A New Idea of India: Individual Rights in a Civilisational State

by Harsh Gupta 'Madhusudan'

The Indian non-Left is made up of a wide range of ideas and world-views: classical liberals, Right-of-Centre liberals, free-marketeers, mercantilists, libertarians, Kautilyan realists, cultural traditionalists, Savarkarite modernisers, Ambedkarite constitutionalists, Swadeshi nativists and so on.

In his 1882 lecture titled ‘What is a nation?’, French philosopher Ernest Renan had said that ‘race, language, [community] interests, religious affinity, geography, military necessities’ do not suffice to create the basis for a nation. Renan observed: A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things which, properly speaking, are really one and the same constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is the past, the other is the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the desire to continue to invest in the heritage that we have jointly received. Messieurs, man does not improvise. The nation, like the individual, is the outcome of a long past of efforts, sacrifices, and devotions.

A civilisation is a broader entity than a nation. In fact, a civilisation can be considered to be the broadest coherent human grouping short of all of humanity itself. The United States and France are clearly distinct nations, but they belong to the same civilisation, namely, ‘the West’. It is true that a civilisation can be an amorphous entity and that its borders can be subjective. This, of course, excludes the universalist meaning of ‘civilisation’ where it refers to all of humanity, or all of humanity minus the ‘barbarians’ however defined.

India is a civilisation which is transforming into a ‘nation’ through the instrumentality of a sovereign, democratic State.

Renowned jurist Nani Palkhivala had written in 1974: Freedom cannot be inherited in the blood stream. Each generation will have to defend it and fight for it—then alone will it be passed on to the next. Liberty can die surely, though not as swiftly, in a democracy as it does in a totalitarian state. Only the husk of democracy—the one man, one vote rite—may survive after freedom has perished.

Like other religions, hypocrisies and hierarchies exist in Indic religions as well, but they are primarily sociological—related to gender and caste—and less theological. This is not because there are no ‘holy texts’ or doctrines, but because those texts and doctrines can be selectively followed.

Scepticism is an indispensable foundation of what is called ‘science’. The fundamental premise of scientific inquiry is that an unknown truth can be learnt through iterative experimentation and exploration. A school of thought that is dogmatic cannot profess to be scientific.

physicist Richard Feynman said, science is belief in the ignorance of the experts.

Hinduism will never have a Pope, or a Vatican, or a final prophet, or an unalterable holy text, or the one ‘true God’. That is why the opposition from some groups to multiple interpretations of, say, the Ramayana, is very unfortunate.

The fundamental flaw of modern India’s secularism as practiced today is that it embodies a confusion between the State and the Society.8 Nowhere is this confusion more evident than in the way secularism and communalism are routinely hailed as antonyms. The opposite of secularism is not communalism but theocracy, for secularism is a feature of the State; nation-states can be secular or theocratic. Communalism is a feature of all societies. In a free, democratic and liberal country, when people who share the same ideas build coalitions and alliances, it is not only acceptable but sometimes even welcome.

The degree of economic freedom determines the type of social capital, and the greater the economic freedom, the more likely it is that communities not tied exclusively to social, religious, linguistic or ethnic identity will emerge.

In a delicious irony, while purportedly protecting the land from alien faiths, the self-anointed protectors have come under the influence of foreigners in their interpretation and practice of the Hindu tradition, aping the antediluvian diktats—which disregard scepticism and deny openness—of the same traditions from which they aim to defend Hinduism. As the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche observed, those who fight with monsters should be careful lest they become monsters.10 How else does one explain a so-called Hindu faction, however fringe, which beats up defenceless young couples, yet subscribes to the same broad Hindu tradition that worships Krishna, famed for his relationship with Radha, with whom he was never married? How does one reconcile a self-styled Hindu faction which attacks women for drinking alcohol, when Hindu festivals are celebrated by men and women alike with the consumption of a drink made from the cannabis plant, and when the potent datura is offered in prayer to Shiva? These groups seem to have internalised the anti-blasphemy attitudes of medieval Turks and the prudery of Victorian England.

our idea of ourselves should evolve into seeing individual citizens as the unit of State policy. It is this philosophy—where salvation is ultimately individual and individualised

There are four levels of political consciousness, in increasing order of depth—party politics, public policy, the philosophical and the psychological.

political reconciliation of social diversity was attempted through democratic consociationalism which is a long and difficult-to-pronounce word that essentially means power–sharing between identitarian groups. A subset of consociationalism is confessionalism, where the primary power-sharing is between religious groups, and this more than anything else defines the Nehruvian idea of India today.

