Archive for Review of Books
Power and Contestation
Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam (2007) Power and Contestation: India since 1989, London: Zed Books.
Power and Contestation, written by two well-known political theorists-cum-activists in India, presents the most up-to-date and comprehensive chronicle of India’s political history since 1989. Combining post-nationalist, feminist and new left perspectives, the authors candidly illustrate how the power of capital and nation in post-1989 India has constantly been contested in public and political discourse.
Narrating the political transformations and changing state–society relations in India in the last two decades, the authors argue that India post-1989 has witnessed a significant departure from its foundational principles such as Nehruvian socialism, secular nationalism and the principles of non-alignment. Although global factors like the ‘end of the Cold War’ and neoliberal reforms have significantly influenced developments in India, the authors argue that it was primarily the ‘internal conflicts and logics’ that propelled these transformations in India (p. 2). With the decline of the Congress party and the regionalization of Indian politics, the issue of caste has re-emerged in the political sphere. The ‘mandalization of politics’ (p.16) and the increasing political mobilisation of the lower caste has not only challenged the hegemony of the upper castes but also significantly influenced the imperatives of electoral politics in India. Secularism, a key political principle which traditionally provided considerable psychological and political security to religious minorities, has been under vigorous attack with the rapid rise of Hindutva politics manifested in the demolition of Babri Mosque in 1992 and the ‘state-sponsored massacre of Muslims in Gujarat’ in 2002 (p. 51).
Globalisation and neoliberal economic reforms, as updated incarnations of the old idea of development and modernisation, have dispossessed people, disrupted communities and destroyed their cultures and livelihoods without offering them any viable or dignified alternatives. As a response, various non-party political formations and grass-roots movements or what the authors call ‘new left’ movements have emerged to contest the exclusive and exploitative logic of global capital and its local ally the nation/state. The conflicts in the north-east and Kashmir region have also challenged the ‘idea of India’. Although global capital has helped the Indian nation to secure a place in the world, the authors conclude that ‘in India, as elsewhere in the world, the contestations to the power of Capital and Nation are so many, so varied, and so relentless’ (p. 181).
Since the book is written from the ‘new left’ perspective, it captures only one aspect of India’s transformation since 1989. Despite this, the strength of the book is its numerous recent examples and candid analytic style, which make it an admiral contribution to the Zed Books series on ‘Global History of the Present’ and a rich resource for anyone working on India.
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@ Sarbeswar Sahoo, Political Studies Review, Vol. 7, No. 1, January 2009
Making Aid Work?
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee (2007) Making Aid Work. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 170pp, £9.95, 978 0 262 02615 4
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee’s Making Aid Work provides an excellent forum to discuss the problems engulfing international development aid. It argues that the ineffectiveness of foreign development aid is primarily due to “institutional laziness” (p.7). Banerjee argues that international donor agencies, NGOs and multilateral institutions do not pay much attention to the impact and “cost-effectiveness” (p.16) of a program and are often “unclear about what they should be pushing for” (p.21). Building on the drugs evaluation model, Banerjee argues that “randomized trials… are the simplest and best way of assessing the impact of a program” (p.10). Although “randomized trials are not perfect” (p.11), argues Banerjee, they provide “hard evidence” (p.113) and “spur[s] innovation by making it easy to see what works” (p.122).
The problems of foreign aid, as recognized by Banerjee, have been universally agreed upon by several economists and policy makers. However, his arguments on lazy thinking and randomized experiments have received skeptical responses. Many have rejected his accusations that the international donors are not pursuing impact evaluation and cost-benefit analysis. Banerjee’s argument is very limited and ambiguous. His academic training in economics influences much of his thinking on macro level quantitative experimentation, ignoring the dynamics of power relations at the grassroots level. He also fails to explain the idea of randomized experiment in a clear manner. His emphasis on laziness (not filling up a form) that is grounded on a particular example from Pakistan does not really apply to regular NGO functioning. As Mick Moore has rightly argued, development agencies are “staffed and run by expressive intellectuals” who are “skilled in performing the key functions of the contemporary aid business: producing position papers and strategy documents and managing inter-agency coordination meetings” (p.43).
By placing the emphasis on institutions, Banerjee has failed to address the “politics” of development and international aid, which often has created a “culture of dependency” at the grassroots level. Banerjee is also unable to understand that the problem of foreign aid is not primarily due to “institutional laziness” but the result of a rationalized and active institutional effort to depoliticize development and to create what James Ferguson (1990) has called an “anti-politics machine”. Nevertheless, Banerjee’s arguments have generated numerous pertinent issues and discussions related to the aid regime. His concluding essay has brilliantly addressed the machine like character of development policy making. The structure of the book is innovative, although the forum discussions are regrettably brief.
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This review has been published by Sarbeswar Sahoo in Political Studies Review, Vol. 7, No. 1, January 2009
Empowering Visions
What roles do the modern media play in the sphere of culture, politics and governance? Christiane Brosius’ Empowering Visions: the Politics of Representation in Hindu Nationalism (London: Anthem Press, 2005) is an attempt to address ‘why, how and when Hindutva ideologues and pragmatics exploited the video media in order to claim power over public opinion-making and opinion-shaping’ (p. 3). Grounded on the theories of popular culture, anthropology of audiovisuals and thick ethnographic analysis, Brosius brilliantly depicts the roles played by Jain Studios’ videography in representing Hindutva’s cultural nationalism as an alternative conception of modernity, nationhood and national identity against the existing morally corrupt culture of secularism. These alternative empowering visions are realized through active entwining of ‘imagination to politics and ideology, space to time, image to narrative, and agent to action’ (p. 4).
