Bastar tribals and Indian Maoists in Satnam's Jangalnama

Deep inside the forests of Bastar in southern Chattisgarh live a mass of Indian citizens – tribals – who speak a tongue that bears no resemblance to the major Indian languages; subsist on broken rice, salt, dried fish and roots; have no gods or religion in the sense that has now become normative, and have no comprehension either of many basic axioms of democratic politics and market economics. As soon as we look at them, we begin to misunderstand and patronise them: their minds are almost impossibly foreign, and in popular discourse they are mostly referred to in a pejorative way. They occupy territories rich in mineral and forest resources, and yet are themselves desperately poor.

In and around these tribals, there exists in these jungles a shadowy but substantial force of guerrillas, the Maoists, including both men and women, non-tribals and tribals. The Maoists, or Naxals, seethe at the neglect of the Gonds by the Indian state, believe that the rapacity of capitalism is inimical to the forests and the tribal way of life and advocate "an alternative mode of production", think that Indian democracy is a sham, and are seriously committed to the idea of an armed revolution that will overthrow the Indian state. They have seized control of much of the forest in Chattisgarh, and now run a parallel government of sorts there with the support – sometimes voluntary, sometimes forced – of the tribals.

Finally, alongside these two presences in the jungle, there is a significant absence: that of the Indian state – spoken of internationally as a rising superpower, but present locally only in a severely attentuated and debilitated form, and uninterested in implementing its own legislation on matters like tribal community rights over forest resources, such as the Recognition of Forest Rights Act of 2006. It has none of the attributes of efficiency, accessibility, neutrality and trustworthiness that are minimally to be expected of it, and has over time, by its own dreadful avarice and callousness, lost its moral claim to the allegiance of those in its domain. The fascinating story of these three forces is told in the greatest detail, from a point of view sympathetic to the first two and hostile to the third, by the Punjabi writer Satnam in Jangalnama, his lacerating memoir of a few months in the forest in 2002.

It is the squads of the Maoist militia who control and defend the jungle, and is through them that Satnam gains access to the tribals. Much of the time in Jangalnama, the writer is seen walking, sometimes two or three days at a time, accompanying squads of young Maoists who are always on the move, carrying messages or supplies. Some guerrillas are tribals, some are not; but there is not between them the division and hierarchy that is characteristic of these interactions in other spheres of Indian social, political and economic life. Whatever may be said of the Maoists, they at least see the tribals as human beings, and grant them a dignity that the machinery of government has not. By walking in their wake, Satnam is able to to personally experience the enormous physical hardship and sacrifice of their lives, as also their sense of community and fraternity, and the ardour of both their hate and love.

But it is in the depiction of the day-to-day life of the Gonds that Jangalnama touches its greatest heights. Satnam marvellously opens up for us the peculiar innocence, fragility and unworldliness of these people. Many Gonds, he reports, cannot count beyond the number twenty; after they reach this limit they start all over again from one, and finally add up the twenties. How then are they to imagine that around them lie mineral resources worth thousands of crores in the world market, or even to hold their own in small transactions with shopkeepers and moneylenders? Because of their indigence and ignorance, most Gonds do not live beyond the age of fifty, yet they are not particularly exerted by questions of life and death, and do not have extended rituals of mourning for those who pass away. Their sense of time is not of minutes and hours, but rather of day and night, of the coming and going of the seasons. Many have never seen a bus or a train, or any of the wonderful machines which are forged from the iron ore that is extracted from sites beneath their own feet. They love to sing and to dance, but never individually. Theirs is still to a large extent a pre-modern “collective culture” that is, on the one hand, seen by "civilised society" (this phrase almost always appears in ironical quote marks in Jangalnama) as subhuman, and on the other, is now caught up with the very different, highly theorised and ideological, collective culture of the guerillas.

For the tribals, writes Satnam, Delhi does not evoke the same scenes and suggestions that it might for someone in the city. "Dilli is only a word associated with government, and to them, government means greedy contractors, repressive police, displacement and harassment." In one of the most scathing passages in the book, he charges:

The jungle is rich in medicinal plants and herbs, but the medicines made from these never reach the inhabitants of the jungle. ...The inhabitant of the jungle is not part of the market because he does not have money. If the ailing people do not have money, their only cure is death. ... The establishment isn't concerned with human life; it is there to sell contracts – contracts for exploiting jungles, for mining, building roads and hospitals, promoting private education. In fact, it doesn't even shy away from giving out government on contract: whichever faction bids the highest for dishonesty will capture power.

In contrast, the Maoists have at least built some basic infrastructure, set up rudimentary health facilities, offered assistance with farming and irrigation, and defended, even if with a gun, the tribal rights over "jal, jangal aur zameen" (water, the forest, and land). Satnam's portraits of some of the Maoists he meets are very vivid, humanising: Lachakka, a young female guerrilla who ran away from an oppressive marriage; Narang, an elderly revolutionary who wants first of all to improve the material life of tribals by setting up new systems of agriculture and fishery. When he writes of the radicalisation of Basanti, a tribal girl, that "from life experience she has gained a simple and clear understanding of what justice is, how power corrupts it, and the nexus between injustice and power", we recognise this anger because we know ourselves the truth of the world around us.

But as a group, can the Maoists really be trusted in the long run? How can one repose more than a limited, skeptical faith in a formation which self-consciously applies a vocabulary and a jargon of a Chinese communist, making reference, as Rohini Hensman points out in a recent essay, to classes of people and social conditions which often have no real relevance to Indian life? What about the history of successful civil resistance movements worldwide, especially in the twentieth century, running parallel to the bloody battles of communism? Satnam writes that the guerrillas devote some time each day to reading and studying, and that "almost every guerrilla has a pen in his pocket." But much as they may venerate the Lal Salaam and the Little Red Book, one feels that these warriors for a more just world might also do well to have a look at The Black Book of Communism.

In one incident, Satnam describes a massive political rally in the jungle organised by the Maoists:

Dressed in colourful attires, decked with horns of nilgai and peacock feathers on their heads, the people gathered on the grounds to the steady beat of a drum. ...Carrying banners, flags, and placards, the long column began marching peacefully through the jungle to the sound of drums. A guerrilla squad was accompanying them. There was no claos, no clamour. No government officials, no police, no bystanders. Journalists and press reporters, some with cameras, sound system technicians, and a few teachers had come from the town. ...In those jungles of Bastar alone, more anti-American protests must have been raised that in all of India...

An anti-American rally in the heart of the forest! As an example of a growing political awareness among the tribals, a wish to understand the processes at work in the wider world, this would be an impressive and warming spectacle. But, as Satnam tells us at another point, "I found out that most inhabitants of the jungle had only recently heard, for the first time, the names of Bush, Vajpayee, Musharraf and Afghanistan. The war had introduced these names to them as well as put them in the 'league of traitors.'" But what kind of perception of villainy is this? Can it really be respected? The tribals seem to be puppets moved by the doctrinal fervour of the Maoists, repeating the names they are given. When asked at the rally to come forward and utter words of support for a resolution condemning the American invasion of Afghanistan, "many refused to get up from their places, some spoke up from their own seats, others just shook their heads and tried to hide themselves in the darkness." Satnam's report on the tacit alliance between the Maoists and tribals yields some strange and anachronistic scenes, testimony to a new kind of skewed power relations and an ideological zeal gone overboard.

