India and the Burden of a Functioning Democracy

In a world going to shit.

--let's start at the very beginning--

First, there were humans on earth. We organized into tribes and clans and fought with nature over resources. Then some tribes realized some other tribes were also in the neighbourhood so they fought those tribes over said natural resources. Then some of them realized they might as well inter-marry, share skills and tools, and conquer nature together.

So on and so forth it went, until hundreds of tribes and clans got together and created Kingdoms, and then Kingdoms fought each other, then had the same realization all over again, so mergers of Kingdoms happened. Nieces were married off to enemy nephews in wedding ceremonies full of cautious, suspicious celebrations.

Then the great European Trading Company conquests started and changed everything. These brilliant European traders and thinkers and writers and parliamentarians together came up with the military and economic innovations needed to pretty much take over the world. And in the aftermath of the loot, plunder and massacre that these 'trading companies' unleashed, came the great Nation States that today dominate the earth. New ideas like Democracy and Communism and Socialism and everything in between took hold in the world. These Nation States turned out to be ... Tribes of a different sort: wherever a Nation State went to conquer or plunder, it created another Nation State. Within a century or so, scarcely a square inch was left of the globe that was not forced to pledge allegiance to one flag or the other.

This is the world we were born into: cut up and divided by borders that almost always sprung up not by mutual consent, but by force, torture, violence, humiliation, usurpation. The new dynamics became those of power, and in its most benign-seeming form, the power was primarily economic in nature, backed of course by military strength. If you have the power to defend your borders, and you have enough by way of natural resources to play in the global market, you would be considered a serious player. If you were one of the most serious players, you'd be called a Superpower. The biggest bully in the playground.

It's not easy to convince several million people to suddenly see themselves as part of another, more arbitrary, centrally planned, National identity. And so the best minds of several generations - psephologists, politicians, orators, artists of all stripes - put their minds, hearts and energies to the task. Once the fire of national fervour was lit, these pioneers could sit back and watch the spectacle unfold. What was mostly just a way to organize a tribe into a defensible force became a point of...pride and love. Pride and love that might have usually been reserved for family, or friends, or nature, or art itself. Now we were asked to love a flag, love those who live and serve under that flag. That love gave birth to sons and daughters of the flag, who took to these loose organizations as the a priori truth - the only possible way to be.

So we arrive at 2020. In the world of Nation States, their indestructible borders (except if a Superpower wants to destroy it), and their fervent, ardent Nationalists. Us. The patriots and soldiers, the politicians and artists, who rally around flags and make-believe lines in the sand as if it were our birth right. As if these figments of another generation's imagination was the only possibility.

In the process, some new things started happening.

First, economic growth became the sexiest metric for how cool a Nation State is. Pride and Joy started to become anchored to more figments of more imaginations. Made up, easy to confuse, statistically malleable numbers like GNP, GDP. Calculations can be made, apparently, to tell us how amazing our lives are. It boils down to a single digit, with a percentage at the end of it. And nomatter how much of a shitfest your personal or professional life might be, if the growth is strong, it can't be the Nation State's fault! Look! We are growing. Our metric of success, as a proud, loving citizenry, is growth. This is the one thing we have in common with cancer.

But the earth is no longer vast expanses of untouched, unexplored land and water. Tribes that grapple over resources with each other don't have infinite resources to plunder. Nation States are bulky, massive - feeding them requires more water, gold and wheat than even the land ever imagined it would have to produce.

Add to it the pressure of economic growth, and you have forests and rivers turning into timber and sewage. Food crops being sold before being eaten. Farmers ...starving. Think about how that could possibly be. How could a farmer ... starve? We live in an economic straitjacket that could mean you live 200 meters from a giant, glorious, flowing river, but if you don't have money in your pocket, you would die of thirst.

In the interlocked exchange systems we find ourselves in, no one is safe from anything that happens anywhere in the world. Economics has married all the Tribes to each other. Whether human beings realize it yet or not, there IS no longer a single Tribe to protect. Our identity formation is still lagging behind reality. We are already One. We may moralize about this or that Nation State's shittiness, but it no longer hinders trade. It might still hinder travel - because individual rights are no longer a priority - but it will not hinder trade. Money must move, humans can wait.

But Nation States continue to fight, strategize, plot and devise ways to outperform each other. We must be better than China - as if China were something apart from us, some abstract Other for us to beat. Beat them at what, exactly? Countries compete with each other over price and quality of goods, creating an infinite spiral that is soon to be our collective doom - in the form of the climate crisis. (Note that the doom would be collective, and not restricted to one or the other country, regardless of how many sons and daughters we send to the border).

