"India is an idea whose time has come," declared Indian Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh recently. The lofty statement, tailor-made for diplomatic
conference rooms, suggests that India has emerged as a mature democracy and
major nation state on the global stage. It also snarls with a hidden barb for
Pakistan - India's erstwhile rival that has fallen on hard times.
Most crucially, it trumpets the status of a US protégé. Since the fall of the
Soviet Union in the late 1980s, India has progressively moved into the US
orbit. With 9/11, the strategic objectives of India, Israel, and the United States
have steadily merged, leading to the emergence of a de facto triumvirate. In
diplomatic rhetoric, US-India relations are called the alliance of the two
democracies - suggesting a kind of equivalence between the two societies'
institutional framework. In a recent speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center,
Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao attributed India's political traditions to
a US fountainhead.
"It was therefore no accident that the Constitution that India adopted in 1950
was also inspired in great measure by the ideals of freedom, equality and
justice that formed the bedrock of the United States Constitution," she
declared. And like the script for a Hollywood/Bollywood romantic comedy,
union of the two states was deferred by various machinations and
misunderstandings. "Yet, for several decades after our independence, relations
between our two democracies failed to realize their potential because of
estrangements derived from the atmosphere of the Cold War and its
manifestations in our region," said Ms. Rao.
This bit of political amnesia is characteristic of India's modern statecraft.
Fantastically, these words wipe out the long struggle against British
colonialism that gave birth to both India and Pakistan. The statement recasts
the Indian state as a replication of the American successor to British empire,
blithely ignoring the bloodbaths that accompanied the struggle to boot the
British out of the subcontinent.
This brings us to the question, what kind of idea is India? Or rather, whose
idea is it? From this perspective, Ms. Rao's obsequiousness is quite revelatory.
Post-Cold War India and its transformation has been a test case of US
democracy - the 200-year old ideology with all its masks, pretensions, and
theatricalities. As India follows the gym routine of the prevailing Mr. Universe
- picture here a balding, rheumatoid-stricken Uncle Sam with
Schwarzenegger-esque muscles, posing in a Speedo - we are given a
fascinating window into the warts and victories of the American democratic
project.
There is a sacred bond at the heart of the American project - the tie uniting
capitalism and democracy is as intrinsic as that uniting hydrogen and oxygen
in H2O. The dream of universal suffrage serves to mask one incontrovertible
fact - the modern state is designed to protect the wealthy and guarantee the
flow of resources to a gold-plated elite class. As Adam Smith noted in The
Wealth of Nations, "Civil government, so far it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or
of those who have some property against those who have none at all." After its
neoliberal upgrade in the 1970s and 1980s, as advocated by the philosophies
of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, American democracy has
steadily loosened the safeguards on social and environmental exploitation.
This result: a mushroom cloud of economic disparity that has blasted the
famed American middle class out of existence.
After opening up to the United States in the late 1980s, India has
transformed itself in the former's image. All the macro and micro-economic
numbers look impressive, with enormous wealth entering the country through
foreign investment and global business relationships welding Indian
telecommunications, textiles, and technology to Europe and American
markets. India is anointed as globalization's poster child, the proof that proper
application of neoliberal economic principles will lead to power and clout.
Yet, the social space tells a far grimmer story.
While islands of liquid wealth congeal in Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore's
elite regions, India's agricultural regions and broader urbanscapes are
desiccating under the thorny hand of poverty. Since the 1980s, the Indian
government has drastically cut its investment in agriculture - land holdings are
rapidly concentrating in the hands of large landlords, turning the small,
independent peasants into landless laborers or industrial drudges.
And while the superhighway of India's economy ought to transport the
enterprising urban poor into economic sufficiency Slumdog Millionaire style,
the fact remains that there are meager social services to support them in a
decent manner. For instance, a recent study ranked India's public health care
and nutritional programs below sub-Saharan Africa. The technocrats and
industrial magnates who rent out Versailles for their daughters' weddings, and
even the middle class floating on the bubble of multinational corporate
investment, overshadow the ghostly class of the dispossessed.
There is a name for the waves of migrants pouring into cities as mining
interests devour tribal lands, port construction decimates fishermen's
livelihoods, and dams submerge farmland: development refugees. These join
Muslims who are being dispossessed by the Hinduization of India's
development. Several Indian investigations, including the respected Gopal Das
and Justice Sachar reports, reveal that India's 160 million Muslims are India's
most disenfranchised population - their economic and cultural segregation is
ghettoizing them from the flow of resources, power, and even respectability.
"Muslims are the new untouchables" is a familiar tag line these days.
Democracy has always had a schizophrenic relationship with religion. The
excesses of Catholicism and the militancy of Protestantism inflamed Europe's
Enlightenment, the intellectual movement that deposed God and instituted
humanism on the ashes of theology. The acme of the Enlightenment's liberal
secularism was the American Revolution, which produced the US
government's Lockean Constitution. Religion was distanced to the outlands of
national life. Yet, like a secret marriage, it remained bonded to politics.
Religion has helped ameliorate the excesses of the liberal state, and has even
been used to transmute the effects of state violence into further political
capital. Let's illustrate. Throughout US history, puritanical and millennial
movements have hit the social landscape in waves, fueled by a political system
that strips the people to endow the elite class with more wealth. For instance,
the rise of religious right in the 1970s and 1980s was fueled by the destruction
of the labor class, as industrial jobs moved to India and China on the dictates
of the CEOs and Wall Street. The neoconservatives reaped the bounty of mass
impoverishment. In fact, their political support of evangelical churches, to
which the broken-hearted people turned, gave them popular power to achieve
their political goals.