French writer Guy Sorman observed in The Genius of India: The British may have given India parliamentarism of a certain kind but the democratic spirit was alive long before colonisation. [Alexis de] Tocqueville had rightly sensed this. The distinction between the form and spirit of democracy makes it clear why other former British colonies—Burma, Iraq and those in Africa—have never taken to democracy. They never had a democratic culture and so parliamentary structures are mere facades to conceal dictatorships. On the other hand the democratic ethos is firmly ingrained in the Indian culture … Let us assume that monotheism and the centralised church give rise to totalitarianism examples of which can be found in the history of Europe and present-day Islam; it would then appear that Indians are completely immune to the totalitarian temptation. Not only have the great religions like Jainism, Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism and Christianity coexisted for centuries, but each one in turn has been divided and subdivided into an infinite number of allegiances and communities. The dominant cult, Hinduism, which has several million gods and goddesses, is hardly likely to predispose the mind to political absolutism.

Nehru changed, and rightly so, the Hindu personal laws by passing the Hindu code bills in 1955–1956. While the Hindu laws were made progressive, Muslim laws were left untouched. The right thing would have been to have the same laws from the beginning as is the case in America or Australia, but even today something as classically liberal as this issue is painted as bigoted by many political parties as well as sections of the Indian intelligentsia.

soft or symbolic secessionism within the Indian republic through a diluted Sharia remains the norm. The renowned jurist and Nehru’s cabinet colleague Mohammadali Carim Chagla wrote in his autobiography Roses In December: Consider the attitude of the Government to the question of uniform civil code … Government has refused to do anything about it on the plea that minorities will resent any attempt at imposition. Unless they are agreeable it would not be fair and proper to make the law applicable to them. I wholly and emphatically disagree with this view. The Constitution is binding on everyone, majority and minority … Jawaharlal showed great strength and courage in getting the Hindu Reform Bill passed, but he accepted the policy of laissez faire where the Muslims and other minorities were concerned. I am horrified to find that in my country, while monogamy has been made the law for the Hindus, Muslims can still indulge in the luxury of polygamy. It is an insult to womanhood; and Muslim women, I know, resent this discrimination between Muslim women and Hindu women.

As Indian society urbanises, caste barriers gradually dissolve, joint families give way to smaller units, women begin to enter the formal economy in large numbers, the young attain universal literacy and start becoming digital natives, hitherto unheard of professions become more commonplace, a sexual revolution brews unheralded, and as civilisational awareness follows industrialisation and in turn leads to self-assuredness, old certitudes as well as Orientalist cliches of a collectivist, traditional, rural, static India start to fall apart.

about ‘the idea of India’. The most troubling thing about that is not the ‘idea’ part, where we can partially agree and partially disagree, but the ‘the’ part.

In 2012, the writer Ashok Malik aptly described the problem with India’s intellectual discourse, opining that ‘the so-called opinion-shapers, in media and academia, have no stake in the real economy’.

In his book Intellectuals and Society, economist Thomas Sowell wrote that intellectuals are judged by whether their ideas ‘sound good to other intellectuals or resonate with the public’.31 Sowell said that there was no objective test for the ideas that intellectuals offered, and ‘the only test for most intellectuals is whether other intellectuals go along with them. And if they all have a wrong idea, then it becomes invincible’ as the idea gets repeated and endorsed by the establishment en masse. Intellectuals have no accountability to anybody but their own community.

The intellectuals have invented their own version of Godwin’s law—no matter what the issue, it will be turned into a debate on secularism and liberalism, feeding upon old tensions centered on caste and religion.

