A "union of states"

A "union of states"

 (First Post, 12 Feb 2022)

According to Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, “India is described in the Indian Constitution as a union of states and not a nation. One cannot rule over the people of a state in India. Different languages and cultures cannot be suppressed. It is a partnership, not a kingdom.” Let’s see about that.

The terms “union” and “state” (in the Hindi text: rājyon kā saṅgh) are quite vague, especially for a juridical document: both can have several interpretations. A "union" can mean a federation, which is a sovereign state dividing itself in autonomous provinces; or a confederacy, a permanent alliance of sovereign states; and everything in between, with history often showing an evolution from the one to the other. Thus, Switzerland is effectively a federation but called itself at its founding Confederatio Helvetica. An effective confederacy at present is the political structure of the Eurasian landmass's western subcontinent, the European Union. As the Brexit has demonstrated, though to much surprise, a member state of the EU retains its sovereignty, including the defining right to secede. By contrast, the Indian Republic does not confer on its lower political units this right of secession.

A "state" usually means a sovereign country, but it can also mean a province within a country. It is very common for this class of words not to have a fixed meaning in regard of its dimension of sovereignty, e.g. "land" in German means a province, in Dutch a sovereign country, and in English it has no political meaning, merely signifying any non-maritime region. When appearing in a legal text, such words first require a definition. From the wording in India's Constitution, one can deduce that here the word “state” (rājya) means the political level below full sovereignty.

 

 

Trivially, today's Indian Republic is geographically the sum total of its states. Yet historically it is not correct to imply that India has come about by uniting pre-existing states, as "union of states" might suggest. It came into being as a successor-state to British India. Yes, much of its present territory consisted of theoretically independent states before the Transfer of Power in 1947,  the Princely States. But these did not negotiate with British India as equal partners who then decided to merge. Instead, by signing the Instrument of Accession, they gave up their (already theoretical) sovereignty to be absorbed into the Republic.

 

For better understanding, consider the contrast with the European Union. The EU consists of sovereign member states with their own political history, mostly with active nationalist movements that went as far as to foment war against each other. It took the horrors of two World Wars and the common fear of the Soviet Bloc to make them water down their sovereignty step by negotiated step in a common ever-closer union. Each state retained the right to veto common decisions, so that these required a consensus. In India, by contrast, in vital matters the centre can overrule the states.

 

A great advantage of having a united federation of semi-autonomous states rather than a conglomerate of sovereign states is that it dedramatizes what would otherwise become a cause for war: the redrawing of boundaries between the states. The reorganization of the Northeast into the "Seven Sisters", the creation of Andhra Pradesh in the 1950s or the Panjabi Suba in the 1960s, or the more recent bifurcation of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, are the stuff that elsewhere wars are fought over. Yet under the umbrella of India, they became mere administrative procedures. Though pooh-poohed by Rahul Gandhi, the existence of a national level above the affected states is highly beneficial.

 

One thing Eurasia's southern and western subcontinents have in common is that in their founding statements they avoid the term "nation" to refer to themselves. In Europe this would be a denial of history, where nationalist passions and considerable blood-letting were needed for the unification of Italy and Germany, the independence and unification of the Yugoslav states followed later by this federation's disintegration, etc. The project of countering these old nationalisms with a new EU nationalism has only lived in a small Rightist fringe; the “nation” counts as but a relic from history. In India, by contrast, the idea of defining the Subcontinent's population as a nation has been alive in the Freedom movement, which was influenced by the contemporaneous European nationalisms, most explicitly through VD Savarkar's translation of Italian nationalist thinker Giuseppe Mazzini.

 

Indians have debated whether they form a nation, and if so, what kind of nation. The Nehruvians claimed India was a new nation, with Mahatma Gandhi as "father of the nation", and in need of "nation-building". This is in complete denial of history, when a sense of Indianness existed for millennia. So Gandhi himself had considered India an ancient nation with himself as its grateful son. The Muslim League applied the Ottoman division into millets, "nations", meaning religious communities treated as political units. The Left mostly preferred a fragmented India and invoked the European equation of nation with national language, e.g. the Bengali nation. Prakash Ambedkar thought that the attributes of nationhood apply to the castes: "Every caste a nation."

The present Sangh Parivar effectively espouses Gandhi's view (the asli Gandhi, not the naqli Gandhi who triggered this debate) that India is an ancient nation which includes every Indian. Nowadays it downplays its original Hindu identity and emphatically calls itself nationalist, forever intoning the mantra “unity”. But in an earlier stage, under MS Golwalkar, it taught that only Hindus (in the broad sense) form the nation, while the Muslims and Christians are mere guests. The reason was that only Hindus could boast of a civilizational continuity, whereas Christians and Muslims had historically rejected the culture they found here, or from which they converted, explicitly wanting to replace it with their own.

