Are we becoming anti-State?
India, in recent years, has been called undemocratic, un-secular, intolerant and lately an authoritarian State with an emerging agenda of Hindutva (Hindu Nationalism). These anti-India outbursts have stemmed from many quarters, snowballed further by the virility of the social media.
Common to most outbursts is the misuse of Indian Secularism and the Freedom of Speech — tools to berate the Indian State. Aswini K. Mohapatra, professor at JNU, sees this misuse of Secularism, often dubbed as Pseudo-Secularism in the emerging counter arguments, as “a ploy to deny an alternative perspective to emerge…drawn on our historical experiences, philosophical traditions, and spirituality”. (Mohapatra, April 2017)
One such quarter is the Public-school educated intelligentsia. As students in 1960s and 1970s, they have spent much of their sexagenarian lives in a Congress-led India set firmly in Nehruvian values and unfortunately are trained solely in Western ideologies. Ousting of the Congress in 2014 has seen this section grow very insecure in a changing Indian environment where incumbents are seen tapping indigenous literature and pre-colonial Indian society to supplement the so-far Western-led dominant forms of knowledge.
As a reaction, this intelligentsia, though claiming to be the voice of the minority, is instead unleashing a well organized and a sinister anti-India propaganda based on distorted facts. Recall the Award Wapasi (award-returning scholars) brigade here, which is also alleged to suffer from selective activism in their choice of issues.
Add to the above — Congress party leaders and allying parties, seething in frustration in their now-seemingly-permanent status of being the Opposition; Dissenting students perched defunct on campus grounds, well beyond the expiry of their courses, caught in a fashionable stalemate of going anti-establishment, probably lacking a constructive purpose to life; Clamoring leftists reverberating empty handedly, as decades go by confirming the failure of communism and purist socialism the world over !
West Bengal is a good case in point here of a thirty-year bastion lost due to sole pursuance of trade-unionism in name of Communism with little inclination, if any, towards social emancipation.
Last is the burgeoning middle-class that cannot stop whining in its comparison of India to the West, forgetting the role of centuries of colonial plunder in the current day North-South divide, and often misconstruing Westernization as Modernization. This category, however, being drivers of the economic wheels of the nation, may have a case for pardon. Their criticism of India, set in naivety, is after all purely on economic and material grounds and hence largely innocuous.
All in all, that is quite a list above! And, hence we see the likes of Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid, Sitaram Yechury, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Omar Abdullah, the Award Wapsi brigade and of course Arundhati Roy — all very passionate, time and again, in their anti-India stance.
Roy, of course, could easily be slotted in many of the above categories and many times over — as a Leftist, as an inspiration to the dissenting students and as an intellectual ensconced in India of the Congress era. Sadly, summing all these also point towards a by-default and a perpetual ‘anti-Establishment’ state of the mind.
Roy’s recent attack on the Indian State, alleging a repressive role by the Indian Army in Kashmir, terms India as a ‘Colonial State’ (Roy, May 2017). Needless to say, such strong terminology to describe India reeks of partisan politics and probably a foreign led anti-India agenda.
This denigration of India, a malaise suffered by many categories as described above, has become a common-day phenomenon! But more unfortunately, many like Roy, while berating India, unknowingly unleash far deeper ramifications than they realize — they end up undermining the ideology of a ‘State’.
This is what this writing is about — Our drop-of-the-hat distaste for the Indian State that undermines the ‘idea of a State’, and why that should not be so!
The ‘State’, first conceived in the tumultuous Europe of the 1400s, saw its formal culmination in the 1648 signing of the Peace of Westphalia treaty. The pre-colonial India, a model of pre-Westphalia polities itself, had to suffer the stimuli of colonialism to become one such state following its independence in 1947.
In doing so, British India responsibly imported the Westphalia idea of a ‘State’ into its multi-nation society, and hence was born ‘India the State’ — with marked borders and with a centralized authority supported by Constitutional bodies.
