Indian Core Values

04-22-2005, 06:33 AM

rajesh_g wrote:
QUOTEConsider the question, is India mainly oral tradition ?

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050407/as...519797.asp


I think that is probably a question for historians.
I think a more significant question, and one which the above article touches on, is:
Is Indian thought less precise in comparison to other civilizations. Is there any traditional discipline that has anywhere near the level of precision required by say modern science? My feeling is that it is only in the past few centuries that India has been exposed to the kind of precision seen in modern science. Any counter-examples?

My sister, an architect, is fond of saying "Indians have no clue how to build (physical livable structures)." or words to that effect. Is she right <!--emo& Big Grin

--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' />. A complex building takes a lot of precise preplanning and thought, not merely throwing a pile of bricks together. Aside from temple architecture, is there anything that demonstates Indian capabilities in this direction? I seem to recall having read somewhere that anything halfway decent was because of Greek influence.

QUOTECommenting on the inordinate length of our Supreme Court judgments, Nani Palkhivala had once observed that they give clear evidence of the Indian preoccupation with eternity and infinity.

<!--emo& Big Grin

--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' />

Regards,
Sandeep.

04-22-2005, 07:27 AM

very perceptive post(the one commenting on NC) , Sandeep. Gives rise to some thoughts which i will vent in due course after crystalllizing them

04-22-2005, 11:58 AM

Sandeep (and others),

Professor Balu has been doing research in related area(s). He runs a yahoo group on the book that he has come out with. Here is one post from their group from Satya (one of IF members)..

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheHeathenIn...ess/message/478

QUOTEFollowing a short exchange on the nature of science with Jakob last year, I have been pondering about the nature of knowledge in pagan and religious cultures. I would like to see if the members of this group have any thoughts or reaction on the matter.

It seems to me that if we agree that culture is a 'configuration of learning', then we could expect culture to have a profound effect on our conception of what knowledge is. Diverse cultures might be expected to have different attitudes about knowledge, different notions about what exactly constitutes knowledge, and probably different approaches towards accumulating it.

Professor Balu has said in the past (if I understood properly) that science, as we know it, could not have arisen without religion. I have no basis to quarrel with this assertion, but it has always surprised me how religion (in which a ready made explanation of the entire Cosmos is self-contained) could possibly spur the production of - or give rise to - any new knowledge about the Universe. (If God
created the Universe in Seven Days, and we all know that because he revealed that truth to us, why should we be at all interested in how, say a galaxy was formed?) Yet, it seems obvious, that Western science has done exactly that at a rapid clip.

My question is - does anybody else perceive such a paradox? If not, why not? If so, do you have any thoughts on how to reconcile said paradox?

*************

I was listening to a program on the radio a few weeks ago, which commemorated the journey of Lewis & Clark, who explored the American wilderness with a Native guide, Sakagewa. Lewis & Clark catalogued many thousands of species of plants in their journeys. The radio host raised the issue - given the sheer number of new plants they were encountering, how did they decide which ones were most important to catalogue and sample?

It seems the decisions were guided by the knowledge of the natives. It was they who pointed out the plants that were important or useful either medicinally or for other uses.

Lewis and Clark are hailed as making a landmark contribution to Botanical Science in America, one that apparently serves as a basis even today. But it seems, when you dig below the surface, that they were in many cases, merely compiling knowledge that already existed amongst the Natives.

This led me to wonder: are there any instances of the same in other fields?

I know for instance that, maybe a hundred years before Western science postulated germ theory, an ancient surgical method to repair nasal fractures was transplanted from India to the West. The West, at the time, lacked the knowhow to repair nasal fractures. The Indian method (it still bears this name, I believe), utilized
antiseptic and cautery techniques that improved the success rate. Even though Harvey had already demonstrated the human circulatory system, the West had not figured out that the skin flap grafted over the wound required an adequate circulation.

The Indian method, sans Harvey, took this into account.

Even though Western medical science can explain why the Indian method was successful, it is unclear what logic ancient Indian surgeons used to arrive at their technique, which is still the one in use today.

My point is that non-religious (or pagan) cultures must have their own methods of pursuing knowledge. And since they are different from cultures influenced by religion, these methods could be expected to be very different from what we see in the West.

Has there been any study of what those methods are and how they differ from Western science?

--Satya


To which Jochem replied..

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheHeathenIn...ess/message/480

QUOTEHi Satya,

I do not have an answer to your last question, viz. the question about different kinds/methods of knowledge production. I suspect that this is a barren territory and that the research done so far in these fields will fail in providing any satisfactory explanations.

To give you an example: we still do not know how the Romans managed to build all those magnificent temples, theaters, aquaducts, etc.. There were no architects, civil engineers neither was there the technology or scientific know-how of today. If you read the famous "On Architecture" of Vitruvius you will still not know how they did it.

(http://www.ukans.edu/history/index/europ.../home.html)

Modern day archeology offers analysis and interpretation, and I suppose we could copy say a Roman temple or aquaduct. But how did they do it remains (largely) unanswered. Clearly they had the knowledge necessary to build those incredible edifices, but it is doubtful wether it is the same knowledge we apply in our architecture of today.

I wonder what your impression is of the first chapter of Vitruvius' text. Here he sums up the requisites for being a good architect. I think it gives a hint of the differences between the (cognitive) prerequisites for e good Roman architect and a contemporary (Western one).

With regard to you first question I have to say I do not see the paradox. What religion does is promote a certain attitude, it molds one's experience of the world, it makes the world into something explanatorily intelligible. Of course, a particular religion offers a particular account of the cosmos, and one could accept that to be the end to it- why question what has been answered beforehand? But one's knowledge of Gods intentions is always limited. We are but human, our knowledge is necessarily perspectival (being part and parcel of the cosmos), tentative, and hypothetical. Therefore, God's total and ultimate truth (i.e. an EI account of everything that ever
was, is and shall be) is unattainable for humans. In the best case (a part of) this truth is revealed, but in most of the cases one is destined to search for Gods intentions, in both the scripture (being the word of God) an in the world (being His creation and thus an expression of His intentions). Therefore, when it comes to the
divine truth, we are stuck at the level of interpretation. Hence, the offshoot of heresies, the phenomenon of excommunication, etc.

Religion generates a configuration of learning. This means that it provides a fertile soil for some kinds of knowledges to prosper, while others wither away. Scientific knowledge has thus been privileged in the West. Science has found a fertile soil and in religion it has the perfect example of what an explanation should do.

Why scientific knowledge has emerged in the renaissance and has subsequently progressed so rapidly should probably be rephrased in terms of the double dynamic of religion. I have no idea how to go about that. Would you like to have a go at that? In the mean time is the above explanation clear enough?

Kind regards,

Jochem

Satya's followup..

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheHeathenIn...ess/message/500

QUOTEDear Jochem,

Thank you. I think your explanation answers my first question about what I saw as the paradox of science flourishing in a religious culture. Wanting to know the intent of God would indeed seem to be a powerful imperative for obtaining knowledge. It would also seem this imperative might dictate that knowledge is framed in a particular way

It is interesting to explore what attitudes might drive the accumulation of knowledge in non-religious cultures. You talked about the Roman aqueducts. I encountered a similar example when I visited Mexico recently. Some of the pyramids there have been designed with ingenious acoustics, and geo-spatial effects. There are still highways in the jungle that stretch for miles. Yet, as our guide was demonstrating many of these things to us, he went on to say that it was a mystery how the Mayans had managed to build all these structures without any knowledge of architecture. Which of course was an astounding statement to me. Not that the Mayans should have built these things, but to suggest that they had no science of architecture or engineering. It seems to me obvious that they did!

Just as it is obvious (because we have the evidence of the aqueducts and the cities) that the Romans did. Yet, imagine if every trace of Roman architecture and engineering had been destroyed and the only evidence we had was Vesuvius' treatise. We would today not be able to imagine (given our conception of knowledge) that the Romans had any ability to build cities or aqueducts or roads.

It is really interesting what Vesuvius finds as important enough to record in his treatise on architecture. For him, it seems of primary importance to say what the *qualities* of an architect should be. It is not as important to record the principles of geometry, physics or optics or even music, history etcetera - all fields he says a good architect should be versed in.

The very first point Vesuvius makes is that that the science of architecture consists of both practice and theory. It's interesting that he talks about science as allowing one to *judge* a work. He is not interested primarily in how to get stones stacked on top of each other to form a tower. For him, science allows one to judge the tower. I don't think of our modern Western science in any such terms. In fact, it befuddles my scientific self that, on opening this treatise on the science of architecture, I see no theories about how to engineer foundations on silty soil or water erosion or any of the innumerable other questions that come to mind when we wonder "How did they do that?"

In fact, as one reads the document, one gets the sense Vesuvius uses even a bread-and-butter science term like 'theory' in a different way than we do today. "Theory," he says "is the result of that reasoning which demonstrates and explains that the material wrought has been so converted as to answer the end proposed." Theory is not (as I would assume) something that allows us to execute the construction of a building. "Practice" alone could accomplish that. "Theory" in Vesuvius' book is what helps us judge the end product: that demonstrates and explains whether the construction has answered its *purpose*.

Our science arises from wanting to discover God's intentions, God's purposes. We then apply the knowledge gained to acheive our own ends. Whereas the Roman science seems to say Man decides on the purpose of his construction, and he uses science to adjudge whether he has acheived that purpose.

Is this how you see it?

Satya

Quote from Vesuvius:

"1. Architecture is a science arising out of many other sciences, and adorned with much and varied learning; by the help of which a judgment is formed of those works which are the result of other arts. Practice and theory are its parents. Practice is the frequent and continued contemplation of the mode of executing any given work, or of the mere operation of the hands, for the conversion of the material in the best and readiest way. Theory is the result of that reasoning which demonstrates and explains that the material wrought has been so converted as to answer the end proposed.

2. Wherefore the mere practical architect is not able to assign sufficient reasons for the forms he adopts; and the theoretic architect also fails, grasping the shadow instead of the substance. He who is theoretic as well as practical, is therefore doubly armed; able not only to prove the propriety of his design, but equally so to carry it into execution.


One can follow the thread from the links above..

04-23-2005, 11:01 AM

Thanks for the link to that discussion. Satya's comments on Vitrivius (not Vesuvius which is a mountain I think <!--emo& Smile

--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /> ) are very interesting as are the other questions that are raised and partly answered. I'll try to make some coherent comments later.

By the way there was a series of posts on IF reproducing a 1985 article by Prof.Balagangadhara's on self identity and decolonizing the social sciences, but it has been removed I think. I do have it saved on disk if anyone wants it (hope thats OK). I haven't gone through it in detail myself.

Regards,
Sandeep.

04-25-2005, 08:04 PM

Some first thoughts on Satya's first question and Jochems reply.
Satya asks
QUOTEProfessor Balu has said in the past (if I understood properly) that science, as we know it, could not have arisen without religion. I have no basis to quarrel with this assertion, but it has always surprised me how religion (in which a ready made explanation of the entire Cosmos is self-contained) could possibly spur the production of - or give rise to - any new knowledge about the Universe. (If God
created the Universe in Seven Days, and we all know that because he revealed that truth to us, why should we be at all interested in how, say a galaxy was formed?) Yet, it seems obvious, that Western science has done exactly that at a rapid clip.

My question is - does anybody else perceive such a paradox? If not, why not? If so, do you have any thoughts on how to reconcile said paradox?


to which Jochem's reply is:
QUOTEWith regard to you first question I have to say I do not see the paradox. What religion does is promote a certain attitude, it molds one's experience of the world, it makes the world into something explanatorily intelligible. Of course, a particular religion offers a particular account of the cosmos, and one could accept that to be the end to it- why question what has been answered beforehand? But one's knowledge of Gods intentions is always limited. We are but human, our knowledge is necessarily perspectival (being part and parcel of the cosmos), tentative, and hypothetical. Therefore, God's total and ultimate truth (i.e. an EI account of everything that ever
was, is and shall be) is unattainable for humans. In the best case (a part of) this truth is revealed, but in most of the cases one is destined to search for Gods intentions, in both the scripture (being the word of God) an in the world (being His creation and thus an expression of His intentions). Therefore, when it comes to the
divine truth, we are stuck at the level of interpretation. Hence, the offshoot of heresies, the phenomenon of excommunication, etc.


While this could be said to briefly answer the question it goes on to assume some sort of fundamental unattainability having to do with the nature of the human mind itself. To that I would reply that rather than say that science is the product of the "human mind" I think it is more accurate to say that the content of science is the product of the "scientific mind". The scientific mind operates on the basis of identifying and representing measurable objects and making associations (concepts) between them leading to further representations, and so on. Why should the limitations of the scientific mind be assumed to be a limitation of the human mind in general?

Regards,
Sandeep.

04-26-2005, 02:07 AM

I would rather that Satya, Jochem explain this but the way I understand it -> I think thats exactly what is being said. I think the point being made is that religion promotes a particular configuration of learning. And that configuration of learning promotes a certain way of thought. The scientific thought per above posts finds a fertile ground in the religious land.

BTW I had posted a portion of Balus 85 paper in the itihaas-puranaa thread which was archived at http://indiaforumarchives.blogspot.com/200...asa-purana.html - it was posted on Aug 12.

I will have to ask Balu's permission to post his other writings which will give people a better idea of where he is coming from.

ramana · 05-12-2005, 09:34 PM

Jaswant Singh's Speech at India Today conclave-2002

11-18-2005, 09:59 AM

Overdose of fake secularism
 I am a Hindu, but... G.Das
QUOTEThe confident, handsome friend of our son gave a telling reply to a visiting Englishwoman the other day in Khan Market. "I am a Hindu, but...", and he went into a winding reply about his beliefs. He hastily added that he was an Indian first. It was a perfectly honest answer, and any other person might have made it about Islam or Christianity.

