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The Indian Conservative: Hindu apologism goes mainstream

Jaithirth Rao is an Indian businessman who founded Mphasis, a cookie-cutter IT outsourcing company based in Bangalore, India. In time, his stature as one of India’s aspirational new tech elites gave him space to air his views on politics, history, culture and a range of other social subjects. Rao calls himself a true-blue conservative in the Burkean sense – small government, free markets, traditional family values, continuance over radical change … the whole kit and kaboodle. “The Indian Conservative” is a compilation of his various lectures, talks and thoughts on an assortment of issues that Indian conservatives have concerned themselves with. It seeks to put forth an argument that conservatism in India has a long and colourful history that deserves further study. In doing so, Rao tries to elevate the status of conservative figures like Sardar Patel and Dadabhaoi Naoroji who’ve been given short shrift due to independent India’s wholesale adoption of Nehruvian liberalism.

Before reading the book, I was genuinely curious about a lack of cohesive picture of the conservative movement in India. Other than recent speculation about how different India would have been if Sardar Patel had been made PM instead of Nehru (a long shot considering the zeitgeist of the time), there’s very little we know of the other side of Nehru’s liberal India. The previous hints I’d seen were through Guha’s books, and even he laments the lack of scholarship on Indian conservatism. So when I came across this book, I picked it up without even checking reviews online. In a way, this turned out to be a good thing because I could start with no prejudgments about the author, content or style, and could appreciate the book for exactly what it was supposed to be – an overview of conservative thought in India, and a case for why it should be studied more intensively.

Boy was I wrong! In this post, I want to do two things: firstly, review the book for what it is, and then talk about all the things that it isn’t – so you can see for yourself the various ways in which Jaithirth Rao missed the mark in entirely avoidable ways. My overall assessment of Rao’s book is mixed – on the one hand, it brings conservative thought to the mainstream and gets us talking about it on an intellectual level and without the baggage of Hindu extremism. Equally, the book fails to deliver on every single claim it makes at the outset: it’s not historically accurate or complete, it never explains what makes Indian conservatism different from its Western cousin, isn’t held up by solid arguments so much as statements of intent, and finally, is too heavily reliant on the author’s 10-mile-high understanding of Indian society.

What follows is an expansion on these two sides of the coin. This post is going to be longer than average (which is already much longer than most blogs) so if you’re liable to get bored, I’d suggest skipping the next section and jumping straight to the second part where I make my case for why Jaithirth Rao’s latest book is only a 4/10, and can be ignored by most people.

What It Is

“The Indian Conservative” considers various spheres of conservative thought, namely political, cultural and social. The book also includes a small chapter about Rao’s own views on aesthetics and education. The chapters on cultural, social and aesthetic spheres cover what it means to be Indian, and how the conservatives of history, legend and imagination have all combined to create a rich, vibrant, multiethnic and multicultural polity we know as India. These chapters are all fairly boring with very little to stand on other than a smattering of religious texts and some well-intentioned proclamations by leaders.

The really interesting bits are actually all in the first chapter: the political sphere. Here, the author begins with a broad definition of what Indian conservatism is and what its guiding principles are.

Conservatism is a school of philosophy which is not characterized by rigid contours or definitions. It believes that human beings as individuals and as communities have evolved over time, developing laws, institutions, cultures, norms and associations. This evolutionary process undoubtedly contributes to practical utility.

The conservative position is that improvements have to be gradual, and preferably peaceful. Sudden, violent attempts at so-called improvements are viewed with suspicion, because they are likely to backfire, destroy much of the good in the past and the present, and deliver a situation substantially worse than the earlier one.

For those with an interest in political theory, it’s not hard to notice a direct and strong link to Western conservatism – more specifically as a school of thought containing Alexis de Tocqueville, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith. However, Rao reminds us that these ideas are not foreign imports to India. Indeed, if one were to consider the Mahabharatha and Tirukkural to be foundational texts of the Indian civilization, we would see that the Indic civilization itself is a deeply conservative one.

These two texts – one a religious epic and the other a collection of words of wisdom – deal with the three pursuits of humankind: artha (material, political and economic wellbeing), kama (beauty, passion and sensous pleasures) and dharma (virtue and morality). A fourth pursuit – moksha – is attained when the other three are achieved.

Then, the author makes the link between ancient Indic thought and modern history.

Let us switch gears and consider names associated with modern Indian conservatism, focusing for the time being on the pre-Independence era. The first is Rammohun Roy, who was a political conservative and a supporter of British rule, while being a social and religious reformer – a reformer and not a radical. The second is Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who can be characterized as almost the founder of Hindu conservatism. […] Bankim and Lajpat Rai along with several others realized that a shared Hindu cultural identity could be the basis of overcoming vertical and horizontal boundaries among Hindus, like caste.

Hinduism, in other words, formed pre-Independence India’s “imagined community” a la Benedict Anderson. This is where Jerry Rao (that’s what the author goes by apparently) brings modern day Hindu nationalism back into the conservative fold. In his analysis, the roots of Hindu nationalism and that of Indian conservatism are one and the same. There may be some merit to this line of thought, but I think there are some gaps in Rao’s reasoning that someone else will have to fill. We’ll pick up this thread later in the post.

To those who might argue that conservatism everywhere is merely reactionary hand-wringing, Rao has a ready response:

The view that conservatives love the old and oppose all change is both simplistic and wrong. Conservatives are most certainly not reactionaries. We only love those parts of the old and inherited that are constructive and creative and not dysfunctional. We are committed to change, which as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed, and as the Yajur Veda articulates, is inevitable. We, however, do not believe in jettisoning features of the past that are worth preserving or that we feel are worth cherishing.

While this is a sensible position to take and I personally find it hard to refute, it’s nigh impossible to shake the feeling that much of Rao’s analysis is based on European and American conservatism, with all the Indian bits retrofitted to prove his point. We’ll return to this objection in the next section.

Returning to the question of political conservatism, the author details how the Indian National Congress until the late 1920s saw British rule as a benevolent protector state. Its only demands were only for ‘home rule’, on the lines of what the Irish were fighting for. We know that Dadabhai Naoroji’s strongest allies in the British parliament at the time were Irishmen, and even before Naoroji’s time, Raja Rammohun Roy was received in England by the liberal Unitarians. So almost unwillingly, the author concludes, Indian conservatives ended up in the wrong camp due to the obstinacy of the British Conservative party. He doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that this is just how politics is played and there are no unconditional alliances in the pursuit of power.

[…] even though Rammohun Roy went to England as a very conservative emissary of the impoverished Mughal emperor, he was feted not by the High Church party, but by nonconformists like the Unitarians. Willy-nilly, even conservative Indians ended up being seen as liberal fellow travellers. In the decades that followed, British Tories preferred Indian maharajas to scholars like Naoroji. It was only the Liberal Party which would nominate Naoroji for a parliamentary seat. Gokhale faced the same situation. His only interested audience in England was to be found among liberals.

In the struggle for independence, Rao makes a case for why conservatives largely supported India’s British overlords, and why many chose fight their own countrymen alongside the colonial powers. His argument is a tried-and-tested one about maintaining continuity, making incremental progress, sticking to available remedies etc. In this regard, he sees Ambedkar, Gokhale and Savarkar as incrementalist heroes who ensured that when India did gain freedom, it would retain much of the old legal and civic structure. The Indian Constitution – despite the devious machinations of socialists and Soviet sympathizers – is thankfully only a minor facelifted version of the Government of India Act of 1935.

Here, Rao anticipates an objection from the other side: given that in one stroke the Indian Constitution prohibits discrimination on the basis of caste, gender or religion, all so deeply embedded in our history and our country, would it not be more appropriate to call it a revolutionary document, far from being a conservative one? His answer is a firm “maybe”. He argues that under the British, all Indians were treated alike – as chattel to be thrown out of trains when caught travelling in the whites-only carriage. So, Indians had already internalised some of this non-discrimination anyway, and the constitution only ensured that the progress made was not lost at some later time. A supremely weak argument; but a coherent argument nonetheless.

