India's Political Samsara: Can The Soul Of Civilisation Escape Its Three Thieves?

The nucleus of high Indian philosophy centres on the Atman. An invisible, indivisible entity that cannot be cut, cannot be burnt, cannot be created, and cannot be destroyed. It travels through time and space ad infinitum, incarnating through different bodies based on a cosmic ledger of karma.

The Atman is an eternal wanderer journeying across the ocean of Samsara, facing repeated tides of birth, death, and rebirth. In rare cases of endeavour or with the mercy of time, the Atman escapes the waves of Samsara to achieve release, salvation, moksha.

Samsara, in a sense, is not just experienced by individuals, but also civilisations. So it is here that we shall view India, at least its civilisational spirit, as the Atman. This Indic Atman navigates the Samsara of the world, which all civilisations experience. Its births and deaths correspond to India’s political manifestations. Its karma is how it expresses itself in the direction of culture and policy.

In every avatar, it seeks a more golden body, yet gold is never guaranteed. Rising and falling like the moon, its fortunes wax and wane. It delves into darkness and shines with full brilliance. Yet no matter its form, it must navigate the Samsara of the stars era after era.

Crowned by the ice-clad Himalayas in the north and bound by the warm Indian Ocean in the south, India would be a crucible of peoples. Mixing and matching, swapping and synthesising, the people of India slowly cultivated a unique sense of oneness yet distinctness. A very real cliché of unity in diversity. What allowed this is multivariate.

The fertile geography of the land combining with natural geologic borders bore a massive population that could only co-exist with each other via cultural norms of pluralism and acceptance of differences – Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti (Truth is One, the Wise call it by many names).

Thus, the Vedic creed swept across India as chariots dominated battlefields. The way of the Vedas gave validation if not exaltation of parochial identities and practices while simultaneously connecting them to a theological cosmopolis – Dharma.

Across India, the Dark Lord would be seen in various avatars: Krishna, Ram, Vitthal, Jagannath, Perumal, Venkateshwara, etc. From the Himalayas, the moon-imbued Master would journey through the subcontinent as a wandering ascetic, leaving black stone idols as his footprints. And of course, every village would possess its own matron goddess, all an emanation of a singular feminine divinity. There is an inherent unity in India precisely because of both material and cultural factors interacting over millennia.

Yet India has seldom been united politically. The soul of India has taken many bodies: the Mahajanapadas, the Mauryans, the Guptas, the Palas, the Cholas, the Karkotas, the Marathas, and perhaps the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, and the British Raj qualify as “bodies” of India, though seen as a misshapen, malevolent incarnation for some while just another form for others.

As some manifestations expressed themselves in more decentralised terms, relying more on local vassalage and decentralised governance, others bound their subjects like iron. Most possessed a mixture of systems naturally. As such, we see this oscillation between centralisation and decentralisation. The Republic of India provides one of the most clear cut examples.

At the Republic’s onset, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru found common cause with Ashoka’s Mauryan Empire in fashioning a powerful centralised state. In a swift series of Bismarckian diplomacy, the princes of India would bend their knees to the peasant-descended Home Minister of India, Sardar Patel, many times at the threat of the newly free army of the Republic.

From 1947 to 1984, the Republic would concentrate its power in the seat of Delhi and loins of the Nehru-Gandhi family. Whilst this ensured that the body of India didn’t balkanise, it also brought the soul of India at the mercy of a corrupt and incompetent dynasty. India had traded the rule of many monarchs for the rule of a single clan.

After the assassination of Indira Gandhi, India’s diversity would strike back. Separatism would abound in the following years. And while India was being physically pulled apart at the seams, it would also be politically fractious as the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty atrophied.

Caste politics, previously kindled to cleave Hindus into fiefdoms of influence, would inflame into a wildfire with the Mandal Commission, engulfing the Congress Party, which flirted with its flickers prior.

Secularism now openly morphed into appeasement of India’s minority Muslim population and was shattered with the doom of Babri’s domes as India’s million mutinies would arrive in full force.

Chaotic and corrupt coalition politics dominated India across the 1990s to 2000s until once again, history decided it was time to rhyme.

Fate had chosen Narendra Modi as the instrument of gathering. India’s disparate pieces were sewn together through a series of policies.

Through centralising tax regimes in GST, streamlining welfare in Jan Dhan-Aadhar, and a litany of central government incentives to kick-start domestic economic growth, the Indian economy formalised and united into a single marketplace rather than a motley of bazaars.

Pivotal in this centralising and streamlining was technology. India Stack and Jio’s mobile revolution connected more Indians online than ever before. The conversation about “India” by Indians was larger than ever in its history.

Beyond mass monetisation and digitisation, Modi’s government has been on an infrastructure-building blitzkrieg. Roads would be laid across millions of miles reaching villages that had never seen automobiles. Electrifying currents ran parallel into these villages on a seemingly endless string of wires.

In January 2024, saffron flags blazed across India’s cities, towns, and villages, and the millennia-old chants reverberating through the sanctum of the newly consecrated Ram Mandir crowned the BJP’s ideological crusade. Hindutva rang the bells of victory, the sacrifices of men, governments, and generations of prayers seemingly answered.

