Why the Government of India should establish a Department of Indic Studies
For everyone tired of hearing that there is no "right-wing ecosystem" in India
Why is the Communist Movement still relevant in India?
There are various scenes that stick out when you watch The Kashmir Files, but one scene truly stood out to me, and many others.
"Government unki hai toh kya hua, System toh hamara hai", says Pallavi Joshi's Radhika Menon, an obvious amalgamation of several "eminent academics/intellectuals" whom we are familiar with, making a declaration with an obvious confidence of someone who is sure of their own correctness, and the institutional backing they possess. And sadly, those of us who consider ourselves as coming from an Indic point of view, KNOW that she is correct about this as well. Politics in a democracy is, as every student of the subject knows, just as much a study of the permanent institutions of a society as it is a study of the constant churn of the democratic process.
Eight years into the Modi regime, as we reflect on the complete asymmetry of the BJP's dominance in the electoral arena, versus the legacy (Nehruvian+Marxist) elite's successful holding of the fort in the institutions like the Judiciary (India's premier example of Robert Michel's Iron Law of Oligarchy), the media, academia, and culture, we are left with a sense of frustration - frustration at the BJP/RSS's refusal/inability to topple the legacy elite's sovereignty over these institutions (or even any attempts to do so). This essay, in its small way, attempts to find a way out of this maze.
It also gives us an answer to the question posed in the heading of this section: the Communist Movement is still relevant in Indian politics not because it still has a few MPs in Parliament, or functions as a regional party in the modern iteration of Adi Shankara's Keralam. It is still relevant because during the height of its political success, it managed to convert its political capital into institutional presence and currency.
This should be completely unsurprising to any student of Antonio Gramsci and his diagnosis and prescriptions in the 1930s that are today the foundations of the international Left and their Indian apprentices. Gramsci himself derives heavily from Italian Elite Theory (also called the Machiavellian School of Political Science) and its proponents like Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels, and Vilfredo Pareto (a great book to get know more about these ideas is James Burnham's The Machiavellians).
The gist of these ideas is: political change/revolution in any society does not spring up from the majority, rather change is almost always a result of the persistence and opportunism of a small but committed minority. Even a politically-charged majority population needs an elite, intellectual vanguard to channel this chaotic energy into a laser-focused movement. Those familiar with the Left will know that this is the very foundational idea of Leninism, which was taken to its logical conclusion with Gramsci, and forms the basis of the Praxis of the Left. Without Gramsci, there would be no "Long March through the Institutions" that the Left has undertaken not just in western countries but also in places like India.
Now, instead of being demoralized by this, I think the Indic movement ought to learn a thing or two from our Red counterparts. This lesson of course, is that political power is fleeting. Circumstances change, the mood of the People changes, cultural norms change. No matter how big and successful you are as a political power, your rule can wither away at any moment (just ask the Communists of West Bengal, most of whom you will find in Trinamool Congress offices today in the mazy lanes of Kolkata).
So as the BJP and RSS find themselves at a high-water point of political power today, I think their primary purpose should be to establish institutional centers of power in the fields of academia, media, culture, etc. - both within and outside the control of the Government of India. This alone can grant them the same political and intellectual longevity - a tree that bears fruits long after it has been planted - like the Communists do today.
Setting up Institutions, and why Nehru matters
To a smart observer, the BJP/RSS's haplessness in the legacy institutions of India should really not be that surprising. When political parties win elections in a functioning democratic system, it does not lead to the resignation of all social science professors that don't share the views of the new party, or the removal of all permanent bureaucrats hired or Judges appointed by the Old Regime. Instead, what happens is that the head of the serpent is removed from its old body and a new head is temporarily installed. However, the body of the serpent remains the same and mostly continues to function as it did when the serpent had a different head.
So it should be fundamentally unsurprising that in 2022, eight years after the first election of Narendra Modi as the Prime Minister of India, India's legacy institutions broadly retain the same nature and ideologies as they did in 2013.
