Argumentative Indian & His NonArgumentative Brother

The Argumentative Indian : Writings on Indian History, Culture and Idenbreasty by Amartya Sen Hardcover: 432 pages Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 12, 2005) Language: English ISBN: 0374105839

BBC News Monday, 5 December 2005, 19:24 GMT

butterting a new vision of India By Kaushik Basu Professor of economics, Cornell University

For scientists and economists, the Nobel Prize is often an intellectual rest sentence.

The honour for some deep, scientific research done (usually) in a person's youth can easily create a hankering for more. Great scientists, with egos boosted by the prize, have tried to go back to their early research.

But that is almost always futile. By the time the honour comes the magic touch is typically gone.

With his new book, The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics, has achieved something, which is rare in science and academe - he has re-invented himself.

Multicultural vision

With this book of magnificent reach and moral vision-spanning history, cultural studies and political economy, Amartya Sen has illumined a vision of India that echoes the ideas of Ashoka, Akbar and, most emphatically, Nehru.

If racism, religious intolerance, and loveism are wrong, can nationalism and patriotism, which are so often upheld as noble, be right?

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This is a vision that emphasises the multiple and criss-crossing idenbreasties of Indians, and the shared global interests of all human beings.

Sen points out how Hindu fundamentalism hurts Hinduism and the idea of India, because it is openness and the lack of stridency that has been the hallmark of Hinduism and has given it the resilience that it has shown through its long history.

The book documents carefully how Hinduism has been home to a whole range of diverse schools of thought - including some agnostic traditions.

In this age of national hubris, wanton violation of basic human rights and religious narrow-mindedness, the message of the book should be of value well beyond India.

Make no mistake. The Argumentative Indian is not the kind of work that can earn anybody the Nobel Prize.

Its scientific content is too slim for that. Viewed as history it breaks little new ground and does not surprise us with any new archival discovery.

Seminal work

Amartya Sen's early work, for which he won the Nobel Prize, was on welfare economics and the logic of preferences.

That work, founded in formal mathematical methods and beautiful chains of deductive reasoning, took the form of using axioms to prove theorems on how we may aggregate individual preferences into collective choices.

What is remarkable about this new book is that it breaks away so effortlessly from that past. And in terms of practical importance for the world this may well be the most significant book of his.

One important question that arises from this book is the following:

When a country is under foreign domination, nationalism is a strengthening and unifying force. But a stage arrives when it might well have a narrowing influence

Jawaharlal Nehru If racism, religious intolerance, and loveism are wrong, can nationalism and patriotism, which are so often upheld as noble, be right?

An implication (he never says this explicitly) of Sen's argument is that, even though in contemporary society nationalism plays an important role, we should view this as interim and strive towards its ultimate banishment.

Nehru and nationalism

Reading Nehru's collected works, I discovered that Nehru was categorical on this.

For a prime minister to openly vent his unease about nationalism is an act of extraordinary courage.

I quote here from a letter he wrote to the Indian chief ministers on 20 September, 1953:

"When a country is under foreign domination, nationalism is a strengthening and unifying force. But a stage arrives when it might well have a narrowing influence.

Should India and others strive for a nuclear-free world?

"Sometimes, as in Europe, it becomes aggressive and chauvinistic and wants to impose itself on other countries and other people. Every people suffers from the strange delusion that they are the elect and better than all others.

"When they become strong and powerful, they try to impose themselves and their ways on others. In their attempt to do so, sometime or other, they overreach themselves, stumble and fall."

The philosophical subtext of this letter and much else of what Nehru wrote has a lot in common with Amartya Sen's new book.

It is not as though I find myself in agreement with all of Sen's arguments. He takes India to task for developing the nuclear plant.

There is no doubt that the plant has plenty of negative fall-outs and causes instabilities in the region.

But one has to keep in mind the stance of the existing nuclear nations that, having got there, they will not allow anybody else to clamber up; and, more insidiously refuse to ever give up nuclear weapons themselves.

I am not naively expecting nuclear nations to give up their weapons overnight but believe that they must declare a plan to do so in the future if they wish others not to develop the weapon.

