The Case for Debate

The ease and charm with which Professor Bhikhu Parekh lapses into Sanskrit has to be experienced to be treasured. “Vaade vaade jaayate tattvabodhah,” he says, each word as distinct as the other, “It is only through debate and discussion that you do two things: you discover truth, and—tattva bodhah—not only that, you also realise it. You make it a part of your way of life.” This is the central thrust of Debating India: Essays on Indian Political Discourse (Oxford University Press, 376 pages, Rs 895), his latest book. The essays in this volume cover multiple aspects of contention in the country, all the way from ancient days to 9/11, and many of them were originally delivered as lectures by Professor Parekh, a Padma Bhushan awardee, member of Britain’s House of Lords, and a political philosopher who has taught at the University of Westminster and that of Hull in the UK.

The book may be academic in approach, but the essays are rivetting, marked by an urgency to reach out to Indians at large and remind them of what’s at threat of being lost in all the noise out there. “We had a great tradition of public debate,” he says, “This is something which is unique to India of all the countries that I have studied—and there are quite a few. This is the only country where there has been [such a tradition], where for example there would be thousands and thousands of people before whom there would be this spectacle of two pundits debating, one a reformer and the other a conservative. When Buddha came along in ancient India, the same thing happened. No one was allowed to convert someone or propagate another religion unless he was able to convince them…. And the debate went on for days and days and weeks and weeks. This is right from the sixth century BCE, and it went on until the 1960s or 70s in one form or another.” For over 2,500 years, as he outlines with lucidity in his book, the engagements across the land have been both profound and prolific: Vedic Brahmins versus Buddhists, the Carvaka school versus others, Hindus versus the Islamic ulema and then Christian missionaries; Hindu conservatives versus reformers; and what he calls ‘the six great debates’ of the Gandhi era that saw the Mahatma engage Tagore and Ambedkar apart from a range of modernists and fundamentalists, and Nehru argue in favour of what we now call the Nehurvian Consensus. “We do need a reminder of the fact that we had this great tradition and that we are in danger of losing it. Of course, traditions do get lost. But in the current climate, we seem to be rather unhappy with differences. And where there are no differences, there can’t be debate.”

Echoes of Professor Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian are inevitable here, but Professor Parekh’s emphasis is on contemporary issues. His aim is to critique Indian political discourse, which, he writes ‘has not been as probing and self-critical as it needs to be’. “We are argumentative, yes, on philosophical abstract issues that have no relevance to social and political life,” he says, pointing out where he differs from Sen, “We had bold speculation, imaginative theories in the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, logic… but when it comes to social and political affairs, we [Indians] become very timid. Show me one major group of writers, for example, who are bold in their criticism of the caste system, in their attack on economic inequality, on poverty.”

Among the debates that Professor Parekh finds unsatisfactory in India is the one on secularism. His position, as one essay spells out, is that it remains muddled by the use of a word—‘secular’—that does not go well with the dharmic tradition of India’s vast majority. The term ‘religion’, in his view, applies to the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and is inappropriate for Hinduism. “The definition of ‘religion’ is too narrow to capture [it]. You can be a Hindu and still be an atheist… and if the definition is problematic, the separation of religion and state becomes problematic, and secularism becomes problematic.”

India, he writes, would have been better off with ‘a more nuanced secularism than Nehru allowed’. The aloofness from religion that the country’s first Prime Minister displayed, he believes, was at least partly responsible for the confusion to come. As a leader, he was far too elitist to understand what religion meant to people, and after the death of Gandhi, who did, the leadership’s finger on the pulse of popular passions was lost. “The communalism Nehru attacked was the majority one. He thought minority communalism was largely a response to that, and so if the majority becomes more generous, the other kind will disappear. I think he was rather naïve…” And then there were all sorts of “silly distractions” over issues like whether a secular state could accord someone a religious funeral. The leader’s response to ‘the Hindu complaint of unequal treatment’ worsened matters, he writes. ‘Although Hindus flourished in—even dominated— India under Nehru, they developed a deep sense of cultural marginalization.’ At the end of that phase, secularism “had become like an incubus which was haunting us”. And by the late 1980s, the streets were ringing with cries of ‘Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain’: “In a country where over 80 per cent are Hindu, do you have to tell them to be proud of being so? Which means for years they’ve been made to feel small.”

