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Tag Archives: secularism

A culture of complaint?

16 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by opus125 in India

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communalism, culture of complaint, indian secularism, Jawaharwal Nehru, nerhu, private sector, secularism, The constitution

Gandhi & Nehru 1942

Gandhi & Nehru 1942

Indians have the legal right to protest and the right to contrary views. The constitution does not allow violence or destruction of private property in expressing personal views. Nor does it allow for false statements that could lead to harm others.

Perhaps the best advice if some artist or writer offends you is don’t read or see it. When books are banned because of religious sensibilities it seems to me book sales – or sales pirated copies in the side streets go up.

However a culture of complaint has been spreading over India.

Protest is appropriate but violent protest and the destruction of property is not.

Early Indian nationalism had strong religious overtones . Gandhi realised the need to transcend its potential divisiveness, teaching Sarva Dharma Sambhava equality of all religions.

Concerned over primal passions evoked by religion, Nehru was a universal secularist who moderated to a more Gandhian view, perhaps concerned by how to moderated the deep wound of to the new nation during Partition.

Nehru said “Some people think that it means something opposed to religion. That obviously is not correct. What it means is a state  which honours all faiths equally and gives them equal opportunities” (Sarveralli Gopal, Jawalharlal Nehru: An Anthology). This could be seen as either an extra dimension to secularism or as a tolerant multi faith republic. Religion is deeply embedded in Indian public life.

As Hinduism numerically predominates India minority groups may feel pressured to deny their heritage. So should there be a wall between state and religion? Or concessions that encourage the ancient minority religions to feel welcome?

As Lloyd I. Rudolph (in Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State) reminds us Nehru  ran India with essentially an urban industrial strategy coalition of urban and  rural interests. With a small but powerful administration  of managerial professionals, from the 2nd and 3rd five year plans a private sector welcomed freedom from foreign competition.

The English educated middle class manned senior services, built the public sector staffed large firms in modern private sector.

The large land holding  rural notables were junior partners who managed to survive or block land ceiling legislation. As they control state governments, they consented to import substitution and industrial self reliance, middle class control of central government or the advantages accrued to the urban elites.

But from the 1970 to 80’s, the rise of conservative Hindutva and the conflicting demands of caste and tribe “bullock capitalists” “backward classes” middle peasants, and scheduled groups have muddied the waters.

As Union minister Pramod Mahajan said in 2000 “I know that most members of Parliament see the constitution for the first time they take their oath on it.”  Congress politician V. N. Gadgil put it another way in 2005 “In India you do not caste your vote, you vote your caste.”

Mr Gadgill spoke those words in 1995. Now, among the Indian Diaspora I meet when travelling home, I hear concern that India’s tradition toleration and diversity is ebbing in the rush to middle class wealth.

“The current resurgence of identity politics, or the politics of caste and community, is but an expression of the primacy of the group over the individual. It does not augur well for liberal democracy in India” wrote sociologist André Béteille.

While India has had its failures, it has on the whole been a successful democracy.

I hope that Mr Béteille is proved wrong. I hope the realities of the new Indian government will encourage moderation.

Personally, I believe it will.

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A Nation-State called India?

08 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by opus125 in India

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Tags

Indian politics, nation state, secularism

India

Indians often criticise the Invaders and their legacy. The secularist Constitution is primarily a Western view. However, there has never been discovered any one Hindu government that ruled India with a singled social, political or religious ideology.

It would delight me if the utopian Great Society, or Ram Rajya (literally “rule of God”) did exist. Gandhi and other nationalists held up this golden age as a an nationalist, Independent India. Hindu reformers claimed the corrupted idolatry of the and was a corruption of a lost religious unity that reawakened would rise as a beacon to the world.

Did Gandhi really believe it or was it only a metaphor? Afterall he turned the Gita – where Krishna incites Arjuna to battle  – into a tome for non violence,

It seems to me that any attempt to pin India down leaves me unsatisfied. It is as if the people of this vibrant land like its nebulous undefinable quality that allows them to be who they want as long as they don’t get caught or upset their family.

