The Indian Tragedy

Earlier this year, the Republic of India turned seventy. On January 26, 1950, the country adopted a new Constitution, which severed all ties with the British Empire, mandated multi-party democracy based on universal adult franchise, abolished caste and gender distinctions, awarded equal rights of citizen-ship to religious minorities, and in myriad other ways broke with the feudal, hierarchical, and sectarian past. The chairman of the Drafting Committee was the great scholar B. R. Ambedkar, himself a “Dalit,” born into the lowest and most oppressed strata of Indian society, and representative in his person and his beliefs of the sweeping social and political transformations that the document promised to bring about. The drafting of the Constitution took three whole years. Between December 1946 and December 1949, its provisions were discussed threadbare in an Assembly whose members included the country’s most influential politicians (spanning the ideological spectrum, from atheistic Communists to orthodox Hindus and all shades in between) as well as leading economists, lawyers, and women’s rights activists. When these deliberations concluded, and it fell to Ambedkar to introduce the final document — with 395 Articles and 12 Schedules, the longest of its kind in the history of the democratic world — to the Assembly, he issued some warnings, of which at least one was strikingly prophetic. He invoked John Stuart Mill in asking Indians not “to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or to trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions.” There was “nothing wrong,” said Ambedkar, “in being grateful to great men who have rendered life-long services to the country. But there are limits to gratefulness.” His worry was that “for India, bhakti, or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country. Bhakti, in religion, may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, bhakti or hero-worship, is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.” When he spoke those words, Ambedkar may have had the possible deification of the recently martyred Mahatma Gandhi in mind. But his remarks seem uncannily prescient about the actual deification of a later and lesser Gandhi. In the early 1970s, politicians of the ruling Congress Party began speaking of how “India is Indira and Indira is India,” a process that culminated, as Ambedkar had foreseen, in political degradation and eventual dictatorship. In June 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties, jailed all opposition politicians, and imposed a strict regime of press censorship. This was a time of fear and terror, which lasted almost two years, and ended when Mrs. Gandhi — provoked in part by criticism from Western liberals and in part by her own conscience — ended the Emergency and called for fresh elections, which she and her party lost. If one is reminded of Ambedkar’s warning when reflecting on the career of Indira Gandhi, it brings to mind even more starkly the career of India’s current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. In terms of their upbringing and ideological formation, no two Indian politicians could be more different than Modi and Mrs. Gandhi. One witnessed enormous hardship while growing up; the other was raised in an atmosphere of social and economic privilege. One had his worldview shaped by the many years he spent in the Hindu supremacist organization, the Rashtriya Swamaysevak Sangh (RSS); the other  was deeply influenced by her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, who detested the RSS. One has no family; the other had children and grandchildren. One had to work his way up the ladder of Indian politics, step by step; the other had a lateral entry into a high position purely on account of her birth. And yet there are significant commonalities. These very different personal biographies notwithstanding, it has long seemed to me that there are striking similarities in their political styles. Back in 2013, I wrote in The Hindu that “neither Mr. Modi’s admirers nor his critics may like this, but the truth is that of all Indian politicians past and present, the person Gujarat Chief Minister most resembles

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