For a debate on secularism to prove worthwhile, he argues, it needs to be “formulated properly”. The last major attempt to reshape it was made by Home Minister Rajnath Singh, who in Parliament sought to define it as ‘panth nirpekshta’ (sect neutrality) instead of ‘dharma nirpekshta’ (religion neutrality) in contending that the dharma of India’s majority was inherently secular. What does Professor Parekh make of that? “I think it’s an issue of falsehoods and some truths,” he replies, “[The minister] is mixing up many different things and it would take me an hour to unravel them. Briefly, I would say secularism is a concept that is not used in our Constitution. The word did not originally appear even once, but at the same time the whole philosophy of it informs the Constitution. We don’t define it because we know we can’t have a crisp definition.” The historical explanation for why Independent India did not define itself explicitly as secular, he adds, is often forgotten. “When the issue was raised in the Constituent Assembly by Professor KT Shah, who said, ‘We’re a secular state and we should use that word’, Ambedkar said, ‘No, we should not use that word.’ Why? Because in a secular state—and they were thinking of the American wall of separation between state and religion— the state cannot interfere with religion, and Ambedkar said this was what the state was meant to do in India; that in a Hindu society, the caste system and all that, ‘We’ll have to dismantle it and therefore the state will have to interfere.’”

The complexities of it chase us till this day. “Now at one level,” he continues, “Rajnath Singh is making sense: if secularism means indifference to dharma, and this means ethics or morality, then it means a secular state is indifferent to morality. How can a state be indifferent to morality? That’s crazy. So it can’t be dharma nirpekshta. So what is the state neutral to? Panth. Sect. But inbetween, you have problems. Where does religion fit in? It’s not ‘sect’, it’s not ‘dharma’. Secondly, what do you mean by panth?”

In ‘Critical Reflections on the Indian Democracy’, a chapter written soon after the 2014 General Election, Professor Parekh describes Candidate Modi’s campaign as an ‘ingenious blend of religious and secular appeals’. Has this blend changed? “The Modi we saw during the campaign and the immediate aftermath of the Election was one Modi. The Modi we see now is slightly different. And it alarms me in two ways. His campaign was secular at one level; he talked about vikaas, though there was a religious touch to it—he didn’t have to spell it out. It was a shrewd mixture of an essentially secular message interlaced with religious appeal.” What he has observed since, however, is a “subtle division of labour between him and the RSS”; “He seems to be saying, ‘What are the areas which matter most to the RSS, and two are crucial, education and culture, the iconography of India and all that, and let’s quietly outsource it to the RSS—you do what you want, and in return you leave me alone to do what I want, foreign policy, globalisation…’.”

And that, the professor adds, may be part of a project that’s slowly making itself apparent. “So what you are beginning to see, and I still can’t make sense of it, is Hindutva Mark II. It is connected with globalisation, a country open to all, a foreign policy of cooperation with neighbours, Look East, Central Asia and all that, bringing in huge amounts of foreign investment, giving the Indian disapora a stake in the country… Now how does this agenda fit in with Mark I? [This time, it seems as if] Muslims have been told, ‘You can have your religion, we Hindus are very tolerant of religion, but culturally ek hona chaahiye’ (we must be one).” This is a project of ‘sanskriti karan’, the cultural assimilation of minorities: “Wanting Muslims to be cultural Hindus while retaining their religion. That is the intellectual masterplan.”

With the country’s cultural arena in such a state of flux, then, is the space for inter-religious debate shrinking? “No,” he says emphatically. “Relations between Hindus and Muslims I don’t think have been strained… minor acts of intolerance may have bothered minorities, but they also recognise that the loudest protests have come from Hindus themselves. If the state begins leaning towards the majority, civil society spontaneously says, ‘We will be a rival force.’ Civil society in India is beginning to assert itself. That’s a good sign. And that’s our strength as a democracy.”

On the whole, though, as Professor Parekh observes in one of his essays, the regular holding of free and fair elections is all that Indian democracy has to show for its success. Its debates remain inadequate and its outcomes even worse. This, he says, is largely a result of the short shrift that republican aspects of it—especially the emphasis on equality and fraternity— have got over the years since 1947. What Ambedkar was keen on did not get enough attention, and the leader’s charge that India lacked a ‘public conscience’ remains just about as valid as it did in his time. “For thousands of years, Ambedkar said, society has practised untouchability, but why did nobody complain?” Voices against the excessively hierarchical way India works, in his assessment, are still not as loud as they ought to be. And the irony of it is that Gandhi’s message— of ahimsa, for example—has not made headway either. Does it mean much to Indians anymore? “It holds people because internationally it gives you leverage,” says Professor Parekh, “As a collective philosophy, I don’t think it matters to us… We tolerate far too much violence.”

The surprise package in Debating India is a chapter that features an imaginary dialogue between Gandhi and Osama bin Laden. Surprise not because such a thing has been deemed imaginable, but for the sincerity of the correspondence. The point, says the professor, was to ask what Gandhi would have said to Bin Laden. And for the Mahatma to tackle the latter, “You can’t turn Bin Laden into a strawman.”

The bigger point, of course, is that even extremes ought to be engaged in dialogue. Nobody is beyond the pale of vaade vaade. In general, in all arenas, minds can and do change. But first, people need to talk: something that a group of 44 in the Lok Sabha would do well to bear in mind too.

Bhikhu ParekhbooksDebating IndiadharmaEssays on Indian Political Discourse