Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Aligning State with religion like Sri Lanka, a 16th century European idea, fraught with dangerous consequences: Prof. Rajeev Bhargava

Delivering the Foundation Day Lecture of A. N. Sinha Institute of Social Studies (ANSISS) on "Asoka and the Roots of India's Democratic Pluralism" at Ashok Rajpath, Gandhi Maidan, Patna, Prof. Rajeev Bhargava, the author of Between Hope and Despair:100 Ethical reflections on Contemporary India began with his response to what Prof. Faizan Mustafa the Vice-Chancellor, Chanakya National Law University (CNLU), Patna concluded with regard to accepting Hinduism to be the dominant spiritual heritage of India for the sake of social harmony. 
 
Prof. Bhargava observed: "I think his conclusion is one which is in despair rather than in any hope that we should declare and in effect, we should have Hinduism as informally or formally the primary religious tradition of the country. That's another way of saying its kind of a soft Hindutva line. I would just say that the example of Sril Lanka should really frighten us. Sri Lanka, in 1956 declared Sinhalese to be national language of the country. In the late 1950s, Buddhism  was more or less the declared State religion of Sri Lanka.We know of the havoc it caused in Sri Lanka, a rapidly advancing economy, an extremely literate society, a very progressive society with a number fine academic institutions suffered a major setback because of the civil war that occurred in Sri Lanka beginning with 1980s. So, I think the way to establish social harmony is by giving recognition, perhaps, in some proportion, but giving recognition to all faiths, by faiths I just don't mean only religions but also recognition to reason which is Nehru for example committed himself to. Reason works only when you have faith in reason. Reason does not work automatically. There are lots of areas which will not be explored by reason unless we have faith in the success of reason. So, lets not oppose reason and faith. Reason is also among the many faiths that we have. And some recognition must be given by the State particularly in an era where belonging to the nation-state is one of the primary belongings of a human being and any form or any mode by which you alienate people by making the State belong to one community is not going to be good for civil friendship, it will not be good for citizenship equality and it will not be good for social or religio harmony between religious communities." 
He added: "We can go further back. The idea that a State is aligned to a religion goes back to 16th century Europe. In 16th century Europe, you might remember, it was fraught with so-called wars of religion. At that time one of the solutions that was adopted was that in each territory the king had to proclaim what his religion was and then all persons living under the territory had also embraced the religion of the king.The formula was one king, one faith, one law. This created religiously homogeneous communities but it was impossible to create these religiously homogeneous communities to have this strategic solution without expulsion and without extermination of large number of groups that did not submit to the religion of the king. So that is one of the consequences of this whole idea that there should be a State religion. It was accompanied by massacres and by massive expulsions. In fact the whole of the United States of America it had people who were dissenters from various parts of Europe and particularly from what we now know as United Kingdom or Great Britain. So, religious homogeneity and State religion was created in a very unethical and undesirable ways which brought a lot of grief to society. I think accepting this idea is fraught with lot danger....we are all inheritors of certain ancient cultures....all of them in some ways shaped the ethos of this country....Cultures are not uniformly good and cultures are not uniformly morally worthy.There is deep ambiguity in cultures and religions It is with this ambivalence that we have to contend and its is with a ethical direction that we need to bring about changes in our own cultures." He underlined that his lecture is not on secularism but on democratic pluralism.
 
Prof. Bhargava was responding to Prof. Mustafa's advocacy of failed Sri Lankan Buddhist model which has adopted Buddhism to be a State religion. Prof. Mustafa said, "Social harmony is far more important than whether the State is religion neutral or not. Therefore, if social harmony can be achieved by declaring Hindusim to be the dominant spiritual heritage of India, I don't mind it." He felt that the model of separation between the State and religion has failed and we should think of the jurisdictional model "just like the United Kingdom where the king is the defender of faith, head of the Anglican Church or like Sri Lanka where Buddhism dominant religious heritage, it has been recognised constitutionally. I still feel Indians don't want to go the Pakistan way or the Saudi Arabia way. We don't want that kind of relationship between the State and religion but  if we recognise Hindusim to be the dominant spiritual heritage of India it will be historically and culturally correct and if it can built peace in our society and this excessive religiosity and use of religion in politics can come to an end, this is not a big price to pay." 
 
The complete text of his lecture on "ASOKA AND THE ROOTS OF INDIA’S DEMOCRATIC PLURALISM"

This essay interrogates the resources in the ancient Indian tradition for the making of democratic pluralism and the values undergirding it. (As I will show in India democracy and pluralism are constitutively linked and therefore sometimes I will
simply call this tradition, democratic rather than democratic pluralist) It argues that contemporary Indian politics, thinking, and political imaginary are influenced by two major but opposed traditions. One, which I shall not discuss below, consists of a masculine warrior ethic driven by realpolitik that directly or indirectly reinforces the hierarchical Dharmasastric worldview. This is a conservative, antidemocratic tradition that has no hesitation in setting aside higher moral law or values and in using violence for securing and maintaining power. The second which will be centre of my attention is shaped by a deep-rooted pluralist imaginary that valorizes mutual acceptance and civility between differing religio-philosophical groups and endorses government by discussion rather than violence. Its source lies in the Asokan social and political ethic, which is grounded in the pacification of politics. Twentieth-century Indian leaders like Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Nehru reconstructed it and can be viewed as founders of what in post independence India became a democratic pluralist tradition. While a fragile and delicate democratic order based on this ethically inclusive and pluralist tradition was founded in 1950, the other anti-democratic tradition, driven by political violence and grounded in hierarchy, formally opposed to kingship but steeped in the culture that fosters it— which I call the antidemocratic tradition— continues to thrive and currently appears to have gained greater currency.