Looking back on its short span of seventy years, India emerges victorious, not just as a promulgator of the idea of a ‘State’, but also as a ‘multi-nation State’, not withstanding the inherent challenges that emerge from its heterogeneity.
Of course, the Indian society, tenacious and strewn together by tolerance inherent to its culture, has played a considerable role in the sustenance of this ‘multi-nation State’. Being a well-functioning democracy, devoid of a State religion, has further cemented the multi-nationality.
In the process, India may have bettered the Westphalia model of State, spread on an area only slightly smaller than that of Europe, all the while giving a sweetened twist to the idea of Secularism. That all of this would emerge, centuries later, from a soon-to-be colony, mustn’t have been in the wildest imagination of the Westphalia signatories!
Aha, the contingent nature of History!
India’s cultural multiplicity has proven advantageous in practical terms as well and has helped it remain largely peaceful, devoid of civil strife, coup, army rebellion and ethnic cleansing. Barring the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, rarely has India seen social unrest in one part of its territory travel to another, largely due to its heterogeneous nature.
Do you see the Gorkhaland agitation invoke little outside its bastion of West Bengal? Guess not! Remember, even the much-talked Gujarat riots of 2002, agreeably a key blot on Indian Secularism, didn’t traverse outside of Gujarat. Undoubting, India in its multi-nation splendor, walks and trots as a unitary entity, at times totters, but never falls apart, in-spite of and due to its multi-nationality.
The placid developments in India, in areas of infrastructure and human index, should not be confused as failures of the Indian State. Instead a weak economic base and an inherited colonial legacy play a role here. Also not to forget that the Industrial Revolution, historical catalyst to West’s current day prosperity, was made to bypass India entirely. Poor leadership, corruption and mis-governance for much of the past seventy years, fallibilities of the erring human nature, maybe added too.
Instead we need to appreciate how India has upheld the sanctity of the ‘idea of a State’ rather well inspite of a mis-rule under Congress and inspite of some huge policy making lacunas. Let us see some examples below.
First India’s judiciary has upheld the Constitution even in most trying cases, undermining even the central government in power when required to do so. Recall the verdicts of 2016 — when the Supreme Court quashed the governor’s order, restoring the sacked Chief Minister in Arunachal Pradesh.
Or when the court-ordered floor test helped the Congress regain power in Uttarakhand. A heightened sense of constitutional upholding was seen in the fair trial of Azmal Kasab stretching across four years. The Supreme Court’s landmark decision, mandating enquiry in encounters protected under AFSPA, equated the State to the common man when it announced,
“Does it matter whether the aggressor was a common person or the State? The law is the same for both and is equally applicable to both…This is the requirement of a democracy and the requirement of preservation of the rule of law and the preservation of individual liberties…”(Supreme Court, 2016).
If at all, the Indian Judiciary can be alleged of slow turn-around time and of judicial overreach but never of turning its back to the Constitution of India.
Second, India’s institutions, if laggard and corrupt, yet have remained strong. The resilience of the Indian economy, backed by a strong institutional framework, was effectively showcased to the world during the 2007–2008 financial crisis, one of the rare times when the economic world order stopped short in its Neo-liberal race and admitted to the need for government backing at the heart of economic life — a moment of the ‘return of the State’.
But not for India, this return, where the ‘State’ has always been present, only that it has balanced itself more and more with the ‘Market’ since the liberalized 1990s.
Third, if a track record of unnatural deaths to judge the performance of any modern State is anything to go by, then the period between 1000 and 1525 CE has a chilling story to tell for India. Estimates suggest that sixty to eighty million died at the hands of Muslim invaders and rulers in this period (Lal, 1973). Killings by the Thugees (bandits) alone account for up to two million lives lost in this period (McWhirter, 1979).
