Tragedy of Modi's India: Where doves don't fly

In security parlance and in the narratives of war and international relations, the opposition between hawks and doves is one of the most recognisable contrasts. The dichotomy is stark and the scenario is clear.

Hawks are those who are proponents of militarism, masculinity and war, who believe that a display of strength is the quickest form of security. It reflects a certain culture of machismo, of technological virility, a certain celebration of a bullyboy attitude as the test of a nation's vitality. Hawks do not mind shedding blood to gain control.

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For the middle class, long condemned to being Third World and third rate, to being kicked around, being hawk is the aspirational movement for India. To be militarily strong and be recognised as being strong is a moment of the nation's arrival. Today we often see the scenario of security as the context for patriotism.

Peace

Oddly, India as a nation, as a civilisational tradition, as a historical perspective viewed itself as a peace-loving country. Peace as a word, as a way of life, as a value frame symbolised Indian politics.

As a non-aligned nation, we wanted to create a third order, a world based on Panchsheel, which was neither West nor Soviet but sought an alternative world beyond the redundancy of cold war.

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Nehru was one of the great opponents of apartheid and Gandhi symbolised a whole dream of non-violence, of Satyagraha encapsulated between Swadeshi and Swaraj.

We were proud of the non-violent nature of nationalism and saw it not as a sign of weakness but as part of the originality of our tradition.

The transition from a peace perspective to a security syndrome came across several decades. Firstly, the so-called Indian defeat at the hands of China dimmed Nehru's stature as an international leader.

Secondly, the growth of insurgency and rebellion creation a perpetual sense of internal war among our elite.

Thirdly, Pakistan's behaviour as a semi-rogue state cavorting with the US and Islamic terror irritated the elite which wanted it "disciplined." Despite India's creative role in Bangladesh, there was a sense that we were not taken seriously by the world.

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Peace, our middle class and elite felt was no longer a passport to international recognition. There was a sense our current elite did not have what it takes to be seen as a world power. India's commitment as a UN peacekeeper, our enthusiasm for the UN as a way of life diminished as we realised that trade and defence were the immediate languages of the global world.

There was also a realisation that our claims to peace as part of a civilisational tradition were slowing us down as a nation. As India became more jingoistic and security oriented, we discarded our sense of civilisation reducing it merely to a ritual of table manners, an aesthetic for a nation.

We also realised violence was not just a result of war, but a consequence of development. Development as a project created more refugees, especially internally displaced in India than all the wars we had fought.

As elites we began deciding that being a soft state was not worth it, nation demanded a more aggressive mindset. The decline of Nehruvianism was not just the decline of Congress, it was our sense that a new kind of aggressive, aspirational nationalism was required to survive in the global world. The plurality, the anarchy of our old style of nationalism gave way to the uniformity.

Transition

The transition from Nehru to Modi is actually not just the decline of the Congress but the transformation of Indian society from doves to hawks. India made four transitions simultaneously, from the BJP to the Congress, from plurality to majoritarianism, from syncretism to Hindutva, from being doves to being hawks in the global world.

It was a transition of mindsets which still has not been worked out either in the politics of culture or the culture of politics which media tries to capture but has failed miserably in doing so.

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Modi was the designer politician who was tailor-made to effect this collective transition. The first symptoms of his regime highlighted it. First was the symbolic displacement of Nehru by a more Bismarckian statue of Sardar Patel. This was not the Patel who had the modesty and humility to adjust to Gandhi's wishes but the Patel who used military might and Machiavellian threat to effect the integration of states.

Second was the integration of internal security into the nation-state imagination headed by think tanks of men like Ajit Doval who saw sustainability as a seditious threat to security.

Environment

The crackdown on NGOs whose environmental concerns were seen as destabilising the borders and vitiating India's commitment to being a strong state committed to the logic of development.

India began reading Pakistan more through "Islamic" eyes. We matched it eye for eye, convinced it had to blink first. Then Modi became the apostle of nuclear energy convinced almost like a new religious convent that nuclear inaugurated the advent of the second modernity. There was a conceptual clearing of political vocabulary and meaning where terms like development, citizenship, patriotism, and security acquired an official meaning and legitimisation.

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Citizenship, for instance was not a term of inclusiveness but a disciplinary exercise demanding a new civics and new rituals of loyalty. Modi's attempts to offer the NRI as inspiration was an attempt to graft the American dream in India. Nalanda plus Silicon Valley could be the new slogan of his developmental state. His dealings on nuclear trade signalled that India was to be a well-behaved nation.

India has decided that, as a species of thought doves do not have a chance for survival in the Darwinian world of security. This is a tragedy that the future will have to unravel.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)