Of Billy Budd, Ishrat Jahan and Democracy

Herman Melville’s unfinished novel, Billy Budd, tells of a young sailor kidnapped off an American ship, The Rights of Man, to serve on the HMS Bellipotent.

The year is 1797, two decades after the American Revolution put in place the world’s first democratic government.

The story is blatantly allegorical.

The Rights of Man is the title of Thomas Paine’s enormously influential book supporting the new American ideology; the name of the British ship, Bellipotent, is Latin for “Potent in War.”

Looking at his own ship sailing away, Billy shouts, “Good-bye to you old Rights of Man!”

On the warship, he has no rights.

Its Master at Arms, envious of Billy’s sunny innocence and instant popularity with the crew, accuses him of planning a mutiny. Billy, too tongue-tied to express his outrage, hits the man, causing a fall that kills him.

The Captain of the Bellipotent knows that Billy is innocent but sentences him to hang. The official Gazette report of these events justifies the punishment by presenting Billy as a villainous foreigner who stabbed and killed the Master at Arms as part of a planned mutiny.

More than a century after Melville wrote the novel (during the run up to the Spanish-American War that brought the Philippines under American rule), the HMS Bellipotent is once more entrapping, defaming and killing innocents.

The “War on Terror” has become the rationale for democratic governments to do inexcusable things to “suspects” who have done nothing and have no recourse in the face of false accusations and stealthy murder.

In the United States, the illegalities of the prison at Guantanamo and the “renditioning” of suspected terrorists to torture in other countries have disappeared into a penumbra of acceptance as dirty but necessary realities. Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance have woken a larger section of society to the misuse of elite power, but the head of the NSA can still get away with saying that journalists who question his agency are helping terrorists.

In India, the kidnapping and cold blooded murder of 19-year old Ishrat Jahan and the wrongful imprisonment of the accused in the Malegaon blast case have become national scandals, but remedial action has been inconsequential.

The CBI has now charge-sheeted four officers of the Intelligence Bureau in Ishrat’s staged “encounter” killing, but it seems prosecution will require the consent of the Law Ministry.

If the government does not allow prosecution, it will be justly accused of joining the conspiracy, not just for murder but also for inflicting grievous damage to Indian democracy.

Not only should the four IB officers be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, the Government must use the case to subject the inner workings of the Intelligence Bureau to stringent examination and reform.

Established in the colonial era as an instrument of oppression, the IB operates today without legal basis or a shred of accountability, either to Parliament or to the Executive branch.

The need to bring the agency within a democratic and accountable framework is urgent, for it is slated to have a vast new system of electronic surveillance.

I do not have to guess what such a system will do, for as a journalist writing on controversial matters, I am subject to close surveillance and continuing interference.

The most recent example was yesterday.

Both my phones stopped working shortly after I emailed their numbers to Kishore Mahbubani (who I had known as Singapore’s Ambassador at the United Nations), so that we could arrange to meet during his visit to the Festival of Ideas in Goa.

Every call I make brings on a fruity voice announcing “network congestion.” One phone occasionally flashes a sign that “Active call redirect has been activated.”

This is the least of the transgressions I have endured over the past year, but that story will be told in a book arguing that if we do not get the IB into an accountable framework it will mean the death of Indian democracy.

Ashutosh Varshney's NRI View of India

Ashutosh Varshney, an academic at Brown University in the United States, has a new book out, “Battles Half Won: India’s Improbable Democracy.”

Judging from what he said at a book release ceremony in Goa yesterday, it is the usual intellectually disreputable NRI product, a mix of Western stereotypes and learned blindness to inconvenient history.

India’s democracy is “improbable” in Western eyes because of the country’s poverty and the expectation (Varshney's citations began with John Stuart Mill), that a country so diverse could not be a nation, much less be subject to democratic governance.

Varshney ascribed the failure of democracy in the great majority of poor countries – over 75% – to a variety of internal factors, not breathing a word about the primary reason, endemic subversion by neo-colonial interests.

In noting Pakistan’s failures he ignored completely the poisonous process of its creation by the British and its ISI enforced servitude as their proxy to disrupt South Asia and the Islamic world.