Indeed the genocide suffered by the Hindus and Sikhs of India at the hands of Arab, Turkish, Mughal and Afghan occupying forces for a period of eight hundred years is as yet formally unrecognized by the World. This was when India was only a disjointed array of kingdoms, lacking centralized authority and law-enforcing agencies like a unified army.
India, as a British colony, suffered a fate no less macabre, another regrettable phase in history made possible because Hindustan (India) the non-State, had fallen prey to colonialism. The decade following the 1857 mutiny saw deaths of almost ten millions people, “the untold holocaust” as writer and historian Amaresh Misra calls it (Mishra, 2007). Similar grotesque figures account for lives lost in famines and massacres during the last ninety years of the colonial India (1857–1948 CE). The 1896–1897 famine alone affected ninety-six million people, killing five million (Gurcharan Das, 2007). The list goes on endlessly.
To compare, death toll figures due to communal riots in Independent India up to the year 2003 are marginal at 17,131 (Rajeshwari, 2004). This is indicative of the fair and quelling hand of the State machinery. This is an impressively low figure in a State which hosts 1.324 billion people, considering that a similar number of Indians lose their lives in road accidents in approximately fifty days. 410 people died on Indian roads every day in 2016 (Dashi, 2017). Factly.in, a data journalism website that prides on gathering meaningful data using RTI as one of its tools, counts 431 as lives lost to communal strife in the four years from 2011 to 2014 (Dubbudu, 2015).
Even the most hardened and vehement hater of the ‘State’ cannot ignore the above described gross anomaly in numbers of unnatural deaths as found in India when it has been — a disunited set of kingdoms, a Colony and finally a State.
Somewhere we need to admit that a better governance system than by a democratic and a secular State is yet to be found.
A quick comparison of India with other modern nation-states is merited for here. Let us start with the United States of America, close to being an ideal State for many. The US, as a State, has dubious origins. An artificial construct of a State, unlike India, it decimated its indigenous populace of Red Indians, creating a clean slate to start afresh the process of nation-cum-state building, its American Dream paving way for the most adventurous and the most-able from all parts of the world to come and assist in its nation-building. Therein lies the success of the US!
Or with the West Asian States where many would easily figure high on the list of ‘how a State ought not to be’! Where sectarian wars have spewed venom into lives of the civilians, decimating lakhs even in the twenty first century. In spite of a religious homogeneity, the turmoil in these States go to show that being a State in the Westphalia sense is not enough. The degree of Statehood counts and many in West Asia have not gone far in their State-building! In South Asia too, we have some good examples — Pakistan, a deep State but a weak nation, while Afghanistan, a strong nation embodying Afghanhood but with an immensely weak nation to the despair of many.
Of course a comparison with China, the growing super power is a must. With its dangerous obsession of state-building, when Mao’s Great Leap Forward project aimed at a quick industrialization of China killed forty five million in four years. The Tiananmen Square massacre sounded the final death knell to hopes of China ever being a democratic State, at least for decades to come! And, if you agree that a non-democratic State is only half a State, then China has a long way to go notwithstanding its almost-there super-power status.
Finally, with the prosperous European States, wherein we forget that they have had four hundred years of State building behind them, and are still reaping from the benefits of being colonial powers in the past.
And, hence of all the citizens in the world, we Indians should be the last to deride the sanctity of a State and all that it entails — its surveillance capabilities, its territory securitization, its centralized authority, its judiciary, police and army.
In the least, we should accept the State’s efforts of creating a sense of civic-nationalism using centripetal forces. Why such resistance to singing the national anthem in the movie-hall? State Nationalism gives one a bigger horizon to paint one’s zeal on, away from regressive forms of Ethnic or Religious Nationalisms.
While it is fine to disapprove of certain actions by the State’s machinery (the Judiciary, the Army), hallmark of a true democratic State, it is simply not acceptable to deride the idea of a State. It is fine not to be too fond of a political figure (understandably so), of a certain law passed, of a certain act of the army but in the process, do not mow down India or the idea of a State. We have every right to dislike our government, but we cannot live in India and righteously exercise the right to hate our country. At-least not until we can envisage a better form of governance than the State!
