Times of India, Apr 18, 2004
With each passing day we continue to watch China 's mesmerising success in creating millions of low-end manufacturing jobs through the export of toys, shoes, clothes, and all the things we need to live our daily life. We also observe the striking success of Indians in exporting knowledge services to the global economy.
Seeing these phenomena some Indians insistently ask, are we going to skip the industrial revolution and jump from an agricultural to a services economy? The question, not surprisingly, frightens people because the rest of the world has evolved from agriculture to industry to services, and India appears to have missed the middle step.
Karl Marx predicted that the railways would usher in India 's industrial revolution as they did in many Western nations. They didn't. After Independence , Nehru attempted an industrial revolution via the state. He didn't trust private entrepreneurs, so he made the state the entrepreneur, and not surprisingly, he failed. Today, whether our fast growing services can transform the lives of our millions is debatable, but the desirability of creating manufacturing jobs is not. It is a pity that we are losing the opportunity because of bad policies.
It is especially heartbreaking because we have come a long way since 1991 in improving our competitiveness -- there has been a telecom revolution; interest rates have come down and capital is plentiful; our highways and ports are improving; real estate markets are becoming transparent. It's also true that a few large companies in a few sectors have become globally competitive, but that's not enough to create a revolution. Hence, our exports are a paltry $55 billion compared to China 's $400 billion.
There are many reasons for our industrial failure, but the silliest and most hurtful one is that 670 industries in India are still reserved for small (SSI) companies, and they are unable to compete against the large firms of our competitor nations. They make simple things like pencils, boot polish, candles. We now import these products freely, but we don't allow our big companies to make them. We could create millions of new jobs by exporting these products, as the Far East nations have done. But the government is afraid to touch the ‘‘SSI holy cow'' as it fears a powerful lobby. The truth is that this vested interest faded long ago and there is little incentive left in being an SSI. In recent years, around 150 industries have been de-served and there was no adverse reaction from anyone. The only vested interest left is the department of small-scale industries.
Certainly, our entrepreneurs face other problems: electric power is less reliable and costlier than in competitor nations; octroi/check nakas keep our trucks waiting for hours; excise and import duties may have come down, but their cascading effect (tax on tax) burdens Indian manufacturers; our labour laws continue to destroy our work ethic and scare entrepreneurs from hiring workers -- if you can't fire a bad worker and can't close your factory then you will be hopelessly uncompetitive. Finally, ‘‘licence raj'' may have gone but ‘‘inspector raj'' is well and alive; the ‘‘ midnight knock'' from an excise, customs, labour, factory inspector haunts many an entrepreneur.
Some of these obstacles are more daunting, such as labour reform and power, and will be more difficult to overcome. But scrapping SSI reservations is an easy thing to do, and should be in the manifesto of all parties. Whoever wins this election and removes this silly anachronism could create India 's industrial revolution and go to glory.
Monday, April 19, 2004
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Private Secularism !
Outlook, 12 Apr, 2004
“The country with the most impressive and intelligent secularist movement is India,” wrote Christopher Hitchens in the respected journal, Daedalus, last summer. Hitchens is a public intellectual who is read and listened to with some admiration on both sides of the Atlantic. He did not explain, but I think what he meant is that Indian secularism has acquired many voices and it seems to be maturing.
It is sobering to remember, however, that Indian secularism was unable to stop the murderous carnage in Gujarat, which may have receded in public memory by the good cheer from a rapidly growing economy and an approaching election, but still remains a blot. There is a change, nevertheless, in the rhetoric of the political class this time. Amidst the usual scramble for seats and alliances there is healthy silence on religion. The turning point seems to have been the four state elections in November and December, and every politician who has been interviewed in the past eight weeks has talked about “bijlee, sadak, pani”. Our fondest hope, of course, is that these three words will replace “mandir, masjid, and mandal” in our political lexicon, and when that happens we may be looking at the most dramatic change in the Indian political mindset in decades. Clearly, it is too early to proclaim that victory.