As with any work of passionate advocacy, there are certain things that Jangalnama leaves out. There is always a guerrilla squad accompanying Satnam, so it is likely that he cannot see very much more than what he is shown. Otherwise, he would have some sense that the guerrillas themselves are guilty of more excesses, whether it is violence against dissenting tribals or compromises with contractors and businesses, than his book allows; these charges are not just establishment counter-propaganda. Again, it is not just the guerrillas, but also many individuals and organisationals in Indian civil society, who are agitating for a more just treatment of the tribals. So, no matter what his problems with "civil society", it is an insult to many within it to treat it as one homogenous, lackadaisical, and ideologically slavish group. Rather, it is Satnam who, perhaps for good reasons of his own, appears to have lost faith in the possibilities of democratic protest. At one point he writes that if the anti-Tehri and anti-Narmada Dam protest movements had taken up arms like the Maoists have, these battles would not have been lost in the maze of complicity and corruption comprising the legislature, the executive, and even the judiciary.

Yet, if the first principle of a democracy is that citizens should understand the needs and realities of those who are most different from them, then this is a book that, even though it rejects Indian democracy, genuinely opens up such an extended passage of engagement. "Is there no option except to pick up the gun?" Satnam asks a Maoist. "Had there been one," he answers, "there would have been no need to pick it up." That these are the last words of the book, when the placement of this exchange would have been more logical almost anywhere else, gives Jangalnama a sense not of a resolution but a lingering ambivalence, as if there is more thinking left to be done. There is an sound in Jangalnama that is neither the desperation and puzzlement of the tribal nor the wrath and ideological obstinacy of the guerrilla, but something else: a sad, disillusioned, morally lucid and disquieting anger that any reader would do well to experience, even if finally reject.

And some links to other essays: "Social Banditry" by Ramachandra Guha; "Bastar, Maoism and Salwa Judum" by Nandini Sundar; Arundhati Roy's recent "Walking With The Comrades", to my mind a much more cloying and less persuasive piece of embedded journalism than Satnam's, worth studying for such curiosities as the repeated and romanticising use of the word "beautiful" ("We walk through some beautiful villages. Every village has a family of tamarind trees watching over it, like a clutch of huge, benevolent, gods. Sweet, Bastar tamarind. By 11, the sun is high, and walking is less fun. We stop at a village for lunch. Chandu seems to know the people in the house. A beautiful young girl flirts with him.He looks a little shy, maybe because I’m around. Lunch is raw papaya with masoor dal, and red rice. And red chilli powder. We’re going to wait for the sun to lose some of its vehemence before we start walking again. We take a nap in the gazebo. There is a spare beauty about the place."); "Heading For a Bloodbath" by Rohini Hensman; "Targeting Naxalism", a special issue of the magazine Pragati; "Winning By Out-Governing" by Michael Spacek; "The Real Solution For Naxalism" by Abheek Barman; "How Many Deaths Before Too Many Die" and "Death On The Margins" by Shoma Chaudhury.

Update, May 24: And the fresh outbursts of Naxal violence in the last week, in which civilians were targeted for the first time because they happened to be travelling with special police officers or SPOs, some more reactions: "Breaking The Mistrust in Chhatisgarh" by Nandini Sundar, "The Dangers of Playing Footsie with Maoists" and "Bleeding Heart Cynics" by K Subrahmanyam ("In states where the sections of the political class feel that in order to sustain their votebanks and siphon off development funds disturbed conditions are to their advantage, it will be difficult to eliminate Maoism without addressing misgovernance and its offshoot, bureaucratic corruption"), and "No military solutions for Maoism" by Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar.

On the anthology Civil Resistance and Power Politics

In the last half-century, what has united African-American civil rights campaigners in the American South in the 1960s, anti-apartheid demonstrators in South Africa in the eighties, anti-communist agitators in Czechoslovakia in 1989, discontented citizens and student groups at Tiananmen in China in the same year, and striking monks in Burma in 2007 and Tibet in 2008? The answer is civil resistance – a mass program of deliberate, purposive action committed to non-violence, and intended to alter the balance of political power so as to bring about what some commentators have called “a revolution without revolution”.

A hundred years ago, civil resistance as a political force was not much more than a minor curiosity. Although it had theoretical roots in the ideas of Thoreau, Tolstoy and Ruskin, in the realm of worldly application Mohandas Gandhi’s work for the rights of Indians in South Africa was about the only feather in its cap. Today, that is no longer so. The idea of civil resistance today has a history, a dignity, an allure, a vocabulary (agitations in the Philippines in the eighties gave rise to the term “people power”; the Czech writer Vaclav Havel produced a famous essay called “The Power of the Powerless”; the peaceful transfer of power in Prague in 1989 threw up the term "velvet revolution"). “Civil resistance” brings to mind strikes, fasts, boycotts, demonstrations, the use of potent symbols and messages, a sense of active community, solidarity, and discipline among discontented people. Civil resistance grasps that there are forces other than brute force (even as it accepts that violence and armed resistance may be justified in certain extreme situations). It is directed at the individual conscience of both the demonstrator and the adversary, and therefore runs deeper than matters of ideology. At the same time, it is nothing without mass support, and constructively channels the power of the crowd as a force for change.

Insofar as one of the reasons for studying history is to avoid repeating its mistakes, civil resistance offers a sharp, self-conscious break with many centuries of bloodshed and suffering over political, social and religious disputes. Thus, even when it fails, or is stamped out by violent reprisals, it is still on one plane a success, for having neutralised through responsible action the instinct to meet blow for blow. Yet, as recent history shows, civil resistance, while not evenly and universally effective, does not need any charitable definitions of success. As Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, the editors of this volume of case studies of modern civil resistance campaigns around the world, argue, the idea of civil resistance has helped redefine revolution since the 1960s. Although violence remains endemic in human affairs, civil resistance “has assisted at the birth of a new genre of revolution, one that involves force but not the violence always associated with that word.”

One of the key emphases of Civil Resistance & Power Politics is that it understands civil resistance not as an ideal of moral action and non-violent “conversion” of the adversary through “truth-force” as Gandhi saw it, but simply as a strategy of practical politics. Moral transformation of the adversary is not essential to successful civil resistance. As the second half of the book’s title indicates, civil resistance is often a response to “power politics” – the negligence, manipulation, and active oppression demonstrated by those in power. But it seeks to counter that with a power politics of its own. Its morality is restricted to non-violence; beyond that it may legitimately be all calculation and pragmatism. We should neither romanticise the idea of civil resistance, nor believe, despite some of the more stirring stories around it, that it infallibly reaches its projected ends.

Indeed, as the scholar Judith M.Brown argues in a clear-eyed review of Gandhi’s civil resistance campaigns, mass action strategised by the most celebrated practitioner of the method, even though it significantly changed the terms of imperial engagement with the colonised, could not really be said to have brought an end to empire, as some hold. Other political and economic circumstances, such as the Second World War and Britain's own faltering interest in the idea of empire, were just as influential in tilting the balance of history in favour of Indian independence.

Gandhi certainly radically enlarged the terms of protest and negotiation available to the disenfranchised, and laid down a frame where any person, even a child, could join the movement as a political actor. Yet even here, Brown shows, his local campaigns directed towards a specific end, such as the farmers’ agitations in Champaran and Bardoli, were much more successful than his pan-Indian campaigns, where it became harder to exercise discipline all the way down the line. Among the lessons we learn from Gandhi’s example is that civil resistance does not usually yield instant results: it shifts the balance of power step by step. We learn also that much depends on the timing of civil protest, and on the adversary’s willingness to engage. During the Quit India campaign of 1942, for instance, the Raj’s attention was directed towards the World War, and Congress leaders engaged in programs of civil resistance were summarily rounded up and thrown into jail. The movement was not a success. So, as the career of even the most successful exponent of civil resistance shows, skilful strategy (and not just moral rigour) can immeasurably help improve the efficacy of civil resistance.

