In this episode, Shalini Randeria speaks with political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta about the global rise of civilizational narratives — from India and China to Russia, Turkey, and parts of the U.S. They explore why governments increasingly invoke ancient civilizational identities, how this shift fuels soft authoritarianism, and what it reveals about the deeper crisis of liberal democracy. They also discuss how civilizational thinking erodes the historicity of the modern nationstate, replaces democratic negotiation with pregiven identity, and licenses new forms of exclusion and political violence. Mehta contrasts today’s nostalgic, essentialist civilizational claims with earlier Indian thinkers like Gandhi and Tagore, whose visions were futureoriented and emancipatory. A wideranging conversation on democracy, identity, and the dangerous seductions of civilizational politics.
Democracy in Question? is brought to you by:
• Central European University: CEU
• The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: AHCD
• The Podcast Company: scopeaudio
Follow us on social media!
• Central European University: @weareceu.bsky.social
• Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: @ahcdemocracy.bsky.social
Subscribe to the show. If you enjoyed what you listened to, you can support us by leaving a review and sharing our podcast in your networks!
S11E09 Pratap Metha
Shalini: [00:00:00] Welcome to a new episode of Democracy in Question the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I am Shalini Randeria at the Central European University in Vienna, and senior fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy Graduate Institute, Geneva. This is the ninth episode of Season 11 of Democracy in Question.
I am very pleased to welcome today, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who is currently university lecturer at Princeton University Centre for Human Values. He has had a long and distinguished academic career, having taught at Harvard University, Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, and the School of Law at New York University.
He has served as Vice Chancellor of Ashoka University in India between 2017 and 2019, and prior to that was president of the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. He was also member convener of the Indian [00:01:00] Prime Minister's National Knowledge Commission and was on the board of governors of the International Development Research Centre of Canada and Vice Chair of the World Economic Forum's Council on Global Governance.
In 2011, he received the prestigious Infosys Prize for Social Sciences as, and I quote the words of Jury Chair, Professor Amartya Sen, “one of India's finest scholars and public minds who has inspired a new generation of intellectual inquiry”. A political theorist and intellectual historian, Pratap Bhanu Mehta has been on the editorial boards of flagship academic journals, such as the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Democracy.
A prolific writer and a public intellectual, he is an editorial consultant to the Indian Express and a regular contributor to the Financial Times Foreign Affairs and the International Herald Tribune. [00:02:00] His books include The Burden of Democracy, published in 2003, and several co-edited volumes, such as the Oxford Companion to Politics in India, Non-Alignment 2.0 with the subtitle of Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the 21st Century, Shaping the Emerging World: India, and the Multilateral Order. In 2016, then the Oxford Companion to Indian Constitution, followed by Rethinking Public Institutions in India in 2017, and also in 2017, Navigating the Labyrinth: Perspectives on India's Higher Education.
In some of his recent works, Pratap has begun to articulate a timely critique of the civilizational turn in political discourse, which is a threat to liberal democracies today. We devote this episode to a discussion of the origins and effects of the discourse on civilizational [00:03:00] continuities that seeks to sideline more secular historical conceptions of modern democratic nation states. I ask Pratap to reflect on this recent discursive turn in the broader context of the crisis of liberalism.
We discuss the relationship between the turn to civilizational ideologies and contemporary forms of soft authoritarianism, a recurring theme on this podcast. What are the implications of this new civilizational narrative for international relations and how does it feed into both authoritarian national politics and shifting geopolitical hierarchies?
How does it undermine the very historicity of state formation and more conventional conceptions of the modern nation state? Pratap explains competing Indian concepts of civilization, earlier ones, those of Gandhi and Tagore, for example, that are future-oriented in [00:04:00] contrast to the nostalgic, essentialist, and identitarian ones being asserted today. Finally, we also explore what forms of counter politics, and contestation can envisage to a hegemonic civilizational ideology. What politics could successfully oppose the tyranny of an ethnic religious majority, which paradoxically mimics marginality and victimhood?
Pratap, welcome to the podcast, and it's a great pleasure to have you with me today and thank you so much for joining me from Princeton.
Pratap: It's a great honour to be able to talk to you. You've written so much about this subject, and I've learned so much from you over the years.
Shalini: Let me start by a general question on the civilizational turn and the civilizational state, as you have called it. We can observe a recent political move by governments in China, Russia, Turkey, India, among others, to [00:05:00] increasingly deploy a discourse of their civilizational superiority, and civilizational continuity. This is also partially true of the US if we focus on the white supremacist, fundamentalist Christians. Why has this obsession with civilizational continuities defined in religious terms become so salient today? And what kind of political legitimacy does the recourse to a country's glorious civilizational past offer that older narratives in terms of the nation state could not?
