A Country in Search of Itself: Brief Reflections on the Occasion of India’s Independence Day

Los Angeles, August 15^th

As India marks the 73^rd anniversary of its independence, it is once again an opportune moment to reflect on what remains of the legacy of the anti-colonial struggle that led to India’s deliverance from colonial rule.  The country might seem to have weightier subjects on its mind: the coronavirus continues to cut a blazing trail through much of the country, and whatever actions the state has taken to stem the transmission of the disease have evidently been woefully inadequate.  Tens of millions of people have been thrown into the ranks of the unemployed.  Many people have been cheered, and some startled and dismayed, by the bhoomi pujan conducted by the country’s Prime Minister, who is supposed to represent every citizen without distinction, at Ayodhya in consequence of the 2019 Supreme Court decision that left the path open to Hindu nationalists to raise a grand temple in honor of Rama at his alleged birth place.  That such a ceremony, which seems to be not only about building a temple to augment Hindu pride but also coronating a king, should have taken place at a time when the pandemic is exacting an immense toll says something about the priorities of the present regime.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the bhoomi pujan, Ayodhya, 5 August 2020.

*Love for the Country: Obama, Giuliani, and Narratives of Patriotism

 

 New York’s former mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, dubbed by the adoring American media as “America’s mayor” after the events of September 11 cast him in the spotlight and even turned him into a hero in the eyes of many, has long had a habit of attempting to insert himself into the public sphere after his “retirement” and failed attempt to gain America’s presidency.  Giuliani was always known for his machismo rather than his intelligence, and it is not surprising that one of the many sinecures that came his way after he supposedly brought New York back on its feet—first by tackling crime on the city’s mean streets, acting tough with criminals, and then by showing terrorists that New Yorkers could not be cowed into submission by turning their twin towers into burning infernos—was as a consultant to various law enforcement agencies, in and outside the United States, on cultivating “zero tolerance” with respect to crime.  For Giuliani, as for many others who are habituated to the idea that certain human beings should be treated as a lower species, “zero tolerance” is produced not by tackling the social roots of crime—and “crime” is, needless to say, never the actions of Wall Street bankers who plunder the wealth of common people, or the backroom dealings that enable many of the country’s wealthiest people and corporations to evade taxes—but merely by packing the jails.

 

That Giuliani has always had “zero tolerance” for those who do not meet his exacting standards of patriotism has become amply clear with his latest pronouncement, relayed not surprisingly on Fox News, that President Barack Obama has never expressed love for the United States.   (If a man is known by the company he keeps, it is worth recalling that Fox News, Giuliani’s favorite news channel, in the aftermath of l’affaire Charlie Hebdo described the city of Birmingham as a “Muslim-only” city where non-Muslims could not go at all.  Even David Cameron, scarcely the champion of liberal views or the model of perspicacious reasoning, could not restrain himself from describing Fox News’ anchors as “idiots”.)  “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say,” Giuliani told a dinner meeting of business executives, “but I do not believe that the president loves America.  He doesn’t love you.  And he doesn’t love me.  He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”  Giuliani has now elaborated his views in an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, but one need not bother oneself excessively with his words of explanation.  Giuliani avers that he did not mean to question Obama’s “motives or the content of his heart”, and that he only sought to convey his feeling that Obama’s words and actions have often had the effect of lowering the morale of Americans.  It is surprising, indeed, that Giuliani concedes that Obama has a heart; some, myself included, have wondered whether the same could be said of Giuliani.  “America’s mayor” claims that he only seeks to open a national conversation on this question, though it sounds very much like a national conversation, which quite animated some Americans, on whether Barack Hussain Obama could really claim to have been born in the United States.

 

Giuliani challenged the media to furnish examples of Obama’s unqualified love for his country—a challenge that the gallant New York Times found irresistible.  This weighty newspaper, in a piece entitled “Criticism Aside, Obama Has Stated Love for U.S.” (February 23), defends Obama with chapter and verse from his numerous speeches.  When Obama was but a presidential candidate in 2008, he confided to his audience:  “I also know how much I love America.”  At the Democratic National Convention that same year, Obama told the wildly cheering crowd, “I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain.”  Moreover, as the New York Times reminds its readers, Obama’s love for his fellow countrymen and women appears not to have diminished a jot even after the first difficult years of his presidency, since in 2011 at a town-hall meeting in Illinois he sought to explain to his audience “why I love this country so much.”  Obama could well be forgiven if, in this love-drenched environment, he might have not quite mustered the will or ability to love Rudolph the red-necked moose.