But I sensed an unhappy defensiveness â the 'but' betrayed that he was ashamed of being a Hindu. This happened a few weeks after I got a call from one of Delhi's best schools, asking me to speak to its students. "Oh good", I said, "in that case, I shall speak about dharma and the moral dilemmas in the Mahabharata."

The principal's horrified reaction was, "Oh don't, please! There are important secularists on our governing board, and I don't want a controversy about teaching religion." I protested ineffectually, "But surely the Mahabharata is a literary epic, and dharma is about right and wrong. Where does religion come in?"

As I think about these two incidents, I ask myself, why should these two successful young professionals be embarrassed of their heritage? Something has clearly gone wrong. With the rise in religious fundamentalism, it seems to me that it is difficult to talk about one's deepest beliefs.

Liberal Hindus are reluctant to admit being Hindu for fear they will be automatically linked to the RSS. I certainly blame Hindutva nationalists who have appropriated our culture and tradition into a political agenda. But I also blame our secularists who behave no better than fundamentalists in their antipathy to tradition.

One of the strengths of Western civilisation is that in times of crisis, it seeks sustenance and inspiration from the rational ideals of Greece and Rome, from Homer, Pericles and Virgil.

Why should it become 'untouchable' for a sensitive, modern, school principal? In part this is due to ignorance. We do not read our ancient classics with a critical mind as secular works of literature and philosophy, as young Americans read the Western classics in their first year of college as a part of their "core curriculum".

So, we depend on our grandmothers or Amar Chitra Katha or second rate serials on Sunday morning television. Meanwhile, the Sangh Parivar steps into this vacuum with its shrunken, defensive, and inaccurate version of our history and happily appropriates this empty space.

And the richness of tradition is lost to this generation. No one reads Edmund Burke these days. He opposed the French Revolution because he feared that killing the church and aristocracy would cut off links with the past.

I too value continuity in our "custom, community and natural feeling" in Burke's language, which is so necessary to realise our full human potential. To respect tradition means that one must criticise it as our 19th century reformers did. But I fear that our secularism is unwittingly undermining tradition.

The challenge before modern, decent Indians today, it seems to me, is essentially the same as the one Ram Mohan Roy faced in the early 19th century: how to grow up mentally healthy, integrated Indians? How do we combine our liberal modernity with our traditions in order to fully realise our potential?

08-27-2006, 09:34 PM

<img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/devilsmiley.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='devilsmiley.gif' />
It hurts to realise how easily some MPs - out of the 545 in the Lok Sabha and less than 250 in the Rajya Sabha - take all of us, the voters, for granted. Many of them do not do their required homework for parliamentary duties. They come and sign the attendance record that ensures payment of their daily allowances. They write on slips of paper that often passes for a memorandum handed to ministers, highlighting grievances or demands, and then would like the media to report about it. .

**acharya** · 10-18-2006, 12:53 AM

http://sabhlokcity.com/debate/Notes/note1.html

April 1998
CULTURE, DEMOCRACY AND DEVELOPMENT
by
Deepak Lal
INTRODUCTION

In this 50th year after Indian Independence, the arrival of a government led by the cultural nationalist's of the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP), after another in a series of elections since the mid 1980's which have delivered hung parliaments, the issues encompassed by the three triads of my title have come to the fore in public debates. Is democracy capable of delivering development? Are the fears of the cultural nationalists that the modernization that the globalisation of the economy portends will also lead to Westernisation and the undermining of a cherished Hindu way of life, valid? These are the central questions I want to answer in this lecture. These were also the questions I dealt with in somewhat different contexts in my two most recent books , so that rather than dazzle you with lots of references I will leave those of a scholarly bent of mind to consult these books for the evidence for many of the assertions I will be making in this lecture.

1. THE HISTORIAN CONTEXT

But I want to begin by putting these debates in a historical context. Despite nationalist and Marxist hagiography, as I argued in an earlier book , modernity ,- by which I mean the promotion of modern intensive growth- began with the British Raj in the 19th century. Intensive growth which entails a sustained rise in per capita income is to be contrasted with extensive growth which has occurred worldwide for millennia with output growing sufficiently to keep pace with the rise in human population which has been a feature of human history since we came down from the trees. Intensive growth, moreover, is of two types. The first is Smithian growth, which occurs even in agrarian economies whose productivity is ultimately bounded by the fixed factor of production-land. In the past Smithian growth was largely due to the extension of the market often under the force of imperial arms, as under the Pax Mauryas and Pax Guptas in India, the Pax Graeco/Roman of the ancient Mediterranean world, the Pax Abbasid of the Arabs, the Pax Sung of the Chinese, the Pax Tokugawa in Japan and the Pax Britannica worldwide in the 19th century. By contrast the second type of intensive growth -Promethean- is a European miracle, and depends upon utilising the relatively unbounded energy provided by the natural capital represented by fossil fuels to convert land bound agrarian economies into mineral energy based 'industrial' economies. In an important sense the process of economic development consists essentially of this transformation, and this began with the growth of modern Indian industry -often based on Indian capital and imported know how- from the mid 19th century during the classical laissez faire and free trade era of the British Raj.
This nascent process of modernization was aided and abetted by two important institutional reforms which have cast a long shadow on independent India. The first was the introduction of a legal system based on the Common Law, as well as the gradual extension of representative institutions first at local and then at provincial levels. The second was the creation of a native class of English speaking 'creoles' through the implementation of Macaulay's famous Minute on Education. The future of both the nationalist struggle and post Independence India has largely been determined by the attitudes of and divisions amongst these Macaulay's children through their use or misuse of the legal and political institutions they inherited from the Raj to which they took like fish to water. As Anil Seal the Cambridge historian of the nationalist movement has put it as regards the representative institutions created by the British :" Associations, like cricket, were British innovations and, like cricket, became an Indian craze" Why India should have taken so easily to these foreign Western implants when they were rejected in so many other ex-British colonies, is a question I will come to eventually, but before that I need to outline the dilemma that the two wings of Macaulay's children faced from the outset and which continues to haunt them and India to this day. This is the question of reconciling tradition with modernity. To deal with this I need to provide an account of the role of culture in development.
2. CULTURE AND SOCIAL EQUILIBRIA

Culture remains a murky concept. I have found a definition adopted by ecologists particularly useful. They emphasize that, unlike other animals, the human one is unique because its intelligence gives it the ability to change its environment by learning. It does not have to mutate into a new species to adapt to the changed environment. It learns new ways of surviving in the new environment and then fixes them by social custom. These social customs form the culture of the relevant group, which are transmitted to new members of the group (mainly children) who do not then have to invent these 'new' ways de novo for themselves.
This definition of culture fits in well with the economists notion of equilibrium. Frank Hahn describes an equilibrium state as one where self-seeking agents learn nothing new so that their behavior is routinized. It represents an adaptation by agents to the economic environment in which the economy "generates messages which do not cause agents to change the theories which they hold or the policies which they pursue." This routinized behavior is clearly close to the ecologists notion of social custom which fixes a particular human niche. On this view, the equilibrium will be disturbed if the environ-ment changes, and so, in the subsequent process of adjustment, the human agents will have to abandon their past theories, which would now be systematically falsified. To survive, they must learn to adapt to their new environment through a process of trial and error. There will then be a new social equilibrium, which relates to a state of society and economy in which "agents have adapted themselves to their economic environment and where their expectations in the widest sense are in the proper meaning not falsified".
This equilibrium need not be unique nor optimal, given the environmental parameters. But once a particular socio-economic order is established, and proves to be an adequate adaptation to the new environment, it is likely to be stable, as there is no reason for the human agents to alter it in any fundamental manner, unless and until the environmental parameters are altered. Nor is this social order likely to be the result of a deliberate rationalist plan. We have known since Adam Smith that an unplanned but coherent and seemingly planned social system can emerge from the indep-end-ent actions of many individuals pursuing their different ends and in which the final outcomes can be very different from those intended.
It is useful to distinguish between two major sorts of beliefs relating to different aspects of the environment. These relate to what in my recent Ohlin lectures I labelled the material and cosmological beliefs of a particular culture. The former relate to ways of making a living and concerns beliefs about the material world, in particular about the economy. The latter are related to understanding the world around us and mankind's place in it which determine how people view their lives-its purpose, meaning and relationship to others. There is considerable cross-cultural evidence that material beliefs are more malleable than cosmological ones. Material beliefs can alter rapidly with changes in the material environment. There is greater hysterisis in cosmological beliefs, on how, in Plato's words, "one should live". Moreover the cross-cultural evidence shows that rather than the environment it is the language group which influences these world-views.
This distinction between material and cosmological beliefs is important for economic performance because it translates into two distinct types of "transactions costs" which are of importance in explaining not only 'market' but also 'government or bureaucratic failure'. Broadly speaking transactions costs can be distinguished usefully as those costs associated with the efficiency of exchange, and those which are associated with policing opportunistic behavior by economic agents. The former relate to the costs of finding potential trading partners and determining their supply- demand offers, the latter to enforcing the execution of promises and agreements. These two aspects of transactions need to be kept distinct. The economic historian Douglass North and the industrial organization and institutionalist theorist Oliver Williamson have both evoked the notion of transactions costs and used them to explain various institutional arrangements relevant for economic performance. They are primarily concerned with the cost of opportunistic behavior, which arises for North, with the more anonymous non-repeated transactions accompanying the widening of the market, and for Williamson, from the asymmetries in information facing principals and agents, where crucial characteristics of the agent relevant for measuring performance can be concealed from the principal. Both these are cases where it is the policing aspects of transactions costs which are at issue, not those concerning exchange.
To see the relevance of the distinction in beliefs and that in transactions costs for economic performance and in explaining the source and outcomes of the dilemmas of Macaulay's children, it will be useful to briefly delineate how broadly speaking material and cosmological beliefs have altered since the Stone Age in Eurasia.
3. CHANGING MATERIAL AND COSMOLOGICAL BELIEFS

1. On Human Nature:

Evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists maintain that human nature was set during the period of evolution ending with the Stone Age. Since then there has not been sufficient time for any further evolution. This human nature appears darker than Rousseau's and brighter than Hobbes' characterizations of it. It is closer to Hume's view that " there is some benevolence, however small...some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent." For even in the hunter gatherer Stone age environment the supremely egotistical human animal would have found some form of what evolutionary biologists term "reciprocal altruism" useful. Co-operation with one's fellows in various hunter- gatherer tasks yields benefits for the selfish human which can be further increased if he can cheat and be a free rider. In the repeated interactions between the selfish humans comprising the tribe, such cheating could be mitigated by playing the game of "tit for tat". Evolutionary biologists claim that the resulting "reciprocal altruism" would be part of our basic Stone Age human nature.
2. Archaeologists have also established that the instinct to "truck and barter", the trading instinct based on what Sir John Hicks used to call the "economic principle" - "people would act economically; when an opportunity of an advantage was presented to them they would take it" - is also of Stone Age vintage. It is also part of our basic human nature. Agrarian Civilizations:

With the rise of settled agriculture and the civilizations that evolved around them, however, and the stratification this involved between three classes of men - those wielding the sword, the pen and the plough- most of the stone age basic instincts which comprise our human nature would be dysfunctional. Thus with the multiplication of interactions between human beings in agrarian civilizations many of the transactions would have been with anonymous strangers who one might never see again. The "reciprocal altruism" of the Stone Age which depended upon a repetition of transactions would not be sufficient to curtail opportunistic behavior.
Putting it differently, the 'tit for tat' strategy for the repeated Prisoners Dilemma (PD) game amongst a band of hunter-gatherers in the Stone Age would not suffice with the increased number of one-shot PD games that will arise with settled agriculture and its widening of the market. To prevent the resulting dissipation of the mutual gains from co-operation, agrarian civilizations internalized restraints on such 'anti-social' action through moral codes which were part of their 'religion'. But these 'religions' were more ways of life as they did not necessarily depend upon a belief in God.
The universal moral emotions of shame and guilt are the means by which these 'moral codes' embodied in cultural traditions are internalized in the socialization process during infancy. Shame was the major instrument of this internalization in the great agrarian civilizations. Their resulting cosmological beliefs can be described as being 'communalist'.
3. The basic human instinct to trade would also be disruptive for settled agriculture. For traders are motivated by instrumental rationality which maximizes economic advantage. This would threaten the communal bonds that all agrarian civilizations have tried to foster. Not surprisingly most of them have looked upon merchants and markets as a necessary evil, and sought to suppress them and the market which is their institutional embodiment. The material beliefs of the agrarian civilizations were thus not conducive to modern economic growth. The Rise of the West:

