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September 20 - September 21, 2020
The idea that ‘constitutional morality’ by itself is the only legitimate form of patriotism is deliberately vague and obtuse.
Of course, much of this may be less about being principled and more about realpolitik. The Hindutva movement may want a future without caste so that it can better mobilise Indic faiths. It desires an end to all religion-based personal laws, some of which are blatantly misogynist. It does not want to go back to a past where homosexuality was criminalised. It is okay with the right of women to choose when it comes to all abortions, except the very late-term ones, and so on.
What investor and leftist activist George Soros’s theory of reflexivity says about markets also holds true for politics—perception can become reality.
Some Congress leaders such as Shashi Tharoor have written books explaining the
difference between Hinduism and Hindutva as they see it, owning the former while disowning the latter. Although, without changes in key policy positions, this rhetoric is ultimately futile sophistry.
As Vinayak Savarkar, the freedom fighter and philosopher-theorist of Hindutva said, ‘Sexual attraction has proved more powerful than all the commands of all the prophets
While China’s homogeneity is often exaggerated by casual observers, it is undoubtedly less diverse than India.
United States, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher invoked this construct, saying that ‘the moral foundation of this [Western] system is the Judeo-Christian outlook’.3 The United States is the current leader of ‘the West’, clearly a civilisational construct, for there is no such political entity.
US president Donald Trump echoed Thatcher when he said:
Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty.
We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive.
In marked contrast, the notion that India is a civilisation is surprisingly controversial in India itself. Even today, there are some who claim that India was created in 1947 or 1950, confusing the establishment of a constitutional democratic republic with the genesis of India.
He mocked Indians as a ‘beastly people with a beastly religion’.5 He is often lambasted for doubting the Indian nation’s existence. On 26 March 1931, Churchill said at the Constitutional Club in London: India is no more a political personality than Europe. India is a geographical term. It is no more united than the equator.
Punjabi and Telugu are different languages, just as French is different from Bulgarian. Yet, the European Union is the modern secular inheritor of Christendom, which in turn was shaped by its Greco–Roman heritage. Parallelly, the Indian Union is the democratic manifestation of a Dharmic polity.
Today, many Brahmins are in white-collar jobs and as motivated by financial success as any other Indian. The idea of reciprocal service in a non-monetary economy applies much less, especially when said service was defined in a hereditary context.
What Khilnani is unable to articulate, for that would cause too much cognitive dissonance, is that India and Pakistan undoubtedly represent two civilisations.
India represents the pinnacle of syncretic polytheism and Pakistan probably the most unrestrained instincts of proselytising monotheism.
Huntington responded, in essence saying, ‘Not so fast’. He argued correctly that people would start asking deeper questions of identity, ‘who are we?’ as opposed to ‘what do we believe in?’ and henceforth global fault lines would be primarily civilisational ones.
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, whose perspicacious travelogues on India and the Islamic world seemingly agreed with Huntington, took a step back and over the long horizon envisioned the development of ‘our universal civilisation’—a global, humane civilisation whose genesis was nonetheless rooted in the liberal West. To that extent, he seemed to endorse Fukuyama.
Daks.a declares that one who desires happiness should look upon another just as he looks upon himself. Happiness and misery affect one’s self and others in the same way.12 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, US ambassador to India from 1973 to 1975, recognised this assimilative tendency and syncretic approach.
‘the defining strength of Indian civilisation is its ability to absorb synergistically the culture of outsiders … thereby conquering its conquerors’
Savakar envisioned a State that does not distinguish between citizens based on religion and worship … he spoke of a State that treats all equally, but Savarkar said the nation will be a Hindu nation.
If it is meant in a broader Dharmic and Indic sense, as Vajpayee and Savarkar used it, the assertion is unquestionable. If Hindu is used in a narrower sense, then the hypothesis is more debatable.
systems. As Nassim Taleb has observed, ‘religions are not quite religions: some are philosophies, others are legal systems.’17
It is not well known that prior to becoming the president of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1943, Bharatiya Jan Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mookerjee had been the president of the Maha Bodhi Society of India, the principal organisation of the Buddhists, in 1942.
