#169 The Past Is A Foreign Country

Truth and reconciliation. A theory of social norms.

Programming Note: We couldn’t get the audio file in time. We might upload it later.

India Policy Watch: Itihaas Gawaah Hai?

Insights on burning policy issues in India

- RSJ

We are always short of important issues to solve as a nation. No wonder we have taken up the task of finding out which ancient temples were destroyed and buried by medieval Muslim rulers who then went on to build quite ordinary-looking mosques over that rubble. Forensic archaeology is a new national pastime if you were to go by the news channels in India. Quite honestly, this thing crept up on me (us?) without so much of a notice. One day we were debating sound topics like loudspeaker bans at mosques or the lack of bindis on the foreheads of women models in ads and the next day we are doing jasoosi in the precincts of medieval monuments like Indiana Jones (or, maybe like Bharat Joshi). Does the Gyanvapi mosque have sheshnaag (not to be confused with this Jeetendra film of the 80s) murals on its walls? Should we raze the mosque in Mathura because there is conclusive evidence of a Krishna lalla temple being underneath it? What’s being hidden in the twenty locked rooms inside the Taj Mahal? Is Qutub Minar standing on an ancient Vighneshwara temple?

Vital issues of national interest, all of them. We must excavate the truth. Dig we must.

If we let these things run their course, we will soon have most of north India being dug up because there are mosques or Mughal monuments everywhere and who knows what lies beneath them. This digging up the earth, filling it and then rebuilding new monuments over them could then be the answer to the employment crisis facing us. The amateur Keynesian in me delights at this prospect though given the rising inflation it might not be the most opportune time. But who cares about short periods of inflation when you are correcting the long arc of history? Anyway, coming back, there are two reasons I see being offered for the sudden spurt of interest in this business of correcting alleged historical grievances.

How Far Back Will You Go?

First, this is just another way to humiliate our Muslims who now have to answer for the deeds of some medieval bigot of their community. The ideology of Hindutva thrives on this and there is a long list of these issues that can keep the pot boiling here. I suspect this is true. And it will be terrible for India in the long run. There’s not a lot the current Muslim community can do to redress this past. The medieval world worked on very different forms. Kings sacked the cities of rival kingdoms quite regularly and destroyed important symbols to leave their imprint. I’m sure there were many more Jain and Buddhist temples in India at the turn of the first millennium given we had kings of those religious denominations ruling large parts of this land. As these dynasties lost power to their rivals, what happened to those monuments? Some other kings destroyed them? Should the Jains demand such an investigation? Also, how far back will we go to find the truth? Should the people of Kalinga (modern-day Odisha) seek reparation from Magadh (Bihar) for what Emperor Ashoka did 2500 years ago? There seems to be historical evidence Ashoka massacred them in the battle of Kalinga before embracing Buddhism. Or, should the predominantly Hindu merchants of Surat seek damages from the Maratha community today for the sacking of their city in 1664 by the forces of Shivaji? Should the various tribes of eastern India seek a court-monitored survey for evidence of their sacred monuments under the many dams, steel plants and mines that the state has built over the years? I mean this is recent history and we have evidence of how tribal and forest-dwelling communities were displaced without seeking their consent. Surely, we could redress this if we want.

So, who decides how far back will we go or who should be the victims that deserve to be ahead in the queue while looking for redressal of past humiliation? And who should be answerable today for those acts of the past? There are no answers to this because the likely point of the current exercise seems to fit the pattern of finding ways to show our Muslims their place. The answer to the question how deep we should dig then is this - just enough to serve the current political need and make the lives of Muslims in India today insufferable.

Talking of digging deeper, I am reminded of an anecdote, most likely apocryphal, involving the great poet Raghupati Sahay (who incidentally used Firaq Gorakhpuri as his nom de plume.)

One day his neighbour told him:

“Sahay, main kal apne bagiche mein kaafi samay tak khod raha tha. Aur teen feet zameen ke neeche, achanak mujhe ek telephone ka taar mila. Hamare poorvaj itne aage thae ke unke paas telephone bhi thaa!”