What factors improve the probability of civil resistance campaigns succeeding? The case studies offered here show that, since civil resistance is really a form of political theatre, widespread local and international publicity is certainly a factor. (The rise of the Internet and the availablity of cheap video technology are therefore good omens for civil resistance in the 21st century.) Astute leadership and discipline are very significant, as passions can often get out of hand in mass movements; "the crowd" is often only a step away from turning into "the mob". International support and the pressure of neighbouring powers, including the threat of economic sanctions, can often decisively influence the way domestic power holders perceive their options in dealing with civil resistance. So, as Christina Fink writes in her essay on the demonstrations by the monks in Burma in September 2007, the refusal by India and China, the two biggest powers in the region, to exert any pressure on the Burmese military regime to negotiate with the dissidents made it easier for the generals to crack down on the protests without fear of reprisal.

Most importantly, mass commitment, as Gandhi realised, makes for campaigns that cannot be crushed easily and without loss of face and authority, and provides a kind of safety in numbers. On the subject of the crowd in civil resistance movements, Garton Ash, one of the chroniclers of the people's movements of Eastern Europe that brought down communism in the late eighties, writes in his essay "A Century of Civil Resistance":

Peaceful revolutions, like the violent ones of old, are distinguished by the eruption of very large numbers of people – call them, according to taste, the masses, the people, the crowd, or the citizens – into public spaces, and hence onto history's stage.. They are the exceptional moments when, to adapt Karl Marx, the people make their own history; or at least, they feel they do. [...] There is strength in these numbers, and there is safety. Such mass gatherings break through the barrier of fear which, as Gandhi saw, is the essential bulwark of non-democratic regimes. [...] In the early twenty-first century, we need new studies of the crowd in these new-style revolutions. Their sociology cries out to be understood better, as do their group dynamics. This is, let is be said at once, difficult to do. You cannot interview 500,000 people. Even if you could, memory rewrites history.

I have spent many hours of my life standing in revolutionary crowds, on freezing squares from Warsaw in 1980 to Prague in 1989 to Kiev in 2004, and they remain gloriously mysterious. What is it that sways them one way or another? Who is it that comes up with the chants that erupt, apparently spontaneously, as the crowd speaks back to the speaker as if it were itself one person? Who, as we stood on Wencelas Square in Prague in 1989, had the idea of taking his or her ring out of his or her pocket, holding it up and rattling the keys like a Chinese bell? (Within minutes, some 300,000 people were doing the same, producing a sound that I shall never forget.) Perhaps even the person who really started it does not know.

[...] Freedom of expression – recovered, or fully enjoyed for the first time – is of the essence in such moments. As Alexander Solzenitsyn and Vaclav Havel both argued, the freedom to say what you want, to challenge a regime of organized lying with "one word of truth", is both a symptom and a cause of political change. When people "speak truth to power" they are themselves empowered. They shift the power balance simply by saying words in public.

The merit of this anthology is in the way it takes the reader forward from civil resistance as a beautiful and moving idea to civil resistance as, if you will, prosaic practice. Even as it seeks to reshape history itself, civil resistance has much to learn from its own history, and, as this book demonstrates, much history today to learn from.

Here is a good recent essay by Garton Ash: "Velvet Revolution: The Prospects" ("The prospects for an attempted velvet revolution depend not just on the nature of the state and society it happens in, but also on the place of that state and society in a wider international setting. Painting...with a very broad brush, one might suggest that the best chances are to be found in semiauthoritarian states that depend to a significant degree, politically, economically, and, so to speak, psychologically, on more democratic ones—and most especially when the foreign states with the most passive influence or active leverage on them are Western democracies. Thus, attempts have failed in large, independent, self-referential states such as China but also in small, isolated, peripheral ones such as Burma, sandwiched as it is between China and India.")

And here are two old posts: "On the Autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi" and "On Vaclav Havel's To The Castle And Back".

[A shorter version of this essay appeared last weekend in Mint Lounge]

Orwell on language, and the language of Orwell

The writer Rebecca Solnit has said about the essay form, comparing it to fiction, that, “In essays, ideas are the protagonists, and they often develop much like characters.” This thought might be a good way of making a case for the abiding relevance of the essays of George Orwell. Although remembered in the main today for his novels Animal Farm and 1984 and his travel books The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia, Orwell was also the writer of some of the best-known essays of twentieth-century prose, including “Charles Dickens”, “The Prevention of Literature”, “In Defence of English Cooking”, “Why I Write”, and, most influentially, “Politics and the English Language”.

If ideas are the “characters” of essays, then the main characters of Orwell’s essays could be said to be four heavyweights: Freedom, Socialism, Totalitarianism, and Language. Just as no family ever agrees on any one point or takes one clear line, these four ideas also never work themselves, in Orwell’s writing, into some clear and consistent pattern, easy to summarise and propagate. To learn what he is saying – and we are thinking of a world in which the two World Wars, the Russian revolution, and the rise of Hitler were the main trends through which he was thinking out his ideas – we have to read Orwell, to witness a mind thinking its way through a political and moral minefield (As George Packer perceptively notes in his introduction, "In his best work, Orwell's arguments are mostly with himself."). A good way of beginning such a project would be to go through some of the pieces recently brought together in a sleek new volume called Critical Essays. This title is apt, for it as a critic of trends and currents in the immediate world around him that the essayist wields the most power.

The strongest of Orwell’s stresses (and hence the easiest argument to reproduce) was against totalitarianism, both of the communist and fascist varieties. As early as any other observer of his time, he grasped how the Soviet state was far more evil than the system which it claimed to refute, and that its management of thought and opinion could only end up making automatons of both the bureaucracy and citizens. We know well today the truth of Orwell’s argument that the organised deception practised by totalitarian states is not a temporary expedient, but is rather “something integral to totalitarianism”. In the same way, his observation that, in totalitarian states, “history is something to be created rather than learned” is something that historians of dictatorships from the Third Reich to Saddam’s Baathist Iraq have repeatedly demonstrated. Orwell gives us a lens that lays bare the deceptions of an entire brand of politics.

Orwell’s interest in language as an instrument of politics – as a means not for expressing but “for concealing or preventing thought” – is what animates his most famous essay, “Politics and the English Language”. Here, Orwell’s attack on bad, vague, overwrought or obfuscatory English is made not just as a writer concerned with declining standards. Orwell also sees that such language can be a result not just of plain incompetence or laziness, but of a deliberate intent to distort or mask the truth. Orwell proves that it is often in the interest of the state – or else a class within the state, such as the bureaucracy – to only pretend to be giving information or to be demonstrating intent, or empathy, or solidarity (he cites the classic bureaucratic cliche “we will leave no stone unturned”). But the very vagueness and woolliness of the words being used give the game away, and we would know this only if we have a conceptual awareness of how language is working, or can be made to work.

Orwell’s argument is of course aimed against the state – whether the propaganda machine of totalitarian states, or the hedging and inffectuality of democratic states – and against the peculiar jargon of ideologies like Marxism, of which he was a relentless opponent. But we could easily apply it today to many forces in our times. The hysterical shrieking, pervasive sexualisation, and bad faith of so much advertising and PR-speak today are a conscious debasement of language, as are the peculiar argot of management schools, political parties, and academia, the deliberate hysteria and melodrama of our media, and the many short-cuts of chatspeak when it infects more traditional forms of written communication. (I don’t know about you, but many emails and letters I get address me as “u” rather than “you”, and to me even this apparently harmless and innocent misdemeanour seems not just a diminishment of me, but of language and thought itself.) All these currents, under the aegis of the so-called forces of freedom, threaten our selfhood and independence in the free world as much as oppressive political power might; freedom cannot be something that is bestowed upon us, but is something that emerges actively from our own thought, language, and actions. And for Orwell, where thought is put to sleep, there begins the road to subjugation. Language as a means not of stimulating but of stupefying thought – that is Orwell's target. Writing of totalitarian propaganda, he speaks of how such thought can debase language and hollow it out completely from within, but he is perceptive enough to see that this kind of degradation can work both ways: that "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." We have in our culture today an abundance of shallow language that corrupts thought.

