05-19-2007, 03:55 PM
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t...8b82dpsct9f9003
Fears for Democracy in India
By MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
On February 27, 2002, the Sabarmati express train arrived in the
station of Godhra, in the state of Gujarat, bearing a large group of
Hindu pilgrims who were returning from a trip to the purported
birthplace of the god Rama at Ayodhya (where, some years earlier,
angry Hindu mobs had destroyed the Babri mosque, which they claimed
was on top of the remains of Rama's birthplace). The pilgrimage, like
many others in recent times, aimed at forcibly constructing a temple
over the disputed site, and the mood of the returning passengers,
frustrated in their aims by the government and the courts, was angrily
emotional. When the train stopped at the station, the Hindu passengers
got into arguments with Muslim passengers and vendors. At least one
Muslim vendor was beaten up when he refused to say Jai Sri Ram ("Hail
Rama"). As the train left the station, stones were thrown at it,
apparently by Muslims.
Fifteen minutes later, one car of the train erupted in flames.
Fifty-eight men, women, and children died in the fire. Most of the
dead were Hindus. Because the area adjacent to the tracks was made up
of Muslim dwellings, and because a Muslim mob had gathered in the
region to protest the treatment of Muslims on the train platform,
blame was immediately put on Muslims. Many people were arrested, and
some of those are still in detention without charge â despite the fact
that two independent inquiries have established through careful
sifting of the forensic evidence that the fire was most probably a
tragic accident, caused by combustion from cookstoves carried on by
the passengers and stored under the seats of the train.
In the days that followed the incident, wave upon wave of violence
swept through the state. The attackers were Hindus, many of them
highly politicized, shouting slogans of the Hindu right, along with
"Kill! Destroy!" and "Slaughter!" There is copious evidence that the
violent retaliation was planned before the precipitating event by
Hindu extremist organizations that had been waiting for an occasion.
No one was spared: Young children were thrown into fires along with
their families, fetuses ripped from the bellies of pregnant women.
Particularly striking was the number of women who were raped,
mutilated, in some cases tortured with large metal objects, and then
set on fire. Over the course of several weeks, about 2,000 Muslims
were killed.
Most alarming was the total breakdown in the rule of law â not only at
the local level but also at that of the state and national
governments. Police were ordered not to stop the violence. Some egged
it on. Gujarat's chief minister, Narendra Modi, rationalized and even
encouraged the murders. He was later re-elected on a platform that
focused on religious hatred. Meanwhile the national government showed
a culpable indifference. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee suggested
that religious riots were inevitable wherever Muslims lived alongside
Hindus, and that troublemaking Muslims were to blame.
While Americans have focused on President Bush's "war on terror,"
Iraq, and the Middle East, democracy has been under siege in another
part of the world. India â the most populous of all democracies, and a
country whose Constitution protects human rights even more
comprehensively than our own â has been in crisis. Until the spring of
2004, its parliamentary government was increasingly controlled by
right-wing Hindu extremists who condoned and in some cases actively
supported violence against minority groups, especially Muslims.
What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of
democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the
radar screen of most Americans is evidence of the way in which
terrorism and the war on Iraq have distracted us from events and
issues of fundamental significance. If we really want to understand
the impact of religious nationalism on democratic values, India
currently provides a deeply troubling example, and one without which
any understanding of the more general phenomenon is dangerously
incomplete. It also provides an example of how democracy can survive
the assault of religious extremism.
In May 2004, the voters of India went to the polls in large numbers.
Contrary to all predictions, they gave the Hindu right a resounding
defeat. Many right-wing political groups and the social organizations
allied with them remain extremely powerful, however. The rule of law
and democracy has shown impressive strength and resilience, but the
future is unclear.
The case of Gujarat is a lens through which to conduct a critical
examination of the influential thesis of the "clash of civilizations,"
made famous by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. His
picture of the world as riven between democratic Western values and an
aggressive Muslim monolith does nothing to help us understand today's
India, where, I shall argue, the violent values of the Hindu right are
imports from European fascism of the 1930s, and where the
third-largest Muslim population in the world lives as peaceful
democratic citizens, despite severe poverty and other inequalities.
The real "clash of civilizations" is not between "Islam" and "the
West," but instead within virtually all modern nations â between
people who are prepared to live on terms of equal respect with others
who are different, and those who seek the protection of homogeneity
and the domination of a single "pure" religious and ethnic tradition.
At a deeper level, as Gandhi claimed, it is a clash within the
individual self, between the urge to dominate and defile the other and
a willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and
equality, with all the vulnerability that such a life entails.
This argument about India suggests a way to see America, which is also
torn between two different pictures of itself. One shows the country
as good and pure, its enemies as an external "axis of evil." The other
picture, the fruit of internal self-criticism, shows America as
complex and flawed, torn between forces bent on control and hierarchy
and forces that promote democratic equality. At what I've called the
Gandhian level, the argument about India shows Americans to themselves
as individuals, each of whom is capable of both respect and
aggression, both democratic mutuality and anxious domination.
Americans have a great deal to gain by learning more about India and
pondering the ideas of some of her most significant political
thinkers, such as Sir Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi, whose
ruminations about nationalism and the roots of violence are intensely
pertinent to today's conflicts.
A ccording to the Huntington thesis, each "civilization" has its own
distinctive view of life, and Hinduism counts as a distinct
"civilization." If we investigate the history of the Hindu right,
however, we will see a very different story. Traditional Hinduism was
decentralized, plural, and highly tolerant, so much so that the vision
of a unitary, "pure" Hinduism that could provide the new nation,
following independence from Britain in 1947, with an aggressive
ideology of homogeneity could not be found in India: The founders of
the Hindu right had to import it from Europe.
The Hindu right's view of history is a simple one. Like all simple
tales, it is largely a fabrication, but its importance to the movement
may be seen by the intensity with which its members go after scholars
who present a more nuanced and accurate view: not only by strident
public critiques, but by organized campaigns of threat and
intimidation, culminating in some cases in physical violence. Here's
how the story goes:
Once there lived in the Indus Valley a pure and peaceful people. They
spoke Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the gods. They had a rich
material culture and a peaceful temper, although they were prepared
for war. Their realm was vast, stretching from Kashmir in the north to
Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in the south. And yet they saw unity and solidarity
in their shared ways of life, calling themselves Hindus and their land
Hindustan. No class divisions troubled them, nor was caste a painful
source of division. The condition of women was excellent.
That peaceful condition went on for centuries. Although from time to
time marauders made their appearance (for example, the Huns), they
were quickly dispatched. Suddenly, rudely, unprovoked, invading
Muslims put an end to all that. Early in the 16th century, Babur,
founder of the Mughal dynasty, swept through the north of Hindustan,
vandalizing Hindu temples, stealing sacred objects, building mosques
over temple ruins. For 200 years, Hindus lived at the mercy of the
marauders, until the Maharashtrian hero Shivaji rose up and restored
the Hindu kingdom. His success was all too brief. Soon the British
took up where Babur and his progeny had left off, imposing tyranny
upon Hindustan and her people. They can recover their pride only by
concerted aggression against alien elements in their midst.
What is wrong with that picture? Well, for a start, the people who
spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from
outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of
the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous
than Muslims. Second, it leaves out problems in Hindu society: the
problem of caste, which both Gandhi and Tagore took to be the central
social issue facing India, and obvious problems of class and gender
inequality. (When historians point to evidence of these things, the
Hindu right calls them Marxists, as if that, by itself, invalidated
their arguments.) Third, it leaves out the tremendous regional
differences within Hinduism, and hostilities and aggressions sometimes
associated with those. Fourth, it omits the evidence of peaceful
coexistence and syncretism between Hindus and Muslims for a good deal
of the Mughal Empire, including the well-known policies of religious
pluralism of Akbar (1542-1605).
In the Hindu-right version of history, a persistent theme is that of
humiliated masculinity: Hindus have been subordinate for centuries,
and their masculinity insulted, in part because they have not been
aggressive and violent enough. The two leading ideologues of the Hindu
right responded to the call for a warlike Hindu masculinity in
different ways. V.D. Savarkar (1883-1966) was a freedom fighter who
spent years in a British prison in the Andaman Islands, and who may
have been a co-conspirator in the assassination of Gandhi. M.S.
Golwalkar (1906-73), a gurulike figure who was not involved in the
independence struggle, quietly helped build up the organization known
as RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or National Volunteers
Association), now the leading social organization of the Hindu right.
Savarkar's "Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?," first published in 1923,
undertook to define the essence of Hinduness for the new nation; his
definition was exclusionary, emphasizing cultural homogeneity and the
need to use force to ensure the supremacy of Hindus.
Golwalkar's We, or Our Nationhood Defined was published in 1939.
Writing during the independence struggle, Golwalkar saw his task as
describing the unity of the new nation. To do that, he looked to
Western political theory, and particularly to Germany, where what he
called "race pride" helped bring "under one sway the whole of the
territory" that was originally held by the Germani. By purging itself
of Jews, he wrote, "Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it
is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be
assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan
to learn and profit by."
In the end, Golwalkar's vision of national unity was not exactly that
of Nazi Germany. He was not very concerned with purity of blood, but
rather with whether Muslim and Christian groups were willing to
"abandon their differences, and completely merge themselves in the
National Race." He was firmly against the civic equality of any people
who retained their religious and ethnic distinctiveness.
At the time of independence, such ideas of Hindu supremacy did not
prevail. Nehru and Gandhi insisted not only on equal rights for all
citizens, but also on stringent protections for religious freedom of
expression in the new Constitution. Gandhi always pointedly included
Muslims at the very heart of his movement. He felt that respect for
human equality lay at the heart of all genuine religions, and provided
Hindus with strong reasons both for repudiating the caste hierarchy
and for seeking relationships of respect and harmony with Christians
and Muslims. A devout Muslim, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, was one of his
and Nehru's most trusted advisers, and it was to him that Gandhi
turned to accept food when he broke his fast unto death, a very
pointed assault on sectarian ideas of purity and pollution. Gandhi's
pluralistic ideas, however, were always contested.
On January 30, 1948, Gandhi was shot at point-blank range by Nathuram
Godse, a member of the Hindu political party Mahasabha and former
member of the RSS, who had long had a close, reverential relationship
with Savarkar. At his sentencing on November 8, 1949, Godse read a
book-length statement of self-explanation. Although it was not
permitted publication at the time, it gradually leaked out. Today it
is widely available on the Internet, where Godse is revered as a hero
on Hindu-right Web sites.
Godse's self-justification, like the historical accounts of both
Savarkar and Golwalkar, saw contemporary events against the backdrop
of centuries of "Muslim tyranny" in India, punctuated by the heroic
resistance of Shivaji in the 18th century. Like Savarkar, Godse
described his goal as that of creating a strong, proud India that
could throw off the centuries of domination. He was appalled by
Gandhi's rejection of the warlike heroes of classical Hindu epics and
his inclusion of Muslims as full equals in the new nation, and argued
that Gandhi exposed Indians to subordination and humiliation. Nehru
believed that the murder of Gandhi was part of a "fairly widespread
conspiracy" on the part of the Hindu right to seize power; he saw the
situation as analogous to that in Europe on the eve of the fascist
takeovers. And he believed that the RSS was the power behind this
conspiracy.
Fast-forward now to recent years. Although illegal for a time, the RSS
eventually re-emerged and quietly went to work building a vast social
network, consisting largely of groups for young boyscalled shakha, or
"branches"which, through clever use of games and songs, indoctrinate
the young into the confrontational and Hindu-supremacist ideology of
the organization. The idea of total obedience and the abnegation of
critical faculties is at the core of the solidaristic movement. Each
day, as members raise the saffron flag of the warlike hero Shivaji,
which the movement prefers to the tricolor flag of the Indian nation
(with its Buddhist wheel of law reminding citizens of the emperor
Ashoka's devotion to religious toleration), they recite a pledge that
begins: "I take the oath that I will always protect the purity of
Hindu religion, and the purity of Hindu culture, for the supreme
progress of the Hindu nation." The organization also makes clever use
of modern media: A nationally televised serial version of the classic
epic Ramayana in the late 1980s fascinated viewers all over India with
its concocted tale of a unitary Hinduism dedicated to the
single-minded worship of the god Rama. In 1992 Hindu mobs, with the
evident connivance of the modern political wing of the RSS, the party
known as the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, or National People's Party),
destroyed a mosque in the city of Ayodhya that they say covers the
remains of a Hindu temple marking Rama's birthplace.
