India interrogated
The Burden of Democracy, Pratap Bhanu Mehta; Language as an Ethic,
Vijay Nambisan; Roots of Terrorism, Kanti P. Bajpai; New Delhi: Interrogating India Series, Penguin India, 2003. pp178, 182 & 181, respectively
The success of last month's World Social Forum held in the southern Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay) focussed attention on this vast country of over a billion people with, if the evidence of Mumbai is to be believed, its particularly rich NGO landscape and high rates of political participation. Indeed, one of the pleasures of India for the anglophone visitor lies in the fact that portions of the country's intellectual life are conducted in English, rendering this fascinating country less opaque to the outsider than it might otherwise be. While India has no fewer than 18 official languages, English has retained its position as the lingua franca of academic life and of national debate, and visitors to the excellent bookstores to be found in Indian intellectual centres, such as Delhi or Kolkata (Calcutta) and presumably also Mumbai, will not be disappointed in their search for material in English on Indian history, culture and society.
While the Oxford University Press has a long record of publishing in India, making available both new books and Indian classics in its low-priced Oxford India Paperbacks series, Penguin Books, another British firm, has only recently started trading in India under the Penguin India imprint. However, what Penguin lacks in seniority it has made up for in innovation, proof of which is to be found in Penguin India's valuable "Interrogating India" series. Indian academics, journalists and essayists are here invited to write on a subject of present debate, keeping their remarks to essay length and not being afraid to write personally or idiosyncratically.
The first three titles in the series are by Pratap Mehta, Vijay Nambisan and Kanti Bajpai, writing on Indian democracy, attitudes to language and experiences of terrorism, respectively. Forthcoming titles have been announced on the subjects of corruption and nationalism, and, taken together, this engaging series of books, each one of which can be read with pleasure in a few hours, provides a brisk and energetic introduction to some of the main issues of contemporary debate in India. Mehta and Bajpai are academics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, while Nambisan is a journalist, and his book is raw and opinionated in ways that those by the professors are not. However, all three writers direct their remarks at the general reader, in itself testimony to the breadth and vitality of Indian public debate.
The Republic of India, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta points out in his The Burden of Democracy, was a kind of vast experiment when it was put together in 1947 out of British India and the princely states that then made up the subcontinent, minus those areas that chose to join either East (now Bangladesh) or West Pakistan. By a stroke of the pen, "for the first time in Indian history, all Indians were declared to be citizens, not subjects," Mehta writes. "To give two hundred million largely unlettered and unpropertied people the right to choose their own government and the attendant freedoms that come with it was a leap of faith for which there was no precedent," even as the existence of "unbounded poverty, illiteracy, the absence of a middle class, immense and deeply entrenched social cleavages" and all the other legacies of British rule in India might have been thought of as having made that leap a rash one.
However, for Mehta while this bold engagement is to be applauded, establishing "the principle of political equality, freedom and dignity indelibly in Indian society", Indian democracy can also be seen as having been vitiated from the start by persistent and vertiginous social and economic inequalities. While the post-independence constitution guaranteed political equality for all Indian citizens, it said little about other forms of equality, and "it is the peculiar sense of the self in relation to others that social inequality and the state have produced that gives Indian politics its texture." The persistence of inequality, the "ways in which it shapes the self, of privileged and marginalised alike," has, Mehta says, resulted in a democracy that, while it observes formal rituals such as periodic elections, can have a disappointing content.
Too often, the state is experienced as distant and monolithic, or is seen as a battleground for special interests trying to hijack it for their distinct purposes rather than as a conduit for the national interest arrived at by democratic means. However, even more important than these distorted perceptions of the state is the fact that Indians, Mehta says, have not been able to engage in the "cultural work of creating democratic citizens," largely because the inequalities of Indian society have "humiliated" and undermined the self- respect of much of the population. Too many Indian citizens still find themselves excluded and in poverty despite the granting of equal voting rights and attempts by successive governments to practice forms of positive discrimination, easing the Dalits, tribals and members of the Scheduled and Other Backward Castes into the mainstream through a complicated system of quotas.
"The institutions and practices of most inegalitarian societies," Mehta writes, "deny individuals this basic form of recognition -- that they are valuable in some sense, that they have some moral standing. In such societies, the quest for having one's worth affirmed will take a debased form.... Inegalitarian societies, where there is no public acknowledgement of individual self-worth, will be characterized by both a fierce competition to dominate, and, paradoxically, an exaggerated sense of servility... a desire to dominate and a kind of self-abasement ... cause us to lead inauthentic lives: lives not governed by values and concerns properly our own."
It is this lack of recognition, together with the injured sense of self-respect that goes with it, that has led to the search for communal self-esteem that has marked Indian politics in recent years, Mehta argues, and led to phenomena such as Hindu nationalism, which aims to recast India as an exclusively Hindu nation. A damaged sense of self, he argues, is at the bottom of attempts to impose a single culture on India's multi-cultural and multi-religious mix, dominating others in the process. "Movements otherwise as diverse as the Dravidian movement, the Shiv Sena, the Bahujan Samaj Party, or even for that matter the Bharatiya Janata Party [the ruling BJP], have in some ways tapped into this politics ... The fact that so much of our politics is about self-esteem is a testament that somewhere, and in complicated ways, this society mutilates the self-respect, the sense of moral worth, of individuals enough to make them attracted to such a politics."