What investor and leftist activist George Soros’s theory of reflexivity says about markets also holds true for politics—perception can become reality. As has been said, ‘If you wear a mask for too long, there will come a time when you can’t remove it without removing your face’.

French political economist, often hailed as the ‘father of Europe’, Jean Monnet remarked, ‘It is better to fight around a table than on a battlefield.’

Sunil Khilnani wrote in his book The Idea of India, Partition was ‘the greatest violation of Gandhi’s idea of India as a civilisational unity’ by ‘irrational forces’. Khilnani mentions the ‘larger conceptual enigma of Partition’ and wonders if it should be seen as the ‘division of one territory between two “nations” or peoples? Or the breaking of one civilisation into two territories?’

Nassim Taleb has observed, ‘religions are not quite religions: some are philosophies, others are legal systems.’

While many intellectuals have long argued for the primacy of group rights over individual rights, and the protection of minority interests, there needs to be a detailed discussion on how this mindset might lead to the withering of individual identity over a period of time. An identity-based special ‘minority group right’ can broadly be of two types. It can either give the group’s members more liberty or enforce more restrictions. Canadian political philosopher Will Kymlicka, a leading proponent of multiculturalism, has developed a similar classification.25 He supports the former, terming them ‘external protections’, and is less enthusiastic about the latter, which he calls ‘internal restrictions’.

Political scientist Steven Ian Wilkinson of Yale University has shown that increasing consociationalism in India has led to rising ethnic violence.27 Consociationalism is a power sharing arrangement in a democracy between different groups, according them special collective rights,

Wilkinson argues that no consociational arrangement can cover all ethnic groups in allocating political power and State resources. Some groups will always be left out. Caste-based agitations by socially dominant peasant castes such as Marathas, Jats, Patels and Gujjars over reservations in education and jobs is testament to this. Even if the impossible goal of satisfying each group is achieved, distribution within groups will tend to be unequal and lead to resentment.

Wilkinson is thus right in pointing out the weaknesses of consociational agreements, ‘most importantly the institutionalisation and freezing of ethnic identities that by nature are multidimensional and oppositional—that seem to intensify rather than moderate ethnic violence’.

Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker has shown that in a market system, discrimination hurts even those who indulge in it, not just those who are discriminated against.

Canadian philosopher Jan Narveson writes in his book Respecting Persons in Theory and Practice34: Only individuals can make decisions, have values, engage in reasoning and deliberation: and the subject matter of morals is how entities capable of doing these things should do them. Facts about group decisions and actions are logically contingent on the occurring of acts of communication and responsive behaviour among individuals, who establish chains of commands and other patterns of behaviour responsive to the behaviour of others.

If welfare is being granted to correct past wrongs, only the systematically and historically marginalised people should qualify for affirmative action. If welfare is granted to set right the present economic and social inequalities, then affirmative action must not be based on malleable identities, so as to avoid institutionalising perverse incentives.

Anand Vardhan wrote in Newslaundry, ‘When two claimants on social justice find themselves in a victim-perpetrator equation, an influential section of the media either looks away or refuses to identify social or religious groups of the victims and perpetrators.’

Ayn Rand was right when she said, ‘The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.’

The CAA is similar to the Lautenberg Amendment in the US,92 which prioritises some Christians and Jews from the former Soviet Union, as well as religious minorities from Iran.

No system can be secular. Political systems can be sect neutral.

Hamid Dalwai, a Marathi Muslim who faced ostracism from his community for being a radical reformist, understood this. He advocated women’s emancipation through education and employment at the social level, and for a liberal–secular government at the political level. In his 1969 book Muslim Politics in Secular India, he critiqued minority politics for continuing to further the separatist mindset of the pre-Partition Muslim League.8 The real problem, Dalwai wrote, was Muslim obscurantism. Dalwai also argued that the right answer to Muslim communalism is not its Hindu variant, but genuine secularism. Hindu communalism is largely reactive whereas the Muslim opposition to the separation of State and religion is centered on theology, a reality that is globally observable today. Despite this reality, the Left-leaning intelligentsia attempts to falsely draw an equivalence between both. Dalwai wrote that Indian Muslim intellectuals are more likely to blame Hindus rather than introspect. As early as 1967, he led a protest march demanding that the government should end the practice of triple talaaq.9 On 20 March 1970,10 he founded the Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal to bring about social reforms in the Muslim community. Speaking at a function of the Samajwadi Mahila Sabha in March 1973,11 he said that purdah should be legally banned, and family planning made compulsory. Rejecting claims that Sharia laws were made by God and thus must not be changed,

