Crisis of the Indian Intellectual – Philosophical Assumptions

By Meghna Chandra and Archishman Raju.

The previous article in the series addressed the question of who the Indian intellectual is. This section delves into the philosophical assumptions of the English speaking Indian intelligentsia, whether it be Subaltern Studies historians, ultraleftist activists, or liberal technocrats. Though they come from different places, they arrive at the same point—a vicious attack on the Indian struggle for self-determination. This includes an attack both on the Indian Freedom Struggle and the Indian state post-independence. These intellectuals sound militant, but share many similarities with colonial ideology and rely on the West for authority and legitimacy. 

Though these trends claim to be “critical” traditions on behalf of the oppressed, or for democracy, they pave the way for the trivialization of struggle, the relinquishing of national sovereignty, the division and polarization of society, and disrespect for the sacrifices and martyrdom of those who fought for freedom. In short, they are counterrevolutionary trends that justify and enable neocolonialism in South Asia.

Subaltern Studies and the Deconstruction of Freedom 

The Subaltern studies school of historiography, founded in 1982, made its position clear in the preface to the founding volume. Subaltern historians distinguish themselves from “elitist” Cambridge (imperialist) and Nationalist schools of historiography because they focus on history “from the bottom up”. “Subaltern” broadly refers to groups that have been “marginalized” in mainstream political discourses, like women, peasants, lower castes, minorities. Subaltern historians focus on localized histories that get left out in the “grand narratives” of the Freedom Struggle. They read for the “silences” in the archives, whether colonial legal records or Congress newspapers. Subaltern historians draw upon Gramsci, Derrida, Foucault, Althusser, and others.¹

Subaltern Studies claims to be in conversation with Marxism. Ultimately, the Marxism Subaltern Studies draws from is an anti-communist Marxism at odds with the mainstream movements of the 20th century for socialism and national liberation.

Sumit Sarkar’s gushing obituary of British Marxist E.P. Thompson reveals this problem. He reiterates Thompson’s assessment of the Soviet Union as “ossified and bureaucratic” and celebrates Thompson’s work for preserving “the generous dreams of alternative, democratic, and humane forms of socialism”. He uplifts Thompson’s attention to “empirical detail” rather than ideology in reconstructing the history of the industrial revolution.² The Marxism of the Subaltern Studies school is a very white Marxism that lives in the academy rather than the lifeworlds of the masses of people. Sarkar is at odds with the majority of his countrymen, many of whom name their children after Stalin.

The Subaltern Studies school understands nationalist historiography as mere hagiography of nationalist leadership that glosses over the “collaborationist aspect” of the Freedom Movement. Subaltern Studies thinkers are deeply pessimistic about the state as a means of ending oppression and defending people’s freedom; Ranajit Guha declared in 1982 that the Indian state has “failed to come into its own”,³ and Spivak says that the aspiration to be a leader is undemocratic and itself a source of problems in postcolonial societies.⁴

As Irfan Habib has noted, Subaltern Studies historians rarely delve into the economic aspects of colonial rule. If they do, they narrow their focus on very local grievances, ignoring the common economic conditions of the Indian people as a whole. Any attempt at a large-scale analysis of British imperialism is considered the work of “elitist” observers. As Habib writes:

It is really a wonder how Subaltern historiography has established its repute despite its closing its eyes to major aspects of the economy of colonial India, such as the tribute, deindustrialization, the tariff and exchange chicaneries, GDP, distribution of income, etc.5 

Subaltern historians state their goal is to “demystify… the material interests” behind the Nationalist movement,⁶ but the result is to obscure imperialism as a world system. As they attack anti-colonial nationalist leadership, their material interests as tenured professors in Western universities never come into question.

Furthermore, the Subaltern School does not seek to learn from the actual process of political change, or examine the organic link between the leadership and the masses. To the contrary, it assumes that the leadership of that period was as disconnected from the masses as the elites of this period (which includes them) and then posits that these elites failed the people. Ironically, their thesis that the elite has failed the people is much more true of our moment than it is of the Freedom Struggle which they seek to deconstruct.

Ranajit Guha: An Elitist Interpretation of Discipline

One example is in Ranajit Guha’s Dominance without Hegemony. Guha claims that Gandhi’s use of the word “mobocracy” to describe the violence at Chauri Chaura betrays his elitism. Guha writes that mobocracy is “an ugly word greased with loathing, a sign of craving for control and its frustration, it is lifted directly out of the lexicon of elitist usage as a measure of the distance between those on the side of order and others who were regarded as a threat to it”.⁷ “Discipline” for Guha means imposing order with the intention of control for self-interested purposes.

Guha profoundly misunderstands and misrepresents Gandhian discipline. Gandhian discipline was not intended to subjugate people, but to help them achieve their potential. Any student or teacher knows that discipline is a crucial part of learning. Gandhi believed in nonviolence as a creative and positive force that could bring a new human into being, a concept foreign to Western liberal philosophies of politics that are indeed about domination and individual liberties. Also, every revolutionary tradition has demanded discipline of those who participate in the struggle for freedom, this extends from Lenin, Mao to Fidel Castro and Martin Luther King Jr. Furthermore, the fetishization of indiscipline or spontaneous activity from below does not allow for large scale change of political structures which is the goal of any political revolution.

