Individual liberty overrides group identity

 

Group identity vs. individual Liberty has played an outsized role in human progress and by inference societies. After the early Greek flourish, there was a rise of religions. First Christianity and then Islam became dominant religions. Human beings everywhere started having the wherewithal to rule over larger territories and impose control. Order in society became of paramount importance. Kings and religious leaders held sway. Tradition, precedence and discipline ruled. The progress in human thinking slowed down drastically. Till the age of enlightenment in Europe.

Newton, Copernicus, and Galileo in science; Locke, Descartes, Voltaire, Kant and many others ushered in the age of reason. This naturally led to the triumph of the individual over the group. Human rights started getting important. liberty, equality, freedom, opportunity, and tolerance became cardinal virtues in many parts of the world.

How has it helped in human advancement? Societies high on individual liberty (mostly Western countries) have come up with exceptional thinkers who have created new paradigms for progress. This has made these societies prosperous, and forward-looking thus fuelling a virtuous cycle. Many other societies which have been relatively prosperous have fallen into stasis after brief spurts.

The crucibles of these ideas are the schools and universities. The space that Governments and socities allow help them to seed the minds of these free thinkers who can wrestle with ideas with unecumbered minds.

The Guru of Statecraft

 Chanakya was a minister and strategist in ancient India. He was the chief advisor to Chandragupta who is recognised as the founder of the Maurya dynasty in Pataliputra.

Chanakya was born in Taxila(now in Pakistan) in 375 BC and he moved to Patalipitra in the East, a very large distance then. He helped Chandragupta expand his kingdom to be amongst the pre-eminent ones in the world. But he is more famous for writing 'Arthashastra', an ancient treatise on economics, politics and war. This text was lost in the 12th century but subsequently, a Sanskrit copy on palm leaves was discovered in 1905. 

The Arthashastra is a hugely influential book on statecraft in India. Many scholars now also refer to it for war strategy. It is one of the books from Asia along with Sun Tzu's The Art of War from that age that reflects the way people thought about war.

The book suggests conquest of the enemy as the final aim and the king can resort to any means to achieve his goal. This could include assassinations, bribery, creating rifts or using force. Chanakya was steeped in what is referred to as the school of realism for statecraft. The means did not matter to him.

On the contrary, India after independence was highly influenced by Gandhi for whom means were as important as ends.

It is difficult to hazard a guess whether Chanakya's ideas were successful. The Maurya dynasty floundered after three or four generations after Chanakya's death. There is possibly no reliable record of anyone using his tactics and being successful later.

Gandhi's way keeps getting questioned for his high idealism. The enduring appeal of Machiavelli and Chanakya suggests Gandhi is not fully successful either and the debate continues. 

The Divergent Paths of India and Pakistan

 It has been 75 years since both the countries became independent. Pakistan was carved out of British India in 1947. It consisted of East and West Pakistan. In 1971, East Pakistan separated and became Bangladesh.

Pakistan and India today stand at two very different points in their trajectories and it is interesting to see which points of departure triggered these diverse paths.

The most critical difference right at birth was the way the core identity was defined. India decided to be a secular republic whereas Pakistan decided to become an Islamic country. This meant religion was to be given primacy in the formulation of any policy. Many parts of religion are incompatible with modern democratic values and Pakistan like any other country has not been able to resolve these conflicts. This became more of a problem after the Islamic radicalisation process started by Zia Ul Haque. 

Gandhi died in January 1948. Patel died in 1950. But from the top echelons of Congress, a stellar set of leaders from Nehru, Maulana Azad, and Rajgopalchari were there to see the country through the initial tumultuous years. Nehru continued till 1964 and gave a sound democratic framework and built several institutions in the fledgeling republic. In Pakistan, Jinnah was ailing and died in 1948. The first Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan was shot dead in 1951. After that, the political leaders did not have that stature and the first decade after independence witnessed a lot of turbulence ending with military rule.   

The Indian founding fathers were foresighted enough to calibrate the power of armed forces. The army retained its stranglehold over power in Pakistan and over time this has led to several military coups and regimes disrupting the democratic fabric.

The basic ethos of the Indian constitution was diversity. It tried to accommodate languages, religions, and cultures. The Pakistan establishment dominated by the Urdu-speaking West Pakistan elites tried to impose their language and culture on the very different Bengali East Pakistan. This led to resentment finally culminating in the liberation of Bangladesh. This weakened the country significantly not only militarily and strategically but also psychologically. The country could not then recover from a vicious cycle of events after that. 

Today India has one of the largest economies in the world, a vaunted technological workforce, and macroeconomic stability. Pakistan is still struggling with debt and supplying basic amenities like electricity and water.

It is sad but shows how history can be cruel if people are not alert and allow their leaders to choose self-aggrandising paths over progressive thinking. 