(Sahay, I was digging around in my garden yesterday. After digging to a depth of three feet, I found a piece of telephone wire. Our ancestors were so smart. They already had telephone way before the rest of the world)

Sahay responded:

“Bhai sahab, main bhi kal apne bagiche mein kuchh khod raha thaa. Aur paanch feet khodne ke baad pataa hai mujhe kuchh bhi nahin milaa. Iska matlab hai hamare purvaj ko wireless phone ke baare mein bhi pataa tha.”

(Bro, I too was digging around my garden yesterday. And you know what, after digging for over five feet, I found nothing. Our ancestors were so smart they knew wireless telephony too.)

I guess we only find what we wish to find when we dig into the past.

Reconciliation With Whom?

The second argument that intellectualizes this pursuit of digging into the past is more interesting. The premise is we will find a sort of historic reconciliation as a society if we face up to the truth of the medieval violence by Muslim rulers or invaders against the Hindus. The soul of a repressed community will awaken once we have restored our temples and sacred sites to their past glory. And this will be good for the nation because we have been living far too long in the paradigm set by western intellectuals who have mentally colonised us. Till we break free from these shackles, we will never be free, and we will never realise our true potential. Let me quote two different columnists who have made this point in the past week.

Sapan Dasgupta writing in the Sunday Times of India (“Gyanvapi issue: Let’s not go into denial mode”) had this:

“In a battle of public perceptions, however, legal proceedings play a minor role. In fact, during the Ayodhya dispute, judicial procrastination became a source of exasperation. What seems more relevant is that the Gyanvapi controversy could become a starting point for renewed interest in the destruction of Hindu temples from the 11th to 18th centuries.

“… To merely fall back on the law to regulate public sentiments isn’t enough. What is also needed is a historical narrative that tells Indians of all communities the honest truth about the ugly medieval inheritance. To fall back on obfuscation and denial – as secularists are often inclined – will merely drive Hindi victimhood underground and make it ugly. It will also exclude the intelligentsia from an overdue re-evaluation of India’s troubled past.”

And here’s Shekhar Gupta writing in the Print on the same issue (“Mandir or Masjid? New surveys not needed, just acceptance of truth & move towards reconciliation”):

“Three decades ago, Nelson Mandela gave us an idea as powerful as Mahatma Gandhi’s Ahimsa, and more contemporary: Truth and reconciliation. It follows that there cannot be any reconciliation without the truth.

At this point in the 21st century, the Hindus can stop digging evidence of their victimhood in the past. It’s already available from the sources even the other side considers credible. The Muslims and the Left-secular elites should similarly get over their denialism of the wrongs of the past, whatever the motives of the wrong-doers.

It is self-defeating now to hang the secular cause on arguments like ‘was Aurangzeb a nice guy?’. No medieval ruler of any kind was a nice guy in 21st-century terms. Some were just worse than others.

Once both sides accept the truth, a slow reconciliation will be possible.”

Dasgupta insists on a revised historical narrative that tells us about the ugly medieval inheritance while Gupta is keen we get into a truth and reconciliation mode like South Africa. It sounds good and pacifist on the surface. We must acknowledge there are faultlines in the Hindu-Muslim relationship in India. This is because of our medieval past. And these faultlines can only be erased by both communities accepting the sins of the past and then moving on. There are three issues I have with this line of thinking.

First, the reconciliation like it happened in South Africa (or, maybe even at Nuremberg following WW2) requires the victims and perpetrators of the atrocities to be present to reckon with their past. The idea in South Africa wasn’t to persecute the individuals for the past crimes but to gather evidence of what happened. The Truth and Reconciliation council collected statements from victims and their families about human rights violations. It also received pleas for amnesty from the perpetrators in exchange for disclosing their acts of violence during the apartheid regime. This was done in open, transparent public hearings that were broadcast to the world. The process was largely seen as being successful and it laid the foundation for democracy in post-apartheid South Africa. How does such a process apply to the medieval acts of Muslim rulers and invaders in today’s India? Who will talk of personal pain and loss and who will plead guilty if acts of violence in specific terms? Will we have Indian Muslims publicly apologise for something done by Aurangzeb three centuries back? Who specifically among the community will have to apologise? Do we know them? What kind of reconciliation will that achieve except vicarious glee among some at showing a section of our fellow citizens their place? And if we are at it why shouldn’t we do the same for atrocities of the recent past like on Dalits and the tribal communities? Why shouldn’t we face up to this truth too?

