Image courtesy Global Thought Columbia University

This year, the tenth Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer memorial lecture was delivered by Professor Akeel Bilgrami on 8 December, 2017, in the wake of the twenty fifth anniversary of the planned demolition of Babri Masjid and the beginning of the devastating Bombay riots. There could not have been a better occasion and time to learn about the history of communalism in modern India because the event was organised to commemorate the life and work of Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer, who tirelessly worked for communal harmony during his lifetime and was also the founder of the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism, Mumbai. Professor Bilgrami, who is Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, and has been deeply invested in the study of secularism all his life, was gracious enough to meet me before the lecture and talk to me about the rise of communal ideology in India in recent years, especially after the rise of BJP in India.

When I asked him rather naively what lies ahead for a generation wracked by communal violence — a generation that wants to fight the forces causing such violence – he responded by saying that we need to understand the specific nature of such violence, and in doing so, gauge exactly when such violence took its root. But he provided an important caveat – he suggested that we need to first understand the difference between antecedents and roots while looking at the recent history of communal violence in India before we consolidate a movement to fight it. Historians, especially those belonging to progressive circles, often hark back to the Hindu Mahasabha and its opposition to important nationalist movements, the role people like Savarkar, Mookherjee and others played in consolidating a monolithic Hindu identity that defines itself in opposition to Muslim identity. This is an important antecedent, that is, the birth of the Hindu Mahasabha certainly foreshadows later instances of communal violence in India in general, but the roots of the communal violence we see now lie elsewhere. They lie in the formation and the implementation of the Mandal Commission in 1990. The BJP’s dream of a singular, unified Hindu identity was about to be disintegrated and divided along caste and class lines. Both L.K Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayee nearly threatened to withdraw their support if the government did not review its stand. According to Professor Bilgrami, the rise of the BJP in its current avatar should be traced back to this important event. The eighties and the nineties, therefore, planted new roots of communal violence in India. This may also further help us understand how the hindutva side of the BJP government and its political economy, which is a neo-liberal economy, prop each other up. Their apathy for the deprived classes also comes from their failure to gauge the millennia-long violence against dalits and minorities in our country. The ban on beef, the mindless torture on minorities by self-styled gaurakshas, demonetisation are some of the symptoms of this apathy (stemming from their desire to consolidate a singular undivided Hindu identity) from recent times.

This brings us to his illuminating lecture on the relationship between populism or populist rhetoric and fascism which points to the limits of liberal discourse to address the rise of communal or rightwing ideology in India. Populism is defined as a political approach that aims to disrupt the existing social order by mobilising the common people against elites. But, populism has become a word of “opprobrium”, to borrow a word from Professor Bilgrami’s lecture, for both the rightwing and those who belong to progressive circles because of the blatant appropriation of the term and populist rhetoric by the former (we must not forget that Modi’s rise can be attributed to his populist rhetoric of being a common man – someone who garnered favour because of his humble background as a one-time chaiwalla, to say nothing about the election of Ram Nath Kovind — who is a dalit — as the president of India) and the unfortunate failure of the latter to capture the common man’s concerns. He expresses concern over a “movement vacuum” in our country, a gap filled by some important student movements in recent times, but a consolidated fight against rightwing forces cannot ignore the roots of the communal violence seen in recent times, and has to take into account the question of caste and thereby define a strong populist movement by reclaiming populism as an approach that is in favour of dalits and muslims in our country.

In order to explain the fascist tendencies of rightwing-communal ideology in India, I quote these memorable lines from his talk:

Apart from the feature of finding the external enemy within (the Jews then, Muslims now) and despising and subjugating it, there are several other details:  above all there is the sinister and powerful paramilitary organisation of the RSS shaping the ideological outlook of the government (no other right wing nationalism in the world, so far as I know has anything quite like this); then there is the menace of a vigilante youth group (the ABVP) mimicking the Balillas in Mussolini’s Italy, bullying students on campuses who raise deep questions about caste or about economic inequality or about Kashmir or…; then there is the calling critics of the government ‘treasonous’ and ‘anti-national’; then there is the constant talk of purity in caste which echoes racialist attitudes on blood and descent in European fascism, and finally there is the ‘fusion’ of the interests of the corporations and the state which was Mussolini’s explicit definition of fascism and which is exemplified in the strident neo-liberal aspirations of the Indian government with widespread support among a wide range of classes including of course, as I said, the middle classes. 