Indeed, without a disciplined force, the struggle for freedom can very easily be distorted and destroyed. Nehru in his autobiography explains the rationale behind Gandhi’s suspension of civil resistance in the wake of Chauri Chaura. He says that in the early 1920’s, the leadership had not yet understood the need to train grassroots cadres in the strategy and tactics of the freedom struggle while the leadership was in jail. This led to agent provocateurs seizing control over local organizations: “There is little doubt that if the movement had continued there would have been growing sporadic violence in many places. This would have been crushed by the Government in a bloody manner and a reign of terror established which would have thoroughly demoralised the people”.⁸

Gandhi’s decision to suspend Chauri Chaura must be seen in the context of an evolving movement leadership. To reduce nationalist leadership to “elitism” is a luxury of armchair critics who have never taken responsibility for a movement. Their criticism betrays a profound lack of respect of the human lives involved in an actual struggle. 

Subaltern historians also refuse to believe in the possibility of mutual transformation in which the leader and the people learn from each other and are transformed. They are absolutely cynical about the revolutionary significance of a privileged class making a principled decision to side with the masses of the poor and dispossessed.

Anti-Apartheid revolutionary E.S. Reddy explains how the poor and so-called “subaltern” drove the first movement for Satyagraha in South Africa and created Gandhi as a leader. He tells the story of Valliamma Munuswami Mudaliar, a 16 year old daughter of a fruits seller in Johannesburg who had been sentenced to hard labor for 3 months. While in prison, she fell sick, but refused to apply for early release. When Gandhi asked her if she repented going to jail, she replied that she was ready to go to jail again. When he asked her about the possibility of her death, she said “I do not mind it. Who would not love to die for one’s motherland?” Valiamma died and became one of the many martyrs of the freedom struggle. 

As Gandhi said:

There were 20,000 strikers who left their tools and work because there was something in the air... These men and women are the salt of India; on them will be built the Indian nation that is to be. We are poor mortals before these heroes and heroines.

He also said to someone in Madras:

You have said that I inspired these great men and women, but I cannot accept the proposition. It was they, the simple-minded folk, who worked away in faith, never expecting the slightest reward, who inspired me, who kept me to the proper level, and who compelled me by their great sacrifice, by their great faith, by their great trust in the great God to do the work that I was able to do.9

The Indian Freedom Struggle got its fundamental character and legitimacy not from elite “charismatic leaders”, but from the sacrifices of ordinary people like these; the leaders and the people created each other dialectically. Smearing the Freedom Struggle as a power grab by elites underestimates the will and judgment of ordinary people to choose their own leaders and make history.

The Subaltern Studies allergy to leadership is the result, not of a desire to get closer to the people, but a desire to distance themselves from struggle. The deconstruction of Indian nationalism by elites today allows them to rationalize their neglect of the people who have given them so much. To get closer to the “problematic”, “oppressive”, “fascist” or conversely “voiceless”, “fragmented” and “oppressed” masses is out of the question. To commit to educating them and in doing so, educating themselves would mean giving up too much. Subaltern studies historians ultimately follow a politics of guilt, enabling them to criticize a progressive past in order to maintain the status quo.

Arundhati Roy

The ultraleftist Indian intellectual has their platform not on the pages of academic journals, but in the Western press, social media, and movements of the cosmopolitan elite. They claim to be activists recovering the subaltern voice in history and resisting the “authoritarian” Indian state but effectively align themselves against the masses with imperialism. Ultimately, they attack the agency that has the ability to decisively develop and transform society towards equality and justice—a sovereign Indian State.

Arundhati Roy is one such ultraleftist intellectual. Roy rose to international fame in 1997 for winning the British Booker Prize for her novel God of Small Things. Soon after, she wrote an article criticizing India’s nuclear tests and became the darling of the anti-globalization movement and the global cosmopolitan activist class. She has written a score of books and articles which attack the Indian state. Her writings support among other things the secession of Kashmir from India (a position no mainstream political party in India, left or right, has supported), the Narmada Bachao Andolan against big dams, and the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency.

Among her most influential is The Doctor and the Saint, which is an introduction to B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. The point of The Doctor and Saint is to “rearrange the stars in our firmament” by attacking Gandhi’s legacy as a mass leader and social reformer, and thrusting up the legacy of Ambedkar in its place. It is written as if everything that is known and believed around the world about Gandhi by the masses of people is a lie, packaged by the Mahatma and his team, from his time in South Africa fighting against apartheid, to his leadership of struggles, to his kinship with the poor, to his commitment to fighting for social reform within India. She argues that Gandhism is a hop, skip, and jump to Hindu Nationalism, and that Gandhi foiled Dalit self-determination. 

