Global Thinker Award 2009

Full Speech of Lord Meghnad Desai

Your Excellency Ambassador Mr Rajan, Mr Bhattacharya, and friends, I thank you for giving me this honour. I hope that by the time I finish, you don’t revise either the global or the thinker part of the award. I think it’s a very general title, “Our Troubled Times…” because our times are troubled in many different ways. One could talk about global financial meltdown the world is facing, which is going to take its toll yet for some more months, perhaps years; I could talk about climate change and global warming as another part of the troubled times; I could speak about terrorism; I could speak about the general endemic problem of poverty, malnutrition, maternal mortality, and various problems like that. I think I’m going to try and put together these sources of ideas in a different way. I’m going to talk about the challenges that India faces rather what the world faces. And to me the challenges that India faces was very much epitomized by what happened on 26/11 in Mumbai where for 59 hours 10 terrorists held Mumbai to ransom. There were several deaths, some of them brave but futile, others accidental, and some of course of the terrorists themselves. In the wake of that crisis, lot of dissatisfaction, lot of public meetings, people were agonizing as to what they could do, and what this particular event told them. I think one has to understand the nature of the event. Why it was such a shock and why in response to that event, not only now but also in future, one has to actually think, much more the nature of India than anything else. I had two feelings when I watched it live on TV. First of all, that it was war on India. It was not in any sense a war on five star hotels in Mumbai. While some people tried to minimize it that people only worried only about the five star hotel, guests and so on, it was not an attack on them. Not only the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal where lots of ordinary people died, but there was the Cama hospital, Leopold Café, the Nariman House, in a sense, there was enough of the edge of Bombay which was and still remains the beckon of cosmopolitan life in India. It was an attack on the cosmopolitan idea of India. It was an attack on all of India. The reactions in my view, from the political establishments were grossly inadequate. I think it was a failure of ideas. The first reaction that I heard from the local MP Mr Deora, was a typical reaction from UPA, saying “I hope there is no communal riots in Bombay”. It is not that I wish there were communal riots in Bombay, but I want to point out that in a very crucial moment when a lot of people have felt or should have felt that all India was under attack, the first worry that lot of politicians had that India is not one. And indeed, they see India as divided. That was not the perception of the people those were standing outside. The more you saw the perception of the people standing outside day after day was that we were all together under attack. It was not an attack on a community or by a particular community; it was an attack by an alien element on all of India. But it was not clear that the politicians could articulate what India it was that was under attack. Because, only a few days previously, one tendency in Indian politics BJP, Shiv Sena, VHP, etc, had attacked Hemant Karkare and suspected him of being a traitor to India because he was investigating the Malegaon case. I have already said how the Congress, UPA reaction was also quite partial in terms of secular India under threat. The Prime Minister, who is actually a very nice man, did not appear before the country before 20 hours after the attack happened. And indeed, the most remarkable thing about those 59 hours was how leaderless India was left. Yes, the commandos came and helped, the naval commandos and the NSGs helped and the police and the firemen helped, the staff of the hotels was excellent, all that is true. But India, Bombay was leaderless. There was nobody who was able to articulate what had happened to India at that time because there was confusion. The Prime Minister I was told did not appear because the next day there was voting in Madhya Pradesh and he felt that by his intervention he might be accused of affecting election outcomes. This is one of the symptoms of what the problem is.  