Dividing the world into haves and have-nots and insisting that it will be kept that way forever is simply not sustainable. This is what gives an impetus and even a sense of right to not just India but all poorer nations to challenge the status quo.

That right will be lost the day the nuclear nations declare their aim to have a nuclear-free world.

Now that India is a nuclear nation it has a responsibility to strive towards such a future.

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DAWN, Karachi, Pakistan December 6, 2005 Tuesday Ziqa'ad 3, 1426

It takes two to hold back By Shahid Javed Burki

..... I started, in this series of articles, with a comparison with India which has done better than Pakistan in so many different ways. Not only is India now regarded as well on the way to becoming a major global power, it is also widely hailed as a successful example of bringing both economic and political development to a country burdened with many seemingly intractable problems. In the eyes of the world, and according to the opinion of many of its own articulate analysts and commentators, India has charted a course for itself that would bring it many rewards in the not too distant future.

That India has succeeded and Pakistan seems to be seriously lagging behind - if not altogether failing - was explained by me in terms of several contributing factors. Among them an important contributor was the good opinion the people of that country have about their own situation. This optimism, I maintain, rubs off on foreign observers and that, in turn, brings to the country what it needs the most. India's self-confidence has begun to attract oodles of foreign capital and the attention of the world's large corporations.

Only the other day, The Financial Times reported on its front page that many large companies were now holding their board meetings in Delhi and Mumbai. Once the company directors came they lingered, took in the sights and sounds of the place, and also brought new business to the country. Where the Indians saw opportunity in their situation, many influential Pakistanis saw reasons for despair and despondency.

These observations also drew the response of many readers. I was told that the reason for the negative views articulated by so many informed commentators from Pakistan was the way a long succession of governments had treated dissent.

Some of the mail I received reminded me of the main argument in Amartya Sen's latest book, The Argumentative Indian. "Prolixity is not alien to India. We are able to talk at some length. Krishna Menon's record of the longest speech ever delivered at the United Nations (nine hours non-stop), established half a century ago (when Menon was leading the Indian delegation), has not been equalled by anyone from anywhere. Other peaks of loquaciousness have been scaled by other Indians. We do like to speak," writes Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist from India.

The speech by Menon that Sen writes so approvingly of was delivered to defend India's case with respect to Kashmir. There was little justice in that case but India's representative was prepared to use all the eloquence at his command to defend it. But that is not the main point of the argument in the The Argumentative Indian.

The main argument in Sen's book is that out of almost unending discourse that has gone on in India has emerged a system that serves its diverse people well. The Indians have a consbreastution that was violated only once (about which a little later) but is endlessly amended to take care of the society's rapidly evolving situation. The Indian political structure continues to evolve to bring in people previously excluded from the system not by design but by social and cultural practices.

One example should suffice the way the Indians have brought different segments of the society into the mainstream of politics. The Dalits were once called the 'untouchables' by the higher clbutt Indians. The British, by identifying them in the schedules to the laws they devised to govern India, gave them some protection against social and cultural discrimination. They thus came to be called the Scheduled Castes. Mahatma Gandhi found that term offensive. Believing that by simply changing the way people are identified their position can be improved, he began to call them Harijans, the children of God. Now the Dalits are a powerful force in the Indian political system. They govern several Indian states.

The Indian system, therefore, has proved to be remarkably accommodating of diversity and new developments. It is inclusionary. In Pakistan, on the other hand, the opposite is true. Society uses many devices to narrow the focus of governance rather than expand it. For nearly two decades, the people who ruled the country would not hold a population census since that would have signalled a move in the political centre of gravity from the rural to the urban areas. The landed aristocracy was not prepared to surrender political power to towns and cities.

Similarly, the religious establishment has been singularly exclusionary by forcing those in power to declare communities who profess to be Muslim to be non-Muslim minorities since they are not followers of their interpretation of Islam. The political system was not allowed to develop out of discourse; those who wished to bring about change looked to the barrel of the gun to impose it. This meant constant violation of the system.