 

The Nature of Power

 

There is a popular saying that goes like this: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

A quick run through the 20th century's violence is enough to prove that. 

Hitler died in April 1945. The allied forces had captured Germany, and a few embattled Japanese regiments were waging a feeble war. The conclusion was foretold. Yet the US establishment decided to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This killed and wounded 250 thousands people forever. These were not forces fighting the war - they were innocent people who had no direct role in the war. 

General Franco killed thousands of Spaniards who opposed him. Stalin sent millions to Siberia and got many eliminated. The Pol Pot regime in Cambodia killed fellow citizens.Many Chinese lost their lives in the Cultural Revolution.

Most of us meet many types of human beings including political leaders and it is truly impossible to find someone at a personal level who wants to indulge in genocide. But the same leaders become power-hungry and do not mind ordering mass eliminations.

It is only power and nothing else that transforms ordinary people into cruel despots. It changes their psyche. They rationalise all their inhuman actions with glib explanations. They distance their real selves from the tragedy that their actions bring. They lose their soul. Power is the evil that captures their humanity. 

India's Lunar Triumph

 

The Chandrayaan -3  mission was a testament to the prowess of ISRO. Also a glowing tribute to Indian science and technology. 

We tend to relate to the moon in various ways, through stories, myths or even as a symbol of beauty and that is why it catches the public imagination even more. But ISRO has a long series of accomplishments. Over 60 odd years, ISRO has completed 124 spacecraft/satellite missions, 93 launches and 431 international customer satellite launches. 

The key milestones range from the first rocket launch (1962), the first satellite launch (1975), the launch of own rockets for satellites (1980), space capsule recovery (2007); Chandrayaan 1, the moon impact probe(MIP) reached the surface of the moon (2008), and Mangalyaan, a space probe,  that reached and stayed on the orbit of  Mars after a 298-day journey (2013). 

Promoting scientific temper is important and the constitution recognises it too. Science does contradict most things religious, so by extension many deeply held beliefs around which we conduct ourselves. This does not make it easy to convert people to growing a deep faith in science.

On top of that people in positions of influence who get a large amount of media space, try to legitimize anti-science discourse with their comments ranging from condemning Darwin ( as important a figure as Newton), or dragging in stories from epics and passing them off as scientific claims. Recently, the country arguably paid a heavy price for several unscientific acts during COVID-19.

Tweeting, speaking and celebrating the lunar mission; a signature scientific and technological achievement is desirable but it is meaningless without genuinely promoting scientific temper.

The Light that is Gandhi

 

Gandhi is a revered figure worldwide. Mandela, Martin Luther King, and Obama are among those who count him as their inspiration. The story in India is a little different though. There are M.G. roads (Mahatma Gandhi Road) in most cities, and he stares out from currency notes and Government publications but social media is full of ugly comments about him. His assassin Godse is now quite visible too in movies and birthday celebrations. 

It is difficult to kill Gandhi however. Lincoln played his part in trying to end slavery and Gandhi was the man who ended the other ill that afflicted the world - colonialism. If slavery was justified by assuming blacks to be inferior, colonialism rationalised the white man's superiority over natives. Power, money, and technology from the ebbs and flows of history are used as proxies for superior natural ability. Silly it may be, but this is what was the intellectual bulwark for all the principal social ills in history like slavery, colonialism, and caste.

To mobilise masses in a country with multiple languages, religions and a burden of feudalism was an enormous achievement by itself. To use that force in a non-violent way to drive out the British without too much rancour with both the victims (Indians) or the vanquished like the British is unprecedented.

Add to that his incredible personal simplicity, transparency in relationships, adherence to principles despite any obstacle, use of truth and love for all bar none yet remaining primarily a political leader is impossible to replicate.

He was also a deeply original thinker, fearless, and never afraid to take risks. He did not follow any defined path and built his own ideology and modus operandi for the freedom struggle.

There is nothing more noble on Indian Independence Day than to remember this great man, a frail-looking lawyer infused with the highest ideals of humanity. 

The Shadow of History

 The rebellion of 1857 in India against the British forces is a landmark event. In early May, sepoys in the cantonment in Meerut captured the government buildings and started the uprising. The next day they rode to Delhi and appointed the 82-year-old Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Moghul emperor, then feeble and ruling actually over a small fraction of the city's area as their titular head. This gathered momentum and in a few weeks, sepoys all over the whole of North India had joined the rebellion. The Nana Saheb of Cawnpore, Laxmi Bai, and Begum Hazrat Mahal were the prominent rulers who also joined the fight.