The rise of the West was mediated by the Catholic Church in the 6th-11th centuries, through its promotion of individualism, first in family affairs and later in material relationships which included the introduction of all the legal and institutional requirements of a market economy as a result of Gregory the Great's Papal revolution in the 11th century. These twin Papal revolutions arose because of the unintended consequences of the Church's search for bequests- a trait that goes back to its earliest days. From its inception it had grown as a temporal power through gifts and donations -particularly from rich widows. So much so that, in July 370 the Emperor Valentinian had addressed a ruling to the Pope that male clerics and unmarried ascetics should not hang around the houses of women and widows and try to worm themselves and their churches into their bequests at the expense of the women's families and blood relations. The Church was thus from its beginnings in the race for inheritances. The early Church's extolling of virginity and preventing second marriages helped it in creating more single women who would leave bequests to the Church.
This process of inhibiting a family from retaining its property and promoting its alienation accelerated with the answers that Pope Gregory I gave to some questions that the first Archbishop of Canterbury, Augustine, had sent in 597 AD concerning his new charges. Four of these nine questions concerned sex and marriage. Gregory's answers overturned the traditional Mediterranean and Middle Eastern patterns of legal and customary practices in the domestic domain. The traditional system was concerned with the provision of an heir to inherit family property, and allowed marriage to close kin, marriages to close affines or widows of close kin, the transfer of children by adoption , and finally concubinage, which is a form of secondary union. Gregory amazingly banned all four practices. Thus for instance there was no adoption of children allowed in England till the 19th century. There was no basis for these injunctions in Scripture, Roman law or the existing customs in the areas that were Christianised.
This Papal family revolution made the Church unbelievably rich. Demographers have estimated that the net effect of the prohibitions on traditional methods to deal with childlessness was to leave 40 per cent of families with no immediate male heirs. The Church became the chief beneficiary of the resulting bequests. Its accumulation was phenomenal. Thus for instance in France one third of productive land was in ecclesiastical hands by the end of the 7th century!
But this accumulation also drew predators from within and without to deprive the Church of its acquired property. It was to deal with this denudation that Pope Gregory VII instigated his Papal revolution in 1075, by putting the power of God - through the spiritual weapon of excommunication-above that of Caesar's. With the Church then coming into the world, the new Church-state also created all the administrative and legal infrastructure which we associate with a modern polity, and which provided the essential institutional infrastructure for the Western dynamic that in time led to Promethean growth. Thus Pope Gregory the Great's Papal revolution lifted the lid on the basic human instinct to 'truck and barter', and in time to a change in the traditional Eurasian pattern of material beliefs with their suspicion of markets and merchants. This in time led to modern economic growth.
But it also led to a change in the traditional Eurasian family patterns which were based on various forms of 'joint families' and family values, which essentially removed the lid on the other opportunistic basic instincts which the shame based moral codes of Eurasia had placed. To counter the potential threat this posed to its way of making a living- settled agriculture- the Church created a fierce guilt culture in which Original Sin was paramount, and morality was underwritten by the belief in the Christian God.
In this context it is worth noting the important difference between the cosmological beliefs of what became the Christian West and the other ancient agrarian civilizations of Eurasia. Christianity has a number of distinctive features which it shares with its Semitic cousin Islam, but not entirely with its parent Judaism, and which are not to be found in any of the other great Eurasian religions. The most important is its universality. Neither the Jews, nor the Hindu or Sinic civilizations had religions claiming to be universal. You could not choose to be a Hindu, Chines or Jew, you were born as one. This also meant that unlike Christianity and Islam these religions did not proselytise. Third, only the Semitic religions being monotheistic have also been egalitarian. Nearly all the other Eurasian religions believed in some form of hierarchical social order. By contrast alone among the Eurasian civilizations the Semitic ones (though least so the Jewish) emphasized the equality of men's souls in the eyes of their monotheistic Deities. Dumont has rightly characterized the resulting profound divide between the societies of Homo Aequalis which believe all men are born equal (as the philosophes, and the American constitution proclaim) and those of Homo Hierarchicus which believe no such thing.
The classic statement of this Christian cosmology was St. Augustine's "City of God". His narrative of a Garden of Eden, a Fall leading to Original Sin and a Day of Judgment with Heaven for the Elect and Hell for the Damned has subsequently had a tenacious hold on Western minds. Thus the philosophes of the Enlightenment displaced the Garden of Eden by Classical Greece and Rome, and God became an abstract cause- the Divine Watchmaker. The Christian centuries were the Fall. The Enlightened were the Elect and the Christian Paradise was replaced by Posterity. This seemed to salvage the traditional morality in a world ruled by the Divine Watchmaker. But once Darwin had shown him to be blind, as Nietzsche proclaimed from the housetops at the end of the 19th century, God was dead, and the moral foundations of the West were thereafter in ruins. But the death of the Christian God did not end secular variations on the theme of Augustine's Heavenly City. Marxism, Freudianism and the recent bizarre Eco-fundamentalism are secular mutations of Augustine. But none of them have succeeded in providing a moral anchor to the West. Such an anchor is of importance to the economy because the 'policing' type of transactions costs associated with running an economy are increased in its absence.
There is also the growing collapse of the Western family. It was presaged by the overthrowing of the traditional family patterns of Eurasian civilizations by Gregory I's individualist family revolution. This would have destroyed the Western family much earlier were it not for the subsequent fierce guilt culture the Church promoted in the Middle Ages, which kept the traditional morality in place. But with the exorcising of both guilt and shame as illegitimate moral emotions in the West, there are fewer moral bulwarks left to shore up the family.
Another consequence of Gregory I's family revolution was that the social safety nets provided by the family in most Eurasian societies were from an early date partly provided by the State in the West. This nationalization of welfare accelerated in this century, leading to vast transfer states. The accompanying erosion of traditional morality in the West is manifest in various social pathologies- such as widespread family breakdown, high levels of illegitimacy and divorce, proliferation of single parent families, soaring crime rates and the perpetuation of an urban underclass.
It is these accompanying social effects of modernization in the West, concerning equality and the family which disturb so many of Macaulay's children, who have had two distinctive responses to modernization. NEHRU VS GANDHI
4.

The two wings of Macaulay's children can broadly be classified as socialist and traditionalist, and can be identified with their towering nationalist leaders- Nehru and Gandhi. In their own ways both sought to reconcile India's ancient cultural traits with modernity.
Nehru while embracing modernization found a particular thread in Western cosmologist- Marxism- which had become dominant from the late 19th century, useful in reconciling tradition with modernity. In its economic ideas, from the days of Dadabhai Naoroji through Gokhale to Nehru the modernizing element of this new English-speaking caste chose to adopt only the radical and not the classical liberal elements in English economic thought. This is partly understandable as a natural revolt by nationalists against the dominant economic ideology of the metropole at the time- which in mid to late 19th century Britain was the classical liberalism of "laissez-faire". But there was more to their embrace of the collectivist and anti-market strand of Western economic thought. As their chief spokesman Nehru, memorably put it in his Autobiography, " right through history the old Indian ideal did not glorify political and military triumph, and it looked down upon money and the professional money-making class..Today (the old culture) is fighting..against a new and all-powerful opposition- the bania (Vaishya) civilization of the capitalist West. But the West also brings an antidote- the principle of socialism, of co-operation and service to the community for the common good. This is not so unlike the old Brahmin ideal of service, but it means the brahmanization- not in the religious sense of course- of all classes and groups and the abolition of class distinctions". A more succinct expression of the ancient Hindu caste prejudice against commerce and merchants- the lifeblood of a market economy- would be hard to find. This socialism espoused by the English-speaking caste seemed to combine tradition with modernity, whilst allowing this caste to behave as the Brahmins of old. But its stewardship of the economy has been a disaster.
Most poignantly, except for those agile enough to become 'rent-seekers', these economic policies have above all damaged the prospects of their progeny. In India, during the years of the Nehruvian dynasty the English-speaking caste sought to place many of its progeny abroad, thereby demonstrating by its private actions the bankruptcy of its public policies. Even the recent partial liberalization has markedly changed the perceptions of the young of this class about the possibility of a fruitful life in India. In the long run this is the greatest prize that liberalization offers, as on it will depend not only the health of the economy but also of the polity.
But there was a second solution to the conundrum faced by the early nationalists of reconciling tradition with modernity. Vivekanand, Tilak but above all Gandhi were as much Macaulay's children as the radical modernizers. Gandhi -as he outlined in Hind Swaraj- eschewed modernization and sought to preserve the ancient Hindu equilibrium. He was implacably opposed to western education, industrialization and all those 'modern' forces which could undermine this equilibrium. Above all, even though he was unequivocally against untouchability, he nevertheless upheld the caste system and its central feature of endogamy- a fact that at least Mayawati and her Bahagun Samaj Party (BSP) have noted. He wished to see a revival of the ancient and largely self-sufficient village communities which were an essential part of the Hindu equilibrium.
His ideas still continue to resonate, as witness some of the professed economic beliefs of the BJP and the extraordinary speech by the ex PM Narasimha Rao in the special Lok Sabha session. But this is a means to perpetuate poverty. The modernizers were right to believe that the only way to ultimately eliminate India's age old structural poverty was to convert an agrarian economy condemned to diminishing returns because of its dependence on a fixed factor- land- into a mineral based energy using economy through industrialization. The problem was with the means they adopted.
If both the socialist and the traditionalist panaceas of Macaulay's children have failed India, perhaps the time has come to free ourselves of them and their influence? This is what seems to implied by Mulayam Singh Yadav's recently stated desire to eliminate the role and influence of English in our national life.
5. MODERNIZATION AND WESTERNISATION

Assessing the role of English in national life leads directly to the issue of whether modernization requires westernisation. There are three important points to be made. First, as is apparent from the surge in learning English as the second language of choice worldwide- from culturally nationalist France to China- it is now the world 'lingua franca' in large part because it is now the international language of science and commerce. These are the instruments of the modernity on which future prosperity is increasingly seen to depend in a globalised economy. India has a head start in this respect given its colonial educational heritage. It would be senseless to give this up.
Second, as the experience of the Austro-Hungarian empire, as well as the continuing resistance of many non-Hindi speaking states in India attests, in multilingual states, if the language of any group is adopted as the official language that immediately puts its speakers at an advantage, and will be fiercely resisted by other groups. To allay these discords, like the Austro-Hungarians many ex-colonial nationalist states have kept the old Imperial 'lingua franca' as the official language. The same pragmatic consideration continues to apply to India, and seeking to eliminate the colonial 'lingua franca' is likely as in Austro-Hungary to lead to the vernacular nationalism which will destroy the Union.
The third point is more complex. It concerns Macaulay's children. As we noted, the cross-cultural evidence shows that rather than the environment it is the language group which determines cosmological beliefs. Therein lies the rub for Macaulay's children. For the full-fledged members of this caste, for whom English has become their first language, their cosmological beliefs are likely to conform more closely to those
of their linguistic cousins in the West than their vernacular countrymen. They are Westernised in a way that those for whom English is a second or third language are not.
But if modernization requires a knowledge of English for instrumental reasons, does that mean that Westernisation will follow willy nilly? There has been an influential body of thought in development studies which has claimed this necessary connection. But this is to assume that material beliefs determine cosmological beliefs. Even though in the rise of the West the two were conjoined, there is little reason to believe this is the case as the important case of a modernised but non-Westernised Japan has shown.
Unfortunately in India there continues to be great confusion amongst the intelligentsia on this point which is reflected in the two diametrically opposed panaceas that its Macaulay's children have prescribed for its ills. The roots of this confusion go back to the early days of the nationalist struggle. All the early leaders of the movement were Macaulay's children, and their nationalism echoed the creole nationalism that overthrew colonial rule in the America's - both in the North and the South. The major complaint of the 'creoles' against the 'penisulares' was that even though in every respect- language, descent, customs, manners and even religion- they were indistinguishable they had an inferior status because of the accident of their birth.
In India, Macaulay's children too had an inferior status, despite being English in every respect except "in blood and colour." Like the American creole elites they first sought to remove these restrictions on their advancement, eg. by agitating for the ICS exams to be held in India, and when these fell on deaf years, they sought to exclude their peninsulares from their colony with the cry of full Independence. There was however a division we noted between the modernising and traditionalist elements in this English speaking caste. Both groups implicitly believed that modernization and Westernisation were linked. But whereas the Nehruvians - who despite lip service to marrying Indian with Western culture-accepted the implication and sought to implement a particular secular Western set of cosmological beliefs, the Gandhians (whose cultural successors include the various Hindu nationalist groups) have sought to resist modernization for fear it would lead to Westernisation.
But there was another choice which was to modernise without Westernising- a process in which the role of English would be instrumental. For the myriad district and lower level service functionaries whose first language remained their vernacular the English they spoke as a second or third language already fulfilled this role. They were not infected by Western cosmologist like the English speaking caste. Even though not Westernised they could have been modernisers. It was fateful that, during the nationalist movement, it was Gandhi-that other Macaulay's child- who mobilised them politically. For unlike the modernisers, Gandhi was above all concerned with maintaining a refurbished Hindu equilibrium. But by equating modernization with Westernisation he created a backlash not only against the cosmological views of the West but also its material beliefs. Many of the views of both the Hindu nationalists and many in the Janta Dal also reflect this confusion.
The field was then left clear for the modernisers cum Westernisers, symbolised most powerfully in the iconic figure of Jawaharlal Nehru. It is instructive to see why it is the Western cosmology they imbibed- Marxism- which has had such inimical effects on the material prospects of Indians.
To put this in context a useful distinction made by the English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott needs to be kept in mind. He distinguishes between two major strands of Western thought on the State: the State viewed as a civil association, or alternatively as an enterprise association. The former view goes back to ancient Greece, with the State seen as the custodian of laws which do not seek to impose any preferred pattern of ends (including abstractions such as the general (social) welfare, or fundamental rights), but which merely facilitates individuals to pursue their own ends. This view has been challenged by the rival conception of the State as an enterprise association --a view which has its roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The State is now seen as the manager of an enterprise seeking to use the law for its own substantive purposes, and in particular for the legislation of morality. The classical liberalism of Smith and Hume entails the former, whilst the major secular embodiment of society viewed as an enterprise association is socialism, with its moral aim of using the State to equalize people. Equally, the other major ideological challenge to classical liberalism in this century, Fascism (national socialism), also viewed the State as an enterprise association. Both involved collectivist moralities as a reaction to the morality of individualism.
Till the rise of centralised nation states in Renaissance Europe, few states had the administrative means to be 'enterprising'.Once the administrative revolution of the 16th century expanded the tax base and the span of control of the government over its subjects lives three types of 'enterprises' have been pursued by states. A religious version as epitomized by Calvinist Geneva and in our own times by Khomeni's Iran. A productivist version consisting of 'nation-building' and a distibutionist version promoting some form of egalitarianism. Each of these 'enterprises' conjures up some notion of perfection, believed to be "the common good".
Socialism and the various variants of Marxism have their cosmological parentage in the Christian cosmology. As in
Augustine's "City of God", Marxism, looks to the past and the future. There is a Garden of Eden- before 'property' relations corrupted 'natural man'. Then the Fall as 'commodification' leads to class societies and the impersonal conflict of material forces leading to the Day of Judgment with the Revolution and the millennial Paradise of Communism. This mutation in Western cosmology also leads to Oakeshott's distibutivist "enterprise" view of the State . But it should be noted that whilst recently this 'enterprise' view based on the Juadeo-Christian cosmology has dominated Western political thought there is the older Greek current which looks to the State as a 'civil' association which was associated with the Scottish Enlightenment, and which has greater relevance for India than the Judaeo Christian version which has so poisoned the minds of Macaulay's children.
Finally, as Japan has shown, the Rest do not have to make the Faustian compact of the West where the instrumental rationality promoted by its individualism led to the Industrial Revolution but in the process destroyed its soul. Japan has been able to alter its material beliefs by adopting the institutions of the market, and transforming its ancient hierarchical social structures by basing them on acquired rather than ascribed status through the fierce meritocratic competition based on educational attainment. It has also not had to give up its traditional forms of family nor its other cosmological beliefs based on shame. The same opportunity is open to India to adopt the West's material but eschew its cosmological beliefs.
6. THE FAMILY