A preliminary remark is in order before exploring the issue further. Any textual material on democracy in the modern sense of the term is unlikely to be available in any ancient or medieval tradition. Nor is there is a linear tradition with a continuous history of democratic ideas. Therefore, I will not interpret this project as an exploration of a straightforward history of these modern democratic ideas and their relationship to morality. Instead, I have undertaken a brief but complex history of ideas and practices within monarchies, oligarchies, and republics that retrospectively were recognized as integral to a tradition of what I have here called a thin or thick version of democracy. My approach here is based on the following. At crucial junctures in history, certain conceptual spaces open up that, under certain conditions and provided we build an appropriate narrative, can be seen to contribute to the growth of modern complex ideas such as democracy or secularism. These conceptual spaces enable multiple historical agents to imagine new concepts, provided they have the motivation to do so. 

A conceptual space may open up and remain wholly unutilized for long periods of time, sometimes so long that it may entirely recede out of our background and be entirely forgotten. The important thing is that they are available in the conceptual stock as a resource, for use, dissemination, and under certain conditions mobilization.

At key moments in the history of a society, all these elements drawn from different periods of history and therefore from different conceptual spaces may be forged together to form a broad conception of, say, democracy. It follows that to understand the relationship between democracy and Indian traditions, one must unpack democracy, break it down into its constituent elements, and conduct a study of the history of these elements, taken discreetly, and explore if all these features are available in our traditions. Moreover, the complex history of democracy in India cannot be written without its knotted relationship with those elements within Indian that contested and opposed it. Therefore, what is attempted here is my own reconstruction of the history of those conceptual spaces/generating practices that may have existed within nondemocratic political formations but which, when combined with other historically discrete practices, go on to form, under different conditions and amid radically opposing ideas, a recognizable tradition of democracy in India. Of these two broad traditions, as I said, I shall focus largely on the democratic tradition and within it on the Asokan social and political ethic that makes, in my view, the largest contribution to it. 

Crucial to this essay is the following understanding of the term democracy, which may, at least partly, have a distinctive Indian flavor. First, all persons living in a well-defined territory, regardless of their class, race, gender, language, or religion, are taken to be citizens, that is, members of a political community. Modern democracies are definitionally inclusive, not always in fact but in their ideals. Second, all citizens are equal. Two features of this conception are integral to democracy: 
(a) a commitment to pluralism and 
(b) the principle of non-exclusion and discrimination. This maximum inclusiveness also entails that the state cannot have a strong alliance with any one linguistic, religious, or ethnic group. Furthermore, democracies presuppose 
(c) the maximum possible pacification of politics—political power is transferred peacefully, not violently—and 
(d) the presence of an open public sphere
where representatives are chosen or issues freely discussed, debated, and contested.
(e) Such free exchange of views tolerates dissent, and those with different viewpoints are viewed only as temporary adversaries not permanent enemies. 
And (f) there is a willingness to negotiate and compromise in the interest of fraternity among citizens with radically different conceptions of the good. Points (e) and (f) require the virtues of self-restraint (samyama) and open-mindedness, the ability to listen to many (bahushruta). Without the cultivation of these virtues, civility, a central feature of democratic culture, is absent and democracies are severely endangered. 
Finally, (g) the effective exercise of one’s capacities as a citizen requires that everyone has a modicum of material well-being. While economic equality is not necessary for democracy, a modicum of material well-being is. A connection exists between democracy and the everyday good of ordinary people. If so, while the idea of democracy has been around for more than two millennia, it did not have a positive valence until the advent of modernity. By this criterion, democracy was not realized anywhere in the world until the twentieth century. There was no real democracy in Athens because women and slaves were never counted as citizens. 

All contemporary democracies have had at least some elements of the above mentioned constitutive features in their pasts. Writing the history of democracies involves making a convincing case for their presence in the social and political traditions on which they draw.