Politically, the BJP began to gather strength in the late 1980s,
drawing on widespread public dissatisfaction with the economic
policies of the post-Nehru Congress Party (although it was actually
Congress, under Rajiv Gandhi, that began economic reforms), and
playing, always, the cards of hatred and fear. It was during its
ascendancy, in a coalition government that prevented it from carrying
out all its goals, that the destruction of the Ayodyha mosque took
place. The violence in Gujarat was the culmination of a series of
increasingly angry pilgrimages to the Ayodyha site, where the Hindu
right has attempted to construct a Hindu temple over the ruins, but
has been frustrated by the courts. Although the elections of 2004 gave
a negative verdict on the BJP government, it remains the major
opposition party and controls governments in some key states,
including Gujarat.
For several years, I have studied the Gujarat violence, its basis and
its aftermath, looking for implications for how we should view
religious violence around the world. One obvious conclusion is that
each case must be studied on its own merits, with close attention to
specific historical and regional factors. The idea that all conflicts
are explained by a simple hypothesis of the "clash of civilizations"
proves utterly inadequate in Gujarat, where European ideas were
borrowed to address a perceived humiliation and to create an ideology
that has led to a great deal of violence against peaceful Muslims.
Indeed, the "clash of civilizations" thesis is the best friend of the
perpetrators because it shields them and their ideology from scrutiny.
Repeatedly in interviews with leading members of the Hindu right, I
was informed that no doubt, as an American, I was already on their
side, knowing that Muslims cause trouble wherever they are.
What we see in Gujarat is not a simplistic, comforting thesis, but
something more disturbing: the fact that in a thriving democracy, many
individuals are unable to live with others who are different, on terms
of mutual respect and amity. They seek total domination as the only
road to security and pride. That is a phenomenon well known in
democracies around the world, and it has nothing to do with an alleged
Muslim monolith, and, really, very little to do with religion as such.
This case, then, informs us that we must look within, asking whether
in our own society similar forces are at work, and, if so, how we may
counteract them. Beyond that general insight, my study of the riots
has suggested four very specific lessons.
The rule of law: One of the most appalling aspects of the events in
Gujarat was the complicity of officers of the law. The police sat on
their hands, the highest officials of state government egged on the
killing, and the national government gave aid and comfort to the state
government.
However, the institutional and legal structure of the Indian democracy
ultimately proved robust, playing a key role in securing justice for
the victims. The Supreme Court and the Election Commission of India
played constructive roles in postponing new elections while Muslims
were encouraged to return home, and in ordering changes of venue in
key trials arising out of the violence. Above all, free national
elections were held in 2004, and those elections, in which the
participation of poor rural voters was decisive, delivered a strongly
negative verdict on the policies of fear and hate, as well as on the
BJP's economic policies. The current government, headed by Manmohan
Singha Sikh and India's first minority prime ministerhas announced a
firm commitment to end sectarian violence and has done a great deal to
focus attention on the unequal economic and political situation of
Muslims in the nation, as well as appointing Muslims to key offices.
On balance, then, the pluralistic democracy envisaged by Gandhi and
Nehru seems to be winning, in part because the framers of the Indian
state bequeathed to India a wise institutional and constitutional
structure, and traditions of commitment to the key political values
that structure embodies.
It should be mentioned that one of the key aspects of the founders'
commitments, which so far has survived the Hindu-right challenge, is
the general conception of the nation as a uni-ty around political
ideals and values, particularly the value of equal entitlement, rather
than around ethnic or religious or linguistic identity. India, like
the United States, but unlike most of the nations of Europe, has
rejected such exclusionary ways of characterizing the nation, adopting
in its Constitution, in public ceremonies, and in key public symbols
the political conception of its unity. Political structure is not
ev-erything, but it can supply a great deal in times of stress.
The news media and the role of intellectuals: One of the heartening
aspects of the Gujarat events was the performance of the national news
media and of the community of intellectuals. Both print media and
television kept up unceasing pressure to document and investigate
events. At the same time, many scholars, lawyers, and leaders of
nongovernnmental organizations converged on Gujarat to take down the
testimony of witnesses, help them file complaints, and prepare a
public record that would stand up in court. The only reason I felt the
need to write about these events further is that their analyses have,
by and large, not reached the American audience.
We can see here documentation of something long ago observed by the
Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen in the context of
famines: the crucial role of a free press in supporting democratic
institutions. (Sen pointed out that there has not been a famine in
recent times in a nation where a free press brings essential
information to the public; in China, by contrast, in the late 1950s
and early 60s, famine was allowed to continue unabated, because news
of what was happening in rural areas did not leak out.) And we can
study here what a free press really means: I would argue that it
requires a certain absence of top-down corporate control and an easy
access to the major news media for intellectual voices from a wide
range of backgrounds.
Education and the importance of critical thinking and imagination: So
far I have mentioned factors that have helped the Indian democracy
survive the threat of quasi-fascist takeover. But there are warning
signs for the future. The public schools in Gujarat are famous for
their complete lack of critical thinking, their exclusive emphasis on
rote learning and the uncritical learning of marketable skills, and
the elements of fascist propaganda that easily creep in when critical
thinking is not cultivated. It is well known that Hitler is presented
as a hero in history textbooks in the state, and nationwide public
protest has not yet led to any change. To some extent, the rest of the
nation is better off: National-level textbooks have been rewritten to
take out the Hindu right's false ideological view of history and to
substitute a more nuanced view. Nonetheless, the emphasis on rote
learning and on regurgitation of facts for national examinations is
distressing everywhere, and things are only becoming worse with the
immense pressure to produce economically productive graduates.
The educational culture of India used to contain progressive voices,
such as that of the great Tagore, who emphasized that all the skills
in the world were useless, even baneful, if not wielded by a
cultivated imagination and refined critical faculties. Such voices
have now been silenced by the sheer demand for profitability in the
global market. Parents want their children to learn marketable skills,
and their great pride is the admission of a child to the Indian
Institutes of Technology or the India Institutes of Management. They
have contempt for the humanities and the arts. I fear for democracy
down the road, when it is run, as it increasingly will be, by docile
engineers in the Gujarat mold, unable to criticize the propaganda of
politicians and unable to imagine the pain of another human being.
