Vijay Vikram

I spent some of the previous afternoon at the Barnes & Nobel Bookstore in Downtown Chicago. I leafed through some books. I began with Jonah Lehrer’s “Imagine: How Creativity Works”. Lehrer’s op-eds in The New York Times and Wired Magazine have been rewarding. His book however is not. It appeared to me as the most popular kind of popular science. The language is not engaging and he indulges in the American habit of using examples culled from the corporate world and product development to illustrate creativity. While this may be a legitimate approach for others, I remain allergic. I should add I only read 10 pages.

I then moved on to Thomas Sowell’s “Intellectuals and Society”. I liked this book.  Sowell makes useful distinctions between the following:

a)     Intellect

b)     Intelligence

c)     Wisdom

Intellect is the least impressive quality of the three in Sowell’s schema. It consists of the ability to originate and manipulate ideas, comprehend and articulate complex arguments and so forth. Intellect on its own does not endow its possessor with the knowledge of what is right. One requires intelligence for that, says Sowell. For example, Marx’s Das Kapital “was a classic example of an intellectually masterful elaboration of a fundamental misconception…” In other words, Marx possessed intellect but certainly little intelligence and no wisdom.

Wisdom of course is that rather ethereal quality that surpasses even intelligence and attempts to arrive at the knowledge of what is truly good and truly right – a quality that has been christened ethical intelligence by a modern Chinese thinker.

While I find Sowell’s understanding of wisdom unproblematic, his characterization of intellect and intelligence did challenge my own conception. I have understood “intelligence” as the quality of being able to digest and comprehend large amounts of information, grasp and proffer sophisticated, well-constructed arguments and evince an aptitude for the mathematical and natural scientific modes of enquiry. I considered “intellect” to be a higher quality, one that supplemented raw intelligence with ethical judgment. Thus, Sowell and I have the same content in mind but have used differing referents.

Another interesting aspect of Sowell’s argument is the establishment of “Intellectual” as an occupational category rather than a conferrer of normative value. Hence, intellectuals are those whose primary occupational concern is with ideas. Academics, journalists, think tank scholars, writers and so on. To call somebody any “intellectual” is not to make any statement about his intelligence but merely state his occupation. Of course, this is not how conventional conversation is conducted. Nevertheless, I did think this an interesting and valuable contribution.

The book into which I dug most substantially was Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” which is a portrait of life in a Mumbai slum. I read forty pages of it. This book has garnered a lot of press and as with any new India book, fiction or non-fiction, it naturally attracted my attention. Just the day before I had read a very caustic – and might I add, pleasing – review of the book by Paul Beckett, the man in-charge of The Wall Street Journal in India. (http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/04/30/the-letdown-of-behind-the-beautiful-forevers/)

If I remember correctly, Beckett’s main grouse was that whilst Boo succeeded in narrating the horrible lives of the slum-dwellers she failed to provide any coherent insight into why things were the way they were in the slum. She had a ready-made cast of villains according to Beckett – the police, global capital and Sister Paulette of the local orphanage – that provided some explanation for the wretched lives of the slum-dwellers.

I think there exists a distinction between reportage/talented story-telling and philosophical insight. Boo succeeds at the former but fails at the latter. What should be pointed out is that I don’t think Boo was aiming for the latter. She is after all, a reporter. A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, but a reporter nonetheless. It is not in the reporter’s job description to provide meaningful philosophical insights into the workings of the world. He can only tell you what happened and if he is a good reporter those happenings will possess a narrative. That is all.

It is only a recent perversion of the reporting profession that requires reporters to function as ersatz intellectuals and philosophers. Some reporters unfortunately clamour to supply this demand and end up over-reaching themselves and cheapening public discourse.

In any case, I liked what I read of Boo’s Beautiful Forevers. It was what I expected it to be: a sensitive, humanizing portrayal of India’s urban underclass. It is easy to empathize with Boo’s cast of characters – Abdul the waste-sorter and Asha the aspiring slum-boss. But do not go to this book looking for philosophical insight. Go to this book as you would to a novel, expecting a good story, a good distraction with the added benefit that this is “real” and therefore telling you something about the “real” world and not simply about the workings of the author’s imagination. This is of course a foolish way to approach literature but all of us suffer from the affliction of valuing non-fiction more than fiction in varying degrees.

