Bhikhu Parekh
Debating India: Essays on Indian Political Discourse
Oxford University Press
2015 xix+374
Rs 1640
Only a mind so deeply versed in his own culture could have written so wise a book. No reader will fail to come away without a greater insight into the Indian story. Parekh has a disarming capacity both to be unsparingly critical of modern India’s polity yet always finds in himself a generous conclusion. It is revealing to compare the far more enthusiastic response of a W H Morris- Jones from an earlier generation of political scientists of modern India with Parekh’s more acerbic analysis. But then Parekh is assessing an India which has moved on so dramatically through Shining India from that of the generation of the founding fathers of the Republic. Dispassionately, he judges the giants of modern India, Tagore, Ambedkar, Jawaharlal Nehru, with Gandhi running as a thread throughout. There are engaging essays on the nature of India’s public discourse, national symbols, the workings of Indian democracy, secularism, dealing with jihadism, even the nature of Indian friendship.
The relationship between Tagore and Gandhi was always bound to be fractious, rivals as they were to being India’s most distinguished contemporary. And whatever he owed to Yeats on being awarded the Nobel prize in literature, Tagore must have felt he had the edge. Though we now know it was not he but Dr Prinjavan Mehta, a far more intimate Indian friend of Gandhi, who first described him as a Mahatma, Tagore could not fail to be moved by Gandhi’s defence of Indian rights in South Africa. Gandhi was sufficiently impressed by Tagore’s views on education to send his sons to Santiniketan on his return to India in 1915.But they came at the world from such different directions. If moksha meant self-dissolution they interpreted this very differently, Tagore an `opening up the self to and suffusing it with the richness of the world’, Gandhi `reducing oneself to zero, purifying oneself of all that was base, shedding ties and attachments to the world, and aiming at emancipation from or extinction of the bondage of the flesh.’(p 64)Tagore hated the non-cooperation campaign, though at the price of his `moral loneliness’, seeing it as a rejection of the West, hating the burning of foreign cloth. Gandhi denied that he rejected the West, felt his was the way to emancipate Indians from a sense of inferiority, and that ` healthy nationalism was a necessary step to internationalism.(p 75)’They fell out again over Gandhi’s belief that the Bihar earthquake was God’s punishment for untouchability. Here Parekh expresses his own moral judgement, that connecting the natural and moral worlds in this way has no foundation: `one can argue with equal, even greater cogency that we live in a pluriverse, made up of different and in some cases autonomous orders of being and levels of reality.’(p 85) But Tagore’s belief of God’s only working himself out in the world through its beauty but not its ugliness is no more `scientific’ and `rational’. Yet there can be little doubt that Tagore with a quite different feel for the human condition, its sexual anguish, our all too human frailties, comes out the better from this comparison.
Parekh is especially shrewd in his appraisal of Ambedkar. We diminish him by categorising him as a Dalit leader: he was far more of a national and international figure. Indisputably the framing of the Indian constitution owes more to this highly qualified constitutional lawyer than anyone else. Yet Ambedkar was himself chary of hero-worship: `Bhakti or hero worship is a sure road to degradation and eventual dictatorship.(Quoted p 97)It was he who had the principle of fraternity added to the Preamble to the Constitution, the only way forward to an equal society. His was a vision of a westernised State bureaucracy fashioning a just society .Parekh again sees Ambedkar lessened if we narrowly focus on his differences with Gandhi. We are now more aware of how Gandhi was out of his depth with a member of the Scheduled castes far more highly educated than himself. Normally their leadership was pretty deferential to the Congress. Sadly, Ambedkar is quoted as taking hope from Gandhi’s assassination: `it will release people from bondage to a superman, it will make them think for themselves.’(quoted p 124) And Parekh believes Ambedkar’s attitude to Gandhi l `lacked balance and objectivity.’ He feels Gandhi was closer to the Dalits than Ambedkar himself and `they trusted Gandhi and gave him their loyalty to a much greater degree than to him.’(Parekh p 123)His faith in a westernised elite as the means for change is seen as misplaced and the idea of a separate electorate contradictory withhis ideal of fraternity. Was the mass conversion of his Mahar community to Buddhism not in some sense Gandhian?