Perhaps now, the newly elected dalit leader Jignesh Mevani from the Vadgam constituency of Gujarat can guide the way and stand as a beacon in such dire times.
 

Akeel Bilgrami is an Indian-born philosopher of language and of mind, and the author of Belief and Meaning, Self-Knowledge and Resentment, and Politics and the Moral Psychology of Identity  as well as various articles in Philosophy of Mind as well as in Political and Moral Psychology. Bilgrami is currently the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University in New York.

Sneha Chowdhury is member of the editorial collective of the Indian Writers’ Forum.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum.
 

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Postcards for Gandhi, Courtesy SAHMAT

Uday Mehta (UM): I think of you, especially in the essays that constitute this book, as doing a rather particular kind of philosophy. It is a very distinguished tradition of practitioners, including the late Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Alasdair MacIntyre in the Anglo-American tradition; Michel Foucault, in the French tradition; Adorno and Walter Benjamin in the German tradition, and of course several others. One of the things that marks this way of doing philosophy (if that is the term we should use) is that the familiar, and typically sharp lines that separate philosophy from the humanities and the social sciences, are wilfully and self-consciously breached. I don’t mean that they are breached just for the heck of it, but that questions are posed in such a way that makes answering them reliant on such a breach. Bernard Williams, as you know, proudly affirmed philosophy as a humanistic discipline. Your own work is heavily informed by the dissenting tradition of 17th century thought, and by contemporary history and social science. And yet, in many ways, this way of doing philosophy is the minor key of contemporary Anglo-American and, increasingly, even continental philosophy. How would you describe what you do? Does it matter to you if it is thought of as “doing philosophy,” or does that description seem arcane to you, as it did for Richard Rorty?
Akeel Bilgrami (AB): I must confess that my work has not been motivated by any self-conscious effort towards trying to reorient the discipline of philosophy, nor even to follow a tradition set by the philosophers you mention, much as I admire them all. Rather, it’s just that certain issues grabbed my interest and I followed what I thought was most important and urgent in them. And when that led to having to read history and intellectual history, and to studying some political economy and politics and a variety of cultural phenomena, I just followed that lead as best I could — mostly for the sake of coming to some fundamental understanding of the issues. You are certainly right that most philosophers do not have a capacious understanding of their subject and many might even view this sort of outreach as contaminating their discipline. However, looking at things from the other side, we mustn’t forget that the social sciences themselves, particularly economics, have manifestly abandoned the historical, the broadly conceptual, and, above all, the value-oriented aspects of their pursuits. So it is possible that we are now at a disciplinary moment when philosophy is poised to pick up that slack and pay close attention to the very things that the social sciences have abdicated. This would, then, be an exciting time to be doing philosophy.  