The author argues that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies, since the late 1980s, have heavily exploited the modern media, particularly audiovisual technologies to create visions of idealized Hindu way of life. Employing Schiffauer’s idea of ‘field of discourse’– ‘as a sphere in which cultural agents interact with each other with regards to interpretations, norms, values, questions of style and memories’ (p. 3) – Brosius argues that Jain Studio’s production and distribution of propaganda videos has helped the BJP in spreading cultural and ideological images to influence the public consciousness with a pan-Indian cultural nationalism grounded on the glories of the golden age. By depicting the people passionately participating in the saffron revolution, these images and narratives invite further participation of the audience. Key images and narratives from the domain of local popular culture were appropriated and commodified in a package to heighten ‘political marketing’ and mobilization (p. 93); to influence the popular psyche of the people; and to present itself as a credible force to reshape the modern nation-state, reclaim the stolen stories and rewrite the national history.
Selective use of particularistic media imaginations and narratives has colonized the public conscience and provocative representations in the public sphere have generated antithetical feelings of ‘self’ and ‘the other’. Visual media has convincingly justified Hindutva’s agenda of Hindu cultural identity as ‘credible’ and depicted Muslims as anti-nationals and a threat to the nation. It argues that the national history has been misrepresented by the anti-nationals and a self-empowerment could be achieved only by re-mapping Indianness through a return to the ‘indigenous and “true” history of the Hindu people’ (p. 12). A sense of ‘pop patriotism’ is being crafted by softly manipulating the Hindu sentiment through devout citizenship, righteousness, self-sacrifice, sacred violence, heroism, national devotion, and the notion of martyrdom which has ‘left deep scars on the skin of civil society, and changed the mental maps of large parts of Indian citizenry for good’ (p. 180). The video media, which is a part of Hindutva’s ‘cheerful revolution’ aimed at forming a powerful paternalistic state with a seemingly disciplined and infantile citizenry ever ready to sacrifice for the cause of universal brotherhood and moral community (p. 93). Since 1998, the Internet has decentralized the power of representation and disseminated Hindutva ideology on a wider scale. The presentation of imaginary and narratives in cultural production has, thus, played a significant role in redefining identity, history, nationhood, governance and politics.
The only shortcoming of the book would be its overemphasis on the cultural ‘production’ of image and narratives and not the ‘reception’ of it by the people. Despite this, the book is an admiral contribution to the Anthem South Asian Studies series. Its uniqueness lies in its provocative and telling arguments embedded in ethnographic description and provides a valuable contribution to the field of popular culture and anthropology of iconography.
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@ Reviewed by Sarbeswar Sahoo, Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 16, No. 3, September 2008, pp. 357-358.
Assassination of the Third World
THE DARKER NATIONS — A Biography of the Short-lived Third World: Vijay Prashad; LeftWord Books, 12, Rajendra Prasad Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 650.
Vijay Prashad opens his book The Darker Nations: A Biography of the Short-lived Third World with the affirmation that the Third World was not a place but a project, vibrant and significant. Leaders of newly-independent countries crafted an ideology and a set of institutions to bear the aspirations of their populations for another, better world.
This is a powerful account of the way in which the Third World moved to the centre stage of international politics by the beginning of the 1960s, challenged the forces of domination and by the end of the century was pushed out or to use Prashad’s term “assassinated” by neo-liberal globalisation and its powerful instruments. The Third World project and its ideologies and institutions had enabled the powerless to hold a dialogue with the powerful and try to hold them accountable. The dialogue was terminated unilaterally by the powerful.
Beginnings
Prashad traces the new political platform from the 1928 meeting in Brussels of the League Against Imperialism where the project of the Third World began to take shape. It was there that the call for the rights of the darker nations was first made. Unity of the people of the Third World came from a political position against colonialism and imperialism rather than from any intrinsic cultural or racial commonalities. But in the early stages itself, they demonstrated their ability to discuss international problems and offer considered notes on them. The platform incorporated not only a quest for enhanced status, but also for economic justice in the face of a shared condition of poverty, underdevelopment and dependence. Prashad points out how in spite of disagreements in tactics and strategy, the Third World had a core political programme around the values of disarmament, national sovereignty, economic integrity and cultural diversity.
Underlining the significance of the Bandung Spirit, the author shows how the formation of the Afro-Asian movement was an integral part of the story because it was through the relations among the main non-aligned countries that the Third World was constituted. What was meant by the Bandung Spirit was simply that the coloured people had emerged to claim their space in world affairs not just as an adjunct of the First and Second Worlds but as players in their own right.
The Bandung Spirit was a rejection of the two major policies of imperialism — economic subordination and cultural suppression. Despite its immense diversity, the Third World came to exhibit a remarkable unity of purpose in its struggle to establish a new international order, to shake off the rules and institutions devised by the old established forces and create new rules and institutions that would express the aspirations of the newly emerging forces.
Marginalisation
Prashad describes the marginalisation and virtual demolition of all international institutions, oriented to or initiated by the Third World, not only by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) but by the U.N. itself. Two examples will suffice. The United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC) was virtually suppressed. The principles and procedures produced by the UNCTC would have posed a frontal challenge to the kind of anti-Third World operations maintained by many multinational corporations. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) which was created on the initiative of the Third World and which could at one time challenge the power of the First World global corporations was deprived of its original purpose and direction. With the creation of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), it was deemed superfluous and unnecessary and the UNCTAD in its leaner and meaner form became just a promoter of transnational corporations. In July 2000 the U.N. Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, launched an ambitious partnership with 50 of the world’s biggest and most controversial corporations thus blessing their exploitative penetration of markets in the Third World, having already buried the UNCTC’s Code of Conduct which would have effectively held them to account.
The economic development in the Third World was a complex process that involved more than just economic factors. The distorted development agenda followed by most of the Third World and the imperialist pressure faced by these states resulted in misery for millions. By the 1980s the Non-aligned Movement (NAM) was infected with the belief that economic development is a technical problem that should not be bothered with the question of the Third World. Prashad points out how the path to the New World Order has been paved with the debris of failed policies and short-sighted development programmes promoted by the World Bank, IMF and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT).
