and in the actualisation of some of the values popularised by other social sciences such as economic development, ethnic integration, diffusion of innovations, organisational growth and spread of modernity. Is this what psychology is all about? Should this be the most important part of the science? Is the ideal social psychologist primarily a social engineer? These are odd questions to raise, specially in the present disciplinary culture of world psychology, with its war cries of social relevance and social responsibility; and in the context of Third World psychology, pathetically trying to be locally meaningful with the help of an imported conceptual apparatus, confronting and trying to solve decades old problems which are meaningless in the indigenous life-world.

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As the science of psychology has developed, a basic difference between the psychologist as a social engineer and the psychologist . as a social thinker has come to the fore in many Third World societies. The emergence of this difference has been accompanied by an increase in the scope of the engineering concept of psychology and a shrinkage in the scope of psychology as philosophical enterprise, to the utter delight of the modern psychologists in nonmodern societies. By definition, such a psychology is a ‘useful’, relevant science, hard, down-to-earth and realistic in its goals, and dependent on the positivist criteria of scientific self-assessment and selflegitimation. Refutability, operationalism, predictability, reliability and validity are the central themes in the sociology of such a science. The philosophical grid such a science works with sets science apart from other forms of knowledge and from other modes of apperception. In its extreme form, this form of psychology is part of the unending human search for social and political certitudes and for knowledge which one day hopes to become a part, however low-status, of the amoral, hard, fully universal natural sciences. There is a continuity between such an idea of good science and the idea of professionalism or expertise. The former includes what has been called an assessment-oriented concept of psychology, in turn closely allied to the conventional positivist concepts of operationalism, empiricism and instrumentality—all of which are closely tied to the ideas of professional social research and expert interventions in social consciousness and processes. It is not accidental that the main justification for oppressive systems comes today not from the rejection of science and technology but from the theodicy of science and technology. Even when such a science is used for critical purpose, as for instance in the assessment or criticism of some forms of traditions, in effect it becomes a ‘secondary elaboration’ of the modern world-view. For that mode of assessment cannot easily be turned around against the matrix of values which has become

the source

of new

kinds

of violence

and

insanity,

embedded in new kinds of political pathology of everyday life in the modern world; in adjustment, normality and ‘reasonableness’ and in global structures which exploit their once-emancipatory roles (such as organised science and institutionalised development). On the other hand, there is the psychology which the modern world usually subsumes under bad history or half-baked biography

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and which the classical and ‘primitive’ world-views might subsume under mythology. This psychology is less geared to power (except the power exercised over one’s own self as part of the process of self-realisation) and less given to prediction (even though it is often cast in the language of oracles, delphic vision and utopianism). It is basically an interpretation, an exercise in suspicion and often, even if cast in the language of mysticism, a means of demystification. It is a psychology less burdened by the need to be scientific and it naturally gives greater scope to imagination, intuitiveness and playfulness. In its extreme form it may become indistinguishable from some forms of mysticism but, whatever its form, it is kinder to the defeated forms of consciousness and knowledge in the world. Simple-minded though it may seem, the primary contradiction today in the culture of psychology is between a science which is useful and productive and a science which is useless and to that extent

free;

between

a science

which

has

a weakness

for the

categories popular in the dominant consciousness of the world and a science which by default avoids the structuration imposed by such dominance; between a science which rejects holism and aesthetics as primary values while ordering knowledge and a science which accepts the values as relevant; and, above all, between a science which by virtue of its social success begins to represent the existing systems of authority and a science which even in its failures and irresponsibilities is a defiance of such authorities. The science that does not work (like unorganised music, sports and arts) has at least a chance of circumventing the oversocialisation of much of modern psychology. The science which works (like the management sciences and most of economics) can primarily work for those trying to control the consciousness of an iniquitous world. In sum, psychology as pragmatics or as a science of assessment can only be superficially critical, not fundamentally so. For when it is critical, it is mainly critical of the defeated and the weak, not of the victorious and the powerful. Psychology as a mode of interpretation gives us a better chance of avoiding the existing social categories by allowing us to use, as part of our scientific repertoire, our undersocialised ideas and motives. It has better scope for becoming a critical consciousness of consciousness and, for that matter,

unconsciousness. Ultimately, the two forms of psychology represent the difference between what depth psychologists call management

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of symptoms in its narrowest sense and ‘working through’ in its widest sense. An appropriate name for the positive science of psychology can be psychotechnology. Interventionism is written into its self-created mandate. Such a psychology has to try to alter for the better, according to the prevailing doctrines of social progress, the values, motives, and cognitive styles of persons and groups who do not meet the technician’s own standards of scientific spirit, in turn identified with mental health or normality, and the technician’s concept of accessibility (that is, the extent to which a person or a group is accessible to modern psychology and has access to psychological expertise). Intervention, thus, is seen not as a response to inequity, injustice, humiliation and cruelty, but in effect as means of supplanting the existing cultures, priorities and visions of those deprived of the blessings of modern psychology and its political ideology. As in the case of the exploitation of inanimate nature by modern technology, psychotechnology alters what exists, for the simple reasons that the alteration will increase control, manoeuvrability and power, or become fully accessible to science. This point can be illustrated better by using the by-now-shop-worn example of the reaction of psychologists to Joseph Weizenbaum’s computer programme ELIZA, which mimicks psychotherapy.’ The most shocking thing about the episode was not that respected professionals like K.M. Colby and others took the programme more seriously than Weizenbaum, and expected innovations in computer software to one day substitute the human psychotherapists and solve all manpower problems in the area of mental health. Nor was it the revelation that the professional psychologists did not see themselves as ‘engaged human beings, acting as healers’ or as participants in the experience of others, but as so many mechanised information processors. The most disturbing element in the Eliza episode was the fear of live human beings and their emotional life—the fear of the chaos, the unpredictability and non-linearity of human experience, and the attempt to substitute the ‘imperfections’ of everyday life by the ‘perfections’ of science. Psychology in this respect is an enthusiastic foot soldier of the global culture of science. The dominant concept of a useful psychology is a direct product of the same mechanomorphic consciousness, in turn a product of the history of mechanisation of nature, animals and humanity

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which began with Galileo and Francis Bacon in seventeenthcentury Europe.‘ In fact, the concept of mechanomorphism does not fully convey the potentials of this consciousness, which presumes what I have elsewhere called an induced double split in consciousness, a split between cognition and feelings within the person and a split between the self and the not self combined with the objectification of the latter. Perhaps it is this ‘dead man’s eyes’, as Theodor Roszak once called it following William Blake, which captures something of the schizoid, life-denying spirit of this particular concept of knowledge. Despite periodic self-doubts and dissenting voices, this mechanisation has gone on unabated in the Western civilisation till recently. Only recently have the exponential growth in nuclear weaponry and the sheer dimensions of the ecological crisis spawned the awareness that the world has become a better habitat for machines than for the living beings. It is now obvious to even many ardent technophiles that a large part of humanity, like the rest of the earth’s flora and fauna, lives under sufferance in a technocratic world; it has become, Weizenbaum notwithstanding, substitutable. The other side of the omnipotency which technology seemingly gives humanity as a species is the impotency to which technology has reduced the individual. Applied social psychology has dutifully underwritten these encroachments on the human selfhood. Not only has the disciplinary culture of modern social psychology become technocratic, even the models of consciousness it has produced often resemble easyto-operate kitchen gadgets. The main aim of the models is to facilitate intervention from the point of view of the modern world and to make it more difficult to intervene in the modern world from outside that world. The concepts of health (including adjustment and social performance), rationality (including the only forms of reasoning modern psychology grants, logic and mathematics) and knowledge (including self-knowledge and critical knowledge) have all been corrupted by the technocratic ideology and by the doctrines of progress popular in affluent societies and among privileged sections of the non-affluent societies. At one plane, the idea of a technocratic psychology could be seen as an attempted protest against the perception of psychology as the art of self-realisation and, thus, a new form of self criticism

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in some of the major non-Western traditions.” The earlier non-positivist tradition of psychology (also implicit in some readings on

Western philosophers like Plato, Leibnitz and Heidegger) embarrasses many first and second generation modern psychologists in the non-West. They see in this tradition a retlection of the decadence of their cultures which, like the dreams and phantasies of a psychotic in one’s own family, must be either hidden or explained to the moderns with the help of the categories of modern psychology. This can be put another way. Many Third World psychologists assume an isometry between their traditional cultures and medieval Europe, against which the Enlightenment consciousness.was a protest. They feel they too are fighting local versions of medievalism with tHe help of a universal cross-cultural psychology. They are unwilling to grant that an alternative, critical psychology of human consciousness and unconsciousness for our times can be built more effectively on these surviving traditions of psychology than on Lockean positivism; which though it started as a critique of medievalism became, after acquiring domination within the world of science, a non-critical legitimation of modernity and of the pale imitations of modernity in the Third World.° What is the political consciousness non-critical scientific psychology upholds? What is the politics of its method? First, non-critical psychology promotes, projects and sanctions as universal ideals those character traits which are conducive to the growth of modern structures, especially traits which link personal achievements to performance in areas where rich dividends are paid by competitiveness and the search for individual success; impersonal,

contractual, social relations (that is, skill in handling

secondary group relations); and calculated risk-taking. (The traits together invoke the imagery of the post-war cricketer with a welfarestate mentality used by C.L.R. James.’) Take for instance the modern psychologist’s cherished personality compatible with a high rate of economic growth. Underwriting such a personality, whether it is defined in terms of high achievement motives or the form of creativity Everett Hagen puts in opposition to the authoritarian, non-entrepreneurial personality or the non-traditionality described by William Kaop, automatically puts a premium on performance in the economic sphere when the economy is organised along non-synergic lines, as under early or advanced capitalism,

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Ashis Nandy

state capitalism or despotic socialism. In other words, psychologists themselves, under the guise of being relevant, hand over the monopoly of eupsychias to the repugnant principles of the global : political economy. Likewise with the personality patterns compatible with Western education, competitive media-based politics, and organisational behaviour. In each case, modern psychology tries to help one perform better in a system which apotheosises competition, success and performance and sees dissent from these values as psychological ill-health, infantility or primitivism. Not only is human autonomy, but human choices are thus specifically restricted. Second, non-critical psychology locates the control of psychotechnology in psychotechnology itself. That is, the political problems of technology are seen as soluble within the confines of technology. This not merely further endorses expertise, it banishes from psychologia theories of mind which seek to limit psychotechnology as part of an attempt to protect from interference and control the distinctively human aspects of the mind, and which refuse to try to supplant, control or manipulate aspects of human ability and imagination through applied psychology. Contemporary applied psychology has no place for what Ram Chandra Gandhi may call, a cultivated ‘cognitive indifference’ towards the products of modern science and technology. Some popular Western psychologists like Erich Fromm and Abraham Maslow have sensed that this problem springs partly from the molecular nature of modern psychology and partly from its managerial vision. Modern psychology has to reject holistic approaches to social problems lest they, the approaches, make the problems theoretically and technically unmanageable. Such a psychology cannot admit that in breaking down a civilisational problem into its Components, One not only makes the problem manageable but also changes the nature of it. In fact, there persists a widespread suspicion in psychology of the more ambitiously holistic theories; they are consigned to philosophy, declared definitionally non-falsifiable and as, what Alan Weinberg calls, trans-science.* Alternatively, an implicit quasi-Goedelian position is taken on them; and it is claimed that to the extent the theories are molar,

they are internally inconsistent or unscientific and to the extent they are internally consistent, they are molecular. Such theories, as a result, find expression in peripheral journals and in marginal,

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insecure psychologists who justify their holism by prematurely or falsely claiming practical results for their theories. Much of humanistic and transpersonal psychology, of both the West and East, is caught in this vicious circle. Third, non-critical psychology sees the psychological ‘health’ of a society as divisible and orients itself to the ‘treatment’ of the individual. Changing, rather than liberating human nature is the central concern of such a psychology. I need hardly point out that such a view is typically organised around the concept of an essentially sinful individual pitted against social morality and trying, against his or her nature and under stress, to conform to social ethics. Such a psychology is hostile to world-views which see human nature itself as the depository of the core human values which are deformed by and need to be liberated from dehumanising, oppressive, social institutions. Such a psychology, therefore, has to be hostile to any low technology psychology which rejects the idea that human personality is the basic target of social engineering and nurtures the ambition of breaking the stranglehold of modern psychology to allow freer play to ethnopsychologies committed to a more positive view of human nature and for that reason suppressed or marginalised till now as anti-scientific and retrograde. Fourth, non-critical social psychology is mostly oblivious to the politics of everyday life; it bases its social intervention on what to the moderns is current common sense. Concepts such as development, national integration, academic performance and organisational efficiency fall within the range of such common sense, and mainstream social psychology tries desperately to be useful with reference to such concepts. Common sense however, as Clifford Geertz’s sensitive work has made us aware, is neither universal nor random. Common sense is a culture and, like all cultures, it has definable boundaries which selectively exclude or admit.’ An easy acceptance of common sense clearly locates one in a particular culture in preference to others, simultaneously allowing one to accept the social and political assumptions of his or her field of knowledge unexamined and bypass all fundamental criticisms of the science as so much philosophy. It ensures that all intellectual intervention in society remains in the nature of minor reformist criticisms. The four themes in positivist applied psychology are held together

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Ashis Nandy

by a distinctive epistemology which seeks to depoliticise the ‘text’ of psychology and makes a virtue of the effort. Under the influence of this epistemology, applied social psychology rejects the ethnography of mind and views all theories of mind as parts of a prescience which has been or soon will be supplanted by theories of behaviour—the way some clinical psychologists believe that biopsychological and neurochemical constructs will one day make the mentalistic constructs superfluous. Even many depth psychologists articulate such a faith, and Freud in his weaker moments slipped into a similar physicalism. In other words, mainstream applied psychology continues to view the humanistic study of human nature—by this I do not mean humanistic psychology but the psychology which accepts the interpretations of human subjectivity yielded by philosophy, the humanities and the arts—as softer, less reliable and ephemeral and as the kind of data which cannot serve as the bedrock of certitude for the psychologist. Such a view cannot accept that while the ‘science’ of applied psychology yields relatively less ambiguous data, they are not as hard as they look, for they are more fragmented and less collected in realistic settings. The ‘art’ of psychology admittedly yields data which are ambiguous, self-contradictory and non-linear but also more realistic. After all, the human mind itself is often self-contradictory and non-linear." The tendency of non-critical psychology to overemphasise the science, at the expense of the art, of psychology is part of an ideology which makes modern applied psychology impervious to its own hidden sociology and politics. This ideology is expressed most clearly in the anti-philosophical stance of a majority of practising applied psychologists and in their belief that they need not be aware of the sociology and philosophy of their science, that all social intervention should be based on science, not on ‘intuitive’ social knowledge of the kind which goes with metaphysics. As a result, while some of the sciences which the psychologists call the mature sciences—especially the science which psychologists idealise, physics—see themselves more and more as parts of a new natural philosophy, modern applied psychology tries to move closer to the rejected self-image of the natural scientists. Yet, as Paul Ricoeur puts it, ‘metapsychology is not an optional, adventitious construction; it is not an ideology, a speculation; it has to do with what Kant called the determining judgements of

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experience; it determines the field of interpretation.”'' Because it sees itself as a technology rather than as a philosophy, applied psychology has become one of the least self-conscious among the social sciences about its political foundations. Its self-image, specially in the context of the Third World, is primarily that of an apolitical science trying to clean itself of contamination by the psychologist’s own values, emotions and motives. But are emotions, motives and values intrusions into the sphere of orderly knowledge? Or are they an intrinsic part of any system of knowledge? Elsewhere, I have tried to argue that every science is definitionally a political statement, that any psychology, the harder it tries to be unaware that it is an interpersonal political process, the more it ends up as an ego defence against the awareness of the process. Seen thus, the feeling states and goals which are often seen as extraneous to science are actually the very stuff of psychology which without them cannot play its civilisational role as the experience of experience.’ Here I shall try to stress only one aspect of my argument, namely that it is the psychologist’s selfconcept as a technologist which has induced him to lend his services to larger social and cultural forces in which he is not interested and about which as a result he knows little. In trying to make an instrument out of his science and of his subjects, he has become an instrument himself. He has not avoided politics; he has become an agent of larger political forces without any awareness of the nature of these forces. In recent years, nowhere is this instrumental use of psychology more evident than in the conformist, dehumanising, self-righteous worlds of education and management. Protests against the devastation psychotechnology has brought about in education have begun. The competitive, elitist, alienating system of schooling, the process of hegemonisation through education, the political assumptions and goals of pedagogy, and of course the use of measures of intelligence and aptitudes, have all become increasingly obvious. Fifty years after Gandhi raised some of these issues in the usual old-fashioned way, the counter modernist movements in education in the post-Maoist world of Ivan [lich and Paulo Freire, 1ave come back to the Third World via the West. In the area of management and organisational behaviour even this has not happened. As a result, applied social psychology has beautifully blended with the world-view of the organisation man trying to remake the

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Ashis Nandy

world in his own image. Modern applied psychology, one might say, has attained its self-fulfilment in the deadening certitudes of modern management. Even the Japanese success story has, instead of challenging the dominant paradigm of management, merely enriched it with concepts borrowed from Japan’s non-modern traditions. At this plane, the requirements of an autonomous psychology of the Third World and critical psychology merge. Twenty-five years ago the then popular guru of youth rebellion, Herbert Marcuse, pointed out that psychological categories were fast becoming political categories:

Psychology could be elaborated and practiced as a special discipline as long as the psyche could sustain itself against public power, as long as privacy was real, really desired and self shaped; if the individual has neither the ability nor the possibility to be for himself, the terms for psychology become the terms of the societal forces which define the psyche. Under these circumstances, applying psychology in the analysis of social and political events means taking an approach which has been vitiated by these very events. The task is rather the opposite: to develop the political and sociological substance of the psychological nouion."

Marcuse would not have thought such of the suggestion of Nigel Armstead who, a decade afterwards, supported the tradition of sociological social psychology as against that of psychological social psychology."’ But in a way Armstead extends the argument of Marcuse at the epistemic plane. For sociological social psychology is forced to reflect critical social consciousness; psychological social psychology is forced to seek an autonomy for psychological variables that exists only theoretically. Finally, the self-justification of modern applied psychology, which insists that all criticism should be followed by concrete suggestions about how to do another kind of psychology, how to change the existing culture of the science, and how to succeed in social intervention better." This way of viewing the problem implies that the tools of contemporary applied psychology are equally available to those fighting the establishment. The view is insensitive to the capacity of the dominant tradition of contemporary

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psychology to cannibalise, in the name of pragmatism, those visions which are outside the dominant culture of the science. Attempts to intervene strictly according to the rules laid down by the mainstream ideology of science, especially attempts to intervene non-critically, bind psychology even more irrevocably to the authoritative political and social ideologies of our times. Observing the rules of the game is not the responsibility of the defeated visions of human consciousness and defeated eupsychias. While those rejecting the dominant tradition of contemporary psychology may not have ‘practical’ suggestions to offer, they may have a faith to share. Good psychology, they believe, is intrinsically useful, not as an instrument, but as an intervention in the contem-

porary social consciousness. In psychology, perhaps more than in any other human endeavour, being is becoming and the personal is the social. A good psychologist is, and has to be, sensitive to the cruelties, inequities and injustices in the world because he cannot be otherwise. This sensitivity is given in the personality dynamics which pushes him toward psychology as a discipline, in his relationship with his own values, and in his relationship with his discipline. The professional pragmatism of everyday life that we see all around us is a negation of this basic social sensitivity of the creative social scientist, seeking expression in an as-yet-inarticulate, personal knowledge-based art of psychology. Such pragmatism is a negation of the inauthentic, pedestrian psychological ‘engineering’ which intellectual creativity cannot but negate. This is another way of saying that there are implicit codes in human consciousness which connect the ideas of authentic creativity and aesthetics in science, on the one hand, and the sensitivity and resistance to man-made suffering perpetuated through institutional and psychological structures, on the other. Attempts to overformalise this connection in the form of a molecular, prematurely applied science only disconnects the psychologist from the humanness of his subjects and, ultimately, from his own human self. For naive pragmatism, like its pseudo-negation, hard materialism, cannot visualise the transformative potentials of a restructuration of social consciousness. A critical psychology, if it does not artificially draw a line between individual mind and shared consciousness, lays bare this innate relatedness between the psychologist and his social environment, cemented through the former’s creative authenticity.

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Ashis Nandy

In the first case, social intervention is something that has to be brought into being and activity sought for; in the second, intervention is assumed and it is lived, not manipulated. It is to this other role of psychology that I would like to draw the attention of my intellectual colleagues.

Notes

. This paper draws upon a presentation made at a seminar on The Social Perception of Reality, held at the Department of Psychology, the University of Allahabad, some years ago and upon a lecture given at the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science in March 1986. I am beholden to D.L. Sheth for his detailed comments on an earlier draft. J. Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement to Calculation (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1976), pp. 1-12, particularly pp. 5-6. . The same problem has been approached from another point of view in Veena Das, ‘Science and Violence in Popular Culture: Four Novels of Ira Lavine’, in A. Nandy, ed., Science,

Hegemony and Violence (New Delhi: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1988), pp. 211-31. . For two non-Western views on the beginnings of modern science, see S.H. Nasr, Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man (London: Mandala, 1976), and A.K. Saran, “The Traditional Vision of Man’, presented at the UNESCO and the ICSSR Meeting of Experts on the Impact of Science and Technology on Cultural Values and the Quality of Life in Asia, Hyderabad, September 1978 (mimeo.): J.K. Bajaj, “Francis Bacon, the First Philosopher of Science’, in Nandy, ed., Science, Hegemony and Violence, p. 24. For a brief summary of the argument see Ashis Nandy, “The Traditions of Technology’, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). . Many nineteenth century Indian social reformers often borrowed heavily, for

purposes of social criticism, from the utilitarian and positivist traditions in the

6.

hope that they could expand the repertoire of civilisation. They failed to anticipate that they were borrowing from a culture of knowledge which was cannibalistic vis-a-vis other cultures. On the ideology of affluent society and problems of critical consciousness it poses, a brief statement which could be particularly useful to psychologists is in Herbert Marcuse, “Liberation from the Affluent Society’, in L. Hamalian and F.R.

Karl,

Thomas . C.L.R.

eds.,

The

Y. Crowell, James,

Radical

Vision:

Essays for the Seventies

(New

York:

1970), pp. 90-104.

Beyond a Boundary (London:

Hutchinson,

. A. Weinberg, ‘Science and Trans-Science’, Minerva,

1963).

10 (1972), pp. 209-22.

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C. Geertz, ‘Commonsense as a Cultural System’, in C. Geertz, ed., Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthology (New York: Basic, 1985), pp. 73-93. 10, The issue has been posed by many in terms of the confrontation between two rival epistemologies, the classical model of scientific method and hermeneutics. See for example, Charles Taylor, ‘Peaceful Coexistence in Psychology’, Social Research, 40, | (1973), pp. 55-82. Taylor recognises that the problem starts with the classical model claiming inter-subjectivity and ideological neutrality, even though it clearly prefers certain solutions and theories over others. . P. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. D. Savage (New Haven: Yale University, 1970), p. 433. 2. A. Nandy, ‘Towards an Alternative Politics of Psychology’, International Social ee

Science Journat, 35, 2 (1983), pp. 323-38. . H. Marcuse,

Eros and Civilisation (New York: Beacon Press, 1955), ‘Preface

to First Edition’.

. N. Armstead, in N. Armstead, ed., Reconstructing Social Psychology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), ‘Introduction’, pp. 7-27. . The dangers of such a philosophy of science have been elegantly discussed in the context of medicine in Manu Kothari and Lopa Mehta, ‘Violence in Modern Medicine’, in Nandy, ed., Science, Hegemony and Violence. For a moving statement of the philosophy of intervention with a built-in powerful

check against over-intervention, see Masanobu Fukuoka’s interview with the East West Journal, quoted in T.S. Ananthu, “Towards an Alternative Methodology of Science’, Lecture at National Institute of Science, Technology and Development, 13 January 1986 (mimeo).

Thirteen

The Health Scenario in India Jayshree P. Mehta

In the act of adopting the Constitution on 26 January 1950, the people of India dedicated themselves to the creation of a new social order based on equality, freedom, justice and dignity of the individual and, to that end, decided to eliminate poverty, ignorance and ill-health. It is an integral part of this pledge that we review our achievements and failures periodically in this regard and rededicate ourselves to the pursuit of these long term goals with better plans and renewed vigour. It is all the more imperative to carry out such an exercise at this juncture since we have less than a decade to fulfil the Alma Ata declaration of ‘Health for All by 2000 A.b.’ Acknowledging the importance of health not only as an end in itself but more importantly as a major instrument of overall socioeconomic development, the present paper aims to assess the current health scenario and the state of health care facilities in the country, by highlighting their positive features and major lacunae. The paper further attempts to suggest an alternative strategy to make health care more accessible and acceptable to the masses. It must be mentioned, at the outset, that the paper focuses essentially on rural health facilities, since almost three-fourths of the Indian population is concentrated in rural areas.

The Health Scenario in India

281

Current Health and Family Welfare Situation The current health and family welfare situation in the country is a play of light and shadow, marked by some outstanding achievements as well as grave failures in the form of unnecessary morbidity and mortality conditions. There has been a steady decline in the death rate after 1921. However, there was a marked decline in fertility only during the last two decades, particularly more during the last decade. In the past, the population growth in India has not been governed by fluctuations in the birth rate but by wide variations in the death rate. It is evident from Table | that death rate before 1921 was as high as 47 per 1000 population. Thereafter the Table 1: Birth Rate and Death Rate in India, 1901-1988 Decade

Source:

Note:

Birth Rate

Death Rate

1901-11

49.2

42.6

1911-21

48.1

47.2

1921-31 1931-41 1941-51 1951-61

46.4 AS.2 39.9 41.7

36.3 Sile2 27.4 22.8

1961-71

AZ

19.0

1971-81 1981* 1986* 1988*

37,2 33.9 32.6 Bes

15.0 1 sled 10.9

Government of India, Pocket Book on Family Welfare Information (New Delhi: Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 1990); Government of India, Year Book, 1988-89 (New Delhi: Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 1989), p. 99, Tables B.1 and B.1.1. Data on birth rate and death rate obtained by reverse survival method for the period

1901-81

(Government

of India,

1990).

* SRS (Sample Registration System) estimates.

Indian mortality rate started declining. During 1921-31 the death rate stood at about 36, dropping to 27 during 1941-51. In fact, mortality rapidly fell after 1921. The death rate which was about 23 during 1951-61, dropped to 15 during 1971-81 and to about 11 during the next decade. The spectacular decline in the general mortality level in recent times is mainly due to the sharp fall in infant mortality which accounts for about 30 per cent of the total

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Jayshree P. Mehta

mortality, for all ages, in a year. The infant mortality rate (IMR) remained at a high level till 1920 and it was only after 1921 that the rate dropped closer to the 200 level (see Table 2). The trend is one of definite decline, especially after 1951. The IMR, Table 2: Mean Expectation of Life at Birth (e°,) and Infant Mortality Rate q,, 1901-1991.

Period

1901-11 19V1=21 1921-31 1931-41 1941-51 1951-61 1961-71 1971-81 1980 1981-86 1986-91

Source:

Notes:

Value of e’,,

Values of g,/IMR

Male

Female

Total

Male

Female

Total

22.6 19.4 201.9 32.1 3255 41.9 46.4 50.9 54.1 55.6 58.1

2oeS 20.9 26.7 31.4 Suleg} 40.6 44.7 50.0 54.7 56.4 el

22.9 20.1 26.8 31.8 S21 41.3 45.6 50.5 54.4 56.0 58.6

290 302 249 218 190 153 130 124 113 105 NA

283 279 232 204 175 138 128 134 115 105 NA

287 291 241 211 183 146 129 129 114 105 94

GOI, Family Welfare Information, Government of India, Year Book, 1989-90 (New Delhi: Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 1990), p. 113, Tables B.1 and B.1.1 and p. 137, Table B.12. Data one", and q,, up to 1961-1971, are based on the life table estimates. Data on e*, for the period

1971-81

and

1980 are based on SRS, Registrar

General India. The data for the remaining period are projected figures. Data on IMR for the period 1971-91 are based on SRS estimates.

which was about 183 per 1000 live births during the decade 1941-51, dropped to about 146 during the next decade and to 129 during 1961-71. The rate of decline has however been slowling down, with the IMR standing at 94 during the recent period. As can be seen from Table 2, the average expectation of life at birth which was 27 years during 1921—31 had just doubled by the year 1980 and has been found to be about 59 years during the recent period. The male-female differentials in the mortality have also reduced over a period of time. This is an achievement indeed. But let us remind

ourselves that even this lengthened lifespan is still short by about two decades as compared to that in the developed countries. It is also less than that achieved in some of the developing countries like Sri Lanka and China. The infant and child mortality rates are

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283

still distressingly high. The country’s health programme has so far managed to bring it just below 100 per 1000 live births, a figure far higher than that achieved in Sweden (9), USA (16), U.K. (17), Thailand (27) and Sri Lanka (45). This is an indication of our society's failure to provide not only medical care, but food, shelter, clean water and sanitation for its women and children. Similarly, the mortality rates among female children and among women of the child bearing age are very high. Among female children (0-4 years) it is 34 per 1000 children,' with the maternal mortality rate being as high as 418 per 100,000 live births. This high level of mortality has had an adverse effect on fertility. The country’s birth rate is still high (31 per 1000 population), use of contraception among couples being very low. The current morbidity and mortality picture shows one major variation from the past. Famines no longer take the toll they use to, smallpox has been eradicated, cholera and malaria have been curbed, and immunisation has protected children from dangerous childhood diseases like, whooping cough, diphtheria, tetanus and polio. But in other respects the overall character of morbidity has not changed much. Poverty is a major underlying reason for this unchanged situation. India roughly accounts for one-third of an estimated 900 million people living in absolute poverty, which the World

Bank

describes

as a condition

of malnutrition,

illiteracy,

disease, short life expectancy and high rates of infant mortality. In this context, the Seventh Five Year Plan aimed at bringing down the poverty ratio to 25.8 per cent by 1990, 10 per cent by 1995 and 5S per cent by 2000.° The poverty ratio has largely remained unchanged in the twenty year period 1960-80 (see Table 3). It is only during the last decade that some downward trend 1s visible. About two-fifths of the people are still living in absolute poverty. In absolute terms, 222.20 million rural people live below the poverty line. As the poor failed to secure a proportionate share of the benefits of development, the slight increase in the per capita income had no significant effect on alleviation of poverty. Diseases arising from poverty, and its accompanying conditions of malnutrition, bad sanitation, lack of safe water supply, drainage or adequate housing, and low levels of immunity are still common. These include tuberculosis, gastroenteritis, malaria, leprosy, filariasis, etc., (which rarely occur in the developed societies) and measles, tetanus, whooping cough, bronchitis, pneumonia, scabies, worms

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Jayshree P. Mehta

Table 3: Poverty in Rural India Year

Poverty ratio

Rural Persons below poverty line (in millions)

1960-61 1965-66 1970-71 1977-78 1984-85

Source:

56.8 49.8 47.8 2 BS) 39.9

202.21 196.30 207.80 254.92 222.20

Abstracted from Table 6.1 in N.B. Rao, ed., /ndia 202] (Baroda: Operations Research Group, 1989).

and fevers (especially among children). It appears that although the average Indian may now live longer, his morbidity is only marginally less than that of his forefathers, and he continues to be largely prone to the same diseases as they were. In both morbidity and mortality, there are large variations from state to state (for instance, between a death rate of 7.2 per L000 population in Kerala and a death rate of 19.2 in U.P.); even within a state, there may be variations. The differences between urban and rural areas are also very large (see Table 4). Although the death rate in rural area has declined substantially, it is still around 12.2 per 1000 population as against 7.6 in the urban area. The IMR in rural areas is much higher (105) compared to that in the urban areas (62). What is even more important, there is a marked differ-

ence in health status (which is found to be closely correlated with class, caste and income) between the upper and the middle classes on the one hand and the vast bulk of poor people on the other. Among the latter, frequent illness and untimely death are still the lot of an average individual, and among at least some sections of the poor, there is reason to believe that morbidity has increased rather than decreased. Nutritional deficiency, poor personal and food hygiene, and bad environmental sanitation, all of which increase the risk of infection, and inadequate immunisation measures are still the most frequent causes of morbidity and mortality, especially among the poor and vulnerable groups like women and children. During the last 40 years production of food grains has increased and we have also been able to build up fairly large buffer-stocks. But due to several weaknesses in the overall socio-economic situation, the overall

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285

Table 4: Infant Mortality Rate by Rural-Urban Residence, India, 1972-86 Year

1972 1977 1982 1986

Source:

Note:

Rural

Urban

Total

DR

IMR

DR

IMR

DR

IMR

17.4 15.9 13.3 Lee.

150 140 114 105

9.9 9.3 ef 76

85 81 65 62

15.9 14.5 12a 11.1

139 130 105 96

Government of India, Pocket Book on Family Welfare Information (New Delhi: Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 1991); Government of India, Year Book, 1988-89. DR: Death Rate; IMR: Infant Mortality Rate.

nutritional picture has not improved. The average per capita calorie requirement, as per an estimate of dietary intake in terms of proteins and other foods by the National Institute of Nutrition, is around 2,250. This requires an estimated per capita food consumption of around 275 kg per annum (about 750 gm per day). Based on this norm, a recent study estimated that food requirement would be about 240—43 million tonnes (On various assumptions) as against the availability of 187-90 million tonnes during 1991... A study by UNICEF showed that in 1973-74 about 38 per cent of rural and 46 per cent of urban population’s nutrition was below the minimum adequate level. With only a marginal change in the poverty ratio since then, little improvement can be expected on the nutrition front. There is little organised effort to improve cooking practices and dietary habits so as to better utilise the available food. Consequently there are millions of individuals whose illness arises basically from malnutrition. There are no medical solutions to this problem—the only way to prevent their morbidity and mortality is to make a direct attack on poverty itself. Government intervention, in this regard, has taken the form of special programmes such as the Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP), the National Rural Employment Programme (NREP) and the Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme (RLEGP). While IRDP aims at endowing the identified poor with some assets which can generate income through self-employment, NREP and RLEGP seek to generate gainful employment for unemployed and underemployed persons in rural areas through the creation of productive

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Jayshree P. Mehta

community assets. Besides, there are other programmes. Evaluation by the Planning Commission, banking institutions and independent agencies has shown that the objectives of the programmes are not being fulfilled to the desired extent—there have been deficiencies and weaknesses in the implementation of these programmes.’ As such, the results achieved on this front are at best marginal. As mentioned earlier, there is some evidence to show that the percentage of people below the poverty line may have declined, although there is no doubt that their absolute number has increased substantially. From the nutritional point of view ours is a dual society, consisting of a small group of the well-fed and a very large group of the undernourished. The upper classes and income groups have no shortage of food and are even becoming prone to diseases of affluence and overeating which one finds in developed countries. On the other hand, malnutrition is widespread among the poor, its severe forms being found among vulnerable groups like agricultural labourers, scheduled castes and schedule tribes, urban slum dwellers, etc. Very little has been achieved in remedying this basic evil and in creating a more egalitarian economic and social structure.

The Morbidity Situation A good deal has been done for the control of communicable diseases. But the main battle still seems to he ahead. Malaria which was almost eradicated has staged a comeback with a vengeance. Tuberculosis, essentially a disease of poverty, still takes a toll of about 500,000 lives a year. It is estimated that there are 8 million active cases of tuberculosis in the country, of which approximately 2 million are believed to be infective sputum-positive cases. The population at risk of contracting filariasis has increased. Leprosy still continues to rage. India has one-third of the leprosyaffected persons in the world and about half of its population is susceptible to the disease. Cholera, as stated earlier, has been significantly reduced but other water-borne diseases still account for a large proportion of morbidity and mortality, especially amongst children. Acute diarrhoeal diseases alone are believed to take away 1.5 million lives each year. Sexually transmitted diseases are also on the increase. Tetanus, diphtheria and rabies are not yet

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287

under control. We now face a real threat from yet another disease, AIDS, for which there is no cure available at present.

Environment, Sanitation and Hygiene In so far as improvement of the environment is concerned, the record of our performance is even more dismal and the little that has been achieved seems almost of microscopic proportion against the gigantic tasks before the country. About 80 per cent of the urban population has been provided with protected water supply. But as of today, only one village out of ten has safe drinking water and only one village out of five has adequate water supply facilities. Conditions regarding drainage and sewerage treatment are worse. Out of a total of 3,119 cities and towns only 217, with 34 per cent of urban population, have some type of sewage disposal facilities, and it is estimated that 7 million out of 40 million urban households still use the open ground for defecation. In rural areas, virtually nothing has been done to tackle this grave situation and only a negligible proportion of the rural population (2 per cent) has been provided with sanitary latrines. The large expansion in modern industry in the post-independence period has created a new source of pollution, industrial wastes, and no adequate steps have yet been taken to control it. The country thus carries the double burden of the microbial pollution of the environment due to underdevelopment and chemical pollution due to industrial activity.

Health Education Literacy is a powerful tool in raising consciousness and increasing knowledge of various aspects of life. Though the level of total literacy has increased over a period of time, it is still low (43.3 per cent), that of females being just 32.9 per cent. Health education therefore assumes great importance to make people aware of the forces that threaten their lives, the ways to manage them, and the preventive measures needed to minimise the incidence of illness. While health education has been envisaged to be the primary responsibility of the grassroots level workers, very little has been done in actual practice due to various reasons, The recent use

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Jayshree P. Mehta

of mass media, particularly radio and TV, in the promotion of health and family welfare messages is a step in the right direction, although its reach is restricted. However, these means cannot match the benefits accrued from personal contact. The present non-formal adult education programme can very easily include a health education component to fill the existing void.

Health Care Facilities: An Update To ensure a healthy life, it is absolutely essential to prevent or at least minimise the incidence of ill-health, to alleviate unavoidable pain and to strive constantly to modify extraneaous living conditions to enable individuals to live a full and active life. The provision of health care therefore should be such that it addresses those very aspects that threaten the lives of individuals. Public health care should be supportive to local communities in their endeavour to create and maintain conditions that promote the health of their people. Unfortunately, in our enthusiasm to provide the best for our people, we look to the West, even with regard to the provision of health care, ignoring the domestic requirements. Our medical and health systems, inherited from the British, are characterised by several disturbing features. An evaluation has concluded that ‘the imported and inappropriate model of health services is top heavy, over centralised, heavily curative in its approach, urban and elite oriented, costly and dependency creating.” Furthermore, the progress of modern medicine has unfortunately led to a devaluation of the traditional medical systems. It has also created a widespread fascination with new and ‘magical’ ways of dealing with ill-health rather than instilling in people the basic value of preventing illness itself. It must also be mentioned that the medical establishment (that is, the practitioners, clinicians, pharmacists and drug manufacturers) which provides medical care, is a part of the elite class with vested interests in aping the West. Since they act as a reference group for the common people, their impact is felt far beyond the field of health and medical care. A more basic reason for exercising caution in transporting a Western model of health care is the research experience of the West which highlights the shortcomings and limitations of medical progress. This is not to discount the value of modern medicine since, on the positive side,

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289

we have been successful in eradicating several communicable dis-

eases like smallpox, which had earlier proved fatal, and have been able to lessen the morbid conditions that afflict the masses. However, even while these campaigns against individual epidemic diseases are noteworthy, the anticipated decline in mortality and improvement in the health condition of the people has not been realised. The trend of decline in general mortality, as noted earlier, appears to have been arrested, and we are still battling with unduly high levels of infant, childhood and maternal mortality. In essence we have failed to protect the two most vulnerable groups, women and young children. The recognition of health as a basic human right, including that of women and children, and the need to rethink the basic approaches to organised health care led to the genesis of the provision of primary health care in 1978 at Alma Ata. The concept of primary health care to which India is also a signatory, was endorsed by all countries at this conference. Primary health care in the rural areas is essentially provided through the vast network of primary health centres (PHCs) and its associated sub-centres, which have their genesis in the recommendations of the Bhore Committee report. Right from the First Plan period, the emphasis was on the need for creating an infrastructure for the delivery of health services throughout the country. In the formulation of health programmes there has been a tendency to concentrate on those components of health that were considered to be more manageable, like establishment of physical infrastructure, control of communicable diseases, expansion of medical and paramedical manpower, self-sufficiency in drugs and family planning.° A disturbing feature is the low priority accorded to the health and family welfare sector vis-a-vis the total plan investment during the different plan periods. As can be seen from Table 5, while there has been a definite increase in terms of actual rupees invested, the proportionate share of health and family welfare in total investment for the country has definitely declined. This speaks volumes regarding the commitment of the government to its people in meeting their health needs. While the financial investment in health and family welfare is low, the picture with regard to human resources (that is, availability of

manpower to provide health care) is quite encouraging. It is evident from Table 6 that the figure for specialists available in the rural areas

290

Jayshree P. Mehta

Table 5: Pattern of Investment on Health and Family Welfare in Different Plan Periods (Rs. in crores)

Period

Total Plan investment outlay (all heads of development)

Plan investment on

Health

Family Welfare

Ist Plan (1951-56) 2nd Plan

1,960.0 (100) 4,672.0

65.2 (3.3) 140.8

—

(1956-61)

(100)

(3.0)

(0.1)

8,576.5

225.9

(100)

(2.6)

(0.3)

Seba (2.1) 760.8

278.0 (1.8) 491.8

3rd Plan (1961-66)

4th Plan (1974-79) Sth Plan

15,778.8 (100) 39,426.2

(1974-79)

(100)

(1.9)

(1.3) 1010.0

(100) 1,09,291.7

(1.9) —

(1.0) 3412.2*

(100) 1,80,000.0

(1985-90)

Source: Note:

24.9

1821.0

(1980-85) 7th Plan

5.0

97,500.0

6th Plan

(in part) Total 6th Plan

0.1

(100)

—

(3.1)

3392.9

3256.3

(1.9)

(1.8)

Government of India, Family Welfare Information, Government of India, Year Book, 1988-89, Table H.2. Figures within parentheses refer to percentage to total. * Includes health.

Table 6: Health Manpower in Rural Areas of India, as on 31.12.1991

Type of Personnel

Specialists* per 10,00,000 population Medical Officers at PHC per 10,00,000 population Health

Workers

Computed

% Filled

5.61

3195

70.4

4.09

Bog

86.1

4.40

4.02

91.4

from Rural Health Statistics in India (Rural Health

Ministry of Health Statement

Note:

Number in position

(male & female)

per 1000 population Source:

Number sanctioned

and Family Welfare,

Government

Division,

of India,

1992),

I, 5.0.

* Surgeons, obstreticians and gynaecologists, physicians and pediatricians.

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291

is to the tune of about 70 per cent of the total sanctioned number; the corresponding figure for medical doctors at primary health centres is 86 per cent and that for grassroots level workers is 91 per cent. While the doctor-population ratio meets the prescribed norm, the latter itself is not high enough to provide adequate health care to the rural population. A major failure of our health care system is the lack of involve-

ment of the community and the absence of health care evolving from the needs and traditional practices of the people so as to make it more integrative. In an effort to address this issue various schemes have been implemented to generate community support. The Community Health Volunteer (CHV) or Health Guide (HG) was one such scheme implemented. throughout the country designed to utilise the local community persons and provide them a short term training course in the provision of basic health care. The scheme visualised the HG as a liaison between the people and the existing infrastructure of hospitals and dispensaries. Several evaluations have attested to the positive aspects of the scheme.’ However administrative and other problems have led to its virtual discontinuation. The scheme brought to light the critical role that the community can play in managing its own health problems with some assistance and support from the organised health structure. Such a strategy lessens the dependency of the community and also lowers the costs of health care. Today, a number of non-governmental organisations have been entrusted with the task of providing health and family welfare services to the community through trained volunteers from the community itself. Evaluations of these schemes have proved that community involvement in this manner has increased the utilisation of health services.“ The foregoing discussion on the health scenario in India has highlighted the gravity of the problem arising from a multitude of factors like poverty, malnutrition, inadequate sanitation, poor hygiene, lack of potable sources of water, absence of health education, and more importantly,a heavy reliance on Western, urban, elitist models of specialised health care, which are devoid of peoples’ participation. The last has particularly created disparity, with regard to health conditions of the infants, children and mothers,

as evidenced by prevailing mortality rates of these groups, between the urban and rural population.