Pratap: Fascinating question. I think this civilizational turn in thinking about states is performing five functions, five different overlapping functions. The first is that it's not an accident that all the states you mentioned, the United States, Russia, Turkey, India, China. This [00:06:00] is a moment where they have turned more authoritarian, and the link between authoritarianism and the turn to civilizational state is not accidental. Many observers have pointed out the fact that the modern nation state uses the language of freedom, consent, democracy, and an authoritarian state needs, in some senses, a narrative of legitimation that marginalizes or sidelines a forward-looking agenda of freedom, democracy, and so forth.
Second, insofar as a narrative of victimhood is very important for authoritarian states. The sense of being injured, the sense of being besieged. Civilization provides this extraordinarily capacious way of being besieged. A nation state is a very particular political entity. It's besieged when there's external aggression.
But when you say a civilization is besieged, anything can besiege it, right? Demographic change can besiege it. Liberal intellectuals can besiege it. Marxist intellectuals can besiege it. And so part of what [00:07:00] civilization allows you to do is this kind of very capacious sense of victimhood, which is absolutely central to the constitutive identity of all of these regimes All of these states that you mentioned, India, Turkey, Russia, China, the United States want to be geopolitical hegemons, at least in their regions, if not globally. And they have great power ambitions, and they think that something like an articulation of cultural hegemony or cultural values allows them to exercise a kind of values-based cultural hegemony, at least in their spheres of influence. American leaders now feel completely entitled to say to Europe: "you're losing civilizational values. Somehow, we have this kind of birthright to tell you”.
I think India has been a sense of sub-regional ambitions, China has middle kingdom ambitions, Russia has. So it is, in a sense, infusing their aspirations to regional hegemony with some kind of ideological cover. The [00:08:00] third, as you mentioned in your opening, I think it does perform a psychological need: look, the nation state is the ubiquitous political form of the modern world. Practically, everybody has a kind of nation state. They are 200. It doesn't give you that narrative of distinctness and superiority and that kind of sense of vicarious pride psychologically that this identification with deep civilizational values. The West has a culture of liberalism, Christianity, China, of Confucianism - it does perform that important psychological need in some ways of marking out both distinctiveness and a kind of superiority in some ways, or at least a defensive pushback against others characterizing you as simply similar to everybody else or just in the waiting room of history, waiting to be like America.
The fourth, which is I think more particular in local or different contexts. I think, there are variations in it [00:09:00]. There is a kind of interesting sociology to the appeal of the rise of the concept of civilizational state. Sam Huntington had made the notorious argument about the clash of civilizations. I think one of the powerful points he had made sociologically was, that, in most of these societies there's been a kind of displacement of an old elite by a new vernacular elite. And I think in India this is very palpable. It's literally vernacular in the sense that it speaks in India languages, positions itself against the domination of a Latin, anglicized elite. I think, in the United States it's this axis between the college-educated elite which is seen to be contemptuous of the rest. Now again, whether that's true or not, we can debate. But there is a kind of vernacular backlash. I'm more confident about this in the case of India. I think there is a kind of sociology to it that picks on this idea that this is a powerful way of [00:10:00] being anti-elitist and yet, in a sense, being nationalist at the same time.
Last and final, and this is a smaller thing, perhaps politically not that consequential. I think in some parts of the world, there is also a genuine anxiety and question about their heritage, so much so that they need to rediscover it. China, of course, as we know, completely erased its Confucian past. I think in India, there's some of that anxiety about allegedly the Latin elite in producing a kind of deracinated cultural identity. So, some of it is that kind of natural curiosity and reaction. But I think also, there is this worry, particularly the United States. There's always been this interesting question: does liberal democracy or even capitalism for that matter, or any modern form of politics that we articulate, does it rest on cultural resources that it itself cannot supply? Cultural resources of restraint, [00:11:00] informal norms. And this is something that comes from outside of democracy. Tocqueville had made this argument in the 19th century that American democracy dances lightly on the surface, because religion does a lot of work of that socializing.
And as societies are becoming more atomized some of these anxieties return, and I don't think the civilization state is an answer to that, but I think it taps into this idea that we actually need to look beyond just the formal institutions and think of the kind of deeper mores, values if need be. We need to reinvent them to act as a kind of supplement to democracy.
Shalini: I was wondering if it's not ironical that nation states promote the idea of a civilization, which is an entity which is both historically and morally prior to the state. What you're pointing out is this very potent mixture of cultural identity formation plus authoritarianism, plus imperialism which is part of the [00:12:00] story. But you've also suggested, Pratap, in some of your writings, that it's highly risky when politics draws its legitimacy from a notion of historical past, continuity framed in the idea of civilization rather than from constitutionalism or popular consensus. To what extent do you think the rise of civilizational ideology is the result of the failures of liberal democracy to deliver on promises of equality, dignity for all its citizens?
