Saying It Like Mani

Aiyar’s signal contributions to Indian politics have been to keep alive two big ideas. Non-alignment is not a fashionable word any more. But in the section on foreign policy you will find its true spirit expressed as never before. This is the idea that India will be open to outside streams of thought but will,in the end,fashion its own thinking. This intellectual aspiration is now all but dead. The second is that India,while constructively engaging with great powers will,in the final analysis,have to stand on its own. In an intellectual climate when we are besotted with the idea of America as saviour,these lessons bear repeating. In a column on Chandrashekar Dasgupta’s book on Kashmir,Aiyar powerfully reminds us that the great powers’ attitude towards Kashmir has always been shaped by their own strategic interests; their construction of the issue has also been profoundly shaped by their commitments in Palestine. This is a very poignant lesson to remember as we once again prepare to negotiate with American strategic concerns in the region.

Aiyar has also been a tireless champion of the profound claim that Indian democracy needs to be deepened by making it more participatory. The excitement of this democracy is that millions now want to shape their own destiny,and we need decentralised participatory structures that can respond to this bubbling from below. Aiyar’s poignant introduction captures much of the clarity and excitement about this issue in Rajiv Gandhi’s own conception of democracy. It is such a pity that most of his party,and most of the custodians of government,do not understand what is at stake in decentralisation. And they would do well to re learn what Rajiv Gandhi had in mind.

Aiyar is,however far less convincing on his other two themes: socialism and secularism. Socialism,as lived doctrine,rather than a set of values is always marked by a touch of hypocritical chicanery. Aiyar does have a cogent defence of the idea that the state does need to do a lot of things. But in this day and age to write about socialism without reflecting at all on the failures of Indian statism and its corruption into a self-defeating populism is a bit odd. But in some ways Aiyar ought to be more wary of socialism,precisely because he is such a compelling democrat. What stands out in his democratic credentials is the powerful strand of anti-paternalism: it is simply wrong for higher levels of government to take decisions that should be taken through participation. But it is precisely this fear of paternalism that leads liberals to be suspicious of overweening state power.

The very state that says that it alone will decide what is to be produced by industry or how much,what is to be taught in our universities,will also be the state that will distrust the people’s capacity to choose wisely. Liberals and decentralisers have actually more in common than Aiyar acknowledges,and he fails to consider the possibility that it is precisely statism that came in the way of empowering people.

On secularism he is less convincing for a different reason. His attacks on the BJP and many woolly-minded colleagues in his own party are spot-on. His own values are cogently defensible and ones to which sensible constitutionalists should subscribe. But on this topic,his characteristic powers of self-reflection are less evident. Secularism becomes so much a slogan for partisan politics that it skirts some of the more difficult questions. Why did the Hindutva become such a genuinely powerful social movement? Simply assigning blame to Advani’s yatras is not enough. A more brutally political way of putting this question would be this. Even when Congress has everything going for it,why does it leave the country divided and state institutions corrupted and weak? It can be said of Aiyar what was said of Burke: he gave to party what was meant for mankind. One can only hope this brilliance will return to its larger purpose.