Citizenship by Design, Part 3: Samajik Citizenship

This week, we continue our exploration of samajik citizenship, community membership that starts with samaj instead of sarkar. We do so by dipping our toes into the writings of Tagore and Gandhi, since they engaged with the issues that concern us here. There are many reasons to start with samaj and not sarkar; we mentioned a couple last week:

1. The state is too monolithic and centralized to be able to address local wicked problems.

2. Ecology is not part of the politics of the state.

Both of these are big claims that need backing, which we will get to one day, but today we are going to add one more line of evidence, which starts with the 'felts' of the matter, not the facts.

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If a 'fact' represents the state of the world, then a 'felt' is how the world makes you feel.

The facts of a wicked problem - say, the dispute between Karnataka and Tamil nadu over Kaveri water - tell you that farmers on both sides of the border need water and drought years are particularly hard. The felts tell the same story through emotions: farmers in Karnataka as well as in Tamil Nadu may feel that the water is 'theirs' first, and anyone who contests that claim is a traitor to their cause.

The facts of citizenship belong to sarkar. The passport with your name and photo is issued by the state. It's the state that adds you to the voter rolls. In short, the state registers your presence within its borders. But what about the felts? Membership in a political community is a matter of belonging isn't it? To whom do you belong? That sense of connection comes from samaj, not sarkar.

But let's not be too romantic about samajik citizenship, because it's impossible to think about India today without thinking about is as a nation state. Of course, we had a long history as a nation or collection of nations before we became the nation state we are today, but the lived reality is one of a nation state. The state and the market - sarkar and bazaar - dominate our lives. All we are saying is: don't underestimate samaj's potential, even as it's being sandwiched between sarkar and bazaar.

Membership claims often incite deeply felt emotions, many of which are negative. We make tacit judgments about who truly belongs to a place and who is an intruder. Constitutional protections are important in such circumstances - that I have a piece of paper showing I am a citizen of India can make the difference between freedom and confinement. But the fact (of that piece of paper) isn't protection against the felt of perceived difference. Instead, we have to fall back on samajik emotions of generosity and welcoming. If those positive emotions are left uncultivated, it's likely that those whose politics depends on inciting anger also capture the state and turn the law into an instrument of oppression. Samajik citizenship is hard work, but it offers protections that formal, state citizenship doesn't.

Tagore and Gandhi

It's in that samajik context, with its swirling emotions of who's in and who's out, the hated outsider versus the true patriot, etc, that the concept of swaraj as swa-raj (self rule as rule over the self) becomes an important criterion of citizenship, the shaping of a self that can engage with others. Paradoxically, two figures intimately associated with the nation state were suspicious about its tendencies. That would be, Gandhi, the 'Father of the Nation' and Tagore, whose name is on the National Anthem. While Gandhi's preference for village life is well known, Tagore's privileging of Samaj over Sarkar has vanished from our collective consciousness.

Tagore placed significant emphasis on the concept of 'samaj,' which was the heart of collective life for him. He believed that the strength and vitality of a nation lie in its samaj, the collective life-practices and values of its people. Tagore argued that the samaj, rather than the state (sarkar), was the traditional core of Indian civilization.

deep concern to recapture not merely the village-based existence, but the recovery of neighbourliness . . . and to protect nature and the rural community from the exploitation by machine. There is much to suggest that there was an alternative way of life in his mind -- a way of life continuous with natural environment.

from: Ganguly, Swati and Abhijit Sen, eds. Rabindranath Tagore and the Nation: Essays in Politics, Society and Culture.

Gandhi had a profound and multifaceted understanding of Swaraj, which can be translated as self-rule or self-governance. For Gandhi, Swaraj encompassed not only political independence from colonial rule but also a broader concept of self-rule that extended to various aspects of individual and collective life.

Gandhi emphasized that true Swaraj begins with self-rule at the individual level. He believed that individuals must have control over their own minds, passions, and desires, practicing self-discipline and self-restraint. Gandhi saw self-rule as the foundation for achieving inner freedom and living in accordance with one's moral values.