Think of how the situation would be if the State did not exist in the first place. Something akin to how life is portrayed in the popular television series ‘Game of Thrones’? Famous seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Rousseau, visualized a Europe-amidst-revolutions, on similar lines when they formulated the importance of State in their respective versions of the ‘Social Contract Theory’. Until the human being proves himself of moral autonomy as Mahatma Gandhi wistfully desired so, man is to be assumed as being Hobbesian (and self-serving) in nature. Hence, impelling the need for a State!
This is what Roy forgets each time she bludgeons the Indian State, highlighting her ignorance when she rambles out Kashmir, Goa, Telangana, Manipur, Nagaland, Punjab and Hyderabad as suppressed nations, akin to an child excitedly counting alphabets off her fingers.
Does she not realize that as independent States, these regions would be economically unviable with even less to offer to its people than the Indian State currently does? Models of classical geopolitics tell us that a large nation-state augurs well for its people, as do historical records indicating that India has seen long stretches of peace when under a large empire compared to when it has been a disarray of kingdoms.
But I hand it to Roy in her fight on behalf of the tribals. But does it need to turn into an anti-India drive? Till as late as 2015, eighteen thousand Indian villages stood bereft of electrical connection, sixty-five years post independence. Does it indicate that India as a State is bad or does it point to an inefficient and scam-ridden regime led by the Congress party for much of this period? As the last men in the last row that the tribals probably are and have been for centuries, their only chance for emancipation is under governance by a constitutionally democratic State?
Maybe, I am too quick pining the blame on Roy and the dissenting JNU students. Even erudite scholars from Social Sciences are fallible to criticize the concept of a State. This happens so, because no alternate forms of governance have been found, at least not since the Westphalia model of State was exported to most parts of the world. Understandably, comparisons are difficult to come by, and slinging blanket potshots at the ‘State’ have become the norm.
Indian Constitution set in Sarvodaya Bhava (Progress of all), strives to secure happiness and prosperity for not just the majority, but for all. But even for a ‘Socialist, Secular, Democratic, Republic’, that India is, this is difficult to come by. Pleasing all is never a possibility, in practice!
The ‘rule of the majority’ is where a democratic State struggles the most and also when it comes under flak the most as ‘Tyranny of the majority’. Admittedly, this is the biggest challenge for any well-meaning democratic State, and is to be met with using minority-protecting laws. India has fared well very well here too, to the extent of being labeled as a minority appeaser. As I say, good laws are a good start
Clearing of land and rehabilitation of affected tribal and rural citizens for the purpose of large dam construction is a typical example of one such challenging situation when the Indian State has come under flak, time and again. I question here, Why do we conveniently amiss the reasons on why the State is impelled to construct a dam in the first place — an irresponsible civil society, uncaring of its population explosion and its increased demand for water and irrigation needs?
A State is never bad!
However, the politicians and bureaucrats, who are civilians before they are anything else, and hence products of the Civil Society, could make a State look bad. As Hobbes and Locke believed, a State is a product, a progeny, and a grand project of the humans. By this logic, pitfalls in a State’s fabric and functioning, when so, stem from defects of the human nature and from civilians lacking in Civic and State Nationalism because they are too embroiled in parochial identities at levels of religion and class.
The greed of the ‘Market’, a by-product of rise of Capitalism five hundred years ago, has further added to the woes of the State, ripping the latter from the pedestal that Hegel rightfully bestowed it with. Hegel’s conception of the State, “State is the march of God on Earth”, saw it as the perfect and highest form of social system. However, in practice, that cannot be so simply because the agent of the State, the human being is self -serving.