I have never liked Ranbir Kapoor or Katrina Kaif. So, it was with some trepidation that I decided to watch Raajneeti. It was recommended both by friends and family and one gentleman even mentioned that one of the characters reminded him of me. The film also happened to be about one of the subjects dearest to my heart: Indian politics. I also had the distinct feeling that it might not be crap. So, on the last day of my trip to India, I went along to see it.

The first thing I must mention about the film is that it borrows liberally from The Mahabharata. Nay, it’s based on it. What better inspiration could there be for a tale about Indian family politics? It was a pleasure to be able to identify and compare Raajneeti’s characters with their mythological antecedents. Some scenes from the epic are even unselfconsciously reproduced in the film. Perhaps the most memorable one is near the end where Nana Patekar, assuming the role of 21st Century political Krishna prevails upon Arjun (Ranbir Kapoor) to put aside any pretensions to honour and family ties and satisfy the requirements of political morality.

This is a theme that runs through the entire film. The idea that politics and statecraft is a plane upon itself and therefore mandates its own set of rules and morality. In this sense, it is reminiscent of Machiavelli.

(As an aside, I should point out that Nana Patekar’s character, Brij Gopal comes across as an amalgam of Shakuni and Krishna – which, needless to say, is a stimulating combination)

I was instinctively drawn to Ajay Devgan’s character (Suraj Kumar) who is unambiguously based on Karan from The Mahabharata. There seems to be an aura of badassery that permeates his character. Suraj, just as Karan in The Mahabharata embodies a will to power, a clear talent and of course an inevitable pathos. Just like his mythological antecedent, he remains loyal to Duryodhana till the very end.

Manoj Bajpai is the actor tasked with playing Duryodhana doppelganger in the film. And I must say that Bajpai is grossly under-utilised. He is forced to play quite a pathetic, unidimensional character and none of his versatility is on show. I have always felt that Manoj Bajpai got a raw deal from the Hindi film industry. He has all the potential to be a an unconventional leading man (better than Ranbir Kapoor at any rate). If somebody of similar stock like Irfan Khan is allowed his time in the sun, surely there’s space for Manoj Bajpai.

On an aesthetic note, I really must applaud the high production values of 21st Century Hindi Cinema. The wardrobe, props and locations were flawless. The dialogue was careful to utilise political Hindi, which was a nice touch. In many ways, Hindi cinema has come of age. The film industry has started making what I suppose can be loosely termed as ‘social interest’ films. More importantly, Bollywood betrays a sense of confidence and brashness that is infectious.

Having said that, Raajneeti is not free from the usual idiosyncrasies of Hindi cinema. There is of course the exotic love interest and the badly done, obligatory sex and kissing scenes that no Hindi film seems to be able to do without these days. Still, these are forgivable flaws.

In any case, I would like to end by making two observations:

1) I’ve always felt that the moral imperative in The Mahabharata lay with Karan. It is him that I am drawn to and it is him that I have empathy with. It is he who should win and it is he who deserves the gaddi. In this fashion, both The Mahabharata and Raajneeti end unsatisfactorily for me.

2) Raajneeti was only released by the Censor Board after the removal of a few scenes from the film. I imagine these scenes were deemed offensive to the sensibilities of the Gandhi family. I would love to find out what they were.

The crisis of the English-speaking politician in India (read: the firing of Shashi Tharoor and the spot of bother that Jairam Ramesh has found himself in) has led to a peculiar state of affairs - the name of Nandan Nilenkani has begun popping up as some sort of panacea to the ills faced by the urbane politician without a mass base. He is being posited as a model that Tharoor and Ramesh would be better off emulating seeing as he successfully made the transition from corporate life to public service and has been working away, quietly and efficiently – to implement a new layer of bureaucracy onto a State notorious for its world class public service delivery. This view would of course be unexceptionable in the drawing room chatter of Lutyens’ Delhi. However, I think this view – this argument is fallacious and represents a political discourse that is unthinking and venal.