Politically, W. H. Morris-Jones described Indian politics as “a play within a play”:

“One very general way of putting the problem is to point out that the student of Indian political institutions soon forms the impression that the main thing he has to learn is that nothing is ever quiet what it seems or what it presents itself as being …..

The observer of Indian politics will not look at his subject for long before he gets the feeling that he is missing something. This feeling can perhaps be only described by metaphors…..

“Such a feeling with regard to Indian politics is perfectly justified; what the observer has so far not taken into account is the play within the play.”

As a histophile I suggest, modern Neo-Hinduism and Neo-Buddhism developed in response to Protestant, Orientalist and Western reconstructed models of History. It is to be expected. The story we tell of ourselves – our hiSTORY – develops in response to the unfolding of society. We all too often look at the past through coloured hues of a modern lens and modern politics is network of mostly European or Muslim ideas.

This the Hindu nationalist gripe and yet, remove the ceremony, you find it is also a foundation of modern Hindu nationalism that critiques it.

As K. M. Paikkar observed after Independence “Clearly, our new democratic, egalitarian and secular state is not built on the foundations of ancient India, or of Hindu thought.”

In 1888 John Strachey put it more bluntly, ”there is not, and never was an India, or even a country of India possessing, according to European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social, or religious.”

Strachey saw the world through European blinkers. As Ainslie Embrose reminded us, this describes a 19th century “political artefact created by the British imperial power that was essentially artificial, with its existence dependent upon the careful exercise of that power.”

The British model made use of the Mughal models of administration, for taxation and justice. Islamic institutions influenced what a nation state means throughout South Asia.  I suggest political systems world over are ideological constructs. I suggest that the flux of contradictory thoughts that is India may offer a more unity than rigid ideologies of politicians.

I suggest the masses of India have a different view of what a political entity means. The grasping of disparate internet driven pseudo democratic sensationalism could learn from the Hindu Buddhist ideology.

Defining a nation is beyond this article, however an arbitrary perimeter cut into an terrestrial surface, ultimately an “imagined community” (Benedict Anderson) of a mutually recognised and assumed recognition and obligations to a shared culture or shared language (Gelner).

However, India has been a land of accepted difference and diversity and the internalised transmission of popular myth a life reality.

“India has been the seat of a single culture, however diversely expressed” wrote Sir Percival Spear

Instead of a Nation-State, Ravinder Kumar describes India as a “Civilization-State” with distinctive traits, social character, wealth creation social and political structures and texture of moral values.

“As a result of the development in material conditions and growth in political awareness that has taken place after 1947, the deep contradiction between the sharply focused identiy of a Nation-State, on the one hand, and the truly epic diversity of the local and regional cultures  which underpin Indian cibvilization, on the other, can no longer be brushed aside. Indeed, without focusing on the centres of disquiet within the subcontinent, it is clear that the notion of India as a Nation-State sends tremors of alarm through wide swarthes of the people, who look to their location in regional or local communities as the primary basis of their identity formation. Even in the great heartland, where Hindi (or one of its variants) constitutes the language an shapes the culture of the people, the primary basis of identiy formation remains the locality of the region; beyond which stands the amorphrous concept of a pan-Indian civilization and partially crystalised notion of a Nation-State.”

Consider modern India: with the world’s third largest military (at about 1/12th of GDP), largest population, about 15th in Industrial production, and third for its number of scientific and technological personnel.

Whether the Ram Rajya will ever be scientifically proven to have existed is not the point. India can only be understood by referring to it. You must look at her on at least two different levels. On one level you have the nation state, a nationalist concept elevated at the time of the French Revolution.  On another you have people for who the land was an expression of a religious history that formed their identity.

The concept of nation-state is a mental abstraction distant from daily life of many. Besides creating a cohesive Pan-Indian State, and representative government, the liberation struggle sought to transform India from an agricultural to an Industrial economy.

While the slowly changing landscape is also considered an illusion, it is a long standing expression  of the legends that shape meaning into people’s lives. There is a faith in life and a living of life itself.

A rural scattered society since feudal times, occasionally interfered with by a Hindu, Muslim or European.

Meanwhile a huge middle class increasingly tricked into politics of a divisive media that fuels US Vs Them divide: Hindu Muslim, Superrich Vs Middle class, Middle Class Vs untouchable.

The problem seems to me to be expressed by a critique of my Western ways by a dear Indian friend.

“You are too much in your head Bry. Look within.”

Both Hindu and Buddhist speak of changing, illusory of daily life (samvrti-satya) and the absolute truth (paramarthasatya) of uncharacterisable, quality-less (nirguna) Brahmin. A Buddhsit may contrast the changing possibilities of the empirical world to the intuitive void, or unlimited emptiness (sanyata). Life is often compared to a man terrified by a snake that turns out to be a coiled rope.

The lack of discrimination, called ignorance (avidya, aviveka).

The analogy fits well for all modern politicians using fear to knee jerk the population toward a idealised often fictional legend of the ideal citizen. Indias national Maha Bharat, expressed as an ideal virtuous, battle hardened larrikin Anzac of Australia, or the

On a more practical level what will last, and what will soon disappear when the political bluster dissolves.

Independence Day 2012 Bhrat Bhavan Bhopal

Independence Day 2012 Bharat Bhavan Bhopal

Spirituality requires earning to distinguish between the illusion of arguing politicians, seen as corrupt and far removed from daily life, and the intuited truth people feel within themself. Move closer to Delhi, or the cities removed from the land, these illusions of social class take on illusory proportions!

As the USA begins to collapse because it overreached itself, I am reminded of a Chinese politician who brushed off US concerns as not seeing the whole perspective of history.

Whitehead was not thinking of India, but his words from Process and Reality apply in this confusing land:

“It is the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the over-whelming permanence, there iis an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can only find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence. Those who would disjoin the two elements can find no interpretation of patent facts. “

I would rather we grasp the ideal and the modern illusory reality together, and with a perspective for history, see the possibilities of the moment. Aim for the ideal, while working with what is. The problems is ‘what is’ is itself an illusion.

 

 

 

 

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Sacred and Secular India?

29 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by opus125 in India

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Tags

India, indian secularism, Jawaharlal Nehru, secularism

India_by_Woooble

India_by_Woooble

When the Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah formerly introduced Pakistan o the world he spoke of a nation built on the principles of tolerance he saw as part of past Islamic civilizations. In his single minded pursuit for recognition for his minority Muslim friends he was equally careful to be unclear and nebulous of the details.

Muslims, excited by the prospect of some political recognition of their ideals, found Pakistan a geographically distant impossibility. To many unable to travel north to new West of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh)if Pakistan was for Muslims then were they somehow less a Muslim when all the political hype and promises of independence softened?

Now Pakistan is seen by many Indians as the enemy that lost its ideals to a democracy weakened by military coups.

……….and what is India?

Westernised Jawaharlal Nehru with his ideas of semi socialist liberalism wanted a secular India, not strictly divided between Church and State as in the USA, but influenced by Gandhi , a secularism understood to mean a diluted tolerant pluralism, and a government not necessarily distant from faith[1].

How would this play out? When asked how Pakistan with its essentially Hindustani culture was different to India, Jinnah pointed to the USA and the power of an idea. America was essentially British but an idea birthed a new nation.

Selling one liner ideas is easier than sustaining a nation. Similarly, in India slogans may win elections but they are rarely sustainable policies.

For instance, Nehru’s deputy, the tea-totalling austere Vallabhbhai Patel , saw that minorities should prove their loyalty to India. Muslims who had once clamoured for Pakistan should prove to a nervous Hindu population they would remain loyal Indians.

Nehru felt the congress led government should ensure Muslims would want to be loyal. The minority must be treated as the majority. They should not only be treated fairly but feel they are being treated fairly.

I am reminded of how when the British allowed a semi autonomous government in Central Provinces in 1937, some Hindus demanded veneration of Durga as symbol of Mother India, much as the West may demand a flag salute or recitation of the Oath of Allegiance. The most pro Indian Muslim could not consent to idolatry and was seen as unpatriotic. In India, 1937 seems to me a stepping stone that led to a widening divide between Congress and the Muslim League.