292

Jayshree P. Mehta

Thus, what is wrong with the present system is its fragmented approach to the health care problem. The urgent need of the day, therefore, is to substitute this approach by a more holistic one which addresses the people’s social, economic, environmental, educational, cultural, and health and family planning needs through their own involvement.

Summary and Conclusions The status study of the present health care programme in the country has brought to light several issues. There is no denying that there are several achievements that the present health programme can claim, such as substantial reduction in the mortality rates, increase in the average expectation of life at birth, the expansion of medical research and education, the development of specialised institutions and super specialisation, and the extended reach of health services including the establishment of a vast network of primary health centres to meet the rural health needs. The country has also made notable achievements in the control and eradication of communicable diseases like smallpox, cholera, plague and malaria. The family planning and maternal and child health programmes have made notable strides in controlling fertility and promoting better health of women and children. On the other hand these achievements appear minuscule when compared to the level of morbidity and mortality prevailing in the country today. We still have high levels of infant, childhood and maternal mortality, higher than even those obtaining in some of our neighbouring developing countries. A plausible explanation for this situation lies in the fact that we have probably failed to integrate health development with the overall development. Furthermore, despite the implementation of numerous poverty alleviation programmes, it has not been possible to reduce poverty to the desired extent. In the event we have been unable to make any appreciable dent in malnutrition, environmental and personal hygiene, and in controlling communicable diseases. Even the basic requirement of providing safe drinking water to the majority of the population has not been met, exposing them to the constant risk of water-borne diseases. There is no programme of health education worth the name to instil in people the value of health. Moreover, the present vast health infrastructure is still not adequate to meet

The Health Scenario in India

293

the health needs, particularly of that section of population residing in remote and inaccessible rural areas. This is compounded by the fact that the health care providers—population ratio 1s below the prescribed norm. The programme still has features of being top heavy, curative, urban biased, dependency generating and costly. The lack of community involvement in the programme is also responsible for underutilisation of the health services. The extent of the government’s commitment to meet its people’s health needs is reflected in the allocation of funds during the various plan periods. Though the absolute rupee investment in the health care programme has increased over a period of time, its proportionate share in the total plan investments under all heads of development has decreased. It is thus evident that any measure that seeks to promote the health of the people should be provided as an integrated package of health (including family planning) and development. Such a package can simultaneously address the social, cultural, economic,

philosophical, environmental, nutritional, educational, and health and family planning needs of the people. This approach will help identify the various needs of the community in the sustenance and enjoyment of life, like nutritious food, safe drinking water, adequate housing facilities, protection from environmental health hazards, prevention and management of illness, minimising poverty, and exposure to the wider world through formal and non-formal education. Understanding the value system and culture the community can throw light on how best to meet these requirements and ensure that it is done in a manner acceptable to the community. The participatory element should thus be the crux of any developmental programme, including health. The present health policy and programme therefore need to be suitably amended to incorporate these dimensions if the individual and societal health care needs are to be met in an effective manner. A delicate balance must be maintained among all these dimensions so that the fulfilment of one is not at the cost of the others. Health must become a national concern, in the sense that the formulation and implementation of the health policy should be a collaborative and cooperative responsibility of individuals, families, local com-

munities and the government.

294

Jayshree P. Mehta

Notes

. Government Nm

of India,

Pocket

Book

on

Family

Welfare

Information

(New

Delhi: Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 1990). C. Mishra and M. Hassan, ‘Poverty Perspective’, in N. Bhaskara Rao, ed., /ndia 2021 (Baroda: Operations Research Group, 1989), pp. 99-127.

. R.B. Gupta, ‘Basic Needs—Roti-Kapda-Makan’, in Bhaskara Rao, ed., /ndia 2021, pp. 70-85. Mishra and Hassan, ‘Poverty Perspective’, in Bhaskara Rao, ed., India 2021. . ICSSR-ICMR, Health for All. An Alternative Strategy (Pune: Indian Institute of Education,

1981).

. A. Bose and P.B. Desai, Studies in Social Dynamics of Primary Health Care (New Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corporation, 1983), p. 228. . See National Institute of Health and Family Welfare, An Evaluation of Community Health Workers’ Scheme-A Collaborative Study, Technical Report-4 (New Delhi:

National

Institute

of Health

and

Family

Welfare,

1978);

and

M.M.

Gandotra, N.P. Das and U. Shah, Evaluation of the Health Guide Scheme in Gujarat (Baroda: Population Research Centre, 1985), p. 114 (mimeo). . N.P..Das, G. Patel, U. Shah and N. Bhatt, Evaluation of Mini Family Welfare Centre Scheme—Saheli Project (Baroda: Population Research Centre, 1991), p. 39 (mimeo); and N.P. Das, U. Shah, A.C. Padhiyar and G. Patel, /ntegrated

Mother and Child Health and Family Welfare Project: Evaluation of an NGO Project (Baroda: Population Research Centre, 1991), p. 43 (mimeo).

Fourteen

Religion, Politics and Modernity Sudipta Kaviraj

This paper would make a case for an understanding of the relations between religion and political processes in India through a form of historical sociology. In doing so I shall make some critical remarks about the usual ways in which the two disciplines most concerned with the problem of communalism—the disciplines of politics and history—have actually gone about their analysis. Political scientists usually put the problem beyond any possibility of explanation by avoiding a historical perspective. Historians do usually bring in a longer term perspective, but fail often to disentangle this from anachronistic and presentist assumptions. The most common procedure is to speak of religious communities unworriedly in a language of majorities and minorities. This is misleading because, I shall argue, before the coming of modern coginitive processes, to speak of this language is inappropriate, and it does not respect the identity of the past to be different. Both of these are in their differing ways presentist views, the first distorted by its selfimposed limitation, the second long term but misleadingly anachronistic. It is of course assertable that all sociology is historical. But to understand what religion is doing in contemporary Indian politics, we need a historically oriented thinking for two more specific reasons. First, it is impossible to judge a modern social practice without some comparison with past ones, specially without analysing what a practice with a similar name used to do in past forms.

296

Sudipta Kaviraj

Second, it is necessary because of the peculiar temporality of social objects which populate our lived world. Practices, institutions, ideas are hardly ever homogeneous in temporal terms: their different layers and components do not come from an identical period in history. Like the material things amongst which we live, our social world is also of a complex temporal structure; things which exist today at the same time did not originate together, and would not disappear at the same time. To respect this differential we must get beyond the easy and misleadstructure of temporality ing impression of functional connectedness that simple contemporaneity imposes on them. To take an example from an idea I shall use later, one of the major features of modern Indian history is the coevality of the colonial and the modern. But evidently it is essential to resist the temptation to treat them as equivalent and interchangeable; and it makes a great deal of difference whether we see communalism as a consequence of colonialism or something that is linked to processes of modernity. If it is the first, communal politics should have lost its power after independence. If the second, then the continuation of communal politics after freedom, albeit in an altered form, would not be wholly surprising. In this paper I shall not try to offer a general analysis of the relation between religion, modernity and politics, but bring into discussion an element often left out of consideration. The claim is not that it explains the emergence of communal politics, but the far more modest one that without some consideration of this no explanation can succeed. An essential part of this story is to find the logic of modernity’s reconstitution of identity. This logic consists of two distinct parts or processes. Modernity, as is well known, brings in a new logic of self-determination, which means in this context literally, determination of the self, choosing what one would be. But again there are two sides to this act of self-determination. First, there are wholly new types of belonging which modernity renders possible. Identities like modern national ones were not available in a world that existed before. But it also makes possible, often even obli-

gatory, people’s ‘having’ their earlier identities in an altogether different way. Thus the meaning of ‘being a Muslim’ or a Hindu might change fundamentally, though the persistence of the phrase as a description of practical being produces a misleading impression of continuity. It is not as if people were not Muslims before, but

Religion, Politics and Modernity

297

they were not Muslim in the same way; or rather, the significance of their being Muslim was not the same, precisely because it was a social world which lacked this accent on being something. That world admitted a great deal of cognitive and philosophical reflexivity; but this kind of political being or reflexivity is a new thing. It is also worth considering whether the normal critical associations of the term reflexivity should be applied at all to this mode of political being. To understand how modernity transforms individual and collective identities, it is essential to reconstruct the structure of identity in premodern societies. Of course, in empirical terms, this can only be done by historians because premodernity may refer to very different things in differing social contexts; utterly dissimilar social formations might be brought misleadingly together by their common property of being replaced by a uniform modernity. But historians have not been centrally interested in this question till recently. Thus it is possible to grope towards some understanding of this by a process of negative inference. Since we know what modern identities at least descriptively are like, we can think out what aspects of these identities would have been unavailable to inhabitants of earlier societies. If we cannot establish firmly what they must have thought in a particular fashion, we can at least affirm that there were certain things which could not have figured in the way they imagined their social world. Among the many transformations brought in by modernity | shall take up only two. I have argued elsewhere that the introduction of Western rationalist education in India bifurcated the society’s common sense and divided Indian culture in a radically different

and unprecedented fashion. Indian culture had traditionally been marked by great internal inequality and distance: between the literate and the unlettered, between the practical users of literacy and its ritual users, between different castes because their ways of acquiring and using literacy were different. Despite the various inflections and articulations by divergent groups, it was identifiably a single common sense, held together within the confines of a common discourse or conceptual alphabet which groups used opportunistically for their particular aims. Erudite Brahmins and illiterate Shudras may offer prayers to their deities in mutually inaccessible ways (because the Shudra would not know Sanskrit, and the Brahmin would not descend from it into vernaculars); but

298

Sudipta Kaviraj

they would have shown an implicit agreement that praying constituted a vital and inescapable activity in their arrangement of social life. Each would understand the practice, if not the exact manner in which it was performed. Introduction of Western education decisively shattered this integral single common sense of traditional culture by inducting a new kind of common sense based on rationalist premises common in nineteenth century Europe. It created two separate discourses about the social and political worlds. This was reinforced by the symbolic association of these two conceptual languages with the natural languages of English and Indian vernaculars, respectively. English was regarded by the first modernisers as the indispensable language of science, legality, administration, and generally of the historically unfamiliar ‘public life’ which British administration had brought with itself. Bengali babus, for instance, warmly welcomed its unfamiliar principles, and imposed them on a society going through rapid and unclear transformation to disallow access to women and the lower classes. This created a strange dichotomy of inside and outside, of the home and the world, of the rationalist world of politics and the sentimental one of domesticity created essentially by generalising upon the experience of the middle class. English was regarded as the language of the outside, the public space, of control, of easy and effortless domination of the upper orders against the vernacular muteness of the women and the lowly. Thus the first Bengali babus spoke Bengali at home, increasingly apologetically. In the public contexts of their office, or in public discussions they discoursed in English, which in any case was also necessary for career advancement in the colonial bureaucracy. Subsequently, in Bengali and other languages of India, there were distinguished and determined attempts to break down this barrier and to make the vernacular perform those exalted functions which modernists had reserved for English. Bankimchandra and Rabindranath both wrote about science in Bengali and gradually created a syntax more suited to modern discursive reasoning; the great significance of these performances was to prove that one could engage in intellectual modernity in vernaculars, to show that ‘modern’ and ‘English speaking’ were not necessarily equivalents. Yet, in institutional terms, this fatal connection between modernity and Westernism and English language remained. There remained thus a fundamental connection between

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the modernist way of conceiving and being in the world and using English, the basic symbolic connection between the conceptual and natural languages. Colonial modernity brought along a more silent but no less fundamental process of change. I have called it one of enumeration: the transformation of a small, approximate, tentative conception of the social universe into the typical modern image of mapped and counted identities. It is sobering to notice that it is the process of census which creates majorities and minorities and imprints them indelibly on the minds of social groups, much before democracy arrives. Besides, the majorities of democracy are, in principle at least, random and momentary, bound to change quickly in the exigencies of the next vote. The majorities of the census, given the logic of modern politics, hold a permanent menace, and correspondingly subject the minorities to constant reminders of an equally permanent helplessness. This process of objectification of communities, to use Bernard Cohn’s terms, had incalculably far reaching consequences for the making and remaking of political identity, including religious ones. To appreciate the enormity and the specific character of this change it is necessary to make some remarks about the structure of identity in premodern times. I have marked this contrast by a distinction between fuzzy and enumerated communities, using communities in the indeterminate meaning of any social group to which an individual relevantly belongs, roughly equivalent to the ways in which many Indian languages would use the term samaj. In traditional Bengali, before the language developed modern aspirations and therefore entered into an enormous search for sanskritic equivalents for English concepts, samaj meant any relevant social group, any acknowledged belonging. The word fuzzy has its own problems, but it has to do a lot of work in my argument. Fuzziness indicates several interconnected features indicating a lack of clarity or objectification in terms of space and the geographical distribution of social groups. It also indicates unclarity in terms of numbers. In traditional society, although one vaisnava would recognise another and thus feel closer to him than to others, they had no means of asking and of knowing how many of them existed and what they could do for their common benefit by undertaking concerted actions. While their conceptual apparatus had considerable precision for identifying themselves and others, its precision was not adapted to modern types of collective action

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in political life. It is the actual possibility of such collective action or the threat of their imminent mobilisation that constitutes an essential feature of modern politics. Finally, social differences were organised in a fuzzy fashion in still another sense—in their actual geographic organisation. Linguistic dialects illustrate this logic of difference. Although it is easy to notice that dialects change slowly as we move from one area to another, it is hard to point out precise boundaries between them. The organisation of this difference is more like a colour spectrum, rather than of clearly differentiated objects with precise linear frontiers. By implication, although such differences are real in a world of transitions of this kind, there would remain a fair degree of neighbourly comprehensibility on both sides of the border, unlike in a world of boundaries. Political conflicts are likely to be less intense, in any case, when the boundary between the self and the other is unclear. The major question about politics of course refers to the social relations between Hindus and Muslims as religious communities. It is essential to examine this closely for two reasons. The first stems from our hypothesis that modernity not only makes new identities possible, it does not leave older ones alone. Indeed, identities which existed in a different mode earlier undergo a crucial though often undeclared transformation, becoming old identities of a new type. It is essential to ask if people’s ways of being Hindus and Muslims have changed. The second reason for examining this question has to do with the dominance of nationalist habits of thinking in our social science discussions. Some basic premises of nationalist thinking are so widely influential that they make us forget that these are representations of an historical reality, and thus subject to critical tests. Communalist ideas are widely criticised and rejected in India but this is done most often from unexamined nationalist positions. Its first premise is the connection that it establishes between the rise of communal politics and British colonial policy, an argument admittedly of undeniable plausibility. However this argument can be stated in several different forms. First, it can be advanced as a simple intentional explanation making this appear as a conspiracy of the colonial administration to continue its tenure by fatally dividing the indigenous people. Alternatively, it could also be seen as an inevitable part of the modernist reconstitution of identity which colonial rulers used to their benefit. A corollary of the

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nationalist picture is its usually flattering picture of the precolonial past. Nationalists sometimes come close to asserting that precolonial India had developed strong traditions of secular political authority. Evidence in support of this view is marshalled in three mutually supporting ways. it is often suggested that after the entry of Islamic groups, after the initial military skirmishes, the two great religious cultures evinced civilised curiosity about each other; and through the deliberate ideology of enlightened figures like Amir Khusro and the more complex rationality of popular religious imagination, there emerged in time the great cult of our nationalist imagination—a ‘composite culture’. Much of course depends on what we put into this ambiguous term. Nationalists themselves meant by this at least two interconnected ideas. First, to them, this process gave rise to new cultural forms into which earlier specifically Hindu or Muslim forms were sublated, and which it would be misleading to call by a religious proper name. One of the most appropriate examples of

this would be Hindustani classical music. Second, they also mean by a composite culture the habitually peaceable existence of the two communities without much persistent hindrance to each other’s religious observances, and the appointment of individuals from both communities into administrative positions, which were observable features of precolonial history. But what is particularly misleading is the extreme implication often carried with this view that medieval, especially Mughal, India had developed a secular public space, and this was disrupted by malicious colonial practice. Colonial policy was driven no doubt by less than idealistic motives, but equally surely, there was no prior public space and secularism for colonialism to destroy. The actual historical record would fit a somewhat modified picture of the relations between communities. Indian society was characterised by a type of social organisation (this is an argument running through such diverse thinkers as Marx to Tagore) which accorded to the state less centrality than the standard European practice. The state that existed in this kind of marginality to the social organisation of castes was moreover a segmentary structure without a clear locus of sovereign power. Political authority was segmented between local structures of power, based on control over land and resources of temples, regional kingdoms, which despite constantly fluctuating frontiers had some stable cultural

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significations, and a distant, grand, occasional empire whose existence was both spectacular and marginal at the same time. The essential productive and ritual order of castes did not depend on the state’s sanction directly, and therefore, by corollary, it was not within the state’s power to destroy. The longevity of the caste system has been attributed sometimes to its relative autonomy from the political order. The insecure destiny of the states in India did not affect the stability of the productive order of castes. The very different rhythms of the political and productive arrangements in Indian society amply demonstrate this fact. Thus the state can be said metaphorically to occupy a central place on the high ground in the middle of a circle of local communities which continued their quotidian existence without much assistance or interference from the political authority. Historically, Hindu society had shown a peculiar ability to absorb and culturally assimilate groups which entered its fold from outside, even with military power. Islam was the first exception. Islamic groups had much greater cultural self-confidence, and clearer self-recognition in terms of doctrines and observances. This prevented an absorption into Hindu society in the treacherously insidious way that had been the common fate of earlier intruders. But Indian Islam eventually developed many peculiarities which must be put down to its constant transactive relation with indigenous religious forms. (It is misleading for several reasons to call this indigenous religion Hinduism;

Al Biruni for instance calls it a Brahminical

religion

which is indeed a much better, sociological, description.) The fact that political authority lay with Islamic groups made it impossible for Brahminical society to ignore it entirely. Thus the insidious aggrandisement of Hindu religious practice, which dissolved other social identities without their realising it, did not succeed against the Islamic culture. Gradually, indigenous society allowed the two types of Islamic groups—the military entrants and the large masses of indigenous converts—to settle down into exclusive groups or circles of their own, obeying in an indirect sense the exclusivistic logic of the Hindu social order. This also allowed Hindus to treat Muslims specialising in particular trades or crafts as quasi-castes, religious identity for themselves and caste for others, which assisted this absorption into the segmentary circle-of-circles structure. Nationalist thinking represented this process somewhat one-sidedly, emphasising in effect a self-congratulatory view of Hindu tolerance, and

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implying that a secular public sphere had emerged in precolonial India. Since Muslim ruling dynasties came to control the upper layers of political authority (and under their rule the uppermost layer of the empires became distinctly more stable and substantial), but Hindu groups controlled commercial, craft and other productive practices, this required from both groups an effective protocol of transactive relations for the prosecution of everyday business. But it is a typically modernist misjudgment to believe that such transactions in mundane matters like commerce and administration formed the base of a culture which became wholly mixed in every respect. Evidently, there were some well understood rules of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ realms, and the transactions were strictly restricted to the outside ones. The familial and domestic space, which is the most intimate, sacred, and fundamental for group selfidentity, remained entirely exclusive in the manner of the dominant logic of caste society. Also, because the mundane is less important than the sacred for premodern mentalities, the significance of such transactions was comparatively meagre. The sacred, for both communities, remained largely exclusive and unmerged, and intolerant of excessive contact, despite the efforts of the remarkable line of bhakti saints and sufi mystics to produce syncretic forms. Their aesthetic achievements were more substantial than their social influence. But their extraordinariness consists precisely in the rarity of what they attempted and achieved rather than their ability to restructure everyday practices on a general scale. Rather, orthodox Hinduism succeeded in most cases in reabsorbing these reform religions and bringing them back into a slightly modified caste order. Thus, because the sacral was higher than the mundane, the temple and the mosque, the household puja and namaz remained more significant than the market and the court; and these interactions did not result in the creation of a public space under the state’s control. The neigbourliness of the two communities remained a back to back phenomenon—which can be a meaning of the term composite culture. In religious matters the two communities used their most powerful weapons against their competitors. Islam’s egalitarian appeal to the lower castes in the Hindu order was sought to be answered by the Hindus by imposing the whole series of humiliating disabilities of untouchablity on the convert. Islamic orthodoxy also often mounted pressure on rulers for more energetic

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conversion of infidels, which most of the statesmanly princes ignored. The two communities retained their distinctness unlike, say, in England where Normans and Saxons mixed into a distinctly new indiscernible identity. Yet the historical record seems to indicate a remarkably low degree of organised violence, if we do not count the violence necessarily accompanying princely wars. Nationalist history in India put this down to the principles of unity in diversity, or mutual tolerance, and thus a conscious decision of the leaders to create a composite culture. I feel this was more due to the logic of social organisation and the fuzziness of the world of communities. Religious difference might have given rise to social conflict, but the social world was not structured in a way that these could not assume forms of modern violence. Colonialism brought into this world of small scale the rationalist logic of enumeration in the two related processes of census and

mapping. Originally, this was associated with the effort of colonial administrators to have a better understanding of their political task; but its unintended

consequences

were

far reaching.

It funda-

mentally altered the logic of community identities. Members of social groups and communities are counted with a terrifying finality, and later with the greater statistical virtuosity of the modern state even their rates of growth established. The spatial distribution of communities became clear, along with the bewildering diversity of identities in which people could place themselves. Indeed, one of the features of a modern condition is the relative deliberateness with which people can choose their identities, can decide who they are. The change that modernity brings to identity is paradoxical. Traditional identities like caste and religion are altered by the forces of modernity, and especially the demands of the modern politics of numbers. But it is a new type of identity, entirely produced by the modern imagination, which submerges them all—the new, constructed, willed, imagined community of the nation. Other identities are still at work inside this process of apparent submergence: the power of the religious sense of violation in Indian nationalism should not be underestimated. It is not only the putative nation which feels strengthened by this counting process; all other traditional identities are equally submitted to its power. In the creation of Pakistan we can see how religious identity can submerge the national in itself in a curious inversion of the Indian case. With a slight turn of history, all such identities can come to the foreground with amazing rapidity.

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What is generally considered the tolerant practices of traditional Hinduism had a deep connection therefore with the fuzziness of communities, their existence in a world of transitions rather than of boundaries, and the consequent overlaps between the self and the non-self in such a world. To use the language of modernity anachronistically about this world, it was a world of minorities, because this world was not governed by a form of politics which would make statistical majority a vital principle of advantage. It is deeply misleading therefore to suggest, even absent-mindedly, that there were majorities and minorities before the colonial enumeration process. After this process is completed however, it begins to have perceptible effects on how the people wear their identities. While it would have been misleading to speak of the diverse practices of Brahminical society as a single Hindu religion, after the social world is reconstituted (not merely redescribed) through this publicly available knowledge, there appear self-conscious proposals to restructure Hinduism into a more organised single religion. Initially, the practical point of this proposal was to oppose Christianity and the pressures of cultural colonialism, but at the centre of such proposals lay a clear appreciation of the logic of modernist politics—a refashioning of the community to refashion the world. Formerly, religious groups rarely spoke in the language of a collective interest; now they speak no other language except the collective advantage of the collective self. These changes are also intimately connected with an alteration of social cognition, the kind of necessary knowledge which people have about their society, and which they employ in their everyday social practices. Modern politics is a politics of numbers both in its democratic and authoritarian forms. It is necessarily related, to some changes in the cognitive regimes of societies. The cognitive changes associated with enumeration were of course the creation of educated Europeans initially, assisted later on by their Indian counterparts who were gradually inducted into this cognitive regime and its standard ways of conceptualising the social world. Though this reconstitution of the social world was thus the product of a historically specific form of knowledge and its practical application, its consequences were not limited to the educated or to those who had access to its procedures and intricacies. It transformed the picture of the social world of the subaltern classes with equal if not greater finality, precisely because they were not equipped with the techniques by which dissenting individuals could critically reflect

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on its political effects. Poorer, illiterate people did not take part in the adumbration or administration of this project, but they were equally subject to its consequences. Their worlds were also marked indelibly by these fatal lines of distinction. Interestingly, illiterate Hindus and Muslims may not be able to count, but they soon came to know with precision how members of majority and minority communities should behave in modern political life. Colonial policy contributed to a constant exacerbation of frictions between religious communities through several overt and subliminal processes. Administrative decisions like separate electorates showed the basic trend of British thinking on this matter. But subtler processes of redescription of past conflicts as communal differences also created the atmosphere for the emergence of communal politics in the last phase of colonial rule. The most fundamental damage to political imagination was done perhaps by the idea underlying Partition that minorities can secure themselves only in a state of their own, that is, only if they have turned themselves into a majority. The equation of democracy with simple majoritarianism is thus not an invention of the modern Hindu communalists, but a gift of British liberals thinking with appropriate anxiety about the future wellbeing of their colonial subjects. The sociological transtormation of the nature of religion under the logic of modernity is often seen as rise of fundamentalism, a term used interchangeably in Indian political debates with communalism. Fundamentalism is seen as a resolute retreat from the principles of modernity into the more comprehensible doctrines of tradition, a secure move into the past in the face of modernity’s incomprehensibility and sufferings. But this description does not fit communal politics in India, where it is clearly a strategy to get more secure advantages within the arrangements of modern electoral politics. Thus modern communal politics in India presupposes the existence of parliamentary electoral arrangements, or at least of the numerical biases of the modern state. Communalism,

although

it uses religion with great stridency, must be seen as an ironically grotesque part of the historical process of depletion of religious beliefs, of the process Weber called disenchantment. I should like to argue that traditional secularist theory worked on a simplistic, dualist picture of the historical process of depletion of religious beliefs often implying that rationalisation leads directly into a secular, atheistic view of the world. Clearly, this model does

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not fit even Western secularisation and denies the complexities and interruptions of the rationalisation process. In fact modernity undermines traditional ways of holding religious beliefs by educational practices and modern modes of social and economic life. But this does not lead, except in self-conscious intellectual groups, to a sudden rupture from religious consciousness and a leap into a secular mentality. What happens is a historical process of slow depletion of values. I shall try to portray this by a distinction between a thick and a thin religion. Traditional religious beliefs were thick in the sense that an individual’s religious identity was anchored in beliefs spread across a wide variety of levels—from large metaphysical beliefs about the nature of existence, to minute ritual practices in worship, like the wearing of the mark of the particular sect. To take an example from Benyal, shaktas worshipping different forms of shakti and vaishnava devotees of an erotic and youthful Krishna would normally live in neighbourly peace in the same localities; but according to the traditional way of thinking

about religion, it is unlikely that they would have seen themselves as practising the same religion. Vaishnavas would disapprove of the spilling of literal or metaphorical blood as part of the purification of worship. Shaktas would evince reciprocal scorn about the pale vegetarianism of the vaishnava sect and their love of explicit eroticism. Rituals and doctrinal principles again would prevent a gaudiya vaishnava (follower of Chaitanya’s vaisnavism) of Bengal from accepting a South Indian vaishnava as practising an entirely identical religion, though they would both worship forms of Vishnu. This religion is thick because in order to determine someone's religious identity a large number of criteria are apt to be employed. The social consequence of this thick religion is of course a great segmentation of the map of social groups. Traditional believers in vaishnavism and shakta religion would find it impossible to form large coalitions on the basis of their religious beliefs. The religion of the communalists is by contrast a comparatively thin affair, and

many

of its most

effective

political moves

must

appear ungrammatical to traditional conceptions of identity, sacrality and auspiciousness. During the shilanyas ceremony at the site of the Babri Masjid most political sadhus happily overlooked infringements of the sacred Hindu calendar; but one of the shankaracharyas protested on the ground that this showed complete disregard for the distribution of sacred time. This difference of

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attitude is highly significant. Obviously, the politically inclined Hindu saints considered this a relatively minor matter, and regarded the timing of the event to suit the political calendar an evidently appropriate move. This shows their transposing of the hierarchy between the two times: the sacred calendar is wholly subordinated to the mundane calendar of electoral politics. To the traditional believer, all such mundane temporal arrangements must be subordinated to the structure of sacrality built into the universe itself by its maker. The distinction between ordinary and sacred time is part of the structure of the universe, and it cannot be infringed without turning religion into its travesty. Yet, in order to be politically effective at all, the ceremony had to have a religious character, consecrated by the appropriate codes of language, rituals, mores and metaphors. By conjunction of circumstances, what happened thus came to have a highly emotional but depleted sacrality in which the invocation of the sacred is essential, but its demands are diluted, its rituals simplified, metaphysical ideas either wholly spurned or held with an astonishing detachment or treated as wholly dispensable. However, if this thin sacrality was used in the sphere of politics alone, its power would have been much less. But the stuff of which this is made is to be seen in all aspects of daily life in modern India, especially in urban settings and among petty bourgeois social groups. Education and the daily contact with the structures of modernity have irreversibly disenchanted their worldly imagination, and they have lost forever the resources for belief in the world of traditional thick religion. The best icons of this thin, displaced, depleted sacrality are the plastic gods placed above the windscreens of the huge metropolitan buses. Traditional religiosity insisted on the distinction between the sacred and the profane in respect of space, time, language, even materials out of which icons could be fashioned. Modern life has thinned down and displaced sacrality in all these respects in the most brusque business-like manner. The plastic deity is wrenched, like his devotee, from the habitual sacred place of inhabitance in the temple, and forced into an unsuitable mechanical interior. He is a refugee as much as his worshipper. Already the sacrality of the time of worship is infringed; he is to be given an often perfunctory devotion according to the time of convenience, during a break in the work rather than at those times of transtition (sandhi) which are marked into the

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eternal architecture of the daily cycle. In Hindu traditional thought there are also widely understood principles about the construction of idols, a grammar of materials and manners of depiction taken from the intricate disciplines of rasas (moods) and mudras (postures). Use of plastic is an obvious violation of this code of sacrality which suggests that images of God can only be made out of materials made by Him—stone, wood, clay or metal. The immutability of God’s presence is translated into the durability of plastic materials, placing it in the nondescript space between the sacred and the mundane. Nothing shows the ungrammaticality of this modern religion more than the poses of the icons and the predominant rasas their presence is supposed to evoke. The most drastic example of this violation of iconic grammar is the widespread depiction of Lord Rama in the BJP posters of recent years. Traditionally, Rama’s iconic image was that of the dhirodatta nayaka (benevolent hero) and his portrayal is in terms of shanta rasa (peaceful mood) in which he offers the ultimate assurance of a just order to men troubled by the confusing experience of the everyday. His life, depicted every year through thousands of Ramlila enactments in India’s villages, is of course a story of constant and unremitting provocation. But what he depicts, in that story of aggravation from all angles, is poise, unprovoked quiet, a sense of measure, peace and forgiveness. He is a restorer of moral order, not a perpetrator of revenge. This is why the icon is dominant over the narrative; the idol shows the principle at the place of rest of the story rather than the agitation of the episodes. That is the essence of the traditional interpretation of Rama’s extraordinary narrative. Hindus did not learn of the provocations constituting his life from L.K. Advani. Yet his proper image is shanta, because his exemplarity, his godliness consists in not returning violence with violence. Despite his victory over Ravana, the essential element in his life is not violent retribution, but compassion, karuna. In current propaganda material Rama is shown in an unaccustomed warlike pose, with an

uplifted bow, an arrow fitted to the string, in the very act of doing violence—albeit in the cause of justice in general and the BJP’s formation of government in particular. From the traditional point of view this wrathful Rama is wholly ungrammatical, a complete misunderstanding of the complex narrative and its iconic representation. If he returns violence with irritation and violence he loses his great calm and sense of measured propriety. Instead of acting

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like an ancient god, he acts like a modern politician. This reinvented Rama, therefore, does not represent tradition, except in a very problematic way. The political consequences of this process of thinning of religion are quite evident, because this is only a part of a much larger transformation of political experience. Initially the aspirations of nationalist ideology and its unrelenting search for the material advantages of modernity made Third World societies continue with the received structures of the colonial state. During the national movement, the colonial state was the primary target of political attack; but after achieving freedom nationalist states have not proposed a return to the earlier, traditional equilibrium of a distant, limited, non interfering state and a largely segmented, self-determining society. Indeed, the most significant feature of this transition to modernity is the relationship of the state to the other institutions of society, the struggling appearance of something resembling sovereignty through the expanding claims of the colonial state. In India, this idea of sovereignty was unprecedented more in terms of its domestic implications, than its external ones. Sovereignty of the state meant of course that other states could not interfere with its internal process of political decision-making. Sociologically, however, the more problematic element was the establishment of sovereignty over the ‘lower institutions in society, if we apply a misleading metaphor from European history. In the West, this process of crucial subordination of all other temporal authority to the rule of the modern state was accomplished by the struggles of absolutism against feudal authority. India experienced nothing comparable to that decisive historical process. Given the architecture of social institutions, the descriptions ‘high’ and ‘low’ become misleading in the Indian context. The state could not, by explicit legislation, reorder the structure of castes, the arrangement simultaneously of production and ritual status; thus its authority, though despotic in one sense, was not absolute. But after initial resistance during the colonial period, society resigned itself, in large measure, to the new relationship between the state and other social organisations, to its sovereignty, its right to legislate changes in the fundamental productive and distributive order. It is impossible to reverse this process and revert the modern state back into its earlier position of marginality. As a consequence, all types of social exchanges which happened earlier in the non-state realms, have now to be mediated through the apparatuses of the state.

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Social groups in India are thus pressed to deal with, and bring under their advantageous control, this leviathan, this large, strange, unfamiliar, faintly threatening animal. At the same time they try to do this by deploying their available repertoire of social actions and identifications. It is hardly surprising therefore that what happened in the political history of India was not a melting away of tradition under the powerful light of modernist enlightenment. Those institutions of modernity, like the state, which had to be accepted as part of the modern condition have been dealt with through a traditionally intelligible grid of social identity and action. The constitutional system in India therefore was consistent with the internal principles of liberal constitutionalism, but inconsistent with the self-understanding of social groups. The national state simply assumed that citizens would act as liberal individuals, but failed to set in motion a cultural process which could provide the great masses of people the means of acquiring such self-understanding. Naturally, traditional identifications went through a process of adaptation to the modernist logic of electoral politics, giving rise to, unsurprisingly, forms of political behaviour which are indescribable either in terms of liberal politics or the traditional operations of power. The logic of adaptation is very similar in the case of both casteist and religious communities. M.N. Srinivas had pointed out sometime ago that descriptions like ‘intermediate castes’ were ungrammatical in terms of the traditional logic of the caste system, since the jati

system was highly region specific. In the context of parliamentary politics however

these conceptions make eminent sense, because

they can help the sub-brahminic groups from various regions to fashion imposing electoral coalitions to press their common economic or other material demands on the state. Srinivas called them ‘monster castes’ to indicate, I suppose, both their ungrammatical quality and their great size and electoral potential. There is an historical dimension to this process which naturally does not figure in the calculations of politicians who engineer this kind of adaptation to the logic of modern politics. What are the likely results of such changes in the structure of caste behaviour in general? Would a politically strong caste become socially increasingly weak, and eventually, perhaps lose its ability to achieve coordination of social behaviour? Is it an ironic stage in the eventual historical dilution of caste as social force? The political use of Hindu religion is exactly similar in some

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ways. It is a trusim that Hindu religion has a sociologically decentralised structure, and it was only under the impulse of colonial modernity that proposals were advanced for a ‘semiticised’ unitary Hinduism. Indeed, the abstract self-description of all these religious groups as ‘Hindu’ was itself a product of modernity, proposed originally by nationalists who thought Hinduism suffered in comparison with Christianity because of its lack of effective ecclesiastical organisation. Still, this remained an outer layer of their religious self-identification, as people who would have acknowledged that they were ‘commonly’ Hindus, showed no willingness to adopt religious practices that were common, which would supersede their everyday practice as shaivites, vaishnavites or shaktas. The idea of Hinduism itself is quasi-political in origin, in the sense that people did not wish to be Hindus in this abstract sense until they felt a political need to do so. It is therefore easy to exploit it for overtly political purposes. What the constitutional category of scheduled or intermediate castes has done in case of caste identity, the thin form of Hinduism can accomplish equally well for religion. It enables its practitioners to propose the establishment of large coalitions, in the case of Hinduism indeed the largest possible one in Indian society. By its own internal logic, however, this religion must be fundamentally untraditional in several respects. Unlike traditional religion, it is not apolitical, but organises an impressive assemblage of world renouncing sadhus to assist in the winning of elections by a communal political party. It must also be utterly casual about rituals, or the philosophic or doctrinal aspects of religious life. It turns the Durkheimian conception of religious life upside down: instead of valuing the sacred side of life over the mundane; it is willing to make compromises on the side of its sacred practices for securing advantages in politics, the most mundane of all pursuits. Its iconography is vulgar and improper. But its menace in democratic political life is overwhelming, making it attractive to communal political groups. Since Hinduism is the religion of the majority, this makes it easy for its advocates to speak the language of democracy. But the critical Opinion in India has been more concerned with an ideological rejection of Hindu communalism and its recent strength than with a convincing sociology of its politics. It is curious, in the first place, that communal politics gained strength after about

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forty years of national government, not immediately after Independence. If this was entirely due to the forces of traditionalism, it should have appeared at that time rather than forty years later, during which period forces of modernity had gained enormously in Indian society and economy. This raises doubts about attributing its origins simply to tradition. Evidently, these political forces have much more to do with modernity than is usually conceded by the secularists in India. If this is seen as a process generated by movements of the forces of modernity, the affair becomes less puzzling. Tocqueville remarked in his classic studies on Western trajectories that although in the French case, modern democratic politics was accompanied by a decline of religious influence in public life, it was more likely in societies with a strong religious culture that democratic politics would show the imprint of popular religious notions. With any spread of democracy a certain degree of laicisation of politics was inevitable. In India as well, to speak in Tocqueville’s terms, the functioning of democracy slowly brought on a democratisation of society—the decline of the cultural deference in which the lower classes held the more privileged, educated ones. As ordinary people grasped the great significance of numbers in electoral politics, it was also not surprising that increasingly from the lower levels of political institutions, beginning with the panchayats, a new style of functioning came to be represented in the political arena which was less dominated by English language, less observant about the stipulations of liberal parliamentary norms. Since these politicians had no direct access to the knowledge of Western parliamentary styles of governance, they simply translated these unfamiliar, and in any case abstract, principles into terms more comprehensible to rural India. Since the sixties, Indian politics has seen a massive alteration in style, language, modes of behaviour, reflecting far more the actual cultural understandings of rural Indian society rather than the Westernist cultivation of the elite which inherited power in the Nehru years. But this was compounded by the forgetfulness and negligence of the Nehruvian state itself about the process of the cultural reproduction of the nation. It not merely failed to create conditions for a common sense in Indian politics, through which liberal, secular political ideas could be communicated dialogically to them, rather, its neglect of cultural

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institutions like primary education contributed to a further division between a Westernist English-using social aristocracy and a disadvantaged vernacular culture condemned to backwardness and self-deprecation. Ironically, the material benefits of modernity were gathered in so exclusively by the inhabitants of the English circles of discourse that it gave rise to two wholly understandable reactions in the rest of society. First, of course, it set off a great movement of emulation, through the enormous extension of English medium schools. But the number of those who could benefit from these changes was bound to be quite small, and that merely added to the intense resentment of the others. Since the benefits of development were so unequally and unjustly distributed, it prepared ground for two types of political dissent—an economic critique of class and an indigenist critique of modernist cultural privilege. The second kind of resentment, naturally, has predominantly found cultural expression through regionalist and communal politics, through the politics of Hindi and Hinduism. There is of course no inevitability about this connection between exclusion and modernity; in the nineteenth century most vernacular cultures gave rise to strong modernist argumentation within themselves. But there has been a noticeable evacuation of that vernacular field of discourse in the last two decades by the liberal, secular, modernist, on occasion even leftist intelligentsia. Their abdication of the vernacular discourse, their excessive reliance on the state and its increasingly less accountable bureaucracy, and their withdrawal from the dialogic stance of conversation into a more arrogant attitude of peremptory command has created a situation in which forces of Hindu majoritarianism can claim the dignity of cultural self-assertion against a dispensation in which individuals are penalised for speaking their mother tongue or evincing interest in their own culture. An assertion of cultural indigenism is a likely consequence of democracy, and the unwillingness of liberal and left politics.in India to allow expression to these impulses has enabled Hindu communal and Hindi chauvinist politicians to appropriate the considerable power of such cultural democracy. The breakdown

of the diglossia which characterised the national movement has only accentuated this association of modernity with exclusivism. However, some contradictions of this ambiguous religion, which has been made more strident at the cost of becoming more mundane, can be detected already in the politics of the BJP. Quite

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obviously, communal politics suffers from an acute indetermination of the ends and the means: Is capturing of government a means of building the Rama temple, or is the slogan of the temple the means to securing victories in elections? This is not an inconsequential difference, as is evident from the emerging frictions within the communal groups themselves, between the political and the revivalist wings. For the political party, the utility of the issue is in keeping it alive, so that the more the temple is delayed the more elections can be won through rhetoric against those who are obstructing its construction. Once the temple is built, this great electoral issue is lost, or has to be rediscovered at some other site. Politicians who would have to run administrations of course immediately appreciate the problems of running a permanent movement. The more religiously inclined wing of the communal groups obviously see the formation of a state government as a means towards the construction of the temple, and naturally see the present as a great theatre of retribution for the imagined desecrations of the past. Given the complexity of India’s religious history, they can easily produce a long list of such wrongs of the past to be righted, with the dangers of a generalised communal conflict of a kind hardly any electoral politician would find appetising. Understandably, therefore, there were proposals for a judicious deradicalisation of the BJP’s slogans from groups inside the party itself. When in the seventies communal propaganda seemed to bring in few dividends, and the destiny of the Jan Sangh seemed irreversibly on the decline, some elements inside the party suggested that the party should subtly shift its appeal to the middle class. Instead of the traditional appeal to Hindu chauvinism, it should try to project itself as a substitute for the Congress, asking for support not because of its ideological differences with the Congress, but its

similarity—offering a cleaner, more efficient, less corrupt government. After the dramatic success of the rathayatras, its own agenda was rewritten in a retrograde direction; but it is remarkable

how

clearly the party has not rejected its other, more secular constituency. Its advertising of support from well-known professionals, its campaign in the English newspapers, the occasional electoral arguments from its campaigners that its secularism was more real than the plagiarised Westernism of the Nehruvians all point to the fact that it continues to appeal to the constituency of modernist groups, even as it persists with its blatantly communal propaganda

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aimed at the more traditional Hindu groups. Attacking traditional values in order to undermine this form of politics is not very useful, because it is not a traditional religion. Its roots lie in the contradictions,

bewilderments,

suffering

and

enticements

of

modernity, but it is a modernity which is already taking a trajectory quite different from the Western one. It is possible that in shifting the line between the sacred and the profane and playing opportunistically with it, this political religion would erase that distinction itself and turn eventually to more secular forms of mobilisation. But the example of Iran and some other Third World states would urge caution: for it is possible for religious consciousness to acquire a modern ideological form, that is, become a historically stable formation of consciousness, which can turn against all principles of modernity, including democracy itself. To understand the problems the depletion of religion might throw in our path, references to Western history are of limited utility. It is a task not of statesmanship (which can undoubtedly take care of short term conflicts) but of fashioning a political theory which reflects seriously on the specific trajectory that modernity is taking in Indian history. It cannot be understood as a mere complicated re-enactment of modernity in the West. At the same time, it cannot be understood without reference to it.

