Tag Archives: tradition

Searching for Left and Right in Indian Politics

08 Sun Mar 2015

Posted by in India, Society, South Asia

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Frequently – nay, always – does one read and hear discussions about right-wing politics and left-wing ideology in India, each being pit as the antithesis of the other. Countless hairs have been pulled in the quest to define the Indian Right, Hindutva, or whatever incarnation seems to be trending that day. Comparison to right-wing movements and leaders in foreign countries add an exotic flavour to this cacophony of generalisations. All the noise, however, is embarrassingly misguided for there is neither a Left nor a Right, as understood in the West, in India.

Coined to describe the accidental sitting arrangement in the French legislature after the Revolution, the Western political nomenclature of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ does not strictly apply to the Indian political landscape. Not only does the country have a different historical experience and political evolution but it is also at variance with Europe in its developmental trajectory. As a result, Left and Right are often highly misleading descriptors that find greater use as pejoratives than as meaningful categories. Closely examined, the division in Indian politics is perhaps better understood as between traditionalism and a modernity imported from the West. It goes without saying that there is a spectrum of thought within each of these groups.

So what are the politics of traditionalism and imported modernity? One site of conflict is culture. Traditionalists believe that India is a Hindu country with an undeniably Hindu past and one should not shy away from this fact. Acknowledging this does not make, ipso facto, India a majoritarian state. Modernists, however, wish to emphasise the plurality of Indian history and argue that a country as diverse as India can stay together only as a secular state. Traditionalists argue that secularism does not provide a level playing field between different belief systems as it does in the West. In fact, non-exclusive and non-proselytising systems such as Hinduism, Jainism, or Sikhism need to be protected against the predatory practices of faiths that are not so. The petty point that receives the most attention at the cost of missing this larger issue is whether the Congress Party, which has ruled India for over three quarters of the time the country has been independent, is genuinely secular or is a conniving player of vote bank politics. Many on the “Right” accept the modernist narrative of secularism as equality but accuse the Congress of minoritarianism, whereas traditionalists beg the question itself and prefer a localised modernity with an Indic soul.

A starker example of the failure of the Right/Left dichotomy in India can be found in economics. Conventional wisdom portrays the Left as socialistic or welfarist and populist while the Right remain the champions of capitalism, open markets and business. In India, the “right-wing” Bharatiya Janata Party has market-friendly economic thinkers like Arun Shourie and Subramanian Swamy and yet it also has Swaminathan Gurumurthy who is suspicious of the entire American financial model. In fact, some of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s views on community and economics mirrors Israeli kibbutzim of the early years far more than it does Wall Street. In between stands Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is not allergic to capitalism or the free market but is also reluctant to abandon the country’s public sector units. Interestingly, the BJP, in its earlier avatar as the Jana Sangh, had stronger positions against state interventions than in its current incarnation.

The same might be said of the “left-wing” Indian National Congress, that some of its younger members might have much more in common with Arun Shourie than their own leaders of yesteryear who advocated control over the commanding heights of the national economy. The Congress party has itself now advocated a mixed economy, building a middle path between state and private capitalism.

The other parties, such as they are, contribute just as generously to the confusion: Babasaheb Ambedkar was a strong votary of capitalism and free markets, but most of the parties which now worship Ambedkar would be reckoned to be broadly to the left of the political universe.

The marriage of the Right with welfarist economics, though rare, is not a new phenomenon. In Europe, Germany’s Bismarckian socialism and the Vatican’s Rerum novarum (and its three sequels), an encyclical by Pope Leo XIII, are Western examples of a politics of tradition, nationalism, and welfare that are not identical but fairly similar to India today.

Another interesting variation on the international Left/Right political framework is the environment. It is difficult to pin down the BJP’s exact environmental policy as it has had very little time at the helm – it is easy to make speeches without accountability while sitting in Opposition. However, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has recently uttered repeatedly a concern for the environment. Some may indeed argue that the BJP’s actions do not match with Modi’s words but the net result remains to be seen. In terms of clean energy, both the Congress and the BJP are inclined favourably towards nuclear power; with the possible exception of France, worldwide, the Left has generally had its reservations on the matter. Similarly, the BJP is gung-ho on solar and wind energy which traditionally saw less support from the international Right – until recently.

It would be erroneous to conflate the traditionalist/imported modernity binary to regressive/progressive labels too. For example, it was India’s “progressive” first prime minister who introduced curbs on free speech and a “regressive” thinker like Vinayak Savarkar argued against untouchability and the caste system. Of course, these are singular examples but this mishmash of views is not uncommon and illustrates the care with which Indian politics much be approached.

None of this is to argue that India cannot learn from the West – it can and should without any shame or hesitation. However, it would not hurt to think through the political scene a little more carefully to make sure we are describing the reality of India and not the Republicans or the Labour Party. Perhaps then, India might start to make an iota more sense to observers.

This post appeared on FirstPost on March 23, 2015.

Nationalism as Structure

14 Thu May 2009

Posted by in Book Review

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Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism: New Perspectives on the Past (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Limited, 2006). 192 pp.

Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism remains one of the seminal books in the scholarship on nationalism. Belonging to the constructivist school, Gellner believes that nationalism is “primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.”1 He further marries nationalism to ethnicity as Anthony Smith does, by stating “nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cross political ones.”2 Thus, ab initio, nationalism is inextricably tied to a political unit known as the state which is defined ethnically. As Gellner clarifies later on, “the problem of nationalism does not arise for stateless societies.”3

Gellner does well to separate nation from nationalism. He hesitates to define nation because it is based on a shifty value, culture. A culture is a mutually agreed upon system of signifiers, ideas, and associations among a group. This changes with each phase of civilisation, pre-agrarian, agrarian, and industrial as the power elites change at each step. In a manner, Gellner would agree with Hobsbawm’s theory of proto-nationalism but like Hobsbawm, Gellner argues for the singularity of the industrial experience that shapes nationalism. Centralisation of government, education, and culture creates the nation from the myths of volk and narod.4 However, Gellner sees the development of the national concept as inevitable: there was no “long-term calculation of interest on anyone’s part,” Gellner argues, because culture and ethnicity was taken for granted in the old days. Only with the appearance of labour migration and bureaucratic employment on their social horizons did they suddenly become conscious of their own culture, and therefore the Other and the Self.5 The advent of modernity breaks people away from traditions and old structures of power and replaces them with “anonymous, literate, identity-conferring culture.”6 Essentially, Gellner’s argument is that nationalism is the product of modernity’s impact on older orders. He therefore accepts the notion of proto-nationalism, yet argues, as Hobsbawm did, that they do not form modern nationalism.

Gellner makes a compelling argument, and its weaknesses reveal as much as its strengths. For example, by Gellner’s first principles, nations must necessarily be ethnically homogenous, failing to explain with any nuance nations like the United States or India. It seems he conflates ethnicity and culture here even though a culture is far more than just ethnicity. Many nations define themselves not on ethnicity but on religion, or common civic values. French nationalism under Napoleon, for example, was specifically civic in opposition to contemporary German or English values.

Furthermore, Gellner sees the development of nationalism on a single trajectory: that of European modernity. He does not explore a basic difference between European nationalisms and, say, Asian nationalisms. The former could, if we accept Gellner’s argument, arise from modernity, but for the latter, large swathes of Asia remain unindustrialised to this day (I follow Gellner’s conflation of modernity with industrialisation). Asian nationalisms have for their core a discourse of opposition to foreign rule (and therefore an inherent inferiority complex)7, while western European nationalisms developed from a fusion of intellectual traditions and conflict. To speak of modernity, then, as the defining ingredient of nationalism, is premature. China defies Gellner’s model because it became institutionally a nation only during Mao’s agrarian Cultural Revolution. Mao’s movement destroyed communist China’s ties to its past, but gained the trappings of the modern state. To flip this argument, if a strong, central bureaucracy is the mark of nationalism, then China and the Ottoman Empire had bureaucracies in the fifteenth century that would put any twenty-first century bureaucracy to shame. Thus, Gellner’s model suffers from a particularly narrow Eurocentric view.

What is particularly odd about Gellner’s argument is that it sets up a structuralist model based on economics and rational actor theory. Nationalism and its participants have been anything but rational in history. Secondly, there is no justification for the structures Gellner assumes. For Gellner (and for many others), the modern bureaucracy forms nationalism. Gellner does not explain why a cultural force like nationalism should be studied through a legislative network. Although legislature may well be part of culture, people prioritise different elements of their identity. The books of the Jewish Bible, for example, clearly mention land, race, religion, and language, and speak in a manner of othering.8 It is, therefore, possible to have nations before modernity.

Gellner is absolutely right in positing that nationalism is a political principle—nationalism is the mobilisation of the nation for political purposes. The question the debate centres around is what exactly is a nation? Gellner writes that it is a set of signifiers and signifiers that are shared by large numbers after modernity. He does not, however, say that the cultural morphemes did not exist before modernity. Thus, Gellner leaves the formation of a nation to sheer numbers. This is unsound in the Aristotelian mode of reasoning because concepts can either have materialisation or not. Gellner’s model asks for a gradation, but a gradation that matures not with members of a national set but with time. If Gellner assumes that nations are modern by definition, the book becomes merely a case study rather than an argument.

Like Hobsbawm, Anderson, and other theorists of nationalism, Gellner contributes much to the field. Gellner’s structural model for nationalism is argued with great rigour and it explains Europe’s experience quite well in the last two centuries. What is unsatisfying is Gellner’s complete neglect of acknowledging the differences in his own examples between Europe and the Middle East.

1: Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism: New Perspectives on the Past(Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Limited, 2006), 1.

2: Ibid.

3: Ibid., 4.

4: Ibid., 56.

5: Ibid., 59, 60.

6: Ibid., 84.

7: Many books have been written on India’s and China’s colonial complex. See, for example, George Perkovich’s India’s Nuclear Bomb, which argues that India acquired nuclear weapons for reasons of prestige. Itty Abraham also makes this point in The Making of the Indian Nuclear Bomb. On China, see Chen Jian’s Mao’s China and the Cold War.

8: Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy