A Dangerous Volksgeist: Indian Law Journal Rejects Solicited Article on Indus Waters Treaty

The following guest post is by Nadia Ahmad, Associate Professor at Barry University School of Law:

The National Law School of India Review solicited me to write a 2,000-word article on January 2, 2019. I responded that I would write about the Indus Waters Treaty. Yet because of my existing deadlines, teaching schedule, and other responsibilities, I said I could deliver at the end of February.

Between the time that I accepted the offer and submitted the piece, India and Pakistan verged on the brink of war. I felt it would be responsible to include an analysis of how those current events factored into the interpretation and enforcement of the Indus Waters Treaty.  The journal said it would not publish my piece, because I addressed “international relations” and not legal issues. I am at my desk still shaking my head as to how an international water treaty that has been litigated in international courts does not provide “legal, jurisprudential perspectives with an inter-disciplinary focus.” I was given no opportunity to update the piece, but merely a “thanks, but no thanks.”  

Here is the three-part blog post, published in Vermont Environmental Law Review’s EcoPerspectives Blog:

• Considering Climate Risks and the Indus Waters Treaty in the 2019 India-Pakistan Showdown (Part 1)
• Reassessing Climate Justice and Energy Security Between India and Pakistan: The Curious Case of the Kalabagh Dam (Part 2)
• Dam-Racing in South Asia: The Environmental Disasters Waiting to Happen (Part 3)

I chose to write about this slight now, because of the broader impact to dissent in India, which has been on the radar of Human Rights Watch:

Sadly, the fact is that there is little room for dissent in India under [Bharatiya Janata Party] BJP. Activists, journalists, lawyers, writers, teachers, actors or artists – anyone who criticizes the government or its divisive ideology – is at risk of being targeted. Either the state deploys its power by arbitrarily cutting off access to funding, ordering audits, issuing warrants for search or arrest; or the BJP’s supporters threaten violence or launch physical attacks. From deeming that to be secular is to be anti-national, or from deciding that to be anti-fascist is to be a terrorist, the heap of wild allegations is unending.

Maybe with the elections, the bigotry and hatred would pass, I reasoned. I was wrong. The rancor will only intensify.

Meanwhile, neighboring Pakistan is no stranger to silencing minorities as it removed a top Princeton economics professor from its national economic advisory board, because he was from a religious minority group.  And then Saudi Arabia is executing intellectuals.

I suffer from a misapprehension that the environment matters to public health, safety, and welfare of the people and their surrounding lands. I also have a misapprehension that war is not the answer to limited natural resource scarcity, and that wars should not be fought over oil, pipelines, land, and water rights. History rarely is on my side. History is on the side of power, war, and racism, and ignores voices of resistance for peace, justice, and equality. 

As the prototype academic, I write enough to raise questions, but not enough to ruffle feathers, so that I can benefit from the fruits of my research and writing toils and not face the backlash of it. It is a fine line to stay out of sight, out of trouble, and still seem like an intellectual. In 1927, French essay Julien Benda published this once famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age in La Trahison des clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals).  Roger Kimball noted the depth of the intellectual treason that Benda described:

The “treason” or betrayal [Benda] sought to publish concerned the way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was “mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers.” The ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were not jettisoned altogether. It was in this sense that he castigated the “desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action.”

In its crassest but perhaps also most powerful form, this desire led to that familiar phenomenon Benda dubbed “the cult of success.” It is summed up, he writes, in “the teaching that says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt.” 

The election results in India are done trickling in – a landslide for the ruling party.

When I received the rejection email from the National Law School of India Review journal editor, the 2016-2017 protests at New Dehli’s Jawaharlal Nehru University were fresh in my mind. Students who criticized the government were called “fascists” and “terrorists.” The protests started as all students protests do with grievances that the administration would refuse to acknowledge and attend to, and then snowballed from there. Under normal academic discourse, there are responses and rebuttals, but with the heavy hand of the state, the free exchange of ideas is limited. The views of this diasporic Indian/Pakistani were unwelcome. I do not know what the full dynamics were that led to the rejection, but as a grandchild of the Indian Partition, I know when things are amiss. I know how stealthily narratives and information are reined in to put forward state propaganda.

