Re: On Indian Liberals

[Sanjeev Sabhlok <sanjeev@sabhlokcity.com>]

--------------------------------------------------------------------- Please help make the Manifesto better, or accept it, and propagate it! --------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Dr. Sanjeev Sabhlok <sanjeev@sabhlokcity.com>
To: debate@indiapolicy.org
Subject: Superb note

Prof. Roy had endorsed a copy of his note on Indian liberals to me. I think this is an absolutely superb short summary. I have therefore taken the liberty to place it at 

../debate/Notes/indian-liberal.doc

linked thro' ../debate/notes.html

I would urge Prof. Roy to see if he can further elaborate/ edit this note if he wishes; this is the kind of material which we should provide to all visitors to IPI's publications page. Short, relevant, crisp, theoretically sound.

At 08:36 PM 04/09/2000 +0530, Prof. Roy wrote: 
>>>>
> On Indian Liberals.
>
>
> The nationalist movement before e.g. the Jalianwala Bagh massacre and the 25 paise common membership fee for the Congress Party, was in the hands of, broadly speaking, liberals.    This was the so-called "Moderate" wing advocating constitutionalism and the gradual removal of the British as opposed to the so-called "Extremist" wing advocating more forceful methods -- roughly speaking, Gokhale and Tilak respectively.    Liberalism then got shunted to the side when the Congress became a mass movement under Mahatma Gandhi, and then after Independence, the liberal flame was kept alive by very few as noted before.
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> So there is clearly a Part I to the text which has all kinds of authors in that first phase, beginning perhaps with Raja Rammohan Roy himself, all the way to the point when the nationalist movement became a mass movement of nonviolent confrontation with the British.   "Dharnas" etc or other kinds of extraparliamentary activity on the streets might reasonably be thought to be outside the liberal fold, at least prima facie.
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> Then there is a second phase from Independence to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union.   The India of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi was de facto an ally of the Soviet Union of Krushchev and Brezhnev, and vice versa.   Because of our conflict with Pakistan, we needed the Soviets internationally, and free market economics was out of the question.     I know from personal experience how hard it was to mention liberal economic ideas throughout the 1970s in academic economics -- I recall being laughed at uproariously or sneered at contemptuously when I mentioned the possibility of free market economics, upto and including March 1991 when the origins of the Congress's reforms were being formulated for Rajiv Gandhi.    The real story is that the 1991 reforms WERE contrary to traditional Congress ideology until that time (viz. Avadi Resolution circa 1955), and it took almost subterfuge to get accomplished the changes necessary in the political outlook.    (That story remains untold -- we now see at the present moment the Congress gasping for its "real" ideology again because it can't really cope with any genuine liberalism.)
>   
> Now there is clearly a third phase underway at present in the mid and late 1990, and beyond.
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> How does the Indian liberal get recognised?  
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> Well, one aspect has to do perhaps with whom he or she has NOT been associated with.   E.g. it would be hard to consider Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, one of India's and Bengal's great heroes, to have been a liberal in view of his political associations with rather obviously anti-liberal ideologies.   Similarly, the Maharashtra wing of Indian neo-fascism was also rather impressed with similar ideologies in Europe.   
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> I do NOT mean fascist in any derogatory sense, and I am quite happy to debate its merits or demerits on another occasion; all I am saying is that if one is overtly sympathetic towards recognisable fascist movements (as Netaji and the founders of the RSS seemed to have been), then it might be hard to reconcile that with political or economic liberalism.   
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> The same goes for the Left and pseudo-Left -- all the overt and covert sympathisers of Stalin's Russia or Mao's China or whomever's North Korea. Again I don't mean this derogatorily and will be happy to debate it another time, but if one has been singing the praises of Stalin or Mao implicitly or explicitly in one's words and actions for years (when it did not seem the Berlin wall would fall) then it becomes hard and perhaps impossible to call that person a liberal....  (E.g., one noted public figure was being feted publicly even while his hosts had, with equal fanfare, imprisoned an individual citizen without cause for weeks -- did the eminence tell his hosts to let the poor fellow go because they were competing for the same newspaper column space?  No way!)
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> So Indian liberals, like liberals anywhere else, are a fragile minority breed, and always have been and will likely stay that way    They stand up for the individual against collective misbehaviour of all sorts, and expect the individual to stand up and be counted as well as an individual.   
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> Liberals would find the adulation of the masses something best left for fascists to enjoy and the praise of power-elites or the press something best left for communists and socialists to enjoy.    Their heroes would include e.g. Socrates and Galileo, the White Rose in Nazi Germany,  Sozhenitsyn, Sakharov -- and of course that brave man called Wei Jing Sheng.   
Subroto Roy.
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