From independence, Rao draws a straight line to the modern-day Modi government, through Partition, the Emergency, 1984 Sikh riots, 1992 Babri riots and the single-term Vajpayee government from 1999-2004. Needless to say, he papers over inconvenient pieces of history. For example, this is what he had to say about the way Advani and the BJP riled up millions of Indians to march to Ayodhya and destroy a centuries-old mosque:

BJP put together a well-crafted national programme in support of the proposed Rama temple. The party organized a motorcade, referred to as a rath yatra, from different parts of the country to Ayodhya. […] The BJP also used the Rama temple movement very intelligently on the caste front. The volunteers in the marches and motorcades came from all castes. Dalit volunteers were specially honoured as layers of foundation stones. The BJP had successfully broken away from the accusations of its critics that it was an upper-caste Brahmin-Bania party.

The denouement of the temple movement came on account of mob violence, which the Uttar Pradesh state government had solemnly assured the Supreme Court would not happen. The inability of the Hindu nationalist forces to control extreme elements remains problematic for conservatives.

And in that one line, he sweeps aside all the many ways that conservative forces – much more than any leftist threat – threaten to pull this nation apart by force. To Jerry Rao, the problem with the Babri demolition wasn’t its complete illegality, or the fact that the Hindu side has no historical claim to that piece of land, or the months of communal provocation by Advani, Uma Bharti. No, the problem was that a handful of extreme elements resorted to mob violence, which was not controlled by the Uttar Pradesh government. So really, we’re told, the UP government was at fault.

But regardless, I’m quite aware that this kind of reasoning is not entirely uncommon in Indian political circles, and even in some intellectual quarters. We can excuse Jerry Rao this piece of unoriginal falsehood as just another symptom of the moral bankruptcy that infects modern-day conservatives everywhere. While their forebears were willing to go against king and society to defend individual freedoms and bring about real change, the modern conservative movement increasingly busies itself with engaging in revisionist storytelling and name-calling instead of getting its house in order and taking a stance against extreme elements.

In responding to any and all critique of this kind of reactionary rationality, Rao likes to fall back on the concept of yuga-dharma to illustrate how the nature of Indian conservatism has evolved over time.

[…] Apastamba Sutra of the Yajur Veda, which the historian P.V. Kane dates to the fourth century bce, talks of Yuga Dharma: the virtue or the ethic that is appropriate to the age. It is Parel’s case that Mahatma Gandhi in his own inimitable way figured out that in the present yuga, it makes sense to walk away from the excessive emphasis on moksha. […] The dharma of Gandhi’s times demanded an active involvement with this world, with his country, with his city.

Modern day conservatives like Jerry Rao fail to consider that in this yuga, yuga-dharma demands that the most conservative thing to do is to stand up against Hindu extremists and defend the Indian way of life from a complete dismemberment from the inside.

In the subsequent sections on cultural, social and aesthetic spheres, Rao has precious little to offer, even when you try very hard to see his point. In the chapter on social issues, Rao offers a tepic objection to the caste system, concluding that the caste system has some limited utility in modern India but society needs to be reformed to make sure that things like untouchability are not brought back in fashion. On the role of women, Rao acknowledges wholeheartedly that women have been mistreated and marginalized for millennia – an unusually candid admission from a writer who seems to skirt all other issues, no matter how obvious they may be to Indians or outsiders:

The same issue received considerable attention from our detractors like Kipling who argued that Indians did not deserve freedom principally because we were given to oppressing our women and our poor and in fact it was the British who protected these unhappy residents of our fair land

Lost in the chapter on aesthetics is another easily-missed admission of guilt: the mistreatment of Muslims. Rao accepts that Muslims are treated as purely political entities to be herded and cajoled into voting for whichever party represents their interest. He sees much to be achieved to bring them back to the mainstream and open up the floor to debate on social issues affecting Muslims.

Issues connected with Indian Muslims that do not deal with religion are largely seen through a political prism and not a social one. I believe that this is a mistake. Muslims are more than just voters. They have given to the country important legacies in architecture, painting, music, dress, food, landscape gardening, literature and much more.

Mysteriously, however, his thoughts on purdah, the role of women in Islamic society and hot-button issues like triple talaq are never clarified. More importantly, his expression of solidarity with Muslim conservatives is entirely undercut by the fact that this is the only time in the book when the author considers the plight of Muslims. You need to be three-quarters of the way through the book to find an acknowledgment of Muslim contribution to Jerry Rao’s “Indic culture”. This and other substantive issues with the book are the subject of the next section.

What It Is Not

At the outset, Jerry Rao’s book is not an honest retelling of Indian history. It leans too heavily on upper-caste tropes of “centuries of humiliation” under successive Muslim rulers, falls prey to the same trite upper-class arguments about the “benevolent British”, and consistently diminishes the serious differences that have always existed between various schools of thought. Let’s consider the matter of Muslims first.

The Islamic Question

In his entire chapter on Indian conservatives in the political sphere, Rao does not find space to drop a single Muslim name. I can name a few stellar individuals right off the bat: Maulana Azad, Shafaat Ahmed, Sir Muhammed Iqbal, and the indomitable Sir Allah Bakhsh.

The last name may be unfamiliar to some, and in all fairness deserves a whole post to himself, but here’s the run-down: Allah Bakhsh was the Premier of Sind in British India – up to 1942 a career conservative within the British Raj. An inveterate secularist, he championed a popular movement against the divisive Muslim League. His popularity was so immense that the Muslim League made nearly no advances into the province of Sind until his death in 1943. In 1942, Churchill’s infamous speech to the British parliament where he refered to Gandhi’s “Quit India” movement with utter disdain and made some unsavoury remarks about the possibility of granting independence to Indians. Allah Bakhsh made it clear that he’d had it – he renounced his post and fully intended to dedicate the rest of his life to gathering support for a free, secular and united India. The united part of his personal manifesto bothered the Muslim League, and every clue points to their involvement in his eventual assassination in 1943.

Was this not relevant to Rao’s case for conservative thought in the country?

Rao might counter my objection by stating that Allah Baksh was indeed a conservative for the most part but by renouncing his premiership, he also renounced all claims to being part of Indian conservatism. Fair enough. But if one is to buy this argument, why does Naoroji figure so conspicuously in Jerry Rao’s narrative? Naoroji too began as a conservative who thought he could make a difference from within the British parliament. Although he made some progress towards his goal of Indian home rule, he soon realised that the powers in Britain wanted control over India at any cost, and saw the predatory Crown as a leech sucking the Indian body dry. By the time Naoroji died in 1917, he was thoroughly disillusioned with the British ability to govern India and wanted them gone.

Naoroji was as radical as they came in 1917. And yet, Rao has no trouble including him in the political narrative. Wilful omission? Maybe. Double standards? Most definitely.

This exclusion of Muslim individuals isn’t restricted to the Independence movement – Rao ignores all Muslim contributions to Indian political thought despite the fact that for over 600 years, this nation was ruled by Muslim rulers. I want to go easy on the author and assume that he ignored them because they were causing many changes to Indian culture by bringing their new ways of life to this land of Hindus. At the risk of being accused of whataboutery, I want to put to Rao this following: if this is the case, why not at least mention Akbar, a man who fought his own zealous family to ensure equal treatment of all citizens regardless of their religious, ethnic or cultural background? For a man so fond of name-dropping, the silence on political changes due to Mughal rule is deafening. On the matter of trade and economic issues, why not mention Sher Shah Suri, the man who facilitated free and fair trade so much that during his time, a caravan could travel unmolested from Peshawar in modern Pakistan to Chittagong in Bangladesh – a distance of over 2000 km. Such free movement is still only a distant memory in modern India, where highway robberies are painfully common. As a lover of free markets and open trade, shouldn’t Rao appreciate this unprecedented effort a bit more?

