What does being a Right Winger mean ?

Edmund Burke defined modern Right-Wing or Conservatives as people who believed in the practical wisdom of institutions, they believed that such wisdom can not be distilled theoretically in equations or binaries. Bharat is the last remaning ancient cradle ever since Mao broke China. We are on our own and we have nowhere to go. Lockdown is a good time to revisit tough concepts.

The sources of dharma in Sanātana system include the Vedas, perception, and the conduct of wise men. Pradeep Chhibber of Political Science dept, UC Berkley, wrote that in conservative Indic traditions the state was not meant to bring social change. Raj Dharm sometimes required the king to look after the poor and the infirm, and build the infrastructure necessary for economic activity and political order. The role was limited to ‘kingly’ duties. It was widely believed that social change must come by the transformation of individuals, not an agency of the state. This view was defended by both Aurobindo and Gandhi.

It contrasts sharply with the writings of others such as Ambedkar and Nehru who advocate using state power to remake society and the economy. Too much history is a curse which often leads great nations to revisionism or revanchism led delusions. We must retrace steps to plan better for the future but we must do it ever so wisely. If we know our scriptures well, we can turn this curse into a boon. 

We often forget that constitutions themselves are a product of the culture, they can not dictate new cultures (like VIP culture). The Mahatma's model deified poverty and failed in its objectives because men can not help gods, they can only help themselves. It was a cruel joke. The Mahatma wanted the poor to feel noble about poverty. How Nehru's planned economy experiment turned out is for all to see. Babasaheb was more practical than the two, he believed that the benefits of free market, globalization and liberalisation must reach every last mile and must not be confined to a select few.

The ancients are long gone, we don't have an Aurobindo or a Gandhi and Raj Dharm is simply unattainable because we live in a very complex world that does not believe in Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam as much as we do. A good question to ask at this point is why did the nation of nations agree to come together? The answer lies in events surrounding the Karachi Congress Session (1931). The quasi-legal congress resolution reiterated commitment to Purna Swaraj while introducing fundamental rights and socialistic principles, the resolution was under considerable Gandhian influence as well.

The Bharatiya conservative vision is to advance ideas that promote philosophical wisdom of Bharat, which seeks to secure human dignity, rule of law and true economic freedom. It is much more than a political party named Bharatiya Janta Party. It is a vision to establish what a conservative Whig once called "government of the people, by the people, for the people."

Conservatives believe that the government is not a vehicle of social transformation, that the transformation must come from within the society. They believe that the government's role is limited to that of an enabler, a facilitator and a judge. For instance, the GOP believes that the government does not give us liberty, that liberty is a natural right. When government expands beyond its defined role (defined by little books called constitutions or traditions), people place their liberty into the government's hands.

In his essay 'On liberty', Burke defined modern conservatism because he was opposing the French revolution. He was opposing movements like those of Telangana's guerrillas (1948) and Calcutta's naxalites (1969). Howard Erdman wrote in 1978 that Bharatiya conservatism was a weak political force ‘despite the country’s well-rooted traditions’. We have come a long way, haven't we? Like we know in Bharat, there is ALWAYS more to go. Bharat is a vision fit for a renaissance.

PS: To begin with, can we stop calling ourselves Right-Wing or Conservatives? Can we have a Sanskrit word? These Western concepts need redefinition in Bharat's context.

Devolutionary Denial

Coronavirus came to Bharat riding on international fliers, a number of them belonging to an Islamist cult called Tableeghi Jamat. The contagion was preventable, with 30% of the infected cases coming from a single source but Bharat unsurprisingly failed to act objectively. The suddenness of events mortified it and now it turns into anger. Bharat seems unequipped to handle the situation without devolving into barbarism. This blog is a gist of my opinions on issues that come together to render us blind.

