Combining Bhakti with Power
Some liberal Hindus and Muslims have been highly critical of what I have written on the demolition of the Babri structure and related issues since December 6. They expect that I define my position on the question of the place of Muslims in India. Even if I ignore the implicit insinuation (and in some cases explicit) in it, the suggestion is misplaced. I see myself as an analyst of developments and not as a grand architect, or an ideologue, of an ideal India.
Indeed, I distrust ideologies and ideologues. My main difficulty, however, is with the idiom in which the public discourse has been conducted in our country for over seven decades, that is, since the ascendancy of the Gandhi-Nehru leadership in the freedom movement. 1 would describe it as the liberal-Marxist-Gandhian idiom. Pandit Nehru has been the foremost expression and user of this idiom and he continues to dominate our discourse even in death.
This proposition must come as a surprise to most readers. For, Pandit Nehru has generally been regarded as a liberal and a Marxist and not as a Gandhian. Indeed, the popular perception of him is that he was opposed to the Gandhian approach. There is some merit in this view as far as issues like the place of village industry vis-à-vis large industry is concerned. But there was a deeper identity of approach between two leaders which explains why Gandhiji designated Pandit Nehru as his successor.
Western thinkers had merged liberalism and Marxism to produce the theory of democratic socialism and in the process emasculated both. It was in fashion under the title of Fabianism in Britain when Pandit Nehru was a young student there. He just picked it up.
Democratic Socialism
He did not have to struggle too hard to accommodate Gandhism is his democratic socialism either. Even when he was alive, Gandhi ji’s own close lieutenants had divested Gandhian thought and practice of dynamism resulting from the Mahatma’s own immersion in Sanatan Dharma and reduced it to a programme of social action and reform. So diminished it could not have escaped being subsumed by the powerful liberal-Marxist thought current which claimed to address the same questions of social reforms and justice.
In terms of will power, Gandhi ji was doubtless one of the finest examples India has ever produced. But there is no evidence to show that he grasped the need for, and logic of, state power. Not to speak of his critics, he saw himself as a Ram Bhakt. But he was a Bhakt not of Ram in his totality, that is of Ram the warrior also, but of Ram as Purushottam Purusha, that is of Ram who set the ideal for ethical life.
This aspect of Gandhiji’s personality and of the idiom he used and popularised has been ignored. As a result, it is generally not realised that Bhakti uninterested in the power dimension of life has informed the thinking of educated Indians for centuries.
Spiritual Currents
As one of many constituents of Indian spirituality before Muslim invasions and rule, Bhakti was one proposition; it was then accompanied by other spiritual currents as well as extensive search for, and exercise of, state power. As a dominant current under Muslim rule, more often than not extremely harsh and debilitating, it assumed an altogether different significance. It doubtless helped protect Hindu culture in extremely difficult circumstances, even if in an emasculated and rigid form. But it also promoted escapism as a way of life.
This is well illustrated by the fact that the crippling ‘ideals’ of poverty, austerity, indifference to social reality and power came to be widely cherished. The Bhakti movement became both an expression and an instrument of fragmentation of the Hindu vision and personality. As a result excessive emphasis came to be placed on certain aspects earlier meant not for householders but for renounces and ascetics.
Muslim power did not sit easily on rural India. No Muslim ruler even acquired the capacity either to disarm the peasantry or destroy local leaders. And vast and thick forests provided excellent terrain for guerrilla warfare. The British raj managed to disarm the peasantry, destroy large forests, and make the local leaders dependent on it for their very survival. The Bhakti psychology was thus powerfully reinforced.
This psychology explains the easy acceptance by the urban Hindu elite of the alien concepts of liberalism and Marxism. As noted earlier, their merger to constitute the theory of democratic socialism involved the emasculation of both. Since this is not a familiar proposition, some additional observations would be in order.
No serious student of history of ideas in the West will deny that liberalism is anti-power and anti-state in its origins and essence. Its concern is the mythical individual torn out of the social fabric. While it could, in the name of that nonexistent individual, help ‘legitimise’ private greed arid economic growth as an offshoot of that greed, socialism of whatever variety must inevitably deny it that role.
Socialism too is anti-state in its origins and essence. It is a child of utopianism and a twin brother of anarchism which liberalism as the philosophic foundation of capitalism must in its turn, seek to frustrate. The Marxist concept of dictatorship of the proletariat would have remained the meaningless prattle it was if Lenin had not conceived of and built an army of professional revolutionaries and subordinated that army called the Communist party to his will. This was a case of total inversion of the original idea. That kind of concentration of power is negation of power and not its fulfilment.
Indian intellectual’s life has not overcome this troublesome legacy 45 years after the achievement of independence and the ‘exercise’ of state power in fulfilment of responsibilities that must devolve on rulers of a country. The magnitude of corruption, a euphemism for abuse of public authority and resources for personal ends from top to bottom of the state machinery, is one consequence of that legacy. Other more readily intelligible illustrations belong to the field of foreign policy and defence.
Twin Theories
Only a leader lacking in sense of history and recognition of the logic of power could ridicule the twin theories of power vacuum and balance of power and only an elite similarly handicapped could endorse him. Similarly, only a political leadership contemptuous of Kshatriya values could keep out service chiefs from the formulation of the country’s defence policy and its implementation. It is just inconceivable that our chiefs would be able to exercise the kind of influence General Collin Powell has been seen to do in respect of the Gulf war and the deployment of US forces in Somalia. He determined the level of force and equipment he would require before he would act and President Bush complied.
Right or wrong, this is my view of the idiom of the Indian public discourse and should help make intelligible my rejection of it. This would also explain my difficulty in discussing the Muslim problem in a manner which is accessible to my readers. Even so 1 shall try next time. Meanwhile, if I have acted as an iconoclast, it is only because it cannot be helped if the deck is to be cleared for a meaningful debate.
The Times of India, 30 December 1992