An overview of the anti-democratic tradition
 
I begin with a quick overview of the antidemocratic tradition in India. Three features mark it. First, a warrior ethic that glorifies violence. This is already available in the oldest text in the tradition, the Rig Veda, where Indra, the god of sky, rain, and thunder, is supreme. Through sheer brawn, he pushes apart the world into two halves, Heaven and Earth, releases primordial waters, and splits open the cosmic mountain so as to free imprisoned sunlight and cattle. As a result, he is also the god of war. The language used to glorify Indra is extremely masculine and violent. With his ojas, a Sanskrit term signifying both physical strength and the power of rulership and domination, Indra smashes and pulverizes rivals. He destroys, crushes, splits apart, slays, and breaks an enemy’s rage. Rigvedic poets portray Indra’s terrifying demeanor and unbridled, brute force by way of sexually charged metaphors involving male dominance and female subservience. Indra’s physical act of forcing enemies down corresponds to a political act of subjugation and deference. By directing Indra to conquer the universe and conduct cattle raids for profit, Rigvedic poet-priests clearly propagate a violent masculine ideology—a Rigvedic warrior ethic in which bravery, toughness, and brute strength are celebrated as core components of manhood and in which men who flex their muscles in cattle-raiding expeditions and open warfare are praised and honored. The ideal men who accept Indra as their role model are called (big/strong man; champion), signifying one with an expert martial and political role. That this warrior ethic is gloriously amoral, exalts ruthlessness, brooks no conception of justice, and permits the use of any means to achieve self-aggrandizing political goals hardly needs underscoring. To take just one example from modern Indian thought, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the principal architect of Hindutva, claims that Ashoka’s turn to nonviolence ultimately weakened India’s independence at that time, making it susceptible to foreign invasions and therefore was “anti-national.”

Second, amoral pursuit of earthly goods, particularly political power. The Arthasastra, composed between the first century BCE and first century CE is the most well-known political treatise in this tradition, As Patrick Olivelle puts it, the Arthasastra is a comprehensive ideal-typical text addressing an absolute monarch who wished to achieve this-worldly success, covering a wide array of topics such as governance, law, economy, warfare, and foreign relations. It is centrally preoccupied with the concept of coercive law or authority (danda). In the Arthasastra, rules of statecraft have priority even over the Dharmic varna order; to secure public order, the king is justified in even disregarding Brahminical immunities. Indeed, the pursuit of artha (worldly success) is prior to all else. What we get from the Arthasastra is an articulation of a domain of politics that is abstracted from morality, religion, and metaphysics. From it, the antidemocratic tradition of modern India has derived much. 

For instance, Savarkar combines violence with amoral ruthlessness in the political domain. He argues that warfare in ancient India followed the principles of just war, but only as long as it was honoured by both contending parties. But wars, he argues, cannot always be fought with a common understanding of the rules of engagement, or principles of dharmayuddha. In some contexts, Hindus must adopt alternative forms of warfare in order to defeat the invader-enemy. Such wars had to be unjust. Savarkar writes, “Were a serpent (an inveterate national enemy) to come with a view to bite the motherland, he should be smashed into pieces with a surprise attack, deceit or cunning or in any other way possible.” For Savarkar, if the end in one’s view is just, then any means, no matter how ruthless or unjust, can be adopted to achieve it. This is how one must fight British imperialists. Arguably, this ruthlessness is also to be adopted by Hindus toward their most intimate enemy, the Muslim.
 
Third, the Brahminical notion of Dharma. Patrick Olivelle mentions that in response to the decentering of Vedic Brahminism by Buddhist and Asokan ethic, the Brahmins reappropriated and formulated a new comprehensive idea of Dharma that brought together under one system the ethical necessity of ritual sacrifice in the maintenance of the cosmic order and the fourfold, deeply hierarchical social order consisting of Brahmins (the priestly class), Kshatriya (warriors), Vaisya (the agrarian and mercantile class), and Shudras (the service class, which at the lowest rung included the untouchables). In the Manava-Dharmasastra, the duty of the Kshatriya king, (rajadharma) is to observe Brahminical rituals and enforce the deeply inegalitarian varna order. Large sections of the two major Indian epics also appear to incorporate this Brahminical view. Following this logic, a deeply inegalitarian, antidemocratic strand in Indian politics seeks a strict demarcation between the social and political domains and substantive political deregulation in religious matters. This is entirely consistent with the demand to preserve caste hierarchies, to deny “lower castes” the status of equal citizens, and to oppose women’s entry into the decision-making process and is therefore a fertile ground of antidemocratic thinking.
 
Restrictive Equality in the Antidemocratic Tradition
Kingship (in any of three major varieties—autocracy, morally self-limiting empires, or monarchies that submit to Brahminical Dharma) was not the only locus of governmental authority in ancient Indian texts. The other loci of authority existed in political forms where power was shared among a ruling elite or group of chieftains (the ganas and sanghas). The term gana was used as part of two compound terms: gana-sangha and gana-rajya. Sangha meant an assembly and rajya governance or the government. Gana, on the other hand, referred to all those who claim to have equal status. These gana-based polities, different from kingdoms, were egalitarian in the narrow sense that members of the ruling clans treated each other as equals. The historian Romila Thapar refers to them as oligarchies, or oligarchic/aristocratic clan-republics.
 
These gana-sanghas were of two kinds. The first, deliberative assemblies did not have much role in actual decision-making. The king had the option of consulting them. At best, these acted as advisory or judicial bodies. The second appear to have had a greater role in decision-making. Three features characterized them: first, all heads of families met mandatorily in the assembly to discuss and debate matters of public importance. There were few restrictions on the expression of independent opinions of individual members and a greater tolerance for views different from one’s own. 

