India

by Shashi Tharoor

  The fact that the principal reason for entering Parliament (or a state assembly) is to attain governmental office poses two problems. First, it limits executive posts to those who are electable rather than to those who are able. Second, it puts a premium, in India’s political culture, on defections and horse-trading. The Anti-Defection Law of 1984 was necessary because in many states (and, after 1979, at the Center) parliamentary floor-crossing had become a popular pastime, with lakhs of rupees, and many ministerial posts, changing hands. Now musical chairs is an organized sport, with “party splits” instead of defections, and for much the same motives.

  Worse, in the states, the parliamentary system permitted the perversion of the popular will by its potential for manipulation from the Center. Chief ministers have notoriously been imposed by New Delhi upon state governments formed by the ruling party, without reference to the electorate or indeed to the state legislators themselves. One result has been endemic bickering and “dissidence,” with legislators rushing off to the capital to intrigue against a chief minister who can be brought down just as easily by central fiat. Another has been — at least in three states — a resort to extraconstitutional methods to force change. Genuine autonomy would have eliminated the basis for secessionism; as the United States knows all too well, strong local governments are the bedrock of national democracy. The disrepute into which the political process has fallen in India, and the widespread cynicism about its pretensions to federalism, can be traced directly to the workings of the parliamentary system.

  So can much of India’s political corruption. In the states it emerges from the need to keep legislators happy in order to remain in power, and in the Center from the need to finance not just a national election campaign but 542 local ones, all costing several times the legal limit. As a result the honest politician is as rare as unadulterated milk, and just as difficult for the system to digest.

  How is all this relevant to the challenges identified in this book? The parliamentary system in India has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legislate, who has sought election in order to wield (or influence) executive power. It has produced governments more skilled at politics than at policy or performance. It has distorted the voting preferences of an electorate that knows which individuals it wants, but not necessatily which policies. It has permitted parties that are shifting alliances of individuals rather than vehicles of coherent sets of ideas. It has subverted federalism by reducing the autonomy of state leaders (though this has changed with the 1996 elections). It has promoted nationwide corruption, and it now threatens national instability. We must transform it.

  The case for a presidential system of either the French or the American style has never been clearer. A directly elected chief executive in New Delhi would have stability of tenure free from legislative whim, would be able to appoint a cabinet of talents, and, above all, would be able to devote his or her energies to governance, and not just to government. The Indian voter will be able to vote directly for the individual he wants to be ruled by, and the president will truly be able to claim to speak for a majority of Indians rather than for a majority of MPs. To offset the temptation for a national president to become all powerful, and to give real substance to the decentralization essential for a country of India’s size, an executive chief minister or governor should also be directly elected in each of the states. Those who reject a presidential system on the grounds that it might lead to dictatorship may be assured that their fears are misplaced; Mrs. Gandhis brief stint of Emergency rule proved that the parliamentary system confers no immunity from tyranny, and the powers of the president would, in any case, be balanced by those of the directly elected chief executives in the states.

  * * *

  Change must come to India. In one sphere it has already come: the opening up of the economy inaugurated by former prime minister Narasimha Rao has released long-pent-up creative energies that — with sufficient foreign investment and credit — can still transform India into, if not another Asian tiger, at least the missing lynx. The frustrations of unemployment are the cause and the fuel for many of India’s political extremists; a growing, unshackled economy would provide them more productive outlets for their aspirations. The advantages of a common Indian market are also a powerful antidote to secessionism — once each state has the political autonomy and the economic freedom to take advantage of its benefits.

  Political change is also inevitable. When, in the wake of the 1996 elections, I wrote in The New York Times that the increasing decentralization they portended might not be a bad thing for India, a Yugoslav diplomat at the United Nations came up to me, his brow furrowed in concern. “I have served in India,” he said, “and I liked your article. Except for one thing. Don’t encourage all this talk of decentralization. It is dangerous. Believe me, I know what I am talking about. Don’t make the mistakes we made.” I thanked him for his concern, but remain convinced that there is too much holding India together for that change to take the form of a Soviet- or Yugoslav-style balkanization. Yet the evident failings of die current way of running things point clearly in the direction I have outlined above — toward a system for making pluralism work better. The alternatives are either chaos or an order imposed by force (which eventually leads to chaos).

  Indian solutions are already being found in India and by Indians. The proliferation of human rights groups, women’s groups, groups organizing the rural peasantry for purposes ranging from the ecological to the gynecological, all testify to the way in which democracy has acquired greater content at the grassroots. Our future depends on our ability to educate our children, develop the potential of Indian women, provide opportunities to the historically underprivileged, diminish unproductive conflict between communities, and prevent the abuse of the human rights of our fellow citizens. All this is happening, and it is happening from within. Outsiders can help, but the good they do could easily be outweighed by the baggage they carry: a country still recovering from two hundred years of colonial rule does not take kindly to criticism by foreigners. The best kind of change is that which comes from within, and Indians are changing, meeting Indian aspirations, raising Indian standards in all these fields.