The ultimate fear of the cultural nationalists is that modernization will undermine traditional mores concerning marriage and the family. The resistance to the purported cultural pollution coming over the satellite channels, and the shenanigans concerning the Miss World contest reflect this fear. But is it justified?
Since Marx and Engels there has been the view that with modernization the traditional extended family identified with pre-industrial societies is doomed. Modern families will become more and more like Western families: with love marriages, nuclear families and a cold hearted attitude to the old. There are others who maintain that as the Western style of family seems to go back at least to the Middle Ages in Northern Europe, this modern family pattern was not merely the consequence but the cause of the Western industrial revolution. Research by the Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody casts serious doubts on both these positions.
First, as the historical evidence shows that the Western family revolution predated the Industrial revolution, clearly the latter could not have caused the former. Second, as Goody shows at length, the purported advantages of the Western system, leading to a greater control of fertility, were to be found in many other Eurasian family systems which, however, did not deliver industrial revolutions.
But that the Western Christian world particularly in its North Western outpost deviated from what had been the traditional family pattern in Eurasia from about the late 6th century seems undeniable. The major difference was that in the West the Church came to support the independence of the young: in choosing marriage partners, in setting up their households and entering into contractual rather than affective relationships with the old. They promoted love marriages rather than the arranged marriages common in Eurasia. Friar Lawrence in "Romeo and Juliet" egging on the young lovers against their families wishes is emblematic of this trend. But why did the Church promote love marriages?
It has been thought that romantic love far from being a universal emotion was a Western social construct of the age of chivalry in the Middle Ages. Recent anthropological and psychological research however confirms that this is erroneous- romantic love is a universal emotion. Moreover it has a biological basis. Neuro-psychologists have shown that it is associated with increased levels of phenylethylamine an amphetamine-related compound. Interestingly the same distinct biochemicals are also to be found in other animal species such as birds which also evince this emotion. However, it appears that this emotion is ephemeral. After a period of attachment the brain's receptor sites for the essential neuro-chemicals become desensitized or overloaded and the infatuation ends, setting up both the body and brain for separation- divorce. This period of infatuation has been shown to last for about 3 years. A cross-cultural; study of divorce patterns in 62 societies between 1947-1989 found that divorces tend to occur around the fourth year of marriage!
A universal emotion with a biological basis calls for an explanation. Socio-biologists maintain that in the primordial environment it was vital for males and females to be attracted to each other to have sex and reproduce and also for the males to be attached enough to the females to look after their young until they were old enough to move into a peer group and be looked after by the hunting -gathering band. The traditional period between successive human births is four years- which is also the modal period for those marriages which end in divorce today . Darwin strikes again! The biochemistry of love it seems evolved as an 'inclusive fitness' strategy of our species.
The capacity to love maybe universal but its public expression is culturally controlled. For as everyone's personal experience will confirm it is an explosive emotion. Given its relatively rapid decay, with settled agriculture the evolved instinct for mates to stay together for about four years and then move on to new partners to conceive and rear new young would have been dysfunctional. Settled agriculture requires settled households. If households are in permanent flux there could not be settled households on particular parcels of lands. Not surprisingly most agrarian civilizations sought to curb the explosive primordial emotion which would have destroyed their way of making a living. They have used cultural constraints to curb this dangerous hominid tendency by relying on arranged marriages, infant betrothal and the like, restricting romantic passion to relationships outside marriage. The West stands alone in using this dangerous biological universal as the bastion of its marriages as reflected in the popular song "love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage".
The reason for this Western exceptionalism goes back to the earliest period of the Christian Church, as we have seen. But the Church also had to find a way to prevent the social chaos which would have ensued if the romantic passion its greed had unleashed as the basis for marriage had been allowed to run its course in what remained a settled agrarian civilisation. First it separated love and sex, and then created a fierce guilt culture based on Original Sin. Its pervasive teaching against sex and the associated guilt it engendered provided the necessary antidote to the 'animal passions' that would otherwise have been unleashed by the Church's self-interested overthrowing of the traditional Eurasian system of marriage. But once the Christian God died with the Scientific and Darwinian revolutions, these restraints built on Original Sin were finally removed. The family as most civilizations have known it became sick in the West, as the Western humanoids reverted to the 'family' practices of their hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Within Western cosmologist there was, however, another way to deal with the death of the Christian God, rather than rely on these continuing secular variations on Augustine's "City" to provide the moral cement of its society. These were the views associated with the Scottish Enlightenment- in particular of its most eminent sages: David Hume and Adam Smith.
Hume, unlike the philosophes, saw clearly that Reason could not provide an adequate grounding for morality. As Nietzsche was to later say so trenchantly about utilitarianism any such attempt would be unsuccessful because :"moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it". Kant's attempt to ground a rational morality on his principle of universalisability- harking back to the Biblical injunction "therefore all things whatsoever ye do would that men should do to you, do even so to them"- founders on Hegel's two objections: it is merely a principle of logical consistency without any specific moral content, and worse it is as a result powerless to prevent any immoral conduct that takes our fancy. The subsequent ink spilt by Western moral philosophers has merely clothed their particular prejudices in rational form.
By contrast Hume clearly saw the role of morality in maintaining the social cement of society and that it depended on a society's traditions and forms of socialization. Neither God nor Reason needs to be evoked (or can be) to justify these conditioned and necessary habits. This is very much the view about ethics taken by the older non-Semitic Eurasian civilizations whose socialization processes are based on shame.
However, as this account shows, there is no reason whatsoever for the rest of the world to follow this peculiar and particular Western trajectory. It is not modernization but the unintended consequences of Pope Gregory I's family revolution which have led to the death in the West of the Eurasian family values the Rest rightly continues to cherish. The Rest do not have to embrace this cosmology. Moreover, even Macaulay's children can heal their fractured souls by embracing the Scottish sages: Hume's morality based on tradition and Smith's material beliefs based on the market. This classical liberalism provides a means of modernizing without succumbing to the moral emptiness of the current Western cosmology.
7. DEMOCRACY AND DEVELOPMENT

This leads on to the final question I would like to address in this lecture: is there any necessary link between democracy and development?
A number of cross-sectional statistical studies claim to have found such a relationship. But the statistical proxies used for the political variables in these studies do not inspire much confidence, which are further plagued by the econometric problem of identification. In our recent book Myint and I found no relationship between the form of government and economic performance during the 30 year economic histories of the 25 developing countries that we studied. Rather than the polity the initial resource endowment, in particular the availability or lack of natural resources was a major determinant of policies which impinged on the efficiency of investment and thereby the rate of growth. This was basically due to the inevitable politicisation of the rents that natural resources yield, with concomitant damage to growth performance. By contrast resource poor countries, irrespective of the nature of their government, were forced to develop their only resource- their human subjects. Thus the economic performance of resource poor countries like the Far Eastern Gang of Four tended to be much better on average than that of those with abundant natural resources like Brazil and Mexico. Countries like India and China whose factor endowments fall in between these extremes swerved between following the policies of their resource abundant and resource poor cousins, with a resultant indifferent intermediate economic performance. The difference in performance was further explained by the other major determinant of growth- the volume of investment. Thus whilst the efficiency of investment in India and China during both their dirigiste and more economically liberal periods was about the same, China's investment rate has been about twice India's resulting in its growth rate also being twice as high.
If differences in the polity cannot explain differences in economic performance, is there any reason to prefer one type of polity over another- in particular democracy over some authoritarian alternative? As usual de Tocqueville is both succinct and prescient. In his Ancien Regime he wrote:
" It is true that in the long run liberty always leads those who know how to keep it to comfort, well- being, often to riches: but there are times when it impedes the attainment of such goods; and other times when despotism alone can momentarily guarantee their enjoyment. Men who take up liberty for its material rewards, then, have never kept it for long...what in all times has attracted some men to liberty has been itself alone, its own particular charm, independent of the benefits it brings; the pleasure of being able to speak, act, and breathe without constraint, under no other rule but that of God and law. Who seeks in liberty something other than itself is born to be a slave".
Democracy, therefore, is to be preferred as a form of government not because of its instrumental value in promoting prosperity- at times it may well not- but because it promotes the different but equally valuable end of liberty. However, as the experience of many countries- not only in the Third world - attests, democracy is a frail flower, and India is unique in having successfully nurtured it in such a vast, diverse and poor country. The assault on it during the Emergency merely succeeded in showing how deeply rooted it had become in the Indian soil.
This success needs an explanation. It is to be found in the political habits of different cultures which have been formed as much by the geography of the territory where the relevant culture was formed than any ideology. Thus, China in its origins in the relatively compact Yellow river valley, constantly threatened by the nomadic barbarians from the steppes to its north, developed a tightly controlled bureaucratic authoritarianism as its distinctive polity which has continued for millennia to our day. By contrast Hindu civilisation developed in the vast Indo-Gangetic plain, protected to a greater extent by the Himalayas from the predation of barbarians to the North. As I argued in The Hindu Equilibrium, this geographical feature (together with the need to tie down the then scarce labour to land) accounts for the traditional Indian polity which was notable for its endemic political instability amongst numerous feuding monarchies, and its distinctive social system embodied in the institution of caste. The latter by making war the trade of professionals saved the mass of the population from being inducted into the deadly disputes of its changing rulers. Whilst the tradition of paying a certain customary share of the village output as revenue to the current overlord, meant that any victor had little incentive to disturb the daily business of its newly acquired subjects. The democratic practices gradually introduced by the British have fit these ancient habits like a glove. The ballot box has replaced the battlefield for the hurly-burly of continuing 'aristocratic' conflict, whilst the populace accepts with a weary resignation that its rulers will through various forms of 'rent-seeking' take a certain share of output to feather their own nests.
There is no intrinsic reason why this particular form of polity should be inimical to development, as long as the rulers adhere to the principles of good government so lucidly set out by the sages of the Scottish Enlightenment- Smith and Hume. A good government on this classical liberal view looks upon the State as a civil association, which promotes opulence through promoting natural liberty by establishing laws of justice which guarantee free exchange and peaceful competition. It should not seek to promote some enterprise of its own or seek to legislate a particular morality. The reason for India's relative economic failure lies not in its polity but in the Nehruvian era's embracing of the view of the State as an enterprise association- promoting the enterprise of Fabian socialism.
This seems to be changing, but there still does not appear to be a firm enough understanding, particularly amongst the intelligentsia, of promoting the view of the State as a civil not enterprise association amongst our rulers. One important way to achieve this would be to adopt in the sphere of economic policy what seems to have been attained in defense and foreign policy- a cross party consensus which allows continuity in policy. As the example of numerous liberalising developing countries has shown, for successful development, a team of technocrats broadly committed to an open market economy needs to be given its head, for at least a decade and protected from political cross-winds. India has such a team in place, the only remaining question mark is whether it will be allowed to complete the reform process above the political hurly-burly. If it is, there is no reason why India should not be able to combine prosperity with liberty without losing its soul.

01-24-2007, 06:49 AM

<!--emo&

--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad.gif' /> Equity is no appeasement but humanism, says PM

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Blog this story

New Delhi: In a rejection of BJP's charge that UPA's minority welfare policies were driven by vote-bank politics, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday said equity is no appeasement but a sign of humanism.

"A commitment to equity is not appeasement. It is a mark of one's commitment to humanism," he remarked in his address commemorating the 110th birth anniversary of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose in the capital.

His comments came amidst a fierce attack BJP has mounted on the UPA for its range of plans aimed at the uplift of minorities, especially Muslims, in the light of the Sachar Committee report on the economic and social condition of the community.

Singh recalled that Bose too believed that all minority communities should be allowed their due space in governmental affairs.

"As the president of the Indian National Congress (INC) in 1938 he (Bose) articulated a vision that is of abiding relevance. Netaji's view that all minorities communities be allowed their due space in cultural and as well as governmental affairs testified to his humanism and commitment to egalitarian values," the Prime Minister said.

Singh also recounted that both Bose and Mahatma Gandhi remained deeply committed to Hindu-Muslim unity and amity. "They were both deeply spiritual men, but equally secular. They understood that India's great contribution to humankind is the idea of sarva dharma sambhava," he remarked.

**acharya** · 02-05-2007, 02:27 AM

EPW Perspectives
May 7, 2005

Verdicts on Nehru

Rise and Fall of a Reputation

This essay examines the posthumous reputation of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. It seeks to ask, and at least partially answer, this question â why has a man who was so greatly adored in his lifetime been so comprehensively vilified since his death? After exploring how Nehru was revered while he was alive, the essay turns to the political tendencies that opposed and still oppose him. Among the critiques of Nehru it investigates are those emanating from the Marxist, Hindutva, Gandhian, Lohia-ite and free-market points of view.
Ramachandra Guha

Sixty years ago, in the depths of the second world war, Pieter Geyl began work on a book on the legend of Napoleon. Conceived in a Nazi internment camp, written after his release, and published only after the war was over, Geylâs Napoleon: For and Against analysed what several generations of French scholars had said about this most formidable figure of history. It is time that someone did something similar with regard to the modern statesman who embodied his nationâs hopes and fears as intensely as did Napoleon. This was Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister of India for the first 17 years of its existence as a free nation. As the Canadian diplomat Escott Reid wrote in 1957, âthere is no one since Napoleon who has played both so large a role in the history of his country and has also held the sort of place which Nehru holds in the hearts and minds of his countrymen. For the people of India, he is George Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower rolled into one.â

This essay is inspired by Pieter Geyl, yet its methods are somewhat dissimilar to those used by the great Dutch historian. I seek here to ask, and at least partially answer, a question that has long intrigued me â why has a man who was so greatly adored in his lifetime been so comprehensively vilified since his death? However the evidence I present is by no means restricted to the printed word. In a culture that remains principally oral, I also draw upon years of listening to what Indians of different generations, backgrounds, and temperaments have been saying about Jawaharlal Nehru.