The rise of political fascism is also part of the "idea" of India. The spectre of
communalism, particularly Hindu-Muslim violence, is traced to the increasing
power of the Sangh Parivar, a group of organizations weaving violence into
India's social and political fabric. The BJP, one of India's two national parties,
is the Sangh Parivar's political wing and translates the exclusive blend of
racism and class elitism called Hindutva into law. Roughly translated,
Hindutva means Hinduness as the core of national identity.
Visions of India as a Hindu dreamscape operate at the Muslims' expense, as
illustrated by the 1992 massacres accompanying the destruction of the Babri
mosque (December 6, 1992), though Christians, Parsis and other minorities
have also been victimized. In Orissa, one of India's poorest states, militant
Hindus have organized cleansing pogroms for Christians, burning down 180
churches and 4,500 homes.
Social polarization in India is fueling the religious right; the state and its
patrons find it expeditious to deflect economic pain onto racial hatreds. In
other words, the elites benefit, just as Orange County millionaires politically
cash in on desperate Midwestern farmers in the US.
No surprise then that India's economic growth is vivifying the caste system,
projecting untouchable status on Muslims, Christians, and Parsis even as the
dalits are grudgingly admitted to the fold. The RSS's ideology of Hindutva is
popularizing only one of the religions folded under the broad term,
"Hinduism" - specifically, the most caste-conscious of them all, Sanatana
Dharma. This only formalizes India's transformation of its religious elite, the
Brahmins, into the political elect.
Indian conservatism too has a European precedent. B.S. Moonje, the mentor
of RSS founder K.B. Hedgewar, visited Italy and was an ardent admirer of
Mussolini's brand of fascism. In fact, the RSS's social structure was modeled
on Mussolini's Nationalist Socialism, with an emphasis on radicalization and
military training for the youth. "This twin trope of self-defense and a lost
manhood that is in need of recovery are part of the daily rhetoric of Hindutva,"
Professor Biju Mathew notes pithily.
Even as Mughal landmarks are commercialized into tourist hot spots, the
Brahmin elites are conducting psychological warfare against India's Muslims,
using the political rhetoric of terrorism to channel grassroots aggression
marshaled by the RSS.
There are older echoes of European history in this procedure. "A study of the
Ruling Class policies reveals that it has great similarity with the one followed
by Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain," noted an editorial in the Dalit Voice
Newsletter about India's de-Islamicization of its social landscape. "The only difference is that the Hindu upper castes are more sharp and sophisticated
because of the limitations imposed in the 20th century by the checks
exercisable by the United Nations Human Rights Charter and international
public opinion."
The trick to nationalism is that it is always attended by an advantageous
confusion over the nation's proper borders. Manifest Destiny - the creed that
history itself is authorizing the expansion of the nation's sphere of influence -
perpetually arms democracy with guns and cannons (or missiles).
Let's turn again to the American archive. Still fresh from its revolutionary
zeal to prove the moral evil of British exploitation, the young United States
announced the Monroe Doctrine in 1823: its declaration of imperial authority
over all of Latin America. It made good on its promise too. The 1980s were a
particularly gruesome chapter in Latin American history, with US sponsored
coups, drug wars, and death squads cowing the continent to accept NAFTA's
economic liberalization. The "varied carols of America" that Walt Whitman so
tenderly praised sounded an awful lot like gunshots south of the border. Critics
and activists agree that Manifest Destiny turned Latin America into a US
bordello.
Similarly, as part of the American-Israeli axis, India's geopolitical designs
could hardly limit themselves to its own political boundaries or even those of
its subcontinental neighbors. Over the past few years, India has revealed the
scope of its own Manifest Destiny: it has been positioning itself as a power
player on that beleaguered Eurasian chessboard, Afghanistan. The platform to
the resource-rich Middle East and Africa, and the nexus of pipeline routes
exporting Central Asian oil to powerful markets, Afghanistan is the key to
world dominance in the 21st century.
As US General Stanley McChrystal noted in a confidential report to Barack
Obama, "Indian political and economic influence is increasing in Afghanistan,
including significant development efforts and financial investment." India has
constructed four consulates in Afghanistan, which Pakistan has charged are
operating as spy bases for Indian intelligence to launch covert operations in
Pakistan's province of Baluchistan. In addition, there are more than 4,000
Indian workers and security personnel working on different aid and
reconstruction projects in Afghanistan. India is also poised to deploy its troops
in the region, accelerating the area's militarization. Pakistan has charged India
with supporting the Afghan warlords who are destroying Afghan civil society
in contract to the nations attempting to subjugate the Afghans to their master
plans for the region.
The US pattern of terror, death, and coercion of Afghan civilians is not even
in past-tense - the pattern for all "great nation" operations in the region.
How then should we understand India as democracy's newest dream?
Democracy is a mask, a disguise employed in the theatre of a 400-year old
idea - the modern European nation state. After the excesses of the American
project, there is surely no need to wait for a new harvest of violence and
disenfranchisement in the Indian subcontinent. There can be little surprises to
the outcome of the Indian nation state, as it sets out to attain its dream of
political glory. But let's take a sneak peek. The conflagration of nationalization
is denaturing South Asian civil society. The composite culture, the region's
rich aesthetic imagination embroidered by both Hindus and Muslims has been evaporating under communal hatred measuring 451 Farenheit. Islam is being
erased to an echo, a dream of a dream east of the Indus. It looks equally grim
for the Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan, regions that India has
appropriated under its footprint.
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