Pratap: I think one has to be a little careful about how one puts this argument. I agree with you, in the backdrop, there is a sense of a failure and inadequacy of liberal democratic institutions and societies as we've seen them functioning. They've not delivered on a whole number of fronts. But I think the reason we have to be careful is one, we have to ask the question: [00:13:00] failure in comparison to what? Obviously, liberal democracy is always a work in progress. It'll make mistakes. It's not entirely clear that the civilizational states are addressing the problems they claim liberal democracies did not address. Which is to say, if this were a good faith argument you would actually test the potency of this idea of a civilization by state: does it actually address the problems that you think it is going to address, if the problem is inequality, if the problem is lack of housing, if the problem is the lack of productive employment? In some senses, it seems to draw us away or build political coalitions away from those problems rather than addressing them.
The second thing we have to be a little careful about is that the puzzle about the civilization of state sociologically is: how many of the most powerful elites have embraced this idea and tried to use it for their own purposes? [00:14:00] So just to take two very quick examples. In Silicon Valley, if you take people like Alexander Karp, founder of Palantir, they're making the argument that all this technological stuff they're doing, this has this kind of higher purpose of revivifying a kind of muscular civilizational identity. So much of big capital in India has put its weight behind this.? And that makes you wonder whether this is really about people fed up of liberal democracy. Or how much of it is a coming together of particular elite discourse. Because if you look at the resources that are going into it, it is extraordinary how much of it is sustained by elite commitments. One of the arguments you could make is that this is an instrument for a one kind of elite, either trying to displace another kind of elite or to shore up its legitimacy in the face of what might be more potent challenges. About the fact that elites are conniving and suppressing democracy, [00:15:00] supporting the surveillance state, actively undermining efforts to lower inequality and so forth.
So yes, in the backdrop, I do think it is a sign that liberal democracy does not function as it should, but I think that's the pretext as much as it is the cause.
Shalini: On another occasion talking about the failures of liberal democracy in a different context, you've related them to the global crisis of legitimacy. On the Persuasion Podcast hosted by Yascha Mounk, who was also a guest on my podcast you spoke of the contemporary crises, the multiple crises of three institutional formations in which the liberal democratic project was traditionally embedded, the economy, the state, and the global context of geopolitics. Could you say something about these three interlocking crises and explain why you think the civilizational narrative has been so successful in providing an [00:16:00] answer to these crises in so many different societies?
Pratap: Gosh, it's a big and important question. The claim I was trying to make in that podcast and more generally is that the crisis of legitimacy is a global crisis. We often talk of the crisis of liberal democracy and backsliding in liberal democracies. But, almost every other regime type is also struggling with a form of crisis of its own as well.
I don't think we should take it for granted that the Chinese party state doesn't have a legitimation crisis of its own. A simple measure of that is how much repression and how much closure your society needs to function. And certainly, you could argue under President Xi, there's been a kind of regression. Arguably, it may be a kind of global crisis of governance rather than just a crisis of a particular regime type.
But speaking of liberal democracy, I think two things in particular stood out. The very things that we used to think [00:17:00] were the virtues of liberal democracy., checks and balances, decentralization of power, separation of powers, strong institutions, and emphasis on processes and forms. Those very instruments of liberty came to be seen as impediments to democracy. And I think this is an interesting argument because if you think of democracy as having two dimensions. One is checks and balance and holding power to account. The other is this idea that in a democracy, we come together to do things.
And I think the sense went around that the institutional configuration of liberal democracy is making it difficult for the people to feel empowered as agents that can do things to fulfil what they want to fulfil. Create a better economy, create more productive jobs. And if you look at the populist backlash, it's a backlash against those institutional forms that slow you down.
These institutional [00:18:00] forms, courts, bureaucracies, independent regulatory institutions, these have been hijacked by particular elites that are thwarting the will of the people. And so, what they've been able to set up is this tension between, in a sense, the two aspirations of democracy, the accountability aspiration and the checks and balances aspiration.,
Look, part of the romance of democracy was that we come together to achieve things. And so, the sense that democracy is not letting you do things you want to do opens up a disposition towards authoritarianism, that you have to just cut through process. What is form, what is process? Rule of law is a figment of elites wanting to subvert the democratic will. And so you see these parallel conversations almost everywhere. The attack on courts, that attack on independent institutions, media. This is no longer, in some senses articulating the will of the people. It's actively [00:19:00] subverting it.