Actions by a State, if truly democratic, are, to a large extent, a reflection of the trends in the Civil Society. Only that the State often ends up becoming the gun-touting shoulder for the erring Civil Society, for the greedy Market, and bears all the brunt when it enforces policies that have stemmed from trends in the Civil Society and the Market in the first place.
And, so, flaying arms for breaking the State does not tantamount to good sense because no better system of governance have been found since the Westphalia Treaty! All the more better if the State is democratic and secular.
To all the anti-State dissidents, I say, ‘step aside and get a life’. Or maybe not! On second thoughts, it probably is fine if they wish to continue with their seditious calls. That gets the like of me to delve deeper into how India has fared, in face of all odds. India, in spite of its size and heterogeneity, is indeed one of the best working model of a State in the world today.
India, a ‘State of different nations’, has done a great good job of it and is by no means a ‘Colonial State’ as Roy terms it!
And, yes, Arundhati Roy is indeed an anti-national because she is anti-State to start with! In being so, she undermines nationhood little realizing that no nation can survive without it being a State.
If and when Kashmiri Muslims are able to carve themselves a separate territory, they would need to be a strong State to protect their nationhood of Kashmiriyat (Kashmiri Nationhood)! With all due respect to Roy, what then happens to her anti-State rhetoric?
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Bibliography
Books
· Mishra, Amaresh (2007): War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, New Delhi: Rupa & Company
· Lal, Kishori Saran (1973); Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India, Delhi, Research [Publications in Social Sciences], Page 216
Online Citations
· The Hindu, ‘Are we a nation of pseudo-secularists?’, 28 April 2017, www.thehindu.com, <http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/are-we-a-nation-of-pseudo-secularists/article18260757.ece> paragraph 14 [accessed 25 August 2017]
· Youtube.com, ‘Indian Author and Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy says India has illegally occupied Kashmir’, 16 May 2017, www.youtube.com <https://youtu.be/r25eCJXrKm0> [accessed 25 August 2017]
· Prakash, Satya, ‘Law is same for common man, forces: SC on Armed Forces Act’, 9 July 2016, www.hindustantimes.com < http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/law-is-same-for-common-man-forces-sc-on-armed-forces-act/story-M7qrzHomTw6zR4fClIyk3J.html > paragraph 6 [accessed 25 August 2017]
· Ramesh, Randeep, ‘India’s secret history: ‘A holocaust, one where millions disappeared…’,’ August 2007, www.theguardian.com, <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/aug/24/india.randeepramesh> paragraph 4[accessed 25 August 2017]
· New World Encyclopedia contributors, ‘Thugs’, 7 December 2015, New World Encyclopedia, <http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Thugs&oldid=992484> Page Version ID: 992484 [accessed 25 August 2017]
· Das, Gurcharan, ‘India: How a rich nation became poor and will be rich again’, 19 March 2007, Developing Cultures: Case Studies, Lawrence E Harrison and Peter L Berger
< https://gurcharandas.org/rich-nation-poor > Paragraph 19, [accessed 25 August 2017]
· Rajeshwari, B, ‘Communal Riots in India, a chronology (1947–2003)’, IPCS Research Papers March 2004, www.nagarikmancha.org,
< http://nagarikmancha.org/images/1242-Documents-Communal_Riots_in_India.pdf > [accessed 25 August 2017]
· Dubbudu, Rakesh, ‘India had 58 communal incidents per month in the last 5 years & 85% of these incidents occurred in just 8 states’ , 1 December 2015, www.factly.in < https://factly.in/communal-incidents-in-india-statistics-57-communal-incidents-per-month-last-4-years-85-these-incidents-happen-in-8-states/ > [accessed 25 August 2017]
· Dashi, Dipak K, ‘410 people died on Indian roads every day last year’, 24 April 2017, www.timesofindia.com,
< http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/410-people-died-on-indian-roads-every-day-last-year/articleshow/58333548.cms > paragraph 1 [accessed 25 August 2017]