What the champions of this view – Ms Sagarika Ghose and Mr Rajdeep Sardesai in particular – don’t seem to realise is that Nandan Nilenkani is a civil servant, not a politician. The two professions are of course complementary seeing as they are both committed to the furtherance of the national good but it might as well be like comparing apples and oranges. A politician creates political will, a civil servant implements it.

I have no intention of defending the Sinophilia of Jairam Ramesh or the misplaced gregariousness of Shashi Tharoor. But, it is the job of the political animal to be an active public figure whilst it is up to the civil servant to make himself as anonymous as possible and go about his mandate with a quiet efficiency.

All that the repeated invocation of the Nilenkani example shows is that Indian politics is being reduced to a managerial profession. The highest peak that Indian politics can climb is that of managerial achievement. There is no doubt that Indian governmental structures could do with some of the incentivisation that the private sector is famous for. However, Politics is not economics. Politics is not management. Politics is not administration. Politics is, well, politics. It demands a will to power and a sense of overarching national vision. More than anything, it demands a complete emotional bond with the national community. But if Nandan Nilenkani – with all his managerial/administrative virtues - is being posited as the ideal-type of the savvy politician of 21st Century India then there is something wrong with how we imagine our politics.

I am glad Arundhati Roy exists. I say this because we desperately require a coherent structural critique of Indian democracy. Naysayers might argue that her critique is far from coherent but that is of little concern here. I am happy that at least somebody is willing to question the nature of Indian democracy, even if that person stares across from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. There seems to be an unthinking; publicly articulated commitment to democratic politics all across intelligent conversation in India. It has become the holiest of our holy cows. The Indian variant of democracy is sustained by a wide variety of adulatory literature, scholarly and journalistic. Perhaps most perversely, in a strange case of the post-colonial disease, Western approval for India’s choice of government leads to much puffing of chests in the Indian middle classes. We are told that it – along with Bollywood – is the source of much of our “soft power”, whatever that is.

I am not going to waste time listing the failures of our unique choice of government. They should be clear to any thinking Indian. What I am going to argue however, is that democracy could never really have succeeded in the Indian climate. I ask you to be patient because mounting an intellectual challenge against something that possesses the degree of unthinking social acceptability the way democracy does requires effort and often I shall resort to polemic to get my point across.

I say that democracy could have never succeeded in India because India is a feudal society. By feudal I mean a state of affairs where unequal relationships between humans and between groups are socially legitimate. The very idea that humans should be or can be treated equally is an idea that would be alien to a feudal society. It also means that human beings are not viewed as individuals per se – a construct that has been one of the primary outcomes of the European Enlightenment. Rather, a feudal society imagines human beings as part of bigger social groups – religious, ethnic, regional and uniquely in the case of India, caste. Democracy then, could only properly germinate and take hold in Europe and Europe-inspired societies after the absorption of Enlightenment ideology into the European DNA. The Enlightenment has washed up on the shores of India, yes. But, it has failed to take hold of the Indian imagination. It is groups that assert themselves in India – Dalit assertion, Muslim assertion, Gujjar assertion. The individual is nowhere to be seen.

The Nehruvian project’s central failing was its assumption that the extension of the universal franchise would transform the teeming masses of Hindustan – the various regional, religious and caste allegiances into the intellectually comfortable category of the Enlightenment individual. This was fantasy. Democracy is premised on the notion of the individual, and I use the term in a deliberately technical sense. Democracy can’t create the individual, it depends on the individual for its very existence.

The grafting of democratic government onto a society that has no basis for it has led to a peculiar and perverse state of affairs. Indian politics has become an arena for the contestation of identities rather than competing claims of the common good. As Lant Pritchett has pointed out -

Politicians have been able to survive on creating identities around caste and religion claiming to deliver social justice by the very fact of their election. That is, that someone of their group holds high office in and of itself provides social legitimacy to a group’s claims to fully equal participation in the social and political sphere. Attacks on these politicians for lack of effectiveness or corruption could be seen as, at best, missing the larger social point and at worst, as a retrograde attempt of the forces of the elite to “keep them in their place.”