Second, any reconciliation involves the recognition that there was a significant power differential that led to the atrocities among the communities. This power differential is usually all-encompassing – political, economic, and social. An important part of the reconciliation is to create legal and constitutional methods to bridge this differential from then onwards. Let’s look at this in the context of reconciliation that Shekhar Gupta seems to suggest. There was a power differential in medieval north India between the Muslim rulers and their Hindu subjects which led to atrocities, subjugation of their rights and razing of their temples. Does this differential still exist? In the case of South Africa coming to terms with apartheid, it did. The whites dominated the political and social economy to the exclusion of the coloured communities upto the 90s.

Does that hold in today’s India? Do the Muslim community today hold the same power the medieval bigot from their community did then? You know the answer. Or, maybe you can read the Sachar committee report. So, what kind of redressal will we achieve after having blamed our Muslims of today for the sins of their ancestors? What powers will we strip them off that will redress them balance? Also, what is the Hindu victimhood that we are afraid will go underground if it weren’t allowed to find its expression in our current society? If you look around it is difficult to see in what social or economic spheres are the majority today victims in real terms? This is an imagined victimhood. In fact, there’s the other scenario that’s more likely. It is possible that Muslim victimhood might go underground if we continue down this path. And then the cycle will continue with no reconciliation.

Third, and this is a point we raise often in these pages - what should be our priorities at this time? We are a low-income nation that has underperformed on its potential for decades. We still have a window of opportunity available to raise our people out of poverty and provide a life of dignity to them. That should be our goal. Do we believe a reckoning with the past that’s over half a millennium old, however justified, will take us further on that goal? Are we not able to build good roads, hospitals, and schools because we are weighed down by the sense of victimhood and our medieval history? And once we are out of that funk, will we make lives of our people prosperous? And it’s not true that we can do both at the same time as some argue? We cannot build a nation while seemingly persecuting a sizeable section of our own people. We also have limited state capacity that should be channeled to its most productive use.        

I will leave you with an extract from Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. Neibuhr was an American theologian and ethicist who, as Wiki will tell you, worked on the intersection of religion, politics, and public policy (should have known about him before). There are three arguments Neibuhr makes in his book that are relevant for this discussion. First, individual self-interest cannot be fulfilled in collective good. Therefore, to also believe a collective good will spur individual action is an illusion. Second, inevitably the will to power overcomes the will for good. So, don’t expect an action, however well-intentioned for a society, that strengthens power for a group will not fall into the trap of furthering that power at the expense of being a force of good. This is because collective morality is much more vulnerable to fracture than individual morality which is by itself liberal. And lastly, morality and political power are a dangerous combination to hold, and they can subjugate every other interest in the name of national egoism. It erodes any kind of self-criticism and leads to an eternal search for scapegoats for pinning the blame of underperformance.     

Here's Neibuhr on the dangers of collective self-assertion and for society to suffer ‘uneasy harmony’ than let loose ‘egoistic impulses’:

“The more the moral problem is shifted from the relations of individuals to the relations of groups and collectives, the more the preponderance of the egoistic impulses over the social ones is established. It is therefore revealed that no inner checks are powerful enough to bring them under complete control. Social control must consequently be attempted; and it cannot be established without social conflict. The moral perils attending such a political strategy have been previously considered. They are diametrically opposite to the perils of religious morality. The latter tend to perpetuate injustice by discouraging self-assertion against the inordinate claims of others. The former justify not only self-assertion but the use of non-rational power in reinforcing claims. They may therefore substitute new forms of injustice for old ones and enthrone a new tyranny on the throne of the old. A rational compromise between these two types of restraint easily leads to a premature complacency toward self-assertion. It is therefore better for society to suffer the uneasy harmony between the two types of restraint than to run the danger of inadequate checks upon egoistic impulses.”  

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A Framework a Week: Social Norms and Public Policy

Tools for thinking public policy

— Pranay Kotasthane

Individuals live at the intersection of markets, society, and the State. Markets sometimes fail, and so do the State and society. We know reasonably well about market failures and State failures, but much less about what causes social failures and how to resolve such failures.

That’s where the theory of social norms and social change, pioneered by ethicist and psychologist Cristina Bicchieri comes in. Social failures—such as female genital mutilation or open defecation—where an individual’s conformance with the practice depends on the behaviour and attitudes of others, are called norms.