I think there is something to that critique. Many of these institutions, in some senses, began to implode from the top as it were in different ways. The economy, I think, is more complicated. One because as you have also pointed out, it's not the case that the concept of civilization state addresses a core economic malaise. In fact, it again uses it to license probably deeper forms of corruption and concentration of capital almost everywhere. You can see it in the United States. You can see it in India. But I think the economy is an issue to the extent that in the background, there is a deep economic anxiety. And I think one of the interesting things about this moment is that anxiety is not fully represented in the data. If you look at official figures, it's not that unemployment rates are catastrophically high in Western Europe or in the United States. In fact, by historical measures, they're pretty low. It's not that inflation is like the stagflation of the 1970s [00:20:00] yet. Mr. Trump's Iran war might still get us there, but it's not quite there yet.
Nevertheless, over the last seven to 10 years, particularly after the 2009 financial crisis is the palpable sense in Western democracies of stagnation, possible fall in the standards of living in countries like Britain, and this incredible uncertainty about what are the parameters one should think of going ahead. What does the economy look like 10 years from now?
And I think it's that anxiety that in some senses provides some of the ballast for a kind of reaction against old liberal elites. That the world they bequeathed to young people right now it is not a world that is easy to describe in terms of what the framework is going to be going ahead.
Shalini: What you are pointing to is an interesting argument about how strong men, they're mostly men these soft authoritarian leaders, [00:21:00] are able to represent themselves to their own citizens as embodying quite directly the will of the people. But what if we turn for a moment to the sphere of international relations, because many of these soft authoritarian regimes are jostling with one another on the global geopolitical arena, trying to reposition themselves in a new hierarchy of nation states. Could you explain the role that the reference to civilizational legacies plays today in international relations in order to justify these different geographical spheres of influence? In a sense, they don't have to assert civilizational superiority. They just have to assert difference and therefore a re- regional hegemony.
Pratap: That's a fascinating question. And it is an open question. How [00:22:00] much role the civilization of this course is playing in geopolitics. Partly that question is complicated by the fact that frankly geopolitics is being conducted so much by the whims of individuals. I think we should be careful not to put too much retrospective rationality to what Mr. Putin does or what Mr. Trump does. But having said that, I think there are a couple of functions you can clearly see. One, almost all of these states have a kind of sense of at least their regional or hemispheric influence. In the new discourse in the United States about the West or the Western hemisphere.
Even if they don't stick to the spheres of influence, I think the United States is acting like a classic imperial power i, claiming a kind of hemispheric hegemony. Part of that entitlement to say that this hemispheric hegemony makes ideological sense has to invoke something like common Western values. The admonition to Europe is that you are betraying our common civilization. That's what [00:23:00] entitles us to say something to you in a way in which we don't care about the Southeast Asians. If they didn't abide by Christian values or the First Amendment values as we understand, who cares.
So, this is exercising a kind of hemispheric entitlement. Turkey as a source of civilization, has fantasies of a middle kingdom in some ways. I think South Asia is more muted but essentially South Asia is a kind of unified cultural zone which transcends some of the current nation state forms. And so I think it does perform that function.
I also think increasingly in the United States, particularly, which is at the forefront of this, a kind of theological civilizational discourse is actually much more deeply pronounced. In fact, the United States is probably the only country in the world that is behaving like a civilizational theocracy. When Pete Hegseth says, it can reign apocalypse on anybody, these kind of Biblical images of fire and brimstone can justify a kind of ruthlessness [00:24:00] and a will to power and a will to destruction, that normal ideologies find it difficult to do. I think we do underestimate its power. That a secretary of War no less can stand up and will destruction on somebody, and there's not that much reaction or backlash. And that's one of the features of civilizational discourse. It has this kind of alchemy and power to vicariously be able to justify almost anything.
The final thing I'd say, and this links the discussion to India in some ways, is that one of the curious things about the civilizational discourse, is how wedded it is to justify violence.
In India, the recreation of a civilizational discourse is about what betrayed Indian civilization, what made Indian civilization weak, was all these Buddhists and Gandhians, with the introduction of pacifism, and moral values. What we need to recover is a kind [00:25:00] of theodicy of violence almost. This is a kind of open acceptance and legitimization that politics is structured around, in Schmidtian terms, the friend - enemy distinction. It is structured around the fact that once you make those distinctions, all bets are off on what means you use. This will to ruthlessness, that the civilizational discourse is licensing is true of Mr. Putin, Mr. Erdogan. So, civilization sounds like it is a very nice word. It's a value we would all cherish. Who doesn't want to be civilized? But this particular association with forms of ruthless violence as central to political identity, that's a very powerful function of civilizational discourse. That's what's licensing a kind of geopolitical order now where all bets are off.