The degeneration of politics in India and the values it has engendered have infected the country’s public institutions. Naresh Saxena, a former IAS officer who served in Uttar Pradesh, penned a note for the National Advisory Council at the time of the UPA’s first election into office (2004) that is breathtaking in its hard hitting honesty about the current state of affairs (particularly in North India) and which articulates a common view within the elite civil service that things are going downhill, in large part because the integrity and the non-partisan character of the civil service have deteriorated. He says:

…because between the expression of the will of the State (represented by politicians) and the execution of that will (through the administrators) there cannot be any long-term dichotomy.  In other words, the model in which the politics will continue to be corrupt, casteist and will harbor criminals where as civil servants will continue to be efficient, responsive to public needs and change agents cannot be sustained indefinitely. In the long-run political and administrative values have to coincide.

I have often been asked what I consider an alternative to democracy to be. I would imagine that India needs a form of government that integrates market institutions into the fabric of the country without the wholesale import of political norms that have no roots in Indian society. My goal for now is simply to open the debate.

Postscript:

1) You can watch Arundhati’s critique of Indian Democracy here

2) I owe a substantial intellectual debt to Lant Pritchett and his idea of India as a ‘Flailing’ State. Read his landmark paper here [PDF].

The latest controversy surrounding Shashi Tharoor is proving to be utterly compelling. More so because I feel that the anti-Tharoor camp both in the media and especially within the political class is reaching critical mass. The earlier controversies had potential for embarrassment but they were surely nothing that could dethrone him from a political position that has given him an enviable seat on the Delhi Durbar – that motley crews of socialites, industrialists, politicians and media honchos who determine the direction of public life in our country.

On their own, Tharoor’s comments about the Cattle Class and Saudi intervention didn’t possess enough sting to conduct a full and thorough public trial of Mr Tharoor (although oftentimes, it came quite close to that) leading to a resignation. However, the cumulative effects of the earlier Twitter controversies and this IPL bust-up are ominous.

This controversy also has the added benefit of the whiff of a sex scandal. I use the term here very loosely, but in a puritan society like ours, Tharoor’s public appearances with his arm around Dubai beautician Sunanda Pushkar was bound to ruffle a few traditionalist feathers. The news that Tharoor is on to his third marriage with Ms. Pushkar doesn’t endear him to the Grand Old Men of the Congress party by any stretch.

Shashi Tharoor was always going be an unorthodox Indian politician. Aside from lacking familial pedigree and caste allegiance, his decidedly upper-class mannerisms and flamboyance in the English language set him apart from the typical Indian politician. New Delhi and Bombay’s chattering classes of course welcomed his entry because they had finally found one of their own in that dirty business called politics.

I should add that as an English-speaking, Western-educated Indian I have some sympathies for Mr Tharoor and his predicament. However, I wonder where his priorities lie. Public life demands compromise and personal sacrifice. The heat and dust of Indian public life is especially unforgiving. In his tenure as Minister of State for External Affairs I have heard more about Shashi Tharoor’s five star lifestyle than his initiatives on foreign policy. It seems to me that Mr Tharoor is more interested in simply carving a little niche for himself in Delhi’s intellectual social circuits – attending film festivals, diplomatic dinners and delivering eloquent speeches at prize ceremonies –  than he is in building a career in national service. The adulation of the Delhi bourgeoisie must be intoxicating. But if Mr Tharoor was serious about building a career in Indian politics and working towards the clichéd common good he should have – as Kanchan Gupta argued – “kept a low profile, networked and built a constituency in Delhi.”

It may be too late for that however. The anti-Tharoor lobby is baying for blood and 10 Janpath might just oblige. This then, would be one dramatic rise and fall in the Mahabharat that is Indian politics.

Update: Mr Tharoor could take a leaf out of his colleague, Palaniappan Chidambaram’s book and offer to resign. In the circumstances, Sonia Gandhi would be compelled to accept and Mr Tharoor could take a sanyas from public life. This act of self-denial would play well with the voting public and earn him the respect of his peers. He could after an appropriate amount of time – having cast off his dandyish avatar and perhaps gone on a neo-Nehruvian Discovery of India trip – return to public life a thoroughbred desi political animal.

