Commentary/Rajeev Srinivasan

As soon as the leftists tasted power, they metamorphosed into the garden variety of politicians

I have come to the conclusion that America is not really a moral country, but a moralistic one. In other words, Americans like to preach, and they are rather self-righteous. But when it comes down to actual practice -- action is louder than words and so forth -- they seem to have few qualms, either as a state or as individuals, in pursuing the most expedient path, morals be damned.

Let's take the US in its foreign policy approach. While sanctimoniously preaching the importance of human rights, they nevertheless are violating the rights of millions of innocent Iraqi civilians by enforcing a crippling embargo -- that too under the smokescreen of UN approval. They turn a blind eye to the rights of Tibetans and other denizens of China's police state, while enthusiastically pursuing trade alliances with China.

The US spares little thought for the rights of Afghans under the extremist Taliban -- they have their eyes set on exploiting Central Asia's oil and gas via a pipeline through the Afghanistan to Pakistan. The US has supported various abhorrent regimes in South America, including those in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, to support mercantilist policies aimed at helping large US corporations. As Milton Friedman once declared, "The business of America is business."

The US loudly proclaims the merits of democracy, but when democracies make decisions they don't like, Americans either ignore them (eg Jammu and Kashmir elections, the Iranian polls) or subvert them (eg Salvador Allende in Chile). And then American diplomats have the chutzpah to stand up and sermonise: one is forced to admire their audacity!

The man in the street is equally quick to embrace hypocrisy. There is allegedly a 'war against drugs' meant to reduce the ill-effects of narcotic usage. But this very popular program is fundamentally flawed as it is completely oriented to the supply side, rather than to the demand side. To wit, the premise is only that those countries that provide the drugs should be browbeaten into not growing the poppies or cannabis or whatever.

Oddly enough, this is the 'free market' at work -- another cherished American shibboleth. There is demand for narcotics, so as rational economic beings, peasants cultivate drug-related crops. Taking a leaf from America's own mercantilist books, Colombia, Mexico and so forth ought to actively support and encourage this home-grown, successful 'industry' instead of being cowed into submission!

The ironic part of all this is that it doesn't seem to occur to Americans that they share at least half the blame. If only Americans were to exercise more self-restraint and discipline in reducing the consumption of drugs, demand would dry up, the 'free market' would swing into action, and Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' would automatically compel Andean peasants to switch to other crops.

On the contrary, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his insightful essays on America a century ago, Americans feel somehow impelled to be busybodies and to stick their nose into others's affairs. Some of the most ferocious interferers are, of course, the religious far-right, whose causes include everything from the rights of unborn babies (but alas, not of born ones) to the introduction of the deliciously self-contradictory 'creation science' in classrooms.

The most passionate purveyors of this moralistic fervour are groups such as the Moral Majority. As some wag noted, they are neither moral nor a majority. Which is highly fortunate for all those who don't share their particular set of views on religion, social mores or race. But then, one would somehow expect radical religious people to couch their arguments in moral terms.

That brings me to the surprising thing about the moralisers in India. The religious right there, as expected, has strong views couched in moral terms. But then, amazingly, so do the radical left-wingers. If one follows the utterings of India's self-proclaimed 'progressives', one would be convinced they are full of compassion for the rights of the downtrodden; and furthermore, that they have a heaven-sent monopoly on the said compassion.

As though they alone cared. How purblind! In point of fact, the majority of those who have done anything for the downtrodden in India have been religious and spiritual people: The Buddha, Ashoka the Great, the Bhakti saints, Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Narayana Guru, to today's Baba Amte, Pandurang Athavale, Medha Patkar and Sunderlal Bahuguna of the Chipko movement.

In reality, leftists, barring very few, are no exemplars in India. The age of the committed ideologue has passed: As soon as leftists tasted power, they metamorphosed into the garden variety of politicians. Any unctuous, self-congratulatory posturing by them about superior moral standing is to be consumed with a large pinch of salt.

Therefore, it is quite a challenge for the average Indian -- dealing with the Scylla and Charybdis of fundamentalists at either end of the spectrum. One can manage hellfire-and-brimstone preachers of doom from the right by avowing a benign agnosticism. But how, indeed, does one deal with the dubious moralisers of the left? By out-posturing them, perhaps? But they are immune to reason, afire as they are with their own uncompromising (and unconscious) fundie views, born of naiveté.

I am reminded of an acquaintance of mine, a talented New York writer, a callow 23-year-old, fully convinced that she, and she alone, has seen the light. I used to tell her she was a little mistaken, she didn't actually invent ethics and morals, she had merely discovered them. To no avail -- she was intent on, as it were, 'converting' me. I used to think, wearily, "Been there, done that."

No, she did not invent morals. Neither did another acquaintance, a woman in California who, for reasons best known to herself, has taken it upon herself to tell my friends how wicked I am. She apparently harangues them with tales of my sins, some real but mostly imagined -- I wish I were so nefarious, I'd be so much more interesting! I figured this woman must be a paragon of virtue. (Generously, I didn't pursue the other possibility -- that she was an overly-zealous reformed sinner.)

But then I saw her in driving school, and I had to smile to myself -- so she's not perfect, after all! (For those not familiar with driving school, in California you take eight hours of exceedingly boring classes to ameliorate the effects of small infractions like speeding.) I was relieved: the last known perfect human being continues to be Gautama the Buddha circa 563 BCE. And morality has been analysed in detail in India surely since the time of the Great Master, and certainly much earlier.

I was browsing through a copy of Moral Dilemmas in the Mahabharata, published by the Indologist publisher Motilal Banarsidass. Incidentally, this imprint includes some extremely interesting, well-written books, for example Heinrich Zimmer's Myths and Symbols of Ancient India, and Ananda Coomaraswamy's The Art of Indian and Indonesian Asia. Highly recommended, especially for an ardent but under-informed diaspora Indian like me.

Anyway, the book considers the many moral questions in the Mahabharata. A fair amount of the analysis went over my head, because the scholars quoted Sanskrit slokas assuming the reader's familiarity with content and context. But some of the critical dilemmas revolve around the use of less-than-wholly-savory tactics in the pursuit of Truth, the big picture. To wit, is it appropriate to pursue dharma by all means, fair or foul?

I believe it is this holistic perspective that the historically naive lack. Instead of attacking the roots of the malaise, no-doubt well-meaning, leftists attempt to create little band-aids for symptoms. There is a computer science axiom that suggests something to the effect that 'premature local optimisation is the root of all evil'. That is to say, it is counter-productive to attempt to improve things in narrow contexts without comprehending the effect on the whole enterprise.

It is critically important to examine these moral issues closely, because in the final analysis, India has embarked upon nothing less than the making of a just society. Shashi Tharoor notes in his soon-to-be-released book India: From Midnight to Millennium that there are four major debates going on in India now: bread vs freedom, centralisation vs federalism, pluralism vs fundamentalism, globalisation vs self-reliance.

I would add a fifth, morality vs moralisation.

The Indian state came into being in 1947 as the product of a moral position -- that espoused by Mahatma Gandhi, however unsatisfactory the end result may have been to him. The American state came into being in 1776 also based on a moral position: "No taxation without representation"; it has since faced its greatest crisis, the US Civil war, based on the moral issue of slavery. It is only natural that morality is writ large in each nation's consciousness.

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