THE RISE OF THE GOLDEN BIRD
India is an ancient and the only surviving pre-bronze age civilization. India has maintained civilizational continuity with its past in a manner
that is distinct from its counterparts. The idea of India as a civilizational state and the need to learn from its millennia old journey has been driven by a reformist renaissance by New India’s thought leadership. India’s establishment intellectuals, accustomed to analysing the world through red goggles, had debunked this idea through the application of a Eurocentric worldview in their definition of what constitutes a civilization. Civilizations in their view were states with hard frontiers, single languages, homogenous inhabitants, organized religion which are governed by unbroken monarchical institutions. The mere absence of political continuity in India’s millennia old history was for them sufficient grounds to exclude India from the coetus of civilizational states. New India’s thought leadership has junked this academic censure by highlighting the existence of ample cultural evidence to the contrary. India while lacking in political continuity has shown unbroken cultural continuity in its journey. India in its culture more than makes up for what India might lack in political continuity.
India’s cultural continuity is best reflected in the diversity of Indian spirit. The Guru Grant Sahib mentions the name of Lord Ram numerous times. There is a striking and remarkable similarity among Hindu and Buddhist traditions. In different regions of India, people invoke the same deity through different names and different rituals. This diversity of spirit is one among the many attributes of India’s unbroken cultural continuity with its past. India’s past across generations, as stated by Jerry Rao, are replete with texts that highlight the conflict faced by humans while dealing with Artha (Economic Activity), Kama (Beauty and Passion) and Dharma (Virtue and Morality).
The scant attention paid to the inherited wisdom of our communities was a function of politics going back to the days of the British Raj. The Indian leaders that emerged during the early phases of the Raj such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy were of the view that British rule had been providential for India. Roy was in our view Modern India’s first reformist. Roy believed that British Rule would serve as an instrument of social reform. It had shaken Indians out their slumber and brought to light glaring social problems rampant in Indian society at the time, such as the practice of Sati. Roy laid emphasis on the role of the State to enable an individual to overcome the tyranny of the collective while not disregarding the inherited wisdom of communities. Roy aimed to garner popular consent for reform by linking them to the egalitarian ideas mentioned in the vedas and the upanishads. Indian leaders following the footsteps of Roy favoured incremental social and political reform. This view is best illustrated in the words of R.G Bhandarkar who stated that “We should not adopt the procedure of the French Revolution, but imitate the action of the English People, whose pupils we are. They have realized as great changes as the French Revolution sought to effect, but in a manner which connects them with the past of the history of the country”.
One does not need to go as far back in history to realize why incremental change works and revolution does not. The dramatic reversal of the secular changes brought about by Ataturk in Turkey are a sharp contrast to the maturity displayed by India’s ruling political party while pursuing an institutional mechanism to resolve the contentious Ram Janmabhoomi movement. Going back to the Raj, the Achilles heel of Indian Conservatives and ensuing collapse of conservative thought in India’s political economy lay in their support for dominion status as opposed to complete independence. As a result, in the post-independence period, Indian Conservatives found themselves largely relegated to the position of a caucus within the congress party. A second tragedy that hit Indian conservatives was the death of figures such as Sardar Vallabhai Patel which ensured that soviet admirers within the congress party were free to experiment on the people of India. The Avadi session of the congress in 1955 ensured that the floodgates were opened to the enactment of Statist Economic Policies. These policies made large sections of Indian public the opposite of “Atma Nirbhar” in their personal lives.
Prasanta Mahalnobis, a key member of India’s first planning commission was to quote Jerry Rao “A leftist with an enduring affection for the Soviet Union''. The Indian State instead of directing its efforts on improving education and healthcare, decided that it was equipped to play the role of a CEO one day and that of a social worker the next. Incompetence was institutionalized as a virtue by the enactment of high import tariffs. This was done without realizing that the protection afforded to the industry by an abnormally high import tariff regime could also be used to penalize the downstream consumer by pricing the end product higher in comparison to that on the global market. The bureaucracy as a natural consequence had to assume the role of a gatekeeper. The emergence of a gatekeeping culture also served as a precursor to a culture of rent seeking. This top down approach in the realm of artha was in stark contrast to what conservatives would have ordained.