There are several huge scholarly problems with Roy’s ahistorical polemic, many of them covered by other writers including Rajmohan Gandhi. As Rajmohan Gandhi and others have shown, Roy takes multiple incidents and quotes them out of context; she omits facts that go against her case in order to paint the picture of Gandhi as a racist, a casteist, an elitist, an opportunist, and a moralistically immoral “consummate politician”.¹⁰

Roy shares the orientation of the Cambridge School and the Subaltern Studies school in trivializing colonialism and infantilizing the masses. Colonialism, for Roy, is not an attack on the whole people, but merely on an elite. As she writes, colonialism “had drained the wealth of a once-wealthy subcontinent—or, shall we say, drained the wealth of the elite in a once-wealthy subcontinent.”¹¹ Roy’s formulation is profoundly wrong. The worst victims of colonial exploitation were the poor, most horrifically, the millions upon millions who died in famines. Authors including Kali Charan Ghosh and Mike Davis chronicle these deaths, arguing that it was colonial policies, not environmental disasters alone, that created death. They expose the colonial policies that exported food in times of famine, hoarded surplus food, allowed for rampant speculation of grain, implemented crushing taxes on farmers to finance railroads and imperialist wars, censored the press to the extent of malnutrition and death. The British justified their policies as population control. The end of colonialism in India signified no less than the end of genocide via famine.¹² Roy’s formulation of Indian Independence as a mere transfer of power from one elite to another minimizes the demonic nature of imperialist oppression and the significance of the Indian Freedom Struggle.

Roy cites Shahid Amin’s article on Gandhi as Mahatma and implying that Gandhi’s mass following came not from principled mass support but from rumors planted by manipulative Congressmen, Gandhi’s “charisma”, and “gullible” people. Throughout the article, whenever Gandhi or Congress win the support of the whole Indian people, whether it is mass support for the Temple Entry program, or the electoral victories of Congress among people of all castes and religious communities in 1936 or 1946, Roy dismisses it as manipulation. In the name of countering elitism, Roy adopts an elitist view of history, ignoring the history made by the Indian people.

Ironically, Roy’s descriptions of Gandhi, the Freedom Struggle, and Indian society echo those of Winston Churchill who described India as hopelessly oppressive and divided and in need of British civilization. As he said in his “Our Duty in India” speech, “While any community, social or religious, endorses such practices and asserts itself resolved to keep sixty millions of fellow countrymen perpetually and eternally in a state of sub-human bondage, we cannot recognise their claim to the title-deeds of democracy. Still less can we hand over to their unfettered sway those helpless millions they despise.”¹³ Winston Churchill painted an image, not unlike Roy has, of the Indian people as viciously and eternally casteist, and therefore undeserving of democratic self rule and self-determination.

The great tradition of anti-colonial revolutionaries inspires colonized people to draw upon the progressive aspects of their civilization so that they may have confidence in themselves in ushering in a new era of history. In contrast, Roy, like Winston Churchill, denigrates the Indian people. It is no wonder that Roy’s popularity has been confined to the Western cosmopolitan elite.

Throughout The Doctor and the Saint, Roy charges that Gandhi is a racist, and that the true anti-racist tradition comes from the anti-caste tradition tradition alone. Others have debunked the “Gandhi as a Racist” trope explaining Gandhi’s views in the context of the times and his own political development.¹⁴ Ultimately, Roy’s formulation of Gandhi as a racist denies the tradition he inspired of Afro-Asian solidarity against the Western world order. She never mentions the sacrifices an independent India, led by the people she criticizes, made on behalf of other oppressed races e.g. in agitating for the ending of apartheid in South Africa. Gandhi and India’s anti-racism came from identifying with the Darker Nations rather than with the white world order. It was Gandhi’s anti-racist theory of nonviolence that led him to write to the Crisis Magazine in 1929, “Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grandchildren of slaves. There is no dishonour in being slaves. There is dishonour in being slave-owners.”¹⁵ It is no wonder that the world’s foremost theorist of race, empire, and democracy W.E.B. Du Bois called Gandhi the “greatest man in the world” and the “Prince of Peace” among living leaders.¹⁶

Roy is patently wrong when she says the unity of Indians and Africans in South Asia was in defiance of Gandhi’s legacy. She misleadingly quotes Gandhi to suggest he did not advocate joint struggle between Indians and Blacks because of anti-black racism. In fact, Gandhi initially opposed a joint struggle of Indians and Africans against apartheid because he believed in the non-equivalency of the struggle of native Africans. As he told Reverend S.S. Tema of the ANC in 1939:

The two cases are different. The Indians are a microscopic minority. They can never be a menace to the white population. You, on the other hand, are the sons of the soil who are being robbed of your inheritance. You are bound to resist that. Yours is a far bigger issue. It ought not to be mixed up with that of the Indian. This does not preclude the establishment of the friendliest relations between the two races.

Gandhi ultimately thought of Africans as the rightful owners of South Africa, Indians as settlers, and Europeans as usurpers, exploiters, and/or conquerors. Gandhi believed Indians could make a contribution to the African freedom struggle by struggling for the honor of India through nonviolence. He even said in 1946, upon hearing of the murder of an Indian near a passive resistance demonstration, that he would not shed a single tear if all the Indian satyagrahis were wiped out, because they would point the way to the Africans and vindicate the honour of India. Gandhi changed his views on joint struggle by 1947 in light of growing joint anti-fascist and anti-imperialist struggle. He ultimately blessed the efforts of Dr. Yusuf Dadoo and Dr. Naicker to build political cooperation between the ANC and INC.

Dr. Yusuf Dadoo, one of the architects of Indian-African unity, was forged in the crucible of Satyagraha led by Gandhi. As he said in 1979, “I hold Gandhiji in very high respect and affection. He, as a matter of fact, had a great deal in moulding my thinking and subsequently my political activities. I believed in Gandhiji to the extent that there must be resistance, there must be struggle for justice and righteousness.”

