Over the top

As Lord Balfour noted in his introduction to Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, “[the] whole political machinery presupposes a people so fundamentally at one that they can safely afford to bicker; and so sure of their own moderation that they are not dangerously disturbed by the never-ending din of political conflict.”

Exhibit 1

Exhibit 2

Britain is an oddity. A tiny island nation that rose to create the largest land Empire in world history and spread its language, culture and political institutions to the farthest reaches of the globe. Since 1945, it’s world stature has declined precipitously as it shrunk to a shadow of its former self. But the narrative of rise and fall is not merely a narrative confined to Britain, it is the story of the West at large: of Western Europe and Europe-inspired societies like those on the North American continent.

Living at the beginning of the 21st Century, we find that those societies who in the past were so sure of their superiority: material and intellectual, now find themselves running a gross confidence deficit, their material prosperity no longer secure and their intellectual doctrines in question. Polemicists of the Right have prophecised the downfall of the West for some time. This “downfall” however, is unlikely to be a dramatic event. It is more likely to be a gradual decline, slow but sure. The West shall go down but not with a not a bang, but a whimper.

But let us return for the time being to Britain and the nature of its contemporary life. In the latter half of the 20th century, Britain embarked on a policy of allowing mass-migration from the non-West and thus acquired a substantial population of non-Westerners in a fit of absent-mindedness, a policy that was prophecised to lead to disaster according to one controversial figure in post-War British life.

Britain’s loss of confidence in its sense of self – be that self good or bad – coupled with the reality of a substantial population of assertive non-Westerners, especially extremist Muslims who have appropriated liberal-democratic notions of Representation, Rights-based discourse and Egalitarianism and successfully synthesised it with the strengths of a Global Political Islam – has led to a state of affairs that is altogether explosive. Assertive Muslim extremism in Britain is matched by subaltern-nativist movements of the white working class such as the English Defence League (EDL) and white nationalist political parties such as the British National Party (BNP). Lying between these two extremes is Britain’s apolitical-apathetic majority and a pusillanimous political class.

Lord Balfour’s characterisation of the English then as “…a people so fundamentally at one that they can safely afford to bicker; and so sure of their own moderation that they are not dangerously disturbed by the never-ending din of political conflict” rings a tad hollow. Sometimes, England feels just like Weimar.

Postscript: To watch fascinating interactions between the BNP and non-whites click here and here.

Authored by Vijay Vikram

By Vijay Vikram

It’s been a while since I wrote on this blog. And a very good piece by a chap called Ahmad Kamran on The South Asian Idea has pushed me into rectifying that. (more…)

By Vijay Vikram

I have never liked Ranbir Kapoor or Katrina Kaif. So, it was with some trepidation that I decided to watch Raajneeti. It was recommended both by friends and family and one gentleman even mentioned that one of the characters reminded him of me. The film also happened to be about one of the subjects dearest to my heart: Indian politics. I also had the distinct feeling that it might not be crap. So, on the last day of my trip to India, I went along to see it.

The first thing I must mention about the film is that it borrows liberally from The Mahabharata. Nay, it’s based on it. What better inspiration could there be for a tale about Indian family politics? It was a pleasure to be able to identify and compare Raajneeti’s characters with their mythological antecedents. Some scenes from the epic are even unselfconsciously reproduced in the film. Perhaps the most memorable one is near the end where Nana Patekar, assuming the role of 21st Century political Krishna prevails upon Arjun (Ranbir Kapoor) to put aside any pretensions to honour and family ties and satisfy the requirements of political morality.

This is a theme that runs through the entire film. The idea that politics and statecraft is a plane upon itself and therefore mandates its own set of rules and morality. In this sense, it is reminiscent of Machiavelli.

(As an aside, I should point out that Nana Patekar’s character, Brij Gopal comes across as an amalgam of Shakuni and Krishna – which, needless to say, is a stimulating combination)

I was instinctively drawn to Ajay Devgan’s character (Suraj Kumar) who is unambiguously based on Karan from The Mahabharata. There seems to be an aura of badassery that permeates his character. Suraj, just as Karan in The Mahabharata embodies a will to power, a clear talent and of course an inevitable pathos. Just like his mythological antecedent, he remains loyal to Duryodhana till the very end.

Manoj Bajpai is the actor tasked with playing Duryodhana doppelganger in the film. And I must say that Bajpai is grossly under-utilised. He is forced to play quite a pathetic, unidimensional character and none of his versatility is on show. I have always felt that Manoj Bajpai got a raw deal from the Hindi film industry. He has all the potential to be a an unconventional leading man (better than Ranbir Kapoor at any rate). If somebody of similar stock like Irfan Khan is allowed his time in the sun, surely there’s space for Manoj Bajpai.

