RAM RAJYA AS THE PATELIAN STATE

Beyond spiritual concepts, India’s civilizational conception of self must frame its identity asa high trust, hard security state.

- HINDOL SENGUPTA

Ever since I wrote the biography of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (“The Man Who Saved India”, 2017), I have argued that the Indian state must transition from using only Gandhian notions for self-reference to combining the aspiration of universal nonviolence with the practical application of hard security to protect sovereignty in a difficult geography and build a high trust society.

The idea that India must use its own cultural history, including its foundational literature, as ideational sources for strategy has been deliberated more vividly in recent times, not least in the public utterances of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and foreign minister S. Jaishankar (including in his book “The India Way”).

The completion of the Ram temple in Ayodhya has also brought about declarations of the start of the recreation of “Ram Rajya”, a golden age of justice which, says the Ramayana, started with the return of the god-king Ram to Ayodhya after 14 years in exile.

But beyond the spiritual symbolism, a lot more structural thought is needed into trying to understand if “Ram Rajya” indeed could be a sociopolitical aspiration of India, and what policy decisions and actions would be required to build it.

Fundamentally, this essay argues that the Ram Rajya is what I call the Patelian state. One of the great failures of the Indian state since Independence is an over-romanticisation of Gandhian idealism while incessantly grappling with intense security, and other structural, challenges for which Gandhian thought had little immediate answers. Therefore, the Indian state had to surreptitiously build and deploy military capability in everything from insurgency to nuclear weapons capability while advocating nonviolence. While this, for a time, may have worked as international positioning during the tenure of the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, quickly it created deep social cognitive dissonance, not least when India lost a critical war to China in 1962.