UM: One of the very striking claims you have been making for several years, and which you make in these essays—and which has had a huge influence on me—is that for a figure like Gandhi, politics in its many forms, including in our agency as citizens, just did not make up the terms through which he thought of bettering the world. This is a remarkable claim, especially since we so often think of Gandhi as having inaugurated mass politics in India. Encouraging a certain type of mass public action is one of his most enduring influences all over the world. The idea that there could be something profoundly wrong with the world; and that nevertheless, the redress to that condition was not to be secured through political means, goes against the dominant grain of modern thinking. Could you say more about this? Is this a way of animating the category of ethics as something sharply distinct from politics, rather than the way it is typically thought of as something tied to politics?
AB: When I made the claim you cite, I was trying to understand what I described as a ‘studied indifference’ in much of Gandhi’s theoretical writing (of course, we must not understand the term ‘theoretical’ here in any academic sense) to the kind of liberal, constitutional framework within which the very idea of politics was mostly understood in the tradition of his colonial masters. I was trying to put that indifference together, on the one hand with Gandhi’s incessant moralistic perspective on things and his constantly avowed religiosity and, on the other hand, with his resistance to political abstractions that took one away from the experiences of ordinary people in their quotidian social habitat. In order to integrate these different aspects of his thought, it seemed to me right to attribute to him a skepticism about the idea that what is bad in human beings (a constant theme for Gandhi, as for all religious moralists) can be set right simply by making them over into some abstract form of being called ‘citizens’ in a form of polity that came to be associated with the nation-building exercises in Europe since the Westphalian peace. That is what I meant when I suggested Gandhi was an anti-political thinker. This is quite compatible with viewing Gandhi as having inaugurated a form of mass politics in India that was highly original and imaginative. You ask something slightly different: whether he believed that a wrong in the world (which is somewhat different from what is bad in us) could be redressed by political means. Well, for him, I think a lot depends on what that wrong is or, better, what level of description you give it. It also depends on which phase and context of his thinking we are talking about. So, for instance, if you described the wrong in terms of what he opposed in very specifically oppressive actions and policies of the British government in colonial India or colonial South Africa, he certainly repeatedly appealed to mass politics of one kind or the other to resist such wrongs. Clearly, in this sense, he believed in a politics of resistance. So also, as others have pointed out, when it came to the resolution that was moved at the Karachi Congress in 1931, he found himself in a context where he openly committed himself to a radical (rather than an orthodox liberal) version of political principles and rights. Even on secularist politics he changed his mind, as Bipin Chandra has documented, from the time of his early writings to what he was saying by the 1940s (I discuss some of this in my chapter on secularism in the book). But it is also well known that he believed that there was a great deal in the modern civilisation of the West that was tied to capitalism, and more generally to attitudes of gain and profit and consumerism that you could not constrain merely by liberal or even socio-democratic conceptions of politics, i.e., by a familiar set of political, legal, and economic constraints. Rather, one should shun the entire mentality that underlies it. He certainly did not have a socialist alternative that was supposed to follow upon a transcending of capitalism in the way that Marx did; instead he wanted to pre-empt capitalism in India (not unlike Marx in his very late phase when he was focused on the peasant communes in Russia) and to do so by repudiating the mentality, the cognitive outlook, that lay behind it. This required a deeper reflection about what the corrosive moral and political effects of that mentality are. Hind Swaraj, among other things, is a harshly worded reflection about just that.