I want to say that what really has happened in the last two decades, the idea of India as it was present – live and vibrant in the first few years after independence has degraded. We do not have a narrative of India as a nation. The narrative of India as a nation was constructed in reaction to the critic of a foreign power of a foreign culture, which said, you are not a nation. You are just a collection of religions, regions, thoughts, and ethnicities and tribes, and so on. That was the accusation that the British made against India. At that time the first few people who received western education in the middle of the 19th century, rose to this challenge. They had imbibed the idea of nation, history of how nations are made, what nations were at that time forming in Europe. They had amalgamated these ideas and reacted to the challenges to say of course we are a nation. There was another response possible which I feel never came to them. Europe is not a nation, why should we be a nation? Why should anything be a nation? What’s so compelling about being a single nation? The challenge was to show that India was a nation. I think what happened at that stage, to begin with, to summarize a long history, one branch of the reaction to construct the story of the Indian nation was to take religion as the basis. Hinduism was the basis thus this word got concocted in the 19th century and one branch was the revivalist like the Arya Samaj and so on, another one was the reformist like the Brahmo Samaj, Prarthana Samaj, and indeed the influence like Swami Vivekananda and others were trying to take Hinduism and make a single coherent one story somewhat like Christianity. Same sort of reaction happened among Indian Muslims. They too had a reform idea under Syed Ahmed and the revivalist ideas were going on and so forth. It was not until the Congress started articulating the needs of elite urban India. They began to form the notion of a nation, which of course had a religious root but perhaps it was more than that. From then on till about 1947, the struggle that Congress and other parties waged specially through different ideas, again and again came up with certain problems. One narrative of Indian nation begins in almost pre-history and says India is a nation because it is an Aryan nation and this has a continuous history; it has a philosophy of culture and a certain beauty and profundity of thought which is continuous and therefore that is today the Indian nation. The Congress at that moment chose not to go down that line and it said, yes, while that is true, there is also a mixed stream of Islamic influence. A syncretic idea arose of India mingling of the Islamic and Hindu cultures and India is that which was formulated in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries and now it is that India which we celebrate as a single nation. Nehru’s Discovery of India was very much the idea and they got a lot of people to hold by. 

The problem is that both the two narratives proved inadequate. First of all, the partition broke quite a bit of the old narrative of why India was a nation and then of course since independence, there has been a clash between these two different ideas of why India is a nation. What young Deora was articulating at the time of 26th of November was indeed the fear that different people had different ideas why India was a nation. We have now come to a stage in Indian history where we can look again at that whole formulation of the idea of why India is a nation. It is possible that without fear of certain types which were haunting the earlier generation… The earlier generation was haunted by the British critic that these people would never form a coherent union, they were never capable of self rule and therefore they always needed a foreign hand to rule over them. Sixty-One years after independence, India has led to rest that fear that India would fall apart, would disintegrate, would balkanize, would not be able to run itself and so on. India is now a vibrant democracy, the largest and most popular democracy in the world and if you think about it, not many nations around the world including the western world can boast of having been a democracy for as long as 61 years. Germany has not been, nor has been Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, to say nothing about eastern Europe, Russia has not been a democracy for 61 years in its entire history, and in French history the fourth republic did not last as long as 61 years. In having democracy for 61 years is already beginning to be quite a unique achievement in the history of the world. There has been no other democracy, which has been as multi religious, as multi-lingual, and as multi-ethnic as India has been. These are substantial achievements. My idea that I want to advance to you is that the earlier generation wanted a single story, a single unified, over arching narrative as to why India was a nation. I would like to point out that not only those stories are now very divisive, those are the stories that are currently haunting the Indian politics—the story of a Hindu India as against a syncretic India. Those stories are right now devised and even haunting India and both of them are grossly inadequate. They are inadequate because first of all both the stories by and large are not Indian stories. There is the history of Delhi Sultanate. All of South India has been left out of that narrative because South India did not have anything like the experience that North India had about the Muslim invasions. Even for a long time in ancient India, there was a distinction between Aryavarta and Dakshinapath. And I think South India has a good reason of feeling that there was no sufficient admission of South India in Indian history. Also, we have kept the Northeast completely out of the narrative. When you think about India, people don’t think about Assam, Nagaland, the Garos, the Khasis, and wasn’t it interesting the other day in Bombay when a woman from Mizoram won the marathon, the organizers thought she was a foreigner. I think that was one of the most remarkable stories that a woman wins a marathon and she is completely ignored because nobody thought that she was an Indian. 