 

The main problem with asserting an Indian nationhood, as per Rahul Gandhi, is its diversity. This is a false problem, merely a higher magnitude of what every country has to deal with. Moreover, it is part of the genius of Hindu civilization that it can deal exceptionnally well with diversity. While there is always room for improvement, the present federal structure takes care rather well of the needs of its diverse demographics. All the way from Brussels, I dare say that in terms of a political structure doing justice to its own motto of "Unity in diversity", the European Union had better learn some lessons from the Indian Republic.

 

 

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Gandhi the Englishman

 (The Pioneer, 1 January 2014)

 

Shortly before independence, Mahatma Gandhi asked Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel to step down as candidate for the Congress leadership and hence for the upcoming job of Prime Minister. It was the only way to foist Jawaharlal Nehru on India, as Sardar Patel would easily have gotten a majority behind him. Yet, Nehru was overtly Westernized and known to be in favour of industrialization and modernization, while Gandhi was reputedly opposed to this approach.

Was Patel’s outlook not more capable, more popular and more Gandhian? With the benefit of hindsight, we can moreover say that the choice for Nehru ultimately led to the festering Kashmir problem, to proverbial socialist poverty, and to the communalization of the polity. Yet, when Gandhi made his fateful pro-Nehru move, he tried to minimize its importance and laughed it off: “Jawaharlal is the only Englishman in my camp.” This was a most curious reason, as Gandhism was popularly taken to imply a choice for native culture and against Westernization. But then, Gandhi himself was not really a votary of Gandhism.

 

Backwardness

Superficially, of course, with his spinning-wheel, he seemed to be the colourful paragon of Indian swadeshi (native produce) ideals. But there already, the problem starts. Indian culture had never opted for willful backwardness. In its time, the Harappan culture played a vanguard role in industry and trade. When you compare the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, you find decisive technological progress: Arjuna has abandoned Rama’s bow and arrow (not to speak of Hanuman’s mace, the primitive weapon par excellence) for a sword and a chariot. Jokes about Hindus highlight their uptight and greedy nature, but none would question their entrepreneurial skills. Indeed, Indian emigrants to more libertarian countries, and now also the native Indians relatively freed from socialist controls, have surprised everyone with their economic success.

It is the British who de-industrialized India, thus dooming it to backwardness and poverty. In order to give some justification to their policy, they fostered the idea of a “spiritual” India, uninterested in material progress. Gandhi proved to be a faithful propagator of this British notion. He also tapped into an anti-modern fashion in the West, where some intellectuals got tired of industrialization and set up autarchic communes.

Although Gandhi led the Freedom Movement, he was also a British loyalist. He volunteered for military service in the Boer War and in the suppression of the Zulu rebellion, and recruited for the British war effort in the First World War. From 1920 onwards, as the formal leader of the Indian National Congress, he got crowds marching but didn’t achieve much in reality. He let his enthusiastic foot-soldiers down. Initially, it was still possible to be both pro-British and pro-Indian, e.g. Annie Besant’s Home Rule League aimed for autonomy (swaraj) within the British Empire, on a par with “grown-up” states like Canada and Australia. In 1929, however, Congress redefined its goal as “complete independence” (purna swaraj). Mass agitation highlighted and popularized this goal, but Gandhi’s subsequent conclusion of a far less ambitious pact with Viceroy Lord Irwin betrayed his own pro-British feelings, not shared by his disappointed younger followers. In 1927, he had indeed blocked a similar resolution for full independence, pleading for dominion status instead. From 1942 onwards, as India’s independence was being prepared, he was relegated to the sidelines. When Prime Minister Clement Attlee finally announced the transfer of power, the memory of Gandhi’s mediagenic mass campaigns was only a “minimal” factor, as he confided later in an interview.

Being a loyalist of a world-spanning empire, Gandhi was at least immune to a rival Western fashion: nationalism. His opponent Vinayak Damodar Savarkar took inspiration from small nations seeking their nationhood, like the Czechs and Irish wanting independence, or Germany and Italy forging their unity, as exemplified by Savarkar’s translation of Giuseppe Mazzini’s book championing Italian nationalism. His “Hindu nation” was numerous enough, but centuries of oppression had given it the psychology of a defensive nation. Gandhi, by contrast, had the outlook of the multinational empire. That helps explain why in 1920 he could become enamoured of the Caliphate movement, defending the Muslim empire from which the Arabs had just freed themselves. It certainly explains his incomprehension for the founding of Hindu nationalist organizations (Hindu Mahasabha 1922, RSS 1925) in reaction against his tragicomical Caliphate agitation.