Second, we used the best technology, the most money, and our brightest brains - to build bombs. Nuclear arsenals now dot the world. Their coolants run out, and we have no idea what to do with them. We have miles of stacked pillars full of radioactive material that we never thought we'd have to deal with. We built bombs which would spontaneously detonate - and stopping them detonating creates nuclear waste that we don't know what to do with.

Also, Nation States have put this arsenal of weapons capable of destroying the earth several times over into their Normal Administrative Duties. National bureaucracies can't promise you if your Visa will arrive on time, or maintain electrical lines worth a nickel - but somehow, we trust them with world-ending power.

In the meantime, we ended up being economically interconnected anyway, so no one will allow any nuclear attacks on anyone else because one domino goes down and we all go down with it. So - we have billions and billions of our collective money torched and converted into mass-murder devices that...hopefully and most likely...no one will ever use.

Despite all this - despite desperate, hopeless disadvantages, Nation States still endure because of one reason only. Fear.

All Nations created on earth were predicated on homogeneity. National Citizenship was granted if you fit in to the normal, or at least promised not to disrupt it. The US is One Nation Under God. France is for the French... etc. National programs and campaigns are created around the world to ensure that diversity doesn't disrupt the day-to-day. Certain Values and Morals are promoted as Acceptable and Nation-worthy; others are shunned as deplorable, and sometimes cast as downright criminal. One Nation's criminal is another Nation's Acceptable, and so on.

But homogeneity breeds Fear of the Other. And so National Denizens began to worry about their comfortable bubbles being burst by other Nation States they disliked or feared. Keeping their Way of Life is of the utmost importance. Nation States around the world spend a majority of their money on Defence - as if what they are hiding inside is somehow absolutely the most wondrous thing in the world. Every single Nation State thinks they are God's Gift to Humanity, and find their hearts moved to great depths of violence to defend their own pieces of the earth.

But then came India.

A country with no homogeneity. No history of unity. No kingdom had ever encompassed the subcontinent. The great Indian experiment was to turn the traditional Nation State model upside down.

The Founding Fathers who created this Republic were onto something: not only did they include diversity, they decided to celebrate and forefront it. They decided to let each different culture find its expression and freedom in the mainstream.

The Founding Fathers created a system that worked for a staggering diversity of religions, ethnicities, cultures, traditions, races and ideologies. India has a Communist Party fighting Democratic elections. We have several National Languages. Germany and France have nuclear arsenals, but Uttar Pradesh and Bihar do not. States do not compete on Growth - they cooperate.

We don't turn people away, or try to change them: instead, we simply expand our idea of what it means to be Indian. We accommodate more and more, we allow more and more, we accept more and more.

Being Secular, as you'll probably have guessed by now, is only one part of this larger project of Radical Inclusion. Having a state machinery that is Religion-Blind is crucial, but not sufficient. The Law is also Caste-Blind, and Region-Blind, and Race-Blind, and Wealth-Blind, (all only true in theory, I know, but bear with me).

By bringing in a Religion-Aware Law, the current Indian Government has subverted the entire experiment of India. This is a dangerous, dangerous path to tread - and not only because of our original pledge of Secularism, but because the Indian experiment is the planet's final, dying hope. India should not inspire love or adulation - it should inspire serious, thoughtful study. Because somewhere in the chaos of the political establishment of India is the solution the planet badly needs to rescue itself from ... the several threats Nation States have created.

The CAA should not only worry you as an Indian, but as a human being with no other planet to escape to. The Indian experiment must succeed, and bring into its fold evermore diversity and difference.

For all our sakes.

Love,

Shiv

PS: Sorry this time my tone is totally different and annoyingly arcane sounding if you wanna unsub I would get it but some topics need this kind of treatment ok so chill and just read the whole thing and then reply ok? As usual Imma wait for your email/call/message/coffee invitation.

PPS: While writing this I was constantly thinking of 100,000 examples from within India itself that can serve to contradict everything I'm saying. Feel free to bring those up and contradict me. I've been grappling with this idea for a bit, and I felt I better share it with you and get your thoughts on it before it it festers or fades.

PPS: Checkout Tagore's speeches against Nationalism. Checkout also Yogendra Yadav's study of India's Diversity. Checkout Samvidhaan, a show by Shyam Benegal on YouTube.

PPPS: Wild thought - can the Indian Federation allow one State to be run as an Islamic or Hindu State? Put another way, can we bring Pakistan into the Indian matrix? Why? Why not? Not talking about practicalities here, just, theoretically speaking. How would that work - to have most states be Secular, but one or two of them as Religious? Wonder if then there will suddenly be a need for weapons haha and we'll end up at square one.