Patrick French :
(From previous issue)
What is remarkable from this distance of time, in this age of binary politics and virtual insults, is how deeply Indian politicians on nearly all sides engaged in these debates.
To take a few examples, Gandhi absorbed ideas from far and wide, and met with his intellectual opponents whenever he had the chance. Asked about Western civilisation, he famously said it would be “a good idea”. Like many of his associates, his attitude to the values it claimed to represent was ambiguous. Ambedkar was in certain respects both a constitutional liberal and a socialist. Savarkar read Spencer and Mill, and was influenced by Mazzini, an Italian national liberationist who rejected classic Enlightenment principles. Golwalkar, a devotee of Bharat Mata who mistrusted foreign influences, was an admirer of Tilak, who supported political freedom and legislative responsibility alongside immediate self-rule. He was aided by Joseph Baptista, a barrister and liberal who defended Savarkar in court. When Tilak found himself charged with sedition in 1908, he was defended by the rising Bombay lawyer Mohammad Ali Jinnah. People did not feel they had to agree on everything in order to work together. Liberalism was for a long time the only political show in town, which does not mean to say Tilak did not taunt its proponents: “I have seen Liberals in England come out to India to get into conservative ways,” he once said. At great personal cost, these interactive politicians of the early 20th century gained repeated concessions from the guardians of the British Empire.
Crucially, Nehru was a liberal leader of a romantic nationalist bent who preferred Fabian socialism to Soviet communism. He accepted dominion status as a route to a republic, and along with most of his colleagues in the Constituent Assembly in the late 1940s, supported popular democracy and universal adult suffrage at a time when countries such as Switzerland, Greece and the United States did not allow all women to vote. The Constitution itself is, by any historical standard, a liberal constitution. Nehru’s foreign policy was accommodative, and an at times credulous antidote to great power politics.
His interest in rural uplift and panchayats was that of a communitarian liberal in the tradition of GK Gokhale. He believed in women’s rights and in human rights, telling India’s chief ministers in a letter in 1948 that they should be careful not to permit detention without trial since, ‘even in the short run, this is bad for the country, for the people, and for the Congress, which is held responsible’. Even a figure like Patel, though more socially conservative than Nehru, remained a champion of individual rights and of liberty, seeing them as essential for national development. One of his strongest objections to the princely rulers was their arbitrary exercise of power.
Many of those who critiqued Nehru’s Government after 1947 were themselves from a similar social or educational background. Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of the Jana Sangh, was the son of a knight and judge of the Calcutta High Court. The Swatantra Party, which proposed liberal economics as an antidote to socialism or statism, was founded by Nehru’s old friend and colleague C Rajagopalachari.
None of these influences and alliances show that a liberal political settlement was inevitable at independence. A different set of leaders or a different set of events could have derailed the creation of a participatory liberal democracy long before it had a chance to become a fundamental part of Indian identity. Another foundational prime minister might have sought to rule by decree. The attraction of pre-War RSS leaders to fascism and to Mussolini’s organisational skills could have been extended rather than sidelined. Marxism-so intellectually powerful in India from the 1960s to the 1980s-could in other circumstances have become a dominant force rather than fading to the margins.
But that is not what happened: instead, liberals of all parties and of none continue to make the political weather in India, consciously or otherwise. The legacy of the republic’s early leaders offers a coherent grounding for a practical political ideology. When Narendra Modi said in 2015: “Mine will be a government that gives equal respect to all religions,” he was making a statement that would be illegal in illiberal countries where religion controls state power. The alternative to statements such as this being actively enforced is to tacitly cede power to the crowd, and allow them to determine facts on the ground. Vigilantism in India benefits nobody, and leads only to a breakdown of social trust and an unspecified atmosphere of fear.
The BJP could reclaim the contribution of liberalism to its founding pantheon, and place their historic allegiances into a comprehensible modern context. Rather than feeling awkward that its heroes like Hedgewar were tangential to the freedom movement in the 1940s, and for example opposed Quit India, the party might seek to understand the political choices of its claimed intellectual ancestors such as Rajaji and Tilak, and acknowledge that the right can also be liberal. The past is what it is: we cannot gainsay the moves that other moral actors made at a different time and place.
FROM THE START of the 1990s to the financial crisis of 2008, proponents of the international order and neoliberal economics (another spinoff from the original word) thought the shape of the world was certain. Rather, the future is clouded.
In many countries, the failure of modernity to deliver all that was promised has led to a turning backwards. To return to the subject of Trump, what did he mean by ‘the West’? It is possible he himself does not know, and it was a civilisational impulse rather than a thought. “We write symphonies,” he said in Warsaw. “We pursue innovation.” His allegiance may be to a conceptual White Christian tribe with shared values of inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness, which extended at one time from Europe to countries that are not geographically part of the West, such as Australia.
Trump either does not know or does not admire many of the liberal ideas that democratically elected leaders often promote, such as accountability, diversity, gender equality, an independent system of criminal justice (he has fired the head of the FBI) and a free press (he wants to pummel the logo to death). Indeed, much of what he says and tweets opposes what are commonly perceived as liberal values. In his Warsaw speech, he used the word ‘strong’ 15 times, the word ‘blood’ in various forms five times, and the word democracy not once, although he managed a reference to “a strong and democratic Europe”. Instead, he asked if the West had the will to survive, placing himself at the centre of a Nietzschean struggle, even if it had to be in splendid isolation. His promise was to go back to the future and ‘Make America Great Again’. In this, he is not unusual. In country after country, the ancestral past appears increasingly attractive.
Many Americans, and particularly those in the coastal media, are suffering from Post-Trump Stress Disorder, shocked that a man who cares so little for their mores, the conventions of democracy and indeed truth itself should be president. But the US is not the first country to have an embarrassing leader. Libyans, Ugandans and North Koreans have had to endure much worse; Belarus has President Lukashenko, who likes to take his pre-teen son to work with him; Bavaria had King Ludwig, whose only interest was in building fairytale castles; and Britain had George III, who according to rumour shook hands with a tree under the impression it was the King of Prussia. India has been fortunate in the regard: no Prime Minister since independence has been demonstrably incompetent.
The real problem Trump faces is his inexperience. At the recent meeting of the G20 in Germany, he was outmanoeuvred by Russia and China and the US was left isolated. Most of his rivals have been in the multi-player game of international politics for decades, and he could not match them. During an earlier meeting with Modi, he jumped at the suggestion that his daughter Ivanka might lead a US delegation to a global entrepreneurship summit in India. As a politician with plenty of experience of dealing with business families, Modi knew which button to press.
(To be continued)