Second, if a unanimous decision could not be reached, the matter was put to vote.
 
Third, from among members of the assembly, a chief (raja) was chosen to lead. In some passages in the Rig Veda and the Atharva Veda, the king owed his position to the consent of important members of the political community (the extension of the modern concept of franchise to the entire population of the republic would be inaccurate and ahistorical). Qualities like physical strength, oratory skills, shared beliefs and practices with members of the political community, and leadership in warfare were considered favourable. This office was not hereditary. It did not pass from one generation to another within the same clan. Given this, the historian Jagdish Sharma refers to them as “government by discussion.” Despite many democracy-resembling features, they don’t count as democracies largely because they worked with highly restrictive ideas of equality. To take just one example, women were never allowed to be members of any form of deliberative assembly, or even be witness to the workings of the sabha. They were permitted only to attend vidhata, religious assemblies that served no political function.

Given this, it is not surprising that the ideology undergirding gana-rajyas—the fourth feature— is incorporated within the modern antidemocratic tradition. For example, though Savarkar recognized and glorified these clan-republics, he was keener on emphasizing their militaristic dimension. In his account, all citizens making decisions about their community were militarily trained and ready to go to war and sacrifice their lives. While a militarized citizenry is entirely compatible with ancient republics, they don’t sit easily with democracies. Nor is a democratized warrior ethic compatible with modern democratic thinking. But there is a deeper problem with Savarkar’s ideas. In his thought, the demos morphs into an ethnos. By Savarkar’s proclamation, only someone who is born in the subcontinent and whose religion too is born here is a Hindu. All others such as Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Parsis are outsiders. The entire subcontinent for Savarkar belongs to these Hindus, and to become a self-governing republic they must be ready for a war, even a civil war, with all outsiders (non-Hindus) living in the same territory. Elements of antidemocratic imagination come into Savarkar’s thought from both his valorization of violence and the reduction of demos into ethnos.
 
Together, these four strands give raise to an amoral, violent, hypermasculine, exclusionary politics in order to frequently, though not always, maintain an inegalitarian social order. These strands constitute what I call India’s antidemocratic tradition.
 
Democratic Elements in Asoka’s Dhamma

Intertwined with the antidemocratic tradition, shaped by its response to it, and challenging it is the democratic tradition in India, inspired largely by Ashoka’s political ethic, and to which I now turn. Among the features that transformed republics into democracies was the rejection of the warrior ethic. In the initial period of his rule, Asoka himself exemplified this ethic with its masculine virtues. Asoka’s principal contribution to what eventually became India’s democratic tradition came in the later part of his life. The turning point in Asoka’s life came in the eighth year of his rule, after the war waged on Kalinga. The scale of wanton destruction at Kalinga left Asoka distraught and changed his perspective on war. Henceforth, Asoka publicly denounced the very idea of glorifying continuous conquest. By doing so, he sowed the seeds of the pacification of politics.
 
It is best to distinguish first the project of social equality that treats people as equals in the social domain and political equality that aims to distribute power to all. Second, political equality might be restrictive or inclusive. The gana-sanghas mentioned above had equality among elites. This is restricted equality. Democracy, on the other hand, presupposes inclusive equality— everyone in the territory must have a share in power and at the very minimum a claim to be treated impartially by the political ruler. Elements of inclusive equality (social and political) are found in Asokan inscriptions. The principal constituent of his political Dhamma is that the king’s main calling was not to conquer territories and show valour on the battlefield but instead to elevate life-sustaining goods of ordinary persons above power, conquest, and glory. Pillar Edict 6 clarifies that central to the king’s Dhamma is material welfare of his subjects: Sarvajana, sarvaloka hita (welfare of all living beings in this world and hereafter). It is part of Asoka’s Dhamma, his moral vision that all live and travel in comfort, be happy, and enjoy material benefits. War, conquest, and the pursuit of glory upset both the physical security of humans and the valid pursuit of these need-based goods. Moreover, a government run by Dhamma must be for all his subjects.

Quite clearly, the Asokan political ethic did not have a conception of citizenship, particularly one of active citizenship. Yet, Asoka appears not to discriminate between his subjects based on any of their ascriptive qualities. Those who needed care from the ruler included women, slaves, servants, and the disabled. The seeds of an inclusive polity in which all subjects are treated without discrimination lie in this vision. Of course, an expansive conception of inclusive subjecthood can sit quite comfortably with a highly restricted idea of a political community of decision-makers. Yet, it can also be argued that the path from severely restricted ideas of subjecthood to an inclusive polity of citizens goes through an inclusive conception of subjecthood. This idea of inclusiveness is based on the dignity and worth of all living beings. It is in this vein that Asoka takes it on himself to plant mango groves, dig wells, build rest houses along main routes, and grow banyan trees on the road in order to provide shade to both humans and animals. The inclusion of animals is extremely interesting. With respect to many life-sustaining goods, there is no real distinction between humans and animals. Animals and humans alike need drinking water, food, protection from the sun, and medical treatment. For Asoka then, dhammic government must commit itself also to animal welfare. Asoka espouses not just human universalism but a universalism across species.
 
