Indian Instincts

by Miniya Chatterji

  Sanjay then had the preposterous idea of controlling India’s population by sterilizing the men of the country. Without consultation or planning, he immediately decreed that anyone with more than two children would be mandatorily sterilized, with no regard for age or marital status. The sterilizations were mostly done in makeshift and often extremely unhygienic conditions, and most cases were forced. Two thousand men died from the botched surgeries.19 In just one year of the emergency 8.3 million Indian men were sterilized and lost the right to be fathers.20 This order for compulsory sterilizations proved to be a death knell for Indira Gandhi’s government as it incited a mass electoral revolt across north India and led to her loss in the 1977 polls.

  Despite this, many Indians feel that Indira’s authoritarian rule is what the country needs. They think it is the only medicine that would make things work here. They have forgotten the reign of terror during the Emergency, and believe that autocracy would have emerged a winner if it had not been for the excesses of the family planning programme. The perception is that Indira was the ‘strong’ leader India needed.

  One of the most established Indologists of our times, under whose guidance I had the privilege of writing my master’s, and later doctoral, thesis at Sciences Po in Paris, Christophe Jaffrelot, has for the past thirty years painstakingly followed the ascent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Jaffrelot’s magnum opus, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, published in French in 1993 and in English three years later, was the earliest serious study that accurately predicted the rise of right-wing politics in India.21 In a riveting article, Jaffrelot points out that the styles of leadership represented by Modi and Indira Gandhi are very similar as they both epitomize two variants of populism.22 This also goes to show that populism can be injected into right-leaning politics as much as the left-leaning variety.

  Jaffrelot says that first, both Modi and Indira attempt to equate themselves with the Indian nation. While Indira’s supporters claimed ‘India is Indira and Indira is India’, Modi’s slogans evoke the notion ‘I am the new India’. He quotes the work of political theoretician Ernesto Laclau23 to show that this behaviour is typical of populist rhetoric, which relies on empty signifiers.

  Another similarity, Jaffrelot notes, is in the high ideals evoked by both leaders. ‘Both leaders relate to the people in the name of high ideals. While Indira Gandhi wanted to eradicate poverty, Narendra Modi resorted to demonetization to eradicate corruption. This decision could strike a moral chord among voters because of the extent to which they suffer from the curse of corruption. Its emotional impact was all the more significant as Prime Minister Modi congratulated Indian citizens for their national sacrifice, while they were suffering from his efforts to “clean” the country.’24

  Jaffrelot points out, ‘The nationalist rhetoric goes with a rejection of pluralism and alternative power centres—since the populist is the nation, any opposition is necessarily illegitimate. The judiciary is seen as an obstacle to the expression of the people’s will. Students, academics, NGOs who protest in the street—like in Bihar and Gujarat in 1973 or JNU and DU today—can be disqualified as “anti-national”. Similarly, some opposition parties are not only adversaries, but enemies who divide the nation. Hence, Indira’s de-legitimization of the 1971 “reactionary” Grand Alliance, and the BJP’s objective of a “Congress-mukt Bharat”.’

  Jaffrelot then notes a few important differences between Indira and Modi, notably the erosion of the over-representation of upper castes among members of Parliament and Legislative Assemblies; meanwhile, their percentage has risen in states the BJP won from 2014. In India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, for example, he finds that the new assembly has 44 per cent upper caste MLAs—12 per cent more than in 2012, and the highest share since 1980.

  The similarities, and even the differences, lead Jaffrelot to conclude that India’s new populism relies on an ethno-religious definition of the nation. He notes that this is an ‘ethnic democracy’ model, a term formulated by Israeli social scientist Sammy Smooha to describe Israel’s trajectory, where even though the regime remains in tune with the democratic constitution in practice, minorities are marginalized.

  I agree with Jaffrelot’s observations. But in my opinion, the fact that in free and democratic India, the styles of working of Indira and Modi (their forceful public policies and the unemotional way they deal with political opponents or those who fall from favour) have been accepted, or as Kakar says, ‘submitted to’, indicates a larger and more sinister issue—that democracy per se is not good enough. If, in our current governance system, there are not enough checks and balances to limit encroachments on freedom, it is time we reconsider the sort of governance system that works for us. The guarantee of collective freedom is not the only criterion for the viability of a governance system, but it is an important one. We cannot allow the bindings of the immense complexities we have ourselves created just to feed and shelter ourselves, to be the basis of another self-made trap in the form of a governance system that gives us bread but restricts our freedom.

  Here, I would add that our tradition of public discourse—focused on domestic politics and politicians—is useful only if it serves in the immediate or even long term as an effective check on the government. Indeed a system of elections and voting is dependent on the people’s understanding of the problems to be addressed and their perception of what others seek. This is a perspective put forward by John Stuart Mill, who emphasized on seeing democracy as ‘government by discussion’, a phrase that was coined later by Walter Bagehot.25 In the context of India, then, is public discourse playing a major role in allowing us to freely express the changes we desire and expanding our collective understanding of the government our vote must elect? We certainly need to ask ourselves whether our habit of speaking about politics everywhere, from farms to buses, reading about it on eighteen out of twenty pages of the newspaper every day, and watching triple-deck bands of breaking news on television related to the politics of our land is helping us work with the government or other stakeholders to ensure our collective well-being.