Sita Ram Goel wryly observed in his book Freedom of Expression: Secular Theocracy versus Liberal Democracy: The concept of Secularism as known to the modern West is dreaded, derided and denounced in the strongest terms by the foundational doctrines of Christianity and Islam … It is, therefore, intriguing that the most fanatical and fundamentalist adherents of Christianity and Islam in India—Christian missionaries and Muslim mullahs—cry themselves hoarse in defence of Indian Secularism.

MP Subramanian Swamy wrote an essay in 2014 on how the government control of temples is proving to be disastrous for the Hindu community. Swamy wrote: Tamil Nadu temples, under the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department, has control over more than 4.7 lakh acres of agricultural land, 2.6 crore square feet of buildings and 29 crore square feet of urban sites of temples. By any reasonable measure, the income from these properties should be in thousands of crores of rupees. The government, however, collects a mere 36 crore in rent against a ‘demand’ of mere 304 crore—around a 12 per cent realisation.113 As the scientist and writer Anand Ranganathan has pointed out, just five states in southern India control 90,700 temples, with Tamil Nadu controlling 36,425 temples and 56 mathas, from which the state government leeches huge sums of money at will.

The 93rd amendment was designed to overturn two key judicial pronouncements given in favour of individual and equal rights. The first was the verdict of the eleven-judge bench in T.M.A. Pai vs State of Karnataka (2002), which held that all citizens should have equal rights in the domain of education and the second verdict was of the seven-judge bench in P.N. Inamdar vs State of Maharashtra (2005), which ruled that unaided institutions (whether minority or non-minority) could not be subjected to the government’s reservation policy.

Matthew Inman, creator of the web comic The Oatmeal, brought out this kind of hypocrisy memorably, showing how fundamentalist Christians mock scientologists for having strange beliefs.124 As the saying goes, ‘A cult is a church down the street from your church.’

Nassim Taleb writes in Skin in the Game: When we look at religion and, to some extent ancestral superstitions, we should consider what purpose they serve, rather than focusing on the notion of ‘belief’, epistemic belief in its strict scientific definition. In science, belief is literal belief; it is right or wrong, never metaphorical. In real life, belief is an instrument to do things, not the end product.

Taleb again: Judging people on their beliefs is not scientific. There is no such thing as ‘rationality’ of a belief, there is rationality of action.

Taleb again, ‘Superstitions can be vectors for risk management rules.’ According to him, ‘The only definition of rationality that is practically, empirically, and mathematically rigorous is that of survival … Anything that hinders one’s survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is deemed irrational.’129 Taleb presents rationality ‘in terms of actual decisions, not what is called “beliefs” as these may be adapted to prevent us in the most convincing way to avoid things that threaten systemic survival.’

clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson is scathing in his assessment of those who turn rationalism into a cult. He says that ‘the worship of the rational mind makes you prone to totalitarian ideology’ because ‘the rational mind always falls in love with its own creations’.

The right to offend is fundamental to free speech.

Clarence Brandenburg, a leader of the racist Ku Klux Klan, was allowed to take out inflammatory rallies by the US Supreme Court in the landmark Brandenburg vs Ohio case—just one year after the tragic assassination of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. The court ruled that so long as any speech is both unintended and unlikely to incite imminent lawless action, it must not be curtailed. The court held that the intent of violence, the probability of violence, as well as the imminence of violence, all three must be present. Mere abstract advocacy of violence, much less hate, cannot be proscribed. Therefore, what is hate speech in some countries qualifies as protected speech in American jurisprudence.

In stark contrast to India’s caveat-filled constitutional right to free speech, the First Amendment to the American Constitution simply states that ‘Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press’.