In the first part, we saw the general classification of Western political systems. Since the Greeks, Western thinkers have struggled to propose the best form of government. The utopian idea has always been that of maximally autonomous individuals under the protection of a neutral state. This part is primarily a summary of the essays of an eminent scholar and economist based in the UK, Dr. Bhikhu Parekh, who assesses post-independent Nehruvian India.

Introduction

The ‘right’ and ‘left’ now firmly entrench themselves in our minds despite glaring inconsistencies, as most continue to use them both informally and formally. Intellectuals have persistently questioned the relevance of Western political ideas to the lived experience in India or other non-western cultures. The most relevant in contemporary times is that of Dr. SN Balagangadhara and his group, who show that much of today’s normative ‘liberal democracy’ has clear theological roots and may not make sense outside the Western world. Universalising and secularising a theological theme may be problematic when applied to Indian culture. Independent India, ignoring indigenous political philosophy, inherited Western values, creating a story of contradictions clashing with the intensely traditional society of India.

Political theory offers society self-consciousness and self-understanding. It ensures rational debate on public issues and contributes to the creation of a civilised and healthy society. Non-Western societies have rightly complained that ethnocentric Western political theory, especially the gold-standard ‘liberal democracy’, has limited explanatory power outside the West. However, no contemporary non-Western society has produced much original political theory. The reasons have been different in different societies.

The following three sections are a summary and paraphrasing of the two important essays of Professor Bhikhu Parekh (Nehru and the National Philosophy of India and The Poverty of Indian Political Theory), where he assesses post-Independent Nehruvian India. Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister from 1947 to 1964, was a patriot, undoubtedly, but he constantly looked at the West as a template for India’s future, rejecting the indigenous past.

The Political Thought of Nehruvian Independent India

Nehru threw his weight behind the seven principles of a ‘New India’ (to bring it out of stagnation) based on modernity: national unity, parliamentary democracy, industrialization, socialism, scientific temper, secularism, and non-alignment. This ‘unofficial but official’ philosophy of India gained such supreme moral authority that few political theorists took the trouble of critiquing it.

National unity, the best protection against hostile forces, was Nehru’s top requirement for national independence. He believed that a strong, constitutionally bound, centrally governed government would address many issues, including narrow regional and caste loyalties, the forging of patriotism, and preventing fragmentation. He stressed industrialization and higher education for forging unity, ignoring primary education and cultural heritage as enduring bases for national unity. The ignoring of primary education led to a huge variety of schools with little coordination, no coherent framework of objectives, limited relevance to Indian conditions, and poor attempts to ground pupils in Indian history and culture. The future citizens of India grew up with little in common, sometimes sharing the minimum of memories and values with their parents. In some English-medium schools, the products were a confused mix of the West and India.

Parliamentary democracy with universal adult suffrage, fair elections, separation of powers, an independent judiciary, a free press, civil liberties, and constitutionally guaranteed basic rights was the only way to hold together a diverse, vast, and divided country. Alternatives like ‘communitarian’ and ‘organic’ democracy advocated by thinkers like Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo did not appeal to Nehru. Though Nehru owed his position to Gandhi, ironically, he was unsympathetic to the Gandhian idea of a loosely structured polity and preferred a federal polity with a strong centre.

Industrialization, a major route to political and economic independence, was the solution to India’s poverty and national weakness against foreign conquests. Nehru saw cottage and small-scale industries only as a temporary expedient until the country became fully industrialised. Nehru, in his inexorable industrialization, ignored agriculture as a lever of economic development. Nehru confirmed contemporary European thinking by placing agriculture as a primitive and culturally inferior activity. For Gandhi, villages held the key; for Nehru, villages were the problem.

Socialism was a lifelong commitment for Nehru. However, his social analysis throughout remained diverse and confused because Indian experiences did not match the theories. He tempered his pre-independence hard socialism (which threatened to isolate him) with a democratic form of socialism. The Second Five-Year Plan developed by Mahalanobis to create a ‘socialist society’ was the overall strategy for the Nehru period. It was a private-public sector mix with a dominant public sector. Nehru’s socialism had economic and political consequences. The concern was to increase production rather than provide a national minimum for all Indians. The five-year plans gave low priority to public action aimed at endemic undernourishment, illiteracy, basic medical facilities, clear drinking water, and cheap food. Public investment in education, health, housing, and goods distribution was not merely a matter of justice but also a vital socio-economic investment capable of yielding high long-term dividends. In that sense, his conception of socialism was structurally flawed.

