The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future

The thesis, roughly, is that Samuel Huntington's emphasis on a clash between civilizations is misplaced; that the more important clash is within civilizations; that this, more important clash is ubiquitous in modern democracies; that the clash itself is between those citizens willing to embrace a diversity of people and backgrounds and those seeking to establish a nation in which citizens share similar (or the perceived same) backgrounds, ethnicities, religious beliefs and the like; that India, with the possible exception of the United States, is exemplary among nations in its record of inclusiveness, and; that the Hindu right is threatening India's evident capacity for diversity through the Hindu right's efforts "to craft a public culture of exclusion and hate," a culture exemplified by the tragic events in the state of Gujarat in February of 2002. Members of the Hindu right may well take exception to the way they are portrayed in "The Clash Within." For those, like myself, peering in from the outside, the lack of statistical data on the composition, size and beliefs of the Hindu right that might verify Ms. Nussbaum's depiction is somewhat frustrating. Perhaps reliable data do not exist. Further, it is worth noting that Huntington was very much aware of the "clash within," and acknowledge as much in the opening pages of his book. Huntington was, however, focused on clashes likely to spark conflict on a global, or multi-national scale. Finally, some of what Ms. Nussbaum says about the Hindu right and the motivations underlying it apparently draw upon a wealth of earlier research. To an outsider, some of this can be quite puzzling. She claims, for example, that "shame grew like a wound in the psyche of some Hindu males" and that "the female body came to symbolize the nation." As a result, Nussbaum notes, "one might suppose" that this "symbolic association" would lead to the "veneration of women and delicate treatment." Far from it. Partly because males of the Hindu right exhibit "an unusual degree of disgust anxiety," killing Muslim women in Gujarat while brutally defiling them was, in effect, tantamount to having intercourse with them. (Ms. Nussbaum's account is more graphic.) In light of the gravity of the incidents she describes it may seem like small beer to raise this point, but Nussbaum's premise - that "the female body came to symbolize the nation" - would seem to be valid in either of two widely diverging outcomes, (a) the female body is venerated or (b) the female body is defiled. That would lead me, a stranger in this terrain, to question the premise that "the female body," in India came to "symbolize the nation." Or at least ask: Did the males in Abu Ghraib symbolize Iraq to the soldiers, some female, who subjected them to denigrating poses? Martha Nussbaum's text prompted at least as many questions as she purported to answer. Yet, it is this very capacity to raise questions, summon thoughts and overall expand the

Full of the sound and fury , signifying nothing. Acamedician Nussbaum engages in intellectual bumper-car to the cheers of her small, misguided audience. Now its India, and she is going to tell them what for. The level of mediocrity goes along with high self-opinion. It's a lesson, that intellectuals with lots of book-learning like to pontificate on things they know nothing about. It's embarassing really, that the crazy aunt is now out of the attic and raving in the street. I address this problem directly, the almost hallucinatory psychology of academic elites who think they know what's good for the rest of us. Not almost. We face this problem in America right now, with another teacher-ideolog increasing big government, which goes along with the yetta nannying like horse and carriage. The "myth of the meritocracy" must be replaced with a more realistic view of the "elite mediocracy" and their "celebritocacy." Now, vote against my review. PS - nothing tells the academic hallucination like Gandhi. A social reformer, he also said the British should surrender to Hitler. Non-violence, right?