Of course, Independent India was born from what Gandhi called “the vivisection of the mother”, the blood of partition.

A symbol of the tension of the New India may be the Somnath temple in Gujurat, destroyed by Muslims Mahmoud of Ghanzi in the eleventh century , and after being rebuilt, by Emperor Aurangzeb After two centuries, it was rebuilt for the last time and inaugurated by Rajendra Prasad, India’s first President. .

A close friend of the disciplined Patel, the Hindu Prasad had ignore Nehru’s advice to stay away.

“I respect all religions and on occasion visit a church, a dagah and a gardwara” he said.

Nehru feared a “spirit of communism and revivalism has gradually invaded the congress” speaking when another of Patel’s friends Purshottamdas Tandon was elected President of Congress in 1950.

Perhaps now the need to maintain the public order as different groups seeks to divide and conquer the voting public disillusioned by an unwieldy and corrupt government. Public supported tolerance has drifted into pacifying intolerant demands of pressure groups playing on people’s fears.

It is not a uniquely Indian problem. As an Australian based in Bhopal, I am appalled by the Abbott governments insistence of criminalising refugees as “cue jumpers” , the misuse of the Anzac legend to portray Australia as a nationalist Bronzed Aussie of British descent.   The myth ignores Australia’s post world war II European migration. 60% of Australians do not claim British heritage.

Similarly Gandhi called on the myth of a once great Hindu India. India has never been entirely Hindu. Gandhi’s ideas worked in the public mind because they gave the powerless a way to protest. Gandhi’s ahimsa , a Jain respect for animal life that the Mahatma turned into a political ideal, was born during the violent birth of Indian nationalism. The British could use guns against Tilak’s calling on the Mahabharata to over throw Colonialism. Violence against Gandhi’s defenceless salt marchers would destroy British claims of moral superiority.

By turning the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna’s great justification to Arjuna slaughter his warring brethren into a tale of personal spiritual struggle,[i] Gandhi recreated a myth as unhistorical, but more benign, as the singular and narrow Hindutva of some nationalist politicians.

“One nation one religion” as a slogan has even been used as a readymade garment manufacturer in Bund Garden Road Pune. Even if only intended for commerce, this large sign, politicized religious sentiment, whatever its creed, makes me nervous.

Manu’s legal code may have preferred the “twice born” upper class and Brahmins to live between the Indian ocean and the Bay of Bengal is contrasted with India’s ancient merchant diaspora .that is often quick to desert Brahmin ideals alone but whose displays of piety in he country are more Indian than in India.

[[I assume the stricter members of the Hindutva movement would disagree, The rise of the Brahmins to power came with feudal society, after the collapse of the Maurya’s, claims Devangana Desai (The religious imagery of Khajuraho), drawing on archaeological research. Hinduism pre-dated Buddhism, but Brahmins were given already religiously significant land such as Nashik and Mathura by rulers seeking to raise their prestige . Also, Dravidian south sees its religion predating the northern Aryan invasion, which some Hindus do not believe. It is quiet possible that the British spread idea of an Aryan race may have been tribal groups rather than a racial entity]].

“Hindui is tolerance, but [fill in the blank] are not rue Hindu’s.”

Yes, Hinduism has been remarkably tolerant over the years, what is less clear historically what Hinduism really is.

That will be another blog post …….

For the moment, consider how Prime Minister Nehru defined a secular constitution. Rather than evoke the strict church -state division of the USA, Nehru said “Some people think that it means something opposed to religion. That obviously is not correct. What it means is a state  which honours all faiths equally and gives them equal opportunities” (Sarveralli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: An Anthology).

 

[1] Concerned over religions primal passions, Nehru’s ideas were initially more universally but moderated over time, perhaps influenced by the carnage of partition. Early nationalism was religiously inspired bur Gandhi realised the need to transcend its potential divisiveness. He taught ‘sarva dharma sambbhava’ or Equality of All Religions.

[i] In a sense it reminds me of the personal struggle or jihad of Islam, which is also used by some to justify conquest.

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