All Gandhi's Children
Mini Teaser: With the most diverse society in the world, India can serve as a model to the West in its struggles to reconcile liberal democracy with Islam.
AFTER THE fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, there was an outpouring of books reflecting upon the rivalry between totalitarian and democratic political systems. Some were triumphalist, seeing the victory of the West as inevitable, owing to the superiority of its institutions and values. Others were more introspective, recognizing that the two major forms of totalitarianism—fascism and Marxism-Leninism—were invented in the West and had, for large swaths of the twentieth century, a profound appeal for Western intellectuals and opinion makers.
More recently, the market for serious political writing has been invaded by books juxtaposing Western ideals and Islamic fundamentalism, since the latter now appears to have replaced secular totalitarianism as the major threat to the democratic way of life. Once more, the mood varies: where some books are apocalyptic and even hysterical, viewing Islam as in every way irreconcilable to modernity, others are more sober and accommodating, seeking to wean ordinary Muslims away from the grip of fanatics and into the camp of liberal democrats.
These books have all sought to defend Western democracy against its enemies both inside and outside its borders. Where Soviet Russia stood menacingly against the United States and its allies during the Cold War—its work aided by malign or misguided fellow travelers living within democratic, capitalist countries—now, the threat of Islamism is likewise internal as well as external. On the one hand, there are jihadi terrorists waiting to attack Westerners and Western institutions everywhere as part of a global campaign for dominance; on the other hand, there are the growing numbers of Muslim immigrants in Western Europe and North America who tend to live in enclosed ghettos rather than integrate with the host society.
To me, what is remarkable about this substantial (and still-growing) literature is that it largely ignores India. Some books may have a passing reference or two to the country; others do not even grant it that favor. Yet one would think that given its size, diversity and institutional history, the Republic of India would provide a reservoir of political experience with which to refine or rethink theories being articulated in the West. For six decades now, India has lived next to and somehow coped with China, an even larger and more populous nation run as a single-party state. Its other neighbors have included military dictatorships (which Pakistan and Bangladesh have been for much of their history) and absolutist monarchies (as was Nepal until recently). For the same period of time, India, a dominantly Hindu country, has had as equal citizens a substantial Muslim minority. As the historian W. C. Smith wrote in 1957, it was only in modern, postcolonial India that adherents of Islam lived in very large numbers without being the ruling power. Here they shared their citizenship “with an immense number of other people. They constitute the only sizable body of Muslims in the world of whom this is, or ever has been true.”
More than fifty years later, many Western nations also have large Muslim minorities of their own. Thus, India provides a test case of the challenges to democracy from its critics on the left and the right; and a test case of the challenge to social harmony posed by a multireligious population—which makes its current irrelevance to modern debates on politics and citizenship all the more surprising.
INDIA’S STRUGGLE from a state under the thumb of an empire to a country of vibrant, independent home rule is a story that unfolded in three broad political and intellectual phases. The Republic of India was forged by argument and counterargument, through a series of debates that set forth the agenda necessary to create this most diverse democratic society. It began in 1857 with a massive popular uprising against British rule, which sought to restore a precolonial order with a Mughal sovereign at its head. The failure of this rebellion prompted a growing awareness of the fault lines within Indian society, and a desire to throw Western ideals of liberty and freedom back at the conqueror. The Indian National Congress, formed in 1885, argued that a subjected people should, in stages, be allowed to create self-government. Other politicians focused more on social reform, on challenging the institutions of patriarchy and caste discrimination so prevalent in India or on forging peaceable relations between Hindus and Muslims.
The striking thing about modern India is that the men and women who made its history also wrote most authoritatively about it. The most influential Indian politicians, such as Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and B. R. Ambedkar, were thinker-activists, writing original books and essays to puzzle their ways through the economic, religious and political quagmires they faced. Gandhi was the father of Indian nationalism who, between the 1920s and 1940s, forged a popular, countrywide movement against the British empire. Nehru was the architect of the modern Indian nation-state, serving as prime minister from the nation’s birth in August 1947 until his death in May 1964. Ambedkar was the great leader of the country’s oppressed castes who also oversaw, as the country’s first law minister, the drafting of the Indian Constitution, which came into effect on January 26, 1950.