 

The question, one that can barely be contemplated in America, is not whether Obama loves his country enough, but whether he loves it too much.  There is a strand of thought associated with the sentiment voiced by Samuel Johnson, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”  Assuming, however, that most people do love their country, and that Americans are no more exceptional in this respect than any other people, and assuming as well that most people will be inclined to see some measure of patriotism as both desirable and reasonable, let us grant that patriotism may in itself not be an unhealthy sentiment.  Even the most hardened critics of their country are likely to succumb to patriotism, and the recent events surrounding the killings of French cartoonists have amply demonstrated how quickly people are ready to circle the wagons and fall back upon patriotism.  However, the patriotism of Giuliani demands something else, something much more stringent than mere affection for one’s country.  “I don’t hear from him”, complained Giuliani about Obama, “what I heard from Harry Truman, what I heard from Bill Clinton, what I heard from Jimmy Carter, which is these wonderful words about what a great country we are, what an exceptional country we are.”  Lest Giuliani, now a staunch Republican, should be accused of pillorying a Democratic President, he makes it a point to invoke the patriotism of three Democratic presidents.

 

So, as has happened so often in American history, the affirmation of America’s greatness and its exceptionality itself becomes a necessary condition for being considered a true-blooded American.  That Obama has, sadly, passed Giuliani’s stringent test all too often is not something that would interest much less confound Giuliani, since falsehood and deception are intrinsically part of his being.  Obama has repeatedly and with evident conviction described the United States as “the greatest democratic, economic, and military force for freedom and human dignity the world has ever known”; this piece of pompous and offensive banality is only exceeded by his pronouncement, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.”  Not unlikely, such of Obama’s defenders who might still cringe at this shameless exhibition of American exceptionalism will almost certainly point out that the latter remarks were uttered at the commencement ceremony of the United States Military Academy and must only be viewed as a tactical attempt by the president to engage the country’s brightest young soldiers.  It is Obama’s predecessors, Bill Clinton and George Bush, who called America the world’s “one dispensable nation”, but it is Obama who has made this phrase his signature line.  “America remains”, so stated Obama in his State of the Union address in 2012, “the one indispensable nation in world affairs”, a sentiment reaffirmed in precisely the same language—“So the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.  That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come”—and with almost defiant conviction at the aforementioned US Military Academy commencement ceremony.

Rosie the Riveter, WW II

 

Let us not merely console ourselves with the thought that hubris has brought down many countries and empires and that the United States will not be spared by history either.  The calamitous consequences of American exceptionalism will have to be borne by others.  We may also bemoan the fact that the illusory difference between Democrats and Republicans has been the bedrock of what passes for politics in the United States.  Both these trajectories of thought must be pursued at greater length by those keen on seeding the grounds for a much richer conception of politics and ecumenical futures.  In the meantime, however, it is worth asking whether there may be yet other modes besides pity, contempt, and condescension with which to question the scandalous patriotism of public figures or contemplate the vexed question of love for one’s country.  In closing, I am reminded of these hauntingly moving lines by the twelfth-century Saxon writer on mystical theology, Hugo of St. Victor:  “It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether.  The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.  The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.”

 

 

 

*The Difficult Return to the Womb: The Travails of the Non-Resident Indian in the Motherland

A number of my friends, acquaintances, and students have emailed me an article that appeared in the New York Times business pages on November 28, entitled ‘Some Indians Find It Tough to Go Home Again’.  The article, which chronicles the difficulties that some well-intentioned Indians have encountered in their efforts to relocate to India, has evidently created something of a buzz.  No one even a decade ago would have expected that Indian Americans, in significant numbers, would choose to return to India.  The call of the ‘motherland’ may have always been there in the abstract, but even among those who thought of their stay in the US as a brief sojourn in their lives, and who seemed determined to render service to the motherland, the return to India was always deferred.  Inertia and laziness have a way of taking over one’s life; but, for many others, the moment when the gains of a professional career, built painstakingly through dint of hard work and a relentless commitment to ‘achievement’, could be abandoned seemed not yet to have arrived.