Fifteen

Religious and Secular Identities Rajeev Bhargava

Introduction In the

last decade

or so,

a view

in the social

sciences

on

the

relationship between modernity and religion has become immensely popular. On the face of it, it is entirely explanatory. It tells us why modernisation and the politics of secularism have marginalised the believer and encouraged the growth of zealotry. But sotto voce and in a what-else-do-you-expect sort of reasoning it also justifies, if not fanaticism and religious dogmatism, at least a full-blooded attack on modernity and secularism. Now, there is a good deal of justification in expressing discontent at the dominant form assumed in Third World societies by modernity and secularism. Some very powerful reasons exist for subscribing to this view, but I believe a few at least are not entirely honourable. It is these reasons that I try to bring into focus in this paper, which is neither concerned with the explanatory part of the story, nor with all the justifications it offers for the misdemeanours of modernity but only with those that I find unconvincing. Let me at the outset indicate some of the reasons for my unease with this view. For a start, it is plagued with an excessive them-us syndrome. It ridicules the dichotomies of modernity without the slightest awareness of its own fractured vision. It is obsessed with the spirituality of traditional religion but unashamedly obscures the spiritual roots of modernity. It is over-sensitive to the linkages of power, wealth

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and privilege with secular but not with religious discourse. It fluctuates between a perilous purism for which a value loses all its import even when slightly tainted with power and a vertiginous relativism for which high values are at base plain, lowly desires. In short, I detect in this reasoning a dash of motivated simple-mindedness, an oversimplification that has dangerous consequences in times of trouble. The reader may forgive me for framing this issue in personal terms. For sometime now, those of us with a modern, secular identity find ourselves increasingly alienated not only from the neo-religious and the anti-secularists but more so from many fellowsecularists. Being secular, we can hardly feel at home amidst the current deluge of religious hysteria everywhere in the country. Yet, something about the dominant discourse of secularism is

equally disconcerting. We find ourselves wedged between secularists in power and the religious who wish to usurp this power from them. However, it appears to me that among those threatened are also some believers who, as a matter of plain fact, can neither identify with what can be called the state-secularists nor with neo-religious ideologues and neo-traditionalist militants. Why is it that some secularists and believers are equally threatened when the accepted wisdom of our time adjudicates that all secularists and believers are fundamentally divided? The divide between the secular and the religious is something like a cultural institution in our country. Is it time, however, to challenge it? Could it be that some varieties of secularism exist which have more in common with religion than with state-secularism? If this is really so, is a modern, secular identity always opposed to a religious identity? We cannot begin to answer these questions unless we have some understanding of what precisely it means to have an identity. In the first part of the paper, therefore, | ask, with a generous dose of abstraction, what it is to have an identity. I propose first a general framework of answering this question and then claim that within it there exist at least four ways of formulating conceptions of identity. In part two, putting this framework into effect, I ask what it is to have a religious identity and if it is different from other forms of cultural identities. Is religious identity like any other cultural identity or does it possess a unique structure? Can it be subsumed under the general notion of cultural identity or is it distinct enough from other cultural identities to require special treatment? Finally,

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in part three, 1 explore what relationship exists between religious and modern, secular identities. The main claim in the paper, as may already have become obvious, is that some forms of secular identities have more in common with some variants of religious identities than they do with members of their own fold, and that a common culture cuts across the familiar divide between the religious and the secular.

What is it to have an Identity? It is commonplace in logic to claim that the concept of identity has to do with sameness. The identity of an object is its sameness with itself. It is equally trivial to observe that anything whatsoever is the same with itself at any instant. At the very next instant, however, it has already become different from what it was just a moment ago, changed in some way. If an object has to retain its identity, remain same with itself, it must resist the myriad ways in which change threatens its very character. So the question of identity is related to the question: What keeps an object the same despite the many changes it suffers over time? It is related to another question as well: Just as a thing is identical with itself only if it remains same over time, so it can be

identified with something else provided the features it possesses are the same as those present in others. Two discernible things can be identical if they have the same attributes. However, if they are discernible, what brings them together under the same description? What unifies an object with other objects despite its ostensible difference with them? The problem of identity is related, therefore, to the problem both of stability amidst transformation and of unity within diversity. However, it is impossible for anything to remain same with itself in all respects all the time. To demand that it do so is to impose such a stringent requirement that no object can meet it. It renders any object incapable of ever retaining its identity over time. A thing can remain identical with itself in some, not in all, respects. Equally, if sameness over time of any odd set of features of an object was sufficient for its identity then everything would always

remain identical with itself. And if nothing ever lost its identity, then the problem of identity cannot even arise in the first place. As

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a matter of fact, to say that a thing has remained the same with itself over time is almost always elliptical for the statement: A thing has remained the same with itself over time in some relevant respects. A criterion of relevance is built into a statement of identity. This is equally true of a thing’s identity with other things. At a given instant there are any number of respects in which a thing is the same with other things and a number of other respects in which it is different. To talk of the identity of something with some other thing makes sense therefore only within a pre-selected domain; once again, identity is crucially linked to some principle of relevance. In short, a thing is the same with itself over time or the same

with other things at any given time only with respect to some features selected according to some criterion of relevance. To repeat, sameness of relevant features over time is integral to any notion of identity. To have an identity, a thing must have features that are both relevant (essential) and enduring (permanent).' If this is true of the identity of all objects, it must equally be true of the identity of the human person or the self. To remain same over time with herself or with the other, to possess or share an identity, a person must be identical with some of her permanent and relevant attributes or attributes of entities that she recognises as her own. This conforms to the minimal sense of identity with which we are all acquainted, with a simple phenomenology of identity. To have an identity is to recognise the presence of something stable in the midst of change and diversity. It is to be located somewhere, to possess a tangible sense of being at home in the world. More importantly, this sense of being anchored is obtained by identifying with something that, on the face of it, appears different. I must be able to say: This, that appears different, is the same as me. I must be able to call it by the same name with which I call myself or at least call it my own. Assertions of unity assimilate, synthesise, and establish connections among diverse things that go so deep that little point remains in calling them different. My features can be mapped so smoothly on to something else that it is no longer possible for me to call them by anything else. Conversely, to lose one’s identity is to be dispossessed of one’s bearings and the ability to see where one stands, to be unhinged, detached and to feel

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insecure. It is to fail to choose or discover something that is one’s own, to be unable to find the relevant sameness with anything. What are the possible candidates for entities or features that provide me a proper anchorage, with which I can identify? One such set must be the person’s physical or bodily features. Some relevant bodily features of a person must endure for a person to have an identity. At the same time, bodily entity can hardly be a sufficient condition for the identity of a person. No person can be exhaustively identified with her body alone. The identity of a person cannot be reduced to bodily identity which is at best a supervenience. This is so because a person is a person only in so far as she has mental attributes. Strawson is surely correct in viewing a person as an entity to which both corporeal characteristics and states of consciousness can be ascribed.” The identity of a person must minimally but crucially depend on the identity of states of her consciousness. But what can the identity of states of consciousness mean? States of consciousness are of two kinds. To begin with there exist states such as sensations, by which are generally meant bodily feelings such as pain and tickles, that cannot occur without their minimal awareness by the subject. Roughly the same reasons that disqualify the body as the sole criterion of personal identity apply to sensations. However, there also exist beliefs and desires, that is,

those states which are characterised by what Brentano called intentionality, and the ascription of which always involves the use of a ‘that’ clause as in ‘The VHP believes that a temple should be built on the site of the mosque.’ Beliefs and desires must possess an intentional content. Now, unlike sensations, beliefs, desires and the acts they guide do not require that in order to have them we be conscious of them. These states do not presuppose consciousness. At the same time, no person can have all her beliefs and desires without some minimal awareness. To be a person at all, an individual must be conscious of some of her beliefs and desires. It is necessary, therefore, that to have an identity a person must consciously be able to identify with some of her beliefs, desires and acts. Beliefs and desires can be conceived in two fundamentally different ways, however. Their intentionality ensures that they necessarily possess a content. But this content may be individuated wholly independent of anything external to the individual mind or may be

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seen to crucially depend on the natural environment and social context, in particular the linguistic practices of the community. The first atomistic and psychologistic view of intentional content I find utterly unconvincing.’ I cannot here go into the reasons for why I reject the atomist, psychologistic view but if indeed it is correct then, on the assumption of the centrality of beliefs, desires, and acts to the whole issue of personal identity, it may be said that the identity of a person is constituted in large measure by the language she uses, by her vocabulary. A person’s identity, one can legitimately say, is defined by her language. A person then has the beliefs and desires she does largely because of the words she uses. She cannot identity with her beliefs and desires without identifying with the conceptual framework embodied in the vocabulary provided by her language. Identification with beliefs and desires is impossible without language because she would not know what these beliefs and desires mean and therefore what they are, unless she has a language. Since entry into a world of meaning is crucial for the formation of beliefs and desires, personal identity is related to a world of meanings. Moreover, this world of meanings can be held only in common with others. To identify with beliefs and desires is to identify with something which is ineluctably social, necessarily shared with others. A human individual recognises his identity in socially defined terms.’ Indeed, since these desires and beliefs emerge through interaction with others, we might legitimately say that the identity of a person is largely a matter of social construction. Identities develop in the participation and accomplishment of a

world with others. Briefly put, I identify myself both with my language and with members of my linguistic community. That is why, one identifies oneself, as one is identified by others, by being located in a common world of meanings, a culture. This common world of meanings can be further disambiguated into a frame of reference shared with others and a common intentional grid. To share a common vocabulary is to partake first of all in a common world of reference, that is, the terms used by us must refer to the same entities. We do not invent names for things in isolation, independent of each other; rather, we achieve this classification together. We get initiated into the practice of cutting up the world, slicing it in one rather than another manner. When I identify with a common world of meaning, I declare that I belong

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to a particular tradition of drawing distinctions. Snow, for the Intuit, must be classified in more than twenty ways. For the Karam of New Guinea, bats are birds but cassowaries are not. Most Indian languages must be able to mark boundaries within their world to create a world of jatis. There is a minimal sense in which I identify myself not only with this way of classifying and categorising the world but with all those who share this classification. Furthermore, we also possess a common intentional grid equally essential for our identity. By the possession of a common intentional grid I mean only that a linguistic community must share the sense of terms they use. Of course, this hardly implies that every word within a language possesses One meaning for all members of the linguistic community. It does mean, however, that the sense of each word is in principle

available to all, that even if they do not agree on its sense, they have a minimal grasp of it. It is because of this shared grid that we understand each other or indeed ourselves. This understanding is crucial for my identity, for the sense of sameness both with myself and with others. My identity is linked to this understanding, to the stock of self-interpretations available to me. It is this understanding that provides the ground on which any explicit unity and solidarity, crucial for my identification with others, is built. All this may not be always too evident to me but the issue is thrown into sharper relief when I am flung in the midst of those who I do not understand. It is crucial for my identity that I continue to remain with those who I understand, that I retain a shared intentional grid or else I shall lose sense of my own identity. Of the many enduring features ascribable to a person, I have picked out the linguistically and socially constructed beliefs and desires as the ones relevant for her idei tity. However, a person has many beliefs and desires not all central to her identity. The criterion of permanence and relevance must enter our discussion of identity in order not only to pick out beliefs, desires and acts but also to specify which of these are critically defining. Obviously, not all but only enduring beliefs and desires which people persistently strive to hold and realise are crucial for their identity. More importantly, of the ones that endure, only the relevant ones count. A person must view them as relevant, they must matter to her, if

they are to enter the definition of her identity. This issue of how things matter to persons needs to be probed

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further, for it leads straight into a discussion of the different ways of conceptualising human identity. One way of conceiving relevance is to view it merely as a matter of strongly felt desires. Of the wide variety of desires and beliefs, those which I feel most strongly about, to which I have the strongest attachment, that is to say, those which I am most attracted to, enter my identity. Mattering here is a simple issue of how strongly I desire something. According to this view, a person’s identity is constituted not by any set of beliefs and desires but only those he strongly desires. I call this the identity of wantons and the social universe inhabited by such wantons is shaped by what can be called a culture of unfettered desire. Who is a wanton? A wanton has desires, strongly felt desires, even perhaps the desire to have certain desires (second-order desires) but it does not bother him one bit if none of his acts are ever guided by second-order desires.. A wanton never cares which of his many desires will be effective, i.e., which of them will move him all the way to action. A person who wants to smoke is a wanton. One who wants not to smoke may also be a wanton. What classes both as wantons is simply the fact that neither is bothered which of these two wants will eventually determine his acts. In other words, a wanton is not, what Frankfurt calls, a reflective self-evaluator.® In short, his criterion of relevance is not constituted by reflective self-evaluation. What is relevant is what he strongly desires not what he might have evaluated. Unlike a wanton, a person with a capacity for self-evaluation may have conflicting wants, the desire to smoke and the one not to smoke. His desire to smoke may even be stronger than his desire not to smoke but it matters to him that he has not given up smoking. In other words, he is moved by a value distinct from and seen by him to be superior to his strongly felt desires. To acknowledge evaluation in this context is to accept that a human agent is not moved by desires alone but also by a will that in some sense he has helped form. Whether or not he manages to be moved by his second-order desires, he prefers his will to be constituted by what he values. He not only deliberates on how to fulfil his desire but also on what he must desire. ; Perhaps this point can be formulated even better by making use of Taylor’s notion of strong evaluation.’ Taylor would distinguish the wanton from the strong evaluator by claiming that at best the

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former evaluates only weakly. A weak evaluator judges something as good simply because he desires it. By contrast, for a strong evaluator it is not sufficient that something be desired for it to be good. Indeed things that are desired may be bad. Secondly, for a weak evaluator all desires are of equal worth. Ideally all must be satisfied. If some have to be forsaken it is because they are contingently incompatible with others. The weak evaluator chooses to fulfil one desire rather than another not because it is intrinsically more worthy, but only because it happens to be circumstantially more realisable. The strong evaluator on the other hand has a sense of qualitative difference between the worth of different desires. Strong evaluation implies that I can choose to have something qualitatively better than others. It follows that the identity of a strong evaluator is informed by the language of strong evaluation, by a vocabulary that incorporates qualitative distinctions between things he strongly values and those that he merely desires or values weakly. A person cannot have an identity in the absence of such a framework of qualitative distinctions because it furnishes the criterion of relevance constitutive of identity. What is relevant for a person’s identity is what he values strongly. The identity of a person is defined not by any odd set of beliefs but th~se he holds firmly, with good reason, and by values that cannot be reduced to mere desires, that he judges to be more important than mere desires.” Only those beliefs and desires that a person strongly values, finds worthy are crucial to his identity. Since my identity is formed within an enduring framework, not to possess it is to fail to have an identity.” A framework provides a person with a springboard from which to aspire to do or be something. This aspiration to be moved, whether or not one is successful, by some values that are regarded as better than others is central to the notion of commitment. To strive for some values, no matter how unattainable, is to be deeply engaged with them, to have entrusted oneself to them. It is to constantly judge my desires and to hope to guide my actions by standards set by these values. It is to want my life to be directed by them. Hence the tie between commitment and identity. Indeed my identity is defined

by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case

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what is good or valuable, what ought to be done, what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand."

For without a framework a person will not be able to properly tell what the world is like and how to orient himself to it. A crisis in one’s identity results precisely when that happens. Strong evaluators can be further categorised into two types: On the one hand there are those who see the world divided starkly and exclusively into low-placed wantons and high idealists, and on the other hand exist those who, somewhat suspicious of ultimate ideals, are happy to occupy a space between the world of wantons and a universe of ultimate ideals. Some strong evaluators are high idealists while others are committed to many worlds of smaller ideals. The social universe of high idealists is shaped by what I call a culture of ultimate ideals, while that of the second type is moulded by what can be called the culture of multiple goods. To be sure, the identity of the person with ultimate ideals is constituted by beliefs, desires and actions but the criterion of relevance by which identity-constituting beliefs, desires and actions are selected is shaped entirely by ultimate ideals.'' One’s identity within this culture is non-negotiable or almost so. It is possible that I am not simply born into it. There may even be an element of choice here but when acquired it leaves no scope for manoeuvrability or escape. Getting out of it is next to impossible. In a culture of multiple goods, one’s identity is not formed by any ultimate ideal. From an existing repertoire of identities a

person partly selects and shapes her identity. One cannot radically alter this existing stock nor can any individual pick up any one and mould it exactly as she pleases. The entire repertoire is not up for grabs and all identities are not immediately negotiable. But all values are placed in this culture within specific contexts and therefore the identities they shape are context-dependent. The only general principle to be found here is that as one moves from one context to another, one must also be able to shift one’s identity, negotiate it. There is a greater sense of fluidity here. Not only is this culture different from the world of ultimate ideals but also from the culture of unfettered desire. This is largely because it neither reduces values to desires nor elevates any single such set above all contexts. Standards of values exist and objectively but

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they also vary from context to context. Correspondingly, there cannot be a single, overarching set of ideals that legislate on everything irrespective of the circumstances. Finally, there may also exist another culture that combines elements from the second and the third. Here a single but extremely thin spiritual ideal guides and integrates smaller ideals without subordinating them. Smaller ideals are accompanied by a sense of high ideal but not determined by it. This culture can be called a culture of plurality infused by a sense of high ideal. Because it finds ample room for smaller ideals, this culture is different from a culture of high ideals but as it does not altogether discard a single, high ideal (albeit a thin one), it is not collapsible into a culture of

multiple goods. This culture allows us to get to a higher ideal by passing through and not past smaller ideals. It can never exist independently of the culture of multiple goods nor aspire for something wholly transcendent. It has a down-to-earth spirituality. Let me recapitulate. I began by saying that to have an identity is to have an integral connectedness to a stable and relevant set of beliefs, desires and acts. Since these beliefs, desires and acts are constructed and sustained socially, to have an identity is to be integrally connected also to all those who share the conceptual framework that generates these beliefs, desires and acts. To have an identity is not only to have a language but also a community with which to identify. It is to live in a common world, a world defined by a common vocabulary, generating a particular set of orientations that impel us to act in some rather than other ways. These I claimed constitute conditions for the minimal identity of a human person. Not to be able to have even this is not to be human at all. I then distinguished four different cultures within which identities are formed and therefore four different forms of identities. The first culture provides a minimally stable sense of one’s identity and meets the weakest possible criterion of relevance; weakest because no more stability or fixity can possibly be expected from desires or pro-attitudes on which alone it is grounded. But identities are rooted in the stronger criterion of relevance, shaped by values that are distinct from desires. Such identities formed within frameworks of strong evaluators can be of two types: the identity of high ideals and of multiple values. Finally, I specified yet another type of identity formed within a culture that I called a culture of plurality

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infused by a sense of a high ideal. That concludes part one of the paper. The reader must now be looking for illustrations of these different cultures and for the relevance of these distinctions to the stated objective of the paper. Let me turn now to these issues.

Religious Identities Even the slightest acquaintance with religion is evidence enough that our dominant conception of religious identity firmly places it within the culture of ultimate ideals.'* To have a religious identity is to possess a framework that enables us to make qualitative distinctions between what is worthy and trivial, the strongly valuable and merely desirable, superior and inferior, sacred and profane, the highest good and the downright evil, the admirable and the contemptible, the glorious and the despicable; in short, our ultimate ideals and their converse including that which is merely pleasant, beneficial or advantageous but not of enduring, overriding significance. Consider for example the religious identity of the Sikh." On the dominant interpretation of the issue, a Sikh, if he is a Sikh at all, must aim ultimately to liberate himself from the cycle of transmigration and attempt to achieve this by nam simran (meditation on the divine

name).

Furthermore,

he must

venerate

all the

ten

Gurus, affirm the sanctity of the Guru Granth Sahib and the place where it is permanently lodged, namely the gurudwara. The teachings of the Gurus, found largely in the Granth Sahib have far more relevance and worth, greater validity than any other moral or educational book. Their value, for him, goes so deep that in the long run life without them will not be worth living; a Sikh will not properly be able to define his situation, orient himself, discriminate the right from the wrong, the good from the bad, which is to say he will not just be able to act humanly at all.'’ Any attack on the gurudwara, whatever the provocation, is evil and has to be denounced. The teachings of the Gurus are inviolable, no matter the change in circumstances. These values have to be observed whatever the cost. The Buddhist Bhikkhu too has his set of high ideals, values that lie so deep that without them he will not be able to keep going in this world. It is of profound concern to him whether or not the

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Dhammic order exists.'"" An adhammic world is a world of suffering, dukkha, of the rule of desires that are fleeting and ephemeral, born largely out of ignorance. The ultimate ideal, therefore, is to liberate oneself from this world of impermanence, to attain true knowledge, quench one’s cravings and attain a state of nirvana. He does this not by chanting the name of God but by following the eight-fold path in this world." Likewise the world of at least some Hindu Brahmins striving to remain free of pollution (especially caste-pollution), to preserve their purity represents a pursuit of high ideals. The world on this Brahaminical interpretation is full of things and deeds that possess the capacity to incur temporary or permanent impurity. The Brahmin must avoid permanent impurity and must by ritual practice purify himself when temporarily polluted. Impurity is related first of all to organic aspects of life, to organic waste and secondarily but equally importantly to those whose work relates to it. Since the world of the untouchable is lowly and demeaning, he must refrain from straying into it, and if by accident he does, then by appropriate ritual he must immediately decontaminate himself.'’ But even his image of ultimate hell is that of a place where rules governing pure and impure objects/practices have ceased to be observed. What must be prevented at all costs is not just the descent into an impure world (do not forget, that there is auspicious impurity as well)" but the collapse of the caste-system, the regression into a culture of unfettered desire. Indeed, all religions build their own picture of hell, of disorder and chaos, of dispersion, of desires run amok, of valueless anarchy. The greatest fear of all religions is that the world will lapse not straight into a state of war of all against all, but into one marked by an erosion of high values. Loss of religious identity is a fall from a culture of high ideals to a culture of unfettered desire. Is this the only form of religious identity available, i.e. an identity formed by ultimate ideals in direct opposition to a weak and unstable one constituted by desires? In a brilliant monograph, Geertz introduces an important distinction between the religious and the religious-minded, the latter a result of the ideologisation of religion.” Similarly, in an influential article, Nandy distinguishes religious zealotry from two other forms of religion, religion as faith and religion as ideology.” Presumably then, there exist three kinds of religious identities, the identity of the zealot, of the faithful and

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finally of the religious ideologues. In what follows, I shall first try to explore these three different kinds of religious identities. To these I shall then add three other types: religion as lived spirituality (religious spiritualism), spiritless religiosity, and what I call religion as pastiche. Let me begin with Nandy’s Man of Faith. What is the identity of the person with faith? Faith, not surprisingly, is an elusive term. Philosophers of religion have seen faith either as a form of belief or as trust or as both. For some, especially the Thomists, faith is just a form of theoretical belief, a set of statements concerning the existence of God deemed to be true.’ To have faith is to believe that God exists. Luther did not entirely dispute this meaning but from his point of view, more importantly, faith is a form of trust. A person who has faith does not as much have a theory about God as trusts him. Faith then is less a matter of convictions and more a matter of attitude and orientation. For pragmatists such as Pascal and James, faith is entirely a matter of trust grounded in probabilistic, practical

not

deductive,

theoretical

reasoning.

Clearly,

a

person with faith is either a devout believer or one who lives his entire life trusting God. Conceptions of faith have also differed with the exact meaning of ‘belief’. To believe, according to Wilfred Cantwell Smith is not to state something that could be true or false, not to opine, but to devote oneself to whatever one has faith in.” It is to set one’s heart upon it; be powerfully attracted to it, to love it. Faith then is belief but the believer, rather than some one with a set of theoretical attitudes, is one who loves the object of her belief, is wholly devoted to it. Recall once again the minimal conditions of identity: an identity is formed by beliefs, desires and acts that are permanent and relevant. The identity of a person with faith is constituted by her firm, unshakable belief in the existence of God or in the possibility of the existence of a world governed by ultimate ideals. Furthermore, she loves and is devoted to God, to a Godly order, or to her own ultimate ideals. The two, firm belief in the ideals and love for them, reinforce each other. Love and devotion, moreover, are powerful emotions and like all similar emotions, they have a strong hold on the person who experiences them.” A religious person is in the grip of these overwhelming emotions that are long lasting and affect her deeply. It is these emotions that give a reason for living, a meaning and direction to the life of the woman or

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man of faith. Implicitly or explicitly, this world of faith, love and devotion is different from and superior to the mundane, everyday world governed by ordinary desires. The identity of a person with faith, so characterised, is subsumed without remainder within the notion of religious identity outlined above. Does this capture what Nandy has in mind? It appears not for according to him faith is a way of life, not exclusively a matter of beliefs and devotion. Whatever could this mean? Nandy says nothing at all on this but it is not too difficult to conjecture what could possibly be implied by this. I said that a man or woman of faith has firm beliefs. But firmness of beliefs can also mean something entirely different from the emotional charge suggested in the previous paragraph. As Wittgenstein pointed out, firmness of belief is not always a matter of the intensity of feeling with which they are held.* A belief is firmly held not when it is strongly felt but when it guides one’s entire life. To have firm beliefs is to participate in practices that make some beliefs natural to hold. To have firm beliefs in the relevant sense is just to engage in a way of life. Kolakowski says something to the effect that the point of religion is often lost when stated in doctrinal terms, that ‘religion is not a set of propositions but a way of life in which understanding, believing and commitment emerge together in a single act.” To have faith, then, is to have your identity constituted in and by those practices in which understanding, believing and commitment emerge together. However, Nandy means something more than this. For him, religion as faith is ‘definitionally non-monolithic and operationally plural.’ This is an awkward, obfuscating phrase, but it is clear that Nandy has made faith by fiat into not just a way of life but as implicating several, differing ways of life. He goes on to say: Unless a religion is geographically and culturally confined to a small

area,

it has as a way

of life, in effect,

to turn

into a

confederation of a number of ways of life which are linked by a common faith that has some theological space for the heterogeneous that everyday life introduces.” There is a grain of truth here but one should be cautious in accepting it. Cautious, because monolithic and operationally unilateral faiths do in fact exist, and even when they have been born

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and bred in smaller areas, they contain within themselves the propensity to spread. It all depends on context and opportunity. Geertz, ever so vigilant, makes much the same point as Nandy, but is also aware of the ever-present contradictions of religious faith which, for him, is: as much a particularizing force as a generalizing one . . . whatever universality a given religious tradition manages to attain arises from its ability to engage a widening set of individual, even idiosyncratic, conceptions of life and yet somehow sustain and elaborate them. When it succeeds in this, the result may indeed as often be the distortion of these personal visions as their enrichment, but in any case, whether deforming private faiths or perfecting them, the tradition usually prospers. When it fails, however, to come genuinely to grips with them at all, it either hardens into scholasticism, evaporates into idealism or ‘fades into electicism.* The coming together of many faiths is as much as enriching as a distorting process. The universalisation of faith, whatever its cause, external or wholly internal, does not produce a happy plurality alone but also a dangerous monism with all the accompanying distortions of identity. Despite this caution, we simply have to concede that religion can also embody a plurality of local ways of life and being plural, it contains seeds of tolerance. Such a religion cannot be shaped by a simplistic culture of ultimate ideals with a single contrasting vision of its other, the culture of unfettered desire, but must resemble the cultural world of multiple values. Correspondingly, the religious identity it produces must reflect this plurality and tolerance, must accommodate a number of seemingly incompatible values. Religion as faith then is a form of love, trust, belief or a way of life. It can be monolithic or pluralistic, universalising or particularising, divisive or integrative. Often it is placed firmly within a culture of ultimate ideals but it may also closely resemble a form of life that is found within a culture of multiple values. The identities

it generates or sustains, therefore, are as varied as its own diverse and malleable cast. For Nandy, the faithful believer by definition leads an integrative, pluralistic way of life. I hope to have offered an alternative picture in which this is not necessarily so.

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What makes religion as ideology different from religion as faith? How is the identity of a religious ideologue distinct from the identity of the believer, of the man of faith? Again, Geertz provides a clue here that may be more revealing than Nandy’s suggestions. Geertz says that whereas the religious person is held by his religion, the religious ideologue holds it.” The ideologisation of religion begins when the certainty of faith begins to totter. Powerful emotions accompanying belief in a world grounded in ultimate values loosen their grip. A gulf begins to appear between processes of understanding and belief, between belief and commitment. As Geertz puts it, ‘people find it harder and harder to make religious rituals and symbols work, more and more difficult to draw out of them the settled sense of moving with the deepest grain of reality that defines the religious mind.” This is a phase suspended between religiousness on the one hand and agnosticism and atheism on the other. Love, devotion, trust, the redoubtable, taken-for-granted quality of religious symbols begins to make way for doubt, not quite the doubt that religion is a storehouse of falsehood and deception but doubt about the manner in which it has been hitherto assumed. Religion begins to be a matter of theoretical belief and like any other belief is increasingly seen to fall within the ambit of evidence and argument. Once religion becomes a set of propositions, it may, as is the case with all propositions, turn out to be false and, therefore, in the face of threat from common sense or science, it becomes increasingly doctrinal and dogmatic. It first resembles and then acquires the character of an ideology. Strictly speaking, the religious ideologue has already lost his religious identity or else he is in the process of losing it. The appearance of religious ideologies is a symptom of a crisis in religious faith. The identity of a religious ideologue is no longer firmly anchored in ultimate ideals. Indeed, the connection between such ideals and his practice has already snapped. His actions are guided more and more by desires, by economic or political interests. He may offer a religious reason for everything he does but that reason is not causally efficacious. It either accompanies it without any determining power or is supplied as a rationalisation. Even when the two are connected, and religious beliefs and values are seen to be the primary cause of action, very often this connection is not of the right or characteristic kind. High ideals hover over human actions that are in fact determined by ordinary beliefs and desires. The

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identity of a pure religious ideologue is formed less within the framework of high ideals, and more in the culture of unfettered desire. Though carrying its shadow, they are not really constituted by religious ideals. The purely religious identity of such a person Is in a sense already crisis-ridden. What of the religious zealot? The zealot is one who has accepted that the moment of faith, perhaps even of religious ideology, has passed. He is possibly aware that both faith and religious ideology are dead and can be revived at best in an altogether different form. He lives in a culture of unfettered desire but makes the restoration or creation of a religious order his primary project. Typically, he speaks of going back to the original state of perfection or to a time when his society took the crucial wrong turn. He selects the eternal fundamentals of his religion by which his life and the life of all others will be governed in future. He defines his identity purely in terms of this unaccomplished project. He is moved by an earthy desire for power and by a grievous sense of real or imagined hurt, the characteristic stance of the victim, of those who are left out, who do not belong to any existing order. The ideologue believes that ultimate ideals inform his action. The zealot, on the other hand, has no such illusions. He is a robust political realist, cynical and instrumentalist: cynical of all existing ultimate ideals, uninhibited in his use of any means to achieve his purported goal and well-versed in the cunning and deceit of political games. Anything is justified in the name of his larger political goal of religious revivalism. Zealotry and ideology are two distinct forms taken by religion within a culture of unfettered desire. I promised that I shall speak of three other kinds of religious identities. The first one that can be called spiritless religion is wellknown. Suffice it to say that a body of religious practices from which the original, living impulse has been wrenched is religion that is spiritless. Many of us have read about the conditions under which Protestantism was born, the abysmal conditions that compelled the mild reforms of Hinduism in the nineteenth century. Recall Hegel ranting against the positivisation of religion, against a religion expunged of both rationality and autonomy. In spiritless religiosity, in both its scripturalist or ritualist varieties, the body remains but the original spirit has evaporated. From what I call religion as pastiche, both the original body and intent are gone and a very poor imitation of the original impulse inhabits an

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entirely new set of practices. Let me elaborate. Pastiche is a term of art with a family resemblance to the notion of parody but dissimilar in significant respects. In art, pastiche is an imitation of a peculiar form ‘without parody’s ulterior motive, without its satirical impulse, without laughter.’ Pastiche imitates the original with a grim, dead pan exterior. Parody laughs at a style, at a form. Pastiche, on the other hand, precisely because it is serious and sombre invites laughter not at the form it imitates but at itself. Moreover, unlike parody that has a latent understanding that something normal exists of which it is a comic imitation, and that

possesses a genuine feel for the original, pastiche is irrevocably delinked from it. It simply has no idea of what it is imitating. As Jameson puts it, pastiche is blank parody.” Pastiche religion, likewise, is an empty replica of religiosity. It has all the marks of ersatz, of the spurious. It thrives where people have forgotten what it is to have a religious experience or even the memory Of it. They have no idea any longer of what it is that they seek to imitate. Pastiche then is the heavily laboured imitation of religiosity. Curiously, it is part of a general nostalgia of things past, one that tries to bring back sepia-edged memory of what our grandparents did. The zealot has a teleological perspective. He wants to bring about something using the most efficient means available to him. Those with a penchant for pastiche religion have an expressive perspective. They are on a trip of self-expression: people in search of a religious identity compelled to make do with vacuous and laughable imitations instead.” This brings me to religion as lived spirituality. Here religion is distinct from both metaphysics and morality, from speculation and praxis. The highest point in metaphysics and morality has the same object as religion, namely the ultimate being or the universe and its relationship to humanity; but whereas praxis is an art and speculation a science, ‘religion is the sensibility and taste for the infinite.”*’ Religion’s essence is ‘neither thinking nor acting but intuition and feeling.’™ It is a corruption of religion to inundate it with philosophy and coerce it into a system. Religion strays when it posits essences and determines the nature of things, loses itself in an infinity of reasons and deductions, seeks out final causes and proclaims eternal truths.” It also deviates when it develops systems of duties, commands

and forbids actions with unlimited authority.”

The reckless conversion of religion into metaphysics and morals is

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responsible, on this view, for spitefulness and persecution, for wrecking society and making blood flow like water.” Religion is the intuition that the infinite accompanies the finite, the powerful but immediate feeling that the human world is not disconnected from the rest of the universe. The emphases on a sense of immediacy and on accompaniment are crucial. Immediacy separates religion from rationality and mere accompaniment disengages it from causality. This overwhelming and potentially disturbing feeling should ‘accompany every human deed like holy music: we should do everything with religion, nothing because of it’. By their very nature, religious feelings should inhibit the strength of our actions and invite us to calm and dedicated enjoyment.

It is the drive for power or for systematic uniformity that breeds intolerance but a person with a living sense of the spiritual sees his religion only as a part of the whole and knows that

regarding the same views just as pious his own, and from and feelings flow, lacking.”

objects that affect him religiously there are and nevertheless completely different from which other elements of religious intuitions the sense for which he may be completely

Religion teaches humanity and modesty and a friendly inviting tolerance. ‘Modern Rome, godless but consistent hurls anathemas and excommunicates heretics; ancient Rome, truly pious and religious in a lofty style, was hospitable to every god and so it became full of gods.” Schleiermacher could well be speaking of some forms of traditional and modern Hinduism. A person with such a religious identity is contemplative and tolerant. He has a matter-of-fact relation to his high ideal and lives

his life with a constant sense of its presence. With such a conception of religion, the person is shaped by the culture of plurality infused with a sense of high ideals; a minimally high ideal accompanying a world of multiple values.

Modern, Secular Identities I began this paper by expressing a sense of unease with the black and white dichotomy that keeps elements of the religious apart

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from every element of the secular. In part two, I claimed that the identity of a person can be constituted in four different ways that I placed in an ascending order, implying that a more mature, fully human sense of one’s identity is gained as one climbs up the scale. The identity of a person is constituted, I claimed, by a culture of (a) unfettered desire, (b) ultimate ideals, (c) multiple values and (d) multiple values infused by a sense of high ideals. Each of these cultures is distinct from and may oppose others. In part three | claimed that though our dominant sense of religious identity appears to be formed by a culture of ultimate ideals, other religious identities

exist within each of the above-mentioned cultures. In other words, different forms of religious identity, in potential conflict with each other, exist within any major religion. Secularists, in part unwittingly, but partly from ideological motivation, have had a one-sided, rather caricatured view of religious identity. Clearly, they need to dispense with their religious stereotype and replace it with a more refined picture of religious identities. But the religious person must do much the same. For he too views the secular man as possessing a single set of well defined characteristics. I suggest against this view that within the larger domain

of secularism

exist different

forms

of secular

identities,

each in potential conflict with the other. Secular identity is internally differentiated and hierarchised as well. Every type of religious identity has its secular counterpart. Let me explore this further. The connection between a modern, secular identity and the culture of unfettered desire is too well known to require a detailed treatment. But is modernity, as some traditionalists allege, the first to have launched a culture of wantons? Is modern culture and the identity formed within it reducible to the culture of unfettered desire? Neo-traditionalist critics of modernity believe precisely this: that an exhaustive description of modern culture is in hand as soon as it is portrayed as a culture of desire hostile to all high ideals. Herein is replicated the believer’s, the zealot’s and the ideologue’s view of modern secularism. They fulminate equally against modernity for embodying their vision of hell on earth, for undermining ideals and negating all values. In such a picture of this world they could not agree more with contemporary nihilists and irrational relativists. Every advocate of monolithic faiths endorses the post-modern view of contemporary secular world that in an ethics without God sex-drives, power or material interests masquerade as the good. For him, only his

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ideals, soaring well above the rest of the world, can claim immunity from this muck. However, even he cannot claim that modernity has a monopoly on this culture. All religions conceive, not on the basis of speculation alone, their own distinctive picture of valueless anarchy. The Hindu has contempt for the world of the Bhogi, the Buddhist has his own conception of the Addhamic world, the world of Dukkha. The Muslim pictures in similar terms the world of the Kafir. All religions worry about the catastrophic moment when humanity will plunge deep into this world but will lack the cultural resources to come out of it. The fact is that human beings have always carried the cross of a world almost beyond redemption that already exists or is just round the corner. This is not surprising. Each human being keeps at least one foot in this culture forever threatening to explode. Ramayana and Mahabharata are not stories about the modern condition. The modern world is, even by religion’s own reckoning, only the most contemporary version of a culture of unfettered desire. It is not and cannot be the only such culture. So it is not the lot of modernity alone to house the culture of unfettered desire. Even so, modern secularism may still be reducible to this culture. At any rate, it might appear so for three reasons. First, this is one of modern secularism’s own self-understanding. To counter the persistent contempt for desire characteristic of the culture of ultimate ideals, the first bolder statements of modern secularism saw pure desire in everything. Modern secularism has presented itself defiantly as a form of naturalism. It is not altogether untrue to say that on balance it encourages a suspicion of high ideals. This is why if the principal question is posed in such stark terms: ‘Are you going to obey God or follow your own desires?’, then modernity must be seen as humanity’s swiftest slide yet into a worthless world of pure appetite. What modern secularism occasionally chooses to understand of itself is different from what, however, it really is. It has its own ultimate ideals."' Second, it is also placed firmly within a culture of multiple values. However without the obvious presence of a high ideal, smaller ideals, incommensurable and disconnected from each other, possess less power and intensity of attachment unless seen as manifestations of inescapable desire. Frequently, therefore, small ideals are not adequately differentiated from desire even by those who wish to do so. Third, the spiritual roots of modernity are hardly ever recognised even by the most ardent supporters of modern identity.

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In brief, a modern secular identity 1s formed within each of the cultures I mentioned in part two. It is formed not only by a culture of pure desire but also by a culture of ultimate ideals, of multiple values and of multiple goods infused by a thin, spiritual ideal. I would like to explicate each of these a bit more. What are the ultimate ideals of modern secularism? There are many perspectives on secularism’s high ideals of which I address one. The modern, secuiar outlook developed in opposition to the pre-modern view of the world which can be roughly characterised as possessing two features. First, the universe is seen as a text to be interpreted; the entire world is an embodiment of ideas, expresses meaning, and has an overall purpose. Second, the essential identity of humans is defined in relation to this cosmos. Questions of identity do not make sense unless formulated within a-cosmology. For our fulfilment, therefore, we must place ourselves within this meaningful universe, be in touch with this cosmos, know where we stand in relation to other things in it. One opposition to this perspective came from modern naturalism. The other principal challenge was posed by what, for want of a better term, can be called Kantian Humanism. This dualistic humanism accepts that non-human nature is intrinsically meaningless, composed of distinct entities that relate contingently and mechanically to each other. The interpretative vision of nature is fully discarded. However, meaning is not dispelled from every bit of the world. The human world is meaningful; only now, it is claimed, whatever meaning exists in human life, in society and history, is due entirely to the conscious or unconscious acts of human beings. Society and history possess the meaning they do because of us. Human beings cannot, therefore, find their identity in relation to this detextualised world. They have to create their own identity by producing their own ‘webs of significance’, their own culture. This much, perhaps, will be constitutive of any defensible version of modern secularism but from here several paths open up, one of which leads straight to one of the high ideals of modern secularism, which I call superhumanism. Superhumanism celebrates the death of God but creates a new God instead; it apotheosises man. It replicates in finest detail the structure of theological reasoning. The attributes of the subject are the same: it can plan anything and execute it to perfection. There is nothing he cannot know, predict, control; only now, it is man not God. Man’s natural powers are unlimited; it is only a question of time when they will

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be fully realised. History may be made within constraining circumstances not entirely of his choosing now but a day will come when it will be made with radical freedom. Both natural and historical processes can be fully tamed. An ultimate ideal of modern secularism, therefore, is perfect self-creation. All else is trivial, unworthy, low. The essential identity of human beings is that of a creative producer. Human beings are defined by their ever-developing powers of self-realisation. Anything is justified in the service of this ideal: devaluation of the present, the renunciation of desire, sacrifice of peace, forfeiting ordinary human relations, abandoning individual morality. Violence, suffering, even death are justified for the sake of creative existence. The high ideal of modern secularism can be as exacting and severe as its religious counterpart.

But modern secularism has developed a great distrust of such ideals also. Consider, for example, political secularism. A firmer grasp of its principles depends upon a prior understanding of what Taylor has called the ‘affirmation of ordinary life’.* The need to separate the affairs of ultimate ideals from the governance of thisworldly interests and values arises precisely because ordinary, mundane existence can no longer be undervalued. Whatever else it might be, modern political secularism also reflects the grudging recognition that the independent pursuit of this-worldly values is as important as the struggle to gain other-worldly benefits. The implication for us is clear: the demotion of ultimate ideals and the elevation of plurality. T.N. Madan mentions somewhere that secularism is a ‘gift of Christianity’. Quite true, but surprisingly he fails to note its universalisable potential. I say this with all the attendant risks of being misunderstood precisely because I believe we can find cultural roots in support of such ‘universal’ values. By Madan’s own reckoning the life of the householder, one of the small ideals of modern secularism, is also highly valued not only among the Kashmiri pandits whom he has studied in detail but in the entire Hindu society.” Just as the modern Western bourgeois who values the life of production and family must steer clear of the dangers of both reckless indulgence and ultimate ideals, so the Hindu grahastha should resist complete surrender to the bhogi (pleasure-seeker, sensualist) or the sanyasi (renouncer, ascetic).“ It is precisely this universalisable ideal of human fulfilment in ordinary affairs of this world, a concern for peace, security, ordinary life and its corollary,

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to abjure violence and avoid suffering, that undergirds the modern, secular person’s distrust for ultimate ideals. He knows that ultimate ideals bring about disorder almost as much as unfettered desire. He knows too that a conflict between ultimate ideals is as irreconcilable as a clash between desires. The culture of multiple values is born, therefore, out of the recognition that all fundamental values cannot be realised at the same time to the same highest degree.* But how does modern secularism realise this? Is it not trapped within its own ultimate ideals? I believe it achieves it by recovering its own spiritual roots, by delving deeper into the full-blown implication of humanism, by pointed reflection on what a life without God means. The rejection of a transtemporal, other-worldly life implies that we altogether eschew the habit of imagining Gods, not that we replace older deities with new ones. It means also that we recognise and respect the limitations of humans and struggle with humility for smaller ideals. This spiritualised, humanist secularism accepts that we cannot know, predict and control everything, that there are limits to our attempts to tame natural and even historical processes, that contingency in nature or history cannot be entirely overcome and that therefore some areas of the world will always appear dark, obscure, absurd. Humanism after all is just'what it is: humanism, neither a theism not a superhumanism. Spiritualised secularism recoils from the over-bloated, over-active conception of human beings. There is much in us that 1s not made by but given to us. We are passive in relation to a part of nature that lies both external and internal to us.“ We can hardly afford to forget what men and women have known for centuries, i.e. those who are born will grow old and die, that disease and infirmities of old age can be controlled, not entirely eliminated and therefore that suffering cannot be wholly

vanquished. Spiritual secularists know that suffering is often manmade but they do not forget that some suffering is not made by man. Now this precisely is what religious spiritualism teaches us, that in everything we do we carry the sense of our relation to the universe, to the infinite, that we know our imperfections, and therefore that we never overreach ourselves. It is in this spirit that we learn that although many human conflicts can be settled not all circumstances are equally propitious for resolving them by reason.

