The Great Indian Manthan

Poorva Paksha

The Buffalo Springfield classic, ‘Stop, Hey What’s that Sound’ — actually entitled, ‘For What it’s Worth’, even though the lyric ‘For What it’s Worth’ doesn’t appear in the song at all — is an iconic protest song and staple of 1960s counterculture. After 60 years, we still play it today to evoke the mood and spirit of righteous protest. This implies that even six decades later, we are out protesting for precisely the same demands of earlier generations; things like free speech, civil rights, gender, caste and religious equality, more love and less war. But this is not the whole picture. In some respects, the ways our struggles have evolved are more significant than the ways that they’ve remained the same.

‘There’s something happening here/But what it is ain’t exactly clear/

There’s a man with a gun over there/Telling me I got to beware/

I think it’s time we stop/Children, what’s that sound?/

Everybody look, what’s
going down?’

If we are to credit Pushparaj Deshpande and Gurdeep Singh Sappal, both from the Delhi-based think-tank Samruddha Bharath Foundation, then what’s going down is nothing short of a ‘battle for India’s soul’. That’s the bedrock idea of their scorching new book, The Great Indian Manthan: State, Statecraft and the Republic.

On one side of this battle stand heirs to the original nation-building project of independent India: “In their efforts to forge a nation that was free, fair and equal, India’s founders were convinced that the State would have to establish itself as the supreme custodian of order and justice; to be autonomous and have institutionalised authority to shape the polity. Only then could it further the nation’s constitutional promise, be the protector of the weak and vulnerable, and weave a symphony from the numerous voices of India. Only then could it be an instrument of progressive change, political stability, and economic development.”

On the other side stand the burgeoning legacy of a cultural and religious consciousness fundamentally opposed to those progressive (secular, pluralist, egalitarian…) values: “Those who belonged to this orthodoxy (most notably the RSS and its Parivar) refused to brook any kind of engagement or ideological integration with the egalitarian tradition. They began to covertly resist and oppose the national political project, thus setting the stage for a conflict between diametrically opposed political projects.”

Diametric opposition, polarisation, is, of course, the socio-political situation that we all find ourselves in today. But that is merely the backdrop of this book, not its focus. The focus, I think quite insightfully, is on how what was earlier a primarily ideological battle has metastasized into a cancer attacking vital organs of the State: its foundational institutions. As Deshpande puts it in the Editor’s Introduction, “In the last decade, these institutions have been deployed to coerce India’s constituent units into accepting one ideology, one people and one leader.” If his expression sounds reminiscent of Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer, this is not an accident.

We better stop/Hey, what’s that sound?

Everybody look, what’s going down?

Instead of getting into the fray around strategic deterioration of State institutions, I cannot delay any longer in revealing who it is that is setting out these arguments and evidence. For, the who of this polemical new book might be more noteworthy than the what.

It is Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, who writes on the institution of the Cabinet; Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi writes on the National Advisory Council—which she used to chair; former VP Hamid Ansari writes on Parliament; CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury writes on Coalitions; former Supreme Court Justice Madan Lokur writes on the Judiciary; former Governor Margaret Alva writes on the institution of the Governor; former Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa writes on the Election Commission; Wajahat Habibullah, India’s first Chief Information Commissioner, writes on the Information Commission.

The two-fold pattern here is by now abundantly manifest to you: the contributors to The Great Indian Manthan are apex practitioners from within the institutions whose present ailments they prognosticate; at the same time, they are leading figures from Congress or its allies. If the latter quality makes this book difficult for you to pick up, I can attest that the former quality really makes it difficult to put down.

There’s battle lines being drawn/Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong/

Young people speaking their minds/Getting so much resistance
from behind/

It’s time we stop/Hey, what’s
that sound?/

Everybody look, what’s going down?