The 16th century Grand Trunk Road, a truly impressive trade route connecting Bengal to the Hindukush

In the end, it is obvious to all but the most intransigent that Jerry Rao’s recounting of Indian political history deliberately omits Muslim names while trying to secure ‘Indian conservative’ firmly in the hands of Hindu actors. In case you needed more convincing, here’s how the author summarizes what Indian culture is:

I would argue that “we the people” is meant to be a reference to people with a shared culture, however limited or tenuous that idea may be. We call it Indian culture. The fact that many of its traditional elements have a Hindu touch does not make it an exclusively Hindu culture. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are doubtless central. But so are the Jataka tales, Jain sutras, Sufi music, the Sikh gurbani, Reverend Beschi’s Tamil epic Thembavani, Abraham Panditar’s Carnatic music compositions on Jesus, Avestan verses, Bene Israel psalms, Santhal chants and so much more.

So it’s everyone on the planet except mainstream Muslims. Good to know, Jerry!

Conservatism and Its Masters

Perhaps the most cringeworthy parts of the book are where Jerry Rao echoes Indian conservatives in his defence of the British Raj as a benevolent, positive addition to Indian history. A century of poverty, strife and gradual resurgence seems to have granted him a doe-eyed version of what the British were actually doing in India. This is how Jerry Rao views the

The fundamental political dispute that defined the first half of the twentieth century in India had to do with the approach to the Raj. Many conservatives believed that with all its faults, on balance the Raj must be leveraged as a force for the good. […] It is not uncommon to keep running into the view that we were in a sense lucky not to have been colonized by the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch or even the French. The Indian encounter with the Anglo-Saxon has been seen as one that resulted in a refreshing outburst of creativity, which had constructive outcomes.

A “refreshing outburst of creativity”? In what, massacring peaceful protesters?

And yet, Rao does not spare the pre-British Mughals the same generosity; this despite the undeniable fact that everything from food to clothing to our culture itself was made infinitely more colourful by Mughal patronage.

Rao’s claim that the 1950 Indian Constitution must be seen as a conservative document is comical in its absurdity. His whole argument hinges around the Manusmriti, an ancient Indian document that lays out the various rules governing Hindus, codifies the ways in which they may interact with each other and prescribes a very rigid set of roles that individuals of each caste, creed and gender could perform. Many devout Hindus consider this document to be divinely handed down from God to the sage Manu – therby making it inviolable and sacred. Most contemporary discourse about “Brahminical orthodoxy” ultimately refers back to this text. Let’s consider the evidence presented before us:

One can argue that the idea of non-discrimination too had an evolutionary history through the Raj. […] The jury is out on whether the Manusmriti was simply an idealized text or if it was practised. But for what it is worth, it did have a measure of social sanction and it did provide for differential punishments for identical crimes committed by persons belonging to different castes. It turns out that the Raj successfully subverted this ideology fairly early in the game.

[…] in the area of gender, the practices of the Raj were not necessarily much behind those prevalent in Britain and America. In the late nineteenth century, the Madras Medical College did admit women. In the early twentieth century, Cornelia Sorabji was not allowed to practise in the Bombay High Court because women were not allowed to practise in English courts at that time. The enhancement of women’s rights can also be seen as a gradual and phased affair, rather than one which was parachuted in by our Constitution.

Some have argued that the grant of universal adult franchise by our Constitution was truly revolutionary. The very chronology by which the political institutions of India evolved from the Regulating Act, Pitt’s India Act, the Charter Acts, Queen Victoria’s Proclamation, the creation of Councils, the Minto-Morley Reforms, the Montagu-Chelmsford Act and the 1935 Government of India Act all the way to our Constitution makes it an evolutionary, gradual, constitutional process. The retention of the key features of the political institutions bequeathed to us by the Raj makes the process a conservative one. The new Constitution did go against doctrines like the Manusmriti. But that process had started long ago.

Much has been written regarding the status of Manusmriti in pre-colonial Indian culture, and I don’t want to belabour this point too much. However, two things need to be noted: first, as pointed out by historians such as Ram Guha and Shashi Tharoor, the Manusmriti was considered as useful in daily affairs as the Bible is to Americans today. Laws existed separate from the rules laid out in the Manusmriti, and it was really the British who gave Manusmriti more weight than society did. The Gentoo Code that the British adopted in their dealings with Indians was the first time in centuries that the Manusmriti came to be regarded as anything more than a historical relic. This is not to imply that all pre-colonial Indians were casteless hippies enjoying life freely. No, by codifying these loose and amorphous rules as the basis of all Indian law, the Raj actually cemented the very discrimination that Jerry Rao so gleefully tries to downplay.

Second, if Jerry is fine with the British state because it subverted the provisions in the Manusmriti, one wonders if this is a matter of principle or a convenient factoid the author is exploiting. Supposing a Muslim ruler had done the same thing by imposing a set of rules that applied to Hindus without any regard to their castes, would Rao be equally glad that age-old shackles of caste had been broken by a wise ruler? What if Jerry Rao reads a bit more Indian history and learns that Aurangzeb did exactly this? Would he start singing praises about the great ruler Aurangzeb who ruled over all of India and destroyed the caste system for all eternity? I doubt it very much, and I think this inconsistency proves that for Jerry Rao, the Manusmriti matters purely because the British first legitimized it, and then subverted it. That’s not conservatism; that’s just boot-licking.

Coda

It’s now getting tiring to point out the fact that Indian conservatives are without exception drawn from the same mold of upper-caste, upper class urbanites who seem to be entirely removed from the rest of India’s “unwashed masses”, all while simultaneously preaching what the caste system actually is to people whose daily lives are defined by it. Trust me, I hate this dreadfully boring continuance as much as anyone else. And it brings me no small amount of frustration to be saying that of a writer who I thought could make a genuine attempt at wrestling with the vexed issue of conservatism in India. But Rao shows neither the self-awareness nor the honesty required to carry out such a task. In the end, his book is just another in a long line of sad restatements of cliched elite truisms about India’s glories and its colourful past, and adds nothing to enrich popular discourse. If I’d gone my whole life reading this book, I don’t see how I would have been poorer by a paisa, an ounce or a thought. However, I suspect that “The Indian Conservative” is going to be instructive to liberals looking to rebutt Indian conservate arguments. If nothing else, it goes to demonstrates all the reasons why it may be considered at best a hollow intellectual space, and at worst a dangerous normalisation of previously taboo apologisms.

In one word, Jaithirth Rao’s attempt at mapping out the history of conservative thought in India can best be summarized as ‘dishonest’. It papers over many issues in Indian culture purely because the author finds them inconvenient to his narrative that ther is a positive thing called “Indian culture”. Where impossible to ignore, Rao’s hamfisted arguments only delegitimize the conservate case, even while exposing his less-than-adequate research. Nevertheless, the book is important as an emblem of the growing brazenness with which Hindu apologism is seeping into everything in India. If nothing else, it may be a sign of the books to come.

Categories
Culture Society

Overpopulation, or The Great Indian Lie

Unlike what Western “experts” (and increasingly Indians themselves) think, India isn’t over-populated. It’s merely under-governed.

I have a bone to pick with Hasan Minhaj. I don’t particularly like his comedy but I don’t really hate it either. He’s like this ex-Indian dude who thinks he sees things that Indians don’t notice because they’re too used to it. He combines elements of observational comedy with a casual, city babu approach which results in an oversimplified, somewhat lazy understanding of Indian people and politics. Case in point: the video below, where he talks about how there are too many Indians holding redundant jobs and doing what he sees as useless activities.

This isn’t an entirely horrible joke, but that’s not why the people are laughing. They’re laughing because they recognize the scenario and agree with the observation. Click the links for more about the evolutionary and social purposes of laughter (good read).

