Voices of Dissent

Two persistent dissenters and the deeper sources of their dissent

- Ashis Nandy

FINDING Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi or someone sharing his political and cultural sensibilities is not easy today. In his homeland, it can even be hazardous.

India's Second Republic sees the admirers of Gandhi as self-indulgent, romantic peaceniks or traitors conspiring to stall the country's journey towards its inescapable destiny: being another neat example of what the late activist-scholar Herbert Feith used to call repressive, developmentalist regimes. This is a well-known syndrome in East and Southeast Asia and in South America, where a quicker pace of development—sometimes even glossy pronouncements on a free market economy and future development—becomes a full justification for an authoritarian state.1

Politically, this syndrome seeks support from populism and masculine nationalism, near-total control of media and blatant crony capitalism. Psychologically, it thrives on cultivated paranoia, a streak of narcissism, and psychopathy in the upper echelons of politics. A few decades ago, this syndrome—let us call it Feith's demon—entered South Asia and has already left the democracies in the region tottering. More recently, after seriously injuring the world's most powerful democracy, it is trying to subvert the world's largest democracy.

Such an ambience may trigger a desperate search for someone carrying the sensibilities and worldview of Gandhi. This is exactly what happened when Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency in India during 1975-77. Many turned to Gandhi as a strategic guide, some reaffirmed his vision of India's future, and others found solace and hope in his autobiography. As the community already had a widely shared image of Gandhi as a freedom fighter carrying an appropriate message of liberation, some even reimagined Gandhi as a