Coming back to Indian secularism, it is important to ask why it has failed to stem the rising tide of intolerance in recent years? And the reason, I suspect, is that it is identified in the public mind with atheism. It is true that many of our most vocal secularists were Marxists and they did not value the religious life. In a well-meaning effort to limit religion to the private life they behaved as though all religious people were superstitious and stupid. This naturally didn’t go well with the majority of Indians who are deeply religious and suspicious of godless, westernised, brown sahibs telling them what to do. Our secularists were also statist, thinking that the state could reform society and religion, which is again arrogant and foolish for genuine reform must emerge from within society. Moreover, our secularists forgot that the truly religious are usually deeply secular. Thus, what has failed is not the noble philosophy of secularism but its practice in India, and in the meantime, intolerant fundamentalists have filled the vacuum.
Partially as a reaction to this failure a new generation of secularists have come to prominence in the past 15 years, and this is what Christopher Hitchens has in mind. The change began when Ashis Nandy first assaulted the old, orthodox, Nehruvian secularists with his critique of the European modernity in the mid-1980s. He promoted a return to tradition, wherein we might find the roots of a religious tolerance of a different kind, which might better resonate with the masses than the hegemonic language of Western secularism. A year later, T.N. Madan, the distinguished sociologist, wrote that secularism was having a problem in India because the realms of the sacred and secular continued to be deeply intertwined in Indian tradition. Secularism would only succeed in India if we understood it to mean inter-religious understanding and an equality of citizenship rights; he added that we should “take both religion and secularism seriously, and not reject the former as superstition and the latter as a mask for communalism and or more expediency.”
This attack did not go well with the Nehruvian secularists, who roundly chastised Nandy and Madan for feeding into the hands of the Hindu nationalists. In the early nineties, Partha Chatterjeee, the eminent social scientist at Columbia University, questioned if secularism was, in fact, the right way to stop Hindu majoritarianism. The Hindu right, he argued was perfectly comfortable with the institutional processes of the modern state, and the main issue was not ideology, he felt, but to protect the cultural rights of the minorities, and this could best be done through toleration “premised on autonomy and respect for persons…but made sensitive to the varying political salience of the institutional contexts.”
Neera Chandoke, the political scientist at JNU, responded by arguing that the concept of toleration was not enough and that minorities needed supportive structures in order to protect their cultural identity. The writer, Mukul Kesavan, and others rightly worry, however, that this sort of thinking will only delay the day when we might call ourselves equal and common citizens of one state. Rajeev Bhargava, the editor of an excellent volume of essays on Indian secularism, distinguishes between political and ethical secularism, and says that to exist in a more liveable polity, we as citizens need to agree to what is right rather than what is good. Let’s just be content with living together, rather than living together well (which is, of course, another project, and a valid one too.)
So, how do we begin to privatise religion? The answer, I think, lies with the deeply religious but moderate voices in each religion’s mainstream, who must come forward and proclaim once again that true religion has nothing to do with political life. The failure of our contemporary public life is that we do not hear these voices, but only hear the shrill voices of extremists at both ends. It was not always so. Earlier, we had sensible public figures who were also deeply religious. Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Azad, Vivekananda used to speak with credibility on behalf of the vast majority of religiously minded Indians. Today, what we have is an unfortunate polarization between an influential and articulate minority of secularists and the vast majority of silent, religiously minded Indians. Neither takes the trouble to understand the other, and what we have as a result is a dialogue of the deaf. We need to hear the many reasonable voices of good sense within the Hindu and Muslim religious communities, surely, there must be a few courageous individuals who will speak up before their faith is totally hijacked by the terrorists!
Following Rajeev Bhargava, our secularists should learn from the American philosopher, John Rawls, and distinguish between public reason and secular reason. While public reason limits itself to political and civic principles, secular reason is broader and deals with a secular person’s moral doctrines and first philosophy. Our secularists need to be aware of this distinction and refrain from introducing secular values and secular reason into political debate. This is not easy to do, I realise, because liberal political values are intrinsically moral values and closely intertwined with moral doctrines.
Above all, let’s learn from our own Emperor Ashoka, who ruled when Hindus and Buddhists were fighting each other in mid-third century BCE, and who declared in his famous Edict XII, “The sects of other people deserve reverence…By thus acting, a man exalts his own sect, and at the same time does service to the sects of other people…He who disparages the sects of others…inflicts the severest injury on his own sect.” Here is a wonderful insight for our times: you damage your own religion when you malign another’s and secularism is not only good for governance but also for religion. Those who call for a Hindu nation not only harm the nation, they also damage Hinduism.
