Why I Am a Liberal: A Manifesto for Indians Who Believe in Individual Freedom

377 Pages·2016·2.24 MB·English

by  Sagarika Ghose

SAGARIKA GHOSE

WHY
I AM A
LIBERAL
A Manifesto for Indians Who Believe in Individual Freedom
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
1. The Liberal Patriot
2. The Liberal Hindu
3. The Liberal Thinker
4. The Liberal Dissenter
5. The Liberal Woman
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
For all Indians who believe in individual freedom
Introduction
W
hy this long essay on why I am a liberal? What is the need for it? What are
the reasons for trying to create a manifesto or a charter for Indian liberals at a
time when the word ‘liberal’ itself is considered discredited and is almost a term
of abuse? These days it’s fashionable to write on the Indian’s religious or
cultural identity. Perhaps it’s less in tune with the prevailing zeitgeist to write on
the Indian’s modern liberal identity. Does the twenty-first century Indian even
have a liberal identity which is both self-aware, self-critical and committed to
modern liberal values?
The word ‘liberal’ is central to the political and public debate at this moment.
For many, the liberal is the arch-enemy; the liberal is considered ‘anti-national’,
‘anti-Hindu’, ‘anti-religious’, even ‘anti-India’. Liberal women, particularly, are
perceived to be on a collision course with ‘Indian values’. Women seen in a bar
are liable to being dragged out by the hair and beaten. Women protesting against
discrimination and harassment in a university hostel are liable to being accused
of ‘marketing their modesty’. Liberal women who dare to fall in love with men
from a different religion are liable to being hauled up before the courts and
described as helpless, unthinking, infantilized beings who have been either
brainwashed, lured into infamy or led astray.
The mantra goes: the Indian who displays muscular nationalism is the
authentic Indian! Rooted in Indian values! Rooted in Indian soil! The liberal?
Hah! The liberal is cast as disconnected and anti-Bharatiya sanskriti. Millions of
Indian citizens who define themselves as broadly ‘liberal’ or in Hindi
‘pragatisheel’, ‘udaarvaadi’, ‘reformist’ or ‘secular’ are puzzled by this enmity
directed at them. They are taken aback by the hatred that self-proclaimed
‘nationalists’ direct against them. Who are they, these millions of Indian
liberals? There are so many. There are the various followers of the dazzling
procession throughout India’s history of non-denominational prophets,
philosophers and thinkers who were thought leaders on self-criticism and
change. There are the progressive thinkers toiling to bring change at the
change. There are the progressive thinkers toiling to bring change at the
grassroots. There are those who freely raise slogans at a university. There are
those who participate in Dalit protests against injustice. There are those who
interrogate Hinduism’s rich traditions. There are those who question caste
injustice, superstition and black magic. There are those who popularize the
works of twelfth-century spiritual reformers like Basavanna. There are those
citizens who work to bring welfare measures to areas where armed Maoism is
dominant. There are those who support the right to eat the food of your choice,
who support the right to worship according to choice, who love others of the
same sex, who marry outside religious boundaries, who dare to fall in love and
link hands in public.
Are all these millions of people against India and her traditions? When moral
policemen and vigilante mobs enforce their idea of ‘Indian values,’ when police
form ‘Romeo squads’ to target young lovers, when a jeans-clad young woman
speaking on a mobile phone is seen by university authorities and khap
panchayats as a she-devil whose dangerous inner energy must be curbed by
patriarchal control, and when the government of the day lends them support,
when religious minorities find themselves constantly in mortal danger, then
indeed it does seem as if the light of our quiet, home-grown liberalism, so
beloved of so many, is flickering, if not dying out altogether. But if that liberal
light is dying, then this book throws its arms (however flimsy) around the liberal
flame to protect it from the threatening gusts, and cries out, ‘Do not go gentle
into that good night . . . rage, rage against the dying of the light.’1
So perhaps this is precisely the right time to write this essay. Precisely
because people perceived to be ‘liberal’ are under unprecedented attack. This
book is a journalistic reportorial essay written in the spirit of advancing an
argument to spark a debate among interested citizens. It makes no claim to have
all the answers; instead, like a pilgrim, it’s only the beginning of a quest for the
answers, the start of a journey. The seeker seeks and invites others to join in the
search. In the spirit of the Upanishads—the word, as India’s philosopher–
president S. Radhakrishnan so beautifully describes, means to ‘sit near’2—this
book is written to open a dialogue, to ask who is the Indian liberal, what does
Indian liberalism mean and why is the liberal so misunderstood and so
caricatured by those who are anti-liberal? Let’s open the dialogue.