On an aesthetic note, I really must applaud the high production values of 21st Century Hindi Cinema. The wardrobe, props and locations were flawless. The dialogue was careful to utilise political Hindi, which was a nice touch. In many ways, Hindi cinema has come of age. The film industry has started making what I suppose can be loosely termed as ’social interest’ films. More importantly, Bollywood betrays a sense of confidence and brashness that is infectious.

Having said that, Raajneeti is not free from the usual idiosyncrasies of Hindi cinema. There is of course the exotic love interest and the badly done, obligatory sex and kissing scenes that no Hindi film seems to be able to do without these days. Still, these are forgivable flaws.

In any case, I would like to end by making two observations:

1) I’ve always felt that the moral imperative in The Mahabharata lay with Karan. It is him that I am drawn to and it is him that I have empathy with. It is he who should win and it is he who deserves the gaddi. In this fashion, both The Mahabharata and Raajneeti end unsatisfactorily for me.

2) Raajneeti was only released by the Censor Board after the removal of a few scenes from the film. I imagine these scenes were deemed offensive to the sensibilities of the Gandhi family. I would love to find out what they were.

I am glad Arundhati Roy exists. I say this because we desperately require a coherent structural critique of Indian democracy. Naysayers might argue that her critique is far from coherent but that is of little concern here. I am happy that at least somebody is willing to question the nature of Indian democracy, even if that person stares across from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. There seems to be an unthinking; publicly articulated commitment to democratic politics all across intelligent conversation in India. It has become the holiest of our holy cows. The Indian variant of democracy is sustained by a wide variety of adulatory literature, scholarly and journalistic. Perhaps most perversely, in a strange case of the post-colonial disease, Western approval for India’s choice of government leads to much puffing of chests in the Indian middle classes. We are told that it – along with Bollywood – is the source of much of our “soft power”, whatever that is.

I am not going to waste time listing the failures of our unique choice of government. They should be clear to any thinking Indian. What I am going to argue however, is that democracy could never really have succeeded in the Indian climate. I ask you to be patient because mounting an intellectual challenge against something that possesses the degree of unthinking social acceptability the way democracy does requires effort and often I shall resort to polemic to get my point across.

I say that democracy could have never succeeded in India because India is a feudal society. By feudal I mean a state of affairs where unequal relationships between humans and between groups are socially legitimate. The very idea that humans should be or can be treated equally is an idea that would be alien to a feudal society. It also means that human beings are not viewed as individuals per se – a construct that has been one of the primary outcomes of the European Enlightenment. Rather, a feudal society imagines human beings as part of bigger social groups – religious, ethnic, regional and uniquely in the case of India, caste. Democracy then, could only properly germinate and take hold in Europe and Europe-inspired societies after the absorption of Enlightenment ideology into the European DNA. The Enlightenment has washed up on the shores of India, yes. But, it has failed to take hold of the Indian imagination. It is groups that assert themselves in India – Dalit assertion, Muslim assertion, Gujjar assertion. The individual is nowhere to be seen.

The Nehruvian project’s central failing was its assumption that the extension of the universal franchise would transform the teeming masses of Hindustan – the various regional, religious and caste allegiances into the intellectually comfortable category of the Enlightenment individual. This was fantasy. Democracy is premised on the notion of the individual, and I use the term in a deliberately technical sense. Democracy can’t create the individual, it depends on the individual for its very existence.

The grafting of democratic government onto a society that has no basis for it has led to a peculiar and perverse state of affairs. Indian politics has become an arena for the contestation of identities rather than competing claims of the common good. As Lant Pritchett has pointed out -

Politicians have been able to survive on creating identities around caste and religion claiming to deliver social justice by the very fact of their election. That is, that someone of their group holds high office in and of itself provides social legitimacy to a group’s claims to fully equal participation in the social and political sphere. Attacks on these politicians for lack of effectiveness or corruption could be seen as, at best, missing the larger social point and at worst, as a retrograde attempt of the forces of the elite to “keep them in their place.”

The degeneration of politics in India and the values it has engendered have infected the country’s public institutions. Naresh Saxena, a former IAS officer who served in Uttar Pradesh, penned a note for the National Advisory Council at the time of the UPA’s first election into office (2004) that is breathtaking in its hard hitting honesty about the current state of affairs (particularly in North India) and which articulates a common view within the elite civil service that things are going downhill, in large part because the integrity and the non-partisan character of the civil service have deteriorated. He says:

…because between the expression of the will of the State (represented by politicians) and the execution of that will (through the administrators) there cannot be any long-term dichotomy.  In other words, the model in which the politics will continue to be corrupt, casteist and will harbor criminals where as civil servants will continue to be efficient, responsive to public needs and change agents cannot be sustained indefinitely. In the long-run political and administrative values have to coincide.

I have often been asked what I consider an alternative to democracy to be. I would imagine that India needs a form of government that integrates market institutions into the fabric of the country without the wholesale import of political norms that have no roots in Indian society. My goal for now is simply to open the debate.

Postscript:

1) You can watch Arundhati’s critique of Indian Democracy here

2) I owe a substantial intellectual debt to Lant Pritchett and his idea of India as a ‘Flailing’ State. Read his landmark paper here [PDF].

- Vijay Vikram

One of the misfortunes of having an intellectual sympathy for the political Right in India is that one automatically finds oneself in the company of unbecoming Hindu goons, be they online or in the field. As legitimate political activity in India is set on a default left-liberal setting, it is in the normal order of things quite problematic to find a desi political animal to engage with who is possessed of a sense of public service and a strong sense of national identity.

The ones who do represent the aforementioned themes and other programmes dear to the heart of the Indian political animal often also couple these admirable political sentiments with quite a nasty anti-cosmopolitanism, not to mention a general distaste for Muslims. The latest brouhaha over a 95-year-old Indian painter’s decision to accept Qatari citizenship is a case in point. Without going into the stultifying details of this non-controversy, it is possible to illustrate the dilemma faced by the urban nationalist. On the one hand, there is the establishment media with all its shrillness busy bestowing titles of greatness upon Mr. Hussain, on the other, we have the cyber crusaders intent on punishing the nonagenarian for his treachery. Can you be a man of the Right and refuse to rain abuse on M.F. Hussain? For a child of that Indo-Persian synthesis called Hindustan and an advocate of assertive political action, this can cause a fair degree of cognitive dissonance.

If the choice is between urban cosmopolitanism however – a distinctly apolitical concern – and a movement that promises vigorous and ambitious national reform, the political animal ought to waste little time.

In an India that does not maintain a conscious commitment to the secularism that was so dear to her founding father, the only meaningful political-reformist impulses are to be found within that broad church called the Hindu movement. There is little doubt that the secularist project held enough promise to animate independent India’s Oxbridge-educated nation builders and for that matter, much of the professional elite. The vision of a progressive, religion-blind, postcolonial power was surely an attractive one for the champagne socialist. However, the democratising impulse inherent to Nehru’s nation building project ensured that a genuine commitment to secularism was gradually overwhelmed by the parochialism that comes naturally to a feudal society such as India. Nehru’s all-encompassing pan-Indian vision was to founder dreadfully on the rocks of region, religion and caste. Secularism in India means little more than being nice to Muslims and Christians. Although this is an admirable sentiment, it surely cannot form the basis of a comprehensive national philosophy.

The history of independent India’s politics is the history of the Congress ceding the nation-building imperative to the political Right. Why this has happened is a matter of debate. Perhaps the Congress, post-1947 really was a facade built around the gigantic political personality of Nehru and once he went, so did the fire of his guiding philosophy. One can scarcely accuse his daughter and her heirs of having much of a political Weltanschauung. Perhaps it can be accounted for by the vigorous activism of the Hindu right and the religiosity of the Hindu masses that in another era, Gandhi used to great effect.

Two points are clear though: India is a nation that still needs building and because the secularist project has run out of steam and fails to inspire the desi political animal, the only prescriptions for audacious political renewal are to be found in proposals put forth by modernisers from within the Hindu camp. There may be passionate men and women with an avowed commitment to Indian secularism residing in Delhi and Bombay who would contend the latter claim. What they fail to realise however is that they expend so much energy in fighting off the march of the Right and its pernicious agendas that they have little time to indulge in visions of societal renewal and meaningful political engagement. Machiavelli’s ideal of the political animal – one who sought the fulfilment and the glory that comes from the creation and maintenance by common endeavour of a strong and well-governed social whole – seems lost in the mediocre soap opera that is Indian politics.

The tasks facing the desi political animal then, are certainly not straightforward but necessary. He must utilise the energies unleashed by the right to create an atmosphere conducive to su-raj or good government. In practical terms this means committing oneself to policy affairs. In more normative terms, it means emphasising the political will and the ideological tenacity that comes naturally to overtly political movements. In the end, an Indian committed to political renewal has only one natural home, the Right, warts and all.

- Vijay Vikram