Will India Achieve Genuine Democracy, Justice?

About a month ago, I finished Jawaharlal Nehru’s book The Discovery of India. He wrote this book while he was in prison.

From 1921 to 1945, Nehru was arrested 9 times and spent almost 9 years in prison fighting for Indian independence.

In August 1942, Mahatma Gandhi gave a speech in favor a resolution for the British to “Quit India.” In response, Nehru spent nearly 3 years in the Ahmednagar Fort with other Indian independence leaders.

The book is partly an account of his experiences in politics, but he also go through the history of India, its culture, and it explains how Nehru was traveling throughout India where he reached a remarkable breakthrough. He discovered that his country had a soul:

“It was not her wide spaces that eluded me, or even her diversity, but some depth of soul which I could not fathom, though I had occasional and tantalizing glimpses of it. She was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. All of these existed in our conscious or subconscious selves, though we may not have been aware of them, and they had gone to build up the complex and mysterious personality of India.”

The personality is called Bharat Mata, which means “Mother India.” In the book, Nehru talks about this concept to an audience.

He said, “Bharat Mata, Mother India, was essentially these millions of people, and victory to her meant victory to these people.”

In a metaphysical democracy, it is possible to heal the divisions of a large and deeply divided country group through Dharma, ahimsa (nonviolence), and satyagraha (truth force). According to Nehru:

“Dharma really means something more than religion. It is from a root word which means to hold together; it is the inmost constitution of a thing, the law of its inner being. It is an ethical concept which includes the moral code, righteousness, and the whole range of man’s duties and responsibilities.”

Nehru defined a “metaphysical democracy.” He wrote, “This realization that all things have the same essence removes the barriers which separate us from them and produces a sense of unity with humanity and nature, a unity which underlines diversity and manifoldness of the external world.”

A metaphysical democracy requires leaders who try to bring people together. Nehru reminds people that the Mughal Empire (1506-1857) reached some of its greatest heights under the reigns of Emperors Akbar (1556 to 1605) and Aurungzeb (1658 to 1707).

Nehru saw Akbar as a tolerant Muslim ruler who allowed his Hindu, and other nonMuslim, subjects to live and work peacefully. Akbar’s great-grandson, Aurungzeb, according to Nehru was, “A bigot and an austere puritan, he was no lover of art or literature. He infuriated the great majority of his subjects by imposing the old hated jeziya poll-tax on the Hindus and destroying many of the temples.”

As the British were gaining a foothold on India, Aurungzeb inflamed the divisions in India. The British exploited the situation and slowly took over India during the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Nehru stressed the importance of Gandhi’s leadership:

“The essence of his teaching was fearlessness and truth, and action allied to these, always keeping the welfare of the masses in view. The greatest gift for an individual or a nation, so we had been told in our ancient books, was abhay (fearlessness), not merely bodily courage but the absence of fear of mind.”

Gandhi’s views on metaphysics are closer to Aristotle than Plato. Plato wrote in the Republic that philosopher-kings were the only people who were fit to rule.

Aristotle rejected this view. Nicholas Tampio, a professor of political science at Fordham University wrote:

“In The Politics, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) criticizes his teacher Plato’s political vision for being unrealistic and irresponsible. Plato argues that a just society will possess all things, including children, in common; Aristotle responds that parents will only care for children whom they recognize as their own. Aristotle reverses Plato’s method: rather than start with philosophical abstractions that can then be applied to experience, Aristotle collects evidence from Greek constitutions to determine what preserves and destroys states and keeps them well or ill administered.”

To take Aristotle’s point further, people can only become good parents when they care about their children. When politicians only care about half of the American people, they are unlikely to govern with justice and wisdom.

When he took office, Nehru said, “This is no time for petty and destructive criticism, no time for ill will or blaming others. We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell.”