We know all international order is hypocritical, there are deviations, great powers always act with impunity, but it's hard [00:26:00] to imagine a geopolitical conjuncture with absolutely no moral compunctions and restraints. Once you worship civilization anything is possible. l
Shalini: Across the board we are hearing that same justification for the war in Ukraine as one is hearing about the attack on Iran. But there's something else I wanted to pick up. The language of self-determination and freedom, which was fundamental to nation states seems to have been eclipsed and replaced by this narrative of a monolithic civilizational block already, always pre-given. Now, whereas nation states are historically constituted through specific processes and acts at determinate points of time, civilizations can be presented as extra or supra historical. So that history itself becomes a series of extraneous ruptures that threaten, but can’t overwhelm this kind of [00:27:00] timeless continuity, which is being argued for. How has this transformed our understanding of the nation state and its historicity?
Pratap: That's a deep and fascinating question. Here's one way to think about it. I think your reference to historicity is important. All modern nation states are in part created by a reputation of their own past to a certain degree, insofar as modern nation-states are premised on egalitarianism, horizontal solidarity, mobility. They represented a certain kind of modernity turning back against the past.
And all modern nation states are recent. That's true of Italy. That's true of the United Kingdom. In countries like India and China people get very upset when you say it is a modern state. It's because we are talking of a kind of very specific political form tied to political sovereignty. And of course, the process of creation of states was extraordinarily [00:28:00] bloody. There isn't a single nation-state formation process that did not have its exclusions or forms of genocide even. As Michael Mann[1] and others very powerfully pointed out, modern nation states´ attempt to create a kind of horizontal demos bound by ties of egalitarian solidarity in its wake produced lots of ethnic exclusions and expulsions.
We don't have to valorise the modern nation state as a political form. But its fundamental promise was that this is a political form that's necessary to institutionalize liberty, equality and fraternity. It is very much tied to that project and it's a form that in its best incarnations is created through a kind of constant negotiation and renegotiation. about who needs to be included, who needs to be represented. And its orientation is forward-looking. Tocqueville said, the great thing about democracy is we don't ask where we come from; what we ask is where are we going? In some ways it's part of a [00:29:00] kind of modern future-oriented open horizon, the sense of possibility in progress that tomorrow can be better than today. The life prospects of our kids will be better than ours are. And I don't think it's an accident that in all of these societies that sense of confidence in a future is probably at its lowest point in the last 25-30 years or at least it's understood as being much more uncertain.
Shalini: Is that true of India? Do you have the feeling that there is little optimism about the future among large sections of Indian citizens today? What surprises me, in fact, is the mix of aspirations and a horizon of hope, which is combined with an enthusiasm for a backward-looking civilizational glory.
Pratap: I agree with you. I think there are different temporalities, and I think for a country like India, which is emerging from centuries of extreme poverty at [00:30:00] one level the sense of improvement, I think is palpable. I do think what is missing in India not to the same extent is that much of the 20th century politics was conducted around either utopias or piecemeal utopias. And we know many of those failed, many of those were disasters. But I think what we are getting at this moment is a sense of incremental improvement without a kind of articulation of a collective shared horizon of what the society will look like. So, it is possible that you can both experience material improvement withouthaving a shared understanding of what binds you with your fellow citizens. And I think that's the gap partly that the civilization story fills. So, in that sense, I think this moving away from a politics of negotiation to, as you said, a pre-constituted [00:31:00] identity. This identity does not require negotiation between people and constituents. What it requires is authoritative interpreters who can tell you what it means to conform to the benchmark of a civilization or civilization identity.
A civilizational identity also is quite useful in creating exclusions because somebody has to benchmark what this identity is. What does it mean to be a member of the Hindu civilization? And the problem is not what its content might be. It's once you allow for this kind of benchmarking somebody will be, in India's case, Muslims, minorities, Christians, will be excluded from its ambit. I think in the United States, some of that is being used in the politics of anti-immigration. Again, the commonality in all of these countries is this deep demographic anxiety. At least its political and moral value is often to misdescribe that somehow there's a kind of demographic re-engineering. A demographic re-engineering is [00:32:00] quite compatible with democracy if done properly. It's quite compatible with creating forward-looking visions. What demographic engineering is not compatible with is a benchmark civilizational identity that people should look a certain way, think a certain way, be benchmarked in a certain way. So, it's actually very useful for all those political forces that have an agenda of exclusion and for targeting particular groups for being who they are.
Shalini: You've recently made a fascinating contrast between the western European understanding of civilization, and a forward-looking emancipatory concept of civilization as understood by Mahatma Gandhi, for example, a century ago, which is not a backward-looking nostalgic past continuity. And you argued that for Gandhi, the past was a resource, but it was not a source of coercive command. Civilization was not simply received inheritance, but something that had to be crafted anew. And in [00:33:00] the Indian context of resistance to British imperial rule, Gandhi and Tagore were important in articulating a critique of Western civilization and its false claims to universality.
