Heptanesian Archives

If one thinks back about the hype manufactured around the golden jubilee of Independence in 1997 — hype which nonetheless failed to create more than a flutter and a grumble in the public heart — it is surprising that Republic Day this year passed with little more than the standard commemoration. In the history of modern constitutional democracies, the fiftieth anniversary of the Indian Republic is an occasion equal to, if not more important than, the attainment of Independence from British rule. But every year, we are treated to the pompous display of newer and more sophisticated weaponry, the silly self-congratulation, decorating of heroes in an ongoing war against our largest neighbour and against  sizeable portions of our own population in the name of “national security.” All of these questionable and disgusting rituals have little to do with the actual meaning of the Republic.

The Democratic Revolution

Writing two hundred years ago, about another newly independent country experimenting with the radical idea of equality, Alexis de Tocqueville formulated his well-known idea of the democratic revolution.

Democracy for him was not something that could be institutionalised in elections, ballot boxes, or grand declarations of liberty. Rather, democracy was for him a concrete process, revolutionising every aspect of our lives through the simple, but powerful, principle of equality. And when the democratic revolution starts, when its principle comes to be applied to all realms of modern life, it is impossible to arrest it. In that way, democracy is ineluctable, permanent, because once the idea of equality percolates to every sphere of society — culture, politics, economics — it necessarily questions and shatters the hierarchies of wealth, race, caste, culture, even appearance.

What it leaves in its wake is a different, and perhaps less inspiring story. In more recent times the successes of the democratic revolution, the mass energies it has unleashed in world-wide struggles for equality — everything from anti-colonial struggles and anti-caste movements to civil liberties and socialism — has resulted in equally ferocious backlashes.

Defending or Destroying Democracy?

This Republic Day, rather than staying at home and watching the parading of empty national pride and machismo, I attended a dharna in the mill areas of central Mumbai. Called to commemorate Republic Day and led by the Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti, the speakers drew attention to the real meaning of democracy, and the historic role that Bombay’s labourers had played in the building of our new society by fighting for the rights to equal work and livelihood.

Those protesting textile workers, once at the forefront of the Indian labour and trade union movements, the struggle for Independence and for a united Maharashtra, are now being crushed by mill owners who subcontract textile production to the unorganised powerloom sector. In these sweatshops, none of the constitutional guarantees of equality of work and employment apply. Their mills are being closed down and the land sold to corporate barons, all in the name of greater wealth and liberalisation. In this they are supported by a Government that openly espouses the authoritarian idea of Hindutva, a philosophy concocted in reaction to the anti-hierarchical upsurges unleashed by the Mandal Commission, the enfranchisement of previously unequal sections of Indian society.

Tocqueville’s reflections on the American Revolution ring ironic today. The U.S.A., one of the first countries to embrace the democratic revolution, has now become the most oppressive global power today — while still speaking in the name of human rights and liberty. There is an important lesson for India here. While the rhetoric of democracy has increased so much in the past several years, it has now been trivialised beyond meaning. The most recent example of this was during General Musharraf’s coup, when our mainstream press became hysterical about the death of democracy in Pakistan, crowing wildly about India’s liberalism and tolerance, and Pakistan’s medievalism. Why then, on this important national holiday, do we commemorate the golden jubilee of the “world’s largest democracy” by a display of all the violent machinery meant to repress and extinguish the hopes of the democratic revolution?

Originally published on Satyam Online.

Several days ago, the headlines of our major national papers showed Home Minister L K Advani announcing to the world “damning evidence” to prove the Pakistan Government’s direct role in the recent hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight in Kandahar. The purpose of this press conference, it appeared, was to beseech the so-called “international community” — a convenient nickname for the U.S. Government — to declare Pakistan a terrorist state. The Government claimed a victory in the “war against terrorism” when, in a passing remark to a reporter at the White House, Bill Clinton’s spokesman agreed that the hijackers should be brought to book for their actions.

Dismantling India’s Independent Foreign Policy

This is but the latest instance in a recent trend, initiated under the previous BJP Government, which sees India’s diplomatic and military victories scored not by the strength of decisions taken in South Block, or by its armed forces on the battlefield, but through the intervention of the U.S. The much-trumpeted victory in Kargil earlier this year, on which the BJP-led coalition rode to power in the latest election, would have been less certain, more prolonged and bloody, had Bill Clinton not instructed Nawaz Sharif to withdraw his forces or face cancellation of international loans and other punishments by the world’s last superpower. That the BJP or Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh — who all along have maintained that the Kashmir imbroglio should be resolved bilaterally, as per the Simla Agreement and Lahore Declaration — could acquiesce in this obvious third-party mediation, and moreover sell this as a victory to the electorate, was a dangerous precedent in India’s foreign policy whose implications are now becoming clearer in the wake of the recent hijacking.

Since the nuclear tests at Pokharan in May 1998 which blasted India and Pakistan back onto the radar screens of foreign policy planners and strategists in Washington, the BJP has been slowly and happily surrendering India’s sovereignty in international affairs — a legacy of non-alignment and Nehru’s nationalist vision of keeping India free of domination by the world’s great powers — to the designs of United States.

Washington’s New Frontline State

This is the same United States which, in its Cold War strategy of bolstering “frontline states”, gave birth to the Afghani mujahadeen and their leader Osama Bin-Laden to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan by pumping money into Pakistan, channeling arms through the ISI and Pakistani military. Only to find that those “freedom fighters” turn into “terrorists” when they no longer served the U.S.’s imperial designs in the region. In the meanwhile those hundred of thousands of Kalashnikov and AK47 rifles, Stinger missiles and hand-held grenades provided to Pakistan found their way into Kashmir, Punjab, and the North East and spawned the insurgencies of the eighties and nineties, whose massive repression continues to drain the public exchequer, sow violence and instability, and embolden communal politicians like Advani to scapegoat Muslims and other “anti-national” elements.

From the time he flagged off the Rath Yatra for the liberation of the Ramjanambhumi in Ayodhya, to the present day when he is appealing to the moral authority of a country responsible for financing and arming groups across the world to serve its global strategies, Mr Advani and his cohorts have continuously spoken in the name of Indian national pride and national security. Behind this hollow rhetoric lies a failure of his party and Government to identify the real culprits responsible for sowing violence and division inside India and in its neighbourhood, through their communal politics and global arms networks. The BJP and their supporters, elated at the crummy recognition finally offered by the U.S. since the nuclear tests — which makes great power intervention in the region more urgent as it is a nuclear flashpoint —  now are martialling evidence against Pakistan in the distant hope that these impartial arbiters of global morality will save India from its enemies within and abroad. Indeed, if we go by recent history, the evidence against the terrorists is damning.

Originally published in Satyam Online