Readable:

Got A Girl, Named Sue

The Trouble with Shashi

Tharoor Go, Save Your Class

Mayawati and Mr. Tharoor

One of the misfortunes of having an intellectual sympathy for the political Right in India is that one automatically finds oneself in the company of unbecoming Hindu goons, be they online or in the field. As legitimate political activity in India is set on a default left-liberal setting, it is in the normal order of things quite problematic to find a desi political animal to engage with who is possessed of a sense of public service and a strong sense of national identity. The ones who do represent the aforementioned themes and other programmes dear to the heart of the Indian political animal often also couple these admirable political sentiments with quite a nasty anti-cosmopolitanism, not to mention a general distaste for Muslims. The latest brouhaha over a 95-year-old Indian painter’s decision to accept Qatari citizenship is a case in point. Without going into the stultifying details of this non-controversy, it is possible to illustrate the dilemma faced by the urban nationalist. On the one hand, there is the establishment media with all its shrillness busy bestowing titles of greatness upon Mr. Hussain, on the other, we have the cyber crusaders intent on punishing the nonagenarian for his treachery. Can you be a man of the Right and refuse to rain abuse on M.F. Hussain? For a child of that Indo-Persian synthesis called Hindustan and an advocate of assertive political action, this can cause a fair degree of cognitive dissonance.

If the choice is between urban cosmopolitanism however – a distinctly apolitical concern – and a movement that promises vigorous and ambitious national reform, the political animal ought to waste little time.

In an India that does not maintain a conscious commitment to the secularism that was so dear to her founding father, the only meaningful political-reformist impulses are to be found within that broad church called the Hindu movement. There is little doubt that the secularist project held enough promise to animate independent India’s Oxbridge-educated nation builders and for that matter, much of the professional elite. The vision of a progressive, religion-blind, postcolonial power was surely an attractive one for the champagne socialist. However, the democratising impulse inherent to Nehru’s nation building project ensured that a genuine commitment to secularism was gradually overwhelmed by the parochialism that comes naturally to a feudal society such as India. Nehru’s all-encompassing pan-Indian vision was to founder dreadfully on the rocks of region, religion and caste. Secularism in India means little more than being nice to Muslims and Christians. Although this is an admirable sentiment, it surely cannot form the basis of a comprehensive national philosophy.

The history of independent India’s politics is the history of the Congress ceding the nation-building imperative to the political Right. Why this has happened is a matter of debate. Perhaps the Congress, post-1947 really was a facade built around the gigantic political personality of Nehru and once he went, so did the fire of his guiding philosophy. One can scarcely accuse his daughter and her heirs of having much of a political Weltanschauung. Perhaps it can be accounted for by the vigorous activism of the Hindu right and the religiosity of the Hindu masses that in another era, Gandhi used to great effect.

Two points are clear though: India is a nation that still needs building and because the secularist project has run out of steam and fails to inspire the desi political animal, the only prescriptions for audacious political renewal are to be found in proposals put forth by modernisers from within the Hindu camp. There may be passionate men and women with an avowed commitment to Indian secularism residing in Delhi and Bombay who would contend the latter claim. What they fail to realise however is that they expend so much energy in fighting off the march of the Right and its pernicious agendas that they have little time to indulge in visions of societal renewal and meaningful political engagement. Machiavelli’s ideal of the political animal – one who sought the fulfilment and the glory that comes from the creation and maintenance by common endeavour of a strong and well-governed social whole – seems lost in the mediocre soap opera that is Indian politics.

The tasks facing the desi political animal then, are certainly not straightforward but necessary. He must utilise the energies unleashed by the right to create an atmosphere conducive to su-raj or good government. In practical terms this means committing oneself to policy affairs. In more normative terms, it means emphasising the will to power that comes naturally to overtly political movements. In the end, an Indian committed to political renewal has only one natural home, the Right, warts and all.

