The Difficulty of Being Reformist

And why Das shouldn’t count on Raj Dharma as a saviour of the Indian economy

Nationalism in India has a lot more shades than fifty, and the only big S&M—sales and marketing—success of the past 20 years has been too S-driven to endure. Is there space out there for a liberal brand of conservative nationalism instead? Marketer-turned-opinion-shaper-at-large Gurcharan Das thinks it’s about time India had a mass movement for a Strong State. Not an authoritarian one, but one that enforces the Rule of Law, is accountable to people, and therefore manages to crush corruption.

In the past, writes Das, India did well on democratic accountability, so-so on social cohesion and rather poorly on economic dynamism. Since 1991, he contends, the country has done okay on cohesion, well on dynamism, but is fast turning into a ‘flailing state’. Some of the blame he lays on what he sees as the Centre’s ‘policy paralysis’ (a term that may have lost some of its currency this past fortnight), coupled with cases of corruption that he considers proof of a lawless state of affairs (instances of justice in cases of mob violence don’t seem to impress him).

The rest of the blame he lays on India’s alleged weakness as a state down the ages. Historically, he writes, every regime has had to adapt itself to an inherent ‘ordered heterogeneity.’ This, of course, is true. But his broad retelling of Indian history—a sort of fairy tale of post-1857 Pax Britannica after centuries of violence—seems so severely constrained by Anglocentric sources that one’s eyes glaze over.

It is tempting to pin such an orientalist reading of history on ‘groupthink of the globalised’ if not on Churchill’s 1943 call at Harvard for an empire ‘of the mind’. What confounds me, however, is Das’ attitude towards caste. As a form of hierarchy, he declares himself against it, but—cheered by the fact that most Indian billionaires are of a single caste of traders—he speaks of it as a ‘competitive advantage’ a few breaths later. In olden days, he blithely suggests, royal authority was held in check by the clamps of finance and oversight of Dharma, and this was all thanks to caste divisions of power.

Ah, Dharma. Das’ deliberations on it are already legion. In this book, it’s a springboard for his core proposal. ‘India,’ he writes, ‘will have to rediscover a moral core in order to come to grips with its present crisis of the rule of law and become a mature democracy. ‘Rediscover’, I say, because a universal ideal of ‘public dharma’ lives in people’s hearts if not in their practice, thanks to the extraordinary continuity of Indian civilization.’

For clarity on what Das means, read The Difficulty of Being Good, his bestseller on Dharma that draws on The Mahabharata to wrestle with the idea. It’s a jolly good read. Among other things, he looks at the greys of goodness, locates divine sanction to contour the rules of fairplay to specific contexts, and even tries to reconcile The Gita’s injunction of selfless effort with Adam Smith’s espousal of self-interest as a means to maximise welfare in a free market. In his latest book, Das outdoes himself. He finds an echo of Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ from The Wealth of Nations in a description of a trader’s life at the mercy of nature in Ved Vyasa’s epic. The two vibe very well with each other, in his portrayal, as advisory classics.

‘[D]harma is especially useful for public policy because it’s a pragmatic concept and does not seek moral perfection…’ which is an endeavour, he warns, that ‘inevitably leads to theocracy or dictatorship.’

What Das insists he has in mind is a secular sort of Dharma, something he would have India adopt as its ‘code word’ (just as the US has ‘liberty’ and France ‘egalite’) by way of a strategic exercise in myth-making for the sake of the country’s future. ‘Dharma can mean many things—duty, law, justice, righteousness—but mostly it is about doing the right thing.’

The guile at work is apparent only at the end. With Dharma guaranteed to be a saleable proposition at the polls, Das writes, it would be easy for a right-of-centre political formation (like the Swatantra Party of yore) to achieve power and push for a free market…which happens to be this book’s core motivation, as it turns out.

As an objective, it’s vaguely laudable. India’s economy could do with some help. As a strategy, it’s brazenly crafty. But while Mahatma Gandhi himself—as Das hints—may well have been a great one for the use of artifice in aid of noble purposes (ah, the difficulty of being great), Das forgets that India’s eventual emergence will have to be an enlightened one. It will have to be a function of rationality, not myths. Or, as the Brahma Sutra urges, ‘Athato Brahma Jigyaasaa’, a function of a broad quest for the ultimate truth, not delusions.

Gurcharan DasnationalismRaj Dharma