UM: Staying with Gandhi, one of the ways in which Gandhi strikes me as almost unique among colonial critics of imperialism is that his challenge to the empire seems singularly unmarked by a sense of inferiority, or a lack of self-confidence, itself so often a product of the empire. This does not seem to me to be true of Nehru, Ambedkar Jinnah, or for that matter Kenyatta or Nkrumah. They all appear not just to have been influenced (as Gandhi clearly was too) by the ideas and practices of the empire, but also in some way distorted, even disfigured, by them. I am not sure you agree with this characterization of Gandhi (and the others), but it makes me wonder if the reason for it might have something to do with what you argue, namely that Gandhi’s opposition to the empire is ultimately a part, and only a part, of a much larger critique of modernity. Gandhi (like Marx), as you point out, is ultimately really concerned with a kind of alienation from nature and from ourselves, which for both of them are the defining traits of modernity. In that sense his critique of empire, even though very sharp, is almost a secondary purpose, and because of that he can inoculate himself from the distortions, such as those that stem from wanting to wrest power from the imperialists.
AB: The way I’ve put the point you are making is to say that Gandhi had a very specific sort of confidence that later, even very powerful, anti-imperialist voices such as Fanon or, say, Edward Said, did not possess. Your term ‘inferiority’ is perhaps a slightly misleading description to put on what the source of the lack of this confidence in the others really is.  So take someone like Said, who is so widely read today. He wrote eloquently about the distortions that ‘the West’ has shown in its understanding and conceptualizations of the cultures of the global South (or what was called the ‘Orient’).  But he never really asked what was wrong in the West’s own civilizational tendencies, in its own conceptualizations, in short what was wrong in the West’s understanding of itself.  It requires a specific kind of confidence to ask that, a confidence that comes not from overcoming a sense of inferiority so much as from possessing a set of intellectual and conceptual reserves. It really comes, in my view, from being a philosopher of a sort that I believe Gandhi was and Said and Fanon were not. It comes from having deeply reflected on moral concepts and the moral life and its relation to politics and economics and culture. That is really my primary reason for being so interested in Gandhi and, as you say, for my placing him side by side with Marx and looking at his ideas on nature, alienation, and so on. Your question, as you have formulated it, makes it seem that if one sees this quality in Gandhi’s thought, one must see his anti-imperialism as secondary and somewhat unimportant. I wonder if that can be right. It would be a bit like saying Marx’s anti-capitalism is made less important because he believes that transcending capitalism is in the service of freeing human beings into a new and liberated subjectivity that is unalienated. I would prefer to say that Gandhi’s anti-imperialism was supremely important to him but it nestled within his eventual ideal of a self-governing moral human subject, just as Marx’s critique of capitalism did.

UM: You were a close friend and colleague of the late Edward Said. By pure happenstance during the last conversation I had with Edward (on the phone) he mentioned you with great affection and admiration and spoke of the course you were teaching together. You write very movingly in your essay about him. It is an essay about Edward but also about friendship. Your relationship was clearly a friendship of many parts — shared intellectual passions, political commitments, a deep love of music, and many other things. Reading your essay on Said made me think about friendships and the academy. How have these and other (I am thinking of Noam Chomsky and Prabhat Patnaik, to whom you dedicate this volume) specifically “academic” friendships moulded your life in the American academy and are there such friendships that link you with India? Has friendship been important to the ideas that you cherish?
AB: It’s hard to talk about specific friendships in a public forum, Uday. But, I do see the point of your question. Speaking generally (individuals apart), in the academy and in intellectual life more broadly, when you learn about ideas from others they become friends in a way that is closely tied to personal respect as much as intimate or amiable relations.  Anyone with any experience in the academy will notice that intellectual ability is far more common than intellectual character, and may even perhaps be less important than it.  I reckon all of us over a lifetime of thinking and writing come across and, if we are lucky, come to know a handful of people (if that) of whom one thinks: if he or she thinks I am alright, I must at least approximately be alright. They may be one’s friends, of course, but they are not merely so.

UM: Finally, since this book is being published in America and India, what are your thoughts about these two rather difference contexts in which you are intervening? This is clearly not a book of policy recommendations, but you are avidly engaged with public and intellectual life in India. What are some of the points where you see your work as confronting the new political dispensation in India following the recent elections?
AB: I do spend about six weeks in India each year and yes, I do try and keep up with Indian politics. Occasionally, if asked, I write about India in more public spaces than books and learned journals. About the outcome of the recent elections, I can’t, in a short space, do much more than say that there is nothing to do but to work as hard as we can in the next few years to try and make sure that there is a very different outcome next time. It has never before been as frustrating for me to be away from India since it is more urgent now than ever before (except perhaps the brief period of ‘the Emergency’) to put one’s effort in opposing the government and its policies.  

UM: Could you name five or six books outside of your discipline that have influenced your work in recent years?
AB: In no particular order and without too much reflection let me put down the following:
1) Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down
2) Various writings of Marx that I have studied over the last few decades including—what is often excluded by others influenced by Marx—The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
3) Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
4) M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism
5) Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
6) Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
 
Akeel Bilgrami is the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy; Professor, Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum
 

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