In the United States, by some estimates fully 40 percent of
Indian-Americans hail from Gujarat, where a large proportion belong to
the Swaminarayan sect of Hinduism, distinctive for its emphasis on
uncritical obedience to the utterances of the current leader of the
sect, whose title is Pramukh Swami Maharaj. On a visit to the
elaborate multimillion-dollar Swaminarayan temple in Bartlett, Ill., I
was given a tour by a young man recently arrived from Gujarat, who
delighted in telling me the simplistic Hindu-right story of India's
history, and who emphatically told me that whenever Pramukh Swami
speaks, one is to regard it as the direct voice of God and obey
without question. At that point, with a beatific smile, the young man
pointed up to the elaborate marble ceiling and asked, "Do you know why
this ceiling glows the way it does?" I said I didn't, and I
confidently expected an explanation invoking the spiritual powers of
Pramukh Swami. My guide smiled even more broadly. "Fiber-optic
cables," he told me. "We are the first ones to put this technology
into a temple." There you see what can easily wreck democracy: a
combination of technological sophistication with utter docility. I
fear that many democracies around the world, including our own, are
going down that road, through a lack of emphasis on the humanities and
arts and an unbalanced emphasis on profitable skills.
The creation of a liberal public culture: How did fascism take such
hold in India? Hindu traditions emphasize tolerance and pluralism, and
daily life tends to emphasize the ferment and vigor of difference, as
people from so many ethnic, linguistic, and regional backgrounds
encounter one another. But as I've noted, the traditions contain a
wound, a locus of vulnerability, in the area of humiliated
masculinity. For centuries, some Hindu males think, they were
subordinated by a sequence of conquerors, and Hindus have come to
identify the sexual playfulness and sensuousness of their traditions,
scorned by the masters of the Raj, with their own weakness and
subjection. So a repudiation of the sensuous and the cultivation of
the masculine came to seem the best way out of subjection. One reason
why the RSS attracts such a following is the widespread sense of
masculine failure.
At the same time, the RSS filled a void, organizing at the grass-roots
level with great discipline and selflessness. The RSS is not just
about fascist ideology; it also provides needed social services, and
it provides fun, luring boys in with the promise of a group life that
has both more solidarity and more imagination than the tedious world
of government schools.
S o what is needed is some counterforce, which would supply a public
culture of pluralism with equally efficient grass-roots organization,
and a public culture of masculinity that would contend against the
appeal of the warlike and rapacious masculinity purveyed by the Hindu
right. The "clash within" is not so much a clash between two groups in
a nation that are different from birth; it is, at bottom, a clash
within each person, in which the ability to live with others on terms
of mutual respect and equality contends anxiously against the sense of
being humiliated.
Gandhi understood that. He taught his followers that life's real
struggle was a struggle within the self, against one's own need to
dominate and one's fear of being vulnerable. He deliberately focused
attention on sexuality as an arena in which domination plays itself
out with pernicious effect, and he deliberately cultivated an
androgynous maternal persona. More significantly still, he showed his
followers that being a "real man" is not a matter of being aggressive
and bashing others; it is a matter of controlling one's own instincts
to aggression and standing up to provocation with only one's human
dignity to defend oneself. I think that in some respects, he went off
the tracks, in his suggestion that sexual relations are inherently
scenes of domination and in his recommendation of asceticism as the
only route to nondomination. Nonetheless, he saw the problem at its
root, and he proposed a public culture that, while he lived, was
sufficient to address it.
In a quite different way, Tagore also created a counterimage of the
Indian self, an image that was more sensuous, more joyful than that of
Gandhi, but equally bent on renouncing the domination that Tagore saw
as inherent in European traditions. In works such as Nationalism and
The Religion of Man, Tagore described a type of joyful
cosmopolitanism, underwritten by poetry and the arts, that he also
made real in his pioneering progressive school in Santiniketan.
After Gandhi, however, that part of the pluralist program has
languished. Though he much loved and admired both Gandhi and Tagore,
Nehru had contempt for religion, and out of his contempt he neglected
the cultivation of what the radical religions of both men had
supplied: images of who we are as citizens, symbolic connections to
the roots of human vulnerability and openness, and the creation of a
grass-roots public culture around those symbols. Nehru was a great
institution builder, but in thinking about the public culture of the
new nation, his focus was always on economic, not cultural, issues.
Because he firmly expected that raising the economic level of the poor
would cause them to lose the need for religion and, in general, for
emotional nourishment, he saw no need to provide a counterforce to the
powerful emotional propaganda of the Hindu right.
Today's young people in India, therefore, tend to think of religion,
and the creation of symbolic culture in general, as forces that are in
their very nature fascist and reactionary because that is what they
have seen in their experience. When one tells them the story of the
American civil-rights movement, and the role of both liberal religion
and powerful pluralist rhetoric in forging an anti-racist civic
culture, they are quite surprised. Meanwhile, the RSS goes to work
unopposed in every state and region, skillfully plucking the strings
of hate and fear. By now pluralists generally realize that a mistake
was made in leaving grass-roots organization to the right, but it is
very difficult to jump-start a pluralist movement. The salient
exception has been the women's movement, which has built at the grass
roots very skillfully.
It is comforting for Americans to talk about a clash of civilizations.
That thesis tells us that evil is outside, distant, other, and that we
are perfectly all right as we are. All we need do is to remain
ourselves and fight the good fight. But the case of Gujarat shows us
that the world is very different. The forces that assail democracy are
internal to many, if not most, democratic nations, and they are not
foreign: They are our own ideas and voices, meaning the voices of
aggressive European nationalism, refracted back against the original
aggressor with the extra bile of resentment born of a long experience
of domination and humiliation.
The implication is that all nations, Western and non-Western, need to
examine themselves with the most fearless exercise of critical
capacities, looking for the roots of domination within and devising
effective institutional and educational countermeasures. At a deeper
level, the case of Gujarat shows us what Gandhi and Tagore, in their
different ways, knew: that the real root of domination lies deep in
the human personality. It would be so convenient if Americans were
pure and free from flaw, but that fantasy is yet another form that the
resourceful narcissism of the human personality takes on the way to
bad behavior.
Martha C. Nussbaum is a professor in the philosophy department, law
school, divinity school, and the college at the University of Chicago.