Gandhi’s Collected Works, published by the government of India between 1958 and 1994, run to more than ninety volumes. More than fifty volumes of Nehru’s Selected Works have so far been published by a trust created in his name. In the 1980s, the government of Ambedkar’s home state, Maharashtra, published sixteen volumes of his writings, an individual volume sometimes exceeding a thousand pages. Although many of the entries in these collected or selected works are routine letters or speeches, others represent extended essays on subjects such as national identity, democracy, religious culture and social justice. Indians in general (and Indian writers in particular) tend to be prolix and verbose, but in these instances at least, quantity has not necessarily been at odds with quality.
In January 1915, Mohandas K. Gandhi returned home from two decades of life and struggle in South Africa. Four years later, he led the first of several countrywide campaigns against colonial rule. Gandhi is hailed in India as the Father of the Nation, but he may as well be seen as the mother of all battles concerning its future. At once a politician, social reformer, religious pluralist and prophet, Gandhi was at the center of crucial debates on nationalism and social reform. Gandhi believed that freedom would be won by satyagraha, or nonviolent protest; others argued in favor of armed struggle. Gandhi thought that Indians should rely on their own cultural traditions; others (notably the poet Rabindranath Tagore) insisted that they keep their windows open to the currents of the world. Gandhi was opposed to the pernicious social practice of untouchability, but his campaign against it was derided by the Hindu orthodoxy, who warned he was moving too quickly, as well as by low-caste radicals (such as B. R. Ambedkar), who complained that he wasn’t moving fast enough. Gandhi believed that Hindus and Muslims could comfortably live together in a single nation-state; others (notably the future founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah) claimed that history and politics forced them now to live apart.
Gandhi wrote so much and so well on such a wide variety of topics that it is hard to offer a representative quote. Still, let me try. He consistently urged Indians to cure themselves of their own social evils. And a clear evil as he saw it was the issue of untouchability:
We make them crawl on their bellies; we have made them rub their noses on the ground; with eyes red with rage, we push them out of railway compartments—what more than this has British rule done? . . . It is idle to talk of Swaraj [political freedom] so long as we do not protect the weak and helpless. . . . Swaraj means that not a single Hindu or Muslim shall for a moment arrogantly think that he can crush with impunity meek Hindus or Muslims. . . . We are no better than the brutes until we have purged ourselves of the sins we have committed against our weaker brethren.
The debates provoked by Gandhi had a profound impact on the making of India, on its adoption, at independence, of a political system based on respect for all religions, gender equality and affirmative action to ameliorate centuries of caste-based discrimination.
It then took Jawaharlal Nehru, as prime minister, to turn these ideas of a nation into the policies of a state. Thus Nehru staked out clear positions on, for instance, the adoption of multiparty democracy based on adult franchise; the importance of economic planning; the granting of equal rights to minorities; the placing of India in a position of nonalignment during the Cold War; and the necessity of de-emphasizing primordial identities.
Indeed, the battle to integrate diverse religious communities was clear from the outset. For when India became independent in August 1947, it was also divided, with parts of the west and east coming to constitute the Islamic homeland of Pakistan. Millions of Muslims remained behind in India. A rising movement of Hindu fundamentalists now demanded that these Muslims be treated as second-class citizens. The demand was opposed by Jawaharlal Nehru, who, in a letter to the chief ministers of Indian provinces in October 1947, observed:
I know there is a certain amount of feeling in the country . . . that the Central Government has somehow or other been weak and following a policy of appeasement towards Muslims. This, of course, is complete nonsense. There is no question of weakness or appeasement. We have a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they cannot, even if they want to, go anywhere else. They have got to live in India. That is a basic fact about which there can be no argument. Whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with this minority in a civilized manner. We must give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic State. If we fail to do so, we shall have a festering sore which will eventually poison the whole body politic and probably destroy it. Moreover, we are now on a severe trial in the international forum. . . . We are dependent for many things on international goodwill—increasingly so since partition. And pure self-interest, apart from moral considerations, demands that world opinion should be on our side in this matter of treatment of minorities.