Dadoo explains that it was the synthesis of Nehruvian Marxism with Gandhian morality that shaped him as a revolutionary. It is not an unprincipled “packaging” that defines Gandhi’s legacy in South Africa, but a history and tradition of moral courage and revolutionary transformation.¹⁷ Roy’s smears serve to discourage principled unity rather than encourage it.

Perhaps the biggest flaw of Roy’s treatise is her unwillingness to acknowledge the strides of the Indian State prior to liberalization. Roy obscures that it was an independent India in the legacy of the Freedom Struggle that made huge strides towards social justice for all Indians. Five Year plans laid the basis of a modern, self-sufficient state out of a nation with stagnant agriculture, little to no industry, and mass illiteracy and social backwardness. Our freedom fighters created a native industry relatively free from the exploitation of Western capitalists, developed their own capital goods, established universities that educate some of the world’s finest scientists and engineers, achieved food sovereignty, and began the process of redistributing land.¹⁸ India championed a New International Economic Order which fought for the right of developing nations to choose their own social systems, full permanent sovereignty of states over their natural resources including the right to nationalization, the right to just and equitable prices for raw materials and primary commodities, the transfer of technology and scientific knowledge from the developed to the developing nations, and the right to assistance against colonialism and neocolonialism.¹⁹²⁰

With regards to fighting caste oppression, the public sector, which Nehru developed to be the “commanding heights of the economy” was one of the most powerful tools to ensure employment for the lower castes via reservations. The attack on the public sector through structural adjustments is an attack on Dalit employment.²¹ The strivings of the Indian state in implementing land reform are also significant anti-caste measures since they sought to redistribute land held by large landowners on a feudal caste basis.²² Indira Gandhi furthered the anti-Zamindari land reforms made by Jawaharlal Nehru by introducing loans, subsidies, and rural employment for small farmers and landless laborers. She introduced a scheme to provide homestead land for landless Dalits. Her policy of bank nationalization ensured that credit was available to the poor in backward urban and rural areas. Finally, Indira Gandhi established the 20-point programme which among things advocated for the abolition of caste oppression and the Bonded Labor Abolition Act which made caste-based slave labor illegal.²³²⁴ Bipin Chandra notes how during the Emergency, 3 million housing sites were distributed to the landless and Dalits, and 1.1 million acres of surplus land distributed, in addition to a moratorium on recovery of debts.²⁵ It is not the Indian State that stands in the way of peace, development, socialism, and the ending of all forms of oppression, but the erosion of the state.

Roy criticizes liberalization, in which the Indian State relinquished control of the Indian economy to Western bodies, and slyly suggests that Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy allows for this state of affairs. She says he is the “Saint of the Status Quo” since everyone from Obama, Modi, Rahul Gandhi, and Occupy Wall Street anarchists loves him. Roy echoes the ruling elite that has repurposed Gandhi into an empty symbol, stripping away his anti-imperialist substance that identified Western civilization as the enemy of humanity. Roy obscures that it was the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of a unipolar world, and the blackmailing of the World Bank and the IMF that forced India to liberalize²⁶ rather than innate casteism and consumerism of the Indian nation state as she implies. By blaming the Indian people and their leaders alone for the inequalities in Indian society, she obscures the context of world imperialism.

Ultimately, Roy is not “clarifying” or “exposing”, but attacking a tradition of anti-oppression and socialism born in the Freedom Struggle under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, forged in Bandung, and developed during the world communist and anti-imperialist movement. If India is to strive for revolutionary transformation, it is the tradition of nation building to which it must return, the very tradition that Roy attacks.

The writings of ultraleftists like Arundhati Roy play an important role in the crisis of the West—they provide the ideological base for a color revolution. Color revolutions rely on Western-backed NGOs and activists to launch an ideological, psychological and ultimately actual war against sovereign nation states. The ultimate beneficiary of color revolutions is not the marginalized, but the Western World Order which stands to benefit from destabilized nations that cannot use their civilizational and natural resources for the good of their people.

Roy’s anarchistic rejection of the state and flexible definition of empire prevents a clear understanding of the forces standing in the way of peace and prosperity in South Asia. It is no wonder that Financial Times, the world’s foremost newspaper of the business elite, gushes over her as a “pioneer of wokeness”²⁷ and voice of the powerless.²⁸

The meaning of democracy: The liberal co-optation of the Indian Freedom Struggle

Western-looking liberals do not dress themselves in the same kind of “critical” or “marginal” clothing as the Post-colonialists or the ultra left activists. They openly embrace the West as a paragon of democracy and human rights and blatantly write Indian history to provide the ideological basis for an Indo-Western alliance. They focus on India as a “democracy” distinct from the rest of the “authoritarian” third world, and divorce the meaning of democracy from the struggle against imperialism, war, poverty, and racism. These liberals try to explain away the revolutionary substance of the freedom struggle, and distance themselves from the Indian people.

