Ideas that harm

Many will be alarmed at the open calls for violence and even genocide in the wake of a recent movie on Kashmir. The BJP has not spoken against or cautioned Indians about this, and nor do most expect it to. This is because the party and its leaders generally tolerate and perhaps even encourage rhetoric against minorities. However, there are other reasons as well and it is interesting to examine the intellectual relationship the party has to the mob.

The BJP’s constitution says it has something called a “basic philosophy”, and that is “Integral Humanism”. The name refers to four lectures given by Deendayal Upadhyaya in 1965. In it, Upadhyaya says that the nation is merely the highest expression of a mob. There is a technical way in which the party understands what it calls “group mind” and “group thinking”. This is how Upadhyaya explains it:

The individual was made up of body, mind, intelligence, and soul, which are all different from one another (he doesn’t say how mind is different from intelligence or what a soul is). He continues: The person’s soul is unaffected by personal history. Similarly, national culture is continuously modified by history. Culture includes all the things held as good and commendable, but they do not affect “chiti”, which is the name of the national soul. India’s national soul, Upadhyaya says, is fundamental and central. “Chiti” determines the direction of cultural advance. It filters out what is to be excluded from culture. Societies are animate and a society has a body, mind, intellect, and soul. Some Westerners were beginning to accept this truth, and he quotes one of them, William McDougall, as saying that a group had a mind and a psychology, its own methods of thinking and action just as an individual did. A society had an inborn nature that was not based on its history. Events do not affect it. This group nature is like the soul in individuals, which was also unaffected by history. This group mentality is like mob mentality but developed over a longer period. The nation needs both an ideal and a motherland and only then is it a nation. And the State exists to protect this nation, which has an ideal and a motherland. This nation, Upadhyaya says, is only those born Hindu in India and not its religious minorities.

McDougall was a popular writer in early 20th century America and it was especially his writing on race that interested Americans. Of Africans, McDougall writes in the same work that Upadhayaya agrees with: “The incapacity to form a nation must be connected with the fact that the (African) race has never produced any individuals of really high mental and moral endowments even when brought under foreign influences; and it would seem it is incapable of producing such individuals. The few distinguished (N-word), so called, of America —such as Douglass, Booker Washington, Du Bois —have been, I believe, in all cases mulattoes or had some proportion of white blood. We may fairly ascribe the incapacity of the (N-word) race to form a nation to the lack of men endowed with the qualities of great leaders, even more than to the lower level of average capacity.”

Illustration: Binay Sinha

In the same work McDougall has written on the passion of the White mob that gathers to lynch the African American, but we need not go into that here. Upadhyaya extends that to India by saying: “Collective Mentality: An average Indian student at present is a mild and meek young man. Compared to an average student of twenty years ago, he is weaker and milder in every way. But when a score of such students get together, the situation becomes different. Then they indulge in all sorts of irresponsible actions. Thus, a single student appears disciplined, but a group of students becomes (undisciplined). We shall have to consider why this change comes about. This is known as mob-mentality, as distinct from individual mentality.”

Similarly “(s)ociety and social mentality evolve over a much longer period. There is a thesis that when people live together in a group for a long time, then by historical tradition and association, and also by continued intercourse, they begin to think similarly and have similar customs. It is true that some uniformity is brought about by staying together. Friendship arises between two persons of similar inclination. However, a nation or a society does not spring up from mere co-habitation.” He says this of course to exclude minorities.

The national soul, “chiti”, and group mind are not scientific phenomena and the works of McDougall are not science (he thought, like Upadhyaya did, that the mind could influence evolution). How would we know what India’s “chiti” was telling us? Did it come to us through some individual messiahs or was it the case that whatever was popular at the current time was the expression of “chiti”? The group mind assumes a constant and unbroken unanimity and no real individual freedom. That is an absurdity. Even if possible, a nation thinking as a mob, in unison and marching in lockstep, is a dangerous thing for itself and for others.

And yet this is what the ruling party of India says in its constitution is its “basic philosophy”.

The writer is chair of Amnesty International India