PHILOSOPHY OF DEFENCE

BASUDHA CHAKRAVARTHY

It will soon be sixteen years since India emerged as a free nation; not only free, but a united nation, like it had not been ever before, though about a fourth of the country seceded and formed itself into a separate State. The Indian nation as it emerged nearly sixteen years ago, has for the first time now been called upon to defend its freedom. The defence we have to put up is also unique in nature; for the content of what we have to defend is different from what individual kings sought to defend in various parts of the country and at various periods of her history. Then indeed we had no unified defence at all. What some of us tried to defend, others conspired with the enemy to destroy. Thus it happened during foreign invasions, not the least during the British. Still even then, of course, there were glorious episodes of attempt at defence. The defence of India in the First World War was the defence of the British Empire of India. The Indian people were called upon to defend the empire against German Imperialism, and they rather thought it worth while to do so. Yet nationalist opinion, even then, saw through and took advantage of the incongruity of that defence. Revolutionaries were actually involved in a plot with Germany. Nationalism derived strength from the professed war aims of the Allies. It developed into a colossal mass movement until again in the Second World War India was asked to regard the defence of Britain to be her own. That request lacked reality because at the same time as Britain professed to defend democracy and freedom from the onslaught of Fascism, she was denying freedom and democracy to India. There was a school of thought, however, which considered it feasible to fall in line with Britain because by so doing India would save herself from filling victim to what was, if anything, a greater menace than British Imperialism, and in the process win freedom and democracy in the course of the inevitable liquidation of imperialism by political and economic forces issuing out of the war. This school was led by M. N. Roy, a greater anti-imperialist than whom the country had probably not produced. The Communist Party of India took a like stand, not from its own judgment, but because in the mean-time the Soviet Union had been attacked by Hitler and must needs be supported. Nationalist India owned the need to defend freedom and democracy, but needed to have freedom and democracy before doing so. So it spontaneously launched a movement to make the British quit this country. Pending that, it did not see what it was that had to be defended. In the later stages of the war, defence came to mean defence from invasion by Japan, and when it was known that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s Azad Hind Fouz was operating in collaboration with Japan, defence lost all meaning for the average Indian.

It is now, then, for the first time in history, that we, as a nation, are called upon to defend ourselves. The call has been the more impelling because we thought we had no enemy and pledged ourselves to a permanent policy of peace. That was why some years ago our Prime Minister cold-shouldered a proposal for a pact of joint defence with Pakistan with the query “Defence against whom?” Even when China stirred up trouble on our border, he, as well as the nation, hoped it could be peacefully settled. Even after the northern neighbour had killed a number of our guards on the border and occupied twelve thousand square miles of our territory, Pandit Nehru did not believe that we should have to fight a war with China. He did not believe it and the nation did not like to believe it. If he made a mistake, so did all of us. Of course, there were a few among us who thought otherwise. They distrusted China because it had gone communist, but both the Government and the people declined to give their protests and fears face value. Now, of course, they can claim they have been proved right.