So what precisely is the nature and ideologies of these institutions? What does the body of the serpent - which has its own mind and operates largely independently no matter which head is installed on top of it - look like?
The most simple way to answer this question is that institutions are fundamentally Nehruvian in nature (I could say that they are Fabian Socialist, but that would need too much elaboration). That is, they are largely animated by the assumptions and beliefs of India's first Prime Minister, who ruled the country for almost fifteen years. This is why, no matter what you think of his ideas or beliefs, you cannot ignore Nehru. To this day, India's academic institutions zealously protect the dominance of his ideas (and the ideas to his Left) in their premises. To this day, the very fact of what it means to be a Prime Minister, the standards you are held to in that office by the media and even the people, are (for better or worse) the standards set by Nehru - the longer Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister, the more like Nehru he became, and the more adulation he received from our Legacy Institutions.
The best way to understand the next statement by the Editors' Guild of India critical of the BJP/RSS, or the next "Open letter by 50 eminent activists/academics" critical of some BJP policy, is to understand that it is almost as if the ghost of Nehru himself is standing in judgment of the policy. Whatever you think of Nehru, Indian politics is still played by the rules of the game that he established, and the Overton Window of ideas remains firmly grounded in the "traditions" of Nehruvianism. And tradition, as G.K. Chesterton famously said, is nothing but the "democracy of the dead".
So how did it get to this point? Is it simply a result of the fact the Nehru's Indian National Congress exercised political power (and even when they didn't they were still the central node that everyone else organized against) for most of India's post-Partition period? This must obviously be a large reason for this dominance, but I don't think it's the only one. Other reasons like purging any institutions of their ideological enemies (seen most prominently in academia), and the fact that institutions often have emotions and memories like people do, have also given Indians a completely lopsided and ideologically motivated elite.
Perhaps the part of this Nehruvian ideology most relevant to our discussion is the way it looks at India's history. For the Nehruvian mind, the past is not something to look back at with happiness and fondness. Instead, this mindset sees the past as unnecessary and unwanted "baggage" that is standing in the way of India's "progress" towards a supposedly Utopian future that will be brought about by a "Welfare State". It considers the Indian tendency to worship our heroes and to feel pride in our unique civilizational heritage as a problem to be dealt with. There is perhaps no incident that reflects this better than the rebuilding of Somnath Temple in the early years after Partition. Nehru of course, famously refused to attend the inauguration of the new version of this famous temple, which has seen countless Ghazis destroy its physical structure over the centuries, only to rise, time and time again from the ashes, while the monsters who destroyed it rot away in the dust.
[Even if we are allowed to talk about our history, we must be constantly critical to ensure that we remain a demoralized population. We must reduce the ancient, vast and composite Dharmic tradition to its worst parts - and repeat to ourselves that the only thing that represents us is "Caste and Sati". I understand why the British wanted us to think this, but why did the Congress and their Leftist allies want us to feel this way too? It's something to ponder about…]
To me, this refusal by Nehru to refuse to have any association with the the pre-1947 past perfectly represents the deracination of his mind, which was developed in an upper-class British education and drowned deeply in the Socialist and Communist ideas of his time. And anyone who watches how the Indian State reacts to matters of Indic civilizational heritage today - the refusal to correct past wrongs against Dharmic faiths, the mummification of countless ancient Dharmic places of worship as "Archeological Sites" - will see instant similarities to Nehru's own views on the matter.
Through this example, I wanted to give a sense to reader just how deep-rooted the instincts of Nehru and his ideas (which aren't anything really special, mostly being the politics of an early-20th century British Labour voter) are in our institutions. If you're an avid observer of Indian politics and the discourse surrounding it, these assumptions are in the air you breathe, they are assumed to be the just and true way to do things, especially in the Institutions. Nehru's ideas are, to use a Gramscian term, the hegemonic ideas of the Indian Institutions. And to the Indic movement, these ideas and the institutions they currently occupy are the biggest lesson we can learn from the post-Partition period of our history. Indeed, true success for the Indic movement will only come when these very institutions are, over time, forced to give up their Nehruvian instincts, and instead adopt our instincts and ideas about India as a Civilizational State.