Orwell is one of the most quotable of writers, and the pleasures of his ringing sentences can only be communicated by direct quotation. From a long essay on Dickens, in which Orwell takes Dickens to task for criticising society without ever offering a constructive program, before concluding, more sympathetically: "The vagueness of [Dickens's] discontent is a mark of its permanence. What he is out against is not this or that institution, but, as Chesterton put it, 'an expression on the human face'." From a review of TS Eliot's late poems, which Orwell judged negatively: "If one wants to deal in antitheses, one might say that the later poems express a melancholy faith and the earlier ones a glowing despair." Here, in one of the most moving passages in all of Orwell, are his criticisms of Gandhi and his religiosity in an essay called "Reflections on Gandhi":

Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because 'friends react on one another' and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one's preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconciliable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi — with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction — always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which — I think — most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

And here is the first paragraph of Orwell's review of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, which, through a brilliant summary that is content to leave all analysis for later, summons up an unforgettable image of Chaplin's comic genius:

France, 1918, Charlie Chaplin, in field grey and German steel helmet, is pulling the string of Big Bertha, falling down every time she fires. A little later, losing his way in the smoke screen, he finds himself attacking in the middle of the American infantry. Later he is in flight with a wounded staff officer, in an aeroplane which flies upside down for such lengths of time that Charlie is puzzled to know why his watch persists in standing up on the end of its chain. Finally, falling out of the aeroplane into a mud-hole, he loses his memory and is shut up in a mental home for twenty years, completely ignorant of what is happening outside.

These vigorous and combative essays have dated only slightly; both as a record of their time and as advice for our own time, they still have much to say.

And a recent post that takes up Orwell on the question of writerly depictions of working life: "On Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work".

On Tzvetan Todorov's Torture and the War of Terror

One of the major early decisions of the Obama presidency in America—a decision intended to establish a sharp break with the Bush regime’s way of working—was the resolution to shut down the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010. This site has been one of the key locations, along with the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, that has led to the debilitation of America’s moral standing in the world, and has created a general derision at the purported aims of the “war on terror”.

As the world’s first democracy and, even today, the first among democracies, America has a certain responsibility, no matter how awesome its power, towards democratic norms. But as the philosopher and historian of ideas, Tzvetan Todorov, argues in his new book, Torture and the War on Terror, not only is the Bushian phrase “war on terror” a vague, dubious and scaremongering idea, it has succeeded, in contravention of generally accepted norms in the civilized world, in sanctioning unspeakable human rights violations upon detainees in the interest of “security”.

Todorov is concerned, like many other commentators, about the Bush administration's tactic of introducing euphemisms such as “illegal enemy combatant” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” to work its way around prevailing strictures against the use of torture to extract information from suspects (as glimpsed, for instance, in the line taken by the infamous "Torture Memo" of 2002, on which a comprehensive set of listings is here). He is also worried about the support extended to such practices by other governments in the free world. But he is distressed, most of all, by the recent change in the moral climate that has made ordinary citizens of democracies, like you and me, believe that torture is a worthwhile way of ensuring that our safety is defended.

A common hypothetical situation put forth by those who say torture is under some circumstances justified (and there are many “hawks” among democratic thinkers who subscribe to such views) is the “ticking bomb scenario”. A terrorist has been arrested; it is known he has planted a bomb somewhere. There is only one hour to find out where. The lives of thousands of citizens are at stake. In such a situation, would you not use the harshest methods to get the necessary information out of the detainee? If you say “no”, all too often you are assumed to be an unreasonable and lily-livered bleeding-heart.

But, argues Todorov, the situation involving most detainees on a charge of terrorism is far more prosaic than this cooked-up situation of high drama, and usually our own knowledge of what they may have plotted amounts to no more than a strong suspicion. Further, nothing proves that the information obtained under torture is actually true. As the third-degree methods used by policemen in India often prove, prisoners under duress will confess to pretty much anything you accuse them of. Intelligence obtained by subjecting a man or woman to intense stress or degradation is often not, to use the catchphrase, “actionable intelligence”. Too often, torture is about nothing but the exercise of absolute power of one human being over another.

Lastly, even if torture allows, in a small number of cases, the resolution of a short-term crisis, in the long run it does incalculable damage to the moral standing of nations, inflames hostility among adversaries, and makes the population of neutral countries unsympathetic to the cause. As the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat has written, “Torture aims for a single goal—obtaining information—but it achieves a slew of others.”

Citizens of democracies, notes Todorov, often criticize sharply the human rights violations of totalitarian regimes. But we should look closer home too, to see if we are not, by degrees, being turned into the very brutes that we so abhor. Even if we are not actually at fault ourselves, barbarous acts are being committed by governments we have elected, that claim to be acting in our interest. "institutionalized torture is even worse than individual torture," writes Todorov, "because it subverts the very foundation of the idea of justice and law. If the state itself becomes the torturer, how can we believe in the civil order that it claims to bring or to sanction?" There are no good reasons for torture, either on the count of utility or of morality. Todorov’s short, trenchant book is a reminder that we cannot be tough on terror without also, paradoxically, being tough on torture.

And some links: "Should We Fight Terror With Torture?" by Alan Dershowitz, "If Torture Works" by Michael Ignatieff", "Bush's Intellectual Torturers" by Todorov, "Does Torture Work?" by Edwidge Danticat, and "The Torture Myth" by Anne Applebaum.

Todorov's points also have great relevance closer to home. Custodial deaths in India are among the highest in any of the world's democracies, a sign of how far we have to go on respecting the rights of individuals and the rule of law. We are at the moment debating our own Prevention of Torture Bill, on which point you might want to read Neelabh Mishra's "Dismantle The Iron Maiden".

An interview with Ramin Jahanbegloo

The achievement of Iranian-Canadian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo has been, over a series of books, to interpret India for Indians, often with the help of other Indians. Jahanbegloo’s works include Talking India, a book-length conversation with scholar Ashis Nandy; The Spirit of India, a study of the thought of 20th century Indian thinkers; and India Revisited: Conversations on Contemporary India, a set of interviews with Indian politicians, businessmen, artists and sportsmen. In these works, Jahanbegloo presents to Indian readers a set of resources and interpretive frameworks to understand both their history—rich with intellectual ferment and examples of fertile synthesis—and the criss-crossing forces and energies of the present moment. On the occasion of the release of two new books—India Analysed (Oxford University Press), a dialogue with psychoanalyst and historian Sudhir Kakar, and Beyond Violence (Har-Anand), a political manifesto for the 21st century, written in collaboration with Italian ambassador Roberto Toscano— I asked Jahanbegloo some questions about his relationship with India.

You grew up in Iran and were a doctoral student in France. What then are the origins of your intense interest in India?

I think that what I know about India today is the result of 30 years of reading, reflection, conversations with people, and travelling within India. My first links to the thought of India were the books by Gandhi, Tagore, and Radhakrishnan that I found in the library of my parents. Later, for my master’s degree in France, I was working on Carl von Clausewitz and war. Around this time I began to gravitate towards the literature of non-violence, which seemed a very appealing alternative to the Western military tradition. So I actually did my PhD on Gandhi: My thesis was called "Gandhi and the West". Later I also did a book on Tagore in Persian for Unesco. I first came to India 20 years ago and I have been coming back regularly ever since. Sometimes I say to my friends that either I have been an Indian in a previous life or I will be one in my next life.

So many of your books—such as your book with Ashis Nandy, and the new one with Sudhir Kakar—are cast in the form of a dialogue. Could you tell us why you prefer this approach?