I

It is safe to say that no modern politician had anywhere near as difficult a job as Nehruâs. At independence, the country he was asked to lead was faced with horrific problems. Riots had to be contained, food shortages to be overcome, princely states (as many as 500) to be integrated, refugees (almost 10 million) to be resettled. This, so to say, was the task of fire-fighting; to be followed by the equally daunting task of nation-building. A constitution had to be written that would satisfy the needs of this diverse and complex nation. An election system had to be devised for an electorate that was composed mostly of illiterates. A viable foreign policy had to be drafted in the threatening circumstances of the cold war. And an economic policy had to be forged to take a desperately poor and divided society into the modern age.

No new nation was ever born in less propitious circumstances. Fortunately, Nehru had on his side a set of superbly gifted colleagues. His cabinet included such men of distinction as Vallabhbhai Patel, B R Ambedkar and C Rajagopalachari. They were helped by the remaining officials of the Indian Civil Service; the steel frame that was one of British colonialismâs unquestioned gifts to free India.

For all the assistance he got Nehru was, as the elected prime minister, most responsible for the success or failure of his governmentâs policies. For one thing, the other giants I have named all departed early. Patel died in 1950; Ambedkar and Rajaji left the cabinet in 1951. For another, in the popular mind it was Nehru who was most directly identified with the philosophy of the new nation state; with ideas such as democracy, non-alignment, socialism, and secularism, ideas to which, in his writings and speeches, he gave such eloquent expression.

At this time, the mid-1950s, Nehruâs domestic reputation was as high as high can be. He came as close as anyone has, or ever will, to becoming the âpeopleâs princeâ. He was Gandhiâs chosen political heir, and free Indiaâs first freely elected prime minister. After the death of Vallabhbhai Patel in 1950, he towered among his colleagues in the Congress Party. His vision of an India fired by steel plants and powered by dams was widely shared. He was seen as a brave man, who fought religious chauvinists; as a selfless man, who had endured years in jail to win freedom; and above all as a good man. His appeal cut across the conventionally opposed categories of man and woman, low caste and high caste, Hindu and Muslim, north Indian and south Indian. Representative here are the recollections of a now distinguished Tamil diplomat who grew up in the capital in the 1950s. He told me that âto us Pandit Nehru was a great golden disc shining in the middle of New Delhiâ.

A spectacular demonstration of the Indian peopleâs love for Jawaharlal Nehru was on display during the general elections of 1952. In campaigning for the Congress Nehru covered the country from end to end. He travelled 25,000 miles in all: 18,000 by air, 5,200 by car, 1,600 by train, and even 90 by boat. A breathless party functionary later described this as comparable to the âimperial campaigns of Samudragupta, Asoka and Akbarâ as well as to the âtravel[s] of Fahien and Hieun Tsangâ.

In the course of the campaign Nehru âtravelled more than he slept and talked more than he travelledâ. He addressed 300 mass meetings and myriad smaller ones. He spoke to about 20 million people directly, while an equal number merely had his âdarshanâ, flanking the roads to see him as his car whizzed past. Those who heard and saw him included miners, peasants, pastoralists, factory workers and agricultural labourers. Women of all classes turned out in numbers for his meetings.

This is how a contemporary account describes the interest in Nehru:

Almost at every place, city, town, village or wayside halt, people had waited overnight to welcome the nationâs leader. Schools and shops closed: milkmaids and cowherds had taken a holiday; the kisan and his helpmate took a temporary respite from their dawn-to-dusk programme of hard work in field and home. In Nehruâs name, stocks of soda and lemonade sold out; even water became scarce. ... Special trains were run from out-of-the-way places to carry people to Nehruâs meetings, enthusiasts travelling not only on foot-boards but also on top of carriages. Scores of people fainted in milling crowds.

No leader in modern times has enjoyed quite this kind of veneration: as Escott Reid suggests, Nehru was for his people the founder, guardian, and redeeemer of the Indian nation state â Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt all rolled into one. Even the most hard-boiled sceptics were swayed by his charm and charisma. Consider this now forgotten enconium by Nirad Chaudhuri, published in The Illustrated Weekly of India in the second week of May 1953, a year after Nehru and his Congress had won a comfortable victory in the first general elections. The writer was (by this time) a moderately well known Indian, but his subject still towered over him, as well as everybody else. Nehruâs leadership, remarked Chaudhuri, âis the most important moral force behind the unity of Indiaâ. He was âthe leader not of a party, but of the people of India taken collectively, the legitimate successor to Gandhijiâ. However, if âNehru goes out of politics or is overthrown, his leadership is likely to be split up into its components, and not pass over intact to another man. In other words, there cannot, properly speaking, be a successor to Nehru, but only successors to the different elements of his composite leadershipâ.

As Chaudhuri saw it, the Nehru of the 1950s helped harmonise the masses with the classes.

Nehru is keeping together the governmental machine and the people, and without this nexus India would probably have been deprived of stable government in these crucial times. He has not only ensured cooperation between the two, but most probably has also prevented actual conflicts, cultural, economic, and political. Not even Mahatmajiâs leadership, had it continued, would have been quite equal to them.

âIf, within the country, Nehru is the indispensable link between the governing middle-classes and the sovereign peopleâ, continued Chaudhuri, âhe is no less the bond between India and the worldâ. He served as

Indiaâs representative to the great western democracies, and, I must add, their representative to India. The western nations certainly look upon him as such and expect him to guarantee Indiaâs support for them, which is why they are so upset when Nehru takes an anti-western or neutral line. They feel they are being let down by one of themselves.

Nirad Chaudhuri always prided himself on his independence of mind, on always being above (and ahead) of the herd. But even he could not escape the glow of the great golden disc then shining in the middle of New Delhi. It is noteworthy that Chaudhuri never allowed this essay to be reprinted, a fact which adds to the delight with which I excerpt it here.

Such, then, was Jawaharlal Nehruâs reputation at its zenith; it is time now to move on to its nadir.

II

In my early days as an academic, I made the mistake of defending Jawaharlal Nehru in the smoky seminar room of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, off Landsdowne Road in south Calcutta. I was then very young, and my defence was weak and confused anyway. I canât even remember what form it took (I most likely said that he was a decent man, as politicians go). But it was enough to bring the roof down. I got snarls and dirty looks in the seminar room itself, and afterwards was set upon by my immediate boss, then an up-coming political scientist in his mid-30s (and now a scholar of world renown). This gentleman called a colleague into his study and, pointing to me, said: âEi shala Jawaharlal Nehru shapotaar!â

To be a supporter of Nehru in a Marxist stronghold of those days is much like someone now defending the emperor Babar in a âshakhaâ or camp of that hardcore Hindu organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). For the Left, Nehru was a wishy-washy, weak-kneed idealist, full of high-flown rhetoric but without the will or wherewithal to take revolutionary action against the ruling classes. Indeed, the political scientist who chastised me had just then published an essay making this case â here he also compared Nehru, unfavourably of course, to Lenin.

Truth be told, the first prime minister of free India was not exactly popular among non-Marxist circles in Calcutta either. The intellectuals mocked his second-class degree from Cambridge, while the brown sahibs pointed out that, unlike his close contemporary the yuvraj of Cooch Behar, he had not even made the cricket First Eleven at Harrow. And of course Bengalis of all stripes and ideologies lamented the accident of history which had placed him, rather than their adored Subhas Bose, at the helm of the government of free India.

What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow. An old clichÃ©, which in this case turns out to be surprisingly true. For Nehru has been, for some time now, the least liked of Indian politicians, dumped on from all parts of the political spectrum, in all parts of the land. As I know from experience, it is as risky a business to defend Jawaharlal Nehru in Delhi or Bombay in 2005 as it was to defend him in Calcutta back in 1982.

A future historian, assessing the decline and fall of Nehru in the Indian imagination, might reckon 1977 to be the watershed, the year in which the delegitimation of an icon began gathering pace. That was when the Janata government came to power, after 30 long years of Congress rule (and misrule). The Janata Party was forged in the prisons of northern India, by men jailed under the Emergency imposed by prime minister Indira Gandhi. It brought together four disparate political groupings, united in the first instance by their opposition to Gandhi. These were the Hindu chauvinist Jana Sangh, the non-communist (or socialist) Left, the old style or âGandhianâ Congressmen, and the free-marketeers of the Swatantra Party.

The Janata Party is long dead, and its constituents have each gone their separate ways. Yet an examination of their political styles in the years since reveals that aside from the Emergency and Gandhi, these four political groupings (as well as the intellectuals who have supported them) were, and are, also united by their hatred of Jawaharlal Nehru.

Each of the Janata fragments has had its reasons for opposing Nehru and his legacy. The Jana Sangh, now metamorphised into the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), takes its cue from its mother organisation, the RSS, that seeks to build a Hindu state in India. Following the RSS, the BJP too trains its fire on Nehruâs philosophy of secularism, which they claim rests on the âappeasementâ of the minorities. Nehruvian âpseudo-secularismâ is said to have shown grave disrespect to Hindu sentiments while wantonly encouraging Muslim ones, this resulting in a wave of communal and ethnic conflict, not least in Kashmir.

By contrast, the non-communist Left takes its cue from the work of the brilliant, maverick intellectual Ram Manohar Lohia. Lohia took a PhD in political science in the University of Berlin, fleeing the city just as Hitler came to power. After his return he worked ceaselessly to root socialism in the cultural soil of India. Like Lohia, his modern-day followers â who exercise considerable influence in north India â have seen Nehru as the symbol of the upper-caste, upper-class, English-speaking intelligentsia that has held sway since independence. This elite, they contend, has manipulated both political and economic power to its advantage, if to the detriment of the low caste, non-English speaking majority, whom the Lohiaites themselves seek to represent.

If for the BJP, Nehru could not represent the âspirit of Indiaâ because he did not subscribe to the right religion (indeed, to no religion at all), for the Lohia socialists his unfittedness to rule was proven by the fact that he stood apart, in class, culture and language, from those he ruled over. The Gandhian critique takes a different line altogether. It argues that despite being the Mahatmaâs acknowledged heir, Nehru ultimately betrayed his legacy. Where Gandhi fought for a free India based on a confederation of self-sufficient village republics, Nehru is said to have imposed a model of industrial development that centralised power in the cities by devastating the countryside. Those who attack Nehru in the Mahatmaâs name have forcefully argued that planned industrialisation has fuelled both environmental degradation and social conflict, outcomes that could have been avoided if India had instead followed a decentralised or âGandhianâ approach to economic development.

The fourth, or Swatantra-ite critique of Jawaharlal Nehru is associated with the name and ideas of C Rajagopalachari. âRajajiâ was once a follower of Gandhi, later a friend and colleague of Nehru, and still later an opponent. It was Rajaji who coined the term âlicence-permit-quota-rajâ to describe the stifling strangehold of the state over the economy. This stranglehold, he and his latter-day followers have argued, has kept India at the low âHinduâ rate of growth of 3-4 per cent per annum. It is their view that if Nehru had instead freed the economy from the government, and allowed private entrepreneurship to flourish, India would have grown at 8 to 10 per cent a year â it would, indeed, long since have become the biggest of the Asian tigers.

Continuing Attack

The Janata Party may have fragmented, but the fragments flourish, each continuing to attack Nehru and Nehruvianism from their own, particular vantage point. Their attacks are given salience by the fact that their main political rival is the Congress Party which, for the four decades after Nehruâs death, has continued to be led (and mis-led) by members of his own family. Thus the BJP mutters â more often shrieks â about the baleful effects of the âminority appeasementâ promoted by Nehru and his successors. The Lohia-ites offer themselves as the authentic, grassroots, Hindi-speaking alternative to the deracinated brahmins of the Nehruite Congress. The Gandhians seek a decentralised, village-centred, eco-friendly path instead of the Nehruvian model of âdestructive developmentâ. And Rajajiâs heirs, the free-marketeers, complain that the second generation of reforms has been held up by the residues of âsocialistâ thinking that successor regimes have failed to fully wash away. Finally, there are the Marxists, who argue that, to the contrary, there is too little socialism in what Nehru once practised and in what his successors now preach.

