Essay: Modernising Modernity

Modernising Modernity

Shivanand Kanavi

(This article appeared in Ghadar Jari Hai,
Vol II, No 3, July-September 2008. See www.ghadar.in )

What does being modern
mean, or what is modernity,
is a question worth investigating,
because the word ‘modern’
is used very often to characterise
the political, social and economic
system we have today. Here we are
not looking into the esoteric and often
contradictory sense in which the
word 'modern' is used in literary,
artistic and architectural contexts.
In these areas it is difficult to find
a reasonably coherent, agreed upon
definition of the term ‘modern’. In
this essay we are concerned with the
way the term ‘modern’ is used in social,
political and economic fields.

First of all, we see that ‘modern’
is not used in a purely chronological
sense. In almost all cases ‘modern’
is used as a value judgement;
something ‘modern’ is to be aspired
for and even fought for. It is mostly
used to signify something that
would be more socially progressive,
less hierarchical, less discriminatory,
more democratic, more equitable,
something that would reduce
human drudgery so that the mind
and body can be free to pursue more
intellectually and physically satisfying
pursuits than merely the struggle
for roti, kapada and makaan.

Soon after independence, Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru called for ushering
India into the modern era. He
called the large industrial complexes,
dams and other technological
complexes as ‘temples of modern India’.
The underlying sentiment was
that the traditional temples of India
were places where faith was primary.
However, in these new temples
of modern India, rationality, science
and technology would be primary.
Heavy industry, IITs, IIMs, space
and nuclear programmes, state
funded industrial research laboratories,
were all started. We are seeing
the results in this century.

Nehru and his colleagues in the
Congress led the new elite into going
along with the installation of Westminster
style parliamentary democracy
in India by British colonialism.
To some it appeared promising compared
to the quality of governance
under crony Maharajas under British
rule. After the transfer of power
in 1947, the Indian elite developed
the present-day Indian multi-party
democracy with a new republican
constitution and elections based on
universal adult franchise, which is
repeatedly hailed as the world’s largest,
modern, vibrant democracy.

In India, we may not have
reached the heights and speeds of
Chinese construction, but we have
created the Indian big businessman.
He is becoming known all over the
world for his appetite to build global
corporations through mergers
and acquisitions, cut mega financial
deals in global to stock markets and
grow in personal wealth.

The Nehruvian project of ‘modernisation’
in the socio-economic and
political sense thus seems to have
succeeded. Then one may ask, why
is there need to redefine modernity?

In satellite remote sensing technology,
one gets an image of the
earth from the skies but before one
interprets the picture based on certain
assumptions, one needs to go to
the areas photographed by the satellite
and check the condition on the
ground. In space technology jargon
this is called finding the “ground
truth”. Thus as we come down from
the macro picture of GDP growth,
and shining examples of technology
and industry to the ground truth, we
are struck by the fact that nearly 66
percent, of people in India, that is 70
crores, have the capacity to spend
less than Rs 20 a day. At the same
time, according to the Financial Express,
the total wealth of India’s billionaires
stands at $334.6 billion
(Rs14,38,780 crores).

India is planning to send a rocket
to the moon next year. Named Chandrayaan-
1, it is a great achievement
by our space scientists, who work
with shoe string budgets. At the
same time, a large number of India’s
children are malnourished and have
no decent education. Millions of our
people cannot afford good health care
even though Indian doctors are dazzling
the world with their brilliance
in dealing with stem cells, genetics
and so on.

These facts are known to grounded
Indians and do not need belabouring.

In short, the progress and modernisation
achieved in India during
the 20th century and especially after
independence, have been significant
but highly iniquitous. One could argue
that not only have they fallen
far short of expectations and promises
but have actually created an unprecedented
gulf and polarisation.
They have been achieved by a small
section that has cornered both the
natural resources and the treasury
of the government.

This necessitates a re-examination
of the paradigm of modernity.

The concept of modernity adopted
by India’s elite is European in origin.
There were many attempts in
Europe to make a radical departure
from the clutches of the dark Middle
Ages. The Europe of those days was
characterised by religious wars, religious
persecution, persecution of dissenters,
inquisition, witch hunts, oppression
of the mass of peasants and
artisans by feudal lords, the church
and the monarchy and so on. The rise
of Humanism, the Protestant Reformation,
the counter reformation
within Catholics, Deism, demands
for the separation of church and
state, the rise of national churches
instead of an imperial Papacy, the
demand for religious freedom, agnosticism,
mechanistic views of the
universe, the rise of modern French
materialism, the empirical and experimental
approach to science and
so on, were different aspects of this
struggle.