  There are grounds for hope, but not for certitude. At least it can be said that India’s destiny lies in the hands of Indians. They might seize it with the vision of a new India of revivified pluralism, an India that accommodates vast diversities and is yet greater than the sum of its contradictions. Or — for India is also capable of this — its fate might be decided by the petty calculations of those who only know how to manipulate the system for short-term gain. Satyameva Jayaté, says our national motto: “Truth Always Triumphs.” But no one knows which truth it will be.

  When I published The Great Indian Novel in 1989, I surprised many friends by my concluding emphasis on dharma, an ancient concept that I have occasionally translated in the present volume as “faith.”

  But “faith” conveys only a small portion of its meaning. Dharma is perhaps unique in being an untranslatable Sanskrit term that is, nonetheless, cheerfully defined as a normal, unitalicized entry in an English dictionary. The definition offered in Chambers Twentieth-Century Dictionary is “the righteousness that underlies the law; the law.” While this is a definite improvement on the one-word translation offered in many an Indian Sanskrit primer (“religion”), it still does not convey the full range of meaning implicit in the term. “English has no equivalent for dharma,” writes P. Lal in the glossary to his “transcreation” of the Mahabharata, in which he defines dharma as “code of good conduct, pattern of noble living, religious rules and observance.”

  My friend Ansar Hussain Khan, author of the polemical Rediscovery of India, suggests that dharma is most simply defined as “that by which we live.” Yes — but “that” embraces a great deal. An idea of the immensity and complexity of the concept of dharma may be conveyed by the fact that, in his superb analytical study of Indian culture and society, The
Speaking Tree, Richard Lannoy defines dharma in at least nine different ways depending on the context in which he uses the term — from “Moral Law” to “righteousness.” Lannoy also quotes Betty Heimann’s 1937 work Indian and Western Philosophy: A Study in Contrasts: “Dharma is total cosmic responsibility, including God’s, a universal justice far more inclusive, wider and profounder than any western equivalent, such as ‘duty.’”

  I mention dharma again because it may be the key to bridging the present gap between the religious and the secular in India. The social scientist T. N. Madan has argued that the increasing secularization of modern Indian life is paradoxically responsible for the rise of fundamentalism, since “it is the marginalization of faith, which is what secularism is, that permits the perversion of religion. There are no fundamentalists or revivalists in traditional society.” The implication is that secularism has deprived Indians of their moral underpinnings — the meaning that faith gives to life — and fundamentalism has risen as an almost inevitable Hegelian antithesis to the secular project. The only way out of this dilemma is for Hindus to return to dharma — to the tolerant, holistic, just, pluralist Hinduism articulated so effectively by Swami Vivekananda.

  I do not believe, in any case, that there is a clear-cut distinction between the religious and the secular in Hinduism. Some scholars of Hinduism argue that India has not traditionally accepted the notion of a separation between dharma and moksha (salvation), on the one hand, and the secular values of artha (wealth) and kama (pleasure) on the other. The Hindu’s secular pursuit of material happiness is not meant to be divorced from his obedience to the ethical and religious tenets of his faith, which makes the distinction between “religious” and “secular” an artificial one; there is no such compartmentalization in Hinduism. The secularism avowed by successive Indian governments, argues Professor R. S. Misra of Benares Hindu University, is based on dharma-nirpekshata (“keeping apart from dharma”), whereas an authentically Indian ethic would ensure that secular objectives are infused with dharma.

  I find this view persuasive but incomplete. Yes, dharma is essential in the pursuit of material well-being, public order, and good governance; but this should not mean turning public policy over to sants and sadhus, or excluding any section of Indian society from its rightful place in the Indian sun. If we can bring dharma into our national life, it must be to uphold, rather than at the expense of, Indianness. Secularists are reproached not so much for their modernism as for their lack of a sense of their place in the grand Indian continuum, their lack of dharma. In my view, to live in dharma is to live in harmony with one’s purposes on earth, not necessarily in a traditional way. Dharma today must accompany doubt and diversity; it must accept that there is more than one Truth, more than one Right, more than one dharma.

  Contradictory? Hinduism has always acknowledged the existence of opposites (and reconciled them): pain and pleasure, success and failure, creation and destruction, life and death, are all manifestations of the duality inherent in human existence. These pairings are not contradictory but complementary; they are aspects of the same overarching reality. So also with the secular and the sacred: a Hindu’s life must involve both. Indian thought has always assumed that new beliefs are inserted into old ones, rather than set up in opposition to them, which is why philosophical, ideological, and even religious challenges to Hinduism have simply been absorbed into the faith over millennia. New ideas emerging from new experiences refresh and alter the traditional ideas based on old experiences, but do not replace them. One does not have to believe in a cyclical view of history to accept the Upanishadic idea of the constant rebirth of the timeless. India is arguably the oldest continuing civilization in the world, one that, in essence, has throughout remained connected to, and conscious of, its own antiquity (whereas Greeks, Egyptians, and Persians had to rediscover or reinvent a past from which history had ruptured them). Secularism can only be effective when reconciled with, and assimilated into, this continuing civilization.

