HVK Archives: An incomplete sense of nationhood
An incomplete sense of nationhood - The Hindu
Prem Shankar Jha
()
12 January 1997
Title : An incomplete sense of nationhood
Author : Prem Shankar Jha
Publication : The Hindu
Date : January 12, 1997
As the year dawns that marks the 50th anniversary of India's
independence, .Indians would do well to ponder over the anomaly of
the country's insignificance in international affairs. How is it
that a nation of about a billion people - a sixth of mankind -
hardly ever figures in the endless debate that is now going on in
virtually every international forum about the shape of the world in
the 20th century? Why is India simply not in any reckoning of the
balance of forces that could emerge after the Cold war? Why do the
policymakers who are trying to cobble together a new international
order react with irritated surprise when India suddenly decides not
to go along with their grand designs, as it did over the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty? Why is India's claim to a permanent
seat in the U.N. Security Council treated with contempt Why does
its attempt to secure a non-permanent scat in competition with
japan meet with such a crushing defeat?
Why, for that matter, is the world so set that the dividing line
between nuclear and non-nuclear states must pass between China and
India when the two are of almost equal size, have been in armed
conflict before and are five times larger than the next most
populous country. What is it that makes Ms. Madeline Albright,
U.S. Secretary of State-designate, go to Indonesia and talk of that
country (and not of India) as the future counterweight to China in
Asia? Why, for that matter, is Indonesia considered worthy of a
permanent scat in the Security Council as India?
Why is India simply not news? When the New York Times, to take
only one yardstick, carries at least five stories on China every
week, why does it carry barely one a week on India? More
important, why has China become part of mainstream news, with
correspondents regularly reporting even secondary policy changes
like tax hikes on foreign companies, while India remains part of
the exotic, where the only fit subjects for reporting are
earthquakes, cyclones and child labour? Why, in short, is the
world's second-most populous nation and its largest democracy are
insignificant?
Over the years, a plethora of reasons has been advanced to explain
the anomaly. As to not making news. it is often pointed out that in
the media today, good news is no news. Notwithstanding the Kashmir
insurgency and the earlier troubles in Punjab (which did get
actively reported), India is profoundly at peace with itself. Its
very stability deprives it of newsworthiness. India has also
shunned multinationals, so there are no millions of shareholders
abroad whose fortunes can be affected by changes in the country.
Lastly, India is also not a threat to any country, except possibly
Pakistan.
On nuclear non-proliferation, it can be argued that the dividing
line runs between India and China only because China exploded its
bomb in 1964, three years before the NPT was proposed, while India
did so in 1974, four years after it was signed. It can also be said
that India is reaping the fruits of being, however tangentially, on
the losing side in the Cold War, while Indonesia, with the least
savoury human rights record in Asia, is being rewarded for being
equally tangentially on the winning side. Several commentators
have, with considerable justification, also put the blame for
India's insignificance on its miserable economic records. Here,
too, they argue that India found itself on the losing side of
ideology. And last but not the least, by pitting Pakistan against
India and importing the Cold War into the subcontinent, Partition
undermined Nehru's vision of a positive peace making role for
non-alignment, and checkmated India's claim to greatness.
Each of these explanations is plausible, but neither singly nor
together do they resolve the mystery of India's insignificance.
The true reason does not lie outside India but inside it. In the
age of mass communication, the world sees India largely through
Indian eyes. If it does not take the Indian nation seriously, it
is because Indians have only a vague idea of their own nationhood.
At first sight, this may appear to be a strange observation. No
other country is so prickly about its sovereignty when dealing with
other governments and institutions, as concerned to safeguard its
economic sovereignty; to retain its nuclear option: and to take its
rightful place in the U.N. and other bodies. No group of immigrants
has retained such close and powerful links with its own culture.
language and traditions as those from India, whether it is the
Bhojpuri-speaking Mauritians and Guyanese, or the green cardholders
who make up three quarters of the Indian immigrants in the U.S. and
who continue to hesitate about changing their nationality despite
the manifest advantages of holding a U.S. passport.
A moment's reflection would show, however, that these are not
necessarily signs of a strong national identity. On the contrary
many, like the notorious prickliness of Indian diplomats in
international fora and the Left's allergy to foreign investors, are
defensive postures and reactions that reflect not the strength of
the Indian identity but its fragility. As for the binding power of
Indian culture and religion. while this is undeniable, it does not
in any way conflict with the claim made here that India's sense of
its own nationhood is weak and therefore defensive.
To understand that anomaly it is necessary to distinguish, as do
scholars who study China, between the Grand and Little Traditions
of Indian nationhood. The adhesion to "Indian" culture belongs to
the little tradition of caste, kinship, language, food and ritual.
It is not so much Indian as Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Kannadiga
or, more subtly, Lingayat, Saraswat and so on. To perceive the
truth of this observation, it is only necessary to contrast the
vigour of the "regional" Indian associations in London, New York,
and other global cities with the anaemia and torpor of the 'Indian'
associations in them. What is lacking in India is a Grand tradition
of nationhood - a core set of values and ideas that Indians use to
define themselves as Indians.
The contrast with China is instructive. China too has its little
traditions, although these are far less differentiated than those
of India. But it also has a living Grand tradition, forged out a
belief in its own manifest destiny, a highly-centralised rule, and
a bureaucracy selected on the basis of merit. In Imperial times,
these were the mandarins, selected on the basis of their
familiarity with Confucian principles of law and administration.
Today, the Grand tradition survives in a drastically altered form,
in the centralised rule of the communist party and the reinvested
ideology of "market socialism."