Parekh sees Jawaharlal Nehru’s prime-ministership in two halves, a misguided one as a modernist, a more positive one as a critical modernist. Down to the late 50s Nehru, in his drive for industrialisation, neglected agriculture, seeing in India’s villages and the antiquated outlook of the peasantry the source of India’s degeneration. But his socialism Parekh assesses lacked any real drive for `equality or even equity,’(p 143) Nehru was no true democrat, Cabinet meetings were run like tutorials and Parliament played but a small role. The Congress party became `little more than a family –owned recruiting ground for careerists and sychophants.’(p 166) Even Nehru’s foreign policy is seen as driven by a search for international approval and so merely perpetuated India’s sense of colonial inferiority. But then it all changed. Nehru belatedly grasped the importance of agriculture, the need for the small scale, small farms, local irrigation schemes, local power stations .This was linked with his reaching out to the people through Panchayat Raj, locally elected bodies. He turned his attention to primary and secondary education. All this is ` a shift from uncritical to critical modernism.’(p 175)Even so, Parekh emphasises his break from Gandhi: `he courageously stood up to Gandhi not often politically but almost always ideologically and committed India to the path of modernisation, a no mean achievement.’(p 176)
There are some very original and imaginative chapters on Gandhi. We learn how deeply Einstein admired Gandhi. But Einstein doubted the efficacy of Gandhian non-violence against the Nazis and Bonhoeffer likewise,accepting the need to assassinate Hitler.So Parekh inspects the limitations of satyagraha. Intriguingly, he believes, certainly in the early stage of Nazi rule, non-violence would have worked: `it would be wrong to rule out the possibility of effective non-violent resistance altogether.’(p 261)And so could non-violence work against al -Qaeda and Isis? There is a brilliant imagined conversation between Osama bin Laden and Gandhi. Parekh makes the shrewd point of the Islamists: `in denying their humanity we risk losing our own.’(p 271)He believes dialogue is possible. The Arab spring revealed a readiness for change in Islamic societies and one bin Laden would himself have had to acknowledge. And a sympathetic western approach would break through bin Laden’s Manichean world view. If a readiness for dialogue is defensible I’m not so sure passive non-resistance against either the Nazis or Isis would be no more than suicide. Parekh, however, has the arresting insight that at its root violence is driven by a fear of death. Gandhi had no fear of death, and indeed saw death `as an act of self-expression.’(p 266)
Beyond personalities Parekh explores a range of issues. Initially he describes the nature of traditional public discourse, contrasting vada, a deliberation entered into with an open mind and pure heart, and vijigisu, where no holds are barred and you seek to smash your opponent. Over time Parekh sees a merging between Advaita Vedantism and Islamic Sufism, `opening up a cross cultural universality that helped unites the multi-religious Indian society.’(p 16)Would all this survive the new kind of debate opened up by the challenge from the west, above all by the mssionaries? I am surprised Parekh sees Dayananda Saraswati as a great reformer. But will a public discourse that is `suspicious of all claims to absolute and final truth’(p 33) survive Hindutva?
Who knows about the choice of India’s national symbols? Here Parekh is unusually informative. It is Ashoka’s charka not Gandhi’s that is on the national flag. Do the colours represent green for Muslims, saffron for Hindus ,white for the other communites? In the end this colour code was abandoned in favour of the colours representing certain spiritual values, `cultivating systematic ambiguity.’(p 45)It was a close run thing for the choice of national anthem between Jana Gana Mana and Vande Mataram. The former won but the latter was to enjoy equal status. India might have been named Barat.
There is a caustic account of the workings of Indian democracy. Had Ambedkar had his way India would have been more a Republic than a democracy. Family dominates elections,Parekh interpets,. so much so it is almost `like a caste.’ Neither Congress nor the BJP have any national vision. The BJP might have become the equivalent to a Christian Democratic party but instead `became a culturally shallow politically intolerant and narrowly Hindu party.(p 195) Congress had the making of a Social Democratic party but fell into the trap of being merely dynastic. Indian elections have become even more presidential than under Nehru and Mrs Gandhi. Parekh is of course assessing the way India has been transformed, or indeed malformed, by Shining India. Horrendous inequalities have opened up, 2/5ths of Indians now exist in poverty, at best seeking survival, opening up a gap with the successful two-fifths, threatening `to undermine the moral consensus that has sustained Indian democracy so far.’ Wealth and political power are seen as replacing caste as the basis of `a new hierarchy: ` the quest for domination trumps the need to address common problems in a cooperative spirit.’
Overarching the far more critical economic and social crisis is a cultural one of Indian secularism. Communal breakdown of course tore the subcontinent apart in 1947 and the threat of further conflict has never gone away. The Constituent Assembly went for a uniquely Indian version of secularism, one which recognised the pervasive presence of religion in public life and legislated for the equal status of all religions. Nehru had favoured a French version in which though freedom of conscience was recognised but Church and State would be separated, leading in France’s case to state sponsored ant-clericalism and in today’s France a seeming lack of tolerance for religious minorities. Nehru would have preferred a more secular nature in the public sphere. But the majority Hindu community soon felt that the Muslim minority were being over-privileged, leaving them with a sense of cultural marginalisation and, as Parekh reads it, `resentment of secularism itself.’(p 147)
No one had struggled more than Gandhi to achieve communal harmony. Parekh is excellent in portraying the way he sought a conversation between religions. If Gandhi believed in a supreme intelligence in the universe, he rejected the very idea of any monolithic claim to the truth, even that a faith had a monopoly of its founder. Religions do not function in isolation, `rather they are driven by their inner telos to reach out to others as part of their unending religious search.’(p 306)
But today’s India is confronted by a quite different expression of belief in the Hindutva project. A little surprisingly, Parekh is none too alarmed at its recrudescence under the new Modi administration. This Hindutva mark two is softer than its original-remember the shocking vandalism of the mosque at Ayodhya in 1992-with `a recalibration and rebalancing of its components.’: `a strong Hindu cultural ethos within the limits of the Indian constitution and relative distancing from the RSS.’(p 226) Others would beg to differ. The murder of M Kalmurgi, a Kannada literary critic by a Hindu fanatic, is one pointer. Amit Chaudhuri, for one, sees a warping of the Hindu tradition of pluralism by a new Wahabi -style version of the faith.
As a delightful addition Parekh explores the Indian tradition of friendship. He does so in terms of the great Indian classics. I would have favoured a contemporary literary reference, to the friendship between Maan and Firoz in Vikram Seth’s novel, A Suitable Boy.
