Land of Lime

I learnt from Shankar this morning that the Times of India published an edited version of the following on Saturday, March 4th under the title ‘Lessons from Gandhi’. The link is to the epaper, since the OPED sections haven’t been updated for a while by the TOI; but accessing the epaper is a cumbersome process and meant not for the fainthearted.

After I had finished writing this article, I read an interview Bush gave to Indian journalists prior to his departure to India and here is one response that struck me as remarkable.

“Q Mr. President, what is your earliest memory of India?
George W. Bush: Gandhi, …..”

Alright, here is the full version that the readers of TOI didn’t get to read.

If Bush met Gandhi

“We wage a war to save civilization, itself. We did not seek it, but we must fight it – and we will prevail.”

As President Bush visits this week that cradle of an ancient civilization, South Asia, a simple question springs to mind: what is civilization according to George W Bush?

A related question might clarify my focus on civilization: how does Bush perceive and engage with the world? Candidate Bush projected himself as a plain spoken, even incurious, regular Texan, who urged America to be a ‘humble nation’ and not get involved in nation building. 9/11 transformed him into the most Wilsonian of American Presidents, seeking to spread liberty and transform the world.

If in his nomination acceptance speech in 2000, he spoke of ‘occupying the land with character’ and responsibility, four years later in the second inaugural, he argued that the ‘survival of liberty’ and ‘expansion of peace’ in America depended on the expansion of freedom everywhere. Even in 2001, he had characterized democratic faith as the ‘inborn hope of our humanity’, a trust ‘we bear and pass along’. But a coalescence of radical ideology and technology (using planes as weapons) on 9/11 compelled Bush to come to terms with a new threat that doesn’t have borders and isn’t localizable, with a global civil war in the horizon. Absent a moral milieu, the world now is in a state of anomie and suicide (bombers) aren’t merely deviant, but destroy civilization itself. For Bush, reinstituting order everywhere could only happen with democratizing the world through elections and integration into a global economy.

But how does he understand liberty? Note Bush’s repeated invocation of liberty as Almighty’s gift to mankind and as a universal aspiration, yet it manifests in his worldview primarily as Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty, as freedom from coercion. While he speaks of rule of law, freedom of speech, assembly and worship and a free economy, consider his restrictive examples: opportunity to pursue a profession and raise a family, or allowing women to work and sending girls to school. In practice, thanks to the war on terror, even this negative liberty has turned into what Blair characterized as ‘freedom from harm’. In pursuit of this ‘most fundamental of all liberties’, Bush would cut any corners, thus turning a blind eye to the evil that lies within. Recall, Bush’s enthusiastic ‘bring them on’ invitation or Rumsfeld’s ‘Stuff happens’ to explain torture.

Clearly, Bush is no Lincoln attempting to ‘achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace … (for) all nations’ with malice toward none and with charity for all. However, beyond his questionable and inconsistent campaign to spread democracy, a more positive conception of liberty is evident in his notion of civility: ‘Civility isn’t a merely tactic, but a determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos.’ But Bush assumes that this civility has already been achieved, whereas both the conceit of his moral certainty (recall, repeated assertions to God being on the side of justice and order) and the reality of the world should make us realize civility (and civilization) is fragile and ought to be conceived as a reneweable endeavor, as Gandhi believed.

Understood thus, how can Bush advance civilization’s cause, as he travels to Gandhi’s land? What can Bush learn from Gandhi about freedom and civilization to engage an authoritarian Pakistan and a nuclear India?

Gandhi characterized civilization as that ‘mode of conduct, which points out to man the path of duty’, the duty being striving to ‘know ourselves and attain mastery over mind and passions’. What is achieved through such striving is freedom, conceived as Swaraj (self-rule), which for Gandhi is not Almighty’s gift or something imposed from above. It is achieved and experienced as self-realization, through truth and non-violence by each person, whose only entitlement is to ‘determined effort’. Even if any conception of personal freedom that Bush subscribes to is absent, note how Gandhi empowers human agency. Further, such self-realization is not experienced in subjective privacy but in an ethico-political life of which Gandhi himself was a great practitioner and in a community of self-governing people. Thus, Gandhi traverses beyond the binaries of positive-negative liberty and the consequent focus on individual wants, offering Swaraj as a democratic ideal.

If Bush had met Gandhi, he would have pointed out this civilizational legacy to South Asians this week and compelled them to embark on a truly democratic project, as he himself would have done in America. Then his stated objective to ‘save civilization’ through democracy and liberty would have been more meaningful. Even when faced with the spectre of radical terror armed with WMD and a global civil war, if Bush’s quest to save civilization has to go beyond his present solution of ‘creating the other in the image of the self’, one of these days he needs to meet Gandhi.