Sunil Khilnani in his The Idea of India says that India symbolizes “the adventure of a political idea: democracy”, the third moment in the great experiment launched at the end of the 18th century by American and French revolutions”.²⁹ He says Asia is a region “where vast numbers of people remain politically subjugated” and considers India to be the best challenge to this.³⁰ Khilnani does not clarify what he means by political subjugation but it is clear that he sees any system that does not follow western liberal democracy to be a form of political subjugation. Khilnani sees the independence and unity of India not as the result of a historic mass struggle but as “the wager of India’s modern, educated, urban elite”.³¹ Khilnani gives a very superficial history of pre-colonial India including demonstrably false statements like there was a “monopoly of literacy vested in one social group, the Brahmins”.³² He then says that Gandhi transformed the Congress in a way that “preserved its conservative, distinctly non-revolutionary character”.³³ Before independence, the Congress “could not pretend to any developed meditation on democracy”. Instead, the freedom struggle was led undemocratically by “an eccentric parent” and “not designed to nourish commitment to democratic institutions”.³⁴

These extraordinary statements totally distort the meaning of democracy. The freedom struggle was the highest expression of democratic sentiment, which at its basic level, means rule by the people. Masses of people chose their own leaders and consciously participated in the political process by fighting for their freedom. The Indian path to democracy was different from the western liberal path. In that sense, it was much closer to the Chinese path and the path taken by other formerly colonized countries. In seeing democracy as some sort of wager that a westernized elite imposed on a backward unprepared society, Khilnani perpetuates some of the worst imperialist myths about Indian society. It is not Gandhi, but Khilnani who is extremely conservative and non-revolutionary. His emphasis is on “the observance of rules and procedures designed to instill the moderation which democracy needs”, and “Democracy as a regime of laws and rights, as a set of procedures that moderates the powers of the state”, not on the democratic demand for the removal of poverty and neo-colonialism.³⁵ Though Khilnani champions Nehru, it is precisely against this conservative idea of liberal democracy that Nehru had argued, for example, during the debate on the First Amendment to the Indian constitution. Jawaharlal Nehru, in speaking of liberals, had said “they do not act for fear of acting wrongly, they do not move for fear of falling, they keep away from all healthy contact with the masses, and sit enchanted and self-hypnotized in their mental cells”.³⁶

Ramchandra Guha writes India After Gandhi to explain to Western observers why democracy in India has survived. Throughout his book, he evaluates India’s democracy on how closely it has followed procedural elements, such as voting, transfer of leadership, treatment of the opposition by the party in power—in other words, how closely India’s democracy resembles Western Democracy. Indeed, he credits the British with providing the state machinery for the first elections, “The elections of 1952 were a script written jointly by historical forces that had long been opposed to each other: British colonialism and Indian nationalism. Between them these forces had now given this new nation what could fairly be described as a jump-start to democracy.”³⁷

Throughout the book, Guha is disturbed by the Indo Soviet alliance, which he sees as running counter to India’s democratic commitments. For example, he is at pains to explain the “double standard” of Nehru condemning Britain’s interventions in the Suez Canal while not condemning Soviet invasion of Hungary. He suggests Nehru’s affinity with Krishna Menon boiled down to their friendship and common love of books, rather than shared ideological principles.

What Guha refuses to grasp is that Nehru did not equate Western Imperialism with “Soviet expansionism” because he understood the greatest threat to democracy was imperialism. He was not an anti-communist, not because he was ignorant of the “kulaks” and the “intolerance” of the Soviet State, but because the Soviet Union fought for peace and made alliances with Non Aligned countries on equitable terms, in contrast to Western “democratic” countries that overthrew democratically elected leaders in the third world and used famine as a bargaining weapon to enforce its foreign policy.³⁸

In his speech at the Non Aligned Movement, Nehru counterposed world democracy and independence with empire and war, not with communism. In his speech at Bandung in 1955, he singled out NATO as “one of the most powerful protectors of colonialism” because of its actions in Goa, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, and that supporting NATO was incompatible with opposing colonialism.³⁹ In Belgrade in 1961, he said “It is war or the fear of war that has led to the Cold War. It is the Cold War which has resulted and is resulting in the old imperialism and the old colonialism hanging on wherever they exist because they deem it advantageous.”⁴⁰ Nehru threw his lot in with other oppressed nations, including “authoritarian” China, because of the common interest in peace and eradicating the crushing poverty that was the legacy of imperialism. At Bandung, he worked to build unity among the darker nations across ideological lines, cementing his place in history as one of the greatest fighters for peace and democracy in the 20th century.

For the new Indian liberals, the period of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency is the worst period of Indian democracy. No context is laid out for the imposition of the Emergency, whether it be the series of coups and assassinations perpetuated by the western ruling elite, or Jayprakash Narayan’s extremely dangerous call to the army to disobey the government. No analysis is made of which classes and sections supported the emergency. Indira Gandhi’s radical reforms are dismissed as “gestural radicalism”. A full treatment and understanding of the Emergency requires a separate article, but here we just wish to make the point that this liberal understanding of the emergency is a western understanding, as Guha makes clear by approvingly quoting foreign (read western) observers.⁴¹ Guha gives no space to how the third world, the Soviet Union and the majority of the world viewed this period in India. Prominent Indian communist Mohit Sen notes how the Emergency was “vociferously condemned” by the ruling elite and press of the US, UK, and other imperialist countries, but completely supported by the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc, Cuba, Vietnam, Arab countries, and other non-aligned states. These countries recognized the dangers of destabilization, having seen its consequences in Bangladesh, Chile, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other countries.⁴²

Guha’s criteria for democracy was not even shared by the foremost leader of the freedom struggle. As Gandhi wrote in 1934:

