Liberalism & its contradictions

One only has to look at any day’s newspaper headlines to appreciate the extent of the problem. US President Donald Trump calls African-American sportsmen, commentators and politicians dumb. Yet another American Sikh is assaulted. A prominent British politician compares burqa-clad women to “letterboxes” and bank robbers. Another Muslim man is killed in Rajasthan, adding to the growing list of victims of Hindu lynch mobs. The spate of stories about discrimination, insult and violence against minority communities has one thing in common: They are happening in democratic countries with a liberal political order, by elected politicians and their acolytes. Historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s brilliant book is an elegy on liberalism that was once considered the West’s proud contribution to human civilisation. He delves into history of the last century and evolution of political thought to find answers to the question why liberalism is collapsing.

The assault on liberal thoughts and practices, Mr Mukherjee concludes, arises from contradictions that lie embedded in the foundational tenets of liberalism. Nineteenth century liberal thinkers considered colonised people too inferior to enjoy the gift of liberalism. While upholding in abstraction the principle of liberty and equality their practice showed some were more equal than others. And the thought lives on and has been manifesting itself in rallies in America and Europe and in the racist screeds on the internet. The second contradiction marking liberalism from its birth relates to the individual and his/her place in the society. Liberalism viewed societies as “an accidental conglomeration of atomised individuals” who were bearers of universal rights that could pit them against each other. It was the opposite of what Gandhi thought. He saw individuals in a society bound by chains of reciprocity. Like him, Tagore too, believed in the individual finding fulfilment in the wholeness and unity of mankind.

Mr Mukherjee takes readers through twentieth century history to show how attempts to regulate individual rights to produce a complete man and achieve social progress ended up destroying the very rights they sought to uphold and embellish. Marxist utopians dreamt of building a new civilisation with new kind of human being freed from the bondage of capitalism. Built on rationalism, Nazism saw millions who have not yet seen the light of reasoning could be guided and controlled to produce a rational order. In the end, millions who would be turned into a new whole man ended up in Gulags and Stalin’s charnel houses.

While the bloody history of Nazism and communist rule in the Soviet Union evoked by Mr Mukherjee offers examples of how enlightenment and the dream of building a new human civilisation has degenerated into catastrophe, his essay is a Cri de Coeur about liberalism’s failure. He has highlighted three prominent examples of liberalism under threat. The unexpected victory of a racist and authoritarian Donald Trump; the equally unexpected Brexit vote to leave the European Union and rising anti-immigrant sentiments have moved the author. But his special concern is about India.

Despite the violence, oppression and inequities of the British Raj its liberal disciples launched India on a path of a parliamentary democracy imbued by the sense of justice and solidarity. Although it was far from the ideals of the world’s liberal democracy erected on the ruins of colonial rule, it was an undeniable achievement. Much of Nehru’s success, though, was undone by his own daughter, whose destruction of the independent judiciary and bureaucracy and imposition of autocratic rule was a reminder how quickly the established order could be overturned. Although democracy was restored, Mr Mukherjee laments how the Congress government opportunistically turned its back on violations of individual rights and freedoms and repression of the minorities. Mr Mukherjee’s impassioned essay has clearly been stirred by the latest threat to liberal democratic order by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. By calling India a country of the Hindus and trying to erect a Hindu state the government has shaken the foundations of secular India. By equating Indian civilisation with Hindu civilisation the BJP government has monopolised the mantle of nationalism and termed any critic of the government antinational. In unsparing language, Mr Mukherjee denounces the killings of Muslims: “Murder in the name of Hindu Rashtra is fast becoming a way of life in democratic India”.

The author’s dismay about the twilight of liberal democracy in India is deepened by the awareness that intolerance and bigotry against the Muslims is not limited to the ignorant and obscurantists. Educated people who would be expected to support the rule of law and uphold the constitution can be heard in clubs and cocktail parties mouthing communal views. This pool of support and popular mandate aids the slide towards authoritarianism. Elections may be held and Parliament may be functioning, but he fears that street violence could impose the rule of Hindutva ideology.

Mr Mukherjee’s anxiety is clearly informed by the German experience. In analysing the rise of Nazism in Germany he wonders what made millions of Germans consent and become willing participants in the horrors that Hitler perpetrated. His tentative answer: People’s love for strong authority, glorification of war, making order more important than liberty, a chauvinistic nationalism, racism, especially anti-Semitism, and rabid anticommunism. There is reason to worry if to Indian ears this sound familiar.

The reviewer, founding editor of YaleGlobal, is author of Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization . (Penguin). Disclosure: He is also Associate Professor, Ashoka University TWILIGHT FALLS ON LIBERALISM Rudrangshu Mukherjee Aleph

159 pages; ~399