Consistent with his rejection of the warrior ethic is Asoka’s declaration in Rock Edict 8 that instead of pleasure tours for hunting, the King must undertake dhammic tours. The key feature of these journeys is that he gets an opportunity to conduct discussions in moral assemblies and have deliberations, dialogues, and question-and-answer sessions on Dhamma. These are the vehicles of education in Dhamma, an important component of his political morality. Formal education needs specialists, a new class of intellectuals employed and trained by the ruler’s administration, who explicate the content of Dhamma and explain it in moral assemblies.

Asoka wished that the appeal of Dhamma would be restricted not only to elites but would also inspire ordinary folks. It must become part of their common sense, must penetrate popular imagination, take hold of the entire social imaginary. Dhamma is a sociopolitical project, a kind of mission to transform popular consciousness. This means that moral educators, intellectuals, must take Dhamma everywhere within the kingdom to help raise popular ethical awareness. Engraving and inscribing Dhamma is one way to realize this mission, but the message also needs to travel to other countries. For this, travelling messengers are required, and Asoka arranged for such trips. Thus, by formulating Dhamma and elaborating how it is to be realized, Asoka attempts to reshape the then existing Brahmin-Kshatriya culture.

Attention must also be drawn to other ideas crucial to the theme of democracy and morality: the necessity of persuasion, impartiality, and law that constrains kings. First, while subjects owe obedience to the king’s commands, which in turn flow from Dhamma, Pillar Edict 7 makes it clear that compliance to Dhamma must arise from njjhati (persuasion) and not niyama (law). Everyone must follow Dhamma out of an inner disposition to comply— one’s conscience, as it were. Second, Asoka’s pillar inscription 7 speaks of the importance of impartiality of judges and public officials. All litigants must be treated fairly. This is as close as the ancient tradition gets to the idea of equality before law. Third, before Asoka, right and wrong actions were possibly determined by the king himself. The laws were applied not consistently but arbitrarily. Thus rajas rewarded or punished others according to their personal interests or whims. By fashioning the idea of Dhamma, Asoka attempts to tame the institution of kingship itself, to contain the absolute exercise of power by the king. Dhamma is a set of fundamental moral principles above even the emperor.

Participation
 
Unsurprisingly, full political participation, one of the key values of thick democracy, is not available in the texts of Indian tradition. Yet discursive engagement with one another in the public domain, without which democratic participation is impossible, is extensively discussed in Asokan inscriptions. For Asoka wants a change not only in the warrior ethic but also to what might be called the word-warrior ethic, in the reckless display of manliness in verbal battles, in hostility conveyed through words, in attempts at braggadocio, and in using language to humiliate others. By advising against himsa (violence) through vaaccha (speech), Asoka appears to introduce the idea of civility. He is keen to prevent physical violence and to inhibit any assault on human dignity.

This is particularly evident in what might be called the social dimension of Dhamma, in his articulation of intergroup morality—what we owe each other as religio-philosophical groups. In its social dimension, Dhamma consists of a specific form of civility and self-restraint, samyama. Society in Asokan times had deep religio-philosophical diversity. Given this diversity, profound disagreements and conflicts were commonplace between different religio-philosophical groups (pasamdas): ritual-oriented Vedic Brahmins, philosophically minded Brahmins, and antiritualists such as Ajivikas, Jains, and Buddhists, who also differed from one another on issues of ontology and morality. Space does not allow me to go into the details of these differences, but it is clear that for a ruler with imperial ambitions, it was important to find a way to enable all pasamdas to live together. What, despite profound differences in worldviews, could the basis of such coexistence be? For Asoka, such coexistence is impossible without shared values, what he called the saara (essentials) that constitute the common ground of these conflicting conceptions.

What then are these essentials? The fundamental principle of Dhamma in its social dimension is vacaguti, variously interpreted as restraint on speech or control on tongue. Why give such importance to speech? In a context of intense word wars or verbal battles, speech had to be reined in. The question is what kind? Edict 12 says that speech that without reason disparages other pasamdas must be restrained. Speech critical of others may be freely enunciated only if we have good reasons to do so. However, even when we have good reasons to be critical, one may do so only on appropriate occasions, and even when the occasion is appropriate, one must never be immoderate. Critique should never belittle or humiliate others. Thus, there is a deep, complex, and layered restraint on one’s verbal speech against others. Let us call it other-related self-restraint. However, the edicts do not stop at this. They go on to say that one must not eulogize one’s own pasamda. Undue praise of one’s own pasamda, without good reason, is as morally objectionable as unmerited criticism of the faith of others. Moreover, the edicts add that even when there is good reason to praise one’s own pasamda, it too should be done only on appropriate occasions, and even on those occasions, never immoderately. As bad as blaming other pasamdas out of devotion to one’s own pasamdas is undue or excessive self-glorification. By offending and thereby estranging others, one’s capacity for mutual interaction and possible influence is undermined. Thus, there must equally be multitextured, ever deepening restraint for oneself. Let this be self-related self-restraint.

