Anguished blame transfer

Looking Away Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in new India by Harsh Mander Speaking tiger;Price: Rs.495; Pages: 418

There’s a thriving community of impassioned Left liberals in Lutyens’ Delhi, the academy and media, which dominates the public discourse and shapes public policy. Unfortunately, its power and influence is in inverse proportion to its capabilities, cognitive or otherwise. Even to this day, this privilegentsia is blissfully unaware that it was the wrong ideological left turn of their idol Master Joe Nehru (as he was known in Harrow College, UK), and the acts of commission and omission of his dynastic and ideological heirs, which have reduced high potential post-independence India into a wretched inegalitarian republic of open, continuous and uninterrupted corruption and injustice.

An influential and articulate voice within this left liberal community is of Harsh Mander, a member of post-independence India’s privilegentsia (public school, St. Stephen’s, IAS), former India director of Action Aid and member of the National Advisory Council (2010-12), constituted by Congress president Sonia Gandhi to advise the party and government on ways and means to alleviate poverty, inequality and social injustice. During his brief tenure in NAC, Mander was a driving force behind the Food Security, Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee legislations. A prolific author, currently Mander is the founder-chairperson of the Delhi-based Centre for Equity Studies.

The provocation for his latest oeuvre is an observation made by American philosopher Noam Chomsky — a darling of the liberal left universally — about post-liberalisation India’s newly-emergent greedy and uncaring middle class. “What is really striking to me… is the indifference of privileged sectors (sic) to the misery of others. You walk through Delhi and cannot miss it, but people just don’t seem to see it… they put themselves in a bubble and they don’t seem to see it,” Chomsky reportedly said in 2013. Mander evidently shares Chomsky’s penetrating insight into the manners and mores of the country’s new middle class. 

“A dispassionate external observer would be bewildered by middle-class India’s capacity to look away when confronted with enormous injustice and suffering; by our society’s cultural comfort with inequality,” he reflects, explaining the title of this compendium which catalogues the challenges of poverty, corruption and social injustice that define contemporary India.

Starting with a damning indictment of businessmen and economists who voiced apprehensions about the inflationary impact of the Food Security Act passed by Parliament in 2013, the author unsparingly lays bare the numerous and multiplying inequities, injustices and deprivations that characterise post-1991 India.

This compendium is divided into three broad sections. The first, titled ‘Many exiles of India’s poor’, contains 18 short essays which expose the shocking extent to which the country’s poor majority is deprived of food, housing, education, and respectable employment. In addition, several essays detail the ruination of the justice and public medical and education systems, and the pitiful plight of the nation’s farmers and neglected tribal communities. To the credit of the author, the economic distress of the poor who suffer most when public services and systems malfunction, is detailed with data, anguish and compassion.

The second section of this book titled ‘The legitimisation of prejudice’ comprises 13 essays starting with the triumph of the BJP led by Narendra Modi in General Election 2014. In these essays Mander expresses apprehension about the fate of the minority Muslim community under the rule of the new “majoritarian” BJP and prime minister Narendra Modi. Again, the subject of scrutiny is dispiriting socio-economic iniquities and deep prejudice against Muslims and minorities being fanned by inflammatory BJP/RSS propaganda. And in the third section of this anguished polemic titled ‘The imperative for public compassion’, Mander makes a plea to the public and especially the middle class, the intelligentsia and the establishment to cultivate the qualities of empathy, mercy and compassion. Readers are exhorted to imbibe these virtues from the Mahatma, Dr. Ambedkar, several bottom-of-the pyramid individuals and “from those with nothing”.

Undoubtedly Mander has a compassionate heart which is in the right place. But I wonder about his head. A dispassionate analysis plainly indicates that it’s left-liberal ideology ill-advisedly imposed by Master Joe and his ideological heirs, which is responsible for this sorry mess. A cursory study of history would have informed him that right until the early 19th century, the Indian subcontinent was one of the world’s richest societies generating 20 percent of global income. This was because of the free enterprise and strong mercantile traditions of the population, developed into socially valuable expertise over several millennia.

Moreover despite  ruthless exploitation of the subcontinent by the British Raj for almost two centuries, by the end of the Second World War, pioneer Indian entrepreneurs such as G.D. Birla, J.N. Tata, Walchand Hirachand, and Lala Shri Ram had built a modern industrial base — the most advanced in the post-colonial third world — which could have pitchforked newly-independent India into the ranks of industrial nations.

Unfortunately, despite having authored a history text (Discovery of India), Master Joe who just about scraped through Cambridge University with a degree in natural sciences, had little knowledge of economic history or indeed of economics itself.