Western democracy is on its trial, if it has not already proved a failure. May it not be reserved to India to evolve the true science of democracy by giving a visible demonstration of its fitness? Corruption and hypocrisy ought not to be inevitable products of democracy as they undoubtedly are today; nor bulk a true test of democracy.43

Gandhi did not believe, as Guha does, in the righteousness of Western democracy. He even suggested that it was a failure because of its foundation of violence and imperialism. He left it to the great anti-colonial movements to evolve a true democracy that operated on the principles of non-violence. Gandhi’s understanding of democracy resonated with that of W.E.B. Du Bois, who defined democracy in Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace as inextricably tied to ending poverty and guaranteeing the rights of colonies to determine their own future, free from war and economic coercion.⁴⁴ It also resonated with that of Martin Luther King, who said that America needed a “revolution of values” away from materialism, militarism, and racism in order to get on the right side of the world revolution, and fulfill the promises of its founding fathers.⁴⁵

Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagriya: The Neoliberal Technocrats

Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagriya constitute a different section of the Indian elite who have found acceptance in Western universities. Bhagwati has a chair named after him in Columbia University, which Panagriya occupies. Their basic ideological premise of their work is to support free trade and economic reforms that relinquish the Indian state’s control of India’s economy. They devote a large amount of effort criticizing the socialistic direction of India’s early economy, directing the majority of their criticism at Indira Gandhi for measures she took from 1969-1973. These measures include the nationalization of the fourteen largest banks, general insurance, oil companies, and coal mines, diluting foreign equity in all firms to 40% or less, confining investments in large firms to highly capital intensive industries, reserving labor intensive products for small-scale industry, strictly limiting urban land-holding, and restricting worker layoffs in large firms.

These measures reflected the hard-fought intellectual consensus in India of a bygone era: a strong self-reliant economy driven by state control of key strategic industries and protections for Indian workers. Jagdish Bhagwati once served as one of the economic advisors in India before abandoning that role to find a home in Columbia University and MIT. His views on free trade remained obscure and irrelevant in Indian policy but started receiving renewed attention after the economic reforms of 1990-1991. Bhagwati and Panagriya have made it their credo to defend these reforms, and devoted several books to the subject. 

Their basic argument is simple, that economic growth is needed for the removal of poverty and all socialistic mechanisms are prohibitive to that growth. However, Bhagwati and Panagriya are only too aware that socialism in Russia led to some of the highest economic growth rates. For them, these growth rates are always “transitory”. They do not mention external factors which affected India’s growth in its early period including the historical impact of colonialism, three wars, droughts and an oil shock. Bhagwati and Panagriya obscure the truth with the use of technicalities and statistics. In essence, their work defends the western ideological agenda and completely ignores history and politics. Defending free trade like a good British-style liberal, they ignore that “free-trade” and market capitalism were characterized by slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. Indeed, it takes a considerable amount of schizophrenia for a formerly colonized subject to become such a vociferous advocate of free trade knowing the colonial history of how “free trade” was used to flood opium in China or export food grains out of India during famines. They speak against all the progressive gains that the Indian state has made for the Indian people, including highly progressive labor laws, nationalized heavy industries, bank nationalizing allowing easy loans and credit to the vast poor and food self-sufficiency. 

While Bhagwati and Panagriya claim to act for the removal of poverty, in the final analysis, their thesis has no role for the people. All change must come from above. In actual fact, bank nationalization and food security continue to be extremely popular measures in India as evidenced by the large protests in their favour.⁴⁶ Bhagwati and Panagriya’s contempt for the poor is visible in their books. In India’s Tryst with Destiny they are even able to defend the documented rise in inequality with reforms with this fantastic argument:

“If incomes increase in Mumbai but not in the Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra, evidently inequality of income has increased between Mumbai and Ratnagiri. But if those living in Ratnagiri are not comparing themselves to what is happening in Mumbai, why is this inequality measure of any relevance?”47

How do they know about those living in Ratnagiri? They make an argument by analogy:

“Similarly, within our own university (which happens to be Columbia University in New York), the inequality between the top salaries---the president enjoys the highest salary---and the lowest salaries is a salient issue, what what is not an issue (at least as of now) is how our salaries compare to those of Wall Street.”48

This non-serious and incorrect analogy makes a mockery of poverty and inequality. It is likely that neither writer has ventured outside the university neighborhood to ask how Harlem residents who have been pushed out by Columbia’s gentrification feel about their salaries.

Panagriya and Bhagwati have become popular because they align with what has become the intellectual consensus among a new generation of Indian technocrats. This consensus decries the achievements of the post-independent Indian state, criticizes its inefficiency and promotes the myth that all gains were made after 1991. Using bad statistics, the works of Panagriya and Bhagwati serve an ideological function: to weaken the Indian state. If inefficiencies existed and continue to exist in Indian bureaucracy which is inherited from colonial rule, then there is a need for administrative reform, not for privatizing industries.

Here is where the neoliberal technocrat aligns with the ultra-leftist even though both may be vehemently opposed to each other. Both, for different reasons, would like to see a weak Indian state which is incapable of defending the interest of the people. Bhagwati has openly called for the use of “foreign pressure” (American pressure) on the Indian state. The neoliberal technocrat posits as an expert, capable of marshaling facts and statistics, and leading the people out of poverty from above. 