Nationalism
Prashad traces the evolution of nationalism in the Third World. Rejecting the idea of nationalism that emerged from Europe’s history, the Third World states had absorbed the idea of nationalism and fashioned it to suit the rhythm and demands of their various histories. But as IMF-led globalisation undermined the idea of nationalism, conservative social classes gathered together to offer an alternative vision of what is meant to be patriotic; indeed what it meant to be nationalistic. The secular nationalism of the Third World agenda withered before the rise of a cultural nationalism deeply invested in racial, religious and such atavistic differences.
Collapse
The assassination of the Third World led to the virtual destruction of the ability of the state to act on behalf of its population, an end to making the case for a new international economic order and a disavowal of the goals of nationalism. Prashad shows how catastrophic the demise of the Third World has been.
In spite of the virtual collapse of the Third World, the term is used as a self-designation of peoples who have been excluded from power and authority to shape their own life and destiny. As such it retains, as in Prashad’s description, a supra-geographic denotation, describing a social condition marked by social, political, religious and cultural oppressions that render people powerless and expendable. In this sense the Third World also encompasses those people in the First World who form a dominated and marginalised minority.
Based on prodigious research, this ambitious and wide-ranging book presents a fascinating account of the Third World, its rise and fall. Prashad’s study represents issue-based international history at its best. He weaves together the tale of Third World politics with stories about personalities, problems of revolution and social change, ideological tensions and people’s aspirations.
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@ Ninan Koshi, The Hindu, 15 July 2008
NGOs, Activists & Foreign Funds
THE WELL-researched book is the result of two events; the national systemic bending-over-backwards to ‘render justice’ to the Muslim victims of the Gujarat riots and the denial of a visa to the Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, by the US state department. The first was a process and the second an incident, and both the process and the incident were authored by the same group of prominent ‘peace’ and human rights NGOs and individual activists whose signature tune is ‘anti-Hindu’.
This book is not about the hundreds of NGOs working with great dedication among the socially and economically backward sections of our society motivated only by the inspiring vision of transforming social attitudes and the quality of life of the people amongst whom they live and work. But it is about those NGOs and activists whose ’peace’ and human rights activism cloak deep political ambitions and objectives not restricted to participating or influencing electoral politics but aimed at shaping the character and direction of the Indian polity in a manner which derives from their warped notion of the Indian nation. Their political ambitions and activism are essentially undemocratic and anti-India nation.
Notwithstanding the fact that important democratic institutions including the NHRC, Parliament and the Judiciary have repeatedly shown a marked tilt towards minorityism and have rushed to do the bidding of the ‘peace’ and human rights activists profiled in this book, these persons have nevertheless shamed our judiciary, our men in uniform and our polity with their criticism of these pillars of our democracy on foreign soil and even before foreign governments. Parliament should consider suitable restrictions being placed on retired judges, retired armed force personnel including and above the rank of Brigadier, retired bureaucrats including and above the rank of Assistant Secretary and retired policemen including and above the rank of SP from undertaking projects for foreign or foreign-funded think-tanks and from deposing before foreign governments and their departments on any issue without prior permission from the Government of India.
The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court has been sitting for over five decades on the title suit of the Ramjanmabhumi while the Supreme Court promptly issues interim orders on cases filed by the Muslim community seeking to deny Hindu access to the site; those guilty of the genocide of Sikhs during the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, those guilty of the genocide of Kashmiri Hindus and those that render Kashmiri Hindus alive in the notorious Radhabai Chawl incident during the Mumbai riots of 1992, have all escaped the notice and attention of these very national institutions and the same ’peace’ and human rights activists who continue to campaign for the Muslim victims of the Gujarat riots of 2002.
There is a growing perception among the Hindu intelligentsia that ‘peace’ and human rights NGOs and activists are holding all democratic institutions in the country hostage to international opinion about democracy and good governance to serve the cause of ’secularism’ in a peculiarly on-sided fashion, which may be interpreted to be anti-Hindu.
The well researched book exposes that India’s so-called secular polity is teetering perilously on the brink of minorityism aided and abetted in no mean measure by this well-networked group of Hindu-baiters who have succeeded in cleverly cloaking their congenital anti-Hindu bias in the garb of constitutional ’protection of minority rights’ discourse. These NGOs and other politically motivated activists have embarked on the twin mission to weaken India’s political will to deal ruthlessly with Islamic, Christian and Naxal terrorism and to de-Hinduise the nation. A group of nationalist Indians – some of them residing abroad – came together to profile these ’internationally acclaimed’ ’peace’ and human right NGOs and activists with a view to exposing their anti-India and anti-Hindu activism.
The most striking feature of this book is that, in spite of the fact that the authors never discussed which NGOs to put under the scanner and which activists to expose when they began to write the book, they all zeroed in on the same groups! The book offers a veritable mine of information on these NGOs and activists – who are their supporters, partners and collaborators, what they say, what they write and their position on important national issues. What the compilers have presented, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. They have provided endnotes and appendices, which will enable the interested reader to dig deeper.
The book argues that contrary to doctored public opinion, these internationally- acclaimed NGO’s and activists are a threat to communal harmony and India’s democratic ethos. Communal harmony and democracy are naturally and best protected only when 85 per cent of this nation’s population repose faith in the country’s democratic institutions.
The book exhorts the reader to raise his voice too as a political Hindu to render service to this great nation’s well being.
In this second and revised edition of the book a new chapter, exposing AID, has been added, as well as a number of new appendices that include Narendra Modi’s speech at a book release function. The book exposes Nirmala Deshpande, Arundathi Roy and Admiral Ramdas and their kind much better and the kind of industry of which they are a part. Arundhati Roy, soon after Pokharan 2, said that she was a mobile independent republic. Roy also said she is not a flag-waving patriot. But since Roy has a passport, it must have something to do with the Indian nation. So, the Indian nation is relevant at least to the extent that it allows these people to travel abroad to badmouth this country.