Her book The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's
Future will be published this week by Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press.
Fears for Democracy in India
By MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
On February 27, 2002, the Sabarmati express train arrived in the
station of Godhra, in the state of Gujarat, bearing a large group of
Hindu pilgrims who were returning from a trip to the purported
birthplace of the god Rama at Ayodhya (where, some years earlier,
angry Hindu mobs had destroyed the Babri mosque, which they claimed
was on top of the remains of Rama's birthplace). The pilgrimage, like
many others in recent times, aimed at forcibly constructing a temple
over the disputed site, and the mood of the returning passengers,
frustrated in their aims by the government and the courts, was angrily
emotional. When the train stopped at the station, the Hindu passengers
got into arguments with Muslim passengers and vendors. At least one
Muslim vendor was beaten up when he refused to say Jai Sri Ram ("Hail
Rama"). As the train left the station, stones were thrown at it,
apparently by Muslims.
Fifteen minutes later, one car of the train erupted in flames.
Fifty-eight men, women, and children died in the fire. Most of the
dead were Hindus. Because the area adjacent to the tracks was made up
of Muslim dwellings, and because a Muslim mob had gathered in the
region to protest the treatment of Muslims on the train platform,
blame was immediately put on Muslims. Many people were arrested, and
some of those are still in detention without charge â despite the fact
that two independent inquiries have established through careful
sifting of the forensic evidence that the fire was most probably a
tragic accident, caused by combustion from cookstoves carried on by
the passengers and stored under the seats of the train.
In the days that followed the incident, wave upon wave of violence
swept through the state. The attackers were Hindus, many of them
highly politicized, shouting slogans of the Hindu right, along with
"Kill! Destroy!" and "Slaughter!" There is copious evidence that the
violent retaliation was planned before the precipitating event by
Hindu extremist organizations that had been waiting for an occasion.
No one was spared: Young children were thrown into fires along with
their families, fetuses ripped from the bellies of pregnant women.
Particularly striking was the number of women who were raped,
mutilated, in some cases tortured with large metal objects, and then
set on fire. Over the course of several weeks, about 2,000 Muslims
were killed.
Most alarming was the total breakdown in the rule of law â not only at
the local level but also at that of the state and national
governments. Police were ordered not to stop the violence. Some egged
it on. Gujarat's chief minister, Narendra Modi, rationalized and even
encouraged the murders. He was later re-elected on a platform that
focused on religious hatred. Meanwhile the national government showed
a culpable indifference. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee suggested
that religious riots were inevitable wherever Muslims lived alongside
Hindus, and that troublemaking Muslims were to blame.
While Americans have focused on President Bush's "war on terror,"
Iraq, and the Middle East, democracy has been under siege in another
part of the world. India â the most populous of all democracies, and a
country whose Constitution protects human rights even more
comprehensively than our own â has been in crisis. Until the spring of
2004, its parliamentary government was increasingly controlled by
right-wing Hindu extremists who condoned and in some cases actively
supported violence against minority groups, especially Muslims.
What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of
democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the
radar screen of most Americans is evidence of the way in which
terrorism and the war on Iraq have distracted us from events and
issues of fundamental significance. If we really want to understand
the impact of religious nationalism on democratic values, India
currently provides a deeply troubling example, and one without which
any understanding of the more general phenomenon is dangerously
incomplete. It also provides an example of how democracy can survive
the assault of religious extremism.
In May 2004, the voters of India went to the polls in large numbers.
Contrary to all predictions, they gave the Hindu right a resounding
defeat. Many right-wing political groups and the social organizations
allied with them remain extremely powerful, however. The rule of law
and democracy has shown impressive strength and resilience, but the
future is unclear.
The case of Gujarat is a lens through which to conduct a critical
examination of the influential thesis of the "clash of civilizations,"
made famous by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. His
picture of the world as riven between democratic Western values and an
aggressive Muslim monolith does nothing to help us understand today's
India, where, I shall argue, the violent values of the Hindu right are
imports from European fascism of the 1930s, and where the
third-largest Muslim population in the world lives as peaceful
democratic citizens, despite severe poverty and other inequalities.
The real "clash of civilizations" is not between "Islam" and "the
West," but instead within virtually all modern nations â between
people who are prepared to live on terms of equal respect with others
who are different, and those who seek the protection of homogeneity
and the domination of a single "pure" religious and ethnic tradition.
At a deeper level, as Gandhi claimed, it is a clash within the
individual self, between the urge to dominate and defile the other and
a willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and
equality, with all the vulnerability that such a life entails.
This argument about India suggests a way to see America, which is also
torn between two different pictures of itself. One shows the country
as good and pure, its enemies as an external "axis of evil." The other
picture, the fruit of internal self-criticism, shows America as
complex and flawed, torn between forces bent on control and hierarchy
and forces that promote democratic equality. At what I've called the
Gandhian level, the argument about India shows Americans to themselves
as individuals, each of whom is capable of both respect and
aggression, both democratic mutuality and anxious domination.
Americans have a great deal to gain by learning more about India and
pondering the ideas of some of her most significant political
thinkers, such as Sir Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi, whose
ruminations about nationalism and the roots of violence are intensely
pertinent to today's conflicts.
A ccording to the Huntington thesis, each "civilization" has its own
distinctive view of life, and Hinduism counts as a distinct
"civilization." If we investigate the history of the Hindu right,
however, we will see a very different story. Traditional Hinduism was
decentralized, plural, and highly tolerant, so much so that the vision
of a unitary, "pure" Hinduism that could provide the new nation,
following independence from Britain in 1947, with an aggressive
ideology of homogeneity could not be found in India: The founders of
the Hindu right had to import it from Europe.
The Hindu right's view of history is a simple one. Like all simple
tales, it is largely a fabrication, but its importance to the movement
may be seen by the intensity with which its members go after scholars
who present a more nuanced and accurate view: not only by strident
public critiques, but by organized campaigns of threat and
intimidation, culminating in some cases in physical violence. Here's
how the story goes:
Once there lived in the Indus Valley a pure and peaceful people. They
spoke Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the gods. They had a rich
material culture and a peaceful temper, although they were prepared
for war. Their realm was vast, stretching from Kashmir in the north to
Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in the south. And yet they saw unity and solidarity
in their shared ways of life, calling themselves Hindus and their land
Hindustan. No class divisions troubled them, nor was caste a painful
source of division. The condition of women was excellent.