Monday, April 12, 2004
Private Secularism!
Outlook, 12 April, 2004
“The country with the most impressive and intelligent secularist movement is India,” wrote Christopher Hitchens in the respected journal, Daedalus, last summer. Hitchens is a public intellectual who is read and listened to with some admiration on both sides of the Atlantic. He did not explain, but I think what he meant is that Indian secularism has acquired many voices and it seems to be maturing.
It is sobering to remember, however, that Indian secularism was unable to stop the murderous carnage in Gujarat, which may have receded in public memory by the good cheer from a rapidly growing economy and an approaching election, but still remains a blot. There is a change, nevertheless, in the rhetoric of the political class this time. Amidst the usual scramble for seats and alliances there is healthy silence on religion. The turning point seems to have been the four state elections in November and December, and every politician who has been interviewed in the past eight weeks has talked about “bijlee, sadak, pani”. Our fondest hope, of course, is that these three words will replace “mandir, masjid, and mandal” in our political lexicon, and when that happens we may be looking at the most dramatic change in the Indian political mindset in decades. Clearly, it is too early to proclaim that victory.
Coming back to Indian secularism, it is important to ask why it has failed to stem the rising tide of intolerance in recent years? And the reason, I suspect, is that it is identified in the public mind with atheism. It is true that many of our most vocal secularists were Marxists and they did not value the religious life. In a well-meaning effort to limit religion to the private life they behaved as though all religious people were superstitious and stupid. This naturally didn’t go well with the majority of Indians who are deeply religious and suspicious of godless, westernised, brown sahibs telling them what to do. Our secularists were also statist, thinking that the state could reform society and religion, which is again arrogant and foolish for genuine reform must emerge from within society. Moreover, our secularists forgot that the truly religious are usually deeply secular. Thus, what has failed is not the noble philosophy of secularism but its practice in India, and in the meantime, intolerant fundamentalists have filled the vacuum.
Partially as a reaction to this failure a new generation of secularists have come to prominence in the past 15 years, and this is what Christopher Hitchens has in mind. The change began when Ashis Nandy first assaulted the old, orthodox, Nehruvian secularists with his critique of the European modernity in the mid-1980s. He promoted a return to tradition, wherein we might find the roots of a religious tolerance of a different kind, which might better resonate with the masses than the hegemonic language of Western secularism. A year later, T.N. Madan, the distinguished sociologist, wrote that secularism was having a problem in India because the realms of the sacred and secular continued to be deeply intertwined in Indian tradition. Secularism would only succeed in India if we understood it to mean inter-religious understanding and an equality of citizenship rights; he added that we should “take both religion and secularism seriously, and not reject the former as superstition and the latter as a mask for communalism and or more expediency.”
This attack did not go well with the Nehruvian secularists, who roundly chastised Nandy and Madan for feeding into the hands of the Hindu nationalists. In the early nineties, Partha Chatterjeee, the eminent social scientist at Columbia University, questioned if secularism was, in fact, the right way to stop Hindu majoritarianism. The Hindu right, he argued was perfectly comfortable with the institutional processes of the modern state, and the main issue was not ideology, he felt, but to protect the cultural rights of the minorities, and this could best be done through toleration “premised on autonomy and respect for persons…but made sensitive to the varying political salience of the institutional contexts.”
Neera Chandoke, the political scientist at JNU, responded by arguing that the concept of toleration was not enough and that minorities needed supportive structures in order to protect their cultural identity. The writer, Mukul Kesavan, and others rightly worry, however, that this sort of thinking will only delay the day when we might call ourselves equal and common citizens of one state. Rajeev Bhargava, the editor of an excellent volume of essays on Indian secularism, distinguishes between political and ethical secularism, and says that to exist in a more liveable polity, we as citizens need to agree to what is right rather than what is good. Let’s just be content with living together, rather than living together well (which is, of course, another project, and a valid one too.)