He alludes to a pernicious notion among foreigners and Indians alike: India is overpopulated. It’s almost a truism in policy circles, and a regular topic of discussion in upper-class family discussions. If only maybe 30% of those other people could just do us a favour and die without any trace, we’d all be so much better off. Even as most Western economies are at less-than replacement levels of fertility, Indians (and Indian women in particular) are constantly chastised for having too many kids. At various points in our history, leaders have made attempts to address what they saw as a fatal flaw of Indian society: the extreme fecundity of its populace. As recently as during the 2019 Independence Day speech, the Supreme Leader of India sought to make overpopulation a key issue for his government:

There is one issue I want to highlight today: population explosion. We have to think, can we do justice to the aspirations of our children? There is a need to have greater discussion and awareness on population explosion

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, 2019

To be fair, this misconception isn’t exactly new: even the British government saw India’s population as a nuisance. Never mind that the British saw themselves as separate from the native Indians and thus at a numerical disadvantage. This constant sense of vulnerability gave rise to all sorts of weird relics that we still live with – I’m looking at you, Police Act of 1861. While Gandhi and Nehru saw the vast oceans of people as a force for good and thus harnessed them in the Indian freedom movement, subsequent generations weren’t so forgiving or thoughtful. Nehru’s daughter Indira defaulted to the British impulses of population containment. During the Emergency, her son – an omnipotent pustule, automotive engineer and cultivator of ‘chamchas‘ – Sanjay Gandhi put in place a program of forced sterilization where the state sent officials and doctors to round up men and snip their pipes. At its peak, the program was responsible for the sterilization of hundreds and thousands of Indians every day. Although the exact numbers are hard to come by, it remains independent India’s worst episode of state overreach (I have a whole theory of how this program essentially sealed the Congress’ fate in the 90s and created the space for the subsequent rise of the BJP, but that’s a post for another day).

The Indian government, as a result of state-sponsored sterilisation drives, held an effective monopoly over the production of condoms until the late 90s

Why they’re wrong

It’s an open secret that India has delusions of grandeur. A common pastime among Indian chachas is to sit around in front of TV sets gazing into their navels and gawk at the greatness they see inside. The nauseating refrain I hear is that India is going to beat China in the next 20 years. How, exactly? By treating people as pests living off the land and multiplying like crazy? No; India’s future is tied to its investment in its population.

Modern obsession with Asia’s overpopulation is born out of European colonizers’ misplaced understanding of human populations. Nearly everybody who believes Asia is overpopulated believes in some form of the Malthusian theory of population:

By nature human food increases in a slow arithmetical ratio; man himself increases in a quick geometrical ratio unless want and vice stop him. The increase in numbers is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence. Population invariably increases when the means of subsistence increase, unless prevented by powerful and obvious checks.

Thomas Robert Malthus

Most economists and public policy experts agree that this theory is not true, and that there’s no real limit to the maximum population that any piece of land can handle. Human ingenuity, technological progress and cultural attitudes all play a role in determining how large societies get before they face any issues. Malthus’ understanding of Britain may be true, but Britain is a small island stranded off the coast of a sparsely-populated woodland. Europe was never as fertile as Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley, and neither was as resource-rich as India or China. For a more detailed (yet accessible) discussion of how chance features like terrain, rivers and coastlines have a strong bearing on nations’ fate, read Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall.

Aided by geography, China grew to its present state because of its immense population; not in spite of it. The higher population gave China a huge head-start over much larger economies like the US and allowed China to leapfrog from a backward, poor, poverty-stricken medieval playground to the modern-day hyper-urban wonderland it is today. All in less than the 70 years that China has been a modern nation-state. If we ignore the years under Mao’s failed experiments from the 1950s to the late 1970s, China’s history really only begins in 1979 with Deng Xiaoping’s liberalizing reforms. So, China reached modernity in 40 years while European nations achieved it in 400 years and America in 200. There are several explanations generally offered for why – world politics, geography, historical connections through the Silk Roads, Chinese historical cycles etc. While all of these theories have a kernel of truth to them, none would ever make any sense without China’s manpower. China’s population was its passport to greatness.

Today, there’s not a single shred of evidence to show that Indian society is being strained by its population. India’s economy is in decent health, per capita consumption of energy and food are not egregious (unlike in America and Australia), forest cover is increasing (though only marginally), urban areas don’t sprawl (again, unlike in America and Australia), urbanization is proceeding at a rapid pace but is contained to a few large clusters, there’s a fairly robust legal framework to protect the environment and provide compensation to displaced peoples, and the number of refugees from India is a minute proportion of the number of refugees worldwide. So, the number of people is not really an issue right now. I agree that at some point, it may very well become one but as things stand now, India’s population is a non-issue.

But hey, you may object, if population isn’t an issue, why does India have hundreds of millions of homeless people? What’s with the unemployment and malnutrition? Why do so many children go hungry? Why are schools so crowded and underfunded? Why are graduates leaving the country in droves? Why is crime so prevalent yet under-reported? Why are Indians so blase towards violence, death and misery? Why is there so much filth on the streets? If not for population, why has India been an “emerging economy” for the past several decades? The answer is simply under-government.

State capacity

India’s state performs poorly in basic public services such as providing
primary education, public health, water, sanitation, and environmental quality. While it is politically effective in managing one of the world’s largest armed forces, it is less effective in managing public service bureaucracies.

Devesh Kapur in “Why Does the Indian State Both Fail and Succeed?”

During the 19th and 20th centuries, it was common to refer to China as the “sick man of the East“, but in the 21st century, the term is more aptly applied to India. And all of India’s ailments come down to one simple diagnosis: a profound lack of state capacity born out of a misplaced zeal to appear “efficient” at the cost of being “effective”.

It’s not just me saying this, and neither am I some sort of a discoverer. Every single person in India is aware of it. I can very confidently state that most non-Indians know it as well. Writing about India’s weak state has made many journalists’ careers, and continues to be the raison d’etre for every BBC reporter in the country. But to the casual observer, India’s overpopulation and weak enforcement of laws are two separate issues. Most people – including our friends Hasan Minhaj and Narendra Modi – don’t appreciate that a weak state is the common cause of both problems.

Let’s consider for a brief while how deep it goes and how many aspects of Indian life are touched by a lack of state capacity. Consider for example the corrupt, inept and oft-maligned police. As I mentioned earlier, the police force in India was created (and still operates by) rules and procedures contained in the Police Act of 1861. That’s a 150 year-old law that is still largely the same as it was then. A law whose primary purpose was to protect the British state from the population. So, India’s policemen don’t “protect and serve” anybody other than the state. In the traditional “three pillars” understanding of government, policemen are in the border between the executive and judicial branches. But in India, the colonial nature of the force means that in reality, the police are at the intersection of executive and legislative. Their primary goal at all times is to protect their asses and serve their political overlords. But let’s say we forget this for now and just hire more policemen. Not just a few thousand, or a hundred thousand. I mean at least a couple million more, to bring the total number of policemen and women to well over 3 million individuals, possibly 4 million. What would that do to society?

I saw these all over Bangalore during a recent trip. I didn’t see it then but I realize now that this is a perfect example of a lack of state capacity. Why do you need a mannequin, especially when the government says it has a severe shortage of policemen, and there’s growing concern over unemployment? Why not employ a real person to stand around in filth and not do anything?

Bring out the crystal ball

First, existing laws can be enforced, property rights overseen and its women protected if the state hired more policemen. The extra policemen wouldn’t all be out on the streets patrolling; most would just sit behind desks filling out paperwork and taking complaints. Western police forces are more effective because they have people both out in the streets and behind desks. In India, they’re usually either out there or behind desks. So, when a non-urgent case (like sexual harrassment, rape, domestic violence etc.) is brought before them, policemen prefer to not go to the scene. They couch their laziness and ineptitude behind pretences of family values, “private matter” and all that.

Second, if you follow supply-demand logic from Econ 101, as the supply of police jobs is increased, the societal value of being a cop reduces. So, they stop enjoying exalted privileges. If every street has a policemen living around there, it reduces to just another profession, like being a tailor or a teacher. For one, a policeman cannot demand money for just doing his job. For another, off-duty cops will be more likely to be caught in random shootouts (or “encounters”), which reduces the willingness to engage in such vulgar displays of power. So in one stroke, employing several thousands more policemen would not only reduce corruption, but also extrajudicial abuse of power. No more Nirbhaya and no more Sohrabuddin.