This represented the ‘new’, the
renaissance (rebirth), the modern.
This entire course of events took several
centuries to develop. At the end
of this tortuous process, full of twists
and turns, one saw the emergence of
capitalism and colonialism as preponderant
symbiotic systems. The
foundations of capitalism and colonialism
were the new property relations
which held private ownership
rights of individuals as sacrosanct
and envisaged a society based on
social contract between individuals
and the state. The state itself was
a ruthless defender of capitalist private
property and at the same time
a mediator and mitigator of conflict
between the owners of these property
rights. This was also termed the
“civil society” and the “rule of law”.

The 17th and 18th century also
saw the increasing use of machinery
and technology in production along
with division of labour and purely
wage based relationships between
owners and workers. The great land
grab in the Americas and Australia,
along with the straight forward loot
and plunder of riches from India and
other places, not to forget the slave
trade from Africa, funded the European
industrialisation. It was also
accompanied by evictions and pauperisation
of millions of peasants and
artisans in Europe. They were left to
fend for themselves. Later, legends
were fabricated on how thrift, merit
and hard work led various families
to become great property owners, so
that the dispossessed would emulate
their example instead of taking to
rebellion.

This is how capitalism took birth
and slowly came to dominate the
economy and society.

In India, the British administrators
saw that clear private property
rights did not exist. The king had the
right to collect taxes, while the village
communities and adivasi communities
managed a portion of the
lands and forests. The British conqueror
proceeded to claim ‘the power
of eminent domain’, which did not
have a precedent in India, and established
colonial ownership of land
and forests. They also privatised
cultivated land and extracted exor-
bitant revenues through Zamindari
and other systems. Cornwallis
and his colleagues claimed that the
introduction of private ownership
would ‘modernise’ and stimulate the
Indian economy.

The situation was summed up
very well by Titumir and Dudu Mian
of East Bengal in the first half of the
19th century. They organised a large
peasant rebellion against the East
India Company and its Zamindars.
They claimed, “the land belongs to
God, we peasants are all children of
God. It is our privilege to enjoy its
fruits and it is our duty to look after
it. Who are the Firangis and these
Zamindars to appear on the scene
now and claim ownership of the
same?”

It is said by some that Capitalism
with its individualism brought
in the concept of individual ‘rights’.
However, what is forgotten is a small
detail that capitalism is founded on
private property rights and hence
treats all those without property as
outlaws or at least outcastes. If you
are a landless peasant in a village or
a landless villager who migrates to
the city in search of livelihood and
builds a jhuggi to protect his family
from the elements, only to be treated
as an illegal encroacher of land, then
you would understand the place of
the propertyless in this ‘civil society’
governed by ‘the rule of law’. The
only right that is given as a palliative
to cover up the rule of the oligarchs
is the highly circumscribed right to
vote. The rest of the rights are not
within your reach unless you become
at least a petty proprietor. The petty
proprietor himself sees the real limit
of his rights whenever he raises any
‘lawful’ or just demand that might
slightly inconvenience the oligarchs.

All this is done within very rational
and noble frameworks of ‘fundamental
rights’, and ‘natural law’,
which then rub salt in the wound
by declaring that all human beings
are born equal. A society claiming
to give universal rights has no obligation
to enable its members to live
and work as human beings. Each one
is supposed to fend for himself. If a
dispossessed person finds others like
himself and forms a brotherhood to
claim his share of the social product,
then attempts are made to suppress
them or, if that fails, to co-opt a few
‘representatives’ of the dispossessed
into the establishment.

Of course the use of division of labour
and machinery leads to greater
mass production for the market
place. All are welcome to partake of
these products, provided they pay
the price set by the market. They are
also told that now they have ‘choice’!
If at any time the profits of the oligarchs
are under a squeeze, then the
state wakes up to its primary duty.
It comes to the oligarchy’s rescue, at
the cost of further misery to the millions.

Science, technology and reason
are all harnessed to maximise theprofits
of the oligarchs. Thus you
end up with 53 billionaires in India
owning Rs 14,38,780 crores while
70 crore Indians cannot spend more
than Rs20 a day. This is where modernity
based on capitalism, imposed
on India through British colonialism
and further developed by Indian oligarchs,
has led us.

