Beauty of Compromise , livre ebook
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2013
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19
pages
English
Ebooks
2013
Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Publié par
Date de parution
15 septembre 2013
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9789351183150
Langue
English
Ramachandra Guha
The Beauty of Compromise
CONTENTS ~ Dedication
Preface: The Case for Polemical Moderation
PART I: DEBATING DEMOCRACY
1. Redeeming the Republic
2. A Short History of Congress Chamchagiri
3. Hindutva Hate Mail
4. The Past and Future of the Indian Left
5. The Professor and the Protester
6. Gandhi s Faith and Ours
7. Verdicts on Nehru: The Rise and Fall of a Reputation
8. An Asian Clash of Civilizations? The Sino-Indian Conflict Revisited -->
The Beauty of Compromise PART II: THE WORD AND THE WORLD
10. The Rise and Fall of the Bilingual Intellectual
11. Pluralism in the Indian University
12. In Nehru s House: A Story of Scholarship and Sycophancy
13. Life with a Duchess: A Personal History of the Oxford University Press
14. Turning Crimson at Premier s
15. The Gentle Colossus: Krishna Raj and the EPW
Sources
Acknowledgements -->
Copyright Page
-->
The Beauty of Compromise ~
The fundamental principle that governs-or ought to govern-human affairs, if we wish to avoid misunderstandings, conflicts, or pointless utopias, is negotiation.
-Umberto Eco
I
Over the past few decades, the nation states of South Asia have been home to some of the most bitter conflicts of the modern world. Women have opposed the domination of men; subaltern classes have resisted the hegemony of the elite; regions on the periphery have protested exploitation by the centre. To class and gender and geography have been added the fault lines of language, caste, religion and ethnicity.
No region of the world-not even the fabled Balkans-has had a greater variety of conflicts within it. South Asians are an expressive people, who have expressed their myriad resentments in a diversity of ways-through electing legislators of their choosing; through court petitions and other legal mechanisms at their command; through marches, gherao s, dharna s, hunger strikes and other forms of non-violent protest; through the burning of government buildings; and through outright armed rebellion.
The record of our nation states in dealing with these conflicts is decidedly mixed. Some conflicts, which once threatened to tear a nation apart, have, in the end, been resolved. Other conflicts have persisted for decades, with the animosities between the contending parties deepening further with every passing year.
From this vast repertoire of experience within South Asia, this essay will foreground some of the more intractable of these conflicts. I will analyse, among others, the Kashmir dispute and the Naga insurgency in India, and the rebellion of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. I will argue that these conflicts persisted for so long because of the inflexibility and, dare I say, dogmatism of the contending parties. The question I pose here is this: Could a middle path of accommodation and reconciliation, adopted by either party to a conflict or both, have helped in reducing or mitigating the suffering and the violence?
II
In search of an answer to this question, let me first turn to some forgotten episodes in the career of a man who might be considered a paradigmatic South Asian, Jayaprakash Narayan (JP). Narayan was an Indian patriot, but he retained close links with the republican struggle in Nepal as well as the socialist movement in Sri Lanka. He worked actively for conciliation between India and Pakistan. And he was an early supporter of the rights of the Tibetan people.
Within India, JP is celebrated for his role in two major movements: the Quit India struggle of 1942, and the Indira Hatao movement of 1974-75. During Quit India, JP achieved countrywide renown for his daring escape from Hazaribagh jail, after which he spent more than a year underground, eluding the colonial police.