  This is an important question to ask because if the answer is ‘no’, there are two concerns: first, this is an enormous waste of public energy on a system that is of our own making, a case of ‘much ado about nothing’, and second, it raises the possibility of an information gap between the governors and the governed.

  There is no point being ‘argumentative Indians’ if the information given out to the public is carefully censored. If the government seeks to influence the media, then what are we left to talk about except praising the government and giving subtle hints about our inconveniences. Even post-Independence nationalists in civil society could argue intelligently and mobilize different perspectives towards building institutions, because they had some sort of transparency on the goings-on and possibility of criticizing the powers that be if needed.

  I worry that we are so caught up in the ‘form’ of democracy that we have forgotten that its essence is slipping.

  What I mean by ‘form’ is our assumption that declaring ourselves a democracy is enough, or that having plenty of public discourse on politics is beneficial. We stop short of assessing if the so-called hardware and software of democracy—to use Guha’s terminology—are being respected.

  The essence is the guarantee of our freedom. Ever since man decided to live in groups, we’ve asked ourselves—how do we live together in a way so that all of us can enjoy our freedom to immerse ourselves in our instinctual activities, and allow others to do the same as well? I reiterate this because we must remember that governance systems, old and new, were created to help us maintain that balance.

  Now, if talking about governance has become our larger preoccupation without any productive use of that talk to effectively ensure our collective freedom or anything else we feel governance must provide we Indians have gone terribly off-track on our evolutionary ascent.

  References

  BBC News. 201
4. India’s dark history of sterilisation. 14 November. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-30040790.

  BBC News. 2011. Egypt: Cairo’s Tahrir Square fills with protesters. 8 July.

  Das, Gurcharan. 2002. India Unbound, first edition. (New York: Anchor Books).

  Drèze, Jean, and Amartya Sen. 2013. An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

  Economist (US). 2014. What’s gone wrong with democracy. 1 March.

  Guha, Ramachandra. 2016. Democrats and Dissenters (Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India).

  Higgins, Andrew, and James Kanter. 2015. Leaders from Eurozone work into morning on Greek crisis. New York Times, 12 July.

  Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), p. 9.

  Jaffrelot, Christophe. 1996. The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s: Strategies of Identity-building, Implantation and mobilisation (with special reference to central India) (London: C. Hurst and Company Publishers).

  Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2017. Populism, remixed. Indian Express, 24 March.

  Kakar, Sudhir, and Katarina Kakar. 2007. The Indians: Portrait of a People (New Delhi: Penguin Books India), p. 21.

  Rawls, John. 2001. The Law of Peoples: With, the Idea of Public Reason Revisited (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).

  Researchgate. 2012. Sterilization regret among married women in India. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234133191_Sterilization_Regret_Among_Married_Women_in_India_Implications_for_the_Indian_National_Family_Planning_Program.

  Sen, Amartya. 2005. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (London: Macmillan).

  Varma, Pavan K. 2005. Being Indian: The Truth About Why the Twenty-first Century Will be India’s (New Delhi: Penguin Books India), p. 47.

  Wright, David. 2016. Poll: Trump, Clinton score historic unfavorable ratings. CNN, 22 March.

  10

  Religion

  In India, the cradle of four world religions, we somehow expect tolerance, peace and harmony to thrive. At school, we are taught that India is multicultural and that our strength lies in the diversity of languages, cultures and religious beliefs. Hinduism, India’s most popular religion, is itself supposedly a collection of various regional practices and beliefs, and so it is assumed that it must be accepting of differences.

  We hear mosques calling out prayers and temple bells chiming on the same street. The queues for langar at gurdwaras make a blessed and excited cacophony. We assume that the visitors to these institutions get along with each other, that there is fraternity despite diversity.

  When I was six, our family lived a few years in Agra, the city that boasts of the Taj Mahal. A few kilometres away from this beauty, inside the air force camp, I would watch my father visit a cramped and modest local temple, more often when he needed a favour from the gods. I saw my mother pray harder and the box of sweets in my father’s hand grow larger with each temple visit, as the desperation for the favour increased.

  My parents were ‘modern’, a word that at the time meant being educated, English-speaking and Western in social habits. Yet, it was not out of character for them, no matter where we lived, to install a temple at home—a wooden holder placed in a corner of my parents’ bedroom—and go to a local temple to offer sweets when the going got tougher. At the same time, they also offered me the lifelong freedom to visit neither the temple at home nor the one outside—as a child, I once told them that I could not understand why idols had to be worshipped because my faith resided within me.

  Much later, living in a different part of the world, I would often hear inhabitants of foreign lands talk of India’s ‘spiritual’ aspect. They would ask me about the sacred cow, karma, yoga, and mendicants in Benares. They would vociferously marvel at how even the poor were so content in India, assuming that the gratification, despite all that poverty, must be related to their belief in religion. Most of these people had not visited India.