The call for defence has immediately brought us awareness of what to defend. We know that we have to defend our freedom but know also what is meant by “We”. We have been made aware of the unity that the British gave to India in the administrative and economic sense but which was forged into a unity of spirit by our fight to end British rule. Being called upon now to defend ourselves we know also what we are, the Indian nation that is integrated unto inter-dependence of its units. That awareness caused suspension by the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham of its secessionist platform, because, but for it, that party might have used India’s danger, in the same manner as England’s danger was at one time Ireland’s, and sometimes looked like also being India’s, opportunity. If Dravidastan was a serious proposition, there was little reason for its protagonists to own the danger caused by foreign invasion to the country by separation from which Dravidastan was to be formed, as a danger to themselves. We know now also what our fight for freedom really and totally meant. Even at the beginning of our awakening to the need for freedom, we looked back to our ancient heritage of the Gita and the Upanishads and found therein the means to absorb the impact of modern Western culture, thus freeing ourselves from the complex web of rituals and beliefs through which Christianity made a bid to cut. Then we traversed the entire gamut of our history and re-discovered the evolution through ups and downs, strains and stresses, of our national being. Now as we are threatened, we hear again the temple bell ringing through the depths of the ages, see the ridge at Delhi assuring us that our ancient being has survived all invasions, Mahavallipuram proclaiming the unassailable majesty of our quest of the Universal Being transcending our existence and Fatehpur Sikri reminding us of our abiding heritage of synthesis. So we experience a great upsurge in arts and literature in all our languages. We are made conscious of the free, synthetic living that constitutes our way of life whatever vicissitudes it may have been subjected to, at various periods of our history. If all this is tinged with religion and direct emphasis has been laid on faith in God as our sheet-anchor as contrasted with the atheistic creed of our invader, there would be no danger of our relapse into obscurantism, provided we keep pace with modern thought as, in the very compulsion of our international contacts, we must. Just as in a personal or family crisis one looks round to the roots of one’s being and shelters oneself in those very memories and experiences of one’s past for whose continuity in the future one fears, so a nation is made alive by danger to all it has lived, learnt and seen through, having acquired in the process a personality and character of its own. Our fight for freedom was too much politically orientated to enable us to remember the total national background. Even when it reached out to quest of economic fruition, it stopped short of making us conscious of the potentiality of cultural growth on the background of our past. No wonder the present danger has acted as a catapult to our total self-perception–so much so that a prominent communist Professor-member of Parliament who, not so long ago, called Sir Aurel Stein, who had undertaken an incredibly hard journey for thousands of miles to reach a mountain repository of the ancient Chinese civilization and Sarat Chandra Das, our first cultural ambassador to the prohibited land that Tibet was, wolves in sheep’s clothing serving Western imperialism, has in a speech in the Lok Sabha invoked Sita’s exhortation to Mother Earth to make for her a hole where through she might enter the earth, to ask for a similar hole, could a thing of the age of miracles be now made possible, so that he could prove his fidelity to his mother country. His plea might well be given face value, and rather than taunt him for the sacrilege he had committed in desecrating cultural values of the highest order, or suspect his motives for current avowal of patriotism, he might be welcomed as a prodigal returning to the bosom of his motherland. That is the kind of elemental urge that national danger has evoked. People return to the fundamentals of national existence embodied through the ages in their literature, music, sculpture, architecture and art and bequeathed in countrywide tradition. It seems not only the communists but all of us strayed away from the mother country. Else, how did we engage ourselves in fratricidal strife between the States over this bit of territory or that or just to assert one language over another–perhaps a richer vehicle of the common culture? Why did we make the problem of national integration loom so large? We were oblivious of our country and needed the shock of foreign invasion and the consequent danger to our homeland and all that it means for us, to realize where the roots of our lives lay. In that perspective International Communism has been shown to impinge on the freedom of nations, Chinese Communism has revealed itself as a violent aggressor and Indian Communism with its unconcern for national freedom is an alienized force and so out of place in the present context of national defence. We hark back to our national self.

So we are integrated and it is not surprising that the problem of national integration is regarded as solved. Rather it is deemed to be non-existent. Yet the danger of over-optimism is there following the risk of over-simplification. It is true that much of what seemed to be forces of disintegration was but competition for integration. These were the normal outbursts of desire for self-expression, of fear of being left in the lurch. States competing with one another for territorial expansion or linguistic consolidation, were really fighting for places that they considered their dues, in a developing, emerging India. It was a frightful race for integration, not anything like disintegration. Linguistic minorities were also just anxious for proper places for themselves. All these trends and tendencies have been levelled down by the national danger. Yet, it may be said, they have been scotched, not killed. For, whatever maladjustment they signified will yet have to be set right. But communalism was and remains the chief obstacle to integration. It will not do to forget the dimensions it attained before the emergency. Under the emergency it has been lying low but has not been as non-evident as linguism and provincialism have been. This is explained by a great snag in our national self-perception. Our nation-state is secular but the content of the nationalism enshrined in it has been largely feeling of oneness in the majority community and national defence is prone to partake of the same quality. The moorings to which we go back are largely Hindu. Communalism operates today as a psychological barrier to mutual trust, feeling of mutual oneness and mutual give and take. Our nationalism declined to admit the theory of Hindus and Muslims being separate nations but the partial success of that theory in the secession of the Muslim-majority areas to form a separate State, left its scars on nationalism. Yet the Indian nation grows on secular lines and faces the task of evolving a synthetic nationhood. The national danger presents the task of reclaiming national synthesis from the ravages of the decades, beginning with the last period of the ninteenth century, both as a challenge and an opportunity. It will not do to brook communalism any longer. It will no longer do to rot in the rut of self-righteous communalism that has grown to pathological proportions. The connotation of national defence must be not only the jingling of the temple bell but the truth Kabir sought to find and Akbar to establish, and the dream Emperor Shahjehan dreamt while looking at Taj Mahal from his captivity at the Agra Fort. Both the majority and minority communities have duties towards its realization. If we are to defend our heritage, we must know what it is. Not only Hindu, Muslim and aboriginal cultures but what of Western contact has enriched our inner and outer being are our prized possession. This latter has introduced us to modern modes of thought. Not that scientific thinking was alien to our nature. Contemporaneously with ancient Greece. Kapila and Kanada laid in India the foundation of materialist thought. Indian civilization was just before British conquest at a level, by no means inferior, to that of contemporary Europe. Foreign rule retarded our development but dialectically gave us contact with modern thought. That, like everything else, needs to be defended today lest we tend to retire within our shells like China, which seems to have adopted a sort of spiritual and cultural autarchy. It cannot be denied that there is, in our nationalism, a streak of medievalism and revivalism, represented by certain political and social trends. These run counter to, and prevent conscious assimilation of, all the strands of our cultural being. The national emergency is an hour of trial, but also an hour for us to rise to the full height of our being. We cannot thus rise without full perception of our national personality. Corrosive influences like communalism, provincialism, revivalism must be permanently smothered. That is not yet done and constitutes a gap in our national defence.