Needless to say, when an idea or impulse is this deep-rooted, it can be extremely hard, almost impossible, to completely uproot and dismantle. And in all honesty, I don't want to dismantle these ideas completely either. There's a lot to appreciate in this Weltanschauung and there are many ways in which it has made us a better country. In fact, a pretty good argument can be made that the ideology of the emerging Indic movement (Hindutva can be seen as an aspect of this) is a successor ideology to the nationalism constructed by Gandhi and Nehru. It can be argued that Hindutva wouldn't even have grown to its current strength today, had the INC nationalism that preceded it not given it a stable foundation (perhaps best represented by national symbols and institutions like the Army).
What I do think is that the Indic movement can learn how to build institutional power from the INC and the Left (differences between whom are largely in the nature of Sigmund Freud's "narcissism of small differences") so you can exercise control over the institutions that make the rules of the political game, or that decide what the "truth" is in a mass information society (the media; although this power has slowly withered away in the age of social media), or those institutions that are above, and have more power than elected leaders (the Judiciary).
After all, if winning elections is synonymous with winning a single battle, then creating permanent institutions that steadfastly transmit your ideas and impulses (even when you lose political power, and long after you're dead) should be synonymous with winning the war.
What Is to Be Done?
So if you're someone like me who is deeply bothered by the complete absence of the Indic movement in India's institutions, and you have overcome your desire to constantly point out everything wrong with Subcontinent Islam (which often acts as a gateway drug for many as they exit the framing of Nehruvian Socialism), you will have read the above sections and said, "That's a great history lesson and all, but what can the average person do to solve this problem?"
This is, of course, the main point of this essay. The absence of a "right-wing ecosystem" has led to countless hours of doom-posting on "right-wing Indian Twitter" (for a lack of a better term), and while there are many, many good attempts by people to pick up the BJP/RSS's slack and try to do it themselves (the excellent new initiative Brhat is my pick of the bunch in this genre, and I wish them the best of luck!), but as commendable as these initiatives are, and as much as I enjoy them personally, I think by their very nature these organizations will have a small, but dedicated audience, and that any such organization should have a genuine worry about preaching to the choir (I'm sure none of this is new information for the people striving hard in these self-established institutions).
What we truly need to do to institutionalize our ideas is to create a new Department or Ministry within the Government of India and staff it diligently with people from our movement. Becoming a department of the State has many advantages - first, you receive the legitimacy of being an organ of the sovereign power of the land; second, you receive the resources of the State to pursue your research and intellectual goals; third, it provides a landing spot for countless young people who are desperate to find a way to contribute intellectually to this movement. In a purely political sense, you reward your friends, which as Carl Schmitt tells us, should be a founding principle of any political movement (and it is also something that the Nehruvians and Leftists have always excelled at).
So, while I know the people who clicked on this essay didn't need any convincing, I hope you see why I think we need to start a movement to push the Government towards setting up a Department/Ministry of Indic Studies as an organ of the State (there are of course many more reasons for this - such as the fact that there is so much research that needs to be done to better understand our own history, culture, architecture, etc.)
So it's all done then, we have a shiny new Ministry of Indic Studies as a part of the Indian Government. We have a brand new ship, but now the question, who should be the Captain to lead this new ship?
This is of course a matter of subjective opinion, but my personal pick for the role to head this new institution would be none other than Sanjeev Sanyal.
Now I know that Mr. Sanyal, as a member of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, already has his hands full with various (some might say more important) matters. But the reason he would my pick is that watching one of his talks on YouTube is what gave me the inspiration for writing this essay in the first place.