  Those living abroad and following the news are horrified by the news of the frequent rioting, violence and murder in the name of religion in India. They knew that through the seventy years of being independent, we have killed thousands of our fellow citizens for reasons related to defending our religion, by that coin opposing that of others.1 Then, of course, there is the carnage of Partition in 1947, when one to two million people were killed, 75,000 women raped and mutilated, numerous villages set afire, and fifteen million people uprooted as Muslims were forced to trek to West and East Pakistan (the latter is now known as Bangladesh), while Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction.2

  My association with my Bengali Brahmin parents and the Muslim Farooqui family in Delhi has sensitized me to the angst and complex emotions on both sides of the divide.3 In my twelve-year relationship with the Farooquis’ son, we spent about eight years living together in various parts of the world. Every face-off between Hindus and Muslims would rock the chances of the societal acceptance of our relationship in India. This was despite the fact that the vicious hostility, based entirely on religious differences, of my family towards the Farooquis in the initial four years or so had gradually changed to fond friendship based on human values. My father discovered that he shared many typical middle-class Indian values with the Farooquis. ‘They are the same as I,’ he finally declared after six years of knowing them. Yet, this fortunate and uncommon reconciliation between the families could never drown out the condescending voices from the rest of society. A pandit once ousted my father from the temple after chiding him publicly for having ‘given away’ his daughter to a Mohammedan.

  Caught between the two religions for so long, I have perhaps become more sceptical of the petty religious differences in our country. Indeed, my perspective on religion, as I write about it today, is a consequence of deeply private experiences, as much as it is of my intellectual curiosity. As I sought reasons I read and learnt about Hinduism and Islam in India. I painstakingly researched religion and eventually even wrote my master’s thesis on the Indian Muslim community in Paris during my studies in the city.

  Instances of religious violence in India are far too many and frequent to list, but here is just a glimpse. Millions of Hindus and Muslims died during the Partition of India, and in the riots that followed. A few decades after Independence, certain sections of Sikhs in Punjab were unhappy about domination by Hindus and started seeking political autonomy. In 1984, under orders from Indira Gandhi, the Indian army attacked the Golden Temple with tanks and armoured vehicles, killing many Sikhs. Thereafter, Indira Gandhi was assassinated on 31 October 1984 by two Sikh bodyguards. The assassination provoked unprecedented mass rioting in India against Sikhs—thousands were burnt alive or killed, and many displaced and injured.4

  Communal violence in Kashmir continues too. While Kashmiris continue to live in constant fear for their lives, since the late 1980s, large numbers of Hindus who chose to remain in Kashmir have been driven out. Meanwhile, spurts of anti-Christian violence have frequently occurred in independent India as well. These days, even atheists are not spared. Recently in 2017 in Coimbatore, Farook, who had abandoned Islam and ran an atheist social media group with 400 members, was allegedly murdered by members of a Muslim radical group.5

  It is a paradox that religious violence is rampant despite the subcontinent having historically been the womb of the Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh religions. But it is a greater paradox that the modern Indian nation state is constitutionally secular but even more inextricably trapped in the baffling, blinding and immense power of our own mortal creation—religion. This entrapment has, in a Frankensteinian turn of affairs has led to differences.

  In other parts of the world too, at different points of time, religion has become larger than life, perhaps whenever we have forgotten that it is a man-made creation and not divinely ordained.

  In Europe, during the Middle Ages, we killed each other in
the Christian Crusades against Muslim invasions. A few centuries later, there were bloody wars between Roman Catholics and Protestants. More recently, we massacred innocents in terror attacks in the name of jihadist Islam. Nation states and corresponding governing structures, such as in Pakistan and Israel, have been created on the basis of religion, and committed atrocities on believers of minority religions. Each time we have felt justified in taking lives in the name of religion is when we have perceived religion as a cause much greater than ourselves.

  So if the whole world is killing each other over religious differences, why should we be surprised when we Indians do the same?

  But we are surprised, because somehow, we do not expect this in India. Just as those outside India presume there is spiritual peace here, we Indians believe in unity in our diversity.

  There are two popular perspectives to Hinduism, which is followed by 79.8 per cent of Indians today6—a massive 966 million, approximately. One, pluralists envision a decentralized profusion of diverse ideas and practices that are happily incorporated under the big tent of Hinduism. I believe that this is the perspective that has made it to our school textbooks. The second perspective is the kind of Hinduism currently in practice, of the centralists who identify themselves as part of a single, pan-Indian, more or less hegemonic, orthodox tradition, centred on an ancient Vedic lineage of texts, transmitted primarily in Sanskrit by Brahmins. This orthodox manifestation of religious identity is prone to rejecting anyone who differs from it. It also points to a Hindu rashtra, deemed by divine ordinance, its purity measured by the proximity of its inhabitants to the ancient Vedic culture, and polluted by anyone whose faith is different.