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

by Harsh Gupta 'Madhusudan'

This book is an important step in India’s intellectual evolution.

This complete dominance of the Left, backed by the patronage of a socialist State, meant that certain ideological assumptions became so hardwired into economic, political, cultural and social discourse that it became India’s default

The message was clear: it was not Nehruvian economic policies that had failed India, it was India’s cultural moorings that had failed Nehru.

By combining a civilisational idea of India with a strong advocacy of individual rights, they present a coherent political and economic philosophy that has wide-ranging applications in policy and governance.

It demolishes many of the assumptions and hypocrisies of various shades of the Left while systematically making its case for an alternative.

By some accounts an atheist, Savarkar wanted to tame the centrifugal forces of region and language (and the stratifying forces of caste) with that of a unifying identity of Hindutva, which for him was more than Hinduism and included other Indic religions.

Moreover, Savarkar was explicit that all Indian citizens irrespective of religion were to be treated equally by the State.6 This facet of history about Savarkar and ‘the Right’ is neither widely known nor appreciated, and is germane to our conceptualisation of the new India as one with ‘individual rights in a civilisational state’.

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.

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.

Pandurang Vaman Kane opined, ‘dharma is one of those Sanskrit words that defy all attempts at an exact rendering

This book makes the case that a ‘civilisational republic’—a democratic polity based on the rule of law that in turn is rooted in India’s millennia-old pluralistic ethos—is the surest guarantee of securing the freedom that Palkhivala held so dear.

Nassim Taleb expounded on the meaning of the word ‘religion’ in his book Skin In The Game: For most Protestants, religion is belief with neither aesthetics, pomp nor law. Further East, for Buddhists, Shintoists and Hindus, religion is practical and spiritual philosophy, with a code of ethics (and for some, cosmogony). So when Hindus talk about the Hindu ‘religion’ they don’t mean the same thing to a Pakistani as it would to a Hindu, and certainly something different for a Persian.

In simple terms, the Indic worldview is more cyclical than linear, and is not entirely deterministic.

That is why the opposition from some groups to multiple interpretations of, say, the Ramayana, is very unfortunate.

Inevitably, the State favoured some groups over others, anointing itself as the referee. In both economic and social spheres, the Indian State exuded a certitude that chafed against the millennia-old pluralist and sceptical ethos of the society it sought to govern.

But Nehru’s philosophy of centralisation and certitude, carried forward with increasing intensity by the successor-members of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, had disastrous consequences for economic development and communal harmony.

Till the lifetime of Indira Gandhi at least, the Congress—despite many secular adjustments—broadly represented the mainstream of Indian nationalism. However, as it progressively vacated the old ground and simultaneously lost its overwhelming political dominance, traditional Indian nationalism increasingly came to be identified with forces that had hitherto been on the fringes. The slow transition of Vande Mataram and Bharat Mata from being a mainstay of the Congress to being identified with the BJP epitomised the shift.

The fundamental flaw of modern India’s secularism as practiced today is that it embodies a confusion between the State and the Society.

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.

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.

It is this philosophy—where salvation is ultimately individual and individualised—that is congruent with Indian society’s heritage and best represents the possibility for India to emerge as a progressive, prosperous and strong nation for all her billion-plus citizens.

India has welfare schemes like Right to Food, which negate choice and competition and instead force distribution of food to the needy through a government-run body in centralised, top-down model rife with waste and corruption.

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.

Finally, at the psychological level, the real debate is between self-belief and a deep-seated inferiority complex.

To have a nation but not a State is the equivalent of having a body without a backbone—the society or culture looking to survive or thrive has simply no protection. The Jewish people realised this the hard and tragic way in twentieth-century Europe.

After large parts of India were ruled by Turkic-Muslims and European-Christians for more than seven centuries, we won independence in 1947, symbolically breaking with not just the colonial power, Great Britain, but also with the claimant of the Mughal legacy, the Islamic nation of Pakistan.

Their idea of India—as defined by the court poets and philosophers of the dynasty—fundamentally viewed India as a post-colonial state with multiple groups that had to be reconciled in a collective pursuit of peace and progress. 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.

As 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.

Moreover, the ostensibly disadvantaged minority religions are often aggressively proselytising whereas Hinduism—or other Dharmic systems such as Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism—are not.

Whether this provision is used frequently or not is hardly the point; soft or symbolic secessionism within the Indian republic through a diluted Sharia remains the norm.

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.

Rich temples and privately funded Hindu institutions—with some exceptions for the latter run by linguistic minorities—have come to be regulated and often effectively controlled by the government, while many minority ones are exempt from various quotas and laws even while they receive subsidies from the government. Why? Because equality would be communalism—a lovely ‘ism’ with a neutral meaning in the rest of the world but with connotations of ‘bigotry’ in India.

Those who complain selectively about fake news, social media and WhatsApp forwards are more often than not complaining about the loss of their monopoly in setting the narrative as they can no longer decide what should be discussed.

India is not just a nation-state manufactured in 1947, it is an ancient civilisation with a remarkable—and unique—cultural continuity across space and time.

The accepted pieties of the immediate past have become heavy cobwebs that need to be removed.

Indeed, for an ever increasing number of Indians, an ideal polity would be a State that is ideational and not just territorial, and a State that sees all citizens as equal individuals.

India must transcend the hitherto dominant ‘idea of India’, where the State sees people as members of (different and often warring) groups and not as individual citizens first.

For Nepal, it might be that the Buddha was born in, and only in, Nepal. For Lanka, it might be that victory in the Cricket World Cup and the Civil War. For Bhutan, happy people and tasty jam.

As if a few people sitting together, often in the cafes of Washington DC’s K Street or London’s Piccadilly or New Delhi’s Khan Market can decide, once and for all, this is Indian and this un-Indian. We don’t think in this manner. We are only putting forward our opinion—one which a very large section of the country may share to varying degrees.

it does not matter beyond a point whether India becomes a veto-wielding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council or not—its international influence will be palpable.

The new kid-on-the-block—rather, an ancient civilisation returning to the global high table—is India.

As absolute poverty falls and Indians climb up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, questions of identity arise.

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’.

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.

Although a raucous democracy, it is routine in India for consequential policies with very large budgetary outlays shaping critical sectors such as education, defence and healthcare to be approved and implemented with scarcely any public debate about their costs and benefits.

Intellectuals such as Amartya Sen were quick to conjure up morbid imagery of children dying every week when the legislation on providing food security was delayed. But they remained mute about the scope which the programme enjoys and the methods it employs.

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.

Threats to internal security are viewed through the lens of ideology or religion, with an infantilisation of the perpetrators, as if the intellectuals are in collusion with brazenly opportunistic political parties who are evidently open to throwing India’s security agencies under the bus of identity politics in their quest for the marginal vote.

race to the bottom and degrades all discussion. It is a telling fact that the intellectual whose work resonates with the public is almost extinct. Social media and the internet have made it easier to put out ideas for public consumption and break the monopoly enjoyed by the intellectual elite on setting the narrative for public discourse. The crumbling of the media monopoly has accelerated with the rise of Hindutva in the digital age.