Our idea of what is Indian is now to be expanded. Our ideas got to admit the really substantial diversity that exists. Although we talk about unity in diversity, we really have failed to include the variety of ethnicities, races, religions, and languages even. There are 26 languages in the eight schedules. But there are many more languages. I’m sure all the many languages in the northeast have not received their due as Indian languages. We have to start believing that the people of Nagaland, Mizoram, or Arunachal Pradesh, have not to be tamed to be Indians. We do not have to invade them and take them over. We have to embrace them as indeed what the history of the last 60 years has been. There has been a mixture as it was military and diplomatic efforts so that by now most of the northeast feels it is genuinely part of India. But there is no reason why it should be so, because in the narratives of the nationhood, the northeast played no part whatsoever. No Indian King of any religion ever got to Assam. Assam is not part of the national anthem if you think about it. I think the integration of different parts of India is our first …(inaudible word). Secondly, the whole story of Hindu India, completely leaves out the Dalits. All understood how glorious the religion was and how philosophical it is and now we talk about Advaitya and so on. The fact is those who were talking about Advaitya were living out of the considerable part of the society and oppressing them. I don’t know how one can reconcile philosophical heights with such gross oppression of a part of your own people. It’s not that one wants to forgive slavery, but the Americans who went from Africa confronted the Europeans and it took America 350 years to finally embrace the equal citizenship of black Africans and white Europeans and that’s what will happen tomorrow when Obama gets inaugurated. But in this case it was not any foreign nation. It was the own people of India who were being excluded out of the narrative of why India was India. And indeed I think, people like Ambedkar and Ramaswamy Nayakar and Jyotirao Phule had protested and indeed there was a case just before the British were about to leave India, people like Ambedkar and Nayakar wanted the British to stay because they were not quite sure that their rights would be guaranteed. This is actually recorded in Indian history. But their fears to some extent were not true. There is still a big trouble of social equality in India, and I do believe that this is the biggest struggle India right now faces and it is trying to meet that challenge whereby people of different caste, women and men, different tribes, all those people would feel to be socially equal parts of India. That is experiment over the last 60 years, which has been the most thrilling experiment. I take the view and I want to urge upon the view that India may be an ancient civilization but it is a young nation. It is a nation with a history of 61 years. What was born on 1947 was and is India. India, which was pre-partition, was only India because the British happened to rule over the territory. The boundaries of India had never been drawn before in its history. No Gupta, Maurya, or Moghul king drew the boundaries between India and Tibet or between India and Afghanistan or India and Burma. What we know India before or after partition has been a construct of 19th century. Administrative unity that the British imposed on India gave it a shape, a territory, a size, and then we try to find stories to celebrate it as being eternally always there. What is there now since 1947, after the partition in India, has survived what was created in the partition. Pakistan broke up into two and India survived. It survived because it is a unique experiment in creating a category which is not religious, not tribal, or ethnic. It is a category of being citizen of Democratic Republic of India. For the first time in India history, ordinary Indian had a say in how they will be governed. There are all sorts of stories about how India had republics in the 5th century BC and so on, but none of them was a democracy. No previous Indian king or anybody else recognized the equality of all Indian citizens with a right to vote. The fact that Indians had for the first time had all equally the right to govern themselves was a revolutionary decision by the founding fathers of India. This is why relating that experience to an earlier history is futile because the earlier history completely denies the equality of all Indians. It completely denies the right of all Indians to rule themselves. It completely denies the rights of free speech, right to private property, right to be anywhere, right to work anywhere, and so on. Therefore, we don not search in the roots of history for the reason why India is a great nation. We celebrate the present. Yes, it’s an imperfect present and the present has to be improved upon. Every nation has to again and again retell the story.  

America was a nation of white Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 18 and early 19 centuries. By the end of the 19th century it was thought to be a nation of white European Christian Protestants. After a while not just Protestants, Catholics also became part of America. Now they say only whites, Blacks, and American Indians are all part of America. America has changed the story of its own nationhood every fifty years or so. There is no reason why India should be stuck by old stories and not rethink themselves. The rethought history of India would be the story of India as it were born on Niagra forest. Yes, it has old civilizations but what’s valuable is not the old, what’s valuable is the new. What the present generation in 60 years has achieved has never before been achieved in India. Unity, an single government, a nation of equal citizens, struggling to establish social and economic equality for its citizens, but all the time trying to do it in a consensual as far as possible, non-conflictual way. If we celebrate that, then we don’t have to wreck ourselves on the storms of communalism and secularism because I do believe that is an irrelevance. Let us say that being citizens is the mot important thing and what your religion is, is your private matter. What is important is that we are all part of India, people born here, who live here, vote here, who run their lives here, and the fact that they do it together in this way is what defines India to be. Therefore, the choices for India in this troubled times are to assert itself as a unique creation, which should go on growing. It is something that all Indians have created together and it has not been a gift of any foreign or domestic power, or leader.