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and that therefore there are times when it is better to live with conflicts than to seek forced resolution. It is ultimately this humility which teaches us tolerance and the love for diversity. Whatever else is contained in the discourse of rights and justice, it also reflects this great humanist insight. I am not suggesting that the language of rights and justice, so central to some versions of modern secularism, has a contextual validity. My plea is only that it is not always a symptom of vacuous principles. In the vicious presence of ultimate ideals, the discourse of rights and justice also represents courage.” The spiritual roots of modern secularism are not as barren as they appear to be at first sight and not all that removed from the plurality and tolerance taught by all the major world-faiths. I have tried to argue that each of the four cultures mentioned above equally nourishes religious and secular identities. Let me straightaway home in on one implication of this argument. I believe it follows from what I have said that though on one level the religious and the secular are distinct from each other, another level exists where each is structurally similar to its counterpart. A religious identity informed by ultimate ideals has much in common with a secular identity formed within the same culture. Both in turn may be sharply differentiated from any identity formed by a culture of unfettered desire. The form of identity, therefore, is as important as its content. The content of religious and secular identity is distinct. One is integrally tied to God, the other is not. But on its own this difference need not lead to opposition and hostility. For a conflict to develop, the content must be expressed in a deeply divisive form. Furthermore, the question: Can religious identity be subsumed under cultural identity or does it possess special features? makes little sense unless we specify the form of religious identity that we have in mind and indicate the precise form of cultural identity that is to subsume it. For example, the identity of the monolithic believer can be subsumed under the more general category of the cultural identity informed by high ideals. But so can the identity of the superhumanist. On the other hand, the identity of ideologues and zealots, both religious and secular, cannot be subsumed under the widest possible category of an identity formed by a culture of ultimate ideals. Religious and secular zealots invariably clash with each other. Religious and secular ideologues view each other with

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suspicion and contempt. But religious and secular persons informedby a lived spirituality are likely to treat each other’s difference with respect and understandable concern. To sum up, the view that a deep incompatibility always exists between religious and secular world-views is at best misleading. My claim is that the incompatibility exists between different forms of cultural identity each of which subsumes both the religious and secular identity. Does this analysis have any other empirical or interpretative purchase? I believe it helps us better understand the identity of Indian political actors. In the article discussed above Nandy makes a four-fold classification of political actors in the subcontinent.” First, there are those who are believers neither in public nor in private (e.g. Nehru). Second, those who are non-believers in public but believers in private (Indira Gandhi). Third, those who are believers in public but not in private (for example, Jinnah, Advani). Finally, those who are believers both in public and in private (Gandhi). Cases one and four appear to be simple and easily explicable but two and three seem complex and are usually explained in terms of a disjunction existing in modern societies between ideologies that define people’s personal identity and those that legitimise their public authority. I believe the distinctions drawn by me illuminate this issue differently. First, the case of Nehru and Gandhi is not as simple as it first appears. Though Nehru was not a believer in public or private, his secular identity may well have been drawn from the cultural resources of multiple values infused by a sense of high spiritual ideal. This means that he may have been closer to persons with a sense of religious spiritualism and to those who formed their identity with reference to a plurality of ways of life than to secular ideologues and fanatics. Likewise Gandhi, a believer in public and private, who said that ‘those who thought religion and politics could be kept separate understand neither religion nor politics’, had scant sympathy for scripturalists and ritualists, for religious ideologues and zealots, or for that matter for those who say their faith as monolithic. He was not averse to separating these forms of religion from his form of politics. Had he persons with such religious identities in mind, he would quite certainly have been equally at home making the statement that ‘those who want to mix religion with politics understand nothing of religion and politics.’ Indeed, there is nothing inconsistent in this because the intent of the two statements is similar. Keeping some forms of religion out of some

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forms of politics is the only way of ensuring the mingling of other forms of religion with a different kind of politics. Those who killed him understood this well. Ironically, though not surprisingly, he was misunderstood at first by almost all secularists. The case of Jinnah and Indira Gandhi is even more interesting. In different ways both are placed firmly within a culture of unfettered desire possibly with no integral room for high ideals. As we have seen such a culture cannot provide the requisite depth critical for a stable human identity. Their identity, therefore, is thin, and like quicksilver, it moves quickly from one point to another. This is why it is possible for them to have one identity in private and another in public, indeed why they can quickly change their identity even within the public or the private realm. This is also why Jinnah was an atheist in private and a religious ideologue in public. Once different forms of religious and secular identities are introduced into the discussion, other issues may also be seen somewhat differently. Consider, for example, the claim of some well-meaning secularists that the political acts of the BJP, including the Rath Yatra, have nothing to do with religion or the opposite claim that the BJP politicises religion. These statements are at best nebulous and misleading, in desperate need of contextualising. It seems to me clear that while the BJP has no allegiance to religious spiritualism or to faith as an inherently tolerant way of life, it is fundamentally interlocked with religious ideology and zealotry. The claim that the BJP has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with secularism absolves religion of all responsibility for its own perversions. Indeed, it accepts the spurious assumption of religious people of all hues that in itself religion is perfect and that its imperfections come from its lamentable contact with base, secular culture. Communalism has as much to do with religion as it has to with secularism because it thrives in a certain culture common to both. Likewise, while there is some truth in the claim that the BJP has politicised religion it must immediately be asked: Religion of what kind, of which culture? Once again the statement creates the impression that a perfect entity has been deliberately perverted by its unnecessary and deplorable entanglement with secular politics. But it is not the BJP alone that has politicised religion. Transformations in religion are not spurred in a social vacuum. It is only after religion has been ideologised that its politicisation is possible. Similarly, the fortunes of the BJP are no doubt bolstered by the

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support in urban areas from people whose identity is formed by pastiche religion, but the creation of this form of religion is not the handiwork of the BJP or any other political movement. If there is any plausibility at all in the views I have offered, then we can look afresh at some important questions that continue to grip us. Is modernity incompatible with faith, with the plurality and tolerance of traditional, religious ways of life? Has it and does it necessarily plunge all societies into valueless chaos, into a culture of unfettered desire dreaded by high idealists? It is not uncommonly believed that modernity has disrupted or marginalised the life of the believer, that it has produced the religious ideologue and its pathological form, the modern, religious zealot. Is this claim plausible? Does modernity really force upon us the unacceptable choice between the devil and the deep blue sea, between the unprincipled, individualist, wanton and the ideologue, the zealot, the lover of pastiche? Perhaps no one denies that modernity has unleashed processes of homogenisation of unprecedented scale, power and technological force. These forces and processes are bound to transform any settled way of life any where in the world. To that extent, and in so far as modernity is tied to industrialism and capitalism, traditional faith, with its plurality and its privileged, self-evident authority, is bound to be disrupted. Traditional religion can no longer be immediately persuasive because modern forces wrench away from religious symbols the determining power they once possessed. Trust, unconditional obligation, the voluntary surrender of choice, powerful emotions such as love that once turned belief into faith and conviction gradually give way to reason and doubt. In these changed circumstances belief must be supported by evidence or argument and when neither is available, it must try to stand on its own. It is this wobbly self-reliance, however, that produces a belligerent, dogmatic, and doctrinal religion. Modernity often turns traditional faith into a set of doctrines and in so far as secularism 1s modern at all, it is ridden with glaring deficiencies. But my purpose in this paper is to suggest that it also generates cultural resources with which to counter many of its defects. It is this which is often forgotten by many of its critics. Let me put the issue differently. It is true that modernity and secularism,

in at least some

of their aspects,

have

assumed

a

mindless, horrific form. It is equally true that some of these features are inescapably tied to practices that cannot simply be

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wished away. When faced with this, how do we construct our responses? One can react to it either by blindly lapsing into glib support of earlier forms of religions and traditions, defending these

against

all, not

just the

currently

dominant,

forms

of

modernity and secularism. All said and done, this is the character and effect of Nandy’s polemical reflexes. I admire Nandy’s piece on secularism not only for its sharp-witted, focused repartee but also for its sophistication. But on reflection, I cannot help feeling that for all its elegance it does not get a suitable handle on real problems,

and

therefore,

it is in the last instance

not polished

enough. Its finesse springs from its complex view of religion; Nandy is sensitive to its internal differentiations. But he succumbs in the end to the Achilles’ heel of every polemicist: he caricatures his opponent; the view of modernity and secularism that emerges from his essay is too simplistic. In short, he works with a routine offensive strategy. Call the other an absolute evil and when he protests at the loathsome presence of similar features in your own position, say that these are only temporary, accidental afflictions rubbed off by close but forced encounter with him. This is our familiar foreign hand syndrome, a deadly new form of the intellectual’s own homespun xenophobia. An alternative response does not attempt to seal off religion from modernity, or tradition from secularism, but tries to see exactly how each of these operate in different cultures, in that of

unfettered desire, of multiple values, of ultimate ideals that bypasses multiple values, and in the other mature culture that passes through these multiple values. To do so is to see the strength of both modernity and tradition, of secular and religious outlooks. It is also to refuse to make easy choices that are frequently forced upon us. It does not bother me in the least if the reader finds in this view a whiff of compromise. He might say, however, that this compromise does not work. But do we know what does? It seems to me obvious that a sweeping rejection of modernity is neither possible nor desirable. Accomplishing a variant of modernity is the most reasonable option available to us. I am sure that the saner among the anti-secularists, in their less polemical moments, know this already. But it is time they said so openly.

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347

Notes

. Robert Bellah says that an identity is a statement of what a person or a group 1s essentially and as it were permanently. Erikson says that the term identity connotes both a persistent sameness with oneself (self-sameness) and a persistent sharing of some essential characteristics with others. See E. Erikson, ‘The Problem of Ego Identity’, in M. Stern, A.J. Vidlich, D.M. White, eds., Identity and Anxiety (Illionis: Free Press, 1960), pp. 37-38. i) .

P. Strawson, /ndividuals (London & New York: Methuen,

1964), p. 104.

. For a statement of reasons why I oppose this view, see my /ndividualism in Social Science (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1992).

. P. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (London: Penguin University Books, 1966), p. 108. . On the notion of wanton, see H. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 16. . Ibid. . See C. Taylor, Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 16-21. . The best recent statement of this view is found in C. Taylor, Sources ofthe Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chs. 1-4. . Ibid., pp. 19-20.To possess an identity is then to have a framework and to know how one is placed in relation to it. 10. Ibid., p. 27. ig By ultimate ideals I mean values that are incomparably higher than desires, and even than other values. They are of ultimate importance, override all other values and desires under all circumstances and all times. These command our fundamental, deepest commitment. Consider, for example, Alan Wheelis’s view that identity is founded on those values which are at the top of the hierarchy—the beliefs, faith and ideals which integrate and subordinate all values. See, A. Wheelis, The Quest for Identity (New York: Norton, 1953), p. 200. By religion I mean a set of beliefs and practices concerning the transtemporal, the eternal, the other-worldly or God. By secular I mean the view that either negates the existence of the other world (implying a commitment to whatever is designated by a suitable interpretation of the general terms agnosticism and atheism) or at least one for which human beings, livings or dead, have no relevant or meaningful relation to it. ey These examples, needless to say, are greatly oversimplified and present only one, perhaps even a caricatured view of the issue but I believe for the purpose of this paper they would do. 14. See, for example, W.H. Mcleod, Who is a Sikh? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), particularly pp. 91-121. . For a recent

statement

Juergensmeyer, ‘What Religious Nationalism’, 16. This immediately makes more metaphysical and above. But, for present

on the life of the Bhikkhu

in Sri Lanka,

see Mark

the Bhikhu said: Reflections on the rise of Militant in Religion, 20, January (1990), pp. 53-75. its inclusion among religions highly suspect. Buddhism is moral wisdom and less religion in the sense specified purposes, I ignore this.

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Rajeev Bhargava

live I recognise that the contrast between a culture of ultimate ideals and a culture of unfettered desire tends to break down here. The world of the untouchable is

not even a world of desire, it is a universe of degraded bodily existence. To accommodate this example, one requires a category wider than even bodily desire. From the point of view of the Brahmin’s ideals, the world of the untouchable represents chaos or valueless anarchy. It is a world from where the good has altogether, though not arbitrarily, vanished. 18. See Veena Das, Structure and Cognition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 128. (M2), C. Geertz, Islam Observed (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 18, 61. . A. Nandy, “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance’, in Veena Das, ed., Mirrors of Violence (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 69-93. . See R. Swinburn, Faith and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), ch. 4. . See T. Penelhum, ed., Faith (New York: Macmillan, 1989), p. 11. . See the short but excellent section on emotions in J. Elster, Nuts and Bolts in

the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 61-70. . Quoted

in J.L.

1982), p. 218.

Mackie,

The Miracle

of Theism

(Oxford:

Clarendon

Press,

. L. Kolakowski, Religion (Glasgow: Fontana, 1982), p. 218. . Nandy, ‘The Politics of Secularism’, in Das, ed., Mirrors, p. 70.

. Ibid. . Geertz, Islam Observed, p. 14. See also p. 48.

. Ibid., p. 61. s Ubids, po 102: . F. Jameson, ‘Post Modernism and Consumer Society’, in H. Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic (Washington: Bay Press, 1983), p. 114.

. This particular form of ‘post-modern’ religious identity is an entirely new historical entity. It is pastiche religion that is responsible for the sudden upsurge of visits to temples by the denim devotees of Hanuman and for slogans such as ‘I love Ram’ and ‘Let’s go for Ram Rajya’. . F. Schleiermacher, On Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1988), p. 103. . Ibid., p. 102. _ Ibid., p. 98. Ibid. . [bid., 108. . Ibid., p. 110. . Ibid., p. 108.

40.

Ibid. . See Taylor, Source of the Self, parts 1V and V.

eilesteh coppy Aley. T.N. Madan, Non-Renunciation (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 9.

. Ibid., p. 10. . This is a feature as much of religion as of secular perspectives. For example, the four ashrams of Hinduism reflect this point. . To my mind the best statement of this view is to be found in S. Timpanaro, On Materialism (London: New Left Books, 1975).

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47. Although I am not a great admirer of ultimate ideals, [ recognise that they will not disappear overnight. They are generated under special social conditions and, unless something is done about them, will continue to sprout. I do think however that their potency can be checked. It goes without saying that I believe

that all the relevant

virtues

associated

with ultimate

ideals, can,

to

some realistic degree, be realised in a culture of multiple values. One of the problems with ultimate ideals is precisely that they make absolutist demands that it is humanly impossible to meet. They fail to realise the virtues they espouse. 48. A. Nandy, ‘The Politics of Secularism’, in Das, ed., Mirrors, pp. 75-77.

Sixteen

Cultural Embodiment and Histories: Towards Construction of Self Gurpreet Mahajan

Shortly after independence, the people of India gave themselves a Constitution that protected the political and civil liberties of the citizens of India and guaranteed equality before the law. In a tradition bound hierarchical society this was perhaps the most important act of empowerment of the individual. Cutting across caste and gender differences, it granted citizenship to each individual and, by virtue of that endowment, resolved to treat each person as an equal member of the Indian polity. In other words, it privileged the category of citizenship over those of religion, caste and gender. It did not, of course, ignore the existence of other identities; indeed it allowed each individual to practise his/her own religion and advocated the neutrality of the state in all such matters. To the extent that the state was to have no religion, it was expected to be neutral in the disputes between contending notions of good. It was, however, allowed to regulate religious activity in the interest of protecting ‘public order, morality and health’, but as a general rule, religion was placed in the private domain of action, one over which the state was to have minimum possible control. Subsequently, in the year 1976, India was declared a sovereign

secular state in which all religions would have an equal space to exist and grow.

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The Constitution recognised the existence of community identities and the importance of these modes of organisation; consequently it did not enforce a common civil code. The framers of the Indian Constitution hoped that in due course the people of India would be able to evolve a common civil code but for the present they thought it best to accept the ways of life of different religious communities. The same protection was not however extended to the caste structure. To do away with the practice of untouchability, the Constitution granted equal social and political rights to all individuals. The notion of good that members of a particular caste might endorse did not act as a deterrent in this case. In fact, groups that had been oppressed for generations on account of their caste were provided reservations at various level. Through affirmative action of this kind, the framers of the Indian Constitution hoped

that members of these castes would be able to participate as equals in the political life of the state. Thus the Constitution embodied a complex but theoretically ambiguous notion of the individual-community relationship. It acknowledged, on the one hand, the significance of social identities in constituting the self and, on the other, it entrusted the state with

the responsibility of changing the existing social fabric. The former acted as a restraining influence on the political agencies while the latter legitimised state intervention in the social arena. Gradually, in actual political practice, it was the latter that gained greater ascendancy.

Stressing the transformative role of the state, Pandit

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime minister of independent India, introduced a series of changes in the Hindu Personal Law. For a variety of historical reasons he did not temper with the Muslim Personal Law, but he nevertheless worked with the assumption that economic development and modern education would liberate the people from the yoke of tradition and orthodoxy. Since then, many have placed their faith in the process of modernisation, particularly in its ability to erode, or at least to weaken and displace, traditional community identities.

These expectations have not however been realised. Forty-five years after independence we find that religion and caste based community identities have not diminished. Social conflicts have increased and so have incidents of communal violence. Ethnic, regional and linguistic identities have begun to assert themselves and caste continues to be the most important variable in the

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informal structures of communication that have developed around formal and institutionalised power. To the liberal and the radical forces this appears to be a consequence of the desecularisation of the state. Mobilisation of people along community lines and the mixing of politics with religion have jointly produced this predicament. A strident assertion of the neutrality of the state and the dissociation of religion from politics would, in their view, help to counter communalism and the forces of disintegration. This analysis of our present predicament and the associated reading of tradition and cultural identities has been the subject of considerable debate in the recent past. The critics of the Nehruvian paradigm of development have offered alternative explanations of our contemporary experiences; but much more importantly, they have questioned the desirability of constructing

a modern, secular,

nation state.' Theoretically, this interrogation of the existing principles of political organisation begins with a conception of the individual that is significantly different from the one that informed the Nehruvian model. In fact it draws upon the notion of a culturally embodied self that found, at least, a weak expression in our Constitution. This competing conception of the self and the associated rejection of an abstract person, a universal individuality, merits close attention because it offers an alternative political vision: a way of organising our social and political life in which the community plays an important role. In the writings of these theorists itself, it points to a form of political organisation in which people participate in the political process as members of reasonably autonomous and self-defining communities. This paper reflects upon the notion of a culturally and socially embodied self and the political vision that emanates

from it. It examines,

in particular,

the notion of community that informs this perspective and suggests that we dissociate the notion of an embodied self from the justification of communitarian existence. Implicitly, it hints at another conception of embodiment and historicality: one that might be more acceptable to our post-modern sensibility.

Liberalism conceives the individual as a freely choosing, autonomous self, engaged in the maximisation of his/her own utilities.

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The only kind of social and political bond that can exist between such atomised

persons

is a contractual

one,

based on individual

needs and interests, which can ensure the conditions necessary for the realisation of individually defined goals and ends. There are, in that sense, no shared ends that are collectively pursued in society. What political organisation provides, for such a society, is a ‘procedural’ framework in which individuals can pursue their separate desires, interests and conceptions of good life. Since ends and goals are individually defined, what people share in the political relationship is the attribute of citizenship; consequently, within liberalism, the individual in his/her capacity as a citizen becomes the subject of political and juridical discourse. Rights are conferred upon citizens, and individuals can make legitimate claims upon the state only as citizens.* In other words, the individual is constructed and embodied as a citizen; this is the only identity that is recognised politically. The critics of the modern, secular, nation state question this conception of the self. Even though they rarely discuss the philosophical assumptions of liberalism, the manner in which they analyse the Indian society and explain our contemporary experiences, points quite unmistakenly in that direction.’ Minimally, they suggest that the individual should be seen as a bearer of multiple identities:

as

a member

of a family, caste, varna, tribe,

village and state.’ Citizenship or membership of a state is obviously an important marker of individual identity in the contemporary world,

but it does not exhaust

or subsume

membership

of other

groups and communities in society. Further, membership of cultural communities—based on caste (varna and jati), religion and tribe—constitutes the living fabric of Indian society: it shapes the social choices and political preferences of the people.’ But more importantly, it provides a shared system of values and a way of life: day to day activities, forms of dress and address are shaped by these identities. As these conceptions are nurtured in the family, caste and local community, they provide the initial framework of thought which the individuals carry with them almost all their life. Hence, they provide the fore-conceptions that mediate our engagement with reality. Indeed, they offer a conception of good that informs all aspects of our lives.° In India these community identities have existed over a long period of time. Historically, they are prior to our identity as

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political citizens of India.’ Further, the processes of modernisation have altered and modified these identities but not eroded them. The resilience and continued presence of these forms of identity is an indicator of the strength and importance of these modes of identification. Analysts of the Indian polity should recognise this ground reality: indeed, they should build on the ‘lasting and conserving elements of this ancient land’.* Thus, at one level, it is argued that the individual should be seen both as a member of a political community (that is, the Indian state) and as a member of cultural and non-political communities. However, at another level, the individual is defined in terms of her/his cultural identity: S/he is seen as a member of this or that jati, tribe or religion, and it is felt that these social and cultural identities should be given greater space in the public arena. The need to open up spaces in civil society and entrust more responsibilities to communities is linked, in the ultimate analysis, to a critique of the functioning of the modern Indian state and an understanding of the modes of social and political organisation in traditional India. However, this statement follows quite logically from their reading of individual-community relationship. Beginning with the claim that Indians see themselves first and foremost as members of a caste, tribe, village and religion, they argue that these community identities constitute people’s selfunderstanding and shape their social and political choices. But more importantly, these community identities can play an important role in the public arena, particularly in the formulation and implementation of state policy. In a hierarchical society like India where caste is the basis of stratification, and with it, an instrument of domination and exploitation, the category of caste can be used to identify the oppressed and the backward. The people thus identified can legitimately be provided special opportunities— reservations in educational institutions, jobs, civil services, etc.— to enable them to compete equally with other elites in the market.” Moreover, state policies concerning health, family welfare, education and other development activities have been successful only when they have incorporated and used knowledge systems and instrumental mechanisms available at the local village level.” These claims are linked to the belief that an effective development strategy must be sensitive to the particular needs of the people. It must be sensitive to the diverse needs of the different categories of

Cultural Embodiment and Histories

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people. Treating the population as a single mass of undifferentiated people is neither realistic nor judicious. Since caste and religion are still the organising principles of the social life of the people of India, they can provide one way of differentiating between groups and identifying their needs, habits, inhibitions and constraints. Indeed, to break the existing hierarchies of power and authority at the local level, we can use the category of caste to ensure the participation of different categories of people in the decision-making process."'. The centrality of the category of caste is, in the writings of other critics, displaced by the category of reJigion." In both cases it is argued that the existence of these community identities is compatible with democratic modes of organisation. Caste has, for instance, been adapted and absorbed in the democratic process. In the present political system it has acquired a purpose and a function quite different from the one for which it was originally intended." Similarly, while analysing the category of religion, these theorists maintain that the absence or negation of religion in the public sphere is not essential for the effective functioning of democracy. Questioning the liberal claim that desecularisation of the state is responsible for communal violence, they argue that religion was central to the social and political life of the people in pre-colonial India, yet there were hardly any incidents of communal violence then. Some critics go a step further." They argue that communal violence is a contemporary phenomenon. Violent clashes between religious communities are steadily increasing with modernisation: earlier they were restricted to urban towns but now they are ‘spreading outside the parameters of modern and semi-modern India’."" Besides, the systematic violence that is orchestrated during these riots requires a degree of planning, political calculation and rational organisation, the resources for which are available today with the advent of modernisation. The modern condition is responsible in yet another way. Industrial development displaces large sections of the population from their original surroundings, resulting in a deep sense of dislocation and alienation. At the same time it fails to provide an alternative set of values and, along with it, a sense of belonging to these people. To offset this deficiency they try to reclaim and assert their traditional identities more stridently. Thus the alienation generated in the process of modernisation provides the material for the

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growth of orthodox religious forms.'* Besides, in a free market system where labour is available in surplus, traditional loyalties of caste, religion and region get reinforced as they provide the support structures necessary for withstanding the fluctuations of the market."’ Once again, the structures of modernity rather than the presence of religion creates the conditions of conflict and violence in society. In more positive terms, it is argued that religion provides a system of values that binds social existence. Hence, the erasure of religion from the public sphere has meant the disintegration of individual and social life. In fact the instrumental use of religion that we witness these days is a consequence of the ‘secularisation of religion’. The domination of instrumental rationality, which is an expression of modernity, permits the use of religion for the promotion of purely selfish and private means. The delegitimation of religion facilitates this. Since religion is no longer treated as a system of values that can order life and prescribe limits to individual action, it opens up space for the unconstrained pursuit of private ends."* On other occasions it is argued that the space vacated by religion in the public sphere has been taken by the ideology of nationalism, which as a system of ideas is equally arbitrary and violent. After all, the wars fought in the name of the nation state have claimed more lives and caused greater destruction than any other event in the history of humankind." The fact that the magnitude and scale of destruction may be related to the nature of weapons used in contemporary warfare is of little significance because nationalism is, within this framework, seen as one aspect of the monster called modernity: science and technology, which have given us the instruments of mass annihilation, are its other faces. The advocates of this point of view actually question the project of enlightenment, particularly its belief in itself and its mistrust of tradition. Since the principle of secularism and the demand to relegate religion to the private sphere of life are attributes of this project, they are, as it were, condemned from the start. However, even when it is dissociated trom the other contents of modernity, the principle of secularism—particularly the withdrawal of religion from the public

sphere—is

criticised

for encouraging

the instrumental

use of

religion.

Thus the continued presence of religion in the public sphere is justified on two grounds. First, it is argued that religion per se is

Cultural Embodiment and Histories

357

not responsible for the kind of hostility and hatred that we witness among members of different communities today. Second, and more importantly, it is argued that ‘communal violence’ is a contemporary phenomenon embodying a system of rationality that is characteristic of modernity. This analysis is further buttressed by

the claim that the principle of tolerance, which defines a liberal democratic framework, is an attribute of all lived and practised religions.” Continuous interaction with members of other communities in the course of everyday life, generates a degree of tolerance and diversity in which religious boundaries become fuzzy as members of one community participate in the religious and cultural practices of the other. In contemporary India, despite the increasing incidents of communal violence, we find Hindus visiting ‘gurudwaras’ and rubbing shoulders with the Muslim pilgrims at the Chishti Dargah in Ajmer. Space is created within religious traditions in yet another way. The exigencies of historical situations and the binding force of human relationships frequently require more accommodative behaviour; it calls for adjustments in which religious norms are often revised and reconstituted.” As such lived religions express a degree of diversity and variance that is not always found in the original edict: they are, in other words, ‘. . . non-monolithic

operationally plural.’” religion of the majority than a way of life. Since high degree of diversity

and

It is further argued that Hinduism—the of the people in India—is nothing more it is not a text-based religion it displays a and tolerance.”

Three conclusions follow from this. First, religion is not a closed and orthodox system of ideas that militates against the very nature of democratic organisation. Second, religions—particularly those that have existed over long periods of time and continue to be practised—speak to us in many voices. Their multivocality, which expresses the diversity of historical experience, allows for a degree of internal critique. Third, India’s past was traditionally openended. It expressed and embodied inter-religious tolerance and allowed diverse cultural communities to live and survive in neighbourliness. All three statements legitimise religion, and by

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dissociating it from superstition and dogma, justify the presence of religion in the public domain. In fact they prepare the ground for demanding greater space for these communities in our public life. The theorists who actually favour more space for traditional communities point to the urgent need to curb the power of the Indian state and to strengthen the institutions of civil society. The Indian state is, in their view, becoming steadily more violent, undemocratic and unresponsive to the needs of the people: it is using its power to crush popular movemenis for a more just and equitable order. Further, they feel that the institutional ensemble of the state is incapable to regulating and peacefully controlling many sectors of our social life.“ Analysing particular incidents of communal violence, the critics point out that the state’s handling of social issues has fuelled social tensions. Police insenstivity has, in particular, aroused communal passions. In any case, recognising the limitations of police intervention—both in averting violent conflicts between communities and providing security to the members of the affected community—they argue that matters of routine social interaction between religious communities, and other actions that affect the day-to-day life of the people of an area, could be negotiated and resolved by members of different communities. For instance, leaders of the Hindu and Muslim communities in a particular area could determine (or else help the administrative authorities to determine) the size, route and security arrangements for particular religious processions or functions. The issues that might legitimately be left to the communities is obviously debatable, but the essential prescription of unburdening the state remains. In institutional and organisational terms this theoretical claim translates into the demand for a loose confederation of different associations and natural communities: perhaps a multi-layered and loosely knit system of power in which loyalty is owed to kula (family), jati, varna, village, region and, in the last instance, state.” Although the precise relationship between different communities at different levels remains in most cases untheorised, the model of a decentralised polity is universally acclaimed. And in every instance

it is supported by a critique of the nation state and the ideology of nationalism. The belief that societies should be organised around a state that provides a centralised structure of power and authority is, it is argued, a modern concept,” one that is instrumental in

Cultural Embodiment and Histories

359

imposing a homogenised and alien structure on natural and culturally defined communities that are the repository of diverse ways of life, tolerance and syncreticism of the Indian civilisation. It is perhaps necessary to remind ourselves that the arguments that have been presented here, in the form of a single narrative, are statements that come from different sites and theoretical framework. The differences amongst the critics are manifest in the definition of concepts, explanation of the present predicament and the choice of the privileged community. Some favour the category of caste, others speak of religious community. A few, however, see the village as the basis of shared perceptions and expectations. Similarly, some critics point to excessive centralisation and state control while others hold the condition of modernity responsible for our present predicament. The former emphasise the need to strengthen the intermediary, traditional institutions of society, the latter value a non-instrumental mode of rationality and wish to restore a sense of belonging and rootedness. Both of them, however, give primacy to the community. Community (defined in terms of jati/caste/religion/tribe/village) becomes, on the one hand, the most important unity in a decentralised polity because that is the level and medium through which people can be involved in the social and political process; and on the other, it expresses a form of rationality that offers an alternative to the instrumental and utilitarian ethic that characterises a modern individualising society. In each case it is treated as a valued good: the condition of our historically specific existence and an antidote to the ills of modernity. In a society where the political arena is continuously invaded and occupied by traditional loyalties of caste and religion, where the individual is frequently defined by these social identities, this analysis makes immediate sense. It provides, in the first instance, a

conception of the self that is more sensitive to our historical reality. But much more significantly, it cautions us against the use of categories from the political discourse of liberalism in the West to our culturally distinct social reality. Emphasising the heterogeneity of cultures, it induces respect for tradition and legitimises indigenous modes of rationality. On the whole it offers a new way of relating ourselves to our past and making sense of our present; a way in which we are no longer burdened with the impossible task of forgetting our past or mistrusting the voices that are embedded in local and cultural traditions.

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IV

Compared to the advocates of Nehruvian liberalism and rational modernism, the critics of the modern, secular, nation state offer a more adequate conception of the self and a new, more illuminating reading of our historical experience. However, certain aspects of their aralyses, particularly their construction of the historical past and understanding of the individual-community relationship, are deeply disturbing: they raise theoretical and political problems that need to be analysed systematically. The ‘critics’ displace the abstract individual of liberal discourse with a historically determinate subject, possessing distinctive cultural attributes and community linkages. By placing the individual in a tradition (which s/he inherits as a member of a particular caste, religion, tribe, village, etc.), they historicise subjectivity, yet paradoxically enough, they provide an essentialist and transhistorical reading of that tradition. They equate religion with a non-instrumental rationality and a system of values that order individual and social life. Similarly, they see community existence as the ‘other’ of a society that is composed of atomised individuals and marked by conflictual relationships. In each case the entity is defined not by any of its historical attributes but by its opposition to a concrete Other. Thus while speaking of religion, these theorists do not refer to any particular religion, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam or Christianity, nor do they refer to the practices of any particular religious community. As essentialist reading of religion, tradition and community allows them to overlook the specific historical practices that give substance to the traditions that we have inherited as members of this or that community. While the advocates of community centred existence are not unaware of the oppressive practices that have historically characterised some of these communities, there is no theoretical space in their framework for a critical assessment of these practices. In place of a critical reappropriation of tradition, the writings of these theorists justify the totality of our inherited practices and ways of living; indeed they end up justifying tradition per se. They do this partially by imbuing it with values that are cherished by the modern consciousness. Tolerance of difference and respect for diversity, which are perhaps two of the most desired modern liberal values, are transferred to another historical time: they are

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seen as the defining attributes of traditional forms of social and political organisation. This reversal of categories rehabilitates tradition; it makes it appear more acceptable to the modern consciousness and the contemporary Indian. However, reading the past from the value grid of the present, the critics of the modern, secular nation state never really engage with the past. Instead of identifying a system of values through which traditional life was organised, they assure us that the values that are precious to contemporary liberals were better embodied in our pre-modern existence. The inadequacies of their historical reading are only supplemented by the silence on the nature of existing community practices and the structures of power embedded in them. But the most serious problems in their analysis relate to the understanding of social embodiment, religious practice and traditional life. While defining the self in terms of its social and cultural attributes, these theorists recognise that individuals are bearers of multiple identities: they are simultaneously members of a family, jati, village, region and religion. However, their description of these identities as ‘oceanic

circles’ and their endorsement of each of these identities reinforces the view that individuals participate in the political process as bearers of these many identities simultaneously. The harmonious co-existence of these identities in one and the same person suggests that these identities complement each other and operate with supportive value frames and conceptions of good. This reading of multiple identities fails to recognise the conflict between identities. It neglects the fact that each identity involves a different network of inclusions and exclusions. In each case the self and the other are constructed differently. When we see ourselves as bearers of a

particular identity, we foreground a specific interest that cannot be simply displaced by another. There is, in other words, a politics of cultural diversity, and understanding it requires a more differentiated reading of cultural and social identities. The critics of the modern, secular, nation state use the notion of

an embodied self to interrogate the liberal claim that social identities which give individuals their determinate characteristics and personality are not relevant in the political domain. Referring to the problems associated with the distinction between the private and the public domain and the secular principle of neturality, they argue that identities that constitute the self cannot be effaced at

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will in specific domains of action. Moreover, in a society where interpersonal relationships are, to a considerable extent, shaped by community identities, the state has to negotiate with members of different communities at various levels. It cannot, in other words, dissociate itself from them completely. Besides, the principle of secularism has, in most cases, been counterproductive. Historical experience, they argue, shows that the attempts of the state to regulate and redefine community practices have elicited strong reactions; they have only helped strengthen orthodox and fundamentalist forces in society. On the basis of these and other related arguments, these theorists argue that traditional commun-

ities should be allowed to regulate their own life with minimum interference from the state. This alternative prescription of political behaviour that follows from their analysis of historical experience is supported and given credibility by the belief that traditional communities are open and tolerant: they allow the existence and expression of difference, and possess internal structures and modes of critique. Both these claims and the conclusions drawn from them are deeply problematical. In the first instance, these arguments equate tolerance with the existence of difference and diversity. Consequently, they see the existence of diverse practices among different communities as a sign of the tolerance of our culture and religious tradition. The fact that the members of each community are closely guided by the inherited practices of that community, that the different practices of these communities privilege certain identities and systematically suppress others, that they frequently define social roles in a similar way, are aspects that are easily ignored. The ability of an individual to distance his/herself from the community practices and to redefine his/her relationship to these is never, therefore, a serious consideration within this framework. As such, it is the existence of differences across communities rather than the availability of space within the community for the articulation of difference that defines this reading of tolerance. Two things need to be emphasised in this context. First, the existence of difference over space and region does not diminish the oppressive nature of communitarian existence. Second, acknowledging the existence of cultural diversity is one way of giving respect and authentic human existence to the other. But, as a principle, its theoretical value lies in its ability to serve a critical

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interest.

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By exposing ourselves to different ways of living and

thinking that are embodied

in diverse cultures, we become

aware

of the finitude of our existence and come to recognise the possibilities of other ways of living and organising ourselves. Exposure to other can, in this sense, serve a critical function: it can create the conditions in which we can critically appropriate our inheritances. The mere existence of difference across space and time is not, therefore, sufficient for an ‘authentic’ existence: it does not itself create the conditions for change, critical distance or open dialogue. This does not, however, imply that traditions are monolithic entities, frozen in time. It points instead to another historical reality. Under the present conditions, when the process of individuation has brought to the fore new identities, and gender discourse has redefined social roles in a way that had virtually no

place in traditional community structures, it is difficult to envisage an internal critique leading to the redefinition of community practices. In the struggle for redefinition, however, voices that were embedded in tradition and lost over time, may be retrieved and reconstructed, but the critical impulse for such an exercise is likely to come from the changing pattern of material conditions of life and exposure to other ways of thinking about ourselves. It is difficult to pin our hopes on traditional communities for another reason. As the critics of the modern nation state point out, in industrialising societies like India, the leadership of traditional communities—based on religion, caste or kinship—has passed into the hands of orthodox practitioners. The prevalent path of modernisation has created a large number of urban poor who have been displaced from their original surroundings in which their life had any meaning. Living under conditions of extreme alienation, these people try to give meaning to their lives by recreating old traditional practices and lending support to an orthodox and fundamentalist expression of that tradition and religious order. Now, if this is the form in which community identities manifest themselves in contemporary India, then we need to be extremely cautious about privileging traditional forms of organisation. Judging by the analysis offered by these theorists, it is also difficult to envisage how traditional forms of organisation, particularly religion, could be reconstructed in its ‘essential’ and true form in the present circumstances. The ‘critics’ rightly argue that religion should not be bracketed

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as the ‘other’ of that which is rational and scientific. It should also not be judged by its present form because the manner in which it is being revived, constructed and used cannot be delinked from the process of modernisation. It is the latter assertion that must however alert us against reorganising social life in a way that would give greater power to the leaders of traditional communities. Besides, judging by past experience there is little reason to assume that these communities will be able to regulate social life and resolve conflicts. Leaders of religious communities have, on most occasions, been unable to resolve inter-community conflicts among themselves. Similarly, representatives of religious communities forming district level peace committees, to regulate religious processions and other related activities in the area, have met with little success.” Consequently, in our attempt to unburden the state and strengthen civil society, we would be better advised to go beyond the organisational framework provided by traditional communities.

Vv The problems associated with the analysis offered by these theorists are only in part related to the way in which traditional communities have functioned and continue to function. They arise, much more fundamentally, from the way the individual and the community are understood within this framework. Since traditional forms of community existence—based on caste, religion or triibe— are given priority vis-a-vis an individualist society with a utilitarian ethic, it is the commonality of perceptions and the collective nature of experience that are foregrounded in their writings. The individual is, as a consequence, pushed to the background. Indeed the individual is systematically neglected in their analysis. This neglect is evidenced even in their reading of the Western experience. ‘Thus, secularism is associated with the separation of religion and politics, the delegitimation of religion, and the extension of state’s control over sectors of cultural life. What is excluded is the accompanying process through which knowledge, patterns of behaviour and institutional arrangements that were once grounded in divine power are transformed into phenomena of ‘purely human creation’. Similarly in the narrative of modernity, what is ignored is the discourse on human rights and the institutions of representative

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democracy that carry forward the project of secularisation. In other words, what is emphasised is the desacralised conception of the world and the instrumental nature of the emerging rationality, and what is conveniently forgotten is the place of the individual in the project of emancipation. Working perhaps with the model of Hobbes’ philosophy, the ‘critics’ assume that by making the individual the proprietor of his/her own powers, we would necessarily construct an atomised society in which each individual, pursuing his/her own interests, is continuously in conflict with others. It is well worth remembering that conflict emerged in the Hobbesian framework due to the scarcity of resources and the individual’s ‘incessant desire for power that ceaseth only in death.’ Conflict is, in other words, the consequence of a perfectly competitive society in which individual desires and wants are unilaterally translated as the desire for ‘power’. In actual practice, however, competition is neither complete nor endless. Associations emerge within the market that sustain group interests. In any case, what is more significant is that conflict is not a simple and direct consequence of the individual’s attempt to define his/her life, interests and desires. Three conclusions follow from the foregoing discussion. First, an atomised society emerges only when individuals define themselves as rational maximisers of their utilities. Consequently, to construct a society imbued with the spirit of commonness and sociability, we needed to displace this utilitarian, need-based ethics. Diminishing the space for individual self definition and reflection is neither necessary nor desirable. Second, in a society like India,

where communities exercise a considerable degree of authority over the individual, the space for self definition cannot create moral and social anarchy of the kind that is lamented by the ‘communitarians’ in the West. And third, instead of choosing between the particularity of an atomised society and the unreflective unity of community existence, we need a notion in which the particular and the universal are embodied and synthesised. For Hegel, the notion of individuality represented such a unity. We need to retrieve this unity in our conception of the individual and posit it against the abstract individualism of liberal thought. When we reflect upon the specific character of universality and particularity that characterises individuality, we necessarily move

beyond the notion of a disembodied self, disengaged from all past

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practices and community linkages. We will begin instead with an individual whose personality expresses the universality of a cultural formation and its way of life. However, while speaking of this ‘radically situated’ and culturally embedded individual, we need to remember that embeddedness can be conceptualised in at least two ways. We can, like Winch, think of it as ‘rule following’, or else, like Heidegger, identify it with structures of pre-understanding. In case of the former, we assume that the existence of a community involves the operation of a specific set of rules, and participation in the life of that community requires an application of those rules. In other words, we believe that the actions of individuals are governed by rules that are defined and collectively upheld by the community of which s/he is a member. Since rules have a definite structure and content, it is meaningful and important to speak of situations where rules have been followed and others where they have been violated. After all there are, or can be, rules about rule application and rule following. Thus, when we associate social life and community existence with rule following, we minimise the space for legitimate deviation from the accepted norm. On the other hand, when we follow the Heideggerian example and transform the transcendental age into an historical subject by placing him/her in a tradition, we suggest that tradition, or a particular set of inherited practices, provides the fore-structure of understanding: it constitutes the pre-judgements with which we approach the world. However, these pre-judgements or prejudices are only the fore-conceptions with which we approach the world. Our whole life is not always lived with these prejudices: indeed many of them are revised and reconstituted as we go through our life’s experiences. In this framework, a determinate individuality carries its past at every moment of its present existence; it cannot severe its link with it; yet, its actions are not entirely determined by that past. An authentic existence demands both the recognition of historical embeddedness and a critical reflection upon everything that is handed down to the individual. Tradition gives us our personality but it does not foreclose our options: it does not determine our actions completely, nor does it make our choices for us. Armed with new intellectual resources and placed in different circumstances, the individual can, and often does, revise and reconstitute the inherited practices. Consequently, when we think of a culturally embodied self as

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the starting point of social and political theory, our historicality demands that we start with the Heideggerian conception of Understanding. Problems arise when the modernist desire to forget the

past, to break free from traditions and all remnants of ‘dogma and superstition’, is displaced by an equally romantic desire to retrieve our tradition and to privilege subcultures, traditional community practices and modes of social organisation. As inheritors of the legacies of modernity, though not of its seminal myths, we need to begin with a conception of individuality that takes cognisance of our historical particularity and makes that the basis of moral and political life.

Notes

1. While the critics of the Nehruvian paradigm are many, the political form of the modern, secular, nation state is questioned primarily by A. Nandy, T.N. Madan, Shiva

V.R.

Mehta,

and C. Alvares.

R. Kothari, Despite

D.L.

Sheth,

B. Wariavwalla,

the differences between

V. Das, V.

them, their writings

collectively provide a critique of the experience of modernity and make a forceful plea for the use of indigenous categories of social and political organisation. Philosophically, they challenge some of the assumptions of liberalism and acknowledge, in its place, the positive role of social and cultural identities and the value of traditional community existence. While making these arguments they operate with an understanding of Indian tradition, Hinduism, traditional communities and community identities that is shared by a much larger group of social scientists. As such, the ideas they represent draw a theoretical justification from a much larger body of social science knowledge. Keeping in mind this wider intellectual discourse, the paper tries to construct the arguments and the theoretical perspective that informs this political vision. Using the logical construct as an analytical tool, it reflects upon those forms of political orgnaisation that are, explicitly or implicitly, privileged in these critiques. 2. Within the framework of liberalism, rights also prescribe the limits of state action; nevertheless, the state—as legitimate political authority—is regarded as the guarantor and custodian of the inalienable rights of men. And the civil society provides the conditions under which these rights can be enjoyed by the members of the polity. 3. The most notable exception being V.R Mehta who presents his case as a critique of the liberal individualist paradigm. However, most of the other theorists also share the belief that a liberal society based on contract and a utilitarian ethic makes human existence expendable; consequently, to move

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away from this utilitarian, instrumentalist ethic, we need to construct a society based on natural and/or local communities. See V.R. Mehta, /deology, Modernisation and Politics in India (Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1983), p. 142; and S. Sabherwal, India: The Roots of Crisis (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 19. In the writings of other theorists, references are frequently made to ‘primary loyalties’, ‘social and cultural identities’ and ‘ethnic identities’. . See R. Kumar, ‘The Past and Present: An Indian Dialogue’, Daedalus, Fall (1989), p. 45; S.K. Mitra, ‘Desecularising the State: Religion and Politics in India after Independence’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, October (SS) Fppa a5) 7 . For the people of South Asia, their religion establishes their place in society and bestows meaning on their life, argues T.N. Madan in ‘Secularism in its Place’, Journal of Asian Studies, November

(1987), p. 749.