That peaceful condition went on for centuries. Although from time to
time marauders made their appearance (for example, the Huns), they
were quickly dispatched. Suddenly, rudely, unprovoked, invading
Muslims put an end to all that. Early in the 16th century, Babur,
founder of the Mughal dynasty, swept through the north of Hindustan,
vandalizing Hindu temples, stealing sacred objects, building mosques
over temple ruins. For 200 years, Hindus lived at the mercy of the
marauders, until the Maharashtrian hero Shivaji rose up and restored
the Hindu kingdom. His success was all too brief. Soon the British
took up where Babur and his progeny had left off, imposing tyranny
upon Hindustan and her people. They can recover their pride only by
concerted aggression against alien elements in their midst.
What is wrong with that picture? Well, for a start, the people who
spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from
outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of
the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous
than Muslims. Second, it leaves out problems in Hindu society: the
problem of caste, which both Gandhi and Tagore took to be the central
social issue facing India, and obvious problems of class and gender
inequality. (When historians point to evidence of these things, the
Hindu right calls them Marxists, as if that, by itself, invalidated
their arguments.) Third, it leaves out the tremendous regional
differences within Hinduism, and hostilities and aggressions sometimes
associated with those. Fourth, it omits the evidence of peaceful
coexistence and syncretism between Hindus and Muslims for a good deal
of the Mughal Empire, including the well-known policies of religious
pluralism of Akbar (1542-1605).
In the Hindu-right version of history, a persistent theme is that of
humiliated masculinity: Hindus have been subordinate for centuries,
and their masculinity insulted, in part because they have not been
aggressive and violent enough. The two leading ideologues of the Hindu
right responded to the call for a warlike Hindu masculinity in
different ways. V.D. Savarkar (1883-1966) was a freedom fighter who
spent years in a British prison in the Andaman Islands, and who may
have been a co-conspirator in the assassination of Gandhi. M.S.
Golwalkar (1906-73), a gurulike figure who was not involved in the
independence struggle, quietly helped build up the organization known
as RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or National Volunteers
Association), now the leading social organization of the Hindu right.
Savarkar's "Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?," first published in 1923,
undertook to define the essence of Hinduness for the new nation; his
definition was exclusionary, emphasizing cultural homogeneity and the
need to use force to ensure the supremacy of Hindus.
Golwalkar's We, or Our Nationhood Defined was published in 1939.
Writing during the independence struggle, Golwalkar saw his task as
describing the unity of the new nation. To do that, he looked to
Western political theory, and particularly to Germany, where what he
called "race pride" helped bring "under one sway the whole of the
territory" that was originally held by the Germani. By purging itself
of Jews, he wrote, "Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it
is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be
assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan
to learn and profit by."
In the end, Golwalkar's vision of national unity was not exactly that
of Nazi Germany. He was not very concerned with purity of blood, but
rather with whether Muslim and Christian groups were willing to
"abandon their differences, and completely merge themselves in the
National Race." He was firmly against the civic equality of any people
who retained their religious and ethnic distinctiveness.
At the time of independence, such ideas of Hindu supremacy did not
prevail. Nehru and Gandhi insisted not only on equal rights for all
citizens, but also on stringent protections for religious freedom of
expression in the new Constitution. Gandhi always pointedly included
Muslims at the very heart of his movement. He felt that respect for
human equality lay at the heart of all genuine religions, and provided
Hindus with strong reasons both for repudiating the caste hierarchy
and for seeking relationships of respect and harmony with Christians
and Muslims. A devout Muslim, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, was one of his
and Nehru's most trusted advisers, and it was to him that Gandhi
turned to accept food when he broke his fast unto death, a very
pointed assault on sectarian ideas of purity and pollution. Gandhi's
pluralistic ideas, however, were always contested.
On January 30, 1948, Gandhi was shot at point-blank range by Nathuram
Godse, a member of the Hindu political party Mahasabha and former
member of the RSS, who had long had a close, reverential relationship
with Savarkar. At his sentencing on November 8, 1949, Godse read a
book-length statement of self-explanation. Although it was not
permitted publication at the time, it gradually leaked out. Today it
is widely available on the Internet, where Godse is revered as a hero
on Hindu-right Web sites.
Godse's self-justification, like the historical accounts of both
Savarkar and Golwalkar, saw contemporary events against the backdrop
of centuries of "Muslim tyranny" in India, punctuated by the heroic
resistance of Shivaji in the 18th century. Like Savarkar, Godse
described his goal as that of creating a strong, proud India that
could throw off the centuries of domination. He was appalled by
Gandhi's rejection of the warlike heroes of classical Hindu epics and
his inclusion of Muslims as full equals in the new nation, and argued
that Gandhi exposed Indians to subordination and humiliation. Nehru
believed that the murder of Gandhi was part of a "fairly widespread
conspiracy" on the part of the Hindu right to seize power; he saw the
situation as analogous to that in Europe on the eve of the fascist
takeovers. And he believed that the RSS was the power behind this
conspiracy.
Fast-forward now to recent years. Although illegal for a time, the RSS
eventually re-emerged and quietly went to work building a vast social
network, consisting largely of groups for young boyscalled shakha, or
"branches"which, through clever use of games and songs, indoctrinate
the young into the confrontational and Hindu-supremacist ideology of
the organization. The idea of total obedience and the abnegation of
critical faculties is at the core of the solidaristic movement. Each
day, as members raise the saffron flag of the warlike hero Shivaji,
which the movement prefers to the tricolor flag of the Indian nation
(with its Buddhist wheel of law reminding citizens of the emperor
Ashoka's devotion to religious toleration), they recite a pledge that
begins: "I take the oath that I will always protect the purity of
Hindu religion, and the purity of Hindu culture, for the supreme
progress of the Hindu nation." The organization also makes clever use
of modern media: A nationally televised serial version of the classic
epic Ramayana in the late 1980s fascinated viewers all over India with
its concocted tale of a unitary Hinduism dedicated to the
single-minded worship of the god Rama. In 1992 Hindu mobs, with the
evident connivance of the modern political wing of the RSS, the party
known as the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, or National People's Party),
destroyed a mosque in the city of Ayodhya that they say covers the
remains of a Hindu temple marking Rama's birthplace.