Forty years after his death, Jawaharlal Nehru is a visible presence in our public and political life. His name is invoked often, but almost always in a negative sense, as an object of derision or abuse. The criticisms of Nehru now are vast and varied, so varied indeed that they contradict each other without fear of recognition. Just before the general elections of 2004, the Delhi monthly National Review interviewed two stalwarts of the political firmament: Lal Krishna Advani, then home minister and deputy prime minister in the government of India, for many years now the leading ideologue of the Hindu right; and Ashok Mitra, the former finance minister of the government of West Bengal, and a still serving ideologue of the radical left. This, without first checking with one another, is what they said about Nehruâs practice of secularism:

Lal Krishna Advani: âWe are opposed to Nehruvian secularism. We accept Gandhian secularism. Nehru started off with the assumption that all religions are wrong. For Gandhi, all religions are true, and they are different paths to the same goal. We thought many of Gandhiâs political policies were not sound, but we accepted his idea of secularism.â
Ashok Mitra: âNehru turned the meaning of secularism upside down. Secularism, he thought, was embracing each religion with equal fervour. And which he exemplified by frequent visits to mandirs and mosques, to dargahs and gurdwaras, to churches and synagogues. But once you embark on this slippery path, you end up identifying the stateâs activities with religious rituals such as bhumipuja and breaking coconut shells to float a boat built in a government workshop. This was inevitable because since Hindus constitute the majority of the stateâs population, Hindu rituals came to assert their presence within state premises.â

Which of these assertions is correct? Did Nehru hate all religions equally, as Advani suggests? Or did he love all equally, as Mitra claims? Perhaps it does not really matter. Perhaps these statements tells us less about Nehruâs actual beliefs (or policies), and more about the political preferences of his contemporary critics. On the one side, there is Advani, who considers âHindutvaâ, or Hindu nationalism, the most promising political movement in modern India â and worries why it has not progressed further. Whom does he blame? Nehru. On the other hand, Ashok Mitra considers Hindutva to be the most pernicious political movement in modern India â and is angry that it has progressed so far. And whom does he blame? Nehru.

It would be intriguing to develop the Advani/Mitra contrast in other directions. Consider thus their likely views on economic and foreign policy. Advani probably thinks that the Nehruvian epoch was characterised by excessive state intervention; Mitra certainly believes that the state did not intervene enough. Advani holds that, in the formative decades of the 1950s, India aligned too closely with the Soviet Union; while Mitra thinks that we did not cosy up to Moscow enough. Advani must believe that Nehru did not do enough to promote the cause of the Hindi language; Mitra most likely holds that he did too much.

For both Advani and Mitra, their political project is best defined negatively: as the repudiation of the economic and social philosophy of Jawaharlal Nehru. Lifelong political adversaries though they may be, these Indians are joined in a lifelong fight against a common enemy â father.

III

Jawaharlal Nehruâs posthumous reputation brings to mind a remark of the 19th century British radical, Edward Carpenter. Carpenter claimed that âthe outcast of one age is the hero of anotherâ. He clearly had himself in mind, an environmentalist and prophet of sexual liberation ahead of his time. But the case of Jawaharlal Nehru shows that the opposite can equally be true. That is, the hero of one age can very easily become the outcast of another.

Why has Jawaharlal Nehruâs reputation fallen so far and so fast? One reason is that as the first, and longest-serving, prime minister, he was in a unique position to shape his nationâs destiny. He did a great deal, but there is always the feeling that he should have done more â much more. And modern middle-class Indians are as a rule very judgmental, especially when it comes to passing judgment on politicians. As his biographer S Gopal once pointed out, Nehruâs âvery achievements demand that he be judged by standards which one would not apply to the ordinary run of prime ministers; and disappointment stems from the force of our expectationsâ.

Allied to this is Nehruâs nearness to us in time. We live in a world shaped by him and his colleagues. And no modern man has had such an authoritative influence on the laws and institutions of his country. Adult suffrage, a federal polity, the mixed economy, non-alignment in foreign policy, cultural pluralism and the secular state â these were the crucial choices made by the first generation of Indian nation-builders. The choices were made collectively, of course, but always with the consent and justification of one man above all â Jawaharlal Nehru. So when Indians today meet to deliberate over them, they single out one man above all for approbation or denunciation. Questions that can be posed in the plural tend to be posed in the singularâ instead of asking why India chose to be secular rather than theocratic, we ask why Nehru did so.

It is only 40 years since Nehru died. Since Indians still live with the consequences of decisions taken by him and his colleagues, some of them presume that they could have taken better decisions. And so they pass judgments on Nehru the like of which they would never pass on other Indian rulers, on (say) Akbar or even Lord Curzon. Of course, the judgments are anachronistic, made on the basis of what we know in 2005 rather than what Nehru knew in 1955. That does not stop them being made. Far from it. Over the years, I have spoken often about Nehru to audiences in different parts of India, to audiences composed variously of businessmen, students, scholars, and activists. Everywhere, I have met people who know that they could have done Nehruâs job better than he did it himself; that is, they know that they could have âsavedâ Kashmir, taken India onto a 10 per cent growth path, solved the Hindu-Muslim problem, eliminated corruption in government, and brought peace with our neighbours. How foolish of us not to have elected them all as prime minister!

To illustrate how anachronistic these judgments are, consider only the claim that Nehru âimposedâ a socialist economic model on India. In fact, there was a widespread belief that a poor, ex-colonial country needed massive state intervention in the economic sphere. The leading industrialists issued a âBombay Planâ that called for the state to invest in infrastructure and protect them from foreign competition. This plan, signed by J R D Tata and G D Birla among others, approvingly quoted the claim of the Cambridge economist A C Pigou that socialism and capitalism were âconvergingâ, and that a dynamic economy needed to mix the best features of both. When the draft of the Second Five-Year Plan âthe manifesto, so to say, of the heavy industry strategy finally adopted âwas shown to a panel of 24 top Indian economists, 23 supported it. Behind the mixed economy model, therefore, was a consensus shared by economists, technocrats, politicians, and not least, industralists.

A third reason for the fading of the Nehruvian sheen is political, namely, the decline of Congress hegemony. The debunking of Nehru began with the coming to power of the Janata Party in 1977. Since then, the Congress has steadily lost ground in both the centre and the states. There have now been as many as eight non-Congress governments at the centre; and more than 50 such in the states. The composition of these governments has been non-Congress; their beliefs and practices, often anti-Congress. In the realms of politics, economics, culture and the law, these groupings have had ideas often sharply opposed to those that Nehru stood for. While they were out of power these ideas had little salience or popularity; but now that there are in power the ideas themselves have power â as well as influence.

A fourth reason for the fall of Nehruâs reputation lies in the misdeeds of his family. What we have here, as the sociologist AndrÃ© BÃ©teille has pointed out, is the reversal of a famous Biblical injunction. Instead of the sins of the father being visited on his children, for seven successive generations, in Nehruâs case the sins of the daughter and grandson have been visited upon him.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of modern Indian history is that every act of Nehru that nurtured a liberal democratic ethos was undone by his own daughter. He promoted a political opposition, she squelched it. He respected the press, she muzzled it. He allowed autonomy to the executive, she preferred to rely on âcommittedâ civil servants and judges. His Congress was a decentralised, democratic organisation, her Congress was a one-woman show. He kept religion out of public life, she brought it in.

Like his mother, Rajiv Gandhi was a politician with an undeveloped moral compass, yet with a marked capacity for cronyism and manipulation. His regime further undermined the institutions and processes of liberal democracy. Yet, and this is the paradox hardly anybody notices, those institutions and processes were, in the first place, crafted by Nehru himself.

In truth, Nehru had nothing to do with the âdynastyâ. He had no idea, nor desire, that his daughter would become prime minister of India. In 1960, the respected columnist Frank Moraes wrote that âthere is no question of Nehruâs attempting to create a dynasty of his own; it would be inconsistent with his character and careerâ. In fact, Nehru chose not to nominate a successor at all. That job, he felt, was the prerogative of the people and their representatives. After his death, an otherwise bitter critic, D F Karaka, saluted this determination ânot to indicate any preference with regard to his successor. This, [Nehru] maintained, was the privilege of those who were left behind. He himself was not concerned with that issueâ â thus, incidentally, giving the lie to the idea that he ever wanted his daughter to succeed him.

After Nehru the Congress chose Lal Bahadur Shastri to become prime minister, a post on which he quickly stamped his authority. Indira Gandhi herself may never have become prime minister had not Shastri died unexpectedly. She was chosen by the Congress bosses as a compromise candidate who (they thought) would do their bidding. But once in office Gandhi converted the Indian National Congress into a family business. She first brought in her son Sanjay and, after his death, his brother Rajiv. In each case, it was made clear that the son would succeed Gandhi as head of Congress and head of government. Thus, the âNehru-Gandhi dynastyâ should properly be known as the â(Indira) Gandhiâ dynasty. But blood runs thicker than evidence; and when political commentators persist in speaking knowingly of the âNehru-Gandhi dynastyâ, why will the public think any different?

A fifth reason we Indians tend to give Nehru less credit than his due is that he appears to have lived too long. Lord Mountbatten once claimed that if Nehru had died in 1958 he would have been remembered as the greatest statesman of the 20th century. Writing in 1957, Escott Reid remarked that Nehruâs âtragedy may be the tragedy of [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt: to remain leader of his country for a year or two after he has lost his grip and thus damage his own reputation and his countryâs interestsâ.

This was astonishingly prescient. For it was after 1957 that the clouds began to descend on Nehru. In 1958 there was the Mundhra scandal, the first signs of serious corruption in government; in 1959 the unfortunate dismissal of the communist government in Kerala; in 1960 rising tension on the China border; in 1961 the conquest of Goa (which marred both Nehruâs non-alignment and his professions of non-violence); in 1962 the disastrous war with China. These setbacks emboldened the critics to speak of the other failures of Nehruâs regime: such as the continuing conflicts in Kashmir and Nagaland, the lack of attention to primary education, the hostility to business, the failure to effect land reforms.

Finally, Nehruâs posthumous reputation has also suffered from the neglect of scholars and scholarship. There is an intriguing contrast here with Mahatma Gandhi. In his lifetime Gandhi was looked down upon by intellectuals who, even when they admired his ability to move the masses, thought little of his ideas, which were so completely alien to, and often at odds with, the progressive currents of the day. But after his death the intellectuals have rediscovered Gandhi with a vengeance. In Nehruâs case the trajectory has been exactly the reverse; while he lived the cream of the worldâs intelligentsia crowded around him, whereas after his death they have left him alone.

This contrast is starkly manifest in the continuing production of books about the two men. Thus, the best Indian minds have thought deeply about Gandhi â consider here the fine recent studies of the Mahatma by Ashis Nandy, Bhikhu Parekh, Rajmohan Gandhi, and others. So have some able foreign minds â as for instance Denis Dalton, David Hardiman and Mark Juergensmeyer, all authors of insightful works on Gandhi and Gandhian thought. By contrast, a cast of rather ordinary Indians have written somewhat superficially about Nehru. And we can say the same about the foreigners. For none of the works on Nehru that now pour off the presses remotely match, in empirical depth or analytical insight, the far older works of Sarvepalli Gopal and Walter Crocker.

I do not mean here to overestimate the power of the printed word. Popular ideas about Nehru will continue to be shaped by propaganda and political prejudice rather than by solid scholarship. Still, had there been a slew of sensitive, empathetic, elegantly written books on Nehru â comparable to those on Gandhi â this might have promoted a more nuanced understanding of the colossal range of problems Nehru had to confront â a range unprecedented in the political history of the modern world â and allowed for a more healthy appreciation of Nehruâs achievements.

IV

Thirteen years ago, I wrote a piece in the Indian Express called âNehru Is Out, Gandhi Is Inâ, this my first, superficial foray into the question of Jawaharlal Nehruâs posthumous reputation. I said there that âtoday few other than the career chamchas are willing to defend [Nehru], and fewer still to understand himâ. Yet I had âno doubt that in time Nehruâs reputation will slowly climb upwards, without ever reaching the high point of the 1950sâ.

When I wrote this, in the middle-class mind Jawaharlal Nehru was a figure of ridicule rather than reverence. That he still is â for the most part. Yet there is now some, admittedly slight, evidence of a clawing back from the abyss. When in the last months of 2004, The Week magazine ran a poll to choose âIndiaâs best prime ministerâ, Nehru ranked a low fourth, below Indira Gandhi, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Atal Behari Vajpayee. This result must have embarrassed the last-named, as it might have embarrassed Indira Gandhi and Shastri had they been alive. But it was noteworthy that some 13 per cent of those polled had Nehru as their choice; this in comparison to a poll conducted by another popular magazine some years ago, in which a mere 2 per cent of respondents are said to have chosen Nehru as âIndiaâs best prime ministerâ.

There have also been appreciative noises about Nehru recently, from those who have historically opposed him. The Marxists, for so long among his fiercest critics, now defend his public sector socialism against the prevailing winds of privatisation and liberalisation. Meanwhile, one of the key beneficiaries of those winds, the software entrepreneur N R Narayana Murthy, has conceded that without Nehruâs emphasis on high-quality technical education there might have been no Indian âIT revolutionâ at all. And there has been praise that is even more unexpected. At home, the BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani rarely speaks positively about Nehru, but on a tour in North America he spoke warmly of him as the âarchitectâ of Indiaâs democracy, a democracy that in a post-cold war world is valued more than it ever was before.

There is, I sense, some slight recovery in Nehruâs reputation. As the decades pass the ascent might become more marked. And then the man might be pulled down again. What is certain that if India still exists a century from now, Indians will still be debating what Nehru meant to the history of their country. Over time, his posthumous career might come to resemble that of Napoleon: rise, fall, and rise again. And so on, in an endless and endlessly fascinating cycle. Perhaps in a hundred years someone will be in a position to authoritatively track these shifts in reputation, to write a whole book with the title Nehru: For and Against. This âsomeoneâ, we may hope, will be a historian with the energy and imagination of the great Pieter Geyl himself.

Email: ramguha@vsnl.com

[This essay is based on the second V K R V Rao Memorial Lecture, delivered at the Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, on January 20, 2005.]

03-16-2007, 10:02 PM

Murli posted this on a yahoogroup recently and I reread this after a long time.. I do not know if this has been posted but it was worth a read.

http://www.geocities.com/ifihhome/articles/kkp001.html

Decolonizing the Indian Mind : Kapil Kapoor

03-17-2007, 08:00 PM

<!--emo&

--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad.gif' /> Sworn to honesty, Patwaris go on strike

Anand Prakash | Gurgaon

In an unusual step, Patwaris of the district have gone on a five-day strike after the Deputy Commissioner of Gurgaon made them take a pledge at a public place to be honest. After receiving numerous complaints, the DC had taken this unprecedented step on Thursday.