The idea of dialogue is central to my world view and the way I work. I think the essence of philosophical work is dual: to engage in dialogue, but also to have the courage to think independently, to think like a dissident. You might call these the two Ds of philosophy. Each of my book-length conversations with Indian scholars has different emphases. With Ashis Nandy it was issues such as religion and secularism; with Kakar I have tried to explore the attitudes of Indian people towards sex, the mystical side of Indian religious life. I have a similar book forthcoming with the intellectual Bhikhu Parekh, where we talk about political philosophy, multiculturalism and diversity in the Indian context.

Even your other new book, Beyond Violence, while not explicitly in a dialogical format, is written in collaboration with the Italian ambassador to India, Roberto Toscano.

The book itself is about how dialogue can be used as a tool to tame the violence in our world today. So it made sense to write it with someone from another religion, another culture, since it is about how we must transcend the idea of an “us” and a “them” and find shared values with others. The idea of shared values is important because, as the first decade of the 21st century is showing us, the world is no longer facing regional issues, but global issues—all our problems are deeply interlinked. The terrorist attacks on Mumbai fall not just into a regional pattern, but a global pattern.

But can humanity really advance “beyond violence”? Isn’t violence a kind of constant throughout human history?

Let me put it this way. If we look at modernity, we can discern two strands to it. One is a narrative of domination and mastery: over nature, over technology, over other human beings. This is a narrative of violence. The other is that of emancipation, of freedom, of individualism. So, although the first principle cannot be eliminated, it can certainly be moderated by the second. The idea of permanent violence does not mean that successful examples of the reverse have not been seen. All the thinkers of non-violence have always emphasized that we cannot just accept the situation that we have—we have to think of ways of transcending it. So I am not a fatalist on the subject of violence.

You take up the idea of the native strengths of Indian culture more specifically in your book The Spirit of India. What is this spirit?

The strength of India is that it is a country of in-betweens. It is a median country. If you look at the 20th century, India was never totally on the side of either traditionalism or modernism. Traditionalists had to learn how to engage with modernists, and modernists in turn were moderated by voices rooted in tradition, as in the relationship between Gandhi and Nehru. The common element in the work of Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore and several other thinkers is an attempt to acknowledge the richness of Indian traditions while also trying to root out its uglier aspects, its injustices. Even the intellectual journey of someone like Maulana Azad, for example, is the journey of someone who spoke like a fundamentalist in his youth and like a secularist in his later years. He went from a kind of Islamic revivalism to Islamic humanism.

I was struck by your remark in a lecture that Gandhi’s aim was to “democratize democracy”. What do you mean by that? How does Gandhi approach the idea of democracy and where does he leave it?

By that remark I meant that Gandhi wanted to further democratize the Western idea of democracy that he came across in his reading and in his years in the West. Gandhi is not a pluralist, a democrat, in the liberal sense—that is, he does not just emphasize the rights and freedoms of people, but also their duties. So his is what I call an enlarged pluralism, in which freedoms stand side by side with responsibilities. This leads naturally to the idea that change in society cannot occur in a vertical, top-down way, but only in a horizontal way, through individual empowerment and will. And that is a very relevant idea in today’s world: that individuals assert themselves, and not just allow states to act in their names. As Gandhi used to say, "The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within."

Finally, you were put in prison, in solitary confinement, without being charged, for over four months by the Iranian government in 2006. What impact did that experience have on you?

Solitary confinement leads to a great increase in self-awareness and self-discipline. You are fighting insanity; you have to learn how to get along with yourself. I had to work very hard to beat back the bitterness that prison creates, the sense of your most basic rights being violated. I had no paper so I would put down my scattered thoughts on biscuit wrappers. Later I published them as a collection of aphorisms called A Mind In Winter.

Is there any one of those aphorisms that you can share?

I can. “The meaning of life is life itself.” In prison you become aware of naked life, stripped of any ideology or dogma. You realize that life cannot be reduced to any system or simple moral framework—it is bigger and stronger than any of these things.

Two old posts on Jahanbegloo are here: "Talking India with Ashis Nandy" and "Ramin Jahanbegloo on Gandhi and his concept of freedom". A review of Spirit of India is here.

And some older interviews with writers: Ramachandra Guha, Samrat Upadhyay, Altaf Tyrewala, Pico Iyer, and Christopher Kremmer.

On Basharat Peer's Curfewed Night

There are many books now in circulation on Kashmir and its discontents, but possibly none as haunting and intimate as this one. Basharat Peer has been a name in Indian journalism for some years now for his reporting on Kashmir for Rediff and Tehelka, but his new book Curfewed Night, a blend of memoir and reportage, is probably the best first-hand account of the region—its beauty, its alienation, and its pain—available to thousands of interested readers more simply and securely Indian than Kashmiris are.

Indeed, Curfewed Night lifts the veil not just from a Kashmir that is no longer a part of mainstream experience and limps along on its own track, but also from an India that many of us are not willing to acknowledge. Here is India as a military power, holding its own citizens—or people that it asserts are its citizens—to ransom in a double bind of ineptitude and brutality.

Peer was born in 1977, the son of a bureaucrat in the state civil service and the grandson of the village headmaster, in Seer village in Anantnag district, Jammu and Kashmir. His childhood was relatively serene and uncomplicated, bound up with the circadian rhythms of village life and the seasonal cycles of farm work and winter slowdown. Here is an idyllic village scene from early in the book:

On most Saturday evenings throughout my childhood in the mid eighties, a blue Willys jeep would drive to my village in southern Kashmir. It would follow the black, ribbon-like road dividing vast expanses of paddy and mustard fields in a small valley guarded by the mighty Himalayas. Two or three floor mud and brick houses with tin and thatch roofs faced the road. A few were brightly painted and most were naked brick; dust and time had coloured their rough timber windows and doors a deep brown. A ground level room in every third house had been converted into a shop. Villagers who routinely sat on the wooden shopfronts to gossip, talk politics and cricket would wave at the jeep. A not-so-tall man in his early thirties, almost always wearing a suit, a matching tie, and brown Bata shoes would raise his right hand in greeting. If you saw him up close, you could see his deep brown eyes, straight nose, plump cheeks, and the beginnings of a belly. The Willys would slowly come to a halt in a village square, not far from a blue and green milestone that bore the name of our village: Seer, 0 kilometres.

Father would step out near a modest, naked brick house next to a grocery store and a pharmacy...

What is so charming about this passage is that although Peer is describing his own father, we are given this information at the very end. We see the older Mr.Peer as the villagers see him, and although he is one of them, his position in the wider world gives him a kind of glow, a halo, when he comes back home to his humble origins.

Sent at the age of 11 to a boarding school a few miles from the village, the young Basharat feasts on books by Kipling, Dickens, and Stevenson. His connection to India, like that of many Kashmiri youth, is remote; he knows it only as the force that rigs elections and rules by decree from a distant centre. Then the rising pitch of the demand for self-determination in the winter of 1989-90, and the white heat of the Indian response, destroys the delicate balance of the old world for good. “That winter began my political education,” writes Peer. “It took the form of acronyms: JKLF, JKSLF, BSF, CRPF. To go with it I learnt new phrases: frisking, crackdown, bunker, search, identity card, arrest and torture.” At school, the students spontaneously stop singing the national anthem. Peer hears of teenagers slightly older than him crossing the border to receive training in arms from Pakistan; he finds boys from his own school absent after the vacations after the exodus of Pandits from Kashmir and he is herded with other males of his village to camps where their affiliations are scrutinized. Briefly, he too wants to enter the world of guns and glory, but is talked out of it by his family. He is sent off to study in Aligarh and then Delhi, far from the war zone.