Simply put, I think Mr. Sanyal is the most eloquent and effective communicator that the Indic movement possesses today. Despite having a full-time job as an economist, it's clear to anyone that he has a fascination for Indian history and culture that you can only find in an autodidact (a trait that I must admit I share as someone who never studied history academically but still feels a hunger to explore the depths of knowledge still stuck in our past). I'm sure the Prime Minister knows him well too, which obviously helps.
Another person that I would really like to be involved in leading this new Ministry/Department would be Mr. Bibek Debroy, who is a very under-appreciated Indic scholar and would be a perfect fit for such an institution. Now I promise that I'm not trying to only pick Bengali members of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, but I honestly think that such a Department under these two individuals would be best placed to thrive in its goals.
Staffing these institutions further with young, dedicated people who share this intellectual hunger for knowledge is the obvious next step, and I honestly think there's no shortage of people just on Twitter who, given the opportunity, would thrive in such an institution. There's too many people to mention, but I would be amiss to not mention the likes of J. Sai Deepak, Anurag Shukla, and many, many more.
We now have a ship, but where are we headed?
So, having established such an institution and staffed it with the right people, the question remains - what kind of work would this Ministry/Department do?
In my personal opinion, such an organization should be one where resources (time, money, etc.) should be spent on these major fields:
Re-examining Indian history from an Indic point of view, while not relaxing any scholarly norms (the goal must be to create the next set of "Eminent Historians", but this time, they'd be batting for our team). It made sense for the British to look at the Third Battle of Panipat (1761) as a battle between the "Afghans" and the "Marathas". The British had no skin in this fight and were a neutral third-party. But what's stopping us from declaring that was a fight between the "Afghans" and "Us"? We must stop looking at our own history in third-person. "We" are the Marathas, the Sikhs, the Cholas, the Ahoms and the Tuluvas. And they are "US".
Spending time and money to develop and do research on Indic art and architecture. In the forefront of this should be a push to create "neo-Indic architecture" - what Indic architecture would have looked like had it's development not stopped by foreign invaders, and it had been allowed to develop naturally into modern times. We could also look at how such architecture could be used for constructing "secular" buildings in India like schools and hospitals, instead of the depressing, gray, square-shaped boxes that they often look like. Architecture and art has the power to communicate in one second, something that takes pages and pages to write. The goal should be for our buildings to sing the Rasa of our civilization back to us, as we walk past them (try to think of how a European Christian must feel when they walk through the streets of Florence). The Adiyogi Statue built by Jaggi Vasudev (Sadhguru) near Coimbatore is a great example of what this could look like.
The development and preservation of all of India's major and minor languages. Languages are not just the way we talk to each other, they are also the storage house for the emotions and memories of any group of people (once you read the role of the Maratha language and the Bhakti Movement that developed alongside it, you will never underestimate languages. We would've have arguably never got a Chhatrapati Shivaji had it not been for the Warkari movement. The same applies to the Vijayanagara Empire and the Telugu language, and the Hoysala Kingdom and the Kannada language, etc.) It is India's vital strength that we have inherited the memories contained in so many major and minor languages, and even more dialects. This Department/Ministry must first ensure that every Indian language continues to be a language that is alive, and then, spend resources to patronize literature, poetry in these languages. If this manages to effect a revival of Sanskrit as a spoken language (like the Jews did with Hebrew after the formation of Israel), it would be a bonus.
At the risk of this section becoming more and more an exercise of my imagination (I have many more ideas that I could list out in a separate article if anyone's interested), I would like to conclude by saying that the biggest reason I think we need such an organization is the old Silicon Valley pitch of "an idea should be good enough that you yourself would want to use it". If such an organization existed, I'm sure I speak for many people when I say that I would leave whatever job I'm doing to get even a chance of working for such endeavors. To even get the chance to play a small role in this hunt for civilizational answers, now that would really be a chance of a lifetime!