Such themes are taken up by Kanti Bajpai in his Roots of Terrorism, the best written of the three books, and one which describes in detail three of the regional and ethnic conflicts that have long troubled Indian politics: those in Kashmir, the Punjab and the northeast states, particularly in Nagaland. India, Bajpai points out, has not escaped political violence in the 50 years of its existence, Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi all having been the victims of assassination, and episodes of serious inter-communal violence have also made up a sometimes grim record.
Much of that violence seems to have issued from what, following Mehat, might be called problems of recognition and of damaged communal self-esteem: in Kashmir and in Punjab, for example, the "cultural estrangement" felt by these states' Muslim and Sikh populations in the face of the "unalterable numerical domination of the [Indian] heartland" has turned into a "powerful sense of political alienation from the central government" and movements towards secessionist nationalism. As a result of Muslim Kashmiri and Sikh fears of being "swamped" or "overwhelmed" by the majority Hinduism of the rest of India, and of their calls for special status not in their eyes having always been respected, requests for greater autonomy within India have led to demands for secession from it. These calls, left unanswered by the Indian state, have developed into violence.
Bajpai writes that "underlying the secessionist groups' fear of the heartland and of ethnic competitors is a profound anxiety about loss of control over one's future, which appears to be passing into the hands of faraway or nearby others." In order to salve this fear, the liberal answer has been a recipe of "timely and imaginative social, economic, political, and administrative engineering," moving to improve economic conditions in the states in question and to put in place political structures that answer better to calls for greater local autonomy, the "array of autonomous district or hill councils in Jammu and Kashmir, West Bengal and the Northeast" being examples of "local councils that were created over the past two decades to address the fears of minority ethnic groups within these states."
The present writer recently had the opportunity to see one of these hill councils in operation, that in Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir state, a Buddhist area and former kingdom on the Tibetan border.
Bajpai would like to see this liberal answer extended, conferring a special status on all the borderland states that would give them "special degrees of autonomy in respect of religious and social practices, customary procedure, civil and criminal justice, and ownership and transfer of land." This special status would be most fully consonant not only with meeting local grievances, and thus defusing the threat of political violence, but also most in line with the Indian traditions of "liberal constitutionalism, civic nationalism, layered federalism, and group rights that have evolved since 1947," guaranteeing the neutrality of the government of India while also devolving power as much as possible to state and local level. In this way, the special status of these states would be justly recognised.
What Bajpai does not want to see, and protests against, is any further rise in the Hindu fundamentalism that has marked Indian politics in recent years, and, worryingly, appears to have had some success in influencing government. The inter- communal violence in Gujurat in 2002, during which an estimated 2,000 Muslims died, the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 by Hindu fanatics, along with other distressing reports, has done nothing for India's reputation abroad, betraying Nehru's idea of India as a state founded on secular, inclusive principles. Allegations made about the role of the security forces in the Gujurat disturbances and in the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque are particularly disturbing.
The Ayodhya mosque, built by the Mughal emperor Babur in the 16th century, allegedly upon the site of an earlier Hindu temple dedicated to Lord Rama, was destroyed by a mob of Hindu fanatics in 1992. As the BBC's Mark Tully wrote later, "during my years in India I have reported many stories that have distressed me ... [but] Ayodhya was a denial of something which I regard as quintessentially Indian," and it was, therefore, the source of particular distress.
Similarly, according to Indian writer Arundhati Roy, a magnetic figure at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, during the 2002 Gujurat riots "there was a deliberate, systematic attempt to destroy the economic base of the Muslim community. The leaders of the mob had computer-generated cadastral lists marking out Muslim homes, shops, businesses and even partnerships. They had mobile phones to coordinate the action. They had trucks loaded with thousands of gas cylinders, hoarded weeks in advance, which they used to blow up Muslim commercial establishments."
The last of the three books, Vijay Nambisan's Language as an Ethic, vigorously defends the use of English in India, and, indeed, "Indian English", though sometimes "Indianisms" of the type he describes are, he says, only evidence of "carelessness". Voices have been raised against the use of the English language in India, seeing it as a legacy of the colonial period. In order, to get closer to the "real India", such voices say, an Indian language should be used.
However, languages are not cast in stone: they can always be refunctioned for local uses, and Nambisan argues that the debate over the use of English is a false one. Indeed, he shows disdain towards "our high priests of what constitutes 'Indian' "and quotes with approval words used by the Indian novelist RK Narayan when asked why his books did not do well when translated into Indian languages: "because they were written in an Indian language to begin with."
These books, and the series from which they come, are an excellent introduction to contemporary India, whetting the appetite for further volumes to come.
Reviewed by David Tresilian