In Delhi, though, Peer gains an awareness not available to him in Kashmir of “the various Indias that existed, Indias that I liked and cared about, Indias that were unlike the militaristic power it seemed in Kashmir”. Peer enlists in the media boom at the turn of the century and becomes a reporter. He returns to his homeland to try and be the voice for its troubles, even as he knows he is one of those fortunate Kashmiris who can leave for better prospects any time they like.

Peer’s book is so good because it moves skilfully between close-ups of people and the long view of history, and because it describes the scars not only on the physical but also the psychological landscape of Kashmir. He treats his subjects with sensitivity and sympathy, and they respond graciously in turn. His work illuminates many vexing predicaments that cannot be accounted for by mere statistics. For example, he shows how, even when an innocent is killed on suspicion of being a militant, his family is counselled not to seek justice for him because it will only mean further trouble for them. The living must resign themselves to the loss of a loved one, and try and stay under the radar of the authorities as if they are not victims but criminals.

Meanwhile, for every person who is confirmed dead, there is another who has disappeared without a trace: Kashmir actually has an Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons. Kashmir, in Peer’s reckoning, is a twilight realm of the dead, the absent, and those left behind who furtively eke out a perilous existence, caught between soldier and militant. The living are fortunate to be still standing—"In these times, every day is a gift", says one of them. But it is not much of a gift, for in order to survive the living, too, “have buried and cremated the individuals they had once been”. Srinagar, the capital,

...is a medieval city dying in a modern war. It is empty streets, locked shops, angry soldiers and boys with stones. It is several thousand military bunkers, four golf courses, and three bookshops. It is wily politicians repeating their lies about war and peace to television cameras and small crowds gathered by the promise of an elusive job or a daily fee of a few hundred rupees. It is stopping at sidewalks and traffic lights when the convoys of rulers and their patrons in armoured cars, secured by machine guns, rumble on broken roads. It is staring back or looking away, resigned. Srinagar is never winning or never being defeated.

[Srinagar newspapers often] print headlines announcing deaths in red. Some run a box on the front page giving the daily, updated statistics of the dead. Srinagar is being in a coffee shop, in an office, outside of a college, crossing a bridge and feeling, touching, breathing history, politics and war, in unmarked signs and landmarks. It is seeing a bridge, a clearing, a nondescript building, and knowing that men fell here, that a boy was tortured here.

[...] Srinagar is a city of bunkers. Of the world's cities, it has the highest military presence. But Srinagar is also a city of absences. It has lost its nights to a decade and a half of curfews, and de facto curfews.

Peer has not only travelled widely to put faces and names and stories to the situation that goes just by the name "Kashmir" but, as is evident from some of these sentences, he has also found a language equal to the burden of representing the anger and loss of an entire world, of a whole generation disfigured by armed conflict. If Curfewed Night offers no solutions, it is because there is already no shortage of them. What is in short supply is the courage to admit culpability and the will to begin on a new footing, and that redemptive state cannot bloom without books such as this one.

And some links to further reading: "Mutiny In The Mountains", a recent piece by Peer; "Death In Kashmir", "The Birth of a Nation", and "Kashmir: The Unending War", a three-part essay by Pankaj Mishra from 2000 (and an exchange between some readers of the piece and Mishra); "The Trouble With Eden" and "How Pluralism Goes Bad" by Mukul Kesavan, from 2008 and 2006 respectively (and again a response to Kesavan and Kesavan's reply); "Azadi", a recent essay in Outlook by Arundhati Roy; "The Question in Kashmir" by Pratap Bhanu Mehta; "Think The Unthinkable" by Vir Sanghvi, "Independence Day For Kashmir" by Swaminathan S. Aiyar, "A New Compact With J & K" by Nitin Pai, and "Rethinking Kashmir Politics" by Yoginder Sikand, four essays published at almost the same time in August this year; "The Kashmir Conundrum" by Harinder Baweja; "Report From Kashmir" by Amitava Kumar from 2002; "Kashmir: The Roads Ahead" by the foreign policy expert Stephen P. Cohen, from 1995; "One-Sided Coverage", an argument by Sevanti Ninan on the representation of the Kashmiri viewpoint in the Indian media and a recent interview with the journalist Chindu Sreedharan on the subject of media coverage of the Kashmir issue; "A Target Forever", a recent piece by SAR Geelani, the Delhi University lecturer first sentenced to death by an Indian court on a charge of involvement on the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001 and later acquitted in 2005 by the Supreme Court; and lastly, "On The Making of Jashn-e-Azadi" by the documentary film-maker Sanjay Kak, who has also written about the reception of his controversial film here.

A list of links to selected Internet resources on Kashmir maintained by the UC Berkeley Library can be found here. And a good book to read on the Kashmir dispute is Sumantra Bose's Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths of Peace (2002), from which a brief excerpt is here. A reading list of other books on Kashmir with brief comments on each can be found here.

[A shorter version of this piece appeared last Saturday in Mint)

On Paul Ginsborg's Democracy: Crisis and Renewal

Democracy: the idea comes from ancient Greece (where it was practised as direct democracy), then languished for aeons, resurfaced in the eighteenth century in a new form (that of representative democracy), made steady progress in the nineteenth century, and then caught fire and swept the field in the twentieth. It is now the dominant vision of the political good; even the most undemocratic regimes in the world utter democratic pieties or aspire for the fig leaf of rigged elections to cover their shame. Democracy rarely fulfils its intrinsic potential, but neither is it corrupted as easily as more utopian systems: it is both fragile and tough. It can be mostly procedural – limited to elections – or it can deeply permeate a society’s thought and everyday life. And though it can seem the most natural and practical of arrangements, yet it also requires a faith in human beings that amounts to a kind of idealism.

Indeed, it is idealism that animates Democracy: Crisis and Renewal, a new book by the historian and political theorist Paul Ginsborg, because, when interpreted statistically, democracy is not in crisis but is flourishing like never before. In 1926, Ginsborg writes, only 29 countries in the world had broadly convincing democratic credentials. But by 2000, 120 of the 192 nation-states of the United Nations could be said to be democratic. Communism, the greatest adversary of liberal democracy in the twentieth century, has collapsed except for one or two tenacious redoubts. Even though various kinds of dictatorship still prosper all over the world, not a day passes without democracy taking a small step forward, whether in China or Cuba.

The crisis, then, that Ginsborg detects in many of the world’s established democracies (among which we should include India), comes from within. And to help us make sense of what may be going wrong and how these troubles have been anticipated at different stages in the history of democratic thought, Ginsborg summons the spirits of two of the greatest modern political thinkers, the nineteenth-century contemporaries John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. Although neither man stood for democracy as we understand it now (we must remember that a concept seemingly so self-evident as universal suffrage is a fairly recent reality, and that these men lived under a different democratic sky), and there were many differences between them on the subject, both were integrally involved in the project to make all men and women “active subjects in both politics and society”, and in that this is one of the ideals of democracy they were both democratic. Much of what they had to say in their time with respect to democratic ideas remains relevant to present circumstances.

In Ginsborg’s reading, democracy is being undermined today by a complex of interrelated problems. Firstly (and this is a kind of paradox), liberal democracy has its roots in nineteenth-century European liberalism, which held that every adult citizen deserved, on the one hand, greater autonomy and private freedoms, and on the other, a right to vote and participate in representative government. But in many modern nation-states, politics and the political class have now become excessively professionalised; politicians are seen as being of a different breed from normal citizens. At the same time – and this is perhaps more serious – citizens have increasingly retreated into the private sphere, and are often involved in politics only to the extent of bemoaning its quality. Thus democracy has been “hollowed out”; it is not vigorous, but operates on a kind of autopilot. “Where politics does survive,” writes Ginsborg, “it has become media and personality politics, to be viewed rather than experienced”. Democracy is representative, but not participatory, when ideally it should be both.