Scientific Temper, his fifth national goal, desired the dogmatic, mystical, speculative, uncritical, inward-looking India to become a strong society like Europe through scientific reasoning. This meant the development of science and technology, fostering rational and empirical ways of thinking, and rejecting faith. He held the Orientalist view strongly that science and technology were primitive in ancient India, which was one of the reasons for its colonisation.

Secularism, the notion of state neutrality, and the separation of the public social sphere from the private religious sphere were straight imports of European ideas battling their religious issues. The debate on the relation between the state and religion ranged widely: the incoherent notions of “Hindu raj,” suppressing religion altogether; equal respect for all religions; or indifference to religion. Nehruvian secularism was an ambiguous and complex concoction of the last option. He was intensely hostile to the ideological and institutional dimensions of religion but deeply sympathetic to the spiritual dimension, though he never clearly defined the term ‘spiritual’.

Nehru’s state claimed all the rights of a ‘Hindu state’ in its relations with the Hindus. He took liberties with the Hindus, like objecting to the President inaugurating the rejuvenated Somnath temple; objecting to Bande Mataram because of religious connotations; allowing the Hindu Code Bill, which included state temple management; and insisting on debating religious issues as the Hindu personal law and banning cow slaughter in secular terms. But he dared not touch the Muslim personal law, despite his anxiety to have a uniform civil code. In claiming the rights of a Hindu state, Nehru’s government’s refusal to accept the obligations of defending and promoting their religion incurred charges of inconsistency and disingenuity in applying secularism.

Non-alignment was a key point of his almost single-handedly formulated foreign policy. In some areas, such as India’s relations with the scattered mass of overseas Indians and the countries of their settlement, Nehru never managed to develop a clear policy. In his foreign affairs policy, he did accept the civilizational importance of India. Gandhi, non-violence, and Advaita appealed as solutions to a world tired of violence and conflicts. He believed in “enlightened capitalism” co-existing with liberalised communism as the way forward to harmonise relations between the polarised worlds of capitalism and communism.

This non-alignment principle aimed for a world of new and proud states to attain the four crucial goals of national integration, economic development, self-determination, and freedom from external interference. Nehru’s foreign policy was, however, not adequately neutral. It freely expressed its views, took sides, and found itself allied with different groups on different occasions. Nehru’s international role had mixed consequences. It strengthened India’s self-confidence and self-esteem, brought India into various international commissions and organisations, and built useful contacts. But it also developed an exaggerated sense of its importance and mistook visibility for power.

Convinced of international support, India tended to take a somewhat patronising attitude towards its neighbours. In his concern for the world stage, Nehru did not give India’s neighbours the degree of attention and priority they deserved. He made the double mistake of neither coming to an understanding with them nor guarding against their aggressive designs.

Justification of National Philosophy

Nehru argued for this national philosophy as the only basis for constructing the new polity. Nehru invoked Indian civilization and culture but gave vague references to the ‘central lessons’ of Indian history and Indian character. For Hindus, secularism as a notion is completely alien, as traditions, a total way of life, regulate both personal and political life. Even other national goals such as parliamentary democracy, socialism, industrialization, and non-alignment had no or only a limited basis in Indian civilization. Except on issues such as a strong Constitution, many in Congress did not agree with Nehru’s goals.

Modernising as the best solution for our problems was driven by the conviction of Western superiority in the march of progress. According to the Orientalist narrative, ancient and mediaeval India were all about ignorance, superstition, scarcity, economic and social injustices, and tyrannical customs. His arguments were popular but open to objections when arguing that modern civilizations were morally superior. Civilizations, as self-contained wholes, are not amenable to comparative evaluation. Modernity’s constituents, such as rationalism, individualism, liberal democracy, the state, technology, a scientific worldview, utilitarianism, and economism, were not all logically related. They had come together in Europe because of historical factors and had different combinations in different societies, and some of them could even go. India could have developed its own distinct model of modernization.

India’s secularism has been one of the most glaring examples of transposing an idea from the West to an inappropriate soil. The same was true of the other ‘national goals’. India could have opted for other forms of democracy than the Westminster model. It could have opted for a more decentralised and participatory planning style, different from both capitalistic and communistic forms. In short, one could accept Nehru’s national ideology and yet arrive at either a different vision of the country or a different way of realising it. Nehru failed to make a convincing case for his national ideology, partly because he was not a rigorous thinker and, more importantly, because there can never be a rational demonstration of political ideologies.

