Fathers killed sons in that long summer of 427 BCE; men were slaughtered at the altars of the gods. “The ancient simplicity into which honour so largely entered,” the warrior-historian Thucydides wrote of the civil war in Corcyra, “was laughed down; society divided into camps and no man trusted his fellow”. “There was neither promise to be depended upon, nor oath that could command respect; all parties dwelling[dwe-ling(home,आवास)] rather in their calculation upon hopelessness as the permanent state of things”.
Thucydides’s evocative[i'vó-ku-tiv(mindful,याद ताजा करने वाला)] description of what happens when peoples go to war with themselves rings true in India, two and a half thousand years on. Mohammed Akhlaq, savagely[sa-vij-lee(brutally,क्रूरतापूर्वक)] killed last month, isn’t the first victim of a mob[mób(crowd,भीड़)] crazed by religious passion. His murder, though, comes amidst[u'midst(among,के बीच)] a widening communal bushfire — and under a government apparently[u'pa-runt-lee(clearly,प्रकट रूप से)] hesitant to put out the flames.
Hopelessness could prove to be our permanent state of things — liberals address the forces that drive this ideological tide.
The defence of India’s republican ideal will need more than nostalgic[nó'stal-jik(desirous,लालायित)] appeals to our supposedly tolerant heritage. Instead, it must engage two key realities: A society terrorised by giant[jI-unt(big,बड़ा)] forces it barely comprehends, and an anaemic[u'nee-mik(weak,कमज़ोर)] state that has contracted out power to practitioners of a toxic identity politics.
“English steam and English free trade,” as Karl Marx noted in his now unfashionable 1853 essay on colonial India, produced a social revolution. Postcolonial industrialisation and then neoliberalism accentuated[ak'sen-choo,eyt(stress,emphasis,जोर देना)] it. From the moment of its birth, India saw warfare between peoples struggling to take control of their upturning words: Savage communal violence, caste conflicts[kón,flikt(battle,विवाद)], ethnic-religious insurgencies[in'sur-jun(t)-see(rebel,विद्रोह)] in Punjab, Kashmir and the Northeast; the criminalisation of the countryside.
For every crisis, there is context: In this case, the bewildering[bi'wil-du(surprising,हक्का बक्का कर देने वाला)] transformation of the basic blocks of the social order. Evidence of a society making an epic transition is everywhere. India is seeing the emergence of a giant cohort['kow,hort(group,समूह)] of dependent elderly at precisely[pri'sIs-lee(exactly,शुद्ध रूप से)] the same time record undereducated young people are struggling to find work. India needs to be creating a million jobs a year; it cut five million in the high-growth years of 2004-05 and 2009-10.
In 1957, the scholar R. Datta Choudhury noted that “the traditional joint family remains, by and large, the most common characteristic of Indian family”. Inside a generation, the demographer J.P. Singh has noted the norm has reversed; even where the joint family exists, he notes, it does so “in a nominal or skeleton form”.
From authority structures within families to the status of women; from the way we bring up children to the way we die — modern capitalism is, inexorably[in'ek-s(u-)ru-bul(continuous,लगातार)], reordering India’s civic life. The strains this generates tie the communal rioter with the ethnic insurgent and the rapist. Each is an instrument of a system of belief that claims to uphold order in dangerous times.
From the experience of states, from South Korea to Cuba, experts know providing services like education and health are key to a successful transition to modernity. The bottomline is, though, that India just doesn’t have the capacities needed to do so.
Figures produced by the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management tell the story. The US federal government has 889 employees per 1,00,000 population; India’s Union government has just 295, overwhelmingly non-executive. Local and state government employees in the US number 6,314 per 1,00,000; Uttar Pradesh has 352; Bihar, 472; even Gujarat, 1,694.
India’s police-population ratio, at 150:1,00,000 population, is similarly anemic, contrasted with the typical levels of over 250:1,00,000 in most Western societies — societies, it bears mention, that are far more orderly. Even India’s ratio of active-duty troops to population, at 1:866, is far below China’s (1:591), Pakistan’s (1:279) and the US’s (1:187). The Indian state has, similarly, no capacity to dispense justice. India has about 1.2 judges per 1,00,000 population, the US, 11, China, 17, Germany, 25, and Slovenia, 39.
For the practice of politics, the anaemia of the state has had practical consequences[kón-si-kwun(t)s(result,परिणाम)]. Power has contracted out to community tyrants[tI-runt(dictator,तानाशाह)], whose kingdoms draw legitimacy from tradition, real or imagined. There’s a reason why ideologically disparate governments have punished so few perpetrators[pur-pu,trey-tu(culprit,अपराधी)] of mass violence: They are, after all, the same people who bring order, and even development, to everyday life. Brutality is essential to the sustenance of these tyrannies: For defining group boundaries; for uniting the people through the act of shedding the blood of enemies; for signalling to the state their power. In time, as history shows us, it leads, inexorably, to warfare.
Liberals cede[seed(surrender,सौप देना)] legitimacy to this toxic politics when they advocate toleration. Had the Bisara mob not killed Akhlaq after all, it would have been practising the virtue of tolerance — and able to claim it, in turn, for its ugly beliefs. This precisely has been adroitly[u'droyt-lee(skillfully,कुशलता से)] deployed by the rightwing in the wake of the killing — violence, they claim, is a consequence of liberal unwillingness to respect religious belief.
For decades now, it’s worth noting, the state has institutionalised tolerance — becoming, in effect, a kind of high inquisitor[in'kwi-zi-tu(interrogater,जाँच अधिकारी)]. Section 295 of the Indian Penal Code allows prosecution of “whoever destroys, damages or defiles any place of worship, or any object held sacred[sey-krid(holy,पवित्र)] by any class”. Section 295 A permits the punishment of whoever “insults or attempts to insult... religion”.
Literature, art, scholarship, and those who create them, have been targeted because of this code of toleration. That people are willing to kill for this cause ought not surprise, for the law long ago conceded[kun'seed(admit,मानना)] that a man who eats a cow is a danger to the people.
For an idea to be legitimate in a republic, its foundations must rest on reason — not beliefs. Liberals have long sought accommodation with tradition and faith. Plural societies, though, can only be built by interrogating our most cherished beliefs: Religions are ideas and, like all ideas, must be questioned.
India needs a new modernism — a project that will be fraught and dangerous. “We live in a difficult time,” the scholar John Verges wrote to the great humanist Desiderius Erasmus in the midst of the Inquisition, “it is dangerous either to speak or be silent”. The price of tolerating what is, though, will be the death of our republic.
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