Politically, the BJP began to gather strength in the late 1980s,
drawing on widespread public dissatisfaction with the economic
policies of the post-Nehru Congress Party (although it was actually
Congress, under Rajiv Gandhi, that began economic reforms), and
playing, always, the cards of hatred and fear. It was during its
ascendancy, in a coalition government that prevented it from carrying
out all its goals, that the destruction of the Ayodyha mosque took
place. The violence in Gujarat was the culmination of a series of
increasingly angry pilgrimages to the Ayodyha site, where the Hindu
right has attempted to construct a Hindu temple over the ruins, but
has been frustrated by the courts. Although the elections of 2004 gave
a negative verdict on the BJP government, it remains the major
opposition party and controls governments in some key states,
including Gujarat.
For several years, I have studied the Gujarat violence, its basis and
its aftermath, looking for implications for how we should view
religious violence around the world. One obvious conclusion is that
each case must be studied on its own merits, with close attention to
specific historical and regional factors. The idea that all conflicts
are explained by a simple hypothesis of the "clash of civilizations"
proves utterly inadequate in Gujarat, where European ideas were
borrowed to address a perceived humiliation and to create an ideology
that has led to a great deal of violence against peaceful Muslims.
Indeed, the "clash of civilizations" thesis is the best friend of the
perpetrators because it shields them and their ideology from scrutiny.
Repeatedly in interviews with leading members of the Hindu right, I
was informed that no doubt, as an American, I was already on their
side, knowing that Muslims cause trouble wherever they are.
What we see in Gujarat is not a simplistic, comforting thesis, but
something more disturbing: the fact that in a thriving democracy, many
individuals are unable to live with others who are different, on terms
of mutual respect and amity. They seek total domination as the only
road to security and pride. That is a phenomenon well known in
democracies around the world, and it has nothing to do with an alleged
Muslim monolith, and, really, very little to do with religion as such.
This case, then, informs us that we must look within, asking whether
in our own society similar forces are at work, and, if so, how we may
counteract them. Beyond that general insight, my study of the riots
has suggested four very specific lessons.
The rule of law: One of the most appalling aspects of the events in
Gujarat was the complicity of officers of the law. The police sat on
their hands, the highest officials of state government egged on the
killing, and the national government gave aid and comfort to the state
government.
However, the institutional and legal structure of the Indian democracy
ultimately proved robust, playing a key role in securing justice for
the victims. The Supreme Court and the Election Commission of India
played constructive roles in postponing new elections while Muslims
were encouraged to return home, and in ordering changes of venue in
key trials arising out of the violence. Above all, free national
elections were held in 2004, and those elections, in which the
participation of poor rural voters was decisive, delivered a strongly
negative verdict on the policies of fear and hate, as well as on the
BJP's economic policies. The current government, headed by Manmohan
Singha Sikh and India's first minority prime ministerhas announced a
firm commitment to end sectarian violence and has done a great deal to
focus attention on the unequal economic and political situation of
Muslims in the nation, as well as appointing Muslims to key offices.
On balance, then, the pluralistic democracy envisaged by Gandhi and
Nehru seems to be winning, in part because the framers of the Indian
state bequeathed to India a wise institutional and constitutional
structure, and traditions of commitment to the key political values
that structure embodies.
It should be mentioned that one of the key aspects of the founders'
commitments, which so far has survived the Hindu-right challenge, is
the general conception of the nation as a uni-ty around political
ideals and values, particularly the value of equal entitlement, rather
than around ethnic or religious or linguistic identity. India, like
the United States, but unlike most of the nations of Europe, has
rejected such exclusionary ways of characterizing the nation, adopting
in its Constitution, in public ceremonies, and in key public symbols
the political conception of its unity. Political structure is not
ev-erything, but it can supply a great deal in times of stress.
The news media and the role of intellectuals: One of the heartening
aspects of the Gujarat events was the performance of the national news
media and of the community of intellectuals. Both print media and
television kept up unceasing pressure to document and investigate
events. At the same time, many scholars, lawyers, and leaders of
nongovernnmental organizations converged on Gujarat to take down the
testimony of witnesses, help them file complaints, and prepare a
public record that would stand up in court. The only reason I felt the
need to write about these events further is that their analyses have,
by and large, not reached the American audience.
We can see here documentation of something long ago observed by the
Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen in the context of
famines: the crucial role of a free press in supporting democratic
institutions. (Sen pointed out that there has not been a famine in
recent times in a nation where a free press brings essential
information to the public; in China, by contrast, in the late 1950s
and early 60s, famine was allowed to continue unabated, because news
of what was happening in rural areas did not leak out.) And we can
study here what a free press really means: I would argue that it
requires a certain absence of top-down corporate control and an easy
access to the major news media for intellectual voices from a wide
range of backgrounds.
Education and the importance of critical thinking and imagination: So
far I have mentioned factors that have helped the Indian democracy
survive the threat of quasi-fascist takeover. But there are warning
signs for the future. The public schools in Gujarat are famous for
their complete lack of critical thinking, their exclusive emphasis on
rote learning and the uncritical learning of marketable skills, and
the elements of fascist propaganda that easily creep in when critical
thinking is not cultivated. It is well known that Hitler is presented
as a hero in history textbooks in the state, and nationwide public
protest has not yet led to any change. To some extent, the rest of the
nation is better off: National-level textbooks have been rewritten to
take out the Hindu right's false ideological view of history and to
substitute a more nuanced view. Nonetheless, the emphasis on rote
learning and on regurgitation of facts for national examinations is
distressing everywhere, and things are only becoming worse with the
immense pressure to produce economically productive graduates.
The educational culture of India used to contain progressive voices,
such as that of the great Tagore, who emphasized that all the skills
in the world were useless, even baneful, if not wielded by a
cultivated imagination and refined critical faculties. Such voices
have now been silenced by the sheer demand for profitability in the
global market. Parents want their children to learn marketable skills,
and their great pride is the admission of a child to the Indian
Institutes of Technology or the India Institutes of Management. They
have contempt for the humanities and the arts. I fear for democracy
down the road, when it is run, as it increasingly will be, by docile
engineers in the Gujarat mold, unable to criticize the propaganda of
politicians and unable to imagine the pain of another human being.