Nehru’s national ideology, acquiring political dominance, primarily reflected the political consciousness of the Westernised elite, to whom it assigned a crucial role. Different parts attracted different classes. National unity, a strong state, and non-alignment appealed to most Indians; industrialization and parliamentary democracy to the elite; socialism (guaranteeing high prices for agricultural products and a supply of agricultural materials at stable prices) to the peasantry; and secularism to the minorities. The least benefiting, who remained its critics were the urban and rural poor, the unemployed, and the proponents of a Hindu country.

Broad enough to offer something to everybody; concrete enough to provide a sense of direction; ambiguous enough not to alarm or alienate a large section; and visionary enough to inspire and motivate millions, his national philosophy enjoyed widespread popular support. Nehru threw all his enormous personal and political authority into it, regarding it as an unquestioned premise of the Indian state. Winning three elections based on his national philosophy reinforced its moral and political legitimacy. Gradually, this became a national mantra. Nehru is indeed the founder of the modern Indian state. No criticism can take his love for India away from him. But, given the background of his education and training, his vision of India looked mainly West. Despite disagreements, critics have yet to develop an equally broad vision.

Major Political Debates of Post-Independent India

Indian political experience throws up questions on how Western ideas filter through their indigenous analogues; the different ways of political discourse in English and in the regional languages; the distinction between private and public in a society that refuses to separate the two; and the concept of the political in a society that has long seen it as an inseparable dimension of the social. There are also implications when a society, never structured around a state and not considering political authority autonomous, decides to reorganise along state lines. Some major political debates in post-independent India have been on reservations, the nature of the Indian state, federalism, and secularism.

Reservations

India, the only country with an extensive constitutional programme of positive discrimination (seats reserved in assemblies, public jobs, and professional academic institutes) in favour of deprived groups, wanted to integrate deprived groups into mainstream political life and address centuries of neglect and oppression. As a permanent government policy now, positive discrimination raises important questions about the nature of justice, the trade-off between justice and such other equally desirable values as efficiency, social harmony, and collective welfare, and the propriety of making social groups bearers of rights and obligations.

It also raises questions about the redistributive role of the state, the nature and extent of the present generation’s responsibility for the misdeeds of its predecessors, and the meaning of social oppression. Justice is generally an individualist concept; it is due to an individual based on his qualifications and efforts. Justice needs redefinition, obviously in non-individualist terms, if social groups are subjects of rights and obligations. We should also demonstrate continuity between the past and present oppressors and oppressed. We must also analyse the nature of current deprivation and determine that it is a product of past oppression, conferring moral claims on the oppressed. These questions are important in India, where positive discrimination has no roots in the indigenous cultural tradition and is much resented. There are few studies either challenging or articulating the theory of justice on the basis of reservations. Some work, however, relies on American literature without appreciating that the historical relations between upper caste Hindus and the untouchables and tribals bear little resemblance to those between American whites and blacks.

Nature of the Indian State

The modern state in India introduced by the British underwent important changes in response to its colonial requirements and the Indian social structure. Unlike Europe, it permitted a plurality of legal systems to share sovereignty with self-governing communities. After independence, India remained a complex political formation without correction. It has uniform criminal but not civil laws. Muslims, tribals, Christians, and Parsis have their own total or partial personal laws, which the state enforces but does not interfere with. The Indian state thus recognises both individuals and communities as bearers of rights. Criminal law recognises only individuals, whereas civil law recognises most minority communities as distinct legal subjects; thus, it is a liberal democracy of a very peculiar kind.

Federalism

India’s federalism has a distinct character. It is possible that in a multi-communal society, the modern state, committed to uniform laws, individualism, abstract equality, and undivided legal sovereignty, might alienate minorities to provoke conflicts and secessionism. By rejecting the idea that there is only one way to form the state and thinking about alternatives, we may be able to better deal with the ethnic conflicts and secessionist movements that the dominant model of the state is now confronting. Maybe the state should not separate from society in the first instance. Rather than insisting on a uniform legal system, we might allow its constituent communities to retain their different laws and practises within the ambit of widely accepted principles of justice. Hardly any Indian political theorist has challenged the basic categories of Western political thought and theorised the specificity of the Indian state.

Secularism

Our founding fathers, concluding for a secular India, remained muddled on the meaning of secularism. Selective interference in Hindu matters, non-interference in Muslim personal laws, and giving public money to Muslim schools were peculiar secularistic policies. The Congress wanted to deny the dominant and distinct Hindu ethos from the beginning. Secularism changed from an equal indifference to an equal respect for all religions during Indira Gandhi’s tenure, becoming equally vague and incoherent. No government has fully explained why India should be a secular state in its current sense; the arguments are unimaginative and derived from Western history.