Bhagwati and Panagriya deny the existence of a Washington consensus. They claim that India accepted neoliberal reforms on its own. Ironically, they are facing the collapse of the liberal capitalist doctrine in their own place of residence. The unraveling of the American state, the profound crisis it finds itself in, America’s own turn to protectionism has made their arguments even less compelling.

Departure from an honorable past

Perhaps what makes the predominance of neocolonial-minded Indian intellectuals in the West so tragic is the example of their ancestors. In the times of the Freedom Struggle, the role of Indian intellectuals in the West was to understand the Western World Order and seek a way out for the country’s freedom. 

For example, Krishna Menon came to the United States as UN Ambassador and tirelessly defended India’s Non-aligned foreign policy to the warmongering west. He unapologetically sided with national liberation struggles all over the world and refused to pay obeisance to the white diplomatic establishment. The Western Press lampooned him and treated as a literal savage. Time Magazine depicted him in 1962 in front of a disembodied snake charmer and snake, suggesting an oriental mix of barbarism and wiliness.⁴⁹ If Indian intellectuals are being lifted up in the West today, it is because they are singing a new tune of compromise and collaboration with the West.

Another example is that of revolutionary writer Mulk Raj Anand. Anand spent a good deal of his life in the West, but remained accountable to the Indian people. He rejected the snobbery of the London literati and grounded himself in the stories of his own people. Though he wrote in English, he told the stories that celebrated the beauty and humanity of the Indian poor, exposing the unjust imperialist world order that denied them their right to self-actualization. He was a founding member of the Progressive Writers Movement in 1938, a movement that sought to expose the legacy of colonialism, agitate for a world wide redistribution of resources, and rediscover and renew ancient traditions of justice. He explained the purpose of progressive literature:

The writers who criticise the progressives don’t understand that there is a search for the other in all writing. The young man seeks the beloved and writes about her when he cannot find her. The same is the longing of the writers who speak about the need for solidarity with other human beings from empathy. The departure brought about in poetry by Faiz is relevant. He addresses his beloved and tells her not to ask him for the old love. The personal love of the old ghazal writers has given way to love of the people.50

Unlike the Indian intelligentsia today, the Progressive Writers Movement made a commitment to the poor and oppressed grounded in love. They did not see people as an anthropological other to be “understood” and “uncovered”, but as a part of humanity that must be given the opportunity to rise out of poverty and achieve their potential. 

Indian intellectuals of yesteryear were committed not only to the poor and oppressed of their nation, but to humanity. They would have understood the profound changes that are going on in the world today. K.M. Panikkar’s Afro Asian historiography would have led him to understand that the world is passing from the epoch of Western dominance, ushered in by Vasco da Gama, to the epoch of humanity with the rise of Asia. He would reiterate the need for peace in Asia today in a time when the West tries to provoke Asians into fighting Asians by herding them into anti-China defense agreements. Rather than self-righteously denouncing “authoritarianism”, he would recognize the achievements of states like China and Vietnam in striving to eradicate poverty and Russia in shaking off Western control. He would have encouraged Indian leadership to turn East and renew its ancient ties with Asia. He would have renewed the call for a New International Economic order based on self-determination, development, cooperation, and democracy.

Finally, the Indian intelligentsia of old would have recognized that they have a duty to reject pessimism and search for possibilities in the present. As Nehru said at the Asian Relations Conference in 1947, “Strong winds are blowing all over Asia. Let us not be afraid of them but rather welcome them for only with their help can we build the new Asia of our dreams. Let us have faith in these great new forces and the things which are taking shape. Above all let us have faith in the human spirit which Asia symbolised for these long ages past.”⁵¹

The time is ripe for Indian intelligentsia to draw upon the heroism, sacrifice, and genius of the Freedom Struggle to wage a second battle for independence from neocolonialism, for world peace and for a renewed socialist economy directed for the wellbeing of the people. Only in defending and continuing our traditions of struggle can we do our duty as intellectuals to become instruments of freedom, for our people and for humanity.

---

References:

