The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions by Michael Walzer

Author:Michael Walzer [Walzer, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

FOUR

The Future of National Liberation

I

If I insist on the strong opposition of secular national liberation to religious revivalism, if I deny their secret kinship and refuse to recognize the zealots as the necessary heirs of the liberators, then I must face once again the paradox of liberation and address the question it poses: Why have the leaders and militants of secular liberation not been able to consolidate their achievement and reproduce themselves in successive generations? Over the past several decades, Indian intellectuals and academics have been debating this question in its local version: “Why is it,” one of them asks, “that the Nehruvian vision of a secular India failed to take hold?”1 A leading figure in the recent debates is Ashis Nandy, whose work I have already cited, a longtime critic of both secular nationalism and Hindutva—the “disowned doubles of each other.” In an article entitled “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Toleration,” Nandy evokes a pre-modern, pluralist, and tolerant Hinduism (“fuzzy” and syncretistic), which, he says, the militants of national liberation ignored and suppressed. Their secular and modern radicalism produced a pathological reaction, which is revivalist and also modern; the modernism is shared. Having learned from Western theories of statecraft, the partisans of liberation and the partisans of religious revival are equally willing to use the power of the modern state against their opponents.2

So Nandy’s “critique of Hindu nationalism,” writes the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami, “is intended to be of a piece with the critique of Nehruvian secularism.” Hindutva, “itself the product of modernity, owes its very existence to the oppositional but at the same time internal dialectical relation it bears to … secularism.”3 This isn’t a Marxist, internationalist critique but rather an anti-modernist (or anti-Western) critique, and it has attracted wide support in India from writers, some of whom might best be identified as latter-day Gandhians; others are postmodernists and postcolonialists. Nandy argues that Gandhi’s political use of Hindu motifs was justified because his Hinduism was authentic—that is, “located … in traditions outside the ideological grid of modernity” and therefore unavailable for parochial political mobilizations. By contrast, Hindutva is radically inauthentic. Nandy writes mockingly about the RSS, a paramilitary Hindu nationalist group:

Whatever the revivalist Hindu may seek to revive, it is not Hinduism. The pathetically comic martial uniform of khaki shorts, which the RSS cadres have to wear, tells it all. Modeled on the uniform of the colonial police, the khaki shorts … identify the RSS as the illegitimate child of Western colonialism.

Nandy has similar things to say about the Nehruvian state, which took upon itself, he writes, the “same civilizing mission that the colonial states had once taken upon themselves vis-à-vis the ancient faiths of the subcontinent.”4

That last point is certainly true; it is another example of the paradox of national liberation, but not one that necessarily carries the condemnation that Nandy intends. In 1829, for example, the British banned the sati—the ritual immolation of a Hindu widow on her husband’s funeral pyre—and, after independence, the new Indian government reiterated the ban, acting out, I suppose, the “same civilizing mission.

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