M. S. N. Menon

WHAT is it that inspired India’s foreign policy? Was it land, plunder, markets or hegemony? India has not been after any of these things. Its objectives were civilisational. And that is how it will remain.

And its civilisation has conditioned India to be its brother’s keeper — a task few others are fit to take up. Others have more often betray the trust.

It is religious dogmatism that has more often led to crisis in human relations. But India is never dogmatic. The Vedas often express doubts. India has thus avoided the thousand and one mistakes that other civilisations have committed. And the Indians have always lived amidst a diversity of races, religions and languages without conflicts.

Its mind being free, India has wandered where it listed. In the process, it has created a bewildering diversity of thoughts. The West is bewildered by it. It frowns upon diversity.

There are believers and non-believers in India, heretics and sceptics, rationalists and free thinkers, materialists and hedonists. India has never drawn a line of divide between the faithful and the faithless, the blessed and the damned. Everyone followed the faith that suited him best. There never was conscious persecution of any.

The more India doubted the answers, the more tolerant it became. Ashoka, the greatest emperor in history, was an ardent Buddhist. But he exhorted his followers not to make an exhibition of reverence to their own sect while condemning others. On the contrary, they should show reverence to other sects. “By doing otherwise, they do harm to both,” he says.

It is this spirit of accommodation and tolerance that made India a peaceful haven to many religious and peoples. Religious wars were unknown.

Buddhism was the most sublime religion of the time and Ashoka had it carried to the far corners of the world — as far as Syria in the west, Sri Lanka in the south and Kabul and beyond in the north. But all through persuasion. The native culture was only influenced, never replaced.

But propagation of Buddhism was not an end in itself. The real objective was to serve the people. Ashoka says: “There is no higher service than the welfare of the whole world.”

Plato concentrated on the just society. India on the perfect man. But without the perfect man, there can be no just society. The ideal of the perfect man continues to inspire India.

Similarly, while Europe pursued the path of manly vigour, public spirit and private virtue, India followed the contemplative and reflective side of human nature.

“I suppose”, said Jawaharlal Nehru, “that Indians by and large are gentler than almost any people of the world. They dislike violence”. It was their long civilisation which brought about this basic transformation in their character. That is why they have never gone out to conquer.

Indian civilisation is universal in the deepest sense of the term. Which is why this primordial civilisation has survived intact and has not degenerated into a narrowly defined religion. And it continues to produce men with a universal spirit like Gandhi (the great soul), Nehru (the dreamer and visionary), Aurobindo (the mystic), Vivekananda (the reformer), Tagore (the poet) and Dr Radhakrishnan (the philosopher). They were the men who shaped modern India and its thoughts, and they were all universalists. The narrow spirit was alien to them.

Every being has within him/her a code of growth (it is called Swadharma in Indian philosophy), a principle that guides his/her evolution. Similarly, each nation, says Vivekananda, has one principal note around which every other note comes to form a harmony. In India’s case, that centre is its spiritual life.

Nationalism is an enemy of the universal spirit. Yet it is not an evil. The evil is narrowness, selfishness and exclusiveness, says Gandhiji. Hatred of other people, so often associated with nationalism, ethnicism and fundamentalism, had no place in Gandhiji’s outlook. He hated the British colonial system, but refused to hate the British people. He never wanted India to gain at the expense of other people. “I do not want India to exploit a single human being,” he had said.

Gandhiji opposed all kinds of national and regional chauvinism. To a Japanese member of Parliament, who sought a message with the Japanese before World War II, Gandhiji wrote back: “I do not subscribe to the doctrine of Asia for Asians if it is mean as an anti-European combination.”

This was precisely the stand of Nehru at the 1948 Asian Relations Conference,e when he said that he did not propose to oppose Europe. On his policy of non-alignment, he said: “I have no objection to people coming together because they like each other. But I have the strongest objection to people coming together because they dislike and hate somebody else.”

Nehru was a great champion of the UN and he did everything in his life to promote it. He was convinced that “if there is going to be no world order, then there might be no order at all left in the world.” he said: “I have no doubt in my mind that world government must and will come, for there is no other remedy for the world’s sickness.”

In advocating the Panchsheel principles, India was putting across an alternate model of international relations — especially of non-interference and cooperation. Nehru’s policy of nonalignment prevented the polarisation of the world into two hostile camps.

Aurobindo used to say that there are only two alternatives before mankind: a world state founded on the principle of centralisation, uniformity and mechanical unity, or a world union, founded on the principle of liberty and diversity. The West has chosen the first, India the second. America promotes the Americanisation of the world. If carries the American value system, which vast masses of people do not accept.

 

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Courtesy: The Tribune: July 31, 1998