Global India, democracy and violence

The story of India and its independence movement is a dramatic one. It has been associated with one figure above all: Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence. His rise is particularly interesting and important in the 20th century because he is a contemporary of Hitler, Stalin and Churchill – three militaristic, macho figures who sought to transform the globe through military prowess and the use of State capacity.

Non-violence is, in some ways, a negative category. It means the absence or the negation of violence.

The attitude of India’s most significant political actors towards violence animated and remade modern India in very consequential terms. Violence is a central political question. We know this from the age of the civil wars in England and the work of Hobbes. The struggle of modernity is known to be a struggle of capturing violence within the State. Through this process, the State becomes the author and the destination of modern politics. The State also establishes a monopoly on violence. This is how modern politics was birthed. Much of the work of political theorists and philosophers has been to look at this very complicated story and ask how we got here.

The story of India’s independence movement shows some important departures from Western ways of thinking. This was not nativism but rather some tough, reflexive, capacious thinking. The anticolonial nationalists realised that the British Empire could be permanent because, by the turn of the 20th century, it had converted itself into a State which had absorbed all of the violent capacities of Indians. Indians had been depoliticised, and the Empire itself had morphed into a kind of non-violent, welfarist institution.

How could they break this monopoly? I think the big moment of 1905 needs to be seen as a global conjuncture, which is to say that very many similar events were happening simultaneously in the world. It was India’s first mass moment of politics: the Swadeshi, or home rule, movement. It’s when the anti-Statist political subject was born.

The beauty and audacity of this project was that it decoupled the question of violence from the State and wrested it back to the individual. This has profound implications. Gandhi was innovating in this tradition of thinking, as reflected in his monumental commentary on The Bhagavad Gita.

The Gita and the Mahabharata become the instigating point or the site on which various Indian political actors, Gandhi included, start rediscovering the meaning of politics in relation to ethics. In this search, they decouple the question of violence from the State and deposit it into the individual. It is not a matter of the State versus the individual, as anarchists would have had it, but rather that, as an individual subject, I have many capacities.

One of the main capacities I have is the capacity of death. This way of thinking is contrary to the liberal tradition, which had always been about protecting and enhancing life. The Gita turns this on its head. Most significantly, this critique of liberalism discovers enmity in entirely intimate and familiar terms.

In recent European history, the enemy has generally been the “other”: the immigrant, the foreigner and, most catastrophically, the Jew.

In India, this is dramatically overturned. The enemy is always in your midst. It’s your brother. This is a profound realisation because, from around 1910 onwards, the British are becoming existentially unimportant to the Indians. Indians can already imagine a politics where the British don’t exist. So, the British are denied even a position of enmity.

I don’t know why India is called a subcontinent. It feels like Europe plus plus. When India’s politicians were thinking about decolonisation, they weren’t just thinking about producing freedom. They also had to produce a political form that was going to work in such a massive society. That required some innovation in political thinking.

India should not be seen only as a place or a historical context. It should also be seen as a category in the same way that Europe is a category. It represents the birth of new political norms that are capable of universal projection.

Applying this to the present day, whether in Europe, America or India, our intimates and our neighbours incite our greatest difficulties – to use a less passionate word than “hatreds”. Our politics have become intimate; they have become visceral.

India shows us how politics will unfold in the era of 21st century mass democracies. By “global India”, we mean that India is a habitus of new political ideas which developed in the last century. These political ideas refer to fundamental questions of self-sovereignty, violence and democracy.