The clearly reveals the position of these so called NGO activists in regard to national territory, to opinions they express in regard to Jammu and Kashmir, the kind of nonsense they speak on American and Pakistani soil about our jawans, is a cause of grave concern, because they are members of either the National Integration Council or of CABE or of the National Advisor Council of the UPA government. And they are not above glorifying terrorism.
With facts the book argues that the so-called NGOs have no faith in our elected parliament, they have no faith in our judiciary, they have no faith in the NHRC. They go to the US state department to depose before it, begging the US State Department to come to India and protect India’s democracy. It is high time legislation is put in place banning such people from deposing before alien governments against the Indian Army and India’s democratic institutions. Very little is generally known about the kind of position these people take on American soil against the Indian nation, or their position on Jammu and Kashmir, or what they are to say about our army. We have our jawans dying day in and day out protecting our territory, protecting our right to live. Why is it that the media does not do an expose of these people, on what they have stated about Jammu and Kashmir, what they have stated about Naxal terrorism, what they have stated about India’s defence requirement, what they have stated about the Indian Army? What is the opinion that they have about India’s democratic institutions? Every major issue concerning national security, every issue concerning national interest, they reduce to the politics of minoritysm.
Arundhati Roy, for example, speaks for effect. She puts words cleverly together. And, mindless that we are, we are so fascinated by the English she speaks that we fail to subject the contents to critical scrutiny. In fact, she has run down everything that is sacred or reverent to large sections of India’s people. The book has documented, word for word, what they have said, and the kind of patrons they have found abroad. Why do the European Parliament and the US State Department support these activists? The compilation prompts us to look at these questions and gives us the need to have the courage to look at the answers. Releasing the book on September 9, 2006, KPS Gill noted his surprise ‘that anti-nationals in our country are respected, and nationalists are derided. These days our country is fighting terrorism. But our so-called intellectuals have made efforts unparalleled in the history of the world to decry and deny our success in fighting terrorism’.
Vigil has placed before the readers, world for word a true picture of the so-called NGOs. One must have the courage to look at the book dispassionately. The book exposes the illustrious people who find international patronage. This brilliantly analysed and thought-provoking book is a must for all those who love India.
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Reviewed by Pradeep Kumar, Meri News: Power to People, 29 March 2008
Runaway State-Building
Conor O’Dwyer (2006) Runaway State-Building: Patronage Politics and Democratic Development, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 278pp, ₤ 33.50, 0 8018 8365 2
Runaway State-Building offers a comparative analysis of democratic performance in three newly democratized countries of Eastern Europe –Poland, Slovakia and Czech Republic. Employing both quantitative and qualitative analysis and drawing upon the literature on party politics and theories of organization, especially of Weberian bureaucracy, O’Dwyer introduces the idea of ‘runaway state-building’ which refers to ‘rapid expansion in the size of the state administration without a commensurate increase in its professionalism and effectiveness’ (p.28). What causes runaway state-building; and why have certain states performed better in comparison to others although democratic transition occurred during the same time? The answer, according to him, lies in the intertwining of party-building and state-building where patronage politics plays a significant role.
O’Dwyer partly disagrees with Martin Shefter that democratic transition into unconsolidated state bureaucracies results in rampant patronage politics. According to him, ‘[s]tate administrations in new democracies may be predisposed to patronage politics, but they are not predestined to it’ (p. 19). He identifies three basic factors affecting the state-building process – ‘demobilized societies, delegitimized states and varying logics of party competition’; his emphasis, however, lies on ‘the quality of party competition’ (p.170).
In demobilized societies, elections provide an opportunity for the citizens to punish the non-performing governing parties. In robust party competition system, the ‘fear of losing’ power is high which ultimately constrains patronage politics and holds parties accountable. Runaway state-building occurs when the opposition parties fail to constrain the government. Due to the lack of any credible challenge, the fragmented parties and ‘weak governance system’ in Poland and the ‘dominant party system’ in Slovakia are heavily involved in patrimonialism to legitimize their authority, and are more prone to ‘fictitious universalism’ – ‘preserving nominally free benefits for which under-the-table payments are necessary’ (p. 143). However, the presence of robust competition, a credible opposition and a ‘responsible party system’ has shielded the Czech politics from runaway state-building. Extending the argument to other new democracies in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia, he makes a ‘huge comparison’ (p. 171) which conforms and also concludes that ‘patronage-driven expansion’ not only weakens the state effectiveness but also undermines ‘the legitimacy of the new democratic order itself’ (p. 192).
Two of the shortcomings are the author’s non-recognition of the role of civil society which was active during the transition; and his over emphasis on the role of political parties which suffer from centralization of authority and lack of grassroots social base. Despite this, the uniqueness of the book lies in its theoretical sophistication substantiated by numerous empirical comparisons across the globe which makes it a valuable contribution to the literature on comparative politics and political sociology.
Reviewed by Sarbeswar Sahoo in Political Studies Review, January 2008, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 140-41
More than Five-Point Someone
Nussbaum’s idea that deculturisation dehumanises the IIT grad is wrong
SALIL TRIPATHI
Journalist
AHMEDABAD burned. The Sangh Parivar thugs attacked innocent Muslims and the police maintained they had no orders to protect them. Narendra Modi’s administration cted in ways which prompted a Supreme Court judge to compare him to Nero. There were many activists and journalists witnessing that orgy of violence and recording it. Among those who wrote movingly, angrily, and eloquently about the ghastly incidents at Gulbarg Society was Raj Kamal Jha, Executive Editor of The Indian Express. Not only did he narrate what he saw and heard, he pieced together missing strands meticulously, like an engineer building a superstructure. But he would, wouldn’t he? For Jha was an engineer by training: he studied at the Indian Institute of Technology, graduating in 1987.