He cited Indonesia’s failure without a nod to the brutal realities of the Cold War that inflicted on the country a massacre of some 500,000 “communists” and imposed prolonged rule by a military junta backed by Washington.

He was silent on the manipulations of African countries by Britain, France and Belgium that destroyed their infant experiments with democracy and plunged many into murderous tyranny and perennial civil war.

Since the 1990s Africa has painfully extricated itself from many such conflicts and under the Organization of African Unity democracy had become the norm on the continent; but in the last few years, as European neocolonialists have faced crisis at home, they have reversed decades of progress. Varshney is blind to the past and the present.

Similarly, the 1953 British-American coup that destroyed Iran’s homegrown democracy under Mohammed Mossadegh has evidently made no impression on his scholarship.

Varshney has to ignore all this because that is the cost of NRI success in Western academia; what is inexcusable is that in explaining India’s success he ignores completely the country’s millennial tradition of governance directed by concepts of Ramrajya and the constant democratic influence of the major castes even under the most despotic rulers.

He accepts without question the Western claim that its “nations” represent the conceptual default framework essential for democracy.

Western nationhood is the result of armed conquest and the violent molding of all minorities into servitors of an imposed national ideal. Their democracies are a recent historical development that assumed their current liberal character only in the second half of the 20th Century, under the impact of the human rights revolution Gandhi let loose with Satyagraha in South Africa.

In contrast, the Indian nation is the result of a long evolution going back to the compilation of tribal lore into the Vedas that tamped down group conflicts and allowed the emergence of interdependent castes. The Ramayana and Mahabharata mark significant points in that evolution, and over the millennia, Indian polity has shown a remarkable capacity to meet challenges and adapt to new conditions.

Guru Nanak and Kabir initiated the modern Indian renaissance by seeking to break down religious and caste divisions that had emerged during a period of invasion and social decadence. Their success can be judged by India’s massively unitary response to British rule. The only effective response to that upsurge was the enormous and completely unprecedented communal violence the British engineered.

Varshney seems oblivious to this entire history when he terms Jawaharlal Nehru the “father of Indian democracy.” Nehru certainly deserves credit for nursing India into electoral politics, but the essentially democratic spirit of Indian society is of ancient origin.

Indian democracy is not “improbable.” It is our heritage.

A New Indian Policy for China

India needs a new China policy that is more than “Hope for the best, Expect the worst.” I suggest that it be oriented to the realization of three primary goals. 

Primary Goals

• Ensure international support for peace and stability in China as it experiences the economic crash landing that is surely shaping up. Without clear assurance of such support, China will continue its current ill-advised effort to hide the crisis by statistical bluff and political bluster. Combined with miscalculations and paranoia that could make the situation much worse and perhaps open the door for war as a remedy. Some elements of the People’s Liberation Army might want that scenario, but it would be an unmitigated disaster for the Chinese people and for all of Asia. The far right in the United States might also prefer that outcome, but it would be a serious and lasting defeat for America’s democratic mainstream. The only real beneficiaries of war in Asia would be the old imperial Powers of Europe; as the Cold War did when once before their decline seemed imminent, it would give them a new lease of life. (Britain and its proxies in Asia, especially Pakistan, will undoubtedly seek to counter this goal, not least by embroiling India in sectarian violence.)

• Push China towards democracy. The regime in Beijing should welcome this, for the Communist Party has no real support and is now spending more on internal security than on defense; a transitional road-map with overt international support would help enormously to keep its own population engaged peacefully in the process.

• Make Tibet independent by a peaceful and negotiated process. Tibet has never been a sovereign part of China. It became a tributary for a few decades after the Mongol invasion of the 17th Century, but otherwise has been an independent entity through history. Beijing will certainly object strongly to any change in the status of Tibet but its genocidal policies have effectively destroyed any little legitimacy it might have had there. After initial expressions of outrage, Beijing power-brokers should welcome the objective of peaceful and negotiated change in Tibet; it will allow China to rid itself of a heavy karmic and political burden and emerge as a modern democratic country fully acceptable to the world as a global leader.

