The Elephant in the Room
In the Telegraph of India, Mukul Kesavan makes a number of very valid points.
As pundit after Western pundit from the left, right and centre tells us why Iraq can’t be a democracy or even a nation because it’s too poor or too fractious or too various, you suddenly realize that if India didn’t exist, no one would have the imagination to invent it. And even if they did, they wouldn’t have the inclination to because in the absence of India, the prejudices about the non-West that Anglo-American policy-makers and opinion-mongers peddle for a living, would pass for wisdom.
Many of those pundits are probably too busy writing on their latest book “Snappy Title: How I Expanded a Moderately Original Idea Into 300 Pages of Misleading Anecdotes“(*) to bother reading mr. Kesavans article. Too bad. Kesavan claims that India is the most important country in the world today. That might be an Indian variant of the European eurocentrism, of course, but it might also be true. India is special. In 1947, Kesavan writes, this desperately poor subcontinental polity born out of genocidal violence, freighted with more religious communities, language groups and cultural differences than any other part of the world set off to be a democratic, pluralist nation-state. And sixty years later, India is still a democratic, pluralist nation-state.
Now we’re the elephant in the room when Western commentators invoke the Free World or reach once more for that mythical beast, the Judaeo-Christian past of democratic peoples. It’s not merely that we’re free and not Western, democratic and conspicuously not Judaeo-Christian, though both these things are important in a world made claustrophobic by the self-congratulatory narcissism of the Anglo-American West. It is also that we are these things without being occupied by MacArthur, protected by CENTO or bailed out by the Marshall Plan. And what’s more, we’ve taken the West’s largest claim to political liberalism, the separation of church and state, or secularism, and turned it into a many-petalled pluralist flower.
And perhaps most importantly, Kesavan’s points are not merely valid, they are increasingly valid:
So when Holland, that bastion of ‘tolerance’ and ‘multiculturalism’ commits itself to banning the burqa because the practice of a hundred Muslim women subverts the foundations of Western democracy, when English politicians vie with each other to steal the white constituencies of the British National Party and when every leader in Europe from Romano Prodi to Ségolène Royal to Tony Blair feels free to publicly tell Europe’s Muslims that they need to behave, amid this hysteria, India stands out as a model of balance and sanity.
Despite a long history of communal riots and pogroms, despite secessionism, terrorist attacks on parliament and elsewhere, India still isn’t in the business of banning burqas or ordering Sikhs to present themselves for haircuts. No one should underestimate the occasional cruelty of the Indian state or the discrimination many minority populations face in India, but equally, Indians should take great pride in the country’s pluralist equilibrium, its remarkable poise. So when we hear a complacent Western voice divide the world into the civilized West and the unwashed Rest, we should raise our trunk and swish our tail and having made our enormous presence felt, politely ask if he could say that again.
Read the rest here.
(*) I have stolen that snappy title from an email I received from fellow Norwegian blogger Bjørn Stærk. I hope he does not mind too much.
Tags: In English, Politikk
Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 at 11:17 pm • Uncategorized • RSS 2.0 feed • leave a response or trackback