Third, these policemen need to be paid, which means that a robust financial services network is needed to ensure timely payment of salaries and pensions. So now, you need ATMs and bank branches in more places. Where not economical, you will see the growth of cashless economies. Whereas the disastrous demonetization drive of 2017 created a scenario where regular transactions were replaced by cashless transactions (for a short while), our scenario would see the growth of a cashless economy that doesn’t compete with the cash economy.

Finally, it would spur economic growth. because there are many more policemen now, they spread out to every part of the land and start families in all sorts of unlikely places. With policemen comes a sense of safety, which dampens the urge to migrate to cities. Instead, this safety encourages local investment and small-scale entrepreneurship. Farmers don’t have to worry about theft so they invest in high-yield, high-value crops, which improves agricultural productivity. Even if all of this seems a bit far-fetched, hiring 2 million policemen at the rate of 10000 rupees per person per month is equivalent to giving the economy an additional 20 billion rupees per month. Even if the household savings rate stays at 30%, that means that over 14 billion rupees gets spent on goods and services, which would have a huge ripple effect that creates new jobs, industries and entirely unknown markets. Yes, there will be inflation, but economic growth needs inflation.

And all of this is just from hiring 2 million policemen. Imagine how radically India would transform if it hired more teachers, peons, janitors, cashiers, land inspectors and marketers; funded more scientists and researchers, trained more doctors and nurses, conducted more workshops and health clinics. India’s greatest successes – the eradication of polio, the creation of the Aadhar system, the postal system and the general elections where over 900 million people take part in a convoluted and boring spectacle – are all examples of India using its people as resources.

A conclusion

India’s population is its greatest asset. Centuries of colonialization have convinced us otherwise but we must shed this baseless, outdated, racist and often self-flagellatory opinion if we are to grow as a nation and expect more out of our leaders. In a way, a slim state is another instance of India’s socialist nature clashing with its capitalistic state – resulting in a system that claims to serve everybody but doesn’t have the necessary resources to serve anybody but itself. Decades of IMF loans, World Bank investments, US aid funds and numerous balance of payment crises have resulted in a state that almost apologises for its very existence, and hesitates to spend on even the provision of basic services. In trying to ape Western, advanced economies, Indian policymakers are only too eager to talk up efficiency measures, while saying nothing about being effective.

It’s about time we changed this. The nation needs its politicians to spend more on capacity building, which will inevitably require massive levels of public spending and job creation. But all of this can only begin when we stop talking about overpopulation and start talking about undergovernance instead.

Categories
Indian politics Politics Society

Lynchings and Hangings Solve Nothing

Another day, another brutal murder-rape in India. This time, the scene of the gruesome gangrape and murder of a veterenarian wasn’t Delhi, Gurgaon, Allahabad or Patna. It was the relatively safe, “progressive” city of Hyderabad. Understandably, everybody is furious. A widely circulating video on social media asks for the lynching and chemical castration of the accused.

There is a perverse kind of logic here: if you brutalize people enough, they are going to think twice about brutalizing women. Not only is this kind of thinking reductionist and against constitutional norms, it’s also completely missing the point. At best, brutal punishments are a bad solution to the wrong problem; at worst, they are inhumane and ripe for abuse.

The reductionist manifesto

The most important reason societies fail to prevent such heinous crimes against women is actually quite simple: they fail to realize that rape by an individual is fundamentally different from gangrape. The former is a power equation between the two people involved, but the latter is a reflection of the dynamics of the victim’s and the rapists’ identities within the community.

A lone rapist needs two things to carry out his act: proximity to his victim, and the knowledge that he can get away with it. An uncle molesting his underaged nephew is aware of these factors, as is the boyfriend taking advantage of his new girlfiend. Sometimes, proximity comes from mere physical distance: as we can see in the numerous cases of rapes committed by cab drivers. But other times, the perpetrators use emotional proximity as a lever to coerce the victim into acts she may not be comfortable with. Assaults of this kind are common to the point of invisibility: in college dorms, buses, homes, schools, parks. Everywhere you can have two people in seclusion, you can find the potential for sexual attacks. Proximity is the biggest factor in rapes: according to the NCRB, in 94% of all rapes, the victim and the culprit knew each other before the rape. So, rapes are personal.

However, gangrapes are a different beast. The perps only really need to be aware of one thing: the weakness of their victim’s identity. Every woman is acutely aware of this. Walk through any large city and you see signs of it everywhere: men leering at every woman walking past them, making passes at them while every man nearby pretends that nothing’s happening. Time and time again, victims of gangrape have to pierce through layers of inscrutable prejudice against their identity.

When the victim is a young person with hopes, dreams and careers she aspire towards by dint of her equal constitutional rights, the rapists see a woman. A weakling who cannot resist. Nothing else matters. Does not matter if the woman is rich, famous or outspoken. Every woman is fair game for the gangbanger. This helplessness of the Indian woman is exacerbated by onlookers, authorities, the general public and even some parents that follow the familiar logic of: “oh look, a young woman who wants to look good! I bet all that attention from those men is exactly what she wanted.” So, if you want to fix the problem of gangrapes, it is useless to target the individuals who are directly responsible. What you need a much broader definition of what it means to “be responsible”. Whereas rape by an individual is an inherently personal act, a gangrape is necessarily communal.

It takes a whole village

Take your mind back to the now-forgotten gangrape of Asifa Bano in a village near Kathua. She was abducted in broad daylight, sedated, raped over several days and murdered. The most important part of this whole horrible affair is that she was held captive in a temple where villagers offer prayers thrice a day. The family was known to be part of a socially weak community facing severe pressures to move out.

When the accused were found to be members of a radical Hindu outfit, leaders quickly picked sides. Women and child rights activists picked the side of the victim, while village elders, community leaders and politicians implicitly took to defending the accused. Several members of the ruling party took part in protests supporting the accused, where women threatened to burn themselves in public if the accused were not released. Even lawyers showed up at courts blocking authorities from filing the necessary paperwork. Civic communities expressed their outrage by demanding the death penalty for the accused, calls which were routinely suppressed by the police, media and politicians playing their own cynical games.

A further level of responsibility lay on the officers responsible for the investigation. Several policemen were found to have tried to prevent witness testimony and some were arrested on suspicion of trying to tamper with evidence. Many of them had received bribes to suppress the case. When the attention turned to the relationship between the policemen and the accused, it was shown that the policemen had allowed patently false “evidence” to be produced.

Look at the chain of events and you see a familiar pattern emerging: between the victim and justice lies a whole world jealously guarding the rapists. And none of it is addressed by reflexive demands for lynching and castration.

Harsh punishments don’t deter crime

This is a simple point, but one that popular media has yet to realize: harsher punishments don’t really deter crime. Time and time again, academics have shouted from every stage that would allow them that the current retributive attitude towards justice is completely wrong.

A 2014 study undertaken by the National Research Council announced that one of its “most important conclusions is that the incremental deterrent effect of increases in lengthy prison sentences is modest at best.” In other words, threatening people with increasingly harsh punishments doesn’t discourage crime. And it’s not just for longer prison sentences; even death penalty has little effect on the incidence of crime. Amnesty has said so for years now, but like everything these days, it’s fallen on deaf ears.

If anything, harsher punishments encourage bargaining behaviour, which makes it less likely that the perps actually face any action. For the sake of simplicity, let’s take an example of a traffic offence. If you’re facing a fine of $50, you’re likely to try to bribe the policeman with $30 so you can walk away and the cop can pocket the bribe. When facing a criminal sentence (like for drunken driving), you may decide to negotiate with him the price of your freedom. Let’s say you’re looking at a 6 month prison sentence. You may take the view that 6 months in the can is worth $5000 to you. So, you bribe the policeman the amount and walk out. Now, let’s say that a rich guy killed a few homeless people while driving under the influence. Let’s say this changes public attitude towards DUIs and the authorities decide that punishments need to be stricter – maybe 5 years in the can. Now, if you’re caught driving drunk, you’re going to think that 5 years is worth at least $15000. You promptly pay the cop and he pockets the money. The cop tells his cop friends and they realize that there’s money to be made in catching people drunk. Now, even otherwise decent cops get into the game, offering to free “harmless” or “just over the limit” alcoholics for a price. If corruption was at a 20% level earlier, now it’s likely to be 50%. If you raise the punishment further because everybody seems to be getting away with it, you’re likely to find nearly 100% corruption, under-reporting and a complete breakdown of the logic you began with.