Now, you contrasted that to the current narrative of Hindutva, the idea of a Hindu civilization asserted as a dominant culture of the majority. It reminded me of the German concept of “Leitkultur”, the dominant culture to which minorities must per force be made to assimilate. Could you say something about the Indian earlier varieties of understandings of civilization, qualitatively different from the Hindu rights view of the idea today?
Pratap: That's a wonderfully large question. In the 19th century, the term civilization was associated with what you might call the outer growth of complexity of societies? And it denoted more complex [00:34:00] organizations of power. So, if you read John Stewart Mill on civilization[2], that's what civilization is: greater complexity, division of labour, the ability to harness more power in all its kind of organizational forms. And of course, as 19th century Europeans also realized that concept of civilization referred only in a sense to the outward forms of our collective existence. It actually leaves vacuums of all kind, which is why these juxtapositions between culture and civilization, so that distinction in Europe between civilization and culture in India also got rearticulated in the 20th century as sabhyata and sanskriti, where sabhyata referred to the outward political and economic forms and sanskriti to something much deeper in terms of mores, moral values and so forth. What was common to both, I think is that in their ideal forms, they were never benchmarked to identity per se. Sanskriti, if you like, in the Indian [00:35:00] context, enables you to transcend the bounds of any identity that you have.
So, at the turn of the century when, let's say, Radhakrishnan[3] invokes this concept, his argument is that what the modern concept of culture has done is that it has benchmark culture to identity. It names who you are, and in that naming to define an essence of who you are. Whereas the whole point of at least the original religious teaching is to transcend the limitations of any contingent identity you have. It was also a critique of what we have done in the name of culture and civilization is replaced individual egoism with collective egoism and narcissism. And in fact, collective egoism makes it worse because it magnifies the power of egoism so much. And this is the kind of critique that Tagore makes that modern nationalism remains confined within the traps of egoism where the whole point of a culture is that [00:36:00] enables you to constantly transcend it, overcome your limitations. Whether they be in limitations of self or outer limitations of what you can collectively achieve. That's one thing.
The second thing I think is almost unique to Gandhi. Gandhi is one of the few 20th century thinkers who refuses to argue on the terrain of history in one very specific sense. So, when we think of the current civilizational discourse, particularly in India, what is the core anxiety driving it? The core anxiety driving it is, how do you represent the story of India's past? And how do you represent the conflicts between different communities? So, it is the story of Hindu-Muslim relationship, a relationship of Hindus being oppressed by Muslims in medieval India, temples being destroyed, Hindu culture threatened, which is still continually being threatened. Is this a story of syncretism? [00:37:00] Is this a story of accommodation? And one of the interesting features of India is that both the Left and the Right seem to share the same historical ground in that they think that the fate of modern India depends on getting that historical story right. So, if you can present this story as a story of accommodation, of different streams mingling, a home for everybody, the project of modern India will be secure. On the other hand, the Hindu right says, “this is a story that eclipses what happened. It falsifies for the sake of contemporary concerns the injustices that might have happened in the past”. And Gandhi was extraordinary in saying that both are arguing on the same ground. And in that sense, he refused history. He says, "I'm not interested in what happened in Mughal India." Why should the morality we choose [00:38:00] or the kind of state we built be based on this historical narrative? He argues in some ways that fighting on the ground of history is a recipe for a cycle of perpetual resentment and revenge.
Let's say for argument's sake: „tomorrow you did discover some more document that more temples were destroyed in Mughal India." Should that dictate our morality at all at this moment? You can leave the historians to argue that out. But this is a peculiar kind of investment that the identity of our modern nation-state depends on telling this history. By the way, there's a similar anxiety in the US. In this culture war, this duelling war between the 1619 Project[4] and the 1776 Project. As if the fate of contemporary America depends on telling that history.
Now, I'm not against that historical debate, but it's one thing debating it as historians. It's another thing saying, [00:39:00] everything you do as a historian will have a consequence for that morality. Gandhi just refuses that past. Tagore refuses that. He says, look, if you're looking for the creation of a new being who's spontaneous, aesthetically fulfilled, do you want to go on to keep this cycle of facticity? We can just admit, history has been a slaughter bench up till now, but the whole point is to transcend it.
So I think for Gandhi and Tagore, civilization just gets very firmly anchored to moral values. So if you want to give civilization a name, it is ahimsa[5], it is aparigraha, it is detachment, it is the ability to overcome your own narcissism. It completely refuses the ground on which civilizational identities are built, which is historical narratives, usually of resentment and revenge.
Shalini: This is a very important point. Gandhi is saying, a nation without a history is a happy [00:40:00] nation. He is to argue for leaving history behind as the fundament on which to build a society, a community, and a new polity. Now, let us turn in the last part of our conversation, Pratap, towards an effective counter politics to this kind of majoritarian, authoritarian politics of belonging, which is one way of looking at the civilizational turn.