And yet the American academic Martha Nussbaum condemned the “IIT mentality” in these pages for the decline of humanism in India. In her book, The Clash Within, Nussbaum weaves an intricate argument, in which she links technological, political, religious and economic forces which have permitted the rise of Hindutva, in particular its hold over educated middle- class Indians. Her exact words in the interview: “This IIT mentality — become technically competent engineers, forget about human values — is very dangerous, particularly for a country like India.”To be sure, there is some logic to this argument. Indian school children have to decide early on the career they wish to pursue. By the time they are 15, they must give up many subjects. Smarter kids are pressured to take part in gruelling exams for a spot in the IITs. Once there, the coursework is primarily technical; when an IIT grad starts working, the exposure he (even today a majority of IIT grads are men) has had to history is dimly recollected, if at all. As economist Ajay Shah, himself an IIT alumnus puts it: “Most people in India are getting too little history, politics or philosophy. Anyone with a semblance of IQ gets pushed into the science or engineering track and then you’re down to Amar Chitra Katha renditions of history.” But the conclusion Nussbaum draws — that this deculturisation somehow dehumanises the IIT grad — could not be more wrong. And it certainly does not make them supporters of genocide. IIT grads are often brilliant, with a quirky sense of humour, knowledgeable in some arcane aspect and respectful of the scientific method.
In every society there is the divide between what CP Snow called the Two Cultures. Indeed, Rajappa Iyer, another IIT grad says: “Some of what Nussbaum says rings true. Technocrats, economic libertarians are not empathetic and therefore propose solutions that don’t take human nature and consequence into account.” And yet the same IITs that Nussbaum criticises produced not only Jha but also Shripad Dharmadhikari, an associate of Medha Patkar; social entrepreneur Vijay Mahajan, who runs innovative lending programmes for livelihood assistance; Arvind Kejriwal, the Magsaysay-winning anticorruption crusader and left -leaning journalist Praful Bidwai. One of the loudest critics of communalism was Narayana Murthy of Infosys, who devoted his Darbari Seth lecture to expressing his anguish over the violence.
In other words, a large number of IIT grads think beyond their calculators. There is a strong meritocratic streak at the IITs— the students who get through the entrance exams do so because they’re smart; they are not part of India’s old-money elite, nor are they from the power elite. Shah adds:“My sense is that IIT-ians take pride in having fought their way up the food chain in a meritocratic way.” Contrary to what its critics say, IIT is a melting pot in India where the students often don’t know each other’s caste labels. As one grad told me: “You just don’t notice those things. What matters is being able to solve problems in fluid mechanics.”
As a result, IIT campuses are remarkably devoid of student politics, mainstream political parties, or coalitions representing the ugly reality of India interfering with the academic community. The IITs help the Indian undergraduate break with some of the more horrible aspects and difficulties of India. That’s a matter to rejoice. There is another famous campus where politics is ever-present, and Indian reality intrudes all the time, consuming the lives of its students. India is omnipresent there in its myriad realities, and the campus the stepping stone to political life. It is called the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. And it gave India Sitaram Yechury and Prakash Karat. Go figure.
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@ From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 4, Issue 49, Dated Dec 22 , 2007
‘The IIT mindset feeds into the fascist nature of the Right’
Noted American political philosopher Martha Nussbaum speaks to SHOMA CHAUDHURY about her new book and the roots of Hindutva
What’s the central premise of your book?
The book’s main thesis is that we should understand the real clash of civilisations as a clash that is internal to all modern democracies. A clash between people who are willing to respect and live with those who are different, and people who anxiously seek domination. Then, agreeing with Gandhi, I say that at a deeper level the real conflict of civilisations is the clash within the individual self as the desire to dominate other people contends against compassion and concern.
What about India makes it susceptible to the hate ideology of the Hindu Right?
When I started the book in 2002, I thought it would be a grim story about the collapse of democracy in India. But it became a story of resilience. There is something about the political culture of India, including the strength of its press that enables it to survive. But there are real weak points. The key one is the system of education. There is not enough attention on critical thinking and independence of mind in India. Not enough on stimulating the imagination. We all have the capacity to understand what happens when we inflict pain on others. But this capacity needs to be trained and developed through the arts — dance, music, theatre. Tagore understood that, Nehru less so. The people behind Hindutva, on the other hand, have been very clever about culture formation. They have formed people into a killing force by using fun and games, the lure of solidarity in the shakhas, the clever use of symbols and rhetoric, and by a genuinely altruistic and self-sacrificing ideology which is very appealing. After Gandhi, this has been completely missing in the Left. They have left symbolic cultural formation completely to the Right. Partly because they felt economic issues were more important and partly because of the contempt for religion that most in the Left had.
It’s five years since Gujarat 2002, are you still feeling optimistic about India?
It’s lucky for the progressive forces that the BJP has no competent leadership at present. They haven’t found a younger generation that can appeal to voters. I do not think Arun Jaitley can, and after the death of Pramod Mahajan —
What about Modi?
I cannot imagine he will ever make it on a national level. Even the Right wants a leader who can woo the US, and he can’t even visit there because of his record of criminality. For the US to revoke an official visa is pretty amazing. To return to your earlier question, what I’m really discouraged by is the growing dominance of a technocratic middle class that is anti-political and for whom the suffering of excluded people doesn’t mean a lot. This IIT mentality — become technically competent
engineers, forget about human values — is very dangerous, particularly for a country like India. I’m afraid the need to make deals with the US is adding to this skew. I find that Sonia Gandhi says the right things. I think of her as somebody with a keen moral imagination, who really understands what women went through, say, in Gujarat, but of course she has to play her cards really carefully.
You argue in the book that one of the reasons a fascist Hindu Right mindset has taken hold is that the creative, sensuous, almost feminine ideals of Vishnu and Krishna have been replaced by a militant, virile masculinity. Can we go back to the old view?