The indicators that India has not been able to create a grand
tradition of nationhood are too many to enumerate. But it is
visible in even the smallest and most trivial of occurrences. In
May 1996, the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy
of Sciences organised a three-clay conference of Indian and Russian
academics in Moscow to discuss the Indian experience as a stage in
the transition from socialism to a market economy. In his opening
address the organiser, who was one of the academics who helped
frame the economic policy of Mr. Gennady Zhyuganov explained the
purpose of the conference was to study how India had achieved such
remarkable success in making a smooth transition. To his and other
Russian participants' surprise, with one exception, the Indian
economists - comrades all - vied with one other in running down
India's achievements, cast doubts on the growth rates achieved
since 1993 or described them as a flash in the pan, and predicted a
vast increase in unemployment and rapidly widening income
differentials in the coming years.
Six months later, when a leading politician from the opposite end
of the political spectrum was asked during a conference at Harvard
University what he thought of the Chinese President, Mr. Jiang
Zemin's visit to India, he said that he had never felt so
humiliated in his life because India gave way on every point to the
Chinese and gained absolutely nothing in return. Whether these
self-belittling assessments were correct or not is beside the
point. What was significant about them was that they were being
aired outside the country. In point of fact, both the economists
in Moscow and the politician at Harvard probably knew that their
criticisms were grossly exaggerated. What they failed completely to
grasp was that abroad they were Indians first and Leftists or
members of the BJP next. No Chinese or Vietnamese, and for that
matter any American or European, ever does such a thing.
Within India the absence of a sense of nationhood is reflected in
an obsession with equity on all matters - social, economic,
political and even defence and sports issues to the complete
exclusion of any concern for nation building. Reservation was seen
as a necessary evil by the framers of the Constitution to be
reviewed after 15 years. It has not only been extended
indefinitely but is being applied indiscriminately to just about
any caste, religious, and most recently gender, group that can even
remotely claim to be discriminated against. No one, least of all
this writer, doubts that Indian society will become truly
egalitarian only when all caste, religious, and ethnic groups are
more or less evenly distributed in positions of decision-making
power. But not one of the politicians who are playing to the caste
gallery today has even asked, let alone seriously explored, how
this cardinal principle can be achieved without throwing away the
principle of merit, and endangering the survival, let alone
building, of the Indian nation, in a brutally competitive
knowledge-driven world (the answer lies in a combination of
education and a very limited, one-time preferential treatment, but
that is not the issue being discussed here).
The same obsession dominates the economic debate. Every attempt to
slow down the opening up of the Indian economy is founded on cries
that it will increase social inequalities. Hardly a day goes by
without a Surjeet or a Yechury not attacking the "utter failure" of
the Narasimha Rao Government's policies because they "Increased" or
failed to address the issue of poverty. Every slight rise in the
inflation rate is greeted as a fresh sign of this failure, and not
a week goes by without a demand from the Left, occasionally echoed
by the BJP, that reforms must wait till the problem of poverty and
equity has been resolved. The fact that this barrage of
condemnation is not supported by a single economic statistic, and
that all the relevant data point relentlessly in the opposite
direction - towards a rise in employment, fall in the number of job
seekers on the live register, a decline in the crude death rate, an
a rise in the real wage rate of agricultural workers - is once more
beside the point. What is important is the total absence of any
acknowledgement that the nation has to make hard choices if it is
to survive, and an acceptance that these will hurt some groups in
the short run.
Once again, the contrast with China or Vietnam could not be more
stark. From the halls of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to
the distant communes of Xian, visitors are told that technology is
the key to power in the next century. If China is to "catch up
with and surpass the West" it must acquire the latest technology.
If this means letting in foreign investors who own much of the
technology that China needs, so be it. If they have to be enticed
into coming in with assured infrastructure and huge tax
concessions, then so be it. And in the sharpest possible contrast
to the Surjeets of the world, when you ask a Chinese about the
ravages of inflation which is only now coming down after four years
of 15 to 24 per cent price increases, they tell you, "yes," prices
rose in Guangzhou by 18 per cent last year, but money incomes rose
by 31 per cent, so by and large most people are better off than
they were before." This simple argument, strangely enough, has not
been put forward even by the Narasimha Rao and now the Deve Gowda
Governments.
The weakness of India's nationhood described above is rooted in an
even deeper failure. There can be no nation without an elite.
India has not only not created a new national elite after
independence; it has destroyed the two traditional elites that had
existed at the time of independence - the Princes, and the "steel
frame" of bureaucrats, professional managers and the armed forces
that modern India inherited from the British. The way in which this
was achieved is now history - the denigration of the princes,
despite the fact that many of them played a key role in bringing
their peers into the Union; the reduction, the denial of
ministerial support to bureaucrats in the fact of parliamentary
enquiries, and the freezing of civil service salaries for 32 years
till 1979, to reduce the bureaucracy to the ranks of the new poor
and make it a pliant tool of the corrupt business-politics nexus.
But the very instrument that India has fashioned with the greatest
skill to keep together a nation of at least 16 major and
innumerable minor ethnic groups has done the most to prevent the
emergence of a new nationally-conscious elite. This is India's
democracy. Without for an instant denying its immense vitality and
contributions to nation building in other spheres, it has to be
conceded that the democratic process has created a widening gap
between the qualities that are needed to capture political power
and those that are needed to run a state or the nation. It is to
the credit of the system that by and large those who have succeeded
in doing the first have been unusually dynamic men. But fewer and
fewer of them know what is involved in running a huge and
heterogeneous nation.
There are no facile answers to the questions raised here. But until
we take stock Your failures with a clear eye, we cannot even begin
the task of remedying them.
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