Secondly, consumer capitalism has profoundly affected the rhythms and emphases of our lives, which are increasingly organised on a work-and-spend axis. The better-off classes are rich in comforts but often perceive themselves to be poor in time; the logic of choice and self-interest, while beneficial in many ways, has also produced what Ginsborg thinks to be “an extraordinary passivity and disinterest in politics”.

This crisis was foreseen by thinkers such as Benjamin Constant, who wrote in 1819 in his essay “The liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns”: “The danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily”. The history of modern democracy is one of the (on some occasions mortal) struggle to expand the circle of enfranchisement to include all adult citizens. Therefore, by taking for granted what has been won for us at great cost, we open the door, however slightly, to a time when we may not have it again.

Lastly, in many of the world’s mature democracies, politics and big money have joined hands, and election spending has spiralled to preposterous levels. This not only makes a charade of democracy’s putative egalitarianism, it also makes it vulnerable to the Marxist critique of the state, which charges it with being the preserve of a particular class and of entrenched economic interests. The “classic liberal distinction between the political and economic spheres”, of the kind maintained by Mill, and today by his more determinedly ideological modern-day followers, can ignore serious issues about the relationship of democracy and economics.

Marx, on the other hand, was prescient in his understanding of how political and economic democracy must go hand in hand, and how, in a capitalist system, the worker is profoundly alienated from both the product of his labour and from himself, in ways that damage him or her and also the larger edifice of democracy (Marx’s diagnosis, though, was more acute than his proposed revolutionary solutions).

Ginsborg presents a number of responses to these issues of democratic destabilisation. Some of the best passages in his book are those which summarise Mill’s thoughts on citizenship as nourished in the soil of democratic freedom and openness. Mill imagined citizens as a group of “active and dissenting individuals”, self-disciplined, independent-minded, nurturing a strong sense of the meaning and worth of their individuality. “He loved eccentrics rather than conformists; he wanted everyone to make up their minds on the basis of information and deliberation.” Democracy had to be rooted in healthy disagreement and debate if it was not to wither, because “Mankind speedily becomes unable to conceive diversity, when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it” (We see from such sentences that Mill is so enjoyable not just because of the strength of his thought but also the marvellous rhythms of his syntax).

Although there is much talk now of the relationship between civil society and democracy on the one hand and the individual and democracy on the other, Mill also stressed the responsibilities in democracy of that other unit of social organisation, the family. Although the family in history had often stood for a system of authority, incarnating “the virtues of despotism, but also its vices”, the family might also serve as “the real school of the virtues of freedom”. Ginsborg takes up this theme:

Every family is different and each has its own individuality and history. Yet there can be little doubt that under modern consumer capitalism most families, for the reasons I have outlined, are overwhelmingly conformist (in Mill’s sense of the term) and self-absorbed. They are not, by and large, producers of active and dissenting individuals, nor do they contribute anything but a minimum part of their extraordinary energy and creativity to a public democratic sphere. It is as if, by a sleight of hand, they have been separated from politics. How to break through that separation, to release some of those energies so that they could contribute to the reinvention of democracy, is probably the greatest rebus of modern politics.[...] Families, civil society, and the democratic state need to exist in a mutually reinforcing equilibrium.

And here is Ginsborg again on the subject of individuals, time, and democratic participation:

The question of time in a society which is not time-rich but time-poor, and which is dominated by work-and-spend routines, is a very serious one. [But] it is not that individuals have no time, but that they are not accustomed to making time for the public sphere. Mill hits the nail on the head: “So true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and everything that is usual appears natural.”

Putting aside a few hours every week for matters of public interest could quite easily come to seem customary, especially if those who now hold political power in democracies thought such an objective worth of encouragement. Under the honeyed routines of consumer capitalism, to pass a great many hours in hypermarkets and shopping centres has now become quite “natural”. A priori there is nothin to prevent time spent in improving democracy from becoming a habitual part of people’s lives. Such a prospect does not offer material rewards, but quite possibly a greater meaning to life – something which is often deeply felt as lacking today.

Ginsborg highlights innovative citizens’ initiatives around the world, such as a township in Brazil that practices a kind of direct democracy, or a proposal by two political theorists in America for a national “Deliberation Day” before elections to foreground the importance of political debate. He points to how, in our internet age, communication and access to information have been greatly improved for those who are prepared to make productive use of technology, and how global civil society is coming together in extraordinary ways in transnational movements of protest or proposal.

Ginsborg’s book closes with a thrilling dialogue in which the ghosts of Mill and Marx are seen carrying on their running debate from “a cloud somewhere over Europe” (Mill is wearing walking shoes, as he has just returned from a long botanical expedition; Marx has “recently been promoted from Purgatory”, and is carrying a book, which he keeps annotating). They begin to talk, to reflect over mistakes they might have made in the light of current realities; Marx agrees that he made a mistake in interpreting the birth of capitalism as its death throes, and agrees that “the rate of profit does not fall”, while Mill admits that he mistook the virtuous consequences of competition, and “over-estimated the self-righting capacities of the market”.

The best point in their discussions is made by the older man. Just as virtue is proved not by theoretical knowledge of the good but by good actions, says Mill, so too democracy, which we understand to be “virtue in its political guise”, can be established only through regular practice at large and small levels. Ginsborg’s book demands that we be not just subjects but also agents of democracy.

And here is a roundtable of essays on and debates around democracy, moving from larger overviews to more specific angles: "Democracy: a short history" and "Whatever happened to democracy?" by John Keane; "Downloading Democracy" by Robert Conquest; "Democracy and its global roots" by Amartya Sen; "Democracy as a way of life" by Sidney Hook; "Democracy for all?" by James Q. Wilson; "Liberal education and mass democracy" by Leo Strauss; "The essence of democracy: not majority rule" by Minoo Masani"; "Democracy's Global Crisis" by Ralph Peters; "Is voter ignorance killing democracy?" by Christopher Shea; "The myth of the rational voter" by Bryan Kaplan; "Aunt Kobra's Islamic Democracy" by Reza Aslan; "Islamist Parties and Democracy" by Husain Haqqani and Hillel Fradkin; "Identity, Immigration, and Democracy" by Francis Fukuyama; "Democracy's Forgotten Dimension" by Vaclav Havel; and "Reinventing democracy" by Jose Saramago.

And here are two essays each on Marx and Mill respectively: "The poet of dialectics" by Francis Wheen (whose biography of Marx is one of the most entertaining books on politics I have ever read) and "Karl Marx, journalist" by Christopher Hitchens; and "John Stuart Mill" by Richard Reeves (who runs the thinktank Demos and has just published a widely praised biography of Mill) and "The Forgotten Philosopher" by Alan Wolfe.

And lastly, an old post that shows that Mill and Gandhi might have had much to talk about: "Ramin Jahanbegloo on Gandhi's concept of freedom".

On Vaclav Havel's To The Castle and Back

In one of a series of grand revolutions that swept over Europe in 1989, the Czech playwright Václav Havel, then the most prominent dissident in his country and indeed one of the cogent critics of totalitarianism in the world, was swept into Prague Castle on the wings of what came to be called the Velvet Revolution. It was a fairytale conclusion to a lifetime of difficult and often lonely political opposition that had included several years in prison.

But if that moment was romantic, the years that followed, and which are described in Havel's new memoir To The Castle and Back – one short term as president of Czechoslovakia, and the two full terms at the helm of the Czech Republic – were mostly prosaic. The man who previously had followed the path of his conscience and had freely spoken his mind now entered, half-willingly, the world of bureaucracy, diplomacy, suits and neckties, compromise, caution, acronyms, and rhetoric – entered the massive precincts of Prague Castle, one of the oldest and largest seats of a head of state in the world, "almost literally a city within a city" – a site whose architecture seemed designed specifically for murky and furtive conduct. "Just think of those long corridors! They actually seduce one into a kind of life in the corridors of power, invite one to invent and spread rumors, to weave intrigues." To The Castle And Back might be read as an account of idealism in politics as tempered by the push and pull of worldly forces: of the castle of the self in the castle of power.