Implementation

• International: To achieve these policy goals India should institute two processes of ongoing consultations: with China on the one hand, and on the other, with the United States, the Russian Federation, Japan, South Korea and ASEAN. The aim of the latter process should be to agree on and implement a set of measures calibrated to respond effectively and with balance to Chinese behavior, both positive and negative. The two consultative processes should have the stated aim of converging in agreement on a new security framework for the Asia-Pacific region. 

• Domestic: The Government should issue a White Paper setting out its China policy and initiate a broad all-party consultative process to ensure that it is located outside the partisan sphere of Indian politics. 

• Programs of public information and education should follow the publication of the White Paper to ensure that Indians are generally aware of what is happening and able to see through the disruptive propaganda sure to come from British/Pakistani mass media proxies in the country.

Undemocratic Anti-Terrorism

The threat of a draconian National Counter-Terrorism Centre combining Intelligence and Police powers seems to have been beaten back, at least for the moment.

All major state leaders, including those supportive of the Manmohan Singh government seem to have opposed the move at the 5 May meeting in New Delhi.

I have to say “seem” because the meeting was closed to the media.

On a situation of critical importance to the future of Indian democracy the government chose to veil debate and keep citizens in the dark.

For this government that is par for the course.

It sneaked in changes to legislation on law and order to create a secretive and unaccountable Intelligence apparatus and is now trying to pretend that is no big deal.

The NCTC “will merely arrest and hand over people to the State police” the Home Minister was quoted in news reports.

He makes it seem so smooth, so law abiding, so impervious to the thuggish proclivities that have characterized “anti-terrorist” activity.

It is as if he never heard of encounter killings or custodial deaths of people manifestly innocent of anything but attracting the interest of gum shoes who think they are storm troopers.

So far, such malignancies have been confined to some states and rogue cops; the NCTC will make that phenomenon national and concentrate abusive power in very few hands.

Even without police powers our Intelligence agencies behave with scant respect for the civil rights of Indians.

I speak from experience about that, as can most journalists whose writings and attitudes have been noticed by the authorities. (The late lamented Dharam Shourie, PTI correspondent at the UN for two decades, told me that whenever he was putting together a politically sensitive story in Delhi a "telephone repairman" would magically appear to work on the connection outside his house.)

What part of my writings and attitudes has attracted the attentions of some agency of the Indian government I cannot say, but it has kept me under surveillance and periodically rifled through my belongings ever since I returned to India in 2008 after four decades in the United States.

The operatives involved have not been masters of their art, so it has been hard to ignore their efforts. In one case my tail followed me into a camera shop and stood behind me gesturing to the salesman not to sell me what I wanted; his image was clearly visible in the glass case we both faced.

At a meeting convened by Pondicherry’s “Progressive Writers,” I was examining my eyelids for holes when the speaker paused to observe that the “spy was asleep;” evidently he hadn’t got the memo that “progressives” should take the assertions of government agents with some salt.

The most recent evidence comes from an experiment I conducted: before leaving Pondicherry on 3 May I locked the door to my bedroom. In New Delhi on 5 May my bag was rifled in my Ashram room and the small bag containing all my keys taken. For some obscure reason they also took all my pens, including a marker I was using to highlight passages in a biography of Sri Aurobindo. 

If pure paranoia can drive agents of the Indian government to act with such breathtaking brazenness towards a senior citizen and life-long votary of Gandhi, what will they not do?

If this piece should be followed by my developing sudden multiple organ failure as happened with pacifist J. Sri Raman a few months ago, chalk it down to anti-terrorism.

In case readers think that is being overly dramatic: in Pondicherry on two occasions motorcyclists who had the look of cops ran into my bicycle quite deliberately and then took off. It was sheer luck that I escaped with only bruises and a concussion.

For the sake of balance I should add that in the United States I was also a person of interest. After 9/11 that was very much an in-your-face phenomenon, with my telephones broadcasting racist talk radio and periodic assaults on my car and house.  At one point a posse of plain-clothes and uniformed police appeared at my door at night and conducted an impromptu cross examination in the living room, vastly thrilling my young children.

Both in the United States and in India I interested the authorities not because of anything I have ever done but because I fit a profile they dreamed up. Perhaps it was simply that their cynical calculus could not compute my independence or idealism.

In such a world it is only prudent to refuse when a government demands an increase in its powers of abuse.