Civilisational Slack - Bharat's devolutionary denialism is a product of unceasing cycles of destruction and reconstruction. With every invasion, the talent, energy and intellectual capacity were extinguished for generations, until they became a distant memory. The resultant siege mentality combined and intellectual depletion built Bharat's volatile RAM-like memory. Life goes on as the past goes by. A thousand-year retreat has ensured that even in its short bursts of revivalism, Bharatiya intellect remains insecure and archaic. It seeks validations from the societal elite or the West. Indian National movement was a marriage of religious and political awakening. Unfortunately, the resulting contradictions cracked Bharat's civilization open. Globalisation is giving more problems than solutions to issues like Islam's relentless encroachment on Bharat's borders. To its dismay, Bharat looks inward once again. Bharat is essentially a Hindu civilization. The Hindu conviction of Bharat's eternity is not built on fear of defeat or destruction, but indifference. It harms societal fabric because within this indifference is the indifference to the fate of friends, neighbours, kith and kins. Constant battles, both internal and external, has pushed Bharat into quietism where obedience and suffering in silence are considered virtues. The dilemma is compounded by easily manipulable concepts of Karma, Dharma and Non-Violence. When used in combinations, they become religious responses to worldly defeat.

Piety in poverty - The crisis of Bharat is not only political or economic. It is a civilisational faultline empowered by Bharat's lack of awareness. Europeans like Annie Besant had a better idea of Bharat's civilization than most of her time. Gandhiji's Swaraj was close to Ramraj. He turned a political war into a holy war. It established no new moral or societal frame. It showed no new future. Gandhi's genius lied in amplifying Hindu quietism and religious self-cherishing. His stress was on the fight for truth, rather than a fight to win. It ended up reinforcing the Hindu need to hide and hoard. A quarter of the population stayed in the serfdom of untouchability maintained by violence and starvation. The Mahatma's simplicity deified poverty. The poor were to remain poor with no hope for the future. Fact remains that poverty is not noble or beautiful. It is dehumanizing and it produces a race of malnourished, wasted and stunted people who are born into servitude. The Mahatma successfully reduced Hinduism to mere honesty. He blatantly refused to see the capitalist in the poor out of his piety.

Malicious mimicry - Bharat inherited not just the 'enlightened' concepts of secularism and constitutionalism, it also copied concepts like revolutions. The Naxalbari district was chosen to suit handbooks of revolution: terrain, remoteness and cover provided by surviving blocks of the jungle in Darjeeling. It was a tactically absurd Maoist revolution. It attempted to teach complex theologies to subservient people without liberating them in any true sense. The ritualistic energy and violence led the best young pupils to join a failing cause to fight for the landless and the oppressed but they went to a battle they knew little about. They knew the solutions better than the problems, better than they knew the country. Naxalism was an intellectual tragedy, a tragedy of idealism, ignorance and mimicry. They borrowed a foreign idea of revolution which led to massive pain across all spectrums with no tangible results apart from further pauperisation and widespread anarchy. Even JP's Bihar movement amounted to no tangible long-lasting benefits. It was a revolution without ideas, it was indistinguishable from a primitivist rage. The synthesis of Marxism and Gandhianism bordered on nonsense. Isolated and confused youth refuses to see through the charade. Universities continue to simmer as political parties continue to draw new recruits and newer ideas.

Fiefdoms - Rural folks continue to rise at dawn and retire at dusk, never once yielding to the enlightened ideas that the West glamourises. The village republics of lore were lost a thousand years ago when Islam rose to power. Today, rural Bharat is a network and patchwork of Pradhans who act in collusion with police and politicians to ensure radical ideas like liberty does not encroach his fiefdom. It is a privileged club that spawns more privilege. The village blesses the pradhan though he is distrusted, feared and envied as a prospering racketeer. He rules by consent and custom. Debt is a fact of life and interest is a form of tribute. Rituals regulate the will, and a rebellion comprises of merely abandoning the ritual. Men have retreated to their last, impregnable defence: their knowledge of who they were. They recall caste, karma and unshakeable hierarchies because this knowledge runs deep in the blood. The surety of such knowledge makes them confident. Lethargy and an unshakeable hierarchy run so deep in Bharat that the street is not cleaned until the sweeper comes. It is his job and nobody else's. Titular privileges over laughable fiefdoms are the last remaining claims to fame. Through generations of idle servitude, society has specialized either in serfdom or style. Without a vision of the future, Bharat can only contemplate the sweet rituals of the past but the modern world can not be wished away. The idyllic pastoral life can not be revived.