There are those in India, as you very rightly say, who stress not only the plurality of religions, culture, civilizations within India, but also the internal plurality of Hinduism itself as a way out of accepting the majoritarian discourse. But this also runs the risk of essentializing culture and identity and invoking history as the source of political authority.
So, you have focused on India's capacity to contribute to universal values by treating its heritage of [00:41:00] sacred texts as part of a common collective heritage. Is that likely to have a mobilizing power to build a counter politics around it? And what would you consider to be an adequate engagement with classical Indian political thought and philosophical traditions if we are to think of civilizations differently?
Pratap: I come from two different directions. One, I think that the question of what kind of politics is adequate to responding to this challenge, has to be a multi-fronted answer. I don't think answers to political questions are throwing more texts at them. Or if we can make the distinction between true Hinduism and Hindutva[6] we can get there.
Those are good things to be doing intellectually; that's not the political response, nor the origins of this crisis. As you rightly pointed out at the beginning of the show, there was a crisis in liberal democracy, or the failures of liberal democracy, and particularly the failures of left and centre politics. So it's not just the crisis of [00:42:00] institutions. It is the failure of particular political parties. And I think those failures had three things we haven't yet adequately addressed.
The first was very clearly a kind of intellectual failure. Look, one of the most remarkable things about India but even the United States, is that “liberal” was a word that was made bad by every side in the debate. Nobody wanted to call themselves liberal, the left in India attacked liberalism; forms, institutions, parliament as super-structure. And so that kind of systematic de-legitimation without understanding the intellectual foundations of what we had created in our modern constitution, was the first intellectual mistake of centre-left politics.
The second thing to my mind, the most important one and the hardest one is this. If you look at the BJP's[7] success or the success of right-wing parties across the world, they are [00:43:00] initially built on extraordinary political and social mobilization. For years, they have been doing through cultural organizations the work of creating identities, mobilizing people.
The Left and Centre became sociologically deterministic. We just assume there's a configuration of cross-cutting caste identities in India. If we got that mathematics right that's enough to defeat Hindutva. The Hindu right understood that political identities can be generated, they can be reconstituted through the work of political mobilization, and they created a whole architecture for doing it. Whatever else you might say, the BJP is an extremely impressive political party in the conventional sense. Even now, every election, hundreds of workers show up. The Left and Centre lost almost all of those kinds of institutions, mobilizing capacity, which it used to have: student unions, labour [00:44:00] unions. We are not doing politics. We're expressing opinions, but we are not doing politics in the serious sense. And we are waiting for the other side to make mistakes. There's almost like a fatalism that at some point people will get fed up of these people and we will all discover that civilizational states doesn’t solve your problem of employment. There is still an extraordinary degree of fatalism. What the left-hand centre did was it just completely gave up on conventional politics.
I'll give you one more example: we often say rightly that the social media landscape has transformed politics and the right-wing learned to manage it, use it, deploy propaganda very effectively. There is a lot to that story. But the right itself doesn't quite believe that old myth. You watch elections in India. I'm struck by how much they still believe in old fashioned door-to-door campaigning. [00:45:00] When they lose an election, the RSS[8] will just try and mobilize. I think there's a kind of organizational and political failure.
I don't want to divert from the question you asked. I do think conceptual clarity helps about what liberalism is. I think this canard that Left and Centre, everybody, created in India that liberalism is a foreign import. The West has not been liberal for of most of its history. Every society has an inner conflict between those people who want to give people the right to individuals, the right to self-determination and make something of themselves, on their own terms, and people who want to mutilate their possibilities by benchmarking them to narrow identities. This is a conflict all across the world, in some sense.
So, my view of this question, should there be an Indian political theory? I think it's a red herring. I don't think the term Indian tells you what we want to know. What we want to know is what are the terms of the social contract on which we can live together under conditions of [00:46:00] reciprocity and dignity. Now, I would imagine any rich culture would support ideas of dignity, even though they have not practiced it, and you can come at it in metaphysically many different ways. There's no problem in somebody saying that if you truly read the Upanishads, it is about constantly transcending your identity, not being confined by it. Also, I think the point you made about our text being the common property of mankind., The important thing about our texts, if they are to be interesting and worthy at all, is that they contribute to that common pool of human advancement
In fact, there's a deep irony in Hindu nationalism, because on the one hand, we want to say we are vishwaguru[9], we have something to teach the world. On the other hand, the discourse of culture is always about “this is mine”. But it should [00:47:00] be open to anybody in humanity to pick up any contribution and say: "Look, if this illuminates our condition and helps - build a better world, it's our property."
Shalini: In fact, when you were describing the malaise of the Congress Party in India, I was thinking very much of the Democrats in the US. The same story could be told about US democracy being also fundamentally flawed view of what it takes to do real politics and mobilize on a large scale.