However, like Gandhi, Nehru’s ideas were not uncontroversial. And like Gandhi, he faced a political and ideological challenge from an array of greatly gifted thinker-activists. These included the socialist Rammanohar Lohia, who attacked Nehru for his love of the West and his underplaying of caste oppression; the social worker Jayaprakash Narayan, who attacked Nehru for his neglect of the villages and for his lack of faith in decentralized political institutions; and the liberal C. Rajagopalachari, who attacked Nehru for his suspicion of entrepreneurship and innovation, for his promotion of sycophancy and careerism in the Congress Party, and for being too soft on Communist totalitarianism.
These debates continued as some two hundred Indians convened in a Constituent Assembly between 1946 and 1949 to discuss the elements of a new constitution. The process was overseen by B. R. Ambedkar, who, in a remarkable act of political reconciliation, had been invited by Gandhi and Nehru to serve as law minister in the first government of the now-free India; this despite his longtime opposition to their Congress Party and to them personally. In his closing speech to the Constituent Assembly, delivered on November 25, 1949, Ambedkar warned his compatriots that democratic values were as important as democratic institutions. He thus urged them to:
observe the caution which John Stuart Mill has given to all who are interested in the maintenance of democracy, namely, not “to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or to trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions.” There is nothing wrong in being grateful to great men who have rendered life-long services to the country. But there are limits to gratefulness. As has been well said by the Irish patriot Daniel O’Connell, no man can be grateful at the cost of his honour, no woman can be grateful at the cost of her chastity and no nation can be grateful at the cost of its liberty. This caution is far more necessary in the case of India than in the case of any other country. For in India, Bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.
These words were disregarded by Indians, who in the 1970s laid their liberties at the feet of the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, encouraging her to institute a personal dictatorship. Democracy was finally restored, but in India today, the cult of bhakti, or a craven worship of one’s leaders, is all too visible in the political landscape.
These three phases of political argument may be called “Confronting Modernity,” “Constructing a Nation” and “Debating Democracy,” respectively. Taken together, they constitute a rich, continuous, diverse and still-relevant tradition of argument and debate, which is surprisingly little known inside India (where historians do not pay much attention to ideas, being focused far more on social forces and social aggregates), and wholly unknown outside India’s borders.
THE HISTORIAN Gertrude Himmelfarb has provocatively and (to my mind) persuasively argued that there was a British “Enlightenment” that is as worthy of study and celebration as its better-known American and French counterparts. Each tradition had different orientations and emphases. Whereas the French Enlightenment concentrated on skepticism and reason, and the American version exalted liberty and freedom, the British put the spotlight on “social virtues” such as benevolence, compassion and tolerance. Thus, “At a critical moment in history, these three Enlightenments represented alternative approaches to modernity, alternative habits of mind and heart, of consciousness and sensibility.”
Himmelfarb was writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but now, at our own critical moment in history, it may be apposite to add a fourth national experience to the list. I am myself uncomfortable with the word “Enlightenment.” Let us simply say that the Indian political tradition is as relevant to the dilemmas of the early twenty-first century as any other. This is in part a product of the distinctiveness of the individual thinkers it produced, but in greater part a product of the distinctiveness of the trajectories of Indian nationhood. For India was the first country to win its freedom by nonviolent means, the first democracy to be successful and sustainable in Asia, the only nation to have as many as seventeen different languages and scripts on its currency notes.
In this age of globalization, these multiple histories of modern India must surely have a resonance in other parts of the world—in Africa and in Europe, in North America and in Latin America, where people of different faiths have likewise to learn to live with one another, where the desire to uplift and emancipate the poor by state action likewise conflicts with the freedom and dignity of the individual, where nation-states have likewise to choose between privileging a single “national” culture or permitting a hundred flowers to bloom.
In the past, it was not just Frenchmen who read Voltaire, or merely Englishmen who admired John Stuart Mill, or only Americans who were inspired by Tom Paine or Thomas Jefferson. As democracy seeks to establish itself (with so many false starts!) in the countries of the developing world, it may turn out that the ideas of Gandhi and Nehru and Ambedkar are as important to these strivings as the ideas of the great Western thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And as the countries of Europe and America become more diverse, owing to the immigration of followers of faiths and speakers of languages earlier considered alien or foreign, these older nations may yet benefit from a sideways look at the historical experience of the most heterogeneous society in the world.