. In the words of R. Kothari, ‘the essential unity of India has not been political but cultural’. Further, ‘India is perhaps the only great historical civilization that maintained its cultural integration without identifying itself with a particular political centre’, in State Against Democracy: In Search of Humane Governance (Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1988), pp. 155-57. Also see his Politics and the People: In Search of aHumane India (Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1989), vol. 2, pp. 480-81. R. Kothari, ‘The Indian Enterprise Today’, Daedalus, Fall (1989), p. 65. . To some extent this thinking informed the initial reservation policy embodied _ in the Constitution. In the more recent past it has been used to support the recommendations of the Mandal Commission for the extension of reservation for the members of ‘Other Backward Castes’. In fact, Kothari maintains that caste Is playing a ‘secular historical role’ in contemporary India. See his “Caste and Politics: The Great Secular Upsurge’, Times of India, 28 September 1990. 10. This kind of argument is usually offered by environmentalists and advocates of sustainable development. Pointing to the problems of a state controlled development policy and the violence to man and nature perpetuated by modern technology, through the green and white revolutions, they suggest that a better

and more equitable system would be one that draws upon the local systems of knowledge and information. See. V. Shiva, ‘The Violence of Reductionist Science’, Alternatives, April (1987), pp. 243-61; and C. Alvares, ‘Science, Colonialism and Violence: A Luddite View’, in A. Nandy, ed., Science, Hegemony and Violence (Tokyo and Delhi: The U.N. University and Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 68-112. . Informed by this logic, the panchayti raj institutions provide representation to the lower castes in a separate category, to ensure their participation in the political process. In the field of education too, community based structures are being used to identify target groups and their specific needs. Informal education and the New Literacy Mission, it is argued, can be successful only when such forms of identification are used to differentiate between the needs and requirements of different groups of people. . The displacement of caste by religion makes a crucial difference in our judgement of the various political forces in contemporary India. However, it does not make a significant difference to the reading of our shared Indian tradition.

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Since it places the same value on our inheritances, it allows a theoretical move from the notion of embeddedness to communitarian existence. . Two related arguments are made by Kothari. First, castes function as a part of the caste system only when they ‘behave “segmentally” and according to a system of hierarchy and “closed stratification” .... When they operate as

political entities they belong to the political system’, in his edited collection, Caste in Indian Politics (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1970), p. 6; second, ‘by being different things at different times/points in social interactions, it provides for immense flexibility and produces tension management and assimilative capabilities’, in his Politics in India (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1970), p. 231. . There

are, we

are told, ‘. . . no fundamentalists

or revivalists in traditional

society’, Madan, ‘Secularism’, JAS, p. 749. 15. A. Nandy, ‘Secularism’, Seminar, June 1992, p. 29. 16. The fundamentalist revival of religion in Iran and other countries of Asia has frequently been understood in these terms. In India, the revival of traditional rituals and practices, such as sati, has been explained in this way. See A. Nandy, “The Sociology of Sati’, Indian Express, 5 October 1989. . See D. Chakrabarty, ‘Communal Riots and Labour: Bengal’s Jute Mill-hands in the 1890s’, in V. Das, ed., Mirrors of Violence (Delhi: Oxford

. .

20.

2A.

. .

University

Press, 1990), pp. 158-64. A. Nandy, ‘An Anti-Secularist Manifesto’, Seminar, October (1985), pp. 22-24. A. Nandy, ‘The Soctology of Sati’, Express. Making a distinction between religion as ideology and religion as faith, Nandy argues that the former works with the concept ‘of a well-bounded, mutually exclusive religious identities’, while the latter shares in the diversity of every day life. A. Nandy, ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance’, in Das, ed., Mirrors, pp. 69-73. V. Das, ‘Nationl| Honour and Practical Kinship: Of Abducted Women and Unwanted Children’, paper presented at JNU Gender Studies Forum, 18 September 1992. Nandy, ‘This Politics of Secularism’, in Das, ed., Mirrors, p. 70. In this argument, the attribute of tolerance that was previously associated with all practised religions is seen as the special attribute of Hinduism. The latter is, by this logic, placed in a special category, and occasionally the syncreticism of

the ‘great Indian tradition’ is collapsed to the tolerance of Hinduism. 24. D.L. Sheth, ‘State and the Movements’, paper presented at The Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, August-September 1992; R. Kothari, Rethinking Development: In Search of Humane Alternatives (Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1988), pp. 190-200. PE Mehta, Modernisation and Politics, pp. 130-31; B. Wariavwalla, ‘In Search of National Identities’, paper presented at The Indian Institute of Advanced Study, August-September 1992; and A. Nandy, ‘The Political Culture of the Indian State’, Daedalus, Fall (1989), pp. 13-14. . Kothari, Politics and the People, pp. 481-82. 27. This conclusion is reinforced by some empirical studies. See, for instance, M. Dagga, ‘A Case Study of Communal Riots in Jaipur’, Report for the Project ‘Securities and Violence’ (mimeo). 28. See, U. Baxi, ‘The “Struggle” for the Redefinition of Secularism in India: Some Preliminary Reflections’, p. 5 (mimeo).

Seventeen

Communal Riots in Contemporary India: Towards A Sociological Explanation’ Pravin J. Patel

Introduction Violent conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in India are commonly named ‘communal riots.’ Such riots, analogous to violent racial or ethnic conflicts, involve collective and/or individual acts of violence—murder, looting, arson and the destruction of property. A review of available literature on communal riots in the independent India reveals the following empirical patterns:? First, as compared to a brief period in the late 1940s after the Partition, the

period between 1950s and the late 1960s was relatively less disturbed. Since the late 1960s there has been an unprecedented growth in the absolute number of communal riots in India, in the number of states affected by the riots in the country, and also in the number of administrative districts disturbed by such riots in each of these States.

Second, there is also a qualitative change in the nature of communal violence as indicated by its increased intensity in recent times. Communal riots are now not only recurrent and relatively more prolonged, but also have far greater devastating consequences as evidenced by a steep increase in figures of casualties, loss of property, and use of fire-arms. Third, the occurrence of communal

riots is found to be associ-

ated with the proportion of Muslims residing in a particular place.

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Incidents of communal riots are relatively greater in number in those places where the Muslim population is between 10 to 45 per cent. This does not rule out the occurrence of communal riots in areas where the Muslim population is exeedingly small or large. Fourth, generally these riots erupt more frequently in urban than in rural areas. Fifth, places with a substantial population of Hindu refugees, who migrated from Pakistan after the partition of India, seem more prone to communal riots. Sixth, areas which have experienced communal disturbances in the recent past are also vulnerable to recurring cycles of communal riots. Seventh, at such sites petty quarrels over minor personal issues rather than truly religious issues, are more likely to be transformed into major communal riots. Eighth, among the religious issues, the celebration of religious festivals, rather than cow slaughter or desecration of religious places and graves, accounts for a larger number of communal riots.

Some Prevalent Explanations There have been some efforts to explain the occurrence of these riots. Although these explanations are not always explicitly formulated, they may be subsumed under the following heads. Historical Explanation

One explanation of communal riots between Hindus and Muslims in India is that they are the historical products of past events such as Muslim invasions, establishment of the political supremacy in Hindu India, destruction of Hindu temples, forcible conversion of some Hindus to Islam and above all the British colonial policy of divide and rule.’ It is asserted that all these events caused mutual distrust, hostility and antagonism, leading to riots between them and culminating in the partition of the country on religious grounds. This explanation, however, does not adequately account for their recurrence, increased intensity, and spread in post-colonial India.

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Psychological Explanation Another related explanation of communal riots in India is that they are offshoots of the painful memories of past which are now rooted in the Indian psyche. Some Hindus view the Muslims as a potential threat to the country because of their alleged pro-Pakistani feelings and/or their rapid population growth, real or suspected.” They suffer, in a sense, from a sort of paranoia. Similarly, the Muslims, to a great extent, do not feel very secure while living amongst a vast Hindu majority. They feel that they are being discriminated against.° In other words, they suffer from a ‘minority complex’ or, worse still, at times from a kind of ‘persecution mania’. These psychological formulations do explain, to some extent, the prevalence of communal tensions, but are inadequate to explain the variety, complexity, and history of events labelled as ‘communal riots’. ‘Ethnic’ Explanation

This explanation assumes that due to certain inherent cultural differences, both Hindus and Muslims have maintained separate and highly distinctive identities. They co-exist, but they are largely insulated and alienated from one another. Hence tensions prevail. Some observers of contemporary India feel that Indian Muslims now should join the ‘mainstream’,’ by rejecting the traditional cultural markers which distinguish them from Hindus, and should accept common codes in their social and personal life, so as to enhance the cultural integration between the religious groups. The main lacuna in this approach is that though there are some cultural differences between the Hindus and the Muslims, they do not constitute internally integrated homogeneous communities always capable of acting in unison against each other. Nor are all the cultural differences irreconcilable. Humanistic or ‘Gandhian’ Explanation

Yet another explanation is based on the assumption that those who are involved in such riots are ignorant about the universal humanistic values shared by all the religions and are therefore

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mistakenly hostile to each other. If properly educated, they will learn to live peacefully and harmoniously. Gandhi lived and died for this belief. Yet in spite of his determined efforts, he could not bring significant change in the hearts of the people. This is a sufficient indication of the limitation of this explanation. Economic Explanation This explanation of communal riots stresses the central role of economic factors. However, there are two different versions of it. One simplistic version of this explanation is that Muslims in India are generally underprivileged. Their efforts to improve their economic status creates a feeling of resentment among the majority community of Hindus who in turn try to retaliate. This leads to violent confrontations between the two communities.* Another version of this explanation is that the economic competition between the two groups either for government jobs or in business and in industry creates a clash of interests and results in violent conflicts.’ Both these versions have a degree of empirical validity. However, neither helps us fully understand why riots erupt only at certain times and places. Political Explanation

According to this explanation the degeneration of the competitive political process in independent India into the populist strategy of mobilising the masses along communal lines is responsible for the conflicts between Hindus and Muslims." The truth of this argument also cannot be denied, but it shares the weakness of the economic explanations. Administrative Explanation This explanation attributes the occurrence of communal riots to the ineffective, corrupt, partisan and often inadequate police force or to inefficacy of government machinery in general." Police inaction or overaction is often cited as evidence in support of this explanation. The proponents of this view, therefore, at times demand

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proportionate representation of the Muslims in the administration and also in the police force. However, this explanation is not sufficient to explain the fact why the same administrative machinery, with all its limitations, on some occasions effectively combats ‘communal’ conflagrations and why on other occasions it fails. Each explanation contains an element of truth. Each focuses on a distinctive variable whose importance cannot be gainsaid. However, all these competing explanations mutually weaken each other’s explanatory power as they are largely based on selective evidence from some broad, macro-level observations, rather than on detailed, systematic micro-level analyses of specific riots. They are also based on the fallacious assumption of the homogeneity of a religious group. As empirically borne out, each religious group is marked by internal differentiations and tensions. Besides, a religious group Is not necessarily a ‘community’ in the real sense of the term. People do not necessarily possess the capacity to act in unison simply because they belong to a particular religion.’ The followers of a particular religion do not all equally internalise its value-system

and

identify

with

it. Not

all of them,

therefore,

participate in violent conflicts involving their group. Furthermore, these explanations are based on the mistaken assumption that a social situation is static. The way social groups define and perceive themselves is subject to constant changes. For instance, the period between 1950 and late 1960s, when the wounds of Partition were fresh in the hearts of the Hindus, was relatively free from intense communal violence." In recent years, when there has been a spurt in the incidence of communal riots, Indian Muslims seem to have become considerably less sympathetic to Pakistan, particularly after seeing the regimes of the Generals like Yahya Khan and Zia-ul-Huq. Even Hindus no longer seem to consider Pakistan a serious threat to India, especially after the birth of Bangladesh." Thus, the way the two communities see themselves as well as each other has undergone a radical transformation, yet communal riots persist. A related weakness of these explanations is that they fail to distinguish between ‘communal tensions’, ‘communal conflicts’ and ‘communal riots or violence’. Hence they do not and cannot explain why, and under what circumstances, communal tensions are transformed into violent conflicts. Communal tensions are a

Communal Riots in Contemporary India

necessary but not a sufficient condition of communal

375

riots. And

therefore, we need to explain why the former sometimes do, and

on other occasions do not, lead to the latter. In view of these and other limitations of the above-mentioned explanations,

in-depth, micro-level studies of riot-affected areas,

giving detailed accounts of the dynamics of such riots and their socio-temporal contexts, are vitally necessary. In this paper, I present such a micro-level analysis by examining the case of Vadodara riots. Since the constellation of factors contributing to communal strife varies from place to place, I shall link these findings with those of other places, and consolidate them into a more general and empirically valid theoretical framework.

The Vadodara Riots: A Historical Perspective Vadodara (also known as Baroda) is a flourishing industrial city of Gujarat. Before Independence, it was the capital city of then Baroda State of the Gaekwads. Historically, Vadodara was considered a peaceful city. No communal riot is known to have taken place either during the feudal rule of the Gaekwads or even after the merger of the Baroda State into the Indian union. However, since 1969 so many communal riots have occurred in Vadodara that the city is now on the national map of communal riots. Of all these riots we will closely examine the first three because the subsequent ones are merely chain reactions. The First Riot: 1969

Vadodara experienced the first ever communal outburst in September 1969. It was a spillover effect of the riots of a neighbouring city, Ahmedabad,"

which sucked the major urban centres of Guja-

rat into a severe communal turmoil for the first time after Independence. Many Muslim houses, shops, and religious places in Vadodara city were systematically attacked. There was no apparent reason or local provocation for this riot and the Muslims of Vadodara were caught unawares. Although the loss of property was quite heavy, only eight persons were killed during this riot, a small number compared to nearly 1,000 deaths in Ahmedabad during this period.

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To understand its origins, we will have to:take note of the significant historical events which preceded it. The most significant event in this context seems to be the war between India and Pakistan in 1965.'° The war created an emotional trauma among many Muslims about their loyalty to their motherland, India, vis-a-vis their religion, Islam, and therefore to the Islamic state, Pakistan. This was the first major empirical event which manifested the moral dilemma confronting Muslims after the Paritition, creating an ambivalence in their attitudes. The ambivalence of the Muslims was perceived by many Hindus as a lack of patriotism in them. This type of reaction is not difficult to understand in the emotionally charged atmosphere of a grave crisis like war. Many Muslims were arrested as a precautionary measure under the Defence of India Act. This was taken by some Hindus as ‘evidence’. which ‘confirmed’ their suspicions concerning Muslims. This mutual alienation disturbed the relative harmony between the two communities established after Independence. As a defensive measure, Muslims began to assert their collective identity and to form organised groups. They withdrew their political support to the Congress party in the 1967 general elections in favour of such opposition parties as the Swatantra party. Further, in 1968, a state-wide conference of the Muslims of Gujarat was held to assert their right to pray (namaz) during working hours in the government offices. The conference also demanded that the character of Aligarh Muslim University should not be disturbed. And in July 1969, the Muslims took out a procession in almost all towns of the state, including Ahmedabad, to protest against the attack on Al-Aqusa mosque in Jerusalem, which is one of the most sacred Muslim shrines in the world. In this procession they were also reported to have shouted slogans which were interpreted as provocative by some Hindus. All these identity-asserting acts of the Muslims of Gujarat had an integrative function for their own community. However, as an unintended consequence of this, the Hindus, particularly the orthodox among them, also started closing their ranks fearing that the lack of unity among them may put them in a vulnerable position in the event of a conflict between the two communities. Each community united because it feared attacks from the other. And the efforts of each community to enhance its internal integration

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further alienated the other community, contributing to the increased tension between the two. Each feared and harboured deep suspicions about the other. The conflict became a self-fulfilling prophecy.” As Robert Merton puts it, ‘social definitions popular in groups and collectivities make up an important dynamic part of the process through which anticipations help to create the anticipated social reality.’"* Indian society was passing through a grave economic and political crisis during this period.” After the wars with China (1962) and Pakistan (1965), the Indian economy was in a bad shape, which created disequilibrium in the political power structure as well. In the 1967 general elections the Indian National Congress started losing its popularity. This, inter alia, created internal tensions and finally culminated by late 1969, in a split, giving rise to Congress (R) led by Indira Gandhi and Congress (O) led by Morarji Desai and others. The main base of Congress (R) was provided by the Muslims and the Other Backward Classes of the Hindus. But the Congress (R) could not retain the veteran leaders of undivided Congress with it in Gujarat, as most of them preferred to join the Congress (O). Several new groups joined the Congress (R) bandwagon and started jockeying for power and prominence by mobilising the masses along communal lines, as reflected in the so-called KHAM theory (K = Kshatriya, H = Harijans, A = Adivasis, M = Muslims) adopted by the Congress (R) in Gujarat later in the 1970s. Communalisation of politics in Gujarat became a favoured strategy of Congress (R). These developments further intensified the growing self-consciousness of the two major communities and weakened the traditional socio-political bonds.’! Not surprisingly, riots began in 1969 over a minor scuffle near a temple in Ahmedabad between a few Hindu sadhus and a group of Muslims and quickly spread throughout the state, including Vadodara. The riot left a permanent scar on the city in general, and in the hearts of the Muslims of Vadodara in particular. It generated a measure of communal hatred the city had never seen before. The social fabric of the city was irreparably ruptured. No effort was made to bring the two communities together after the riot.” Nevertheless, for the next eleven years or so not a single communal incident occurred. But the hatred surfaced again

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in September 1981, when another major communal riot broke out in the city. The Second Riot: 1981

The second communal riot in Vadodara began in Ladwada, a Hindu locality surrounded by Muslims, at the end of a ten-day long Ganesh Utsav (the festival of the elephant-faced Hindu God) on 13 September 1981. Originally popular among the Maharashtrian population of Vadodara, the festival is now celebrated with great enthusiasm by almost all Hindu communities in the city. Some Muslims feel that this new development in the cultural life of Vadodara became prominent only after the 1969 riots. On 11 September 1981, two days before the final immersion of the Ganesh idols, a crack was found on the left arm of one of the three idols in the Ladwada locality. Immediately after this was noticed, some Hindu youths went round the area alleging that two Muslim boys had thrown a stone at it. Police investigations revealed no evidence to indicate that the idol had been damaged by Muslims. The Hindu leaders of the area were satisfied with the finding and assured the Muslims that they were not under suspicion. But wild rumours continued to spread in the city during the next two days that the Muslims had allegedly damaged several idols of Ganapati. Nothing was done to dispel these rumours. The administration could have called a meeting of both the communities on 12 September to clarify the matter. But they thought that such a move would give unnecessary importance to the matter, and therefore chose to ignore it.” On 13 September the trouble broke out. Trucks full of people were returning to Ladwada after the immersion of the idols in Sursagar, a lake located in the centre of the city. As the first truck passed under a Muslim house in Mogulwada, someone from the truck shouted that dirty water had been thrown from above. Excited youths got down from the truck raising a hue and cry and the trouble started.“ It was brought under control after police firing. T'wo days later the situation began to return to normal. Two deputy ministers of the Government of Gujarat, one Muslim and the other Hindu, decided to tour the riot-affected area along with some other politicians. The visiting party also included a local Hindu member of the legislative assembly (MLA), a Muslim MLA

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from a nearby town, the then local leader and MLA of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), and a Sarvodaya leader. As the group entered Mogulwada, a Muslim dominated locality, unaccompanied by the police, it was confronted by young Muslims angry at the police firing two days earlier. One of them flashed a knife and stabbed the two Hindu youths accompanying the BJP MLA as his bodyguards. In the scufflle the Sarvodaya leader was thrown to the ground and the Muslim MLA was manhandled. This incident sparked off the second round of violence. Wild rumours circulated among the Hindus that the BJP MLA

was abducted and stabbed;

equally unsubstantiated rumours spread in the Muslim community that one of their leaders, who was the then deputy mayor of the city, had been kidnapped and assaulted in retaliation. These rumours enraged both the communities and caused considerable loss of life and property.” The easy and uncritical acceptance of the rumours indicates how deep-rooted was the mutual distrust and hatred between the members of the two communities. In addition to this, of course, the underworld rivalry between the Muslim bootleggers and their Hindu rivals namely the Marathas and the Kahars, also played a key role in this riot,” which will be discussed in detail later on. The situation was aggravated by the factionalism in the ruling party. In June 1980 the Congress (1) government came to power. From the very beginning the Congress (I) party was divided into two factions, one owing allegiance to the then chief minister (CM’s faction) and the other hostile to it (anti-CM faction). This had split the party even in Vadodara. Most of the Vadodara Muslims belonged to anti-CM faction. The CM’s faction in Vadodara was led by a Hindu Patidar who was also the treasurer of Gujarat Congress (1), and the anti-CM faction of the city was led by a Hindu Brahmin who was a senior minister in the state government. There was a running feud between these two factions. This infighting was believed to be one of the reasons for the assault on the peace committee which visited Mogulwada on 15 September. This was evident from the statement made by the local leader of the CM’s faction that the Muslim members of the committee were attacked to embarrass the chief minister at whose instance they had gone to the city. The local Muslim leaders (anti-CM faction) countered this, saying that the chief minister was ill-advised to send nonacceptable Hindu and Muslim members of the delegation—who

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did not enjoy the confidence of the local people—to the area. One group accused the other of having engineered the riots, and was in turn charged by its rivals of exploiting the situation to its own advantage. The anti-CM faction alleged that the chief minister had failed to protect the minority community in Gujarat. The current riot, according to them, was the eleventh in Gujarat since his government had come to power. This factionalism considerably delayed the pacification process, paralysed the government at a critical juncture, and forced the administration to rely mainly on

the police to restore normalcy.” The Third Riot: 1982

The third communal riot in the city began on 13 December 1982, following the circulation of the news regarding the transfer of an IPS officer, the then Police Commissioner of Vadodara. The Police Commissioner (a shaven Sikh), also the Additional Inspector General of Police, was posted at Vadodara on 3 September 1982. His assignment, ostensibly, was to restore peace in the city which had been continuously convulsed by frequent and often prolonged outbursts of riots. After the September 1981 riots, about eighteen major clashes between Hindus and Muslims had already taken place in the city.* However, within just three months of his posting to the city, the newly appointed Police Commissioner appeared to be quite successful in controlling the situation and became very popular. The decision of the government to transfer him out of Vadodara without apparent reason therefore infuriated him and his sympathisers. While they were thinking of challenging his transfer in the law court, the city was engulfed in the worst ever communal frenzy.” The Police Commissioner’s transfer was preceded by the following two events of immediate significance at the local level. First, the resignations of five Muslim members of the Vadodara Municipal Corporation, including the deputy mayor, in protest against the government’s alleged inability to protect the Muslims from police atrocities. They also made a representation about this to the then Prime Minister of India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi.“ Second, the release of the leader of Baroda Young Muslim Action Committee, who was also a teacher in the M.S. University of Baroda, on 13 December—the day the Police Commissioner was transferred. This coincidence

of the two

events,

according

to some

observers,

led the

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Hindus to believe that the Muslims were responsible for the Police Commissioner’s transfer. The angry Hindus went wild. The killing of at least twenty-two persons and injuries to more than a 100 due to stabbing and police firings,*' in addition to looting and arson, in the course of less than twenty-four hours indicate the intensity of communal passions in Vadodara. Such was the frenzy that the mayor and several other corporators (anti-

CM-faction), all Hindus, were manhandled for over two hours by the outraged Hindu mob who held them also responsible, directly or indirectly, for the transfer. In order to understand the third riot of Vadodara city, it is necessary to examine the major communal and political events which immediately preceded these riots. As already mentioned above, about seventeen major clashes between the Hindus and Muslims had taken place in Vadodara since the second riot of September 1981. But these clashes were not necessarily communal in nature as they were triggered off by warring bootleggers of both the communities. Nevertheless, they did provoke communal feelings.” To illustrate the dynamics of these clashes and the role of the politician-police-bootlegger axis, we will examine the three major clashes which occurred in April, June and October 1982, respectively.

Politicians, Police and Bootleggers On 19 April a clash took place between the Muslims and the Bhois of Yakutpura, where they live together. Three persons were killed in police firing and several others, including women and police officers, were injured. The genesis of the conflict lay in the rivalry between a Muslim bootlegger and a Kahar bootlegger, both believed to be the big bosses of the Vadodara underworld. The Kahar bootlegger, it is said, was initially working with a Muslim engaged in the gambling business; after the latter’s death he started his own illicit liquor business and was joined, a year later, by a Muslim lieutenant.” It was alleged that the Kahar bootlegger was patronised by a local Hindu leader of the CM’s faction, and that at least four

senior police officers acted as a link between the two. The CM’s faction, on the other hand, maintained that a Muslim leader, who

was then elected as a deputy mayor of the municipal corporation and who until then owed allegiance to the local Hindu leader of

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the CM’s faction, was also the patron of the Kahar bootlegger, when he fell out with that faction, he retaliated by setting up a rival bootlegging centre in Yakutpura with the help of the Muslim bootlegger, who was constantly fighting for supremacy with the Kahar, his former boss and current rival. The rivalry and hostility between the two kept mounting till 19 April when they finally clashed.“ In order to investigate into these riots of 19 April 1982, the then newly appointed Acting President of the Gujarat Pradesh Congress (1), who belonged to the anti-CM faction, appointed a sixmember probe panel led by a Muslim MP. This fact-finding committee consisted of members belonging only to the anti-CM group. The panel arrived at Vadodara on the morning of 6 June 1982. Incidentally, the same morning a conflict took place between the police and the Muslims in Mogulwada. The Muslims alleged that four police officers, believed to be close to the local Hindu leader of the CM’s faction, descended with 200 strong armed police on the Muslim neighbourhoods of Khatkiwad and the nearby localities of Mogulwada. The police party had apparently gone to nab a Muslim criminal and bottlegger. When they could not find him they caught his younger brother and took him to the nearby police chowki for questioning. This enraged the Muslims of that locality, who followed the party to the police station. The police beat them and chased them away causing injuries to many. About a dozen of these victims, mostly women and children with bleeding wounds, were brought before the members of the factfinding committee. They were escorted by some local Muslims and other leaders of the ruling party including the then mayor, all

belonging to the anti-CM faction. The Muslims complained to the committee that the police ransacked their houses in the locality and beat up anyone they could lay their hands on, including many innocent men, women and children. One of the local Congress (1)

leaders of the anti-CM faction openly accused the CM’s faction of fomenting tensions and thereby preventing the fact-finding committee from carrying Out its investigations.» As a sequel to this event, the state government, however, transferred all the four police officers out of Vadodara city and considerably reshuffled the city police set-up, particularly at the lower level. Nevertheless, the 6 June conflict was followed by two other minor clashes within ten days. One of these incidents took place

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within less than a week in Navapura-Kevdabag, a locality of mixed population, which had till then remained free from such trouble. Another clash took place on 17 June in Bavamanpura, in the notorious Panigatea area. Both these clashes were supposed to be between the Bhois and Muslims.” The next confrontation took place in the city at midnight on 27-28 October when Dassera, a Hindu festival, and the Katal-KiRaat, the last day of Moharram of the Muslims, coincided.” On 22 October a person in Navapura locality was fatally stabbed.* It was in this already surcharged atmosphere that a scuffle took place between the Bhois and Muslims the next day—23 October, the day of the installation of the Tajias. When a Tajia procession was passing through Navapura, a heated verbal exchange reportedly took place between the Tajia party and a Bhoi fisherwoman sitting on the roadside, about making way for the Tajia procession to pass.” Then suddenly pelting of stones started. As a result, the police who accompanied the Tajia procession resorted to firing. In this conflict three persons were injured due to firing and ninteen due to stone throwing. For several days after this incident, tension persisted and clashes continued for one reason or the other. Interestingly enough, though this trouble started during the two religious festivals it was not considered communal, either by the Muslims or by the Hindus. It was mainly attributed to the gang rivalry between the Muslims and Bhois.” However, the Muslims complained that in this conflict police acted high-handedly towards them and turned a blind eye to the Hindu trouble-makers." Thus, these October riots deeply hurt the Muslims and they formed a Young Muslim Action Committee. The Committee, led by a young Muslim teacher of M.S. University of Baroda, launched its agitation on 5 December 1982 in support of its demands, one of which was the transfer of some police officers, but the list did not include the Police Commissioner.” The leader of the Action Committee, who was close to the antiCM faction of local Congress (I), refused to cooperate with the CM’s faction and the state government." In the meantime, he was arrested late at night on 8 December." Although his arrest was bailable he refused to be released on bail.* In the wake of these developments, news spread on 13 December that the Police Commissioner had been transferred, ostensibly under pressure

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from the anti-CM faction and its Muslim supporters, and once again the city was in the grip of violence.“ This factional fight within Congress (1) was also considered responsible for the rift among the top officers of Gujarat police.” For instance, the then Director General of Police of Gujarat and Police Commissioner of Vadodara did not get along with each other. During the October riots, the Director General of Police along with two other special Inspector Generals of Police (IGPs) camped in Vadodara for a number of days and allegedly kept an eye on the Police Commissioner of the city and curtailed his administrative autonomy. This naturally demoralised the rank and file as they often received contradictory orders. On the night of 13 December, it was alleged that the Director General of Police refused to talk with the city Police Commissioner. The conflict between the two became public on 14 December, when some local sympathisers of the Bharatiya Janata Party brought a stay-order against the transfer of the Police Commissioner.* But the Director

General of Police claimed that before the stay-order could be served the Police Commissioner was relieved of his office in his absence from the city. The Police Commissioner, however, maintained that he was in the town and had not received any communication to this effect from the Director General of Police. Obviously, there was not even a working relationship between the two.

Social Structure, Social Processes and Social Ecology The Vadodara situation appears to be unique since it is one of the

very few places where the underworld has contributed in a large measure to communal violence. However, when the findings of Vadodara situation are consolidated into a larger theoretical framework, one finds that the forces underlying the communal violence are deeply embedded in the social structure of the city. For this purpose, I shall examine the Vadodara situation using the following main concepts: (a) social structure, (b) social processes and (c) social ecology. Moreover, in order to socially locate the participants involved in communal violence and to highlight their socio-economic composition, I distinguish the areas primarily

affected by communal violence from those secondarily affected by it. A primarily affected area is one where riots have originated due

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to some actual conflict, cause or provocation; therefore rioting here is most intense. In the secondarily affected area the rioting is mainly due to the spillover effect of the primarily affected areas and, therefore, relatively less severe. However, due to the communal passions generated by such riots, a secondarily affected area, in the long run, tends to become a primarily affected area. Social Structure

According to the 1971 census, the total population of the city was nearly 4.5 lakhs; by the time of the 1981 census it had reached around 7.5 lakhs. In terms of religion, more than 80 per cent of the Vadodara population is Hindu and about 12 per cent is Muslim. Linguistically, more than 60 per cent of the people are Gujaratispeaking, about 13 per cent are Marathi-speaking, about 12 per cent are Urdu- and Hindi-speaking, and about 4 per cent are Sindhi-speaking.*” The Gujaratis, mainly the upper caste Hindus (Brahmin, Bania and Patel) dominate the economic and political life of the city. They are mainly entrepreneurs, businessmen, and professionals. However, the Gujaratis are also found in different salariat and wage-earning strata. Since Vadodara was a princely state ruled by the Gaekwads, the Maratha rulers, Marathi-speaking people also constitute a sizeable chunk of the population of Baroda city. They are divided into three main caste groups: Brahmins, Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhus (CKPs) and Marathas. The Brahmins are further divided into two subgroups: Konkanastha and Deshastha. Of these the former are considered to be of a higher status. The Brahmins, the CKP and some upper status Marathas (the former sardars of the Gaekwads) are mainly involved in white-collar jobs and professions. While the majority of the Marathas are employed in government bureaucracy and industry, some of the lower status Marathas have taken to bootlegging and carved out their own areas of monopoly in the underworld. In Vadodara city, according to a 1983 estimate,

there were nearly 123 dens (addas) selling illicit liquor worth Rs 1 lakh every day,” in spite of prohibition; and it was believed that

periodic payments (haftas) totalling about Rs 60 lakhs per year were paid to the police officers and political bosses.*' Marathas have been the traditional rivals of Muslims in this lucrative business. Another Hindu community which needs to be mentioned in this

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context is that of Bhois or Kahars, a fishermen community. They are socially, educationally, and economically backward. Traditionally, their main economic activity has been fishing and industrial labour. However,

recently they have entered into the liquor and

gambling business in a big way. Until the late 1970s, it is believed, the Bhois were not involved in bootlegging. But partly because bootlegging is a lucrative business, partly because fishing is not only hazardous but also a low-status activity, and partly because some local ponds have dried up, they have taken up bootlegging as their main activity. In fact, certain areas, where the Muslims had traditionally enjoyed a monopoly over the business of illicit liquor, have been taken over by the Bhois or Kahars since 1977.” As a result, the latter have emerged as a force to reckon with. They have become the new rivals of the Muslims in this cut-throat business of the underworld. Many a time, the underworld rivalry between the two is converted into a communal conflict. Though, numerically very small, having a population of about 15,000, the Bhois or Kahars can be very aggressive and militant. Lately, the Muslims allege, the members of this community have started celebrating certain Hindu religious festivals such as Gokul Ashthami, Ganesh Chaturthi, Navratri and Dassera with great fanfare. This appears to be the consequence of their newly

acquired wealth and status. This status consciousness is also visible in the fact that many of them now distinguish themselves from Bhois and maintain that they are Kahars, though both terms are synonymously used in common parlance and also within the community. They assert that the Kahars (Sanskrit: Skandhar) migrated from North India around the time of the 1857 mutiny. Their original Occupation was to carry palanquins (palakee) and do household work in princely rulers’ establishments. The Bhois, on the other hand, are supposed to be a local community, mainly involved in fishing and hence inferior in status to the Kahars. However, after having migrated to Vadodara, some of the Kahars took up jobs in the Maharaja’s palace, but many of them also took up fishing as an economic activity and started living among Bhois. Some of them even adopted the Bhoi surname out of ‘ignorance’. After the merger of the Baroda State into the Indian Union, those who lost their jobs from the Maharaja’s palace have also taken up fishing or industrial jobs. Be that as it may, the fact is that the Bhoi and Kahar surnames are used interchangeably within the same

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community. But, the desire to be identified as Kahars, and not as Bhois, is increasingly seen among the younger, educated, and relatively better off members of the community. There are about 20,000 Hindu Sindhis who are mainly in business. They came to Vadodara as refugees after Partition but now are quite well established. The 55,000 Muslims of Vadodara are divided into a number of subgroups such as: Alvi Bohras (about 7,000), Sunni Bohras (about 7,000), Sulemani Bohras (about 2,000), Dawoodi Bohras (about 1,200), Dudhwala Jamat (about 5,000), Memons (about 2,000), and others such as Tais, Saiyeds, Quereshis (Khatkis), Garasias, Fakir Jamat, etc. The Bohras, the Dudhwala Jamat and the Memons are mainly involved in business and industry. Among them, the Alvi Bohras and the Dudhwala Jamat are quite affluent. The former are enterpreneurs and have monopoly over the spectacleframe and tin industries, whereas the latter hold sway over the transport industry. Some members of the Dudhwala Jamat are also involved in Warli matka and other forms of gambling. While the Sunnis, the Sulemanis, and the Memons are trying to come up, the others who constitute the bulk are quite badly off.” Most of these Muslims, living in abject poverty, work as industrial labourers and are also involved in bootlegging and other criminal activities.™ According to a report, the majority of the 15,000 residents of a locality called Yakutpura earns its livelihood through bootlegging, gambling, prostitution, black-marketing in cinema tickets and narcotics.* Thus, it is clear that neither the Hindus nor the Muslims are a homogeneous group. Each group is divided vertically along class lines and horizontally

along caste lines. And,

therefore,

though

they follow a common religion they do not automatically constitute a community. Except religion, they have nothing much in common. Their economic and other secular interests differ. Even during riots, their actual involvement and participation are not to the same degree. For instance, the Gujaratis were relatively less involved, whereas the Sindhis were in the forefront in the first riots, and the

lower status Marathas and the Kahars or Bhois were prominent in the second and the third riots. The Sindhis did not play a very significant role in the last two riots, perhaps because they are relatively better off now and no longer consider the Muslims as their rivals.

But

interestingly,

at the time of the 1982 riot one

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heard the Bhois complaining that the Marathas did not wholeheartedly support them. Similarly, among the Muslims, the Bohras and the Memons not only remain inactive during such confrontations, but also carefully avoid any such trouble. Social Processes

During the feudal period, and even after the formal merger of the Baroda State into the Indian Union in 1949, the Hindus and Muslims were fairly integrated into a stable political and social system. This stability was disrupted later due to the dynamics of social processes which are discussed below. During the British period the leaders of the Independence movement avoided confrontation with the native rulers. Therefore they did not organise the people of the States under the banner of the Indian National Congress. Instead, they formed Praja Mandals. In Baroda State also there was a Praja Mandal which worked in close collaboration with the Indian National Congress. Within it upper caste Hindus,

such as the Brahmins,

the Banias and the Patels,

were more active. The Muslims were active in the Muslim Conference, but they worked in collaboration with the Praja Mandal due to the Congress leaders’ policy of forming a united front of Hindus and Muslims against the British. The Muslim League did not have much impact in Vadodara. After Independence the Praja Mandal and Muslim Conference joined the Indian National Congress along with their upper caste Gujarati Hindu and Muslim supporters. However, the Maharashtrians were politically polarised. Some of them were active in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Hindu Mahasabha. Others were associated with the Communists and the Socialists. Yet neither the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha nor the Communists and the Socialists were very strong in Vadodara. The Congress, ever since Independence, has dominated the political life of the city as indicated by the municipal and other elections. The Mahagujarat Janata Parishad and the Janata party were able to hold power at the local level only for brief interludes. However, after the national-level split of the Congress party in 1969, the party at Vadodara became divided and has ever since been plagued by factionalism. The former Jan Sangh and present Bharatiya Janata Party subsequently acquired some influence in

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the old city and has been able to get one MLA elected, especially since the late seventies. The period between 1950 and 1960, it may be noted, was relatively peaceful at the all-India level also; presumably due to the steady economic progress which held out hope of mobility to different strata of society and thereby maintained political stability. But by the late 1960s, particularly after the disastrous wars with China and Pakistan, the effects of a deepening economic crisis were increasingly felt, resulting, as noted, in widespread conflicts between different strata, including industrial and other social groups. This crisis considerably disrupted the prevailing power structure and political alignments. Gujarat too experienced the tremors of these developments, as reflected in the 1969 riots. Since no efforts were made to mend the relationship between the two communities, in Gujarat or in Vadodara, mutual hostility, distrust, antagonism, and tensions continued to grow. This was manifested in the form of organised violence for the first time in 1981, due to local provocation. In 1969, Vadodara was a secondarily affected area but in 1981 it became a primarily affected area. By this time the competition in bootlegging, a lucrative business, had become intense due to the entry of a new community of the Bhois. Moreover the struggle for political power between the Congress (1) and its opponents became acute over a period of time. Besides, the Congress (I) itself became divided into two rival factions. Therefore, the populist strategy of mobilising political support on the basis of traditional loyalties of caste and community was increasingly used. It may be noted that the social base of the Congress (I)’s political power in Gujarat, after the 1970s, has been mainly provided by the Kshatriyas, the Harijans, the Adivasis and the Muslims (popularly known as the KHAM theory).” It can be seen that the first riot followed the split in Indian National Congress, while at the time of the second riot (September 1981) the situation was exacerbated by the growing power struggle and factional infighting within the Congress (1). It was evident that the controversy over the attack on the visiting politicians in a Muslim locality was politically motivated. Similarly, the third riot was preceded by intense gang-warfare and infighting between the two factions of Congress (I) having alignments with different gangs. These factional fights within the ruling party had considerably weakened the integrative capacity of the state and eroded the

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authority of police. This, combined with the determined efforts of certain sections of the Hindus and the Muslims to strive for social mobility, by acquiring economic and/or political power, through legitimate or illegitimate means, aggravated the situation. Social Ecology What appears to be more significant is the social ecology of the city. Vadodara city can be divided into the old and the new. The new city, on the western side of the river Vishwamitri, is generally trouble-free. Mainly middle class and upper-middle class localities are situated in this part. The old city, on the eastern side of the river, is thickly populated. Even within the old city certain parts, particularly those which constitute the walled city, are primarily affected by communal riots while certain others are secondarily affected. For example, Bawamanpura, Bavchawad, Panigate, Ladwada, Mogulwada, Navapura, Fatehpura-Koyali Falia and Yakutpura are the primarily affected areas. The trouble generally originates here and therefore these are the worst affected areas. Often the trouble remains confined to these areas. Only occasionally it spreads to the other parts of the old city, such as Wadi, Raopura,

Mandvi,

Macchipith and Salatwada, which can be des-

cribed as secondarily affected areas. In all these areas there is a sizeable concentration of Muslim population and/or property. But this is not a sufficient cause for the outbreak of riots. For example, in the new city too there are pockets of Muslim populations (e.g. Nava Yard) or property (near railway station), but they are generally trouble-free. If we examine the social composition of the most notorious localities which are primarily affected by communal riots, such as Bavamanpura, Bavachawad, Panigate and Navapura, we find heavy a concentration of the Bhois or Kahars who live cheek by jowl with the Muslims. In Fatehpura-Koyali-Falia, which is another primarily affected area, the houses of the Bhois, Marathas and Muslims exist side-by-side; in Baranpura area, sizeable populations of Marathas and Muslims are neighbours. Large numbers within these communities, in these areas, belong to the lower strata and are competitively involved in bootlegging, gambling, and other criminal activities.

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Vadodara Riots:

391

A Comparative Perspective

When we examine the Vadodara riots from a comparative perspective, we find that the same underlying forces are also found elsewhere. Let me illustrate the point by briefly examining the overall situation of Gujarat and linking it with the all-India situation. The Gujarat situation is by and large representative of India as a whole on the following three counts. First, as in the other parts of

India, the occurrence of communal riots increased in Gujarat only after the mid-1960s. Another similarity is that the recent riots of Gujarat are as prolonged, intense and fatal as elsewhere in India. And thirdly, they are mainly confined to urban areas, with certain towns within the state being more riot-prone than others. Gujarat was given the status of a separate state of the Indian Union in 1960, when the former bilingual Bombay state of western India was divided into two unilingual states: Maharashtra and Gujarat. Although the first ever recorded communal riot of Gujarat (and incidentally that of India) occurred in Ahmedabad

in 1714,* on

the occasion of the Holi festival, the number of riots increased in the state only after the mid-1960s. Particularly the year 1969 can be considered a watershed in the region’s history of communal riots. During this year as many as fourteen out of the total seventeen districts of the state were affected by the unprecedented increase in communal violence. Of the total incidents recorded in the decade of 1960s, more than 80 per cent took place in that year alone. Of the 152 days of rioting in this decade, 98 (i.e. 65.5 per cent) were recorded in 1969. Ahmedabad,

Vadodara, and Godhara

accounted for 40 per cent of the riot-hit areas.” Gujarat can be divided into five major cultural sub-regions: (a) South Gujarat, (b) Central Gujarat, (c) North Gujarat, (d) Saurashtra and (e) Kutchh. Of these sub-regions, Central Gujarat, a subregion with a relatively long history of educational, economic and industrial development, is most affected by communal violence. Again in this sub-region only three towns are worst affected by the recurring riots, namely Ahmedabad,

Vadodara,

and Godhara.

The specific configuration of forces in each city is obviously unique. However, when we examine the socio-economic composition of the groups actively involved in the riots in these cities in a comparative perspective, we find some significant similarities.