There were many bloody battles. Two gruesome episodes in this period stand out. In Cawnpore, many British civilians were killed by the sepoys in the Bibighar massacre. After prolonged fights, the British managed to turn the tables and in September, captured Delhi again. The British forces were in a mood for revenge and they blocked Kashmere gate, the entry to what is now known as old Delhi. Over a period of 4 to 5 days, the English soldiers were allowed to kill all adult males. Many eyewitness accounts of those days speak about the streets and the river turning red with blood. It was horrific.

As a consequence of this, the crown formally then took over the administration of India from the East India Company. The next 90 years under the Raj had its own stories of loot, injustice and blood. 

India came down from contributing a quarter of the world's GDP in the early 18th century to just about an estimated 3 % in 1947 when the British left. It was wealth extraction on a massive scale.

At the same time, modern India today cannot live without Cricket( a sport it is obsessed with), bread, rail and even its passport to the world, the English language. Apart from the relatively new justice and administrative systems. 

The bad came with the good. Can this be undone? No, and it does not make sense to. The only purpose of history should be to understand it and to be aware of our current status and the structural forces that can affect us. The same dynamics existed between the allied countries like UK, US and France with Germany and Japan or even England with the US. Going back in history, similar patterns of conflicts and then mutual absorption occurred between kingdoms within India.

Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it but those who obsess over it and try to live the present with the battles of the past are also condemned to go inside its dark tunnels once again. 

Roman Emperors

 

Dictators and emperors have been some of the most cruel and craziest individuals in human history. Modern ones like Idi Amin, Hitler or Pol Pot have got drunk with power and committed terribly heinous acts. In ancient times, some of the Roman generals and emperors were extraordinary in lives of debauchery, violence and plain madness so much so that they defy imagination.

Julius Caesar(pic on top):

He was strictly the first among equals of the First Triumvirate that ruled Rome. Some of his  acts include:

- He was against luxury and he sent inspectors to dining rooms to catch people eating illegal fine dishes.

- His public spectacles involved armies of infantry, cavalry and elephants fighting. The wild beast hunting parties went on for five days.

- His sexual escapades were numerous and had no rules. He was referred to as 'every woman's husband and every man's wife.'

- As a consul, he stole gold and replaced them with bronze.

Nero:

The infamous Nero (pictured above) fiddled while Rome burnt and his acts defy cross all limits.

- At night he would attack people going back from dinner, kill them with a knife and drop them into sewers without any reason whatsoever.

- He took a fancy to a boy Sporus, castrated him and married him. He was passionately fond of his mother Agrippina too. Subsequently, he also tried to murder her by various means and finally sicceeded in doing so.

-He once got disgusted by the old-fashioned buildings in a part of the city and set fire to them which lasted for a week. While the fire was raging, he sang ' The Fall of Troy'.

Caligula:

He was the third Roman emperor, ruled for less than 4 years and was insane, to say the least.

- He made his high officials run on foot beside his chariot for great distances in their togas.

- He had a wild animal retinue and once decide to feed them the meat of prisoners and watched it standing in the colonnade.

-He had sexual relations with hostages, his sisters and wives of all his nobles as he fancied.

- He had a cruel face and even after that, practised in front of a mirror to make his expressions more fearful.

Marcus Aurelius, much later, was the wise and thoughtful one.

 

Propaganda for Kings

 Krishnadevaraya was a powerful king who ruled in Vijaynagara in modern Andhra Pradesh from 1509 to 1529. He ruled over a vast kingdom that included an area encompassing Bengal to Karnataka. 

Allasani Peddana was a great Telugu poet and fancied himself as 'Andhrakavitapitamaha' or the Creator of Telugu poetry. He was in Krishnadevaraya's court. 

We get disturbed by propaganda and exaggerated hero worship when we see it with political leaders. In te age of democracy and equality it seems so baffling. We treat mere men as Gods. This probably has a genesis in the way in a feudal society we treated our kings. They were arbiters of justice, commanders of the army, divine inheritors who lived in the fanciest of palaces. They also had poets eulogising them to the skies.

Peddana's classic 'The Story of Manu' begins with a encomiums to the glory and prowess of the king. Some of it will embarrass even our most praise-hungry modern leaders.

" For one rich in such qualities,

for an expert rider adept at handling any sort of horse,

for one who is quiet at heart,

whose brilliant fame turned all space white,

whose sword is like a snake filling its belly with the life breaths

of enemies trembling the darkness caused by dust

kicked up by his horses' hooves in one continuous charge,

for Karma reborn, a paragon of the art of giving,

for one who is loyal to good people,

for the lover of lady poetry,

for one whose fame rolls like waves to the end of space,

makes the sun redundant,

who captured the son of the Kalinga king 

in less than half a minute,

whose mind, with all its thoughts and words, rests at the feet

of Lord Venkatesvara, the ultimate source of kindness."