Consider the case of Indian thinker Hamid Dalwai, a brilliant, courageous writer-activist of the 1960s, who was deeply worried about the insularity and ghettoization of his fellow Muslims. Before dying in his early forties, Dalwai wrote a series of timeless essays in his native Marathi, translated for a wider readership by the poet and editor Dilip Chitre. This excerpt gives a flavor of his thinking:
It is an old habit of Indian Muslims to blame Hindus for their woes. However, the Indian Muslim intelligentsia has never really been critically introspective. It has not sought to relate its problems to its own attitudes. It has not developed a self-searching, self-critical attitude. . . .
It is a tragic fact that there does not yet exist a class of critically introspective young Muslims in India. A society which puts the blame on the Hindus for its own communalism can hardly be called introspective. If Hindu communalism is responsible for Muslim communalism, by the same logic it would follow that Muslim communalism is equally responsible for Hindu communalism. The truth of the matter is that the Muslim intelligentsia has not yet given up its postulate of parallel society. It has still not learnt to separate religion from politics. . . .
Indian Muslims today need an avant garde liberal elite to lead them. This elite must identify itself with other modern liberals in India and must collaborate with it against Muslim as well as Hindu communalism. Unless a Muslim liberal intellectual class emerges, Indian Muslims will continue to cling to obscurantist medievalism, communalism, and will eventually perish both socially and culturally. A worse possibility is that of Hindu revivalism destroying even Hindu liberalism, for the latter can succeed only with the support of Muslim liberals who would modernize Muslims and try to impress upon them secular democratic ideals.
These words were prophetic about India, where, in the 1980s and beyond, Hindu revivalism acquired great strength and influence, and provoked a series of religious riots that claimed tens of thousands of lives. Meanwhile, there is no sign yet of an avant-garde Muslim elite. Though the religious passions of the 1990s have cooled somewhat, Hindu irredentism and Muslim insularity continue to be important, potent trends that make India’s compact with democracy and modernity less smooth than it otherwise could be.
In North America and Western Europe, where Muslims are now likewise a large, insecure and inward-looking minority, Dalwai’s warnings were also forward-looking. So, perhaps, were Jawaharlal Nehru’s. Thus, where the Muslim liberal urges his fellows to modernize, the leader of the government must insist that, whatever the provocation, the state should never be identified with the biases or interests of the non-Muslim majority.
The same struggles between minority and majority—and the ways to overcome a tendency toward repression and/or homogeneity which is sure to later backfire—are clear in India’s balance of its own linguistic diversity, which is both mandated by law and affirmed by social practice. Again, this should inform the current dilemma of the West and its struggle to reconcile its now-multicultural nature; India can perhaps serve by example.
It was once believed that a single, shared language was constitutive of national identity. Writing in the 1950s, British historian D. W. Brogan remarked that “it is not accidental that nearly all modern nationalist revivals have begun by defending the claims of a linguistic culture.” In nineteenth-century Europe, “it was in the submerged nations, in partitioned Poland, in Bohemia, in Finland that the linguistic revival became the embodiment of the national spirit.” Moreover:
States which were not linguistically united faced a real, political problem. For . . . there were obvious administrative advantages in linguistic unity and obvious political advantages in securing the kind of spiritual unity that linguistic unity makes possible.
Two influential South Asian politicians drew the same lesson from European history. These were Mohammed Ali Jinnah of Pakistan and S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike of Ceylon (later Sri Lanka). Each tried to impose a single language on the citizens of his nation. In contrast, the leaders of independent India permitted different languages and scripts to flourish, allowing people to be educated and governed in the language of their choice and their region. In Pakistan, the bid to impose Urdu on the Bengali speakers of the east led to the secession of that part of the nation, which emerged in 1971 as the sovereign state of Bangladesh. In Sri Lanka, the suppression of Tamil and the promotion of Sinhala provoked a civil war that lasted thirty years and cost more than a hundred thousand lives. In India, on the other hand, the protection and promotion of different languages has deepened the sense of national unity.
Sixty years of Indian history have decisively refuted the European idea—or conceit—that a nation must be defined by a single language alone. It has already had a salutary effect on South Africa, which, after the demise of apartheid, officially constituted itself as a multilingual nation-state. And this stance can still promote a more sympathetic attitude to minority languages in nations whose laws and customs privilege one language alone.