This is exactly what we find in India with rapes. In our zeal to impose higher and higher punishments on rapists, we’ve given rise to a system where policemen take bribes to not register cases, intentionally perform shabby investigations, falsify evidence and tamper with witness testimony. India is not unique in this aspect: most countries with harsh punishments for rapists suffer similar issues. A BBC article quotes a lawyer saying “police are biased against women and are hesitant to even register cases of gang rape as that would mean the death penalty for a group of men. To circumvent that, often the case would be registered against one man only.” Even a government-appointed panel in India did not think that raising the intensity of punishment was going to have any effect.

So, yes, we all want justice. But there is a better way to achieve it than by simply increasing punishment.

The role of institutions

Research shows that the certainty of punishment is much more important than the severity. If you know for sure that your actions will face consequences, no matter how small, you’re likely to stop and evaluate whether it’s worth the effort. Countries that do a good job of providing a safe space for women do so from the ground-up.

A crucial part of this chain of trust is the role played by institutions such as the judiciary, law enforcement, civic groups and governmental agencies. Which one of us can confidently state that a stricter rape law, if enacted, would be enforced with equal vigour? None apart from the most delusional think that anything will change by increasing the sentence. Other than the possibilities of bribery, corruption and bargaining, there are countless other problems with Indian institutions that make them woefully inept at handling crimes against women.

First, there’s the universal “boys will be boys” defence offered by most men. This coupled with the fact that marital rape is not a crime means that most policemen don’t even recognize rape when they see it, and will therefore try to kill the crime before it even makes it to a police report. Second, there’s the bhav system endemic to India. If a policeman recognizes one of the accused, he’s likely to arrange for a negotiation and try to broker a deal that saves the culprit any public shaming. Once this is done, the policeman gains prestige and respect for being an “honourable man”.

A third problem, sometimes overlooked, is that laws that are “tough on crime” are almost always just “tough on minorities”. Government statistics show that the overwhelming majority of death row prisoners are from lower castes or religious minorities. Does this mean that upper-class Indians are somehow more virtuous than the rest? No, not at all. Quite the contrary. They are just very good at using institutions to cover their tracks.

Which brings me to the fourth and final problem: “incompetence on demand”. Indian policemen, investigative agencies and lawyers are fantastic at feigning incompetence when it’s convenient. When pursuing a case against a Muslim or an SC culprit, every single arm of the government works overtime; the PM comes out to congratulate the country when the guy is hanged, the burden of proof is shifted to the accused and “innocent until proven guilty” is all but forgotten. But a funny thing happens when the accused is upper-caste, or when they are politically connected. Suddenly, the system bends over backwards to mess up at every single chance.

As an example of the level of institutional incompetence I’m talking about, consider the Malegaon blast case from 2006. To a time when Times of India was a respectable newpaper and two full years before 26/11 blasts, and before all this hullabaloo about Islamic terror. The Malegaon case charged several high-profile political actors of conspiring to cause terror with the intention of making it seem like a Muslim plot. The case was watertight from the beginning, but somehow languished in the courts for 8 years. As soon as the BJP government came to power in 2014, the documents went “missing”, key witnesses turned hostile and the case just began falling apart. Many of the accused like Sadhvi Pragya Singh and Lt. Col. Prasad Shrikant Purohit got out on bail and now roam as free (wo)men.

Is this the institution that’s supposed to uphold stricter laws and bring rapists to justice?

Any way you look at it, the Indian criminal justice system is completely incapable of doing its job. Anybody placing their faith in this lopsided system is either unaware of ground realities or just plain complicit in the takeover of our institutions.

Crimes against liberal values

As I said earlier, no gangrape can exist divorced from the identities of the victim and the rapists. And yet, societies do precious little to elevate the weak and vulnerable. Every time we talk about the need to burn the accused or lynch them in public, we are failing the victim all over again.

Where the need is for a recognition of institutional blindness to women’s issues, we get calls for surveillance. Where we need to be giving young women more agency in matters of personal choice, we talk of even less choice. Where we need to be expanding the right to live a life of dignity, we want instead a world with more restrictions. When we should be expanding access to legal intruments, we talk instead of giving these corrupt and venal policemen even more powers. How does any of this make sense?

Burning the accused solves nothing. Mandatory death penalty does not change the fact that our insititutions are filled with corrupt actors. Village elders, panchayat leaders, politicians, policemen, lawyers all conspire to suppress the discovery of crimes by the powerful. Where are the accountability measures needed to keep them in check?

When a case like Kathua that the entire nation was watching can end up in a farce of a trial, how can we ensure that any trial will lead to a conviction? How can we even be sure that the ones we set on fire are the ones who committed the crime? In every single major crime, the impulse is to frame some convenient outcast: generally a Muslim, lower-caste or poor person with limited influence in the political sphere. By extinguishing their life without due process, we are shutting out any possibility of finding out who actually commits these crimes. How can we reform society without any insights into whom it’s actually benefitting? We see lynchings, hangings and burnings as a quick solution. But why does a solution need to be quick? Whom are we actually helping by impulsively punishing the first ones we can find?

Is all this righteous outrage for public consumption? I believe that yes, it is. Every time some Jaya Bachchan or Maneka Gandhi condemns “crimes against women” by asking us to take the law into our own hands by punishing some convenient scapegoat, they are depriving the term “justice” of all meaning.

Why do we need elected leaders and the powerful if they’re just going to ask us to resort to some DIY justice?

Outrage is a weapon for good

No tempest or conflagration, however great, is harder to quell than mob carried away by the novelty of power

Cicero

India is no stranger to social change. In recent years, everything from the Vishakha Commission to the Nirbhaya Act has been as a result of relentless public demand for something to be done about the impotence of women in public spaces. The very bottom-up nature of this means that nothing happens without us speaking up and holding up values we find dear.

But in the process, let’s not forget that justice is not the same as retaliation.

Categories
Indian History Indian politics Religion

The Idea of Ayodhya

Hindustan as an alternative to India

“A few Hindus entered Babri Masjid at night when it was des­erted and installed a deity there. DM and SP and f­orce at the spot. Situation under control. Police picket of 15 persons was on duty at night, but did not apparently act.”

— K.K.K. Nayar (23 Dec, 1949)

This is the first time in years that I’ve decided to write several thousand words on anything other than an academic assignment. So, I’ll try to string my thoughts into a nice blog-friendly structure. Bear with me.

So there’s this idea in political science that when the British waved a wand and vanished in a puff of smoke from what they called “India”, what they left wasn’t so much a country as a bunch of identities loosely confined within an area roughly the size of the Amazon. A fevered puzzle of peoples that had hithertofore agreed to disagree on everything from religion and development to the role of women. People have discussed it for the longest time, in newspaper articles, editorials and countless sneering told-you-sos, and some like Pratap Bhanu Mehta have built their whole careers wrestling with what that means for the India of today.

So you’ll forgive me for my insistence that in order to reach Ayodhya, we need to pass through the bylanes and durbars of Delhi.

What gave us this nation? Why did we end up with the nation we have today, with all its contradictions and problems? How did this chaotic country of 300-something million at independence decide to become a democracy, granting everyone suffrage from the get-go, working within the first decade to dismantle pernicious social structures like untouchability, inequality and zamindari that had hamstrung us for millennia? India’s story is not only surprising within the context of history, but within the broader geopolitical realm in the middle of the 20th century. In a sea of multicultural melting pots like Syria, Nigeria and Iraq (all wrecked by the British, but that’s a story for another day) that never saw an ounce of development or harmony, India stands out as a curious anomaly. Even today, there isn’t another country with the level of diversity of opinion, identities, languages, faiths, opportunities and aspirations as India.