Savarkar illustrates in his seminal work Hindutva, how Indians mixed freely before bottlenecks stratified identities:
Besides logistics, language was a significant barrier and so were social acceptance and job opportunities. The average Indian had almost nothing to fall back on without backing from the biraadri or gotra.
Life was ‘nasty, brutish and short’, to borrow the famous Hobbesian description, and solace was found in the Gods.
Centuries of resisting colonisation and invasion had seemingly sapped our energies, pushed us ever more inwards and made us even more rigid—a civilisation to be sure, but a decaying and wounded one, to use Naipaul’s evocative coinage.
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.
Examples of such protections in India include allowing members of certain groups to have multiple spouses, or increased autonomy in running educational institutions. The question is, why not extend this greater liberty to all citizens?
McGill University’s Vrinda Narain argues in her book Gender and Community: Muslim Women’s Rights in India, ‘In a situation where religion is tied to organized national minorities, this (sexist) discrimination dictates a system of “differential citizenship” based on ascriptive belonging.
The prevailing intellectual consensus that affords special rights to minority groups manufactures resentment in the majority community. This consensus offers no comment on realities like State control over Hindu places of worship. It correctly brands as communal an assertion of majority group rights that manifests itself in episodes like the banning of voluntary conversions while tacitly accepting similar rights for minorities in the name of protection. Is this secularism?
Political scientist Steven Ian Wilkinson of Yale University has shown that increasing consociationalism in India has led to rising ethnic violence.
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.
To address these challenges, the Modi government constituted a panel, chaired by former Delhi High Court Chief Justice G. Rohini, to evaluate the allocation of the 27 per cent OBC quota to different categories for fairness,
The panel has found that less than one per cent of the communities notified as OBC corner 50 per cent of the reservation benefits in central educational institution admissions and recruitment to central services.
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.
It dawned on Marxists by the 1950s that workers wanted to engage with and reform capitalism from within, not overthrow it altogether. In such a scenario, theorists of the New Left started scouting for virgin proletariats, based more on culture than class.
Left-liberals complain that ‘radical’ liberals—the former who support group rights, and the latter who support individual rights—ignore the reality of individuals existing in a world based on social intercourse. This misrepresentation ignores the fundamental difference between the State and society, between coercion and choice.
As 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.
conflation of State and society has slowed down the natural evolution of India from a discrete salad bowl to a composite, dynamic melting pot.
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.
one of the perverse effects of the now-abrogated Article 370 providing Jammu & Kashmir with a separate, special status—also violates equality and liberty.
It is pertinent to note here that advocating for a State agnostic to different sub-identities and a government that sees every citizen only as an equal and free individual Indian does not preclude the citizens from seeing themselves however they like, and from claiming as many hyphenated identities as they want.
France places curbs on certain clothing and accessories and the rule is applied equally, but it may still be considered illiberal. America, barring some exceptions, also has undifferentiated citizenship, while still retaining a normative attachment to liberty. Its jurisprudence is evolving in such a manner that even its taxpayer-funded, race-based affirmative action programmes have to increasingly show that they are not based exclusively on identity and instead have intrinsic pedagogical or diversity benefits.
Ansari said, ‘It is not a melting pot because each ingredient retains its identity. It is perhaps a salad bowl.’
To wit, a melting pot does not mean Indian society must necessarily be homogeneous, or that the State should social-engineer any kind of conformity, as Ansari seems to think. If society, despite getting a classically liberal State, still wants to remain a salad bowl, so be it. It is just not likely to be so, and perhaps that is why certain vested interests do not want such a setup.
He asserted that ‘each community has the right to practice its own personal law.’38 Ansari’s position aligns closely with Indira Gandhi’s views.
The conception of this Hindu Nation is in no way inconsistent with the development of a common Indian Nation … in which all sects and sections, races and religions, castes and creeds, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Anglo-Indians could be harmoniously welded together into a political State in terms of perfect equality.
