Where is India in the encounter of civilization? - Hegde lecture
Written by Rajiv malhotra
(Transcript)
“Disruptive forces” - Centrifugal forces
Nation’s Sovereignty and the Role of Civilization
Cynical attitudes in India
Escapism
“Disruptive forces – Fragments
Three Scenarios for India’s Future
Scenario A is India's fragments get taken over as parts of West, Pan-Islam and China;
Scenario B Indian "culture" succeeds globally but Indian nation-state disappears. (India is not a nation but a culture);
Scenario C India emerges as a thriving nation-state with its own civilization and helps the world.
Globalization and Civilizational Competition
Top three civilizational competitors
The reality I feel is that the West, China and Pan-Islam, each publicly projects their claim of superior civilization and future domination of the world. And United States certainly feels that it is the leader and does not want to give up that claim.
Now these top three civilizations have the following attributes. Each has collective super ego with common values and chauvinistic grand narrative of history (who we are? How our ancestor were great and glorifying ideas and stories about them) and each is committed to achieve global dominance. Each also actively nurtures its civilization and projects it via academics, education, media and policy.
Success factors for competing civilizations
Success Factors | West | China | Islam |
| Historical Identity and Manifest destiny |
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| Modern Institutions |
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| Financial Capital |
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| Political/Military Capital |
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| Intellectual Capital |
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China
Chinese insist that they have their own modernization which is not westernization. What they are telling is that they are telling their youths to modernize but that they have the Chinese approach to modernity. That does not mean you have to mimic the West. You modernize with all consumables and modern technology and all that but there is Chinese philosophical and civilizational ethos behind it.
Pan-Islam
Pan-Islam has a theological grand narrative from God. Islamic grand narrative comes from God which gives them identity, meaning and direction. They have a sacred geography – so the Kaba for example is sacred and you cannot point at Jamma Masjid to pray or any other particular place to pray. So the sacred geography is unique. There is a literalist account of history. Literalist means you cannot say it is metaphorical and we can reinterpret them for today. They are considered to be actual historic events so you cannot mess with it.
There is also preordained projectory into future. Not only the past is fixed but the future is also pre-ordained and you have to live in accordance to achieve that. So there is a scenario of “us” versus “them” – Dar-ul-Islam (us) versus Dar-ul-Harb (them).
Civilizational encounter between US and India America does not have just one point of view and there is no stable point of view – it keeps shifting just like in India where we have many points of view on a complex issue and the views shift over time.
USA’s civilizational Threat Psychosis America has a dual psychosis – civilizational threats it perceives from China and from Islam.
I call this a “Father-Son clash” because China’s industry has been sort of produced or exported by United States. It was US that sent capital to China from Nixon-Kissinger era.
The other psychosis which I have depicted in the right hand side is the clash of fundamentalisms. The Islam is not looking for modernity. They are competing against fundamentalist Christianity and its rival claims over historical prophets each having finality. So this fundamentalism versus fundamentalism between American Christianity and Islam is also a ‘Father-Son Clash’ in the sense that Islam is a offspring of the lineage of Judaeo-Christian prophets.
Now you can see that United States has got here a problem because United States considers itself as consisting of Christian ethos and very modern enlightened secular ethos. Now both these are threatened by two offspring or two civilizations which ironically America has created and America has gifted them the tools in a metaphorical sense.
Challenged America hedging its bets on India
The build up India voices in American think tanks and American policy and so on are saying let us invest in India financial capital, market and labor; let us have military alliances let us have regional political alliances. And the benefit is that it will counter China's hegemony, it contains Islamic threat; it is good for US corporate interests and India will be a stabilizing force in the third world.
But there is also a caution at the bottom that says that if this happens and India is too successful then in the long term we have another China like threat. So while there is a voice that says let us build up India there is also a voice that is concerned that it may get out of hand and become too strong. Therefore let us come to the right hand side that says let us fragment India.
The "Fragment India" is a much older voice than the "Build up India" voice. The "Build up" India is more of a corporate voice and political voice over the last ten years. But the fragmentation of India is a voice that has been there since the cold war. In the fifties and sixties United States has had this attitude that .let us divide and rule. They built up this Dravidian movement; Annadurai was built up and all kinds of movements were built up to fragment India and play one against the other. When Nehru was pro-Soviet then the United States used the Dravidian movement to counteract Nehru's programme of unifying India. So the fragmentation of India is a very old policy. And it says exploit Dalits vs. the Brahmins; Dravidians vs. so-called Aryans; Women vs. Men Minorities vs. Hindus.
US Interventions in India
So I call this the Mother-in-law syndrome. Do I want the couple to be united and happy or do I want them to fall apart?
So I kind of play between these two poles and do not want either pole to happen too much. So United States' policy towards India keeps vacillating between these two poles of "Build up India" and "Fragment India" And you cannot expect a long term stability in the way.
Deconstructing India
So the first building blocks to study are the castes, minorities and women.
Invasion Theory of India
Then there is this idea that everything good about India was imported into India. The so-called Aryans brought Sanskrit. The Greeks brought philosophy and rational thought; Hinduism was a colonial construction; Indian culture was started by the Mughals and British gave Indians a nation and cricket and now we have to import our human rights from America.
Afro-Dalit Project
And they are very much active in Tamil Nadu building up a whole network of youth empowerment and youth training to give them a contrary sense of history that they are historically a kind of oppressed people and non-religious and so on. The Church has a vested interest in it because if you can dislocate their identity from the rest of India then you can re-programme them and give them a new religion and so on. This is called Dalitstan project.