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An analysis of the social ecology and socio-economic composition of the groups actually involved in Vadodara riots has shown that all groups are not equally involved. Only those members of each group having competing and conflicting interests are often found to be involved in intense conflicts, particularly in the primarily affected areas. The evidence from the other two frequently disturbed cities of Gujarat, namely Ahmedabad” and Godhara,” corroborates this pattern. In 1969 the city of Ahmedabad was the worst affected, in terms of casualties and the loss of property. In most places in Gujarat there was a spillover effect of the Ahmedabad riots. Even within Ahmedabad all localities were not equally affected—only the walled city of eastern Ahmedabad was the primarily and mainly affected area. It was here that the conflict began and was the most intense, while western Ahmedabad was largely a secondarily affected area. Even in eastern Ahmedabad all sections of the locality did not equally participate in the riots. In order to understand this aspect of the riots and to socially locate the active participants in the riots, we need to look into the relevant aspects of the social structure of the city. Ahmedabad is the largest industrial city of Gujarat. The city is one of the oldest centres of the textile industry. Most of the workers employed in this industry are Muslims and Harijans. Some migrants from the neighbouring areas of Ahmedabad and from other states are also employed in the textile mills. They mainly live in the thickly populated walled city. Most of them are poor and the competition for jobs among them is acute. This competition is further intensified by the increasing closure of textile mills since the late 1960s. By contrast western Ahmedabad is inhabitated by upper and middle class/caste Hindus, with a small sprinkling of Muslims. There is no direct clash between the two communities here. In the subsequent riots of 1981 and 1985, the pattern of participation in the city was by and large the same. The only new development in the later riots was the role of gang-fights between Hindu and Muslim bootleggers in the walled city. Since many of the poor Muslims and Hindus living in this area seek employment in underworld activities, due to the lack of alternative employment opportunities after the large-scale closure of the textile mills, they provide readily available fuel for gang wars which are transformed into communal riots.

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In Godhara the conflict is only between sections of Hindus and Muslims. Among Hindus only the Sindhi migrants of the Bhaiband sect are involved in the conflict, while among Muslims only the Ghanchis are involved. Other groups of Hindus and Muslims do not have any direct conflict of interest with each other. Godhara was communally disturbed for the first time after the arrival of Sindhi migrants from Pakistan in 1947-48. And since then riots have recurred over a period of time. But the basic structure of the conflicting relationships has not changed. Nor have the issues of the conflicts. The same group of Sindhis clash with the same group of Ghanchi Muslims, time and again, mainly over the issues of residential property and the location of handcarts or cabins for business in the central area of the town. What has happened in Ferozabad, Bhiwandi, Aligarh, Muradabad and many other places outside Gujarat indicates a similar pattern. In Ferozabad,

for instance,

the actual conflict was

between

the

Hindu owners and the Muslim craftsmen of the bangle factories. Similarly, in Aligarh the lock industry, in Bhiwandi the powerloom rivalry, in Sagar the bidi industry, in Muradabad the brassware trade and in Hatia, Hyderabad and Jamshedpur the competition for jobs between the two groups was believed to be responsible for communal

strife.” Even in Punjab, to take an instance of another

type of communal conflict, the root cause appears to be the clash of material interests between Sikh farmers and Hindu traders.” These conflicts, which originate in economic competition (structural strains), become communalised and subsequently spread to other areas, which we have described as secondarily affected areas, due to the existence of communal tensions caused by psychological, ethnic, and other factors.

Concluding Remarks The Vadodara situation clearly shows that neither Hindus nor Muslims are a homogeneous community. Each is internally divided, and communal conflicts are confined only to certain sections of the two communities. Before 1969 Vadodara was not communally disturbed. But once disturbed the riots have occurred frequently and with greater intensity. Petty quarrels and conflicts over political and economic goals, rather than truly religious factors, have sparked off the

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chain of riots, demonstrating the social structural rather than the communal roots of the conflict. This is not to deny the role of tensions generated by psychological, ethnic, and other factors. These tensions do exist to a certain extent. Indeed it is because of their existence that it is possible to ‘communalise’ a secular conflict. The occasional conflicts in the secondarily affected areas are also due to such tensions. In this sense, the psychological, ethnic and other tensions are necessary but not sufficient to explain the outbreak of communal violence. Its source is essentially in the social structure. A social structure, as Robert Merton observes, is *. . . differentiated in historically differing extent and kind into interlocking arrays of social statuses, strata, organizations and communities that have their own and therefore potentially conflicting as well as common interests and values. Thus, every social structure has differentially located units which have potentially conflicting and integrative interests and values. The interests are generally reflected in their socio-economicpolitical exchanges; and values are reflected in their ideologies and

goals. If the socio-economic-political exchanges are mutually rewarding and values, ideologies, or goals are commonly shared, then they work as integrative bonds between these units; otherwise they do not. That is, if some of these structural units try to enhance their interests at the expense of the others, and if they emphasise their values, ideologies and goals while ignoring those of the others, they may weaken the structural cohesiveness and induce conflicts, often violent. Thus, every social structure has in-built strains and tensions and thus the potential for generating social conflicts. However, the transformation of the structural strains into violent conflicts depends upon the social process variable. Social processes are mechanisms which maintain or change the existing social structure and its internal bonds. According to Amitai Etzioni, *. . . societal processes may be responsive to members or they may

allow discrepancies between the desires of members and the provisions of the society to grow. The greater the discrepancy, the greater the violence potential.” In other words, the degree of integration in any given social structure varies empirically. Contemporary Indian society is stratified both horizontally and vertically, with extremely limited scope for upward social mobility

Communal Riots in Contemporary India

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by legitimate means, in view of the deepening economic crisis caused by ‘stagflation’® and increase in unemployment. At the same time the urges and aspirations of the masses have been aroused by the so-called revolution of expectations generated by modernising forces, including the mass media which are described by Lerner as mobility multipliers.” This has heightened the competition over scarce resources, with consequent feelings of relative deprivation leading to tensions and conflicts. In this competition some strata are also motivated to enhance their particularistic interests by adopting illegitimate means and thereby weakening common value-orientations. In such a situation, the state has to play a crucial integrative role by containing and controlling the tensions that inevitably arise. But it has its limitations. The Indian state is dominated by elites who, in order to win power in a competitive democratic context, have to adopt the populist strategy of mobilising groups based on traditional interests like religion, caste and community. This, in turn, not only polarises the electorate along political lines, but also escalates the aspirations of the traditional interest groups which are rallied around caste/community/religious issues. Thus, economic and political competition is superimposed on a social structure which is characterised by traditional loyalties, gross inequalities, a lack of legitimate opportunities for social mobility, and a weak integrative value system. Consequently, mutual distrust, hostility, and antagonism between different strata, including the Hindus and the Muslims, deepen.™ This further weakens the integrative bonds between them. Thanks to the operation of the socio-psychological principle ‘the greater the outgroup hostility, the greater the ingroup solidarity’,” and the consequent emotional structure of inter-group relationships, there is a fertile ground for rumours

and mistrust, which in turn

leads to the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy talked about earlier. From our analysis it can also be inferred that if social processes become more cohesive—either because of the emergence of some superordinate goals, necessitating mutually rewarding cooperation of the conflicting groups for their complementary interests,” or because of the increase in the strength of the integrative role of the state—communal violence will decrease. Thus, the communal divide need not be taken as an irreversible process. In this sense riots serve an important indicative function. Their increase or decrease

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Pravin J. Patel

is a measure of the social integration a particular social structure has managed to achieve at a given point in time.

Notes

. This is a revised and extended version of the paper ‘Baroda Riots: A SocioStructural Analysis of Communal Violence’, serialised in Vigil, 13 February 1985, 20 February 1985, 27 February 1985 and 6-13 March 1985. G. Krishna, ‘Communal Violence in India: A Study of Communal Disturbances ° in Delhi’, Economic and Political Weekly, 12 January 1985, pp. 61-74; N.C. Saxena, ‘The Nature and Origin of Communal Riots in India’, in A.A. Engineer, ed., Communal Riots in Post-Independence India (Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1984), pp. 51-67; Sunday, 3-9 April 1983, pp. 22-24; and K.S. Subramaniam, unpublished paper presented at a workshop on ‘Communal Riots’ held at Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, 7—9 May 1983. Although there is a dearth of systematic efforts in social sciences to theoretically explain the phenomenon of communal riots in contemporary India, there are some noteworthy efforts. I. Ahmad, ‘Perspectives on the Communal Problem’, in Engineer, ed., Communal Riots; B. Chandra, Communalism in Modern India (Delhi: Vikas, 1984); A.A. Engineer, On Developing Theory of Communal Riots (Bombay: Institute of Islamic Studies, 1984); and Saxena, ‘Nature and Origin of Riots’, in Engineer, ed., Communal Riots. . There are conflicts between many other communities and religious groups in India but, as noted by several scholars, in the Indian political parlance the communal problem usually refers to the tensions between the Hindus and the Muslims, perhaps because it is the oldest and most widespread type of communal problem in India. . K.F. Rustamji, ‘Why Jamshedpurs?: Basic Factors Behind Communal Riots’, Mainstream, 9 June 1979, pp. 7-9, 61.

K. Nayar, ‘Between the Lines: Communalism—Old Fears and New Dangers’, Indian Express, 10 December 1980. Debonair, August 1983, pp. 54-58, 66-67, 81. . M. Shakir,

‘An Analytical

View of Communal

Violence’,

in Engineer,

ed.,

Communal Riots, pp. 97-99. However, it may be noted Shakir does not fully endorse this view. . K. Nayar,

‘Between

the Lines:

What

do Moradabad

and Aligarh

Mean?’,

Indian Express, 5SNovember 1980; Rustamji, ‘Why Jamshedpurs?’, Mainstream, and Z.K. Hasan, ‘Communalism and Communal Violence in India’, Social Scientist, 10, 2 (1982), pp. 25-39. 10. S.C. Dubey, ‘Sociology of Violence: Roots in Political Culture’, Times of India, 11 August 1980; and Shakir, ‘Analytical View’, in Engineer, ed., Communal Riots.

Communal Riots in Contemporary India

397

. Shakir, “Analytical View’, in Engineer, ed., Communal Riots, pp. 96-97; and R. Khan, Rafig and M. Satyaprakash, “The Hindu-Muslim Riot in Varanasi and the Role of the Police’, in Engineer, ed., Communal Riots, pp. 305-12. . B. Chandra, ‘Communalism: Misreading of Social Reality’, Mainstream, 31 May 1980, pp. 7-11. . Nayar, ‘What do Muradabad and Aligarh Mean?’, Express. . Rustamji, ‘Why Jamshedpurs?’, Mainstream. . An interesting account of the Ahmedabad riots is given by G. Shah in ‘Communal

Riots in Gujarat’,

Economic

and Political Weekly,

Annual

Number,

January 1970, pp. 187-200. A revised version of this paper is published in Engineer, ed., Communal Riots, pp. 175-208.

. Ibid. . R.K. Merton, ‘The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy’, in R.K. Merton, ed., Social Theory and Social Structure (New Delhi: Amerind Publishing Co., 1968), pp. 475-90. . R.K. Merton and N. Robert, eds., Contemporary Social Problems, fourth edition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

. Shah, ‘Communal

1976), p. 22.

Riots in Gujarat’, EPW.

. Lbid. . H. Spoden, ‘An Historical Perspective on the 1985 Riots’, a paper presented at the ‘South Asia Seminar’, Columbia University, New York, 3 March 1987. In this paper Spoden gives an analysis of the breakdown of the traditional institutions of Ahmedabad. . A. Fernandis, ‘Rumours Fuelled Riots in Baroda’, Times ofIndia, Ahmedabad edition, 29 September 1981. nulbid: Ibid. . Ibid. 26. A.A.

Engineer, ‘Political Corruption Fed Riots’, Sunday Observer, 20 November 1982; and Javed, ‘Anatomy of Baroda Riots—I’, The Daily, 24 December

1982. . Fernandis,

‘Rumours

Fuelled Riots’, TO/.

P. Joshi, ‘Baroda in Turmoil: | & IP’, Indian Express, Ahmedabad edition, 5-6 January 1983; and P. Patel, “Recent History and Politics of Communalism and

Communal

Riots in Gujarat’, in A.A. Engineer and M. Shakir, eds., Com-

munalism in India (Delhi: Ajanta), pp. 142-43. 29 . MLK.

30.

Shs 32 21a

Mistry, ‘Jashpal Singh Speaks Out’, Indian Express, 22 December

1982,

S.S. Swarup, “Anatomy of a Riot’, Sunday Observer, 26 December 1982, I. Sawhney, ‘Jashpal Singh’s Style of Functioning Resented’, Times of India, Ahmedabad edition, 23 December 1982; and Javed, ‘Anatomy of Baroda Riots—II’, The Daily, 25 December 1982. Javed, ‘Baroda Riots—I’, Daily. New Age, 26 December 1982. Joshi, ‘Baroda in Turmoil’, Express. P. Pagedar, ‘Mafia Mars Baroda Peace’, Indian Express, Ahmedabad edition, 6 September 1982; and Swarup, ‘Anatomy’, Sunday Observer. Pagedar, ‘Mafia Mars Peace’, Express.

34. 3D. Ibid.

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Pravin J. Patel

a bids . Swarup, ‘Anatomy’, Sunday Observer. A.A. Engineer, ‘Baroda Riots: Wages of Political Corruption’, Economic and Political Weekly, 13-20 November 1982, pp. 1845-47. . Loksatta, 24 October 1982. . Engineer, ‘Baroda Riots’, EPW. . Clarity, 14-21 November 1962; and Engineer, ‘Political Corruption’, Sunday Observer.

. J.B. Bandukwala, A Gandhian Struggle By the Victims of Baroda (Ahmedabad: Gujarat Vishamata Nirmulan Samity, 1982), pp. 3-4. . Ibid., pp. 5-6.

Riots,

lot Dees . Joshi, ‘Baroda in Turmoil’, Express; and Bandukwala, . . . .

Gandhian Struggle, [os Te Swarup, ‘Anatomy’, Sunday Observer; and Javed, ‘Baroda Riots—II’, Daily. Sawhney, ‘Jashpal Singh’s Style Resented’, TOJ/; Joshi, ‘Baroda in Turmoil’, Express, and Swarup, ‘Anatomy’, Sunday Observer. Shanti, ‘Anatomy’, Sunday Observer. Government of India, Census 1971, Series 5, Gujarat; District Census Handbook,

Part-X

(L):

Departmental

Statistics and

Full Count

Tables,

Vadodara

District, Table B II (p. 78), Table C-V (pp. 87 and 93), Table C-CII (pp. 98-99). 50. I. Sawhney, ‘Police Fail in Their Primary Duty’, Times of India, Ahmedabad edition, 27 September 1983. aly Engineer, ‘Baroda Riots’, EPW; R. Menon, ‘Baroda Riots: Strifes in the Streets’, India Today, 1-15 January 1983, p. 33; and Calrity, 14-21 November 1962.

. Engineer,

‘Baroda

Riots’, EPW,

p. 1845; and Joshi, ‘Baroda

in Turmoil’;

Express.

. Engineer, ‘Baroda Riots’, EPW, p. 1845. . Ibid. . Pagedar, ‘Mafia Mars Peace’, Express. . T. Pantham, Political Parties and Democratic

Consensus: A Study of Party

Organizations in an Indian City (Delhi: Macmillan,

1976), pp. 19-54.

. T. Bhatt, ‘Gujarat: Discontent Leads to Communal Strife’, Sunday, 3-8 April

1983, pp. 40-41.

. Krishna, ‘Communal Violence in India’, EPW, p. 61. However, according to N.C. Saxena this happened in 1730. See Saxena, ‘Nature and Origin of Riots’, in Engineer, ed., Communal Riots, p. 51. 59. Krishna, ‘Communal Violence in India’, EPW, pp. 66-67. 60. Shah, ‘Communal Riots in Gujarat’, EPW,; Spoden, ‘Historical Perspective’, ‘South Asia Seminar’; and A.A. Engineer, ‘Case Study of Five Major Riots from Biharsharif to Pune’, in Engineer, ed., Communal Riots, pp. 261-63. ol. Engineer, ‘Case Study of Five Major Riots’, in Engineer, ed., Communal Riots, pp. 246-61; and Z. Banu, “Two Sides of a Coin: A Comparative Study of the Riots at Godhara and Udaipur’, in Engineer, ed., Communal Riots, pp. 228-37. 62. Nayar, ‘What Do Moradabad and Aligarh Mean?’, Indian Express; Rustamji, “Why Jamshedpurs?’, Mainstream; and Hasan, ‘Communalism and Communal Violence’, Social Scientist.

Communal Riots in Contemporary India

399

63. V.S. D'Souza,

‘Economy, Caste, Religion and Population Distribution: An Analysis of Communal Tension in Punjab’, Economic and Political Weekly, 8 May 1982, pp. 783-92.; P.J. Patel, ‘Violent Protest in India: The Punjab Movement’, Journal of International Affairs, 40, 2 (1987), pp. 271-85. R.K. Merton, Sociological Ambivalence and Other Essays (New York:

Free Press, 1978), pp. 124-25. 65. A. Etizioni, ‘Collective Violence’, in Merton and Nisbet, eds., Contemporary Social Problems, p. 721. 5 . To describe the Indian economy characterised by stagnation and inflation, economists often use the term ‘stagflation’. 67. D. Lerner, ‘Modernization: Social Aspects’, /nternational Encyclopedia of

Social Sciences, vol. 10 (Macmillan & Free Press: 1968), pp. 386-95. Hasan,

‘Communalism

and Communal

gineer, ‘Why and How of pp. 17-19; A.A. Engineer, August 1982, pp. 137-41; Mainstream, Republic Day

Violence’, Social Scientist, A.A.

En-

Communal Riots’, Mainstream, 18 October 1980, ‘Socio-Economic Change and Muslims’, Link, 15 and M. Shakir, ‘Dynamics of Social Violence’, Special, 1982, pp. 29-31.

69. This principle was formulated and empirically tested by Sherif and his associates in their field experiments on intergroup relations. A summary of their

studies is given in M. Sherif and C.W. Sherif, An Outline of Social Psychology, revised edition (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), ch. 9; and M. Sherif, ‘Experiments in Group Conflict’, Scientific American, 195, November (1956), pp. 54-55; reprinted in H.A. Paul, Hand Book of Small Group Research, second edition (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 158-63. 70. This is what Sherif and his associates have successfully proved in their field

experiments, cf. ibid.

Fighteen

The Sardar Sarovar Project: Ecopolitics of Development Pravin N. Sheth’

In the eighties environment emerged as a major development concern, and is gradually emerging as a humanitarian and human rights issue globally as well as in India. Interest and involvement in the escalating and all-round degradation of India’s environment are, relatively speaking, a recent phenomenon. The growing literature on the subject in India now shows the links between its ecological problems

and the dominant

development

model

in which

dams,

_ ‘the temples of modern India’, to use Jawaharlal Nehru’s celebrated words, occupy the central place. However, ‘ecopolitics of development’, or the task of studying environmental policies and problems and relating them with development and political processes, is yet to emerge in India. How has the state managed or mismanaged India’s once rich heritage of natural resources? How has governmental power been manipulated by the ruling elite? Who gets what and how—at what and whose cost—when development plans like big dams and industrial plants are undertaken? What reactions do such development plans generate among those who are adversely affected, and those who are concerned about them on grounds of their interest or ideological concerns? What are their strategies for

The Sardar Sarovar Project: Ecopolitics of Development

401

challenging state policies and actions that have devastating environmental implications? How does the state and its apparatus respond to these challenges? Does politically relevant discourse develop out of such confrontation? Does it help in reinterpreting our dominant development paradigm or is there scope for alternative development and alternative politics? Does it offer some insights for conceptualising and profiling ‘green politics’ as an alternative to politics that has been current around the ‘Blue’, ‘Red’, ‘Pink’

and ‘Yellow’ models of development?’ This should form the content and agenda of the study of ecopolitics of development. The Narmada River Project, covering four major states of India, provides an important case study of maturation of the environmental movement and dynamics related to the ecopolitics of development. No major project before Narmada has brought environmental problems to such a high level of informal debate, political mobilisation, and grassroots activism. The controversy around this project has engulfed horizontal and vertical levels of government and authority and helped forge links between NGOs (non-government organisations) involved in grassroots work and those operating at the national and international levels. It has also contributed to the political discourse on development alternatives— in fact, becoming the ideo-political nursery for greening the politics of India.’

The Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP), the interstate multipurpose project with a terminal major dam, is being built on river Narmada, the fifth largest river in India. The unharnessed water of this 1,312 km long river flows down into the sea every day. The Narmada is a living link between the north and the south. Of all the rivers in India, it has the largest number of temples along its banks and many Hindus cherish the hope of taking its pariakamma (walking around the holy river through all such religious points) once in their lifetime. Sometimes called Abhayanvayi—one that makes us fearless—the river Narmada has today generated a new level of awareness among the meek tribals in the valley who dare to struggle for what they consider to be their right. The Narmada Valley Project (NVP) with its two mega-projects,

402

Pravin N. Sheth

SSP and NSP (Narmada Sagar Project) in Madhya Pradesh (MP) is the largest single river valley project ever to be planned in India. In terms of canal network, it is ‘the largest in the world’, envisaging a network

of 28 other major dams,

135 medium

and 3,000

minor dams (with special types of ponds to be added later on), with an estimated cost of about Rs. 15,000 crores. The total basin area of the river is about | lakh sq km, with about 88 per cent area in Madhya Pradesh, 2 per cent in Maharashtra and 10 per cent in Gujarat. At present, the utilisation of this nver basin is hardly about 4 per cent. SSP, the project undertaken by the Government of Gujarat and Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam (SSNN) will irrigate 17.92 lakh ha

of land spread over Gujarat’s 12 districts, 62 talukas and 3,393 villages, and 75,000 ha in the arid areas of two large districts of Rajasthan. It claims that ‘4,720 villages and 131 urban centres also covering the water-starved Saurashtra and Kutch region in Gujarat state would get a permanent solution as regards the drinking water supply needs’, thus fulfilling the domestic water needs of about 295 lakh persons (2021 census projection). It will serve over 75 per cent of the command area, a chronically drought prone area,° and provide more than 7 lakh new jobs. The cost of SSP, originally estimated at Rs. 6,406 crores, with financial and loan assistance of $450 million from the World Bank (WB) has already reached Rs. 13,500 crores

as the GOG/GOI

(Government

of Gujarat/Govern-

ment of India) had to respond to pressures from WB and meet the critique of the dam by informed public interest groups who characterise the Narmada Project as ‘the world’s worst man-made ecological disaster’.’ Eminent environmentalists and civil rights activists in India and abroad have been pleading for ‘damning the dam’. On financial, sociological and ecological grounds, SSP and other Narmada projects have been strongly criticised as ‘unviable’.* Referring to the human costs, the critics argue that the reservoir will submerge about 37,000 ha of land of which about 11,000 ha are Classified as forests. It will displace about | lakh persons in 248 villages (19 of Gujarat, 36 of Maharashtra and 193 of MP).” The anti-Project activists’ estimates of project-affected persons (PAPs) are more than double this figure.'" About 245 of these villages will get partially submerged. The plight of the ‘oustees’ has been the special concern of social activists and environmentalists.

The Sardar Sarovar Project: Ecopolitics of Development

403

To start with, ARCH-Vahini led by Anil Patel (MangrolRajpipla), raised the issue of just rehabilitation of the oustees being displaced from their land inundated under the SS dam near Kevadia colony. It exposed the weaknesses of the government’s rehabilitation and resettlement (R & R) policy and the lack of sincerity on the part of the GOG in arbitrarily implementing what they professed to be compensatory measures for the oustees." SETU, an NGO in Ahmedabad, with whom Medha Patkar from Bombay associated herself, studied the problems of the oustees and tried to organise them in the process. Anil Patel, Medha Patkar, and NGOs like the Rajpipla Christian Service Society, organised the project-affected peoples (PAPs) at different places in the project area. They also brought the callousness of the GOG to the notice of the social activists outside the state, and used the

English print media to extend the base of their support and put the GOG on the defensive. Eventually Medha Patkar moved to Maharashtra and began to organise PAPs of 33 villages in that state.” Meanwhile SETU disassociated itself from this struggle. Separated from

SETU’s

rocketry,

Medha’s

module

found

its own

orbit of

radical struggle. Anil Patel, on the other hand, successfully fought the GOG in Gujarat High Court and the Supreme Court on the issue of ‘right to rehabilitation’. Responding to the severe indictment of the Supreme Court and its directive (applicable to other ' states as well) on giving a liberal interpretation to the phrase ‘land for land’ used by the Narmada Tribunal and the term ‘rehabilitation’, the GOG came forward with a liberal policy. The NGOs asserted that equitable R & R is not a matter of state largess. Rather it is a fundamental right of the oustees guaranteed by Article 21 of the Constitution. The concerned state governments are legally bound to enforce R & R for all oustees in conformity with the norms and stipulations laid down by the Tribunal and the WB. However, ‘land for land’ basis of R & R has presented the state government with a difficult problem because suitable land on which PAPs can be resettled is not available. Unutilised cultivable land outside forest areas is very hard to come by. And in spite of WB’s recommendations and persistent persuasion by the state governments, the government in New Delhi did not concede to releasing forest land for resettlement purposes till 1990. This left Sey

:

404

Pravin N. Sheth

the governments with the option of purchasing or acquiring private irrigated land in the command area in Gujarat and catchment area in MP. Looking to the nature of the governing elite, the relatively well-off farmers (with whatever surplus land that they may have) could hardly be forced by the governments to sell their land for resettling the ‘oustee families’, who belong almost always, to a social strata much lower than the host community in terms of caste, social status and power. The state governments of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh (MP) have evinced the lack of political will to enforce the relevant legislation (respectively of 1976 and 1985) in this regard. However, the GOG has to a large extent managed to meet the needs of those who are to be affected along the work of the main canal line. One important by-product from the viewpoint of democracy has been the NGOs’ effective fight against the application of the Official Secrets Act (OSA) in the vicinity of Kevadia colony and the dam site as enforced by GOG. The oustees, activists and the mediamen were prevented from seeing the site plans, meeting the construction workers and examining the construction material on the site. Lok Adhikar Sangh (Ahmedabad) led by Girish Patel, a leading lawyer, and other civil rights activists, the communist workers’ union under Thakorebhai Shah, NBA and Vahini, led by Medha Patkar and Anil Patel, respectively, were among the 25 NGOs which protested against the OSA; some of them were detained (some activists alleged that they were arrested). This was widely reported and severally criticised by the media nationwide in January-February 1989." This issue contributed to three major developments. It allowed civil rights activists of the nation to have an intimate understanding of the problems of PAPs and the status of R & R. A new stream of NGOs joined the local activists working for and with PAPs. It exposed the GOG’s arbitrary attitude in this matter, and underlined the importance of people’s right to information. The government tried to create doubts about the ‘axis’ between political-bureaucratic leaders and contractors; the latter, symbolised by Jai Prakash Associates, the main builders of the SSP, were under attack by the activists and the press." From the point of view of long-term political development, since the fascinating ‘development’ projects of the Bhakra Nangal and Hirakund days, the mass of PAPs are now not prepared to become the victims of the ruling class garnering the fruits of development.

The Sardar Sarovar Project: Ecopolitics of Development

405

Their self-assertion through politicisation has empowered them as never before. And it has encouraged other groups in MP and the command area of Gujarat, who otherwise would have felt marginalised and deprived of the gains of development."

The responses to this from the GOG/SSNN were rather reassuring in operational terms. The PAPs are today rehabilitated and resettled with liberal package not offered in such cases anywhere in the Third World. And they will be quite large in number, about 1 lakh. In India where earlier land reforms acts were a failure, the

GOG/SSNN have been able to procure large tracts of good, irrigable land for the PAPs, most of them tribals. Along with the package of visible benefits, they are being lifted from below the poverty line to what is categorised as middle class in India, thus better placed than 54.12 per cent of the aggregate number of the very farmers for whose benefit the project is designed. The latter hold even less than 2 ha of land."* Thus, the Project is not designed for the rich of Kheda district at the cost of poor Adivasis. In fact 72.43 per cent of the project beneficiary farmers in Kheda district are either marginal or small farmers holding either or less than 2 ha of land." From their traditional life of substandard living, the PAPs in Sukha, Parweta, Malu and a score of new settlements now cultivate

more agricultural land (quantitatively and qualitatively) with assured water, better housing, many more inputs and amenities provided by the Nigam aided by NGOs. Again, the Project seeks to benefit 300 persons against one person becoming an oustee who too is a gainer. In the command area 54 per cent of the cultivators are either marginal or small farmers. Most of them are Scheduled Castes (SCs) or Other Backward Classes (OBCs) as in the case of Kheda district. They will all benefit from the Project. Especially, the 3 crore persons in the water-starved regions—parts of North Gujarat, Saurashtra, Kutchh and two districts of Rajasthan—who will receive free drinking water. The Project will also generate 1,450 mw of cheap, pollution free hydel power. The availability of water will help local residents to grow more trees in the command area and help contain the advancing deserts in North Gujarat. The WB has also accepted that the Project will

406

Pravin N. Sheth

bring about a forty-fold improvement in environment through its programme of afforestation. During the last decade, 22 per cent of the forests, that too of the ‘degraded type’ according to experts like Babubhai Jhaveri and some Narmada Control Authority (NCA) officers, in the Narmada valley have already been destroyed as verified from satellite imageries.'* SSP will help save this escalating process of deforestation and aid soil improvement in the catchment area.

Again 18 lakh hectares of agricultural land, 70 per cent of which is arid or drought-prone, will be irrigated. Recurring floods in the river Narmada take a heavy toll of human lives, livestock, rich alluvial soil and properties of about 7.5 lakh people residing near the banks of Narmada in Gujarat. As in the case of Tapi after the Ukai dam, people will be relieved of such nightmare. Similarly, a farming population of 25 lakhs will be rid of the hovering famine syndrome; 7 lakh jobs are expected to be generated. During the mid-1980s, when the Central and state governments were able to meet some of the demands for R & R, a new challenge developed against the Narmada Project. Environmentalists in India were becoming aware about India’s fast deteriorating environment. The Chipko movement and the Stockholm Conference on Ecology placed India’s ecological concerns on the global environmental agenda of awareness and protection. The critics began to argue that the Sardar Sarovar and Narmada Sagar Projects were to submerge 54,106 ha forest and 55,681 ha of cultivable land. It meant destruction, once and for all, of an ‘intricately balanced community of plant and animal life including some rare

species, evolved over millennia’. Another issue raised was the crucial role of forests in soil and water conservation, the vegetationrainfall relationship (though the causality of this relationship has not have been conclusively established), and their value as gene pools and as a storehouse of biological diversity. The environmentalists are rightly concerned about the destruction of even the last remnants of India’s forest cover. They have pointed out that the government so far has not even been able to partially make up the loss by means of ‘compensatory afforestation’ or a workable reforestation strategy for vast tracts of degraded wastelands. Big dams like the SSP, NSP, Vishnu Prayag dam, Bedhi dam and Tehri dam have been opposed as they will directly cause destruction of forests and fertile land, devastate natural

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resources and life support systems. Further, big irrigation and hydel projects even though they promote agriculture are found to be destructive from the ecological point of view and unsustainable over the long term. The green revolution, with its emphasis on intensive irrigation, demands a very high degree of water use; petroleum-derived products like fertilisers degrade soil fertility and pesticides create serious hazards. It is on such grounds that the government planners of the Narmada Projects and its supporters were branded as those whose thinking is a product of ‘resource illiteracy’ or ‘ecological illiteracy’. Sardar Sarvar, according to them, provides a prime example of such thinking, ‘in as much as the solution to the acute water crisis in Kutch and Saurashtra is sought in the waters of the Narmada transferred, at enormous cost over long distances.’ The SSP is also opposed on the ground that a mega project like this requires highly centralised planning, decision making and bureaucratic power. Such a phenomenon by its very nature wili keep the affected people and those working on their behalf away from decision making and implementation of R & R and ecologically sensitive schemes. In such an arrangement, irrigation and power from the projects will benefit a small set of people (well-off farmers,

industrialists, and urban dwellers), while socio-cultural

and ecological costs will have to be borne by the masses—mainly tribals living in the Narmada valley since centuries." Again, the command area, which is the more developed part of Gujarat, will further benefit while the comparatively backward and weaker {mainly arid or tribal) parts of the state will continue to be ignored.” Thus, the gap between sub-regions, classes, and rural-urban communities will, it is feared, widen. However, many of these fears appear to be exaggerated in the case of SSP. Empirical studies undertaken by experts of the Department of Botany, M.S. University of Baroda, and others have challenged some of these assumptions.*! More importantly, the objections raised by environmentalists, particularly those concerning R & R, have been taken care of. Under the circumstances it is important to trace the series of occurrences that have made the policy of GOG environmental friendly, and to reexamine the validity of the objections that some groups still have to the construction of the dam. Reservations about the dam began to be voiced early. In June 1986

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the Vahini organised a seminar on the problems of PAPs and the state of R & R. At this stage even people like Baba Amte (who was present at the seminar) did not utter a single word against the big dam.” However, the Narmada Valley Project began to draw the attention of the environmentalists and intellectuals of India. In April 1987 about 300 leading environmentalists, activists and intellectuals petitioned Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the WB. Citing the adverse observations of the DEF (Department of Environment and Forests)/GOI and the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, they asked them to stop further work on the Narmada Valley Project. In June 1988, a seminar held by Baba at Anand Van brought together, for the first time, leading grassroots activists working in the field of R & R and environment. According to the minutes of the seminar, Medha Patkar did not utter a word against environmental degradation or big dams. However, many environmentalists raised ecological issues, such as failure of the author-

ities to conduct preplanned environmental impact studies, the government turning a Nelson’s eye on the catchment area treatment, problems of silting, salination and waterlogging, health hazards, and so on. It was at this point that a nation-wide environmental lobby, with Narmada Valley Project (NVP) as its target, emerged. Anti-Narmada dam lobby either on the grounds of R & R, or environment or both took shape here. From it also emerged that Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), the powerful national body of anti-Project NGOs. With persistence and preservance the NBA had collected data related to the potentiality of ecological disaster.’ They persuasively put their case against the Project before the media, the Government of India, the Planning Commission and the World Bank. The Indian NGOs forged links with environmentalists working in West Germany, USA, UK, the Netherlands, Sweden and Japan. They also complained of lack of. access to data (such as government resolutions, SSP’s studies/ reports, etc.), making difficult their assessment of official promises and performance.

Meanwhile

Anil Patel and Achyut

Yagnik, of

Vahini and SETU, respectively (who were earlier in the forefront of the struggle against GOG), demarcated R & R as their area of interest. They were withdrawing from the new line of agitation which emphasised the issue of environment. Consequently, the anti-Narmada dam leadership passed into the hands of Baba Amte

and Medha Patkar. Anil Patel decided to monitor the new liberal

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R & R policy and changed the line from ‘struggle’ to ‘struggle with reconstruction’. In mid-April 1989, Thayer Scudder, the renowned rehabilitation expert and an anthropologist, severely criticised the weak progress of SSP’s R & R programme.” His report submitted to the WB really shook the GOG/SSNP. Anil Patel stated to us that there was a rather heated exchange of views between Gujarat Chief Minister Amarsinh Choudhary and Scudder on this point in Gandhinagar.” In our interview with Sanat Mehta, the then SSNN Chairman, we found him rather defensive or reticent on this point. Though quite co-operative and responsive, Mehta could not give us a copy of Scudder’s report in summer 1989.” As expected, he did not send it to us either. When informed by SSNN in April 1989 that more than 900 oustees were soon to be given possession of land, Scudder chose to ignore this information, relying on the mere technicality that his report was complete only in relation to five persons. This report, like the NCA minutes and DOE letter/note was selectively leaked out fuelling the anti-dam media-management.” The fact that Thayer’s views hardly got reflected in subsequent reports of the World Bank teams exposes the misplaced stridency of his report. The WB Review (April-May 1991) on the implementation status of Narmada River Development (Gujarat) underlined that R & R of SSP ‘continues to show reasonable progress overall.’ It also noted that there was ‘still significant opposition to the project in general in Maharashtra and M.P. submergence area with R & R staff there having limited or no access to many villages.’”” However it did acknowledge in explicit terms the improvement in government commitment and planning. Sanat Mehta argued that the reason for GOG approaching the WB was not just monetary as the total cost of the Project was not in any case being met by the Bank, its contribution meeting in fact only a small part of it. The WB’s sanction, contingent on compliance with guidelines relating to R & R and environment, would reinforce the legitimacy of this prestigious project. Such sanctions and support would come only after it had ascertained that conditions relating to R & R and environment were being properly met. This was also the line taken by Chimanbhai Patel (1990-91). He stated: ‘We have already approached the Finance Ministry (at the centre) to allow us to raise public money through such measures

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like equity shares or bonds, etc.’ There was a typical, Gujarati pragmatic approach in Mehta’s efforts which was fully supported by Chief Minister Choudhary and his successor Chimanbhai Patel. In his interview with us, Choudhary admitted that the GOG had conceded to the pressure from WB for the lining of the main canal and its network as an ecological conditionality.“’ He grudgingly stated that issuing a worldwide tender, expert consultancy and actual lining work would cost an additional Rs. 350 crores. Such other environmental expenses and liberal R & R schemes were adding to the total cost of the SSP. But the environmental lobbies had their way. Meanwhile, a series of responsive steps taken by the GOG/SSNN and supported by the Planning Commission helped them strike a positive chord in the decision-making body of the WB." The WB officials told India Abroad (New York) that they were satisfied with the progress of rehabilitation policy and that the environment studies undertaken by the state governments were proceeding apace. However, the environmentalists were not impressed. The WB attitude did not act as a brake but as an accelerator to their activities. Medha Patkar, Girish Patel and economist Vijay Paranjpye went to Washington, D.C. to lobby for their case before WB and others.” The Environment Defence Fund and two other NGOs of USA represented against the Narmada Project before the Senate Sub-committee of the US Congress. The environmental groups also tried to pressurise WB to stop financing this and such projects. It was followed by hectic political mobilisation back home at Harsud, Madhya Pradesh. Harsud had, in September 1989, been the venue of the first ever meet of public activists working in such varied fields as environment, rehabilitation, tribal welfare, social justice, civil rights, consumer interests, women’s questions, anti-nuclear peace action, and antihigh tech Gandhians. “ Leading public figures like Shabana Azmi and Maneka Gandhi and well known activists like Srilatha Swaminathan, Medha Patkar, Narayan Desai, and local activists like Satinath Sarangi were present. The choice of Harsud was symbolic as this town is to be submerged under the waters of the NSP. The Harsud rally was actively and widely reported in the national and foreign media. It was by far the biggest ever environmental protest of

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project-affected people as well as public spirited interest groups led by major activists in the country. Baba Amte observeca: The time is ripe for a green front which would act as a pressure group and force parties to take notice of the millions who suffer from degradation of environment and the destruction which socalled development projects wreck.” It was not only damning of a dam, but protest against what the Harsud Convention called ‘destructive development’. It also emphasised alternative development, calling for the need to strive for ‘sustainable development’. Harsud marked the arrival of the Indian Greens. Never has an environmental event in India received such worldwide attention. The Convention tried to bring a macro perspective to the individual, single issue/local micro movements.” It was perhaps a mass expression against the whole development strategy. It created the possibility of forming a ‘non-party political organisation’ of national dimensions. Integration of grassroots movements at Harsud, against the backdrop of the Narmada Sagar site, widened the alternative political space outside conventional Indian politics. It is premature to announce the advent of a new Green party. But one can certainly look forward to the growing concern for ecopolitics through an alignment of people with public activists, intellectuals, social scientists and media persons. Ecopolitics is informed by a new ethics of voluntary simplicity, avoidance of consumerist life style and stands energised by grassroots movements for the values of environment, social justice and non-violence. Harsud in the present context was a high-water mark with international ramifications; it indirectly contributed to the constitution of the Independent Review Team under Bradford Morse by the World Bank. Significantly, the GOG/SSNN were quick to grasp the implications of such a build-up of public opinion. In fact in November 1989, SSNN Chairman Sanat Mehta and Managing Director P.A. Raj prepared a well-argued out paper, FACTS, which addressed in factual and satistical terms about 44 live issues under debate in public communication (press, memoranda to the governments and WB, etc.) for those interested in R & R environmental protection

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measures, cost and benefit, distribution aspects, and the so-called

alternatives available to SSP. It gave the factual status of environmentally protective measures to be carried out pari passu with engineering works—compensatory afforestation, treatment of catchment area, conservation of flora and fauna, wild life, fish culture, CAD (command area development), drainage etc.

IV The pro-Project argument which cannot be convincingly countered, factually or in terms of a viable alternative, by the anti-dam lobby is the stark reality that Gujarat isa water-starved area. In terms of indicators used in India to identify drought affected area districts and population, the situation in Gujarat appears quite unfortunate. The argument of the anti-dam lobby that the CAD is even at present a very developed area is only partially correct. Anyway, the patterns of drought and rainfall for the CAD area during the last five decades reveal that the area has been affected by partial or widespread droughts. The gap between successive droughts is shrinking while the period of drought is becoming longer, covering more talukas and people.” During the last three years drought affected 62 out of 182 talukas in 12 of the 19 districts. At one point 21 lakh people were employed in relief work. The Planning Commission study, carried out by Dr. Y.K. Alagh, classified the region into 13 agro-climate zones and persuasively argued that 75 per cent of the command area in Gujarat and the entire command area in Rajasthan was drought prone.” Since the SSP would also meet the domestic drinking water requirements of the arid areas of Saurashtra and Kutchh, it might be described as a real drought proofing project and hence the ‘life line of Gujarat’. The alternative sought to be pushed by Baba Amte and others does not look feasible.” Minor irrigation works suggested as an alternative to the SSP will not be viable without recharge from adjacent major irrigation works. The medium and minor irrigation networks and traditional water conservation sources will not get filled in as the large part of the command where they are proposed receive inadequate rain. Moreover, unlike the situation in North India, there is no snow-fed river source here; nor is there any winter rain which can sustain the medium and minor works and

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provide the much needed water to winter crops for irrigation.“ Besides, submergence by major irrigation works accounts for about 5 per cent of the total forest loss in the country; the rest being caused by illegal felling of trees, unauthorised ploughing, authorised allotment of lands to the landless, and increased pressure from graziers as in Kutch, Rajasthan and Banaskantha."!

Vv Anti-Dam

NGOs:

Amoral Tactics?

From time to time Medha Patkar and the supporting NGOs have shifted their position or changed their emphasis regarding issues related to the Project. In the beginning they had not protested against the Project itself, nor were they against the idea of rehabilitation. In fact during the mid-1980s, they were asking for suitable land for those whose land was to be submerged by the mega dams and

the catchment

area.

Consequently,

as an exception

to the

general rule they wanted the reserved forest land near Taloda in Maharashtra to be released.” Thus, at this stage they raised their voice to demand land for those whose land was to be submerged under the main canal. Thereafter, they began to organise those who were likely to be adversely affected because of the construction of the whole canal network. The latest addition to their agenda is the demand to resettle those who are either working on land along the canal network or who are going to be adversely affected by such construction. They are now therefore demanding rehabilitation and resettlement for ‘secondary displacement’.” Earlier good rehabilitation was the goal for which they were rightly agitating. After December 1987, ‘rehabilitation is not the goal, but a means with which to beat the project itself.’ For sometime now they have also made environment the major issue, while at an earlier point of time they used it to question the governments and the SSNN based on the initial experience of the PAPs and the indifferent attitude of the GOG and bureaucracy. The latter, they maintained, made the whole task of R and Ra ‘mission impossible’. In other words, they are not even ready to

candidly take note of the substantial improvement in R and R in terms of physical amenities and participation of the PAPs; aspects

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that have come about primarily due to the groundwork and monitoring of the pro-dam activists like ARCH-Vahini and the cooperation which has grown between them and the authorities. The tactics of the anti-dam lobby appear negative and obstructive. Earlier, some of the NGOs confided to GOI, Planning Commission, foreign NGOs and the World Bank that there was never enough land to spare, acquire or buy from private landowners. When such land did come by, this lobby propagated that the GOG was giving quite high prices to capitalist landowners. Thereafter the argument shifted to the claim that even if the SSNN is able to rehabilitate the PAPs from Gujarat, they would not be able to do so in case of PAPs from the neighbouring states. ‘After all, the Gujarat PAPs make up only 20 per cent of the total of more than 2,00,000 PAPs’, said Patkar. In any case, most of the

PAPs are living in the Narmada basin falling in MP, where Amte and Patkar have concentrated their rigorous agitational programmes, and where Hamara gaon, hamara shasan (our village, our rule) is vigorously enforced, making it quite difficult for government functionaries to enter. R & R: Ends or Means?