 

Universalism

In his youth, Gandhi had been influenced by Jain and Vaishnava saints, but as an adult, he mainly took inspiration from Christian writers like Leo Tolstoi and befriended Westerners like architect Hermann Kallenbach. His name was elevated into an international synonym of non-violent agitation by American journalists. It is logical to suspect a direct transmission from the West for his voguish doctrines, like this political non-violence or his slogan of sarva-dharma-samabhava, “equal respect for all religions”.

The marriage of non-violence and political agitation seems an innovative interpretation of Hinduism’s old virtue of Ahimsa. But Hinduism had tended to keep ascetic virtues separate from Raja Dharma, a politician’s duties. When the Jain Oswal community decided to opt for uncomproming Ahimsa, it gave up its Kshatriya status and adopted Vaishya dharma, the bloodless duties of the entrepreneur. The personal practice of virtues was always deemed different from the hard action that politics sometimes necessitates. From the start, Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence was tinged with the Christian ideal of self-sacrifice, of being killed rather than killing. Not that many Christian rulers had ever applied this principle, but at least it existed in certain Gospel passages such as the Sermon on the Mount. When, during the Partition massacres, Gandhi told Hindu refugees to go back to Pakistan and willingly get killed, he did not rely on any principle taught in the wide variety of Hindu scriptures. But in certain exalted Christian circles, it would be applauded.

This is even clearer in Gandhi’s religious version of what Indians call “secularism”, i.e. religious pluralism. This was a growing value in the modern anglosphere. Within Christianity, Unitarianism had set out to eliminate all doctrinal points deemed divisive between Christians, even the fundamental dogma of the Trinity. On the fringes, the Theosophists and Perennialists sought common ground between “authentic” Christianity, Vedicism and “esoteric” Buddhism as expressions of the global “perennial” truth. Gandhi’s contemporary Aldous Huxley juxtaposed the goody-goody points of all religions in a book aptly titled The Perennial Philosophy. Outside the West, this trend was imitated by progressive circles, such as the Bahai reform movement in Iran, harbinger of modern values like egalitarianism and internationalism (e.g. promotor of Esperanto, the linguistic embodiment of the globalist ideal). In India, the British-influenced Brahmo Samaj and Ramakrishna Mission had promoted the idea of a universal religion transcending the existing denominations. Hinduism had always practised pluralism as a pragmatic way to live and let live, but these movements turned it into an ideological dogma.

 

Syrupy

So, Gandhi’s religious pluralism, today his main claim to fame, was essentially  the transposition of a Western ideological fashion. Of Vivekananda, it is routinely claimed that he was besieged by alternative religionists as soon as he set foot in the USA, and that this influence coloured his view and presentation of Hinduism. Gandhi’s worldview too was determined by Western contacts, starting in his student days in England, when he frequented vegetarian eateries, the meeting-place par excellence of various utopians and Theosophists. It must be emphasized that he borrowed from one current in Western culture while ignoring another, viz. the critical questioning of religion. Historical Bible studies had reduced Jesus to a mere accident in human history, neither the Divine incarnation worshiped by Christians nor the spiritual teacher venerated by many Hindus. In the pious Mahatma, this very promising rational approach to religion was wholly absent.   

Hindus themselves are partly to blame, having long abandoned their own tradition of philosophical debate, embracing sentimental devotion instead. This has led to a great flowering of the arts but to a decline in their power of discrimination. Great debaters like Yajnavalkya or Shankara would not be proud to see modern Hindus fall for anti-intellectual soundbites like “equal respect for all religions”. Very Gandhian, but logically completely untenable. For example, Christianity believes that Jesus was God’s Son while Islam teaches that he was merely God’s spokesman: if one is right, the other is wrong, and nobody has equal respect for a true and a false statement (least of all Christians and Muslims themselves). Add to this their common scapegoat Paganism, in India represented by “idolatrous” Hinduism, and the common truth of all three becomes unthinkable. It takes a permanent suspension of the power of discrimination to believe in the syrupy Gandhian syncretism which still prevails in India.

The Mahatma’s outlook was neither realistic nor Indian. Not even the Jain doctrine of Anekantavada, “pluralism”, had been as mushy and anti-intellectual as the suspension of logic that is propagated in India under Gandhi’s name. It could only come about among post-Christian Westerners tired of doctrinal debates, and from their circles, Gandhi transplanted it to India.  

 

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