1.  Edward Said, “Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society,” in Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorthy Spivak (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. i-x.
2.  Sarkar, Sumit, “E. P. Thompson.” Economic and Political Weekly 28, no. 39 (1993): 2055–57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4400192.
3. David Ludden, Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning and the Globalization of South Asia (London, UK: Anthem, 2011), 12.
4.  Francis Wade, “Gayatri Spivak: ‘The Subaltern Speaks through Dying’,” The Nation, July 6, 2021, https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/interview-gayatri-chakravorty-spivak/.
5.  Habib, Irfan. “Economics and the Historians.” Social Scientist 37, no. 5/6 (2009): 3–20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25655995, 15.
6.  Edward Said, “Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society,” in Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorthy Spivak (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. i-x, xii.
7.  Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 139.
8.  Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography – Jawaharlal Nehru (New Delhi, India: Penguin Books, 2004), 91-2.
9.  “Gandhi, Tamils and the Satyagraha in South Africa by E.S Reddy,” Gandhi, Tamils and the Satyagraha in South Africa by E.S Reddy (South African History Online, July 16, 2013), https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/gandhi-tamils-and-satyagraha-south-africa-es-reddy.
10.  Rahmohan Gandhi, “Independence and Social Justice: The Ambedkar–Gandhi Debate.” Economic and Political Weekly 50, no. 15 (2015): 35–44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24481885.
11.  Arundhati Roy, The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and the Annihilation of Caste: The Debate between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017).
12.  Kali Charan Ghosh, Famines in Bengal: 1770-1943 (Calcutta, India: National Council of Education, 1987); Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London, UK: Verso, 2017).
13.  Winston Churchill, “Our Duty in India,” International Churchill Society, May 11, 2021, https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1930-1938-the-wilderness/our-duty-in-india/.
14.  Enuga S Reddy, “Some of Gandhi’s Early Views on Africans Were Racist. but That Was before He Became Mahatma,” The Wire, October 18, 2016, https://thewire.in/history/gandhi-and-africans.
15.  Mohandas K Gandhi, “Message to the American Negro, May 1, 1929,” MKGandhi.org, May 1, 1929 (Bombay Sarvodaya Mandal & Gandhi Research Foundation, May 1, 1929), https://www.mkgandhi.org/letters/unstates/amer_negro.htm.
16.  W.E.B. Du Bois, “Gandhi,” May 1948. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries
17.  Enuga S Reddy, “Dadoo, Gandhi, and South African Struggle,” Mainstream, September 16, 1989, pp. 23-27.
18.  Bipin Chandra, India Since Independence (New Delhi, India: Penguin Books, 2008).
19.  K. B Lall, “India and the New International Economic Order.” International Studies, 17(3–4) (1978): 435–461. https://doi.org/10.1177/002088177801700305.
20.  General Assembly resolution 3201 (S-VI), Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, (1 May 1974), available from un-documents.net/s6r3201.htm.
21.  Rohitha Naraharisetty, “Why SC, St Organizations Protest Privatizing Public Sector Jobs,” The Swaddle, September 20, 2021, https://theswaddle.com/why-sc-st-organizations-protest-privatizing-public-sector-jobs/.
22.  P. C. Joshi, “Land Reform in India and Pakistan.” Economic and Political Weekly 5, no. 52 (1970): A145–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4360876.
23.  Aditya Mukherjee, “As Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi Dealt with Some Seemingly Unsurmountable Challenges,” The Wire, November 19, 2020, https://thewire.in/politics/indira-gandhi-garibi-hatao-india-history.
24.  See Act no. 19 § (1976), https://labour.gov.in/sites/default/files/TheBondedLabourSystem(Abolition)Act1976.pdf.
25.  Bipin Chandra, India Since Independence (New Delhi, India: Penguin Books, 2008), 324.
26.  Subhomoy Bhattacharjee, “How WB,IMF Got India to Adopt Reforms in 1991,” The Indian Express, September 16, 2010, https://indianexpress.com/article/news-archive/web/how-wb-imf-got-india-to-adopt-reforms-in-1991/.
27.  Nilanjana Roy, “Arundhati Roy, Pioneer of ‘Wokeness’,” Financial Times, April 19, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/42ef5c40-2433-11e7-a34a-538b4cb30025.
28.  Nilanjana Roy, “Arundhati Roy: ‘Always Try to Negotiate Freedom. the Royalties Are Peripheral’,” Financial Times, December 6, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/04d1cf6a-da13-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b482.
29.  Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (UK:Hamish Mailton 1997; India:Penguin Books India, 2016), 4. Citations refer to 2016 Penguin edition.
30.  Khilnani, The Idea of India, 4.
31.  Ibid, 5.
32.  Ibid, 19
33.  Ibid, 26
34.  Ibid, 27
35.  Ibid, 49-55
36.  Nehru, An Autobiography, 429
37.  Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (London, UK: Pan Books, 2008), 117.
38.  Guha, 117-8.
39.  Jawaharlal Nehru, “World Peace and Cooperation (1955),” in The Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1972), pp. 64-72, 69.
40.  Jawaharlal Nehru, Text of Speech Delivered by Prime Minister Nehru at the Belgrade Conference on September 2, 1961 (Information Service of India, 1961).
41.  See Nandita Chaturvedi, “Indira Gandhi and the Struggle for Peace, Sovereignty and Socialism,” Vishwabandhu, September 3, 2022. Also see Bipan Chandra. In the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency (Penguin UK, 2017). https://www.vbjournal.org/issue-1/indira-gandhi-and-the-struggle-for-peace-sovereignty-and-socialism
42.  Mohit Sen, A Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist (New Delhi, India: Rupa & Co., 2003), 354.
43.  Mohandas K. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Electronic Book) (New Delhi:, Publications Division Government of India, 1999) Vol. 65, 12.
44.  W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: And, Color and Democracy (United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2014).
45.  Martin Luther King, “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence,” American Rhetoric, April 4, 1967, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm.
46.  Here we are referring to the recent farmers protests as well as the many protests that have taken place against privatization of banks. 
47.  Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagriya, India’s Tryst With Destiny (India: HarperCollins, 208), 56
48.  Bhagwati and Panagriya, India’s Tryst, 57
49.  “India: The Tea-Fed Tiger,” Time Magazine, February 2, 1962.
50.  Mulk Raj Anand, “Mulk Raj Anand Remembers,” Indian Literature 36, no. 2 (March 1993): pp. 176-186, 184.
51.  Jawaharlal Nehru, “Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speech at Asian Relations Conference 1947,” Tibet Sun, March 24, 1947, https://www.tibetsun.com/news/1947/03/24/pt-jawaharlal-nehrus-speech-at-asian-relations-conference-1947.