In June 1987 the DEF/GOI was constrained to issue a conditional clearance to the NSP and SSP; but the letter along with a note to the Prime minister found its way to anti-dam activists before the clearance. This provided them an opportunity to open up an environmental front. In December 1987 however, the Government of Gujarat announced a new R & R policy; the radical activists got a jolt by such an unexpected announcement. Some of them, in the first flush of their genuine opinion, admitted that this was a good, revolutionary R & R policy.” But once again they shifted their stand—they now began to view R & R as a means to fight the Sardar Sarovar Project and to fulfil the new prescribed end of no SSP at all costs. Typically, the anti-dam leaders focused on problems and uncertainties that characterise the first phase of such a momentous policy, like seeming non-availability of land, hesitance of the PAPs to move from their old homes or problems of initial resettlement. They studiedly refused to see the new, healthy features which had

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emerged and are emerging in the evolving process and which expert teams

of the WB

and

international

NGOs

like OXFAM,

have

observed in their reports and notes from time to time. Even leaders like Baba Amte refused to see the positive aspects. In July 1989 Amte,

in his much quoted book Cry the Beloved Narmada,

cited an outdated minute of NCA meeting of 3 June 1988 stating that land for relocation of the PAPs is not available in Gujarat; when it was a public knowledge that more than 1,000 PAPs, including adult sons, encroachers and the landless, were being allotted 5 acres of land, in each case of their own choice. Contradictions on Reserved Land

Narmada Dharangrasta Samiti, Maharashtra, and Narmada Ghati Navnirman Samiti, MP, had submitted to NCA a list of 38 demands

related to R & R. Demand number 15 was related to the forest land which could be made available to the oustees likely to be affected by the SSP. The memorandum of demands, submitted by the Environment Defence Fund and the Friends of the Earth by Bruce Rich to the US Committee on Foreign Operations Committee on Appropriations (Senate) on 14 June 1988 states, ‘if alternate

lands as per the above tests are not available for the settlement of the tribal villages affected by the Sardar Sarovar, denuded forest lands must be provided for them even on the condition of partial afforestation by Government of Maharashtra (italics added).’ When the (GOM) resolved to rehabilitate the PAPs on such land near Taloda-Dhule, Patkar somehow got hold of this resolution of

GOM and pressurised the GOI into denying permission for the release of such land under the Forest Reservation Act (1980). They used their links with a member of the Planning Commission and Maneka

Gandhi,

the then

Minister

of State

for Environment.

They also pressurised the World Bank. Activists who wanted to prove that R & R was impossible in Maharashtra in view of the

non-availability of land pleaded against such an exception. They were convinced that the DEF would not release even denuded forest land near Taloda under the Act, which was also a condition (no. vil) in DEF’s letter of September 1987—‘no forest land will be utilised for the rehabilitation of the oustees.’ Actually, the anti-dam activists gheraoed the WB officials in New Delhi in July 1989 and asked for denotification of the Taloda

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forest lands. And then came their dramatic somersault, when they began to argue in their pamphlets that such denotification was not a solution because either it is encroached upon or degraded to the point of being non-cultivable.” ‘No Dam at any Cost’ Strategy

Under pressure from WB, Taloda forest land was released by GOM following an order from GOI. And the same organisations like the Narmada Dharangrasta Samiti (which had demanded for the release of this land at least five times before December 1987) opposed it. Medha Patkar and others encouraged the local tribal villagers not to leave this forest land. The Indian and foreign environmentalists rose in a chorus to castigate such a release by the GOI for rehabilitation purpose, saying in effect that the clearance would amount to the selling of India’s ecological and social future at the behest of a foreign agency. The whole case graphically illustrates the ‘no holds barred technique’ adopted by the ‘no dam at any costs’ strategists! This is further supported by the fact that the NBA, supported by environmentalists abroad, succeeded in getting an Independent Review Team appointed by the WB. They have forcefully lobbied for the acceptance of the Report of this Team, all members of which come from developed countries. One should consider this with the critically supportive approach of ARCH-Vahini,

Narmada

Abhiyan,

Shramik

Vikas Sansthan,

Anand Niketan and the like which have monitored the implementation process of R & R or afforestation programmes. The last WB report (April-May 1991) presented after on the spot meetings with resettled PAPs, pro- and anti-activists, etc., stated: ‘NGO interventions on behalf of PAPs in Gujarat, including for those from MP and Maharashtra, are particularly constructive.’ Water, the Issue

The ground-water potential of Gujarat is overexploited by a commercially tuned cash crop farming and by recurrently truant monsoons. At some places the ground-water table has receded to 1000 ft below ground level. In coastal. areas of Saurashtra and Khambhat over exploitation of ground-water has attracted salinity

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ingress. This is noticed even in the wells in Kheda district. Thus the scope for further development of ground-water is quite limited. Consequently, the need for a major storage dam on a large perennial river like Narmada is real and unavoidable. The project is in this context the only dependable answer to the dire need of the state.“ Again as compared to many dams in India where the submergence area is about 20 per cent to 25 per cent of the irrigation area to be benefited, the submerged area in SS dam is only 1.65 per cent of the area which stands to gain. Similarly, at the all-India level population affected is 4 per cent of the population benefited, while in the Narmada case it is only .03 per cent. The WB in its report of April 1990 has brought out these points in clear terms. Moreover, the SSNN has taken note of the points raised by the anti-dam lobby regarding the utility of minor irrigation systems and the traditional ways of water storage, and it hopes to integrate such methods in its overall plan of water resources management. But such schemes can only supplement the major scheme; they cannot and should not supplant the mega dams altogether.

VI Pertinent in this context is the note of the WB (April 90) which states its position after listening to the anti-dam lobby represented by Patkar, Patel and Paranjpye of NBA, EDF, some US Congressmen on one side and Sanat Mehta and his SSP team on the other.” Assessing the project and the possible alternatives, it maintained: The

alternatives,

small dams

have a role, and are, indeed

a

significant part of the overall development proposals for the Narmada basin. But they do not and can not, approach the scale of the benefits of the large dams. The small dams fail to fill in the very year, the dry year, when they are needed most. It was only the large dams that saved Gujarat in the last drought.”

The note also showed that the ratio of inundated land to irrigated land is much lower in the case of the big (Narmada) dams than in case of the small dams and ‘tanks’. It also noted that ‘considerable progress has been made in achieving resettlement policies that are

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arguably the most favourable in any developing country’. The Bank is ‘now working with the government to ensure that implementation is done properly’.*' Also the SSNN is working with 14 progressive NGOs ‘who can relate well to villagers and spot problems early and bring them to the attention of Government.’ The linkages developed between the grassroots organisations, state government (GOG) and the WB are quite significant. It is for the first time in India that such a local-regional-international chain of pressures as well as co-operation has been forged and implicitly formalised for a development project. It has become, albeit unwittingly, a counterpoint of the powerful and articulate anti-dam lobby.

Vil Baba Amte, however was not impressed. He alongwith Sunderial

Bahuguna staged a dharna before the Prime Minister’s residence. They represented before Prime Minister V.P. Singh the need to stop the dam. Giving an ultimatum, they argued that if the SS dam work continued, thousands of local people will lie down before the

gate of the dam (Gujarat Samachar, London, 11 May 1990). The countermove came from a delegation comprising legislators belonging to all the political parties in Gujarat. The Prime Minister told the delegation in clear terms that proper solutions to the problems of environment and rehabilitation were being implemented and as such there could be no compromise regarding the ongoing work of the Narmada dam. Meanwhile the Gujarat Chief Minister and Irrigation Minister Keshubhai Patel were also on the off--nsive. During their one day visit to Washington D.C. in early May 1990, they met the WB Vice President Dr. M. Qureshi to discuss the Narmada Project and the water problem. They addressed large meetings of Gujaratis in New York, New Jersey and London. The Chief Minister lambasted the environmentalists and indirectly had a dig at the otherwise much revered Baba Amte. In London Keshubhai Patel emphasised that without the Project they had had to spend Rs. 1,100 crores for relief work during the last three years’ drought in the state and had incurred an indirect expense of Rs. 6,100 crores. These figures could well be juxtaposed with the initially estimated expense of ~

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Rs. 6,405 for the SSP. However, the figure has almost doubled because of delay and devaluation. Chimanbhai Patel was more forthright. He asked, ‘Where were these respectable environmentalists (read Baba Amte and Medha Patkar) when under the Jaikawadi Project (Maharashtra) thousands of acres of land was submerged and forests with lakhs of trees cut. Similarly why were they silent when under the Ujji Project in the adjoining area, 31,000 acres of land was submerged and forest on 11,000 acres of

land was lost.”

Interest and Identity These meetings of the GOG officials with the NRIs (non-resident Indians) from Gujarat mark a new point in the environmental related development politics. The Gujaratis, who constitute the largest concentration among regional communities of India staying in UK and USA, were sought to be systematically involved to lend

their support to the almost unanimous public opinion in the home state in favour of the SSP. To the extent that these NRIs might fund the project in form of bonds, etc., the GOG will feel less constrained in its attempts to continue with construction of the dam and the canal. For the first time a vigilant pro-Project lobby was built up abroad by the political leaders of a state in India to counter the move of the Indian and foreign environmentalists in Washington. This was reinforced by a rare meet of about 10,000 workers of all political parties, farmers’ associations and social organisations who collected at the Boat Club, New

Delhi, on 22

May 1990. In the meeting chaired by Babubhai J. Patel, former CM of Gujarat and then President of the Lok Swaraj Manch, Chimanbhai Patel, the NGOs of Narmada Abhiyan, Congress leaders, Swami Sachidanand (a widely respected modernising reformer) and Chunibhai Vaidya, a living Gandhian in action (who otherwise is fighting his battles against the GOG over two other dams in North Gujarat), along with MPs and panchayat leaders demonstrated a massive show of solidarity in favour of the Project. Thus May 1990 marked the high point of Gujarat’s solidarity abroad and in India’s capital. In Bombay 1,00,000 strong Gujaratis rallied almost spontaneously in an unprecedented demonstration of support to the Project. Gujarat answered— mobilisation for mobilisation—by collecting activists of considerable

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repute against Baba Amte.” It reminded Baba Amte that Gujarat will not mind waging a fierce battle against the anti-Project environmentalists.” A ‘Second Harsud’ Frustrated

The Narmada Bachao Andalon tried to ‘repeat Harsud’—this time across the Gujarat-MP border.” In their carefully prepared ‘Sangharsh Yatra’ and supported by invited foreign environmentalists (December 1990-January 1991), the Narmada Bachoa Andolan hoped to make it ‘perhaps the most explosive event in the history of the movement.’ The pro-dam NGOs of Gujarat countered the movement with ‘Shanti Yatra’. Farmers, tribals and a cross-section of informed citizens converged at Ferkuva on the Gujarat—-MP border. The one-month long stand off between both sides was marked by massive rallies on the Gujarat side, addressed by the present and former Chief Ministers, NGO leaders, tribal spokesmen, party leaders and others. The pro-dam protesters outnumbered

their counterparts. Activists like Chunibhai Vaidya,

Harivallabh Parikh, Krishnaprasad Patel, Urmilaben Patel, Suren Choksi on one side faced Amte, Patkar, Ashish Kothari, Girish Patel, Nandini Oza on the other for the entire period. In order to force the issue and acceptance of her demands for stopping the further construction on Sardar Sarovar dam and a comprehensive review of the entire Project, Medha Patkar undertook a fast for an indefinite period. H.K. Khan, Chief Secretary, GOG, negotiating on behalf of the Chief Minister, however rejected this demand. The anti-dam marchers had to withdraw from this Ferkuva front,

without gaining in substance. The counter movement in Gujarat, helped by the government and the Nigam, brought together a wide cross-section of Gujarati

people, even from areas like Surat and Bombay which are not to benefit from the Narmada waters. It was led by Harivallabh Parikh, Chunibhai Vaidya, Krishnaprasad Patel and Urmilaben Patel on one side; the government led by Chimanbhai Patel and the Nigam by its Chairman Dr. C.C. Patel and the Gujarat people and press (barring some notable exceptions) stood as a man. Babubhai J. Patel was generally perceived as having experience of NGO activism apart from being Minister for Narmada Development—perhaps, more in the former mould. He tried to have discussion with Amte

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and Patkar and was responsive to supportive NGOs continuously— at the same time bringing dynamism to project work and dam construction. The year 1990-91 thus saw a new experience in purposive interaction between the Nigam/government and grassroots movement so far as Narmada issue is concerned. Also the significant process of dissemination of real information related to considerable progress made in the field of R & R started, when some tribals from MP on the other side of the bridge near Ferkuva chanced to hear from Guyjarat’s activists about R & R in Gujarat. A frustrated anti-dam leader was heard uttering that perhaps they might now have to adopt the Naxalite way. ‘Do they want us to turn to eco-terrorism?’ asked another anti-dam leader. Mature leadership opted for the suicide squad tactics by preparing PAPs to drown themselves in the waters at Manibeli, the first village in Maharashtra to be inundated as the dam goes sufficiently up. Certain parochial comments on Baba Amte and Medha Patkar appeared in a section of the Gujarati press and in some public statements made by pro-dam leaders. This showed lack of modesty and propriety. The tactics and strategies of Medha may be questionable, but not the salient commitment and intellect of this ideologue. So also on the other side, Gujarat’s Shanti Yatra was described as one led by contractors and well-off citizens who were proteges of the Chief Minister. Noted also was the intolerance shown to Chunibhai Vaidya who was stopped from interacting with Sangharsh Yatra tribals lest they should get to know about R & R in Gujarat—information so far effectively blacked out by the anti-Project leaders—and the damage done to NCA’s exhibit in Badvani by the anti-dam miscreants which forced the NCA to pack up and go. The English press by and large gave excessive weightage to the anti-dam views and programmes. The print media’s response provides a productive case-study on the politics of free press in India. Operation Manibeli After Ferkuva the NBA cultivated Manibeli as the major front of PAP resistance. Manibeli is the first village in Maharashtra to be submerged under the Sardar Sarovar dam and it has provided the test case of confrontation between the pro- and anti-dam forces. Assiduously cultivated by Medha Patkar and her NBA, the villagers

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resisted their shifting by the authorities during the monsoon of 1991. ‘We will drown, but will not move’ was their slogan. The episode attracted considerable flak from the Government of Maharashtra and the SSNN in the national and international media. However, during March-April 1992 three dozen families from Manibeli chose to shift to Parveta, a new village in Gujarat. This has opened up the possibility for the pro-dam NGOs to work in the hitherto ‘closed’ villages in the adjoining two states to persuade the villagers to respond favourably to the R & R policy. But the NBA strives to make their access to villages faced with submergence as hard as possible. The Manibeli Operation also fuelled the controversy on the reported resort to repression by Gujarat to evacuate its villagers. The work of persuading of the pro-dam activists and the SSNN, even though only partly successful, took the NBA

aback. On the whole it is a case of stalemate

rather than a draw. The coming conflict in Manibeli and other villages is going to be an equally protracted and controversial war of nerves. Meanwhile the NBA got a tremendous boost and propaganda mileage out of the Independent Review Team (IRT/Morse) Report which was highly critical of the Narmada Project. The Morse Report (June 1992), the first ever such exercise by the WB to evaluate one of its own aided projects, while appreciating the good R & R policy of Gujarat state and the role of the NGOs like the ARCH-Vahini, takes a dim view of the prospects of the Project and suggests that the WB ‘take a step back’, meaning halt Project aid till a fresh look is taken at the entire Project. In its initial response, the Bank has not accepted the drastic suggestion of the Morse Team to halt its aid, but pressures on the GOI and the respective states to ensure a very rigorous implementation of a far more revised policy related to ‘human rights’, R & R and environmental protection are bound to be exerted. In view of

political inclination of the concerned central ministries, the GOT is not likely to take a position that will embarrass the states of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. The Government of Gujarat and the Nigam have rejected the Report as biased, one-sided and unreal, but they will welcome any constructive scheme to make the SSP more eco-friendly, and liberal in terms of extending rehabilitation benefits to the canal affected persons (CAPs) if they happen to be marginal or small farmers. But in view of the progress of the SSP, money spent, and dire need for a large mass of water in an arid region, the people and the

The Sardar Sarovar Project: Ecopolitics of Development

423

Government of Gujarat will not agree to abandon this Project altogether. From the viewpoints of those not clearly aligned with either side also, abandoning the Project is not a cost-effective option... . Given the overwhelming majority view in the state, the time for reconsidering the Project is passed... . While work on dam should continue, the reservoir should not be filled till the issues of rehabilitation are comprehensively sorted out.” An independent body comprising the supporters and critics of the Project can be constituted to monitor the R & R process. Regarding the recommendation of the IRT that the states of MP and Maharashtra should adopt Gujarat’s R & R pattern, the general reaction is that in view of its own region-specific problems, like having to manage many irrigation schemes in the future, MP cannot further liberalise its R & R policy which will involve more land

and

expenses.

Also,.this

will set a difficult precedent

for

future projects. This recommendation as well as IRT’s position that the tribals are separate from the Hindus have been found divisive (the first between Gujarat and other states, and the second between tribals and non-tribals) particularly in Gujarat.

Vill The elements of defiance in the political culture of Gujarat will again get crystallised challenging those having influence and power over or close to the central government and Planning Commission.” In view of the set of corrective schemes which state governments and SSP authorities have incorporated and the willingness to implement well-grounded critical recommendations of Morse Report, the anti-Project activists would relent if they could be convinced that the Project authorities and the governments concerned have the will, capacity and resources to fully carry out the WB-suggested correctives to make the Project just, humanitarian and environment friendly. For this, the centre or any such agency should initiate the process of mediation and negotiation to bridge the misplaced or distorted polarities between both the sides. Particularly in view of the commendable response of the GOG/SSNN and absence of a viable alternative to the Project, the continued

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Pravin N. Sheth

protest against the Project will be deemed as a case in eco-fundamentalism. There are limits to environmental agitation in certain cases like Gujarat; and any act of self-immersion will question the strict Gandhian norms of satyagraha. Each side must remain open to re-evaluating the progress related to the Project as well as its position, even ideological. For example, WB’s reports (1990-1991) appreciating the commendable (though incomplete) progress in R & R should now put Schudder’s report in its place. Nelson, WB’s Economic Expert, has countered Vijay Paranjype’s cost escalation resulting from environmental treatment, etc. Leading NGOs, like OXFAM, and S.L. Verma (former Chairman, Narmada Valley Development Authority, whose critical comments on the dam progress were once cited in The Ecologist by the opponents of the Project) are all now inclined to support the Project,” with the SSNN having taken vital corrective measures in response to the critical stimulus provided by WB, the relentless pressures by the NGOs and periodical evaluation and monitoring reports prepared by the Centre for Social Studies (CSS). The CSS’s last report (No. 13), based on perceptions of PAPs resettled in five villages, notes their relatively happy state as also the improvement in the satisfaction levels of a majority of the PAPs. But the Morse Report has upset all this. Almost all the objections of NBA against the Project have been upheld. The European Parliament through its resolution called upon all its member states to take note of the Morse Report and has urged their Executive Directors on the Bank to vote against further support to the SSP. It has also urged the Japanese government to refrain from providing any further support for the execution of the Project and asked the GOI and three state governments to stop their projects and ‘implement other viable alternatives for supply of water to the drought prone area’.” But the NBA has not been able to provide any viable alternative. In the overall context, the anti-Project NGOs should give consideration to the telling observation of the WB (April 1990) cited below:

The urgency of the needs is very apparent in Gujarat. The average of the number of people classified as facing food scarcity has increased from 2.8 million in 1960s to 12.8 million in 1980s. The average cost of relief efforts over the period 1985 to 1989

has been US $160 million per year.

The Sardar Sarovar Project: Ecopolitics of Development

425

Underlining the scenario of increasing hardship, WB states: These people can be seen as the resettlers of the future who will have to move perhaps into city slums, to find food and employment, in the event that the irrigation does not come. They do not hold public meetings now, but in the year 2020, if you took away their dam, you may be sure they would be out on the streets. Development with human face, if possible, must be accepted in this context. In the case of Narmada Project one must not miss the wood for the trees. Viewed as a whole, the Narmada Project may turn out perhaps to be the best of its kind in India. The democratic process has enabled grassroots activists to insert the maximum corrective inputs

in the ‘revised’ project plan through commendable intellectual home work and persuasive perseverance and national-international networking. They will do well to have an institutionalised arrangement for monitoring its implementation at every stage, in every area, from R & R to environmental safeguards. Governments have the tendency to be arbitrary and the Indian state has a long history of being manipulated by economic elites (like contractors and well-off cash crop farmers). Also, bureaucratic/political corruption and lethargy in the proper implementation of a liberal policy are too evident to need any emphasis. The opponents of SSP will have to work for monitoring the process of the Project. Again, even when the environmentalists and other anti-dam activists seem to be losing their ground in case of the Narmada Project, in a way they have won. They have won the attention of the world to its possible negative effects. They have in the process generated public consciousness and official recognition which will prevent the proverbial renegation by the implementing authority, as in the past (Hirakund, Bhakra, Nagarjun Sagar). It will always be under the public gaze of the Bank, of the grassroots activists and the people. In the process, they have effectively questioned the prevailing dominant development paradigm. They have also reinterpreted it while offering the paradigm of ‘sustainable development’, and the ‘greening’ of not only our development approach, but perhaps the ‘greening’ of politics itself. Hursud, without its Narmada-specific

426

Pravin N. Sheth

meaning, in that sense is bound to be more enduring even if as an old village it may have to physically disappear. Development is Possible Whatever the uncertainties surrounding, and faults or lacunae in, the SSP, its dynamics as a whole has led to development.” The process of identification of land by PAPs themselves, their representation on land purchase committees by NGOs,attempts to form villagers’ cooperatives to look after their affairs, and the proposal to form the water users’/farmers’ cooperatives in the command area are all indicative of people’s participation (some of them novel)—a vital component of development.” So also the distribution of good land with assured irrigation and the whole package of inputs and thinking at the level of the Nigam’s planners to devise mechanisms for the equitable distribution of water and its fair management. One subtle aspect of this developmental dynamics, as noticed by perceptive activists, is the growth of awareness among the tribals about their rights, increase in their capacity to struggle against the state, and the new confidence to meet the problems which the PAPs-turned-resettlers may have to face. The PAP in Gadhed, Vadgam or Manibeli of 1984 had ‘politically’ metamorphosed during 1990-92. This is the immeasurable aspect of development. Again, growth of awareness and readiness of some NGOs and youth to take to afforestation and thus greening of the region as well as NGO monitoring of the SSP all constitute what can be called development. The SSP thus provides an arena for convergence between those advocating seemingly different development paradigms. Since ancient times the Narmada river has been praised as Abhayanvayi. Today let it become Ubhayanvayi—one which promotes continuous and healthy dialogues. The chequered history of the Narmada Project and the turbulence of the debate surrounding it hardly justifies this optimism. However, almost every aspect of this Project has now been fully debated and politicised at every level of the political process. If the river is to be respected in the true sense of the term, the politics of contention should be replaced by the politics of dialogue, that of confrontation by that of consensus, focusing on developing a new ‘centre’ in place of misplaced polarities.*!

The Sardar Sarovar Project: Ecopolitics of Development

427

Dialogue with pressure and implementation of the Project with vigilant monitoring should inform the ecopolitics of development. This is being done by such NGOs like ARCH-Vahini, Anand Niketan, Narmada Abhiyan, Shramik Vikas Santhan and Narmada Poonarvasvat Sankalan Samiti, which have taken a constructively critical approach in support of the SSP by monitoring the policies related to rehabilitation and environmental protection. Even while fighting for the cause of the oustees, they have studiedly kept aloof from adopting the utterly negative and closed mindset of the antiProject activists. In the process they have given a liberal-progressive content to the SSP. Broader Issues and Implications

Some broader issues and trends emerge from the latest developments—from Ferkuva to Manibeli to the Morse Report. As Heinz Vergin, Director of the India Department in the World Bank, has described quite rightly, the NBA has proven to be a ‘valuable thorn’ in the Gujarat government’s flesh. Indian authorities have chosen to sit up and take noticed when outsiders have forced them to attend to the condition of tribals in the submergence area. The Bank may not stop the funding of the SSP altogether but its funding ‘will be adjusted in keeping with the rehabilitation of the oustees’, which means the Morse Report has had some significant impact on the Bank’s thinking. The Narmada Project controversy will help certain long term developmental issues to take firmer shape. Consideration will have to be given to whether ‘land-for-land’ is a feasible form of compensation for other projects outside Gujarat or those to be taken up in India henceforward. It has put the need for having a national rehabilitation policy high on the agenda of India’s development plans.® Public hearings, as is the practice in some countries. will have to be held prior to the start of new projects and monitoring agencies, comprising pro- and anti-dam NGOs to oversee R and R as well as environmental aspects, will have to be formed. And the World Bank and the GOI will have to decide whether they want Gujarat to go it alone without their assistance, as well as without the restraints exercised through reasonable conditionality, or wish to persuade Gujarat gently without pushing it into a

corner.

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Pravin N. Sheth

The debate now is not confined to the Narmada Project alone, . but includes other important issues as well. Whether the environmental perspectives of the developed world can be foisted on a developing country demanding a ‘regionally-differentiated development Project’ accepted in PREPCOM IV-UNCED 1992? How to manage the symbiosis of environment and development? How to reconcile the environmental concerns with development imperatives? And in the process what should be the alternative paradigm of development, not as an ideology but as a viable alternative that reconciles development with environment? The project has carved out its place in the history of development by asking the people and the Indian state to set an agenda, from a grass-roots perspective, for broadening the concern and dialogue. praxis and action for a new model of eco-development. If not damned as the international pressures force it to be, the dam promises to be a pace-setter for the ecopolitics of development in India and the Third World.

Notes

1. The author is grateful to Professor B.C. Parekh, Department of Political Science, Hull University, UK and the Charles Wallace Trust for sponsoring my Fellowship at Hull which made this study possible. 2. John L. Seitz, The Politics of Development (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 142-46. ‘os

For details of these models,

see M. Friberg. ‘The Greening of the Nordic

Countries’, in Narinder Singh, ed.. Peace and Development (New Delhi: Lancer. 1988S).

4. P. Sheth, Toward Alternative Politics: Ecopolitics in Focus (Vallabh Vidyanagar: Gujarat Rajyashastra Mandal, 1989). ‘. 5. P.A. Raj, FACTS—Sardar Sarovar Projects (Gandhinagar SSNL, 1989). In a meeting (8 August 1991) of Nigam executives, NGOs and tribals at Vadodara, C.C, Patel stated that according to the revised plan it would now provide water to 8,215 villages. 6. In the severe drought of 1987, 60 out of the 62 talukas falling under the command area were affected. : 7. C. Alvares and R. Billory, Damming

work,

The Narmada

(Goa: Third World

Net-

1989).

8. See Baba

Amte,

articles of M.N.

Cry,

The Beloved Narmada

(Anand

Van:

1989): numerous

Buch and Sardar Sarovar Project: An Economic,

mental and Human

Disaster (Narmada

Bachao

Andolan).

Environ-

The Sardar Sarovar Project: Ecopolitics of Development

429

. Py Raj, FACTS. . In Gujarati, Sardar Sarovar: Vikas-Ke Vinas? (Ahmedabad: Narmada Ghati Navnirman Samiti, 1990); in Hindi, Narmada: Ek Aur Nadi Ka Ant? (Delhi: Lokayan and Kalpavrikasha, 1989). . Two sessions with Dr. Anil Patel and Dr. Daksha Patel of the ARCH-Vahini. . According to Achyut Yagnik of SETU, comparative accessibility of tribal areas of Maharashtra from tke SSP site in Gujarat and her own mother tongue made her take this decision. . Hiren Gandhi's letters, “Repressive State Vs. The People’, in The Times of India, 8 February 1989. . The high-handed attitude of the dam contractors, Jai Prakash Associates, led the tribal villagers to organise and agitate against the contractors and the police, The Times of India, 18 January 1989 and 19 January 1990. Also, see

Lester Continho’s report, “The Damned of Kewadia Colony’, The Times of India, 19 January 1990, Lokayan Bulletin; 7:1, editorial on ‘Dams and Protests’ raised some crucial questions for the activists seeking more effective interventions on such issues. . For a detailed case study, see Arch-Vahini, Narmada Yojana Ke Visthapit Ka Sangharsh, Gujarat Ka Anubahyv—Vahinti's seminal contribution to development of R & R policy through sangharsh (struggle) as well as rachana (constructive formation). . Krishnaprasad F. Patel, People’s Confrontation at Ferkuva (Ahmedabad: Narmada Abhiyan, 1991). ud Ibid. 18. Babubhai

Zaveri’s

“Tata

Economic

Consultancy

Report

On

Environment’

(xeroxed),.

. Swaminathan S. Anklesharia Aiyar, “The Case against Narmada’, in Indian Express, 12 April 1989 and a spirited statement of this view in Gujarati by Girish Patel, Narmada

. .

. .

Yojna: Kona

Mate?

Kona

Bhoge?

(Ahmedabad:

Lok

Adhikar Sangh, 1989), pp. 24-29. Interview with Achyut Yagnik. Amin and Sabnis, ‘Eco-environmental and Wildlife Management Studies of the Narmada Basin in Gujarat’, paper presented at a seminar on ‘Major Issues in Relation to SSP’, Sardar Patel University, March 1991. Interview with Achyut Yagnik. See Medha Patkar’s comments on Maharashtra government's policy regarding rehabilitation (29 June 1989), Annexure 2, No. 1/2, 1/5, Al3, AlS. and A17 of

their file; her interview given to Sheila Raval, Gujarat Samachar, Surat, 9 April 1990.

Business India. Nn Stated by Anil Patel in his interview with the author. . Interview with Sanat Mehta.

ARCH-Vahiri, ‘R & Rin SSP: Are Critics Right?’ (unpublished). Based on a searching analysis of original reports, documents and literature of anti-dam NGOs, this recent piece exposes the tactics of misinformation, supressio veri and suggestio falsi in the arguments of anti-dam NGOs. 28. Sardar Sarovar Dam Project on Resettlement and Rehabilitation, November! December 1990 Review, World Bank Report, April-May 1991. WN~I NN

29.

Ibid.

430

Pravin N. Sheth

30. Interview with the then Chief Minister Amarsinh Chaudhary. SH Interview with Sanat Mehta. 32} Narmada—A Campaign News Letter (Narmada Bachao Andolan, Delhi), No. 2, August 1989. 33: The Times of India, 8 October 1989. 34. Business India. Spy Sheth, Toward Alternative Politics. 36. Babubhai Patel’s paper ‘Sardar Sarovar Project: Progress Among Challenges’, 1992, on the need of water-starved Gujarat for the Narmada Project. Sie Ibid. 38. Y.K. Alagh and S.R. Hashim, Fact and Fiction: Sardar Sarovar Project (Gandhinagar: Narmada Planning Group, SSNN, 1989), pp. 5, 8 and 17-22. Also talk with Y.K. Alagh on 12 December 1990. Dr. D.T. Lakdawala has given his comprehensive and objective view in his paper, “The Major Issues

Pertaining to Narmada’, paper circulated at a seminar in Vallabh Vidyanagar, September 1991. . Mahesh Pathak, Environmental Planning For Sardar Sarovar Project (Gandhinagar: SSNN, 1989). . Persuasive arguments in Raj, Facts. Also Y.K. Alagh’s answer to Bittu Sehgal. . P.A. Raj, in a Seminar on the Narmada Project, organised by Vigyan Darshan in Ahmedabad,

summer

1989.

2. Demand No. 15 in Narmada Dharangrast Samiti’s 38-point charter of demands,

April 1986.

. . . . . .

Discussion with Dr. Anil Patel and Dr. Sudarshan lyenger. Vahini, R & R in SSP. Discussion with Dr. Anil Patel. Vahini, R & R in SSP. Medha Patkar at a Seminar in Bombay, June 1987. Vahini, R & R in SSP. 49. See Thomas Blinkhorn, the World Bank's ‘Office Memorandum’ on IndiaSardar Sarovar, meeting with Executive Directors, 25 January 1990, for a point by point discussion and position held by WB. Also see, the answer given by SSNN to Baba Amte’s article, ‘Why I Oppose the Narmada Project?’, in Indian Express, 13 March 1990 (xerox). 50. Summary published in The Economic Times, 26 April 1990. ail Gujarat Samachar (Gujarat weekly), London, 11 May 1990. oe: Large rallies crossing party lines were also successfully staged in New Delhi (22

May 1990), Bombay (7 June 1990) and Surat (July 1990) and at Ferkuva (20 December 1990 and 18 January, 1991). Also see, JN. Chopra, ‘Gujarat is United on Narmada’, in /ndia Abroad, New York, | June 1990. Sf. Soon came the public support of the NRIs and Gujarati industrialists claiming they would contribute more than Rs. 1,000 crores for funding the Project, though snags like GOI's approval may not help it materialise. 54. This section is based on my visits to Ferkuva; perceptions developed after closely observing Baba and Medha Patkar, and regularly monitoring developments with the help of participants like Chunibhai Vaidya, Harivallabh Parikh, Krishnaprasad Patel at the Ferkuva stand-off. SY. The Economic Times, editorial, 16 July 1992,

The Sardar Sarovar Project: Ecopolitics of Development

431

. For example, Maneka Gandhi, Environment Minister of State and Rajni Kothari. The ‘high politics’ was played in the union government, with PM V.P. Singh, Maneka Gandhi and Neelmani Routrai responding differently to manipulation or pressure by activists. See, ‘Gujarat Put on Notice About Dam’ and ‘Maneka is Stripped of Big Posts’, in India Abroad, New York, 8 June 1990, and interview with the PM, V.P. Singh in Gujarati weekly, Chitralekha, Bombay, 2 July 1990. Statement of Kothari, Kuldip Nayar, Agnivesh and others, welcoming the Morse Report, The Times of India, 16 July 1992. ye John Clark’s ‘Counterpoints’ to Mecha Patkar’s ‘Points’ in his correspondence, Development Policy Unit, OXFAM, 2 May and 5 December 1990. 58. The Times of India, 18 July 1992. Interestingly a copy of the same was immediately received by NBA at Baroda. . This is admitted by a correspondent covering the Narmada developments for a critical national daily, one who is himself known for his detracting coverage of R;& _R and the Ferkuva stand-off. . P. Sheth, Sardar Sarovar Project—Dynamics of Development (Ahmedabad: Institute of Policy Studies, 1991), pp. 44-47. : 61. P. Sheth, ‘Development—An Indian Experience’, in Denouement, 1, 3 (1990). 62. B.G. Verghese pleads for developing a sense of assurance and trust for ‘promoting partnership in place of confrontation’. See his piece in the review column of The Economic Times, 16 July 1992. Vasudha Dhagamwar criticises the ‘Tribalist’ approach to rehabilitation which seeks to keep the tribals in their own

forést culture.

See her article in Enakshi

G. Thukral,

ed., Big Dams,

Displaced Persons: Rivers of Sorrow, Rivers of Change (Delhi: Sage, 1992).

Nineteen

Raojibhai Patel (Mota): An Appreciation Bhikhu Parekh

This volume of essays is put together in honour of Raojibhai Patel. He was born in 1912 in a large and poor family in a small village in Gujarat. His father raised enough money to finance his secondary and higher education, and Raojibhai secured the degrees of B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Bombay in 1934 and 1938 respectively. Active during the independence movement, he joined M.N. Roy’s Radical Democratic Party in 1940 and unsuccessfully fought the 1946 elections from Ahmedabad constituency. In 1951 he joined the Department of Mathematics, M.S. University of Baroda, as a lecturer and retired in 1972. Since then he has remained an active figure in the public life of Gujarat. Never being good at making money, and having spent such money as he had raising and marrying off his several sisters and three children, he leads a simple life of littke comfort in Baroda. Although a mathematician by training, a field in which he wrote an important book in collaboration with Professors Masani and Patel of Pittsburgh and Wisconsin Universities respectively, he is also a philosopher, a social theorist, and a student of Indian history and politics. Having read widely and thought deeply, he has clearly worked-out views. Like Socrates, to whom he bears considerable physical resemblance, he is a passionate thinker, constantly probing large philosophical questions, challenging fashionable dogmas, and bringing a fresh and powerful intellect to the analysis of contemporary political and ideological issues. It was

Raojibhai Patel (Mota): An Appreciation

433

therefore hardly surprising that his house in Baroda became and’ continues to remain an alternative university. Frustrated by the intellectual mediocrity of the official university, keen and intelligent young students and lecturers belonging to diverse disciplines gravitated towards him. They met for hours at a stretch two or three times a week, discussing Locke, Hume, Marx,

Russell, Carnap, M.N. Roy, Karl Popper, Buddhism, Hinduism, Gandhi, Nehru, and of course Indian politics. The intense discussions almost always ended with a late night meal cooked by Shantaben, his silent but gracious and enthusiastic wife. The meetings, attended by a regular group of about five or six people, had no agenda and required little by way of preparation save the willingness to learn. They began with someone asking a question, which was then probed from different angles, Raojibhai usually but not always dominating the discussion. Sometimes the discussion would continue over several sessions and involved reading and commenting on relevant books and articles. I vividly remember spending days discussing Marx’s German Ideology, Popper’s Open Society & its Enemies, and the concepts of equality and freedom. A year in this environment opened up a whole new world of ideas, wiped out the deficit in university education, and influenced one for life. Rajni Kothari, myself, Dhirubhai Sheth, Prakash Desai, Dhaval Mehta and others were all early products of this ‘school’, succeeded in later years by V.N. Kothari, Pravin Patel and others. As small tokens of our deepest gratitude, Rajni Kothari dedicated his Politics in India, and | my Gandhi's Political Philosophy, to Protessor Patel. Raojibhai, ‘Mota’ as he was affectionately called, played many roles, possible only in an Indian context. He was a teacher though never a guru, for he was too rebellious and rationalist for that. He was a friend in whom one could confide one’s youthful secrets and in whose presence one could drink and smoke—things one was barred by social conventions from doing in the presence of one’s elders. He was also a father figure who could rebuke and criticise and whose unlikely withdrawal of affection one deeply feared. He was an eternal rebel challenging not only the prevalent intellectual orthodoxies and social practices but also the university authorities; as well as an ideal role model for this young admirers. He was also a student, constantly reading, thinking, seeking information, borrowing books, asking service, admitting mistakes and circulating

434

Bhikhu Parekh

drafts of his articles. Thanks

to all this, members

of the ‘Mota

School’ developed powerful emotional bonds with him. They could not clearly define their relationship to him. He was like a father, but not quite; like a friend, but also something more and

something less; like a teacher, but also a fellow-student; affectionate but also a little detached, close yet a little distant. Whatever he was, he was someone very special to them. They loved and adored him. Their homes became his, even as his had become theirs. When they went abroad, they regularly wrote to him and eagerly awaited his replies. Several of them invited him abroad at their expense, and he went and stayed with them for weeks, replicating the relationship and ethos that had so thrilled them in their youth. There were once again the same intense conversations, the same restless probing of issues, the same worry about India which he passionately loves and cares for, and the same gentle rebuke to those who had slackened because of the pressures of family life or the temptation to make money. Through this intense but limited circle of friends, most of whom went on to become academics, Raojibhai’s thoughts found their way into the wider world. Socrates had only one Plato; Raojibhai can claim at least half a dozen. Philosophically speaking, Raojibhai began as a Marxist. He accepted Marx’s materialism, analysis of capitalism, vision of the communist society, and the theories of class struggle and revolution, but attacked his Eurocentrism and failure to recognise the autonomy of consciousness and the creative role of ideas in history. His criticisms were partly derived from M.N. Roy but not entirely, and in some respects they cut much deeper. Although a great admirer of Roy, Raojibhai felt that Roy’s thought lacked coherence and genuine commitment to socialism, and that his cultural renaissance without active political struggle was doomed to failure. He was disappointed but not surprised when Roy not only failed to lead a political movement after independence, but even associated himself with the subsequently discredited Committee for Cultural Freedom. He was even less surprised when Roy’s followers actively defended capitalism and the American policy in Vietnam. Over the years Raojibhai has become more critical of Marx, but continues to remain deeply sympathetic to many of his basic ideas and rejects the view that the collapse of communism discredits Marxism. In the specifically Indian context, he is deeply antipathetic to a good deal of Hindu philosophy especially Vedanta and the Gita,

Raojibhai Patel (Mota): An Appreciation

435

the latter’s ethics of detachment and desirelessness and monistic and determinstic metaphysics being particular targets of attacks in some of his articles. While greatly admiring Gandhi's role in mobilising and organising the Indian masses, he is intensely critical of his religious world-view .and ‘petty bourgeois’ economic and political ideas, a thesis he eloquently developed in his Gandhism. Professor Patel has repeatedly insisted that India is doomed unless it radically modernises itself, not just economically and politically but also intellectually and culturally, and makes a more or less clean break with its past. His uncompromising plea for a radically fresh start is contested by some of his close friends including some of the contributors to this volume. At the political level, Raojibhai’s great achievement consists in founding the Baroda University Teachers’ Association and turning it into a powerful tool of academic and social transformation. Under his leadership, the Association successfully took on the university authorities on several important issues, challenged the city bosses, fought against corrupt teachers, and helped create a healthy academic environment. His activities in Baroda attracted considerable interest and admiration all over Gujarat, and set an example to other university teachers’ associations. Thanks to his and his friends’ efforts, the Government of Gujarat broke with the usual policy of nominating political stooges as Vice-Chancellors and appointed men of integrity and scholarship as heads of several universities. It is his abiding regret that this policy proved shortlived, and that teachers’ associations have degenerated into trade unions aggressively fighting only for their salaries and forming damaging alliances with corrupt students’ unions. With only a few exceptions, all the contributors to this volume know Professor Patel. Some like Rajni Kothari, Dhirubhai Sheth and myself have known him for over thirty years and are alumni of the ‘Mota school’. Others such as Upendra Baxi and Ashis Nandy got to know him later in their lives, and their associations with him

have been limited. But they are all united in their admiration for this ‘unknown Indian’ and his unsung but truly remarkable achievements. His life gives some insight into how, in the midst of

widespread

institutional

decay and moral

degradation,

Indian

intellectual life constantly regenerates itself, and how the increasingly competitive and brutalised Indian society continues to be humanised and rendered bearable by small and unplanned communities based on affection and loyalty.

Notes on Contributors

Upendra Baxi is Professor of Law, University of Delhi and was, until recently, the Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University. He has been a Visiting Professor at Duke University and was Director of Research as well as Hon. Director of the Water Resources Project at the Indian Law Institute. His books include The Indian Supreme Court and Politics, The Crisis of Indian Legal System, Towards a Sociology of Indian Law, Marx, Law and Justice, Inhuman Wrongs and Human Rights: Some Unconventional Essays and Mambrio’s Helmet?: Human Rights for a Changing World. Rajeev Bhargava teaches at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharalal Nehru University. His publications include /ndividualism in Social Science: Forms and Limits of a Methodology. Judith M. Brown is Beit Professor of Commonwealth

History at

the University of Oxford. Among her books are Gandhi's Rise to Power, Gandhi and Civil Disobedience, Modern India and Gandhi, Prisoner of Hope.

Prakash N. Desai is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois and Chief of Psychiatry at the Veternas’ Affairs Medical Centre in Chicago. Also a member of the Committee on South Asian Studies at Chicago University, he is the author of Health and Medicine in the Hindu Tradition. Sudipta Kaviraj taught at JNU (1971-1991) and has been Reader in Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London since 1991. He has written major articles on the nature of the Indian state and nationalist movement in The Economic and Political Weekly and Subaltern Studies. He is the author of The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankim Chandra and the Formation of the Indian Nationalist Discourse (forthcoming).

Notes on Contributors

437

Rajni Kothari is in many ways an intellectual disciple of Raojibhai Patel or ‘Mota’ whom he considers to be his guru. He is author of, among other books, Politics in India which was dedicated to Mota. He has been associated with a large number of unique institutions, starting with the Renaissance Club in Baroda which bore the personal stamp and inspiring imprint of Mota. His own intellectual thrust has been in the broad area of the theory and practice of democratic politics which too started taking shape (especially its ‘grassroots’ orientation),while he was active in Baroda University and the Renaissance Political Behaviour.

Club, with his Direct Action: A Pattern of

Gurpreet Mahajan teaches at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharalal Nehru University. She has published articles in the field of Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Social Sciences and is the author of Explanation and Understanding in the Human Sciences.

Jayshree P. Mehta is Associate Professor of Surgery at Baroda Medical College and Shree Sayaji General Hospital. Member of the Medical

Council of India, she has also been

a member

of the

Senate & Syndicate of the M.S. University of Baroda from 1981 onwards.