What little he knew about the dismal science was learned in the fashionable drawing rooms of Bloomsbury Square from dilettante upper class socialists who were enthralled by the Soviet Union, and regarded central planning and the public sector model as the best prescription for national development.

Therefore when Gandhiji ill-advisedly anointed him free India’s prime minister, Master Joe Nehru lost no time in recklessly uprooting the beautiful forest of India’s private enterprise and mercantilism and replaced it with the desert of public sector enterprises (PSEs), central planning and neta-babu socialism. Foolishly he believed that government clerks could manage the huge PSEs into which the people’s savings were canalised, and that they would generate the surpluses required to invest in education and healthcare. Even more foolishly, he believed that India’s mercantile class could be supressed by imposition of licence-permit-quota raj.

Six decades on, it’s crystal clear that far from being the cure, inorganic Nehruvian liberal-left ideology whose demise Mander laments, is the prime cause of the country’s pathetic condition. But members of the old privilegentsia — such as Mander — blinded by the rationed benefits of Nehruvian socialism, can never acknowledge this truth. Typically they blame ‘capitalists’ who could have saved the nation had they been given the chance to prosper and generate taxes and employment, for the disastrous left turn of Master Joe and his real and ideological heirs.

Dilip Thakor

Liberal Islam manifesto

Islam without extremes: a muslim case for liberty by Mustafa Akyol viva books; Price: Rs.495; Pages: 364

Given the atrocities being committed in the name of Islam by self-styled Islamic groups in different parts of the contemporary world, it’s hardly surprising that many non-Muslims have serious misgivings about Islam, and Islamophobia is on the rise globally. Harsh, literalist, punitive, misogynist and hate-driven interpretations of Islam and the brutalities that flow from them, continue to reinforce widespread negative stereotypes worldwide.

But, as eminent Turkish journalist and scholar Mustafa Akyol reminds us in this inspiring, informative and incisive book, Islam (like every other faith) is far from monolithic. There are diverse and competing interpretations. Despite their claims to represent ‘the true Islam’, supremacist and exclusivist interpretations of the faith are just one of many.

In Islam Without Extremes, Akyol stresses that just as there are narrow, violent, patriarchal, supremacist and grossly illiberal interpretations of Islam, there are other readings which are just the opposite. Islam is also a faith which can be — and is — interpreted as peace-loving and understood as sanctioning freedoms  that embrace religious pluralism and peaceful co-existence. Given the horrific crimes perpetrated by extremist Muslim groups that grab headlines every now and then, this reminder is timely.

To substantiate his argument, Akyol takes us on a journey that starts off during the life and times of Prophet Muhammad when according to the author, social reforms by way of belief and value systems and practices were introduced in society. But not long after the Prophet’s demise, multiple and conflicting explanations of this message emerged. Repressive and regressive interpretations of Islam gradually began to acquire considerable influence. Yet, even under repressive regimes and conniving clergy, liberal interpretations of the faith respecting reason and individual rights continued to be practiced, says Akyol, who makes plain his reverence for a great religion with  the right synthesis of progressive and conservative values, but which has been brought into disrepute by Wahhabi extremism.

Akyol details the rich tradition of Muslim scholars who propagated a liberal Islam that championed a range of human freedoms that were in line with enlightened thinking. ‘Islamic liberalism’, he claims, is, thus, not an oxymoron. Rather, he argues, it is very much part of the legacy of centuries-old Muslim religious tradition.

According to Akyol, conflict between Islamic liberals and literalists has been an integral part of Muslim religious history. Taking us on a quick trip through a history of over a thousand years, Akyol reminds us that Islam was a flourishing liberal faith which rapidly drew adherents around the world. But since then, there has been emergence of competing narratives — in particular, aggressive, radical Islamism (a politico-centric interpretation of Islam) that today poses a major threat, including to Muslims themselves.

For this regression the author blames Western imperialism — as much as the despotism of Muslim dictators subjugating their people and indulging in conspicuous consumption — for sidelining Islamic liberalism.

With its obsession with political power and dictatorial rule, the author believes that radical Islamism is a departure from the true faith rather than an affirmation of it. “…Islamism, and its violent offshoot, jihadism, is more of a political phenomenon than a religious one,” he writes. And despite the clout of radical Islamists worldwide, Akyol is optimistic about the resurrection of liberal Islam and personal liberty in Muslim countries. Therefore he welcomes the rise of ‘Islamic liberalism’ in Turkey, a revivalist phenomenon he describes in considerable detail.

This book is a gem, and will illumine anybody interested in religious and political developments in the Islamic world. Given that in our highly interconnected digital world, developments in Muslim-majority countries make heavy impact worldwide, this book is a valuable contribution to world peace and harmony.

ROSHAN SHAH