For Asoka, hate speech and self-glorification produce discord and dogma. He wishes instead to advance mutual understanding and appreciation, for which it is better to have samovaya (concourse), an assembly of pasamdas where they can hear one another out, communicate with one another. This may not always generate agreement, but it certainly makes them bahushruta, that is, “one who listens to all,” the perfect listener, or one who hears or has heard the many and thereby become open-minded. In this way pasamdas get an opportunity to tease out the impurities and imperfections from their own collective ethical self-understanding. This is the only path to atma pasamda vaddhi (an enhancement of ethical self-understanding) of one’s own pasamda and to par pasamda vaddhi, growth in the ethical self-understanding of others. It also advances saravadhi (the essentials of all religio-philosophical views). The edicts here imply that the ethical self-understanding of pasamdas is not static but constantly evolving, and such progress is crucially dependent on mutual conversation and dialogue. Censuring others without good reason or immoderately interrupts this process and, apart from damaging Dhamma, diminishes mutual growth of individual pasamdas. In another passage, Asoka says that those seeking improvement in their own ethical views should not only communicate with others with different ethical perspectives in order to learn from them but even follow their precepts and “obey” them. This form of practical engagement introduces an ethically charged experiential dimension.
 
In my view, the most important precondition of Indian democracy, that which played a pivotal role in its formation, is India’s religio-philosophical pluralism. For religious pluralism to grow, three conditions must be absent. First, explicit or implicit theologies that encourage the idea of true and false doctrines. One implication of this is that there are permanent enemies, a strong deterrent to free discussion and openness. Second, the existence of a tight connection between ethics of self-fulfilment (paths to salvation or ultimate self-realization) and norms of social interactions; one is not permitted to choose any path to self-realization. A particular path entails specific social obligations dictated by common norms. Third, a close connection between the state and a particular ethical community and its beliefs. None of these conditions obtained with any degree of stability in most regions in India. Conditions undermining religious diversity were not allowed to deepen. 

It is true that toleration was not always intrinsic to each and every individual philosophical doctrine. However, all of them drew on a common understanding that imposed limits on the temptation to get rid of one another. The same common understanding constrained the state to provide exclusive support to any one of them. In short, groups lived relatively peacefully with each other and Indian states in the past encouraged such coexistence because they all shared the same moral and social imaginary. This imaginary was available not in theories or doctrines but in circulating stories, practical political ethics, theatrical performances, and other forms of popular culture. It was also present in the “high arts” and occasionally even in religious literature.

It is important to grasp the subtlety of this point. It can be no one’s argument that an endorsement of religious diversity results in a conflict-free harmony. Diversity is always accompanied from time to time with conflict. In diverse peaceful societies, such conflict does not always lead to violence. Nor are peaceful societies completely devoid of religious violence. But, it appears, it was never allowed to become permanent or persistent.

It is also not anyone’s claim that hatred and demonization of the other did not occur at all. The motives that propelled enmity between groups, therefore, did not flow from rigid categorical identities. Hostilities and demonization were not necessarily irreversible but eventually contained by the presence of a moral pluralist imaginary, reined in by an ethos that encouraged acceptance, accommodation, and even respect for the other. In this widely shared pluralist imaginary, no perspective was completely true or false. No group was completely wrong or right. No ethical community was permanently tainted by error. Most religio-philosophical worldviews in India stopped short of being radically exclusivist, always leaving a door open for including what in other traditions would have become the radical other. While those at the extremes of a continuum saw themselves as rivals, barely any difference was identifiable between, say, moderate astiks (those who affirmed the Vedas) and nastiks (those who negated them).

To sum up, Asoka in the third century BCE articulated a socio-political ethic that gradually receded into the background to become a social imaginary shaping the thoughts and actions of individuals, communities, and political rulers. One should not infer from this that other nonpluralist ideas, whether articulated or not, did not challenge or undermine this pluralist imaginary. Yet many of its constituent elements were powerful enough to meet this challenge and from the late nineteenth century fed into what eventually became a vibrant tradition of democracy.  India has witnessed a movement for dignity and rough social equality from time to time (however, this has never taken the shape of material or economic equality). However, an egalitarian political movement was born only with serious claims of independence from British rule. It is of course true that a push toward some form of social equality is embedded in the fabric of the Indian social imaginary (shaking the varna system, fighting intermediaries between the individual and the god, fighting for religious equality, caste rebellion). The demand for political equality, however, has not arisen from within the Hindu tradition.

Leaders such as Nehru recognized the existence of “tribal republics” in the past and viewed them “as a kind of primitive democracy, though, as in Greece, it was probably confined to the upper classes.” Yet he understood that democratic republics were different from both monarchies and oligarchic or aristocratic republics. In 1950 India proclaimed itself to be a sovereign democratic republic. The core idea of a republic—government by free and open discussion by citizens and regulated by law—was retained but was made inclusive with the help of the adjective democratic. Nehru understood that inclusive equality was at the heart of the democratic imagination.  Political equality was also interpreted in two ways in the early twentieth century. 

