Patrick French :
THE CONCEPT OF liberalism in various mutant forms like ‘left-liberal’ and ‘libtard’ seems to be under attack globally. Originating in America, an idea has taken hold that liberals are effete, elite, hypocritical, unpatriotic, and out of touch with ground-level realities. What is sometimes forgotten in India is that the arguments that led up to independence, the writing of the Constitution and the founding of the modern republic were rooted in liberal political traditions that had by the 1940s become largely indigenous. This is true for many of the intellectual forebears of both the BJP and the Congress, who are claimed (sometimes by both parties) in the pantheon of heroes. The perceived clash between liberals and nationalists, and between liberal values and the history of the Right, is partially illusory. India has had its own forms of liberalism for longer than anyone can remember, and these have the capacity to evolve.
The current world order is being shaken up, and the pieces have not yet fallen into place. We are told we are living in the era of the strongman, and that leaders like Erdogan in Turkey, Duterte in the Philippines, Trump in the United States, Modi in India, Putin in Russia and Xi in China have knocked aside old Western pieties about the role of freedom and democracy in the world order. But is India a plausible part of this jigsaw? I would suggest Indian traditions of government and forms of debate are more powerfully inflected by liberal thought than we realise.
Certainly the world is in flux and nationalism is more fashionable than a generation ago, but this may be less a clash between liberals and nationalists than an inevitable international rebalancing, exemplified by the comparative decline of America and the rise (or return) of Asia, which is accompanied by an assertion of ancestral identity. The mistake of the globalisers and flat-worlders exemplified by Thomas L Friedman was to imagine that older forms of belonging were going to be supplanted by post-identity politics, and that globalisation would lead inexorably to a spread of democracy and internationalism. The hypothesis that the fall of the Berlin Wall would lead to an end to communist rule in China, for instance, was a common mistaken assumption. Ironically, the process of worldwide adjustment now seems to be hitting the United States as hard as any country, and is provoking a profound ideological anxiety.
Donald J Trump has a great talent for articulating unconscious fears; indeed, it may be the key to his electoral success. When he spoke of American carnage and said people were laughing at the land of the free, when he said that assorted Asian powers (first it was Japan, then it was China) were out to destroy the wealth of the United States, when he said Mexican rapists needed to be kept away by a beautiful wall he was going to build, and when he said he would make the bleak, de-industrialised suburbs of middle America hum once more with economic life, he was speaking to the gut. Something had gone wrong, and he had the snake oil salesman’s patter and the outsized populist promise to put it right.
In the US, like many Western countries, the optimism about the future that most people have in India, Vietnam or Cambodia is absent. Remarkably, nearly seven out of ten Republicans say they prefer America as it was in the 1950s, a statement loaded with social and racial freight. In his speech in Warsaw last week, President Trump said: “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilisation in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?” But what did Trump mean by ‘the West’, and does anyone doubt it has the will to survive? After the London Bridge attacks in June, when three petty criminals attacked passersby with knives and were shot dead within minutes by police, London continued on its way. The UK had faced terrorism before, and would endure, just as other countries have the resilience to endure such attacks.
THE IDEA OF ‘the West’-meaning a concert of powers that included Russia- was invented in 1815 in the wake of Napoleon and 20 years of devastating revolutionary wars in Europe and beyond. The idea had links to liberalism and nationalist aspiration, and its growth was partly an attempt to make Europe’s political institutions more accountable in order to stave off possible insurrection. Its proponents challenged the arbitrary exercise of state power as damaging to mutual trust between individuals. Programmes of partial representative government spread through Europe in the 19th Century, and to some parts of India at the civic level. Even in autocratic Russia, serfdom was abolished in 1861.
America was the oddity, seeing itself as a colonial extension of Europe, while maintaining a cruder racial politics and the institution of chattel slavery until 1865. Visiting writers were at times disconcerted by the Trumpian folk they encountered across the pond. To quote the imperial historian John Darwin: ‘Europeans were also puzzled and alarmed by American populism- the very wide suffrage (for white men) and the universal tendency towards elective office, even for legal or judicial officials. The English radical Edward Gibbon Wakefield condemned the rootless mobility of American society, its lack of any sense of place, tradition or history.’
Long before the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, liberal ideas were current in countries that were themselves under European rule in various forms. Nearly 200 years ago, the young romantic poet Henry Derozio could lament that India was ‘chained’, and radical journals in India wrote of ‘separation’ and the ‘drain of wealth’ by the colonial power. Such thinking was circulating globally, aided by the rise of printing, and it was hard in many cases to say where ideas had originated, and to distinguish between those that were of ‘the West’ and those that had emerged from an indigenous political source. India had ancient liberal traditions. As I have written previously in Open,Hinduism has no set of regulations from which a person can apostasise, no clerical hierarchy that can impose sanctions and no historical tradition of killing heretics out of religious duty. What liberals termed ‘toleration’ was an embedded social practice.
When John Stuart Mill wrote, ‘the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind,’ he was approaching Hindu and Buddhist forms of philosophical enquiry. No surprise, then, that Mill was read down the century by Indian thinkers and politicians of all stripes, from Nehru to Savarkar. Reform movements of varying degrees of utopianism were contagious. Everyone was talking. As the late Cambridge historian CA Bayly wrote of the great Bengali reformer: ‘Rammohan Roy himself hosted several celebrations in Calcutta Town Hall for the Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American revolutions between 1820 and 1823.’
Liberalism has always been compromised, in the sense that it began as an exclusive project, but that should not blind us to its malleability as an idea. Women, slaves, non- Christians and non-Europeans have all at times been betrayed by its proponents. John Locke, one of its foundational philosophers, was happy for Catholics to face discrimination since they had ‘blind obedience to an infallible pope, who hath the keys of their consciences tied to his girdle’. Adam Smith put an emphasis on economic freedom that was by no means applicable to all. Lord Macaulay promoted progress and liberal freedoms, even while grossly insulting Indian culture.
In the mid 19th century, Mill depended on civilisational exclusions to justify despotism as a reasonable form of government in India, and famously wrote that, ‘Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.’ Yet the principle remained radical, in terms of individual freedom, as a possible mechanism for ordering society.
As Mill wrote in On Liberty, ‘the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.’
The political scientist Uday Singh Mehta has observed that it was only after the British Empire gained major territorial control of India that liberalism ‘assumes a paternal posture-an odd mix of maturity, familial concern, and an underlying awareness of the capacity to direct, and if need be, coerce’. Chroniclers now spoke of ‘our Indian subjects’ and ‘our Indian empire’, as if they were on some benign social mission. ‘The possessive pronoun simultaneously conveys familiarity and distance, warmth and sternness, responsibility and raw power.’ Claiming a new ethical basis for imperial rule, writers in this tradition distanced themselves from the earlier military excesses of the East India Company and proposed new systems of cooperation and collaboration.
(To be continued)