And yet, there’s a level of agreement on some basics: we are all equal but not the same, we get to pick our leaders (to whatever extent any modern democracy allows its citizens to), and we all get to argue, bicker, fight, shout and scream till we’re blue in the face; just to be able to believe whatever we want to. In other words, we all believe in the nation-state of India. So, a natural question to ask is: how is it that if we can’t agree on anything, we can all seemingly agree on what is and what isn’t India? It’s a weird question – and not just because I framed it that way.

One fantastic book that captures the essential absurdity of this contradiction is The Idea of India by Sunil Khilnani.

TL;DR: there is no single India, and there never was. What we have now is mostly a Gandhian-Nehruvian idea of India as a pluralistic, egalitarian experiment where the state gets to tell its citizens how to conduct themselves with dignity. The other ideas that lost out were: the capitalistic India of Naoroji, the Hindustan of Golwalkar, the kookyland of Besant and the militaristic powderkeg of Bose.

And there began our troubles

See, the issue was that not everybody bought into this idea. There are many that still cling to this outdated and entirely absurd notion that India was a “Hindu rashtra” at some point and we need to return the nation to that. When exactly? 2500 years ago, when the only “Hindus” were in what is now Pakistan, and everybody else prayed to whatever animal they felt like? 2000 years ago, when the country was mostly Buddhist as a rejection of the Hindu social order? 1500 years ago, when the country was so divided on religious grounds that the Buddhists, Shaivas and Vaishnavas considered each themselves entirely distinct religions and burned each other’s temples to the ground? Or was it 1000 years ago, when the Muslim rulers started to organize themselves around Delhi and a large part of northern India was naturally converting to Islam? Or India’s inarguable glory days of wealth and prosperity under the rule of Sher Shah Suri or Akbar but without the Muslim monarchs who are just too much for you to bear? But if you don’t like any of the above, everything else is mostly just a country fragmented into a million states that were only ever united under Ashoka, Akbar and the British Raj. Notice how none of them were ever Hindu empires.

Any way we slice it, in the 2500 years of history of India as a geopolitical entity, it’s only since the 15th century (after the Bhakti wave peaked) that India was a Hindu-majority region. Not Hindu, merely Hindu-majority. So, the idea of Hindustan is based around a narrow focus on 20-25% of the entire history of this country, without any clear reason for why we should focus on this specific 20%. It’s a baseless idea built around flawed logic and a poor understanding of history.

It’s kind of like planting a Hindu image in what is clearly, obviously and historically a non-Hindu building, getting a mob together, performing a puja and hoping that the noise can hide the fact that this idol didn’t exist yesterday.

A bit like the symbolic fight over Ayodhya.

Symbolic of his struggle against reality

The Muslim argument is built on history

We all know the Muslim side of this. Babur, a Kyrgyz-Uzbek warlord who claimed to be descended from both Genghis Khan and Timur, fought his way through the Hindu Kush and arrived in Delhi. He did not like the city or the region and prefered Kabul instead.

Hindustan is a place of little charm… There are no good horses, meat, grapes, melons, or other fruit. There is no ice, cold water, good food or bread in the markets. There are no baths and no madrasas. There are no candles, torches, or candlesticks.

Babur in “Baburnama”

His sister, Khanzada, is one of the most badass and underrated female figures in history (Netflix Originals, where you at?). Also, fun facts: Babur appears to have had homosexual tendencies, drank like a fish, loved music, did every drug that Kabul could offer him and his autobiography (by all accounts, a beautiful work) seems more like a Sufi work than anything a pious Muslim would write. Here’s one gem:

Like us many have spoken over this spring, but they were gone in the twinkling of an eye.

We conquered the world with bravery and might, but we did not take it with us to the grave.

If that doesn’t make you think about the impermanence of glory on the same lines as Ozymandias by Shelley, I don’t know what will. Needless to say, he was also a very characteristically harami Mughal emperor. Another thing that gets overlooked: Babur (and his line) would have preferred to be known as Timurids instead of as Mughals, because they were proud of their Timurid heritage and not so much of their Mongol blood. Babur, as should be obvious by now, had some not-so-nice things to say about the Moghuls:

The Moghul troops who had come as reinforcements had no endurance for battle. They left the battle and began to unhorse and plunder our own men. It was not just here they did this: those wretched Moghuls always do this. If they win they take booty; if they lose they unhorse their own people and plunder them for booty.

Think about that when you’re thinking about why Baburnama is essential reading in most of Central Asia, and I believe should be in Indian schools as well.

He also seems to have ordered the construction of a small mosque in a little sleepy town called Ayodhya. “Seems to have”, because the only record we have of the date is from several decades after the mosque was constructed. Also, for a guy who liked Babur as much as Babur did, there’s no mention of this “Babri Masjid” in his autobiography. There’s also no real evidence to show that Mir Baqi was a “Mir”, or even a significant individual of the time. But the mosque stood nonetheless and people prayed there for centuries, seemingly unmolested by the Hindus around it.

So, let’s not belabour the point here. the Muslim argument is solid and rests on some evidence, but like all Indian history, the details are a bit fuzzy. Let’s look at the “carefully constructed”, “historically accurate” Hindu argument.

The Hindu argument is a whole load of cowdung

Long, long ago, a Dalit man wrote a wildly speculative book called “Ramayana” which said that a racist, sexist hunk called Rama was born in Ayodhya. Nobody seriously takes it to be historically accurate – not least because there are no man-sized apes in Karnataka that can leap across an ocean. It only starts to resemble reality if you reduce it to this:

  • man marries woman
  • they leave on a holiday/exile/honeymoon
  • woman escapes/elopes/gets kidnapped
  • man needs to prove his manliness and ownership over woman by killing the “kidnapper” who actually treats her with more respect than the husband ever does throughout the length of the tale
  • man returns victorious but shames wife for getting kidnapped in the world’s oldest tale of victim blaming.

But even then, it’s little more than a myth to most modern Indians.

Except people like Subramanian Swamy, who’s just a litigious joker with a sensitive ego – and we don’t need to worry about him. Or maybe we do, because rabble rousers like him planted an idol in 1949 and started this whole drama in the first place. Then, they razed Babri to the ground in 1992, on live TV no less. Here’s an oldie but a goodie:

The key instigators like Uma Bharti and LK Advani were rewarded by the Indian political class with MP posts, pretigious ministries at the centre and a whole lot of political capital. The people who stood in the way and tried to prevent popular violence were figures we’re now uncomfortable with. Don’t believe me? Watch:

Later, when the case made its way to the Allahabad HC, the Archeological Survey of India (ASI) found some structural remains under the Babri masjid complex, and the layout of the leftovers looked vaguely like a temple. And that’s it – that’s all the “scientific proof” that the Hindu side’s argument rests on.

The Hindu argument then boils down to this Sparknotes version:

  • Book of fiction written at some unclear point in history says Rama was born in Ayodhya
  • There was a temple under the Babri Masjid
  • Some travellers to Ayodhya write that there was a temple to Rama there at some point
  • Ergo, this site is where Rama’s temple stood.
  • Therefore, it’s ours.

For more insights into the outrageousness of Hindu fundamentalist arguments about Ayodhya and many other topics, watch Vivek (‘Reason’ in English) by Anand Patwardhan. It’s won a bunch of awards, but is not a pretty movie, and is not meant to be a casual watch on the bus ride home. Sit down at a desk and watch. I could only find a link to the Hindi version, so I’m sorry if you don’t understand Hindi.

The emptiness of this case doesn’t end there, because there are some uniquely Indian peculiarities at play here. Enter the courts.

This shit is tiring, man

I’m way out of my depths in the legalities in this section, but I’ve been following this case long enough to be able to see a pattern of complete nonsense in the shenanigans and dirty tricks being used here. Here’s a timeline to help you follow along. There’s a ton of supplementary reading material available in a bookstore near you, if you’re interested in diving deeper into any of the below.

The first is the legal oddity left over from the British period that the deity aka Ram Lalla (aka made up idol placed in temple to provoke Muslims) carries legal rights of its own and is thus represented in court by its own lawyer. The history of this is fascinating and speaks volumes about how the British deepened India’s societal divisions and turned them into active political tools.

