Opinion Yogendra Yadav writes: Where are our political thinkers?

Something similar has happened to the great tradition of modern Indian political thought that nourished politics of colonial and post-colonial India through the 20th century. While everyone notes and comments on the decline of political morals, we tend to miss out on something that is no less significant — the emaciation of our political vision, the shrinkage in the vocabulary of politics, the withering away of our political understanding, the poverty of political judgement and the recession in the agenda for political action. The river of ideas that nourished politics has suddenly dried up. In a stylised way, you could call it the sudden death of modern Indian political thought.

As with all movements in the world of ideas, it is hard to put a date to this “death”. But we can place it somewhere in the first quarter of post-colonial India. Just recall the number and range of political thinkers active in 1947. It’s not just Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar that we all remember. There was a whole galaxy of thinkers, across the ideological spectrum. We had intellectual giants like M N Roy and Sri Aurobindo who had retired from active politics. Within those in active politics, we had Maulana Abul Kalam Azad within the Congress, Acharya Narendra Deva, Jayaprakash Narayan and Rammanohar Lohia from among the socialists, S A Dange and P C Joshi among the communists, Ramasamy Naicker Periyar for radical social justice, C Rajagopalachari from the economic right, and V D Savarkar and Maulana Maududi representing the pro-Hindu and pro-Muslim end of the spectrum.

You may agree or disagree with their ideas, but you cannot deny that they were all political thinkers. They were, or had been, political activists, but their political practice was anchored in a vision of future India. While engaged in everyday politics, they were also engaged in thinking, speaking, writing about issues beyond quotidian partisanship. They were fully immersed in India, but deeply informed of the developments across the world. They read and wrote in English but were deeply anchored in the world of Indian languages. They had strikingly different takes on modernity and tradition, but collectively they shaped a very Indian — and very desi — modernity. They all created a pool of political imagination that shaped our Constitution, divergent political ideologies and competing political practices.

Within the first 25 years after Independence, this tradition suddenly evaporated. By the early 1970s, almost all the thinkers mentioned above had died, leaving feeble ideological legacies, if at all. Political thinking was still dominated by political leaders, though they were not a patch on the body of thought available in 1947. Jayaprakash Narayan’s concept of “total revolution” remained as the last flicker of socialist imagination; Charu Majumdar’s was among the final creative interpretations of Marxism. Vinoba Bhave was among the few notable, if one-sided, inheritors of Gandhi, M S Golwalkar collected the remaining bunch of “Hindutva” thoughts, while Charan Singh articulated the vision of rural-agrarian India. This list may be incomplete, but is surely not off the mark.

Cut to the end of the century and the remainder of the political activist-thinkers also disappeared, with the exception of Kishen Pattnayak, Sachchidananda Sinha, Ramdayal Munda, Dharam Pal and B D Sharma who remained outside mainstream politics. Since then, we don’t have, in any meaningful sense, a body of political thought that reflects on and, in turn, shapes the world of political action.

To speak of the atrophy of political imagination or, more boldly, of the ‘death’ of modern Indian political thought is not to say that we don’t have brilliant minds, thinkers and writers any more. We do, perhaps more than before. But politics, at least in the narrow sense, is not at the centre of their thinking. The various strands of political thinking that still float around do not constitute a coherent conversation, a vibrant contestation, a meaningful dialogue that can connect to the world of politics. There are honourable exceptions. Critiques of the dominant model of development, explorations in the pluriverse of alternatives and occasional debates in feminist and Ambedkarite circles keep the tradition of political thinking alive.

By and large, political thinking was gradually relegated to the world of academia. This produced some brilliant political theorists like Rajni Kothari, D L Sheth, Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, Sudipta Kaviraj and Rajeev Bhargava (and some sharp commentators who write on these pages), but it is safe to say that much of their ideas have not left a deep impression on the world of political practice. Barring such exceptions, the take-over of political thinking by the formal discipline of political science was an intellectual as well as a political disaster. Disconnected from involvement in the world of politics and any language other than English, the academic mode of thinking about politics is geared towards the demands and fads of global academia, indifferent to political consequences.

The sorry state of our politics today is in some measure the result of this atrophy. Reviving and reinvigorating this tradition of modern Indian political thought is a precondition to reclaiming our republic.

Yadav is member, Swaraj India and National Convenor of Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan