The real apes

Guest Columns by Sauvik Chakraverti,

The Newindpress on Sunday, 2007-2008

The real apes

Dhoti-clad vernacular politicians often accuse us, who read, write, speak, sing and even dream in English, of ‘‘aping the West’’. However, their own core ideas and practices, like ‘‘socialism’’ and ‘‘democracy’’, are also Western imports. Who are the ‘‘real apes’’?

Liberalism is essentially an English idea, stumbled upon by a brave people who needed to place their King under legal restraint. In 1215, King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta. This, the ‘‘First Statute of the Realm’’, by placing the King under the Law, secured for the people precious liberties, enshrined in Law. The English were the first people ever to possess a signed Charter of Liberties.

An important liberty obtained that early was the ‘‘freedom to trade by land and sea’’. Another liberty taken from the King was the freedom to run towns independently, thereby enabling the rise of local self-government. The then Lord Mayor of London, William Hardel, was standing by with his hands on his sword-hilt while the hapless King John signed the charter.

These ideas of ‘‘liberty under the law’’ and ‘‘rule of law’’ (as against ‘‘rule of man’’) gave each Englishman ‘‘stability of possessions’’: his life and his property were secure, and, with these, he was at liberty to engage in the great game of trade in order to improve his condition. Freedom and Justice have remained the highest English political values ever since, their gift to the world.

Liberalism, more than anything else, gave England the Industrial Revolution, making her the first nation to graduate from feudalism to capitalism. The word ‘‘revolution’’ is misleading, suggesting, as it does, a sudden event. In reality, capitalism began steadily emerging from under feudal covers as early as the 14th century. The East India Company was set up in 1600. Without democracy, without bureaucracy, without legislation, the English possessed Justice: ‘‘stability of possessions’’ and liberty, without which capitalism cannot work.

When the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto says Third World people need property rights in the 21st century if they are to discover the ‘‘mystery of capital’’, we can fathom why England jumped ahead of the rest of the world, blessed as she was with ‘‘stability of possessions’’ from as early as 1215 AD. Under the common law, every Englishman was secure in his property and his contracts, giving England the lead. It was this same liberalism and common law that was exported and brought modern capitalism to many parts of the world: America, Australia, Canada, and Japan, among others.

Hernando de Soto’s book is sub-titled Why Capitalism succeeds in the West and not in other parts of the world. Political culture is largely to blame. In India, we do not even have a vernacular word for ‘‘liberty’’ in the English, legal sense of habeas corpus. For us, government is ‘‘hukumat’’ or ‘‘raj’’, both suggesting absolutism. Our idea of politics is Machiavellian: what we call Chanakyaneeti. We bow and scrape before any and every tin-pot authority. Liberty under Law has never been a part of our political consciousness. Even when we supposedly fought for freedom and won it, and then gave ourselves a constitution, we created a centralised state while also depriving ourselves of both property rights as well as liberty. Our cities and towns have no local self-government worth speaking of.

That is, instead of an English Charter of Liberties, we gave ourselves a constitution suited ideally for tyranny. We never displayed the courage of the English, nor did we possess their moral convictions, when we allowed Indira Gandhi to nationalise anything she could lay her hands on. We became a nation in awe of power and sought political pull in order to survive. We lost our morality; we became slaves. A nation that worships power has no use for liberty. We lost the freedom thousands of martyrs died for.

Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas K Gandhi were both lawyers trained in England. But the nation they founded was never blessed with the legal liberty of the English. Instead of importing liberalism, Nehru imported two other ideas that grew in England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: socialism and democracy. These ideas swiftly destroyed liberal England. They destroyed large swathes of the world, including India.

Nehru once said that he was the last Englishman to rule India. History will judge that he was just an ape of the English, possessed of the English language and not much else. If Macaulay had dreamed of creating a race of Indians ‘‘English in spirit’’, he failed miserably in his attempt. For the political culture of the Indian is something that knowledge of the English language could not change: witness the swift path Nehru took to install himself at the commanding heights. See how his grand old party has degenerated into Ceasarism and rank sycophancy. Note that in Britain, the Fabian socialists had no aspirations of hitting the ‘‘commanding heights’’: their idea was to begin with municipal affairs. Marxism had no impact in Britain although Marx lived and wrote there.

So who are guilty of ‘‘aping the West’’ uncritically? At least those of us who espouse classical liberalism can plead ‘‘not guilty’’. On the other hand, it is the communists and the socialists who hold power in a parliamentary democracy based on the Westminster-model; they follow Western procedures in Parliament and court. The key English values of Liberty and Justice are nowhere to be found in India. It is they who have ‘‘aped the West uncritically’’.

Mankind has always learnt by imitation, ‘‘the sincerest form of flattery’’. When two old civilisations meet, one strong and dominant, the other weak and clueless, the latter must learn the survival skills of the former. The Greeks, the Romans and the English all exported their ideas and ideals. India today is a nation adrift because we aped English institutions and English ideas only in the formal sense. We now need to embrace that great English idea: Liberty. But then, liberty needs to be fought for. Liberty needs courage. Are we capable of another Freedom Struggle? If not, we are doomed.

The writer is the author of Antidote: Essays Against the Socialist Indian State, and its sequel, Antidote 2: For Liberal Governance