Conservatives, on the other hand, have advocated a greater role for markets due to moral and empirical reasons. This is a sharp contrast to left-liberals that have grudgingly accepted markets for empirical reasons following the collapse of the Soviet Union . Conservatives treasure the market because the free market as stated by Milton Friedman happens to be “The only way that has ever been discovered to get a lot of people to cooperate voluntarily”. Markets require voluntary consent among individuals in order to function and that is what makes it a moral institution. The maverick C Rajagopalachari had realized the folly in the naive notions of Fabian socialism as far back as 1957. Rajaji as he was affectionately known coined the term “license permit raj” to describe Nehru’s system of permissions and licenses required for an individual to set up a private enterprise. Profits resulting in capital formation and investment were gutted as ideas and instead India’s entrepreneurs were gifted a bureaucratic labyrinth requiring the consent of upto 80 agencies on occasion for a license. With the benefit of hindsight it is fair to say that the lack of attention paid to the inherited wisdom of generations contained in these texts is responsible for the economic ailments plaguing India today.
The embrace of an economically dehumanizing outlook was coupled with an outlook of gradual cultural exclusion . Under this program, the country at large was subject to progressive reform in the social sphere and the clergy of the country's largest minority was granted a veto power over deciding which reforms India’s Muslims would undergo. The most naked display of this incongruent approach to social reform was witnessed in the behaviour of the Rajiv Gandhi government in the aftermath of the Supreme Court judgement on the Shah Bano case. The overturning of a landmark Supreme Court judgment by the passage of an act of parliament which denied a humiliated divorcee right to maintenance marked the beginning of the end of this doctrine which excluded India’s Muslims from reaping the benefits of progressive social reform. The conservative response to this doctrine is simple. Subjecting all communities within a region to the same treatment would act as a harbinger of shared solidarity across distinct persons. The spirit of shared solidarity would inevitably result in horizontal social cohesion among India’s communities. The drive in India’s current ruling dispensation to enact a uniform civil code is rooted in this desire to remove hurdles to horizontal social cohesion.
The constant electoral victories of right of centre outfits in democracies across the world exemplify the acceptance of the conservative doctrine of horizontal social cohesion. A precursor to horizontal social cohesion is subjecting all communities to the same treatment during the process of reform. Countries in Europe have recognized the importance of assimilation and the failure of multiculturalism. This is rooted in the notion that migrant communities must not be excluded from the fruits of cultural renaissance that is enjoyed by the White majority in Europe. The idea of the state acting as an enabler of horizontal social cohesion strikes a chord with us at The Reformist.
The Reformist believes that liberalism of the late twentieth century has gradually degenerated into a pathological mix of cultural marxism and postmodernism. The image of the world is that of a battlefield with different social groups vying for power. The most virulent strain of this worldview is the desire to transform the lives of people into political projects and regulate the inner conscience of individuals. This desire to gamify human behaviour goes against the spirit of embracing human imperfection which in itself has played a pivotal role in charting the course of human history. We at The Reformist are opposed to the stifling of the human spirit. Conservatism for us is an evolutionary doctrine where we reform to preserve and reform to herald the growth of freely formed organic institutions such as markets, music clubs, among others. Well meaning citizens across the democratic world that live outside the confines of liberal arts echo chambers have been looking for people to articulate their worldview. They believe that there are things in their societies worth preserving and there are things that need to change. Change is not an end in itself. We at The Reformist through our section on society and culture wish to vociferously advocate for federalizing the public discourse and confidently bringing forth the wisdom of deliberately ignored worldviews. We, quoting the Yajur Veda, are aware that “change is inevitable” and believe that change which is constructive needs to be embraced. Innovation can come from anywhere and avenues for expanding the pool of garnering innovative ideas need to be institutionalized. The editorial team through its Sheldon’s Descendants section is attempting to tap into the often ignored demographic of passionate young minds who with their passion and insight can spur their older counterparts into action.
Our rationale behind launching The Reformist is driven by a desire to see India regain its rightful status. The modern world is entering a phase that is volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous. The world in other worlds is set to undergo a Manthan. We believe that India can thrive during this churn and emerge as a leading power if its response to the churn is driven by a mix of modernity and learnings from its civilizational evolution. The world’s sole pre-bronze age civilization can lead the world in a manner that is just and fair. It is time the Golden Bird rose to the occasion, and in the words of Swami Vivekananda, “Arises, awakes, and stops not till the goal is reached”.
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