Most leaders have argued falsely for secularism as necessary for religious tolerance and harmony. A secular state is not necessarily tolerant (like the Soviet Union during Communist rule or France after the French Revolution), and a religious state is not necessarily discriminatory against minority religions (like traditional Hindu kingdoms in India, Muslim kingdoms in the Middle East, and most of the time even in India). Secularism, with no Indian vernacular equivalents, does not even make sense in the Indian context, where the majority ‘religion’ is unorganised and doctrinally eclectic. Since Indian civilization has a deep religious core, many secular Indians have felt that they cannot be truly secular unless they reject their past completely and choose the future. Hardly anyone has cared to show that the dilemma is unnecessary and arises from a falsely defined model of secularism.

Poorly theorised political questions in India

Surprisingly, post-independent India failed to define traditional ideas on subjects like social justice, the specificity of the Indian state, secularism, legitimacy, political obligation, citizenship in a multi-cultural state, the nature of the law, the ideal polity, and the best way to theorise the Indian political reality. Gandhism, conservatism, liberalism, and socialism were the four major pre-independence political traditions.

Post-independence, Gandhism made a retreat; conservatism did not achieve prominence despite original work by Bipin Chandra Pal, Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda, and Tilak. Liberalism had selective interpretations in writers like Ram Mohan Roy, Dadabhai Naoroji, and Gokhale. Communist Party theoreticians never offered an original interpretation of Marx in light of Indian history and experiences.

Work continues on Kautilya’s Arthashastra, but apart from that, there are no major reconstructions of ancient or mediaeval Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist texts on politics that discuss how Indian thought differs. Most Indian political theorists broadly engage in two categories: bulk repetitive work on the structure of nationalist thought; and derivative work on contemporary Western writers or movements (positivism, behaviourism, and so on). Critical relativism, an evolving category, holds the promise of affirming the autonomy and integrity of Indian forms of thought and life. Contemporary political theorists have taken little interest in producing creative theories for three reasons:

1. The way Indian universities teach political theory: (best students staying away from social sciences; mediocre teachers; poor English command making creative thinking in a non-vernacular language difficult; an inadequate curriculum at the UG or PG level rarely focusing on Indian thought; and many good ones falling to the temptation of toeing the Western line and becoming Indian critics)
2. The domination of the ‘unofficially official’ Nehruvian political philosophy meant that if someone is against secularism, it must be for ‘Hindu raj’; if against socialism, it must be for unbridled capitalism; if against scientific temper, then for religious obscurantism; and so on.
3. The political theorist’s ambiguous attitude towards the complex Indian political reality: The success of the linguistic states’ reorganisation or local self-government (Panchayati Raj), considered subversive and reactionary, surprised political theorists and leaders. India is moving from a loosely structured rural society to a path of industrialization. Political theory, taking the state as its starting point and understanding society in relation to it, replaced traditional social theory, which concentrated on the social structure with the government as one of its many institutions. Traditional Indian political theory grounds itself in a moral consensus about the nature of the social structure and its members’ duties rather than rights. A radical transformation to cope with the vastly different social reality and theorization of New India could not thus happen in the traditional manner.

Indian political theorists have poor knowledge of Sanskrit but a good grounding in Western political theories. The Indian political theorist needed to go West and come back. Some never left home; some went and stayed in the West both physically and theoretically; a few did return but continued to think West. Western writers discuss change against the background of stability and order, whereas the Indian political theorist, as a human being living in a society in flux, carries all its ambiguities in his thought.

The modernist does not believe that his tradition is beyond salvation, and the traditionalist finds it difficult to sustain his faith in light of India’s steady decline for several centuries. The modernist wants a casteless society but has lived his or her life in the secure confines of caste and uses caste resources in times of need. Conversely, the traditionalist likes and uses many of the resources of the modern world. Not surprisingly, many political theorists find it difficult to develop realistic perspectives on their country’s predicament.

Colonial rupture in Indian thought; the cognitive alienation of intellectuals from their society; the difficulty of theorising in English a reality constituted in vernaculars; and practically oriented Indian traditions; have been other factors responsible for poor political theorising too. Political theory requires many things: bold and challenging minds; a love of theoretical understanding; intellectual self-confidence; a climate of tolerance; a relatively firm political reality; the theorist’s ability to get a critical grip on it; and the theorist’s stable moral and emotional relationship to the environment. The absence of all or most of these conditions explains why political theory has not developed in many Third World countries but only in some Western countries during certain historical periods.