So, how do we begin to privatise religion? The answer, I think, lies with the deeply religious but moderate voices in each religion’s mainstream, who must come forward and proclaim once again that true religion has nothing to do with political life. The failure of our contemporary public life is that we do not hear these voices, but only hear the shrill voices of extremists at both ends. It was not always so. Earlier, we had sensible public figures who were also deeply religious. Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Azad, Vivekananda used to speak with credibility on behalf of the vast majority of religiously minded Indians. Today, what we have is an unfortunate polarization between an influential and articulate minority of secularists and the vast majority of silent, religiously minded Indians. Neither takes the trouble to understand the other, and what we have as a result is a dialogue of the deaf. We need to hear the many reasonable voices of good sense within the Hindu and Muslim religious communities, surely, there must be a few courageous individuals who will speak up before their faith is totally hijacked by the terrorists!
Following Rajeev Bhargava, our secularists should learn from the American philosopher, John Rawls, and distinguish between public reason and secular reason. While public reason limits itself to political and civic principles, secular reason is broader and deals with a secular person’s moral doctrines and first philosophy. Our secularists need to be aware of this distinction and refrain from introducing secular values and secular reason into political debate. This is not easy to do, I realise, because liberal political values are intrinsically moral values and closely intertwined with moral doctrines.
Above all, let’s learn from our own Emperor Ashoka, who ruled when Hindus and Buddhists were fighting each other in mid-third century BCE, and who declared in his famous Edict XII, “The sects of other people deserve reverence…By thus acting, a man exalts his own sect, and at the same time does service to the sects of other people…He who disparages the sects of others…inflicts the severest injury on his own sect.” Here is a wonderful insight for our times: you damage your own religion when you malign another’s and secularism is not only good for governance but also for religion. Those who call for a Hindu nation not only harm the nation, they also damage Hinduism.
“The country with the most impressive and intelligent secularist movement is India,” wrote Christopher Hitchens in the respected journal, Daedalus, last summer. Hitchens is a public intellectual who is read and listened to with some admiration on both sides of the Atlantic. He did not explain, but I think what he meant is that Indian secularism has acquired many voices and it seems to be maturing.
It is sobering to remember, however, that Indian secularism was unable to stop the murderous carnage in Gujarat, which may have receded in public memory by the good cheer from a rapidly growing economy and an approaching election, but still remains a blot. There is a change, nevertheless, in the rhetoric of the political class this time. Amidst the usual scramble for seats and alliances there is healthy silence on religion. The turning point seems to have been the four state elections in November and December, and every politician who has been interviewed in the past eight weeks has talked about “bijlee, sadak, pani”. Our fondest hope, of course, is that these three words will replace “mandir, masjid, and mandal” in our political lexicon, and when that happens we may be looking at the most dramatic change in the Indian political mindset in decades. Clearly, it is too early to proclaim that victory.
Coming back to Indian secularism, it is important to ask why it has failed to stem the rising tide of intolerance in recent years? And the reason, I suspect, is that it is identified in the public mind with atheism. It is true that many of our most vocal secularists were Marxists and they did not value the religious life. In a well-meaning effort to limit religion to the private life they behaved as though all religious people were superstitious and stupid. This naturally didn’t go well with the majority of Indians who are deeply religious and suspicious of godless, westernised, brown sahibs telling them what to do. Our secularists were also statist, thinking that the state could reform society and religion, which is again arrogant and foolish for genuine reform must emerge from within society. Moreover, our secularists forgot that the truly religious are usually deeply secular. Thus, what has failed is not the noble philosophy of secularism but its practice in India, and in the meantime, intolerant fundamentalists have filled the vacuum.
Partially as a reaction to this failure a new generation of secularists have come to prominence in the past 15 years, and this is what Christopher Hitchens has in mind. The change began when Ashis Nandy first assaulted the old, orthodox, Nehruvian secularists with his critique of the European modernity in the mid-1980s. He promoted a return to tradition, wherein we might find the roots of a religious tolerance of a different kind, which might better resonate with the masses than the hegemonic language of Western secularism. A year later, T.N. Madan, the distinguished sociologist, wrote that secularism was having a problem in India because the realms of the sacred and secular continued to be deeply intertwined in Indian tradition. Secularism would only succeed in India if we understood it to mean inter-religious understanding and an equality of citizenship rights; he added that we should “take both religion and secularism seriously, and not reject the former as superstition and the latter as a mask for communalism and or more expediency.”