The United States has given the world some noble social and political ideals. So have France and the United Kingdom, and perhaps also India. India can give the world the idea of a state and constitution that protects far greater religious and linguistic diversity than is found in any other nation. We have shown other young nations how to nurture multiparty democracy based on universal adult franchise—mass poverty and illiteracy notwithstanding. But even older nations may learn from our model of nationalism, which is inclusive within and outside its borders, and open to ideas and influences from even the powers that once colonized it. We have demonstrated that nationalism can be made consistent with internationalism. Finally, despite our own past history of hierarchy and inegalitarianism, we have designed and implemented the most far-reaching programs of affirmative action on behalf of the discriminated against and underprivileged.
ADMITTEDLY, IN recent years there has been a belated recognition of the Indian experiment. As other ex-colonies have succumbed to military dictators or one-party rule, the fact that this poor, large and diverse nation has a robust multiparty system based on free and fair elections increasingly has come to the world’s attention. Yet though the freedom of expression and the freedom to choose one’s leaders in India is now widely appreciated, how India survives as a single nation despite its staggering diversity is still imperfectly understood. For more than scholarly reasons, the institutional and ideational origins of Indian democracy and nationhood need more careful attention than they have perhaps received.
But the sharing of information and lessons learned must be reciprocal. In the past, the Indian political tradition innovatively adapted Western ideals and values. The early reformer Rammohun Roy read, with interest and profit, the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jeremy Bentham. The Pune liberal Gopal Krishna Gokhale—whom Gandhi referred to as his “political guru”—even rendered into Marathi a book on compromise by John Morley, the follower and biographer of British statesman William Ewart Gladstone. Gandhi himself was deeply influenced by Western thinkers such as Leo Tolstoy and John Ruskin. Ambedkar was influenced by the pragmatism of John Dewey, who was one of his teachers at Columbia University. Nehru was greatly influenced by European traditions of social democracy, so much so that one unnamed wit once remarked that in every Indian cabinet meeting of the 1950s there was a chair reserved for the ghost of Professor Harold Laski, the British political theorist.
In the present, too, India has much to learn from the world. Even with its absolutism, the Chinese state has been far more focused on creating equality of opportunity through the provision of decent education and health care. Western political parties, unlike their Indian counterparts, are not run as family firms. In the West, public institutions, the bureaucracies of government and the judiciary function with greater efficiency and honesty.
Certainly, despite the lofty aspirations enunciated by India’s founders and embodied in the country’s constitution, this remains a less-than-united nation, a less-than-perfect democracy, a less-than-equal economy and a less-than-peaceful society. The idea of India is being challenged by secessionist movements in Kashmir and the northeast. The borderlands are disturbed; and so too are the countries in India’s neighborhood. The plural, multiparty political system is threatened by the rise of a Maoist insurgency that now extends over a wide swath of the country. This insurgency, which aims to construct a single-party state using the Chinese model, has its roots in the deprivation and dispossession of tribal people. The workings of Indian democracy too are undermined by the growing inefficiency and corruption of the political class, the civil service, the police and the judiciary.
To understand these (and other) problems, we may turn to those Indians who have seriously thought through these issues in the (comparatively recent) past. A deeper engagement with those thinkers and ideas may perhaps make India a better, or at least a less discontented, place. But it is perhaps not Indians alone who need to acquaint themselves with a tradition of argument and debate whose landmarks and contours have helped create an adaptive, inclusive democracy that has found ways to integrate—albeit with flaws—the minorities of their nation that could so easily threaten the sanctity of the state. As once-homogeneous Western nations grapple with mass immigration of peoples speaking different tongues and practicing different faiths, it may be time to look eastward for an answer.
Ramachandra Guha is the author of India After Gandhi (Ecco, 2007). His new book, Makers of Modern India, will be published in the United States in spring 2011 by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
(Image by Rahul Guhathakurta
Image: Pullquote: As once-homogeneous Western nations grapple with mass immigration of peoples speaking different tongues and practicing different faiths, it may be time to look eastward for an answer.Essay Types: Essay