At the societal level, Gandhi envisioned Swaraj as a decentralized form of governance, where power is distributed among local communities and individuals have a direct say in decision-making processes. He advocated for the establishment of self-sufficient village communities, where people could govern themselves and meet their basic needs through local resources and sustainable practices.

It becomes clear by now that self-rule cannot be acquired without the acquistion of a stable character, which can be acquired in turn only by the practice of certain virtues. The chief among them are (1) temperance/chastity (brahmacharya), (2) truth or truthfulness (satya), (3) justice or freedom from possessiveness and greed, and (4) courage or the capacity to overcome fear, including the fear of death. Moreover, swaraj as self-rule is something that is capable of being experienced within oneself. Such inner experience of self-rule enables the citizens to reinforce their political ethics by their aesthetic feelings, their political action by political symbols.

from: Gandhi: 'Hind Swaraj' and Other Writings Centenary Edition (Cambridge Texts in Modern Politics)

Samaj and Swaraj

You may not agree with the list of 'felt' virtues, but it should be clear there's a direct line from samaj to swaraj without the state intervening in the middle. According to Tagore, the samaj represented a society that was not dependent on the state for its functioning. He believed that the village community in India, for example, could sustain itself in terms of health, food, education, recreation, and creativity, without direct support from the state. Tagore saw the samaj as a source of unity, cooperation, and synthesis of diverse elements.

Tagore also emphasized the importance of tolerance, cooperation, and non-exclusion within the samaj. He believed that the samaj should embrace the ethics of unity in diversity, where different religious, cultural, and social groups could coexist harmoniously. Tagore saw the samaj as a space where diverse elements could come together, interact, and contribute to the overall well-being and progress of society.

Overall, Tagore's views on samaj reflected his belief in the significance of community life, cooperation, and the preservation of cultural diversity within Indian society. He saw the samaj as a vital force that could guide and protect people's way of life, providing continuity and strength to the nation. Once again, the idea is not sentimentalise life in the pre-modern era, for it had many flaws. As political designers, we are interested in the possibilities inherent in those pre-modern ways of life, especially when combined with demands for equality that are modern in expression. Tagore would approve, for he wasn't parochial in his interests.

His emphasis, clearly, was on an all-round development of humanity and personality through realisation of one's own inner potentials. This marked a departure from the dominant nationalist approach to the order of things, for which bondage was only about subservience to the foreign ruler and therefore freedom was first and foremost a matter of statecraft and political independence. Tagore, instead, wrested away both the responsibility of bondage and the initiative of liberation from the provenance of the state and located them squarely in the discourse of decline and fall -- and possibility of reawakening -- of the "swadeshi samaj" through realisation and restoration of the agency of the people.

from: Saurav Dasthakur, On Music And Memory: Rabindranath Tagore’s Songs Of Nature In The Age Of Nationalism.

The Role of Ideals

You might dismiss these ideas as romantic idealism that could never be made real. But that's missing the point, for the work of idealism isn't (only) to fashion a perfect political community, but also to act as a directional guide, one that informs our collective journey.

Consider one of the most celebrated works in contemporary political philosophy: John Rawls' 'Theory of Justice.' It paints a picture of an ideal society, and argues that any society that's both rational and just should be ordered this way. Rawls' perfect society will never exist either, but in its universal architecture, it gives a blueprint for the 'good society.'

But Rawls' imagination is only realizable in a state driven society, one where the political and legal institutions of the state absorb the ideals of Rawls' perfect society and turn them into legal and political doctrine, where the state's energies are directed towards assuring justice. The designer has very little role to play in the state driven society unless they manage to capture the attention of the most powerful in the land. But samajik life, which is mostly at a much smaller scale than the nation, offers many opportunities to design citizen interactions.

We will start covering some of our experiments in the coming weeks. But first we are going to take an extended Diwali break. See you in two-three weeks.