Broadly speaking, Hindus endorsed but Muslim elites rejected the individualistic construal of political equality and the idea of representation based on it. They were keen on parity between Hindus and Muslims, which they believed was possible only when the votes of individual Muslims carried more weight than the votes of individual Hindus. They also sought community-specific political rights such as a separate electorate for Muslims. Without these special measures, they felt, real equality or democracy remained out of reach.

The great leader Ambedkar toyed with similar ideas. He believed that through equal citizenship rights, caste hierarchies could be dismantled over time. However, all historically disadvantaged castes, that is, those who were on the margins or excluded from the caste system, needed special representative rights, roughly in proportion to their population. While the individual subject was the eventual holder of citizenship rights, an egalitarian order cannot be successfully achieved without granting special caste-specific rights to the historically disadvantaged ati-shudras, or Dalits. A simple system of political representation will generate neither effective political equality nor social equality. In the constitution of India, these Dalit-specific political rights were included as a temporary measure to be re-examined every ten years. Since caste hierarchies haven’t disappeared, these special political rights continue to be retained in the constitution.

Modern democratic imagination in India then has been shaped by this democracy-facilitating tradition for which the public activity of engagement, discussion, protest, negotiation with the radically different other, and collective decision-making requires a commitment to some values and the cultivation of civic virtues. There was common agreement among the Congress leaders of India’s anti-colonial struggle that violence and force had no place in politics.
 
Gandhi, probably the tallest leader of modern India, fought the empire by claiming truth on his side, with the belief that this fight could not be successful if violence was deployed for this end. Not only Gandhi, but also Nehru and Ambedkar are the inheritors of the tradition of peaceful and nonviolent politics. Following the later Asokan political ethic, they reject the warrior ethic completely, as they do the distinction between friend and enemy. In politics there are adversaries who, apart from their interests, have reason and conscience. For Gandhi in particular, if truth is on one’s side and if one has the collective strength to fight for and insist on it, the adversary’s conscience and reason can be awakened, and he can be made to submit to one’s just demands. The only violence permitted by Gandhi’s philosophy is violence to oneself, or self-sacrifice. Gandhi’s satyagraha, a form of nonviolent, public protest, took inspiration from the Asokan tradition in making samyama or self-restraint one of its key values. The defining principles of satyagraha in terms of the orientation, mechanism, and dispositions are “a force containing within itself seeds of progressive self-restraint” and thereby the capacity to attenuate coercion and escalation in politics. Gandhi was acutely aware that an unrestrained or egotistic politics of conviction was especially liable to engender logic of escalation. Echoing Asoka’s thoughts on self-praise and blaming others, he insisted that nonviolence could not be a movement of “brag, bluster, or bluff” but rather one premised on the cultivation of “unobtrusive humility.” Not bravado or brinkmanship but the performance of self-effacing and self-sacrificing acts would do the political work of demonstrating firmly held political convictions and compelling attention to them. Nonviolence avoids condemnation in the form of criticism and judgment of the actions of others since “the more it speaks and argues, the less effective it becomes.” Gandhi also appears to emphasize Bhavashuddhi: purity of motive implied removing all traces of anger and resentment toward one’s opponent, as well as personal vanity and ambition vis-à-vis the ends of action, so as not to invite bitterness and antipathy. Here we see the central mechanisms of satyagraha mobilized toward creating the conditions for mutual respect, trust, and equality.
 
Gandhi also emphasized the importance of the relationship between self-restraint and religious freedom. Living and engaging peacefully with others with different religious views is crucial to an inclusivist, pluralist democracy. This requires restraint on the full exercise of one’s freedom. But this restraint must come not from the state but the self. Gandhi considers the restrained conduct of individual adherents of a religion to be germane not just for determining the goodness of a religion but also for considering the appropriateness of collective attempts to defend religion. Gandhi advised that adherents of a faith cannot indulge in slander of another faith. “No propaganda can be allowed which reviles other religions. For, that would be negation of toleration. The best way of dealing with such propaganda is to publicly condemn it.” Arguably, the commencement of relations of friendship, which in turn could entail an accommodative stance on one’s part, requires the exercise of great restraint on the part of persons associating with one another while following their religiously inspired goals. And the commencement of such relations requires the presence of courage on  the part of those involved—the courage to conduct themselves in ways that can foster friendship and trust with adversarial interlocutors. He was also clear that “I may not pursue my religious goals by compelling others to act in a particular manner.” So Hindus seeking to protect cows had to focus on themselves and set their “own house thoroughly in order first.”