The issue cropped up early on Wednesday when DC Rakesh Gupta was attending a public meeting at Farrukhnagar, 15 km from Gurgaon. The DC was redressing people's grievances and had called all the district officers and Patwaris. One common complaint of the people was that Patwaris were charging much more than the stipulated fees and the people were harassed by this.

"I was shocked to learn that the Patwaris were charging arbitrarily and fleecing people," said Gupta. On learning that as against a nominal fee of Rs 10 to Rs 50, the Patwaris were charging people Rs 1,000 and more, Gupta immediately decided to tighten the screws. "I asked them to take an oath and reform themselves," added Gupta, who took over this assignment recently. Gupta also informed that the Patwaris had agreed that they had been overcharging.

After the pledge, however, the Patwaris felt offended and took their 'case' to their State association. Meanwhile, the Gurgaon Patwaris decided to go on strike from March 16 to March 21. What is more bizarre, the Patwaris also demanded that the DC and other district officials too should pledge not to 'overcharge' people. Of course, they did not elaborate for what.

"We felt humiliated when we were asked to take the pledge by raising both our hands. He insulted us in public, which we are not going to tolerate," said Tejbeer Singh, chairman of district Patwari and Kanoongo association. Singh demanded that higher officials of Revenue Department such as Tehsildar and Naib Tehsildar should also take oath of not charging money.

Meanwhile, sources claimed that the issue was being taken "seriously" by the Haryana State association. The strike call could impact the real estate business in Gurgaon.

ramana · 11-08-2007, 12:17 AM

QUOTE("ramana")
Link

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE
The Failure of Marathas
Renowned historian Shejwalkar has made an excellent, abridged analysis of the decline of India over the past 2000 years. History of Marathas being his specialization, he has a lot to say on this subject. This account is more or less based on his observations.

The main reason why this empire saw the beginning of its end in less than 100 years since it was established is the fact that none of the Peshwas could fully realise the principles laid down by Shivaji. It was his explicit intention to destroy the Muslim powers and establish a centralised power of the natives which was to be governed by 8 ministers under the control of the sovereign Chhatrapati. If a part of land was to be given to noble warriors it were done so in special cases and even then the state had the right to its produce. He breathed last as Aurangzeb arrived with his full force to wipe out Marathas once and for all. After 9 years of continuous war, he had Sambhaji captured and killed. Shivaji's younger son Rajaram fled to fort Janjira which stood against the Moghuls for 5 years. Aurangzeb began to lure away Maratha nobles with land offers.

As a final measure to avoid the total extiction of his empire, Rajaram issued a statement calling for his people to fight and destroy Mughal empire in whichever way it seemed suitable to them and keep the land earned for themselves. Here onwards, a Maratha warrior would deem it his right to own land for himself and his poterity if he had served the state. Maratha empire expanded in a decentralised manner without any underlying sense of purpose as was amply demonstrated by rivalries within such as the one between Shinde and Holkar which grew to absurd proportions. The nobles raised by Shivaji opposed the unrestrained authority wielded by the Peshwa because in the original scheme, he was just one of the eight ministers. Bajirao I had raised his own generals. He had a towering stature and could have gone against Rajaram's statement to go back to Shivaji's principles. But, he made no attempt in that direction and apart from Madhavrao, the posterity did not produce a first rate statesman.

Moreover, Shahu was raised by the Mughals and hence had a soft corner for them. With him on the throne, Marathas adopted, to the end, the policy of plundering the Mughal Empire but keeping it alive. In the process, they hurt Rajputs and Jats unnecessarily. The expansion had taken place so thoughtlessly that they didn't have a single sympathetic ally up north who would bail them out in their hour of need. This was made abundantly clear at Panipat when Hindu princes of North India, forgetting the humiliation they had suffered with each Muslim invasion in the past, chose to side with Abdalli or remain neutral in battle explicitly declared by Najeeb Khan to be the holy war to uphold Islam in India. Isolated and half starved, Marathas took on Abdalli on 14th Jan 1761 and on that day flower of its army perished.

They also failed to check the British in time. Since the days of Shivaji, the British were warned to stick to their trade and there had been occasional battles. Lord Cornwallis has noted on more than one occasion the enemocity and jealosy they had for the Company. But, apparently, the full force of the British intentions was not realised even as Bengal fell prey to the British in 1757. The British triumphed over French in the Seven Years War (actually 3 years war in India) but this had been dwarfed by the pre-1761 achievements of Marathas.

 The impending invasion which was to prove worse than those of Mahmud Gazani and Timar Lane for India, seems to have been first registered on the Nawab of Oudh as he learnt of the defeat of Angre fleet (@1756) on his death bed. Marathas were never to regain control of sea. But even then they had not grasped the full significance of the defeat. The contemporary British reports remark derisively that "..the Mahrattas behave as if they own the Deccan without once understanding what that means..." They, however, realised the peril in 1765 when they sought to consolidate their position up north. In the words of Madhavrao, the British had put a ring around India and were pressing it from all sides. The British were gaining in strength silently by putting one local power against the other. The shortsightedness of the 18th century rulers didn't help the matters either. Indeed even in the 19th century, the famed Rani of Zansi would not help Peshwa and Tope, who were seeking help from all corners of India to drive the British away. The Queen attacked the British only when her personal interests were put to harm by them. But that is a digression. The death of Mahadaji Shinde in 1792 removed the last great obstacle for the Company rule in North. Nana Phadanavis's heydays were over by 1796 and he was forced to hand over power to Baji Rao II, the son of Raghunath Rao, and disappear from political scene. With Baji Rao II signing treaty with the British in 1802, Peshwai was all but gone.

The Shivshahi and Peshwai had a combined life of 128 years only. Never in its existence did the Maratha Empire have whole of India (as of then and hence as of now also) in its grip. Most of its energy went in consolidating its military position. It made no significant educational, literary or artistic contribution. As has been mentioned earlier, untimely deaths of its most productive men was partly responsible for it apart from the technological superiority of the scavengers and the deep rooted treachery so characteristic of India. It stood out from the rest of the powers on the basis of its principles. It alone could identify with the concept of the whole of India as a single nation and fight for it. The spirit of national pride spurred Marathas to the forefront of the unsuccessful war of 1857 and soon after that they were to produce men who started sociopolitic agitations. Shejvalkar has remarked that it is not a coincidence that in the subcontinent only the land trodden by Maratha horsemen has survived as the modern India.

Towards the end, the Peshwa's reign had been characterised by narrow regional influences. It had become a pro Chitpavan Brahmin system with utter disregard for the welfare of the subjects and had lost its appeal to the common man. It had lost touch with its roots and hence its fall was doomed (Nyayamurti M.G. Ranade). ....



Something to reflect on and see why does the history repeat itself. It comes to group dynamics. People divided in groups are unable to build links with other groups and see the national interests.

Doesnt the ring look similar to the containment strategy of modern times?</div>

11-29-2007, 10:37 AM

This is need of hour
QUOTESocial activism and not politics need of the hour: GovindacharyaÂ 
link
Former general secretary of the BJP, K N Govindacharya, once a well known face in party circles has been quite a recluse for some time now. However, he continues to keenly observe political developments in the country and the world. Proud of his long association with the RSS, the soft-spoken ideologue considers the Pokhran explosion as the greatest achievement of NDA regime, and feels the Indo-US nuke deal is irrelevant.

In a free-wheeling interview to Arun Chaubey, he calls Nandigram a natural reaction to the forces of marketism and touches upon topics like terrorism and impact of liberalisation on the Indian society.

Excerpts:

What is your opinion on the Indo-US civil nuke deal? 

Neither is the deal required nor would it be helpful in its objective. The deal has very little to offer. It is only for power generation, and in terms of power also it would fulfill merely 10% of energy demand. As far as technology is concerned, India has evolved on its own and not at the mercy of US. In fact in the present situation, US needs India more. Therefore India should begin negotiation from a higher pedestal, as this treaty in an indirect way of forcing India towards NPT. India should have made it clear to the US that the Hyde Act cannot be a feature of the deal.

Is the US failure responsible for Islamic terrorism in India as well as other parts of the world? 

The US has tackled the international situation in a wrong way. It has become isolated and got the image of âDadagiriâ. And this wrong approach is responsible in promoting jehadi terrorism across the world.

In the post-Cold War era and with the disintegration of USSR, the US lust for attaining the sole leadership position was even further whetted. But it in return got the sting of 9/11. Since then, the foundation of international relationships has changed radically and the US has not been able to cope with the change.

At this juncture, India has to play an active role instead of adopting a defensive stance. In that way, US can be a useful assistant to India. We need to shed the hangover of inferiority and assume a leadership role through aggresive political diplomacy.

On the home front, how do you view developments in Nandigram? 

Nandigram is a natural reaction to forces of marketism. Singur and Nandigram are specimen events on the process of struggle but their context has not been taken cognisance of. In Singur, Mamata Banerjee despite her 45 daysâ epic fast could not attain the needed result. While the role of violence in Nandigram has undervalued the limitations of peaceful methods of protest in the public discourse, which is tragic and unhealthy for democracy as well as the nation.

How would you describe your long association with the BJP? 

As far as my association with BJP is concerned, I contributed my bit on an ideological level. On electoral plank, I was a witness at close quarters of power circles. I could observe that coming to power is easy, but status quoists and insensitive operatus in the party create hurdles.

Please explain the status quoists and their role in politics? 

The tool of implementation for the party was state machinery, which was not tuned for the purpose of change, therefore the status quoists created hurdles. The political leadership, which was also deficient in terms of motivational and competence, failed to act against it.

But this status quoism lead to disillusionment especially among youth? 

Since the political leadeship was not trained, they were satisfied with their mediocrity of performance and failed to notice that expectations were high from them. The gap between expectation and performance led to disillusionment.

Is there any hope for alternative leadership? 

Indian youth is capable of going ahead on its own. Only thing it has to have is the robustness of Indian civilisation. It has to have the capacity to limit and rule the state power. Only then the establishment and the state will be able to understand India in its own way and not in the European context, and India will be able to contribute its worth globally.

You see hope for India in second generation of leadership, but youth movements have been a failure in India? 

Peopleâs movement including JP movement, anti-Boffors or Ram Janmabhoomi movements and also pre-independence movement were mainly fought against the onslaught, menace and distortion of the state. Therefore, all these movements ended up changing the state, as they neither had the stamina for systemic change nor had the ability to make the government conducive to Indian ethos.

Indian society and youth are now ranged against forces of marketism, indiscriminate globalisation and degeneration of democracy into a sort of âcorporatocracyâ. The need of the hour is to galvanise a parallel political movement like the pre-1934 freedom movement.

The structure needed, methodology adopted and traning needed for the leaders of the movement has to be original.

How do you see the role of so called nationalist parties? Are they losing their edge? 

The political space for vibrant nationalism coupled with pro-poor is vacant in the public sphere of India. As far as nationalist parties- who offer verbal support to the nationalist issues- are concerned, they have lost their credibility because of the disjoint between their promises and their deeds. And those who have pro-poor approach are deficient if not ignorant about the traditions and moorings of the nation.

You have spared a lot of time in studying the impact of liberalisation on Indian society. What is your observation? 

My study on the impact of liberalisation on Indian society has come to the conclusion that:
Rural poverty has not decreased; instead despair and anarchy are looming large in the countryside.

Urban poverty decreased a bit in terms of heavy cost of unemployment, but pollution, crime and atrocities on weaker sections have increased.

Inequalities have increased manifold and the system is attending to only 30 per cent of the society, leaving 70 per cent to their own fate.

Attitude towards women has degenerated to mere consumerism.

Consumerism and permissiveness have pervaded the social fabric resulting in erosion of Indian values and functioning levers of the society.

It has eroded the confidence of India in contributing its might globally, thererby affecting self-pride and self-confidence of Indian society.

It has created acute tension in the socio-political fabric of the nation. New structures, new tools of change will have to be identified, harnessed and integrated as a fighting unit in its own way. 

Besides, globalisation has directed towards further centralisation, homogenisation and monopolisation in which democracy is captured and controlled by money bags. The organs of the state including media and channels of information are used to condition the minds of society for creating false demands to manipulate the system for immoral profits alone. This process in turn creates disconnect between state and markets and society and state, while markets collude together to deprive the society from fulfilling its aspirations.

Therefore, I feel that the battle has to be fought on multiple planks. It has to be decentralised, diversified and localised so that localised communities which defy the dominance of the state as well as market and yet are able to lead a prosperous life based on inter-dependence and cultural advancement.

Besides, it requires a three-pronged robust effort in the direction of intellectual, constructive and educational activities in a decentralised, localised mode.

For all this, an understanding has to be evolved about the concept of development- ways of development based on family being the unit- which has to be nature-friendly in the context of investment, technology, management and participation of people.

Will you return to active politics? If not, why?

I do not agree to this proposition. The role of the party and power politics in India is mostly alien and unmindful of Indian tradition as well as needs. And the whole idea has been borrowed from a society carved out by the formulae of Social Contract theory and the individualism evolved through Protestantism as an ideology. So unprotected individual participation in politics leads to dominance of politics by local and foreign money bags that disconnect the state from the understanding and organisation of the society itself.

The basic dictum about the stateâs existence is supposed to protect the interest of those who cannot protect themselves. But the state has played the role of obstructor, disruptor and speed governor upon the society. Therefore, understanding the limitation and role of party and power politics, my plan is to carve out a social dynamo to speed up the progress and create social deterrant to bring back party and power politics to the rails of values and issues to salvage the society from self-destructive marshy land of crass power game.

Since there is not much difference in politics with regard to sense of purpose, discreet world view, national vision of their own manifestos, the political parties have degenerated into gangs vying for power with no-hold barred methods, visualising power as a tool of social progress. They have turned into groups competing for power, which has become an end in itself and not the means.

Internal participation merely will not suffice as the external pressure of societal level is the need of the hour. So I decided to contribute in the unity of nation and the society in constructive and educational mode, desisting from being a part of the partisan and power politics.