Subrata K. Mitra, Senior Lecturer in Politics and Director of Centre for Indian Studies at Hull University, is the author of Governmental Instability in Indian States, The Post-colonial State in Asia: The Dialectics of Politics and Culture and Power, Protest and Participation. His articles have appeared in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History and the Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Poli-

ICs. Ashis Nandy is Fellow and Director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Chairman of its Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures, and Assocate Editor of Alternatives. A psychologist and social theorist, he is the author of Alternative Sciences, At the Edge of Psychology, The Intimate Enemy, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias, Science, Hegemony and Violence (edited) and the Tao of Cricket. He is also the co-author of The Blinded Eye: 500 Years of Christopher Columbus.

438

Crisis and Change in Contemporary India

Thomas Pantham is Professor of Political Science at the M.S. University of Baroda. He has been a UGC national lecturer and visiting fellow at Princeton University, University of Heidelberg, University of Notre Dame, and St. John’s College, Cambridge. His publications include Politicat Theories and Social Reconstruction: A Critical Survey of the Literature on India (forthcoming), Political Thought in Modern India (co-editor), Political Discourse: Explorations in Indian and Western Political Thought (co-editor) and articles in Praxis International, Political Theory and Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research.

Bhikhu Parekh is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Hull and was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Baroda between 1981 and 1984. His publications include Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy, Marx’s Theory of Ideology, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy and Colonialism, Tradition and Reform. Anthony J. Parel is Professor of Political Science, The University of Calgary, Canada. His publications include The Machiavellian Cosmos. At present he is working on a critical edition of Gandhi's Hind Swaraj.

Pravin J. Patel, Professor and Head at the Department of Sociology of M.S. University of Baroda, was awarded the Indo-US Fellowship in the year 1986-87 to do post-doctoral research at Columbia University, USA. Author of two books and several papers, he is mainly interested in the areas of industrial sociology, sociological theory, sociology of science and ethnicity. Leroy S. Rouner is Director of Boston University’s Institute for Philosophy and Religion. His recent projects include On Community, On Freedom and Selves, People and Persons.He is General Editor of Boston University Studies in Philosophy and Religion.

D.L. Sheth is Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, where he was formerly Director (1984-89). He is Editor of the prestigious journal Alternatives and a founding member and Chairperson of Lokayan. He has to his credit several publications in the areas of Political Sociology, Comparative Politics and Politics of Development.

Notes on Contributors

439

Pravin N. Sheth, former Head of the Department of Political Science at Gujarat University, Ahmedabad, is currently Visiting Professor, Peace Research Centre, Gujarat Vidyapith. He has taught at Pennsylvania University, Philadelphia, (1969-70), headed research projects sponsored by Institute of International Education, USA, and was Charles Wallace Trust Fellow, University of Hull (1990). In addition to his four research-based books, he has

contributed numerous articles to professional journals and edited collections.

Index

abhiman, politics, 17, 256 advaita, 34, 104

Advani, L.K., 309, 343 afforestation programme, 406 agrarian relations, 45 agriculture, 9, 48, 49; Plan allocation for, 45 ahimsa, Gandhi's, 70, 83-84, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 110, 111, 115; doctrine of, 107, 182, 183 Ahmedabad, communal riots in, 375, 392; lawlessness in, over seats for ‘backward’ castes, 228 ahmkara, 253, 257-58, 261, 263 Akbar, 33 Alagh, Y.K., 412 Al-Aqusa mosque, protest in Gujarat over attack on, 376 alienation, of non-English educated class, 196 Aligarh, communal riots in, 393 Aligarh Muslim University, demand for retaining the character of, 376 All-India Village Industries Association, Wardha, 87, 90 Ambedkar, Babasaheb Bhimrao, 8, 9,

11; as activist journalist, 126-27;

America, civil loyalty in, 173, 176; ethnic groups in, 175; immigrants to, 176; liberal tradition of, 173; notion of ‘freedom’ in, 183

American ‘civil religion’, 169 American experience, of nation-building, 173 Amte, Baba, 408, 411, 412, 414, 415, 418, 419, 420, 421 Anand Niketan, 416, 427 anekantavada, Jain doctrine of, 105—6

Annihilation of Caste System, 123 anti-Brahmin movement, 197 applied social psychology, 270, 272, 273-74, 275

Aquinas, 73 ARCH-Vahini, 403, 404, 407, 414, 416, 422, 427 Armstead, Nigel, 276 artha, 63

ashram communities, of Gandhi, 82, 86-87 Asoka, 34-35 Assam,

198

atheism, 333 Atisudras, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 140,

142, 144, 145

:

constitutionalist, 129-30; conversion to Buddhism, 11, 130; a Dalit,

atman, concept of, 64, 65, 67, 257, 263

124-25, 129; Gandhi and, 128-29, 131, 132, 135, 136; Gandhisation, 128-29; legacy and vision of, 123ff; Minister in Nehru’s cabinet, 129; pre-Gandhian activist, 127-28; renunciation of Hinduism by, 130; on swaraj, 126, 127 Ambedkar, Savita, 130

182 29 Lecture, Nehru’s, 114 410

Aurobindo, 181 Auroville, 181, Autobiography, Azad Memorial Azmi, Shabana,

Babri Masjid site, shilanyas ceremony at, 307

Backward Classes, 153

Index Bacon, Francis, 270 Bahiskrit Bharat, 127 Bahuguna, Sunderlal, 418 Bahujan Samaj Party, 194

Bajrang Dal, 196 Balwantray Mehta team report, 47 BanerjecsD IN. 17, Bankimchandra, 298 Bardoli, 84

Barnala, Surjitsingh, 255 Baroda University Teachers’ Association, 435 Baroda Young Muslim Action Committee, 380 Bataille, Georges, 141 Baxi, Upendra, 8, 9, 11, 123, 435 Bedhi dam, 406 beliefs and desires, 321-22, 323, 324, 325 Bellah, Robert, 169, 173 Bengali language, 206 Benjamin, Walter, 142 Bhagvad Gita, 64; on self, 64, 67 Bhakra Nangal Project, 404 Bhakti movement, 208 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 314-15,

379, 388; movement and religion, 15; and politics of religion, 344-45 Bhargava, Rajeev, 11, 16, 317 Bhavabhuti, 30 Bhave, Vinoba, 46, 52 Bhiwandi, communal riots in, 393 Bhois, 386, 389; and Muslims, clashes between them, 381, 383 Bhore Committee report, 289

Bihar, conflicts in, 235 birth control, Gandhi on, 94 Blake, William, 270

block development officer, 47 bonded labour, abolition of, 138 bootleggers of Gujarat, riots between Muslim and Hindu, 392 bootlegging, in Vadodara, 386

Bose, Girindrashekhar, 248, 252 Bose, Subhash, formation of Forward Block by, 250

Bourdieu, Pierre, 13

441

brahmacharya, Gandhi's emphasis on, 10, 66, 94 Brahman, 64, 65 Brahmin-Rajanya dyad, Sanskrit language and, 207-8 Brahminical society, 302, 305 Brahminism, 146

Brahmins, 385 Brahmo Samaj, 181, 182 Brass, Paul, 228 bread labour, 66 Brentano, 321 Brihadaranyaka_ Upanishada, _ selfhood in, 258 British civilisation, 33 British colonial policy, and communal politics, 300, 301; and divide and rule, 371; and impact on India, 33; on reservations for Depressed

Classes in India, 131-32 British imperialism, 59 British liberalism, 59 British rule, 82, 84, 227; Gandhi's opposition to, 36. See also colonial rule Brown, Judith M., 9, 10, 82 Buddha, 34, 35 Buddha and His Dhamma, \30 Buddhist Bhikkus, and ideals, 328-29 Buddhist movement, 208 bundi, 256 bureaucracy, 45; Nehru and, 40; role of, 40 bureaucratic—technological elite, 13 Canetti, Elias, 220, 221

capitalism, 46, 156, 159 Carstairs, G. Morris, 259, 260 caste, -based manual work, 76; -class differences, 193; concept of labour, 63; hierarchy,

socia] conflicts

in,

153; organisations, 99; religion and modernity, 304; as social force, 177; stratification, 354, 355; struc-

ture, 351; system, 30, 35, 302; evils of, 23 casteism, 127, 175

442

Crisis and Change in Contemporary India

Centre for Social Studies (CSS), 424 chamcha, 254 Chandogya Upanishad, 254 Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhus

communalisation, of politics in Gujarat, 377; of secular conflicts, 20 communalism, 15, 44, 306; religion

(CKP), 385 charkha, Gandhi’s stress on, 76, 89 Chaudhuri, Nirad, 179, 182 Chauri Chaura incident, 224

communicable diseases, 289, 292 Communist Party of India (M), 236 communist utopia, 18

child marriage, 63, 66 child mortality rate, 282; female, 283 China, events of 1989 in, 85 Chipko movement, 406 Choksi, Suren, 420

development, 45; identities, 304, 351, 353, 354, 362, 363; practices, 362, 363; relationship between different, 358; unity in a decentralised polity, 359 Community Development Programme, 47 Community Health Volunteer, 291 ‘conceptual imperialism’, 103 Congress, 37, 60, 84, 86, 113, 224,

Choudhary, Amarsinh, 409, 410 Chowdar Tank protest, by Atisudras at, 127

Christian missionary movement, 180 Christian Unitarianism, 181 Christianity, 305, 312, 340 CIA, 171 citizenship, 353; constraints of, 220 civil disobedience, of Gandhi,

10, 74,

223 civil liberty, 111; groups, 168

civil loyalty, 8, 12, 13; and New India, 169ff civilisation of India, 43, 59, 63, 71; degeneration of, 107; Gandhi on modern, 61-63, 112; Nehru on, 25,

Zoe eo SU ole Se Cohn, Bernard, 299 Colby, K.M., 269 colonial modernity, 299 colonial rule, in India, 23, 27, 28, 29 colonialism, and community identities, 304, 305 command area development (CAD) of Gujarat, 412 Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, 138 commitment, and identity, 325-26 Committee for Cultural Freedom, 434 communal electorate, 131 communal politics, 296, 306, 312, 314, 315; British colonial policy, 300, 301 communal riots, in India, 18, 19, 20, SBE SPM sSpier, Silla

and, 307

community(ies),

236,

315;

9, 15-16,

and

139; factional

299, 360;

Ambedkar,

138,

fights in, 379-80,

384, 389; government in Gujarat, 379; withdrawal of Muslim sup-

port to, 376; hegemony, 153, 193, 194 Congress, . . . during Nehru, 36-37; organisational wing of, 39, SO; session, Bhuvaneshwar, *‘Democracy and Socialism’ resolution at, 51; split in, 60, 229, 377; strategy for satyagraha, 223; structure and role of, 37-40; Working Committee meet at Bardoli, 88 Congress (O), 377

Congress (R), 377 Congress ‘syndicate’, 153 ‘Congress system’, 192, 228, 229 Congress of World Religions, Vivekananda’s speech at, 182 Congress Young Turks, 229

Constituent Assembly, 138 Constitution of India, 350, 351, 352 constitutional changes, 217, 237, 238,

239, 241 constructive programme, of Gandhi, 113 contemporary psychology, dominant tradition of, 276-77 converts, 303—4

Index

443

co-operatives, 46 co-operative farming, 45, 46, 51 corruption, in bureaucracy, 45 ‘crisis of modernity’, 21 critical psychology, 17, 18, 271, 276, 277 cross-cultural psychology, 271 crowd formation, and political power, 216, 217; as rational protest, 220-22 cultural diversity, 181, 362-63 cultural embodiment, concept of, 15; and histories, 350ff cultural heritage, 179-80 cultural identity, 16, 53, 318, 354 cultural tradition, 103-6, 107, 110, (YB culture of plurality, 327, 336

Discipline and Punish, 141 Discovery of India, 14, 29, 34, 41, 52,

Dalit(s), 11, 162, 194; Ambedkar’s struggle for, 139, 142; literature,

electorates, separate, 306 emancipatory politics, Ambedkar’s concept of, 146 ‘embodied self’ of Gandhi, 10 Emergency of 1975, 154, 155, 159, 229 England, eighteenth century, 240; popular discontent and disorder in,

177, 179, 180 diseases, poverty and, 283 drinking water, safe, 287, 292 dvaitism, 104

economic development, 44, 239 ecopolitics, 18

ecumenism, 76 education, dual system of, 201, 212; English as medium of, 188, 189,

191, 195, 198, 211, 212; Gandhi's criticism of Macaulay and modern, 75; Nehru on, 43; use of psychology

in, 275 ‘egopolitics’, 17, 249-52

Einstein, Albert, 116, 117

201; theory, 12; women, 140 Dandi salt march, 223 Das, Deshbandhu Chittaranjan, 113

death rate, decline in, 281

decision-making process, at local level, 355 DEF, 408, 415 Defence of India Act, arrest of Muslims under, 376 deinstitutionalisation discourse, 230,

231 democracy, 18, 177; and crisis of ‘governability’ in India, 216ff democratic politics, 158, 159, 165, 167; changing context of, 160-61 Depressed

Classes,

123, 126; reserv-

ation for, 128, 134; voting rights for, 131, 134

Desai, Morarji, 51, 377 Desai, Narayan, 410 Desai, Prakash, 11, 16, 17, 18, 246, 433 desires, and acts, 327; culture of, 338,

339 development costs, 9, 18, 19

Dewey, John, 173 dharma,

63, 65, 68, 105; concept of,

114; law of, 73 dietary intake, 285

218-19 English-educated elite, 191, 198 English education, 188, 189, 191, 195,

198 English language, 14; in India, 187; national policy on, 212; press, 187, 188, 203; role of, in education, 188, 189, 190, 208, 211; spread of, 202-3; and vernacular languages, 298-99 English-medium schools, 189, 195,

198, 212 English riots, 219 environment, health hazards, sanitation, hygiene and, 287

293;

Environment Defence Fund, 410, 415 Environmentalists,

against

Narmada

Project, 408; civil rights activists, on Narmada Project, 402. See also Sardar Sarovar Project epidemic diseases, 289 esteem, interpersonal transaction and,

253-54; self-, 253, 256, 258, 259, 263

444

Crisis and Change in Contemporary India Gandhi, Maganlal, 78

ethnic bonds, 174 ethnic communal identity, 174 ethnic diversity, 175 Etzioni, Amitai, 394

Gandhi, Maneka, 410

Europe, 33; industrial revolution in, 221; post-Enlightenment modernity

Gandhi, 1795 and 135;

M.K*, 8, 9, 10, 11, 82, 152, 182) 183, 2175 2237343373; Ambedkar, 128-29, 131, 132, on Untouchables, 136-38;

in, 101, 102; Gandhi on, 103, 110 European society, 23

assassination of, 117; on commun-

evaluation, wantons and, 324-25, 326

fast in Yervada Prison, 132, 134; machinery, criticism of, 75-76, 89; modernity, critique of, 100-103; Nehru and, 53, 110-15; on modernity, 98ff; personal diet of, 90-93; political philosophy of, 57, 58; on role of crowds, 224

evaluators, identity and, 325-26, 327 exploitation, 101-3 extremist movement,

for home-rule,

60, 239 faith, religion and, 330-31, 332

family planning programmes, 292 family welfare, 289; financial investments

in, 289, 290; health

and,

situation, 281-86 Farhang, Mansour,

Gandhi, Rajiv, 155, 160, 161, 230, 408 Gandhi, Ram Chandra, 272

Gandhi, Sanjay, 155, 159, 160, 229 Mr. Gandhi and Emancipation of the Untouchables,

170

fascism, 229

father-son relationship, 261-62 Ferozabad, communal

ity life, 86; on Congress, 37, 39;

riots in, 393

fertility rate, 281 Five Year Plan, Seventh, and poverty ratio, 283

145

Gandhian model, of partnership, 46 Gandhism, 99, 435 garibi hatao politics, 154 Geertz, Clifford, 273, 329, 332, 333 Germany, post-war, 171, 172 The Glimpses of World History, 29

food scarcity, 50

Godhara, communal riots in, 393

Ford Foundation, 49

Gokhale, Gopal Krishna, 109

foreign invasions, into India, 30, 34

Gorkhaland, creation of, 239

Forest Reservation Act (1980), 415 Foucault, Michael, 100, 141 franchise, universal adult, in India,

governability 226-30

discourses,

governance,

14; problems

173

of,

religious,

Gujarat, 19, 375; communal riots in, 375-93; drought affected areas in, 412; formation of, 391; ground-

77,

179,

153,

159,

Galileo, 270

Indira,

‘Grand Alliance’ of 1967, 163

green revolution, 50, 407 Guha, Ranajit, 143

Friends of the Earth, 415 Fromm, Erich, 272

Gandhi,

crisis

grahastha, Hindu, 340

freedom, Ambedkar’s concept 143; Gandhi's concept of, 72 Freud, Sigmund, 252 Friedrich, Carl, 174

fundamentalism, 306

and

India,

of, 218-26, 231-33 government control, of economy, 231

222 Frankfurt, 324 French revolution,

in

water potential in, 416-17; political conflicts in, 235, 238, 239, 378-80, 384, 389; politicians, police and bootleggers

13,

152,

160, 161, 163, 229, 231, 344, 377, 380; defeat of, 230

in,

381-84;

Sardar

Sarovar Project, government’s policy on, 402-5, 409-11, 419, 422, 427

Index

445

Hindu religious festivals, Muslim allegations against, 386; political

Gurr, 235

gurudwara, 328

use of, 311-12

Guru Granth Sahib, 328

Hindu society, 126, 302 Hagen, Everett, 271 Hanley, C., 249

Hindu traditions, 106, 181 Hindu-Muslim conflicts/relations, 76,

Harijan, 75, 90

300, 302-3, 370-72, 379 Hinduism, 37, 106-7, 132, 179, 249, 302, 312, 314, 334, 357; Ambed-

Harijans, Gandhi's ‘constructive work’ for, 137

Harrison, Selig, 227 Harsud, Convention,

411;

submer-

gence of, due to Narmada Project, 410, 425 health, care facilities, 280, 288-92; care

programmes, 6; education, 287-88,

292; and family welfare situation, 281-86; individual and public, 10; manpower in, 290-91; scenario in India, 280ff; and well-being, Gandhi’s concern for, 91-94 ‘Health for All by 2000 ap’, 280 Health Guide, 291

Hobbes, 173; philosophy of individual power, 365 Hobsbawm, 219 Hocking, William Ernest, 171, 172 home-rule, demand for, 57-59, 60, 62,

64, 68, 77, 79 Hoselitz, B.F., 98 human rights activism,

18, 19, 168.

See also Sardar Sarovar Project humility, 255, 256 Huntington, 235

Hegel, 172, 174, 334, 365 Heidegger, 366, 367 Henry, Patrick, 183 Hind Swaraj,

kar’s criticism of, 140-42; traditional, 305 Hindus, and Untouchables, 145; upper caste, 388; of Vadodara, 385

Huxley, Thomas, 75

11, 57, 70, 72, 77, 86,

92, 102, 107, 113 Hindi belt, 203, 205, 212 Hindi language, 14; as ‘link’ language,

I-ness, sense of, 253

identity, concept of, 318; losing of,

209; as official language, 188, 201, 204; politics of, 314; supremacy of,

320; of a person, 321; problems of, 15; theory of, 16 illiteracy, 283

205

independence

Hindi-speaking 205 Hindi-speaking 204

population,

regions,

196,

202-3,

203,

Hindu beliefs and practices, Gandhi on, 83 Hindu Brahmins, and pollution, 329

Hindu caste system, 14° Hindu Code Bill, 129, 13. Hindu fundamentalists,

179

Hindu hegemony, 128 Hindu

law, Ambedkar

on, 140, 142,

143 Hindu Mahasabha, 388

Hindu Personal Law, 351

Hindu psyche, 259

movement,

relationship

between leaders and crowds, 223-26

India, the Most Dangerous Decades, 22h Indian Administrative Service (IAS), 41 Indian Civil Service (ICS), Nehru on, 40-41 Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), 43 Indian Muslim’s loyalty to Pakistan, 376 Indian National Congress, 388; Gandhi's criticism of, 75; see also

Congress Indian Opinion, 75, 78 3 Indian renaissance,

181, 184

446

Crisis and Change in Contemporary India

Indian Revolt of 1857, against British

Kamaraj plan, 51

rule, 108 Indian society, degeneration of, 22-25,

Kantian morality, 172

Di individualism, 62, 178, 365, 366, 367 Indo-Pak war, 1965, 376 industrialisation, hostility to, 88 inequalities, 46; Gandhi on, 91

infant mortality rate (IMR), 282-85, 291 insult, 253, 254-55

Integrated

Rural

Development

Pro-

Kaop, William, 271 karma, doctrine of, 31 Kashmiri pandits, 340 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 11, 15, 295 Keer, Dhananjay, 126, 127 Kennedy, John, 173 Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad, 211 ‘Key to Health’, 93, 94 khadi, 89; Gandhi’s emphasis on, 87 Khan, H.K., 420 Khan, Yahya, 374 Kheda district, 405

gramme, 285

IMF, 157 Iran, revolution in, 171, 179, 316

Khomeini, Ayatollah, 171, 179 Khusro, Amir, 301

irrigation projects, 43

Kohli, Atul, 232, 233, 234, 235, 238

Islam, Islamic Islamic Italian

Kohut, Heinz, 248, 249

intra-elite conflict, 191, 194, 210

32 culture, 302 groups, 301, 302 nationalist movement,

Kolakowski, 331 Kothari, Ashish, 420 61

Jaikawadi Project, 419 James, C.L.R., 271 James, William, 171, 176 Jameson, F., 335 Jammu and Kashmir, 198 Jan Sangh, 315, 388 Janata Dal, 154 Janata government, 154, 155 Janata party, 230, 388; breakup of,

154 jati system, 311 Jefferson, Thomas, 173 Jews, in Hitler's Germany, 85 Jhaveri, Babubhai, 406 Jinnah, 77, 343; an atheist, 344; defec-

tion to Muslim League, 250

joint family, 35; a social force, 177 ‘justice’, Ambedkar’s concept of, 143 Kahars,

of Gujarat,

379,

386-87;

Kothari, Rajni, 12, 13, 150, 228, 229, 230, 433, 435 Kothari, V.N., 433 Lacan, Jacques, 123 Ladejinsky, Wolf, 49 land purchase committees, 426 land reforms, 45, 46, 49 language debate, politics of metropolis versus vernacular India, 13-14, 187ff language, identity and, 322; issue, 206, 207, 209, 210; policy on, 189, 190, 194, 211 Last Will, 113 law and order management, 217, 236, 237, 238, 241 Lawrence, T.E., 177 leadership functions, 263, 264 Left Front government, 236 Lerern, D., 395 liberal democracy, 44, 162, 234; and

bootleggers, 381-82 Kaira, 84 Kajorolkar, 135 Kakar, Sudhir, 259, 260

popular resistance, 222-23 liberalisation, 157 liberalism, 12, 111, 112, 352,

Kaliol, Om kama, 63

liberty, Gandhi on, 69, 72

Prakash, 117, 118

swaraj and, 72, 74

Lichbach, M.I., 220

360;

Index Lincoln, Abraham, 173 linguistic community, identity

and,

322.323 linguistic conflict, 76 linguistic reorganisation, states,

Indian

190, 200, 201, 205

Menon, Krishna, 42 Merton, Robert, 376, 394 minorities, 299, 305

Mitra, Subrata, 14, 216 mixed economy, 44, 156 Mizoram, ethnic issues in, 239

255 127, 130; satyagraha,

Mchta, Jayshree, 16, 17, 280 Mechta, Sanat, 409, 411, 417

Madan, T.N., 340 Madhya Pradesh, government of, on Sardar Sarovar Project, 404, 422 Mahabharata, father-son relationship in, 262; self-esteem and insults in,

Mahagujarat

Meccano Club, Gandhi's speech at, 102 mechanomorphism, concept of, 269-70 Mehta, Dhaval, 433

of

literacy, 203-4, 287 Lohia, Ram Manohar, 163 Lok Adhikar Sangh, 404 lok shakti, 221 Luther, 330 Lyotard, Gustav Rabruch, 143

Mahad,

447

128

Janata Parishad, 388

Mahajan, Gurpreet, 11, 15, 350

mobilisation, 316, 395 Moderates, home-rule for, 60

modern applicd psychology, 274, 276 modern civilisation, Gandhi on, 71-72,

102 modernisation/modernity, 11, 354, 364; benefits of, 314; critical, 53;

English

language

and,

192-93;

Gandhi, Nehru and, 98ff; individual and collective identities and, 297;

Maharashtra, 236; government of, on Narmada Project, 404, 415

leading to dislocation and alienation, 355-56, 363; and religion, 317; religion, politics and, 295ff;

malnutrition, 283, 285, 286, 292

and secularism,

management,

tradition, 99, 345, 346; transition

Mahar Conference,

behaviour,

127

and

organisational

275-76;

of symptoms,

Mandal Commission, 192 Manibeli operation, 421-23 manual

work, Gandhi

Manusmriti,

munal

Ambedkar’s criticism of,

Marcuse, Herbert, 276 Marriott, M., 255 Marx, Karl, 170, 177 Marxism, 18, 434 Maslow, Abraham, 272 Mason, J., 249

mobilisation,

political

locality, Vadodara,

riots in, 378-79;

com-

conflicts

between police and Muslims, 382

on, 66, 76, 86

1275129, 130 Marathas, of Gujarat, 379, 385, 387, 388

mass

to, 310; and Westernisation, 21 Mogulwada

268-69

317, 336-46; and

moksha, 63, 107

Mook Nayak, 126 moral code of conduct, 251; Gandhi on, 104

morality, 67, 88, 90 morbidity rate, 283, 284, 286-87, 292 Morris-Jones, 227, 228, 232 Morse, Bradford, 411

partics

and, 23] Massclos, J., 223, 224 maternal mortality, 283, 291

McDonatid, Ramsay, 131 mean expectation of life, at brith, 282

Morse Report, on Narmada Project, 422, 423, 424, 427 mortality rates, decline in, 281, 284, 289, 292 Mota (see Patel, Raojibhai)

Mughal India, during, 301

secular

multinationals, 157 Muradabad, communal

public

place

riots in, 393

448

Crisis and Change in Contemporary India

Murphy, Lois, 261 Muslim(s), and Bhoi clashes, 381, 383; bootleggers, 379, 381; -Hindu

relationship, 300-303, 379; identityasserting acts of, in Gujarat, 376;

invasion

into

India,

Nehru

on,

32-33; pro-Pak feelings of, 372, 376; underprivileged, 373

Muslim League, 388 Muslim Personal Law, 351

Muslim population of Vadodara, 385, 387, 390; Alvi Bohras, 387; Dawoodi Bohras, 387; Dudhwala Jamat, 387; Memons, 387; Sulemani Bohras, 387; Sunni Bohras,

387 Nagaland, ethnic issues in, 239 Namboodripad, E.M.S., 137 Nandy, Ashis, 16, 17, 18, 259, 260,

266; 3295 930331 S325 .050— S455 346, 435 Narayan, Jayaprakash, 42, 46, 163, t5 250 Narmada

Abhiyan, 416, 427

Narmada Bachao Andolan 408, 420, 422, 424, 427

(NBA),

Narmada

(NCA),

Control

Authority

406, 415 Narmada Dharangrasta Samiti, 415, 416 Narmada Ghati Navnirman Samiti, 415 Narmada

Poonarvasvat

Sankalan

Samiti, 427 Narmada River Development, 409 Narmada River Project, 401; -affected persons, 402, 403; rehabilitation of affected

mergence

persons,

403,

of population

405;

sub-

due to,

406, 410. See also Sardar Sarovar Project Narmada Tribunal, 403 National Front government, 161

national ideologies, 38, 40, 50 National Institute of Nutrition, 285 national movement, 227

National Rural Employment Programme (NREP), 285 nationalism, 76, 77, 199, 356 nationalist ideology, 310 natural therapies, of Gandhi, 93 Nazism, 171, 172 Nehru(’s), Jawaharlal,

8, 9, 11, 86,

152771535178, 179, 180, 1825226: 239, 240, 343, 351, 360, 400; on British rule, 29; cabinet, 36; China policy, 36; and Congress, 225, 227; and crisis of modernisation, 21ff; on culture, 43; Gandhi and, 53, 98ff, 112; on Indian history, 28-30; on Indian social structure, 29; model of development, 45, 46; on Muslim invasion into India, 32-33; and parliamentary democracy, 227; ‘voyage of discovery’,

27,29 Nehruvian elite, 192, 193, 207

Nelson, 424 neo-Gandhian model of development, 46-47

non-critical psychology, 271, 272, 273, 274 non-governmental organisations (NGOs),

291, 403, 404; anti-dam

activists, 413-15 non-violence, Gandhi on, 60, 82, 84-88; and economic order, 88-91.

See also ahimsa Normans and Saxons, 304 nutritional deficiency, 284, 286 Orientalist view, of India, 42

Orissa, local politics of, 238 orthodox Hinduism, 303 orthodox Islam, 303 OXFAM, 424 Oza, Nandini, 420

Pakistan,

374;

dismemberment

239; and religious identity, 304 pan-Indian elite, 198-99 Panchatantra, 256

of,

Index

political theory and institutions. in Europe, 101 politics, changing concepts of, 151, 153-54; in India, 229-30, 313-14; interpreting Indian, 150ff

panchayati raj, 9, 47-48, 51 Pantham, Thomas, 9, 11, 98 PAPs, 413-15, 426 Paranjpye, Vijay, 410, 417, 424 Parekh, Bhikhu, 9, 21, 117, 432 Parel, Anthony, 9, 10, 57 Parikh, Harivallabh, 420 parliamentary

democracy,

Politics in India, ASO, 151, 228 111;

Gandhi on, 74; Nehru on, 36 partition of India, and communal nots,

370, 374 pastiche, religion and, 334-35 Patel, Anil, 403, 404, 408, 409, 417 Patel, Babubhai, 419, 420 Patel, C.C., 420 Patel, Chimanbhai, 409, 410, 419

Patel, Girish, 404, 410, 420

Patel, Keshubhai, 418 Patel, Krishnaprasad, 420 Patel, Pravin, 19, 20, 370, 433 Patel, Raojibhai, 8, 251, 432ff Patel, Sardar, 38, 240 Patel, Urmilaben, 420 Patkar, Medha, 403, 404, 408, 410, 413, 414, 415, 416, 417, 419, 421; fast by, 420 patronage, seeking, 251, 254 peer group, 178 per capita food consumption, 285 Persian language, role of, 208 personality politics, 246ff Phoenix, 86

Planning Commission, 410, 423; study, 412 Plato, and Gandhi on soul and health of city, 78 pluralism, 15, 174, 175 Polak, Henry, 71 political conflict, 220, 225 political culture, 151 political discontent, and problem of governability, 233 political mobilisation, 235, 236 political parties, 37, 250; Gandhi on, 75, and pressure groups, 234 ‘political religion’, 15 political secularism, 340

449

polyandry, 63 Poona Pact, 128-29

population growth, 281 populism, new culture of, 152 post-Enlightenment modernity, 100, 101, 103 post-independence polity, 12-13. See

also politics poverty, people 284, 286 Praja Mandals, prana, concept press, Gandhi’s

living in absolute, 283.

388 of, 257 criticism of, 74-75 pressure groups, 234 primary education, 9, 314; Nehru on,

50 primary health care, 289

primary health centres (PHCs), 289 princely rule, 63 privatisation, 159 prohibition, in Gujarat and bootlegging. 385 Project Evaluation Organisation, reports of, 47 Protestantism, 334 psychoanalytic theory, in India, 247. psychological interpretation, of personality politics, 247 psychology, 16, 17, 18; assessmentoriented concept of, 267; engineering concept of, 267, 273; politics of application and social relevance in, 266ff; as science, 268-69; of self, 248 psychotechnology, 17, 269, 272, 273, 275 psychotherapy, 269 public accountability, 222, 240 public health, 9, 16, 288 public morality, 17, 251 public sector, 43, 44, 51

450

Crisis and Change in Contemporary India

Punjab, 198; politics in, 238, 239 purusharthas ,63 Queen’s Proclamation of 1859, 113 Qureshi, M., 418

Radbruch, Gustav, 143 Radical Democratic Party, 432 Radical Humanism, 250 Radical Humanist, 259 Raj, P.A., 411 Rajchand, 68 Rajpipla Christian Service Society, 403 Ramakrishna Mission, 181, 182 Ramanujam, A.K., 248 Ramayana, father-son relationship in, 262 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 388 redistributive policies, 217, 237, 238, 241 reform and reconstruction, 10, 85 regional language, promoting, 195—96, 198, 201, 203, 210; as official language, 200 regional political parties, 193 regional politics, 196, 197-98, 314 religion, 169. 170, 355, 356; Gandhi on, 65, 103; and politics, 343-44, 352: politics and modernity, 29S5ff; role of, 172; and secular identities, 317ff: and society, 32 religious groups, 305, 374 religious identity, 15, 328-36, 337; beliefs and, 307; and faith, 32%, 330, 331-32; and ideology, 329, 330, 333-34, 342. 343; of zealot, 329, 334, 342, 343 religious spiritualism, 341, 343 religious tolerance, Gandhi on, 77 Republican Party of India, 139 reservation policy, for Depressed Classes, 13, S35 138) 189. 145, 147 Rich, Bruce, 415 Ricoeur, Paul, 274 Rigveda, selfhood in, 258

rituals, 307 Roland, Alan, 253, 259 Roman Catholics, relief to, in England, 219 Roman Empire. 174 Roszak. Theodor, 270 Round Table Conference, Ambedkar’s participation in, 131, 137 Rouner, Leroy, 12, 169

Roy, M.N.. 250, 259. 432, 434 Roy, Rammohan, 12. 180, 181: campaign against, 181, 182 Royce. Lye R & R policy. 414-25

Rudolph, Lloyd, 99, 227, 231, 232 Rudolph, Susanne, 99, 227, 231, 232 Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme (RLEGP), 285 rural-urban differences, 193 Rushdie, Salman, 254 Ruskin, 83 Russian revolution, 173 Sabarmati ashram, 86 Saberwal, 225, 242 Sachidanand, Swami, 419 sacrality, 308, 309 samaj, 299 samagra gramsevaks, 47 Samkhya, ahmkara, 261 Sangharsh Yatra tribals, 421 sanitation, 283, 287 Sankara, 30 Sanskrit language, 207 Sarangi, Satinath, 410 Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam, 402 Sardar Sarovar Project, 18, 426, 427; activists, 18; anti-dam lobby, 412.

421, 427; anti-dam NGOs, 413-14, 422; demand for rehabilitation of dispossessed people, 413-14, 422: ecopolitics of development, 400ff: pro-Project lobby, 419, 420, 422 sarvodaya, 75, 111, 168 satya, 68, Gandhi on, 100. 103, 104,

LOGS TOR Mean ies ’ satyagraha, 60, 74, 103, 106, 113, 116. Se ues

Index Scheduled Castes, 125, political participation by, 131; reservations for, 138, 139 Schleiermacher, F., 336 Scudder, Thayer, 409 secessionist movements, 216 secular state, India as, 350 secular identities, religion and,

16, 317ff secularism, 15, 61, 166, 177, 193, 356, 364, 365 self, concept of, 353, 360, 361; -creation, 340; -determination, 296; ego, 257; Gandhian anatomy of, 63-68; -government, concept of, 58; -knowledge, 64, 66, 67, 68; psychology, 252 Sen, Keshub Chander, 181 Serampore Christian missionaries, 180 SETU, 403, 408 Sevagram, 86, 87 Shah, Thakorebhai, 404 shakta religion, in Bengal, 307 Shastri, Lal Bahadur, 22, 53, 170 Sheth, Dhirubhai, 13, 14, 187, 433, 435 Sheth, Pravin N., 18, 19, 400 Shiv Sena, 196 Shramik Vikas Sansthan, 416, 427 Sindhis, Hindu, in Vadodara, 387 Singh, V.P., 161, 163,. 230, 418 Sino-Indian war, 1962, 51, 52 slavery, of Depressed Classes, 146 small-scale reconstruction, Gandhi's work on, 86 Smith, Adam, 115 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 330 smritis, 108

social conflict, 232, 300 social ecology, 384, 390 social groups, 374 social identities, 351, 359, 361 social mobility, English language and, 210 social and political reform, 69, 157 social processes, 384, 388-90, 394, 395

social psychology, 273 social structure, of India, 22, 32, 394; of Vadodara, 384, social transformation, 24, 151, Nehru’s model of, 36, 38 socialism, 46, 112, 193; Nehru sociological social psychology, son/childhood,

father—,

451

23, 31, 385-88 158-59, on, 51 276

relationship,

261-62; mother’s selfhood and, 259-60, 263 South Africa, Gandhi in, 85-86; Gandhi's nursing work in, 92 sovereignty, of a state, 73, 310, degeneration of, 22-25, 27 Spencer, Herbert, 115 spiritualism, 341, 343 spirituality, Nehru on, 52; religion and, 335 Spratt, Philip, 259 sraddha ceremony, and father-son relationship, 262 Sri Ramakrishna, 181, 182 Srinivas, M.N., 311 state, autonomy, 155, 157-59; Gandhi on power of, 73-74; role of, 155-60, 395; and the ruling class, 156; and society, 39, 45, 46 States Reorganistion Commission, 239 statist model of modernisation, Nehru on, 35-36 The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 105 Strawson, P., 321 structural changes, Gandhi on, 78 Subaltern Studies, 95, 123 Sudras, 192 ‘sustainable development’, 18, 425 Swaminathan, Srilatha, 410 SWardjaelOO Ses eeu iO oo: Ambedkar’s concept of, 139, 147; Gandhi's concept of, 10, 57ff; and home-rule in Hind Swaraj, 57-63, home-rule and political practice. 73, as self-discipline and as experience, 69-73; theory of, 77 Swatantra party, S51, 153 syadvada, Jain doctrine of, 105, 106

452

Crisis and Change in Contemporary India

Tagore, Rabindranath,

181, 298; on

educational reforms, 182

Tajia procession, police firing on, in Gujarat, 383

Tamil identity, 239

Tamil problem, in Sri Lanka, 239 Tandon, 38, 240 Taylor, C., 324, 340 technocratic ideology, 270 Tehri dam, 406 temple prostitution, 63 tenants, grant of ownership rights to, 49 theory of rights, Ambedkar’s, 11 Third World, pychology of, 275, 276 Tilly, Charles, 219, 220

tolerance, religion and, among communities, 151, 183, 332, 357, 360,

362 Tolstoy, 83 Tolstoy Farm, in South Africa, 86 Toynbee, Arnold J., 116

tradition,

16, 53, 54,

360-61,

366;

Gandhi on, 106-10; and modernity, 98-100, 111 traditional communities, 362-64, 367 traditional

culture,

inequity

in, 297,

298 traditional

identities,

174,

175,

177,

304 traditional social structure, 22, 23, 29 tribals, 194; affected by Sardar Sarovar Project, 426 trusteeship of property, Gandhi on,

67 truth, Gandhi on, 116 Tulsidas, 68

universal franchise, 192 Untouchability Offences Act, 139 untouchables

(untouchability),

125,

128, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 141, 303, 351; abolition of, 133, 138; Hindus and, 145

Upanishads, 257 Uttar Pradesh, communal politics in, 239; extremist movements in, 239; Hindi as official in its language, 188, 189

Vadodara, a comparative perspective, 391-93; riots in, 375-84; Ganesh festival leading to 1981 communal riots, 378-80; Police Commissioner's transfer leading to communal riots of 1982, 380-81; social structure, social processes and social ecology of, 384-90 Vadodara Municipal Corporation, 380 Vaidya, Chunibhai, 419, 420, 421 vaishnavism, 307 varnas, 31, 32

Vedanta, 66; metaphysics, 65; thought, 208 Vergin, Heinz, 427 Verma, S.L., 424 vernacular culture, 314 vernacular elite, and local and regional power, 194; and political power, 206, 209 village, communities, 35, 48; industries,

89; local workers, 47; reconstruction, Gandhi for, 89-91

Vishnu Prayag dam, 406 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), 321

Ujji Project, 419 Ukai dam, on Tapi river, 406 ultimate ideals, culture of, 326, 328,

Vivekananda, Swami, 31, 181, 182 ‘Voice of America’, 36

338, 339, 340, 341, 342 Umma, Muslim theory, 77 underemployed, 285 unemployed, 285 UNICEF study, on nutritional status of population in India, 285

wantons, identity of, 324, 326 Wardha, Gandhi’s experiments in, 90 weaker sections, 138 Weber, Max, 306 Weinberg, Alan, 272

Weiner, Myron, 235

Index

423, 424; withdrawal of support to the project, 18 women’s movements, 166 Wybergh, W.J., 102

Weizenbaum, Joseph, 269 West, India and the, 42-43

West Bengal, conflicts in, 235-36 Western medicine, Gandhi on, 92

Western

path, of development,

24,

25; Nehru on, 9 Western rationalist education,

introduction of, in India, 297, 298 Westernisation, 21, 98 Westernised elite, 21, 23

‘whole village work’, 87 Widowhood, Winch, 366

453

enforced, 63

Wittgenstein, 331 World Bank, 157, 415, 418, 424, 425; assisting in Narmada project, 405, 408, 409, 410, 411; Independent Review Team of, 416, 417, 422,

Yadav, Mulayam Singh, attack on English; language press by, 187, 188, 190 Yagnik, Achyut, 408 Young India, 75 Young Muslim Action Committee, 383 zamindari, 49 zealot, religious, 334, 342, 343 zealotry and ideology, 334 Zellot, Eleanor, 129 Zia-ul-Huq, 374

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Upendra

Baxi is Professor of Law and was,

until recently, Vice-Chancellor, Delhi University. He has been a Visiting Professor at Duke University and was Director of Research as well as Honorary Director of the Water Resources Project at the Indian Law Institute. Professor Baxi’s areas of interest include

folk law and legal pluralism, intellectual property law and the social theory of law. He is the author of Inhuman Wrongs and Human Rights: Some Unconventional Essays (1994); Mambrio’s Helmet?: Human Rights for a Changing World (1994); Marx, Law and Justice (1993); Towards a Sociology

of Indian Law (1986); The Crisis of the Indian Legal System (1982); and The Indian Supreme Court and Politics (1980).

Bhikhu

Parekh

Theory

at the University of Hull.

is

Professor

of

Political He has

been Vice-Chancellor of the University of Baroda (1981-84) and Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia (1968 69), Concordia University, Montreal (1974— 75), and McGill University (1976-77). Professor Parekh has published several

books and articles in the fields of political philosophy and Indian political thought. His publications include Gandhi's Political Philosophy (1989); Colonialism, Tradition and Reform (1989); Contemporary Political Thinkers

(1982);

Karl

Marx’s

Theory

of

Ideology (1982); and Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (1981). The Contributors

Upendra Baxi Rajeev Bhargava Judith M. Brown Prakash N. Desai Sudipta Kaviraj Rajni Kothari Gurpreet Mahajan Jayshree P. Mehta

Ashis Nandy Thomas Pantham Bhikhu Parekh Anthony J. Parel Pravin J. Patel Leroy S. Rouner D.L. Sheth Pravin N. Sheth

Subrata K. Mitra

Jacket design by Bharati Mirchandani

Of Related Interest

INDIA

The Emerging Challenges Edited by M V NADKARNI, A S SEETHARAMU

and ABDUL AZIZ

Despite decades of planned development, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and glaring socio-economic inequalities continue to persist. While planners and policy-makers are seized of these issues, the recent experiments with economic policy and development strategies provide little evidence that the major challenges facing the country will be successfully tackled. It is this concern which motivates the distinguished contributors to this major volume. They provide a critical overview of the direction in which India is moving and an integrated assessment of the prospects before her.

The essays in this collection... offer stimulating critical insights with a mass of detail which for politicians and policymakers could provide the way out of what is now regarded as a hopeless economic and political situation. The Hindustan Times

Contributors:Malcolm Adiseshiah/ Y.K. Alagh/ G.S. Bhalla/ M.L. Dantwala/ M.S. Gore/ C.H. Hanumantha Rao/ N.R. Inamdar/ S. Indrakant/ L.C. Jain/ S. Kulkarni/ C.T. Kurien/ D.T. Lakdawala/ M.V. Nadkarni/

D.M. Nanjundappa/ Narayana/ T.K. Oommen/ S. Parasuraman/ Amal Ray/ A.K.N. Reddy/ T.R. Satish Chandran/ Suresh Shukla/ K. Srinivasan/ G. Thimmaiah/ D.S. Tyagi

1991/430 pages/ 220 x 140 mm/hb

SAGE Publications New Delhi/Thousand Oaks/London