In the United States, by some estimates fully 40 percent of
Indian-Americans hail from Gujarat, where a large proportion belong to
the Swaminarayan sect of Hinduism, distinctive for its emphasis on
uncritical obedience to the utterances of the current leader of the
sect, whose title is Pramukh Swami Maharaj. On a visit to the
elaborate multimillion-dollar Swaminarayan temple in Bartlett, Ill., I
was given a tour by a young man recently arrived from Gujarat, who
delighted in telling me the simplistic Hindu-right story of India's
history, and who emphatically told me that whenever Pramukh Swami
speaks, one is to regard it as the direct voice of God and obey
without question. At that point, with a beatific smile, the young man
pointed up to the elaborate marble ceiling and asked, "Do you know why
this ceiling glows the way it does?" I said I didn't, and I
confidently expected an explanation invoking the spiritual powers of
Pramukh Swami. My guide smiled even more broadly. "Fiber-optic
cables," he told me. "We are the first ones to put this technology
into a temple." There you see what can easily wreck democracy: a
combination of technological sophistication with utter docility. I
fear that many democracies around the world, including our own, are
going down that road, through a lack of emphasis on the humanities and
arts and an unbalanced emphasis on profitable skills.
The creation of a liberal public culture: How did fascism take such
hold in India? Hindu traditions emphasize tolerance and pluralism, and
daily life tends to emphasize the ferment and vigor of difference, as
people from so many ethnic, linguistic, and regional backgrounds
encounter one another. But as I've noted, the traditions contain a
wound, a locus of vulnerability, in the area of humiliated
masculinity. For centuries, some Hindu males think, they were
subordinated by a sequence of conquerors, and Hindus have come to
identify the sexual playfulness and sensuousness of their traditions,
scorned by the masters of the Raj, with their own weakness and
subjection. So a repudiation of the sensuous and the cultivation of
the masculine came to seem the best way out of subjection. One reason
why the RSS attracts such a following is the widespread sense of
masculine failure.
At the same time, the RSS filled a void, organizing at the grass-roots
level with great discipline and selflessness. The RSS is not just
about fascist ideology; it also provides needed social services, and
it provides fun, luring boys in with the promise of a group life that
has both more solidarity and more imagination than the tedious world
of government schools.
S o what is needed is some counterforce, which would supply a public
culture of pluralism with equally efficient grass-roots organization,
and a public culture of masculinity that would contend against the
appeal of the warlike and rapacious masculinity purveyed by the Hindu
right. The "clash within" is not so much a clash between two groups in
a nation that are different from birth; it is, at bottom, a clash
within each person, in which the ability to live with others on terms
of mutual respect and equality contends anxiously against the sense of
being humiliated.
Gandhi understood that. He taught his followers that life's real
struggle was a struggle within the self, against one's own need to
dominate and one's fear of being vulnerable. He deliberately focused
attention on sexuality as an arena in which domination plays itself
out with pernicious effect, and he deliberately cultivated an
androgynous maternal persona. More significantly still, he showed his
followers that being a "real man" is not a matter of being aggressive
and bashing others; it is a matter of controlling one's own instincts
to aggression and standing up to provocation with only one's human
dignity to defend oneself. I think that in some respects, he went off
the tracks, in his suggestion that sexual relations are inherently
scenes of domination and in his recommendation of asceticism as the
only route to nondomination. Nonetheless, he saw the problem at its
root, and he proposed a public culture that, while he lived, was
sufficient to address it.
In a quite different way, Tagore also created a counterimage of the
Indian self, an image that was more sensuous, more joyful than that of
Gandhi, but equally bent on renouncing the domination that Tagore saw
as inherent in European traditions. In works such as Nationalism and
The Religion of Man, Tagore described a type of joyful
cosmopolitanism, underwritten by poetry and the arts, that he also
made real in his pioneering progressive school in Santiniketan.
After Gandhi, however, that part of the pluralist program has
languished. Though he much loved and admired both Gandhi and Tagore,
Nehru had contempt for religion, and out of his contempt he neglected
the cultivation of what the radical religions of both men had
supplied: images of who we are as citizens, symbolic connections to
the roots of human vulnerability and openness, and the creation of a
grass-roots public culture around those symbols. Nehru was a great
institution builder, but in thinking about the public culture of the
new nation, his focus was always on economic, not cultural, issues.
Because he firmly expected that raising the economic level of the poor
would cause them to lose the need for religion and, in general, for
emotional nourishment, he saw no need to provide a counterforce to the
powerful emotional propaganda of the Hindu right.
Today's young people in India, therefore, tend to think of religion,
and the creation of symbolic culture in general, as forces that are in
their very nature fascist and reactionary because that is what they
have seen in their experience. When one tells them the story of the
American civil-rights movement, and the role of both liberal religion
and powerful pluralist rhetoric in forging an anti-racist civic
culture, they are quite surprised. Meanwhile, the RSS goes to work
unopposed in every state and region, skillfully plucking the strings
of hate and fear. By now pluralists generally realize that a mistake
was made in leaving grass-roots organization to the right, but it is
very difficult to jump-start a pluralist movement. The salient
exception has been the women's movement, which has built at the grass
roots very skillfully.
It is comforting for Americans to talk about a clash of civilizations.
That thesis tells us that evil is outside, distant, other, and that we
are perfectly all right as we are. All we need do is to remain
ourselves and fight the good fight. But the case of Gujarat shows us
that the world is very different. The forces that assail democracy are
internal to many, if not most, democratic nations, and they are not
foreign: They are our own ideas and voices, meaning the voices of
aggressive European nationalism, refracted back against the original
aggressor with the extra bile of resentment born of a long experience
of domination and humiliation.
The implication is that all nations, Western and non-Western, need to
examine themselves with the most fearless exercise of critical
capacities, looking for the roots of domination within and devising
effective institutional and educational countermeasures. At a deeper
level, the case of Gujarat shows us what Gandhi and Tagore, in their
different ways, knew: that the real root of domination lies deep in
the human personality. It would be so convenient if Americans were
pure and free from flaw, but that fantasy is yet another form that the
resourceful narcissism of the human personality takes on the way to
bad behavior.
Martha C. Nussbaum is a professor in the philosophy department, law
school, divinity school, and the college at the University of Chicago.
Her book The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's
Future will be published this week by Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press.