As I had mentioned in yesterday’s post, I was eagerly awaiting this evening’s live broadcast of the Intelligence Squared debate on Pakistan. You would be forgiven if you’re not especially enamoured of such events because they have become something of a dreary staple of Western policy circles. People who had never heard of Pakistan before confidently make policy pronouncements on “Af-Pak”, Swat, the “tribal areas” and rattle off a gaggle of Muslim names all in a misplaced effort to garner some form of intellectual capital.

Although this particular panel discussion suffered from some of those traits it was sufficiently stimulating for the most part. I was particularly impressed with Dr. Farzana Shaikh’s deposition. Dr Shaikh, a fellow with the Asia Programme at Chatham House put forth a thesis that seeks to view Pakistani affairs from the old-fashioned prism of Indo-Pak relations and Pakistan’s testy relationship with its founding faith. Her basic contention was that the Pakistani quagmire is a direct result of the the attempt to gain strategic parity with India. There were gasps of discomfort from the Pakistani members of the audience as Shaikh implied that it is time that Pakistan abandon this attempt. A gentleman in the Q&A session afterwards even questioned her “representativeness” as she wrote in the English language and worked for a Western organisation. Evidently, the irony of speaking in the English language escaped him.

Shaikh then, if I may be permitted the usage of the the term falls in the camp of the old school pragmatic secularists who wish to see Pakistan emerge as a developed member of international civil society. I would argue that the time for this Jinnahesque political project has passed and a radical re-imagination is required to foster a new and more sustainable political order on the Subcontinent for the benefit of all the populations involved.

One panelist whose speech I was eager to hear before the debate began was William Dalrymple. Dalrymple’s deposition convinced me that although he might have talents as a travel writer and as a chronicler of Mughal history he has serious deficiencies as an analyst of politics. His speech was a collection of clichés that seemed to have been gleaned from the op-ed pages of various English language newspapers. It’s basic aim seemed to be to reassure the audience that Pakistan hasn’t lagged behind India to the extent that the Western press made it out to be even attesting to the superiority of Pakistani roads and the high penetration of mobile phones. While no doubt true, it didn’t add much insight to the proceedings.

All in all though, it was a stimulating affair. I even had the opportunity to pose a question to Farzana Shaikh via Twitter that went something like this:

Re-integration with India is a utopian notion but is it not the most rational course forward?

This question simply aimed to take Dr Shaikh’s line of thought one step further. If Pakistan is to be a secular state in the classical Western sense as she envisions it then what is the rationale for its existence as a separate Islamic Republic? This of course draws attention to that rather large gorilla in the room that everybody would rather leave alone – the botched Partition of India.

Shaikh dismissed the proposition but to do so is understandable. Talking of Indo-Pak reunification or indulging in revisionist historical scholarship is to commit professional and political suicide as Mr Jaswant Singh, her fellow panellist knows well. He was quick to offer a palatable and politically correct response when the moderator posed my question to him.

Singh is infamous for his book on Jinnah that sought to emancipate the Quaid-e-Azam’s legacy and establish his secular credentials. However, Singh now a full-time public intellectual free from the exigencies of Indian party politics seems unwilling to embrace the logical corollary of his thesis – If Partition was a bad idea to begin with, why shirk from advocating its reversal now?

I have always maintained that Swapan Dasgupta represents one of the teen murtis of intellectual India’s right wing revolt – the other two being Ashok Malik and Arun Shourie. In my view, it is these three gentlemen, in their role as public intellectuals that provide the most coherent voice to the concerns of conservative middle India.

Clearly, Mr Dasgupta occupies a charmed position in India’s political discourse. He has established himself as the leading interpreter of the Indian Right for the country’s English-speaking middle classes in a professional environment which teems with those of the left-liberal persuasion – no small feat. Recently, a more youthful, fashionable libertarian set has sprung up but they shall form the basis of a future post. Swapan compliments his aforementioned role with that of a political activist often appearing in public gatherings to speak in support of the BJP. This has earned him the sobriquet of “neo-ideologue” – not an unfair characterisation if his work on the BJP’s 2004 Vision Document and (presumably) other party matters is taken into account.

Dasgupta’s success in combining intellectual non-conformity with political activism is sometimes sneered at by those who sit on the high-horse of objective reportage and question his credentials as a journalist.