For, the trial in which we are placed today does not relate only to our territorial defence. It extends to the whole of our national character and attitude, and we must, to face it, equip ourselves with all the moral, material and cultural resources at our command. Non-alignment which means non-involvement in politico-military blocks, represents not neutrality, but independence and a desire to be at peace with the world, but not at the cost of justice to others and our own national honour. If there was any presumptuousness about it, our humiliation at reverses in defence against aggression should have well corrected our perspective. Now however we face the question of permanent orientation of our attitude. Acharya Vinoba Bhave has been criticised for advising the nation to continue to seek peace with the aggressor whose unilateral withdrawal from most of the areas he (the invader) conquered, he has described as something unique. He has ascribed the withdrawal as also the Russian withdrawal from Cuba to the growth of a world conscience; but there are others who consider it to have been actuated by diplomatic, military and tactical considerations. It should be noted, however, that he wants our readiness to pursue ways of peace to be allied to strength of self-confidence, just as Mahatma Gandhi’s way of peace and non-violence was wedded to mental and moral strength, and urges all possible moral and even material measures to be taken towards growth of self-confidence. The support by communists and near-communists to the Acharya’s angle of vision is considered by many to be in accord with their political design but that does not detract from the intrinsic plausibility of the Acharya’s stand. Sri Jai Prakash Narain has pleaded that we could and should even face invasion by non-violence–an advice similar to that Mahatma Gandhi gave England when she was under threat of invasion by Hitler and considered equally impracticable.

It is necessary to note here a question related to the fundamental ethics of defence. No less a person than the Prime Minister has lent his authority to the view that we should direct our resentment at Chinese aggression, against the Chinese Government and not against the Chinese people. But the Chinese people are an active party to the aggression and unless it be pleaded that they are an unwilling party, detachment of the kind asked for by the Prime Minister among others, would be difficult to sustain. No authentic claim, that the Chinese people are not behind their Government, has been made and communists are not the only people who would be flabbergasted at any such claim. Indeed China’s border claims have the avowed support of the Formosa Government though the latter professes to dislike the mainland Government’s methods for enforcing them. To exclude the Chinese people from resentment at the treacherous and unprovoked aggression on us by their Government, would therefore not have the sanction of reason. Yet resentment might quite conceivably be tempered by respect for ancient Chinese culture and civilization, which Pandit Nehru has stressed without getting everybody’s approbation in doing so. Such respect has a background of thousands of years and is a direct legacy of Tagore and Gandhi. The question is, whether Communist China’s behaviour should be allowed to wipe out all that, or rather whether China’s adoption of Communism has really not wiped all that out or, whether a totality of outlook should leave room for a faith in the ultimate triumph of human values. The latter alternative is not however practicable without an understanding of the reason for Communism’s success in changing the whole pattern of China’s behaviour, towards which the known existence of a streak of expansionism in her history through the ages, should help. Pandit Nehru has said that our war is not against Communism but Chinese expansionism. But such communists as admit that China has committed aggression on India, have failed to explain why their pet theory that a communist or socialist country cannot commit aggression has gone pitifully wrong in the case of China. If it be not Communism we are fighting against, this much is true that our fight includes a fight to maintain democracy and it is not only pertinent but imperative to remember that our enemy is a communist power and very probably interested in reducing us to the position of a satellite. So we must take into account the wave of opinion, among a strong section of the people, in favour of all-out military preparedness and mass psychological conditioning to that end. This section of opinion holds, that non-alignment has been found very much wanting, that Afro-Asian solidarity is an unreality, and that concern for these in our governmental and other quarters is unrelated to reality. It is charged, by those other quarters, with creating mass hysteria and leading a campaign of hatred for China. It dismisses both charges as showing inadequate comprehension of the gravity of the national peril, if indeed not something worse, a conscious or unconscious inclination to leave the country unprepared. Others naturally identify it with jingo nationalism or chauvinism and, among these others are, not only the so-called leftists and middle of the road travellers, but also self-professed humanists whom the very word nationalism gives the creeps. They naturally invite the retort that we have been unable to resist invasion and have been defeated by the invader, there never was and is any question of our going in for any offensive war and our task consists merely in retrieving our territory and our honour–so that all talks of jingoism and chauvinism are out of place and these possibilities do not for us at all exist. Rather our concern should be about the large veneer of anti-State feeling and activity that exist in the country. This argument, plausible so far as it goes, does not really obviate the possibility that the reaction caused by wounded national self-respect from the former complacent attitude of peace and military go-easy, might indeed make us go somewhat berserk. Concern has already been expressed in certain well-meaning foreign quarters that non-violence should have in the present emergency gone under total eclipse in India. These warnings had better be heeded because it is always unsafe to adopt a “It cannot happen here” attitude and it should be remembered that Nazism rose in Germany as a supposed protest against the wrong of the Treaty of Versailles and that Fascism in Italy looked to revival of the glory of ancient Rome–both with disastrous results. It is not surprising, however, that the tragic futility of moving in what the Prime Minister has called an artificial dreamland devoid of all reality, should have made us swing away to a grim determination on complete armed preparedness for all time. That is however a true nationalist decision derived of a resolve to defend all that is worth defending in the nation. It is grounnded in nationalism for, pending the development of world-consciousness, the country is the base, the nation is the plank, whereon to reach out to the world. As Lewis Mumford explains:

Nationalism “came as a heightened consciousness of racial affiliations, as a cult of rural life and a fondness for special regional backgrounds, as a deliberate appraisal, often invidious, of those differences of face and physique, of language and customs, of memories and habits, which set one regional group apart from another. This sense of identity with a small, earth-bound ‘in-group’ is extremely ancient: the sentiment of nationality long anti-dates any conscious belief in nationalism.

Nationalism was assailed by Universalism, received a lift from the American and French Revolutions and sustenance from the reaction to Napoleon’s conquests. Marx and Engels prophesised its submersion under proletarian revolution, “but just the opposite happened: from the middle of the nineteenth century there came a great resurgence of nationalism.”

Mumford says also: “The ground, for this national revival, had been prepared by the romantic poets, painters and philosophers. The headwaters of these romantic streams was not Rousseau but Shakespeare. In a whole cycle of historical plays Shakespeare had tied the self-regarding sentiment of a people to a landscape and a way of life….The discovery of Shakespeare awakened German romanticism with Goethe and Schiller, and somewhat later, aroused the genius of a Victor Hugo….the historic novels of Walter Scott…..then came a new cycle of national consciousness….aided by work of antiquarians…..William Blake’s poetry. Rousseau understood the part imagination played in building up the national personality.”

So “nationalism was a religion……It is often treated as a political phenomenon of the same order as socialism. But the fact is that its roots are deeper…….nationalism may be defined as the bond of common purpose that unites those who use the same language, have the same background of nature, and follow the same rituals of life. One or more of these is necessary, but the patch of earth is all but indispensable, if only to serve as a common ground in the imagination and a common speech, a dialect if not a language is part of it...the individuality of groups of men is as genuine a fact as personality itself the sense of group identity preserved and fortified through historic memories, is the very essence of nationality...he who uproots nationality kills personality.”

Here is a lesson for those who fail to distinguish between nationalism that is the base of human personality and nationalism that impinges upon the personalities of other nations. Rabindranath is often invoked and rightly too, against the latter; but he was equally cognisant of the former. Copious testimony could be adduced from his works in favour of this view. In the New Delhi seminar on Tagore in 1961 Sir Isaih Berlin “placed Tagore as the poet of nationalism in the context of the historical process.”

The duty of defence will, by common consent, henceforth be always on us. We shall have to be in a permanent state of moral and material preparedness. So we shall be calm but firm, resolutely defending what is ours but scrupulously avoiding intrusion into what are the rights and duties of others. That will also enable us to be sure of, and remain entrenched in, ourselves, and fully conscious of all that is ours, having cast off the lackadaisical manner, in which we have taken everything for granted and let ourselves drift into indecision, slackness and unpreparedness. We forgot the common adage regarding eternal vigilance being the price of liberty; but vigilance, to be in proportion, must not mean militancy for its own sake, but for that transcendent awareness of life which impels man, both individual and collective, to keep himself fit, to go forward and even in face of the strongest adversity, not to yield. A like orientation of our national outlook is the lesson of this our moment of what is, in more senses than one, an unprecedented peril.

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