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April 14 - April 14, 2022
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?
The cultural conservatism is a social response to a religious attack. It should be explained as such and not through the religious lens as importing of Abrahamic ideas into Hinduism.
Nehruvian experiment has largely failed to create a prosperous and harmonious India,
Maybe it was not the intention to create a prosperous and harmonius India.
On the administrative side, besides a Byzantine bureaucratic structure, India also has an enormous dearth of state capacity, with a woefully inadequate number of judges and police officers.
Indians should take responsibility for their destiny, channelise their energies towards preparing to win, and as Krishna advised Arjuna, do so without worrying about the outcome.
In this worldview, Nehru was ‘civilising a savage world’, to borrow from the title of a hagiographic volume on India’s first prime minister by the writer (and Nehru’s niece) Nayantara Sahgal.
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.
Hence, Nehruvian secularism is like the erstwhile Ottoman system where different communities had their own laws and ghettos, even though the Ottoman State was explicitly Islamic. But when it comes to economic redistribution and the welfare state, the ghettos disappear for the Nehruvian worldview and we all become Indians once again, rather conveniently.
The most troubling thing about that is not the ‘idea’ part, where we can partially agree and partially disagree, but the ‘the’ part.
it is the intellectual establishment’s job to originate new ideas and educate the public about them, not that of a political party that faces electoral pressures every other month in a chaotic and large democracy such as India, with some local or state election always around the corner.
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.
They endorse or criticise an idea not based on whether it might work, but where it came from.
They also ignore all the ideas that cannot be traced to their known circles.
British India of the 1930s eventually became five countries—India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, which was made a separate entity by the British in 1937.
‘Kos kos pe badle paani, char kos pe badle vaani’
It was the Arya Samaj, from 1875, that tried to positively and exclusively define the new term ‘Hinduism’ as ‘back to the Vedas’. With this conception, the paths of Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism end up as separate ‘religions’. The
The average Indian had almost nothing to fall back on without backing from the biraadri or gotra. The farm and the local market defined most people’s lives, punctuated occasionally by a rare long-distance pilgrimage. Large-scale relocations mostly happened during times of distress. Marrying contrary to parental wishes was unimaginable. Life was ‘nasty, brutish and short’, to borrow the famous Hobbesian description, and solace was found in the Gods.
But many of the mainstream Right’s ‘controversial’ positions—in support of a uniform civil code and the abrogation of Article 370, for example—are not ‘communal’ but liberal and nationalist.
India needs more genuine liberalism—rule of law, open markets, and separation of religion and State—not a perverted, degenerate version of it.
group. The argument is simply that the government should not see Indians as Hindus, Muslims, Christians and so on, and crucially, that it should not force an individual to self-identify as belonging to a particular group.
Rather, it calls for, at the policy level, the supply side liberalisation of primary and secondary education, a cause that the Congress-led UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government had grievously harmed with the Right to Education Act’s persecution of private schools and kowtowing to entrenched teacher unions.
M.J. Akbar has observed, ‘Only Dalits should be considered a minority’ and Muslims should leave the ‘politics of fear’ and adopt the ‘politics of development’.
the Indian Right, unlike the Right elsewhere, is potentially more at home with liberalism–secularism than the Left could ever be.
The idea of separate electorates for Dalits was supported by B.R. Ambedkar and stoutly opposed by Mahatma Gandhi. The latter undertook a fast-unto-death, and the 1932 Poona Pact, unlike the Lucknow Pact, was a compromise—reservations, not separate electorates, carried the day.
Sardar Patel shot the idea down, saying to thunderous applause: Those who want that kind of thing have a place in Pakistan, not here. Here we are building a nation and laying the foundations for one nation, and those who
choose to divide again and sow the seed of disruption will have no place, no quarter here and I must say that plainly enough.
Instead, the ‘secular’ intellectuals derided the BJP as ‘communal’ for not fielding Muslim candidates in Muslim-dominated constituencies during elections, not realising that their demand was akin to Jinnah’s demand for separate electorates.