So I was invited to this scholar's office. And I saw this map. This is the map of the Dalitstan that was hanging there. On the northern part is Mughalstan which is from Afghanistan, Pakistan and all the way to Bangladesh. This turns out to be what Mullah Omar says when he states that he wants to put the flag of Taliban on the red fort of Delhi and recreate the Mughal Empire. And the southern part of India is Dalitstan and Dravidstan.
Then I started getting deeper into it and found that there is merit in the thesis that says that the local minorities are being appropriated by global nexuses. Afro-Dalit Project is just one example.
“Disruptive Forces” – Frontier India
So Hegde's "Disruptive forces" of 1992 have turned into Frontier India mindset where the following wild things are happening. Local minority is co-opted as a branch office of some Global Nexus; many minorities are apart of some global majority and are used for trans-national agendas; third world intellectual franchises are set up to deconstruct their own nation.
Minorities as part of Global Majorities
If you are at the Macdonald’s in Delhi and you have local establishment with twenty employees you would not say that this is a minority institution. You would say that it is part of global empire. It is part of a huge global multi-national.
Now why don't you not apply the same thing to the Southern Baptist Church or Baptist Church which is a huge multinational which has set up a big network of churches in Nagaland and Tamil Nadu and they have a plan of twenty thousand churches in South India. So why do you call them minorities and not call them branch offices or subsidiaries of global multinationals?
Positive India narrative
And now the irony is that both these views are also encased in India. In India also you have the technocrats, industrialists those kind of people who believe in a positive sense of India. Then you also have people in social sciences (and a lot of social science views are actually imported) in India who do not have faith in India as a nation. So you have both voices within India also.
Hypothetical situation for US intervention in India
Let us say under such scenario Taliban takes over Pakistan and thus is now nuclearized Taliban. Now let us say US is fighting and years go on and the causalities build up and US faces economic pressures at home and another election is coming.
So Obama or the future president has to figure out a way for exiting. So when the US exits, after having flared it up, then it has become a mess that somebody is going to encounter and guess who is going to bear that brunt of it? that will be India. I will also surmise in this hypothesis that Taliban will then have their vision of setting up that Mughalstan. They will see that they have enough disruptive forces sitting in India which can be incited by them and then they can get going with a huge revolution. Now that US has gone they can take over.
Number Two. United States may also have another kind of intervention in India which is to safeguard Christians being persecuted. Some of you may think this is far fetched. So United States may decide "Ok Taliban has got North India. We can go and intervene here and there and get some Christianized pockets in South India. We have built our own base there and we have built a network of support.” So this is the worst case scenario.
Now similar analysis also applies to Islam and China intervening, as each of them has stakes in India and ambitions in India. One can do scenarios like what if China and Pakistan jointly take military action. China would love to have Arunachal Pradesh because of the water -the Brahmaputra river water which can then be taken to Tibet. China would love to take Nepal because most of the water that comes to Ganga comes from Nepal and filters down to India.
What India can contribute to the world?
So to start with what are the problems the world faces where India can offer a solution? I will list just three.
One is that development- the cycle of economic development is not sustainable or scalable. It is not ecologically possible to have development of such large number of people and achieve the per capita consumption of the western standard and also you cannot scale to the whole world.
Then the Abrahamic civilizations are based on exclusivity and a mandate to take over the world and that is not going to sustain peaceful environment.
Finally the human rights laws that exist protect the individual but not cultures. There is no law broken if the language is made extinct or if your culture or your rituals are gone. If you as an individual are not violated then the culture as an entity does not have a status. Only the individual has a status.
There is a whole worked out system in Indian society on ecological sustainability starting with being content with less consumerism. The whole Ashrama model where you divide life into four stages has you as a consumerist in the second stage as householder (Gruhasth). But in the stages before and after that you learn life to be happy without much consumerism. These are social models which may be of application to world order where you cannot expect every body to live hundred years old and be a consumerist from zero to hundred at the American level.
Then there is the concept of groups that are de-centralized and self-organized without a state or a very centralized government or authoritarian government running the show. And all of this results in pluralism, dignified aging and decentralized social security.
Civilizational archetypes: Yogi vs. Gladiator
Yogi’s Dilemma
So at the base of this I have Yogi's dilemma when facing the aggression of a Gladiator. So this is the question I ask those who are very spiritually inclined people. Imagine you are a Yogi and a Gladiator comes to you and says I am going to kill you and you cannot change his mind and you cannot run away.
Indian civilization has to solve this dilemma. And we will see two ways.
One is Mahatma Gandhi's and the other is Bhagavat Gita: non-violent and violent.
You remain the Yogi within but you fight the Gladiator.
The obstacles to this are, India lacks the hard power in terms for economics, governance, military, geopolitics etc. India also has a clash of soft power generally because its own discourse is colonized.
And the final obstacle India faces is its loftiness, apathy of the world, other-worldliness etc, which we have seen before.
I have said three things.
There is a global reality of three major civilizations at peace and war. And their competition will intensify for self-interest. We can wish otherwise but this is the reality. India is a major playground and battle ground for these global forces. The reality of India is that there is internal fragmentation which is worsening and the disruptive forces that Hegde talked about have worsened. These are supported by cycle of vote banks, quotas and bribes. Minorities are becoming branch offices for global nexuses and are receiving funding and ideological and political support. These are the centrifugal forces threatening India's future. As far the future for India, I see that presently India lacks the civilizational Conesus and power necessary to survive as a nation-state in a dangerous world. India itself will disintegrate and its parts assimilated into others while India's culture will flourish as their. Or if India's civilizational foundation can be secured, then it could be a key solution provider to world problems.