This is what attracted so many of my generation to the study of India in the first place — the idea of a counterculture to American masculinity. In the Vietnam War era, they wanted to turn to a culture of love and peace. That’s why so many of them wanted to write about sexuality and the sex lives of gods. I think Gandhi knew how to give those ideas a modern form, of course it was a very ascetic form; it didn’t have the playfulness and the sensuousness. Tagore captured that in his school and in dance. He could certainly make that ideal very charismatic and viable. But today, I think the last refuge of this is in Bollywood — not the feminine forms of the Geeta Govinda exactly, but there is a kind of sensuousness to Bollywood stars when they dance or sing. Part of the appeal is that it isn’t a purely military use of the body. It’s also interesting that Bollywood is the one place where Hindus and Muslims intermingle and intermarry and there is not any great sense of the gulf between them. Maybe that’s where the softer ideal still exists.
You mentioned how the Left has distanced itself from any culture formation that involves the positive use of myth, emotional or religious symbols — ceding that ground to the Right. How does one combat this?
I think it is very hard now because when people here say, we should be studying the Ramayana, others turn to them and say, oh you are becoming communal. I have friends who’ve had that experience. And because the humanities are so devalued in India, intellectuals who might have been able to lead the way to a more progressive appropriation of tradition have moved to America and are happily teaching the Ramayana there! Dipesh Chakraborty can be a leading Left wing intellectual in America, but here he wouldn’t be respected. In the US, it was great that the civil rights movement was able to latch on to African-American music — it was the only creative musical force in America at that time. Blues, jazz — everyone could relate to that. Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” — about a black man who’s lynched —pulled at everyone’s gut, all over America. I think in India, the challenge is to find such a meeting ground in popular culture. Tagore did that by writing songs that everyone could sing. But that is wearing thin — even Bengalis find Tagore a bit tedious now. I think the women’s movement can play a big role. And Bollywood, of course, has great possibilities, if it would use that power. The other area is vernacular literature. The English language market is too commercialised and too aimed at Americans, so it only touches these issues superficially. It’s really in the vernacular literature that people are confronting issues of communities and diversity. Keeping the vernacular literary and theatrical cultures going is important.
Can a utilitarian, globalised, technocratic society — with no interest in identity politics — lead to an uncommunal world?
No, I don’t think so. The minute you start thinking of people as simply inputs into an economic calculus, you’ve moved away from human respect and the ability to imagine others empathetically. This is reminiscent of the Nazi technocracy which was very efficient and found it very easy to talk about humans as things — as cargo — and this was a big part of what made the atrocities possible. I have a lot of colleagues who are economic libertarians, and they think a technocracy will be benign because people will follow their economic self-interest and hire anyone because it’s in their interest to do so. This is exceedingly naïve. People can hate others and refuse to employ them simply because of the stigma. My father was born in the deep South. He lived most of his life in the North but never lost that hatred of African-Americans and he really believed — this is a man who was a high-powered lawyer in a major urban firm — he really believed that a black person would contaminate anything he touched. When I married a Jew it was not quite as bad as if I’d married a black but he didn’t come to my wedding and didn’t speak to me for years. In some ways this has a lot to do with images of masculinity. I think, for my father, who grew up very poor, the son of factory workers, and who brought himself up, there was always deep insecurity, and the strong need to be above someone else. This operates in India in a different way. The insecurity here is historical. Hindu men have been dominated for centuries, first by Muslims (though that was not always an ugly domination) and then by the Raj. So the idea — enunciated strongly by Golwalkar — is that we have been dominated because we were weak and now we must strike back by showing that we are more aggressive even than the ones that dominated us. This is the sentiment that played itself out so horrifically in Gujarat, complicated by the fact that Muslims were economically stronger there than the elsewhere in the country.
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@ From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 4, Issue 47, Dated Dec 08 , 2007
Midnight’s Citizens
India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy
by Ramachandra Guha
688pp, Macmillan, £25
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It’s in the nature of nations to be addicted to their own histories. Older, pre- national communities, one imagines, occupied themselves with mythology. The secular nation, agog, rehearses its history, the very reasons and outcomes of its existence, to itself. What’s common to both activities is the endless familiarity of the subject-matter to the audience. It’s safe to assume that very few people in a group of devotees listening to, say, the Indian epic Ramayana being read out would not have heard it before. It’s equally prudent to assume that almost all the Indian readers of Ramachandra Guha’s capacious history of democratic India would be familiar with a great deal of the story. What is it, then, that gives myths and national histories their appeal?
In mythic retelling, it is repetition itself, accompanied by improvisatory flourishes, that transfixes the audience by returning it to known terrain. Historical narrative, too, depends on familiarity enlivened by interpretative freshness and the surprise of new archival research; but there’s also, at times, something else. Guha reminds us, more than once, that it’s the historian’s job to tell us what happened, and not spend too much time speculating on what might have. Yet it is precisely the possibility of what might have happened but didn’t that gives an immediate but inexhaustible magic to some of the 20th century’s most triumphal historical narratives. Both the American film-maker embarking on the new second world war movie and the Englishwoman wearing a poppy are thinking, yet again, of events that took place many years ago, but also, in some hidden but urgent way, of the world that might have come into existence had the other side won.
Similarly, a “What if?” animates Guha’s reconstruction of the past 60 years of Indian history. Since 1947, the possibility of disaster has taken the form of certain questions and crises: “What if India were to disintegrate; or to become a totalitarian society; or a military dictatorship; or a Hindu state?” All these are scenarios that appeared plausible, at one time or another, to both the Indian and foreign observer. Guha tells us what happened elegantly, sometimes doggedly: but it’s by constantly implying what might have, while disavowing it with the professional historian’s gesture, that he brings his copious material to life. Guha’s book reminds us of what some other recent studies of India have been getting at, but without this civilised single-mindedness: that it’s not just the story of independence that’s worthy of being counted as one of the great triumphal stories of 20th-century world history; that the survival and perhaps the flourishing of free India counts legitimately as another. Once this fact is acknowledged, its political and cultural consequences, I’m sure Guha will agree, need to be viewed with suspicion.