Yet only months later Ayodhya handed its ballot to the opposition, a pattern echoed nationwide even in bastions once dyed deep orange, a red-hot knife plunged straight into Hindutva’s gut.

From abrogating Article 370 to passing the CAA, from RSS cadres burrowing into India’s institutions to textbook rewrites and ceremonial Sengols, the BJP hurled every Overton-shifting spear it could muster, only to face this stinging rebuke in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, prompting critics to sneer that the entire project had come to nought.

That judgment, though, is a cynical oversimplification, for in the deeper currents of culture Hindutva has smothered the ancien régime. Bollywood no longer genuflects before the altar of performative secularism. Social feeds gleam saffron as influencers scramble for orange-hued clout. What better proof of cultural conquest than teenage and twenty-something girls hashtagging Hinduism for likes?

Opposition leaders curse Hindutva with one breath and embark on token temple tours with the next. Perhaps it is vapid, but culture is, after all, the sum of today’s vapidities. When coupled with policy and unabashed Hindu symbolism that makes India’s old secular guard writhe like cattle under a burning brand, the Overton window stands irrevocably shifted. In that realm, Hindutva has won a victory most non-left movements only dream of.

Still, what 2024’s setback and the BJP’s comeback in subsequent state elections shows us is how Hindutva still struggles with what I call the 3 Thieves of India.

The 3 Thieves

Just as the Atman is bound by attachments during its great journey, so has India encountered its own shackles. These attachments can indeed serve purposes, for the Atman must interact with its world; it cannot simply retreat into itself forever.

We have covered much of Hindutva’s battle with pseudo-secularism, but the war is unfinished. India’s pseudo-secularism is primarily built upon legal exceptionalism for minorities and violent vetoes of the street. From these foundations, tentacles emerge across Indian state and society that suffocate the laudable goal of secularism, twisting and mangling it into a malformed, gnarled beast, gorging itself on the Republic.

The only reason Hindutva returned from its exile on the back of Nathuram’s bullet was because of this beast biting off more than it could chew. To permanently slay the hydra of pseudo-secularism, the BJP must bring true equality to India, ending exceptions for minorities via measures like the Universal Civil Code. But beyond legality, it will be societal aspects that will prove more arduous.

Hinduism and indeed Indian culture at large for millennia was built upon the social contract of Ekam Sat and Sarva Dharma Sambhav – an inbuilt pluralism and two-way tolerance that allowed Dharmic religions to evolve, proliferate, and sit in peace with each other.

This was shattered with the voracious appetites of monotheisms like Christianity and Islam, which could not accept the worship of other gods. Yet, what is done is done. We should deal with the now rather than dwell in the nether of ancient conflicts.

What Indian society needs now, rather, is an exaltation of those ancient ideals. A restoration of that two-way tolerance and, if need be, an enforced pluralism. And make no mistake, there is already a natural syncretism across all Indians, but the holdouts wreak havoc. India should not be at the mercy of mobs baying to separate heads from bodies over words coming from their mouths.

In concert with the wretched symphony of minoritarianism is the cancer of caste politics. So much of the pure energy of Indian politics is concentrated on appeasing different castes. Their concerns can range from wanting more affirmative action to receiving free laptops to what surname or caste name should be etched on a statue of a 14th-century feudal lord to simple brute representation in government offices and naturally the graft that can be embezzled from such positions.

In India’s backwaters, caste politics can mean which caste will have the power to terrorise other castes, as many parties are even based on caste. Politics devolves into the dirtiest of gangsterism clothed in crisp white kurtas.

Even more insidious nowadays is the idea of Jatitva where caste politics is pushed to its logical conclusion. Jatitva presents Hinduism as a societal ruse of ruin, Hindutva as a political conspiracy, and the Indian state as an economic oppressor. A caste is framed as its own religion, its own ethnicity, even its own nation.

If India’s pseudo-secularism set India’s different religions at each other’s throat, caste politics makes the body of Hinduism cannibalise itself in zero-sum fury. But perhaps our most cumbersome opponent, our nemesis who has stolen more than all the above combined, is socialism.

India has been crushed under a mountain of poverty, flattening its Himalayan potential into a barren plain. Surely that must mean we should redistribute that of the 1 per cent, those who engorge themselves on a steady diet of carbohydrates fried in the sweat of the proletariat, right?

Well, that is what India’s leadership and the mesmerised masses thought for decades since independence, and indeed so many even today.

A people who literally worship wealth have now designated it as demonic. The crown jewel of the British Empire, the golden bird of Asia, the great diamond in the midst of the Indian Ocean, so famed for its markets and moguls is now a black shadow of its former self.

The solutions of socialism have been attempted ad nauseam in India. The python of Licence Raj slithered around the throats of India’s aspirant businessmen, suffocating them with unending coils of government regulation and licensing. Sweeping nationalisations would consume entire ecosystems of industries, dooming them to bloat and inefficiency. Prices would be frozen like pipes. Ceilings would roof over rents.