Martha C. Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. She worked for eight years (1985-93) with the Research Project of the UN World Institute for Development in Helsinki, focusing on the economic and cultural problems of India. She chose India when she wanted to write on human rights norms for women's development worldwide. She was a consultant with the UN Development Programme's New Delhi Office and in 2004 was a visiting Professor at the Centre for Political Science at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. She lectured in various parts of India and wrote extensively on India's legal and constitutional traditions. She travelled so many times to India that it now feels like her second home. Her relationship with India is intensely political, focussed on issues of social justice, and she has had close contacts with Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1988. Three personalities in particular feature, namely, Nehru, Tagore and Gandhi. In her Preface she states: "This is a book about India for an American and European audience". But it is not only about India but also about the present clash between Islam and the West. She writes: "... that the real clash is not a civilisational one between `Islam and the West', but instead a clash within virtually all modern nations - between people who are prepared to live with others who are different, on terms of equal respect, and those who seek the protection of homogeneity, achieved through the domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition". At a deeper level the thesis of this book is the Gandhian claim that the real struggle that democracy must wage is a struggle within the individual between the urge to dominate and defile the other, and to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality, with all the vulnerability that such a life entails. Nussbaum deals extensively with the ethnic/religious pogrom in Gujarat in February-March 2002 when approximately 2,000 Muslims were killed by Hindus. She analyses the Hindu nationalistic personality and finds sufficient hatred within to explain the Gujarat events. Her conclusion - based to a great extent on Gandhi's thinking - is worth quoting: "The ability to accept differences - differences of religion, of ethnicity, of race, of sexuality - requires first, the ability to accept something about oneself: that one is not lord of the world, that one is both adult and child, that no all-embracing collectivity will keep one safe from the vicissitudes of life, that others outside oneself have reality. This ability requires, in turn, the cultivation of a moral imagination that sees reality in other human beings, that does not see other human beings as mere instruments of one's own power or threats to that power." She argues, in this highly passionate study, that ultimately the greatest threat comes not from a clash between civilisations, but from a clash within each of us. Piet Dijkstra

Last fall in Kerala, a lush tropical area in southeast India, my partner and I sat in a packed house watching Kathakali dancers act out an old story about Shiva and Parvati, a Hindu god and his consort. Though the story was an ancient one, we could have been watching a modern sitcom. The god and the goddess joked around like any loving, egalitarian couple in love - taking care of each other, poking fun at each other. I left thinking that Hindus have some beautiful role models in their pantheon, if Kerala's versions of Shiva and Parvati are any indication. As I've learned from The Clash Within, however, it seems that some Hindus paint a very different picture of their gods - and of their religion. Martha Nussbaum's feminist commentary on religious violence in India paints a terrifying picture of the Hindu right wing. For these politicians, thinkers and leaders, Hinduism is a unified national identity that needs to reaffirm its power (masculinity, in her reading) in the face of inclusiveness and pluralism. Women are held to a standard of sexual purity defined by a small group of conservative men with their own (sometimes prurient) agendas, and India is a mother to defend with her children's blood. This reading is reinforced by Nussbaum's detailed account of the riots in Gujarat, western India, in February and March 2002, which were characterized by brutal sexual violence against Muslim women. The book is a dense 337 pages, but the story - rife with conspiracies, peculiar characters and intense narratives of events surrounding the riots - is riveting. Parallels to the political climate in the United States are immediately apparent - and are teased out further by the author, who writes, "from this story we Americans can learn a good deal about democracy and its future as we try to act responsibly in a dangerous world." In the end, Nussbaum's story is a hopeful one, pointing to a more inclusive and peaceful future.

Having studied Indian history and the Hindutva movement for many years, I must disagree entirely with the first reviewer. Nussbaum's descriptions of the violence in Gujarat, and the state and national government's complicity in it, are well backed-up by official sources, interviews with prominent Indian public figures, and the Sangh Parivar's own texts. Moreover, the point of the book is not to provide a history of this dark incident in India's recent past -- though it does so ably -- but to understand what motivates people to inflict such violence on their own neighbors and countrymen. In doing so, Nussbaum displays a remarkable empathy for Hindutva activists and sympathizers without condoning actions and beliefs that she sees as deplorable. Believing (as did her heroes Tagore and Gandhi) that understanding and caring about one's fellow human beings is essential to a nations's political and ethical well-being, she argues that Gujarat represents "a failure of the moral imagination" that allows humans beings to recognize the humanity of others, and that the furious pace of economic development in India should be matched by the development of humanist ideals that have been abandoned in the last two decades.