What is more interesting however, is the nature of Mr Dasgupta’s political views. We know that he is a self-described friend of the BJP and a confirmed political conservative. But, what is the nature of this conservatism?

Reading through Dasgupta’s vast output of essays and op-eds one gets the general impression that he has drunk deeply at the fountain of British conservatism. His work is full of references to major events in British history and he frequently utilises British conservative metaphors to make his point. I suppose this is a condition that ails all post-colonial intellectuals. A young Jawaharlal, fired by the emancipatory potential of Fabian thought, returned to the “dustbowls of Hindustan” to put into practice those convictions. Strictly speaking, Nehru was not post-colonial but I trust the reader grasps my point. This then, was the beginning of the famous Nehruvian consensus that has influenced more than two generations of independent India’s intellectual establishment and continues to form the orthodoxy of intelligent conversation in the country.

I am unsure as to what extent Swapan Dasgupta holds the experience of British conservatism to be applicable to the Indian context. As I’m sure he would agree, all conservatisms are contextual and claim no universality. However, there is little doubt that he holds British conservatism and Britain’s Conservative Party as the benchmark to which other conservative movements should aspire to.

It is here that we differ. I find the British Conservative impulse to be remarkably dull and staid – committed to the preservation of existing institutions and social norms as values in themselves, no matter their utility. It does well to live up to the caricature of conservatism as a particularly unimaginative, status-quoist and a downright barren mode of thought. Michael Oakeshott, a significant conservative thinker of the last century who also happened to be British argued that to be conservative is to esteem the present above all else. I find this sentiment especially problematic to sustain in an Indian context, a country crying out for a new kind of commitment and authenticity in politics.

As I’ve pointed out in a previous post, India’s political culture is a paradox – in the sense that it is apolitical. Indians find themselves in a context where their Prime Minister and the leader of the ruling national party are both apolitical. In fact, the Prime Minister’s disinterest in the political is marketed as a virtue to a public that has long suffered at the hands of professional politicians. Thus the kind of politics that India needs to embrace in order to ensure public good is a redemptive brand of politics. A conservative movement in India must present an alternative vision for the country and combine this with a vigorous opposition to the comfortable consensus in the political class. The cynicism of the average Indian however and his chalta hai manner may preclude that state of affairs from ever coming to pass.

Update: This piece was also cross-posted on Himal Southasian’s Blog

I’ve been reading two very interesting documents that provide an insight into the worldview of the American intelligence community – the CIA’s Strategic Intent (2007) and the National Intelligence Strategy of the United States (2009) that is published by the Directorate of National Intelligence. The latter, charged with coordinating the vast intelligence apparatus of the United States and its myriad heads, agencies and organisations is now run by Admiral Dennis Blair – whom I remember making some eminently sensible appraisals of Asian security at an international forum.

It does seem that India’s security establishment and the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) in particular could do with some of the clear-thinking that is presumed upon the authorship of a document of this kind. As I’ve pointed out in an earlier post, Indians tend to find the very notion of strategy esoteric and treat its mention with incomprehension. More importantly, it is the lack of an open hiring process that stymies the recruitment of young talent into the intelligence services. I was pleasantly surprised then, when I found positions in the Intelligence Bureau (IB) cheerfully advertised on the Ministry of Home Affairs website. Perhaps then, those shuffling bureaucrats in charge of gathering intelligence on external threats to India’s national interests could take a leaf out of their sister organisation. I can imagine their skepticism however, India’s political culture is uniquely apolitical – fostering the secession of the successful from the political and the public sphere rather than an active engagement. The lumpenisation of national politics, which recieved its most consummate expression in the Samajwadi Party’s luddite manifesto of 2009 has made its way to the college campuses with candidates of a distinctly criminal disposition dominating. The young patriotic bourgeoisie that is meant to form the happy hunting ground of intelligence organisations is too alienated and too busy pursuing the capitalist dream at Amity Business School. The ones who do have public-service on their conscience are involved in waging war against the Indian State – be it through the media or the NGO andolans that proliferate in New Delhi and elsewhere. Arundhati Roy has inspired a generation of young Indians. Perhaps it is best to continue the practice of recruiting directly from the Indian Police Service, at least a modicum of nationalist value-consensus is ensured.