Students and academics in India under BJP rule have been met with tear gas and pellets, faced contempt charges, been arrested under colonial era sedition laws, and are even killing themselves in despair.

The land of Mahatama Gandhi deserves better.

-Nadia Ahmad

Comments

[Anon]

I think it’s a bad idea to allow this blog to be used as an outlet for people to air grievances.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Thank you for posting this. India does indeed deserve better, for sundry reasons ... including the fact that it is the land of remarkably complex and analytically sophisticated philosophies and worldviews (Buddhism began here), including a few of “materialist” orientation (e.g., Cārvāka or Lokāyata); it is the location of the world’s largest democracy (however fragile, as contemporary events attest); the home of religious epics and narratives whose appeal is enduring and not confined to its subcontinent, such as the Mahābhārata (the longest epic poem ever written [c.400 BCE-300 CE] comprising over 100,000 verses) and the Rāmāyaṇa; the land of Akbar, Rabindranath Tagore, B.R. Ambedkar, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rammanohar Lohi, Jayaprakash Narayan, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and Vandana Shiva; mathematicians of the highest caliber, perhaps best exemplified by Srinivasa Ramanujan; world class physicists; embodied democratic forms of Indic communism and socialism, such as that found in the state of Kerala.... The Hindutva ideology and politics (a virulent form of religious nationalism) of the ruling party is dangerous and, at heart, undemocratic, often inspiring individual and collective acts of horrific violence against those who do not adhere to its tenets or are simply outside their politically expedient and ideologically narrow circumscription of Hindu identity, one which is egregiously unhistorical and thus at bottom mythical in the worst sense.

[JinnnahtheCavalry]

"The 'treason' or betrayal [Benda] sought to publish concerned the way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was “mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers.” The ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were not jettisoned altogether."

This basically covers most left-wing and "liberal" academics in the social sciences and humanities today - including their approach to so-called "Islamophobia."

Fortunately, the land of Mohandas well remembers what its former Muslim rulers did to Hindus, Sikhs, etc. How many Hindu slaves died while being transported over the Kush? Can you imagine the typical American law school today entertaining an honest and open academic debate about whether their legal condition was better or worse than Dhimmitude, or about whether sharia is compatible with the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution?

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Assessed according to the conventional and rather crude economic standards touted by Donald Trump and his lackeys, Mughal rule of India could only be judged an economic success of the highest and greatest kind, an unprecedented historic achievement:

“The Indian economy was large and prosperous under the Mughal Empire. During the Mughal era, the gross domestic product (GDP) of India in 1600 was estimated at about 22% of the world economy, the second largest in the world, behind only Ming China but larger than Europe. By 1700, the GDP of Mughal India had risen to 24% of the world economy, the largest in the world, larger than both Qing China and Western Europe. Mughal India was the world leader in manufacturing, producing about 25% of the world’s industrial output up until the 18th century. India’s GDP growth increased under the Mughal Empire, with India’s GDP having a faster growth rate during the Mughal era than in the 1,500 years prior to the Mughal era. Mughal India’s economy has been described as a form of proto-industrialization, like that of 18th-century Western Europe prior to the Industrial Revolution.

The Mughals were responsible for building an extensive road system, creating a uniform currency, and the unification of the country. The empire had an extensive road network, which was vital to the economic infrastructure, built by a public works department set up by the Mughals which designed, constructed and maintained roads linking towns and cities across the empire, making trade easier to conduct.”

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Apropos the comment above (May 24, 2019 @ 08:24PM), one often hears crude—because grandiose and stereotypical—generalizations about Islam and civilization, Islam and women, Muslims and politics, Muslims and violence, Islam and other religions, Islam and democracy or Islam and secularization. Such generalizations are common but counterfeit currency in the public realm, often circulated and cashed in by professors, pundits, and public intellectuals who should know better. As stated, these generalizations are typically false, betraying a disturbingly facile if not unhistorical understanding of Muslims and the Islamic world. By way of a very modest contribution to combating such nonsense, I thought I’d provide a bare bones introduction to the most impressive of the “talented line of Great Mughal rulers.”