Guha begins at the beginning, sketching the indeterminate setting for the project, with Nehru’s poetic ruminations on India’s “tryst with destiny” on the stroke of midnight. (Has any modern politician’s speech, except Churchill’s wartime orations, had as much currency?) Quickly, the demons of which the Indian psyche has still not exorcised itself appear: the irony of a secular Muslim gentleman, the pork-eating spoilsport Jinnah, being responsible for creating Pakistan. Then Partition, the original sin of our creation-myth, for which blame is apportioned to a variety of people – Jinnah, the British, Nehru, Gandhi – but more commonly to the ordinary Muslim citizen. There’s the nightmare of Kashmir, a continual challenge to the moral high ground that India, with its public posture of post-colonial certitude and humanitarian dignity, has tried to occupy since independence. Guha also brings back to us, as he must, the border dispute with China, which led to a small war that India lost, with deep repercussions for the self-esteem of a generation of Indians.
And yet, despite Kashmir, and various forms of governmental wrongdoing and blunders, the Indian middle class and intelligentsia, unlike their counterparts in Japan, England or Pakistan, have never really known what it means to inhabit a morally uneasy position. There’s a mysterious surplus to being Indian, a feelgood element comparable only to the sense of self that Americans possessed until Vietnam. Visitors wonder at how happy the poor are in India, putting it down to ancient reserves of spirituality; equally wondrous is how impervious the Indian secular middle class is, despite all sorts of setbacks, to the sense of guilt, of being morally compromised. This has less to do with spirituality than with the unassailable constitutional promise of what it means to be an Indian. The absence of moral ambiguity means that there sometimes seems to be very little critical thinking in India, only one kind of debate, a nationalism in various forms, repeated infinitely. With a few exceptions, Indians don’t know how to fashion eloquence out of a sense of being wrong or having wronged, at least not without the unmistakable timbre of self-congratulation.
There are reasons for that tenacious feelgood experience. Guha delineates them effectively: the establishment of the machinery and the miracle of the elections (there’s an excellently orchestrated chapter on how the first one happened); the creation of provinces along linguistic lines (which should have led to conflict) by forgotten historical figures; the survival of democracy and free speech in spite of poverty, corruption, sectarian strife, Indira Gandhi and, more recently, the waning of power at the centre and the rise of an opportunistic federalism. Every dubious development has a positive outcome; it’s a story of incorrigible resilience and charm. The first two-thirds of the book, where Guha is describing the consolidation of the shaky state, are, notwithstanding the deluge of facts, surprisingly absorbing; by quoting frequently and shrewdly, Guha allows us to eavesdrop on the multiplicity and richness of the conversation – between politicians, writers, civil servants, well-wishers, detractors – within which change took place.
One thing the book lacks, despite its comprehensiveness, is a sense of interiority. It’s hardly alone among recent Indian histories in this regard. Guha’s understanding of the secular basis for Indian democracy is a constitutional one; that is, the “secular” is a product, in India, of ideals, laws and institutions articulated and validated by the constitution. But the “secular” in India is not only a political construct; it is a cultural space. The domain of culture was inhabited and produced by writers and artists and their audience from the early 19th century onwards; it’s a domain that comprises the interior life of Indian secularism. In this sense, independence and the Nehruvian era that followed are not really the beginning of a history, but the last phase in the story of Indian humanism. From the 1980s onwards, the secular middle class and its culture is completely redefined; the parameters for a new free-market understanding of “Indianness” are put in place. As it happens, the single chapter Guha devotes to culture, or “entertainment”, as he calls it, is the weakest one in the book, with Wikipedia-like accounts of cultural achievements; it attempts to place culture in the constitutional idea of secularism – as providing instances of pluralism and fellow-feeling – but doesn’t locate the constitutional in the interior life that culture represents.
The epilogue, “Why India Survives” (echoing RK Narayan’s unflappable assurance to Naipaul in the 60s: “India will go on”), is a strangely moving coda, and clarifies the country’s peculiar appeal. At one point, Guha mentions he’s “speaking as a historian rather than as citizen”; but allowing the historian to be in commerce with citizenship is what provides the book with impetus, and gives it its most palpable strength. Guha, as a citizen, has been “exasperated” by India, but, in the light of historical evidence, has been won over by it. This mixture of distance and surrender is fairly emblematic of why many middle-class Indians continue to invest themselves, emotionally, in the country; it’s quite distinct from patriotism. To suggest the ambiguity of his own relationship with the country of his birth, and also his utter investment in it, Guha has often in the past used some oddball Englishman of distinction who’s lived in India or thought about it as a metaphor: Verrier Elwin, EP Thompson. In his epilogue, Guha invokes the biologist JBS Haldane, who, moved by the “wonderful experiment” India had embarked on, decided to become an “Indian citizen”. Guha’s book reminds us that the citizenly pride that permeates it is not incompatible with judgment, hindsight, intelligence and distance; that citizenship is not a natural thing, but that it is, in some cases, inevitable.
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@ Amit Chaudhuri The Guardian; Saturday April 21, 2007 http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2061321,00.html
INDIA AFTER GANDHI
INDIA AFTER GANDHI The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. By Ramachandra Guha. Illustrated. 893 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $34.95.
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Late in “A Suitable Boy,” Vikram Seth’s fictional panorama of early 1950s India, the difficult but decent politician Mahesh Kapoor receives advice from an underling: “We should think above divisions, splits, cliques! … This is India … the country where faction was invented before the zero. If even the heart is divided into four parts can you expect us Indians to divide ourselves into less than 400?”