Cultural Superimpositions: The Example of Indian Law

The Indian judicial system today is arbitrary and opaque, with the judges holding an inordinate amount of power. Balagangadhara (Cultures Differ Differently) shows how superimposing Western law on indigenous cultures with their own ways of law and justice leads to the severe distortions that we face today.

Some scholars credit the great British law as a ‘gift’ to Indians wallowing in decadence and lawlessness. However, British society and law were corrupt to the core in the 18th and 19th centuries, when they were ruling a great part of the globe. Their neighbours, allies, and cultural relatives saw them as corrupt, contemptible, hypocritical, and immoral. The British in India did whatever pleased them, but the judges and bureaucrats clothed these acts in a legal language and many non-existent laws. Ironically, there was hardly equal justice in British India. Local European communities did not allow Indian judges and law officers to try them, and they got away with the most brutal crimes through lenient European judges.

Balagangadhara then explains how Indians, after independence, as cultural beings, believing the British law and institutions to be the ideal, mixed them with their own ideas relating to justice, truth, persons, and so on. He gives the example of the notions of ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’. These notions have roots in Christian theology. In Indian culture, there is a clear semantic distinction between lies and deception. The socialisation process in Indian culture even involves learning to lie. Deception, however, is clearly separate from lying. Thus, lying under oath loses its reasoning in law (ratio legis). Yet ‘perjury’ remains a punishable offence in the Indian legal system.

In Western culture, it is the fair, objective, and impartial law that judges, not the person of the judge. In contrast, the Indian judge has a self-view as the ‘embodiment’ of justice, dispensing ‘justice’, often completely independent of, or even oblivious to, legal provisions and statutes. Even for many people going to court, the judge represents justice embodied and personified. This attitude helps us understand the massive corruption of the judiciary in India.

The law in Western culture tries to reduce arbitrariness and capriciousness in settling disputes. But the imposition of Western institutions in India encourages precisely the arbitrariness that the law is supposed to prevent. The figure of the ‘judge’ now uses the legal institution, which gives him the power to do what he does, to make arbitrary pronouncements because of the culturally specific notion of the judge. In indigenous cultural institutions, reasonableness prevails because the judge faces the community directly and owes an explanation to the community in which he lives. In modern courts, such constraints on reasonableness are absent.

Politics and law in Western culture are meant to further the general interests of society but not those of any single community, group, or individual, especially corporate interests. Strikingly, Balagangadhara says, Indian culture does not have a vocabulary to understand any kind of discourse on interests, whether institutional, private, public, general, or social. If such is the case, legislation is meant to explicitly favour specific groups, which would give them votes. The Parliament’s reasons for implementing the laws are not in the general interests of society but are as narrow as the reasoning of an individual who contemplates his own benefit. The British made laws that favoured British interests but cloaked them in the language of ‘general interest’ and ‘interest of the Empire’. ‘Protecting the British interests’ later took the form of the ‘protection of minority interests’ in the Indian Constitution.

When the state promulgates laws that only favour and further narrow interests, citizens end up using such laws mostly retributively. Seeking personal vengeance (dowry, atrocity, and so on) becomes the major, if not sole, goal of the citizenry when they go to the courts. Thus, when implemented in India, the institutions of Western law encourage just the opposite of what such laws are meant to do: a vengeful, spiteful, and ‘selfish’ citizenry. Instead of promoting a cohesive society, such laws encourage divisiveness and conflict in society.

In the next section, we shall briefly look at the amazing political text, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, along with the political thoughts of prominent modern Indian thinkers. Sri Aurobindo, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and SN Balagangadhara are some who have been extremely uncomfortable with Western political models. As all of them stress, the superimposition of Western thoughts on indigenous systems has generally led to a chaotic situation, and we need a lot of will and effort to correct this.

Continued in Part 3  

 

SELECTED REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINGS

1. https://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/6142/1/BLR%20conf%2C%20Bhikhu%20Parekh%20article.pdf The Poverty of Indian Political Theory by Bhikhu Parekh
2. https://www.epw.in/journal/1991/1-2/special-articles/nehru-and-national-philosophy-india.html Nehru and The Political Philosophy of India
3. Law, religion and culture by S.N. Balagangadhara in Cultures Differ Differently: Selected Essays of S.N. Balagangadhara. Edited by Jakob De Roover and Sarika Rao