Jalāl-ud-dīn Muhammad Akbar (1542-1605) was a remarkable ruler of the Mughal Empire on the Indian subcontinent from 1556-1605. Akbar is clearly deserving of the honorific appellation, “Great Mughal,” his reign exemplifying the general qualities of good government and governance in a manner far ahead of his time and place. Indeed, along with the Buddhist emperor Aśoka (ca. 304–232 BCE), Akbar “is remembered as the greatest ruler India has seen.” Stanley Wolpert provides us with a succinct summary of his reign:

“Akbar’s unique achievement was based on his recognition of the pluralistic character of Indian society and his acceptance of the imperative of winning Hindu cooperation if he hoped to rule this elephantine empire for any length of time. [….] [In 1562], Akbar showed his capacity for wise as well as generous rule by abolishing the practice of enslaving prisoners of war and their families, no longer even forcibly converting them to Islam. The following year (1563), he abolished the tax that from time immemorial had been exacted by kings from Hindu pilgrims traveling to worship at sacred spots throughout India. [….] In 1564 he remitted the hated jizya (non-Muslim poll tax), which was not reimposed for more than a century, and with that single stroke of royal generosity won more support from the majority of India’s population than all other Mughal emperors combined managed to muster by their conquests. [….] By pacifying Afghanistan for the remaining quarter century of his rule, Akbar managed to achieve more than that of either the Mauryas or the British, and after conquering those regions he established stable administration within them, creating a pattern followed by his Mughal descendants as well as by early British administrators. [….] [His] efficient administrative system help stimulate and expand India’s economic development and trade, foreign as well as domestic. [….] [Finally], the average inhabitant of Akbar’s India was economically better off than his peasant heirs have subsequently been.” (Wolpert 1977: 127-131)

Akbar held a variety of other historically progressive views: on the treatment of women, he opposed the long entrenched custom of child marriage, arguing that “the object that is intended” in such a marriage “is still remote, and there is immediate possibility of injury.” In fact, Akbar disapproved of slavery, sati and polygamy. His vigorous support of religious pluralism and toleration did not preclude a critical and comparative assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of various worldviews: “in a religion [Hinduism] that forbids the remarriage of the widow, the hardship is much greater.” With regard to the division of property, however, however, he lamented the fact that “in the Muslim religion, a smaller share of inheritance is allowed to the daughter,” proposing instead that, “owing to her weakness, she deserves to be given a larger share” (Sen 2005: 290-291). With regard to religious pluralism and toleration, Amartya Sen writes of the Great Mughal’s

“sponsorship and support for dialogues between adherents of different faiths, nearly two thousand years [after the Buddhist ruler Aśoka’s championing of same]. Akbar’s overarching thesis that ‘the pursuit of reason’ rather than ‘reliance on tradition’ is the way to address difficult problems of social harmony included a robust celebration of reasoned dialogues. [….] Akbar not only made unequivocal pronouncements on the priority of tolerance, but also laid the formal foundations of a secular legal structure and of religious neutrality of the state, which included the duty to ensure that ‘no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.’ [….] While the historical background of Indian secularism can be traced to the trend of thinking that had begun to take root well before Akbar, the politics of secularism received a tremendous boost from Akbar’s championing of pluralist ideals, along with his insistence that the state should be completely impartial between different religions.” (Sen 2005: 16-19)

Finally, patronage of all the arts was, but in particular painting and architecture, flourished as well during his reign, made possible by the vast reserves of treasure held by a fiscally sound state (the imperial finances said to be ‘managed by brilliant administrators’). Sen notes that Akbar’s “political decisions also reflected his pluralist commitments, well exemplified even by his insistence on filling his court with non-Muslim intellectuals and artists (including the great Hindu musician Tansen) in addition to Muslim ones, and, rather remarkably, by his trusting a Hindu former king (Raja Man Singh), who had been defeated earlier by Akbar, to serve as the general commander of his armed forces.”

References & Further Reading:

• Habib, Irfan, ed. Akbar and His India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Moosvi, Shireen. Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and Reminiscences. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1994.
• Robinson, Francis. The Mughal Emperors and the Islamic Dynasties of India, Iran, and Central Asia. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.
• Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
• Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.