This statement, equal parts plea and diagnosis, only begins to describe the challenge confronting modern-day India. As Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Indian leader of the Muslim League, said ruefully in a 1940 speech, seven years before he founded Pakistan: “The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literature. They neither intermarry, nor interdine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilizations.” To say that India is riven by myriad factions and castes and, more fundamentally, divided between two religions is to describe a particularly vicious curse.
One of the achievements of Ramachandra Guha’s deeply felt new history is that the author remains acutely aware of both the truths and falsehoods contained in Jinnah’s remark. A visitor to the world’s second most populous country can, without much effort, witness nasty and sectarian politicking in New Delhi or Mumbai. And the consequences — vicious religious rioting, scars on both India’s landscape and her people — are all too visible. Yet Hindus and Muslims do dine in one another’s homes, and they play on the same cricket teams. Guha’s central aim is to register these discordant notes, and for the most part he succeeds admirably.
“India After Gandhi” begins with the British, who after years of resisting Indian self-government on the grounds that the country was both too mature (“much too old to learn that business,” Kipling remarked) and too young (“they are still infants,” one colonialist said), abruptly quit the subcontinent in 1947. Gandhi was murdered less than six months later by a Hindu extremist, and millions were uprooted during the partition of India and Pakistan, many of them killed in religious violence. The new Indian state faced the dual challenges of integrating its remaining Muslim population and appeasing its Hindu majority.
Much of what was accomplished in the next 15 years was due to the popularity and will of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Despite enormous obstacles within his own Congress Party, Nehru set out to ensure more rights for women and the downtrodden. Guha expertly traces Nehru’s leadership in the writing of India’s Constitution, where legislators overcame potentially fatal disagreements over issues like what language the document would appear in. The finished product, which Guha refers to as a liberal, humanist credo, not only protected numerous basic rights but also provided reservations for “untouchables.”
Some scholars, Sunil Khilnani among them, have argued that by identifying caste as an organizing principle in Indian society, Nehru and his allies inadvertently laid the groundwork for a more schismatic political culture, greater discrimination against Muslims and eventually, the success of the Hindu right. Guha, who is perceptive about both the hardships faced by Muslims over the past 60 years and the caste-based conflicts that endure to this day, disappointingly declines to address these charges. Rather, he implies that Nehru did the best he could under the circumstances to prevent further splits. His success with the Constitution, as well as his support for bills that raised the status of Hindu women and altered unfair property laws, are just some of the ways in which he had a positive impact on India’s young democracy. Guha paints a convincing portrait of Nehru’s good political sense (if never really giving us much insight into his personality).
Still, his long tenure had its share of shortcomings. The prime minister’s self-described “nonaligned” stance, brought about by an understandable disgust with imperialism, certainly helped India avoid some of the nastier elements of the cold war. But double standards abounded: It was one thing to criticize the Anglo-French-Israeli designs on the Suez Canal, and quite another to keep a public silence when Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary the following month. Some years later, India found itself unprepared for a border war with China that had long been percolating. Guha argues persuasively that Nehru, the old anticolonialist, ignored China’s sensitivity about the border, which the Chinese saw as an illegitimate boundary drawn by the British.
Nehru’s most unfortunate legacy, however, was the family he bequeathed to his country. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, became prime minister in 1966, less than two years after his death. The resolve she displayed in supporting East Pakistan’s fight for independence led both to an enormous increase in her popularity and to the creation of Bangladesh. Then, as now, the American government invested a good deal of support in a Pakistani dictator (Yahya Khan, at the time), with diminishing returns and, in this case, tragic consequences. An angry Nixon, who needed Khan’s help in “opening” China, would refer to Gandhi as “the bitch” and Indians as “no goddamn good.”
It was particularly tragic, then, that she used her new strength to try to legitimate authoritarianism. The woman who had once told Americans that if democracy was good for them, it would also be good for the people of East Pakistan, was now saying that democracy guaranteed only mediocrity. Guha writes that Gandhi’s frustration and contempt for democratic procedure had been “manifested early, for instance, in the packing of the civil service, the judiciary and the Congress Party with individuals committed to the prime minister.” In 1975 she declared a state of emergency, restricting civil liberties and abolishing judicial independence. Illegal arrests and forced sterilizations in the name of population control were overseen by her son Sanjay.
Gandhi lifted the state of emergency in 1977, and when she was beaten at the polls a few months later, many of India’s democratic institutions were restored. Still, she won re-election in 1980 before being assassinated four years later. One journalist wrote that with her death India faced a “period of prolonged uncertainty,” a conclusion, Guha says, that “provided further proof of the late prime minister’s success in undermining institutions that stood between her and the nation.” A second son, Rajiv, took over after her death, and although he proved much less authoritarian than his mother, his weaknesses helped pave the way for the rise of the Hindu right in the 1990s. Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party is now back in power, however, and it is led by, of all people, Rajiv’s Italian-born widow, Sonia.
In present-day India, in a city like Mumbai, it is hard not to be struck by the optimism of a burgeoning middle class, people who speak glowingly of relocated Western technology companies and who serve as a counterpoint to American politicians complaining about outsourced jobs. Still, the city is now governed by Shiv Sena, a reactionary Hindu party that scorns not only Muslims but also Hindus from other parts of the country. Moreover, the unwillingness of some Muslims in India to disclose their religion even to friends and colleagues is a clear sign that something is seriously amiss. Guha terms modern-day India a “populist” democracy, which is probably as good a term as any. The question he leaves unanswered is how the country will be able to overcome crushing poverty and overpopulation without exacerbating religious tensions and imperiling its already strained environment. Guha would probably say that India’s hope lies in the strength of its democratic institutions, which have shown impressive and surprising resilience. We can only hope he is right.
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@ Isaac Chotiner has written for The Times, The New Republic and other publications. The New York Times, 26 August 2007; http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/books/review/Chotiner-t.html