Social norms are a sub-set of norms, where the survival of a practice depends concurrently on two kinds of expectations: empirical expectations (I do something because everyone around me also does the same thing), and normative expectations (I think that others expect me to behave in that particular way).

For example, driving on the left side of a road in India is just a social norm. People do that when they see people in their reference network following this practice—an empirical expectation, and when they feel that not doing so will result in punishments or admonishment by people in their reference network—a normative expectation. This “road sense” social norm was largely a stable one before the pandemic. The number of norm-breakers being a small number, at least in our city, Bengaluru. Once the traffic thinned during the first wave, more people started abandoning this norm. This first led to a change in empirical expectations—people broke the norm because they could see others doing it. It has subsequently led to a change in normative expectations as well—people who drive on the left side of the road have grudgingly accepted the norm-breakers, and no longer admonish them.

Coming back to the literature, Bicchieri’s group over the last fifteen years has developed several systematic theories about how a social norm can be created or abandoned. As you would expect, this work finds significant applications in Indian public policy.

Applying this social norm and social change theory to public policy is not a simple task. Neither is the theory easy to learn, as a learner needs to digest multiple frameworks. Nevertheless, it is rewarding to study it, as this theory’s use in designing the Swachch Bharat Abhiyaan demonstrates. The HomeWork section has a link to the full online course on social norms and social change.

For now, I’ll summarise some of my work-in-progress learning from this line of inquiry:

1. Norms are largely upheld when both empirical and normative expectations work in the same direction and reinforce each other. To follow a norm, you should see many people in your reference network following the norm, and you need to fear that breaking the norm will lead to adverse consequences.

2. Norms start getting broken when both these expectations contradict each other. The paper Do the Right Thing: But Only if Others Do So identifies how the norms against corruption break:

Even in the presence of laws and social norms condemning corruption, the widespread occurrence of bribery and kickbacks can induce people to form empirical expectations that most people are corrupt, while simultaneously holding the normative expectation that most people disapprove of corruption. In cases such as this, which expectation might have a greater effect on public officers’ willingness to accept bribes?

1. One key question for public policy is: which of the two expectations matters more? The answer is empirical expectation. From Do the Right Thing: But Only if Others Do So again:

Our data provide compelling evidence that empirical expectations regarding other people’s behaviors well-predict one’s own decisions. Expectations regarding what other people think one ought to do can also predict decisions, but our results suggest this is true only to the extent that such expectations are in line with the choices one believes others would actually make. When normative and empirical expectations are inconsistent, our data indicate that people do what they think others would do in that same situation, even when they believe doing so would not be met with approval.

1. If you want an existing norm to be abandoned, a change in empirical expectations should precede a change in normative expectations. This is because norm-breakers fear punishment. They get emboldened when they see many others breaking the norm. Thus, breaking a norm requires a few trendsetters to ignite the change, and for their act to be widely known.

2. In contrast, if you want to create a new norm, a change in normative expectations should precede a change in empirical expectations. Thus, a community rewarding people who engage in a desirable interdependent behaviour can set the stage for a new norm to become widespread.

3. Attitudes and practices can differ significantly. Even though a person might not be favourably inclined towards a social evil such as female genital mutilation, they might still continue to practice it as their behaviour is contingent on what others do and think about them. The interplay between knowledge, attitude, and practice is instructive.

Source: How Changing Social Norms is Crucial in Achieving Gender Equality, UNFPA-UNICEF

1. What it means is that better information dissemination can help in changing attitudes. But this won’t immediately lead to a change in practice. A change in practice often follows a “gradually, then suddenly” tipping-point trajectory. This means coordination of a behavioural change with others is critical for putting an end to regressive social norms.

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HomeWork

Reading and listening recommendations on public policy matters

1. [Article] Akshay Jaitley and Ajay Shah ask some fundamental questions about India’s electricity sector.

2. [Courses] If social failures, social norms, and social change are themes that interest you, Cristina Bicchieri’s two-part course on these themes is being offered again on Coursera.

3. [Report] How Changing Social Norms is Crucial in Achieving Gender Equality, a UNFPA project that applies the social norm and social change theory to a practical social situation.

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