Societal subjugation - The poor are needed but not accommodated. Mumbai sees homes ranging from Dharavi and Chawls to Sea-facing bungalows and Antilia. Children have become a source of wealth, available for hire, generations after generations. Cruelty has become life itself. Bharat tolerates this injustice quietly. Bharat's ego remains under-developed, depending on the individual's feeling of the moment. The mother's functions as the external ego of the child for a much longer customary period than necessary gets transferred to other social institutions. The individual is never on his own; he is always a member of a group with a complex apparatus of rules, rituals and taboos. Every man is tied to an unescapable brotherhood. The question of the status is decided not as a moral question but a matter of pollution. Rational conversations quickly devolve into magic, prophecies, rituals and nostalgia. Individual obsessions turn into political movements that rarely reach conclusive ends. Poverty and justice become abstractions and obsessions become real. Bharat sees it all but it has stopped observing. It has become blind.

Dharmic dilemma - Bharat's modernity is a facade. It is a nightmare of misapplied technologies. People say they have become too educated for Bharat and fly off. Truth is they are not educated, their imported skills are not rooted in principles. Dharma can be creative and crippling depending on the state of civilisation. Dharma can be used to reconcile men to servitude and help them consider paralysing obedience as the highest spiritual good. Bharat requires obedience of its men. Problem is they lack in basic municipal discipline. Men are locked up in straitjackets by the ideas of Dharma propounded by crooked godmen or cracked consciences. Even Gandhians stretch Gandhianism too far. The pride in courting arrests and lathicharge reeks of vanity. Their main duty seems to revolve around wearing Khadi and keep the Gandhian prayer wheel moving. The Mahatma was stricken with arbitrary dictates of his inner voice. He had perhaps ventured too far into Mahatmahood to understand real-life complexities of the laity. Gandhiji was made by London, law, Tolstoy, Ruskin, the Gita, and his life in South Africa. Gandhians, on the other hand, were made only by Gandhi ashrams. None of them could replicate the Mahatma's success because while Gandhiji's march was symbolic, his followers made a career out of marches. They forget that humility, once it becomes a vow, ceases to be humility.

What can help Bharat really?

Emotional plus national integration.

One without the other is an unachievable utopia.

Blindrunning Bharat

The Chinese Flu has sent severe jolts across the globe. A global lockdown has forced us into self-isolation and self-introspection. Patient numbers in India are going up. They will come down only once the primary transmission cycle is over. The show will go on. India, that is Bharat, will have moved on even before the flu subsides. It will cruise along, zoned out on an auto-pilot mode and blind to the lessons drawn from a global event. This is because Bharat has gradually ossified into a blind civilisation which prefers not to acknowledge issues initially, only to choose flight over fight later. This is the beginning of a four-part blog series where I try deciphering what ails us.

Indian problem-solving begins with denial before progressing to procrastination. It is followed by a phase of prayers to gods or governments, or gods sitting in governments. When prayers fail, Indians spring into action by resorting to risk-filled shortcuts. They delay taking even cognizance, let alone the charge of problems until possible. Example - The suddenness of COVID-19 virus spread caught us off-guard. Did we not know it was coming? We were simply inattentive.

The Coronavirus pandemic is not an isolated event. This pattern of nonchalance is not new. Bharat has known decadence from close quarters, yet it remains blind to the sea of issues it drowns in. It remains blind to origins, decays and extinguishments of sister cultures and civilisations. This dichotomic 'zoned-out' approach is to be half-expected. The inattentional blindness is unintended. The amnesic memory is a survival mechanism and an evolutionary trait provided to protect against horrible history.

