Recently, there was a sad case of a person driven to suicide by the harassment of a powerful politician’s son. The article by Madabhushi Sridhar (The Hans India on 11th January, 2022) on a failing political system made for a distressing read. Land and property settlements; commissions on every conceivable deal; acquiring money and property beyond all possible means; pumping unimaginable money and liquor before elections; subversion of government machineries; and protecting criminal behaviour of relatives and friends have become almost the expected behaviour for politicians across the country. Nobody even bats an eyelid when the same politicians who derive power from people they go begging to before elections become completely deviant, untrustworthy, and unapproachable after coming to power. A recent popular movie (Pushpa) showed how an MP is a part of the syndicate of sandalwood smugglers. Such depictions do not even remotely trouble anybody. The shattered roads across the country are perhaps the most glaring manifestation of our failed parliamentary democracy.
Nehru’s seven principles of a new ‘modern’ India to bring it out of stagnation (national unity, parliamentary democracy, industrialisation, socialism, scientific temper, secularism, and non-alignment) completely rejected the indigenous past to some disastrous consequences. Parliamentary Democracy with universal adult suffrage, fair elections, separation of powers, 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 Vivekananda, Gandhi, and Aurobindo did not appeal to Nehru. Are modern civilisations morally superior? Civilisation, self-contained wholes, are not amenable to comparative evaluation. Modernity constituents such as rationalism, individualism, liberal democracy, the state, technology, scientific worldview, and such are not logically related and they came together in Europe because of historical factors. Some of them could even go in other cultures. India could have developed its own distinct model.
India could have opted for a more decentralised and participatory planning different from both capitalist and communistic forms, as eminent political theorist Dr Bhikhu Parekh says. 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 multicultural state, the nature of the law, the ideal polity, and the best way to theorize the Indian political reality. Political theory taking the state as its starting point and understanding society in relation to it replaced traditional social theory concentrating on the social structure with the government as one of its many institutions. Like ‘secularism’, ‘parliamentary democracy’ as a western solution transposed on Indian soil may be the cause of problems rather than solutions. Barring continuing work on Kautilya’s Arthashastra, there are no major reconstructions of ancient or medieval Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist texts on politics and discuss how Indian thought differs.
The search in western traditions was always present in the ideal for maximal individual liberty under the umbrella of minimal state interference and maximal state security. Seeking that harmony has created ‘isms’ of the most bewildering variety. Colonial consciousness again allowed narratives of western political philosophies to permeate into Indian thinking even as many of the ideas do not simply make sense. As a basic example, the labels of ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-liberal’ to political parties are more words of abuse revealing ignorance of the longstanding and inherent traditions of India.
Indian traditions had evolved a way of an enlightened monarchy and free citizens ages back. Arthashastra and other texts like Ramayana, Mahabharata (especially the Shanti Parvan), and Tirukkural focussed on duties rather than rights of both the rulers and the ruled. Our foundational texts emphasize on the four core human values: Dharma (right living), Artha, Kama, and Moksha. This diverges from the western rights-based individualistic philosophy. In traditional Hindu kingdoms, the polity and the social order were inseparable. The king’s dharma consisted in preserving and enforcing the varna and jati based social structures. Neither the modern concept of democracy nor its parliamentary articulation has a parallel in Indian thought. Karma determined an individual’s birth and natural endowments and thus fully deserved; the modern notion of group justice has no analogue in much of Hindu thought.
Indian civilization, at least five thousand years old, apart from a high quotient of personal happiness, had a thriving economy with highly-evolved arts, literature, education, sciences, spirituality, architecture, and so on. Alternatives to democracy did thrive without the necessity to invade and colonise other countries. Maybe, the decentralised structure allowed invaders to plunder us. Unfortunately, popular discourses made this an example of our ‘weakness’ glossing over the brutalities of invaders and colonials. Most educated Indians get confused with the hard right-left divide of the West as our traditional problem-solving mechanisms are a mix of both. We have lost many decades and now we cannot change the system perhaps. The best way is to make our political-bureaucratic system more accountable. But why and how will an animal lay the trap for itself?
RANDOM MUSINGS 