Taxes would touch the sky, at times skimming 97.5%! By preying on the crab-like mentality of Indians, always gnawing at the knees of every group at their shoulder, predatory politicians constantly dangled free money and myths to their constituents. A steady supply of monetary tranquillisers has drugged India’s animal spirits into sloth.

The takeaway here is that India has tried all this before. Those longing for a repeat of failures, branding their minds with a fiery motto of “India has not tried real socialism,” are condemning India to another streak of destitution. The crushing poverty India is so infamous for throughout the world is directly descended from India’s failing and ongoing socialist experiment.

Dharma Yuddha

When the spires of the Janmasthans in Mathura and Ayodhya were obliterated and replaced with mosques, the Rajas of Hindustan did not unite to take back their holiest lands. When the Shivlings of Somnath and Kashi were destroyed, no devout emperor from leagues away charged in league with fellow Hindu lords to avenge such sacrilege. They did not even sit and watch. They looked away.

The three thieves require a moral crusade rather than a simple political fight. The reason being is that the nature of Indian politics is gripped by something I call the Blue Throat Principle.

During times of upheaval and change, a fury of good and evil arises. The Puranas pronounced such an era during the Churning of the Cosmic Ocean, the Samudra Manthan. As the Devas and Asuras churned the cosmic ocean, miraculous objects and terrible ailments manifested from the process.

One of the worst was the Halahala, an overwhelming, insatiable poison that threatened all of creation itself. Only through the sacrifice of Lord Shiva, who consumed the terrible substance, entrapping it in his throat, did the threat subside.

Lord Shiva’s snow-white throat would darken to a brilliant blue hue, giving him the epithet, Neelkanth, or “blue throat.” The Halahala could not be destroyed; it could only be contained, and that too by one with skill.

In this way, while the BJP has inherent ideological opposition to ideas like socialism, caste politics, and pseudo-secularism, it has to “contain” these poisons produced by the churn of Indian democracy by utilising them, particularly the former two.

Without providing a dosage of freebies and contesting elections on caste, the BJP will lose elections and thereby power. And in the Matsya Nyaya of Indian politics, power is all.

So, it is here we have to assess the present government – how has Modi’s India fared in its navigation of India’s political samsara during this great ideological Samudra Manthan?

Initially, Modi was a centralising force in Indian politics. Indeed, he still is. But politics, like many other phenomena, is a dialectic. Hindutva was fashioned as a force that was centripetal to India, uniting different castes and regions into a powerful maelstrom intended to permanently transform India. It was focused on India as a whole.

For India is also made up of centrifugal forces, and not just extraterritorial elements like Islamism or Left-Liberalism, but also within the Indian identity itself – caste and linguistic identities. So to ensure political power, the Hindutvadi BJP had to appease and possibly even absorb these parochial elements as well, slowing the nation-building process.

This process repeats with the other Three Thieves, though much less so with pseudo-secularism, which is on a severe secular decline. Socialism, however, is indeed still in vogue. One critique is that the government hasn’t been able to deliver world-beating growth so that poor Indians do not need to rely on such welfare or seethe at the wealthy. Because of the impact of COVID, I think this has legs, but it doesn’t possess the whole body of the issue.

India’s addiction to socialism is precisely linked to ideas around caste politics and the nature of India’s political economy. Like handing cocaine to a baby, early adoption of socialism meant an early addiction. As Indian democracy devolved into a zero-sum competition between groups, each community wanted more resources and to corner power, preventing others from ascending – something socialism enables.

Yet even as India held the world’s fastest growth for the past decade, the natural lopsided pace of development also prods the stretching, sensitive sinews of inequality. And while some data suggests that India has actually been reducing inequality, the ubiquitousness of the internet has roused tensions between India’s diverse groups and put a spotlight on the stark contrast between not just rich and poor, but also a justifiably voracious, aspirational middle class.

As a result, the BJP has also had to dip its hands in the red bucket, enacting generous welfare policies (though less than the opposition) to secure unlikely victories in subsequent state elections after a disappointing Lok Sabha outing.

With a reduced tally, the BJP had to go back and absorb the opposition’s tactics, leading to the aforementioned freebie frenzy and most ominously relenting to ratify a caste census, an exercise that could throw acid on the fissures of Indian society by enumerating caste numbers.

On the face of it, it’s just a data-gathering exercise, right? But in practice, the caste census could cause certain castes to descend further into zero-sum politics by rallying for further resource redistribution and representation. Thus, India’s market forces and individual brilliance would be annihilated as a result.

Hence, it is in this campaign against the three thieves where perhaps our metaphor ends. There is no moksha or release for India as that would mean obliteration of its bodily state. India’s Atman cannot choose stillness. It cannot step outside of time. It must churn, striving against the riptide.

But like the lotus that blooms unsullied in muddy waters, so too must India remain rooted yet untouched, engaged in the world, yet above its poisons. And so as the wheel of time turns. The ocean of samsara churns. The soul endures.

What remains is whether India’s next incarnation will rise closer to light or fall once more into shadow.