Havel’s book is actually a tripartite collaboration between himself, his long-time friend and translator Paul Wilson, and the respected Czech journalist Karel Hvizdala. The work is not one continuous narrative, but a selection by Havel of notes, memos to Castle staff, and diary entries between 1993 and 2005, interspersed with long, thoughtful answers to probing questions by Hvizdala.

This makes for a highly appealing structure in which, as in politics, profound and mundane concerns are thrown at each other. Here the President can be heard making a grand point about democracy as “a relationship to the world and to society, a way of thinking” or voicing fears that the Czech Republic "would forever remain in a sphere of dubious quasi-democracies, teeming with populists and nationalists"; there he is found arriving to the conclusion that “We need a longer hose for watering”, or asking “In the closet where the vacuum cleaner is kept, there also lives a bat. How to get rid of it?”, or stating, "I'm sending a percel of shirts for Mrs. Ouskova." Havel’s memos to the staff emphasise the quotidian and practical aspects of politics, and his replies to Hvizdala the larger shape of his thought and the range of his concerns.

Here, by way of illustration, is a question by Hvizdala about the European Union, which was established in 1993 and which the Czech Republic joined in 2004, alongside other formerly Communist states who had existed for several decades behind the Iron Curtain of USSR-led communism:

Hvizdala: The old member states have contributed significantly to the development of the new members who are all less evolved because of long years of communist rule. Do you think that we can ever pay them back? What do you say when you are reminded of this subsidization?

Havel: I think that we have an opportunity to pay them back in a certain way already, and one can even see situations in which we are already doing this. I'm thinking about our political voice. The European Union occasionally still suffers from the old European disease, which is the tendency to make compromises with evil, to close one's eyes to dictatorship, to practice a politics of appeasement or even of accommodation, vis-à-vis totalitarian systems, that is determined by economic interests. Some politicians, those who have not experienced fascism or communism, are incorrigible in this regard. I think that the new members of the European Union, who have a relatively recent experience of totalitarianism, are perhaps duty-bound to take a more principled position – should it occasionally be necessary – and to monitor the European Union in this regard, or educate it. It's in everyone's interest. Accommodating evil has, so far, never forced evil to retreat, or to become more humane; on the contrary, it has always made life easier for it. In the end, when confrontation came, the price that everyone had to pay was infinitely higher than the cost of a firm stance.

Unsurprisingly, one of the main themes of To The Castle and Back is man's struggle with language, and also a writer's love of ordered and precise language – indeed the durability of language in a world of transient things. Caught up in the drudgery of statecraft, he muses, "How wonderful it is, by comparison, to be a writer! You write something in a couple of weeks, and it's here for the ages. What will remain when presidents and prime ministers are gone? Some references to them in textbooks, mostly likely inaccurate."

Among the tasks that Havel is seen taking most seriously is his speechwriting: a recurring issue of these pages is the pressure of composing speeches for all kinds of occasions. “For many years now, my weekends have more or less all been occupied with the writing of speeches," he is found complaining in 1998. "It's awful." Elsewhere, he reveals why the composition of speeches take so much out of him: "I try to write speeches as if they were short poems. They have to have a beginning, a structure, an end, their own melody, energy, and drama. Otherwise it’s impossible.” And at the close of the book we find this beautiful meditation on language:

The beauty of language is that it can never capture precisely what it wants. Language is disconnected, hard, digital as it were, and for that reason, but not only for that reason, it can never completely capture something as connected as reality, experience, or our souls. This opens the door to the magnificent battle for expression and self-expression that has accompanied man down through history. It is a battle without end, and thanks to it, everything that is human is constantly being elucidated, each time somewhat differently. Moreover, it is in this battle that man in fact becomes himself. As an individual, and as a species. He simply tries to capture the world the world and himself more and more exactly through words, images, or actions, and the more he succeeds, the more aware he is that he can never completely capture either the world or himself, nor any part of the world. [...] It's a Sisypean fate. But it can't be helped: man will carry the complete truth about himself to the grave, though someone, in the end, will know that truth after all: if not the Lord God, then at least the great memory of Being.

"I think that the moral order stands above the legal, political and economic orders, and that these latter orders should derive from the former, and not be techniques for getting around its imperatives. And I believe that the moral order has a metaphysical anchoring in the infinite and the eternal." These words late in the book contain the essence of Havel's thought, and if Indian readers find them familiar, it may be because they so closely resemble the thought of Gandhi, who, like Havel, sought to restore the spiritual and ethical dimension in politics, and whose thought, like that of Havel, achieved an extraordinary balance of idealism and realism. Havel, like Gandhi, insists that external change is meaningless without a change within; his observation, in his book Letters To Olga, that

The importance of the no­tion of human responsibility has grown in my meditations. It has begun to appear, with increasing clarity, as that fundamen­tal point from which all identity grows and by which it stands or falls; it is the foundation, the root, the center of gravity, the constructional principle or axis of identity. . . . It is the mortar binding it together, and when the mortar dries out, identity too begins irreversibly to crumble and fall apart

would have been unquivocally endorsed by Gandhi.

Havel’s place in history, grand themes, distinctive organization of his material, fidelity to language, powers of self-scrutiny, and commitment to "living in truth" make for a work that should become a classic of political literature.

And here are links to enough essays by or on Havel to keep you going for a couple of days: "Kicking The Door", an essay published in 1979 ("The strange thing happened then: I became suddenly furious..."); "On The Temptations of Political Power", a speech given in 1991; "A Word About Words" ("thanks to the miracle of speech, we know, probably better than the other animals, that we actually know very little, in other words, we are conscious of the existence of mystery"); "The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World"; "A Farewell to Politics"; "Stories and Totalitarianism"; "Politics and Theatre" ("A friend once said that politics is 'the sum of all things concentrated.' It encompasses law, economy, philosophy, and psychology. Inevitably, politics is theatre as well...In a theatre, our consciences are touched but responsibility ends when the curtain drops. The theatre of politics makes permanent demands on us all, as dramatists, actors, and audience") "Civil Society and Its New Enemies" ("Human beings are not only manufacturers, profit makers or consumers. They are also – and this may be their innermost quality – creatures who want to be with others, who yearn for various forms of coexistence and cooperation, who want to influence what happens around them")"Edvard Beneš: Dilemmas of a European Politician"; "Redefining The West"; "The Intellectual and Politics"; "The Spires of Renewal"; "Politics and Conscience"; "What Communism Still Teaches Us", and lastly, perhaps Havel's most famous essay "The Power of the Powerless".

And here is an old interview with Havel conducted by Michael Bongiovanni "in semi-clandestine conditions at Vaclav Havel's home" in June 1989, shortly before the Velvet Revolution ("What we want, here and now, are simple, elementary things. Without reference to any ideological framework, beyond all ideology. We aspire to a share in the basic values of life, those which simple common sense and elementary human dignity demand we should be entitled to."), and another interview from 1993 published in the literary magazine Artful Dodge. Also, here is an essay called "Exit Havel", written by David Remnick on the occasion of Havel's departure from office in 2003. The philosopher Michael Hodges and the political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain usefully discuss Havel as a "performer of political thought" here.

And some old posts on books by or about politicians: Rajmohan Gandhi's biography of Mahatma Gandhi, Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope; Jawaharlal Nehru as a writer of English prose, and the memoirs of General Pervez Musharraf.