There was a time when ‘brain drain’ could mean only one thing.  Indians educated at the expense of the Indian state flocked to the US, and by the late 1980s there were enough graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology settled in the US that one could speak of the American IIT fraternity.  Ten years after ‘the economic reforms’, the benign phrase used to characterize the jettisoning of the planned economy and all pretensions to some measure of social equality, first commenced in the early 1990s, there was some mention of the trickle of Indians who had finally elected to test the waters of the ‘new India’.  No one is characterizing that trickle as a stream, much less a raging river, but increasingly in India one hears these days not only of those who left for the US but of those who have abandoned the predictable comforts of American life for the uncertainties of life in India.  And, now, to come to the subject of the New York Times’ article, some of the returnees to India are making their way back to the US.  The motherland, apparently, has not done enough to woo the discerning or ethical-minded Non-Resident Indian.

Shiva Ayyadurai, the New York Times tells us, left India when he was but “seven years” old, and he then took a vow that he would return home to “help his country”.  Why is it that, upon reading this, I am curiously reminded of contestants in Miss World or Miss Universal pageants, who have all been dying to save the world, whose every waking moment has been filled with the thought of helping the poor beautiful children of this world?  My eight-year old has certainly never taken a vow that even remotely seems so noble-minded, but then who am I to judge the ethical precociousness of a seven-year old who, perhaps putting aside his toys, had resolved to “help his country”.  The young Bhagat Singh, let us recall, was no less a patriot.  Almost forty years later, Mr Ayyadurai, now an “entrepreneur and lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology”, returned to India, in fulfillment of his vow, at the behest of the Government of India which had devised a program “to lure talented scientists of the so-called desi diaspora back to their homeland”.  Mr Ayyadurai left with great expectations; he seemed to have lasted in India only a few months.  “As Mr Ayyadurai sees it now,” writes our correspondent, “his Western business education met India’s notoriously inefficient, opaque government, and things went downhill from there.”  Within months, Mr Ayyadurai and his Indian boss were practically at each other’s throats:  the job offer was withdrawn, and Mr Ayyadurai once again found himself returning ‘home’ – this time to the US.

One cannot doubt that the culture of work in the US and India is strikingly different, even if the cult of ‘management’ has introduced a cult of homogeneity that would have been all but unthinkable a decade ago.  The account of the difficulties that Indian Americans encounter upon their attempt to relocate to India sometimes reads like the nineteenth-century British colonial’s narrative about the heat and dust of the tropics, the intractability of the ‘native’, and the grinding poverty  – to which today one might add the traffic jams, pollution, electricity breakdowns, water shortages, and a heartless bureaucracy.  The “feudal culture” of India, Mr Ayyadurai is quoted as saying, will hold India back.  How effortlessly Mr Ayyadurai falls into those oppositions that for two centuries or more have characterized European (and now American) representations of India:  feudal vs. modern, habitual vs. innovative, chaotic vs. organized, inefficient vs. efficient, and so on.  Nearly every aspect of this narrative has been touted endlessly.  The only difficulty is that by the time India catches up with the United States, with the West more broadly, the US will have moved on to a different plane.

In all this discussion about home, the mother country, and the diaspora, almost nothing is allowed to disturb the received understanding of what, for example, constitutes corruption, pollution, or inefficiency.   There is no dispute in these circles of enlightened beings that Laloo Yadav is corrupt, but the scandalous conduct of most of the millionaires who inhabit the corridors of power in Washington passes, if at all it is noticed, for ‘indiscretions’ committed by a few ‘misguided’ politicians.  I wonder, moreover, if Laloo’s corrupt politics kept the state of Bihar free of communal killings – a huge contrast from the ‘clean’ and ‘developed’ state of Gujarat, where a state-sponsored pogrom in 2002 left over 2,000 Muslims dead.  Gujarat is the favorite state of the NRIs and foreign investors, though the sheer dubiousness of that distinction has done nothing to humble either party.  Or take this example:  the US has done much (if not enough) to tackle pollution at home, but its shipment of hazardous wastes to developing countries is evidently a minor detail.  And one could go in this vein, ad infinitum, but to little effect.  The more substantive consideration, perhaps, is that there is little recognition on the part of many NRIs that there is a sensibility which still resists the idea that the conception of a home is merely synonymous with material gains, bodily comforts, or a notion of well being that is defined as an algorithm of numbers.  William Blake, when asked where he lived, answered with a simple phrase:  ‘in the imagination’.

On the subject of home, let me allow the 12th century monk of Saxony, Hugo of St. Victor, the final words:  “It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether.  The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.  The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.”