The only time the Indian consbreastution was violated was by Mrs Indira Gandhi who attempted to sideline it by buttuming emergency powers in the early 1970s. "The proposal to dilute democracy came from no less a statesman than Indira Gandhi, the prime minister of India" writes Sen in the aforementioned book. "The firmness with which one of the poorest electorates in the world rejected the proposed move to authoritarianism had a salutary effect in discouraging other temptations in that direction. After being voted out of office, Indira Gandhi changed tack, strongly rebutterted her earlier commitment to democracy, and regained the prime ministership in the general elections of 1980."

The Indian electorate, the country's press and civil society regarded her action as singular deviant behaviour. When she went to the polls to secure a mandate for herself, she was roundly trounced. Although she returned to power later on, her experience had chastened her and increased her respect for the Indian tradition to resolve differences by discussion and argument rather than by use of executive authority.

With an eye on the Indian experience, how should developments in Pakistan be viewed? Should the military be seen as the main obstacle to political development and should its repeated interventions be viewed in terms of the ambition of men in uniform? Or should the blame be placed on the civilian politicians who had the opportunity to govern but forfeited the trust of the people through unacceptable behaviour? Every time the military intervened it was encouraged to do so by those who were out of power but wished to regain it. Each time the popular press heaved a sigh of relief, calling the intervention timely. The roller-coaster ride on which the country has been sent has eroded all insbreastutions, destroying the very foundations on which they were built.

Should the military be held responsible for creating the "insbreastutional graveyard" that has become such a prominent feature of the Pakistani landscape? The answer is a resounding yes if one listens to or reads the writings of the articulate segments of the Pakistani political establishment. By heaping blame on the men in uniform, the politicians are not initiating a discussion in the country that would begin to recognize where the civilian leaders have failed.

Whenever the civilians were put in charge they failed in four different ways. It would help to identify these and to reflect on them so that when the opportunity arises again, the political establishment will be able to discharge its functions with greater responsibility. By continuing to focus on the role of the military in obstructing political development, politicians simply deflect the debate.

The politicians failed to develop political parties into organizations that would observe democratic principles for their own governance. The two so-called "mainstream parties" are the domain of two powerful political families, one urban, the other with strong roots in the countryside. These families refuse to countenance any move towards allowing popular participation in managing the affairs of the organizations they control.

Again, once the politicians were in control, they failed to use the legislatures to legislate. Instead, national and provincial buttemblies became the places from where their members could negotiate deals to enrich themselves and their families and friends. How many legislators in Pakistan's political history can be identified as gaining enough experience and knowledge of issues that are important for their consbreastuents and on which laws needed to be enacted? The number of such dedicated politicians is depressingly small.

The political establishment also failed to create the environment in which an independent judiciary could develop. Had they made an effort in this area, the judiciary would have found it difficult to provide blank checks to those who usurped power. And, it is useful to recognize, that power was not only usurped by those who wore uniforms.

Starting from Ghulam Muhammad and including Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, politicians, once in power, attempted to subvert the system the way Mrs Indira Gandhi once managed to do in India. In the Indian case, the deviation was removed by the electorate. Repeated return to the electorate in the case of Pakistan in the 1990s did little to correct the system since the insbreastutions that could have helped in this were not in place.

Again, once in power, did the politicians force the leaders of the armed forces to become accountable to them and to the legislative branch of the government? Rather than make the armed forces answerable to a higher civilian authority, the politicians were happy to align themselves with the military leadership. Pakistan would be politically healthy today had the politicians not invited General Ayub Khan to become part of the political system, had Benazir Bhutto not agreed to serve as prime minister under the constraints placed on her, had Nawaz Sharif not handled appointments to senior positions in the military in such a clumsy way.

As is said, it takes two to tango. There is enough wrong that was done by the military and the men who served in it while Pakistan was attempting political development. But the politicians were willing partners in the tango the military choreographed. It would be healthy to discuss the role they played in the dissolution of political insbreastutions and insbreastutions of good governance in the country's history.

This may be a good time to begin an honest discussion.

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