How can this be accepted as social
progress? And if it is not, can it
be called modern?

The same Europe which gave
birth to capitalism, and which tried
to establish private property all over
the globe through colonialism, also
gave rise to its negation in the form
of socialism. It took the most powerful
concrete shape in Russia as Bolshevism.
After October 1917, a new
experiment began which brought
forth a new alternative to capitalist
modernity. It built a society based
on abolition of private property and
the development of collective property
and societal property. It also built
a political system which was based
on recognizing rights on the basis of
one’s contribution to social labour,
with “no room here for the shirk!”
Egalitarianism, equal opportunity
for all, education, health care and
jobs for all, reduction of drudgery
using technology, mass participation
in cultural and sports activities
and all other attributes that are associated
with the word ‘modernity’
were achieved in this socialist society.
This new socialist modernity inspired
many a struggle all over the
world.

After about two decades of this
‘dictatorship of the disenfranchised’,
it was realised that the time had
come to rise above a class based definition
of democracy. There were attempts
to remove one-sidedness by
introducing equal political rights
for all, through a new constitution
in 1936 that gave a greater role to
the people directly in making public
policy decisions, instead of the communist
party arrogating to itself this
right as its prerogative.

However, before these innovations
could not take deep root, a retrogression
set in both in the internal
and external policies of the Soviet
Union. Eventually the system collapsed
and the new elite embraced
the old capitalist modernity. This
was visible in its most naked form
when the ‘new oligarchs’ grabbed
huge chunks of Russia’s state owned
industry and natural resources, with
the rise of Yeltsin.

Today, Russia is home to 7 of
the 25 richest people in the world,
and 12 of the 25 richest in Europe.
There are more billionaires living
in Moscow, than in any other city in
the world, with an average wealth of
$5.9 billion (Rs 25,370 crores each).
Russia ranks second in the world
in number of billionaires, with 87,
behind America’s 469, according to
Forbes magazine.

At the end of the Cold War,
the US, Western Europe and Gorbachev’s
USSR along with several
other countries of Eastern Europe
got together in Paris in November,
1990 and redefined modernity,
which they described as a simple
admixture of market economics and
multi-party democracy. Signatories
of the Paris Charter soon made their
belligerence known to anyone who
did not fully fall into line with this
and who tried to experiment with
their own sui generis systems!

After the collapse of the Soviet
Union the debate on modernity has
taken a new form. Now it is claimed
that if you talk of socialism and collective
property you are a fossil, but
if you believe in neo-liberal market
economics and say puerile things
like ‘the business of the government
is to not be in business’ and so on,
then you are a ‘modern’ individual.

What we are seeing in India after
the Paris Charter is an Indian version
of the same recipe of multiparty
democracy and market economics
in full bloom. In fact on July 21 and
22 this year the Indian parliament
once again demonstrated on 24x7
TV, that market economics operates
inside a multi party parliament as
well!
How do we get out of this cul-desac
and truly modernise India?

I would argue that one needs to
dispassionately study the experience
of socialism and why it collapsed, in
order to modernise the theory underlying
a superior democracy and
economic order. Here I do not at
all mean ‘socialist market economics’
as some are proposing, since I
think that would not be very different
from neo-liberal market economics
in the final analysis. What needs
to be done is to study why socialism
got alienated from the people whom
it was supposed to belong to. How
to unleash the human factor in governance
and economic management,
and in all aspects of life? How to
harmonise the individual, collective
and societal interests? How do we
achieve this in the present rancorous
and highly polarised, sectarian
atmosphere? Here it is worth examining
our own traditions and learning
from the rest of the world.

The traditional Indian ethos, according
to some, did not talk about
rights explicitly. Nevertheless, it
integrated individual rights and duties
and societal rights and duties in
the concept of dharma, which is often
narrowly and wrongly translated
as religion. Moreover, the right to
conscience and a mechanism to harmonise
different viewpoints through
anekantavada was upheld long ago,
through beautiful philosophical and
methodological constructs.