Thank you very much for this wide-ranging conversation and for some fascinating insights into very many facets of the civilizational turn and its implications for domestic politics across the world, as well as for international relations. Thanks for being with me today.
Pratap: Thank you, deeply indebted to you. Thank you so much.
Shalini: We heard from Pratap Bhanu Mehta a detailed exposition of the many political and [00:48:00] psychological functions that the civilizational discourse plays today. It provides a culturalist narrative of collective identity, one that is much older than that of the nation-state. It's intimately tied to majoritarian authoritarian regimes, which seek to legitimize their power in ethnic, religious, or in racial terms, and it posits a glorious historical past, coupled with a strong sense of present victimhood, which then can be used ruthlessly to legitimize violence against those seen as enemies or critics of these civilizational claims.
The currently popular civilizational discourse in the US, as in India, thus seeks to exclude and to counter demographic anxieties by recomposing the demos using the language of a dominant culture and its civilizational distinctiveness. Moreover, in international [00:49:00] politics, the myth of civilizational distinctiveness allows each regime to claim geopolitical hegemony within its own sphere of influence.
The sense of collective superiority that such a discourse conveys may act to sideline the political coalitions that we need urgently to build to address the problems of inequality, affordability, housing or unemployment that all our societies face. So muscular civilizational identity serves different ends for new vernacular elites and for the super-rich who are funding this discursive term in so many parts of the world.
Pratap argues that there is certainly a crisis of liberal democracy, which has failed to deliver the goods. Here he points to the tension between the accountability aspiration of liberal democracies and their checks and balances aspiration. The USA is behaving [00:50:00] today like a civilizational theocracy, but in his view, we are witnessing a much more global crisis of governance.
Totalitarian regimes, like Russia and China, also face a legitimacy crisis that they're trying to meet using a discourse of the uniqueness and superiority of their respective civilizations as well. The current civilizational turn is backward looking in contrast to the liberal democratic nation-state project that was based on the promise of institutionalizing equality and freedom in the years to come.
Interestingly, Pratap reminds us that older Indian civilizational discourses, those of Gandhi or Tagore in early 20th century were not nostalgic, but they were emancipatory, future oriented and inclusive. As part of the struggle for India's independence from imperial rule, these [00:51:00] thinkers wished to craft new collective identities that were free to make selective use of resources from the past, not letting the past determine the country's present or future.
Gandhi refused to argue on the terrain of history, as in his view, it's likely to perpetuate revenge and resentment. He felt that modern India should choose its morality and build a new state free from the burdens of history. Pratap also cautioned that an effective counter politics to the majoritarian, authoritarian politics of belonging, which marks the contemporary civilizational turn cannot be built on these older ideas or even on classical texts that expound very different ideas of identity or culture. The delegitimization of liberal institutions by the left in the global south and the spurious argument that liberalism as a [00:52:00] Western import was a serious mistake. Also, the strategy of centre and left political parties to want to capitalize merely on the mistakes of the populist right will not pay dividends unless they too can match the right´s extremely strong mobilizing capacities on the ground.
This was the ninth episode of season 11. Thank you very much for listening. Join me again next month for a conversation with Marlene Engelhorn, who has given away her inherited fortune using an innovative democratic mechanism, that of citizen assemblies. I will discuss with her the detrimental effects of the growing wealth concentration and economic inequality for our democracies and for our societal wellbeing.
Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed, and of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the [00:53:00] Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy
[1] Cf. Mann, Michael: The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge (CUP) 2005.
[2]Cf. Mill, John Stuart: Civilisation, In: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill: vol. XVIII. Essays on Politics and Society ed. by John M. Robson, Abingdon, Routledge 1996, pp. 117-148.
[3] Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) was a renowned Indian philosopher, academic, and statesman who served as the first Vice President (1952–1962) and second President of India (1962–1967). A staunch defender of Hinduism and Vedanta, he built bridges between Eastern and Western philosophy, serving as a professor at Oxford and Mysore Universities
[4] This refers to the New York Times initiated project which claims that the landing of a British vessel near Point Comfort (Virginia) on August 22, 1619, and the subsequent selling of 20 black African slaves to the settlers marks the beginning of US-American history. For details cf.: https://1619books.com/
[5] For the concept of ahimsa, cf.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa.
[6] For the development, as well as the political and cultural aims of Hindutva (Hindu Nationalism) cf.: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindutva
[7]Acronym for Bharatiya Janata Party, a right-wing to far-right political party in India. Since 2014, it has been the ruling party in India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
[8]Acronym for Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Union), an Indian right-wing, paramilitary organisation, founded in 1925. It is closely linked to the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party.
[9] Teacher of the world, a phrase often used by the Indian PM Modi to refer to what India can teach the world.