Words of these kinds, Orwell says, are often used in a consciously dishonest way.
In the British era and even after Independence, missionary-run institutions received prime land in city centres at subsidised rates.
Like in the case of the RTE, the government created incentives for the balkanisation of India’s society, since becoming a ‘minority’ results in benefits flowing from the Ministry of Minority Affairs, and various exemptions become available with minority status under the existing laws.
It went so far as to attempt unilaterally dropping charges against those accused of terrorism38—
It is not clear how doling out public money to religious preachers contributed to India’s culture or increased mutual respect between communities.
But securing equal individual rights for all citizens requires navigating the minefield of pernicious and illiberal legal–constitutional provisions planted by Congress party governments over the decades which, in an Orwellian turn, have institutionalised religious discrimination in the name of secularism.
In government policy, the BJP’s stand favours stronger individual rights with respect to personal laws and equality before the law for all Indian citizens—BJP governments both in the states and at the Centre have generally favoured need-based welfare. Of course, the self-described ‘secular-liberal’ establishment is stoutly against such equality.
A critical piece of the post-liberalisation social reform project is to dismantle this legal minefield and to enshrine equal individual rights for all Indians, irrespective of their religion.
Judging people on their beliefs is not scientific. There is no such thing as ‘rationality’ of a belief, there is rationality of action.
‘Superstitions can be vectors for risk management rules.’
India’s Constitution doles out ‘rights’ to individuals. The American Constitution assumes pre-existing rights and freedoms, and places limitations on the government instead. For India, the State is supreme with practically no constitutional limits because of all the broad caveats. For America, the State is but a constitutionally restricted agent of the individual. In India, the onus is on the individual to show that he or she is within their rights to do something. In the US, the government has to prove that it is constitutionally valid to regulate an undeniable freedom.
But the answer to this challenge is not to continue with restrictions out of fear but to shore up State capacity to enforce the law and take violators to task. That’s where the problem lies, as prison and police personnel statistics illustrate.
Despite opposition from Nehru, Patel got a mosque shifted175 to rebuild the temple at Somnath that had been repeatedly destroyed over the centuries by Muslim invaders.
Patel wanted compensation at market price plus 15 per cent while Nehru favoured no compensation.
Patel unreservedly condemned the methods adopted by Communists as being against the rule of law—he said, ‘Their philosophy is to exploit every situation, to create chaos and anarchy, in the belief that, in such conditions, it would be possible for them to seize power.’
No strain of the modern socialist movement—in India or elsewhere—subscribes to individual freedom as an end in itself.
But inefficiently run programmes are certainly not consistent with individual freedom, especially of the taxpayer, and it must be remembered that the poor also pay indirect taxes and, perhaps even more perniciously, the ‘inflation tax’.
Efficiency is the result of competition. State enabled socialism does away with competition. On a level where monopoly is bad state monopoly over prosperity is the worst.
First, what is preventing noble individuals like Sen (pun not intended) from getting together and helping others during crises like natural calamities?
This is where the breakdown of communities and substitution of the community by the state comes into being. This creates fracture in the local communities but at the same time you have problems when you need access to state for everything.
the economic system most compatible with India’s spiritual heritage is capitalism that works towards equal opportunity and social mobility, for such a system both accepts and allows for a collection of pathways towards the end goal of self-realisation.
Pitroda’s intervention escalated the issue to Rajiv Gandhi, who pulled the plug on what would have been India’s first cellular network deployment.
As we stand on the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution, the government needs to take a bespoke view of laws and policies in areas such as antitrust, data localisation and privacy.
years. Twenty-two hotels were privatised by the Vajpayee government, though fifteen are still run by the Government of India.
labour laws need to be made more flexible while ensuring protections for occupational health and safety.
Land acquisition needs to be streamlined and made faster, and capital markets require reforms so that access to equity funding as well as credit is eased.
businesses, India needs far wider and deeper debt capital markets to meet the needs of the manufacturing sector, which is a lot more capital intensive than the services sector.