This attack did not go well with the Nehruvian secularists, who roundly chastised Nandy and Madan for feeding into the hands of the Hindu nationalists. In the early nineties, Partha Chatterjeee, the eminent social scientist at Columbia University, questioned if secularism was, in fact, the right way to stop Hindu majoritarianism. The Hindu right, he argued was perfectly comfortable with the institutional processes of the modern state, and the main issue was not ideology, he felt, but to protect the cultural rights of the minorities, and this could best be done through toleration “premised on autonomy and respect for persons…but made sensitive to the varying political salience of the institutional contexts.”
Neera Chandoke, the political scientist at JNU, responded by arguing that the concept of toleration was not enough and that minorities needed supportive structures in order to protect their cultural identity. The writer, Mukul Kesavan, and others rightly worry, however, that this sort of thinking will only delay the day when we might call ourselves equal and common citizens of one state. Rajeev Bhargava, the editor of an excellent volume of essays on Indian secularism, distinguishes between political and ethical secularism, and says that to exist in a more liveable polity, we as citizens need to agree to what is right rather than what is good. Let’s just be content with living together, rather than living together well (which is, of course, another project, and a valid one too.)
So, how do we begin to privatise religion? The answer, I think, lies with the deeply religious but moderate voices in each religion’s mainstream, who must come forward and proclaim once again that true religion has nothing to do with political life. The failure of our contemporary public life is that we do not hear these voices, but only hear the shrill voices of extremists at both ends. It was not always so. Earlier, we had sensible public figures who were also deeply religious. Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Azad, Vivekananda used to speak with credibility on behalf of the vast majority of religiously minded Indians. Today, what we have is an unfortunate polarization between an influential and articulate minority of secularists and the vast majority of silent, religiously minded Indians. Neither takes the trouble to understand the other, and what we have as a result is a dialogue of the deaf. We need to hear the many reasonable voices of good sense within the Hindu and Muslim religious communities, surely, there must be a few courageous individuals who will speak up before their faith is totally hijacked by the terrorists!
Following Rajeev Bhargava, our secularists should learn from the American philosopher, John Rawls, and distinguish between public reason and secular reason. While public reason limits itself to political and civic principles, secular reason is broader and deals with a secular person’s moral doctrines and first philosophy. Our secularists need to be aware of this distinction and refrain from introducing secular values and secular reason into political debate. This is not easy to do, I realise, because liberal political values are intrinsically moral values and closely intertwined with moral doctrines.
Above all, let’s learn from our own Emperor Ashoka, who ruled when Hindus and Buddhists were fighting each other in mid-third century BCE, and who declared in his famous Edict XII, “The sects of other people deserve reverence…By thus acting, a man exalts his own sect, and at the same time does service to the sects of other people…He who disparages the sects of others…inflicts the severest injury on his own sect.” Here is a wonderful insight for our times: you damage your own religion when you malign another’s and secularism is not only good for governance but also for religion. Those who call for a Hindu nation not only harm the nation, they also damage Hinduism.
Sunday, April 04, 2004
REMEMBERING MAULANA AZAD
Times of India, Apr 03, 2004
Many of my friends have stopped writing letters ever since the mobile phone came into their lives, but Asgar is not one of them. He continues to write long, elegant letters from Pune, and last week he sent me the following quote from Maulana Azad: ‘‘I am a Muslim and profoundly conscious of the fact that I have inherited Islam’s glorious tradition of the last fourteen hundred years. I am not prepared to lose even a small part of that legacy.
The history of and teachings of Islam, its arts and letters, its culture and civilisation are part of my wealth and it is my duty to cherish and guard them. But with all these feelings, I have another equally deep realisation born out of my life’s experience, which is strengthened and not hindered by the Islamic spirit. I am equally proud of the fact that I am an Indian, an essential part of the indivisible unity of the Indian nationhood, a vital factor in its total makeup, without which this noble edifice will remain incomplete.’’
Asgar is willing to lay a wager that most Indian Muslims feel these sentiments in their hearts. I won’t take the wager because Asgar is probably right. But the question is that if most Muslims feel this way why don’t we hear their sensible voices? Why do we only hear the strident rhetoric of the extremists in our press? It is the same with Hindus — we mainly hear the voices of the VHP and the Shiv Sena these days and not the moderate talk of the believers of Hinduism, the kind of talk we used to hear from Mahatma Gandhi during the freedom movement.