A return to American intelligence priorities then, is called for if this is post is to save itself from degenerating into a rant. There is a distinct change of tone between the CIA document and Admiral Blair’s DNI document. The former, which was authored in 2007 reflects the prevailing intellectual currents of its time – the rise of India and China thesis. The CIA itself argues that “the rise of China and India and the emergence of new economic “centers” will transform the geopolitical and economic landscape.” In the mid to late 2000′s security policy discourse turned towards a theme that its still pursuing, the rise of Asia thesis. The argument runs that the West as symbolised first by Imperial Europe and later by the United States was loosing its preeminence in global politics and the locus of power both economic and political was shifting to Asia. This was the end of the Vasco de Gama era. India and China – nations with similar population sizes and GDP growth rates were held up as the examples that proved the theory. The Republican dehyphenation of India and Pakistan, India’s inclusion into strategic Asia and the nuclear deal helped matters along.

Dennis Blair’s Intelligence Strategy however is very different. India does not find a single mention in the United State’s strategic priorities. Iran, North Korea, China and Russia make it to the list of top state-level concerns. There isn’t any mention of Pakistan either. Funny, I remember them fighting a war somewhere near there.

More significantly, there is a plausible shift in the language deployed by author(s) of the DNI document. The “Vision” of the US Intelligence Community is one where the practice of intelligence “must be consistent with America’s expectations for protection of privacy and civil liberties and respectful of human rights.” This is all well and good but when did civil liberities become the preserve of the CIA and the intelligence community? Surely, it is the job of the State Department to conduct public relations? The inclusion of this text hints at a shift in priorities. American liberals – hurt by the string of international condemnation that accompanied George Bush’s foreign adventures – are using their time in office to restore, as they see it, America’s moral authority. In the process, they forget the real function of strategic policy – the preservation of American hegemony. Ashok Malik is correct in his assesment of Washington 2009 -

“The Democrat leadership is intelligent, even cerebral, and often well-intentioned. It is, however, largely representative of the liberal-extreme Left end of the American political spectrum. At its worst, it resembles a coalition of NGO interests and is lacking in what may be called the ‘hard stuff’. The sense of realpolitik, the cold-blooded execution of military and coercive power, the big-picture strategic thinking: There is an absence of these qualities at the Democrat high table.”

This paradigm shift however, is not sufficient in explaining India’s downfall. The attacks on Bombay in the November of 2008 shattered the myth of India as a potential great power. The wind was taken out of India’s geopolitical sails. India is back where it belongs, with Pakistan.

The Sunday Pioneer seems to have outdone itself today. It features op-eds by two of the finest observers of Indian political and social trends.

First, we have Swapan Dasgupta on the anniversary of the November attacks on Bombay. My favourite sentence from the piece is –

If initial trends are any indication, it is likely to become another occasion for media-sponsored indignation by celebrities — the spurious enough-is-enough syndrome until the fire next time. It will also be the occasion for some mindless repetition of meaningless homilies such as the mantra that “terrorists have no religion”.

Second, we have Ashok Malik on Sachin Tendulkar’s completion of twenty years as an international cricketer. Malik is at his persipacious best with this line –

Great individuals often need, and sometimes build or summon, great contexts. Sachin has been the fulcrum of Indian cricket’s greatest generation — five good men, Tendulkar and Dravid, Ganguly and Laxman, and Anil Kumble. This was a Band of Brothers like no other. They rescued Indian cricket from the swamp of shame, renewed its spirit, taught it how it win — everywhere, in all conditions.

Finally, Martin Jaques writes what I think is a paradigm-defining piece on China for the LA Times. He pierces through to the heart of the neo-liberal contention – that an embrace of free-marketry will necessitate an embrace of political modernity – and denies it its philosophical premise. His characterisation of China as a civilisation-state rather than the nation-state of European imagination is convincing. Perhaps, it is time for the Gurcharan Das’ of this world to stop villifying China and realise the potential of the Chinese model as a template for third-world development.