And then, one of these clowns on the Hindu side had the bright idea of taking this idea further. He filed that the site itself, “Ramjanmabhoomi”, be added as a party to the claim on the grounds that the site itself is sacred to Hindus and its identity cannot be separated from Ram Lalla. You can see the logic at play here.

To make matters worse, the Shia and Sunni sides, predictably, started fighting each other in public statements, weakening each other’s arguments and undercutting the legalese they were spouting in court. This, added to the open hostility and downright backwardness of some of their arguments during the triple talaq hearings just made it much harder for them to convince anybody that there was a “good” Muslim team here.

In the end, the Hindu side won the case with a weaker argument and no claim to the title.

The Hindu side won (obviously)

How did this come to be? The fact is, it was almost inevitable. For one thing, the Hindu parties were better organised and presented a unified face, with most of their disagreements about the role of the Nirmohi Akhara and amicus filings kept under wraps by the guiding hand of the RSS, or Sangh.

Second, the Muslim side had the rug pulled from under them by the Ismail Faruqui ruling in 1994. This meant that the court effectively proclaimed that mosques were not essential to the practice of Islam. When challenged in the SC, the Court decided to not refer this case to a constitution bench because that earlier ruling was only about that specific land dispute. So, the writing on the wall was clear: Muslims cannot expect the courts to hold up their right to worship.

Fundamentally, there was a huge asymmetry in what the two sides were expected to accomplish through the case. For one thing, the Muslim side had to show that the land was being used for prayers, had a clear line of usage and was essential to the Muslim population around there. They were unable to get a mass of people to prove it because of the slightly inconvenient fact that the masjid no longer exists and thus a revisionist could always say that it was never needed in the first place, and the larger issue that UP under Ajay Bisht is on a fast track to the stone age. The Hindu side only needed to show a few pamphlets and “sacred texts” of zero factual value to prove that a temple to Rama existed around that area. However, their frequent shows of force with rallies and procamations meant that courts had to factor into their decision the possibility of sectarian violence erupting as soon as the verdict was out.

And there, we see the problem coming full circle: India’s highest court itself no longer fully subscribes to the “Idea of India” written into the Constitution.

The Ill, The Illiberal and The Illegitimate

The Indian Constitution is a thing of beauty. But not the kind of robust, timeless beauty of the Grand Canyon or Everest. Instead, it’s a bit like the beauty of Michelangelo’s Painting in the Sistine Chapel: artificial, ethereal, delicate and dependent on something else for structural support. The Supreme Court was just that: the meat and bones to a spectacularly liberal and progressive body. Go over the list of landmark SC cases and you’ll see a pattern: the Court has built an image of steadfast justice and no-holds-barred discipline to the founding principles of the Constitution. Apart from the Emergency years (when practically nothing was untouched by Indira Gandhi’s powerlust), the SC has an almost squeaky-clean bill of health. And it’s not just me saying it.

But now, there’s some walking back going on. The SC is no longer an apolitical body, for better or for worse. There are many reasons for this: India’s growing illiberal class, the deviation of executive capacity from the goals of the judiciary and temptations of the legislative, disintegration of the Congress, etc. But I think the fundamental issue is much more pedestrian: just plain corruption.

What this means for the country is that there’s that much less willingness within the judiciary to fight the excesses of legislation, or to push the executive to do more to pretect people’s rights. We see this time and time again, from the court’s unwillingness to engage with the reality of “sedition laws” to the weaponization of the CBI and NIA to the fact that nobody raises a finger against blatantly religious content in states’ academic curricula. Outgoing CJIs get cushy jobs on “committees” designed to do nothing, and immunity from prosecution in the case of inconvenient allegations against them.

The trouble with the new normal

I like the idea of India I grew up with – a pluralistic, socialist, secular, democratic republic. It makes sense to me, seems just, fair and something for the political class to aspire towards. Nothing captures this spirit as much as the Vidhana Soudha in Bangalore. The white Dravidian building in a city of glass and steel is a bit of an anachronism these days, but just its existence is a testament to the character of this country.

The Vidhana Soudha in Bengaluru, in Jan 2019

The building was mostly designed and conceptualised by the Chief Minister at the time, K. Hanumanthaiah, a man with no architectural knowledge, to commemorate the independence of the Mysore princely state, a wealthy and progressive subject of the British crown. The basic idea is said to have begun from the structure of a Dravidian temple – more specifically the architectural style of the Badami Chalukyas, hence the distinct and rounded “gopuram”. Upper reaches of the gopuram incorporate some elements of Persian architecture as well, a nod to the significant role that successful Muslims had played in shaping the state’s history – one of Mysore’s most famous rulers was Tipu Sultan, a legendary warrior-king whose tales of valour and indomitability inspire many to this day. The gilded lion of Sarnath at the top symbolizes the Union of India, of which Mysore was now a part. But the building was to be more than just a statement of the state’s identity – it was also a declaration of the new India’s aspirations: the Romanesque columns holding up the front are a mishmash of various architectural elements picked up in his travels through Europe. With the construction of this building, Hanumanthaiah was stating his intention to develop the state along Western European lines, but without forgetting its unique place in history.

If you peer closely at the inscription right above the columns, it says “Government’s work is God’s work”, a clever inversion of the priorities in “work is worship”. This, to me, is the right role of religious identities – as a factor to be mindful of. Not be guided by it as fundamentalists of every yarn would have us do, or be entirely agnostic to the religious beliefs of the population you govern – as Western democracies tend to view “secularism”. To me, the secular character of India is about more than just professed agnosticism. It is the duty of the state to respect Constitutional principles, actively engage every group and bring a compromise that serves the weaker sections of society. It is served by giving each group a voice, amplifying it so we hear the substance of the argument and then, collectively agreeing upon a mutually respectful course of action.

The Ayodhya verdict is a farce

The Ayodhya verdict achieves most of these but essentially assumes that the Muslims can determine their own course of action in the regular democratic processes of elections and politics. In doing so, the bench misses the most crucial point: if Muslims could dictate their own fate, they would not have to reach the highest court in the country to have their say. The Hindu side has been agitating that if the land wasn’t handed over to them, they’d find other means to achieve it. What recourse did the Muslims have if their side lost? Nothing.

The bench stated that this was merely a property dispute, and that it was not in the court’s mandate to dictate matters of faith. Therefore, the bickering Shia side and Ramjanmabhoomi were thrown out since they were not parties to the dispute. The verdict gave all of the 2.77 acres to the Hindus and instucted the government to hand over a 5 acre piece of land “in a prominent place” to the Muslim parties as compensation.

Seems fair? Sure. But consider this: it was the Muslim side with a stronger claim to the property, and the Hindu side produced no documents to prove the provenance of the land under question. In a property dispute, the Hindus only argued on matters of faith. So why were they rewarded? Let’s assume it’s not a property dispute, despite what the court says. If this was a religious dispute instead, why were the religious arguments of the Muslim side truncated? Why was the role of a mosque not examined again? Why was the Hindu side not required to produce any material on the reliability of Ramayana as a mapping tool? So, it’s not a religious dispute either. Things don’t add up because the case was neither about property nor about religion. It was purely political.

The court – as is the norm these days under loquacious CJIs like Misra and Gogoi who care more about the language of their judgment and the number of times they quote Shakespeare and Locke in one paragraph – wrote in beautiful prose about the high ideal that the Supreme Court of India stands for and the importance of the following rule of law, and of respecting everybody’s opinion. Then quickly turned around and spat justice in the face.

Coming right after the FRA verdict recently, this goes to show that the SC is no longer a reliable friend of the downtrodden. The court decided in favour of the status quo; and thereby implicitly chose the powerful. It abdicated its duty as we watched and cheered on.

The idea of India stands tall in Bangalore and houses the state legislature. Now, a monument to the idea of Hindustan will be built in Ayodhya, acting as a refuge to everybody who thinks that an equal society undermines their right to superiority over someone else.

Shame on all of us for letting it get this far.