The Maulana’s message is that an Indian can be both a Muslim and an Indian at the same time, and being one does not exclude the other. The fundamentalist, on the other hand, believes that an
Islamic person can only have one Islamic identity, and everything flows from it. In India , over the past 50 years, our open Constitution has fostered the modern idea that we can have multiple identities. One can be an engineer, a mother, a cricket enthusiast, and an extremely religious person, all at the same time. This is what, in fact, it means to be modern. In contrast, the extremist, whether Muslim or Hindu, privileges his religious identity.
Asgar writes that one of the best kept secrets in India is the rise of a sizeable Muslim middle class. This has happened, he feels, because of the rapid growth of the Indian economy and rising literacy, particularly of girls. Hence, Indian Muslims are increasingly concerned with jobs and schools rather than fanatical ideologies, which also explains why terrorism has little appeal in our open society. The impact of cable television also contributes to their relaxed attitude.
Members of the new Muslim middle class, not unlike their Hindu counterparts, were living on the margin earlier, and are now seeking, desperately, an identity. They are overwhelmingly religious, and this is why it is so important for them to hear the message of Maulana Azad. No amount of ranting by Westernised secularists will be as effective as a secular message given by a true believer. The timing is also right, for we are in the midst of another election. The discourse of political candidates is inevitably on the
India of their dreams. Can we dare to hope for another Maulana Azad to come forward and tell us about his idea of India , and neutralise the poison that is continuously spread by extremists of both sides?
Many of my friends have stopped writing letters ever since the mobile phone came into their lives, but Asgar is not one of them. He continues to write long, elegant letters from Pune, and last week he sent me the following quote from Maulana Azad: ‘‘I am a Muslim and profoundly conscious of the fact that I have inherited Islam’s glorious tradition of the last fourteen hundred years. I am not prepared to lose even a small part of that legacy.
The history of and teachings of Islam, its arts and letters, its culture and civilisation are part of my wealth and it is my duty to cherish and guard them. But with all these feelings, I have another equally deep realisation born out of my life’s experience, which is strengthened and not hindered by the Islamic spirit. I am equally proud of the fact that I am an Indian, an essential part of the indivisible unity of the Indian nationhood, a vital factor in its total makeup, without which this noble edifice will remain incomplete.’’
Asgar is willing to lay a wager that most Indian Muslims feel these sentiments in their hearts. I won’t take the wager because Asgar is probably right. But the question is that if most Muslims feel this way why don’t we hear their sensible voices? Why do we only hear the strident rhetoric of the extremists in our press? It is the same with Hindus — we mainly hear the voices of the VHP and the Shiv Sena these days and not the moderate talk of the believers of Hinduism, the kind of talk we used to hear from Mahatma Gandhi during the freedom movement.
The Maulana’s message is that an Indian can be both a Muslim and an Indian at the same time, and being one does not exclude the other. The fundamentalist, on the other hand, believes that an
Islamic person can only have one Islamic identity, and everything flows from it. In India , over the past 50 years, our open Constitution has fostered the modern idea that we can have multiple identities. One can be an engineer, a mother, a cricket enthusiast, and an extremely religious person, all at the same time. This is what, in fact, it means to be modern. In contrast, the extremist, whether Muslim or Hindu, privileges his religious identity.
Asgar writes that one of the best kept secrets in India is the rise of a sizeable Muslim middle class. This has happened, he feels, because of the rapid growth of the Indian economy and rising literacy, particularly of girls. Hence, Indian Muslims are increasingly concerned with jobs and schools rather than fanatical ideologies, which also explains why terrorism has little appeal in our open society. The impact of cable television also contributes to their relaxed attitude.
Members of the new Muslim middle class, not unlike their Hindu counterparts, were living on the margin earlier, and are now seeking, desperately, an identity. They are overwhelmingly religious, and this is why it is so important for them to hear the message of Maulana Azad. No amount of ranting by Westernised secularists will be as effective as a secular message given by a true believer. The timing is also right, for we are in the midst of another election. The discourse of political candidates is inevitably on the
India of their dreams. Can we dare to hope for another Maulana Azad to come forward and tell us about his idea of India , and neutralise the poison that is continuously spread by extremists of both sides?
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