Gandhi also wrote on civility, another feature of democratic public life that took inspiration from the Asokan tradition. He begins with a critique of the nature of politics in the early twentieth century. “Civility, good manners and humility—these virtues are at such a discount these days that they seem to have no place at all in the building of our character.” Gandhi claimed that civility is really an expression of what he calls “the spirit of non-violence”; in contrast, incivility and insolence are indicative of “the spirit of violence.” For Gandhi, violence is not merely physical but psychological and discursive as well. He proposes that all politics of noncooperation must adhere to the principles of civility. This means being courteous even toward the government and its supporters, apart from displaying manners, respect, and politeness in all interactions. The purpose is to exhibit a “spirit of love” as an effective means for pursuing all political interactions. He also believed that “what is readily yielded to courtesy is never yielded to force.” Gandhi concludes his essay by arguing that civility should not only be considered a “virtue,” but each individual should try to “cultivate it” as part of individual or national culture.

Gandhi also rejected the idea of one absolute truth against multiple falsehoods. This multiplicity of absolutes was unavoidable given the impossibility of mortal knowledge of the divine, the simultaneous insistence on the absoluteness and unknowability (neti, neti) of truth. “It is impossible for us to realize perfect truth so long as we are imprisoned in this mortal frame. . . . This impossibility led the seeker after truth to appreciate ahimsa.” This inescapability of multiple truths marks religious pluralism as the inevitable and healthy destiny of human kind. This morally requires ahimsa and therefore interreligious toleration. But it also encourages interreligious equality. Unlike other conceptions that presuppose the idea that oneness with significant others as well as God is achieved by abolishing/ignoring/belittling the radical other, that is, by eliminating plurality, here oneness is attained by accepting all radical others as equally significant because they variously manifest one supreme being or concept. Thus, to tolerate is to refrain from interfering in the life of others, not despite our hatred for them, nor because we are indifferent to them, but because we love them as alternative manifestations of our own selves or deeply care for some basic norm common to all of us. We may not be able to do or be what they are, we may even dislike some of their beliefs and practices, but we recognize that they are translations of our own selves or of gods within each of us. This binds us together in a relationship of lasting affection.

Nehru, India’s first prime minister, consciously modeled himself on Asoka. Nehru quotes H. G. Wells, “Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history, . . . the name of Asoka shines, and shines almost alone, a star. From the Volga to Japan his name is still honored. More living men cherish his memory to-day than have ever heard the names of Constantine or Charlemagne.” Ashoka was admired because for him “true conquest is the conquest of men’s hearts not by force but . . . persuasion. . . . Everywhere an appeal was made to the mind and the heart; there was no force or compulsion. . . . He showed respect and consideration for all other faiths.” Besides, rather than benefit himself, “this astonishing ruler, beloved still in India and in many other parts of Asia, devoted himself to public business.” Nehru persuaded everyone to have chakra, the wheel of Law at the center of the Indian flag. Other Asokan symbols are also used as national symbols.
 
Conclusion
 
Contemporary Indian politics, thinking, and the wider political imaginary are influenced by two major traditions that are opposed to each other and are currently locked in a rather uneven battle. The first consists of (a) the masculine warrior ethic, 
(b) an understanding of realpolitik found in the Arthasastra
(c) the Brahminical Dharmasastric worldview, 
and (d) parts of Indo-European traditions that without sufficient self-awareness draw on a conception of religion that was consolidated during the European Wars of Religion. Some extreme nationalisms even draw their inspiration from Nazism. It is on these traditions that contemporary Hindutva rulers draw inspiration. Indeed, all four of these related traditions are part of a violent, antidemocratic tradition in India that shapes not only the thoughts and practices of leaders of Hindutva but at least partly other Indian leaders as well. 

The second tradition is shaped by a deep-rooted pluralist imaginary that valorizes mutual acceptance and accommodation between differing religio-philosophical groups and that limits overideologization and the formation of radical otherness. This much older tradition of the Asokan political ethic emphasizes the importance of dialogue and discussion and encourages civility in the public sphere. It also advocates the pacification of politics. An even earlier tradition is well disposed to “government by discussion”. These long-standing traditions assumed a constitutional form in contemporary India, the principal architects of which were Ambedkar, Gandhi, and Nehru. They laid the foundations of a rights-based democracy inspired by multiple values. The battle between these two traditions is seen by many in India as a struggle over the soul of India.

Dr. Rajeev Bhargava was until recently a professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, was between 2007-2014, its Director and is currently the founder-director of the centre’s Parekh Institute of Indian Thought. He has been a professor of political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Delhi. He did his M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Oxford University, England. He is a permanent (honorary) fellow at Balliol College (Oxford). He is a fellow in Ethics at the Harvard University, Columbia University, Stanford University, New York University, Institute of Advanced Studies (Jerusalem), Wissenschaftskolleg (Berlin), Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna), Australian Catholic University (Sydney), and University of Leipzig. His many publications include Reimagining Secularism (2023), The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy (2010), Politics and Ethics of The Indian Constitution (2008) and Secularism and its Critics (1998) and Individualism in Social Sciences (1992). His work on secularism and individualism is internationally acclaimed. He has contributed to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Oxford Handbook of Political Theory. Bhargava is on the advisory board of several national and international institutions, and was a consultant for the UNDP report on cultural liberty. The Foundation Day lecture was delivered on 2 October 22, 2024.

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