12-01-2007, 12:19 AM

abdul kalam's website and epaper
Billionbeats

12-08-2007, 11:15 AM

Hi people. It''s been a while since I last came here.

In the meantime I had a flurry of brain activity and wrote a whole lot of stuff, mostly on BR.

I would like to post some of those articles here for whatever comments they might attract. I wonderd where to post this one and thought that Indian core values may become visible if we can recognise the layers that have been painted on.

QUOTE
I see a lot of confusionÂ on questions like "Who is a dhimmi?", "Who is not?", "Who is a Hindu fundamentalist?", "Who is not?", "Who is a Hindu revivalist?""Who is not?" etc.

For example I have been described both as a Hindu rightwing fundamentalist as well as a Macaulayite dhimmi for saying the same things. I am sure others would have faced a similar situation.

These questions have answers, but those answers can come only with some idea of how Hindu society has developed and moved over many more centuries than Islam.

I will try and put down some thoughts but the post promises to be a long one.

Let me start with an analogy to describe societies. Most people are likely to have played with marbles. If you have a marble on the ground and you hit with another, the first marble moves off in some direction or the other. A similar analogy would be balls on a billiard table.

Imagine a huge billiard table (maybe 100 km long) with a 50 Kg billiard ball rolling on it. (Unlike real billiards the ball is rolling, not still, but hey you don't get 50 Kg billiard balls on 100 Km tables)

Anyhow this 50 Kg ball is rolling along the 100 Km long table. Now if you hit this 50 Kg ball with a standard billiard ball (using a cue) you will hardly notice a change in the movement of the 50 Kg ball. If you are serious about changing the direction of movement of the 50 Kg ball using your only tool - billiard balls, what you need is the cooperation of 25, or 50 or 200 billiard players who all aim to hit the 50 Kg ball from one side. Each hit makes only a slight difference - but after 100 hits the 50 Kg ball will be moving in a slightly different direction. And if you can see the 50 kg ball after it has moved along this new direction for 25 km, you will find that it has strayed far from its original path.

You may never see the ball in its changed path. But in order to make it go on a changed path you need to know
a) Where the ball is coming from to predict which way it is going
b) Which way YOU want the ball to go
c) A means to hit the ball many times with the little strokes at your disposal to achieve the end result.

Huge societies are like this 50 Kg ball on a 100 Km long table. Small frequent strokes change their path and the changed path is visible only tens of kilometers (centuries) down the line.

Why centuries? Was that a typo? No. It does take at least a century to make major changes in a really huge society. Let me quote a medical example. Despite modernity, international travel, net savviness and awareness of the world, many Indians still carry with them memories of medical myths. Without going into details, many Indians believe that action X causes disease Y, which is complete nonsense. Changing that belief will take centuries for a simple reason. Each person who believes that myth today has heard it from a grandparent - and has therefore been primed with misinformation that is at least 60 to 70 years old. This person has often already fed that misinformation to his children and grandchildren, ensuring that the 70 year old misinformation is propaganted for a further 50 to 70 years. Changing this requires multiple acts of correction and everyone in the chain has to be told that the info is wrong or that some new info is correct. Achieving this sort of change often requires at least a century, sometimes more.

If most Indians are dhimmi today. it is because of attitudes that were instilled centuries ago. It is worth trying to look back at what happened to understand where we are today. Only that will give us an idea of where we are heading and any direction changes hat we may seek.

By the time Islam came to India the civilization had already been chugging along for over 2000 years. Things had happened, Buddhism and Jainism had arisen and spread their wings across India or outside. All three religions survived and there were and are similarities in the worldview of all three. None of them sought by written code to impose death sentences or slavery on practitioners of the other and conversion form one to the other (for convenience or political gain) was not punishable by death.

Then Islam came in and it was a totally new ball game. As it spread its tentacles and rulers settled in, the first dhimmis started being produced. Over a span of centuries Islam came to control most parts of modern India for at least a while, during which populations who had no place to flee had to submit to dhimmitude.

Dhimmi attitudes became commonplace in India. Cover or hide yer wimmen. Do not dispute anyone who says anything good about Islam. Accept without murmur criticism of your faith. Practice it in the background. Perhaps it took several centuries for this process to happen, but it happened alright. In the meantime, new hawks developed in India who figured out the weaknesses of the Islamic kings. The Mughal empire started cracking up with Hindu upstarts challenging their hegemony. But there was probably no stability of the sort needed for a gradual rollback of dhimmitude - for attitudes once established need centuries to remove wholly.

It was about this time that the British came to India. Their style was completely different and their technology better. They found a fissured land divided up between warring Kings and played one against the other. As long as they got the loot they wanted they did not bother whether the supported Muslim kings or Hindu kings. In some places such as Mysore state, they replaced a Muslim ruler with a Hindu one. In other places they may have favored a Muslim for their convenience.

The British did not ask for dhimmitude per se, but once again they did not specifically foster an environment to remove it. They were interested in wealth and loot and created conditions to foster that. In fact they may have perpetuated Hindu dhimmitude, as I will speculate.

I believe the British actually helped to make allies out of Muslims and Hindus in a way different from the ruler-dhimmi relationship that had existed previously. British rule upset the ruler-ruled equation in India so thoroughly that Hindus and Muslims got together to throw out the British. But something happened that caused exactly the opposite as well, almost simultaneously.

Britain fostered its own agenda to "educate Indians to appreciate British goods" as Macaulay intended. The education of Indians started with the creation of Bengali babus. The English education and Macaulay-ization was taken up with enthusiasm by some Indians because it offerred a route of economic release for them. Macaulay-ization as we know was not taken up with the same gusto by Muslims who tended to go towards Madrassa education. This led to a split between Hindus and Muslims because dhimmi former subjects of Muslims were getting empowered, while the act of Macaulayization was seen as a threat to Islam. Hindus, who were already dhimmified, did not see much of a threat to Hinduism by Macaulayization, as their faith was already crushed in their dhimmi minds.

However the need to get rid of the British did unite Hindus and Muslims for a bit. Hindu dhimmitude no doubt assisted in maintaining communication and trust while there was cooperation, but the increasing Macaulayization and power of Hindus was noted with alarm by some Islamists. After all, "Macaulayization" was not just creation of a class of Britain lovers. It was also the creation of borrowed British institutions, particularly secular rule of law and democracy with elections that would ensure that any majority bloc would win. When independence became a distinct possibility, these Islamists realised that their old power - the old "Muslim ruler-Hindu dhimmi subject" would be gone. That was unacceptable and the idea of Pakistan was born from this.

The important point to note here is that Muslim-Hindu cooperation during independence revolved around the old ruler-dhimmi relationships built up during the earlier Islamic era. This old ruler-dhimmi cooperation was a useful unifier in British rule, but the Macaulayization of Hindus was advanced enough to favor British style democracy and government and not a return to the old Islamic state. In fact even the existing Hindu Kings in India opted for democracy and to join the Indian union.

The most rabid Islamic elite ran off to Pakistan but the old Islamic power base in many India states remained. Also remaining was a natural and deep dhimmitude of most Hindus. It was this dhimmitude that probably aided harmony and the development of early post independence India, while commitment to Macaulayization stabilized the democratic system.

Pakistan was Islamist from the word go. they had no need for British democracy and values. And any remaining kafirs in Pakistan were treated just like Islam treats kafirs.

I think that if Pakistan had not been rabidly Islamist, and had not constantly tried to arouse Indian Muslims to rebel Indian dhimmitude would have gone on much longer. But it is going.

But dhimmitude will take more than a century to go, and if dhimmitude in a fellow Indian bothers you, it is worth remembering that it is a deeply entrenched and centuries old mindset that was created by the need to survive under murderous Islamic kings. It will not go away soon, and people who show dhimmitude need to be seen with sympathy as well behaved and non aggressive (dove) survivors rather than mocked as being stupid.

People need to be gently lifted out of an anachronistic dhimmi mindset and not coerced into thinking something different. That coercion leads to cognitive dissonance, anger and rebellion. That is why, when you mock a dhimmi sufficiently, he will call you a Hindu extremist. If so called clever Hindus have any brains - they will display patience and understanding about an age old mental process and change it in gradual steps rather than by aggressive mocking. The latter is a self goal that Hindus have no business scoring when they are getting the first chance in centuries that they can actually do something useful in the world. A hurried change in dhimmi mindset cannot occur. You are only making things more difficult for yourself by cursing an Indian as being a dhimmi and accusing him of dancing to the tune of his lords. He can't help it. If you are intelligent - you can help.

I have had my say. i have no idea whether anyone will understand, but I feel better for having said it.

dhu · (This post was last modified: 12-08-2007, 04:09 PM by dhu.)

It needs to be remembered that, in the greater timeline, the Christians came before the Muslims. Islam was formed only after Augustine had introduced the concept of divine will to Christianity; so we do not really see in Islam the struggles to appropriate traditions and to formulate a Hindu Code for subjects (to find the Hindu version of the law-giver Moses - that is, to manufacture a hoax). Islam is the leaner and meaner version of Christianity; Islam has done away with these needs and is absolutely assured of its "mission".

The so-called western world will be done in by Islam precisely because Islam is the more refined version of Christianity; Islam does not need to manufacture a sham Liberation theology since it is quite visibly the "religion" of, for, and by the darkies.

But in India, we were exposed to the Version 2 of Islam much before the Version 1 of Christianity. Theoretically, this should automatically lead to a de-dhimmification just as the antidote is often a more dilute version of the poison. Even now, we can see elaborate arguments being formulated against Christianity which will lead eventually to de-dhimmification (eg, Balu) if not a renewal of our Renaissance. Against Islam, we would have had to content ourselves with "Mohammad is a child molester" type arguments and there would have been no progression from the human wasteland of Islam. So Christianity is serving as a foil against which we can ground our renewal. As with everything, however, it is a race against the clock.

Many times, I have seen the most Dhimmi individuals actually turn around and surprise with a caustic comment against Islam/Christianity or at least an acknowledgement of the Hindu view. These tend to be the older generation. Newer genration has been infected with version 3 of Communism/Liberalism/Secularism. Communism is the western product that prevent sympathy from accruing to the authentic traditions of the darkies and instead channels these sympathies towards Islam or heterodox niches in western civilization. The biggest mistake we can make is thinking that Liberalism is a repudiation of the Christian origins of the West.

Just some stray thoughts; feel free to contradict.

12-13-2007, 01:07 AM

QUOTEEthos and development 
Pioneer.com
Hiranmay Karlekar
It's time we had an Indian model of development, not the one unimaginatively imported from the West

As the year draws to an end, one needs to ponder the goal India has set for itself as a nation and ask: Is that all that we should aspire after? Mercifully, the search for an answer has been simplified by the absence of confusion about what the country wants to be -- join the global club of the rich and powerful and cast itself in the image of the developed countries. This leads us to two questions. First, is it a worthy goal to set for India? Second, can India achieve the goal?

As to the first, one need not froth in the mouth while talking of Western countries and, particularly, the United States which, whatever its faults, is a vibrant democracy. Nevertheless, both global warming and the energy crisis raise the question of the sustainability of the developed countries' pattern of development. More, it is remarkable that we want to be like others, and not others to be like us. This reflects that we lack an independent vision of ourselves or what we want to be; hence, we cannot expect others to be like us. Second, even if we know what we are, we are ashamed of it and want India to be like some other country.

Both facts are unfortunate. A country without a vision of itself lacks a civilisational identity. In trying to be another country, it follows a developmental course that is not guided by its historical experience and is in constant danger of running aground. The argument that the experience of other countries will help in navigating our course, overlooks the fact that societal guidance systems are not environment neutral but products of history, and are difficult to replicate in a different context. Besides, the societal evolutionary process, through which contemporary Western countries have emerged, has been very different from India's. As a result, India's civilisational and cultural ethos are very different from theirs.

The social, political, economic and cultural contours of the developed countries have been shaped by the Renaissance, Reformation and the Enlightenment and the impact of capitalism and imperialism. On the other hand, those of India's have been shaped by its civilisational heritage as defined by Upanishads, Vedas, Ramayan, Mahabharat and Purans, and the sacred texts of Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism in interaction with the Islamic and British experiences.

One can argue that British rule gave India a set of modern institutions, built after those of its own, and an English-speaking Indian elite capable of running these. One can also argue that the Bengal Renaissance, which blazed form the middle of the 19th century to the first three decades or so of the 20th, created an intelligentsia and a middle class steeped in the ethos of Western modernity and capable of spearheading development pattern approximating that seen in the West.

The English-speaking Indian elite, however, constitutes only a minuscule fringe, culturally alienated from the inhabitants of the country's vast rural hinterland. It led the freedom struggle because, apart from the quality of its own leaders of the time, the masses, though electrified by Mahatma Gandhi, had yet to hone their leadership skills sufficiently thanks to lack of education and the restricted franchise that mostly excluded them from the limited representative institutions the British provided. It, however, could not hold its own politically in the post-independence period, thanks to the introduction of adult franchise, which enabled the rise of leaders who empathised and communicated with the masses. Most such leaders, unfortunately, have yet to learn to run Governments and ride the challenges of a globalising economy. Nor can they intervene effectively in the growing confrontation between the 300-million strong consuming segment and the 700-million strong rural masses for resources and opportunities. Should the confrontation persist, social unrest, compounded by cross-border terrorism from Pakistan and Bangladesh, may hobble economic development

We had chosen a path which made the emancipation of subaltern humanity an integral part of progress. We are now jettisoning it -- making the emergence of competent subaltern leadership more difficult -- and hitching development to meeting the consumer aspirations of the upper and middle classes. While this is making the emergence of competent subaltern leadership difficult, copying of the Western model of development hinders efforts to build an Indian model in keeping with the country's heritage. It is as much the world's as India's loss. For India's heritage, which includes the entire nature in the moral universe created by human beings, is the only one which makes for harmonious co-existence between human beings and nature.

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