First, a definition of liberalism, a look at the way the word and the philosophy
is generally understood. ‘Liberalism is a move for freedom from monarchical
and feudal control . . . for freedom of speech, freedom of membership of groups .
. . for the independence of the ordinary man from the state or from organized
labour . . . liberals are committed to the equality of the Left . . . and laissez faire
economic theories, often seen as the “middle”, although liberals see themselves
as radicals, wishing to change society.’3
There is little agreement on what liberalism exactly means, although all
liberals are united in their primary belief in limited government, autonomous
institutions, individual freedom and the rule of law. Liberalism seeks, above all,
to ‘limit political power and enables individuals to experiment freely in various
spheres of life’.4 Daniel H. Cole and Aurelian Craiutu quote that liberalism is not
a single ideology but a ‘big tent’ of theories advanced by many thinkers. They
quote thirty types of liberalism, from Old Liberalism to New Liberalism,
Progressive Liberalism, Classical Liberalism, Radical Liberalism, Economic
Liberalism, Orthodox Liberalism and others. Liberals are divided on the exact
role of the government or the Big State and how free markets and trade should
be, although ‘hardly anyone agrees that they should not be regulated at all or that
they should be centrally planned by self-anointed experts’.5 Liberalism is ‘a
supreme form of generosity’,6 accepting dissent, disagreement, minority rights
and religious freedom; liberalism need not be an advocate for open borders but
because liberals place great store in equality before the law, immigrants cannot
be restricted on the basis of race or religion, they write.
Liberalism is a set of beliefs marked by its humility, which constantly seeks
dialogue and is sceptical about utopian claims of human perfectability. Thus,
‘liberalism has no ready made easy solutions . . . and is inseparable from the
doubts we feel about it.’ The authors point out that ‘Modern liberal societies are
the best political systems we fallible humans have managed to create.’7 In an
essay in Aeon magazine, Nabeela Jaffer8 quotes political philosopher Hannah
Arendt to say that it’s the internal moral dialogue within oneself which is the
highest form of thought and quotes Arendt’s phrase that ‘loneliness is the
common ground of terror and extremism’. While liberals are comfortable with
self-doubt and the inner moral dialogue, those non-liberals attracted to
‘totalitarian ideologies and charismatic strongmen . . . experience a loss of trust
in their own self and are cut off from human commonality’.9
In India, liberals may be Left liberals (that is, believers in social freedoms but
in a more or less government-controlled economy, like many liberals in the
Congress party) or they may be Right liberals (believers in laissez faire
economics but uncaring about assaults on individual personal and civic freedoms
such as attacks by gau rakshaks or the various moral policeman senas, like some
liberals in the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]).10
For the purpose of this essay I have chosen to emphasize the Gandhian
definition of the term ‘liberal’. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was, in many
ways, the most successful liberal politician of all time.
Why was Gandhi India’s greatest liberal? First and foremost because of his
steadfast commitment to non-violence. Second, his deep mistrust and scepticism
about an all-powerful centralized big government or Big State. One of the
thinkers Gandhi admired was the nineteenth-century American philosopher
Henry David Thoreau, who believed: ‘That government is best which governs
the least.’11 Third, an abiding belief in the capabilities and innate good sense of
the individual, and the power of the individual conscience, both moral and
spiritual—what Gandhi called the individual satyagrahi. Fourth, a commitment
to India’s constitutional values and rule of just laws and equality for all before
the law. Fifth, and most importantly, a fundamental respect for dissent and
disagreement. As Gandhi told Nehru: ‘Resist me always when my suggestion
does not appeal to your head or heart. I shall not love you less for that
resistance.’12 The idea that even without a 100 per cent agreement there can still
be love, friendship and cooperation is a crucial Gandhian belief.
The Indian liberal, for this essay, is not just the legatee of Gandhi, but also a
legatee of the spiritual liberal and questioning traditions embodied by the
venerable Yajnavalkya, sage of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, of Lord Krishna
in the Bhagavad Gita, of the great spiritual leaders and crusaders for individual
dignity such as Gautama Buddha and Mahavira, of Bhakti reformers like Kabir
in the fifteenth century and Mirabai in the sixteenth century, and later Narayana
Guru or Jyotirao Phule, and even later, inheritors of Rammohan Roy, G.K.
Gokhale, Rabindranath Tagore, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, C. Rajagopalachari
and Jawaharlal Nehru, who was a liberal in his entire being, although he did
reject the liberal economy, fearing the ravages of capitalism on the poor.