The right to conscience was upheld
as the right to find one’s own
salvation through a self chosen belief
system and a way of life that
goes with it. This was not confined
to spiritual matters, as expressed
splendidly by the Bhakti movement,
but included temporal matters as
well. For example, a reading of the
Svetashvatara Upanishad shows
that in those days there were many
theories about the origin of the universe:
1) kala (time), 2) svabhava
(inherent nature), 3) niyati (fate),
4) ydrachha (accident), 5) bhoota
(elements of matter), 6) prakruti (female
principle, primeval matter), 7)
purusa (male principle, spirit). The
author is in favour of the 7th theory
but he does not condemn or ridicule
the other six. Similarly Kautilya in
Arthashastra states in the very beginning
the views of Manu’s followers,
Brihaspati’s followers and then
enunciates his own. There is respect
for tradition but there is also assertion
of his individuality.

The Indian method of discourse
too was highly respectful of the ‘other’
view. A proponent would first put
forward in the strongest possible
terms the opponent’s case, (purva
paksha) and then go on to posit his
views, (siddhanta) without rancour,
ridicule and demagogy.

Liberal tolerance in the ‘modern
civil society’ of the “other” is
not even a shadow of the Indian approach.
Tolerance hides animosity
and condescension just below the
surface and too often erupts in majority-
minority polarisation. At best
it signifies a temporary coexistence
due to circumstances, without mutual
respect and necessarily without
the basis for long term harmony.

The Indian ethos was steeped in
humility and respect. Indians posited
that truth reveals itself to the seeker
and no seeker can claim to have
a complete grasp of the truth. Thus
there would be many points of view
which need to be integrated to get a
total understanding of a phenomenon.
The blind men and the elephant
is an oft quoted parable in the Indian
‘marga’ (high brow) as well as ‘desi’
(folk) traditions. This was articulated
in anekantavada and shyadvada.
That is, truth has many facets and no
one can claim a monopoly over it.

Anekantavada goes against absolutism
and Aristotlean certainty
and yes/no binary logic. Divisions like
‘them and us’, ‘with us or against us’,
right or left, belong to capitalist modernity
and the Cold War. Clearly the
Indian approach leads to harmony,
leads to an inclusive society and absorbs
cultural and philosophical influences.
It leads to a possibility of coming
up with non partisan solutions to
today’s complex problems.

The state’s dharma was to look
after education, health care, tank
and canal irrigation etc. In short the
Rajadharma was to provide sukh
(prosperity) and suraksha (security
from internal and external destabilisers).
Even in the architecture of
Harappan excavations one sees that
as early as 3000 BC Indians thought
of individuals as born to society and
not in a vacuum. That is expressed in
well planned sanitation, grain storage
silos, storm water drains etc - in
short a societal level planning and
execution and that too in all parts of
the town, in elite quarters as well as
the quarters of the commoners.

The right to conscience, in traditional
India, thus becomes a natural
reflection of reality, which can
be viewed in many ways, unlike in
Europe where it became a privilege
granted by a sovereign. In the Indian
approach to the right to conscience,
the state has no role to play. Right
to conscience is not part of a political
balancing act but is a reflection of
multifaceted nature of truth itself.

In modern India, a product of the
colonial legacy, we have forgotten all
this. The state grants the right to conscience
through the Constitution and
takes it away when it deems fit. Not
only are anti-conversion laws passed
in various states, but thousands have
been incarcerated in the North East
and Kashmir because they question
the involuntary union of India or because
they are considered fundamentalists
in the ongoing ‘War against
Terror’. Has this led to harmony and
less strife?

Modern India has followed capitalist
footsteps and increasingly believes
in ‘each one for himself’ and ‘markets
will decide’. It thereby abdicates societal
dharma that an individual is
born to society and society has an
obligation to look after the individual
and provide him opportunities to contribute
productively.

The caste system was a negation
of the right to conscience and the
right to knowledge, as well as of the
duty of the state to provide sukh and
suraksha to all. That is why the caste
system constantly provoked rebellion
against itself from the very beginning.
When it predominated, society
stagnated and when the caste system
was shaken up and overthrown, even
if temporarily or locally, the society
was rejuvenated.

Along with the summing up of
the experience of socialism in the
former Soviet Union, Indians would
greatly benefit by also getting rid of
Macaulayan Eurocentric prejudices
and studying our own tradition. This
is not to say that pre-British and precapitalist
India is where we should be
heading in the future. But we need to
develop an alternative paradigm of
modernity that not only promises an
equitable, just, non hierarchical and
caring society, but that also harmonises
the relationship between mankind
and the rest of nature as well as
the individual, collective and the societal
interests. In one word, there is a
burning need to build a truly modern
alternative to the highly unsatisfactory
present, instead of being bound
by various versions of capitalist modernity.