  In an essay in the London Athenaeum in 1915, Ananda Coomaraswamy responded defiantly to the challenges posed by modernity to India’s essential identity by enunciating a universal proposition:

  Each race contributes something essential to the world’s civilization in the course of its own self-expression and self-realization. The character built up in solving its own problems, in the experience of its own misfortunes, is itself a gift which each offers to the world. The essential contribution of India, then, is simply her Indianness; her great humiliation would be to substitute or to have substituted for this own. character (svabhava) a cosmopolitan veneer, for then indeed she must come before the world empty-handed.

  Or, as Yeats would have it, hollow-hearted. If the “cosmopolitan veneer” of secularism were indeed a substitute for all that is worth cherishing in Indianness, our hands would be empty indeed. But if it infused our Indianness as our Indianness infuses our worldliness, that would be a triumph. This is what our secular parties need to learn if they are to combat effectively the threat of the Hindu resurgence.

  I, too, am proud of my Hinduism; I do not want to cede its verities to fanatics. To discriminate against another, to attack another, to kill another, to destroy another’s place of worship, on the basis of his faith is not part of my dharma, as it was not part of Vivekananda’s. It is time to go back to these fundamentals of Hinduism. It is time to take Hinduism back from the fundamentalists.

  * * *

  “Anyone who wants to understand the modern world,” wrote William Rees-Mogg in the London Times on March 11, 1996, “must make a personal passage to India, which has the deepest and most resilient culture of the four likely economic superpowers of the next century, more stable and politically advanced than China, not yet denatured by the modernism of the United States and Europe.” Rees-Mogg sees the continuity of India’s traditions as its greatest strength while predicting for it the status of an economic superpower in the twenty-first century. Neither thought would have occurred to most Indians.

  Such predictions may be unduly optimistic. Rees-Mogg’s calculation was based on the premise of 7 percent growth in India until 2025, against 2.5 percent growth in the “mature economies,” giving India, the United States, and the European Union the same GDP in thirty years. (China, by the same projection, would be much bigger than any of the three.) But his analysis rested implicitly on a confident answer to the central dilemmas posed in my introduction to this book: Indian democracy, he concluded, has “solved the constitutional problem” and so will be able to manage the inevitable processes of political change and economic growth. I believe that, provided Indians keep the faith, he may well be right.

  The questions with which I began this book are not merely academic debates; as I recalled in the introduction, they are now being enacted on the national and world stage, and the choices we make will determine the kind of India the youth of today will inherit in the twenty-first century. John Kenneth Galbraith once spoke of India being in a state of “suspenseful indecision.” As India celebrates its sixtieth year of independence, the time has come to end the suspense and decide.

  I believe that, yes, Indians will stand for democracy, openness, tolerance, freedom.

  Yes, democracy can be unbearably inefficient, but efficiency without democracy can be simply unbearable.

  Yes, regionalist decentralization could be dangerous, but devolution of power — accepting that answers to every question in Dharwar are not necessarily found in Delhi — can strengthen democracy rather than dilute it. In many ways the United Front coalition represents a reaffirmation of the aggregative style of the Indian nationalist movement, which had been denatured by the centralism of Indira Gandhi.

  Yes, we are not by nature a secular people — religion plays too large a part in our daily lives for that — but Indian secularism should mean letting every religion flourish, rather than privileging one above the rest, while ensuring that the tradition of dharma infuses both public policy and private conduct
. After all, there are too many diversities in our land for any one version of reality to be imposed on all of us. Hinduism is a civilization, not a dogma. Worse, the version propagated by the proponents of Hindutva resembles nothing so much as the arguments for the creation of Pakistan, of which Indian nationalism is the living repudiation. Hindu resurgence is the mirror image of the Muslim communalism of 1947; its rhetoric echoes the bigotry that India was constructed to reject. Its triumph would mark the end of India, and that, I am convinced, Indians will not let happen.

  And finally, yes, we can drink Coca-Cola without becoming Coca-colonized. I do not believe that Indians will become any less Indian if, in Mahatma Gandhi’s metaphor, we open the doors and windows of our country and let foreign winds blow through our house. Our popular culture has proved resilient enough to compete successfully with MTV and McDonald’s; there is probably a greater prospect of our music and movies corrupting foreign youth, especially in other Asian and African countries and among subconti nental expatriate communities in the developed world, than of the reverse. Besides, the strength of “Indianness” has always lain in its ability to absorb foreign influences and to transform them by a peculiarly Indian alchemy into something that belongs naturally on the soil of India. The language in which this book is being published in India is just one example of this.