Without moral imagination, India is becoming intellectually mediocre

Newspaper columns are generally of two types. The first is newsy and full of events. There is a hunger for headlines. The second is a more laid-back version which prefers to be out of step, and more made for critique. Mine is the second kind.

Harold Wilson, the British PM, once said that a week is a long time in politics. The last fortnight in that sense was an excruciating one, almost startling in its uneventfulness. Probably the most official and boring event was Mahatma Gandhi’s anniversary. As a nation, we have routinised Gandhi, treating him as a mnemonic which we quote once or twice a year. As a society, we have to put him in mothballs, as a heritage to be preserved. Sadly, we do not treat him as an experiment to be improved upon and reinvented.

Even the Congress seems to be amnesiac about him. Two major events in the party’s history occurred at this time. The first was Rahul Gandhi’s walk. The padayatra had little sense of Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of walking. It had no sense of Gandhi’s sense of discovery or protest. Rahul virtually treated the walk as an exile. Only his beard redeemed him, giving him a sense of sagacity, which he lacked.

The party elections were even more dismal. Mallikarjun Kharge played a mimic member of the Gandhi family and sustained the Congress as a bad habit. Shashi Tharoor, caught in the drift of party struggle, could have been playfully Gandhian and claimed a normative victory. One is reminded of Abraham Lincoln responding to a discussion, announcing ‘10 Nayes and 2 Ayes. Gentlemen, the Ayes have it.’

If one compares the Sardar Patel celebrations, the marathon run with the Gandhi events, one senses the secondariness of Gandhi to the current regime. But Patel lacked the intellectual sweep of Gandhi and Gandhi demands to be perpetually reinvented. Think of three possibilities.

The debates on the Anthropocene, the Gaia hypothesis seeing the Earth as sacred and man as intrusive. We as a nation are still caught in the climate justice controversy and are failing to shape the overall debate. Gandhi’s ideas of Swadeshi and Swaraj as a spiraling sense of moral and intellectual concern fits the sense of Anthropocene.

In fact, one should have constitutionalised the requirements of the Anthropocene making it at least part of the wish list of the Directive Principles of State Policy. The futuristic Gandhi eludes the imagination of this regime. This was the time to go back to the idea of nature and knowledge as commons.

We as a part of civil society should have set up a ‘Truth Commission’ for the Northeast and Kashmir. The brutality of the AFSPA is non-Gandhian and civil society should have initiated an inquiry. Sadly, civil society seems indifferent to any collective initiative which might create a prospect of reinventing Gandhi.

Because we are afraid of peace in the Northeast, we are intellectually afraid of China. I imagine some journalist asks, “What do you think of the Chinese civilisation?” Gandhi would have said, “That would be a good idea”. A China of bully-boy tactics dominated by a party is a second-rate China. It needs to be spiritually and politically confronted. Today only the Dalai Lama has the moral imagination for it.

Thirdly, at a time when we are celebrating our achievements at ISRO, in space, it is time we redeem Khadi, go back to creating a new metaphysics for cloth, and revive the dream of Indigo as a colour. The idea of cooperatives has become clerically official and lost the dream of an alternative imagination. Craft as a dream, as philosophy, as a signal for an alternative imagination should be revived. A goose stepping Ministry of Cooperatives can hardly grasp the playfulness of Satyagraha.

Gandhi would have indigenised Pugwash to start a Satyagraha for the place. One misses his playfulness, his sense of prayer, and faith in the future. It needs the accompaniment of laughter that our politicians lack.

I remember Jamnalal Bajaj had given a Ford to Gandhi’s Ashram. It ran for a few weeks and broke down and Gandhi had it pragmatically tethered to two oxen. When visitors came, he would modestly claim, “Meet my Ox-Ford.” This sense of laughter has been erased. Democracy is dying out of pomposity and boredom.

Lastly, Gandhi would not have cribbed about the hunger report and India’s low rating in it. He would have evoked Vivekananda and shown how food, fasting, and festival can become a moral response to hunger. It was not the number but the fact of hunger that would have worried him.

One senses that without a moral imagination India is becoming intellectually mediocre. We need exemplars to enact new experiments. It is a pity we treat Gandhi as a silly old habit rather than a moral science of the future. It is time every man turns Gandhian to reinvent a more enchanting India.

The writer is a social science nomad. The views expressed are personal.

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