What I observe is alarming. It is close to paralysis. Governmental actions, few of them unfair and excessive, must be seen in these lights. The virus lockdown allowed me to analyze some issues with a clearer mind.

Devolutionary denial

Current events are unprecedented. For the first time, Bharat realises why prevention is better than cure. It is a refreshing change from the slack which has harmed our progress since long. Bharat has a habit of denying the obvious and it thinks denial will make problems disappear. It rarely addresses issues in plain sight, and it is rarer still to seek conclusive solutions. For instance, death punishment is no longer an effective deterrent. Heinous crimes shake national conscience to an extent that society frequently finds itself baying for criminal blood as ancient Romans did. The devolution seems complete with increasing attacks on what we call the idea of India. Bharat is ridiculed for its struggles with straitjacketed western concepts like human rights, democracy and secularism. It does not even try redefining or tailoring tough concepts to own need, hoping somebody else will do it. It has become a nation where privileged students know the language of their long-gone conquerors better than mother-tongues. Human societies usually hold cultures dear to their hearts. It is different in India where colonial fetishes stare through windows of the countless English medium schools. Subjugation is complete when the conquered is seen adapting, adorning and worshipping the conqueror. Bharat does all three. It sits back and curses modernity for not providing it with panaceas. 

Modern miners

Modernity has not been kind to Bharat per se. It realises it is walking into the Information age - impoverished, uneducated and unprepared. Online freedom is beginning to feel like a trap laid by the usual suspects. Tech giants mine Bharat's data as colonialists mined colonies for minerals. Companies call it 'data mining', but we can call it 'data farming' because we are the crops. Companies turn wealthier and smarter at the cost of the poor and the unwitting. Unchecked internet is being provided to populations of third world nations, sowing seeds of endless cheap entertainment, onscreen-offscreen violence and technological imperialism. Bharat remains content in scrolling down screens mindlessly. It finds a valve in outraging online aimlessly. It remains blind to internet-led hikes in perversion and radicalism. The disrespect for time is such that it enjoys watching JCBs working just as much as it enjoys watching videos of people watching JCBs working. Few notice how Bharat zones in and out like violence-stricken people suffering from psychic numbing. Its lack of vision is a direct result of the thousand-yard stares into the traumatic past. This amnesiac sense of history and time is no accident. Bharat's obsession with self-inflicted injuries matches with its penchant for false self-appraisals. This situation gets worse with internet penetration. The numbness comes from long and continuous practice, and its observation requires clean-cut breaks like the current state of lockdown. Nothing is new for Bharat. It has seen it all, and it fails to recall.

Catastrophic callousness

The government was swift in enforcing a lockdown but it underestimated public denialism. Police are using batons and prayers to keep people in homes. Some sections of the society refuse to self-isolate, thus endangering the entire society. Unshockingly, the government remains indecisive (even in Corona crisis). Expecting a government to be different from the people it serves is wrong. Expecting a government to be different from goons is not right either, at least not in this part of the world. The government knew that the initial COVID-19 virus transmission was unidirectional, moving from urban areas into rural hinterlands where it should not exist. The government knew that COVID-19 virus came piggybacking with international travellers, that groups like Tablighi Jamat were high potential carriers. The government failed to act in time. Now, Delhi braces up for a pandemic right after a communal riot. Bharat braces up to fight a war amid an economic slowdown. The poor are left with no option but to wait for charity. Misplaced paternalism has robbed them of health and hope. It is not just the poor though. Bharat frequently finds itself forced to protect both the rule of law and rule-breakers. The know-it-all youth grows disenchanted but rarely offers anything viable. The brightest minds migrate to the West. Bharat does not call them back or stop them from leaving shores. It remains blind to wasted kids, communities and opportunities. The government has become a punching bag that is used perennially for both lamenting and venting.

How long can Bharat run blind like this? No idea. The psychological immune neglect needs to heal. We need to wake up and start working towards progress because unlike other nations we have nowhere else to go. Bharat is not ready for the future that is coming. The global order is changing. It is a good time for Bharat to bring reforms and reclaim development before its memory is reset again.